Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  The one who told me about this, told me it was something that stood twelve hundred summers ago. But I don’t think so. He had heard it from someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone else and they are all dead and so is he and time is a mysterious place. He said it was a tall structure in the form of a cylinder. How tall, I said, and he said, oh, as tall as the sky. I don’t think that is true either. He said there was a three-sided cap on it that was made of gold. I said where was it and he said on Continent Three, but Continent Three died three hundred summers ago. I said what was it for. He didn’t know. He just remembered the shining three-sided cap standing into the sky. I said if you remember it you must have seen it. He said no. So there might have been something tall with a shiny top on it on Continent Three but what he described was only in his mind and no Soldiers have ever constructed such a thing so maybe he made it up and it did not exist at all.

  “Does this qualify as history?” Hanna asked Arch.

  “Damned if I know. I never did get a look at what Kwek called Rowtt’s historical records, whatever they were. Aren’t they supposed to refrain from keeping records? Isn’t that the command of their god?”

  “You talked to Kwek sometimes,” Hanna said to Gabriel, politely not mentioning one of the things he had talked to Kwek about. Nakeekt would never have guessed that anyone could be telepathic if Gabriel had not told Kwek. “Did she say anything about them?”

  More guilt. “I didn’t ask. I just kept her company, told her a little about us, tried to make sure she was comfortable. She said she was. I prayed, once.”

  “Did you? What did she make of that?”

  “It didn’t translate,” he said. “I think ‘our daily bread’ did, but not much else.”

  “‘Our daily ration of vegetable-based protein food’?”

  Hanna set the page-turning program on automatic. Flip. Flip. Flip.

  “What was that about code?” she said.

  “There was no code,” Arch said. “It was an hypothesis that fell apart right away. It was just that this has untranslatable words and phrases that never showed up in the original datastream. Linguistics is trying to interpret them by context. It’ll take a while. I’m going to get some rest,” he added. “It’s getting late.”

  “It is?” said Hanna, her sense of time skewed to uselessness. It would be near the end of the night at That Place, its inhabitants in the deep sleep before dawn, and she was so out of synch with Endeavor’s cycle that she forgot what chronometers said as soon as she looked away from them. She was not the only one who felt unbalanced; everyone was fading.

  “I guess I’d better rest too,” she said, the endless Battleground day still weighing on her. “We might be busy when Linguistics is done.”

  • • •

  She expected to sleep well but did not. She dreamed of Jameson explaining that Michael Kristofik had not died after all. The explanation was obscure but sounded reasonable in the dream. A burst of joy and relief filled her, she was whole again, and blindingly happy.

  She woke up and began to cry. She found herself, almost as if this was the dream, not that, stumbling through corridors until she came to Gabriel’s door. When he heard her voice he came at once, rumpled but slowly waking, and held her as she clung to him and wept, trying to think of her as a mourning child, like so many he had known, trying to ignore the warmth of her in his arms.

  Finally she could tell him about the dream.

  “I know,” he said. “I had some like that when I was a kid, after my parents died.”

  “But it’s been so long! There are days when I don’t think of Mike more than a hundred times, why is this happening now?”

  “You’re grieving again,” he said, “because you’re grieving for another man. Only this time the loss is your choice. Are you sure it’s the right one?”

  “It is. God help me, it is.”

  She was calmer now, though the deep weight of tears still choked her chest. The calmness fell apart when she turned toward the door and Gabriel said rashly, “Michael’s not dead, you know. There’s something after this.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Hanna said, too full of sorrow to answer with tact.

  “How do you know that? There’s an infinity of universes, and do you think the Creator of them all, who holds in His unimaginable thought the dance of every quark, can’t shepherd a single soul from this life to another?”

  Hanna turned back. She said, “And do you think every telepath who ever lived hasn’t cried out for someone lost? True-humans do it too, but not like we do! We would know the scarcest, scantest trace of someone we love if a trace survived! I’ve felt people’s minds when they died, not just Mike’s. They don’t go anywhere. They just stop. What do you think I was doing,” she said, the tears burning now and turning to rage, “for weeks after Michael’s death? I did not speak, I had no time to speak to living humans, I was searching for him! I looked everywhere, I looked to the farthest stars! He wasn’t there, he was gone, he’s gone forever. Don’t try to give me your pathetic comfort,” she said savagely, “it doesn’t work—”

  Because you’re grieving for another man, Gabriel had said, and as she went away she thought of the risk Jameson took with every venture into A.S. I could not bear that loss, she thought, and then she thought But it shouldn’t matter any more—!

  And now going back to sleep was out of the question, and she went back to her quarters and dressed and went wearily to Communications, trying to still the clamor of competing voices that were all hers.

