The D’neeran Factor (91 page)

The unknown. He chewed the palm of one hand. His head ached.

He thought:
I
can't do it.

He thought of what would happen if he begged Castillo to leave him somewhere, anywhere, in human space.

He would be killed. That's what would happen.

He looked toward the controls of the
Avalon.
He had been in Fleet too long not to know something about them. For centuries the human species' desire for many spacecraft had run head-on into the complexity of interstellar flight, and the result had been standardization. A brave man would hijack the
Avalon
and—

But Gaaf was not a brave man.

The Fleet would come eventually to this world of aliens. They would take him and probe him and punish him for his part in what had happened to the
Far-Flying Bird.

Unless. There was his Fleet record: adequate if not outstanding. There was what he had done for Hanna.

And if the impossible was true? Then there might be more. If it was true.

Desperation gave him a small cunning. He crept toward the controls after all. Trembling, looking over his shoulder, he researched the course to Gadrah.

And there it was, as he had feared but not quite, not really, believed until now: a lonely track past the limits of known space, bumped off the inner edge of the spiral arm that had in it not only Earth and her offspring, but all the habitable worlds supposedly known to any human beings.

Aboard the
Avalon,
standardized, were data storage modules no longer than a finger and a centimeter thick. Gaaf knew where to find them. He put onto one what he wanted to take, and ordered the
Avalon
to forget his tampering.

Then he sat back, quaking and twitching, to wait.

*   *   *

The Treasure Store of Elenstap in the Land of Ell was a fair, proud structure three stories high, with two wings set at angles to the main bulk of the building, which was the older portion. Ell had been essentially at peace for a thousand years, and its people's lively interest in the arts for those thousand years and longer was reflected in the land's Treasure Stores, by which name was meant public treasures that
belonged to all the people who came to admire them. The newer wings of the Store of Elenstap had been constructed to complement the Old Store. They were made of white marble streaked with russet, the marble having come from the same quarry that had supplied the stone for the Old Store. Set into the exterior walls at intervals were palimpsests representing the most important works within, and the representations, though stylized, were masterpieces in their own right. Also the cartouches had been treated with a substance, invisible by day, that absorbed the daylight and shone at night. The Store stood by itself in a grove outside the city, and visitors to Elenstap came there at night to regard a sight no visitor should miss: the radiant images floating in the dark, seemingly unsupported, a catalog in light of the chief treasures of that place.

The
Avalon
remained at Elenstap that night. The crew rejected the hospitality of Elenstap and stayed on board. If the townsfolk or the official party from the City of the Center were offended, they did not say so, and the humans could not read the nonhuman faces or tell what the movements of the heavy bodies said.

At twilight it began to rain. There was a sharp burst of wind and water which declined to a settled drizzle. No one would come to stand outside the Treasure Store that night, though it glowed brightly as ever in the rain.

Before dusk changed fully to night, Castillo began to detail certain plans he had been formulating since the
Avalon's
arrival. Not even Gaaf was surprised by them. But his lack of surprise was of a different order from that of the others. He had made a vague guess at what would be done, deducing it from what Castillo said. The others had not had to guess. There was something that they needed on this world, and it had not been given to them. Therefore they would take it.

Gaaf listened to them talk and they turned into aliens—strange smooth-skinned beings with flexible mouths. This terrified him, and the
Avalon
was very dark. His simple plan for escaping them seemed a hopeless thread. He was afraid they could read his mind, that someone had read it all along, like the woman who ought to have died on the
Avalon.
He even thought he saw her at a corner of the dark room.

Don't give me away!
he begged, but she did not hear him;
she disappeared. He knew she had not really been there, he was not crazy. All the same his body twitched. The Uskosians were no good either, anatomical freaks with muscle in the wrong places. They were the only link he had left to the Polity, though; to real human beings.

The briefing was over and he had not heard a word of it.

