The D’neeran Factor (43 page)

Starr Jameson, lately not much interested in eroticism, spent his nights dreaming of sun-warmed seas or, sometimes, Arrenswood; of broad empty sweeps of water or forest or grain, warmed by the light of unspecified suns. In these dreams he did not have the insistent transmitter implanted in his ear, and was relieved of responsibility and twenty years younger; all of which only made each day's waking reality a more potent shock.

The part of his mind that guided dreams was puzzled, then apprehensive, then alarmed when it got out of control. The sweep of radiant water faded, its coolness vanished from his skin, and he was in the dark. Hanna ril-Koroth was
back, a nightmare shape crouched on his bed with a hand twined hard in his hair. Something icy nicked at his throat. She said,
Wake up. Now! And don't move, or you die.

The not-quite-words were frantic. He mumbled, “Not me, Hanna,” and started to move, and nearly lost a handful of hair.

She said out loud, “Damn you, I'm real. You're not dreaming. Wake up!”

He thought she was Iledra's pale hand reaching for him, vengeful, and then that she might be real after all; but it was hard to tell with the Dreamdust coursing through him. He opened his eyes and saw a blacker figure melding with the darkness.

He said with difficulty, “Turn on the lights.”

She gave the command and in the burst of light moved convulsively, shoving a knee hard into his stomach. It hurt. He lay very still. She was real, all right, and so was the knife against his neck. He blinked until her face came into focus against black draperies, pale and familiar; but she was changed and haggard.

She said, “I've g-got something you want. We, I, want something. From you.”

He stared into her eyes and their blue mixed with his dreams and he fell into a summer evening's sky, a new dream stirring. Knife, fist, and knee evaporated. He lifted a heavy, tentative hand that brushed her hip.

“Stop it!” Her voice was high-pitched and impatient. Her face blurred, but not before he saw it was a stranger's. She said in a stranger's voice, “What's, what the hell's wrong with you?”

“Dreamdust?” he said, but it did not come out right and she said, “What?”

He said more clearly, “Dreamdust.”

She said, “Oh, hell.” The hand in his hair relaxed and she drew back. The knife left his throat, but it trailed across his chest and the point stopped between two lower ribs. If she drove it in it would not kill him at once, but he could be entirely disabled.

He had to get the fog out of his brain, which told him even now, earnestly, that he was alone with a woman who had a knife, and grievances, and maybe an alien army at her back. He wanted the Dreamdust antidote. He made her understand,
and felt a suspicious probe for the truth of what he said. In his helplessness it was a violation.

“Get it,” she said, but she kept the knife where it was while he reached for the panel that hid the antidote. Dreamdust is physically disabling, and his hand wavered. Ordinary people could burn out all the brain cells they wished without having to worry about instant recovery. Jameson kept antidotes for everything at hand, because he did not have that common luxury. He resented it.

He had trouble with the phial and after a minute, wordlessly, she took it from him, letting go of the knife to do so. It lay close by his hand, but he was so foggy he had no chance of making a grab for it without risking death, and both of them knew it. She opened the phial and held it out to him. The bitter liquid trickled down his throat, and he saw her take up the knife again before he put his head back and waited for his thoughts to clear. He closed his eyes and felt her weight shift. Her hands, knife and all, rested intimately on his knee.

Presently he said, “I hoped you would come back.”

“What?”

“The house let you in, didn't it?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said hesitantly, as if precision were costly, “I thought, I thought you'd forgotten to, to tell it not to. After I was here before. I didn't, I didn't know how I, I was going to get in. But it knew me and it…”

Her voice trailed away. In the dark behind his eyelids he pictured her creeping through the silent house, fumbling through unknown rooms in search of him, waiting each second for discovery.

“I didn't forget. I wanted to make it easy. You might have come for shelter when I wasn't here,” he said, and felt her reach for the truth again. This was why D'neerans did not lie; there was no point to it. But he was telling the truth.

