The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  His voice enchanted her. It had always enchanted her, resting her with its sureness, creating a spell in which she saw the universe he knew—or made. His eyes were distant, set on visions. But she saw with her fresh shock-born sight that they were the eyes of a very weary man.

  She took a deep breath and stood up. The spell was broken.

  “What you are thinking of is not real,” she said.

  He answered without resentment, “How do you know?”

  She did not know. There was only her own inner insistence that what he proposed somehow was not right, and against it his certainty that it was.

  She said, “I don’t want to believe that it can happen. You do. But I think in the end that what the People want to believe is what will be.”

  “That,” he said, and after a pause: “That. I had forgotten that.”

  He bowed his head and she saw the direction of his thought. She said sadly, “Must it be war between us, then, to shape their reality?”

  “What?” He looked up, scarcely seeing her. An odd expression touched his face. He said, “It won’t be. We’re both out of it.”

  “But I could—” Hanna said, and then the word struck her, and the pacing aging tiger and the prison of the fields and the dwindling days racing into night.

  “Both?” she said. It was only a breath.

  He looked as if she had caught him in the act of performing some unspeakable crime. She said, “What have you done? What are you going to do?”

  “That’s entirely my affair,” he said, in an instant cold as stone.

  He meant to stop her. But she said. “You’re leaving the project. It’s over for you. Everything’s over. But why?”

  “I’m in need of a rest too,” he said, lying without a sign of guilt. “I should like to go home for a time.”

  “That is not true.”

  He said with a sigh, “I wish one could lie to you successfully. I ought to have learned better by now. Leave it, Hanna. Just leave it. The project is a shocking failure, and the responsibility is mine. That’s true enough.”

  “But not the whole truth?”

  “It’s all the truth that matters,” he said impatiently. “The failure is complete, and all mine. You’ll drop it, if you have any kindness.”

  She said, remembering more, “I could ask Peter.”

  “You don’t,” he said, and the world split for her; he appeared angry but the appearance was a trick, a diversion, a ploy to cow her into silence, and underneath that was real anger, entirely controlled, but he adamantly would not let her know all the truth. “You don’t,” he said, “know when to give up, do you? But you never did. The subject is closed. Good night, Hanna.”

  He turned and started away, escaping. His footsteps echoed on hardwood, a nightmare of abandonment from the past. Hanna said, perhaps aloud, perhaps not: “Not this time.” She slipped in front of him and blocked his way. She said, “Tell me. Tell me the rest of it or I will take it from your mind. I will tear it out by the roots.” Bluff. “You owe me. I’ve died for you, yes, you! how many times? You owe me the truth. You owe me a little of your precious self! You can give it to me or I will take it.”

  How admirable the uses of deception! He believed her, and she had learned the trick from him.

  If he thought there was only one thing to do he would do it, however distasteful. He told her about Struzik, the threats, the ultimatum, the coming end. She stood before him, small and immovable, and listened. He could not bring himself to say: I did this, I gave it all up, for your peace. But it was manifest in everything he said.

  Yet still in the short recital there were things he did not say. He had been this way at their first meeting, layered, giving up what he must in order to hide another thing and yet another. She had been his match even then. She was stronger now, and bolder. When he was finished she put out her hands and touched him. His heart beat under her right hand. He made a sharp movement as if to turn away, but he did not. His eyes rested on her face curiously now, and with, she thought, a kind of fatalism. She thought he knew what was coming.

  She said softly, “More. The rest.”

  There is no more.

  She heard the words form, but he did not say them. He was caught in suspense and watched himself through a stranger’s eyes. It had been hard for him always to resist her touch. This time he could not. Something hurt, wavered, and broke. It was so nearly audible that she started and stepped closer protectively.

  All over. It will not matter to anyone. Why not?

  He said without any expression at all, “Are you familiar with the term ‘profound geriatric failure’?”

  “Yes…” She looked up into his face without comprehension, distracted by the irrelevance.

  “What do you think it is?”

  She said, puzzled, “The standard techniques of cellular and hormonal regeneration and toxin removal don’t work and they have to use a modified procedure. Everyone knows that.”

  “No. That’s the popular understanding of the term. The medical definition is quite different.”

  She had gotten very good at disentangling Jameson’s substance from his style, and she remembered that he was never irrelevant. She stood very still, except that her hands moved a little, not to caress him but to touch while she could the solid warm flesh, strong and unchanging. She did not want the moment to end. She did not want to go on to the next one. Jameson’s face was a mask and she knew past any doubt that she was going to hear something she did not want to hear. But she said, compelled, “What is the medical definition?”

  He did not answer at once. He drew her back into the room and to a seat before the cold fireplace. He sat close beside her. Even now, she thought, it was for her comfort, not his.

  He said, “It is the rare inadequacy of all anti-senescence techniques. Occasionally a victim who continues standard treatment will begin to respond normally. More often, at some unpredictable point, treatment accelerates aging without warning or recourse. The failure is so rapid and overwhelming that no treatment is of any use. The victim dies, of old age or something else, within a year of the last treatment, regardless of his chronological age.”

