The D’neeran Factor (106 page)

“Mikki,” Mirrah said, “go look in the cart. Look for the knives.”

I didn't want to go, he'd be there a couple of days, there was no hurry.

But Mirrah pushed me away, toward the cart. “You'll be trapping with Pavah, come winter. You'll need a good knife. Go look. Go look!”

Another night, this one arbitrary, a night in space. They all ran together, all the nights, the lamps of the flowers, warm summer nights in Ell, the storm with the lighting flaring, Ree with rain lashing the windowpanes, night after night on the
Golden Girl—

Michael's head lay in Hanna's lap. Her hands were soft on his face and scarcely moved.

“Tell me the beginning,” said her soft voice.

The beginning was in
GeeGee
's memory, but he did not need to refer to it. He said, “The Hobbes Settlement Corporation
was founded in the year 2398 by Richard Hobbes and Thomas Shadhili. Hobbes lived in the former nation of United States, in Namerica. I couldn't trace Shadhili. There was a list of nineteen hundred and four investors. Counting whole families, they represented maybe eight thousand people. The philosophical basis of the venture was isolationist. You know what Earth was like then.”

Hanna said guiltily, “Refresh my memory.”

“Taxes were high everywhere, higher than any time anywhere on Earth, to support the new colonies. These people had money. They hated the taxes. And the idea of the Polity was in the air. This was before the Plague Years, which was when the idea of a central authority— what turned into the Polity—really took hold. But it was coming, and it wasn't a popular idea. The people who signed up with Hobbes and Shadhili, they didn't want to be around when it happened. They didn't want their descendants to be around. That was one of the reasons for the whole Explosion. One of the many reasons.”

“Yes. I knew that,” she said with some complacency. “And then?”

“They thought it out well. They equipped the expedition well. But they needed a labor force, so they took twenty thousand other people with them, people who couldn't afford to invest, who were indigent, as far as I could tell. Desperate people. They called it, the investors called it, benevolence. I never ran across any criticism of it. Maybe there wasn't any. There was too much going on then, too much to criticize, too much even to keep up with. What were twenty thousand people, with the millions pouring out? But I've seen the manifests. If you read between the lines, look at the names, look at the places of origin, you can see where the labor force came from. The places that developed last, mostly. The people with dark skin. In Croft—”

It was the first time he had used the name of the village, and it stopped him. After a minute he said, “In Croft, almost everybody was darker than Pavah and me—”

He stopped again, suddenly. Then he said in a different voice, “Why?”

Her hands moved on his face. “There must have been mingling, over the years. On D'neera we're all more or less brown.”

He stored the question, let it drop.

“There isn't much more. They left. Nobody ever heard of them again. As far as I know.”

“Somebody did.”

Hanna tried to match it up with his memories in the dark. The pieces did not quite fit. Time had nibbled away the edges on both sides. But it was possible to make a first approximation of what had happened.

“There was a distinct class system from the start,” she said. “Did they know where they were going?”

“Only in the most general way, I think. Remember: there was a wave of optimism all through the Explosion. The universe was full of Earths, they thought. It is, I guess. They're just harder to find than it seemed at first. The prospectus just said, they'd establish a settlement on a planet where a high quality of life could reasonably be expected to be maintained. It said which direction they'd take, but it didn't spot any candidates, and anybody who read it, I think, would assume they never meant to go as far as they did. But maybe they meant to all along, meant to disappear, meant to sever the connection from the start. Or maybe they didn't. Maybe it happened later, for some other reason.”

They were silent. She bent to kiss his forehead. He was drifting away again. Remembering—

—Otto was distracted that harvest time, but happy all the time. Otto had a harvest of his own on the way.

“They'd best hurry up and marry,” Mirrah said, but nobody could take time for a wedding during harvest, not in Croft or Sutherland either. It didn't much matter; the ribald teasing was just the same as it would be if they'd married before starting the baby, the only difference was that Marlie hadn't left her mother's house yet, still lived in Sutherland instead of in Croft with Otto. Even at harvest the men found time to work on building Otto's house. The women through the summer, when the peddlers came around, had bought household goods for Marlie as well as for themselves; now they sorted through outgrown infants' gear, sewed soft blankets. Mirrah had a special reason to be pleased; Carmina would have a playmate almost her own age.

Marlie held out till after harvest, but only just. The day before the wedding half of Croft packed up and went to Sutherland, oxen pulling the carts. It was a fine day, we left early in the morning when the nip of fall was sharp in the air and frost made the grasses by the roadside sparkle, and the stubble in the fields was bright as broken glass. Later it got warm; we sang all the way. Otto wanted to walk, but they made him ride in the cart. “You need to rest up,” they said. I didn't ride either; I ran ahead with Pehr, we had contests throwing stones. He was older than me and he always won, but I thought I would be bigger than him someday, Pavah was a big man. In Sutherland there was a feast that started as soon as we got there. Marlie was as big around as the oxen, she was a little thing and now she looked just like a ball. Otto shouted when he saw her and picked her up, grunting, though even carrying the baby she couldn't have been heavy; she beat at his shoulders to make him put her down, big rough Otto who'd had this silly grin on his face ever since he started courting Marlie.

