It wasn’t really dark. There were flashes of light, pinwheels, silent explosions of brightness, firework forms pursuing one another, a mad dance against the blackness.
Hanna watched them for a while. It did not seem to matter that she was blind.
Nothing hurt. She did not know why that was so important.
She felt nothing: nothing at all. If that was the alternative, fine.
Iledra said: Beloved H’ana-daughter. Attend to me.
Her mourning filled the darkness. Hanna felt tearful. Iledra was lost to her, it was only her own sad desire that spoke.
H’ana daughter, I am here.
Here? What is here?
The bright images gave way to a room where men and women clustered round a shrouded figure, half-machine, that lay unfeeling and unmoving.
That is you.
No. That is not me.
But it was not important.
“She is aware of me,” said Iledra’s voice through deep water.
“Ask her,” said another voice she ought to know.
She felt Iledra’s reluctance, but slowly an image formed, the details changing, shifting: a little space ship as Iledra imagined it, two persons whom she recognized.
“She does not want to think about it,” Iledra said.
“She must. She will not for us. She must for you.”
Think. Remember.
But it was not so much a protest against thinking about what had happened, as against the thing itself. She was not sure what that was, but it was bad.
Think. It is important, H’ana-daughter.
The keystone so. Tomorrow rain. We rest by speaking pools, enclosed….
Remember. It is important to me.
Her awareness leapt, and for an instant she knew she was alive.
Iledra?
I am here. Tell me.
“Tell her,” said the voice she ought to know, “to think it to you in words. I want the clearest report possible.”
“She’s too weak. It will have to be images.”
In the silence Hanna’s mind murmured along pleasant, harmless paths.
“All right, then,” the voice said presently. “Describe them as well as you can.”
Show me the aliens. Show me what happened.
The urgency and sorrow seemed distant. It was, perhaps, safe to approach them; memory too, perhaps. She did so cautiously, for Iledra. Who would not push her to terror and then recoil from it as others (others?) had done. She fell through a kaleidoscope of the New City, Koroth, Earthly glitter, black space, and thought very clearly: The signal.
And then?
A picture: Anja and Charl at her shoulders, not knowing the last hours of their lives had come; the tension, apprehension, fumbling at a mystery.
And then? And then? And then?
It was not so hard to make the images, as long as she remembered it had all happened to somebody else. Not to her. Never to her.
A quick intake of breath, involuntary. “So they destroyed it without reason or warning.”
Iledra’s voice. “None.”
The pain! I cannot, I cannot, no! No! No!
There were quick, half-sensed flurries of movement that she knew only through Iledra’s perceptions.
“This is what happened each time—”
“All right. Yes. I can block it and go on.”
“Not so much,” said still another voice, a woman’s voice.
Hanna’s mind soared suddenly into the air above southern Koroth. Here was the little town where her mother taught the neighbors’ children, and orange blossoms were heavy on the air. The summer sun late in the evening cast long shadows from every hillock, and the heat was thick as water. I can feel that, she thought, and reached for a shadow. She thought she knew how it would feel between her fingers.
She had no fingers.
The voice said close by, “What did you tell them?”
D’neera. D’neera. I told them only of D’neera. They asked where my People are.
“D’neera,” said Iledra’s voice, sounding sad. “Yes. The center of her universe is D’neera. She is not only human; she is D’neeran.”
“Did she not tell them about the Polity?”
“Not much, I think. It is not clear. They guessed there was more. But it was too late then. Their only dangerous knowledge is of D’neera. I do not know how they made her tell them even that.”
“You see what they did.”
“It would be enough.”
“For anyone.”
“Yes.”
The third, strange voice said, “Enough. Enough for today. No more.”
“One moment.” Something came near. Close to her ear the familiar voice said, “Hanna. I’m sorry.”
Sorry? she wanted to say. But she could not speak, and the question still rang in her mind when they put her to sleep again.
* * *
“Horrible,” said Iledra. She noticed, with detachment, that her hands were shaking.
