The D’neeran Factor (42 page)

“No,” Leader admitted, “but you begin to see.”

“I see,” said Hanna desperately, stubbornly, “that
you
are changed.
He
saw it.” She meant true-Leader.

“And you,” said Leader-in-her-thoughts.

“But I don't want to be changed!”

“But you are,” he said. He seemed and sounded like a man come to safety through a tempest. Hanna felt his feelings clearly enough; but she did not know if they were hers also. They might be, if she let them. Because suddenly she had none of her own, none at all. Everything else seemed to have run out of her along with fear.

She took one aimless step and then some more. She faced a polished black panel and stopped because there was
no particular reason to turn around and go in another direction. Her reflection was a dim shadow of herself, and she did not like looking at it. She called for darkness and slid into a heap at the panel's foot. All the lights went out, and all the black and white edges smoothed into grayness under starlight.

She said almost conversationally, “Look, I can't take any more. I just can't.”

“There is not much more,” Leader remarked.

“‘Not much more.' What does that mean?”

“Why,” Leader said, “I am prisoned in death. But if we come to my Home I will be freed.”

She understood only in part. She shook her head. “They'd kill me when they were done,” she said.

“But when you are finished with me in the presence of your People, they will obliterate me, who am already dead!”

“I'm sorry,” Hanna said, meaning it, “but I won.” She did not have to explain to him the significance of her mastery of this tired but functional human body.

“Fraud!” he said to her again, and lashed her this time with a memory of her own from an age ago on
Endeavor,
when she had in her arrogance criticized true-human limitations and proffered herself as the ultimate link to strange minds.

“You do not wish to learn anything,” said Leader, a disappointed pedant.

“I am too tired to learn,” Hanna said.

“It is easier to be a Render,” Leader said bitterly.

She answered wearily, “What else can I do? If I choose your way I betray my own people and make my death certain.”

“But you do not know what my way is,” he said. “And even if it were only what you think, how is it worse than your way?”

The air before Hanna thickened and blurred, and in it she saw Sunrise burning, the silver groves of her Nearhome gone up in flames, Swift bewildered and deranged and his mother's death consuming him. “You rob him of my springtimes,” Leader said. A child who was both Leader and Swift reached for the delicate, sweet-smelling tendrils of a young tree which blackened and melted along with the child, and with it melted also a million recollections and history
known through living minds treasured since the first thought net formed in a primeval sea.

She wanted to tell Leader there was nothing she could do about it, but he was gone, hidden, sulking in a corner of her consciousness. The knowledge he had tried to thrust upon her lay between them, uncomprehended. Because she would not comprehend, or maybe could not; she was not structured to comprehend it. She spoke instead what seemed a truth she could understand: “It's got to be one or the other. The advantage depends on me, don't you see? They know where we are but not how to program all the way. Now I know where you are—”

She paused, dubious. We and they and you seemed remarkably interchangeable.

But Leader did not answer. He only sulked—and grieved.

*   *   *

Hanna stayed where she was for a long time. Most of the time her eyes were fixed remotely on space. Twice
Heartworld II
said a Jump was coming and ran aloud through chains of equations; twice a chime sounded, and what Hanna saw changed. Each change took precisely one chronon. Or perhaps it did not. She wanted to touch a human presence and reached out for Jameson, for Iledra, for anyone, and could not sense the existence of a single living entity. She was not an Adept, and she was very far from anything human. She was alone with Leader, and he had discovered something that might be her conscience, and jabbed at it unmercifully.

The fourth Jump showed her, very small and distant, a glowing nebula. Stars were being born in its heart. Life would come from them in their turn. By which time humans and the People too would have vanished, or gone on to “a future unimaginable as the improbable past…”

She heard Jameson's deep voice say the words. She almost saw the room beside the flowing river where he had spoken them. She moved finally. She was cold and cramped. She did not like the way her thoughts kept going back to him, and to her own blighted promise.

