Battleground Read online

  Over the course of some ten years he had been—at one time or another or simultaneously—her lover, superior, colleague, nemesis, mentor, protector, friend. Hanna had never gotten anywhere trying to pin down what he was to her and had given up trying.

  It did not help that he could stir her sexually with one calculated touch.

  She talked to him often during the flight. She made sure no tears were visible, and she didn’t tell him reality was shaky. When he was at home for these conversations he brought Mickey to the viewer, and held up the baby’s tiny fist and made waving motions with it, and did all the stupid things adults did on such occasions. He didn’t say anything stupid, though. Hanna thought he had probably never said a stupid thing in his life.

  This occupied very little of the three weeks. It took much less time to get to more remote destinations in space, the space-time laws governing Inspace transit having an entirely counterintuitive relation to those directing three dimensions. A shorter way to New Earth—meaning a shorter interval in time—might be found someday, but now Hanna, trying to anchor herself in what was instead of what had been, had too much time on her hands.

  Work helped. She had learned that when, without much choice about it, she had taken over Contact Education—

  (She had hardly spoken in weeks. Her voice sounded rusty.

  “Contact—education? I can’t.”

  “You can. Let me give you the reasons why you will. Bodily assault on an operative of Intelligence and Security. Conspiring and aiding in holding him against his will. Conspiring and aiding in setting him adrift in deep space with no life support but a spacesuit—”

  “He was not adrift! He was securely fastened to a relay structure and I gave Fleet his exact location within minutes!”

  “The charge will not mention that. You will also be charged as accessory to everything Michael Kristofik would have been charged with if he had lived. I won’t recite the list. It was too long to memorize. Ask yourself why you are here instead of in a cell.”

  “You. You are using your influence to protect me. Again.”

  “Nobody has that much influence! No human individual. The full Commission might—if someone influences them.”

  Silence.

  “Ask me who can do that, Hanna.”

  She said grudgingly, “Who.”

  It was better than the night before, when he had remarked that Michael Kristofik had not been unambiguously heterosexual. She had said, “He was not ambiguous with me,” and savagely hurled a teacup at his head.

  “Relations with the nations of Uskos are of paramount importance to the Commission. At the moment Norsa of Ell is one of the most important beings on Uskos. He is therefore extremely important to the Commission. It would make Norsa unhappy to see you imprisoned—”

  “You cannot imprison me. I was made a citizen of the nation of Ell.”

  “Norsa has made that clear. There is Personality Adjustment, however.”

  Silence. And fear.

  “Whereas it would make Norsa happy, and would therefore make all the Commissioners happy, to see you heading the new division. Think about it, Hanna.”

  Silence. But the sullen blue glare was an answer.)

  —so Hanna worked. She had begun studying New Earth’s language before leaving Old Earth, a minimal challenge for someone who had had to become fluent in three alien tongues, and now she practiced it, and added a study of Oversight’s files on New Earth. She was not going to be welcomed there, at least not by Oversight. She was going as a functionary of another government department, one now locked in a power struggle with Oversight over resources: search for aliens, or search for lost colonies? She knew she could not make them forget that, but at least she could demonstrate respect for their work by demonstrating knowledge of it. Besides, the knowledge might come in handy when she got there.

  When she did, though, Oversight wasn’t the problem.

  • • •

  The Oversight historian was friendly, in fact. She was Amir Almond, a native of Earth, a slight Asian woman, a little hesitant at first. She said they needed to talk before Hanna went to meet with the archivist.

  They sat outdoors in a warm shower of sunlight, in front of the building where Almond had her office. This was an interim outpost, not designed to be permanent, but the buildings that housed offices, laboratories, and dwellings did not look flimsy.

  “The New Earth population pays attention to its towns,” Almond said when Hanna commented. “We didn’t want to put up something ugly. Functional, yes. Grotesque, no.”

  “Thoughtful . . . Have the people been pleased about getting back in contact with Earth? I know their historical knowledge of Earth ended pre-Polity.”

  “They have a lot of catching up to do, but they’re very pleased. On the whole.” Amir sighed. “Of course, the very first thing we had to do was tell them about the Plague Years and say, by the way, Plague’s still around, so here’s your vaccine, now drink it down like good little colonists . . . !”

  Hanna laughed, but without humor. “I saw what Plague did to Gadrah. Although I knew it as Dawkins’ Fever.”

  “Yes, that’s its other name. The original name. You . . . ?” Amir looked at her curiously. Comprehension came into her eyes.

  “Oh!” she said. “That was you!”

  “Yes, I was there.”

  “Some of my colleagues haven’t forgiven you yet for getting there before us . . . !”

  Amir’s lips curved, but Hanna said, “There were five of us.” On the run. “We were only trying to survive. One of us didn’t make it. But not because of Plague.”

  Amir seemed not to have noticed her change in mood.

  “Did you know you’re a case study?” she asked.

  “What, the five of us on Gadrah? An Oversight how-not-to-do-it study, or something?”