In the middle of the night the
Avalon
lifted into the air. It flew straight over Elenstap and came to the Treasure Store, and it pushed fire before it. The end of the new west wing blew away. The
Avalon
hovered at the broken end and the men threw down a ramp to bridge the gap between the ship and the smoky second floor of the Store. Gaaf shoved through the men at the end of the ramp. He did not remember going there. Wales yelled, “You're supposed to be up with Suarez!” but they were in a hurry, they did not have a second to spare, and no one else questioned Gaaf. Castillo looked at him and the pale blue gaze looked through him; then Castillo turned away.

Gaaf prayed to something and ran after the others, across the ramp, fleeing from darkness into the dark.

The others had lights and wore masks to protect them from the dust and smoke. Gaaf had no equipment. He ran in the dark, tripping over broken stones, falling. His clothes ripped, his hands bled; he got up again and ran into a wall. But he fell on it weeping with relief. He fumbled through the dark with his hands on the wall, bumping into things and knocking them over, or bruising himself against heavier objects that would not move. A door opened under his hands and he fell inward into a blacker darkness and the door snapped shut behind him; the air was cleaner here, but he could see nothing and crawled in the blackness, clawing for the door. He found it and crawled out into the smoke again—and saw a light bob as a man ran back toward the ship with something in his hands.

He kept dragging himself along the wall, stumbling and choking. He was dazed, he had forgotten why he was doing this (but he knew he could not go back); it was blind flight propelled by blind hope, but the hope was light years distant where there were human beings. Another door opened, on light this time, and fresher air; Gaaf saw a staircase, and he half-fell down it. The stairs were painted like the rainbow and gracefully railed, lit by lamps shaped like miniature
starbursts, though this way was for emergencies and seldom used. It was pretty, for a nightmare.

He could not read the strange alien signs. But the aliens left nothing to chance, not on a route designed for frightened beings trying to get out. The door that led outside was transparent, the blessed wet night showed through it, and it opened outward as soon as Gaaf fell on it. He stumbled out into the rain. There was a terrible howling somewhere, horrible screams far away but surely louder than any normal throat could make—he did not recognize it as machine noise, fire or disaster control devices racing to the Store of Elenstap and making their ordinary sounds. It seemed that something living and huge and ravening was coming for
him
—

A dark shape passed overhead, accelerating to another target. If Gaaf had been missed from the
Avalon,
no one had bothered looking for him.

He stumbled through the grove of trees with wet branches lashing at his head, and out into the soggy fields.

*   *   *

In the night Gaaf began to understand about the Master of Chaos. Rain pattered on trees he could not see in the dark, and the wind moaned through them. He walked zigzag and blind, falling when stones and other objects turned under his feet, capricious and malevolent. The ground kept falling away or rising up in front of him, so that he moved in a drunken lurch. He could not see anything. He could not even see the lights of Elenstap reflected from the clouds. He did not know if he were walking away from the town or toward it, he went in no direction but randomness.

He kept his right hand in his pocket much of the time, clutching the precious wafer that might buy his life from the Polity. The gold chain was there, too. And maybe she would plead for his freedom as she had pleaded for the aliens' lives. And when she learned of his flight from Castillo and learned of this journey in the dark she would say,
How brave you are, Henrik Gaaf.
The blue eyes would rest on him gently and—

He talked to her in the dark. He talked to his sisters on Co-op also. But they said,
Quite whining, Henrik, shut up and work.

The rain slackened and stopped. After that there were
new noises in the dark as nightbeasts crept from hiding and set about the hunt. There were not so many trees, and then none. The ground was more even and things grew in it in rows which Gaaf followed because it was easier walking that way. Sometimes there were no rows, but solid masses of vegetation that caught at his legs and feet like snapping animals. He stumbled on, wet to the skin, cold and hungry and very tired.

When he could go no farther, he sat down on the ground. He tried to imagine Hanna beside him, the warmth, but he could not. He was too cold.