She got up and went cautiously through
Heartworld II
to the living quarters. Nothing looked quite right or entirely wrong. She took off her clothes and dropped them into a
cleaning bin—she thought that was what it was; once she had known, but now she was not sure. Drawing a bath was less difficult, but when she slid into the water she cupped a little in her hands and touched her forehead to it. In memory, of course, of the First Home.

After that she bathed very quickly, and left the water as soon as she could. She was afraid that it would dissolve her.

She wandered naked through
Heartworld II
and thought about Leader. She had not thought about him before. You could not call it thought, that first battle for control. Nor had she thought about him during the days? weeks? as a passenger in her own body. Then she had only studied every detail of
his
thought as if he were under a microscope, so she could use it all for ambush. But Leader-in-her-thoughts, pseudo-Leader, changed Leader, had declined to die. He remained explorer, watchsetter, father, bondmate, an intelligent being steeped in a rich culture which resembled nothing humans had ever encountered before; a culture organically founded, more strangely structured than F'thal's, as limited as Girritt's but transcending its limitations.

On the flight deck she leaned across the unused pilot's console, looked again at the bright nebula, heard a chime, and was suspended in a dense field of stars. The starclouds shone for her, great drifts flung across the velvet of night, the jewels of creation promising gifts of life. A memory stirred: the old pull of curiosity beyond bearing, the seductive whisper born of desire saying she could deal with whatever she encountered.

With my body a weapon and fire in my hand and the great fleet pouring death from alien skies…

She saw herself and Leader, People and Renders, humans and bestial aliens, locked in a dance of hate.

She thought of the very first steps, which had determined the form of the dance.

She had thought, when she wrote “Sentience,” that the meaning of her life was the pursuit of understanding.

She had pursued nothing. She had only fallen into the pattern of the dance, not acting but reacting, seeking escape, even into death.

Leader whispered, “Full sentience is the power to choose the harder path.”

She turned her head sharply, as if he stood beside her.

“What can you know of it,” she said, “when you see us as nothing but beasts?”

“I know what I have learned from you,” he said. He meant “Sentience,” as if he had read it, and she saw, shocked, that he had. He had read it within her; read it in her cells and brain and the perspectives she brought to all that he saw through her eyes, whether she was consciously aware of them or not; and he accused her now of denying all she was.

“But I didn't know about you then,” she said. “I didn't know it could mean this!”

“But what if—?” he said, and he meant: What if someone stepped outside the dance? What if there were a hybrid, changeling, two-in-one, someone who could think simultaneously in two realities and show each to the other without the fear that was the heart of the dance?

If one could do it without being insane to the eyes of both, or be reassuringly the same and yet different. If one could do it. If she could do it. She and Leader—

“Yes,” he said; for it was his thought she thought.

“But how?”

“I don't know,” he admitted.

She sought within his reality for a key. His memories lay complete behind her thought, a secret known to no other human being. His knowledge was hers to use as she chose, freely. Death and transition and life-in-We—

“Saved safely in thee—”

But transmuted—

She said, “I think I know.” She put a hand against the thick transparent barrier that kept out the cold of space. The hand trembled.

He said after a little while, “Have you the courage?”

“I don't know. Oh, I don't know!”

He said slowly, “You must know more.”

“More,” she said, seeing what he meant and dreading it.

“You must
be
more.”

She rubbed her bare skin, shivering, clinging to her humanity.

“I will be utterly mad,” she said.

“No more than I,” he answered ruefully. That was true already, in any case. Neither ruefulness nor any other form of humor was part of the People.

“All right,” Hanna said, and bowed her head. Choosing. But no gratification accompanied the choice; she was compelled rather by the shadow of what she had been—which would mean nothing and be nothing if she did not make this choice. And she only knew that she had chosen when:

Smoke rose beyond marsh grasses that obscured her view. Something screamed barely audible in agony; barely audible though its throat was bursting because another battle was joined; on one side the cloud of which the thing was both part and (to the People) whole; and locked with it, wrestling with it and seeking to consume it, the People, savage and new, near foundering.

