Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  Hanna went to Communications. She reported back, “There are huge gaps in the transmissions. Times when there weren’t any, or just a few, and weak ones at that. Or our instruments aren’t good enough to pick them up. But the only selection criterion is clarity. What Communications is leaving out is just more of the same—war, speeches, and public assemblies. And more war.”

  “Why the gaps?” Carl said.

  “War,” said Glory. “Everybody’s capability destroyed at times.”

  Arch said, “The place is just one big battleground, isn’t it?”

  • • •

  A D’neeran Adept did not have to fear ghosts. In trance, in fact, you didn’t have to fear much of anything—depending on how much humanity you were willing to give up.

  On Hanna’s first attempt to “listen” to Species Y, her humanity tripped her up. She detached herself from Endeavor steadily and remorselessly, and then, in trance or not, could not resist reaching straight out for one little human boy. Telepathy was not supposed to be possible over such immense distances, but telepathy, notoriously and unpredictably, could shatter boundaries when love was involved. Love, it seemed, did not recognize distance.

  Oh, what a happy little boy he was! He knew a surprising number of words but did not think in them consistently; instead there was straight, shining clarity of experience, vivid as a glowing dream. Bath time: splashing water, delight. A woman’s love as certain and surrounding as Hanna’s womb had been, love like shafts of sunlight binding woman and child.

  But the woman was Thera. Not Hanna.

  She slipped out of trance. The emotions trance did not permit crashed in on her. She wept.

  She reported to the team. They had to know each other’s vulnerabilities if they were to strengthen their bond.

  Team protocol. No argument.

  • • •

  She kept trying, and felt only the people on Endeavor. Once there was a surprise, a trace of wildness that seemed not quite human—but it was. There was, Hanna concluded the first time it happened, something strange about at least one person on Endeavor, but her business was aliens, and after that she ignored it. She did not touch Mickey again, but she could not move toward Species Y either. Mickey appeared to be the telepathic equivalent of a black hole for Hanna, and she could not break orbit.

  She reported to the team.

  “You should have brought him along,” Glory said.

  Hanna blinked at her, picked up an image: some hybrid warrior queen/earth mother, baby in one hand, sword in the other.

  Hanna reminded herself that youth sometimes masquerades as insanity.

  “I’m sure you left him in good hands,” Glory said sweetly. “Our director has him, I heard.” Glory had met Jameson and liked him very well. Women did. That hooded gaze suggested (accurately) that he had applied his formidable intelligence to the art of pleasuring as thoroughly as any other subject he wished to master.

  And our director is how you got this choice assignment, too. The stab of jealousy, professional and sexual, seemed to flash out of nowhere.

  Hanna wanted to slap her.

  Instead she said, “Someone here thinks this could be genuinely dangerous.”

  “That’s me,” said Dema Gunnar. “You’re our only Adept. We don’t know yet what abilities we’re going to need, or how we’ll need to use them. But we might need you as a fully functioning Adept.”

  “I’ll work on it,” said Hanna. “May I have a word with you, Glory?”

  Later the others found out that Hanna had showed the girl the full horror of that first contact with Zeig-Daru. If Glory had needed credentials, she got more than she wanted. What Hanna had gone through left even people who disliked her in awe of her.

  They were only surprised that Glory voluntarily remained on the team. She spoke to Hanna with a new respect, and she never said the words “our director” again. That was no surprise.

  They had to be able to trust each other.

  Team protocol. No argument.

  • • •

  The linguists had identified a dominant language, indeed the only language—the absence of variation arguing a long history of worldwide communication—and begun to work on translation programs. A computer could learn to reproduce the sounds the Y beings made much faster than humans could educate their own vocal equipment. The body resists too much novelty. Novelty is work.

  Hanna tired of watching the repetitive loop. She wanted to know what the beings were saying. She wanted to talk to the chief linguist, but when she went to see him, a harried-looking woman intercepted her and said Mister Mortan was busy and by order of Captain Metra was not to be disturbed. Getting five real live D’neerans aboard an Endeavor explorer was a first—in certain circles on D’neera it had been cause for celebration—but not everybody thought telepaths were important people even at first contacts. Hanna turned then to Communications’ chief, with whom she already had, so to speak, some credit, and got an audience with her without difficulty.

  “They won’t talk to you because they’re having fits,” said Kaida Aneer.

  “About—?”

  “They don’t talk to me any more than they have to, either. Of course,” Aneer said with satisfaction, “I’m in charge, so that’s more than they’d like.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Not enough variety in the sources. They thought they could analyze language use across different contexts and work the matches from one context to another, but there aren’t enough contexts.”

  “Ah,” said Hanna. “War, speeches, and public assemblies?”

  “You got it.”

  • • •

  Time passed. Kaida Aneer hinted that Linguistics had made progress. There were visuals of texts from some periods, there were audiovisuals of Species Y individuals reading texts aloud, there were correlations being made. Maybe there would be translators soon. Everyone on the team had spent time on Girritt, F’thal, or Uskos, and they knew how to use translators. But when they began to discuss it Hanna said they ought to try to understand as much of the language as possible, even if they did not learn to speak it.

