Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  Hanna said nothing, but she was indeed listening, and knew what Kakrekt would say next.

  “Listen to the Holy Man’s mind,” Kakrekt said. “Find out about the poison, and tell me.”

  After a long hesitation Hanna lied, “I will try. As you said, the matter is complex. Once when I tried to listen to the Holy Man’s thought, he perceived that I was doing so, and he also knew what information I sought. You would not want that to happen.”

  Four eyes regarded her, pale glints in the night. Hanna was afraid Kakrekt would demand telepathic assurance that what Hanna said was true. Some of it was, but Kwoort had sensed her touch only because she had been impatient and careless. She could do as Kakrekt requested. She only did not want to.

  “When will you try?”

  “I don’t know. It will have to be a time—” lying, solemnly—“when he is particularly receptive.”

  Kakrekt seemed satisfied.

  “Try as soon as you can. I will speak with you soon. Come now,” she said.

  They went back the way they had come, Hanna dragging behind, trying to prolong her escape into the open air if only by seconds.

  • • •

  July 17: The roses had been tampered with and bred back a century, and a century more and a century more and more centuries before that. They were small, and as inconspicuous as simple pink, red, and yellow can be against deep green leaves. The stems bristled with thorns. But their scent was as intoxicating as any drug, and potent on this bright summer evening.

  Jameson had almost forgotten about them. He seldom came to this obscure corner of the gardens, having ordered the roses set in place twenty years ago only because they were rare.

  Adair Evanomen waited for him here, a good walk away from the people who sipped drinks and swallowed luxurious tidbits on the terrace or strolled the grounds nearer the house. Their voices were inaudible from here.

  I must bring—Catalyna here, Jameson thought, knowing his first impulse had been to share this sensuous luxury with Hanna. Who surely already knew about it; who knew far more about what grew on his lovely property than he did.

  He nodded to Evanomen and raised an eyebrow but said nothing. It was the other man who had requested a private word.

  “I’m sorry to take you away from your guests . . .”

  “Never mind. What is it?”

  “A conversation I had with Captain Metra today. Daily report, status quo for the most part. There was one troublesome aspect . . . How well do you know the telepaths on board? Besides Hanna, the others?”

  “I’ve met them all. Carl and Glory, too.”

  “I didn’t mean them. It’s the telepaths—”

  Evanomen looked around uncomfortably. He sat down on a bench almost hidden by roses, looking for words.

  “Metra said the telepaths have stopped mixing with true-humans altogether, if they can possibly avoid it. When there’s more than one of them and a true-human’s present, they’ll communicate with each other telepathically—an obvious parallel conversation to whatever they’re saying to the true-humans. They didn’t do that before, at least as far as anyone knew. Metra wonders what they’re talking about.”

  Interesting . . . “What do you think it might be?”

  “It could be anything, obviously. Metra suspects they’re hearing things from Hanna that they’re not passing along.”

  “What about Glory and Carl? Are they part of this supposed conspiracy?”

  “The others have shut them out too. I’d like your advice on what to do. If anything.”

  Jameson did not answer at once. The sky had finally begun to darken, perfectly clear, as it had been all day. A couple of late butterflies drifted by. Mickey called them flying flowers.

  Presently he said, “Get complete transcripts—word for word—of the telepaths’ reports to Metra. Route them to me, too.”

  Evanomen’s face was a question.

  Jameson said, “Metra summarizes what they’ve said for you, and you summarize what she’s said for me. ‘Status quo,’ you say. Things go missing in summaries of summaries. Get the originals.”

  “Hanna’s the source, and we can only get what she says through the others. The issue is what they might be leaving out.”

  “We’ll start with what we can get. Then we’ll see.”

  • • •

  July 18: Gabriel meditated on the simplicity of the tiny chamber. There were so few objects in it that space alone defined them; or did the objects define space? The question was elegant and beautiful, prompting gratitude for the purity of the place, gratitude for the moment, for the privilege of being at play in the fields of the universe—the experience of simply being alive.

