He did not finish the sentence but smiled at her, teasing. They had been friends for years.
“You know I wouldn’t have you. Good night,” she said.
She watched him leave with Henriette and went to bed, scooping up a comforting and undemanding Kit on the way.
* * *
The first thing Hanna discovered was not about aliens but about herself.
She missed Endeavor’s crew.
She was thousands of kilometers from the ship when it Jumped, and psychologically so separated from it that its vastly greater distance from her after the transit was of little importance. That was not a matter, as Jameson had put it, of proximity; it happened because she had begun detaching herself as soon as Endeavor released the shuttle she piloted. She had gone about Endeavor with a kind of low-grade awareness operating at all times, as naturally as sight and hearing, because that was the way she lived. But it could be shut off, as it was now. She would not use it again in any degree until she sought a specific entity.
The Endeavor made its Jump at oh-three-hundred Standard hours, which Hanna thought of vaguely as pre-dawn. By that time she had mastered the shuttle. It was a simple-minded machine, designed to ferry cargo or, as a lifeboat, provide life support and nothing more for twenty to fifty people for only a few days. It was bare of luxuries. It offered no entertainment. Its only sophisticated features were the anti-gravity plant which let it make planetary landings and provided Earth-normal gravity, and its Inspace communications facility.
Hanna found that Ludo Brown was assigned to monitor her. Just before the Jump she said, “Don’t let the captain forget to set up relays if you go too far away.”
Brown laughed at her. “He won’t forget. If he does, Tamara won’t.”
“Are you going to come back here before the second Jump?”
“We don’t know yet. It doesn’t matter, does it? It wouldn’t take long to get back.”
Hanna knew a course could be retraced very quickly in deep space. Endeavor, having taken four months to come this far, could get home in a few days. Anyone from human space could reach them, now, as quickly—if there was anything worth coming out here for. But her new and unaccustomed isolation weighed on her heavily.
Brown checked with her again after the Jump, and then left her alone for an hour.
Without his voice there was no sound except the whisper of the shuttle’s systems. There was nothing to look at but its no-nonsense gray fittings. The standardized color-coding of its displays shone without change when the lump of matter and energy that was Endeavor had vanished from its sensors.
Hanna sat in the pilot’s module and looked about her nervously. There was no point in wasting time—indeed, the less she was out here the better she would like it.
She consulted the shuttle’s handbook and discovered that she could not order it to turn off its lights; she had to douse them manually. She did so, and then had to turn them back on to find the switch for dimming the displays. She turned the lights off again.
She sat in the dark and looked at the stars and tried to relax.
She had been alone in deep space before. She had piloted a small freighter, by herself, all the way to Willow—partly because she wanted to see Willow and that was a cheap way to get there, and partly for the experience. The experience had been sheer joy. She had broken no new paths, but the currents of the space-time sea were deceptive, and navigating them had given her pleasure and excitement. Each Jump brought a new view of the universe. The solitude had been not fearful but wonderful. It made her think of her ancestors in humankind’s dim morning, piloting organic cockleshells from continent to continent of the mother world in the days before it was mapped, navigating—as she did—by the stars. At times on that voyage she had felt her kinship with them so strongly that her individuality, her self, ceased to matter, and in her divided mind she saw herself only as human and undifferentiated from the species.
It was not a way of self-regarding that D’neera would ever foster. Her efforts to share it had been met with acceptance—but not understanding; and she had ceased to think of it. But she had not forgotten it.
Now she felt no pleasure. She was no far-flung outrider of a species of indomitable explorers, but a single scared being who wished only to retreat to the safety of the herd—for all that it was a herd of just such outriders.
She settled herself as comfortably as she could, and tried to clear her mind as Ling had taught her. This was the first step toward the satya trance of the Adept, wherein body and emotion alike disappeared and the universe took on new guises. But Hanna had not taken that path past its start.
Finally, tentatively, she let herself begin to drift through the field of consciousness that somehow was both inside and outside herself. It was closer kin to Inspace than realspace, its matrix less matter than life. Its essence was unknowable, and only its broadest contours had been sketched; but it was a medium real as air to Hanna and her kind, who used it without fear. Here in peace and solitude she might have touched Tam or Erik or even Iledra without effort, though they were caught in the flux and flow of other concerns and would not know her.
Hanna set the familiar aside, and quested for a shadow and an eye.
There was nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
A sound called her—real sound, made for the ears: Brown’s voice.
“Mmff?” she said, emerging from shadow.
“Endeavor to Shuttle Five—”
“I’m here. Here,” she said, forgetting the proper formula as she broke into the world of speech.
“How you doing?”
“All right. What time is it?”
“Oh-four-thirty. Why?”
“Nothing. That’s all right.”
She had turned out the lights an hour ago. She had not been asleep, only altogether focused on the ancient sense D’neera had brought to new flower. And telepathy, unconstrained by space, played tricks with time also.
“Anything to report?”
“Nothing.”
