The D’neeran Factor (118 page)

He said something to her, a nothing-meaning courtesy. But she said after a further silence, “It is lonely here.”

“Yes,” he said. “I see it must be.”

“I am young,” she said in a low voice. “I have no one. I see no one. I see no one like you.”

It was an invitation, the saddest he had ever heard. He hesitated, trying to find words, and she must have thought he had not understood, because she made it clear. “Will you come with me to my room?”

“I can't,” he said. “I'm very sorry.”

“My father sleeps soundly, my uncle, too. I walk in the night and they do not hear. I look out and see nothing. I hear nothing. There is nothing to hear.” Her eyes filled with tears. “My father talks only of getting enough to eat, my uncle of how everything will end. Nothing changes, each day is like the day before, and always tomorrow will be like today, until I am old. I was to be married, but now he is dead, my cousin who was my betrothed. You are my cousin, too, though my father will not say it. I do not know why. The old ways are dead. Will you give me at least a memory to hold?”

She stepped closer and he repeated, “I can't.”

“Is it because of the woman who is with you?” she said. “I saw how you look at her, but I am prettier than she is.”

He remembered the jewels and soft gowns of the Mistresses of the Post, and beside them set Hanna with her dangerous hands. There was a hardness and strength in Hanna that Marin could not have seen in the women she had known.

“I'm sorry,” he said again.

The girl turned away without another word, taking the
light with her. He found his way back to Hanna with relief and spread another blanket over her.

They woke early and left before the household stirred; he did not want to see Marin again.

*   *   *

He had not slept well. All night he had been troubled by visions of sad broken windows, darkness where there ought to be light. The rooms behind the windows were empty. The dreams did not leave him with the dawn. The rain kept coming down, soaking his bare head, trickling down his neck. Beside him Hanna and Shen plodded on, heads down, not very fast, talking softly of how far there was to go.

“We still don't want to get there in the light,” Hanna said.

“Sooner I see a fire the better,” Shen said.

“We're not going in daylight unless we know where
he
is. They didn't say anything about him. I couldn't ask. We shouldn't know anything about him, if we were what I said. They would have had to give me an opening, and they didn't.”

She glanced at Michael, inviting his comment, but he didn't have one. B did not seem real—nor did the misty morning, nor the wraiths they had left behind. All the things he had finally remembered, a world of them, had vanished during the years of his forgetfulness. Nothing was the way he had thought it would be.
My father talks only of getting enough to eat, my uncle of how everything will end…

They went on quietly for a while. Shen said, “Think we could get sick?”

Hanna paused a moment, lifted her head and looked at the rain as if it were an enemy. It might be; every breath they took was loaded with microbes.

“People have survived here for centuries,” she said. “That suggests there's nothing here that could kill us before we could get help, no alien bug we've no defenses against. But something's been happening.”

“The same thing,” Michael said. “That's what Orne said. But they called it the new fever, when I heard of it before. Something the settlers brought with them might have mutated.”

“So we could get sick,” Shen said. “Real good news.”

But Hanna said, “There's another possibility. I'd like to plot these cycles against B's visits.”

Shen said, “A carrier?” but Michael said simultaneously, “No. They would have had it behind the wall. It would have spread out from there.”

Hanna gave him another look, but she did not try to refute him.

Toward midday the forest gave way to open grassland which once had been farmed. Before the trees thinned too much they sat at the roadside and chewed on nutrient tablets. The road was very straight, and they could have seen to its vanishing point on a clear day; today it disappeared into rain. But they saw the darker shape that began to emerge from the mist, and slipped into the scant cover of the trees. What came out of the rain was a truck straight out of Michael's memories— and this one was so battered, so noisy, so old, that he might have seen this very one as a child. There were people in the cab, and a dozen bundles bounced around in the back.

They stayed out of sight until it was gone. Hanna said, “They're going to where we spent the night, I think. They're Orne's servants going home.”

Shen looked into the rain where the truck had vanished. A last faint squeak-and-rattle sounded through the patter of the rain.

“Why do they go back?” she said.

“Habit,” Hanna answered.

“Home,” Michael said.

*   *   *

On the
Golden Girl,
Theo dozed uneasily in Control. He was trying to get adjusted to the cycle of daylight here, and it was hard going. There was a local-time chronometer keyed to Gadrah's roation, and another that kept Standard time. Theo had started to think Standard time was an aberration, there wasn't any such thing, Standard didn't mean standard at all. But his body didn't like this new kind of time, and today he could neither sleep soundly nor wake completely.

He came out of this twilight state for the second or third time in a Standard hour and straightened groggily in his seat. He thought of coffee and then, with lust, of his bed. If he could lie down in the dark, he might get some real sleep. But Michael might call again, and what if something happened, what if the three outside needed him fast?

He remembered then that he wasn't the only person with ears left on
GeeGee.

He went to Lise's room, but she was sound asleep, the picture of peace. She wasn't worried about Michael out there in the rain; she thought nothing could hurt him, he could do anything.

Theo couldn't bring himself to wake her. He went to Henrik's room, found no Henrik, and set off on a tour of
GeeGee,
resolved that Henrik would do something for his keep for a change. What he found, instead of Henrik, was an open locker spilling out their winter gear. More was missing than Michael and Shen and Hanna had taken.

He went outdoors, stood in the rain, called Henrik's name, walked in circles around
GeeGee,
shouting. Maybe Henrik had only gone for a walk; it had been a long time since any of them touched ground. But he got no answer, and finally, because he didn't know what to make of it but was sure it meant nothing good, he called Michael.

*   *   *

“Now we don't know where Henrik is either,” Hanna said.

