The D’neeran Factor (76 page)

“You're immunized against it, though. Everybody is. It came out of Colony One at the beginning of the Explosion. You've heard of the Plague Years, I know; well, that was Dawkins' fever. Ever since then you can't even get a vital signs readout without having your immunity tested. It's still around, but you don't find it very often. It would be just possible for her to get it if she'd always been in some isolated
place and never had any medical care. But she's had the best—there's evidence of a massive regeneration effort in adulthood—and she's been around. Has she ever been around!”

The edges of the incision melted together under Theo's hands. When he was done, there was only a red line cutting across the inflamed skin. He ran a finger over it with a craftsman's approval and said, “Rescue can worry about scarring. That's good, though. You can let go now.”

Michael held on to the right hand anyway. It had escaped the general destruction and was smooth to the touch, but it radiated heat. He said, “What did you do? The same kind of profile you did on my blood a couple of years ago?”

“Yes, and she's been everywhere. All the Polity worlds. Valentine. And the Outside worlds, too, which is very rare—Girritt, F'thal, even Zeig-Daru. And there were some other things the tracking program couldn't match up.”

“Maybe there's something wrong with it. That doesn't sound right about Zeig-Daru. Nobody's been there except a few D'neerans.”

“Well, the base pattern is D'neeran.”

“It's
what?
”

“D'neeran.” Theo, puttering among metal boxes, stopped and looked at him curiously. “What's wrong with that?”

“Well—it's just that getting anywhere near B would have to make a telepath sick.”

He was shocked and it must show; Shen was too still, Theo looked too uncertain. He pulled himself together and said calmly, “If she's D'neeran, she wasn't with him by choice. She might not have much to tell us. Are you sure?”

“That's what it said,” Theo said stubbornly. “And if she's not D'neeran, why would she go to D'neera? Nobody goes there either.”

“I did once,” Michael said reminiscently. “I was spaced. I thought I was going to D'ning on Co-op, from a town an hour away. I couldn't figure out why passage cost so much and why it took so long.”

Theo looked at him suspiciously, but the story was true. It had happened in the years just after the
Pavonis Queen,
when he had spent money wildly and the drugs and the women were interchangeable, the craving for something unidentified insatiable, the fights a constant in every spaceport
bar. Twice he had nearly killed men with his fists, and later bought them off. And lately it seemed he had not changed so much since then as he had thought.
Not much improvement,
she had said.

Theo cleared away equipment. He left a monitor bracelet on the woman's wrist. He studied the readout module at her shoulder, frowning.

“She's no worse,” he said. “You said three days to rendezvous, if we start now? I hope she holds out.”

Shen said, “Mike, they called back just before I came down. Want to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“Want to know what happened.”

“They don't have to know.”

“Told 'em you'd call.”

“Forget it.”

She shrugged. Theo said, “Mike, I said let go of her hand. You'll confuse the monitor.”

Michael released the hand with a twinge of reluctance. “Think she'll make it?” he said.

Theo said, “Somebody help me take this stuff back to the lab.”

Michael watched him gather up instruments and load them onto Shen and Lise like pack animals. He did not repeat the question.

When the others went out, he stayed where he was. The woman on the bed looked more like a human being now that some of the bruises were clearing, and he was uncomfortable. After a minute he realized that her nudity disturbed him, and drew a sheet over the limp figure. It was not possible for her to be an object of desire, and he had known more than his portion of naked flesh; it was her helplessness that troubled him.

He thought of Theo's judgment of her origin. D'neerans were no more faultless than other human beings and had some faults of their very own, but they were too sensitive to psychic pain to live willingly with evil. This woman could not be one of B's pack. Instead she had had the bad luck to become his prey. And she did not think Michael was much better.

He thought:
Live. So I can tell you that wasn't me you saw. He just drops in sometimes. Please live.

*   *   *

The dark lifted a little from time to time. When it did, she thought she was in a nightmare. Past, present, and future bounced around inside her skull in urgent jolts—

*   *   *

Contact the Polity Admin Starr Starr Starr! They must not find out who I am
—
hide from them!

