The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “Indeed all is chaos,” said the aliens in their soft growly voices, “yet we of the Musicians Guild impose order on it. It is transitory indeed; all order is transitory. Thus our assertion of sentient being lies in art, which patterns time in beauty.”

  At the height of each day’s heat the crowds dispersed. The musicians drifted away as they had each summer for a hundred years, as they would for a hundred more. Occasionally Michael and Gaaf accompanied individuals to their homes or customary haunts (in one of which, once, they met Shen). More often they sought a shady spot and were quiet under the weight of the heat. Michael talked to Gaaf, dutifully following Theo’s instructions: Let him hear human voices. Talk to him. Gaaf was a good listener; he never interrupted, never contradicted, never asked difficult questions; he never made a sound. He was motionless, a brown statue with eyes that shifted now and then but never met Michael’s. And an extraordinary thing occurred. Michael found there were things he could not talk about. He could talk about now, about quiet, neutral things: how to make a stew, how long the flowers in the garden would grow, a new game Lise had learned; present things. But he tried to speak of the estate left behind on Valentine, how the sea sounded distantly all night and all day, how the peace of it was enlivened by companions of one’s choice, and he could not; he tried to talk of how he had bought and fitted GeeGee, the pleasure he had felt as the ship became his before his eyes, but the words caught and choked in his throat. Those had been dreams, too, and he was filled with a sense that they had been incomplete, that something was missing and they were unreal. He began to think he had made a wrong choice. Flight and search might have been the better one. He might have found what he sought; then everything would be real again.

  Once, though, he spoke of the past, but of a more distant past. It happened on the first day on which he was offered a portion of the morning’s proceeds before the musicians took their pay away to eat and drink it up. He nearly refused his share, then remembered just in time that that would be impolite. Later, sitting under a tree whose every branch burst with miniature duplicates of itself which would drop and seek anchor in the soil when the days shortened, he pulled the coins from his pocket and looked at them. They were bright gold and heavy and closely engraved with text that for all he knew might be (and probably was) a legend of the beginning of money.

  Suddenly he laughed. So all the riches had come to this, begging to begging, and once more he sang for his bread. He said so to Gaaf, laughing.

  “It’s easier now, though. Easier…” The laughter faded; he talked on; the words came of their own accord. He had never said them to anyone before, not even Hanna. But this was like talking to no one.

  “Easier than saying yes yes yes…‘Yes, ma’am, I can do that to you, but it costs a little more…’ ‘Yes-sir, you can do that to me, it doesn’t matter if it hurts as long as you pay enough, the docs are good at fixing us up.’ ‘Yes, Brother, I have spent the requisite hours on my knees contemplating the sin of aggression, only there’s some other people I wish you’d told that to, but you wouldn’t know them…’ I would’ve had to do it twenty years to get as rich as I wanted to be. So I did something else. I invested it. You know how I invested it, don’t you? Everybody knows. After that it was easy. The women, all I had to do was look at ’em. Snapped my fingers and down they went. The money had a lot to do with it. So I got radar in my head. Learned to see the ones who looked past the money and the face. Not,” he said, scrupulously honest, “that it didn’t have advantages. It just wasn’t enough. You know what I mean?”

  Gaaf did not answer. He did not appear to have heard. Michael looked at him doubtfully and said, “No, I guess you don’t.”

  Clouds had settled over the sun; the sky was gray. There was a roll of thunder and raindrops splattered the pavement.

  Gaaf lifted his head with an expression of deadly fear. The flute rolled over the pavement with a ping; Michael kicked it in his scramble to get to Gaaf. He laid one hand on the man’s shoulder, the other on his head.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Henrik! It’s all right!”

  Gaaf breathed noisily. He looked around as if he did not know where he was.

  He began to talk. It was the first time he had said more than two consecutive words. He talked disjointedly of the Treasure Store of Elenstap and the night of stumbling through the farmlands. He talked about the morning when the aliens found him, but he was hazy about it. All he could remember was being afraid. He thought they would blame him for what the men of Castillo’s crew had done in the night; he thought they would do something to him. He thought that all the time until Hanna came, he expected to be tortured or put to death, he thought they only put it off to torment him. He said all this with surprising clarity.

  At the end Michael said, “It’s over now.”

  “Until they come,” Gaaf said, meaning the Polity.

  “Yeah, well, we’ve all got that to worry about.”

  A smile snaked across Gaaf’s mouth, a trailing thing of remarkable nastiness.

  “Not me,” he said. “Everything’s been easy for you. It’s my turn.”

  Michael shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, but his mind shot on to something else. Gaaf was talking, Gaaf remembered; Michael crouched in front of him; a tremor ran through him, wraiths shifted under his feet.

  “Henrik,” he said, “where were they going? When they left here?”

  Gaaf’s eyes settled on his face. He must have heard the plea in Michael’s voice, and God knew what was in his too-transparent eyes; Gaaf shrank away.

