Battleground (15 page)

N
O TIME T
O WASTE,
too many questions—they began lists of questions, changed lists to three-dimensional, dynamic models, posed questions that flowed into one another.

Why did an introduction require a statement of age? To establish relative status? Seniority? What were the implications of that “if he returns”? Was this conditional a special case, or did they never say “when he returns”?

All leading to the question at the center of the model: What true statement defined the worldview of beings who might live for a millennium, but appeared to have chosen a social contract that ensured early death? And how much choice did they have?
Was
it a choice, or was it hard-wired?

Hanna left the theorists to it; they had more time to think about it than she did. She was the focus in Communications for hours at a time. Negotiating the first study party fell to her—Prookt agreed to three observers as a team at a single location, satisfying mission protocol. She did not ask for more; she did not know what Prookt would regard as critical mass. He would not promise that other parties could follow. Even for this one there was a condition: she, personally, was required to return to the original contact site at the same time, and stay there for the duration of the observation period, so that any difficulties or questions that arose could be referred to a superior officer—that meant Hanna—on the ground.

All right, so there was some flavor of a hostage arrangement here. Interesting question, given the low value placed on life, did that concept play any part in their—

No time, fill in the blank later. Not the hard way, she hoped.

Consulting no one, she threw mission protocol overboard and agreed.

•   •   •

Jameson a
ccepted the arrangement because he had to. Getting observers onto Battleground was a major advance—especially since Soldiers' obsession with war and mastery of interstellar travel (maybe lost, maybe not) meant he was under intense pressure from the Commissioners of the Polity and from Fleet. They wanted all the information they could get (they stopped just short of calling it intelligence) as quickly as possible.

But he was furious with Hanna for making herself vulnerable. Their summary sessions—at nearly hourly intervals in this period—were formal and impersonal. They were carried out blind, too, because Jameson thought that if he had to look at Hanna's face now, he would explode.

•   •   •

She would
be in the gray room—a different concrete room—for about thirty-seven Standard hours, the length of a Battleground day. It had a table and a bench and a barely padded platform for sleeping. Behind a partition there were sanitary facilities that a human being could use without too great a sense of strangeness. The room was not a cell but a standard billet. The door was not locked and Hanna was not overtly guarded. It was assumed, however, that she would stay in the room. She saw no reason to leave it.

For entertainment, a screen set into the wall showed current broadcasting. Hanna might have been looking at the AV loop on
Endeavor
, except that some of it was real-time or only a few hours old. Old or current, it was all war, speeches, and public assemblies.

Still, she watched it closely for some time, and finally there was a brief reference to an alien (not-Soldier) visitation. There was even video of Dema and the two true-human scientists she escorted, but then the narrator said the guests were not interested in “our desperate situation,” and that was that. Apparently if the guests were not interested in the situation (whatever it was), Rowtt was not interested in the guests. The attitude was incomprehensible to Hanna. Humans greeted first contacts with a variety of reactions, but indifference was not one of them.

She couldn't find a way to mute audio, but she could deactivate the translator. The audio became background, almost white noise. Clicks and whistles, most words spoken softly: as Maya Selig had observed, it was a pleasing language to hear. True, frequent explosions modified the effect. She listened for some hours, getting up sometimes to pace, sometimes turning her attention to human thoughts, touching the human beings on
Endeavor
lightly, telepaths and true-humans alike, careful not to distract them from what they were doing.

Most often she touched Dema and her companions. The site of their observations was a vast crèche and the study had begun well; Benj Parker, one of the true-human social scientists, was beside himself with excitement. The other, Prez Mercado, was a man who lived for data. He had never collected it on nonhumans, though, and wondered now and then if he was dreaming, but he made no mistakes. Dema's customary tranquility was almost unruffled, a solid counterweight to Parker.

Presently Hanna lay down on the platform, tired, tempted to sleep. But she thought the Holy Man might be recognizable, now that she had touched him from a dream.

She let trance draw near, let it enfold her, and went in search of him.

•   •   •

The Holy M
an was coming to the end of her prayers. She felt an unaccustomed sense of distraction tonight.

The mechanical prayer counter at her belt ticked over patiently with each repetition.

