The D’neeran Factor (28 page)

*   *   *

“It is autumn here too,” said Iledra. “We are together in that for once. Strange places you've been, H'ana-ril.”

She paused, waiting. It was a minute before Hanna stirred. She was a faraway face to Iledra. Her eyes were dead. Iledra looked at her more closely. Fear seized her that Jameson had been wrong and Hanna would never be well again.

But the blue eyes shifted, came to focus, and were Hanna's: sad, but intelligent and alive.

She said, “Hello, Lee. This is a surprise.”

It was the second time she had said it. Iledra said, “Are you all right, H'ana-ril?”

“Yes,” Hanna said. Fleeting surprise touched her face. “I'm getting stronger,” she said.

“Good. I expected to hear from you, and I did not, so…”

“Oh,” Hanna said. Her eyes shone with quick tears. She turned her head away so Iledra could not see her face. She said, “I couldn't bring myself to— There was so much I
didn't understand from Tharan, and I've read…I've read about the, the, the…tree…tree—”

She stopped, fumbling. Iledra said, puzzled, “The what?”

Hanna now seemed utterly confused. Iledra watched her with amazement and alarm. Hanna said at last, triumphantly,
“Things.”

Iledra closed her eyes for a moment and thought: Her mind is broken. But Hanna went on sanely enough, “The soldiers of the Polity. Half the fleet's in the system, isn't it? They say there've been—disturbances—”

Tears glittered on her cheeks.

Iledra put down her mug of honeyed juice. It was the last of the season, and she would not take a meal outdoors again this year. The rainbow glimmer of fading falseoaks surrounded her, and fine nurturing dust powdered her hair and shoulders with a million subtle jewel-flashes; but the wind was rising, and one more stormy night would scatter the last of the tree-borne light. Had Hanna been thinking of falseoaks? But the connection was obscure.

Iledra said slowly, “There are disturbances everywhere. The Fleet strategy is to stop an invasion here, but it is not popular. I have secured the communication here. Are you secure?”

It did not occur to her that the question represented a marked change in her own attitudes. It did not occur to Hanna either, apparently. Hanna only shook her head and said with an effort at a smile, “None more secure. I tried to call Cassie and they wouldn't even let that go through.”

“Indeed. I'll tell her I've spoken with you. I said there are disturbances everywhere. The governments of the Polity worlds bicker and shout. They think we have too many ships, men, guns, sentinels, and the Commission leaves them too little. You know the administrators of WestCon have fallen on Co-op? And the governors of Montana on Heartworld, though all Montanans are mad in any case. Even Lancaster's parliament has been overturned. I thought Lancaster forever asleep. I suppose you've heard of these things, but…”

Her voice trailed away, because Hanna was not listening. Rather, she listened to something else. She turned her head and stared into a room so dark Iledra could see nothing in
it. In reflected light from the video screen her eyes were a stranger's, and slitted.

“H'ana,” Iledra said softly, but there was no response.

After a minute she went on. She spoke steadily and conversationally. Chill wind clutched her hair and trickled down her neck.

“You know all that, I'm sure. But probably you have not heard of Colony One's proposal to evacuate all D'neera and destroy the Houses and the cities, so if the aliens come there would be nothing, and the Fleet if it loses here could retreat to worlds the aliens cannot find. They might even have done it, H'ana—but they could not think how to resettle all of us.”

“Yes,” Hanna said. “That's right. All at once. I hadn't heard.” She turned back to Iledra, looking only wistful. She said, “What did Jameson say?”

“Nothing,” Iledra said. “Not a word. He knew it must come to nothing. And he is in no position to protect us.”

“No,” Hanna said. “I wish I could see him. But I haven't. Tell me more.”

