The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “Why?” She shifted uneasily. This was not a question that had occurred to her. She drew up her knees and curled her arms around them protectively. She said, “It was what you said, I suppose. That they were strange.”

  “Was it? Was that the only reason?”

  “Why—I don’t know. I don’t know. You said that yourself.”

  “I wasn’t there. You were.”

  It was hard to look away from his cold gaze. Erik had looked at her like this sometimes, and only irritated her. Now a mountain might have been addressing her, compelling her to answer.

  She was not used to finding true-humans impressive. Jameson must have thought she was frightened, because he said with a hint of exasperation, “I’m not going to eat you, you know. Just answer my questions as accurately as you can.”

  “Yes,” she said after a minute, but she saw there was no softening in his eyes. She looked at him very steadily, wondering what he was about.

  He said, “I’m thoroughly familiar with your report. The imagery was all visual?”

  “All. Yes.”

  “And frightening.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was anthropomorphic to an extreme degree. How much of it did you yourself create?”

  Hanna had not asked herself that either. She pushed nervously at her hair and said, “I might have—I might have ‘created,’ as you call it, all of the images. But they were correlates of—of thoughts that weren’t mine. That’s how it works.”

  She could not keep away from his eyes very long. They were sometimes gray, sometimes green; she found them disconcerting.

  He said, “Are you quite, quite sure of that?”

  She was suddenly angry, for no reason. “Yes! Yes, I’m sure! I’ve had enough experience with F’thalians, with Girrians, to know that, that when something like that comes up it’s a symbol for something that’s really there!”

  “And of what precisely are they symbols?”

  She said unwillingly, “I pinned some of them down, as far as you can pin something like that down. They were impressions of—of a whole long stretch of time, and patience. And hunting.”

  “The spear?” he said quickly.

  “Yes. But not hunting with it. It changed from something else, you know. It wasn’t a real spear. It was all symbols I saw. It was—you read that I saw a snake?”

  “I read that it was a living portion of a snake, and that you identified it with yourself.”

  “Yes. Well. It’s not that they thought I was a snake, you see. It was a perception of me as…incomplete. Alive but divided.”

  “You did not say that in your report.”

  “I didn’t understand it until later. That’s all. Hunting and patience and that image of me. I haven’t been able to think of anything else.”

  “I see,” he said.

  He leaned back in the chair and she jumped, the movement taking her by surprise. He looked past her, frowning a little. She felt herself, for the moment, dismissed.

  It struck her that of all the strange events of her life, strange as any was to have this man sitting in her tiny cabin, discussing a first contact in her terms.

  Her terms. It came to her forcibly that she was being taken seriously after all: somewhere. You could not be taken much more seriously than this. But somebody had not wanted her to know it; somebody had not even wanted Erik to know it.

  Jameson said presently, still looking at something else, “You still think they are telepaths.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “You must have been as strange to them as they were to you. Might that account for the rather ominous nature of the images?”

  “I suppose it might—no. Wait.”

  She bowed her head and stared at the floor. Textured matting. Jameson’s elegant boot. She did not want to remember. She shut her eyes and called to memory the fabric of an instant, warp and woof, presence and absence interwoven. Surely the aliens had felt her surprise and apprehension; but she had felt no such thing from them.

  More. More. The absence of surprise had been so complete as to be a tangible thing; but so embedded was it in the shape of the gestalt that she had not even identified it, until now, as an entity.

  “They knew me,” she said softly. “Like F’thalians who’ve met us before. They knew me for a human being.”

  Jameson said flatly, “That’s impossible,” but Hanna was caught in recollection. She drifted among images, examining them one by one and all at once for a connection that was not a connection.

  “Lost,” she said dreamily. “Lost and divided. Lost planets, that was it. Lost worlds, found again—”

  Jameson said very sharply, “What was that?”

  “Hmm?” She looked up, open and unguarded and pleased with herself. But Jameson leaned forward intently. Hanna’s pleasure passed into alarm.

  Jameson said urgently, “Are you certain of that?”

  “Yes. Yes! Divided—lost worlds—lost worlds? Where have I heard that before?”

  She put her hands to her head, which had begun to ache.

  “Legend,” he said. He looked at her with open curiosity.

  She could not keep up with him. She said, “What legend?”

  “The legend of the Lost Worlds, from the time of the Explosion. You know the history of the Explosion?”

  “I only know the name, and that it was the, the great period of colonization.”

  “Umm-hmm.” His eyes were still on her, but he was seeing something else again, something far away and long ago.

  “It began seven hundred years ago,” he said, and she tilted her head, caught in the deep quiet voice. “No one knows how many hundreds of millions of human beings left the Earth and its moon in the space of some three hundred years, nor how many vessels carried them. The ships that went officially to Colony One are accounted for; but there were many that were not official, and some that were desperate, and surely many did not reach their destination. The East threw its poor and dissenting away in the wastes of Co-op, till Co-op broke free. Its records never were good…The private ventures were uncounted, ship after ship of men and women seeking better lives, freedom, riches, the fulfillment of dreams admirable or reprehensible…. It was the greatest fleet the human race has seen, and its full extent was never known. Some ships are known to have disappeared. How many others vanished? Often colonists were stripped of their goods and marooned—or simply killed. Some were found later, or their bones. Many were not…You should know this. Everyone should know it.”

