The D’neeran Factor (24 page)

They did not bother to hide their thoughts. Hanna understood none of it. Their new agitation only threatened her precarious peace. An ocean's slow pulsebeat rocked her.

A new and powerful voice said:
One star may be all that We need; its Home, whence it returns: first known, last to fade in the end-of-self. We will try.

We will try.

They were specialists in their way. They knew what mutilation did to the human spirit and made a ruin of her breasts. They knew what disfigurement did to identity, and
destroyed her face. They knew what sudden blindness did to courage, and put out her eyes. They knew about humans and their children, and did things in her belly that made her pass out again, but not for long, because they never let her stay unconscious for long.

*   *   *

Wednesday night Jameson recalled the
Endeavor.
There was no choice. It was too vulnerable, too tempting a target, sailing space with its computers chuckling to themselves and blithely inviting the aliens to come say hello. So he was told, anyway, and reluctantly he believed this much at least: now was not the time to expound on the philosophical arguments in favor of alien contact.

Another name for the
Endeavor
Project was current in certain circles. It was “Jameson's Folly.”

Erik Fleming asked to be reassigned to the hopeless search for
XS-12
and Hanna. Jameson had no direct authority in the matter, but he still bore his precarious title and his hint to Fleming's Fleet superiors would go a long way. He said he would see what he could do.

When he was done with Fleming he poured a drink and stood at the edge of his office for a while, looking out at the river as Hanna had done not long ago.

He did not think he would see her again, and in memory, memory of a time so separated from the desperate now that it might have been a distant past, she came before his eyes with her odd blend of adamant and innocent. He had thought: she needs only a little shaping to be a precious tool; a little patience with compromise, some skill in the way things work. Now he thought: she did not want to go. And did not even think about the courage that took her out there. And neither did I.

He had spent his life in public service. He was responsible for humanity first, then Heartworld. If he were to accept responsibility for every individual who came into his work the burden would crush him. He could not afford to forget the fact, and now he was reminded of the reasons he had learned it in the first place. He had begun to like Hanna ril-Koroth; and he had personally sent her to her death.

*   *   *

You know this configuration. I see that you do. And from here to your Home?

She was quite mad. When she thought of something they wanted they cut off another bit of her. That was her reward. Sometimes it was the other way around. It seemed proper and gratifying. When it was finished there would be nothing left of her. An orderly and needful procedure.

In a moment of vague anxiety she asked, it's all right, isn't it, Iledra? Yes, Iledra answered.

This being is your Leader? But there are others. What are you?

I am nothing. Nothing does not live, therefore I do not live, therefore kill me.

We will not. Show me the Homes again in your thought. Not that one. The others. The others!

I have no eyes, no hands, therefore no thought.

Iledra sat up in bed and called “H'ana?” but there was no answer. Dawn showed at her windows. It was night in Namerica, she could talk to Jameson if she wished, but what was there to tell him? Hanna was still alive. Iledra could not explain the shock that had waked her. She was not even sure it was real; perhaps she had been dreaming about Hanna, and only her own anxiety had roused her.

She lay down again and pulled the feather-stuffed quilt over her shoulders.

*   *   *

Four days later the mayday from
XS-12
reached the
Mao Tse-Tung
and the D'neeran light cruiser
Voltaire,
which haunted space where the scout had disappeared. It carried position referents which were arrogantly clear. The
Voltaire
had no chance in the race that followed. The
Mao
plunged through uncharted space much faster than was safe, and in a steaming empty place with an atmosphere that could just be breathed, Aziz Khan found the wreck
of XS-12,
the pieces of Charl Zeig and Anja Daru, and something he did not at once recognize as H'ana ril-Koroth, which still barely lived.

I
t wasn't really dark. There were flashes of light, pinwheels, silent explosions of brightness, firework forms pursuing one another, a mad dance against the blackness.

Hanna watched them for a while. It did not seem to matter that she was blind.

Nothing hurt. She did not know why that was so important.

She felt nothing: nothing at all. If that was the alternative, fine.

Iledra said:
Beloved H'ana-daughter. Attend to me.

Her mourning filled the darkness. Hanna felt tearful. Iledra was lost to her, it was only her own sad desire that spoke.

H'ana daughter, I am here.

Here? What is here?

The bright images gave way to a room where men and women clustered round a shrouded figure, half-machine, that lay unfeeling and unmoving.

That is you.

No. That is not me.

But it was not important.

“She is aware of me,” said Iledra's voice through deep water.

“Ask her,” said another voice she ought to know.

She felt Iledra's reluctance, but slowly an image formed, the details changing, shifting: a little space ship as Iledra imagined it, two persons whom she recognized.

“She does not want to think about it,” Iledra said.

“She must. She will not for us. She must for you.”

Think. Remember.

No. Oh, no.

But it was not so much a protest against thinking about what had happened, as against the thing itself. She was not sure what that was, but it was bad.

Think. It is important, H'ana-daughter.

The keystone so. Tomorrow rain. We rest by speaking pools, enclosed
….

Remember. It is important to me.

Her awareness leapt, and for an instant she knew she was alive.

