The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  Castillo acted amused.

  They went through the factory and the thing with the saddle got interested in Gaaf. It sidled up to him, pranced around his feet, tripped him up. He kept thinking it would bite him, he dodged it, he made tentative kicking movements, and finally he ducked into a dark passageway to escape it. It followed him. So did Brinee, who found him leaning against a wall, sweating, trembling, and cursing the beast in a whisper. His agitation was apparent even to nonhuman eyes, and Brinee shooed the thing away.

  Brinee said, “I am sorry. It is only a pet.”

  Brinee stood between Gaaf and the end of the passage. Gaaf looked past him longingly. Where were the other human beings?—he had to catch up with them. But he could not bring himself to walk toward Brinee in the dark.

  Brinee said after a while, “My far-kin Awnlee had such a one as a child. He loved it dearly.”

  Gaaf knew which of the dead aliens was Awnlee. Hanna’s mental cry of anguish at his death had been perceptible to all of them.

  The passageway was murky as the middle of a night. Something seemed to tug at the leg of Gaaf’s trousers; he looked down in a frenzy, kicking. But there was nothing there.

  “Are you well?” Brinee said.

  Gaaf passed a shaking hand over his face and said, “This is hell.”

  The word came out of the translator in unadorned Standard. Neither Ell nor any other Uskosian land had an equivalent concept or a comparable word.

  “Ell?” said Brinee. “No, today we are in the land of Ree. Let us join the others.”

  Throughout the rest of the tour, Gaaf felt animals snapping at his ankles. There were never any animals there, though.

  The factory produced fine liqueurs the color of ripe grain. There were jars and jars of them stacked, shelved, crated, awaiting shipment.

  Castillo tasted the liqueurs and nodded. He said to Suarez, with no attempt at concealment, “Mark two.”

  The aliens had no idea what he meant. Gaaf was beginning to guess.

  They were given certain gifts, as Castillo had predicted. Half a dozen jars of the exotic liqueur; a pyramid of spun-crystal many-colored balls that made sweet sounds when the wind blew over them; stiff ceremonial gowns and masks in primary colors; a handful of other things; not much.

  “They took a fortune in presents to Earth,” Ta complained aboard the Avalon.

  “They expect a return before they do that again,” Castillo answered.

  That was enough to satisfy Ta, but Gaaf, emboldened by this rare communicativeness in Castillo, said, “Did they come out and say that?”

  “Hinted.”

  “That’s a hell of an attitude,” Ta said, aggrieved.

  Wales said, “The funny thing is we’ve got what the Polity was going to give them right down in the holds.”

  Some of them chuckled, but Gaaf did not see the humor in it.

  “Don’t say so when they’re around,” Castillo said. “Not a word.”

  They were traveling toward a city in the heart of Ell where they would be welcomed by an agrarian guild. Suarez said before they landed, “Won’t be much here, I guess.”

  “You never know,” Castillo said. “There’s something they want us to see later, some kind of museum. Might round us out, if it’s as good as I think it is. It’s time we went. Long way to Gadrah. Back to Omega, a good six weeks; a week to Heartworld sector; then another five. Three months. We might pass the Polity on the way, I guess,” he said, and the smile came again.

  They had now been on Uskos for two Standard weeks, and Gaaf had thought himself adjusting to it. By that he meant that he had learned to blank out the nonhuman landscapes, beings, language, and artifacts. He clung instead to the interludes on the Avalon as if they were life, and all the rest a dream to be endured. In this life a single image suddenly stood out, clear if not technically accurate. It was the course Castillo projected: a course through the waste of Outside, then into and out the other side of human space to another void. In the middle—to be crossed with casual haste, touching nothing—was all the space Gaaf had ever known before: Earth and Fleet’s headquarters at Admin, the amusements of Valentine, the roiling network of Polity culture, even the outposts to which Oversight ministered, even (God help him) Co-op. And everything outside that was barren: a few alien civilization that were patches of terrifying light; and Gadrah, the unknown.

