Hanna said as little as possible, and Bella, at her side, said nothing. Neither did Kaida Aneer, who thought (but did not say) that Hanna had been splendid. Hanna doodled, a habit of Jameson’s she had picked up to see her through conferences, which she disliked. His doodles were precise geometrics. Hanna drew trees and flowers. She had no artistic talent and the trees and flowers might not be recognizable to anyone else, but she liked them. Jameson was present at this conference because he could not be left out, but only partially; his head and shoulders appeared near the head of the table more or less life-size and more or less at the right altitude; he was in space, traveling to Heartworld, and there was a malfunction in his spacecraft’s holo systems. Andrella Murphy appeared to be with him, but her image was fully formed and three-dimensional, and so was Adair Evanomen’s. Like Bella, Evanomen did not speak. Metra and her officers were voluble, but Jameson and Murphy were not, though when they did speak it was to the point. Hanna could not say that about anyone else. Dema was not even visible, her voice patched in from the crèche where she and her companions were working. Hanna was also aware of her telepathically, and knew that Dema had begun to feel, after hours in the crèche, that the underground spaces were closing in on her.
It was Jameson—when the critics had begun repeating themselves—who said, “The salient point seems to be that Kwoort Commander should be our contact until and unless we can gain access to the Holy Man. Hanna, please pursue further contacts with Kwoort. Try to work your way through him to his superior. Secondly, Prookt consented to the original team’s current visit without difficulty, but he has authorized a lower-ranking officer to be his contact with Captain Metra, and this officer balked when he was asked if other teams could come to the surface. See if Kwoort will be more receptive to our landing more personnel.
“There is one caveat.” He said it without emphasis, but Hanna knew his voice better, probably, than anyone else alive, and she looked up quickly from the image she had just mutilated. “I don’t like Kwoort’s notion that we have a capability that could be a useful tool for war. It seems he might suspect the existence of telepathy.”
Hanna had confessed uneasiness at her reference to something she should not have known. None of the others had paid much attention. It was typical of Jameson to see the hazards of that single slip.
“It would take more than one incident for him to think of it,” Hanna said. “He would have to have a background of knowledge that admits the possibility of telepathy to come to that conclusion, unless it happened several times. I think technology was at the back of his mind.”
“Avoid the whole subject, if you can. We weren’t planning to keep telepathy a secret in the long run, but we might have to, and certainly for the present. I don’t want Kwoort focused on it, or God forbid, thinking seizure of a telepath would be the equivalent of capturing a weapon. We’ll amend mission protocol with a formal directive that no one is to refer to it in any way until further notice.”
“That will diminish my people’s usefulness—”
Hanna broke off. She had felt a ripple of anxiety from Dema.
“Will they be of any use at all?” Metra said to Hanna. Her voice implied that she doubted it.
“Just a—wait, Dema. I think we’ll be safe enough if we restrict ourselves to passive observation, but we’ll be much less effective—”
H’ana! Dema was almost frantic now.
“What, Dema?”
Dema gave it to Hanna in one powerful burst: her direct declaration to a Warrior that she could perceive thought.
Hanna said softly, “All right. Repeat that, please. In words. Dema, you didn’t do anything wrong. Go ahead, please. Tell them.”
Dema said, “We wanted to start asking direct questions, telepathically, of one of the females, so I explained what we were going to do. We practiced a little so she could get used to it—questions like, how many Soldiers have you given birth to? What is this one’s name? We’ve only asked simple, innocuous questions so far. But she knows exactly what we can do and what it feels like when we’re doing it.”
Murphy said, “Just the one?”
“So far, yes.”
“So this female is the only being on the entire planet who knows this.”
Every head in the room swiveled in Murphy’s direction. Hanna saw Jameson nod thoughtfully.
Will they discuss assassination later? When no one else can hear . . . ?
If they did he would not tell her about it. There would be other things he would not tell her about as the powers and decisions of a commissioner’s role embraced him once again. He would even share control of Intelligence and Security, with its reputation for ruthlessness: I&S, which still pressed for Adjusting Hanna even though Uskos had intervened.
He can be ruthless, and I have watched that part of him gain strength this last year . . .
She was better at governing her expression than most telepaths, but when Jameson looked at her he hesitated perceptibly before he spoke. But his own expression did not change, and his gaze was impersonal.
He said, “You’ll stop direct communication by telepathy, of course. Dema, if the female questions it, you don’t have to give a reason. These people call themselves Soldiers, think of themselves as Soldiers, have built a military society. They appear to be good at taking orders.”
Hanna was watching him recede, drifting away through a lonely future. She said with an effort, “Dissension does not exist, from what I’ve seen. Mostly they don’t even think about the orders they carry out.”
“Then if the woman questions you, Dema, simply tell her to forget it. Would she confide in anyone, do you think? A spouse, for example?”
Dema said hesitantly, “Oh, spouse. There’s a male who might be her mate, or one of her mates—we haven’t even gotten started on that. Whatever they have is not—I don’t think it’s anything like human relationships. I can’t even give you a glimmer of what it is.”
