The D’neeran Factor (105 page)

It was full night again, this was Hanna at his side, her hand on his arm in reality and in dream. She said softly, “Was Mirrah her name?”

“No. No. It just means, Mother—”

He longed deeply for the
Golden Girl.

There were voices outside. The people of the place were coming back. But he could not face them yet.

The flute was silent and neglected. Michael slept during much of the day to make up for the sleep he did not get at night. He rarely remembered the dreams that woke him each night, once with a scream. Hanna talked of ending the experiment. It was going too slowly, she said. For every day when she saw a mountainside or a stone house clearly, there were two or three when he could not or would not go farther into the dark, when he stood on the edge of it and the
light would not come and there were no words in the sounds of the voices there, though he came closer and closer to giving them names, closer to knowing what they said. In the nights, after the dreams woke him and left him unable to sleep, he roamed
GeeGee.
Sometimes he met Henrik. He told Henrik what he knew about their destination, what he could remember, hoping to jar Henrik into speech. But Henrik only grunted. There was no doubt that he was sane. Nor did he seem to be afraid any more. Hanna, when Michael told her about those one-sided conversations, said Henrik was angry.

“You can tell from what I say?”

“I can tell without that. I feel him sometimes.”

“I guess that's better than the way he was. Sometimes when I talk to him he seems, oh—I don't know. Satisfied.”

“Satisfied? Do you tell him how much it hurts to do what you're doing?”

“I think it shows, when I talk about it.”

“So he's satisfied. Because you're suffering?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Ugh. Let's stop it. For a while, anyway.”

“We're not going fast enough as it is. We could get there before I remember anything useful.”

“Oh, crazy man—!” Hanna did not know she echoed Shen.

“Not as crazy as I'm likely to get.”

“I know. I know. I know.”

Hanna did not walk through Michael's memories any more, she only stood at the edge of them and watched—

—Pavah didn't talk much more than Mirrah did. He had a smile—I see it in mirrors sometimes. He talked some about space. Told me the sun was a star, showed me other stars, what you could see. Said we were on a planet, told me there were more, with people on them, he said…

The night Carmina came, he talked then. Anittas the midwife shooed us out when the pains got close together. We both kissed Mirrah before we went and I was scared. The animals, I'd seen animals get born, this wasn't the same. And Mirrah who always knew what to do was helpless,
there was no way to stop this, no way to hurry or change it. But she wasn't scared; just busy, working hard.

We went to sit in Firmin's house. Other men kept the vigil, too, while the women stayed with Mirrah. They drank ale, Pavah let me have some, and he and all the others, they treated me different that night, more like a man. Pavah I could tell was listening, I did, too, but you couldn't hear anything through the stone. I didn't listen much to the talk of crops and herds, but after a while they started in on Otto, Otto who slipped away whenever he could to Sutherland where Marlie lived. “Your turn next,” they said.

“I remember,” Ugo said, “when Otto couldn't see it; couldn't see bringing children into the world. I told him then a girl would change his mind.”

“I still don't know it's a good idea,” Otto said.

“Maybe not in the east,” Firmin said. “Here it's different.”

“Only as long as they let us be,” Otto said.

“What could they want with us? Some grain sometimes; they're better off letting us alone.”

“So far,” Pavah said, trying to hear through stone. “No reason to think it'll change. But I didn't like what I saw, when I went east two years ago.”

Pavah was what they called the outside man. When there was business with another town, he did it; all the towns had somebody like that. So he usually was the first to get news.

“What did you see?” Abram said. The others all knew, Abram must have known, too, but he was old, sometimes he forgot things, though his fingers never forgot a tune the old fiddle had known. It was there that night between his feet, ready to celebrate.

“Orchards dying, for one thing,” Pavah said. “And at Sutherland last summer, Joan, you know, went east to negotiate a new harvest machine. She got it without much need to bargain—because, she said, the blight's spread to the grain, they don't need all the machines they have, there's nothing for them to do.”

“It's nothing to do with us,” Ugo said. “That's far away.”

“They're finally converting,” Pavah said. “The native varieties are resistant, that's true. But when the conversion's complete, then what? Native strains follow the seasons, like you'd expect. One crop a year. With the imports they get
three. Now they've gone over there's a third as much food. Stockpiles don't last forever. They'll run short. Then what?”

I never heard the answer; there was a stirring at the door and Abram's daughter Padma came in smiling.

“A girl,” she said to Pavah. “Pretty as her mother, healthy, too. They're both well.”

Pavah's face lit up. “Let's go see your sister, Mikki,” he said. We went out, the other men trailed out, too, Abram with his fiddle, and the music followed us to where Mirrah suckled Carmina. She didn't look pretty to me, all purple and squashed! But it was a good night all the same. After a while I went out where the music was and danced, we all danced half the night. We lit a fire for dancing, but later it died, there was light enough from the flowers and the sky was alive, the arc of the Ring looked close enough to touch and the fires Pavah said were burning stones flew from end to end of the sky, even the moons looked solid not just points of light running, running, and Abram made me recite all their names. And before I went to sleep I saw Carmina again, she and Mirrah and Pavah were all asleep together and I thought: when I was born it was like this, too. And now it's all of us together and this funny-looking babe is part of us. I'm somebody's brother. She's their daughter. My sister. Ours.

Remembering was hard work, draining. When something came out of him it stayed out, and not by itself, but surrounded by a net of related memories to be examined one by one. Sometimes they triggered other things, details like electrical shocks. He could begin to sketch an outline for Hanna. The villages like a string of jewels at the base of the mountains—

“—Croft to Dunhill to Sutherland and then south,” the peddler said. “Not last year, though. Not last year.”

Mirrah hefted a skillet, testing its weight with her fragile wrist. Carmina on her shoulder babbled and peered around with bright bright eyes.

“Where were you last year?”

“East of here. A long way east.”

Mirrah laid the skillet in the midsummer dust. She'd heard the new sound in his voice. So had I. Mirrah wasn't going to say any more and I didn't know what to ask. The other women, they were bolder. They got him to say it: Fairfield. He didn't try to hold out, didn't want to—he said: “Fairfield. I was at Fairfield.”

It was quieter. The women still handled the cloth and the pots. There was a ring they handed round, it had red stones, Otto came later and bought it for Marlie, for when they married. The women kept looking at the ring. Their minds weren't on it, though. They started to use the kind of talk grown-ups used, not like they didn't want children to understand, it was just that there was so much they didn't have to say, things they knew and kids didn't. They looked grim. Most everybody that day was in the fields, just a few old women were there when the peddler came over the dusty road, not really a road, a dirt track. And Mirrah and me; I'd been sick.

“Fairfield's still there,” he said. “But it's not what it was. Half the able-bodied men gone.”

“Dead,” someone said.

“Who knows? They took them away in the night, the ones they didn't kill on the square the first day—”