The D’neeran Factor (11 page)

“Hanna?” said a soft and urgent voice.

She swam toward the voice, up through dark waters. Pursued and pursuers receded.

“Hanna? Wake up. Wake up.”

She straightened, surprised to find herself not in bed. The cold light of the text display hurt her eyes. Her back hurt. She was cold.

Tamara said, “What's wrong with you?”

“What?”

“You're shaking.”

“Wake fast. Happens.”

It came out in a mumble. Tam touched her shoulder anxiously.

“Did you hear the alert?”

“Yes. I did. What alert?”

“You and some of the others. Briefing Room Two. I've only got a minute, I have to get back.”

“All right,” Hanna said vaguely.

“Promise? You won't go back to sleep? Promise.”

“Promise.”

“I have to go. Hurry.”

“Thank you,” Hanna said. She heard the swish of the door as it closed.

She got up, feeling heavy and unwieldy as a statue come to life. It seemed that she could only think one thought at a time, very slowly. There was a weight of nothing tangible in the pit of her stomach. When she started for the door, she stumbled.

The walk took forever.

When she entered the briefing room all the heads turned toward her—again—as if the scene from a few hours ago were being repeated. Her stomach lurched and she stopped dead. But there were only three people there—Erik, Koster, and Hanna's chief from Navigation.

“You're late,” Erik said, not quite in a snarl.

“I'm sorry….” She pushed a hand through her hair and looked at them blankly. It struck her that the discontinued stimulants were taking their revenge. The thought did not console her.

“Dismissed. Except you,” Erik said, looking at Hanna. “Sit down.”

She did. She was acutely aware of the hard seat of the chair. The pale blue of a wall was garish. The others' footsteps thudded loudly as they left. Koster gave her the strangest look—half smug, half resentful.

When the door shut Erik said, “Why didn't you come when you were called?”

“I didn't hear. I was sleeping,” she said, longing for more sleep.

He looked as if he didn't believe her. He said, “I don't have time to go through the whole thing again. You know about Beta?”

She tried to remember something about a Beta, and shook her head.

“Signal Beta. An hour ago. My God,” he said impatiently, “how could you miss it? Another alien transmission, an exact duplicate of the first one, except that the locus referents are different.”

“What?” Hanna said, startled into wakefulness. Erik went on without slowing down.

“We're making the first Jump in that direction in four hours—sooner, if Navigation gets it worked out faster. You're staying behind. Shuttle Five's ready—should be ready by now. Get in it and take off. I want maximum distance between you and this ship when we Jump. I don't want you smeared all over the cosmos. Get moving.”

“But—but—” A sense of time-run-out seized her. She could not remember why. She tried to pick out sensible questions from the mass of them that assailed her. “What about communications? I've never flown one of those shuttles—how can— When are you coming back for me? You're coming back, aren't you?”

“Of course we're coming back!” Everything she said irritated him. His anger had lost none of its edge. He said with plain restraint, “I don't have time for details. Communications has a station assigned to you. You can get all the information you need from them. You shouldn't have any trouble with the shuttle—if you're the hotshot pilot your dossier says you are.”

She nodded. She wondered why she had never noticed that Erik's beautiful blue eyes were so small.

“But how long will I be out?” she said.

“I don't know. At least as long as it takes us to calculate the parameters for a second Jump. You wanted to do this, dammit, and now you're doing it, so get started!”

She got up cautiously, mindful of her leaden feet. “I didn't want to do it,” she said. “Commissioner Jameson wanted me to do it. Why are you taking off after them? They won't be there either.”

“Maybe they will. That'd be the end of your theory, wouldn't it?”

“What's wrong with my theory? A theory,” she said lucidly, “is just a theory.”

“We were doing fine without your theories,” he said.

“I don't understand you,” she said helplessly.

“I thought D'neerans were supposed to be the best at understanding everybody. That's what all your damn theories are about.”

