The D’neeran Factor (97 page)

“That is true, and so I have told Michael. Yet it is not enough, Norsa. And I do not know what to do, for he continues to grow worse.”

*   *   *

The clouds had moved in all the morning, and the wind was fresh, lifting Michael's hair and chilling his bare shoulders. The musicians of the city looked at the sky and tested the wind with dampened fingers. They gave Michael small pieces of paper on which they had written names, places, contact codes: “In the event we do not return,” they said, “for autumn is early; yet song flourishes even in winter in warmer climes.”

So he sang a troubadour's song for them:

“What does that mean?” they asked when he was done, and he translated loosely:

“Good-bye my companions, good-bye until spring; I have naught to live on, not a thing; only air unless I get the favor of a king!”

“Ah, that is a good song,” they said, and went away singing it.

The tiny trees still clung to the branches of their sires, stubborn in the gusting wind. There was dampness in it. The vehicle which had brought Michael and Gaaf had gone home, according to custom. They would have to walk whether the rain caught them or not. So they set out through the city with the wind blowing about their ears, for once without the interested participation of spectators who had all withdrawn to await the storm; and they walked through the back ways, the lesser-known paths Michael discovered instinctively. Presently they were walking through a part of the town they had not seen before: by the side of a moss-choked stream that waited for the cataracts of autumn storms.

The heavy vegetable smell of the moss was familiar. Michael had not smelled it for a long time. He avoided the places where it might assault him.

Haven, supposed to be, like this; from myself that time, though. Wasted, worthless human being: what did it? The girl I didn't know in the morning, that last night on Colony One? Crying all night on my pillow, didn't know till I climbed up in the morning from the dead. What I wanted was dope; what was I using then? Saw the bruises on her face, said what the hell did you do. She said: You did it. You did it. You.

He wanted to get away from the stream, but they had followed it into a cut between high banks, smoothly made of concrete and offering no way out. The wind played above, outside this narrow gorge where the air sat heavy and sullen over the dwindling, stinking thread of water.

Find me a place, Kareem. A place to go. Please. No people. No dope…And he did, but he hadn't seen it. Hot and dry and the stream drying up so the smell came in—

“Here,” he said quietly. “This way, Henrik.” Steps cut into the wall led straight up, a hard climb though the bank was lower; near the top a burst of wind shook them. Gaaf swayed and Michael put out a hand to steady him. At the top the monumental buildings of the city stood over them, perpetually falling if you looked up too long. The wind slapped their faces, and then the rain; only a few drops, so far.

Henrick Gaaf said clearly, “We're going to get wet.”

Michael was silent with surprise. He stole a look at Gaaf's face. It was different, intelligent,
like a bright rat,
Michael thought, and disliked himself for it.

“It's a long way home,” he said.

“Home,” Gaaf said in a curious tone.

They walked up the broad street in the wind, in silence. The moss smell was gone, and the memories that had threatened to come into the light had diminished.
This is what I get for not running,
he thought, and put the memories back where they belonged, with an effort.

Think of something else
—

*   *   *

Hanna had gone home early to avoid the rain, to her chauffeur's relief. She went to the room where she worked each evening, distilling the observations of the day, and settled to work. The first patter of raindrops swelled to a steady susurration. Thunder growled, but she did not hear it. The room had been dim when she came in, and slowly it got darker.
The self-contained processing unit shone with its own light, and she did not stop to illuminate the room. A smell of damp earth came in through the windows.

“Today,” she wrote, “I learned through debate with the Philosophers Guild that there is already a movement toward consensus on the significance of this world's very first contact with humans, meaning not Rubee's and Awnlee's journey to our space, but the visit Castillo and his men made here in the
Avalon.
‘That's easy,' they said. ‘That was obviously the Master's hand.'

“I asked how they knew. The explanation was complicated, but in essence it seemed to be that this visit was of the same order as natural disaster. It is clear that at the deepest level, Uskos is less concerned with cause than with effect, and the stance, in short, is phenomenological. Still, this is only an explicit, intellectual acceptance of common experience, a shift in emphasis from the human view, which is inclined to subordinate the event to its explanation. There is less detachment from primal experience—”

Hanna had been concentrating intently. Something like a prick between her shoulder blades distracted her. As soon as she was aware of it, it drilled into her back. She leapt up, spun around: pure reflex.

“Henrik…” She sighed, relaxing. “I didn't know you'd come home. You startled me.”

Gaaf did not answer. He stood and looked at her. She thought suddenly that he had been there for some time, staring at her head framed in light.
A fine target,
she thought absurdly, but it was not so absurd. She had a faint vision of what he saw now. The light fell on her weakly; the curves of her body in its scanty summer clothing were pronounced to his eyes.

He walked toward her, his purpose clear. She took a step backward and bumped into the wall. He reached for her and she said, “Henrik, don't,” and called, worried:
Mike!
She was not afraid of Gaaf, she could extricate herself from the unfortunate scene easily enough, but she might not be able to do it without injuring him. Gaaf's hands were soft and sticky as slugs and not very strong. He pressed and smothered her against the wall, yet there was no threat in him. He embraced her without violence nor any understanding of her reluctance. Blind compulsion propelled
him, some semblance of love, and she did not want to hurt him either physically or in thought. She managed to keep her mouth away from his, managed to reasonably confine his hands. “No, no,” she said, “I don't like this, Henrik, I don't want to do this. Please stop, Henrik. Please stop!”
Mike!
she said again, urgently; Gaaf slobbered at her neck; she felt sick. “Please, Henrik, stop. I don't want to hurt you. Please!”

