The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “It is easier to be a Render,” Leader said bitterly.

  She answered wearily, “What else can I do? If I choose your way I betray my own people and make my death certain.”

  “But you do not know what my way is,” he said. “And even if it were only what you think, how is it worse than your way?”

  The air before Hanna thickened and blurred, and in it she saw Sunrise burning, the silver groves of her Nearhome gone up in flames, Swift bewildered and deranged and his mother’s death consuming him. “You rob him of my springtimes,” Leader said. A child who was both Leader and Swift reached for the delicate, sweet-smelling tendrils of a young tree which blackened and melted along with the child, and with it melted also a million recollections and history known through living minds treasured since the first thought net formed in a primeval sea.

  She wanted to tell Leader there was nothing she could do about it, but he was gone, hidden, sulking in a corner of her consciousness. The knowledge he had tried to thrust upon her lay between them, uncomprehended. Because she would not comprehend, or maybe could not; she was not structured to comprehend it. She spoke instead what seemed a truth she could understand: “It’s got to be one or the other. The advantage depends on me, don’t you see? They know where we are but not how to program all the way. Now I know where you are—”

  She paused, dubious. We and they and you seemed remarkably interchangeable.

  But Leader did not answer. He only sulked—and grieved.

  * * *

  Hanna stayed where she was for a long time. Most of the time her eyes were fixed remotely on space. Twice Heartworld II said a Jump was coming and ran aloud through chains of equations; twice a chime sounded, and what Hanna saw changed. Each change took precisely one chronon. Or perhaps it did not. She wanted to touch a human presence and reached out for Jameson, for Iledra, for anyone, and could not sense the existence of a single living entity. She was not an Adept, and she was very far from anything human. She was alone with Leader, and he had discovered something that might be her conscience, and jabbed at it unmercifully.

  The fourth Jump showed her, very small and distant, a glowing nebula. Stars were being born in its heart. Life would come from them in their turn. By which time humans and the People too would have vanished, or gone on to “a future unimaginable as the improbable past…”

  She heard Jameson’s deep voice say the words. She almost saw the room beside the flowing river where he had spoken them. She moved finally. She was cold and cramped. She did not like the way her thoughts kept going back to him, and to her own blighted promise.

  She got up and went cautiously through Heartworld II to the living quarters. Nothing looked quite right or entirely wrong. She took off her clothes and dropped them into a cleaning bin—she thought that was what it was; once she had known, but now she was not sure. Drawing a bath was less difficult, but when she slid into the water she cupped a little in her hands and touched her forehead to it. In memory, of course, of the First Home.

  After that she bathed very quickly, and left the water as soon as she could. She was afraid that it would dissolve her.

  She wandered naked through Heartworld II and thought about Leader. She had not thought about him before. You could not call it thought, that first battle for control. Nor had she thought about him during the days? weeks? as a passenger in her own body. Then she had only studied every detail of his thought as if he were under a microscope, so she could use it all for ambush. But Leader-in-her-thoughts, pseudo-Leader, changed Leader, had declined to die. He remained explorer, watchsetter, father, bondmate, an intelligent being steeped in a rich culture which resembled nothing humans had ever encountered before; a culture organically founded, more strangely structured than F’thal’s, as limited as Girritt’s but transcending its limitations.

  On the flight deck she leaned across the unused pilot’s console, looked again at the bright nebula, heard a chime, and was suspended in a dense field of stars. The starclouds shone for her, great drifts flung across the velvet of night, the jewels of creation promising gifts of life. A memory stirred: the old pull of curiosity beyond bearing, the seductive whisper born of desire saying she could deal with whatever she encountered.

  With my body a weapon and fire in my hand and the great fleet pouring death from alien skies…

  She saw herself and Leader, People and Renders, humans and bestial aliens, locked in a dance of hate.

  She thought of the very first steps, which had determined the form of the dance.

  She had thought, when she wrote “Sentience,” that the meaning of her life was the pursuit of understanding.

  She had pursued nothing. She had only fallen into the pattern of the dance, not acting but reacting, seeking escape, even into death.

