The D’neeran Factor (4 page)

“We meet again in three days' time,” he said.

“In three days, Master,” she said. But she hoped, and he knew it, that soon she would be nowhere near D'neera.

The bathing rooms of Ling's establishment were uncompromisingly bare. It was a condition of working with Ling that on his premises, at least, his students share his asceticism. Hanna stood under a fall of cold water until she felt clean—it did not take so long to feel clean in winter, when the water was icy—cupped some of it in her hands and drank to ease her dry throat, dressed and left quickly. It was a considerable walk to her House, and she was eager to be there.

The answer's got to come today, she thought. This morning. But it's midnight at Polity Admin. But no, dammit, he's not even on Earth, I don't know what time it is where he is. Why doesn't he make up his mind?

Much of her way was uphill and the day was growing hot, but she was in superb condition and City Koroth seemed to flow backward around her. City Koroth: first city of D'neera, center of the first province, site of the first governing House. The founders leaving ravaged Luna had sworn not to repeat history's mistakes. They had favored beauty over utility, trees over convenience, flowers—a tiny side street caught Hanna's eye, and she glanced appreciatively at its blaze of blossoms—flowers over almost everything. Sometimes the ground trembled under her feet as heavy machinery moved beneath it, but the ground itself, in this stretch, was surfaced with beautifully painted and well-maintained tiles. It was true that the midyear sun heated them so they stung her bare feet; but the next part of her way was through a shade garden where birds swooped low and sang piercingly and snatched at her ears until she thought soothing shoo-away thoughts at them. And how odd, she thought, looking at
their tiny paws, that we call them “birds.” When first I saw true-birds on Earth I said no, that can't be a
bird…!

After the garden there were neighborhood markets which sold, absurdly, flowers. She bought one with her good name and tucked it into her coiled dark hair. There were cool thick-walled dwelling places, a place for the manufacture of clothing—she skidded to a stop and looked through the open door in astonishment. A woman passing by inside wheeled and came toward her, already angry.

“It's just,” Hanna said weakly, “that last week they grew foodstuffs here.”

But the woman only met her with a vast certainty that none of the too-numerous regulations were being broken, nothing was being polluted, and not even the House of Koroth—here her finger waggled emphatically in the hot breeze; Hanna's head began to ache—could find anything wrong!

But the produce balance, said Hanna, trying to remember whether the ponics people had reported a move and if so to where, but the woman was having none of it, and took her rather forlorn thought that she would have to check into it as a threat.

Hanna left, and ran the next block or two.

Governing any part of D'neera was not easy.

There were more gardens, including a stark patch of desert which she circled carefully because it grew spikes which would hurt her feet. There were plenty of people about, many noisy children and their quieter adults, but snatches of song and the music of fountains came to her plainly on the wind. A child came with her for a time, chattering confidentially and practicing his budding faculty for projection until her head ached again from his efforts. When he grew tired of walking she handed him over to the nearest willing adult; when he was ready to go home, someone would make sure he got there. Once she passed an adolescent boy and girl leaning together against a tree, eyes closed, barely touching, deep in that mutual inner exploration which for a season obscures all other concerns. Likely enough they had forgotten where they were and would begin making love right here, unless they got hungry first. No one would disturb them. Hanna was twenty D'neeran or twenty-four Standard years old and she had not felt this sort of attraction,
as of particles of opposite charge, since adolescence; and in spite of her protest to Ling, even the purely sensual encounters were increasingly far between. I'm getting old, she thought in a moment's panic, and I'm still young. A hundred and fifty years to go, and already no time for love! There was too much else to think about: produce reports, facilities-use reports, the New City being built past the wilderness, the aftermath of war. And, when she could manage it, her private work in exopsychology, shabbily neglected. And the decision in the far-away Polity. And its consequences. If it came out the way she wanted it; she and the Lady of Koroth.

