The water was always warm and clear, and drew her irresistibly. She forgot sometimes to push against it, floating in a timeless sea, and the physical therapist who took her to the pool each day would call, “Hanna! Hanna! You’ve rested long enough.” And she would make a dreamy effort, forgetting the purpose was to make her stronger, filled with wonder at the play of muscle and the sensations of water against her skin. It was strange to inhabit a body. She remembered inhabiting one familiarly, but she could not get used to it again. Parts of it surely were gone? Movement unbalanced her; food was distasteful and she spilled it; her face glimpsed in a mirror with clear blue eyes surprised her.
They had made her body whole by slight degrees, and would do the same with her mind. Living in the unworld of brain barred from body was painful, so she had been unconscious for five months, except for the sessions with Tharan. The exceptions might have been her undoing, for she opened her new eyes to memories of The Questioner, repeated daily and ingrained past forgetting, and very little else. Tharan had not been a reassuring companion. His head was filled with images of fleets on the move, chaos at home and his anxiety to return, mistrust of the men around him and violent dislike of Starr Jameson. That was Tharan’s version of events, or all of it Hanna saw, anyway. Her final waking, therefore, was to unrelieved bleakness. To ease her transition to physical life she was given drugs that softened without changing the prospect. It was always at a distance from her, and so was grief—for herself, for D’neera, for Anja and Charl, for something else; but what? It was too distant to see. It was there in dreams she could not remember, a loss and an emptiness that would never be filled. Tharan was gone, and there was no one to uncover her dreams.
So faithfully had she been cared for that after a week she could walk. She could not walk very rapidly or very far, but she could walk. She came out of the hydrotherapy pavilion one day, moving hesitantly and wearily away from the water’s support, and found Jameson waiting for her.
She thought he must have come to see someone else, but that made no sense. He was here for her, then. Barely clothed and wet through, she forgot the chill of dry air while she searched memory for the proper thing to say. Ordinary courtesies no longer came automatically, and never sounded right when she remembered them.
He said, “Hello, Hanna,” providing the clue she needed.
“Hello,” she said in relief, but fragments from Tharan came together without warning: the ruin of the Endeavor Project, the near-ruin of this man’s career, the ragged end of his visions, devastation of his life, and had it not sprung from her? She had never given a thought to what he risked in trusting her. Now, when she saw the size of the gamble, it seemed to Hanna in her distress that he must have come here to accuse her. She might have panicked, except that he appeared utterly unchanged. As it was, she looked at him piteously.
He said, startled, “Are you all right?” and took her arm, which had seemed very far from his intention.
“All right,” she said faintly.
“I can come back later, if you wish.”
“No,” said Hanna, so unused to having power to postpone the unpleasant that she did not really understand the option.
He went with her to her room, and she leaned on his arm most of the way. Seeing him had jolted her from her fog—and she wondered with new clarity how much of it was self-created, not chemically induced. But the question sank in her painful anxiety for his welfare, and she was not clearheaded enough to think such anxiety might be ludicrous while his strength literally held her up.
Her room was comfortingly dim. She sank onto the bed with a sigh, telling herself she must not fall asleep just yet. The light flared, and she blinked. She had forgotten that her preference for semi-darkness was not shared by everyone.
Jameson came to stand before her, tall and solid and wrapped in the old stillness. He watched her intently, not trying to disguise it. There were deeper lines than she remembered at the corners of the gray-green eyes, and his gaze was colder than she had ever seen it. She felt a twinge of unreasoned fear of something besides reproach.
She could not think of anything to say. After a while he said, “How are you feeling, Hanna?”
His eyes and tone were so at odds with the concern in the conventional question that she did not understand immediately, as if it were necessary to translate what he said from one language to another. “I’m—well. I’m feeling better. Time,” she said, pushing at her hair. It was cropped close, a silken cap, and felt strange to her hand.
“Intelligence is rather anxious to get at you without the intermediary. Think you’ll be strong enough to talk to them soon?”
“Soon. I think—soon.” But Ward, her chief physician, spoke of that or something like it at least twice a day. He must know the answer. She hardly heard the next trivial questions, answering by rote. He had to have the answers already. He did not care what she said. He was not listening; only looking. He had come here only and specifically to look at her.
He took a step toward her and without warning, swept by fear, she shrank away from him, fighting an impulse to run. She could not run. She was too weak.
“Hanna?” he said, but she could not answer, huddled in on herself and shivering.
