The D’neeran Factor (7 page)

“Erik. Wake up. Please.”

She shook him once and rubbed his chest. Her brown hand, tremulous, looked alien against the white skin and coarse gold hair. He opened his eyes and smiled, then reached up and pulled her down to him.

“No. No. That's not it, Erik. That's not what I want.”

She struggled again and he let her go. The smile faded. He was puzzled and vaguely annoyed.

“What's wrong?” he said.

Her heart quieted.

“The dream. Something after me.”

She showed him what she could—not the immediate horror, because the dream was receding after the fashion of dreams, but the residual fear she knew would not let her sleep again soon. Before she broke the quick contact she felt a flash of anger. He did not like telepathy, like most true-humans, and she had given him no warning this time.

She lay down and put her head on his chest. She wanted him to put his arm around her. Instead he said, “You ought to get some help.”

She looked from a pool of light into darkness and thought of Iledra's advice, stubbornly ignored.

“But the other dreams stopped,” she said. “It's different this time.”

He said after a minute's silence, “If you say so. But talk to Peng tomorrow, will you? That's what he's here for.”

“It won't help.”

“Hanna….” He patted her shoulder finally. His voice was carefully tolerant. “I'm getting a little tired of this.”

She was instantly guilty, and resentful too. And she could not show him her resentment without angering him again. And she did not know how to tell him about it. She had
never learned to filter emotion through words. That was a true-human skill.

She eased off the bed, feeling a tug at her stomach as she slipped from its half-gee field into normal gravity. She had discovered long ago where the disciplined officer liked his luxuries: right here. She was one of them.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” she said inaccurately, since it was well past ship's midnight.

“Turn out the light before you go,” he said.

Hanna's pullover and pants and sandals were scattered between the suite's outer door and the bed. She put them on and slipped out into a quiet corridor. Its lights were dimmed in deference to the arbitrary hour. More doors led to other officers' suites, and she hesitated outside one of them. Tamara—but she knew communications chief Tamara Hweng well enough to know that Tam was not inside.

She began walking, not toward her own room but drawn by an intangible thread toward the woman she sought. Not even Erik could quell the D'neeran impulse to seek understanding, and gentle Tamara at least would listen. The aftermath of the dream oppressed her. She finally found Tamara sipping coffee in the crew's mess hall, not alone. Heads turned casually and away again. Hanna was used to being ignored, almost unseen.

Tamara waved at her. “Sit down,” she said. The man with her, Ludo Brown, did not look pleased.

Hanna sat, sharply sensitive to Brown and feeling like an unwelcome child.

“I had another one of those dreams,” she said.

Even as she spoke, Hanna saw that Tam looked tired and preoccupied.

“Was it the same thing?” Tamara said.

“The same as it's been lately, yes. Not like the ones I used to have.”

“Well, I can't tell the difference, from what you say,” Tamara said, but Hanna felt her quick sympathy. She patted Hanna's hand. “You had an awful experience and you still dream about it. You ought to talk to Peng about it. You really ought to. You'll get over it quicker if you ask him to help.”

“But it's not
like
that, Tam. It's not just living it over. It's like there's really something out there.”

Brown, to her astonishment, looked at her sharply. “What is?” he said. “Out where?”

“Out—” She stared at him, taken aback. “I don't know. Out there.”

“Well?” he said not to Hanna but to Tam.

“No. Ludo, don't be silly.” Tamara began to laugh.

“Is she talking about the same thing?”

“It's not the same thing at all. She's been having bad dreams. What we've got is something else. Prob'ly means less than a dream. I mean, it's altogether different.”

Hanna might as well not have been there. She looked from one to the other doubtfully and said, “What are you talking about?”

“Spooks,” Tamara said. “An incoming Inspace signal. Very erratic. We've been debugging and defogging all night and we can't get rid of it.
I
think the last relay we planted is defective.”

Hanna, distracted, considered it. Communications through so-called inner space were subject to the same uncertainties as travel and could not be maintained without closely spaced signal relays. A tenuous chain of them now connected
Endeavor
with the established networks of human space.

“Is it a message?” she said.

“No, it's not. Random energy, random timing. That's what makes it so frustrating. If there were some structure we could use for diagnosis—but there's not. And Mister Imagination here keeps telling me it's not in the system.”

Brown looked up and grinned at Tam. Hanna wished he liked her better, because she liked him. She liked looking at him, too. There were many D'neerans of Hanna's coloring and some who were darker, but Brown's rich darkness was rare where she came from. But he did not like her, because he did not like D'neerans, and he only tolerated her for tolerant Tamara's sake.

“All the same,” Brown said, “you can't get away from it. They think there might be something out here. You can't help thinking about it.”

“I can,” Tamara said, and Hanna said again, “What are you talking about?”

“The Amber signals,” Tam said. “We pick them up sometimes around Alta. They don't say anything, they don't mean
anything, and, Lord knows, they're not focused on Alta. They're ordinary glitches, only more of 'em. They're nothing. Some natural source we haven't pinned down yet.”

“Or maybe not,” Brown said. “That's why we're out here, isn't it? And not out past, say, Heartworld?”

“I don't understand this,” said Hanna, beginning to feel desperate. It would be so clear if she could just peek into Brown's thoughts. But that wasn't polite, and his native human faculty for projection, the foundation of her own ability but uncontrolled, was not operating at the moment.

“There's nothing to understand,” Tamara said, but Brown said simultaneously, “They told us to track down the spooks. You know they did, Tam.”

Tamara raised her fingers to her lips in a comic shushing gesture and breathed, “Unofficially….” She added, “The relay's defective. If we can't eliminate the noise we'll have to censor it. Or go back and replace the relay module. I'll talk to the captain, but I'm sure he'll go for the censor.”

