The D’neeran Factor (116 page)

“What kinds of things?” she said.

“We won't know till we get there,” he said.

W
ith a kind of jolt, a thump Hanna later swore she heard, the small world of the
Golden Girl
returned to normal. Lise began to smile again. Shen told Michael daily that he had gotten too soft to be a revolutionary. Even Henrik came out of his hole, drawn by the general atmosphere of well-being, and some of his furtiveness dissipated. He said he would tell them everything he could, but except for what he knew about the men of the
Avalon,
he had no useful information. “So all that was for nothing,” Michael said, meaning Henrik's abduction, but he forgot to apologize for it.

There was nothing to do but spend the remaining weeks teaching the others how to get along in his native tongue. He taught them everything else he remembered, too, warning them that information thirty years out of date might be more dangerous than none. Instead of the caution he meant them to learn, they developed a lively curiosity about what they would find. The holiday atmosphere of Uskos returned, the journey became an excursion, and at times they left
GeeGee
to run herself and played games in the lounge, shouting with laughter.

Hanna should have known better. She knew it, too, but her fear for Michael had gone on too long and gone too deep. It was enough to see him whole, enough to be loved again. He was back. It was enough.

A thread of black ahead of them got bigger, turned into a cloud, grew until it covered everything before them. When they passed into its tenuous fringe, it looked as if nothing was there, as if they plunged into black emptiness. Not even that troubled them. They sailed through the dust in a capsule
of light, and the only acknowledgment they gave the dark was to agree that it was boring. They came to the stellar system of Gadrah, took a week to get through its shoals, hunted down the place itself, and finally saw it: blue and rich with water, dappled with cloud, magnificently ringed.

Hanna had taken care to time the arrival for the middle of the night, and lied about when it would happen. She did not want anyone but Michael in Control when the time came. When it did, he stood without moving, not taking his eyes off the sight. Even if the others had been there, he would not have noticed them. Hanna stayed out of his head, out of his way, for a full hour. But finally she went to him and touched him, and he smiled at her. She had never seen so much peace in his eyes.

“I'm all right,” he said.

“I'll get some sleep, then.”

“Do.”

She was nearly at the door when he said, “Thank you.”

Hanna added up everything that had happened since her last sight of Earth.

“Don't mention it,” she said, and went to bed.

*   *   *

Cruising coastlines: at high magnification each coast was the track of a demented snake. They stayed high, out of reach of the naked eye. It was amazing how many shores were backed by mountains close enough and tall enough to suggest that the Post might be there.

It would have been faster to look for heat, but
GeeGee
was not seeing so well in infrared. She was considerably overdue for maintenance.

It took longer to explore a coastline than Hanna had ever dreamed. They limited the search to the eastern edges of continental bodies, and to temperate latitudes. Even with those restrictions there was a lot of coastline, and it was deserted, not counting the profusion of animal life. Hanna looked at the animals and shuddered. Not because these animals were especially frightening—they were not, they came in an ordinary range of shapes and habits—but because there were no humans, nothing had been tamed.
There weren't many children born here,
he had said. There had never been many children. Something on Gadrah wouldn't let humans breed.

After three days they had narrowed the search to a coast which had been masked by cloud for all of those days. The clouds were not local, but part of an immense funnel that spread over half a continent, and the funnel was not moving. “It would be a long hurricane season,” Hanna said, thinking of the length of all seasons here, and Michael looked at her blankly. Hurricanes had not come to the mountains. “Radio,” she said suddenly (it had nothing to do with hurricanes), and his face was more blank still.

But Lise—who sometimes still nestled against the wall, but today, prim and upright, had taken a seat—said, “They would want radio. To keep in touch with the people who ran the mines. And the soldiers, when they went places.”

“I never heard of one or saw one,” Michael said. And when Hanna set
GeeGee
to scanning, they heard nothing.

This part of the world was turning away from the sun, and
GeeGee
with it. It was getting dark under the clouds down there. Aboard
GeeGee,
however, it was morning.

“We'll have to wait for the clouds to clear,” Hanna said.

“It's fall there,” Michael said.

“Hurricane season.”

“All right, but I mean, in the fall there were weeks of cloud. If we want to see anything we'll have to get under them.”

“They're
low
clouds. If we get under them, anybody down there can see us, too.”

“Not at night.”

“
GeeGee
is not soundless in atmosphere,” Hanna pointed out. “Do want him to hear us and look up? Castillo? ‘B'? Why do you call him B anyway? When here they called him Tistou?”

“They called him that, B, on the ship.”

There was a warning in his tone. Michael did not need to be in trance to remember what had happened on the proto-
Avalon.
But he did not talk about it.

Hanna took the warning and retreated. “Wait till it clears.”

A lifetime of patience told Michael to listen. He thought about it. He said finally, “We'll wait another day or two. But not weeks.”

The morning went on; under
GeeGee,
in geosynchronous orbit, evening progressed. The night would be very dark on
the ground. Michael disappeared, leaving Hanna in Control; he roamed the ship, a big cat prowling a cage. Hanna tracked him without effort from her place in Control. She hardly needed to be a telepath to know what he was doing at each moment.

When she heard a voice she said automatically, “What?” and looked around, thinking someone had come in and spoken. But Lise pointed silently at a communications panel, and another voice said incomprehensible words.

Lise said softly, “
GeeGee
's got something on radio. They said: It's a false alarm. Nobody sick here.”

“They? Oh!”

“It was something like that.”

Mike!
Hanna called, and strained to hear more. It was tantalizing, the words had a familiar sound, and at each syllable she felt herself on the point of understanding. Lise was quicker; she translated the next phrases aloud while Hanna still fumbled for their meaning.

