The D’neeran Factor (40 page)

Tears of weariness came to her eyes. Even dead he was not dead. There still was no escape.

She lifted a hand to her hair, but the pain in her arm was so great she let it drop.

Over the mourning came unbidden a memory of Leader's creation. He was a creature of drugs and suggestion, with true-Leader's power behind them, constructed in the chasms of an ego violently disorganized by pain.

So precariously founded he might, she thought, be vulnerable. Perhaps he could be destroyed. Perhaps the mindhealers could do it.

The thought compelled her to rise. She began to stumble through darkness, supporting herself against the wall with her uninjured arm.

and the oldest blackness and the falling years mourn us lost riches parts lost from the whole
—

Be quiet,
she said in despair,
oh, quiet!
and quiet descended.

She had no goal but clumsy motion. She was at one place or another with no recollection of getting there, as if movement required such effort there was nothing left for the perceiving of it. But presently she was in a docking bay, looking at
Heartworld II
through a fog of pain. The hatch from which Something had emerged was open. She went through it and in time found herself by a disordered bed. It was big enough for a big man, or one of the People. She was lost in it.

She fell on it. She felt the automatic pulse of thought from pseudo-Leader, she would sleep and he could regain control—and then her conviction and then his that he could not. He was herself.

She slipped into blackness, too tired to be grateful for the peace.

*   *   *

When she woke Leader was still there. If he had not been she might never have thought again, but as it was she said to him,
Go away, you are not real.

I am, I am, I am,
he wept, so clearly she heard the words.

Tears covered her face. Which was odd, she thought, because the People do not have tears.

She sat up. It was nearly as difficult as the first time. Weariness past enduring enwrapped her.

I
am real,
Leader insisted, and Hanna fell back again, helpless. Dark and warmth and wetness surrounded her. The medium she breathed was joy. She struggled to escape a clutching memory, not hers. “No,” she said, but he would not be denied, and
Heartworld II
changed to:

A chamber hewn from rock richly carved in celebration. Lifetender's task was nearly done. She tapped an embrittled shell with a silver hammer, and tiny claws appeared at a crack, tiny fingers reached for the world. They fastened on the fingers of Leader and Sunrise, sealing a communion begun while the little one was an embryo. They bathed together in running water and all the community was a song around them. In other Nearhomes, and in other times, the same ritual simultaneously was being performed or had been performed or would be performed. He danced in the water, stretching his baby limbs
as swiftly as I,
said a long-dead swimmer, and now in this place he was Swift.

The vision faded. Hanna saw the rich woods of Heartworld again.

He is my son not yours,
Leader said.
I
am real. This happened to me!

She turned slowly, unable to move quickly. Crumpled fabrics rubbed at her face and woke pain in her wounded arm. A trace of a familiar scent—imagined, perhaps—brought Jameson before her.

When she thought of him she got up slowly, swaying, feeling curiously light. She felt an edge of panic at the smallness of the room—no, at the absence of those other eyes, other dimensions, other perspectives which her two eyes alone could not see.

She thought of the hearthstone of Leader's Nearhome, a brilliant mosaic that made one pattern from many. She thought of the sculptures made to be seen by many eyes at once, at which Flametender had excelled.

“No,” she said, pushing knowledge away, but it would not stay away. They were so vulnerable, so fragile for all their strength, subject to one another's pain so that a hurt to one robbed all of competence and a community's strength wasted exponentially. And through Leader she had come to see this weak place, and she had gone for it with all a Render's savagery.

I
do not want to think like them!
she thought, and thought:…
telepathic cousins, who can reach into another being's very thoughts, comprehend him from the inside, ensure peace as we go on….

She had written the words in another life, when she was herself and Leader, though she did not know it, stalked her.
Echoes of dashed hopes, confidence unfounded—what would Jameson say when she told him she had thought about nothing but killing? About what she had done to Bladetree?

That she had done all she could, perhaps. And then he would forgive her. Perhaps.

“Fraud, fraud, fraud!” someone said. It was her voice.

“But I had to. I had to,” she said; and thought there were other things she had to do.

She moved slowly to the flight deck, seeing nothing, stumbling with exhaustion. Exhaustion would never leave her. She had to go on in spite of it. She had to get back to Jameson and tell him she had won.

But nothing lived on the First Watchsetter to signal the docking bay open. She could not leave it yet.

She shrank from facing the bloody work of her hands. But she must do it or never leave; and unwilling, unthinking, she stepped from
Heartworld II
into a ghost ship where nothing lived but herself. Nothing could; she had heard the end of their last fading thoughts.

The route to the First Watchsetter's command chamber was as familiar as if she had walked it a thousand times, though the stairways were hard to climb. The corridors were dim and their walls altogether blank. The murals were keyed to living brains, and had died with them. She felt that she had spent weeks, months, years maybe, in this ship. The command chamber would have been homelike as her rooms at Koroth, except for the evidence of carnage. A burst of grief, hers or Leader's, brought her to her knees among the crumpled bodies. She could not look at the tatters of Bladetree. True-Leader's face was twisted in death, and she knelt in his dried blood.

Fraud, fraud, Render!

“No,” she said, “Oh, no. How can you call me that? After what you did to me?”

Renders,
he said,
buried their dead. Not Ours.

“I can't do anything! They're too big, they're too heavy, how could I move them?”

And what did it matter to the dead?

And truly death for Us,
said Leader,
far from Home and transition and life in We, though you might for me
—

She did not know what he was trying to tell her. He
could not force it upon her. He was less strong than before. He had lived through his own death, but in the passage he had lost the greater part of substance. And what he tried to tell her was so strange there was no place for it in her reality.

