The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  They rose through the clouds and flew over their white billows, up in the sunlight Ell would not see for days, and sped toward the northwest. It was a flight of several hours, and Michael spent it looking absently toward the clouds, or toward Hanna and Norsa, but not as if he saw anything. He did not speak. He was silent as Henrik Gaaf had been for so long.

  * * *

  After the flight, and after a further journey made in a Foresters Guild vehicle, and after, finally, a long, wet walk under great green umbrellas, they came to the Scarlet Glades. “Behold the Red Forest!” Norsa said.

  Hanna looked and looked again, but saw no Red Forest. They were surrounded by tall trees that did indeed resemble gigantic plumes, but their color was predominantly bronze-green; and though the color shaded at the edges toward red, the place did not look like anything Hanna had seen in Awnlee’s thought.

  She said, “Norsa, are you sure this is the correct site?”

  “I fear Awnlee exaggerated,” he said.

  “Beyond doubt…” Under other circumstances Hanna might have laughed. Now it was all she could do to arrange her face in a facsimile of a smile.

  She said, “Awnlee told me there were ruminants large as my house. I suppose the ruminants also are somewhat smaller than he gave me to believe.”

  “I do not know,” Norsa confessed, “because I cannot comprehend what was in his mind. Thus may expectation outpace reality!”

  “You do not know how truly you speak,” Hanna said, staring at Michael. He did not even hear her.

  They left after staying only a little while. Just before they passed out of the forest glade, Hanna turned once more. The glades had not gotten their name without a reason. She pictured the place in sunlight, early in the morning or at sundown, when the light was rich and the bronze leaves came to life. It would not take much imagination to infuse the scene with cinnabar and see all it was in red. That was what Awnlee had chosen to do, and how he had chosen to remember it; and so he had made Hanna a gift of his imagination, and with it, beauty.

  “Farewell,” she said softly, and Michael finally turned his head, drawn from his preoccupation. But she had said the word for her friend Awnlee. She had no intention at all of saying it to Michael.

  * * *

  It was necessary to exchange courtesies with a committee of the Foresters Guild, and after that they went to a lodge where they were to spend the night, first dining with the committee. Michael was entranced, and smiled at things no one else could see. A sun shone, and flowers shone at night like the light-storing alloys of Uskos, brighter than the flares of meteorites. Iridescent winged creatures no bigger than his thumb flew to perch on his hand and peer at him with faceted eyes, their fine scales light and dry to the touch. The sound of running water filled the nights, and with it music: an old man with a bow. The voices in the next room talked until he fell asleep, and steered him through shoals of dream.

  He scarcely touched his meal. When the persons of the committee departed, he sat over wine with Hanna and Norsa and heard the rain fall. Few visitors came here during the rains, and except for a reduced staff, the travelers from Ell had the lodge to themselves. The refectory was brightly lit, but there were also festive candles, and Hanna had the other lights extinguished so that they sat in the mellow candlelight. Michael watched Hanna and thought: How beautiful she is.

  When all the correct formalities had been observed, she spoke his name and he followed her to a sleeping room. Once inside, she began to talk to him. She used Standard words and Ellsian, she used terms he had come to recognize as Girrian and F’thalian, and they meant in their various modes the same things: treasure of my soul, thou finest-furred darling, mate desired above all inferiors, more beloved than self; and she called him by his name: Mikhail.

  “Wait, oh, wait!” she said.

  “I will not wait.”

  She had an unfair advantage if she chose to use it. If she was afraid for him, angry with him, afraid for herself without him, she could batter him with raw emotion and force him to suffer with her. She did not do it, and all he could think was: How beautiful she is.

  “You have always done everything alone.” She had reduced the light here, too, to candlelight, and shadows were caught in her hair. Trickles of water reflected the flickering light, and flame ran down the windowpanes.

  “You do not have to do this alone,” she said. “You must not.”

  “If the others want to come, they can.”

  “I don’t mean that. Mikhail, there is a time and place for governments. Don’t think of going alone. Wait for the Polity. They’ll go at once, and how could they go without you? They’ll need you. And you’ll have all your wishes that way. Those people, the ones you called ‘they,’ who did terrible things—they’ll be brought down. All your pain will be revenged. Don’t you understand that things must have been as they were because of isolation? When the isolation ends, there’ll be light there. It will be a new age. Only be patient, a little patient. Wait. Wait with me, and we’ll go together.”

  The logic could not be argued. “I’m going all the same,” he said, “whether the rest of you do or not.”

  “It’s you I don’t want going there. Not like this. I would do it a different way. A better way. This is a world, Michael! A whole world, a strange one! How do you think you can have it on your terms? You need authority at your back.”

  He did not know what she was talking about. She watched him try to understand it. But something had been left out of him, or maybe taken out, and he could not understand. Authority was only something to be gotten over or around or past, a part of the environment, to be dealt with when necessary and otherwise ignored: a concrete, null-value thing, not an abstraction, and certainly disconnected from justice. Once he had told her that Alta had seemed like an alien planet with strange gods. So it was, she now saw, with every place. She would never have to wonder how it happened that Michael had moved easily among aliens in these weeks. He had been among aliens all his life.

