The D’neeran Factor (9 page)

“Heaven knows. I don't think so.”

“I thought you said something about—” Hanna fumbled uneasily. Water? Waiting? “Never mind,” she said.

“Good,” said Tamara. “Don't ask me to remember anything I said two seconds ago. Please.”

She sat on Hanna's bunk with her capable hands, a little unsteady, wrapped around a mug of steaming coffee. There were hollows under her brown eyes, and the lids drooped from watching too many readouts that did not change. Signal Alpha now was twenty-four days in the past. Tamara had told Hanna that her ears were even wearier than her eyes; that she listened always for an audible voice, although it was absurd; that in her rest periods she lay still and awake because she could not stop listening. It had become her habit to meet Hanna in her short breaks from Communications, because Hanna knew little of the field. With Hanna, Tam could, she said, stop listening.

Hanna said, “They set the damn meeting place. They've got to be close.”

She sipped tea and waited for Tamara to say the next thing; they had had this conversation before.

Tamara said inevitably, “Well, maybe they're not.”

“Huh?”

“Not close.”

“And if they're not we either did something wrong or—”

“Or they never meant to show up at all.”

“Which is ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous.”

Tamara got up with a sigh. She said, “I guess it's time to go back and make sure we're set up for the conference.”

“What conference?” Hanna said with half-hearted curiosity.

“Alien Relations. At sixteen hundred hours. Another session with The Man himself listening to every word and jumping on anything he doesn't like. I'm not used to operating on that level, Hanna.”

Hanna frowned at her. “What man?”

“What?”

“Wait a minute.” Hanna sorted it out. True-humans sometimes used a verbal shorthand that seemed to make up for the vivid images D'neerans exchanged to supplement language, and she was not good at it. “You said the man listens to every word. What man?”

“The commissioner.”

“Which commissioner?”

“Jameson,” Tamara said patiently.

“Oh. I see. Alien Relations. Erik won't let me in on those meetings, you know.”

“I know,” Tam said, but she left without saying anything else. There was nothing more to say. Hanna had told her all about it: the bitter argument, the truth coming out at last that even Erik thought her not quite human, a threat, a freak to be kept away from important
human
work.

“You're lucky to be here at all,” he had said, and that had been the end of it. She had done as she was told. Erik was the captain and orders were orders; the implications would not be self-evident on D'neera, but there were no other D'neerans here. So she had stayed in her place in Navigation, downing stimulants and working endless hours like everyone else, with little room in her mind for anything else; the stimdope she and the rest of the crew were taking had given her no choice, because they concentrated your mind on whatever task was set it. Her head was filled with mathematical symbols that danced around each other in closed circles and ran together until they made no sense. She was stuffed with them and befogged by them, and her baffled
crewmates made another fog around her. Their search went round and round in circles too.

She wouldn't think about it any more. She couldn't bear to. There was no way out of the fog, but at least she could sleep and forget about it for a little while.

*   *   *

She yawned and hovered a moment behind someone's eyes in the command module with its bright displays and telltales and the human beings monitoring a sleek machine whose trillion nerve endings made it a nearly living thing. She drifted, soothed, through the ordinary detritus of humankind, a hundred separate universes of greater or lesser charm, self-contained though admirably bridged. Her tension eased. For after all, though D'neeran she was human, at home, at rest among the—

Beasts,
said a whisper in her head. She whimpered but the whispering went on without words; she struggled to move limbs that had no strength; she was trapped in the smoke again, and the first flicker of apprehension swelled into fear. The whisper crept closer and called her. Wrong, wrong, no good at all; dark and ashes and an eye like the sun watching pitiless and the shadow looming without mercy, new, new, something new and terrible and that was all she knew, that was all she would ever know but it knew
her.

I come. I come to you
—

She heard herself with terror.
N.S. Havock
filled her eyes. Her hand moved toward a key and Roly, who did not want to die, cried, “You're too good at this!” But still her hand crept on to the last thing she would ever touch. “You're mad!” Dorista said and seized the dreaming hand but it seemed she had gone on: dust of
Clara
and, yes, her people dust—what waited past that end? The whisper said:
We wait.

She shouted and the shout woke her up. She sat up shakily, sweating.

(“But you were saved,” Peng said reasonably. “The Interworld Fleet, wasn't it?”

“
Yes. Heavy cruisers. The
Willowmeade
under Tirel
—I
remember
Willowmeade—”

“These dreams, then. Do you want to die?”

“Me?” she said with disbelief.

“What else?”

“If they come from outside—”

“They don't come from outside,” he said.)

She said out loud, “It's the drugs.”

The words fell into the cabin's dead air without conviction.

She turned over and pushed her face into the thin blanket that covered her bunk. Her thoughts shot off in all directions: the numbers danced in the puzzled fog and Erik's fear and unkindness underlay it all. If only she could talk to Iledra— really
talk
to her, not record a message that would be censored anyway and wait for a reply to clear Earth. Or to her mother; but Cassie had taken up with a mood poet and gone to live on a beach in the tropics.

The thing that pulled her thoughts in all directions was something she did not want to think about. It had been easy to avoid, with the dreams gone and the stimulants at work.

Suddenly she wanted very badly to go to the conference, to find out what somebody else thought. The heads out here were numbed with drugs and anticlimax. What would the outsiders say? What did the omnipresent Jameson think of the mire his pet project had gotten into? Maybe he knew what was going on. Maybe somebody would say something that would make it unnecessary for her to think about her scraps of surmise. If she went, would Erik throw her out in front of all those important people? What would be the harm in just listening?

