The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “Let us go in,” she said. “You may observe me. If I do something that causes you agitation, you will stop me.”

  They went into an antechamber where they waited for some minutes while the nightwatch went to wake up the man in a farther room. But presently the watchman came back and said, “He will not come out.”

  “Then we will go in,” Norsa said, and they went into the next room and Hanna saw Henrik Gaaf.

  She was startled. He was not. He was far past ordinary surprise.

  The room was sparsely furnished and there was a pallet which might have served as a bed, but Gaaf huddled in a pile of coverlets on the floor. He had his back to a corner. He was emaciated and pale, and he blinked at her and a slow smile spread over his face.

  Hanna took a step toward him. Norsa said quietly, “’Anarilporot!”

  “I will not harm him,” Hanna said. “This one gave me a kindness. The Master encouraged him to do so and therefore I lived, though it was meant for me to die as Rubee and Awnlee died. I will not harm this one.”

  She took another step, though with reluctance. It seemed that something was going to happen that she would not like. It did. Gaaf came up out of his swaddling and threw himself on her feet. She backed away and he caught at her legs so that she lost her balance and sat down abruptly face to face with him. She had looked once into a lava lake that seethed and boiled. It came back to her because that was what she saw inside Gaaf. He pawed at her face and hair and she wanted to hit him and escape—but she did not, though her skin crawled. She ground her teeth and set herself to endure him; she studied him through her revulsion. He smiled and crooned and his eyes had an expression she had never seen before. He patted her shoulders and then her breasts; she twitched violently and caught his hands to keep them off her. He was content with holding her hands. He whispered and whispered and she sorted out the words that ran together. “Came for me, you, you…! Not alone. Not alone here any more…”

  His hands twisted out of hers and caressed her arms. She shuddered. A longing for Michael possessed her, for the touch of his clean hands. She made herself keep still and listen.

  “…home take me home…See? See what I’ve got.”

  He fumbled in a pocket; when he let go of her to do it, she crept away. “…see…see…” She looked with disbelief at the broken gold chain; recognized it, and shuddered again. And here was something else. “Here…seeseesee!”

  Norsa squatted beside her. “Do you know that that is?”

  She had to try twice before she could answer. “It is an ordinary data storage module.”

  “What is its significance to him?”

  “I do not know. I have to get out,” she said suddenly in Standard. She jerked away from Gaaf, evading the clutching hands; she got to her feet and walked out quickly, though her knees trembled. The ubiquitous guards followed her into the gallery outside Gaaf’s rooms. She stood shaking until Norsa came out.

  He said with interest, “There is water coming from your eyespots.”

  “Yes. It will stop by itself in a little while.”

  Norsa said, “Is that person deranged?”

  “I think so.”

  “We thought it possible, but we could not know. We did not know what to do, and were afraid in our ignorance to attempt any help. We have fed him as best we could, by force, despite the risk; there was nothing else we dared to do. Is there help you can give?”

  “I do not know. There is one among my companions who has some skill in healing sickness of the body. I do not know about sickness of the spirit. Perhaps there is help he can give.”

  “Tell me which it is, and I will send for him at once.”

  “No. I mean—as you wish, Norsa. But I cannot explain to him tonight. I can give no more help to anyone any more in this night which grows old so that morning has almost come. I must have rest.”

  “Then you will have rest. Is there anything with which I can provide you for your comfort?”

  The tears had stopped, but they started up again. “You can provide my companion Michael,” she said. “He is my shelter in the night. I am grieved by lacking him. Surely you know we will cause you no harm. Is it necessary that we be parted?”

  “Perhaps not,” Norsa said after a pause. “Yet it must be so in what is left of this night, for he is far away. Yet tomorrow perhaps this will change.”

  “I have gratitude.”

  She wiped her eyes and followed Norsa back to the street. Tomorrow he would bring Michael to her. Tomorrow also they would have to do something about Gaaf, if they could, if Theo could, but she could not think of it tonight; she was dizzy and her eyes were full of fog. When they came to her quarters she was already asleep and Norsa had to wake her before she could go in. When he touched her to rouse her, she said sleepily, “Mike?” and Norsa looked at her curiously and thought of questions that had to do with this odd bonding. But he was too polite to ask them then; a weary guest must first be given sleep.