  • • •

  Hanna did not much care for Kit Mortan, Endeavor’s chief of Linguistics. He reminded her somewhat of an animal native to the world of Primitive A. Her focus when she was there had been on an arguably pre-sentient species of that world, beings who had begun to fashion rough tools and use a vocabulary of perhaps two hundred utterances—whether these should be called words and phrases—language, in short—was a subject of debate, because there was scant evidence of syntax. Following these beings and scavenging their kills were creatures that the earliest observers had taken for large snakes, some as long as three meters, until someone noticed they traveled on numerous boneless appendages which carried them so smoothly and rapidly that the animals appeared to glide across the ground. It was not Kit’s appearance that made her think of them, however; it was a certain sinuosity of movement, a scavenger turn of mind. She had known him on Earth; she had spoken of him to Jameson—

  (“He smiles too much.”

  “Did you not, just five minutes ago, tell me that I do not smile enough?”

  “He smiles when he has nothing to smile about. You don’t smile even when you want to, when I can feel it in you like a light you’re trying to hide—”)

  Kit had said something and Hanna had not heard it. She had a vague impression that he wondered whose mind she was reading and hoped it was not his.

  “Sorry,” she said. “What was that?”

  “I said, the most striking feature of this material is that it has nothing in common with the broadcast datastream we picked up coming in. Look at this—”

  It is evident that all we make must be sustainable through the efforts of our own hands. I am insistent that it be so. There are those on the mainland who wish to help us, they have promised the building of a power center. All of us see the danger of coming to rely on this center. Who is to say that the mainland might not one day be destroyed as other continents were destroyed? Then we would not be able to maintain the center and for safety would have to close it.

  She said, “Is this about the reactor that supplies power for That Place?”

  “I would say that’s very likely. The material seems to fall into a couple of broad categories. Most of it’s about the day-to-day functioning of That Place. But some of it looks like secondhand oral history, things somebody besides the writers said that the writers set down.
Facts, legend, speculation—”

  “‘Writers,’ you said. It was written by different people? You can tell by how it’s said?”

  He looked at her with pity for her ignorance, as if the answer should be obvious. “We can tell because a number of different handwritings appear. We’ll be doing another set of groupings based on who actually wrote what. It’s too bad you didn’t get a sample of this Nakeekt’s handwriting.”

  “You might have one,” Hanna said. “That bit about the power center—Nakeekt might have written that. She founded That Place.”

  “I thought she said it wasn’t known who founded it.”

  “She lied,” Hanna said.

  Kit looked at her skeptically. She ought to be used to this by now, her testimony mistrusted and discounted although her knowledge came from direct experience while true-humans’ came from deduction and analysis of the written or spoken word. She was used to it. But she no longer wasted energy trying to convince them.

  “Why don’t you,” she said, “load what you’ve got into a reader. No, two readers. One for Arch.”

  “You want to take them with you?”

  “Yes. If that’s all right,” she said, thinking, Why the hell else would I ask? And felt an unaccustomed twinge of shame; she was irritable because she was still jumpy from a dream and its aftermath.

  She said, lingering on purpose so as not to be too abrupt, “It’s all in here?”

  “Most of it. The categories are just a first approximation, remember. We’ve just started on the coded material. You’ll get that next.”

  “Arch said there wasn’t a code after all.”

  “First we thought there was, then we thought there wasn’t. Now we’re certain some of it’s in code. Not much, and it won’t take long, once we get to it.”

  She took the readers and went to wake up Arch, who was sleeping alone, for once. “Time to work,” she said, and handed him a reader. They looked at the outline of categories at the start.

  “I’ll take the oral history,” Arch said with enthusiasm. “I liked the way that first passage went—‘time is a mysterious place.’”

  “You know,” said Hanna, “I wonder where they got ‘mysterious.’ It doesn’t feel like a Soldier word.”

  He found the passage and jumped to a note. “It wasn’t in the original datastream; Kit’s never seen it before. There are a couple of variations, and here are the contexts, next layer down, and the rationale, next layer—they’re not rushing this, Kit practically wrote a paper on this one word. Want to see?”

  “When did he have time? That passage was translated by the time I got back to the ship.”

  “The notes are from an hour ago. He must have made a guess that worked out.”

  Hanna nodded. She did not have to like Kit to know that he was marvelously good at his work.

  She looked at the list of categories. Many of the entries were routine. Food preparation—cross-indexed to native food sources, appearance of, cultivation of (with a note: Refer to Zey), cross-indexed to fiber sources, cross-indexed to fabric, production of, cross-indexed—

  “Listen to this,” said Arch. “A Warrior of three hundred and one summers told me this that she saw herself. It was before I came here and she has not come here yet but maybe she will. It was in the far north region of Continent Two before the destruction and it was on a mountain. There was there, untouched, a place where Soldiers could once sit outdoors, the area having gone without attack for a long time. There were some tables and benches there and the tables had canopies over them as if to provide shade when it was warm, but it was not warm when the Warrior was there. The tables and benches and canopies were all made of metal painted red, and the tables and benches were of mesh so the rain would drain through them. When the Warrior was there it was cold and there was snow piled high on all of it and there were icicles that hung from everything. The Warrior said the sun came out while she was there and she was surprised. She said it was pleasant. She kept saying this, as if she were trying to find some word better than pleasant, and she said that it made something happen inside her when she saw it. She did not know what it was. I think now that I know what it was, I think she meant it was beautiful, the light on the clear bright ice and the white snow and the red standing out warm, and that she wanted to look at it a long time. At that time I had started to have sensations also that I did not understand and I had started to dream. So I asked her if she dreamed but she did not know what I meant, and when I explained, she said no. But I think one day she will start to dream, if she survives.”

