The D’neeran Factor (56 page)

She said—with difficulty, because her throat was tight—“I've never heard a word about this. It must be almost unknown.”

“It is. It's limited to a handful of medical personnel on Heartworld and at the Beyle Center here, and a very few other persons. My sister…I suppose Morisz knows. He knows everything about everybody. The last time I spoke of it was five years ago to Andrella Murphy.”

He leaned back, exhausted. She could not guess what these few minutes had cost him.

And all the past weeks? What of them?

The enormity of his sacrifice gained on her comprehension, but only slowly; it was too large to see all at once. All
debts were cleared forever. He could owe her nothing more. He had paid back everything at once, magnificently, with everything he had and everything he wanted; with all of himself.

She found her voice somewhere. There was one question more that must be asked.

“Why…?”

“Why what?” He looked at her finally. He was exhausted beyond fear or need of defense.

“Why did you—do what you did for me?”

He said, “I don't know why.”

“You never do anything without a reason!”

He said with the ghost of a smile, “No doubt there is one.”

“You must…you must have said something to yourself.” She touched him at last. He took her hand; automatically, it seemed. She said, “You must have told yourself something. What did you say? When you decided?”

“Just that—I couldn't.” He was mystified by it still. “I couldn't press you, persuade you, work on your sense of duty, seize on your—your frightening generosity—let the others try to do it, coerce you into service—or ‘adjust' you, as Peter suggested—I couldn't. You'd earned freedom many times over. I couldn't do anything to keep it from you. I just could not.”

Why? But she did not say it again. He really did not know. Something dormant and forgotten had been forced to new life by circumstance, or by Hanna herself. He had said: No more. I will not buy power with her pain. I will not.

She got up and drifted away from him, thinking she ought to speak and unable to say a word. What was there to say? She could not talk of gratitude. He did not want her gratitude. He would not like it. The wind from the garden whispered round her head. She felt curiously light: light and free.

Freedom. It had an odd taste. Her life was her own. He would let no one else shape it. He stood between her and all the massed moral force of the Polity, unbending.

“What will they do without us?” she said.

“Damned if I know…”

“Try to live forever?”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

“Was that why you—?”

She looked around hesitantly. He was standing now, wrapped in all his old dignity in spite of weariness.

“That is not for me,” he said. “It could never be for me.”

Truth. Whole truth.

She wandered uncertainly toward the outer door and looked into the dark. “Will they think of the evils that may come?”

“Some. Not much. The reward is potent.”

The future on his shoulders
—

I have too…

“You know,” she said slowly, “I thought that you would be in charge. That everything was safe. Even if we didn't agree on what should come you would listen. Even tonight. You would judge. You wouldn't decide lightly. I could leave it to you.”

He said, “They're not evil. They'll manage without me…I must learn to believe that.”

“But will they think of the People?” she said. “Someone must.”

Free, oh, free! To go home and build a city, arbitrate the Riverine dispute which surely went on still, prod a university to action, play sweet starlit games with laughing boys…

He said at her back, certain as ever: “There is nothing you could do. Even if you were willing to participate, what could you do against all the rest?”

She saw D'neera suddenly and clearly, as if all her life there had been compressed to crystal and brought to this room for her pleasure. Flowers, laughter, light, beloved sea, star-powdered nights; but it did not need her—it receded as she watched—the laughter faded.

She said, “I could do more than you think.” It was true. She did not know all her own potential yet, but it was true. “I'm unique. We haven't talked about it much, but you know it. Unless you create another like me—years away, you said—there will be no one who can do what I could do. And I could—be their guard and sentinel. They shouldn't be our servants. Or maybe we would become theirs, and maybe that would be wrong too. Or maybe not. But they must see all of it, all the possibilities. That they must shape themselves as they want. And we must see it too. And if I were to—when you told me all the things you wanted me to do, that first day—if I were to—”

She turned and saw that he seemed to have stopped breathing. There was no color in his face. She went on with difficulty, “If I were to do all that, it would be…you were giving me more than tasks to do, weren't you? You were asking me to…when you said I would be the guide—you meant, did you know it? that all the project would be in, in my image, our future with them—and yours, if we worked together—”

The words came very hard. She was so tired of decision and labor, someone, someone, must instruct the People not to permit themselves to be bent to human self-serving, there was no one else but it was so hard to give herself freely, even for this. She wanted Jameson to say something, but he did not. He was utterly still, remote as the People's star. Her hands crept together and her fingers sought the Heir's Ring of Koroth, but it was not there. She had searched, but never found it. It was lost in the dust of Home.

“And you could—you would—if I came to the project, the way you wanted—then you could be there too, and—would it have to be war between us?”

He shook his head abruptly, and suddenly sat down. He put a hand over his eyes. She looked down at him with compassion and a profound regret. She was giving back the gift, and it was a terrible gift to make to one so proud. She thought: Perhaps I have just lost whatever chance there was for love in his strange code. But no one else will ever see again what I see now. But I wish it could be the other way.

“I will do it,” she said. The voice sounded strange in her ears, as if it were someone else's. But at last she knew it, clearly, for her own.

R
ubee of Ell of the world Uskos said to Hanna ril-Koroth of D'neera, “You are the possessor of a wonderful house. It is fair as the Wonderful House of Piore.”

Rubee lied, with utmost courtesy. Hanna accepted the courtesy and disregarded the lie.

“It is your house as well,” she answered with equal politeness, and lay back on a pale blue couch that glimmered cool pastel in the dusk, like everything in her house at twilight; wonderful to her, at least, as the Wonderful House of Piore could ever have been to him. Or to her? Or it? Uskosians all were called “he,” because they had to be called something. But no human word was really right.

