The D’neeran Factor (92 page)

*   *   *

In the hours before they came to Omega, Hanna, sleeping in the arbitrary predawn, slipped in and out of slumber. She had discovered that some of the mirrors could be made transparent, and she could look out from this room as she could from Michael's next door. In the absence of artificial light, stars reflected jaggedly everywhere. Each time she opened her eyes that night, she floated in a bath of diamond-dust. It was beautiful, but not restful. It seemed that somewhere another Hanna moved parallel to this same track, approaching Omega with Rubee and Awnlee once more. The voices channeled through Omega bounced off the cradling stars. Nearby was a ship of the Polity; on cue it would come sailing to the ravaged
Bird.

The sense of time slightly askew was very strong. Hours later at Omega it still wrapped her in dream—the kind of dream which makes waking welcome. But this time there was no wait at Omega, no systems checks with Fleet cooperation. “Ready as she'll ever be,” Shen said briefly, when
GeeGee
was on the edge of the long Jump that had marked the
Bird
's end.

“Let's go,” Michael said, and they went,
GeeGee
making the Jump without the histrionics in which Uskosian spacecraft indulged. There was a certain tension in Michael and Shen. It was possible that the
Bird
was still out here somewhere, with official company. She was not; she must have been taken away. There was nothing out here: no people, no relays, no voices, no habitats. Nothing.

GeeGee
clucked away at the calculations preceding the next Jump. Lise, curled against the wall, returned to her absorption
in a doll. She ought to be outgrowing dolls, but this was one of the sort whose appearance could be manipulated in detail. Not long ago it had looked like the pseudo-Zeigans of Hanna's hallucinations, and had suffered a good deal as Lise avenged the fright she had gotten. Now it had human features, light brown skin, and long black hair. Lise worked on making it beautiful, and on making its blue eyes exactly the shade of Hanna's. Shen put her feet up on a control panel and almost smiled. Michael and Theo talked seriously together. Hanna thought that was a good thing; someone had better be serious about this great step into silence. She went closer; they were discussing what to have for dinner.

The dream-cloud of threat vanished from her mind quite suddenly. She went to Michael and waited until Theo went away. Then she said, “I suppose I ought to move in with you.”

“Of course you should,” he said, and that was that.

*   *   *

The beings on the
Far-Flying Bird
had expected to reach Uskos from Omega in approximately five Standard weeks. The
Golden Girl
's capacity for data manipulation was not as great, and for
GeeGee
the trip would take seven weeks. It was a long time to live between the dubious past and the uncertain future.

Michael did not think much about what he had lost. There was nothing he could do about it.

The future was a different matter, but he could do nothing about that either, yet. It would come as it would come. You took the opportunities you had and made more when you could. That was the deal the universe handed you. It was the only one you got.

*   *   *

He liked hearing Hanna talk about futures. They were not futures you would expect from a woman who had tried to kill you with a colloidal disruptor at first sight.

“Before the Polity comes,” she said, “we can move on. There are places out there like D'neera before the Founders came. We could find one and start all over.”

“Inventing fire,” he said wryly, “unless you can recreate technology.”

“I'm a technological idiot. I only know how to make
things work if other beings put them together right. I'm a specialist, you know.”

“How do we start over, then?”

“With babies, of course. What else do you need to start over? Yours and mine. Theo's and Lise's. And Shen—Shen—”

“Shen as a mother doesn't quite—”

“No. No, it doesn't compute. Are you sterile?”

“Not for much longer.”

“Me either. That's all right, then.”

Lise wanted to pilot the
Golden Girl.

“You said even I could fly her alone. You said that.”

“It was true.”

“Teach me, then. You're teaching Hanna.”

“You can't read well enough.”

“But all you do is talk to
Gee!
”

“Not quite. That's not quite enough.”

She said that she would learn to read better if he would teach her about
GeeGee.
At that time she had become interested in remarks Hanna had dropped about the place where they were going. Hanna, to encourage Lise, wrote a lively synopsis of what she had learned about Uskos from Rubee and Awnlee. It began as a primer, but because part of Hanna was a scholar, it was comprehensive. The others read it, too, and talked about it a good deal.

Hanna instructed them: “The first thing to remember is that Uskosians are friendly.”

But Shen said, “Never seen human beings. No reports. First thing we tell 'em is the envoys got murdered. Second thing, we're in a stolen ship, hope Contact never shows up. Stay friendly? Huh.”

“Well. When you put it like that—”

*   *   *

There was a past, too. It could not be excised from the future.

Hanna whispered endearments in four languages, panting. The small fists dug into his back, the little claws of her fingernails nearly pierced his skin. She treated his mouth as her personal property. These moods were like an exorcism, as if past and future could be made to disappear if only the
present was narrowed to sensation. “Darling Michael, sweet Mike—” He kissed her throat and she trembled; he licked droplets of moisture from her breasts and she shivered and sighed, an animal with swollen blank eyes. “Mikhail,” she cried, “Mikhail—!”

