The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  So that was it…She smiled at herself, acknowledging without self-consciousness an element that might have been in play in their meeting months before, though she had not recognized it then. Like him or not, he was a most excellent male animal. Her body spoke earnestly, approving a likely hunter on an ageless, age-old level. She looked at his shoulders and his movements with simple pleasure.

  He had watched her tonight too with discomfiting intentness, but not, she thought, with desire. She had felt something else and more disturbing in the instant of feedback when her barb sank into his brain. Behind his surprise and anger, which she expected, and the dreamlike complexities of any intelligent mind, was something she had not recognized. Shadow and strength, she thought, unable to put more precise words to it; some great defeat, and poised against it an inflexible assertion.

  Defeat by what? Assertion of what? She shook her head in confusion. Jameson saw the movement and looked at her curiously. He left Iledra to examine his collection of F’thalian artifacts and crossed the room to Hanna.

  “You gave a very good speech,” he said.

  “A very bland speech.”

  “Precisely.”

  She shook her head again, smiling now, and looked past him to the edge of the room, which merged unwalled with the moonlit river. She said, “I thought power would be guarded better.”

  “The Polity is an administrative apparatus. It has no power; only influence.”

  “And I am a two-headed hornmaster of F’thal,” Hanna answered, and looked up just in time to see him smile. The warmth of it was glorious; it made him another man; and she was still staring at him when he turned to her, saw her interest, and—was himself again.

  He said abruptly, “I think we have found a way to induce explicit contact.”

  Hanna forgot immediately about everything but Species X. Iledra turned and came toward them quickly. Hanna said, “What is it? Have you done it?”

  “We have not done it yet. It is a last resort.”

  “A last—why? What do you mean?”

  He looked at her very somberly. He said, “You were terrified after your single clear contact with Species X, were you not?”

  “Yes. I was. So?”

  “Look,” he said.

  He called up a projection of their sector of the Milky Way, Endeavor’s first voyage a thin green line threading among the stars, the present voyage—an extension of the first—in red. It hovered ghostly in the middle of the room. Hanna put her hand into it, watching the mist glow on her skin.

  “Endeavor’s here?” she said.

  “Approximately. You see it has not gone far past the point where you left it. That is because we have been—experimenting.”

  Hanna looked up quickly. “Changing the tune?” she asked.

  “Yes. We tried inexplicable disappearances, without broadcasting prior information about where the Endeavor would go next. When the ship returned to its point of departure, Species X simply took up the chase again. We generated our own coordinates for rendezvous; they followed, and kept their distance. We tried varying the content of our base signal. There was no new response. Your compatriots on the Endeavor gave us nothing. Their perceptions were even more ambiguous than yours.”

  “What were they?”

  “Nothing to the point, believe me. Not to any point. But we have done something, finally, that has made them begin transmitting location signals again. So far we have not responded. I think it is time to do so. On their terms, as nearly as we can guess what those terms are.”

  Hanna shoved her hands into the pockets of her short jacket and looked at him, wishing she dared try reading his thoughts. She felt Iledra’s perception of her desire, and felt Lee’s shock at the boldness and rudeness of the wish. But Iledra had not faced Jameson on the Endeavor, and won her way to a kernel of truth through layers of obscurity.

  Hanna said, “I think you’d better begin at the beginning.”

  “Do you know what it is? I don’t.” The wintry amusement with which she was becoming familiar touched his face.

  “I think,” Hanna said cautiously, “you can dispense with philosophy.”

  “All right. I’ve told you about the experiments we tried—all but one. That one was more successful. You will remember that one thing, and one thing only, brought a reaction from the aliens while you were aboard Endeavor. That was your own approach to them, in isolation from the ship.”

  He paused, looking at her without expression. Hanna dug her hands in deeper. She thought she knew what was coming.

  Jameson said, “I had them recreate that situation, in form though not in substance. The Endeavor’s engineering staff modified a shuttle for remote control. The Endeavor specified a location for rendezvous, took the shuttle there, and left it—just as you were left behind last year. A starship—to all appearances the same one that came to you—appeared at the proper location. It made a pass at the shuttle and disappeared. Shortly afterward the Endeavor began receiving locus references again. Now, it is clear, after so long a time, that the beings do not wish to contact the Endeavor itself. They were not interested in the unmanned vessel. I think they may wish to meet with a single representative of humankind, away from a vessel large enough, perhaps, to be threatening. I don’t know if it matters who the representative is. But they—” He hesitated. “They know you, as it were.”

  Hanna had been very still. Now she moved suddenly, almost convulsively. She said, “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I. I did not want to do this. I did not want to place any human being in so vulnerable a position. In a sense, of course, every person on the Endeavor is vulnerable. But I have not forgotten the intensity of your reaction to the earlier contact.”

  “Thank you very much,” Hanna muttered.

  “Hmm?”

  “Nothing…”

  She turned away from him and began to pace, flowing black trousers swirling about her legs. She said, “They veered off from your decoy. Why wouldn’t they do it again?”

