Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  “Come in, Hal,” she said gently. “What happened?”

  He showed her an image of himself on Admin’s concourse, enjoying the view of the river between rain showers. And an image of the couple who passed by and the man glancing his way. Hal did not know the man, but evidently at some time Hal had been pointed out to him as a—

  D’neeran! spat the man’s thought—filthy, snooping telepath!

  I know, Hanna answered.

  H’ana, I couldn’t help it, I know you tell us not to react but I couldn’t help it, I looked at him, that’s all, just looked at him, and H’ana, he wanted to kill me!

  I know, she said again; took him into the embrace of her thought and soothed him, showing him again what she had gone through in her own first immersion in true-human society, not as long ago as it seemed. Things were even a little better now.

  Routine teaching duties, she thought after he left.

  She had gone through this with all her D’neeran students. A dozen more had started it, besides the successful four. But most could not endure what true-humans thought of them even with all the solace she could give them, and relinquished their hopes and fled home. She did not think Hal would finish the course.

  She had not let him see that, though. In theory, she should not have been able to hide it from him. But she was a telepathic Adept, one of a rare class even on her own world. And in some part of her brain forever subtly, materially changed, she had acquired an immense power from the group mind of the alien People of Zeig-Daru—the power to block as much of her thought as she wished from any human telepath.

  No one except Starr Jameson knew this, and there was another thing she had not told even him (though he must suspect). While she taught her students how to keep from slipping into true-humans’ thoughts uninvited—difficult for a D’neeran—and how, in the interests of harmony, they should never, ever attempt to probe those thoughts, she had long since dispensed with her own scruples. If true-humans wanted to lie to her explicitly or by omission, she had decided, they were fair game.

  • • •

  The document was headed simply:

  “Report to Archives.

  “I’m writing this because our grandchildren might want to know about it someday.

  “This place, the town of Dwar on New Earth, has been visited by nonhumans.

  “There were only a few of them and they only stayed a few days. They didn’t show any sign of hostility but they didn’t respond to friendly overtures, either. Mostly they just walked around and looked at things. They seemed to prefer to sit under trees and talk to each other most of the time. Maybe this was some kind of rest stop for them. I said there were only a few, but that could mean we only saw a few at a time, not necessarily the same ones every time. They looked so strange to us that they would have had to stay longer for us to learn to tell them apart. And they were here, or some were here, two or three times a day, with gaps in between, so maybe they were on some kind of rotation. We assume they were using a shuttle, unless there’s some way to build a starship small enough to land on a planet. Earth couldn’t, when our ancestors left, but they said it wouldn’t be long, so why couldn’t somebody else?

  “Anyway, they came down in the meadowland out past Li Chen’s farm. Nobody saw the first landing, but once we knew what to look for we could see their craft coming and going from there, and after they left we went over to look, and that was obviously the place they used for landing.

  “We talked about them a lot while they were here, and we’ve talked about them since. This is a consensus report, so I’m including everything that everybody saw.

  “It doesn’t seem like much now. A lot of us tried as best we could, with gestures and single words, to start some kind of language exchange, but they just flapped their ears at us and walked away. Same thing when we tried drawing pictures. Same thing when we offered them food. We have no idea what it meant when they flapped those ears, which they did with each other, too. Maybe it meant they were laughing.

  “I don’t know how far we could have gotten in a language exchange anyway, because I don’t think we could make the same sounds they do. Maybe because of the way their mouths are made, a lot of the language we heard when they were talking to each other consisted of whistling. They use clicks, too, almost as much as the whistling. They do use words (we assume they were words) along with that, though. It’s really kind of a musical language to listen to, but I don’t think a human being could ever speak it.

  “I guess the best thing I can do is explain what they looked like. We’re agreed on that.

  “They’re shaped like human beings, but slender and taller than we are, at least these were all taller than any of us, by maybe thirty centimeters on the average. Arms and legs proportionate by our standards to the human head and torso, but there seem to be extra joints, or more versatile ones than we have, judging by the way they walk and point at things. It makes them look graceful and it made us wonder what kind of dances they have. They have a head covering similar to human hair in different shades of brown, but it’s thin, sparse. You wouldn’t think it would give much protection from the weather, but nobody ever saw one wear a hat. Of course, it was summer, and we didn’t have much rain while they were here.

  “Under the forehead there are what look like two bony plates most of the time, but a few responsible, truthful people saw the plates slide up and roll back one time, in one individual, and there were eyes under them, although they must not use that pair often. Maybe when they want to get a really good look at something.

  “Under that there’s a pair of regular eyes. They come in different colors, but they’re all on the light side, gray or yellowish. They don’t seem to have pupils, so we don’t have any idea what the mechanism is for seeing. There isn’t any equivalent of a human nose on the face, which is all eyes and mouth. Their mouths seem to be perfectly round. Several people got a glimpse of teeth, not white like ours but black or dark gray, and they have flexible tongues, the impression being that those are longer and thinner than ours.

