The planes of reality were all discrete, white emptiness cut by darkness, so sharp-edged Leader thought it would all fly apart at any moment. The split was intrinsic in the universe. He knew it, all the People knew it, and bridged it all-together. Now there was nothing to contain it but himself and this alien and memory unsupported by the binding We. Though empty, she functioned, an automaton operating by animal compulsion, automatic and implacable as the universe. She did not even see that reality was unstuck.
Her thoughts cut him, and he was entirely exposed to them now and sometimes, even, thought them. Revulsion and hatred washed over him; in denial of his existence she would drown him. Scalding blasts of negation threatened him. Hating in return was salvation: so the Student-Celebrants whispered long ago: HATE AFFIRM. AFFIRM. AFFIRM.
Stronger than captive or paradigm she had also her Home at her back close at hand and around her a Render’s artifacts
they made none we stopped them in time
and now that her enemy was visible she faced him powerfully and he was alone, save for her. Save for her who
would Us
kill, I would kill
the Students were
bloody were beastly were cruel were
right. You
kill. You kill!
She made the random transit over the yacht’s repeated warnings. The arcs of thought were not all hers. She followed them one by one. Danger danger danger too dangerous a game suicidal (but if it were not sometimes necessary all ships would prohibit it utterly. The instructor shook his solemn head. They should; there is no reason for it ever to be necessary. You ought to be with me now, Umberto.)
Artifact of beasts THAT IS NOT MY THOUGHT I WILL NOT THINK IT.
The random Jump would save her from pursuit; the computer that ordered it would itself need time to determine where it was. There is Sol. Firsthome of water. NOT MY THOUGHT.
In the strange starfield she tried to think, but the alien bubble burst in her head and she swam in its shards. Heartworld II trembled around her, its planes and angles quivered with immanence, poised, changing to something else. It too would shake apart and dissolve in non-being. There was no color in the universe. It was a white fog cut by shadows from dead space, being and unbeing clearly distinguished. She fell through its cracks to the Students’ arms, experienced in pain and in murder…
clearly remembered dimly foreseen
and murder I will—!
She shook her head violently over and over until it ached. The pain made a handle and she hung on it. The disjunctions were Leader’s reality, not hers. Or his perception of hers, shaped by living millennia; their weight crushed her. She ought to have a soul and she had nothing—
“Stop it!” she cried out loud, and buried her face in her hands. The skin of her face grew hot, grew coarse, and she moaned from her own deep fear.
Home, Nearhome, warm sea of thought gently turning
gentle sea indigo amethyst white spires of Home
“Home,” she whispered, and slowly, painfully, straightened. Her thoughts cleared. She could go home. Iledra would protect her, help her dig out this monster and never, ever hurt her.
She said to Heartworld II, too quick for Leader, “Set course for D’neera.”
“Working,” it said, and all her muscles convulsed in his blast of fury.
He did not know how to speak. He was not made for it, and even using her he could not do it. Wildfire was constructed to find aural equivalents for thought and written symbol, and he was not. Nor was she exquisitely alive to currents in the atmospheric sea, so that even commanding her consciousness he was robbed of a potent sense and irreparably numbed. But he used parts of her well.
He held her paralyzed in horror and moved one hand to cancel the course she had just set. Fear and rage rained on him like blows. The hand jerked; toward her head; as if she could plunge it into her skull and tear him out in handfuls of dripping brainmatter. But he held steadfast to the hand. It was a soft and disgusting paw, nearly black against the white of this living, thinking room. Yet she was very light compared to many of the Treecubs, who ran a spectrum that confused him.
Their machines could be run without speech. He had learned how to do that in the long nights, driving her weary body so that in the end he knew more than she did, drawing fierce and invisible on her knowledge, for survival and escape depended on it. She understood the workings of this vessel only because he had showed her and forced her to see because she had not wanted to see and not wanted to know because: because of the other one. Whose eyes had picked him out.
Now the other hand, set to dancing over a keyboard whose logic was mathematical. He understood that, too.
Yes. More much more much closer his goal than he had hoped. Yes. Yes!
She said in despair, to no one but inevitably to Leader: He was right.
??
to keep me there. No choice
??
the future on his shoulders
I have too.
Heartworld II said, “The first portion of this course requires intensive calculation due exclusively to randomization. The remainder is known. The probability is ninety-five percent that no more than sixty transits will be required to reach subject terminus. The probability is 90.233 percent that the journey will require less than 144 hours.”
