“Who are they?”
Morisz said stubbornly, “I’d rather not say.”
Hanna lifted her tired face and said, “They’re important.”
“Who?” Jameson said, just as Feng said, “How do you know that?”
Hanna did not answer. Jameson got up and went out with a sense of foreboding.
The light from the door was dim on the faces of al-Nimeury and Petrov and Struzik. Morisz stood nearby. He looked satisfied and unpleasant.
al-Nimeury said at once, “What are you trying to pull?”
Jameson shrugged, looking past him at the others. Petrov, like al-Nimeury, looked furious; Struzik had the face of a man in shock.
al-Nimeury said, “What the hell are you having a secret meeting for?”
“Lady Hanna came back in the night,” Jameson said. “She brought valuable intelligence.”
“I know,” al-Nimeury said. “Morisz told us.”
Petrov said, “Weren’t we going to hear about it?”
“Eventually.” Jameson knew when there was an end to the usefulness of evasion. There would be no quick secret mandate for Hanna, thanks to Morisz; he would have to salvage what he could from the wreckage of his plan. He said, “Come on in. You too, Stan. You’d better hear this.”
He turned and went into the house and they followed him, talking loudly. He ignored them.
Murphy was kneeling by Hanna when they came in. She looked up and said calmly, “Hello. Starr, have you looked at this?”
“No. Why?”
“There’s something wrong. Lady Hanna says she had medical supplies and used them. It shouldn’t be infected.”
“Compatible biology, then?”
“In some way.”
Jameson frowned at Hanna, who looked back at him without expression. Something new to worry about now, and no way to tell how dangerous it was because no one had had an alien corpse to dissect, or visited the world in question, or even had the artificial environment of a captured spaceship to study. Environmental traces in Hanna’s own body on her first return had been inconclusive. She was, however, alive after two contacts. That was encouraging, but the still-open wound could mean she was slowly being eaten alive by something nasty that might or might not remain confined to her. And there was no time to study her. She had already violated biosphere protective regulations by returning here, and ought to be quarantined. The fact clearly had occurred to Murphy. Jameson wished he could tell her privately not to mention it in front of Feng—and then saw her turn suddenly to Hanna, puzzled, and knew Hanna had told her.
He said, “Sit down, all of you. If you please.”
“I want an explanation,” al-Nimeury said.
“You’re going to get one.”
Only al-Nimeury remained standing, his eyes on Hanna. They had not met before, but there was no need for introductions. Hanna regarded him bleakly from her seat before the dying fire.
“A D’neeran,” al-Nimeury said with contempt in his voice. “So much damage. One D’neeran!”
Hanna got up slowly. What he thought, what he meant, reverberated behind the scarcely heard words. Trouble. Difference. Separation. Arrogance. A whole history. But al-Nimeury could not know she was his sister; he had not seen the void that lay between human beings and the others. The strangeness. And he was strange to her as she to him. Her body felt curiously light. Sleeplessness, disorientation, and her own urgent purpose kept the room at one remove from her. Her careful schooling in the uses of telepathy was confused by the functioning of Leader-in-her-thoughts, still here, still alive, crouching waiting watching while she tried to do what he and she together would do later somewhere else. Alliances. She and Leader. She and Jameson. She and al-Nimeury? She hardly saw the commissioners of the Polity. They were presences nearly without flesh, and only two of them counted. One was Jameson: steady, fearless, committed. And reckless, a thing she had thought never to find in him; but he had not much left to lose. The other was al-Nimeury, and his dislike, even disgust, was the strongest force in the room. It woke chords of hostility in her, the ancient emotional response to threat that fueled war within humanity and might now reach outside it if she could not, as she had said to Jameson, put an end to the dance. And she would have to end it here first to reach the People. On the edge of thought she heard or felt Jameson thinking, trying to find a way around his colleagues. Already he was separate from them. Already they saw him stripped of the power his office gave him. But there was a power in him that depended on no office, and she felt it with gratitude. Because there was no way around these others. The only way was through them.
