The D’neeran Factor (14 page)

Hanna did not have to compare her memories of the Hierarchus with her experience on Shuttle Five to know that was not the attitude of Species X, though Tamara—her only contact with the life of
Endeavor
now—told her the aliens were invisible or absent from the second location they had selected. No dreams haunted Hanna. No one came near to ask what really had happened to her out there, and her report seemed to have sunk into silence and left no trace. But she thought of it anyway, the pain and the fear and the strangeness, whenever she lifted her tired eyes from her work or stretched out for a minimal nap; and she came to certain meager conclusions which she did not share with anyone—the persons around her having, it seemed, lost interest in anything she might tell them.

She worried a little about their insistence on ignorance, although in fact there was nothing she could add that would clarify her original impressions. She worried a little also when Tamara told her, some two weeks after the incident that Starr Jameson was expected a few days hence, and that Hanna, presumably, would return to human space when he did. Hanna said acidly that the return trip should be entertaining; but she remembered with discomfort her sense of being in the man's debt. It occurred to her that the last year of her life, viewed from a certain perspective, bore in abstract the imprint of his hand. It was an unpleasant thought, and she kept it at a distance as her concentration centered more and more strongly, to the exclusion of all else, on her work. Undistracted now that she had no other duties, she saw solutions to puzzles that had seemed insoluble. She left the thicket of references and drew more heavily on her own experience of F'thal and Girritt, her own observations of
the Primitives. The underlying structure of her thought crystallized and she wrote rapidly and confidently, sure of her ground. No doubt no one would read what she wrote, but it was truth. She was constructing a monument whose existence was testimony to the validity of its thesis, for it was founded on empirical data—but the data did not exist in true-human reality. She felt, when she thought of the grand futility of her effort, the exaltation she had felt when the
Clara
began moving toward its end, and she gave herself over to it. She did not forget Jameson, but the apprehension retreated to one small corner of her mind where she looked at it from time to time in a detached sort of way. In the long run, she thought, it did not matter. In the long run nothing mattered except what she was doing.

No one bothered to tell her when Jameson arrived, or that he wished to see her. The door sounded several times before she heard it through a daze that was half obsession, half exhaustion, and then she thought it was Tam.

“C'mon in,” she said automatically, and not until he came to her side did she look up and see who it was.

Unprepared for the apparition, she only stared and said, “Oh.”

She had to look up a long way to see his face. She recognized him at once, but familiarity with his image had not prepared her for his height, nor for the really shocking sense that he was in charge here—that he would be in charge wherever he was. Her experience with true-human authority was limited to Erik, and what she sensed in Jameson was not the same thing at all; and it held her silent and round-eyed.

Jameson looked from her face to the passage she was working on. He said without formality or introduction, “I've seen some of what you're doing. Captain Fleming pulled it out of the main data bank. I'd like to see the rest.”

Hanna moved finally—to look past him and see what entourage he had brought. The door to her room had shut and no one else was there. Questions chased one another through her head. She opened her mouth to ask them and found herself too tired. It didn't matter. She did not think she could refuse his request even if there were reason to refuse. Weariness and shock made her movements uncertain.
She pawed through a litter of printouts for a display module, plugged it into her terminal, and cued it for a current draft. When she turned to hand it to him she caught him eyeing her with something that might have been surprise.

She said, “Yes?”

But he said only, “May I have the chair?”

“Oh. Yes. Of course.”

She retreated to her bunk, which was as deep in annotated paper as the rest of the room. She had to move some of it before she could sit down, and under some of the scraps she found the remains of a sandwich. It occurred to her rather belatedly that Jameson probably was not used to such settings.

He spent a long time reading. Hanna set herself to watch him, but in the long unbroken silence she drifted irresistibly toward sleep. So much more work to do and she had to have some of those references, she could not emphatically criticize a structure of theory and double it in a new direction without references, lots of references, footnotes, oh Lord…Annual Report 2832, The Committee on Alien Relations, Starr Jameson, Commissioner-Heartworld, Chairman. The Coordinating Commission had not had much power five hundred years ago. Now, in theory, three of the five voting members could override the unanimous will of all the populations of the Polity. For a while. Until they were pulled and more amenable replacements appointed. And how did it work anyway? Why did she not know more about history? But on D'neera you could study what you wanted and she had never cared about history or art either, only fighting and aliens. And maybe gardening, sometimes, but the millefleurs got into everything….

Hanna yawned and fell sound asleep.

His voice woke her. It was a very deep voice, and she liked it. The inappropriate thought woke her further and she sat up straight, shaking her head. He was not talking to her. He was speaking to someone on the ship's intercom, asking for coffee and spirits.

He turned to look at her directly and Hanna stiffened, suddenly wide awake and unsure of herself. His eyes were cold, and she felt herself being measured as no one had measured her before, not even Iledra. Jameson was a presence,
utterly sure of his power and his right to judge her, and her response to this new thing was blank astonishment.

He said without ceremony, “How did you know this?”

“Know what?” she said stupidly. She was staring at him again. His face was too interesting to be ugly, with strong bones and unexpected hollows. She liked that, too.

He leveled a long forefinger at the wallscreen, which still showed the passage she had been writing when he came in. It said:

“Most observers of Primitive B, citing winged-flight mass limitations as a curb on braincase development, have assumed this rudimentary culture will stagnate until environmental change forces it to evolutionary regression or extinction. However, the acknowledged complexity of B nestbuilding activity, until now wrongly attributed exclusively to instinct, illustrates the prevalence of logical operations in everyday life. For example, the pitch of the nests' woven-branch ‘roofs' is determined not only by an explicit projection of expected severity of rainstorms in a given area, but also by individual preference for the fruit of certain vines which flourish best on more nearly vertical surfaces…”

Hanna gathered her scattered thoughts and said, “I ‘heard' them. I was there when the flock I was studying was settling in for a nesting season. ‘I think I will make it higher and there will be more to eat.'”

