Battleground (2 page)

“I don't know how far we could have gotten in a language exchange anyway, because I don't think we could make the same sounds they do. Maybe because of the way their mouths are made, a lot of the language we heard when they were talking to each other consisted of whistling. They use clicks, too, almost as much as the whistling. They do use words (we assume they were words) along with that, though. It's really kind of a musical language to listen to, but I don't think a human being could ever speak it.

“I guess the best thing I can do is explain what they looked like. We're agreed on that.

“They're shaped like human beings, but slender and taller than we are, at least these were all taller than any of us, by maybe thirty centimeters on the average. Arms and legs proportionate by our standards to the human head and torso, but there seem to be extra joints, or more versatile ones than we have, judging by the way they walk and point at things. It makes them look graceful and it made us wonder what kind of dances they have. They have a head covering similar to human hair in different shades of brown, but it's thin, sparse. You wouldn't think it would give much protection from the weather, but nobody ever saw one wear a hat. Of course, it was summer, and we didn't have much rain while they were here.

“Under the forehead there are what look like two bony plates most of the time, but a few responsible, truthful people saw the plates slide up and roll back one time, in one individual, and there were eyes under them, although they must not use that pair often. Maybe when they want to get a really good look at something.

“Under that there's a pair of regular eyes. They come in different colors, but they're all on the light side, gray or yellowish. They don't seem to have pupils, so we don't have any idea what the mechanism is for seeing. There isn't any equivalent of a human nose on the face, which is all eyes and mouth. Their mouths seem to be perfectly round. Several people got a glimpse of teeth, not white like ours but black or dark gray, and they have flexible tongues, the impression being that those are longer and thinner than ours.

“Their ears are where you'd expect them to be, but stretched out they're huge—as I said, flapping them seems to be part of the way they communicate. Most of the time, though, they keep them folded toward the backs of their heads. The ears move around a lot, but they're only completely unfolded for that flapping. All the individuals we saw, by the way, had shades of grayish-brown skin. None of them were anywhere near as dark as some of our people.

“But their noses! If I may interject a personal comment, their noses—I have to call them that, they obviously function for breathing—were the most surprising thing of all to me. They've got one on each side of the neck, finger-shaped but short, sort of curved to fit the neck and attached there like tubes, and the tips are flexible too, though nothing like the ears—the tubes just seem to expand and contract with the breath, and they each have three openings at the front. They might connect directly to lungs, bypassing the gullet, but there's no way to know, and no way to know what they use for a larynx or how air gets to it or how it works.

“Their hands look surprisingly like ours—four fingers, although proportionately longer and with an extra joint, opposable thumbs, ditto. Nobody ever saw their feet. That I know of.

“The rest of this report is not consensus. I want to make that clear.

“I heard a rumor that one of the nonhumans, just one, had been seen coming out of the woods with Mi-o Roland, who is about twelve in Earth years, so I went to ask her about it. That did happen—it was her mother who saw them. If I didn't know better, I would suspect they had been having some kind of sex. Mi-o is said to be somewhat advanced for her age in that respect. Anyway, Mi-o's mother was there, and Mi-o wouldn't answer any questions with a yes or no, unless a giggle means one thing or the other. I wish I had recorded that conversation! Mi-o did seem to be implying that that's exactly what they had been doing. But she wouldn't come out and admit it, so even if she knows what's under those creatures' boots and baggy coveralls, the rest of us might never find out.

“Maybe she said more to her mother, though, because when Ms. Roland walked me outside, she asked if I thought a nonhuman could get a human pregnant. I told her it was genetically impossible.

“Respectfully submitted by Maya Selig. Sworn statements from forty-seven citizens attached.”

Hanna sat back and muttered, “Thank you very much for nothing, Maya Selig.”

On reflection, though, the people of Dwar had done the best they could with damn little to start with. In fact, they had done an excellent job.

It was late. Hanna made a quick meal in her office and went home.

