The D’neeran Factor (85 page)

She said after a long pause, “I've got no way of knowing the exact situation. I could call D'neera. Find out.”

“Then they'd know for sure we're coming. The only chance is speed. And no warning.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Can you even make a guess at what they'll do?”

“Speed,” she said half to herself. “Maneuverability; that's what you've got. No guns. They must know it. Wait.” She thought about D'neera's defenses. They were taken seriously since Nestor's short, vicious attempt at conquest several years before. “You'll have to identify yourself. You can
put it off for a little while. Not long, or they'll shoot; D'neerans will, I mean. Then if the Polity's there, their people will know who you are, too. They'll let you go down, but they'll have you targeted by the time you hit the ground. Have you thought about where you'll land?”

“Koroth, that's all. Your own House is least likely to risk you, right? You tell me where to touch down.
GeeGee
can do the rest.”

“There's prairie west of—no, don't try the prairie. City Koroth's got an outport. Land there; there won't be any shooting. Too many people around. They'll get you going back out. If I were a Polity commander, I'd have a lot of small, fast gunboats there. With atmospheric capability, as many as I could get the magistrates to agree to. They'll be faster than
GeeGee.
And I would—I don't know. Try talking you down, I guess. If it didn't work—it won't work, will it?” She saw the answer in his face and said, “Then I'd start shooting. Sharpshooting. Not to destroy
GeeGee;
just to disable her so you'll have to land. But if that doesn't work either—well, then they might shoot to kill.”

After a minute he said, “I'll try it. Just make sure your own folk know who I am. I don't want them thinking I'm a Nestorian kamikaze who's forgotten the war only lasted a day.”

He turned away. After a moment Hanna went after him. She was very cold now. He glanced around and waited for her; she came up beside him and looked up with troubled eyes. It was too easy to see him riding
GeeGee
down the sky in a burst of flame, plunging toward Hanna's native soil.

“Mike…?” The friendly diminutive came by itself. She had not wanted to use his name.

“Yes?” he said.

“Do you have to do it that way? Are you sure you can't go back to Valentine?”

“Oh, yes. We hooked into a relay a little while ago. I tried a transmission to Valentine. It didn't get through; I got a Fleet officer instead. That's all I get to talk to from now on, Fleet and I&S.” There were shadows under his eyes, but he was tranquil. “A Jump later I scanned the 'beams. Valentine's officially turned over ownership of
GeeGee
to I&S as reparations for the
Pavonis Queen.
I&S got an order waiving trial; did you know they can do that?
GeeGee
's stolen
property now. Valentine's cut me loose, Hanna. And believe me, when Valentine's bankers don't back you, you're done.”

She said, “Let me try talking to Starr.”

“Who?” He was blank; she nearly laughed again, but it would have been bitter. “Oh,” he said. “Would it help now?”

“I could try. Even,” she said, looking away, “if it's a little late.”

And she was still a person of some importance, because the censors permitted her to do it. There was a delay that seemed endless, and she shivered in Control. Michael disappeared briefly and came back with a blanket which he draped over her shoulders. “I wonder just how close the nearest Fleet ship is,” he said, watching the chronometer.
GeeGee
's mass detectors were at full power, and she was ready to Jump the instant they registered anything larger than a hydrogen atom. “Traps,” Michael said succinctly. Hanna waited, listening to unknown voices murmur through the great distances. She thought of the
Pavonis Queen,
and of the outrageously simple approach to the trap Michael had just escaped.

“Have you always seen traps everywhere you looked?” she said.

“I always looked for them,” he said, “but I only saw them when they were there.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was grim. “There were one or two I didn't see.”

She would have asked what he meant, but the light-raddled screen in front of her cleared, and there was Jameson. Her heart rose up all in one piece. There was stability, there was everything she had craved; it was in the irony in the gray-green eyes, in the imperturbable mouth.

“Well?” she said.

He looked past her, looking for Michael, but Michael had faded into the shadows. “Yes?” Jameson said.

“What about that bargain?”

“It didn't work very well, did it?” he said. Hanna studied him carefully. This was not a private conversation; many ears would hear what they said.

“Why don't you just take him on his terms?” she said. “There's information you could use. Take the bargain or you get nothing.”

“Stop saying ‘you,'” he told her. “Don't use that word. I have very little to do with this.”

“Why are you talking to me, then?”

“You asked,” he said; she saw amusement.

“Well, say what they told you to say,” she said. It went home, but he recovered.

“Enough is enough,” he said. “You're valuable. So is Mr. Mencken; possibly more so. A mistake was made. Mr. Figueiredo is willing to start over again. Give him the information that was promised, and Mr. Kristofik can go free. He has only to return Mr. Mencken. As for you: your position seems ambiguous. You can do as you please.”

She was watching him intently. The amusement had not gone away.

“We'll think about it,” she said, and broke the connection. She did not hear Michael come up behind her, but as she stared at the blank screen, he spoke almost in her ear. She did not take in what he said.

“Starr was lying,” she said. “He was saying what he was told to say, and it was a lie. And he knew I would know it.”

“You don't mean they'd try the same trick again!”

“Probably not the same. Not exactly the same. Maybe this time they would do just what they undertook to do, and then when you got home to Valentine and walked into your house, they would be waiting for you. They'd do something like that, this time.”

“You said he knew you would see through the lie,” Michael said. “Why would he be so careless?”

“He's not careless about anything.” She stood up, letting the blanket fall from her shoulders, feeling the bite of cold air. “He wants to see what I will do,” she said. “He's curious. He wants to see what will happen now.”

She went out then, back to her room, where she could try in solitude to set her thoughts in order. They resisted. All she could think was that the rules for domestic order that she had accepted as necessity on civilized worlds had turned into a cold machine. They were meant to protect people like her. They were meant to protect her from people like Michael. Maybe that was right. She supposed it was.

