Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  It said, “We were informed that you are female, guest. I am male. Kwoort Commander instructed me to make you welcome.”

  “Preparation to mate is not necessary, host. Did Kwoort Commander think it is?”

  “Kwoort Commander once knew a not-Soldier female, and instructed me to welcome you as she welcomed him.”

  This would convince even Metra that Kwoort Commander had been on New Earth. Evidently he was the one who had gone into the woods with Mi-o.

  Mi-o, thought Hanna, you have a lot to answer for.

  “I note the intention, host. I am prepared to meet the Commander without further welcome.”

  She thought she detected some relief as he moved back. He said, “Guest, you will meet Prookt Commander. Kwoort Commander was called away to meet a hostile incursion.”

  Another one? Joseph said. Is it heating up down there?

  Hanna didn’t answer. She said to the being, “I prefer not to be welcomed as one welcomes a mate.”

  “Guest, I will so inform Prookt Commander.”

  She followed the being to an opening in the surface of the field where a mound of dirt had swiveled away to show a metal platform. They stepped onto it and it began to descend. The hatch slid shut above them.

  “Host, what is your name?”

  “In my rank it is not important. I am a Soldier like all others.”

  “Are we to call all of you Soldiers?”

  “Yes, though females also are called Warriors.”

  Confirming the linguistic interpretation. The distinction between “Soldier” and “Warrior” was subtle, one of a whistle-pitch only. Kit Mortan’s people had applied the Standard tags to avoid the clumsy “male nonhuman” and “female nonhuman.”

  The lift stopped and they stepped out and walked through gray concrete corridors, sealed against moisture but unpainted. The walls were bare. She was prepared for this; she had seen interior images trapped from ancient broadcasts, and identical walls through Soldiers’ eyes.

  (“Status?”

  “We observed no art in the datastream because they make none . . .”)

  Except for Kwoort Commander, and that trace of a painting on his wall. Hanna suspected he had put it there himself.

  A room, the same concrete, already a weight on Hanna’s shoulders. Tables and uncushioned benches of utilitarian design; a human would see nothing strange at first glance. A screen set into one wall showed moving images and text of the same kind Endeavor had recorded. It was silent.

  The Soldier said, “Prookt Commander, the guest requires no further welcome.”

  Four Soldiers were seated at the tables. None of them got up. But one said, “I am Prookt Commander. I have four hundred and fifty-four summers.”

  Joseph said, How’d you miss the greeting convention—!

  I wasn’t listening for words! I never heard it—

  “Greetings, Prookt Commander. I am Hanna—Warrior. I have—” A moment’s hesitation. She was tempted to lie. But she finished, “—thirty-six summers.”

  “What is your purpose here, guest?”

  “It is as our communications specified, host. First, stalemate—” there was no word for peace, this was as close as it got—“between Soldiers and not-Soldiers.”

  The ears moved. Kit Mortan was still working on the rich repertoire of ear movements and facial expressions. The translator could not help her here, but—

  What’s that knot of—bafflement? He doesn’t know how to respond!

  Prookt Commander said finally, “Soldiers and not-Soldiers have stalemate. We wish to acquire weapons.”

  “I cannot assist you with that, Prookt Commander.”

  There was a pause she recognized as a convention, in case she had forgotten to say something. Prookt Commander had addressed the only thing that interested him. If she had nothing else to say, the interview was over.

  The whole First Contact was about to be over. Good-bye, nice meeting you, see you around space-time sometime—

  But so far they hadn’t said no to anything. Maybe any request would do.

  She said, “Not-Soldiers wish to observe Soldiers’ daily lives.”

  She did not say there were scientists on Endeavor who would kill for the chance.

  “Will this help you build weapons that we might acquire?”

  She started an automatic reply. Stopped. Against all reason, “no” would be exactly the wrong answer.

  “It is possible, Prookt Commander. Will you instruct Soldiers to cooperate with not-Soldiers in arranging these observations?”

  “Certainly, guest.”

  “Also I would like to greet—” They were giving her commanders, she would take commanders, Holy Men could wait. “I would like to greet Kwoort Commander. I would like to speak of the not-Soldier female he once knew.”

  She felt that Prookt Commander was mildly puzzled. But he said, “I will so inform him, guest, if he returns.”

  (What is that “if”—no time, come back to it later.)

  “I note your intention, host. I will leave now,” she added, perceiving that her immediate departure was expected. Prookt Commander had covered everything he thought necessary.

  “Very well,” he said. “Survive, guest.”

  And she answered, knowing she did it correctly: “Survive, host.”

  • • •

  She emerged from the pod into Endeavor Three to find champagne flowing. Her team closed around her—to keep a crowd of true-humans from swinging her onto their shoulders and carrying her around. If they did and Metra saw them they would be sorry.

  “Conference,” she said, and the team escaped.

  Sinking into a familiar chair, suddenly exhausted, she admitted to herself: Not bad for a First Contact.