  I cannot bear this, Hanna thought.

  To feel that one cannot, and know one must and will…

  Jameson said softly, “The Heartworld political arena is an exciting milieu,” and Hanna listened through a blur of pain. “I was involved in it from the time I could talk—earlier perhaps. My grandfather might have been commissioner at one time, but Progressive fortunes were low in those years. My father for many years headed the Provincial Court. He’s dead now; he was one hundred and forty when I was born. My sister married a man of another province and perpetually runs for a council seat. Someday she’ll win, I suppose…I was very happy. Full of plans, full of ideas, eager for power and it came year by year, always growing…There was so much I wanted to do. A world was not enough. I thought two centuries would be too short. I wanted to get to the top early. Later I wanted to do so even more badly, though for other reasons. But even at the start I thought of little else.”

  His voice was very quiet, but he spoke without hesitation. His skin was faintly golden in the soft light and etched with fine lines Hanna had hardly noticed before. She thought: You can’t do this. I love you.

  “Nothing,” he said, “is constant except change. I came to want another thing. My family helped found Heartworld seven hundred years ago. Starrbright has descended in the direct male line ever since that time, and I could take you today to Southwest Namerica and show you where my ancestors lived before the Explosion. Starr is a family name; it has been borne by many men through the centuries, and some women. I wanted to continue the line. It was time. In my twenties I thought an entire world of attractive women had been created just for me; at thirty I looked for a wife. I wanted a great deal. Beauty, intelligence, breeding, education, character—I don’t remember all the list. I have not thought about it for years. No one suited me, but there was plent
y of time. I thought it was time to prepare for the long fine future. You haven’t started anti-senescence treatments yet, have you?”

  “No,” she said, startled into speech. “In a few years, I guess. There’s—” She nearly choked on the next words, but said them anyway: “No hurry.”

  “I got around to it at thirty-two, in Standard years. You’ll find that before the initial treatment they do the most extraordinary battery of tests. Before they let you go they tell you to come back in thirty days and again in six months for more tests. The six-month visit helps them determine what modifications need to be made in future treatment. Most people think the thirty-day visit is required for the same reason, but it is not. It’s because the infinitesimal fraction of the population for whom the procedure fails react predictably—with a massive immunological failure that will kill if it is not caught at once. I didn’t even last the thirty days. I was extremely ill before the time was up. I had never been ill before. I was appalled, even before I knew what had happened. I suppose I thought I was immune to death…Afterward I changed my plans.”

  She waited for him to go on, but he did not. He had said what was necessary. He would not embellish it. Presently she said unevenly, knowing the answer, “You have kept trying?”

  “Yes. Each time it does not kill me I gain a little time. There has always been talk about the obscene length of some of my vacations. It takes time to treat widespread carcinoma.”

  There was not a trace of self-pity in the way he said it. He presented it as a matter of fact, dispassionately. Hanna lifted her hands to her face. They were icy. Everything she knew about him and everything she had not understood was in place now. The mosaic was complete. There was so much I wanted to do. So little time for intellect and ambition to mark the passing years, leave an imprint or a legacy. The gamble! Time after time—! For an instant she saw his world as, perhaps, he saw it—a shadowy place of uncertain values, where he stood over an abyss and made what he could from whatever was at hand, building for eternity in spite of time.

  She said—with difficulty, because her throat was tight—“I’ve never heard a word about this. It must be almost unknown.”

  “It is. It’s limited to a handful of medical personnel on Heartworld and at the Beyle Center here, and a very few other persons. My sister…I suppose Morisz knows. He knows everything about everybody. The last time I spoke of it was five years ago to Andrella Murphy.”

  He leaned back, exhausted. She could not guess what these few minutes had cost him.

  And all the past weeks? What of them?

  The enormity of his sacrifice gained on her comprehension, but only slowly; it was too large to see all at once. All debts were cleared forever. He could owe her nothing more. He had paid back everything at once, magnificently, with everything he had and everything he wanted; with all of himself.

  She found her voice somewhere. There was one question more that must be asked.

  “Why…?”

  “Why what?” He looked at her finally. He was exhausted beyond fear or need of defense.

  “Why did you—do what you did for me?”

  He said, “I don’t know why.”

  “You never do anything without a reason!”

  He said with the ghost of a smile, “No doubt there is one.”

  “You must…you must have said something to yourself.” She touched him at last. He took her hand; automatically, it seemed. She said, “You must have told yourself something. What did you say? When you decided?”

  “Just that—I couldn’t.” He was mystified by it still. “I couldn’t press you, persuade you, work on your sense of duty, seize on your—your frightening generosity—let the others try to do it, coerce you into service—or ‘adjust’ you, as Peter suggested—I couldn’t. You’d earned freedom many times over. I couldn’t do anything to keep it from you. I just could not.”

  Why? But she did not say it again. He really did not know. Something dormant and forgotten had been forced to new life by circumstance, or by Hanna herself. He had said: No more. I will not buy power with her pain. I will not.

