The D’neeran Factor (29 page)

And listened painfully for a reply. And heard none. And lay down again and began to weep, her face pressed into a pillow.

Wills froze the record and said, “That's all. She cried till she went back to sleep.”

Morisz scowled at the sad little picture. He said, “What was she looking for, anyway? If not the spyeyes?”

“She's a telepath,” Wills said. “She
says
she's not exercising the faculty, but I understand they can't always help it. If she senses she's being watched, she might be looking for something without knowing exactly what she's looking for.”

“That's right,” Morisz said, not happily. “So don't ask her about this incident. Next time she'd be looking for spyeyes, because she'd
know
she's being watched.”

He told Wills to include the scene in Jameson's précis and got rid of her. He thought about calling Jameson, and decided against it. Starr was on his way to Heartworld, where Taylor had just succeeded—barely—in quashing a demand for hearings on Jameson's fitness for his position. “I seem to be making a career out of smoothing feathers,” he had said to Morisz just before he left. It was something he would not have said a year before, but they were by way of becoming friends, and the strain of the last months was having an effect. The very term he had used was proof that Jameson, with his fine sense of discrimination for a phrase, was not himself; nothing native to Heartworld wore feathers.

Morisz decided this last bit of nonsense could wait until Jameson got back.

*   *   *

There seemed always to be someone looking over her shoulder. She heard sometimes a breath at her back, and turned to find no one. Some of her clumsiness came from starts at footsteps close behind her, but always when she looked there was nothing. They asked her occasionally what she did in the night. The question made no sense; she only
slept; she sensed they did not believe her, but she never asked what they meant by the question. Because she was afraid—afraid of what she might hear, afraid she might be doing something dreadful in the dark, afraid The Questioner had kept some of her sanity and she would never get it back.

One day in desperation, thinking if she did not challenge her intellect she soon would have none left, she tried to catch up with developments in her field. The first extract the index showed her was a critique of “Sentience” that suggested all its conclusions—all her years of work—were suspect because her predictions about the uses of telepathy at first contact had been flatly wrong. It was cross-referenced to an item that informed her she had been, during the months of unconsciousness, stripped of her Goodhaven Award.

She stared at the text for some time, feeling nothing at all and wondering why there were tears in her eyes. No one had considered the matter important enough to tell her about it. She supposed it was not, then, important. The Academy's little ornament was somewhere in the wreckage of
XS-12,
or lost or destroyed or, fittingly, in alien hands.

“But it
was
important,” she whispered despite the constriction in her throat; and she was reaching for the key that would erase the screen when Jameson's name caught her eye. His part in getting her the prize had been suspected.

Finally alert, filled with real anxiety, she searched for more information. There was no more; there had been only that one hint of it. But there was plenty of other information on the last six months of Jameson's life, and Hanna read into the night, fighting sleep.

Tharan had thought with some triumph of Jameson's crisis, but he had provided no details. Now Hanna learned that at one point only a single vote in Heartworld's general council had saved Damon Taylor from having to demand Jameson's resignation. Taylor insisted doggedly that Jameson was the best man to have in the commissioner's seat now, and as long as law permitted him to keep Jameson there he would do it. There had been talk of impeaching Taylor; it had come to nothing, but certainly he would be gone after general elections two years hence, along with a number of other councilmen.

The revelation that Species X had known what it was
looking for did not make Jameson better liked on his own world or any other. He had always been too liberal a commissioner for many Heartworlders' tastes, and controversial from his first day in that position. The
Endeavor
Project had not been popular at home; now the worst pessimists' fears were realized, and they did not let anyone forget it. There was another side to the early-warning argument Jameson and Taylor had used. It was this: the aliens might have searched for hundreds of years without success if it had not been for the
Endeavor.
On other worlds, and for the same reasons, Jameson was called everything from incompetent to insane. Muammed al-Nimeury criticized him publicly, and the other commissioners tolerated this breach of official etiquette. No one—not even Andrella Murphy, who was said to be his friend and possibly his lover—defended him.

There were images from an earlier life Hanna had not wondered about before: Jameson leaving a theater with an exquisite, dark-eyed woman on his arm; Murphy whispering in his ear at a hearing on interworld law, saying something that produced the kind of radiant, open smile Hanna had seen only twice; Jameson shaking hands with some Co-op dignitary at a glittering formal gathering, poised and inscrutable. His private life was very private indeed, but some of it had surfaced recently, not through the efforts of his friends. Hanna tried to tally the rumors of dissipation with the austerity of his usual manner and with her own glimpses past his self-control, but she could not make them fit together.

The present was easier to understand. Now he was always alone, except for a bodyguard or, sometimes, a grim-looking Rodrigues at his shoulder. She guessed his world was divided into two kinds of people—those who sought to bring him down, and those who were waiting to see if the others would succeed. What she did not understand was why he tolerated it; why he did not go home to comfortable obscurity; why he endured the weariness she had seen, when all his hopes must be ended and there was nothing left but duty.

But that is precisely what it is, she thought when she lay down at last. That is what I did: endured all I could, without hope, because it was my duty. He knew it. That was why he could forgive.

The thought comforted her, and she clung to it down the sickening slide into sleep.

But the dreams were worse that night, in the morning they were closer, and soon the days were nightmares too.

“Hanna,” Ward said, raising her voice.

Hanna lifted her head slowly. Ward's face
dark as deeprock
was attentive.

“Hanna?”

“Sorry…” Hanna rubbed her face. Her hands had shrunk. The fine planes of her face felt deformed.

“Melanie,” she said in panic.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” She licked her lips. They felt almost like her lips.

