The D’neeran Factor (21 page)

Anja said suddenly, “H'ana, something's happening out there.”

Hanna waited, helmet in hands.

Anja said hesitantly, “There's an opening now. A new one. They're not going to shoot at us, are they? Wait. It's lit up now. I can't see inside.”

Hanna said, “Step up the magnification.”

“All right. Yes. It's just a little bare room. An air lock, I guess.”

“What's the light like? How's it compare to Solar illumination?”

She heard Anja put the question to the scout.

“It is within Sol-normal parameters,” the computer said.

“You heard?”

“I heard.”

“It's at the kilometer mark, almost. Barely moving.”

“Have you tried calling them?”

“We're still trying. There hasn't been an answer.”

“Maybe that's it,” Hanna said.

“What is?”

“An open door. An invitation.”

“Weird way to do it.”

“Direct, anyway.”

But Hanna went on waiting for what seemed a long time. She thought that even if someday she forgot whatever happened next, she would never forget this chamber with its comfortless benches and rows of tool lockers. It did not seem connected with anything else, not even in time. Her suit's EV environment was not activated and she was hot. The niche from which it had come had a shiny door. She saw her reflection in it, barely. Her hair was pulled back and tightly bound for weightlessness. The oval of her face was clear, and the wide, too-wide blue eyes. Other details faded in distortions.

She thought there were times when you couldn't think much about what you were going to do. You had to just go and do it.

Finally she put her helmet on and fastened its seals.

“I might as well go out,” she said. Her voice sounded too loud in the helmet.

“All right.” Anja sounded scared again.

“Maybe you'd better program a panic button. Just in case.”

“A what?” Charl said.

“Just tell the computer. It'll tell you how to set it up. What you want is to get the hell out of here the instant anything goes wrong. If you lose contact with me, for example.”

She went into the air lock, listening carefully as they talked to the scout. They were doing it right. Locked away from ship's atmosphere, she watched ship and suit pressure gauges and presently, when their original readings were reversed, gave the outer hatch an exit command. The stars wheeled and her stomach gave way for a giddy instant as she left artificial gravity. She tumbled in a bowl of distant, shining glory. For the first time in her life the pleasure of this experience was shadowed by dread dark as the hulking scout. She stopped the slow spin, locked in star patterns for an upright referent, and started the drive unit on her back.

The guidance controls were at her waist. She touched them and drifted round the scout. The alien vessel and the glow signaling the open hatch were clearly visible. She moved toward them slowly. She thought of the enormity of what she was doing, making history, and chose not to think
about that. She thought of Starr Jameson and said in a whisper he could not hear: “If you were out here you'd think twice about a renaissance.”

“What?” Charl said.

“Nothing.”

When she had gone about halfway she stopped. She said, “If I wait here do you think they'll come out?”

“No,” Charl said promptly.

Anja said at the same time, “Yes.”

“Well, let's see.”

After a minute Anja said, “How long will you wait?”

“Well—why not an hour? Why not, long as we've waited on them?”

But the bravado grated on her own ears. She was ashamed of it. She started to move her hand to go on, and saw a shadow against the alien light.

She let out breath in a long, deep sigh, believing, at last, in a concrete reality.

She said, “See that?”

“I see it.” Charl's voice was tense.

“Well?”

“What?”

“Dammit, bring the picture up and tell me what it is! It's dark out here!”

“Oh. It's got four limbs. And a head. I think. H'ana, that's all I can tell. It's in a spacesuit.”

“Can you see its face?”

“No, the face plate's opaque.”

She hesitated. Move and counter-move. Stopping had brought a response. She would stay where she was.

It was moving faster than she had been. She put a hand to her belt and touched controls that would boost contrast on the scene before her. The alien changed from a featureless shadow to a figure in a spacesuit. The suit differed only in detail from her own; given a little time, she would be able to figure out what everything on it was supposed to do. It was pressurized, and she could not guess at the body beneath it.

It came closer, and its helmet was subtly different in shape from her own—higher, wider, but shallower front to back, as if its head were oblong. Like her own it did not have a full face plate. There was only a darker band about two-thirds of the way up, presumably for it to see through.

Closer: Protruding from its garment at one side was something that might be a tool, or a weapon.

And closer: She could not see through the visor. The gloved hands had each three fingers and an opposable thumb.

In the last seconds it grew bigger, bigger, bigger than any human she had seen, like a figure of nightmare that would never cease growing—but it did.

It reached out and a four-fingered hand, huge, closed on her wrist. She must have made some sound because Anja said sharply, “H'ana, are you all right?”

“Yes. Can you see?”

“We can see. Why'd it do that?”

She swung round in vacuum and tried to see what it used for eyes, but the visor was dark to her.

Charl said, “Did you know you're moving away?”

She had not noticed. She looked ahead. The alien ship grew as she watched.

“Pretty fast,” she said uneasily.

“Try to pull away.”

“No. I have to go along,” she said, but her throat was tight.

Anja said, her voice too high, “Are you brave or just stupid?”

Hanna did not know the answer. She was close enough to see details of the compartment beyond the open hatch. But there were no details to see; as Anja had said, it was bare.

“I'm going to try contacting it telepathically,” she said, and without waiting for an answer reached out in thought as she had been doing since childhood, prepared for the rich, living texture of an intelligent mind.

There was nothing. It was not a machine; it was living, all right; but she could tell nothing else about it. She sensed none of its emotions, intentions or attitudes, not even its awareness of her presence. The impersonal connections she had felt on
XS-12
were shadows of this strength. She had never touched such a barrier, not even among the most powerful Adepts she had known.

She tried giving it an explicit message. She could not think in words to it; pseudo-verbal communication was possible only when there was a shared language. But visual-emotional-conceptual
content could be shared across species, and what she said to it in this way was:
I
am friendly-curious though afraid oh so afraid and wish to know you in rich sharing. Will you oh please commune?

