The D’neeran Factor (6 page)

It was a rhetorical question. Jameson said, however, “She goes after a citybuster. The
N.S. Havock.
”

Morisz knew he had made a mistake. “Right,” he said.

Jameson said sleepily, “The
Clara
appeared to be drifting into
Havock
's path. She was not considered a threat. It seems to have occurred to Lady Hanna, however, that a switch into Inspace mode and a random Jump at the point of closest approach would take
Havock
out. It would have worked, Stanislaw. It would have worked, you know.”

“And killed everybody on the
Clara.
It wasn't smart,” said Morisz, who believed in the wisdom of living to fight another day. “Not even so brave. Just crazy. They were all half-crazy on that ship. Your typical D'neeran doesn't like violence. He starts talking about how he's too empathic to stand it. Then he gets stomped. That won't go over with the Fleet personnel.”

“It's an experiment,” Jameson said mildly. “Let's give her a chance, shall we? Naturally there will be personnel changes at the end of the first year.”

“A year's a long time,” Morisz said. “Something might—”

He stopped, but too late. Jameson looked at him narrowly and said, “Something might happen sooner. Was that what you were going to say?”

Morisz did not answer. He was half-ashamed of his interest in
Endeavor
's projected route. There had been unexplained communications blips for centuries. The experts said the last few years' reports from Sector Amber were not really disproportionate. Officially they had no connection with
Endeavor
's course through Amber. Officially the name was arbitrary too. Not amber for caution. Just Amber.

Jameson said casually, “Amber's out in the direction some church used to fulminate about, isn't it? The Church of the Coming from the Stars, I believe. Quite a mouthful. What do the brethren think of the project?”

“I wouldn't know,” Morisz said. He felt his face getting hot. He was too honest to expunge anything from his own I&S file, and anyway his life so far had been blameless. But if his youthful fling with that nutcult disappeared from the record by itself, he wouldn't reinsert it.

Embarrassed into silence, he watched Jameson pick up the reader and a stylus, note Liuku's replacement and sign the report. He had entirely forgotten Hanna ril-Koroth; when he remembered it was too late. He had been smoothly, ruthlessly diverted for just long enough.

Jameson handed back the cassette without a sign of smugness. “Behind schedule,” he said, “but close enough. How about a drink and early dinner? We've got a long flight in the morning. Have you ever hunted with a spear?”

“No,” said Morisz, wishing he hadn't come.

“You'll be learning the hard way, then. It's the only way to learn, however.”

“What are we hunting, anyway?”

“Tigers,” Jameson said, and almost smiled.

T
he exploration vessel
Endeavor,
carrying a crew of two hundred, left terrestrial orbit on the first day of March in the year ST 2835. There were ceremonies. Starr Jameson appeared in the
Endeavor
's common room and made a practiced and inspiring speech about mankind's destiny to seek new horizons. With him was Commissioner Andrella Murphy of Willow, who looked at everything about her with an air of friendly interest and spoke to no one except Jameson. The commissioners from Colony One and Co-op were not there. Their schedules did not permit them to attend: not by accident. Katherine Petrov, Earth's voting commissioner, made a few formal remarks in a flat voice and disappeared—literally; she was a holo projection.

Jameson and Murphy were real, however. Hanna stood unsteadily on tiptoe to see them from the rear of a too-dense crowd. She wished she could catch a glimpse of their thoughts, but without prior personal knowledge of an individual's “flavor,” it was impossible with so many people about. She liked Murphy's looks, but not Jameson's. When he was not exerting himself he looked, she thought, cold and indifferent; but she could not see anything very well. The ceremonial circle included Erik Fleming, and Hanna knew he must look like a model officer in his forest-green Fleet uniform, because he always did. He also was admirably handsome—a golden-haired sunchild, Hanna thought, though she was not given to poetic flights. Partly because of this she was favorably disposed toward Fleming, and in the hectic month of training before launch, they had become more than friends. This had advantages besides the obvious ones; for one thing it smoothed Hanna's way with her crewmates,
who did not know what to do with D'neerans, but knew how to behave toward their captain's friend.

After the formal leavetaking
Endeavor
proceeded to Alta at the edge of human space, a passage that took it an infinitesimal distance into the spiral arm that was Earth's home. The journey took many more days than such a routine trip required, and every minute was used for systems testing. There would be no help near if anything went wrong after Alta.

At Alta, the monks came up to bless them. Hanna was fascinated. It was her first experience with one of the little splinter colonies founded on religious principles, and she imagined penitents stuffing their robes into spacesuits and performing rituals in free fall, firing little globules of blessed liquid that would splat on
Endeavor
's sensitive hull. Or perhaps they would use a pressurized stream of it?

They did not. They went round
Endeavor
in a vessel begged, borrowed, or stolen from whatever secular government Alta had and shook holy water in the general direction of the ship as it drifted in orbit. Hanna found them prosaic.

Afterward the abbot drank wine with Erik Fleming in the captain's quarters.

“A peculiar experience,” Erik said to Hanna later.

“What did you talk about?”

“You, among other things.”

He said it teasingly, but Hanna, not mind-listening, missed the overtone. Her sketchy knowledge of history was biased toward the paranoid. The genetic experiments that had created D'neera's founders had been prohibited and outlawed everywhere. There were dreadful tales of what the founders had fled, and some of the nastiest concerned measures taken in the name of holiness.

She said with some alarm, “Is this one of those groups that thinks D'neera is demons' work?”

“Oh, no, he thinks you're all right. He's a very intelligent man, actually. He said he was looking forward to further revelations of God's glory.”

But Erik had a quizzical expression, and Hanna, sprawled ungracefully on the lounge that was the only visible luxury in the captain's spartan suite, said, “But?”

