There were two hundred of them here and when they were all quite close they waited for the crew to come out, but nothing happened. Nobody came out for a long time.
(al-Nimeury wiped sweat from his face. Is it really taking this long, he thought, or is she making it seem that way? The gray hull shimmered in the sunlight and through it he saw, very far away, the D’neeran woman. Jameson held her tightly and his eyes were closed, his face pressed against her hair. My God, al-Nimeury thought, he’s in love with her, how extraordinary; but something began to open on the hull, and he waited to see what would come out.)
There was a hole of black nothingness in the sunlight and something huge and gray showed in the opening. The first ripple of fear struck it and was flung back redoubled. They thought it threatened them, not knowing they were the threat, and some screamed and ran, and others surged forward. Round and round went the loop accelerating in an instant of thought, a paradigm of cornered fang and claw. The People saw Renders, the first weapon was fired and it was confusion, warfare, death and dying, red blood in the hot hazy morning and happening so fast they had only time to hate and did not even know why they died, D’neera’s time was just beginning and they knew nothing of telepathy and each felt the things’ terror as his own, the instant response of murder to danger, savage animals spilling from the grayness, savage animals twisting on the grass, and the pleasure of their dying proved it—
(STOP, STOP—)
“Stop!” cried Katherine Petrov, weeping and gasping, rocking back and forth.
The vision shivered and was gone. al-Nimeury made an inarticulate noise, and into the frozen silence came other sounds: a sigh from Murphy, Petrov’s sobs. Feng stared into space, ignoring Petrov moaning at his side. Morisz started to curse and changed his mind.
Jameson eased Hanna’s head into his lap. He thought she was unconscious, but her eyelids fluttered and for a moment she looked at him. Then her eyes closed and she lay still.
He waited for the others to say something. Morisz said at last, “That’s—that’s what’s going to happen every time we make contact?”
Jameson looked down at Hanna and saw that she could not or would not answer.
“Presumably,” he said. “That’s how they see us, you know. All of them, in a great collectivity. They’ve been searching for us as a deadly danger ever since that day.”
“Then how in hell are we ever going to get anywhere with them?”
Jameson said, “Either Hanna will, or maybe nobody ever will.”
Murphy’s head was buried in her hands. She said indistinctly, “How is she going to do that?”
Jameson started to stroke Hanna’s hair, hesitated, and went on with it. The hell with it, he thought; I’ve gone too far already.
He said, “She was in intimate contact with one of them for some time. You all understand, I think, that she was under the control of a non-human personality. I have learned tonight that it was not altogether non-human. It was partially created from elements of Hanna’s own personality; it was not entirely imposed from outside. She succeeded in integrating it, in making herself a kind of hybrid. She hopes she will be able to forestall the instant-feedback effect.”
al-Nimeury said, “What about—how did she get them to agree to negotiation anyway?”
Jameson said, treading a narrow divide between fact and fiction, “She has one important contact.”
“I don’t see why they won’t just kill her on sight.”
“They didn’t the first time. They didn’t kill all of the colonists immediately. They kept some alive long enough to interrogate and experiment with them. They found nothing but the hatred and fear they expected, of course, under the circumstances, and the same has been true for Hanna. If she can control her own reaction, perhaps…” He left the thought unfinished.
Murphy said in an odd voice, “Perhaps?”
He said bluntly, “The only risk is hers.”
Murphy stared at him, upright and indignant. “You’d send her to them again? After what they did before?”
Jameson shrugged. It cost him more than he would have cared to admit to her.
Petrov was recovering. She said querulously, “We’d better send the whole damned Fleet with her.”
“No,” Hanna said unexpectedly. “Nobody.”
She tried to sit up and Jameson helped her. She held his hand and said without looking at any of them, “I’ve got to make them restructure reality. Not frighten them. All I need to do is convince a few we’re not what they think, really convince them, and it’ll spread through the whole population. They must have gone a lot faster than we did. No war, that kind of communication—it took us longer every time we did it.”
Struzik said, “Did what?”
“Changed the shape of the universe. Like knowing Earth goes around the sun, like accepting evolution or the size of the Milky Way or meeting F’thal. It changes everything for a whole species.”
Murphy said in astonishment, “That’s what you’re going to try to do?”
“Well,” said Hanna, “what else is there to do? Except kill them?”
She listened to the voices drifting around her as if they were a kind of music, sense forgotten. The room was very bright now. They were arguing about her nebulous contact, about studying and waiting and the gathering of intelligence, about weaponry human and alien, about what Co-op would say and what Fleet would want, about the course to Home and—with Jameson picking a most delicate course—about Leader’s impact on her.
They would go on arguing for a long time (humans talk so, she thought) and then they would let her do it. Jameson still was not sure of them, but he could not feel what she felt: the bare tilt of a balance to one side, the change in al-Nimeury’s reality, at least, that would make the difference.
She struggled to her feet and found herself looking into Jameson’s face. She said: I’m going to sleep now.
