The X Factor Read online

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  The X Factor

  By

  Andre Norton

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  I

  Even nighttime on Vaanchard was disturbing. It was not a time of peace in which one could hide. There were gemlike glints in the garden path, a soft luminescence to the growing things, new scents and—

  Diskan Fentress hunched over, his chin almost touching his knees, fingertips thrust into his ears. He had closed his eyes to his surroundings, too—though there was no way to filter those scents out of the air he breathed. His mouth worked; he was afraid he was going to be thoroughly and disastrously sick, right here where his shame would be public. Not that anyone would let him see their disgust, of course. The elaborate pretense that Diskan Fentress was one of them would continue and continue and continue— He swallowed convulsively.

  The greenish moonlight had reached the edge of the path now, awaking the glints to crystalline brilliance. A new fragrance tantalized his nostrils, but not aggressively. Diskan could not imagine anything in this garden as aggressive. When created and brought to perfection by the Vaans, a pleasure place was subtle.

  Diskan fought a silent struggle against his heaving insides, against the terrible bonds this garden and the building from which he had fled, this city, this world, had laid upon him. His trouble reached back farther than just his coming here to Vaanchard—to a day when Ulken the Overseer had brought a stranger down to the pond back on Nyborg, had called Diskan out from the murky water, where he stood up to his middle, green slime smearing his bare body, and had spoken to him as if he were a—a thing—not a man with feelings and a mind, if not a body, like his fellows.

  Now Diskan's breath came in a ragged sob. His eyes might register the path and the strange growth, if he wanted to look, all the elfin glory of the night, but he saw the past now.

  His troubles had not begun by the pond either, but back down the trail of years. His mouth shaped a grimace, half a snarl of frustrated rage. Way back, that beginning—

  He could not remember any time when he had not been aware of the truth, that Diskan Fentress was a reject—a badly working piece of human machinery that could be turned only to the simplest and dirtiest of jobs. He did not know how to use the outsize share of strength in his poorly coordinated body, breaking when he wanted to mend or cherish. And his mind functioned almost as badly—slowly and stupidly.

  Why? How many times had he demanded that in the past, ever since he could think and wonder at all! But he had learned quickly not to ask it of anyone but himself—and that impersonal power that might or might not have had a hand in his misfashioning.

  Back on Nyborg he had—would they say—"adjusted"? At least being used for the brute-strength jobs left him mostly to himself during the day, and that was escape of a kind, something he did not have here.

  Then, in spite of shrinking from that memory, Diskan thought again of the scene by the pond. Ulken, filthy, coarse, but still judged infinitely higher in the community scale than Diskan, standing there, a sly grin on his face, shouting as if his victim were deaf in addition to all the rest.

  And the man with him—

  Diskan closed his eyes, licked his lips before he swallowed again, willing himself not to—no, no!

  That man, lithe, of middle height, all feline grace and ease, his fine body well displayed in the brown-green uniform of Survey, the silver comet of a First-in Scout on his breast! The stranger had looked so clean, so close to the ideal of Diskan's haunted dreams that he had simply stared at him, not answering Ulken's shouted orders—until he saw that blackness on the Scout's face, just before the Scout had turned on Ulken. The overseer had shriveled and backed off. But when the Scout had looked at Diskan once more, Ulken had grinned, maliciously, before he slouched away.

  "You are—Diskan Fentress?" Disbelief, yes, there had been disbelief in that, enough to awaken in Diskan some of the old defiance.

  He had waded out of the water, pulling up fistfuls of coarse grass to rub the slime from him.

  "I'm Fentress."

  "So am I. Renfry Fentress."

  Diskan had not really understood, not for a whole moment of suspended time. He had gone right on wiping his big clumsy body. Then he answered with the truth as he had known it.

  "But you're dead!"

  "There's sometimes a light-year stretch between presumption and actuality," the Scout had replied, but he continued to stare. And a small hurt, hidden far inside Diskan's overgrown frame of flesh and bone, grew.

  What a meeting between father and son! But how could Renfry Fentress have sired—him? Scouts, assigned for periods of time to planet duty, were encouraged to contract Service marriages. This grew from the need to breed a type of near mutant species necessary to carry on the exploration of the galaxy. Certain qualities of mind and body were inherited, and those types were encouraged to reproduce their kind. So, Renfry Fentress had taken Lilha Clyas as his wife on Nyborg, for the duration of his assignment there, a recognized and honored association, with a pension for Lilha and a promising future for any children of their union.

  In due time, Renfry Fentress had been reassigned. He then formally severed the marriage by Decree of Departure and raised ship, without knowing whether there would be a child, since his orders were a matter of emergency. Eight months later Diskan had been born, and in spite of the skill of the medics, it had been a hard birth, so hard that his mother had not survived his arrival.

  He did not remember the early days in the government creche, but the personality scanner had reported almost at once that Diskan Fentress was not Service material. Something had gone wrong in all that careful planning. He was like neither his father nor his mother, but a retrocession, too big, too clumsy, too slow of thought and speech to be considered truly one of a space-voyaging generation.

