The D’neeran Factor (121 page)

When he looked again, they were flashing over
GeeGee
's first landing site, that abandoned clearing in the wilderness. He might never know why it was there. Orne's summer lodge had surprised him, too. He had not known the masters ever left their walls, except to walk in the town like gods. There was so much he did not know, might have learned long ago—if he had told the truth at the start on Alta. Instead he had allowed the last, the only memories to seal his lips, had turned away all questions, until it was too late and the
Pavonis Queen
separated him for good from
any power that might have tracked down B and uncovered the secrets of this place. While here the people died in waves of sickness, their brutal unbalanced civilization toppling.

I
could have stopped it. I let it happen
—

But he had been rattled and shaken like a die in a cup, and the hand that had done it was here somewhere. He thought of that soft white hand with an awe so deep it was nearly terror.

Hanna said softly, “He is only a man.”

Maybe.

He was weak, so sick he doubled over. When he recovered enough to straighten, he said, “How could one man get so much power?”

“Why, chance,” said the dark woman, an oracle again. He looked into her eyes and thought he saw the ambiguous eyespots of Uskos. “Not much is predictable and not much is just,” she said; she might have been Norsa citing a lesson of the Master.

“No,” Michael said, rejecting it.

“You knew that,” she said. “Every day of your life has proved it.”

He felt the others watching him, and felt the burden of their lives, which all of them, even Hanna, owed to him. He felt the futility of it in the face of the desertion below.

“Yes,” said Hanna. “But you'll go back for Daryeva all the same, when you can. Won't you?”

The sickness began to pass. “Of course,” he said.

The land rose under
GeeGee.
There must be changes in the nature of the forest below, but they were not evident from the air. The road snaked on patiently and the horizon billowed with mountains. They were flying low, under the cloud cover, but before they reached the mountains the clouds changed, were higher and thinner, the air brighter; the great funnel was moving at last. They did not have to slow as much as he had expected to follow the road, which after a tortuous course of preliminary turns made straight for a gap in the last fold of land. Sunlight flashed off
GeeGee
's nose as she emerged from it, the flanks of the mountains fell away, the road swooped down in the sun on a broad plateau and turned north. There was silence in Control.

He saw the dirt track veering west before anybody else. When he told Theo to turn
GeeGee
and follow it, nobody said anything.

The land moved under them dun and green. The mountains threw out a feeler, and the village on its unhurried river nestled up against them. He had seen it from the air before, yes, from that mountain peak. The perspective was different, but he would have known it in spite of worse distortions. Home.

He took the helm and set
GeeGee
down slowly in a barren grain field, wondering if he would have to ask someone to finish the job; his knees and hands were weak. Croft appeared eerily unchanged. Even the field was recently harvested; people lived here, then.
Most likely nobody I knew,
he cautioned himself. And a figure walked across the field toward
GeeGee,
stopping, however, a hundred meters from the nearest structure (Annitas' house), too far from
GeeGee
to make out a face.

“Mike,” said Hanna. “Look.” He looked, and saw what she indicated: a second figure, this one half-hidden by the corner of the house. It held something. A weapon?

“Covering the other one,” Hanna said.

He went alone to meet the man who stood in the field. The brilliant sunlight shone on his head with a trace of autumn warmth, but a strong wind was blowing, pushing the clouds away. The air had the heady wine taste he remembered, had never tasted anywhere else. He walked quickly, but it seemed to take a long time. The man who waited was powerfully built, with a grizzled head and broad familiar face. His eyes got bigger and bigger as Michael came near. Michael stopped in front of him and said, “Otto?”

“A-Alek?” said the other man, hardly getting it out.

“It's Mikhail. I've come back. Looking for my sister; is she alive?”

Otto got his mouth shut. He turned and waved a jerky arm and the other figure, armed, came into the open and came up to them. It was a woman, tall and slender, with a hard lovely face and eyes Michael knew. They were his own. “Greetings, Carmina,” he said.

“Somebody has to stay on
GeeGee
,” Hanna said to Shen. Lise and Theo were already gone at Michael's beckoning,
Lise tumbling out of
GeeGee
with eager haste, Theo looking stunned.

“You go,” Shen said.

“All right.” Hanna was nervous. She quivered with alarm; she had caught some of Michael's superstitious fear in spite of herself.
B is a real man with real guns, s
he told herself, but she heard Rubee's comfortable voice telling tales all the same.

Finally she left
GeeGee.
Shen could be trusted, she told herself. Shen knew what to do.

