The D’neeran Factor (13 page)

It was not curiosity, nor duty. It was darker than either, seductive, unknown. Half in trance she reached for it, and flinched away.

She could not examine it closely. But she let it draw her imperceptibly outward.

There were no whispers. There was only, for eternity, the dark.

A spark of light appeared. It was born of a single photon, and expanded.

It was an eye: the eye of a dream.

Her body vanished. She hung before the eye in a place without form. It
knew
her: personally, individually, malignantly.

She could escape to her body, to the shuttle, to
Endeavor.
With all her will she forced herself to stay an instant, and reflected in the eye she saw: serene hearthfires burning trapped living flesh, a glittering detection device become a flying forked spear, the mad wriggle of a severed serpent which was herself, lost barren unlighted worlds tumbling anchorless, the watery lunge of a streamlined shape with a thousand teeth—

Straight at her.

She was pawing at the communications key, limp and choking in the dark. She never knew what she said to Ludo Brown, nor how long it took them to come for her. Later she remembered that she had not taken her eyes off the mass sensor till blessed
Endeavor
appeared; and that they did not believe her when she said it had changed once before.

“T
ake a look at that,” Erik said. He pushed a display module at Hanna.

Hanna looked. The central data column, stripped of accessory notations, showed average mass readings over a period of some hours. There was a bulge toward the end of it.

“Is that from the shuttle?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

The bulge had to be
Endeavor.
She lifted her hands helplessly and said, “So I dreamed it.”

He came around the table and stood behind her. He reached over her shoulder and made an adjustment, and the figures flickered and changed.

“This is the last ten minutes,” he said.

Now there were two bulges, the first much smaller than the second.

Hanna shivered suddenly. “So there was somebody there.”

“There was. And you missed a chance of contact by yelling for help.”

He was profoundly disgusted. Hanna opened her mouth to answer, and shut it again. There was nothing she could say. It was possible that he was right.

Erik turned away and went back to his place. The table in Briefing Room Two was littered with coffee mugs and reference printouts. Everyone who had anything to do with direct contact procedures had been in here in the last few hours, questioning Hanna. She had not been able to satisfy any of them.

Hanna said suddenly, “When did you get this breakdown?”

Erik shrugged. “A long time ago. Half an hour after you came on board, maybe.”

“You let me go on thinking I must have imagined that reading?”

“What difference did it make?”

“It makes a lot of difference to me! I wondered if, if I couldn't trust my own eyes, what else could I trust?”

“Not much,” he said. “You didn't get one goddam useful fact. Just a bunch of space-happy hallucinations. They were coming to talk to you and you panicked.”

“You don't know they were coming to talk to me. They disappeared—” She looked at the mass readings again, to be sure. “They disappeared before you came into realspace. There,” she said, pointing.

“I'm going by what you said yourself. You thought they were coming to you.”

“Yes,” she said, remembering the lunge of the hungry fish-thing and her mad obsession with the sensors until
Endeavor
came.

“That's the only thing you said that made any sense.”

He stared past her. His mouth was set, but he was no longer particularly angry. Hanna had felt his anger die through the hours of debriefing, and it was a relief to her, although she knew the reason. Erik was convinced that he had won whatever battle he thought he was fighting. He thought her too incompetent to threaten his version of the way things ought to be. She had proven herself a failure, and proven him right. Nothing about her could engage his emotions very strongly now.

That was not true of Marte Koster, who had gotten more furious as time went on. Hanna said, “Did you tell Marte about this?”

“Sure.”

“No wonder she was so mad.”

Erik said indifferently, “You might as well get some rest.”

After a minute Hanna got up. Her muscles ached. She was in fact very tired. She also felt, in some way she could not define, injured.

She said, “What are you going to do now?”

“I'm not sure yet. Plant an unmanned beacon and go on to the new locality, probably. Depends on what they say Earthside.”

Hanna looked down at her hands. “I could go out again,” she said.

“No. Nobody's going to try that again. Don't ask me why. Not my decision.”

She felt a surge of relief—and on its heels, taking her by surprise, disappointment.

She started to leave without saying anything, and then turned back and said, “When do you want me back in Navigation?”

“You won't have to worry about Navigation anymore.”

She said uncertainly, “What does that mean?”

“You're going home. Very quietly. Just as soon as I can get transport out here for you.”

“But—but what about my research?”

He finally looked at her. He said, “You're wasting your time anyway. Who's going to take you seriously after the junk you came up with out there?”

“It wasn't junk! I don't know what it meant, but it was meaningful!”

“There's enough computer power working on it to run half the Fleet. If it meant anything we'll find out. Go to bed.”

“Whose decision was it to get rid of me? I want to talk to him.”

“It's mine. Don't waste your time talking. Get out of here. That's an order.”

She got out.

*   *   *

Jameson did not speak of Hanna's adventure to anyone outside the
Endeavor
Project until the day after it happened, the last thing he wanted being to suggest that he was alarmed. He had been in his office in the early dawn, staring at the analysis of the girl's report while the mists rose off the gray river and the red sun, despite the early hour, promised a day of sweltering heat. The commissioners of the Polity met each morning, and he did not mention the
Endeavor
at all until the end of the meeting. He showed the analysis to his colleagues and was pleased when they looked at the masses of question marks, logical branchings and variant interpretations, and shook their heads—all except Katherine Petrov. Petrov was a very old woman, so old that A.S. no longer could give her the appearance of youth; but she was
a very alert old woman. She looked around with bright eyes and said that the whole scenario was terrifying.

“Not really, Kate,” Jameson said.

“How can you say that! Spears and cut-up snakes and burnt sacrifices! Do you know what it reminds me of? An evil myth system, the old planting sacrifices—I don't suppose this girl's a virgin, is she?”

