Michael looking at bright alien coins in his hand, talking of pain.
Michael on his knees, begging.
For what?
The answer was an image of distance and utter isolation.
And I have it! Gaaf thought, triumphant, and she saw that he had something, she even felt it as he felt in his pocket.
And its name? said the echo in his head, his own thought (he believed), and he answered, thought the word, said it, even said it half–out loud.
She pulled out of him then, wrenching herself away from trance. As soon as she did, her stomach revolted; she put her head on her knees to keep from being sick. When she looked up, Gaaf was upright and staring at her. Suspecting. In fact he should know perfectly well what she had done; only he could not believe it.
She ignored him. She turned to Michael and touched him until he woke. He smiled at her as he always did when he woke and found her there.
It did not seem to Hanna that what she had learned could be of any significance, yet it seemed so important to Gaaf, this thing Michael had begged for and Gaaf had withheld. She said hesitantly, even shyly, because she felt ridiculous, “Does the name ‘Gadrah’ mean anything to you?”
He almost fainted.
* * *
When she told him about the module, he took it away from Gaaf. Gaaf resisted, desperate. Hanna was paralyzed with his fury, his fear, her own confusion. She did not recognize Michael. He had gone into shock, the man she knew, and come out someone else. His shadow leapt on the ceiling as he moved on Gaaf. Hanna was afraid he would kill, though this was not what she had seen before, the passion to hurt, he was only consumed by a single goal; but he might kill to get it. She called to him out loud and in thought and he did not hear, she clutched his arm and he flung her away, she had dropped the light, could see nothing, the tumult in the corner was a melee of violence and noise. But all the noise was Gaaf’s. Michael did not utter a sound.
He had what he wanted and ran out into the storm.
Gaaf was conscious and essentially unhurt. Hanna did not waste time with him. She picked herself off the floor where Michael had thrown her and ran after him, pursued by a blast of hatred from Gaaf. The wind hit her like a wall when she came onto the veranda. Hurricane! she thought, staggering backward, but it was only a gust, and she got back the breath the wind had taken, and pushed away from the house.
She did not think about where to go, she ran without thinking. But when she rounded a corner against the wind, and struck off without thought down a path slippery with rain that led to the street, she knew what her destination was, what Michael’s must be: GeeGee.
As soon as she knew it, she lost her head. Michael would lift off, he would be gone, no one would know where he had gone and she would never see him again. She could not even keep up with him, much less catch up; sheer weight made a difference in this storm, where the wind shoved her backward and knocked her from side to side. She called his name, but the wind blew it away, so she cried out to him in thought, too. Her feet slipped on the tiles of the path and she fell with a splash; it did not matter, she had been soaked as soon as she got to the door, and now the wind whipped her dripping hair against her face with a force that stung.
The street was not quite dark. Its margins were edged with lines of light which the curbs took up in daylight and released at night. But nothing moved in the street except water, which made it a stream.
Hopeless, hopeless— The wind slackened and she ran more easily, though there were gusts that unbalanced her. She put her head down and threw herself against it. Hopeless— She would (beginning to think again) go back. She would call that Emergency Contact Locus and somehow get through to Norsa. There were guards around GeeGee and he would see to it that they would not let Michael board.
The wind blew her around a corner and she bumped head-on into Michael.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and pushed against him as if she could merge her body into his.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” He shouted into her ear. “I was coming back. I heard you. I felt you fall, I was afraid you’d get hurt.”
“Oh yes yes yes,” Hanna said, not interested in anything but holding him. He looked around; he had to lift his head to do it, and she clutched him. “Come here,” he said. She seized his hand as hard as Lise ever had, and he led her to a wall she had not seen in the dark. There was a gate in it. He struggled with it in the wind, got it open, pulled her through it, and crouched with her in the shelter of the wall. It was cold and black, the rain streamed down the wall and down their backs, and the wind still pulled at them, but it was no longer like being beaten.
Michael tried to speak and Hanna interrupted.
“How could you! How could you do that to Henrik? How could you do this to me? You can’t run away, I won’t let you, you’re mine—!”
She was seized with a possessiveness she had not known was in her. At some time when she was not looking, it had become a law of nature that Michael could not leave her. She shouted at him, cried, pounded his chest with her fists. He let her rave, listening seriously until she ran down; by then the water had formed a puddle around them.
Hanna subsided at last into sobs. “You can’t!” had become “You won’t, will you? Please?” And she knew she had made a spectacle of herself, fallen into a patch of pure hysteria. She was ridiculous—and wet; a marine creature whose tears were lost in the water it breathed.
Michael leaned forward, put his mouth against her ear, and began to talk.
“I wasn’t going to leave you. I wasn’t going to take off. I just wanted to take it to GeeGee and see. I couldn’t think of anything else. I heard you call and turned back. I always would. I always will. Don’t you know that by now? Listen to me. Listen. I will never leave you. Never.”
But there was something in the hand which caressed her; she felt it burn into his palm.
“That’s it,” she said, “isn’t it. The place.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have to find out.”
“Yes.”
