Battleground (22 page)

“You don't know that; so far the evidence is indirect. I think you're trying to convince yourself—because you don't want to go through what it will take to get the answers to the questions we've been discussing—”

“God damn you,” Hanna said, and got up and walked out.

Gabriel stared after her a moment and turned to see Jameson close his eyes in—exasperation? Pain? He opened them again and Gabriel said, “Is there anything I can do? Should I go and try to bring her back?”

“No. I don't know.” He looked at Gabriel, expression unreadable. “These people are disturbing her. Has she said anything more about her attitudes toward them than you just heard?”

Gabriel thought about it. “No,” he said. “It was new to me. I'm not sure she was aware of it herself. It might have just now spilled into her conscious mind.”

“It might have,” Jameson said. “She speaks on impulse, acts on impulse, quite often. This is not the first difficult conversation she's simply walked away from. Throws things, too,” he added, almost to himself. He looked thoughtfully at Gabriel. He said, “You're an expert in the unconscious mind, are you not?”

“I wouldn't call myself that, no. I studied it, though, because I knew I would be working with children who had suffered severe trauma.”

“Have you ever seen a biography of Hanna?” Jameson said. “There are several. They range from Contact's official version—dry facts—to one or two things so lurid I don't recognize her in them. Or myself, for that matter. Are you familiar with any of them?”

“Oh, yes,” Gabriel said. “I didn't waste my time with the prurient ones, but to be frank, sir, she's almost an idol for me, so I've read everything on her that looked like it might be halfway to the truth.”

“Keep—” Jameson stopped, sighed again, and said, “Keep an eye on her, will you?”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Go back to those biographies and read between the lines. Look at the trauma points and the picture that emerges. Then add in another factor: that Hanna is not true-human. In recent years she has spent every minute of her life balanced between D'neeran and true-human modes of perception, and a substantial part of it accommodating alien modes as well. Keep that in mind.”

“I . . . see,” Gabriel said slowly, “I will do that. I think I see what you're asking of me. But I don't think the biographies will have the truth about one more factor, and that is the bond she has with you. Will you tell me?”

“Won't she?”

“She thinks she has,” Gabriel said, “and I'm taking what she said as a confidence, whether she knows her own truth or not. But now I'm asking you. What impact have you had on her life?”

“Far too much,” said the other man. “Or not nearly enough. We disagree on which it is. Good-bye.” He turned his head toward some receptor Gabriel could not see and said “Endit.” And the image was gone.

“F
IND A
MORE COMFORTABLE
place for her,” Hanna said.

Talk to the historian,
Jameson had said. She would talk to Kwek. She would find a reason to abort the mission. She did not want to go back to Battleground again and she did not want to deal with Kwoort.

There is such strangeness in an alien's mind that one first has a compulsion to withdraw, as if there is a danger of being sucked into insanity. It is only a different reality, a different sanity . . .

She had written that herself, years ago. Then, she had not been concerned with the fine distinction of determining if the alien really
was
insane. But she was quite certain the question applied to the former Holy Man, and that it would soon apply to Kwoort.

She stood with Arch outside the small conference room she had used for her earlier reports to Jameson, where Arch had been explaining human history to a confused Kwek. He said, “This is as comfortable as any place on the ship. I think she likes flowers, but where would I get flowers? And I don't—”

“Flowers?”

“She had flowers in her workspace. I noticed because everybody says Soldiers don't decorate anything, and here she had these flowers.”

“Wait a minute. Let me think. Kwoort—the first time I made contact with him he was remembering a painting on a wall. He painted it himself, I think, a memory he had from New Earth. It's the only trace of art anyone's seen. Now Kwek, and flowers—Arch, what is the significance of
that
?”

He didn't have an answer. He said, “We can ask Kwek, but I don't know if she'll know what we mean. She seems sort of—stunned, I guess, like she's going through some kind of catastrophe. She's not really thinking. She's putting all her energy into holding something back, from herself, I think.”

“When did that start?”

“The minute I said something that challenged their, you'd call it a creation myth, I suppose.”

“They have a creation myth? They have—at least they had—the science to get to New Earth and back, and they believe in
myths
?”

“She doesn't, really. I think she's been trying to hang onto what she's supposed to believe for a long time, and having a hard time doing it. Here we come along, and she's already on the edge, and suddenly I make it impossible for her to keep trying. All her doubts, all her suspicions that what she's been told all her life isn't true, and bam—suddenly she knows. That's the catastrophe. If Kwek was a human being I'd say her mind's in bad shape right now.”

“Mind as in logical thought? Or mind as in emotions?”