Peter Struzik spluttered. Struzik represented Earth along with Petrov, under the old rules that gave the mother world two seats on the commission; but he was its president and did not vote, and could afford to find humor in situations that drove the others to frenzy. Petrov looked at him suspiciously and said, “What's funny now?”

“She's D'neeran,” Struzik said. “Know the D'neeran definition of a virgin?” He leaned forward, grinning. “A kid too young to know which sex it is. Then it decides it doesn't matter anyway and goes after anything that moves.”

Petrov snorted, but only to hide a snicker. Jameson disregarded the exchange and said, “That's just what I mean, Kate. You looked at this data and immediately patterned it in human terms. Lady Hanna is human too. The familiar elements you see are part of her background as well as yours. She did her own patterning here.”

“Perhaps,” Andrella Murphy remarked, “Species X was the origin of the myths.”

She smiled pleasantly at Jameson. Murphy when bored was inclined to flights of fancy and outrageous speculation. Jameson wished he were a telepath himself, so that he could object to her in silence that he did not want any such ideas put into the others' heads.

He said, “Am I meant to take that seriously, Andrella?”

“I suppose not,” she admitted. “But D'neera was cut off from us for so long—”

“Never completely,” Jameson said, and Petrov said, unexpectedly supporting him, “That wouldn't matter. The continuity of human culture is so strong, a few hundred years wouldn't matter. Not even a few thousand when you're talking about archetypes. The images that come down from before the dawn don't die. They're so embedded in all our cultures, they're nearly inborn.”

Murphy looked rather sadly at the analysis and said, “So what looks like the source of a primal image…”

“Is only another image,” Jameson said. “This is no literal rendering of the content of an alien mind. You're looking at Lady Hanna's creation.”

“I wouldn't like to meet her on a dark night, then.”

“Oh,” Jameson said, “I don't suppose she's as bad as all that. It's not surprising the images she formed are frightening. She told me only hours before the contact that the quality of alienness, so to speak, frightens her. I think she would agree that she inevitably transformed the beings' thoughts in the act of perceiving them. It's impossible to disentangle a purely alien element from this combination.”

al-Nimeury said, “What good is it, then?”

Jameson said regretfully, “Not much, I'm afraid. Not immediately. But it was communication, of a sort. It was governed by natural laws. After a few more such instances, perhaps we will begin to understand what those laws are, and form a theory that will make telepaths a useful addition to
Endeavor
in the future.”

They were all beginning to look bored now. Struzik muttered, “This would make a pretty mess if the public got hold of it.”

“Irrelevant, as long as Alpha and Beta remain secret.”

al-Nimeury said suddenly, “I want to bring that up again. You came out to Co-op and talked the assemblymen into going along with this and nobody knows what's going on. Co-op's paying its share and they've got a right to know what happens—”

They all began talking at once, except for Murphy, who watched Jameson closely. Arthur Feng was not in the room but on Colony One. His head and shoulders seemed to hang in the air at the foot of the table; there was something wrong at his end, and through the apparition the wall of the room was visible. Jameson saw with satisfaction that something was wrong with the sound now too, and though the wraith's lips moved, nothing it said was audible.

Jameson let the others talk themselves into keeping the matter under seal. They subsided at last, more or less in agreement. Struzik said, “What if Beta comes to nothing and this is all the contact there is, Jamie? What will you do then?”

“I don't know,” Jameson said. “Don't call me that, Peter. If Species X misses
Endeavor
again—and I think that may happen—I'll go out there to talk with Fleming and Koster.”

Petrov said, “Why in heaven's name go all the way out there?”

“Review the troops, boost morale, that sort of thing.”

Struzik said pettishly, “Couldn't you just do it by holo?”

“I'd be back in time for the budget hearings, Peter. Weren't you telling me only last week that personal contact is of utmost importance?”

“Is that new girl of yours going?”

“Maybe,” he said with the trace of a smile.

“I thought so. You just want a few days off. I guarantee I'll make your life miserable. I'll call you a dozen times a day.”

Jameson submitted to the teasing good-naturedly. He could afford to. He had set out to undercut the impact of Hanna ril-Koroth's report without entirely discounting her value, and succeeded. It was no small accomplishment in this group, and although they were predisposed to pay little attention to a D'neeran, he could not have done it so easily if Petrov had not, by chance, given him a custom-made opening.

At that, he did not think Andrella Murphy believed a word of it; she knew him too well.

*   *   *

Hanna made up her mind to risk smuggling out the data she wanted. She would record everything on a wafer the size of her thumbnail, and swallow it as she left; but so much of it was classified that she thought there was a good chance Erik would anticipate her, and she would be caught.

Therefore she worked frantically to salvage what she could from the wreck her venture on
Endeavor
had become. With no idea how long she would be on the ship, she plunged into its archives and worked with an energy that came not from stimulants but from desperation. She slept in snatches, fully clothed, and forgot to eat except when Tamara brought her food. The synthesis she had envisioned since one luminous moment when she fully understood the Hierarchus was tantalizingly close. An eyes-only report on F'thalian linguistics promised a foundation for describing a theory of separate but contiguous realities, and as she read it her notes on F'thalian thought, side-by-side with the Polity report, fell finally into place. The contradictions between true-human linguistic analysis and her perceptions were illusory;
the two were complementary, paired but distinct outlines of the same structure, each lacking salient features. The reasons for omissions that had puzzled the analysts were clear, and so was the reason for F'thal's clear and baffling boredom with human beings. In the giddy swirl of F'thalian perception, interactions were substantial as material objects. Pan-F'thalian did not describe “things,” only systems and an infinity of subsystems. F'thal had no word for “aliens” because humans were only a minor division of the great subsystems of life. There was nothing special about beings from other stars.