The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  It was in the center of the circles of the doomed, then, that Michael stood and shouted, reckless. He threw names into the gray wind and they blew back to his mouth. Shen grumbled without ceasing, watched the crowd with slitted eyes; Hanna watched the sky. Both missed at first the man—a young man—who finally came forward and tugged Michael’s arm. But they saw Michael bend his head to the other’s, and started forward, hands on their hidden weapons.

  The man slipped away before they got to him. But Michael came to meet them. His eyes glittered.

  “That was the road to Croft, the one we came in on,” he said.

  Hanna looked at the circles of murmuring men and women, but she could not see where the man had gone.

  “It is dead,” she said. “Marin said so.”

  “No, no. People have come back, she said.”

  “And what does that mean, when the people who once lived there are dead? They were all taken from the town when you were. Does it matter who lives there now?”

  “It might. Do you remember what Norn said? The man and woman who took Carmina, knew us. They must have come from Croft or Sutherland. And later, he said, the people scattered. They could have gone home.”

  “All right. All right.” She pulled the communicator from her pocket. “We’ll get GeeGee in. Follow the road to its end.” She looked at the sky as she thumbed the transmittal switch. If GeeGee could monitor ground transmissions from the air, the Avalon could, too. But the gray sky was empty.

  * * *

  GeeGee was ready for quick flight, as she had been everywhere. A very sleepy Theo landed her at the Post thirty minutes after Hanna’s call. “I’m going to bed now,” he said, but he didn’t. He waited in Control with the others, watching the land unroll beneath the Golden Girl. They passed over Orne’s house in minutes and flew steadily north over the deserted lands.

  “It’s not paved all the way,” Michael said.

  “You remember?”

  “I remember—” The dusty track through Croft. For all he had ever known it was dust all the way to its unknown end. He closed his eyes briefly, remembering, and constructed a map in his head. The paving stretched to Sutherland. Croft lay a little to the southwest, with the dirt track (how deep in mud today?) curving through its tiny heart. One end went to Sutherland; the other must keep up the curve, and come around to join the main road to the Post.

  When he looked again, they were flashing over GeeGee’s first landing site, that abandoned clearing in the wilderness. He might never know why it was there. Orne’s summer lodge had surprised him, too. He had not known the masters ever left their walls, except to walk in the town like gods. There was so much he did not know, might have learned long ago—if he had told the truth at the start on Alta. Instead he had allowed the last, the only memories to seal his lips, had turned away all questions, until it was too late and the Pavonis Queen separated him for good from any power that might have tracked down B and uncovered the secrets of this place. While here the people died in waves of sickness, their brutal unbalanced civilization toppling.

  I could have stopped it. I let it happen—

  But he had been rattled and shaken like a die in a cup, and the hand that had done it was here somewhere. He thought of that soft white hand with an awe so deep it was nearly terror.

  Hanna said softly, “He is only a man.”

  Maybe.

  He was weak, so sick he doubled over. When he recovered enough to straighten, he said, “How could one man get so much power?”

  “Why, chance,” said the dark woman, an oracle again. He looked into her eyes and thought he saw the ambiguous eyespots of Uskos. “Not much is predictable and not much is just,” she said; she might have been Norsa citing a lesson of the Master.

  “No,” Michael said, rejecting it.

  “You knew that,” she said. “Every day of your life has proved it.”

  He felt the others watching him, and felt the burden of their lives, which all of them, even Hanna, owed to him. He felt the futility of it in the face of the desertion below.

  “Yes,” said Hanna. “But you’ll go back for Daryeva all the same, when you can. Won’t you?”

  The sickness began to pass. “Of course,” he said.

  The land rose under GeeGee. There must be changes in the nature of the forest below, but they were not evident from the air. The road snaked on patiently and the horizon billowed with mountains. They were flying low, under the cloud cover, but before they reached the mountains the clouds changed, were higher and thinner, the air brighter; the great funnel was moving at last. They did not have to slow as much as he had expected to follow the road, which after a tortuous course of preliminary turns made straight for a gap in the last fold of land. Sunlight flashed off GeeGee’s nose as she emerged from it, the flanks of the mountains fell away, the road swooped down in the sun on a broad plateau and turned north. There was silence in Control.