  “Their ears are where you’d expect them to be, but stretched out they’re huge—as I said, flapping them seems to be part of the way they communicate. Most of the time, though, they keep them folded toward the backs of their heads. The ears move around a lot, but they’re only completely unfolded for that flapping. All the individuals we saw, by the way, had shades of grayish-brown skin. None of them were anywhere near as dark as some of our people.

  “But their noses! If I may interject a personal comment, their noses—I have to call them that, they obviously function for breathing—were the most surprising thing of all to me. They’ve got one on each side of the neck, finger-shaped but short, sort of curved to fit the neck and attached there like tubes, and the tips are flexible too, though nothing like the ears—the tubes just seem to expand and contract with the breath, and they each have three openings at the front. They might connect directly to lungs, bypassing the gullet, but there’s no way to know, and no way to know what they use for a larynx or how air gets to it or how it works.

  “Their hands look surprisingly like ours—four fingers, although proportionately longer and with an extra joint, opposable thumbs, ditto. Nobody ever saw their feet. That I know of.

  “The rest of this report is not consensus. I want to make that clear.

  “I heard a rumor that one of the nonhumans, just one, had been seen coming out of the woods with Mi-o Roland, who is about twelve in Earth years, so I went to ask her about it. That did happen—it was her mother who saw them. If I didn’t know better, I would suspect they had been having some kind of sex. Mi-o is said to be somewhat advanced for her age in that respect. Anyway, Mi-o’s mother was there, and Mi-o wouldn’t answer any questions with a yes or no, unless a giggle means one thing or the other. I wish I had recorded that conversation! Mi-o did seem to be implying that that’s exactly what they had been doing.
But she wouldn’t come out and admit it, so even if she knows what’s under those creatures’ boots and baggy coveralls, the rest of us might never find out.

  “Maybe she said more to her mother, though, because when Ms. Roland walked me outside, she asked if I thought a nonhuman could get a human pregnant. I told her it was genetically impossible.

  “Respectfully submitted by Maya Selig. Sworn statements from forty-seven citizens attached.”

  Hanna sat back and muttered, “Thank you very much for nothing, Maya Selig.”

  On reflection, though, the people of Dwar had done the best they could with damn little to start with. In fact, they had done an excellent job.

  It was late. Hanna made a quick meal in her office and went home.

  • • •

  There were three people in Jameson’s study when she went in, one of them Jameson. The second was three months old going on four; he lay on his stomach on the floor, pushing at it to get his head up in the air so he could look around in a wobbly way, his eyes huge with pleasure and surprise. The third was Thera August. She loved lecturing adults on the minutiae of infant development, and since Hanna was not much interested, and Jameson was, he would do.

  Thera was arguably the best child companion in human space. She had lived in the homes of the rich and powerful for a hundred and twenty years, and had been on the point of comfortable retirement when she agreed to come to Jameson for reasons lost in an obscure skein of family and political relationships. In her long career she had heard more secrets than an entire espionage network could have gathered, and she had never divulged one of them. She was not a friend and she was not a servant. Although paid (well), she was not exactly an employee, either. She was an independent, completely liberated planet. She was not the tribe of relatives and neighbors who would have helped care for a baby on Hanna’s homeworld, but she was not (the option Hanna had violently rejected) a perfectly programmed, humanlike servo, either. She was one of the rewards that came with the kind of old wealth Jameson had inherited with the family estate on Heartworld, and Hanna had been in no position to turn this favor down.

  She went straight to the baby and dropped to the floor and picked him up. He chuckled and reached for her face, and she covered his with kisses. He smelled sweet and fresh and it was some time before she paid attention to the adults in the room.

  “I can take him with me tomorrow,” she said to Thera, “for the morning at least. There’s a holo conference with F’thal in the afternoon. Not that he’d be disruptive. Just distracting—last time they started bragging about their own young and we never got back to the agenda.”

  “I doubt he’ll ever be deliberately disruptive,” Thera said. “You can tell a lot about personality by this stage. This one is going to be sunlight.”

  Like his father, Hanna thought.

  She kissed her son again and looked at him, determined to focus only on his own, individual face. How unfair it would be to seek resemblances! He was not Michael Kristofik all over again; he was Michael Bassanio, unique, himself, and Hanna would not even call him by his formal name. He was Mickey: the future, not the past.

  Hanna held herself to this standard by an effort of will because the past was still close as her breath. Mickey’s father had died a little more than twelve Standard months ago, though the anniversary itself, blessedly, had meant nothing to her. A year of twelve Standard months was not a year on her native world; it certainly was not a year on Gadrah, where seasons stretched through far more days than in other places where humans lived. The preceding fall in this hemisphere on Earth had been harder, because it had been autumn in the place where Michael had left her. He had not meant to die, it was true. But sometimes that did not seem to make a difference.

  Perhaps, she still thought sometimes, I will take Mickey and flee always ahead of fall, spend my life in springs and summers.

  But it would be wrong to do that to him. I must give him a lasting home, if I can.

