The D’neeran Factor (16 page)

Presently he said, “Would any D'neeran have done what you just did?”

“No—” She shook her head. The slight movement rocked her. She was close to her limit from strain and exhaustion.

“No? It's you, then? I might have known…”

He pursued a tangential thought.

“What?” she said weakly, trying for the thousandth time to follow him with logic.

“Suicide maneuvers,” he said as if she ought to have known. “You do believe in the direct approach, don't you?”

“Do I?” said poor Hanna. Her head thudded unmercifully.

“Umm-hmm…” His gaze turned inward. He said very softly, perhaps to himself, “What will you become when youth and luck and brilliance fail you?”

She almost knew what he meant. She did not want to know. She put up her hands and pushed it away. She said, “Just tell me why. Tell me why!”

He came back from wherever he had gone and regarded her, again, dispassionately. He said, “I will tell you this. The future should not be shaped by fear.”

She was at such a peak of sensitivity that the tapestry-vision was tangible, obscuring him. Species X was a glowing point of change. Human destiny depended on a choice: advance or retreat.

She said shakily, “If, if they are too frightened of what I have found, they won't, they won't let
Endeavor
go on and there won't be any more
Endeavors
—”

The edges of her vision closed in, and she swayed. He stepped forward quickly and caught her arm. He looked down at her curiously and said, “That's it.”

“But—but you could just have told me,” she said.

After a minute, to her lasting amazement, he smiled. It was like a light breaking over his face.

“I never thought of that,” he said.

Hanna did not hear him. Shadow lay on her sight and
Endeavor
writhed about her, insubstantial, thought not artifact. Dimly she saw it as seed for a new cycle of legend. The day of colonists lost and otherwise was over, having been but the foundation of a greater adventure. She looked at the hand that held her without seeing it, though it was a thing concrete and immovable among the shifting veils of time. Remembered islands soared above an alien sea. She muttered, “I understand now. I understand.”

“I think you do…. Are you all right?”

“No,” Hanna said honestly. She pulled her arm from his grasp and sat down with a thump. The
Endeavor
shivered and solidified. She looked up at Jameson resentfully. Meeting him, she thought, was like running head-on into a whirlwind. If you weren't careful it would take you just where it wanted, and you could not possibly ignore it.

He said, “You can do it, then? You will do it?”

“Stay quiet?” She hesitated. She did not know what she ought to do. Finally she said, cautiously, “For now. Because there's so little to go on. But not if I have—if I have what I think is proof they're hostile to all of us.”

“I wouldn't ask that of you. You misunderstand—” Fluency failed him for the first time; she thought in surprise that she had touched him somehow. After a minute he said, “There is no going onward without danger. Not for an individual, and not for the human species. But I have responsibilities.”

Hanna wished wearily that he thought plain speaking was one of them. Yet he spoke to her as to an equal.

She said, “You mean that I should trust you?”

He didn't say anything. She did not either. In the course of half an hour they had fallen into a strange and temporary
intimacy; but she could not imagine trusting Jameson without direct access to his motives and intent.

He turned away without haste. He was going to leave without another word. She said impulsively, “Commissioner?”

“Hmm?” He looked around, almost smiling; he was very pleased about something.

“Do you trust me?”

“D'neeran sincerity is notorious,” he said, amused.

“Well. Yes.” Hanna pushed at her unkempt hair, tense and mistrustful. A hundred questions danced in her head. She picked one at random. “What if the aliens come back?”

“Do you think they are out here now?”

“No. No, I don't. But I don't think they're going to stop.”

“No. We can't keep dancing to their measure, Lady Hanna.”

“Meaning—?”

“The
Endeavor
's voyage will proceed as originally planned. We will see how far the patience you detect extends.”

The islands were momentous peaks; but the sea of time was infinite.

“A long way,” she said.

“Then perhaps eventually we will have to do something else. Perhaps you will have to do something else.”

“Me—?”

“You. You're a beginning, you know,” he said, and was gone.

H
anna did not talk to Jameson again on that voyage, and the force of his presence and vision diminished.

