The D’neeran Factor (62 page)

She said slowly, “I can understand it as they do—sometimes. It's not only because of the language, though. It takes practice, saturation. Even with the translator you might not understand this very well, and it's only a sort of outline anyway. Rubee is going to be both narrator and principal actor for this, and Awnlee will be all the others…Narration doesn't seem to be really important in a true formal presentation, but it will be almost all you have.”

“But you don't rely entirely on narration.”

“Oh, no.” She glanced up at him. The comment was not idle; he was getting to something. He was right. Since that first recorded presentation, Rubee and Awnlee had allowed her to enter their minds while they performed, as thoroughly as her considerable ability allowed. Her perception was multifaceted and enriched in ways words could scarcely explain, and sometimes in her reports she did not even try,
and made audacious statements of fact and prayed no one would ask for an explanation.

“Could you share it with me?” he asked, and she started.

She looked at Rubee and Awnlee for want of somewhere to fix her eyes; they were making final adjustments to each other's gowns with darting fingers. She said, “I thought you didn't like it when I thought to you.”

“It's tolerable, within reason,” he said. “And knowledge is my job, too.”

“Then I must do some preparation, too,” Hanna said, and walked out on all of them.

She went to the terrace where the little party would assemble. Lights were sunk into the stone, making sharp constellations in near-night. The sky was blue-black and stars were coming out, and the evening air smelled of grass and earth. There was a balustrade set at intervals with glass-clear flowers from Co-op. She leaned over it, seeking the scented breeze. She was angry. Jameson asked for an intimacy denied her when it might have counted. Her abilities were cheap now, they might have been tools wielded by a computer. The computer had a name and reputation: Lady Hanna ril-Koroth of D'neera, the human race's leading authority on aliens. She knew her official biography by heart, having heard herself introduced to too many expectant audiences.

“…member of the Goodhaven Academy for the Study of Alien Species since the remarkable age of twenty-five…”
Twenty-one,
god damn it, screw Standard chronology, what's wrong with D'neera's years?

“Consultant to Polity Alien Relations and Contact, chief architect of the Zeigan Contact Project, she also organized the nucleus of D'neera's program in alien studies at the University of D'vornan…” It's called The University, idiot; just happens to be at D'vornan.

“…and many other honors.”

And. And. And.

(And when they get to me after the speech, late at night when they've had a few drinks, they want to know what the People
did
to me…)

That's your job, woman. “Alien relations.”

Her hands were too tight on the railing. She relaxed them, with an effort.

True-humans never liked it when she touched their thoughts. It taught them more about her than they wanted to know, and exposed them uncomfortably to her. Jameson was no different from the others. But she had learned a thing or two since their time together.

She went to the shelter of the wall of the house, sat cross-legged on the stone, and cleared her mind.

Four years ago she had thrown herself into the study of D'neera's Adept disciplines with a passion whose source was not precisely as disinterested as its teachers advised. She had said:
I
must master my body so pain cannot master me; for now that I know my own weakness I live in fear.
The teachers had not sent her away. Motives more reprehensible than fear had led some of them on the same quest, but the studies themselves had a way of shaping the student. Her progress had been rapid, and now she had some skill in the art of consciousness clarified and disciplined to pure purpose.

She had also learned not to regret her ignorance at the time of her first contact with the People of Zeig-Daru. If she had known more, even if they had done the same terrible things to her, she would not have felt any of it. But history would have been different.

Presently the soft summer air and the dark and the stars drew far away. Her body lost its weight and vanished.

Jameson came outdoors to something that seemed a statue, so still was Hanna. If he watched her closely, he saw at long intervals an eyeblink or a slow breath. Otherwise she did not move until he sat down nearby and spoke her name. She turned her head without haste. Her face was remote: alien as Rubee's. He waited warily for the first stab at his consciousness, the sense of an intrusive presence in one's own inviolable mind. What came was barely perceptible, a cold thread like nothing he had felt before, devoid of personality as the eyes that a little while ago had been Hanna's.

He was relieved.

The aliens came in their rich vestments like gliding stones, figures of geometry with substance and bulk. The lights at their feet cast shadows behind them which bent over the balustrade and flowed into the night. Shadow seemed to thicken round them and slowly, like the swirl of
black cloud in black sky, the darkness shaped other forms. Their masks were of all colors. Jameson did not see them with his eyes. He saw Rubee's knowledge and memory: what ought to be. So now he had two kinds of sight, one of them directed by that force he could not identify with Hanna; also he heard the rasp of Rubee's voice, and laid over it, impersonal, mechanical, the Standard translation.

“And this is the story of the Travels of Erell,” Rubee said; and at a distance a gong sounded, or seemed to.

“In a year on the second day of Urrt, Erell set forth. At his side was his selfing Awtell, and they sailed a fair ship; for Erell was of Ell by the ocean.”

The night wind blew from an Uskosian sea. At parting the people played the Path of Stoell; no, the shadows played the people's play; no, it was only Awnlee playing a multitude of players.

Awnlee sang in a voice like rough metal and was the wind that bore the ship away.

“They crossed the eyeless ocean steering by the moons. There were storms and the Master appeared in the towering waves but neither sank nor aided them. They sailed on without hesitation until they came to an empty land. They rested and went on.”

Rubee faced the terrible waves and Awnlee, compressing fifty roles in one, was the sea. The storm keened with a furious voice. No one ever played the Master's part; but in the patterns of the movements of the play, a space was left for him. Then they were still, resting, though sea and wind murmured on. In rest the cowled shapes bent toward one another with great dignity, selfing sheltered by sire.

