The D’neeran Factor (48 page)

Leader-in-her-thoughts was singing some melody wrested from Hanna's memory. She made him shut up.

“I'm listening,” she said.

Jameson was detached as she had ever seen him, and she stood with tilted head, entirely alert, and listened to a dry sequence of orders. The People's course program could not be used until it was translated into human mathematics. Hanna would work with Fleet to do that while she still traveled through human space. When she was finished the Fleet escort would leave her, but she would not be able to rest. She would program a powered projectile to return to human space. Into it she would dictate every scrap of information she had gotten from Leader-in-her-thoughts about the People's military capability, technology, biosphere, biology,
history and cultural patterns. She would describe in detail their remarkable development of telepathy, especially their use of it to control machines, which had only a coincidental resemblance to human direct-control techniques, D'neeran or otherwise. She would continue reporting until the last possible moment, and send the projectile back just before she contacted the People.

She thought there were other things she had better be doing as contact approached, but she did not say so.

When Jameson was done giving orders he waited for her to comment on them. But she had lost interest in orders several minutes before. She had heard none of the latter instructions; she was caught up in the open strain in his voice, and sensed a new fragility in the surface he presented.

She would do him no favor by breaking it. But she could not help saying, “Are you going to be all right?”

His face changed in the instant before he turned away from her. It must have been a very long time since anyone had asked him such a question. She moved toward him too quickly and was light-headed again. The space around her was luminous and his shoulder when she touched it was the form and substance of warmth.

She whispered, “S-starr?”

He made the very slightest of movements, a fractional lessening of tension. He said, “You haven't got it right. You're not supposed to hiss.” His head was bowed and she could not see his face, but there was something new in his voice.

She rubbed his arm gently, at a loss for words, and moved a little dizzily to face him. She leaned against him without looking up, and he made a sound of exasperation or defeat or desire and abruptly pulled her to him without restraint. They kissed with concentrated, mutual greed. Hanna had not even thought of lovemaking in so long that the violence of her physical reaction took her by surprise. But she did not think of it then; she did not think at all.

He raised his head after—it seemed—a very short time. She murmured a protest and leaned on him in earnest now because her knees were weak.

He said reluctantly, “They're waiting.”

“In a minute…”

She meant she could not face anyone else without time to pull herself together. She was sure she did not say all that, but he said, “Me too,” and moved away a little. Inside her, newly roused, Leader mourned again for Sunrise.
Shut up shut up shut up,
she said, but it was too late. Jameson kept slipping with her over a border into a lovely unknown land, but she could not get him to stay there.

She said, “Ah, you have such discipline.”

“Not enough.” He folded his arms—possibly to prevent himself from reaching out to her again—and looked at her with bright eyes. The odd, irregular face was younger and no longer tired. The consciousness that half a dozen people expected them to appear annoyed her.

She said anxiously, “If I come back will you remember this?”

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise,” he said without hesitation.

“Oh, good. Oh, I'm glad. What ever happened to that girl in Central Records?”

He said in some alarm, “How did you know about her?”

“I snooped. While I was here before. Where is she?”

He shrugged. “Back in Central Records, I suppose.”

“And always will be?”

He looked at her carefully and said, “Unless she learns to distinguish between a setback and the end of a man's career, yes.”

“Why,” said Hanna, “do you have such a wall around yourself? What are you hiding from?”

They faced each other in the center of the room, and she saw the habitual shutter begin to drop over his face. He shook his head. “No questions, Hanna. Not now.”

“I might not have another chance. Even if I come back. If you're gone.”

He said heavily, “Does it really matter now?”

She sighed and said, “No. I suppose it doesn't. And if we knew each other better we might not get along at all.”

“I wonder. I wonder about that sometimes.”

He took her arm again before she could answer, and this time, knowing she would get no more from him now, she went out with him obediently.

*   *   *

Today air traffic froze by order of high authority. The river became a ribbon. The city shrank to invisibility and disappeared as Hanna rose into cloud and then the clouds were under her too, dazzling.

Entering black space meant re-entering a personal reality from which she had briefly escaped, and it was more real than the one that had Jameson in it. If it were not for the Fleet vessel that trailed her, she would have thought her little time on Earth a dream. As a sleeper, waking, remembers sharp singular images shorn of context, Hanna remembered details: the color of al-Nimeury's eyes, the texture of Jameson's hair, the curve of Murphy's back as she knelt touching Hanna's arm. And as if she were waking from a dream, Hanna (as she spoke with Fleet and
Heartworld II,
slaved ship's systems to
Willowmeade
's, prepared to analyze the precious course program) felt sorrow not sensibly connected to events, as sorrow ought to be, but the shadow of the sorrow of a dream, truncated and distant from consciousness.

They might have let her speak to Iledra, but she had not asked. She might have spoken to Jameson frankly of love, but she had not.

She was going back into the night, which was real, and on to a deeper night. Only this commanded her attention.

Heartworld II
was half real, half not. Faces looked at her from every wall, voices echoed in chambers whose silence only she had broken for what seemed all her life.

She was busy at every moment. Leader would not be a translator. He did not have to be. She knew the People's notation as if she had learned it in infancy. She was no mathematician, but she did not have to be. The Fleet vessel threw mathematicians at her, summoned hastily to this flight not in body but through the skein of relays that filtered into every part of human space.

Hanna did not know any of them. Their faces ran together.