After a minute he sat down beside her. There was a tangled coverlet on the bed, and to her astonishment he picked it up and draped it about her shoulders. It was the first gesture of kindness she had known in many months; the men and women who cared for her were not unkind, but busy and impersonal. She began to cry, the acid tears tickling her nose incongruously, and to her further astonishment felt his hand on her back. The simple act of compassion overwhelmed her and she turned to him blindly, reaching out, expecting nothing. Very slowly, he put his arm around her.
“Forgive me,” she whispered.
He shook his head, but the movement came from some sharp conflict within himself.
“Please,” Hanna said urgently.
“There is nothing to forgive,” he said as if against his will.
“What I did…” Tears blurred her eyes. The shameful memory smothered her.
“You did all you could…” He spoke slowly, reluctantly, but his arm tightened around her. She responded to it, not to his words, and laid her head on his shoulder without thinking, knowing he would not mind; he only thought he ought to mind it. He was a point of wholeness in a sadly tattered universe, and she clung to him, needing wholeness too desperately to care if he wished to be clung to or not.
He bent his head and she moved a little, holding her breath with a sense that time and space had slipped and left them, the two of them, miraculously alone and secret. He said close to her ear, very softly, “I wish it had not been you. But I’m glad it was you.”
She said on a long breath, “Why…”
“You did not speak. It was not you. They destroyed you.”
“Everyone blames me…”
“They are wrong. Who could have done better?”
“Anyone. You—”
“Not I.” He touched her hair, a delicate gesture of comfort. “If anyone tells you he would have done better, he lies.”
She turned her head a little, almost secretively, as if he would not notice that his lips now touched her cheek. Her skin seemed to have been dead, and suddenly was alive. She whispered, “But I told them—”
“Not enough. Not enough for their purposes…”
She was passionately grateful. He had strength enough for both of them. She was safe with him. Safe: from doubt, from guilt, from memory. She had never needed anyone before, nor anything so badly. She would tell him so.
Then he remembered something he had forgotten, and she felt it fall between them like a knife. He drew away from her with a movement so abrupt it was nearly violent. Time resumed. She actually cried out, bereft. The act was so deliberate and implacable that he might as well have gotten up and walked out, and she wept, uncomprehending.
He waited without moving or touching her until her sobs eased. Presently she straightened, sighing, and wiped at her wet cheeks. Jameson turned his head, but he did not speak at once and his face was unreadable. A last sob choked her. He said—it might have been another man talking— “Do you remember the probe Tharan did?”
She nodded, hardly hearing.
“What happened after he broke the rapport?”
“After?” Confused by his contradictions, still shaken to the bone, she tried to remember. It had been so long ago. It was mixed up with all the interrogations before it and after it, and besides she had been sedated, which was not customary. The healer was supposed to be strong enough to share your full awareness of whatever made you seek him out. But Tharan had not come to her as a healer, and nothing about that probe had been customary.
“I fell asleep,” she said. “Or passed out. I don’t remember which.”
“I mean before that, but after Tharan broke the contact.”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember anything. Did something happen?”
He said after a moment’s silence, looking directly into her eyes, “No. I thought perhaps something had occurred to you afterward. But if there was nothing…”
“No,” she said uneasily.
He stood up, remote as ever, preparing to leave. She said quickly, “Commissioner?”
“Yes?”
There was a question she had asked no one because she was afraid of how they would look at her. But whatever he felt, it was not, at least, contempt.
“Why has there been no attack on D’neera?”
For an instant she saw exhaustion in his face, and pain so great it shocked her into silence. He said something she did not absorb; said good-bye, and she nodded numbly; left her staring after him. If she had ever thought him impenetrably armored, the minutes just past would have shattered that illusion. But this was different; she had with her question gone straight for a nerve, all unknowing, and seen something she was not supposed to see. Why, when it was a question everybody must be asking?
She could not think of a reason, but she stopped wondering about it because she was preoccupied with something else. She had finally remembered his reply, and also the inflection he gave it. It was a non-answer, but why had he said it that way? She could not get it out of her mind, and it worried her till other shadows hid it: “You ask me that?”