•   •   •

There were three people in Jameson's study when she went in, one of them Jameson. The second was three months old going on four; he lay on his stomach on the floor, pushing at it to get his head up in the air so he could look around in a wobbly way, his eyes huge with pleasure and surprise. The third was Thera August. She loved lecturing adults on the minutiae of infant development, and since Hanna was not much interested, and Jameson was, he would do.

Thera was arguably the best child companion in human space. She had lived in the homes of the rich and powerful for a hundred and twenty years, and had been on the point of comfortable retirement when she agreed to come to Jameson for reasons lost in an obscure skein of family and political relationships. In her long career she had heard more secrets than an entire espionage network could have gathered, and she had never divulged one of them. She was not a friend and she was not a servant. Although paid (well), she was not exactly an employee, either. She was an independent, completely liberated planet. She was not the tribe of relatives and neighbors who would have helped care for a baby on Hanna's homeworld, but she was not (the option Hanna had violently rejected) a perfectly programmed, humanlike servo, either. She was one of the rewards that came with the kind of old wealth Jameson had inherited with the family estate on Heartworld, and Hanna had been in no position to turn this favor down.

She went straight to the baby and dropped to the floor and picked him up. He chuckled and reached for her face, and she covered his with kisses. He smelled sweet and fresh and it was some time before she paid attention to the adults in the room.

“I can take him with me tomorrow,” she said to Thera, “for the morning at least. There's a holo conference with F'thal in the afternoon. Not that he'd be disruptive. Just distracting—last time they started bragging about their own young and we never got back to the agenda.”

“I doubt he'll ever be deliberately disruptive,” Thera said. “You can tell a lot about personality by this stage. This one is going to be sunlight.”

Like his father,
Hanna thought.

She kissed her son again and looked at him, determined to focus only on his own, individual face. How unfair it would be to seek resemblances! He was not Michael Kristofik all over again; he was Michael Bassanio, unique, himself, and Hanna would not even call him by his formal name. He was Mickey: the future, not the past.

Hanna held herself to this standard by an effort of will because the past was still close as her breath. Mickey's father had died a little more than twelve Standard months ago, though the anniversary itself, blessedly, had meant nothing to her. A year of twelve Standard months was not a year on her native world; it certainly was not a year on Gadrah, where seasons stretched through far more days than in other places where humans lived. The preceding fall in this hemisphere on Earth had been harder, because it had been autumn in the place where Michael had left her. He had not meant to die, it was true. But sometimes that did not seem to make a difference.

Perhaps
, she still thought sometimes,
I will take Mickey and flee always ahead of fall, spend my life in springs and summers.

But it would be wrong to do that to him. I must give him a lasting home, if I can.

She looked at her son's happy face and thought that Michael must have been an infant like this. She knew his childhood had been secure and safe, full of work but full of love. Until he was about ten.

Then came the rest of it.

She whispered, “That will never happen to you, Mickey.”

Because she would kill for her son. She did not think: die for him—because she simply wouldn't die. She would go on killing and killing, until everybody who might hurt this child as his father had been hurt was just—gone.

O
N BATTLEGROUND
,
there was war. There had always been war. There would always be war. There had never been anything else and there never would be.

The being the humans would call Kwoort did not entertain a thought that it might be otherwise. Kakrekt might, but she did not tell anyone. Especially not the enemy and its Demon High Commander, Kwoort.

•   •   •

On Old Earth, Starr Jameson requested further information from New Earth. Knowing bureaucrats well, he was specific about what kinds of information he wanted and how to go about finding it.

Sometimes, when Hanna wasn't looking, he rocked Mickey's cradle himself. Wondering, as he did, why he discouraged Hanna's suggestions that it was time she and Mickey made a home of their own. Wondering if the quiet of his house would one day be empty instead of restful, without Hanna's voice, without Mickey.

But certain political currents were shifting, and soon he would be too busy to notice that they were gone.

