The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  But the only difference he saw was that Jameson was smiling, the rare sunburst of a smile Morisz had seldom seen.

  “Stan. Glad to see you,” Jameson said, and they shook hands and Morisz relaxed. There was no difference. It was just like Polity Admin on Earth, except for the smile and also that this was partly a social occasion.

  Morisz, not thinking socially, said, “I thought you’d be glad. This is it, isn’t it?”

  Jameson seemed not to have heard him. He said, “You’ve come prepared for big game, I hope?”

  “I don’t know,” Morisz said cautiously. “How big?”

  “Medium, I should say. Earth import. Nothing difficult.”

  “I thought of bringing a combat laser,” Morisz said a little wistfully.

  “Not here. Here you hunt with spears or bows or not at all. It’ll be good for you, Stanislaw. Come on up to the house.”

  Morisz wondered if he should pursue the matter of the report he carried or wait for Jameson to bring it up again. Well, that was like Admin too. He supposed ambiguity was a sort of immutable attribute, which Jameson practiced with guests as well as professional associates.

  The house had a great central hall that made Morisz look around in wonder. The floor was made of polished wood. Of course; Heartworld was famous for its exotic woods. It would require a great deal of human, not robot, care, and Morisz was sure Jameson did no polishing. The rugs scattered on it would be handwoven. He stared at a gleaming brass chandelier and Jameson followed his gaze.

  “F’thalian glowpods,” he said. “It only looks incandescent.”

  “Doesn’t that spoil the authenticity?” Morisz was surprised into bluntness.

  “The Authenticist movement is very vocal but very small. And its spokesmen travel in aircars.”

  He took Morisz to a room where a fire blazed in a stone hearth. Morisz did not like open fires but sat near it anyway. He took the drink Jameson handed him and without making a display of it stole a more careful look at the other man’s face. Was he spaced? Did he, on vacation at home, indulge himself as he did at his leisure on Earth, with whatever interesting drug the purveyors to Polity VIPs might provide? With, of course, the tacit consent of Earthside Enforcement officials who did not like to antagonize men like Jameson.

  But Jameson sat down with a sigh, said, “How does the roster shape up, Stan?” and Morisz might have been back in the big riverside office on Earth, preparing to report in the ordinary way.

  He took a cassette from a locked pouch under his shirt. It was wafer-thin and almost weightless in his hand, and it held the final I&S reports on the proposed crew of the exploration vessel Endeavor. It contrasted so sharply with its surroundings that Morisz suddenly wondered if there were a reader in the house to put it in.

  “It’s not a bad list,” he said. “I question a couple of the names.”

  “You’ve already had one shot at it,” Jameson said.

  Morisz smiled faintly. “You’re still showing a couple I could do without.”

  “I know,” Jameson said. He brought a reader from a drawer built into the wall, reassuring Morisz, and slipped the cassette into it. He said, “Make yourself comfortable. This might take a while,” and began reading.

  Morisz was not comfortable. The room was too quiet, except for the fire, which made distressingly irregular sounds. The place was full of light that seemed warmer than glowpod luminescence; presumably the shades around the pods accounted for the golden cast. The shades were made of glass. Glass? Yes. Morisz had not been to Jameson’s Earthside home. He had heard it was something like this; not nearly so extreme, however. He would bet this house didn’t even speak. It was free from the subliminal sounds of machines and the energy transformations that ran them, and it felt too much as if it had a life of its own. Occasionally human voices sounded through it; one was a woman’s, and Morisz wondered who she was. Jameson’s recent companion in Namerica, a spectacular creature, was still there, which was not to say Jameson had no companions during his rare visits home. But Morisz knew of none at present, and he would know. No doubt whoever it was was at home here. Jameson had relatives nearby, a steward to manage the great estate, a housekeeper—the whole arrangement reminded Morisz that Heartworld’s first families still had things pretty much their own way, especially in Arrenswood.