Michael slumped with his head on one hand, half-asleep. The room was dark except for a pool of light around the bed. The iris that opened on space was shut to the shifts that came with each Jump. The edges of the room melted into the dark, and Lise slept in shadow on a padded couch, her fragile legs in an awkward sprawl. Theo sat near the bed; he did not sleep. He got up often and looked at the patient, the monitor readouts, the tubes that fed into her arm all the help that was left to give. Shen had shrugged and left them to their vigil. There was no sound except for the whisper of
GeeGee
at night, and the sick woman's difficult breath.

I
must do it, I must. But in nightmare one cannot move, the body has no strength, I cannot breathe, I feel nothing…nothing…

Michael brooded on the face that healed before his eyes. The lesser bruises were gone, the others disappearing. It was like watching a blurred image come into focus; as if it were not her face that changed, but his eyes that cleared. In the slow hours he saw the clear arch of the brow emerge, the mouth soften to delicate curves. A silver chain that could not be removed glistened against skin turning to pale brown satin. Once, her eyes opened. When he leaned over, he saw that it was reflex and she was aware of nothing near her; he saw also that her eyes were the deepest blue he had ever seen. They closed and he drew away, troubled. She had begun to look familiar, but he did not know her.

—
oh no I have failed all alone with the dead I feel NOTHING—!

Six years of Hanna's life vanished. She fell into the past. The People of Zeig-Daru tore her apart, humans regenerated her, and she woke, a disembodied consciousness in null-space, sightless, paralyzed, disconnected from muscle and nerve—

Lise stirred and moaned. The sides of
GeeGee
rushed in and sucked out with a roar. The air went with them. Michael
woke to the dark, paralyzed. He could not lift a hand, could not breathe, there were weights on his chest.
“GeeGee!”
He was choking. “Life support! Air!”

“All systems A-OK,”
GeeGee
said, “don't you like the atmosphere mix?”

He flailed at stifling darkness and then it was gone. His heart pounded and he breathed in gasps. He felt something he had not known in years: panic. He was incredulous. Lise lifted herself with a struggle, dazed. Theo said, “What was—?”

“I don't know—” His heartbeat eased. Nothing was changed. He must have slept and dreamed something terrible—but Lise and Theo had felt it, too—

D'neerans learn before they are six to suppress unwilled projection of thought. In extremity inhibition gives way.

Oh God they are big so much bigger than I cruel and ruthless oh agony no—! No!

The room filled up with ghastly shadows. Michael got a good look at them, impossibly there, bestial figures of malignant intelligence. Lise flew across the room and into his arms with a terrified cry—right through the shadows.

“Theo!” He shouted into a well. “Something on Revenge, what did we pick up!”

Shen tumbled into the room. She held a knife and yelled, “Where are they, where!”
Oh help help help me!
Hanna screamed, but silently, dreadfully, and Lise shrieked an echo in Michael's ear.

The monstrous shadows touched the sky. The sick woman writhed in a pile of sheets and tubes, center of a storm. Michael fell on her. “Stop it,” he said, “stop, stop!” He took her face in his hands, took her shoulders and shook her. Her eyelids flickered. He saw her face and nothing else, shadow was everywhere. “Wake up! Stop it!”

She shrank away from his hands and lifted her own and struck at him. He felt the effort as if it were his. He thought she clawed his eyes, chopped his neck—but that was only her intent; she had not touched him. A strong woman with a newborn's strength.

The light came back.

Lise cried in great gusts, howling. Michael held her tightly with one arm and kept the other hand on the stranger's shoulder. Over Lise's head he saw Theo and Shen shaken, staring, waiting for him to say it was all right.

“All right. It's all right,” he said, and disentangled himself from Lise. He did not want to loosen his hold on the woman. He brushed a lock of tangled hair from her face and she made a pitiful sound, still lost in a private horror. But it was private again.

