The D’neeran Factor

by Terry A. Adams

  He took the communicator from his pocket and held it in the open. Anyone listening would hear what he said.

  He said, “B…”

  He made a long sound of it, almost a caress. Most likely the creature had not been called by that sound for thirty years.

  “B,” he said, “let’s talk.”

  The silence was so long that he thought it might not work, even come near working, even make a start. He had nothing to offer and no threat to make. If I were B, I would kill me now and go right on waiting for GeeGee. Picking off a leader made good sense. But B might think Hanna the greater threat that way.

  Nothing happened. The lovely country spread around him in the same silence as before, until he thought there would be no answer and he must stand here disregarded until he gave up and went back, impotent.

  The cold voice split the quiet when he was almost ready to turn. It said: “What’s there to talk about?”

  “There’s questions,” Michael said, playing his empty hand. “Questions nobody’s asked you before. And there’s staying alive. I can’t go back either. One minute under probe and I’m a candidate for Adjustment. How about a truce? It could be comfortable here if we get together.”

  He stood waiting as calmly as if B had a reason to keep him alive. There could not be one. The only question was whether what he said would spark a little curiosity. To come to B like this was an admission of defeat. B would know it, and maybe that would work on him. Maybe confidence would lead him to indulge in some play before he ended it.

  The voice said finally: “Talk, then.”

  Michael said, “Face to face.”

  He took out the stunner he had, held it out for watching eyes to see, and threw it away from him.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” he said. “You’ll search me anyway. I’m alone and there’s four of you. I’ll never catch you sleeping like I did the other time.”

  He waited again. The reminder of what he had done to B one night as a boy was deliberate. It might get him shot down where he stood, but he didn’t think so. For this thing, he thought (not “man”), that last headache wouldn’t matter. Instead B would remember the child and the months of power.

  He was right enough for the voice to start up again. It directed him to an opening in the hills to the north, a short walk. When he entered it, long shadows fell over him; it was late. He walked up a grassy cleft, turned into another, followed a winding stream to another. Shadow passed into dusk. A small wind rustled the grasses through which he passed and there were sounds of water. The sky on its way to night was the deep blue of Hanna’s eyes. The toneless voice spoke from time to time and told him where to go. In spite of it he was at peace. He was filled with a deep, calm expectation. It was necessary to see the face again, to look into the empty eyes; it had always been necessary. He hardly thought at all. Only he thought, They are listening over there, Hanna and the rest. They will know where he is. It will help.

  He had not brought the light the others needed, had not expected to have to use it, but his eyes adjusted to the falling night. The sky was clear and the Ring cast some light, maybe as much as Earth’s moon, which he had seen once at the full and treasured in memory. He did not stumble.

  He crossed, as he was told, a tiny streamlet the width of a stride, and crossed a flat wooded space with a hill rising sharply to the left. That brought him to the bank of a larger stream into which the small one flowed. He turned to the left, downstream, as instructed, and worked his way through the brush. The stream was a barrier to his right, a sheer cliff three times his height to the left. The cliff suddenly cut back, the stream meandered away, and he came round the outcrop of the cliff and saw an open space. It was not large, but it was large enough for the Avalon.

  The Avalon was shut down, or so it looked from here; at least it showed no lights. He wondered how it had tracked him from its place in this creek bottom, how GeeGee had been spotted in the morning. He hesitated for a moment, awaiting challenge, but none came, and he went on toward the ship, picking his way among stones cast up by the creek in times of flood.

  When he had come nearly to the side of the ship a hatch opened near the ground, falling silently to make a ramp. That was where he had first seen Hanna. There was an oblong of dim light and he walked up the ramp and into the light, and men hidden on either side stepped forward at once and the muzzles of weapons dug into his sides. He held his hands up and open. He did not even look from side to side to see who the men were until they had searched him, which they did thoroughly and not gently. He got by with the communicator, though. It was made to fasten to nearly anything and he had attached it to his coat right over his heart, in plain view, and they did not take it away. He had hoped for that. It might make things easier, if Shen and Hanna heard what was said.

  When the men flanking him were done, he looked at them. One was even taller than Michael, and fair; that would be Wales. The other was a smaller brown-eyed man. Michael recognized him from Henrik’s description: Bakti.

  The weapons shifted away. One moved around, settled in the small of his back, and urged him onward. He kept his hands up and started forward. Wales talked softly, telling him where to go. “Left, all right, now right.” They came to a ladder and he stood still while Bakti climbed it; Bakti crouched with a laser pistol while Michael went up. Wales followed. After that they took him through two short corridors at right angles and showed him through a door.

  The door took him to the Avalon’s equivalent of Control. It did not have GeeGee’s plush light and he had not expected it. He had been on other private spacecraft, though, and his flesh tightened fastidiously at this. There might have been a visible movement, because the pistol rammed hard into his spine. There was hardly any illumination besides the Avalon’s displays. What there was, was probably Sol-normal, but it was ashen. He looked at a light source and saw the transparent cover deep in dust. Running was taking a toll on the Avalon, too.

