The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  At last the stunted paws (pretty hands) ill-made and fumbling move (in lost grace) and symbols stand before Our blurred eyes. We crowd together and all of Us long-ago crowd closer too, watching Our hope (or destruction) Our fear; it is clear fear was right. The locus references are clear, starbeacons ineradicable. There will be no escape for the Treecubs, who can no longer hide from a hidden enemy and must wait for Our blow to fall.

  Here is one world, their birthplace, bursting with life. In alien memory it glitters with snow.

  Here a second, long-settled and nearly as strong and its name is the graceful soft name of a tree.

  What have We to do with sounding names?

  Lights glow with acknowledgment from Home. The vigil there is ending, the data pouring into the Generals’ hands—

  The alien hands falter. Wrongness gathers in corners like smoke.

  We have no such function—

  We do but We do not. Something like it, since the Students’ time; but not this; not quite. The new concept is pseudo-Leader’s

  contamination, Bladetree says, and all of Us fall back in alarm.

  The alien says through Our great uneasiness: I will show you how to translate the data in the human vessel—

  Human? What is Human?

  —a clear course program for these worlds—

  Its vision dazzles Us with wrongness—

  —while We sought them their power increased. Five Homes rich and powerful are their heart and the heart of danger—

  Five! We are frozen, the fear, the power, corruption, wrongness, aloneness resonating together. The fragile balance rocks. True-Leader struggles to anchor it: Five but not that of the Wildfire-thing—

  And the alien says: She might have been someone’s Sunrise.

  Sunrise among Us again is created from his/its/Our longing and caught in tumbling currents of grief and fear the alien throws back its alien head as at a mortal blow

  I did not think of her! It was not I!

  Do not, do not!

  When I am dead—

  Stop, stop!

  you must tell her I loved her even in this form—

  * * *

  The thought hurt them physically and sliced them in two. True-Leader, wrenched apart, existing twice, relinquished Sunrise to himself. He stumbled desperate toward the alien, reaching out, and the others reached for him, overcome with sorrow and altogether unbalanced with this last blow.

  But pseudo-Leader’s thought impossibly winked out, and the alien rose and reached for them too.

  * * *

  In that instant they understood the wrongness, the thing hovering behind this changed Leader, and the understanding was too late; the alien moved convulsively; something glittered in its hand; true-Leader’s agony flared in his knowledge of certain death, and the knife ripped through flesh and membrane and all of them felt it, impaled and transfixed by horror. The alien was among them free and strong as rushing water, and Steersman stumbled toward the creature, fumbling at his belt, but he failed in the chaos of Leader’s dying, and he also died. Then all of them were blinded, and it caught the weapon from Steersman as he fell, and killed Flametender and wounded Bladetree, and sprang for Bladetree with the knife while Apprentice sought to flee and could only crawl.

  A weapon, Apprentice thought, I must get a weapon lest it escape.

  But he could not, prisoned by the weakness of his kind and reeling in the dissolution of other minds dying without solace, the unbearable disruption of the last worst horror. And it took its time with Bladetree and Apprentice writhed with his agony, and Leader screamed both alive and dead and reality began to die about Apprentice. The corridors were a marsh in which he sank and drowned in hate. He clutched for support but there was none, the universe was ending, and he did not even know Hanna had come for him when she shot him in the back and he too died.

  Chapter 15

  A word drifted through the dark, half-transparent air, drawn out into many syllables and at first meaningless. Hanna saw clearly that it was a material and perhaps living thing.

  It flared against the darkness; shortened, wavered, crystallized; settled into solid reality, and vanished.

  Just before it disappeared it spoke. It said: “Blood.”

  When it was gone time was uniformly gray and blank. Not even memory marked it.

  Presently she saw that time was the gray flooring of the corridor, centimeters from her eyes; saw blood on it; saw that some was subtly lighter than the rest, and remembered.

  The lighter patch was her blood.