  “Suppose they take your translator away, and you need to know what they’re going to do to you,” she said. “You might need to escape. Or attack.” The last two words might have sounded doubtful. Hanna had not chosen her team for aggressiveness.

  Everybody nodded and turned back to the AV loop. Somebody’s surface navy was taking a beating.

  Carl Ruck said suddenly, “Wait a minute. What just happened? What just happened to our peaceful mission?”

  Hanna muted the loop’s audio. The sounds of explosions stopped, along with the soft accompaniment of clicks and whistles and spoken syllables that might be commentary. Carl looked stunned. Hanna felt stunned.

  She said at last, “We’ve started thinking we’re going into a war zone. But for all we know most of the planet is at peace. Or maybe it wasn’t at the time of these transmissions but it is now.”

  Dema said, “H’ana, ludicrous as it is, I once saw a transmission on four hundred and sixty-two ways to prepare the F’thalian sqwiddit. For breakfast alone, and not counting taxidermy. Have you seen anything like that on this loop?”

  “You know there isn’t anything like that . . . Of course, we don’t know what they’re saying yet in those speeches and public assemblies.”

  Dema said, “H’ana. Look a little closer at those public assemblies. They do a lot of marching.”

  “I haven’t seen any marching forma—”

  “They march in place. It’s subtle, but that’s what they’re doing. If you listen hard you can hear the rhythm. They march, H’ana. All of them.”

  After a silence Hanna said, “Well, Communications has the translators programmed to recognize and project the right sounds, anyway. I’d better find out how Linguistics is
doing on meaning.”

  This time she got to see Kit Mortan and he said they were doing just fine. Of course, so far everything seemed to be about some religious war, but they’d only just gotten started.

  Chapter II

  ON ALTA, a colony world that had never been lost and was not in the least important, Brother Gabriel Guyup considered the possibility that divine intervention was responsible for his remaining comfortably dry in spite of the rain pouring onto his abbey and its grounds.

  The material reason for this was that the walkways between buildings had been roofed over not long before Gabriel, himself once an orphan rescued by the monks, had finished the offworld part of his education and returned to join the faculty of the abbey school. He had vivid memories of getting soaked to the skin as he ran from class to class in earlier years.

  The divine intervention, one might reason, had taken the form of inspiring a donor to contribute a large sum of money to the school, some of which had been used for this improvement. Gabriel wondered if the donor had been a student here, and had his own memories (rather fond ones, years later, when one was dry) of getting soaked in the damp climate where the abbey had been built.

  The likelihood of that was high, Gabriel thought, and what—aside from divine inspiration—might have motivated the giver? Gratitude for the haven the abbey had been to a child who had no one to love, as it had been for Gabriel? Or, possibly, the guilty conscience of one who had strayed far from its teachings?

  Gabriel sat down on a convenient stone bench without looking. It had a puddle on it, as he noticed too late. It was not worth getting up. He deserved to have his backside soaked for that last cynical thought. But he no longer tried to cut off the thoughts when they came. They had been battering him for so long that he had given up.

  I do not like this, he thought, I do not like what I am becoming.

  He looked out at the silver curtain of rain. The other frequent, unwelcome thought followed naturally. Perhaps he did not belong here any more. Perhaps he ought to leave. As he could, without recrimination. Almost all the other brothers had come here midway through worldly lives. Perhaps he was even expected to leave; certainly it seemed his superiors had hinted at it in the last year, assuring him God would understand such a need, and that they would welcome him back if the time came to return.

  It was not doubt of God that ate at him. Doubt could be accommodated; the long history of his church was full of doubters, and some had even made it to sainthood. Disillusionment with humankind was harder, and he did not know where it had come from; it had crept into his heart unnoticed until it was firmly in place and he felt it burning like unshed tears. Had he seen one traumatized child too many, perhaps?

  So far it had not affected his behavior. He remained a steady, reliable brother, father, teacher, and friend to boys whose ages ranged from five to eighteen Standard years. His fellows saw what they had always seen and expected to see: a man who dried the youngest children’s tears, won the older boys’ admiration as an athlete, and spoke convincingly of perfect peace and love at the heart of creation. But there was seldom peace in his heart these days.

  Presently he got up and went on, knowing he only waited for the day to be over, knowing that meant there was something wrong with the way he lived his days. The night would be his own, and there would be something to take him away from gnawing introspection: a new paper by a Contact Education student who had spent several months on Uskos.

  Some of his colleagues thought he should drop this freakish interest in aliens. Speculation on the children of other stars had dimmed the Star of Bethlehem considerably ever since Neal Girritt, six hundred years ago, had stumbled across the planet named for him and found it occupied by indisputably intelligent nonhumans who had no Savior and had no idea they needed one. The contact with F’thal fifty years later had not helped. But the faith of Gabriel’s fathers had muddled along, if in slow retreat, and the last decade’s contacts with Zeig-Daru and Uskos did not seem to have speeded (or reversed) its decline.