She had stopped crying. Her anger was gone; the weariness it left behind slowed her speech. “Wait until morning,” she said.
“In the morning we go to Ree. We won’t come back until the day after tomorrow. Do you think I can wait that long? I’ll take you back to the house, and I promise to come back. I solemnly swear it. But I’m going to GeeGee tonight.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“I don’t think—”
“I will. I will.”
GeeGee, having been moved near the city for the travelers’ convenience, was not far away as distances went: an hour’s pleasant walk. Tonight it would be two hours or more, none of it pleasant. In the last years of Hanna’s life she had leapt solar systems with ease. Now all her journeys had come down to this: a few kilometers of hard going in the rain.
“You think that’s the place,” she said.
“I don’t know.” He was part of the darkness, indistinguishable. Only his hands proved he was there. They had been quiet on Hanna’s shoulders, but suddenly they were restless, brushing water from her hair, wiping it from her face; they felt for her substance in the dark.
“What else do you think it could be?”
“I’m afraid to think.”
“Does Henrik know?”
“Maybe. Hanna, I don’t know anything!”
“Let’s go back and ask him,” she said craftily.
“No. Why? When we can plug it into GeeGee and see?”
She gave up. “I always liked walking in the rain,” she said.
The irony was lost on him. “All right. Hold tight to my arm. If the lightning comes too close, we’ll lie low in a ditch.”
“And drown!”
“C’mon,” he said.
The wind and rain diminished, though there were periods when the downpour was as hard as ever. The lightning stayed far away. Once Hanna looked toward the city and saw it strike repeate
dly at the top of one of the great towers. The glow rimming the streets was subdued in the rain, and they walked in the middle to avoid the rushing, flooded gutters. Time slowed to an endless moment of wet and cold in which Hanna had leisure to be astounded by her panic. She held to herself the thought, like a magical charm, that her fear had found Michael in the storm, that it had broken through the armor of his obsession and that he had turned back, desiring her safety more than this other thing he wanted. But still he had surprised her again. Nothing she knew about him had prepared her for the unforgiving passion he had shown Gaaf. And she was afraid of where it could take him next.
Toward midnight they reached the Golden Girl. There were no guards around GeeGee after all. But they appeared as soon as Hanna and Michael came into the welcome, familiar dryness, where even the lights were the color of an old friend; they came running from somewhere inside and stopped in consternation when they saw the humans.
Hanna said to them understandingly, “Indeed it is a very wet night.”
“Very,” agreed their captain. He raised a hand and with great dignity led his crew out to their proper posts; not without some regretful looks backward.
Control had an abandoned look. Michael sat in the master’s place, which had been his until Hanna’s greater skill supplanted him. In the last hour Hanna had felt a great purposefulness crystallize in him, and he had hardly been aware of her company. Yet above all there was a great restraint. He did not know what he had, and kept speculation to himself.
He slipped the module into a notch and told GeeGee: “Read and store.” His face and voice were blank. They waited, Hanna as still as Michael. It seemed to be a very long time before GeeGee said, “Done.”
“What is it?” Michael asked.
“A course in standard format,” GeeGee said indifferently.
“What’s the destination? Compare with what you’ve got in memory.”
This time the pause was unquestionably very long. At the end of it GeeGee said, “The destination is not in my memory.”
Michael said so quietly that Hanna scarcely heard him, “Give me a schematic.” But GeeGee said, “I cannot produce visual data from this source. Terminal point lies outside my visual matrix.”
Hanna said, “We can get a projection.” She leaned over Michael’s shoulder, pulled a keyboard into position, and slowly, stopping often to consult GeeGee, entered a series of commands. She scaled the display so that GeeGee’s terminal course referent would be at one side and the unknown destination at the other, and instructed GeeGee to superimpose the whole on a map of whatever lay between. The map ought to be accurate enough; it was based on centuries of observation, even though no one had gone out there to look first hand.
The picture that finally came was a fantasy. The prime referent at the left of the screen was Heartworld, but the star at the other edge was, by GeeGee’s scale, fully five hundred light-years away. Hanna did not have to ask GeeGee to know what that meant. That was unexplored space out there. No one had gone there, not ever—or so all the records said. But here was a course, plain and straight.
Michael did not move. His hair and clothes were partially dry, but only partly, so that he looked half finished. He was very pale and he looked—Hanna blinked at him—terrified.
“But what is it?” she said.
He said, “That’s Gadrah.” His voice cracked on the second word. He put his head down on the console so she could not see his face.
* * *
They spent what was left of the night on the Golden Girl. Michael did not sleep. He lay on the bed in his old room and stared upward as if he would see some kind of path emblazoned in the tracery of leaves at the top of the room. Hanna slept, but fitfully. Each time she woke it was with a start, and with heavier eyes. Once she said when she woke, “You didn’t believe it existed, did you?”
That was what he had been thinking about. He was used to Hanna; he was not even surprised.
He said, “That’s not quite it. I believed it existed, but somehow it wasn’t real. Not if nobody else thought it was.”
“Except him.”
“B. Yes.”