  Jameson glanced up at Morisz once, his face expressionless, and went back to reading. Morisz watched him covertly. Jameson was a big man whose face seemed to have been put together without regard for consistency. There might be Amerind blood in the jutting bones and dark hair, but his eyes and skin were incongruously light. His mouth was sensitive when he let it be, the strong face surprisingly pleasant when he smiled; but he did not smile often. By Standard count he was forty-six and, Morisz thought, aging well. Rapidly, but well. He looked—

  Morisz hesitated, wondering not for the first time about standards for judging age. Jameson stubbornly kept trying all the usual anti-senescence procedures, and probably looked younger than the forty-six of earlier centuries; but he seemed older than Morisz, who was near eighty but might have been an untreated thirty-five. Today Jameson also looked pale and very tired—unexpected in a man supposed to have been vacationing for eight weeks. He’s tried A.S. again, Morisz thought, and it hit him hard. He looks like hell. And now he’s waiting for the rest of the verdict.

  Presently Jameson put the reader aside with an economical, final-seeming motion. Morisz came to attention.

  Jameson said, “The alternate for Liuku. That’s the only change.”

  Morisz estimated his chances of prevailing and found them small. Endeavor’s crew list had been thrashed out over several months by the Coordinating Commission, the Interworld Fleet, Alien Relations, and all the other components of a living bureaucratic network whose separate parts had their own goals to consider. I&S probably had exercised all its options. Nonetheless Morisz said, “Liuku’s a hell of an Inspace technician. I’d rather see her out there than the alternate.”

  “She’s a Technocrat,” Jameson said. Without giving the word special emphasis, he managed to make it sound distasteful. Morisz was a man of moderate views, and he did not care for Earth’s Technocrat enclaves either. Their children were machined and augmented to something more or less than human, and they came out of the enclaves slightly or severely bent. But Liuku had bent in the not-uncommon direction of becoming a superb technician. Morisz’s report said so, but now he said so again, emphatically.

  Jameson said, “I know. But any person on the Endeavor, including the engineering staff, might have to talk to whatever’s out there. How do you think a Technocrat would get along with something like a Girrian?”

  “Heartworld prejudice,” Morisz said.

  “Possibly. But I won’t risk it. Liuku’s out,” Jameson said, and Morisz knew he had lost.

  He hesitated, wondering if he should bring up his personal reservations about the man who would command Endeavor. Their sum, however, was only that at thirty-nine—half Morisz’s age—Erik Fleming was too young. You never got anywhere arguing age with Jameson, and in any case it was Jameson who had bullied and cajoled Fleet into leapfrogging a handful of young officers upstairs.

  Morisz decided to skip Fleming and move on to surer ground.

  “The D’neeran woman,” he said. “Hanna Bassanio. Ril-Koroth. Whatever they call her.”

  Jameson leaned back and put the tips of his long fingers together. He said politely, “Yes?”

  “I think she’s a very unwise choice.”

  “I know you do. I believe she is the only person you strongly protested who will be making the voyage.”

  It was a pointed reminder that Morisz had gotten nearly everything he wanted, but he said anyway, “They’re erratic. D’neerans in general, I mean. This one’s reckless. You saw what she almost did against Nestor?”

  “Courageous,” Jameson remarked.

  Morisz eyed him doubtfully, wondering just how much Jameson knew about it. He certainly knew t
he basic facts of D’neera’s half-day war with Nestor—the only war in D’neeran history. There would have been no D’neeran defense force to fight it if Jameson, unofficially and personally, had not talked the D’neeran magistrates into creating one when Nestor’s militarism had begun concentrating on the despised telepaths. It was supposed to be coincidence that D’neera was lush and prosperous, while Nestor’s settlements were bleak and tired. Morisz believed in that coincidence just about as much as he believed the Interworld Fleet’s timely intervention in the incident meant that the Coordinating Commission had acted on a wave of spontaneous, unanimous altruism. Jameson surely had been behind that too. But the official record included only a bare outline of Hanna ril-Koroth’s part in the engagement, and there was no reason for Jameson to know the details.

