The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  They might have been going in circles, but Hanna never stopped, or even hesitated. He could not imagine what compass had its home in her head. Or was there no compass at all? Was it only that she trusted her zigzag course would lead them somewhere? Left then right, left, right—she went on steadily. But it was odd that they never were outside, never passed into an open courtyard. They might as well have been underground.

  He kept following the steady light while the wind and the rats tore at his ears, the screams got louder, the endless chuckle swelled to laughter, an uproar of mirth. So this was what he had dreamed of, what he had had to find. The passion for freedom was wasted. There were no masters left—save one; Chaos ruled here.

  The sunlit place where aliens had told him about that Master was gone. He could not remember the sun.

  If I had not been self-seeking, self-protecting—

  Hanna stopped suddenly, and he bumped into her. He put his arms around her from behind, holding on. She whispered, “I heard something,” and turned the light off. Michael only heard screams; they were louder in the dark. But his eyes adjusted and it was not perfectly black. There was a glow ahead.

  Hanna stepped out of his arms. She put away the stunner she held and gave the light to Shen. “Wait,” she said, and walked toward the light.

  The old gaslight fixtures still worked. Gas burned in a fireplace, too, with a steady subliminal roar, in a row of tiny jets that looked like teeth. There were cooking pots at the fire, a pile of blankets in front of it. An old man sat on the blankets and looked up from hollow eyes.

  Travelers, Hanna said, and spoke her piece; told the old man about Michael, half-truths. He lived here as a boy and seeks old friends.

  Dead, most like.

  His name was Conwy, he told her. Only half her mind was on what he said. The other half was on B. She did not know how to ask this Conwy about B, not without rousing more interest than she wanted to rouse.

  Three of us. May we—?

  I have little to eat, but it is yours—

  She walked back to Michael and Shen and saw that Michael was far away, farther away than he had ever been in trance or memory. He was in shock, she thought dispassionately. His face, which would be the pattern of beauty for her all the rest of her life, was bewildered. Shen had seen it, too. Hanna did not say anything to Shen about what the two of them must do. Shen already knew. There were two of them to think; that would have to be enough.

  * * *

  A dream. He remembered feeling like this before sometimes—when he was saturated with drink or drugs, and nothing that happened was connected to anything else, and faces were phantasms that came out of air and went back into it, and every phrase uttered by every voice was significant, masking a secret that in a minute, just a minute, he would understand. It was stupid, not to be able to understand.

  Here was a lean old face with sunken cheeks. “I lived in the barracks in those years,” Conwy said, “in Zed-Alpha-Eight. I had a wife. I had a child. Two other children were born dead. Now my wife and the child who lived, they are dead, too.”

  Croft, Michael heard himself say. Sutherland, he said.

  Conwy had not heard of them. He had not known a woman called Kia.

  “Dead, so many dead,” he said.

  “This time?” Michael was learning. The smell of the gas was strong, it must be full of impurities.

  “Every time. This is the fourth, and the worst. Finished, some say. I don’t know. No doubt it will come again.”

  The shadows in the room jiggled at a draft. They were all Michael could see. He heard Hanna murmur questions, Conwy answering. Conwy knew a man, old like himself, who had been a musician once.

  “Take us there,” Hanna said.

  “He will be sleeping,” Conwy said.

  “I know.” She knelt at Conwy’s side and smiled at him. She was not hard now. She was softened, and the softness was real, not deceit, and when she smiled even Marin would have thought her beautiful.

  “Well, then, we will make him wake up,” Conwy said.

  And it was not far, and the man at the end of the path was Norn, bald now, with deep eyes under heavy brows. Michael recognized him, and wept.

  * * *

  Hanna squatted side by side with Shen. Shen whispered, “Past the middle of the night.”

  “I know.”

  “Where’s B?”

  “Maybe this one knows.”

  “Wouldn’t count on longer than dawn.”

  “No.”

  Shen inched closer. She said, “What’s wrong with Mike?”

  Hanna said calmly, “He’ll be all right.”

  “Never seen this.”

  “I have.”

  “All right. All right. Look, he’s different. Not like anybody else. I know that. Think I don’t know that? Never seen this, though. Gotta get him out of here.”

  “In a while.”

  Shen did not find this satisfactory. She retreated into sullen silence, fingering her stunner. It would not be good enough if B caught up with them.

  Norn in rags was enthroned on a magnificent chair. “I was not there, but I heard,” he said. “There was nothing left but burnt bones. There were three of them, yes, three piles of smoked bones. I heard they were kind to Kia, that after what they did she would not have walked again, nor sung, and killing her was kind. I heard Alban was there, and died, too, and the visitor, the woman Lillin, your mother. Did you hope she had escaped?”

  “No.” On the ship without a name Michael had heard too much about Lillin’s death. He had never hoped it was a lie. The details had been too cruelly clear.

  “The babe lived,” Norn said.

  “Lived…”

  “Oh, yes. Snatched out living at the last by one of those who killed her mother. I did not know the man. But evidently there were some things he could not do, and leaving the child in that house, knowing the fire would be next, was a thing he could not stand for. He handed her to the first woman he saw in the street. Ercole; do you remember Ercole? She is dead now.”

