The D’neeran Factor (64 page)

Vickery's interest waned. He shook his head. “Chances are he's just like everybody else in human space. One, all he
knows about the
Bird
's course is what direction she's going and what star she's headed for. And two, he doesn't care.”

“Maybe,” Figueiredo said. “All the same, if Director Jameson could get them to agree to an armed escort, it would solve everything.”

Jameson said, “I will push Hanna as hard as I can. She will, in turn, push Rubee and Awnlee as far as possible. I doubt very greatly that she could under any conceivable circumstance get that result.”

Vickery said, “She's under your direct supervision.”

“The aliens are not.”

Figueiredo said, “There's another option. If we didn't send any gifts, there wouldn't be a target.”

Jameson said, “If the gifts go, Hanna goes. It's a package. And the Commssion strongly favors her preceding a diplomatic party by some months, since that's what Rubee wants.”

“Very advantageous for her. Her professional reputation, I mean. The gifts—is that how she persuaded them to take her along?”

Jameson turned around at last. His eyes were so cold that Figueiredo shut up abruptly. He said, “Perhaps it's time I&S officers charged with protecting aliens spent some time at D'vornan under Hanna's tutelage. The arrangement was Rubee's suggestion. It has to do with the Travels of Erell. If you don't know what that means, you had better find out. Check out the navigational systems once more, if you please. I will see to it that Hanna knows as much as possible about this man Kristofik. She may have to negotiate with him.”

Figueiredo was not happy, but he nodded.

*   *   *

Now there were no more places to go. The aliens and Hanna stayed on Earth. For their protection—and to their bewilderment—they were placed under the surveillance of bugs, spyeyes, airspace monitors; the aliens could ignore them and forget that they were there, but Hanna could not. She thought of them as everything that was worst about Earth, about Polity Admin for that matter. They gave you no privacy, if they thought they had a good reason to take it away. What if she needed real aloneness? What if she were to take a lover?—an academic question, because she had
had no lover since Jameson. She had discovered in herself, with him, an unsuspected capacity for exclusive love. Passion had no power to touch her now, and after five years celibacy had become a habit, so that she had nothing to be private about. There was a principle involved, though, and she had good-byes to say. She would have liked having privacy for that.

“I found I liked teaching better than running things, but you will listen to one more suggestion, won't you? Institute the program in F'thalian mathematical thought, and get Tai-Tai Ling out from Earth to teach it. You will? Good, oh, good. And, oh, if you should hear from my mother, tell her I tried to find her…”

Communications that ducked through Inspace—that disappeared at one point in realspace and appeared in another—never reappeared at all if they were sent too far, and over long distances had to be transmitted from one automatic relay to another, just as a spacecraft could not go from star to star with a single Jump and so made each journey piecemeal. Rubee and Awnlee had left no relays behind them. They had not been able to speak to Uskos for nearly four years. As the day for departure came close, Hanna thought of her own voyage on the exploratory vessel
Endeavor,
the one that had led to contact with Zeig-Daru. She had never examined her dependence on the relays that marked
Endeavor
's path. The controllers of
Endeavor's
voyage—among them Jameson, a commissioner then—had always know what was going on.
Endeavor
had always been able to shout for help. Its crewmen had remained in contact with their homeworlds, though the contacts had been censored. It had not occurred to Hanna that space exploration could proceed in any other way.

The gulf Rubee and Awnlee had crossed—silent, beyond help, incredibly vast—was a gulf indeed. The way they had done it marked them alien more clearly than anything else Hanna had learned about them. They did not even know how courageous they were. They did not think about it. They followed in the footsteps of Erell, and Erell had not said, “Good-bye until I think of calling home.” He had only said: “Good-bye.”

“I noticed the stoneveins were fading in the snow. They need to be cut back. You will? Oh, thank you, thank you. You
can keep the fish. And, oh, if my mother comes by, give her my love…Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye…”

Jameson wanted her to come to his office. He wanted her to study a file which could not be transmitted out of Admin. She did not want to spend any more time in offices. Her days in human space were going away quickly. She would be isolated for the last seven of them, having her immunities (as she thought of it) fine-tuned. She had paid no more attention than she had to the army of biotechs who at the start had tampered first with her, then with Rubee and Awnlee, then with all of them, then with the
Bird
itself; now they were going to do it all over again, in reverse. So she would spend a week in a sealed environment and go straight from that to the
Bird,
and she did not want to waste time at Admin.

“I will have plenty of time to study whatever you want when I can't go anywhere,” she told Jameson.

“You have to see it
here,
” he said stubbornly.

“Nothing I have to do with now is
that
highly classified.”

“When it comes from I&S it is.”

“You weren't always so careful about regulations!”

“I wasn't always accountable to Vickery,” he said.

Hanna had had an inadvertent hand in Jameson's fall from power. She took his last remark as a reproach, though perhaps it was not meant to be one.

“Dear Samuel, I didn't know you felt that way for me. You didn't when I left, did you? It's just missing me? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I never thought of you that way. Don't wait for me. Go on to someone else. But please say you'll still be my friend. Good-bye, good-bye.”

“How can you negotiate with a man you know nothing about?” Jameson asked another day.

“The same way,” Hanna nearly snarled—she had been saying good-byes all the morning—“I negotiated with the People on Zeig-Daru. And with Rubee and Awnlee. Do you think I can't assess a human being?”

