Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  “These first contacts. You’ve done two of them?”

  “And I’m here looking for a starting point for a third. Yes, Chain. That’s what I do. That’s what we’ll be doing together, you and I.”

  As they started the searches she heard him think: Just wait till I tell people who this is!

  She was getting used to being a legend.

  They had a second keyword list ready before the first, predictably fruitless, search was done: anything and any combination they could think of having to do with aliens, nonhumans, starflight, spacecraft, and on and on. Chain threw in “strange beings” for good measure. Nothing, except for many alerts on “landings”; but those dealt with maintenance flights to the mothership.

  “That’s right, she’s still up there,” Hanna said with interest. “And you still send people up?”

  “On a regular basis. If the orbit starts decaying into the atmosphere, we’re going to push her out toward space and wave good-bye.”

  “Chain, why didn’t your people do that long ago? It wouldn’t have affected your mayday beacon, and you wouldn’t have to worry about debris coming down on your heads. The thing’s huge. It would break up coming down through atmosphere, but it could do a lot of damage. Why’s it still there?”

  “Sentimental attachment?” He shrugged. “I guess someplace inside we still like to think we’re space travelers.”

  Hanna nodded. It made sense to her. She said, “Let’s see if Mi-o Roland ever put anything on record.”

  She had not. In fact, except for a birth record for Mi-o Roland consistent with the chronology, there was no evidence the girl had ever existed, apart from the Report to Archives.

  “Could she have changed her name?” Hanna said. “I forget—do women here customarily take their husbands’ names?”

  “Not usually,” he said, “but it’s not consistent. It’s an unusual first name, though. Let’s try—”

  Nothing.

  “Could she have changed that too? It’s a little awkward to pronounce. If she had wanted to change it to something easier, would it be a matter of public—well, no. That first search would have given us that.”

  Chain said, “This is a land of small towns, Hanna. We’ve spread over one continent, no more, and we’re spread thin at that. In a small town everybody knows your business anyway, so if you get around to reporting it to some central office—that’s me, for now—fine. If you don’t, nobody’s going to fine you or whatever they do where you come from. All reporting is voluntary.”

  He wore glasses; Hanna, who had never seen spectacles before, had examined them thoroughly. He took them off and laid them on the console where they worked. He looked sad. He said, “I’ve spent a lot of time with the Oversight historian. The kinds of questions she asked started me wondering. I’ve asked questions of my own, and Oversight’s free with its library. It’s different out there. With your people, I mean.”

  He meant the five worlds of the Interworld Polity and the others within its sphere of influence. He had ceased to see Hanna as D’neeran.

  He said, “We have a family named N’goto who make the finest porcelain you people have ever seen. Something about the clay on the riverbanks where they farm. The family developed the art of making it, oh, four hundred years ago? The rest of us buy it, sure. We ask for it a year in advance, usually a tea set for a marriage gift, and we pay the price the N’gotos ask, and it’s a high one, and it’s fair. We know how precious it is better than you Oversight people do.” (Hanna did not correct him. Oversight or Contact, it was all the Polity to him.) “The N’gotos don’t have much time to spare from the land, and this is their art, and it’s beautiful. Cherished.

  “Now Oversight is talking about markets in the Polity, and the family’s in an uproar.

  “I see things coming, Hanna. I see things I don’t like. They even say we have to stop calling this world New Earth, they say every colony ever settled wanted to call itself that and they all had to pick something else, and we’ll have to do that too. Not everybody sees everything I’ve been thinking about, but we’re all mad about that.”

  “Understandably,” said Hanna, but she was thinking of the alternatives to change. Stagnation, for one. A turning in, a narrowing of vision, knowledge trickling away. Helplessness in the face of new threats. She thought of Plague, and Gadrah.

  “Well, let’s get back to work,” he said.

  • • •

  “Nothing,” Hanna said later to Jameson, light-years away. It was late night in Dwar; Hanna had stayed up to reach Admin in Jameson’s morning. “I was reminded of the mothership, though. At the time of the incident, it was exactly where it is now—in orbit around New Earth. Surely the aliens would have boarded it. It’s clearly a starship, at least, to any beings with experience with starships. If they were here for R&R—a reasonable hypothesis, based on the accounts—they would have checked it for threats. Do you think they might have left traces?”

  She watched him think about it. She had always liked watching him think. The results were often surprising—and sometimes were direct hits on a target no one else had even seen.

  “I wouldn’t expect to find physical traces,” he said. “Not after generations of colonists making inspection trips. Presumably they would have noticed any damage or anything out of place—”

  “—like alien picnic leavings—”

  He gave her a startled look but said, “If they were curious about it, they might have tried to access the computers.”

  “I don’t know if I could recognize that if they had. Especially since these systems are obsolete. Do you think it’s worth my persuading someone here to take me up for a look? If there’s anything to find, finding it is probably beyond me.”