  Hanna found herself breathless. For a moment she had stood high above a tapestry of history, watching the sweep and scope of it. She wrenched herself into the present, shocked and resentful of the power that could so easily impose its vision. And she did not like being told what she should know.

  She said, struggling for objectivity, “It’s only a possibility. Though when you put it together with the—the quality of the images—”

  She stopped short, not liking the implications. Jameson’s face gave nothing away, but she knew he was thinking precisely the same thing.

  In the sudden silence the door chattered at them. Hanna went to it, unthinking. She could not focus on the meaning of prior knowledge and the hunt. Her head was full of what she did know of the Explosion: Constanza Bassanio shaven-headed, pregnant and scarred, ransomed from death in a Lunar stockade just before the last ship left for the green promise of D’neera under Clara Mendoza’s command. “Dreams admirable or reprehensible”…the outcasts’ dream had only been to stay alive…

  A serving robot drifted through the door and wavered without orders to a landing at Jameson’s feet. After a minute Hanna, compelled by courtesy, settled herself cross-legged beside it. She said reluctantly, “Coffee?”

  “The coffee’s for you.” He leaned over and picked up a decanter and looked at the contents with distaste.

  She thought of Heartworld and ancient wealth. She said, “I guess they couldn’t find any Arrenswood whiskey.”

 
; “I certainly hope not. Not paid for with public funds. I’ll have coffee after all, I think.”

  She went silently through the ritual of serving, obscurely astonished at the scene. Was Jameson thinking of Species X? His face told her nothing. She made no effort to probe his thoughts or feelings—he might, she thought, recognize the nearly palpable impact of telepathy for what it was—but she was wide open for anything that might escape him. Some true-humans, like Koster, were full-time explosions of emotion, natural broadcasters who made the air around them crackle.

  But Jameson was as self-contained as any true-human she had ever met. There were not even any physical cues to help her guess what he was thinking. He did not fidget, he did not engage in nervous mannerisms, and every movement was precisely controlled.

  Hanna, to her surprise, began to relax. His stillness was comforting, after the noisy activity of her own thoughts and the tension that accompanied all her days here. Jameson might have been alone, for all the attention he paid her now. But she could not doubt his intelligence or alertness; and she thought again of outriders and pioneers, and remembered a thing she had known but not examined—that Starr Jameson was the force behind the whole Endeavor Project, and the vessel and its crew and their work were the reflection of his will.

  He said without prelude, very quietly, “You will not speak of this conversation to anyone. Not even Captain Fleming or Dr. Koster.”

  She said with casual curiosity, “Why not?”

  “Because everything you have said is unsubstantiated.”

  She was startled. “I thought you believed me!”

  “The question of belief does not arise.” He looked at her with, she thought, a trace of something new in the sea-colored eyes. Speculation?

  She shook her head. He said, “Is it so difficult to promise silence?”

  “Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, yes. You can’t keep secrets very long on D’neera even if you want to. People guess. Bits of data creep into overt content. The harder you try to keep a secret the quicker you give it away. I can’t help it. You seem to know more about telepathy than most people. I thought you would know that.”

  “I do,” he said. “That is why you are not going home.”

  “I’m not?” Hanna said, and was unprepared for the wave of desolation that poured over her. She must have projected some of it because Jameson made a sharp, half-protesting gesture. Hanna scarcely noticed, absorbed in the surprising knowledge that for all her anxiety to finish her work, deep inside she had heard, all along, a glad song: “Home…soon!” In the maze of Standard dating she had not lost sight of her native seasons. First snowfall was due in Koroth. The D’neeran year was longer than Earth’s, and the seasons of Koroth were long and distinct. Soon fantasies of ice would rise in the city: palaces, statues, crystal vegetation, slides and labyrinths elaborated as winter darkened. In sunlight it was a city of flashing mirrors. The fires of Sunreturn…she could be home for Sunreturn…

  Jameson said something and she answered absently, “Yes?”

  “I said: Have you thought of entering your work for a Goodhaven award?”

  “Hmm?”

  He said patiently, “The Goodhaven Academy’s annual competition. You are familiar with it?”

  “Yes. Of course.” She came back reluctantly. “I’ve read a lot of Academy publications. They do good work, with F’thal at least. Not the kind of work I do.”

  “Then perhaps it’s time you showed them something new.”

  “Me?” What he had said about the Academy’s prestigious award began to sink in. She sat back on her heels and stared at him. She said, “Wait a minute. They wouldn’t give it to a D’neeran. Especially not me! I’m saying D’neerans can do exopsychology better than anybody else. And it’s true. I’ve found out things, just by being a telepath, nobody ever found out before. But they won’t want to hear that, Commissioner!”

  He said inexorably, “You are creating a completely original work of great potential value. You should be finished with it by the deadline for the next competition. Are you afraid to try?”

