Leader said, It is time.
Time, Sunrise said; time, said the leaves.
“Time…? Oh, no…”
Hanna began to shiver. She said thickly, having scarcely had the courage to think of the question before, “Must I die in th-the pain? Again?”
Not, Leader said, in my body.
Sunrise stood and walked into the darkness. Light glimmered at her feet. When that faded too Hanna knew she was sinking back into the dream.
* * *
The passages were too dark for human eyes, and Sunrise guided her. Around her were walls of silence, the telepathic barrier with which Bladetree had met her when he took her from XS-12. It seemed tangible, so that she shrank away from physical walls with the sense that she would run into them. She stopped sometimes in the complexities of darkness, thinking Sunrise had gone on through solid substance, but always Sunrise turned and held out her hand and Hanna followed, trusting her. The barrier began to shiver; through it she heard whispers and sometimes identified those who made them, though in doubt and confusion. For their conceptual names were those of their tasks, or descriptive, or spoke of one person’s relationship to one or more other People, and everyone had many such names, and everyone but Hanna always knew who was meant. She was herself an alien-too-small-Render-thing and many other things, none pleasant; but also she was form-of-Leader.
She knew dimly that she walked, but her consciousness was erratic and it seemed she was in one place or another without volition or movement. The empty rooms she crossed with Sunrise were bare of ornament, the rich imagery of many thoughts sufficing to fill them.
Not bare, said the People in surprise. Do you not see beauty? A wall of fine mosaic came to vivid life, and she admired it. Here was a column of pale light; but its final form depended on its union with other columns in other rooms. For a moment she saw the work whole. “Beautiful,” she whispered.
Someone said, That is no Render, and others answered, Yet it is. Yet he is. Yet We are.
Here were more walls that danced with symbols waiting for a thought to rearrange them. All history was here. Hanna asked a question without knowing what she asked, and Sunrise paused and the symbols changed. Sunrise said: In the long days when my love was gone, in the days when my duties permitted, in the nights when my Child slept, I studied these matters.
A web of lines enclosed a globe of stars. Here was the People’s sun, here the sun of the less-than-People, here the travels of generations. Hanna reached out to point, and did not have to. Sunrise knew the place she meant, and knew her question.
No others. Only the Lost Ones, the less-than-People; only your own kind.
“But why? Why go that way?”
Why not? It chanced to lie in Our path.
“If you had gone another way it might have been—”
Leader-in-her-thoughts took it up: The slippery-thinkers or the uncarpenters, the tree-dwellers or the not-yets or others still unmet—
And all of them shouted at her: Are they all like you?
“No. No. Yes.” Hanna looked up at Sunrise’s flat face with the noselike projection she knew, had known for some time, was a bony plate to protect the organ of telepathy, distinct and localized as Hanna’s own eyes.
“They are all like me. They are all like you, too. They fear death and protect life, as I do, as you do. It is the first lesson life teaches any world, the first lesson life learns. It is life.”
You teach Us, yet you know not soul, they sighed, and the deep vibration began again, a cavern of winds at her feet.
Hanna said with downcast eyes, “I cannot know its meaning.”
We are soul, they said.
“But there is something else,” she said, and Leader said, That is true.
What else? they said, and Hanna almost knew.
When Hanna looked at still another room Sunrise had vanished. Hanna was not in the room of records anymore; this was a dark and pleasant place with soft lights that flickered, light enough for the People’s unveiled eyes, but she could not tell why the light was not steady. Many lights are not, they said. It is pleasing this way. She took an experimental step, and then another. The floor wavered before her eyes, from one substance and one level to another, and she knew she was seeing many floors through many eyes, and had not their perceptual adjuncts to tell her which she stood on. The walls had a calm and warming polish, though their color changed or seemed to, and sometimes she saw stone. She called on Leader, but he could not help her. Your body, he said, is not mine. You must sort the flux yourself.
Many hours had gone by since the last stimulant injection. She had not expected ever to need another one. There were weights on her feet, her chest and head hurt and the darkness was caught in her eyes. She stumbled on softness and the carpet made a hollow for her body and a cushion for her head. This was a room for children, scattered with bright toys, some of which a human child would take up at once. The room was empty because the alien-Render-thing had come. She crossed the rug and it flattened obediently. A couch offered to enfold her. She did not have to climb up on it—she dropped onto it—it was made for persons even smaller than she. She did not lie down. If she did she would go to sleep, and there was not much waking left.
She sensed Swift before she saw him, sleepy and compliant in Sunrise’s arms. He rubbed at his eyes and Hanna felt the down of his child’s plumage against Sunrise’s cheek. Her body trembled with Leader’s eagerness. Swift was big as a human six-year-old, but he did not seem heavy when Sunrise put him in her arms. She was abruptly isolated, watching tears stream down her own cheeks, and saw herself with amazement. That body, her body, was shaken with emotion. Bowed with fatigue and Swift’s weight, it caressed the child and Sunrise and dimly, as if through a pane of solid substance, Hanna felt the joy of their reunion, and all their Nearhome rejoicing in it.
But dimly, dimly. And then not at all.
