Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  “He was calm,” Gabriel said. “He said he’s bringing the Holy Man he answers to—Tlorr, was what the name sounded like. Do you know who that is?”

  “Maybe.” She got her legs over the side of the bed, two separate weights of stone. Carefully smoothed the skirt over her knees, but recognized that sitting on someone’s bed in the dark and talking quietly was a familiar mode for Gabriel, with no sexual connotations, and at the moment she might have been one of the children sheltered by his abbey.

  I don’t know this man, she thought, and he’s worth knowing. When there’s time, when we’re not being driven by Kwoort—

  • • •

  Held the ampoule close to her face, flicked the tab, inhaled. Gabriel held the one she had handed him and watched her silently. Thrum. . . .

  She opened her eyes, sighed with satisfaction. “Better,” she said.

  He turned toward the doorway that would take them to the pod. She said, “Gabriel? Aren’t you going to use it?”

  “No.”

  “You’re so tired you won’t be able to walk pretty soon!”

  “I’ll keep it,” he said. “If there’s an emergency I’ll reconsider. I don’t need it yet.”

  He was moving slowly and wearily. She followed him into the bay and into the pod and took her place in the pilot’s seat. She went smoothly through the sequence that allowed them to leave Endeavor; they descended toward the planet’s night side.

  “Do you have some kind of religious proscription against artificial health aids?” she said, focused by the drug, unable to let it go.

  “No. Not within reason. We don’t use A.S., though,” he said, meaning anti-senescence techniques, and she said slowly, “I remember that. Somebody told me that once, about your abbey. I’d forgotten. Is it hard, knowing you’ll die sooner than the rest of us?”

  “Hard? Yes, sometimes. Sometimes brothers leave the order just because of that. But do you know the suicide statistics among people who think they’ve lived too long?”

  “Well, no. Is it high?”

  “It starts going up at around age one hundred. At a hundred and seventy-five it’s ten percent.”

  “And that’s high?”

  “Hanna, my dear—” unconscious of those two words “—that is one in ten people. Among people under age one hundred it’s less than one in five hundred thousand. And there’s plenty of testimony that the ninety in a hundred in the top range only go on living because they believe their family or society or God expects it of them. They wait for death as for a welcome guest.”

  “Starr wouldn’t, if it worked right for him,” Hanna said sadly. “He always wants to see how things turn out. Make them turn out the way he wants, preferably.”

  He caught the implication, and knew it was something he was not supposed to know, but all he said was, “And you?”

  She didn’t answer. D’neerans did not talk to outsiders about the dark side of their unique society, where unremitting intimacy did not depend on physical proximity. In the earliest generations so many died by their own hands that it was called the Dying Time; only now, in Hanna’s lifetime, were memorials going up, and remembrance ceremonies multiplied. It still occurred, though it was rare. The deaths were grieved, but they were accepted, because not everyone born a telepath could stand it for a lifetime. Hanna understood. She had fallen deep into her own well of despair after Michael’s death, and all Starr Jameson’s efforts might not have been enough if it had not been for Mickey. She hoped she would never have to look into that darkness again.

  The pod slipped into the upper atmosphere and Gabriel reached for her hand. “Not so fast—”

  “What? Why?”

  “There’s no reason to hurry. You’re going too fast.”

  “Too fast for what?”

  “I don’t know. You’re going too fast.”

  “I just feel like—”

  “It’s the stimulant. The drug. What do you think you’re going to accomplish by hurrying?”

  “All right!” She threw up her hands—the pod was guiding itself anyway—and gave the decelerate order. They angled into clouds.

  Gabriel was still not satisfied; Hanna felt it. Responding to something sensed, she dimmed the interior lights, until only the glow of changing readouts filled the capsule. He would have liked those off too, she thought, but he said nothing, and she glanced at him to see his eyes closed, his lips moving. He was praying. She thought: What a strange pair we are. Her own attention, in this space of stillness and darkness, was drawn to the dark city they were coming to. The second time she had gone there it had been night, and she knew lights rarely showed aboveground. Yet ten million Soldiers lived beneath the surface, packed into the space a city of half a million humans might occupy. They took meals in common in innumerable refectories—her own perception, confirmed by others’ observations—but there seemed to be time and space for solitude, if they wanted it, and no sense of resentment at the unvarying focus on work, war, and the care of offspring. She had touched the minds of Soldiers assembled for the repetitive speeches, detected no rebellion against the ascendancy of the High Commander and the Holy Man—nor any particular hatred of the Demon, whoever that was, either.

  Is it, she wondered, the absence of imagination that repels me? Most thoughts seem as gray as the spaces where they live and work. How could such a species envision exploring space?

  The pod made steadily for its programmed landing place, unbuffeted, so far, by high winds. Hanna supposed Kwoort would be waiting. She reached out and tried to touch him, but—thrummm . . . Strange.

  A prickle of apprehension. She tried again.

  Thrummm . . .

  The apprehension edged toward fear. It was like opening your eyes on a sunny day and seeing blackness. There was no improvement on a third attempt.