  He saw the dirt track veering west before anybody else. When he told Theo to turn GeeGee and follow it, nobody said anything.

  The land moved under them dun and green. The mountains threw out a feeler, and the village on its unhurried river nestled up against them. He had seen it from the air before, yes, from that mountain peak. The perspective was different, but he would have known it in spite of worse distortions. Home.

  He took the helm and set GeeGee down slowly in a barren grain field, wondering if he would have to ask someone to finish the job; his knees and hands were weak. Croft appeared eerily unchanged. Even the field was recently harvested; people lived here, then. Most likely nobody I knew, he cautioned himself. And a figure walked across the field toward GeeGee, stopping, however, a hundred meters from the nearest structure (Annitas’ house), too far from GeeGee to make out a face.

  “Mike,” said Hanna. “Look.” He looked, and saw what she indicated: a second figure, this one half-hidden by the corner of the house. It held something. A weapon?

  “Covering the other one,” Hanna said.

  He went alone to meet the man who stood in the field. The brilliant sunlight shone on his head with a trace of autumn warmth, but a strong wind was blowing, pushing the clouds away. The air had the heady wine taste he remembered, had never tasted anywhere else. He walked quickly, but it seemed to take a long time. The man who waited was powerfully built, with a grizzled head and broad familiar face. His eyes got bigger and bigger as Michael came near. Michael stopped in front of him and said, “Otto?”

  “A-Alek?” said the other man, hardly getting it out.

  “It’s Mikhail. I’ve come back. Looking for my sister; is she alive?”

  Otto got his mouth shut. He turned and waved a jerky arm and the other figure, armed, came into the open and came up to them. It was a woman, tall and slender, with a hard lovely face and eyes Michael knew. They were his own. “Greetings, Carmina,” he said.

  “Somebody has to stay on GeeGee,” Hanna said to Shen. Lise and Theo were already gone at Michael’s beckoning, Lise tumbling out of GeeGee with eager haste, Theo looking stunned.

  “You go,” Shen said.

  “All right.” Hanna was nervous. She quivered with alarm; she had caught some of Michael’s superstitious fear in spite of herself. B is a real man with real guns, she told herself, but she heard Rubee’s comfortable voice telling tales all the same.

  Finally she left GeeGee. Shen could be trusted, she told herself. Shen knew what to do.

  The wind outside was sharp, the sunlight dizzying. A faint, luminous streak arced across the high sky: the Ring. The long slopes tilting up toward the mountains were deserted, but when the wind fell for a moment, she heard the tinkle of small bells where herd animals clustered in sunny hollows, gleaning the last sweet mouthfuls of summer growth. The people who had come out of the stone houses had all disappeared into one. Hanna went toward it slowly. Up close, the village did not look whole. Some houses were deserted and falling, succeeding summers and winters having shifted their stones. But everything was here, on
the whole just as Michael had remembered it. She went into the house where the others were; it was Otto’s, she found.

  That was Marlie and I who came for you. Our son was dead, the first; later we had another, he lives, here he is. We did not find you, but we found Carmina. Brought her home.

  Michael could not take his eyes off Carmina. It was strange to see Alek and Lillin in her face. There was a tranquillity in her that he recognized; he had had it, too, sometimes. But rarely, only on the very best days. She had given him up for dead as soon as she was old enough for Otto to make her understand what had happened. Her only brother had been Milo, Otto’s living son.

  No one here was ever troubled again. Life went on, and death; Marlie died last year. But not of that evil, that sickness brought from outside.

  From outside ? Are you sure ?

  Yes. Sure. It came only when the traveler came, he brought it like a gift. Not every time. The last time he came, though, it followed again. And the masters were not exempt as they had been before.

