The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  And then there was the shocking end of it, he heard the sounds outside and hesitated, thinking he ought to go see, and Castillo came back, running and yelling orders through an intercom to Wales on the flight deck. Gaaf was in his way and was shoved aside. The push was hard enough to knock him into the wall and bruise his shoulder, and the first instant of shock and pain brought tears to his eyes. He collected himself and followed Castillo slowly to the flight deck. But they were taking off when he got there, in a hurry, jabbering. Later he found out Juel was dead.

  The Avalon left Revenge behind and moved out into space. There was no more talk about the People of the Rose. Instead they talked about the Golden Girl. The Avalon had gotten a good look at her: a pretty ship, an expensive, sophisticated toy. A Dru-class yacht. Gaaf had never seen one before. He stared at the pictures and tried to imagine the luxury inside. You had to be born to wealth to have one, he thought. But why would anyone who could own one be on Revenge? What interest could anyone like that have in stealing Castillo’s store of trade goods?

  Far away from Revenge, in deep space, the Avalon waited. The men asked: for what? But Castillo kept his own counsel. Besides Castillo there were five of them now that Juel was dead: Suarez, Wales, Gaaf, Ta, and Bakti. They passed time with gambling and watching the ’beams. What the ’beams had to say was going to be crucial. What was the golden ship going to do with the woman who was the only witness to the aliens’ deaths?—it was a mystery. The Avalon filled up with the stink of fear. If Oversight had come to Revenge between scheduled visits, if a Fleet representative had been there to warn them off, that would have been one thing. But the golden ship could have nothing to do with Fleet. And nobody knew about Castillo and Revenge. Except—Castillo in those early hours looked at the men of his crew with (it seemed to Gaaf) something new in the ice-blue eyes—

  They waited, watching the ’beams. They waited for information about the golden ship. It did not occur to any of them that Hanna might be dead and the secret of their identities gone with her—to any of them except Gaaf, the only one who knew how sick she had been. He did not tell the others, because he did not dare tell Castillo that he had eased her pain and thus, surely, helped her turn on them. But he was haunted, and his dreams were haunted, too, by the swollen brutalized face, the stripped fever-hot body; by knowing he had played God and given her (though he had not known it then) a chance at life. A voice echoed in his mind, fuzzy with fever and drugs. Equally without fear or gratitude she called to him: Wait! Still he was afraid that she was dead. But she might get treatment in time. But from whom?

  The name of the Golden Girl’s owner came finally. Gaaf was on the flight deck when it came. There was a picture with it, a routine identification shot. Gaaf looked at the face and wondered what it would be like to be handsome and rich. The man in the picture looked gently amused. Castillo barely glanced at it. He knew the name; he did not have to look at the face that went with it. Suarez also knew it, and cursed bitterly. Castillo only said: “Him!”—as he had said once before, laughing then.

  “Who is he?” Gaaf asked, but softly, so that Castillo could choose to overlook the question. And he did overlook it, or did not hear it. He looked at the image with cold hate.

  The Avalon went nowhere for a time. “What are we waiting for?” said the others.

  “You’ll see,” Castillo answered in his soft voice.

  Gaaf wondered if that meant Castillo didn’t know, had no ideas.

  Castillo and Suarez talked together privately a great deal. They did not tell anyone what they talked about.

  * * *

  Twelve hours after Hanna’s escape:

  Gaaf slept fitfully, an hour at a time. The aliens died over and over in his sleep. Hanna’s eyes were blank with shock and blue as meadow grasses in the clear morning light after a night of storms. She threw herself at Castillo and Wales turned the stunner on her and she fell, the distant sleepiness of stun softening her face.

  Twenty-four hours:

  Castillo was calm. There was nothing on the ’beams. The men gambled and drank. “If he’s smart, he’ll kill her,” Suarez said. “He doesn’t need the attention.”

  “Worst thing he could do,” Castillo said. “They’re looking for him, not us. She said so. He needs her.”

  “He might not know that.”

  A smile of real pleasure. “If he finds out too late, when she’s dead—that’s best for us. More time.”

  “They’ll drag it out of him, though. That he had her. Where he got her. Us.”

