The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  “What does it say?” I said.

  “It says get out. Get out. Get out.”

  “What does this mean?” I said.

  “Do you know what they had at Millside?” he said. “There was a map of the wall that showed each place where weapons are stored. The locks are strange things, they are worked with numbers that are pushed with the hand. For some of them we had the numbers.”

  I began to understand, and not all the ice in my back came from the winter.

  “If we go, where can we go?” I said. But he did not answer, and shut the door in my face.

  I did not know what it all meant, but I knew enough to be afraid as I ran back through the dark, though it was only the beginning of fear, born less of understanding than of what I had seen in Kia’s face and heard in Leren’s voice. So I hurried, scarcely heeding the ice underfoot; only as I came close to Kia’s street, I saw light shining over the roofs; I saw, as I came closer still, light filtering between houses and other small buildings that lay between; and I heard voices on the wind, men’s voices, some shouting to others. I did not feel any fear, did not feel anything, except an urgency to get to Mirrah and to Kia’s house, and this carried me over the ice. But I ran without looking at the ground. My eyes were all for the sky. For when I had gone only a little distance, not far from Leren’s house, I had seen a thing that hung in the sky not much higher than rooftop-level, a thing big as many houses put together. I could not make out what it was, I saw only one piece of it at a time, as the roofs between cut one part or another from my sight, but it was long and slender like a needle in the sky, and shafts of light shone downward from its belly. They are not directed at Kia’s house, I said to myself. They will not touch me. And I continued to say this until I came around the last corner and saw all of it at once: the air and the street filled with light from the thing in the sky, the street filled with Postmen, too, all carrying weapons and looking about and shouting to each other, and Kia’s door wide open, and then, tearing from that door greater than the noise of the crowd, a woman’s screams.

  I did not know if it were Mirrah or Kia I heard, I did not know or feel anything, I only ran on blind to the Postmen and the thing in the sky. I was seized and hurled to the ground, though I fought, knowing for the first time what it was to wish to hurt men with my hands; for they stood between me and Mirrah. And a time passed which I could not measure. I felt no cold, though I lay bound on the ice and bound also to one of the Postmen’s wagons; for I had continued to struggle and seek to drag myself toward the house after my hands and feet were tied, until they attached me to something that would not move. I wept and bit at the ropes and when anyone came near me, screamed curses, and the men, well-armed as they were, and helpless as I was, stood away from me with amazement in their eyes, as if I were a wild beast. And the sounds came from Kia’s house in broken fragments, there would be a silence and then another scream, at each of which I thought my whole body would shatter; until there came the sound of guns, and after that, from that house, a silence that did not end.

  At that the strength went out of me, to fight or do anything else. The street remained bright, but I saw all else that happened in colors of black. Men came from the house, the first of them being the traveler Tistou. And he waved the Postmen back, and as they removed to the farther side of the street they released me from the wagon and took me with them, dragging me across the ice; and the traveler spoke into something he carried, and a greater shaft of light came from the thing over my head, and Kia’s house was not there any more. There was only fire where it had been.

  Now none of Kia’s neighbors had shown themselves, but the Postmen went from house to house ordering them into the street until it was filled with bodies and moving limbs edging away from the fire, and one shouted at them, a man dressed in clothes so fine that I knew he came from behind the wall; and he told them to look on what had been done and learn from it. After that for a further lesson he broke my hands. And I knew nothing for a little time after, but the cold woke me and in my pain I saw that the traveler knelt over me. He took my chin in his large cold hand just as Kia had once done; only when he looked into my eyes, which he had not seen before in their natural state, he laughed and spoke to the man who stood by in his rich garments.

  “They will not soon forget this night,” the traveler said. “I am glad to have been of help. No reward is necessary. But if you insist, then I will take this—”

  And his mouth smiled at me. But his eyes were transparent, as I had suspected, and there was nothing behind them but a great emptiness. And how could anything else have been there? Because where Mirrah and Carmina had been, and Kia and Alban, and no doubt Leren, too, and their homes and their lives, now there was nothing, what marked his path was emptiness and absence and lack, where there had been life. And I knew in some way what he would do to me, how it would be done, what living would be like, such living as I had left, and I knew that when he was done he would kill me; but I knew also that if he did not I would never know fear again. There would not be anything worse that could happen to me than what had happened in this season, along with what this traveler would cause to happen in the waste he prepared for me. But not all of it had happened yet, and the agony of my hands filled all my body and mind, and I could still be afraid, because I was.

  “Take him,” said the man from behind the wall. And the traveler took me away.

  During the days it took for the last memories to come forward into light, Hanna did not leave Michael in body or in thought. She was a silent spectator (as he wished), and at the end of it he evicted her. Not forcibly, but by way of something that was half request and half order; in either case, she could not refuse it.

  She told the others, “He is very sick.” But she was not sure how true that was, though he did not talk to her. He lay on his bed and it was difficult to tell whether he was awake or asleep, even when his eyes were open. But he ate, when Hanna brought food to the room. And as before, in the middle of the night he left it and wandered around the Golden Girl with an uncanny knack for avoiding anyone else who might be abroad in the night.

