The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  The I&S man hesitated, let it pass. “All right. He was injured, starving, came out of nowhere, as far as he and you knew. What about later? There should have been evidence of his origin.”

  “He said he didn’t remember anything. He always said that.” The old man lifted his head. His face was dreamy with remembering. The investigator let him run on unchecked. “He meant he didn’t want to talk about it. At first we told him if he helped us find the place, maybe he could go home. I think he didn’t want to. I think it was the worst thing we could have ever said. ‘I remember nothing,’ he said; he was frightened, and he stuck to that always, though I taxed him with lying, scolded him, taught him the evil of falsehood as well as I could. Yet for the most part he was a good boy. He was lively and intelligent, a leader. The boys of his time looked up to him. Did his lessons, did his chores, worked hard, played hard, the way a boy should. I don’t know what he said to God. He went through the forms. I don’t know what they meant to him, I don’t know what the memories meant that he wouldn’t tell us. I used to worry about it. It was deceptive because he seemed—”

  The old man stopped suddenly. A minute went by. The investigator stirred and seemed about to speak. But the other man went on, slowly now. “When he had been here awhile, he seemed so open. Sunny. When I think of him, I see him smiling. It makes me forget—it made me forget. The first year wasn’t smooth. He fought with other boys, bigger boys. When he did, he was like an animal again, the wild animal I saw at the start. We told him finally we couldn’t keep him if he kept doing that. After that he mastered it, we thought, the demon in him—”

  The pause was longer this time. At last the investigator said neutrally, “Perhaps he did.”

  “Oh, I know, you don’t believe in demons, do you?” There was irony in the old eyes now. “They come in many forms, you know. They gnaw at human weakness. They fatten on pain. Our exorcisms are sophisticated, these days. We tried. We tried all that love could do. We tried to help him trust us. But he never talked about where he came from, never told us what he’d been through, not even a hint. Brother Healer tried every trick he knew, too. Said he knew pain when he saw it, said it wasn’t good to let it fester in a child, said it could make monsters. But he never got anywhere.”

  The old man fell silent, eyes on the stone at his feet. After a while the investigator said, “Did he say anything to you when he left?”

  “Nothing. One morning he wasn’t here.”

  “Had he given you reason to think he might go?”

  “No. I don’t know why he did it. I must not have known him at all. I must have been blind.” The old man had been staring at the paving stones. He lifted his head and looked outward, straight at Hanna. “The seeds must have grown all the time he was here. I never saw it. I know how he left. A freighter from Willow signed him on. He was not well educated, not by your standards, but he was strong and quick to learn. We learned the freighter took him to Valentine. I was afraid when I heard that, but I thought…He had a strong will. He wasn’t docile; when I say a boy is good, I don’t mean that. I prayed. I did not think he would be bent to vice against his will.”

  “I’ve heard nothing to indicate it was against his will.”

  “No. No, of course it wasn’t. Corruption doesn’t work that way. The sinner collaborates with the sin. He knew about Valentine. He knew enough to choose. We don’t try to keep the children from the knowledge of evil. They need to know the enemy to guard against him. We teach them to shun the tempter. Sometimes we fail.”

  The old man looked as if he might weep. The investigator said, “I won’t trouble you any more now, sir. Except that I’d like to get a record of his file, especially the linguistic report.”

  “Certainly. Certainly.”

  The old man got to his feet. He was even paler now, the color of the stone, and bent.

  “Where did you get his name?” the investigator asked. “Did you name him Michael?”

  “We did. What he said when we asked him his name sounded something like that.”

  They walked in silence; thinned to mist; disappeared.

  Hanna found she had been holding her breath. She said, as if she had been listening to a good story ended too soon, “Isn’t there more?”

  “Hmm?” Jameson looked at her curiously when normal light returned. The light was warm, but not bright; after the pearly radiance of a fog-washed morning on Alta, it was stuffy and confining.

  “Nothing…” She held herself still. The gaze she turned on Jameson was cool. She said, “Why have you shown me this?”

  “It’s interesting, don’t you think?”

  “You did not have me watch it for its intrinsic interest.”

  “Granted.” He got up and moved across the room. She regarded the broad back coldly, knowing that in the silence he examined a range of words and picked among them. At last he said, “If the worst should happen you will need to know how to deal with him. I believe the key to this man lies in his earliest days. Which are dark. Dark to him because they are shadowed by hunger and violence; dark to everyone else because they are hidden.”

  “Perhaps I can take a thorn from his paw and make him my friend,” Hanna said a little wearily.

  He swung around and gave her a look that was not as friendly as before. “A classical reference? From you?”

  “Me? The over-specialized H’ana? No, don’t worry, I won’t disillusion you. I only know about it because there is a similar tale among the Uskosians, and someone told me about the parallel. Starr, you take this man too seriously—all because the I&S computers bumped out his name.”

  “I take their judgment seriously enough to be glad the person going with Rubee is capable of quick defensive action.”

  She said immediately, “No. I’m done with that.”

