The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  He heard it, too; he knew what she had done and what it meant. They would revolt as soon as they grasped it. They would not let him set them free.

  And here it was: the rage she had forgotten burst out like an oily cloud with screams in it. His face changed. Not Mike. I don’t know who this is but not Mike. A creature hardly human leapt for Hanna’s throat. She dived and rolled. Her mind ticked over in an endless second, analyzing. If he knew anything about fighting, the fury had wiped it out. He was fast, though, and she barely got out of the way of the next lunge. Time still was slowed and everything in it was preternaturally clear. Lise wailed, paralyzed with a terror that was half longing to help Michael and half animal recognition that this was no longer Michael but a thing that ought not be helped, a thing he would not wish her to help. Theo was white as a corpse. Shen was busy with GeeGee, looking over her shoulder as often as she dared.

  She was going to have to hurt him to stop him; if she could; before he caught her and killed her with his hands.

  She picked a direction. Two more lunges; two more calculated, dangerous dodges that brought her up with her back to the swiveling seats before an auxiliary control console. When he came at her again, she caught the outstretched arm, bent, shifted—and heaved him over her shoulder headfirst. She spun and pounced like a cat. He was wedged between two seats, struggling to get up, all coordination gone in the passion to destroy. She kicked him on the jaw without compunction and it had no effect at all; so she sprang to the top of the console and crouched and waited. When he came up at last, back half-turned to her, she hit him at the base of the skull with the edge of her hand. She had to do it twice more before he went down. Then he was still.

  GeeGee skimmed back into the light. Shen swore, hissing.

  “Gotta pull out,” she said. “Theo. Come help.”

  Hanna slipped from the console to the floor. She pulled at Michael to turn him over, and Lise helped her; when he was on his back, she got his head into her lap and held him. His mouth bled where her foot had smashed it. The pulse in his throat faltered under her fingers and her own heart nearly stopped; then the beat steadied to a slow but strong rhythm. She nearly wept with relief. Control was full of voices, it seemed that all of D’neera and the Polity were shouting at her. It was dark again, and then light as GeeGee, no longer on her programmed course, broke out over one planetary pole; whether north or south the disoriented Hanna could not tell. “H’ana!” said a woman’s voice, she knew the sound of it, the Lady of Koroth called her. Shen’s lips were drawn back from her teeth; that was, Hanna saw with astonishment, a smile of sorts. Shen fed GeeGee a Jump order; they were nearly away. All the Polity’s gunboats had been plunging for projected landing sites, and the change in course had taken them by surprise.

  Michael’s eyes opened, their color strangely faded; all Hanna saw was the gold. Almost at once he looked up at her with knowledge. She smoothed his hair and it felt like silk to her hand.

  He pulled himself to his feet just as GeeGee Jumped. Hanna gave him her shoulder to lean on. He did not reject it; he needed support and so he accepted it, eternally the realist. He whispered, “Stay here,” and she let him go. The tall figure staggered and she thought of the spiral stairs. Theo started after him and she said: No. He’ll be all right. She added aloud before Theo could respond, “How is he after that happens to him?”

  “After what happens?” Theo was puzzled. “Getting beat up by a girl half his size?”

  Shen muttered, “Told him he’d got soft.”

  “The fit, I mean. The craziness. When he turns into somebody else.”

  Theo looked as if he wanted to deny that anything had happened. He said, “I never saw it before.”

  “I saw the start of it once and I haven’t been around very long. You must know what I mean.”

  “All right. All right. I guess I’ve seen the start of it, too. But I never saw him lose control before. I mean, he could always stop it. He told me, once he told me there were times before when he didn’t. But I never saw the whole thing before.”

  Shen looked at a scanner and said, “We’re clear. Nobody around.” She made an evil noise that Hanna recognized, after a moment, as a chuckle.

  “I have to look at his head,” Theo said.

  “Not yet. Unless you want to handle him if he starts up again.”

  “No,” Theo said with alarm. “No, I don’t.”

