The D’neeran Factor (77 page)

“I'll try what Theo said. Try to keep her attention on me, keep her mind focused.”

“Dangerous! What if she lives?”

I don't know,
he started to say, but there was no time. The figure on the bed moved with a moan. Lise whimpered. Nightmare moved in.

*   *   *

Hanna crept through a maze of stone. The People of Zeig-Daru were at her heels; she kicked at a flat-muzzled face. “I am a friend!” she cried. They answered:
Thou hast killed he with whom thou wert bonded, that is one; his spouse, the lady of the dawn, that is two; the persons of his crew, that is four others; the spouses of three of these, altogether nine; likewise he who took thee to selfing and thy close kin Awnlee. That is eleven; oh thou human who communicates with We who differ from humankind!

She called for Jameson, for her mother, for the Lady of Koroth.
Starr, Cassie, Iledra, help me!
she cried, and beat with her fists against stone. The air was hot and close and stifled her. There was no end to the rocky passages.

“We could go somewhere nicer,” someone said cautiously.

The stone diminished; the People receded; there was a blur of light. She was just as hot and the breath on her cheek was scalding. She pushed it away impatiently.

“Think of something nice,” the voice pleaded.

“But what?” she said, or thought she said; she could not have named the language.

The voice said hopefully, “Springtime? Flowers. Raindrops.”

She thought a burst of millefleurs and smiled at their color. Trees she had never seen before arched over them: alien vegetation. She was confused. The stone half-materialized again. She said, “Whose spring? D'neera's, Earth's? Zeig-Daru's or F'thal's? What planet, what place on it, what latitude, where?”

“Pick one.”

Her hands were gritty with dirt; they held a plant with naked mud-caked roots. She set it carefully into the hole she had dug. Its tight-coiled buds were shaded with pink. The slanting springtime afternoon light bathed her house in gold. She patted dirt gently around the plant, anticipating its blooms with pleasure.

“That's better,” the voice said in relief. There was a body to go with it now, rangy and well-knit. The face was pleasant, though it was sometimes a man's and sometimes a boy's. The eyes had vivid flecks of gold.

“I have tangentially conjoined you in past!” she said in F'thalian, and knew that he understood it to mean
Why, I know you!
and knew therefore that she had not said it at all, but thought it.

“So I see,” he answered. “But how?”

“They thought you would attack the
Bird,
” she said, the “they” encompassing I&S, Fleet, Contact, Jameson, Figueiredo, and Rubee and Awnlee.

His shock nearly bowled her over; she clung to the dream, she did not want to fall back into the wilderness of accusing stone.

“Why?” said the voice. “Tell me why they thought that!”

Her house slipped away, though she held on as hard as she could; flat on her back she looked up at a blur of a face. She said weakly, “The computers said so.”

“Computers,” said the voice. “Oh my God, their damned computers!”

She could not find her home again. She had escaped the stone, however. She wandered in the summer of another Home, the People's Home. The lady of the dawn, Hearthkeeper
of a Nearhome, dead these five years, walked with her.
Thou killest my spouse and my self,
Sunrise said,
and whom else? Not the beings of F'thal; but you did not make that contact; it predated you. Fortunate F'thal!

I did what I had to do. Thou wouldst have killed me. He whom we both loved would have done so.

And thy sire and sib-selfing? There also thou didst what must be done, heedless of precautions wise men urged.

Rubee's wishes were fulfilled. I did what he would have me do.

Sunrise laughed. That was an anomaly, the People did not laugh. Therefore Sunrise was not really here and it had to be the fever. And it was, she had been dreaming, she was awake now and trapped in a cube of metal on the
Avalon,
in great pain; she waited in rage and disgust for her clothes to be torn away. The hands had not yet touched her flesh, but she felt them crawl on her body anyway. And screamed, outraged.

“No, please,” implored the voice. It was shaky. One chaste kiss touched her cheek. She held hard to a hand.

It doesn't matter you know I can endure it what I have to do have to do have to do—

“Oh, think of something else!” he begged. There were tears on her cheeks; not her tears. A child sobbed at her side. They were in a spacecraft without a name, which both was and was not the
Avalon.
She turned to the boy although it took all her strength, and put her arms around him.

“It was over long ago,” she said grieving.

“I thought so, too. But it wasn't. In a way it only started later.”

The amber eyes widened. Tears were caught in the long lashes. “You're not supposed to know about that!” he said, more surprised than angry, but she shrank away, he had grown up suddenly and smelled of jungle.

He vanished in a lingering fashion. A blurred outline remained which was somehow palpable to the touch, so that she could hold on to the disappearing arm. There were other voices. She could not understand them, but she heard them:

*   *   *

“You all right?” Shen said through her teeth.

“I think so—”

He tried to move his arm, but Hanna held it fiercely. He moved enough to give his cramped muscles some relief; yet surely he could not have been long in that shadow world. He mumbled, “She's too strong for me.”

“Then stop it,” Shen said, bending close. “Stop it now!”

He had forgotten why he had begun this. The abyss of dream was close, easy to slip into again, and tempting—and suicidal. Some part of him knew that it could strip him of secrets without meaning to, without even wanting to. It was the danger he had avoided for a lifetime. Why, then, was it so seductive?

Brother Martin, all white stone and smoldering eyes: “There is a joy in degradation. The freedom from all rules. Cry to Heaven: I do not care! Let go. Wash away…”

Theo and Shen talked. There were echoes; he heard with two sets of ears. The words had meaning for him, but not for the other personality of which he was so powerfully aware. She seized from him whole and unbroken the meaning she could not sort out for herself.