“Don’t do that,” he said, not meaning, don’t sleep.
She could argue with his constraints later, if there was a later. She found her way back to his bedroom and opened it to the sunlight which had bred her ancestors and his, and fell into his bed and into sleep.
Chapter 18
Hanna slept so soundly she did not even wake when Melanie Ward came in with her flickering instruments and began the series of feather-touches that would tell her if Hanna was fit to go on or not. Hanna woke at last not because of pain but because of its cessation. The varying ache in her right arm, which had become part of the landscape of her body, was gone. She dreamed that she was well and whole and when she woke and turned her eyes to where the pain had been she thought for a moment it was true; she had never gotten in the way of the knife, the fight had never happened. But Leader-in-her-thoughts whispered to her and she saw in harsh noon light that the wound was only hidden under a neat strip of false human hide. Then she saw Ward, and behind her Jameson silhouetted against the light. They were talking as if Hanna were still asleep.
Jameson was saying, “But there is nothing immediately life-threatening?”
“Not immediately.” Ward spoke with the irritation of a physician who already knows her advice will be ignored.
“Well, then…”
“I won’t be responsible for the consequences. And I won’t be responsible for starting the sequence of stimulants.”
“You will. Or must I have your commanding officer give you a direct order?”
They converged on Hanna, tall shadows, and she shrank away in irrational alarm. There was the slight pressure of an injection in her uninjured arm. After a moment her head cleared with a rush that threatened to suck her into the sky, she was sitting up and looking wide-eyed at Jameson, and Ward was gone. The immense relief of new energy seemed to touch every cell of her body.
She sighed with pleasure. She had forgotten what it was to feel well.
Jameson said, “The vote was four to one.”
She had been admiring the new steadiness of her hands. She looked up,
distracted.
“Who didn’t—?”
“Petrov. Who still can see that you are stopped, if you don’t leave at once.”
“At once—” She stood up obediently. Artificial strength steadied her legs, and she nodded in satisfaction. She had never liked using stimulants, even when the need was urgent. Why? They were a fine thing.
She took a step, her head swimming, and he stopped her.
“Not this instant,” he said. “Heartworld II’s not ready. And there are things you should hear.”
“All right.” The first burst of well-being was settling down, curling into the corners of her body. Her vision was sharper than usual. She saw that Jameson looked tired and careworn, and said, “You ought to’ve had Melanie give you some of that stuff.”
“I’ll be taking enough of it, I assure you. So will you. Ward advised against a direct booster implant, and you will have to be very careful about giving yourself injections at frequent intervals. You’ll have no time to sleep. How do you feel? Can you attend to what I say?”
Leader-in-her-thoughts was singing some melody wrested from Hanna’s memory. She made him shut up.
“I’m listening,” she said.
Jameson was detached as she had ever seen him, and she stood with tilted head, entirely alert, and listened to a dry sequence of orders. The People’s course program could not be used until it was translated into human mathematics. Hanna would work with Fleet to do that while she still traveled through human space. When she was finished the Fleet escort would leave her, but she would not be able to rest. She would program a powered projectile to return to human space. Into it she would dictate every scrap of information she had gotten from Leader-in-her-thoughts about the People’s military capability, technology, biosphere, biology, history and cultural patterns. She would describe in detail their remarkable development of telepathy, especially their use of it to control machines, which had only a coincidental resemblance to human direct-control techniques, D’neeran or otherwise. She would continue reporting until the last possible moment, and send the projectile back just before she contacted the People.
She thought there were other things she had better be doing as contact approached, but she did not say so.
When Jameson was done giving orders he waited for her to comment on them. But she had lost interest in orders several minutes before. She had heard none of the latter instructions; she was caught up in the open strain in his voice, and sensed a new fragility in the surface he presented.
She would do him no favor by breaking it. But she could not help saying, “Are you going to be all right?”
His face changed in the instant before he turned away from her. It must have been a very long time since anyone had asked him such a question. She moved toward him too quickly and was light-headed again. The space around her was luminous and his shoulder when she touched it was the form and substance of warmth.
She whispered, “S-starr?”
He made the very slightest of movements, a fractional lessening of tension. He said, “You haven’t got it right. You’re not supposed to hiss.” His head was bowed and she could not see his face, but there was something new in his voice.
She rubbed his arm gently, at a loss for words, and moved a little dizzily to face him. She leaned against him without looking up, and he made a sound of exasperation or defeat or desire and abruptly pulled her to him without restraint. They kissed with concentrated, mutual greed. Hanna had not even thought of lovemaking in so long that the violence of her physical reaction took her by surprise. But she did not think of it then; she did not think at all.
He raised his head after—it seemed—a very short time. She murmured a protest and leaned on him in earnest now because her knees were weak.
He said reluctantly, “They’re waiting.”
