Battleground (42 page)

S
OUNDS SPILLED FROM
the video unit into her dreams. She w
oke slowly, swimming up through deep water, when they became louder. Gabriel touched her shoulder and she opened her eyes to see a Soldier standing over her, talking. The gossamer net of her translator lay abandoned on a shelf. She stumbled to it and got it on in the middle of a statement: “—will see you now. You must come with me. He orders it.”

She muttered, “Wait, wait,” and the Soldier stood patiently enough while she used the lavatory, ran cold water (the only kind) and splashed her face, hoping it would thin the fog in her head, but it did not. She came out to find the Soldier standing in the same place, Gabriel facing him, translator on. He looked around and said, “He only wants you.”

The thought of leaving Gabriel behind in this maze made her uneasy. “I'm not going without you,” she said.

“The Holy Man does not want Gergtk,” the Soldier said.

“Tell the Holy Man he must see both of us.”

“I cannot tell the Holy Man he must do anything. He tells me what I must do. He tells you what you must do.”

Hanna sat down on the sleeping platform and simply looked at the Soldier. After a minute he took something from a pocket and put it in his ear and asked for instructions. She knew what they were before he said anything.
Wait for reinforcements; bring the female by force.

The diffuse sense of threat she always felt on Battleground sharpened. She gave up and went.

In the hallway, unnervingly, there was a vehicle, a flat cart with rigid seats. She sat in it beside the Soldier while a second stood on a platform at the front and steered by means of levers. There was plenty of clearance for another in the hall, and it moved silently at a good fifteen kilometers an hour. She appreciated the reason for ramps now—and soon, the reason for the bar in front of her; the Soldier driving did not slow down much for corners. The machine had no other features, not even a display to show how fast it went. The Soldier must have a map of this warren in his head. Hanna did not. She was conscious of the increasing distance between her and Gabriel, but she could not have gotten back alone to where she had started.

She had been right about the dreadful distances they would face if they had to get out of this vastness on their own; the convoluted route to Kwoort took half an hour to travel. There were a couple of upward ramps, but more going down, and more activity in the lower levels, more of the silent open carts, many more Soldiers who registered the strange sight of her without fear or hostility, though there were flickers of awareness; she would have bet money on correlation between a Soldier's age and the degree of interest. Sometimes the cart skirted huge open areas. In one, hundreds of Soldiers were engaged in mock hand-to-hand combat; another enormous space held at least a thousand beings who were scarcely moving but swayed rhythmically—marching in place—while someone on a platform harangued them. She finally began to understand a little about the underground extent of Wektt's habitation. At that, if Kwoort's maps were accurate, it had once been much greater.

She would never find the way out on her own.

Presently they came to an open space that seemed to be a hub for other ways, doors instead of archways opening off it. “We stop here,” said her escort, and she got off the cart and followed him through a door that led—exasperatingly—to narrower corridors, more doors. He took her to one of these and stood aside, and behind the door was Kwoort.

He was robed now in yellowish iridescence, exactly like Tlorr. He sat on a bench and was doing, apparently, nothing. Another bench faced it and Hanna sat down on it.

She said, “If I did not know you so well I would not be able to tell you apart from the Holy One of Rowtt. And yet to Rowtt you are the Demon.”

“I would play both parts at once, if necessary, and be Holy in Rowtt as well as Wektt. I would not be surprised if it has been done.”

She said curiously, “Do many Soldiers know that Rowtt and Wektt communicate about the status of their Holy Men?”

“Not at this time. At other times there have been more who knew.”

Hanna was silent, the thought dizzying; or maybe the dizziness was only, again, altitude.

“Kakrekt returns soon,” Kwoort remarked.

Hanna did not know that Kakrekt had been away. Possibly she had gone to “repel hostile incursions,” as Kwoort had done for Tlorr.

“What does that have to do with me, Kwoort Commander? Holy One?”

“She will want to talk to you. She may summon you herself. I want to be certain you know one thing: she is under my command. The things she talks about are only dreams, and as long as I am Holy Man her desires do not matter. Not to me and not to you. Do you know what I mean by dreams?”

“The things that happen in the mind while you sleep?” she said uncertainly.
Dreams
could mean other things to human beings.

“And sometimes to Soldiers who are awake. They happened to some of us many summers ago. That is when our builders found out how to go through space, and some of us went there, where not-Soldiers lived. But it was a dream. It was not real,” he said, and Hanna caught a flash of something she had not been certain of before. The knowledge of
how to go through space
was firmly in the past, and safely—in humans' judgment—lost.