  She looked at her son’s happy face and thought that Michael must have been an infant like this. She knew his childhood had been secure and safe, full of work but full of love. Until he was about ten.

  Then came the rest of it.

  She whispered, “That will never happen to you, Mickey.”

  Because she would kill for her son. She did not think: die for him—because she simply wouldn’t die. She would go on killing and killing, until everybody who might hurt this child as his father had been hurt was just—gone.

  Chapter III

  ON BATTLEGROUND, there was war. There had always been war. There would always be war. There had never been anything else and there never would be.

  The being the humans would call Kwoort did not entertain a thought that it might be otherwise. Kakrekt might, but she did not tell anyone. Especially not the enemy and its Demon High Commander, Kwoort.

  • • •

  On Old Earth, Starr Jameson requested further information from New Earth. Knowing bureaucrats well, he was specific about what kinds of information he wanted and how to go about finding it.

  Sometimes, when Hanna wasn’t looking, he rocked Mickey’s cradle himself. Wondering, as he did, why he discouraged Hanna’s suggestions that it was time she and Mickey made a home of their own. Wondering if the quiet of his house would one day be empty instead of restful, without Hanna’s voice, without Mickey.

  But certain political currents were shifting, and soon he would be too busy to notice that they were gone.

  Of course he would.

  • • •

  On New Earth, the archivist ran the specified searches. They were without result. He reported the fact with some relief. He had too much work already without legendary Earth sticking its nose in farther than it already was.

  • • •

  And on Old Earth, Hanna Bassanio said grimly, “I’m going to have to go out there.”

  Chapter IV

  HANNA HAD HUNTED (and been hunted) in a variety of modes, but this one was new.

  The first part of it was simple enough, if frustrating. To begin with, there were restrictions on her movements, a reminder that officially, thanks to her foray outside Polity law, she was an accused felon, however leniently treated and however silken her prison’s walls. At this time she was allowed to leave Earth only on demonstrably official business for Alien Relations and Contact; she had not even been allowed to go home to D’neera for Mickey’s birth. Jameson managed to get permission for her to go to New Earth, though, with no more than routine bureaucratic delay. But permission for Mickey to accompany her was denied, as assurance that she would return.

  Then, having no access to a vessel she could pilot herself—Jameson did not even bother trying to get someone to loan her one—she had to wait a month until an Oversight transport going to New Earth could take her there. In the interval she sometimes thought wistfully of the years when Jameson was Heartworld’s representative to the Coordinating Commission of the Interworld Polity, one of the most important beings in human space. He could certainly get things done quickly then!

  “I’m somewhat more limited now,” he said when she complained. He was smiling, she noticed. He had almost never smiled in those days.

  “What, no more government-funded star-going yachts at your disposal?”

  “I miss the yacht,” he admitted.

  Since he might still be a commissioner if it had not been for Hanna (leaving aside the fact that she had, at a crucial moment, blown up the yacht) this was a sore point for her. He put it down to routine political upheaval, a minor swirl in the currents of history. Either way, she didn’t bring it up again.

  In any case, it meant she had time to get Bella Qu’e’n, her prize pupil and a D’neeran, detached from Bella’s current job and trained to replace Hanna for the uncertain duration. The detaching was easy—graduates of Hanna’s program were understood to be on call for Con
tact, and Bella now headed a similar program of studies that Hanna herself had initiated, several years before, on their native world. Harder was convincing Bella, who had a thicker (mental) skin than most of her kind, that she would have to resign herself to holding some students’ hands.

  Eventually Hanna was taken aboard the Colonial Oversight ship for the three-week flight to New Earth, and immediately found herself at odds with reality.

  This spacecraft was much larger than Michael Kristofik’s Golden Girl had been. But the isolation and confinement of all spaceships was fundamentally the same. You were as dependent on the functioning of a complex artifact as a fetus on the womb it inhabited; however clean the air you knew it subtly as re-breathed, and there were literal limits to how far you could walk in any direction. The transport therefore felt like Michael’s GeeGee, and much of Hanna’s time with Michael had been lived in space. Now, often, it seemed he must be just out of sight, that she could go into the corridor and he would be standing there, face alight at seeing her, arms open as she went to him. She found herself weeping again; the uncontrollable bursts of tears had stopped for a while. She did not know how long it would be before they stopped altogether, or if they ever would.

  She had experienced other deaths firsthand, but that one—the sudden death of the man she loved wholly, while she was fully engaged with his mind and emotions—had been destructive beyond belief. The detachment of the Adept trance had been the only thing, probably, that saved her from dying when Michael did. Afterward there had been nothing to shield her from her own sorrow and anger—even when she was taken back to Earth, not quite in chains, and took shelter with Starr Jameson.

  Temporarily, she had said, but she was still there, and so was the unexpected rage at Michael for abandoning her in death. She tried not to redirect it at Jameson, usually succeeded, occasionally failed. He appeared not to notice her fury, but he had to when she threw things at him. He ducked, and remained calm. Her anger did not move him and he would not pity her.