The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  One living D’neeran who can keep her mouth shut, and that’s the one I get—

  Lise was pale and quiet. She had not understood the events at D’neera when they happened, but Theo of the flapping tongue explained. She was outraged. Michael tried for hours to tease the reproach from her eyes. She forgave him finally for trying to abandon her, but in a flood of tears. “Don’t do it again!” she cried, and charged into a full-blown tantrum in which he saw, to his horror, imitated elements of the display he had put on three days before. At the height of it Hanna flew out of hiding, cheeks burning, her sensitivity to emotion exacerbated past bearing. She pounced on Lise and shook her; Lise retaliated with fingernails; Michael at the risk of life and limb was about to dive into the melee when Shen, watching with calm interest, caught his arm.

  “No harm done,” Shen said.

  “What the hell are you saying!”—they rolled on the floor now, spitting.

  “See what she’s doing. Look.”

  And when he made himself be still and look, he saw that Hanna, though her hair nearly stood on end, did nothing more than passively defend herself, blocking blows and guarding the hair Lise pulled.

  It did not last long. Lise went limp and cried again and Hanna held her. Michael came up to them cautiously; they paid no attention to him. “I know,” Hanna was saying, “I know, I know, it hurts so much…” She laid her cheek against Lise’s and they cried together. Michael did not know which of too many kinds of abandonment Hanna grieved for—what she had just done to D’neera? What had been done to her in the past?—or Lise either, for that matter. The range of possibilities was chilling. He thought of Claire, Emma, Kareem, the dogs, the cats, the tourmaline faded and dead by now; he was sick. Hanna lifted her tear-stained face. “Come here,” she said, and held out her hand. He sank to the floor with them and they drew him in, and he bowed his head and wept, too, for a good life made at great cost and senselessly destroyed. Whatever happened now, he would not have it again.

  * * *

  In the hours before they came to Omega, Hanna, sleeping in the arbitrary predawn, slipped in and out of slumber. She had discovered that some of the mirrors could be made transparent, and she could look out from this room as she could from Michael’s next door. In the absence of artificial light, stars reflected jaggedly everywhere. Each time she opened her eyes that night, she floated in a bath of diamond-dust. It was beautiful, but not restful. It seemed that somewhere another Hanna moved parallel to this same track, approaching Omega with Rubee and Awnlee once more. The voices channeled through Omega bounced off the cradling stars. Nearby was a ship of the Polity; on cue it would come sailing to the ravaged Bird.

  The sense of time slightly askew was very strong. Hours later at Omega it still wrapped her in dream—the kind of dream which makes waking welcome. But this time there was no wait at Omega, no systems checks with Fleet cooperation. “Ready as she’ll ever be,” Shen said briefly, when GeeGee was on the edge of the long Jump that had marked the Bird’s end.

  “Let’s go,” Michael said, and they went, GeeGee making the Jump without the histrionics in which Uskosian spacecraft indulged. There was a certain tension in Michael and Shen. It was possible that the Bird was still out here somewhere, with official company. She was not; she must have been taken away. There was nothing out here: no people, no relays, no voices, no habitats. Nothing.

  GeeGee clucked away at the calculations preceding the next Jump. Lise, curled against the wall, returned to her absorption in a doll. She ought to be outgrowing dolls, but this was one of the sort whose appearance could be manipulated in detail. Not long ago it had looked like the pseudo-Zeigans of Hanna’s hallucinations, and had suffered a good deal as Lise avenged the fright she had gotten. Now it had human features, light brown skin, and long black hair. Lise worked on making it beautiful, and on making its blue eyes exactly the shade of Hanna’s. Shen put her feet up on a control panel and almost smiled. Michael and Theo talked seriously together. Hanna thought that was a good thing; someone had better be serious about this great step into silence. She went closer; they were discussing what to have for dinner.

