"Leave me alone," Thorn said. "Duun, for the gods' sake leave me alone!"

"We'll talk later. Let's go home, Haras."

"I haven't got a home! A hatani doesn't have anywhere! He hasn't got anything-"

"We'll talk later, Thorn."

Thorn shivered convulsively. There was no choice. (There's never been a choice. Come home, Haras. Give up, minnow. Pretend nothing's wrong.)

(But she was scared. She panicked. Scared of me-)

"Come on," Duun said.

"I wish you'd been a little later!"

Duun said nothing. Held out his hand toward the door. Thorn left the desk and the room blurred. (Your eyes are running, Thorn.) He walked out and in a vast blurred haze Duun walked beside him down the hall to the elevator. The silence lasted all the way to their door and past the guard there. That watcher was noncommittal, as if he read them both.

Duun closed the door behind them. Thorn headed for his room.

"There was no choice," Duun said. "You know what you'd have done to her?"

"I wouldn't have hurt her!" He spun about and faced Duun squarely, at the distance of the hall. "Dammit, I wouldn't have-"

"I have to be more plain to you about anatomy."

"I wouldn't have hurt her/ I'd have-I'd-" (I can't; couldn't; but touching her, but her touching me-)

"I can imagine you'd have tried." Coldly, cooly, from age and superiority. "Common sense was nowhere in it, Thorn. You know it."

"Tell me. Lecture me. Gods, I don't mind what you do to me, but you came in like that on her-What do you think you did to her, Duun-hatani? Is that your subtlety?"

"I promised you an answer. Years ago you asked a question and I promised you an answer when you could beat me. Well, you came close yesterday. Perhaps that's good enough."

Shock poured over Thorn. Then reason did. He flung up a hand. "Dammit, dammit, you're maneuvering me! I know your tricks, you taught them to me, I know what you're doing, Duun!"

"I'm offering you your answer. That's all. What you are, where you came from-"

"O gods, I don't want to hear it." Thorn turned. He ran. He shut the door to his room and leaned against it shaking.

The intercom came alive. "When you want, you can come out, Thorn. I don't think badly of you. Not in this. Even a hatani can take wounds. This is a great one. Come out when you can face me. I'll wait for you. I'll be waiting, Thorn."

He was dry-eyed when he came out. He unlocked the door and walked out into the hall, and down the hall into the main room. Duun was there, sitting on the riser that touched the wall. The windows were all stars and dark. Nightview. Perhaps it was. Duun did not look at him at once, not until he had crossed the sand and sat down on the riser in the tail of Duun's view.

Then Duun turned his face to him; and there was no sound except something mechanical behind one window and a whisper of air from the ducts.

"Have you come for your answer?" Duun asked.

"Yes," Thorn said. He sat upright, hands on his thighs, ankles crossed. He looked unflinchingly at Duun.

"You've studied genetics," Duun said. "You know what governs heredity."

(Be quick. Drive the knife in quickly, Duun.

O gods, I don't want to sit through this.) "Yes. I understand."

"You understand that genes make you what you are; that every trait you manifest is no matter of chance. A harmonious whole, Haras."

"Are you my father?"

"No. You had none. Nor mother. You're an experiment. A trial, if you will-"

Thorn was strangely numb. Duun's voice drifted somewhere in the half-dark, in the timelessness of the view. The night went on forever and he went on hearing it.

"I don't believe this," Thorn said finally. Not because he did not believe it was something equally terrible. But that he saw no way to accomplish it. "Duun. The truth. I'm something that went wrong-"

"Not wrong. No one said wrong. There are things right about you. But you're different. An experiment. You know how conception takes place. You know genetic manipulation's done-"

"I don't know how it's done." (Clinically. Precisely, like a lesson. It could not be him they discussed, a thing in a dish, a mote floating in a glass.) "I know that it is done. I know they can put things together and come up with something that didn't exist before."

"You know when someone wants a child and there's a-physical impediment-there's the means to bring the embryo to term. A host.

Sometimes a volunteer. In other cases a mechanical support system. An artificial womb. That was so in your case."

(A machine. O gods, a machine.)

"There's nothing remarkable in that," Duun said. "You have that in common with a thousand, two thousand ordinary people who couldn't be born any other way. Medicine's a marvel."

"They made me up."

"Something like that."

He had struggled not to cry. The tears welled up out of nowhere and ran down his face, endless. "When they were putting me together in this lab-" He could not talk for a long time and Duun waited for him. He began it again. "When they made me did they bother to do it twice? Is there anyone else like me?"

"Not in all the world," Duun said. "No."

"Why? For the gods' sake why?"

"Call it curiosity. There are undoubtedly reasons adequate for the meds."

"The meds-"

"They're your fathers if you like. After a manner of speaking Ellud is. Or others in the program."

"What are you?"

"A hatani solution."

Small warnings went off. A prickle of alarm. (Self-preservation. Why should I bother? Why should I care?) But there was fear. "Whose?"

"I might have done many things. I chose to give you the best chance I could give. The only chance I'm equipped to give. Like Ehonin and his daughter."

"Who asked for it?"

Duun was silent for a long time. "The government,"

"Asked a hatani solution?" The enormity of it washed over Thorn like a flood. Duun's stare never gave him up.

"You are one of my principals. I gave you all I could give. I'll go on giving that. It's all that I can do."

The stars glittered on, awash. "I wanted to love her, Duun."

"I know."

"I want to die."

"I taught you to fight. Not to die. I'm teaching you to find solutions."

"Find this one."

"I've already been asked."

Thorn shuddered. All his limbs shook.

"Come here," Duun said. Held out his hands. "Come here, minnow."

Thorn went. It was a pathetic thing Duun offered, shameful for them both. Duun took him in his arms and held tight till the shuddering stopped. After that he lay still against Duun's shoulder for a very long time, and Duun's arms cradled him as they had done before the fire, in Sheon, when he was small.

He slept. When he woke Duun had fallen asleep over him, and his back ached, and it was all still true.