Battleground Page 8

  The baby sleeps, with love his watch and ward.

  It’s safe to move away. The baby sleeps.

  Look back without fear. There’s no danger to be seen. He’s safe.

  Turn away, turn to your work. He’s safe.

  It’s all right to move away. It’s safe to move away. The baby sleeps.

  • • •

  Endeavor Three was quieter than usual. Nobody seemed to know why. People were awake as usual, alert as usual. It was just—

  Funny, I remember when my daughter was young, a man found himself thinking. Nothing could wake that one once she fell asleep, but I used to tiptoe, all the same.

  • • •

  She floats.

  She has not been so deep in trance for many months.

  Before, twice, she was holding hard to life.

  First, her own. Succeeded because help was near and she held on long enough.

  The second time, Michael’s. Failed. Because no help could ever have been enough.

  No emotion in trance. There, but distanced. Return when you choose.

  She has searched in space for alien minds before, but not as an Adept, and those she found, the People of Zeig-Daru, were powerful telepaths, far more powerful than any D’neeran, and they were searching for her, too. That’s not how it is this time.

  But this will work, if she has the will to do it. In trance, emotionless, she has the will.

  She knows how they appear in one another’s eyes.

  So . . .

  Visualize those strange heads, the great ears, multiple eyes. Seek a match, look for images, slip behind the eyes that see other faces. Eyes that look into another’s.

  Feel something like an ocean, a susurration of thought.

  Slip into it, float in it, let it surround—

  Ah, a coalescence, closer, deeper, see the separate threads. Pick one. Follow. Look. Feel . . .

  Look away from those other eyes to see a strip of beach.

  Danger. But only alertness, no feeling of fear.

  Expecting attack. Not from her. From everywhere, all the time.

  A wily one, this one. Old.

  Old! So old!

  That was a shock.

  No emotion in trance.

  There’s a place behind, some distance behind, out of sight. Underground.

  Defend it.

  Nothing ahead but hot sand, ocean to the left, dense foliage to the right. Orders. Break for cover as soon as Demon Soldiers appear.

  A subliminal pulse of drumbeats.

  Suppose in this skirmish they have guns? Because we only have spears. But maybe they only have knives, like the skirmish near the place where missiles are made. Then we were the ones with knives. But I survived, like the time before that and the year of the summer before that.

  Who makes the decisions, about knives and guns and spears? The High Commander? The Holy Man? They have so many summers, their decisions must be right.

  But I have many summers now, I wonder why I have a spear when some in some battles have weapons that spit fire or deform the hearts in the chest.

  Why do I ask such questions, this year of this summer? The two hundred forty-sixth. But the Commanders have many more so they must be right, and the Holy Man has even more than the Commanders.

  But two hundred and forty-six summers is something. It is something! All my crèchemates ceased surviving long ago but I survive. Maybe I will be a Commander one day—

  “H’ana!” someone calls. The D’neeran form of her name. “Time’s up. You agreed.”

  Hanna opened her eyes, felt her metabolism speed up like a smooth machine. She was in her cabin. Carl and Glory watched her drink to ease her dry throat. Then she told them what she had learned.

  They didn’t believe her at first. The telepaths did.

  • • •

  “Status, please.”

  “An important fact.”

  “And that is?”

  “They can live for hundreds of years. Standard centuries. Unless they die in war. Nearly all of them do. Maybe all.”

  There was a silence. When the deep voice spoke again, it was as calm as ever. No shock.

  “How sure are you that your perception of time correlates one-to-one with theirs?”

  “Positive.”

  “What else?”

  “This war appears to be religious, as our linguists thought. As you know, they tentatively assigned the words ‘holy man’ and ‘demon’ to certain terms—there’s some confusion about which side is which. What I sensed confirms the working definitions. The subject also thought of a wide range of variation in weaponry. There’ll be details in my full report.”

  “And what else?”

  “I’m not sure . . . I pushed the subject a little, questioning some underlying assumptions, but—they weren’t quite new questions. He seemed to have been asking himself a few. The—oh, how can I explain it, the track, the trail, the connections, the circuits—the pattern of the thoughts I saw—they were already there—recent and faint, but that’s why I went that way—they’re questions he’s never asked before, maybe doubt—”

  Explaining this kind of intimate contact to true-humans was nearly impossible. She did as she always had, explained as best she could.

  “All right. And what else?”

  “Nothing else, I think. Not from this one contact.”

  “Can you draw any conclusions about their society from it?”

  “Only one. This contact was real-time, not a transmission from the past. It supports the hypothesis that war is ongoing. I don’t know how they tell one side from the other, by the way. Insignia, facial appearance, racial characteristics—I had no impression of anything that would distinguish enemy from ally.”

  “What is your recommended next step?”

  “I’ll do it again.” And again, and again.

