The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “Forgive me,” she whispered.

  He shook his head, but the movement came from some sharp conflict within himself.

  “Please,” Hanna said urgently.

  “There is nothing to forgive,” he said as if against his will.

  “What I did…” Tears blurred her eyes. The shameful memory smothered her.

  “You did all you could…” He spoke slowly, reluctantly, but his arm tightened around her. She responded to it, not to his words, and laid her head on his shoulder without thinking, knowing he would not mind; he only thought he ought to mind it. He was a point of wholeness in a sadly tattered universe, and she clung to him, needing wholeness too desperately to care if he wished to be clung to or not.

  He bent his head and she moved a little, holding her breath with a sense that time and space had slipped and left them, the two of them, miraculously alone and secret. He said close to her ear, very softly, “I wish it had not been you. But I’m glad it was you.”

  She said on a long breath, “Why…”

  “You did not speak. It was not you. They destroyed you.”

  “Everyone blames me…”

  “They are wrong. Who could have done better?”

  “Anyone. You—”

  “Not I.” He touched her hair, a delicate gesture of comfort. “If anyone tells you he would have done better, he lies.”

  She turned her head a little, almost secretively, as if he would not notice that his lips now touched her cheek. Her skin seemed to have been dead, and suddenly was alive. She whispered, “But I told them—”

  “Not enough. Not enough for their purposes…”

  She was passionately grateful. He had strength enough for both of them. She was safe with him. Safe: from doubt, from guilt, from memory. She had never needed anyone before, nor anything so badly. She would tell him so.

  Then he remembered something he had forgotten, and she felt it fall between them like a knife. He drew away from her with a movement so abrupt it was nearly violent. Time resumed. She actually cried out, bereft. The act was so deliberate and implacable that he might as well have gotten up and walked out, and she wept, uncomprehending.

  He waited without moving or touching her until her sobs eased. Presently she straightened, sighing, and wiped at her wet cheeks. Jameson turned his head, but he did not speak at once and his face was unreadable. A last sob choked her. He said—it might have been another man talking— “Do you remember the probe Tharan did?”

  She nodded, hardly hearing.

  “What happened after he broke the rapport?”

  “After?” Confused by his contradictions, still shaken to the bone, she tried to remember. It had been so long ago. It was mixed up with all the interrogations before it and after it, and besides she had been sedated, which was not customary. The healer was supposed to be strong enough to share your full awareness of whatever made you seek him out. But Tharan had not come to her as a healer, and nothing about that probe had been customary.

  “I fell asleep,” she said. “Or passed out. I don’t remember which.”

  “I mean before that, but after Tharan broke the contact.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything. Did something happen?”

  He said after a moment’s silence, looking directly into her eyes, “No. I thought perhaps something had occurred to you afterward. But if there was nothing…”

  “No,” she said uneasily.

  He stood up, remote as ever, preparing to leave. She said quickly, “Commissioner?”

  “Yes?”

  There was a question she had asked no one because she was afraid of how they would look at her. But whatever he felt, it was not, at least, contempt.

  “Why has there been no attack on D’neera?”

  For an instant she saw exhaustion in his face, and pain so great it shocked her into silence. He said something she did not absorb; said good-bye, and she nodded numbly; left her staring after him. If she had ever thought him impenetrably armored, the minutes just past would have shattered that illusion. But this was different; she had with her question gone straight for a nerve, all unknowing, and seen something she was not supposed to see. Why, when it was a question everybody must be asking?

  She could not think of a reason, but she stopped wondering about it because she was preoccupied with something else. She had finally remembered his reply, and also the inflection he gave it. It was a non-answer, but why had he said it that way? She could not get it out of her mind, and it worried her till other shadows hid it: “You ask me that?”

