“Take a look at that,” Erik said. He pushed a display module at Hanna.
Hanna looked. The central data column, stripped of accessory notations, showed average mass readings over a period of some hours. There was a bulge toward the end of it.
“Is that from the shuttle?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
The bulge had to be Endeavor. She lifted her hands helplessly and said, “So I dreamed it.”
He came around the table and stood behind her. He reached over her shoulder and made an adjustment, and the figures flickered and changed.
“This is the last ten minutes,” he said.
Now there were two bulges, the first much smaller than the second.
Hanna shivered suddenly. “So there was somebody there.”
“There was. And you missed a chance of contact by yelling for help.”
He was profoundly disgusted. Hanna opened her mouth to answer, and shut it again. There was nothing she could say. It was possible that he was right.
Erik turned away and went back to his place. The table in Briefing Room Two was littered with coffee mugs and reference printouts. Everyone who had anything to do with direct contact procedures had been in here in the last few hours, questioning Hanna. She had not been able to satisfy any of them.
Hanna said suddenly, “When did you get this breakdown?”
Erik shrugged. “A long time ago. Half an hour after you came on board, maybe.”
“You let me go on thinking I must have imagined that reading?”
“What difference did it make?”
“It makes a lot of difference to me! I wondered if, if I couldn’t trust my own eyes, what else could I trust?”
“Not much,” he said. “You didn’t get one goddam useful fact. Just a bunch of space-happy hallucinations. They were coming to talk to you and you panicked.”
“You don’t know they were coming to talk to me. They disappeared—” She looked at the mass readings again, to be sure. “They disappeared before you came into realspace. There,” she said, pointing.
“I’m going by what you said yourself. You thought they were coming to you.”
“Yes,” she said, remembering the lunge of the hungry fish-thing and her mad obsession with the sensors until Endeavor came.
“That’s the only thing you said that made any sense.”
He stared past her. His mouth was set, but he was no longer particularly angry. Hanna had felt his anger die through the hours of debriefing, and it was a relief to her, although she knew the reason. Erik was convinced that he had won whatever battle he thought he was fighting. He thought her too incompetent to threaten his version of the way things ought to be. She had proven herself a failure, and proven him right. Nothing about her could engage his emotions very strongly now.
That was not true of Marte Koster, who had gotten more furious as time went on. Hanna said, “Did you tell Marte about this?”
“Sure.”
“No wonder she was so mad.”
Erik said indifferently, “You might as well get some rest.”
After a minute Hanna got up. Her muscles ached. She was in fact very tired. She also felt, in some way she could not define, injured.
She said, “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m not sure yet. Plant an unmanned beacon and go on to the new locality, probably. Depends on what they say Earthside.”
Hanna looked down at her hands. “I could go out again,” she said.
“No. Nobody’s going to try that again. Don’t ask me why. Not my decision.”
She felt a surge of relief—and on its heels, taking her by surprise, disappointment.
She started to leave without saying anything, and then turned back and said, “When do you want me back in Navigation?”
“You won’t have to worry about Navigation anymore.”
She said uncertainly, “What does that mean?”
“You’re going home. Very quietly. Just as soon as I can get transport out here for you.”
“But—but what about my research?”
He finally looked at her. He said, “You’re wasting your time anyway. Who’s going to take you seriously after the junk you came up with out there?”
“It wasn’t junk! I don’t know what it meant, but it was meaningful!”
“There’s enough computer power working on it to run half the Fleet. If it meant anything we’ll find out. Go to bed.”
“Whose decision was it to get rid of me? I want to talk to him.”
“It’s mine. Don’t waste your time talking. Get out of here. That’s an order.”
She got out.
* * *
Jameson did not speak of Hanna’s adventure to anyone outside the Endeavor Project until the day after it happened, the last thing he wanted being to suggest that he was alarmed. He had been in his office in the early dawn, staring at the analysis of the girl’s report while the mists rose off the gray river and the red sun, despite the early hour, promised a day of sweltering heat. The commissioners of the Polity met each morning, and he did not mention the Endeavor at all until the end of the meeting. He showed the analysis to his colleagues and was pleased when they looked at the masses of question marks, logical branchings and variant interpretations, and shook their heads—all except Katherine Petrov. Petrov was a very old woman, so old that A.S. no longer could give her the appearance of youth; but she was a very alert old woman. She looked around with bright eyes and said that the whole scenario was terrifying.
“Not really, Kate,” Jameson said.
“How can you say that! Spears and cut-up snakes and burnt sacrifices! Do you know what it reminds me of? An evil myth system, the old planting sacrifices—I don’t suppose this girl’s a virgin, is she?”
