The D’neeran Factor (27 page)

“How do you know?”

Tharan said angrily, “I'm a D'neeran, a telepath, an Adept, and a mindhealer. Don't try to tell me I don't know.”

“You are either incompetent or a liar,” Jameson said, and turned away and started for the door. The ghoulish little tableau was broken. Tharan took a fast step after Jameson.

Sweet winds, summerfruit, soft-plumed love eternal thy warm waters unbroken.

In a great rush of wellbeing Morisz saw a hand slip from its place. The circuit closed; he drifted for an instant toward sleep, and it was over. Hanna was entirely unconscious. Tharan stood still, looking toward her, and the others were between him and Jameson, babbling questions.

“Later,” Jameson said. “Stan.”

It was an order, and Morisz ducked between the others and followed Jameson into the corridor.

“What,” he began, but Jameson shook his head, and they went through half the building, a long walk, in silence. Hospital personnel stared at them with covert or open curiosity, but Jameson paid no attention. Behind them trotted a man from Administration internal security. Two days ago someone had planted a homemade firebomb at Jameson's door; it was primitive but dangerous, and Jameson had reluctantly accepted this minimum of personal protection.

Outdoors the August sun burned hot. Jameson stopped on a deserted flight of stairs, waved the bodyguard away, and said, “They expect to permit her mobility in about three months.”

“Yeah. She'll be able to talk then. Maybe we can get more.”

“I doubt it. But from the moment she moves a finger I want her watched. With spyeyes. Without her knowledge. I want every room in this center in which she spends time wired for sight and sound, and I want you to form a team to study the record, every minute of every twenty-four hours of it, and report to me.”

“Report what?” Morisz said in frustration.

“I don't know.”

Morisz thought: He is going right over the edge. Right here. Right now.

“Starr…” It came out more plaintively than he intended. “It's a dead end. You can't get anything better than what Tharan did. Go right into her head and pull it out—what the hell can I do that's any better?”

“Then send the tapes to me and I'll study them myself.”

Morisz could not refuse the direct request. There was his personal liking for Jameson, for one thing; for another, there were implications for the future. He did not want
Jameson telling anyone he was uncooperative in a matter of such weight, and certainly he could not defend himself by accusing a commissioner of unreasonable caution.

“I'll do it,” he said. “But it's a dead end, all the same.”

“Think so?” Jameson started down the staircase. The sunlight dimmed. The sullen air promised rain.

He said, “They don't leave dead ends. Every time it's looked that way they've set us up for something. Remember that, Stan. It's nearly the only thing we know about them.”

“Yes,” Morisz said, “but they've already set up D'neera. What else could they want?”

“Just watch her,” Jameson said.

T
he water was always warm and clear, and drew her irresistibly. She forgot sometimes to push against it, floating in a timeless sea, and the physical therapist who took her to the pool each day would call, “Hanna! Hanna! You've rested long enough.” And she would make a dreamy effort, forgetting the purpose was to make her stronger, filled with wonder at the play of muscle and the sensations of water against her skin. It was strange to inhabit a body. She remembered inhabiting one familiarly, but she could not get used to it again. Parts of it surely were gone? Movement unbalanced her; food was distasteful and she spilled it; her face glimpsed in a mirror with clear blue eyes surprised her.

They had made her body whole by slight degrees, and would do the same with her mind. Living in the unworld of brain barred from body was painful, so she had been unconscious for five months, except for the sessions with Tharan. The exceptions might have been her undoing, for she opened her new eyes to memories of The Questioner, repeated daily and ingrained past forgetting, and very little else. Tharan had not been a reassuring companion. His head was filled with images of fleets on the move, chaos at home and his anxiety to return, mistrust of the men around him and violent dislike of Starr Jameson. That was Tharan's version of events, or all of it Hanna saw, anyway. Her final waking, therefore, was to unrelieved bleakness. To ease her transition to physical life she was given drugs that softened without changing the prospect. It was always at a distance from her, and so was grief—for herself, for D'neera, for Anja and Charl, for something else; but what? It was too distant to see. It was there in dreams she could not remember, a loss
and an emptiness that would never be filled. Tharan was gone, and there was no one to uncover her dreams.