She went to al-Nimeury, feeling that she floated. She stumbled and Jameson moved toward her, but she got balance back and took the last step. al-Nimeury was a short man, and stocky; her eyes were nearly level with his. They were deep brown, nearly black, and she might have thought there was fire in them, except the fire was behind them in the accumulated prejudice of generations.
She said, very softly, “I have to go back.”
He took a step backward and opened his mouth. He was going to say: I won’t listen. She held his eyes and it was not her eyes or her words that kept him silent so much as Jameson like a flame at her back. She drew on his strength as on a tangible current.
“Do you want war?” she said. “They’re so delicate. So cruel. You could win it. They know nothing of war. They tried to keep up with human warfare, as the colonists of the Lost World knew it. But that was long ago, and the colonists had forgotten—”
“Wait,” somebody said. The word slipped by her, but she felt Morisz’s urgency and answered the question before he asked it.
“I don’t know when it was.” She still looked into al-Nimeury’s eyes. “They have a stable written history, but I know nothing of it. I know only the common memory, which shapes time according to the importance of events. The great human exodus began seven hundred years ago and more, and lasted three centuries. Only in the first century and a half were fragments of humanity lost. Count back and you’ll know what they thought our capability is, as the colonists’ descendants remembered it. And then they got me and found that we’d learned—so much more. How to kill. How to destroy. They can’t match you. You could destroy them—”
Leader seemed to explode in her head, in her whole body. The humans babbled at her but words melted into Leader’s silent shocking clamor. It is true it is true you must see it is true! she cried to him. She felt hands on her shoulders, Jameson’s hands. They drew her back to the light. She trembled violently. Leader read her conviction and her purpose and she said to him, Trust me. Trust me! He answered mournfully, I must. You have the way Home.
She could lift her head. She did, and saw they watched her warily but, except for Jameson, without understanding what had happened. The living presence of Leader was a thing she dared let no one else recognize. Jameson said quietly, “She is very tired. She has been with them and returned with news of…a willingness to open discussions.”
She twisted under his hands at the lie, but they were suddenly attentive; skeptical, yet open to hope. al-Nimeury’s eyes were on her and she said, “You could have them in thirteen days. I can show you how to reach their homeworld in thirteen days. They know where you are but that’s all. They haven’t got the program to get here. They will need weeks to reach you at least. You fear them for nothing, and all because they fear you.”
al-Nimeury looked away from her, uneasy. She felt his uncertainty growing; he had not expected any of this. He said to Jameson, “Is that true? Why didn’t you say so?”
Jameson said, evading it, “Listen to her.”
Hanna said, as much to Leader as anyone, “They know nothing of wars. They have never had one. They know only the slaughter of dangerous beasts, and you are not beasts. Not unless you choose to be.”
“Are you sure? Is this something you’ve guessed?”
It was Morisz’s question, but she watched al-Nimeury, who was unwilling to meet her eyes. She sai
d, “I know.”
Morisz said, “What exactly have they got?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter—” Petrov sprang to her feet in vigorous denial. “Doesn’t matter!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Hanna said. She glanced at Petrov and thought: She could be trouble. She is afraid. Earth-island and outside the blackness—
Hanna moved a little, so that she faced al-Nimeury and he could not ignore her.
“I want to go to them,” she said. “I want to be appointed your envoy. They don’t understand they can’t win.”
“You want to tell them they can’t?” He was doubtful, suspicious.
“It won’t matter to them. If you send anybody but me they’ll attack anyway, because they won’t understand anybody but me. They might do it even if I’m the one who goes, but nobody else has a chance of convincing them—not that war is futile, but that it’s unnecessary.”
al-Nimeury said to Jameson, “I thought you said—” but Petrov said violently, “Nonsense! She’s lying. She came back to do something else for them, she came back to keep us from fighting. Starr, why did you not immediately call for help? She’s still under control. Anyone can see it!”