Peter Struzik spluttered. Struzik represented Earth along with Petrov, under the old rules that gave the mother world two seats on the commission; but he was its president and did not vote, and could afford to find humor in situations that drove the others to frenzy. Petrov looked at him suspiciously and said, “What’s funny now?”
“She’s D’neeran,” Struzik said. “Know the D’neeran definition of a virgin?” He leaned forward, grinning. “A kid too young to know which sex it is. Then it decides it doesn’t matter anyway and goes after anything that moves.”
Petrov snorted, but only to hide a snicker. Jameson disregarded the exchange and said, “That’s just what I mean, Kate. You looked at this data and immediately patterned it in human terms. Lady Hanna is human too. The familiar elements you see are part of her background as well as yours. She did her own patterning here.”
“Perhaps,” Andrella Murphy remarked, “Species X was the origin of the myths.”
She smiled pleasantly at Jameson. Murphy when bored was inclined to flights of fancy and outrageous speculation. Jameson wished he were a telepath himself, so that he could object to her in silence that he did not want any such ideas put into the others’ heads.
He said, “Am I meant to take that seriously, Andrella?”
“I suppose not,” she admitted. “But D’neera was cut off from us for so long—”
“Never completely,” Jameson said, and Petrov said, unexpectedly supporting him, “That wouldn’t matter. The continuity of human culture is so strong, a few hundred years wouldn’t matter. Not even a few thousand when you’re talking about archetypes. The images that come down from before the dawn don’t die. They’re so embedded in all our cultures, they’re nearly inborn.”
Murphy looked rather sadly at the analysis and said, “So what looks like the source of a primal image…”
“Is only another image,” Jameson said. “This is no literal rendering of the content of an alien mind. You’re looking at Lady Hanna’s creation.”
“I wouldn’t like to meet her on a dark night, then.”
“Oh,” Jameson said, “I don’t suppose she’s as bad as all that. It’s not surprising the images she formed are frightening. She told me only hours before the contact that the quality of alienness, so to speak, frightens her. I think she would agree that she inevitably transformed the beings’ thoughts in the act of perceiving them. It’s impossible to disentangle a purely alien element from this combination.”
al-Nimeury said, “What good is it, then?”
Jameson said regretfully, “Not much, I’m afraid. Not immediately. But it was communication, of a sort. It was governed by natural laws. After a few more such instances, perhaps we will begin to understand what those laws are, and form a theory that will make telepaths a useful addition to Endeavor in the future.”
They were all beginning to look bored now. Struzik muttered, “This would make a pretty mess if the public got hold of it.”
“Irrelevant, as long as Alpha and Beta remain secret.”
al-Nimeury said suddenly, “I want to bring that up again. You came out to Co-op and talked the assemblymen into going along with this and nobody knows what’s going on. Co-op’s paying its share and they’ve got a right to know what happens—”
They all began talking at once, except for Murphy, who watched Jameson closely. Arthur Feng was not in the room but on Colony One. His head and shoulders seemed to hang in the air at the foot of the table; there was something wrong at his end, and through the apparition the wall of the room was visible. Jameson saw with satisfaction that something was wrong with the sound now too, and though the wraith’s lips moved, nothing it said was audible.
Jameson let the others talk themselves into keeping the matter under seal. They subsided at last, more or less in agreement. Struzik said, “What if Beta comes to nothing and this is all the contact there is, Jamie? What will you do then?”
“I don’t know,” Jameson said. “Don’t call me that, Peter. If Species X misses Endeavor again—and I think that may happen—I’ll go out there to talk with Fleming and Koster.”
Petrov said, “Why in heaven’s name go all the way out there?”
“Review the troops, boost morale, that sort of thing.”
Struzik said pettishly, “Couldn’t you just do it by holo?”
“I’d be back in time for the budget hearings, Peter. Weren’t you telling me only last week that personal contact is of utmost importance?”
“Is that new girl of yours going?”
“Maybe,” he said with the trace of a smile.
“I thought so. You just want a few days off. I guarantee I’ll make your life miserable. I’ll call you a dozen times a day.”
Jameson submitted to the teasing good-naturedly. He could afford to. He had set out to undercut the impact of Hanna ril-Koroth’s report without entirely discounting her value, and succeeded. It was no small accomplishment in this group, and although they were predisposed to pay little attention to a D’neeran, he could not have done it so easily if Petrov had not, by chance, given him a custom-made opening.
At that, he did not think Andrella Murphy believed a word of it; she knew him too well.
* * *
Hanna made up her mind to risk smuggling out the data she wanted. She would record everything on a wafer the size of her thumbnail, and swallow it as she left; but so much of it was classified that she thought there was a good chance Erik would anticipate her, and she would be caught.