“Horrible,” Jameson agreed. He stood before her still holding the glass of wine she had refused. She had no comforting illusion that today’s ordeal was over. She needed a clear head.
She breathed deeply, trying to compose herself. For a brief space, here in Jameson’s private office, the world was quiet. The wall to the river was shut, although she could see through it. The water was gray and restless under black clouds, the horizon a sick glare of light. She saw lightning, but no thunder was audible here. In another room close by, Cosma was exchanging stares with Paul Rodrigues and with an assortment of military and intelligence men whose questions could not wait. Iledra did not know if they would permit her to leave Earth. She could not and would not promise to keep her new knowledge to herself; to do so would be a rejection of principle amounting to treason. And the true-humans would want to control what she had taken for them from Hanna. They would filter it, edit it, shape it and tell a hundred societies what was good for them to know. A D’neeran could not stand for it; but she did not see how they could keep her here without producing as much trouble as the truth would create.
Jameson moved away from her, looked at the glass in his hand as if he wondered where it had come from, and drank the wine himself. Iledra thought he would go to his desk, an enormous thing studded and surrounded with devices for spanning human space. The ambience the room had had on her last visit was lost in the glitter of tools for communication and information retrieval, and the array had the secondary function of subtly intimidating anyone who faced Jameson when he took his place at its center.
But he stopped short of it and looked aimlessly about the room, and Iledra’s attention sharpened. She read signs that Jameson was very tired and had been taking stimulants for several days, but that should not produce this absence of mind.
He looked around, gauging her recovery from the hour just past. He said as if it were inconsequential, “Why did they send her back?”
“Why did—?”
“They send her back. You must have wondered.”
Iledra said unwillingly, “Yes. But I have been too worried about her to give it thought.”
“It was not altruism.” He came back to stand before her, and she got up as if some subtle alarm had sounded. The conversational tone did not deceive her.
“You think it is important?”
“Obviously. They went to no little trouble to keep her alive. She must have been near death when they stopped—from shock, pain, loss of blood. They nursed her through the shock, sealed her wounds, and provided her with a fair substitute for human plasma. Enough to keep her alive for a day or two; enough to save her until Aziz Khan got to her. Why?”
“She said nothing of it. I don’t know.” At the moment Iledra did not care. “Can she be healed?”
“I think so. The medical people think so. They’ve seen worse.”
“Worse!”
He said dispassionately, “Accident victims. She was mutilated with surgical precision, and all her vital organs are intact. Accidents are not so careful.”
Iledra had never liked Jameson much. Now she loathed him from the heart.
“I want to take her home.”
“D’neera does not have the facilities to care for her.”
“As soon as she is well enough.”
“It will be months.”
Iledra was a tall woman, and did not have to look up very far to meet Jameson’s eyes. She said flatly, “You would not let her go anyway.”
“The point’s irrelevant. She must stay here for her own sake.”
“You would not have let me near her if you had not needed me. If any of you had been able to communicate with her without being unmanned by her fear, you would not have let me see her. If the Voltaire had not been there when the alarm came, would you have told me, even, that you had found her? I think not.”
She was right about all of it. He would not say so; but she heard it anyway.
He said quietly, “It’s pointless to exacerbate public fear. It must be known of course that she has been found, but not everyone needs to know exactly what was done to her. I do not want to deal with a panic.”
“I think you already have one,” Iledra said. She had come to Earth very speedily, but she was no pilot and had spent her days and nights in gathering all the information she could. She knew knots and eddies of the credulous already wanted to run—if only they knew where to run to. Soldiers everywhere watched the void for traces of an invader, and an innocent merchantman approaching Colony One had been blown to bits. All the commissioners’ seats were in jeopardy, along with the bodies that had appointed them. And someone, someone not unimportant, had suggested Jameson be tried for unspecified crimes against humanity.
