“Come and sit down a moment, Hesper,” Taki said, but she shook her head. She looked down at her body and moved her hands over it.
“They feel sorry for us. Did you know that? They feel sorry about our bodies.”
“How do you know that?” Taki asked.
“Logic. We have these completely functional bodies. No useless wings. Not art.” Hesper picked up the blanket and headed for the bedroom. At the cloth curtain she paused a moment. “They love our loneliness, though. They’ve taken all mine. They never leave me alone now.” She thrust her right arm suddenly out into the air. It made the curtain ripple. “Go away,” she said, ducking behind the sheet.
Taki followed her. He was very frightened. “No one is here but us, Hesper,” he told her. He tried to put his arms around her but she pushed him back and began to dress.
“Don’t touch me all the time,” she said. He sank onto the bed and watched her. She sat on the floor to fasten her boots.
“Are you going out, Hesper?” he asked and she laughed.
“Hesper is out,” she said. “Hesper is out of place, out of time, out of luck, and out of her mind. Hesper has vanished completely. Hesper was broken into and taken.”
Taki fastened his hands tightly together. “Please don’t do this to me, Hesper,” he pleaded. “It’s really so unfair. When did I ask so much of you? I took what you offered me; I never took anything else. Please don’t do this.”
Hesper had found the brush and was pulling it roughly through her hair. He rose and went to her, grabbing her by the arms, trying to turn her to face him. “Please, Hesper!”
She shook loose from him without really appearing to notice his hands, continued to work through the worst of her tangles. When she did turn around, her face was familiar, but somehow not Hesper’s face. It was a face which startled him.
“Hesper is gone,” it said. “We have her. You’ve lost her. We are ready to talk to you. Even though you will never, never, never understand.” She reached out to touch him, laying her open palm against his cheek and leaving it there.
C. J. CHERRYH
Pots
C. J. Cherryh is the creator of the encompassing Union-Alliance future-history series, which chronicles the interplay of intergalactic commerce and politics several millennia hence. It includes, among other works, the Hugo Award–winning novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen, memorable for its study of human nature through the creation of clones with programmed memories. Praised for its inventive extrapolations of clinical and social science and deft blends of technology and human interest, the series enfolds a number of celebrated subseries, including her Faded Sun trilogy (Kesrith, Shon’jir, Kutath). Her Chanur cycle (The Pride of Chanur, Chanur’s Venture, The Kif Strikes Back, Chanur’s Homecoming, Chanur’s Legacy), also part of the series, tells of a race of sentient leonine creatures and is notable for its alien viewpoint and illuminating perspectives on the human race rendered from outside it. Much of Cherryh’s fiction is concerned with the impact of environment—family, politics, culture—on the values and ideologies of the individual. In Cuckoo’s Egg she rings a variation on the Tarzan theme, imaging a human child raised to maturity by a race of intelligent felines. Heavy Time contrasts the personalities of its two protagonists, one raised in a nurturing human environment, the other stunted socially by an upbringing deformed by manipulative corporate interests. Her recent quartet of novels formed by Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, and Precursor has been praised for its sensitive documentation of the cultural and racial differences a human colony must overcome in forming a fragile alliance with the planet’s alien inhabitants. The Gene Wars is a blend of epic quest fantasy and hard science fiction, set in a future when nanotechnology is used as a weapon. Cherryh has also authored the four-volume Morgaine heroic fantasy series and the epic Galisien sword-and-sorcery trilogy, which includes Fortress in the Eye of Time, Fortress of Eagles, and Fortress of Owls. She is the creator of the Merovingian Nights shared-world series and cocreator of the multivolume Heroes in Hell shared-world compilations.
IT WAS A most bitter trip, the shuttle-descent to the windy surface. Suited, encumbered by lifesupport, Desan stepped off the platform and waddled onward into the world, waving off the attentions of small spidery service robots: “Citizen, this way, this way, citizen, have a care—do watch your step; a suit tear is hazardous.”
Low-level servitors. Desan detested them. The chief of operations had plainly sent these creatures accompanied only by an AI eight-wheel transport, which inconveniently chose to park itself a good five hundred paces beyond the shuttle blast zone, an uncomfortably long walk across the dusty pan in the crinkling, pack-encumbered oxy-suit. Desan turned, casting a forlorn glance at the shuttle waiting there on its landing gear, silver, dip-nosed wedge under a gunmetal sky, at rest on an ocher and rust landscape. He shivered in the sky-view, surrendered himself and his meager luggage to the irritating ministries of the service robots, and waddled on his slow way down to the waiting AI transport.
“Good day,” the vehicle said inanely, opening a door. “My passenger compartment is not safe atmosphere; do you understand, Lord Desan?”
“Yes, yes.” Desan climbed in and settled himself in the front seat, a slight give of the transport’s suspensors. The robots fussed about in insectile hesitance, delicately setting his luggage case just so, adjusting, adjusting until it conformed with their robotic, template-compared notion of their job. Maddening. Typical robotic efficiency. Desan slapped the pressure-sensitive seating. “Come, let’s get this moving, shall we?”
The AI talked to its duller cousins, a single squeal that sent them scuttling. “Attention to the door, citizen.” It lowered and locked. The AI started its noisy drive motor. “Will you want the windows dimmed, citizen?”
“No. I want to see this place.”
“A pleasure, Lord Desan.”
Doubtless for the AI, it was.
THE STATION WAS situated a long drive across the pan, across increasingly softer dust that rolled up to obscure the rearview—softer, looser dust, occasionally a wind-scooped hollow that made the transport flex—(“Do forgive me, citizen. Are you comfortable?”)
“Quite, quite, you’re very good.”
“Thank you, citizen.”
And finally—finally!—something other than flat appeared, the merest humps of hills, and one anomalous mountain, a massive, long bar that began as a haze and became solid; became a smooth regularity before the gentle brown folding of hills hardly worthy of the name.
Mountain. The eye indeed took it for a volcanic or sedimentary formation at distance, some anomalous and stubborn outcrop in this barren reach, where all else had declined to entropy; absolute, featureless, flat. But when the AI passed along its side this mountain had joints and seams, had the marks of making on it; and even knowing in advance what it was, driving along within view of the jointing, this work of Ancient hands—chilled Desan’s well-traveled soul. The station itself came into view against the weathered hills, a collection of shocking green domes on a brown lifeless world. But such domes Desan had seen. With only the AI for witness, Desan turned in his seat, pressed the flexible bubble of the helmet to the double-seal window, and stared and stared at the stonework until it passed to the rear and the dust obscured it.