  “They were telepaths. There is no doubt on that score; that is the one thing Zeig and Daru are sure of, without reference, incidentally, to your experience. I think they departed when they learned, telepathically, that the drone was not manned.”

  “Because it wasn’t—” She froze where she stood. Iledra caught her thought and made a faint sound of protest and disbelief. Hanna turned slowly. She said to Jameson, “It wasn’t the bait they wanted.”

  He looked at her without expression and said, “That is highly colored language.”

  “Is it? When I saw spears and carnivores?”

  “Analogs,” he said.

  It was her own word. She could not repudiate it.

  She moved restlessly to stare into the projection.

  “What does Marte Koster think?”

  “She does not know what to think,” Jameson said, nearly at her ear. She had not heard him come near.

  “Well, for once she and I agree on something.”

  She looked up at Jameson and said abruptly, “Send Endeavor on and ignore them.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t give you a logical reason. They’re manipulating us.”

  “I know.”

  “We shouldn’t play the game without knowing the rules.”

  “We can’t ignore them any longer.”

  “Why not?”

  They spoke rapidly and quietly. They might have been entirely alone. Iledra moved closer.

  “Endeavor has been in space more than a year. I need results.”

  “Don’t do it. Don’t hurry.”

  He said savagely, “I don’t have forever.”

  Hanna jumped, shocked. His will transfixed her—the implacable will that had created the Endeavor Project from nothing. No half-formed fear would dilute it. He would go meet the beings himself, if no one else would go.

  She said, bewildered, “Forever for what?”

  He looked at her without comprehension. She had to know. She put out a
hand and touched his arm with a hesitance foreign to any D’neeran, to whom touch came naturally as breath. But it seemed a great liberty to take with Jameson. He did not shake her off, however. She said, “What are we looking for?”

  For a minute she thought he would not answer. Then he said, “We are children, my lady.”

  “Children?”

  “All the time of humankind is a second, a tiny fraction of eternity,” he said, so softly that she tilted her head, close as she was, to hear. “It is nothing, my lady. Each of us is caught in our little millisecond of life, and we think that millisecond is everything. But all human history is nothing.”

  He hesitated, looking into her eyes with the first trace of doubt she had ever seen in him. Something reassured him. She felt him relax, almost in relief. He said quietly, “The Endeavor Project is a turning toward a future unimaginable as the improbable past. I am speaking of the far future. Not next year, but millennia to come. We forget the vastness of the universe. We think, skipping among a handful of stars, we have mastered it. We are children, playing on the edge of infinity…. One day, my lady, we will meet the adults.”

  It seemed to her clear, pure truth. She said in wonder, “And they will teach us—?”

  “The unknowable?” he said. It was a question.

  She asked with simple curiosity, “Are you mad?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, as if he had thought of it before.

  He had gone much farther than he intended. The moment of communication ended with a jolt in which Hanna felt his surprise at what he had said. He actually took a step backward.

  He said abruptly, “I don’t intend to order you into space on my authority alone. There will be some delay. But I think you can leave in a few days.”

  “But—”

  Iledra overwhelmed her, thinking furious thoughts to an obstinate child. Jameson said, “You need not be entirely alone. You can take Zeig or Daru, or both of them. This time. Not the next time, perhaps—”

  “Next time! I don’t even want to go this time!”

  “It is essential that a telepath greet them. You can make better guesses about them than any true-human.”

  “Of course,” Iledra said, but Hanna could not let it pass.

  “I don’t know if I can!” She stopped in despair. Iledra’s eyes were as cold as Jameson’s. She went on stubbornly, “If they, if they didn’t have a Change, if they evolved that way, they might be different, so different from us—We’re still human. We’re shaped by language. Telepathy’s a function of the maturation of the nervous system. We learn to use it along with language. We’ve never got very far from the rest of you—whatever you might think,” she added defiantly, but Jameson only nodded.

  “The perfect interface,” he said.

  Soft-furred pollitts snugly burrowed, and downwind the eye of the hunter—

  Iledra’s hand closed on her arm.

  Madness! Before the war you were not so. This fear lies in your own heart!

  Hanna disengaged her arm easily; it was harder to free her thought. She said hopelessly, “We don’t know enough about them,” and saw Jameson’s mouth set.

  “You have the opportunity to learn more,” he said.

  “What they are doing does not make sense in any frame of reference we know.”

  “You,” he said, and lifted a hand and leveled a long forefinger at her, arresting her. “You have just won an award for a work concerned largely with frames of reference—and with your own qualifications, as a D’neeran, to understand them. You have the opportunity to prove the assertions of ‘Sentience’—that you can enter an alien’s skin, obtain for us knowledge of his heart, and show him your own essence. Peace, you said, past any possibility of mistake, without conjecture, without deception, from the beginning. You have the opportunity to make a first contact. There has not been a first contact since Neil Girritt’s two hundred and fifty years ago. No D’neeran has ever made such a contact. Shall I send Marte Koster instead?”