But he said, “There is no panic yet. But it is not wise to provide fuel for one. There are disjunctions enough in every society, and more will come. You cannot be unaware of what is happening here. Security measures already are affecting our economies. Earth’s old proposal for tightening inter-system controls is on the verge of approval. It will take lifetimes to complete, it will drain off more resources than we can afford and restrict our descendants’ freedom of movement to an intolerable degree. I thought the idea was discredited years ago; yet the mood of Heartworld governments is such that if it comes to a vote I will have to acquiesce. Power is shifting on every human world, including yours. For you, if I read the currents correctly, it is taking the form of a return to isolationism. I do not like a new thing I hear from D’neera—that a movement is gaining strength to build up your own defenses, and dispense with Polity protection. What will your people do when they learn what we have just learned—that your world is the aliens’ prime target?”
Iledra said softly, “Don’t try that with me.”
“I beg your pardon?” He looked genuinely surprised.
“Don’t try to frighten me. You lie. The prime target is the Polity. D’neera is no threat to them. They are interested in D’neera only as a means of getting to you. H’ana did not tell them enough.”
Irritation crossed his face; she thought she was not supposed to see it. He said, “When the attack comes their reasons will not matter. You couldn’t fight off Nestor without the Fleet. You can’t do without us now. I hope you can convince your fellow magistrates of that.”
“I am not likely to have much success. The outcry against me has been great. You are right at least about shifting power. I may not be the Lady of Koroth much longer.”
“And the call will come at any moment telling me I am no longer the commissioner for Heartworld. But we still have our responsibilities, Lady Koroth. Neither of us to one world only; both of us to the human species. I will not try to force you to keep silence about Hanna’s condition or anything else you have learned. But I will ask you to use all the influence you have to ensure D’neera’s cooperation. I will ask you to make D’neera see where its duty lies.”
“Duty!” she said, and turned away from him. She was on the edge of tears, as she had been since her first sight of Hanna; it had been a great shock, in spite of Jameson’s warning beforehand. She had made Hanna see where her duty lay, and would regret that success forever.
There would be no attempt to detain her here, for she had made her own prison. Her efforts to insinuate D’neera into true-human society had ensnared her, and all ways out were closed. It would not be her part now to shape a world’s course; the aliens glimpsed as forms of horror in Hanna’s tormented memory would shape them all. Jameson would let her go free so that she could bend or frighten the Houses to docility—meaning that she would smooth the way for a Polity military presence that would come whether it was wanted or not. Her part was to play the go-between; to discourage resistance and make palatable the truth that the Polity would descend on D’neera not for D’neera’s protection, but for its own.
She looked back at him and said, because she had no choice and it did not matter what she said, “I will do what I can.”
He nodded slightly. It was not much of a tribute to what she promised. He said, “There was no indication of their motives in returning her?”
The repetition annoyed her. “None.”
“Perhaps we will find out in time,” he said too casually.
Iledra thought of the useless hulk that had been Hanna and clasped her hands together. They would question Hanna as remorselessly as the aliens had, and she could not prevent it. She could not even say that they were wrong. Where Hanna and the aliens were concerned, no information was trivial.
She said, “There is one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Probably it does not matter—”
“What is it?”
She said slowly, “There seemed a difference in H’ana.”
“What sort of difference?” His tone was unchanged; but she knew that every sense he possessed was concentrated on her answer.
“I don’t—I hardly know. Images and, oh, turns of thought, the equivalent of phrasing, perhaps…”
She was unsure of what she was trying to describe, and the impact of her contact with Hanna was fading. She knew the contours and tastes of Hanna’s personality as well as her own, or she would never have seen the subtle difference; and it might after all be only part of the memory of fear and pain, or the greater disjunction of trauma and drugs. The first would leave greater or lesser traces in Hanna, as tragedy always did, but much of it, and the immediate effects of her physical condition, would dissipate.
She looked up and saw that Jameson still waited for her to go on. She shook her head. “It’s not important,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She hesitated, but the impression dimmed as she considered it. It had been difficult to induce and hold Hanna to concentration, and dream fragments had kept intruding.
“I’m sure,” she said.
