The D’neeran Factor (111 page)

“You think you're keeping me sane,” she said. “If you think I don't see through it, you're the one who's crazy.”

“On this ship, who isn't?” Theo said. “Mike's forgotten what year he's supposed to be living in. Henrik's plotting something—I swear that's what he thinks he's doing. Shen, do you ever see Shen? No? I don't either, except when she shows up at the end of my watch. I haven't heard her talk for a week. Sometimes she grunts. You're crazy because you're crazy about Mike. And Lise and me, we've adjusted. Adjusted to all that! So we must be crazy, too.”

They were silent for a time—Theo could not talk continuously for hours, he had to stop sometimes—until Hanna said, “Theo, do you ever think of scanning for messages for us? When you're here alone at night?”

Theo said, not answering the question directly—but it was an answer all the same—“We used to scan all the time. When Mike first got
GeeGee,
when we used to cruise around, trying her out, playing with her, we were always in recept mode. We kept Shoreground time so Mike and Kareem could talk a couple times a day. For a while all the calls that went to the house, we had 'em sent to
GeeGee.
My God, was it expensive. We were playing…In the middle of the night a couple of times, this woman who was after Mike, she'd call up half-spaced and get him out of bed and tell him
what she'd like to be doing with him that very minute. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.”

Hanna's nose wrinkled with distaste. “Did she get him?”

“No, but she came close. It was a long dry spell before you came along, you know. That's why I said, sometimes he was ready to cry.”

“I didn't know that. He never told me. It couldn't have been because—because there weren't candidates.”

“There was never a lack of candidates. But he was funny the last year or two,” Theo said thoughtfully. “Like nobody he saw was right, not even just for fun. The last year or so before we headed out for Revenge, I don't think there was anybody. I hated it.”

“
You
hated it? Why?”

“Look, pretty women have pretty friends. I was doing all right with the fallout.”

He was so wistful that Hanna laughed. The lighter mood stayed with her until her watch was over, but later, when she was settled in the small lounge with a reader in her hand, the words it displayed unseen, her thoughts returned to the question she had asked Theo—the question he had not wanted to answer, as was apparent now.

A simple instruction to
GeeGee
would be enough—and she wrestled more and more with the compulsion to give it. If she did, what might she hear? What message? The Lady of Koroth, perhaps: “I beg you to come home. I will make all pathways smooth. Though you have abandoned your birthright, I have not abandoned you.” Or Starr: “Do you think me too small to confess to error? I'll see to it your homecoming will be safe—yes, his, too, even his…”

But that is not what he wishes,
she said to the imaginary voices.
He would go on, on and on to the end which was his beginning, without reference to your forgiveness or your power. Perhaps my purpose should be his. Perhaps it should remain his.

And so she would fight her compulsion, see space go by in silence, come always closer to a place where once again the voices would be out of reach. She would listen only to the voices Michael heard—

—was so amazed by what I saw around me, that I had no more homesickness than before. I dreamed of Croft and Pavah each night, but it had been so since that day anyway. I did not know what to call the place, it was bigger than a village like Sutherland or Croft, it was only the Post, and it spread over many hectares of land there by the sea, first on the landward side a great ring of cultivated land, then a circle of factories and warehouses, then one of barracks after barracks, and then the tall white wall with the towers behind. They were not really rings, as I came to see, but half-rings, and the ends of each ended at the sea. Later, too, I came to know there was more to it than my eyes first saw. Not all the barracks were what they seemed, but some were divided into rooms where families might live together; and between those and the wall, there were houses like those I had known in Croft, and in them lived certain people who had earned the right—trusted servants of those who lived behind the wall, who performed their duties at the proper hours and afterward were permitted to leave, passing in and out unquestioned; the soldiers who watched the wall and their families; and also those like Georg, and like Alban and Kia, who took me in. But though there might be a blurring in the purposes of what I saw outside the wall, the meaning of the thing itself was clear, nor was there ever any doubt of its reason: it was to keep the multitude of those outside it, out.

Georg told me nothing more than he had already said on the first day when he carried me to Alban's house. But Kia took pity on my ignorance. She fed me, rations she said, but more than I was used to getting of late, and asked as Georg had asked if I could dance, sing, juggle, entertain? I said I didn't know, I'd never tried.

“Yet you've been heard to sing; so Georg said.”

“The songs we sang in Croft,” I answered.

“Well, they won't do here! Here they want songs of love, child.”

“Like this?—

Pretty Rosie, bouncing Rosie,

Why do you fly so fast?

Stay a while and play a while

With me while summer lasts,

Bouncing Rosie come to play

Upon the summer grass—”

“No, no,” said Kia laughing. “Listen!” And she sang in a low voice, so beautifully that I was enthralled, but slowly:

She laughed again at my expression; I had never heard so sweet a voice.

“You're too young for that,” she said. “Though your voice seems good, and if it survives changing, and your face lives up to its promise as you grow, the young ladies beyond the wall will be sighing for you in a few years' time!”

“What young ladies?” I said. “What's beyond the wall?”

“The masters,” Kia said. “You've heard of the masters surely, even west of the mountains.”

“I've heard of them, but I don't know what they are.”

