Battleground (29 page)

“Of course I'm involved.” He moved; he had been absolutely still, a sign that all his strength was needed to contain something going on inside. His voice was rough when he said, “The Commission has always been closely involved in matters of contact.” A scarcely perceptible pause. He went on, evenly now: “It's too important not to be. They—we—have to know what's going on always, day to day. You can trust Adair for the most part; he only needs experience. But be cautious about what Metra tells you, Hanna. Apparently she's even more closely tied to Vickery's faction than I thought.”

“Tell me—” She heard her own voice waver and tried again. “Tell me if this is true: you want three of us to go to That Place? Gabriel and Kwek and me?”

“That much is true. No boats, though. You'll simply fly there and land.”

“They'll be expecting the landing, then?”

“No, I don't think they will.” He said curiously, “Didn't Metra tell you anything about conditions at That Place? That's why I called. To see what you know.”

Hanna eyed him warily and said, “I don't know anything. What's different about conditions there?”

“There is—” He stopped and then said with cold anger, “That woman should be relieved of command.”

“Fine with me,” Hanna said, “but I wouldn't have gone without information. Not even on Adair's orders.”

“You might have if you thought they were mine.”

“Maybe. Only maybe. What's wrong with That Place? I mean, that isn't wrong everywhere here?”

He lifted a hand and began to tick off points on his fingers. Hanna watched his face, wanting to touch it just once more
.
She had always loved the stark planes—

No.
There was a way to leave an affair behind, or at least start to do it.
A formal Parting. That's D'neeran . . .

“Hanna? Are you listening?”

“Repeat it. Please,” she added, a little late. She heard with satisfaction that her voice was steady. She wasn't sure what her face was doing.

He started over. “The population is not as technologically advanced as Rowtt's.
Endeavor
has picked up radio transmissions, though, and there's electricity, provided by a nuclear reactor on one of the uninhabited islands—a strange combination, considering that observation indicates subsistence agriculture carried on with manual tools. There are only a dozen settlements, the largest with an estimated population of no more than four thousand. No inhabitant was seen who was not a mature adult, and there is no sign of underground structures that might serve as crèches. The extent of isolation from mainstream culture is undetermined. It does not seem to be complete; there appears to be a landing field for small aircraft, well maintained. We haven't seen any flights arrive or depart—though there was a flight today from Rowtt to Wektt and immediately back again, a surprise, reason unknown. Kwoort might be willing to tell you more, if he knows more.”

“I'm not going to meet with Kwoort again! Do these people have weapons?”

“None have been seen, but we have to assume they're there.”

“I can understand taking Kwek, but why Gabriel?”

“He's the only person besides yourself who's had direct contact with a Holy Man. There might be one at That Place.”

“Kwek doesn't think so.”

“She's guessing. It's clear she knows very little. And remote sensors recorded some kind of ritual that might be a religious rite. It occurred more than a week ago, and wasn't noticed until Captain Metra ordered observations reviewed in preparation for this mission. It doesn't fit with anything else we've seen or heard about on Battleground.”

“What is it?”

“It might be burnt offerings,” he said, and all Hanna could say was,
“What?”

•   •   •

Joseph invited Gabriel to a Parting Observance. Benj Parker was coming too, he said, and Glory and Carl, and it would be in Cinnamon Padrick's quarters; Gabriel wouldn't be the only true-human guest. There ought to be candles and wine and some other things, he said vaguely, but none of it was available, so they would just have to make do. He thought Gabriel would find it
very interesting.
The emphasis was almost alarming, and Joseph refused to elaborate. “You'll see,” he said.

Gabriel was not so egotistical as to think God spoke to him directly, but he suspected that isolating himself from his fellow humans for too long was not in the Divine plan for one of his temperament, so he accepted the invitation. He could keep his distance from Hanna in a group.

He had heard of the arrangements in Padrick's quarters but had not been there, and he felt a rush of pleasure at the shadowy forest that stretched away on three sides. All the furnishings had been taken out or shoved against the visible wall, and everyone sat on the floor in a circle.

“There is supposed to be
dirt
under us,” Joseph complained, and someone said, “Really, Joseph, you are such a purist,” and the D'neerans laughed, but quietly; there was the sense of a solemn occasion.

Gradually they fell silent, and finally everyone was looking at Hanna, who had said nothing. She sat cross-legged directly across from Gabriel, and she had not greeted him, only glanced at him in surprise.