He opened his eyes and saw her clearly for the first time. She looked terrible as his dream had made her: thin, hollow-eyed, the pale brown skin bloodless and sallow, her body stiff with tension. Her clothes were torn and hung on her loosely.

She said, “Was there, was, was there an alarm?”

“What kind of alarm?”

“To Morisz. Or somebody. Because you have to listen to me.”

“There was no alarm from here,” he said. “I don't know what you might have done getting this far,” and irritably, at another stab in thought, “I wish you would stop doing that. Do you think I would lie to you?”

Yes!
said her thought resoundingly.

“All right. All right. May I get dressed?”

She hesitated a moment and said, “All right. But move very slowly.”

He pushed away the coverlet and saw her eyes widen, taking in the heavy muscles of his chest and arms. She backed away from him. The knife fell to her knees and she was holding some kind of archaic gun. She said, “I don't forget you hunt tigers. This would stop one. I got it from the, the, the aliens.”

He barely kept still. “From—you have been with them?”

She nodded. He looked at the chunk of metal she held. Her thumb hovered near a stud whose function was unclear, but the hole in the end was pointed toward him.

“I believe you,” he said, and eased out of bed very slowly indeed.

He slept nude, but it did not occur to him to be self-conscious. He dressed slowly, giving himself time to think. Leaving himself open to Hanna's return had been a hopeless gesture. It was inconceivable that she should get this far, even supposing she wanted to come to him. And she ought to have been headed for D'neera, if anywhere in human space. “Rational but uncooperative,” Tso had said. Lady Koroth, witnessing that interview but kept from interfering, had been less temperate; she had used words like “hunted” and “driven.” They might both be right, Jameson thought, watching Hanna as closely as she watched him. Her sleeves were rolled up and an angry red wound showed on one forearm. Tso had reported it, with a note: Combat, query? The fast-healing D'neeran flesh had closed over it already, but scantily and unevenly, and the skin around it was dark and unhealthy. She held the heavy alien weapon awkwardly, using both hands; but the muzzle did not waver.

When he was finished he said in a carefully even tone, “Why don't you put that down, Hanna? You know I was
half-expecting you and you know there has been no alarm. I'm willing to talk to you, but that thing makes me nervous. What does it do, anyway?”

She looked at him with round eyes and said, “Are you—are you going to call for, for help? Don't lie,” she added.

He did not think she would like the truth, and answered reluctantly, “I won't tell anyone yet that you're here. Sooner or later I will have to. Not immediately.”

After a minute she nodded. She looked down at the weapon and turned and pointed it at a shrouded window. Her fingers moved and there was a loud click. Nothing else happened.

She said in mild surprise, “Oh. Must be out of power or something.”

She let it fall on the bed and with it, as if it were an afterthought, the knife.

“I didn't want to hurt you anyway,” she said.

Tension Jameson had not been aware of left him. He went to her and picked up both weapons and took them to a far corner of the room, where he locked them in a cabinet that until now had held nothing more dangerous than a lady's forgotten jewels. Hanna did not object. When he came back and stood before her, she looked at him quite trustfully, almost smiling, as if she were glad to see him. He did not smile back. He said, “You know what I want from you. Tell me what you want from me.”

“What,” she said rather vaguely, and just as he began to speak again, “do you want from me?”

He said, puzzled by the disjointure of her speech, “I want full cooperation. I can promise you nothing, except that you will not be pilloried unnecessarily.”

“It's all right.” The smile disappeared, and she was solemn. “I won't fight anymore. I won't run again. Just listen to me before you talk to anybody else. That's all I ask.”

“I will do that.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Her face lit up with gratitude. He was not above encouraging it, and he sat down beside her and took her hand. But relief, in truth, made him weak. She had seen the aliens and been in a fight, but she had escaped, with God knew what knowledge of them.

“How did you get away?” he said.

