The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  They made me stay in one of the men’s buildings, there were six of them, nor was everyone in them from Sutherland or Croft. Altogether in ten great barracks there were fifteen hundred men and boys; in twelve more, somewhat a greater number of women and girls, and the smallest children regardless of sex. Families met in the cold evenings but only outdoors when the day’s quota of trees was felled and the smoke of their burning made a reek round the camp. The land was more barren each day, each day they marched us farther away. There was great unhappiness, but not much fear. There would be towns, they promised; when the land was cleared, before the spring working of the soil began, families would be reunited, a town would be built, everything would be as it had been before only in a different place, there would be machines so the land could be farmed. They took from each barracks a few men or women and took them to the Post, showed them our herds, our goods stored away, waiting for us; they gave us back our own food to eat. We believed them. Why not? What else was there to believe?

  Face sooty from the smoke, arms aching from the ax, I worked. If all Croft had been in my work party and barracks, or Croft and Sutherland together, we might have pretended to be a town. But they separated us, I was with few I knew and many I didn’t, and we were all parts of broken things, split and dazed. I heard that Otto and Marlie with their baby boy, they met secretly and walked away one night, out in the cold; were followed, caught, brought back; that was all. Just brought back. “So they mean us no harm,” the men said. But Otto had a strong back, was valuable—

  Morning, Michael’s watch, but Hanna went to Control instead. She had left Michael sleeping after a night in a winter of exile. He was tired as if all night he had really wielded an ax. When she went into Control, she found Henrik. He did not hear her come in.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  He jumped, a violent movement; turned an animal’s face to her. His guilt rolled over her like an ocean wave. She gaped. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  He gathered himself for some effort, and she braced herself, amazed and half-afraid. But he only rushed past her, out of the chamber, and she heard him skidding down the spiral stair.

  She went to the seat he had left and tried to see what he had been doing. He had wiped the display with a single touch, probably the instant he heard her voice, but he had forgotten to cancel command mode, and there were indicators she could read. He had been preparing to transmit a call from the Golden Girl; to whom it was directed she could not tell. He had not made it, though. She had come in time to prevent it.

  Not wanting to leave Control unattended, she used internal communications to call Theo. He was not in his quarters, but she found him with Lise. “Come up here,” she said.

  He came at once, worried.

  “Henrik was trying to call out,” she said.

  “Who to?”

  “I don’t know. Who could he call? He doesn’t have anybody out there. But he doesn’t want to be here, he wants us to stop; he must have been trying to reach the Polity.”

  “We have to make sure he can’t. I don’t want to lock him up. Can you fix it so GeeGee won’t transmit without a code we all know but him?”

  “Easily.”

  “Something easy to remember, but something he won’t guess.”

  She used her birth-name, Bassanio, as the code. Theo said when she was done, “Why did you call me and not Mike?”

  She blinked at him. “Mike’s no good for anything,” she said.

  He did not say anything, he only looked at her, stunned. The implication was that he, Theo, was good for something. He hadn’t thought that anyone but Mike would ever think that.

  —noise all the time, the axes’ thud, the crackle of the fires. A man stumbled and cut off part of his foot; they took him away. He didn’t come back. Weeks later we heard he’d bled to death. It wasn’t bad, not too bad. Except. A man from Honiton which I’d never heard of till that winter, he’d been there longer building barracks through the fall, one day he put down the ax. “I’m a free man. I won’t do this any more,” he said. Firmin said, “Think you’d better.” Firmin, thank God, was in my barracks, he tried to stay close to me. The other man said, “What’s going to happen? We’ll see.”

