The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  When he was finished he said in a carefully even tone, “Why don’t you put that down, Hanna? You know I was half-expecting you and you know there has been no alarm. I’m willing to talk to you, but that thing makes me nervous. What does it do, anyway?”

  She looked at him with round eyes and said, “Are you—are you going to call for, for help? Don’t lie,” she added.

  He did not think she would like the truth, and answered reluctantly, “I won’t tell anyone yet that you’re here. Sooner or later I will have to. Not immediately.”

  After a minute she nodded. She looked down at the weapon and turned and pointed it at a shrouded window. Her fingers moved and there was a loud click. Nothing else happened.

  She said in mild surprise, “Oh. Must be out of power or something.”

  She let it fall on the bed and with it, as if it were an afterthought, the knife.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you anyway,” she said.

  Tension Jameson had not been aware of left him. He went to her and picked up both weapons and took them to a far corner of the room, where he locked them in a cabinet that until now had held nothing more dangerous than a lady’s forgotten jewels. Hanna did not object. When he came back and stood before her, she looked at him quite trustfully, almost smiling, as if she were glad to see him. He did not smile back. He said, “You know what I want from you. Tell me what you want from me.”

  “What,” she said rather vaguely, and just as he began to speak again, “do you want from me?”

  He said, puzzled by the disjointure of her speech, “I want full cooperation. I can promise you nothing, except that you will not be pilloried unnecessarily.”

  “It’s all right.” The smile disappeared, and she was solemn. “I won’t fight anymore. I won’t run again. Just listen to me before you talk to anybody else. That’s all I ask.”

  “I will do that.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Her face lit up with gratitude. He was not above encouraging it, and he sat down beside her and took her hand. But relief, in truth, made him weak. She had seen the aliens and been in a fight, but she had escaped, with God knew what knowledge of them.

  “How did you get away?” he said.

  She was very still for a minute. Then slowly, slowly, she reached into her shirt. She pulled out a long tangled strip of a paper-like substance, edged with incomprehensible script. She held it close to her breast, looking at nothing.

  “What is that?” he said, but she did not move or answer and was still as death, so that he looked at her carefully, trying to gauge her sanity and stability. He saw the marks of privation, exhaustion, and the poorly healing injury that must keep her in constant pain. But he did not see fear or madness or any sign of alien control.

  “Hanna,” he said softly, and touched her face. She shuddered and moved.

  “It’s the course program for their home,” she said.

  He stared at her, disbelieving, and reached for it. She twitched it away uncertainly.

  “But you have to listen to me,” she said.

  “I’m listening. How did you get it?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said clearly.

  He said carefully. “I wish you did not have to talk about it. But you must. And you must give me that program. You understand why, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but—oh, he doesn’t want me to! He can’t bear it!”

  Jameson made a patient, noncommittal noise. He did not have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  “Will they see the ship? And come for me?” She looked up with sudden anxiety, and he was uneasy. She had displayed half a dozen moods in ten minutes. He had always thought her volatile, but now she seemed a feather on the wind, immediately responsive to whatever was going on inside her.

  “Where is the ship?” he said.

  “In the hills.” She nodded vaguely in the wrong direction.

  “If they find it I won’t let them take you away until you’ve said what you have to say. How did you get past orbital surveillance?”

  She said with perfect clarity, “Hung around until I found something coming down that had about my mass. Fell in behind it and faked a duplicate of its ID. Followed it down and then split off when I thought it was safe. I was hoping they’d think I was a freak echo. I guess they did.”

  Heartworld II was not too large for Airspace Control to treat as just another traffic blip. If it had gotten so low without being identified, it was unlikely that anyone suspected Hanna was there. The technique was clever and daring, and he was impressed. He made a mental note to make certain no one else got away with it.

  She did not elaborate, but turned to him and laid a hand on his shoulder and smiled, and then looked at the hand as if confused. She seemed lost inside herself, and after a little while he said, using the D’neeran form of her name, “H’ana? What is wrong?”

  She looked up, blinked, and was there again. She said, “It would take—” She started counting on her fingers. She got up to four and started over again. She said, “It would take five days to retrace my route and eight more to…to…to Home.”

  “Home? D’neera?”

  “Home,” she said impatiently. “That’s what they call it. I mean, they don’t call it anything, but that’s how they think of it. Not their, their, towns? Not that. Groupings. More personal homes. Hearths. They change. There’s no spoken language at all. No fixed names for things or people. Except writing of course and that’s numbers. It’s just what they agree on at any given time. But Home is always Home. And they are—now there should be some of them—I can’t tell you about that.” She gave him a sideways glance, almost sly. “We’d kill each other. They know where you are, I mean where Earth is. And Willow. I couldn’t prevent them from finding out—”

  “Hanna!” His hand closed painfully on her arm. “What did you tell them?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t tell them anything. Oh, stop!” she cried in distress. “You said you’d listen!”

