The D’neeran Factor (69 page)

Now detachment was her only wish, though she did not understand why. She only knew that the increasing distance between herself and humankind was not enough. And so she waited restless and impatient and trapped by the murmur of human voices in a space that seemed not empty, but crawling with life.

*   *   *

On one day of the voyage through this busy waste, Rubee called her to the central command module from which he directed the
Bird
's Jumps. This was a circular platform in the center of the circular bridge, bordered by a skeletal structure made of thin columns of light. The light was composed of mathematical symbols that changed rapidly when the
Bird
was in Inspace mode, and Rubee monitored them by eye all at once. When Hanna passed through it to Rubee, the hair on her arms and the back of her neck stood up. In the center of the module a column of golden metal rose from the floor to the height of Rubee's waist. Its top had only two features: a ring of flame-green jewels surrounding a well of darkness, and below that a small indentation.

Hanna asked, “Do you wish me to see a thing, Rubee?” She was fluent in Ellsian now, and no longer used a translator.

“I do,” he said, “and I will have pleasure in your perceiving
it. I wished to do this sooner. But I have not because it is a thing among we three only, you and Awnlee and myself, and we have not been truly alone. The surveillance skills of your people are admirable.”

Hanna laughed out loud. “You are courteous to speak so, Rubee. I do not know if ‘admirable' is the word I would use. But now that we are alone, I will serve you in any way that I can, and it will be an honor to do so.”

“Indeed, part of my intention is to ask you to give a service to me,” he said, “and if you will undertake it, the honor will be mine. Yet also I have in mind a token of friendship between our peoples, but even more a token of the bond among we travelers, and especially the amity between you and my selfing. When I brought him forth on a winter day, I did not know that he would befriend a creature of another star! Therefore in a year I will make the story of the Friendship of Awnlee, and so it will be remembered forever like the friendship of Porsa and Awtell. But this story is not ended yet, and it will not end in my time, for I am no longer young, Awnlee coming to me late. And the service I ask is this: that if it is your fate also to survive Awnlee, you will finish the tale for my people. I would charge you with this; for our friendship is such that if you will, you stand to me as a selfing, and Awnlee's close kin. Will you accept this charge from me?”

“With gratitude, Rubee,” she answered, but she was startled. Uskosians did not take kinship lightly nor speak of it casually; on the contrary. She said uncertainly, “Have I heard more than you have said?”

“You have not,” Rubee said. His fingers rippled with pleasure. “I used those words with deliberation: ‘You stand to me as a selfing.' They are the words of formal adoption in the second degree. Though you may reject my choosing, if you wish,” he added.

“No! I am more honored than I can say. Yet I did not expect this, sire.”

“No one will expect it because it is new,” he said with some complacency. “I do not know what my people will think. You will be a citizen of Ell now, though an alien, and it will be interesting to hear what will be said. Perhaps they will say: if Rubee wished to adopt a selfing, could he not have chosen a person of our world? It is known among my
friends and farther kin that I will bring forth no more selfings, to my sorrow, and that I have long wished that Awnlee might not be without close kin. It is an old loneliness for him, and for myself as well; and who better to assuage it than one who shares with us what no one else of any race will share? By that I mean the circumstances of our meeting, which had great significance for those of both our worlds, and this our journeying together. And perhaps in time you will think of this, and have less loneliness, too; you, the ever-homeless traveler.”

Hanna stared at him.
The ever-homeless traveler
—she wanted to say,
Rubee, isn't that going a little far?
She had a home, D'neera was her home, she had a house upon it near a lake in a cold climate—

A house cared for by others, a house in which she could not remember where the light switches were.

Her hand went slowly to the opal at her throat. The occasion surely called for an exchange of gifts, as most Uskosian occasions did. But she had never been fond of having many personal possessions, and in the last years she had left behind those she had one by one, so that all she had of her own on the
Far-Flying Bird
was the jewel Jameson had given her.

