The D’neeran Factor (50 page)

Hanna shook her head numbly, over and over. She spoke, and so did Leader.

I
live. I live and love thee and—

I killed him. I killed him as he cried out for thee and for the little one who swims so swiftly
—

I
live
—

He is dead, I his murderer
—

Sunrise's face was a nightmare mask, vaguely reptilian, so cruel as to acknowledge no conscience Hanna could recognize; but it wore the hearthkeeper's dignity.

The great rending paws moved over her with a sadist's anticipation. And wavered and were tender hands with elegantly pointed nails, fingertops softly ridged, palms soothing and cool.

Thou art injured, my love?

Thine enemy. Thine enemy!

I cannot see my enemy….

And through Sunrise's eyes Hanna saw herself, not alien animal altogether, but shadowed by Leader's form, visible to eyes not her own. Her own hand, its knuckles scaled, reached for Sunrise.

The crystalline air reflected a thousand faces, which trembled and shattered with a long tinkling sigh. Her hand fell short, her arm was not long enough, her face was wet and The Questioner lifted her to her feet and she nearly fell and Sunrise held her up. She clung to the great arms and tried to hide from the shards of voices that pierced her eyes whispering

New, something new, this is new, o news…

Something new,
murmured the earth, and an arched dome of muted blue closed them in and fell to indigo and blackness, and when light came again she was walking.

She did not know why they were walking. She wished they were not, for she was tired. From the air she had seen elegant lines of roads for surface transport, arranged it seemed not for speed or convenience but for the patterns they made. But they walked, Sunrise shortening her stride awkwardly to Hanna's. Columns rose by the roadside at intervals, higher than Hanna's head, black, and heavily carved. It was high summer, and fruit hung swollen from the trees.
Drop,
whispered the trees.
Fall away, I shall cast you to the wind and increase.
Hanna dissolved into the landscape, bit into a red-gold globe and licked the juices from her hand. Very far away a voice screamed that this was dangerous. Never never
never
eat unknown vegetation or breathe unknown air or touch unknown herbs, lesson number one in the age of space. But this was not unknown. It tasted purple.

Here is something new,
said Sunrise among stalks of grain-to-be, who wore their spent flowers proudly. Their roots drew on earthblood and sang. A swelling grainbud trembled at her brown fingertip and shrank toward Sunrise in fear. Under their feet a million invisible lives took up its cry and something, nothing, snake or scarab, centipede or dream, skimmed the uneasy earth and was silenced.

The grasses froze, the frame cracked and Hanna stepped outside, saw it whole and enclosed, the blue dome the sentient grain Sunrise all one. Fragile in the surface of her
throat's tender skin was a recorder, tiny, a dot just big enough to see, in case they found her body someday. She started to speak to it and was inside again and time flowed, unstopped.

Tell me of thy death.

I died unchoosing
—

No, my love!

none to comfort me last-kindness absent
—

of all deaths the worst
—

they died at my side and I saw myself die….

This alien
—

Hanna leapt at the touch like a startled bird.

did not know. They all die alone and forever.

Animals,
said Sunrise, and Hanna shuddered at the hands on her throat, the great thumbs gouged its hollow and she choked.

No. I live in it, and fade…

They are soulless
—

Only new.

Here is something new,
said the sky, but Hanna did not hear it, absorbed in a streamlet's speaking waters. She lay on her stomach and her head fell gently toward the water, nodding, looking for the faces. A silver streak whisked by her eyes, warning:
I
am not good to eat, no no not I not for you,
and her belly hurt. Her head drooped lower. Pink and turquoise showed in shadows under stones. Her hand crept into the water and the colors vanished with a muted scream. Under the rocks—

No. Thou art careless as Swift.

Sunrise tugged at her hand. Something under the rock would strike, whether she would be good to eat or not.