  “There is no time to listen if you told them that!”

  “But there is. Please! They had time to chart the way to D’neera before, but it’s no different than that was. It will take them months to work out the course here!”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  I am telling you the truth, she thought painfully. He could not disbelieve her. He let go of her slowly. The fear and anger she had roused would take longer to subside. The marks of his fingers showed on her arm, but she did not try to rub them away. He eyed the paper she still held out of his reach and said, “You’d better begin at the beginning.”

  “There isn’t one,” she said. “It’s a closed system.”

  He had the vivid impression that a tired child was speaking from a dream, and wondered if he would be able to get any sense out of her at all.

  But she said, “Wait. I’ll try. Listen. I’m not myself. Not anymore.” She looked at him intently to see if he understood, but he did not.

  “I wanted to understand them. The People. Do I sound insane? I am thinking now in some ways like one of them. And they are very different from us. But I think I understand. I think maybe, maybe there is a way to make them understand. I think maybe I can stop it.”

  “Are you sure?” he said, too roughly because the sudden hope was painful.

  “I can’t be sure,” she said, almost whispering. “It’s only a chance. They might kill me. Or question me again. If I can break the loop—I don’t know if I can. I am human and alien and cannot be either. I must stay detached, outside the dance. Let me try.”

  She laid her good hand against his cheek. Her face was luminous, and his skin prickled at an eerie thought that much of what had been Hanna was burned away, leaving a wraith that might, if she were right, prove stronger than armies. It came to him then with a certainty whose source he did not know that the Hanna he had known was gone.

  Hanna said, “I’m still here. For a while.”

&n
bsp; Don’t read my mind, he wanted to say, and shook his head instead. He said gently, “You must tell me more.”

  “It will take a long time.”

  “You’ll have time. As much as you need.”

  He took her to the room she had left many days before, put her in a deep chair, and gave her a drink loaded with nutrients. When he lit the fire she leaned toward the first flames as if their warmth drew her, and a little, a very little, of the tension went out of her face. The silence of deep night was close around them, and they might have been the only two people on Earth.

  Then he sat down near her and said, “Tell me, Hanna,” and she told him.

  * * *

  It was not yet morning when she finished, but his muscles ached from long stillness when he moved. He felt then a curious detachment, as if a potent drug still worked in his blood and customary realities were in abeyance, and he was a spectator at events that took no notice of him save to demand his acknowledgment. Hanna seemed sometimes an essence of otherness, a creature come from new dimensions, as if the impossibilities of Inspace had come to life. An alien being spoke with her lips, paradoxical: grieved or aggressive, fearful or stately by turns. “I cannot explain!” it cried, or Hanna cried, at times; and then they would bear him, willing or not, to other times on another world, and it seemed a massive alien held out its hands to his fire.

  But sometimes it was only Hanna, though (he thought again) not the Hanna humans had known. He kept to himself a new conviction, born of the story she told and the ways she used to tell it, that neither he nor Hanna nor any D’neeran had properly estimated the power of telepathy—nor the cost to one who used it to its fullest. For even when Hanna spoke in her own voice she was new—or damaged. There was little straight-line logic to what she said, and he stopped her again and again, mystified by statements from a separate universe of discourse, making her show him the foundations of a reality more strange than any she had guessed at in writing “Sentience.” And always she did as he asked her, painfully sometimes when memory shook her, but dutifully and doggedly, until he began to feel he was kin to The Questioner and Lady Koroth was right after all, and all his dreams had come to in the end was the torment of a woman who would not fight him.

  Because he did not think there was any defiance left in Hanna. She had given him her weapons, and in the spaces between her words he heard her clear intention not to take them up again. With every separate sentence she put herself more firmly in his hands, offering herself for his use this last time. Her trust was terrible; and yet he saw, as he had seen from the day he betrayed it, that it was not new. It had always been there, from their first meeting: her conviction that he would choose rightly for the future, a faith as strong as his in his own vision. Perhaps she was not even conscious of it. It seemed part of an implicit, unspoken communication that had gone on under the surface of their words and actions each time they met.

  He wished he could uncover and deal with that alone. He was tired, and he wished he did not have to listen so hard to what she was saying. He had had enough of strain and threats and sleeplessness, of aliens and work. He had spent half a lifetime gaining the responsibility of choosing for mankind, and now he wished he did not have it. The face of mankind was not as close as Hanna’s face, and all that she said and showed him led in one direction only: to sending her away again. Yet that was what she wished him to do, and the bitterest ending of all was that, though she did not know it, he might no longer have the power to do it.

  Silence lay between them when she was done; he broke it at last, inadequately. “I never dreamed of anything like that.”