  It was what he had feared, the guess Hanna had made, which he had not wanted to face. He looked at her quickly. He saw in her eyes the acknowledgment of his responsibility. But then she looked away, at nothing in particular. She seemed to be listening for something above the chatter. Theo had not registered what Otto said; he was busy trying to be invisible, and failing among these dark people. There were perhaps sixty, most strangers to Michael, and half, he learned, were recent refugees from the Post; they had abandoned it and made their way north at the first report of fever. Life here was lived much as it had been lived before, and the disintegration of the city in the lowlands was a rumor that hardly touched Croft.

  * * *

  Shen waited stolidly on GeeGee, ready to take off with an instant’s notice or none at all. She was not restless as Hanna would have been in her place, but checked all the indicators with an occasional steady sweep of the eyes. Hanna spoke with her from time to time.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be able to get him out of here. He won’t want to go.”

  “So tell him to bring the sister along.”

  “It’s a thought.”

  Shen said irritably, “Wouldn’t matter if every last body back there didn’t know where we are.”

  “Yes.”

  And somewhere there was a radio. And somewhere there was Henrik, creeping toward the Post, maybe already there.

  “Nowhere to go anyhow,” Shen muttered.

  “That’s not true any more,” Hanna said, her voice light and thoughtful. “He’ll want to go back now. Just as fast as we can.”

  “Whatever.” Shen went back to studying what GeeGee had to say. Ready to run.

  The shadows shifted in the clear afternoon. People left Otto’s house in twos and threes, going back to their occupations. They cast curious looks at GeeGee, but they knew what she was; they were not ignorant.

  “We know more than they do on the flats,”Otto said. “That’s Carmina’s doing.”

  Carmina smiled and shook her head, disclaiming the praise, but it was true, Michael found. She had asked questions from the time she could talk, and put the answers together with remarkable accuracy. Nothing Michael said surprised her greatly; only the details fascinated her. She was prepared for days of conversation.

  “There can’t be days,” Hanna said, close to Michael’s elbow, touching it impatiently.

  “No, I know, that’s true.”

  “Come along with us,” said Hanna, addressing Carmina. “We have to get in the air.” It was safe in space; safer than here, on the ground and exposed.

  “I’ll stay. I’ll wait for you to come back.”

  There was a heartbreaking serenity about Carmina, as if she had resigned herself to waiting many years ago with unflagging patience. She was unmarried and childless. It seemed possible that she had never been touched, had held herself always a little apart from life. Not what Michael would have done, here or anywhere; not what he could have done. She was detached even from this exotic brother. Who could be nothing more to her, after all, than a dim memory of song.

  “Michael, we have to go!” Hanna said.

  “I know.” But he did not move. He stayed near Otto’s fire, not next to Carmina but placed so that he could look at her without interruption, tracing resemblances.

  Hanna jittered, dancing with nerves. “Mike, please!”

  “It’s just that I might not be able to come back again,” he said to her in Standard, not wanting to alarm Carmina. “There’ll be help from the Polity; I’ll make sure of that. But when I turn myself in, it might be the end for me.”

  “Nonsense,” Hanna said. “All you have to do is trade. Information for freedom. I thought you saw that, I thought you knew it. That this was the way out.”

  “I can’t trade with this, I can’t take a chance. Enough’s happened because I was thinking of myself.”

  She was unconvinced. Well, she would have all the weeks it took to get back to Theta to try and change his mind. But he did not mean to let it be changed. His survival was not important any more. Gadrah’s was.

  “Come along, come along, Mike. We have to go.”

  “In a minute. A few more minutes.”

  Hanna chewed her fingernails.

  * * *

  The mountains swooped into the great valley and then started up again on the other side, not as high there, but high enough to cut off the sun at a rather early hour. The western shadows crept across the valley and made a final leap; suddenly it was dusk. The gleam of the river faded. Shen got food from the galley and carried it back to Control. There was nothing to see out GeeGee’s nose with the naked eye any more, so she adjusted the monitors for night vision and watched them instead. But the radar was more important, the radar searching the sky. Though that, she knew, was terrifyingly limited. The Avalon could wind through the mountains low and slow, come up behind that last tall peak, and never be spotted or suspected till she came around the mountain accelerating and spitting fire.

