The D’neeran Factor (51 page)

They had no ritual for anything like her. Except one, which she had endured.

She said kindly to Sunrise, taking up the debate anew, “You knew not how Renders changed you. How could you? Knowledge is the opening of doors in what is known, through which one walks to new dimensions. And you are enclosed.”

Sunrise said, seeming very human:
We liked it that way. Yet time brings new truths; or reversal of the old. It has been long since there was a new truth. And did We then perceive it truly?

Hanna rested comfortably in the silence, almost at home. She said, “What are they thinking of? Will they call back the ships?”

I
do not know. If the threat is not real? But the threat is real.

“Only if it is made real. Willed real. Don't you see? You do see!” She meant all of them. “I know you do!”

Perceive the past,
Sunrise said, and Hanna knew that the doubt she felt in Sunrise was an echo and reflection of a debate that still went on. And she perceived indeed the past and the weight of it, obstacle and illumination at once.

You ask a new thing,
Sunrise said.

“It is new for the others as well,” Hanna said, thinking of her last hours with humans, who had not understood that the balance of weapons would not sway the People, who had leapt at an idea of negotiation when nothing that could be done with the People resembled human notions of compromise even slightly.

She had not been honest with them, not even with Jameson, from whom she had learned the art of withholding full truth. They would not understand (she and Leader agreed) the strange new thing to be done. But the People understood it, and therefore the debate continued.

It is pity,
Sunrise said,
that you-other must die too.

Hanna thought of what was left of her future, and shivered.

“I must complete his death,” she said.

No. The fullness of his life.

Nonetheless there was grief in Sunrise, deep and poignant. He would not come to her again in the union of their bodies,
or dart through the waters in play with Swift. She would not look on his face again. She would have no other bondmate, and soon her own life must fail.

Why? —a human question. A scientist's question. Sunrise was a fertile female; why must she waste and die when her love's end came?

Hanna saw the answer suddenly, unexpectedly. In the single organism that was the People, there was no room for internal competition for mates. The bond was permanent, imprinted, and exclusive. When it ended the reproductive function did too. There could be no instability in family structure, no intra-group source of stress. In murdering Leader, Hanna had condemned Sunrise as well.

She said in anguish, “I am sorry. So sorry, so sorry!”

Sunrise said nothing. Instead she took the dagger from Hanna, and drew a fingertip across the blade. The ages had dulled it. A thousand Celebrants touched it with her. It was a relic of times past, and Hanna did not know why a species on the edge of extinction would stop to contemplate truth, knowing they shaped it. She did not know how Sunrise kept her waked from the People's dream, nor why they were to her a dream, so that the passing hours were a series of fragments with blankness in between.

“I do not understand,” said Hanna, and halted. She lifted a hand to her throat. The tiny recorder Ward had put in place still was there. She would go on speaking, while she could speak and think. Someone would hear this someday by the river. If not Jameson, someone else. It would not tell him much.

Sometimes you can't think very much about what you have to do. All you can do is to do it.

“Why, yes,” Hanna said, wondering. “How did you know?”

So my love said to me of his travels.

Sunrise smiled. It was little enough like a human smile, but Leader had seen it before, and Hanna's human body warmed with delight.

Sunrise said,
You do not understand why We learned not these things from the Lost Ones.

“Yes,” Hanna said, thinking of their terrible end. She ought not think of it; she must maintain this precious equilibrium.

Sunrise said,
They were different; or We did not know them. We knew Renders only, and Renders they became, and resonated with the Render in Ourselves. I think that is true.

“But surely you knew there was a difference!”

There was none. Or else We would not see…For We did not know, having never seen. We see in the part of you that is she an infinite variety. The Lost Ones knew it not…

Hanna pressed cold hands to her hot cheeks. “They must have. They must have known F'thal, surely, even then.”

They did not,
Sunrise said.

Hanna shook her head, but she could not protest again; she could only accept. In the People's reality the colonists had known only—certain things.