  The dream-cloud of threat vanished from her mind quite suddenly. She went to Michael and waited until Theo went away. Then she said, “I suppose I ought to move in with you.”

  “Of course you should,” he said, and that was that.

  * * *

  The beings on the Far-Flying Bird had expected to reach Uskos from Omega in approximately five Standard weeks. The Golden Girl’s capacity for data manipulation was not as great, and for GeeGee the trip would take seven weeks. It was a long time to live between the dubious past and the uncertain future.

  Michael did not think much about what he had lost. There was nothing he could do about it.

  The future was a different matter, but he could do nothing about that either, yet. It would come as it would come. You took the opportunities you had and made more when you could. That was the deal the universe handed you. It was the only one you got.

  * * *

  He liked hearing Hanna talk about futures. They were not futures you would expect from a woman who had tried to kill you with a colloidal disruptor at first sight.

  “Before the Polity comes,” she said, “we can move on. There are places out there like D’neera before the Founders came. We could find one and start all over.”

  “Inventing fire,” he said wryly, “unless you can recreate technology.”

  “I’m a technological idiot. I only know how to make things work if other beings put them together right. I’m a specialist, you know.”

  “How do we start over, then?”

  “With babies, of course. What else do you need to start over? Yours and mine. Theo’s and Lise’s. And Shen—Shen—”

  “Shen as a mother doesn’t quite—”

  “No. No, it doesn’t compute. Are you sterile?”

  “Not for much longer.”

  “Me either. That’s all right, then.”

  Lise wanted to pilot the Golden Girl.

  “You said even I could fly her alone. You said that.”

  “It was true.”

  “Teach me, then. You’re teaching Hanna.”

  “You can’t read well enough.”

  “But all you do is talk to Gee!”

  “Not quite. That’s not quite enough.”

  She said that she would learn to read better if he would teach her about GeeGee. At that time she had become interested in remarks Hanna had dropped about the place where they were going. Hanna, to encourage Lise, wrote a lively synopsis of what she had learned about Uskos from Rubee and Awnlee. It began as a primer, but because part of Hanna was a scholar, it was comprehensive. The others read it, too, and talked about it a good deal.

  Hanna instructed them: “The first thing to remember is that Uskosians are friendly.”

  But Shen said, “Never seen human beings. No reports. First thing we tell ’em is the envoys got murdered. Second thing, we’re in a stolen ship, hope Contact never shows up. Stay friendly? Huh.”

  “Well. When you put it like that—”

  * * *

  There was a past, too. It could not be excised from the future.

  Hanna whispered endearments in four languages, panting. The small fists dug into his back, the little claws of her fingernails nearly pierced his skin. She treated his mouth as her personal property. These moods were like an exorcism, as if past and future could be made to disappear if only the present was narrowed to sensation. “Darling Michael, sweet Mike—” He kissed her throat and she trembled; he licked droplets of moisture from her breasts and she shivered and sighed, an animal with swollen blank eyes. “Mikhail,” she cried, “Mikhail—!”

  He froze so sharply she must feel it, then thought she had not noticed; she closed around him like a vise, strong arms wrapped around his neck, strong legs pinning his hips. The name echoed in his head.

  “Never mind,” she said clearly. “Let it go.”

&
nbsp; “But—”

  The shock got worse as it sank in. She felt him soften, and remarked on his failure coarsely.

  “I’m not made of stone,” he said, distracted.

  One hand tangled in his hair; the other slipped between them and took up a purposeful caress.

  “Where did it come from?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Not now, darling.”

  His cultivated detachment slipped under her slippery hand. “That’s right,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

  “Right,” he said, it was the last articulate sound he made for some time; he could worry later about the pitfalls of loving a telepath.

  Theo studied medical texts. Sometimes he had questions, and each time he started for Control. The first time he went all the way there before he remembered there was nobody to call, and the only library to which he had access was the Golden Girl’s own. After that he never got out of his seat; but he half-rose, a reader clutched in his hand, more than once.