“It's her. Telepathy.” His fingers were tight on her shoulder, but he made his voice light. “Wonderful thing, telepathy. What do the books say about this, Theo?”

“Huh?”

“Go check the lab library. Or call Rescue. Find out what this is about.” He let go of the woman cautiously. Lise crowded against him and he held her and stroked her hair; she snuffled against his chest. “Theo, it could start up again, go find out what to do!”

Theo, an automaton, looked first at the tubes and readouts. “But the fever's down,” he mumbled, and stumbled out.

Michael looked at Shen and said, “Put the knife away.” She growled and shoved it into her belt. She took Theo's place and stared at the patient balefully.

“What the hell?” she said.

“I told you. Telepathy. I thought for a minute we'd all been doped or something, got some kind of mind-bending bug on Revenge—but all that came from her.”

“Those things? In here?”

“Not real. Illusions. Some kind of shared hallucination that started with her.”

Lise said with a last sob, “What were they?”

“I don't know. Something she made up. Or maybe saw…”

It was past. He began to relax. He sat on the bed and watched the woman's face. Lise wound herself into a ball, her head on Michael's knee; she looked at the telepath fearfully. Michael thought about the shadows. What kind of mind could think them up? But they had had the detailed immediacy of experience: the gray skin, scarlet garments, paws with long curving claws.

He said restlessly, “I've seen those things before. Not them, but pictures of them.”

It was just out of reach, as if someone had just told him the answer and he had already forgotten. He went on thinking out loud: “Nothing looks quite like that except—well, Zeigans do a little; they might be exaggerated Zeigans.
They might be, she's been to Zeig-Daru, Theo said. And she might think of them like that. The first person to make contact, a D'neeran woman, had what you might call a bad experience—”

After a minute of dead silence Shen said, “So?”

He got up, dumping Lise out of his lap. She retreated quickly from the bed. There was a library terminal in the room and the library was well stocked. He sat down at the terminal with some reluctance. He kept wanting to look back at the unconscious woman, as if it were dangerous to turn his back on her.

The guess had to be wrong. There had to be some reason for her look of familiarity besides his reading about Zeig-Daru.

But the search took no time at all. When he asked the library about Zeig-Daru, the first answer was a woman's name. There was a portrait with it. He looked toward the bed once, quickly, without needing to; now he knew why it seemed he had seen her before. He had seen pictures of that face over and over in the months just past, because of the envoys from Uskos.

After a while he got up and went back to the bed. He looked down at Hanna ril-Koroth and said tiredly, “This is very bad.”

Shen lifted an eyebrow. Lise was frightened; she did not understand, but his tone warned her something was wrong.

“This is an important person,” he said. “I knew a lot about her once, at the time of the Zeigan contact. Which she made. Among other things she's Contact's darling and a commissioner's lady. Former commissioner's. I don't know what the hell we're going to do with her. I thought she belonged with B, thought she was nobody, nobody cared what happened to her, we could question her and hand her over to Rescue and that'd be the end of it—but we're going to be looked at like I haven't been looked at in fifteen years. Like I never wanted to be looked at again. There's no way to keep this quiet.”

Theo came in, steadier. He said, “There's not much we can do if it happens again. One of us can try to keep her attention and focus the projection, so we don't all lose our minds. In D'neeran medical centers they keep mindhealers on staff for that.”

Shen said, “You got it wrong.”

“What?” Theo said, but she was talking to Michael.

“Wrong? How?”

“About quiet.” The knife was in Shen's hand. She touched the blade. “Cancel Rescue. All they know is the bitch died. We jettison the body. She never had a name.”

Michael said, “Theo, what did you do? Contact Rescue?”

“No, it was in the library. I'll do that, though. I'd better do that.”

“No. Don't.”

“No?”

“No.” He looked at Shen. “If she dies, all right. No name. Some stranger from anyplace but D'neera. But we don't do anything to hurry it along.”

Shen hissed. “Gonna run
Gee
with those things around?”