  If he meant to sting her with insult, it did not work. She was too absorbed in the new idea to become angry. She had never thought of submitting her work to the Academy. The scholarship structure of true-human society was so far outside her frame of reference that she might as well have thought of competing in a F’thalian courtship drama.

  But what it could mean to be a member of the Academy! Not for herself alone, but as a means of making it easier for other D’neerans than it had been for her to gain access to data and persons and places—

  She felt Jameson watching her very closely. She looked up and opened her mouth to protest that it was impossible. But he said, “I don’t dispose of the prize, but I do have friends in the Academy. Your work would have to stand on its own merits; but if there is a question of injustice, I think I can see to it the award is fairly given.”

  Some seconds passed while she turned his words over, wondering what they meant. She really did not know at once. It was hard to follow him in her weariness. He had said nothing expected or predictable since walking into her room. If he was trying to keep her unbalanced, she was easy prey. She knew little of true-human networks of influence and dimly, trying to understand, she opened herself a little, a little, a very little more, and added it to the slightest intrusiveness, the barest touch of query, just to see what he meant—

  She gaped at him.

  He had taken from her burst of homesickness a conviction that she wanted to leave the Endeavor.

  He had offered her a bribe to stay.

  He knew instantly what she had done. She saw it in his face in the moment of engagement, and sensed—not anger nor guilt nor apprehension, but an intense curiosity so at odds with the circumstance that she was unbalanced even more.

  She got up slowly. She could not think of anything to say, and stared down at him. Light glinted off a scattering of silver in his hair. The gray-green eyes were remote. No curiosity showed in them, nor anything else.

  He said, surprising her again, “Aren’t you angry?”

  “Angry?” She was only bewildered.

  “That is supposed to be the appropriate reaction.”

  “Is it?” She shook her head in confusion. “I only want to know why. Why is it so important that I not talk of this?”

  “You needn’t be concerned about that,” he said.

  “But I am,” she said stubbornly.

  “It is important for you,” he said. “Believe me, it is important for you.”

  A bare hint of threat hung between them. She might have heard it in his voice or sensed it elsewise. She said, thinking it through with great effort, “You mean because I won’t get the prize if I break silence?”

  “More than that.”

  It only confused her more. She shook her head again and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He folded his hands in his lap, an unexpectedly prim gesture. He said, “You’re in an extremely ambivalent position, you know.”

  She looked at him helplessly. She did not have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  “You stand at a branching of the way for D’neera,” he said, calmly as if he were commenting on the weather. “On the one hand this work of yours—what do you call it, by the way?”

  “Uh—‘Sentience,’” she said, startled into speech.

  His face showed, for the first time, a flicker of amusement.

  “A little arrogant, don’t you think? Never mind. It is brilliant. It is a foundation, certainly, for arguments in favor of a position I have held for some time—not a popular position: that D’neera is the ideal interface between the human race and alien intelligences. The Endeavor is funded for a mission of three Standard years. I don’t intend to see the project end in three years’ time. It will go on, and on, and on—through our lifetimes and into the future. This vessel will be joined by sister ships. Within our lifetimes, if we are fortunate, we will se
e contact with a thing that logically must exist on some scale—a super-network of star-traveling species. We might then begin to call ourselves citizens of the universe…Have you ever thought of the part D’neera might play in such a renaissance? You might be our teachers, our translators, our first and most honored ambassadors. But it must begin now, my lady.”

  He paused, waiting perhaps for her to speak, but she could not utter a word.

  He went on, “You are the beginning. An experiment; the first. Being first is a great responsibility, my lady. The arguments against your presence on this voyage were difficult to refute, and indeed you have fulfilled many persons’ misgivings. I was told that D’neerans are erratic, promiscuous, unreliable and tinged with cowardice; over-emotional, stubborn, flouters of discipline and, of course, ridiculously communicative…You cannot babble of Lost Worlds to anyone who will listen.”

  Hanna bit at her fingers and stared at him as if her eyes alone would pierce his skull. Intangible walls of promise and threat closed on her. There was something he was not saying, and everything he did say obscured it. She had guessed something she was not supposed to know, that her silence was important enough to make him offer her a precious gift unasked, and still he skirted the real “why.” Another answer hung round his head like smoke. She listened for echoes of the unspoken.

  She said slowly, “If I don’t tell anybody about this, you and I will be the only ones who know, won’t we?”

  His face was empty and detached as a mask. He said, “The Coordinating Commission must know, of course. And key persons in the Endeavor Project.”

  “But,” she said, answering echoes, “the project personnel report to you, don’t they? So they don’t matter. You didn’t even mention Alien Relations. They won’t know unless you tell them. And the Commission—you can tell them what you think they ought to know. Any way you want to present it. You can shape how they think—”

  She stopped, because he stood up. She had forgotten his height and she looked up, up, into eyes cold and dispassionate as the sea. She felt him put away the hope of deceiving her; he might have pushed away a useless object, but he said only, still calmly, “This is why you frighten us, my lady.”