The D’neeran Factor (49 page)

She knew (from Leader-in-her-thoughts) that security around Home was as tight as anything humans had ever produced in their most paranoid moments, and he could make a fair guess at their reaction to what they had found on the First Watchsetter.

They will not make for your Home, I think; for the others; the fleet flies toward them.

“Not much of a fleet, is it?”

Not much. Not like yours, for which we/they wait in readiness; they will think you the flagship. And fire.

“Will what I write now stop them?”

???

“Well?”

Hope!

The People's defenses, like humanity's long ready but unused, were not automatic. They had to be ordered into action. But even if they did not fire on her single small vessel immediately, what would they do when they sensed
her?
The crew of the
First Watchsetter,
she knew now, had brought every conceivable discipline and defense to stalking the
Endeavor
and examining the precious prisoner. They had shut themselves away from her. But
she
could not use the barrier, the wall, the absence of a connecting medium she had found when (who? Bladetree, Leader answered) came to meet her. With an effort that drained them the crew had, while they questioned her, operated in the Hunter's mode, subsuming the killing reflex into the purposefulness of stalking, though their prey was information. But that was an artificial state, an unnatural event, which drained and dismayed even the remarkable individuals who created it. What would happen when Hanna touched the edge of a whole population's awareness? It depended on her, and on Leader, of course. She could see no recourse except to distance herself from her own fear; with Leader's
help—if he could help. She did not know if she could do it or how she would do it. Therefore she prepared
Heartworld II
to plead for her, to get her time, and at the final Jump was glad of it, because the first thing she saw was a Render.

It seemed painted, two-dimensional, though the texture of its shaggy brown fur was reproduced in detail. Its eyes were filled with red light. It floated in semi-darkness, bright against the shadows. She saw it clearly from the corner of one eye, but when she turned to look at it directly it was gone and the shadows fell again.

Hanna thought automatically: That's silly. What would a painted Render be doing here?

She was much closer to Home than she had expected to come with the last Jump, and the curve of it nearly filled the pilot's port with the fertile marbling of a terrestrial world.

Heartworld II
's song went on, the binary version of Hanna's version of the People's binary version of their version of symbolic communication. It said: (This individual) is harmless flesh and blood, unclawed, not predator, not prey, not harmless, a quantity N. (This individual) stands outside reality strange as the nospace of Inspace, stands outside logic strange as We and I, stands—

It is a Lifetender with blood on its breath,
someone remarked skeptically, and a Render sat in the empty and redundant co-pilot's seat, and the air crackled around it, and Hanna leapt to her feet and was alone again.

Heartworld II
went on talking:

—with you in the unnamed haze, this time they see without fear, We have—they have no need to kill, inertia is reversed and—

It was a hand's width from her face, fur blurring into grayish scales, fangs glittering at her throat. She started to scream and strangled the sound and did not move. It disappeared. She shook with reaction and her legs were weak and the hammering of her heart frightened her.

—one being in this unit, harmless flesh and blood, unarmed, unclawed, requesting permission to land—

Does it lie?
said a Render on the edge of sight, and another said:
Beasts lie.

Then they said:
What is lie?

Hanna stumbled back to her seat. Eyes closed, hands
over her ears, she waited for the Renders to go away. They did not.

“I have,” said
Heartworld II,
“a landing beacon.”

Hanna opened her eyes and peered through more Renders. “Land,” she muttered.

Heartworld II
whistled quietly. “Awaiting orders,” it said.

“Go on down,” she said more clearly. “Land.”

The fall was slow, the Renders whispered at her back and somewhere, everywhere, the equivalent of fingers rested on the equivalent of triggers. She had no illusion about what would happen if she tried to deviate from the course they set her, or why she was still alive. They wanted
Heartworld II,
the prize
XS-12
should have been to them if they had not clumsily destroyed most of its value to them. They wanted the data this ship carried. They must not be allowed to get it. Surely someone, Jameson, Petrov, somebody had thought of this?

She asked
Heartworld II
about it and got no answer. There were more devious ways to ask and she did so and found her suspicions were correct. While she slept
Heartworld II
had been programmed not to self-erase but to self-destruct if alien hands touched it.

So I get off and try to make peace and they come here and it blows them up, she thought. Me too, if I'm still aboard.

The Renders went on talking among themselves, paying no attention to her. Imaginary Renders. She wiped sweat off her face and listened intently to their talk of defense.

But Renders were dust and did not speak.

She was listening to the People. The Renders were her own creation, an objective referent for her fear, which she dared not direct toward the People themselves. Perhaps Leader-in-her-thoughts, who must share her fear but could not fear his own kind, helped her create them, had helped her find this brief precarious solution. They winked in and
out as her eyes moved, but their numbers seemed to be growing.

She had stopped watching the monitors. She looked out the port and saw a civilized world. There was less green than she had expected, more brown and blue, and now she was close enough to see clusters of light past the terminator.

The Renders fell silent. A claw brushed her cheek and with an effort she remained still, biting at her fingers. She reminded herself they were an illusion, one possibility of many and that the most destructive. There were alternatives. There had to be alternatives. She was here to create them.

She said to
Heartworld II,
“I want to meet with one individual. Tell the Defenders—”

She stopped short. Was that the right word?
Yes,
whispered a Render, and the mutter began again. The southern hemisphere, the Nearhome of the Defenders, that was where she was going. Thousands of them there.

She started again, “One individual. The, the Hearthkeeper of the Nearhome of, of—” She stumbled and finished the thought: “Of the Leader of the First Watchsetter.”