The wind outside was sharp, the sunlight dizzying. A faint, luminous streak arced across the high sky: the Ring. The long slopes tilting up toward the mountains were deserted, but when the wind fell for a moment, she heard the tinkle of small bells where herd animals clustered in sunny hollows, gleaning the last sweet mouthfuls of summer growth. The people who had come out of the stone houses had all disappeared into one. Hanna went toward it slowly. Up close, the village did not look whole. Some houses were deserted and falling, succeeding summers and winters having shifted their stones. But everything was here, on the whole just as Michael had remembered it. She went into the house where the others were; it was Otto's, she found.

That was Marlie and I who came for you. Our son was dead, the first; later we had another, he lives, here he is. We did not find you, but we found Carmina. Brought her home.

Michael could not take his eyes off Carmina. It was strange to see Alek and Lillin in her face. There was a tranquillity in her that he recognized; he had had it, too, sometimes. But rarely, only on the very best days. She had given him up for dead as soon as she was old enough for Otto to make her understand what had happened. Her only brother had been Milo, Otto's living son.

No one here was ever troubled again. Life went on, and death; Marlie died last year. But not of that evil, that sickness brought from outside.

From outside ? Are you sure ?

Yes. Sure. It came only when the traveler came, he brought it like a gift. Not every time. The last time he came, though, it followed again. And the masters were not exempt as they had been before.

It was what he had feared, the guess Hanna had made, which he had not wanted to face. He looked at her quickly. He saw in her eyes the acknowledgment of his responsibility. But then she looked away, at nothing in particular. She seemed to be listening for something above the chatter. Theo had not registered what Otto said; he was busy trying to be invisible, and failing among these dark people. There were perhaps sixty, most strangers to Michael, and half, he learned, were recent refugees from the Post; they had abandoned it and made their way north at the first report of fever. Life here was lived much as it had been lived before, and the disintegration of the city in the lowlands was a rumor that hardly touched Croft.

*   *   *

Shen waited stolidly on
GeeGee,
ready to take off with an instant's notice or none at all. She was not restless as Hanna would have been in her place, but checked all the indicators with an occasional steady sweep of the eyes. Hanna spoke with her from time to time.

“I don't know when I'll be able to get him out of here. He won't want to go.”

“So tell him to bring the sister along.”

“It's a thought.”

Shen said irritably, “Wouldn't matter if every last body back there didn't know where we are.”

“Yes.”

And somewhere there was a radio. And somewhere there was Henrik, creeping toward the Post, maybe already there.

“Nowhere to go anyhow,” Shen muttered.

“That's not true any more,” Hanna said, her voice light and thoughtful. “He'll want to go back now. Just as fast as we can.”

“Whatever.” Shen went back to studying what
GeeGee
had to say. Ready to run.

The shadows shifted in the clear afternoon. People left Otto's house in twos and threes, going back to their occupations. They cast curious looks at
GeeGee,
but they knew what she was; they were not ignorant.

“We know more than they do on the flats,”Otto said. “That's Carmina's doing.”

Carmina smiled and shook her head, disclaiming the
praise, but it was true, Michael found. She had asked questions from the time she could talk, and put the answers together with remarkable accuracy. Nothing Michael said surprised her greatly; only the details fascinated her. She was prepared for days of conversation.

“There can't be days,” Hanna said, close to Michael's elbow, touching it impatiently.

“No, I know, that's true.”

“Come along with us,” said Hanna, addressing Carmina. “We have to get in the air.” It was safe in space; safer than here, on the ground and exposed.

“I'll stay. I'll wait for you to come back.”

There was a heartbreaking serenity about Carmina, as if she had resigned herself to waiting many years ago with unflagging patience. She was unmarried and childless. It seemed possible that she had never been touched, had held herself always a little apart from life. Not what Michael would have done, here or anywhere; not what he could have done. She was detached even from this exotic brother. Who could be nothing more to her, after all, than a dim memory of song.

“Michael, we have to go!” Hanna said.

“I know.” But he did not move. He stayed near Otto's fire, not next to Carmina but placed so that he could look at her without interruption, tracing resemblances.

Hanna jittered, dancing with nerves. “Mike,
please!
”

“It's just that I might not be able to come back again,” he said to her in Standard, not wanting to alarm Carmina. “There'll be help from the Polity; I'll make sure of that. But when I turn myself in, it might be the end for me.”

“Nonsense,” Hanna said. “All you have to do is trade. Information for freedom. I thought you saw that, I thought you knew it. That this was the way out.”

“I can't trade with this, I can't take a chance. Enough's happened because I was thinking of myself.”

She was unconvinced. Well, she would have all the weeks it took to get back to Theta to try and change his mind. But he did not mean to let it be changed. His survival was not important any more. Gadrah's was.