Jameson blinked. “That's rudimentary agriculture.” he said.

“I was coming to that.”

They regarded each other in silence for a moment. Then he said, “So you were frightened after all.”

“What?” She thought she had misheard him.

“You were frightened when you undertook the experiment you yourself suggested. Why?”

“Why?” She shifted uneasily. This was not a question that had occurred to her. She drew up her knees and curled her arms around them protectively. She said, “It was what you said, I suppose. That they were strange.”

“Was it? Was that the only reason?”

“Why—I don't know. I don't know. You said that yourself.”

“I wasn't there. You were.”

It was hard to look away from his cold gaze. Erik had looked at her like this sometimes, and only irritated her. Now a mountain might have been addressing her, compelling her to answer.

She was not used to finding true-humans impressive. Jameson must have thought she was frightened, because he said with a hint of exasperation, “I'm not going to eat you, you know. Just answer my questions as accurately as you can.”

“Yes,” she said after a minute, but she saw there was no softening in his eyes. She looked at him very steadily, wondering what he was about.

He said, “I'm thoroughly familiar with your report. The imagery was all visual?”

“All. Yes.”

“And frightening.”

“Yes.”

“It was anthropomorphic to an extreme degree. How much of it did you yourself create?”

Hanna had not asked herself that either. She pushed nervously at her hair and said, “I might have—I might have ‘created,' as you call it, all of the images. But they were correlates of—of thoughts that weren't mine. That's how it works.”

She could not keep away from his eyes very long. They were sometimes gray, sometimes green; she found them disconcerting.

He said, “Are you quite, quite sure of that?”

She was suddenly angry, for no reason. “Yes! Yes, I'm sure! I've had enough experience with F'thalians, with Girrians, to know that, that when something like that comes up it's a symbol for something that's really there!”

“And of what precisely are they symbols?”

She said unwillingly, “I pinned some of them down, as far as you can pin something like that down. They were impressions of—of a whole long stretch of time, and patience. And hunting.”

“The spear?” he said quickly.

“Yes. But not hunting
with
it. It changed from something else, you know. It wasn't a real spear. It was all symbols I saw. It was—you read that I saw a snake?”

“I read that it was a living portion of a snake, and that you identified it with yourself.”

“Yes. Well. It's not that they thought I was a snake, you
see. It was a perception of me as…incomplete. Alive but divided.”

“You did not say that in your report.”

“I didn't understand it until later. That's all. Hunting and patience and that image of me. I haven't been able to think of anything else.”

“I see,” he said.

He leaned back in the chair and she jumped, the movement taking her by surprise. He looked past her, frowning a little. She felt herself, for the moment, dismissed.

It struck her that of all the strange events of her life, strange as any was to have this man sitting in her tiny cabin, discussing a first contact in her terms.

Her
terms. It came to her forcibly that she was being taken seriously after all: somewhere. You could not be taken much more seriously than this. But somebody had not wanted her to know it; somebody had not even wanted Erik to know it.

Jameson said presently, still looking at something else, “You still think they are telepaths.”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

“You must have been as strange to them as they were to you. Might that account for the rather ominous nature of the images?”

“I suppose it might—no. Wait.”

She bowed her head and stared at the floor. Textured matting. Jameson's elegant boot. She did not want to remember. She shut her eyes and called to memory the fabric of an instant, warp and woof, presence and absence interwoven. Surely the aliens had felt her surprise and apprehension; but she had felt no such thing from them.

More. More. The absence of surprise had been so complete as to be a tangible thing; but so embedded was it in the shape of the gestalt that she had not even identified it, until now, as an entity.

“They knew me,” she said softly. “Like F'thalians who've met us before. They knew me for a human being.”

Jameson said flatly, “That's impossible,” but Hanna was caught in recollection. She drifted among images, examining them one by one and all at once for a connection that was not a connection.

“Lost,” she said dreamily. “Lost and divided. Lost planets, that was it. Lost worlds, found again—”

Jameson said very sharply, “What was that?”

“Hmm?” She looked up, open and unguarded and pleased with herself. But Jameson leaned forward intently. Hanna's pleasure passed into alarm.

Jameson said urgently, “Are you certain of that?”

“Yes. Yes! Divided—lost worlds—lost worlds? Where have I heard that before?”

She put her hands to her head, which had begun to ache.

“Legend,” he said. He looked at her with open curiosity.

She could not keep up with him. She said, “What legend?”

“The legend of the Lost Worlds, from the time of the Explosion. You know the history of the Explosion?”

“I only know the name, and that it was the, the great period of colonization.”

“Umm-hmm.” His eyes were still on her, but he was seeing something else again, something far away and long ago.

“It began seven hundred years ago,” he said, and she tilted her head, caught in the deep quiet voice. “No one knows how many hundreds of millions of human beings left the Earth and its moon in the space of some three hundred years, nor how many vessels carried them. The ships that went officially to Colony One are accounted for; but there were many that were not official, and some that were desperate, and surely many did not reach their destination. The East threw its poor and dissenting away in the wastes of Co-op, till Co-op broke free. Its records never were good…The private ventures were uncounted, ship after ship of men and women seeking better lives, freedom, riches, the fulfillment of dreams admirable or reprehensible…. It was the greatest fleet the human race has seen, and its full extent was never known. Some ships are known to have disappeared. How many others vanished? Often colonists were stripped of their goods and marooned—or simply killed. Some were found later, or their bones. Many were not…You should know this. Everyone should know it.”