The D’neeran Factor (95 page)

His hands twisted out of hers and caressed her arms. She shuddered. A longing for Michael possessed her, for the touch of his clean hands. She made herself keep still and listen.

“…home take me home…See? See what I've got.”

He fumbled in a pocket; when he let go of her to do it, she crept away. “…see…see…” She looked with disbelief at the broken gold chain; recognized it, and shuddered again. And here was something else. “Here…seeseesee!”

Norsa squatted beside her. “Do you know that that is?”

She had to try twice before she could answer. “It is an ordinary data storage module.”

“What is its significance to him?”

“I do not know. I have to get out,” she said suddenly in
Standard. She jerked away from Gaaf, evading the clutching hands; she got to her feet and walked out quickly, though her knees trembled. The ubiquitous guards followed her into the gallery outside Gaaf's rooms. She stood shaking until Norsa came out.

He said with interest, “There is water coming from your eyespots.”

“Yes. It will stop by itself in a little while.”

Norsa said, “Is that person deranged?”

“I think so.”

“We thought it possible, but we could not know. We did not know what to do, and were afraid in our ignorance to attempt any help. We have fed him as best we could, by force, despite the risk; there was nothing else we dared to do. Is there help you can give?”

“I do not know. There is one among my companions who has some skill in healing sickness of the body. I do not know about sickness of the spirit. Perhaps there is help he can give.”

“Tell me which it is, and I will send for him at once.”

“No. I mean—as you wish, Norsa. But I cannot explain to him tonight. I can give no more help to anyone any more in this night which grows old so that morning has almost come. I must have rest.”

“Then you will have rest. Is there anything with which I can provide you for your comfort?”

The tears had stopped, but they started up again. “You can provide my companion Michael,” she said. “He is my shelter in the night. I am grieved by lacking him. Surely you know we will cause you no harm. Is it necessary that we be parted?”

“Perhaps not,” Norsa said after a pause. “Yet it must be so in what is left of this night, for he is far away. Yet tomorrow perhaps this will change.”

“I have gratitude.”

She wiped her eyes and followed Norsa back to the street. Tomorrow he would bring Michael to her. Tomorrow also they would have to do something about Gaaf, if they could, if Theo could, but she could not think of it tonight; she was dizzy and her eyes were full of fog. When they came to her quarters she was already asleep and Norsa had to wake her before she could go in. When he touched her to
rouse her, she said sleepily, “Mike?” and Norsa looked at her curiously and thought of questions that had to do with this odd bonding. But he was too polite to ask them then; a weary guest must first be given sleep.

*   *   *

Michael spent the first night in a nightmare of pacing through the rooms of a place that he took to be a luxurious prison; later he learned it was a private home. But it was a prison all the same, because he was guarded. The guards did not try to stop him in his restlessness, but they stood at each doorway that led out into the night. He paced because he was trembling on the edge of the terrible rage, which he finally knew had to do with being impotent and trapped. But he could not give into it because of Lise; because of her he fought it back. She held him there with her frightened eyes: she sensed what the pacing meant, and feared abandonment. And it was because she would not close her eyes, because she would not look away from him even when her face was gray with exhaustion, that he finally stopped moving. He saw that as long as she touched him, she could rest; so he forced himself to join her on a pallet meant (his guards made him understand) for sleeping, and with both Lise's hands clutching his arm, he, too, slept. But even in sleep he waited for the Polity to come, waited to be led away in chains.

In the morning they were taken away again. He thought the next thing he saw would be the face of a human being from I&S. Instead, after a journey of several hours, the vehicle that carried him and Lise and their guards drew up before a labyrinth of a cream-colored house in the center of a garden, and Hanna came out to meet him. She said that Shen was already there, and that Theo would come soon but had been called away to see another human. She told him about Castillo—in shock, he scarcely understood her—and about Henrik Gaaf. She put her arms around his neck and talked to him gently.

“It's going to be all right,” she said. “But it's not all right, is it? What's wrong?”

“I don't know…” He detached himself from her and passed his hands over his face. He looked beyond her to the house the Uskosians had loaned their honored guests. The roof shone like copper, the eaves were loaded with
gingerbread fancywork. Wide doors stood open to the summer wind, and the interior looked, from here, dim and cool. It was a dream waiting to suck him in. It was the wrong dream, he thought. He had to run, he had to get away, he could not wait on fate though it might come after him anyway.

But Lise had already run down the path to the central door, where Shen had appeared. Hanna took his hand and drew him toward the house, and he followed her into a dream of summer.

*   *   *

By the end of the next day they had begun to fall into natural orbits; at the end of seven days, a Standard week, the process was complete.

Hanna was the first to leave. If she had come to Uskos for sanctuary, she forgot the fact immediately; she was still, and first, a scholar. Norsa gave her workrooms in the city, a vehicle, a chauffeur, and she left Michael each morning and returned at night. Though she saw that a cold hand lay on his heart, it seemed to her that he had strayed into precisely the right dream. If he disagreed, that was his business. So she talked to Uskosians and made notes. “I suspect,” she wrote, “that the unusually high rate of mutation on Uskos, which has promoted evolution despite the asexuality of life here, was the origin of the concept of the Master of Chaos; while the identity of generations (though modified by environmental factors and the occasional successful mutation) most likely is linked to the conservative world view expressed in the tales…Uskosians handle the physical universe much as we do, but in their attitude toward it there is something else: a perpetual suspense. They do not say only, ‘What will happen
if we do this?'
They also say, ‘What will
happen to us?'
…The Uskosians with whom I talk are becoming aware of this difference between their perspective and ours and, curiously, feel this makes us far more vulnerable than they are. Several have used a phrase I had not heard before. I'm not sure if the best translation is ‘children of chaos' or ‘the Master's children.' But they meant human beings. I'm sure of that.”

