She remembered then. It had been just before Mickey’s birth and she had been in a state of mind she hoped she would never be in again. She could touch her baby’s forming mind, growing daily in intricacy and potential, but she did not do it often; the experience of the womb was not one an adult should revisit. The wound of her grief for Michael Kristofik had barely begun to turn to scar, and she had begun to face an unwelcome reality—that Starr Jameson had been the only true stable point in her life since their first meeting, an enduring presence which had become a habit—maybe, even, a necessity. She resisted the knowledge and she resented it. But she continued to sleep in his arms every night.
It was not surprising that she had trouble remembering Gabriel.
She said, “Why did Starr contact you?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said honestly, “except that I’m a member of a religious community and have an interest in nonhuman beliefs. There don’t seem to be many people like that around.”
“I still don’t see why you’re here. Are you some kind of expert—sorry,” she said automatically, but his feelings did not seem to be hurt.
“I’ve got, umm, I guess you’d call it a professional interest. My monastery isn’t one of the cloistered ones, though, I mean, it’s a teaching monastery. We’re very much in the world.”
No, you’re not, Hanna thought—he really was awed, as if she were the goddess of alien studies or something, and people “in the world” did not usually react to her like that. She anxiously reviewed what she knew about monasteries. Practically nothing.
“So you’re looking for evidence of faith in alien societies?”
“There’s hardly anything in the literature. You’re the one who’s the expert,” Gabriel said, more reproachfully than he intended, “and you haven’t done anything.”
“It wasn’t important,” she said with no attempt at tact, but his response was equable.
“Maybe not to you, but it’s of great importance to many people, and they’re not all in established religions. With due respect for your own views—”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant, Mister—Brother? What do I call you?”
“Just Gabriel.” He smiled; she found, to her surprise, that she had marginally relaxed. There was a sense of tranquility about him, something inside him that might outlast this moment’s anxiety. She could use some of that . . .
“Gabriel, regardless of any views I might have, it’s not important to the aliens. Not to any we’ve met before now. Do you think so large a part of human culture was neglected in my education? I haven’t done any work on it because there’s so little to say. The peoples of Girritt have a variety of animistic beliefs, but they don’t interest anyone but the most obsessive cultural anthropologists. The majority attitude on F’thal and Zeig-Daru is that universes simply exist, spawning one another; the beings see no reason to posit a First Cause that itself simply exists. Uskosians attribute no moral authority to the Master of Chaos and they do not regard him as a Creator. Although,” she admitted reluctantly, “there are minority views in each case.
“But there hasn’t been much, really, to study. How much did Starr tell you about this society?”
“Nothing,” said Gabriel. “I didn’t speak to him personally, and he didn’t even admit to my abbot that there is a society. I inferred it. It’s a closely held secret, apparently.”
“So far. Well, there’s a rich field for you here. I’ll have—no. I was going to say I’d have one of my team brief you, but they’re all too tightly scheduled.” So was she. But. “Do you know where your quarters are?”
“Wherever my luggage is, I hope,” Gabriel said. He was fair-skinned and blue-eyed, a wiry man undistinguished to the eye except for a mop of sandy curls; but he had a sweet smile. “I’ll find my way.”
“Good. Come back after that and I’ll show you how to access the material we’ve collected so far. Go over it and then come talk to me. I’m glad you’re here,” she said impulsively, realizing that it was true. “This is new, and I don’t know where to begin. Battleground is a world of theocracy and unending, perpetual war. Maybe you can make some sense of that dynamic. I can’t.”
Gabriel did not answer. He was looking at her intently and she caught a glimpse of something he had barely begun to feel and had not yet recognized or named himself. She thought, Oh, no . . .
He seemed to wake up. He nodded to her and turned for the exit. She said suddenly, “Gabriel.”
He turned back.
“Where is your monastery?”
“Alta,” he said.
Hanna sighed. She was too tired to keep her face from showing what she felt.
Gabriel said, “Yes. The Abbey of St. Kristofik.”
“Did you know Michael?”
“I was brought there just after he left, I think, and I was still a small child. I never head of him until, well—”
“Until he—we—became notorious,” Hanna said, trying to smile.
“Until then,” Gabriel said, his own smile real. “I’ve wondered about him, our abbey’s lost son, wondered why he used that name. Do you know?”
Hanna did not know. There were many questions she had not asked because she had thought there would be plenty of time to ask them. She had been wrong. Michael was gone, and she would never know the answers.
She felt tears in her eyes and knew that Gabriel saw them. He took a step toward her, the impulsive wish to comfort her like a flash of light, as startling in its intensity as the impact of telepathy.
But he’s true-human! she thought, and shook her head when he took another step.
“Go,” she said. “Later,” and he finally turned away.
It was indeed later when she remembered that her first remark about correspondence must have seemed, to a true-human, to have come out of nowhere, and he must have guessed she was reading his mind. And that it hadn’t bothered him at all.
• • •
Gabriel found his quarters without trouble, tracked down his luggage (though not without trouble), unpacked mechanically.
