Theo cleared away equipment. He left a monitor bracelet on the woman’s wrist. He studied the readout module at her shoulder, frowning.
“She’s no worse,” he said. “You said three days to rendezvous, if we start now? I hope she holds out.”
Shen said, “Mike, they called back just before I came down. Want to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Want to know what happened.”
“They don’t have to know.”
“Told ’em you’d call.”
“Forget it.”
She shrugged. Theo said, “Mike, I said let go of her hand. You’ll confuse the monitor.”
Michael released the hand with a twinge of reluctance. “Think she’ll make it?” he said.
Theo said, “Somebody help me take this stuff back to the lab.”
Michael watched him gather up instruments and load them onto Shen and Lise like pack animals. He did not repeat the question.
When the others went out, he stayed where he was. The woman on the bed looked more like a human being now that some of the bruises were clearing, and he was uncomfortable. After a minute he realized that her nudity disturbed him, and drew a sheet over the limp figure. It was not possible for her to be an object of desire, and he had known more than his portion of naked flesh; it was her helplessness that troubled him.
He thought of Theo’s judgment of her origin. D’neerans were no more faultless than other human beings and had some faults of their very own, but they were too sensitive to psychic pain to live willingly with evil. This woman could not be one of B’s pack. Instead she had had the bad luck to become his prey. And she did not think Michael was much better.
He thought: Live. So I can tell you that wasn’t me you saw. He just drops in sometimes. Please live.
* * *
The dark lifted a little from time to time. When it did, she thought she was in a nightmare. Past, present, and future bounced around inside her skull in urgent jolts—
* * *
Contact the Polity Admin Starr Starr Starr! They must not find out who I am—hide from them!
Michael slumped with his head on one hand, half-asleep. The room was dark except for a pool of light around the bed. The iris that opened on space was shut to the shifts that came with each Jump. The edges of the room melted into the dark, and Lise slept in shadow on a padded couch, her fragile legs in an awkward sprawl. Theo sat near the bed; he did not sleep. He got up often and looked at the patient, the monitor readouts, the tubes that fed into her arm all the help that was left to give. Shen had shrugged and left them to their vigil. There was no sound except for the whisper of GeeGee at night, and the sick woman’s difficult breath.
I must do it, I must. But in nightmare one cannot move, the body has no strength, I cannot breathe, I feel nothing…nothing…
Michael brooded on the face that healed before his eyes. The lesser bruises were gone, the others disappearing. It was like watching a blurred image come into focus; as if it were not her face that changed, but his eyes that cleared. In the slow hours he saw the clear arch of the brow emerge, the mouth soften to delicate curves. A silver chain that could not be removed glistened against skin turning to pale brown satin. Once, her eyes opened. When he leaned over, he saw that it was reflex and she was aware of nothing near her; he saw also that her eyes were the deepest blue he had ever seen. They closed and he drew away, troubled. She had begun to look familiar, but he did not know her.
—oh no I have failed all alone with the dead I feel NOTHING—!
Six years of Hanna’s life vanished. She fell into the past. The People of Zeig-Daru tore her apart, humans regenerated her, and she woke, a disembodied consciousness in null-space, sightless, paralyzed, disconnected from muscle and nerve—
Lise stirred and moaned. The sides of GeeGee rushed in and sucked out with a roar. The air went with them. Michael woke to the dark, paralyzed. He could not lift a hand, could not breathe, there were weights on his chest. “GeeGee!” He was choking. “Life support! Air!”
“All systems A-OK,” GeeGee said, “don’t you like the atmosphere mix?”
He flailed at stifling darkness and then it was gone. His heart pounded and he breathed in gasps. He felt something he had not known in years: panic. He was incredulous. Lise lifted herself with a struggle, dazed. Theo said, “What was—?”
“I don’t know—” His heartbeat eased. Nothing was changed. He must have slept and dreamed something terrible—but Lise and Theo had felt it, too—
D’neerans learn before they are six to suppress unwilled projection of thought. In extremity inhibition gives way.
