C. J. Cherryh - Foreigner 7 - Destroyer

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DESTROYER

Caroline J Cherryh

the seventh Foreigner book

HTML edition 1.0

scan notes and proofing history

contents

|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|

DAW TITLES BY C. J. CHERRYH

THE FOREIGNER UNIVERSE

1. FOREIGNER

2. INVADER

3. INHERITOR

4. PRECURSOR

5. DEFENDER

6. EXPLORER

7. DESTROYER

8. PRETENDER*

* Coming soon in hardcover from DAW

THE ALLIANCE-UNION UNIVERSE

•DOWNBELOW STATION

•MERCHANTER’S LUCK

•FORTY THOUSAND IN GEHENNA

•SERPENT’S REACH

•AT THE EDGE OF SPACE Omnibus:

Brothers of Earth / Hunter of Worlds

•THE FADED SUN Omnibus:

Kesrith / Shon’jir / Kutath

•THE CHANUR NOVELS THE CHANUR SAGA Omnibus:

The Pride of Chanur / Chanur’s Venture / The Kif

Strike Back

•CHANUR’S HOMECOMING

•CHANUR’S LEGACY

THE MORGAINE CYCLE

THE MORGAINE SAGA Omnibus:

Gate of Ivrel / Well of Shiuan / Fires of Azeroth

EXILE’S GATE

OTHER WORKS

THE DREAMING TREE OMNIBUS: The Tree of Swords

and Jewels / The Dreamstone

ALTERNATE REALITIES Omnibus:

Port Eternity / Wave Without a Shore / Voyager in Night

THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF C. J.

CHERRYH

ANGEL WITH THE SWORD

CUCKOO’S EGG

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM, SHEILA E. GILBERT

PUBLISHERS

http: //www. dawbooks. com

Jacket art by Michael Whelan. DAW Books Collectors No.

1318.

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Book designed by Stanley S. Drate/Folio Graphics Co., Inc.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. ©

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any

resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via

the Internet or any other means without the permission of the

publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase

only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in

or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

First Printing, February 2005 12 3 456789 10

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

U. S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

—MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U. S. A.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

Chapter 1

Spider plants had taken over the cabin, cascading sheets of spider

plants growing from pots improvised from sealed sections of

plastic pipe arranged in racks around the ceiling of every wall.

They made showers of green runners and gave out clouds of

miniature pale-edged spider babies that swayed in the gusts from

vents, in the opening of doors.

The plants were fortunate, kabiu, to atevi sensibilities. They

were alive. They grew, they changed, masking steel walls that

never changed, and in their increasingly abundant green, they

reminded a voyager that ahead of them in the vast deep dark of

space was a planet where atevi and humans shared natural

breezes, enjoyed meadows and forests and the occasional wild

mountain-bred storm, in an environment where, indeed, growth

was lush and abundant.

“The planting is becoming extravagant, nandi,” Narani had

once suggested, that excellent gentleman, when the pipe-pots

were only ten, and ran along only one wall. “Bindanda wishes to

inquire if we should simply discard the excess at this point.”

Bren Cameron’s devoted staff had by now offered spider

plants to every colonist in the deck above, and bestowed them on

every crew cabin that would accept them, where he supposed

they likewise proliferated to the limit of tolerance. He had

consulted the ship’s lab, to whom he had given the first offshoots,

fearing the spread of his house plants might provide lifesupport a

real problem… but lifesupport declared that, no, living biomass

provided their systems no problem at all, except as they tied up

water and nutrients. The ship had plenty of both, and the chief

disruption to the closed loop of life aboard Phoenix, so they said,

was simply that the plants made “an interesting intervention” in

the daily oxygen/carbon dioxide cycle, the energy budget,

humidity and climate control. “A catastrophic die-off would be a

matter for concern,” lifesupport told him, “but we would of

course consume the biomass that might result. Slow changes, we

accommodate quite well. We find this an interesting variance in

the system. They balance humidity. And they clean the air.”

So the plants grew, and showered out their runners with baby

spiders unrestrained over the two years of their voyage,

proceeding from one wall, to two, and now four, having found

conditions very much to their liking—the plants especially liked

their intervals in folded space, such as now, when plants thrived

in crazy abundance and intelligent beings operated on minimal

intellect. The spider plants cured dry air, static, and nosebleeds,

that persistent malady aboard. They were, most of all, alive, and

in the metal world of the ship, they were a bizarre sort of hobby.

Pity, Bren thought, that he hadn’t brought along tomatoes

instead of inedible house plants, preserved tomatoes having

completely run out aboard, in the two-plus years of their

voyage—tomato sauce depleted along with other commodities,

like the highly favored sugar candies. The better part of three

thousand souls aboard consumed a great deal of sugar and fruit,

fruit being novel to a spacefaring population, the simplest flavors

generally being favored over more complex tastes.

