Cuckoo's Egg

by C. J. Cherryh

  Cuckoo's Egg

  off. Because Duun knew he could turn it. Thorn thought of that. Suddenly he was not thinking of the blow; timing-sense deserted him and he shivered, flinched, knowing it. And Duun saw that too.

  "Where's the mind, Haras?"

  Thorn centered himself again. Duun walked around behind him. Thorn's ears strained. He listened to the soft sound of Duun's tread on sand. His own rapid breathing dimmed his hearing and endangered him. He did not move until he heard Duun on his left, then turned his head, pursuing the movement which teased the tail of his eye.

  Slowly Duun extended his right hand toward Thorn's face— (Attack?) Thorn's heart jumped and in a critical moment the hand had passed his reaction-point and he let it, let Duun touch his jaw. A two-fingered grip settled gently on either side, where no one's hand belonged but his teacher's, but the slow-moving hand too quick for him if he should move.

  He was vulnerable to that. He knew it. He cherished it. When Duun discovered weaknesses in him he attacked them, but this was the allowable one, this one was his safety that kept the games all games. Duun never took that away. Duun's dark eyes were on a level with his own, poured force into him, like the dark of night, like the dark and all the stars in which he whirled and perished.

  "What is your need, Haras-hatani?"

  (O gods, Duun— don't.)

  "What is your need, Haras-Thorn? Why did I get through your guard? To what are you vulnerable? Name me that thing."

  "You, Duun-hatani. I need you."

  The grip hurt. Bruised. "What am I to you, minnow?"

  Words failed him. The grip grew harder. Gentler then. The eyes shifted, let him go and he could blink. Duun drew his hand back and Thorn was shaking.

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  "You understand what I did to you, minnow? You understand how easy it was? Do you think I could do it again?

  (Duun holding him by the fire, Duun touching him, all the warmth there was. Not to be touched again. Not ever to allow that to Duun or anyone—) Tears stung Thorn's eyes. (Your eyes are running. Do that tomorrow and I'll beat you.) "Yes," Thorn said. His chest ached. "Yes, Duun-hatani.

  Right now you could."

  Duun's eyes on his. Dark and deep and cold as the artificial night. A second time Duun's hand lifted. (I'll hurt you this time, Thorn.) Thorn lifted his hand ever so slowly and opposed it. Duun seemed satisfied.

  Walked around him again and the skin of Thorn's back crawled. His buttocks tensed. Once more to the side and in front of him.

  Like a lizard-strike this time. Thorn flung up his hand and palm hit palm with a slap that echoed. No force then. No pushing, from either side. Duun signed with his other hand. Thorn accepted it, maintained wariness while Duun disengaged his hand and put it behind him.

  Inviting a strike. (Try me, fledgling.)

  "I'm not a fool, Duun-hatani."

  "You're less one than you were," Meaning the matter of the farmers, Thorn thought. It was all in these days Duun had ever hinted on the matter.

  "I'm not ready, Duun-hatani."

  "The world doesn't always ask if you're ready, Haras. It's not likely to."

  Duun set his hands in his belt. "You're going to have other teachers. Oh, I'll be here. For now. But there'll be others. Other young people. They're not hatani. They know you are."

  (People like me, Duun? Are any like me?) But the question hung in his throat. ("What do you need, Haras-hatani?") It was deadly. It opened him up in ways he knew better than to confess. "When?" he asked. (Duun, I don't want other teachers.)

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  ( Want, minnow? Do I hear want? )

  "Tomorrow. Mind, don't show off. You'll be better in some ways, worse in others. You're good in math; you'll learn to work new ways— not in your head, this time. On machines. They're not hatani. If you hit one of them you'd kill him. Do you understand that? Your reactions are too quick. And they don't know how to stop you. So your reactions have to be quicker. To keep from reacting at all— Do you understand that? Lay down the knife.

  Lay it down when you're with these people. Let yourself be open. So.

