The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “Late in the process. Very late.”

  “Before or after her memories gave out?”

  “Impossible to say. The best guess is it was after she lost consciousness more or less permanently.”

  “There would have been no point at that stage.”

  “There’s no point to any of it. Why do they think we’re some kind of goddamn tigers? What could a bunch of ragged-ass colonists do to make them think that?”

  “Whatever the reason, she ought to have been able to show them otherwise.”

  “What?”

  “‘Sentience.’ Section Six.”

  “Oh,” said Morisz. “That.”

  And then?

  The right response.

  But then

  Exactly the right response.

  Then

  One of us two of us three of us defenseless

  Then

  Vulnerable.

  But later?

  No later not ever.

  There was later.

  No later. No.

  “What’s that for?” Jameson said.

  “What—oh. The screen. I don’t know. We started using it at the beginning. I forget why.” Morisz was so used to having a barrier before the module holding Hanna that he had stopped noticing it.

  “Get rid of it.”

  “Right.”

  But when it was gone Morisz remembered why it had been there. This outer room was large enough to seem uncrowded in spite of its masses of equipment, for even minor regeneration was not a simple task, and Hanna was not a minor project. Now, however, it was crowded with people, and with the screen gone they had to look at Hanna. Eight weeks into the regeneration process she was, if anything, a more repulsive sight than she had been at the start. The medical people liked to see what was happening, though their eyes were not as good as their instrumentation, and sometimes they forgot to cover up the tangle of flesh and tubes and wires with decent sheeting. They had not forgotten this time, but the contours of the figure centered in its zero-g bubble were horribly suggestive. But at least, Morisz thought, she has a face again. The only recognizable thing about Hanna when he had first seen her had been the straight pretty nose. The aliens had not wanted to obstruct respiration.

  The scene taking shape was Jameson’s idea. He seemed not to believe Hanna had told Tharan everything, though the questioning went on for hours each day, and insisted on trying one more thing. Tharan, just outside the chamber where Hanna lay, was already in tenuous rapport with her; she was more heavily sedated than usual, and the effect showed in Tharan’s face as a vague slackness. Neuro- and psychopharmacologists were in place, and a physiogeneralist stared over their shoulders at a mix-monitor panel. A Fleet liaison specialist and one of Morisz’s assistants ignored each other from adjacent seats. There was nothing more to wait for. Morisz was about to witness—in a sense, even, to direct— something he had heard of but never seen: a mindhealer-Adept of D’neera undertaking a telepathic deep probe.

  He said to Tharan, “You know what you’re looking for.”

  “Something…hidden…” Tharan’s voice trailed off. It would be difficult for him to maintain a double awareness—inward to Hanna, outward to the others—but it could be done. He would not attempt to speak to them unless he got what he was after.

  “Anything new. Anything at all. You’ve been over most of it so often you should notice anything different. But don’t waste time on the stuff we know. Get down to the end and concentrate on that.”

  Tharan did not answer. His eyes glazed as the contact deepened. Hanna, Morisz knew, had not wanted to do this, but Tharan had appealed to her sense of duty—and, Morisz suspected, her guilt.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Everybody ready?” he asked, but not until he saw Jameson’s bare nod did he say to Tharan, “All right. Go ahead.”

  Minutes trickled by. Morisz watched Tharan, but he was as motionless as Hanna. He would be living through her experiences now, not just turning them into words for Intelligence, but guiding her attention to details unconsciously noted. If he could he would damp the emotional strain, holding her to detailed objectivity. Morisz had expected signs of strain, but there were none. Time passed, men shifted position and coughed, someone spoke. Morisz wondered why he had ever thought a deep mindprobe would be a dramatic thing—

  Blackblackblackno

  “No!” Morisz whispered, and wiped sudden sweat from his face. The sensation had been one of falling, as if he had been on the edge of sleep and jerked back just in time from an endless black pit, wide awake. He looked sidelong at Jameson and saw a hand slowly withdrawn from an instinctive grab for support. He felt a flicker of satisfaction that Jameson was not immune to this at least, and then was ashamed.

