The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m just trying to help you. That’s the only reason I’d touch you.”

  Her eyes focused on his face. He did not know if she had understood. He leaned closer to her and said softly, “Don’t worry. We don’t do things like that here. It’s different here.”

  She understood that time. She looked at him with intelligence; he might have said with recognition, if that were possible. Her lips parted and she said something he would not have heard if he had not been so close. It was: “Not much improvement.”

  He drew back and stared at her with astonishment, and then with appreciation. He said, “Look, I’ve got enough consciences hanging around here. I don’t need another one.”

  He thought she said something else, but her lips did not move and he did not know what the word was. He almost thought she had thrown a giant question mark into the air. That was impossible, too.

  “What was that?” he said, but her eyes were closed again, and he did not think she heard him any more.

  B returns to Revenge with caution. Sweeps land and sky for a trace of technology beyond that used by the People of the Rose. The other ship has gone. They hunt down Elder Rann again; the city prays and quakes. Rann cannot talk fast enough. “A golden ship, a man with a companion, he called himself your friend—”

  B has a visual on the marauder. Enhanced, it shows name and registration clear on the bow. The Golden Girl out of Valentine. Who is her master?

  Theo said, “You have to clean up.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nobody comes in my surgery that dirty.”

  “You never had a surgery.”

  “I do now.”

  The picture of what was happening on Revenge faded. It was accurate; Michael was as sure of that as if he were there.

  He said, “She’s dirtier than I am.”

  “Shen’s going to clean her up.”

  “My bathroom looks like a biosyn supply house. Thanks to you.”

  “Use mine.”

  Theo was implacable. Michael looked at him quizzically. He said, “Sure you’re up to this?”

  “It’s not that hard.” To Michael’s surprise Theo blushed. He said, “I was pretty good, you know. Before I got thrown out. I can handle this. But we ought to be heading home. She’s really sick.”

  “Before we go home I want to see what she says.”

  “If she lives long enough to say anything, you mean. Look, I can only do so much. We need to head for Valentine and we need to get Rescue out for rendezvous. ’Cause I told you, I can’t use the heavy stuff. And she might need to be on it real soon. If her heart stops.”

  Michael looked at the face of the unconscious woman. It was less swollen, but she had not stirred again. He thought of her single-handed ruin of the plan that had almost succeeded. There was nothing to do but accept it. They could not go back to Revenge; B had heavy arms and was warned. He would watch the empty sky. There had been no time to think about the size of the disaster, the waste of two years’ work, the hunt that should have ended on Revenge. So close. So goddamn close to the secret, the path that led back to the start.

  “We have to do it all over again,” Michael said. But Theo did not know what he was talking about, so he said, “God knows where he’ll turn up next. Maybe he’ll go on Outside. It might be years before we pick up a trail—before I do. You’re out if you want to be.”

  Theo shook his head. “No.”

  “Think about it.”

  “I already know. I’ve been with you six years. Where would I go? I’ll never do what I wanted to do, I doped it away. No med faculty in space’ll let me back in. What would Shen do? Go back to Nestor? You’re stuck with us. Mike, it’s not as bad as you think. We can get something out of this woman. We have to keep her alive. Let me contact Rescue. Please. You said you were under orders.”

  He was right. He was also anxious about Michael. Michael’s face was treacherously transparent; he was desolate and it showed. There were limits to what he wanted even Theo to see. He could not smile, not yet, but he rearranged his face somehow and Theo was relieved. He would have to fight the rest of it out later, when he was by himself.

  * * *

  He went to Control and called Rescue. He told a voice from Valentine there was a sick and injured woman, unidentified, aboard. Would Rescue pick her up? The voice balked. GeeGee was outside their customary range. They were shorthanded. Michael went on talking. He quoted regulations (making some up) and precedent. He appealed to humanity. Shen listened with a sneer and Lise, her interest caught, forgot to be afraid and came close and took his hand. Finally he did what he ought to have done at once. He reminded the voice who he was and mentioned a Valentine Ecomanager whom he knew personally. When it was over, he had what he wanted and Shen was as close to smiling as she ever got. “All right, all right,” he said. “I forgot the Kristofik theory of social structure.”