“They're at war. That's the problem.”

It was a simple statement but took much longer to comprehend than it should have. The time lag told her how tired she was. But Arch waited, expectant. She said, “Go back to her, Arch. I'll come in a minute.”

He went back into the room and she leaned against the corridor wall. She was cold. Hard rain had started while they were inside the gray building with Kwoort and the raving Holy Man, and they had gotten soaked on their fast passage to the pod—fast, because Hanna thought Kwoort might come after them. Her clothes and hair were still damp in spots, and now exhaustion welled up from her bones. She could not have gotten more than a couple of hours sleep between those mad visits to Kwoort; she could not remember when she had last really slept. It might be time to use a stimulant, regardless of how she felt about it.

Trance was an alternative, though it could not be prolonged indefinitely. The fatigue would not go away, but at least she would not feel it.
I will need it with Kwek anyway
, she thought, and let herself slide down the wall and settle cross-legged on the floor.

She had barely closed her eyes when she heard Gabriel say, “Hanna?”

She opened her eyes and looked up.

He said, “What are you doing?” and she felt something different in him, a new kind of concern. He had purposefully sought her out, and she wondered:
What did Starr say to him?

“I'm going into trance,” she said.

“Do you mind if I watch?”

“Believe me, there's nothing to see!”

“Well, then, I'll watch nothing. Why are you doing it?”

“Arch is in there with Kwek.” She tilted her head toward the door. “He's going to ask her questions. I'm going to watch her thoughts and help him decide what to ask.”

“Do you mind if I join you?”

“I don't know . . .” She hesitated. “If you promise not to say anything. It will be delicate, Gabriel. Arch will talk to Kwek and I'll communicate with him about what she's thinking, and maybe guide her a little, telepathically. He'll be communicating on two levels at once, out loud with Kwek and telepathically with me. It's a difficult thing to do. I don't want his concentration broken.”

“I won't disturb either one of you.”

“Oh, me . . . Very little can disturb me in trance.”

“Some things can, obviously!”

“Yes, I'll need to be careful. Still—this is not a child's mind, so nothing's likely to trigger that fear for Mickey. You knew about that, didn't you? I felt no surprise in you when I spoke of it.”

He sat down on the floor next to her. “It was in one of the reports you directed me to when I first came aboard. The other incident, the mating couple, wasn't. How did you come to hold it back? Were you ashamed of it?”

“Of course not. I just didn't want to tell Starr about it when it happened. At the time we couldn't talk without half of Contact and a dozen Commission aides hearing every word. He would have said exactly what you heard when I did tell him, and then I would have said exactly what I did say. I didn't want that to happen with true-human strangers listening.”

“Thank you—if you mean, by that, that I'm not a stranger.”

“No,” Hanna said. “You're not. Now that I think of it, you never have been.”

“That's one of the nicest things anybody's ever said about me,” he said.

Impulsively, she put her hand on his. “Let me take you with me part of the way,” she said. “So you can see what trance is like. I'll move away after the first stage, and you'll feel like you're waking up—oh, no. No,” she said, suddenly remembering the last time she had taken someone with her. She sensed an instant's physical pain; it was Gabriel's, as her nails dug into his hand. She pulled hers away.

“I can't do it,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

They both looked at his hand. She hadn't drawn blood, but the crescent indentations were deep. He rubbed at them absentmindedly and said, “Tell me.”

“No, I'm all right. I'm sorry.”

“I know you were in trance with Michael Kristofik when he died,” he said. “It's in the literature about the events on Gadrah. Is that what you were thinking of?”

“Not now, Gabriel—”

“There are some things in life that you can avoid forever,” he said, “if you want to badly enough. You can decide to withhold parts of yourself, if that's really best for you. Sometimes it's a way to conserve strength you need for other things, or a way to survive in a situation that's otherwise intolerable. And sometimes it's not the best thing for you at all. But it's far better to know when you're doing it, and why.”

“And I'm avoiding . . . ?”

“You're the only one who can know. Giving something of yourself to another, perhaps? Loving the man you have now?”

And tentatively he thought
The men you have now
, but if Hanna sensed the amendment, she ignored it.

“What I loved in Starr is going away,” she said. “It's getting buried. Everything,
everything,
is going to be filtered through the demands of being a commissioner of the Polity. I met him when he was commissioner before. I couldn't love him until it was taken away from him. Now he's got it back again and I look at all our history and—I knew the truth but I needed so badly what he gave me, protection, stability, affection, but—”

Her voice rose and rang through the corridor. “He
controls
me—!”