Shen raged; that was some of the meaning. Theo said, “I don't think there'll be long-term effects. I think it's harmless.”

“Mike? Mike?” whispered Lise. The sound was close. He opened his eyes to a dazzle of light and felt his solid body with surprise. He had thought himself immaterial. Lise hung over him. Her anxiety and fear were blows, channeled by the sick woman.

“Don't be afraid,” he said.

“But I am!” she wailed. “Why don't you just let her die?”

“It's all right, little puss—”

*   *   *

Not for her. Silly. Can't you see she's afraid for you? Aren't you afraid of anything? Weren't you afraid on the
Queen?

“No,” he said. They stood in the docking bay of the
Pavonis Queen.
It was empty and its angles and substance were unreal. Hanna understood that where they were was in fact an engineer's diagram. Every symbol was reproduced on the intangible surfaces. He had a laser pistol in his hand and held it competently, thoughtfully.

“But where did you get the plans?” she said.

“You know how I got them.”

“Why weren't you afraid?”

“What was there to be afraid of?”

“Well—being caught. Of course. Prison or Adjustment. Even death?”

“The Polity never executes anybody.”

“Prison, then?”

“I would have chosen Adjustment. They let you do that.”

“But why? That's death, too.”

“Sure it is. It was worth the risk, that's all.”

“How could it possibly be?”

“Freedom is worth any risk.”

“In theory, yes—” The snow fell outside her house. A fire sang on the hearth. She served tea: a polite accompaniment to polite conversation. He was urbane and relaxed. Too relaxed; his eyes were too knowing; they had seen too much of the other side of civilization.

“The best you can do,” he said, “is choose your own parameters—choose, that is, which game you'll play. What I had in mind required money. I got it, too. Got my choice.”

The glass wall dissolved; snow blew in with a howl. Hanna, teeth chattering, served tea.

“You sit here in this storm and tell me that?” she said.

“I didn't plan the storm,” he said.

The wind cut through her with knives. Hanna stood in a drift of snow. Beyond the long black line of false-oaks, in the direction of D'vornan, the sky was red. She turned to see him bent in agony, cradling his wrecked hands close to his body. “You see it never stopped,” he said. His voice shook with the pain. The glimmering snow parted and a crevice gaped black at their feet, bottomless. She fell to her knees in the snow, weeping; took the twisted hands and kissed them.

“You don't have to do that,” he said.

“I want to. Nobody else ever did it, did they.”

The crevice pulled at them. He knelt before her and they pressed close together, turning their faces from the abyss as if, unseen, it would go away. It did not; it moved under them and they fell gasping, clinging together, through its deeps. They landed not ungently in a blood-red sky filled with shooting stars and long measured howls. Hanna cried out in a nightmare that was not, this time, her own. Black ruins stood stark against a wall of flame. A face leered from the fire: the man she knew as Castillo.

She cried, “What's burning?”

“Everything. My mother. Oh, my poor mother!” He wept again.

“I can't bear this. We have to stop,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, but the tears ran down his cheeks all the same, and she understood that this landscape that was new to her was one he visited only in dreams and never willingly. But he had lived in it. And suffered in it.

“Where are we?”

“I don't know!”

He vanished and the light went with him. “Michael!” she called. “Michael, I'm lost!” And he came to her at once, but now they were in a forest of scarlet plumes which beat together with a sound like rattling bones.

She held to him and said, “The Master's here.”

“He always is,” said the man at her side.

“You know about the Master?”

“I didn't know that's what he was called.”

“I'm tired of him. I don't want it any more.”

“There's a choice?”

“I'm
tired.
I didn't want to kill again, I didn't want to fight, I didn't want to hurt and grieve. I'm tired of pain, I had enough!”

“I know,” he said. “Me, too. Could we help each other?”

They were on another spaceship: “Welcome to
GeeGee,
” he said, she was in his arms and they lay close together; had she taken a lover after all?

“I didn't want that either!” It came out in a strangled cry, but they were still in a place where speech blurred into thought, and he understood.

“You choose what you can and the rest is just there,” he said.

He seemed to know where they were. Hanna did not; she tried to go home and was on the
Bird
with Awnlee dead at her feet.

“I will not do this any more!” she said, and he put his arm around her shoulders. He was concentrated and alert.

“I've been lost a lot,” he said.

“That's good,” she said, because it was preposterously reassuring.

“Why don't we just go home?”

“I don't know where it is,” she said painfully.

“I don't either. We'll find it, though. Let's go see my friends first.”

“But where are they?”

“Here. They always are,” he said, confident. The
Bird
got lighter and lighter, dissolved, and resolved into:

*   *   *

Ordinary light, most extraordinary of all things. Blurred faces floated in it. She turned her head and looked into the amber eyes. They were wary and exhausted. “Hello,” he said, and she felt a great astonishment in him.

She whispered, “Can you control that woman who wanted to kill me? And her apprentice. The little girl.”

“Sometimes.”

“Try.”

He said something to the faces and they retreated. Hanna sank toward sleep. Before she got there she felt him twine around her comfortably, possessively. It felt good.

We have to sleep,
she said.

“Can I dream my own dreams this time?”

It struck her that he was true-human and had no right to accept so equably what had happened. But she answered,
Yes, I think so, good night.

“Good night,” he said. He put his cheek against her hair and fell asleep.