Here was no one, except the two of them, but the air was full of voices. Faces showed in the clouds. Hanna sat in dust and listened to the flowers, which dreamt of dying at summer's end. Her blood stirred with their satisfaction. The communion of Leader and Sunrise went on without her. Vessel, seedpod, something new, a chariot for Leader and nothing more, she dreamed with the flowers of insignificance and thought of winter's stillness and waiting seeds. Her ring cast blue dazzles into her eyes. She pulled it off, lifted it, licked it, dropped it, forgot it. The tiny characters engraved inside said,
The first duty of the D'neeran citizen is
to the integrity of the self,
stopped speaking, flickered, and went out.

*   *   *

Kill it,
they said.
Now, instantly.

The rest of them were Sunrise. Who said:
It is my love. Was and was not; is and is not. But is. He died but did not and dying yet not dead comes to Us for easeful proper death. He also she is of Us/not of Us. We cannot deny the kindness she refused him.

They said (though only of Leader)
That is true.

Alone as Hanna was, helpless as she was, still they feared her. She lived only because of Sunrise; because of Leader-in-her-thoughts, whom Sunrise would not harm; because the communion of bondmates was a whole within the whole, and the greater whole stretched to accommodate it.

Hanna or her avatar stood at the gates of her Nearhome. The gates rose into a sky grown pale in the late afternoon, traced with magical symbols in lapis and silver. The People had outgrown magic, and the designs were merely traditional, but in this world of softened edges the meaning of spear and dagger had not changed.

It was harder and harder to be Hanna. They were surging seawaves; she a soft bubble of foam.

The gates will not hold against death from the skies,
someone said, and the human fleet rained death. Death also fell on Willow, on D'neera, on Earth, their peoples vanished. Cold and shining, past present and future, the handful of gray-brown boxes worked its way through the void, slow but unerring.

The voyage was happening now; in space and in the mind/s of the People. Hanna struggled with the vision, overwhelmed. Spearpoints danced with symbols of another world, a glowing sun, great cats yawning and thinking bloody thoughts of hunger and changing to Renders, and a murmur of astonishment surrounded her. She saw no one except Sunrise.

The gates were open, but seemed closed. They would not let her in, tiger, Render, alien form.

Held they,
said a Hunter,
against Renders past.

Yes,
Hanna said,
but We did not.

There was a great stillness of incomprehension.
No,
said Leader, but less strongly than he had argued by a fireside otherwhere.

Behold,
Hanna said to the ghostly gates, and fell into memory; searched the persons she had been; watched (adamant now, alien and unmoved) a Render die. Pain destroyed it and the People ate its death, absorbing it

like air

like food

like flesh

thus must it be,
they said strongly, but:

The Celebrant wore only a loincloth, which shimmered golden in the fading sun. Behind him in an age-long-past boiled a sea of dark blue cloud, and the wind blew hard. He said:
Felt Renders' power and channeled it to memory unending. Each time at unity was I new and all of Us and stronger. That was my being and purpose and that I fulfilled. Strong grew my Nearhome and fearless

She sat on stone and its heat scorched the burned place on her thigh. Quartz sparkled in the spaces between stone. She summoned an early Explorer, one of the first of the age of space. He wore a uniform something like Leader's. Metal gleamed around him and he mastered it.
Saw We in my time the field of all-life and We its fulfillment and shaper. Saw We were not separate but part of Our world and it part of Us and knew Ourselves separate from beasts yet not. But then there were no Renders. We did not think of that. Naught vanishes, but is changed. But We did not think of Renders.

Leader, wavering, drew on memory and Hanna. Renders died and died again. The years were the whirl of a kaleidoscope. In centuries of Rites the Renders died, and their passionate savagery passed again and again into the People.

“Thus is it,” Hanna lectured them, “in all and each part of Our lives.”

She was, oddly, speaking. The wind took her words and measured them and turned them about for meaning, and absorbed them.

“Look,” Hanna said, urging.