  He whispered to Jameson, “Tharan lost it.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Morisz glanced uneasily at the pharmacologists. He had been there for Hanna’s first waking, and knew first-hand what happened when a half-mad telepath lost control. Tharan was supposed to be able to focus and channel her awareness, centering it on himself and reinforcing the inhibitions against random projection that Hanna had internalized in childhood and practiced all her life. If he failed, the pharmacologists would take over. But even they were using negative alerts, so a circuit would close and Hanna would sleep if they made any move without warning. That first time their colleagues had nearly killed her when all they wanted to do was shut her up.

  Tharan was quite still, his hand resting on the thin plastic film that provided a visual cue for the force field containing Hanna. Sometimes he went inside with her, but not today; she could not be touched indiscriminately, and in the deep probe the urge to do so would be strong.

  The tension had grown with that fragment of Hanna’s memory, and Morisz muttered to distract himself, “He’s getting attached to her in spite of himself, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Jameson just breathed the word.

  “Says she knows what a mess she made of it.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Morisz was not an imaginative man, but he remembered Tharan’s confidence and was chilled. What would it do to you, he wondered, to lie paralyzed and blind and anesthetized for weeks, remembering how you got that way, reflecting on your failure, living with the conviction of the man who was your only link to life that you had endangered everything you knew?

  mistake mistake mistake stupid mess D’neerans look what how’d we get here goddamn

  Words, even seemingly in Hanna’s voice. Jameson turned his head and said, “She’s getting that from one of us.” There was ice in his voice.

  “Not me,” Morisz said a little nervously. He looked around and saw the Fleet major gone red-faced and too stiff, unused to his private thoughts becoming public property.

  lovest me thy father mother brother lover here fullsharing lest cold night

  Tharan shifted abruptly. Morisz was on his feet. No words that time, not until he created them, and not in Hanna’s voice but silent strangeness, a jolt of madness.

  Jameson said quietly, “Nothing new.”

  “What?”

  “Think about Tharan’s reports. That’s what he’s been describing all along.”

  “Oh…” Morisz sat down slowly. The men behind them whispered to each other. “She was identifying with them.”

  “Sometimes,” Jameson said, but he was leaning forward now and watching the two D’neerans closely, as if he could force his way into Hanna’s brain himself.

  But Tharan, after a while, straightened and shook his head. “That’s all,” he said. The words were a little slurred.

  Jameson continued to stare at him. Tharan put his head in his hands. When he looked up his face was more alert; he had broken the rapport.

  “There isn’t any more,” he said. “I told you there wasn’t.”

  Jameson got up and went to stand beside him, looking through the transparency at Hanna. Morisz followed, uneasy. In the weeks since Hanna’s return Jameson had become more reserved
than ever. It had never been easy to guess what he was thinking; now it was impossible. He seemed to be turning to stone, perpetually preoccupied with something no one else perceived. But whatever it was focused the force of his personality instead of subduing it, so that when he spoke it was like a glimpse of flame, and Morisz sometimes thought that one day Jameson would explode.

  Tharan stood up and Jameson said, “There is more.”

  “There isn’t. It just ends.”

  “They hadn’t finished with her. You know what was in her bloodstream: psychotropic drugs. You know what they would do. It must have been done after what you have shown us.”

  “It ends,” Tharan repeated.

  “Memory does not vanish. The organism records everything. On the cellular, the chemical, the molecular levels, if nowhere else. If you are as competent as you say, you could retrieve her primal memories of gestation. Why not this?”

  “I can’t retrieve something unless there was enough consciousness to organize the experience in the first place. There wasn’t. They dissolved her ego.”

  “She perceived it as dissolution. That does not mean it was dissolved.”

