The D’neeran Factor (25 page)

“I want to take her home.”

“D'neera does not have the facilities to care for her.”

“As soon as she is well enough.”

“It will be months.”

Iledra was a tall woman, and did not have to look up very far to meet Jameson's eyes. She said flatly, “You would not let her go anyway.”

“The point's irrelevant. She must stay here for her own sake.”

“You would not have let me near her if you had not needed me. If any of you had been able to communicate with her without being unmanned by her fear, you would not have let me see her. If the
Voltaire
had not been there when the alarm came, would you have told me, even, that you had found her? I think not.”

She was right about all of it. He would not say so; but she heard it anyway.

He said quietly, “It's pointless to exacerbate public fear. It must be known of course that she has been found, but not everyone needs to know exactly what was done to her. I do not want to deal with a panic.”

“I think you already have one,” Iledra said. She had come to Earth very speedily, but she was no pilot and had spent her days and nights in gathering all the information she could. She knew knots and eddies of the credulous already wanted to run—if only they knew where to run to.
Soldiers everywhere watched the void for traces of an invader, and an innocent merchantman approaching Colony One had been blown to bits. All the commissioners' seats were in jeopardy, along with the bodies that had appointed them. And someone, someone not unimportant, had suggested Jameson be tried for unspecified crimes against humanity.

But he said, “There is no panic yet. But it is not wise to provide fuel for one. There are disjunctions enough in every society, and more will come. You cannot be unaware of what is happening here. Security measures already are affecting our economies. Earth's old proposal for tightening inter-system controls is on the verge of approval. It will take lifetimes to complete, it will drain off more resources than we can afford and restrict our descendants' freedom of movement to an intolerable degree. I thought the idea was discredited years ago; yet the mood of Heartworld governments is such that if it comes to a vote I will have to acquiesce. Power is shifting on every human world, including yours. For you, if I read the currents correctly, it is taking the form of a return to isolationism. I do not like a new thing I hear from D'neera—that a movement is gaining strength to build up your own defenses, and dispense with Polity protection. What will your people do when they learn what we have just learned—that your world is the aliens' prime target?”

Iledra said softly, “Don't try that with me.”

“I beg your pardon?” He looked genuinely surprised.

“Don't try to frighten me. You lie. The prime target is the Polity. D'neera is no threat to them. They are interested in D'neera only as a means of getting to you. H'ana did not tell them enough.”

Irritation crossed his face; she thought she was not supposed to see it. He said, “When the attack comes their reasons will not matter. You couldn't fight off Nestor without the Fleet. You can't do without us now. I hope you can convince your fellow magistrates of that.”

“I am not likely to have much success. The outcry against me has been great. You are right at least about shifting power. I may not be the Lady of Koroth much longer.”

“And the call will come at any moment telling me I am no longer the commissioner for Heartworld. But we still have our responsibilities, Lady Koroth. Neither of us to
one world only; both of us to the human species. I will not try to force you to keep silence about Hanna's condition or anything else you have learned. But I will ask you to use all the influence you have to ensure D'neera's cooperation. I will ask you to make D'neera see where its duty lies.”

“Duty!” she said, and turned away from him. She was on the edge of tears, as she had been since her first sight of Hanna; it had been a great shock, in spite of Jameson's warning beforehand. She had made Hanna see where
her
duty lay, and would regret that success forever.

There would be no attempt to detain her here, for she had made her own prison. Her efforts to insinuate D'neera into true-human society had ensnared her, and all ways out were closed. It would not be her part now to shape a world's course; the aliens glimpsed as forms of horror in Hanna's tormented memory would shape them all. Jameson would let her go free so that she could bend or frighten the Houses to docility—meaning that she would smooth the way for a Polity military presence that would come whether it was wanted or not. Her part was to play the go-between; to discourage resistance and make palatable the truth that the Polity would descend on D'neera not for D'neera's protection, but for its own.

She looked back at him and said, because she had no choice and it did not matter what she said, “I will do what I can.”

He nodded slightly. It was not much of a tribute to what she promised. He said, “There was no indication of their motives in returning her?”

The repetition annoyed her. “None.”

“Perhaps we will find out in time,” he said too casually.

Iledra thought of the useless hulk that had been Hanna and clasped her hands together. They would question Hanna as remorselessly as the aliens had, and she could not prevent it. She could not even say that they were wrong. Where Hanna and the aliens were concerned, no information was trivial.

She said, “There is one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Probably it does not matter—”

“What is it?”

She said slowly, “There seemed a difference in H'ana.”

“What sort of difference?” His tone was unchanged; but she knew that every sense he possessed was concentrated on her answer.

“I don't—I hardly know. Images and, oh, turns of thought, the equivalent of phrasing, perhaps…”

She was unsure of what she was trying to describe, and the impact of her contact with Hanna was fading. She knew the contours and tastes of Hanna's personality as well as her own, or she would never have seen the subtle difference; and it might after all be only part of the memory of fear and pain, or the greater disjunction of trauma and drugs. The first would leave greater or lesser traces in Hanna, as tragedy always did, but much of it, and the immediate effects of her physical condition, would dissipate.

She looked up and saw that Jameson still waited for her to go on. She shook her head. “It's not important,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She hesitated, but the impression dimmed as she considered it. It had been difficult to induce and hold Hanna to concentration, and dream fragments had kept intruding.

“I'm sure,” she said.

“All right. Are you ready to talk to the others?”

She looked once toward the river, as if she could escape to it, but rain obscured it now, silently. “Yes,” she said.

