I come. I come to you—
She heard herself with terror. N.S. Havock filled her eyes. Her hand moved toward a key and Roly, who did not want to die, cried, “You’re too good at this!” But still her hand crept on to the last thing she would ever touch. “You’re mad!” Dorista said and seized the dreaming hand but it seemed she had gone on: dust of Clara and, yes, her people dust—what waited past that end? The whisper said: We wait.
She shouted and the shout woke her up. She sat up shakily, sweating.
(“But you were saved,” Peng said reasonably. “The Interworld Fleet, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Heavy cruisers. The Willowmeade under Tirel—I remember Willowmeade—”
“These dreams, then. Do you want to die?”
“Me?” she said with disbelief.
“What else?”
“If they come from outside—”
“They don’t come from outside,” he said.)
She said out loud, “It’s the drugs.”
The words fell into the cabin’s dead air without conviction.
She turned over and pushed her face into the thin blanket that covered her bunk. Her thoughts shot off in all directions: the numbers danced in the puzzled fog and Erik’s fear and unkindness underlay it all. If only she could talk to Iledra— really talk to her, not record a message that would be censored anyway and wait for a reply to clear Earth. Or to her mother; but Cassie had taken up with a mood poet and gone to live on a beach in the tropics.
The thing that pulled her thoughts in all directions was something she did not want to think about. It had been easy to avoid, with the dreams gone and the stimulants at work.
Suddenly she wanted very badly to go to the conference, to find out what somebody else thought. The heads out here were numbed with drugs and anticlimax. What would the outsiders say? What did the omnipresent Jameson think of the mire his pet project had gotten into? Maybe he knew what was going on. Maybe somebody would say something that would make it unnecessary for her to think about her scraps of surmise. If she went, would Erik throw her out in front of all those important people? What would be the harm in just listening?
She reached out and turned out the light, and sought the greenish glow of a chronometer across the room.
The conference would begin in thirty minutes.
In forty she would go.
…and knew. Found today
found yesterday
found at last
tomorrow ends
today…
Wait.
Watch.
Wait…
It was more than an hour before she stood outside the door and stared at it as if she could see through it.
She had fallen asleep again, just for a little while, and waked feeling profoundly uneasy. Had she had the dream, or not? She couldn’t have; she hadn’t had it since Endeavor’s frustrating chase began; but in her fitful nap it had returned to memory at least, and now it haunted her and teased her as if something known yet not known hovered waiting for a word to make it real.
The polished door showed her nothing but her own reflection: thinner than ever, the dark blue eyes too big, her hair a shaggy mane. She ran both hands through it to tame it, but she did not move yet to open the door. She heard nothing behind it and reached through the wall into mist. There were too many people thinking unfocused thoughts; they slipped from her grasp like the dreams’ unseen thing.
Finally she touched the switch that controlled the door, and it opened.
The room beyond was dark, but in a central blaze of light that seemed to float without foundation, Erik sat at the end of a long table whose other end she could not see. Hirasawa sat at his right and Tamara at his left, and Koster and Brown were in her line of sight. She sensed other presences and all of them, seen and unseen, looked at something hidden by a jutting corner at her left.
She edged into the dark edge of the room, feeling like a spectator at a drama arranged by an invisible director. The wall at her side made an alcove from which she watched in shadow. But what were the actors watching?
A male voice she had never heard before was saying, “—your point, of course, but the project calls for keeping on the move unless you have definite results. You’ve got too much ground to cover to waste time. You’re off course and stretching optimum scheduling now.”
Hanna felt a jolt of anxiety. Marte Koster’s. She knew what Koster would say before the woman spoke, her voice more tranquil than her heart.
“We might stay on course twenty more years without results. Either of the other options would be more acceptable to me than giving up.”
The others murmured programmed agreement—Hanna shook off the thought in irritation.
(The white faces of a F’thalian Hierarchus emerged from the past. The thought of the Hierarchus soared and dipped and dizzily she caught at the flashes of light which were scintillating nodes of intersection, though she could not follow his spirit’s flight.
Observe the water-breathers, he had said. Move a leaflet, so, and they rush eagerly to feed, though on this world to which they were not born they have no prey that moves so. Yet they do it, and their offspring will do it, and thus with all their generations. Thus with thee, Little One—)
She shoved the Hierarchus back into memory with an effort. Damn the drugs, they weren’t working as they were supposed to work, she was more and more easily distracted and divided. Erik was saying, “—a combination of efforts. I think we could do it that quickly; it’s a matter of refining Communications’ data. But you said, sir, that you were opposed to that course of action on grounds other than the time it would require?”
She had heard the voice that answered once before. It was deep and precisely inflected and instantly recognizable. Starr Jameson said, “The likelihood that this system is the home of a star-traveling species is small, gauged by chance alone. The absence of any sign of artificial power generation settles the matter, to my mind.”
Koster said, “We signaled it and somebody answered. Somebody who was breathing down our necks.”