* * *
She saw Melanie Ward every day, and also Larssen, the physical therapist. When she asked them when she could leave they gave her no answer. She did not belong here. This was a Joachim Beyle Center, an acute care facility specializing in regenerative techniques. There were half a dozen of them on Earth, half the total in human space, and this one was within sight of the Polity administration complex. Hanna’s small room had no window, but when she was strong enough she walked round and round the Beyle Center, scuffling through dry leaves over carved stone, and looking at Admin’s distant spire with the stylized star at its tip. Somewhere in those buildings were Jameson’s rooms, where she had been an honored guest. She wished he would come see her again, but he did not. She wished the medics would let her go, but they would not, though now she was as whole as she would ever be and needed only outpatient care. “Wait,” they said, and tested her over and over, and days and then weeks went by.
* * *
“It is autumn here too,” said Iledra. “We are together in that for once. Strange places you’ve been, H’ana-ril.”
She paused, waiting. It was a minute before Hanna stirred. She was a faraway face to Iledra. Her eyes were dead. Iledra looked at her more closely. Fear seized her that Jameson had been wrong and Hanna would never be well again.
But the blue eyes shifted, came to focus, and were Hanna’s: sad, but intelligent and alive.
She said, “Hello, Lee. This is a surprise.”
It was the second time she had said it. Iledra said, “Are you all right, H’ana-ril?”
“Yes,” Hanna said. Fleeting surprise touched her face. “I’m getting stronger,” she said.
“Good. I expected to hear from you, and I did not, so…”
“Oh,” Hanna said. Her eyes shone with quick tears. She turned her head away so Iledra could not see her face. She said, “I couldn’t bring myself to— There was so much I didn’t understand from Tharan, and I’ve read…I’ve read about the, the, the…tree…tree—”
She stopped, fumbling. Iledra said, puzzled, “The what?”
Hanna now seemed utterly confused. Iledra watched her with amazement and alarm. Hanna said at last, triumphantly, “Things.”
Iledra closed her eyes for a moment and thought: Her mind is broken. But Hanna went on sanely enough, “The soldiers of the Polity. Half the fleet’s in the system, isn’t it? They say there’ve been—disturbances—”
Tears glittered on her cheeks.
Iledra put down her mug of honeyed juice. It was the last of the season, and she would not take a meal outdoors again this year. The rainbow glimmer of fading falseoaks surrounded her, and fine nurturing dust powdered her hair and shoulders with a million subtle jewel-flashes; but the wind was rising, and one more stormy night would scatter the last of the tree-borne light. Had Hanna been thinking of falseoaks? But the connection was obscure.
Iledra said slowly, “There are disturbances everywhere. The Fleet strategy is to stop an invasion here, but it is not popular. I have secured the communication here. Are you secure?”
It did not occur to her that the question represented a marked change in her own attitudes. It did not occur to Hanna either, apparently. Hanna only shook her head and said with an effort at a smile, “None more secure. I tried to call Cassie and they wouldn’t even let that go through.”
“Indeed. I’ll tell her I’ve spoken with you. I said there are disturbances everywhere. The governments of the Polity worlds bicker and shout. They think we have too many ships, men, guns, sentinels, and the Commission leaves them too little. You know the administrators of WestCon have fallen on Co-op? And the governors of Montana on Heartworld, though all Montanans are mad in any case. Even Lancaster’s parliament has been overturned. I thought Lancaster forever asleep. I suppose you’ve heard of these things, but…”
Her voice trailed away, because Hanna was not listening. Rather, she listened to something else. She turned her head and stared into a room so dark Iledra could see nothing in it. In reflected light from the video screen her eyes were a stranger’s, and slitted.
“H’ana,” Iledra said softly, but there was no response.
After a minute she went on. She spoke steadily and conversationally. Chill wind clutched her hair and trickled down her neck.
“You know all that, I’m sure. But probably you have not heard of Colony One’s proposal to evacuate all D’neera and destroy the Houses and the cities, so if the aliens come there would be nothing, and the Fleet if it loses here could retreat to worlds the aliens cannot find. They might even have done it, H’ana—but they could not think how to resettle all of us.”
“Yes,” Hanna said. “That’s right. All at once. I hadn’t heard.” She turned back to Iledra, looking only wistful. She said, “What did Jameson say?”
“Nothing,” Iledra said. “Not a word. He knew it must come to nothing. And he is in no position to protect us.”
“No,” Hanna said. “I wish I could see him. But I haven’t. Tell me more.”