Kia looked as if she thought I might be playing a joke on her, either that or my ignorance had no limit. Finally she saw the second thing was true and explained, but either she didn't make a very good job of it or I couldn't get my thought around what she said, because still it had no sense, It was a jumble of people who were different, who were rich, who ate without working for it, who had things I'd never heard of before, who did what they liked all the time. But maybe she explained it well enough after all, because even when I learned more about it, I never learned anything to contradict what I thought she'd said.

Then Alban came home, and late though it was, when he found I'd never seen the sea he took me to it. We walked with the wind stirring round our ears through cold cobbled streets, the first I'd ever seen, always curving and curving toward the north with the wall and the soldiers' houses at our right. And there were gates in the wall, with broad roads smoothly paved with stone leading straight to them; but they were closed, and over each one was a kind of little house with windows, and Alban said there were soldiers in them. Then far off I began to hear a sound, which was sometimes like thunder and sometimes like a hiss, and at last we came around a final bulge in the wall—which was not a
perfect half-circle, but in places bulged out or withdrew—and the wind struck me with a force to take my breath away, and there was a glimmer of pale sand and beyond that the sea. The foam that rolled up on the sand was luminous, and the wind took it and blew it stinging onto my face. But out past where the waves broke, out to sea, there was nothing but blackness. It was so cold I shook, though I had still the warm cloak Mirrah had made for me just before leaving Croft, laughing and exclaiming on my growth,
Soon I'll have no time for anything but making clothes for Mikki
— The salt wind brought wetness to my eyes. Alban said the sea went on forever. I had to turn my head to see light, and even the lights of the walled city were set well back from the sea, and they wavered with the wind and the blurring of my eyes. It was a bigger world than I had thought, this planet as Pavah had called it, it did not seem like a place where I might have been born.

I think Alban talked a little, but I heard nothing of what he said; not that night. When he was done talking and thought I should be done looking, he said we must go home (though it was not my home), and we walked away in the dark.

*   *   *

I was used to working with my hands, stockherding, stone cutting, the dirt hot on my arms with the summer sun. The tricks Georg put me up to didn't seem like work, and each day it was something different. The dancing-master made me twist, sway, wanted me to fly through the air, it seemed, and Kia made me sing; somebody they called the master of hands came once, tried to teach me an illusion or two but went away disgusted; still he told Georg there was hope for me later, when I was over the worst of my growth and the parts of my body didn't run away from each other any more. Yet the dancing-master said it was too late, while Kia said soon it would be the wrong time for my voice, though it wasn't yet. I couldn't see what they wanted with me, didn't see why they kept me there. But Kia one night while they drank wine, she and Alban and Georg and some others of the performers whose services were not needed behind the wall that night, she took my chin in her hand and turned my face to the light: “What a waste it'd be!” she said. Saw the question in my eyes, I think, and talked about faces and
fortunes. At first it made a nonsense in my head. But I understood something before she was done: “Such a pretty flower to bloom for the countryfolk!” she said, and like a light breaking I knew how I looked through her eyes. It explained much, the exclaimings over me by Mirrah's friends in Sutherland each time we went there as I grew, which went back as far as I could remember; it explained a man weeping with loneliness who had approached me in the barracks one night when the lights were turned out, though my sleepiness and ignorance had turned him away; and Georg, of course, what he had heard. I pondered it while they drank, seeing that in Croft they had been used to me from birth and so no one had ever commented on how I looked, or maybe didn't really see me. I was Pavah's son, Mirrah's son, a hard worker, of easy temper and, I had been told, sweet nature, and those who knew me had not cared about my face.

Then Kia, filled with wine, began to cry. They had taken me from my mirrah, she said, and from that passed into lamenting that she had no child. Alban was silent and grim, having heard it all before. And it was then by accident that they learned what I was good for, because one of the men, Norn by name, had brought with him an instrument, and it leaned in a corner; and as Kia wept, and Alban grew sullen, and it was plain that he felt himself accused and a quarrel was brewing, I crept to the corner to get away and began to play with the instrument. Norn, also wishing to escape, followed me and showed me its principles. Yet it seemed that I knew them and had only to be reminded how to turn my breath into music. Norn became silent, speaking only now and then in a whisper to correct my fingering or give me some other word of advice, and I played a song Kia had taught me, and then the one she had sung on that first night, and then a song I knew from Croft. I paid no attention to the others, only to Norn's whispers, which I heard eagerly and which my breath and fingers translated without further thought. I was happy for the first time since the day of the walk to Sutherland, and more than happy, there was a wholeness I had not imagined before, nor could I name it in any way. And I was not conscious of doing or being anything remarkable, and when I looked up and saw that all of them stared at me, their eyes shining in the dim
lamplight, my first thought was that I had done something wrong.

But that was not why they gaped at me, as I learned soon enough.

*   *   *

“Still you must learn other things,” Georg said. So once a day the dancing-master came to teach me pliés, pirouettes, and other moves with outlandish names; also Kia kept teaching me songs to sing and telling me where to breathe. Norn also came a day or two to teach the flute, but then desisted. “I am afraid of doing more harm than good,” he said. His place was taken by a woman named Portia, who on the first day of her coming crashed into Kia's kitchen crying, “Where is it? Where is this prodigy? I must see it!” And she was not awed as Norn had been, which was good, since I was getting a swelled head; but she listened to me play and said, “You have much to learn, boy!” And proceeded to teach, thereby earning my affection without ever doing anything else to get it. She did not need to do anything else.