The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  His voice was low and rough. He was shaken with hope.

  “I could take you into it with me. Do you want to do it?”

  He was silent for some time. Hanna did not press him. She knew that between the moment of decision and the moment of action, it was sometimes necessary to stand for a little on the brink, to possess for a minute longer the freedom to retreat.

  He said, “When can we start?”

  They lay on Michael’s bed, side by side and relaxed. The room was almost dark.

  They had not said anything since taking this position. From that point onward Michael had been more vividly aware of Hanna’s personality than at any time before. There had been telepathic contacts like this every day, but they had been fleeting, like a word or a touch or a smile. Now it was as though she uncovered a hidden light. He had thought it would feel like a current flowing between them, but it did not. It was not even like Hanna’s hallucinations. Those had been full of movement, rapid changes, a kaleidoscope of memories; this was very still. The only word he could think of to describe it was there-ness, and what was there was Hanna.

  He knew she had begun to enter the trance, though in an odd way, as if it were not a goal to be reached but already in existence, needing only to be acknowledged; as if getting to it were not a matter of trying, but the relinquishing of effort.

  It did not seem very potent. It did not seem strong enough to draw him back through the years, past the barrier of darkness. But suggestions flowed from Hanna, instructions to let go, to float, to drift back and back…

  We will begin at the ending…

  Even in trance, he revolted.

  Let go. Let go. The beginning, then. Back. Back. And look. What do you see?

  The meadow was misty with the distance of years. But flowers grew in it.

  Focus.

  White flowers. The stamens brushed with velvety gold, petals defined by lines finer than a hair in pink shading to lavender.

  And focus.

  The soft colors filled his vision. The shapes were new as each heartbeat, older than his life. The plants were tall, their slender stems bending gently in the wind. Long slim serrated leaves, bumpy and a little sticky. The sap is toxic. I remember.

  Good. Good.

  He looked up and the mist was gone. The sky was cloudless, the sun high. Mountains rose to his left, toward the east; westward the land sloped more gently to the valley with its cluster of barns and cottages set on a great stretch of cultivated fields. The vision was clear as the crystalline air. It was real, and surrounded him; the taste of herbal wine filled his mouth. The smell, the dazzling sunlight of a summer day that would never end as long as Michael lived, thrust at him and wounded him; even before the scene was fully formed he sank to his knees on the turf, clutching his belly with a crazy conviction that he had been opened and his insides would fall out. Hanna’s soft hands held him together until the transition was over. The feeling passed. He sighed and lifted his eyes to the summer.

  “A long summer,” Hanna said at his side.

  “All the summers everyplace else—summer’s always seemed short. I know why, now. They were longer here.”

  “I see,” said her thought: impersonal. Remote.

  The air was pure, untainted by a few lazy columns of smoke that rose from the valley floor. Down there a broad river meandered across the basin, folding in on itself in convoluted curves, but the meadow was so high that the forest stretched out on every side looked, from this altitude, more like thick bumpy fabric on the cushions of the mountains, or like thick moss, than what it was.

  He said, remembering, “I used to think, if you could jump off the mountain, you’d bounce.” And he looked at his shadow and it shrank, because for a moment he was a boy.

  Hanna turned for the valley. He followed, not walking so much as floating. At the top of the first steep slope, he paused. The desire to stay in the radiant meadow, where it was safe, was almost unconquerable.

  Hanna waited for him at the edge of the meadow. She did not speak or even make a gesture of encouragement. He waited in suspense to find out what he would decide. Then he slipped over the edge.

  The end of the meadow turned precipitously into an acute drop, and they slid and scrambled down and down into the forest. The world changed. The trees which had looked to be all of a piece were individuals now. He had not seen trees like them anywhere else. The stems did not grow to great girth, and the branches were sinuous arms that reached for the sky and, through each day, stretched toward the sun in its path, so that in the morning all the forest seemed to lean one way, and in the evening another

  Down and down he went, Hanna following easily. What difficulties could there be in this journey they made only in thought? Yet the descent was a strange blend of past and present. There were drops that had been heart-stopping thrills for a boy, and he felt the ghost of that old challenge when he took them, but now they scarcely stretched his long legs. At steppingstone rocks across a chattering stream he stopped to gauge the leap—and then walked over, crossing the gap easily, accepting adulthood and the passage of years, even though nothing had changed. Invisible bird-things called in the quiet of the day. That was the only sound; there was not even wind to stir the trees, and nothing made by man crossed the sky. He took Hanna along trails made by wild things near the little stream, and the trails were just as they had been thirty years before. The peace of the place sank into him. It might have been the morning of creation here, before any strife or evil was made.

  Soon they were close to the foot of the mountain. They could not possibly have come so far so rapidly. But trancetime was not realtime.

  From a rock ledge they looked down on a pool in the stream, the first pool of any size they had seen. Michael dropped cross-legged on the ledge and smiled at the water. He said, “It’s good to swim in. But cold!”

  They stayed by the water for a long time. The sun did not move. A useful thing, that trance. The music of the invisible birds blended with the song of the water, and never altered. Hanna noticed; she said, “It doesn’t change because it’s not real. None of this is real.”