  Morisz said, “Let me tell you what really happened. This woman was left in command of the—the—”

  He hesitated, searching his memory. Jameson’s eyelids drooped; he looked half-sleep, or bored. He murmured, “The D’neeran corvette Clara Mendoza.”

  “Uh—yes. She was in command because she was the only rank left among the survivors. The Clara’s arms and shields were out, life support was half-gone, gravity was fluxing, the thing could just barely wallow around in realspace. She’s called on to surrender. She decides not to. What does she decide to take on?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Jameson said, however, “She goes after a citybuster. The N.S. Havock.”

  Morisz knew he had made a mistake. “Right,” he said.

  Jameson said sleepily, “The Clara appeared to be drifting into Havock’s path. She was not considered a threat. It seems to have occurred to Lady Hanna, however, that a switch into Inspace mode and a random Jump at the point of closest approach would take Havock out. It would have worked, Stanislaw. It would have worked, you know.”

  “And killed everybody on the Clara. It wasn’t smart,” said Morisz, who believed in the wisdom of living to fight another day. “Not even so brave. Just crazy. They were all half-crazy on that ship. Your typical D’neeran doesn’t like violence. He starts talking about how he’s too empathic to stand it. Then he gets stomped. That won’t go over with the Fleet personnel.”

  “It’s an experiment,” Jameson said mildly. “Let’s give her a chance, shall we? Naturally there will be personnel changes at the end of the first year.”

  “A year’s a long time,” Morisz said. “Something might—”

  He stopped, but too late. Jameson looked at him narrowly and said, “Something might happen sooner. Was that what you were going to say?”

  Morisz did not answer. He was half-ashamed of his interest in Endeavor’s projected route. There had been unexplained communications blips for centuries. The experts said the last few years’ reports from Sector Amber were not really disproportionate. Officially they had no connection with Endeavor’s course through Amber. Officially the name was arbitrary too. Not amber for caution. Just Amber.

  Jameson said casually, “Amber’s out in the direction some church used to fulminate about, isn’t it? The Church of the Coming from the Stars, I believe. Quite a mouthful. What do the brethren think of the project?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Morisz said. He felt his face getting hot. He was too honest to expunge anything from his own I&S file, and anyway his life so far had been blameless. But if his youthful fling with that nutcult disappeared from the record by itself, he wouldn’t reinsert it.

  Embarrassed into silence, he watched Jameson pick up the reader and a stylus, note Liuku’s replacement and sign the report. He had entirely forgotten Hanna ril-Koroth; when he remembered it was too late. He had been smoothly, ruthlessly diverted for just long enough.

  Jameson handed back the cassette without a sign of smugness. “Behind schedule,” he said, “but close enough. How about a drink and early dinner? We’ve got a long flight in the morning. Have you ever hunted with a spear?”

  “No,” said Morisz, wishing he hadn’t come.

  “You’ll be learning the hard way, then. It’s the only way to learn, however.”

  “What are we hunting, anyway?”

  “Tigers,” Jameson said, and almost smiled.

  Chapter 2

  The exploration vessel Endeavor, carrying a crew of two hundred, left terrestrial orbit on the first day of March in the year ST 2835. There were ceremonies. Starr Jameson appeared in the Endeavor’s common room and made a practiced and inspiring speech about mankind’s destiny to seek new horizons. With him was Commissioner Andrella Murphy of Willow, who looked at everything about her with an air of friendly interest and spoke to no one except Jameson. The commissioners from Colony One and Co-op were not there. Their schedules did not permit them to attend: not by accident. Katherine Petrov, Earth’s voting commissioner, made a few formal remarks in a flat voice and disappeared—literally; she was a holo projection.

  Jameson and Murphy were real, however. Hanna stood unsteadily on tiptoe to see them from the rear of a too-dense crowd. She wished she could catch a glimpse of their thoughts, but without prior personal knowledge of an individual’s “flavor,” it was impossible with so many people about. She liked Murphy’s looks, but not Jameson’s. When he was not exerting himself he looked, she thought, cold and indifferent; but she could not see anything very well. The ceremonial circle included Erik Fleming, and Hanna knew he must look like a model officer in his forest-green Fleet uniform, because he always did. He also was admirably handsome—a golden-haired sunchild, Hanna thought, though she was not given to poetic flights. Partly because of this she was favorably disposed toward Fleming, and in the hectic month of training before launch, they had become more than friends. This had advantages besides the obvious ones; for one thing it smoothed Hanna’s way with her crewmates, who did not know what to do with D’neerans, but knew how to behave toward their captain’s friend.