  She had never experienced anything like it. She could not think of any possible cause except the stimulant, this time the full dose for her body mass. It was supposed to be safe, and she had brushed off Dema’s warnings. Logic assured her the effect would probably be temporary.

  Only probably—

  And if the effect was cumulative—

  The fear grew a little more. But she tried again and this time found Kwoort. Slowly, much more slowly than she was accustomed to, her perception sharpened. Finally the gestalt and the context were clear. Kwoort was with another being, and she recognized that one too. The Holy Man. The Holy Man, not the deposed, crazy one.

  I shall go out to meet them. That was Kwoort, a pulse of images. This place will be free from attack for a time.

  Glimpse of another city, a seacoast.

  Concentrations there, a little longer. Kwoort again. Then they are to extend operations to the north. But this city is nearly recovered from the last cycle. Attacks will resume here soon.

  But first, the centers northward . . . ?

  The wind started when they neared the surface, and she slipped away from Kwoort’s thoughts and thrust the fear down. She finished the landing fast, swooping into calmer air; instruments said hard weather was coming again. That appeared to be a constant with few lulls, and she wanted to get to ground. The pod would barely notice lightning strikes, except to record them, but it was too small to ignore the resulting turbulence and the brute force of wind. Gabriel looked at her when he heard the subtle hiss of increased acceleration. “Weather,” she said succinctly.

  “Gives a new meaning to the term ‘bad climate,’ doesn’t it?”

  She said fretfully, “Does the sun never shine here?”—thinking of the glint of light on the splashing fountain at Dwar, of old trees around Jameson’s home and sunlight bright on autumn leaves, or Mickey on an ocean beach, throwing handfuls of sand with abandon in the clear, precious light.

  “Sometimes,” Gabriel said.

  “It’s always been cloudy, at least, when I’ve been do
wn here, or worse than cloudy.”

  They came to rest at what the instruments said was the right place, but Hanna had to cue exterior lights before they could see the blocky building a short walk away. It was closed, the steps and terrace before it empty.

  “No welcome mat,” said Gabriel.

  Hanna turned off the light. She didn’t want the two of them silhouetted against it when they left the pod.

  “We’ll take lights with us,” she said. “We’d be blind without them.”

  He said, “Are you all right?” He was looking at her in the glow of the instrument panels and she saw for an instant what he saw: her face taut, eyes too bright. Then the image was gone as if a shutter had closed, gone though she had not willed it to go.

  “I don’t know, Gabriel. I think the stimulant is a problem. But the counteragent isn’t an option. We don’t have any with us . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I feel, oh, walled off. Maybe I should have gone into trance instead. I couldn’t now, if I needed it. Maybe I made a mistake.”

  “It’s not too late to go back,” he said.

  “Is that what you think we should do?”

  They looked at each other in silence, in the dim light. Presently Gabriel said, “I think that this is the valley of the shadow of death. But I believe we’re not alone.”

  For once, the reference did not have to be explained to Hanna. It had crossed so many cultures and so many centuries that even she recognized it. But she said, “I think there’s only you and me. I think I’m glad we’re away from the heart of the city, where Kwoort could get reinforcements in a hurry, and that he’s only brought one other with him. And that the com units have been programmed so a single word will get Metra’s people down here. That’s what I believe . . . Do you think you could kill someone? An alien?”

  “I don’t know. The question,” he said wryly, “does not arise in the usual course of my life.”

  “You are fortunate,” Hanna said.

  “Yes, I am. But does it make you think less of me?”

  She found that she could not lie to him.

  “It could be inconvenient. In the circumstances.”

  “Then you must find an awful lot of people inconvenient.”

  “No,” said Hanna. “Most of them will never have to face the choice. But most of the true-humans I know would have no hesitation if the need arose, though any D’neeran would.”

  Except me.

  “And maybe I would have less than I think,” said Gabriel. “To save a child, for example—I don’t think I would hesitate. And I don’t think it would be a sin. But what it might do to me later—that I don’t know.”

  After a pause Hanna said, “I have become a violent person, I think. I hate it in the abstract—but it comes easily to my mind when there has not even been an explicit threat—when I only think there might be one.”

  “Does that trouble you?”

  “Not much,” she said, an unpalatable truth but still truth, and she got out of her seat and they went out into the night, Hanna reflecting that they were not, in any case, armed, and wondering if that was a mistake too.

  • • •

  The night, at ground level, was hot and still. There was thunder not far away, a low, almost subliminal rumble that did not seem to stop and that set up a vibration in the bones. They walked toward the building, pointing narrow beams of light at the ground. Outside the beams the blackness was complete and closed around them like a wall. Hanna kept looking around anyway, as if she could see something, as if some threat might come out of the dark. And she knew that she ought to be able to tell for certain if there was a threat or if there was not, but the sense she relied on always, and most of all in times of danger, was dulled.

  It shouldn’t be, she thought. The drug didn’t affect telepathic perception like this, not even a few hours ago, whatever it might do to trance. But this time I had twice as much . . .

  “It’s nothing,” Gabriel said softly; for a moment she thought he had read her mind, but then she said, “What do you mean, what’s nothing?”