  “Nor did I. But that was the point of ‘Sentience,’ was it not? That each species shapes its own reality…but I didn’t mean it quite so literally. And is shaped by it, you know. Is shaped by it…”

  She seemed to drift away. Jameson stood up, a little stiffly, and went at last to get a drink for himself.

  “Run through the reaction model again,” he said. “Simple fear! I don’t believe it!”

  “The dynamics aren’t simple.”

  “Quite obviously. Tell me again. I want to make sure I understand.”

  “All right.” Toward the end she had been talking more easily, as if human speech came more readily with practice. Now she said quite normally, “It starts with what the People are, full telepaths. I don’t know just where in their evolution the ability showed up. It seems there are other animals on their homeworld with a form of it, even plants somehow, but in the People it reached a peak of mutual consciousness that’s nearly a group mind, and shaped them and their history and their culture all together. And the past is alive. Very seldom does anyone just die, just end, as we do. That’s the worst thing that can happen to them…”

  Her voice faltered, and he saw grief in her face. She said, “It happened to the ones I killed. Because of me. They were so far from Home, it happened so fast, there was no chance for the living to absorb them.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” he said.

  “Why,” she said, as if it were very simple, “the experience of generations is transmitted directly, not in words or pictures, but what it was to live it. They are those who came before.”

  “But they have individual identities as well—”

  “Clearly, yet they can’t exist apart from one another. Space travel is painful for them. Dangerous. They’re a space-time collectivity, and individual identity depends on it. And its most important manifestation, where we’re concerned, is that life for them is Us or not-Us. No exceptions. No borderlines. There are the People, and there is everything else. And everything else is harmless, or prey, or predator, and because they are so self-identified, they lack the ability to identify with anything else. They make analogs from their own reality to ours, just as we do with other things, but they are even more limited than we are in the sources they have to choose from.”

  She looked at him uncertainly, and he said with some relief, “I think I do understand that. It’s a blind spot, like Girritt’s limitations in technology.”

  “Yes. And what makes it worse, what makes it more dangerous for us, is that the deaths of not-Us beings are gratifying to them. It had to be that way, you see. Because you cannot subsist without killing other life forms. They even sense something—I’m not sure what—from plants. And you can’t eat something if you experience its death as your own, can you? I think they have entirely different receptors for each other and for not-Us beings, and the perception of the death of prey or predator is something we don’t have any words for at all. I could call it a kind of pleasure, but that’s not fair. It makes them sound like sadists, and they’re not, not really. You like the taste of meat, don’t you? But you don’t think that makes you a killer because the meat has to be slaughtered. Well, they don’t kill or torment for pleasure; it’s a by-product, so to speak. But it’s there, and at the same time, among themselves, they’ve had no experience of war or conflict, nor compromise nor accommodation either. Because to kill another is to kill oneself. And everything else—”

  She hesitated, and he said, “Is harmless or predator or prey. Yes? And which are we?”

  “Predators,” she said promptly. “And that’s where the next element comes into play. There are dangerous animals on their homeworld. They are not specifically dangerous now, of course, because for many centuries the People have had a weapons technology that deals with them easily. But the most dangerous of all for many ages, the archetype of the beast, a sort of primate as it happened, was very close kin to us. Not literally, of course, but in the structure of its instinct and behavior it was much more like us than we are like the People. It was non-telepathic, and growing sentient. And it was—it was them or the People. There was only one that was going to be the dominant species, and take the niche humans got here. And so they—they—” She stumbled. “Made them die. With ritual death as the focus. They made the…the disappearing, the dissolution they wanted, real.”

  Jameson di
d not understand this any better than he had the first time she said it. He let it go by. He said, “But they were wiped out long ago.”

  “Yes, oh, yes. But they still live in the ancestral memory which is this generation’s memory. And the People have not left their evolutionary response to danger behind any more than we have. You know what that response is more intimately than most of us, I think. You don’t hunt tigers with disruptors; you use a spear. And I saw you have scars?”

  Her easy tone caught him off guard. Tiger-traces were a mark of honor, women of his own culture found them exciting, others sometimes were revolted and could not understand why he kept them; but to Hanna they were just there. He pulled himself back to the matter at hand and nodded. “I was lucky. I made a mistake once, long ago, and lived to remember it.”

  “Were you thinking of trying to reason with the tiger at the time?”

  “What do you think? Of course not. There are only two things to do with tigers—stay out of their way, or kill them.”

  “Well,” said Hanna, looking at him with some distaste, and he lifted a placating hand.

  “No, don’t,” he said. “I’m quite fond of tigers, actually. You’d be surprised how much I know about them. But we are talking about instinct, are we not? And instinct has no middle ground.”

  “Yes,” said Hanna, “and that is where the circle closes, and the model is what happened to the human colony they found, and not only what happened to the colony but what happened to the People because of it. Just as things happened to them because of those others. Although they don’t know that, I think. He doesn’t think so.”