Cinnamon turned large green eyes on Hanna and said in a soft and unsurprised voice, “Oh, you’re one of the telepaths. The famous one.”
Hanna nodded, looking at her, trying to understand the source of the strangeness; she saw an ordinary woman. Soft, sleek brown hair was cut close to the rounded skull, subtly striped; a cosmetic effect, Hanna supposed. Cinnamon was seated at a small table, on a small (but softly padded) chair, and she was eating, dipping morsels into a sauce and chewing them daintily. Two more places were set at the table, and there were bowls of other tidbits that Hanna identified as meat, something she did not consume herself. No D’neeran did. D’neerans would not eat anything that had a central nervous system.
A second glance told her the cubes of meat appeared fresh, or at least, just-reconstituted. And they were raw.
“Would you like something to eat?” Cinnamon said.
“Umm, no, thank you.”
“Sit, then.”
Hanna did, wondering why she was uneasy. Few human beings of any sort could really disturb her any more, and there was no threat here. Just that strangeness . . .
“I’ve been hoping to meet you, Lady Hanna,” Cinnamon said.
“It’s just Bassanio now—”
“Oh, I don’t think so. You’ll always be Hanna ril-Koroth, I think.”
There was too much truth to this for Hanna to argue the issue. She said, “Do you have a few minutes to spare? I wanted to ask you about the work you and your team did on Battleground. I apologize for not studying your reports first, but I—might be pressed for time. I know it’s late, I’ll try not to keep you long, you must need to sleep—”
“Always,” Cinnamon said. “I love to sleep. It’s my favorite recreation. But not so much at night.” She touched a finger to the wall next to her and said, “Sweetie? Pix? Our snacks are ready. And we have a visitor.”
A minute later the door said Come in! again. Two people came in, and the strangeness tripled.
At first glance Hanna took them for brother and sister, though Matthew Sweet was tall and muscular and Pix Mundy was short and round. It was the coloring that made her think so, the pale pinkish skin, where Cinnamon’s was rosy, though they had the same big green eyes, and Pix’s, meeting Hanna’s, seemed to go perfectly round. Both had hair patterned symmetrically, almost identically, in black and white. “You all come from the same place?” Hanna said, looking at Cinnamon’s stripes, thinking of local fashions, thinking (to herself) there was no end to people’s love of decorating themselves.
“Colony One,” Cinnamon said agreeably. “We have known each other since birth. Our home is in a small area on the continent Atlas; specifically, a mountainous, rather isolated region occupied by those of our ethnicity. Do you know the geography of Colony One?”
“A little. I’ve been there, to Atlas, in fact.” But I never saw anybody like you there.
The others had crowded up to the little table and started to eat, Pix Mundy with a greed that explained how she had come to be round. Matthew Sweet looked at Hanna with uncomfortable intentness. She wondered fleetingly how many of Endeavor’s crewwomen he had seduced.
“Are you Pix’s brother?” she asked.
He and Pix looked at each other with secretive amusement. “Among other things,” he said.
“Yours is a, umm, pretty, umm, self-contained population?”
“Do you speak to aliens sso craftily?” said Pix. There was an undercurrent of sibilance. Hanna thought Pix’s ears, inside, might be lined with the faintest layer of white down, but it was hard to tell in the dim light.
Hanna backed down. The subcultural mores of human beings were not her field. She said, “You know Endeavor went on alert for a brief time because of a possible threat from the beings here, the reason you were evacuated—”
Over their protests, she remembered. It was this team that had refused to leave until Metra threatened them with force.
“Umm . . . well. It came to nothing, but one of their commanders was disturbed by something, and I can’t tell what it was. I’m trying to find out what our people were doing that might have made him react so unexpectedly. I know whatever it was, was innocently done. None of us on the surface have expressed hostility or displayed xenophobia or done anything that would obviously cause offense. All any of us have been doing is learning things. I came to ask what you’ve learned that perhaps a Commander would rather we didn’t know.”
“Xenophobia would not be good,” said Pix. “I don’t think we would like xenophobia very much.”
The three Colonists looked at each other with understanding. Hanna thought about trying to see their thoughts; these humans touched her curiosity more than the Battleground beings did.
She suppressed the impulse and said, “What results have you had from your work, in this first phase?”
“They are not very interesting, anatomically,” said the one called Sweetie. “F’thalians and Uskosians are much more interesting. Genetically—but then, we are very interested in genetics. It is our specialty. Are you interested in genetics?”
“Not particularly,” said Hanna, whose short foray into the subject had been prompted by motherhood. She had learned, for example, that Mickey had not inherited his father’s gift for music, though language—multiple languages, if he were exposed to them—would probably come easily to him.
“Surprising—since your people resulted from experiments gone wrong.”
“I would hardly say they ‘went wrong,’” Hanna said. “What have you learned about their genetics?”