  He also haunted the medlab, which since Michael’s purchase of the Golden Girl had been used only for analyzing Hanna’s blood. He spent hours becoming familiar with the equipment, going back and forth between the electronic instruction manuals and the mechanical and computer controls. After a while, at times, he thought he could use some of it; at other times the equipment laughed at him, if crystal and metal could be said to laugh.

  His chief comfort was that all GeeGee’s passengers were healthy. He had even reimmunized Hanna against Dawkin’s fever—though that might have been the worst thing he could do. Who knew what was waiting on Uskos?

  “Nothing,” Hanna said with finality, finding him one day in the medlab; she wandered about, touching polished chrome.

  “Why’d the Polity go to so much trouble with you, then?”

  “They always overdo the wrong things. Can you deliver babies, Theo?”

  He stared at her in disgust. They were at this time approximately halfway through the time to Uskos (rather more than half the distance), and there were long intervals when Hanna and Michael disappeared from the life of the Golden Girl, to reappear softened, blurred, and shamelessly devoted. In six years Theo had seen Michael through half a dozen affairs, but nothing like this. There had always been a trace of unwillingness in his surrender before, something withheld; but this woman was affecting his brain, there was more than gonads involved.

  She looked at him and he thought she had felt his disgust, but she only smiled in an absentminded way.

  “It was because of something that happened with Zeig-Daru,” she said. “There was a cut on my arm. Here.” She showed him the inside of her right forearm. It was smooth and glossy; her skin glowed, these days.

  She said, “They finally found out what the infection was, but they never could cure it. They ended up cutting out the whole chunk and regenerating down to the bone. So they decided, when the Uskosians made contact, to be extra careful. But they admitted we’re not likely to trade diseases.”

  He was relieved to hear her talking in practical terms.

  “How’d you get the cut?” he said.

  “It was a knife wound,” she said. “But I won. Killed ’em all.”

  She smiled at him again and walked out, leaving him gaping.

  He pulled himself together and got back to work. If anybody got hurt or sick, he was all they had. That went for all of them, even a bubblebrain who talked in one breath of babies and killing.

  They kept a sort of erratic Standard time, and erratic half-regular watches in Control. Michael, as the paid companion of some traveler in the past, had picked up enough knowledge of spaceflight to obtain pilot’s certification for most ships of GeeGee’s class. Shen had a sound background in military training, and had refreshed her skills with GeeGee; she and Michael between them had browbeaten Theo into learning enough to follow GeeGee’s own precise instructions. That was good enough for the common routes of human space. What GeeGee did now was not so easy. There were questions to be answered and decisions to be made. There was also, fortunately, Hanna. She had begun intensive spaceflight training in her teens, she had been a pilot before she was anything else, and she could fly (she said once, casually) anything. The result was that in practice her watch was flexible; it began whenever there was a question and ended when the hard parts were over. She was the acknowledged authority on the journey, and on call all the time.

  Her “watch” ended one night near the middle of the night. Theo had taken over in Control, and Shen and Lise were asleep. Hanna rested with Michael in the smaller lounge, which was quite dark. Even the ports were dimmed, so little light entered from the field of stars. Hanna sat at one end of the small room, Michael at the other but not far away. Each was visible to the other only as a shadow. Michael had said something about Uskos, and then they had been silent for a time. As if a couple of meters between them made a difference, Hanna began to think of Michael as she had never thought of him: objectively. He had essentially relinquished command of the Golden Girl to her. In the timeless round of their days and nights he was almost a passive presence, anticipating her wishes and meeting all her desires. He was sunlight uncomplicated by shadows; a pattern of simplicity, all surface. It would be easy to think of him as weak.