Oh God they are big so much bigger than I cruel and ruthless oh agony no—! No!
The room filled up with ghastly shadows. Michael got a good look at them, impossibly there, bestial figures of malignant intelligence. Lise flew across the room and into his arms with a terrified cry—right through the shadows.
“Theo!” He shouted into a well. “Something on Revenge, what did we pick up!”
Shen tumbled into the room. She held a knife and yelled, “Where are they, where!” Oh help help help me! Hanna screamed, but silently, dreadfully, and Lise shrieked an echo in Michael’s ear.
The monstrous shadows touched the sky. The sick woman writhed in a pile of sheets and tubes, center of a storm. Michael fell on her. “Stop it,” he said, “stop, stop!” He took her face in his hands, took her shoulders and shook her. Her eyelids flickered. He saw her face and nothing else, shadow was everywhere. “Wake up! Stop it!”
She shrank away from his hands and lifted her own and struck at him. He felt the effort as if it were his. He thought she clawed his eyes, chopped his neck—but that was only her intent; she had not touched him. A strong woman with a newborn’s strength.
The light came back.
Lise cried in great gusts, howling. Michael held her tightly with one arm and kept the other hand on the stranger’s shoulder. Over Lise’s head he saw Theo and Shen shaken, staring, waiting for him to say it was all right.
“All right. It’s all right,” he said, and disentangled himself from Lise. He did not want to loosen his hold on the woman. He brushed a lock of tangled hair from her face and she made a pitiful sound, still lost in a private horror. But it was private again.
“It’s her. Telepathy.” His fingers were tight on her shoulder, but he made his voice light. “Wonderful thing, telepathy. What do the books say about this, Theo?”
“Huh?”
“Go check the lab library. Or call Rescue. Find out what this is about.” He let go of the woman cautiously. Lise crowded against him and he held her and stroked her hair; she snuffled against his chest. “Theo, it could start up again, go find out what to do!”
Theo, an automaton, looked first at the tubes and readouts. “But the fever’s down,” he mumbled, and stumbled out.
Michael looked at Shen and said, “Put the knife away.” She growled and shoved it into her belt. She took Theo’s place and stared at the patient balefully.
“What the hell?” she said.
“I told you. Telepathy. I thought for a minute we’d all been doped or something, got some kind of mind-bending bug on Revenge—but all that came from her.”
“Those things? In here?”
“Not real. Illusions. Some kind of shared hallucination that started with her.”
Lise said with a last sob, “What were they?”
“I don’t know. Something she made up. Or maybe saw…”
It was past. He began to relax. He sat on the bed and watched the woman’s face. Lise wound herself into a ball, her head on Michael’s knee; she looked at the telepath fearfully. Michael thought about the shadows. What kind of mind could think them up? But they had had the detailed immediacy of experience: the gray skin, scarlet garments, paws with long curving claws.
He said restlessly, “I’ve seen those things before. Not them, but pictures of them.”
It was just out of reach, as if s
omeone had just told him the answer and he had already forgotten. He went on thinking out loud: “Nothing looks quite like that except—well, Zeigans do a little; they might be exaggerated Zeigans. They might be, she’s been to Zeig-Daru, Theo said. And she might think of them like that. The first person to make contact, a D’neeran woman, had what you might call a bad experience—”
After a minute of dead silence Shen said, “So?”
He got up, dumping Lise out of his lap. She retreated quickly from the bed. There was a library terminal in the room and the library was well stocked. He sat down at the terminal with some reluctance. He kept wanting to look back at the unconscious woman, as if it were dangerous to turn his back on her.
The guess had to be wrong. There had to be some reason for her look of familiarity besides his reading about Zeig-Daru.
