“I’m going by what you said yourself. You thought they were coming to you.”
“Yes,” she said, remembering the lunge of the hungry fish-thing and her mad obsession with the sensors until Endeavor came.
“That’s the only thing you said that made any sense.”
He stared past her. His mouth was set, but he was no longer particularly angry. Hanna had felt his anger die through the hours of debriefing, and it was a relief to her, although she knew the reason. Erik was convinced that he had won whatever battle he thought he was fighting. He thought her too incompetent to threaten his version of the way things ought to be. She had proven herself a failure, and proven him right. Nothing about her could engage his emotions very strongly now.
That was not true of Marte Koster, who had gotten more furious as time went on. Hanna said, “Did you tell Marte about this?”
“Sure.”
“No wonder she was so mad.”
Erik said indifferently, “You might as well get some rest.”
After a minute Hanna got up. Her muscles ached. She was in fact very tired. She also felt, in some way she could not define, injured.
She said, “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m not sure yet. Plant an unmanned beacon and go on to the new locality, probably. Depends on what they say Earthside.”
Hanna looked down at her hands. “I could go out again,” she said.
“No. Nobody’s going to try that again. Don’t ask me why. Not my decision.”
She felt a surge of relief—and on its heels, taking her by surprise, disappointment.
She started to leave without saying anything, and then turned back and said, “When do you want me back in Navigation?”
“You won’t have to worry about Navigation anymore.”
She said uncertainly, “What does that mean?”
“You’re going home. Very quietly. Just as soon as I can get transport out here for you.”
“But—but what about my research?”
He finally looked at her. He said, “You’re wasting your time anyway. Who’s going to take you seriously after the junk you came up with out there?”
“It wasn’t junk! I don’t know what it meant, but it was meaningful!”
“There’s enough computer power working on it to run half the Fleet. If it meant anything we’ll find out. Go to bed.”
“Whose decision was it to get rid of me? I want to talk to him.”
“It’s mine. Don’t waste your time talking. Get out of here. That’s an order.”
She got out.
* * *
Jameson did not speak of Hanna’s adventure to anyone outside the Endeavor Project until the day after it happened, the last thing he wanted being to suggest that he was alarmed. He had been in his office in the early dawn, staring at the analysis of the girl’s report while the mists rose off the gray river and the red sun, despite the early hour, promised a day of sweltering heat. The commissioners of the Polity met each morning, and he did not mention the Endeavor at all until the end of the meeting. He showed the analysis to his colleagues and was pleased when they looked at the masses of question marks, logical branchings and variant interpretations, and shook their heads—all except Katherine Petrov. Petrov was a very old woman, so old that A.S. no longer could give her the appearance of youth; but she was a very alert old woman. She looked around with bright eyes and said that the whole scenario was terrifying.
“Not really, Kate,” Jameson said.
“How can you say that! Spears and cut-up snakes and burnt sacrifices! Do you know what it reminds me of? An evil myth system, the old planting sacrifices—I don’t suppose this girl’s a virgin, is she?”
Peter Struzik spluttered. Struzik represented Earth along with Petrov, under the old rules that gave the mother world two seats on the commission; but he was its president and did not vote, and could afford to find humor in situations that drove the others to frenzy. Petrov looked at him suspiciously and said, “What’s funny now?”
“She’s D’neeran,” Struzik said. “Know the D’neeran definition of a virgin?” He leaned forward, grinning. “A kid too young to know which sex it is. Then it decides it doesn’t matter anyway and goes after anything that moves.”
Petrov snorted, but only to hide a snicker. Jameson disregarded the exchange and said, “That’s just what I mean, Kate. You looked at this data and immediately patterned it in human terms. Lady Hanna is human too. The familiar elements you see are part of her background as well as yours. She did her own patterning here.”
“Perhaps,” Andrella Murphy remarked, “Species X was the origin of the myths.”
She smiled pleasantly at Jameson. Murphy when bored was inclined to flights of fancy and outrageous speculation. Jameson wished he were a telepath himself, so that he could object to her in silence that he did not want any such ideas put into the others’ heads.
He said, “Am I meant to take that seriously, Andrella?”
“I suppose not,” she admitted. “But D’neera was cut off from us for so long—”
“Never completely,” Jameson said, and Petrov said, unexpectedly supporting him, “That wouldn’t matter. The continuity of human culture is so strong, a few hundred years wouldn’t matter. Not even a few thousand when you’re talking about archetypes. The images that come down from before the dawn don’t die. They’re so embedded in all our cultures, they’re nearly inborn.”
Murphy looked rather sadly at the analysis and said, “So what looks like the source of a primal image…”
“Is only another image,” Jameson said. “This is no literal rendering of the content of an alien mind. You’re looking at Lady Hanna’s creation.”
“I wouldn’t like to meet her on a dark night, then.”
“Oh,” Jameson said, “I don’t suppose she’s as bad as all that. It’s not surprising the images she formed are frightening. She told me only hours before the contact that the quality of alienness, so to speak, frightens her. I think she would agree that she inevitably transformed the beings’ thoughts in the act of perceiving them. It’s impossible to disentangle a purely alien element from this combination.”
al-Nimeury said, “What good is it, then?”
