Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  Somebody used Gabriel’s mouth to say, “You didn’t say anything about love.”

  For a moment she was absolutely still. She did not even move until she said, “I don’t think I’ll have Starr much longer either. I don’t know if I want what he’s becoming.”

  The somebody using Gabriel’s mouth said, “What does that have to do with somebody else falling in love with you?”

  “Oh. Nothing. Well, do it at your own risk,” she said, and started walking again.

  It’s time I took some risks, Gabriel thought with new conviction. She looked back once more. It was a very thoughtful look, and he rejoiced in it as he followed her to the pod.

  • • •

  It was a rocky flight. Hanna, who Gabriel thought ought to be paying more attention to what she was doing, instead talked savagely. “If they want us to ‘survive,’ they should have waited for better weather over Rowtt!”

  “You’re the one who insisted on meeting now,” Gabriel pointed out.

  “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad!” Billowy white clouds had turned dark as they descended and there was lightning, there was wind; the pod shuddered as it neared the surface. “Never mind, Gabriel. We’ll go faster than the lightning,” she said blithely, and he wanted to point out that this was impossible but thought it best to keep his mouth shut.

  Still, when the hatch slid open, she stood uncertainly at the portal, looking out at the strangest storm Gabriel had ever seen. Afternoon had come but it was so dark that it might have been twilight; hot wind came in hard blasts and thunder was almost continuous, but there was no rain—not yet; there might be some in the black clouds, lit up weirdly by lightning within. The ominous light had a greenish cast.

  Hanna muttered something that was lost in thunder, and Gabriel said, “What?”

  She raised her voice. “High incidence of low-precipitation electrical storms. That was in one of the reports.”

  “I read that.”

  “Something to do with the magnetosphere? I don’t remember.” She jumped to the ground without bothering to order the ramp down, and he followed.

  They were at the place where they had met with Kwoort before, the blocky, ungraceful building they had not entered, fronted by three shallow steps and a stingy terrace made of the same deteriorating concrete.

  “It looks deserted,” Gabriel said. Hanna walked quickly toward the door, veering at the strongest bursts of wind. Gabriel managed to resist the urge to put his arm around her, to steady her. She said softly, between stutters of thunder, “Kwoort’s here, though. So is somebody else. But it’s not the Holy Man, whatever Kwoort says. He lied.”

  He started to ask how she knew, then didn’t, accepting it.

  The door did not open automatically but swung inward at Hanna’s tentative push. They stepped into the featureless inside of a cube. There were lights set in the ceiling, dim with grime, and dust on the floor, scuffed with tracks that resolved into footprints. Gabriel turned to close the door and Hanna stopped him with her hand on his. “No. There’s been too much confinement done since we got here,” she said obscurely. “Me first and then Arch. His wasn’t voluntary. Don’t close any doors you don’t have to.”

  Gabriel shook his head, without a clue to what she meant. He looked down to see her brown hand against his own lighter skin, and he was distracted, lost in the sight. It might be the only time she ever touched him and his mind filled with the moment, the coolness of her skin on his.

  She took her hand away and turned to the blank wall opposite the door. There was a slight sound and a section of the wall slid up. They walked through the opening into another gray chamber. Hanna glanced back, but the wall did not shut behind them; instead another panel opened, and Kwoort stood there with a personage behind him. The second figure was deep in the shadowy interior, too far away for Hanna to make out its face.

  “I greet you,” said Kwoort. His eyes—all of them—were on Hanna.

  “Here are two Holy Men,” he said, “one of my people, one of yours. You and I will leave them to converse.”

  “Very well,” Hanna said after a moment. She seemed to have forgotten Gabriel; she had gone still and was looking at Kwoort with a directness that chilled. Gabriel suddenly remembered things he had heard about this woman that had nothing to do with her quick mind, her desirable flesh, or her tears. He wondered if she had managed to obtain a weapon and somehow conceal it.

  Another panel opened, and in a moment she was gone with Kwoort without one look back, and Gabriel, feeling especially unholy, faced an alien Holy Man: his strangest dream had come true, and he was alone without any ally except (fittingly) his God.

  • • •

  Deeper and deeper into a gray warren where there were no birds to sing (I have heard there are birds on this world, thought Hanna, though she had seen none), and she opened her perception fully to Kwoort and saw that he thought of growing old, and of growing insane if not holy, and he knew it was happening, that he had become killer only, never breeder again, because the breeding function itself was gone, it was time to think only of killing—

  —but it was not quite time, not quite, and he demanded, “How do you choose not to breed?” with the urgency of an implacable force behind it.

  She had expected him to rail about telepathy and was completely unprepared for the question. She struggled to make the switch and began slowly, “It has been an easily implemented choice for a thousand summers, though exercised less in places where there is much room—”

  Too slowly for Kwoort.

  “That is not what I mean! We do not have room! And we do not have a choice!” he said, and she caught a momentary flash from his mind, not an image of Soldiers but of another species that lived on this world—finger-sized, dead white, hairless and blind—it lived underground, they were crowded and scrambling over one another, they turned on each other savagely and tore with sharp teeth and ate, ate—

  Hanna stumbled as if someone had hit her. Kwoort moved faster, leading her on floors slanting downward, taking her deeper through gray rooms as if in fear of pursuit or—no—of being overheard.