She tried to get up, and her hand fell on something that yielded. It was Steersman. She rose then in one quick movement, driven by horror.

It was hard working in the dimness with the silent shapes around her. Leader tried to withhold his knowledge, but he could not, no more than she could reject it. There were more lights here than on a human ship, or there seemed to be more in the half-night the People preferred; all of it spun sometimes before Hanna's eyes, and once she thought it looked like nothing so much as a tinseled habitat seen from outside, a glittering explosion of life in the depths the People hated. She did what she had to do manually; her scalp itched; she was using backups, there was nothing wrong with the front-end system, she ought to plug the ship into her brain and
think
the First Watchsetter's instructions.

You do this very well, my friends dead at your feet,
Leader said bitterly when she was done.

Her skin rippled. Almost she heard Roly long-before.

“I will pay for it,” she said, not at once sure what she meant. But with the words a thing she had not thought of for two human years came with perfect clarity into focus.

Dorista had stopped her hand in time, but not her heart, which had gone on to touch the bit of metal that ended a universe, Hanna's universe. Some of her had stayed in the night, detached. Easy prey for the First Watchsetter, drawn to its dark promise…easy prey for Leader, who had only to expand a cleavage already there…

We do it better,
he said.

She shivered, fighting the rush of her own memories which he pressed upon her.

Truly the body's death is ending for you,
Leader said.
Not for Us.

She had a hard brief vision of herself and her kind as a parody, an incomplete obscenity, as if an animal with thumbs grafted to clumsy paws were to think itself thereby human. She felt herself pulled and distracted at the sight, and then saw that his intention was to distract her. Something
was happening, and he wished her attention withdrawn from it.

He could not do it. She had hidden a knife from him, and now he could hide nothing. New lights flashed on a communications panel, pulsing urgently. She read them without effort, but it was a moment before their import burst on her.

COME IN. COME IN. DO YOU READ? WHAT IS WRONG? DO YOU READ? WHAT IS WRONG? WE ARE COMING. WE COME.

She stared at the message, transfixed. It could not be true! But the denial was founded on what she wanted, not on what was, and she stumbled finally to the lights and peered at them, and then tapped a hesitant code on a panel shaped for other hands. A strip of paper, or something like it, unreeled from a slit. She tore it off and squinted in the shadow. The characters on it were sometimes intelligible, sometimes not. When they were intelligible they also said:
WE COME.

They were coming because her/Leader's information had been fed Home as she gave it, by prearranged program, and the transmission had been interrupted without warning or explanation. There had been no answer to their increasingly urgent inquiries, so they were coming.

She remembered, then, and thought: No. Oh, no. An endless time spent watching Leader-in-her-thoughts and holding to her purpose, and all for nothing. They were coming, and they knew where Earth was, and Willow. True-Leader was dead, but he had beaten her. Tampering with them, unsettling them, unbalancing them, waiting for the moment to attack their disarray, she had hardly noticed what pseudo-Leader had told them. She had not seen its importance. They were coming, and it was all over. She might as well have told The Questioner.

She rubbed her face in confusion, bits of dried blood peeling off unnoticed, and looked at the mocking lights. She thought of using Leader's sidearm on herself, for what could she take home now except the acknowledgment of this second and greater failure? But pseudo-Leader stormed at her,
I
will not die twice!

She thought of waiting for them to come after all. Leader liked that. But there was still a great deal they would want to know, and she was not so lost as to tell them. There would be another Questioner to rend her.

“Not in my body you don't,” said Leader, shocked.

It was her voice again. What, oh no, what was happening to her? She ought to be terrified—but she was past terror. Her capacity for fear was used up at last.

She would go. She could not stay. But she could not face Jameson, either; but she had to, to tell him Earth and Willow were uncovered.

Best to move the Watchsetter first, if she could, so the People could not find it and she could bring humans back to it. If she could do it. If one person could move it.

“No,” said Leader, impatient with her stupidity. “One person alone in space cannot do anything. Why build spacecraft for the impossible?”

“All right,” Hanna said.

She half-turned to flee, then turned back, weak with the importance of a new thought. The Watchsetter was a treasure for humans. She could not give it to them, but she could take with her the most important thing. It would skew the odds, at least. It might do more; might permit such destruction of the People's threat as to leave them harmless to humans forever. She might have failed utterly in what Jameson had expected of her in an innocent time long-before; but she thought he would settle for victory.

She dropped into the watchman's place and entered a half-remembered code.

“No!” Leader howled. She saw her hands change to hairy paws, but Leader was weaker and her fingers barely faltered. She shook her head to keep coarse ghostly hair from her eyes.

“Render!” Leader hissed, but she went on. No madness or illusion could stop her now. She had strength still for one last hope. If the Watchsetter dissolved around her she would go on until her body failed.

More paper fell from the printer's slot. She did not try to decipher the heading in the bare illumination, but she knew she had made no mistake. She had in her human hands the clear route to Leader's Home, a mathematical map of safe channels through space that would permit humankind to go from this point to Home at wartime speed. If she got
Heartworld II
away the People would have no equivalent for human space. A location was one thing; the course program embedded in this substance was another.

She thrust the parchment into her shirt and went back to
Heartworld II
with memories of the People coming in waves, buffeting her. Voices shouted in her head. They were not all Leader's.

I
was Student of animals only, Historian of Renders, prepared against the day. It came. They called Us, desperate Explorers having found Our dread. I went through space, a thing I had not dreamed. And hated it. The severing!

She veered from her course at the Student's power, fell against a wall and saw it flicker; a mural came briefly to life.

Found carnage in a star's light, Renders penned, Explorers dead or dissipated terrorized. The grasses were golden, like some of Home