The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “What about the rest? They coming over here?”

  No. Later. Not yet. She saw through someone’s eyes for half a second. The man was on the Avalon. There was tension and some kind of suspicion there: dissent inside the wolf pack, directed at B. She couldn’t concentrate on it, she couldn’t concentrate on the import of what B was doing, exiling them here; she was drawn too hard to the dark shape on the floor at the edge of someone’s vision.

  Shen got up and roamed the tiny room, furious, thinking.

  “How bad’s Mike hurt?” she said, got no answer, turned to see tears streaming from Hanna’s eyes again; went back to her, and went back to slapping her. The wet cheeks were starting to bruise. “Can he walk? Can he walk!”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know! I don’t think so.”

  “Gonna have to try. Soon’s they leave.”

  Hanna got a glimpse of what Shen was thinking.

  “He can’t, it would kill him—”

  “You remember before? Broken ribs, fever, you remember what you did?”

  “I remember. But—”

  “So?”

  They stared at each other. Shen shook Hanna again, gently this time. “Gonna die anyway, him, you, everybody. All we got left’s one surprise. You’re it. You and Mike.”

  * * *

  He was conscious of being cold. His body was shutting down. The pain had removed to some distance, was with him and would be there until the end, but hung back for a time like a live thing, a scavenger waiting for an opening. In the half-world of relative peace, images played at random in his head, the mind shutting down, too. He saw the house on Valentine, much too big, ridiculously big, but it had given him the seclusion he wanted. A dark blue-eyed woman lived there, completing his peace. He was not capable of questioning the image. It seemed as if it had been so. It was what he had wanted, and here at nightfall he believed he had had it.

  Hanna sat beside him on the beach below the house, dressed in white. The wind gusted hard from the sea and she put up a hand to her frivolous floppy hat, to hold it on. Wisps of hair escaped and stirred softly in the wind. She was smiling, and her eyes were as blue as the sunlit water.

  “It won’t hurt to get up now,” she said. “I’ll keep it from hurting.”

  “Can you?” He did not really doubt her. It was Hanna, he realized now, who kept the pain at bay, so that it made a circle around him but did not quite touch him.

  “It’s your useful trance,” he said, pleased. “All right, then.”

  The bright white sand dazzled his eyes. If he squinted, he could see other things through the sand. He was somewhere else as well as on the beach, simultaneously. It was too dark to see much of the other place, but he was alone there. There had been other men; they were gone. He had to learn to stand. “Try locking the knee,” Hanna said, and it worked. He would never walk normally again, too much muscle was damaged or gone, but if he kept the leg straight and balanced carefully, he could use it as a prop to heave himself along.

  The beach was gone, but Hanna walked ahead of him, still in white. One side of the skirt was slit nearly to the hip, and when the wind blew it away, he thought he had never seen anything more lovely than her shapely brown leg. There had been other women, and he remembered them with love and gratitude. They had helped educate him for loving Hanna.

  “I didn’t tell you often enough how beautiful you are,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Be careful here. There’s a ladder you have to get down.”

  It helped a lot that he was weightless; or maybe he felt that way because there was, in his undamaged limbs, a strength he had never dreamed he had. Sometimes he hung by his good hand from a rung, supporting his weight one-handed without effort, feeling for a foothold for the usable leg; sometimes, weight on one foot, he leaned precariously inward while he shifted the hand. It was not a long ladder, but it took time all the same. “Don’t hurry,” Hanna said.

  “It would’ve been good,” he said. “Wouldn’t it? Nothing else like it for either of us. Once in a lifetime. You couldn’t do this with just anybody, could you?”

  “I could not.” She stood on air beside the ladder. It had gotten very dark, but she was illuminated, and the sea breezes from nowhere stirred her hair and the long white skirt. He looked at her with love.

  “I heard of it long ago,” she said with the cool objectivity of trance. “It’s called a true match, I think. You don’t see it often on D’neera or anywhere else—people who go on together for years and years and it only gets stronger. I think that’s what we might have been. But there has to be time to find out.”