  “I do not—no, perhaps I do. What happened then to the child?”

  “Why, I do not know for a certainty. Ercole kept her a time, though the winter was lean. There has not been a winter of such thinness in my lifetime, not even the last, though the one that comes now will starve us all. Ercole kept her until a man and woman came seeking you and your mother and the babe.”

  “When? Who were they? Where did they go?”

  “Slowly, slowly. It was a long time ago. With Kia gone I had no reason to go to that part of the town, you understand? I do not remember what else I heard. It is too long ago. Why did you wait so long to come back? They said Tistou took you away; where have you been?”

  “I didn’t know the way back,” Michael said, but Norn looked at him with mistrust, so he said, “There were people, when I was a boy, who thought Tistou came from another world. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes,” Norn said. “There are those who think so still. They say he comes from a homeland of which this was to be an outpost. But we are forgotten; that is what they say. When I was younger, I believed the part about the homeland, because surely this world is forgotten, but not that the traveler went back and forth. Now I wonder. He comes and goes, he has the only flying machine ever seen, and he has not grown old, as I have. Did you learn the truth?”

  “It is all true. When I escaped from him, I was not here any more. I have tried to find my way back ever since.”

  Michael waited for Norn to take it in. Norn scowled and was silent. Hanna said gently, “It is hard to understand. But what Mikhail says is true. We will go back, and you will not be forgotten any more. People will come with food and medicines. But now Mikhail must find his sister, if she lives; and the traveler is here now, is he not? We found this place by following him, but he does not know that yet. If he finds out, he will try to kill us before we can bring help. Do you know where he is?”

  “No,” Norn said. He looked at Michael shr
ewdly. “If that is true, you must have a flying machine, too. Where is yours?”

  Michael’s mind was on the piles of bones, the weeping child given to a stranger in the street. Hanna answered, “It is hidden, we hope. We cannot allow Tistou to know we are here.”

  “Is it warm inside, like his? Is there plenty to eat? That is what they say of his, but he does not give much away. He came in the summer, there was food then, not much but enough. Now there is hardly any. Men have gone to Tistou to beg, and he has sent them away with empty hands. Then he grew tired of beggars, it seems, for the last one who went, he killed. Do you have food?”

  “We have food. We will bring it, if we can. But if we are to do that, and if we are to get away to bring help here, we must know where Tistou is. Is there anyone who knows?”

  Norn said to Michael, “Do you still play?”

  Michael nodded slightly. Hanna saw fire reflected in his eyes, red against the snow. She said, “He has become a master of the instrument. If there is a chance, he will play for you. But you must help him get the chance. Norn, we are in deadly danger from this Tistou. There is a man who came here with us, who knew Tistou from before, and he has disappeared. I think he will betray us, do you understand? We must know where our enemy is. Will you not help us?”

  “I have told you I do not know,” Norn said, and it was the truth. But then he said, “There is one who may know. I will take you to her.”

  * * *

  Deeper into the night, into the maze. Even Hanna was lost now. Norn could not move fast. His spine and the joints of his legs were knobby and inflamed, and every step was painful. Michael supported him. He thought of the medicines on the Golden Girl; he thought that where he had grown up, Norn’s condition must be a footnote to the history of medicine. And then he wondered about Norn’s age. He could not be more than sixty in Standard years.

  Hanna murmured, “We take them for granted, the anti-senescence treatments. I’ve had one. And you?”

  “Two.”

  Norn ought to be still a young man.

  Norn talked as he cautiously, painfully moved.

  “A bad winter, that. But this one that comes, I will not see its end.”

  Sometimes there were sounds in the rooms they passed, as sleepers roused at the slow footsteps. But only once did anyone look out.

  “By that spring so long ago, many folk were scattered, and the guards too weak to follow.”

  The years flickered as Norn talked, springs rising and falling. A slow recovery; the next two waves of sickness had not been so bad. The masters had still lived behind their wall.

  “All who might have risen up were dead, or fled. There were none fool enough to do what Kia did.”

  New seedstock appeared, blight-resistant, giving great yields. “Did he bring it?” Hanna said. “The man Tistou?”

  “Perhaps,” Norn said, and Shen said, “Why?”

  Hanna answered, “Why did he do anything? He does not seem to have gotten rich through coming here. How did he come here to begin with? Who is he?”

  Now for the first time there was a gust of outside air. They turned into a hall where arched windows made up one side. Some were open and others broken, and a strong breeze blew through them. The sound of the sea was audible. Hanna turned to one of the windows. She had been born near an ocean, and could not resist the sound of any sea. But the night was so dark that the waves, however close, were invisible.

  “This way,” Norn said, not pointing but shifting his weight on Michael’s arm to indicate the path. They went through an arched door opposite the windows and stood in the dark. “Darya! Daryeva!” called Norn, and Hanna’s light picked out a figure on the floor.