  “Do you know? Do you remember? Henrik…!”

  But the animation drained from Gaaf’s eyes. He fondled something in his pocket, and sank back into silence.

  * * *

  The time sense of a dream is skewed, but Hanna always knew how long she had been on Uskos. When it got to be half a summer, she looked at the sky more often. Where was the Polity mission? Clouds came into the sky, a harbinger of wet autumn. Henrik was getting better.

  What time is it? Time. What day? The day was frozen in miniature, as if everything within view was very small but perfectly clear. Not for the first time, not quite; but for the first time Henrik could question what he saw. Directly in front of him, the rangy man with the face carved by an angel. The gentle hands. On his shoulders. “Here, this way. Don’t fall. There’s a step.” The music. The man’s eyes were closed, he communicated only with the pipe at his mouth. Piercing fantastic rills. Overhead a gray sky. On every side, an appreciative circle, the others. The aliens. Oh no. Oh no.

  He shrank, hiding. No one noticed. What day is it? When will they come? They would come to take him home. And they would take the musician away; he was sure they would do that, without knowing why he was sure.

  The wind was cooler today. Cooler than when?—he did not know. He could not remember. He thought of the woman, remembering, hand in his pocket, fondling the chain. And the other thing, the slip of metal. Only now he remembered something more, without detail. The woman wasn’t alone, she didn’t sleep alone; she lived with the dark musician. There were details now, disjointed and unplaced in time, but very clear. Blue eyes distant and cool on poor Henrik’s face, turning and warming to: Mike. That’s his name. I hate him. I hate him. Who is he? Poor Henrik can’t quite remember. Poor Henrik’s not quite himself.

  Hanna confided in Norsa. Telling her troubles to an alien did not strike her as an unusual thing to do.

  She told him: “My companion Michael has a troubled heart, and I do not know how to give him aid.”

  “What trouble could he have? For he is well-mated and also has the love of other companions, nor is he hungry or ill or enslaved. And by all that you have told me of ’Unans, he ought therefore to be happy.”

  “That is correct, and therefore it is all the more difficult to give help to him in his distress.”

  “Does he fear the law of ’Unans, when other ’Unans com
e here? For the gentle hints of my colleagues and myself ought to suffice in sealing his freedom, if all that you say is right; and even if we wished, we could not now withhold them. Else the persons of the Physicians Guild, and those of the Musicians Guild, will spring, as you have taught me to say, ‘on our backs.’ We do not want that to happen!”

  “That is true, and so I have told Michael. Yet it is not enough, Norsa. And I do not know what to do, for he continues to grow worse.”

  * * *

  The clouds had moved in all the morning, and the wind was fresh, lifting Michael’s hair and chilling his bare shoulders. The musicians of the city looked at the sky and tested the wind with dampened fingers. They gave Michael small pieces of paper on which they had written names, places, contact codes: “In the event we do not return,” they said, “for autumn is early; yet song flourishes even in winter in warmer climes.”

  So he sang a troubadour’s song for them:

  Adieu, mes amours, adieu vous comment,

  Adieu, mes amours, jusque au printemps!

  “What does that mean?” they asked when he was done, and he translated loosely:

  “Good-bye my companions, good-bye until spring; I have naught to live on, not a thing; only air unless I get the favor of a king!”

  “Ah, that is a good song,” they said, and went away singing it.

  The tiny trees still clung to the branches of their sires, stubborn in the gusting wind. There was dampness in it. The vehicle which had brought Michael and Gaaf had gone home, according to custom. They would have to walk whether the rain caught them or not. So they set out through the city with the wind blowing about their ears, for once without the interested participation of spectators who had all withdrawn to await the storm; and they walked through the back ways, the lesser-known paths Michael discovered instinctively. Presently they were walking through a part of the town they had not seen before: by the side of a moss-choked stream that waited for the cataracts of autumn storms.

  The heavy vegetable smell of the moss was familiar. Michael had not smelled it for a long time. He avoided the places where it might assault him.

  Haven, supposed to be, like this; from myself that time, though. Wasted, worthless human being: what did it? The girl I didn’t know in the morning, that last night on Colony One? Crying all night on my pillow, didn’t know till I climbed up in the morning from the dead. What I wanted was dope; what was I using then? Saw the bruises on her face, said what the hell did you do. She said: You did it. You did it. You.

  He wanted to get away from the stream, but they had followed it into a cut between high banks, smoothly made of concrete and offering no way out. The wind played above, outside this narrow gorge where the air sat heavy and sullen over the dwindling, stinking thread of water.

  Find me a place, Kareem. A place to go. Please. No people. No dope…And he did, but he hadn’t seen it. Hot and dry and the stream drying up so the smell came in—

  “Here,” he said quietly. “This way, Henrik.” Steps cut into the wall led straight up, a hard climb though the bank was lower; near the top a burst of wind shook them. Gaaf swayed and Michael put out a hand to steady him. At the top the monumental buildings of the city stood over them, perpetually falling if you looked up too long. The wind slapped their faces, and then the rain; only a few drops, so far.