  He put his head down on his knees because he felt faint. “You sick?” Bakti said.

  He mumbled, “I don’t feel so good.”

  “That’s a joke,” Suarez said. “The doctor gets sick.”

  He thought of saying: Maybe we can catch what they have here. But he did not, because he suddenly did not want them to have an overriding reason for wanting a physician aboard.

  He still had his head down at the landing. He said, “I have to stay here. I can’t sit through one of those God damn shows the way I feel.”

  “I don’t know if I can get through another one either,” Wales said, but they were indifferent.

  Castillo said, “If somebody’s here, at least we don’t have to secure the ship. Just keep your eyes open.”

  “Yes,” Gaaf said.

  They were down and the others filed out to the farmers’ guildhall and a dignified spectacle of sowing and reaping, to the some-kind-of-museum which might be—what? Mark five? Mark six? Mark the last, anyway.

  Gaaf did not raise his head until they were gone. When he did he had real difficulty doing it, because of the fatigue that dragged at his bones all the time. From the flight deck he saw that the sky outside was gray. The town of Elenstap was spread out before him on a series of gracefully folded hills. Many of the structures in it were brightly colored, so that it presented a festive air. But the colors all ran together, and it was not a human spectacle, and Gaaf shrank away from it, back into the dimness of the Avalon.

  The unknown. He chewed the palm of one hand. His head ached.

  He thought: I can’t do it.

  He thought of what would happen if he begged Castillo to leave him somewhere, anywhere, in human space.

  He would be killed. That’s what would happen.

  He looked toward the controls of the Avalon. He had been in Fleet too long not to know something about them. For centuries the human species’ desire for many spacecraft had run head-on into the complexity of interstellar flight, and the result had been standardization. A brave man would hijack the Avalon and—

  But Gaaf was not a brave man.

  The Fleet would come eventually to this world of aliens. They would take him and probe him and punish him for his part in what had happened to the Far-Flying Bird.

  Unless. There was his Fleet record: adequate if not outstanding. There was what he had done for Hanna.

  And if the impossible was true? Then there might be more. If it was true.

  Desperation gave him a small cunning. He crept toward the controls after all. Trembling, looking over his shoulder, he researched the course to Gadrah.

  And there it was, as he had feared but not quite, not really, believed until now: a lonely track past the limits of known space, bumped off the inner edge of the spiral arm that had in it not only Earth and her offspring, but all the habitable worlds supposedly known to any human beings.

  Aboard the Avalon, standardized, were data storage modules no longer than a finger and a centimeter thick. Gaaf knew where to find them. He put onto one what he wanted to take, and ordered the Avalon to forget his tampering.

  Then he sat back, quaking and twitching, to wait.

  * * *

  The Treasure Store of Elenstap in the Land of Ell was a fair, proud structure three stories high, with two wings set at angles to the main bulk of the building, which was the older portion. Ell had been essentially at peace for a thousand years, and its people’s lively interest in the arts for those thousand years and longer was reflected in the land’s Treasure Stores, by which name was meant public treasures that belonged to all the people who came to admire them.
The newer wings of the Store of Elenstap had been constructed to complement the Old Store. They were made of white marble streaked with russet, the marble having come from the same quarry that had supplied the stone for the Old Store. Set into the exterior walls at intervals were palimpsests representing the most important works within, and the representations, though stylized, were masterpieces in their own right. Also the cartouches had been treated with a substance, invisible by day, that absorbed the daylight and shone at night. The Store stood by itself in a grove outside the city, and visitors to Elenstap came there at night to regard a sight no visitor should miss: the radiant images floating in the dark, seemingly unsupported, a catalog in light of the chief treasures of that place.