She looked at him in silence for a minute, her skin prickling. She understood one thing at least, finally and unhappily: that her quiet exclusion from
Endeavor
's small society had lasted only as long as she made it possible for the others to ignore her, and Erik to enjoy her. Now that she had opened her mouth she might face—if Erik were a bellwether—open hostility.

She said, “Never mind. I don't think I want to understand you.”

She was at the door when he said, sounding pleased, “You didn't have any warning this was coming, did you?”

“No.” She turned in the open door and leaned against its frame.

“Why not?”

“I don't know. Maybe they didn't try to touch us that way this time. Maybe they did and I didn't recognize it. Maybe I'm wrong about the whole thing.”

“Maybe you are,” he said.

He wasn't going to say anything else, so she left.

*   *   *

Andrella Murphy's home stood on the opposite side of the river from Polity Administration, to the north and past a curve in the river so that the administration complex was not visible. What Murphy could see, on a summer night, was a basin of light. The river was thick with bridges here, and
the computer-controlled ground traffic poured across them like streams of fireflies. Light lay heavy on the gentle slopes beyond the river. Murphy's house sprawled across a hillside, and the brow of the hill cut off a view upriver to the ancient monuments of what had been the seat of a mighty government before the stars changed the world.

Murphy had gone to some expense to make sure metropolitan noise did not reach the house. On her candlelit terrace the only sounds were of summer insects and the occasional night breeze. Outside the candelight there was darkness, and then the precipice and the endless fall into light.

Most of Murphy's dinner guests had gone home. Her husband had swallowed a sober pill and gone to bed, and only three others were left. Muammed al-Nimeury of Co-op sat in a shadow and talked, ostensibly to Murphy; she rarely answered, however, because he was talking for the benefit of Henriette Guilbert. Henriette posed becomingly and did not answer at all. The story—no doubt true—was that Starr Jameson had warned her to look gorgeous and keep her mouth shut if she expected him to take her out in public. It was a fact (as Murphy had ascertained) that Henriette used intelligence boosters just to perform her duties for Admin's Central Records section. Whatever else she wanted out of life did not, presumably, require much intelligence. Murphy was not inclined to quarrel with her logic. Henriette was here with Jameson, after all, and having a remarkable effect on al-Nimeury. Murphy was willing to make allowances for Muammed. His wife was on Co-op, and Murphy supposed he was lonely.

Jameson had disappeared into the high-security communications module that was part of every commissioner's home. Murphy had not heard the call summoning him there. She was not concerned. If there were a Polity-wide emergency, she and al-Nimeury would have been wanted too. Most likely it had something to do with Heartworld's lively political infighting. But she wished Starr would finish and go home, and take Henriette with him; then Muammed would leave.

But when Jameson came back he dropped into his seat with every appearance of staying for a while. He looked very pleased with himself. Murphy sighed and said, “Well?”

“Henry,” Jameson said.

“Yes?” said the woman, looking at him with great brown eyes.

“Go away. Go play with the Kits.”

Henriette got up without resentment. An obliging puff of wind pressed her gauzy gown to her body, and al-Nimeury grunted in appreciation.

“Where are they?” she said.

“Locked in the garden, I believe. I hope.”

“All right,” Henriette said. “But aren't they asleep?”

“They're nocturnal. They haven't bred all the original Cat out of them yet.”

“They're working on it,” Murphy murmured.

“Abominations,” Jameson said in disgust. He watched Henriette cast about and set off more or less in the right direction. When she was out of earshot he said, “
Endeavor
's finally got a Beta.”

al-Nimeury made a rumbling noise in the shadows. Murphy said, “What does it say?”

“Same thing as before, except for the locus description. That's different. It'll pull them off in a new direction. The question, of course, is what to do.”

“What do you mean?” Murphy frowned at him. “Shouldn't they just go there?”

“Should they?”

“Are you asking for advice?”

al-Nimeury said, “Want mine?”

Jameson looked thoughtfully toward the shadows and said, “I don't know.”

“Drop it,” al-Nimeury advised.