“Be our strong arm against the Demon, chastise him, for he believes not in you.

“Be our strong arm against the Demon . . .”

Before prayer counters, there had been—

What had there been?

“Smite the Demon as he seeks to smite your faithful, we pray.

“Smite the Demon as he seeks to smite . . .”

There must have been something.

Beads?—she started back, she had seen beads in front of her eyes.

She opened the other pair of eyes and examined the full field of vision.

Nothing. It was nothing she remembered. She did not know where it came from.

The prayer counter was waiting.

“Guard the faithful against the Demon's treachery, as we guard our faith.

“Guard the faithful—”

Pebbles?

The Holy Man started trembling. She was seized with a desire to remember the crèche of her origin.

“Demonic trickery!” she roared—she began to run to the door to seek a Soldier, suddenly stopped.

She had been working hard. Praying intently. How this new occurrence, this not-Soldier visitation, might be used against the Demon, yes, that was it, that was what she had been praying about. Their Soldiers and Warriors were on this very world, this very night. Surely Abundant God would show her how to use them to advantage. Tonight's distraction was merely God's way of telling her she needed to rest.

And she wasn't as old as the others so she wasn't going—

•   •   •

—mad. Like the ot
hers. Like they always did.

Well, I found a Holy Man, all right,
Hanna thought.

•   •   •

After that she tr
ied to sleep but could not; she only lay on the platform and let alien thoughts wash over her, the pulse of something like drumbeats sounding even here. Nothing, after the Holy Man (but surely that had been a female?) was distinctive enough to hold her attention. Immersion in the heart of a city made no difference. Soldiers seemed almost universally phlegmatic; they did not think beyond immediate goals no matter where they were. Humans daydreamed, fantasized, replayed memories, started to do something and then changed course, were intensely responsive to each other, moved through emotional states at a dizzying rate of speed—and those were the normal ones. The great mass of Soldiers did not look to the past, and they did not look to the future beyond the next step of whatever task they had to perform.

What did the exceptions mean? Why was a Holy Man different, or a Kwoort?—whose presumed counterpart, Prookt, could almost have sunk into the background without a trace. Was Battleground home to two distinct sentient species? Were there classes dictated by genetic patterns, as on F'thal?

Eventually her speculations faded into a trancelike state that was not trance. It was not sleep, either, but it passed the time.

-

•   •   •

“Status, please.”

Jameson sounded exhausted. Others had reported to him while Hanna was on Battleground, and gauging from his voice he had been awake, personally, for every single hourly update.

“I've returned to
Endeavor
, arriving shortly after the observation team. The same team is—”

“Welcome back.” Light flickered and video came to life. Jameson's eyes were cold. He had not forgiven her.

“Thank you . . .” He looked as tired as he had sounded. She spoke carefully. “The same team is returning to the surface tomorrow, Rowtt's tomorrow. I'm not required to be there this time. Do you want a personal report from Dema now on observations to date?”

“Is there a general report?”

“One will be transmitted within the hour.”

“Then I'll read it when it gets here, unless there's something that requires immediate attention. Is there?”

No softening in the stony face.

“No,” she said.

“And your own activities?”

“Unproductive, I'm afraid. I did finally connect with a Holy Man. Or a Demon. Who knows which is which? But the Holy Man is insane, or going insane, or expects to go insane. Because all Holy Men do.”

He blinked. He seemed at a loss for words. After a pause he said, “Judged by whose standards?”

“The Holy Man's. The Holy Man is female, by the way.”

“Female. You must have learned something more. She must have done something besides think about her sanity.”

“She prayed. And went to sleep. And woke up again and prayed some more. That's not all she does—she's commander-in-chief, I think—but that's all she did while I was there.”

“In other words, you put yourself at risk with nothing to show in return.”

The deserted conference room went quiet. Then she said, “I thought we already had this argument.”

“You didn't clear this little excursion with me.”

“No. No, I didn't.”

“Not again. Never again.”

Hanna took a deep breath. He might as well have been in the room with her, she might as well have been reading his mind. He was angry with her because he was afraid for her.

She said gently, “I've been there twice and nothing has happened to me. I promise: If I feel threatened I'll tell you.”

