Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  Hanna said very quietly, “We could help you learn more.”

  Kakrekt whispered (Hanna felt the leap of hope), “How could you do that?”

  “Not-Soldiers know a great deal about their past. The civilizations that led to the present have been traced in detail, cities like this excavated, the lives of rulers and ordinary people examined. We have done this through the cooperation of many sciences. We could teach you the sciences; we could help you reclaim the past.”

  Kwoort said, “It is of interest to no one. Except to the few who live too long.”

  The dark weighed heavily, stone and earth and riotous jungle overhead, and Hanna wanted to break for the outside. She resisted the urge to run and said, “Why is it of no interest? What is the authority that says Abundant God forbids the study of history?”

  “The Holy Men say so, they have said so forever. Always, it is remembered and written down again, everywhere in every time, in the holy books found in Rowtt and here too. Only, I wonder if those Holy Men said it because they knew they would forget, that all forget.”

  “The end-change, the forgetting—”

  “Don’t speak. I do not wish to talk any more. Go away. You too,” he added to Kakrekt, but Kakrekt did not move.

  Hanna was glad to obey. She turned and urged Gabriel before her back through the passage, dimly visible in reflected light; they turned a corner and saw the opening to the outdoors, and went to it and stepped with relief into the tropical day.

  The heat seemed to have gotten even more stifling in the minutes they had spent inside the mound. The air felt thick, like liquid, and it was hard to breathe. There were sounds, bird sounds, Hanna supposed, though the birds she had seen had been silent to human ears, but she did not hear the calls she might have expected somewhere else. She heard small moans like intermittent cries of pain. Gabriel started to say something but she put a hand on his arm and said, “Hush.”

  “Hush,” Gabriel repeated, and quoted, “‘Don’t speak.’ ‘Go away.’” He sounded exasperated.

  Hanna shook his arm a little. “I want to see what Kwoort is thinking. So hush.”

  She expected fragments of a quarrel, but the aliens were silent now, Kakrekt watching Kwoort and taking hope from his concentration. For Hanna that concentration produced abstractions, few concrete referents, hard to decipher:

  ...and others have come to this point and must have known what I know that I will leave nothing behind nothing that I write until the end all that came before lost because I have forgotten it and forgot where I hid it and in time I will even hide this sack and forget where I hid that too. As they forgot. Nothing but the end and what would happen if I shouted to them before then shouted you are wrong! All of you are wrong, you have always been mistaken, the god you believe is false! They will say I am not in my right mind I have come to that change and they will feed me and bathe me and seek another Holy Man and all will go on as before

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You can talk. Kwoort’s thinking about forgetting. I would bet the chemistry of memory is tied right into that second pair of eyes. That there are tiers of memory—it would take forever to untangle the relationship, even if we could get some of them to volunteer to be studied. I wonder . . . I thought they’re not interested in us enough to volunteer. But Kakrekt’s different.”

  “Volunteers is what we want, isn’t it?”

  “And Kakrekt might be willing to order them to do it, if we can help her learn some history. I wonder,” said Hanna, “if we should concentrate on her instead of Kwoort.”

  “Or on . . . whoever they were? Whenever they were here?”

  “No! Not now. It’s been a long time since ‘they’ were here . . . One problem at a time.”

  They sat on the ground and waited. Sweat crawled on their skins. There were insects, too, some of them with wingspans like Earthly eagles, but the insects were not interested in human fluids. Hanna and Gabriel scrambled up when they heard the aliens’ voices drawing near. Quarreling about where to go next, but Kakrekt had just conceded.

  Kwoort said to the humans, “It will not be so hot at the next place. Maybe you are pleased to hear that.”

  “I don’t know,” Hanna said. “Is it another place of ruin?”

  “Ruin. Yes.”

  • • •

  More interminable consultation with Navigation: at least it was cool inside the pod. Eventually they flew toward the southwest, until— “You’re landing on that?” said the navigators.

  “It’s just a desert, isn’t it?” Hanna replied.

  “Not exactly,” they said, but she didn’t know what they meant until she got out of the pod and they began to walk across a glassy surface barely masked with windblown dust.

  The damn stuff was slippery and lumpy. It had solidified erratically, so that the uneven ground in places had edges that would have cut bare feet to shreds—for a change Hanna had sensibly worn tough boots, and even those started to show damage—and in others betrayed balance as badly as ripples of melting ice. The sun was well up but there were black shadows that made rounded humps look edged and hid the depth of ankle-turning pits beyond edges. And where winds had swept the dust away the rock was shiny, and reflected light in disorienting flashes like a forest of tiny mirrors. It lay all around them in hills and hollows, red-brown and brown-black, and though the sun beat on it, fog lingered from night air meeting heat retained from the day before, and mist lay in strata here and there, damaging depth perception even more. Not that it was cool. They had not changed latitudes by much, and the climate was only cooler by comparison.

  Kakrekt hung back stubbornly by the pod, but Kwoort wanted to walk on the tormented surface. He did it easily, with inhuman balance.

