The D’neeran Factor (75 page)

Hot water did not relax him; it only reminded him of his weariness, and of too many nights of half-sleeping on rock.
Had it all, Kristofik. All that money. Couldn't you just enjoy it?

The answer comes, the name. Maybe it means something; maybe not. The man with a thousand names puts little stock in them. He gets a picture, too. He knows the face. Twenty years ago: a boy on a street in Shoreground. Thirty years ago: a terrified child.

Then it is war. And B's first object is the elimination of Michael Kristofik.

Dressing in Theo's darkened room he jumped at a movement on the edge of sight and spun to face it. His savage reflection looked back from a mirror. His hands were clenched. “Quick with our fists today, aren't we?” he said to the mirror, but there was no humor in the face that looked back at him. And after all, he thought irrelevantly, the woman was probably property of the pack that ran with B this year, willing enough to watch a night of flame.

He saw inside his eyes another fist from long ago.

Never again. Not any man.

“Shut up,” he said to the voices inside his skull, wondered why he had ever started the hunt; but he knew the answer to that; only he had not known how hard it would be.

When he knows it was me, he'll wish he'd killed me years ago in Shoreground. Seeing me there must have been a shock; but he thought I couldn't be a threat. Just another kid fallen into Valentine. And lost. Like the troubadour's song
—
“Since the soul in me is dead, better save the skin”
—
knew what that meant first time I heard it
—

*   *   *

Hanna thought it might be time to come out of trance.

The cool voice of reason said it was time. The disjunction of consciousness should not be maintained past necessity. It drained the body, especially when it was held, as she held it, against the body's sickness and wounding. Necessity, said reason, was gone. This was medical treatment she was getting, no worse; unorthodox, perhaps, but competent. If she stayed in trance, she might find a way to overpower the men
and women who held her, and then?—without them she would die.

Reason also warned her of the consequences of letting go. Everything was there, waiting its time—pain and fear, grief overdue and thus strengthened, some particularly revolting memories from the
Avalon,
and the knowledge that she was lost outside—no longer human space, perhaps, but certainly human law. Not even reason could assess her exact position; she had missed some important facts. The stun effect had made her memory patchy, like her consciousness as she fought it. She had escaped the
Avalon,
but she did not know what she had come to. She remembered an upraised fist and brutal rage, somehow averted. She remembered indifference to her death, provided she remained alive long enough to be useful. It was all connected to the face she recognized and the gold-flecked eyes; that made sense; but she also remembered pity and a soothing touch, and it was all the same man, and that did not make sense at all.

While she thought about this, she was touched again. She gave herself up to the hands with indifference. She knew without opening her eyes whose hands they were; they belonged to the woman and the girl. They washed her carefully and renewed the healing salve. The woman did not like it.
Babysitter, medaide, nurse: didn't sign on for this: he'll want me to cook for them next!
The girl might have been caressing a doll endowed with imaginary life, healing its hurts and her own with narcissistic devotion.
Poor baby, poor darling, I'll make it better, oh help me, oh hold me!

Hanna opened her eyes to see what they would say when they knew she was conscious.

The woman called Shen did not say anything. She thought:
What a constitution. We could use her.

Hanna turned her eyes on the girl named Lise. She could not see Lise very clearly. Lise did not know that, and it made no difference anyway. She responded with the egocentricity of her age. She leaned over Hanna, a sudden jerk. She said, “He didn't mean it.”

“What the hell?” Shen said.

Lise said in an urgent whisper, “He wouldn't have hit you. He wouldn't. He doesn't do that. He won't hurt you.”

It was overpowering love, it was worship that excused
and did away all faults. Hanna thought that the child deceived herself. But Lise said, “It's hard for him. I don't know what it is, he won't tell me anything, anything at
all.
But he won't hit you. He won't.”

She touched Hanna's shoulder lightly, mindful of the bruises.

Hanna acknowledged without emotion that all of them were careful with her, even Shen. Reason said they would care for her; that it was time to submit to the body's claims and let herself be healed.