They did not die as We would have them die,
Sunrise said.
So we tampered with the brain itself, as with yours. And thus, if they would not be Renders, we made them Renders…

Hanna turned her head sharply at a whisper in the darkness. But there had been no audible sound. The great voice was beginning again, and whispered, though conditionally, though tentatively:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Leader said,
It is time.

Time,
Sunrise said;
time,
said the leaves.

“Time…? Oh, no…”

Hanna began to shiver. She said thickly, having scarcely had the courage to think of the question before, “Must I die in th-the pain? Again?”

Not,
Leader said,
in my body.

Sunrise stood and walked into the darkness. Light glimmered at her feet. When that faded too Hanna knew she was sinking back into the dream.

*   *   *

The passages were too dark for human eyes, and Sunrise guided her. Around her were walls of silence, the telepathic barrier with which Bladetree had met her when he took her from
XS-12.
It seemed tangible, so that she shrank away from physical walls with the sense that she would run into them. She stopped sometimes in the complexities of darkness, thinking Sunrise had gone on through solid substance, but always Sunrise turned and held out her hand and Hanna followed, trusting her. The barrier began to shiver; through it she heard whispers and sometimes identified those who made them, though in doubt and confusion. For their conceptual
names were those of their tasks, or descriptive, or spoke of one person's relationship to one or more other People, and everyone had many such names, and everyone but Hanna always knew who was meant. She was herself an alien-too-small-Render-thing and many other things, none pleasant; but also she was form-of-Leader.

She knew dimly that she walked, but her consciousness was erratic and it seemed she was in one place or another without volition or movement. The empty rooms she crossed with Sunrise were bare of ornament, the rich imagery of many thoughts sufficing to fill them.

Not bare,
said the People in surprise.
Do you not see beauty?
A wall of fine mosaic came to vivid life, and she admired it. Here was a column of pale light; but its final form depended on its union with other columns in other rooms. For a moment she saw the work whole. “Beautiful,” she whispered.

Someone said,
That is no Render,
and others answered,
Yet it is. Yet he is. Yet We are.

Here were more walls that danced with symbols waiting for a thought to rearrange them. All history was here. Hanna asked a question without knowing what she asked, and Sunrise paused and the symbols changed. Sunrise said:
In the long days when my love was gone, in the days when my duties permitted, in the nights when my Child slept, I studied these matters.

A web of lines enclosed a globe of stars. Here was the People's sun, here the sun of the less-than-People, here the travels of generations. Hanna reached out to point, and did not have to. Sunrise knew the place she meant, and knew her question.

No others. Only the Lost Ones, the less-than-People; only your own kind.

“But why? Why go that way?”

Why not? It chanced to lie in Our path.

“If you had gone another way it might have been—”

Leader-in-her-thoughts took it up:
The slippery-thinkers or the uncarpenters, the tree-dwellers or the not-yets or others still unmet
—

And all of them shouted at her:
Are they all like you?

“No. No. Yes.” Hanna looked up at Sunrise's flat face with the noselike projection she knew, had known for some
time, was a bony plate to protect the organ of telepathy, distinct and localized as Hanna's own eyes.

“They are all like me. They are all like you, too. They fear death and protect life, as I do, as you do. It is the first lesson life teaches any world, the first lesson life learns. It is life.”

You teach Us, yet you know not soul,
they sighed, and the deep vibration began again, a cavern of winds at her feet.

Hanna said with downcast eyes, “I cannot know its meaning.”

We are soul,
they said.

“But there is something else,” she said, and Leader said,
That is true.

What else?
they said, and Hanna almost knew.