Michael came into the room in a hurry, heard Gaaf's breathing, saw the shapes struggling in the dark. “No, please!” he heard Hanna say. He crossed the room, got hold of Gaaf's right arm, lifted him without effort, and threw him at a blank spot on the wall. Gaaf hit it with a thud, slid down it, and was still.

Hanna cried, “Why did you do that!” and plunged past Michael before he could answer. She flew to Gaaf and knelt beside him, feeling his pulse, running her hands over him, testing for broken bones.

Michael said stupidly, “Huh?”

“If I'd wanted to break his neck, I could've done that myself!”

“But—”

“Did you have to be so rough?”

He swore softly at her back, at the unfairness. Gaaf was conscious and she cradled his head against her breast, no doubt, Michael thought, to Henrik's entire satisfaction. He went to them and squatted beside Hanna to apologize and help Gaaf up. But when he put out his hand, Gaaf whimpered and cringed away.

“Don't hurt me,” he wept, “don't hurt me, I won't do it, I won't do anything—”

The sound, the shadow-man, the weak movement in the dark came together; Michael was somewhere else.

I
beg you,
said the body in the dark at his feet, bereft of pride, bereft of triumph;
I
won't do it, I swear! Don't hurt me, don't do it, I beg, let me live—!

Hands grabbed his feet and he kicked them. Another grasped his arm; he threw it off. He did not remember getting through the dark house. But he was in the garden, standing shaking among the drenched flowers. The rain fell and fell, whispering old pleas.

Hanna came after him at once. She came up behind him
and put her arms around him, and set her face against his back.

She said softly, “I saw that.”

The warmth at his back soaked into his spine, but he was rigid. She felt for his hands and he let her have them.

She said dreamily, “It was dark. Dark and lonely. It was a long time ago. But it was you. Not a child. You.”

He shook his head as if he could deny it, and rain ran from his hair into his eyes.

“I didn't want to hurt him,” he said in someone else's voice, and Hanna answered in a sleepy trance-tone, the oracle's voice: “Who?”

His voice shook. “This is all for nothing, because of what I did. All you've done won't be enough. But I had to do it. I did what I had to do.”

“I know. I know…”

The voice was infinitely tender. The softness underfoot, the universal grasses that held worlds together, gave way. He closed his eyes to stop this world from heaving and threatening to crack. But waves ran through the ground as if something alive writhed underneath it. Nothing was solid: nothing except the arms around his waist.

She said, “You are the most gentle human being I have ever known.”

It seemed to him mockery. But presently he detached himself from Hanna and turned to face her.

“C'mon,” he said. “They think we don't have the sense to come in out of the rain. Maybe they're right.”

In the gray light her face was remote and beautiful. “When was it?” she said.

“A long time ago,” he said. “When I was somebody else.”

They walked back toward the house together, and he began to tell her about it.

The planning and execution of the robbery of the
Pavonis Queen
had not been easy. Toward the end the details took so much time that there was no time for sleep. Afterward Michael personally dumped the body of the single casualty into space. In those days his face seldom showed what he really thought, and he performed the task without visible emotion. But when it was all over he was very tired. He was
(best guess) twenty-three or twenty-four, and he had never been tired before.

It didn't matter, because there was nothing he had to do. For the first time in his life he had nothing to reach for. He hired Kareem to look after the money and make it grow—and was lucky, luckier than his ignorance deserved and luckier than he knew at the time, because Kareem was an honest man.

There was plenty of money to start with, even after the others were paid off, and Kareem started making it increase at once.

Michael had nothing to do but spend it. At first he did not know what to spend it on, but he found out quickly what to buy: any damn thing he wanted.

But it wasn't the way he had thought it would be. He bought fine clothes—and did not recognize himself in them. He was not vain, having come to regard his looks only as a marketable commodity, but he was a realist, and he knew he required no adornment. He gave that up and bought meals that would cost an ordinary workman a week's wages; but they didn't fill him up any better or longer than plain food. He bought places to live and didn't live in them because they always seemed empty no matter how many people came to them (and people came, all right, but he looked around sometimes and saw that they were strangers). Inevitably he tired of the fine homes, and they went on the block. Kareem saw to it that they went for a profit. And Michael bought expensive machines and abandoned them, bought expensive women and abandoned them, bought expensive art—and kept that longer, at least, though years later, acting from an obscure desire for simplicity, he began to rid himself even of that. At a profit.

He didn't buy friends. He bought companions, but he always knew exactly what he was getting for his cash.

He got tired of buying things. There had to be more to freedom that that. So he behaved like a free man; he traveled. He went to all the worlds of the Polity, no longer a smiling guest, someone's pampered toy, but alone (except when he bought a woman to take along). He went to all the great capitals. He found nothing in them except more things to buy.

But that ceased to concern him because he came to see
all things through a thickening haze. He drank a good deal, and became indifferent to the quality of what he drank. He was young and strong and the drink was of little consequence. But the mainstream of Polity culture had been notoriously drug-soaked for the last century, and that was a different matter. There was a dizzying spectrum of choices, and Michael, who could afford anything he wanted, started at one end of it and worked his way steadily toward the other. He didn't know what he would do after he got there. But probably he would never get there. He mixed compounds with abandon, for one thing. For another, he developed a penchant for the illegal, which made it a risky business not only from the point of view of the law wherever he happened to be, but also because of the unpredictability of what he injected, ingested, or otherwise absorbed. And then when he was spaced, he got into fights. Somebody would kill him someday, or he would kill somebody else, and that would be the end of it.