Rubee and his selfing Awnlee wandered about and touched things in the growing gloom. Their fingers at full extension resembled thin tentacles; flexed, they were like roots. An Uskosian had not truly seen a thing until he had touched it, and here on the world D'neera, where nothing that could be embellished was left plain, the lively fingers of Rubee and Awnlee were busy.

There was not much to touch in this house, however. Though it was the home of a D'neeran, the place was austere, the character of its rooms a matter of color and form. The sunward wall of Hanna's sitting room was transparent; the house was built into a hillside, so that this upper level looked down on a lawn and water garden (the pool frozen now), and past that a line of trees, and beyond that a distant fringe of light marking the edge of the city D'vornan. That was decoration enough for Hanna, and the view was fresh after her long absence.

Hanna had been gone from home for six Standard months.
Since the Uskosian envoys' announcement of their presence in human space, she had spent all her time on the powerful Polity worlds, Earth mostly, studying Rubee and Awnlee—and often feeling more like a tour guide than a scholar. Neighbors had tended her home, made sure the servomechanisms kept working, cleared away the debris of autumn storms. She thought, smiling, that when she came home for good, she would owe a great arrears of community service.

But that would not be for a long time. There was yet a longer journey to make first.

Rubee formulated a question. Hanna was a telepath, but she knew Rubee so well that she saw it coming with her eyes. The alien said, “You live in this house alone?”

“When I can. When I can live on my homeworld at all, I mean; when I am not on other worlds doing its business. I lived here alone for some months before you came. Before that I lived in City Koroth, in the House of its governing women, which we visited yesterday. I lived there with many others. I came here to D'vornan to teach at the University, which we visit tomorrow. I like it better here.”

“But I thought,” Rubee said, “D'neera is a—”
(something,
said the translator tucked into Hanna's ear) “—society, because it is a society of telepaths.”

“Think that again,” Hanna said wearily, and dipped into Rubee's thought, unclipped the memory bank at her waist, and gave the translator a new word.

Communal.

She said, “On the whole D'neerans live communally. I am an exception. Exceptions are freely tolerated.”

“Ah,” said Rubee, understanding, or thinking that he understood, and Hanna watched Rubee and Awnlee and wondered how long it would be before she saw her home again.

She was so glad to be there that for all her liking for these strange guests, and in spite of the importance of her work with them, she dreaded going away with them again. She was only at home because the envoys were making courtesy visits everywhere, and Hanna's own planet was a stop on the itinerary the Polity's officials had made up for them. The portion of her duty that would start in a few months more—to accompany the envoys when they returned to Uskos—meant it would be at least two Standard years before she saw her home again.

The six months she had been gone were already too long.
No one else can befriend and guide these beings as well as you can,
Polity Alien Relations and Contact had said to her when the Uskosians arrived;
no one has your experience, there is no one like you.
The director of Contact had given her other reasons for accepting the task, not including personal ones. If he had included personal reasons she would have listened, even though that was another story, an old love story, a finished one; for Hanna it was not as finished as it ought to be, and perhaps memories had helped make her decision. Yet in the end it was no one's good reasons, no flattery, no sense of duty that had captured her. It was curiosity. She was heir to the governing House of Province Koroth and would one day be its Magistrate, but first she was an exopsychologist. She knew the aliens of F'thal and Girritt, she had walked among the Primitives, and she was humankind's authority on the People of Zeig-Daru, but she could not resist a new thing.

Awnlee was too young to be anything but honest. He said, “This home cannot really be like the Wonderful House of Piore.”

Rubee turned and looked at his selfing. The Uskosian face was rigid except for the ciliated mouth, the eye-spots were shifting patches of gray sparked with iridescence, and the gaze was a new experience for humans. Body language said everything the face did not, and Hanna saw (from the position of the whiplike fingers, the carriage of the lumpy body, even the angle of the stubby feet) that Awnlee meant to return to the plane of realistic assessment.

Rubee conceded, “It is not. But it has its own beauty.”

“It belongs to you as well as me,” Hanna said correctly. Then—because she was working, because she was always working—she said, “What was the Wonderful House of Piore?”

“Do you wish a formal presentation?” Rubee asked.

“Informal,” Hanna said promptly, because she was less interested in ritual presentation of the elaborate myths of Uskos—though that was an important art form—than in their function in everyday life.

“In a year,” Rubee said, and his unmelodic voice was richer, deeper, “Piore sought to build a house. ‘I will shelter me from the elements,' Piore said, and he builded a
house of importance, and admired it, and widely admired it was. The earth quaked, and it foundered. Piore stood in the ruins lamenting, and the Master of Chaos came to him and signified amusement. ‘Why do you signify amusement?' said Piore, and the Master of Chaos answered, ‘High was your house and imposing; yet the foundation was not strong.'

“And Piore said, ‘I will build me a house of great strength,' and he did. Yes, strong it was, well-founded and impenetrable, so that all his selfings came there saying, ‘Now we shall be safe.' And safe they were and earthquake did not move it. Yet it was forbidding, and save for Piore's selfings no one came to it, and Piore was lonely; and the Master of Chaos came to him and signified amusement. And Piore said, ‘Why do you signify amusement?' ‘I signify amusement,' said the Master of Chaos, ‘because you have forgotten the Tale of Taree.'”

(The—
Oh, God,
Hanna thought.
Myths within myths within myths!)

“Then Piore remembered the Tale of Taree, and he pulled down the house and rebuilded it, and now it was both strong and fair; but Piore was jealous of it, and let no one in, and sent away his selfings. But Authority came and said, ‘It is not permitted to make such a thing just here,' and tore it down. Piore stood in the ruins lamenting, and the Master of Chaos came and signified amusement. Piore said, ‘Why do you signify amusement?' ‘I signify amusement,' said the Master of Chaos, ‘because you can't win.' ‘I know that,' said Piore, ‘as who does not?'