  * * *

  Michael spent the first night in a nightmare of pacing through the rooms of a place that he took to be a luxurious prison; later he learned it was a private home. But it was a prison all the same, because he was guarded. The guards did not try to stop him in his restlessness, but they stood at each doorway that led out into the night. He paced because he was trembling on the edge of the terrible rage, which he finally knew had to do with being impotent and trapped. But he could not give into it because of Lise; because of her he fought it back. She held him there with her frightened eyes: she sensed what the pacing meant, and feared abandonment. And it was because she would not close her eyes, because she would not look away from him even when her face was gray with exhaustion, that he finally stopped moving. He saw that as long as she touched him, she could rest; so he forced himself to join her on a pallet meant (his guards made him understand) for sleeping, and with both Lise’s hands clutching his arm, he, too, slept. But even in sleep he waited for the Polity to come, waited to be led away in chains.

  In the morning they were taken away again. He thought the next thing he saw would be the face of a human being from I&S. Instead, after a journey of several hours, the vehicle that carried him and Lise and their guards drew up before a labyrinth of a cream-colored house in the center of a garden, and Hanna came out to meet him. She said that Shen was already there, and that Theo would come soon but had been called away to see another human. She told him about Castillo—in shock, he scarcely understood her—and about Henrik Gaaf. She put her arms around his neck and talked to him gently.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “But it’s not all right, is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know…” He detached himself from her and passed his hands over his face. He looked beyond her to the house the Uskosians had loaned their honored guests. The roof shone like copper, the eaves were loaded with gingerbread fancywork. Wide doors stood open to the summer wind, and the interior looked, from here, dim and cool. It was a dream waiting to suck him in. It was the wrong dream, he thought. He had to run, he had to get away, he could not wait on fate though it might come after him anyway.

  But Lise had already run down the path to the central door, where Shen had appeared. Hanna took his hand and drew him toward the house, and he followed her into a dream of summer.

  * * *

  By the end of the next day they had begun to fall into natural orbits; at the end of seven days, a Standard week, the process was complete.

  Hanna was the first to leave. If she had come to Uskos for sanctuary, she forgot the fact immediately; she was still, and first, a scholar. Norsa gave her workrooms in the city, a vehicle, a chauffeur, and she left Michael each morning and returned at night. Though she saw that a cold hand lay on his heart, it seemed to her that he had strayed into precisely the right dream. If he disagreed, that was his business. So she talked to Uskosians and made notes. “I suspect,” she wrote, “that the unusually high rate of mutation on Uskos, which has promoted evolution d
espite the asexuality of life here, was the origin of the concept of the Master of Chaos; while the identity of generations (though modified by environmental factors and the occasional successful mutation) most likely is linked to the conservative world view expressed in the tales…Uskosians handle the physical universe much as we do, but in their attitude toward it there is something else: a perpetual suspense. They do not say only, ‘What will happen if we do this?’ They also say, ‘What will happen to us?’…The Uskosians with whom I talk are becoming aware of this difference between their perspective and ours and, curiously, feel this makes us far more vulnerable than they are. Several have used a phrase I had not heard before. I’m not sure if the best translation is ‘children of chaos’ or ‘the Master’s children.’ But they meant human beings. I’m sure of that.”

  Hanna finished this passage late at night in a room she had commandeered for work in the humans’ maze of a house. When she was done, she showed it to Michael. He looked at the last lines for a long time. Then he said, “Oh, hell, I could’ve told you that.”

  * * *

  Lise was the next to go. A friendly neighbor’s selfing came, then brought other younglings; they enticed Lise from the garden and soon she was running about the town with them in torrents of noise, her slim legs flashing golden among their square brown bodies. Uskosians were indulgent with their offspring, and no one thought it odd that Lise was allowed to run free as she wished. She even followed her new companions to their study groups, the instructors encouraging her visits as highly educational, and her Ellsian improved rapidly.

  She came home in tears one day, however; the younglings played many games which required infinitely flexible hands, and Lise could not keep up.

