The D’neeran Factor (78 page)

Watson Sellers was an experienced officer of the Fleet. This was not the first derelict he had boarded, spanning the space between ships in free fall, suited against zero and vacuum; behind him the bulk of a Fleet vessel—
Comet
, this time—and his team strung out in a wavering line; before him a dark hulk whose luck had all been bad.

The
Far-Flying Bird
was not dark, though, and not silent. Uskosians built windows into their spacecraft with abandon; the
Bird
looked from close up all light. And it broadcast a continuous mayday, not the sedate rote of a human spacecraft in trouble, but a frantic shout. A ship this noisy and this bright should not be derelict. It should answer
Comet
's call. It did not even drift or spin; it stood to unmoving, nose lifted toward home as if it smelled the way.

An air lock was open. Sellers already knew that; everyone
on
Comet
knew it. The noise and the light and the lock made them think of old spacemen's tales that had once been seafarers' tales of undamaged vessels found with lights burning, meals cooking, gliding calmly before the wind with no one aboard and nothing to say where everybody had gone.

Sellers had not been on the
Bird
before. He was a man of some aesthetic sense, and when the boarding team broke through he walked through the
Bird
stunned by the sweeping lines that made small spaces look large and large ones vast, and by the palettes of color. Then they came to the bridge and found rags and swollen fleshy bags: Rubee and Awnlee. The
Comet
's skipper heard Sellers grunt inside his helmet and said, “Well?”

“We've found them, ma'am.”

“And?”

“They're dead. That's the aliens; Lady Hanna's not here.”

“Keep looking. How did they die?”

“There are no visible wounds. We need a medical team here.”

He heard her give the order. Then she said, “Getting word to Omega is first priority. Find out as much as you can as quickly as you can, and find Lady Hanna. I shall wait only for a preliminary report before Jumping to Omega. You'll remain there in charge of the investigation until relieved. Understood?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Sellers said. He split up the party to search for Hanna and set off in the direction he had asigned himself. In his helmet he heard the controlled bustle of the
Comet
's bridge. The skipper speculated with her officers on disease; Sellers knew that she was wrong. There was the open air lock, and the aliens had the look of beings who die suddenly and in pain. He listened, unconsciously at first, for sounds besides those transmitted from
Comet.
Then he found himself trying to adjust the audio pickup of his suit and knew what he was doing. The pickups were working fine. There was nothing for them to hear. When the sounds of the
Comet
were gone, complete silence would descend. Sellers thought for the first time in twenty years that he was a long way from home.

Michael drifted in and out of sleep. He had been very tired even before Hanna's hallucinations began, and those had gone on for a long time. In his dreams scenes from Hanna's life and his tumbled together. He thought at first that he saw pictures from his own imagination, made-up events from a life inferred from the dream-truths she had shown him. Later he knew they were real. He had not been to Koroth, but if he were set down in its House, he would know where each corridor led, he would know the women's faces, fair or aged with ironic eyes:
The child has left us.
White whispers of F'thal in crazy-angled chambers:
Poorly the creature gyres!
Polished echoes in emptiness, a deep voice colder than any unhuman's:
Do not ask if I love. What's all must be enough.

Someone dreamed:
I
am lost.
He did not know who dreamed it.

Theo shook him from time to time, talked quietly and went away, full of worry. He ought to tell Theo there was nothing wrong with him, he only needed sleep, there would be time enough for waking. And meanwhile the woman in his arms was a firm anchor to reality, a sensuous burden that differed from the others he had known in feeling just right, tailored to his comfort. Or had they all felt that way in the deep contentment of half-sleep?—perhaps they had. But he could not remember any of them. There was only the tent of warmth he and Hanna made together, a cathedral-space of sufficiency.

But there was the other part of her and what she represented: the implacable hand of the Polity.

The last thought woke him fully. He let go of her, startled.

Don't leave me, please don't leave,
she dreamed, and her longing overwhelmed him. The longing was for somebody else, but that did not matter.
I
am empty, fill me,
she dreamed, a powerful erotic plea; he kissed her throat and touched her, unresisting, unresisted; he nuzzled and nestled into the hollows of breast and flank. His cheeks burned and her skin burned his urgent hands. “Oh, yes!” he whispered, but her memories rose between them. Powerless, hurting, revolted, she felt other hands, and
No!
she said, and “No!” she moaned aloud, so that he separated from her and left her, aching with desire.

He turned his face away and waited until the faint sounds of disturbance ceased and she was quiet. When he looked at her again, she was profoundly asleep.