  “No, no! You personally. In a medical text. It came up when I was talking to a physician friend once about cross-infection from alien species. He said there was only one known case. You got a knife cut on Zeig-Daru and it became infected, am I correct?”

  It had happened on a Zeigan spacecraft in a knife fight to the death.

  “Close enough.”

  “Topical infection of subject’s right arm. Something like that.”

  “Amir, they had to take my arm apart and regenerate out from the bone! Does that sound like a topical infection to you?”

  Amir thought something like, Oops!

  Hanna sighed. “Amir, I’m sorry. These things we’ve been talking about—I have some bad memories. Can we talk about something else? What did you want to see me about before I go to the archives?”

  “The archivist,” Amir said. She almost patted the bench beside her, a subliminal soothing motion. Hanna had gotten up at some point, at one of the painful jabs to memory, without being aware of it. She went back and sat down again.

  Amir said, “He’s really a nice man—one of those big-bear types. Loves his archives. And his tea—oh, my, how he loves his tea! He made the jump to Standard right away, and the translation programs for the archives got done twice as fast as they would have without his help. He’s been grumbling a little lately. Sort of growling! I don’t think,” she laughed, “he was used to working quite so hard, especially over such a sustained period. He wasn’t really pleased when your department’s request came in. ‘What!’” Amir tried to growl. “‘On top of all this other extra work I have to do these days?’ You know the attitude I mean?”

  “I certainly do. I’ve felt that way myself from time to time.”

  “I guess we all have. Anyway, he wasn’t thrilled about your coming here, but he was prepared to be helpful. Until last night.”

  Amir was suddenly wary. Something in Hanna twitched. She said, “What exactly happened last night?”

  “Someone dropped a remark—well, it was m
e, actually. Just in passing. I said, oh, by the way, the woman who’s coming is D’neeran. And he said, what’s that? So I explained about D’neera.”

  “And he hates me,” Hanna said.

  “Well, yes.”

  • • •

  Even though she was forewarned, Chain Charpentier’s hostility hit Hanna like a fist. She stammered for the first time in years, and she was only trying to introduce herself.

  “I know who you are,” he said. He thought: I know what you are, too.

  “Mr. Charpentier,” she said, “what do you think I am?”

  “That!” he said triumphantly. A stubby forefinger poked at the air in her direction. “You read my mind just now. Didn’t you?”

  “Mr. Charpentier,” she said, “I could hardly help it. Do you know how strongly you’re projecting? Would you kindly stop projecting? And may I have a cup of tea?”

  “I’m doing what?” he said, and added, “I’m not working with you. And no tea!”

  The tea-making apparatus was in a corner of the archivist’s office. Hanna went to it, calculating dates in her head. The ancestors of these people, otherwise apparently free of prejudice, had left Earth at a time when hostility to telepaths had become vicious. And nothing had happened to their descendants here, in their isolation, to add to their knowledge or change their minds.

  Hanna started to make tea. Charpentier, stunned by the effrontery, did not protest because he was briefly speechless. Hanna decided to take advantage of his silence. She did know some history: her own.

  “Mr. Charpentier,” she said, “I would like to tell you a story. I ask only that you listen.”

  Without turning to look at him, or waiting for a response, she began.

  “My many-times-great grandmother was named Constanzia Bassanio. She was born on Earth, and she was a member of the first completely telepathic generation. Whatever plans the governments of Earth had for telepaths when they started the so-called New-Human Genetic Project had been dropped. They were already afraid of what they saw in people like Constanzia’s mother and father. They were terrified of children like Constanzia. And that fear seeped into the population of Earth like poison.”

  He wasn’t interrupting, at least.

  “By the time Constanzia was six, no one identified as a telepath was safe anywhere on Earth. Many were murdered. So were others who were not telepaths; it was enough to point a finger and shout ‘New-human!’ and a mob would form.

  “The governments of Earth built an enclave—a sanctuary, they called it—and moved the entire population of the New-Human Project into it. There were fifty to sixty thousand people there, all telepaths. Except the guards. They had to be true-human, because it’s hard for telepaths to learn to fight. We feel other people’s pain. And that first generation had not learned to block, even when it meant the difference between surviving and—not.”

  Charpentier had not moved. The tea was ready. Hanna filled two mugs and set them on the small table nearby. She still did not look at Charpentier, and she didn’t stop talking either.

  “Constanzia spent her entire childhood and adolescence in that enclave. Conditions were humane, but if she wanted to go out, she had to have an armed true-human escort. In time, people stopped asking to go out. At some point the guards had begun to feel that they were not guarding the telepaths from true-humans, but the other way around.”

  Hanna sat down and sipped tea.

  “All this guarding was getting expensive. So the governments of Earth built another enclave, this one on Earth’s airless moon, where there was no population to guard against—or to guard. Earth’s satellite keeps one face always to the planet, a spectacular sight. I’ve seen it. But the enclave was built deep inside. The people in it never saw the home they had been torn from, and they never saw the sun.