None of the images or the writings by and about her, nothing, had prepared him for her personality, shooting off sparks, or for her mind, so quick even when she was plainly exhausted. Watching recorded lectures had not prepared him for her grace of movement, which had not deserted her even in her surprise. And absolutely nothing had prepared him for her tears.
He had frankly expected himself to succumb, at least for a while, to a schoolboy case of hero-worship for which he was much too old. Now it looked like he might be in for something worse.
C’mon, Lord. Do I have to?
Chapter VII
CAN YOU STOP IT CAN you stop it I said I order you to stop it. The Cutter only looked at me and of course I know the progression cannot be stopped. But she opened her past-eyes and said Kwler had asked her that. She said nothing about Tlorr but maybe Tlorr has asked a different Cutter. This one said though I had chosen her carefully because she is old enough she must have doubted, she must doubt but she said. We are to live in the day and Abundant God gives us forgetfulness to make it easier to obey. I wonder what she thought, explaining a fundamental directive of God to a Commander so old, but she knew what she was supposed to say.
That is what I believed when I did not have so many summers, when I did not have many summers at all, and maybe I was wrong and she is not old enough, Prookt should be old enough but evidently he is not, and maybe this Cutter believes as Prookt believes. And maybe they are right and my doubts wrong.
It is hard coming to this, I look at Kwler and remember what he was, I look at Tlorr and know she moves inexorably toward the place where Kwler has already gone and I also move toward it no matter how intensely I do not want to. I remember the summers before Kwler changed, I remember a summer when we talked about going to That Place—how long will I remember that talk, it will
not be long, I think.
If we had gone
• • •
Hanna put out a hand to activate transmission to Rowtt, and stopped. After a while the man next to her—he was always next to her in Communications, no matter when she was there, slipping into place as soon as she came in—said her name. She turned her head slowly, and looked at him.
“Are you all right?” he said.
Hanna nodded. He was Metra’s spy. She seldom spoke to him unless he spoke to her, and not always then. He didn’t care, as long as he knew what she was doing.
Hanna noticed her suspended hand. It didn’t seem to have enough joints. She drew it back. There were beings she would rather feel a bond with than Kwoort. If the last minutes were an indicator, however, she might not have the choice.
“Do you know where Gabriel Guyup’s quarters are?” she asked Metra’s man, and of course he did.
• • •
Gabriel woke with the reader draped over his chest. He had drifted into sleep and let it fall. It was his second day on Endeavor, and he had spent nearly all the time studying what Endeavor had learned so far. Sleep had caught up with him; the door might have been sounding the entry request for a long time.
He stumbled to it, conscious of uneasy dreams that fled as he tried to seize them. “Enter,” he said, and remembered at the last second to push his hair out of his eyes.
“Oh!” he said—idiotically, he thought too late. Hanna ril-Koroth looked up at him with an odd expression on her face.
“Not ril-Koroth,” she said. “Bassanio. I resigned from Koroth’s House.”
“Oh, that’s right, I knew that—” Worse and worse. “Come in, come in!”
He didn’t think at once of offering her a seat; by the time he did she was leaning against the wall, hands behind her. She was dressed with stark simplicity, but before her hands disappeared he saw the blue gleam of the ring that he knew (from his half-guilty perusal of her life) had excited so much comment.
“I want you to come with me to the surface,” she said abruptly.
“Me?”
“Why not?”
Gabriel was having as much trouble waking up as usual. He grasped for words that tried to elude him. “I’m not—trained. I haven’t even been through your program, I’d like to do that if I could get permission, but it’s not relevant to what I do, if I keep doing it—”
He was babbling.
“This is a better way to learn,” she said calmly. “You can skip the preliminaries.”
“I thought I would, I don’t know, be analyzing things.”
“Oh, there are plenty of people to do the analyzing! But there’s not a single other soul on board who might be able to talk to these people about a god. Do you think you could pass yourself off as a human version of a Holy Man?”
There were so many things wrong with that proposition that he didn’t know which one to point out first. No one knew yet exactly what function Soldiers’ Holy Men served. He couldn’t imagine passing himself off as a holy anything, and the implied dishonesty was repellent. Before he could decide what to object to first, she pushed off from the wall, ready to leave.
“Go to Kit Mortan and get a crash course in using a translator. I think Kwoort’s at leisure; I’ll see if he can spare us some time.”
“Now?”
“If he’ll see us. Don’t worry.” She smiled at him, the first real smile he had seen on her face. It blinded him; he closed his eyes and made himself concentrate on what she said next. “Engage him in a real dialogue about their beliefs, if you can. I want to—observe.”
“Snoop in his mind,” Gabriel translated, not knowing what he said; it might have been nonsense for all he knew.
Her eyebrows went up.
“Observe,” she said firmly. “Anyway, I’m not supposed to go down there alone. Starr found out I did it again and made it clear what he thought about that. He’ll be easier to get along with if you come with me.”
“Starr?—oh, the director.”
“Commissioner. You might as well get used to calling him commissioner. I have to,” she said, obviously not happy about it, and went out.
