The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “It’s all right. They won’t attack. I’ll come back. You shouldn’t have sent the ship. To follow me.”

  “How did you know about Willowmeade?”

  “I guessed. I know you,” Hanna said. She said this strongly and without hesitation, and sounded irritated. He breathed again, weak with relief. It was Hanna, all right, and whatever had happened to her, she was herself.

  “You’re positive they won’t attack?”

  “Positive. They were going to. They aborted. It’s all right. If you don’t do anything stupid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Speaking more easily now, she said, “Don’t frighten them. Pull Willowmeade back.”

  “Are they demanding that?”

  “I am. Demanding it. I promised them.”

  He glanced at al-Nimeury, but it was Murphy who said, “Yes. Yes, we’ll do it.”

  “You have to. They’ll know. Look,” Hanna said, “it’s started. Now it’s up to you.”

  Not me, he thought. Not any longer.

  Someone else had come into the room. He knew who it was without looking around: the new commissioner from Heartworld.

  He said, “You have to come back. We have to talk to you.”

  “I know. I’ll come. Not yet.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to, to, see some people. The others from—the ones who belonged with the people I killed. And find—I lost my ring.”

  He hesitated, and decided not to pursue it. He said, “I’d rather you came back right now.”

  “I can’t. I have to show them—Starr?”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t do much. He did it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The alien. Made the interface. In me. He was—he is one of their great ones. They know that. I miss him. I like his, his, wife,” she added with apparent irrelevance.

  Jameson, at a loss, said, “That’s nice.”

  “They might not have any more—” There was a long pause. Then she said, “Watchsetters. They might have communicators instead. She’d be good at it.”

  “I’m sure she would. When can you come home?”

  “But this—oh. Does Iledra want to know?”

  “I mean here,” he said to his own surprise.

  “Oh. I don’t—a few days. I was wrong.”

  She seemed to think he would know exactly what she meant. He said, “What were you wrong about?”

  “I didn’t go far enough.”

  “No?”

  “No. It’s not enough to…to…to think with them. To know what’s real. You have to live with them too. And then—”

  There was another long silence. The space and time between them disappeared and he could almost see her face, alight with wonder. He thought she reached out to touch him, and shook his head to make the vision disappear.

  “Then?” he said. “What then, Hanna?”

  “Why, then you have to die with them,” she said.

  Chapter 20

  The room Tirel gave her on Willowmeade was small and cramped. There was a guard at the door. Tirel said she was an honored guest and the guard was there to keep curious crewmen from disturbing her. He lied. She was guarded because no one knew what to make of her yet; because suspicion lingered, and Tirel wanted no alien monster stalking his ship. If sometimes Hanna felt like a guest, it was because of the very crewmen who were kept away from her. Her room filled up quickly with their gifts: fresh flowers grown in cubicles cramped as hers; tapestries as carefully woven as the coverlet incinerated with Heartworld II; strange and beautiful animals carved by clever hands; presents of food from the galley; cherished garments from the women. The room took on the look of D’neera, crowded with beauties stacked and tumbling over one another. It was only later that Hanna wondered why the phenomenon had happened, and found that as the full story of her contacts with the People spread through Willowmeade, with it spread a wish not so much to honor as to comfort her.

  She hardly left the room, because she was weary and sad and unwell and it was difficult to get used to human beings again. Still, she resented Tirol’s strictures. She had been the prisoner of someone or other for a long time now—or maybe sometimes she had really been a guest—but she wished they would stop calling it one thing when it was the other.

  A true-human mindhealer came to see her, and asked questions she would not answer, and proposed a moderate intake of drugs (a suggestion she rejected with some violence), and said that she ought to have the most normal regimen of living possible.

  He must have forgotten to tell anyone else. Her other visitors were not normal, they did not pay social calls; they asked questions about the People. They thought she must have all the answers and she did not. A lifetime of study would not be enough to get them all. She could not even answer simple questions with the expected yes or no. To do so was to disregard a world of connotations, implications, and interconnections, and a simple answer, being incomplete, was false. Her ambiguous answers satisfied no one, but they were all she had.

  She talked to Jameson sometimes. The transmissions were clear; behind lurking Willowmeade, as Hanna moved toward the People’s Home, other ships of Fleet had worked feverishly to set human relays in place. Whatever came next, the line was in place for communication with the People, and Willowmeade now followed it home. It was a remarkable achievement, Jameson told Hanna complacently, but she was not interested, and barely nodded in acknowledgment.

  Their conversations sometimes were private, but Jameson was cool and impersonal. The caution with which she was treated must have had his approval, and she asked him finally, bitterly, what she had to do to prove herself to him, and, indeed, what exactly she was supposed to prove. He was jolted for the first time from his abstraction. He said, “You must understand, Hanna, we still don’t know how human you are.”

  “But he’s gone. Gone.”

  “His memories are there, are they not? His knowledge?”

  “Yes, but he isn’t. I ‘heard’ him sometimes before I came away…” She fumbled, searching for words to explain. “He’s still there, in them. But it’s a change. By the time I left he was already almost archetypal, like the others—the ones who’d been in him. They lose some individuality…She’ll die soon, his spouse. Not right away; in a year or so. Just slowly, gradually fade. I think I might too.”

