The D’neeran Factor (110 page)

—noise all the time, the axes' thud, the crackle of the fires. A man stumbled and cut off part of his foot; they took him away. He didn't come back. Weeks later we heard he'd bled to death. It wasn't bad, not too bad. Except. A man from Honiton which I'd never heard of till that winter, he'd been there longer building barracks through the fall, one day he put down the ax. “I'm a free man. I won't do this any more,” he said. Firmin said, “Think you'd better.” Firmin, thank God, was in my barracks, he tried to stay close to me. The other man said, “What's going to happen? We'll see.”

After a while the Postmen came, they were never far away, some always in sight. Tried persuasion. Moved to threats. Consulted with each other. Called reinforcements. And beat him. At first there was a move to help him, but they stood in a ring with their guns pointing out, fired once all at once into the air and we stood there. Trying not to watch. I saw tears on Firmin's face. They left the man bleeding in the sharp hard mud, left him to lie there all day, in the middle of the circle of guns. They didn't care if he froze to death, but he didn't. At night they let us carry him back and he groaned all night, breathing hard. In the morning they took him away. He came back in a week or two, but his face didn't look the same, that was why they sent him back, I think, so we'd see him every day and remember. He worked, he never tried to stop again. None of us did—

Hanna started to have dreams of water. The lake at D'vornan shrouded in autumn fogs, the slow river that rolled through City Koroth; most often the sea at Serewind, where she had grown up. Maybe it was just because she was in space, where every gram of moist vapor was reclaimed and recycled. But sometimes it seemed to her that the sounds of water came to her from Michael's dreams. Sometimes behind his words, behind, even, those memories that had come fully into the light, there was the gray light of a distant sea. And meanwhile he lived half on Gadrah and half here; saw Hanna sometimes clearly, sometimes dimly as a ghost.

One day—they were more than halfway to Heartworld sector, measured in time and not by the twists of their convoluted course—she tried again to help him, to use distance and cool logic to interpret that other world he saw:

“A policy of deliberate terror.” Her hands moved on his face. “They fed you well enough, with your own confiscated stores, yes? Housed you warmly. Keeping the labor force healthy. But they split families up, communities. Retaliated harshly at the first sign of rebellion.”

“But you can't call it terror, not really. If you did what you were supposed to do nothing happened.”

“They weren't capricious, then.”

“Not that.”

She leaned over him, her hands light and nervous.
Gray water meets gray sky somewhere out there.
He reached up; the graceful fingers touched her face, traced her features as if he were blind and sought to see her.

“I hurt you,” he said.

She shrugged. “I could have stopped you. With force, if I'd wanted. But it wouldn't have taken that. Talking would have done it.”

“Why did you let me do it?”

She shrugged again. He realized that she had never said it, not once in all the months had she said the most dangerous word her heart could conceive. But she sank down beside him, found his mouth: a cool drink of fresh water.
Salt air on a salt cold wind.

“I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you. I want to have children with you. I want to live with you all our lives.”

Hanna said when she got her voice back, “That covers a lot of territory.”

“All right. I know it's scary.”

“I can't answer. I can't decide.”

“My timing might be a little off, I admit—”

So the laughter was coming back and he was becoming himself again. Even if it was not quite the same self—

—and Georg came one day round the middle of the day while we ate, not in the big building where we took it in shifts morning and night, a hundred men at a time and less talk than you'd think because their minds were on the little time there'd be later to seek out those they loved before the lights were extinguished in the cold and the cold dark closed in; no, it was daytime, he came to the dead forest supposed to turn into fields by spring, where the midday meal was carried round by trucks. Women and old men from the barracks served the food—not Mirrah—she'd gotten herself assigned with the women who looked after the young children all day, so she could be with Carmina. There was nothing she could do to be more with me; we met in the courtyards at night.

Ate the bread made from Croft's own good grain but there wasn't much, there was less as the days went by—they said the stores ran short but they lied, there'd been enough and to spare when we left. The Postmen stood off by the unfelled trees with their share, no greater than ours—but what did they eat at night at the Post, when the nightshift came where we were and the others went back? They got no thinner that I could see. I saw the wagon come growling and humming across the waste and paid it no heed, they came and went all the time. Saw the man who went to the Postmen and later they looked toward where I was, but I didn't know they looked at me, till one came and said, “Boy, come with me.”

Cold that day, I could see my breath, I followed it to the other men, thinking they'd give me an errand, send me through the wood to another worksite where it wasn't worth driving; they'd done that before. But the Postman took me to Georg with his face like polished stone, like the flint that looked smooth, even oily, but with sharp edges where it was split.