  She lay unmoving and watched a pageant of fantastic deaths behind her eyes.

  Thus have you wrought…

  Dreary droning voice from nowhere. Her own thought.

  Presently she considered turning her head. To do it, or not to do it, was a most profound question.

  At last, because her right arm hurt horribly, she moved. Her cheek was sticky and stung as it pulled loose from the floor. Her flesh was insubstantial, but it responded to her will.

  Only yours only yours only yours! cried the voice, and she shuddered and cringed from it.

  Leader was dead. In her mind there was a whimpering where he had been. But he was dead. The whimpering did not stop.

  Presently another word appeared. “Up,” it said. She clung to it, used it for support, climbed it slowly, and was sitting. It disappeared.

  Apprentice’s torn corpse lay near her. There was a gaping hole in his back; Steersman had been carrying a projectile weapon. The custom was associated with a past shadowed by Renders, which responded unpredictably to any defense save having big holes blown in them.

  “No. No,” Hanna muttered. That bit of knowledge could not come from anywhere. They were all dead.

  She stretched consciousness cautiously. The effort cost an almost physical pain. Nothing living met her. She reached inward and was empty, like this spacecraft, like the universe.

  She preferred it to the frenzy of their dying, which had gone on for some time even when their bodies were certifiably dead and past reviving even with human techniques. It ought not to have been so much like the Clara. These things were not human. But the blackness was the same, and the wailing ghosts. She had thrown herself on the floor in shattering hysterics and clawed at her ears to shut them out. Her throat was raw from screaming. None of it did any good at all, and in the madness she had nearly died too.

  Now it was finished, and to what end? Sunrise would wait forever, a whole Nearhome subject to her grief. That was all.

  Hanna sat on the cold floor and looked inside her right forearm, which was on fire. It was clear true-Leader or Steersman had turned the knife back on her somehow, though she did not remember it. The wound was ugly, but it had missed the big veins and nearly stopped bleeding. Her whole arm hurt and was stiff, but she could use it.

  Use it, she thought, for…

  And quailed. She did not want to use it for anything. She wanted to lie down again and go to sleep, rejecting thought and purpose.

  The whimpering went on and on and grew into a howl of pure and untainted despair. For a moment, in slow confusion, she looked at Apprentice’s body; but he would never speak in thought again.

  Leader still lived in her mind. He did not want her to stop. He did not want to die a second time.

  Tears of weariness came to her eyes. Even dead he was not dead. There still was no escape.

  She lifted a hand to her hair, but the pain in her arm was so great she let it drop.

  Over the mourning came unbidden a memory of Leader’s creation. He was a creature of drugs and suggestion, with true-Leader’s power behind them, constructed in the chasms of an ego violently disorganized by pain.

  So precariously founded he might, she thought, be vulnerable. Perhaps he could be destroyed. Perhaps the mindhealers could do it.

  The thought compelled her to rise. She began to stumble through darkness, supporting herself against the wall with her uninjured arm.

  and the oldest blacknes
s and the falling years mourn us lost riches parts lost from the whole—

  Be quiet, she said in despair, oh, quiet! and quiet descended.

  She had no goal but clumsy motion. She was at one place or another with no recollection of getting there, as if movement required such effort there was nothing left for the perceiving of it. But presently she was in a docking bay, looking at Heartworld II through a fog of pain. The hatch from which Something had emerged was open. She went through it and in time found herself by a disordered bed. It was big enough for a big man, or one of the People. She was lost in it.

  She fell on it. She felt the automatic pulse of thought from pseudo-Leader, she would sleep and he could regain control—and then her conviction and then his that he could not. He was herself.

  She slipped into blackness, too tired to be grateful for the peace.

  * * *

  When she woke Leader was still there. If he had not been she might never have thought again, but as it was she said to him, Go away, you are not real.

  I am, I am, I am, he wept, so clearly she heard the words.

  Tears covered her face. Which was odd, she thought, because the People do not have tears.