“He seems to have some idea that Inspace transit is a
matter of being picked up by God's hand and thrown across space.”

“Well, that's as reasonable as some of the other theories. I lean to the one that says there's no such place as ‘Inspace,' myself.”

“Why not?” said Erik, and went off to approve another checklist. No space captain was so unimaginative that he did not wonder how he annihilated space and time without himself being annihilated; but meanwhile there were checklists.

Even on the customary routes, space travel required caution and, past Alta, the last human outpost in the direction
Endeavor
now took, there were no customary routes. One could go from Earth to Alta in a matter of two Standard days, the actual transits taking no measurable time but data processing requiring a good deal. The equivalent distance through unexplored space would take weeks or months. In a comfortable room on a long-settled world it was easy to speak of great Jumps “through” Inspace that gobbled light years. Alone in immensity you thought instead of limitations: one unsuspected gravity well in your (theoretically nonexistent) path, one unsuspected wrinkle in space, and you would not be heard of again. Under these circumstances you did not gobble space but nibbled at it, felt your way with probes, and concentrated on looking very, very carefully for what might be between you and where you wanted to go. If you got there, others could follow at speed; but someone had to be the plodding first, and out here
Endeavor
was the first.

Hanna settled rather cautiously into shipboard routine. As an exopsychologist she would not be needed until and unless
Endeavor
found intelligent life, and meanwhile she was assigned to Navigation. Unknown-space techniques were familiar to her in theory, new in practice. She was entrusted with little responsibility and did not expect much. Mostly she helped with preliminary studies that would be checked and re-checked and double-checked and checked again. The work was tedious, the sense of community she remembered from D'neeran spacecraft was missing—or at least withheld from her—and at the end of each six-hour shift her ears rang with the constant noise of true-humans who communicated only out loud. Her only wish at those
times was to escape to the quiet of her tiny cabin, where she measured the gap between herself and her companions and thought it might be unbridgeable.

Nonetheless, the spacegoing experience was priceless. In these times there were few ways to learn the navigational skills of space exploration. The worlds of the Polity, concerned with internal development and consolidation, had done little exploration for three hundred years. Other human settlements, a scattered fringe marking the outer limit of the first wave of expansion through space, had many problems, little money, and no reason to move on. The roughly spherical volume of the universe known as human space was still limited in content. There were the Polity worlds—Earth, Willow, Co-op, Colony One, and Heartworld—five jewels of prosperity. There were D'neera and Lancaster, which were doing well enough, and a handful of settlements like Nestor which were not. There were many apolitical or quasi-political units like Alta or its infamous converse, Valentine, for the most part single-purpose colonies carved out of hostile environments and barely maintaining themselves. They did not matter much to the Polity, or to anyone except their more or less wretched inhabitants, and if they had any curiosity about what lay past human borders, they could not afford to satisfy it.

Also inside human space, though collectively called Outside, were F'thal and Girritt and two worlds that were home to species of uncertain status known as Primitives A and B. Hanna's personal interest in the
Endeavor
lay with the beings Outside. By the time the ship left Alta, she had investigated its library and found that it contained masses of material she had never seen before on all four species. There were minor works and papers and reports from countless governments and scholarly projects, all written during the centuries of D'neera's isolation, all archival matter considered so obsolete or unimportant that it had never been collected in one memory before. There were long-defunct journals, autobiographies of forgotten researchers, obscure essays, operational holos of rituals no human had attended for hundreds of years. There was data on the F'thalians, the only star-traveling species humanity knew of besides itself, whose existence Hanna had not suspected, accessible now because it was newly declassified to this expedition.
Much of it was poorly organized, having been poured into
Endeavor
's memory with no attempt to order the chaos of centuries; but before the first Jump into unknown space, three weeks into mission, Hanna already had seen—not how the data would combine with her own observations, but that somehow it would.

This was exactly what she had hoped for, and she began to spend all her free time reading. She had perhaps one Standard year for research, and she would not waste it. Research was what she had come here to do. To be present when
Endeavor
made a contact was, she thought, a dream, Iledra's dream; space was too vast, full sentience too rare, for contact to come soon. Her presence here was enough to set a precedent so that when
Endeavor
achieved its goal, one D'neeran or another would be there.

What she thought she could do with the archives was of more immediate interest.

Sentience showed different faces to true-humans and to D'neerans—more precisely, to Hanna. If she could synthesize them, the achievement would do more for D'neeran status in the community of man than the whole last century of tentative rapprochement had done. This was her reason for being here, and all the rest—token participation in true-human society, navigational skills, even the slight chance of a first contact— was insignificant beside it. She was so absorbed in her own concerns that she hardly noticed when
Endeavor
made its first halt to signal a likely star system, three months into mission. Later she knew she ought to have paid attention, because that was when the dreams began.

*   *   *

A loudspeaker said: This is an emergency this is not a test. Repeat. This is disaster. This is no dream.

She looked at the displays but she could not see
Havock
because the displays looked back at her with great yellow eyes. She cried out and tried to run from them. Tirane was dead and screaming and all the others too. They took so long to die and dragged her down, down, and death ate her. Smoke of burning flesh sucked at her knees and tripped her. Metal screamed: the
Clara Mendoza
's dying wails. Death and more death and
Havock
waited with her to die in a life become night. The Nestorian cruisers stalked her and she
could not move. Something huge hunted behind them in the dark. Closer. Closer. The smoke choked her screams.

She woke up snorting and struggling, tangled in sheets smooth as water.

Managed to sit up. Couldn't remember the voice code for light. Fumbled with numb fingers until she found a switch and light blazed. Her heart thudded brutally and her muscles were weak.

“Erik,” she said. He didn't stir.