  The Avalon remained at Elenstap that night. The crew rejected the hospitality of Elenstap and stayed on board. If the townsfolk or the official party from the City of the Center were offended, they did not say so, and the humans could not read the nonhuman faces or tell what the movements of the heavy bodies said.

  At twilight it began to rain. There was a sharp burst of wind and water which declined to a settled drizzle. No one would come to stand outside the Treasure Store that night, though it glowed brightly as ever in the rain.

  Before dusk changed fully to night, Castillo began to detail certain plans he had been formulating since the Avalon’s arrival. Not even Gaaf was surprised by them. But his lack of surprise was of a different order from that of the others. He had made a vague guess at what would be done, deducing it from what Castillo said. The others had not had to guess. There was something that they needed on this world, and it had not been given to them. Therefore they would take it.

  Gaaf listened to them talk and they turned into aliens—strange smooth-skinned beings with flexible mouths. This terrified him, and the Avalon was very dark. His simple plan for escaping them seemed a hopeless thread. He was afraid they could read his mind, that someone had read it all along, like the woman who ought to have died on the Avalon. He even thought he saw her at a corner of the dark room.

  Don’t give me away! he begged, but she did not hear him; she disappeared. He knew she had not really been there, he was not crazy. All the same his body twitched. The Uskosians were no good either, anatomical freaks with muscle in the wrong places. They were the only link he had left to the Polity, though; to real human beings.

  The briefing was over and he had not heard a word of it.

  In the middle of the night the Avalon lifted into the air. It flew straight over Elenstap and came to the Treasure Store, and it pushed fire before it. The end of the new west wing blew away. The Avalon hovered at the broken end and the men threw down a ramp to bridge the gap between the ship and the smoky second floor of the Store. Gaaf shoved through the men at the end of the ramp. He did not remember going there. Wales yelled, “You’re supposed to be up with Suarez!” but they were in a hurry, they did not have a second to spare, and no one else questioned Gaaf. Castillo looked at him and the pale blue gaze looked through him; then Castillo turned away.

  Gaaf prayed to something and ran after the others, across the ramp, fleeing from darkness into the dark.

  The others had lights and wore masks to protect them from the dust and smoke. Gaaf had no equipment. He ran in the dark, tripping over broken stones, falling. His clothes ripped, his hands bled; he got up again and ran into a wall. But he fell on it weeping with relief. He fumbled through the dark with his hands on the wall, bumping into things and knocking them over, or bruising himself against heavier objects that would not move. A door opened under his hands and he fell inward into a blacker darkness and the door snapped shut behind him; the air was cleaner here, but he could see nothing and crawled in the blackness, clawing for the door. He found it and crawled out into the smoke again—and saw a light bob as a man ran back toward the ship with something in his hands.

  He kept dragging himself along the wall, stumbling and choking. He was dazed, he had forgotten why he was doing this (but he knew he could not go back); it was blind flight propelled by blind hope, but the hope was light years distant where there were human beings. Another door opened, on light this time, and fresher air; Gaaf saw a staircase, and he half-fell down it. The stairs were painted like the rainbow and gracefully railed, lit by lamps shaped like miniature starbursts, though this way was for emergencies and seldom used. It was pretty, for a nightmare.

  He could not read the strange alien signs. But the aliens left nothing to chance, not on a route designed for frightened beings trying to get out. The door that led outside was transparent, the blessed wet night showed through it, and it opened outward as soon as Gaaf fell on it. He stumbled out into the rain. There was a terrible howling somewhere, horrible screams far away but surely louder than any normal throat could make—he did not recognize it as machine noise, fire or disaster control devices racing to the Store of Elenstap and making their ordinary sounds. It seemed that something living and huge and ravening was coming for him—

  A dark shape passed overhead, accelerating to another target. If Gaaf had been missed from the Avalon, no one had bothered looking for him.

  He stumbled through the grove of trees with wet branches lashing at his head, and out into the soggy fields.