  Tharan said blankly, “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “I don’t intend to argue semantics. Is there any possibility she is deliberately blocking you?”

  “No,” Tharan said positively.

  “Could there be a block imposed by another?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  Tharan said angrily, “I’m a D’neeran, a telepath, an Adept, and a mindhealer. Don’t try to tell me I don’t know.”

  “You are either incompetent or a liar,” Jameson said, and turned away and started for the door. The ghoulish little tableau was broken. Tharan took a fast step after Jameson.

  Sweet winds, summerfruit, soft-plumed love eternal thy warm waters unbroken.

  In a great rush of wellbeing Morisz saw a hand slip from its place. The circuit closed; he drifted for an instant toward sleep, and it was over. Hanna was entirely unconscious. Tharan stood still, looking toward her, and the others were between him and Jameson, babbling questions.

  “Later,” Jameson said. “Stan.”

  It was an order, and Morisz ducked between the others and followed Jameson into the corridor.

  “What,” he began, but Jameson shook his head, and they went through half the building, a long walk, in silence. Hospital personnel stared at them with covert or open curiosity, but Jameson paid no attention. Behind them trotted a man from Administration internal security. Two days ago someone had planted a homemade firebomb at Jameson’s door; it was primitive but dangerous, and Jameson had reluctantly accepted this minimum of personal protection.

  Outdoors the August sun burned hot. Jameson stopped on a deserted flight of stairs, waved the bodyguard away, and said, “They expect to permit her mobility in about three months.”

  “Yeah. She’ll be able to talk then. Maybe we can get more.”

  “I doubt it. But from the moment she moves a finger I want her watched. With spyeyes. Without her knowledge. I want every room in this center in which she spends time wired for sight and sound, and I want you to form a team to study the record, every minute of every twenty-four hours of it, and report to me.”

  “Report what?” Morisz said in frustration.

  “I don’t know.”

  Morisz thought: He is going right over the edge. Right here. Right now.

  “Starr…” It came out more plaintively than he intended. “It’s a dead end. You can’t get anything better than what Tharan did. Go right into her head and pull it out—what the hell can I do that’s any better?”

  “Then send the tapes to me and I’ll study them myself.”

  Morisz could not refuse the direct request. There was his personal liking for Jameson, for one thing; for another, there were implications for the future. He did not want Jameson telling anyone he was uncooperative in a matter of such weight, and certainly he could not defend himself by accusing a commissioner of unreasonable caution.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “But it’s a dead end, all the same.”

  “Think so?” Jameson started down the staircase. The sunlight dimmed. The sullen air promised rain.

  He said, “They don’t leave dead ends. Every time it’s looked that way they’ve set us up for something. Remember that, Stan. It’s nearly the only thing we know about them.”

  “Yes,” Morisz said, “but they’ve already set up D’neera. What else could they want?”

  “Just watch her,” Jameson said.

  Chapter 10

  The water was always warm and clear, and drew her irresistibly. She forgot sometimes to push against it, floating in a timeless sea, and the physical therapist who took her to the pool each day would call, “Hanna! Hanna! You’ve rested long enough.” And she would make a dreamy effort, forgetting the purpose was to make her stronger, filled with wonder at the play of muscle and the sensations of water against her skin. It was strange to inhabit a body. She remembered inhabiting one familiarly, but she could not get used to it again. Parts of it surely were gone? Movement unbalanced her; food was distasteful and she spilled it; her face glimpsed in a mirror with clear blue eyes surprised her.

