The D’neeran Factor (68 page)

Michael said, “Come on, Theo. Let's go see if we can find somebody to talk to.”

“Looks nasty.
I
should go,” Shen said.

“They're harmless—at least they always have been. I've never done anything to get them mad. I wouldn't take a woman with me, though, not and expect any cooperation.”

“Me,” Lise said softly. She tugged at Michael's arm.

“Not you. Especially not you.”

He detached himself and went with Theo to find winter gear, warmcoats, heated boots. When they left the
Golden Girl,
they still had not seen a single inhabitant. The walk was short but not easy. The
Golden Girl
's landing site was the only flat place among the rocks; a hundred meters from the ship they had to begin climbing over them or skirting them. There was ice underfoot, and stones that turned treacherously. When they passed the first buildings, there were people at last: half a dozen small boys, bundled in black. One held a ball, another a tapering metal rod. Perhaps they had been playing with the objects. Now they stood and stared.

Michael said, “Hello. We come from the Polity. I want to speak to an elder.”

Theo muttered, “Polity?”

“I don't know if they've heard of Valentine. They know about the Polity.”

For a minute there was no reaction at all from the boys. Then one moved; he took off at a dead run into the town.

“Is that an answer?” Theo said.

“I don't know. Maybe. We'll wait.”

They waited a long time. The children did not go back to their game. They stayed where they were and stared. Michael felt a prickly wrongness and tracked it down. He got on well with children and knew their ways; he and Theo could not have come in such a way to another such isolated place without being surrounded by children and besieged with questions when the first shyness wore off. But not here.

The boy who had run away did not come back. An adult came finally, moving without haste through a stony channel that could not be called a street. A cap covered his ears and clung to his skull. He was heavily bearded and dressed, like the children, in a loose black tunic and trousers. There was no warmcoat, though, nor any real protection against the cold. The season would not be cold for him.

He said a word and the children moved away, walking quickly but not running. One disappeared into a house nearby. The others straggled on and vanished among the rocks and structures beyond. The word had been unintelligible; even Standard was changing here, where contact with the linguistic mainstream was so rare.

The man said nothing else. He did not look as if he were going to. Michael had prepared a speech; he made it. He regretted intruding on the peace of the People of the Rose. He would disturb them for no more than a few minutes' time. He wished to join his friend, a red-haired man who might have come here in recent months. The world was large. Might the People of the Rose have word of him? Might they know where he had gone?

The silence when he finished was so long that he wondered if the man had understood him, or, understanding him, would not answer.
Answers one way or another.
He glanced at Theo. It might be necessary to come back, and bring with them Theo's answer kit. And indeed, when the elder had stood for a time in silence, he turned around and walked away.

Theo stared after him. “Hard to carry on a conversation with, isn't he?”

“They weren't this bad when I was here before.”

Michael started after the elder, Theo following. When they had gone a few paces the elder turned. “Begone!” he said.

“I would like to do that,” Michael said. “I intend to. Will
you at least tell me if my friend has been here? I only want,” he added truthfully, “to take him away.”

He had worn no gloves and his hands were cold. He folded them under his arms and waited some more. The elder said finally, “If you do that, the Lord will bless you.”

Michael's heart jumped so far he thought the jolt must show in his face. He heard Theo draw a breath. He said carefully, “He will go as soon as I find him, and so will I. Are there others with him? They won't stay after he goes. And I'll tell the Oversight Service you want them gone.”

The elder thought it over and said, “I am Elder Rann. Come with me.”

They followed him through icy pathways to a building perhaps a little larger than most. Inside there was a bare hall, unheated, with doors on either side. The elder opened one of them. Past it there was a flurry, but when Michael and Theo went in no one was there. A woman of the house, Michael guessed, had slipped away. Inside the room were a table and six hard chairs. There were no ornaments, and no other furniture except a case set against one wall. This held two roses carved in stone, a third of some softer substance, and six books.

“Wait here,” Rann said, and left them.