  After the formal leavetaking Endeavor proceeded to Alta at the edge of human space, a passage that took it an infinitesimal distance into the spiral arm that was Earth’s home. The journey took many more days than such a routine trip required, and every minute was used for systems testing. There would be no help near if anything went wrong after Alta.

  At Alta, the monks came up to bless them. Hanna was fascinated. It was her first experience with one of the little splinter colonies founded on religious principles, and she imagined penitents stuffing their robes into spacesuits and performing rituals in free fall, firing little globules of blessed liquid that would splat on Endeavor’s sensitive hull. Or perhaps they would use a pressurized stream of it?

  They did not. They went round Endeavor in a vessel begged, borrowed, or stolen from whatever secular government Alta had and shook holy water in the general direction of the ship as it drifted in orbit. Hanna found them prosaic.

  Afterward the abbot drank wine with Erik Fleming in the captain’s quarters.

  “A peculiar experience,” Erik said to Hanna later.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “You, among other things.”

  He said it teasingly, but Hanna, not mind-listening, missed the overtone. Her sketchy knowledge of history was biased toward the paranoid. The genetic experiments that had created D’neera’s founders had been prohibited and outlawed everywhere. There were dreadful tales of what the founders had fled, and some of the nastiest concerned measures taken in the name of holiness.

  She said with some alarm, “Is this one of those groups that thinks D’neera is demons’ work?”

  “Oh, no, he thinks you’re all right. He’s a very intelligent man, actually. He said he was looking forward to further revelations of God’s glory.”

  But Erik had a quizzical expression, and Hanna, sprawled ungracefully on the lounge that was the only visible luxury in the captain’s spartan suite, said, “But?”

  “He seems to have some idea that Inspace transit is a matter of being picked up by God’s hand and thrown across space.”

  “Well, that’s as rea
sonable as some of the other theories. I lean to the one that says there’s no such place as ‘Inspace,’ myself.”

  “Why not?” said Erik, and went off to approve another checklist. No space captain was so unimaginative that he did not wonder how he annihilated space and time without himself being annihilated; but meanwhile there were checklists.

  Even on the customary routes, space travel required caution and, past Alta, the last human outpost in the direction Endeavor now took, there were no customary routes. One could go from Earth to Alta in a matter of two Standard days, the actual transits taking no measurable time but data processing requiring a good deal. The equivalent distance through unexplored space would take weeks or months. In a comfortable room on a long-settled world it was easy to speak of great Jumps “through” Inspace that gobbled light years. Alone in immensity you thought instead of limitations: one unsuspected gravity well in your (theoretically nonexistent) path, one unsuspected wrinkle in space, and you would not be heard of again. Under these circumstances you did not gobble space but nibbled at it, felt your way with probes, and concentrated on looking very, very carefully for what might be between you and where you wanted to go. If you got there, others could follow at speed; but someone had to be the plodding first, and out here Endeavor was the first.

  Hanna settled rather cautiously into shipboard routine. As an exopsychologist she would not be needed until and unless Endeavor found intelligent life, and meanwhile she was assigned to Navigation. Unknown-space techniques were familiar to her in theory, new in practice. She was entrusted with little responsibility and did not expect much. Mostly she helped with preliminary studies that would be checked and re-checked and double-checked and checked again. The work was tedious, the sense of community she remembered from D’neeran spacecraft was missing—or at least withheld from her—and at the end of each six-hour shift her ears rang with the constant noise of true-humans who communicated only out loud. Her only wish at those times was to escape to the quiet of her tiny cabin, where she measured the gap between herself and her companions and thought it might be unbridgeable.