  B waited for him with folded arms. There were lines on his face that had not been there thirty years before, or even twenty, in the glimpse Michael had gotten of him in Shoreground. On Gadrah he was called Undying; but Michael thought: He is old. Without the treatments he will die soon. Even with them.

  Bakti and Wales still stood behind Michael with weapons at the ready. B took a laser pistol from his own belt and armed it; then he nodded at the other two and they went away. There had been no sign of the fullblood Oriental, Ta, or the one Hanna had called Suarez.

  “Back up,” B said. “A couple more steps. You can put your hands down now.”

  Michael let his hands fall. The sense of peace was still with him, and it deepened. In all important respects his objective was accomplished. There was only a moment of distraction to create, and he could pick it. There was no hurry. He had all the time he would ever have, and the last mystery stood in front of him and looked into his eyes.

  He said with genuine curiosity, “Why’d you decide to talk to me?”

  B answered, “Thought I’d see how you turned out.”

  “A lot of people have been doing that lately…Tell me this,” Michael said. “What are you?”

  “A traveler,” the man said, but the eyes had some expression for once; they were a wolf’s. “A merchant,” he said.

  “I’ve known a lot of travelers, a lot of merchants. They didn’t come here. How did you find out about this place?”

  “Luck,” B said.

  “You weren’t just cruising around out here.”

  “Oh, no,” the man said. “There was a record. There was a course. The ship that came here in the Explosion, the first one, went back. One man took it back. He was supposed to sell it, use the money to buy smaller craft. So they could keep the connection, go back and forth. Instead he kept the money and stayed on earth. Kept the course, too. It floated around…Never got to a Polity data bank. Not while he was alive, because if anybody came back here they’d find out he was a thief. Not after he died because nobody knew what it was.
It was during the Explosion. It was just another course. It got passed down with souvenirs. It was a rich family, thanks to him; they kept their property together. Then they had some hard times. I was trading in curiosities and heard they had some to sell. Looked them over and bought the lot. They didn’t know about spacegoing, didn’t know what they had, threw it in with the rest for junk. Wasn’t anything like it in Polity records. I came to see.”

  The wolf-look was still there, but there was a new attention in it. Michael knew himself, knew what his transparent face must show: a child’s wonder at the tale.

  “Then they never meant to stay cut off,” he said, as if B ought to have personal knowledge of that time hundreds of years ago, as if he had been alive then.

  He is only a man, Hanna whispered in his mind; and as if to confirm it B answered, “Guess not.”

  “But when you came—didn’t they want to make contact then?”

  “No,” said the man, faint amusement on his face.

  “Because they’d have lost what they had. Because Oversight would have come, and they couldn’t have kept running things like they did. You told them that. You told them whatever you wanted them to think. But the sickness?” Michael said, not pausing to consider what it meant that the answers came so easily, that this information would not be given to a man who might live.

  “It was nothing much,” B said. “Dawkins fever. I couldn’t get the vaccine, last trip.”

  “But when you had it, the other trips, you only gave it to the—”

  He stopped because he couldn’t say the word. Masters had never come easily from his tongue. Now he could not say it at all.

  B said, “You haven’t changed much,” and there was a threat in it. He looked at Michael just as he had thirty years ago. Michael knew why. His face and body had grown into mature beauty, but the child who had never been quite lost had returned. All the time in between slipped away, and a child looked at B with clear eyes. This time he was not afraid. There had been wounds inflicted in that earlier captivity, but they were healed. There had been too much kindness given and received since then, too much love. Even the sharp edges of Lillin’s death were smoothed since he had seen Carmina, gone with the old rage. There were monsters, all right, real ones, and B was one of them. His monstrosity was his indifference. There were no people where he lived, only objects. He was a sport of nature; there was nothing of him in Michael; he was something that had happened to Michael, and that was all. The monster faced him and held Michael’s death in his hands, but he was wrapped in peace, even joy. I am, Michael thought, joy rising, I am Hanna and Theo, Lise and Shen; nothing can change that. He smiled, and B moved the pistol suddenly, tightening a slackened aim.

  “What did you want with Gadrah?” Michael said. “What could they have here you’d possibly need?”

  B did not speak. But it was the last question Michael wanted an answer to, and he persisted. “They haven’t got much to sell here, they can’t buy much. Not enough to make coming out here worth it. Why’d you do it?”

  B said with a shrug, “Thought I might need the place. Nobody knows about it, nobody finds me.”

  “If they started hunting you back there? Because of the children? Or were there other ships like the Far-Flying Bird?”

  He saw the answer in B’s eyes. Private spacecraft disappeared from time to time, luxury craft like GeeGee, without a trace. They used common routes and there would be ways to hail them, ways to get aboard with an innocent tale. You would take what you could, jewels, cash, leave no survivors, plunge the dead craft into a sun.

  They hadn’t done that last thing with the Bird. The alien controls would have been beyond them.

  He waited a little longer, looking around without being obvious about it. He was looking for the monitors that had to be here somewhere watching the valley.

  “Want to talk truce?” he said, not meaning it, not listening for an answer; only buying time.