Jameson said regretfully, “Not much, I’m afraid. Not immediately. But it was communication, of a sort. It was governed by natural laws. After a few more such instances, perhaps we will begin to understand what those laws are, and form a theory that will make telepaths a useful addition to Endeavor in the future.”
They were all beginning to look bored now. Struzik muttered, “This would make a pretty mess if the public got hold of it.”
“Irrelevant, as long as Alpha and Beta remain secret.”
al-Nimeury said suddenly, “I want to bring that up again. You came out to Co-op and talked the assemblymen into going along with this and nobody knows what’s going on. Co-op’s paying its share and they’ve got a right to know what happens—”
They all began talking at once, except for Murphy, who watched Jameson closely. Arthur Feng was not in the room but on Colony One. His head and shoulders seemed to hang in the air at the foot of the table; there was something wrong at his end, and through the apparition the wall of the room was visible. Jameson saw with satisfaction that something was wrong with the sound now too, and though the wraith’s lips moved, nothing it said was audible.
Jameson let the others talk themselves into keeping the matter under seal. They subsided at last, more or less in agreement. Struzik said, “What if Beta comes to nothing and this is all the contact there is, Jamie? What will you do then?”
“I don’t know,” Jameson said. “Don’t call me that, Peter. If Species X misses Endeavor again—and I think that may happen—I’ll go out there to talk with Fleming and Koster.”
Petrov said, “Why in heaven’s name go all the way out there?”
“Review the troops, boost morale, that sort of thing.”
Struzik said pettis
hly, “Couldn’t you just do it by holo?”
“I’d be back in time for the budget hearings, Peter. Weren’t you telling me only last week that personal contact is of utmost importance?”
“Is that new girl of yours going?”
“Maybe,” he said with the trace of a smile.
“I thought so. You just want a few days off. I guarantee I’ll make your life miserable. I’ll call you a dozen times a day.”
Jameson submitted to the teasing good-naturedly. He could afford to. He had set out to undercut the impact of Hanna ril-Koroth’s report without entirely discounting her value, and succeeded. It was no small accomplishment in this group, and although they were predisposed to pay little attention to a D’neeran, he could not have done it so easily if Petrov had not, by chance, given him a custom-made opening.
At that, he did not think Andrella Murphy believed a word of it; she knew him too well.
* * *
Hanna made up her mind to risk smuggling out the data she wanted. She would record everything on a wafer the size of her thumbnail, and swallow it as she left; but so much of it was classified that she thought there was a good chance Erik would anticipate her, and she would be caught.
Therefore she worked frantically to salvage what she could from the wreck her venture on Endeavor had become. With no idea how long she would be on the ship, she plunged into its archives and worked with an energy that came not from stimulants but from desperation. She slept in snatches, fully clothed, and forgot to eat except when Tamara brought her food. The synthesis she had envisioned since one luminous moment when she fully understood the Hierarchus was tantalizingly close. An eyes-only report on F’thalian linguistics promised a foundation for describing a theory of separate but contiguous realities, and as she read it her notes on F’thalian thought, side-by-side with the Polity report, fell finally into place. The contradictions between true-human linguistic analysis and her perceptions were illusory; the two were complementary, paired but distinct outlines of the same structure, each lacking salient features. The reasons for omissions that had puzzled the analysts were clear, and so was the reason for F’thal’s clear and baffling boredom with human beings. In the giddy swirl of F’thalian perception, interactions were substantial as material objects. Pan-F’thalian did not describe “things,” only systems and an infinity of subsystems. F’thal had no word for “aliens” because humans were only a minor division of the great subsystems of life. There was nothing special about beings from other stars.
Hanna did not have to compare her memories of the Hierarchus with her experience on Shuttle Five to know that was not the attitude of Species X, though Tamara—her only contact with the life of Endeavor now—told her the aliens were invisible or absent from the second location they had selected. No dreams haunted Hanna. No one came near to ask what really had happened to her out there, and her report seemed to have sunk into silence and left no trace. But she thought of it anyway, the pain and the fear and the strangeness, whenever she lifted her tired eyes from her work or stretched out for a minimal nap; and she came to certain meager conclusions which she did not share with anyone—the persons around her having, it seemed, lost interest in anything she might tell them.
