The D’neeran Factor (52 page)

(Think it then. Think my death. So that at the end it will pass into this great plurality and be remembered and someday somehow be returned—but how transmuted?—to those who ought to hear it. Survive. In some form, survive!

I lie, no, recline, not on the altar I feared—there never were altars, they needed no gods, there were laboratory tables not altars—at ease—
his
ease. Bondmate clasps my hand. She does not fear the alien flesh. The Child clings to me, now puzzled and lamenting. Knows his father. How can he among so many? How can he in such strange form?)

The sun rises, warming the vivid height. Such places do We choose when there is choice. This is the time We choose, when choice is given: the rising of the sun.

(The drink is cool and has no taste to my alien mouth—)

The cup of last-kindness thy father's own skull, carven, gemlike, polished. Last-kindness, like water, is tasteless. This path We choose (no others so choose) for saving, for peace
and full joining. Drink! Like water is formless is shapeless: life gives it form: ever filling, ever bursting forth. Life shapes itself. You have shaped your time, your self, your Home and Us for the good or the ill of your days and those to come. Water purifies flesh. Flesh dissolves in sweet water. Now join the eternal completing!

The purpose,
We affirm, for this is needful, and

The purpose,
he affirms, and knows Us, each of the persons of his Nearhome and beyond them the persons of all others past and present, and in others at this very dawn those who like him wait for the sun to give up completed lives:

The purpose,
he says, and Bondmate bows her head grieving and assenting:

The purpose,
he says, and the Child is still, hands on his father's alien heart:

The purpose,
he tells Us,
is life and the absence of death; life unending in the soul, life renewed in the Child.

It is the true and proper answer and he fully freely gives it. And We ask:
What have you learned?

He says:
I
have learned that my love's eyes are green.

Green. A word. A thing a color We cannot see.

It is all of me which comes to you,
he says.
That We know and that We do not know, save I; new lives, new deaths; the balance of a stranger's form, and worse: a stranger's death.

We do not want this thing. To change Us?

Renders changed Us. It is no Render completes Us now, but one of Us.

We doubt. His limbs are weak, the alien strength is waning.

He says:
Think with pity (though We could not pity Renders) on their end. These are not beasts and yet they die: finally, irrevocably, beyond recourse. The sorrow! A race of sorrow, a species that knows its fate: they invent immortality, and invent belief in it: it bends and twists and warps them even the best. They are what We might have been; pity them!

And this is what he has learned. And so We also learn. For this is how We learn.

The limbs come near to weightlessness in the morning light. They are no longer his nor anyone's. In each moment he is nearer. He looks back/We look back at the silent strange form, a rag of a thing, small and harmless. He is almost
visible; We are always almost visible at this ending, almost on the edge of sight a puff of smoke, almost in clear dawn light. It is so always, and this is the same. One of Us. And each of Us always is different from all, and so with each death and new life We are changed, and changed all the more by the Great.

Therefore begins the final scrutiny and shaping, judgment and acknowledgment at once, and We pare to a structure of light his life and honor it: fear met with courage, suffering with duty fulfilled to final measure in the company and sharing of a beast.

Not beast,
he says.
Returned she to grieve with Bondmate and Child. Beasts do not do that. Forswore she attack. Beasts do not do that. She is Ours. We are she.

And the lives intertwined are a skein of light, he stretches thinning toward Bondmate once more, and is attenuated, and settles without fear or grief into each cell of each one of Us.

And the alien form is a wisp of darkness in the light of a sun no longer strange, and

It is done.

*   *   *

She dreams of water. Mist, really. The cool spray of falling water bathes her face.
Her
face. She lifts to it a hand that has a cobweb's weight and strength.
Her
hand. Strange thought.

Why strange?

Her eyes open, with effort. See the scaled gentle face, familiar as her own. She smiles, and whispers a question.

Sunrise cannot answer. She does not know why the human body lives. But she tends to it carefully as she tends Swift, and the food she puts into its mouth comes warmed and softened from her own. And is gratefully accepted.

The ships have been called back. They are not necessary.

*   *   *

The security module was not in Jameson's house anymore. The place where it had been was a cavity, the walls scarred and strange from amputation. He felt as if a part of his body had been removed. The transmitter was gone from his ear and it seemed he would never again know what was going on anywhere.

He slept drugged to the top of his skull and severed from
the world and they almost had to break his house down before it sounded an alarm of intruders and he finally woke, sick with dread. The antidote to oblivion didn't really take effect until he was on his way to Admin in al-Nimeury's aircar. He had fallen on the way out his own front door, and he did not remember anything al-Nimeury had told him. He was too proud to ask for a repetition. He watched the night go by and waited for al-Nimeury to say something else. When it came it was a string of curses, but absentminded, as if al-Nimeury had been through it all before.

Jameson tried his dignity and found it, with relief, returning.

“Calm yourself,” he said.

“You sonofabitch, you never answered me. Did you tell her not to talk to anybody but you?”

Jameson said vaguely, “You never know.”

“I'm not sure she's all there anymore. Maybe Katherine was right—no. No, I take that back. I was there, she wasn't faking. But she sure as hell sounds strange.”

Jameson knew who he meant then. al-Nimeury said, “Here, are you going to be sick?”

“No. Sorry.”

“What the hell then?”

“Never mind. Shut up.”

The aircar swooped down to a wet rooftop and al-Nimeury said, “We're here. Come on.”

They ran through the labyrinth of Admin to al-Nimeury's rooms. Pain shot through Jameson's head at every step. al-Nimeury kept talking. “She's patched in through
Willow-meade.
How did she know Tirel was out there? Did you tell her? Or did she get it out of your head?”

“I don't know.”

