The D’neeran Factor (35 page)

T
he planes of reality were all discrete, white emptiness cut by darkness, so sharp-edged Leader thought it would all fly apart at any moment. The split was intrinsic in the universe. He knew it, all the People knew it, and bridged it all-together. Now there was nothing to contain it but himself and this alien and memory unsupported by the binding We. Though empty, she functioned, an automaton operating by animal compulsion, automatic and implacable as the universe. She did not even see that reality was unstuck.

Her thoughts cut him, and he was entirely exposed to them now and sometimes, even, thought them. Revulsion and hatred washed over him; in denial of his existence she would drown him. Scalding blasts of negation threatened him. Hating in return was salvation: so the Student-Celebrants whispered long ago:
HATE AFFIRM. AFFIRM. AFFIRM.

Stronger than captive or paradigm she had also her Home at her back close at hand and around her a Render's artifacts

they made none we stopped them in time

and now that her enemy was visible she faced him powerfully and he was alone, save for her. Save for her who

She made the random transit over the yacht's repeated warnings. The arcs of thought were not all hers. She followed them one by one. Danger danger danger too dangerous a game suicidal (but if it were not sometimes necessary all ships would prohibit it utterly. The instructor shook his solemn head. They should; there is no reason for it ever to be necessary. You ought to be with me now, Umberto.)

Artifact of beasts
THAT IS NOT MY THOUGHT I WILL NOT THINK IT.

The random Jump would save her from pursuit; the computer that ordered it would itself need time to determine where it was. There is Sol.
Firsthome of water.
NOT MY THOUGHT.

In the strange starfield she tried to think, but the alien bubble burst in her head and she swam in its shards.
Heartworld II
trembled around her, its planes and angles quivered with immanence, poised, changing to something else. It too would shake apart and dissolve in non-being. There was no color in the universe. It was a white fog cut by shadows from dead space, being and unbeing clearly distinguished. She fell through its cracks to the Students' arms, experienced in pain and in murder…

clearly remembered dimly foreseen

and murder I will—!

She shook her head violently over and over until it ached. The pain made a handle and she hung on it. The disjunctions were Leader's reality, not hers. Or his perception of hers, shaped by living millennia; their weight crushed her. She ought to have a soul and she had nothing—

“Stop it!” she cried out loud, and buried her face in her hands. The skin of her face grew hot, grew coarse, and she moaned from her own deep fear.

Home, Nearhome, warm sea of thought gently turning

gentle sea indigo amethyst white spires of Home

“Home,” she whispered, and slowly, painfully, straightened. Her thoughts cleared. She could go home. Iledra would protect her, help her dig out this monster and never, ever hurt her.

She said to
Heartworld II,
too quick for Leader, “Set course for D'neera.”

“Working,” it said, and all her muscles convulsed in his blast of fury.

*   *   *

He did not know how to speak. He was not made for it, and even using her he could not do it. Wildfire was constructed to find aural equivalents for thought and written symbol, and he was not. Nor was she exquisitely alive to currents in the atmospheric sea, so that even commanding her consciousness he was robbed of a potent sense and irreparably numbed. But he used parts of her well.

He held her paralyzed in horror and moved one hand to cancel the course she had just set. Fear and rage rained on him like blows. The hand jerked; toward her head; as if she could plunge it into her skull and tear him out in handfuls of dripping brainmatter. But he held steadfast to the hand. It was a soft and disgusting paw, nearly black against the white of this living, thinking room. Yet she was very light compared to many of the Treecubs, who ran a spectrum that confused him.

Their machines could be run without speech. He had learned how to do that in the long nights, driving her weary body so that in the end he knew more than she did, drawing fierce and invisible on her knowledge, for survival and escape depended on it. She understood the workings of this vessel only because he had showed her and forced her to see because she had not wanted to see and not wanted to know because: because of the other one. Whose eyes had picked him out.

Now the other hand, set to dancing over a keyboard whose logic was mathematical. He understood that, too.

Yes. More much more much closer his goal than he had hoped. Yes. Yes!

She said in despair, to no one but inevitably to Leader:
He was right.

??

to keep me there. No choice

??

the future on his shoulders

I have too.

Heartworld II
said, “The first portion of this course requires intensive calculation due exclusively to randomization. The remainder is known. The probability is ninety-five percent that no more than sixty transits will be required to reach subject terminus. The probability is 90.233 percent that the journey will require less than 144 hours.”

*   *   *

Hanna stared at the course display. Its rainbow colors were incomprehensible, and then coalesced into something she could understand. It was almost a course for D'neera. Almost.

Points beyond.

He hid nothing. He could not. Numbers, only numbers. But their meaning to him and to her differed so that she could not grasp fact at once and worked it out painfully.

D'neera must be the rendezvous but it could not be but it had to be. Because the crew of the First (Sentinel) (Watchman) (Watchsetter) knew it and (from Hanna's own thought) could find their way there. Not there. Not quite there. To a star as such things went nearby. She knew D'neera's space intimately. Training cruises.

This was a triple, one a red giant that shone rust-bright over Koroth. They called it the Dragon's Eye.

A course once established in human space was logged centrally. The Polity ran the library and withheld some things, no doubt. D'neera participated in the give-and-take. The crisscross of safe courses in its little sphere of exploration was standard navigational programming, not much used but there it was. And there they waited, at the Dragon's Eye.

Luck,
she said to him,
luck, you could not know the course would be here.

Near is near enough,
he said:
I
am an Explorer: I would have found the way. This is a gift of time.

She said:
I
will not let you do this.

You will.

