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Cuckoo's Egg
C.J. Cherryh
DAW Books, Inc.
Donald A. Wollheim, Founder
375 Hudson Street,
New York, NY 10014
Elizabeth R. Wollheim
Sheila E. Gilbert
Publishers
www.dawbooks.com
in cooperation with
SEATTLE BOOK COMPANY
www.seattlebook.com
Produced by
RosettaMachine
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Cuckoo's Egg
The Finest in
DAW Science Fiction
from C.J. CHERRYH:
THE ALLIANCE-UNION UNIVERSE
The Company Wars
DOWNBELOW STATION
The Era of Rapprochement
SERPENT'S REACH
FORTY THOUSAND IN GEHENNA
MERCHANTER'S LUCK
The Chanur Novels
THE PRIDE OF CHANUR
CHANUR'S VENTURE
THE KIF STRIKE BACK
CHANUR'S HOMECOMING
CHANUR'S LEGACY
The Mri Wars
THE FADED SUN: KESRITH
THE FADED SUN: SHON'JIR
THE FADED SUN: KUTATH
Merovingen Nights (Mri Wars period)
ANGEL WITH THE SWORD
The Age of Exploration
CUCKOO'S EGG
VOYAGER IN NIGHT
PORT ETERNITY
The Hanan Rebellion
BROTHERS OF EARTH
HUNTER OF WORLDS
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Cuckoo's Egg
THE MORGAINE CYCLE
GATE OF IVREL (#1)
WELL OF SHIUAN (#2)
FIRES OF AZEROTH (#3)
EXILE'S GATE (#4)
THE EALDWOOD FANTASY NOVELS
THE DREAMSTONE
THE TREE OF SWORDS AND JEWELS
OTHER CHERRYH NOVELS
HESTIA
WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE
THE FOREIGNER UNIVERSE
FOREIGNER
INVADER
INHERITOR
PRECURSOR
DEFENDER*
EXPLORER*
*Forthcoming
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Cuckoo's Egg
Copyright © 1985 by C.J. Cherryh.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 646.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.
Microsoft LIT edition ISBN: 0-7420-9098-1
Adobe PDF edition ISBN: 0-7420-9100-7
Palm PDB edition ISBN: 0-7420-9170-8
MobiPocket edition ISBN: 0-7420-9099-X
Ebook editions produced by
SEATTLE BOOK COMPANY
Ebook conversion and distribution powered by
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All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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Cuckoo's Egg
Electronic format made
available by arrangement with
DAW Books, Inc.
www.dawbooks.com
Elizabeth R. Wollheim
Sheila E. Gilbert
Publishers
Palm Digital Media
www.palm.com/ebooks
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Cuckoo's Egg
Table of Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
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Cuckoo's Egg
I
He sat in a room, the sand of which was synthetic and shining with opal tints, fine and light beneath his bare feet. The windows held no cityview, but a continuously rotating panorama of the Khogghut plain: a lie. Traffic noise came through.
His name was Duun. It was Dana Duun Shtoni no Lughn. But Duun was enough for day-to-day. They called him other things. Sey:general. Mingi: lord. Or something very like. Hatani: that was another thing. But Duun was enough now. There was only one. Shonunin the world over knew that, and knew him; and when the door chimed and they came to bring the alien to him, whose who carried it would not look him in the eyes, not alone for the scars that a shonun could see, the pale smooth marks traced through the fur of half his face like the limbs of a lightning-blasted tree, the marks that twisted his right ear and left his mouth quirked in permanent irony and one eye staring out of ruin.
He was Duun, of Shanoen.He reached out hands one of which was marred, like his face, and took the closed carrier that they gave him, marking how their ears slanted back and how they turned their heads from his for horror— not of what they saw: they were meds, and had seen deformity. It was the force in him: like a great wind, like a great heat in their faces.
But his hands were gentle when he took the carrier from them.
They went away, appalled and forgetting courtesies.
He waved the door shut and set the carrier on the table-rise, opened it and gathered the small bundled thing from it.
* * *
Shonunin were naked when they were born, but downed in silver that quickly went to dapples and last of all to gray body coat and black on limbs and ears and crest. Duun held the creature on its discarded wrapping, on his knees; and its downless skin was naked and pink as 1
Cuckoo's Egg
something lately ski
With the claw he lifted the lid of a sleeping eye; he saw it white and milky, centered with blue, restless in natural shiftings. He touched the convolutions of the stiff, small ears; explored the visible organ and discovered reaction: so it was sensitive. That was of interest. He examined the fat, clawless feet, all one pad as far as the toes. Unfurled a five-fingered hand with the careful touch of a single clawed finger, and the tiny fist clenched again, stubbornly. It waved its limbs. Fluid shot from the organ and fouled Duun's clothes.
Any shonun would have flinched seeing that. But Duun gathered up the wrap about the infant and mopped at himself patiently, with infinite patience. So. Likewise shonun infants performed such obscenities, if more discreetly. It let out cries, soft and weak and meaningless as all infant cries. It struggled with less strength than his own infants had shown.
He knew what it would be, grown. He knew its face. He knew every aspect of its body. He gathered it against his breast in the stinking blanket and rose, went to the package they had brought him that morning and left on the riser by the bed. He held the softly crying creature in the crook of his left arm. for he was still more able with the right hand, two-fingered as it was. He managed to open the case and to warm the milk— not milk of shonunin; by synthesis the meds provided, of their own ingenuity.
There was data, which had come days ago; he had memorized it. The creature wailed; so shonunin wailed, exercising infant lungs. And it breathed the air shonunin breathed: and perhaps its gut would take the meat shonunin ate one day. The meds thought that this was the case. The teeth that would grow would, some of them, be pointed like the major teeth of a shonun. "Hush, hush," he told it, joggling it against his chest. He 2
Cuckoo's Egg
drew the warmed bottle from the case and thrust the nipple into the soft mouth that quested among the blankets. It suckled noisily and quieted, and he crossed the sand to the riser he had left, sat down cross-legged, rocking it, whispering to it.
"Be still, be still."
Its eyes closed in contentment; it slept again, fed and held. It could not, like a shonun, be taken for granted. He was delicate with it. He laid it finally in the bowl of his own bed and sat beside it, watching its small movements, the regular heaving of its tiny round belly; and when the view in the windows changed and became the nightbound sea, he still watched.