He fell asleep without knowing it, and when he woke up it was light and an alien bent over him. He yelled and squirmed away from the touch and then he saw that he was surrounded by a ring of them. He began to weep. He wept all the rest of the day; they looked at him without comprehension. There were no translators and they could not talk to him, though they tried; they tried very hard. And they took him back to the City of the Center and put him in a bare locked place, he had not expected anything else, he had not expected anything, and he was passive and only wept; but when they took the wafer of data away from him, he howled so desperately that they gave it back to him again.

A
long space voyage is the ultimate reach of boredom; any Fleet cadet will attest to that. The leaps of starflight pall after a time, the dark outside has no end, and all parts of the universe look the same. Library terminals and holoshows are finite resources; one's companions rub on one's nerves. The journey is not an end, but only a means toward one. Getting there is a state of stasis to be endured, and it seems as if the end will never come.

But there are also people who seek space with passion. With freedom from planets and solid ground comes a freedom like that of the sea. For these persons, where there are no other beings, there can be no obligations. Time is measured not by the tyranny of regulated clocks, but by Jumps; a very different matter, since no two are of the same length, and the exact point of terminus is increasingly hard to predict as routine paths are left behind. For those who absent themselves further from the human race, avoiding use of the relay system, a season in space can be as close to perfect freedom as any human being will get.

In order to take up the course to Uskos, the
Golden Girl
first had to go to Omega.

That was the hard part. Humankind was universally unfriendly, and the sense that it was so grated on everyone but Michael, and the others grated on him.

Theo spent too much time with the newsbeams, helping no one's mood. There was nothing to be heard about Mencken, but there was news from D'neera, since D'neerans talk profusely about everything they know or think they know. The magistrates of D'neera clearly had been lied to. Hanna's message had not been delivered to Lady Koroth,
and the magistrates, in ignorance of the facts, clamored for Hanna. A flower of their civilization, beloved, needed and missed, Lady-Koroth-to-be, dutiful daughter of her House, she could not be spared: the magistrates appealed at large to the Polity and the man it sought. They said Polity clumsiness in trying to trap Michael had caused him to abort, what other reason could there be?—they wanted Hanna too badly to engage in games or duels, there would be no more traps, if only Michael would bring her home where she belonged.

Theo told Michael about this, and told Hanna, too; she got a pinched look around the mouth and disappeared into the room of mirrors. She would not come to Michael's bed and she would not talk about it. He did not know what to do for her and she would not tell him.

One living D'neeran who can keep her mouth shut, and that's the one I get—

Lise was pale and quiet. She had not understood the events at D'neera when they happened, but Theo of the flapping tongue explained. She was outraged. Michael tried for hours to tease the reproach from her eyes. She forgave him finally for trying to abandon her, but in a flood of tears. “Don't do it again!” she cried, and charged into a full-blown tantrum in which he saw, to his horror, imitated elements of the display he had put on three days before. At the height of it Hanna flew out of hiding, cheeks burning, her sensitivity to emotion exacerbated past bearing. She pounced on Lise and shook her; Lise retaliated with fingernails; Michael at the risk of life and limb was about to dive into the melee when Shen, watching with calm interest, caught his arm.

“No harm done,” Shen said.

“What the hell are you saying!”—they rolled on the floor now, spitting.

“See what she's doing. Look.”

And when he made himself be still and look, he saw that Hanna, though her hair nearly stood on end, did nothing more than passively defend herself, blocking blows and guarding the hair Lise pulled.

It did not last long. Lise went limp and cried again and Hanna held her. Michael came up to them cautiously; they paid no attention to him. “I know,” Hanna was saying, “I know, I know, it hurts so much…” She laid her cheek
against Lise's and they cried together. Michael did not know which of too many kinds of abandonment Hanna grieved for—what she had just done to D'neera? What had been done to her in the past?—or Lise either, for that matter. The range of possibilities was chilling. He thought of Claire, Emma, Kareem, the dogs, the cats, the tourmaline faded and dead by now; he was sick. Hanna lifted her tear-stained face. “Come here,” she said, and held out her hand. He sank to the floor with them and they drew him in, and he bowed his head and wept, too, for a good life made at great cost and senselessly destroyed. Whatever happened now, he would not have it again.