The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  He sat up slowly, shaky and hungry. It had been some time since he ate, a day or longer. He only ate when Hanna insisted and sometimes refused food then. He did not know what day it was; only he knew that they had been in space a long time. He tried to remember his last meal. And met only mist.

  He sat on his bed in the dark for a long time. His mind was not clear, but seemed more clear than it had been; clear enough to know that it was clouded. He remembered—a true, new memory, this—reaching for Hanna—an hour ago? Days ago? She had pulled away. “What’s wrong?” he had said.

  “Last time you hurt me—”

  She had been afraid of him, in her eyes there were recollections of the Avalon. He said he could not have hurt her. She insisted until he thought she had imagined it, had lost her mind, and then it seemed to him that the only firm thing in the world had collapsed and gone away from him. But then she had convinced him that it was true, that he had betrayed her trust, given her pain not pleasure, retained no slightest memory of the incident—and then he knew that he was the one who was mad, and with it a monster.

  But even that was better than the other thing, than Hanna’s clear sanity being lost to him, even if she could not love him any more. And certainly after that she could not. She was gone because he had hurt her (he forgot about Control); she was gone because he was a monster.

  Another memory crept into his despair: Theo seeking help for Lise. He had turned Theo away, abandoned Lise. He got up quickly at the thought, and staggered at a surge of dizziness. When it cleared he was bending over cold water, splashing it on his face. He lifted his head and saw a monster in the mirror, a tragic mask, a face that had forgotten how to smile.

  He got out of the room somehow and went to look for Lise. He found her in her cabin, seated at a desk with a reader before her. She looked up calmly, not at all as if she were surprised to see him.

  He said, “Puss, are you all right?” His voice did not come out the way he wanted it to.

  She nodded. He found a place to sit and then could not think of anything else to say. He tried to talk anyway, stammering out some apology for his neglect, but she did not let him finish.

  “I know,” she said. “Theo told me what you’re trying to do. I know it’s hard. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  Tears of weakness blurred his eyes. It was the saddest thing he had ever heard. He was used to worrying about Lise, he was used to taking care of people, that was what he did, that was what he was. Now Lise said he should not do it. He would have to be a monster.

  Lise said critically, “Have you been eating?”

  He shook his head.

  “I thought Hanna was taking care of you,” she said. She was surprised at Hanna, she disapproved; he heard that in her voice.

  He managed to say, “I can still feed myself.”

  “I don’t think you can,” Lise said. “Wait.”

  She slipped out. He did not have the strength to follow.

  She came back with bread and butter and cheese and strong, hot tea. He ate and drank automatically. It was hard work getting the bread to his mouth at first, but he was stronger even before he finished, and the mists cleared a little more. He really had been very hungry. He could talk more easily, ask Lise about her studies. She answered with that same calmness, but came to sit beside him and drink tea from his cup, more like herself; still he thought she was subtly older, edging toward maturity.

  A picture of a baby named Carmina rose up before his eyes, and he choked on a mouthful of bread. Lise pounded his back, though it wasn’t necessary. He wanted to grip her in a tight embrace to keep her safe, forever safe. But he was afraid of what he might do to her. He swung toward tears again. “Where’s Hanna?” he said, though she was afraid of him and did not love him any more.

  “Control,” Lise said.

  “Yes, it’s her watch.”

  Lise said doubtfully, “They’re all Theo’s now, I think, except he makes Shen stay up and do more. But he went to get Hanna. He said he needed her.”

  There must be something wrong. But not too badly wrong or they would have come to get him. Or would they? Why would they?

  He got up and went out, followed by Lise; made it up the spiral stairs and into Control. Hanna and Theo were there, their backs to him. It was blindingly bright. There was a high, regular sound in the room; it was familiar, he ought to know what it was.

  He did. It was an audible accompaniment to some contact GeeGee had made, carrying no information but providing certain psychological benefits for the novice in space—or for a wanderer long out of reach of human sounds.