  She got up and drifted away from him, thinking she ought to speak and unable to say a word. What was there to say? She could not talk of gratitude. He did not want her gratitude. He would not like it. The wind from the garden whispered round her head. She felt curiously light: light and free.

  Freedom. It had an odd taste. Her life was her own. He would let no one else shape it. He stood between her and all the massed moral force of the Polity, unbending.

  “What will they do without us?” she said.

  “Damned if I know…”

  “Try to live forever?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “Was that why you—?”

  She looked around hesitantly. He was standing now, wrapped in all his old dignity in spite of weariness.

  “That is not for me,” he said. “It could never be for me.”

  Truth. Whole truth.

  She wandered uncertainly toward the outer door and looked into the dark. “Will they think of the evils that may come?”

  “Some. Not much. The reward is potent.”

  The future on his shoulders—

  I have too…

  “You know,” she said slowly, “I thought that you would be in charge. That everything was safe. Even if we didn’t agree on what should come you would listen. Even tonight. You would judge. You wouldn’t decide lightly. I could leave it to you.”

  He said, “They’re not evil. They’ll manage without me…I must learn to believe that.”

  “But will they think of the People?” she said. “Someone must.”

  Free, oh, free! To go home and build a city, arbitrate the Riverine dispute which surely went on still, prod a university to action, play sweet starlit games with laughing boys…

  He said at her back, certain as ever: “There is nothing you could do. Even if you were willing to participate, what could you do against all the rest?”

  She saw D’neera suddenly and clearly, as if all her life there had been compressed to crystal and brought to this room for her pleasure. Flowers, laughter, light, beloved sea, star-powdered nights; but it did not need her—it receded as she watched—the laughter faded.

  She said, “I could do more than you think.” It was true. She did not know all her own potential yet, but it was true. “I’m unique. We haven’t talked about it much, but you know it. Unless you create another like me—years away, you said—there will be no one who can do what I could do. And I could—be their guard and sentinel. They shouldn’t be our servants. Or maybe we would become theirs, and maybe that would be wrong too. Or maybe not. But they must see all of it, all the possibilities. That they must shape themselves as they want. And we must see it too. And if I were to—when you told me all the things you wanted me to do, that first day—if I were to—”

  She turned and saw that he seemed to have stopped breathing. There was no color in his face. She went on with difficulty, “If I were to do all that, it would be…you were giving me more than tasks to do, weren’t you? You were asking me to…when you said I would be the guide—you meant, did you know it? that all the project would be in, in my image, our future with them—and yours, if we worked together—”

  The words came very hard. She was so tired of decision and labor, someone, someone, must instruct the People not to permit themselves to be bent to human self-serving, there was no one else but it was so hard to give herself freely, even for this. She wanted Jameson to say something, but he did not. He was utterly still, remote as the People’s star. Her hands crept together and her fingers sought the Heir’s Ring of Koroth, but it was not there. She had searched, but never found it. It was lost in the dust of Home.

  “And you could—you would—if I came to the project, the way you wanted—then you could be there too, and—would it have to be war between us?”

  He shook his head abruptly, and suddenly sat down. He put a hand over his eyes. She looked
down at him with compassion and a profound regret. She was giving back the gift, and it was a terrible gift to make to one so proud. She thought: Perhaps I have just lost whatever chance there was for love in his strange code. But no one else will ever see again what I see now. But I wish it could be the other way.

  “I will do it,” she said. The voice sounded strange in her ears, as if it were someone else’s. But at last she knew it, clearly, for her own.

  THE MASTER OF CHAOS

  This book is for Maurine K. Kelly.

  Chapter 1

  Rubee of Ell of the world Uskos said to Hanna ril-Koroth of D’neera, “You are the possessor of a wonderful house. It is fair as the Wonderful House of Piore.”

  Rubee lied, with utmost courtesy. Hanna accepted the courtesy and disregarded the lie.

  “It is your house as well,” she answered with equal politeness, and lay back on a pale blue couch that glimmered cool pastel in the dusk, like everything in her house at twilight; wonderful to her, at least, as the Wonderful House of Piore could ever have been to him. Or to her? Or it? Uskosians all were called “he,” because they had to be called something. But no human word was really right.

  Rubee and his selfing Awnlee wandered about and touched things in the growing gloom. Their fingers at full extension resembled thin tentacles; flexed, they were like roots. An Uskosian had not truly seen a thing until he had touched it, and here on the world D’neera, where nothing that could be embellished was left plain, the lively fingers of Rubee and Awnlee were busy.

  There was not much to touch in this house, however. Though it was the home of a D’neeran, the place was austere, the character of its rooms a matter of color and form. The sunward wall of Hanna’s sitting room was transparent; the house was built into a hillside, so that this upper level looked down on a lawn and water garden (the pool frozen now), and past that a line of trees, and beyond that a distant fringe of light marking the edge of the city D’vornan. That was decoration enough for Hanna, and the view was fresh after her long absence.