The D’neeran Factor (41 page)

A scarlet-suited Student reached from the wall. Hanna avoided his grasp; he disappeared.

Knew at once what they were what We feared had feared and fear: Renders without question, for they killed Us: Renders grown to master metal, worse: Renders of a distant star

She stumbled into a room she had not seen before. The chairs looked comfortable, though too large. The ceiling was hung with gems that would dance in moving air; but no air moved.

Prisoned them and questioned, but they knew naught. Called on a sky-born Render to crush Us, but it came not. Some said it was not. Hate scalded Us. We remembered Renders' hate. And its extinguishing.

The room shrank. There was no way out. “Let me out!” Hanna gasped, but the walls closed in remorselessly. The glittering stones were the People's eyes.

Remembered the Rite of Renders' days. We used it applied it to flatten to claim them, defuse and defang them. They crawled, begged, yielded, and died. One by one

Hanna chewed her fingers, crawling. Illusion! The door was where she had left it. She climbed to her feet and trudged toward it and through it, head down.

dissolved them and changed them and learned alteration the source and the secret and thou final fruit

The pseudo-familiar corridors dilated and expanded with her breath. She was a Student, and saw a helpless Treecub vanish in agony; was a colonist racked into insanity.

learned We the change that might aid times-to-come

She got through a last portal and
Heartworld II
was there.
All the beings stored in Leader flung history at her. Here were memories of a thousand Nearhomes still walled against long-extinct Renders, here was the Last Hunt which had spanned two hundred years, here were ancestral deaths remembered by survivors whose loss was more final than humans could know. More: burning brands defending misty seacaves, naked hunters hunted by the essence of evil, an archetype ages old that was a living presence still.

She walked into
Heartworld II
and to its flight deck, wobbling but upright, and still bombarded. Human fittings welcomed her. The computer's human-seeming speech soothed her.

“We are leaving,” Hanna said to
Heartworld II.

“Destination?” it inquired without anxiety.

“D'neera,” she said, suddenly remembering it was a day or less away. “D'neera. Oh, dear God. D'neera.”

Listen,
Leader said.

“Shut up.”

She let
Heartworld II
do most of the work—that was what it was made for and carried on with it a dialogue in which her part was more crystalline and uninflected than the yacht's. Leader brooded at the back of her thought, contemplating going as a prisoner to D'neera. He said, “You are now alien there as I.”

“I am human,” she said, opposing his doubt. To be human was to be Hanna, and she would not be Leader. Or the other thing, “which you are,” Leader said. “No,” Hanna said.

Nonetheless (the docking bay opened slowly on darkness, and
Heartworld II
meshed fields with the First Watchsetter, pushed against substance and non-substance, and lifted) it was true. The day when humans became Renders was not ended. The People had met therefore were meeting therefore would meet a handful of humans stranded on a hostile world, and had seen Renders and were seeing them and would see them. Hanna did not understand how this could be, but there was no question
(Heartworld II
floated gently into space, and frost glittered in pale starlight where it had been) that was what the People saw. No question they would see it again and forever “because you
are
” Leader said, complexes of Render instinct, and barren of the living omnipresent communication through time as well as space that made up this thing she must call the People, or their soul.

No Jump had ever been so welcome as the one that left the First Watchsetter behind.

*   *   *

Why were there no stimulants on this ship?

Clouds drifted erratically and at intervals into her vision. Her reading on Earth had hinted at glorious devastating drugs in high places. There was a guarded link to Jameson. Imagos, Fantasee, Reomla, Dite's Dream—why not the common ordinary boosters everyone used? Why couldn't he have left her some?

You will be Home soon,
Leader said,
and will rest. Or not. Not I. Not you, while I am with you. They will not permit!

Hanna muttered through her weariness, “Iledra will.”

He believed it. He shared her faith in Iledra; he could not do otherwise.

He said,
Close to Home closing destruction of mine
—

“Close,” she agreed hazily; got up to keep herself awake; saw facing her a map of human space.

The map was an automatic display, an entertainment, a pretty pattern, a reduction of space to the dimensions of the mind. She wondered what it was doing here in a place that belonged to Jameson. He was not a man to diminish the reality of night and rock.

But other people came here too: Heartworld's councilmen, perhaps, or guests of its governments from other worlds. They would come to watch a pilot, maybe Jameson himself, manipulate the controls that flung them through space-time. Here it was, anyway. She regarded it with somber fascination. Schematic and out of scale it showed everything, a child's-eye view of the universe, where the stars humanity called its own twinkled merrily, connected by thin diamond-bright lines that showed common courses, relay networks—

She was near such a network. Within one? Yes!

(Kiri grinned at a face from Control, unflappable, unquenchable. “A tricky maneuver with minim data. Bassanio in command. Not bad!”

“I don't remember this group being reported ready to up-phase
—
”

“It was safe enough. Anyway I couldn't stop 'em.”

The face said furiously, “Damn you, Kiri, one of these days you're going to lose a whole pod!”

Kiri, laughing, closed D'neera out. The training vessel
Star of Gnerin
was too filled with delight for gravity-chained faces to distress it.

“We know better, don't we?” she said, smiling at Hanna. “I
wish there were no relays
—
they'd never know what we do!” Hanna agreed, happy and triumphant. She was sixteen, carefree, and immortal…)

“D'neera,” she said to
Heartworld II.
“Call D'neera, the House of Koroth, I want to talk to Lady Koroth.”

No!
Leader said with violence. He needed time; D'neera was too close.

Heartworld II
made its busy calculations, located a target, and spoke. Its identicode preceded its message. This was so routine that Hanna gave it no thought, nor the probability that through all of human space the code was flagged and tagged—

“Stand by for holographic transmission,”
Heartworld II
said tranquilly.

