The D’neeran Factor (101 page)

The wind and rain diminished, though there were periods when the downpour was as hard as ever. The lightning stayed far away. Once Hanna looked toward the city and saw it strike repeatedly at the top of one of the great towers. The glow rimming the streets was subdued in the rain, and
they walked in the middle to avoid the rushing, flooded gutters. Time slowed to an endless moment of wet and cold in which Hanna had leisure to be astounded by her panic. She held to herself the thought, like a magical charm, that her fear had found Michael in the storm, that it had broken through the armor of his obsession and that he had turned back, desiring her safety more than this other thing he wanted. But still he had surprised her again. Nothing she knew about him had prepared her for the unforgiving passion he had shown Gaaf. And she was afraid of where it could take him next.

Toward midnight they reached the
Golden Girl.
There were no guards around
GeeGee
after all. But they appeared as soon as Hanna and Michael came into the welcome, familiar dryness, where even the lights were the color of an old friend; they came running from somewhere inside and stopped in consternation when they saw the humans.

Hanna said to them understandingly, “Indeed it is a very wet night.”

“Very,” agreed their captain. He raised a hand and with great dignity led his crew out to their proper posts; not without some regretful looks backward.

Control had an abandoned look. Michael sat in the master's place, which had been his until Hanna's greater skill supplanted him. In the last hour Hanna had felt a great purposefulness crystallize in him, and he had hardly been aware of her company. Yet above all there was a great restraint. He did not know what he had, and kept speculation to himself.

He slipped the module into a notch and told
GeeGee:
“Read and store.” His face and voice were blank. They waited, Hanna as still as Michael. It seemed to be a very long time before
GeeGee
said, “Done.”

“What is it?” Michael asked.

“A course in standard format,”
GeeGee
said indifferently.

“What's the destination? Compare with what you've got in memory.”

This time the pause was unquestionably very long. At the end of it
GeeGee
said, “The destination is not in my memory.”

Michael said so quietly that Hanna scarcely heard him,
“Give me a schematic.” But
GeeGee
said, “I cannot produce visual data from this source. Terminal point lies outside my visual matrix.”

Hanna said, “We can get a projection.” She leaned over Michael's shoulder, pulled a keyboard into position, and slowly, stopping often to consult
GeeGee,
entered a series of commands. She scaled the display so that
GeeGee
's terminal course referent would be at one side and the unknown destination at the other, and instructed
GeeGee
to superimpose the whole on a map of whatever lay between. The map ought to be accurate enough; it was based on centuries of observation, even though no one had gone out there to look first hand.

The picture that finally came was a fantasy. The prime referent at the left of the screen was Heartworld, but the star at the other edge was, by
GeeGee
's scale, fully five hundred light-years away. Hanna did not have to ask
GeeGee
to know what that meant. That was unexplored space out there. No one had gone there, not ever—or so all the records said. But here was a course, plain and straight.

Michael did not move. His hair and clothes were partially dry, but only partly, so that he looked half finished. He was very pale and he looked—Hanna blinked at him—terrified.

“But what is it?” she said.

He said, “That's Gadrah.” His voice cracked on the second word. He put his head down on the console so she could not see his face.

*   *   *

They spent what was left of the night on the
Golden Girl.
Michael did not sleep. He lay on the bed in his old room and stared upward as if he would see some kind of path emblazoned in the tracery of leaves at the top of the room. Hanna slept, but fitfully. Each time she woke it was with a start, and with heavier eyes. Once she said when she woke, “You didn't believe it existed, did you?”

That was what he had been thinking about. He was used to Hanna; he was not even surprised.

He said, “That's not quite it. I believed it existed, but somehow it wasn't real. Not if nobody else thought it was.”

“Except him.”

“B. Yes.”

“That's really why you needed to find him,” she said. This time she did not sound like an oracle, but she might have been the model for one, with her tousled hair and pale cheeks and sleep-haunted eyes.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Michael said. He could not interpret her expression. She rolled over and slept again.

Fantasies.
They got in the way on Alta, between him and his schooling. Not at first. At first there were only the nightmares, dreadful dreams of noise and screaming and flame, and then, like their extension, the only life he could remember with certainty: the endless time with B, its passing divided into the times when he was locked into a room by himself, and locked into it with B. And the first clear memory that came later was of the Post, and it was no fit medium for fantasy. He would not wish to go there, to that stone-guarded place. Then he remembered a little more, not clearly, without definition. And thought—dreaming over his lessons, washed with sweetness, awash in longing—
When I grow up I will go there.
“There” was a dreambrew of mountains and meadows far from the Post. They would be clean and safe, as they had been before some great event which he thought of one day, inexplicably, as “the relocation.” And then—

But he had never gone on from “and then.” He only dreamed of the sweet-scented meadows, as if, once there, he could get back everything else still hidden in cloud.