Nothing happened to test her wobbly commitment. The
Endeavor
crept on, marking a trail through infinity, its progress even slower now because it paused before each Jump to announce a new destination.

No answer came. But the communications equipment sang again and again with the bugs now called, routinely, ambers. The working hypothesis was that they were overflow or feedback from Inspace communications between a ship outside sensor range and an unknown base that might be half the galaxy away; but their content was random, garbled, indecipherable.

There was a little space of hope when a series of robot probes were directed toward the star system that had served as a trigger, at least, for contact. The probes found a life-sustaining, pleasant planet, but it showed no sign of the work of hands or anything like them. Even Marte Koster finally gave up her dream of a super-civilization so energy-efficient as to be indetectable. There was no intelligent life here. Probably there never had been.

Hanna, immersed in “Sentience,” ceased to think of Species X. It was background to a life settled into peace, even into contentment. She did her tasks in Navigation, and researched, and wrote, and watched “Sentience” grow under her hands. In her crystalline recollection of the aliens she knew, there was no space for those who insisted on remaining unknown. She felt sometimes a guilty relief at their silence. She did not know if her estimate of Jameson's
responsibilities matched his own. If it did not, if events forced her to speak against his wish, he would—

She skipped away from the thought when it came, and also from the whisper that to know such a secret about such a man was power. But maybe not; who would believe her?

Endeavor
went on its way, trailing a ghost.

*   *   *

She was slightly more respected after her lengthy interview with Jameson; not much more. Her mates regarded her as a sort of organic radio rig whose perceptions had been as valid, and as useless, as those of the ship's Inspace receptors. Hanna might quarrel with the generalization, but she could not correct it without breaking her promise to Jameson, and therefore let it pass. She never again had the conscious sense of an alien presence, and her nightmares did not return. Sometimes she thought on waking that she remembered dark and shapeless impressions, but they never came clear—not in her unassisted efforts to remember, and not with the help of Peng's skill in hypnosis nor even, with Hanna's reluctant consent, his pharmacopoeia, until she felt that she was becoming as saturated with brain-bending chemicals as the day's true-human fashion dictated.

The only result of these experiments was a greater liking between Hanna and Peng, and they became lovers for a while; until Hanna for no good reason grew bored, and drifted away.

*   *   *

She did not forget Jameson's prediction of what D'neera might become, and she finished “Sentience” with a daring and passionate plea that humankind make use of her people's abilities.

“Each sentient species,” said the book which every day took on more life of its own, “exists perceptually, socially, and philosophically in a separate and entirely valid reality that in the last analysis is incomprehensible to us—unless we share their very thoughts. In our dealings with F'thal and Girritt and the two Primitive species, we have only made analogs of Outside realities from bits and patches of our own. The models we use therefore are riddled with error and at best incomplete. They have worked, so far. Yet tomorrow or the next day we might meet beings whose comprehension of us, or ours of them, is essential to amity—or
even to our survival, or theirs. Humanity would be wise to cultivate its telepathic cousins, who can reach into another being's heart, comprehend him from the inside, prevent dangerous errors of understanding and judgment, and ensure peace as we go on in search of the unimaginable—the same quest that shaped our ancestors, and has shaped us, and ultimately is the shape of humankind.”

When she re-read the final phrases she recognized a voice that was not her own. She excised it from the text, but it was not so easy to get it out of her head.

When the work was done she applied for her release from the
Endeavor
Project, leaving to Iledra the task of submitting the book to true-human channels of distribution, and to the Goodhaven Academy. A flurry of messages passed between them. Iledra's were filled with uncharacteristic doubts; the refrain of Hanna's was an equally uncharacteristic “Be quiet and do as I say.”

To Iledra's surprise, obstacles in important places evaporated. Hanna could not be surprised by anything of the sort— not since her discovery of an obscure sub-file during her research on Primitive A. It was entirely administrative and ought not to have been there, but there it was: documentation of her application for the visit, a handful of rejections bearing unknown names, and at the end a voice-recorded order to the functionary who had signed the final permit.

The order said: “Approve it.” The speaker was listed by Admin's careful identicode system as SHJ.