  Leader whispered, “Full sentience is the power to choose the harder path.”

  She turned her head sharply, as if he stood beside her.

  “What can you know of it,” she said, “when you see us as nothing but beasts?”

  “I know what I have learned from you,” he said. He meant “Sentience,” as if he had read it, and she saw, shocked, that he had. He had read it within her; read it in her cells and brain and the perspectives she brought to all that he saw through her eyes, whether she was consciously aware of them or not; and he accused her now of denying all she was.

  “But I didn’t know about you then,” she said. “I didn’t know it could mean this!”

  “But what if—?” he said, and he meant: What if someone stepped outside the dance? What if there were a hybrid, changeling, two-in-one, someone who could think simultaneously in two realities and show each to the other without the fear that was the heart of the dance?

  If one could do it without being insane to the eyes of both, or be reassuringly the same and yet different. If one could do it. If she could do it. She and Leader—

  “Yes,” he said; for it was his thought she thought.

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  She sought within his reality for a key. His memories lay complete behind her thought, a secret known to no other human being. His knowledge was hers to use as she chose, freely. Death and transition and life-in-We—

  “Saved safely in thee—”

  But transmuted—

  She said, “I think I know.” She put a hand against the thick transparent barrier that kept out the cold of space. The hand trembled.

  He said after a little while, “Have you the courage?”

  “I don’t know. Oh, I don’t know!”

  He said slowly, “You must know more.”

  “More,” she said, seeing what he meant and dreading it.

  “You must be more.”

  She rubbed her bare skin, shivering, clinging to her humanity.

  “I will be utterly mad,” she said.

  “No more than I,” he answered ruefully. That was true already, in any case. Neither ruefulness nor any other form of humor was part of the People.

  “All right,” Hanna said, and bowed her head. Choosing. But no gratification accompanied the choice; she was compelled rather by the shadow of what she had been—which would mean nothing and be nothing if she did not make this choice. And she only knew that she had chosen when:

  Smoke rose beyond marsh grasses that obscured her view. Something screamed barely audible in agony; barely audible though its throat was bursting because another battle was joined; on one side the cloud of which the thing was both part and (to the People) whole; and locked with it, wrestling with it and seeking to consume it, the People, savage and new, near foundering.

  The grasses rippled past her, traveling. Or she moved, though without body or volition. She was coming near the Celebrant, on whom their power was focused. She could not see him past the ragged band that circled fire and stone and sacrifice.

  “Not sacrifice.” Leader stood beside her in the wholeness of his prime, uniformed. Scarlet blinded her in the sunlight of the P
eople’s beginnings.

  “Then what?”

  Through the kin-group, through the fiery circle to the stone where lay the Render, screams diminished in extremity to choking sounds. She saw herself. Her flesh convulsed. She cried out in anguish and:

  “…not sacrifice,” Leader was saying. “That is a human concept. This is other.”

  She lifted her head from the floor of Heartworld II.

  “I cannot,” she said. “It’s him,” meaning Bladetree.

  “It is all of Us,” Leader said. “We are not human.”

  She lay on ice. Her skin shrank from it.

  “I will try,” she said, though it was impossible, and at once the common memory seized her again, vivid as if this ancient day from the morning of the world were yesterday.

  She stood beside a fair deep pool, freshwater, tree-shrouded. The sea was far away, though ever-present in the soul; the People had spread far in great migrations. They had well-made weapons of stone and wore glossy furs. Before her stretched on massive stone was a Render. Its fangs gleamed; but its eyes were intelligent, its thought aware and utterly filled with hate.

  It was less alien to her than were the People.

  Celebrant lifted the stone knife and Hanna’s hand rose with it. A ring of fire surrounded them. She would use fire too.

  “No,” she said. “No!”

  Taken one by one and costly beyond measure for they kill Us easily and overpower Us. Leaving no-time for transition. Quicker increase, many mates. Meat-eaters even as We and We are their prey. We are no match. Therefore We must believe and shape…

  The thing thrashed, crying out, lost. Hanna saw herself. The knife slipped from her hands.

