The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “I was just remembering…”

  Willowmeade’s next Jump would take it back into human space. Hanna’s would start her on the path the People had charted.

  Tirel knew the purpose of her mission, but neither he nor anyone except Leader knew what she expected at the end. He looked at her curiously and said, “Sure there’s nothing you need?”

  “No, thank you,” Hanna said.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  A little later, when Willowmeade was a light-year gone, Hanna wept. All the human faces had vanished, all the human voices. But the reason she mourned had to do with his last words to her; they seemed the sum and essence of what being human was, and her tears were not for herself.

  Time ran on, shrinking. She had no time to watch it run. She had too much to do. Why? Why tatter her voice with talking, reciting facts, surmise, portraits of the People? Why work so for Fleet with its guns, or for Jameson who sent her again into night?

  It is for the future, Leader answered, comforting her.

  She was not comforted.

  She went on with it, though. The stimulants drummed in her and distanced her from all save the tasks before her. The hard part was remembering human speech; and sorting out the knowledge Leader had given her in the days when she came scarcely human toward Earth. Singular concepts triggered hallucinatory visions that touched all her senses and forced her to think with precision of how she could describe them. Strange flowers filled the decks of Heartworld II, predatory fleshy living things whose massed shapes pleased the People. When she bathed, the water seemed a running stream, and the walls that surrounded her shifted to angles their designers had never intended. Leader, caught in the interstices of her self so that though he was a functioning unwelcome intruder it seemed he ought to have been there always, said of every moment: it should be thus.

  It seemed to her she was more alien than human.

  The theories of “Sentience” were nonsense. This was what she had meant, but she had not known it before. “Sentience” was a failure because neither she nor anyone else had fully understood what she was talking about.

  Leader thought quietly in corners:

  I too was most fortunate. Saw Sunrise, Hearthkeeper’s child, one rainy dawn in early youth and I too was a child, younger even than most at bonding and all of Us in your thinking children. The bond cannot be otherwise. There is no place for jealousy for doubt for dolor unknown to Us but known to me since known to you. There was no ceremony, nor need for one. Came I to her Nearhome. We grew and flowered together until time came. Sealed the bond in a space of time apart. Those who passed the Bower knew and took joy and strength from creation of love which was shaped from our bodies and selves. The future born anew with each bond.

  She did not wish my leaving yet they called me: Explorers, Watchsetters: from the first waking, ever: she knew. Yet she is my rest and true Home and ever was. And ever is.

  Hanna listened to Leader within her, and to the voices within him. They passed a halfway point in space, passed it again in time. Time was material. And shrinking.

  She turned with more than human patience to the task of disentangling the People’s written language, a tricky blend of mathematics and pictographs with all its own structural complexities. She analyzed flawlessly, drug-driven, the relationship of its precise, concrete symbolic structure to the ambiguity of the People’s living mind/s. Behind her acute attention drifted shadows of lost futures, dreamlike. Might have built a city, guided Koroth, loved, learned to laugh…

  Might have grown wise…

  Living is, said Leader, and will be. Different. Yet real.

  “For you. Not for me.”

  How do you know?

  “I do not know. I hope. I do not want your future. I want only mine, and will not have it. There will be naught but the dispersion. And the ruined self and I think the body’s death. And then nothing.”

  Not nothing. He wanted to ease her grief. Even among Us it is said one can live for the Good. And die for it.

  “That is no comfort. I choose this, but I do not know why. I do not want it. But I choose it.”

  You will be remembered. The work of your hands and thought and self will live. You will live. Not as We do; as humans do.

  “That is no comfort!”

  * * *

  When the last Jump was near, it was Leader who remembered to send back the return projectile, and to program it with messages for Iledra and Cosma and her parents and cousins.

  She left no farewell for Jameson.

  * * *

  At the very last she programmed Heartworld II to begin broadcasting a plea for tolerance that would, she hoped, induce the People to consider some course besides blasting her to atoms at once.

  She knew (from Leader-in-her-thoughts) that security around Home was as tight as anything humans had ever produced in their most paranoid moments, and he could make a fair guess at their reaction to what they had found on the First Watchsetter.

  They will not make for your Home, I think; for the others; the fleet flies toward them.

  “Not much of a fleet, is it?”

  Not much. Not like yours, for which we/they wait in readiness; they will think you the flagship. And fire.

  “Will what I write now stop them?”

  ???

  “Well?”

  Hope!

  The People’s defenses, like humanity’s long ready but unused, were not automatic. They had to be ordered into action. But even if they did not fire on her single small vessel immediately, what would they do when they sensed her? The crew of the First Watchsetter, she knew now, had brought every conceivable discipline and defense to stalking the Endeavor and examining the precious prisoner. They had shut themselves away from her. But she could not use the barrier, the wall, the absence of a connecting medium she had found when (who? Bladetree, Leader answered) came to meet her. With an effort that drained them the crew had, while they questioned her, operated in the Hunter’s mode, subsuming the killing reflex into the purposefulness of stalking, though their prey was information. But that was an artificial state, an unnatural event, which drained and dismayed even the remarkable individuals who created it. What would happen when Hanna touched the edge of a whole population’s awareness? It depended on her, and on Leader, of course. She could see no recourse except to distance herself from her own fear; with Leader’s help—if he could help. She did not know if she could do it or how she would do it. Therefore she prepared Heartworld II to plead for her, to get her time, and at the final Jump was glad of it, because the first thing she saw was a Render.

