Battleground (23 page)

No longer in trance but acutely aware of Kwek's distress, she conferred with Arch in the corridor again.

“We can't keep her here long,” she said. “We'll have to come up with some explanation to give Kwoort pretty soon as it is. He only let her come because his Holy Man wanted to smooth things over.”

“She wasn't locked up with me. Do you think he gave her some instructions while we were separated? About something to do here? Or learn?”

“Absolutely not,” Hanna said with certainty. “If she had intentions she was trying to conceal, I would have seen it.”

“Do you think Kwoort knows how close to the edge she is?”

“I have no way of knowing—unless I ask him. Unless I ask him, dammit.”

“Find out if anything bad's going to happen to her if we take her back.”

“Find out from Kwoort, you mean—”

There seemed to be a conspiracy to get her to talk to Kwoort some more.

“I don't like Kwoort,” she said.

Arch frowned at her. “Didn't you always tell us to be careful about objectivity? Not to let human prejudices get in the way of observation?”

“Do you like these people?”

“I like Kwek, I think, sort of.”

“And I don't like Kwoort. There were some individual Zeigans I liked and some I didn't, insofar as they're individuals. I don't especially like most F'thalians I've met but a few I do. I can't think of any Uskosians I dislike, but some I like more than others. And,” she repeated, “I don't like Kwoort.”

“You want to demand a more compatible contact, or what?”

“If I did I might get one, but the new one wouldn't be as valuable. It might even be Prookt. I'm going to have to talk to Kwoort again,” she said crossly. “Did anybody find out what might have set him off? He's got to have found out about something besides telepathy, but what? How we breed, how we reproduce, or don't? He was questioning me about that. But why would that infuriate him so?”

“Bella's got the rest of the team working on it. They'd rather be on the surface, though, and so would I.”

“Nobody's going to the surface until Metra's satisfied they're not at risk. And I don't want any more humans where Kwoort can get at them anyway. In case he wants to know who the telepaths are, and one of the true-humans lets something slip.”

“So what makes you exempt?”

“I think you would call the reasons corrupt,” she said, thinking of Heartworld's council and all the eyes on Jameson, thinking of her desire for freedom and what she would do to get it. “It won't surprise you that I think Starr will approve of them.”

“It's a disappointment to stay on board, after all the training, all the work while we were getting here—”

“I didn't say it would be permanent . . . We'll see.”

Bella
, she thought, and quested for Bella without turning to ship's communications. It felt natural, and she wondered fleetingly if returning to a life on Earth would mean wrenching disorientation as she limited herself once more to speech—

I hate it when I'm there
, said Bella—

Finding anything—?

Don't think so. But come and see . . .
Cheerful. They'd been making a game of it.

That. Critically important. But so was the question of what to do with Kwek right now, for the next hours.

Hanna slipped back into the conference room. They had not turned off the translators yet, and Gabriel was talking comfortably to Kwek; she seemed less afraid.

—you have been talking about—?

This time he hardly blinked. “Nothing very interesting. My school.”

“I suspect it is pretty interesting. Tell me about it someday, too . . . Kwek, are you weary? Would you like to rest?”

“Yes. Can I?”

“My sleeping platform is yours.” An Uskosian concept of hospitality, extended by a human being to a Soldier.

“My cabin,” she said to Gabriel. “Stay with her, if you will.”
Don't let her roam,
the captain wouldn't like it,
she meant, and told him that too.

“What are you going to do?”

“Talk to my team. But first,” she said, resigned to the inevitable, “I'm going to get a stimulant. I've got to. I don't know when I'll get a chance to sleep again.”

I
T
THRUMMED
,
taking effect, only for
a moment. On
ly half a dose, but her mind speeded up, her senses cleared, her muscles were free—or felt free—of the toxins of fatigue. But she knew at once that trance would not be an option; it felt as if a film had slammed into place between conscious thought and that place of the unconscious that was the wellspring for trance. She had a moment of alarm. But what did she need trance for, right now?

She felt good, otherwise. Better than just good. She had been so tired, for so long, that she had forgotten what well-being was like. It felt wonderful.

The team had commandeered the auditorium again, and Hanna saw why as soon as she walked in. The walls were covered with images of written reports spiced with pictures, and the images shifted position, rotated, changed size, occasionally pulsated; a few drifted around the room, including one, upside down, that appeared to be Kwoort. There was an enveloping sensation, as she came in, of delight—the pulsating, especially of pictures, had been set going just for the pure visual hell of it—and she thought of one of the criticisms sometimes leveled at D'neerans as a people:
They are childlike.
Well, nobody had said that about
her
recently.

And she felt, as the telepaths turned to look at her, exactly as if she had incurred the disapproval of moralistic children; they had sensed the subtle effect of the drug immediately.

I only took half of it!
she said defensively.

Simultaneously, they gave the emotional equivalent of a shrug. If D'neerans were inclined to have strong opinions about what other D'neerans did to themselves, they were also, generally, of the opinion that nobody escaped being an idiot some of the time; in Hanna's case, these D'neerans thought, that might be much of the time.

