Cuckoo's Egg

(The world's wide, mi

Cuckoo's Egg

XIV

There was peace, eerie peace and stillness, in which moving cost little and breathing cost far less. A gentle air touched Thorn's face and a breeze stirred against his cheek.

Duun floated above him, balanced crazily on one arm that gripped the back of the seat. Thorn blinked, and Duun freed him of the restraints. A little move of Thorn's arm against the seat freed him from the cushion.

"We're up," Thorn murmured. "We're up."

"Where the worlds spin, yes. You can be easy awhile, mi

Duun pulled gently at his wrist— "Keep your arm stiff. Never mind, don't try to hold." The fastenings of the flightsuit gave way. Duun's own suit drifted in pieces, loosed at chest and wrists and ankles. Duun worked him free: torque set them spi

Freedom, then, Thorn drifted, shut his eyes in exhaustion, half-slitted them to watch Duun come and go through a hole he had not seen before. A hatch had opened above them. In the lazy spin Thorn caught sight of white light, of shonun bodies that drifted to and fro about some business. Duun went up to that place and sailed down again like some graceful diver.

Duun's ears were up; his eyes were lively and bright.

(He knows this, he knows all of it, he's been this way more than once.)

"Where are we going, Duun?"

"Hush. Rest. People are busy."

"What's happened to the world?"

194

Cuckoo's Egg

"It's still there. Fighting's centered mostly now around the shuttleports and Avenen and Suunviden, but it's dying down now— now that we're away and there's not a damn thing they can do about it."

"Why did we do it? Where are we going?"

"Why, why, and why? There's a shower on board. I'm going to use it.

When I have I'm going to tape some plastic around those hands of yours and make you pleasanter company." Duun drifted off from him. Thorn twisted in midair and saw him disappear down yet another hole. Thorn tried to maneuver himself, spun and brought up against the cushions, remembering only at the last moment not to use his hands; he rebounded helplessly and drifted, waiting.

* * *

A vacuum went on in the shower and Thorn watched the water droplets run in clinging trails until they were gone and the lamp dried him. He elbowed the latch and drifted out again, turned once in midair in slow revolution before Duun snagged him and wrapped a plain blue kilt about him, tugged the self-belt about his waist with a touch familiar years ago, exactly the snugness, exactly the way Duun had done it then— Thorn looked into Duun's face from a grownup angle, met him eye-to-eye when Duun finished with the small pat on the side he had given him when he was small. Time went backward and forward, spun like the room.

"Follow me," Duun said, trod on the cabinet wall and drifted upward with unerring grace through the narrow hatch.

Thorn kicked off, angled his body with what grace he could manage and sailed through in Duun's wake, followed him again, up into a light, into the mind and heart of the shuttle where crew came and went.

They stared— (they shocked; they want to be polite; they don't know whether to stare or not, whether staring's honest or only rude.) Duun drifted on and stopped and Thorn imitated his move, ignoring the stares—

(The world in flames. They oughtto hate me. I don't blame them. I was born for it.) And he floated strangely free, taking all their blame, ignoring 195

Cuckoo's Egg

their eyes on his smooth pale skin, suffering Duun's grip on his arm that drew him toward the window.

The bright blue world— was there. Its fires were invisible. The perspective denied everything— the fires became one more illusion beyond a window; his life shrank to invisible scale, lived out on a mountain and in a city whose burning could not even stain the clouds.

He stared and stared, and the tears beaded in his eyes until his blinking drove them. He wiped his eyes and a droplet floated free from his fingertip, perfect, a wobbling orb like the world in space.

"Do you love it?" Duun asked. "Do you love it, mi

"Yes," Thorn said when he could say anything at all. He wiped his eyes again. "It's still there."

"So long as you aren't on it," Duun said, and it was truth; he had seen it.

Thorn's chest ached. He put out a hand and touched the window and the world.

* * *

The ship left the world, while they belted in below. The engines kicked them hard and long.

Thorn shut his eyes. I can't sleep, I can never sleep, he told himself, but the strength ebbed out of him and he felt the pain reminding him of what he was and what it cost, constantly, like the beats of his heart. "Drink,"

Duun said, and fed him something through a straw that he wanted no more of after the first sip. "Drink it." Again, in that voice that had drilled him all his life, and it left no choice. Thorn drank, and slept; and when he woke Duun slept by his side— his unscarred side toward him, that side that gave its own illusions, of what Duun had been before.

Thorn shut his eyes again. (Is Sagot alive? Did Manan and the other pilot live? The guild— did the missiles defend it?)

196

Cuckoo's Egg

(Children standing on the rock at Sheon, seeing red suns bloom on their horizons. Smoke palls the sky. Thunder shakes the ground.) (In the halls at Dsonen people run in confusion, not knowing where to go.) The sun whirls past the canopy and men like great insects manage the controls. The plane hangs in the sky and time stops. The war goes on in a moment frozen forever, all war, all time.

Sagot sits in her lonely hall. There is thunder. She sits frail and imposing at the end of that room, waiting in front of all the empty desks.

A shuttle flies in place and the universe rushes past it, sweeping the world out of its reach.

* * *

There were mundane things. There had to be: there were bodily needs, and Thorn cared stubbornly for himself, once Duun had shown him how things worked; there was a breakfast of sorts, and Thorn found his hands a little less painful. Crew came drifting through their compartment in the urge of like necessities and coming back again. There was still the surreal about it, like the drifting course they took, a leisurely pace, a slowness like a dream.

"Where are we going, Duun?"

"Gatog."

"Is that the station?" Thorn had never heard it called that.

"It's one of them." Duun said.

(Isthere more than one?) Sagot's teaching developed cracks, fractured in doubts. (Is no truth entire?)

"We had a report," Duun said, "the ghotanin have sent a messenger to Tangan offering to talk. The kosan guild refused at first, but they're going to relent."

197

Cuckoo's Egg

"Is that part of your solution?" Thorn asked. His mind worked again. Duun looked at him with that closed hatani stare to match what Thorn gave him.

"Balance is," Duun said. "It was never my intention to destroy the ghota."

"They call you seyDuun."

'It's a courtesy these days."

"You led kosanin?"

"Once."

No more than that. Duun would not be led.

More of sleep and meals and bodies. The gel on his hands began to peel.