  Stand still." A third time Duun reached toward his face. Thorn's hand lifted— stopped in indecision. (Trick? Or what he means?) He let Duun touch his jaw, let the touch trail down and beneath it. "That's good," Duun said. And drew the hand back again. "Remember that. They're like that.

  None of them could stop you. None of them would have a chance. None of them know how to stand, how to move. They won't touch you. That's the one thing they'll understand. Even if they forget that— don't react.

  Understand, Thorn?"

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  VII

  They were five: Elanhen, a youth whose back had black tipping on the gray, broad of shoulder, with a wary eye turned to the world and a diffident and ready grin; he was first and easiest in his manner (wisest, Thorn thought: the manner is all he gives the world, he keeps all the rest reserved.) There was Cloen, a smallish fellow whose belly-fur had dapples— ("Don't remark on it," Duun warned Thorn in advance when Duun described Cloen that way. "His baby-mark's still with him.") And Cloen was least outgoing, and quickest to frown. (He has a wound, Thorn thought; it bleeds into the water. Cloen would be an easy mark. If I were after him.)

  And Sphitti, lank, unkempt Sphitti. They called him that, which was a kind of weed (like Thorn). Sphitti would sit and think and think and he hardly talked.

  Lastly there was Betan— who was female; who moved with a wide-hipped stride, whose grin was sudden and whose wit was quicker than the rest. Betan smelled different. Betan wrinkled her nose at him and grinned in a way no one had ever looked at him, which frightened him.

  (Confidence. She knows things. She knows things I don't and knows she knows and she knows she can take me.) If Duun had looked that way at him and laughed inside like that Thorn would have gone cold to the soles of his feet. He would have eaten nothing and drunk nothing Duun could have dreamed of touching and not dared sleep in his bed. That a stranger looked at him this way was devastating. He stood staring back the first time that they met and put on his most frozen, expressionless face.

  (They don't have the moves, Duun had insisted. But Duun had lied before.)

  They met, all five of them, in a room Duun took him to, on a floor above the floor where they lived. "Go inside," Duun said, and under the eyes of a watcher at the door, made to leave him, which prospect alone filled Thorn with panic. "Mind your manners." Duun did not say, mind what I told you.

  It was what Duun did not say that always weighed heaviest. Thorn was expected to remember those things without being told. "Yes, Duun,"

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  Thorn had said, and committed himself on his own, as the watcher opened the door to let him in. The touch of Duun's hand in the middle of his back was a dismissal, not a shove.

  Four strangers got up off their seats when he passed the foyer, four strangers whose commingled scent was artifice and flowers, in a white-sanded room as large as the gymnasium: it had five desks; and the windows in this white sterility showed a thicket like Sheon's woods, a tangle for eye and mind. He would smell of fear to them. He stopped still.

  "Hello," said the one he discovered as Elanhen. "Hello," Thorn said, and put the best face on he could, a face he had seen in Duun when he met the meds. "I'm Haras." Haras he was to outsiders, his hatani-name. They told theirs. That was how it started. "We're a study-group," Elanhen said.

  "They say you're good."

  He might have been furred as they were, four-fingered, with ears and eyes like theirs. (I'm different. They shot at me at Sheon. Aren't you shocked, the least bit?) But no one affected to notice.

  (Duun, Thorn thought, Duun knows them. Duun set this up. Duun arranged it, all.) He felt the walls of a trap about him. He let them invite him to the desk that was to be his and show him the computer. "You have to catch up with us," Elanhen said. "Sit down, Har
as-hatani."

  He did. He took the keyboard onto his lap and tried. He had trouble with the keys, but not with the math. He fouled the machine once and he was ashamed, looked up at Sphitti, thinking to meet scorn.

  "Try again," Sphitti said. "From the beginning." Without rancor.

  The others watched him. Thorn centered his mind, recalled Sphitti's instructions and got it right this time.