  H’ana!

  She fastened on the call: Joseph? Bella!—they were monitoring her, and though Gabriel did not know it, Dema and Arch watched him.

  Bella, steady, practical: Did you know you have gone underground?

  I don’t want to be underground!

  I can see why!—Bella had caught her vision of tiny cannibals, too. The captain’s ordered a fix on your position. She’ll come get you, if she has to.

  “Kwoort Commander,” Hanna said, “stop, take me back!” She had kept track of their turns for the first three or four but at the tenth or twelfth change of direction this maze had defeated her, though now they were in a level corridor that ran straight, straight, and long, to a vanishing point in darkness, tracks of wheels showing in the dust.

  The cannibalistic image had unnerved her. For the first time she was almost afraid of Kwoort. She did not know how to fight him if it came to that; she did not know his anatomy. The eyes would be vulnerable but what else, surely the genitalia, if she kicked between his legs it would hurt—

  Maybe, said Joseph, who had read the physiologists’ reports, but the organs are usually retracted, the attack might be ineffective—

  Contact with Bella and Joseph had calmed her. She stopped; she would not go any farther. She said, “Kwoort Commander!” and almost said You are angry with me, but aloud made it a question: “Kwoort Commander, are you angry with me?”

  The translator chirped. There was no match for angry. But Hanna had no doubt of what he felt.

  He could not take her any farther without seizing her and dragging her, and she saw that he thought about doing it, but he did stop, and turned and said “Speak to me of breeding!” with fury.

  Instead she said, “First tell me how the misun
derstanding came about, that my historian was briefly made prisoner—”

  “The lower ranks of Soldiers are sometimes inattentive. These were inattentive. They have been disciplined,” said Kwoort.

  The same lie.

  “Answer my question!” Kwoort said. Hanna had known enough human warriors to know the tone of command even filtered through a translator. She was going to have to answer, and there was no reason not to tell the truth. But, Something I didn’t expect, she said to Joseph and Bella, feeling their tension—or maybe they only reflected hers. He’s angry about more than telepathy. Find out what the other humans on Battleground were doing, who they were talking to, what they were studying, what else he might have found out about us.

  That had to be it, she thought. Kwoort had learned about something besides telepathy, and was outraged.

  The two of them at least had stopped and were standing still in that gray corridor. Hanna did not know where it went, but she knew she did not want to go there, not without knowing what waited.

  “Please, Kwoort Commander,” she said. “There were students of the body here only a little while ago, and if they return they will answer your questions better than I can. Can we come to an agreement? Can you promise they will be safe from harm? That you will not try to keep them, as you tried to keep our historian? If you can promise those things they will tell you anything you want to know.”

  The eyes were all open and all yellowish-gray; they seemed to glow in the dim space. There was a flash of bright blue, out of place. The ring on her hand, perversely, had decided to act as if it were alive. This time Kwoort paid no attention. She could feel his effort to master emotion and with it his awareness that those emotions—for which she thought he had no words—were ever stronger and someday soon would go beyond control.

  But the day had not come yet. The breathing channels at his neck pulsed more slowly. There was a fractional relaxation of all his body.

  She almost whispered, “I would like to return to my companion, the human holy man. He is a gentle being unused to communicating with nonhumans, and I do not want to leave him alone in this strange place for long—”

  —just as Bella told her, tension in the thought, Try to get back to Gabriel, there could be a problem with His Most Exalted Madness or whatever he is—

  Kwoort turned abruptly back the way they had come. Hanna followed as quickly as she could. Noting, as she went, that “gentle” had not translated.

  • • •

  Gabriel’s first impression was that this being—this person, he reminded himself—was in constant motion. The Holy Man was robed, and Gabriel’s next crazy thought was Is there some significance to ceremonial robing among sentient bipeds, yeah, they all do it, I think we all do it. The robe was made of some crinkly off-yellow fabric with an iridescence to it sort of like that clingy silvery thing Hanna wore the other day oh God I shouldn’t think of that— And he thought: Where’d the expert go when I need her?

  The Holy Man’s hands were long and thin, the fingers in constant motion. Better than Hanna about reading reports, Gabriel remembered something a physiologist had observed about gross anatomy in datastream images weeks ago: “...observed no analogue to the human fingernail, but tegument on fingers darkens gradually which might represent a transition to more protective skin structure—”

  Maybe the subject of the report had been better at holding still than this Holy Man, whose dark fingertips danced. The being rocked from one foot to the other, and the shifting patterns of light in the fabric of the robe made it appear that the garment danced, too. The tongue tip, hardly wider than a blade of grass, protruded and flickered. Paradoxically, a line of ancient poetry came to Gabriel’s mind, one that evoked stillness in eternity: Oh sages standing in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall—

  The Holy Man began to speak, and Gabriel forgot about poetry. There were whistles, clicks, words with a cadence that might have been speech, but the translator produced a steady stream of not translatables. What a time for it to malfunction!