  Honor thee who taketh pain transmute to joy create their end. Lest coming-time sees Renders only weaponed, powerful, dominant, Our vanishing all the ages of Our selves

  The mountain stream spoke icily. Fire and stone. Fishers and farmers gathered for the Rite. Precious stones gleamed on her breast. She wielded knife and fire with scaly hands. The implacable bestial will flared, faded, and was malleable.

  This is true. Is real. We change the real, make truth. They dwindle, yet We kill few. Yet they dwindle, unsubstantiated by past years past lives directed by a Rite that

  Sea wind blew strongly on her sea-colored skin, and tore at her rich garments. A city gleamed beyond the dunes. The creature’s pain was ecstasy.

  Vanish and dissolve! she cried, all cried, and it was nothing, strength and self obliterated and with it all its kind. Reduced to protoplasm, mind gone, will gone, it was ripe for harvesting. They took it in, its nothingness.

  So are they nothing, harmless, impotent, and blown and tattered on the wind and threat no more, and We have made them so

  Once more for an instant she was Hanna. She lay in darkness in Heartworld II and a human mind sought to understand, and could not, because: under the knife and her hard bloody hands a sentient species expired, driven to death by the People’s will. And nothing else.

  Chapter 16

  Dreamdust is a transparent powder with potent effects on the human nervous system. It produces, inevitably, sleep, but it is taken because it guarantees pleasant dreams, shaped by the dreamer’s desires and providing whatever gratification he does not get in waking life. It is a product of Co-op, where the first, mostly unwilling settlers used it and thus, according to one view, survived the years of privation with some sanity intact; or, according to another view, failed to achieve any lasting thing until it was outlawed. Now it is used for the alleviation of chronic nightmares, and in expert hands for the guidance of dreams to modify personality without brainsoup intervention. But it also is used—not legally, since it is addictive—for its own sake. Most users dream of the erotic, and after many nights with ideal mates no longer form real relationships. But some use the powder to evoke tranquility, though that too is dangerous unless they are sufficiently strong-willed to refrain from comparing night to day.

  Starr Jameson, lately not much interested in eroticism, spent his nights dreaming of sun-warmed seas or, sometimes, Arrenswood; of broad empty sweeps of water or forest or grain, warmed by the light of unspecified suns. In these dreams he did not have the insistent transmitter implanted in his ear, and was relieved of responsibility and twenty years younger; all of which only made each day’s waking reality a more potent shock.

  The part of his mind that guided dreams was puzzled, then apprehensive, then alarmed when it got out of control. The sweep of radiant water faded, its coolness vanished from his skin, and he was in the dark. Hanna ril-Koroth was back, a nightmare shape crouched on his bed with a hand twined hard in his hair. Something icy nicked at his throat. She said, Wake up. Now! And don’t move, or you die.

  The not-quite-words were frantic. He mumbled, “Not me, Hanna,” and started to move, and nearly lost a handful of hair.

  She said out loud, “Damn you, I’m real. You’re not dreaming. Wake up!”

  He thought she was Iledra’s pale hand reaching for him, vengeful, and then that she might be real after all; but it was hard to tell with the Dreamdust coursing through him. He opened his eyes and saw a blacker figure melding with the darkness.

  He said with difficulty, “Turn on the lights.”

  She gave the command and in the burst of light moved convulsively, shoving a knee hard into his stomach. It hurt. He lay very still. She was real, all right, and so was the knife against his neck. He blinked until her face came into focus against black draperies, pale and familiar; but she was changed and haggard.

  She said, “I’ve g-got something you want. We, I, want something. From you.”

  He stared into her eyes and their blue mixed with his dreams and he fell into a summer evening’s sky, a new dream stirring. Knife, fist, and knee evaporated. He lifted a heavy, tentative hand that brushed her hip.

  “Stop it!” Her voice was high-pitched and impatient. Her face blurred, but not before he saw it was a stranger’s. She said in a stranger’s voice, “What’s, what the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Dreamdust?” he said, but it did not come out right and she said, “What?”