  “This enclave was segregated by gender. The governments of Earth were afraid to kill some sixty thousand people outright. There would have been a terrible outcry, even with the endemic hatred of telepaths. But this way the problem would, so to speak, die out. No more telepathic children, no more problem. And meanwhile the entire population was well away from Earth.

  “The governments of Earth were so used to guarding, however, that they kept it up. It couldn’t have been easy for the guards, either. A telepath doesn’t just tell you he’s in pain; he makes you feel it with him. But by then the character of the true-humans chosen to be guards had by necessity changed. They were selected, so to speak, to be impervious to the suffering of others. At least that. I will not say they were chosen specifically to enjoy it. But many of them, it appears, did.

  “The first weeks were terrible. The guards could not stand the bombardment of emotion. They urgently needed to force the captives to stop projecting their fear and grief, their loneliness at being separated from spouses and lovers and children, and they turned to violence. Many people were beaten, including Constanzia. It’s said she was badly scarred.

  “It’s hard to keep beating innocent people if you see them as people, so steps were taken to make the people seem less human. They cut off Constanzia’s lovely hair and shaved her scalp. The family story says her hair was much like mine, black as space, and that she wore it long, as I do. The story says she even looked like me—and perhaps she did, but no images from those days survive.

  “That phase didn’t last long. The governments of Earth found a solution: the telepaths’ water supply was infused with strong sedatives.

  “And that was supposed to be the end of it—all the telepaths half-awake, half-asleep, until the last of them died.”

  Chain Charpentier suddenly came to the table and sat down. He said, “This must have been just after my ancestors left. How did yours get out?”

  “With the help of good people,” Hanna said. “And they were true-humans.

  “They were wealthy, but not wealthy enough to fund a settlement ship. It wasn’t a settlement ship that went to D’neera, but a strung-out fleet, one ship at a time, as the rescuers scrambled for the money to buy them. Worse than that: fertile, Earth-like planets were in high demand. In return for giving up such a lovely piece of real estate, the governments of Earth, or corrupt officials, required payment for each and every refugee allowed to leave, even the smallest infant, even the unborn child Constanzia was carrying. There was a price on each of my ancestors’ heads, Mr. Charpentier.

  “Not all the ships made it to D’neera. There was no one in the Lunar enclave experienced in spaceflight, and there was time only for hasty, last-minute training. Desperation training. There was a time limit, you see. An amnesty period, the governments of Earth called it . . .

  “Not everyone on Luna got off, either. Some of them died there, after many years, drugged and alone,” she said, and saw Charpentier shudder.

  “The order of departure was fixed by lottery. Constanzia was one of the last to make it out. But—would you like to hear a happy ending to one story, Mr. Charpentier? Constanzia and the man she loved had conceived a child just before the removal to Luna. On the very night before it began, it’s said. She was pregnant all those months in the deeps of the moon. And her lover found her on the last ship, and he was there when the next of my line, their daughter Melisande, was born. They went on to have two more children, both sons, and they were together until they died.

  “And that’s the end of my story,” Hanna said.

  Charpentier finally drank his cold tea. He set the mug down with a thump. He said, “Well, do you want to get some work done or not?”

  It was still grudging, but it was consent.

  • • •

  It was late afternoon when they had their tea, and they did not start work until the next morning. Hanna had only gone back to the module assigned her in the Oversight complex. She looked around at Dwar with enjoyment as she returned to the Archives office at Town Center next day. There were deciduous trees in the re
gion of Dwar and they were in full leaf; it was summer here, and a hydra-headed fountain splashed vigorously in the town’s main square. The day was warm, the square quiet, and Hanna stood for a while by the fountain, admiring the bursting joy of the water and feeling fresh wind on her face. She was accustomed to the confinement of spacecraft, but journeys in space always reminded her that a simple variable of terrestrial worlds—changing weather—was a treasure. Dwar too was a jewel in its gentle way. Its builders had used warm brown native stone for most structures, and laid roadways of crushed white rock. It made for a pleasing contrast, and Hanna, surrounded by the fantastic architecture of Admin’s city for too long, took her time getting to Archives.

  Chain had petitioned Amir Almond for all the data he could get about D’neera, and about Hanna, and absorbed as much as he could while he waited. Hanna sensed that, but he did not say anything about it at first, so neither did she.

  “We start where?” he asked.

  “Well, let’s re-run the searches Starr asked for, just as a check, and go on from there.”

  “Starr? Jameson?”

  “Contact,” she said absently, eyes on the text on a screen.

  “That wouldn’t be the one who used to run the Polity, would it?”

  It appeared that Chain had not thoroughly absorbed several hundred years of history in a few months’ time. He could hardly be blamed for that—especially by Hanna.

  “No one commissioner ‘runs’ the Polity,” she said patiently. “And their powers are limited. To some degree. It’s complicated, Chain.”

  “So he used to be one of the people running the Polity?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Hanna, trying not to laugh.

  “And he’s your boss?”

  “Technically.”

  “What does that mean, technically?”

  She thought, to herself, It means we sleep together. Out loud she said with equal truth, “He wouldn’t try to make a first contact himself. I wouldn’t dream of trying to administer something like the department he heads.”