He didn't answer, but she thought she saw a softening. She went on, “There are a hundred people longing to get down there and learn everything they can, and Prookt seems to regard me as the liaison. Before I left he said I'll meet Kwoort Commander soon. ‘If he returns,' Prookt said—but I'm convinced now that's a convention. That it means ‘if he lives to return'—”

“Did you ask if you can bring companions?”

“No—but he thought only of me.”

“Oh, hell . . .”

She waited while he thought it over. There was no rational reason for refusing, and he knew it; she saw an answer in the set of his mouth, a minute change, and knew she had won.

He rubbed his hands over his face, a rare gesture. “See Kwoort as soon as you can. But try,” he said rather hopelessly, “try not to go alone.”

“I'll try.”

“Then go to bed now, Hanna. Rest. So I can.”

S
LEEP CAME IN FRAGMENTS,
small and tormented. She was habituated to roaming through Soldiers' minds, and could not seem to stop. She did not do it consciously. She only woke—every five minutes, it seemed to her, but probably a couple of times an hour—with the weight of gray spaces on her mind, fragments of conversation, snippets of hands engaged in work; and once, like the flare of light from a faceted jewel, the being she recognized as Kwoort Commander.

I could not find the last pages I wrote, just as I could not find the pages I wrote before that when I looked for them. I have hidden them all, I think. I thought it would be systematic, that I would forget the distant past first and then the intermediate past and then the recent, but there are blanks everywhere I look and soon I will forget to look, I will forget to look for what I have forgotten. How can I serve Abundant God in the place where I must go if I cannot remember?

She was waked by a hand on her shoulder so gentle that she whispered, “Starr?”—she must tell him about the forgetting, he would be interested—before she opened her eyes to see Bella's grin.

“So you dream about the man! What'll you give me not to tell?”

D'neerans by definition were not subject to blackmail. The word had no meaning in a society where people read minds, and telepaths did not take it seriously. Except for Hanna, who knew that a discreet form of the crime was a useful part of Jameson's political strategies.

Bella got a glimpse of that, and her smile wavered.

Hanna sat up, feeling as if she had not slept at all. “What?” she said.

Bella's good humor returned, a little forced.

Message from Rowtt. The mighty Kwoort will honor you with an audience.

Hanna blinked at the flippancy. She thought there had been a time when she had a sense of humor, but she couldn't remember it. Jameson said she had never had one—

“When?” she asked.

“Evening our time. Afternoon theirs. Dema's on the surface now. I mean under it. Her team went hours ago.”

Hanna did not answer. She caught at dream-fragments. Dreams could, unnervingly, be trusted. Except when they couldn't.

But there was nowhere that last fragment could have come from, except Kwoort.

She climbed out of bed, shedding the twisted sheet.

So Kwoort Commander was afraid of forgetting his past. Was he going insane too? Were they all crazy?

•   •   •

The Soldiers and Warrior
s who cared for the crèche at Rowtt's easternmost extension did not understand some of Benj Parker's questions, and his frustration began to run high. He wondered if someone who'd been through the Contact Education program could do better. Then he started to wonder—to his credit, not all his colleagues would have wondered—if it was time to take advantage of the presence of a telepath. That was why Dema Gunnar was there, after all.

Parker was one of
Endeavor
's sociologists, a native of Co-op and at the height of his career at some one hundred twenty years of age. He differed from most true-humans in being reasonably comfortable with D'neerans. He had gotten that way doing ethnographic fieldwork sixty years ago on D'neera, not long after the Polity reestablished formal relations with the telepaths. The place had been an ethnographer's dream, as he had expected it to be. Its people, largely cut off from mainstream culture for hundreds of years, had developed all manner of charming folkways. Parker had gotten a few decent papers out of the experience. He could have gotten more if only they hadn't just shaken their heads at his ignorance and reverted to telepathy so often. You
could
footnote a thought somebody aimed at your head, but he hadn't wanted to push it too far.

He switched off his translator and said to Dema, “Are these answers making sense to you? Mentally, I mean. So to speak.”

“Do you mean are they coherent? Yes, they are.” Dema quoted Hanna, her teacher and mentor: “You have to forget about thinking like a human.”