“Do you really think so?” Hanna said. She swayed, sickened and dizzy from the power of Petrov’s fear. Jameson put his arm around her quickly. He said to Petrov, “Hanna killed five of them to get away and bring us the way to their home.”
“So she says!”
“I did,” Hanna said faintly, and used everything she had learned from D’neera and from the People to take Petrov there. She leaned against Jameson and showed Petrov the chaos, the soundless screams and the thick blood and reality ending, and Leader-in-her-thoughts lived his death again, and Petrov recoiled in horror, and Hanna let her go.
Petrov sat down abruptly. Her face was haunted, her eyes inward. She did not try to speak.
The others had glimpsed some of it too. Jameson said close to Hanna’s ear, “A demonstration of the usefulness of D’neerans, or at least of Hanna. After that, can you doubt her ability to communicate with the aliens?”
Someone moved restlessly. al-Nimeury said not to Hanna but to Jameson, “I don’t care. Even if it’s all true I want to send humans. Not her. The aliens are telepaths themselves, we don’t need D’neera.”
Hanna said flatly, “You can’t shut us out any longer. You cripple yourselves with fear of us. He knows.” She meant Jameson. “You think I will reach into your mind and know its secret places. All your shames, the dark hidden things you won’t acknowledge even to yourselves…what can you do with these beings, who can do that more surely than I can? You know they took me and tortured me—”
The Questioner came alive for an instant, and her voice caught. The effort of projecting to Petrov had drained her more than she thought. She turned her head and for a moment put her cheek against Jameson’s shoulder, fixing herself in present reality, and went on.
“They took fear from my heart and used it. I showed them my own fracture points. Pain and mutilation, humiliation, all it took to make me a blind, screaming animal. I told them all unwilling how to destroy me and end my spirit. And they learned from the colonists too. Whom they slaughtered. Everything I most feared, the greatest terrors humans have, they learned from humans. Will you go to them yourself? But I have learned from them. I have some things no one else has. And you would send someone else, defenseless, to treat with them?”
She knew al-Nimeury acknowledged the logic; but disbelief fought logic.
Morisz muttered, “If we can beat them so easily, why is there a chance they’ll fight? You can just tell them what will happen. Won’t they give up? What will happen?”
“Genocide,” Hanna said.
There was a murmur of disbelief from Struzik.
“They would not give up,” Hanna said. “You would have to kill them. You would not kill all of them, but you would destroy them. All their culture. Every fragile thing they have built through the millennia. They are more vulnerable than you are, than we are. They may be a dead end like Girritt—or evolving toward something neither we nor they can guess. Perhaps they will become a group mind, a step maybe—” she glanced up at Jameson—“toward becoming adults. Now they are a fabric, and too great a rent will destroy them. They must be sheltered—”
“Sheltered!” al-Nimeury said, and she felt his outrage. When she thought of The Questioner it was incongruous even to her, but she knew it was true.
She began, “A moral choice—” and the word made them look at her with distaste. Morisz said skeptically, “Don’t they know they’re weak? You still haven’t told us—why do they hate us? Why would they fight?”
“The colony,” Hanna said. She let the words drop among them, and quite suddenly felt that she had reached the end of her strength.
She sagged against Jameson, indifferent to their eyes, and said nothing more. After a minute he said gently, “Explain. Explain to them as you did to me.”
“I can’t,” Hanna said, and roused herself enough to turn to him. She wanted it to be over, she wanted him to hold her, she wanted to go to sleep in his arms in peace and safety, and what she wanted was clear to him. He was alarmed, but he held her, and she was happy. She did not, at this moment, care about the conflict she felt in him. Slowly he was coming to his senses. He would come to them in the end. This would do for now.
“Hanna,” he said, and pushed the moment aside with an almost physical effort.
I want you to stop doing that, she thought, but not so that he could hear her, and looked up obediently.
“Show them,” he said.