When Hanna looked at still another room Sunrise had vanished. Hanna was not in the room of records anymore; this was a dark and pleasant place with soft lights that flickered, light enough for the People's unveiled eyes, but she could not tell why the light was not steady.
Many lights are not,
they said.
It is pleasing this way.
She took an experimental step, and then another. The floor wavered before her eyes, from one substance and one level to another, and she knew she was seeing many floors through many eyes, and had not their perceptual adjuncts to tell her which she stood on. The walls had a calm and warming polish, though their color changed or seemed to, and sometimes she saw stone. She called on Leader, but he could not help her.
Your body,
he said,
is not mine. You must sort the flux yourself.

Many hours had gone by since the last stimulant injection. She had not expected ever to need another one. There were weights on her feet, her chest and head hurt and the darkness was caught in her eyes. She stumbled on softness and the carpet made a hollow for her body and a cushion for her head. This was a room for children, scattered with bright toys, some of which a human child would take up at once. The room was empty because the alien-Render-thing had come. She crossed the rug and it flattened obediently. A couch offered to enfold her. She did not have to climb up on it—she dropped onto it—it was made for persons even smaller than she. She did not lie down. If she did she would go to sleep, and there was not much waking left.

She sensed Swift before she saw him, sleepy and compliant in Sunrise's arms. He rubbed at his eyes and Hanna felt
the down of his child's plumage against Sunrise's cheek. Her body trembled with Leader's eagerness. Swift was big as a human six-year-old, but he did not seem heavy when Sunrise put him in her arms. She was abruptly isolated, watching tears stream down her own cheeks, and saw herself with amazement. That body, her body, was shaken with emotion. Bowed with fatigue and Swift's weight, it caressed the child and Sunrise and dimly, as if through a pane of solid substance, Hanna felt the joy of their reunion, and all their Nearhome rejoicing in it.

But dimly, dimly. And then not at all.

She was apart from them. There was no room for her. She had no power at all—Leader had it all—she would never have any again. To her eyes—but they were not her eyes—Swift seemed to grow larger. He filled the field of vision, he was the largest thing in the universe, he was its center, he
was
the universe. Green gentle eyes looked into hers, and he laughed soundlessly with pure infant mirth. His father held him like a treasure of innocence, unscathed.

Time to come. Time to come in my arms. Now truly it is my time!

I am not ready,
Hanna cried,
I
have no child!
—for she saw in Swift the something else she had almost known before.

But no one heard her. No one.

Fear clawed at her and would have clutched her throat, but it was not her throat anymore. There was a panic urge to try to seize control again.

She mastered it.

No. Let it be! I came here for this….

She tried to say to Leader:
I
knew it would be hard. I do not know if I have the strength.

But he was still absorbed in Swift, and did not hear her.

Time is,
said the voice of a wind astray in starlight;
time
echoed the sky, white again (night was gone);
time
whispered a tunnel of arching blue leaves whose thin flexible branches bent low to caress the heads of those who passed;
time
sang a moat of rushing water;
time
murmured flickering flame;
time time time
said the voices of a world, until:

*   *   *

Time evaporates. Past is ended and present ending, and only the future exists as Hanna hurries on from moment to moment.
But she sees where Leader bears her: through passages of leaf and bough to a silver spire from whose peak a flame beckons like hope, and up, and up, and up, until she has ascended to the radiant sky.

Thus rejoice We that We share not the fate of all life else….

They do not speak to Hanna anymore nor even, now, to Leader. The great thought has no subject nor any object. It is thought thinking itself.

(Do not think of what you have to do, thinks something-of-Hanna caught in a crevice of stone.)

What will last-kindness do to this alien form?

(What will it do to me!!!)

We do not know.

(I recline—)

Terror is a palpable thing. It is no stranger; it has an old companion's face; but now she is utterly contained with it. It does not touch her body. No heart beats faster, no breath is shorter, no muscle is weak with it.
He
is not afraid. She sees through eyes that were hers, and feels terror that is only hers. She wishes to report, report, report; to objectify; to become the observant scientist postponing the future moment by moment by reporting, reporting, reporting as if there were a future, as if it matters her voice will live on in the object in her throat. But she cannot speak.