  “It’s real somewhere.”

  “In you.”

  “It’s always been there,” he said, smiling. He was back where all smiles had begun.

  Hanna said, “We must move on to the village.”

  There was a burst of cold wind. He said quickly, “No. We can’t. It’s a long way. I’m tired.”

  She said objectively, “That is a lie. You half-know yourself that you lie. You are not tired.”

  He said after a pause, “I’m afraid.”

  “That is the truth.”

  Without warning it was twilight. The shadows under the trees were impenetrable; the bird-things stopped singing, and there were ominous rustles deep in the wood. He looked downstream, steeling himself to go on.

  Hanna said, “Not today.”

  “Are you sure?” he said, although he was relieved.

  “I’m sure. Hold my hand. We’re coming out of it.”

  Now the star of Uskos was indistinguishable from others in its field. The Golden Girl’s journey of some one hundred days was begun. Hanna had taken a longer voyage, she had spent a full year on the exploration ship Endeavor; but the Endeavor had not covered nearly so great a distance. There was nothing slow and patient about this. GeeGee’s course would be essentially parabolic: straight to Omega, where she would veer up and in not toward the heart of human space but toward Heartworld, and not even directly for that world itself but for the equivalent of Omega in that sector, another end-point. Only it was not an end, not for the Avalon or for the Golden Girl either. Like Omega, the end had become a starting place.

  They had come from summer, but all GeeGee’s chronometers said bewilderingly that it was midwinter. Midwinter in Standard time, midwinter at Polity Admin—

  Hanna stood in Control and looked at the chronometers. She had left Admin more or less at the season she now left Ell, escaping winter once m
ore. Where was Gadrah in its orbit? What would the season be where GeeGee landed? Where would she land?

  When she asked him, Michael said, “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think there’s a landing program included with the course?”

  “There isn’t. There’s orbital compensation based on Standard chronology, though. The usual thing.”

  “GeeGee could work out the year length from that, anyway.”

  “She did.” He smiled up at Hanna’s surprised face. “Shen and I did it last night while you were asleep. Jumped the data through every ring we could think of. It’s a singleton—”

  “What?” The rarity surprised her.

  “—and the star’s hotter than Sol, but Gadrah’s not as far out as you’d expect. The year’s only about twice Standard length.”

  It would make for well defined seasons. Hanna said so.

  “They’re long, all right. But there’s not much axial tilt, and the orbit’s more regular than most,” he said.

  “That would modify the extremes, then. What an odd place, Mike. A singleton? A clear shot in, no gas giants, no big gravity wells, nothing to worry about?”

  “But a lot of junk,” he said. “A lot of junk! Rocks. Ice. Comets. Lots of comets. There’s a warning in the program: most orbits unknown.”

  “Then how—we can’t Jump through it, can we?”

  “No. Realspace and radar.”

  “The best natural defenses I’ve ever heard of.” She was baffled. “Why did they go in in the first place? The original expedition, I mean. Why did they choose that direction, anyhow, when space was open everywhere?”

  He leaned back in his place. His brown hands, very dark from the Uskosian sun, rested quietly on the console. He said, “I did a lot of research at one time. I think I know where that expedition originated. I think I know who led it. I know the colonists’ names on the manifest—my ancestors’ names—but I don’t know why they went where they went. The records don’t say that.”

  “You never told me that. Wait.”

  She was suddenly on overload. She took the seat next to him and put her head down on the console just as he had done a few nights before when Gadrah looked back at him from GeeGee’s displays.

  “What is it?” he said; a comforting hand touched her back.

  She said without lifting her head, “Was this what you were going to try to find on your own? After you left the rest of us on D’neera?”

  “Yes. It would have been a disaster. This is one of the regions where I thought it could be, but it wasn’t the one I’d picked. I guessed wrong.”

  “Oh, God.”

  She kept her face on her folded arms. It would have been a flight with no end, certain death because of the wrong guess. Hanna shivered, and he rubbed her back.

  He said, “Maybe I’ll find out more there.”

  “Surely. Yes.” She straightened. There was another question. It was enormous; she did not see how she could have overlooked it even for a few days.

  She said, “Starr said to me once that if you got to Alta from a Lost World, it couldn’t be considered lost. It’s not lost. That man knows about it, that B. How?”

  “I don’t know. I mean to find out.”

  Stone. Twilight.

  The figure at Hanna’s side wavered; took courage from her detachment, and stood firm. The scene became lighter. A dusty, unpaved track wound away among a cluster of structures. All were black in the scanty light, but hardly darker than the sky. Water sounded faintly nearby, a river near at hand, but otherwise the night was silent, with no sound of wind or insect or night-hunting beast. Hanna squinted at the shadowy buildings. They were well made, and did not look as primitive as she had expected them to be. Stone kept them cool in summer, kept the fires’ warmth inside in winter. Wells tapped the abundant groundwater. The building stones fit together well, without gaps.

  “Craftsmen here,” she murmured.

  “It was all here before I was born.”

  He didn’t know how he had known that. He sweated with the effort to remember, though there was no heat in the dim light.

