The D’neeran Factor (26 page)

Morisz said, “I read yesterday's transcript. There was nothing. Nothing definite.”

Tharan said patiently, “Telepathic communication is not a one-to-one correspondence with fact.”

Morisz only looked at him. Tharan knew Morisz was impatient and beginning to get angry. Hanna should have been a mine of information and she was not, and the true-humans did not understand why. Tharan was not surprised. He had come to Earth prepared to explain the uses and limitations of telepathy. Now he settled himself against the wall in the corridor outside Hanna's room and began to lecture.

He said, “Every bit of information exchanged is surrounded by a network of associated concepts, memories, emotions. It can be very precise if you have a language in common, and fairly precise even without that if there's a shared cultural matrix. If you don't have either of those things, you have what H'ana was writing about in ‘Sentience'—very broad, global concepts with a high degree of subjectivity. She's trying to put into words—or sometimes I am—things that were images, symbols, very fuzzy when you try to objectify them. To put it another way, she knows a great deal about the aliens, but it's not the kind of knowledge you want. You'll notice all they got out of her was hard-science information. Stellar configurations are a shared objective reference, so she could show them where D'neera is. But they were the ones doing the questioning, not her. And where the ‘soft' side is concerned, how they think, how they live, that kind of thing—as I said, she has a lot of information, but there's no program to plug it into. So it doesn't make sense to her or to me and it's not going to make sense to you.”

When he stopped he saw Morisz's mouth twitch. Morisz said, “There's some objective data, though. The Lost World, for instance.”

“Sure—because there was something in her cultural matrix to connect it to. But it's very general. No detail.”

Morisz pondered. He said, “I don't understand what she means. That they were doing something besides questioning her.”

“I know. I don't either. Neither does she. It's very vague. Maybe religious but not really, she says, and then somehow divorced from its original context. They ripped her up for a reason, but she doesn't know what it was.”

“You have to get more.”

Morisz looked tired. Tharan said sympathetically, “Jameson on your back?”

Morisz did not answer. He didn't have to. Jameson kept turning up at odd moments, straight and stiff and staring at the remnants of Hanna with an inhuman lack of queasiness. The man had a strong stomach and maybe, Tharan thought, some things going on inside him a mindhealer could hardly resist. But he wanted Hanna sucked dry anyway.

After a minute Morisz said, “We're wasting time.”

“Yes,” Tharan said, and set about calming himself for the return to Hanna. What he was doing was hard. Everything he got for Morisz was filtered through layers of blind pure animal pain.

Tharan thought it was a good thing they had him. They'd have gotten nothing by themselves.

*   *   *

After a while it seemed to Jameson that he had been hearing Dale Tharan's voice all his life.

They found out what the aliens looked like and made pictures, and Hanna looked through Tharan's eyes and agreed (with what pain Tharan did not say) that the pictures were accurate. They found out what the outside of the alien spacecraft looked like, which told them nothing, and what an alien torture chamber looked like, which told them less. They found out you could make a neural stimulator from something that looked like living fabric and set about trying to do so, hoping if they succeeded they could work backward to some bit of knowledge about the aliens. They searched for records of the Lost World, but there were none; that was why it was lost. They tried to figure out how an alien stungun worked. They analyzed blood samples taken from Hanna on the
Mao,
and came up with something unexpected.

“Psychoactive drugs?” said Jameson, who saw every report anyone made on Hanna. His eyes hurt constantly and he seldom slept. The first narrow escape from being recalled to Heartworld might be over, but only his intimate knowledge
of the situation here kept certain key councilmen in line.

“Yeah. Funny thing is, she doesn't remember any effects.” Morisz's eyes were red too.

“Can you tell when she got them?”

“Late in the process. Very late.”

“Before or after her memories gave out?”

“Impossible to say. The best guess is it was after she lost consciousness more or less permanently.”

“There would have been no point at that stage.”

“There's no point to any of it. Why do they think we're some kind of goddamn tigers? What could a bunch of ragged-ass colonists do to make them think that?”

“Whatever the reason, she ought to have been able to show them otherwise.”

“What?”

“‘Sentience.' Section Six.”

“Oh,” said Morisz. “That.”

“What's that for?” Jameson said.

“What—oh. The screen. I don't know. We started using it at the beginning. I forget why.” Morisz was so used to having a barrier before the module holding Hanna that he had stopped noticing it.

“Get rid of it.”

“Right.”

But when it was gone Morisz remembered why it had been there. This outer room was large enough to seem uncrowded in spite of its masses of equipment, for even minor
regeneration was not a simple task, and Hanna was not a minor project. Now, however, it was crowded with people, and with the screen gone they had to look at Hanna. Eight weeks into the regeneration process she was, if anything, a more repulsive sight than she had been at the start. The medical people liked to see what was happening, though their eyes were not as good as their instrumentation, and sometimes they forgot to cover up the tangle of flesh and tubes and wires with decent sheeting. They had not forgotten this time, but the contours of the figure centered in its zero-g bubble were horribly suggestive. But at least, Morisz thought, she has a face again. The only recognizable thing about Hanna when he had first seen her had been the straight pretty nose. The aliens had not wanted to obstruct respiration.

The scene taking shape was Jameson's idea. He seemed not to believe Hanna had told Tharan everything, though the questioning went on for hours each day, and insisted on trying one more thing. Tharan, just outside the chamber where Hanna lay, was already in tenuous rapport with her; she was more heavily sedated than usual, and the effect showed in Tharan's face as a vague slackness. Neuro- and psychopharmacologists were in place, and a physiogeneralist stared over their shoulders at a mix-monitor panel. A Fleet liaison specialist and one of Morisz's assistants ignored each other from adjacent seats. There was nothing more to wait for. Morisz was about to witness—in a sense, even, to direct— something he had heard of but never seen: a mindhealer-Adept of D'neera undertaking a telepathic deep probe.