Hanna stared at the course display. Its rainbow colors were incomprehensible, and then coalesced into something she could understand. It was almost a course for D’neera. Almost.
Points beyond.
He hid nothing. He could not. Numbers, only numbers. But their meaning to him and to her differed so that she could not grasp fact at once and worked it out painfully.
D’neera must be the rendezvous but it could not be but it had to be. Because the crew of the First (Sentinel) (Watchman) (Watchsetter) knew it and (from Hanna’s own thought) could find their way there. Not there. Not quite there. To a star as such things went nearby. She knew D’neera’s space intimately. Training cruises.
This was a triple, one a red giant that shone rust-bright over Koroth. They called it the Dragon’s Eye.
A course once established in human space was logged centrally. The Polity ran the library and withheld some things, no doubt. D’neera participated in the give-and-take. The crisscross of safe courses in its little sphere of exploration was standard navigational programming, not much used but there it was. And there they waited, at the Dragon’s Eye.
Luck, she said to him, luck, you could not know the course would be here.
Near is near enough, he said: I am an Explorer: I would have found the way. This is a gift of time.
She said: I will not let you do this.
You will.
His confidence was too much like that of The Questioner, who had been right after all. She shrank away from it, watching him use her hands. She was not connected with them. He was busy and occupied and she might have leapt upon him but did not, seizing instead on the moment to think. He was too busy to prevent her. She looked at the alien thoughts her brain somehow thought. But that could not be. He could not be a physical entity! He could not!
Watchsetter/Sentinel/Explorer at the Dragon’s Eye. Red light—but no light penetrated. They were sealed in and would not/could not go out. She thought experimentally of old pleasures, whirling stars in free fall, the mind-wrenching glory of solitary consciousness lost in all of creation. Her body trembled. The ghost of The Questioner whispered in her brain.
Do not think of that!
Thou fearest the void?
Do not think of it!
There is much then thou fearest of space?
Much. Yet We came for thee. And dissolved thee.
She twisted away from the memory that was nearly upon her. She thought in despair: You have won from the beginning.
Since the dawn. I/We must. It is harder. You are stronger.
Stronger than?
Stronger than a furred and evil darkness. She did not understand. She did not feel strong. But it was true, because he could not deceive her.
He added: A desperate chance.
I?
You. Desperate. Theory. Process catalyst experiment who knew you would bend to Our use? You have. You are used.
A thousand memories rippled in his thought. They were his/not his; they were old. The living dead jostled her in them. What had they altered and dissolved? Before Hanna, before the colonists? Something not-People but other-than-beast.
She was close to it. He wavered and weakened alone with a Render-thing!
The memories invested her with strength beyond her own. She understood this suddenly and drew on all of it and unseated him with one great heave. Reality rocked and was hers again, her body was hers again, her mind was entirely clear. The hands Leader had used were hers, and she concentrated on remembering them earth-stained in a garden, caressing a lover, competent, dangerous: her hands, not scaled and clawed. She could speak.
“Are we still on course for D’neera?”
“No,” said Heartworld II.
“Cancel the program. Calculate a course for D’neera—no—can—”
She was not speaking aloud any longer, and her hands were gray again.
* * *
So strong, too strong!
That was both of them, possessing one another’s fear. There was a resonance effect; it grew stronger with each loop, and each time it swung round and struck them they were weaker. He had not expected this. It had not been so with the Lost Ones. Who would think that one alone—?
He scrambled for balance and pounded her with memories of subjection and the alien limbs jerked. The stars twitched through her eyes and he thought they had Jumped. No. Not yet. But she had gotten the command out before he stopped her, and the course was direct for her Home. To make it work he had to reconstruct reality, rejecting hers, but that was her strength and his weakness. She could make a universe in solitude. He could not, nor could he master fear alone: not without the architect the People together were, not without the dampers, baffles, comfort of a billion living brains.
* * *
She thought triumphantly: I can!