  He was honest enough to admit that creeping physical weakness might have something to do with this focus on lofty thoughts. Healthy, he might be preoccupied with lust. Or maybe he could accommodate both.

  A Soldier came in without warning—there was never warning, never a knock—and said that Kwoort wanted to see Gabriel alone.

  This was a new demand, and Gabriel wondered if he ought to be afraid. He looked at Hanna.

  She had lain down again as soon as the Soldier made it clear she was not wanted. He said her name and she looked at him, her eyes the only color in the room. She sat up, still holding his gaze, and he relaxed a little as her thought touched him.

  You’re worried? I’ll be with you, if you like. Like this . . .

  The cart, the caverns, all echoed with noise. He had not been out of the billet for some time, and after such isolation the warren felt like a mad cacophony. But, I’m here, Hanna said, and he leaned into the feather-touch, a shield against chaos. Being told things telepathically resembled, he thought, a mild electrical shock inside his head. Hanna was not telling him anything, she was only letting him feel her existence, in touches soft as the petals of flowers. It was her personality that he felt, and he drank it in. He was not aware of passing time until the Soldier ordered him out of the cart and he went slowly through a doorway to Kwoort. This was an anteroom, and he and Hanna had never gotten past it. Gabriel had seen Kwoort here a dozen times, sitting, standing, pacing. Today his posture on the bench where he sat was one Gabriel had not seen before, the long, flexible back curved, the head drooping.

  After a minute Gabriel said, tentative, “Holy One?”

  He had to repeat it twice, and go closer, before Kwoort looked up, and it was another long minute before the alien said, “Ah. The not-Soldier male.”

  Time, already slowed by endless inaction, slowed further. Kwoort appeared content to remain still forever. Finally Gabriel prompted, “You wanted to see me?”

  Another minute.

  “I did. I must have. Or you would not be here.”

  He looked down at something in his hands, sheets of paper or some other material. Gabriel took another step.

  “What do you have there?”

  “I wrote this, I think. I wrote it, I do not remember writing it! I found it in my satchel and perhaps another Soldier put it there but it is my hand. I must have written it.”

  He dropped his eyes—two eyes that looked dulled, the other pair closed—and began to read aloud.

  “I cannot remember the prayers. I hear them in the walls and I know that I know them, I have always known them, but when I do not hear them I cannot remember them.”

  He went on, but his voice fell to a mumble. Gabriel thought of boosting the translator’s volume, but then it was too late. Kwoort had fallen silent, staring at the papers in his hands. The satchel that accompanied him everywhere lay at his feet, more papers spilling from its mouth.

  Presently Gabriel pulled another bench around and sat down on it, facing Kwoort, so close his knees almost touched Kwoort’s robe.

  Hanna’s touch again, faintly questioning. Gabriel had no answer but patience.

  A long
time passed. Gabriel was not even aware that he had slipped into a meditation, contemplating the miracle of self-reflective consciousness, God’s greatest gift, the attribute in which intelligent creatures most resembled Him. Simply to be, to know that one was, here in this gray cubicle, was miraculous.

  “Teach me,” Kwoort mumbled.

  Gabriel said gently, “What would you have me teach you?”

  “Teach me to pray!”

  “I would if I could,” Gabriel said, with a sadness lost in the translator.

  Kwoort stared at him (hungrily, whispered Hanna’s thought). Why can’t you teach him—oh!

  “Compassion,” said Gabriel, knowing that Kwoort heard cooperation, the closest match the translator, after all this time, had been able to find. “Humility.” Possessing low rank. “Kindness.” Cooperation, again. “Pity.” Acknowledgment of another’s inferior performance.

  He could have gone on and on, because he had done more than meditate and make love to Hanna. While she slept or stared at the ceiling and wrestled with whatever she withheld, he had listened to what the wallscreen was saying, explored what the translator could tell him about it, analyzed the results, and seen the implications.

