Battleground Read online

  At least, thought Jameson, I never made the mistake of trying to hide an affair, though acknowledging Hanna cost me dearly. This liaison will come back to haunt Karin and Abel one day.

  He had thought the same thing when he first learned that greed had diverted Edward Vickery into paths incompatible with public trust, and the knowledge had delighted him. It was the opportunity he needed, and Heartworld’s Commission seat was nearly in his grasp again. Vickery was not present either materially or virtually; he was on Heartworld, too busy fending off official censure to attend this casual session. Which was why Jameson was here to run through a routine briefing on the Battleground mission.

  Routine was what they were going to get. He wasn’t going to tell them about that contact with Hanna, the underlying sadness, the loneliness embedded in the question . . . Don’t I know you well enough by now? He had endured enough intrusive questions about his personal relationship with Hanna in years past. It was almost accepted now, and tolerated (barely) even on his homeworld, and he would not do anything to revive old controversies.

  Chapter IV

  HANNA WAS GETTING TIRED. She was seriously tired of her own compatriots, for one thing, and what they were doing to the true-humans around them. Her inadvertent arousal of Joseph and Bella had repercussions that complicated everyone’s lives. Bella, having enjoyed Joseph, had sent him away and told him not to come back. Joseph sulked, declined to be consoled by Glory (which hurt her feelings), but allowed a broadminded Endeavor crewwoman to cheer him up. Bella became interested in the same woman, who enjoyed the attention, decided she was undecided about her own preferences, and teased both her suitors until they realized she was engaging in the kind of game D’neerans did not play. Arch, comforting Glory for her rejection by Joseph, ended up assuaging her curiosity about what it was like to have sex with a D’neeran.

  “No wonder you people do it so much!” she said to Hanna, who did not want to hear about it.

  But Arch reported to Hanna, “She wasn’t with me, not all of her; she was comparing. Why do those people do it so much? How can you do it with them?”

  Hanna wanted to hear that even less, but she answered.

  “It was educational, when I first came into close contact with true-humans,” she told Arch, not entirely in words. “And I had fun, too, of course.”

  “But later? Those other two?” he said, but she was not going to expose Michael or Starr so intimately in order to satisfy Arch’s inquisitiveness.

  “Starr is an exceptional man, and so was Michael,” she said.

  He wanted to know more, but she blocked his probe easily; she was practiced in Adept skills and did not have to fall back on the greater power she held secret.

  “I guess I’ll have to keep trying until I figure it out for myself,” Arch said. He would, too, and happily; making love was Arch’s avocation. Rejection (which he had experienced from Hanna early on) did not trouble him. There were women everywhere, he said cheerfully, and he liked all of them, and many of them liked him right back. Now he added, not unkindly, “You’re hiding what you feel. That’s what true-humans do. Have you gotten so exceptional yourself that you’ve turned into one?”

  “I sometimes think that has happened,” she said.

  It was not a new thought. She let him feel her sadness about it, but did not show him how deep it went. She was neither one nor the other, neither D’neeran nor wholly true-human, and there was not another like her. Nor would there be, because an alien race also had engraved some pathways in the substance of her brain that no other human being of any origin possessed.

  She was tired of the Battleground beings, too. And just plain tired.

  • • •

  “Status, please.”

  “I’m getting nowhere.” No preamble. “I’ve surveyed a machinist, some kind of computer technician, another nursing female, a—a—just a minute. I’m looking for the list.”

  “I have one. An instructor of marksmanship—at a firing range, or some analogous place, apparently. A heavy vehicle operator, and someone preparing meals. Hanna?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you get any sleep in the intervals between these contacts?”

  “What?”

  Jameson leaned back and looked out across the river. Finally spring, but the day was cool, the sky cloudy. It was time to get a medical report on Hanna, he thought.

  “How much sleep did you get in the last twenty-four hours?”

  She was silent, probably trying to remember. Finally she said, “I don’t think I’ve slept for a while.”

  “Why? What are you trying to do?”

  “We need a breakthrough,” she said. “I need to find one of their authorities. What we’ve been calling the Holy Man, or the Demon.”

  “It’s not working. You’re randomly sampling an enormous population for a few individuals. The odds of finding an ‘authority’ this way are poor.”

  “What, then? What do you think I should do?”

  “Just a moment.”

  He found the report he wanted in seconds; he had gone back to it several times since first reading.

  “Remember the fighter who was part of an effort to take a section of beach?”

  “Yes, of course. That was the first one I touched. It was when I found out how long-lived they are.”

  “Even longer-lived than you thought, probably. Have you seen the reports on the planet’s orbital statistics?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t studied them.”

  “You do know the year is longer than a Standard year?”

  “Not by much. Something over a couple of months?”

  “It adds up. Your fighter, with his two hundred and forty-six summers, is almost three hundred Standard years old. And he thought of the commanders and the Holy Man as being much older than that.”

