She ran out of words; the tiredness was too heavy a weight. She ought to be in a storm of tears, but there wasn’t enough energy for tears. She was a lonely spot of consciousness, huddled on a floor in this bit of manmade metal, and infinity—emptiness—outside.
Gabriel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I know you have to stay on Earth, but you don’t have to live with him, do you?”
“No, but I’ll have to keep working for him. Until the Polity lets me go, or,” she said bitterly, “until he dies.”
And she could feel Gabriel’s puzzlement at that, but the truth about Jameson and anti-senescence was something she had forced from him long ago and against his will, and ambivalence about the way she had done it made her all the more unwilling to betray his secret.
Slowly the anger died away. She was too tired to keep it up. And Kwek was waiting.
She put her hand on Gabriel’s again and said, “Relax your muscles. Clear your mind. Come with me a little way. I’ll help you.”
• • •
Kwek’s perception: Odd to see this familiar room through her alien eyes. The walls a clear light blue, unnoticed by the humans so accustomed to it, not really seen for a long time. Kwek’s memory: In the last crèche where she served, she had thought of painting some walls yellow, to bring in the illusion of sunlight, but there had never been time and there had never been energy, she only mated and nursed and ate, nursed and ate. Kwek’s sense of the not-Soldiers: Hideous-looking, voices harsh when they turned off the translators, the poverty of their language’s range of sounds, suited perhaps to their tiny, stationary ears. And that thing, that organ, in the middle of their faces, she suspected it was for respiration, it was disturbing . . .
“I’ve told you what we believe about the origins of everything, in simple terms,” Arch said. “I’m not saying Abundant God didn’t set it all in motion, but that it was a long and vastly complicated process. Well, complicated to us. Maybe not to Abundant God.”
In Kwek, assent. Encourage it.
“I have often thought—”
Afraid to say it out loud.
“Nothing you say here will be repeated to anyone on your world.”
A whisper. “I think that you are right.”
Fear, but—the relief! At being able to say it! She is—
“—trembling, you are trembling. Is it forbidden to say such a thing in Rowtt?”
“Rowtt or anywhere! It is never said . . .”
—I see an exception—
“Surely there is someplace where it can be said? The isles you call That Place, perhaps?”
That Place? What is that, Arch?
Wasn’t a chance to tell you about—
“That Place is where you said you might want to go. What’s the difference between That Place and Rowtt?”
“They say you can ask questions in That Place. That you can think of new explanations for what is.”
—vague, I can’t see—
“What exactly is it like to live at That Place, Kwek? Can you describe how being there is different?”
“No—I don’t—”
No clear image, nothing ever seen. But she thinks there may be people there like her.
“Have you ever known anyone who went to That Place?”
“No. At least, I have known some who said they would go there, and I did not see them again. So I thought that was where they had gone.”
A real landmass?
Masses, islands. We’ve mapped it.
Tell her that—
“Let’s see.”
Arch at the wall, talking to data storage. Images coming quickly and arranging themselves: geography, topology, climate, remote ecosurvey—
Hanna said: I didn’t know That Place was there.
I did, but this is standard survey data, no detail. We only paid attention to big complexes, like Rowtt.
—and population centers.
Tiny. Figures?
Not even an estimate. But—
“People live aboveground in That Place, Kwek. We saw that from space. Did you know?”
—afraid—
“Why does that frighten you?”
—thought paralyzed, only fear—
“Is it dangerous to be aboveground?”
—no surviving—
Kwek stood suddenly. Arch had given her water and her hand jerked and knocked over the glass, splashing the tabletop.
“I am afraid to go to That Place. But I cannot return,” she said.
“You can’t go back to Rowtt?”
“I will cease to survive soon, there.”
—the meaning is not physical—
“Your spirit will cease to survive?”
But the translator had no word for spirit.
• • •
Kwek could not say any more. Not would not; could not. She sat down again but only looked from one to another of the human beings, looking at them with all her eyes, trembling with emotion again but not able to say a word. Hanna had not anticipated this dilemma. What do you do with an alien being who does not know where it wants to go?
No longer in trance but acutely aware of Kwek’s distress, she conferred with Arch in the corridor again.
“We can’t keep her here long,” she said. “We’ll have to come up with some explanation to give Kwoort pretty soon as it is. He only let her come because his Holy Man wanted to smooth things over.”
“She wasn’t locked up with me. Do you think he gave her some instructions while we were separated? About something to do here? Or learn?”
“Absolutely not,” Hanna said with certainty. “If she had intentions she was trying to conceal, I would have seen it.”
“Do you think Kwoort knows how close to the edge she is?”
“I have no way of knowing—unless I ask him. Unless I ask him, dammit.”
“Find out if anything bad’s going to happen to her if we take her back.”
“Find out from Kwoort, you mean—”
There seemed to be a conspiracy to get her to talk to Kwoort some more.
“I don’t like Kwoort,” she said.