Of course he would.

•   •   •

On New Earth, the archivist ran the specified searches. They were without result. He reported the fact with some relief. He had too much work already without legendary Earth sticking its nose in farther than it already was.

•   •   •

And on Old Earth, Hanna Bassanio said grimly, “I'm going to have to go out there.”

H
A
NNA HAD HUNTED
(and been hunted) in a variety of modes, but this one was new.

The first part of it was simple enough, if frustrating. To begin with, there were restrictions on her movements, a reminder that officially, thanks to her foray outside Polity law, she was an accused felon, however leniently treated and however silken her prison's walls. At this time she was allowed to leave Earth only on demonstrably official business for Alien Relations and Contact; she had not even been allowed to go home to D'neera for Mickey's birth. Jameson managed to get permission for her to go to New Earth, though, with no more than routine bureaucratic delay. But permission for Mickey to accompany her was denied, as assurance that she would return.

Then, having no access to a vessel she could pilot herself—Jameson did not even bother trying to get someone to loan her one—she had to wait a month until an Oversight transport going to New Earth could take her there. In the interval she sometimes thought wistfully of the years when Jameson was Heartworld's representative to the Coordinating Commission of the Interworld Polity, one of the most important beings in human space. He could certainly get things done quickly then!

“I'm somewhat more limited now,” he said when she complained. He was smiling, she noticed. He had almost never smiled in those days.

“What, no more government-funded star-going yachts at your disposal?”

“I miss the yacht,” he admitted.

Since he might still be a commissioner if it had not been for Hanna (leaving aside the fact that she had, at a crucial moment, blown up the yacht) this was a sore point for her.
He
put it down to routine political upheaval, a minor swirl in the currents of history. Either way, she didn't bring it up again.

In any case, it meant she had time to get Bella Qu'e'n, her prize pupil and a D'neeran, detached from Bella's current job and trained to replace Hanna for the uncertain duration. The detaching was easy—graduates of Hanna's program were understood to be on call for Contact, and Bella now headed a similar program of studies that Hanna herself had initiated, several years before, on their native world. Harder was convincing Bella, who had a thicker (mental) skin than most of her kind, that she would have to resign herself to holding some students' hands.

Eventually Hanna was taken aboard the Colonial Oversight ship for the three-week flight to New Earth, and immediately found herself at odds with reality.

This spacecraft was much larger than Michael Kristofik's
Golden Girl
had been. But the isolation and confinement of all spaceships was fundamentally the same. You were as dependent on the functioning of a complex artifact as a fetus on the womb it inhabited; however clean the air you knew it subtly as re-breathed, and there were literal limits to how far you could walk in any direction. The transport therefore
felt
like Michael's
GeeGee,
and much of Hanna's time with Michael had been lived in space. Now, often, it seemed he must be just out of sight, that she could go into the corridor and he would be standing there, face alight at seeing her, arms open as she went to him. She found herself weeping again; the uncontrollable bursts of tears had stopped for a while. She did not know how long it would be before they stopped altogether, or if they ever would.

She had experienced other deaths firsthand, but that one—the sudden death of the man she loved wholly, while she was fully engaged with his mind and emotions—had been destructive beyond belief. The detachment of the Adept trance had been the only thing, probably, that saved her from dying when Michael did. Afterward there had been nothing to shield her from her own sorrow and anger—even when she was taken back to Earth, not quite in chains, and took shelter with Starr Jameson.

Temporarily
, she had said, but she was still there, and so was the unexpected rage at Michael for abandoning her in death. She tried not to redirect it at Jameson, usually succeeded, occasionally failed. He appeared not to notice her fury, but he had to when she threw things at him. He ducked, and remained calm. Her anger did not move him and he would not pity her.

Over the course of some ten years he had been—at one time or another or simultaneously—her lover, superior, colleague, nemesis, mentor, protector, friend. Hanna had never gotten anywhere trying to pin down what he was to her and had given up trying.

