The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  * * *

  A day or two later Peter Struzik said, “I don’t care how you do it. Beat her, dope her, make love to her, tell her she can name her price—just get her going so we can get somewhere.”

  Jameson said nothing. They had just disconnected from an all-project conference that was another installment of the ongoing quarrel the whole endeavor had become. Hanna’s reports from Heartworld II were rich in detail—too rich; there were no guidelines for interpreting them. If Hanna had died with Leader-in-her-thoughts, they would have made a hero of her and gratefully accepted the finite body of knowledge and speculation left to them. Since she had made the mistake of staying alive and only declining to cooperate, resentment had turned to suspicion. How much of what she said was true? Had she been mistaken in some places? Had she even lied? It was evolutionary nonsense for a child-bearing female to die soon after her spouse. It was ridiculous to suppose that objective reality could be altered by the consciousness of a species, that flora were in any way conscious, that a world’s direction could turn on the shaping of a single mind. Why had Hanna’s answers on Willowmeade been so unsatisfactory? If she had once translated the People’s written language, as she claimed, why would she not do it again? Did she wish it to remain a mystery? Perhaps if they could read it, they would learn things that contradicted her testimony. Perhaps she knew it.

  Struzik walked up and down Jameson’s new office with small fussy steps. When he went out of this room he would walk through the project’s main workspace, where the air was that of a battlefield. Most of Jameson’s former staff still worked for the commissioner’s office, assisting in the transition; but some, like Rodrigues, were here. They were not expert in the matter at hand, and personal loyalty prevented them from complaining of the project’s direction or lack of it, except perhaps among themselves. But there was a larger group of specialists recruited just for this undertaking, and they were frustrated and angry, they could not get at Hanna, and they had begun to talk of her absence as deliberate sabotage performed, for inscrutable but probably political reasons, by Jameson. The two groups did not mix well.

  Struzik looked down forty stories at the river, an ice-blue ribbon today. He said, “You could get her to stop sulking.”

  “She is not sulking,” Jameson said mildly.

  “Well, what do you call it? Sleeping her life away when we need her.”

  “Peter. It has been almost a year since she went into space with the other two to meet the Zeigans. Do you need to be reminded why we named them that? She was present at the deaths of her friends, she was taken apart in body and spirit and intellect, she was rushed through regeneration and was conscious far too often while it was going on, she was kept a prisoner here and treated—not badly, but not particularly well; and all that was the easy part.”

  “I know, I know, I know. But she could be made useful anyway.”

  Struzik peered over his shoulder to see what Jameson made of the suggestion. Jameson knew exactly what he meant. He said, “She’s had enough of chemical tampering. It’s not a thing that has ever been accepted on D’neera in any case. She doesn’t like it and she’s not used to it.”

  “Living with you must be an education for her, then.”

  There was no response, and after a minute Struzik went on, “She wouldn’t have to know about it, you know. She’d just feel better. Calm. Cooperative. Happy. If—”

  “No.”

  “Maybe somebody else could make her see reason, anyway. If you won’t. If you’d let one of us talk to her—”

  “No.”

  “No?” Struzik swung around and said experimentally, “Look, you could be removed from the project. Not that I, that we want to do that. It’s hard watching an old friend go under. We all got here more or less the same way. What happened to you—it could have been me or Kate or any of us. The point is, you’re answerable to us. It’s going to be our hides if you don’t produce. Do I have to spell out what it means to you? Your own council dumped you and we grabbed you. For this. If you last a month and that’s the end, with all the talk, what are you going to do then? I hear people say already you’ve been overrated all along, and that’s when they’re being nice. Now, think about it, Jamie. I know you can do it. It’s her or you. You just decide.”

  He stared at Jameson. There was no reaction for a long moment, and then Jameson’s right hand moved in a rude gesture. That was all.

  * * *

  The mists were thinning. She slept well for several nights running, and the half-heard echoes of Leader that made her anxiously turn her head, as if to hear better, were muted and vanishing. She communicated a little with Iledra, but not by holo or video or even voice; she wrote, as she had from Endeavor; it was easier that way to be cautious, to be sure of saying neither too much nor too little, to hide behind the shield of distance and make noncommittal answers to Iledra’s fulminations on the Polity, whose occupation of D’neera was finished but far from forgotten.

  “Don’t you,” Iledra asked again and again, “want to come home?”

  “Not yet,” Hanna answered each time.

  She had no energy for going home. She felt she was at home, maybe as much at home as she would ever feel again, anywhere. Jameson’s house emphatically was not D’neeran; it was uncluttered and largely unadorned; but it was luxurious for all its look of austerity, and suited Hanna better than the gaudier conventions of D’neera.

  She absorbed the spaciousness and quiet gratefully. She liked the quiet especially, because there was no peace inside her. Leader’s voice was fading, but others took its place. In one way or another they were all her own, but often enough the notes her spirit played were taken from elsewhere, from others. It amused her to put names to them.

  You shirk your duty. You have come through fire and agony and now at the flowering and fruit you turn aside. Why then did you do it? What good will it be? What benefit?

  Was that Iledra? Jameson?

