The D’neeran Factor (19 page)

Hanna jumped, shocked. His will transfixed her—the implacable will that had created the
Endeavor
Project from nothing. No half-formed fear would dilute it. He would go meet the beings himself, if no one else would go.

She said, bewildered, “Forever for what?”

He looked at her without comprehension. She had to know. She put out a hand and touched his arm with a hesitance foreign to any D'neeran, to whom touch came naturally as breath. But it seemed a great liberty to take with Jameson. He did not shake her off, however. She said, “What are we looking for?”

For a minute she thought he would not answer. Then he said, “We are children, my lady.”

“Children?”

“All the time of humankind is a second, a tiny fraction of eternity,” he said, so softly that she tilted her head, close as she was, to hear. “It is nothing, my lady. Each of us is caught in our little millisecond of life, and we think that millisecond is everything. But all human history is nothing.”

He hesitated, looking into her eyes with the first trace of doubt she had ever seen in him. Something reassured him. She felt him relax, almost in relief. He said quietly, “The
Endeavor
Project is a turning toward a future unimaginable as the improbable past. I am speaking of the far future. Not next year, but millennia to come. We forget the vastness of the universe. We think, skipping among a handful of stars, we have mastered it. We are children, playing on the edge of infinity…. One day, my lady, we will meet the adults.”

It seemed to her clear, pure truth. She said in wonder, “And they will teach us—?”

“The unknowable?” he said. It was a question.

She asked with simple curiosity, “Are you mad?”

“I don't think so,” he said, as if he had thought of it before.

He had gone much farther than he intended. The moment of communication ended with a jolt in which Hanna felt his surprise at what he had said. He actually took a step backward.

He said abruptly, “I don't intend to order you into space on my authority alone. There will be some delay. But I think you can leave in a few days.”

“But—”

Iledra overwhelmed her, thinking furious thoughts to an obstinate child. Jameson said, “You need not be entirely alone. You can take Zeig or Daru, or both of them. This time. Not the next time, perhaps—”

“Next time! I don't even want to go this time!”

“It is essential that a telepath greet them. You can make better guesses about them than any true-human.”

“Of course,” Iledra said, but Hanna could not let it pass.

“I don't know if I can!” She stopped in despair. Iledra's eyes were as cold as Jameson's. She went on stubbornly, “If they, if they didn't have a Change, if they evolved that way, they might be different, so different from us—We're still human. We're shaped by language. Telepathy's a function of the maturation of the nervous system. We learn to use it along with language. We've never got very far from the rest of you—whatever you might think,” she added defiantly, but Jameson only nodded.

“The perfect interface,” he said.

Soft-furred pollitts snugly burrowed, and downwind the eye of the hunter
—

Iledra's hand closed on her arm.

Madness! Before the war you were not so. This fear lies in your own heart!

Hanna disengaged her arm easily; it was harder to free her thought. She said hopelessly, “We don't know enough about them,” and saw Jameson's mouth set.

“You have the opportunity to learn more,” he said.

“What they are doing does not make sense in any frame of reference we know.”

“You,” he said, and lifted a hand and leveled a long forefinger at her, arresting her. “You have just won an award for a work concerned largely with frames of reference—and with your own qualifications, as a D'neeran, to understand them. You have the opportunity to prove the assertions of ‘Sentience'—that you can enter an alien's skin, obtain for us knowledge of his heart, and show him your own essence. Peace, you said, past any possibility of mistake, without conjecture, without deception, from the beginning. You have the opportunity to make a first contact. There has not been a first contact since Neil Girritt's two hundred and fifty years ago. No D'neeran has ever made such a contact. Shall I send Marte Koster instead?”

Iledra said empathically, “No!” The air pulsed with warning. Hanna needed no special sense to know what Iledra thought of: D'vornan's new course of study; a report, which Iledra would supervise personally, on the introduction of D'neerans into true-human mindhealing; a whole list of scarce-spoken hopes, a world's coming of age.

Hanna looked from Jameson to Iledra and turned away from them. She went back to the projection and stood beside it without looking at it. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, she felt Iledra's indignation that Hanna should even think of turning away from this opportunity. From Jameson she felt nothing, but exasperation showed in his face. He wanted her to see it, she thought. She had not missed his significant glance at the tiny jeweled symbol of the Goodhaven Academy sparkling on her shoulder. She was not through paying for it, nor for all those beginnings.

She took her hands from her pockets, and the Heir's Ring sparkled too. She tugged at it and pulled it off. She said to Iledra, “Have you forgotten the inscription inside?”

Iledra remembered. She looked at Hanna coldly. It was the first time Hanna had felt anything of the kind from Iledra.

Hanna said, “I'll tell you what it is. ‘The first duty of the D'neeran citizen is to the integrity of the self; for the welfare of the state depends on the well-being of the individual.'”

Iledra did not answer in word or thought. Hanna said, “Take it. Cosma can wear it for me. Just in case.”

She felt a question form at last, and shut it out. “Take it,” she repeated, and Iledra took the ring as if she might not give it back.

On balance, Hanna thought, Iledra was right, or right enough to leave no real choice. If there were a first contact, it had better not be Marte Koster who made it; better H'ana ril-Koroth of D'neera; better another stone laid to found Jameson's seductive vision.

“All right,” Hanna said. “I'll go.”

T
he space ship was called
XS-12.
“X” meant Extraterrestrial, “S” meant Scout; Hanna never found out what the Twelve was for.

It was as austere as Shuttle Five, and it was not big enough for three people.

When it had been in space six weeks Hanna looked out the ports in its nose and thought: It's just as well we hate each other. It gives us something to do.

(“Why told you no one of your dreams?”

“Why left you no record of yours?”

“I
did, they kept it from you
—
”

“As you knew they would. Placid you ate the argument
—
”

“It was sense!”