  * * *

  She saw Melanie Ward every day, and also Larssen, the physical therapist. When she asked them when she could leave they gave her no answer. She did not belong here. This was a Joachim Beyle Center, an acute care facility specializing in regenerative techniques. There were half a dozen of them on Earth, half the total in human space, and this one was within sight of the Polity administration complex. Hanna’s small room had no window, but when she was strong enough she walked round and round the Beyle Center, scuffling through dry leaves over carved stone, and looking at Admin’s distant spire with the stylized star at its tip. Somewhere in those buildings were Jameson’s rooms, where she had been an honored guest. She wished he would come see her again, but he did not. She wished the medics would let her go, but they would not, though now she was as whole as she would ever be and needed only outpatient care. “Wait,” they said, and tested her over and over, and days and then weeks went by.

  * * *

  “It is autumn here too,” said Iledra. “We are together in that for once. Strange places you’ve been, H’ana-ril.”

  She paused, waiting. It was a minute before Hanna stirred. She was a faraway face to Iledra. Her eyes were dead. Iledra looked at her more closely. Fear seized her that Jameson had been wrong and Hanna would never be well again.

  But the blue eyes shifted, came to focus, and were Hanna’s: sad, but intelligent and alive.

  She said, “Hello, Lee. This is a surprise.”

  It was the second time she had said it. Iledra said, “Are you all right, H’ana-ril?”

  “Yes,” Hanna said. Fleeting surprise touched her face. “I’m getting stronger,” she said.

  “Good. I expected to hear from you, and I did not, so…”

  “Oh,” Hanna said. Her eyes shone with quick tears. She turned her head away so Iledra could not see her face. She said, “I couldn’t bring myself to— There was so much I didn’t understand from Tharan, and I’ve read…I’ve read about the, the, the…tree…tree—”

  She stopped, fumbling. Iledra said, puzzled, “The what?”

  Hanna now seemed utterly confused. Iledra watched her with amazement and alarm. Hanna said at last, triumphantly, “Things.”

  Iledra closed her eyes for a moment and thought: Her mind is broken. But Hanna went on sanely enough, “The soldiers of the Polity. Half the fleet’s in the system, isn’t it? They say there’ve been—disturbances—”

  Tears glittered on her cheeks.

  Iledra put down her mug of honeyed juice. It was the last of the season, and she would not take a meal outdoors again this year. The rainbow glimmer of fading falseoaks surrounded her, and fine nurturing dust powdered her hair and shoulders with a million subtle jewel-flashes; but the wind was rising, and one more stormy night would scatter the last of the tree-borne light. Had Hanna been thinking of falseoaks? But the connection was obscure.

  Iledra said slowly, “There are disturbances everywhere. The Fleet strategy is to stop an invasion here, but it is not popular. I have secured the communication here. Are you secure?”

  It did not occur to her that the question represented a marked change in her own attitudes. It did not occur to Hanna either, apparently. Hanna only shook her head and said with an effort at a smile, “None more secure. I tried to call Cassie and they wouldn’t even let that go through.”

  “Indeed. I’ll tell her I’ve spoken with you. I said there are dist
urbances everywhere. The governments of the Polity worlds bicker and shout. They think we have too many ships, men, guns, sentinels, and the Commission leaves them too little. You know the administrators of WestCon have fallen on Co-op? And the governors of Montana on Heartworld, though all Montanans are mad in any case. Even Lancaster’s parliament has been overturned. I thought Lancaster forever asleep. I suppose you’ve heard of these things, but…”

  Her voice trailed away, because Hanna was not listening. Rather, she listened to something else. She turned her head and stared into a room so dark Iledra could see nothing in it. In reflected light from the video screen her eyes were a stranger’s, and slitted.

  “H’ana,” Iledra said softly, but there was no response.

  After a minute she went on. She spoke steadily and conversationally. Chill wind clutched her hair and trickled down her neck.

  “You know all that, I’m sure. But probably you have not heard of Colony One’s proposal to evacuate all D’neera and destroy the Houses and the cities, so if the aliens come there would be nothing, and the Fleet if it loses here could retreat to worlds the aliens cannot find. They might even have done it, H’ana—but they could not think how to resettle all of us.”