Therefore she worked frantically to salvage what she could from the wreck her venture on Endeavor had become. With no idea how long she would be on the ship, she plunged into its archives and worked with an energy that came not from stimulants but from desperation. She slept in snatches, fully clothed, and forgot to eat except when Tamara brought her food. The synthesis she had envisioned since one luminous moment when she fully understood the Hierarchus was tantalizingly close. An eyes-only report on F’thalian linguistics promised a foundation for describing a theory of separate but contiguous realities, and as she read it her notes on F’thalian thought, side-by-side with the Polity report, fell finally into place. The contradictions between true-human linguistic analysis and her perceptions were illusory; the two were complementary, paired but distinct outlines of the same structure, each lacking salient features. The reasons for omissions that had puzzled the analysts were clear, and so was the reason for F’thal’s clear and baffling boredom with human beings. In the giddy swirl of F’thalian perception, interactions were substantial as material objects. Pan-F’thalian did not describe “things,” only systems and an infinity of subsystems. F’thal had no word for “aliens” because humans were only a minor division of the great subsystems of life. There was nothing special about beings from other stars.
Hanna did not have to compare her memories of the Hierarchus with her experience on Shuttle Five to know that was not the attitude of Species X, though Tamara—her only contact with the life of Endeavor now—told her the aliens were invisible or absent from the second location they had selected. No dreams haunted Hanna. No one came near to ask what really had happened to her out there, and her report seemed to have sunk into silence and left no trace. But she thought of it anyway, the pain and the fear and the strangeness, whenever she lifted her tired eyes from her work or stretched out for a minimal nap; and she came to certain meager conclusions which she did not share with anyone—the persons around her having, it seemed, lost interest in anything she might tell them.
She worried a little about their insistence on ignorance, although in fact there was nothing she could add that would clarify her original impressions. She worried a little also when Tamara told her, some two weeks after the incident that Starr Jameson was expected a few days hence, and that Hanna, presumably, would return to human space when he did. Hanna said acidly that the return trip should be entertaining; but she remembered with discomfort her sense of being in the man’s debt. It occurred to her that the last year of her life, viewed from a certain perspective, bore in abstract the imprint of his hand. It was an unpleasant thought, and she kept it at a distance as her concentration centered more and more strongly, to the exclusion of all else, on her work. Undistracted now that she had no other duties, she saw solutions to puzzles that had seemed insoluble. She left the thicket of references and drew more heavily on her own experience of F’thal and Girritt, her own observations of the Primitives. The underlying structure of her thought crystallized and she wrote rapidly and confidently, sure of her ground. No doubt no one would read what she wrote, but it was truth. She was constructing a monument whose existence was testimony to the validity of its thesis, for it was founded on empirical data—but the data did not exist in true-human reality. She felt, when she thought of the grand futility of her effort, the exaltation she had felt when the Clara began moving toward its end, and she gave herself over to it. She did not forget Jameson, but the apprehension retreated to one small corner of her mind where she looked at it from time to time in a detached sort of way. In the long run, she thought, it did not matter. In the long run nothing mattered except what she was doing.
No one bothered to tell her when Jameson arrived, or that he wished to see her. The door sounded several times before she heard it through a daze that was half obsession, half exhaustion, and then she thought it was Tam.
“C’mon in,” she said automatically, and not until he came to her side did she look up and see who it was.
Unprepared for the apparition, she only stared and said, “Oh.”
She had to look up a long way to see his face. She recognized him at once, but familiarity with his image had not prepared her for his height, nor for the really shocking sense that he was in charge here—that he would be in charge wherever he was. Her experience with true-human authority was limited to Erik, and what she sensed in Jameson was not the same thing at all; and it held her silent and round-eyed.
Jameson looked from her face to the passage she was working on. He said without formality or introduction, “I’ve seen some of what you’re doing. Captain Fleming pulled it out of the main data bank. I’d like to see the rest.”
Hanna moved finally—to look past him and see what entourage he had brought. The door to her room had shut and no one else was there. Questions chased one another through her head. She opened her mouth to ask them and found herself too tired. It didn’t matter. She did not think she could refuse his request even if there were reason to refuse. Weariness and shock made her movements uncertain. She pawed through a litter of printouts for a display module, plugged it into her terminal, and cued it for a current draft. When she turned to hand it to him she caught him eyeing her with something that might have been surprise.
She said, “Yes?”
But he said only, “May I have the chair?”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.”
She retreated to her bunk, which was as deep in annotated paper as the rest of the room. She had to move some of it before she could sit down, and under some of the scraps she found the remains of a sandwich. It occurred to her rather belatedly that Jameson probably was not used to such settings.