  Shen said abruptly, “Good thing you did that, told us what you did. Outside, huh? If he wasn’t shot down first?”

  “That’s right.” Reaction was setting in. He could have crushed her skull between his hands; the thought made her weak. The silver chain bound for Uskos was chokingly tight.

  “Can’t get rid of us that easy,” Shen said. “You’re all right.”

  Hanna did not say anything to that. Shen would not expect it.

  She made herself wait a little longer. When five minutes had gone by, she passed through GeeGee to Michael’s room, stopping on the way to take a stunner from the cabinet where GeeGee’s small store of arms was kept. But she knew at once, when she went through his door, that she would not need it. The room was dark except for the glow of starlight; he lay on the bed looking up into the dark. She came to him and touched him, and found that his hair and face and shoulders were wet. He had put his head under cold water.

  She stretched out at his side, but he did not speak. Hanna ached as if it were she who had been hit.

  “Michael,” she said, but there was no answer. She turned and leaned over him in the dark. She put her hands on him and his body was foreign to her as an alien substance. In his rage he had fallen into a dream; he was in it still, and in Hanna, seeing it, recognition woke. Snow and flame and a blood-red sky. A child crying with pain.

  She whispered his name at intervals, until finally he moved, remembering her. She could not say anything about what she had done. Intead she said as steadily as she could, and practically: “When did you start having those attacks?”

  To her surprise he answered, perhaps because he was so beaten that it did not matter. But he talked as if speaking hurt.

  “The first time was—the night I got away—onto Alta.”

  There was a jolt of fear and flight. Castillo.

  “Got away from him?”

  “Yes.” The quiet voice was hoarse, as if he had been screaming. Perhaps he had, down here where no one could hear.

  “How long were you with him?”

  “I don’t know. Months, I think…There were never any clocks. I guessed about day and night. I got bigger…I knew we’d landed somewhere. He went out and came back drunk. He forgot to lock the door. It was the first time he ever forgot and I tried to run out and he caught me. It was always bad, but it was worse that night…”

  His voice trailed away. She saw a picture of explicit sexual brutality, an agonized child caught in terror and helpless rage. She said, her own voice not quite steady, “He gave me to the others, but he never touched me himself, not once. I never thought about it. If I had, I’d have thought he only liked men.”

  Michael said, “Only when he can’t get little boys.”

  “You must have been an exquisite child.”

  “That’s why he took—” The ragged voice stopped.

  “Took you away from where, Mike?”

  The silence lengthened in despair. She was whispering again, and shaking. “You don’t know, do you?”

  He turned his head away; he was trembling, too. She said with urgency, as if the quick question let her leap an abyss without looking down, “How did you get away?”

  “He passed out…”So faint she heard more thought than words. “There was something—heavy—I can’t remember what it was. I got it—somehow I got it up. I couldn’t hold things, I, my hands—”

  She thought he was going to choke. She stroked his cheek, willing him to breathe. “Your hands were injured. Did he do that?”

  “He saw it done. When he—took me on board—he tried to fix them.
So I could use them for him. On him. He was, he was satisfied with how they came out. He liked, liked ruining things, I think. And so I dropped it on his head—” He was entirely unaware of a disjuncture. “I didn’t remember until later. That was the first time.”

  “And then you ran out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got off the ship?”

  “Somehow. I don’t remember. Hanna, don’t you see what you’ve done?”

  Another whisper. “I know what I did…”

  “I can’t take the rest of you Outside.” He was trying patiently to explain. “Lise and Theo and Shen, they’ve got a right to a real life. We can’t just fly around forever with no place to land. But they won’t let me give myself up. That’s why I had to leave them behind…” His voice trailed away. GeeGee closed in on them, claustrophobic.

  Hanna’s fingers went to the chain at her throat. The links pressed into her skin. “There’s Uskos,” she said.

