The D’neeran Factor (109 page)

I understood about the eyes, all right, having worked with breeding stock since I could walk, but I didn't know what it all meant. He wouldn't talk about it any more; after a while I stopped asking questions.

Then in the afternoon we came to Sutherland. It lay behind a hill, else we'd have seen the trouble before it was too late; but men stepped out of a grove at the side of the road. They wore clothes like the men who'd been to Croft, and they carried things in their hands they pointed at us.

Pavah stopped and pushed me behind him, all in a moment. I didn't want to hide behind his back, but he wanted me there, it was hard to know what I should do. He said a few words to them, and they to him; he told them we weren't of Sutherland; they told us to go on, we were Sutherlanders now. And we went on; because I knew without asking what the things were the men carried, they were weapons like Pavah had told me about, and the men watched us.

When we came around the hill, I saw the streets of Sutherland were full of more of the metal wagons than I'd ever seen before, ever imagined there could be. People were carrying things into the wagons, furniture, clothes, household goods: the houses were being emptied. “So it's come,” Pavah said.

The Postmen went away but there were others everywhere, all with weapons, they watched us with the others. Then Joan saw us and came to us. She'd been crying, and by the time she got to us she was crying again. “Alek, you shouldn't have come,” she said.

Between sobs she told him how they'd come in the wagons in the morning, made the people come together, told them what to do. While she talked, I looked around and saw many people weeping, but they kept on anyway, carrying things to the wagons.

Pavah said, “Has there been resistance?”

“In the first hours, and two men dead.” She named them;
one was Kimon. “Since then, no one. We think of Fairfield. But I was nearly the third. I was nearly the third.”

“How was that?” Pavah said.

She stopped crying, still too angry for tears. “One of them put his hands on Ader. He put his hands on her. And I screamed at him and went to kill him, but an officer stopped him, stopped me. ‘There'll be none of that,' he said, and the animal went away. Alek, there'll be nothing left. They said they'll come back for the stores and the herds.”

“Have they said anything about Croft?” he asked.

“It's next, they said.”

Elot came up then; Joan cried and he held her and patted her shoulders, though he was heavy with grief. Pavah started helping the people load their goods, and I did what he did. It was late, the dark began to come; he looked around to make sure none of the Postmen were near and said, “I have to get back to Croft. I must tell them what's coming, tell them not to resist.”

I said hotly, “We're to go like oxen where we're driven?”

“Where's there to run to, in winter? They'd be on us in a day. You haven't seen the guns fired yet, Mikhail, but you heard Joan: two men dead. Otto'd be the first to go in Croft, I think.”

“When will we go?” I said.

“Soon, in the dusk. Listen. There's a risk. If I don't get clean away at once, they'll shoot. I have to carry back word, I have to be with Mirrah, but you don't. We'll all be taken to the same place. Stay with Joan, and we'll find each other when we get where they take us.”

“I don't want to stay,” I said.

“But I want you to,” he said, and dropped what he was carrying and hugged me hard for a long time. I wanted to cry, but I was too old for that.

“I love you,” he said. And he didn't have to go back to Croft at all; only he couldn't bear Mirrah's being without him.

When it was dark, he edged to the edge of the light and then took off, fleet of foot. He underestimated the range of the guns, I think. While a little light still caught him they fired, one, two, three—I think all three bullets found him. He was dead when he hit the ground, he was dead when I got to him, and one of them fired at me, too, but he missed
and the others stopped him, knowing I wouldn't run far, only to him. I threw myself on him and cried and cried until Joan came and made me leave him—

Michael cried for an hour altogether, without shame or restraint. Hanna held him in the dark and cried, too. He said, “I could have run the other way, gone first, distracted them, they might not have seen him in time, they might have missed.”

“Michael, Mikhail, don't say that, no. He did what you would have done in his place.”

“If I had, if I had—”

“There was nothing you could do. There was nothing you could do! It would not have changed anything.”

“But he—”

“—did what he had to do. Hush, my love. Hush.”