“That's nice,” said Hanna, meaning the meadows. He had not known she was awake. “I didn't know there was anything good,” she said.

“There was. Before they noticed us.”

“Who were ‘they'? Who were ‘us'?”

“It was so quiet,” he said softly, he remembered that, a piece of memory painfully retrieved. He showed her more pieces. “They must have let us alone for a long time, a generation at least. There was music.”

“A village.” She put a name to something taken from his thought.

“Primitive. But the summers. Oh, the summers!”

The deep shadows of the forest. The cold spray of water on hot days cascading down living rock.

They lay together thinking about summer until Hanna
fell asleep again. She nearly pulled him down into it with her.

Flight.
From the truth of what it was, forever out of reach. From Alta. From poverty. From memory. From himself.

“But you did stop,” Hanna said drowsily.

“No.” The quiet space on
GeeGee
was a world in itself, removed from every place he had ever been. Even time stopped in it. “I kept moving farther and farther out of Shoreground,” he said. “I worked harder than I had to, for a long time. Thinking it would make a miracle happen.”

“What miracle?”

“I didn't know.”

“No miracles,” Hanna said, and fell asleep.

After a while he answered her anyway. “No miracles.”

Compulsion.
The history of the Explosion was a nice hobby for an amateur scholar. He even went to all the places it could possibly be. As a dilettante; so he said.

Then a woman named Hanna ril-Koroth met the People of Zeig-Daru. It was an important meeting. But for Michael all its importance lay in the history of the People, who had once-upon-a-time destroyed a human colony of which humans had no record. Always in his search he had rejected speculation, though rumors of Lost Worlds circled his head like bees as he studied the history of colonization. He had not heeded the tales, fixed on what he thought was real. Until Hanna came back, was carried back, in pieces, talking of lost worlds. Then finally he knew, clearly as if he had always known: no study of what was known would show him what he sought.

And he dragged from his memory a memory of dark night skies. A few dim lanterns of stars shone sparsely in it; they were either very close or very hot. Somewhere in the dust was a Sol-type star with the world he knew going around it. And he went back to the history of the Explosion, and turned his attention to the ships that had disappeared, the shiploads of emigrants cheated or unlucky or otherwise lost in oblivion.

That was all he had meant to do, but control passed out of his hands. There were the first steps of the search for B. The narrowed vision, the subtle changes in his life, like buying
GeeGee,
that meant more than he knew at the time. It was only in the end that it crystallized.

“I wonder you stayed sane,” Hanna said.

“Did I stay sane?”

Hanna sat up once more. She said, “Do you know what you are? There's a toy. I've seen it on D'neera, I've seen it in the Polity, I've seen it on F'thal and even on Girritt. It's a little thing with a round bottom. On top there's a torso of a human being or a F'thalian or a Girrian. The bottom's weighted, and every time you give it a push it falls over and then, because the bottom's round, you see, and heavy, it jumps right back up again. That's what you are.”

It was not a flattering image, but he took the sense and let go of the picture.

“But is that sane?” he said.

“I don't know.”

She slept some more.

Reality.

Hanna woke up for good.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Why, go there, of course. Do you need to ask? You already thought of that, earlier tonight.”

“But that's only because I was so afraid that's what you would do,” Hanna said. She was even paler now. She was not hysterical this time; but he saw that she was, again, afraid.

*   *   *

Norsa fished them out of the
Golden Girl
in the gray morning, complaining mildly because they had not been where they were supposed to be at the appointed time. Outside
GeeGee
the day was dim and everything was wet. It was not raining, but the clouds had turned the morning into dusk. Hanna was very tired, the tiresome morning a dream which felt as if it could turn into a nightmare in a moment. Everything she saw seemed new, even before they departed from the City of the Center. The identical towers seemed—not only inhuman, the nonhuman did not trouble her—but inhumane. The wet streets had a sullen look. Insignificant details sprang to her eyes: a flaw in the paving, a wind-battered flower. The field from which they would begin their journey was a wasteland made for machinery.

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.