“In a minute…”
She meant she could not face anyone else without time to pull herself together. She was sure she did not say all that, but he said, “Me too,” and moved away a little. Inside her, newly roused, Leader mourned again for Sunrise. Shut up shut up shut up, she said, but it was too late. Jameson kept slipping with her over a border into a lovely unknown land, but she could not get him to stay there.
She said, “Ah, you have such discipline.”
“Not enough.” He folded his arms—possibly to prevent himself from reaching out to her again—and looked at her with bright eyes. The odd, irregular face was younger and no longer tired. The consciousness that half a dozen people expected them to appear annoyed her.
She said anxiously, “If I come back will you remember this?”
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise,” he said without hesitation.
“Oh, good. Oh, I’m glad. What ever happened to that girl in Central Records?”
He said in some alarm, “How did you know about her?”
“I snooped. While I was here before. Where is she?”
He shrugged. “Back in Central Records, I suppose.”
“And always will be?”
He looked at her carefully and said, “Unless she learns to distinguish between a setback and the end of a man’s career, yes.”
“Why,” said Hanna, “do you have such a wall around yourself? What are you hiding from?”
They faced each other in the center of the room, and she saw the habitual shutter begin to drop over his face. He shook his head. “No questions, Hanna. Not now.”
“I might not have another chance. Even if I come back. If you’re gone.”
He said heavily, “Does it really matter now?”
She sighed and said, “No. I suppose it doesn’t. And if we knew each other better we might not get along at all.”
“I wonder. I wonder about that sometimes.”
He took her arm again before she could answer, and this time, knowing she would get no more from him now, she went out with him obediently.
* * *
Today air traffic froze by order of high authority. The river became a ribbon. The city shrank to invisibility and disappeared as Hanna rose into cloud and then the clouds were under her too, dazzling.
Entering black space meant re-entering a personal reality from which she had briefly escaped, and it was more real than the one that had Jameson in it. If it were not for the Fleet vessel that trailed her, she would have thought her little time on Earth a dream. As a sleeper, waking, remembers sharp singular images shorn of context, Hanna remembered details: the color of al-Nimeury’s eyes, the texture of Jameson’s hair, the curve of Murphy’s back as she knelt touching Hanna’s arm. And as if she were waking from a dream, Hanna (as she spoke with Fleet and Heartworld II, slaved ship’s systems to Willowmeade’s, prepared to analyze the precious course program) felt sorrow not sensibly connected to events, as sorrow ought to be, but the shadow of the sorrow of a dream, truncated and distant from consciousness.
They might have let her speak to Iledra, but she had not asked. She might have spoken to Jameson frankly of love, but she had not.
She was going back into the night, which was real, and on to a deeper night. Only this commanded her attention.
Heartworld II was half real, half not. Faces looked at her from every wall, voices echoed in chambers whose silence only she had broken for what seemed all her life.
She was busy at every moment. Leader would not be a translator. He did not have to be. She knew the People’s notation as if she had learned it in infancy. She was no mathematician, but she did not have to be. The Fleet vessel threw mathematicians at her, summoned hastily to this flight not in body but through the skein of relays that filtered into every part of human space.
Hanna did not know any of them. Their faces ran together.
She did not sleep, ever. She did not need Leader, but he talked to her anyway. He meditated in a corner of her mind, content:
I will not die but live. Strangely. In thought and bone of generations past and those to come. Not memory, but real.
No longer bearing precious burdens in my own true body; no life that you understand; not to act, but to advise. To love those past and those to come. And pass into history more than Self. Sacrifice less great than you think and payment and exchange for final value. Logical progression, natural act, next and last phase of life, and that for which I was most joyfully destined all my time.
Only those who die without this truly die.
Now Alta was nearer than Earth, but neither was near. The alien program cracked and broke. The mathematicians leapt upon the prize, the programmers and engineers went without sleep. The commander of the Willowmeade, a courteous man, thanked Hanna. She stared at his face, distracted, thinking him Erik.
It was not Erik. He talked like Erik. But, “We have met before,” she said.
“Briefly,” he said, smiling. “Rescue mission to the Clara Mendoza. I always wondered, did you scrap her?”
“We buried her,” Hanna said. “With her crew.”
“Funny thing to do,” he said.
Yes, Leader agreed. Then he thought of the First Watchsetter and was not sure.
The commander—Tirel, she remembered suddenly—said, “We won’t be with you much longer. I understand you’ve got plenty of power and fresh stores. Anything you need before we withdraw?”
She shook her head. She needed nothing more. She had had a great deal. She had been—
Lucky. Lucky to have had D’neera. The Mason Range Falls crash a kilometer down jutting rock and rainbows leap in sunlight mellow as Earth’s, and clean. At B’ha the sea rocks gently only with the sweet star’s motion. There is no moon. On no human world do stars shine more clearly. On no human world is freedom so friendly. I was shaped by no mold. Made myself. And chose my own loyalties.
Lucky. I have been so lucky, so fortunate, so happy!
Tears must have glittered in her eyes, because Tirel said, “What’s wrong?”
The D’neeran Factor Page 36