  Shen began to think about lifting GeeGee into the air, getting above the mountains and scanning exhaustively for an intruder. The only recourse of an unarmed ship facing one with arms was flight. With people on the ground to be picked up, seconds would count.

  “Come on,” she growled. “Get him out of there. Come on!”

  She took the remains of her meal back to the galley and put them away. When she returned to Control, she had made up her mind. She would take GeeGee up and look around.

  She was reaching for the communications switch to tell Hanna that when the Avalon rose up from behind the mountain peak, and radar picked it up and set off a shrill alarm.

  * * *

  The communicator on Hanna’s wrist went off frantically. The noises outside were unmistakable, the scream of GeeGee taking off in a single max-power burst, the thunder of other engines, then a roar that split the night. Hanna flung open the door just in time to see a gout of flame erupt where GeeGee had been—but no longer was; she was a flurry of light streaking up the valley and up into the air, headed for space. “She’s gone!” Theo said in despair, but Hanna said, “GeeGee’s our only chance. Shen’s got to keep her safe. And she’s drawn them off. We’ve got some time.”

  There was another burst of fire, high this time, and far away. Hanna held her breath, but there was no explosion, no fireball. GeeGee was still intact, still running hard.

  She looked around and saw Michael with relief—the old Michael, to whom danger was a practical problem with concrete solutions.

  “They’ll come back,” he said. “Theo and Lise could stay here. B doesn’t know them.”

  “Henrik does.”

  “Henrik. Damn him. All right; we’ve all got to go.” He asked Otto, “Have you got anything that would help us get out?”

  “Carts,” Otto said. “Beasts.”

  “We’ll go on foot, then.”

  “Where to?” Hanna said.

  “Sutherland,” Michael said. “Come on.”
<
br />   * * *

  He had lied, though. As soon as the night hid them from Croft he turned away from the road and led them down the riverbank. “There were too many people back there,” he said. “Otto won’t tell them what I said, Carmina won’t—maybe. What are they going to say when their neighbors are threatened? And there were people there I don’t know. Who don’t understand what it means, why we have to get away. There used to be a ford here.” It was still there. They had to use the light, worrying Michael, but a hillock on the edge of the stream largely hid the ford from Croft. The rocks were slippery underfoot.

  “Where’s there to go?” Theo said.

  “The mountain. Caves there. We’ve still got food tabs, there’s plenty of water; if we’re careful we can even use fire. We could hold out for a while.”

  “They won’t stop hunting till they find us,” Hanna said.

  “If they’re looking around Sutherland, though, it’ll give Shen a chance to come back and get us.”

  They ran up the long bare slope of the mountain’s foot until Lise lagged behind, her breath coming in painful gasps she had tried to suppress. Michael carried her for a time, and they walked, but they did not stop. It was imperative to get under cover. Even the line of the first trees above was no guarantee of safety; there was no reason to suppose anything was wrong with the Avalon’s infrared sensors. They had to get under the earth, into the caves Michael remembered. There was still a long way to go.

  Lise said finally, “I can walk.” It was the first thing she had said since the crisis began. He put her down and trudged upward. The wind had died with the day, and walking kept them warm. Hanna’s face was turned to the sky; she tripped once or twice. But she was no longer looking for the Avalon, at least not entirely. She was looking because the sky, clear now, was alive. A tiny moon that cast little light moved across it so quickly the motion was visible; before it disappeared another came, describing a different arc. The Ring was a high distant arch, unchanging; only now that she could see it well, she saw it was really a plurality of rings, a series of delicate-looking bands separated by strips of night. Now and again a meteor flared. It was not the season for any of the great showers. But in one quadrant of the sky a comet shone like a stylized picture of all the comets that had ever existed. All these phenomena stood out prominently in a sky that otherwise was scantily starred. No sky anywhere else was like it.