“Armies,” Hanna murmured.
“What?”
“Armies of the breeding,” she said. “Descending on That Place. Massacring everyone there . . . There were a lot of areas we didn’t get a look at. There’s somebody in that little building. Remember? The one we could see from the landing field? Where Nakeekt didn’t want us to go?”
He saw shadows under her eyes that should not be there, and it was not just the immediate lack of sleep that had put them there. He was beginning to feel exhausted, too. Everything about Battleground was oppressive. It was a weight on his thoughts, and how much more heavily must it weigh on Hanna, who had shared the beings’ minds?
She said, “I wonder if Kwek could tell me who it is. What it’s about.”
“What are you talking about? What’s that got to do with the text?”
“I don’t know. Whoever’s in there was crying out and he was saying Nothing, nothing . . . I’m going to ask Kwek.”
“How? Well, she still had a com unit—”
“I shouldn’t need it. I mean, I’ll try telepathically first. In trance.”
She got up and went out without another word. It did not occur to him until the door closed that she might intend to attempt the contact immediately. He went after her then, and caught up with her in the hall.
“Yes,” she said to the unspoken question. “Now.”
“Aren’t you supposed to have somebody with you when you do this?”
“This isn’t official. Metra’s not going to know about it. Mission protocol be damned.”
“Let me be with you, all right?”
“If you want.”
“What am I supposed to watch out for?”
“Well,” she said, “if I come out of it and beat you up there might be some cause for concern.”
He looked for a smile, and didn’t see one.
• • •
It was morning, and Kwek thought she would be given something to do. She had been told there were many tasks, and she would work sometimes at one, sometimes at another. She could do other things, too, interesting things. But first Nakeekt and some others would talk with her about the things she remembered, and that was what they did immediately after the morning meal, when the sun had risen only a little. What is the first thing you remember, they said. Do you know where you came to life. Do you remember the crèche where you were born. What were you taught about Rowtt. What were you taught about the Holy Man and what were you taught about the Demon. Did you ever see the Holy Man of that time up close, do you remember what he looked like. Do you remember the first prayers you were taught.
“This is an interesting experience,” Kwek said. “No one has ever asked me questions like this before.”
“No,” said Pritk. “They don’t do it anywhere else. And we will teach you to ask questions yourself, if you don’t already do it.”
“Oh, I do. I asked a lot of questions in my last posting. But I only asked them of myself.”
“What was the posting?”
“I am Wektt’s keeper of records.”
Their ears curled: intense interest.
“That is wonderful,” said Nakeekt. (Kwek did not know the word she used, as she had not known the word “dream” the first time she heard it.) “Did you study the records?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Were you discouraged from doing that?”
“I didn’t tell anybody. Nobody asked about anything except which cities were growing fastest and how many Soldiers were in them, and where the battles were and what were the numbers killed in them. That was all I was supposed to put in them. I put in other things, too, that I heard. But I didn’t tell anybody I was doing that.”
There was a moment of respectful silence.
“Why did you do that?” Nakeekt said.
“In case,” Kwek said, “the next record-keeper—had—interest . . .”
She was fumbling; the words did not sound quite adequate.
“I think you mean, in case the next one cared,” Pritk said.
“What?”
“Cared. That is a new word,” said Pritk, and the enlargement of Kwek’s vocabulary began.
• • •
Gabriel watched Hanna. After a while, belatedly, he started to examine his motives, but he did not stop watching her.
He wanted to be with her in case something went wrong, but did some secret part of his mind whisper that here was a defensible opportunity to be alone with Hanna and just look at her?
He thought he ought to pray and he did not want to pray. He wanted to look. There was no harm in looking.
Rationalization.
His stomach began to growl. He had no idea what time it was at That Place, but it was lunchtime here.
Sublimation.
He was restless after five minutes. “Not much can disturb me in trance,” she had told him, but he was reluctant to move too much. He found that his gaze had moved from her profile to the swell of her breasts. He tore his eyes away and they fell on the holo of her son. He looked at the child’s exquisite, laughing face and tried to imagine Hanna with Mickey, this prickly woman’s jagged edges softened, her eyes bright with love.
I will not think about that, he thought, but it was too late. He wanted her to look at him with love too; he wanted to take the still figure in his arms. When she came to him after the dream of her own beloved he had seen how broken the invulnerable woman could be, how broken she had been; he wanted to tell her she could be whole again; he wanted to be the one to make her whole. He didn’t want much, he thought, and then the massive wave of what he really wanted broke and drowned him: only everything.
Not just Hanna, as lover or friend, but everything else out here too: another life. One that he might have had anyway, if a family hadn’t shattered with his parents’ early death.
So he had made a decision after all, and it seemed that it had already been made months ago, even years ago, and recognizing it was all that had happened now.
Hanna’s breathing changed, and her eyes opened and turned to him. The blue gaze was remote.