She reached a wide stone avenue that broke up at the end into greensward, and beyond it the white walls of the House rose into the clear blue sky. There was not much traffic to the House today, though as she ascended the final hill she met a freight carrier, festooned with banners and piloted by two men deep in half-spoken, half-thought conversation. On Earth the machines drove themselves. Was that what she wanted for D'neera someday? The machines thinking and the people tending to them? Towers founded on crystal and held up by aggies? Anti-gravity mansions in the sky, anchored by fragile-seeming cables and swaying—but only for effect—with the wind…

“But I didn't really like it there,” she said a little guiltily, and plucked a handful of many-scented millefleurs and carried them with her the rest of the way to the House, holding them as if they were a talisman against change.

When she passed into the House its ambience closed over her like water, cool and dim in the summer's fierce heat. The walls and floors and ceilings and furnishings testified to a peculiarly D'neeran passion for the decorative arts, and the whole vast warren always smelled deliciously of flowers and baking. But its essence was the people who lived and worked here. There was always an undercurrent of activity, less a matter of sound than the hum of many brains thinking all at once, and the flavor was decidedly female; this House was traditionally female, and had been since Maria Koroth started building it six hundred years ago. A hundred and fifty people worked here (when they felt like it), and all but a handful of them lived here. There was room for all of them; the House had been growing by
fits and starts for hundreds of years, and Hanna still could get lost in it after five years of residence.

She did not have to ask for news. Cosma ril-Koroth, who, like Hanna, stood high in the house, sensed her presence and met her in a scarlet-draped hallway with a shake of the head. They made faces at each other, sharing disappointment in silence, and Hanna went on to her workspace. The first thing she saw when she came into the room—plainer than most, by her choice—was a message from Iledra, Lady Koroth, winking at her from a computer terminal:

“The Design Arbitration Committee at the New City site has failed to settle the Central Garden question within the lawful ninety-day negotiation period. I intend to invoke magistrate's privilege. Will you go there tomorrow and settle the matter? Choose a design that appeals to you and
do not
let them persuade you to grant an extension of the arbitration period. This project
must
be started this year. At least half the committee members, to my certain knowledge, are expectant parents. Ask them where they think their children will live if we do not build…”

Hanna stared at the message for a little while. Grimly, trying to ignore disappointment, she rearranged her thoughts. She had hoped to disinter her notes on Girritt tomorrow, and try to make sense out of them. But perhaps it was just as well; perhaps she would never make sense of them without the Polity archives. And the archives were closed to her, unless…

She thought of the silver spaceship, the library it would carry, the ancient eyewitness accounts of the first contacts with Girritt and F'thal and the Primitives. Surely the evidence she needed was there. Without it how could she prove to contemporary true-humans that they were wrong? How could she show them that the charming, monkeylike Girrians had not knowledgeably rejected high technology but were simply incapable of thinking past a certain level of abstraction in technical matters? True-humans would have it that Girrians lived as they did for noble motives. They had passed into the mythologies of certain religious and social movements as the embodiment of non-technocrat virtue—and the Girrians fostered the myth, having learned to enjoy the respect it brought them from the smooth-skinned beings called humans. But they did not understand telepathy,
either, and had permitted Hanna to examine the contents and blank spaces of their minds (so many and such very large blank spaces!) with the generosity of naïveté. True-humans would take a lot of convincing, however—and more and more it looked as if Hanna would never have a chance to convince them.

She sighed and sat down and wiped Iledra's message, and called up the ever-growing list of questions to answer, tasks to perform, reports to read and write, requests to fulfill, disputes to arbitrate. Two landkeepers of Riverine Sector were quarreling over a stand of falseoaks on their common border, which one wished to fell. A nearby village had entered the dispute. I will have to stop seeing Ling, Hanna thought, I just don't have the
time
—

The Lady of Koroth came into the room without a sound. She had a trick of making unexpected entrances, and Hanna jumped at this one, seeing herself without warning through Iledra's eyes—

(Brown-skinned and blue-eyed and growing into beauty but always too thin since the war, too apt to see the shadows beyond sunlight, hear silence in the intervals of music
—)

“Stop it,” Hanna said. Her hands made fists on the keyboard. A trace of shadow lingered for a moment, and the intrusive presence withdrew. Hanna said without turning around, “I wish you wouldn't think such things, Lee. Not at me, anyway.”

