The D’neeran Factor (96 page)

There were street musicians in the City of the Center. Michael had heard what they played, and though it was
strange and harsh to his ears, the games they played with pitch and rhythm had possibilities.

He got his flute and went into the garden, because one still was left, and never would leave by himself. Gaaf sat among the flowers and stared at nothing.

Michael said quietly, “Let's go for a walk.”

Gaaf was by no means normal, but he was more responsive than he had been when Theo brought him home. He looked up and mumbled, “Where?”

“I don't know. Anywhere. Come on.”

Gaaf climbed to his feet, small and vague beside Michael. They went out together, Gaaf treading close on Michael's heels.

*   *   *

Summer closed over them. The flowers in the garden, instead of fading, grew taller and more brilliant until they were a blaze of colored light. The humans seemed to see them even in the dark, as if some afterimage were imprinted on the retinas of their eyes. The flowers worried Theo. Like flowers everywhere they attracted insects: why? There was no need for pollination.

“Think,” Hanna urged.

“I'll ask Ritee and the others.”

“No, don't. Think about it.”

“You know?”

“I know. I knew before someone told me. Think. Use your eyes.”

So he walked in the garden hour after hour, thinking—until he saw it: saw a flower close over an insect, and when it opened later there was nothing left but a little debris.

“I swear I heard it burp,” he said to Hanna, and she laughed.

She laughed often in those days, which fell into one another in a golden cascade like the notes from Michael's flute. All the days were alike, so that time seemed to have stopped, frozen at high summer in a great gout of light. The flood of sunlight changed them. Hanna and Michael and Shen turned very dark, and their eyes, blue and amber and green, were startling. Lise was dusted with gold all over, and even Henrik Gaaf turned nut-brown. But the best Theo could do for his own transparent skin was keep it from broiling.

It was the dry season, and there were seldom clouds. The
heat was unremitting but not unpleasant, they were dazed with it, in the dusk they sat on a veranda and talked in lazy tones until they straggled off to bed. It was a civilized kind of heat, like their hosts: courteous, attentive to the comfort of a guest. They lived in the safest of sanctuaries—safe in its comfort, safe in its dreamlike separation from any world that had ever been real to them before, and safe in fact—for a time.

No one thought of it explicitly as refuge except Michael, but he thought of it that way less and less. Someday the Polity would come, of course. But if he was only waiting for an end to this world Hanna had given him, he ought to be looking at the sky, and he was not. He looked over his shoulder instead, he looked at the ground at his feet; he did not wait for something from the sky; he waited for the world to be rent and for a look at something deep in an abyss.

Yet his days were as quiet as those of the others. When the morning began to grow hot, he would leave the house with Gaaf tagging behind him, climb into one of the chauffeured vehicles placed at the humans' disposal, and be carried through the city to the place where musicians gathered. Monolithic the city might be, but there were crevices and crannies where gardens had been planted, fountains set to soaring, and parks laid out, each lovely and unique. Through the middle of the day he sat cross-legged and nearly naked in the sun, burning blacker and blacker, in time not a novelty but a colleague. He searched
GeeGee
's library for works on music theory that did not rely on the written word. The leathery beings who played impossible instruments with inhuman hands learned human musical notation quickly, and Michael quickly learned theirs. His Ellsian got better, if somewhat specialized, and he talked fluently of greater and lesser scales. Sometimes he played dances from the Renaissance of Earth's western world, tunes a thousand and more years old, and the beings of Uskos came near and danced, stumping solemnly and rhythmically in circles round the alien with his shining instrument, while one of their number accompanied him on a drum. Sometimes the man and the other musicians played together, the notes of the flute darting silver and gold through the deeper chords. There were strange duets,
and when Michael sang he collected crowds who threw money into hollow pots that rang when the coins fell inside. The days together were a timeless dream made of nothing but music; they were rich heavy drops that fell into still water, pregnant with light.

“Indeed all is chaos,” said the aliens in their soft growly voices, “yet we of the Musicians Guild impose order on it. It is transitory indeed; all order is transitory. Thus our assertion of sentient being lies in art, which patterns time in beauty.”

At the height of each day's heat the crowds dispersed. The musicians drifted away as they had each summer for a hundred years, as they would for a hundred more. Occasionally Michael and Gaaf accompanied individuals to their homes or customary haunts (in one of which, once, they met Shen). More often they sought a shady spot and were quiet under the weight of the heat. Michael talked to Gaaf, dutifully following Theo's instructions:
Let him hear human voices. Talk to him.
Gaaf was a good listener; he never interrupted, never contradicted, never asked difficult questions; he never made a sound. He was motionless, a brown statue with eyes that shifted now and then but never met Michael's. And an extraordinary thing occurred. Michael found there were things he could not talk about. He could talk about now, about quiet, neutral things: how to make a stew, how long the flowers in the garden would grow, a new game Lise had learned; present things. But he tried to speak of the estate left behind on Valentine, how the sea sounded distantly all night and all day, how the peace of it was enlivened by companions of one's choice, and he could not; he tried to talk of how he had bought and fitted
GeeGee,
the pleasure he had felt as the ship became his before his eyes, but the words caught and choked in his throat. Those had been dreams, too, and he was filled with a sense that they had been incomplete, that something was missing and they were unreal. He began to think he had made a wrong choice. Flight and search might have been the better one. He might have found what he sought; then everything would be real again.