“All right. Are you ready to talk to the others?”
She looked once toward the river, as if she could escape to it, but rain obscured it now, silently. “Yes,” she said.
They went to the door together. Just before they got there he said abruptly, “I was glad to hear about her eyes.”
She trusted him too little to think he meant it, but she said, “I’ll have them sent in a week or two. We were going to do away with the bank. None of our defense people have needed their spares for years.”
“It was good news you have them. The plan was for a stock transplant.”
“I know.” Iledra’s own eyes filled with tears. She said, “I would hate to think of H’ana with someone else’s eyes. Her own are so lovely.”
Jameson looked down at her and said to her surprise, “Yes. They were very lovely.”
The door opened, and the questions began at once.
?
Not this Home. Circled
!
unfearing
not mine! not me!
we rest
oh help me oh help
unheard. Dream. Forget.
The next wakings were less painful, and even more dreamlike. Some she would remember, some she would not. Part of her mind began to store information. They were fixing her, re-growing much of her, patching together the rest. Her own eyes, grown on D’neera and banked there when she joined Defense, were available; that was good. Her flesh responded eagerly to regeneration, the speed was something built in at the time of the Change; that was not so good, not when there were so many different things to juggle. She could not move or feel anything. They explained to her once that so many delicate processes were going on in healing her that it was best she stay away, stay asleep, and let them go about the business of repairing the envelope that held Hanna ril-Koroth.
Presently they tried waking her to full self-awareness, and in the first burst of memory she was frantic to flee, and could not move nor even cry out. Her panic blasted a hundred people. They knocked her out to stop the nightmare-silent screaming and, reluctantly, since Iledra had gone home, asked D’neera to send a telepath to aid them.
Dale Tharan came without protest, approved by the Polity precisely because he was an outspoken advocate of giving it anything it wanted and taking in return all D’neera could get. But he did not like Hanna, and when he had eased her into reality as he was supposed to do, he told her she had not done him or herself or D’neera any favor by failing to hold out against the aliens. And hideous now. A limbless lump, he added, but even Tharan was not proof against Hanna’s first clear sight, through his eyes, of what the aliens had made of her. They made her sleep again, and next time they woke her Tharan, with considerable dedication, painted her portrait as she had been and would be again. It was not much to hold on to, but it was something.
* * *
Jameson had the interrogation sessions linked with his office. He listened while he went about his business, and when he was with other people he had the transmission routed to the implant in his ear, which was supposed to be used only for matters of extreme urgency and when he had shut himself off from the world by every other means.
The data extracted from Hanna were, then, twice disembodied. She could hear, but she could not speak. The questions therefore were asked by the men whose business it was to ask them, but the answers were filtered first through Tharan, and then through the complex electronics that fed Tharan’s voice into Jameson’s ear. What he heard might have been messages shouted by Hanna across a river, the meaning twisted, distorted, blown away by distance and the wind. Those about him were often disconcerted. He wore a wrist communicator, as was his habit, but ordinarily he was courteous about its use. Now he would interrupt anyone or anything to raise it to his lips and snarl, “Ask her—”
Ask her anything. How many? On their ship? On their world? How many planets? What weaponry?—until they had to give up questions, because Hanna would get confused, and think aliens not humans questioned her, and send Tharan with a spinning head stumbling away, unmanned, as Iledra had said, by her fear.
What she said of the Lost World jolted Jameson. He had not really believed in it until now, thinking it a bare possibility; but it was real; and the spectacle of a human population tortured, manipulated, subjected to experiment and killed, was appalling. Humans had almost stopped doing such things to each other—a hopeful sign for the future, he had always thought. Now there was the prospect of its starting all over again with an aggressor to whom economic sanctions and human opinion meant exactly nothing.
He seized on what the sacrificed colonists could do for him, however, without permitting himself compunctions about using a ghoul’s opportunity. The information came early enough to save him for a time, because it was immediately clear that Species X had been searching for humanity for a long time. Jameson said publicly and privately to anyone who would listen, playing the idea for all it was worth, that it was fortunate the first contacts had been with Endeavor and XS-12 so that humankind had some warning. It was not enough to get back all the ground he had lost, but Heartworld did not replace him and he was still in control.
