The D’neeran Factor (66 page)

“So he came from a colony? Which one?”

“That's the mystery, you see. I said there was a mystery. No one knows. The dialect didn't match anything.”

“Who did this report?”

“Oh, famous people. Experts.” The old man looked up, bright-eyed. “You know, during the Explosion, in the early days, the colonists went out so fast,
so
many from all parts of Earth, the records broke down. Ships vanished, too. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of thousands of people, I think it was millions, they fell into space and disappeared. I think about that sometimes. I thought about it when he was here. You've heard of the Lost Worlds?”

“Yes,” said the other man, “but I don't believe in them. I'd like to see that report, if I may.”

“Of course you can. But you'll find it says just what I've said.”

“All right. How did he get to Alta from wherever it was?”

“I don't know. We guessed. A month before I found him a merchant put in at the port here. There were others, merchants and freighters come here all the time, but the others had nothing to hide. They were tracked and questioned. They'd never seen him. One of them couldn't be tracked. The port here isn't as careful as the ones in the Polity. That's what I'm told; I wouldn't know. When they looked into it they said the registration was false. There was no ship with that number and name.”

“He could have told you something, surely. When he learned Standard.”

“Could have, but didn't.” The old man's grief had eased as he told the story. It caught up with him now. He bowed his head and took hold of the coarse rope that gathered his robe. There were knots in it; he fingered them as if for comfort. The investigator waited patiently. Presently the abbot began to speak, slowly.

“We asked him. He said he didn't know. I think he told the truth. That was at the beginning. When he said it, his eyes had that lost look, the look you see on children's faces when they've lost everything, parents, homes, and don't know why, don't understand why they've been hurt. We had
sixty boys here then, homeless children from everywhere. It's near eighty now. Their faces run together now that I'm old. But he stands out. He was a beautiful child when we got some meat on him. He had beautiful hands, too, except, you know, they'd been broken. Broken on purpose, the doctors said, and set too late and badly. They weren't good for much. So I took him to Willow myself to have them fixed. There were signs of—of other kinds of violence. I don't need to tell you about that. It's in his file.”

The I&S man hesitated, let it pass. “All right. He was injured, starving, came out of nowhere, as far as he and you knew. What about later? There should have been evidence of his origin.”

“He said he didn't remember anything. He always said that.” The old man lifted his head. His face was dreamy with remembering. The investigator let him run on unchecked. “He meant he didn't want to talk about it. At first we told him if he helped us find the place, maybe he could go home. I think he didn't want to. I think it was the worst thing we could have ever said. ‘I remember nothing,' he said; he was frightened, and he stuck to that always, though I taxed him with lying, scolded him, taught him the evil of falsehood as well as I could. Yet for the most part he was a good boy. He was lively and intelligent, a leader. The boys of his time looked up to him. Did his lessons, did his chores, worked hard, played hard, the way a boy should. I don't know what he said to God. He went through the forms. I don't know what they meant to him, I don't know what the memories meant that he wouldn't tell us. I used to worry about it. It was deceptive because he seemed—”

The old man stopped suddenly. A minute went by. The investigator stirred and seemed about to speak. But the other man went on, slowly now. “When he had been here awhile, he seemed so open. Sunny. When I think of him, I see him smiling. It makes me forget—it made me forget. The first year wasn't smooth. He fought with other boys, bigger boys. When he did, he was like an animal again, the wild animal I saw at the start. We told him finally we couldn't keep him if he kept doing that. After that he mastered it, we thought, the demon in him—”

The pause was longer this time. At last the investigator said neutrally, “Perhaps he did.”

“Oh, I know, you don't believe in demons, do you?” There was irony in the old eyes now. “They come in many forms, you know. They gnaw at human weakness. They fatten on pain. Our exorcisms are sophisticated, these days. We tried. We tried all that love could do. We tried to help him trust us. But he never talked about where he came from, never told us what he'd been through, not even a hint. Brother Healer tried every trick he knew, too. Said he knew pain when he saw it, said it wasn't good to let it fester in a child, said it could make monsters. But he never got anywhere.”

The old man fell silent, eyes on the stone at his feet. After a while the investigator said, “Did he say anything to you when he left?”

“Nothing. One morning he wasn't here.”

“Had he given you reason to think he might go?”

“No. I don't know why he did it. I must not have known him at all. I must have been blind.” The old man had been staring at the paving stones. He lifted his head and looked outward, straight at Hanna. “The seeds must have grown all the time he was here. I never saw it. I know
how
he left. A freighter from Willow signed him on. He was not well educated, not by your standards, but he was strong and quick to learn. We learned the freighter took him to Valentine. I was afraid when I heard that, but I thought…He had a strong will. He wasn't docile; when I say a boy is good, I don't mean that. I prayed. I did not think he would be bent to vice against his will.”

“I've heard nothing to indicate it was against his will.”

“No. No, of course it wasn't. Corruption doesn't work that way. The sinner collaborates with the sin. He knew about Valentine. He knew enough to choose. We don't try to keep the children from the knowledge of evil. They need to know the enemy to guard against him. We teach them to shun the tempter. Sometimes we fail.”

The old man looked as if he might weep. The investigator said, “I won't trouble you any more now, sir. Except that I'd like to get a record of his file, especially the linguistic report.”

“Certainly. Certainly.”

The old man got to his feet. He was even paler now, the color of the stone, and bent.

“Where did you get his name?” the investigator asked. “Did you name him Michael?”

“We did. What he said when we asked him his name sounded something like that.”

They walked in silence; thinned to mist; disappeared.