She knows I want her and she is angry—
“No,” she said. “I can’t imagine being angry with you. I don’t even know what you were thinking,” which sounded preposterous to Gabriel; surely he had shouted it. She seemed to shake herself a little. “I couldn’t find him,” she said. “I think it’s a him; I’m not sure.”
“Him?” It seemed to Gabriel that he was talking very slowly. Certainly his thinking was slow. “Not Kwek?”
“Kwek’s busy,” Hanna said. “She was with Nakeekt and some other people, but they were all talking at once. There was too much going on. If I could understand what they were saying . . . I told everybody to learn as much of the language as they could, but nobody did. Including me. I will not make that mistake again.”
She sighed and rose from the floor in one fluid movement. If she sensed his agitation she had chosen to ignore it.
“So I looked for whomever they’ve got locked away in that little building, but I couldn’t find him. ‘Nothing,’ he kept saying, ‘nothing.’ I think it’s someone in what they call the end-change. Not many Soldiers make it to that stage. And if this one is there but hasn’t yet gone over the edge . . . this is probably the only chance I’d have to talk to someone like that. I need to go back one more time. If Starr will let me.”
• • •
Hanna did not even try persuading Metra that a return to That Place could be productive. She thought of hijacking the pod and dismissed the idea. Not as immoral or even unwise; as impossible. Endeavor really was a first-class operation, its security impeccable. She would have to try to convince Jameson.
Contacting him, however, proved impossible. This time it was not the Arrenswood house’s doing, but Metra’s. While Hanna was at That Place Me
tra had unearthed a regulation that was ironclad, from Fleet’s perspective, or at least she pretended to think it was:
You are authorized to initiate communication with the director of Alien Relations and Contact, and no one else. The director summarizes reports to his superior, the commissioner in charge. Commissioner Jameson is no longer the director. Mission protocol. No exceptions.
Jameson had approved the principle—months ago, when it ensured that Hanna could reach him without interference from Edward Vickery. He had probably not thought of the implications since. That left Evanomen, who (Metra had informed her) had been appointed director as soon as Jameson was sworn in as commissioner.
He’ll never agree, Hanna thought, but when his harried face appeared she saw something like relief come into it and revised her opinion. He said immediately, “Did you know Norsa is trying to learn Standard?”
After a moment she felt a slow smile begin. She could just see her friend Norsa of Ell, whose tentacular fingers tied themselves in knots when he was frustrated.
“He never said anything about it to me. But I haven’t talked to him since I left Earth.”
“I just did. But you couldn’t call it a conversation.”
The smile got wider. “How is he? And his grand-selfings?”
“I have no idea. Naturally I asked, but I couldn’t understand the answer. I’m not sure he understood the question. He would not use the translation program. Can you talk to him? I do think he said something about your courtesy in learning Ellsian. Is he being courteous in turn? That would be typically Uskosian, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, very typical!”
“Do you think you could convince him he has no aptitude for languages?”
“I can’t talk to anybody but you,” she said, and explained the regulation. “I can’t even talk to Starr unless he initiates contact.”
“That has to be changed. What if I’m not available?” Evanomen evidently did not intend to put Hanna on a personal unlimited access list.
“Thank you . . . Give Norsa my regards when you speak to him again,” she said. “Tell him I’ll go to Uskos myself and teach him Standard, if he wants.”
“Would you?” Evanomen said, and stopped short, perhaps remembering that now he could order Hanna to do just that.
“Of course. If I’m ever done here,” she said. “By the way, there’s a source of information I’d like to contact, but I need to go back to That Place to do it. Secretly, I mean; a quick midnight visit to someone who’s sequestered from the others. I don’t think Captain Metra will approve it without your authorization or Starr’s.”
Evanomen frowned at her. Her tone had been casual and she made sure her face was guileless.
“Starr’s rather busy,” he said.
Hanna discovered a developing talent for improvisation. “This person might be able to give us some background on the documents we’ve got. And I suppose we’re going to Wektt soon, and then we’ll be focused on what’s there. I’d like to be finished with That Place first.”
“This would be you and Gabriel Guyup?”
“Just me. I don’t think Gabriel has the—aptitude, to use your word—for secrecy.”
“How long would you expect to be down there?”
“An hour maybe? Less?”
He wanted particulars, which Hanna made up on the spot, and said he would give her a decision later. She was not hopeful, but half an hour later Metra interrupted her belated lunch with a summons and started by saying, “I don’t know how you did it, but—”
Hanna had a hard time keeping her mind on the rest of it because she was thinking: I did it by misdirection, manipulation, in short, deceit. I’m turning into an excellent true-human.
Chapter VII
THE BEST SHE COULD DO to be invisible was dress in black.