Since reason anchored the trance, and the balance of reason urged leaving it, she did so.

The first thing she thought as her mode of thinking shifted was that the concept of the Master of Chaos was more clear to her than it had been before.

The next thing was that she wished she were safe within the strictures of Polity Admin.

The last was a question even reason had not raised. She knew the Polity well, and especially how Jameson thought. Admin had the course to Uskos. Fleet might have tracked the course of the
Far-Flying Bird
as a precaution, a day or two behind, listening for messages of distress. If they had done that (a thing that would suit Jameson), they would know something had happened. The context of her situation would be changed, and she would not be as alone as she felt; the power of five planets waited to help her, if only she stayed alive long enough.

It was her last conscious thought. Exhaustion waited outside the trance, and took over.

GeeGee
sang:

“I don't think that's exactly what I want to hear,” Theo said. His face was shiny, but his eyes were intent, and the fingers that manipulated the instruments were steady. The living bone quivered, an artist's medium.

“I thought it would help you with your incising,” Michael said gravely.

“Incising? There's no such word.”

“Sure there is.”

“How do you know?”

“I'm educated, remember?”

Theo said, “I haven't done anything like this in years. Shut it off, all right?”

“Remind me not to let you touch me, if I get hurt.”

“Dammit, Mike—”

“Yessir.
GeeGee,
the music is not appreciated. Turn it off.”

The sweet voice stopped in mid-song. All of them were in Michael's room, leaving
GeeGee
to tend to herself. The room was brilliantly lighted, especially the bed where the injured woman lay in a cone of blinding light. Movement had a sharp edge in the light, and some of the sharpness was tension, but imperceptibly it drained away. That was because Michael so far had not slipped, to all appearances was himself, and the others were reassured.

A splintered end of bone shifted a millimeter and a metal box said suddenly, “Optimum match.”

“Not quite as good as the other one,” Theo said. “Still. She can be grateful. It should have punctured the lung.” He used a spindle-shape the size of his thumb to fuse the fixative saturating the bone. The metal box chirped and displayed patterns of relative binding strength. Theo touched up his handiwork and the chirps steadied to a hum. Theo said with satisfaction, “That's good. Sealed tight. It waited too long. This must have happened two days ago.”

Lise, watching avidly, said, “Ow.”

“Mike?” said Shen. She was at the woman's feet, watchful. Theo had not wanted to burden the weak body further with a general anesthetic; he had stationed Shen and Michael so that they could restrain sudden movement if the unconscious woman stirred. It had not been necessary. Michael
still held her right hand, stretched above her head and out of Theo's way, but his grip was light. Her left hand lay on her breast, puffy in spite of quick care; that came from the blow to the man with the disruptor. How had she managed to do it, painful as it must have been to move?

Shen said, uncannily echoing the thought, “Two days like that, she did what you told me? Couldn't.”

“You wouldn't think so.”

“What did she do?” said Theo, who had not heard the story; and when Michael told him he would not believe it. He said, “She couldn't even have walked without screaming.”

“She did. I saw it. She might have been doped. It would've had to be a hell of a brew.”

“She wasn't doped. She had a broad-spectrum anesthetic at some point, but that was a long time ago. There was just a trace left when I looked at her blood, not enough to make any difference. There was a high concentration of endorphins—still. She couldn't have,” Theo said, firmly rejecting fact.

He put away the spindle and selected a slim object with a bulge at one end. He drew it carefully along the edges of the incision. It made no sound, but the layers of fat and muscle quivered. Michael looked away, queasy. There was no difference in kind between what had happened to the woman already, the beating and the rape, and this even more intimate invasion of the flesh.
What nonsense,
he thought, and heard faint clicks; he looked again and saw Theo with a handful of clamps. “That's a good job, if I say so myself. Ready to close,” Theo said in a strong, efficient voice that was an echo from some past time.

Michael said, “You said you couldn't make any sense out of her blood.”

“I finally did. In some ways. You know what I can't understand? Dawkins' fever. Nobody gets that.”

“I've never heard of it.”