“That’s really why you needed to find him,” she said. This time she did not sound like an oracle, but she might have been the model for one, with her tousled hair and pale cheeks and sleep-haunted eyes.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Michael said. He could not interpret her expression. She rolled over and slept again.
Fantasies. They got in the way on Alta, between him and his schooling. Not at first. At first there were only the nightmares, dreadful dreams of noise and screaming and flame, and then, like their extension, the only life he could remember with certainty: the endless time with B, its passing divided into the times when he was locked into a room by himself, and locked into it with B. And the first clear memory that came later was of the Post, and it was no fit medium for fantasy. He would not wish to go there, to that stone-guarded place. Then he remembered a little more, not clearly, without definition. And thought—dreaming over his lessons, washed with sweetness, awash in longing—When I grow up I will go there. “There” was a dreambrew of mountains and meadows far from the Post. They would be clean and safe, as they had been before some great event which he thought of one day, inexplicably, as “the relocation.” And then—
But he had never gone on from “and then.” He only dreamed of the sweet-scented meadows, as if, once there, he could get back everything else still hidden in cloud.
“That’s nice,” said Hanna, meaning the meadows. He had not known she was awake. “I didn’t know there was anything good,” she said.
“There was. Before they noticed us.”
“Who were ‘they’? Who were ‘us’?”
“It was so quiet,” he said softly, he remembered that, a piece of memory painfully retrieved. He showed her more pieces. “They must have let us alone for a long time, a generation at least. There was music.”
“A village.” She put a name to something taken from his thought.
“Primitive. But the summers. Oh, the summers!”
The deep shadows of the forest. The cold spray of water on hot days cascading down living rock.
They lay together thinking about summer until Hanna fell asleep again. She nearly pulled him down into it with her.
Flight. From the truth of what it was, forever out of reach. From Alta. From poverty. From memory. From himself.
“But you did stop,” Hanna said drowsily.
“No.” The quiet space on GeeGee was a world in itself, removed from every place he had ever been. Even time stopped in it. “I kept moving farther and farther out of Shoreground,” he said. “I worked harder than I had to, for a long time. Thinking it would make a miracle happen.”
“What miracle?”
“I didn’t know.”
“No miracles,” Hanna said, and fell asleep.
After a while he answered her anyway. “No miracles.”
Compulsion. The history of the Explosion was a nice hobby for an amateur scholar. He even went to all the places it could possibly be. As a dilettante; so he said.
Then a woman named Hanna ril-Koroth met the People of Zeig-Daru. It was an important meeting. But for Michael all its importance lay in the history of the People, who had once-upon-a-time destroyed a human colony of which humans had no record. Always in his search he had rejected speculation, though rumors of Lost Worlds circled his head like bees as he studied the history of colonization. He had not heeded the tales, fixed on what he thought was real. Until Hanna came back, was carried back, in pieces, talking of lost worlds. Then finally he knew, clearly as if he had always known: no study of what was known would show him what he sought.
And he dragged from his memory a memory of dark night skies. A few dim lanterns of stars shone sparsely in it; they were either very close or very hot. Somewhere in the dust was a Sol-type star with the world he knew going around it. And he went back to the history of the Explosion, an
d turned his attention to the ships that had disappeared, the shiploads of emigrants cheated or unlucky or otherwise lost in oblivion.
That was all he had meant to do, but control passed out of his hands. There were the first steps of the search for B. The narrowed vision, the subtle changes in his life, like buying GeeGee, that meant more than he knew at the time. It was only in the end that it crystallized.
“I wonder you stayed sane,” Hanna said.
“Did I stay sane?”
Hanna sat up once more. She said, “Do you know what you are? There’s a toy. I’ve seen it on D’neera, I’ve seen it in the Polity, I’ve seen it on F’thal and even on Girritt. It’s a little thing with a round bottom. On top there’s a torso of a human being or a F’thalian or a Girrian. The bottom’s weighted, and every time you give it a push it falls over and then, because the bottom’s round, you see, and heavy, it jumps right back up again. That’s what you are.”
It was not a flattering image, but he took the sense and let go of the picture.
“But is that sane?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
She slept some more.
Reality.
Hanna woke up for good.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“Why, go there, of course. Do you need to ask? You already thought of that, earlier tonight.”
“But that’s only because I was so afraid that’s what you would do,” Hanna said. She was even paler now. She was not hysterical this time; but he saw that she was, again, afraid.
* * *
Norsa fished them out of the Golden Girl in the gray morning, complaining mildly because they had not been where they were supposed to be at the appointed time. Outside GeeGee the day was dim and everything was wet. It was not raining, but the clouds had turned the morning into dusk. Hanna was very tired, the tiresome morning a dream which felt as if it could turn into a nightmare in a moment. Everything she saw seemed new, even before they departed from the City of the Center. The identical towers seemed—not only inhuman, the nonhuman did not trouble her—but inhumane. The wet streets had a sullen look. Insignificant details sprang to her eyes: a flaw in the paving, a wind-battered flower. The field from which they would begin their journey was a wasteland made for machinery.
The D’neeran Factor Page 74