  For once, the breath of a sigh. For once, the other voice. The one that says: thou.

  “I thought you would say that.”

  “Until tomorrow?”

  “Until tomorrow. Endit.”

  • • •

  After that it was easier.

  This one—much younger. Reading something on a—screen? No, a bound book—that—she?— I think it’s she—holds in her hand. Surroundings a gray blur, underground, aboveground? A building? A—tent?

  • • •

  “Status?”

  “The linguists have seen no literature as we know it because there is none.”

  “There are treatises on warfare, I understand. And religious texts.”

  “I have found no trace of admiration for their form, nor contemplation of the art of making them.”

  “Poetry?”

  “No trace in any text extracted from the data. No trace in any mind that I have touched.”

  • • •

  She spent so much time in trance that it bled over into daily life. What she got in trance ground her down, outside it, with frustration. That first contact proved exceptional, a suggestion of riches that came to nothing. Nearly everyone on the planet, it seemed, walked through life without question or analysis. She learned rote details of an infinity of tasks, laid over equally rote consciousness of a distant, godlike authority; she drifted in an undercurrent that reminded her of rote prayer, borrowed ears to hear the hiss of rhythms that reminded her of drums, borrowed eyes that in the spaces between tasks fastened on video projections of war, speeches, and public assemblies.

  Eventually she met with something different; and when she came out of trance, hated it.

  • • •

  “Status, please.”

  “We have seen no transmissions of domestic life because there is none.”

  “You told the social scientists there is a child-rearing structure.�
��

  “I’ve seen it now. It’s a structure for producing Soldiers for the Holy Man. There is no evidence of childhood or parenthood as we know it.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “Wait. A moment.”

  Jameson waited patiently through a silence that was longer than a moment. He wished he could see Hanna’s face, but he was not yet willing to push the restrictions on voice-only, limited-data communications. When she spoke again the odd, remote quality of trance was gone, but she was choosing words thoughtfully, carefully.

  “In this contact, I observed a dialogue between a male and a female. They are—filling a certain role in the life of the society of which they are a part. It is . . . in another society it would be a parental role, but the emotions we associate with that role are absent. The adults view themselves only as breeders. The structure is not familial, and is directed only toward physical survival of the young to maturity. There is no parallel in my experience. Except, perhaps, breeders of animal stock . . .”

  She paused. Jameson was used to these pauses. He did not try to rush her.

  She said at last, “The only Standard words that work here are ‘nursery,’ or ‘crèche.’ The male and female I was with are caretakers; they are two of many in this one place. The females primarily suckle multiple infants. The males see to supplying the females’ enormous nutritional needs, and to feeding older children and keeping the complex organized. I don’t know if this pair are the biological parents of any of the children there. It seems possible, in context with some of the things they thought about, but it doesn’t seem to matter. My impression is that whatever connection there was, even to the female’s identification of her own young, is weakening, and soon will be gone.”

  Another pause. When it had gone on for a long time he said, “I was beginning to think some kind of personal parent-child relationship was universal among sentient species.”

  “Evidently not,” Hanna said. “We thought two genders were standard for optimal evolution, too, until we came into contact with Uskos. Now we know that one will work, under certain conditions. Reproduction here might require three.”

  “What?” he said, but she went on without answering.

  “The dialogue was about crèche issues. I will give staff sociologists the details I have. But mostly I watched for other things they thought about, in the intervals when they weren’t talking.

  “The female is changing roles. She is—” Hanna was choosing words even more carefully now. “She has been in a nurturing mode . . . nurturing, in this context, meaning no more than nursing. She is moving toward a, a warrior role, a fighting mode. It feels instinctual, cyclical, but still there is the sense of a, a—a structure of some sort, directed from outside—military? Governmental? I don’t know.”

  “What about—”

  “The male has filled a military role too, and will do it again, but he’s at—the center of the reproductive cycle? While she’s emerging from it?”

  “You are asking me?”

  “Just thinking. Of the best way to describe it. He’s immersed in caretaking and mating. They think about mating a lot. There’s an enormous reward there, I think.”

  This time the pause was very long. Finally he said, “Go on. Is there more?”

  “There’s something there that scares me,” she said unexpectedly. “When they think about mating, it’s not about a particular mate. It’s only about intense pleasure and an impersonal drive. It’s compulsive.”

  “Sounds like sex to me,” he said dryly.

  “No, no. Stop thinking like a human male. I think,” she said slowly, “I think there is an actual third party involved. When they think of mating there is another presence in their thoughts.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t see it. It’s like they don’t see it. Their perception of it, the sense they have of it, is purely tactile. Physically—physically, it might be quite small. And it might—” Her voice wavered. “I think it might not look like the ones I’ve been calling the male and the female at all.”

  They were both silent, thinking about it. Jameson felt an unaccustomed prickle in his spine. Something that could scare Hanna? Something about, of all things, sex, that could scare Hanna?

