The D’neeran Factor (123 page)

Michael turned the light to a dim glow and left it with them. It would shine for months, maybe years; at least they did not have to fear the dark. “The water's just down there,” he said, pointing downhill, and made sure they saw where he pointed. “If you need some, for God's sake don't get lost!”

“I'm not that crazy,” Theo muttered, and closed his eyes.

Michael crawled back to the mouth of the cave, Hanna following. They laid one of the communicators on a rock in the open and retreated just inside the cave, where they could hear it call but sit upright in some comfort. They swallowed nutrient tablets and took turns going to the stream for water, tiptoeing past Theo and Lise, already sound asleep. When Hanna came back, she had no coat; she had spread it over the other two for warmth. Michael took off his coat, too, and they huddled together under it.

Hanna said, “Oh, God, how I want a bath!”

“There's the stream,” he said.

She shivered. “It might come to that.”

She leaned against him, still shivering, but not with cold. “Somebody's dead,” she said.

“What do you mean? Shen?” he said anxiously.

“I don't think it's Shen. But somebody's died. I felt it on the way up. I would have known if it was Shen. But somebody I know is gone.”

Michael held her in silence. He was so accustomed to living with a telepath that she had ceased to seem strange, but sometimes he was reminded that her humanity was of a different order from most, from his.

“It couidn't have been anybody in Croft,” he said. “The
Avalon
hasn't come back yet. Somebody at the Post? Somebody on the
Avalon
?”

“I don't think so. I don't know any of those people well enough to feel it if they died. It might not even have been here, it might have been somebody at home. But I think it was here.” She paused. “I hope it wasn't Henrik.”

He moved involuntarily. He didn't want it to be Henrik. He said as lightly as he could, “What the hell are we going to do about Henrik, anyway?”

“Leave him,” she said. “He made his choice. If we get away and get the Polity here, he can go home. To prison, probably.”

“I wouldn't like to see that happen.”

“No. I guess I wouldn't either. He doesn't really try to be the way he is. He just never knows what he's doing,” she said, and Michael laughed.

“I don't either. Do you?”

“Not till it's over,” she admitted.

“I stayed too long,” he said as if it were the logical sequel. “I couldn't tear myself away.”

“I know,” she said, forgiving him. She added, “Carmina gave me her gun.”

“Is that what you were carrying? Do you know how to use it?”

“I think so.” She dug in a pocket and pulled out a bulging pouch; something rattled inside it. “Ammunition,” she said.

“That's good. And we've got two stunners. But either way we'll have to be at close range.”

“We'll arrange that if we have to,” she said.

They sat in silence, waiting.
At the end of the universe,
he thought. Because of the stone overhead and the brush outside, he could not see the sky, not a single star to say there were other places.
Run to ground
—he knew what that meant, now. All the running he had ever done had been only a prelude to this.

But he could not feel despair. Not with Shen out there, faithful; not with Hanna at his side.

He got his hand under her chin, turned her head and kissed her. This night ought to belong to the painful, necessitous nights he had spent dragging himself through memories. But there were all the others, too. Luxury was where you found it, where you made it.

He felt the tension begin to run out of Hanna, melting out like tallow. “I don't want to take too many clothes off,” she said.

“We'll see what we can do,” he said, and they lay down together on the stony bed, cushioning each other as best they could.

*   *   *

The lights went out one by one in Croft, until the only one left was in the house where Carmina lived with Otto. They had talked for a time, but Carmina was not inclined for conversation, and Otto at length had left her alone. Now as the night wore on, they were silent. Carmina's face was calm but watchful; her eyes moved at every sound. Anyone who knew Michael would have recognized that look.

Her mind was not as quiet as her face and hands. Strangely (but it would not have been strange to anyone who knew Michael) she had no difficulty in accepting what had happened—and might happen. Her brother had come home. That was a fact. He carried the seeds of a revolution; if he got away he would make it happen, and Carmina's life and the lives of everyone she knew would change. That was a fact. Carmina had always dealt in facts, some of them hard. These were better than most.

But the bones of a hard fact, and the richness of the flesh that clothed it, were different things.

Her mind wandered among riches. The man who shared her blood, looking no older than she in spite of the difference in their ages—how little she had learned about him! But much about Gadrah, and much about the worlds outside it. He had seen her thirst for knowledge and ministered to it; she was ashamed, thinking of it; she had not asked what she could give in return. But all he had seemed to want was to look at her.

The candle burned low. The town was silent. There were many who slept, and Otto's gray head drooped and his eyes were half-closed. But no doubt others sat awake in the dark, waiting for a return.

Carmina dreamed, though awake. She dreamed of the worlds of which Mikhail had told her, the busy homeworld, the colonies unlike Gadrah where human life had thrived. She dreamed of governments, too, and law, and what they might do here, where there had never been any law but custom—or the caprices of power.

She had been dreaming this last dream a long time when the sound began. She knew it at once, she had known it when she heard it in the afternoon, and it had brought a stark memory of danger, of screaming and terror and fire.

In the afternoon it had only brought her brother home. But now it was night.

She stood in the open door with the candle behind her, inviting danger. Her view of the landing was clear. One spacecraft looked much like another to inexperienced eyes, but she had studied the
Golden Girl
hungrily while she waited in the day at Otto's back, and even in the dark she was certain this was not the same one. The hunters, then.

She stood unmoving while lights came toward her, drawn by light. Two men came to the door and at last she gave way, backing into the room; there were weapons in their hands, and she knew, by description, what they did. She knew one of the men by description as well. The undying. Tistou.

“Where are they?” he said. He looked at her strangely when the light flashed on her face. Otto had gotten up behind her. Tistou said, “Where are they, old man?”

“Gone,” Otto said. “The gold ship came and got them.”