But the search took no time at all. When he asked the library about Zeig-Daru, the first answer was a woman’s name. There was a portrait with it. He looked toward the bed once, quickly, without needing to; now he knew why it seemed he had seen her before. He had seen pictures of that face over and over in the months just past, because of the envoys from Uskos.
After a while he got up and went back to the bed. He looked down at Hanna ril-Koroth and said tiredly, “This is very bad.”
Shen lifted an eyebrow. Lise was frightened; she did not understand, but his tone warned her something was wrong.
“This is an important person,” he said. “I knew a lot about her once, at the time of the Zeigan contact. Which she made. Among other things she’s Contact’s darling and a commissioner’s lady. Former commissioner’s. I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do with her. I thought she belonged with B, thought she was nobody, nobody cared what happened to her, we could question her and hand her over to Rescue and that’d be the end of it—but we’re going to be looked at like I haven’t been looked at in fifteen years. Like I never wanted to be looked at again. There’s no way to keep this quiet.”
Theo came in, steadier. He said, “There’s not much we can do if it happens again. One of us can try to keep her attention and focus the projection, so we don’t all lose our minds. In D’neeran medical centers they keep mindhealers on staff for that.”
Shen said, “You got it wrong.”
“What?” Theo said, but she was talking to Michael.
“Wrong? How?”
“About quiet.” The knife was in Shen’s hand. She touched the blade. “Cancel Rescue. All they know is the bitch died. We jettison the body. She never had a name.”
Michael said, “Theo, what did you do? Contact Rescue?”
“No, it was in the library. I’ll do that, though. I’d better do that.”
“No. Don’t.”
“No?”
“No.” He looked at Shen. “If she dies, all right. No name. Some stranger from anyplace but D’neera. But we don’t do anything to hurry it along.”
Shen hissed. “Gonna run Gee with those things around?”
“I’ll try what Theo said. Try to keep her attention on me, keep her mind focused.”
“Dangerous! What if she lives?”
I don’t know, he started to say, but there was no time. The figure on the bed moved with a moan. Lise whimpered. Nightmare moved in.
* * *
Hanna crept through a maze of stone. The People of Zeig-Daru were at her heels; she kicked at a flat-muzzled face. “I am a friend!” she cried. They answered: Thou hast killed he with whom thou wert bonded, that is one; his spouse, the lady of the dawn, that is two; the persons of his crew, that is four others; the spouses of three of these, altogether nine; likewise he who took thee to selfing and thy close kin Awnlee. That is eleven; oh thou human who communicates with We who differ from humankind!
She called for Jameson, for her mother, for the Lady of Koroth. Starr, Cassie, Iledra, help me! she cried, and beat with her fists against stone. The air was hot and close and stifled her. There was no end to the rocky passages.
“We could go somewhere nicer,” someone said cautiously.
The stone diminished; the People receded; there was a blur of light. She was just as hot and the breath on her cheek was scalding. She pushed it away impatiently.
“Think of something nice,” the voice pleaded.
“But what?” she said, or thought she said; she could not have named the language.
The voice said hopefully, “Springtime? Flowers. Raindrops.”
She thought a burst of millefleurs and smiled at their color. Trees she had never seen before arched over them: alien vegetation. She was confused. The stone half-materialized again. She said, “Whose spring? D’neera’s, Earth’s? Zeig-Daru’s or F’thal’s? What planet, what place on it, what latitude, where?”
“Pick one.”
Her hands were gritty with dirt; they held a plant with naked mud-caked roots. She set it carefully into the hole she had dug. Its tight-coiled buds were shaded with pink. The slanting springtime afternoon light bathed her house in gold. She patted dirt gently around the plant, anticipating its blooms with pleasure.
“That’s better,” the voice said in relief. There was a body to go with it now, rangy and well-knit. The face was pleasant, though it was sometimes a man’s and sometimes a boy’s. The eyes had vivid flecks of gold.