  See them, all the differences. Those in the higher classes have two mutually functioning brains. They move whitely, gracefully. Swaying they mean—what do you think they mean? How do you think they think with two brains?

  A teacher long-ago? Or H’ana Bassanio long-ago, a small girl contemplating pictures from F’thal?

  Thus the turn and the shimmer that is faster than the eye or comprehension and we catch the facets sparkling and dance in our turn live die and know all or naught—

  The Hierarchus, surely; yet it sounded like Leader.

  Worth it all. Not much in this life worth it all. Transforming transcendent the will straight and sure worth the gift. Choose, and do not hesitate.

  That was her own voice, and the cruelest of all. But she had learned some things since the black day of the Clara. She had thought that day a hard one. Now she knew it had not been hard at all.

  She crept from the voices to Jameson, because there was nowhere else to go. Rock. The universe is made of rock. Here was rock, grim and immovable. She spent the evenings sleeping with her head on his knee, a most satisfactory resting place. He always held a reader propped on his other knee; he held it with his left hand, and his right lay on her waist. It did not wander, except sometimes, with restraint, to smooth her hair.

  She is a sick child and so I will treat her, said his thought, stubbornly, and he declined to remember the kiss, far from a child’s, that she had given him. But she was not a child and she was not, she discovered, the thing Bladetree had left for Fleet to find. Her face was unflawed, her breasts round and whole, her skin soft to the touch, the arc of her hips an invitation whether she wished to be inviting or not. And Jameson was not altogether rock, because she learned these things through his senses. And finally learned more; not willingly.

  * * *

  There was no fire tonight. The east-looking doors stood open to a mild wet evening, and when the last gray faded from the horizon the clouded sky was altogether black. A fragrant breeze whispered through the room, fretful, impatient. A new and unsatisf
actory report on linguistic programming—the last perhaps that would be made to Jameson—still showed on the reader’s face when he put it down. The movement woke Hanna from her half-sleep, but Jameson did not get up, so she only sighed and turned to settle her cheek more firmly on his thigh. The room was cool and she shivered a little, but she had no desire to move from Jameson’s presence to somewhere warmer. Her arm hurt, no nearer healing than before; and the voices were very bad tonight.

  I do not hide from you my grief and fate my love gone my end approaching my child left to kin’s care and comfort; I/We in him yet not the same and grief to all though not what you know in like case; yet mourning I think is for all the same and universal, so it seems; though We are ignorant still; you, I, all of Us.

  The room was very dark; the reader, half-hidden from Hanna’s sight, a vivid spot of light.

  Grief, that is all; defeat and bitterness. In Peter’s place I would do the same. He knows the cost to me. I think he even cares, a little. In his place I would do the same.

  Hanna’s muscles tightened. She put her hand suddenly on Jameson’s knee. She would not have spoken, but he said, drawn from his abstraction, “Hanna?” He meant: Is something wrong?

  “Nothing,” she murmured.

  “All right…”

  But her eyes were wide open in the dark. Since coming to Jameson she had made no effort to tap into his thought. His kindness and the care he took of her were all she wanted and all she cared about. The conversation of confusion inside her had kept her from looking for more. She thought of it, when she thought of it, as a sign that she was more true-human now than otherwise—

  They don’t have to care for anyone, child; for anyone but themselves. We haven’t got that luxury. True-humans, they call themselves. The authentic thing. What does that mean, “human?” What do you think it means?

  Strange, this…

  Oh don’t, Hanna said silently to herself, and almost sat up, almost spoke, to make him stop thinking. Or she could stop listening, break the contact inadvertently formed in her drowsiness, go quietly to the garden or her room; he did not know she heard him and wished her, undoubtedly, to remain ignorant of his thought.

  A voice from the past said severely: You turned away when you should have stayed. We are all of us entitled to our pain. You cannot deny another’s truth. That’s selfish. Don’t do it again.

  Hanna stayed where she was, and listened. Jameson thought in words, and though bitterness attended it, his thought was clear and precise as his speech, stripped and pitiless.

  …to feel that one cannot, and know one must and will. Hanna I suppose knows it well. But I had forgotten; so long has it been since the reek of tiger breath and pain forgotten too; the weight and the spear out of reach and the long knife slipping from my hand. When I was well, I had to hunt again. Had to. A Jameson of Arrenswood, of Starrbright. I could not but I did. No one knew I was afraid. They watched me close and hard. They saw no fear. No sign of breaking…

  Hanna closed her eyes and saw color. Green: deep shadowed forest paths. Russet, aquamarine: grain against an alien summer sky.

  …and I will not break now, though I never loved it there. The girls’ bright eyes see only Starrbright. Their mothers are worse. Arrenswood affairs; a council seat someday if I live this down long enough. The years run short and I die day by day into night. At the Capitol a tiger is caged….

  The dark closed in and split into bars. Shafts of sunlight between them warmed shabby fur. Hanna let another nightmare seize her, Jameson’s nightmare; he lived it, waking. His hand stirred restlessly on her flesh, but he did not know what he touched.

