The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “I don’t know—”

  “Here, then?” She let him retreat; the village was safer. “Do you know how many people were here?”

  “Ninety? Eighty-five?” Births. A death—

  Instinctively she steered away from the death. “You must have been related to all of them.”

  “No. I wasn’t. Mirrah and Pavah, they used to live somewhere else. They came here to get away—”

  The circle of light expanded. They had been pacing through the dark without being able to see anything; now some things were visible. The stone walls had an air of friendliness and safety, the austerity of the interior a grace counterpointing the lush summer outside. The stone was very clean. It had been polished to a warm glow with sand. There were furnishings well made from the region’s light wood, each component made of strips bound together for strength. He saw a simple chair with double vision. One: an old friend. Two: a folk artifact, a collector’s piece. Rugs braided by dark slender hands. A spray of dried flowers bright in black hair. And here in the deep well of a window cut through stone, a doll, his mother’s treasure, the head of crudely glazed ceramic, the body stuffed with rag. And here: the picture she had sewn from colored scraps—

  —borrowed a steel needle from Padma, she’d lost her own. A crowd of tiny figures. “They don’t look much like people,” I said, teasing her; she was different that spring, soft and round, and bigger day by day. There weren’t many children born there, they’d thought I was all they’d have. Now here was another coming. They were happy, and I was, too.

  The work pinned in the heavy frame Pavah had made was so bright the colors jumped out. “Look, Mikki, look at the gown this one wears, just like the color of the sky. Oh, if I could make it shiny, like the gown was! If I could show you how it was! And the stones the great lady wore round her neck!”

  “Where, Mirrah?”

  “At the Post, before you were born.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been to the Post.”

  Her fingers moved quick and nervous; they were worn, but they looked just like mine. “I don’t like to talk about it, Mikki.”

  “Why?”

  She laughed at all my “why’s,” she always laughed, but she answered when she could. That time she didn’t laugh. Her eyes weren’t like mine, I had Pavah’s eyes, hers were dark, she hid things in them—

  It was full night again, this was Hanna at his side, her hand on his arm in reality and in dream. She said softly, “Was Mirrah her name?”

  “No. No. It just means, Mother—”

  He longed deeply for the Golden Girl.

  There were voices outside. The people of the place were coming back. But he could not face them yet.

  The flute was silent and neglected. Michael slept during much of the day to make up for the sleep he did not get at night. He rarely remembered the dreams that woke him each night, once with a scream. Hanna talked of ending the experiment. It was going too slowly, she said. For every day when she saw a mountainside or a stone house clearly, there were two or three when he could not or would not go farther into the dark, when he stood on the edge of it and the light would not come and there were no words in the sounds of the voices there, though he came closer and closer to giving them names, closer to knowing what they said. In the nights, after the dreams woke him and left him unable to sleep, he roamed GeeGee. Sometimes he met Henrik. He told Henrik what he knew about their destination, what he could remember, hoping to jar Henrik into speech. But Henrik only grunted. There was no doubt that he was sane. Nor did he seem to be afraid any more. Hanna, when Michael told her about those one-sided conversations, said Henrik was angry.

  “You can tell from what I say?”

  “I can tell without that. I feel him sometimes.”

  “I guess that’s better than the way he was. Sometimes when I talk to him he seems, oh—I don’t know. Satisfied.”

  “Satisfied? Do you tell him how much it hurts to do what you’re doing?”

  “I think it shows, when I talk about it.”

  “So he’s satisfied. Because you’re suffering?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “Ugh. Let’s stop it. For a while, anyway.”

  “We’re not going fast enough as it is. We could get there before I remember anything useful.”

  “Oh, crazy man—!” Hanna did not know she echoed Shen.

  “Not as crazy as I’m likely to get.”

  “I know. I know. I know.”

