The D’neeran Factor (93 page)

And yet. Her very first perception of him had been as a presence of shadow crouched beside the
Avalon.
He had been in grave danger; but there had been no anxiety or fear in his thought. Afterward there had been that night of intense emotional union. Most true-humans could not have done what Michael had done. Most true-humans, fearing dissolution in her madness, would have knocked her out with drugs or otherwise, and almost certainly killed her.
And then there was the rendezvous with the Polity and what he had done to meet it, and the decision to flee Outside to nothing less than death.

She thought of water, sunlit, dappled with the shapes of leaves. If you slammed into it, it slammed back and broke bones and broke skulls. If you came to it gently it shifted, accommodating. It crept into corners, changed shape silently; it sank through sand and found crevices invisible to eyes. In heat it evaporated into gas and dissipated; in cold it froze to crystalline solids of great beauty. It adapted infallibly to circumstance; but it was very strong.

But the metaphor did not hold up indefinitely, because in Michael there was also a black place where Hanna could not go. Michael could not either, not at will. He only endured it, when he had to. It had nothing to do with sunlit water. “I guess,” he said into the dark, very quietly, “we ought to learn how to be polite to the Uskosians.”

“Polite?”

“To say ‘please' and ‘thank you' and so on. In Uskosian.”

“Ellsian…That's not a bad idea.”

“It's a little late to start learning the whole language. Is it hard?”

“Not very. Not like F'thalian. These beings think in the same patterns we do, at least, and the linguistic structure—of Ellsian, anyway—is comprehensible.” She thought unwillingly that she was going to have to start working again. “We could have tapped into D'vornan and picked up the language programs.”

“Could we? But we don't have any translators to use when we get there.”

“It would have helped, though. My accent's not perfect; human throats and tongues aren't made like theirs. The Polity translators were programmed with Awnlee's help, and I can't duplicate what he did. I can make a basic phrasebook for the rest of you, though.”

“Have to do.”

“Yes. I guess it will.”

*   *   *

Once or twice she used the name again: “Mikhail.” She did not mean to do it, and knew what she had done only after she had said it. The first time she paused, surprised at herself; she looked quickly at Michael for his reaction. There
was also a certain invitation in her eyes. If he wanted to say more, she was ready to hear it. But he smiled and shook his head, and she picked up a cushion and threw it at him. “All right,” she said. “Who needs to know anyway?”

The second time she did not even hear herself say it. He did not know where it had come from, how she had dredged it from his memory, why it had slipped from the end of her tongue. She said it half in her sleep as she drifted away. Michael could not follow her; he was immediately awake. He lay with his head on her breast, so restful, such a restful place. What was he going to tell her, how much, when, and what did it matter now, the little he knew? B was gone, must be gone forever. The hopeless quest into dust was postponed, at the very least; he would not pursue that path if Hanna could produce, magically, another life for him. He was entirely in her hands, hers and the hands of chance. The hands of the Master of Chaos.

He sighed and turned his mouth to her skin. She woke a little; her fingers ruffled his hair.

“But if you'd told the Polity,” she said, “they would have searched.”

He stopped breathing. She was more than half asleep; not even half awake. The compulsion to speak to her dream was strong.

Why not? She would find out anyway—

And so he answered, and relief, like the release of a long tension, made him weak, and his speech was slurred.

“They wouldn't have believed it. Not without a probe. With one they'd have had me.”

“Then you didn't know yourself…until after the
Queen.
”

She was a sleepwalker, an oracle, and he was not sure he heard her words with his ears.

“It was hard,” he said. “Nobody knows how hard. A kid in the dark…Didn't know there was anyplace else. Thought Alta was part of the same world. Later I knew there were more, but then I thought it was someplace like Revenge. Didn't dare ask questions. Afraid they'd send me back. Thinking they could. Didn't guess the truth till long after the
Queen.
Too late.”

“Yes,” she said. She was awake now. Her arms tightened around him, or around the lost child he had been. She did
not ask any more questions. But he thought that for the first time in his life there was a certainty in it: Hanna's flesh and blood, the beating of her heart.

Hanna lay still. The words bubbling up to consciousness stung her, connecting. With the speculations of an aged monk; with a vision of flame in a silver-shot sky. The questions she did not ask trembled in her mouth. Who should know more about Lost Worlds than she? It was Hanna who had brought back the news of one Lost World in the first terrible weeks of contact with Zeig-Daru: a message of destruction, a tale of a colony long dead. Almost, in this moment, she believed the old abbot had been right.

Then sense asserted itself.
“If he got to Alta from a Lost World, it couldn't be considered lost…”
The voice of ultimate common sense; Jameson's voice. The fire had to have been on Nestor where such things could happen at the hands of the so-called law; or maybe, even, on Co-op, in the great riots a few years before Hanna was born. It was easier to believe that this strange, exquisite man lived with one great delusion than to believe in Lost Worlds.

Finally she said softly, “Mike? Where could it have been really?”

But now he was asleep, at peace, and she would not rouse him to talk about yesterday.

Then they were there, a new world broad before them:
Like a feast,
Michael thought, watching Hanna's intent face. And he stood by her place in Control and felt regret for what would be finished today, the honeymoon. Past now.

Hanna had no time for regret. She was worried.