“Show them what?”
“What happened when they met the colonists. What they saw in us. You showed me a little. I don’t think you knew you were doing it. It wasn’t all in words.”
She thought back slowly. Trying to concentrate on a single memory from the past hours, days, months, was a matter of slow drunken circling, an absent-minded bird looking for a landing place, distracted by currents that had nothing to do with its goal. She found it at last, and shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m too tired.”
“You can.”
“It’s not the same as with one person. It’s harder. I’m not an Adept.”
“I think you’re something more than an Adept now. Something different. You can do it. Show them,” he said, and she resented his certainty.
She bowed her head and said against his heart, “How often have you made me do things I did not want to do?”
“I have never ‘made’ you do anything,” he said, and then could not hide the thought that if she pulled this off perhaps he would survive after all, and Endeavor would go out again.
You only want to use us for your dream, she said, or remembered saying, or he remembered it, and when she looked up he would not meet her eyes for the first time in all their acquaintance. But she stood groggily with her arms around him and knew she was going to do it anyway.
Behind her she heard Murphy speak anxiously. The words meant nothing, but she understood the vector of communication between Murphy and Jameson.
She has reached her limit, let her rest.
There is no time for rest, we must resolve this now.
It is not so urgent.
It is. If we do not immediately present a solid front to our governments and the military, I do not think we will ever do it. And if she is wrong about the timing, it could begin tomorrow, or today. We do not know their capabilities in unknown space.
But if she is right we have the firepower.
To attack. But we do not know what there is to defend against. I do not think she knows, except in the most general terms. And how many lives does that mean?
Yes. I see. I see.
* * *
They stood on a broad river plain and looked at the sky. The plain was fertile, washed annually by spring floods that left rich deposits of soil. They were not ill-fed. They had that much to
thank the river for.
The thing in the sky had been there a day now, and sometimes seemed to move nearer. It was no longer a dot visible only to the sharpest-eyed of the young, but clearly an oval.
(Murphy moved uneasily. Is this apprehension what they felt, she wondered, or is it Lady Hanna’s, knowing what happened? Or my own, guessing what is to come?)
The radio worked well enough, and was all they had. Some of its parts were pirated from the useless Inspace communications equipment that still bore Eden Unlimited’s logotype. This third generation joked about the name; the company that had found this world, and dropped their grandparents here with (they discovered too late) second-hand, shoddy equipment, had passed into their jerry-rigged culture as Flybynight Inc.
This would not be Flybynight coming back. It had to be from Earth, or maybe Colony One or maybe another colony, maybe there were hundreds of colonies now. But if the radio worked, why did it not answer them?
(Hanna sat on the floor, so limp in Jameson’s arms he knew she would topple if he let her go. He knew where he was, sheltered in his own invaded home, but the river was there too, and he was highly critical. Stupid to build there. No wonder they lost their computer. As sensible to build on a volcano’s slope as on a flood plain.)
They swarmed from the stilted wooden houses, calling back and forth through the thick bright air. My God, it’s coming closer. Oh, Jesus. Tell your mother, tell her to stay inside, no, come out, oh, Jesus.
Do you read, said the radio, come in Overhill, do you read. The UFO’s descending, we’ll keep in touch. Have you heard from N’Gomba’s group, are they sending anybody, what, wait a minute, it’s landing, I never heard of anything like, they must have changed the design.
(The air was hazy and Struzik blinked into the sunlight, trying to see. Featureless metal; it must be damned claustrophobic inside. No markings, nothing like that in the Polity, then or now or ever.)
They gave it plenty of room to land. As soon as it was down they started running toward it, laughing and crying. Sometimes they had been sure they were forgotten and now it was all right. They wouldn’t leave, it was a good place to live, unless some of the youngsters, well kids are like that, even some of the adults, but it didn’t matter, it was all right, they could get machines, a grant, a doctor, news, they could make a world, it was all right now.
The D’neeran Factor Page 35