She worried a little about their insistence on ignorance, although in fact there was nothing she could add that would clarify her original impressions. She worried a little also when Tamara told her, some two weeks after the incident that Starr Jameson was expected a few days hence, and that Hanna, presumably, would return to human space when he did. Hanna said acidly that the return trip should be entertaining; but she remembered with discomfort her sense of being in the man’s debt. It occurred to her that the last year of her life, viewed from a certain perspective, bore in abstract the imprint of his hand. It was an unpleasant thought, and she kept it at a distance as her concentration centered more and more strongly, to the exclusion of all else, on her work. Undistracted now that she had no other duties, she saw solutions to puzzles that had seemed insoluble. She left the thicket of references and drew more heavily on her own experience of F’thal and Girritt, her own observations of the Primitives. The underlying structure of her thought crystallized and she wrote rapidly and confidently, sure of her ground. No doubt no one would read what she wrote, but it was truth. She was constructing a monument whose existence was testimony to the validity of its thesis, for it was founded on empirical data—but the data did not exist in true-human reality. She felt, when she thought of the grand futility of her effort, the exaltation she had felt when the Clara began moving toward its end, and she gave herself over to it. She did not forget Jameson, but the apprehension retreated to one small corner of her mind where she looked at it from time to time in a detached sort of way. In the long run, she thought, it did not matter. In the long run nothing mattered except what she was doing.
No one bothered to tell her when Jameson arrived, or that he wished to see her. The door sounded several times before she heard it through a daze that was half obsession, half exhaustion, and then she thought it was Tam.
“C’mon in,” she said automatically, and not until he came to her side did she look up and see who it was.
Unprepared for the apparition, she only stared and said, “Oh.”
She had to look up a long way to see his face. She recognized him at once, but familiarity with his image had not prepared her for his height, nor for the really shocking sense that he was in charge here—that he would be in charge wherever he was. Her experience with true-human authority was limited to Erik, and what she sensed in Jameson was not the same thing at all; and it held her silent and round-eyed.
Jameson looked from her face to the passage she was working on. He said without formality or introduction, “I’ve seen some of what you’re doing. Captain Fleming pulled it out of the main data bank. I’d like to see the rest.”
Hanna moved finally—to look past him and see what entourage he had brought. The door to her room had shut and no one else was there. Questions chased one another through her head. She opened her mouth to ask them and found herself too tired. It didn’t matter. She did not think she could refuse his request even if there were reason to refuse. Weariness and shock made her movements uncertain. She pawed through a litter of printouts for a display module, plugged it into her terminal, and cued it for a current draft. When she turned to hand it to him she caught him eyeing her with something that might have been surprise.
She said, “Yes?”
But he said only, “May I have the chair?”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.”
She retreated to her bunk, which was as deep in annotated paper as the rest of the room. She had to move some of it before she could sit down, and under some of the scraps she found the remains of a sandwich. It occurred to her rather belatedly that Jameson probably was not used to such settings.
He spent a long time reading. Hanna set herself to watch him, but in the long unbroken silence she drifted irresistibly toward sleep. So much more work to do and she had to have some of those references, she could not emphatically criticize a structure of theory and double it in a new direction without references, lots of references, footnotes, oh Lord…Annual Report 2832, The Committee on Alien Relations, Starr Jameson, Commissioner-Heartworld, Chairman. The Coordinating Commission had not had much power five hundred years ago. Now, in theory, three of the five voting members could override the unanimous will of all the populations of the Polity. For a while. Until they were pulled and more amenable replacements appointed. And how did it work anyway? Why did she not know more about history? But on D’neera you could study what you wanted and she had never cared about history or art either, only fighting and aliens. And maybe gardening, sometimes, but the millefleurs got into everything….
Hanna yawned and fell sound asleep.
His voice woke her. It was a very deep voice, and she liked it. The inappropriate thought woke her further and she sat up straight, shaking her head. He was not talking to her. He
was speaking to someone on the ship’s intercom, asking for coffee and spirits.
He turned to look at her directly and Hanna stiffened, suddenly wide awake and unsure of herself. His eyes were cold, and she felt herself being measured as no one had measured her before, not even Iledra. Jameson was a presence, utterly sure of his power and his right to judge her, and her response to this new thing was blank astonishment.
He said without ceremony, “How did you know this?”
“Know what?” she said stupidly. She was staring at him again. His face was too interesting to be ugly, with strong bones and unexpected hollows. She liked that, too.
He leveled a long forefinger at the wallscreen, which still showed the passage she had been writing when he came in. It said:
“Most observers of Primitive B, citing winged-flight mass limitations as a curb on braincase development, have assumed this rudimentary culture will stagnate until environmental change forces it to evolutionary regression or extinction. However, the acknowledged complexity of B nestbuilding activity, until now wrongly attributed exclusively to instinct, illustrates the prevalence of logical operations in everyday life. For example, the pitch of the nests’ woven-branch ‘roofs’ is determined not only by an explicit projection of expected severity of rainstorms in a given area, but also by individual preference for the fruit of certain vines which flourish best on more nearly vertical surfaces…”
Hanna gathered her scattered thoughts and said, “I ‘heard’ them. I was there when the flock I was studying was settling in for a nesting season. ‘I think I will make it higher and there will be more to eat.’”
Jameson blinked. “That’s rudimentary agriculture.” he said.
“I was coming to that.”
They regarded each other in silence for a moment. Then he said, “So you were frightened after all.”
“What?” She thought she had misheard him.
“You were frightened when you undertook the experiment you yourself suggested. Why?”
The D’neeran Factor Page 10