He spent a long time reading. Hanna set herself to watch him, but in the long unbroken silence she drifted irresistibly toward sleep. So much more work to do and she had to have some of those references, she could not emphatically criticize a structure of theory and double it in a new direction without references, lots of references, footnotes, oh Lord…Annual Report 2832, The Committee on Alien Relations, Starr Jameson, Commissioner-Heartworld, Chairman. The Coordinating Commission had not had much power five hundred years ago. Now, in theory, three of the five voting members could override the unanimous will of all the populations of the Polity. For a while. Until they were pulled and more amenable replacements appointed. And how did it work anyway? Why did she not know more about history? But on D’neera you could study what you wanted and she had never cared about history or art either, only fighting and aliens. And maybe gardening, sometimes, but the millefleurs got into everything….
Hanna yawned and fell sound asleep.
His voice woke her. It was a very deep voice, and she liked it. The inappropriate thought woke her further and she sat up straight, shaking her head. He was not talking to her. He was speaking to someone on the ship’s intercom, asking for coffee and spirits.
He turned to look at her directly and Hanna stiffened, suddenly wide awake and unsure of herself. His eyes were cold, and she felt herself being measured as no one had measured her before, not even Iledra. Jameson was a presence, utterly sure of his power and his right to judge her, and her response to this new thing was blank astonishment.
He said without ceremony, “How did you know this?”
“Know what?” she said stupidly. She was staring at him again. His face was too interesting to be ugly, with strong bones and unexpected hollows. She liked that, too.
He leveled a long forefinger at the wallscreen, which still showed the passage she had been writing when he came in. It said:
“Most observers of Primitive B, citing winged-flight mass limitations as a curb on braincase development, have assumed this rudimentary culture will stagnate until environmental change forces it to evolutionary regression or extinction. However, the acknowledged complexity of B nestbuilding activity, until now wrongly attributed exclusively to instinct, illustrates the prevalence of logical operations in everyday life. For example, the pitch of the nests’ woven-branch ‘roofs’ is determined not only by an explicit projection of expected severity of rainstorms in a given area, but also by individual preference for the fruit of certain vines which flourish best on more nearly vertical surfaces…”
Hanna gathered her scattered thoughts and said, “I ‘heard’ them. I was there when the flock I was studying was settling in for a nesting season. ‘I think I will make it higher and there will be more to eat.’”
Jameson blinked. “That’s rudimentary agriculture.” he said.
“I was coming to that.”
They regarded each other in silence for a moment. Then he said, “So you were frightened after all.”
“What?” She thought she had misheard him.
“You were frightened when you undertook the experiment you yourself suggested. Why?”
“Why?” She shifted uneasily. This was not a question that had occurred to her. She drew up her knees and curled her arms around them protectively. She said, “It was what you said, I suppose. That they were strange.”
“Was it? Was that the only reason?”
“Why—I don’t know. I don’t know. You said that yourself.”
“I wasn’t there. You were.”
It was hard to look away from his cold gaze. Erik had looked at her like this sometimes, and only irritated her. Now a mountain might have been addressing her, compelling her to answer.
She was not used to finding true-humans impressive. Jameson must have thought she was frightened, because he said with a hint of exasperation, “I’m not going to eat you, you know. Just answer my questions as accurately as you can.”
“Yes,” she said after a minute, but she saw there was no softening in his eyes. She looked at him very steadily, wondering what he was about.
He said, “I’m thoroughly familiar with your report. The imagery was all visual?”
“All. Yes.”
“And frightening.”
“Yes.”
“It was anthropomorphic to an extreme degree. How much of it did you yourself create?”
Hanna had not asked herself that either. She pushed nervously at her hair and said, “I might have—I might have ‘created,’ as you call it, all of the images. But they were correlates of—of thoughts that weren’t mine. That’s how it works.”
She could not keep away from his eyes very long. They were sometimes gray, sometimes green; she found them disconcerting.
He said, “Are you quite, quite sure of that?”
She was suddenly angry, for no reason. “Yes! Yes, I’m sure! I’ve had enough experience with F’thalians, with Girrians, to know that, that when something like that comes up it’s a symbol for something that’s really there!”
“And of what precisely are they symbols?”
She said unwillingly, “I pinned some of them down, as far as you can pin something like that down. They were impressions of—of a whole long stretch of time, and patience. And hunting.”
“The spear?” he said quickly.
“Yes. But not hunting with it. It changed from something else, you know. It wasn’t a real spear. It was all symbols I saw. It was—you read that I saw a snake?”
“I read that it was a living portion of a snake, and that you identified it with yourself.”