  At her side the ghost said: we’ve seen worse

  Chapter II

  NO TIME TO WASTE, too many questions—they began lists of questions, changed lists to three-dimensional, dynamic models, posed questions that flowed into one another.

  Why did an introduction require a statement of age? To establish relative status? Seniority? What were the implications of that “if he returns”? Was this conditional a special case, or did they never say “when he returns”?

  All leading to the question at the center of the model: What true statement defined the worldview of beings who might live for a millennium, but appeared to have chosen a social contract that ensured early death? And how much choice did they have? Was it a choice, or was it hard-wired?

  Hanna left the theorists to it; they had more time to think about it than she did. She was the focus in Communications for hours at a time. Negotiating the first study party fell to her—Prookt agreed to three observers as a team at a single location, satisfying mission protocol. She did not ask for more; she did not know what Prookt would regard as critical mass. He would not promise that other parties could follow. Even for this one there was a condition: she, personally, was required to return to the original contact site at the same time, and stay there for the duration of the observation period, so that any difficulties or questions that arose could be referred to a superior officer—that meant Hanna—on the ground.

  All right, so there was some flavor of a hostage arrangement here. Interesting question, given the low value placed on life, did that concept play any part in their—

  No time, fill in the blank later. Not the hard way, she hoped.

  Consulting no one, she threw mission protocol overboard and agreed.

  • • •

  Jameson accepted the arrangement because he had to. Getting observers onto Battleground was a major advance—especially since Soldiers’ obsession with war and mastery of interstellar travel (maybe lost, maybe not) meant he was under intense pressure from the Commissioners of the Polity and from Fleet. They wanted all the information they could get (
they stopped just short of calling it intelligence) as quickly as possible.

  But he was furious with Hanna for making herself vulnerable. Their summary sessions—at nearly hourly intervals in this period—were formal and impersonal. They were carried out blind, too, because Jameson thought that if he had to look at Hanna’s face now, he would explode.

  • • •

  She would be in the gray room—a different concrete room—for about thirty-seven Standard hours, the length of a Battleground day. It had a table and a bench and a barely padded platform for sleeping. Behind a partition there were sanitary facilities that a human being could use without too great a sense of strangeness. The room was not a cell but a standard billet. The door was not locked and Hanna was not overtly guarded. It was assumed, however, that she would stay in the room. She saw no reason to leave it.

  For entertainment, a screen set into the wall showed current broadcasting. Hanna might have been looking at the AV loop on Endeavor, except that some of it was real-time or only a few hours old. Old or current, it was all war, speeches, and public assemblies.

  Still, she watched it closely for some time, and finally there was a brief reference to an alien (not-Soldier) visitation. There was even video of Dema and the two true-human scientists she escorted, but then the narrator said the guests were not interested in “our desperate situation,” and that was that. Apparently if the guests were not interested in the situation (whatever it was), Rowtt was not interested in the guests. The attitude was incomprehensible to Hanna. Humans greeted first contacts with a variety of reactions, but indifference was not one of them.

  She couldn’t find a way to mute audio, but she could deactivate the translator. The audio became background, almost white noise. Clicks and whistles, most words spoken softly: as Maya Selig had observed, it was a pleasing language to hear. True, frequent explosions modified the effect. She listened for some hours, getting up sometimes to pace, sometimes turning her attention to human thoughts, touching the human beings on Endeavor lightly, telepaths and true-humans alike, careful not to distract them from what they were doing.

  Most often she touched Dema and her companions. The site of their observations was a vast crèche and the study had begun well; Benj Parker, one of the true-human social scientists, was beside himself with excitement. The other, Prez Mercado, was a man who lived for data. He had never collected it on nonhumans, though, and wondered now and then if he was dreaming, but he made no mistakes. Dema’s customary tranquility was almost unruffled, a solid counterweight to Parker.

  Presently Hanna lay down on the platform, tired, tempted to sleep. But she thought the Holy Man might be recognizable, now that she had touched him from a dream.

  She let trance draw near, let it enfold her, and went in search of him.

  • • •

  The Holy Man was coming to the end of her prayers. She felt an unaccustomed sense of distraction tonight.

  The mechanical prayer counter at her belt ticked over patiently with each repetition.

  “Be our strong arm against the Demon, chastise him, for he believes not in you.

  “Be our strong arm against the Demon . . .”

  Before prayer counters, there had been—

  What had there been?

  “Smite the Demon as he seeks to smite your faithful, we pray.

  “Smite the Demon as he seeks to smite . . .”

  There must have been something.

  Beads?—she started back, she had seen beads in front of her eyes.

  She opened the other pair of eyes and examined the full field of vision.

  Nothing. It was nothing she remembered. She did not know where it came from.

  The prayer counter was waiting.

  “Guard the faithful against the Demon’s treachery, as we guard our faith.

  “Guard the faithful—”

  Pebbles?

  The Holy Man started trembling. She was seized with a desire to remember the crèche of her origin.

  “Demonic trickery!” she roared—she began to run to the door to seek a Soldier, suddenly stopped.