  “I hope so,” he said, and now he was deliberately mild. “I know how you feel about it; about, especially, the Zeigans you killed. I understand your reluctance to consider doing anything of the kind again. Yet the fact remains that you were trained for war, and you fought in an interhuman war; and later, in a desperate situation with the People of Zeig-Daru, you were capable of doing what you had to do. I hope you are never again put to that test. But consider, Hanna, what this man is. Consider: after the monks had saved him and sheltered him for years, he left them without a word and went straight to a life they despised. Then there was the leap to piracy and, most likely, murder. Will you smile at him and wait for him to kiss your hand?”

  Hanna’s mouth twisted. Put that way it was horrible. She said, “There was a Lost World. Nobody knew about it fifteen years ago. But the Zeigans destroyed it long before our time, before his time. He couldn’t have come from there.”

  “If he got to Alta from a Lost World, it couldn’t be considered lost,” Jameson said sensibly. “There are enough backward pocket settlements even within the Polity to keep a linguist occupied for eternity. I don’t put much stock in the abbot’s speculations. I should think their healer was right, though, when he spoke of monsters being made.”

  “I would be interested in seeing his psyche profile,” Hanna said, and then, because he gave her an odd look, “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I don’t have it,” Jameson said.

  She might have let it go, except that she sensed a rare uncertainty in him. “Did you try to get it?” she said.

  “Yes. Figueiredo said it was not to be disseminated outside I&S. He said it was anomalous and contradictory. He ascribed this,” Jameson said—with a straight face, but Hanna saw the amusement behind it—“to the fact that an I&S operative who got close to him, and ought to have been a definitive source of information, was female.”

  “Oh, nonsense!”

  “I think so, too. Still, for whatever reason, there is no consistent and therefore no valid profile.”

  “Well, if you start with the presumption that your subject is a monster, and then he doesn’t act like one, I suppose you have trouble putting the pieces together.”
>
  Hanna gave up. She wanted to go home, or to what passed for it here. This would be her last night planet-bound for some weeks; the quarantine facility orbited Luna. After that her course would take her outward; past Heartworld, which she had visited, and Carrollis, which she had never seen; past a settlement named Revenge, which she had never even heard of until the Bird’s course became important; and after that on and out and out. She said before she left, though: “All this is a waste of time, isn’t it? There’s no sign of tampering with the program; not if you’ve told me everything.”

  “I’ve told you everything. I’m uneasy, all the same.”

  She gave the last words little thought when he said them. She did not mean to think about Michael Kristofik any more at all. But she yielded to her wish to ride the wind in the Earthly night, high above silver and black; and as she sailed through the moonlight the reason came to her for Kristofik’s irrational effect on I&S and Admin, Jameson and Figueiredo and all of them. They were the keepers of order and rules, and the stranger from nowhere cared nothing for any of it, and ignored both rules and keepers; successfully, too.

  * * *

  During the week she spent in the isolation chamber, they took so much blood from her that she became weak. Each time they took some they came back and fed her more chemicals, poisonous brews, some of which contained living creatures. The ones put straight into her veins did not make up for loss of blood. They said she would make more quickly. They had to get it right, though it would be impossible for her to walk among human beings until she came home and the work was undone. They were stripping her of her immunity to certain dangerous organisms at large in human society, because in some way she did not understand it was incompatible with immunity to common Uskosian equivalents. Rubee and Awnlee, separated from her for now, endured the process in reverse.

  Hanna did what was asked of her, and otherwise withdrew from human intercourse. She had planned the withdrawal, not consciously, for a long time; she understood that almost as soon as she entered quarantine. The isolation chamber was built into a habitat in orbit around Luna. The accommodations were spare but comfortable, and though she could not touch another human being (except those swathed in protective garments), she could talk freely with anyone she knew at any distance. She might have said her good-byes then. But she had planned, not consciously, to get that done beforehand. She was finished because she had sensed a subtle internal warning that she would need this space of time in between Earth and embarkation, though she hardly knew for what.

  The reason unfolded as the quiet days passed. When first she stepped into her chamber she sighed and felt relief; thereafter all her thoughts turned away from Earth. She did not so much think as feel; feel Earth drop away from far under her feet, not physically, not yet, but in importance; feel Rubee and Awnlee as lodestones close by; feel her thought change as her body changed to something that could no longer stay whole among humans.

  In a year Nlatee said to his sire, “With fire we might warm ourselves in winter, and the path to the land of the mountains of fire is not long.”

  The path was discouraged by the Master of Chaos, however, and Nlatee’s sire and all his sire’s selfings and all the people sought to dissuade him. They said, “Who knows what will happen to us if you take that path?”

  Nlatee on a night therefore broke open the winter stores and took what he needed, and he set out alone on the path to the land of the mountains of fire.

  On a day of his journey the Master of Chaos came to him and said, “I see that you travel, Nlatee. Where are you going?”

  Nlatee, because the Master had discouraged this path, answered, “I am going to the great river yonder, to steal fish from the persons who live there.”

  “That is forbidden by treaty, Nlatee.”

  “Then I will take care they do not catch me.”

  The Master signified amusement, and disappeared.

  Nlatee thought it would be best for the Master to see him no more; yet how could he not be seen? Who knows what the Master sees?