Jameson said, “Try to find out if she is on emotionally intimate terms with that male or anyone else. Do you have any sense of that?”
“My impression is that she isn’t, with him or anyone; far from it. But I just don’t know.”
sounds familiar, said the ghost, suddenly at Hanna’s shoulder.
of course . . . touching a mind so strange there are no referents . . .
he was good to us, said the ghost, changing the subject. good for us
for a while. only a while
“If you can find out, using only translators and passive observation, we need to know. Urgently,” Jameson said. “If there is nothing else? No? We’ll issue the directive about telepathy at once. Captain, please see to it that all personnel are notified without delay. Hanna, you’ll report immediately if you or any of your team have information on whether or how far this knowledge might spread on Battleground.”
He looked at Murphy, who shook her head. Jameson said, “Endit.”
Chapter V
KWOORT COMMANDER WAS AWAY from Rowtt again.
“Is the Commander often called to unexpected battles?” Hanna asked Prookt Commander from a station in Communications. She had not been relegated to a lesser officer as Metra had, and Metra regarded it as a personal insult. Hanna’s favored status presumably was Kwoort’s doing, by order or influence.
“Often, yes. His rank is high. He is second only to the Holy Man.”
“I wish to meet with him again if he returns,” Hanna told Prookt.
“Very well. I will so inform Kwoort Commander.”
And Hanna had to be satisfied with that, to the disgruntlement of the scientists aboard Endeavor, who reminded her of animals at an exotic zoo as feeding time approached. All that knowledge waiting down there! All those questions to ask, specimens to examine, discoveries (and reputations) to be made! They were viciously jealous of Dema and Parker and Mercado, who moved to a second crè
che and then a third. They clamored for the team to undertake work for which they were not qualified, studies in—everything: engineering, physiology, archaeology, botany—botany? How, when they were confined to multilayered subbasements? It was Metra’s job to refuse them, not Hanna’s, to Hanna’s profound relief.
The team was overloaded as it was, holding to Rowtt’s diurnal cycle and using stimulants to override their bodies’ demands (and counteragents to override the stimulants so they could sleep in the intervals on Endeavor). Parker and Mercado showed no ill effects, but Dema rejected the stimulant after the first trial—“I felt strange. Distant. Fuzzy,” she said obscurely—and somehow kept operating in a haze of exhaustion. Hanna was not in much better shape, awake and available whenever the team was on Battleground. And some of the scientists managed to bypass Metra and get their demands through to her.
“Theology,” she said to Jameson wearily. “I don’t know whose idea that was. There aren’t any theologians aboard.”
“It might be helpful to have one.” It seemed that he meant to say more, but she was too tired to care, and did not ask about what he might mean to say next.
“I guess that would make somebody happy, but I don’t know who! Endit,” she said. Prematurely, as she soon found out.
She did not bring up the fate of the Warrior who knew about telepathy, either. Presumably the Warrior was still in the original crèche, nursing successive broods. If she had spoken to anyone else about the not-Soldiers’ strange way of communicating, Hanna did not hear about it from Prookt.
• • •
Days passed, and still Prookt Commander did not cooperate. Hanna repeatedly asked permission for other teams to go to the surface, and she requested meetings between Battleground experts in many fields and their human counterparts. Prookt Commander was not hostile, merely indifferent (and maybe lazy). When Hanna tried more insistently to get him to stir from immobility, he said something that translated infuriatingly to “By and by, perhaps.” Accustomed as Hanna was to being in space, she was not used to staying on board a ship when there was a habitable planetary surface down there. Like Dema, she felt walls closing in.
After a week of this, the Soldiers in Rowtt’s equivalent of Communications began to inform Hanna that Prookt was not available to speak with her. On the other hand, she decided, no one had said she could not simply go to Rowtt and make her way to the Commanders’ headquarters by herself. Perhaps Prookt had not thought to issue orders prohibiting it.
Hanna flew to Rowtt in the same pod she had used before. Metra, wanting results, agreed to notify Rowtt that she was coming only after her departure from Endeavor. Hanna made no effort to notify Jameson. She didn’t want him prohibiting it.
• • •
A figure stood on the field exactly where she had first landed and did not move as she circled before touching down. One of the Soldiers Prookt commanded? She reached out, a gossamer touch that ought to be imperceptible to its object, and knew at once who it was. She whipped the pod around the figure—an unnecessary flourish—completed the landing, and went out to Kwoort Commander. The air felt electric; the climatologist had predicted storms and Hanna had timed her arrival to get there before them.
No formal greetings this time. She said, “Prookt Commander told me you were away.”
“I returned a short time ago,” he said. “Prookt did not at once report your recent requests. But I was with him when he received word of your approach. He could not avoid telling me of your possible motive.”
“Prookt Commander,” Hanna said, “is being obstructionist.”
Obstructionist was an excellent word. It translated almost one-for-one between human and Battleground tongues.
“Prookt is very young,” said Kwoort.
“At three hundred and fifty-four summers?”