“Yes. Well. It’s not that they thought I was a snake, you see. It was a perception of me as…incomplete. Alive but divided.”
“You did not say that in your report.”
“I didn’t understand it until later. That’s all. Hunting and patience and that image of me. I haven’t been able to think of anything else.”
“I see,” he said.
He leaned back in the chair and she jumped, the movement taking her by surprise. He looked past her, frowning a little. She felt herself, for the moment, dismissed.
It struck her that of all the strange events of her life, strange as any was to have this man sitting in her tiny cabin, discussing a first contact in her terms.
Her terms. It came to her forcibly that she was being taken seriously after all: somewhere. You could not be taken much more seriously than this. But somebody had not wanted her to know it; somebody had not even wanted Erik to know it.
Jameson said presently, still looking at something else, “You still think they are telepaths.”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“You must have been as strange to them as they were to you. Might that account for the rather ominous nature of the images?”
“I suppose it might—no. Wait.”
She bowed her head and stared at the floor. Textured matting. Jameson’s elegant boot. She did not want to remember. She shut her eyes and called to memory the fabric of an instant, warp and woof, presence and absence interwoven. Surely the aliens had felt her surprise and apprehension; but she had felt no such thing from them.
More. More. The absence of surprise had been so complete as to be a tangible thing; but so embedded was it in the shape of the gestalt that she had not even identified it, until now, as an entity.
“They knew me,” she said softly. “Like F’thalians who’ve met us before. They knew me for a human being.”
Jameson said flatly, “That’s impossible,” but Hanna was caught in recollection. She drifted among images, examining them one by one and all at once for a connection that was not a connection.
“Lost,” she said dreamily. “Lost and divided. Lost planets, that was it. Lost worlds, found again—”
Jameson said very sharply, “What was that?”
“Hmm?” She looked up, open and unguarded and pleased with herself. But Jameson leaned forward intently. Hanna’s pleasure passed into alarm.
Jameson said urgently, “Are you certain of that?”
“Yes. Yes! Divided—lost worlds—lost worlds? Where have I heard that before?”
She put her hands to her head, which had begun to ache.
“Legend,” he said. He looked at her with open curiosity.
She could not keep up with him. She said, “What legend?”
“The legend of the Lost Worlds, from the time of the Explosion. You know the history of the Explosion?”
“I only know the name, and that it was the, the great period of colonization.”
“Umm-hmm.” His eyes were still on her, but he was seeing something else again, something far away and long ago.
“It began seven hundred years ago,” he said, and she tilted her head, caught in the deep quiet voice. “No one knows how many hundreds of millions of human beings left the Earth and its moon in the space of some three hundred years, nor how many vessels carried them. The ships that went officially to Colony One are accounted for; but there were many that were not official, and some that were desperate, and surely many did not reach their destination. The East threw its poor and dissenting away in the wastes of Co-op, till Co-op broke free. Its records never were good…The private ventures were uncounted, ship after ship of men and women seeking better lives, freedom, riches, the fulfillment of dreams admirable or reprehensible…. It was the greatest fleet the human race has seen, and its full extent was never known. Some ships are known to have disappeared. How many others vanished? Often colonists were stripped of their goods and marooned—or simply killed. Some were found later, or their bones. Many were not…You should know this. Everyone should know it.”
Hanna found herself breathless. For a moment she had stood high above a tapestry of history, watching the sweep and scope of it. She wrenched herself into the present, shocked and resentful of the power that could so easily impose its vision. And she did not like being told what she should know.
She said, struggling for objectivity, “It’s only a possibility. Though when you put it together with the—the quality of the images—”
She stopped short, not liking the implications. Jameson’s face gave nothing away, but she knew he was thinking precisely the same thing.
In the sudden silence the door chattered at them. Hanna went to it, unthinking. She could not focus on the meaning of prior knowledge and the hunt. Her head was full of what she did know of the Explosion: Constanza Bassanio shaven-headed, pregnant and scarred, ransomed from death in a Lunar stockade just before the last ship left for the green promise of D’neera under Clara Mendoza’s command. “Dreams admirable or reprehensible”…the outcasts’ dream had only been to stay alive…
A serving robot drifted through the door and wavered without orders to a landing at Jameson’s feet. After a minute Hanna, compelled by courtesy, settled herself cross-legged beside it. She said reluctantly, “Coffee?”
“The coffee’s for you.” He leaned over and picked up a decanter and looked at the contents with distaste.
She thought of Heartworld and ancient wealth. She said, “I guess they couldn’t find any Arrenswood whiskey.”
“I certainly hope not. Not paid for with public funds. I’ll have coffee after all, I think.”
