Battleground (33 page)

Then it stopped.

She leaped to her feet, shuddering, breaking out in sweat. Her hands shook.
What was—

It had not been audible, it had been the anguished cry of a sentient mind. Not human, though: a Soldier. She reached out, still shaking, seeking.

And sensed Gabriel, broadcasting confusion and alarm, plain to any telepath in the neighborhood. But Hanna was the only one listening.

She called to the telepaths,
I thought you were monitoring Gabriel!

Why would we? He was asleep!

Gabriel first—she grabbed the sheets that lay on the table and put them back in the drawer where they belonged, trying to stack them just as she had found them, trying to still the tremor in her hands, trying at the same time to see what Gabriel saw. Nakeekt and Kwek were with him, and it was apparent that Gabriel did not have his translator, because Nakeekt was talking and he did not understand her.

But where—?

He was wet, soaked, in fact, and in the dark. Outdoors, then, in the rain.

Gabriel! Where the hell—?

He barely perceived the question, but she got an answer anyway, a fleeting impression of the pod at his back. She shoved the drawer shut, left the room, and headed into the rain at a run.

•   •   •

She circled around, moving as fast as she could without light, to make it appear she had come from anywhere except the vault of documents. Mud and grass squelched underfoot, but the ground was level, and she did not fall. She heard Nakeekt's voice and turned on the light, and for an instant saw Nakeekt leaning toward Gabriel, her face almost in his, both their faces shining with rain, Nakeekt shouting as if that would force the not-Soldier to understand her. Nakeekt whirled as Hanna ran toward them and called out, “Are you going to pretend you do not comprehend either?”

“I understand. Do you not see he is not wearing the translation device?”

“Why not? Where have you been? You have been spying!”

If Gabriel could not talk to them she did not have to worry about matching his lies—or about, knowing Gabriel, any inconvenient truth he might offer.

“We lost contact with our spacecraft,” Hanna said, improvising. “I came outside to see if that would help. I suppose my fellow-Soldier did the same thing.”

“I don't think so,” Nakeekt said. “Kwek says you can do that with your, your, head?”—she was uncertain, but she had the fundamental fact right.

Who had been so unwise as to tell Kwek about that?

“The ability is not reliable,” Hanna said, thinking fast, suddenly detesting all the lies she had told, such a non-D'neeran thing to do. She had told more of them on Battleground than she could remember telling anywhere.

She swung around at something—

All for nothing nothing—

—an echo, a fainter mental howl, from the shadow that was that cottage, but she could not see it through the rain, and no one else could hear it, and Nakeekt could not be ignored.

“Is that what you have been doing? You did not say much while we walked yesterday. Is that what you did all day, look at what was in
my
head? Did you do it all night? I should not let you go! Do you think we could not kill you here? We have weapons!” Nakeekt had reverted to active duty rapidly. “I will not let you go!”

Now she had Hanna's full attention.

We have done you no harm and wish you no harm,
she said, straight to Nakeekt's mind, in words that did not register but with sense and conviction that did—finally, pure truth. And Nakeekt knew it was.

Nakeekt's breathing organs swelled and shrunk, swelled and shrunk. Hanna had seen Kwoort's do it too, the rapid breathing that accompanied strong emotion, as in humans.

“You may not wish to do harm, but others would, if they knew more! Are you going back to Rowtt? What are you going to report there?”

“We will not go back to Rowtt,” Hanna said. “I think we will be ordered to Wektt, although we have not been told that certainly. But we will not report anything we have seen here that is not already known. You sustain yourselves, and you do not fight. That is known, is it not? So that is all we will say. I know nothing more except that there is much you have not told us. And I will not say that.”

She was not connecting with Nakeekt's thoughts now; you could not be evasive in thought without its being perceived, and she was evading the whole truth. She expected to learn more—if not here, in This Place, then from the texts she had transmitted to
Endeavor.
Whatever they were, their nature was different from those that had made it into the datastream Communications had tapped at the start. The telepaths on
Endeavor
had told her that, not in the primary content of their thought, but in how they perceived what they saw of the first translated passages.