“It's never been your strong point in the past!” Jameson's temper was frayed, too.

“From what I remember about the
Pavonis Queen,
there won't be
time
to negotiate. You can't negotiate when you're full of sleepygas!”

“He has left Valentine again. His offices there say he may
be away some time. He filed no flight plan; Valentine does not require the filing of flight plans by private pilots. You have never met anyone like him before.”

“There are not that many varieties of true-humans.”

“He was a Registered Friend at seventeen. He must have known every worst thing there is to know about men, yes, both men and women, before he was twenty-one. He put much of his earnings into education, and saved the rest: an aberration in a Friend. He also cultivated extralegal contacts from the day he came to Valentine. When he met Tonson—who made several trips to Valentine in those years, and was Kristofik's client—he was ready. I&S believes he had been searching for such an opportunity from the start. You need to know about him, Hanna.”

“I do not.” She smiled; not a pretty smile; savage. “I'd like to meet him, though. He'd be a refreshing change, don't you think? I have some calls to make. If I come see you it will be from curiosity.”

Jameson's smile was not pleasant either. “I don't care about your motives. Just do it.”

“I
hope that when relations are established and I can come home, I can come back to the House and do my work for Koroth. I have worked so much for the Polity that I have been useless at home. If I cannot end it, perhaps I should leave the House altogether. If you find out where my mother is, would you please tell her I love her? And say good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye.”

Something tickled the far reaches of Michael's memory from time to time.
The Rose.
He could almost remember something it meant. When he repeated the phrase it had an edge to it, as if there were connotations buried in his mind that distorted the common flower name.

He might have started a search program for The Rose as soon as Gian left, but the general access information networks would have a billion references to roses. He did not even know what category to start with.

In the night he woke to a thought that stopped his breath: might The Rose be one of the things he could not remember, the whole reason for the search for the many-named man?

But then he started breathing again. He was certain that wherever he had heard of The Rose, it had been recently; part of his adulthood, at least.

The next day he searched a few classes at random. Planets?—he had never heard of one so named, but it might be a variant or the local name for a world known officially as something else. It might be a star or a satellite or an asteroid. But it was not, or so the networks told him.

“Spaceships?” said Theo, and got a quick response, and tied up data retrieval the rest of the day tracking down forty-two vessels named
Rose,
none of which were likely to have anything to do with the man Michael wanted.

“People,” Shen suggested the morning after that.

“Bars,” said Theo wistfully.

“I don't think we're getting anywhere,” Michael said.

He got them back to work, with some difficulty—it was this week's day for an army of housekeepers and groundskeepers to descend on the estate and impose order on it—and tried to work himself. He had investments to look after. It was hard to keep his mind on them, though, and anyway he was not necessary to their success.

“In fact,” said the man who managed most of them, “I was looking forward to that long trip you were talking about.”

Michael smiled at the dark face on the telescreen. “I just couldn't stay away, Kareem. I'll leave again; any day now.”

“The sooner the better!”

Shen was nearby, taking a break from haranguing gardeners. When Kareem Mar-Kize's face disappeared, she said, “Not so.”

“What's not so?”

“Better. Not so.” She glided closer, stood over him, leaned over and poked a rigid finger into his belly. The flesh did not yield, but she said, “Soft.”

“I am not.”

“Lived good too long. Baby girls, stray cats—”

“Like you.”

“Like me. Listen, that Gian, say he knew more. Call that an answer? You want answers? Ways to get 'em. One way or another.”

“I know Valentine. I know how he thinks. Go away and let
me
think.”

The thing he was trying to remember twitched at intervals through the day. Theo and Shen stayed away. The animals of the house came one by one to doze in the warm afternoon. None were native to Valentine; humanity's bonds with its pets stretched back beyond recorded history, and humans had not been on Valentine long enough to breed anything native into something that could be loved. But dogs lay at Michael's feet, cats stalked through the shade, a kitten slept on his knee; presently a F'thalian tourmaline, an exotic abandoned by some human visitor to Valentine, inched up his arm and perched on his shoulder. Later Lise, too, came to the open-air study where he watched the sun and shadows. She stayed some distance from him, curled in a chair with a reader in her lap that showed pictures of pretty clothes. She did not say a word and it was impossible to guess what she thought. He supposed she was occupied with new plans for ravaging his credit, to which he had given her access; the string of deliveries, having driven Shen nearly mad, had tapered off, but probably not for long. Lise had not wanted to live with Flora, she refused with lamentations to be parted from Michael, and was on her way to becoming a permanent member of the household.

The sun finished its morning arc and the shadows grew long. The blossoms of the trees Gian had seen only in darkness blazed brighter in the slanting light. They were hardly more colorful than the flowers mounded at their feet: D'neeran millefleurs, difficult to grow most places, but here showing their native bent for taking over everything around them. They were so much a fixture that most days Michael scarcely saw them. But it was the millefleurs—little known outside their home, obscure symbols of a place off traveled paths—that gave him the idea.

In the evening he went back to the computer and specified a search. He wrote: “Subject—human settlements, associated features, geographical or social, Standard or colloquial terminology. Exclude Earth. Exclude all cities above population 100,000. Exclude all official place names. Mark: Rose. Search.”