But her face was so sad that Iledra hesitated. She thought now that Hanna's deficiencies might be neither physical nor intellectual, that something else perhaps had broken, and she could say nothing that would not bring further pain. Hanna could not know all the tumult the forced marriage of true-humans and D'neerans had brought, because true-humans now controlled most of D'neera's channels of communication, and chose what to suppress. All the old prejudices had flared again, strong as in the years of isolation. Polity soldiers no longer were permitted to visit the surface of D'neera for rest and recreation; there had been rapes, batteries, thefts, finally a full-scale riot. Most Polity societies closed their doors to D'neerans for, they said, the outsiders' own protection. This meant D'neerans who wished to evacuate voluntarily—and there were many—could not do so. They stayed at home with everyone else, watching a hostile sky whose harborage of the true-human fleet seemed more threatening, for now at least, than hypothetical aliens of unknown power.

And it was Hanna's doing. And to know all that she had brought about would not help her.

Iledra said, “I will tell you more another time. Are you comfortable, H'ana?”

“Yes,” Hanna said doubtfully.

“But unhappy…”

“I can't,” said Hanna, lines creasing her forehead, “seem to think. They don't—want to talk to me. They're not allowed to, I think. The people here. I only ever see a few. And men from Intelligence. I go to, to where they tell me. The pool. The gymnasium. Nobody's there.” Something like horror came into her eyes. She repeated, “Nobody's ever there. I can't, can't think to anybody. They don't like it. There's nobody to talk to. I'm living in a box. I'm not living—”

She stopped suddenly. Her eyes were dim again. Iledra waited. After a minute Hanna said clearly, “It's all right here. I'll come home when I can.”

Iledra said, “Are you quite sure you're all right?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Not, perhaps, a little—confused?”

“Confused?” Hanna said. “Why, no.” And now she only looked, in fact, tired.

Afterward Iledra called Jameson, but when she said she wanted to talk about Hanna, he would not speak with her.

*   *   *

She did feel odd. Fuzzy. Maybe even a little confused. She spent many hours in the pool, comforted by water. Melanie Ward talked of womb-returns and said she could not do it forever. But in the pool she could keep her eyes closed, and she did not like looking at things. Objects and bodies and faces had taken to having periods of unintelligibility, as if she had lost the patterns of what they were supposed to look like. Speech sometimes was mere noise, meaningless and almost painful. She was possessed by a lethargy of mind and body that seized her anywhere, at any time, so that she stopped what she was doing and neither moved nor thought until someone spoke to her or something else happened to rouse her. The commonplaces of technology were sporadically, unnervingly beyond her grasp; not that she did not understand principles, but that she could not remember which knob or lever or button did what, and she had to stop and think how her bath or the terminal in her room worked. She was glad her meals were brought to her so she did not
have to cope with their preparation, though it meant always eating alone, when she bothered to eat.

She did not want to tell anyone about these things, but exhaustion drove her finally to tell Ward that sleep did not rest her. She woke in the mornings as tired as if she had not been to bed at all, and seemed always on the edge of remembering an evil dream. She thought it out with some difficulty, and decided the transition drugs must be responsible. But when she put the question to Ward, Ward said she was no longer being doped.

“But every day they give me—”

“Immune boosters, because your resistance is down. Nutrients, because”—a hint of reproach—”you don't eat properly.”

“I don't understand,” Hanna said. She made a vague pass at her hair, missing by some distance. “Can I have something, then? To help me with the dreams? To help me rest?”

“No,” Ward said, and made an explanation to which Hanna did not attend. The truth was that she was afraid of sleep. She was afraid she would die in the night. There were mornings when her first thought on waking was that she
had
died, and somehow revived with the dawn. She felt as well an urgent need for sleep, no matter how much she got, and the conflict between fear and desire was painful. She did not want to tell Ward about it, because she also was afraid to confess that she was afraid. The Questioner had exposed too many unsuspected weaknesses. Hanna would not herself expose more.

“Tell me,” Ward said invitingly, “about your dreams.”

“I don't remember them,” Hanna said truthfully.

After that the I&S men who came to her every day wanted to hear about her dreams too, but she could not satisfy them.

*   *   *

In December the first snows came.