*   *   *

As if he had crossed some dreadful threshold and, having crossed it, was stronger, Michael surprised Hanna by making a partial recovery. Sometimes he was much like himself; was himself. Turned up in Control at his scheduled hours, turned questions aside, took over the running of his ship with relief at its prosaic demands as if he visited another country and was glad for the escape. He was much quieter than before. And whenever he slipped away into the half-trance half-dream, Hanna always knew at once, even if she were as far away from him as it was possible to get on the
Golden Girl.
She went with him each time, flying to his side—

—two days in the damn metal wagons, crowded among the weeping women, a shrieking baby or two. There was hardly air for breath. An old man died and was taken away—for burial the Postmen said but I think not, I think his bones lie scattered still beside the road. His old wife cried all the second day, rocked back and forth in misery. Joan tried to take care of me, stayed at my side until then, but the old woman was her aunt, her dead mother's sister, and needed her, no, needed more than Joan could ever give; but she left me with Ader. We wriggled to a corner and kept it. In the dark Ader gave me what comfort she could; did Joan know? And look
the other way? Thinking, the boy's our own kind, a good boy, Alek's son? I was too young but near old enough; did Joan think Ader a mother at, what, fourteen?—would be safer that way? And then we came to the forests flatter than the river valley, old seabed it must have been, the sea not far they said, and under the topsoil, sand. The wind blew all the time. Sea level: summers were longer there, I heard. All the same in winter it was dusted with snow, but mud squelched underfoot after morning frosts. Flocks of waterfowl darkened the sky and the sky was big with no mountains to close it in. Only forest.

Joan found Mirrah right away. Wouldn't let me see her at first; told her about Pavah so I needn't. I don't know how she told her, what words she used. Then Mirrah had to see me, was frantic to see me, as if I were dead, too, until she did. I'd never seen her cry before. Shaking with despair in the night, and Carmina cried, too, not knowing why. And I wanted to protect them, to save them, but it was too late, was already done.

They made me stay in one of the men's buildings, there were six of them, nor was everyone in them from Sutherland or Croft. Altogether in ten great barracks there were fifteen hundred men and boys; in twelve more, somewhat a greater number of women and girls, and the smallest children regardless of sex. Families met in the cold evenings but only outdoors when the day's quota of trees was felled and the smoke of their burning made a reek round the camp. The land was more barren each day, each day they marched us farther away. There was great unhappiness, but not much fear. There would be towns, they promised; when the land was cleared, before the spring working of the soil began, families would be reunited, a town would be built, everything would be as it had been before only in a different place, there would be machines so the land could be farmed. They took from each barracks a few men or women and took them to the Post, showed them our herds, our goods stored away, waiting for us; they gave us back our own food to eat. We believed them. Why not? What else was there to believe?

Face sooty from the smoke, arms aching from the ax, I worked. If all Croft had been in my work party and barracks, or Croft and Sutherland together, we might have pretended to be a town. But they separated us, I was with few
I knew and many I didn't, and we were all parts of broken things, split and dazed. I heard that Otto and Marlie with their baby boy, they met secretly and walked away one night, out in the cold; were followed, caught, brought back; that was all. Just brought back. “So they mean us no harm,” the men said. But Otto had a strong back, was valuable—

Morning, Michael's watch, but Hanna went to Control instead. She had left Michael sleeping after a night in a winter of exile. He was tired as if all night he had really wielded an ax. When she went into Control, she found Henrik. He did not hear her come in.

“Good morning,” she said.

He jumped, a violent movement; turned an animal's face to her. His guilt rolled over her like an ocean wave. She gaped. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he lied.

He gathered himself for some effort, and she braced herself, amazed and half-afraid. But he only rushed past her, out of the chamber, and she heard him skidding down the spiral stair.

She went to the seat he had left and tried to see what he had been doing. He had wiped the display with a single touch, probably the instant he heard her voice, but he had forgotten to cancel command mode, and there were indicators she could read. He had been preparing to transmit a call from the
Golden Girl;
to whom it was directed she could not tell. He had not made it, though. She had come in time to prevent it.

Not wanting to leave Control unattended, she used internal communications to call Theo. He was not in his quarters, but she found him with Lise. “Come up here,” she said.

He came at once, worried.

“Henrik was trying to call out,” she said.

“Who to?”

“I don't know. Who could he call? He doesn't have anybody out there. But he doesn't want to be here, he wants us to stop; he must have been trying to reach the Polity.”

“We have to make sure he can't. I don't want to lock him up. Can you fix it so
GeeGee
won't transmit without a code we all know but him?”

“Easily.”

“Something easy to remember, but something he won't guess.”

She used her birth-name, Bassanio, as the code. Theo said when she was done, “Why did you call me and not Mike?”

She blinked at him. “Mike's no good for anything,” she said.

He did not say anything, he only looked at her, stunned. The implication was that he, Theo,
was
good for something. He hadn't thought that anyone but Mike would ever think that.