The D’neeran Factor (100 page)

She stood cupping the light as if it were a real candle, and listened to the rumor of the wind. The air was cooler in the storm, and she shivered, but not with cold; there was a primeval strength to winds like this which demanded notice. And she remembered, fishing it from a dialogue on a long summer day far off on Earth, the reason power was cut off and ordinary pursuits put aside during storms like this. It was not (as Theo had thought) a necessity or even a precaution, but a ritual. In some households there would be talk of the Master's hand, and the younglings would be instructed by the storm. In others there would be no talk—but everyone would stop, and acknowledge the wind and the flood.

She went slowly to the room where Michael was, thinking that perhaps he would be watching the storm, too, his eyes clear with fascination. And she found him in a room adjoining the veranda, and the wide doors were open so that the tumult of the storm came in on a spray of rain; but he was asleep, and did not see any of it. He lay just outside the range of the spray on a lounge that was poorly formed
for the human body, so that he sprawled across it like a broken child. There was a music cube at his head, and Hanna came near and heard a shout of summer and sunlight. But outside the night was pitch-dark, and she did not see but heard the thrashing of the garden trees.

Henrik sat in a corner on a pile of rugs. He had been watching Michael in the dark.

Hanna knew it; she was revolted. There had been a change in Henrik, as if the moment of violence the day before had waked him from a deep sleep. His new attention was fixed on Michael, and it was inimical.

She sat down at Michael's head as if to shield him from Gaaf's eyes with her body and her light. Patches of the sky lit up from time to time with lightning, and were followed by rumbles of thunder from other places in the city.

Her tension increased. But it was not because of the storm; it was because of Henrik.

Does he think I can't feel his hatred? What if he tries to do something about it?

And if she could see into his head a little? She ought not make the attempt.
Ought
not: a social prohibition against the invasion of the ultimate fortress of privacy. But it was a prohibition that had ceased to trouble Hanna much in these last years, and she might never have so good an opportunity. There was no one near to distract her, and Michael slept deeply. She put her free hand on his forehead and he did not feel it.

And so she made her mind empty in something that was kin to the satya trance, though not so complete or difficult; she made herself hollow, a gong that would resonate to whatever touched it. First the room and then the wind and rain became remote, and she entered a shell of silence; and into this focusing of perception she admitted the point of life that was Henrik.

Thus it was that as the storm thundered on she saw herself, and what poor Henrik thought of her: not much. She was hardly present in his head at all. She was tiny in the map he had made of the world, an appendage to something larger than life that loomed like a threat. It was powerful, detestable, and malignant. It was Michael.

Somewhere far outside the trance she was horrified. Inside it, cool logic operated. It said that under the blankness
of the past weeks, an obsession had grown in Gaaf. The burden of uncounted humiliations, the weight of his life, must have a focus; and here, where humankind was concentrated in a handful of personalities, here in a place he did not want to acknowledge as real, Michael had become the focus.

She ceased to hear the storm. Without emotion and therefore unrecognized by Gaaf, she slipped through the perpetual panic of his thought.

Fortune's favored child: that was how he saw Michael. Had Hanna been herself she might have laughed, though bitterly.
How is that?
she asked, but he thought the question came from inside himself, so skillful was Hanna and so (still) befuddled was Gaaf, and inexperienced in this way of communication; so he answered, and he answered with envy.

She murmured agreement in Gaaf's brain.
He has so much
…But she could not have done it if she had not made herself an echo.

The women and the money, the money and the women
…

There was not much distinction between the two. In Gaaf's eyes they fell into Michael's hands, into his arms, coins and great gouts of credit, a procession of women who offered themselves like shameless animals—

Somewhere outside the half-trance Hanna laughed to herself. Had she been that bad about it? No doubt.

He will pay for it!
Gaaf said (he supposed) to himself, with such clarity and certainty that Hanna for an instant lost control, and heard the storm again, and the shadow in the corner stirred, alerted.

Outside the trance she was deeply alarmed. But she could not afford alarm; if Gaaf felt it, even he would know what she was doing. She wrapped herself in trance like a shield of silence, purposeful and irresistible. She engaged in no casual inquiry now. It was essential to find out what Henrik meant by his smug conviction. And she crept up on him as stealthily as if it meant Michael's life; as it might, if the satisfaction she had read in Gaaf, the sureness of coming revenge, had a foundation in fact.

…
satisfying!
she breathed in the corners of his mind, a vengeful echo.

He gloated:
They will take him away.

And,…
power!
Hanna purred, catching at the knowledge
of power in his hand, and there were quick little flashes of events and the burden of all that power:

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.