“They say there's no use leaving tonight. They don't want to ride back in the rain.”

“From where? Have they said from where? Or where to?”

“Not yet…”

“Morning,”
somebody said, she knew that word. Michael came in and stood still.
“But it will be wet, all the same.”

“If it is, it is.”

“Well, it has rained for a week. Why should tomorrow be different?”

Two men laughed together.

“We'll swim back soon as we can.”

“Luck!”

The radio burped, went on with a quiet hiss; there were no more voices.

“So it's down there,” Hanna said. “Under the clouds. Somewhere.”

*   *   *

Time to go. Michael would not wait any longer. “We'll fly over sooner or later,” he said, “at night, too. Why not in the rain?” And they fell through the clouds into darkness and wet. “No one's going to spot us,” Michael said. “The Post won't have radar; what for? The
Avalon
's shut down. Guaranteed. Conserving power. When what she's got is gone, there won't be any more.”

More coastline. It was dark, but
GeeGee
built up pictures from contrast, mimicking the human eye. Sand dunes made into islands by stands of patchy grass. Bays and inlets and slow-moving creeks like the one by Millside. Marshlands turned to lakes by the rain. Finally—there was silence when they saw this—the regular outlines of cultivated fields. All of it was in tones of gray and black.

Then buildings. There was a sound at Hanna's side, it was Michael; she heard him before she saw the heaps of stone just barely in view.

GeeGee
moved on slowly, recording. The humans were silent. Hanna recognized what she saw from the air, as if all along, while she read Michael's memories, she had known how it would look from above. It was all there, the irregular half-circles, the pale wall, inside it the enclave up against the sea.

Michael murmured, “There's no light.”

“Some.”
GeeGee
's rendering showed bright spots that had to be lights.

“Not enough.”

“It was a dark town.”

“Not this dark. And not inside the wall.”

He was going to tell
GeeGee
to stop, but Hanna put a hand on his arm. “We're defenseless,” she said, and Shen looked around and nodded.

“We keep moving, then,” he said.

There wasn't much of it. There were fields again, and the whole thing faded behind them. Hanna had expected something bigger—but what they had seen would look big to a child. They flew on toward the north, still slowly. Hanna said, “What now?”

She did not mention Croft. There was a road that went to Croft. But first they would have to find it.

“I want to find out what's wrong,” he said.

“You're sure something's wrong?”

“There weren't any lights on the walls.”

“No.” The dark winter and the sickness and the blight came to her mind. But that had been thirty years ago.

“It was all right a few years ago,” she said. “That's what they told Henrik.”

He took a deep breath and seemed to shake himself. “We won't find out any more from up here.”

“Who goes? You and me and Shen,” she added, answering herself. “You don't go alone!”

“Then find some hills to hide
GeeGee
in,” he said. “And get ready to get wet.”

*   *   *

There were no appreciable hills within three days' walk from the town. And
GeeGee
would stand out like a nova to anything looking down from the air.

After they had thought about it for some time, Michael said, “There won't be anything in the air.”

The others were not of his opinion. None of them had ever lived in a place where nothing but birds flew.

“What about
Avalon?
” Shen said.

“Flying where? Looking for what? We'll chance it,” he said, he smiled at them, he liked taking risks, risk had made him. Hanna was worried, Shen glum.

They would take stunners with them. Hanna thought:
At the first opportunity we must steal something better. Something fatal.
And heard Shen's identical thought. They put the stunners in the pockets of warmcoats unused since Revenge. The coats were waterproof and would be useful if the weather turned really cold. Hanna thought the coats inadequate, too. She would have liked body armor better.

They spent some hours selecting a landing site. It had to be open land but not marsh, solid ground but not forest, near a road but too far away to be seen from it. They settled on a patch that had been cultivated once—the remains of a fence still edged it—but now was overgrown with grasses and slim seedlings of native trees. There was nothing like it nearby; it was an island in virgin woodland, and Hanna puzzled over the anomaly. But it suited their purpose.

She and Michael and Shen stepped out of
GeeGee
into a wet dawn. They walked through woods at first, and it was hard to know when the rain stopped, if it ever stopped, because every step brought down water from the trees. Hanna thought nostalgically of the Red Forest of Ree, where travelers could command umbrellas. There were no umbrellas here; only water.

In an hour, however, they reached the road. Rain fell from the open sky, and when they came from under the trees it was full light. The road was lightly paved, but in poor
condition; there were holes and scattered blocks of paving matter.

“Kept up until lately,” Shen said.

“I wonder,” Michael said. He looked at Hanna. “Think something did happen, since B was last here?”

“That field where we landed, that hasn't been fallow very long, either.”

He looked up the road, not in the direction they meant to take, toward the sea, but landward. “The road from Sutherland was paved,” he said, remembering how it had felt in the stifling truck. “We didn't spot many paved roads from the air.” But he turned and started walking the right way.

They planned to walk all day. They carried no weight, except for communicators and the stunners; by evening they would be at the town, would look for a place to sleep but go without if necessary. They did not hurry. They did not want to come to the Post before dark. Hanna resigned herself to hunger, being wet, getting tired. But when the walking had established its own rhythm, and discomfort had come to seem the norm, she began to feel something else: the loneliness of the place. There was no sign of habitation except for the road, and they walked hour after hour without seeing anyone on it. There was no sound of machines; only wind and rain and, rarely, a rustle at the roadside when a small animal ran from their passage. They spoke seldom, and when they did their voices were loud. Soon even the slight noise of their footsteps was like thunder. And when they rounded a curve in the road and saw a structure built by hands, Hanna stood and stared, might have stared all day—except that Michael, diving for cover, turned back to pull her after him into the bush.