So faithfully had she been cared for that after a week she could walk. She could not walk very rapidly or very far, but she could walk. She came out of the hydrotherapy pavilion one day, moving hesitantly and wearily away from the water's support, and found Jameson waiting for her.

She thought he must have come to see someone else, but that made no sense. He was here for her, then. Barely clothed and wet through, she forgot the chill of dry air while she searched memory for the proper thing to say. Ordinary courtesies no longer came automatically, and never sounded right when she remembered them.

He said, “Hello, Hanna,” providing the clue she needed.

“Hello,” she said in relief, but fragments from Tharan came together without warning: the ruin of the
Endeavor
Project, the near-ruin of this man's career, the ragged end of his visions, devastation of his life, and had it not sprung from her? She had never given a thought to what he risked in trusting her. Now, when she saw the size of the gamble, it seemed to Hanna in her distress that he must have come here to accuse her. She might have panicked, except that he appeared utterly unchanged. As it was, she looked at him piteously.

He said, startled, “Are you all right?” and took her arm, which had seemed very far from his intention.

“All right,” she said faintly.

“I can come back later, if you wish.”

“No,” said Hanna, so unused to having power to postpone the unpleasant that she did not really understand the option.

He went with her to her room, and she leaned on his arm most of the way. Seeing him had jolted her from her fog—and she wondered with new clarity how much of it was self-created, not chemically induced. But the question sank in her painful anxiety for his welfare, and she was not clearheaded enough to think such anxiety might be ludicrous while his strength literally held her up.

Her room was comfortingly dim. She sank onto the bed with a sigh, telling herself she must not fall asleep just yet. The light flared, and she blinked. She had forgotten that her preference for semi-darkness was not shared by everyone.

Jameson came to stand before her, tall and solid and wrapped in the old stillness. He watched her intently, not trying to disguise it. There were deeper lines than she remembered at the corners of the gray-green eyes, and his gaze was colder than she had ever seen it. She felt a twinge of unreasoned fear of something besides reproach.

She could not think of anything to say. After a while he said, “How are you feeling, Hanna?”

His eyes and tone were so at odds with the concern in the conventional question that she did not understand immediately, as if it were necessary to translate what he said from one language to another. “I'm—well. I'm feeling better. Time,” she said, pushing at her hair. It was cropped close, a silken cap, and felt strange to her hand.

“Intelligence is rather anxious to get at you without the intermediary. Think you'll be strong enough to talk to them soon?”

“Soon. I think—soon.” But Ward, her chief physician, spoke of that or something like it at least twice a day. He must know the answer. She hardly heard the next trivial questions, answering by rote. He had to have the answers already. He did not care what she said. He was not listening; only looking. He had come here only and specifically to look at her.

He took a step toward her and without warning, swept by fear, she shrank away from him, fighting an impulse to run. She could not run. She was too weak.

“Hanna?” he said, but she could not answer, huddled in on herself and shivering.

After a minute he sat down beside her. There was a tangled coverlet on the bed, and to her astonishment he picked it up and draped it about her shoulders. It was the first gesture of kindness she had known in many months; the men and women who cared for her were not unkind, but busy and impersonal. She began to cry, the acid tears tickling her nose incongruously, and to her further astonishment felt his hand on her back. The simple act of compassion overwhelmed her and she turned to him blindly, reaching out, expecting nothing. Very slowly, he put his arm around her.

“Forgive me,” she whispered.

He shook his head, but the movement came from some sharp conflict within himself.

“Please,” Hanna said urgently.

“There is nothing to forgive,” he said as if against his will.

“What I did…” Tears blurred her eyes. The shameful memory smothered her.

“You did all you could…” He spoke slowly, reluctantly, but his arm tightened around her. She responded to it, not to his words, and laid her head on his shoulder without thinking, knowing he would not mind; he only thought he ought to mind it. He was a point of wholeness in a sadly tattered universe, and she clung to him, needing wholeness too desperately to care if he wished to be clung to or not.