Chapter VIII
GABRIEL’S EXPERIENCE WITH orbit-to-surface shuttles was confined to flights accomplished strictly by routine. This time he was not in a passenger compartment but next to the pilot, and she made a detour to show him all three of Battleground’s moons, disregarding the pod’s exasperated warnings that she was off course; shot back to the approved route at top speed (much too fast, said the pod); and finally let the craft float kilometers over the surface while she reprogrammed her translator. It resisted, scolding and issuing warnings to which she paid no attention. Navigation scolded too, from Endeavor, and Hanna told them calmly and mendaciously that Brother Gabriel needed to meditate before landing. Gabriel opened his mouth to protest, but before he could she shot him a glance of pure mischief, and he realized—feeling himself sinking—that he would probably forgive her anything.
He had never felt anything like this. Girls at the university he had gone to on Colony One had thought him strange as soon as he told them what he meant to do with his life. He had not had many opportunities to fall in love. Was it supposed to happen this quickly?
Probably not.
At last she seemed satisfied, and speeded up the descent.
“You took out your name?” he hazarded.
“I fixed it so when they say it, I’ll hear it the way it really sounds.”
He would have let it go, but there was doubt in her voice, or maybe in the air between them.
“Why is that important?” he said.
“Because . . . because . . .” The silence seemed to go on a long time. The pod continued a stately descent, swathed in cloud. Gabriel saw half-formed figures in its random swirls, vaguely threatening; he wrenched his gaze back to Hanna just as she said, “Because it’s honest.”
She fell silent, watching instruments. He glanced at her profile once more and away. He did not want to stare. The light in the capsule and the muffling cloud outside were not flattering to her skin, sallow against a vivid red tunic that bared her arms. He could not imagine what her last comment meant.
“Almost there,” she murmured.
Gabriel had not had time to become afraid, but now he felt it like cold fog: not fear of the nonhuman waiting for him, but fear of failing. His voice sounded to him like a croak of inadequacy.
“I’m an amateur. What do you think (for God’s sake) I can do (that someone else can’t do better)?”
“I heard that.” She paused. “I mean, I heard all of it. You project like a supernova.” She did not stop to explain and went on without giving him a chance to ask.
“We’re trying to find common ground here. You’ve seen my reports on Battleground. There’s no real history here, no philosophy. No music, no literature, no art, nothing to start talking about. But there’s religion. Of some kind.”
The clouds were gone, the atmosphere sliced horizontally as cleanly as a cake. The sad little island was just below.
“Help me with this, Gabriel,” she said, and executed an egregiously dramatic landing, startling him. He wondered if she was showing off for Kwoort.
He followed Hanna out of the capsule into heat under an overcast sky. Kwoort Commander stood alone in front of the decrepit building. I don’t know how he gets here, a voice like a clear bell said in his mind, startling him. Maybe he levitates.
Kwoort came forward to meet them. Gabriel whispered one more prayer, and then they stood in front of Kwoort and Hanna said: “Host, the guest with me is Gabriel, a holy man who wishes to greet you.”
“Me?” Isn’t there a protocol, Gabriel wanted to say, but if there was, Hanna wasn’t offering any guidance. “I’m not ‘holy,’” he protested, the first thought that came to him. “I would like to be
. I try to be. But I’m not.”
The translators gave the gist of this to Kwoort. His ears stirred, and the bell said, He’s laughing . . . Gabriel looked at Hanna again. Surely she had some plan for this meeting? Go where he takes you, said the bell.
“Haknt says you are holy,” Kwoort was saying. “You say you are not. Who is right? Would you not know if you were holy?”
Answer, Gabriel.
At least this answer came easily. It was something he had thought about.
“Would I know? It seems to me that the holiest of our men—and women—don’t see themselves as holy at all. They are too much aware of the perfection of God to think they are anything but imperfect.”
“Tell me about your Holy Men,” Kwoort said.
“I don’t know if your Holy Men can be compared to ours. And isn’t your Holy Man really a Holy Woman?”
Kwoort said, “The reproductive function falters with time, and ceases altogether when a Soldier or Warrior survives many summers. It would be more accurate to speak of ‘Holy Ones,’ but custom has kept the term ‘Holy Men.’ Perhaps at one time Warriors were not permitted to become Holy Ones.”
“Only perhaps?” Gabriel said. “Many of our languages have had the same convention, but we know its origins. You do not?”
“I am not that old,” Kwoort Commander said, and flapped his ears.
Hanna moved a little. The slight joke had caught her attention, but Gabriel did not know why. Perhaps it was only because Kwoort had made a joke at all.
She must have felt his question. She said, He knows nothing of history except what he has lived, knows only the repetitive texts our linguists deciphered. Speak to him. Don’t watch me in silence—
It was Gabriel’s first experience with telepathy, and he struggled to focus on Kwoort. He said, “Among the human beings who know my god, one becomes holy by serving him with all one’s heart, all one’s soul—” Beep, said the translator, rejecting the word. Gabriel hesitated. “All one’s self,” he finished. “Many of the holiest had short lives, even by human standards. But Hanna tells me that among your people it is possible to become holy only by living to great age.”
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