Through her eyes looked Sunrise and Leader and a vast omnipresence. They saw:

The lapis which was stone and art all at once, and thought, and the shaping of hands, and before that the eons of creation, and all the years to come. So the artist's hands and his brain shaped the stone, and the stone and its color and texture shaped also his brain and the brains of all who
saw it, and those in turn shaped others, and each was changed and returned refreshed and new to create what was real in the viewing and be created by it. Thus it was with sky and water, earth and stars, and always with each other, through the ages. And with Renders. For each that died, each principal in the Rite, dissolved indeed; but not into nothingness.

“Not here,” Hanna said. “Not here, at least.”

It seemed they listened, silent, holding breath.

“You made them part of you,” Hanna said. “That was the purpose of the Rite. I know. He told me so. But did you not see that you were thereby changed?”

No,
said the thickening air.

But Sunrise said:
It is We who speak. Taste truth.

No,
said the wind.

Truth was kernel and seed, though. It was hard. It would not go away. They could not make it not be. It was, and grew.

She tried to tell the recorder: Yes I was right I hear feel smell
see
truth acknowledged, one and one and ten and exponentially a shift a change I was right!

But her tongue was too thick.

(In deepest space and the wells of time a particle of dust pulls gently on another and it comes. To them, drawn, another. And another. Ruled by final forces galaxies form
—)

You are right,
whispered Leader-in-her-thoughts. Hanna did not hear him. She was in this moment at home, and the season was turning. The falseoaks at their peak shone even in the night, the shining dust fell on her upturned face from the shining sky.

Sunrise took her arm softly, softly, as if touching a lover grown frail and strange. Carefully Hanna stepped to the gates.

She thought the gates said that she was dangerous. She could not be dangerous. She lifted a hand to her head and felt feathery, delicate scales. The sunlight was warm as water, and she swam in it. Beyond the gate a maze of passages began, and hidden among them was Swift.

Leader said:
This creature is I, and not dangerous. I am the Leader of the First Watchsetter, and I tell you so.

There was an authority in Leader-in-her-thoughts that Hanna had not heard before. He drew strength from Sunrise, from the People, from the persons of his Nearhome,
and was completed by them, unmistakably himself. His assurance checked their doubt. An infinity of circles swept away and faded out of Hanna's perception, conflict resolving in harmony. And dizzily she saw that this would not have been possible if she had not in the first place accepted Leader's right to exist; because then he would not have accepted it, nor would those who watched him now—the knowledge was plucked from her thoughts and reverberated and faded outward through the dimming circles.

The wind said:
Enter.

*   *   *

It was dark. Time played tricks. She had walked for hours through the People's debate, dreaming and bemused. She had been part of it, irresistibly, and now was not. The indefinable roar that had filled her was gone. She was apart in a circle of light, and there was a great silence.

She shook her head, hard, suddenly wakened to herself. She felt something in her hands and looked down to see that she held a stone knife. Its slender hilt was delicate as her hands, gold-chased, gem-encrusted. The jewels were bluish-green. They matched a leaf that bent low, shyly tapped her arm, and whispered welcome.

She jumped at the touch, and saw that Sunrise sat beside her on a stone bench. Copper-colored metal lay polished at her feet and stretched into the nearer darkness. Beyond that gray shapes of growing things rose, against a wall, and the wall against a cloud-torn night sky. She was inside—just inside—the Nearhome of the Defenders.

“Why?” She was hoarse. She cleared her throat and said to Sunrise, “Why can't I hear them anymore?”

We are apart, you and I…I wished to know with whom I walked. I think I cannot know. You are he, yet not. Nor are you altogether other. New, I said. New indeed…

The surface of the bench somehow had been softened, though it looked and felt like stone. It was finely carved, and all its design (she knew, though human eyes alone would find no sense there) was the story of a far-famed Hunt. There were rituals for the completion of such works. There were rituals for everything. Ritual imbued all of life, a complex outer structure for the incomprehensibly complex inner structure of the People.

It pleased Hanna that she had thought of that. It meant she was still human, and still Hanna.