The D’neeran Factor (104 page)

“What is it?” he said; a comforting hand touched her back.

She said without lifting her head, “Was this what you were going to try to find on your own? After you left the rest of us on D'neera?”

“Yes. It would have been a disaster. This is one of the regions where I thought it could be, but it wasn't the one I'd picked. I guessed wrong.”

“Oh, God.”

She kept her face on her folded arms. It would have been a flight with no end, certain death because of the wrong guess. Hanna shivered, and he rubbed her back.

He said, “Maybe I'll find out more there.”

“Surely. Yes.” She straightened. There was another question. It was enormous; she did not see how she could have overlooked it even for a few days.

She said, “Starr said to me once that if you got to Alta from a Lost World, it couldn't be considered lost. It's not lost. That man knows about it, that B. How?”

“I don't know. I mean to find out.”

Stone. Twilight.

The figure at Hanna's side wavered; took courage from
her detachment, and stood firm. The scene became lighter. A dusty, unpaved track wound away among a cluster of structures. All were black in the scanty light, but hardly darker than the sky. Water sounded faintly nearby, a river near at hand, but otherwise the night was silent, with no sound of wind or insect or night-hunting beast. Hanna squinted at the shadowy buildings. They were well made, and did not look as primitive as she had expected them to be. Stone kept them cool in summer, kept the fires' warmth inside in winter. Wells tapped the abundant groundwater. The building stones fit together well, without gaps.

“Craftsmen here,” she murmured.

“It was all here before I was born.”

He didn't know how he had known that. He sweated with the effort to remember, though there was no heat in the dim light.

“We need light…a fire?” she said. “On a hearth?”

“Oh, not fire!”

“All right. All right—”

For an instant it seemed that he vanished. It was not good to let go of trance too quickly, but Hanna did it, falling into the intense, brief confusion that accompanied the wrench. When she came out of that, too, she was leaning over him. She kissed him and lay touching him for a long time. He was calm again. But there was an aching loneliness on the other side of the dark.

She said, “I think remembering is even more important than I thought.”

“Why?”

“If you don't do it now, how will it be if you get there and it happens all at once?”

“Oh, but—” He turned his face away from her. It was a gesture she was beginning to know. But he would always turn back again.
Cut out your heart and show it to me,
she would say with each step toward the past. And each time she said it he would wince and turn away. And then turn back, and do it as well as he could. But it was going to take longer than she had thought.

Everything took longer. Hanna had expected Henrik to appear within a day or two, driven by the need for human contact.
He did not seem to need it or want it. He slipped out of his room in the middle of
GeeGee
's nights and raided the galley, usually when Shen was in Control and everyone else was asleep. Hanna ran into him once or twice and he glared at her with hatred. Her liking for him did not increase. In the face of the unexpected difficulty in prying information from Michael, she thought of starting in on Henrik. That would be much simpler than recovering the deeply buried dead. Michael slept poorly, there were bad dreams, he was tired—and they had hardly begun, the trip was only a week old, what would happen to him before the end? Maybe they would have to stop the travels in Michael's mind, maybe the dark years would have to stay dark. If so there would be plenty of time to work on Henrik, to take the practical approach (as Hanna thought of it) to foreknowledge of Gadrah—for she had started to doubt the practicality of what she so cruelly attempted to do with Michael.

Try flowers again. Show me flowers. In the dark, if necessary.

And it was very dark. Twilight here always? Couldn't have been.

It wasn't—

Then he remembered:
Light in the dark like a moon I'd never heard of, never seen
—

Something glimmered at the edge of sight. It waxed brighter and brighter, and exuberant radiance, clumps of light climbing fences, stones, stone walls, exuding a sweet perfume. Flowers. Flowers that shone in the dark.

The wraith beside him asked questions. He didn't know the answers. But his heart trembled with the beauty of the flowers.

“It only happened a few days out of the year. I couldn't have seen it more than a few times.”

“Evidently it made an impression.”

He felt a great gratitude for her objectivity. It was like having a sound wall at your back. The light of the flowers was cold, and objects near the largest clusters cast shadows.

“Are they cultivated?” said Hanna's wraith.

“In a way. Casually.”

Not cut till they go to seed. So they'll grow again. Sometimes we barter the seeds
—

“For what?”