  “What’s that?” Lise said.

  “Money always wins.”

  “Ah,” she said, enlightened.

  He gathered clean clothes and went to Theo’s room, walking the corridor as if the stone of Revenge had gotten into his feet. The game he had played for the last two years was over. As soon as B knew who was after him, it would be a new game: not a private hunt but a private war. It would start soon. It might have started already.

  The People of the Rose have no use for Inspace communication, but the relays come near Revenge, as on all norm-pattern routes in human space. The Interworld Fleet has sown relays like seed for centuries. B puts a query to a common-access information network. The request has low priority and traffic on the relays is heavy. Access is skewed by the demands of Fleet, which often commandeers great chunks of the system’s capacity for an hour or a day. B waits.

  Hot water did not relax him; it only reminded him of his weariness, and of too many nights of half-sleeping on rock. Had it all, Kristofik. All that money. Couldn’t you just enjoy it?

  The answer comes, the name. Maybe it means something; maybe not. The man with a thousand names puts little stock in them. He gets a picture, too. He knows the face. Twenty years ago: a boy on a street in Shoreground. Thirty years ago: a terrified child.

  Then it is war. And B’s first object is the elimination of Michael Kristofik.

  Dressing in Theo’s darkened room he jumped at a movement on the edge of sight and spun to face it. His savage reflection looked back from a mirror. His hands were clenched. “Quick with our fists today, aren’t we?” he said to the mirror, but there was no humor in the face that looked back at him. And after all, he thought irrelevantly, the woman was probably property of the pack that ran with B this year, willing enough to watch a night of flame.

  He saw inside his eyes another fist from long ago.

  Never again. Not any man.

  “Shut up,” he said to the voices inside his skull, wondered why he had ever started the hunt; but he knew the answer to that; only he had not known how hard it would be.

  When he knows it was me, he’ll wish he’d killed me years ago in Shoreground. Seeing me there must have been a shock; but he thought I couldn’t be a threat. Just another kid fallen into Valentine. And lost. Like the troubadour’s song—“Since the soul in me is dead, better save the skin”—knew what that meant first time I heard it—

  * * *

  Hanna thought it might be time to come out of trance.

  The cool voice of reason said it was time. The disjunction of consciousness should not be maintained past necessity. It drained the body, especially when it was held, as she held it, against the body’s sickness and wounding. Necessity, said reason, was gone. This was medical treatment she was getting, no worse; unorthodox, perhaps, but competent. If she stayed in trance, she might find a way to overpower the men and women who held her, and then?—without them she would die.

  Reason also warned her of the consequences of letting go. Everything was there, waiting its time—pain and fear, grief overdue and thus strengthen
ed, some particularly revolting memories from the Avalon, and the knowledge that she was lost outside—no longer human space, perhaps, but certainly human law. Not even reason could assess her exact position; she had missed some important facts. The stun effect had made her memory patchy, like her consciousness as she fought it. She had escaped the Avalon, but she did not know what she had come to. She remembered an upraised fist and brutal rage, somehow averted. She remembered indifference to her death, provided she remained alive long enough to be useful. It was all connected to the face she recognized and the gold-flecked eyes; that made sense; but she also remembered pity and a soothing touch, and it was all the same man, and that did not make sense at all.

  While she thought about this, she was touched again. She gave herself up to the hands with indifference. She knew without opening her eyes whose hands they were; they belonged to the woman and the girl. They washed her carefully and renewed the healing salve. The woman did not like it. Babysitter, medaide, nurse: didn’t sign on for this: he’ll want me to cook for them next! The girl might have been caressing a doll endowed with imaginary life, healing its hurts and her own with narcissistic devotion. Poor baby, poor darling, I’ll make it better, oh help me, oh hold me!