He froze so sharply she must feel it, then thought she had not noticed; she closed around him like a vise, strong arms wrapped around his neck, strong legs pinning his hips. The name echoed in his head.

“Never mind,” she said clearly. “Let it go.”

“But—”

The shock got worse as it sank in. She felt him soften, and remarked on his failure coarsely.

“I'm not made of stone,” he said, distracted.

One hand tangled in his hair; the other slipped between them and took up a purposeful caress.

“Where did it come from?” he said.

“I don't know. Not now, darling.”

His cultivated detachment slipped under her slippery hand. “That's right,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

“Right,” he said, it was the last articulate sound he made for some time; he could worry later about the pitfalls of loving a telepath.

Theo studied medical texts. Sometimes he had questions, and each time he started for Control. The first time he went all the way there before he remembered there was nobody to call, and the only library to which he had access was the
Golden Girl
's own. After that he never got out of his seat; but he half-rose, a reader clutched in his hand, more than once.

He also haunted the medlab, which since Michael's purchase of the
Golden Girl
had been used only for analyzing Hanna's blood. He spent hours becoming familiar with the equipment, going back and forth between the electronic instruction manuals and the mechanical and computer controls. After a while, at times, he thought he could use some of it; at other times the equipment laughed at him, if crystal and metal could be said to laugh.

His chief comfort was that all
GeeGee
's passengers were healthy. He had even reimmunized Hanna against Dawkin's
fever—though that might have been the worst thing he could do. Who knew what was waiting on Uskos?

“Nothing,” Hanna said with finality, finding him one day in the medlab; she wandered about, touching polished chrome.

“Why'd the Polity go to so much trouble with you, then?”

“They always overdo the wrong things. Can you deliver babies, Theo?”

He stared at her in disgust. They were at this time approximately halfway through the time to Uskos (rather more than half the distance), and there were long intervals when Hanna and Michael disappeared from the life of the
Golden Girl,
to reappear softened, blurred, and shamelessly devoted. In six years Theo had seen Michael through half a dozen affairs, but nothing like this. There had always been a trace of unwillingness in his surrender before, something withheld; but this woman was affecting his brain, there was more than gonads involved.

She looked at him and he thought she had felt his disgust, but she only smiled in an absentminded way.

“It was because of something that happened with Zeig-Daru,” she said. “There was a cut on my arm. Here.” She showed him the inside of her right forearm. It was smooth and glossy; her skin glowed, these days.

She said, “They finally found out what the infection was, but they never could cure it. They ended up cutting out the whole chunk and regenerating down to the bone. So they decided, when the Uskosians made contact, to be extra careful. But they admitted we're not likely to trade diseases.”

He was relieved to hear her talking in practical terms.

“How'd you get the cut?” he said.

“It was a knife wound,” she said. “But I won. Killed 'em all.”

She smiled at him again and walked out, leaving him gaping.

He pulled himself together and got back to work. If anybody got hurt or sick, he was all they had. That went for all of them, even a bubblebrain who talked in one breath of babies and killing.

They kept a sort of erratic Standard time, and erratic half-regular watches in Control. Michael, as the paid companion
of some traveler in the past, had picked up enough knowledge of spaceflight to obtain pilot's certification for most ships of
GeeGee
's class. Shen had a sound background in military training, and had refreshed her skills with
GeeGee;
she and Michael between them had browbeaten Theo into learning enough to follow
GeeGee
's own precise instructions. That was good enough for the common routes of human space. What
GeeGee
did now was not so easy. There were questions to be answered and decisions to be made. There was also, fortunately, Hanna. She had begun intensive spaceflight training in her teens, she had been a pilot before she was anything else, and she could fly (she said once, casually) anything. The result was that in practice her watch was flexible; it began whenever there was a question and ended when the hard parts were over. She was the acknowledged authority on the journey, and on call all the time.

Her “watch” ended one night near the middle of the night. Theo had taken over in Control, and Shen and Lise were asleep. Hanna rested with Michael in the smaller lounge, which was quite dark. Even the ports were dimmed, so little light entered from the field of stars. Hanna sat at one end of the small room, Michael at the other but not far away. Each was visible to the other only as a shadow. Michael had said something about Uskos, and then they had been silent for a time. As if a couple of meters between them made a difference, Hanna began to think of Michael as she had never thought of him: objectively. He had essentially relinquished command of the
Golden Girl
to her. In the timeless round of their days and nights he was almost a passive presence, anticipating her wishes and meeting all her desires. He was sunlight uncomplicated by shadows; a pattern of simplicity, all surface. It would be easy to think of him as weak.