  And there are going to be more contacts, Gabriel thought. For the first time humanity was systematically and consistently seeking them, and this new Gabriel wondered if the Department of Alien Relations and Contact might eventually accomplish what all of humankind’s holy wars had not, and put an end to an ancient, dwindling faith.

  • • •

  On Old Earth, Thera produced holo after exquisite holo of Mickey walking (sort of), trying out words, and exhibiting an early draft of his father’s sweet temper. Thera was sure he would also develop his mother’s not-easily-classified intellect. He had to have gotten something from her, and it certainly wasn’t the sweetness.

  Starr Jameson, meanwhile, found himself not unpleasurably pursued by interested women. It was not a new phenomenon, but had been in abeyance while Hanna lived with him; her absence apparently signaled open season. He might have responded warmly to some of the overtures, but—there was Hanna, who had foreseen this. “Do as you wish,” she had said, but he did not like the complications of dealing with more than one woman at a time, and he was emphatically still dealing with Hanna, emotionally if not (regrettably) physically. He preferred to entertain lovers at his home, too—“Because here you are in complete control,” Hanna had said—but how would Mickey, interrupting an intimate breakfast, react when the woman he found there was a stranger?

  So Jameson allowed himself to be pursued but not caught. He was too busy for an affair anyway.

  And he wasn’t lonely.

  Certainly not.

  Chapter III

  HANNA HAD A SMALL holo of Mickey in her cabin. There was none of Starr Jameson, because it would not be appropriate. Any other lover, yes. Just not the Director of Alien Relations and Contact.

  There were no holos of any kind in the small conference room where she waited for now-daily voice contact to be established. It would have been an appropriate place for an image of the director, and Hanna was relieved there was none there. She would want to take it down every time she saw it. Or put it up again.

  “Good morning, Hanna.”

  She warmed to his voice in spite of herself.

  “Good morning.”

  “Status, please.”

  “Temporary hold.”

  “Why is that?”

  Because it’s not working the way it’s supposed to, that’s why.

  “As you know, Communications and its Linguistics division have completed preliminary collection and analysis of available data and are producing prototype translators. The mission plan calls, at this point, for sociological and other specialist interpretation of the data while Contact team telepaths assimilate their findings prior to actual contact. However—”

  She stumbled. When had she gotten so good at spouting this nonsense?

  “However, data produced by Species Y societies appear to be, by a process of self-selection within those societies, restricted within narrow, narrow—”

  You’re laughing at me. I just know you are.

  “—parameters, leaving,” she said abruptly, “the specialists with little data to interpret. Unless we reverse the sequence. Come up with something new, some less quantifiable information. Prior to contact. From out here. Telepathically.”

  “I see.”

  Silence. He had ghosts of his own.

  (“There is a new sensor in operation,” he had said early in the search for Species X. “The telepath, the D’neeran child. She said perhaps she can come up with more, if she is alone.”

  And someone had answered, “You sound as if you’re putting her out to be a sort of gauge of what there might be to fear . . .”)

  “Starr? Are you there?”

  “Yes. Have you made a deliberate attempt yet? To carry out telepathic observation?”

  “A few tentative tries, with no result.”

  “You haven’t reported that.”
<
br />   “I haven’t tried very hard. It didn’t seem important until the scarcity of information available from monitoring became apparent. I believe it’s time to make a serious effort at telepathic observation, but I wanted first to advise you that that is my recommendation. As the team’s only Adept, I would be lead in this effort. With your approval, we’ll proceed.”

  After another, rather long silence, he said, “I suspect that ‘lead’ in this context means ‘solo.’”

  “Not necessarily. In theory.”

  “But in practice?”

  “In practice, Bella, at least, might be able to connect with a distant consciousness. But she does not have Adept skills; she cannot use the altered state of the satya trance. Any contact she made might be more easily perceptible to the subject.”

  More silence. Finally: “Approved. Is there anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Until tomorrow, then. Endit.”

  The voice sounded normal. Almost casual. Not quite.

  • • •

  Jameson looked at the river forty stories below. It was nearly a year since he had gotten the first tantalizing information about Species Y from New Earth. Winter was near its end; it had come to Admin late but hard. There was unseasonable ice on the river, and a clear blue sky that did not hint at the merciless, knife-edged wind.

  It was Jameson who had forced the original Endeavor to accept Hanna, and it was he, personally, who had sent her alone in search of Species X. He had seen exactly what they had made of her: a thing mutilated and unrecognizable. Even in these last months, though years had passed, there were nights when he had waked and called for light so that he could see the triumph of regeneration he held in his arms, and sleepy blue eyes opening without fear.

  She’s not alone this time, he reminded himself.

  He kept telling himself that all day.

  • • •

  Hanna found a way to stay clear of the gravity well that was Mickey. Simple visualization and imagery, after all. But she needed help to do it.

  From their quarters, from the team’s conference room, wherever the D’neerans could isolate themselves from true-humans, they guided her through a dream.