  After a moment she said, “I don’t see why you’ve brought this up.”

  “I don’t either, exactly. It’s incidental; I was just thinking about that fighter . . .” He found himself tapping the screen with the end of a stylus. “Forget about trying to find a particular individual. You’ve been taking a wide view; suppose you go deeper instead. The fighter was . . . contemplating a possible future. There was an aspiration involved, remember? A personal motivation. He thought he might become a Commander. That’s what’s lacking,” he said abruptly. “You’re skimming surface thoughts, goal-oriented. There’s more than that to some of them, at least. This fighter had—would you call it hope? Is that the only emotion you’ve been able to pick up?”

  “Well . . . not quite. The nursing female, the first one, I mean”—there were so many she had lost count—“was getting impatient, you know. Ready to be done with it and go on to another role. And the male doing inventory was a little, oh, aggrieved when he found something in the stores that shouldn’t be there. So they do have emotions. I just haven’t looked at emotion closely. Trance is not really compatible with experiencing it. I can observe what others feel, and sometimes it hits me later—I’ve done that—”

  Her voice faltered and stopped.

  Damn it, if I could only see her face!

  “What instance are you thinking of, Hanna?”

  “That . . . last . . .” The words dragged out one by one into silence. But he could guess what she had not said.

  Last hour or last minute or last second. And then Michael Kristofik’s death. She had never been able to speak directly of those moments, from which she had emerged half-sane, or worse.

  He said her name softly. If she could talk of it now he would listen in spite of all those other ears. But she only said, “Never mind—” and he heard the effort in it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said gently, and meant it, though he could not have known what his questions would trigger and could not have anticipated this.

  Because she was healing, and on the nigh
t before she left to join Endeavor she had murmured sleepily, smiling, sated, “You are in danger of making me fall in love with you again . . .”

  She said, “Can we talk about this another time?”

  “Of course. But . . . try to go deeper, Hanna. As best you can.”

  • • •

  Some hours later, secured in her cabin with Arch as monitor, she tried something new.

  • • •

  A mirror, a face. So young. The (past-eyes) hardly indentations. My mouth is too small and my ears are too big. What can I do to make him look at me?

  Wistfulness.

  I know it will not matter but I wish my fellow-Soldier would look at me more. My hair will not grow longer. I think the color is pleasant, I wish he would look at my hair.

  Thin four-jointed fingers. Both hands moving, fingers in hair.

  A braided rope is pleasant to look at. I looked at Kwee’s hair when she braided it. I wonder if my fellow-Soldier would look at mine.

  A narrow plait, another, and another.

  Pleasant to see! They sway when my head moves! And my ears do not look so big. Maybe he will look at my hair. Although I know it will not matter when the time comes and the facilitators come. When the time comes it will be any Soldier whose time has also come. That is the power of Abundant God.

  I wish I could think of a way to make my mouth bigger. I wish my fellow-Soldier’s time could come when mine does and I could be with him when the facilitators come, but it won’t happen.

  But if my mouth was bigger, maybe he would look at me more.

  “Time. H’ana? It’s time.”

  Hanna came slowly out of trance. Her cheeks were immediately wet with tears.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “She wants to look nice for her friend,” Hanna said. “She wants to look pretty.”

  There was a mirror in the room, which Hanna occasionally consulted to make sure her face was not dirty. She rose and went to it now and looked at herself. She had lost a little weight, not enough to matter, and not unusual when she was under a strain. She looked past the image in the mirror to what it meant. D’neerans did not much prize appearances, and she had not realized until she began to go among true-humans that by the standards of their dominant culture, she was beautiful. On the rare occasions when she took pains about what she wore, even Jameson’s eyes widened, and he was not easily impressed. There were elements of true-human culture that she had often observed but had been slow to internalize. So it had only recently occurred to her that how she looked might be turned to her advantage in certain situations; or maybe it was not recognition of the fact, but the first wedge of willingness to use it.

  She was not shielding her thoughts, and Arch caught the last one and came up behind her. His hand closed on her shoulder. He said, “Does the word ‘corruption’ mean anything to you?”

  She said, “I think about it, from time to time.”

  “You think you’re not using your face, your body, to your advantage now? You think that true-human man would take such good care of you if you were ugly?”

  “He would take care of me because I’m useful,” she said. “That’s how it started in the first place. Alien Relations and Contact would not be what it is without me. He would take care of me no matter what I looked like. But he would not make love to me, if I were ugly.”

  Arch took his hand away and said, “He hasn’t been able to keep the whole legal apparatus of the Polity from threatening you. You’re selling yourself pretty cheap.”

  She said slowly, “The cost to him has been very high. You have no idea.”

  • • •

  Looking for emotion now, consciously.

  He and she and their facilitators are mating—

  A violent stop. Dema and Joseph were saying What what what is wrong?