She went silently through the ritual of serving, obscurely astonished at the scene. Was Jameson thinking of Species X? His face told her nothing. She made no effort to probe his thoughts or feelings—he might, she thought, recognize the nearly palpable impact of telepathy for what it was—but she was wide open for anything that might escape him. Some true-humans, like Koster, were full-time explosions of emotion, natural broadcasters who made the air around them crackle.
But Jameson was as self-contained as any true-human she had ever met. There were not even any physical cues to help her guess what he was thinking. He did not fidget, he did not engage in nervous mannerisms, and every movement was precisely controlled.
Hanna, to her surprise, began to relax. His stillness was comforting, after the noisy activity of her own thoughts and the tension that accompanied all her days here. Jameson might have been alone, for all the attention he paid her now. But she could not doubt his intelligence or alertness; and she thought again of outriders and pioneers, and remembered a thing she had known but not examined—that Starr Jameson was the force behind the whole Endeavor Project, and the vessel and its crew and their work were the reflection of his will.
He said without prelude, very quietly, “You will not speak of this conversation to anyone. Not even Captain Fleming or Dr. Koster.”
She said with casual curiosity, “Why not?”
“Because everything you have said is unsubstantiated.”
She was startled. “I thought you believed me!”
“The question of belief does not arise.” He looked at her with, she thought, a trace of something new in the sea-colored eyes. Speculation?
She shook her head. He said, “Is it so difficult to promise silence?”
“Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, yes. You can’t keep secrets very long on D’neera even if you want to. People guess. Bits of data creep into overt content. The harder you try to keep a secret the quicker you give it away. I can’t help it. You seem to know more about telepathy than most people. I thought you would know that.”
“I do,” he said. “That is why you are not going home.”
“I’m not?” Hanna said, and was unprepared for the wave of desolation that poured over her. She must have projected some of it because Jameson made a sharp, half-protesting gesture. Hanna scarcely noticed, absorbed in the surprising knowledge that for all her anxiety to finish her work, deep inside she had heard, all along, a glad song: “Home…soon!” In the maze of Standard dating she had not lost sight of her native seasons. First snowfall was due in Koroth. The D’neeran year was longer than Earth’s, and the seasons of Koroth were long and distinct. Soon fantasies of ice would rise in the city: palaces, statues, crystal vegetation, slides and labyrinths elaborated as winter darkened. In sunlight it was a city of flashing mirrors. The fires of Sunreturn…she could be home for Sunreturn…
Jameson said something and she answered absently, “Yes?”
“I said: Have you thought of entering your work for a Goodhaven award?”
“Hmm?”
He said patiently, “The Goodhaven Academy’s annual competition. You are familiar with it?”
“Yes. Of course.” She came back reluctantly. “I’ve read a lot of Academy publications. They do good work, with F’thal at least. Not the kind of work I do.”
“Then perhaps it’s time you showed them something new.”
“Me?” What he had said about the Academy’s prestigious award began to sink in. She sat back on her heels and stared at him. She said, “Wait a minute. They wouldn’t give it to a D’neeran. Especially not me! I’m saying D’neerans can do exopsychology better than anybody else. And it’s true. I’ve found out things, just by being a telepath, nobody ever found out before. But they won’t want to hear that, Commissioner!”
He said inexorably, “You are creating a completely original work of great potential value. You should be finished with it by the deadline for the next competition. Are you afraid to try?”
If he meant to sting her with insult, it did not work. She was too absorbed in the new idea to become angry. She had never thought of submitting her work to the Academy. The scholarship structure of true-human society was so far outside her frame of reference that she might as well have thought of competing in a F’thalian courtship drama.
But what it could mean to be a member of the Academy! Not for herself alone, but as a means of making it easier for other D’neerans than it had been for her to gain access to data and persons and places—
She felt Jameson watching her very closely. She looked up and opened her mouth to protest that it was impossible. But he said, “I don’t dispose of the prize, but I do have friends in the Academy. Your work would have to stand on its own merits; but if there is a question of injustice, I think I can see to it the award is fairly given.”
Some seconds passed while she turned his words over, wondering what they meant. She really did not know at once. It was hard to follow him in her weariness. He had said nothing expected or predictable since walking into her room. If he was trying to keep her unbalanced, she was easy prey. She knew little of true-human networks of influence and dimly, trying to understand, she opened herself a little, a little, a very little more, and added it to the slightest intrusiveness, the barest touch of query, just to see what he meant—
She gaped at him.
He had taken from her burst of homesickness a conviction that she wanted to leave the Endeavor.
He had offered her a bribe to stay.
He knew instantly what she had done. She saw it in his face in the moment of engagement, and sensed—not anger nor guilt nor apprehension, but an intense curiosity so at odds with the circumstance that she was unbalanced even more.