“Quite.” Jameson again. “You were then two and one-half light-years away from—let’s be specific and say from the life-bearing planet of that system. Your data on the planet itself, therefore, is two and one-half years old. Certainly no native species has developed Inspace techniques in that time. The beings who responded to you therefore came from elsewhere—”
“Yes,” Hanna muttered, and froze: how had she known that? She stood in the dark and heard the voice going on, a deep music without meaning, her thoughts paralyzed. She made herself breathe again, and think of what it meant. She knew it; never mind how, for now. She knew it. It meant something—
“—should say they prefer to keep their business there to themselves since they invited you to a meeting not in that stellar system but some distance in an opposite direction. I still agree with Kwomo that you ought not to spend time visiting the system. You might do something with an unmanned probe, if you can do it quickly enough—”
Hanna slid without volition into Koster’s frustration. Marte reached out, reached out, for something unseen she saw slipping away. Her need for comfort was so strong that Hanna moved forward automatically. Her eyes were drawn to the end of the room, visible now, where most of the wall was a video screen that showed Starr Jameson and two other men bigger than life, dominant and unreal. The little group of spectators was tense.
Something nagged at the back of her mind. She ignored Koster, with difficulty, and stopped and dug for it in silence.
Koster was talking again: “—backtrack to our original point of contact? If we got our signals mixed up and they’re looking for us somewhere else, they’ll go back too. There’s been a mistake.”
“Assuming they exist,” said one of the strangers on the screen. “Lieutenant Hweng, are you sure the signal’s source was nearby? Couldn’t it actually have originated within the system, maybe an automatic device set in place long ago? Something impor
tant might have been where you are now and be long gone.”
Tamara said with absolute conviction, “There has been no mistake. The margin of ambiguity was too tight for the origin to be in the system. It was far more clear than ours must have been at reception.”
Koster said, “Then there’s been some kind of accident. We’ve missed each other. They must want to meet us as much as we want to meet them.”
She expanded on the theme, but Hanna was not listening anymore. The receding shadow stood for an instant in the light.
“Oh, they don’t,” Hanna said out loud. “They don’t want us to see them. They don’t.”
After one frozen instant all the heads turned in her direction at once. Someone said from the video screen, “Who is that?”
Hanna did not move. She did not even feel the eyes; she was looking inward, watching pieces slot into place: the dreams and the tracking shadow always just outside her perception, the Dreamdust experiment whose results had reflected no suggestion of hers, the conviction that she had already known Jameson’s theory to be true without knowing, until she heard it, that she knew it. It fit together so simply. It was as simple as—
—as killing Havock would have been.
She shivered and looked up.
Jameson said across fifty light-years, “Would you come into view, please? And identify yourself?”
She stood on the edge of light and saw that Erik’s face was scarlet. His anger was a tangible barrier she would have to push through. Tam watched her with surprise and approval. She concentrated on Tam; the barrier vanished and she stepped into the light.
Erik said tightly, “I’m very sorry for this interruption. Ms. Bassanio wasn’t supposed to be here.”
Jameson said, “The proper title is ‘Lady Hanna,’ is it not? Is that correct?”
She turned to face the screen. She did feel the eyes now, and someone was thinking with sarcasm of her kludge of a title, and someone else was thinking GO AWAY. The faces borrowed from Earth were not half so unfriendly. The man in the center knew exactly who she was. That was odd, but she could not spare much thought for the oddness, because she was still thinking hard and she was frightened. She was not good with words, and she was willing to make a fool of herself by being wrong, but it would be terrible to do it by being right and not being able to explain. WE DON’T WANT YOU, somebody thought, and it stabbed her. Jameson had asked her something but she could not remember what it was and could not answer. Now he was saying, “Would you repeat your remark?” She took a deep breath, trying to tell herself this was no worse than the Arbitration Committee. But it was.
“I said—” She fastened her attention on the video screen. She couldn’t remember what she had said. “I meant maybe Marte is wrong. Maybe they don’t really want to meet us.”
“Nonsense!” Marte Koster said so violently that Hanna jumped. Her hands trembled with self-consciousness, with fatigue, with the impact of Koster’s hostility. She felt an urge to hit Koster’s puffy face.
But Jameson did not look hostile. He did not even look surprised. She concentrated on him with a kind of gratitude.
“It’s not nonsense,” she managed to say. “There’s something wrong about the whole thing. What were the odds against making a contact so soon? I know—I’ve heard—there’s a reason we came this way. I’m not a statistician, but still it only makes sense if they were looking for us too.”
“That’s what I said!” Koster almost rose in her frustration. Hanna would not look at her but felt the movement in her own limbs, which jerked in unwilled sympathy.
She said, “No. No. It’s not the same thing. They might—they might want to do other things besides meet us. They might just want to know where we are. They might want to study us. They’re watching us. I think they’re watching us.”
She did not take her eyes off Jameson. She had never seen so guarded a face in her life. He might have been thinking anything. She waited for him to say something, but it was one of the strangers at his side who said with open skepticism, “Do you have any evidence to support this—this very remarkable hypothesis?”