They went to the door together. Just before they got there he said abruptly, “I was glad to hear about her eyes.”

She trusted him too little to think he meant it, but she said, “I'll have them sent in a week or two. We were going to do away with the bank. None of our defense people have needed their spares for years.”

“It was good news you have them. The plan was for a stock transplant.”

“I know.” Iledra's own eyes filled with tears. She said, “I would hate to think of H'ana with someone else's eyes. Her own are so lovely.”

Jameson looked down at her and said to her surprise, “Yes. They were very lovely.”

The door opened, and the questions began at once.

The next wakings were less painful, and even more dreamlike. Some she would remember, some she would not. Part of her mind began to store information. They were fixing her, re-growing much of her, patching together the rest. Her own eyes, grown on D'neera and banked there when she joined Defense, were available; that was good. Her flesh responded eagerly to regeneration, the speed was something built in at the time of the Change; that was not so good, not when there were so many different things to juggle. She could not move or feel anything. They explained to her once that so many delicate processes were going on in healing her that it was best she stay away, stay asleep, and let them go about the business of repairing the envelope that held Hanna ril-Koroth.

Presently they tried waking her to full self-awareness, and in the first burst of memory she was frantic to flee, and could not move nor even cry out. Her panic blasted a hundred people. They knocked her out to stop the nightmare-silent screaming and, reluctantly, since Iledra had gone home, asked D'neera to send a telepath to aid them.

Dale Tharan came without protest, approved by the Polity precisely because he was an outspoken advocate of giving it anything it wanted and taking in return all D'neera could get. But he did not like Hanna, and when he had eased her into reality as he was supposed to do, he told her she had not done him or herself or D'neera any favor by failing to hold out against the aliens.
And hideous now. A limbless lump,
he added, but even Tharan was not proof against Hanna's first clear sight, through his eyes, of what the aliens had made of her. They made her sleep again, and next time they woke her Tharan, with considerable dedication,
painted her portrait as she had been and would be again. It was not much to hold on to, but it was something.

*   *   *

Jameson had the interrogation sessions linked with his office. He listened while he went about his business, and when he was with other people he had the transmission routed to the implant in his ear, which was supposed to be used only for matters of extreme urgency and when he had shut himself off from the world by every other means.

The data extracted from Hanna were, then, twice disembodied. She could hear, but she could not speak. The questions therefore were asked by the men whose business it was to ask them, but the answers were filtered first through Tharan, and then through the complex electronics that fed Tharan's voice into Jameson's ear. What he heard might have been messages shouted by Hanna across a river, the meaning twisted, distorted, blown away by distance and the wind. Those about him were often disconcerted. He wore a wrist communicator, as was his habit, but ordinarily he was courteous about its use. Now he would interrupt anyone or anything to raise it to his lips and snarl, “Ask her—”

Ask her anything. How many? On their ship? On their world? How many planets? What weaponry?—until they had to give up questions, because Hanna would get confused, and think aliens not humans questioned her, and send Tharan with a spinning head stumbling away, unmanned, as Iledra had said, by her fear.

What she said of the Lost World jolted Jameson. He had not really believed in it until now, thinking it a bare possibility; but it was real; and the spectacle of a human population tortured, manipulated, subjected to experiment and killed, was appalling. Humans had almost stopped doing such things to each other—a hopeful sign for the future, he had always thought. Now there was the prospect of its starting all over again with an aggressor to whom economic sanctions and human opinion meant exactly nothing.

He seized on what the sacrificed colonists could do for him, however, without permitting himself compunctions about using a ghoul's opportunity. The information came early enough to save him for a time, because it was immediately clear that Species X had been searching for humanity for a long time. Jameson said publicly and privately to
anyone who would listen, playing the idea for all it was worth, that it was fortunate the first contacts had been with
Endeavor
and
XS-12
so that humankind had some warning. It was not enough to get back all the ground he had lost, but Heartworld did not replace him and he was still in control.

Except—control was an illusion. Maybe he had known it from the moment Rodrigues's voice called him from the illusions of his last hours with Henriette. If he had not known it he found out one night when he took an enormous dose of Imagos, hoping to lose grim reality in the blurred edges of beauty for a little while. But the coals in his fireplace were Hanna's charred eyesockets, bone showed through his own unsteady hand, and he could not get the antidote into his bloodstream fast enough for comfort. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before. He sat sweating in a room cool enough to need a fire and acknowledged something he had pretended not to know: the dreams that had given birth to
Endeavor
were finished. There would be no brave leap into the future; only torturous courses dictated by need. Past and future had come seeking
him,
and he was as helpless as Lady Koroth.

*   *   *

Another purpose?

Another. Old old. Incomplete. They did not finish.

Finish what?

I don't know. An ending. More than death. More than me. They stopped. And still another.

Purpose? What?

I don't know. I don't know!

“Tharan,” said an audible voice. It must have said his name several times before it penetrated his dialogue with Hanna.

He got up, shaking off Hanna's frantic grab for contact. To stay sane himself he had to harden himself against her clutching terror. If she had been anyone else, if she had been here for any other reason, they would have let her sleep through the months of helplessness and enforced paralysis. They could not, and she sometimes skirted the raw edge of panic. Tharan kept trying to tell her she was safe now. She kept forgetting.

Stanislaw Morisz had called him. Morisz beckoned and
Tharan went out the door with him. There was nobody in the corridor. This was a very busy medical center, but they'd sealed off a whole floor for Hanna.