Heartworld II
chuckled doubtfully and began the translation.

She knew then that Leader had been thinking of Sunrise all along; and he came suddenly to life and cried out with longing.

Heartworld II
settled slowly to a city. It was white in the midday light, though other colors showed here and there. Its rooftops were landscaped and decorated and made into space for living or beauty to be seen from above, a convention inconsistently followed on human worlds but perhaps universal here. It was not large, but she had seen smaller towns clustered round it during her controlled fall.

Thousands of them here, she thought, and felt the Renders crowding round her, and licked her dry lips again and again. She was afraid, and her fear created the beasts. The cabin was hot, surely with their body heat. Yet it was the animal in the People she must fear, and the animal in herself, and the Renders could not harm her though they kept the truth before her eyes.

“They will bring you the individual you request,” said
Heartworld II.

So near,
whispered Leader-in-her-thoughts, and Hanna shivered. Sunrise was indeed near. Among the Nearhomes scattered round Defense were two or three occupied mostly by Watchsetters, and one of them was Leader's.

Heartworld II
drifted gently downward, under the rounded towers of the tallest buildings. In them, unlike the People's spacecraft, there were windows, transparent openings in immaculate walls; but she could not see anything through them. The Renders surrounded her, muttering. Beyond them on the edge of perception she seemed to hear a grim vibration of floodwater or landslide, a threat inescapable as an incoming tide complex and unpredictable under dancing moons. The Renders held it back. Behind their red eyes were hundreds, thousands, millions of eyes watching her. She hid behind draperies of coarse fur and hoped the Renders would not go away.

Heartworld II
touched down at last. Automatically she checked monitors, rounding out the view the port gave her. This was clearly a landing field, though no other vessels showed around her. Its floor was brilliant white, and she saw that only
Heartworld II
's compensation for light kept it from hurting her eyes. The nearest structure was a kilometer away; the work of the Defenders was carried on deep underground. Nothing moved, except once when a blood-red flash drew her eyes to something like a bird that vanished almost at once.

Heartworld II
said, “You are to leave this vessel and walk to the building you see before you.”

“All right,” Hanna said. She was busy for a few minutes, modifying
Heartworld II
's destruct program slightly. She said, “What is
Heartworld I,
anyway?”

“Heartworld I,”
said its sister, “is reserved for the president of the General Council.”

“And the commissioner from Heartworld gets Two?”

“That is correct.”

“Well, good-bye,” she said.

“Good-bye,” it answered without surprise.

She went out, accompanied by a rapidly multiplying retinue of Renders. Those nearest her had solidified, and jostled her now. Their odor was delicate and sweet—no. That was the warm lambent air. She scarcely saw her goal through the crowd, though the Renders thinned in substance
at a distance so that even in their infinite numbers those on the horizon were only shapes of air, hollow spots in the atmosphere, which she could barely see by squinting because she had forgotten to protect her eyes and the light was indeed too bright. But all her memories of Home and the First Watchsetter were of spaces filled with dimness, and she did not understand this light.

Her footsteps made dull sounds on the shining ground, but the Renders made no sound at all. The structure ahead of her grew slowly. It was not large. She knew it was made for observation and maintenance, that was all. It was expendable.

She had miscalculated how long it would take her to reach the building, and before she got there
Heartworld II
blew itself up with a roar and a hot blast of wind that knocked her flat. Debris rained on her unshielded back and the arms clasped over her head. Before the roar was finished she looked up and saw that the Renders had gone, and one of the People said to her, invisible:
Why did you do that?

His voice was clear over the roar that was also the relentless waiting flood. She answered:
I
did it to protect both of us.

He seized and examined the thought and she cried out aloud, remembering The Questioner; though to Bladetree she had said little so clearly, having been consciously obscure or blurred by madness.

The presence vanished, but it was not replaced by silence. The sound of the explosion must have ended, but still she heard it, a thunder of countless voices. The ground seemed to tremble and she dug her hands into it: earth now, not the flat whiteness. Bluish stalks came loose in her fingers, studded with tiny blue pinpoints of flowers. She cowered before an impending avalanche, but nothing happened, it was only their immanence she felt, the giant awareness of her presence.

She turned her head, licking dust from her lips. She had not given any thought ahead of time to how she would handle the minutes just past, because she had had no idea where to begin. The right response, by luck perhaps, had come from some deep unconscious well, and she had managed to distance herself from the People, transforming them
into dangers she could understand. But the innumerable Renders, the tide, the landslide, the avalanche, all were ultimately irresistible and this was not good enough. She would have to succeed quickly in what she had come here for, or she would go under.

She remembered a moment from the struggle with Leader-in-her-thoughts and forced her attention to physical reality. The earth was warm, something had burnt through her clothing and there was patch of fire on one leg, there was dirt under her fingernails and the tiny blue flowers gave the air its odor. The People's sun shone on her indifferently.

She carefully relaxed all her muscles and lifted her head—and saw Sunrise standing over her.

L
eader-in-her-thoughts cried
Lovely how lovely my love how long absent o stay with me!
and…

Hanna choked, her face in the dirt again because she wished to reach for Sunrise and draw back all at once and was helpless and…

In the stunning surge of longing and desire Sunrise took her shoulders and turned her without effort. The pressure of the thousand million voices was gone. Sunrise regarded her with eyes hidden behind the membrane that kept out the sun and said very intimately:
Thou art not truly my strength.

Sunrise's headfeathers were intricately groomed and her face was decorated with stylized flowers. A flame-shape, symbol of her office, hung from a chain round her neck.