  “A relay,” he said to the pair of backs, so weakly he thought they wouldn’t hear him.

  They did, though. Hanna said, “It’s Omega. We’ve crossed over.” She glanced around and went very still. She had not seen him in full light for two or three days. She said in an ordinary voice—but her eyes studied him sharply—“It’s a complicated course from here. There’s no prime route between here and where we need to go. We’ll change course several times. The interpolations are complex; it will take nearly four weeks.”

  Four weeks were nothing to Michael who blundered through forty years. Theo also turned around; he looked at Michael narrowly and said, “We can get news now.”

  Michael looked at him stupidly. Theo said, “We can find out if the situation’s changed. Maybe they’ve made new offers, public offers. At least we can find out about the mission to Uskos.”

  It was too much; he swayed and they came to him, Theo alerted by his face, Hanna by something more. He clutched Hanna, trying to talk. He said, or thought he said, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

  “Satisfied?” Theo said to Hanna savagely, when they had got him back to bed.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  * * *

  He heard Theo say he was not diseased and talk about what had been done for Henrik. He put out a hand and got hold of Theo’s wrist. He was weak, for a man not diseased, but it was not that his body had failed him; rather, the air here, in the present, was a thick liquid hard to push through.

  But he did not have to talk. Hanna translated to Theo what he thought.

  “He doesn’t want to be drugged like Henrik was.”

  “Am I supposed to just stand here and watch this happen?”

  “It has a natural course.”

  Somehow, through Hanna, he felt Theo’s incredulity.

  Hanna’s voice. “I don’t say that. He says it. He says: let him finish.”

  They argued. In the end Theo won; won something. Michael knew that because he felt Theo inject something into his arm. Maybe it was supposed to connect him with some kind of reality.

  He felt it begin to work. And saw reality, all right, only not the one Theo had wanted him to have.

  The sense of Theo’s presence faded. But Hanna’s was strong.

  Stop it, she said to him, stop!

  He wouldn’t; he couldn’t. Hanna could not know the favor she had done him, opening the past; nor Theo just now with the stuff he had forced into Michael’s veins. He saw like an open door the gate of trance Hanna had shown him long before.

  Don’t do it. Stop—

  —walking in the dark morning, the days were shorter, we left before dawn to reach Sutherland by dark. Bitter cold but we were warm enough with movement and furs. We’d eaten before we left, hot cakes Mirrah baked on the hearth; we had more packed away for mid-day, and meat, fresh-cooked for a journey of only a day and that in the cold; but I always pitied the little caged animals killed for meat, I couldn’t do it, couldn’t slash the small furred throats, though Pavah said it had to be done, I’d have to learn to do it, praying maybe in apology as many did acknowledging kinship; but he’d never made me do it. Time enough he said— Cheese Mirrah had sent, fruit from the winter store, water and strong wine, till Pavah laughed and groaned: “You’ll kill us of surfeit, woman! It’s only lunch we want!”

  “It’s hard walking on a
n empty stomach,” she had said. “To be warm you need to eat.”

  For a long time we talked little, warming with the walking and the rising sun. We did not speak of the Post till almost midday. And Pavah would have said nothing had I not asked, and when I did it was no great question; only, “What do we do at Sutherland, Pavah?”

  “Tell them what happened,” he said. “Find if they’ve thoughts on it.”

  “How much thinking can there be?” I said.

  “Thoughts of resistance, perhaps. There might be some. But it would be folly.”

  “Why?” I said. “Would it be like Fairfield?” But Fairfield wasn’t real to me, it was only a name.

  “You heard of that? Of course you did,” he said, answering himself. “Croft’s small, we all hear what the others hear.”

  “I don’t know what they did at Fairfield,” I said. “I heard of killing, but how? There are strong men in Croft and Sutherland; Fairfield must have had strong men, too.”

  “With no weapons but hunters’ knives,” he said, “or woodsmen’s axes.”

  “Hunters have bows, too, and spears.”