She looked around the circle and took a deep breath. She said into the silence: “Love never really ends. But we part from what was, and go on to what will be. I have reached a parting from one whose life I have shared. I do not do this easily or lightly. And I do not wish to part from him with enmity, but with gratitude for what I have had. Today I sever a bond, and I honor its ending with celebration, relinquishment, release . . . and hope.”

Her voice was quiet and a little unsteady. An image came to Gabriel—from Hanna's mind and those of the other telepaths, perhaps all the true-humans saw it—of the candles they had not been able to obtain. The flames were golden and unwavering.

“These are the things I celebrate,” Hanna said. “Sanctuary, when pain was near extinguishing my spirit. Sensual passion more intense than any other I have known. The joy of knowing a mind fascinating in its depth and complexity. A home of grace and beauty. They have nourished me. And now I relinquish them.”

The flames flickered and died. They went gradually, diminishing to sparks that lingered, reluctant to go out. Gabriel felt a breath of grief—Hanna's—and felt her holding onto the sparks. She could not seem to let them go.

“These I relinquish, too: Habits of mind foreign to me: obsession with power and hidden motive. Reliance on material wealth. Suppression of the deepest part of who I am—a telepath. Fear that in being what I am, I damage the well-being of one I loved. From these, I am released.”

More intangible candles went out, all at once, and these completely, as if the flames were glad to go.

“These are my hopes: A free life for my child, without the oppressive need for guards, lest his welfare be used as a threat. A home that is ours alone, reflecting our deepest selves. The self-sufficiency I sacrificed in times of trouble now past.” There were tears on her cheeks.

Three new candles came to life, flames swelling slowly until they dazzled.

Hanna said: “It is finished.”

And she might have thought she meant it, but Gabriel noticed that sparks still lingered in the depths of some candles that were supposed to have gone out.

•   •   •

Han
na said to Metra, “Is there some reason you're delaying this little excursion?”

“It takes time to gather intelligence,” Metra told her.

“Intelligence you were not sharing with me in any case.”

“You have it now.”

“All of a sudden, yes. You could hardly keep a commissioner of the Polity from talking to me—well, I suppose he's a commissioner now, it was only hours away. But I tried to get information from Communications and at first they wouldn't give me any. And then, zap, they flooded me with it. Did Starr, or maybe Adair or Zanté, contact you directly in the meantime?”

Metra's mouth twitched, but she said nothing.

“Never mind. It's nearly morning at That Place. Is there anything else you've somehow forgotten to tell me? No? Then we're going. Now.”

G
ABRI
EL,
a polite man in spite of (or perhaps because of) his longtime exposure to young boys, a naturally rude population, offered to stand during the flight to That Place, but Kwek declined the offer and did not even, really, appear to understand it.

“I am accustomed to standing during troop movements,” she assured him, so he took the passenger seat in the pod. Sitting down beside Hanna as if nothing had happened felt odd, after the ritual he had seen a few hours ago. He thought of saying,
Are you all right?
but obviously she was, hands and eyes steady, although a shell of silence seemed to surround her.
That's an interesting folk custom you people have
—no.

He might as well have been shouting. Hanna said mildly, “You're giving me a headache.”

It got her moving, anyway; she spoke to the pod and touched keypads, and the pod left
Endeavor
and moved into space. There was no homing beacon this time, and no airspace that could be counted safe, nor time to tease the puzzled Gabriel. She stayed in solid contact with
Endeavor
, letting its navigators, trained for this as well as for deep space, guide the pod by remote to a point directly “above” the largest settlement at That Place. The fall that followed was strictly controlled by antigravity, speed at the maximum the pod could take without the risk of burning up.

Down through blue-glowing high-atmosphere cloud, through separate layers of winds. Even That Place would be cloudy today, they had told her.
We're not staying for the storms, though,
she thought.

And she also thought:
I should not have been so quick to come
. She had only wanted to get it over, get it done, all of it; get back to her son, who pressed on her mind more and more insistently as the time apart from him went on. Jameson's home—that “home of grace and beauty”—would not be Mickey's any more and she did not know where they could go. She felt a wrench of guilt.

Cinnamon said girl you do not know which side of your bread the butter is on

Gabriel.

Glory said that stuff you're giving up can I have it

“Gabriel.”

“What?”

“It wouldn't surprise me if we had a common ancestor not too far back—the one that got drafted into the New-Human Project.”

She shut him out while he was trying to make sense of that.

“Kwek,” she said.

“Yes, Commander?”

Where in hell had that “Commander” come from?

“Kwek, I want you to go out first. It's possible these people haven't even heard about us. I want you to explain to them. All right?”