  “Why,” said Hanna, “and how far?”

  “I wanted to see this with my own eyes. A weapon was used here at its most powerful—a test, perhaps, of its ultimate formulation. Most areas of the dead continents are like this, I think, but I have not been to them since the weapon was used. There are blasted areas in Rowtt and elsewhere in Wektt, but not like this.”

  “Do you intend to cross all of it on foot?” She raised her voice; Kwoort had already gained ground on the humans.

  “Perhaps,” said Kwoort, who must know they were fifty kilometers from anything resembling ordinary landscape, but he did not mean it. Since the translator could not convey the complaint in Hanna’s tone, he must have deduced it, because she saw that he certainly recognized her reluctance, and responded as if she were a whining Soldier. And however far he meant to go, he obviously expected Hanna and Gabriel to accompany him, because he stopped and waited for them to catch up. They did not hurry. They did not dare; the footing was too treacherous. Hanna hoped Kwoort would not linger long. The ambient radioactivity here was slightly elevated over the norm of other places she had been to on Battleground; short-term exposure should not be dangerous, but she would not want to live there.

  He waited at the top of a shallow rise, but when they got there they saw that the other side descended much more steeply. At the base of some tortured hillocks lay a pair of pools. Hanna could not tell how far away they were; in the absence of anything for comparison, distance was hard to gauge, and the hillocks might really be respectable hills, the pools small lakes. There was heavier mist over them, and the water, at a distance, looked milky.

  Perhaps it was not water. Hanna thought she probably would not want to breathe the mist.

  Kwoort started downhill, toward the pools. Hanna called after him, “We are not going there!”

  He was moving fast, and his voice barely floated back to them. “I order you,” he said.

  “No,” said Hanna, not raising her voice this time, but directing a negative to his mind so that he could not ignore it. He swung around, surprised. No one ever disobeyed orders. Except, maybe, Kakrekt—if he dared to give her a direct order and find out.r />
  Look at us. Do we look like Soldiers?

  The answer was grudging, but at least it was No.

  It made no difference to Kwoort, whatever he intended to do. He turned and continued walking down the long slope, toward the murky pools. After a minute Hanna set her communicator for visual imaging and recorded the scene. Gabriel watched her curiously.

  “Why didn’t you do that back at the other place?”

  “Because I didn’t think of it, all right?” said Hanna, and cursed herself for it.

  Kwoort got to the pools and stood motionless for a long time. He had almost forgotten about the humans; he was thinking of the power it had taken to turn once-fertile land to rock, thinking of the spaceflight that weapons technology had accidentally made possible, thinking the population had grown again and would soon explode, wondering if the world would survive.

  “They are self-destructing,” Hanna whispered, “and he knows it.”

  For the first time she felt pity—for Kwoort, for Kwek, for Kakrekt and Nakeekt—and she resisted. It was a good deal less painful to hold onto dislike. And when Gabriel asked her to repeat what she had said, because he had not quite caught the words, she only shook her head.

  • • •

  After that they went far south, toward Wektt proper, and followed the curve of the world still farther south to someplace where it was the end of winter, as in the city, but with temperatures colder still, and they had followed it too to the middle of the night. The sky was black and without stars (because there were, of course, clouds), and Kakrekt stalked ahead of them into a cave of ice, and they went through two sets of doors and walked into warmth and light.

  “What,” said Hanna after a moment’s silence, “do you call this?”

  “Waste,” Kwoort growled, “wastage of labor and energy.”

  But Kakrekt said with simple pride, “It is only an adjunct to my billet. It is not physically proximate, of course.”

  Gabriel said, “It’s Kakrekt’s garden.” His cold hand took hold of Hanna’s.

  It used hydroponic principles, but no protein-based vegetable food was grown here. Flowering vines climbed the walls and containers studded them, dripping with leaves and more flowers. There was rock underfoot, in erratic paths that led between banks and beds of more flowering plants. They had been planted without, apparently, regard to any plan.

  Kakrekt said calmly, “Perhaps they make things like this at That Place.”

  No grasp of design, Hanna was thinking, the implication of Kakrekt’s words escaping her at first.

  “Then why did you not go there?” Kwoort said to Kakrekt. “It would be an excellent move for you to go there now.”

  And then Hanna was all attention.

  Kwoort turned to her and said, “Is that where my former record-keeper went? Record-keepers have a high incidence of going to That Place. I myself was Rowtt’s record-keeper for some time.”

  Hanna looked up at Kwoort and saw the thrusting smile. His ears unfurled and flapped. Laughter at what he knew must be her surprise.

  “How much do you know about That Place?” she said.

  “Why should I answer your questions? You offer nothing in return.”

  Hanna looked at him in silence. Spyeyes. Fuel modules. Weapons that kill organisms but leave structures intact. Shall we give them the fruits of our mastery of death?

  “I think,” said Kakrekt, “they will offer me the knowledge I want.”

  And Hanna was still silent, but now her thoughtful gaze was on Kakrekt.