“I have tangentially conjoined you in past!” she said in F’thalian, and knew that he understood it to mean Why, I know you! and knew therefore that she had not said it at all, but thought it.
“So I see,” he answered. “But how?”
“They thought you would attack the Bird,” she said, the “they” encompassing I&S, Fleet, Contact, Jameson, Figueiredo, and Rubee and Awnlee.
His shock nearly bowled her over; she clung to the dream, she did not want to fall back into the wilderness of accusing stone.
“Why?” said the voice. “Tell me why they thought that!”
Her house slipped away, though she held on as hard as she could; flat on her back she looked up at a blur of a face. She said weakly, “The computers said so.”
“Computers,” said the voice. “Oh my God, their damned computers!”
She could not find her home again. She had escaped the stone, however. She wandered in the summer of another Home, the People’s Home. The lady of the dawn, Hearthkeeper of a Nearhome, dead these five years, walked with her. Thou killest my spouse and my self, Sunrise said, and whom else? Not the beings of F’thal; but you did not make that contact; it predated you. Fortunate F’thal!
I did what I had to do. Thou wouldst have killed me. He whom we both loved would have done so.
And thy sire and sib-selfing? There also thou didst what must be done, heedless of precautions wise men urged.
Rubee’s wishes were fulfilled. I did what he would have me do.
Sunrise laughed. That was an anomaly, the People did not laugh. Therefore Sunrise was not really here and it had to be the fever. And it was, she had been dreaming, she was awake now and trapped in a cube of metal on the Avalon, in great pain; she waited in rage and disgust for her clothes to be torn away. The hands had not yet touched her flesh, but she felt them crawl on her body anyway. And screamed, outraged.
“No, please,” implored the voice. It was shaky. One chaste kiss touched her cheek. She held hard to a hand.
It doesn’t matter you know I can endure it what I have to do have to do have to do—
“Oh, think of something else!” he begged. There were tears on her cheeks; not her tears. A child sobbed at her side. They were in a spacecraft without a name, which both was and was not the Avalon. She turned to the boy although it took all her strength, and put her arms around him.
“It was over long ago,” she said grieving.
“I thought so, too. But it wasn’t. In a way it only started later.”
The amber eyes widened. Tears were caught in the long lashes. “You’re not supposed to know about that!” he said, more surprised than angry, but she shrank away, he had grown up suddenly a
nd smelled of jungle.
He vanished in a lingering fashion. A blurred outline remained which was somehow palpable to the touch, so that she could hold on to the disappearing arm. There were other voices. She could not understand them, but she heard them:
* * *
“You all right?” Shen said through her teeth.
“I think so—”
He tried to move his arm, but Hanna held it fiercely. He moved enough to give his cramped muscles some relief; yet surely he could not have been long in that shadow world. He mumbled, “She’s too strong for me.”
“Then stop it,” Shen said, bending close. “Stop it now!”
He had forgotten why he had begun this. The abyss of dream was close, easy to slip into again, and tempting—and suicidal. Some part of him knew that it could strip him of secrets without meaning to, without even wanting to. It was the danger he had avoided for a lifetime. Why, then, was it so seductive?
Brother Martin, all white stone and smoldering eyes: “There is a joy in degradation. The freedom from all rules. Cry to Heaven: I do not care! Let go. Wash away…”
Theo and Shen talked. There were echoes; he heard with two sets of ears. The words had meaning for him, but not for the other personality of which he was so powerfully aware. She seized from him whole and unbroken the meaning she could not sort out for herself.
Shen raged; that was some of the meaning. Theo said, “I don’t think there’ll be long-term effects. I think it’s harmless.”
“Mike? Mike?” whispered Lise. The sound was close. He opened his eyes to a dazzle of light and felt his solid body with surprise. He had thought himself immaterial. Lise hung over him. Her anxiety and fear were blows, channeled by the sick woman.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
“But I am!” she wailed. “Why don’t you just let her die?”
The D’neeran Factor Page 57