He, himself, was not from a spacefaring population, and he

dreaded the day that their daily fare would get down to the yeasts

and algaes that had been lonely Reunion Station’s ordinary fare

for the few centuries of its existence.

Reunion was now in other hands. Its population was aboard,

headed for a refuge and a new life on a station orbiting what they

understood to be an eden, a reservoir of fruit candies and other

such delights.

They consumed stores at a higher rate than planned. Now tea

was running short. Caffeine was about to run out altogether. That

was a crisis.

Bren took his carefully cherished cup—he afforded himself

one small pot a day and kept a careful eye on what remained in

their stores, knowing that his atevi staff would sacrifice their own

ration to provide for him till it ran out, if he did not insist they

share.

This late evening as usual, after a very nice dinner, he seated

himself at his writing-desk, which supported his computer along

with the paper, pen, formal stationery and wax-jack of an atevi

gentleman… not the only paper aboard, but close to it. He set his

teacup down precisely at the proper spot, just so, opened the

computer, and resumed his letters, a tapping of keys so rapid it

made a sort of music; it had a rhythm, a living rhythm of his

thoughts, like a conversation with himself.

He wore his lightest coat in the snug, pleasantly humidified

warmth of his cabin, maintained only a minimum of lace at the

cuffs—in the general diminution of intelligence and enterprise, no

one stirred much during their transit of folded space, few people

went visiting, and entertainments were mostly, during such times,

television of the very lowest order. Staff gathered in the dining

hall to watch dramas from the human archive… but there were

no longer refreshments, under the general rationing, and the

whole affair had begun to assume a worn, threadbare

cheerfulness, which he usually left early.

He dressed, every day, wore the clothes of a gentleman, which

his staff meticulously prepared and laid out daily… the lace now

unstarched, that commodity having run short, too, but the shirts

carefully ironed, the knee-length coats immaculate. He read in

the afternoons. He was learning ancient Greek, long an ambition

of his, and working on a kyo grammar—being a linguist, the

translator, the paidhi, long before he became Lord of the

Heavens. He had been charged with retrieving a few thousand

inconvenient colonists and getting them back to safe territory,

and in the process he had discovered a further need for his

services. He had words. He could make a dictionary and a

grammar. He reverted to his old scholarly duties to keep his mind

sharp.

He likewise kept up his letters, daily, his evening ritual, along

with the after-dinner tea. He had a cyclic record of the rise in the

quality of his output during sojourns in normal space, when his

brain formed connections, and, longer still, those intervals of

folded space, when his prose suffered jumps of logic and

grammar and other flaws. In the latter instance he learned that

the ship’s crew had a reason for rules and discipline and careful

procedure. He found that strict schedule and meticulous

procedure afforded his dimmer days a necessary structure, when

it was oh so easy to grow slovenly in habit. Rules and formality

were increasingly necessary for him and the staff, when getting

out of bed these days took an act of moral fortitude.

But every day his staff dressed him completely and properly,

no matter that he seldom called on the upstairs neighbors and

received no guests. He was their necessary focus, as his letters

and his dictionary had become the purpose of his interminable

days—and he went through his meticulously ordered daily

routine on this day as on over seven hundred days before this.

The letters, the one to his brother Toby, and the other to Tabini,

aiji of the aishidi’tat, the association of all atevi associations,

each totaled above a thousand pages. In all reason, he doubted

either his brother or the aiji who had commissioned him to this

voyage would ever have the patience to read what amounted to a

self-indulgent diary—well, they would read certain key sections

he had flagged as significant, but that was not the point of

creating it in such detail.

Sanity was. The ability to look up a given day and remember

they had made progress.

Dear Toby, he began his day’s account, a peaceful night and a

day as dull as yesterday, which, considering our adventures of

time past, I still count as good.

What have I done since yesterday?

I solved that puzzle I was working on. I learned a new

Greek verb form. The aorist isn’t as hard as advertised,

compared to atevi grammar. I reviewed the latest race car

design. Remember I had lunch with Gin and her staff last

week, and we have that race in their hallway next week,

Cajeiri’s team, namely us, against Gin’s engineers, with

some of the crew betting on the outcome. I have to bet

with my own staff. She has to bet with hers. I have second

thoughts on the bet between us being in tea, of which

Bindanda tells me I have one cannister remaining, and

they are likely as short, by now. I think we should have

kept it to sugar packets. We have more of those. Either of

us losing will put us in truly desperate straits for caffeine.

I think I should propose to Gin that we change the bet to

sugar. And it’s the theory of a bet that matters, isn’t it?