Endeavor had come openly to Battleground, gifting Soldiers with images of human society, hiding nothing. The pod did not even have a camouflage program for its white skin and Endeavor carried no secretive devices to make a human body blur from sight; personal proximity shields were manufactured not for spying but for casual anonymity in public spaces, and in any case were based on the parameters of human vision and might be ineffective with Soldiers. So Hanna’s approach had to be as stealthy as she could make it. Her descent took her first to the sea sixty kilometers from the settlement, and she approached the clearing chosen for touchdown on manual control, hugging waves and then treetops when she reached land, ports opaque and exterior lights quenched. She kept the pod at a hover over the small field for a few minutes, probing with invisible sensors, in case an insomniac Soldier had decided to take a walk. None had, apparently. She did not even know if the Soldiers of That Place ever walked abroad in black night.
Finally she let the pod settle into the clearing, killed interior displays, opened the hatch, and moved down the ramp. The air was warm and fragrant, and she hesitated, breathing in the night. She had not been alone on a planetary surface—no Soldiers, no Gabriel—since leaving Earth.
The seductive moment passed. The path to the settlement was clear, and she began to walk. One thing at least Endeavor had been able to provide: membranes covered her eyes’ surfaces which moderated whatever ambient light there was, so that she could see without using a light. They gave a silver sheen to her eyes that would startle an unprepared human. But a Soldier would not know it was unusual.
The path was not straight but was easy to follow. It was banked and the earth trodden down, and the rain had ended soon after she and Gabriel left, so the ground had drained and she did not have to wade through mud. She moved along it silently. She had gotten permission to carry a sidearm in case she met with a large predator, and kept her hand near it. Big carnivores seemed to be absent from That Place, and perhaps from all of Battleground; some might have evolved, but it was not hard to imagine that centuries of war, destroying habitat, had driven them to extinction. The flora were another matter. The eat-anythings made Hanna nervous.
She had been walking for perhaps ten minutes when a flash of light startled her. It was peripheral and did not affect her modified vision, but she was horrified; it had come from her own hand, blue and beautiful and bright; from the ring that had become so much a part of her that she had forgotten it might give her away. She tried to wrench the lovely thing off but it did not want to go; she stood on the path for far too long, twisting it until it finally, reluctantly, allowed her to slide it from her finger. She stuffed it into a pocket and found herself sweating. Maybe it was the shock of knowing she might have blown her own cover with a stupid oversight. Or maybe it was fear of losing it if it was not on her hand.
Or maybe—and she realized then that she had felt exposed from the moment she stepped out of the pod—it was that since she could see everything around her, some ancient part of her brain could not acknowledge the reality that the rare moonless night hid her from other eyes. And, going full circle, it really did not. Even in this deep a darkness, a Soldier would see more clearly than a human would.
The realization paralyzed her for a moment, coming on top of the mistake with the ring and the tiredness that had underlain every thought and action for days. It seemed possible that the rest of the path would be lined with eat-everythings and their tongues would bind her like cords and wrest her to surfaces that would hold her as if glued while they began to digest her alive.
Hanna . . . It was Bella; it was a mental croon. You’re not alone. Just let me at those nasty plants!
She relaxed a little, took a deep breath, and forced herself to move, though she clutched the sidearm hard. After a few paces it was easier, and Bella thought, Some hero you are! and Hanna finally smiled, herself again.
She tried to move even more quietly as she came near the cottage. Here it was necessary to leave the path and cross open ground; that part she did very quickly, in a sprint, and slipped behind the small building. S
he was alert for any attention directed her way, but sensed nothing.
If the cottage was meant to be a jailhouse, it was, at least from exterior evidence, a humane one. There were windows that would admit natural light, and at a height that would allow a Soldier inside to look out, though no face had showed at any of them when Endeavor’s spyeyes had been watching. They looked dark even to Hanna’s enhanced night vision, meaning no light shone inside. The place was larger than she had thought, with four windows at the rear, from any of which she could be seen. But there was no reason to think the occupant was watching.
And now, so close, she saw that the view from the windows was partially blocked by interior bars. It really was a jailhouse, then.
She crouched, nonetheless, in a tangle of creepers, and listened for sound. There was a whisper of wind, so little she had not noticed it until now, and a faint rustle of leaves. A whir of wings overhead that made her start, a hum of insects, scarcely audible: that was all. There were not even any sounds small animals might make in the brush. If any animals were there, her approach had scattered them or made them go still.
She focused awareness then on the enclosed space in front of her, expecting the immediate sense of a sentient mind.
Nothing, came Bella’s whisper. Nobody there.
It broke Hanna’s concentration. She said crossly, Go away.
But she thought at first—pressing her cheek against cool stone, letting consciousness flow through it—that Bella was right.
A minute later she changed her mind. Bella was almost right.
Because the no one who was there had been a someone once. There was no strong marker of personality; there was less than she had felt in anyone, human or alien, infant or adult. It was certainly the mind of a Soldier. But this mind was a great, undifferentiated contentment.
It felt delicious to Hanna, stretched taut with tension for weeks.
She let herself ease into it.
• • •
Turquoise. And teal. It is water. It is above her, the transparent domed ceiling keeps it back. It is all around the circular room. And below the transparent floor. It is under her feet.
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