The traveler said smiling, “The ship has not come back. It did not turn back soon enough, to have come back. They are here.”

“Well, search, then,” Otto said.

They did search; they looked in every house and byre, the spaceship hovering overhead and flooding the town with light. The searchers took Carmina with them, and at each cottage, when the householder was roused, they put the end of a weapon to the base of her skull, to show what would happen if there were protests. At each house she smiled, calm and unafraid, and endured it. She even endured (though she did not smile) a clumsy caress from the man with the gun at her head; but Tistou said, “There's no time. Keep your eyes open.” After that there was only the gun, better than the heavy hand.

One thing frightened her, though she did not show it. The ship at the rooftops, the light pouring down—she had seen that a long time before, her earliest memory.

When they were satisfied Croft hid no fugitives, they took her back to Otto. They put her against the wall and pointed the guns at her breast. “Where are they?” Tistou said.

“I will not tell you,” she said, dreaming of law.

“Well, old man?”

“Sutherland,” Otto said. “They took the road—” he pointed—“that way. At least, they said they would go that way.”

“Do you agree?” Tistou asked her, but she would not move or speak. He looked at her closely again, as if some memory or moment of knowledge were near.

He stepped back and put the gun in his belt and went out, followed by the other man, who was very big and fair. Carmina moved to the door and watched them go. Otto said, “I had to tell them, child. They would have killed you.”

“Yes,” she said. “But maybe Mikhail thought of that.”

“He was a clever boy,” Otto said.

*   *   *

Theo had not looked at the time since nightfall, and he did not know how long he had slept when Michael woke him. His chronometer showed Standard time, and it could not tell him how long it was to dawn. When his eyes were fully open he saw that Michael was exhausted. Hanna stood there, too, heavy with sleep.

“Your turn. Wake me in a couple hours,” Michael said.

Theo went for water first. On the way back to the mouth of the cave, passing the others, he saw that Michael and Hanna were already asleep. Hanna had taken his place and slept with her arms around Lise, who had hardly stirred, and Michael held Hanna. The three were very close, very beautiful—and vulnerable. There was a mountain over their heads and it could fall and crush them in a moment.

The chill of the cavern reached into Theo's bones. The only help he could give was to watch, so he did it.

He did not wait inside the cave but just at the opening, ready to duck inside at the first sign or sound of anything in the air. He was cold and alone, and even when his eyes adjusted to the dark, even here looking into the open, he felt
smothered; the bluff was a mass of black hung over his head and he faced a tree. On either side of the tree, and at either hand, brush shut out everything except a few patches of starless sky. He longed for a clear line of sight to the valley, for
any
sight of it. Michael had said B would return to the village, but if he did, it would be hard for anyone on the mountainside to know it. The wind rustled gently, and whenever it rose Theo started as if he heard hunters creeping through the wood. Once in a windless moment he thought he heard a spacecraft lift off, and jumped to his feet, ready to run. But as he stood in the dark the sound faded and was gone. He strained his ears and heard only the night, until he was not sure he had heard anything at all.

He sat down and waited again. He was still very tired. But he was on guard, fighting sleep, when the communicator set up a sweet steady signal and an unmistakable voice said, “Mike?”

He had never been so glad to hear anything. He said shakily, “Mike's asleep, I'll get him,” and scrambled to wake the others.

They came out to a filament of dawn. It wasn't much, because the mountain blotted out the east. Shen said, “Coming in, where are you?” and they stood in the open and looked up at the lightening sky.

Michael got his communicator back and talked into it, thinking
This is too easy.
“Meet us just under the tree line,” he said. “About forty-five degrees south from a straight line up the mountain from Croft. See it?”

“Not yet,” she said. There was no sound to indicate
GeeGee
was near, and Shen would not tell them where she was, not when someone else might be listening.

They started downhill in a hurry, running and skidding on the steep decline. “What if the other one comes back?” Lise said nervously.

“They'll go after
GeeGee,
” Michael answered to reassure her, and saw Hanna nod.

The light strengthened as they went on. Going down was easier than climbing had been, and there was no stopping to peer around in the dark for old, changed landmarks. They were close to the open when they heard
GeeGee,
and a few seconds later saw her gliding in at an altitude not much greater than theirs.

“That's fine,” Michael said. “Set her down.”

“Hell of a grade,” Shen complained. But
GeeGee
stopped in midair and slowly lowered herself toward the ground.

Made it,
he thought, and saw Hanna freeze, staring across the valley through the lacy tops of the last trees.

“Tell her to get out!” she cried, there must have been a burst of thought, too, or Shen had seen what Hanna saw, because there was a roar from
GeeGee
and she was gone, leaping into the air as from a catapult. “Back,” Michael said, “everybody back!” They did not need to be urged, they all saw the other shape now, a dark blot racing across the valley, and they turned and climbed for their lives. Michael ran behind the others, looking over his shoulder, waiting for an explosion in the air or among them, but there was none. Then the valley was empty and the sound of engines was gone.

They kept running until they tumbled through the mouth of the cave. The dark past the opening was a wall.
I
thought I had stopped running,
Michael thought. He had shoved the light into his pocket as the day grew, and now he got it out and turned it on and they wormed their way back to their first resting place. They sat in a circle round the light, panting and sweating in the chill air.

Michael wondered for the first time what would become of them. He looked at Hanna and saw her hunched, head bowed to her knees. He had never seen her like that before.

After a while Theo stretched out on his back on the stone. He said, “They had us. If they'd fired, it would've been over.”

“They went for the ship,” Michael said. He looked at the stone because otherwise he would look at Hanna, and he did not want to. For once he did not want her reading his thoughts.

She did not have to read them. She had been a soldier and a killer, and she could make out the strategies of violence for herself.