But her face was so sad that Iledra hesitated. She thought now that Hanna’s deficiencies might be neither physical nor intellectual, that something else perhaps had broken, and she could say nothing that would not bring further pain. Hanna could not know all the tumult the forced marriage of true-humans and D’neerans had brought, because true-humans now controlled most of D’neera’s channels of communication, and chose what to suppress. All the old prejudices had flared again, strong as in the years of isolation. Polity soldiers no longer were permitted to visit the surface of D’neera for rest and recreation; there had been rapes, batteries, thefts, finally a full-scale riot. Most Polity societies closed their doors to D’neerans for, they said, the outsiders’ own protection. This meant D’neerans who wished to evacuate voluntarily—and there were many—could not do so. They stayed at home with everyone else, watching a hostile sky whose harborage of the true-human fleet seemed more threatening, for now at least, than hypothetical aliens of unknown power.
And it was Hanna’s doing. And to know all that she had brought about would not help her.
Iledra said, “I will tell you more another time. Are you comfortable, H’ana?”
“Yes,” Hanna said doubtfully.
“But unhappy…”
“I can’t,” said Hanna, lines creasing her forehead, “seem to think. They don’t—want to talk to me. They’re not allowed to, I think. The people here. I only ever see a few. And men from Intelligence. I go to, to where they tell me. The pool. The gymnasium. Nobody’s there.” Something like horror came into her eyes. She repeated, “Nobody’s ever there. I can’t, can’t think to anybody. They don’t like it. There’s nobody to talk to. I’m living in a box. I’m not living—”
She stopped suddenly. Her eyes were dim again. Iledra waited. After a minute Hanna said clearly, “It’s all right here. I’ll come home when I can.”
Iledra said, “Are you quite sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Not, perhaps, a little—confused?”
“Confused?” Hanna said. “Why, no.” And now she only looked, in fact, tired.
Afterward Iledra called Jameson, but when she said she wanted to talk about Hanna, he would not speak with her.
* * *
She did feel odd. Fuzzy. Maybe even a little confused. She spent many hours in the pool, comforted by water. Melanie Ward talked of womb-returns and said she could not do it forever. But in the pool she could keep her eyes closed, and she did not like looking at things. Objects and bodies and faces had taken to having periods of unintelligibility, as if she had lost the patterns of what they were supposed to look like. Speech sometimes was mere noise, meaningless and almost painful. She was possessed by a lethargy of mind and body that seized her anywhere, at any time, so that she stopped what she was doing and neither moved nor thought until someone spoke to her or something else happened to rouse her. The commonplaces of technology were sporadically, unnervingly beyond her grasp; not that she did not understand principles, but that she could not remember which knob or lever or button did what, and she had to stop and think how her bath or the terminal in her room worked. She was glad her meals were brought to her so she did not have to cope with their preparation, though it meant always eating alone, when she bothered to eat.
She did not want to tell anyone about these things, but exhaustion drove her finally to tell Ward that sleep did not rest her. She woke in the mornings as tired as if she had not been to bed at all, and seemed always on the edge of remembering an evil dream. She thought it out with some difficulty, and decided the transition drugs must be responsible. But when she put the question to Ward, Ward said she was no longer being doped.
“But every day they give me—”
“Immune boosters, because your resistance is down. Nutrients, because”—a hint of reproach—”you don’t eat properly.”
“I don’t understand,” Hanna said. She made a vague pass at her hair, missing by some distance. “Can I have something, then? To help me with the dreams? To help me rest?”
“No,” Ward said, and made an explanation to which Hanna did not attend. The truth was that she was afraid of sleep. She was afraid she would die in the night. There were mornings when her first thought on waking was that she had died, and somehow revived with the dawn. She felt as well an urgent need for sleep, no matter how much she got, and the conflict between fear and desire was painful. She did not want to tell Ward about it, because she also was afraid to confess that she was afraid. The Questioner had exposed too many unsuspected weaknesses. Hanna would not herself expose more.
“Tell me,” Ward said invitingly, “about your dreams.”
“I don’t remember them,” Hanna said truthfully.
After that the I&S men who came to her every day wanted to hear about her dreams too, but she could not satisfy them.
* * *
In December the first snows came.
Hanna got worse. She felt more and more as if she lived in a box that shut her off from the rest of the world. At first she thought the difficult, complete suppression of telepathy was the source of her isolation, but it did not explain everything. Her body, once strong and athletic, was unreliable. Her muscles twitched, she walked into walls, dropped things, fell sometimes. She had headaches and her eyes felt so tired she thought something was wrong with them, but Ward said otherwise. Ward did, however, tell the Intelligence agents to stop hounding her. They stopped; less for her health’s sake, Hanna thought, than because there obviously was nothing more she could tell them.