“Oh, very little so far,” Cinnamon said. “There hasn’t been time so far. There’s just the boring anatomy. And they don’t know anything about their own genetics. We’re starting from scratch.”
“What do you mean, they don’t know much?”
“I said, not anything. They haven’t even done the most basic, any-child-can-do-it Mendelian experiments.”
Hanna shook her head. “Of course they have. You know about the underground agriculture? Those crops have to be hybrids from nature.”
“I doubt they’re doing any hybridization now,” Cinnamon said. “Not if their research is on a level with public health science. Because they don’t have any of that. They don’t know the first thing about viruses—and they’ve got plenty. Someday,” she said, smiling at Hanna with her rosy mouth, “you’re going to walk into an alien environment and find yourself the perfect host for some organism Earth never dreamed up.”
“I did,” Hanna said, “but the one that almost killed me was a mutation from a Terrestrial virus. It was Plague. What did you join this mission for, if you weren’t willing to take some chances?”
“Curiosity, what else?” said Sweetie, as if she should have guessed.
“And the opportunity, when it’s over and we’ve got time and our pay, to see the real Moon,” Cinnamon said.
All three of them looked at the pseudo-windows, where the moon was nearly all the way up. Hanna looked at it closely.
“That’s not Colony One’s moon,” she said. “That’s Earth’s.”
“Yesss,” said Pix. “The real Moon.”
Hanna pulled herself back to the subject. “Does that seem odd to you?” she said. “I mean, does such ignorance seem compatible with the complex society they have?”
“It’s not complex,” said Sweetie.
“What do you mean?”
“Where do you see complexity? They are born, they mate, they fight, they die.”
“They have a religion.”
“They reproduce,” Sweet said indifferently. “Any amoeba can reproduce. I will bet you—say, a freighter of sweet fish—”
“What?” Hanna said.
“—against, oh, whatever you would like—what would you like?”
“Freedom,” Hanna said.
“You, too?” He looked at
the forest again. “Is that characteristic of the products of the old experiments, I wonder? Only a hypothesis.”
“The old—?” He had lost Hanna. “What are we betting on?” she said. “I don’t think I could lay my hands on a freighter of fish. But if I could bet, what would I be betting on?”
“That the religion is not complex. Of course I don’t know anything about it, but what I’ve heard suggests that it is as boring as their anatomy.”
Hanna considered this. “I’ve assumed it has a complexity we haven’t yet penetrated,” she said.
“Human thinking,” Sweetie said.
“Damn,” Hanna said. She, of all people, should not have to be reminded of that pitfall.
“That would not be in your reports,” she said. “What else have you left out? What did you imagine? What did you fear?”
“We fear the viruses,” said Cinnamon indistinctly; she was licking her fingers vigorously. The dishes in front of her were empty.
“We did atmospheric sampling before I went to the surface the first time. The organic molecules we found were incompatible with anything in the human body. You are human, aren’t you?” she added, suddenly not too certain of it.
“Our DNA is indisputably human,” Sweetie said, “just as yours is. Cinnamon speaks for herself. I think it’s not so much fear as horror of the emptiness the epidemics have left. Because there must have been epidemics, there must have been plagues. They are crowded together, they would not even know what caused them, and they are used to death. I think it likely the crèches we talk about are built on the bones of earlier ones, layers on layers of bones. But they deny it. They do not intend deceit, I think; they only do not remember. And there are no records. The disease we called Plague was finally contained and vaccines developed because centuries of research came before. That does not happen here. Civilization crashes and burns, they start all over, repopulate, breed and breed, that they remember, that they must breed—and they must breed, make no mistake. The common cycle of estrus is confined in Earthly mammals to females. Not here. We cannot see how they ever developed a civilization at all. Unless they had help. And we think that they did.”
It seemed preposterous. Hanna frowned.
Cinnamon said, “Sweetie is correct. Do you wish to see the tissue samples we brought back? There is evidence of genetic tampering at a high level of sophistication, many generations ago. I do not know if you would call it help.”
“Tampering by whom?”
“Who knows? I would look for traces, if I were you. I would bring archaeologists, now or later.” Cinnamon smiled. “You have added a preacher to your team, why not an archaeologist?”
“Gabriel’s not exactly—”
Sweetie broke in: “I would ask myself, I would ask the—preacher—I would ask an archaeologist too: What kind of intelligence finds it necessary to create thinking creatures like those of this world? Why were they created? We know why the experiments were done to create telepaths. You were meant to be spies. We are not so sure about those that made our ancestors. But here,” said Sweetie, with a smile that showed sharp teeth, “we are.”
Hanna might have asked another question, but Cinnamon said placidly, “I am ready to nap now.” The great green eyes were half closed.
“I, too,” Sweetie said. He pushed away his own empty dishes, and stood and stretched. It was a full-body stretch, languorous and fluid. He was admirably muscled. “Pix?” he said.
“There iss some food left,” she said, eyeing other bowls, scarcely touched. “I will sssave it for later.”