His confidence was too much like that of The Questioner, who had been right after all. She shrank away from it, watching him use her hands. She was not connected with them. He was busy and occupied and she might have leapt upon him but did not, seizing instead on the moment to think. He was too busy to prevent her. She looked at the alien thoughts her brain somehow thought. But that could not be. He could not be a physical entity! He could not!

Watchsetter/Sentinel/Explorer at the Dragon's Eye. Red light—but no light penetrated. They were sealed in and would not/could not go out. She thought experimentally of old pleasures, whirling stars in free fall, the mind-wrenching glory of solitary consciousness lost in all of creation. Her
body trembled. The ghost of The Questioner whispered in her brain.

Do not think of that!

Thou fearest the void?

Do not think of it!

There is much then thou fearest of space?

Much. Yet We came for thee. And dissolved thee.

She twisted away from the memory that was nearly upon her. She thought in despair:
You have won from the beginning.

Since the dawn. I/We must. It is harder. You are stronger.

Stronger than?

Stronger than a furred and evil darkness. She did not understand. She did not feel strong. But it was true, because he could not deceive her.

He added:
A desperate chance.

I?

You. Desperate. Theory. Process catalyst experiment who knew you would bend to Our use? You have. You are used.

A thousand memories rippled in his thought. They were his/not his; they were old. The living dead jostled her in them. What had they altered and dissolved? Before Hanna, before the colonists? Something not-People but other-than-beast.

She was close to it. He wavered and weakened
alone with a Render-thing!

The memories invested her with strength beyond her own. She understood this suddenly and drew on all of it and unseated him with one great heave. Reality rocked and was hers again, her body was hers again, her mind was entirely clear. The hands Leader had used were hers, and she concentrated on remembering them earth-stained in a garden, caressing a lover, competent, dangerous: her hands, not scaled and clawed. She could speak.

“Are we still on course for D'neera?”

“No,” said
Heartworld II.

“Cancel the program. Calculate a course for D'neera—no—can—”

She was not speaking aloud any longer, and her hands were gray again.

*   *   *

So strong, too strong!

That was both of them, possessing one another's fear.
There was a resonance effect; it grew stronger with each loop, and each time it swung round and struck them they were weaker. He had not expected this. It had not been so with the Lost Ones. Who would think that one alone—?

He scrambled for balance and pounded her with memories of subjection and the alien limbs jerked. The stars twitched through her eyes and he thought they had Jumped. No. Not yet. But she had gotten the command out before he stopped her, and the course was direct for her Home. To make it work he had to reconstruct reality, rejecting hers, but that was her strength and his weakness. She could make a universe in solitude. He could not, nor could he master fear alone: not without the architect the People together were, not without the dampers, baffles, comfort of a billion living brains.

*   *   *

She thought triumphantly:
I
can!

And concentrated on the humming metal around her, building a universe on it and on its master, reconstructing reality from memory and a seed. The weight of millennia would not shape her. She herself was enough. She thought she could see Starr Jameson here, one eye on the readouts, the other on—what? Some theory of governance, perhaps, here in space, free for a little while from the clash of cultures, translating in the ambiguous pathways of thought (and his more ambiguous than most) abstract to concrete, principle to power. The largesse of solitude—

*   *   *

The first Explorer to go alone into space saw craft and cosmos dissolve, and opened a hatchway and stepped into unbeing. After that no one went alone. Solitude could not be borne. They had not known it. How should they have known it, never having felt it? Yet space was necessary. They had to go, to find what inhabited the stars, for fear that Renders did, having won the conflict otherwhere. As indeed they had, it seemed, everywhere.

Now Leader impossibly lived with one. If it were really Leader he could not have endured it a single day. But he was not real. Not real, and not alone. He lived in close company with Wildfire, who was fascinated—

—and let
Heartworld II
slip away, forgetting to be afraid. What could he mean, real and not real? The People
were just out of reach, but she saw what they made, a tangible network real as a magnetic field around their Home. A collective dream, impossible for one alone to maintain—

She understood too late that fear was as much defense as defeat. Leader was not afraid either now, and his strength was terrible. Something like the power of The Questioner seized her arm and she wiped out the program for D'neera and rose, trembling. They were not going anywhere now. The compulsion to reprogram was powerfully her own, and she resisted it. Leader was not in control, but neither was she. She stepped away from the console and her reluctant knees gave way and she fell against the equipment and then, squirming, to the floor. She did not feel her cuts re-opening, but there was blood on the polished white floor. She lay with her face against its coldness and when she tried to get up could not. This time it was not Leader's doing, however. The weeks of exhaustion, the mad flight, the final struggle, were too much.

She begged
Let me rest
and images of peace descended: melodies of falling water, harmonies for the skin, she moved almost to meet it, almost felt the plangent drops.

Leader was arrested. This fragile flesh would serve neither of them much longer. Leader knew it, and did nothing to her now, and was gone: almost gone.

She rested and tried again, and this time pulled herself to her feet. She did not know how much time had passed, nor how long it had been since she ate or slept. Earth and D'neera were dim memories. The struggle within her filled time and space, and time was an all-consuming now.

She went painfully through the stalemated ship, a step at a time. The living quarters were luxurious and the food service area well equipped, but there was nothing to eat. She went on vaguely, feeling Leader at the back of her mind, waiting balefully for something but saying nothing.

Without conscious thought she found her way to the emergency stores. Nutrient tablets, which would keep her alive. Why? She swallowed two, compelled. She explored further, her knees shaking. Medical supplies. No stimulants. She would have to sleep, and was afraid to do it. That was what Leader was waiting for. Awake, she could keep some command of herself; asleep, her body would be Leader's to
use as he pleased, voice and hands and all that was necessary to take her where she did not wish to go.