The relief from that pressure did not halt the decline of her mind, however. She cast about in desperation for release, and a longing came upon her to go home. It seemed that if she were on D’neera she could be well; that the universe would look right, smell right, fit her comfortably. Even the passage through space drew her, even anything that was not here, where nothing but water was right.
Still they would not let her go, and they would not tell her why, and when she thought of tapping their minds to find out why, she was afraid. Because they seemed so strange to her: almost alien, in fact.
* * *
Early each morning Morisz went over the previous day’s and night’s reports on Hanna ril-Koroth. They were lavishly illustrated, because she was watched as closely as even Jameson could wish, though Morisz still thought it a waste of time and resources.
This morning, however, the report was accompanied by a nightside operative. Morisz canceled an appointment and had her brought in at once. She said, “This might not be important, but you did say to report anything unusual.”
“I meant it. Let me see it.”
He waited while she searched the night’s record for what she wanted. His office looked inland from the river, and in the weak winter sun he picked out the bulk of the Beyle Center with its fringe of parkland and snow-dusted trees. What was Hanna up to now? Whatever it was, if Wills thought it important enough to show him, it had better be passed on to Jameson.
Wills said, watching the timeline, “Most of it was ordinary. She went to bed early, got up after a while, and started studying. A text on Terrestrial evolution this time. Toward morning she went back to bed, but this time she got up again, and she didn’t seem to be in fugue. I think she’ll say she remembers this if she’s asked.”
“I think she remembers all of it,” he said.
“Well, it’s just an opinion, but I don’t think she knows how much she’s up. Otherwise why would she complain about being tired? Here it is.”
They leaned forward simultaneously. The room from which the image came had been dark, but the picture was enhanced to full visibility. Hanna’s room at the Beyle Center was, by the center’s standards, highly decorated. The patterned walls with their ornaments of crystal and metal made it almost certain Hanna would not find the near-microscopic spyeyes by accident. The furnishings were spare, but Ward had had rich fabrics brought in, and pretty objects that when activated moved or spoke or projected rippling color. The object was to provide Hanna with plenty of positive sensory stimulation; but she seemed not to notice her surroundings, and did not play with the enchanting toys.
She was in bed, just beginning to stir, in the picture Morisz saw. She sat up, pushing away the sheets with a quick motion. She wore a white gown that fell from her throat to her feet and covered her arms as well. Until recently she had slept naked, but the habit had changed overnight and, it seemed, permanently. She stayed away from mirrors, too; Ward said she had contracted a revulsion to the sight of her own body; a reaction finally, she thought, to its mutilation.
Hanna swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up straight. Her face was slack with weariness. She tilted her head as if listening for something. Her eyes moved, searching.
After a minute she got up. She moved to the middle of the room, so unsteadily Morisz thought she might fall. She looked around her and began to move again. She looked into the tiny bath cubicle, opened the door of the room and looked out into the hallway. She slid open the panel of the room’s small storage module and pawed through her sparse collection of clothing. Morisz realized to his astonishment that she was trying to find something.
He said to Wills—in a whisper, as if Hanna could hear, although what he saw had happened hours ago— “I wonder if she’s caught on to the spyeyes?”
“She’s looking in the wrong places. She’d be looking in the room itself.”
Presently Hanna gave up the search. She went back to her bed and sat down slowly, dejection in the lines of her body. Still she looked about the room. It seemed to Morisz that she almost sniffed the air. She stopped that too and was still. Her lips parted and she said in a whisper, faint and sibilant but clear: “Come out! Come out where I can see you!”
And listened painfully for a reply. And heard none. And lay down again and began to weep, her face pressed into a pillow.
Wills froze the record and said, “That’s all. She cried till she went back to sleep.”
Morisz scowled at the sad little picture. He said, “What was she looking for, anyway? If not the spyeyes?”
“She’s a telepath,” Wills said. “She says she’s not exercising the faculty, but I understand they can’t always help it. If she senses she’s being watched, she might be looking for something without knowing exactly what she’s looking for.”
“That’s right,” Morisz said, not happily. “So don’t ask her about this incident. Next time she’d be looking for spyeyes, because she’d know she’s being watched.”