Hanna glanced at him, but then she looked back at Jameson and said, “I think I do. It’s not objective. It’s not on a readout anywhere. It’s all inside my head. But I started, I started feeling it about the time we sent the first transmission. And it’s come and gone and it’s taken different forms, but I think it’s real.”
She waited for a response. Nothing, for a few seconds that seemed much longer. GET RID OF HER, Koster thought. Then Jameson said, “Go on,” and just as she relaxed in relief, “Please be brief.”
She tried, but it seemed to go on for a long time. It was hard to keep it in order, hard to put it all in words, and she could not show the Polity’s men directly what she meant. They watched her without expression as she talked. Jameson moved only once, to put down the notepad he held, and Hanna stumbled because she heard Koster think savagely: NOT WORTH TAKING NOTES ON! On the wall in far-away Namerica there was a lambent glow as of sunlight reflected from water, and when she noticed it she faltered again. All the Endeavor’s clever design tricks failed, and she was vividly aware that she inhabited a metal container lost in darkness. But she recovered and went on.
She finished, “It has occurred to me that they might be telepaths. If the things I’ve noticed are significant, they have to be. I’m not a telepathic Adept. I couldn’t possibly be aware of a distant non-telepathic presence when I’m surrounded by so many people and—I don’t think even an Adept would be, unless he were deliberately reaching out to something and had a pretty clear idea what it was. That means they must be touching us in some way, though I’m the only one equipped to feel it strongly.”
She thought of Tamara listening always for the voice that did not come, of the goal at the edge of Marte’s sight. She added, “Maybe some of the others feel it a little. But if that’s true, the only possible interpretation is that they have, have gone partway toward contact and are avoiding completing it. For some reason. I don’t have any idea why they would do that. I don’t—I don’t know why it would take the form of something from my own experience. Yes, I do. I mean, that’s because I pattern it unconsciously, because I don’t have the, the templates of their experience. But why it should be that—”
She stopped abruptly, unwilling to approach the question more closely. She had said everything she had to say. There was no reason to go on.
They were waiting for more, however. They waited until Erik said, “Thank you, Ms. Bassanio.”
It was a dismissal, and his voice was rough. He had only gotten angrier while she talked. She looked at him uncertainly.
Jameson said, “Lady Hanna.”
“Yes?”
She looked back at the wall with some anxiety. Nobody up there looked inviting, but it was a better view than Erik’s fury.
“Do you think it would be worthwhile importing an Adept?”
“Why—I don’t know. They’ve got skills I haven’t, of course, but on the other hand….” She pondered.
She must have thought about it too long, because Jameson said patiently, “On the other hand what?”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Adepts don’t have my training. My experience. I mean, I think I’m the only D’neeran who’s been to F’thal, for example, Adept or not. The Adepts I know, they’d have some very interesting mystical things to say about aliens, but it wouldn’t be much use from your point of view. There’s something I could try,” she said, and regretted it instantly.
It was too late, however. Jameson said, “What is that?”
She said unwillingly, “I could try to touch them without the interference. I’d have to be separated from the ship.”
Jameson moved abruptly. No, not abruptly; it was just that her attention was caught because he had been so still until now. He said, “Telepathic reception is not a matter of proximity, I understand.”
“Not really. But practically speaking it’s like—like—”
> She couldn’t find the words. Jameson said, to her surprise, “Like Newtonian physics and Inspace. Direction is a perceptual construct, but things still fall downward.”
“Yes,” she said, understanding him perfectly. “Yes, that’s it.”
“Suppose you were, as you put it, separated from the ship? What then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think,” she added, utterly forgetting propriety, “I would like it much.”
Jameson blinked. Out of the corner of her eye Hanna saw Erik make a violent gesture, instantly controlled.
“Why not?” Jameson said.
Automatically, because it was her custom to let emotion speak for itself, she visualized herself alone in nothingness, knowing the thing that hid behind Nestor’s warships was nearly upon her. The persons around her stirred uncomfortably, and someone made a sound of protest. But Jameson could only hear her words, so she said simply, “I think I would be scared.”
He looked, for the first time, mildly surprised. He surprised her by saying, “How did you feel the first time you made telepathic contact with a F’thalian?”
“What? Why?”
“How did you feel?”
“Well….” She tried to remember. The dizzying sweep of infinite circles was familiar to her now. She couldn’t think of F’thalians without them. But at first it had been like falling, and at every attempt she flinched away until the Hierarchus showed her the circles intersected everywhere, and she would always fall to a momentary resting place.
She said at last, “It was strange. It frightened me.”
“The novelty?” he suggested.
“Well—”
He made a gesture with one human hand that would have meant, if the Hierarchus made it, Similarity of the First Order. She stared at him, disconcerted. How did he know so much about it? Or about her trip to F’thal, for that matter?
The D’neeran Factor Page 7