GeeGee
had moved in slowly, broadcasting a simple speech Hanna had recorded in Ellsian. It said: “I am the friend of Rubee and Awnlee of Ell, she who traveled with them: an alien, a visitor, a guest. As gifting I bear the story of the Journey of Rubee. I will have great honor if you will speak with me.”

Hanna liked this speech. It was dramatic, it was designed to provoke curiosity (a fact the Uskosians would recognize and approve), and it was courteous. Hanna had spent some time concocting it. Uskos should fall at once into a frenzy of welcoming.

Instead there were flat acknowledgments in harsh-sounding voices that had the half-familiarity of a dream, followed by a command for the travelers to do exactly as they were instructed. There was no threat, but also there was no welcome, not even the most formal of courtesies. When
GeeGee
landed at last—it took a long time to get permission to land—they were directed to a desert, a place of dried watercourses in a red-brown land. And an escort of Uskosian vessels landed with them, gently as a fleet of butterflies, surrounding the
Golden Girl.

They went through
GeeGee
to the starboard lock, and Hanna went out with the others behind her. The sky was vast and opalescent and a cold wind came from it. There were sharp stones on the rusty soil, splintered by heat and cold, and scrubby plants that bent in the wind. Five streamlined vessels flaunted gaudy insignia in an arc in front of Hanna; the others had landed behind her, to
GeeGee
's port side, completing a precise circle with
GeeGee
small and impotent at the center. Between
GeeGee
and the ring of aircraft a single Uskosian waited, a spot of vivid color in the gray wind. Hanna led her little party toward him. He stood without moving; even the stiff fabric of his bright blue uniform did not sway in the wind.

The humans came up to him and stopped. When they did, other Uskosians came out of the other vessels, so colorfully garbed they might have been sifted through a prism. Hanna looked around and saw that her party was surrounded.

She said to the blue-clad being in Ellsian, with all the courtesy Uskos had taught her: “I am she who was the companion of Rubee and Awnlee of Ell, and was present at the end of their journey. I have news of them, though grievous news.”

The being did not answer at once. There were pouches and a slackness in his face that showed he was about Rubee's age, and there was something of Rubee's stateliness in him. The advancing Uskosians in their bright uniforms stopped. It was wrong, all wrong; a Polity mission must have gotten here first, and at any moment humans must show themselves and seize Michael and Hanna, too. Yet she sensed no human presences except those she knew, and though she did not probe the thought of the being
before her, there was no hint that he acted on behalf of humans.

At last he said, “I am Norsa of Ell, a maker of agreements.”

Hanna answered politely, “I am 'Anarilporot. My companions are named—”

She stopped. At the sound of her name—which she had rendered as an Uskosian would say it—Norsa had lifted his hand. The aliens converged, each holding at ready a glossy shaft of metal. The weapons were not stunners. They could release a force that punched holes in flesh.

She had not meant to shock Uskos with telepathy at once. But she used it to say unhappily to Norsa, because it carried conviction more powerfully than speech:
I did not expect this greeting for the friend of Rubee and Awnlee, Rubee's selfing in the second degree of adoption, Awnlee's near-kin!

Norsa was sufficiently shocked, the tendrils round his mouth squirmed with it, but he took Hanna away anyway. The other humans also were removed, separately, except that Lise and Michael were permitted to remain together; that was because the child shrieked and clung to Michael, and Hanna, seeing weapons leveled, said to Norsa, “But they are sire and selfing!”

Shen who had made a sharp movement toward Michael also was in danger. “No!” he said, and Shen stopped in mid-stride. “Hanna will fix it,” he said, but his voice was strange.

Hanna was led away. She got a last glimpse of Michael standing in the waste, looking at her over Lise's curls. Shen and Theo also watched her go, and they looked after her mistrustfully. But Michael's eyes were as strange as his voice: without hope. She could not do anything about it then, she could not even stop to comfort him, and had to walk away.

On a day
(said Hanna),
Rubee of Ell set forth with his selfing Awnlee to seek the persons of other stars; and the vessel which bore Rubee and his selfing outward was the
Far-Flying Bird,
which was the pride and flower of the land of Ell and of all Uskos. And Rubee and Awnlee sailed on and on, and the years went by; for space was dark and empty, and it
seemed there were no other persons among the stars. Yet they did not fear, but felt themselves better acquainted with the Master of Chaos than they had been before.

They came at last to a place among the stars where other persons were, and these persons called themselves Humans, which Rubee and Awnlee rendered “'Unans,” and this meant in the tongue of the 'Unans, “persons.” And the 'Unans sent to Rubee and Awnlee one 'Anarilporot to be their friend and guide, and they were feasted and made welcome, and they made gifts to the 'Unans and were given fine presents in return, and they traveled widely among 'Unans, and always they were welcome.

Yet one day Rubee said to 'Anarilporot, “The hour approaches when we must leave, for we wish to come to our home on the fourteenth day of Strrrl.” But certain wise 'Unans sought to discourage the departure, for they had heard the whisper of the Master of Chaos. But Rubee was firm, and set forth as he had decided, and he was accompanied not only by his selfing Awnlee but by 'Anarilporot, even as in past times Erell and Awtell were accompanied by Porsa of Sa. And there was great friendship among these three, and especially between 'Anarilporot and Awnlee, so that Rubee claimed ‘Anarilporot as his selfing in the second degree of adoption. And Rubee made the beginning of the story of the Friendship of Awnlee, which now is lost; yet in truth it is the same as the story of the Journey of Rubee.