  The thin smile crossed B’s face. “Why not?” he said. He shifted position and Michael saw the screen behind him, hidden by his body until now. There was only one and it was not scanning in infrared, though the picture was enhanced to compensate for the dark. It was coming from the air; there was a mobile spyeye out there, of course. But B had his back to what it showed.

  B had seen his eyes move, and looked at him narrowly. Michael thought carefully and deliberately, in words so clear Hanna, if she were with him, could not mistake them: Get out of my head. The others need you. He said aloud, “Now, Shen!”

  B was not a fool. He guessed. He did not turn to look at the monitor; he moved away from it instead, waving Michael toward it, so he could see monitor and man at the same time. Michael walked in front of it, blocking B’s line of sight, counting seconds. He turned his back on the screen and said casually, “What kind of truce would you have in mind?”

  B knew what it was about now. He lifted the pistol. There would be no more talk; his eyes were empty as they had always been. Killing was not a pleasure, it was only a task, a permanent, efficient means to an end.

  Seconds: Michael charged head down. The last step was a leap. A tremendous shock hit him, a planet fell on him oceans and all; half-conscious, he didn’t know where he had been hit till pain started in his shoulder and arm, tentatively at first. It was going to get big and not give him much time. He had bowled B over and the pistol had spun away somewhere and he would never get to it; he tried to use his weight to hold B down and was flung away, strength gone, vision blurring. B yelled for Wales and the smell of burned flesh filled the room. B scrambled for the pistol. Seconds, more seconds! B had the pistol and turned, and Michael tried to move his head to look at the monitor but could not do it; the full weight of the pain came down, there wasn’t room for anything else, and he blacked out not expecting to wake up again.

  * * *

  Just before GeeGee came, Hanna fainted. She had gone suddenly shaky and vague, and Theo, when he saw it, questioned her sharply. “Broke trance too fast,” she had said, and then, while Theo watched for the Golden Girl, collapsed.

  Shen set GeeGee down too hard, thinking of nothing but speed. A hatch yawned open on the side and Theo and Lise between them dragged Hanna through it. “We’re in!” Theo yelled at an intercom and GeeGee lifted. A buzzer went off at the open hatch and Theo could not hear anything else till Shen triggered the closure from Control. The cover lifted into place and sealed itself, and there was quiet again.

  Hanna sat up and shook off Theo’s hands. Her face was bloodless and her eyes looked bruised. “Oh, God, he’s hurt,” she said.

  “Who? Mike?”

  “Yes.” She ran trembling hands over her hair. She looked as if she might cry. “How are we ever going to get him out?” she said.

  “What did he do?”

  “Kept them busy,” she said, remembering the weapon in B’s hand, and buried her face in her hands.

  “Kept them busy?” Theo said incredulously.

  She did not answer. She got up holding on to Theo, still shaky, but she got steadier on the way to Control. They were skimming over mountains, down low, to Theo’s surprise; he had expected Shen to take them into space, dodging the Avalon. But there was nothing after them.

  “He wanted to keep their attention off the monitor,” Hanna said, and repeated, “How do we get him out?”

  Theo said, “Look, you’re not going to like this. But he must have meant to look after himself. I think he wants us to go.”

  She was furious—but cut it off; that was more than fear talking. Whatever Michael wanted was what Theo wanted, and he was thinking of Lise. Get out, Michael had told her, and she had obeyed blindly; she could not be angry at Theo for doing the same thing.

  Theo said persistently, “If he can get off the ship, he’ll be all right. He knows the language, the territory—there’s Carmina. Maybe he means to go to ground till the Polity comes.”

  “But he’s hurt.” She realized then that she did not know how badly. She had broke
n the thin trance-link before it happened, had been pulling herself together from that, and whatever had happened to Michael had come up behind her and knocked her out. She thought for an instant, Oh God is he dead? and Lise saw her face and went white.

  But if he were dead, she would know it beyond doubt. The best part of her would be dead, too.

  Lise said in a trembling voice, “Couldn’t you make him stop?”

  “I didn’t know what was going to happen. It was like he, he knew just what he was doing— Oh,” she said in anguish, “God damn him for not being afraid!”

  Shen had not said anything. Hanna leaned against the back of Shen’s seat. Theo was trying to comfort Lise and GeeGee’s normal sounds went on steadily, but there was a great silence, an absent voice. Hanna was weak and could not think.

  Shen said, “Theo, you think you could get GeeGee home?”

  He looked around, his arm around Lise. He was silent for a minute, working it out. “Sure,” he said.

  “Post.” She was talking to Hanna now. “You and me, we steal a truck, see what they’ve got for guns. Get back there and come in behind, on foot. All right?”

  “Wait a minute.” Hanna’s head started to work again. “They were only at Croft because we were. They’ll go back to the Post.”

  “Yeah. We go, too, then. Get off GeeGee farther away. Send Theo back to Theta. Walk in like before, us two. They think nobody’s left here, think we went with Theo.”

  “But if they think that—” There were flaws everywhere Hanna looked. If the Golden Girl escaped, B would give up on Gadrah; he would have to make a desperate flight to human space, try to disappear there; nothing else would be left.

  Shen said practically, “Find out what he’s thinking.”

  “What? Who?”

  “B,” Shen said, making a curse of it.