The D’neeran Factor (70 page)

To ride the gales of the stars
…Humans did not talk to their spacecraft that way. Rubee at the center of a cylinder of pulsing light, standing, was not ugly or misshapen; he was magnificent. Hanna stood also, as if at attention. Awnlee beside her wrapped his fingers around hers, all the way around. Hanna said directly to his mind:
We have this in common: I, you, all intelligence; naught else in the universe feels and does this.
The
Bird
's common sound, a low sweet humming, grew louder, higher, louder. The ship under Hanna's feet gathered herself; poised on the edge of space and time; lifted her wings; in a chronon was somewhere else. Hanna turned to the transparency and looked in all senses Outside. The configuration of space had changed; the stars
had shifted. All the worlds she knew were at her back. Awnlee chattered as the
Bird
's song faded sweetly. “Five of your weeks, a short time, till the fourteenth day of Strrrl. Think of what I will show you! There are forests like scarlet plumes under skies as blue as yours. There are ruminants big as your house. There are sparkling wines colored like the grain, and pink insects sweet to eat. There are—”

“Awnlee, come here,” Rubee said in a voice so ordinary that Awnlee suddenly silent was at his side before Hanna registered the movement. Then came a knowledge of something she had not felt before in Rubee: not fear, but a kind of deep concern.

She followed Awnlee to the central mandala. It no longer glowed; that should not be. The omnipresent humming dropped to silence. The
Bird
should not be so quiet, not in Inspace mode. Rubee was intent, Awnlee apprehensive, and Hanna saw that they were concentrated on the ghostly columns of numbers which were all that remained of the brilliant light.

All of them showed, uniformly, the Uskosian symbol for zero.

*   *   *

Rubee and Awnlee forsook the central mandala for the work stations that lined the bridge. Hanna did not speak. It was not easy to refrain, but she could not interrupt their urgent absorption. She only said once, “Is there a way in which I might be of service?”

But Rubee said, “No. We are grateful, but you have not the necessary skill with our vessel.”

Therefore she listened with all her senses. With her mind she perceived that Rubee was worried and surprised; in Awnlee there was a chill of fear, and he kept reassuring himself in terms that in words would translate to:
It
is not so bad, we will be safe will be safe will be safe!
With her ears she heard them talk of technical matters that baffled her. Their hands flew over glowing banks of keypads which responded with unintelligible schematics and columns of numbers. The
Bird
talked back to them, sounding anxious; or was that Hanna's imagination? She stood at Awnlee's back and watched what he did until she could endure it no longer. She must ask what had happened. Before she could do it he said, not to her but to Rubee, “That is the thing,
then. It is a simple electrical malfunction. Simple, yet extensive; it is the power infrastructure for the distortion of dimension. I have not heard of such a thing before, neither in the prototypes nor the test voyages. I do not know how it could be.”

He looked at a many-colored pattern that looked like (and, Hanna now realized, was) a wiring diagram. Large portions of it blinked on and off. Two meters away Rubee sighed, watching an identical image.

“There will be no quick journeys without repair,” he said, “and repair means retracing our course. We will not come home on the fourteenth day of Strrrl; not this year.”

Awnlee was still tense, but he said with the appearance of cheer, “If we must have this trouble, it is good that we have it at once. The conventional engines are unaffected. We are near Oneba, some thirty light-days; a long journey, yet not impossible nor more than inconvenient.”

“That is true. Yet it will be best to remain here and signal distress, for the searchers will come quickly when our call comes to Oneba. That will use only thirty true days, and in one day more someone will come. And what are thirty-one days?—a grain of sand.”

Hanna absorbed it slowly. They meant that the Inspace system was out. The
Bird
could not Jump. Without the Inspace option, the
Bird
was months away from Omega. They were, it appeared, marooned, for at least a month. Then she thought, surprising herself: What of it? Here was light, warmth, air, food, companionship. The
Bird
had not suffered a disaster. It was only a routine breakdown in space; it only meant delay.
It means rest,
she thought, and said half-consciously but aloud, in Ellsian, “There will be nothing we can do. There will be nothing we must do.”