Dema said, “You might as well start with me.” She had a printout in her hands. She knew that Hanna was fond of printed media, believing, on an illogical but fundamental level, that it conveyed more stable information than quantum images did. “We were in Rowtt longest, but we'd barely gotten to the—whatever it is—we called it a school, but . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, all we'd done when the evacuation order came was talk to one of the officers in charge, and nothing that was said seemed to upset him. Then we went into another room to talk about what to do first. Nobody around us was agitated or disturbed—well, when are they ever?”

“Try spending some time with Kwoort . . .” Hanna looked around at the mad scene. She could feel her team's weariness; except for Carl and Glory, they were perpetually short of sleep. But it was oddly distant, as if strained through a filter. She felt another quiver of uneasiness about the stimulant she had inhaled.

“Tell me about the crèches you went to,” she said. “That was the longest and most intensive contact any of us have had with them. Kwoort said to me,
How do you choose not to breed?
Did you say anything that might have made him ask that?”

“Well . . . I suppose so. Yes.” Dema put the papers down. “It was clear these were just people doing their jobs. Part of the job is coupling to produce more Soldiers, but it's regulated by a biological cycle. It must be inconvenient sometimes, and at the first crèche we were at, I asked how they get around that. I said we don't have to reproduce unless we want to. I said there are ways to enjoy mating without conception taking place, and it was the oddest thing, Hanna. The female I was talking to became frightened. This was after the prohibition against telepathy went into effect, so I was limited in what I could pick up, but . . . She wouldn't think about it.
Wouldn't
. There was that sense of fear, and then she fastened her attention on one of those video screens we saw everywhere, and after that she wouldn't even look at me. I had to go on to somebody else. And I didn't mention it again.”

“All right. That might be something important. Make sure it's in your notes, put in every detail you can remember. Who else was where and doing what,” she said, focused on goals, “in the hours before Kwoort gave that order about Arch?”

Dema produced more paper, with a flourish. “Here's the list of who was on the surface.”

Hanna looked at the first name and said, “Oh, is he aboard?”

“You know Pirin Zey?”

“Not personally. I looked him up once.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because Starr fell asleep trying to read something Zey wrote about projected grain yields up into the thirty-first century in the province where Starrbright is. And nothing
ever
puts Starr to sleep. He thinks everything's interesting. Except Pirin Zey.”

For Pirin Zey was an agronomist's agronomist. He studied crops: their growth, husbandry, distribution, and economics. It was the foundation of any civilization, and like other kinds of foundations—the fundament of a building, for example, or an alphabet—it did not inspire sonnets.

“Zey's an expert, though,” Hanna said, and Dema said, “Well, he would be, wouldn't he, if Contact wanted him. And he spent two days there.”

Hanna was in no danger of falling asleep now, and tried to read one of Zey's gray reports. Then she decided to go find him instead. His brain had to be more stimulating than his prose style. A sponge would be more interesting, if it was marginally alive.

“I'm going to read your mind,” Hanna told him, overrode his protests, assured him she had no interest in his personal life. “Think about what you saw on the surface. That's all I care about and that's all I'll see.” She was lying, partly; she would inevitably learn some things about Zey's personality and emotions, but it was true that she didn't care about them.

Zey said timidly, “Is this going to be that trance thing I heard about?”

“No,” said Hanna, “this is going to be raw telepathy,” and smiled at him. It was a predatory smile.

They showed you—

What they had showed him was not on the surface, but underground.

Underground: she had touched Soldiers working the hydroponics complexes, but then she had been part of them, accepting that this was the safest way to carry out agriculture. The surface was risky; underground was certain—

—acre on acre, light diverted from the surface or entirely artificial. It might as well have been in space—

More of it.

And more of it.

And more of it.

“What?” said Zey.

“Nothing,” said Hanna. Zey was using stimulants too, and had not yet taken the counteractive dose that would allow him to rest, so Hanna's thought had meshed synergistically with his, racing. But she had actually mumbled:
Now I know why Starr fell asleep.

•   •   •

She hadn't thought Zey's specialty could possibly have triggere
d Kwoort's anger, but seeing him had saved time, anyway. She decided to see other people instead of bothering with their reports, starting with the political scientists. But they were asleep. Just as well, Hanna thought. She would try the physiologists.

Later she wondered what would have happened if she had been content with what Cinnamon Padrick, Pix Mundy, and Matthew Sweet had written about Soldiers' physiology, the facts they had put in their reports, the conservative deductions they had made about body parts and functions and put on record; if she had not found Cinnamon and her team awake and said on impulse,
What did you think? What did you feel? What did you imagine, however strange it seemed? What did you fear?—
and listened hard.