Hanna finished this passage late at night in a room she had commandeered for work in the humans' maze of a house. When she was done, she showed it to Michael. He
looked at the last lines for a long time. Then he said, “Oh, hell, I could've told you that.”

*   *   *

Lise was the next to go. A friendly neighbor's selfing came, then brought other younglings; they enticed Lise from the garden and soon she was running about the town with them in torrents of noise, her slim legs flashing golden among their square brown bodies. Uskosians were indulgent with their offspring, and no one thought it odd that Lise was allowed to run free as she wished. She even followed her new companions to their study groups, the instructors encouraging her visits as highly educational, and her Ellsian improved rapidly.

She came home in tears one day, however; the younglings played many games which required infinitely flexible hands, and Lise could not keep up.

“It can't be helped,” Michael said. “I'm sorry, little puss. It can't be helped. You have pretty hands”—they were very grimy—“but they're human hands.”

“Then I don't want them!” she cried.

“Yes you do!” His voice was harsh and she looked up in surprise; he held her dirty paws tightly.

“Mike?” she said.

Instead of answering, he bent and gently kissed the backs of her hands. She turned them over and looked at them with greater approval.

“I can run faster than they can,” she said.

“I know. You run like the wind. Don't show off too much, though. Now run back and watch them so you can tell Hanna what they do. And then when they have a different game, you can play with them.”

She darted out through the garden, brilliant as the flowers. Michael watched her go and thought that she had grown, and at any time now would sprout breasts. Lise had no idea how old she was. This seemed ordinary to Michael, who thought his age in Standard years was somewhere in the early forties. And when her body did change, and her mind? He was afraid it would be hard for her, as it had been for him. When the world turned out to be different from everything you thought it was beforehand, you could withdraw from it—or run at it head-on, no matter how ill-informed you were. Either course was disastrous. But he
would be there to help her—he hoped—and so would Hanna—

Oh?
said a ghostly chuckle in his head.
What have you ever saved from the sucking dark? Or whom?

He shook his head, blinking. A cloud must have passed over the sun.

Think of something else—

—and here in the sunlight Lise was granted an Indian summer of childhood, among children so alien that her queer combination of ignorance and sophistication went unnoticed. The longer it lasted, the better.

That was the last time she came back during the day except to eat or entertain her lively friends, and she reported dutifully to Hanna on the younglings' games.

*   *   *

Next Theo went. On the fourth night Hanna came in and said to him, “You have to talk to them about biology. I don't know enough. Medicine, physiology, genetics—I need a whole Contact team. I don't have one. You're it.”

“I don't know enough either,” Theo said. He had not ventured into the city. He spent his days sleeping or lounging in the garden, staring out at the skyline beyond the trees. He avoided the others, and reminded Hanna of a man about to leap into a lake of cold water and hesitating on the edge.

Hanna was hot and tired, and she had rarely refrained from leaping into anything.

“You know more than I do. You're an expert, compared to me. Take them to
GeeGee
and open up the medlab.”

“I don't know enough,” he repeated.

Hanna looked at Michael, but Michael said, “I'd better see about dinner,” and left.

Hanna said to Theo, “Look what you did for me. Look what you're doing for Henrik.”

Theo snorted. Henrik Gaaf was present at this conversation: piled in a corner, gazing blankly ahead.

“But he said something today, Theo. He actually said good morning to me.”

Theo said, “I haven't heard him say anything.”

“Well, I have. Whatever you're doing is working. You know enough, Theo—you just don't believe you do.”

He shook his head. Hanna went to where he perched on
a shapeless mass supposed to be a chair, and sank to her knees so that she was looking up at him.

“Theo,” she said, “where would Mike be without me?”

He did not speak. She went on, “You know the answer. I don't know if you think it means you owe me anything. If you do, please do this for me. For me and for Mike and for the beings who might save him before it's all over. I'll never ask you for another favor. Please.”

She had invested the words with an urgency that was more than verbal. He thought about it for a while. Finally he muttered, “I'll try.”

“Thank you. Anyway, Theo, you can't know less about humans than the Uskosians do. They won't know when you're wrong!”

So Theo left next day to do his best with a committee of physicians from the nations of Uskos. It was more interesting than he expected, his curiosity was aroused, and he went back the day after that. Soon he only came back at night, too.

*   *   *

Shen got bored and just walked out. She found her way unerringly to a raucous section of the city the Uskosians had not talked about. Somebody bought her a drink, and she liked it so well that she persuaded Hanna to get Norsa to give her some money. He was pleased to do it, but she rarely had to spend anything. She became very popular in certain quarters, and stayed out till dawn some nights, and came home singing, even when she was carried home.

So they were all gone, settling into courses that circled Michael, the still point around which they swung and revolved, the home, more than the house, to which they came back. He watched them go and come as people had come and gone for years, so sure of his care that they scarcely noticed it. Now in the mornings the house was silent. On the eighth morning Michael stood in it and listened. To silence, except for the quiet wind blowing through the garden trees. Inside the house it was dim and, at this hour, still cool, and outdoors the light poured down.