Slowly, Nakeekt's respiration began to ease. She was silent for a time. Gabriel had the sense to be quiet and Kwek did not say anything either. Finally Nakeekt said, “Go, then. I will let you go but I want you to go now.”

This suited Hanna. She did not want to be around if anyone connected a missing coverlet with an extra one found near the vault.

“Very well,” she said. “Kwek, are you coming with us?”

“I would like to go back for a while,” Kwek said. “I would like to talk with Arkt again—”

“No,” Nakeekt said. “You can't go. You have made your decision by coming here with these not-Soldiers. If you go with them and do not come back, if you go to Wektt with them,
they
might not say ‘There are things in That Place nobody knows,' and soon they will go away, but you will not go away and one day you might say that—no, you cannot be allowed to do that. You will stay. And you,” she told Hanna, “will not come back. If you do I will think not-Soldiers want to war with us, and I will make sure you do not survive.”

Nothing!
someone howled.

Hanna did not answer. She would not promise not to come back. Nakeekt had not shown or told her anything that could tell her who it was that screamed
Nothing!
in the night or why it happened, and she wanted very badly to know.

“
C
APTAIN METRA TOLD ME
in
confidence, before the conference, that Lady Hanna has a personal agenda.”

“Hanna? An agenda?”

“That she's angry. With you, the captain said, for breaking with her.”

“She's
the one breaking with
me, but nobody seems to believe that . . . well, I suppose it might follow that she's angry anyway, about something—but what agenda does Metra think she has?”

“Failure of the mission, was the implication. In the captain's defense, Hanna has made no secret of her dislike of Battleground.”

“That is a concern, but for a different reason. Hanna has impeccable instincts. She was convinced Zeig-Daru knew of our existence and was implacably hostile long before we knew anything about Species X. I wonder what unconscious awareness she might have about Battleground that she hasn't yet been able to articulate. But she wouldn't sabotage the mission for any reason. Hidden agendas and Hanna don't go together. She would simply refuse to go on.”

“She's not in a position to overtly refuse. Or am I wrong?”

“Well—admitted. She isn't. Given that, the protests we've already seen were predictable, but she will continue to comply. I would not take anything Metra tells you ‘in confidence' very seriously. How did it go, otherwise?”

“It wasn't pleasant. I might have exerted more control than I did, but I wanted to get a sense of how these people are with each other. It was not like overseeing traders in F'thalian luxury goods . . .”

•   •   •

It had been a wrangle, the air thick with accusations, but blessedly short.

Metra to Hanna: “You had no business spying. What do you think this is? An Intelligence and Security operation? Did I authorize you to do what you did? Did anyone?”

Hanna to Metra: “You were eager enough for the results!” And then, gouging where she knew it would hurt (and drive Metra wi
ld with fury): “I thought
Endeavor
was a first-class operation. First-class operations do not lose communications capability!”

Get out of my sight
, Metra thought, and Gabriel said, “It was my fault. I should have trusted Hanna and stayed where I was.”

“It was not your fault,” said Hanna, and put her hand on his.

“You're right about that,” Metra said. “It was your responsibility to inform him of what you were going to do and what he ought to do—but you didn't tell anybody. If you were one of my crew I'd confine you to quarters for the duration.” She looked at all she could see of Evanomen, his head and shoulders, floating in the air. “I assume we're going to Wektt. I recommend assigning real humans to the contact.”

She did not even bother to use the conventional term, “true-humans.”

Evanomen finally said something. “It might have been a mistake to hide the nature of the telepaths.”

“That was Bassanio's idea. A serious misjudgment on her part.”

“I do not recall anyone disagreeing,” Hanna said. She briefly considered pointing out that it had in fact been Jameson's idea, decided her own mistakes could do without examination, and went on. “Kwoort was determined to the end to enlist us in his war. Nakeekt has things she wants to conceal, and if she had known what I was when we landed she wouldn't have shown us anything. Downplaying it's still my recommendation, when we go to Wektt.”