  “I’m not doing that again!” she said.

  • • •

  She has memorized all of it, it is never difficult, there are only so many variations on the text. Almost time to speak. Beyond the folding doors they wait, a whole marching field of them. Exhort them to obey, exhort them to sacrifice! For the Holy Man.

  Fill myself with strength. Fill myself with certitude! Fill myself! Such good cakes. Time for one more. Maybe two more. It is almost time, time to go through the doors, this uniform is too tight, why didn’t they get me one that fits. Maybe there is time for one more cake—

  Joseph said apprehensively, “You were in there a long time this time.”

  “It was sort of compulsive,” Hanna said. She looked around, not sure what she was looking for. Glory started to hand her a flask of water.

  “No,” Hanna said, “I’m not thirsty. I’m hungry. God, am I hungry.”

  • • •

  He is looking at a vehicle. It runs on treads; what fuels it is obscure, although if his thought were guided that way, it would be clear, because he knows. There are things he is supposed to know, but—

  It fell off. Again. I thought I had. The screws just right. I must have done it right. Part right. The assembly held. Together. In my hands. It felt solid when I lifted it. But then the bolts and the first nut and I tightened the second nut and why did it fall off? I cannot do anything right, and the officer will come and she will flap her ears at me and say everything I do is incompetent it is always this way—

  “H’ana? You’re crying again.”

  She wiped her eyes. She said, “God damn him.”

  “Who? Your subject?” Joseph put out a hand to comfort her.

  “No. Starr. I swear, when I get back I’ll prowl through his emotions and feed them back to him. See how he likes it!”

  “Does he have any?”

  She said the same thing she had said to Arch: “You have no idea.”

  • • •

  Skimming again. Impatient. Endeavor, they told her, was nearly at the end of its journey. Her communications with Jameson were strained. She refused to open herself to the emotions of the Battleground beings again, told him trance was no use if she could not use its detachment. She knew (and knew that he did too) the truth was that she had had enough of tears—her own—and declined to cry someone else’s. He stopped short of ordering her to do exactly that.

  Somewhere between dragonfly landings in alien thoughts, the ghost surfaced.

  we always did what he wanted us to do and it always worked. even when we didn’t want to do it—

  you always did what he wanted you to do. i resigned from his control one day on Michael’s GeeGee. you must have missed that

  you tried but. what are we doing at contact education

  surviving. you must know what personality adjustment would mean. there would be only a white shadow left of me. you would be the ghost of a ghost

  The ghost subsided, unhappy. Hanna went on sampling surface thoughts. Surface thoughts would do just fine. Surface thoughts would tell them all they had to know.

  • • •

  “Status?”

  “Their theology appears to lack moral implications because it has none.”

  “Elaborate, please.”

  “They go each moment with the consciousness of a godhead. It is a universal, it is, so to speak, the default, when they do not concentrate on a task or attack or defense. I have met perhaps two humans whose minds go that way. I thought them psychotic. Here it is the norm, and the norm cannot, by definition, be psychotic.”

  “But moral implications?”

  “In this consciousness there is no place for the importance of others’ lives. They do not matter. Only what will come after, and they imagine the afterlife ecstasy is akin to what they feel in mating. Killing is encouraged. Death in battle is their expected end. I have seen no sign of conscious personal cruelty, such as human beings sometimes inflict on one another. But I have sensed no concept of universal b
rotherhood, either, or of spontaneous kindness.”

  “How,” said the voice—always calm, but this time with a kind of astonishment—“can they possibly live?”

  “I don’t know. Yet.”

  • • •

  Gabriel Guyup stumbled through old stone corridors, half-asleep and full of apprehension. He was waked occasionally to comfort a sick child, or one prone to chronic nightmare, but this time the night-duty brother had said: “Father Abbot wants you.”

  “Wha—?” said Gabriel, half a syllable all he could produce.

  “Father—Abbot—wants—you.”

  Oh, dear God, if a child has died . . .

  He rounded the last corner and the door was before him, spilling light into the dim hallway. He slowed down when he reached it, but sick fear went before him, and the abbot took one look at his face and winced.

  “What’s wrong?” said the abbot, which ought to have been Gabriel’s question, and Gabriel found a mug of coffee thrust into his hand. He had an accurate reputation as a heavy sleeper.

  “You called for me—”

  “Yes, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. I know you’re not afraid of me!”

  “It’s . . .” He looked at the chronometer on Father Abbot’s wall. Alta stubbornly insisted on dividing its days into twenty-four hours, though they were not Standard hours. At the abbey it was just past two o’clock in the morning.

  “It’s daytime at Polity Admin, apparently. Sit down.”

  Gabriel sat and sipped. His fear eased. Admin—this would have something to do with Colonial Oversight, then; though they were usually good about calling in daylight, local time.

  “Are they bringing a child?” he asked.