She was very still for a minute. Then slowly, slowly, she reached into her shirt. She pulled out a long tangled strip of a paper-like substance, edged with incomprehensible script. She held it close to her breast, looking at nothing.

“What is that?” he said, but she did not move or answer and was still as death, so that he looked at her carefully, trying to gauge her sanity and stability. He saw the marks of privation, exhaustion, and the poorly healing injury that must keep her in constant pain. But he did not see fear or madness or any sign of alien control.

“Hanna,” he said softly, and touched her face. She shuddered and moved.

“It's the course program for their home,” she said.

He stared at her, disbelieving, and reached for it. She twitched it away uncertainly.

“But you have to listen to me,” she said.

“I'm listening. How did you get it?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” she said clearly.

He said carefully. “I wish you did not have to talk about it. But you must. And you must give me that program. You understand why, don't you?”

“Yes, but—oh, he doesn't want me to! He can't bear it!”

Jameson made a patient, noncommittal noise. He did not have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

“Will they see the ship? And come for me?” She looked up with sudden anxiety, and he was uneasy. She had displayed half a dozen moods in ten minutes. He had always thought her volatile, but now she seemed a feather on the wind, immediately responsive to whatever was going on inside her.

“Where is the ship?” he said.

“In the hills.” She nodded vaguely in the wrong direction.

“If they find it I won't let them take you away until you've said what you have to say. How did you get past orbital surveillance?”

She said with perfect clarity, “Hung around until I found something coming down that had about my mass. Fell in behind it and faked a duplicate of its ID. Followed it down and then split off when I thought it was safe. I was hoping they'd think I was a freak echo. I guess they did.”

Heartworld II
was not too large for Airspace Control to treat as just another traffic blip. If it had gotten so low without being identified, it was unlikely that anyone suspected Hanna was there. The technique was clever and daring, and he was impressed. He made a mental note to make certain no one else got away with it.

She did not elaborate, but turned to him and laid a hand on his shoulder and smiled, and then looked at the hand as if confused. She seemed lost inside herself, and after a little while he said, using the D'neeran form of her name, “H'ana? What is wrong?”

She looked up, blinked, and was there again. She said, “It would take—” She started counting on her fingers. She got up to four and started over again. She said, “It would take five days to retrace my route and eight more to…to…to Home.”

“Home? D'neera?”

“Home,” she said impatiently. “That's what they call it. I mean, they don't call it anything, but that's how they think of it. Not their, their, towns? Not that. Groupings. More personal homes. Hearths. They change. There's no spoken language at all. No fixed names for things or people. Except writing of course and that's numbers. It's just what they agree on at any given time. But Home is always Home. And they are—
now
there should be some of them—I can't tell you about that.” She gave him a sideways glance, almost sly. “We'd kill each other. They know where you are, I mean where Earth is. And Willow. I couldn't prevent them from finding out—”

“Hanna!” His hand closed painfully on her arm. “What did you tell them?”

“I didn't. I didn't tell them anything. Oh, stop!” she cried in distress. “You said you'd listen!”

“There is no time to listen if you told them that!”

“But there is. Please! They had time to chart the way to D'neera before, but it's no different than that was. It will take them months to work out the course here!”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

I
am telling you the truth,
she thought painfully. He could not disbelieve her. He let go of her slowly. The fear and anger she had roused would take longer to subside. The marks of his fingers showed on her arm, but she did not try
to rub them away. He eyed the paper she still held out of his reach and said, “You'd better begin at the beginning.”

“There isn't one,” she said. “It's a closed system.”

He had the vivid impression that a tired child was speaking from a dream, and wondered if he would be able to get any sense out of her at all.

But she said, “Wait. I'll try. Listen. I'm not myself. Not anymore.” She looked at him intently to see if he understood, but he did not.

“I wanted to understand them. The People. Do I sound insane? I am thinking now in some ways like one of them. And they are very different from us. But I think I understand. I think maybe, maybe there is a way to make them understand. I think maybe I can stop it.”