The D’neeran Factor (120 page)

“Is it warm inside, like his? Is there plenty to eat? That is what they say of his, but he does not give much away. He came in the summer, there was food then, not much but enough. Now there is hardly any. Men have gone to Tistou to beg, and he has sent them away with empty hands. Then he grew tired of beggars, it seems, for the last one who went, he killed. Do you have food?”

“We have food. We will bring it, if we can. But if we are to do that, and if we are to get away to bring help here, we must know where Tistou is. Is there anyone who knows?”

Norn said to Michael, “Do you still play?”

Michael nodded slightly. Hanna saw fire reflected in his eyes, red against the snow. She said, “He has become a master of the instrument. If there is a chance, he will play for you. But you must help him get the chance. Norn, we are in deadly danger from this Tistou. There is a man who came here with us, who knew Tistou from before, and he has disappeared. I think he will betray us, do you understand? We must know where our enemy is. Will you not help us?”

“I have told you I do not know,” Norn said, and it was the truth. But then he said, “There is one who may know. I will take you to her.”

*   *   *

Deeper into the night, into the maze. Even Hanna was lost now. Norn could not move fast. His spine and the joints of his legs were knobby and inflamed, and every step was painful. Michael supported him. He thought of the medicines on the
Golden Girl;
he thought that where he had grown up, Norn's condition must be a footnote to the history of medicine. And then he wondered about Norn's age. He could not be more than sixty in Standard years.

Hanna murmured, “We take them for granted, the anti-senescence treatments. I've had one. And you?”

“Two.”

Norn ought to be still a young man.

Norn talked as he cautiously, painfully moved.

“A bad winter, that. But this one that comes, I will not see its end.”

Sometimes there were sounds in the rooms they passed, as sleepers roused at the slow footsteps. But only once did anyone look out.

“By that spring so long ago, many folk were scattered, and the guards too weak to follow.”

The years flickered as Norn talked, springs rising and falling. A slow recovery; the next two waves of sickness had not been so bad. The masters had still lived behind their wall.

“All who might have risen up were dead, or fled. There were none fool enough to do what Kia did.”

New seedstock appeared, blight-resistant, giving great yields. “Did he bring it?” Hanna said. “The man Tistou?”

“Perhaps,” Norn said, and Shen said, “Why?”

Hanna answered, “Why did he do anything? He does not seem to have gotten rich through coming here. How did he come here to begin with? Who is he?”

Now for the first time there was a gust of outside air. They turned into a hall where arched windows made up one side. Some were open and others broken, and a strong breeze blew through them. The sound of the sea was audible. Hanna turned to one of the windows. She had been born near an ocean, and could not resist the sound of any sea. But the night was so dark that the waves, however close, were invisible.

“This way,” Norn said, not pointing but shifting his weight on Michael's arm to indicate the path. They went through an arched door opposite the windows and stood in the dark. “Darya! Daryeva!” called Norn, and Hanna's light picked out a figure on the floor.

*   *   *

She was Norn's granddaughter. She was perhaps sixteen, with a little pointed brown face and large eyes. She looked at all of them, even Norn, with fear, and Norn stood there and told them her history: how in the first weeks after Tistou had come, in the summer, one of his companions had seen Daryeva, and liked what he saw; how Daryeva had not stayed out of sight but sought out the man, and lived for a time now and then on the flying machine; how she had started a child, and lost it, and then seemingly lost her power to charm the big fair-haired man, because he rarely
came to see her now; how her own folk, virtuous, would have nothing to do with her.

Not calculated to gain her confidence,
Hanna said to Michael's head. But the girl said to Norn: “When you thought I could get food for you, you were not so quick to cry punishment! What do you do here, old man? Will you sell me for the night for half a loaf, as before?”

Norn began to shout. Hanna said quickly, “Get him out of here,” and Shen did it without much trouble, marching the old man out with an arm locked behind his back. They heard him cursing in the hall, in a burst of wind that blew in.

Hanna and Michael sat down uninvited, but with a common impulse. There was no point in scaring the child with shadows twice her size.

“You do it,” Hanna said to Michael; he read the meaning in her eyes.
You can gain anyone's trust.

But he asked his own questions, not the ones Hanna wanted him to ask.
Did you ever hear of a woman called Kia? The name Lillin? A girl, no, woman, Carmina, now twice your age?
Daryeva thought him mad; harmless, though; his eyes were so hurt, his voice so gentle. She developed a small frightened coyness, a poor residue of her liaison with the man Wales. Hanna moved at Michael's side, said impatiently in his head,
Ask her about the
Avalon! He only thought:
Poor little Darya.
“Soft,” Hanna muttered in Standard, “you're too damn soft. Shen was right.” She shifted languages. “Where have they gone to, girl, the man who got you with child, and the others, and the machine that flies?”

“It does not only fly,” the girl said. “It is a spaceship.” She said the Standard word well, with little accent.

“Well, and where has it gone? Where is it hidden?”

Defiance flared in the great eyes. Michael touched her arm and said gently, “Please answer.”