  “Holy sage,” Gabriel said, reverently in spite of himself, because he faced a thinking creature of some God that might also be his, “I am here to hear about your beliefs and to tell you about mine, but I don’t think the translator is working. Can you understand what I’m saying? I can’t understand you—”

  “Yes,” said the being, “believe,” and soared into punctuated babble again. The few macroscopic parts of the translator weren’t substantial enough to grab and shake, Gabriel’s impulse; he could only wait for a pause in what the Holy Man was saying. He waited for what seemed like eternity but was probably minutes, transfixed by the movement, the strangeness, and he began to notice things about the Holy Man that he hadn’t seen at once. The creature was stick-thin, taller than Gabriel by a head; once, when he went momentarily still, he looked like a dressed-up mantis. It was when he started up again that Gabriel saw the real oddity: no facial expressions accompanied the stream of gibberish. The mouth moved with speaking and the tongue flickered constantly, but all the other muscles of the face, and the eyes, were fixed. Gabriel thought of something he had seen on Co-op as a child, after his parents were killed and he lived briefly in Gergowan with a cousin’s family. The whole brood had gone to see the New Year maskers, crowding the street on a cold night while costumed men—nearly all of them were men—roared and danced to drive the dark away. One of them ran up to Gabriel, gesturing mock threats, swollen to inhuman size in animal guise. The arms waved, the legs flailed, the wild activity kept the cold away; the figure swung a torch in either hand. But the animal head was rigid and the animal face never changed. Clearly the thing was alive, but it did not have the face of a living thing, not even of any animal; it had the face of something alive in body but not in soul. Gabriel had thought of the devil then, and he thought of the devil now.

  He didn’t even believe in the devil any more.

  The enormity of this impression was only beginning to show itself when he heard a soft whisper in Standard: The translator’s all right. He’s speaking a language we haven’t heard before—or else it’s schizophasia . . .

  He looked at the communicator on his wrist, but it wasn’t showing anything. The whisper came again: No, no, it’s Dema, don’t you know me? You have to get used to telepathy. There is nothing wrong with the translator.

  “What are you—?”

  Hush! Don’t talk out loud! Think the words like you were going to say them.

  Spooked, Gabriel couldn’t think at all. The Holy Man had kept right on going, but the sounds were coming faster now, and the volume was rising. The jitters seemed to have sped up, too.

  “Holy One,” he said. “Holy One?”

  “Kill,” the translator said suddenly.

  “Are you talking about killing?” Gabriel said to the Holy Man.

  “Death,” said the translator, picking something out of the stream of sounds. “Demon,” it said, and seconds later, “Compression query—”

  Kwoort burst into the gray chamber. “What are you doing to the Holy One?” he said.

  All Gabriel could think was Where’s Hanna? and the whisper said Coming and flooded him with reassurance.

  Hanna came in then, eyes abnormally wide, anxiety a cloud around her.

  “He has done nothing,” she said. “Kwoort Commander, you have deceived us. This is not the Holy Man from whom you take orders. Is he even a Holy Man at all?”

  Kwoort made a fast turn in her direction and seemed to catch himself on the edge of a violent movement. He said, “He is what Holy Men become.”

  For a few seconds Hanna was as still as Kwoort. Finally she said, “Kwoort Commander, I do not understand what you are doing. Do you understand, yourself?”

  • • •

  “That was a Holy Man, all right, or used to be,” she said later, “and he’s a babbling idiot.”

  S
he had barely spoken on the flight back to Endeavor, told the captain in an absentminded way that she would talk to her later, and taken Gabriel with her to report to Jameson. She and Gabriel, and Jameson’s holographic image, this time complete, shared her small cabin instead of a common-access conference room. Probably the captain could monitor whatever happened here, but maybe she wouldn’t.

  Gabriel and Hanna sat side by side on Hanna’s narrow bed while Hanna talked. Jameson, listening in a space hundreds of light-years distant, seemed to take up most of the rest of the room. He looked very real, and standing he was very tall, and Gabriel moved a little so that he could see both of them. Hanna was making small restless movements. Jameson made hardly any, as if there were only so many nerves between them, and she had most of them.

  “Kwoort’s so different from most Soldiers he stands out like a solar flare,” she said.

  Jameson said, “Is that an emotional reaction, or an objective observation?”

  “Both, I suppose. He’s being pulled in different directions, he’s—I can’t even conceptualize it, much less pin it down in words. It’s not that there’s more than one personality; there’s definitely only one, a strong one. He reminds me a little of you,” Hanna said. Jameson’s expression changed to surprise, and Hanna said, “The intensity. ‘I burn,’ he told me. But your fire is controlled. His isn’t.”

  They looked at each other in stillness for a moment. Something changed, subtly. What’s that? Gabriel thought, then recognized, belatedly, the current of pure sensuality between the man and woman who were so far apart. Jameson had acknowledged Gabriel’s presence and since then had not looked away from Hanna. Gabriel felt sick with embarrassment. And appalled, his eyes on Hanna’s parted lips, at his own answering surge of lust.

  Hanna took a deep breath and moved a little; the context changed. Something that had opened in Jameson’s face closed again. Finally he did look at Gabriel. He said, “What were your impressions?”