  They had made her body whole by slight degrees, and would do the same with her mind. Living in the unworld of brain barred from body was painful, so she had been unconscious for five months, except for the sessions with Tharan. The exceptions might have been her undoing, for she opened her new eyes to memories of The Questioner, repeated daily and ingrained past forgetting, and very little else. Tharan had not been a reassuring companion. His head was filled with images of fleets on the move, chaos at home and his anxiety to return, mistrust of the men around him and violent dislike of Starr Jameson. That was Tharan’s version of events, or all of it Hanna saw, anyway. Her final waking, therefore, was to unrelieved bleakness. To ease her transition to physical life she was given drugs that softened without changing the prospect. It was always at a distance from her, and so was grief—for herself, for D’neera, for Anja and Charl, for something else; but what? It was too distant to see. It was there in dreams she could not remember, a loss and an emptiness that would never be filled. Tharan was gone, and there was no one to uncover her dreams.

  So faithfully had she been cared for that after a week she could walk. She could not walk very rapidly or very far, but she could walk. She came out of the hydrotherapy pavilion one day, moving hesitantly and wearily away from the water’s support, and found Jameson waiting for her.

  She thought he must have come to see someone else, but that made no sense. He was here for her, then. Barely clothed and wet through, she forgot the chill of dry air while she searched memory for the proper thing to say. Ordinary courtesies no longer came automatically, and never sounded right when she remembered them.

  He said, “Hello, Hanna,” providing the clue she needed.

  “Hello,” she said in relief, but fragments from Tharan came together without warning: the ruin of the Endeavor Project, the near-ruin of this man’s career, the ragged end of his visions, devastation of his life, and had it not sprung from her? She had never given a thought to what he risked in trusting her. Now, when she saw the size of the gamble, it seemed to Hanna in her distress that he must have come here to accuse her. She might have panicked, except that he appeared utterly unchanged. As it was, she looked at him piteously.

  He said, startled, “Are you all right?” and took her arm, which had seemed very far from his intention.

  “All right,” she said faintly.

  “I can come back later, if you wish.”

  “No,” said Hanna, so unused to having power to postpone the unpleasant that she did not really understand the option.

  He went with her to her room, and she leaned on his arm most of the way. Seeing him had jolted her from her fog—and she wondered with new clarity how much of it was self-created, not chemically induced. But the quest
ion sank in her painful anxiety for his welfare, and she was not clearheaded enough to think such anxiety might be ludicrous while his strength literally held her up.

  Her room was comfortingly dim. She sank onto the bed with a sigh, telling herself she must not fall asleep just yet. The light flared, and she blinked. She had forgotten that her preference for semi-darkness was not shared by everyone.

  Jameson came to stand before her, tall and solid and wrapped in the old stillness. He watched her intently, not trying to disguise it. There were deeper lines than she remembered at the corners of the gray-green eyes, and his gaze was colder than she had ever seen it. She felt a twinge of unreasoned fear of something besides reproach.

  She could not think of anything to say. After a while he said, “How are you feeling, Hanna?”

  His eyes and tone were so at odds with the concern in the conventional question that she did not understand immediately, as if it were necessary to translate what he said from one language to another. “I’m—well. I’m feeling better. Time,” she said, pushing at her hair. It was cropped close, a silken cap, and felt strange to her hand.

  “Intelligence is rather anxious to get at you without the intermediary. Think you’ll be strong enough to talk to them soon?”

  “Soon. I think—soon.” But Ward, her chief physician, spoke of that or something like it at least twice a day. He must know the answer. She hardly heard the next trivial questions, answering by rote. He had to have the answers already. He did not care what she said. He was not listening; only looking. He had come here only and specifically to look at her.

  He took a step toward her and without warning, swept by fear, she shrank away from him, fighting an impulse to run. She could not run. She was too weak.

  “Hanna?” he said, but she could not answer, huddled in on herself and shivering.

  After a minute he sat down beside her. There was a tangled coverlet on the bed, and to her astonishment he picked it up and draped it about her shoulders. It was the first gesture of kindness she had known in many months; the men and women who cared for her were not unkind, but busy and impersonal. She began to cry, the acid tears tickling her nose incongruously, and to her further astonishment felt his hand on her back. The simple act of compassion overwhelmed her and she turned to him blindly, reaching out, expecting nothing. Very slowly, he put his arm around her.