Except—control was an illusion. Maybe he had known it from the moment Rodrigues’s voice called him from the illusions of his last hours with Henriette. If he had not known it he found out one night when he took an enormous dose of Imagos, hoping to lose grim reality in the blurred edges of beauty for a little while. But the coals in his fireplace were Hanna’s charred eyesockets, bone showed through his own unsteady hand, and he could not get the antidote into his bloodstream fast enough for comfort. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before. He sat sweating in a room cool enough to need a fire and acknowledged something he had pretended not to know: the dreams that had given birth to Endeavor were finished. There would be no brave leap into the future; only torturous courses dictated by need. Past and future had come seeking him, and he was as helpless as Lady Koroth.
* * *
Another purpose?
Another. Old old. Incomplete. They did not finish.
Finish what?
I don’t know. An ending. More than death. More than me. They stopped. And still another.
Purpose? What?
I don’t know. I don’t know!
“Tharan,” said an audible voice. It must have said his name several times before it penetrated his dialogue with Hanna.
He got up, shaking off Hanna’s frantic grab for contact. To stay sane himself he had to harden himself against her clutching terror. If she had been anyone else, if she had been here for any other reason, they would have let her sleep through the months of helplessness and enforced paralysis. They could not, and she sometimes skirted the raw edge of panic. Tharan kept trying to tell her she was safe now. She kept forgetting.
Stanislaw Morisz had called him. Morisz beckoned and Tharan went out the door with him. There was nobody in the corridor. This was a very busy medical center, but they’d sealed off a whole floor for Hanna.
Morisz said, “I read yesterday’s transcript. There was nothing. Nothing definite.”
Tharan said patiently, “Telepathic communication is not a one-to-one correspondence with fact.”
Morisz only looked at him. Tharan knew Morisz was impatient and beginning to get angry. Hanna should have been a mine of information and she was not, and the true-humans did not understand why. Tharan was not surprised. He had come to Earth prepared to explain the uses and limitations of telepathy. Now he settled himself against the wall in the corridor outside Hanna’s room and began to lecture.
He said, “Every bit of information exchanged is surrounded by a network of associated concepts, memories, emotions. It can be very precise if you have a language in common, and fairly precise even without that if there’s a shared cultural matrix. If you don’t have either of those things, you have what H’ana was writing about in ‘Sentience’—very broad, global concepts with a high degree of subjectivity. She’s trying to put into words—or sometimes I am—things that were images, symbols, very fuzzy when you try to objectify them. To put it another way, she knows a great deal about the aliens, but it’s not the kind of knowledge you want. You’ll notice all they got out of her was hard-science information. Stellar configurations are a shared objective reference, so she could show them where D’neera is. But they were the ones doing the questioning, not her. And where the ‘soft’ side is concerned, how they think, how they live, that kind of thing—as I said, she has a lot of information, but there’s no program to plug it into. So it doesn’t make sense to her or to me and it’s not going to make sense to you.”
When he stopped he saw Morisz’s mouth twitch. Morisz said, “There’s some objective data, though. The Lost World, for instance.”
“Sure—because there was something in her cultural matrix to connect it to. But it’s very general. No detail.”
Morisz pondered. He said, “I don’t understand what she means. That they were doing something besides questioning her.”
“I know. I don’t either. Neither does she. It’s very vague. Maybe religious but not really, she says, and then somehow divorced from its original context. They ripped her up for a reason, but she doesn’t know what it was.”
“You have to get more.”
Morisz looked tired. Tharan said sympathetically, “Jameson on your back?”
Morisz did not answer. He didn’t have to. Jameson kept turning up at odd moments, straight and stiff and staring at the remnants of Hanna with an inhuman lack of queasiness. The man had a strong stomach and maybe, Tharan thought, some things going on inside him a mindhealer could hardly resist. But he wanted Hanna sucked dry anyway.
