The D’neeran Factor (103 page)

Hanna passed her hands over her hair, self-soothing. Life in a broken mirror, shattered and refracted—

“—it clear,” he was saying. “Nothing logical, nothing to teach—not any of what you'd call facts. Half of what I think I know, I think I made up. I was Lise's age when they took me away. Maybe younger. It was thirty years ago. The language—nothing. Not a word.”

Her hands settled on her chest, to ease the constriction
round her heart. So they were not only going to Gadrah in defiance of sane judgment, they were going without anyone who knew anything about the place, not even Michael, unless Henrik did.

She said, “It's all there.”

“I don't know what you mean…” He had turned away.

“Everything gets stored,” she said. “No memory is completely lost. D'neeran mindhealers are trained to retrieve what seems forgotten. I myself, when it was necessary to find what I knew about the People of Zeig-Daru that I did not remember, was linked with a healer. It didn't work—but that's because the People are—different. And had done certain things no human had heard of, to ensure it wouldn't work. Otherwise I have never known it to fail.”

“There are no healers here.”

“I'm not a healer. But I'm an Adept, as a healer must be.”

“Meaning?”

“It's the trance that makes it possible.”

She had told him about the satya trance, how she had used it on the
Avalon.
Slowly he looked around. “A useful thing, that trance…”

His voice was low and rough. He was shaken with hope.

“I could take you into it with me. Do you want to do it?”

He was silent for some time. Hanna did not press him. She knew that between the moment of decision and the moment of action, it was sometimes necessary to stand for a little on the brink, to possess for a minute longer the freedom to retreat.

He said, “When can we start?”

They lay on Michael's bed, side by side and relaxed. The room was almost dark.

They had not said anything since taking this position. From that point onward Michael had been more vividly aware of Hanna's personality than at any time before. There had been telepathic contacts like this every day, but they had been fleeting, like a word or a touch or a smile. Now it was as though she uncovered a hidden light. He had thought it would feel like a current flowing between them, but it did not. It was not even like Hanna's hallucinations. Those had
been full of movement, rapid changes, a kaleidoscope of memories; this was very still. The only word he could think of to describe it was
there-ness,
and what was there was Hanna.

He knew she had begun to enter the trance, though in an odd way, as if it were not a goal to be reached but already in existence, needing only to be acknowledged; as if getting to it were not a matter of trying, but the relinquishing of effort.

It did not seem very potent. It did not seem strong enough to draw him back through the years, past the barrier of darkness. But suggestions flowed from Hanna, instructions to let go, to float, to drift back and back…

We will begin at the ending
…

Even in trance, he revolted.

Let go. Let go. The beginning, then. Back. Back. And look. What do you see?

The meadow was misty with the distance of years. But flowers grew in it.

Focus.

White flowers. The stamens brushed with velvety gold, petals defined by lines finer than a hair in pink shading to lavender.

And focus.

The soft colors filled his vision. The shapes were new as each heartbeat, older than his life. The plants were tall, their slender stems bending gently in the wind. Long slim serrated leaves, bumpy and a little sticky.
The sap is toxic. I remember.

Good. Good.

He looked up and the mist was gone. The sky was cloudless, the sun high. Mountains rose to his left, toward the east; westward the land sloped more gently to the valley with its cluster of barns and cottages set on a great stretch of cultivated fields. The vision was clear as the crystalline air. It was real, and surrounded him; the taste of herbal wine filled his mouth. The smell, the dazzling sunlight of a summer day that would never end as long as Michael lived, thrust at him and wounded him; even before the scene was fully formed he sank to his knees on the turf, clutching his belly with a crazy conviction that he had been opened and his insides would fall out. Hanna's soft hands held him together
until the transition was over. The feeling passed. He sighed and lifted his eyes to the summer.

“A long summer,” Hanna said at his side.

“All the summers everyplace else—summer's always seemed short. I know why, now. They were longer here.”

“I see,” said her thought: impersonal. Remote.

The air was pure, untainted by a few lazy columns of smoke that rose from the valley floor. Down there a broad river meandered across the basin, folding in on itself in convoluted curves, but the meadow was so high that the forest stretched out on every side looked, from this altitude, more like thick bumpy fabric on the cushions of the mountains, or like thick moss, than what it was.

He said, remembering, “I used to think, if you could jump off the mountain, you'd bounce.” And he looked at his shadow and it shrank, because for a moment he was a boy.

Hanna turned for the valley. He followed, not walking so much as floating. At the top of the first steep slope, he paused. The desire to stay in the radiant meadow, where it was safe, was almost unconquerable.

Hanna waited for him at the edge of the meadow. She did not speak or even make a gesture of encouragement. He waited in suspense to find out what he would decide. Then he slipped over the edge.