But Rubee had made a negative with his hands. “It is true that we have no present danger,” he said. “Yet I am troubled because of the error that has occurred, and I wish to study it further. Also I wish to investigate the systems that continue to function. The failure of dimensional manipulation has bereft us of much power. If the old-style engines should fail also, only emergency generators will be left to retain life support—and I do not like having only one system as our defense against death in space.”

Hanna knew well the perpetual caution of starship captains,
whatever their species or form. She said, “That is proper. Yet how could two such errors occur, Rubee?”

“How could one occur? Yet there is not one, but two; there are two already. There is the error that effected the malfunction. Therefore I must deduce that there is an error also in a diagnostic program, or else we would have been forewarned. What else might there be? What else might fail? We will work until we find out.”

He said this with finality, and he did not intend to wait; at once, Hanna and Awnlee following, he rose and took his way to the “wing” that housed the
Bird
's Inspace systems, which Rubee and Awnlee accurately called the distorters of dimension. Hanna had spent little time in this part of the
Bird.
It was a world of soaring silver spaces, arched and dizzily high. It was impressive, but it was not designed for comfort.

Hanna was not comfortable, and there was nothing she could do to help the Uskosians, except to stay out of their way. She did that for a long time, watching the units of time the aliens called hours go by on the strange chronometers. She was left to her own thoughts, which were not comfortable either. At about the time help could arrive, she had expected to be making a ceremonial, mythic landing on Uskos. She had expected a period of such intense work that it might produce the most brilliant results of her life. All her expectations had led to this, a profound anticlimax, and she was—not distressed. It even seemed that she might be treacherously relieved.

“There are erasures I do not understand,” Awnlee said suddenly and very loudly. His voice echoed in the curved spaces, solitary in the great expanse.

“But what is the cause?” Rubee said.

“I do not yet know. They have not the appearance of randomness.”

Hanna listened absently. A smile twitched at her lips. She was unquestionably released from the expected, at least for a little while. No human voice could follow her here for a month. She formed phrases and turned them over in her mind, trying them out:
I'm very sorry, Starr.
But they did not have the ring of truth.

Rubee, peering over Awnlee's shoulder at a console a few meters away, straightened with a gesture of disappointment.

“It is garbled beyond retrieval,” he said.

“It is not,” Awnlee said. “I will need some days, but I will reconstruct it. I will start at once.”

Rubee said, “Do not begin now. Night has come. No reason has occurred to hurry us. I wish to observe what you do, but I do not wish to do it tonight.”

The tendrils around his mouth drooped. Hanna remembered what he had said of his age. She said, “Indeed, Awnlee, it is time to rest.”

“Then I will wait,” Awnlee said, though it was plain that he longed to begin, and Hanna left him to talk to Rubee and take “one look more” at the mystery.

*   *   *

Hanna slept uneasily in the hot night. She dreamed too much, and woke often. The dreams were all a confused medley of the past. Here was the governing House of Province Koroth, vast and cool. “Do this,” said the Lady of Koroth, “do that, you must, it must be done.” The pale face altered; Hanna looked into her own blue eyes. She would be the Lady of Koroth one day, a magistrate of D'neera, lawmaker, law-abider. The People of Zeig-Daru thought to her, fondly accepting. Their great hands held instruments of torture. Hanna woke sweating; turned, and slept again. She rested comfortably in Starr Jameson's arms. She was loved. “Not yet,” he said. “There is something you must do first.” He turned into the Master of Chaos and then into Rubee, who lectured under a tree.

“Details change,” Rubee said. “Grand designs must not, except by the hand of the Master. The honor is greater that way. By honor I mean sureness and security. Nonetheless persons make designs, and the Master enters in their alteration.”

