The D’neeran Factor (10 page)

—as killing
Havock
would have been.

She shivered and looked up.

Jameson said across fifty light-years, “Would you come into view, please? And identify yourself?”

She stood on the edge of light and saw that Erik's face was scarlet. His anger was a tangible barrier she would have to push through. Tam watched her with surprise and approval. She concentrated on Tam; the barrier vanished and she stepped into the light.

Erik said tightly, “I'm very sorry for this interruption. Ms. Bassanio wasn't supposed to be here.”

Jameson said, “The proper title is ‘Lady Hanna,' is it not? Is that correct?”

She turned to face the screen. She did feel the eyes now, and someone was thinking with sarcasm of her kludge of a title, and someone else was thinking
GO AWAY.
The faces borrowed from Earth were not half so unfriendly. The man in the center knew exactly who she was. That was odd, but she could not spare much thought for the oddness, because she was still thinking hard and she was frightened. She was not good with words, and she was willing to make a fool of herself by being wrong, but it would be terrible to do it by being right and not being able to explain.
WE DON'T WANT YOU,
somebody thought, and it stabbed her. Jameson had asked her something but she could not remember what it was and could not answer. Now he was saying, “Would you repeat your remark?” She took a deep breath, trying to tell herself this was no worse than the Arbitration Committee. But it was.

“I said—” She fastened her attention on the video screen. She couldn't remember what she had said. “I meant maybe Marte is wrong. Maybe they don't really want to meet us.”

“Nonsense!” Marte Koster said so violently that Hanna jumped. Her hands trembled with self-consciousness, with fatigue, with the impact of Koster's hostility. She felt an urge to hit Koster's puffy face.

But Jameson did not look hostile. He did not even look surprised. She concentrated on him with a kind of gratitude.

“It's not nonsense,” she managed to say. “There's something wrong about the whole thing. What were the odds against making a contact so soon? I know—I've heard—there's a reason we came this way. I'm not a statistician, but still it only makes sense if they were looking for us too.”

“That's what I said!” Koster almost rose in her frustration. Hanna would not look at her but felt the movement in her own limbs, which jerked in unwilled sympathy.

She said, “No. No. It's not the same thing. They might—they might want to do other things besides meet us. They might just want to know where we are. They might want to study us. They're watching us. I think they're watching us.”

She did not take her eyes off Jameson. She had never seen so guarded a face in her life. He might have been thinking anything. She waited for him to say something, but it was one of the strangers at his side who said with open skepticism, “Do you have any evidence to support this—this very remarkable hypothesis?”

Hanna glanced at him, but then she looked back at Jameson and said, “I think I do. It's not objective. It's not on a readout anywhere. It's all inside my head. But I started, I started feeling it about the time we sent the first transmission. And it's come and gone and it's taken different forms, but I think it's real.”

She waited for a response. Nothing, for a few seconds that seemed much longer.
GET RID OF HER,
Koster thought. Then Jameson said, “Go on,” and just as she relaxed in relief, “Please be brief.”

She tried, but it seemed to go on for a long time. It was hard to keep it in order, hard to put it all in words, and she could not show the Polity's men directly what she meant. They watched her without expression as she talked. Jameson moved only once, to put down the notepad he held, and Hanna stumbled because she heard Koster think savagely:
NOT WORTH TAKING NOTES ON!
On the wall in far-away Namerica there was a lambent glow as of sunlight reflected from water, and when she noticed it she faltered again. All the
Endeavor
's clever design tricks failed, and she was vividly aware that she inhabited a metal container lost in darkness. But she recovered and went on.

She finished, “It has occurred to me that they might be telepaths. If the things I've noticed are significant, they have
to be. I'm not a telepathic Adept. I couldn't possibly be aware of a distant non-telepathic presence when I'm surrounded by so many people and—I don't think even an Adept would be, unless he were deliberately reaching out to something and had a pretty clear idea what it was. That means they must be touching us in some way, though I'm the only one equipped to feel it strongly.”

She thought of Tamara listening always for the voice that did not come, of the goal at the edge of Marte's sight. She added, “Maybe some of the others feel it a little. But if that's true, the only possible interpretation is that they have, have gone partway toward contact and are avoiding completing it. For some reason. I don't have any idea why they would do that. I don't—I don't know why it would take the form of something from my own experience. Yes, I do. I mean, that's because I pattern it unconsciously, because I don't have the, the templates of their experience. But why it should be
that—
”

She stopped abruptly, unwilling to approach the question more closely. She had said everything she had to say. There was no reason to go on.

They were waiting for more, however. They waited until Erik said, “Thank you, Ms. Bassanio.”

It was a dismissal, and his voice was rough. He had only gotten angrier while she talked. She looked at him uncertainly.

Jameson said, “Lady Hanna.”

“Yes?”

She looked back at the wall with some anxiety. Nobody up there looked inviting, but it was a better view than Erik's fury.

“Do you think it would be worthwhile importing an Adept?”

“Why—I don't know. They've got skills I haven't, of course, but on the other hand….” She pondered.

She must have thought about it too long, because Jameson said patiently, “On the other hand what?”

“Oh. I'm sorry. Adepts don't have my training. My experience. I mean, I think I'm the only D'neeran who's been to F'thal, for example, Adept or not. The Adepts I know, they'd have some very interesting mystical things to say about aliens, but it wouldn't be much use from your point of view.
There's something I could try,” she said, and regretted it instantly.

It was too late, however. Jameson said, “What is that?”

She said unwillingly, “I could try to touch them without the interference. I'd have to be separated from the ship.”

Jameson moved abruptly. No, not abruptly; it was just that her attention was caught because he had been so still until now. He said, “Telepathic reception is not a matter of proximity, I understand.”