“Yes,” said Kwek. It was apparent to Hanna that Kwek was not used to being asked if orders were all right with her.

Through the last and lowest of the clouds, on manual control: Hanna brought the pod to a stop, hovering. She had finally gotten to see enough data to know what she would find. The landing field was grassy and unmarked by the attacks that scarred Rowtt's. This settlement, the largest population center of That Place, was near the seacoast, though tiny villages were scattered across several islands, and ocean took up the field of vision east to the horizon. The community spread out from the airfield's edge, fewer than thirty structures housing four thousand people; they were of necessity large enough to make up in volume what they lacked in numbers, though smaller outbuildings made a ragged border.

Looking at images on
Endeavor,
feeling the same distaste the first look at Rowtt had given her, she had tried to keep a negative response in check, thinking it a product of her experiences in Rowtt and with Kwoort. This was not the war-pounded land over Rowtt; there was forest Metra had described as jungle pushing inland. There should be no equivalent of Kwoort here; Kwek thought there was no Holy Man. All to the good, since by this time Hanna, with limited choices, would settle for being anyplace where a Kwoort and a spooky Holy Man were not.

She went lower, studied the roofs of the buildings. They told her nothing. She had seen the buildings from all sides, in any case, as images from scanners sent to the surface in preceding days, so minuscule no Soldier's eye had found them. The few aboveground structures at Rowtt had been flimsy, not expected to last long, and had punctuated the violated landscape with grooved, tilted roofs that showed little overhang; they would speed runoff from heavy rains but keep wind from getting a hand under an edge and tearing the whole thing off (until some attack blew them to bits). The structures here were built on a different model, and presented a range of jutting ridges. A memory brushed her mind: the House of Koroth on D'neera, a small town in itself, which had grown by accretion over centuries, where Hanna had lived for several years. But that House, typically for D'neera, sang ornament even to the sky, with towers and cupolas and graceful gables carried to the point of architectural overkill. These roofs were plain.

One of the structures butted close on the landing field. Several figures came out of the nearest door, looking up, and Hanna reached out and felt the unmistakable signature of the minds of beings of Battleground. Her own surprised instant of relief told her she had harbored a little fear that she would not be able to do this, though the paralysis of telepathy with human beings was gone as if it had never been there.

There was surprise on the ground, too. Not at the presence of something in the sky, but at its silence and its stillness in midair, and at the way it looked: white, not the gray they were used to seeing; and the huge blue-black numbers and letters embedded in its skin were in a script they had never seen at all.

Hanna finished a slow landing. “Here goes,” she said, and Kwek went out.

Hanna folded her arms and put her head back. She was not good at waiting.
A morning here at most
, she thought.
I hope it is more interesting than Rowtt.

Gabriel said, “I hope it's less revolting than Rowtt.”

“Gabriel . . .” She turned her head, almost laughing. “I think you have more natural psi ability than any true-human I've ever met. Are you sure your mother didn't spend any time on D'neera? Say, nine months before you were born?”

“Nobody ever told me that before!”

“Well, you never met any telepaths before, did you? So who would notice? But you've been told—don't tell me I'm wrong!—that you have a lot of empathy? For the children you work with, maybe?”

“That, yes.”

“Well, there you are . . .”

“My relatives never said a word about D'neera. Aren't there too many genes involved for that to happen anyway?”

“I was teasing,” she said gently.

She watched a monitor, almost idly. Nothing unexpected; three Soldiers (if that was what they called themselves here) were talking with Kwek. Kwek wore a communicator programmed for translation. It was transmitting, and the conversation was a low murmur inside the pod. Hanna had slowly come to see Soldiers as individuals, getting beyond the strangeness to register identifiable faces, bodily variations, distinct stances, characteristic gestures. Two of the Soldiers with Kwek were male; females moved differently.
I wonder how they feel when they're pregnant
, she thought. Remembered lying on her side and trying to sleep—not that that was comfortable, but at least it was bearable, which lying on her back was not, and lying on her stomach was not even to be thought of—

(“—look on the bright side.”

“What
bright side?”

“Your skin is lovely, and now there is so much more of it.”

“I hate you—”)

Hanna smiled. He had kissed her shoulders in spite of the way she looked, stroked her gently and then not so gently, discomfort faded into the improbable erotic—

She shook her head
(let it go)
and amplified the volume on the dialogue outside.

I did not believe it at first either, but that is what they are.

Well, very well. What are we supposed to do with them?

Nothing. Let them walk around. Let them ask questions. It is all right to answer the questions.