  There had been other tests, many of them. He could not recall them separately now, only that they were one long haze of frustration, mental pain, discouragement, and sometimes fear. For some years, while he had been a small child, he had been tested again and again. The authorities could not believe that he was as imperfect a specimen as the machines continued to declare.

  Then he had refused to be so tried again, running away twice from the creche school. Finally one of the authorities, after a week of breakage, sullen rages, and violence, had suggested assigning him to the labor pool. He had been thirteen then, larger than most full-grown men. They had been just a little afraid of him. Diskan had a flash of satisfaction when he remembered that. But he had known better than to try to settle problems with his fists. He had no desire to be condemned to personality erasure. He might be stupid, but he was still Diskan Fentress.

  So he had gone from one heavy work job to the next, and the years had passed—five, six? He was not quite sure. Then Renfry Fentress had come back to Nyborg, and everything had changed—for the worse, certainly for the worse!

  From the beginning. Diskan had been suspicious of this father out of space. Renfry had shown no disappointment, no outward sign, after that first moment of blank survey at their meeting, that he thought his son a failure. Yet Diskan knew that all this existed behind the other's apparent acceptance.

  Renfry's attitude became only another "why," giving Diskan almost the same torture
as the first "why" had always held. Why did Renfry Fentress take such trouble to search out a son he had never seen? When Diskan had been born and his mother had died, the Scout had been traced by the Service as was the regulation, so that he might express his wishes concerning the future of his child. And the answer had come back, "Missing, presumed dead," an epitaph for many a First-in Scout.

  But Fentress had not died in the black wastes of space, where a meteor hit had doomed his ship to drift. Instead, he had been picked up by an alien explorer, outward bound on a quest similar to his own, the hunt for planets to be occupied by a rapidly expanding race.

  And among the people of his rescuer, Renfry had found a home, a new wife. When he was again able to establish contact with his own people, he had received the now years-old report of his son's birth. Since his new marriage, happy as it was, could have no offspring, he had hunted that son, eager to bring him to Vaanchard, where Renfry had taken his optional discharge.

  Vaanchard was wonder, beauty, the paradise long dreamed of by Renfry's species. Its natives were all grace, charm, intelligence governed by imagination—a world without visible flaw, until Renfry brought his son to shatter the peace of his household, not once but many times over!

  Diskan dropped his hands from his ears, suffering the discomfort of sound. He held them up to survey the calloused palms, the roughened fingers. In spite of soothing lotions, the fingertips could still snag fine garments, window hangings, any bit of fabric he touched. They could smash, too, as they had tonight!

  There was a smear of blood across the ball of his right thumb. So he had more than memory to remind him of what had happened back there, where the bell-toned notes were rising and falling in a wistful pattern of music that was not human but that sang in the heart, was a part of the body. Light, sound, and, now that he had unplugged his ears, he could hear laughter. It was not aimed at him. They were so kind, so intuitive. They did not use laughter as a weapon; they did not use any weapons. They only overlooked, forgave, made allowances for him—eternally they did that!

  If he could only hate them as he had hated Ulken and his like! There was a fuel in hatred to feed a man's strength, but he could not hate Drustans, nor Rixa, nor Eyinada, their mother and now his father's wife. You cannot hate those who are perfect by your standards; you can only hate yourself for being what you are.

  The movement of his fingers enlarged the bead of blood on his thumb. It trickled sluggishly, and Diskan licked it away.

  "Deesskaann?"

  The lilting song of his name—Rixa! She would come and find him. There would be no mention of shards of gem blue on the white floor. No one would ever mention again a priceless wonder that had been reduced to splinters in an instant after centuries of treasuring. If they had raged, if they had once said what he knew they thought—that would make it easier. Now Rixa would want him to go back with her. No!

  Diskan stood up. The carved bench swayed. He watched with a second of detached acceptance—was that about to crash into ruins, too? Then he stepped behind the seat, moving with the exaggerated care that had been a part of him ever since he had come to Vaanchard, knowing at the same time it would be no use, that he would trample, smash, blunder, that wreckage would mark any path he would take through this dream world.

  He could not retreat to his own quarters; he had done that too many times in the past few days. They would look for him there first. Nor could he continue to hide out in the garden with Rixa on the hunt. Diskan surveyed the lighted building. Music, the coming and going of forms before all those windows, no hiding place unless—

  One darkened room on the lower floor— He made a hurried count to place those two windows. He could not be sure, but they were dark and drew him, as a hurt animal might search out a hollow log for temporary shelter.

  The tide of his misery ebbed a little as he bent his mind to the problem of reaching that promised retreat undetected. Clumps of bushes dotted the ground, and he could avoid the one glowing statue. Under the music and voices from the house, he heard the trilling call of a night flying varch. A varch! With a little luck—

  "Deesskaann?" Rixa was on the path not far from the bench.