“Not really. But practically speaking it's like—like—”

She couldn't find the words. Jameson said, to her surprise, “Like Newtonian physics and Inspace. Direction is a perceptual construct, but things still fall downward.”

“Yes,” she said, understanding him perfectly. “Yes, that's it.”

“Suppose you were, as you put it, separated from the ship? What then?”

“I don't know. I don't think,” she added, utterly forgetting propriety, “I would like it much.”

Jameson blinked. Out of the corner of her eye Hanna saw Erik make a violent gesture, instantly controlled.

“Why not?” Jameson said.

Automatically, because it was her custom to let emotion speak for itself, she visualized herself alone in nothingness, knowing the thing that hid behind Nestor's warships was nearly upon her. The persons around her stirred uncomfortably, and someone made a sound of protest. But Jameson could only hear her words, so she said simply, “I think I would be scared.”

He looked, for the first time, mildly surprised. He surprised her by saying, “How did you feel the first time you made telepathic contact with a F'thalian?”

“What? Why?”

“How did you feel?”

“Well….” She tried to remember. The dizzying sweep of infinite circles was familiar to her now. She couldn't think of F'thalians without them. But at first it had been like falling, and at every attempt she flinched away until the Hierarchus showed her the circles intersected everywhere, and she would always fall to a momentary resting place.

She said at last, “It was strange. It frightened me.”

“The novelty?” he suggested.

“Well—”

He made a gesture with one human hand that would have meant, if the Hierarchus made it, Similarity of the First Order. She stared at him, disconcerted. How did he know so much about it? Or about her trip to F'thal, for that matter?

She said, “All right. It could be the novelty.”

She had forgotten Erik. He could not restrain himself any longer. He said suddenly, his voice furry, “Even if there's something to this, I don't know how practical it is to separate her from the
Endeavor.
She couldn't get very far in a reasonable time in the shuttles we carry. They're not Inspace transport.”

Jameson made a barely perceptible gesture, and one of the men with him took up the discussion.

“You could Jump and leave
her,
” the other said. “The shuttles are equipped as lifeboats and have Inspace communications capability, am I right?”

Erik said stubbornly, “It would take us away from ground zero for an indefinite length of time.”

They went on talking. Hanna, finding herself extraneous, looked for a place to sit down. Her knees felt uncommonly weak. There was no vacant place near Tam, but she found an empty spot next to McCarthy and felt under the table's edge until she touched the button that made its associated chair unfold from the floor. McCarthy looked at her in astonishment, as if seeing her for the first time, but he did not speak to her.

She was shaken and apprehensive and she did not try to hide it. A true-human would have tried, but Hanna had not been among them long enough to adopt the habit, even if there had been any sense in it; and here, anyway, some of the surfaces were wearing so thin that her anxiety was not overly conspicuous. Erik was a stranger. He had a right not to take her seriously, she supposed, but she had thought that was because Marte Koster did not take her seriously. Surely if these men did, Erik would? But he did not, or adamantly refused to, and she watched something that she finally understood was a duel of words until Erik lost. When the man with Jameson was done—it was Kwomo Thermstrom, she discovered, and remembered his name from the
Endeavor
Project proposal—Erik had agreed to the experiment
at some unclear point in the future. That was all. As if she had never been there they talked of other things, of staying and going and unmanned probes, and finally Hanna realized no one was going to talk to her again, and stopped listening.

She stayed until the end, but not with pleasure. Too many questions had come to her in the last half hour, and she kept thinking of more: of what it might mean to Iledra and to D'neera if she came back from the forthcoming vague mission with something to show for it, and what it might mean if she came back with nothing. She was used to acting on the basis of direct mind-to-mind communication, but could she have made a mistake? Here in this strange world of true-humans, might she have misidentified as alien a complex of her own past and fears?

Once she looked up and saw Jameson looking at her so closely that she stared back at him in shock. For an instant she felt naked—not as an object of sexual interest, but as if she were being stripped right down to the bone and implacably assessed.

It lasted a second or two, and then he looked at someone else. She might have imagined the whole thing. But she knew she had not; why should a commissioner of the Polity watch her that way? What possible importance could she have for him?

She could not think of any, but later, as she filed out with the others, she thought suddenly: Whatever it is I will not like. Whatever he's doing, I wish he would not.

S
he would not even try to transmit the letter. It would not get past the censor. She went on with it anyway, speaking softly, watching words form and lines flow on a square of light in her darkened room.

“I don't understand what I feel, Lee. It's new. Is it fear? Today I told the commissioner F'thal frightened me once. That wasn't the same. It was strange and exciting. And I was so curious about them! I couldn't have been very afraid. And, oh, what people said to me after Nestor! How brave I must have been! Was I? I don't remember feeling like this. I don't understand this. I don't. I don't. Am I imagining it? I have to get off the stim boosters….”

It was deliciously quiet in the tiny cabin. Hanna should have had the booster implant renewed some hours ago. She had not; she would not. It seemed to take a great deal of energy to move even a little. Her mouth tasted of metal.

“This might be the chance we talked about. I have to be good enough. Don't I? I never thought it would happen. But I thought, if it did, I'd show true-humans how to do it right. Do it right from the beginning. I'm not even curious about them, Lee. Why? How can I not be? Why am I afraid? I have to get off the boosters and think. We're not going anywhere. We're staying here a couple of weeks more. I'll have time to think….”

The room's sparse furnishings seemed to move in the dark.

Hanna fell asleep with her head on the computer keyboard.

She spun through the thought of the Hierarchus, pursuing a meaning that just eluded her. It was essential that she
find it, because behind her was something that pursued
her,
and what she sought was her defense against the seeker.

The terror was so familiar that it bored her.