She got up slowly. She could not think of anything to say, and stared down at him. Light glinted off a scattering of silver in his hair. The gray-green eyes were remote. No curiosity showed in them, nor anything else.
He said, surprising her again, “Aren’t you angry?”
“Angry?” She was only bewildered.
“That is supposed to be the appropriate reaction.”
“Is it?” She shook her head in confusion. “I only want to know why. Why is it so important that I not talk of this?”
“You needn’t be concerned about that,” he said.
“But I am,” she said stubbornly.
“It is important for you,” he said. “Believe me, it is important for you.”
A bare hint of threat hung between them. She might have heard it in his voice or sensed it elsewise. She said, thinking it through with great effort, “You mean because I won’t get the prize if I break silence?”
“More than that.”
It only confused her more. She shook her head again and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
He folded his hands in his lap, an unexpectedly prim gesture. He said, “You’re in an extremely ambivalent position, you know.”
She looked at him helplessly. She did not have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
“You stand at a branching of the way for D’neera,” he said, calmly as if he were commenting on the weather. “On the one hand this work of yours—what do you call it, by the way?”
“Uh—‘Sentience,’” she said, startled into speech.
His face showed, for the first time, a flicker of amusement.
“A little arrogant, don’t you think? Never mind. It is brilliant. It is a foundation, certainly, for arguments in favor of a position I have held for some time—not a popular position: that D’neera is the ideal interface between the human race and alien intelligences. The Endeavor is funded for a mission of three Standard years. I don’t intend to see the project end in three years’ time. It will go on, and on, and on—through our lifetimes and into the future. This vessel will be joined by sister ships. Within our lifetimes, if we are fortunate, we will see contact with a thing that logically must exist on some scale—a super-network of star-traveling species. We might then begin to call ourselves citizens of the universe…Have you ever thought of the part D’neera might play in such a renaissance? You might be our teachers, our translators, our first and most honored ambassadors. But it must begin now, my lady.”
He paused, waiting perhaps for her to speak, but she could not utter a word.
He went on, “You are the beginning. An experiment; the first. Being first is a great responsibility, my lady. The arguments against your presence on this voyage were difficult to refute, and indeed you have fulfilled many persons’ misgivings. I was told that D’neerans are erratic, promiscuous, unreliable and tinged with cowardice; over-emotional, stubborn, flouters of discipline and, of course, ridiculously communicative…You cannot babble of Lost Worlds to anyone who will listen.”
Hanna bit at her fingers and stared at him as if her eyes alone would pierce his skull. Intangible walls of promise and threat closed on her. There was something he was not saying, and everything he did say obscured it. She had guessed something she was not supposed to know, that her silence was important enough to make him offer her a precious gift unasked, and still he skirted the real “why.” Another answer hung round his head like smoke. She listened for echoes of the unspoken.
She said slowly, “If I don’t tell anybody about this, you and I will be the only ones who know, won’t we?”
His face was empty and detached as a mask. He said, “The Coordinating Commission must know, of course. And key persons in the Endeavor Project.”
“But,” she said, answering echoes, “the project personnel report to you, don’t they? So they don’t matter. You didn’t even mention Alien Relations. They won’t know unless you tell them. And the Commission—you can tell them what you think they ought to know. Any way you want to present it. You can shape how they think—”
She stopped, because he stood up. She had forgotten his height and she looked up, up, into eyes cold and dispassionate as the sea. She felt him put away the hope of deceiving her; he might have pushed away a useless object, but he said only, still calmly, “This is why you frighten us, my lady.”
“Because you can’t have secrets,” she said breathlessly. “But you must have known!”
“In theory,” he said thoughtfully. “In theory. I must say I was not prepared to test it myself…I offer you a straightforward bargain, then. I am, as Lady Koroth knows, D’neera’s only effective champion in true-human circles of power. This is not an easy thing to be, and I must have your cooperation. In this case I must have your silence. Without it—well. It is your world you risk. Not mine.”
“But how can it be so important? Why? Why? Tell me that.” Her voice was shaky. “Just tell me and—so I can decide! You would really turn against us? You would do that?”
He did not answer. Perhaps he would not do it. But he could; she felt the potential of his power, so intense and repugnant that she backed away from him involuntarily. She might have been running from rape, revolted. And then she knew that she had projected the sickening image, because she felt in the same instant his shocked disclaimer of any physical interest in her whatsoever.
She stood by her cluttered bunk, breathing hard. She had broken through his icy self-possession, anyway; they stared at each other in mutual outrage, and she knew he felt as violated as herself.