She did not sleep, ever. She did not need Leader, but he talked to her anyway. He meditated in a corner of her mind, content:

I
will not die but live. Strangely. In thought and bone of generations past and those to come. Not memory, but real. No longer bearing precious burdens in my own true body;
no life that you understand; not to act, but to advise. To love those past and those to come. And pass into history more than Self. Sacrifice less great than you think and payment and exchange for final value. Logical progression, natural act, next and last phase of life, and that for which I was most joyfully destined all my time.

Only those who die without this truly die.

Now Alta was nearer than Earth, but neither was near. The alien program cracked and broke. The mathematicians leapt upon the prize, the programmers and engineers went without sleep. The commander of the
Willowmeade,
a courteous man, thanked Hanna. She stared at his face, distracted, thinking him Erik.

It was not Erik. He talked like Erik. But, “We have met before,” she said.

“Briefly,” he said, smiling. “Rescue mission to the
Clara Mendoza.
I always wondered, did you scrap her?”

“We buried her,” Hanna said. “With her crew.”

“Funny thing to do,” he said.

Yes,
Leader agreed. Then he thought of the First Watchsetter and was not sure.

The commander—Tirel, she remembered suddenly—said, “We won't be with you much longer. I understand you've got plenty of power and fresh stores. Anything you need before we withdraw?”

She shook her head. She needed nothing more. She had had a great deal. She had been—

Lucky. Lucky to have had D'neera. The Mason Range Falls crash a kilometer down jutting rock and rainbows leap in sunlight mellow as Earth's, and clean. At B'ha the sea rocks gently only with the sweet star's motion. There is no moon. On no human world do stars shine more clearly. On no human world is freedom so friendly. I was shaped by no mold. Made myself. And chose my own loyalties.

Lucky. I have been so lucky, so fortunate, so happy!

Tears must have glittered in her eyes, because Tirel said, “What's wrong?”

“I was just remembering…”

Willowmeade'
s next Jump would take it back into human space. Hanna's would start her on the path the People had charted.

Tirel knew the purpose of her mission, but neither he
nor anyone except Leader knew what she expected at the end. He looked at her curiously and said, “Sure there's nothing you need?”

“No, thank you,” Hanna said.

“Good luck,” he said.

A little later, when
Willowmeade
was a light-year gone, Hanna wept. All the human faces had vanished, all the human voices. But the reason she mourned had to do with his last words to her; they seemed the sum and essence of what being human was, and her tears were not for herself.

Time ran on, shrinking. She had no time to watch it run. She had too much to do. Why? Why tatter her voice with talking, reciting facts, surmise, portraits of the People? Why work so for Fleet with its guns, or for Jameson who sent her again into night?

It is for the future,
Leader answered, comforting her.

She was not comforted.

She went on with it, though. The stimulants drummed in her and distanced her from all save the tasks before her. The hard part was remembering human speech; and sorting out the knowledge Leader had given her in the days when she came scarcely human toward Earth. Singular concepts triggered hallucinatory visions that touched all her senses and forced her to think with precision of how she could describe them. Strange flowers filled the decks of
Heartworld II,
predatory fleshy living things whose massed shapes pleased the People. When she bathed, the water seemed a running stream, and the walls that surrounded her shifted to angles their designers had never intended. Leader, caught in the interstices of her self so that though he was a functioning unwelcome intruder it seemed he
ought
to have been there always, said of every moment: it should be
thus.

It seemed to her she was more alien than human.

The theories of “Sentience” were nonsense. This was what she had meant, but she had not known it before. “Sentience” was a failure because neither she nor anyone else had fully understood what she was talking about.

Leader thought quietly in corners:

I
too was most fortunate. Saw Sunrise, Hearthkeeper's child, one rainy dawn in early youth and I too was a child, younger even than most at bonding and all of Us in your thinking children.
The bond cannot be otherwise. There is no place for jealousy for doubt for dolor unknown to Us but known to me since known to you. There was no ceremony, nor need for one. Came I to her Nearhome. We grew and flowered together until time came. Sealed the bond in a space of time apart. Those who passed the Bower knew and took joy and strength from creation of love which was shaped from our bodies and selves. The future born anew with each bond.

She did not wish my leaving yet they called me: Explorers, Watchsetters: from the first waking, ever: she knew. Yet she is my rest and true Home and ever was. And ever is.

Hanna listened to Leader within her, and to the voices within him. They passed a halfway point in space, passed it again in time. Time was material. And shrinking.

She turned with more than human patience to the task of disentangling the People's written language, a tricky blend of mathematics and pictographs with all its own structural complexities. She analyzed flawlessly, drug-driven, the relationship of its precise, concrete symbolic structure to the ambiguity of the People's living mind/s. Behind her acute attention drifted shadows of lost futures, dreamlike. Might have built a city, guided Koroth, loved, learned to laugh…

Might have grown wise…

Living is,
said Leader,
and will be. Different. Yet real.

“For you. Not for me.”

How do you know?

“I do not know. I hope. I do not want your future. I want only mine, and will not have it. There will be naught but the dispersion. And the ruined self and I think the body's death. And then nothing.”

Not nothing.
He wanted to ease her grief.
Even among Us it is said one can live for the Good. And die for it.

“That is no comfort. I choose this, but I do not know why. I do not want it. But I choose it.”

You will be remembered. The work of your hands and thought and self will live. You will live. Not as We do; as humans do.

“That is no comfort!”

*   *   *

When the last Jump was near, it was Leader who remembered to send back the return projectile, and to program it
with messages for Iledra and Cosma and her parents and cousins.

She left no farewell for Jameson.

*   *   *

At the very last she programmed
Heartworld II
to begin broadcasting a plea for tolerance that would, she hoped, induce the People to consider some course besides blasting her to atoms at once.