  Hanna did not walk through Michael’s memories any more, she only stood at the edge of them and watched—

  —Pavah didn’t talk much more than Mirrah did. He had a smile—I see it in mirrors sometimes. He talked some about space. Told me the sun was a star, showed me other stars, what you could see. Said we were on a planet, told me there were more, with people on them, he said…

  The night Carmina came, he talked then. Anittas the midwife shooed us out when the pains got close together. We both kissed Mirrah before we went and I was scared. The animals, I’d seen animals get born, this wasn’t the same. And Mirrah who always knew what to do was helpless, there was no way to stop this, no way to hurry or change it. But she wasn’t scared; just busy, working hard.

  We went to sit in Firmin’s house. Other men kept the vigil, too, while the women stayed with Mirrah. They drank ale, Pavah let me have some, and he and all the others, they treated me different that night, more like a man. Pavah I could tell was listening, I did, too, but you couldn’t hear anything through the stone. I didn’t listen much to the talk of crops and herds, but after a while they started in on Otto, Otto who slipped away whenever he could to Sutherland where Marlie lived. “Your turn next,” they said.

  “I remember,” Ugo said, “when Otto couldn’t see it; couldn’t see bringing children into the world. I told him then a girl would change his mind.”

  “I still don’t know it’s a good idea,” Otto said.

  “Maybe not in the east,” Firmin said. “Here it’s different.”

  “Only as long as they let us be,” Otto said.

  “What could they want with us? Some grain sometimes; they’re better off letting us alone.”

  “So far,” Pavah said, trying to hear through stone. “No reason to think it’ll change. But I didn’t like what I saw, when I went east two years ago.”

  Pavah was what they called the outside man. When there was business with another town, he did it; all the towns had somebody like that. So he usually was the first to get news.

  “What did you see?” Abram said. The others all knew, Abram must have known, too, but he was old, sometimes he forgot things, though his fingers never forgot a tune the old fiddle had known. It was there that night between his feet, ready to celebrate.

  “Orchards dying, for one thing,” Pavah said. “And at Sutherland last summer, Joan, you know, went east to negotiate a new harvest machine. She got it without much need to bargain—because, she said, the blight’s spread to the grain, they don’t need all the machines they have, there’s nothing for them to do.”

  “It’s nothing to do with us,” Ugo said. “That’s far away.”

  “They’re finally converting,” Pavah said. “The native varieties are resistant, that’s true. But when the conversion’s complete, then what? Native strains follow the seasons, like you’d expect. One crop a year. With the imports they get three. Now they’ve gone over there’s a third as much food. Stockpiles don’t last forever. They’ll run short. Then what?”

  I never heard the answer; there was a stirring at the door and Abram’s daughter Padma came in smiling.

  “A girl,” she said to Pavah. “Pretty as her mother, healthy, too. They’re both well.”

  Pavah’s face lit up. “Let’s go see your sister, Mikki,” he said. We went out, the other men trailed out, too, Abram with his fiddle, and the music followed us to where Mirrah suckled Carmina. She didn’t look pretty to me, all purple and squashed! But it was a good night all the same. After a whil
e I went out where the music was and danced, we all danced half the night. We lit a fire for dancing, but later it died, there was light enough from the flowers and the sky was alive, the arc of the Ring looked close enough to touch and the fires Pavah said were burning stones flew from end to end of the sky, even the moons looked solid not just points of light running, running, and Abram made me recite all their names. And before I went to sleep I saw Carmina again, she and Mirrah and Pavah were all asleep together and I thought: when I was born it was like this, too. And now it’s all of us together and this funny-looking babe is part of us. I’m somebody’s brother. She’s their daughter. My sister. Ours.

  Remembering was hard work, draining. When something came out of him it stayed out, and not by itself, but surrounded by a net of related memories to be examined one by one. Sometimes they triggered other things, details like electrical shocks. He could begin to sketch an outline for Hanna. The villages like a string of jewels at the base of the mountains—

  “—Croft to Dunhill to Sutherland and then south,” the peddler said. “Not last year, though. Not last year.”

  Mirrah hefted a skillet, testing its weight with her fragile wrist. Carmina on her shoulder babbled and peered around with bright bright eyes.