She would answer for him. She said, ignoring Hanna, “It has gone away to the south where it is warm. Once before it went, and I went, too. He did not take me this time. But he will come back.”

“Do you want to wait for him?” Michael said. “You could come with us instead.”

The defiance melted. Her eyes became luminous; she was a child, reminding him painfully of Lise.

Hanna said, “We can't take her now. We'll come back for her if we can.”

She was exasperated. There was nervousness in her voice, in every quick movement.

“He's not even in this part of the world,” Michael said. “We don't have to hurry any more.”

“Just how long do you think it will take us to question every old man and woman in the place?”

“Not long. When it gets light, not long.”

They waited for dawn in Daryeva's little room. It was scarcely more than a closet, but she had made it her own. There were shells from a southern sea, a bracelet of Polity manufacture—part of the
Far-Flying Bird
's stolen trove, Hanna guessed. There were dried native flowers in a Polity vase, a music cube made on Willow, a head clumsily carved of highland wood. It was supposed to resemble Daryeva; Wales had made it for her.

Hanna and Shen wandered in and out. One of them was always in the hall, listening, watching. Michael stayed with Daryeva. She told him the story of her short life. She was young and resilient and she did not know how sad it was. He put his arm around her, half-blinded—sometimes she was Lise, sometimes himself. He was too torn with pity to see clearly. But it seemed to him that none of what had happened to Daryeva needed to have happened.

If I had not been so self-protecting I would have, could have
—

Morning finally came. The rain had stopped. Hanna and Shen looked through the broken arches uncertainly, as if, deprived of rain, they might no longer be on the same world. Outside the arches was a broad stone esplanade set two meters above the wet sand, which stretched a considerable distance to the receding tide. Sea and sky alike were gray.

When it was full light, Michael had Daryeva take them to a courtyard she had told him about in the night. It was almost in the center of the occupied portion of the maze,
and it was all the marketplace of which the Post could now boast. In the early morning people straggled in. Some brought food from outside, not much; those fortunate enough to have food grown and stored against the winter begrudged it. But there were still warm clothes and blankets to be looted from the ruined mansions, and a certain trade was carried out that way, food for warmth.

Michael moved from person to person, group to group. His questions were thrown back at him unanswered. He might as well have been on the wrong world.
I
knew no one of that name. Nor that.
He was an antic figure here, too well fed, too well clothed, with the dark women dogging his heels and the pariah Daryeva following.
How old do you think I am, to remember those days? Why, I was not even born!
There was no body of shared knowledge, no collective memory, it had died with the old and with displacement, or what was left was crippled and incomplete.
I
have never heard of such a town. Never. Never.
“Every old man and woman in the place,” Hanna had said; but the old were rare. The look of age was deceiving. The “old,” like Norn, might be only of an age that elsewhere would be the beginning of life's prime. Shen thought little of it, Michael nothing. But Hanna that morning felt stifling horror for a while. It was unnatural and obscene for death to come after so few years. She told herself anti-senescence was really the unnatural thing, but it didn't help; she was horrified still. The specter of early death made ghosts even of the young.

It was in the center of the circles of the doomed, then, that Michael stood and shouted, reckless. He threw names into the gray wind and they blew back to his mouth. Shen grumbled without ceasing, watched the crowd with slitted eyes; Hanna watched the sky. Both missed at first the man—a young man—who finally came forward and tugged Michael's arm. But they saw Michael bend his head to the other's, and started forward, hands on their hidden weapons.

The man slipped away before they got to him. But Michael came to meet them. His eyes glittered.

“That was the road to Croft, the one we came in on,” he said.

Hanna looked at the circles of murmuring men and women, but she could not see where the man had gone.

“It is dead,” she said. “Marin said so.”

“No, no. People have come back, she said.”

“And what does that mean, when the people who once lived there are dead? They were all taken from the town when you were. Does it matter who lives there now?”

“It might. Do you remember what Norn said? The man and woman who took Carmina, knew us. They must have come from Croft or Sutherland. And later, he said, the people scattered. They could have gone home.”

“All right. All right.” She pulled the communicator from her pocket. “We'll get
GeeGee
in. Follow the road to its end.” She looked at the sky as she thumbed the transmittal switch. If
GeeGee
could monitor ground transmissions from the air, the
Avalon
could, too. But the gray sky was empty.

*   *   *

GeeGee
was ready for quick flight, as she had been everywhere. A very sleepy Theo landed her at the Post thirty minutes after Hanna's call. “I'm going to bed now,” he said, but he didn't. He waited in Control with the others, watching the land unroll beneath the
Golden Girl.
They passed over Orne's house in minutes and flew steadily north over the deserted lands.

“It's not paved all the way,” Michael said.

“You remember?”

“I remember—”
The dusty track through Croft.
For all he had ever known it was dust all the way to its unknown end. He closed his eyes briefly, remembering, and constructed a map in his head. The paving stretched to Sutherland. Croft lay a little to the southwest, with the dirt track (how deep in mud today?) curving through its tiny heart. One end went to Sutherland; the other must keep up the curve, and come around to join the main road to the Post.