And concentrated on the humming metal around her, building a universe on it and on its master, reconstructing reality from memory and a seed. The weight of millennia would not shape her. She herself was enough. She thought she could see Starr Jameson here, one eye on the readouts, the other on—what? Some theory of governance, perhaps, here in space, free for a little while from the clash of cultures, translating in the ambiguous pathways of thought (and his more ambiguous than most) abstract to concrete, principle to power. The largesse of solitude—
* * *
The first Explorer to go alone into space saw craft and cosmos dissolve, and opened a hatchway and stepped into unbeing. After that no one went alone. Solitude could not be borne. They had not known it. How should they have known it, never having felt it? Yet space was necessary. They had to go, to find what inhabited the stars, for fear that Renders did, having won the conflict otherwhere. As indeed they had, it seemed, everywhere.
Now Leader impossibly lived with one. If it were really Leader he could not have endured it a single day. But he was not real. Not real, and not alone. He lived in close company with Wildfire, who was fascinated—
—and let Heartworld II slip away, forgetting to be afraid. What could he mean, real and not real? The People were just out of reach, but she saw what they made, a tangible network real as a magnetic field around their Home. A collective dream, impossible for one alone to maintain—
She understood too late that fear was as much defense as defeat. Leader was not afraid either now, and his strength was terrible. Something like the power of The Questioner seized her arm and she wiped out the program for D’neera and rose, trembling. They were not going anywhere now. The compulsion to reprogram was powerfully her own, and she resisted it. Leader was not in control, but neither was she. She stepped away from the console and her reluctant knees gave way and she fell against the equipment and then, squirming, to the floor. She did not feel her cuts re-opening, but there was blood on the polished white floor. She lay with her face against its coldness and when she tried to get up could not. This time it was not Leader’s doing, however. The weeks of exhaustion, the mad flight, the final struggle, were too much.
She begged Let me rest and images of peace descended: melodies of falling water, harmonies for the skin, she moved almost to meet it, almost felt the plangent drops.
Leader was arrested. This fragile flesh would serve neither of them much longer. Leader knew it, and did nothing to her now, and was gone: almost gone.
She rested and tried again, and this time pulled herself to her feet. She did not know how much time had passed, nor how long it had been since she ate or slept. Earth and D’neera were dim memories. The struggle within her filled time and space, and time was an all-consuming now.
She went painfully through the stalemated ship, a step at a time. The living quarters were luxurious and the food service area well equipped, but there was nothing to eat. She went on vaguely, feeling Leader at the back of her mind, waiting balefully for something but saying nothing.
Without conscious thought she found her way to the emergency stores. Nutrient tablets, which would keep her alive. Why? She swallowed two, compelled. She explored further, her knees shaking. Medical supplies. No stimulants. She would have to sleep, and was afraid to do it. That was what Leader was waiting for. Awake, she could keep some command of herself; asleep, her body would be Leader’s to use as he pleased, voice and hands and all that was necessary to take her where she did not wish to go.
Another door opened and she looked at a room which burst upon her with the immediate and present sense of a human personality. In the deepest heart of space, centered in humankind’s most sophisticated machine, he would have wood. It smiled warmly from walls and she tripped on the hand-pieced carpeting. The great bed drew her. The richly worked counterpane came from the looms of Arrenswood. It looked warm, though the colors danced before her eyes. She lifted it with a trembling hand and slid beneath it, leaving smears of blood. She apologized silently to Jameson and let her head fall with relief. Peace, stability: you could defeat him, but you could not break him.
Do not think of that! said Leader, and threatened her with a memory of The Questioner but it was weak and far away because Leader lived in this body too and its exhaustion was his too. I cannot help it, Hanna answered, human, female, and felt him drift away. She closed her eyes, comforted. Perhaps he would let her sleep for a while; this was his body too.
* * *
When Wildfire slept it was like being at Home, in some ways at least. The undercurrents of dream, the fragments of thought, were alien; but in a way it was a warm sea in which one knew one was not alone; not, in fact, one. The daemons that peopled her brain were a company, a shared reality her waking mind excised from existence, and he could almost forget it was her creation alone, and let himself almost believe it was woven of threads of We, changed but real.
The relief was so great that he wanted to dream with her, but there were other things to be done. He opened her eyes and heard her groan. He hoped she would dream of quiet things, pods and vessels, rooms and structures and houses, as she often did; but sometimes they were open to the wind, ragged, tottering, threatening to go dark and populated by monsters. And Leader was the monster.