  She had been working hard. Praying intently. How this new occurrence, this not-Soldier visitation, might be used against the Demon, yes, that was it, that was what she had been praying about. Their Soldiers and Warriors were on this very world, this very night. Surely Abundant God would show her how to use them to advantage. Tonight’s distraction was merely God’s way of telling her she needed to rest.

  And she wasn’t as old as the others so she wasn’t going—

  • • •

  —mad. Like the others. Like they always did.

  Well, I found a Holy Man, all right, Hanna thought.

  • • •

  After that she tried to sleep but could not; she only lay on the platform and let alien thoughts wash over her, the pulse of something like drumbeats sounding even here. Nothing, after the Holy Man (but surely that had been a female?) was distinctive enough to hold her attention. Immersion in the heart of a city made no difference. Soldiers seemed almost universally phlegmatic; they did not think beyond immediate goals no matter where they were. Humans daydreamed, fantasized, replayed memories, started to do something and then changed course, were intensely responsive to each other, moved through emotional states at a dizzying rate of speed—and those were the normal ones. The great mass of Soldiers did not look to the past, and they did not look to the future beyond the next step of whatever task they had to perform.

  What did the exceptions mean? Why was a Holy Man different, or a Kwoort?—whose presumed counterpart, Prookt, could almost have sunk into the background without a trace. Was Battleground home to two distinct sentient species? Were there classes dictated by genetic patterns, as on F’thal?

  Eventually her speculations faded into a trancelike state that was not trance. It was not sleep, either, but it passed the time.

  -

  • • •

  “Status, please.”

  Jameson sounded exhausted. Others had reported to him while Hanna was on Battleground, and gauging from his voice he had been awake, personally, for every single hourly update.

  “I’ve returned to Endeavor, arriving shortly after the observation team. The same team is—”

  “Welcome back.” Light flickered and video came to life. Jameson’s eyes were cold. He had not forgiven her.

  “Thank you . . .” He looked as tired as he had sounded. She spoke carefully. “The same team is returning to the surface tomorrow, Rowtt’s tomorrow. I’m not required to be there this time. Do you want a personal report from Dema now on observations to date?”

  “Is there a general report?”

  “One will be transmitted within the hour.”

  “Then I’ll read it when it gets here, unless there’s something that requires immediate attention. Is there?”

  No softening in the stony face.

  “No,” she said.

  “And your own activities?”

  “Unproductive, I’m afraid. I did finally connect with a Holy Man. Or a Demon. Who knows which is which? But the Holy Man is insane, or going insane, or expects to go insane. Because all Holy Men do.”

  He blinked. He seemed at a loss for words. After a pause he said, “Judged by whose standards?”

  “The Holy Man’s. The Holy Man is female, by the way.”

  “Female. You must have learned something more. She must have done something besides think about her sanity.”

  “She prayed. And went to sleep. And woke up again and prayed some more. That’s not all she does—she’s commander-in-chief, I think—but that’s all she did while I was there.”

  “In other words, you put yourself at risk with nothing to show in return.”

  The deserted conference room went quiet. Then she said, “I thought we already had this argument.”<
br />
  “You didn’t clear this little excursion with me.”

  “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “Not again. Never again.”

  Hanna took a deep breath. He might as well have been in the room with her, she might as well have been reading his mind. He was angry with her because he was afraid for her.

  She said gently, “I’ve been there twice and nothing has happened to me. I promise: If I feel threatened I’ll tell you.”

  He didn’t answer, but she thought she saw a softening. She went on, “There are a hundred people longing to get down there and learn everything they can, and Prookt seems to regard me as the liaison. Before I left he said I’ll meet Kwoort Commander soon. ‘If he returns,’ Prookt said—but I’m convinced now that’s a convention. That it means ‘if he lives to return’—”

  “Did you ask if you can bring companions?”

  “No—but he thought only of me.”

  “Oh, hell . . .”

  She waited while he thought it over. There was no rational reason for refusing, and he knew it; she saw an answer in the set of his mouth, a minute change, and knew she had won.

  He rubbed his hands over his face, a rare gesture. “See Kwoort as soon as you can. But try,” he said rather hopelessly, “try not to go alone.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Then go to bed now, Hanna. Rest. So I can.”

  Chapter III

  SLEEP CAME IN FRAGMENTS, small and tormented. She was habituated to roaming through Soldiers’ minds, and could not seem to stop. She did not do it consciously. She only woke—every five minutes, it seemed to her, but probably a couple of times an hour—with the weight of gray spaces on her mind, fragments of conversation, snippets of hands engaged in work; and once, like the flare of light from a faceted jewel, the being she recognized as Kwoort Commander.

  I could not find the last pages I wrote, just as I could not find the pages I wrote before that when I looked for them. I have hidden them all, I think. I thought it would be systematic, that I would forget the distant past first and then the intermediate past and then the recent, but there are blanks everywhere I look and soon I will forget to look, I will forget to look for what I have forgotten. How can I serve Abundant God in the place where I must go if I cannot remember?