“Cloth. Metal. Things we didn't make ourselves—”

A burst of light crawled up the side of the nearest cottage. He looked at it. Hanna took his arm and said, “Home. I know.”

He tried to repeat the word, but it died on his tongue. Nonetheless he moved inexorably toward the structure, not walking but effortlessly gliding, as in a dream.

“Where are the people?” she said, but he couldn't think about that.

He tried to stop at the door but slid through it. They were inside. It was very dark.

“Did it happen in the summer?” she asked. “What you said once? When they noticed you?”

“No. It was at the end, the end of—”

Everything:
the bronze ceiling of the
Golden Girl
met his eyes, but he plunged back into the dark. There was a shelf…Here…He reached upward from habit—habit!—then remembered he was tall. His shadow-hands fell on familiar shapes. An old, old ritual asserted itself. He did not have to think about it.

There was light. Hanna blinked at the small metal lamp in his hands.

“Was that made here?”

“No. No metalworking here. Other places.”

“What does it burn?”

“Animal fats.”

“How did you light it?”

“Flint.”

She was an uncomprehending savage. How did she think you started a fire, anyway?

“Laser matches,” she said.

Outside the radius of lamplight the dark was thick. Michael walked into the shadow, hands spilling light. The familiar outlines around him settled into some pattern they had worn into his soul long before, a poignant fit that overpowered for a while the prospect of pain. Hanna wanted information, he could give her some now, while he remembered: “The Post is a twelve-day journey on foot. But at the Post they have machines. They can come here in a day, in the atoes they use.”

“Atoes…”

A picture formed: wheeled vehicles, self-propelled and nearly silent. He had never known how they were powered. Now he guessed, from the vantage of the present. Or the future: “Electric, I think.”
Willow manufacture. At Newtown, the Spectator works
—

The prick of astonishment at what his present self knew threatened to balloon. Hanna said, “Don't think about it. Do they have aircraft?”

“I never saw one. No, only one. But it was a spacecraft—”

The light wavered. Something started to grow, snow and fire; he would run. Hanna said, calming him, “The atoes. How many did they have?”

He was silent. She felt the effort he made, and then he answered: “I saw maybe a dozen altogether.”

“And the population? And the size of the Post?” she said, because now, she knew, they talked of the Post.

“I don't know—”

“Here, then?” She let him retreat; the village was safer. “Do you know how many people were here?”

“Ninety? Eighty-five?”
Births. A death—

Instinctively she steered away from the death. “You must have been related to all of them.”

“No. I wasn't. Mirrah and Pavah, they used to live somewhere else. They came here to get away—”

The circle of light expanded. They had been pacing through the dark without being able to see anything; now some things were visible. The stone walls had an air of friendliness and safety, the austerity of the interior a grace counterpointing the lush summer outside. The stone was very clean. It had been polished to a warm glow with sand. There were furnishings well made from the region's light wood, each component made of strips bound together for strength. He saw a simple chair with double vision. One: an old friend. Two: a folk artifact, a collector's piece. Rugs braided by dark slender hands. A spray of dried flowers bright in black hair. And here in the deep well of a window cut through stone, a doll, his mother's treasure, the head of crudely glazed ceramic, the body stuffed with rag. And here: the picture she had sewn from colored scraps—

—borrowed a steel needle from Padma, she'd lost her own. A crowd of tiny figures. “They don't look much like people,” I said, teasing her; she was different that spring, soft and round, and bigger day by day. There weren't many children born there, they'd thought I was all they'd have. Now here was another coming. They were happy, and I was, too.

The work pinned in the heavy frame Pavah had made was so bright the colors jumped out. “Look, Mikki, look at the gown this one wears, just like the color of the sky. Oh, if I could make it shiny, like the gown was! If I could show you how it was! And the stones the great lady wore round her neck!”

“Where, Mirrah?”

“At the Post, before you were born.”

“I didn't know you'd been to the Post.”

Her fingers moved quick and nervous; they were worn, but they looked just like mine. “I don't like to talk about it, Mikki.”

“Why?”

She laughed at all my “why's,” she always laughed, but she answered when she could. That time she didn't laugh. Her eyes weren't like mine, I had Pavah's eyes, hers were dark, she hid things in them—