  He gave her a very measured look. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not if you’re a human being. And you weren’t united with him very long. I think you’re just grieving, Hanna. Because you’ve lost him…Did you love him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think it matters. He was me. And I thought if I lived through it, somehow he’d still be there.”

  Jameson’s explanation was insulting—who should know how human she was, if not Hanna herself?—but it explained the medtechs who swarmed about her. They examined her as soon as she came aboard Willowmeade; decontaminated her, corrected some nutritional imbalances, pounced on her still-bleeding arm with delight; and analyzed her skin, her hair, her nails, and every conceivable body fluid, along with the air that had been in her lungs when she arrived. After a day or two they came back and began scanning every cell of her brain. They talked enthusiastically of dendrites and axons while the traces of light that defined Hanna formed ambiguous amoebic shapes on portable video screens, and the mainframe computer in medical mode emitted strange gobbles and pings as comment on what Hanna had become.

  They were on to something. They would not tell her what, so she read their thoughts, and was frightened. Perhaps Jameson was right after all; there were subtle physical changes in her brain. Interpreting them was difficult, but something, plainly, had happened to her.

  “Give us just a little slice of cortical tissue,” they coaxed her. “Quick, simple, safe, painless—”

  “No!” she said. She had been tampered with enough. Her head ached at the very thought. “Enough is enough!” she cried in despair, and Jameson unexpectedly supported
her.

  “Should I thank you?” she asked him.

  “No. Why? What you are now works. Just the way it is.”

  “Then you’d want to be able to replicate it. Replicate me.”

  “It will be a long time before we can do that. I dislike using the word ‘impossible,’ but it just might be applicable.”

  He was using holographic transmission, exceedingly rare for him; he said it was too difficult to remember that you were talking to an illusion. And indeed he appeared so substantial, seated at ease in Hanna’s cabin, that she yearned to put out her hands to touch him, and restrained herself with difficulty. She brought her mind back to what he had said and asked, “Why?”

  He shifted a little in his unreal chair, and Hanna, recognizing the signs, prepared to be lectured.

  “The theory postulates two elements that are too difficult to deal with,” he said. “One is the shaping of consciousness the aliens did when you were their prisoner. The other is the massive regeneration you went through on Earth. The changes probably were in place before you left, and were overlooked because no one recognized their significance. We might be able to modify the regenerative effect in a healthy subject. But the first part of the business…certainly we wouldn’t reproduce it, even if we could. And we’ll need the aliens to find an alternative means of producing the same effect. No, you’re a synergistic product. Getting the same result, with due attention to the safety of the subjects, will take years. You’ve made it possible to proceed with contact along more conventional lines. I don’t see why anyone should be permitted to dig around in your head.”

  Hanna thought rather doubtfully that it sounded like rationalization for a decision made on emotional grounds, but probably not; probably he meant just what he said.

  * * *

  She spent two weeks on Willowmeade, and through all of it, when she was not being questioned or examined, she grieved. Whether her brain’s changes had anything to do with it or not, she was still more than half alien. Now she felt herself to be much as the persons of the First Watchsetter had seen her—a part of an organism severed from the whole, and bereft. Before Leader’s final transition she had not looked beyond it, thinking there would be nothing, or still-Leader; if she had looked beyond it she could not have predicted this loneliness. She refused to talk to Iledra. She did not know if she wanted ever to go home. She had said farewell to D’neera, deeply and it seemed irrevocably. She could not easily undo the parting; and there was a question she sometimes contemplated, without daring yet to test it: whether or not she might have become so different that she belonged nowhere.

  Presently Willowmeade came to Earth, and she was invited aboard a shuttle for the trip to the surface. The two men with her might have been an honor guard, or merely guards. They were not sure themselves—as Hanna discovered by shamelessly examining their thoughts. She had not asked anyone on Willowmeade what was going to happen to her next. Jameson had talked of “developing and implementing a plan of systematic contact with the Zeigans” —but she did not know how much choice she had about participating, what role was designed for her and how much pressure would be applied if she declined it, or what the official attitude might be concerning her humanity or lack of it.

  The shuttle dropped to an Admin landing pad, and Hanna’s guards took her through a section of the maze she had never seen before. The place was nearly empty; it was a down-day, and she moved through the hushed corridors feeling like a ghost.

  A door opened, and Jameson came out of it. The guards disappeared.

  Hanna looked at him in silence, and saw that he regarded her speculatively. She shrank in on herself; felt herself grow smaller, tighter, harder. It had occurred to her that when she saw him she might throw herself into his arms. But not when he looked at her like this.

  “Come in,” he said suddenly, and she walked past him cautiously, stiff-legged, into a strange room from which she could see the river shining far below. It was very quiet. It was almost always very quiet wherever Jameson was, as if silence were something he created as an extension of himself. Hanna caught her breath; it was nearly irresistible.

  She did not want to look at Jameson. She looked instead at an object in the room: the head of an alien animal, carved in wood. A memory came from months before of Jameson lifting it with careful hands to show it to Iledra. But this was not where she had seen it.