The room was stuffy, and no sound came into it. “What's he gone for?” Theo said.

“Man-eating dogs,” Michael said solemnly.

“They have those?”

“No. Of course not. They don't have any animals. It's against their beliefs.”

He looked closely at the roses. He had taken the central one to be made of fabric, but now he saw that it was molded from a plastic with the texture of flesh. The lines of the petals were obscenely suggestive. He lifted an eyebrow and took down one of the books, listening for the elder's return. The book was covered in fine linen and had been bound by hand. The pages were handwritten. He opened it and read:

“The one-hundred-twenty-sixth subclass of the sixty-seventh class of knowledge is this. The land which is given by the LORD is HIS and HE gives a small part of it to man. It is the will of the LORD that man encroach not on the land under HIS sway.

“The one-hundred-twenty-seventh subclass of the
sixty-seventh class of knowledge is this. The hand of man is heavy on the land, but less heavy than the hand of the LORD.”

He heard a sound outside the room and shelved the book quickly. The elder came in carrying a long scroll. He put it down on the table and unrolled it: an exquisite hand-drawn map. Michael bent over it and saw that it showed the city. Every shabby building was on it, with a name or a function written neatly from corner to corner, and the gradations of rock were indicated in shades of rose and red.

“You landed here,” Rann said, pointing. “We are now here. They are
here.
” He set a blunt fingertip on a rectangle larger than the rest. It was at the side of the city opposite
GeeGee
's landing site.

Michael said incredulously, “They're in the city?”

“They are not here now. They have gone.”

Gone.
He was paralyzed. One faint lead after another, traces, guesses—where the hell could the trail lead from here? Theo glanced at him anxiously. But Rann said, “They will return. They said they will return. They said if we touch their possessions we will die. We do not want them. I have seen them. There are tawdry, frivolous things and offensive machines. When the Fleet ship comes, it will drive them away. But the ship will not come for one hundred days, and the Lord has sent you to expunge them from his land.”

Michael breathed again. “I will certainly do my best,” he said.

*   *   *

The warehouse was booby-trapped, but at a primitive level that suited B's assessment of the People of the Rose. The safeguards gave Michael and Theo no trouble. Inside was a great empty space, but also, stacked against one wall, a mound of crates. They broke into some of them and found that the “tawdry, frivolous things” were treasures. There was a silver tree that swayed and sang. A portrait of a lady came to life in pearly-rose flesh. When Michael reached out to touch her he felt softness, but saw without surprise that his hand came out her back. A plain black cube when touched produced a symphony of color and sound accompanied within a small radius by gravitational variations that made them dizzy. Near to it a crystalline complex of shapes winked in and out of real existence. There were many more
beautiful things. Nearly all were marked “ones”; the creators of some were known throughout human space.

Against silver-gray walls the wonders stood and moved and sang. He looked at them with wide eyes. Kia's hand pulled him on, but he hung back, staring. It was the first time he had seen beauty like this, and he had no word for it.

“Mike? Mike!”

“Yeah.” A thick sound. His eyes cleared. He was back in the warehouse on Revenge, and Theo stood among the crates, apprehensive. He was pale, and he looked at Michael with something like fear. Michael took a deep breath. The blood-deep rage retreated to the place where it lived, mocking him; frightening him, this time. It had stayed where it was supposed to be for years. Yet in a few hours it had shown itself twice, leaving the bruise on Lise's shoulder, the look on Theo's face. A name hung in his mind:
Kia.
There was nothing else with it. Whatever it meant was gone back deep inside him with the fury.

Theo said slowly, “If he's stored all this here, if it's got to be gone before Oversight comes in a hundred days, do you think…”

They looked at each other. Michael finished it. “That he'll be back soon?”

“We could be close, Mike.”

“Could be. Could be.”

He had the priceless ability to think of one thing at a time. He put everything out of his mind except the coming days.

“We got some luck,” he said. “Now we wait.”