Or was it Wildfire herself? Did she see herself as he saw her, as a Render, padding from forest to city? Although Renders were forever extinct; even if here there were worlds of them; even if—
She could smell the millefleurs, and they thought to her. Iledra did not; she only spoke. There was a split in her mind and one side spoke, but the other screamed without words. Here was Leader, an endless succession of Leaders blending into one another back, back to the beginning, outlines blurred and overlapping. She tried to fit into the spectrum and rebounded, reeling at Leader’s revulsion. For an instant she saw herself through his eyes. She knew it was herself although her fangs dripped blood and she hissed, scarlet eyes speaking murder. The skies blurred in pain. Beast almost-other she writhed under knives. Their enemy was no-thing; they gathered it in, and harvested her. YES. YES. YES. Voluptuous agony; she was ash, assimilated.
* * *
He felt the pain of exhaustion in the alien limbs, and the dizziness was physiological. He stumbled against a wall and she nearly woke, but this time it was easy to make her tormented mind stay asleep, because she did not much want to wake up or even, perhaps, live.
The thought gave him pause; he let the fragile frame sag and thought about it. She was wired for self-destruction, in the months past he had seen it running like a silver thread through her thoughts, buried deep but shining sometimes clear and purposeful. She had come to them with it, bringing it like a gift and a readiness, a thing that must ease what they did. It was there long-before in the filament of consciousness the time they almost had her. And afterward: leaping gladly for Bladetree in order to die. And before: something to do with a human war, and were they all like this?
And now it was irreversible. For The Questioner knew intimately the original purpose of the rite, and taught it to her well, though present need called forth a different end.
She dreamed of Renders, and there was no one to soothe her. He was glad enough to stay out of this dream.
He had to feel his way through the vessel, putting one foot in front of another, steadying himself with her hands on the walls. Each touch sensed through alien cells was a shock. He had to let the body rest. But first there were tasks to perform, and he found the laser where she had dropped it and ejected it into space. She would try to damage herself, to die and escape that way, and he could not let her do it.
Then he set course again, and afterward let her head rest on the main control console, wishing he were still hidden from her. Everything had been easier when she did not know he was there, lurking behind her conscious thought, her fear masking his, acting when she slept, night after night matching her knowledge to written symbol…it was so much easier to hide. So much easier. And he might have done it longer and avoided this, except that in the end he could not hide his presence from one dangerous man.
* * *
Waking was difficult. It was the most difficult thing she had ever done in her life, because she was drowning. Her lungs were full of amniotic fluid and she fought to be born.
Leader was growing stronger.
I can’t wake, I can’t, I can’t, and I will die.
A hand reached for her, a real hand, human, strong, and pulled her to the surface of consciousness. A shell cracked, and she was born. But when she looked for the hand it was gone. The controls of Heartworld II surrounded her, and no one was here except the two of her.
She tried to speak and felt Leader come alert, and ducked out of his awareness. She felt him searching for her, puzzled and alarmed.
She wondered: How did I do that?
It was midnight at the Center, and her fingers moved in the familiar sequence that would link her room to the library network. She struggled to interpret the Standard symbols she had been reading all her life. Sometimes they shivered into alien notation, and then she could understand. Her telepathic sense had never been this keen and she was on guard, and would not have heard the footstep but felt the intention. And turned off the display and slipped into bed, and someone came in.
Half her self disappeared. She almost felt a pop, and then forgot. She opened her eyes to a room no longer strange and reassured the attendant, and that was how it was done.
If he can go from hiding to control, can I?
She looked through his/her eyes and saw their course was toward a red point in nothingness where the alien ship waited, crewed by her torturers. And came out of hiding and took him by surprise, felt him unbalanced and falling, said “Cancel course!” before he could react, and felt his rage.
* * *
Her strength was terrible. He panted, or she did. They would careen back and forth forever, a pendulum till death overtook them, unless he could secure control. He needed a weapon; not one of matter, for this was his flesh too. But. But.
She moved. He went along, perforce. What weapon was safe to use? What had he used that she had not learned to take and use against him?
One thing. Only one thing.
* * *
She felt his intention and hunted for the laser. Maybe this time he could not turn her hand.
It came to her that she had done nothing with these aliens but try to die.
A forgotten reader lay in the lounge. It came to life when she picked it up. Philosophy: elegant abstractions danced before her eyes. She shook her head at them, feeling like a savage. In her universe abstraction had no meaning.
The ship is dying, she said. Most of us are gone. We can let them take us prisoner. Or fly into final chaos, and take them with us.
