The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “That is true. Yet it will be best to remain here and signal distress, for the searchers will come quickly when our call comes to Oneba. That will use only thirty true days, and in one day more someone will come. And what are thirty-one days?—a grain of sand.”

  Hanna absorbed it slowly. They meant that the Inspace system was out. The Bird could not Jump. Without the Inspace option, the Bird was months away from Omega. They were, it appeared, marooned, for at least a month. Then she thought, surprising herself: What of it? Here was light, warmth, air, food, companionship. The Bird had not suffered a disaster. It was only a routine breakdown in space; it only meant delay. It means rest, she thought, and said half-consciously but aloud, in Ellsian, “There will be nothing we can do. There will be nothing we must do.”

  But Rubee had made a negative with his hands. “It is true that we have no present danger,” he said. “Yet I am troubled because of the error that has occurred, and I wish to study it further. Also I wish to investigate the systems that continue to function. The failure of dimensional manipulation has bereft us of much power. If the old-style engines should fail also, only emergency generators will be left to retain life support—and I do not like having only one system as our defense against death in space.”

  Hanna knew well the perpetual caution of starship captains, whatever their species or form. She said, “That is proper. Yet how could two such errors occur, Rubee?”

  “How could one occur? Yet there is not one, but two; there are two already. There is the error that effected the malfunction. Therefore I must deduce that there is an error also in a diagnostic program, or else we would have been forewarned. What else might there be? What else might fail? We will work until we find out.”

  He said this with finality, and he did not intend to wait; at once, Hanna and Awnlee following, he rose and took his way to the “wing” that housed the Bird’s Inspace systems, which Rubee and Awnlee accurately called the distorters of dimension. Hanna had spent little time in this part of the Bird. It was a world of soaring silver spaces, arched and dizzily high. It was impressive, but it was not designed for comfort.

  Hanna was not comfortable, and there was nothing she could do to help the Uskosians, except to stay out of their way. She did that for a long time, watching the units of time the aliens called hours go by on the strange chronometers. She was left to her own thoughts, which were not comfortable either. At about the time help could arrive, she had expected to be making a ceremonial, mythic landing on Uskos. She had expected a period of such intense work that it might produce the most brilliant results of her life. All her expectations had led to this, a profound anticlimax, and she was—not distressed. It even seemed that she might be treacherously relieved.

  “There are erasures I do not understand,” Awnlee said suddenly and very loudly. His voice echoed in the curved spaces, solitary in the great expanse.

  “But what is the cause?” Rubee said.

  “I do not yet know. They have not the appearance of randomness.”

  Hanna listened absently. A smile twitched at her lips. She was unquestionably released from the expected, at least for a little while. No human voice could follow her here for a month. She formed phrases and turned them over in her mind, trying them out: I’m very sorry, Starr. But they did not have the ring of truth.

  Rubee, peering over Awnlee’s shoulder at a console a few meters away, straightened with a gesture of disappointment.

  “It is garbled beyond retrieval,” he said.

  “It is not,” Awnlee said. “I will need some days, but I will reconstruct it. I will start at once.”

  Rubee said, “Do not begin now. Night has come. No reason has occurred to hurry us. I wish to observe what you do, but I do not wish to do it tonight.”

  The tendrils around his mouth drooped. Hanna remembered what he had said of his age. She said, “Indeed, Awnlee, it is time to rest.”

  “Then I will wait,” Awnlee said, though it was plain that he longed to begin, and Hanna left him to talk to Rubee and take “one look more” at the mystery.

  * * *

  Hanna slept uneasily in the hot night. She dreamed too much, and woke often. The dreams were all a confused medley of the past. Here was the governing House of Province Koroth, vast and cool. “Do this,” said the Lady of Koroth, “do that, you must, it must be done.” The pale face altered; Hanna looked into her own blue eyes. She would be the Lady of Koroth one day, a magistrate of D’neera, lawmaker, law-abider. The People of Zeig-Daru thought to her, fondly accepting. Their great hands held instruments of torture. Hanna woke sweating; turned, and slept again. She rested comfortably in Starr Jameson’s arms. She was loved. “Not yet,” he said. “There is something you must do first.” He turned into the Master of Chaos and then into Rubee, who lectured under a tree.

  “Details change,” Rubee said. “Grand designs must not, except by the hand of the Master. The honor is greater that way. By honor I mean sureness and security. Nonetheless persons make designs, and the Master enters in their alteration.”

  Rubee’s face changed in its turn; first to something cruel with many pointed teeth; then to a human face that looked at Hanna with a pleasant smile and gold-flecked eyes. It said in a stranger’s voice, “No one can hear you out here.”

  “No, no!” Hanna cried, trying to scream. Her own muffled shout woke her up. She sat up in the dark and pushed at her hair. It was wet with perspiration.

  She turned on a light and looked about with an eerie sense that all that surrounded her was unreal; that she still dreamed. The room had been made over for her in blue and lavender, as comfortable and human as her own fading home. The air circulated with a faint whisper. Except for that there was silence, and Rubee and Awnlee slept deeply nearby.