  And yet. Her very first perception of him had been as a presence of shadow crouched beside the Avalon. He had been in grave danger; but there had been no anxiety or fear in his thought. Afterward there had been that night of intense emotional union. Most true-humans could not have done what Michael had done. Most true-humans, fearing dissolution in her madness, would have knocked her out with drugs or otherwise, and almost certainly killed her. And then there was the rendezvous with the Polity and what he had done to meet it, and the decision to flee Outside to nothing less than death.

  She thought of water, sunlit, dappled with the shapes of leaves. If you slammed into it, it slammed back and broke bones and broke skulls. If you came to it gently it shifted, accommodating. It crept into corners, changed shape silently; it sank through sand and found crevices invisible to eyes. In heat it evaporated into gas and dissipated; in cold it froze to crystalline solids of great beauty. It adapted infallibly to circumstance; but it was very strong.

  But the metaphor did not hold up indefinitely, because in Michael there was also a black place where Hanna could not go. Michael could not either, not at will. He only endured it, when he had to. It had nothing to do with sunlit water. “I guess,” he said into the dark, very quietly, “we ought to learn how to be polite to the Uskosians.”

  “Polite?”

  “To say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and so on. In Uskosian.”

  “Ellsian…That’s not a bad idea.”

  “It’s a little late to start learning the whole language. Is it hard?”

  “Not very. Not like F’thalian. These beings think in the same patterns we do, at least, and the linguistic structure—of Ellsian, anyway—is comprehensible.” She thought unwillingly that she was going to have to start working again. “We could have tapped into D’vornan and picked up the language programs.”

  “Could we? But we don’t have any translators to use when we get there.”

  “It would have helped, though. My accent’s not perfect; human throats and tongues aren’t made like theirs. The Polity translators were programmed with Awnlee’s help, and I can’t duplicate what he did. I can make a basic phrasebook for the rest of you, though.”

  “Have to do.”

  “Yes. I guess it will.”

  * * *

  Once or twice she used the name again: “Mikhail.” She did not mean to do it, and knew what she had done only after she had said it. The first time she paused, surprised at herself; she looked quickly at Michael for his reaction. There was also a certain invitation in her eyes. If he wanted to say more, she was ready to hear it. But he smiled and shook his head, and she picked up a cushion and threw it at him. “All right,” she said. “Who needs to know anyway?”

  The second time she d
id not even hear herself say it. He did not know where it had come from, how she had dredged it from his memory, why it had slipped from the end of her tongue. She said it half in her sleep as she drifted away. Michael could not follow her; he was immediately awake. He lay with his head on her breast, so restful, such a restful place. What was he going to tell her, how much, when, and what did it matter now, the little he knew? B was gone, must be gone forever. The hopeless quest into dust was postponed, at the very least; he would not pursue that path if Hanna could produce, magically, another life for him. He was entirely in her hands, hers and the hands of chance. The hands of the Master of Chaos.

  He sighed and turned his mouth to her skin. She woke a little; her fingers ruffled his hair.

  “But if you’d told the Polity,” she said, “they would have searched.”

  He stopped breathing. She was more than half asleep; not even half awake. The compulsion to speak to her dream was strong.

  Why not? She would find out anyway—

  And so he answered, and relief, like the release of a long tension, made him weak, and his speech was slurred.

  “They wouldn’t have believed it. Not without a probe. With one they’d have had me.”

  “Then you didn’t know yourself…until after the Queen.”

  She was a sleepwalker, an oracle, and he was not sure he heard her words with his ears.

  “It was hard,” he said. “Nobody knows how hard. A kid in the dark…Didn’t know there was anyplace else. Thought Alta was part of the same world. Later I knew there were more, but then I thought it was someplace like Revenge. Didn’t dare ask questions. Afraid they’d send me back. Thinking they could. Didn’t guess the truth till long after the Queen. Too late.”

  “Yes,” she said. She was awake now. Her arms tightened around him, or around the lost child he had been. She did not ask any more questions. But he thought that for the first time in his life there was a certainty in it: Hanna’s flesh and blood, the beating of her heart.