*   *   *

The journey to D'neera night have been made in three days. Michael extended it to ten for misdirection's sake, to weary the watchers' eyes on D'neera and make them wait and
wait.
GeeGee
had not gone in a straight line to anywhere since leaving Revenge. She went in no straight line now; she zigzagged across human space in a butterfly dance. All the space outside looked the same: black with sparks and the swathe of the Milky Way.

Late on the first night Hanna came to Michael's room, and to his bed. Throughout the rest of the flight she kept coming back. Sometimes he looked at her eyes and thought they saw too much—inevitably she saw the charts that haunted him—but she did not ask questions. They did not say much to each other at all. But when she was with him she made these last days a time of pleasure and peace, and to give her something in return he played songs for her, the antique music he loved: dances, madrigals, melodies of courtly love, a solstice song two millennia old. She did not make him feel that he had to talk with her, nor did he feel that he had to pretend anything.

With Shen and Theo he pretended, exerting all his strength to appear natural—cheerful, confident, filled with light. But then he would let it slip when he was alone with Lise, and with Lise, he talked. He had promised to teach her to cook, and he used the promise as an excuse to keep her with him in the galley for hours at a time. He meant to teach her more than cooking, and ten days was not long enough.
Love life,
he said,
it is precious no matter what happens.
And,
Don't gamble with money,
he said,
it's not important enough. Gamble with your life, your happiness, your health. They're the only stakes worth gambling for. Remember that,
he said,
repeat it back to me.
And,
Promise you'll remember. Promise. Promise,
until she promised, her eyes so troubled that he was forced to check himself, smile, pretend his intensity had been a mistake.

*   *   *

On the last night Hanna woke briefly to see Michael like a shadow at the wall, studying the dim glow of his charts. She slept again and dreamed that Starr Jameson came to see her. At first they were on the
Golden Girl,
but then they were in mountains, in the heart of a D'neeran range Hanna knew well. They were near the top of a peak, but Hanna could not see anything because the morning was filled with mist. Water dripped from shrubs to the ground, and the fog was so low it barely cleared Jameson's head. He wore an
expression she had never seen on his face before; he looked both hurt and outraged.

I
can't help it,
she said,
you knew there must be someone else one day.

I knew, and it comforted me. But why this man?

Can't you see how beautiful he is?

Since when has a beautiful face meant anything?

There's more to it than that. He gives, he gives with every breath.

Why should that matter to you? You are cold, as cold as you need to be. I was able to give you that. Now you can think
—
at least, until now, I thought you could.

But I don't want to think.

Then what in heaven's name do you want?

She told him explicitly what she wanted to do, and that she wanted to keep doing it with Michael. Jameson was not jealous. But he said:
You wouldn't be able to keep him. He came from nowhere and that's where he'll go. He has no center
—
love, you'll say, but love is wayward; you need law and custom as well. You could have kept me, were it not for your pride. But you won't be able to keep him.

You go to hell,
she said.

*   *   *

In the morning Hanna saw Theo, and he talked with some tension of what would happen on D'neera. Hanna thought again of
GeeGee
racing through the sky, carrying only Michael, going out and out. The charts of nothing rose up before her. They came together with Michael's silence and with something she had guessed without explicit awareness. She knew.

Theo spluttered at her; her face must be bleached.

She brushed him away and went in search of Michael. He was in the galley with Lise, who sat on a high stool and dropped pellets of produce into a very large pot set on a very small cooking flat. Lise giggled as the pellets expanded, resuming vegetable shapes. Michael stood beside her, talking of spices.

Hanna thought she was going to be sick. She rocked on a wave of panic, the first she had felt in years.

I
have to talk to you,
she said, not in words but on a gust of fear. There was a clatter on the polished floor. The ladle he had dropped dribbled streamlets of aromatic broth.

He got the ladle back and gave it to Lise. “Just keep stirring,” he said.

Hanna led him to his own room in silence. She felt fragile, breakable; her hand sliding the door shut was not steady.

“I know what you're going to do,” she said.

He had no answer. He was silent, watching her.

“You've lied to all of us. You're going Outside, aren't you?”

“It'll be all right,” he said.

“Oh, you're mad!” she said, and he moved toward her and touched her, stroked her face and hands, was concentrated on her comfort; she saw abruptly, with the force of revelation, what he was. Time came and went, the Master's hand was light or heavy, and always it was all right. He believed it; that was how he convinced others it was true. And if it were not all right he would make it so, if he could, asking nothing in return. She looked at him with a kind of terror. She had never known anyone like him before. She did not think she would know anyone like him again.

“Why?” she said. “Why?”

“Hanna, there's nothing left for me here. There is absolutely nothing for me here.”

“There's nothing out there either!”

He said gently, “There's something I'll try to find. I've been looking for it for a long time.”

“What?”

He shook his head, smiling.

“Listen, oh, listen,” she said. “I might still be able to keep them from changing you, from Adjusting you. And I might, I could still, D'neera would be sanctuary, I only have to ask. Koroth would take you in, you could stay there, you could be at the House or at my home—” She hardly knew what she said. She was thinking:
You can't go, I don't know you!

“Think what it would be like,” he said. “Could you guarantee Polity treachery wouldn't extend even to D'neera? You could get Koroth to shelter me, but I'd never be safe. I've looked over my shoulder for twenty years. I won't do it again. And think what it would be like for you. D'neera would be the only place where I'd have even a margin of safety, small as it was, and I'd never be able to leave. Can you see me there, an outsider in a telepaths' society, dependent
on you? Going slowly crazy, I'd think, and following you around. No, I'll do it this way. Maybe someday I'll come back.”