“All right. Where am I thinking like a human here?”

Dema was no Adept, but she was good. The Warrior who was the subject of this interview was suckling an infant, and Dema could feel the female's sense of her strength pouring into the newborn.

“What is troubling you, Benj?”

“This—woman—told me that this—baby—will be on solid foods in a couple of weeks, our time. You heard that, didn't you?”

“Yes. And it's true,” Dema added, feeling Parker's disbelief. “I got an image of the infant marching not long after, too.”

“Marching?”

“Walking, then. But I didn't see much . . . transition. A few steps—then he marches—”

“There's got to be something wrong with the timing!”

“Not necessarily. Look at her, Benj.”

“All right, I'm looking.”
And it's not a pretty sight.

“How many breasts do you see?”

“Too damn many!”

“Benj . . .”

“All right. Four. There might be more under that coverall, for all I know. I can't even tell the males from the females except at times like this.”

“She's in crèche mode, so, yes, there are more.”

“Crèche mode being—”

Dema explained carefully: “She reached a point in a biological cycle where it was time for her to come here. She's here—and so are the other adults, for the same reason—specifically to reproduce and to nurture more Soldiers. They mature quickly, and my sense of the adults is that they're devoted to the process, not the young. They know others will take over the children as soon as they're walking, and they know most will be killed in battle, many as soon as they've reproduced, so there's the absolute minimum of personal attachment. A short infancy makes sense, reduces the chance of strong bonding. They wouldn't have the kind of hormones that promote parental bonding in us, either. When my son was born, they put him in my arms right away and oh! I've never felt anything like it! I—”

“No baby stories! I'm not interested! Why can't this—female—just
tell
me this, instead of going on and on about Abundant God?” said Parker.

“Translation only goes so far,” Dema said, not insulted. “I don't think it's Abundant God that's the imperative—it's the biological cycle, and that's just their way of explaining it. That's how all the religions start out, that need for an explanation. It's something I can sense that you can't. You'd work it out for yourself eventually, but I know
now.
”

The Warrior stood up and went out. She returned with a second infant; Parker knew it was a different one because its hair—if that was hair—was reddish, and it was smaller. She opened another compartment in her garment and the baby, if that was a baby, began to feed. Parker felt sick.

“All right,” he said. “The translator's just not working here, not well enough. Can you just
think
to her? And to me?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dema.
What else has H'ana been trying to tell you all these years?
she thought wearily, but she did not project it to him.

“But I will have to tell her what I'm doing,” Dema said. “I don't want to walk around in someone's mind—not even an alien someone's—without telling her how deeply her privacy, her self, is going to be invaded.”

“I thought that's what Hanna's been doing all along?”

Dema suspected Hanna paid only lip service to the scruples D'neerans were supposed to have, but it might not be good to tell Parker that. She said more or less truthfully, “That was just for background. Anyway,”—Dema was on surer ground now—“she's the only one of us good enough to do that consistently without the subject knowing, and even she slips up sometimes. So I need to tell this woman what I'm going to do.”

“Then tell her!”

“You, too, Benj. I'll need to open up all the way. If your mind wanders I'll know where it's wandering. Forget about having secrets.”

Parker stared at her, and felt himself shrink. Dema Gunnar, when he forgot she was a telepath, was a beautiful woman. Tall, buxom, stately—just like his spouses. When she smiled she appeared to glow. A possible wife number four—well, no. A telepath, after all. Maybe an interesting interlude, though.

“And I know exactly what you're thinking right now,” Dema added. “I wouldn't have to be a telepath to know that. So forget about being embarrassed.”

Parker wished he could hide behind the redness of his face. But D'neerans were pretty tolerant of lustful thoughts. He knew that from personal experience. He remembered certain other personal experiences from his days in the field—one field in particular, a riot of flowers—one telepath in particular, he had never forgotten her face—or the rest of her either—

He felt his face get even redder. Dema had started smiling at him; now she laughed out loud.

“All right, all right,” Parker said. “Tell her, and let's get started.”