  “It can’t be helped,” Michael said. “I’m sorry, little puss. It can’t be helped. You have pretty hands”—they were very grimy—“but they’re human hands.”

  “Then I don’t want them!” she cried.

  “Yes you do!” His voice was harsh and she looked up in surprise; he held her dirty paws tightly.

  “Mike?” she said.

  Instead of answering, he bent and gently kissed the backs of her hands. She turned them over and looked at them with greater approval.

  “I can run faster than they can,” she said.

  “I know. You run like the wind. Don’t show off too much, though. Now run back and watch them so you can tell Hanna what they do. And then when they have a different game, you can play with them.”

  She darted out through the garden, brilliant as the flowers. Michael watched her go and thought that she had grown, and at any time now would sprout breasts. Lise had no idea how old she was. This seemed ordinary to Michael, who thought his age in Standard years was somewhere in the early forties. And when her body did change, and her mind? He was afraid it would be hard for her, as it had been for him. When the world turned out to be different from everything you thought it was beforehand, you could withdraw from it—or run at it head-on, no matter how ill-informed you were. Either course was disastrous. But he would be there to help her—he hoped—and so would Hanna—

  Oh? said a ghostly chuckle in his head. What have you ever saved from the sucking dark? Or whom?

  He shook his head, blinking. A cloud must have passed over the sun.

  Think of something else—

  —and here in the sunlight Lise was granted an Indian summer of childhood, among children so alien that her queer combination of ignorance and sophistication went unnoticed. The longer it lasted, the better.

  That was the last time she came back during the day except to eat or entertain her lively friends, and she reported dutifully to Hanna on the younglings’ games.

  * * *

  Next Theo went. On the fourth night Hanna came in and said to him, “You have to talk to them about biology. I don’t know enough. Medicine, physiology, genetics—I need a whole Contact team. I don’t have one. You’re it.”

  “I don’t know enough either,” Theo said. He had not ventured into the city. He spent his days sleeping or lounging in the garden, staring out at the skyline beyond the trees. He avoided the others, and reminded Hanna of a man about to leap into a lake of cold water and hesitating on the edge.

  Hanna was hot and tired, and she had rarely refrained from leaping into anything.

  “You know more than I do. You’re an expert, compared to me. Take them to GeeGee and open up the medlab.”

  “I don’t know enough,” he repeated.

  Hanna looked at Michael, but Michael said, “I’d better see about dinner,” and left.

  Hanna said to Theo, “Look what you did for me. Look what you’re doing for Henrik.”

  Theo snorted. Henrik Gaaf was present at this conversation: piled in a corner, gazing blankly ahead.

  “But he said something today, Theo. He actually said good morning to me.”

  Theo said, “I haven’t heard him say anything.”

  “Well, I have. Whatever you’re doing is working. You know enough, Theo—you just don’t believe you do.”

  He shook his head. Hanna went to where he perched on a shapeless mass supposed to be a chair, and sank to her knees so that she was looking up at him.

  “Theo,” she said, “where would Mike be without me?”

  He did not speak. She went on, “You know the answer. I don’t know if you think it means you owe me anything. If you do, please do this for me. For me and for Mike and for the beings who might save him before it’s all over. I’ll never ask you for another favor. Please.”

  She had invested the words with an urgency that was more than verbal. He thought about it for a while. Finally he muttered, “I’ll try.”

  “Thank you. Anyway, Theo, you can’t know less about humans than the Uskosians do. They won’t know when you’re wrong!”

  So Theo left next day to do his best with a committee of physicians from the nations of Uskos. It was more interesting than he expected, his curiosity was aroused, and he went back the day after that. Soon he only came back at night, too.

  * * *

  Shen got bored and just walked out. She found her way unerringly to a raucous section of the city the Uskosians had not talked about. Somebody bought her a drink, and she liked it so well that she persuaded Hanna to get Norsa to give her some money. He was pleased to do it, but she rarely had to spend anything. She became very popular in certain quarters, and stayed out till dawn some nights, and came home singing, even when she was carried home.