Are they fighters?

No.

I don't understand. Are you their appointed guide?

No, well, I am guiding them, that's true. But I want to stay here.

Don't make up your mind in a hurry. Because if you decide to stay there's no going back. Do your Commanders know your plans?

No, they think I'm still on the not-Soldiers' spacecraft.

Their what?

Another one:
Do your Commanders know the not-Soldiers are here?

Not
here
, not in This Place. They have been to Rowtt. Lots of them have been to Rowtt.

So they are fighting for Rowtt?

No! They are not fighting for anybody.

What are they doing, then?

Walking around. Asking questions.

Will they take the answers back to Rowtt?

Hanna sat up, alerted. She stopped listening to words and listened more deeply, sorting out individuals by the texture of their thought. The one who had asked that last question had something to hide; no, they all had something to hide, this female was only the first to think it explicitly, and her question had alerted the others.

“There's something wrong here,” she said softly.

“What?” said Gabriel.

“They have secrets they mean to keep.
Damn
it.”

“What's wrong? We don't have to ask them about their secrets. In fact, you can tell if we're getting close to them and change the line of questioning, can't you?”

“I guess I'll have to. We don't dare get into a dangerous situation. I tried to requisition a sidearm and the captain denied it . . .”

She had missed a few exchanges while they spoke.

You can stay for a day or two. Or for the rest of your life.

Something else there. Something behind the thought that was not being spoken.

If for a short time, you cannot come back again.

I know I do not want to go back to Rowtt. I am certain of that.

Remember this: we have to agree to accept you, too.

Why would you not accept me?

Do you dream?

Yes.

You will have to tell us about your dreams.

Is that what determines whether you will accept me or not?

Not altogether. It's in your favor that you dream. How does your mating time cycle? When does your time come again?

Kwek hesitated. Hanna could tell the question was significant. Kwek could, too.

Not for a long time. Not until next summer, maybe longer.

Hanna raised an eyebrow. Kwek had lied. She would need to mate very soon.

“Have they forgotten about us?” Gabriel said.

“They're a lot more interested in Kwek, obviously.”

They watched, absorbed. For a time the conversation seemed to go round in a circle; Kwek and the others continued to talk, but there was nothing new. Hanna murmured, “This isn't the welcome Kwek expected.”

“Me either, if they'd never heard of us. Seems if an alien landed in your backyard you'd be a little excited about it.”

“You would think. But you saw the reports about the early contacts with Prookt. He wasn't very excited, either . . . Let's go out before they forget about us altogether.”

And this was better, she thought, better than Rowtt at once, because the cloud cover was not solid and they stepped into slanting sunlight. Hanna sighed, feeling lighter, and looked first at the sky. It was still early in the long day and the sun was near the horizon, casting long shadows; in another patch of sky hung Battleground's largest moon, almost full, and appearing, at the moment, pink.

They walked up to the group of aliens, and Hanna froze.

I was wrong, they are different, I touched no minds quite like these from space, nor since. Do the talking, Gabriel.

“Lady, who is the First Contact expert here?” he said, and the translator broadcast it, and the aliens looked at him quizzically.
Lady
had not translated.

So few people have done this that you qualify as an expert. I want to look. With eyes and everything.

“Hello,” said Gabriel pleasantly, as if greeting colleagues. “I am Gabriel Guyup, I have thirty-five summers.”

Hanna gave him a surprised look. She had thought him younger. He was her age in Standard years, but as for experience—

“Let me see if I have your names right. Nookt—no, Nakeekt? Pritk. And Genkt?”

They did not use the greeting convention, no statement of age. And they did not like his using it.

“Have you lived here long?” said Gabriel sociably, and the innocence of it made something happen in Hanna's chest. Gabriel, she thought, these are not your friendly neighbors on Alta, these are not even human beings—

She studied them as closely as she and Gabriel were being studied, seeing what Maya Selig had wondered about,
what's under these creatures' boots and baggy coveralls.
She had seen the images the physiology team brought back, and was not surprised by the ropes of muscle, the extra joints in the arms and legs. This group did not wear the universal gray coveralls—only pieces of them in muddy, motley colors, exposing sinuous arms to the air in this subtropical climate, and sandals instead of boots on long-toed feet. The edges of the garments were finished, and skillfully, but not by machine, and they were patched where the original uniforms would have had insignia of rank. And the patches, in two cases, bore designs that had nothing to do with rank, one a complex geometric that resembled a mandala, the other, equally complex, the unmistakable face of a flower, built up in relief with colored threads.