  She said, “Where am I?”

  “My offices,” said the quiet voice behind her.

  “No, it’s not!”

  He said carelessly, “New job, new rooms. They needed someone to head up the contact project. They’re thinking about sending Endeavor out again, too. Gives me a chance to stay on Earth. Heartworld has a new commissioner; have you forgotten? He likes my old quarters very well.”

  His voice was entirely controlled. If she looked at him his face would be tranquil too. So she listened with the other, inward hearing, more sensitive and finely honed than it had ever been before her sojourn with the People, and felt his pain. Her head drooped.

  He said, sounding merely curious, “Why are you angry?”

  “I hardly know where to begin!”

  It was not what she had meant to say; it came from Leader’s empty place. She twisted her hands together nervously and said, “Why did you send Willowmeade to follow me? After the promise you made that I’d be alone?”

  “It was necessary. It could have gone either way. By your own account the beginning was shaky—”

  “You endangered everything I was trying to do!”

  “Did we? You believed we would put nothing in position for an attack. It was worth the gamble that they therefore would believe it too—and not look too hard. If you failed, we had an alternative. It was necessary,” he repeated.

  “It wasn’t.” Hanna took a deep breath. Leader was gone, but she would speak for him. She said, “It was stupid and dangerous, and you cannot, you can not, behave with these beings the way you behave with each other. They’re different. They play by different rules. You can threaten them without meaning to. If you behave like the beasts they remember you’ll undo everything I’ve done. They know I’m an aberration. They could reject me as quickly as they took me in, if you can’t give up something of yourselves the way they did, the way I did. If you can’t understand that, then it was all for nothing!”

  “Good,” he said approvingly.

  Astonished, she turned to him at last. He was smiling.

  “Good?”

  “That’s exactly what we must learn from you, and through you.”

  She looked at him suspiciously, but he was serious. For once he was telling the whole truth. But if he thought it would soothe her, he was mistaken.

  She said, “You mean you want to use me some more.”

  He said thoughtfully, “You can put it that way if you want to.”

  “Can’t you go on without me? What do you want from me now?”

  Jameson said slowly, “I want your recommendations on how best to establish regular communication with the aliens, with the exchange of knowledge to promote mutual understanding as your highest priority. I want you to organize a detailed plan of contact. I want you to go back there, if need be; with companions, if that is best. If so, I want you to train the others. I do not think you should be questioned any longer. Our questions come from a human perspective entirely. I want to know what you will say when you are allowed to speak spontaneously, with due reference to ‘Sentience.’ I want you to be the guide for a future spent sharing the universe with these beings…That will do for a start.”

  She felt sick. She said, “I don’t want to do anything.”

  He looked at her for a long moment and then said, “All right.”

  She eyed him with disbelief. He added, “Trying to force you is futile. There is no weapon to use against you. I cannot threaten you, even with confinement. You’re too important. You don’t know anything about the kind of personal power that has its source in the way others perceive you,
but you have it now, whether or not you know how to use it. I can’t touch you. Not now. No one can. And if you don’t care about power or riches, and I don’t think you do, I have nothing to bribe you with…What do you want? What is the dearest wish of your heart?”

  She was taut as she listened, but it was all true. She felt—the lifting of a great weight? No, not its vanishing, it was too soon for that, but the first intimation that a burden she had long carried might, in time, be put down.

  There was only one thing she wanted. She said simply, “Rest.”

  He nodded. “You can leave for D’neera today, if you like.”

  She shook her head abruptly. She was not ready to go home to D’neera. It was not time. She did not know why.

  “No? Well, then, there are quarters for you if you want them; near here, near my home. You can be the guest of the Polity for as long as—”

  “Not that!”

  “What?” Her vehemence startled him.

  “I don’t much like the way the Polity treats its guests,” she said, but she said it forlornly. Her vision was blurred. That happened often of late, but she could not remember the last time she had wept.

  After a minute he said slowly, “You could come stay with me.”

  He spoke with an edge of reluctance, as if he were not sure what he was offering or if he should offer it at all. But the fireside and the warmth and the quiet of his home, the sense of enduring, solid-founded peace, were fully present to her mind.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  * * *

  She slept; slept for three weeks; slept through the nights and half the days, waking to eat when Jameson insisted, waking sometimes to slip from his house by night or by day to walk a little in an endless spring rain. Her eyes were swollen with sleep, and she was slack as a broken bowstring. Jameson gave the house orders, and it guarded her. People came to it, but it would not let them in and sent them away. People called, but it let no one speak to her; and she slept. Her dreams were strange and restless and sometimes terrifying. She woke from a nightmare one evening and in a sort of daze made her way to Jameson’s study, where he sat reading before a fire. He must have spoken to her, but she never remembered what he said. There was space for her beside him and she crept into it, easing her head onto his shoulder and pressing so close that she might have been trying to erase herself as a separate presence from the universe. He looked down at her for a long time, and finally laid down the reader he held and very gently put his arms around her. Hanna began to cry. She cried for a long time and he held her through it, until she was done and exhausted with weeping and lay down with her head in his lap and slept again. When she woke near morning he had not moved; he was sleeping too, and still held her hand.