  • • •

  Deserts and lakes and mountains and rivers and deserts. And more deserts. Sites of battles, Kwoort plotting courses on maps he took from his satchel and unrolled. Human voices, Endeavor’s patient navigators. An incongruous stop to relieve themselves, Hanna and Gabriel behind separate bushes: Hanna made sure there was nothing in sight that looked like an eat-anything. After that, the changing border with Rowtt, flying low though Kwoort assured Hanna they would not be detected and fired on this far from Rowtt’s chief city. It was hard to stay alert hour after hour, and the tension between Kwoort and Kakrekt became both grating and monotonous. Talking of military matters they were amicable enough, but it was evident to Hanna that their final goals were very different. She could not tell exactly how they differed. The discordance was too great, their thoughts jangled like orchestras at war, and her own mind went numb in response.

  “Hanna,” said Gabriel. He was not standing behind her now but sitting on the floor, back to the back of her seat and leaning against it. He was tiring, too.

  “What?”

  “I thought I heard a Communications signal.”

  Hanna opened her eyes and saw a blinking light. It was green: not an emergency. But she activated the link, and to her surprise, instead of hearing a voice, she saw words scroll across her field of vision. Kwoort and Kakrekt could not read them, and obviously they were not meant to hear them.

  Say nothing that might threaten ongoing talks. Maintain friendly relations at all costs until further notice. By order of Commissioner Jameson.

  “What does that say?” said Kwoort.

  “A routine status report,” Hanna lied. Gabriel got up and looked at the message as it repeated. He said nothing, but Hanna heard the question he did not ask. What the words said was clear, but why someone had found it necessary to send them was obscure. She wondered what had happened.

  • • •

  Jameson, returning to Earth on Heartworld III, reflected that he really had missed the yacht.

  He meant to make some changes—Edward’s taste was not his—but the vessel would do for now. He could reach anyone from it, just as he could from Admin, and access any information he needed; he could conference, debate, field questions and demands, as easily as he could on Earth. His staff was just as accessible, his working days just as frequently interrupted even in deep space. All the old authority was back, complete with accoutrements and image.

  Maybe not the image.

  “Answer,” he said automatically at the communications signal, and did not think of the picture he presented until he saw the astonishment on Karin Weisz’s face.

  “Oh,” he said, and looked down and around. Mickey was sprawled across his lap, asleep. The Dog took up all the space on the seat to his right. The Cat was wound tightly against his left hip, a gray ball of fur with one protruding white paw. None of them looked like waking up.

  “If you can spare the time,” Weisz said.

  “Go ahead . . .”

  He rolled up the reader he had been holding (rather uncomfortably) just above Mickey’s head and put it aside. On the Cat’s side. The Dog liked to play grab-and-keep-away. If he was very lucky, the animal would outgrow the game—

  Irrelevant. The Dog wouldn’t be living with him much longer. Or the Cat, or Mickey.

  Weisz said, “I just saw the last Endeavor conference. Why didn’t you alert the rest of us?”

  “What’s the urgency? You’ve seen it now . . .”

  “We could be the Commission that doubles human life spans, or triples them, or more! How long have you known?”

  “Known what? Hanna found out how long-lived these people are the first time she made contact with one of them. That does not automatically translate into longer human lives. We’re looking at years of research that might come to nothing.”

  “I want all the information you have.”

  “You already have it.”

  “I have précis. I want everything.”

  “I’ll see that you get it,” he said equably—he would inundate her with it, millions of words, billions of numbers, every scrap of information on the Battleground mission.

  “Immediately.”

  “I’ll call Zanté as soon as we’re done. What do you mean to do with it, by the way?”

  She said aft
er a perceptible pause, “I just want to be fully informed.”

  “You understand the secrecy here?”

  “The existence of the mission is not secret. People are wondering publicly if there’s been a contact, and if so what we’ve found.”

  “I hope you don’t intend to answer those questions.”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “Good-bye, then. Let your staff know the data’s coming. Endit . . .”

  She was gone, her eyes in the last seconds speculative. He was speculating too, but he was sure he did not show it.

  She had lied about maintaining secrecy, he thought. Colony One had a high turnover in commissioners; for several weeks Karin had been looking at the prospect of becoming another commissioner emeritus. Crying Live for a thousand years! might gain her quite a lot of time. And if she did that, Jameson could not afford to be seen standing in the way. Kwoort’s cooperation—or the cooperation of somebody in authority on Battleground—had just become critical.

  • • •

  “Enough,” Kwoort said finally. “Enough for today. Return us to the plateau where the beacon is placed. Come back tomorrow.”

  “That is acceptable,” Hanna said.

  “I did not ask you if it is acceptable. You will do it unless you want to end all contact with Wektt. You could return to Rowtt, of course, and deal with Prookt.”

  “Or Tlorr,” Hanna said.

  “Tlorr will not cooperate. I told her you will not consider aiding any of us, and she has no further interest in you. At best she will delegate Prookt to deal with you, and then where will you be? Where you started.”