  He shook his head, uncomprehending. She said, “I’m a citizen of the nation of Ell. There’s a story I promised Rubee I would tell. Would the Polity risk an incident to get us back? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  She waited while he absorbed it. She knew when he had grasped it, because she felt a little of the laughter revive in him. It was a giant joke on the Polity, and he turned toward her in the dark, almost smiling.

  “I’d rather run toward something than away,” he said. “But I seem to remember the course was secret.”

  “They gave it to me, though.” She lifted a hand to her throat and spoke a word in Ellsian. The silver chain parted and slid into her hand, shining in the faint starlight. She held it out to him.

  “It’s in here,” she said.

  He did not take it at once. He said, “You know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes. Take it.”

  “I know what you had back there. You can say goodbye to all of it if you do this.”

  She was barefoot and wore another woman’s clothes. The last thing she possessed was in her hand.

  “I know,” she said. “Take it.”

  After a minute he did. He did not speak again. She lay close beside him and presently he fell into a quiet sleep, still holding the chain. Hanna did not sleep; she looked out at the stars and seemed to hear the blowing of a clear strong wind.

  * * *

  Hiero-volan Mencken was told nothing. He had been told nothing from the moment he woke, tingling and dizzy, in the dark little room he identified as part of the Golden Girl’s staff quarters. His shouts did no good, except perhaps to relieve his own feelings, his head hurt and he stopped shouting quickly. There was nothing in the room or on his person that would help him get away. If he ever got his hands on Hanna ril-Koroth—

  He did not know what had happened. He thought it was Hanna who had stunned him somehow. But perhaps she had been doped, drained, brainwashed and filled up again, her personality altered; no other explanation was conceivable.

  He waited for ten days, subject sometimes to concerts his captors may have considered entertainment, or torture.

  J’ai trove qui me vent amer;

  s’amerai, quant la brunete au vis cler m’a dit,

  que s’amour avrai,

  bien me doi de li loer…

  “What the hell does that mean?” he said when it broke in on his lunch, and got nearly the only piece of information he was given on the Golden Girl, for what good it did him. While he drank the excellent soup—the food was good, he had to admit—Michael Kristofik smiled and translated: “I’ve found one who wants to love me; if I should love, as the dark lady with the bright face told me I’d have her love, I’m to be praised for her.”

  It made no more sense in Standard than it had in whatever the original language was. Kristofik looked happier than he had any right to be. He had only put off the inevitable, he was a dead man so far as his present antisocial personality was concerned, but he looked as if he’d forgotten that. But Mencken could not take advantage of the lapse because Shen Lo-Yang did not take her eyes off him, she did not even seem to blink, and the stunner she leveled at him was set for full power, which at this range could be fatal.

  The next thing Kristofik told him, when he had been there nine days, was that on the morrow he would leave the Golden Girl. He was told that someone would come for him when it was time, and he was advised to go quietly. He was told he would then be safe, and free to pursue justice as he chose.

  So he waited through the next day, but nothing happened; at any rate not to him. For a time the sounds of the ship changed in a way he recognized as a difficult but slickly accomplished set of maneuvers; the self-contained gravitational field of the spacecraft did not waver, but Mencken thought they were in an atmosphere. This was it, he thought. But then it ended and time went on and on into the night, hour after hour without activity or news; he did not even get any dinner.

  Went wrong somehow, whatever they planned. He had mixed feelings about that. Some of it was grim satisfaction; was Hiero-volan Mencken to be shoved off a pirate ship with a gun in his back, while the pirate laughed at him? Never. On the other hand—the other hand was not good to think about. He had a family waiting for him. He did not like thinking of how long they might have to wait.

  “What happened?” he said next morning when they brought him breakfast. There was a lot of it, as if they were making up for the meal missed the night before.

  Kristofik and Lo-Yang did not answer. They looked at him as if—he saw this acutely—he were a problem. He was by no means a coward and he ate his well-made omelet with deliberation, studying the black-clad man and woman who had his life in their hands. He thought he detected in Shen Lo-Yang a certain pleasure, which was a nasty thought, considering her history. Kristofik was pale and his mouth showed the trace of a shallow cut. Trouble from outside?—but the Golden Girl had not landed anywhere or been boarded; he was sure of that. Perhaps Lady Hanna had slipped out of control, a heartening possibility.