After a minute Morisz said, “We’re wasting time.”
“Yes,” Tharan said, and set about calming himself for the return to Hanna. What he was doing was hard. Everything he got for Morisz was filtered through layers of blind pure animal pain.
Tharan thought it was a good thing they had him. They’d have gotten nothing by themselves.
* * *
After a while it seemed to Jameson that he had been hearing Dale Tharan’s voice all his life.
They found out what the aliens looked like and made pictures, and Hanna looked through Tharan’s eyes and agreed (with what pain Tharan did not say) that the pictures were accurate. They found out what the outside of the alien spacecraft looked like, which told them nothing, and what an alien torture chamber looked like, which told them less. They found out you could make a neural stimulator from something that looked like living fabric and set about trying to do so, hoping if they succeeded they could work backward to some bit of knowledge about the aliens. They searched for records of the Lost World, but there were none; that was why it was lost. They tried to figure out how an alien stungun worked. They analyzed blood samples taken from Hanna on the Mao, and came up with something unexpected.
“Psychoactive drugs?” said Jameson, who saw every report anyone made on Hanna. His eyes hurt constantly and he seldom slept. The first narrow escape from being recalled to Heartworld might be over, but only his intimate knowledge of the situation here kept certain key councilmen in line.
“Yeah. Funny thing is, she doesn’t remember any effects.” Morisz’s eyes were red too.
“Can you tell when she got them?”
“Late in the process. Very late.”
“Before or after her memories gave out?”
“Impossible to say. The best guess is it was after she lost consciousness more or less permanently.”
“There would have been no point at that stage.”
“There’s no point to any of it. Why do they think we’re some kind of goddamn tigers? What could a bunch of ragged-ass colonists do to make them think that?”
“Whatever the reason, she ought to have been able to show them otherwise.”
“What?”
“‘Sentience.’ Section Six.”
“Oh,” said Morisz. “That.”
And then?
The right response.
But then
Exactly the right response.
Then
One of us two of us three of us defenseless
Then
Vulnerable.
But later?
No later not ever.
There was later.
No later. No.
“What’s that for?” Jameson said.
“What—oh. The screen. I don’t know. We started using it at the beginning. I forget why.” Morisz was so used to having a barrier before the module holding Hanna that he had stopped noticing it.
“Get rid of it.”
“Right.”
But when it was gone Morisz remembered why it had been there. This outer room was large enough to seem uncrowded in spite of its masses of equipment, for even minor regeneration was not a simple task, and Hanna was not a minor project. Now, however, it was crowded with people, and with the screen gone they had to look at Hanna. Eight weeks into the regeneration process she was, if anything, a more repulsive sight than she had been at the start. The medical people liked to see what was happening, though their eyes were not as good as their instrumentation, and sometimes they forgot to cover up the tangle of flesh and tubes and wires with decent sheeting. They had not forgotten this time, but the contours of the figure centered in its zero-g bubble were horribly suggestive. But at least, Morisz thought, she has a face again. The only recognizable thing about Hanna when he had first seen her had been the straight pretty nose. The aliens had not wanted to obstruct respiration.
The scene taking shape was Jameson’s idea. He seemed not to believe Hanna had told Tharan everything, though the questioning went on for hours each day, and insisted on trying one more thing. Tharan, just outside the chamber where Hanna lay, was already in tenuous rapport with her; she was more heavily sedated than usual, and the effect showed in Tharan’s face as a vague slackness. Neuro- and psychopharmacologists were in place, and a physiogeneralist stared over their shoulders at a mix-monitor panel. A Fleet liaison specialist and one of Morisz’s assistants ignored each other from adjacent seats. There was nothing more to wait for. Morisz was about to witness—in a sense, even, to direct— something he had heard of but never seen: a mindhealer-Adept of D’neera undertaking a telepathic deep probe.
He said to Tharan, “You know what you’re looking for.”