“It won't matter,” Metra said, “because there won't be any telepaths in the picture. I don't want any of them involved.”

“I'll take it under consideration,” Evanomen said, meaning, intentionally, nothing.

“Captain Metra is speaking from prejudice,” Hanna said. “Leaving my people out of it would be idiotic.”

“You
are
confined to quarters,” Metra told Hanna.

“I can't agree to that,” Evanomen said with more authority. “I want Hanna working on the new data with Arch Harm.”

“Is that what Starr wants?” Hanna said, just to goad Metra, responding to Metra's fury in spite of herself. Damned if she was going to say “Commissioner Jameson;” she felt like throwing the affair in Metra's face, over or not.

“Try not to make a disaster of it,” Metra said. “The equipment you left behind was valuable. So far your accomplishments are confined to running away from Kwoort every time you saw him, and getting thrown out of That Place.”

And the best Hanna could say to that was, “Well, not
every
time.”

K
IT MORTAN HAD ORDERED
the telepaths out of Communications as soon as Hanna left the surface. He said he would let them access the new documents from the auditorium if that would make them go away, and that was where Hanna found them. Gabriel trailed after her, radiating guilt.

“Look at this,” Bella said, depressed. Kit had supplied raw material, not the ongoing
translation, and the masses of text were incomprehensible.

Hanna looked at the moping Bella, sighed, and called Kit to ask for the translation. He hesitated, but only a little; whatever Evanomen (or Jameson, or Zanté) had said to Metra about keeping Hanna informed had not lost its power, and the translations appeared quickly. She flipped through pages, muttering “next” and “next” and “next,” watching them flash past.

“Metra said you should have sampled randomly,” Joseph told her.

“It's a shame she didn't say that at the start. We'll have to settle for randomly sampling the samples, I guess.”

She paused—at random—and read:

The one who told me about this, told me it was something that stood twelve hundred summers ago. But I don't think so. He had heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone else and they are all dead and so is he and time is a mysterious place. He said it was a tall structure in the form of a cylinder. How t
all, I said, and he said, oh, as tall as the sky. I don't think that is true either. He said there was a three-sided cap on it that was made of gold. I said where was it and he said on Continent Three, but Continent Three died three hundred summers ago. I said what was it for. He didn't know. He just remembered the shining three-sided cap standing into the sky. I said if you remember it you must have seen it. He said no. So there might have been something tall with a shiny top on it on Continent Three but what he described was only in his mind and no Soldiers have ever constructed such a thing so maybe he made it up and it did not exist at all.

“Does this qualify as history?” Hanna asked Arch.

“Damned if I know. I never did get a look at what Kwek called Rowtt's historical records, whatever they were. Aren't they supposed to refrain from keeping records? Isn't that the command of their god?”

“You talked to Kwek sometimes,” Hanna said to Gabriel, politely not mentioning one of the things he had talked to Kwek about. Nakeekt would never have guessed that anyone could be telepathic if Gabriel had not told Kwek. “Did she say anything about them?”

More guilt. “I didn't ask. I just kept her company, told her a little about us, tried to make sure she was comfortable. She said she was. I prayed, once.”

“Did you? What did she make of that?”

“It didn't translate,” he said. “I think ‘our daily bread' did, but not much else.”

“‘Our daily ration of vegetable-based protein food'?”

Hanna set the page-turning program on automatic.
Flip. Flip. Flip.

“What was that about code?” she said.

“There was no code,” Arch said. “It was an hypothesis that fell apart right away. It was just that this has untranslatable words and phrases that never showed up in the original datastream. Linguistics is trying to interpret them by context. It'll take a while. I'm going to get some rest,” he added. “It's getting late.”

“It is?” said Hanna, her sense of time skewed to uselessness. It would be near the end of the night at That Place, its inhabitants in the deep sleep before dawn, and she was so out of synch with
Endeavor
's cycle that she forgot what chronometers said as soon as she looked away from them. She was not the only one who felt unbalanced; everyone was fading.