  It seemed painted, two-dimensional, though the texture of its shaggy brown fur was reproduced in detail. Its eyes were filled with red light. It floated in semi-darkness, bright against the shadows. She saw it clearly from the corner of one eye, but when she turned to look at it directly it was gone and the shadows fell again.

  Hanna thought automatically: That’s silly. What would a painted Render be doing here?

  She was much closer to Home than she had expected to come with the last Jump, and the curve of it nearly filled the pilot’s port with the fertile marbling of a terrestrial world.

  Heartworld II’s song went on, the binary version of Hanna’s version of the People’s binary version of their version of symbolic communication. It said: (This individual) is harmless flesh and blood, unclawed, not predator, not prey, not harmless, a quantity N. (This individual) stands outside reality strange as the nospace of Inspace, stands outside logic strange as We and I, stands—

  It is a Lifetender with blood on its breath, someone remarked skeptically, and a Render sat in the empty and redundant co-pilot’s seat, and the air crackled around it, and Hanna leapt to her feet and was alone again.

  Heartworld II went on talking:

  —with you in the unnamed haze, this time they see without fear, We have—they have no need to kill, inertia is reversed and—

  It was a hand’s width from her face, fur blurri
ng into grayish scales, fangs glittering at her throat. She started to scream and strangled the sound and did not move. It disappeared. She shook with reaction and her legs were weak and the hammering of her heart frightened her.

  —one being in this unit, harmless flesh and blood, unarmed, unclawed, requesting permission to land—

  Does it lie? said a Render on the edge of sight, and another said: Beasts lie.

  Then they said: What is lie?

  Hanna stumbled back to her seat. Eyes closed, hands over her ears, she waited for the Renders to go away. They did not.

  The value of

  what We lost when

  and one being

  but blow it away

  and lose the

  Let it land

  “I have,” said Heartworld II, “a landing beacon.”

  Hanna opened her eyes and peered through more Renders. “Land,” she muttered.

  Heartworld II whistled quietly. “Awaiting orders,” it said.

  “Go on down,” she said more clearly. “Land.”

  The fall was slow, the Renders whispered at her back and somewhere, everywhere, the equivalent of fingers rested on the equivalent of triggers. She had no illusion about what would happen if she tried to deviate from the course they set her, or why she was still alive. They wanted Heartworld II, the prize XS-12 should have been to them if they had not clumsily destroyed most of its value to them. They wanted the data this ship carried. They must not be allowed to get it. Surely someone, Jameson, Petrov, somebody had thought of this?

  She asked Heartworld II about it and got no answer. There were more devious ways to ask and she did so and found her suspicions were correct. While she slept Heartworld II had been programmed not to self-erase but to self-destruct if alien hands touched it.

  So I get off and try to make peace and they come here and it blows them up, she thought. Me too, if I’m still aboard.

  The Renders went on talking among themselves, paying no attention to her. Imaginary Renders. She wiped sweat off her face and listened intently to their talk of defense.

  But Renders were dust and did not speak.

  She was listening to the People. The Renders were her own creation, an objective referent for her fear, which she dared not direct toward the People themselves. Perhaps Leader-in-her-thoughts, who must share her fear but could not fear his own kind, helped her create them, had helped her find this brief precarious solution. They winked in and out as her eyes moved, but their numbers seemed to be growing.

  She had stopped watching the monitors. She looked out the port and saw a civilized world. There was less green than she had expected, more brown and blue, and now she was close enough to see clusters of light past the terminator.

  The Renders fell silent. A claw brushed her cheek and with an effort she remained still, biting at her fingers. She reminded herself they were an illusion, one possibility of many and that the most destructive. There were alternatives. There had to be alternatives. She was here to create them.

  She said to Heartworld II, “I want to meet with one individual. Tell the Defenders—”

  She stopped short. Was that the right word? Yes, whispered a Render, and the mutter began again. The southern hemisphere, the Nearhome of the Defenders, that was where she was going. Thousands of them there.

  She started again, “One individual. The, the Hearthkeeper of the Nearhome of, of—” She stumbled and finished the thought: “Of the Leader of the First Watchsetter.”

  Heartworld II chuckled doubtfully and began the translation.

  She knew then that Leader had been thinking of Sunrise all along; and he came suddenly to life and cried out with longing.

  Heartworld II settled slowly to a city. It was white in the midday light, though other colors showed here and there. Its rooftops were landscaped and decorated and made into space for living or beauty to be seen from above, a convention inconsistently followed on human worlds but perhaps universal here. It was not large, but she had seen smaller towns clustered round it during her controlled fall.