—and diverted to—

A uniformed Fleet commander who stood before her larger than life and with no warning, so that she jumped, thinking in confusion that she had blacked out and they had boarded and this was a flesh-and-blood giant and really here.

He said politely, “I am asked by Lady Koroth to tell you that she invites you to return home.”

They stared at each other. It seemed a long time since Hanna had looked on a human being. She found her voice and said, “Where is Lady Koroth?”

He had to think about that a minute. She saw that he looked weary. A patch on his shoulder said his name was Tso.

He said, “She is nearby.”

“I want to talk to her.”

“That is impossible,” he said, still courteously.

“Why is it impossible?” she said, already knowing the reason as if the knowledge had leaped from the brain of the invisible Lady Koroth to hers. There had been Fleet troops in plenty on D'neera for months. The magistrates now were only figureheads. Compromise was over. It was no longer possible for Iledra to speak for herself. Hanna's dream of going home had been folly from the start. And all Iledra's
other hopes. They would not even let her speak to Hanna. They must be afraid of what she would say. And what could that be but a warning to Hanna
not
to come?

Tso shifted tactics. “Nothing will happen to you,” he said. “We are under the strictest orders, from the highest possible sources, not to hurt you.”

Hanna said, “If Iledra tells me it's safe to come home I'll come. Not otherwise. I want to talk to Commissioner Jameson too.”

“Of course,” Tso said. “Immediately. It will take only a few minutes to patch through to Earth.”

He turned away and issued orders to, from Hanna's vantage, a wall of
Heartworld II.
When he turned back Hanna had had a little time to think. Tso's official face was as blank as Jameson's at its best, but his eyes flickered. Hanna was thin and blood-stained and disheveled. Fleet would not be much impressed, nor whatever watcher of Morisz's they called in—and I&S certainly would be called in. What would they say to Jameson before she spoke to him, before he even saw her image for himself?

“I still want to talk to Iledra,” she said, “or Cosma,” but Tso did not answer. He said casually, “How long will it take for you to come here?”

“A long time,” Hanna said as casually. She drifted without haste toward the communications panel of
Heartworld II,
skirting the insubstantial giant. The obliging yacht, without orders to the contrary, was projecting her semblance to D'neera. Somewhere—even, no doubt, in her House itself—her image walked ghostly through familiar space.

She cut off the communication with a movement of her hand. When she looked around, Tso was not there.

Leader had what he wanted, but she jerked at his wave of—pity? Pity! For her!

He said in what seemed a whisper, “Not to be able to go Home…!”

“You can't either…”

She fell wearily into the pilot's seat. Another Jump was imminent. She would not feel safe until it was over. They would pinpoint her location through the relays, and come here. She was not even sure
Heartworld II
's course could not be remote-sabotaged. The dense-written course program for Leader's Home lay between her breasts, folded and crumpled.
She could not go home; she must put the course into Jameson's hands. Why? She thought confusedly that it would be more sensible and safer to put it into Iledra's. But they guarded Iledra against her coming. To get to Iledra she would have to throw herself against a wall of them. They would take the precious thing from her and send it through safe channels to Jameson; and to the commanders and Intelligence and the rest of the commissioners. She would never see Jameson face to face again. If he permitted her to speak to him she would be a prisoner, powerless and subdued and far away from his presence. Half the security force of the Polity would be listening, and his public persona would concede what it must to all the other eyes and ears.

But Hanna had nothing to do with his public persona. She had never had much to do with it. Every contact she had had with him had come down quickly to essential truth. So she must get to him and see him alone, and tell her story to him and only to him; and maybe by then she would know what, after all, was essential truth.

Five days to Earth, said an ETA display. How long had she been gone? It might have been weeks or months, for all her prisoned time-sense could tell. In five days she would be able to think of being free from the People forever.

The chime she had been waiting for sounded. She was safe again, for a little while. She sighed and rose, thinking of the paper that would give humans mastery, and her duty to take it to them.

She looked out the port at the stars and the universe split at ill-made seams, and she fell through nothing, gasping, and then it was over. She had been looking through Leader's eyes; but he was not real.

He said insistently, “I am.”

She looked again at the enormous port, the window on nothingness that frightened him so. Her eyes picked out a constellation that by chance resembled the Bowman, the tip of his shaft an ancient mariner's reference. But Bowman circled in Leader's sky, not hers.

She sat down, shaking. Her hands looked strange and were covered with dry blood. She was filled with longing to bathe in a golden pool where sapphire flowers mused and Swift played on sun-warmed stones, diving sleek into the shallows, rehearsing old courses of sea-born life.

She buried her face in her filthy hands. After all, it was only her own human wish to cleanse herself of blood; but it was transfigured.

“Yes,” Leader whispered, and she felt something like a song begin. It was no music
she
had ever known; it was music by analogy only. And she did not know, huddled in this black-edged whiteness that was foreign to her in its very human-ness, why he sang.

He saw something she did not.

“Changeling,” one of them said.

“Not me,” Hanna said. She understood only dimly what it was she denied. She thought, desperately, not of D'neera but of Earth, birthplace of the species humankind. She concentrated desperately on Jameson, quintessentially male, reminding her that she was female; embodiment of human power, reminding her that she deserved a human fate. For all else seemed slipping away.

“We are both changed,” said one of them.

She felt relief like soft rain to nourish her, but it was not her relief. Yet it was comforting. Leader-in-her-thoughts curled round her like smoke.

“Changeling, hybrid, two-in-one,” he crooned with her voice.

Hanna got up again, and could not take a step. Leader did nothing to stop her; it was only that there was nowhere to go. This time it did not occur to her to say he was not real. She never thought of it again.

Instead she said, “I don't want that. I don't want it. I don't want it.”