  “Why us?” he said. “You and me. We’re so different.”

  “But you have what I need. And I have it for you. Why shouldn’t we be different, otherwise?”

  “I almost had the rest of what I wanted, once,” he said. “Plain peace. I wish I could have found it and given it to you. But we’ve got more than most people get.”

  “I know that. I didn’t see it at first. Not until this happened, not really. But I know now.”

  Negotiating the ramp was hard. The ground between the Avalon and GeeGee was uneven enough to be a worse trial, and it was dark. There must be an end to the body’s resources even in trance, which only permitted them to be drained far beyond ordinary limits, beyond safety. Michael’s pace, which had not been fast, slowed even more. GeeGee had not come any nearer for some time. Michael wondered it he had been moving at all, or had only thought so. He paid close attention to the next awkward step. “I was standing still,” he said. “It’s not going matter anyway, is it?”

  “Probably not,” Hanna said, and he looked up and could not see her any more; only GeeGee looming ahead of him in the night.

  They had not bothered to close GeeGee up. There was a ramp here, too, and he dragged himself up it and through the air lock and into the belly of his ship, which hummed and showered him with golden light. His own bed was close at hand, but he turned the other way and saw Hanna at the top of the spiral stair, her face serene and, now, transparent. A fragment of lyric came to him, part of the old music he most loved: God grant every gentleman such hawks, such hounds, and such leman!

  “Where are they?” he said. “Do you see anything?”

  “I see nothing except what you see. I’m not really there, Mike.”

  “Oh, that’s right. How am I going to get up the stairs?”

  “Pull,” she said. And waited without moving, a dimming figure of light, while he humped awkwardly up the endless stair, pulling with the good right arm, pushing with right knee and foot, up one step at a time. Toward the end he had less strength. He was nearly finished, and when he finally reached the top, he had to try several times before he could stand up. GeeGee’s light was fading, and to breathe he had to will his chest to move in and out. He stood wondering why he had not yet been discovered and stopped, and then his ears told him why. They had been (he realized) attuned to a different level of reality altogether. But now when he paid attention, he heard voices from the direction of Control, angry voices, an argument building. The men were too busy quarreling about B’s erasure of the way home to think they might have left a threat behind.

  He turned and hitched his weary way past the galley, through the main lounge and the small one, past the medlab. The corridor bent to the left and he took the turn awkwardly. In a minute he would turn right again and would face the door behind which Hanna was shut up. He could not see her any more. She waited for him where she had been all the time.

  He kept listening to the real world, straining to hear the voices that had dropped away behind him, and that saved him, because he heard the sound in the corridor through which he passed. Just before the second turn there was a setback, something to do with the mechanical systems, to his left; he staggered into it and pressed his back flat against the wall. Someone made the turn he had just made and came level with him, looking ahead and to the next turn, to his right therefore, so that Michael had
an instant of grace. It was B, with something in his hand.

  Michael saw what it was, Carmina’s gun, a deadly thing, B was going to kill. For an instant, a second in which time stopped, everything was clear. The riddle of B was simple after all. Something that might have been a man had said No! to life some time a long time ago.

  Yes! said Michael, and fell on B’s back. They went down together and the gun went off with a great noise. He had no strength of his own but there was a great inrushing, Hanna’s strength, more. Knee in back, arm around the throat, he heaved, pulled, felt the straining spine—and heard a crack. The last air rattled out of B’s mouth and he was limp.

  It was not Michael but used-up flesh that jerked through the last few paces, punched the simple sequence that opened the lock, and held out the gun to Hanna. She took it, but she never did anything conscious with it. Wales had come, drawn by the noise, and he fired straight at Michael’s back. The blast took his heart, Hanna felt the heat on her breast as Michael fell on her, and it was by reflex that she fired and killed Wales as she fell down with Michael into his death.