  Thousands of them here, she thought, and felt the Renders crowding round her, and licked her dry lips again and again. She was afraid, and her fear created the beasts. The cabin was hot, surely with their body heat. Yet it was the animal in the People she must fear, and the animal in herself, and the Renders could not harm her though they kept the truth before her eyes.

  “They will bring you the individual you request,” said Heartworld II.

  So near, whispered Leader-in-her-thoughts, and Hanna shivered. Sunrise was indeed near. Among the Nearhomes scattered round Defense were two or three occupied mostly by Watchsetters, and one of them was Leader’s.

  Heartworld II drifted gently downward, under the rounded towers of the tallest buildings. In them, unlike the People’s spacecraft, there were windows, transparent openings in immaculate walls; but she could not see anything through them. The Renders surrounded her, muttering. Beyond them on the edge of perception she seemed to hear a grim vibration of floodwater or landslide, a threat inescapable as an incoming tide complex and unpredictable under dancing moons. The Renders held it back. Behind their red eyes were hundreds, thousands, millions of eyes watching her. She hid behind draperies of coarse fur and hoped the Renders would not go away.

  Heartworld II touched down at last. Automatically she checked monitors, rounding out the view the port gave her. This was clearly a landing field, though no other vessels showed around her. Its floor was brilliant white, and she saw that only Heartworld II’s compensation for light kept it from hurting her eyes. The nearest structure was a kilometer away; the work of the Defenders was carried on deep underground. Nothing moved, except once when a blood-red flash drew her eyes to something like a bird that vanished almost at once.

  Heartworld II said, “You are to leave this vessel and walk to the building you see before you.”

  “All right,” Hanna said. She was busy for a few minutes, modifying Heartworld II’s destruct program slightly. She said, “What is Heartworld I, anyway?”

  “Heartworld I,” said its sister, “is reserved for the president of the General Council.”

  “And the commissioner from Heartworld gets Two?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well, good-bye,” she said.

  “Good-bye,” it answered without surprise.

  She went out, accompanied by a rapidly multiplying retinue of Renders. Those nearest her had solidified, and jostled her now. Their odor was delicate and sweet—no. That was the warm lambent air. She scarcely saw her goal through the crowd, though the Renders thinned in substance at a distance so that even in their infinite numbers those on the horizon were only shapes of air, hollow spots in the atmosphere, which she could barely see by squinting because she had forgotten to protect her eyes and the light was indeed too bright. But all her memories of Home and the First Watchsetter were of spaces filled with dimness, and she did not understand this light.

  Her footsteps made dull sounds on the shining ground, but the Renders made no sound at all. The structure ahead of her grew slowly. It was not large. She knew it was made for observation and maintenance, that was all. It was expendable.

  She had miscalculated how long it would take her to reach the building, and before she got there Heartworld II blew itself up with a roar and a hot blast of wind that knocked her flat. Debris rained on her unshielded back and the arms clasped over her head. Before the roar was finished she looked up and saw that the Renders had gone, and one of the People said to her, invisible: Why did you do that?

  His voice was clear over the roar that was also the relentless waiting flood. She answered: I did it to protect both of us.

  He seized and examined the thought and she cried out aloud, remembering The Questioner; though to Bladetree she had said little so clearly, having been consciously obscure or blurred by madness.

  The presence vanished, but it was not replaced by silence. The sound of the explosion must have ended, but sti
ll she heard it, a thunder of countless voices. The ground seemed to tremble and she dug her hands into it: earth now, not the flat whiteness. Bluish stalks came loose in her fingers, studded with tiny blue pinpoints of flowers. She cowered before an impending avalanche, but nothing happened, it was only their immanence she felt, the giant awareness of her presence.

  She turned her head, licking dust from her lips. She had not given any thought ahead of time to how she would handle the minutes just past, because she had had no idea where to begin. The right response, by luck perhaps, had come from some deep unconscious well, and she had managed to distance herself from the People, transforming them into dangers she could understand. But the innumerable Renders, the tide, the landslide, the avalanche, all were ultimately irresistible and this was not good enough. She would have to succeed quickly in what she had come here for, or she would go under.

  She remembered a moment from the struggle with Leader-in-her-thoughts and forced her attention to physical reality. The earth was warm, something had burnt through her clothing and there was patch of fire on one leg, there was dirt under her fingernails and the tiny blue flowers gave the air its odor. The People’s sun shone on her indifferently.

  She carefully relaxed all her muscles and lifted her head—and saw Sunrise standing over her.

  Chapter 19

  Leader-in-her-thoughts cried Lovely how lovely my love how long absent o stay with me! and…

  Hanna choked, her face in the dirt again because she wished to reach for Sunrise and draw back all at once and was helpless and…

  In the stunning surge of longing and desire Sunrise took her shoulders and turned her without effort. The pressure of the thousand million voices was gone. Sunrise regarded her with eyes hidden behind the membrane that kept out the sun and said very intimately: Thou art not truly my strength.

  Sunrise’s headfeathers were intricately groomed and her face was decorated with stylized flowers. A flame-shape, symbol of her office, hung from a chain round her neck.

  Hanna shook her head numbly, over and over. She spoke, and so did Leader.