  She sat up. It was nearly as difficult as the first time. Weariness past enduring enwrapped her.

  I am real, Leader insisted, and Hanna fell back again, helpless. Dark and warmth and wetness surrounded her. The medium she breathed was joy. She struggled to escape a clutching memory, not hers. “No,” she said, but he would not be denied, and Heartworld II changed to:

  A chamber hewn from rock richly carved in celebration. Lifetender’s task was nearly done. She tapped an embrittled shell with a silver hammer, and tiny claws appeared at a crack, tiny fingers reached for the world. They fastened on the fingers of Leader and Sunrise, sealing a communion begun while the little one was an embryo. They bathed together in running water and all the community was a song around them. In other Nearhomes, and in other times, the same ritual simultaneously was being performed or had been performed or would be performed. He danced in the water, stretching his baby limbs as swiftly as I, said a long-dead swimmer, and now in this place he was Swift.

  The vision faded. Hanna saw the rich woods of Heartworld again.

  He is my son not yours, Leader said. I am real. This happened to me!

  She turned slowly, unable to move quickly. Crumpled fabrics rubbed at her face and woke pain in her wounded arm. A trace of a familiar scent—imagined, perhaps—brought Jameson before her.

  When she thought of him she got up slowly, swaying, feeling curiously light. She felt an edge of panic at the smallness of the room—no, at the absence of those other eyes, other dimensions, other perspectives which her two eyes alone could not see.

  She thought of the hearthstone of Leader’s Nearhome, a brilliant mosaic that made one pattern from many. She thought of the sculptures made to be seen by many eyes at once, at which Flametender had excelled.

  “No,” she said, pushing knowledge away, but it would not stay away. They were so vulnerable, so fragile for all their strength, subject to one another’s pain so that a hurt to one robbed all of competence and a community’s strength wasted exponentially. And through Leader she had come to see this weak place, and she had gone for it with all a Render’s savagery.

  I do not want to think like them! she thought, and thought:…telepathic cousins, who can reach into another being’s very thoughts, comprehend him from the inside, ensure peace as we go on….

  She had written the words in another life, when she was herself and Leader, though she did not know it, stalked her. Echoes of dashed hopes, confidence unfounded—what would Jameson say when she told him she had thought about nothing but killing? About what she had done to Bladetree?

  That she had done all she could, perhaps. And then he would forgive her. Perhaps.

  “Fraud, fraud, fraud!” someone said. It was her voice.

  “But I had to. I had to,” she said; and thought there were other things she had to do.

  She moved slowly to the flight deck, seeing nothing, stumbling with exhaustion. Exhaustion would never leave her. She had to go on in spite of it. She had to get back to Jameson and tell him she had won.

  But nothing lived on the First Watchsetter to signal the docking bay open. She could not leave it yet.

  She shrank from facing the bloody work of her hands. But she must do it or never leave; and unwilling, unthinking, she stepped from Heartworld II into a ghost ship where nothing lived but herself. Nothing could; she had heard the end of their last fading thoughts.

  The route to the First Watchsetter’s command chamber was as familiar as if she had walked it a thousand times, though the stairways were hard to climb. The corridors were dim and their walls altogether blank. The murals were keyed to living brains, and had died with them. She felt that she had spent weeks, months, years maybe, in this ship. The command chamber would have been homelike as her rooms at Koroth, except for the evidence of carnage. A burst of grief, hers or Leader’s, brought her to her knees among the crumpled bodies. She could not look at the tatters of Bladetree. True-Leader’s face was twisted in death, and she knelt in his dried blood.

  Fraud, fraud, Render!

  “No,” she said, “Oh, no. How can you call me that? After what you did to me?”

  Renders, he said, buried their dead. Not Ours.

  “I can’t do anything! They’re too big, they’re too heavy, how could I move them?”

  And what did it matter to the dead?