He bent his head and she moved a little, holding her breath with a sense that time and space had slipped and left them, the two of them, miraculously alone and secret. He said close to her ear, very softly, “I wish it had not been you. But I'm glad it was you.”

She said on a long breath, “Why…”

“You did not speak. It was not you. They destroyed you.”

“Everyone blames me…”

“They are wrong. Who could have done better?”

“Anyone. You—”

“Not I.” He touched her hair, a delicate gesture of comfort. “If anyone tells you he would have done better, he lies.”

She turned her head a little, almost secretively, as if he would not notice that his lips now touched her cheek. Her skin seemed to have been dead, and suddenly was alive. She whispered, “But I told them—”

“Not enough. Not enough for their purposes…”

She was passionately grateful. He had strength enough for both of them. She was safe with him.
Safe:
from doubt, from guilt, from memory. She had never needed anyone before, nor anything so badly. She would tell him so.

Then he remembered something he had forgotten, and she felt it fall between them like a knife. He drew away from her with a movement so abrupt it was nearly violent. Time resumed. She actually cried out, bereft. The act was so deliberate and implacable that he might as well have gotten up and walked out, and she wept, uncomprehending.

He waited without moving or touching her until her sobs eased. Presently she straightened, sighing, and wiped at her wet cheeks. Jameson turned his head, but he did not speak
at once and his face was unreadable. A last sob choked her. He said—it might have been another man talking— “Do you remember the probe Tharan did?”

She nodded, hardly hearing.

“What happened after he broke the rapport?”

“After?” Confused by his contradictions, still shaken to the bone, she tried to remember. It had been so long ago. It was mixed up with all the interrogations before it and after it, and besides she had been sedated, which was not customary. The healer was supposed to be strong enough to share your full awareness of whatever made you seek him out. But Tharan had not come to her as a healer, and nothing about that probe had been customary.

“I fell asleep,” she said. “Or passed out. I don't remember which.”

“I mean before that, but after Tharan broke the contact.”

She shook her head. “I don't remember anything. Did something happen?”

He said after a moment's silence, looking directly into her eyes, “No. I thought perhaps something had occurred to you afterward. But if there was nothing…”

“No,” she said uneasily.

He stood up, remote as ever, preparing to leave. She said quickly, “Commissioner?”

“Yes?”

There was a question she had asked no one because she was afraid of how they would look at her. But whatever he felt, it was not, at least, contempt.

“Why has there been no attack on D'neera?”

For an instant she saw exhaustion in his face, and pain so great it shocked her into silence. He said something she did not absorb; said good-bye, and she nodded numbly; left her staring after him. If she had ever thought him impenetrably armored, the minutes just past would have shattered that illusion. But this was different; she had with her question gone straight for a nerve, all unknowing, and seen something she was not supposed to see. Why, when it was a question everybody must be asking?

She could not think of a reason, but she stopped wondering about it because she was preoccupied with something else. She had finally remembered his reply, and also the inflection he gave it. It was a non-answer, but why had he said
it that way? She could not get it out of her mind, and it worried her till other shadows hid it: “
You
ask me that?”

*   *   *

She saw Melanie Ward every day, and also Larssen, the physical therapist. When she asked them when she could leave they gave her no answer. She did not belong here. This was a Joachim Beyle Center, an acute care facility specializing in regenerative techniques. There were half a dozen of them on Earth, half the total in human space, and this one was within sight of the Polity administration complex. Hanna's small room had no window, but when she was strong enough she walked round and round the Beyle Center, scuffling through dry leaves over carved stone, and looking at Admin's distant spire with the stylized star at its tip. Somewhere in those buildings were Jameson's rooms, where she had been an honored guest. She wished he would come see her again, but he did not. She wished the medics would let her go, but they would not, though now she was as whole as she would ever be and needed only outpatient care. “Wait,” they said, and tested her over and over, and days and then weeks went by.