Murphy giggled. Jameson said equably, “The
Endeavor
Project is a reality, Muammed.”

“Worse luck,” al-Nimeury said. “It's not too late to stop it, though.”

“It is,” Jameson said. “The question is not whether or not to turn back, but how best to proceed.”

He was looking at Murphy again. She said, “Well, then, of course you want to go where they want you to go. To do anything else would be to turn your back on them and fly away.”

“Unless,” Jameson said, “they're playing a game whose results accrue to their benefit, giving us nothing in return. Shall we go on playing it, Andrella?”

“Not at midnight,” Murphy said.

Jameson ignored the hint. He said, “If there should be no one at the new location, we'll have to rethink our response.”

Murphy smiled. “You'd already decided to send them on,” she said.

“This time…There is a new sensor in operation.”

Murphy knew Jameson well enough to pick up the faint irony in his voice. She said resignedly, “Tell me about it.”

“The telepath,” he said. “The D'neeran child. She barged into the strategy meeting today. Fleming was wild. The
Endeavor
is leaving her behind, Andrella, behind and all alone. We might have an advantage in the game that Species X does not suspect. She seems to believe she has sensed something frightening about them. I don't know how much credence to give it. She said perhaps she can come up with more, if she is alone.”

“You sound,” Murphy said, “as if you're putting her out to be a sort of gauge of what there might be to fear.”

“She could be making it all up, of course,” he said calmly.

“Probably,” al-Nimeury said. He got up and came into the dim light, a square and solid man compacted of darkness. “You know what I think about the whole damn thing,” he said to Jameson.

“Yes,” Jameson said. “It's new, so it's inadvisable.”

“You don't know what the hell's out there. You've got two hundred human beings out there with their throats wide open to anything that wants to cut 'em. I liked Katherine's proposal better, but no, you had to have it go out unarmed. Bring 'em home, Starr. Before it's too late.”

Jameson said, “‘Here be dragons.'”

“What?”

“Look at the old Earthly seafaring maps, Muammed. That's what they used to write in the blank spaces.”

“As I recall,” Murphy said, “there were some dragons.”

“Starr?” Henriette said from the edge of the terrace. She cradled a tank-nurtured Kit in her arms. It was soft and round and playful and innocent, and it would never mature sexually or grow into a cat. It purred loudly. Henriette said, “Can I have some of these?”

“I'll get you as many as you want,” Jameson said, “provided you promise never, never, never to bring one to my house. It's time to go, Henry.”

“Past time,” Murphy said.

But at the last minute she held Jameson back with a hand on his arm. His head was silhouetted against stars; she could barely see his face. “Is there really a danger?” she asked.

“You know the theory,” he said. “Interstellar travel implies a level of technological achievement that makes it cheaper to manufacture wealth than to seek it through aggression. Likewise it implies a structure of rationality transcending aggression for ideological motives. Certainly F'thal has fit the theory perfectly.”

“Then does it matter what the D'neeran girl thinks?”

He shrugged. “What do you think of Henriette?” he said.

“She's lovely. But—my dear Starr, what do you talk to her about?”

“Who talks? Now if you and I….”

He did not finish the sentence but smiled at her, teasing. They had been friends for years.

“You know I wouldn't have you. Good night,” she said.

She watched him leave with Henriette and went to bed, scooping up a comforting and undemanding Kit on the way.

*   *   *

The first thing Hanna discovered was not about aliens but about herself.

She missed
Endeavor
's crew.

She was thousands of kilometers from the ship when it Jumped, and psychologically so separated from it that its vastly greater distance from her after the transit was of little importance. That was not a matter, as Jameson had put it, of proximity; it happened because she had begun detaching herself as soon as
Endeavor
released the shuttle she piloted. She had gone about
Endeavor
with a kind of low-grade awareness operating at all times, as naturally as sight and hearing, because that was the way she lived. But it could be shut off, as it was now. She would not use it again in any degree until she sought a specific entity.