She absorbed the nugget with relief. One question answered. She said, though, “But you really did go to the place where some of us lived.”

“It was an aberration, it was nothing. Kakrekt will see that her dreams are nothing, if she survives. Do not encourage her. Tell me now about the weapons you know. Tell me what they do. Tell me how to make them.”

“I don't know how to make them. If I tell you what they do perhaps you can make them yourself. But you will have to give us something in return.”

“And what do you think I have to trade?”

“Order Soldiers to accompany us to our worlds. We might gain useful knowledge from studying them.”

“Then I must have the weapons first. I must have them in my hands.”

“No.”

“Then we have nothing more to talk about.”

“Allow us to return to our spacecraft, then.”

“No. Think about what I have said, and I will think about what you said.”

Hanna thought of Kakrekt and her “dreams.” Kakrekt might settle for knowledge.

“Very well,” she said.

T
IME WAS PUNCTUATED BY
the meetings Kwoort required. It co
uld not be measured by the intervals between them, which were sometimes long and sometimes seemed very short. Hanna made no discernible progress demanding research volunteers from Kwoort and he made no discernible progress demanding weapons from Hanna. At least they had defined goals, even if they weren't moving toward them. Kakrekt sometimes saw Hanna too, along with Gabriel, interrogating them fiercely about the kinds of knowledge not-Soldiers could help her get, but she could not do anything but talk about it because she was under Kwoort's command. She had something in mind about changing that, though, and Hanna began to guess what it was. But she did not tell Gabriel.

Time dragged. The supply of meal tabs dwindled. Hanna's reports to the telepaths carried no useful content.

•   •   •

Kwoort called us to him again today
.
He demanded that I “s
ee into the mind,” as he calls it, of Tlorr. I told him I couldn't, because I don't know Tlorr well enough to find her again.

That might be true,
said Bella.

Or:

Kwoort demanded that I tell him how my sidearm was put together. He had a Soldier take it apart and the Soldier got sick and died. Radiation poisoning, I suppose. I told him I don't know how to make them, I only know how to use them.

That's true,
said Bella.
You're technologically challenged.

Or:

Kakrekt had us brought to her. She wanted a history lesson. Human history, I mean.

From you? That must have been a short conversation
.

Gabriel's a teacher.

Not so short, then.

Pretty long, actually.

Did you learn anything?

I dozed off, actually.

•   •   •

The door was not locked. On the second day Hanna had opene
d it and walked down the wide corridor outside, between rows of flat gray panels and other doors. In one direction they stretched so far that dim lighting and diminishing perspective made the walls appear to converge in the dark. At the other, closer, there was a T-junction, but when Hanna got to it there was more of the same on either side. A Soldier came out of one of the doors and looked at her. The Soldier did not say anything, and Hanna went back to the room she shared with Gabriel while she still could; she was afraid that if she went around more than one corner she would not find the way back. The Soldier had not said anything to her but might have reported what he had seen, because the next time Hanna opened the door there was a guard outside who said they could not go anywhere.

She closed the door and looked at Gabriel. He shrugged. “You weren't going anyplace anyway.”

In fact Hanna had begun to think it was possible. She had nothing to take notes with, but why could she not mentally recite lefts, rights, ups, and downs while another telepath accompanied her in thought and made a three-dimensional map?

Too late now. She would have to find other ways to pass the time.

•   •   •

One way was easy and, in retrospect, inevitable. Hanna's s
cruples about Gabriel's heart dissolved; in the early days of their enforced intimacy she acceded to mutual seduction, and found that heart tougher than she had supposed. Gabriel might be sexually inexperienced, but he was an adult more mature in many ways (Hanna admitted) than she was, and she was pleased to offer him the adventure she suspected was now his real desire. He was moving beyond infatuation, she thought. He was looking ahead—here, in this place where he could see nothing—to a larger universe than he had known before, and to the man he might become.

“If I could give back to you,” he said once, “what you're giving me—”

“How can you think you're not . . . ?”

He smiled down at her; she was moving a forefinger in little circles on his chest, memorizing the texture of his skin.

“I mean loving you is going to affect the rest of my life. I'll certainly never think of women the same way again.”

She moved the hand to his disarrayed curls, memorizing those too.

“You're keeping me human,” she said. “Helping me shut out these thousands on thousands of Soldiers' minds. They're as heavy as all the concrete and rock—”

She shivered, reminded of that unbearable weight. Gabriel kept it from crushing her.

•   •   •

If you could get Metra's attention,
Hanna said.

I
got
Metra's
attention.
Bella's thought signaled bad news coming.

And?
said Hanna.