  She came close and touched him. The shadows round her eyes were dark in the candlelight; she looked bruised.

  “Is this how you were in the years before?”

  “How I was…?”

  “Fixed. Immovable.”

  He looked at her without comprehension.

  “Stubborn!” she said.

  “I don’t know…”

  It seemed odd that Hanna who understood so much should not understand that all considerations were irrelevant beside the course in the module next to his skin; that on the threshold of this last journey, for the first time in his conscious memory, the sense of being in flight had left him. He would stand here and listen to her all night, if that was what she wanted, but it would not make any difference.

  She saw that finally. Her hands fell away from him. She looked up at him from those shadowed eyes and he said, “It will be all right.”

  “It won’t.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “No. It could be dangerous,” he said with no sense of incongruity, and her mouth tightened; but whatever the temptation might have been, she did not let him feel her anger.

  “Is there nothing I can do to bring you to your senses?”

  He considered the question carefully and answered, “No.”

  She did not talk to him any more. She blew out the candles and they undressed in the dark, silently. Angry or not, she turned to to him with caresses, and maybe that was supposed to remind him in another way that he need not go by solitary ways any longer; but the dreams were too strong, he could not accomplish the act of love, and though Hanna stayed beside him through the night, he was alone.

  * * *

  She had to tell Norsa that they were going away. It took a long time, and it was evident to Norsa (Hanna did not try to hide it) that she did not want to start on this journey. They sat together in the Scarlet Glades and he made her a remarkable proposal.

  “At one time,”
he said, “upon your arrival, yours and that of your companions, you said to me that ’Unans must appear to have little regard for law; and to support that statement, you adduced the actions of yourself and your companions up to that time. Yet you told me also that ’Unans have a great impulse toward law. And it seems to me that what your companion Nikell now proposes, though not (as clearly as I can determine) unlawful, does not fall precisely within the bounds of law. Is it for this reason you have distress? For I have come to know you well in the fine days of our association, and it seems to me that in yourself, at least, there is great respect for law.”

  She answered, “Indeed, Norsa, I believe that what you have said of me is correct; and in regard to my companion Michael, it is not so much that he rejects law, as that he acknowledges none. In these last many years he has had no conflict with law, except as he nearly became its victim, which is why, as you know, we are here; for except in that matter only, the goodness of his heart protected him. Yet it is not law I now fear, but folly. In this matter I would seek the protection of law and the civilization of humans; yet just as this human does not consider law’s constraint, equally he does not seek its protection. Therefore he goes forth, I fear, to great peril, and I cannot restrain him.”

  Norsa’s answer was rash, but its source was the pure impulse of friendship.

  “It is possible that he could be restrained, and made to wait until the other ’Unans arrive.”

  “Restrained?” she said, faltering.

  “Immediately, at your word. You are kin to the citizens of Ell, and like us a citizen. He is not, however precious he is to you. If that is what you wish…”

  After a long pause she said, “No. I have deep gratitude, Norsa, but I cannot do that. That betrayal would destroy the affection between us, between Michael and myself, forever.”

  “Yet you fear for his life, and there can be no greater destroyer of affection than death, which is the end of all sharing and exchange.”

  “That is correct, Norsa. And yet,” she said more firmly, “I cannot do it. I could do it if I knew his death awaited at the end of this path, but I do not know that. I do not know the future. And so I can only seek to persuade. I will not exert force.”

  “I judge that you choose rightly,” Norsa said, “though I share your concern, and always will share it until I know that you are safe. For surely you know the story of the Journey of Nlatee, wherein great benefit came to Uskos, though Nlatee was disobedient and followed a discouraged path.”

  “Then why did you give me such an offer?”

  “It is necessary at times to choose between friendship and right, and right is not always the correct choice. Likewise, in a matter of affection, as between sire and selfing, some small betrayal may be useful, where a greater runs only counter to the desired end.”

  Norsa’s cilia and fingers had stopped moving; even his eyes were still. Hanna eyed him cautiously and said, “I do not know your meaning, Norsa. But it is impossible for me to plan betrayal, however small it may be, at least plan betrayal that must remain secret. I could not, in the long term, hide anything from Michael. I am a telepath, he is accustomed to my free exercise of that faculty, and I could not refrain from the use of it, even if I wished, without his knowledge of my withdrawing. And then I would have to speak truth to him in any case, or watch affection die as surely as in the other instances we have discussed.”

  “Yet there may be a course around this obstacle, if you wish the aid of a friend, even though you do not know until the moment it shows itself what it is.”

  “Indeed such aid could be of the greatest value,” Hanna said.

  “That is all I wished to know. Let us speak of it no more, lest you see what I contemplate without even desiring to see it, as I know sometimes occurs. Instead we will talk of leavetaking, which I know must be soon; yet I, too, shall have many answers to produce both for the populace and its leaders, who do not expect this departure.”