  “Yes,” Hanna said. “That’s right. All at once. I hadn’t heard.” She turned back to Iledra, looking only wistful. She said, “What did Jameson say?”

  “Nothing,” Iledra said. “Not a word. He knew it must come to nothing. And he is in no position to protect us.”

  “No,” Hanna said. “I wish I could see him. But I haven’t. Tell me more.”

  But her face was so sad that Iledra hesitated. She thought now that Hanna’s deficiencies might be neither physical nor intellectual, that something else perhaps had broken, and she could say nothing that would not bring further pain. Hanna could not know all the tumult the forced marriage of true-humans and D’neerans had brought, because true-humans now controlled most of D’neera’s channels of communication, and chose what to suppress. All the old prejudices had flared again, strong as in the years of isolation. Polity soldiers no longer were permitted to visit the surface of D’neera for rest and recreation; there had been rapes, batteries, thefts, finally a full-scale riot. Most Polity societies closed their doors to D’neerans for, they said, the outsiders’ own protection. This meant D’neerans who wished to evacuate voluntarily—and there were many—could not do so. They stayed at home with everyone else, watching a hostile sky whose harborage of the true-human fleet seemed more threatening, for now at least, than hypothetical aliens of unknown power.

  And it was Hanna’s doing. And to know all that she had brought about would not help her.

  Iledra said, “I will tell you more another time. Are you comfortable, H’ana?”

  “Yes,” Hanna said doubtfully.

  “But unhappy…”

  “I can’t,” said Hanna, lines creasing her forehead, “seem to think. They don’t—want to talk to me. They’re not allowed to, I think. The people here. I only ever see a few. And men from Intelligence. I go to, to where they tell me. The pool. The gymnasium. Nobody’s there.” Something like horror came into her eyes. She repeated, “Nobody’s ever there. I can’t, can’t think to anybody. They don’t like it. There’s nobody to talk to. I’m living in a box. I’m not living—”

  She stopped suddenly. Her eyes were dim again. Iledra waited. After a minute Hanna said clearly, “It’s all right here. I’ll come home when I can.”

  Iledra said, “Are you quite sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Not, perhaps, a little—confused?”

  “Confused?” Hanna said. “Why, no.” And now she only looked, in fact, tired.

  Afterward Iledra called Jameson, but when she said she wanted to talk about Hanna, he would not speak with her.

  * * *

  She did feel odd. Fuzzy. Maybe even a little confused. She spent many hours in the pool, comforted by water. Melanie Ward talked of womb-returns and said she could not do it forever. But in the pool she could keep her eyes closed, and she did not like looking at things. Objects and bodies and faces had taken to having periods of unintelligibility, as if she had lost the patterns of what they were supposed to look like. Speech sometimes was mere noise, meaningless and almost painful. She was possessed by a lethargy of mind and body that seized her anywhere, at any time, so that she stopped what she was doing and neither moved nor thought until someone spoke to her or something else happened to rouse her. The commonplaces of technology were sporadically, unnervingly beyond her grasp; not that she did not understand principles, but that she could not remember which knob or lever or button did what, and she had to stop and think how her bath or the terminal in her room worked. She was glad her meals were brought to her so she did not have to cope with their preparation, though it meant always eating alone, when she bothered to eat.

  She did not want to tell anyone about these things, but exhaustion drove her finally to tell Ward that sleep did not rest her. She woke in the mornings as tired as if she had not been to bed at all, and seemed always on the edge of remembering an evil dream. She thought it out with some difficulty, and decided the transition drugs must be responsible. But when she put the question to Ward, Ward said she was no longer being doped.

  “But every day they give me—”

  “Immune boosters, because your resistance is down. Nutrients, because”—a hint of reproach—”you don’t eat properly.”

  “I don’t understand,” Hanna said. She made a vague pass at her hair, missing by some distance. “Can I have something, then? To help me with the dreams? To help me rest?”