He told Wills to include the scene in Jameson’s précis and got rid of her. He thought about calling Jameson, and decided against it. Starr was on his way to Heartworld, where Taylor had just succeeded—barely—in quashing a demand for hearings on Jameson’s fitness for his position. “I seem to be making a career out of smoothing feathers,” he had said to Morisz just before he left. It was something he would not have said a year before, but they were by way of becoming friends, and the strain of the last months was having an effect. The very term he had used was proof that Jameson, with his fine sense of discrimination for a phrase, was not himself; nothing native to Heartworld wore feathers.
Morisz decided this last bit of nonsense could wait until Jameson got back.
* * *
There seemed always to be someone looking over her shoulder. She heard sometimes a breath at her back, and turned to find no one. Some of her clumsiness came from starts at footsteps close behind her, but always when she looked there was nothing. They asked her occasionally what she did in the night. The question made no sense; she only slept; she sensed they did not believe her, but she never asked what they meant by the question. Because she was afraid—afraid of what she might hear, afraid she might be doing something dreadful in the dark, afraid The Questioner had kept some of her sanity and she would never get it back.
One day in desperation, thinking if she did not challenge her intellect she soon would have none left, she tried to catch up with developments in her field. The first extract the index showed her was a critique of “Sentience” that suggested all its conclusions—all her years of work—were suspect because her predictions about the uses of telepathy at first contact had been flatly wrong. It was cross-referenced to an item that informed her she had been, during the months of unconsciousness, stripped of her Goodhaven Award.
She stared at the text for some time, feeling nothing at all and wondering why there were tears in her eyes. No one had considered the matter important enough to tell her about it. She supposed it was not, then, important. The Academy’s little ornament was somewhere in the wreckage of XS-12, or lost or destroyed or, fittingly, in alien hands.
“But it was important,” she whispered despite the constriction in her throat; and she was reaching for the key that would erase the screen when Jameson’s name caught her eye. His part in getting her the prize had been suspected.
Finally alert, filled with real anxiety, she searched for more information. There was no more; there had been only that one hint of it. But there was plenty of other information on the last six months of Jameson’s life, and Hanna read into the night, fighting sleep.
Tharan had thought with some triumph of Jameson’s crisis, but he had provided no details. Now Hanna learned that at one point only a single vote in Heartworld’s general council had saved Damon Taylor from having to demand Jameson’s resignation. Taylor insisted doggedly that Jameson was the best man to have in the commissioner’s seat now, and as long as law permitted him to keep Jameson there he would do it. There had been talk of impeaching Taylor; it had come to nothing, but certainly he would be gone after general elections two years hence, along with a number of other councilmen.
The revelation that Species X had known what it was looking for did not make Jameson better liked on his own world or any other. He had always been too liberal a commissioner for many Heartworlders’ tastes, and controversial from his first day in that position. The Endeavor Project had not been popular at home; now the worst pessimists’ fears were realized, and they did not let anyone forget it. There was another side to the early-warning argument Jameson and Taylor had used. It was this: the aliens might have searched for hundreds of years without success if it had not been for the Endeavor. On other worlds, and for the same reasons, Jameson was called everything from incompetent to insane. Muammed al-Nimeury criticized him publicly, and the other commissioners tolerated this breach of official etiquette. No one—not even Andrella Murphy, who was said to be his friend and possibly his lover—defended him.
There were images from an earlier life Hanna had not wondered about before: Jameson leaving a theater with an exquisite, dark-eyed woman on his arm; Murphy whispering in his ear at a hearing on interworld law, saying something that produced the kind of radiant, open smile Hanna had seen only twice; Jameson shaking hands with some Co-op dignitary at a glittering formal gathering, poised and inscrutable. His private life was very private indeed, but some of it had surfaced recently, not through the efforts of his friends. Hanna tried to tally the rumors of dissipation with the austerity of his usual manner and with her own glimpses past his self-control, but she could not make them fit together.
The present was easier to understand. Now he was always alone, except for a bodyguard or, sometimes, a grim-looking Rodrigues at his shoulder. She guessed his world was divided into two kinds of people—those who sought to bring him down, and those who were waiting to see if the others would succeed. What she did not understand was why he tolerated it; why he did not go home to comfortable obscurity; why he endured the weariness she had seen, when all his hopes must be ended and there was nothing left but duty.
But that is precisely what it is, she thought when she lay down at last. That is what I did: endured all I could, without hope, because it was my duty. He knew it. That was why he could forgive.
The thought comforted her, and she clung to it down the sickening slide into sleep.
But the dreams were worse that night, in the morning they were closer, and soon the days were nightmares too.
snow too deep and where the whitesky seeking prey? Lost, all lost and fallen. Death and loneness, waste of white.