  Hanna opened her eyes to see what they would say when they knew she was conscious.

  The woman called Shen did not say anything. She thought: What a constitution. We could use her.

  Hanna turned her eyes on the girl named Lise. She could not see Lise very clearly. Lise did not know that, and it made no difference anyway. She responded with the egocentricity of her age. She leaned over Hanna, a sudden jerk. She said, “He didn’t mean it.”

  “What the hell?” Shen said.

  Lise said in an urgent whisper, “He wouldn’t have hit you. He wouldn’t. He doesn’t do that. He won’t hurt you.”

  It was overpowering love, it was worship that excused and did away all faults. Hanna thought that the child deceived herself. But Lise said, “It’s hard for him. I don’t know what it is, he won’t tell me anything, anything at all. But he won’t hit you. He won’t.”

  She touched Hanna’s shoulder lightly, mindful of the bruises.

  Hanna acknowledged without emotion that all of them were careful with her, even Shen. Reason said they would care for her; that it was time to submit to the body’s claims and let herself be healed.

  Since reason anchored the trance, and the balance of reason urged leaving it, she did so.

  The first thing she thought as her mode of thinking shifted was that the concept of the Master of Chaos was more clear to her than it had been before.

  The next thing was that she wished she were safe within the strictures of Polity Admin.

  The last was a question even reason had not raised. She knew the Polity well, and especially how Jameson thought. Admin had the course to Uskos. Fleet might have tracked the course of the Far-Flying Bird as a precaution, a day or two behind, listening for messages of distress. If they had done that (a thing that would suit Jameson), they would know something had happened. The context of her situation would be changed, and she would not be as alone as she felt; the power of five planets waited to help her, if only she stayed alive long enough.

  It was her last conscious thought. Exhaustion waited outside the trance, and took over.

  GeeGee sang:

  The hounds they lie down at his feet,

  So well they can their master keep;

  His hawks they fly so eagerly

  No fowl dares come him nigh…

  “I don’t think that’s exactly what I want to hear,” Theo said. His face was shiny, but his eyes were intent, and the fingers that manipulated the instruments were steady. The living bone quivered, an artist’s medium.

  “I thought it would help you with your incising,” Michael said gravely.

  “Incising? There’s no such word.”

  “Sure there is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m educated, remember?”

  Down there comes a fallow doe

  As great with young as she might go.

  She lifted up his bloody head

  And kissed the wounds that were so red…

  Theo said, “I haven’t done anything like this in years. Shut it off, all right?”

  “Remind me not to let you touch me, if I get hurt.”

  “Dammit, Mike—”

  “Yessir. GeeGee, the music is not appreciated. Turn it off.”

  The sweet voice stopped in mid-song. All of them were in Michael’s room, leaving GeeGee to tend to herself. The room was brilliantly lighted, especially the bed where the injured woman lay in a cone of blinding light. Movement had a sharp edge in the light, and some of the sharpness was tension, but imperceptibly it drained away. That was because Michael so far had not slipped, to all appearances was himself, and the others were reassured.

  A splintered end of bone shifted a millimeter and a metal box said suddenly, “Optimum match.”

  “Not quite as good as the other one,” Theo said. “Still. She can be grateful. It should have punctured the lung.” He used a spindle-shape the size of his thumb to fuse the fixative saturating the bone. The metal box chirped and displayed patterns of relative binding strength. Theo touched up his handiwork and the chirps steadied to a hum. Theo said with satisfaction, “That’s good. Sealed tight. It waited too long. This must have happened two days ago.”

  Lise, watching avidly, said, “Ow.”