  “Where were you last year?”

  “East of here. A long way east.”

  Mirrah laid the skillet in the midsummer dust. She’d heard the new sound in his voice. So had I. Mirrah wasn’t going to say any more and I didn’t know what to ask. The other women, they were bolder. They got him to say it: Fairfield. He didn’t try to hold out, didn’t want to—he said: “Fairfield. I was at Fairfield.”

  It was quieter. The women still handled the cloth and the pots. There was a ring they handed round, it had red stones, Otto came later and bought it for Marlie, for when they married. The women kept looking at the ring. Their minds weren’t on it, though. They started to use the kind of talk grown-ups used, not like they didn’t want children to understand, it was just that there was so much they didn’t have to say, things they knew and kids didn’t. They looked grim. Most everybody that day was in the fields, just a few old women were there when the peddler came over the dusty road, not really a road, a dirt track. And Mirrah and me; I’d been sick.

  “Fairfield’s still there,” he said. “But it’s not what it was. Half the able-bodied men gone.”

  “Dead,” someone said.

  “Who knows? They took them away in the night, the ones they didn’t kill on the square the first day—”

  “Mikki,” Mirrah said, “go look in the cart. Look for the knives.”

  I didn’t want to go, he’d be there a couple of days, there was no hurry.

  But Mirrah pushed me away, toward the cart. “You’ll be trapping with Pavah, come winter. You’ll need a good knife. Go look. Go look!”

  Another night, this one arbitrary, a night in space. They all ran together, all the nights, the lamps of the flowers, warm summer nights in Ell, the storm with the lighting flaring, Ree with rain lashing the windowpanes, night after night on the Golden Girl—

  Michael’s head lay in Hanna’s lap. Her hands were soft on his face and scarcely moved.

  “Tell me the beginning,” said her soft voice.

  The beginning was in GeeGee’s memory, but he did not need to refer to it. He said, “The Hobbes Settlement Corporation was founded in the year 2398 by Richard Hobbes and Thomas Shadhili. Hobbes lived in the former nation of United States, in Namerica. I couldn’t trace Shadhili. There was a list of nineteen hundred and four investors. Counting whole families, they represented maybe eight thousand people. The philosophical basis of the venture was isolationist. You know what Earth was like then.”

  Hanna said guiltily, “Refresh my memory.”

  “Taxes were high everywhere, higher than any time anywhere on Earth, to support the new colonies. These people had money. They hated the taxes. And the idea of the Polity was in the air. This was before the Plague Years, which was when the idea of a central authority— what turned into the Polity—really took hold. But it was coming, and it wasn’t a popular idea. The people who signed up with Hobbes and Shadhili, they didn’t want to be around when it happened. They didn’t want their descendants to be around. That was one of the reasons for the whole Explosion. One of the many reasons.”

  “Yes. I knew that,” she said with some complacency. “And then?”

  “They thought it out well. They equipped the expedition well. But they needed a labor force, so they took twenty thousand other people with them, people who couldn’t afford to invest, who were indigent, as far as I could tell. Desperate people. They called it, the investors called it, benevolence. I never ran across any criticism of it. Maybe there wasn’t any. There was too much going on then, too much to criticize, too much even to keep up with. What were twenty thousand people, with the millions pouring out? But I’ve seen the manifests. If you read between the lines, look at the names, look at the places of origin, you can see where the labor force came from. The places that developed last, mostly. The people with dark skin. In Croft—”

  It was the first time he had used the name of the village, and it stopped him. After a minute he said, “In Croft, almost everybody was darker than Pavah and me—”

  He stopped again, suddenly. Then he said in a different voice, “Why?”

  Her hands moved on his face. “There must have been mingling, over the years. On D’neera we’re all more or less brown.”

  He stored the question, let it drop.

  “There isn’t much more. They left. Nobody ever heard of them again. As far as I know.”

  “Somebody did.”