  “That’s not what I speak of.” We walked on in silence. I did not break it; I knew he would speak again. He said, “It’s time you knew of such things. I thought to wait till you were older, but you grow fast. And maybe you’ll age faster still, if—”

  He didn’t go on from “if”; he started over. “They’ve weapons that shoot projectiles that pierce to the heart, fired by a burning powder. They’ve weapons that pour out a light that burns. Those I’ve seen, in the hunts in the forests beyond the Post. And I’ve heard of a weapon that seemingly does nothing at all, except when it’s pointed at a man, he dies. That I’ve not seen. Nor have I seen another thing they talk of, a weapon that stops and crumples a man in a step, though later he wakes unharmed. It might be true. It might not.”

  “The hunts you saw, was it when you went to the Post for Croft?” I said, but I knew it was not.

  “They were before you even were, before your Mirrah and I married; when we lived there.”

  “What did you do there? How did you come away?”

  “We were servants of the masters, Lillin and I. It was a hard life, though not as hard as some. When I came to know Lillin, I asked permission to leave, to go away west of the mountains, and it was granted.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.

  “Well, you ought to know this; maybe you’ll need to know it one day. That’s not something that happens often, a servant permitted to leave. To leave without permission is against the law. A man can be punished for it, or a woman; they can even be killed. But they let me go because I was an embarrassment.”

  He grinned, his teeth white as cloud in the winter sky.

  “Why an embarrassment?” I said.

  “These eyes. Yours and mine and Carmina’s. My mirrah, your grandmother you never knew, was a servant, too, and a pretty thing. A son of a master’s house took a liking to her. I was the result. These are known eyes, one family’s eyes, though they’ve spread through intermarriage. When you see them, you know whose blood runs in the veins. And you see them in the fields and factories, too; but they were willing enough to get them out of the house. And so we were allowed to leave. We had to leave behind all we had, though; came to Croft with the clothes on our backs.”

  I understood about the eyes, all right, having worked with breeding stock since I could walk, but I didn’t know what it all meant. He wouldn’t talk about it any more; after a while I stopped asking questions.

  Then in the afternoon we came to Sutherland. It lay behind a hill, else we’d have seen the trouble before it was too late; but men stepped out of a grove at the side of the road. They wore clothes like the men who’d been to Croft, and they carried things in their hands they pointed at us.

  Pavah stopped and pushed me behind him, all in a moment. I didn’t want to hide behind his back, but he wanted me there, it was hard to know what I should do. He said a few words to them, and they to him; he told them we weren’t of Sutherland; they told us to go on, we were Sutherlanders now. And we went on; because I knew without asking what the things were the men carried, they were weapons like Pavah had told me about, and the men watched us.

  When we came around the hill, I saw the streets of Sutherland were full of more of the metal wagons than I’d ever seen before, ever imagined there could be. People were carrying things into the wagons, furniture, clothes, household goods: the houses were being emptied. “So it’s come,” Pavah said.

  The Postmen went away but there were others everywhere, all with weapons, they watched us with the others. Then Joan saw us and came to us. She’d been crying, and by the time she got to us she was crying again. “Alek, you shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  Between sobs she told him how they’d come in the wagons in the morning, made the people come together, told them what to do. While she talked, I looked around and saw many people weeping, but they kept on anyway, carrying things to the wagons.

  Pavah said, “Has there been resistance?”

  “In the first hours, and two men dead.” She named them; one was Kimon. “Since then, no one. We think of Fairfield. But I was nearly the third. I was nearly the third.”

  “How was that?” Pavah said.

  She stopped crying, still too angry for tears. “One of them put his hands on Ader. He put his hands on her. And I screamed at him and went to kill him, but an officer stopped him, stopped me. ‘There’ll be none of that,’ he said, and the animal went away. Alek, there’ll be nothing left. They said they’ll come back for the stores and the herds.”

  “Have they said anything about Croft?” he asked.

  “It’s next, they said.”