Hanna got worse. She felt more and more as if she lived in a box that shut her off from the rest of the world. At first she thought the difficult, complete suppression of telepathy was the source of her isolation, but it did not explain everything. Her body, once strong and athletic, was unreliable. Her muscles twitched, she walked into walls, dropped things, fell sometimes. She had headaches and her eyes felt
so tired she thought something was wrong with them, but Ward said otherwise. Ward did, however, tell the Intelligence agents to stop hounding her. They stopped; less for her health's sake, Hanna thought, than because there obviously was nothing more she could tell them.

The relief from that pressure did not halt the decline of her mind, however. She cast about in desperation for release, and a longing came upon her to go home. It seemed that if she were on D'neera she could be well; that the universe would look right, smell right, fit her comfortably. Even the passage through space drew her, even anything that was not here, where nothing but water was right.

Still they would not let her go, and they would not tell her why, and when she thought of tapping their minds to find out why, she was afraid. Because they seemed so strange to her: almost alien, in fact.

*   *   *

Early each morning Morisz went over the previous day's and night's reports on Hanna ril-Koroth. They were lavishly illustrated, because she was watched as closely as even Jameson could wish, though Morisz still thought it a waste of time and resources.

This morning, however, the report was accompanied by a nightside operative. Morisz canceled an appointment and had her brought in at once. She said, “This might not be important, but you did say to report anything unusual.”

“I meant it. Let me see it.”

He waited while she searched the night's record for what she wanted. His office looked inland from the river, and in the weak winter sun he picked out the bulk of the Beyle Center with its fringe of parkland and snow-dusted trees. What was Hanna up to now? Whatever it was, if Wills thought it important enough to show him, it had better be passed on to Jameson.

Wills said, watching the timeline, “Most of it was ordinary. She went to bed early, got up after a while, and started studying. A text on Terrestrial evolution this time. Toward morning she went back to bed, but this time she got up again, and she didn't seem to be in fugue. I think she'll say she remembers this if she's asked.”

“I think she remembers all of it,” he said.

“Well, it's just an opinion, but I don't think she knows
how much she's up. Otherwise why would she complain about being tired? Here it is.”

They leaned forward simultaneously. The room from which the image came had been dark, but the picture was enhanced to full visibility. Hanna's room at the Beyle Center was, by the center's standards, highly decorated. The patterned walls with their ornaments of crystal and metal made it almost certain Hanna would not find the near-microscopic spyeyes by accident. The furnishings were spare, but Ward had had rich fabrics brought in, and pretty objects that when activated moved or spoke or projected rippling color. The object was to provide Hanna with plenty of positive sensory stimulation; but she seemed not to notice her surroundings, and did not play with the enchanting toys.

She was in bed, just beginning to stir, in the picture Morisz saw. She sat up, pushing away the sheets with a quick motion. She wore a white gown that fell from her throat to her feet and covered her arms as well. Until recently she had slept naked, but the habit had changed overnight and, it seemed, permanently. She stayed away from mirrors, too; Ward said she had contracted a revulsion to the sight of her own body; a reaction finally, she thought, to its mutilation.

Hanna swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up straight. Her face was slack with weariness. She tilted her head as if listening for something. Her eyes moved, searching.

After a minute she got up. She moved to the middle of the room, so unsteadily Morisz thought she might fall. She looked around her and began to move again. She looked into the tiny bath cubicle, opened the door of the room and looked out into the hallway. She slid open the panel of the room's small storage module and pawed through her sparse collection of clothing. Morisz realized to his astonishment that she was trying to find something.

He said to Wills—in a whisper, as if Hanna could hear, although what he saw had happened hours ago— “I wonder if she's caught on to the spyeyes?”

“She's looking in the wrong places. She'd be looking in the room itself.”

Presently Hanna gave up the search. She went back to
her bed and sat down slowly, dejection in the lines of her body. Still she looked about the room. It seemed to Morisz that she almost sniffed the air. She stopped that too and was still. Her lips parted and she said in a whisper, faint and sibilant but clear: “Come out! Come out where I can see you!”