  Hanna tried to match it up with his memories in the dark. The pieces did not quite fit. Time had nibbled away the edges on both sides. But it was possible to make a first approximation of what had happened.

  “There was a distinct class system from the start,” she said. “Did they know where they were going?”

  “Only in the most general way, I think. Remember: there was a wave of optimism all through the Explosion. The universe was full of Earths, they thought. It is, I guess. They’re just harder to find than it seemed at first. The prospectus just said, they’d establish a settlement on a planet where a high quality of life could reasonably be expected to be maintained. It said which direction they’d take, but it didn’t spot any candidates, and anybody who read it, I think, would assume they never meant to go as far as they did. But maybe they meant to all along, meant to disappear, meant to sever the connection from the start. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe it happened later, for some other reason.”

  They were silent. She bent to kiss his forehead. He was drifting away again. Remembering—

  —Otto was distracted that harvest time, but happy all the time. Otto had a harvest of his own on the way.

  “They’d best hurry up and marry,” Mirrah said, but nobody could take time for a wedding during harvest, not in Croft or Sutherland either. It didn’t much matter; the ribald teasing was just the same as it would be if they’d married before starting the baby, the only difference was that Marlie hadn’t left her mother’s house yet, still lived in Sutherland instead of in Croft with Otto. Even at harvest the men found time to work on building Otto’s house. The women through the summer, when the peddlers came around, had bought household goods for Marlie as well as for themselves; now they sorted through outgrown infants’ gear, sewed soft blankets. Mirrah had a special reason to be pleased; Carmina would have a playmate almost her own age.

  Marlie held out till after harvest, but only just. The day before the wedding half of Croft packed up and went to Sutherland, oxen pulling the carts. It was a fine day, we left early in the morning when the nip of fall was sharp in the air and frost made the grasses by the roadside sparkle, and the stubble in the fields was bright as broken glass. Later it got warm; we sang all the way. Otto wanted to walk, but they made him ride in the cart. “You need to rest up,” they said. I didn’t ride eit
her; I ran ahead with Pehr, we had contests throwing stones. He was older than me and he always won, but I thought I would be bigger than him someday, Pavah was a big man. In Sutherland there was a feast that started as soon as we got there. Marlie was as big around as the oxen, she was a little thing and now she looked just like a ball. Otto shouted when he saw her and picked her up, grunting, though even carrying the baby she couldn’t have been heavy; she beat at his shoulders to make him put her down, big rough Otto who’d had this silly grin on his face ever since he started courting Marlie.

  “I’ll never act that dumb,” Pehr whispered in my ear, but then I caught him looking at Ader, Joan’s girl; I hadn’t seen her for half a year, and she wasn’t the same little kid any more.

  It went on all night and half the next day. There was plenty of food and plenty of ale and drink made from the sweet berries that grew along the river. Abram had come riding in a cart with his fiddle. Sutherland had a piper, Kimon his name was; he played with Abram and I fell in love with the pipe. He let me use it a little, and when he saw how much I wanted it, he said he’d make me one. People came in and out all night, they’d sleep for a while in someone’s house and then come back to eat and drink and dance and talk some more. Toward morning it got quiet; more people had gone out to sleep for good. Mirrah and Carmina went to Joan’s and went to bed, but Pavah and I stayed up. I was sleepy, but I didn’t want to miss anything. The talk was softer, Abram dozed off in a corner with the fiddle on his knees, and I sat by Pavah and tried to keep awake while he talked with Ugo and Joan and Elot. Joan did for Sutherland what Pavah did for Croft, carried on outside business. Elot her husband did what Ugo did, organized work in the fields, settled disagreements; it was Elot who’d marry Otto and Marlie the next day. In the middle of the night it was cold outside. Inside the moothall— bigger than Croft’s, Sutherland had more people—it was warm, there were three big hearths and fires burned in all of them. The ale went around, but Joan talked about a man who’d come to Sutherland from the Post in one of the metal wagons that ran by themselves. Nobody laughed any more. She didn’t like what he’d come for, didn’t like what he’d said.