SERPENT’S REACH BY C.J. Cherryh

“Need Meth-maren,” it insisted. “Need. Need. Urgent.”

“I don’t know where she is,” he said. “She left She said she would come back soon. I don’t know.”

It rushed away, through the door to the garden, damaging the doorframe in its haste. Jim followed it past the demoralised house-azi, looked out into the ravaged back garden where a deepening pit delved into the earth, where the neighbour’s wall had been undermined. Guard-azi stood their posts faithfully, but as close to the azi quarters door as they might. He went out past the excavation, past the guards-sought Max, and having located him in the azi quarters, told him of Warrior’s request, not knowing what he ought to have answered.

“We must stay here as we were told,” Max concluded, his squarish face grimly set, and there was in his eyes a hint of disapproval for the azi who suggested a violation of those instructions. Jim caught it and bit off an answer, turned and hesitated in the door, irresolution gnawing at him with a persistence that made his belly hurt. The hive wanted: Raen would have been disturbed at an urgent message from the hive. She needed to know.

And he was charged simply to keep the house in order.

That was not, now, what she needed. The look that had been in her eyes when she left him had been one of worry, anxiousness, he thought wretchedly, because she must leave him in charge, him who could not understand the half of what he ought.

He looked back, shivering. “Max,” he said.

The big guard-azi waited. “Orders?” Max asked, that being the way Raen had arranged things.

“I’m going upstairs. You’re in charge down here.”

“She said you were to work.”

“She said I was to take care of things. I’m going upstairs. I have something to do for her. You’re in charge down here. That’s the order I’m giving you. I’m responsible. I’ll admit to it.”

Max inclined his head, accepting, and Jim strode back the way he had come, across the devastation of the garden, past the domestic azi in the kitchen, who was mopping up the broken dish—past the comp centre, the screens of which flashed with messages which waited on Raen. The walls vibrated with song. Warriors hulked here and there in the dark places of the hall. A majat-azi scampered out of the farther doors, female, naked, bearing a blue light that glowed feebly in the shadow. She grinned and traded fingers across his shoulder as she passed, and he shuddered at the madness in that laughing face. A male followed, younger than left the pens to any other service, and the same wildness was in his eyes. A whole stream of them began to pour up from the basement with a Worker behind them, fluting orders for haste.

He fled in horror, lest he be swept up with them by accident, herded with them into the dark pit outside. He ran the stairs, hurled himself into the bedroom, Saw it safely vacant and locked the doors.

It was a moment before he could unknot his clenched hands and arms and straighten. One part of him did not want to go farther . . . would rather seek the corner of the room and tuck up there and cease.

Like the lower azi, when they reached the limit of their functions.

Raen needed more than that. This tall, gaunt Kontrin had come, and talked with her, and she had been distressed: the strange born-man azi had distressed her further. He under-stood that there were connections he could not comprehend, that perhaps she was somewhere with him, who was of her kind—and that in hazardous things an azi of his training was useless.

Keep the house in order.

It was far from what she needed, but it was the limit of his function. He had seen betas, who could make up what to do: Kontrin, whose function he could not conceive, but who simply knew. He had seen the pens and knew himself.

Dimly he realised that if Raen were lost, he would be terminated: someone had told him that they did not pass on their azi; but he failed to take alarm at that. He thought should that happen, he would simply sit down and wait for termination, out of interest in other things, without further use. There was an unfamiliar tightness in his throat that had bided there most of the day, a tenseness that would not go away.

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