  “No,” Ward said, and made an explanation to which Hanna did not attend. The truth was that she was afraid of sleep. She was afraid she would die in the night. There were mornings when her first thought on waking was that she had died, and somehow revived with the dawn. She felt as well an urgent need for sleep, no matter how much she got, and the conflict between fear and desire was painful. She did not want to tell Ward about it, because she also was afraid to confess that she was afraid. The Questioner had exposed too many unsuspected weaknesses. Hanna would not herself expose more.

  “Tell me,” Ward said invitingly, “about your dreams.”

  “I don’t remember them,” Hanna said truthfully.

  After that the I&S men who came to her every day wanted to hear about her dreams too, but she could not satisfy them.

  * * *

  In December the first snows came.

  Hanna got worse. She felt more and more as if she lived in a box that shut her off from the rest of the world. At first she thought the difficult, complete suppression of telepathy was the source of her isolation, but it did not explain everything. Her body, once strong and athletic, was unreliable. Her muscles twitched, she walked into walls, dropped things, fell sometimes. She had headaches and her eyes felt so tired she thought something was wrong with them, but Ward said otherwise. Ward did, however, tell the Intelligence agents to stop hounding her. They stopped; less for her health’s sake, Hanna thought, than because there obviously was nothing more she could tell them.

  The relief from that pressure did not halt the decline of her mind, however. She cast about in desperation for release, and a longing came upon her to go home. It seemed that if she were on D’neera she could be well; that the universe would look right, smell right, fit her comfortably. Even the passage through space drew her, even anything that was not here, where nothing but water was right.

  Still they would not let her go, and they would not tell her why, and when she thought of tapping their minds to find out why, she was afraid. Because they seemed so strange to her: almost alien, in fact.

  * * *

  Early each morning Morisz went over the previous day’s and night’s reports on Hanna ril-Koroth. They were lavishly illustrated, because she was watched as closely as even Jameson could wish, though Morisz still thought it a waste of time and resources.

&n
bsp; This morning, however, the report was accompanied by a nightside operative. Morisz canceled an appointment and had her brought in at once. She said, “This might not be important, but you did say to report anything unusual.”

  “I meant it. Let me see it.”

  He waited while she searched the night’s record for what she wanted. His office looked inland from the river, and in the weak winter sun he picked out the bulk of the Beyle Center with its fringe of parkland and snow-dusted trees. What was Hanna up to now? Whatever it was, if Wills thought it important enough to show him, it had better be passed on to Jameson.

  Wills said, watching the timeline, “Most of it was ordinary. She went to bed early, got up after a while, and started studying. A text on Terrestrial evolution this time. Toward morning she went back to bed, but this time she got up again, and she didn’t seem to be in fugue. I think she’ll say she remembers this if she’s asked.”

  “I think she remembers all of it,” he said.

  “Well, it’s just an opinion, but I don’t think she knows how much she’s up. Otherwise why would she complain about being tired? Here it is.”

  They leaned forward simultaneously. The room from which the image came had been dark, but the picture was enhanced to full visibility. Hanna’s room at the Beyle Center was, by the center’s standards, highly decorated. The patterned walls with their ornaments of crystal and metal made it almost certain Hanna would not find the near-microscopic spyeyes by accident. The furnishings were spare, but Ward had had rich fabrics brought in, and pretty objects that when activated moved or spoke or projected rippling color. The object was to provide Hanna with plenty of positive sensory stimulation; but she seemed not to notice her surroundings, and did not play with the enchanting toys.

  She was in bed, just beginning to stir, in the picture Morisz saw. She sat up, pushing away the sheets with a quick motion. She wore a white gown that fell from her throat to her feet and covered her arms as well. Until recently she had slept naked, but the habit had changed overnight and, it seemed, permanently. She stayed away from mirrors, too; Ward said she had contracted a revulsion to the sight of her own body; a reaction finally, she thought, to its mutilation.