  She lay back uneasily. The face with the gold-flecked eyes was still nearly visible. An old sensation gnawed her, as if she whispered to herself, “You have overlooked something!” But it was associated only with danger and fear; and what was there to fear?

  But she had thought that, too—sometimes, before.

  She made a face and thought: Be paranoid, then; think of the worst; think back, seeking anomaly; think.

  There are erasures I do not understand. They have not the appearance of randomness—

  She felt vulnerable and exposed. She got up and put on some of the skimpy clothing she had brought with her. The tight singlet and shorts clung to her; her skin was clammy.

  Think.

  The programmed distortion occurred, the Bird had told Awnlee. And then the Inspace failure. No one can hear you out here.

  She paced the room. Her bare feet trod the resilient floor without disturbing the silence of the Bird.

  Suppose there was no random error. Suppose what appeared to be error was the result of a skillfully implanted series of commands.

  The course program had never been touched. For that it need not have been touched. There were people who had studied the Bird’s Inspace engineering systems. Hanna did not remember Jameson saying anything about those persons being investigated beyond the common bounds of security clearance. It was just possible, therefore, that the engineering failure had been planned. And the route from Earth to Omega was available to anyone who wanted it. It was standardized, part of the common programming of Inspace navigation. Given such detailed knowledge of the Bird’s course so far, and knowledge of its general direction beyond, which had never been a secret, anyone might have extrapolated the Bird’s approximate location after the first Jump past Omega. After that first Jump the possibilities for error would grow exponentially, but the finish of the first must be within a reasonably confined radius. The calculation could not be precise, however, without possession of the course program; and without precision, even if someone were searching within that radius, there would be a margin of safety for the Bird. But Hanna could not estimate its extent.

  Should she go to Rubee now and wake him from sleep? She leaned against a lavender wall and pressed her cheek a
gainst it. It was the wildest speculation, but she thought of how it could be done. Someone who was not afraid to go out past Omega could do it, exploring in weeks of small patient steps the logical path outward, until the data were complete and the leap as safe as any inside human space. Given the necessary skill, it needed only time. And Awnlee and Rubee had been in human space nearly a Standard year; had someone come this way while they went with Hanna round the worlds?

  She closed her eyes and shut out the lavender light. Reached out, out, past Rubee and Awnlee, beyond the sleeping Bird and farther still, in all directions and no direction. In the isolation of the Bird she might, with all her skill and all her mind concentrated, touch a familiar presence though it be light years away. There ought to be nothing else for her to touch. There should be no stranger near at hand.

  There was something. She brushed against it and jerked away, chilled. It was in space and thought of the Far-Flying Bird. It thought of the treasure in the Bird’s guts.

  “God damn it,” she said softly, scarcely able to believe in what she had felt. But it was there. It was close by, and purposeful.

  She did not know exactly where it was. Telepathy could not tell her that.

  She went to Rubee’s room and pounded on his door. He answered at once. He wore a sleeping robe that brushed the floor and he adjusted it punctiliously as the door opened. Hanna felt his surprise. She said, “I am sorry to wake you, Rubee. But I must, and now.”

  “Enter. Enter—”

  She was already in the room, talking as quickly as the need to think in Ellsian allowed. He did not understand her at first, so that she had to back up and repeat her knowledge and surmises; when he grasped them his eyespots worked and shone.

  She finished, “All that would be necessary, would be a command for the system to fail upon completion of the first Jump after Omega. I think that was done. Our position is exactly what they would wish. No signal from us can reach Omega for one Standard month. We cannot Jump to get away. These humans can be sure that we will transmit a distress signal that includes our exact location, which is all that they need. Perhaps they even believe it will be directional toward Omega, and will confine their search accordingly. I think we had better not do that, Rubee. I think we had better not send a signal at all, and begin the long journey to Omega as soon as the old-style engines are at power—and not in a direct line, either.”

  Rubee said, “I will activate the engines and set course at once. But I wish one of us had thought of this more quickly. The signal was initiated some time ago. I saw no reason not to do that.”

  “Directional?” She watched the margin of safety shrink.

  “Yes. How long will it take a human spacecraft to find us if all that you say is correct?”

  “Hours.”

  “Hours have gone by already.”

  “Then we had better think of evasion instead of escape,” she said. “They may be nearly here.”

  He went quickly to the bridge and she followed him. He did not speak again, but manipulated a work station without explanation. She understood that he ordered the Bird to extend its scanning range. The display at this station was blank and black at first. Then it showed one thing: the arrowhead-shape of an atmosphere-efficient spacecraft. Rubee’s fingers stretched to pointed threads and touched tiny keypads in a blur of speed. Numbers appeared beside the image.

  “What does that mean?” Hanna said.

  He said, “They are moving in from the direction of Oneba, and they come with great speed. They have scanned the Bird as we slept. This vessel could not match the speed of that one even at full power; not in a hunt; it was not made for chase or pursuit. There is no hope of escape.”

  He turned away from the terminal and started out. Hanna called after him, “Where do you go?”

  He answered without stopping, “I go to wake Awnlee. They will arrive in one of our hours; less than one of yours. We are caught completely.”