  “What you hear,” Gabriel said to Kwoort, “is not what I’m really saying.”

  “That makes no sense!”

  “I think,” said Gabriel, “you’re wired differently. I think we exist in—” He hesitated, looking for something that would translate accurately. “I think we exist in—in brain-states, we might call them—you’re not capable of having. I think it has to do with the relationships we have with our young, where you have none. Because of that much of our language will not translate as we mean it, and those brain-states are active in our prayers.”

  Hanna sighed in his mind, Give him something, Gabriel. Think of something!

  So Gabriel did. It did not seem like much, but it was all he had to offer.

  “Listen to the wall,” he said simply. “When you hear prayers, write them down. Then you will not have to remember them.”

  “Go,” said Kwoort in a whisper, and called for a Soldier to take Gabriel away.

  • • •

  July 20: Bella was a darker brown than Hanna. Her round, blunt-featured face was not beautiful, but she looked open, honest, and trustworthy—as if all of Bella shone out of her face.

  This was a trait shared by successful confidence tricksters, as Jameson had reminded himself when they met. He reminded himself again. The image from Endeavor showed only Bella’s head and shoulders; there would be little body language to rely on. But he saw that her eyes—deep true green eyes, those indeed beautiful—were wary.

  She did not have a nervous disposition, but after he had stared at her a little while in complete silence, she licked her lips.

  He said in a voice like velvet, “I can’t communicate with Hanna directly. You can. Establish communication with her, please.”

  He expected her to balk, and she did, throwing her head back and saying “What?” as if he had proposed something obscene.

  “I need to talk to her and I can’t,” he said patiently. “Not with technology, not with telepathy. I’m asking you to be, so to speak, my interpreter. Contact her now, please.”

  “It’s not that easy—”

  “Of course it is. You do it frequently. The conditions might be a little different; you won’t be doing any after-the-fact editing.”

  “We wouldn’t do that,” Bella said, looking innocent.

  “You’re doing something, and hiding it so poorly even Metra has noticed. Talk to Hanna for me. And don’t leave anything out.”

  Unexpectedly, Bella grinned.

  “We’re pretty bad at it, aren’t we?”

  She still looked at him, but her eyes refocused on something inward that he could not see. Jameson knew the look.

  Bella said, “She’s asleep.”

  “Wake her.”

  This time her resistance was in earnest.

  “She’s dreaming. I don’t like going into dreams. A lot of it comes from a preverbal level, and it’s crazy in there.”

  “Show her a door and knock on it. Keep knocking. Make her hear the sound.”

  A look of respect. She had not known how much he knew about telepathy. He ought to; Hanna answered questions readily. It was only being its object he did not like.

  It seemed to take a long time for Hanna to wake. The silence was the first still interval in Jameson’s long day, and in it he became aware that he was tired to the bone. There had been two nights of violent storms, and Mickey had been afraid and come to Jameson, not Thera, for consolation. He was short on sleep and more storms were promised for tonight. He had already told Catalyna he could not see her. The affair was likely to die before it even started—

  “She says you wouldn’t want her now. She’s all gray and thin, just bones . . .”

  He couldn’t read Bella’s face; there were too many emotions, passing too quickly.

  “Is she awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “Maybe . . .”

  Surprise now, and grim disapproval.

  “They ran out of supplies, they’re eating native food. It’s not poison, but they wonder if it was nourishing them. We knew that. Hanna says now she’s sure. She says they can’t live on it. She doesn’t mean it’s not sustaining them well enough, she means there’s no nourishment at all.”

  “Why the hell wasn’t that in your reports?”

  Bella focused on Jameson fully. “We reported what we knew to the captain. I don’t know what happened. And Hanna wasn’t positive before, and now she is.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Somehow. “What else is going on?”

  A pause. Then Bella said, “Nothing. Nothing’s changed. They’ve come to some hypothesis about the translation program—Gabriel’s come to it—”

  “Go over it in the next report. What’s she not saying, Bella? Or are the rest of you hiding something, all of you?”