The grasses rippled past her, traveling. Or she moved, though without body or volition. She was coming near the Celebrant, on whom their power was focused. She could not see him past the ragged band that circled fire and stone and sacrifice.

“Not sacrifice.” Leader stood beside her in the wholeness of his prime, uniformed. Scarlet blinded her in the sunlight of the People's beginnings.

“Then what?”

Through the kin-group, through the fiery circle to the stone where lay the Render, screams diminished in extremity to choking sounds. She saw herself. Her flesh convulsed. She cried out in anguish and:

“…not sacrifice,” Leader was saying. “That is a human concept. This is other.”

She lifted her head from the floor of
Heartworld II.

“I cannot,” she said. “It's
him,
” meaning Bladetree.

“It is all of Us,” Leader said. “We are not human.”

She lay on ice. Her skin shrank from it.

“I will try,” she said, though it was impossible, and at once the common memory seized her again, vivid as if this ancient day from the morning of the world were yesterday.

She stood beside a fair deep pool, freshwater, tree-shrouded. The sea was far away, though ever-present in the soul; the People had spread far in great migrations. They had well-made weapons of stone and wore glossy furs. Before her stretched on massive stone was a Render. Its fangs gleamed; but its eyes were intelligent, its thought aware and utterly filled with hate.

It was less alien to her than were the People.

Celebrant lifted the stone knife and Hanna's hand rose with it. A ring of fire surrounded them. She would use fire too.

“No,” she said. “No!”

Taken one by one and costly beyond measure for they kill Us easily and overpower Us. Leaving no-time for transition. Quicker increase, many mates. Meat-eaters even as We and We are their prey. We are no match. Therefore We must believe and shape…

The thing thrashed, crying out, lost. Hanna saw herself. The knife slipped from her hands.

Honor thee who taketh pain transmute to joy create their end. Lest coming-time sees Renders only weaponed, powerful, dominant, Our vanishing all the ages of Our selves

The mountain stream spoke icily. Fire and stone. Fishers and farmers gathered for the Rite. Precious stones gleamed on her breast. She wielded knife and fire with scaly hands. The implacable bestial will flared, faded, and was malleable.

This is true. Is real. We change the real, make truth. They dwindle, yet We kill few. Yet they dwindle, unsubstantiated by past years past lives directed by a Rite that

Sea wind blew strongly on her sea-colored skin, and tore at her rich garments. A city gleamed beyond the dunes. The creature's pain was ecstasy.

Vanish and dissolve!
she cried, all cried, and it was nothing, strength and self obliterated and with it all its kind. Reduced to protoplasm, mind gone, will gone, it was ripe for harvesting. They took it in, its nothingness.

So are they nothing, harmless, impotent, and blown and tattered on the wind and threat no more, and We have made them so

Once more for an instant she was Hanna. She lay in darkness in
Heartworld II
and a human mind sought to understand, and could not, because: under the knife and her hard bloody hands a sentient species expired, driven to death by the People's will. And nothing else.

D
reamdust is a transparent powder with potent effects on the human nervous system. It produces, inevitably, sleep, but it is taken because it guarantees pleasant dreams, shaped by the dreamer's desires and providing whatever gratification he does not get in waking life. It is a product of Co-op, where the first, mostly unwilling settlers used it and thus, according to one view, survived the years of privation with some sanity intact; or, according to another view, failed to achieve any lasting thing until it was outlawed. Now it is used for the alleviation of chronic nightmares, and in expert hands for the guidance of dreams to modify personality without brainsoup intervention. But it also is used—not legally, since it is addictive—for its own sake. Most users dream of the erotic, and after many nights with ideal mates no longer form real relationships. But some use the powder to evoke tranquility, though that too is dangerous unless they are sufficiently strong-willed to refrain from comparing night to day.