  He didn’t answer directly. “That would be beyond Oversight’s capabilities, too,” he said. “I will contact Fleet, though. It’s worth a look from them.”

  He would get results; and if anything substantial came of the examination of New Earth’s mothership, anything to make the whistling beings more real than one old report made them, Hanna might not be waiting around for transport the next time she needed it.

  • • •

  The next morning Chain said he couldn’t think of anything else to try. Hanna put her feet up and stared at uninformative displays. We’re too dependent on databanks, she thought. We think if something’s not in there, the something doesn’t exist.

  “Chain,” she said, “do you know anything about—oh, what is it?”

  She was dredging deep in her memory now. Some casual conversation Jameson had had with a dinner guest one evening, something that interested him; he seemed to be interested in everything.

  Often, Hanna listened to those conversations, even—once she was speaking—participated, but that night her hearing had felt muffled. That night she had only been waiting for the last guest to leave.

  Michael Kristofik had been dead four months. With every part of herself, with a completeness she had never known before, she had loved every part of him—the sunlight, and all the rest of that fractured personality, parts dark or damaged, haunted or lost. She had been deep in the trance of the Adept with him when he died, and all the light she had ever known went out in the moment of his death, and she had been insane with loss. Until she returned to Earth—was returned, like a package no one cared about—to Jameson.

  She still loved Michael, but he had rekindled an almost forgotten flame in her body, and it had not gone out with his death. She was used to being touched, used to being loved; her skin was starved, crying out with need. Desire was back. She desired Jameson with all the heat of their first coupling years before, and she knew she was desired in turn. She knew he thought her beautiful even in the pregnancy that was just becoming visible; she knew it every night when they went to their separate beds.

  There were scarcely any words. They were not necessary
; she had hardly taken her eyes from Jameson all evening, and he had known it.

  He came back from saying the last good night and stood in front of her. She began to speak, and he lifted a hand in a slight gesture she knew: Don’t talk. He said, “I intend to make you forget him for a while.”

  She would have laughed at anyone else who said that. She did not laugh that night. And, for a while, she forgot.

  Chain was looking at her strangely.

  She got her brain going again.

  “Folklore?” she said. “Oral histories?”

  “Amir asked me about that,” Chain said. “Sure, every family’s got stories. Mostly lies, though.”

  “Are there still Rolands around?”

  “Lots of Rolands,” he said. “Some moved out to other towns, but there’s plenty around here still. Why?”

  “I want memories,” she said. “Things that never made it to the computers. Can you give me a roster of the Rolands who live near Dwar? I’m going to talk to them personally. And, Chain?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you transmit an appeal for help from anyone who might have heard about Mi-o from old stories? And anybody who might have an artifact from her time? What I wouldn’t give for one little, insignificant alien artifact from her time!”

  • • •

  During the afternoon, mindful of farm families’ crowded days, she only went to see Amir, who said, “I’d love to see them collect the family stories. Before they’re lost.”

  “But why would they lose them, Amir?”

  “Because they’re stories people tell in limited societies,” Amir said. “Societies—small ones—where gossip is a primary medium, and people say, ‘Do you remember old so-and-so?’ and other people laugh because they do. When that stops, oral history stops. And it doesn’t make it into official records: old so-and-so probably was an old so-and-so, and the family’s going to talk about it, but they won’t be eager to put it in a database. So it stops. It stops when the society reaches a critical limit—in size, in mobility and resulting dispersion, or as a result of outside pressures like invasion or the influence of a larger culture.”

  “And that’s going to happen here?”

  “Well, the stressor here will be the last I mentioned—assimilation as a subculture into the Polity. It’s inevitable, I think. Unless they tell us to go away. They can, you know. And if they tell us to do that, we will.”

  All the same, Hanna thought as she walked away in the summer afternoon, maybe the name should be modified. To Colonial Oversight and Destruction Service, perhaps.

  • • •

  She knocked on the first Roland door that evening between dinner and bedtime. She got no new information, but Odele Roland made some calls, and assured Hanna that if she showed up at George Selos and Mindy Roland’s farm the next evening, there would be more Rolands to greet her.

  She took Chain with her. Forewarned, he came prepared to record. He retrieved half a dozen stories of interest (to Rolands—and to Amir, as it later turned out). Nothing on Mi-o.

  The next day, she had said, she would—

  “But why tomorrow?” several Rolands said. Mindy had been making and getting calls and messages all evening. “Why not a couple weeks from now? We’re past due for a family reunion—we’ll never have a better excuse!”

  • • •

  A fully equipped Interworld Fleet starship arrived and took up orbit around New Earth. This caused some excitement among the colonists, but only mild surprise among Oversight personnel, once it was explained that the old mothership was an object of interest to a famous specialist in the history of early expansion and settlement.

  Fleet sent incredibly expensive vessels here and there for sillier reasons, they said.

  • • •

  The day before the Roland family reunion, early in Dwar’s morning, Hanna got an urgent call from Jameson. She was at the Archives Office with Chain, and her heart jumped hard in her chest when she saw the priority code.