She heard herself with amazement. Where had this fury come from? But she could not stop the words either. “He doesn't try to control what I think or what I feel, but just because of the position he's in, he shapes how I live my life, he's shaped it for years! I tell him there's nothing for humans here, we should leave, we'll take no good away and maybe we'll take harm—but even if he believes me, he says I've got to go on, I've got no choice . . . It's been that way since the start. I don't know what to do, and I don't know what I'm going to do when I get back! I want
out
. I don't know who I'd be without him, I need to find out—and it's never going to happen, not the way things are now—”

She ran out of words; the tiredness was too heavy a weight. She ought to be in a storm of tears, but there wasn't enough energy for tears. She was a lonely spot of consciousness, huddled on a floor in this bit of manmade metal, and infinity—emptiness—outside.

Gabriel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I know you have to stay on Earth, but you don't have to live with him, do you?”

“No, but I'll have to keep working for him. Until the Polity lets me go, or,” she said bitterly, “until he dies.”

And she could feel Gabriel's puzzlement at that, but the truth about Jameson and anti-senescence was something she had forced from him long ago and against his will, and ambivalence about the way she had done it made her all the more unwilling to betray his secret.

Slowly the anger died away. She was too tired to keep it up. And Kwek was waiting.

She put her hand on Gabriel's again and said, “Relax your muscles. Clear your mind. Come with me a little way. I'll help you.”

•   •   •

Kwek's perception: Odd to see this familiar room through her alien eyes. The walls a clear light blue, unnoticed by the humans so accustomed to it, not really seen for a long time. Kwek's memory: In the last crèche where she served, she had thought of painting some walls yellow, to bring in the illusion of sunlight, but there had never been time and there had never been energy, she only mated and nursed and ate, nursed and ate. Kwek's sense of the not-Soldiers: Hideous-looking, voices harsh when they turned off the translators, the poverty of their language's range of sounds, suited perhaps to their tiny, stationary ears. And that thing, that
organ,
in the middle of their faces, she suspected it was for respiration, it was disturbing . . .

“I've told you what we believe about the origins of everything, in simple terms,” Arch said. “I'm not saying Abundant God didn't set it all in motion, but that it was a long and vastly complicated process. Well, complicated to us. Maybe not to Abundant God.”

In Kwek, assent. Encourage it.

“I have often thought—”

Afraid to say it out loud.

“Nothing you say here will be repeated to anyone on your world.”

A whisper. “I think that you are right.”

Fear, but—the relief! At being able to say it! She is—

“—trembling, you are trembling. Is it forbidden to say such a thing in Rowtt?”

“Rowtt or anywhere! It is never said . . .”

—I see an exception—

“Surely there is someplace where it can be said? The isles you call That Place, perhaps?”

That Place? What is that, Arch?

Wasn't a chance to tell you about—

“That Place is where you said you might want to go. What's the difference between That Place and Rowtt?”

“They say you can ask questions in That Place. That you can think of new explanations for what is.”

—vague, I can't see—

“What exactly is it like to live at That Place, Kwek? Can you describe how being there is different?”

“No—I don't—”

No clear image, nothing ever seen. But she thinks there may be people there like her.

“Have you ever known anyone who went to That Place?”

“No. At least, I have known some who said they would go there, and I did not see them again. So I thought that was where they had gone.”

A real landmass?

Masses, islands. We've mapped it.

Tell her that—

“Let's see.”

Arch at the wall, talking to data storage. Images coming quickly and arranging themselves: geography, topology, climate, remote ecosurvey
—

Hanna said:
I didn't know That Place was there.

I did, but this is standard survey data, no detail. We only paid attention to big complexes, like Rowtt.

—and population centers.

Tiny. Figures?

Not even an estimate. But—

“People live aboveground in That Place, Kwek. We saw that from space. Did you know?”

—afraid—

“Why does that frighten you?”

—thought paralyzed, only fear—

“Is it dangerous to be aboveground?”

—no surviving—

Kwek stood suddenly. Arch had given her water and her hand jerked and knocked over the glass, splashing the tabletop.

“I am afraid to go to That Place. But I cannot return,” she said.

“You can't go back to Rowtt?”

“I will cease to survive soon, there.”

—the meaning is not physical—

“Your spirit will cease to survive?”

But the translator had no word for
spirit
.

•   •   •

Kwe
k could not say any more. Not would not;
could
not. She sat down again but only looked from one to another of the human beings, looking at them with all her eyes, trembling with emotion again but not able to say a word. Hanna had not anticipated this dilemma. What do you do with an alien being who does not know where it wants to go?