The D’neeran Factor (55 page)

Everywhere We went was new.

“No,” Hanna said to the trace of an old Apprentice, or perhaps it was Apprentice who spoke. Jameson thought she said it to him. He said, “It can't be helped. I don't know if what is coming is ‘good' or ‘bad' or even if those judgments are applicable. I don't think they are. What's going to happen— just is. Is exploration good or bad? It doesn't matter. It just is, inevitable. So is this. There'll be no hope of stopping it—even if stopping it might be good. All that will be left, all that is ever left, will be to minimize some evils that may come. There are some dreadful possibilities for exploitation, violence, enslavement, among ourselves or in conflict with them…There are no plans, Hanna. None that I know of; though I might not know, now.”

She said hopefully, “Has anyone but you even thought of it?”

“Oh, surely. Surely. I must,” he said, thinking aloud now, “get Peter to institute a study of the questions. Secretly, of course. It can't be done too soon and they will put it off if they can.”

They would rather put it off for a century or two,
Iledra said. But she had been talking about something else. Or maybe not.
To have a telepath at a first contact
—
they must see what it could mean!
And this was what it meant.

Hanna ran. Pure instinct. She fled through the wide inviting doors, stumbled on a dark terrace, crushed barely nascent growth underfoot (there was no complaint; flowers here did not complain).

And stopped. There was nowhere to go this time.

Jameson came after her, picking his way more carefully. She gave him her arm and let him take her back to the house. They were silent. He was neither surprised nor distressed
by her abortive flight. She thought he had expected it. Predictable.

He brought her, predictably, a tiny glass filled with brilliant red liquid. The chemical man; though his head had been clear these last weeks. She glanced up at him suspiciously—she was not entirely unaware of certain suggestions he had rejected on her behalf—but he said, “It's only Valentine brandy, Hanna,” and she drank it. It was bitter.

He said, just as if there had been no interruption, “Individual survival has always been humankind's first dream. You accepted as self-evident—it has always been so accepted—that awareness of one's own inevitable death is an early mark of sentience. Did it never cross your mind on Zeig-Daru that in doing what you did you had found a kind of endless life for yourself?”

The questions would not go away.
Questions answer one another,
said an Explorer long-ago. Hanna said doggedly, “It did not. Anyway that wasn't me. It was
him,
just changed. I don't think I
want
to live forever.”

“You'll change your mind when the end is closer.” There was a sharp secret amusement in him that made her stare at him.

She said, abandoning right and wrong, “They'll never agree to it.”

“Will they not? They're extraordinarily malleable. And maybe,” he said very gently, “that is their function. You find the prospect unimaginable. But consider yourself: a new thing in the life of the human species. Unimaginable, until you were real. Did you know there was a time, before your people left Earth, before the oppression began, when telepaths were called new-humans? Then the rest of us became true-humans—a term coined in hostility toward what your ancestors were. Because they had been unimaginable, and were new, and perhaps better. You have indicated that the Zeigans regard themselves as instruments of life. In the strict sense all of us are—and this, perhaps, is one more step in its progress. Life experiments, you know. The Zeigans so far have been successful. Perhaps success for them means absorbing us, and the F'thalians, and others we will come to know together. Can you say this is untrue? When we don't even know—as you know better than anyone—what is real?”

His voice enchanted her. It had always enchanted her, resting her with its sureness, creating a spell in which she saw the universe he knew—or made. His eyes were distant, set on visions. But she saw with her fresh shock-born sight that they were the eyes of a very weary man.

She took a deep breath and stood up. The spell was broken.

“What you are thinking of is not real,” she said.

He answered without resentment, “How do you know?”

She did not know. There was only her own inner insistence that what he proposed somehow was not right, and against it his certainty that it was.

She said, “I don't want to believe that it can happen. You do. But I think in the end that what the People want to believe is what will be.”

“That,” he said, and after a pause: “That. I had forgotten that.”

He bowed his head and she saw the direction of his thought. She said sadly, “Must it be war between us, then, to shape their reality?”

“What?” He looked up, scarcely seeing her. An odd expression touched his face. He said, “It won't be. We're both out of it.”

“But I could—” Hanna said, and then the word struck her, and the pacing aging tiger and the prison of the fields and the dwindling days racing into night.

“Both?” she said. It was only a breath.

He looked as if she had caught him in the act of performing some unspeakable crime. She said, “What have you done? What are you going to do?”

“That's entirely my affair,” he said, in an instant cold as stone.

He meant to stop her. But she said. “You're leaving the project. It's over for you. Everything's over. But
why
?”

“I'm in need of a rest too,” he said, lying without a sign of guilt. “I should like to go home for a time.”

“That is not true.”

He said with a sigh, “I wish one could lie to you successfully. I ought to have learned better by now. Leave it, Hanna. Just leave it. The project is a shocking failure, and the responsibility is mine. That's true enough.”

“But not the whole truth?”

“It's all the truth that matters,” he said impatiently. “The failure is complete, and all mine. You'll drop it, if you have any kindness.”

She said, remembering more, “I could ask Peter.”

“You don't,” he said, and the world split for her; he appeared angry but the appearance was a trick, a diversion, a ploy to cow her into silence, and underneath that was real anger, entirely controlled, but he adamantly would
not
let her know all the truth. “You don't,” he said, “know when to give up, do you? But you never did. The subject is closed. Good night, Hanna.”

He turned and started away, escaping. His footsteps echoed on hardwood, a nightmare of abandonment from the past. Hanna said, perhaps aloud, perhaps not: “Not this time.” She slipped in front of him and blocked his way. She said, “Tell me. Tell me the rest of it or I will take it from your mind. I will tear it out by the roots.”
Bluff.
“You owe me. I've died for you, yes, you! how many times? You owe me the truth. You owe me a little of your precious self! You can give it to me or I will take it.”