“I guess I'd better rest too,” she said, the endless Battleground day still weighing on her. “We might be busy when Linguistics is done.”

•   •   •

She expected to sleep well but did not. She dreamed of Jameson explaining that Michael Kristofik had not died after all. The explanation was obscure but sounded reasonable in the dream. A burst of joy and relief filled her, she was whole again, and blindingly happy.

She woke up and began to cry. She found herself, almost as if this was the dream, not that, stumbli
ng through corridors until she came to Gabriel's door. When he heard her voice he came at once, rumpled but slowly waking, and held her as she clung to him and wept, trying to think of her as a mourning child, like so many he had known, trying to ignore the warmth of her in his arms.

Finally she could tell him about the dream.

“I know,” he said. “I had some like that when I was a kid, after my parents died.”

“But it's been so long! There are days when I don't think of Mike more than a hundred times, why is this happening now?”

“You're grieving again,” he said, “because you're grieving for another man. Only this time the loss is your choice. Are you sure it's the right one?”

“It is. God help me, it is.”

She was calmer now, though the deep weight of tears still choked her chest. The calmness fell apart when she turned toward the door and Gabriel said rashly, “Michael's not dead, you know. There's something after this.”

“No, there isn't,” Hanna said, too full of sorrow to answer with tact.

“How do you know that? There's an infinity of universes, and do you think the Creator of them all, who holds in His unimaginable thought the dance of every quark, can't shepherd a single soul from this life to another?”

Hanna turned back. She said, “And do you think every telepath who ever lived hasn't cried out for someone lost? True-humans do it too, but not like we do! We would know the scarcest, scantest trace of someone we love if a trace survived! I've felt people's minds when they died, not just Mike's. They don't go anywhere. They just stop. What do you think I was doing,” she said, the tears burning now and turning to rage, “for weeks after Michael's death? I did not speak, I had no time to speak to living humans, I was searching for
him
! I looked everywhere, I looked to the farthest stars! He wasn't there, he was gone, he's gone forever. Don't try to give me your pathetic comfort,” she said savagely, “it doesn't work—”

Because you're grieving for another man,
Gabriel had said, and as she went away she thought of the risk Jameson took with every venture into A.S.
I could not bear that loss,
she thought, and then she thought
But it shouldn't matter any more—!

And now going back to sleep was out of the question, and she went back to her quarters and dressed and went wearily to Communications, trying to still the clamor of competing voices that were all hers.

•   •   •

Hanna did not much care for Kit Mortan,
Endeavor
's chief of Linguistics. He reminded her somewhat of an animal native to the world of Primitive A. Her focus when she was there had been on an arguably pre-sentient species of that world, beings who had begun to fashion rough tools and use a vocabulary of perhaps two hundred utterances—whether these should be called
words and phrases—language, in short—was a subject of debate, because there was scant evidence of syntax. Following these beings and scavenging their kills were creatures that the earliest observers had taken for large snakes, some as long as three meters, until someone noticed they traveled on numerous boneless appendages which carried them so smoothly and rapidly that the animals appeared to glide across the ground. It was not Kit's appearance that made her think of them, however; it was a certain sinuosity of movement, a scavenger turn of mind. She had known him on Earth; she had spoken of him to Jameson—

(“He smiles too much.”

“Did you not, just five minutes ago, tell me that I do not smile enough?”

“He smiles when he has nothing to smile about. You don't smile even when you want to, when I can feel it in you like a light you're trying to hide—”)

Kit had said something and Hanna had not heard it. She had a vague impression that he wondered whose mind she was reading and hoped it was not his.

“Sorry,” she said. “What was that?”

“I said, the most striking feature of this material is that it has nothing in common with the broadcast datastream we picked up coming in. Look at this—”

It is evident that all we make must be sustainable through the efforts of our own hands. I am insistent that it be so. There are those on the mainland who wish to help us, they have promised the building of a power center. All of us see the danger of coming to rely on this center. Who is to say that the mainland might not one day be destroyed as other continents were destroyed? Then we would not be able to maintain the center and for safety would have to close it.