  That was not a private talk. Gaaf heard it, but it was too complicated for him. Every place in the Avalon seemed dark. There was shadow on all the faces. He went once to the room where Hanna had been imprisoned and saw the gold chain on the floor. He saw its provocative gleam against smooth skin—until the skin bruised and bled. He had not been able to watch the beating, but Wales had come to get him to wake her up, and so he had to see what they had done.

  He put the chain into his pocket. When he revived her, she had been warm under his hands…

  Suarez had been with Castillo a long time, longer than any of them except the dead Juel. Gaaf was the new man. He had been on the Avalon for six months, buying medical supplies for resale, and this was to have been his first run to the place they called Gadrah. He supposed it was something like Revenge. When they got there, he was to perform some kind of service, act as physician to some vague population of colonists. There was a great deal he had not been told.

  He came across Suarez in the common room. Suarez, drinking alone, was talkative. Gaaf asked him who Michael Kristofik was.

  “A mistake,” Suarez said. “That’s what he is, a mistake.”

  “What kind of mistake?”

  “I remember,” Suarez said in a confiding voice. His eyes had a secretive look.

  “What do you remember?” Gaaf said, bolder.

  “Prettiest little boy you ever saw. Got away one night on Alta.”

  A nightmare that was not a dream swept over Gaaf. Cries in the night months ago, no dream; in space near Colony One, which they had left in a hurry for no reason Gaaf could see. They were a child’s cries, but in the morning no child was aboard. Later, on Willow, he watched Castillo watch a fresh baby-fat boy, maybe ten years old; the dilated eyes came out of a bad dream. The boy was with a crowd of family. He left with them, safe, out of reach. You could not forget nightmares when the pieces added up by day. Castillo’s expression. Cries in the night. The pretty boy who got away.

  “Mikhail,” Suarez said.

  “What?”

  “That’s his name. Wonder if he remembers.”

  Gaaf thought about something else, retreating. He put his hand in his pocket, and the chain rubbed against his fingers.

  Slight as the wisp of a dream and with burning flesh. The black bone-deep bruises on her thighs. I couldn’t do what they did, Gaaf thought. I’d be gentle. So careful—

  He dreamed about it, smiling a little. But Suarez said, “He went to whoring on Valentine. Then he pulled off a big one. I mean big.”

  The lights in the common room seemed dim. It was darker and darker. Chairs, tables, everyday objects thickened; they had sharp angles in the dark, were unrelieved cubes.

  “What’s the mistake?” Gaaf asked.

  “He’s still alive,” Suarez said.

  Thirty-six hours:

  He slept again, a little. Hard fists on soft skin. She cried out, tears of agony stood in her eyes, burst out, coursed down the discoloring cheeks.

  “Oh no. Oh no—” He woke again and stumbled to the common room. They were listening to the ’beams. The hunt was up. Not for them. But only not yet.

  “We have to go,” Suarez said.

  He sat at Castillo’s right hand. Castillo sat at the head of a long table. He had something in his hands. Gaaf had seen it before: a cylinder of densely engraved gold. At one end there was a rim of flashing jewels round a circle of blackness. Castillo turned it over and over.

&nbs
p; “Go where?” said Ta. His nails were badly bitten; he was subject in some moods to something like remorse.

  “Gadrah,” Castillo said. “As planned.”

  “They’ll get us there, too!” Ta said with violence.

  “They won’t,” Castillo said. The faint smile covered his whole face. I know something you don’t, it said.

  “Fleet’ll be everywhere for this. There’s no place they won’t go.”

  “Not Gadrah,” Castillo said, and he said it with absolute certainty.

  “Why not?” Ta said.

  “You’ll see. But our cargo’s incomplete. We were robbed,” Castillo said without irony. “This is the last run. We’re trading for more than payload this time. There’s not enough to trade.”

  The things stored on Revenge had been purchased legitimately. There was no chance of replacing them.

  Wales said, “You’re not thinking of another raid someplace.”

  “We might not need one.” The smile stayed in place. “We might be able to get somebody to give us what we need.”

  “How?” Wales said.