How admirable the uses of deception! He believed her, and she had learned the trick from him.

If he thought there was only one thing to do he would do it, however distasteful. He told her about Struzik, the threats, the ultimatum, the coming end. She stood before him, small and immovable, and listened. He could not bring himself to say: I did this, I gave it all up, for your peace. But it was manifest in everything he said.

Yet still in the short recital there were things he did not say. He had been this way at their first meeting, layered, giving up what he must in order to hide another thing and yet another. She had been his match even then. She was stronger now, and bolder. When he was finished she put out her hands and touched him. His heart beat under her right hand. He made a sharp movement as if to turn away, but he did not. His eyes rested on her face curiously now, and with, she thought, a kind of fatalism. She thought he knew what was coming.

She said softly, “More. The rest.”

There is no more.

She heard the words form, but he did not say them. He was caught in suspense and watched himself through a
stranger's eyes. It had been hard for him always to resist her touch. This time he could not. Something hurt, wavered, and broke. It was so nearly audible that she started and stepped closer protectively.

All over. It will not matter to anyone. Why not?

He said without any expression at all, “Are you familiar with the term ‘profound geriatric failure'?”

“Yes…” She looked up into his face without comprehension, distracted by the irrelevance.

“What do you think it is?”

She said, puzzled, “The standard techniques of cellular and hormonal regeneration and toxin removal don't work and they have to use a modified procedure. Everyone knows that.”

“No. That's the popular understanding of the term. The medical definition is quite different.”

She had gotten very good at disentangling Jameson's substance from his style, and she remembered that he was never irrelevant. She stood very still, except that her hands moved a little, not to caress him but to touch while she could the solid warm flesh, strong and unchanging. She did not want the moment to end. She did not want to go on to the next one. Jameson's face was a mask and she knew past any doubt that she was going to hear something she did not want to hear. But she said, compelled, “What is the medical definition?”

He did not answer at once. He drew her back into the room and to a seat before the cold fireplace. He sat close beside her. Even now, she thought, it was for her comfort, not his.

He said, “It is the rare inadequacy of
all
anti-senescence techniques. Occasionally a victim who continues standard treatment will begin to respond normally. More often, at some unpredictable point, treatment accelerates aging without warning or recourse. The failure is so rapid and overwhelming that no treatment is of any use. The victim dies, of old age or something else, within a year of the last treatment, regardless of his chronological age.”

I cannot bear this, Hanna thought.

To feel that one cannot, and know one must and will…

Jameson said softly, “The Heartworld political arena is an exciting milieu,” and Hanna listened through a blur of
pain. “I was involved in it from the time I could talk—earlier perhaps. My grandfather might have been commissioner at one time, but Progressive fortunes were low in those years. My father for many years headed the Provincial Court. He's dead now; he was one hundred and forty when I was born. My sister married a man of another province and perpetually runs for a council seat. Someday she'll win, I suppose…I was very happy. Full of plans, full of ideas, eager for power and it came year by year, always growing…There was so much I wanted to do. A world was not enough. I thought two centuries would be too short. I wanted to get to the top early. Later I wanted to do so even more badly, though for other reasons. But even at the start I thought of little else.”

His voice was very quiet, but he spoke without hesitation. His skin was faintly golden in the soft light and etched with fine lines Hanna had hardly noticed before. She thought:
You can't do this. I love you.

“Nothing,” he said, “is constant except change. I came to want another thing. My family helped found Heartworld seven hundred years ago. Starrbright has descended in the direct male line ever since that time, and I could take you today to Southwest Namerica and show you where my ancestors lived before the Explosion. Starr is a family name; it has been borne by many men through the centuries, and some women. I wanted to continue the line. It was time. In my twenties I thought an entire world of attractive women had been created just for me; at thirty I looked for a wife. I wanted a great deal. Beauty, intelligence, breeding, education, character—I don't remember all the list. I have not thought about it for years. No one suited me, but there was plenty of time. I thought it was time to prepare for the long fine future. You haven't started anti-senescence treatments yet, have you?”

“No,” she said, startled into speech. “In a few years, I guess. There's—” She nearly choked on the next words, but said them anyway: “No hurry.”

“I got around to it at thirty-two, in Standard years. You'll find that before the initial treatment they do the most extraordinary battery of tests. Before they let you go they tell you to come back in thirty days and again in six months for more tests. The six-month visit helps them determine what
modifications need to be made in future treatment. Most people think the thirty-day visit is required for the same reason, but it is not. It's because the infinitesimal fraction of the population for whom the procedure fails react predictably—with a massive immunological failure that will kill if it is not caught at once. I didn't even last the thirty days. I was extremely ill before the time was up. I had never been ill before. I was appalled, even before I knew what had happened. I suppose I thought I was immune to death…Afterward I changed my plans.”

She waited for him to go on, but he did not. He had said what was necessary. He would not embellish it. Presently she said unevenly, knowing the answer, “You have kept trying?”

“Yes. Each time it does not kill me I gain a little time. There has always been talk about the obscene length of some of my vacations. It takes time to treat widespread carcinoma.”

There was not a trace of self-pity in the way he said it. He presented it as a matter of fact, dispassionately. Hanna lifted her hands to her face. They were icy. Everything she knew about him and everything she had not understood was in place now. The mosaic was complete.
There was so much I wanted to do.
So little time for intellect and ambition to mark the passing years, leave an imprint or a legacy. The gamble! Time after time—! For an instant she saw his world as, perhaps, he saw it—a shadowy place of uncertain values, where he stood over an abyss and made what he could from whatever was at hand, building for eternity in spite of time.