Arch frowned at her. “Didn’t you always tell us to be careful about objectivity? Not to let human prejudices get in the way of observation?”
“Do you like these people?”
“I like Kwek, I think, sort of.”
“And I don’t like Kwoort. There were some individual Zeigans I liked and some I didn’t, insofar as they’re individuals. I don’t especially like most F’thalians I’ve met but a few I do. I can’t think of any Uskosians I dislike, but some I like more than others. And,” she repeated, “I don’t like Kwoort.”
“You want to demand a more compatible contact, or what?”
“If I did I might get one, but the new one wouldn’t be as valuable. It might even be Prookt. I’m going to have to talk to Kwoort again,” she said crossly. “Did anybody find out what might have set him off? He’s got to have found out about something besides telepathy, but what? How we breed, how we reproduce, or don’t? He was questioning me about that. But why would that infuriate him so?”
“Bella’s got the rest of the team working on it. They’d rather be on the surface, though, and so would I.”
“Nobody’s going to the surface until Metra’s satisfied they’re not at risk. And I don’t want any more humans where Kwoort can get at them anyway. In case he wants to know who the telepaths are, and one of the true-humans lets something slip.”
“So what makes you exempt?”
“I think you would call the reasons corrupt,” she said, thinking of Heartworld’s council and all the eyes on Jameson, thinking of her desire for freedom and what she would do to get it. “It won’t surprise you that I think Starr will approve of them.”
�
��It’s a disappointment to stay on board, after all the training, all the work while we were getting here—”
“I didn’t say it would be permanent . . . We’ll see.”
Bella, she thought, and quested for Bella without turning to ship’s communications. It felt natural, and she wondered fleetingly if returning to a life on Earth would mean wrenching disorientation as she limited herself once more to speech—
I hate it when I’m there, said Bella—
Finding anything—?
Don’t think so. But come and see . . . Cheerful. They’d been making a game of it.
That. Critically important. But so was the question of what to do with Kwek right now, for the next hours.
Hanna slipped back into the conference room. They had not turned off the translators yet, and Gabriel was talking comfortably to Kwek; she seemed less afraid.
—you have been talking about—?
This time he hardly blinked. “Nothing very interesting. My school.”
“I suspect it is pretty interesting. Tell me about it someday, too . . . Kwek, are you weary? Would you like to rest?”
“Yes. Can I?”
“My sleeping platform is yours.” An Uskosian concept of hospitality, extended by a human being to a Soldier.
“My cabin,” she said to Gabriel. “Stay with her, if you will.” Don’t let her roam, the captain wouldn’t like it, she meant, and told him that too.
“What are you going to do?”
“Talk to my team. But first,” she said, resigned to the inevitable, “I’m going to get a stimulant. I’ve got to. I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to sleep again.”
Chapter XIII
IT THRUMMED, taking effect, only for a moment. Only half a dose, but her mind speeded up, her senses cleared, her muscles were free—or felt free—of the toxins of fatigue. But she knew at once that trance would not be an option; it felt as if a film had slammed into place between conscious thought and that place of the unconscious that was the wellspring for trance. She had a moment of alarm. But what did she need trance for, right now?
She felt good, otherwise. Better than just good. She had been so tired, for so long, that she had forgotten what well-being was like. It felt wonderful.
The team had commandeered the auditorium again, and Hanna saw why as soon as she walked in. The walls were covered with images of written reports spiced with pictures, and the images shifted position, rotated, changed size, occasionally pulsated; a few drifted around the room, including one, upside down, that appeared to be Kwoort. There was an enveloping sensation, as she came in, of delight—the pulsating, especially of pictures, had been set going just for the pure visual hell of it—and she thought of one of the criticisms sometimes leveled at D’neerans as a people: They are childlike. Well, nobody had said that about her recently.
And she felt, as the telepaths turned to look at her, exactly as if she had incurred the disapproval of moralistic children; they had sensed the subtle effect of the drug immediately.
I only took half of it! she said defensively.
Simultaneously, they gave the emotional equivalent of a shrug. If D’neerans were inclined to have strong opinions about what other D’neerans did to themselves, they were also, generally, of the opinion that nobody escaped being an idiot some of the time; in Hanna’s case, these D’neerans thought, that might be much of the time.
Dema said, “You might as well start with me.” She had a printout in her hands. She knew that Hanna was fond of printed media, believing, on an illogical but fundamental level, that it conveyed more stable information than quantum images did. “We were in Rowtt longest, but we’d barely gotten to the—whatever it is—we called it a school, but . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, all we’d done when the evacuation order came was talk to one of the officers in charge, and nothing that was said seemed to upset him. Then we went into another room to talk about what to do first. Nobody around us was agitated or disturbed—well, when are they ever?”
“Try spending some time with Kwoort . . .” Hanna looked around at the mad scene. She could feel her team’s weariness; except for Carl and Glory, they were perpetually short of sleep. But it was oddly distant, as if strained through a filter. She felt another quiver of uneasiness about the stimulant she had inhaled.