She reached out and turned out the light, and sought the greenish glow of a chronometer across the room.

The conference would begin in thirty minutes.

In forty she would go.

It was more than an hour before she stood outside the door and stared at it as if she could see through it.

She had fallen asleep again, just for a little while, and waked feeling profoundly uneasy. Had she had the dream, or not? She couldn't have; she hadn't had it since
Endeavor
's frustrating chase began; but in her fitful nap it had returned to memory at least, and now it haunted her and teased her as if something known yet not known hovered waiting for a word to make it real.

The polished door showed her nothing but her own reflection: thinner than ever, the dark blue eyes too big, her hair a shaggy mane. She ran both hands through it to tame it, but she did not move yet to open the door. She heard nothing behind it and reached through the wall into mist. There were too many people thinking unfocused thoughts; they slipped from her grasp like the dreams' unseen thing.

Finally she touched the switch that controlled the door, and it opened.

The room beyond was dark, but in a central blaze of light that seemed to float without foundation, Erik sat at the end of a long table whose other end she could not see. Hirasawa sat at his right and Tamara at his left, and Koster and Brown were in her line of sight. She sensed other presences and all of them, seen and unseen, looked at something hidden by a jutting corner at her left.

She edged into the dark edge of the room, feeling like a spectator at a drama arranged by an invisible director. The wall at her side made an alcove from which she watched in shadow. But what were the actors watching?

A male voice she had never heard before was saying, “—your point, of course, but the project calls for keeping on the move unless you have definite results. You've got too much ground to cover to waste time. You're off course and stretching optimum scheduling now.”

Hanna felt a jolt of anxiety. Marte Koster's. She knew what Koster would say before the woman spoke, her voice more tranquil than her heart.

“We might stay on course twenty more years without results. Either of the other options would be more acceptable to me than giving up.”

The others murmured programmed agreement—Hanna shook off the thought in irritation.

(The white faces of a F'thalian Hierarchus emerged from
the past. The thought of the Hierarchus soared and dipped and dizzily she caught at the flashes of light which were scintillating nodes of intersection, though she could not follow his spirit's flight.

Observe the water-breathers, he had said. Move a leaflet, so, and they rush eagerly to feed, though on this world to which they were not born they have no prey that moves so. Yet they do it, and their offspring will do it, and thus with all their generations. Thus with thee, Little One
—
)

She shoved the Hierarchus back into memory with an effort. Damn the drugs, they weren't working as they were supposed to work, she was more and more easily distracted and divided. Erik was saying, “—a combination of efforts. I think we could do it that quickly; it's a matter of refining Communications' data. But you said, sir, that you were opposed to that course of action on grounds other than the time it would require?”

She had heard the voice that answered once before. It was deep and precisely inflected and instantly recognizable. Starr Jameson said, “The likelihood that this system is the home of a star-traveling species is small, gauged by chance alone. The absence of any sign of artificial power generation settles the matter, to my mind.”

Koster said, “We signaled it and somebody answered. Somebody who was breathing down our necks.”

“Quite.” Jameson again. “You were then two and one-half light-years away from—let's be specific and say from the life-bearing planet of that system. Your data on the planet itself, therefore, is two and one-half years old. Certainly no native species has developed Inspace techniques in that time. The beings who responded to you therefore came from elsewhere—”

“Yes,” Hanna muttered, and froze: how had she known that? She stood in the dark and heard the voice going on, a deep music without meaning, her thoughts paralyzed. She made herself breathe again, and think of what it meant. She knew it; never mind how, for now. She
knew
it. It meant something—

“—should say they prefer to keep their business there to themselves since they invited you to a meeting not in that stellar system but some distance in an opposite direction. I
still agree with Kwomo that you ought not to spend time visiting the system. You might do something with an unmanned probe, if you can do it quickly enough—”

Hanna slid without volition into Koster's frustration. Marte reached out, reached out, for something unseen she saw slipping away. Her need for comfort was so strong that Hanna moved forward automatically. Her eyes were drawn to the end of the room, visible now, where most of the wall was a video screen that showed Starr Jameson and two other men bigger than life, dominant and unreal. The little group of spectators was tense.

Something nagged at the back of her mind. She ignored Koster, with difficulty, and stopped and dug for it in silence.

Koster was talking again: “—backtrack to our original point of contact? If we got our signals mixed up and they're looking for us somewhere else, they'll go back too. There's been a mistake.”

“Assuming they exist,” said one of the strangers on the screen. “Lieutenant Hweng, are you sure the signal's source was nearby? Couldn't it actually have originated within the system, maybe an automatic device set in place long ago? Something important might have been where you are now and be long gone.”

Tamara said with absolute conviction, “There has been no mistake. The margin of ambiguity was too tight for the origin to be in the system. It was far more clear than ours must have been at reception.”

Koster said, “Then there's been some kind of accident. We've missed each other. They must want to meet us as much as we want to meet them.”

She expanded on the theme, but Hanna was not listening anymore. The receding shadow stood for an instant in the light.

“Oh, they don't,” Hanna said out loud. “They don't want us to see them. They don't.”

After one frozen instant all the heads turned in her direction at once. Someone said from the video screen, “Who is that?”

Hanna did not move. She did not even feel the eyes; she was looking inward, watching pieces slot into place: the dreams and the tracking shadow always just outside her perception, the Dreamdust experiment whose results had
reflected no suggestion of hers, the conviction that she had already known Jameson's theory to be true without knowing, until she heard it, that she knew it. It fit together so simply. It was as simple as—