“But not much later, knowing you,” Sweetie said.
Hanna, going out, had the distinct feeling that Sweet and Pix weren’t going anywhere; that all three of them would curl up on the piled cushions of Cinnamon’s room, call for a deeper night, and relax at once, as if their bones were liquid, after one last look at the real Moon.
• • •
Time to study the political scientists’ impressions: Hanna went back to the auditorium and found it almost deserted, all the tired telepaths except Dema gone to bed. The report she wanted floated near the ceiling, flapping. She got the image down to eye level and steadied, with some difficulty. Jewel Guzulaitis, Nyree Olabowale, and Glenna Leatherman had written:
Political science is, at its simplest, the art of government. Our sources of information prior to direct communication with the population of Battleground were:
First, visual data extracted from the planet’s datastream—
Oh, thought Hanna. They use that kind of language—
Second, the spoken word. Reliable transmissions for periods slightly older than the visual actually were available first, but—
Her eyes began to glaze, stimulant or no stimulant.
Finally, reports from the telepathic team led by Hanna ril-Koroth (i.e., Lady Hanna’s own reports). This team was not intended to be used until physical contact was made with subject population, but Lady Hanna was utilized as an adjunct when the data described above yielded fewer results than anticipated.
The report was no more readable than Pirin Zey’s, but her own name got her attention. She made a face and said, “Adjunct. Huh.”
She read on. Guzulaitis, Olabowale, and Leatherman barely referred to her own reports, commenting on their subjectivity when they did. The three had accurately assigned a governing role to the Holy Man. Not surprisingly, the only governing mechanism detected had been military in structure. The commanders, it appeared, ran Rowtt.
And commanders ran Wektt, too.
I forgot about that, Hanna thought.
She went through the rest of the report quickly. There were, of course, two sides at war; but in her own mind, all the individuals she had touched had been Soldiers of Rowtt, because that was the first name Linguistics had identified with a location. Once contact was made, she and all the others had been immersed in Rowtt, buried in it. Wektt was only “the enemy,” championed by “the Demon.” But the people who were “the enemy” had not been clearly distinguishable by anything they had broadcast; nor could Hanna, thinking back, discern any difference between the people of Rowtt and the people of Wektt, or any other place, by what she had sensed in their thoughts or seen in their surroundings.
So what the hell was Wektt? And “That Place” had never surfaced at all before Arch talked to Kwek. Who ran That Place?
H’ana?
She turned; was this the first time Dema had called for her attention?
Distracted, sorry . . .
I think the stimulant, H’ana, it’s not good for us—
I needed it.
She looked around again. Even Carl and Glory were gone now. She might as well hunt up the counteragent and get some real rest.
• • •
She felt it working even before she left the night-duty medic, and scarcely noticed when he pressed another vial into her hand, “in case you need it later.” Her mind began to drift before she reached her quarters, and she did not even notice that Kwek must have been put elsewhere, because the room was empty. She was moving slowly toward the bed, as if she waded through deep water, when an inner voice finally broke through.
reports are not what we do best, it said, and she recognized the voice of the ghost. others can correlate, said the ghost. computers do it even better
then what should we be doing
talking to Kwoort. reports suggest questions. he has answers. always they have the answers to their own reality, the only answers that matter
So she was done with reports; she fell onto her bed without even getting undressed. Their reality, she thought, sinking, going under. Theirs.
That meant Kwoort.
Chapter XIV
COME IN! said Hanna’s door, though she did not remember telling it to say that. She woke slowly to see Gabriel looking down at her. “Kwoort wants us,” he said.
>
For a minute everything was blank. His pale, strained face looked familiar but nothing came to her at the sight of it, no recognition or welcoming; the words in her ears were meaningless, neutral. She thought and felt nothing except the impossibility of moving the solid weight of herself.
He sat down on the edge of the bed, and slowly she began to wake up.
“What’s Kwoort . . . what time is it?” she said, the words slurred. It was hard to move her lips.
“Standard time, I don’t know . . .” He moved a hand. “Evening at Rowtt. You’ve only been asleep a few hours.”
“I need more,” she said, remembering, knowing now that this heaviness was the accumulation of weariness the stimulant had masked.
“I told him we’d come, but . . .”
Hanna sat up: such a simple thing, and so difficult. The light garment she had been wearing for too long clung unpleasantly to her skin.
“When does he want us?” she said.
“I said we’d meet him at the same place in, umm, a Standard hour, I guess.”
Enough time to bathe, at least.
“What does he want? Why—?” The next question seemed more pressing. “Why did he talk to you instead of me?”
“He told Communications he would talk to either of us. And you were asleep.”
“And you weren’t? Gabriel, did you take any stimulant?”
“No.”
“You must be exhausted.”
“And you aren’t?”
“Ah, hell . . .” She put her head back against the wall. The room was almost completely dark, with only a bare glow along one wall at the floor. It reflected faintly on Gabriel’s face. He was not looking at her now.
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