  Castillo explained. He kept turning the golden cylinder in his hands. The engraved letters on it, the ones in Standard, said plainly where it could take them.

  * * *

  Space fled away behind them. Now they had an itinerary, and the first place they would go was Outside. Gaaf, though ten years with the Interworld Fleet, shrank from it. In Colonial Oversight the stops had been far apart, the isolation profound; each tour of duty was like being Outside, or so he had always thought, and he had never been sure the Fleet would return. To avoid thinking of it he made his head be full of Gadrah: a simple puzzle, a place an Oversight veteran should know.

  Suarez showed him pictures of two children of Gadrah and their mother. He said they were his children and their mother’s name was Nekotym. She was a plump creature with bad teeth and extraordinary eyes of warm amber flecked with gold.

  “I never heard of the place,” Gaaf said. “Is it called something else?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s it called?”

  Suarez grinned. Gaaf persisted. “Why’s he so sure Fleet won’t pick us up there?”

  “You’ll see when you get there,” Suarez said, sounding like Castillo.

  Gaaf spent a long time ciphering it out. At least he evolved a satisfactory explanation: that wherever Gadrah was, Castillo’s cover there was impenetrable. It was the only possible explanation.

  Still Gaaf ought to know about the place; ought to have heard of it, at least, by whatever name.

  He tossed and turned in the dark nights, doping himself to sleep when he was desperate for rest. The rags of his life flapped around him in the dark. He had not meant to come to this. He had not meant to witness murder and break bread with murderers. Yet inexorably he had come here. He had never made one single right choice, had not even been a very good physician. There had been too many deaths in the backwaters of a star-spanning culture, and too many of the bereaved had shaken his hand and thanked him, like God, for his failures. His progress from a failing farm on Co-op to greater failures on lesser worlds had been—no progress at all. Increasingly furtive, increasingly alone, he had garnered no good memories to take along on the longest journey he had ever made. He had done one brave thing in his life, and only one: in a sudden access of good taste where a woman was concerned, he had tried to make dying easier for Hanna ril-Koroth. The pathetic inadequacy of it ground at him and gnawed his dreams. There had been a stunner in his hands. A brave man with a stunner could have saved her. But he was not used to saving people; he was only used to helping them die.

  And yet she had survived. They heard it on the ’beams as they hurtled toward Omega. The news came out of D’neera somehow, on the heels of the news of the hunt for Michael Kristofik. No one was surprised, except Gaaf. He had to stay away from them, he could not let them see it. Someone else had saved her. The bruises and fever must be gone. She must look as she had when he saw her first, seated between two lumps of alien flesh, holding one by its thready hand. Steady sapphire eyes: she knew what she was doing. Gaaf did not even know where he was going, he did not even know what Gadrah was. But first he was going to the planet of the aliens. He did not know anything about aliens either, except that he did not like them. She knew about aliens. She was not afraid of the Outside. She was supposed to have gone there. He was going in her place, and someone else had saved her; a criminal, it seemed; a braver one than Gaaf.

  They passed beyond Omega and heard nothing more.

  * * *

  It started to seem as if pieces of the Avalon were missing. In the dark; it was always dark. Sometimes what the other men said made no sense, as if they spoke an alien tongue. They gave Gaaf peculiar looks at times. He stayed in his cabin, but it was dark there, too. The nightmare went on without end. But when it ended, they would be where the aliens were. After that—Gaaf’s mind skipped ahead, passing over the aliens. After that it would be Gadrah, where there were people.

  Sometimes, when he had the energy, when the men of the Avalon looked like people, he tried to find out about Gadrah.

  He was afraid to question Castillo, and Wales was as secretive as Suarez. So he approached Ta, but Ta had made only one trip to Gadrah in three years. He said Castillo and the men of the Avalon were important at Gadrah, that Castillo was a powerful man. Ta said there was a city of white stone that shone in daylight, but the sky always looked cloudy at night. The inhabitants of the city dressed in fine garments and jewels, the finest the Polity could provide. The girls were lubricious, the liquor strong.