“I'll never act that dumb,” Pehr whispered in my ear, but then I caught him looking at Ader, Joan's girl; I hadn't seen her for half a year, and she wasn't the same little kid any more.

It went on all night and half the next day. There was plenty of food and plenty of ale and drink made from the sweet berries that grew along the river. Abram had come riding in a cart with his fiddle. Sutherland had a piper, Kimon his name was; he played with Abram and I fell in love with the pipe. He let me use it a little, and when he saw how much I wanted it, he said he'd make me one. People came in and out all night, they'd sleep for a while in someone's house and then come back to eat and drink and dance and talk some more. Toward morning it got quiet; more people had gone out to sleep for good. Mirrah and Carmina went to Joan's and went to bed, but Pavah and I stayed up. I was sleepy, but I didn't want to miss anything. The talk was softer, Abram dozed off in a corner with the fiddle on his knees, and I sat by Pavah and tried to keep awake while he talked with Ugo and Joan and Elot. Joan did for Sutherland what Pavah did for Croft, carried on outside business. Elot her husband did what Ugo did, organized work in the fields, settled disagreements; it was Elot who'd marry Otto and
Marlie the next day. In the middle of the night it was cold outside. Inside the moothall— bigger than Croft's, Sutherland had more people—it was warm, there were three big hearths and fires burned in all of them. The ale went around, but Joan talked about a man who'd come to Sutherland from the Post in one of the metal wagons that ran by themselves. Nobody laughed any more. She didn't like what he'd come for, didn't like what he'd said.

“As if we'd want to move to the flats!” she said.

“Why did he bring it up?” Ugo said.

“He said more farmland has to be cleared, they've got to get more under cultivation than they've had.”

“There's not enough of us to make a difference,” Ugo said.

But Joan said, “They've more machines there. You can cover six times as much ground, ten times, maybe more.”

“We called a moot,” Elot said. “Even in the middle of harvest we met on it. Nobody wants to go.”

Ugo asked, “Did he say anything about Croft?”

“He said he'd been other places, had more to go to,” Joan said. “Told me plenty of people were going. I said, then what do you need us for? He didn't answer, he looked angry, I think he'd lied. I don't think people in other towns wanted to go either.”

Pavah hadn't said anything. Joan said, “You're quiet, Alek.”

“Too much ale,” he said, though that was a lie; his hands were steady as they always were.

We split up and went off to sleep then. Next day after the wedding, after more eating and drinking and dancing, we carried Otto and Marlie home, Marlie with her bulk in a cart and Otto walking alongside, proud as one of his own bullocks. A few days after that Ugo called us to the moothall, he talked about what he'd heard from Joan and Elot. Everybody had already heard about it and their minds were made up; they didn't want to go anywhere. If the man came to Croft from the Post, Pavah would tell him that. Pavah was quiet then, too. We walked home in a light snowfall, the first of the autumn, Pavah and Mirrah and me. I carried Carmina; she couldn't walk yet, though she pulled herself up on anything handy, fences, furniture, legs; she didn't really talk yet either, but she knew how to say “Mirrah” and “Pavah” and got “Mikki” almost right.

Mirrah said to Pavah, “I thought you'd speak the thoughts you've been thinking.”

“Why frighten them? Nobody likes to think of the worst. Why frighten friends and neighbors, when nothing's happened yet, and may not happen? The Post has sent no one here, nor back to Sutherland either; Joan said she'll send a message if that happens.”

I was getting older, they talked to me sometimes like I was grown up, so I said, “What are you talking about?”

Pavah said, “If they need more people in the fields near the Post, what's to stop them from using force? How much good would it do to say we won't go?”

“They wouldn't have anyplace to put us,” I said.

“There aren't many of us,” he said.

“Everybody in Croft? And Sutherland, too?”

“That's not many people,” he said, smiling. “There's more people at the Post than you can imagine, and room for all of them.”

“Barracks,” Mirrah said softly.

“What's that?” I said.

“Big, big buildings where everybody lives all together.” She and Pavah looked at each other over my head. She said strongly, “I don't want to go back to that, Alek.”

They'd been walking with me between them, but Pavah moved around so that he was in the middle, one arm around Mirrah, the other on my shoulder; only he lifted his hand to muss Carmina's hair. The snow floated down; the long winter was almost here. But the barns were heavy with grain, the smokehouses with meat, the cellars and stone barrels with the gardens' and orchards' yield. We wouldn't be hungry, there was nothing to fear, there had never been anything to fear so I didn't know how to be afraid of a guess, a dim threat, something that was just in my father's mind—