  Iledra said empathically, “No!” The air pulsed with warning. Hanna needed no special sense to know what Iledra thought of: D’vornan’s new course of study; a report, which Iledra would supervise personally, on the introduction of D’neerans into true-human mindhealing; a whole list of scarce-spoken hopes, a world’s coming of age.

  Hanna looked from Jameson to Iledra and turned away from them. She went back to the projection and stood beside it without looking at it. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, she felt Iledra’s indignation that Hanna should even think of turning away from this opportunity. From Jameson she felt nothing, but exasperation showed in his face. He wanted her to see it, she thought. She had not missed his significant glance at the tiny jeweled symbol of the Goodhaven Academy sparkling on her shoulder. She was not through paying for it, nor for all those beginnings.

  She took her hands from her pockets, and the Heir’s Ring sparkled too. She tugged at it and pulled it off. She said to Iledra, “Have you forgotten the inscription inside?”

  Iledra remembered. She looked at Hanna coldly. It was the first time Hanna had felt anything of the kind from Iledra.

  Hanna said, “I’ll tell you what it is. ‘The first duty of the D’neeran citizen is to the integrity of the self; for the welfare of the state depends on the well-being of the individual.’”

  Iledra did not answer in word or thought. Hanna said, “Take it. Cosma can wear it for me. Just in case.”

  She felt a question form at last, and shut it out. “Take it,” she repeated, and Iledra took the ring as if she might not give it back.

  On balance, Hanna thought, Iledra was right, or right enough to leave no real choice. If there were a first contact, it had better not be Marte Koster who made it; better H’ana ril-Koroth of D’neera; better another stone laid to found Jameson’s seductive vision.

  “All right,” Hanna said. “I’ll go.”

  Chapter 7

  The space ship was called XS-12. “X” meant Extraterrestrial, “S” meant Scout; Hanna never found out what the Twelve was for.

  It was as austere as Shuttle Five, and it was not big enough for three people.

  When it had been in space six weeks Hanna looked out the ports in its nose and thought: It’s just as well we hate each other. It gives us something to do.

  (“Why told you no one of your dreams?”

  “Why left you no record of yours?”

  “I did, they kept it from you—”

  “As you knew they would. Placid you ate the argument—”

  “It was sense!”

  “Now you doubt, too late—bitch, witch!”)

  The transmissions XS-12 sent into space could be traced by an audible signal. Often they played it for hours. It had been on for hours now, high-pitched and faint and pulsing. Hanna could not bear it.

  She said suddenly, “I want it off.”

  Charl did not look up from the game he played crosslegged on the floor. Bright chips shifted position in the air.

  “Leave it on,” he said.

  “It’s been on for hours!”

  “I’m used to it.”

  They spoke in careful Standard, having rubbed so closely together for so long that the emotional burden of telepathy also was unbearable. Hanna said, “It’s my turn to have what I want. Silence!”

  Charl hesitated, acknowledging fairness in spite of himself. Hanna’s hand crept inevitably toward the keypad that would silence the noise. A memory of the Clara Mendoza stabbed her, and she felt sick. Charl looked at her quickly and said, “All right.”

  “Thanks.”

  In resounding silence she headed for the cramped cubicle where she slept and which—the operations manual said—was supposed to give her privacy. In the narrow passage she bumped into a sleepy and disheveled Anja. Hanna squeezed past her.

  Hanna’s bunk made her bed on Endeavor look sybaritic. It would improve Erik to sleep here for a while. The single thin blanket did not even pretend to be fabric. It kept a sleeper comfor
table, but it did nothing for the need to snuggle into substantial warmth in the night. Not that XS-12 was cold; it was always the same and just right. It did not have Endeavor’s subtle diurnal and seasonal cues, and its scant drift through realspace allowed no shift in the positions of the stars. The souls aboard her might have been in hell, a hell of isolation and sameness that drove them to tear at each other because there was no other outlet for a tension that rose and fell irregularly and permitted them no action.

  (“I thought,” said Jameson’s voice—it was only his voice, and the transmission was not as clear as it should be—“that what you report is impossible. That telepathic contact without affect is a contradiction in terms.”

  “It is for us. I didn’t believe Charl either, when he told me what he felt on Endeavor. They’re not us. They’re different. I told you they could be different!”

  “They are interested in you, at least.”

  “Presumably. Who the hell knows?”

  “And they’ve done nothing to harm you.”

  “But the dreams. I don’t trust this change. Dammit, why didn’t you let us talk before I came out here?”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. They are analogs; for watchfulness and pursuit, perhaps.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Hanna said, but she liked hearing his voice. It was always calm and steady, and in each of their rare conversations it was a link to reason and the sanity of a busy larger world.

  She said, “Jameson, I don’t think I can take this much longer.”

  “Don’t tell me that. The import of your presence surely—”

  “Don’t make a speech,” she said quickly, and thought she heard the ghost of a chuckle.)

  She was not scheduled to talk to Jameson for four days more. There would be nothing to occupy her thoughts and keep them from unanswerable questions except the laconic once-a-day contact with Project Central, and the prickly oft-broken truce with Anja and Charl, and the other thing. Which came when it would and was gone at once.