She said, “Sire, I give you all my gratitude, and I would gift you with treasure; but this is all I have. And it signifies a bond that was broken.”

“Then we will defer gifting,” he said. “I will own with pleasure whatever you choose to give when the time is convenient; but indeed, I cannot give you now what I wish to give, because it cannot yet be spared.”

He bent and touched the green jewels on the column between them. “Look!” he said.

She came around the column to stand beside him. He touched the darkness centered in the stones and she saw that its surface was not, as she had supposed, a miniature screen for electronic display, but a transparent covering over blackness. She leaned closer, and looked into an infinite depth clouded by silver webs whose threads appeared and disappeared at random and directed the eye to—where?—she could not tell, and she could not take her eyes from them. They were beautiful, and cold.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“It is the visible aspect of a confluence of dimensions. There are eleven at least; no doubt there are more.”

The remote lights absorbed her. “I do not understand…”

“It is a portion of what you call Inspace,” Rubee said.

“Of Inspace…?” Hanna looked up, with some difficulty; the depth attracted her powerfully. She said, “How can this be?”

He was proud, and pleased by her wonder. He said, “I have learned that the making-visible of the confluence of dimensions is not a skill that humans have. We possessed it nearly from the time we learned to distort the dimensions and so cheat the limits of lightspeed. In the designing of the
Far-Flying Bird
it was deemed suitable to place here what you see; but when we have come to my home, I wish it to be yours.”

Hanna said, “Sire, my people have never made a thing like this. We use Inspace, but we have never made any of it visible. The value of this gift is precious beyond words to say, either in your language or in mine. I cannot think of anything I might give you that is not small in comparison.”

“Yet its true significance lies in more than its intrinsic value,” Rubee said, “and I will show you that it is already yours.”

He touched the phenomenon, the ends of his fingers thin as blades. He slipped them under the green jewels and pulled; the stones proved to be fastened to a thin cylinder that came up smoothly from the column. He gave it to Hanna. It was no longer than her hand and felt weightless. It was finely engraved with glittering spirals, and when she looked at it closely she saw that script was woven through the spirals, some of it Standard, some Ellsian. The Standard words said, with many formal flourishes, that Rubee and Awnlee of Ell, on a day aboard the
Far-Flying Bird,
had set into the molecules of this metal a program that marked in the symbols of two planets completion of the course from Uskos to Earth, the homeworld of their honored friend. If they had not assigned Hanna quite the correct birthplace, that did not matter; they regarded Earth as the home-world of all humans, and they were, Hanna supposed, essentially right. She said, “My dear friend, when did you make this?”

“We did not ‘make' it,” he said. “It has been a part of this ship from the beginning of our journey, and we had only to
refine the programming contained in the surface when your Fleet gave us the end of our course. As to the embellishments, and addition of your name, I began them, in our script, soon after you joined us on this ship. Awnlee, when he had learned your script and mathematics, did the remainder; also he entered the course in a form a human ship can read, for your sake, when one day you wish to come to our home, which is yours. The gift you yourself bring to Uskos, the course which is contained in the fillet you wear, proves that the ways of thought of our peoples are not so different. Yet this is not a gift of state, but for your possession only. It is yours although you cannot possess it wholly yet; we stand over the main course computer at this moment, and this is what it reads. But at our journey's end it will be altogether yours, and it will be a memento forever of our travels together, and of our trust which is that of sire and selfing.”

Hanna turned the precious thing slowly in her hands. She could not find words adequate to thank him, and so she touched his thought:
There is nothing like this in the universe. It is unique. It is both yours and mine. I shall have no other comparable gift, ever. And I will remember you forever.

*   *   *

They moved rapidly through the remainder of human space. They followed the route Fleet had given Rubee when he came, a clear, well-charted path, though first Hanna had been rushed to meet him so that a telepath could examine his thought for hostility or hidden motives. After that the Fleet vessels surrounding the
Bird
had become in fact what they pretended to be at first: the escort of an honored guest.