“A week ago your nightmare woke half the House from sleep. Must I order you to visit the mindhealers?”

“You already did. They've done little enough for other survivors. I don't want to talk about it, Lee.”

“Very well,” Iledra said. Her composure was unaltered; Hanna thought of it as unalterable. She said without a change of tone, “You know I've heard nothing from Jameson?”

“Cosma told me.”

Hanna tapped a familiar sequence on her keyboard. The opening page of what had become a large file flashed onto the screen. “The
Endeavor
Project,” said the title page. “A proposal for renewing the organized search for sentient life on the borders of human space.” At the head of the list of names of those who had prepared the document it said: “Starr Hollin Jameson VI, Commissioner-Heartworld.
Chairman, Committee on Alien Relations.” Near that was a flamboyant, illegible signature. The proposal was dated a Standard year before, and Hanna knew it by heart.

She said, “I have to get on that ship. I just have to.”

“Heart's desire,” Iledra murmured.

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

“It never pays to have them,” Iledra said.

She moved at last to Hanna's side, and Hanna looked up a little apprehensively. Iledra was well into her sixties, but she looked only a little older than Hanna; D'neera's first concern upon reopening relations with the Polity a century before had been to appropriate, with unbecoming eagerness, every available advance in anti-senescence techniques. On that score there had been scarcely a dissenting voice. The tall Lady of Koroth, smooth-skinned, gray-eyed, golden-haired, was proof of their efficacy. Hanna could not imagine anything changing her. At some time in the past Iledra had unbent sufficiently to give birth to a daughter, and afterward had given the golden child to its father and forgotten it. Once, when Hanna asked her about that time, she had tried with D'neeran honesty to answer, but she could remember little about so brief and unimportant a contretemps. She had been Koroth's Lady for twenty years and might be Lady a hundred more. She spoke sometimes of the advisability of early retirement, and was fond of pointing to the stagnation of true-human societies as evidence that the young-seeming old gripped power too tightly and too long; but Hanna rather thought that “early” would always be a point somewhere in the future.

Iledra looked over Hanna's shoulder at the
Endeavor
proposal. She said, “I think we should begin giving more attention to alternative ways of proving our usefulness to true-humans.”

“That's what you were doing before this came up. It didn't get you anywhere.”

“True. But the choice is not ours.”

“I don't want to keep plowing away at something I know is hopeless.”

“You know no such thing.” She touched Hanna's shoulder and the girl looked up again, rebellious and reluctant. “Patience,” Iledra said softly. “Patience is everything….”

Behind the gentle words were images of many rivers, of
waters flowing, shifting, changing, slight perturbations repeated for centuries and gradually changing the contours of earth and sky till the whole mighty network was changed. Continents and climates shifted. Hanna rode the imaginary waters—and shook her head as if it were wet, came back breathless to the quiet cool room, and said loudly, “All the same. The data I need so— And to have a telepath at a first contact. They must see what it could mean!”

“They do,” Iledra said. “But they would rather put it off for a century or two…Here is the ring.”

She never bothered canvassing subjects she felt had been sufficiently discussed. Hanna was used to it. She looked at the gem in Iledra's hand and said hesitantly, “I'm still not sure.”

“It is not an absolute commitment. It is an honor, however, and the formality gives, well, some weight to one's authority. I remember that when Penelope gave it to me I found those I dealt with were suddenly more cooperative. It is one thing to defy an administrator-delegate of the House, even knowing what she is likely to become. It is another to quarrel with its acknowledged heir.”