  Perhaps I have had enough, enough for any man. I thought always that I would know when it was time to give up the future and its shaping. Is this it? My heart says no. But I always knew need when I saw it, and I see nothing else, nothing left to command but myself. Well, then, I will. Turn away, let it go, diminish and meet the final test and prove I am master of myself; that at least. Hard to turn away from the turning, though. The furlcrum shifts, the balance changes and history with it. Immortality, of a sort. Should it be? Never mind; it will be. The question is only how—

  In the depths of nightmare Hanna made a pitiful protesting sound. “Hanna?” he said in sudden alarm. She struggled to sit up and did it though she seemed weighted down with rock. A ghostly procession wound through the dark, humans and F’thalians seeking in the People some kind of survival. Nightmares of negotiation—

  The lights came on. “You can’t do that!” she said. She saw that Jameson looked at her with deep concern; he must think her mad and stumbling in painful memory.

  “You can’t!”

  “Can’t do what?”

  The room was full of loud voices. There were only hers and his.

  “What can you be thinking of? You have no right!”

  He said with sudden comprehension. “You’ve been reading my mind.”

  “Yes. Yes. Who is doing this? Why are you doing it?”

  “I do nothing. It will be out of my hands very soon.”

  “But you’re planning—”

  “No. Hush. Wait. There are no plans. Hush…”

  He reached for her but she moved away, avoiding his hands. She said, “Immortality. What do you mean? It can’t be that. I must have got it wrong.”

  “I don’t think so. The potential for survival as some kind of entity in the Zeigan mass mind is…” He did not finish the sentence. He got up, not suddenly, but with one of the movements that always startled her when he ended a long stillness, and she saw him with new eyes. He was not part of the comforting background now, but singular and alive. It struck her for the first time how worn he looked; not by comparison with the recent past, but gauged against the icy and self-contained presence he had been when she met him on the Endeavor. He looked absently around the familiar room, as if he had not seen it before. He said, “Everything will be new, soon.”

  Everywhere We went was new.

  “No,” Hanna said to the trace of an old Apprentice, or perhaps it was Apprentice who spoke. Jameson thought she said it to him. He said, “It can’t be helped. I don’t know if what is coming is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even if those judgments are applicable. I don’t think they are. What’s going to happen— just is. Is exploration good or bad? It doesn’t matter. It just is, inevitable. So is this. There’ll be no hope of stopping it—even if stopping it might be good. All that will be left, all that is ever left, will be to minimize some evils that may come. There are some dreadful possibilities for exploitation, violence, enslavement, among ourselves or in conflict with them…There are no plans, Hanna. None that I know of; though I might not know, now.”

  She said hopefully, “Has anyone but you even thought of it?”

  “Oh, surely. Surely. I must,” he said, thinking aloud now, “get Peter to institute a study of the questions. Secretly, of course. It can’t be done too soon and they will put it off if they can.”

  They would rather put it off for a century or two, Iledra said. But she had been talking about something else. Or maybe not. To have a telepath at a first contact—they must see what it could mean! And this was what it meant.

  Hanna ran. Pure instinct. She fled through the wide inviting doors, stumbled on a dark terrace, crushed barely nascent growth underfoot (there was no complaint; flowers here did not complain).

  And stopped. There was nowhere to go this time.

  Jameson came after her, picking his way more carefully. She gave him her arm and let him take her back to the house. They were silent. He was neither surprised nor distressed by her abortive flight. She thought he had expected it. Predictable.

  He brought her, predictably, a tiny glass filled with brilliant red liquid. The chemical man; though his head had been clear these last weeks. She glanced up at him suspiciously—she was not entirely unaware of certain suggestions he had rejected on her behalf—but he said, “It’s only Valentine brandy, Hanna,” and she drank it. It was bitter.


  He said, just as if there had been no interruption, “Individual survival has always been humankind’s first dream. You accepted as self-evident—it has always been so accepted—that awareness of one’s own inevitable death is an early mark of sentience. Did it never cross your mind on Zeig-Daru that in doing what you did you had found a kind of endless life for yourself?”

  The questions would not go away. Questions answer one another, said an Explorer long-ago. Hanna said doggedly, “It did not. Anyway that wasn’t me. It was him, just changed. I don’t think I want to live forever.”

  “You’ll change your mind when the end is closer.” There was a sharp secret amusement in him that made her stare at him.

  She said, abandoning right and wrong, “They’ll never agree to it.”

  “Will they not? They’re extraordinarily malleable. And maybe,” he said very gently, “that is their function. You find the prospect unimaginable. But consider yourself: a new thing in the life of the human species. Unimaginable, until you were real. Did you know there was a time, before your people left Earth, before the oppression began, when telepaths were called new-humans? Then the rest of us became true-humans—a term coined in hostility toward what your ancestors were. Because they had been unimaginable, and were new, and perhaps better. You have indicated that the Zeigans regard themselves as instruments of life. In the strict sense all of us are—and this, perhaps, is one more step in its progress. Life experiments, you know. The Zeigans so far have been successful. Perhaps success for them means absorbing us, and the F’thalians, and others we will come to know together. Can you say this is untrue? When we don’t even know—as you know better than anyone—what is real?”