Once, though, he spoke of the past, but of a more distant past. It happened on the first day on which he was offered a portion of the morning's proceeds before the musicians
took their pay away to eat and drink it up. He nearly refused his share, then remembered just in time that that would be impolite. Later, sitting under a tree whose every branch burst with miniature duplicates of itself which would drop and seek anchor in the soil when the days shortened, he pulled the coins from his pocket and looked at them. They were bright gold and heavy and closely engraved with text that for all he knew might be (and probably was) a legend of the beginning of money.

Suddenly he laughed. So all the riches had come to this, begging to begging, and once more he sang for his bread. He said so to Gaaf, laughing.

“It's easier now, though. Easier…” The laughter faded; he talked on; the words came of their own accord. He had never said them to anyone before, not even Hanna. But this was like talking to no one.

“Easier than saying yes yes yes…‘Yes, ma'am, I can do that to you, but it costs a little more…' ‘Yes-sir, you can do that to me, it doesn't matter if it hurts as long as you pay enough, the docs are good at fixing us up.' ‘Yes, Brother, I have spent the requisite hours on my knees contemplating the sin of aggression, only there's some other people I wish you'd told that to, but you wouldn't know them…' I would've had to do it twenty years to get as rich as I wanted to be. So I did something else. I invested it. You know how I invested it, don't you? Everybody knows. After that it was easy. The women, all I had to do was look at 'em. Snapped my fingers and down they went. The money had a lot to do with it. So I got radar in my head. Learned to see the ones who looked past the money and the face. Not,” he said, scrupulously honest, “that it didn't have advantages. It just wasn't enough. You know what I mean?”

Gaaf did not answer. He did not appear to have heard. Michael looked at him doubtfully and said, “No, I guess you don't.”

Clouds had settled over the sun; the sky was gray. There was a roll of thunder and raindrops splattered the pavement.

Gaaf lifted his head with an expression of deadly fear. The flute rolled over the pavement with a
ping;
Michael kicked it in his scramble to get to Gaaf. He laid one hand on the man's shoulder, the other on his head.

“It's all right. It's all right. Nobody's going to hurt you. Henrik! It's all right!”

Gaaf breathed noisily. He looked around as if he did not know where he was.

He began to talk. It was the first time he had said more than two consecutive words. He talked disjointedly of the Treasure Store of Elenstap and the night of stumbling through the farmlands. He talked about the morning when the aliens found him, but he was hazy about it. All he could remember was being afraid. He thought they would blame him for what the men of Castillo's crew had done in the night; he thought they would do something to him. He thought that all the time until Hanna came, he expected to be tortured or put to death, he thought they only put it off to torment him. He said all this with surprising clarity.

At the end Michael said, “It's over now.”

“Until they come,” Gaaf said, meaning the Polity.

“Yeah, well, we've all got that to worry about.”

A smile snaked across Gaaf's mouth, a trailing thing of remarkable nastiness.

“Not me,” he said. “Everything's been easy for you. It's my turn.”

Michael shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, but his mind shot on to something else. Gaaf was talking, Gaaf remembered; Michael crouched in front of him; a tremor ran through him, wraiths shifted under his feet.

“Henrik,” he said, “where were they going? When they left here?”

Gaaf's eyes settled on his face. He must have heard the plea in Michael's voice, and God knew what was in his too-transparent eyes; Gaaf shrank away.

“Do you know? Do you remember? Henrik…!”

But the animation drained from Gaaf's eyes. He fondled something in his pocket, and sank back into silence.

*   *   *

The time sense of a dream is skewed, but Hanna always knew how long she had been on Uskos. When it got to be half a summer, she looked at the sky more often. Where was the Polity mission? Clouds came into the sky, a harbinger of wet autumn. Henrik was getting better.

What time is it? Time. What day?
The day was frozen in miniature, as if everything within view was very small but perfectly clear. Not for the first time, not quite; but for the first time Henrik could question what he saw. Directly in front of him, the rangy man with the face carved by an angel. The gentle hands. On his shoulders.
“Here, this way. Don't fall. There's a step.”
The music. The man's eyes were closed, he communicated only with the pipe at his mouth. Piercing fantastic rills. Overhead a gray sky. On every side, an appreciative circle, the others. The aliens.
Oh no. Oh no.

He shrank, hiding. No one noticed.
What day is it? When will they come?
They would come to take him home. And they would take the musician away; he was sure they would do that, without knowing why he was sure.

The wind was cooler today. Cooler than when?—he did not know. He could not remember. He thought of the woman, remembering, hand in his pocket, fondling the chain. And the other thing, the slip of metal. Only now he remembered something more, without detail. The woman wasn't alone, she didn't sleep alone; she lived with the dark musician. There were details now, disjointed and unplaced in time, but very clear. Blue eyes distant and cool on poor Henrik's face, turning and warming to:
Mike. That's his name. I hate him. I hate him. Who is he? Poor Henrik can't quite remember. Poor Henrik's not quite himself.

Hanna confided in Norsa. Telling her troubles to an alien did not strike her as an unusual thing to do.

She told him: “My companion Michael has a troubled heart, and I do not know how to give him aid.”

“What trouble could he have? For he is well-mated and also has the love of other companions, nor is he hungry or ill or enslaved. And by all that you have told me of 'Unans, he ought therefore to be happy.”

“That is correct, and therefore it is all the more difficult to give help to him in his distress.”

“Does he fear the law of 'Unans, when other 'Unans come here? For the gentle hints of my colleagues and myself ought to suffice in sealing his freedom, if all that you say is right; and even if we wished, we could not now withhold them. Else the persons of the Physicians Guild, and those
of the Musicians Guild, will spring, as you have taught me to say, ‘on our backs.' We do not want that to happen!”