  Elot came up then; Joan cried and he held her and patted her shoulders, though he was heavy with grief. Pavah started helping the people load their goods, and I did what he did. It was late, the dark began to come; he looked around to make sure none of the Postmen were near and said, “I have to get back to Croft. I must tell them what’s coming, tell them not to resist.”

  I said hotly, “We’re to go like oxen where we’re driven?”

  “Where’s there to run to, in winter? They’d be on us in a day. You haven’t seen the guns fired yet, Mikhail, but you heard Joan: two men dead. Otto’d be the first to go in Croft, I think.”

  “When will we go?” I said.

  “Soon, in the dusk. Listen. There’s a risk. If I don’t get clean away at once, they’ll shoot. I have to carry back word, I have to be with Mirrah, but you don’t. We’ll all be taken to the same place. Stay with Joan, and we’ll find each other when we get where they take us.”

  “I don’t want to stay,” I said.

  “But I want you to,” he said, and dropped what he was carrying and hugged me hard for a long time. I wanted to cry, but I was too old for that.

  “I love you,” he said. And he didn’t have to go back to Croft at all; only he couldn’t bear Mirrah’s being without him.

  When it was dark, he edged to the edge of the light and then took off, fleet of foot. He underestimated the range of the guns, I think. While a little light still caught him they fired, one, two, three—I think all three bullets found him. He was dead when he hit the ground, he was dead when I got to him, and one of them fired at me, too, but he missed and the others stopped him, knowing I wouldn’t run far, only to him. I threw myself on him and cried and cried until Joan came and made me leave him—

  Michael cried for an hour altogether, without shame or restraint. Hanna held him in the dark and cried, too. He said, “I could have run the other way, gone first, distracted them, they might not have seen him in time, they might have missed.”

  “Michael, Mikhail, don’t say that, no. He did what you would have done in his place.”

  “If I had, if I had—”

  “There was nothing you could do. There was nothing you could do! It would not have changed anything.”

&n
bsp; “But he—”

  “—did what he had to do. Hush, my love. Hush.”

  * * *

  As if he had crossed some dreadful threshold and, having crossed it, was stronger, Michael surprised Hanna by making a partial recovery. Sometimes he was much like himself; was himself. Turned up in Control at his scheduled hours, turned questions aside, took over the running of his ship with relief at its prosaic demands as if he visited another country and was glad for the escape. He was much quieter than before. And whenever he slipped away into the half-trance half-dream, Hanna always knew at once, even if she were as far away from him as it was possible to get on the Golden Girl. She went with him each time, flying to his side—

  —two days in the damn metal wagons, crowded among the weeping women, a shrieking baby or two. There was hardly air for breath. An old man died and was taken away—for burial the Postmen said but I think not, I think his bones lie scattered still beside the road. His old wife cried all the second day, rocked back and forth in misery. Joan tried to take care of me, stayed at my side until then, but the old woman was her aunt, her dead mother’s sister, and needed her, no, needed more than Joan could ever give; but she left me with Ader. We wriggled to a corner and kept it. In the dark Ader gave me what comfort she could; did Joan know? And look the other way? Thinking, the boy’s our own kind, a good boy, Alek’s son? I was too young but near old enough; did Joan think Ader a mother at, what, fourteen?—would be safer that way? And then we came to the forests flatter than the river valley, old seabed it must have been, the sea not far they said, and under the topsoil, sand. The wind blew all the time. Sea level: summers were longer there, I heard. All the same in winter it was dusted with snow, but mud squelched underfoot after morning frosts. Flocks of waterfowl darkened the sky and the sky was big with no mountains to close it in. Only forest.

  Joan found Mirrah right away. Wouldn’t let me see her at first; told her about Pavah so I needn’t. I don’t know how she told her, what words she used. Then Mirrah had to see me, was frantic to see me, as if I were dead, too, until she did. I’d never seen her cry before. Shaking with despair in the night, and Carmina cried, too, not knowing why. And I wanted to protect them, to save them, but it was too late, was already done.