Night falling again. They had dawdled through the last few kilometers, where the road was bordered by fields farmed only last summer. Rain had fallen all day, rarely hard but never stopping, and it had slipped through every crevice it could find and made layers of damp next to the skin. Only movement kept them warm. From here the road made a sudden, meaningless curve and turned slightly downhill. Against the dark sky at the limit of sight there was a blur of deeper shadow. It might have some straight edges—or might not; eyes played tricks in the waning light.

After Hanna spoke, they were quiet. Michael thought there was no sense to Henrik's leaving, nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to do. There was only the road to follow, to Orne's ruined summer lodge and then on to the Post. He could not hope to lose himself in the native population; he had been there when they told Theo there was little population left.

Shen said: “Tricks. B.”

“Habit,” Hanna said. “Home.”

Michael said, “No. Oh, no. He hated them. He was afraid of them.”

There was a little explosive sound in the dark, Shen's
breath; her hand fell on Michael's and clutched it like a claw.

“What's wrong with you?” she said. “He would've sold them to the Polity, that's what he wanted to do. He tried to call out of
GeeGee,
didn't he? To sell us, just the same. Now what's he got to sell? Us again. To B this time. We could get the Polity here if we wanted, get I&S; if Henrik hasn't thought of it, B will. Wait till he finds out we're here! See how fast he kills us! So Henrik tells him we're here, where
GeeGee
is. Thinks he'll be safe from B that way.”

“We have to get B,” Hanna said. “Before he gets us.”

Michael said, “Wait a minute,” and they turned to him. The protest he wanted to make died on his lips. He looked silently at the women in the dark. He could not see their faces clearly; they were shadows, Fates, sisters out of myth. They had guarded his back at every step on this road, deadly enemies to any enemy of his.

“I only want to find Carmina,” he said.

“No revolution?” Shen inquired. She sounded disappointed.

“Oh, no,” Hanna said. “That's not what this world needs. Not now.”

And it was darker still; when he moved, water fell from his shoulders. Which carried something heavy, though he could not look at it yet. It was not necessary, not yet, it could be delayed; there was enough to see in the gap between what he had expected and what he had found. And what they were walking toward was something else to see—that made enough dread to fill up his head and keep it from speculating
what if…

*   *   *

The shadows on the horizon had been rooftops, all right. They were closer than they had appeared, and the travelers were among them quickly. Whatever was wrong with Michael's head got worse. It was not that he didn't see material reality. He walked on real pavement, splashing through puddles and runnels of water that added to the wet in his boots. He saw the stark piles of the factories, the nightmare shapes of the great barracks looming over his head. Superimposed on these, however, were pictures of the way it had been before. The loose stones underfoot reminded him of ice. And there was an unreality that had nothing to do with
either now or then. The factories, barracks, streets, all were dark, and nothing moved anywhere, except water. This could not be a real city. Instead it was a bad dream in which the dreamer comes to a familiar town and finds it crumbling and abandoned. The dark was more than night; it was the darkness hidden in the heart that shows itself only in dreams, where no sun has ever come or ever will come. And because the desertion was real, and the city disintegrating in reality, it seemed dreadfully possible that endless darkness could be real, too.

Michael had feared nothing since the day he escaped from the creature B. He was not afraid now. But his vigilance was gone with his sense of what was real. Anything might come out of the dark and he would not know until it was upon him, just as in a dream.

But the women moved smoothly as cats, ears pricked, eyes everywhere. They were silent. He suspected that Hanna communicated with Shen, guarding him.

When he saw the first faint lights, on the lowest floor of one of the barracks, he turned in another direction. There was someone here after all—but he was reluctant to see who or what it was. What might answer the door you knocked on in a dream like this?

They saw more lights; came around a corner and saw other shapes walking in the dark, three or four of them, heads down and moving away. Michael did not hail them.

He did not know where he was headed. He kept going, not thinking, letting his feet carry him on. The cold rain had been falling forever. Together with the black sky it crushed his heart. Why had he come here?—if he had not tried, if he had never tried, he could have gone on with his life where the sun shone.

If he had done that, something whispered, he would never have saved Lise, never known Hanna.

But he would not have known what he lacked. And he would not have heard
what if. What if I had not been—

They came to the stone houses. Somewhere behind them was the wall. But it was not lighted, and it was only a shadow against the dead black of the sky.

He looked inside the doorway of a house. The door hung from one hinge and water had blown across the threshold. The next house was the same, and the next. Shen produced
a tiny light. It was no longer than her finger but gave off an intense narrow beam. The light showed a jumble of sturdy furnishings beginning to show the effects of abandonment and damp. The cupboards built into kitchen walls were open and empty. Their doors swung crazily and crockery was smashed on the floor.

Hanna said, “Somebody was looking for food, I'd bet.”

Her voice was not loud, but Michael jumped as at a shout. Until now, in this deserted town, they had heard only furtive rustles which he had identified at once. Rats had come to Gadrah with the original stores of grain, and they had flourished.

Shen said, “The ones we saw walking—nobody else left?”

Michael turned to Hanna with an appeal. He saw her face now in reflected light, and it was intent.

“It's happened,” she said. “Colonies have failed. Fertility's depressed here. I'd guess there were less than a hundred thousand people here at the peak—on the whole planet, I mean, not just here.”

“Can't all be dead,” Shen said.

“We haven't looked everywhere. And listen. Orne's daughter said she'd heard there were people again in some of the small towns. ‘Again,' she said; that means they're coming from somewhere.”

Michael said, “There wasn't anyplace but here.”

“I know. Who's behind the wall now? Why hasn't Orne come back?”

Michael thought of what was behind the wall. He had known too little about what was there; his memory had made it monolithic.

“There would be more comforts there,” Hanna said. “Luxuries. Stores of food, at least for a while. The great families ran away, like Orne's. The soldiers would have been sick, too, died or left their posts. It all broke down. So where did the people go?”