She said, “Is this about the reactor that supplies power for That Place?”

“I would say that's very likely. The material seems to fall into a couple of broad categories. Most of it's about the day-to-day functioning of That Place. But some of it looks like secondhand oral history, things somebody besides the writers said that the writers set down. Facts, legend, speculation—”

“‘Writers,' you said. It was written by different people? You can tell by how it's said?”

He looked at her with pity for her ignorance, as if the answer should be obvious. “We can tell because a number of different handwritings appear. We'll be doing another set of groupings based on who actually wrote what. It's too bad you didn't get a sample of this Nakeekt's handwriting.”

“You might have one,” Hanna said. “That bit about the power center—Nakeekt might have written that. She founded That Place.”

“I thought she said it wasn't known who founded it.”

“She lied,” Hanna said.

Kit looked at her skeptically. She ought to be used to this by now, her testimony mistrusted and discounted although her knowledge came from direct experience while true-humans' came from deduction and analysis of the written or spoken word. She
was
used to it. But she no longer wasted energy trying to convince them.

“Why don't you,” she said, “load what you've got into a reader. No, two readers. One for Arch.”

“You want to take them with you?”

“Yes. If that's all right,” she said, thinking,
Why the hell else would I ask?
And felt an unaccustomed twinge of shame; she was irritable because she was still jumpy from a dream and its aftermath.

She said, lingering on purpose so as not to be too abrupt, “It's all in here?”

“Most of it. The categories are just a first approximation, remember. We've just started on the coded material. You'll get that next.”

“Arch said there wasn't a code after all.”

“First we thought there was, then we thought there wasn't. Now we're certain some of it's in code. Not much, and it won't take long, once we get to it.”

She took the readers and went to wake up Arch, who was sleeping alone, for once. “Time to work,” she said, and handed him a reader. They looked at the outline of categories at the start.

“I'll take the oral history,” Arch said with enthusiasm. “I liked the way that first passage went—‘time is a mysterious place.'”

“You know,” said Hanna, “I wonder where they got ‘mysterious.' It doesn't feel like a Soldier word.”

He found the passage and jumped to a note. “It wasn't in the original datastream; Kit's never seen it before. There are a couple of variations, and here are the contexts, next layer down, and the rationale, next layer—they're not rushing this, Kit practically wrote a paper on this one word. Want to see?”

“When did he have time? That passage was translated by the time I got back to the ship.”

“The notes are from an hour ago. He must have made a guess that worked out.”

Hanna nodded. She did not have to like Kit to know that he was marvelously good at his work.

She looked at the list of categories. Many of the entries were routine. Food preparation—cross-indexed to native food sources, appearance of, cultivation of (with a note:
Refer to Zey)
, cross-indexed to fiber sources, cross-indexed to fabric, production of, cross-indexed—

“Listen to this,” said Arch.
“A Warrior of three hundred and one summers told me this that she saw herself. It was before I came here and she has not come here yet but maybe she will. It was in the far north region of Continent Two before the destruction and it was on a mountain. There was there, untouched, a place where Soldiers could once sit outdoors, the area having gone without attack for a long time. There were some tables and benches there and the tables had canopies over them as if to provide shade when it was warm, but it was not warm when the Warrior was there. The tables and benches and canopies were all made of metal painted red, and the tables and benches were of mesh so the rain would drain through them. When the Warrior was there it was cold and there was snow piled high on all of it and there were icicles that hung from everything. The Warrior said the sun came out while she was there and she was surprised. She said it was pleasant. She kept saying this, as if she were trying to find some word better than pleasant, and she said that it made something happen inside her when she saw it. She did not know what it was. I think now that I know what it was, I think she meant it was beautiful, the light on the clear bright ice and the white snow and the red standing out warm, and that she wanted to look at it a long time. At that time I had started to have sensations also that I did not understand and I had started to dream. So I asked her if she dreamed but she did not know what I meant, and when I explained, she said no. But I think one day she will start to dream, if she survives.”

Hanna said, “Where did Kit get ‘beautiful?'”