“There's room at the Post for young men like you,” he
said in that voice that was smooth like his face, then he said what he meant—could I dance, could I sing, play music, do magic tricks? Could I learn? Could I be taught? Had I gifts?—“It's not enough to look good,” he said, and almost gave up, as he told me later. I looked so stupid, knowing nothing of what he meant.

“I'll give you a trial,” he said. When I understood he meant me to go to the Post, to live there, I balked. The desert wood wasn't Croft, but I'd been there a time, Mirrah was there, Carmina, everyone I'd ever known. I had no interest in leaving, none. Not even curiosity. I only wanted to be left alone.

Still he talked, dull though he thought me. He was bored, getting cold, but thorough. He said there'd be good living at the Post, I could have gold if I did well. He asked about my mirrah and said if I were apt I could help her—and had me. I didn't know that, but maybe he did.

Firmin came to us then, and the Postmen did nothing and let him come.

“What do you say to the boy?” he said.

“I've told him of opportunities,” Georg said. “He's a handsome child. If he has any gifts for pleasing, it could be well for him at the Post.”

“He has none,” Firmin said. “An ill-tempered, inept child,” so that I looked at him in surprise, though a moment's thought told me his aim.

“Are you his father?” Georg said.

“His father's dead. But I've an interest.”

“Then you shouldn't wish to keep him here. I offer a chance not many have. I heard of him in passing, through the friend of a friend. A lovely boy, they said, heard singing one night, a lullaby for a little girl. Was it your sister, boy? We'll see if anything can be made of him. If not, he'll return.”

Firmin wanted to argue, but I saw the Postmen moving in. Their weapons on that gray day looked not shiny but dead. “It's all right, I want to go,” I said, afraid for him—

Hanna kept her watches now, and part of Michael's, too, as he kept part of hers; her presence in Control overlapped his by a considerable margin, so that it was impossible to tell, by merely looking into Control and seeing who was there,
whose watch it formally was. They talked casually and unnecessarily about
GeeGee
's
w
orkings, her faithful pursuit of the course Hanna had laid in at Omega. The worlds and stars of human space rose up on monitors, were glittering beacons for a day or two, and vanished and fell behind. Michael looked nearly himself again, stronger, more active. But that was a shell and a concealment. His body lived on G
eeGee
, and some of his mind, but only enough to make the proper motions. In front of his eyes, with the substance of reality, memory played itself out. When he lay down, he would pass not into sleep but into the trance-state Hanna had taught him, and more of the veil would be withdrawn. He no longer plunged toward it, but neither did he avoid it; it was inevitable, and he was content to let it unfold at its own pace. In these hours in Control and elsewhere on
GeeGee
when he was nominally normal and awake, what he had seen in the last hours of trance gained solidity, and took its place in the context of the whole. His mother's face had the clarity of a fine portrait now: the liquid eyes, the black ringlets framing the high forehead furrowed with grief. The comforts of the
Golden Girl
faded to nothing. Crosslegged on frozen ground swept roughly clear of snow in the harsh glare of light that let no one escape or be private, he held Carmina on his lap and sang to her in a boy's soprano, strong and clear, however, and true:

Only sometimes his tears fell on her curly head.

And meanwhile he said quite ordinary things to Hanna, touched her sometimes, turned his head to smile when she touched him, gave
GeeGee
the right orders (prompted by
GeeGee
herself); at some imperceptible point the watch would cease to be officially his and become officially Hanna's, freeing him to leave; and finally he would go, to drift about
GeeGee
aimlessly as a ghost until it was time to return to his room (as alien now as Uskos) and relive another event, another day.

Hanna left behind in Control tried to think of other things. It was not good for her or Michael (common sense told her, and Theo told her repeatedly) for Hanna to permit herself to sink altogether into Michael's obsession. Theo always came early, long before it was time for him to relieve Hanna. He planted himself solidly beside her and talked of what he had lately seen on the 'beams, talked of Lise's studies, encouraged Lise to wander in and out, encouraged Hanna to start the lessons promised the girl in
GeeGee
's operation; he talked of Henrik, speculating on the traits of character or the history that had made Henrik what he was, and on what they might expect of him; when Hanna was more than usually silent he talked of her work in exopsychology (which was in
GeeGee
's library and which he had read), misinterpreting it so outrageously that Hanna in a fury must correct him, was forced to think of something besides Michael, which was what Theo had intended in the first place.