  He said more clearly, “Dreamdust.”

  She said, “Oh, hell.” The hand in his hair relaxed and she drew back. The knife left his throat, but it trailed across his chest and the point stopped between two lower ribs. If she drove it in it would not kill him at once, but he could be entirely disabled.

  He had to get the fog out of his brain, which told him even now, earnestly, that he was alone with a woman who had a knife, and grievances, and maybe an alien army at her back. He wanted the Dreamdust antidote. He made her understand, and felt a suspicious probe for the truth of what he said. In his helplessness it was a violation.

  “Get it,” she said, but she kept the knife where it was while he reached for the panel that hid the antidote. Dreamdust is physically disabling, and his hand wavered. Ordinary people could burn out all the brain cells they wished without having to worry about instant recovery. Jameson kept antidotes for everything at hand, because he did not have that common luxury. He resented it.

  He had trouble with the phial and after a minute, wordlessly, she took it from him, letting go of the knife to do so. It lay close by his hand, but he was so foggy he had no chance of making a grab for it without risking death, and both of them knew it. She opened the phial and held it out to him. The bitter liquid trickled down his throat, and he saw her take up the knife again before he put his head back and waited for his thoughts to clear. He closed his eyes and felt her weight shift. Her hands, knife and all, rested intimately on his knee.

  Presently he said, “I hoped you would come back.”

  “What?”

  “The house let you in, didn’t it?”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said hesitantly, as if precision were costly, “I thought, I thought you’d forgotten to, to tell it not to. After I was here before. I didn’t, I didn’t know how I, I was going to get in. But it knew me and it
…”

  Her voice trailed away. In the dark behind his eyelids he pictured her creeping through the silent house, fumbling through unknown rooms in search of him, waiting each second for discovery.

  “I didn’t forget. I wanted to make it easy. You might have come for shelter when I wasn’t here,” he said, and felt her reach for the truth again. This was why D’neerans did not lie; there was no point to it. But he was telling the truth.

  He opened his eyes and saw her clearly for the first time. She looked terrible as his dream had made her: thin, hollow-eyed, the pale brown skin bloodless and sallow, her body stiff with tension. Her clothes were torn and hung on her loosely.

  She said, “Was there, was, was there an alarm?”

  “What kind of alarm?”

  “To Morisz. Or somebody. Because you have to listen to me.”

  “There was no alarm from here,” he said. “I don’t know what you might have done getting this far,” and irritably, at another stab in thought, “I wish you would stop doing that. Do you think I would lie to you?”

  Yes! said her thought resoundingly.

  “All right. All right. May I get dressed?”

  She hesitated a moment and said, “All right. But move very slowly.”

  He pushed away the coverlet and saw her eyes widen, taking in the heavy muscles of his chest and arms. She backed away from him. The knife fell to her knees and she was holding some kind of archaic gun. She said, “I don’t forget you hunt tigers. This would stop one. I got it from the, the, the aliens.”

  He barely kept still. “From—you have been with them?”

  She nodded. He looked at the chunk of metal she held. Her thumb hovered near a stud whose function was unclear, but the hole in the end was pointed toward him.

  “I believe you,” he said, and eased out of bed very slowly indeed.

  He slept nude, but it did not occur to him to be self-conscious. He dressed slowly, giving himself time to think. Leaving himself open to Hanna’s return had been a hopeless gesture. It was inconceivable that she should get this far, even supposing she wanted to come to him. And she ought to have been headed for D’neera, if anywhere in human space. “Rational but uncooperative,” Tso had said. Lady Koroth, witnessing that interview but kept from interfering, had been less temperate; she had used words like “hunted” and “driven.” They might both be right, Jameson thought, watching Hanna as closely as she watched him. Her sleeves were rolled up and an angry red wound showed on one forearm. Tso had reported it, with a note: Combat, query? The fast-healing D’neeran flesh had closed over it already, but scantily and unevenly, and the skin around it was dark and unhealthy. She held the heavy alien weapon awkwardly, using both hands; but the muzzle did not waver.