  "That's good," Betan said, and Thorn looked guardedly her way. Good was not that easy a, word to win. He suspected humor at his expense. (What are they up to, when will it come? What game are they playing?) 81

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  He tried not to make mistakes. He listened to things and remembered them.

  * * *

  Duun did not mention the matter of the school that day or the next. (When will he move?) Thorn slept lightly, feared his food and ate with attention to taste. (He won't warn me the next time. He won't. He'll move. How? And when?) A panic had settled on him, a sense of things slipping away from him, the chance that Duun himself might go, now that there were so many others to take care of him.

  (What is your need, Haras-hatani?)

  He might wake one morning and find Duun gone, only because Duun knew how desperately he needed him, and needing him was wrong.

  Perhaps Duun was waiting for something. (For me to attack him, for me to start it this time….) But Thorn would lose. Events had proved that. And he nursed a more dreadful suspicion: that if he did not he would lose all the same— for Duun would not abide defeat. Duun would go. He would be alone finally, utterly alone, among all the meds and the strangers they foisted off on him. So he wished only to hold his own. Forever. And not to displease Duun, which seemed mutually impossible.

  He played the dkin for Duun. He sat on the riser. ("We're in the city now,"

  Duun said, "and cityfolk don't use the floor except to walk on." It seemed unreasonable to Thorn. He liked the warmth of the sand and the ability to shape himself a place in it. But Duun said; and he did as he was told.) He played the songs he knew. Duun played him others. This had not changed, and it soothed him and made Duun smile.

  I one day wandered down a road

  that I had never known;

  I one day came upon a path

  that I was never shown.

  It wended up and down the hills

  And wandered through the dell,

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  And there I met a clever man

  Whose like no song can tell.

  I never met a man his like:

  I never hope to say

  How he was like and unlike me,

  This man I met that day.

  He had my look, he had my eyes,

  He had my ways, for true.

  Why, fool, he said, and sang the song

  That I've just sung to you.

  Thorn laughed when Duun had sung it. Duun smiled and adjusted a string.

  "Let me have it," Thorn said.

  "Ah, there's no revenge. My repertoire is endless." The scarred lip twisted.

  It did that in such a smile. "Damn." The string had snapped. Thorn winced. "It's old," Duun said. "Quite old. I'll get another tomorrow." Duun gave the dkin to him to put away, and Thorn took the instrument and put it carefully in its case. "Get some sleep," Duun said.

  "Yes," he said. And turned, again, on his knees on the riser, for Duun had gotten up and come up behind him, and Thorn was wary of that. He looked up. Duun stared at him a long moment and turned and walked away. The silence left Thorn cold. He snapped the case shut.

  (He was thinking something. He was planning something. He meant me to know. Gods, what?)

  Duun stopped in the doorway that led back to the other rooms. Looked back again. Walked on.

  (Waiting for me to do— what?)

  (Does Duun ever do anything without a reason? Does he ever make the least move without a reason?)

  (I'm scared of those people. Does he know?)

  * * *

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  A confusion of white light and white sand— the gymnasium spun and the sand met Thorn's back: he rolled and came up on his feet with lights exploding in his eyes.

  "Again," Duun said.

  Thorn's left knee buckled and went out from under him. He landed on his knees in shock, feeling the abrasions. The skid had cost his shoulders too.

  Sweat stung there. He knelt there and lifted a hand to signal a wait till the daze should pass.

  Duun walked over and took his face between his hands, pulled his eyelids back to face the light, felt over his skull.

  "Again," Thorn said. Duun shoved his head free with a force that rocked him, cuffed his ear and backed off.

  Thorn got to his feet and stood there wide-legged and wobbling.

  "So you haven't learned it all, minnow. Slow, this time. Step by step again."

  Thorn came, reached out his hand in the slow dance Duun wanted, turned and turned and ended up again in the way of Duun's slow moving arm.

  "That's how. Do it, minnow."