She was apart from them. There was no room for her. She had no power at all—Leader had it all—she would never have any again. To her eyes—but they were not her eyes—Swift seemed to grow larger. He filled the field of vision, he was the largest thing in the universe, he was its center, he was the universe. Green gentle eyes looked into hers, and he laughed soundlessly with pure infant mirth. His father held him like a treasure of innocence, unscathed.
Time to come. Time to come in my arms. Now truly it is my time!
I am not ready, Hanna cried, I have no child!—for she saw in Swift the something else she had almost known before.
But no one heard her. No one.
Fear clawed at her and would have clutched her throat, but it was not her throat anymore. There was a panic urge to try to seize control again.
She mastered it.
No. Let it be! I came here for this….
She tried to say to Leader: I knew it would be hard. I do not know if I have the strength.
But he was still absorbed in Swift, and did not hear her.
Time is, said the voice of a wind astray in starlight; time echoed the sky, white again (night was gone); time whispered a tunnel of arching blue leaves whose thin flexible branches bent low to caress the heads of those who passed; time sang a moat of rushing water; time murmured flickering flame; time time time said the voices of a world, until:
* * *
Time evaporates. Past is ended and present ending, and only the future exists as Hanna hurries on from moment to moment. But she sees where Leader bears her: through passages of leaf and bough to a silver spire from whose peak a flame beckons like hope, and up, and up, and up, until she has ascended to the radiant sky.
Thus rejoice We that We share not the fate of all life else….
They do not speak to Hanna anymore nor even, now, to Leader. The great thought has no subject nor any object. It is thought thinking itself.
(Do not think of what you have to do, thinks something-of-Hanna caught in a crevice of stone.)
What will last-kindness do to this alien form?
(Wh
at will it do to me!!!)
We do not know.
(I recline—)
Terror is a palpable thing. It is no stranger; it has an old companion’s face; but now she is utterly contained with it. It does not touch her body. No heart beats faster, no breath is shorter, no muscle is weak with it. He is not afraid. She sees through eyes that were hers, and feels terror that is only hers. She wishes to report, report, report; to objectify; to become the observant scientist postponing the future moment by moment by reporting, reporting, reporting as if there were a future, as if it matters her voice will live on in the object in her throat. But she cannot speak.
(Think it then. Think my death. So that at the end it will pass into this great plurality and be remembered and someday somehow be returned—but how transmuted?—to those who ought to hear it. Survive. In some form, survive!
I lie, no, recline, not on the altar I feared—there never were altars, they needed no gods, there were laboratory tables not altars—at ease—his ease. Bondmate clasps my hand. She does not fear the alien flesh. The Child clings to me, now puzzled and lamenting. Knows his father. How can he among so many? How can he in such strange form?)
The sun rises, warming the vivid height. Such places do We choose when there is choice. This is the time We choose, when choice is given: the rising of the sun.
(The drink is cool and has no taste to my alien mouth—)
The cup of last-kindness thy father’s own skull, carven, gemlike, polished. Last-kindness, like water, is tasteless. This path We choose (no others so choose) for saving, for peace and full joining. Drink! Like water is formless is shapeless: life gives it form: ever filling, ever bursting forth. Life shapes itself. You have shaped your time, your self, your Home and Us for the good or the ill of your days and those to come. Water purifies flesh. Flesh dissolves in sweet water. Now join the eternal completing!
The purpose, We affirm, for this is needful, and
The purpose, he affirms, and knows Us, each of the persons of his Nearhome and beyond them the persons of all others past and present, and in others at this very dawn those who like him wait for the sun to give up completed lives:
The purpose, he says, and Bondmate bows her head grieving and assenting:
The purpose, he says, and the Child is still, hands on his father’s alien heart:
The purpose, he tells Us, is life and the absence of death; life unending in the soul, life renewed in the Child.
It is the true and proper answer and he fully freely gives it. And We ask: What have you learned?
He says: I have learned that my love’s eyes are green.
Green. A word. A thing a color We cannot see.
It is all of me which comes to you, he says. That We know and that We do not know, save I; new lives, new deaths; the balance of a stranger’s form, and worse: a stranger’s death.
We do not want this thing. To change Us?
Renders changed Us. It is no Render completes Us now, but one of Us.
We doubt. His limbs are weak, the alien strength is waning.
He says: Think with pity (though We could not pity Renders) on their end. These are not beasts and yet they die: finally, irrevocably, beyond recourse. The sorrow! A race of sorrow, a species that knows its fate: they invent immortality, and invent belief in it: it bends and twists and warps them even the best. They are what We might have been; pity them!
And this is what he has learned. And so We also learn. For this is how We learn.
The limbs come near to weightlessness in the morning light. They are no longer his nor anyone’s. In each moment he is nearer. He looks back/We look back at the silent strange form, a rag of a thing, small and harmless. He is almost visible; We are always almost visible at this ending, almost on the edge of sight a puff of smoke, almost in clear dawn light. It is so always, and this is the same. One of Us. And each of Us always is different from all, and so with each death and new life We are changed, and changed all the more by the Great.