“Days passed and the moons dipped and danced. A great bird of a kind unknown appeared and sought to seize Awtell, but Erell drove it away. Then he knew this voyage was not discouraged.”

Awnlee danced like the icy moons, and his fingers wove strange figures about one another. He and Rubee clashed with formal violence: Erell and the bird.

“On they went and came to empty lands and the seas were long. They they came to the land of Sa. And they could not understand those of Sa, but then they learned. And they feasted and were welcome.”

Some distant part of Jameson's consciousness told him
he was in trance; but all the rest of it saw the emptiness of the water and land, and later the welcoming.

“At length they departed; and when they left the land of Sa they bore rich gifts, and with them traveled Porsa of Sa. They knew fair winds as they went; and on the fourteenth day of Strrrl they came again to Ell. And when they told those of Ell what they had learned there was rejoicing, and welcoming and feasting of Porsa of Sa, and in after years many went from each land to the other, and Awtell was a leader of all. So did the beings of sundered lands come first to know one another in the ages of the world. And the bond of the lands of Ell and Sa to this minute is not torn by war nor broken by any thing.

“Precious is this minute!”

Rubee and Awnlee withdrew. The shadows went with them. Some time passed, but Jameson did not know how much; time might have stopped until suddenly the presence he had forgotten withdrew from his thought, and he came awake. When he looked at Hanna, she also had returned to normal consciousness, though a trace of remoteness lingered in her eyes. She got up slowly, as if it took a minute to get used to her body again.

She said, “Do you understand now?”

He shook his head. “I thought I did while it was going on,” he said.

“Yes, that's right. I can't keep it up all the time either.”

“I guess you have to be a little inhuman,” he said, meaning no insult.

“That's right,” Hanna said impassively.

“It's got some kind of symbolic meaning, then? This schedule they're tied to?”

“Symbols come in differing degrees of abstraction,” Hanna said. Her voice was cool, pitched in the lecturer's mode. “They stand for living forces that shape the way we think and live. Humans often dissociate visible symbol from its sources. Your sun and crossed spears, the seal of your world—your people think what they feel for it is pride. What it is, is the comfort of the tribe. The Uskosians are fully conscious of all that underlies their symbols—but those foundations are just as powerful for them as ours are for us.”

He said frankly, “I can accept what you say as an intellectual
proposition, and I take it on faith that you're right. But I will not be able to convince Vickery and the others that Rubee will not change his mind if only the situation is explained to him clearly enough and logically enough.”

“Well, I promise you that I will keep explaining it, clearly and logically. But what is the logic of the gifts we take to Uskos?—jewels, art, a treasure to tempt a thief. What is the logic of that?”

“Everyone knows that,” he said.

“Yes,” Hanna said, “and everyone on Uskos will understand Rubee's logic.”

“Then we'll have to think of something else,” he said.

It was hot in Shoreground that year. Outside the central dome the air had a rank ocean smell, and the wind blowing inland carried sand and grit that clung to damp skin and stuck in eyes and hair.

Inside the dome it was different.

Inside the dome at midnight the streets were cool and full of light. Michael Kristofik walked through them invisible, hidden in patterns of shadow that tricked an observer's eye. There were other figures like him in the streets, anonymous clouds that looked half-real, trans-dimensional. Many who came to the dome did not wish to be recognized there, and there were vendors to supply the generators that broke up the light around them.

Shoreground-under-glass was called Carnivaltown. Michael stood at the center of the cauldron and looked up. At intervals shapes lit up the sky: flowers, beasts, abstractions, some of which were salacious. The names of establishments flashed in the air, and images of their attractions. Near the top of the dome, perched precariously on the curved surface, habitats clung to the inner skin, their windows dots from the ground. The masters of Carnivaltown ran the dome from there. Michael had been there often, the last time not long ago: a rich man among his peers, looking down on the lights, removed from the activity below.

This was the third consecutive night he had spent walking the streets of Carnivaltown. Before that, he had not come to them for a long time.

He turned through an entrance wreathed with arabesques.
Synthetic happiness jolted him. It ended when he stepped into the room beyond, leaving a residue of good feeling. A woman with polished silver skin greeted him. The happi-bar lobby was nearly dark and she glittered, a creature of quicksilver eyes, the top of her head a gleaming bald dome. She wore only a golden anklet, but she looked too made of metal to be tempting. She was used to apparitions like Michael. He was used to apparitions like her.

She took him to the kind of cubicle he wanted: a watcher's station, half of one wall a telescreen. From here a customer could overlook the private ecstasies in all the cubicles of the other kind, occupied by people who liked to be watched. The watchers paid heavily, but the others paid just as much, and complained about it; did they not provide the entertainment?

Another silver woman brought the dram of Fantasee Michael ordered. He left it untouched and used the telescreen methodically, ignoring what he saw except to search for a face. This was the third night he had looked for it, and he was prepared to keep going a long time. But in the happi-bar he found it almost at once: the face of a boy perhaps twenty years old with black eyes, fresh white skin, mouth curved in a professional smile. He was alone. Waiting.

Michael looked at the young face for a long time.

Good thing to do when you've been earning well and don't feel like working hard. Display in a voyeur's haven, the quiet kind, like this. Relax, have a drink, let the peepers peep, let them make the moves. Just make sure they know what you are so there won't be an argument later.