It did not help that he could stir her sexually with one calculated touch.

She talked to him often during the flight. She made sure no tears were visible, and she didn't tell him reality was shaky. When he was at home for these conversations he brought Mickey to the viewer, and held up the baby's tiny fist and made waving motions with it, and did all the stupid things adults did on such occasions. He didn't say anything stupid, though. Hanna thought he had probably never said a stupid thing in his life.

This occupied very little of the three weeks. It took much less time to get to more remote destinations in space, the space-time laws governing Inspace transit having an entirely counterintuitive relation to those directing three dimensions. A shorter way to New Earth—meaning a shorter interval in time—might be found someday, but now Hanna, trying to anchor herself in what was instead of what had been, had too much time on her hands.

Work helped. She had learned that when, without much choice about it, she had taken over Contact Education—

(She had hardly spoken in weeks. Her voice sounded rusty.

“Contact—education? I can't.”

“You can. Let me give you the reasons why you will. Bodily assault on an operative of Intelligence and Security. Conspiring and aiding in holding him against his will. Conspiring and aiding in setting him adrift in deep space with no life support but a spacesuit—”

“He was not adrift! He was securely fastened to a relay structure and I gave Fleet his exact location within minutes!”

“The charge will not mention that. You will also be charged as accessory to everything Michael Kristofik would have been charged with if he had lived. I won't recite the list. It was too long to memorize. Ask yourself why you are here instead of in a cell.”

“You. You are using your influence to protect me. Again.”

“Nobody has that much influence! No human individual. The full Commission might—if someone influences
them
.”

Silence.

“Ask me who can do that, Hanna.”

She said grudgingly, “Who.”

It was better than the night before, when he had remarked that Michael Kristofik had not been unambiguously heterosexual. She had said, “He was not ambiguous with
me
,” and savagely hurled a teacup at his head.

“Relations with the nations of Uskos are of paramount importance to the Commission. At the moment Norsa of Ell is one of the most important beings on Uskos. He is therefore extremely important to the Commission. It would make Norsa unhappy to see you imprisoned—”

“You cannot imprison me. I was made a citizen of the nation of Ell.”

“Norsa has made that clear. There is Personality Adjustment, however.”

Silence. And fear.

“Whereas it would make Norsa happy, and would therefore make all the Commissioners happy, to see you heading the new division. Think about it, Hanna.”

Silence. But the sullen blue glare was an answer.)

—
so Hanna worked. She had begun studying New Earth's language before leaving Old Earth, a minimal challenge for someone who had had to become fluent in three alien tongues, and now she practiced it, and added a study of Oversight's files on New Earth. She was not going to be welcomed there, at least not by Oversight. She was going as a functionary of another government department, one now locked in a power struggle with Oversight over resources: search for aliens, or search for lost colonies? She knew she could not make them forget that, but at least she could demonstrate respect for their work by demonstrating knowledge of it. Besides, the knowledge might come in handy when she got there.

When she did, though, Oversight wasn't the problem.

•   •   •

Th
e Oversight historian was friendly, in fact. She was Amir Almond, a native of Earth, a slight Asian woman, a little hesitant at first. She said they needed to talk before Hanna went to meet with the archivist.

They sat outdoors in a warm shower of sunlight, in front of the building where Almond had her office. This was an interim outpost, not designed to be permanent, but the buildings that housed offices, laboratories, and dwellings did not look flimsy.

“The New Earth population pays attention to its towns,” Almond said when Hanna commented. “We didn't want to put up something ugly. Functional, yes. Grotesque, no.”

“Thoughtful . . . Have the people been pleased about getting back in contact with Earth? I know their historical knowledge of Earth ended pre-Polity.”

“They have a lot of catching up to do, but they're very pleased. On the whole.” Amir sighed. “Of course, the very first thing we had to do was tell them about the Plague Years and say, by the way, Plague's still around, so here's your vaccine, now drink it down like good little colonists . . . !”