She could not find the laser. She supposed Leader had hidden it with her hands while she slept. There was nothing left to do but dive into a star. She should have gone for Sol at once, while Leader still was shaken. She would try it now. She turned back to the flight deck.
* * *
He was weary, weary as she. He had not believed the will to die could be so strong. The Questioner in truth bore a share of the blame. Bladetree, son of Celebrants a thousand generations old, had gotten his first name for a reason. Their voices were fainter to Leader. Bladetree lived then in the ancient rite. The aim of now was different.
But she feared The Questioner, lyrically though she had responded. The last weapon had worked well so far. He did not like using it, for the trauma made her briefly useless and was torment to him too, but it would stop her long enough.
The Questioner had conditioned her thoroughly. If he must, he would use her living memory again.
* * *
She opened her mouth to tell Heartworld II what to do and nothing happened. Leader, forewarned, prevented it.
She moved her hands with nightmare slowness, as if many gravities crushed her. But they moved toward an input terminal.
Damn you, thought Leader, and stopped, shocked. He had thought in words.
The universe narrowed to a keyboard. Her hand wavered; pain assaulted her, top of head to tip of toe. “The body,” said a voice from the past, “forgets pain.” She thought, no it doesn’t, you fool. She did not remember falling, but she looked up from the floor to the terminal she could not reach.
She made another effort and The Questioner was there, and her vision halved as one eyesocket became charred bone. Pain consumed her intention, and she screamed. She tried to move and it happened again. Tried to move and it happened again.
Leader watched in a certain suspense as the small hand crowded with too many fingers jerked and fell back. Her heartbeat shook him and then she was gone and he lay panting on the floor. When he got up the limbs moved easily, though they hurt and were very tired. She was gone.
He set course once more, one last time. She was gone and it was easier to hold up the universe, now that he was not fighting hers. A little at a time, at least; these controls were all that mattered. He could do it in this body that was used to its brain’s commands, used to living solitary. He could do it a little longer. If he were true-Leader he could not have done it at all. But he was Leader-in-her-thoughts, and drew on alien resources.
He thought: She is the best they have. And she is not good enough.
His/her body needed rest, and so did he. He gave himself a vivid suggestion and went to sleep.
* * *
The skin she thought flayed from her face was still there, and both her eyes.
Leader slept.
She said to Starr Jameson, “I am not strong enough.”
He was standing in the corridor, looking at her with friendliness.
“Suicide maneuvers,” he said. “What will you do when youth and luck and brilliance fail you?”
“Fail,” Hanna said. “Again.”
“You are on your feet and he sleeps.”
“Only,” she explained, “if I don’t change course. Or try to kill myself. Or—” She considered. “Yes. Or if I try to communicate with anyone. Then he’ll wake. And do that again.”
“Well,” Jameson said, “think of something else. Suicide maneuvers indeed! D’you think I’d be where I am today with those tactics?”
She said doubtfully, “What do you suggest?”
“Oh, something more oblique. Keep ’em guessing till the time comes, then go for the throat. That’s called diplomacy. It’s how you stay on top.”
“Ah,” Hanna said with satisfaction. “I see. But you hated doing it to me, didn’t you?”
He said, “You’re very pretty, but quite mad, you know.”
“But you are a rock,” she said, “and I have no place to stand.”
He disappeared and she cried out, “Come back!”
But the misty walls sharpened and clarified and she was indisputably alone, and not even a footfall echoed in the corridor.
* * *
Leader half-woke at the echo of her soundless plea. It broke through the shadows that hid her, and the poignance of her loneliness made him think of Sunrise. He wished her heartily not to move; their muscles longed for rest. She subsided, falling into denser shadow. The intentions to which he had sensitized himself were absent; otherwise her thoughts were hidden with the trick she had learned from him; but they were on course and alive and would continue so. He was safe. He went back to sleep.
* * *
Ignored, forgotten, Hanna went to the yacht’s galley, seeking her last hope. Heartworld II was big, far larger than a shuttle. One might sometimes use it to take colleagues in the exercise of power from place to place, and entertain them on the voyage. And feed them. And, if they were from certain cultures, give them meat. Which needed to be carved. In the ancient and most basic way: with a gleaming razor-edged knife.
She thrust the knife into her belt.
Leader would not let her die, but she was a Render. Renders killed.