Adair can't get the Commission's attention.

Hanna issued a burst of annoyance. Tinged with fear.

Why not?

Something's going on with Colony One. Something about virtual lives, alternate existence—

Those things are nothing new!

Something about armed conflict.

Oh.

At another time Hanna might have been slightly interested in the matter.

Are you telling me nobody,
nobody
, is paying attention to this mission? Not even Starr?

Nothing's happening where you are. I guess that's satisfactory for now. I bet he'd pay attention if we tried armed conflict, though.

That is not funny.
What did Metra say about food? Did you tell her it's nearly gone?

She said the local food's non-toxic, so eat it.

Hanna had already admitted to Kwoort that though their meal tabs were down to a day's supply, Wektt's foodstuffs wouldn't poison humans. He had, in effect, also said:
So eat it.

•   •   •

She could not make love to Gabriel all the time, and time had
its own weight.

I could do,
she thought,
what they give me all that credit for.

Contact paid her well. Until now she had diverted almost all the credit to Jameson's household accounts. He then, over her objections, diverted it to a depository in Mickey's name but with himself in control. Hanna could not retrieve it after that, and she could not make him take it back. Arguing about it had proved a reliable source of entertainment.

Ultimately she was paid for being a telepath. She was sick and tired of Soldiers' thoughts, but finally resigned herself to doing what no one else could do, and prowled invisible through other beings' minds.

•   •   •

Kwoort prayed. He did not do it very well.

Smite the Demon bu
t I am the Demon. Tlorr prays Abundant God to smite me! And I pray in return: Smite the Demon with your strong arm, and I mean, smite Tlorr. Does she pray with as much sincerity as she did when Quokatk was Holy here? I wonder did Quokatk merely go further into Holiness and we call it madness. Kwler was mad we said, Tlorr and I—

I am distracted. I neglect the prayers.

Guard the faithful against treachery am I supposed to say other prayers here I wonder. These are all I know. But they were prayers against Quokatk, so now they are prayers against me. How can I say them, I once thought there might be no Abundant God but he did not smite me for thinking that, instead he has made me holy and supreme in this place, so what does that mean. Except that I am the Demon.

It was better to be High Commander in Rowtt, I moved outside the citadels, I saw things—

Bones, said the not-Soldier female. All the crèches are built on bones.

•   •   •

If prayer had ever had a place in Kakrekt's mind, she had evicted it. Ka
krekt was on the coast, planning a maneuver conceived before Kwoort appeared from Rowtt.

We have the advantage already, the Holy Man confirms it! Move troops from here and here and here, feint and use missiles to destroy opposing troops at this point, at that point, march, march to Rowtt—

Win!
she thought. But Kwoort would not order it so the plan could not be carried out until he was gone.

Someone is going to win this wa
r, Kakrekt thought. I
will win it. The Holy One will not be here to stop me. And then I will change the world.

Quokatk no longer had any interest in war. Kakrekt was determined that what had happened to him was not going to happen to her. Holy Men came to think nothing could ever change, and that inevitability crushed them in the end. As long as she believed in the possibility of change, she was convinced, she would be sane.

Sometimes she wondered if thinking she could escape the end-change might itself be the beginning of insanity. But she refused to believe that. She had refused to believe that she would die in battle in her early years, and she had not. If the tactic had worked for that, why not this?

•   •   •

Sometimes Kwoort's prayers were fierce, accompanied by images of battle
and carnage. And sometimes they were bitter as he prayed to an Abundant God in whom he did not, that hour, believe. Sometimes he thought of the long sweep of history that was irretrievable because the records of it had not been permitted to survive, and these thoughts left him prostrate on the floor. He had no word for what he felt, but Hanna had done her share of shuddering on floors, and knew that it was grief. At other times he tried to remember his life, and saw the raggedness of memory, and groaned with—not his word, but Hanna's—anguish. It was impossible for Hanna to determine which was the “real” Kwoort. They were all real.

•   •   •

Kakrekt fell into conversations with companions, officers subordinate to
her. Sometimes these conversations were not about war.
Have you ever heard of. I have heard it said, have you. Who in this company is oldest?—summon her. I wish to protect my Holy Man, I have heard whispers about assassination, I have heard a rumor of poison.

•   •   •

When Hanna came out of trance she thought:
So that is what Kakrekt means
to do. I thought it possible and now I know. If I tell Kwoort I wonder what he will do—

But then she had a second thought. It was a non-D'neeran thought, it was as far from transparency as it was possible to get.

Kakrekt would be easier to deal with than Kwoort. I will mention this to no one. Not yet . . .