Hanna laughed, but without humor. “I saw what Plague did to Gadrah. Although I knew it as Dawkins' Fever.”

“Yes, that's its other name. The original name. You . . . ?” Amir looked at her curiously. Comprehension came into her eyes.

“Oh!” she said. “That was you!”

“Yes, I was there.”

“Some of my colleagues haven't forgiven you yet for getting there before us . . . !”

Amir's lips curved, but Hanna said, “There were five of us.”
On the run.
“We were only trying to survive. One of us didn't make it. But not because of Plague.”

Amir seemed not to have noticed her change in mood.

“Did you know you're a case study?” she asked.

“What, the five of us on Gadrah? An Oversight how-not-to-do-it study, or something?”

“No, no! You personally. In a medical text. It came up when I was talking to a physician friend once about cross-infection from alien species. He said there was only one known case. You got a knife cut on Zeig-Daru and it became infected, am I correct?”

It had happened on a Zeigan spacecraft in a knife fight to the death.

“Close enough.”

“Topical infection of subject's right arm. Something like that.”

“Amir, they had to take my arm apart and regenerate out from the bone! Does that sound like a topical infection to you?”

Amir thought something like,
Oops!

Hanna sighed. “Amir, I'm sorry. These things we've been talking about—I have some bad memories. Can we talk about something else? What did you want to see me about before I go to the archives?”

“The archivist,” Amir said. She almost patted the bench beside her, a subliminal soothing motion. Hanna had gotten up at some point, at one of the painful jabs to memory, without being aware of it. She went back and sat down again.

Amir said, “He's really a nice man—one of those big-bear types. Loves his archives. And his tea—oh, my, how he loves his tea! He made the jump to Standard right away, and the translation programs for the archives got done twice as fast as they would have without his help. He's been grumbling a little lately. Sort of growling! I don't think,” she laughed, “he was used to working quite so hard, especially over such a sustained period. He wasn't really pleased when your department's request came in. ‘What!'” Amir tried to growl. “‘On top of all this other extra work I have to do these days?' You know the attitude I mean?”

“I certainly do. I've felt that way myself from time to time.”

“I guess we all have. Anyway, he wasn't thrilled about your coming here, but he was prepared to be helpful. Until last night.”

Amir was suddenly wary. Something in Hanna twitched. She said, “What exactly happened last night?”

“Someone dropped a remark—well, it was me, actually. Just in passing. I said, oh, by the way, the woman who's coming is D'neeran. And he said, what's that? So I explained about D'neera.”

“And he hates me,” Hanna said.

“Well, yes.”

•   •   •

Even though sh
e was forewarned, Chain Charpentier's hostility hit Hanna like a fist. She stammered for the first time in years, and she was only trying to introduce herself.

“I know who you are,” he said. He thought:
I know what you are, too.

“Mr. Charpentier,” she said, “what do you think I am?”

“That!” he said triumphantly. A stubby forefinger poked at the air in her direction. “You read my mind just now. Didn't you?”

“Mr. Charpentier,” she said, “I could hardly help it. Do you know how strongly you're projecting? Would you kindly stop projecting? And may I have a cup of tea?”

“I'm doing
what?
” he said, and added, “I'm not working with you. And no tea!”

The tea-making apparatus was in a corner of the archivist's office. Hanna went to it, calculating dates in her head. The ancestors of these people, otherwise apparently free of prejudice, had left Earth at a time when hostility to telepaths had become vicious. And nothing had happened to their descendants here, in their isolation, to add to their knowledge or change their minds.

Hanna started to make tea. Charpentier, stunned by the effrontery, did not protest because he was briefly speechless. Hanna decided to take advantage of his silence. She did know some history: her own.

“Mr. Charpentier,” she said, “I would like to tell you a story. I ask only that you listen.”