Therefore begins the final scrutiny and shaping, judgment and acknowledgment at once, and We pare to a structure of light his life and honor it: fear met with courage, suffering with duty fulfilled to final measure in the company and sharing of a beast.
Not beast, he says. Returned she to grieve with Bondmate and Child. Beasts do not do that. Forswore she attack. Beasts do not do that. She is Ours. We are she.
And the lives intertwined are a skein of light, he stretches thinning toward Bondmate once more, and is attenuated, and settles without fear or grief into each cell of each one of Us.
And the alien form is a wisp of darkness in the light of a sun no longer strange, and
It is done.
* * *
She dreams of water. Mist, really. The cool spray of falling water bathes her face. Her face. She lifts to it a hand that has a cobweb’s weight and strength. Her hand. Strange thought.
Why strange?
Her eyes open, with effort. See the scaled gentle face, familiar as her own. She smiles, and whispers a question.
Sunrise cannot answer. She does not know why the human body lives. But she tends to it carefully as she tends Swift, and the food she puts into its mouth comes warmed and softened from her own. And is gratefully accepted.
The ships have been called back. They are not necessary.
* * *
The security module was not in Jameson’s house anymore. The place where it had been was a cavity, the walls scarred and strange from amputation. He felt as if a part of his body had been removed. The transmitter was gone from his ear and it seemed he would never again know what was going on anywhere.
He slept drugged to the top of his skull and severed from the world and they almost had to break his house down before it sounded an alarm of intruders and he finally woke, sick with dread. The antidote to oblivion didn’t really take effect until he was on his way to Admin in al-Nimeury’s aircar. He had fallen on the way out his own front door, and he did not remember anything al-Nimeury had told him. He was too proud to ask for a repetition. He watched the night go by and waited for al-Nimeury to say something else. When it came it was a string of curses, but absentminded, as if al-Nimeury had been through it all before.
Jameson tried his dignity and found it, with relief, returning.
“Calm yourself,” he said.
“You sonofabitch, you never answered me. Did you tell her not to talk to anybody but you?”
Jameson said vaguely, “You never know.”
“I’m not sure she’s all there anymore. Maybe Katherine was right—no. No, I take that back. I was there, she wasn’t faking. But she sure as hell sounds strange.”
Jameson knew who he meant then. al-Nimeury said, “Here, are you going to be sick?”
“No. Sorry.”
“What the hell then?”
“Never mind. Shut up.”
The aircar swooped down to a wet rooftop and al-Nimeury said, “We’re here. Come on.”
They ran through the labyrinth of Admin to al-Nimeury’s rooms. Pain shot through Jameson’s head at every step. al-Nimeury kept talking. “She’s patched in through Willow-meade. How did she know Tirel was out there? Did you tell her? Or did she get it out of your head?”
“I don’t know.”
“Little bitch,” al-Nimeury said inconsequentially, and a guard fell back and they were in his chambers. Morisz’s replacement was there, and a dozen men from Fleet, and Murphy, who must have been roused from sleep too but was sleekly groomed as always. Her eyes were wider than usual, though.
Murphy said, “I thought she might talk to me, but she won’t.”
“Right. Well, he’s here now. There’s no video,” al-Nimeury said to Jameson. “She can hear you.”
Jameson said cautiously, “Hanna?”
The faintest of sighs filled the room. There was nothing else. After a minute Jameson looked uncertainly at the others. Murphy muttered, as if Hanna could not hear her, “She’s very strange. Talk to her.”
He said to thin air, feeling like a fool, “Hanna, are you all right?”
A voice said slowly, “Ye-es. Yes. All—right.”
He sank into a chair, beginning to forget the others, all his attention concentrated on a faint sound from infinity. It might have been the voice of a ghost. But even if they had not already checked the identity with every means at their command—and they must have done that at once—he would have known the voice was Hanna’s.
He said, trying to sound ordinary, “What happened?”
“It’s all right,” Hanna said.
“What’s all right? Where are you?”
“Here,” Hanna said.
“Are you on the aliens’ home world?”
There was a long silence. “Yes,” said Hanna.
“Have you come to an understanding with them?”
This time the silence was very long. Hanna said finally, “What?”
Oh dear God, Jameson thought, they have destroyed her mind. Desolation swept over him. He said very slowly and carefully, “Hanna, can you understand me?”
He waited. Nothing. His shoulders ached with tension; surely he listened for a voice from the dead. He had had time to think in the last terrible days, much too much time to think, while all he valued most was taken from him and he could not know if the great price had purchased anything. He had not been able to make Hanna’s weary face disappear, except when he eradicated it in sleep. Now it seemed he might have bought something after all—and now the sound of Hanna’s voice was more important to him personally than anything it might say. It was not a thought that fit in with anything in his life, anywhere. He thrust it aside.
“Hanna?”
She said suddenly, “Yes. Wait.”
But he was nearly ready in his anxiety to speak again when she said, “Very difficult. This. Talking.”
“All right. All right. What’s wrong with you?”
“The interface,” she said. “Wait!”
He was not even sure the command was addressed to him, but he waited. Presently she began to speak, slowly and awkwardly.
The D’neeran Factor Page 39