Hanna wondered if she had been meant to find it.

*   *   *

Near the end of the Standard year she knew she would soon go home, because the
Endeavor
Project officially asked her for a recommendation for one or more D'neerans to succeed her.

She had few candidates to choose from. The D'neeran community of interest in exopsychology was small, and Hanna knew each member of it. She suggested Anja Daru of Sothred and Charl Zeig of Gnerin, and wrote to the two herself—and was informed by a Project Central missive that her correspondence could not be transmitted.

She understood why when she received yet another official communication, this one from Paul Rodrigues, whom she had heard of vaguely as some kind of confidential assistant
to Starr Jameson. The recording showed a dark man impassive as Jameson himself. Rodrigues said, “It is requested that you do not communicate with your colleagues in any way before your departure from the project. Travel arrangements will ensure that you do not meet them aboard ship at the time of exchange. In the interest of maintaining—”

There was a pause. He was reading the last part from a note in his hand, and evidently had not looked at it before.

“In the interest of maintaining some pretense of scientific credibility, it is essential that Ms. Daru and Mr. Zeig should not be predisposed to duplicate your observations. This request is not subject to review.”

“Both of them?” Hanna said in surprise to the oblivious Rodrigues. She stuck out her tongue at the image because she did not like Rodrigues's face, and played back the recording to appreciate the single sardonic sentence that had to be pure Jameson.

She complied with the order, however—if only because she could not think of a way to circumvent it.

*   *   *

Hanna left the
Endeavor
in January of ST 2836, having lived aboard the vessel a little more than ten months. Erik was guiltily relieved to see her go, and Tamara was regretful. Otherwise her departure drew little attention; she was only one of the first to leave in a cycle of personnel changes that would turn over a considerable portion of
Endeavor
's crew in the second year of its voyage.

She came home to Koroth in mid-spring, ravenous for sweet open air and unpredictable winds. She went via a succession of spacecraft from the
Endeavor
to Earth orbit, from Earth orbit to D'neeran orbit, and from D'neeran orbit to Koroth's small spaceport. She walked from its tree-fenced expanse into Iledra's arms. It was morning, the starlight was golden, the very grasses rioted with blossoms, the trees were clouds of color, the windblown fountains were miracles, and her emotion collected a crowd. She came to the House in an aircar, like an invalid or an offworld dignitary, and some hours passed before she was composed enough for Iledra's remorseless debriefing.

All secrets were over now; but the passage of time and the aliens' silence had made them little, as (Hanna now
guessed) Jameson had foreseen. The transmutation of human destiny had lost its impact in her thought, and in the bare outline of events that was all Hanna could provide, Iledra saw only opportunity. Bribery and threat at such a distance were harmless and abstract. Iledra was pleased that Jameson had reposed confidence in Hanna, and more pleased when Hanna made her understand the confidence had been forced, not given.

“You learned something of true-human diplomacy,” Iledra said.

“Or expediency,” Cosma suggested.

“Or corruption,” Hanna muttered, thinking of Goodhaven. The three women, dining privately in Cosma's quarters, regarded one another's versions of the truth and found no common ground, though each was so fully aware of the others' perspectives that it was impossible to decide the validity of one over another.

The discordance did not trouble them, accustomed as they were to the imperatives of a telepathic society. D'neera was a collection of anarchistic splinters whose more-or-less cooperative functioning depended always on a breathless balance. The ship of state, as represented by the lords and ladies of D'neera, tended to lurch wildly, though the goals it eventually reached had so far proved satisfactory. The lords and ladies were in fact harassed administrators, charged with maintaining an open oligarchy and subject to removal if they took their anachronistic titles too seriously. Iledra had once referred to her title as “rather tatty,” which Hanna thought an accurate assessment. When she remembered her long conversation with Jameson she had an uneasy feeling that he knew just how accurate it was; that his careful formality might have been a reproach or a joke or a calculated effort to keep her off balance; that with no such grand title he was far more powerful on his world and in a larger society than she was anywhere, and called her “my lady” to remind her of the fact.