“Hanna,” Ward said, raising her voice.
Hanna lifted her head slowly. Ward’s face dark as deeprock was attentive.
“Hanna?”
“Sorry…” Hanna rubbed her face. Her hands had shrunk. The fine planes of her face felt deformed.
“Melanie,” she said in panic.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” She licked her lips. They felt almost like her lips.
Ward stared at her, and finally dropped her eyes to the surface of her desk. The characters and diagrams on it changed as she keyed in, one at a time, the morning’s test results. Hanna stood up and Ward said, “Where are you going?”
“Look out,” Hanna mumbled.
“What?”
“To look out. The window.”
“Oh,” Ward said, and returned to her study.
Polished metal round the window showed Hanna her face. It looked wrong. She put a hand to her throat and stared blindly at snow, waiting for the fit to pass. This morning was the worst yet; but it had been getting worse for days. She was horribly afraid. She put her forehead against the warm transparent window, trying to remember if Ward had stopped recording before the onset of this last break in reality.
She jumped as Ward said, “You’re all right. A couple of anomalies, nothing outside chance. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
Hanna did not move. She said to the window, “Melanie, when can I go home?”
“Not just yet. You’ve been a very sick girl.”
“You just said I’m all right. Why can’t I go home, Melanie?”
There was a small sigh behind her. Ward said, “Hanna, you know you can’t.”
Hanna drew a fingertip across the window’s surface. She said, “I’m a prisoner.”
“You’re not a prisoner. You go wherever you please here, you can go outside, you can go into the city if you want to.”
“And risk being recognized and—never mind. That’s not what I mean. I want to go home. To D’neera.”
Ward said more gently than before, “Not just yet.”
Hanna turned around. Surely Melanie would notice something was wrong with her face; but nobody ever did. So there was nothing wrong with it. So she was going mad.
“Melanie. I don’t need you anymore. I need a mindhealer.” It took some effort to keep her voice steady.
“Why,” said Ward, looking up at her through dark lashes, “do you say that?”
Hanna did not answer. After a minute Ward said, “We could get Tharan back.”
“No.” Hanna’s hands were quivering. She put them behind her back. “Melanie, what’s your rank?”
“My—?”
“You’re not on the staff here. Somebody told me. You’re with Fleet.”
“Yes. Well.”
She looked disconcerted, almost guilty. Hanna did not know why it was supposed to be a secret and did not care. “Can you let me go?”
Ward shook her head.
“Who, then? Morisz?”
Ward hesitated, but decided, perhaps, she would save herself trouble by answering.
“I suppose he’d have to approve. But ultimately the decision would be Commissioner Jameson’s, I think.”
“Can you arrange for me to see him? I can’t,” said Hanna, desolate, “call him myself.”
There was another hesitation. But Ward said at last, “I’ll try. He’s on Heartworld, though.”
“When he gets back. As soon as he gets back.”
“I’ll try,” Ward said.
On the way to her room Hanna had a moment of sheer terror when a spasm took her right arm and bent it at the elbow. She stumbled against the wall to stop it, to hide it. She got to the room, to the bed, and crouched on it for some time, biting at her hands.
She did not remember the beginning of her fear. Perhaps it had begun with The Questioner, who now visibly pursued her in her dreams. Sometimes in the morning she could not make herself look in a mirror, convinced she would see raw meat with bone showing through. Her body was more strange to her, not less. It made movements of its own accord, and caused her to stumble, shaking her with alarm out of all proportion to the event. She felt an urgent need to hide these incidents and did so, telling herself confusedly Melanie would never pronounce her well if she did not. There were times when she found herself in the pool when it seemed she had been in her room the moment before, or vice versa; times when she was staring at the face of someone who had not been there a second ago and who was waiting for her answer to some question. She did not tell Ward about any of these things, and she was afraid.
Fear had grown on her so gradually she was not aware of its progress, but now when she looked in mirrors she saw that her face, which had always reflected her thoughts because she had no talent for duplicity, had become a mask to hide the fear. Even that was a relief, though it was not always her own ruined face she was afraid of seeing. It was something else—someone else, she thought once—and she did not know what. But each day the fear was greater, and she moved in a haze where she examined each word and hid even her treacherous body’s rebellion from unseen watchers.