•   •   •

It was b
etter than the first landing site, that field riven by explosives. At that, it was not much: only a roughly flat space on an island in a river that snaked over and around the underground city, the only structure a low block of a building made of crumbling and neglected concrete. Trees grew spottily around it, not much taller than the building. They might have been ragged pillars, except that yellow spikes of leaves thrust into the air from their tops; when she went close to one Hanna saw that its bark had a wounded look, as if enemies had slashed at it randomly with machetes. The shallow river was flat as a gray sheet in the clouded, windless day. The air was thick and hot; an oncoming storm was less than an hour away.

“You're sure this is the place?” Hanna said to the communicator on her wrist.

“This is it,” said Kaida Aneer.

No boat or aircraft was in evidence except Hanna's pod, though Communications swore they had defined Soldiers' time measures accurately. Perhaps they were wrong, or perhaps Kwoort Commander was just late—accidentally, or on purpose as a sign of authority—or maybe he had forgotten—

Or, or, or,
said Bella, oddly nervous, as if she were the one on the ground.
You're supposed to know what you're doing, you know—

A door opened in the front of the shabby building, and Kwoort came out. He flowed down the narrow steps in front and stopped. Superior officer's prerogative: Hanna would have to go to him.

She walked toward him, smelling dust, though the ground cover that caught at her sandaled feet was damp.

“I am Kwoort Commander,” he said. “I have seven hundred and twelve summers. I greet you in the name of Abundant God.”

Hanna, at Metra's insistence, had memorized a greeting of her own.

“Thank you,” she said, knowing Kwoort heard it as
I note your intention.
“I greet you in the name of my fellow human beings
(not-Soldiers)
. Our desire is to maintain peace
(stalemate)
with Soldiers and to exchange knowledge. We are glad
(it is pleasant)
that Prookt Commander has permitted not-Soldiers to observe a crèche. We would like
(it would be pleasant)
to visit other sites. We are prepared to exchange many kinds of knowledge.”

There were no beeps or buzzes from the translator. Communications had done its usual superb job.

Kwoort said, “I note your intention. I have some knowledge of not-Soldiers, because I once observed your world. It was interesting.”

“That's what brought us here,” Hanna said, “the knowledge that you visited a world where not-Soldiers live, though it is not the only one. There are many, and I will tell you of the others if that is what you desire. You prepared for the possibility that we would come, did you not? Is that the reason for the surveillance devices in your solar system?”

Until now only the lower pair of Kwoort's eyes had been open—not exactly without pupils, as Maya Selig had reported, though the darker segments, arranged in a regular pattern in each eye, certainly did not work the way human eyes did. Now he opened the others. It was the first time Hanna had seen the phenomenon, and suddenly she understood the nature of those eyes' field of vision, which had puzzled her when the Holy Man opened hers. They appeared different from the others only in having more of the darker dots, but they saw, literally, memories.

“I had . . . I had the satellites set in place . . .” he said uncertainly, and stopped for a moment. Then he went on firmly, “They are there to give warning if our enemy again achieves the ability to attack from space.”

The upper eyes closed. He had not exactly lied. He had tried to remember the time of the satellites' building and launching and found nothing. The memory was gone; he had seized on the most likely explanation, and he would now be sure that it was true.

The hot air stirred. The storm might have speeded up. Hanna had dressed for the heat in a skimpy top and long gauzy skirt, and the skirt fluttered wildly in a sudden gust. The ring she had taken back, as if it had decided to be a weather-teller, emitted one of its unpredictable flashes of blue. Kwoort noticed. He said warily, “What is the purpose of that device?”

“It is decorative—”
Chirp
, said the translator. “It is pleasant to look at,” Hanna hazarded. “That is its only function.”

“What does the light mean?”

“I don't know. The stone came from a place where one great intelligence lives, and they think it is alive in some way. It flashes for reasons they do not understand and we do not understand.”

“I do not know what you mean by ‘one great intelligence.' And you say ‘they.'”

“Both descriptors are true. It would take a long time to tell you about it. I spent the years of two summers studying this intelligence, and there is still much to learn. There are other not-Soldier beings on other worlds who are not like you and not like us.” She paused, thinking he would pounce on that. It ought to have been the most interesting statement Kwoort had heard in his life.