  Henrick Gaaf said clearly, “We’re going to get wet.”

  Michael was silent with surprise. He stole a look at Gaaf’s face. It was different, intelligent, like a bright rat, Michael thought, and disliked himself for it.

  “It’s a long way home,” he said.

  “Home,” Gaaf said in a curious tone.

  They walked up the broad street in the wind, in silence. The moss smell was gone, and the memories that had threatened to come into the light had diminished. This is what I get for not running, he thought, and put the memories back where they belonged, with an effort.

  Think of something else—

  * * *

  Hanna had gone home early to avoid the rain, to her chauffeur’s relief. She went to the room where she worked each evening, distilling the observations of the day, and settled to work. The first patter of raindrops swelled to a steady susurration. Thunder growled, but she did not hear it. The room had been dim when she came in, and slowly it got darker. The self-contained processing unit shone with its own light, and she did not stop to illuminate the room. A smell of damp earth came in through the windows.

  “Today,” she wrote, “I learned through debate with the Philosophers Guild that there is already a movement toward consensus on the significance of this world’s very first contact with humans, meaning not Rubee’s and Awnlee’s journey to our space, but the visit Castillo and his men made here in the Avalon. ‘That’s easy,’ they said. ‘That was obviously the Master’s hand.’

  “I asked how they knew. The explanation was complicated, but in essence it seemed to be that this visit was of the same order as natural disaster. It is clear that at the deepest level, Uskos is less concerned with cause than with effect, and the stance, in short, is phenomenological. Still, this is only an explicit, intellectual acceptance of common experience, a shift in emphasis from the human view, which is inclined to subordinate the event to its explanation. There is less detachment from primal experience—”

  Hanna had been concentrating intently. Something like a prick between her shoulder blades distracted her. As soon as she was aware of it, it drilled into her back. She leapt up, spun around: pure reflex.

  “Henrik…” She sighed, relaxing. “I didn’t know you’d come home. You startled me.”

  Gaaf did not answer. He stood and looked at her. She thought suddenly that he had been there for some time, staring at her head framed in light. A fine target, she thought absurdly, but it was not so absurd. She had a faint vision of what he saw now. The light fell on her weakly; the curves of her body in its scanty summer clothing were pronounced to his eyes.

  He walked toward her, his purpose clear. She took a step backward and bumped into the wall. He reached for her and she said, “Henrik, don’t,” and called, worried: Mike! She was not afraid of Gaaf, she could extricate herself from the unfortunate scene easily enough, but she might not be able to do it without injuring him. Gaaf’s hands were soft and sticky as slugs and not very strong. He pressed and smothered her against the wall, yet there was no threat in him. He embraced her without violence nor any understanding of her reluctance. Blind compulsion propelled him, some semblance of love, and she did not want to hurt him either physically or in thought. She managed to keep her mouth away from his, managed to reasonably confine his hands. “No, no,” she said, “I don’t like this, Henrik, I don’t want to do this. Please stop, Henrik. Please stop!” Mike! she said again, urgently; Gaaf slobbered at her neck; she felt sick. “Please, Henrik, stop. I don’t want to hurt you. Please!”

  Michael came into the room in a hurry, heard Gaaf’s breathing, saw the shapes struggling in the dark. “No, please!” he heard Hanna say. He crossed the room, got hold of Gaaf’s right arm, lifted him without effort, and threw him at a blank spot on the wall. Gaaf hit it with a thud, slid down it, and was still.

  Hanna cried, “Why did you do that!” and plunged past Michael before he could answer. She flew to Gaaf and knelt beside him, feeling his pulse, running her hands over him, testing for broken bones.

  Michael said stupidly, “Huh?”

  “If I’d wanted to break his neck, I could’ve done that myself!”

  “But—”

  “Did you have to be so rough?”

  He swore softly at her back, at the unfairness. Gaaf was conscious and she cradled his head against her breast, no doubt, Michael thought, to Henrik’s entire satisfaction. He went to them and squatted beside Hanna to apologize and help Gaaf up. But when he put out his hand, Gaaf whimpered and cringed away.

  “Don’t hurt me,” he wept, “don’t hurt me, I won’t do it, I won’t do anything—”

  The sound, th
e shadow-man, the weak movement in the dark came together; Michael was somewhere else.

  I beg you, said the body in the dark at his feet, bereft of pride, bereft of triumph; I won’t do it, I swear! Don’t hurt me, don’t do it, I beg, let me live—!

  Hands grabbed his feet and he kicked them. Another grasped his arm; he threw it off. He did not remember getting through the dark house. But he was in the garden, standing shaking among the drenched flowers. The rain fell and fell, whispering old pleas.

  Hanna came after him at once. She came up behind him and put her arms around him, and set her face against his back.