“We could do it through the DeCastro program—”

They were going to start talking shop. Hanna stood up and said. “Well, good night.”

“Good night,” they said without even looking up.

*   *   *

She tried talking to the true-human psychologist Peng, as she had been advised. He said laughingly that he could hardly succeed where D'neeran mindhealers had failed. Were they not supposed to achieve remarkable results with trauma victims? Even with soft psychology?

Hanna gathered this meant they did not use biochemical intervention. She thought she felt a trace of condescension.

She said apologetically, to Peng's amusement, that she had expected the matter to take care of itself.

He approached his task with some enthusiasm, but Hanna was so inarticulate that she did not have to read his thoughts—just his face—to see his enthusiasm wane as quickly as it had come.

He gave her a little flask of something called Dreamdust and told her how to instruct herself to dream that the dead were at peace and the hunters vanquished. It was, he told her, all a matter of suggestion.

Hanna looked at the flask doubtfully and said, “But what if there's another source of suggestion?”

Peng beamed at her and said, “There can't be. That's the beauty of it. Dreams are entirely your own creation. It all comes from inside you.”

“But I'm a telepath.”

“Oh,” said Peng. He frowned.

“We'd never dream—I mean, think of using something like this. We don't project when we're sleeping, unless we're very sick or very drugged or it's enormously stressful, but things creep in.”

“You mean,” Peng said after a pause, “you dream other people's dreams?”

“It's been known to happen.”

“Well,” he said after a further pause, “try it.”

She tried it. The Dreamdust was effective, all right, but the effect was that the thing hunting behind the cruisers was bigger and closer than ever. She could almost see it. She
would
see it. She had to see it, this thing of terror, though she trembled in reality as well as in the dream. But it was shrouded in cloud and when she crawled trembling into the cloud, every instinct screaming for retreat, it solidified before her and was an impenetrable wall behind which the thing faded and was gone.

She didn't want to see it anyway.

There was nothing about peace or vanquishing at all.

She gave the Dreamdust back to Peng and told him she would not trouble him again.

The dreams receded to their former level of tolerable horror, and she was no nearer understanding their significance than she had been before.

*   *   *

Hanna was not on duty when the excitement began. She must have felt it sweep through the ship, but she got it mixed up with her own enthusiasm. She had discovered “Enchanted River: Notes on a Non-Terrene Evolutionary Process.” The work was seven hundred years old, but she had seen that river, and Marshall Ho, dead half a millennium, spoke to her as to a contemporary. Her mind was not on
Endeavor
's quest but in a steaming forest on the world of Primitive A, where the hot thick air lay heavy on her hair and mud squelched at every step and a fault in her breathing mask would mean death.

She had never learned to whom she owed the privilege
of being so uncomfortable. Her request for Polity permission to visit A had been turned down repeatedly, and then one day was granted. She had gone to the planet at once, before They could change Their minds again. A bored Fleet guardian hovered at her shoulder and thought about patting her behind. She watched the sinuous leathery A creatures for days without seeing a single piece of behavior to support her conviction, immediate and direct, that they had already entered the gray area between bestiality and sentience.

“Enchanted River” was a treasure.

Ho, working under the auspices of a rough coalition of Earthly nations, had been unhampered by the stringent regulations developed later by the Polity. He had gotten right down in the beings' midst, and at considerable personal risk watched every detail of their lives for months. He thought their intelligence was on a level with that of certain extinct terrestrial primates, and he held out great hopes for their future.

No one paid much attention even then. Colony One and Co-op had just been established, and there were enough strange things in places where the air was safe to breathe. The contact with F'thal came a few years later, and Ho's ambiguous pets were forgotten. The infant Polity remembered to interdict the place—after the Co-opers decimated a population of potentially future-sentient mammals on their own planet—but the act was neither necessary nor daring, since no one wanted anything on A. Marshall Ho became a footnote in the history of exploration, and then disappeared altogether. “Enchanted River” was never translated into Standard. Hanna did not know why; the translation program was still available, and she had done the job herself by pushing a button. She supposed no one had ever been interested enough to push the right buttons.

She skimmed the work in a couple of hours, her attention so concentrated that when she was done she could have repeated long passages from memory. Then, just to be sure, she ran a search for any mention of something she had seen on A. There was nothing.

(“When did they start building dams?” she said to the Fleet sentinel.

“They've always made 'em. Instinct. Read Rutherford.
Twenty-six fifties,” he said, looking longingly at her breasts. It was a long and lonely tour of duty out here, and he was nearly at the end of it.

“I've read Rutherford. I've seen his pictures. What they were building then wasn't as sophisticated. And it was confined to a limited area.”

“That's very interesting,” he said, edging closer.

She never had to hit him. Her blast of anger straight into his head was enough; and taught her for the first time what true-humans thought of telepathy. It was all mixed up together in memory: the discomfort and his bitter resentment and the—pups, she supposed she must call them
—
learning to build. The vague stirrings of extension of the learning skill to other things. Inchoate, as yet. Unrealized. When need called it would happen. But no telepath had gone there before, and no one else could have sensed it.)

The dams created quiet deep pools where the beings lounged and played. Ho described their environment in exhaustive detail; but he did not mention dams. His photographs showed no dams. Now the structures were everywhere, wherever the A Primitives lived.

It was negative evidence. It was better than saying: I am a telepath and I know. But would it be enough?

She had been still for so long that her muscles were cramped. She got up and the heat and stench faded. Her memory of sunlight filtered through leaves vanished, and her cabin seemed cold and dark. It was standard issue; she had brought little with her from D'neera, and regretted the omission. It seemed noisy, as if many voices were talking very loudly nearby.