  It did not sound like any place Gaaf had seen or heard of in his years with Oversight. But after a while it was plain that Ta was nearly as ignorant as Gaaf; that at Gadrah he had been too preoccupied with spirits and girls to look around much, and the memories he had were unreliable.

  Gaaf wanted to ask if Ta had ever heard the others talk about the way to get there, but he was afraid to. He was afraid Castillo would find out about his questions.

  The other man on the Avalon was Bakti. In ten years he had been to Gadrah three times. He did not know much more about it than Ta. But one night, hunkered in the dim corridor near the black room where Hanna had been held (her blood still spotted the floor), he said to Gaaf, “I don’t think we’re going back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Civilization,” Bakti said. He talked as if he knew what it meant.

  “What do you mean, civilization? Gadrah’s civilized, isn’t it?”

  The other man’s face was uneasy in the shadow. “It’s a long way out.”

  “So?”

  “A long way.”

  Bakti looked at Gaaf emphatically. Gaaf shook his head and Bakti hunched closer.

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t think anybody else knows where it is. It’s out past Heartworld, I know that. And there’s no charted settlements out there. I looked it up. I don’t think anybody knows except him. And maybe Suarez. Juel knew. The other trips I made, they didn’t let anybody else onto flight deck. You couldn’t pick up a relay transmission. It was like it is out here. They said it was us that was shut down for security. I don’t think so. I don’t think there was anything to pick up. It was a lot like this. A long, long trip. And there wasn’t anybody else out there.”

  Gaaf looked at Bakti blankly. Bakti was hinting the impossible, a trap for the credulous. An Oversight veteran would know. The disbelief showed on his face.

  Bakti said, “Listen. Most of the people there, they don’t even speak Standard. Most of ’em don’t read it. Most of ’em can’t read at all.”

  Gaaf grunted. That was unusual even for an isolate like Revenge.

  “And they keep slaves. Would the Polity put up with that if they knew?”

  Gaaf refused to take the statement literally. “It’s not much better on Nestor. They’ve never done anything about Nestor.”

  “Nestor’s got a fleet of its own. This place doesn’t. E
ven on Nestor there’s Polity observers walking around. I never saw anybody from the Polity on Gadrah but us. They talk like nobody ever comes there but us.”

  “Oversight does,” Gaaf said. What Bakti proposed was unbelievable, so Gaaf did not believe it.

  He would see it for himself, and in the meantime he was going to see the aliens.

  Hanna’s face when the aliens died was painted on his dreams. She had tried to save them. She had suffered for them. Nobody had ever done any of that for Gaaf. Nobody had ever looked at him like that. He did not think anyone ever would.

  * * *

  The journey of the Avalon went on for four weeks, which was as long as any point-to-point journey inside human space ever had to last. Then it went on for another week, and another. After that it was impossible for Gaaf to disregard the truth that he was really Outside, and he stopped counting. The others had, perhaps, less imagination; they were not as disturbed as he. Or maybe they were reassured by Castillo’s calmness. The red-haired man was as tranquil as if he were native to Outside, as if the dangers of the flight were insignificant. To be so he must be a masterful pilot. Whenever Gaaf saw him, the empty half-smile was in place on his lips, and his eyes were calm to the point of vacancy. Their light blue was transparent at times. But Gaaf, when he looked into that window (when he dared), looked through it, saw nothing: blank vacuum.

  He seldom saw Castillo, or any of the others. They lived on packaged rations and did not come together to eat, only to drink or gamble or watch dramas of human lives from standard recreational programming play out in the walls of the common room for hours on end. Otherwise they moved in separate orbits, colliding accidentally and not often.

  The Avalon seemed more dark each day. Gaaf secretly brought more lights to his room from other places, and tried to make the shadows flee. But they lurked at the corners of his eyes even when the room was bright as a star. So in the glare of light he closed his eyes and thought of Hanna to keep from thinking of other things. Old habits reasserted themselves and he stopped thinking of the reality of pain which he had witnessed, and remembered the beauty she had been at the very start, an untouchable ideal, like all beautiful women. But they were not untouchable in fantasy, and so she played a part in the limited reach of his sweaty imaginings. There was not much to do on the Avalon, and it was a long voyage.