  After that Shen went after them, Lise said, I heard her, she had that thing that makes the noise and one of them came and I heard it go off. The others—they’re dead, too. She got them, too. I didn’t see that, I was busy. Helping with Mike, till Shen came, then Theo said go help you, I thought you were dead, too, you were so still—

  * * *

  There was something in the medlab which Hanna could not believe had ever been Michael. It was cold in the medlab, icy. Theo had partitioned off the space where Michael’s body lay. He and Hanna argued bitterly. They had been arguing for a long time.

  You shouldn’t be here, he said, I shouldn’t be here, Mike shouldn’t. You have to know when to let the dead go, that’s what they told me a long time ago. If this was Earth, Willow, maybe Co-op, there’d be a chance, if I’d got him wired in in time, if his brain wasn’t dead, but it is—

  Hanna sat in the cold wrapped in blankets Lise had brought. Once, early, she had gone away. Theo left to himself had sat down on the floor and held his head in his hands as if the weight of his own living skull would give him strength to do what he had to do, the last thing he could ever do for Michael. But before he could do it, Hanna had returned. She had found one of the laser pistols and gotten it powered and armed. You will not let him die, she had said.

  B wiped the course while we were locked up, Shen said, while the rest were still over there. Been wiped from the Avalon, too. They didn’t want to stay, he fixed it so they had to. Did that to their ship then did it to Gee in secret so we’re trapped, too. They come and find out, that keeps ’em busy, I guess, while Mike’s coming here—

  Theo looked at Hanna’s eyes black with madness or grief, he looked at the laser pistol, he grieved, he looked and grieved for hours, hardly comprehending what Shen had said, that they had been robbed of the way home. He looked also at the lines and lights that told him where Michael was and they never changed. Machines kept blood pumping steadily through a cadaver but the brain would never think again, and the sun was gone for good. Between fits of weeping he screamed at Hanna and she screamed back or was silent. Let me let him go. He begged abjectly. Please let me let him go!

  Shen could have taken Hanna from behind with a stunner, and she would have done it if Theo had given her a sign, but he didn’t. He thought obscurely that he was doing what Michael would have wanted.

  After twenty-four hours of this Hanna collapsed without warning in a silent heap. Theo made sure she was all right and then, weeping, turned off the machines.

  * * *

  Michael was buried in a mountain meadow with Croft’s valley spread out below. Hanna spent her days and some of the cold nights in the mountains. She went back to GeeGee when hunger drove her, and at those times spoke to no one. In the mountains, though, she talked. She talked to the hills, the streams, and the slanting brown trees, but her words were for ears that were not there, chiefly Rubee’s.

  “I don’t want any more of your stories,” she said to Rubee, her hands full of shreds of leaves; she plucked them off the low branches from which they would not fall, still glossy though richly brown, and tore them slowly one by one to bits. She did this all day long. She resented the leaves; they behaved as if they would not give summer up. “What’s the use of doing anything? I wish I had never heard of you,” she said to dead Rubee.

  She got things mixed up. She knew about the deities of a wild mix of human and other cultures, but the only god she clearly remembered was the Master of Chaos, to whom she insisted, at times, that she was not Uskosian, so his rules should not have applied to her. It would have been good to think the Master had a single face—a pale one with transparent eyes—because if that were so, he would be dead. She had felt him die and be killed by joy, she had felt the victory of laughter. But she had also seen the light go out afterward, which proved that horror might take any face, and the twitch of a finger could sweep love and courage away, and it was best to count on the worst and go on free from the illusion of hope.

  * * *

  Crouched by the grave in the early snow like Michael’s monument, she “heard” people come up the mountain.

  Theo and Lise. And a man and woman not of Croft. Of the Polity.

  Her mind took the longest Jump it had ever made.

  “There could be help,” Norsa had said, “though you will not know until it shows itself what form it will take.”