  * * *

  Awnlee, so calm until now, lost his composure and his courage all at once. “This was not supposed to happen!” he said over and over, and all efforts to soothe him were ineffectual. Hanna wished to learn what she could of the distant presence that was perceptible in this waste of isolation, but she felt only Awnlee’s agitation. Rubee took him away again so that she would not see his pitiful terror. It made no difference. To close him out she had to shut down telepathy altogether, as a true-human might close his eyes, and then she was insensible also to the presences she wanted to touch.

  Shutting consciousness to all of them had one advantage: she was able to think of their situation coldly and without distraction. It came more easily than she expected, as easily as even Jameson might have wished. Alone on the Bird’s bridge, she thought about that. She felt no fear or uncertainty. That was new. In D’neera’s brief war with Nestor, and even more in her first agonizing contacts with the People of Zeig-Daru, she had lived on the edge of madness. This was different. It was as if the years of order and protocol had not passed; as if, in her official life of courtesy, she had grown more callous to danger. Yet she had not faced danger for a long time, so that what she felt could not have come from habituation. She traced it, and saw that its source was anger. This event was too much. She had gone obediently where she was sent, produced what was wanted, done as she was told by D’neera, by the Polity, by all the human voices, for a long time, all her life. Now she must stop and surrender to—well, to the Master of Chaos, if it came to that; Rubee surely discerned that unpredictable hand. After all she had done it was going too far, after all she had done for Polity; could they get nothing right? But she knew she was unfair, that at least Jameson had tried to ward off what was coming, and that it was her own skepticism, conspiring with the aliens’ stubbornness, that had brought her to this position of helplessness.

  Then she thought with more logic of other things. And the first thing logic told her was that they could not escape or get help.

  The next thing was a question. How far should they go in defending the cargo of the Bird?

  She did not have to think about that much to come to a decision. The robbers could have it. Here, take it, is there anything else you would like? Precious it might be, irreplaceable even, but it was dust next to the lives of Rubee and Awnlee. And Hanna did not want to die either, not defending a crateful of baubles.

  The last thing was whether their lives were in jeopardy in any case, and whether anything could be done about it. She was no longer critical of Jameson’s urgency in educating her about Michael Kristofik. She wished she had paid more attention. Twenty years ago on the Pavonis Queen no one had been harmed. With luck it would be sleepygas again. But men change in twenty years. Probably Kristofik did not know that he was already suspected, in advance, of something he had not yet done. He might think that eradicating the Bird and her passengers would be the safest measure; that the Bird would be presumed lost in space on a course that was nearly untried. It seemed to Hanna that murder was the logical step for a man capable of taking it.

  Was he, then, capable of taking it?

  She sat on the bench that girdled the Bird’s bridge with her chin on one hand, and retrieved certain statements from memory. Honoria Hood, twenty years ago: “At no time were lethal weapons used…” Jameson, drawing on sources that went back that far and farther: “There were incidents on Alta and Valentine and later everywhere. He was dangerous. He is still dangerous.” Her own voice, casual, dismissing the threat: “I suppose if you assume your subject is a monster, and then he doesn’t act like one…” But here was Jameson again: “He must have known every worst thing there was to know about men…don’t forget the man he’s believed to have killed…”

  It was so sparse, there ought to have been more, but she had not wanted to listen. And now she must estimate the extent of her danger, and she did not know enough to do it.

  A communications module that ought to have stayed silent for weeks made a sound. Hanna scrambled for it. “Acknowledged,” she
said tightly.

  A man’s voice said, “This is the trader Avalon out of Lancaster. We’ve picked up a mayday from your location. You in trouble?”

  You could say that.

  Hanna said, “We’re the Far-Flying Bird out of Terra on special mission for the Polity. What’s a Lancaster trader doing out here?”

  “Just looking around.”

  The voice was thin and toneless. It disturbed her. She said, “Nobody comes out here. You’re well out of Omega’s range. I don’t know if coincidence goes that far.”

  “You want help or don’t you?” said the voice.

  Rubee came in. His comprehension of Standard was limited. He said, “What have they said?”

  “They play a game.”

  “Do you play?”

  “I will. To discover what we may expect.”

  The light voice outside said, “Talk Standard.”

  Hanna said, “We don’t want help. We’ll handle it.”

  “Not good enough,” said the voice.

  Only three words. The hair stood up on Hanna’s arms, she had heard nothing like them before, nothing like the irony and finality in the slow light voice. If this was Michael Kristofik, Jameson’s assessment had fallen short of the dreadful truth. Her hand shaped itself for a weapon, though she had not held one in years.

  She said coldly, “Let’s work with the truth. I know what you want.”

  It must have startled him. There was a pause before the voice said, “Yes?” so softly it was nearly a whisper. There was a suggestion of hollowness, of echoes in empty spaces, a trick of acoustics.

  “Is it whom we feared?” Rubee said.

  “Who else could it be?”

  “Tell this person to take the cargo and leave.”

  Hanna thought of her own estimate of the reasonable thing to do. She had qualified it before: murder was the logical step for a man capable of taking it. The reservation no longer counted. The man who owned this voice was capable of it.