  And truly death for Us, said Leader, far from Home and transition and life in We, though you might for me—

  She did not know what he was trying to tell her. He could not force it upon her. He was less strong than before. He had lived through his own death, but in the passage he had lost the greater part of substance. And what he tried to tell her was so strange there was no place for it in her reality.

  She tried to get up, and her hand fell on something that yielded. It was Steersman. She rose then in one quick movement, driven by horror.

  It was hard working in the dimness with the silent shapes around her. Leader tried to withhold his knowledge, but he could not, no more than she could reject it. There were more lights here than on a human ship, or there seemed to be more in the half-night the People preferred; all of it spun sometimes before Hanna’s eyes, and once she thought it looked like nothing so much as a tinseled habitat seen from outside, a glittering explosion of life in the depths the People hated. She did what she had to do manually; her scalp itched; she was using backups, there was nothing wrong with the front-end system, she ought to plug the ship into her brain and think the First Watchsetter’s instructions.

  You do this very well, my friends dead at your feet, Leader said bitterly when she was done.

  Her skin rippled. Almost she heard Roly long-before.

  “I will pay for it,” she said, not at once sure what she meant. But with the words a thing she had not thought of for two human years came with perfect clarity into focus.

  Dorista had stopped her hand in time, but not her heart, which had gone on to touch the bit of metal that ended a universe, Hanna’s universe. Some of her had stayed in the night, detached. Easy prey for the First Watchsetter, drawn to its dark promise…easy prey for Leader, who had only to expand a cleavage already there…

  We do it better, he said.

  She shivered, fighting the rush of her own memories which he pressed upon her.

  Truly the body’s death is ending for you, Leader said. Not for Us.

  She had a hard brief vision of herself and her kind as a parody, an incomplete obscenity, as if an animal with thumbs grafted to clumsy paws were to think itself thereby human. She felt herself pulled and distracted at the sight, and then saw that his intention was to distract her. Something was happening, and he wished her attention withdrawn from it.

  He could not do it. She had hidden a knife from him, and now he could hide nothing. New lights flashed on a comm
unications panel, pulsing urgently. She read them without effort, but it was a moment before their import burst on her.

  COME IN. COME IN. DO YOU READ? WHAT IS WRONG? DO YOU READ? WHAT IS WRONG? WE ARE COMING. WE COME.

  She stared at the message, transfixed. It could not be true! But the denial was founded on what she wanted, not on what was, and she stumbled finally to the lights and peered at them, and then tapped a hesitant code on a panel shaped for other hands. A strip of paper, or something like it, unreeled from a slit. She tore it off and squinted in the shadow. The characters on it were sometimes intelligible, sometimes not. When they were intelligible they also said: WE COME.

  They were coming because her/Leader’s information had been fed Home as she gave it, by prearranged program, and the transmission had been interrupted without warning or explanation. There had been no answer to their increasingly urgent inquiries, so they were coming.

  She remembered, then, and thought: No. Oh, no. An endless time spent watching Leader-in-her-thoughts and holding to her purpose, and all for nothing. They were coming, and they knew where Earth was, and Willow. True-Leader was dead, but he had beaten her. Tampering with them, unsettling them, unbalancing them, waiting for the moment to attack their disarray, she had hardly noticed what pseudo-Leader had told them. She had not seen its importance. They were coming, and it was all over. She might as well have told The Questioner.

  She rubbed her face in confusion, bits of dried blood peeling off unnoticed, and looked at the mocking lights. She thought of using Leader’s sidearm on herself, for what could she take home now except the acknowledgment of this second and greater failure? But pseudo-Leader stormed at her, I will not die twice!

  She thought of waiting for them to come after all. Leader liked that. But there was still a great deal they would want to know, and she was not so lost as to tell them. There would be another Questioner to rend her.

  “Not in my body you don’t,” said Leader, shocked.

  It was her voice again. What, oh no, what was happening to her? She ought to be terrified—but she was past terror. Her capacity for fear was used up at last.