Duun cut all the sound. The silence was numbing. Duun walked away, up the aisle toward the illusion of the windows and Thorn followed, on the trackless floor and stopped when the windows were all the view. Duun lifted his arm and pointed. “That’s what the ear picks up. It listens, minnow, it’s turned beyond this solar system. What does it say to us?”
“Numbers.” Thorn looked and lost all sense of up and down. The vision reeled among lights and Gatog’s shape and the occasional bright stars, and Duun a gray-cloaked shadow against that bottomless void. “It talks about the stars, the elements- Stop playing games, Duun! What’s sending it?”
“People.” Duun turned toward him. “People like you, minnow.”
The room was very still. There had never been such a voice. There was nowhere such a voice. The windows were illusion and the world was.
“No, Duun.”
“Do you know differently?”
“Dammit, Duun-don’t do this to me!”
“You wanted your answer. There’s one more question. Do you want to ask it?”
“What am I?”
“Ah.” Duun walked to the window rim, eclipsing a light. “You’re a genetic code. So am I. Yours is different.”
“I’m not shonun?”
“Oh, gods, minnow, you’ve known that for years.” Duun faced him, twilight shadow against the glare, gray against the void. “You just didn’t know what else you could be. The world held all your possibilities. I created you. A code into an egg, not the first trial; there were thousands of tries till the meds got the right of it. A technology had to be built: we had the most of it, our own doing; but you were a special problem. And you-were the success. They brought you to me: they didn’t want to. They’d labored so hard to have you. Do you believe me, minnow? Am I telling the truth?”
“I don’t know, Duun.” Thorn wanted to sit down. He wanted to go somewhere. There was no refuge, on this floor, beneath these windows.
“It is the truth,” Duun said. “The ear picks up those messages. Perhaps there’s something in the pathways of the brain; perhaps it’s knowing one’s own face; perhaps both these things. You duplicate the sounds on the tapes perfectly; no shonun can manage all those consonants-no shonun could read the faces on that tape-except maybe myself; except Sagot sometimes. You taught me. You taught me your reflexes and your inmost feelings; and when we gave you the vocabulary we’ve been able to guess for ourselves-perhaps it’s pathways, gods know- you began to handle it. That’s what you were made for.”
“To live here? To work with this?”
“It doesn’t appeal to you?”
“Duun-take me home. O gods, take me home again.”
“Haras. Don’t break down on me. You haven’t come this far to beg me like a child.”
Thorn came over to the window and turned his back to it. It took the sight away. It put light on Duun’s face and hid his own. “Don’t play me tricks. I can’t-” (Can’t, minnow?”) There was silence.
“The transmissions come at regular intervals,” Duun said in a calm, still voice. “They repeat, mostly. What do they say?”
“I told you what they said.”
“You encourage me.”
“To what?” Thorn looked up at the window; perspective destroyed the illusion, made it only glare and dark, meaningless. He flinched from it and looked back. “Is that why they’re afraid of me?”
“I took an alien, I held it, fed it, warmed it-it was small, but it would grow. I took it up on a mountain and lived with it alone. I slept under one roof with it, I made it angry, I encouraged it and pushed it and I had nightmares, minnow, I dreamed that it might turn on me. There were times I held it that my flesh crawled; I did these things.”
(Duun-o gods, Duun-) It was beyond hurt.
“… I was more than fair with it. I gave it everything I had to give; I went from step to step. I made it shonun. I taught it; argued with it; discovered its mind and step by step I gave it everything I knew how to teach. Every chance. You grew up shonun. No one knew what to expect. When I told Ellud I would make you hatani he was appalled. When the world knew- there was near panic. No matter. It never reached you. When I told Ellud I would bring you to the guild-well, hatani was bad enough: their judgments were limited. But to put you in the guild- That was earthquake. And you won it. You won Tangen. You did it all, minnow.”