And now this: reality distorted, familiar shapes shifted, images drifting through her tangled brain that came from nowhere she knew. Had the Questioner been less guarded than she thought? Had she absorbed memory, knowledge, an alien essence, despite his powers? She had told Intelligence otherwise, and they tested her when she said it and knew it was the truth. Truth at the time; perhaps not now; but what might surface now did not matter. She could not face questioning again. If her brain still held treasures of knowledge she would tell Iledra, and Iledra would tell Morisz from the shelter of D’neera. If they suspected it now they would not let her go. And she had to go. Had to go.
At length she dragged herself off the bed and called Iledra. It took a long time for the call to go through. There was action at Morisz’s offices, no doubt: flurries, discussions, but approval in the end, because Iledra answered. The quiet, familiar room behind her pulled at Hanna’s heart.
Hanna passed a shaky hand across her mouth. “Lee,” she said, knowing others listened, “I want to come home.”
But Iledra said reluctantly that home might be no haven. Hanna made her say it plainly: many D’neerans blamed Hanna for their distress. Hanna had wondered uneasily about the possibility, but that did nothing to lessen the hurt of hearing it.
“How bad is it?” she said.
There had never been much room for evasion in their friendship. Iledra said, “H’ana, I do not know what place there is for you here.”
“Well…” Hanna stirred anxiously. “Defense needs people, doesn’t it? I’m trained.”
“H’ana-ril, I think you had better consider resigning from Defense.”
“Now? When there’s going to be a war?”
“I do not think,” the older woman said sadly, “you will be given any responsibility even if there is a war.”
Hanna thought of everything she had learned and done for Defense, the years spent learning spacecraft, weapons principles, unarmed combat, the honor after Nestor, everything, all of it: all gone.
“What about D’vornan? The university?”
“The program has been closed,” Iledra said, her face blank.
“Oh…But the House—there must be more work? And not enough people?”
Iledra looked away for a minute. Hanna said in dread, “Lee?”
When Iledra turned back there were tears in her eyes. She said, “Lord Gnerin has suggested to me that you resign from this House, and that I name Cosma my successor. There has been no formal motion…yet. If it comes to that they will all be against you.”
Hanna looked at her hand, numb. The Heir’s Ring had come to Earth with Hanna’s eyes. The frosty blue stone was not ostentatious; the Ladies of Koroth could be flamboyant enough when they chose, but they took their responsibilities seriously, and that was what the understated ring said. No one had ever given her a greater honor than Iledra had in selecting her to someday head Koroth. She did not think she would do it as well as Iledra, or Penelope before her, but she had always thought she would do her best.
She said, “What do you want me to do, Lee?”
“I will not—” Iledra stopped and drew a deep breath. “I will not attempt to dictate your course. They cannot force you to resign, or force me to repudiate you.”
“But what do you want?”
“I want, I want things to be as they were before. And they can’t be. They won’t ever be. I will not alter my choice. I will not ask you to resign. But as matters stand now you would be entirely ineffective at Koroth.”
Her face twisted, but Hanna could not spare a thought for her pain; her own was too great. She said stiffly, “I will send the ring back for Cosma.”
“No. Bring it. Come home.”
“But the House would not be home anymore.”
“It will always be your home. It will be—it will be hard. But where else are you to go?”
“Nowhere,” Hanna said. “I have nowhere to go, except to you.”
After that conversation she understood at last the full extent of her loneliness. The haze of fear deepened, and she was unhappier than she had ever been in her life. In desperation she reached out to the only person here who had seemed really friendly to her, and invited her therapist to her bed.
Larssen was pleased; he had kept intimate watch on her body for weeks, after all. He was also kind and affectionate and not unskilled, but Hanna felt nothing. She hardly knew he touched her; all sensation seemed to leave her skin, it was like the hide of some alien animal, no part of her at all. Her thoughts blanked again, and she came back to awareness huddled in a cold ball on her bed, weeping bitterly.
“No use,” she said from somewhere in space. “No use. Go away. Please.”
Larssen was unoffended. He knew the details of what had been done to her; he said it was only to be expected. He made sure she would be all right alone, accepted her apology, and left.
Hanna lay alone in the darkness with an emptiness in her and around her she had never known before. All the rich years had led to this, they were all poured out now, streaming away as such years did at the moment of death. Her work, her pride, her place in her world, even her physical being were come to nothing. She felt nothing but the pervasive fear. She had nothing left but Iledra. She was not sure that would be enough; she was not sure she could ever be filled again. But there was nothing else to try.
Starr Jameson would return to Earth in a few days. She would ask him if she could go home.