“Something…hidden…” Tharan’s voice trailed off. It would be difficult for him to maintain a double awareness—inward to Hanna, outward to the others—but it could be done. He would not attempt to speak to them unless he got what he was after.
“Anything new. Anything at all. You’ve been over most of it so often you should notice anything different. But don’t waste time on the stuff we know. Get down to the end and concentrate on that.”
Tharan did not answer. His eyes glazed as the contact deepened. Hanna, Morisz knew, had not wanted to do this, but Tharan had appealed to her sense of duty—and, Morisz suspected, her guilt.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Everybody ready?” he asked, but not until he saw Jameson’s bare nod did he say to Tharan, “All right. Go ahead.”
Minutes trickled by. Morisz watched Tharan, but he was as motionless as Hanna. He would be living through her experiences now, not just turning them into words for Intelligence, but guiding her attention to details unconsciously noted. If he could he would damp the emotional strain, holding her to detailed objectivity. Morisz had expected signs of strain, but there were none. Time passed, men shifted position and coughed, someone spoke. Morisz wondered why he had ever thought a deep mindprobe would be a dramatic thing—
Blackblackblackno
“No!” Morisz whispered, and wiped sudden sweat from his face. The sensation had been one of falling, as if he had been on the edge of sleep and jerked back just in time from an endless black pit, wide awake. He looked sidelong at Jameson and saw a hand slowly withdrawn from an instinctive grab for support. He felt a flicker of satisfaction that Jameson was not immune to this at least, and then was ashamed.
He whispered to Jameson, “Tharan lost it.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Morisz glanced uneasily at the pharmacologists. He had been there for Hanna’s first waking, and knew first-hand what happened when a half-mad telepath lost control. Tharan was supposed to be able to focus and channel her awareness, centering it on himself and reinforcing the inhibitions against random projection that Hanna had internalized in childhood and practiced all her life. If he failed, the pharmacologists would take over. But even they were using negative alerts, so a circuit would close and Hanna would sleep if they made any move without warning. That first time their colleagues had nearly killed her when all they wanted to do was shut her up.
Tharan was quite still, his hand resting on the thin plastic film that provided a visual cue for the force field containing Hanna. Sometimes he went inside with her, but not today; she could not be touched indiscriminately, and in the deep probe the urge to do so would be strong.
The tension had grown with that fragment of Hanna’s memory, and Morisz muttered to distract himself, “He’s getting attached to her in spite of himself, isn’t he?”
“Yes.” Jameson just breathed the word.
“Says she knows what a mess she made of it.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Morisz was not an imaginative man, but he remembered Tharan’s confidence and was chilled. What would it do to you, he wondered, to lie paralyzed and blind and anesthetized for weeks, remembering how you got that way, reflecting on your failure, living with the conviction of the man who was your only link to life that you had endangered everything you knew?
mistake mistake mistake stupid mess D’neerans look what how’d we get here goddamn
Words, even seemingly in Hanna’s voice. Jameson turned his head and said, “She’s getting that from one of us.” There was ice in his voice.
“Not me,” Morisz said a little nervously. He looked around and saw the Fleet major gone red-faced and too stiff, unused to his private thoughts becoming public property.
lovest me thy father mother brother lover here fullsharing lest cold night
Tharan shifted abruptly. Morisz was on his feet. No words that time, not until he created them, and not in Hanna’s voice but silent strangeness, a jolt of madness.
Jameson said quietly, “Nothing new.”
“What?”
“Think about Tharan’s reports. That’s what he’s been describing all along.”
“Oh…” Morisz sat down slowly. The men behind them whispered to each other. “She was identifying with them.”
“Sometimes,” Jameson said, but he was leaning forward now and watching the two D’neerans closely, as if he could force his way into Hanna’s brain himself.
But Tharan, after a while, straightened and shook his head. “That’s all,” he said. The words were a little slurred.
Jameson continued to stare at him. Tharan put his head in his hands. When he looked up his face was more alert; he had broken the rapport.