  Bella’s mouth opened and closed again. She said finally, “It’s not us. Hanna’s keeping something back.”

  “Ask her what it is.”

  “If she won’t tell us, she won’t tell you!”

  “Ask her.”

  The unfocused look again. Then perplexity.

  Disbelieving. “She could tell you, but not us?”

  “Then I’ll find a way to talk to her,” he said, though he could not see how.

  Bella said, “How is Mickey?” with a longing that must be Hanna’s.

  “He’s good . . .” Jameson hesitated, but Hanna deserved more than that. “He’s afraid of thunderstorms. He wants to be in my lap when they come, he’s fine then. But Hanna would be better. She could do more with thoughts than I can do with words. Soon—I want her—he wants her home soon. But he’s safe, and loved. He’s very much loved.”

  “Don’t cry,” Bella whispered, and he actually put a hand to his eyes before he realized she meant the words for Hanna.

  • • •

  July 21: Back to Kakrekt, a commute so familiar by now that Hanna dozed on the way. She surfaced fitfully from time to time, to snippets of thought, memories of talk.

  “You’d think starving people would notice sooner . . .” Her own voice.

  “No hunger pangs. We eat as much as we can stand. You were already too thin, and so lethargic—the word doesn’t start to describe it. But I couldn’t understand why my clothes were getting loose, or why I feel so strange . . . All I want to do is sleep.”

  “You are here,” said the escort, and Hanna straightened, resisting a hysterical laugh. You are here, universal guide to complex maps: here at the edge of the explored universe, trapped and weak and alone.

  No, she thought; only conditionally trapped; Starr might decide t
o move that warship up, and Battleground wouldn’t stand a chance with Fleet. Nor alone: there were D’neerans on Endeavor.

  But weak, that, yes. It took more effort every time to crawl out of the carts.

  She did not have to crawl out. She was hauled out by Kakrekt pulling on her arm.

  “Come, come—”

  This was a febrile excitement she had not felt in a Soldier before. Kwoort was prone to something like it—

  “But the language has no words for these emotional states because most users of the language don’t experience them after a sort of, think of it as priming the pump, at the start of puberty. After that it’s gone for years, for centuries.” Gabriel. “Most don’t live long enough for, oh, for the circuits to activate fully—”

  She was dragged through Kakrekt’s quarters, through doors, through narrower corridors she had not seen before.

  “Slower!” she gasped. Something had finally taken hold of her spotty concentration. It was the heaviness in her legs.

  “You are always slow, now you are almost standing still,” Kakrekt said impatiently, but she slowed as if for a pet that would not be hurried.

  The narrow corridors gave way to wider ones with Soldiers coming and going, the hush to a rumble that stirred Hanna’s memory. They came abruptly to the space Hanna had seen on her arrival here, the hangarlike cavern with Soldiers crawling over machines in many stages of construction or repair, using noisy tools, shouting at each other. She stumbled through the chaos, dizzy, following Kakrekt’s sinuous figure. A gray glow of natural light grew ahead of them, and they came out onto a familiar plateau. Snow fell here, big feathery flakes. The wet ground showed that earlier flakes had melted, but the air must have cooled and now there was a thin layer of white over everything.

  Kakrekt did not hesitate. She grabbed Hanna’s arm again and dragged her into the snowfall. Hanna’s feet slipped on treacherous rock; on a wave of fury she tried to pull away, and failed, off-balance and weak. This slithery walk went on forever, downhill, minute after minute, until Kakrekt suddenly stopped and Hanna looked up again, freezing, snow splattering into her eyes, and there, like a precious mirage, was the pod.

  She couldn’t stop herself, the code words burst out of her mouth, the translator was programmed not to twist them and the hatch whipped open. She wanted to rush for it, and Kakrekt’s hand held her just long enough to think that would not be wise; and anyway it would be a stagger, not a rush.