“He is also somewhat slow. But he has survived.”
Hanna looked thoughtfully at Kwoort. The sky was overcast and a haze obscured the field, some of it dust kicked up by her flashy landing. Kwoort’s face, in the featureless gray light, appeared dimmed. Hanna attempted no probe. Still, something seemed to settle in her bones: a sense of long, stretched, time.
“Kwoort Commander,” she said, “what is it like to live for so long a time? The oldest of my kind survive only a fraction of the summers you yourself now have. What is it like, looking at lives so short?”
“They are flares, they are flashes,” he said, and he said it dismissively. “Do you think yourself exceptional? If you are, perhaps your life will blaze like a meteorite across the night sky—but it will last no longer. Most are like sparks from a fire in the night.”
“How does Prookt appear to you, then?”
“An ember,” Kwoort said. “Enduring, but with little light.”
“And you?”
“I? I burn.”
Something leaped out of him, a desperation he held tightly to himself and could not know she saw. Her breath caught.
Kwoort Commander said, “I will instruct Prookt to make all the arrangements you desire.”
“I note your intention,” Hanna said. “And might you and I talk of long life? I believe you would show human beings a perspective we have never known before.”
“Another time,” he said. “I am not at liberty this hour.”
“Survive, host,” she said, turning back toward the pod, deciding that at their next meeting she would probe this being’s thoughts mercilessly, relying on her skill to stay hidden.
She looked back when he said, “A request.” Literally, order-with-option-to-refuse. “Disable your translation device.”
“Why, Kwoort Commander?”
“I wish you to say your name and then I will say it back to you. You will know how it is heard here.”
Oddly uneasy, she did as he asked. He said: “Haknt . . .”
The first syllable was a brutal outrush of breath, the second a dull click. She had heard her name on other alien tongues, and it had never sounded so unspeakably strange. For a moment she went quite still.
Then she reactivated the translator and said again, “Survive, host.”
“Survive, guest.”
She knew he watched her until the pod disappeared in the overcast, and that he thought of her for some time after.
Chapter VI
KWOORT ISSUED THE ORDERS he had promised, and Endeavor came to life.
Hanna was again the focal point in Communications, scheduling members of her team to accompany civilian scientists to the surface of Battleground. Like everyone except Endeavor’s regular Fleet officers and crew, who maintained a duty roster based on Standard chronology, she continued to function as best she could on Battleground time, wildly at odds with the circadian rhythms imposed on human biology by Earth’s ancient sun. She slept badly and never reached full alertness. The two members of her team who exercised the option of using stimulants—Carl and Glory, the true-humans—were so clearly more efficient than the telepaths that she sometimes wondered if she should give in and use the organic compounds. They were supposed to be completely safe, a new formulation available only to Fleet, but Hanna kept postponing their use; they had not been tested on telepaths, and she had not forgotten Dema’s discomfort. Certainly she observed no differences in the true-humans’ personalities.
She had used an earlier compound of the drug before, though only under orders, and she was not even certain why the idea revolted her. To be sure, her own society was united in disapproving anything that affected thought beyond a glass or two of wine; it was tricky enough swimming in a sea of living minds when your own was clear. And, to be sure, drugs had played a less than admirable role in the histories of the men she had loved (true-humans both).
But when she found herself falling behind as Soldiers, prodded by Kwoort, worked with her to set up complicated schedules, she wondered if she was merely being self-righteous. Or se
lf-righteous, and foolish as well.
• • •
Gabriel Guyup arrived and boarded Endeavor, to Hanna’s complete bewilderment. Apparently Jameson had forgotten to tell her something. On purpose, possibly.
Warring day lengths had at this point put her in a new trough of fatigue, and she was not prepared to cope with a surprise like Gabriel. She did not look up when the stranger came into Communications, and when she realized that he had come to report to her, her first reaction was irritation at the intrusion. He told her that he had been invited to join the team by Starr Jameson personally. She said, “Well, God damn him anyway.”
The man at the adjoining station perked up. She glared at him. He decided to take a break and drifted away, leaving them effectively alone.
Then she looked at Gabriel and saw that he was just as bewildered as she was. Too tired for the courtesy of words, she simply looked at his mind, and discovered:
That he expected to be awed.
That he was startled at the fierceness of her eyes and the shadows under them.
That he had hoped she would know who he was because they had corresponded.
Corresponded?
Hanna corresponded with entirely too many people, human and not. Jameson had assigned Contact staff to keep her communications sorted, organized, and answered, but she at least glanced at all but the most routine replies. She did like to see the holo, straight video, audio, or written communications from the clearly insane, which fascinated her for some reason. Once in a while there was a threat. She had ignored these until Jameson found out about them and started having them routed to him. He told her about them in detail, and since she could hardly avoid him, she always knew when someone advocated killing her. Presumably Gabriel did not belong in that category.
“I don’t remember any correspondence with you,” she said. “When was it, and what was it about?”
“It was about a year and a half ago,” he said. He added, suddenly shy, “It was about belief systems.”
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