  * * *

  As soon as they returned to the city, the objects brought from the Golden Girl began to march back to the ship in a steady stream. Theo and Lise and Shen would follow Michael anywhere, but it became necessary to deal with Henrik Gaaf, who might have some useful knowledge of Gadrah. Gaaf had been wandering somewhere when Hanna and Michael returned, and he came into the house to find all the common rooms turned upside down as the others ferreted for personal possessions that seemed, now that they had to be collected, to be everywhere.

  Hanna had asked Michael, “How are you going to get Henrik onto GeeGee?”

  “Any way I have to,” he had said. And she was present when Gaaf joined them in the room just off the veranda. This room, spacious and tiled, had remained cool even on the hottest days, and it had been a favorite place for all of them. Now the tiles were dirty with the water they tracked in and out, the baggy lounges looked deflated, and scraps of their summer lives lay everywhere.

  Henrik blinked at them and licked his lips. He said, “What are you doing?”

  “Leaving,” Michael said. He juggled a pair of music cubes and looked at Gaaf dispassionately.

  Henrik focused sharply on Michael. He had given up all pretense of vacuity since Hanna’s dissection of his brain. “Where to?” he said.

  “Where do you think?” Michael said, not unkindly.

  Hanna was near the door with Theo; she had been helping him guide a pallet loaded with foodstuffs toward the veranda. She stopped to watch. She did not see the necessity of abducting Gaaf and strongly disapproved.

  Gaaf’s eyes flickered in her direction. Whatever confidence he had once placed in her was gone, but still he thought of her vaguely as more sympathetic than Michael. He thought about what Michael had said. He knew the answer, but what he said next was what he wanted to hear.

  “You’re going back to the Polity?”

  “No.” Michael drifted nearer, relaxed, unthreatening. Gaaf backed away anyway. Theo moved silently into position behind him, something in his hand; now Hanna knew what would happen.

  Michael said, “Will you come with us? I need to know what you know. Everything about the man you call Castillo, everything about the men with him. They’ll be there. We might have to do something about them.”

  “No.” Gaaf backed up some more, just beginning to grasp it, and torn. The prospect of remaining on Uskos, alone among the aliens, was dreadful. But Gadrah was no better, and Castillo was there.

  Michael nodded to Theo, and Theo put one hand on Gaaf’s shoulder and jabbed at his back with the other. Gaaf jerked, started to protest, and went down, Theo breaking his fall.

  Hanna said quietly, “You didn’t try very hard to persuade him.”

  “Would it have worked?”

  She shrugged, chilled. She wondered how safe it would be to defy Michael now—how safe it would be even for her.

  They took Henrik to GeeGee on a pallet already loaded with bedding, and put him away in the mirrored room Hanna had once occupied. She sat with him for a time. Just before GeeGee took off, Shen looked in, saw Hanna’s gloomy face, and said, “You expected something else?”

  “What?”

  “Just like a man. Thought you’d know.”

  “What?”

  “How they are. Not practical,” Shen said, and walked out with no consciousness of having said anything surprising at all.

  Chapter 6

  When the journey had barely begun, Hanna said to Michael, “What is your plan?”

  “How can there be a plan,” he said, “when we don’t know what’s waiting?”

  He waited for her answer, laughing at her, expecting a diatribe.

  She said frigidly, “We could improve the odds.”

  He stopped laughing. “I wouldn’t object to that.”

  “Tell us what we’re going to. How much do Shen and Theo know? I don’t know anything. Teach us geography. Tell us about the culture. You know what to expect. I don’t. Teach us the language.”

  “I don’t know it,” he said. He was i
ce. He had gotten there from mirth in half a minute.

  She said, “How much do you remember?”

  “Not much. I think you know already everything, everything I remember.” It was becoming difficult for him to talk. “The end is the only thing that’s clear. Before that, I lost nearly everything before that. I don’t know why. There were things I remembered later, little things, that I saw like pictures. But I don’t know how they fit together. What came in between is gone. I—don’t—have—”

  Hanna passed her hands over her hair, self-soothing. Life in a broken mirror, shattered and refracted—

  “—it clear,” he was saying. “Nothing logical, nothing to teach—not any of what you’d call facts. Half of what I think I know, I think I made up. I was Lise’s age when they took me away. Maybe younger. It was thirty years ago. The language—nothing. Not a word.”

  Her hands settled on her chest, to ease the constriction round her heart. So they were not only going to Gadrah in defiance of sane judgment, they were going without anyone who knew anything about the place, not even Michael, unless Henrik did.

  She said, “It’s all there.”

  “I don’t know what you mean…” He had turned away.

  “Everything gets stored,” she said. “No memory is completely lost. D’neeran mindhealers are trained to retrieve what seems forgotten. I myself, when it was necessary to find what I knew about the People of Zeig-Daru that I did not remember, was linked with a healer. It didn’t work—but that’s because the People are—different. And had done certain things no human had heard of, to ensure it wouldn’t work. Otherwise I have never known it to fail.”

  “There are no healers here.”

  “I’m not a healer. But I’m an Adept, as a healer must be.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s the trance that makes it possible.”

  She had told him about the satya trance, how she had used it on the Avalon. Slowly he looked around. “A useful thing, that trance…”