“Little bitch,” al-Nimeury said inconsequentially, and a guard fell back and they were in his chambers. Morisz's replacement was there, and a dozen men from Fleet, and Murphy, who must have been roused from sleep too but was sleekly groomed as always. Her eyes were wider than usual, though.

Murphy said, “I thought she might talk to me, but she won't.”

“Right. Well, he's here now. There's no video,” al-Nimeury said to Jameson. “She can hear you.”

Jameson said cautiously, “Hanna?”

The faintest of sighs filled the room. There was nothing else. After a minute Jameson looked uncertainly at the others. Murphy muttered, as if Hanna could not hear her, “She's very strange. Talk to her.”

He said to thin air, feeling like a fool, “Hanna, are you all right?”

A voice said slowly, “Ye-es. Yes. All—right.”

He sank into a chair, beginning to forget the others, all his attention concentrated on a faint sound from infinity. It might have been the voice of a ghost. But even if they had not already checked the identity with every means at their command—and they must have done that at once—he would have known the voice was Hanna's.

He said, trying to sound ordinary, “What happened?”

“It's all right,” Hanna said.

“What's all right? Where are you?”

“Here,” Hanna said.

“Are you on the aliens' home world?”

There was a long silence. “Yes,” said Hanna.

“Have you come to an understanding with them?”

This time the silence was very long. Hanna said finally, “What?”

Oh dear God, Jameson thought, they have destroyed her mind. Desolation swept over him. He said very slowly and carefully, “Hanna, can you understand me?”

He waited. Nothing. His shoulders ached with tension; surely he listened for a voice from the dead. He had had time to think in the last terrible days, much too much time to think, while all he valued most was taken from him and he could not know if the great price had purchased anything. He had not been able to make Hanna's weary face disappear, except when he eradicated it in sleep. Now it seemed he might have bought something after all—and now the sound of Hanna's voice was more important to him personally than anything it might say. It was not a thought that fit in with anything in his life, anywhere. He thrust it aside.

“Hanna?”

She said suddenly, “Yes. Wait.”

But he was nearly ready in his anxiety to speak again when she said, “Very difficult. This. Talking.”

“All right. All right. What's wrong with you?”

“The interface,” she said. “Wait!”

He was not even sure the command was addressed to him, but he waited. Presently she began to speak, slowly and awkwardly.

“It's all right. They won't attack. I'll come back. You shouldn't have sent the ship. To follow me.”

“How did you know about
Willowmeade
?”

“I guessed. I know
you,
” Hanna said. She said this strongly and without hesitation, and sounded irritated. He breathed again, weak with relief. It was Hanna, all right, and whatever had happened to her, she was herself.

“You're positive they won't attack?”

“Positive. They were going to. They aborted. It's all right. If you don't do anything stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

Speaking more easily now, she said, “Don't frighten them. Pull
Willowmeade
back.”

“Are they demanding that?”

“
I
am. Demanding it. I promised them.”

He glanced at al-Nimeury, but it was Murphy who said, “Yes. Yes, we'll do it.”

“You have to. They'll know. Look,” Hanna said, “it's started. Now it's up to you.”

Not me, he thought. Not any longer.

Someone else had come into the room. He knew who it was without looking around: the new commissioner from Heartworld.

He said, “You have to come back. We have to talk to you.”

“I know. I'll come. Not yet.”

“Why?”

“I have to, to, see some people. The others from—the ones who belonged with the people I killed. And find—I lost my ring.”

He hesitated, and decided not to pursue it. He said, “I'd rather you came back right now.”

“I can't. I have to show them—Starr?”

“Yes?”

“I didn't do much. He did it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The alien. Made the interface. In me. He was—he is one
of their great ones. They know that. I miss him. I like his, his, wife,” she added with apparent irrelevance.

Jameson, at a loss, said, “That's nice.”

“They might not have any more—” There was a long pause. Then she said, “Watchsetters. They might have communicators instead. She'd be good at it.”

“I'm sure she would. When can you come home?”

“But this—oh. Does Iledra want to know?”

“I mean here,” he said to his own surprise.

“Oh. I don't—a few days. I was wrong.”

She seemed to think he would know exactly what she meant. He said, “What were you wrong about?”

“I didn't go far enough.”

“No?”

“No. It's not enough to…to…to think with them. To know what's real. You have to live with them too. And then—”

There was another long silence. The space and time between them disappeared and he could almost see her face, alight with wonder. He thought she reached out to touch him, and shook his head to make the vision disappear.

“Then?” he said. “What then, Hanna?”

“Why, then you have to die with them,” she said.

T
he room Tirel gave her on
Willowmeade
was small and cramped. There was a guard at the door. Tirel said she was an honored guest and the guard was there to keep curious crewmen from disturbing her. He lied. She was guarded because no one knew what to make of her yet; because suspicion lingered, and Tirel wanted no alien monster stalking his ship. If sometimes Hanna felt like a guest, it was because of the very crewmen who were kept away from her. Her room filled up quickly with their gifts: fresh flowers grown in cubicles cramped as hers; tapestries as carefully woven as the coverlet incinerated with
Heartworld II;
strange and beautiful animals carved by clever hands; presents of food from the galley; cherished garments from the women. The room took on the look of D'neera, crowded with beauties stacked and tumbling over one another. It was only later that Hanna wondered why the phenomenon had happened, and found that as the full story of her contacts with the People spread through
Willowmeade,
with it spread a wish not so much to honor as to comfort her.

She hardly left the room, because she was weary and sad and unwell and it was difficult to get used to human beings again. Still, she resented Tirol's strictures. She had been the prisoner of someone or other for a long time now—or maybe sometimes she had really been a guest—but she wished they would stop calling it one thing when it was the other.