  He said suddenly, “What inhibitions do you have, Hanna?”

  He half expected her to say None, as you very well know, but there had to be something.

  After a while she said slowly, “I’m biased against impersonal sex. Even putting aside you and Michael, going back all the way to the first boy I made love with—I remember every boy, every man, I took to bed. Well, maybe not . . . do you remember every woman you’ve been with? Of course not. I can’t give you a list with the names of every man who’s pleasured me, either. But you’d recognize your lovers again. You’d know them. And you would have emotions along with the memories. ‘This one was good company’: a memory with pleasant connotations. ‘That one lied’: lingering anger, perhaps. ‘This one wanted to use me. That one genuinely liked me.’ That’s human thinking, for both male and female. It comes naturally to us; there’s some of that lasting personal connection to our sexual partners in all except the sickest individuals among us. No, even in them, twisted though it is.”

  She knew what she was talking about. She had known one of those human-seeming horrors. She had been present when Michael Kristofik put a monster to death.

  He said, “We designate those individuals as evil—”

  “They are evil.”

  “Is that what you sense?”

  “No . . . No. There’s no sense of malice where a human spirit should be. This element—” her voice was going dreamy now—“this element is part of a coherent gestalt. It’s integral to what these beings are. Oh . . .” Her voice changed again, hardened. “I see now. The impersonality touched something in me that is still sensitized. I just wish I could have killed them slowly,” Hanna said.

  It sounded like a non sequitur, but it was not. Hanna had personally killed two men who had raped her, and one of Michael Kristofik’s companions had killed the other two. Hanna had seemed to regard it as the appropriate penalty for what they had done. Apparently she now thought it had been too lenient.

  He gave her more time, finally prompted her: “And?”

  “Nothing else,” she said, suddenly sounding tired. “Nothing I can pull out as a viable thread.”

  “Well, what you have is substantial. This is going to be interesting,” he added, half to himself.

  “What? The crèches? How they mate?”

  “All of it. F’thal, Girritt, Zeig-Daru, Uskos—we knew nothing whatsoever about those populations prior to actual contact. For the first time we’re assembling a body of knowledge before we talk to them for the first time.”

  She murmured something; he did not think he could have heard her correctly. She could not have said, I don’t like them, not Hanna, and he said, “What was that, please?” and she said more loudly, “I don’t like them.”

  It was so unexpected that he could not respond immediately, and she went on. “It isn’t just the compulsive nature of their mating, the absence of emotion toward another individual. It’s that same impersonal attitude toward the young. Every single sentient species we’ve encountered has one thing in common: the deep, loving attachment to their children. Adults will even sacrifice themselves for other adults’ children, simply because they are children. I don’t think,” she said, her voice becoming very quiet, “anyone on that whole world feels love.”

  He took a deep breath. He could not tell how deeply she was disturbed by the idea; he could not even ask so intimate a question when everything they said was laid out in transcripts seen by many other eyes. He had to be as impersonal in his response as the creatures of Species Y.

  “Very well,” he said. “We’ll treat it as a hypothesis for now. We may find evidence to overturn it. Until
tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “Endit, then.”

  • • •

  Here was another difference. The scholars said, puzzled, that the religious and military texts picked up from old transmissions were curiously one-dimensional. There seemed to be no cultural layering. Even allowing for the limited subject matter, they said, the chief characteristic was repetition.

  In contrast, they brought up titles from Earth’s civilization, where cultures were layered richly one on another. The Gallic Wars. The Holy Bible.

  • • •

  “Status, please.”

  “The culture appears to lack layering because there is none. Past is assumed to resemble present. Future, it is assumed, will mirror past.”

  “With all the years they have at their disposal . . .”

  A sigh. Was that melancholy in the deep voice? But probably only Hanna would hear it.

  Jameson was one of a handful of humans whose immune systems were fundamentally incompatible with anti-senescence techniques, the prospect of their turning deadly always present. It was not the only reason he continued to resist his enduring attraction to Hanna, but it was an important one. Chronologically, he was no more than thirty years her senior. In terms of life span, there could be no estimate. It depended on whether the next attempt killed him or not.

  Hanna was one of the few people who knew it. She could imagine what he thought of squandered centuries.

  • • •

  Expect the unexpected, she had told her Contact Education students. Better yet, dispense with expectations. She was pretty good at that, she thought. Even allowing for the possibility that she was starting to believe her own legend, she thought she was pretty good at that.

  Until she detached from the mind of a Battleground child and found herself, with no apparent gap in time, screaming at someone in Communications to get her through to Earth now, she had to see her son’s face right now—!

  That ended, and she woke up seconds (it seemed) later in a darkened room. She was in sickbay. She knew she was sedated; had been forcibly sedated.