  After a while the Postmen came, they were never far away, some always in sight. Tried persuasion. Moved to threats. Consulted with each other. Called reinforcements. And beat him. At first there was a move to help him, but they stood in a ring with their guns pointing out, fired once all at once into the air and we stood there. Trying not to watch. I saw tears on Firmin’s face. They left the man bleeding in the sharp hard mud, left him to lie there all day, in the middle of the circle of guns. They didn’t care if he froze to death, but he didn’t. At night they let us carry him back and he groaned all night, breathing hard. In the morning they took him away. He came back in a week or two, but his face didn’t look the same, that was why they sent him back, I think, so we’d see him every day and remember. He worked, he never tried to stop again. None of us did—

  Hanna started to have dreams of water. The lake at D’vornan shrouded in autumn fogs, the slow river that rolled through City Koroth; most often the sea at Serewind, where she had grown up. Maybe it was just because she was in space, where every gram of moist vapor was reclaimed and recycled. But sometimes it seemed to her that the sounds of water came to her from Michael’s dreams. Sometimes behind his words, behind, even, those memories that had come fully into the light, there was the gray light of a distant sea. And meanwhile he lived half on Gadrah and half here; saw Hanna sometimes clearly, sometimes dimly as a ghost.

  One day—they were more than halfway to Heartworld sector, measured in time and not by the twists of their convoluted course—she tried again to help him, to use distance and cool logic to interpret that other world he saw:

  “A policy of deliberate terror.” Her hands moved on his face. “They fed you well enough, with your own confiscated stores, yes? Housed you warmly. Keeping the labor force healthy. But they split families up, communities. Retaliated harshly at the first sign of rebellion.”

  “But you can’t call it terror, not really. If you did what you were supposed to do nothing happened.”

  “They weren’t capricious, then.”

  “Not that.”

  She leaned over him, her hands light and nervous. Gray water meets gray sky somewhere out there. He reached up; the graceful fingers touched her face, traced her features as if he were blind and sought to see her.

  “I hurt you,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I could have stopped you. With force, if I’d wanted. But it wouldn’t have taken that. Talking would have done it.”

  “Why did you let me do it?”

  She shrugged again. He realized that she had never said it, not once in all the months had she said the most dangerous word her heart could conceive. But she sank down beside him, found his mouth: a cool drink of fresh water. Salt air on a salt cold wind.

  “I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you. I want to have children with you. I want to live with you all our lives.”

  Hanna said when she got her voice back, “That covers a lot of territory.”

  “All right. I know it’s scary.”

  “I can’t answer. I can’t decide.”

  “My timing might be a little off, I admit—”

  So the laughter was coming back and he was becoming himself again. Even if it was not quite the same self—

  —and Georg came one day round the middle of the day while we ate, not in the big building where we took it in shifts morning and night, a hundred men at a time and less talk than you’d think because their minds were on the little time there’d be later to seek out those they loved before the lights were extinguished in the cold and the cold dark closed in; no, it was daytime, he came to the dead forest supposed to turn into fields by spring, where the midday meal was carried round by trucks. Women and old men from the barracks served
the food—not Mirrah—she’d gotten herself assigned with the women who looked after the young children all day, so she could be with Carmina. There was nothing she could do to be more with me; we met in the courtyards at night.

  Ate the bread made from Croft’s own good grain but there wasn’t much, there was less as the days went by—they said the stores ran short but they lied, there’d been enough and to spare when we left. The Postmen stood off by the unfelled trees with their share, no greater than ours—but what did they eat at night at the Post, when the nightshift came where we were and the others went back? They got no thinner that I could see. I saw the wagon come growling and humming across the waste and paid it no heed, they came and went all the time. Saw the man who went to the Postmen and later they looked toward where I was, but I didn’t know they looked at me, till one came and said, “Boy, come with me.”

  Cold that day, I could see my breath, I followed it to the other men, thinking they’d give me an errand, send me through the wood to another worksite where it wasn’t worth driving; they’d done that before. But the Postman took me to Georg with his face like polished stone, like the flint that looked smooth, even oily, but with sharp edges where it was split.

  “There’s room at the Post for young men like you,” he said in that voice that was smooth like his face, then he said what he meant—could I dance, could I sing, play music, do magic tricks? Could I learn? Could I be taught? Had I gifts?—“It’s not enough to look good,” he said, and almost gave up, as he told me later. I looked so stupid, knowing nothing of what he meant.

  “I’ll give you a trial,” he said. When I understood he meant me to go to the Post, to live there, I balked. The desert wood wasn’t Croft, but I’d been there a time, Mirrah was there, Carmina, everyone I’d ever known. I had no interest in leaving, none. Not even curiosity. I only wanted to be left alone.