He said to Tharan, “You know what you're looking for.”

“Something…hidden…” Tharan's voice trailed off. It would be difficult for him to maintain a double awareness—inward to Hanna, outward to the others—but it could be done. He would not attempt to speak to them unless he got what he was after.

“Anything new. Anything at all. You've been over most of it so often you should notice anything different. But don't waste time on the stuff we know. Get down to the end and concentrate on that.”

Tharan did not answer. His eyes glazed as the contact deepened. Hanna, Morisz knew, had not wanted to do this,
but Tharan had appealed to her sense of duty—and, Morisz suspected, her guilt.

He glanced over his shoulder. “Everybody ready?” he asked, but not until he saw Jameson's bare nod did he say to Tharan, “All right. Go ahead.”

Minutes trickled by. Morisz watched Tharan, but he was as motionless as Hanna. He would be living through her experiences now, not just turning them into words for Intelligence, but guiding her attention to details unconsciously noted. If he could he would damp the emotional strain, holding her to detailed objectivity. Morisz had expected signs of strain, but there were none. Time passed, men shifted position and coughed, someone spoke. Morisz wondered why he had ever thought a deep mindprobe would be a dramatic thing—

Blackblackblackno

“No!” Morisz whispered, and wiped sudden sweat from his face. The sensation had been one of falling, as if he had been on the edge of sleep and jerked back just in time from an endless black pit, wide awake. He looked sidelong at Jameson and saw a hand slowly withdrawn from an instinctive grab for support. He felt a flicker of satisfaction that Jameson was not immune to
this
at least, and then was ashamed.

He whispered to Jameson, “Tharan lost it.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Morisz glanced uneasily at the pharmacologists. He had been there for Hanna's first waking, and knew first-hand what happened when a half-mad telepath lost control. Tharan was supposed to be able to focus and channel her awareness, centering it on himself and reinforcing the inhibitions against random projection that Hanna had internalized in childhood and practiced all her life. If he failed, the pharmacologists would take over. But even they were using negative alerts, so a circuit would close and Hanna would sleep if they made any move without warning. That first time their colleagues had nearly killed her when all they wanted to do was shut her up.

Tharan was quite still, his hand resting on the thin plastic film that provided a visual cue for the force field containing Hanna. Sometimes he went inside with her, but not today;
she could not be touched indiscriminately, and in the deep probe the urge to do so would be strong.

The tension had grown with that fragment of Hanna's memory, and Morisz muttered to distract himself, “He's getting attached to her in spite of himself, isn't he?”

“Yes.” Jameson just breathed the word.

“Says she knows what a mess she made of it.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Morisz was not an imaginative man, but he remembered Tharan's confidence and was chilled. What would it do to you, he wondered, to lie paralyzed and blind and anesthetized for weeks, remembering how you got that way, reflecting on your failure, living with the conviction of the man who was your only link to life that you had endangered everything you knew?

mistake mistake mistake stupid mess D'neerans look what how'd we get here goddamn

Words, even seemingly in Hanna's voice. Jameson turned his head and said, “She's getting that from one of us.” There was ice in his voice.

“Not me,” Morisz said a little nervously. He looked around and saw the Fleet major gone red-faced and too stiff, unused to his private thoughts becoming public property.

lovest me thy father mother brother lover here fullsharing lest cold night

Tharan shifted abruptly. Morisz was on his feet. No words that time, not until he created them, and not in Hanna's voice but silent strangeness, a jolt of madness.

Jameson said quietly, “Nothing new.”

“What?”

“Think about Tharan's reports. That's what he's been describing all along.”

“Oh…” Morisz sat down slowly. The men behind them whispered to each other. “She was identifying with them.”

“Sometimes,” Jameson said, but he was leaning forward now and watching the two D'neerans closely, as if he could force his way into Hanna's brain himself.

But Tharan, after a while, straightened and shook his head. “That's all,” he said. The words were a little slurred.

Jameson continued to stare at him. Tharan put his head
in his hands. When he looked up his face was more alert; he had broken the rapport.

“There isn't any more,” he said. “I told you there wasn't.”

Jameson got up and went to stand beside him, looking through the transparency at Hanna. Morisz followed, uneasy. In the weeks since Hanna's return Jameson had become more reserved than ever. It had never been easy to guess what he was thinking; now it was impossible. He seemed to be turning to stone, perpetually preoccupied with something no one else perceived. But whatever it was focused the force of his personality instead of subduing it, so that when he spoke it was like a glimpse of flame, and Morisz sometimes thought that one day Jameson would explode.

Tharan stood up and Jameson said, “There is more.”

“There isn't. It just ends.”

“They hadn't finished with her. You know what was in her bloodstream: psychotropic drugs. You know what they would do. It must have been done
after
what you have shown us.”

“It ends,” Tharan repeated.

“Memory does not vanish. The organism records everything. On the cellular, the chemical, the molecular levels, if nowhere else. If you are as competent as you say, you could retrieve her primal memories of gestation. Why not this?”

“I can't retrieve something unless there was enough consciousness to organize the experience in the first place. There wasn't. They dissolved her ego.”

“She perceived it as dissolution. That does not mean it was dissolved.”

Tharan said blankly, “That's exactly what it means.”

“I don't intend to argue semantics. Is there any possibility she is deliberately blocking you?”

“No,” Tharan said positively.

“Could there be a block imposed by another?”

“No.”