  * * *

  In the night Gaaf began to understand about the Master of Chaos. Rain pattered on trees he could not see in the dark, and the wind moaned through them. He walked zigzag and blind, falling when stones and other objects turned under his feet, capricious and malevolent. The ground kept falling away or rising up in front of him, so that he moved in a drunken lurch. He could not see anything. He could not even see the lights of Elenstap reflected from the clouds. He did not know if he were walking away from the town or toward it, he went in no direction but randomness.

  He kept his right hand in his pocket much of the time, clutching the precious wafer that might buy his life from the Polity. The gold chain was there, too. And maybe she would plead for his freedom as she had pleaded for the aliens’ lives. And when she learned of his flight from Castillo and learned of this journey in the dark she would say, How brave you are, Henrik Gaaf. The blue eyes would rest on him gently and—

  He talked to her in the dark. He talked to his sisters on Co-op also. But they said, Quite whining, Henrik, shut up and work.

  The rain slackened and stopped. After that there were new noises in the dark as nightbeasts crept from hiding and set about the hunt. There were not so many trees, and then none. The ground was more even and things grew in it in rows which Gaaf followed because it was easier walking that way. Sometimes there were no rows, but solid masses of vegetation that caught at his legs and feet like snapping animals. He stumbled on, wet to the skin, cold and hungry and very tired.

  When he could go no farther, he sat down on the ground. He tried to imagine Hanna beside him, the warmth, but he could not. He was too cold.

  He fell asleep without knowing it, and when he woke up it was light and an alien bent over him. He yelled and squirmed away from the touch and then he saw that he was surrounded by a ring of them. He began to weep. He wept all the rest of the day; they looked at him without comprehension. There were no translators and they could not talk to him, though they tried; they tried very hard. And they took him back to the City of the Center and put him in a bare locked place, he had not expected anything else, he had not expected anything, and he was passive and only wept; but when they took the wafer of data away from him, he howled so desperately that they gave it back to him again.

  Chapter 5

  A long space voyage is the ultimate reach of boredom; any Fleet cadet will attest to that. The leaps of starflight pall after a time, the dark outside has no end, and all parts of the universe look the same. Library terminals and holoshows are finite resources; one’s companions rub on one’s nerves. The journey is not an end, but only a means toward one. Getting there is a state of stasis to be endured, and it seems as if the end will never come.

  But there are also people who se
ek space with passion. With freedom from planets and solid ground comes a freedom like that of the sea. For these persons, where there are no other beings, there can be no obligations. Time is measured not by the tyranny of regulated clocks, but by Jumps; a very different matter, since no two are of the same length, and the exact point of terminus is increasingly hard to predict as routine paths are left behind. For those who absent themselves further from the human race, avoiding use of the relay system, a season in space can be as close to perfect freedom as any human being will get.

  In order to take up the course to Uskos, the Golden Girl first had to go to Omega.

  That was the hard part. Humankind was universally unfriendly, and the sense that it was so grated on everyone but Michael, and the others grated on him.

  Theo spent too much time with the newsbeams, helping no one’s mood. There was nothing to be heard about Mencken, but there was news from D’neera, since D’neerans talk profusely about everything they know or think they know. The magistrates of D’neera clearly had been lied to. Hanna’s message had not been delivered to Lady Koroth, and the magistrates, in ignorance of the facts, clamored for Hanna. A flower of their civilization, beloved, needed and missed, Lady-Koroth-to-be, dutiful daughter of her House, she could not be spared: the magistrates appealed at large to the Polity and the man it sought. They said Polity clumsiness in trying to trap Michael had caused him to abort, what other reason could there be?—they wanted Hanna too badly to engage in games or duels, there would be no more traps, if only Michael would bring her home where she belonged.

  Theo told Michael about this, and told Hanna, too; she got a pinched look around the mouth and disappeared into the room of mirrors. She would not come to Michael’s bed and she would not talk about it. He did not know what to do for her and she would not tell him.