  GeeGee came to Heartworld, then left it far behind. They were nearly at the point of decision. Soon they must turn back, or entrust themselves to a course known, in all the universe, only to the man who had as many names as there were stars.

  Hanna always knew precisely where the Golden Girl was. She spent a third of her time in Control, dividing up each twenty-four hours into pieces with Theo and Shen. She did the slight work automatically and otherwise listened anxiously for Michael’s voice, footsteps, even a thought. She did not hear any of those things. And once or twice she whispered her birthname to GeeGee, the code that would permit her to reach across space and establish a connection with her own past life—but she never went any further than saying the word. If Theo did it, too, in his own hours on watch, she did not know about it.

  This half-a-life continued without change until they were a few hours from the relay which they had begun to call Theta, to mark its distance from Omega on the other side of space. In the early morning hours, not long after midnight, Shen watched GeeGee measure the distance to that endpoint. Theo could not sleep; he came to watch, too, not saying anything. Lise woke from a nightmare and joined them, seeking what comfort she could get from their presence. And Henrik, wide awake, got the notion that the walls of mirrors were looking at him with some purpose, and went out to escape. He did not mean to go to the others in Control, he wanted to keep away from them, but he couldn’t shake the thought of the mirrors, the mirrors might follow him; so he went to Control, just in case.

  Hanna woke up, too. Michael was gone. She went out shivering (she had been dreaming of winter) to look for him. GeeGee was waiting and silent. Hanna went into Control, into the middle of the waiting, and Theo looked around and said, “What next?”

  How the hell do I know?

  She was standing in the door, and she did not know the answer even when the footsteps final
ly came up behind her. Hands fell on her shoulders. She waited to find out whose they were.

  “It’s time to start feeding the course to GeeGee,” Michael said. So if she turned around, it would not be a twelve-year-old boy she saw, a poor fit in the man’s body. But maybe it would not be Michael either.

  Shen asked no questions; she began talking to GeeGee, preparing the ship for the new course. Michael said, “The language won’t be hard. It’s got a lot in common with Standard. If you could learn Ellsian, you can learn this.”

  He turned Hanna around and spoke to her. The others didn’t know enough to understand his next words; not yet. “I don’t think what we’re going to find is what I left. When I left, there was the blight, the epidemic, the start of a revolution. We don’t know how they turned out. But I don’t think anything’s gotten better.”

  Hanna said, “You mean to do something about it.”

  “Something.”

  “You would. But what?”

  He shrugged. He looked just as he had always looked, except that he was very thin. He said, “B made a lot of difference. We could make a difference, too. You can let things happen, or you can make them happen.”

  “What kinds of things?” she said.

  “We won’t know till we get there,” he said.

  Chapter 7

  With a kind of jolt, a thump Hanna later swore she heard, the small world of the Golden Girl returned to normal. Lise began to smile again. Shen told Michael daily that he had gotten too soft to be a revolutionary. Even Henrik came out of his hole, drawn by the general atmosphere of well-being, and some of his furtiveness dissipated. He said he would tell them everything he could, but except for what he knew about the men of the Avalon, he had no useful information. “So all that was for nothing,” Michael said, meaning Henrik’s abduction, but he forgot to apologize for it.

  There was nothing to do but spend the remaining weeks teaching the others how to get along in his native tongue. He taught them everything else he remembered, too, warning them that information thirty years out of date might be more dangerous than none. Instead of the caution he meant them to learn, they developed a lively curiosity about what they would find. The holiday atmosphere of Uskos returned, the journey became an excursion, and at times they left GeeGee to run herself and played games in the lounge, shouting with laughter.

  Hanna should have known better. She knew it, too, but her fear for Michael had gone on too long and gone too deep. It was enough to see him whole, enough to be loved again. He was back. It was enough.

  A thread of black ahead of them got bigger, turned into a cloud, grew until it covered everything before them. When they passed into its tenuous fringe, it looked as if nothing was there, as if they plunged into black emptiness. Not even that troubled them. They sailed through the dust in a capsule of light, and the only acknowledgment they gave the dark was to agree that it was boring. They came to the stellar system of Gadrah, took a week to get through its shoals, hunted down the place itself, and finally saw it: blue and rich with water, dappled with cloud, magnificently ringed.

  Hanna had taken care to time the arrival for the middle of the night, and lied about when it would happen. She did not want anyone but Michael in Control when the time came. When it did, he stood without moving, not taking his eyes off the sight. Even if the others had been there, he would not have noticed them. Hanna stayed out of his head, out of his way, for a full hour. But finally she went to him and touched him, and he smiled at her. She had never seen so much peace in his eyes.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “I’ll get some sleep, then.”

  “Do.”

  She was nearly at the door when he said, “Thank you.”

  Hanna added up everything that had happened since her last sight of Earth.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said, and went to bed.

  * * *

  Cruising coastlines: at high magnification each coast was the track of a demented snake. They stayed high, out of reach of the naked eye. It was amazing how many shores were backed by mountains close enough and tall enough to suggest that the Post might be there.