  Jameson took one look at her face and said hastily, “Nothing wrong with Mickey. Nor anybody else as far as I know.”

  “Then what—Starr, you scared me half to death!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m expecting a certain level of security restrictions on communication to go into effect momentarily, and I wanted to talk to you privately while I can. It seems the aliens did access the mothership computers, and in the eyes of Fleet that makes Earth a target.”

  “It was two hundred years ago!”

  “Well, they are going to be minimal restrictions.” He appeared to think it was funny. Hanna had never thought “Fleet” and “funny” belonged in the same sentence. But then, when Jameson was a commissioner, the Interworld Fleet in its entirety had answered directly to him and his colleagues. Clearly, this gave him a different perspective.

  “Is there any information that might suggest where to look for them?” she asked.

  “Surprisingly, yes—but not enough. The human race hasn’t explored very far from Earth, and these beings could have come from anywhere in this galaxy—or another, I suppose, in theory. There’s just too much space out there, unless we find something to narrow it down. I expect sooner or later the Fleet people will be able to work back to more definitive information. What we do have appears to be there because the aliens did some very preliminary modeling with an idea of taking the mothership home with them.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “A souvenir? Scrap? Well, you’re the expert on alien motivation.”

  “My expertise is failing me just now. Not armaments—the settlement ships weren’t warships. Technology—obsolete even at the time of this contact. Information—anyway they would only have needed the data, not the ship. And they didn’t seem to be interested in getting information from the colonists at all.”

  He shrugged. “The Fleet people will get more—but probably not soon, and not about motivation. We’ll have to communicate with them to find out what that was.” He hesitated. “Do you think you’ll be there much longer?” he said. There was an odd inflection to the question, puzzling Hanna.

  “Probably not,” she said. “Why?”

  He frowned. He said as if surprised, “I miss you.”

  “Ah . . .” said Hanna, and could not think of what to say next. She could not bring herself to say I miss you too, though she missed his hands and his mouth and the hard body that could make her feel fragile, which she was not. That might be worth going back for—if only she had not had to go back.

  She said slowly, “I don’t suppose I can talk to every Roland on the planet—this is nothing like Gadrah, human fertility is not depressed here—but I’ll have a chance to talk to a lot of them tomorrow. I’ll evaluate the need for staying longer after that.”

  “Keep me informed,” he said, as if that strange moment had not happened, and it was not until she had closed the call that Hanna thought: Maybe I do miss him. But I think I am less myself when I am with him. And I do not miss the way that feels at all.

  • • •

  Rolands, Hanna decided, knew how to throw a party.

  There were tents and tables and chairs and people spread out all over the lawns and a nearby field at the biggest Roland farm in Roland (of course) County. Two family bands took turns performing. People here did not eat much meat, but there were a hundred different kinds of fruits and vegetables and cheeses, legumes and nuts and breads. Hanna was glad she had worn loose clothing.

  And there were races! She had not ridden a horse since introducing the species to Awnlee of Ell, but she remembered how to think to the surprised animal between her knees. They didn’t win, but they didn’t come in last, either. Which had seemed to be the colt’s preference.

  One of the family bands put away its instruments and took out others. New Earth’s society was not innovative, but had held true to the best el
ements of Old Earth’s arts, music first of all. Michael Kristofik had taught Hanna about the music he most loved: the plangent harmonies of western Earth’s Renaissance. Starr Jameson had taught her more. So when she realized what was coming, Hanna moved closer to the stage.

  A young violinist came to the edge of the platform, not separable from the instrument she carried. She did not look at the crowd, which was quieting now. Her eyes were on the first, exquisite notes of the Violin Concerto in D Major.

  After the concerto, after the silence, after the applause, the band started playing again.

  Back to earth! cried the guitars. Enough of heaven! Time to rock and roll!

  • • •

  Hanna got to talk to all the Rolands she wanted. She gave them copies of the Report to Archives, too, and asked Rolands to pass them on. Chain and Amir were busy, capturing stories from group after group.

  If this doesn’t turn something up, Hanna thought, there’s nothing to turn up.

  She relaxed and ate and danced and ate some more. The reading she had done on this society paid off; she felt comfortable and accepted. Nobody mentioned telepathy (at least not to her—there were some wary glances), and nobody treated her like a legend.

  Toward dusk she settled on the grass in front of the big stone farmhouse to digest her most recent meal. New Earth’s sun was easing down into a bank of red cloud, and the cooling air was infused with herbal smells that made her dizzy. Minutes of pure contentment like this were rare, and she treasured them. Carrie Roland and her husband, she remembered, were the householders. In a minute she would get up and go thank Carrie for her hospitality.

  On the porch behind her Carrie Roland said suddenly, “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  “Carrie, what?” said another woman.

  “This thing from the archives! That’s got to be old Mia Ferguson they’re talking about!”

  “That woman!”