Jameson found out about the
Far-Flying Bird
from Gil Figueiredo. He got the news late at night, in the dark, and once or twice during the recital he thought he heard echoes of Hanna in the stillness of the house she had loved. Figueiredo's face glared from the white light of a video screen, and he was furious, apportioning blame, assigning some to the commissioners of the Polity for permitting the
Bird
to depart unescorted, some to the Uskosians for their folly. Jameson, it appeared, was exempted. His anxiety was well documented, and the efforts he had made to communicate it to others. But he was appalled when Figueiredo said, “We should have probed Lady Hanna. She's gone. The treasure's gone. She had access to the course. There's an implication of complicity.”

Jameson said bluntly, “You're mad.”

“I'm objective. I don't think you're objective about her.”

Jameson did not argue. He regretted those two spontaneous words; there was no chance of Figueiredo's accusation being taken seriously, and when he found that out he would drop the idea.

Later, in the morning, he tried to reach Edward Vickery, but Vickery had no time for him yet. It was not like the old days when he could reach whomever he wanted whenever he wanted, whether it was convenient for them or not. Now he only learned what was going on at the pleasure of others, no one rushed to tell him anything, no one asked him what to do. He told them all what to do anyway, transmitting urgent memoranda that dealt with approaching Uskos. “Send a mission at once,” he wrote. “There should be no delay in carrying news of an event which the Uskosians will understand as an irruption of Chaos. They will look favorably on an attempt to appproximate, insofar as the event permits, the legend-determined landing date set by Rubee and Awnlee.”

But Vickery finally called him and said there would be no mission until Michael Kristofik had been caught, so that human justice could be displayed to Uskos.

It did not occur even to Jameson that someone besides Kristofik might have been responsible for the rape of the
Bird.
The only objection he made was: “What if you don't catch him?”

“We will. He doesn't know we came up with his name before it happened,” Vickery said with satisfaction, “and he doesn't suspect anything, because he arranged rendezvous with a Rescue craft out of Valentine.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Evidently there was a casualty. He contacted Rescue a day ago with some story about picking up a sick woman somewhere—he wouldn't say where—and we'll have I&S and Fleet personnel aboard the pod when it makes contact.”

“A sick woman?” Jameson said with interest.

“The
Bird
is not a safe environment for human beings. One of his crew probably caught something.”

“It's not that dangerous.” Jameson wondered how much of the material on Uskosian-human biological analogs Vickery had read.

“There were injuries, too. There might have been a fight.
Comet
's gone back to get a report from the team on the
Bird.
We'll know more about it soon.”

“The aliens and Hanna were unarmed.”

“It doesn't have to have been a firefight,” Vickery said impatiently. “Lady Hanna knows unarmed combat, doesn't she? We'll find out when we get him.”

“Valentine has agreed to switching the Rescue craft's crew?”

“Oh, yes. There were token objections. But this is not an internal human affair. This concerns relations with a sovereign nonhuman species. We made it plain we had to have compliance. We mentioned travel sanctions, and that was that.”

Jameson murmured, “I should think so.” Valentine's one-trade economy would fail overnight without the Polity's millions of visitors to its pleasure domes.

After that, acknowledging reality, he stopped urging an immediate expedition to Uskos. He had time to think about Hanna. Michael Kristofik would hardly show himself so quickly if he had not gotten rid of her. Yet it was odd that no one from D'neera had contacted him, Hanna's frantic
mother perhaps, nudged by a daughter's ghostly awareness of impending death, or by the disappearance from the universe of the entity that was Hanna. D'neerans were strange about things like that; they always knew. But it might be that Hanna, in her long absence from home and her increasing detachment from the persons there and elsewhere, had come to maintain such a tenuous place in the hearts of her friends that when she left them altogether, they had not know it.

As for himself: should he not feel something more than concern about relations with Uskos?

Then he realized that he did not believe in Hanna's death, regardless of probability. She was clever and aggressive, he had made her learn a little about Michael Kristofik, and she was amazingly good at staying alive. She did not have as many scruples as a peaceful D'neeran ought to have. The Hanna who had said in the safety of Admin that she did not want to fight again was one person. Hanna alone, out on the edge of law and life, was someone else, as she had proved in the past—though she might not wish to admit it.

He might have loved her better if civilization had sunk deeper than her soft skin. But then she would not have been Hanna.

GeeGee
sang in an archaic tongue with glee, but not much sense:

Michael sat at Hanna's bedside, an invalid himself. The bay horse had a blaze down her nose; on cool days she was frisky, snorted at pockets for sugar, danced when you got on her back, not enough to throw you off, just enough to tease you so that you laughed, and so did she; when she was really in a snit she swerved to trot under low branches, tried to scrape you off and made you duck and yell. He knew the feel of the saddle under his thighs, the reins in his fingers, the partnership of human and beast.