  While Nlatee pondered this he saw a beast. He killed it and skinned it and while he ate its meat he said to himself, “This path is not discouraged to beasts. If I were a beast, the Master would not notice me.”

  And so he put the skin of the beast on his shoulders and its horn on his head, and went on his way clothed in the hide of the beast.

  Nlatee went on his way and the land was warm though it was winter, because he came near to the mountains of fire and they warmed all the land about them, so that green things flourished forever. He came to the mountains of fire and there he kindled a flame, and he returned with it to his land.

  When his sire and all his sire’s selfings and all the people saw that he had tricked the Master of Chaos and that no evil had come to them as a result, they took the fire and warmed themselves, and would have made Nlatee head huntsman. But Nlatee refused.

  “I am going back to the land of the mountains of fire, and there I will bring forth my selfings and rear them,” he said.

  “But why?” said all the people.

  “It’s warmer there,” said Nlatee, “and if the fire goes out you can rekindle it easily. I don’t like it here any more.”

  So Nlatee returned to the land of the mountains of fire where all was green forever, and in later years his descendants warred with the descendants of his sire’s other selfings and with the descendants of all the people, and the descendants of Nlatee won because if their fires went out they could easily be rekindled.

  And the Master of Chaos came, and signified amusement.

  From her position deep in the interior of the habitat, Hanna could not see Luna or Earth or any stars; yet paradoxically, though she was confined and enclosed, her awareness of infinity outside grew and grew. She did not need to look out to see stars. They were there when she closed her eyes, rank on rank of them, blazing in spinning islands. Always deep space had drawn her, from the first; always her desire had led her there; she had commanded her first Jump at fifteen. I am an exopsychologist. That is what I do. Being an exopsychologist was a fine excuse for straying on the edges of space. Was that the real reason for the paths she had chosen? The knowledge of her connection to the great void expanded daily, hourly it seemed. The universe was in motion, it vibrated, it shouted with joy, thunderous. She stood stock-still in a bare sealed room and listened to it. She was an arrow in the instant before release. She heard a great heart beating, and she would fly to it as to a homecoming.

  On the very last day before launch, Starr Jameson came to see her. It was day where he had come from; in Hanna’s chamber, attuned to the rhythms of the Far-Flying Bird, it was night. A transparent barrier separated them, and there was dusk on her side of it. Rubee and Awnlee slept; Hanna heard them sleeping. She stood at the barrier and watched Jameson pretend to find her normal. It was hot inside the chamber, as it would be on the Far-Flying Bird. Hanna’s concessions to Earthly convention were sloughing off one by one; she wore nothing but scraps of fabric molded round her breasts and hips, and her body distracted him. It was something to get a physical reaction from a man futilely desired for so long.

  He talked dispassionately enough. He told her about all the precautions Contact and I&S had taken. It did not matter now that there would be no armed escort for the Bird. The course program was secure; it was more secure than any other knowledge in human space. All the anxiety had been over a rumor, a wisp, a nothing. He had come to reassure her so she would not be afraid.

  That was considerate of him. Hanna listened, and thought that here was someone else who had taken blood from her. The fullness of the freely, generously given self was a memory; her love had gone wrong somehow; it had become thin and acid and if she let it would only leach the life out of her. After tonight she could put it far behind her. She was eager to be gone.

  At the very last he said, “I will not see you again until you return. Rubee rejected the idea of a formal leavetaking.”

  “I know.
He wanted to be alone with Awnlee. They have spent much time in meditation.”

  “So I hear. An attitude of prayer, I’m told.”

  “Oh, no, it’s not that.”

  “No? I’m afraid I’ve never gotten it straight about the Master of Chaos. None of us have yet.”

  “I wrote a paper about it.”

  “But no one understood it.”

  “I’ll try again when I get back, or while I’m gone. But you must have understood that they don’t worship the Master. They recognize his hand, they beseech him, they curse him—but they do not worship him.”

  “That seems very wise of them,” he said.

  Because he could not touch her to say good-bye, he put his hands against the barrier. She set her own, much smaller, against them. It seemed that a trick of dimension had set him far away. Before he went away finally, he turned to look at her once more. He hesitated. She saw herself just for a moment as he saw her: beautiful, unique, a creature who moved freely through strangeness and somehow always came back to being Hanna. He had known her for a long time, he had watched the shaping of her, and he was so used to her that the fresh perception of the moment surprised him profoundly. It seemed to her that he might come back.

  Hanna turned away. She melted into the darkness of her chamber and did not sleep, and waited for the hour when she could come to the Far-Flying Bird.

  “There’s the bastard,” Shen said after the last Jump. It brought them out close to Revenge, compensating for the season so that they were at the right place in the planet’s orbit and even looking at its dayside. It was still a million klicks away, and they boosted magnification for a better view. Cloud and ice made it nearly all white; it reflected back the light of the determined star and never got warmer, it was ice and ice and ice. A surge in the sun’s radiation might make it productive, that or terraforming. But nobody needed it badly enough to bother with terraforming. It was left to the People of the Rose.