  Norsa called them and had them record the course, she thought. They got onto GeeGee while we were in Ree and recorded the course.

  She felt Theo and Lise halt at the meadow’s edge. Theo thought approaching Hanna wasn’t safe, and he would hold Lise back until it was.

  The others came on until they stood beside Hanna, and she looked up at them. They were healthy and fit in their green Fleet uniforms. They looked back at Hanna cautiously. She heard them think that she was not as bad as Theo had said.

  “You didn’t get him,” she said, “he got away,” and they changed their minds.

  * * *

  That was all she had to say to the Polity. Two ships had come to Gadrah; one soon went home, and Hanna was on it. In the first weeks of the trip she spoke only once. That was immediately after departure, when she submitted with unexpected docility to medical examination. At the end of it the examining physician said, “Did you know you’re pregnant?”

  “Yes,” Hanna said.

  “How long have you known?”

  She shrugged.

  “Do you want me to end it for you?”

  “Try it and I’ll kill you,” she said.

  Chapter 8

  So she had decided to live, as was evident from what she had said. She did not feel like living, but she did not feel like dying either; she did not feel much. She was mute at her parting with the others who had been her companions for so many months, and Michael’s companions much longer. They would survive. Theo would look after Lise, Lise would give Theo a reason to live, and Shen would tell them both what to do. Someday Hanna would have to finish it with them, they would have to see the child, and Carmina ought to see it too, when Hanna was alive again. But for now she waited for something to bring her to life. Her child was not real yet; it was flesh busily making the structure to be human, but there was no mind that could even sense the echo of her thought. She was still alone, and only on another journey.

  And that was your last, she thought to Michael who was not present either, that was the end of the journey of your life. Why did you take me, if it was the last? And if you took me, why did you let it be the end?

  The physician came back to see her loaded with charts and readouts. He said she would have a boy and talked about genetic analysis. The child would be much like Michael, he said.

  When the physician was gone she said to the child who was not present yet, You’ll be a handful, then.

  The Polity’s ship came to Theta and crossed into the relay system of human space, and
Hanna spoke for the second and last time on that voyage. She asked for and got permission to contact her House, and, not meeting much resistance, resigned what remained of her tenuous position there. Her son would not be a telepath, and D’neera was no place for a true-human.

  After that, there was nothing to do but wait for the journey to be done.

  It was summer when Hanna got to Earth. The year had come round and started again since she rested under a tree with Rubee and Awnlee. She was put into a medical center and continued to be silent until she was left alone in a room of her own. There were no windows and it was impossible to see the summer. She had acknowledged to herself that she would have to start talking sooner or later; when she tried the door, determined to walk out of the place, and found it locked, she thought she might have waited too long. But it opened suddenly from outside. She stared up in horror; it was too much like what had happened at the end on GeeGee, her mind slipped and she thought Michael would be there, his eyes a blaze of gold and sick to death. The vision passed; Starr Jameson stood in front of her. She leaned against him in relief. “Oh, you came,” she said.

  “Your people at Koroth asked me to. Come on, then,” he said.

  So she finally came back to his house, the new weight in her belly making her steps nervous, though the swelling was scarcely visible yet. It was not a homecoming, but at least she could talk to Jameson, because it seemed that she had known him all her life, and he was not new as Michael had been, but a constant. All the same, she was slow to find her voice. She had been at Jameson’s house for a week before it returned. One evening just at dusk he came to her and suggested they sit in the garden. She went outdoors for the first time since coming here, and was overwhelmed. On spaceships the air had all the life filtered out of it, and no wind ever moved. The garden on this summer evening was fragrant; there were grasses and leaves and flowers to smell. A breeze pressed against her skin, and moonlight made everything silver and black. She was dizzy with the night. Questions crowded to the end of her tongue. She tried to hold them back; to ask them, to be answered, to hear new things, would be to start living again. She had thought herself unready to do it. But she had promised. The child growing under her heart was proof of that.