Meanwhile Cajeiri’s birthday is coming on apace. He

just this morning proposed we turn the birthday party into

a slumber party—God knows where he learned that term,

but I have my suspicions he’s seen one too many

movies—and he’s insisting on inviting his young

acquaintances from upstairs. Cenedi has informed him

that propriety wouldn’t let Irene attend an all-night party

with boys. Cajeiri absolutely insists on both Irene and

Artur, and Gene, of course, and now he wants no

chaperons at all. Atevi security is sensibly appalled…

He deleted that paragraph—not the first he’d set down and

then, considering the reputation and future safety of the boy who

someday would be aiji in Shejidan, erased from the record.

Too many movies, too much television, too much association

with humans, the aiji-dowager said, and he by no means

disagreed with that assessment of young Cajeiri’s social

consciousness and opinions. But what could they do? He was a

growing boy, undergoing this stultifying trip through folded space

during two critical, formative years when youngsters should be

asking questions and poking into everything at hand. And Cajeiri

couldn’t. He couldn’t open doors at will, couldn’t explore

everything he took into his head to do—he couldn’t breathe

without the dowager’s bodyguards somewhere being aware of it.

There were no other atevi children aboard. No one had

considered that fact, Tabini-aiji having had the notion for his son

to go on this voyage as an educational experience, as a way of

making his heir acquainted with the new notions of space and

distance and life in orbit. Argument to the contrary had not

prevailed, and so what was there for a six-year-old’s active mind

on their year-long voyage out to Reunion Station? What had they

to entertain a six-year-old?

The collected works of humanity in the ship’s archive.

Television. Movies. Books like Treasure Island, Dinosaurs! and

Riders of the Purple Sage. The six-year-old had already become

much too fluent in human language, and remained absolutely

convinced dinosaurs were contemporaneous with human urban

civilization, possibly even living on Mospheira, right across from

the mainland. Hadn’t he seen the movies? How could one get a

picture of dinosaurs, he pointed out, without cameras being

there?

And then—then they had picked up their human passengers

from the collapse of Reunion, 4043 passengers, to be exact, now

4078 going on 4149 in the enthusiasm of people no longer

restricted and licensed to have a precise number of children. On

the return leg, there were 638 children aboard, an ungodly

number of them under a year of age, and seven of them of

Cajeiri’s age, or thereabouts.

Children. Children let loose from a formerly regimented,

restrictive environment. And just one deck below, a very lonely,

very bored atevi youngster, heir to a continent-spanning power,

who had rarely been restrained from his ambitions where they

didn’t compromise the ship’s systems.

It was like holding magnets apart, these opposites of amazingly

persistent and inventive attraction. Once they were aware of each

other, they had to meet. The situation made everybody, atevi and

human, more than anxious. Two sets of human parents had

vehemently drawn their children back from all association with

Cajeiri, fearing God knew what insubstantial harm. Or substantial

harm, to be honest: Cajeiri, at seven years of age, had most of the

height and strength of a grown human—he could hardly restrain

the boy if he took a notion to rebel.

Cajeiri had hurt no one, physically. He was ever so careful with

his fragile friends. He was not given to tantrums or temper

outbursts, which, considering his parentage, was extremely

remarkable restraint for a seven-year-old. He had, of the

remaining five children, a small, close circle of human associates

who dealt with him almost daily—a clutch of mostly awed human

children who kept Cajeiri busy racing cars and playing space

explorer and staying mostly out of trouble… if one discounted

the fact that they had learned to slip about with considerable

skill, using service doors and other facilities that were not

off-limits in the atevi section of the ship.

That was one problem they had to cope with.

There was another, lately surfaced, but the first of all fears,

namely that these young human associates told the boy things.

Cautioned never to use the words love, or friendship, or aishi, or

man’chi, and constantly admonished, particularly by the paidhi,

they had found others he should have forbidden, had he halfway

considered. Notably, the words birthday party. They had told

him, and, worse, invited him to Artur’s twelfth, an occasion of

supreme revelation to an atevi youngster.

Refreshments. Presents. Parties. Highly sugared revels.

Four months ago, Cajeiri had served notice he wanted his own

birthday celebration, his eighth being the imminent one, and the

one he looked forward to celebrating with his—no, one still did

not say friends, that word of extreme ill omen between atevi and

humans. His associates. His co-conspirators.

No, had been the first word from Cajeiri’s great-grandmother,

early and firm: aside from all other considerations, the eighth was

not an auspicious or fortunate year, in atevi tradition. The

dowager refused, even cut Cajeiri off from his associates for a

week, seeing trouble ahead. So Cajeiri’s determined little band

had attempted to corrupt the ship’s communication system

(Cajeiri’s clever trick with the computers) to contact one another

in spite of the ban.

Break them up and they fought the harder to reach one

another. Aishi. Association. No question of it. Be it human or be

it atevi, a bond had formed, between Cajeiri and the particular

four of that five who, inexperienced in the facts of human

history, innocent of a war that had nearly devastated the atevi

homeworld over interpersonal misinterpretations, secretly

regarded Cajeiri as their friend, as he called them aishidi, that

word which did not, emphatically not, mean friends—vocabulary

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