“You don’t care,” she said. “You don’t care about D’neera at all! All that about a renaissance and what we can do—it’s all for you, the project is all you! What are you doing? What are you using us for? What are you doing to me?”
She thought she heard him say: After all, this is a terrible thing—but he had not said it. He was angry enough now, furious with her. For a moment the sense of physical danger was so strong that she dared not disengage awareness out of fear for her very life.
The threat disappeared suddenly and completely. Hanna found herself in fighting stance, balanced and ready to move. She was ridiculous. She could not recover as quickly as he. Her muscles twitched. She thought: I went too far.
He stood before her silent and still. She felt the re-evaluation going on inside him, astonishing her again. She was dizzy. She did not know anyone, D’neeran or true-human, who could move on so rapidly and coldly after what had passed.
Presently he said, “Would any D’neeran have done what you just did?”
“No—” She shook her head. The slight movement rocked her. She was close to her limit from strain and exhaustion.
“No? It’s you, then? I might have known…”
He pursued a tangential thought.
“What?” she said weakly, trying for the thousandth time to follow him with logic.
“Suicide maneuvers,” he said as if she ought to have known. “You do believe in the direct approach, don’t you?”
“Do I?” said poor Hanna. Her head thudded unmercifully.
“Umm-hmm…” His gaze turned inward. He said very softly, perhaps to himself, “What will you become when youth and luck and brilliance fail you?”
She almost knew what he meant. She did not want to know. She put up her hands and pushed it away. She said, “Just tell me why. Tell me why!”
He came back from wherever he had gone and regarded her, again, dispassionately. He said, “I will tell you this. The future should not be shaped by fear.”
She was at such a peak of sensitivity that the tapestry-vision was tangible, obscuring him. Species X was a glowing point of change. Human destiny depended on a choice: advance or retreat.
She said shakily, “If, if they are too frightened of what I have found, they won’t, they won’t let Endeavor go on and there won’t be any more Endeavors—”
The edges of her vision closed in, and she swayed. He stepped forward quickly and caught her arm. He looked down at her curiously and said, “That’s it.”
“But—but you could just have told me,” she said.
After a minute, to her lasting amazement, he smiled. It was like a light breaking over his face.
“I never thought of that,” he said.
Hanna did not hear him. Shadow lay on her sight and Endeavor writhed about her, insubstantial, thought not artifact. Dimly she saw it as seed for a new cycle of legend. The day of colonists lost and otherwise was over, having been but the foundation of a greater adventure. She looked at the hand that held her without seeing it, though it was a thing concrete and immovable among the shifting veils of time. Remembered islands soared above an alien sea. She muttered, “I understand now. I understand.”
“I think you do…. Are you all right?”
“No,” Hanna said honestly. She pulled her arm from his grasp and sat down with a thump. The Endeavor shivered and solidified. She looked up at Jameson resentfully. Meeting him, she thought, was like running head-on into a whirlwind. If you weren’t careful it would take you just where it wanted, and you could not possibly ignore it.
He said, “You can do it, then? You will do it?”
“Stay quiet?” She hesitated. She did not know what she ought to do. Finally she said, cautiously, “For now. Because there’s so little to go on. But not if I have—if I have what I think is proof they’re hostile to all of us.”
“I wouldn’t ask that of you. You misunderstand—” Fluency failed him for the first time; she thought in surprise that she had touched him somehow. After a minute he said, “There is no going onward without danger. Not for an individual, and not for the human species. But I have responsibilities.”
Hanna wished wearily that he thought plain speaking was one of them. Yet he spoke to her as to an equal.
She said, “You mean that I should trust you?”
He didn’t say anything. She did not either. In the course of half an hour they had fallen into a strange and temporary intimacy; but she could not imagine trusting Jameson without direct access to his motives and intent.
He turned away without haste. He was going to leave without another word. She said impulsively, “Commissioner?”
“Hmm?” He looked around, almost smiling; he was very pleased about something.
“Do you trust me?”
“D’neeran sincerity is notorious,” he said, amused.
“Well. Yes.” Hanna pushed at her unkempt hair, tense and mistrustful. A hundred questions danced in her head. She picked one at random. “What if the aliens come back?”
“Do you think they are out here now?”
“No. No, I don’t. But I don’t think they’re going to stop.”
“No. We can’t keep dancing to their measure, Lady Hanna.”
“Meaning—?”
“The Endeavor’s voyage will proceed as originally planned. We will see how far the patience you detect extends.”
The islands were momentous peaks; but the sea of time was infinite.
“A long way,” she said.
“Then perhaps eventually we will have to do something else. Perhaps you will have to do something else.”
“Me—?”
“You. You’re a beginning, you know,” he said, and was gone.