“There isn’t any more,” he said. “I told you there wasn’t.”
Jameson got up and went to stand beside him, looking through the transparency at Hanna. Morisz followed, uneasy. In the weeks since Hanna’s return Jameson had become more reserved than ever. It had never been easy to guess what he was thinking; now it was impossible. He seemed to be turning to stone, perpetually preoccupied with something no one else perceived. But whatever it was focused the force of his personality instead of subduing it, so that when he spoke it was like a glimpse of flame, and Morisz sometimes thought that one day Jameson would explode.
Tharan stood up and Jameson said, “There is more.”
“There isn’t. It just ends.”
“They hadn’t finished with her. You know what was in her bloodstream: psychotropic drugs. You know what they would do. It must have been done after what you have shown us.”
“It ends,” Tharan repeated.
“Memory does not vanish. The organism records everything. On the cellular, the chemical, the molecular levels, if nowhere else. If you are as competent as you say, you could retrieve her primal memories of gestation. Why not this?”
“I can’t retrieve something unless there was enough consciousness to organize the experience in the first place. There wasn’t. They dissolved her ego.”
“She perceived it as dissolution. That does not mean it was dissolved.”
Tharan said blankly, “That’s exactly what it means.”
“I don’t intend to argue semantics. Is there any possibility she is deliberately blocking you?”
“No,” Tharan said positively.
“Could there be a block imposed by another?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
Tharan said angrily, “I’m a D’neeran, a telepath, an Adept, and a mindhealer. Don’t try to tell me I don’t know.”
“You are either incompetent or a liar,” Jameson said, and turned away and started for the door. The ghoulish little tableau was broken. Tharan took a fast step after Jameson.
Sweet winds, summerfruit, soft-plumed love eternal thy warm waters unbroken.
In a great rush of wellbeing Morisz saw a hand slip from its place. The circuit closed; he drifted for an instant toward sleep, and it was over. Hanna was entirely unconscious. Tharan stood still, looking toward her, and the others were between him and Jameson, babbling questions.
“Later,” Jameson said. “Stan.”
It was an order, and Morisz ducked between the others and followed Jameson into the corridor.
“What,” he began, but Jameson shook his head, and they went through half the building, a long walk, in silence. Hospital personnel stared at them with covert or open curiosity, but Jameson paid no attention. Behind them trotted a man from Administration internal security. Two days ago someone had planted a homemade firebomb at Jameson’s door; it was primitive but dangerous, and Jameson had reluctantly accepted this minimum of personal protection.
Outdoors the August sun burned hot. Jameson stopped on a deserted flight of stairs, waved the bodyguard away, and said, “They expect to permit her mobility in about three months.”
“Yeah. She’ll be able to talk then. Maybe we can get more.”
“I doubt it. But from the moment she moves a finger I want her watched. With spyeyes. Without her knowledge. I want every room in this center in which she spends time wired for sight and sound, and I want you to form a team to study the record, every minute of every twenty-four hours of it, and report to me.”
“Report what?” Morisz said in frustration.
“I don’t know.”
Morisz thought: He is going right over the edge. Right here. Right now.
“Starr…” It came out more plaintively than he intended. “It’s a dead end. You can’t get anything better than what Tharan did. Go right into her head and pull it out—what the hell can I do that’s any better?”
“Then send the tapes to me and I’ll study them myself.”
Morisz could not refuse the direct request. There was his personal liking for Jameson, for one thing; for another, there were implications for the future. He did not want Jameson telling anyone he was uncooperative in a matter of such weight, and certainly he could not defend himself by accusing a commissioner of unreasonable caution.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “But it’s a dead end, all the same.”
“Think so?” Jameson started down the staircase. The sunlight dimmed. The sullen air promised rain.
He said, “They don’t leave dead ends. Every time it’s looked that way they’ve set us up for something. Remember that, Stan. It’s nearly the only thing we know about them.”
“Yes,” Morisz said, “but they’ve already set up D’neera. What else could they want?”
“Just watch her,” Jameson said.