  “What’s making you so restless. It’s just electricity. Like the air is charged.”

  “It is charged, isn’t it,” she said, not a question.

  “I shouldn’t have agreed to this meeting so quickly. I think that was a mistake.”

  They were nearly at the structure, and there had been no sign of life. Hanna stopped, shifted the light to her left hand and reached out to Gabriel with her right. He took it and they stood for a minute holding hands like timid children, looking not at each other but at the silent building. Hanna said, “The mistakes are adding up, aren’t they.”

  “I hope not,” Gabriel said.

  The door opened and Kwoort came out, light behind him only for a moment before the door shut it in. Hanna felt the dark between them thicken. She reached out to touch his thought, the easy perception, easy as seeing, all wrong, sluggish. But she knew that the figure, a vaguer darkness, was Kwoort.

  Kwoort did not move. Finally Hanna took her hand from Gabriel’s and walked toward him.

  She said, “Greetings, Kwoort Commander,” the courtesy empty in her mouth.

  “Guest,” he said from the darkness, bare acknowledgment.

  “Why have you summoned us?” she asked.

  “I require answers to questions,” he said.

  “As do I,” said Hanna, but she tensed even further.

  Hanna’s previous experience of beings (some human) who had required answers of her was appalling. Trance protected the practitioner from physical pain, but Hanna had concluded some time past that the optimum solution to any such threat was the immediate death of whoever or whatever threatened her. No more goddamned unarmed First Contacts, she thought, and felt Gabriel stir uneasily behind her.

  “You have lied to me,” Kwoort said.

  “I have not lied, Kwoort Commander. None of us have.”

  “You can speak to the mind,” he said. “Speak to mine!”

  So he did know. But why had he not said it openly, in that earlier, aborted meeting?

  After a rather long pause she said, “You suspected that we have this ability, I know . . . and it was your expressed desire to use it in your wars that caused us to decide on concealing it. We are not the enemies of anyone on this world; we will not fight with you or against you. The ability I possess cannot be taught. It is inborn, and only in a small minority. I am the only human being of this expedition to have it—” Protecting the others, if protection was needed. “It cannot be useful to you. And so it was concealed.”

  “You should not have concealed it,” he said.

  “Maybe not.” Mistakes, mistakes! “But put yourself in my place, if you will. I did not know you well; I do not know you now. If you thought I possessed an ability that might aid you in war, would I not fear that you might seize me, as you seized my comrade early in this day, and try to force me to use the ability to your benefit?”

  “What is to stop me, if I think it good to do that?”

  Gabriel had come up beside her. He touched her hand. She knew what he meant her to do, perceive his thought, so she tried, and it should have been easy and was not. She thought the words he formed might be: Don’t talk about power, don’t talk about weapons. Don’t raise the level of aggression.

  “I will speak to you alone,” Kwoort said. “It will not stop you from speaking to your holy man’s mind, will it? But if you have finally told me the truth, he cannot speak to yours . . . we will see. And my Holy Man would speak with him about Abundant God.”

  “Kwoort Commander, how many summers does this Holy Man have?”

  “Tlorr has seven hundred and fifty summers. Why is that of interest?”

  “Because you yourself have seven hundred and twelve. Why have you not yet beco
me Holy?”

  There was a silence, and then Kwoort said, “Only Abundant God knows the time when he will take one of us to himself.”

  She could not sense what he felt as he said that, though she tried. But she thought of the suicide statistics among humans who felt they had outlived life.

  Kwoort whispered: “Speak, I said. Speak to my mind. Speak the truth to my mind.”

  “I cannot ‘speak’ it,” Hanna said. “Not in words. I can do that with humans and other beings with whom I share a spoken language. You and I do not. What I might perceive in you, and can communicate to you, can only be an amalgam of images and emotions, though our minds independently transmute them to words.”

  “You lie!” he roared, so loudly that his cry drowned out the translator, and Hanna saw the source of the strength of his conviction: questions asked of the Warrior who had not been, and perhaps should have been, assassinated. Her answers must have been inaccurate or incomplete.

  “I do not lie! Yes, I know more, when you speak, than you say! I know that you had an informant! But did she not tell you—”

  She realized then that she had trapped herself in another lie. Dema had “spoken to the mind,” and Kwoort knew it; he knew that at least one other human being on Endeavor was capable of it; now he might think all of them were. She would have to tell him all of the truth.

  Only five, she said to him, four besides myself, and tried to show him images of their faces. The effort was enormous and she knew that she had not succeeded. But the number had gotten through.

  She watched Kwoort absorb the knowledge. Watched only with her eyes, because her mind was filled with shadow as deeply as her eyes. He could never have had this experience before, the certain knowledge that another being told the truth, and her perception of his experiencing it should have been just as absolute, but it was not. It was clouded, this sense that she most trusted was uncertain, and it seemed that even if a light shone suddenly in the night, it would illuminate only treacherous wisps of fog.

  Presently he said, “The Holy Man waits for your fellow-Soldier”—a word as close to the Standard “friend” as the translator could get.