The end of the meadow turned precipitously into an acute drop, and they slid and scrambled down and down into the forest. The world changed. The trees which had looked to be all of a piece were individuals now. He had not seen trees like them anywhere else. The stems did not grow to great girth, and the branches were sinuous arms that reached for the sky and, through each day, stretched toward the sun in its path, so that in the morning all the forest seemed to lean one way, and in the evening another

Down and down he went, Hanna following easily. What difficulties could there be in this journey they made only in thought? Yet the descent was a strange blend of past and present. There were drops that had been heart-stopping thrills for a boy, and he felt the ghost of that old challenge when he took them, but now they scarcely stretched his long legs. At steppingstone rocks across a chattering stream he stopped to gauge the leap—and then walked over, crossing the gap easily, accepting adulthood and the passage of
years, even though nothing had changed. Invisible bird-things called in the quiet of the day. That was the only sound; there was not even wind to stir the trees, and nothing made by man crossed the sky. He took Hanna along trails made by wild things near the little stream, and the trails were just as they had been thirty years before. The peace of the place sank into him. It might have been the morning of creation here, before any strife or evil was made.

Soon they were close to the foot of the mountain. They could not possibly have come so far so rapidly. But trancetime was not realtime.

From a rock ledge they looked down on a pool in the stream, the first pool of any size they had seen. Michael dropped cross-legged on the ledge and smiled at the water. He said, “It's good to swim in. But cold!”

They stayed by the water for a long time. The sun did not move.
A useful thing, that trance.
The music of the invisible birds blended with the song of the water, and never altered. Hanna noticed; she said, “It doesn't change because it's not real. None of this is real.”

“It's real somewhere.”

“In you.”

“It's always been there,” he said, smiling. He was back where all smiles had begun.

Hanna said, “We must move on to the village.”

There was a burst of cold wind. He said quickly, “No. We can't. It's a long way. I'm tired.”

She said objectively, “That is a lie. You half-know yourself that you lie. You are not tired.”

He said after a pause, “I'm afraid.”

“That is the truth.”

Without warning it was twilight. The shadows under the trees were impenetrable; the bird-things stopped singing, and there were ominous rustles deep in the wood. He looked downstream, steeling himself to go on.

Hanna said, “Not today.”

“Are you sure?” he said, although he was relieved.

“I'm sure. Hold my hand. We're coming out of it.”

Now the star of Uskos was indistinguishable from others in its field. The
Golden Girl
's journey of some one hundred
days was begun. Hanna had taken a longer voyage, she had spent a full year on the exploration ship
Endeavor
; but the
Endeavor
had not covered nearly so great a distance. There was nothing slow and patient about this.
GeeGee
's course would be essentially parabolic: straight to Omega, where she would veer up and in not toward the heart of human space but toward Heartworld, and not even directly for that world itself but for the equivalent of Omega in that sector, another end-point. Only it was not an end, not for the
Avalon
or for the
Golden Girl
either. Like Omega, the end had become a starting place.

They had come from summer, but all
GeeGee
's chronometers said bewilderingly that it was midwinter. Midwinter in Standard time, midwinter at Polity Admin—

Hanna stood in Control and looked at the chronometers. She had left Admin more or less at the season she now left Ell, escaping winter once more. Where was Gadrah in its orbit? What would the season be where
GeeGee
landed? Where would she land?

When she asked him, Michael said, “I don't know.”

“Do you think there's a landing program included with the course?”

“There isn't. There's orbital compensation based on Standard chronology, though. The usual thing.”

“
GeeGee
could work out the year length from that, anyway.”

“She did.” He smiled up at Hanna's surprised face. “Shen and I did it last night while you were asleep. Jumped the data through every ring we could think of. It's a singleton—”

“What?” The rarity surprised her.

“—and the star's hotter than Sol, but Gadrah's not as far out as you'd expect. The year's only about twice Standard length.”

It would make for well defined seasons. Hanna said so.

“They're long, all right. But there's not much axial tilt, and the orbit's more regular than most,” he said.

“That would modify the extremes, then. What an odd place, Mike. A singleton? A clear shot in, no gas giants, no big gravity wells, nothing to worry about?”

“But a lot of junk,” he said. “A lot of junk! Rocks. Ice. Comets. Lots of comets. There's a warning in the program: most orbits unknown.”

“Then how—we can't Jump through it, can we?”

“No. Realspace and radar.”

“The best natural defenses I've ever heard of.” She was baffled. “Why did they go in in the first place? The original expedition, I mean. Why did they choose that direction, anyhow, when space was open everywhere?”

He leaned back in his place. His brown hands, very dark from the Uskosian sun, rested quietly on the console. He said, “I did a lot of research at one time. I think I know where that expedition originated. I think I know who led it. I know the colonists' names on the manifest—my ancestors' names—but I don't know why they went where they went. The records don't say that.”

“You never told me that. Wait.”

She was suddenly on overload. She took the seat next to him and put her head down on the console just as he had done a few nights before when Gadrah looked back at him from
GeeGee
's displays.