  Hanna said, “Where did Kit get ‘beautiful?’”

  Arch checked the notes. “Context. That was another of the untranslatable words, meaning it never showed up in the datastream. You’d expect ‘interesting’ there, wouldn’t you?”

  “I wonder,” Hanna said slowly, “if they’re inventing new words.”

  Arch consulted more notes. “Kit thinks so. What he translated as ‘beautiful’ started out, he thinks, as the highest degree of ‘pleasant’ with additions of ‘interesting’ and a reference to the visual. It must be a long word in the original.”

  Hanna looked again at the outline of contents, began to navigate through the text, skipping around. Much of it read like a series of handbooks, detailing directions for everything from maintenance of looms to forecasting weather. Here was a tide table (insanely complicated, with three moons—and Metra had proposed landing a boat?) and descriptions of ocean currents between That Place and a numbered island, the number meaning nothing to Hanna.

  She began to key searches for specific topics: Reproduction. Young (n.). Offspring. Infant. Child. Abundant God. God. Holy Man. Demon. As an afterthought she added: Facilitators.

  Nothing.

  She sat back with the reader in her lap, frustrated. How much more material was hidden at That Place? Could Kwek somehow be enlisted to obtain the rest? Could Metra be induced to let her go back to the surface and sneak it out herself? She wanted to talk to Jameson, who was now in a position to make Metra do any damn thing Hanna wanted her to do, if he approved.

  She tried to put a call through to him, but it was night where he was too and he was not to be disturbed—according to the family home in Arrenswood’s capital city, which had not been programmed by Jameson himself but by his relatives, and which told her she was not on the list of people authorized to reach him at any hour. Her name was on one of its lists, though. The list was called: “Banned.”

  It hurt. She was surprised to find that it hurt very much indeed.

  • • •

  Jameson was not asleep, though the house didn’t know it. Mickey had tottered into his unlocked room in silence, and somehow, silently, gotten onto the bed, and started to cry abruptly, miserably, and loudly.

  What the hell . . .

  Mickey, with a fine sense of timing, waited until Jameson managed to sit up and order lights on before scrambling into his arms and escalating to howls.

  Thera appeared in the doorway, still getting into a robe, hair wild. The adults exchanged astonished looks over Mickey’s head. It was not possible to exchange words without shouting; Mickey was too loud. The Dog appeared behind Thera, assessed the situation, charged the bed and threw itself on Mickey, licking the child’s face and whimpering with concern.

  “Nightmare,” Thera said a little later, when Mickey had gotten some words out between diminishing sobs.

  “He doesn’t have nightmares.”

  “He just had one,” Thera pointed out.

  Mickey had accepted a hug from Thera, but clung to Jameson. The boy’s tearful face was uncertain now, but no longer afraid. Something, evidently, had been pursuing him in his dream; it had been large and threatening; that was all he had been able to tell them.

  “Why now? What did he have to eat tonight?”

  “Nothing unusual. He’s in a new place, he
’s had a lot of excitement, and there’s been a certain amount of tension, especially this evening—”

  Jameson’s sister had come to visit, and she had had a lot to say about his caring for Hanna ril-Koroth’s son. He had not allowed her to say it in Mickey’s presence, but even a child as young as Mickey must sense something malevolent in Portia’s look, and what she had not said, at their brief meeting. Along with an unattractive satisfaction, because she too had heard the rumor Jameson bitterly regretted starting.

  Later—because sleep did not come back easily—he lay awake and wondered what Hanna meant to do with Mickey when she returned. D’neeran children were raised less by a parent than by a community; the kinship group was only part of it. Surely she did not intend to swoop into the house on Earth, scoop up Mickey, bear him off without warning, and keep him to herself—she who was half a stranger to her son, her image and voice still familiar thanks to hours of holo and video recordings, but the memory of her scent and touch surely fading.

  No, he decided. Hanna had changed, certainly, but she had not changed that much. She would let Mickey keep his ties to Jameson and Thera; she would not force him to break them.

  Which meant, of course, that she would have to retain some tie to Jameson too, whether she wanted to or not.

  We’ll see just how finished it is, he thought.

  Chapter VI

  HANNA HAUNTED LINGUISTICS, begrudging Kit’s people their deliberate pace. She wanted to go home—back, at least, to Earth. She wanted Mickey. She wanted to make arrangements for a life.

  Ejected from Linguistics, she tried to kill time: tidied her quarters, took exercise, took a meal, tried to think about Battleground, thought about Mickey instead.

  Fretted.

  It can’t be that hard to break a Battleground code. It must be simple, a cipher made by minds and hands, no match for our computers.

  • • •

  “No,” said Kit, “it wasn’t hard. But it’s strange stuff.”

  “Strange meaning—”