It did not respond in any way. They were nearly at the open hatch.

“It won't answer,” she said.

“I don't like it.” Charl sounded anxious. “They're too damn mysterious.”

Anja said, “You can't expect them to jump into our arms.”

“We're jumping into theirs.”

“H'ana is, anyway.”

Hanna said, “Have you got that panic button set up?”

The air lock yawned in front of her. As if of its own will Hanna's free hand closed on the edge of the hatch. The being still held her right arm; her hesitation swung it around sharply. It caught at a handhold she could not see and edged into the cavity, and for a moment they hung facing each other.

Then it pulled her in, not with the gentle tug that would have been enough to break her light anchoring grip, but with a surge of effortless power that wrenched her shoulder and sent her crashing and rebounding from the opposite wall.

“H'ana?” said a voice in her ear.

She gasped, “Assume hostile—”

Gravity came on and she fell heavily on her behind with a jar she felt to the top of her skull.

There was an instant of tremendous noise in her helmet as everything on
XS-12
stopped working forever, and in her mind the silent screams of Charl and Anja as they died, and for an instant she was on the
Clara
again (shut them out, shut them
out!),
and made the screams stop and shrank into the silence. And looked up at the shape towering over her, too stupefied by that moment of death to understand, and thought without knowing why: I hope I die as quickly.

S
he came back to consciousness all at once in a breathless rush. There should not have been any consciousness; she was supposed to be dead. She had charged the alien to make it fire its hand weapon, force it to kill her, because now there was no question of its hostility and she was afraid her mind would be open to it, all her knowledge of human science and defenses and government written out for it to see. The suicidal leap for its throat was the last thing she remembered, and she did not welcome this wakening.

Without opening her eyes or moving, she explored what her senses told her. She was spreadeagled on her back on a hard, smooth surface. Her wrists and ankles were tightly bound, and her clothing had been removed.

Sweat began to bead on her skin. This is impossible, she thought, and pushed against the bonds. They were metal; there was no play at all.

This cannot be happening to me. Can't be. Can't be.

She did not want to open her eyes. Through closed lids she saw bright light. It gave no heat and she was cold. Around her there was silence except for the subliminal hum of machines.

A voice of terrible power and clarity said to her thought:
Whowhat are you?

She opened her eyes at last. She had never wanted less to do anything.

The alien stood near her, big as she remembered, half again her size. Its face was gray, and above that the skull was tufted with scales or coarse feathers. Two eyes were set very far apart in the flat face. Running nearly the length of the face and part-way to the top of the skull was a narrow strip of bony
plating set a little out from the face, and under that a wide mouth that bulged outward, almost a muzzle. The skull was higher than a human's, but more rounded than the shape of the helmet had indicated. At the sides of the neck were organs that looked like gill slits, but they were armored with bone. A red tunic hid its upper body and arms. It also wore a garment something like a kilt; she could not see its legs.

She only stared at it, paralyzed with disbelief and unsureness and the beginning of a fear she did not recognize. Cold choices between life and death did not frighten her, and what else had there been to fear?

It said again, meaning the personal “you”:
Whatwho are you?

Her mind was blank in the face of the impossible. There was no emotional content in the thought at all, only the inquiry. D'neeran Adepts could do something like this, with rigorous concentration and discipline, but it was only a shadow of what this being did without effort. Yet there were overtones also of hard certainties, of things it thought it knew and echoes of other thoughts, and they were deadly.

It lifted a heavy four-fingered hand, and she saw that the fingers ended in thick curving claws. It laid the tips of the claws between her breasts and moved its hand, and there was a stinging as her skin tore. She trembled, but the slight pain roused her.

It said:
I
am the Celebrant-Questioner and the triumph that dissolves you. Show me truth!

Shaken, struggling to comprehend through fear and strangeness, she answered with an image:
I
am Wildfire.

Because that was how her own people sometimes thought of her when they spoke directly to her mind.

A rivulet of blood trickled down her sweating skin. She said to the being, without trying to hide her fear because she could not:
What do you want with/from me?

I will know the heart of our danger: the place/strengths/ safeguards of the beasts: their tools of death, their watchfulness: fulfillment and prediction all at once: the use and proper end of Wildfire. This is what I will have.

Hanna moved convulsively against her bonds, knowing at last and too late, an hour too late, a year too late, that this was what she had ignored, this was what she had been swayed from: the plain fact that the hunter's eye was no
analog, but literally real. The end of courage and birth of fear had their reasons. She had not trusted herself or dead Anja enough. The being's thought made it plain it was interested only in military intelligence and—a horror she did not yet understand and therefore, in extremity, dismissed. It did not care about culture or history, art or philosophy or any of the other things
Endeavor
had gone into space to exchange. It did not care about her luminous vision of all the rich varieties of life. Her own senses had warned her, and she had turned away from them. She had failed, spectacularly and dangerously.

She thought in despair:
I
cannot in rightfulness tell you those things. Peace follows me. My people will not harm you.

But the strength of her own conviction was lost in fear, and the being knew that in this moment she would, if she could, harm it or kill it or anything else to escape.

It said:
You are not-People: clever treecubs come of old to ground awash in blood. You will show me what I ask, for I will hurt and force you.

It meant raw pain, so clearly her body twisted of its own accord in anticipation. It would come if she spoke or did not speak, inevitable, but still she could not accept that and thought in familiar terms of interrogations. She did not know what to do. No one had ever taught her what to do. Human questioning could not be resisted; there were drugs to free a prisoner's tongue; there was no need for systematic pain and no one had ever spoken of it to her, except in whispered tales of forgotten hell-holes.