  Still he talked, dull though he thought me. He was bored, getting cold, but thorough. He said there’d be good living at the Post, I could have gold if I did well. He asked about my mirrah and said if I were apt I could help her—and had me. I didn’t know that, but maybe he did.

  Firmin came to us then, and the Postmen did nothing and let him come.

  “What do you say to the boy?” he said.

  “I’ve told him of opportunities,” Georg said. “He’s a handsome child. If he has any gifts for pleasing, it could be well for him at the Post.”

  “He has none,” Firmin said. “An ill-tempered, inept child,” so that I looked at him in surprise, though a moment’s thought told me his aim.

  “Are you his father?” Georg said.

  “His father’s dead. But I’ve an interest.”

  “Then you shouldn’t wish to keep him here. I offer a chance not many have. I heard of him in passing, through the friend of a friend. A lovely boy, they said, heard singing one night, a lullaby for a little girl. Was it your sister, boy? We’ll see if anything can be made of him. If not, he’ll return.”

  Firmin wanted to argue, but I saw the Postmen moving in. Their weapons on that gray day looked not shiny but dead. “It’s all right, I want to go,” I said, afraid for him—

  Hanna kept her watches now, and part of Michael’s, too, as he kept part of hers; her presence in Control overlapped his by a considerable margin, so that it was impossible to tell, by merely looking into Control and seeing who was there, whose watch it formally was. They talked casually and unnecessarily about GeeGee’s workings, her faithful pursuit of the course Hanna had laid in at Omega. The worlds and stars of human space rose up on monitors, were glittering beacons for a day or two, and vanished and fell behind. Michael looked nearly himself again, stronger, more active. But that was a shell and a concealment. His body lived on GeeGee, and some of his mind, but only enough to make the proper motions. In front of his eyes, with the substance of reality, memory played itself out. When he lay down, he would pass not into sleep but into the trance-state Hanna had taught him, and more of the veil would be withdrawn. He no longer plunged toward it, but neither did he avoid it; it was inevitable, and he was content to let it unfold at its own pace. In these hours in Control and elsewhere on GeeGee when he was nominally normal and awake, what he had seen in the last hours of trance gained solidity, and took its place in the context of the whole. His mother’s face had the clarity of a fine portrait now: the liquid eyes, the black ringlets framing the high forehead furrowed with grief. The comforts of the Golden Girl faded to nothing. Crosslegged on frozen ground swept roughly clear of snow in the harsh glare of light that let no one escape or be private, he held Carmina on his lap and sang to her in a boy’s soprano, strong and clear, however, and true:

  Baby, sleep: thy pavah watches

  thy pavah with infinite care. Baby, dream:

  sweet dreams of pretty toys thy pavah gives thee

  Baby, sleep: safe in thy pavah’s hands, the night holds only comfort for thee!

  Only sometimes his tears fell on her curly head.

  And meanwhile he said quite ordinary things to Hanna, touched her sometimes, turned his head to smile when she touched him, gave GeeGee the right orders (prompted by GeeGee herself); at some imperceptible point the watch would cease to be officially his and become officially Hanna’s, freeing him to leave; and finally he would go, to drift about GeeGee aimlessly as a ghost until it was time to return to his room (as alien now as Uskos) and relive another event, another day.

  Hanna left behind in Control tried to think of other things. It was not good for her or Michael (common sense told her, and Theo told her repeatedly) for Hanna to permit herself to sink altogether into Michael’s obsession. Theo always came early, long before it was time for him to relieve Hanna. He planted himself solidly beside her and talked of what he had lately seen on the ’beams, talked of Lise’s studies, encouraged Lise to wander in and out, encouraged Hanna to start the lessons promised the girl in GeeGee’s operation; he talked of Henrik, speculating on the traits of character or the history that had made Henrik what he was, and on what they might expect of him; when Hanna was more than usually silent he talked of her work in exopsychology (which was in GeeGee’s library and which he had read), misinterpreting it so outrageously that Hanna in a fury must correct him, was forced to think of something besides Michael, which was what Theo had intended in the first place.