  So they were all gone, settling into courses that circled Michael, the still point around which they swung and revolved, the home, more than the house, to which they came back. He watched them go and come as people had come and gone for years, so sure of his care that they scarcely noticed it. Now in the mornings the house was silent. On the eighth morning Michael stood in it and listened. To silence, except for the quiet wind blowing through the garden trees. Inside the house it was dim and, at this hour, still cool, and outdoors the light poured down.

  There were street musicians in the City of the Center. Michael had heard what they played, and though it was strange and harsh to his ears, the games they played with pitch and rhythm had possibilities.

  He got his flute and went into the garden, because one still was left, and never would leave by himself. Gaaf sat among the flowers and stared at nothing.

  Michael said quietly, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Gaaf was by no means normal, but he was more responsive than he had been when Theo brought him home. He looked up and mumbled, “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Anywhere. Come on.”

  Gaaf climbed to his feet, small and vague beside Michael. They went out together, Gaaf treading close on Michael’s heels.

  * * *

  Summer closed over them. The flowers in the garden, instead of fading, grew taller and more brilliant until they were a blaze of colored light. The humans seemed to see them even in the dark, as if some afterimage were imprinted on the retinas of their eyes. The
flowers worried Theo. Like flowers everywhere they attracted insects: why? There was no need for pollination.

  “Think,” Hanna urged.

  “I’ll ask Ritee and the others.”

  “No, don’t. Think about it.”

  “You know?”

  “I know. I knew before someone told me. Think. Use your eyes.”

  So he walked in the garden hour after hour, thinking—until he saw it: saw a flower close over an insect, and when it opened later there was nothing left but a little debris.

  “I swear I heard it burp,” he said to Hanna, and she laughed.

  She laughed often in those days, which fell into one another in a golden cascade like the notes from Michael’s flute. All the days were alike, so that time seemed to have stopped, frozen at high summer in a great gout of light. The flood of sunlight changed them. Hanna and Michael and Shen turned very dark, and their eyes, blue and amber and green, were startling. Lise was dusted with gold all over, and even Henrik Gaaf turned nut-brown. But the best Theo could do for his own transparent skin was keep it from broiling.

  It was the dry season, and there were seldom clouds. The heat was unremitting but not unpleasant, they were dazed with it, in the dusk they sat on a veranda and talked in lazy tones until they straggled off to bed. It was a civilized kind of heat, like their hosts: courteous, attentive to the comfort of a guest. They lived in the safest of sanctuaries—safe in its comfort, safe in its dreamlike separation from any world that had ever been real to them before, and safe in fact—for a time.

  No one thought of it explicitly as refuge except Michael, but he thought of it that way less and less. Someday the Polity would come, of course. But if he was only waiting for an end to this world Hanna had given him, he ought to be looking at the sky, and he was not. He looked over his shoulder instead, he looked at the ground at his feet; he did not wait for something from the sky; he waited for the world to be rent and for a look at something deep in an abyss.

  Yet his days were as quiet as those of the others. When the morning began to grow hot, he would leave the house with Gaaf tagging behind him, climb into one of the chauffeured vehicles placed at the humans’ disposal, and be carried through the city to the place where musicians gathered. Monolithic the city might be, but there were crevices and crannies where gardens had been planted, fountains set to soaring, and parks laid out, each lovely and unique. Through the middle of the day he sat cross-legged and nearly naked in the sun, burning blacker and blacker, in time not a novelty but a colleague. He searched GeeGee’s library for works on music theory that did not rely on the written word. The leathery beings who played impossible instruments with inhuman hands learned human musical notation quickly, and Michael quickly learned theirs. His Ellsian got better, if somewhat specialized, and he talked fluently of greater and lesser scales. Sometimes he played dances from the Renaissance of Earth’s western world, tunes a thousand and more years old, and the beings of Uskos came near and danced, stumping solemnly and rhythmically in circles round the alien with his shining instrument, while one of their number accompanied him on a drum. Sometimes the man and the other musicians played together, the notes of the flute darting silver and gold through the deeper chords. There were strange duets, and when Michael sang he collected crowds who threw money into hollow pots that rang when the coins fell inside. The days together were a timeless dream made of nothing but music; they were rich heavy drops that fell into still water, pregnant with light.