Rubee's face changed in its turn; first to something cruel with many pointed teeth; then to a human face that looked at Hanna with a pleasant smile and gold-flecked eyes. It said in a stranger's voice, “No one can hear you out here.”

“No, no!” Hanna cried, trying to scream. Her own muffled shout woke her up. She sat up in the dark and pushed at her hair. It was wet with perspiration.

She turned on a light and looked about with an eerie sense that all that surrounded her was unreal; that she still dreamed. The room had been made over for her in blue and
lavender, as comfortable and human as her own fading home. The air circulated with a faint whisper. Except for that there was silence, and Rubee and Awnlee slept deeply nearby.

She lay back uneasily. The face with the gold-flecked eyes was still nearly visible. An old sensation gnawed her, as if she whispered to herself, “You have overlooked something!” But it was associated only with danger and fear; and what was there to fear?

But she had thought that, too—sometimes, before.

She made a face and thought: Be paranoid, then; think of the worst; think back, seeking anomaly; think.

There are erasures I do not understand. They have not the appearance of randomness
—

She felt vulnerable and exposed. She got up and put on some of the skimpy clothing she had brought with her. The tight singlet and shorts clung to her; her skin was clammy.

Think.

The programmed distortion occurred,
the
Bird
had told Awnlee. And then the Inspace failure.
No one can hear you out here.

She paced the room. Her bare feet trod the resilient floor without disturbing the silence of the
Bird.

Suppose there was no random error. Suppose what appeared to be error was the result of a skillfully implanted series of commands.

The course program had never been touched. For that it need not have been touched. There were people who had studied the
Bird
's Inspace engineering systems. Hanna did not remember Jameson saying anything about those persons being investigated beyond the common bounds of security clearance. It was just possible, therefore, that the engineering failure had been planned. And the route from Earth to Omega was available to anyone who wanted it. It was standardized, part of the common programming of Inspace navigation. Given such detailed knowledge of the
Bird
's course so far, and knowledge of its general direction beyond, which had never been a secret, anyone might have extrapolated the
Bird
's approximate location after the first Jump past Omega. After that first Jump the possibilities for error would grow exponentially, but the finish of the first must be within a reasonably confined radius. The calculation
could not be precise, however, without possession of the course program; and without precision, even if someone were searching within that radius, there would be a margin of safety for the
Bird.
But Hanna could not estimate its extent.

Should she go to Rubee now and wake him from sleep? She leaned against a lavender wall and pressed her cheek against it. It was the wildest speculation, but she thought of how it could be done. Someone who was not afraid to go out past Omega could do it, exploring in weeks of small patient steps the logical path outward, until the data were complete and the leap as safe as any inside human space. Given the necessary skill, it needed only time. And Awnlee and Rubee had been in human space nearly a Standard year; had someone come this way while they went with Hanna round the worlds?

She closed her eyes and shut out the lavender light. Reached out, out, past Rubee and Awnlee, beyond the sleeping
Bird
and farther still, in all directions and no direction. In the isolation of the
Bird
she might, with all her skill and all her mind concentrated, touch a familiar presence though it be light years away. There ought to be nothing else for her to touch. There should be no stranger near at hand.

There was something. She brushed against it and jerked away, chilled. It was in space and thought of the
Far-Flying Bird.
It thought of the treasure in the
Bird
's guts.

“God damn it,” she said softly, scarcely able to believe in what she had felt. But it was there. It was close by, and purposeful.

She did not know exactly where it was. Telepathy could not tell her that.

She went to Rubee's room and pounded on his door. He answered at once. He wore a sleeping robe that brushed the floor and he adjusted it punctiliously as the door opened. Hanna felt his surprise. She said, “I am sorry to wake you, Rubee. But I must, and
now.
”

“Enter. Enter—”

She was already in the room, talking as quickly as the need to think in Ellsian allowed. He did not understand her at first, so that she had to back up and repeat her knowledge and surmises; when he grasped them his eyespots worked and shone.