  “You think you’re keeping me sane,” she said. “If you think I don’t see through it, you’re the one who’s crazy.”

  “On this ship, who isn’t?” Theo said. “Mike’s forgotten what year he’s supposed to be living in. Henrik’s plotting something—I swear that’s what he thinks he’s doing. Shen, do you ever see Shen? No? I don’t either, except when she shows up at the end of my watch. I haven’t heard her talk for a week. Sometimes she grunts. You’re crazy because you’re crazy about Mike. And Lise and me, we’ve adjusted. Adjusted to all that! So we must be crazy, too.”

  They were silent for a time—Theo could not talk continuously for hours, he had to stop sometimes—until Hanna said, “Theo, do you ever think of scanning for messages for us? When you’re here alone at night?”

  Theo said, not answering the question directly—but it was an answer all the same—“We used to scan all the time. When Mike first got GeeGee, when we used to cruise around, trying her out, playing with her, we were always in recept mode. We kept Shoreground time so Mike and Kareem could talk a couple times a day. For a while all the calls that went to the house, we had ’em sent to GeeGee. My God, was it expensive. We were playing…In the middle of the night a couple of times, this woman who was after Mike, she’d call up half-spaced and get him out of bed and tell him what she’d like to be doing with him that very minute. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  Hanna’s nose wrinkled with distaste. “Did she get him?”

  “No, but she came close. It was a long dry spell before you came along, you know. That’s why I said, sometimes he was ready to cry.”

  “I didn’t know that. He neve
r told me. It couldn’t have been because—because there weren’t candidates.”

  “There was never a lack of candidates. But he was funny the last year or two,” Theo said thoughtfully. “Like nobody he saw was right, not even just for fun. The last year or so before we headed out for Revenge, I don’t think there was anybody. I hated it.”

  “You hated it? Why?”

  “Look, pretty women have pretty friends. I was doing all right with the fallout.”

  He was so wistful that Hanna laughed. The lighter mood stayed with her until her watch was over, but later, when she was settled in the small lounge with a reader in her hand, the words it displayed unseen, her thoughts returned to the question she had asked Theo—the question he had not wanted to answer, as was apparent now.

  A simple instruction to GeeGee would be enough—and she wrestled more and more with the compulsion to give it. If she did, what might she hear? What message? The Lady of Koroth, perhaps: “I beg you to come home. I will make all pathways smooth. Though you have abandoned your birthright, I have not abandoned you.” Or Starr: “Do you think me too small to confess to error? I’ll see to it your homecoming will be safe—yes, his, too, even his…”

  But that is not what he wishes, she said to the imaginary voices. He would go on, on and on to the end which was his beginning, without reference to your forgiveness or your power. Perhaps my purpose should be his. Perhaps it should remain his.

  And so she would fight her compulsion, see space go by in silence, come always closer to a place where once again the voices would be out of reach. She would listen only to the voices Michael heard—

  —was so amazed by what I saw around me, that I had no more homesickness than before. I dreamed of Croft and Pavah each night, but it had been so since that day anyway. I did not know what to call the place, it was bigger than a village like Sutherland or Croft, it was only the Post, and it spread over many hectares of land there by the sea, first on the landward side a great ring of cultivated land, then a circle of factories and warehouses, then one of barracks after barracks, and then the tall white wall with the towers behind. They were not really rings, as I came to see, but half-rings, and the ends of each ended at the sea. Later, too, I came to know there was more to it than my eyes first saw. Not all the barracks were what they seemed, but some were divided into rooms where families might live together; and between those and the wall, there were houses like those I had known in Croft, and in them lived certain people who had earned the right—trusted servants of those who lived behind the wall, who performed their duties at the proper hours and afterward were permitted to leave, passing in and out unquestioned; the soldiers who watched the wall and their families; and also those like Georg, and like Alban and Kia, who took me in. But though there might be a blurring in the purposes of what I saw outside the wall, the meaning of the thing itself was clear, nor was there ever any doubt of its reason: it was to keep the multitude of those outside it, out.