Hanna found she had been holding her breath. She said, as if she had been listening to a good story ended too soon, “Isn't there more?”

“Hmm?” Jameson looked at her curiously when normal light returned. The light was warm, but not bright; after the pearly radiance of a fog-washed morning on Alta, it was stuffy and confining.

“Nothing…” She held herself still. The gaze she turned on Jameson was cool. She said, “Why have you shown me this?”

“It's interesting, don't you think?”

“You did not have me watch it for its intrinsic interest.”

“Granted.” He got up and moved across the room. She regarded the broad back coldly, knowing that in the silence he examined a range of words and picked among them. At last he said, “If the worst should happen you will need to know how to deal with him. I believe the key to this man lies in his earliest days. Which are dark. Dark to him because they are shadowed by hunger and violence; dark to everyone else because they are hidden.”

“Perhaps I can take a thorn from his paw and make him my friend,” Hanna said a little wearily.

He swung around and gave her a look that was not as friendly as before. “A classical reference? From you?”

“Me? The over-specialized H'ana? No, don't worry, I won't disillusion you. I only know about it because there is a similar tale among the Uskosians, and someone told me about the parallel. Starr, you take this man too seriously—all because the I&S computers bumped out his name.”

“I take their judgment seriously enough to be glad the person going with Rubee is capable of quick defensive action.”

She said immediately, “No. I'm done with that.”

“I hope so,” he said, and now he was deliberately mild. “I know how you feel about it; about, especially, the Zeigans you killed. I understand your reluctance to consider doing anything of the kind again. Yet the fact remains that you
were trained for war, and you fought in an interhuman war; and later, in a desperate situation with the People of Zeig-Daru, you were capable of doing what you had to do. I hope you are never again put to that test. But consider, Hanna, what this man is. Consider: after the monks had saved him and sheltered him for years, he left them without a word and went straight to a life they despised. Then there was the leap to piracy and, most likely, murder. Will you smile at him and wait for him to kiss your hand?”

Hanna's mouth twisted. Put that way it was horrible. She said, “There was a Lost World. Nobody knew about it fifteen years ago. But the Zeigans destroyed it long before our time, before his time. He couldn't have come from there.”

“If he got to Alta from a Lost World, it couldn't be considered lost,” Jameson said sensibly. “There are enough backward pocket settlements even within the Polity to keep a linguist occupied for eternity. I don't put much stock in the abbot's speculations. I should think their healer was right, though, when he spoke of monsters being made.”

“I would be interested in seeing his psyche profile,” Hanna said, and then, because he gave her an odd look, “What's wrong with that?”

“I don't have it,” Jameson said.

She might have let it go, except that she sensed a rare uncertainty in him. “Did you try to get it?” she said.

“Yes. Figueiredo said it was not to be disseminated outside I&S. He said it was anomalous and contradictory. He ascribed this,” Jameson said—with a straight face, but Hanna saw the amusement behind it—“to the fact that an I&S operative who got close to him, and ought to have been a definitive source of information, was female.”

“Oh, nonsense!”

“I think so, too. Still, for whatever reason, there is no consistent and therefore no valid profile.”

“Well, if you start with the presumption that your subject is a monster, and then he doesn't act like one, I suppose you have trouble putting the pieces together.”

Hanna gave up. She wanted to go home, or to what passed for it here. This would be her last night planet-bound for some weeks; the quarantine facility orbited Luna. After that her course would take her outward; past Heartworld, which she had visited, and Carrollis, which she had never
seen; past a settlement named Revenge, which she had never even heard of until the
Bird
's course became important; and after that on and out and out. She said before she left, though: “All this is a waste of time, isn't it? There's no sign of tampering with the program; not if you've told me everything.”

“I've told you everything. I'm uneasy, all the same.”

She gave the last words little thought when he said them. She did not mean to think about Michael Kristofik any more at all. But she yielded to her wish to ride the wind in the Earthly night, high above silver and black; and as she sailed through the moonlight the reason came to her for Kristofik's irrational effect on I&S and Admin, Jameson and Figueiredo and all of them. They were the keepers of order and rules, and the stranger from nowhere cared nothing for any of it, and ignored both rules and keepers; successfully, too.

*   *   *

During the week she spent in the isolation chamber, they took so much blood from her that she became weak. Each time they took some they came back and fed her more chemicals, poisonous brews, some of which contained living creatures. The ones put straight into her veins did not make up for loss of blood. They said she would make more quickly. They had to get it right, though it would be impossible for her to walk among human beings until she came home and the work was undone. They were stripping her of her immunity to certain dangerous organisms at large in human society, because in some way she did not understand it was incompatible with immunity to common Uskosian equivalents. Rubee and Awnlee, separated from her for now, endured the process in reverse.

Hanna did what was asked of her, and otherwise withdrew from human intercourse. She had planned the withdrawal, not consciously, for a long time; she understood that almost as soon as she entered quarantine. The isolation chamber was built into a habitat in orbit around Luna. The accommodations were spare but comfortable, and though she could not touch another human being (except those swathed in protective garments), she could talk freely with anyone she knew at any distance. She might have said her good-byes then. But she had planned, not consciously, to get that done beforehand. She was finished because she had
sensed a subtle internal warning that she would need this space of time in between Earth and embarkation, though she hardly knew for what.

The reason unfolded as the quiet days passed. When first she stepped into her chamber she sighed and felt relief; thereafter all her thoughts turned away from Earth. She did not so much think as feel; feel Earth drop away from far under her feet, not physically, not yet, but in importance; feel Rubee and Awnlee as lodestones close by; feel her thought change as her body changed to something that could no longer stay whole among humans.