Iledra?

I am here. Tell me.

“Tell her,” said the voice she ought to know, “to think it to you in words. I want the clearest report possible.”

“She's too weak. It will have to be images.”

In the silence Hanna's mind murmured along pleasant, harmless paths.

“All right, then,” the voice said presently. “Describe them as well as you can.”

Show me the aliens. Show me what happened.

The urgency and sorrow seemed distant. It was, perhaps, safe to approach them; memory too, perhaps. She did so cautiously, for Iledra. Who would not push her to terror and then recoil from it as others (others?) had done. She fell through a kaleidoscope of the New City, Koroth, Earthly glitter, black space, and thought very clearly:
The signal.

And then?

A picture: Anja and Charl at her shoulders, not knowing the last hours of their lives had come; the tension, apprehension, fumbling at a mystery.

And then? And then? And then?

It was not so hard to make the images, as long as she remembered it had all happened to somebody else. Not to her. Never to her.

A quick intake of breath, involuntary. “So they destroyed it without reason or warning.”

Iledra's voice. “None.”

The pain! I cannot, I cannot, no! No! No!

There were quick, half-sensed flurries of movement that she knew only through Iledra's perceptions.

“This is what happened each time—”

“All right. Yes. I can block it and go on.”

“Not so much,” said still another voice, a woman's voice.

Hanna's mind soared suddenly into the air above southern Koroth. Here was the little town where her mother taught the neighbors' children, and orange blossoms were heavy on the air. The summer sun late in the evening cast long shadows from every hillock, and the heat was thick as water. I can feel that, she thought, and reached for a shadow. She thought she knew how it would feel between her fingers.

She had no fingers.

The voice said close by, “What did you tell them?”

D'neera. D'neera. I told them only of D'neera. They asked where my People are.

“D'neera,” said Iledra's voice, sounding sad. “Yes. The center of her universe is D'neera. She is not only human; she is D'neeran.”

“Did she not tell them about the Polity?”

“Not much, I think. It is not clear. They guessed there was more. But it was too late then. Their only dangerous knowledge is of D'neera. I do not know how they made her tell them even that.”

“You see what they did.”

“It would be enough.”

“For anyone.”

“Yes.”

The third, strange voice said, “Enough. Enough for today. No more.”

“One moment.” Something came near. Close to her ear the familiar voice said, “Hanna. I'm sorry.”

Sorry? she wanted to say. But she could not speak, and the question still rang in her mind when they put her to sleep again.

*   *   *

“Horrible,” said Iledra. She noticed, with detachment, that her hands were shaking.

“Horrible,” Jameson agreed. He stood before her still holding the glass of wine she had refused. She had no comforting illusion that today's ordeal was over. She needed a clear head.

She breathed deeply, trying to compose herself. For a brief space, here in Jameson's private office, the world was quiet. The wall to the river was shut, although she could see
through it. The water was gray and restless under black clouds, the horizon a sick glare of light. She saw lightning, but no thunder was audible here. In another room close by, Cosma was exchanging stares with Paul Rodrigues and with an assortment of military and intelligence men whose questions could not wait. Iledra did not know if they would permit her to leave Earth. She could not and would not promise to keep her new knowledge to herself; to do so would be a rejection of principle amounting to treason. And the true-humans would want to control what she had taken for them from Hanna. They would filter it, edit it, shape it and tell a hundred societies what was good for them to know. A D'neeran could not stand for it; but she did not see how they could keep her here without producing as much trouble as the truth would create.

Jameson moved away from her, looked at the glass in his hand as if he wondered where it had come from, and drank the wine himself. Iledra thought he would go to his desk, an enormous thing studded and surrounded with devices for spanning human space. The ambience the room had had on her last visit was lost in the glitter of tools for communication and information retrieval, and the array had the secondary function of subtly intimidating anyone who faced Jameson when he took his place at its center.

But he stopped short of it and looked aimlessly about the room, and Iledra's attention sharpened. She read signs that Jameson was very tired and had been taking stimulants for several days, but that should not produce this absence of mind.

He looked around, gauging her recovery from the hour just past. He said as if it were inconsequential, “Why did they send her back?”

“Why did—?”

“They send her back. You must have wondered.”

Iledra said unwillingly, “Yes. But I have been too worried about her to give it thought.”

“It was not altruism.” He came back to stand before her, and she got up as if some subtle alarm had sounded. The conversational tone did not deceive her.

“You think it is important?”

“Obviously. They went to no little trouble to keep her alive.
She must have been near death when they stopped—from shock, pain, loss of blood. They nursed her through the shock, sealed her wounds, and provided her with a fair substitute for human plasma. Enough to keep her alive for a day or two; enough to save her until Aziz Khan got to her. Why?”

“She said nothing of it. I don't know.” At the moment Iledra did not care. “Can she be healed?”

“I think so. The medical people think so. They've seen worse.”

“Worse!”

He said dispassionately, “Accident victims. She was mutilated with surgical precision, and all her vital organs are intact. Accidents are not so careful.”

Iledra had never liked Jameson much. Now she loathed him from the heart.