  * * *

  She was Norn’s granddaughter. She was perhaps sixteen, with a little pointed brown face and large eyes. She looked at all of them, even Norn, with fear, and Norn stood there and told them her history: how in the first weeks after Tistou had come, in the summer, one of his companions had seen Daryeva, and liked what he saw; how Daryeva had not stayed out of sight but sought out the man, and lived for a time now and then on the flying machine; how she had started a child, and lost it, and then seemingly lost her power to charm the big fair-haired man, because he rarely came to see her now; how her own folk, virtuous, would have nothing to do with her.

  Not calculated to gain her confidence, Hanna said to Michael’s head. But the girl said to Norn: “When you thought I could get food for you, you were not so quick to cry punishment! What do you do here, old man? Will you sell me for the night for half a loaf, as before?”

  Norn began to shout. Hanna said quickly, “Get him out of here,” and Shen did it without much trouble, marching the old man out with an arm locked behind his back. They heard him cursing in the hall, in a burst of wind that blew in.

  Hanna and Michael sat down uninvited, but with a common impulse. There was no point in scaring the child with shadows twice her size.

  “You do it,” Hanna said to Michael; he read the meaning in her eyes. You can gain anyone’s trust.

  But he asked his own questions, not the ones Hanna wanted him to ask. Did you ever hear of a woman called Kia? The name Lillin? A girl, no, woman, Carmina, now twice your age? Daryeva thought him mad; harmless, though; his eyes were so hurt, his voice so gentle. She developed a small frightened coyness, a poor residue of her liaison with the man Wales. Hanna moved at Michael’s side, said impatiently in his head, Ask her about the Avalon! He only thought: Poor little Darya. “Soft,” Hanna muttered in Standard, “you’re too damn soft. Shen was right.” She shifted languages. “Where have they gone to, girl, the man who got you with child, and the others, and the machine that flies?”

  “It does not only fly,” the girl said. “It is a spaceship.” She said the Standard word well, with little accent.

  “Well, and where has it gone? Where is it hidden?”

  Defiance flared in the great eyes. Michael touched her arm and said gently, “Please answer.”

  She would answer for him. She said, ignoring Hanna, “It has gone away to the south where it is warm. Once before it went, and I went, too. He did not take me this time. But he will come back.”

  “Do you want to wait for him?” Michael said. “You could come with us instead.”

  The defiance melted. Her eyes became luminous; she was a child, reminding him painfully of Lise.

  Hanna said, “We can’t take her now. We’ll come back for her if we can.”

  She was exasperated. There was nervousness in her voice, in every quick movement.

  “He’s not even in this part of the world,” Michael said. “We don’t have to hurry any more.”

  “Just how long do you think it will take us to question every old man and woman in the place?”

  “Not long. When it gets light, not long.”

  They waited for dawn in Daryeva’s little room. It was scarcely more than a closet, but she had made it her own. There were shells from a southern sea, a bracelet of Polity manufacture—part of the Far-Flying Bird’s stolen trove, Hanna guessed. There were dried native flowers in a Polity vase, a music cube made on Willow, a head clumsily carved of highland wood. It was supposed to resemble Daryeva; Wales had made it for her.

  Hanna and Shen wandered in and out. One of them was always in the hall, listening, watching. Michael stayed with Daryeva. She told him the story of her short life. She was young and resilient and she did not know how sad it was. He put his arm around her, half-blinded—sometimes she was Lise, sometimes himself. He was too torn with pity to see clearly. But it seemed to him that none of what had happened to Daryeva needed to have happened.

  If I had not been so self-protecting I would have, could have—

  Morning finally came. The rain had stopped. Hanna and Shen looked through the broken arches uncertainly, as if, deprived of rain, they might no longer be on the same world. Outside the arches was a broad stone esplanade set two meters above the wet sand, which stretched a considerable distance to the recedin
g tide. Sea and sky alike were gray.

  When it was full light, Michael had Daryeva take them to a courtyard she had told him about in the night. It was almost in the center of the occupied portion of the maze, and it was all the marketplace of which the Post could now boast. In the early morning people straggled in. Some brought food from outside, not much; those fortunate enough to have food grown and stored against the winter begrudged it. But there were still warm clothes and blankets to be looted from the ruined mansions, and a certain trade was carried out that way, food for warmth.

  Michael moved from person to person, group to group. His questions were thrown back at him unanswered. He might as well have been on the wrong world. I knew no one of that name. Nor that. He was an antic figure here, too well fed, too well clothed, with the dark women dogging his heels and the pariah Daryeva following. How old do you think I am, to remember those days? Why, I was not even born! There was no body of shared knowledge, no collective memory, it had died with the old and with displacement, or what was left was crippled and incomplete. I have never heard of such a town. Never. Never. “Every old man and woman in the place,” Hanna had said; but the old were rare. The look of age was deceiving. The “old,” like Norn, might be only of an age that elsewhere would be the beginning of life’s prime. Shen thought little of it, Michael nothing. But Hanna that morning felt stifling horror for a while. It was unnatural and obscene for death to come after so few years. She told herself anti-senescence was really the unnatural thing, but it didn’t help; she was horrified still. The specter of early death made ghosts even of the young.