  “We need light…a fire?” she said. “On a hearth?”

  “Oh, not fire!”

  “All right. All right—”

  For an instant it seemed that he vanished. It was not good to let go of trance too quickly, but Hanna did it, falling into the intense, brief confusion that accompanied the wrench. When she came out of that, too, she was leaning over him. She kissed him and lay touching him for a long time. He was calm again. But there was an aching loneliness on the other side of the dark.

  She said, “I think remembering is even more important than I thought.”

  “Why?”

  “If you don’t do it now, how will it be if you get there and it happens all at once?”

  “Oh, but—” He turned his face away from her. It was a gesture she was beginning to know. But he would always turn back again. Cut out your heart and show it to me, she would say with each step toward the past. And each time she said it he would wince and turn away. And then turn back, and do it as well as he could. But it was going to take longer than she had thought.

  Everything took longer. Hanna had expected Henrik to appear within a day or two, driven by the need for human contact. He did not seem to need it or want it. He slipped out of his room in the middle of GeeGee’s nights and raided the galley, usually when Shen was in Control and everyone else was asleep. Hanna ran into him once or twice and he glared at her with hatred. Her liking for him did not increase. In the face of the unexpected difficulty in prying information from Michael, she thought of starting in on Henrik. That would be much simpler than recovering the deeply buried dead. Michael slept poorly, there were bad dreams, he was tired—and they had hardly begun, the trip was only a week old, what would happen to him before the end? Maybe they would have to stop the travels in Michael’s mind, maybe the dark years would have to stay dark. If so there would be plenty of time to work on Henrik, to take the practical approach (as Hanna thought of it) to foreknowledge of Gadrah—for she had started to doubt the practicality of what she so cruelly attempted to do with Michael.

  Try flowers again. Show me flowers. In the dark, if necessary.

  And it was very dark. Twilight here always? Couldn’t have been.

  It wasn’t—

  Then he remembered: Light in the dark like a moon I’d never heard of, never seen—

  Something glimmered at the edge of sight. It waxed brighter and brighter, and exuberant radiance, clumps of light climbing fences, stones, stone walls, exuding a sweet perfume. Flowers. Flowers that shone in the dark.

  The wraith beside him asked questions. He didn’t know the answers. But his heart trembled with the beauty of the flowers.

  “It only happened a few days out of the year. I couldn’t have seen it more than a few times.”

  “Evidently it made an impression.”

  He felt a great gratitude for her objectivity. It was like having a sound wall at your back. The light of the flowers was cold, and objects near the largest clusters cast shadows.

  “Are they cultivated?” said Hanna’s wraith.

  “In a way. Casually.”

  Not cut till they go to seed. So they’ll grow again. Sometimes we barter the seeds—

  “For what?”

  “Cloth. Metal. Things we didn’t make ourselves—”

  A burst of light crawled up the side of the nearest cottage. He looked at it. Hanna took his arm and said, “Home. I know.”

  He tried to repeat the word, but it died on his tongue. Nonetheless he moved inexorably toward the structure, not walking but effortlessly gliding, as in a dream.

  “Where are the people?” she said, but he couldn’t think about that.

  He tried to stop at the door but slid through it. They were inside. It was very dark.

  “Did it happen in the summer?” she asked. “What you said once? When they noticed you?”

  “No. It was at the
end, the end of—”

  Everything: the bronze ceiling of the Golden Girl met his eyes, but he plunged back into the dark. There was a shelf…Here…He reached upward from habit—habit!—then remembered he was tall. His shadow-hands fell on familiar shapes. An old, old ritual asserted itself. He did not have to think about it.

  There was light. Hanna blinked at the small metal lamp in his hands.

  “Was that made here?”

  “No. No metalworking here. Other places.”

  “What does it burn?”

  “Animal fats.”

  “How did you light it?”

  “Flint.”

  She was an uncomprehending savage. How did she think you started a fire, anyway?

  “Laser matches,” she said.

  Outside the radius of lamplight the dark was thick. Michael walked into the shadow, hands spilling light. The familiar outlines around him settled into some pattern they had worn into his soul long before, a poignant fit that overpowered for a while the prospect of pain. Hanna wanted information, he could give her some now, while he remembered: “The Post is a twelve-day journey on foot. But at the Post they have machines. They can come here in a day, in the atoes they use.”

  “Atoes…”

  A picture formed: wheeled vehicles, self-propelled and nearly silent. He had never known how they were powered. Now he guessed, from the vantage of the present. Or the future: “Electric, I think.” Willow manufacture. At Newtown, the Spectator works—

  The prick of astonishment at what his present self knew threatened to balloon. Hanna said, “Don’t think about it. Do they have aircraft?”

  “I never saw one. No, only one. But it was a spacecraft—”

  The light wavered. Something started to grow, snow and fire; he would run. Hanna said, calming him, “The atoes. How many did they have?”

  He was silent. She felt the effort he made, and then he answered: “I saw maybe a dozen altogether.”

  “And the population? And the size of the Post?” she said, because now, she knew, they talked of the Post.