Hanna resumed her restless tours of the
Bird
and counted the Jumps and the good-byes, checking them off against an invisible list in her mind. When no more were left, it would mean escape. Among columns of crystal and silver in the
Bird
's engineering section she asked:
Escape from what?
And answered the questions in the banner-bright lounge where Jameson had met her some weeks before:
From Starr. From humankind and its rules and demands.

She did not know why this was so. Perhaps she only needed a vacation. Perhaps she ought to have gone to Valentine.
With Rubee and Awnlee in tow?—the thought of the stately Rubee astray on Valentine made her laugh. But laughter left her quickly. The
Bird
seemed hotter in the “nights,” and she slept badly. The list of Jumps and farewells dwindled each hour.

On the last day there was a final farewell from Lancaster. After that the messages stopped, except the routine transmissions from Fleet stations monitoring the
Bird
's progress. They had come to the edge of the greater gulf, past which all was unknown, except for the thin thread of their course and Uskos' small sphere of space at the end.

Here they paused for final systems checks. The light of the command module faded; the free-standing columns of numbers dimmed. Rubee and the
Bird
and the voices of Fleet technicians talked together, examining life support, servomechanisms, data banks, plasma engines, navigation, course computation, quantum-dimensional mechanics; they went over all of it again and again.

While that went on, Hanna paced, unable either to be still or to leave the bridge. Apart from the central module, the bridge was not exotic to human eyes. The predominant color was a soothing cream. The interior semicircle was thick with displays and work terminals all along the wall; the exterior curve was transparent, so that those on the bridge always could see, in a sense, where they were going. Hanna passed back and forth behind the padded benches that rimmed this section of the circle, and kept looking out, looking Outside. The
Bird
pointed in the direction of its next Jump. Already far behind it lay a relay whose number no one used any longer. In conversations with Fleet it was Omega, the last, the end; Uskosian tongues turned the word into Oneba. The vagaries of space-time made it safe for the first Jump past Omega to be long: four light-weeks, a liberal beginning for their journey. If its liberality could be taken as an omen it could mean, in Uskosian terms, that the journey was not discouraged.

But it would be a Jump into silence. From the next position an Inspace communication would stretch beyond its limit and never reach Omega. Radio or microwave or laser communications would get there—but not until four weeks after they were transmitted. Hanna felt that she looked toward a final, outer limit, into a place where the ubiquitous
voices of humankind did not go. Somewhere ahead was an invisible but real barrier. Perhaps she was not the first to pass it here. Perhaps long ago in the great exodus from Earth, some ill-prepared colonists had gone this way. But if so, no one had ever heard of them again. They had vanished into the great silence.

She shivered at the thought in spite of the warmth of the
Bird,
and rubbed her bare arms. There was a movement at her side; Awnlee joined her just as the hum of the
Bird
's Inspace mode began. The air sang with it, the floor, the walls. Through the clear sound a last human voice rang through the
Bird:
“Logoff from Omega complete. Fair winds attend you!”—and then it was gone.

Her heart lifted. She took a deep breath and came closer to Rubee. The light about him was brilliant; through it she saw dimly that his hand hovered above the golden column. When he touched it, the Jump would come. He seemed to have grown larger, though that was a trick of her eyes and mind, for he was the same stumpy personage she had known all the time, not much taller than herself. But now he was where he belonged. He did not need to be careful and diplomatic; without any diminishing of his native courtesy, he had become the pure traveler, the master of starflight, himself, the essential Rubee. Hanna knew that look. She had seen it in certain human beings, and in the Explorers of Zeig-Daru. The wind was up, and Erell trimmed the sails.

At the proper time by his reckoning, and not a moment sooner, Rubee said to the
Far-Flying Bird
in his own language: “Prepare to ride the gales of the stars!”