  “Mike?” said Shen. She was at the woman’s feet, watchful. Theo had not wanted to burden the weak body further with a general anesthetic; he had stationed Shen and Michael so that they could restrain sudden movement if the unconscious woman stirred. It had not been necessary. Michael still held her right hand, stretched above her head and out of Theo’s way, but his grip was light. Her left hand lay on her breast, puffy in spite of quick care; that came from the blow to the man with the disruptor. How had she managed to do it, painful as it must have been to move?

  Shen said, uncannily echoing the thought, “Two days like that, she did what you told me? Couldn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t think so.”

  “What did she do?” said Theo, who had not heard the story; and when Michael told him he would not believe it. He said, “She couldn’t even have walked without screaming.”

  “She did. I saw it. She might have been doped. It would’ve had to be a hell of a brew.”

  “She wasn’t doped. She had a broad-spectrum anesthetic at some point, but that was a long time ago. There was just a trace left when I looked at her blood, not enough to make any difference. There was a high concentration of endorphins—still. She couldn’t have,” Theo said, firmly rejecting fact.

  He put away the spindle and selected a slim object with a bulge at one end. He drew it carefully along the edges of the incision. It made no sound, but the layers of fat and muscle quivered. Michael looked away, queasy. There was no difference in kind between what had happened to the woman already, the beating and the rape, and this even more intimate invasion of the flesh. What nonsense, he thought, and heard faint clicks; he looked again and saw Theo with a handful of clamps. “That’s a good job, if I say so myself. Ready to close,” Theo said in a strong, efficient voice that was an echo from some past time.

  Michael said, “You said you couldn’t make any sense out of her blood.”

  “I finally did. In some ways. You know what I can’t understand? Dawkins’ fever. Nobody gets that.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You’re immunized against it, though. Everybody is. It came out of Colony One at the beginning of the Explosion. You’ve heard of the Plague Years, I know; well, that was Dawkins’ fever. Ever since then you can’t even get a vital signs readout without having your immunity tested. It’s still around, but you don’t find it very often. It would be just possible for her to get it if she’d always been in some isolated place and never had any medical care. But she’s had the best—there�
��s evidence of a massive regeneration effort in adulthood—and she’s been around. Has she ever been around!”

  The edges of the incision melted together under Theo’s hands. When he was done, there was only a red line cutting across the inflamed skin. He ran a finger over it with a craftsman’s approval and said, “Rescue can worry about scarring. That’s good, though. You can let go now.”

  Michael held on to the right hand anyway. It had escaped the general destruction and was smooth to the touch, but it radiated heat. He said, “What did you do? The same kind of profile you did on my blood a couple of years ago?”

  “Yes, and she’s been everywhere. All the Polity worlds. Valentine. And the Outside worlds, too, which is very rare—Girritt, F’thal, even Zeig-Daru. And there were some other things the tracking program couldn’t match up.”

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with it. That doesn’t sound right about Zeig-Daru. Nobody’s been there except a few D’neerans.”

  “Well, the base pattern is D’neeran.”

  “It’s what?”

  “D’neeran.” Theo, puttering among metal boxes, stopped and looked at him curiously. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Well—it’s just that getting anywhere near B would have to make a telepath sick.”

  He was shocked and it must show; Shen was too still, Theo looked too uncertain. He pulled himself together and said calmly, “If she’s D’neeran, she wasn’t with him by choice. She might not have much to tell us. Are you sure?”

  “That’s what it said,” Theo said stubbornly. “And if she’s not D’neeran, why would she go to D’neera? Nobody goes there either.”

  “I did once,” Michael said reminiscently. “I was spaced. I thought I was going to D’ning on Co-op, from a town an hour away. I couldn’t figure out why passage cost so much and why it took so long.”

  Theo looked at him suspiciously, but the story was true. It had happened in the years just after the Pavonis Queen, when he had spent money wildly and the drugs and the women were interchangeable, the craving for something unidentified insatiable, the fights a constant in every spaceport bar. Twice he had nearly killed men with his fists, and later bought them off. And lately it seemed he had not changed so much since then as he had thought. Not much improvement, she had said.