  Some hours afterward the Golden Girl stopped. He had not heard for some time the characteristic stresses and puffs that meant Jumps; instead there were the louder but less abrupt sounds of movement in realspace. Suddenly there was almost silence, as all movement ceased; life support alone did not make much noise. His door opened. In it this time there were three people, not two, and all of them were armed. They wore spacesuits, but their helmets were not in place. Kristofik and Lo-Yang, of course; but the third was Lady Hanna ril-Koroth. She looked beautiful and calm. He said, “Are you sure you’re pointing that gun the right way?”

  “Come on out,” she said.

  They marched him toward the tail of the Golden Girl, not leading him but telling him where to go, staying a safe distance behind. Michael Kristofik said, “You’re getting out of this safe and sound.”

  “What did you do to Lady Hanna?”

  “It’s what he does,” she said sweetly. “Several times, when he’s having a good day.”

  Mencken glanced around. He did not understand, but Kristofik evidently did, and looked scandalized. Kristofik said, “Your own suit’s waiting for you, and your maneuvers pack. We’re next door to a relay. I’ll tell you the number if you want to know, but it doesn’t matter; you can’t broadcast from on-site anyway. We’ll wait till you’ve got yourself anchored and then we’ll move out. We’ll contact Fleet and tell them where you are. You should be picked up in less than twenty-four hours.”

  “How’d he do it?” Mencken said to Hanna. “Drugs?”

  “Is that what they’re all going to think?” she said. “Tell them this. Tell Lady Koroth and Commissioner Vickery and Gil Figueiredo and Starr Jameson especially, tell Starr in person, give him this message: I quit.”

  The suit was outside an air lock whose indicator lights showed ready. Mencken put it on and waited while the others fastened their helmets, one at a time, so two of them always had him covered. There was no haste or confusion; the teamwork reminded him of his colleagues in I&S. They escorted him
into the lock and out of it. Free fall caught at his stomach and he fumbled for the maneuvers pack, switching it on. He saw that they were indeed close to an Inspace relay, close enough for a searchlight to pick out the details of its platforms and antennae.

  He could not help saying, “I hope you really are going to contact Fleet.”

  We will, said a voice in his head, so clearly he might have mistaken it for speech, except that he had had contact with telepaths before; also it carried the absolute assurance of truth that speech could never have.

  He gave up, having no longer any choice. They stayed where they were while he glided the short distance to the relay. He had no way to tell when the others went back into the ship; the Golden Girl did not move and kept the searchlight shining while he hooked his utility belt to a steel stanchion. After that the searchlight blinked out. The Golden Girl moved away; its other lights became fainter and disappeared.

  He only had to wait seven hours. It was not even long enough to get hungry, after the breakfast he had had; it only seemed like an eternity.

  Chapter 4

  Gaaf the medic, a former physician of Fleet, was trapped in the Avalon, and trapped by more than metal. There were the dreams, and waking nightmares, too.

  First there was the uproar on Revenge. Gaaf watched it. All of them went to the warehouse to retrieve the treasures stored there, but all the things were gone. Castillo made certain statements about what would be done to the People of the Rose. There would not be much living in the City of the Rose when he was finished. Gaaf would have preferred not believing the threats, but he believed them. Castillo’s face was scarlet and he screamed at Suarez to bring him the headman of the town. While he waited he paced and snarled, and then he said more about what he was going to do. Gaaf started to go away but thought: What if he notices I’m gone? What if he knows I left because of him? What if he gets angry at me?—and so he stayed. He stood just inside the Avalon and watched Castillo interrogate Elder Rann. He saw the D’neeran woman again, walking in front of Juel to her death, and turned away as if that would make it not real and sink it into dream.