•   •   •

Hanna expected Padrick to be asleep, and sounded the request fo
r entry at a volume so low she didn't think Padrick would hear anything even if she were awake. But the door said
Come in!
and opened, and Hanna moved into a darkened room that was larger than hers and spoke of comfort. The large bed and couch and a big chair were soft and piled with cushions; three walls had been turned into virtual windows giving on a nighttime forest, alive with whispering leaves and soft nightbird sounds and the smell of herbs and leaf mold and the rustles of small, unseen animals. There was even a breeze, carrying a fragrance of the wild. The room itself might have been a luxurious tent pitched in wilderness. A moon was rising behind the trees. Hanna had seen nothing so elaborate anywhere else on
Endeavor;
Cinnamon Padrick had clearly used her time during the early, uneventful stages of the voyage to ensure that she was pampered. It was so dark, and so startling, that it was a moment before Hanna saw Cinnamon, and when she did, she knew at once that she had found the origin of the not-quite-alien trace of thought sensed weeks ago.

Cinnamon turned large green eyes on Hanna and said in a soft and unsurprised voice, “Oh, you're one of the telepaths. The famous one.”

Hanna nodded, looking at her, trying to understand the source of the strangeness; she saw an ordinary woman. Soft, sleek brown hair was cut close to the rounded skull, subtly striped; a cosmetic effect, Hanna supposed. Cinnamon was seated at a small table, on a small (but softly padded) chair, and she was eating, dipping morsels into a sauce and chewing them daintily. Two more places were set at the table, and there were bowls of other tidbits that Hanna identified as meat, something she did not consume herself. No D'neeran did. D'neerans would not eat anything that had a central nervous system.

A second glance told her the cubes of meat appeared fresh, or at least, just-reconstituted. And they were raw.

“Would you like something to eat?” Cinnamon said.

“Umm, no, thank you.”

“Sit, then.”

Hanna did, wondering why she was uneasy. Few human beings of any sort could really disturb her any more, and there was no threat here. Just that strangeness . . .

“I've been hoping to meet you, Lady Hanna,” Cinnamon said.

“It's just Bassanio now—”

“Oh, I don't think so. You'll always be Hanna ril-Koroth, I think.”

There was too much truth to this for Hanna to argue the issue. She said, “Do you have a few minutes to spare? I wanted to ask you about the work you and your team did on Battleground. I apologize for not studying your reports first, but I—might be pressed for time. I know it's late, I'll try not to keep you long, you must need to sleep—”

“Always,” Cinnamon said. “I love to sleep. It's my favorite recreation. But not so much at night.” She touched a finger to the wall next to her and said, “Sweetie? Pix? Our snacks are ready. And we have a visitor.”

A minute later the door said
Come in!
again. Two people came in, and the strangeness tripled.

At first glance Hanna took them for brother and sister, though Matthew Sweet was tall and muscular and Pix Mundy was short and round. It was the coloring that made her think so, the pale pinkish skin, where Cinnamon's was rosy, though they had the same big green eyes, and Pix's, meeting Hanna's, seemed to go perfectly round. Both had hair patterned symmetrically, almost identically, in black and white. “You all come from the same place?” Hanna said, looking at Cinnamon's stripes, thinking of local fashions, thinking (to herself) there was no end to people's love of decorating themselves.

“Colony One,” Cinnamon said agreeably. “We have known each other since birth. Our home is in a small area on the continent Atlas; specifically, a mountainous, rather isolated region occupied by those of our ethnicity. Do you know the geography of Colony One?”

“A little. I've been there, to Atlas, in fact.”
But I never saw anybody like you there.

The others had crowded up to the little table and started to eat, Pix Mundy with a greed that explained how she had come to be round. Matthew Sweet looked at Hanna with uncomfortable intentness. She wondered fleetingly how many of
Endeavor
's
crewwomen he had seduced.

“Are you Pix's brother?” she asked.

He and Pix looked at each other with secretive amusement. “Among other things,” he said.

“Yours is a, umm, pretty, umm, self-contained population?”

“Do you speak to aliens sso craftily?” said Pix. There was an undercurrent of sibilance. Hanna thought Pix's ears, inside, might be lined with the faintest layer of white down, but it was hard to tell in the dim light.

Hanna backed down. The subcultural mores of human beings were not her field. She said, “You know
Endeavor
went on alert for a brief time because of a possible threat from the beings here, the reason you were evacuated—”

Over their protests, she remembered. It was this team that had refused to leave until Metra threatened them with force.

“Umm . . . well. It came to nothing, but one of their commanders was disturbed by something, and I can't tell what it was. I'm trying to find out what our people were doing that might have made him react so unexpectedly. I know whatever it was, was innocently done. None of us on the surface have expressed hostility or displayed xenophobia or done anything that would obviously cause offense. All any of us have been doing is learning things. I came to ask what you've learned that perhaps a Commander would rather we didn't know.”

“Xenophobia would not be good,” said Pix. “I don't think we would like xenophobia very much.”

The three Colonists looked at each other with understanding. Hanna thought about trying to see their thoughts; these humans touched her curiosity more than the Battleground beings did.

She suppressed the impulse and said, “What results have you had from your work, in this first phase?”

“They are not very interesting, anatomically,” said the one called Sweetie. “F'thalians and Uskosians are much more interesting. Genetically—but then, we are very interested in genetics. It is our specialty. Are you interested in genetics?”