“All right. I’m signing off for another hour.”
“Ludo?”
“Yes?”
“If I don’t answer right away, yell at me. I’m concentrating.”
“Right.”
Silence again.
She was reluctant to let herself go.
Why? It was utterly peaceful. She had sensed no threat. The shuttle’s sensors showed nothing, absolutely nothing, near her.
She composed herself to try again. She was irritated with herself, and very tired. Perhaps she had been asleep after all; if she had not been, she would certainly fall asleep this time. But in the interval before sleep she would explore again, delicately, for the thing that might be nothing but the shadow of her own death-fear; and if that were all it had ever been, she would again find nothing.
* * *
There was nothing to report at five-thirty, at six-thirty, at seven-thirty.
“I have to get some sleep,” she said then to Brown, meaning unbroken sleep.
It got her an interview with an exasperated Erik.
“You can’t sleep,” he said. “We’ll be ready for another Jump by midday.”
“How far away are they this time, anyway?” It had not occurred to her to ask before.
“No more than two or three light-weeks away. In clear open space. We can get there in a couple of days.”
If, Hanna thought to herself, you drive Navigation like animals. And take unacceptable risks.
“I have to sleep, Erik. I was on boosters for days.”
“Aren’t you still?”
“I stopped them yesterday. I don’t want to take them any more.”
He started to swear at her, and stopped himself. The conversation was being recorded.
He said, “If you can’t stay awake we might as well call it off. You’re not getting anywhere.”
There was no video transmission, but she imagined the look of satisfaction on his face. Her desire to rejoin Endeavor diminished.
“You could make the second Jump,” she said. “How long would you have to be in place before the third?”
“The first approximation is five to seven hours. We’re doing only essential observations. Are you suggesting that you stay where you are until then?”
“Why not?”
“We could use you in Navigation. And, uh, I know it must be very restful for you out there, but it’s no light matter to maroon a crewman in unknown space.”
Hanna smiled for the first time in days. It had not occurred to her to use the experiment to escape the rigors of Navigation. But now that Erik had brought it up, it sounded like a good idea.
“You want to give it enough time, don’t you?” she said.
He was silent. He was imagining, she thought, what he would say if Jameson or Thermstrom suggested he had not been sufficiently conscientious.
“All right,” he said finally. “But we’re collecting you before the third Jump.”
Hanna still was smiling when she went to sleep. It was very peaceful out here. There was more tranquility than she had known on Endeavor for a long time. Her fears were dissolving in it, and for a bonus she was getting, for a moment, a childish and satisfactory revenge.
She slept, and did not dream.
* * *
The change came even before the Endeavor made its second transit, but she did not recognize it at once.
She woke with so strong a sense of being watched that before she was fully awake she was looking over her shoulder into darkness.
There can’t be anybody there, she thought, but her fingers seeking the light controls trembled with a purely primeval fear of what lurked in the dark.
The lights came on and there was nothing. Gray metal stared back at her, unmoving.
She was ashamed of herself. But she left her seat and looked into the shuttle’s bare compartments. She thought of getting into a spacesuit and checking the cargo bay meter by meter, or pressurizing it so it would be accessible to her as long as she was out here.
“There are limits,” she said to herself out loud. Nonetheless she examined the bay with video monitors. And then, cursing herself, the exterior of the shuttle. She was, of course, alone.
The exploration had showed her where survival rations were stored. She gnawed a whole-meal pellet, and then another, with the lights on full. She wondered just what the side effects of quitting booster dope were, and whether she ought to be taking something to compensate for them.
Ludo Brown’s voice said loudly, “You awake?”
“I’m awake,” she said, swallowing crumbs.
“We’re about to Jump again.”
“What time is it?”
“Fourteen hundred hours. Don’t you have a chronometer?”
“I guess so. Somewhere. Why are you still on duty?”
“We all are, dear. Anything happening with you?”
She was not going to say: Yes, I’ve got scared of the dark.
“Nothing.”
“You’re more fortunate than the rest of us. It’s a little trickier out here than we thought. Captain says to tell you you’ve got maybe twelve more hours. He says don’t sleep anymore.”
“Damn right I won’t.”
“What was that?”
“Never mind.”
She was busy with Brown for a little while after the Jump, making sure her communication with Endeavor remained intact. Then the silence closed in again.
She was overfull, cramped, and restless. She prowled the stark control module. The sense of not-aloneness still was with her. If it represented an alien touch, surely she would have dreamed; this must be a product of something else, most likely the treacherous stimdope. There was no point in seeking further for aliens, because there were no aliens there. And she did not want to find them anyway.
But what if they were there?
She dropped into the pilot’s seat and stared uncertainly at the oblong patch of space the port showed her. She had an unaccustomed sense of duty shirked.
She could hear herself say to Iledra: I was frightened, and so I stopped trying.