“Now you doubt, too late
—
bitch, witch!”)

The transmissions
XS-12
sent into space could be traced by an audible signal. Often they played it for hours. It had been on for hours now, high-pitched and faint and pulsing. Hanna could not bear it.

She said suddenly, “I want it off.”

Charl did not look up from the game he played crosslegged on the floor. Bright chips shifted position in the air.

“Leave it on,” he said.

“It's been on for hours!”

“I'm used to it.”

They spoke in careful Standard, having rubbed so closely together for so long that the emotional burden of telepathy also was unbearable. Hanna said, “It's my turn to have what I want. Silence!”

Charl hesitated, acknowledging fairness in spite of himself.
Hanna's hand crept inevitably toward the keypad that would silence the noise. A memory of the
Clara Mendoza
stabbed her, and she felt sick. Charl looked at her quickly and said, “All right.”

“Thanks.”

In resounding silence she headed for the cramped cubicle where she slept and which—the operations manual said—was supposed to give her privacy. In the narrow passage she bumped into a sleepy and disheveled Anja. Hanna squeezed past her.

Hanna's bunk made her bed on
Endeavor
look sybaritic. It would improve Erik to sleep here for a while. The single thin blanket did not even pretend to be fabric. It kept a sleeper comfortable, but it did nothing for the need to snuggle into substantial warmth in the night. Not that
XS-12
was cold; it was always the same and just right. It did not have
Endeavor
's subtle diurnal and seasonal cues, and its scant drift through realspace allowed no shift in the positions of the stars. The souls aboard her might have been in hell, a hell of isolation and sameness that drove them to tear at each other because there was no other outlet for a tension that rose and fell irregularly and permitted them no action.

(
“I
thought,” said Jameson's voice
—
it was only his voice, and the transmission was not as clear as it should be
—
“that what you report is impossible. That telepathic contact without affect is a contradiction in terms.”

“It is for us. I didn't believe Charl either, when he told me what he felt on
Endeavor.
They're not us. They're different. I told you they could be different!”

“They are interested in you, at least.”

“Presumably. Who the hell knows?”

“And they've done nothing to harm you.”

“But the dreams. I don't trust this change. Dammit, why didn't you let us talk before I came out here?”

“It wouldn't have mattered. They are analogs; for watchfulness and pursuit, perhaps.”

“That's easy for you to say,” Hanna said, but she liked hearing his voice. It was always calm and steady, and in each of their rare conversations it was a link to reason and the sanity of a busy larger world.

She said,
“
Jameson, I don't think I can take this much longer.”

“Don't tell me that. The import of your presence surely
—
”

“Don't make a speech,” she said quickly, and thought she heard the ghost of a chuckle.)

She was not scheduled to talk to Jameson for four days more. There would be nothing to occupy her thoughts and keep them from unanswerable questions except the laconic once-a-day contact with Project Central, and the prickly oft-broken truce with Anja and Charl, and the other thing. Which came when it would and was gone at once.

(“To see what you are? To see that you are what you seem to be? I don't know. But you will stay there, harmless
—
”

“Helpless!”

“Until I tell you otherwise. You need no help.”)

So telepathic contact without affect was possible. There were no dreams of eyes or stalking warships. There were no affective images crafted deep in human bones. The touches were an assertion of existence: nothing more. They came at irregular intervals, not in sleep but to the waking mind, and no sensor on
XS-12
had ever registered a manifestation of matter to go along with them.

Hanna's tiny compartment was not soundproofed. She lay uncomfortably on her back and listened to Anja and Charl. The voices were faint, and she cocked an ear to the dreary round of the same words, same questions, same uncertain answers all of them had been saying and hearing for six weeks. It was Anja and Charl this time, but it might have been all three of them, or she and Anja, or she and Charl.

Anja said in her soft furry voice, “They might be super-beings, waiting to see if we are worthy.”

“Or not telepaths at all. Could they be non-telepaths?”

“Impossible.”

“Something altogether different, I mean. Made for another sense which we perceive dimly with the only one we have that can perceive them at all.”

“But why wait? Why not contact us?”

“Fear perhaps…”

Hanna shut out the voices as best she could. They receded to a murmur. They could say nothing new. They had been through this again and again and again. The words were wearily unchanging like everything aboard
XS-12.
Hanna longed for the D'neeran summer, or even the spring left behind on Earth.

Hanna had gone out to
Endeavor
in
XS-12,
which had not seemed crowded with only a Fleet pilot aboard. Marte Koster met her with a certain sulky respect. Erik, however, greeted her with more than courtesy. It seemed she was now a person of some importance, a protégée of Starr Jameson and a member of the Goodhaven Academy. Hanna felt only indifference. She would not forget Erik but mostly, she thought, the memory would remind her that true-humans were not very sensible about love. She had never figured out what sharing Erik's bed had to do with following his orders, although the connection had seemed plain to him.

She forgot about him as soon as
Endeavor
was gone, leaving
XS-12
behind with one tremendous jump. Fleming had played the locus-reference game with Species X right up to the rendezvous with
XS-12,
though more slowly and carefully toward the end. Hanna, busy comparing notes with Anja, had not cared about the details. When
Endeavor
was gone the D'neerans turned on their own transmission—here-we-ARE here-we-ARE here-we-ARE—and sat back to wait. And wait, and wait. And the first fragile touch of contact had come almost at once, and again and again—and nothing else had happened, except that the mission had disintegrated into a series of subtle territorial squabbles.

We are acting altogether too much like true-humans, Hanna thought crossly. They insist on having privacy for the oddest things—arguing, making love, having babies—but they expect three people to put up with each other and stay sane in a space maybe big enough for one-point-five. I will never understand them. If something doesn't happen soon I'll go mad!