  There was a counter for it. It arrived against Thorn's ribs in slow-motion and he evaded the feigned force of it. Sweat flew from him and spattered the sand, flung from his hair as he snaked his body back. Duun faced him, hands on knees. Duun did not sweat. His tongue lolled at times, his mouth open and showing his sharp teeth. But it flicked and licked the saliva clear.

  Duun bent now and invited attack. "Keep it slow, Thorn. I've still got tricks."

  Thorn had thought he knew them. The light that danced in Duun's eyes alarmed him. He had never seen Duun extend himself against him. Not truly. He understood that now.

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  Duun's hand flicked out and touched him on the cheek when he came in.

  "You're dead. Dead, Haras-hatani."

  Thorn wiped his face. His centering was gone. He recovered it. (Don't be bluffed. Turn off the fear. Turn it off, minnow.) Duun got a grip on him. Bent him back, holding him from falling. Duun let him go; but Thorn rescued himself from that shame with a tumble up again, sand coating his sweating skin.

  Duun turned his back on him and walked off.

  "Duun. Duun-hatani." His face burned.

  Duun turned. "You don't have to say can't. You are that thing. The world doesn't wait for your moods, minnow."

  "Try me!"

  Duun came back and laid him straightway breathless on the sand, then stood looking at him. "Well, it wasn't can't that threw you that time. Did I promise you a miracle?"

  Thorn rolled over and tried to cut Duun's ankles from under him.

  Thorn ended on his belly this time, spitting the sand that glued itself to his face and hands and body; Duun's knee was in his back, his arm twisted painfully. Duun let him up and sat down on the sand.

  (Invitation?) But Duun held up his hand. "No." Duun said, "not wise."

  Thorn knew where that attack would have taken him— into Duun's grip when he refused to go sailing over Duun and halfway to the wall. And Duun's teeth at his throat. Never grapple, Duun had hammered home to him. Nature shorted you, not me. And Duun had grinned at him that day to make the point.

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  Thorn tucked his knees up and locked his arms about them, panting. Sweat ran into his eyes and he wiped a gritty hand across his brow, flexed the fingers and held them out.

  "You're pulling your claws, Duun-hatani." Pain welled up and hurt his chest and it was not all the pain of several meetings with the floor. "You'd have me in tatters. You'd tear my throat out. Anybody normal— would."

  "Eyes," Duun reminded him, with a touch at his own brow-shadowed eye.

  "That's worst. You let me at your face. Never."

  "I'm sorry, Duun."

  "You wouldn't be sorry. You'd be blind. Damn right I pull it. You do that again I'll scar you. Hear?"

  Thorn rocked his body in something like a bow. He hurt. His bones ached as if they had all been reseated.


  "Yes, Duun."

  "But as for the claws— they might take you if they could touch you. If you were a fool. I'm very good, Thorn. Doesn't that tell you something?"

  Thorn paused a long time. The ache got into his throat and stuck there, embarrassing him. "That I might be."

  "Did you touch me?"

  "No, Duun-hatani."

  "Do I hear can't now?"

  "No, Duun-hatani."

  "The outsiders have gotten into your head. Their moves have infected you.

  Do you let them touch you?"

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  "They touch each other. Not me."

  "They touch you— here." Duun touched his brow. "You lose your focus.

  Youth, Thorn. Give that up too."

  Thorn drew another painful breath. (They're yours. Aren't they? A hatani dictates the moves others make…. Duun-hatani.) "What can they teach me you can't?"

  "What is ordinary. What the world is."

  (The world is wide, minnow.)

  "Duun— they act like I was nothing unusual."

  Duun shrugged.

  "They're lying, aren't they?"

  "What does your judgment tell you?"

  "They're lying. They're pretending. You sent them. You're in control of all of it."

  "Tkkssss. You have a suspicious mind, Haras-hatani."

  "You've always been. Is that close enough to beating you? No one's like me. There aren't any. I'm different. And they're so bust not noticing it they shout it. Why, Duun?"

  "You build bridges in the sky."