She pictured Iledra explaining that to Jameson, without whom she would not have been on the Endeavor. Without whom, for that matter—
Whose decision had it been to set aside official policy and tell D’neera’s magistrates where to find the Nestorian attackers? Who had ordered the Interworld Fleet to stand by?
The same man, possibly, who had given her this precious chance; probably against all advice.
“I’ve got to do it,” she said, and made a face at no one.
She turned out the lights again, and closed her eyes.
The aftermath of stimdope vibrated in her veins, but now she was watchful and alert. This time there was no possibility of sleep. She thought of seeking the shadow again, and on an impulse rejected the idea and concentrated instead on her own wariness. If she was really being watched, there must be a watcher.
Slowly, slowly, silence deepened. Here was the kernel of her watchfulness. She closed round it coldly. And here was a thread which she followed out, out, timelessly into a deeper void.
Into the silence fell a single whisper:
Wait. Wait for Us…
Her concentration broke. She straightened, stiff and gasping. She was halfway across the module before she knew she was running away.
She turned and came back as fast, fumbled for the key that would call Endeavor, and stopped just before she touched it.
What the hell was she going to tell them, anyway? That her palms were damp, her heart thudding—and that was all? That she had tasted strangeness, and learned nothing?
She wiped her hands on her coveralls and sat down again. Blindly, urgently, because she had to do it, she tried to recapture her sense of the touch.
Its shape was too foreign to remember.
It fit nothing in her experience; she had not assimilated it; but it had left a trace.
She found herself hunched over as if in pain. Yet no part of her hurt.
The stars were mist against the black of in-between. She remembered nothing of the touch except a pattern of darkness and light. She closed her eyes to see it better and it coalesced into a picture: dark islands that rose from eternal waters.
She was sure of it, and sure also that it had no referent in water and earth. It did not mean the beings were island-dwellers. It had to do with time; time and waiting.
It was not enough. Not nearly enough.
She had to do it right from the beginning.
She composed herself to try again. The air was chilly against her wet skin. She did not want to close her eyes and shut out the starlight. She did it anyway, and was immobilized. She thought in circles round the act of will she had to perform, and could not undertake it.
Yet after a long time—when her breathing had eased and the sweat dried on her skin and her heartbeat dropped to a normal pace—something she almost recognized stirred within her.
It was not curiosity, nor duty. It was darker than either, seductive, unknown. Half in trance she reached for it, and flinched away.
She could not examine it closely. But she let it draw her imperceptibly outward.
There were no whispers. There was only, for eternity, the dark.
A spark of light appeared. It was born of a single photon, and expanded.
It was an eye: the eye of a dream.
Her body vanished. She hung before the eye in a place without form. It knew her: personally, individually, malignantly.
She could escape to her body, to the shuttle, to Endeavor. With all her will she forced herself to stay an instant, and reflected in the eye she saw: serene hearthfires burning trapped living flesh, a glittering detection device become a flying forked spear, the mad wriggle of a severed serpent which was herself, lost barren unlighted worlds tumbling anchorless, the watery lunge of a streamlined shape with a thousand teeth—
Straight at her.
She was pawing at the communications key, l
imp and choking in the dark. She never knew what she said to Ludo Brown, nor how long it took them to come for her. Later she remembered that she had not taken her eyes off the mass sensor till blessed Endeavor appeared; and that they did not believe her when she said it had changed once before.
Chapter 5
“Take a look at that,” Erik said. He pushed a display module at Hanna.
Hanna looked. The central data column, stripped of accessory notations, showed average mass readings over a period of some hours. There was a bulge toward the end of it.
“Is that from the shuttle?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
The bulge had to be Endeavor. She lifted her hands helplessly and said, “So I dreamed it.”
He came around the table and stood behind her. He reached over her shoulder and made an adjustment, and the figures flickered and changed.
“This is the last ten minutes,” he said.
Now there were two bulges, the first much smaller than the second.
Hanna shivered suddenly. “So there was somebody there.”
“There was. And you missed a chance of contact by yelling for help.”
He was profoundly disgusted. Hanna opened her mouth to answer, and shut it again. There was nothing she could say. It was possible that he was right.
Erik turned away and went back to his place. The table in Briefing Room Two was littered with coffee mugs and reference printouts. Everyone who had anything to do with direct contact procedures had been in here in the last few hours, questioning Hanna. She had not been able to satisfy any of them.
Hanna said suddenly, “When did you get this breakdown?”
Erik shrugged. “A long time ago. Half an hour after you came on board, maybe.”
“You let me go on thinking I must have imagined that reading?”
“What difference did it make?”
“It makes a lot of difference to me! I wondered if, if I couldn’t trust my own eyes, what else could I trust?”
“Not much,” he said. “You didn’t get one goddam useful fact. Just a bunch of space-happy hallucinations. They were coming to talk to you and you panicked.”
“You don’t know they were coming to talk to me. They disappeared—” She looked at the mass readings again, to be sure. “They disappeared before you came into realspace. There,” she said, pointing.
The D’neeran Factor Page 9