  It would have been faster to look for heat, but GeeGee was not seeing so well in infrared. She was considerably overdue for maintenance.

  It took longer to explore a coastline than Hanna had ever dreamed. They limited the search to the eastern edges of continental bodies, and to temperate latitudes. Even with those restrictions there was a lot of coastline, and it was deserted, not counting the profusion of animal life. Hanna looked at the animals and shuddered. Not because these animals were especially frightening—they were not, they came in an ordinary range of shapes and habits—but because there were no humans, nothing had been tamed. There weren’t many children born here, he had said. There had never been many children. Something on Gadrah wouldn’t let humans breed.

  After three days they had narrowed the search to a coast which had been masked by cloud for all of those days. The clouds were not local, but part of an immense funnel that spread over half a continent, and the funnel was not moving. “It would be a long hurricane season,” Hanna said, thinking of the length of all seasons here, and Michael looked at her blankly. Hurricanes had not come to the mountains. “Radio,” she said suddenly (it had nothing to do with hurricanes), and his face was more blank still.

  But Lise—who sometimes still nestled against the wall, but today, prim and upright, had taken a seat—said, “They would want radio. To keep in touch with the people who ran the mines. And the soldiers, when they went places.”

  “I never heard of one or saw one,” Michael said. And when Hanna set GeeGee to scanning, they heard nothing.

  This part of the world was turning away from the sun, and GeeGee with it. It was getting dark under the clouds down there. Aboard GeeGee, however, it was morning.

  “We’ll have to wait for the clouds to clear,” Hanna said.

  “It’s fall there,” Michael said.

  “Hurricane season.”

  “All right, but I mean, in the fall there were weeks of cloud. If we want to see anything we’ll have to get under them.”

  “They’re low clouds. If we get under them, anybody down there can see us, too.”

  “Not at night.”

  “GeeGee is not soundless in atmosphere,” Hanna pointed out. “Do want him to hear us and look up? Castillo? ‘B’? Why do you call him B anyway? When here they called him Tistou?”

  “They called him that, B, on the ship.”

  There was a warning in his tone. Michael did not need to be in trance to remember what had happened on the proto-Avalon. But he did not talk about it.

  Hanna took the warning and retreated. “Wait till it clears.”

  A lifetime of patience told Michael to listen. He thought about it. He said finally, “We’ll wait another day or two. But not weeks.”

  The morning went on; under GeeGee, in geosynchronous orbit, evening progressed. The night would be very dark on the ground. Michael disappeared, leaving Hanna in Control; he roamed the ship, a big cat prowling a cage. Hanna tracked him without effort from her place in Control. She hardly needed to be a telepath to know what he was doing at each moment.

  When she heard a voice she said automatically, “What?” and looked around, thinking someone had come in and spoken. But Lise pointed silently at a communications panel, and another voice said incomprehensible words.

  Lise said softly, “GeeGee’s got something on radio. They said: It’s a false alarm. Nobody sick here.”

  “They? Oh!”

  “It was something like that.”

  Mike! Hanna called, and strained to hear more. It was tantalizing, the words had a familiar sound, and at each syllable she felt herself on the point of understanding. Lise was quicker; she translated the next phrases aloud while Hanna still fumbled for their meaning.

  “They say there’s no use leaving tonight. They don’t want to ride back in the rain.”

  “F
rom where? Have they said from where? Or where to?”

  “Not yet…”

  “Morning,” somebody said, she knew that word. Michael came in and stood still. “But it will be wet, all the same.”

  “If it is, it is.”

  “Well, it has rained for a week. Why should tomorrow be different?”

  Two men laughed together.

  “We’ll swim back soon as we can.”

  “Luck!”

  The radio burped, went on with a quiet hiss; there were no more voices.

  “So it’s down there,” Hanna said. “Under the clouds. Somewhere.”

  * * *

  Time to go. Michael would not wait any longer. “We’ll fly over sooner or later,” he said, “at night, too. Why not in the rain?” And they fell through the clouds into darkness and wet. “No one’s going to spot us,” Michael said. “The Post won’t have radar; what for? The Avalon’s shut down. Guaranteed. Conserving power. When what she’s got is gone, there won’t be any more.”

  More coastline. It was dark, but GeeGee built up pictures from contrast, mimicking the human eye. Sand dunes made into islands by stands of patchy grass. Bays and inlets and slow-moving creeks like the one by Millside. Marshlands turned to lakes by the rain. Finally—there was silence when they saw this—the regular outlines of cultivated fields. All of it was in tones of gray and black.

  Then buildings. There was a sound at Hanna’s side, it was Michael; she heard him before she saw the heaps of stone just barely in view.

  GeeGee moved on slowly, recording. The humans were silent. Hanna recognized what she saw from the air, as if all along, while she read Michael’s memories, she had known how it would look from above. It was all there, the irregular half-circles, the pale wall, inside it the enclave up against the sea.

  Michael murmured, “There’s no light.”

  “Some.” GeeGee’s rendering showed bright spots that had to be lights.

  “Not enough.”

  “It was a dark town.”

  “Not this dark. And not inside the wall.”