Ward stared at her, and finally dropped her eyes to the surface of her desk. The characters and diagrams on it changed as she keyed in, one at a time, the morning's test results. Hanna stood up and Ward said, “Where are you going?”

“Look out,” Hanna mumbled.

“What?”

“To look out. The window.”

“Oh,” Ward said, and returned to her study.

Polished metal round the window showed Hanna her face. It looked wrong. She put a hand to her throat and stared blindly at snow, waiting for the fit to pass. This morning was the worst yet; but it had been getting worse for days. She was horribly afraid. She put her forehead against the warm transparent window, trying to remember if Ward had stopped recording before the onset of this last break in reality.

She jumped as Ward said, “You're all right. A couple of anomalies, nothing outside chance. I'll see you again tomorrow.”

Hanna did not move. She said to the window, “Melanie, when can I go home?”

“Not just yet. You've been a very sick girl.”

“You just said I'm all right. Why can't I go home, Melanie?”

There was a small sigh behind her. Ward said, “Hanna, you know you can't.”

Hanna drew a fingertip across the window's surface. She said, “I'm a prisoner.”

“You're not a prisoner. You go wherever you please here, you can go outside, you can go into the city if you want to.”

“And risk being recognized and—never mind. That's not what I mean. I want to go
home.
To D'neera.”

Ward said more gently than before, “Not just yet.”

Hanna turned around. Surely Melanie would notice something was wrong with her face; but nobody ever did. So there was nothing wrong with it. So she was going mad.

“Melanie. I don't need you anymore. I need a mindhealer.” It took some effort to keep her voice steady.

“Why,” said Ward, looking up at her through dark lashes, “do you say that?”

Hanna did not answer. After a minute Ward said, “We could get Tharan back.”

“No.” Hanna's hands were quivering. She put them behind her back. “Melanie, what's your rank?”

“My—?”

“You're not on the staff here. Somebody told me. You're with Fleet.”

“Yes. Well.”

She looked disconcerted, almost guilty. Hanna did not know why it was supposed to be a secret and did not care. “Can you let me go?”

Ward shook her head.

“Who, then? Morisz?”

Ward hesitated, but decided, perhaps, she would save herself trouble by answering.

“I suppose he'd have to approve. But ultimately the decision would be Commissioner Jameson's, I think.”

“Can you arrange for me to see him? I can't,” said Hanna, desolate, “call him myself.”

There was another hesitation. But Ward said at last, “I'll try. He's on Heartworld, though.”

“When he gets back. As soon as he gets back.”

“I'll try,” Ward said.

On the way to her room Hanna had a moment of sheer terror when a spasm took her right arm and bent it at the elbow. She stumbled against the wall to stop it, to hide it. She got to the room, to the bed, and crouched on it for some time, biting at her hands.

She did not remember the beginning of her fear. Perhaps it had begun with The Questioner, who now visibly pursued her in her dreams. Sometimes in the morning she could not make herself look in a mirror, convinced she would see raw meat with bone showing through. Her body was more strange to her, not less. It made movements of its own accord, and caused her to stumble, shaking her with alarm out of all proportion to the event. She felt an urgent need to hide these incidents and did so, telling herself confusedly Melanie would never pronounce her well if she did not. There were times when she found herself in the pool when it seemed she had been in her room the moment before, or vice versa; times when she was staring at the face of someone who had not been there a second ago and who was waiting for her answer to some question. She did not tell Ward about any of these things, and she was afraid.

Fear had grown on her so gradually she was not aware of its progress, but now when she looked in mirrors she saw that her face, which had always reflected her thoughts because she had no talent for duplicity, had become a mask to hide the fear. Even that was a relief, though it was not always her own ruined face she was afraid of seeing. It was something else—someone else, she thought once—and she did not know what. But each day the fear was greater, and she moved in a haze where she examined each word and hid even her treacherous body's rebellion from unseen watchers.

And now this: reality distorted, familiar shapes shifted, images drifting through her tangled brain that came from nowhere she knew. Had the Questioner been less guarded than she thought? Had she absorbed memory, knowledge, an alien essence, despite his powers? She had told Intelligence otherwise, and they tested her when she said it and knew it was the truth. Truth at the time; perhaps not now; but what might surface now did not matter. She could not face questioning again. If her brain still held treasures of knowledge she would tell Iledra, and Iledra would tell
Morisz from the shelter of D'neera. If they suspected it now they would not let her go. And she had to go. Had to go.

At length she dragged herself off the bed and called Iledra. It took a long time for the call to go through. There was action at Morisz's offices, no doubt: flurries, discussions, but approval in the end, because Iledra answered. The quiet, familiar room behind her pulled at Hanna's heart.

Hanna passed a shaky hand across her mouth. “Lee,” she said, knowing others listened, “I want to come home.”

But Iledra said reluctantly that home might be no haven. Hanna made her say it plainly: many D'neerans blamed Hanna for their distress. Hanna had wondered uneasily about the possibility, but that did nothing to lessen the hurt of hearing it.

“How bad is it?” she said.

There had never been much room for evasion in their friendship. Iledra said, “H'ana, I do not know what place there is for you here.”

“Well…” Hanna stirred anxiously. “Defense needs people, doesn't it? I'm trained.”

“H'ana-ril, I think you had better consider resigning from Defense.”

“Now? When there's going to be a war?”

“I do not think,” the older woman said sadly, “you will be given any responsibility even if there is a war.”

Hanna thought of everything she had learned and done for Defense, the years spent learning spacecraft, weapons principles, unarmed combat, the honor after Nestor, everything, all of it: all gone.

“What about D'vornan? The university?”

“The program has been closed,” Iledra said, her face blank.

“Oh…But the House—there must be more work? And not enough people?”