“Tell me about the crèches you went to,” she said. “That was the longest and most intensive contact any of us have had with them. Kwoort said to me, How do you choose not to breed? Did you say anything that might have made him ask that?”
“Well . . . I suppose so. Yes.” Dema put the papers down. “It was clear these were just people doing their jobs. Part of the job is coupling to produce more Soldiers, but it’s regulated by a biological cycle. It must be inconvenient sometimes, and at the first crèche we were at, I asked how they get around that. I said we don’t have to reproduce unless we want to. I said there are ways to enjoy mating without conception taking place, and it was the oddest thing, Hanna. The female I was talking to became frightened. This was after the prohibition against telepathy went into effect, so I was limited in what I could pick up, but . . . She wouldn’t think about it. Wouldn’t. There was that sense of fear, and then she fastened her attention on one of those video screens we saw everywhere, and after that she wouldn’t even look at me. I had to go on to somebody else. And I didn’t mention it again.”
“All right. That might be something important. Make sure it’s in your notes, put in every detail you can remember. Who else was where and doing what,” she said, focused on goals, “in the hours before Kwoort gave that order about Arch?”
Dema produced more paper, with a flourish. “Here’s the list of who was on the surface.”
Hanna looked at the first name and said, “Oh, is he aboard?”
“You know Pirin Zey?”
“Not personally. I looked him up once.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because Starr fell asleep trying to read something Zey wrote about projected grain yields up into the thirty-first century in the province where Starrbright is. And nothing ever puts Starr to sleep. He thinks everything’s interesting. Except Pirin Zey.”
For Pirin Zey was an agronomist’s agronomist. He studied crops: their growth, husbandry, distribution, and economics. It was the foundation of any civilization, and like other kinds of foundations—the fundament of a building, for example, or an alphabet—it did not inspire sonnets.
“Zey’s an expert, though,” Hanna said, and Dema said, “Well, he would be, wouldn’t he, if Contact wanted him. And he spent two days there.”
Hanna was in no danger of falling asleep now, and tried to read one of Zey’s gray reports. Then she decided to go find him instead. His brain had to be more stimulating than his prose style. A sponge would be more interesting, if it was marginally alive.
“I’m going to read your mind,” Hanna told him, overrode his protests, assured him she had no interest in his personal life. “Think about what you saw on the surface. That’s all I care about and that’s all I’ll see.” She was lying, partly; she would inevitably learn some things about Zey’s personality and emotions, but it was true that she didn’t care about them.
Zey said timidly, “Is this going to be that trance thing I heard about?”
“No,” said Hanna, “this is going to be raw telepathy,” and smiled at him. It was a predatory smile.
They showed you—
What they had showed him was not on the surface, but underground.
Underground: she had touched Soldiers working the hydroponics complexes, but then she had been part of them, accepting that this was the safest way to carry out agriculture. The surface was risky; underground was certain—
—acre on acre, light diverted from the surface or entirely artificial. It might as well have been in space—
More of it.
And more of it.
And more of it.
“What?” said Zey.
“Nothing,” said Hanna. Zey was using stimulants too, and had not yet taken the counteractive dose that would allow him to rest, so Hanna’s thought had meshed synergistically with his, racing. But she had actually mumbled: Now I know why Starr fell asleep.
• • •
She hadn’t thought Zey’s specialty could possibly have triggered Kwoort’s anger, but seeing him had saved time, anyway. She decided to see other people instead of bothering with their reports, starting with the political scientists. But they were asleep. Just as well, Hanna thought. She would try the physiologists.
Later she wondered what would have happened if she had been content with what Cinnamon Padrick, Pix Mundy, and Matthew Sweet had written about Soldiers’ physiology, the facts they had put in their reports, the conservative deductions they had made about body parts and functions and put on record; if she had not found Cinnamon and her team awake and said on impulse, What did you think? What did you feel? What did you imagine, however strange it seemed? What did you fear?—and listened hard.
• • •
Hanna expected Padrick to be asleep, and sounded the request for entry at a volume so low she didn’t think Padrick would hear anything even if she were awake. But the door said Come in! and opened, and Hanna moved into a darkened room that was larger than hers and spoke of comfort. The large bed and couch and a big chair were soft and piled with cushions; three walls had been turned into virtual windows giving on a nighttime forest, alive with whispering leaves and soft nightbird sounds and the smell of herbs and leaf mold and the rustles of small, unseen animals. There was even a breeze, carrying a fragrance of the wild. The room itself might have been a luxurious tent pitched in wilderness. A moon was rising behind the trees. Hanna had seen nothing so elaborate anywhere else on Endeavor; Cinnamon Padrick had clearly used her time during the early, uneventful stages of the voyage to ensure that she was pampered. It was so dark, and so startling, that it was a moment before Hanna saw Cinnamon, and when she did, she knew at once that she had found the origin of the not-quite-alien trace of thought sensed weeks ago.
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