  He made for the next bush and crouched behind it. Now he centered a fierce concentration on the varch, visualizing the wide green wings with their tipping of gem dust, which created a filmy aura when it flew, the slender neck, the top-knotted head. Varch—Diskan thought varch, tried to feel varch.

  Suddenly that call sounded to his right, beginning as a trill and ending in a squeak of terror. The green body flashed out of the shadow, winged toward the path. Diskan heard a second startled cry—from Rixa. But he was on the move, slipping from one bit of cover to the next, until he stood under the nearest of those dark windows, reaching up for the sill. No mistake now—no clumsy fall. Please, no break—just let him get into the dark and the solitude he must have!

  And for once, one of his formless prayers was answered. Diskan spilled through the window to the floor, the sweep of curtains veiling him. He sat there, panting, not with physical effort, but with the strain of steeling himself to master his body. It was several seconds before he parted the curtains to inspect the room.

  A single low light let him see that he had taken refuge where indeed they might not look for him—the room that was Renfry's. Here were kept the travel disks from his Scout trips, the trophies from his star wandering, all mounted and displayed. It was a room that Diskan had never before had the courage to enter on his own.

  On his hands and knees, he crawled from behind the curtains, to sit crouched in the middle of the open space, far from anything he could brush against or knock over. He laced his heavy arms about his upthrust knees and looked about him.

  A man's life was in this room. What land of showing would his life make if the remnants of his passing were set on shelves for viewing? Broken bits and pieces, smudged and torn fabrics—and the slow, stupid words, the wrong actions that would not be tangible but that made smudges and tears inside himself and others. Diskan's hands went up again to his head, not to muffle the sighing music, the hum of voices from beyond walls and door, but to rub back and forth across his forehead, as if to ease the dull ache that had been ever present during his waking hours on Vaanchard. But he did not seem stupid to himself, at least not until he tried to translate into action or words what he thought—as if inside him there was a bad connection so that he could never communicate clearly with his own body, let alone with those about him.

  There were things he could do! Diskan's mouth for the first time in hours relaxed from the wry twist, even shaped a shadow smile that would have surprised him had he at that moment faced a mirror. Yes, he could do some things, and not, he thought, too clumsily either. That varch now— he had thought of the varch, and then he had thought of what it must do—and it had done it just as he wished, and with more speed and skill than his own hands carried out any of his brain's commands.

  That had happened before, when he was alone. He had never dared try it before others, since he was rated as strange enough without that additional taint of wrongness. He could communicate with animals—which probably meant he was far closer to them than to his own kind, that he was a slip-back on the climbing path of evolution. But the varch had distracted Rixa for the necessary moments.

  Diskan relaxed. The room was still, the sounds of merriment more muffled here than in the garden. And this chamber was less alien in its appointments than any other in the huge palace dwelling. The rich fabrics at the window were native, but their colors were not so muted here. They were warmer. And save for one lacy spiral object on the wide desk-table, there were none of the fragile native ornaments. The rack of travel disks might have been taken out of a spacer—perhaps it had been.

  He studied that rack, his lips shaping numbers as he counted the disks, each in its own slot. More than a hundred worlds—keys to more than a hundred worlds—all visited at some time or another by Renfry Fen tress. And any one of those, fitted into
the auto-pilot of a spacer could take a man to that world—

  Blue tapes first—worlds explored by Fentress, now open for colonization—ten of those, a record of which to be proud. Yellow disks—worlds that would not support human life. Green—inhabited by native races, open for trade, closed to human settlement. Red—Diskan eyed the red. There were three of those at the bottom of the case.

  Red meant unknown—worlds on which only one landing had been made, reported, but not yet checked out fully as useful or otherwise. Empty of intelligent life, yes, possible for human life as to climate and atmosphere, but planets that posed some kind of puzzle. What could such puzzles be, Diskan speculated, for a moment pulled from his own concerns to wonder. Any one of a hundred reasons could mark a world red—to await further exploration.

  Keys to worlds—suppose one could use one? Diskan's hands dropped again to his knees, but his fingers crooked a little. That thinking, which was clear until he tried to translate it into action, picked at him.

  A blue world—another Nyborg or Vaanchard. A green—no, he had no desire to face another alien race, and his landing on such a planet would be marked at once. Yellow, that was death, escape of a sort, but he was too young and still not desperate enough to think seriously of that final door. But those three red—

  His tongue crossed his lips. For a long while he had drawn into himself, refused to initiate action that always ended in failure for him. There was a key to be used only by a very reckless man, one who had nothing to lose. Diskan Fentress could be considered as such. He could never be content on Vaanchard. All he asked or wanted was what they would not grant him—solitude and freedom from all they were and he could not be.

  But could he do it? There was the tape, and outside this house, not too far away, was the port. On that landing space were berthed small, fast spacers. For once his background would be an asset. Who would believe that the stupid off-worlder would contemplate stealing a ship when he had no pilot training, when the control quarters of a small ship would be so cramped for his hulking body? It was a stupid plan, but he was stupid.