T
he setting forth of the
Far-Flying Bird
was a stately processional. Cheers accompanied it, wrenching Rubee, Awnlee, and Hanna from their seductive detachment. It seemed there were human beings on every bit of rock or ice in the stellar system of Sol, and all of them had something to say. “I did not know there were so
many
of you!” said Rubee, but he had known the number, twenty billion, from the start, and knew that eight billion occupied the home system.

“Talking germs,” Hanna said. It was not her habit to disparage humankind, not even the nontelepathic majority D'neerans called collectively “true-humans”; but she had hoped they were done with this.

She was the more derisive because the bombardment of talk was not necessary. The
Bird
might have Jumped from Lunar orbit directly into deep space, there was no need for this sequence of in-system Jumps, it had been planned for political reasons. Rubee and Awnlee were not to escape without a formal leavetaking after all; only instead of getting a single banquet of platitudes, they were getting it piecemeal.

They were also widely seen. The Polity could not pass up the opportunities for propaganda provided by this quick peace with friendly aliens. Hanna thought the citizens of the Polity worlds must have seen enough of Rubee's and Awnlee's mild lumpy faces, but somebody, somewhere, did not think enough was enough. There were many requests for visual transmissions from the
Bird.
When Hanna played back edited versions culled from assorted newsbeams, she found the public eye was directed rather too much to herself.
Someone discovered where she had gotten the opal that gleamed provocatively between her breasts, which Starr Jameson had given her long before. The old gossip about the two of them revived and was flung about human space all over again, titillating God knew whom. Were true-human lives so dreary that the long-dead affair of an aging man and a demolished woman could be some kind of entertainment? She listened with her lip curled, but she took off the opal.

She did not take off the other thing she wore close round her throat, a worked silver strand that was not a present to Hanna from anyone, but one of the gifts from humankind to the peoples of Uskos. The others were stored in the
Bird
's cargo hold. They were precious works made by human hands and brains, and they were (thought Hanna, who had seen them on one ceremonial occasion) very beautiful. The Uskosians would like them. She liked better the filigree chain that for all its look of delicacy could be used; a thing of practical import she could cup in her palm. It held secrets to be read with the proper tools. It was a key to the Outside, and it traveled to Uskos warmed by her skin, stirred by the surge of her blood.

“I
could
remove it, if I wished, if I tried, if I knew the proper codes,” Awnlee said, his fingers impossibly thin, prying gently at the chain. He teased her to remove it, she could do that, the invisible clasp was keyed to her voice; she laughed and refused, teasing him. The scanners sent the picture to every part of human space.

It seemed to her obscurely that something would change when Sol's system was left behind, but the border was passed, and it was not enough. Voices still fell into the
Bird
like music, men's voices or women's, in Standard speech accented more or less strangely. The accents all together sketched the settlements of man, and all of them were official. Hanna thought:
That is noise.
To escape it she prowled the ship. When the optics were finally blanked, she reclaimed her opal. The hot air of the
Bird
comforted her skin.

Another Jump, another and another: for all the distance the
Bird
ate so quickly, the pace seemed slow to Hanna. Yet once it had been slower, because new. Someone had come this way a first time, without foreknowledge; before Willow
was found; before the Founders of D'neera, fleeing genocide, escaped to a new world; before the ragged bands settled Nestor and Lancaster and created from the dirt and rock of one world a sickness, of the other a pastoral dream.

That was history. Hanna did not care much about history. Starr Jameson had tried without success to teach her its importance, “because if you do not understand it,” he had said, “you will be its blind tool.”

She was then working on Zeig-Daru, coming home to him and Earth at the intervals she herself had prescribed as mandatory for any D'neeran whose work meant being lost in the People. To communicate with the People meant, by definition, giving up the separateness of the self. Hanna said to him: “Contemplation is the luxury of the detached.” She could not be detached and do what she did so successfully that when Rubee and Awnlee came, he begged her to do it again: saturate herself in an alien culture until she was more alien than human.