Battleground (21 page)

The Holy Man's hands were long and thin, the fingers in constant motion. Better than Hanna about reading reports, Gabriel remembered something a physiologist had observed about gross anatomy in datastream images weeks ago:
“...observed no analogue to the human fingernail, but tegument on fingers darkens gradually which might represent a transition to more protective skin structure—”

Maybe the subject of the report had been better at holding still than this Holy Man, whose dark fingertips danced. The being rocked from one foot to the other, and the shifting patterns of light in the fabric of the robe made it appear that the garment danced, too. The tongue tip, hardly wider than a blade of grass, protruded and flickered. Paradoxically, a line of ancient poetry came to Gabriel's mind, one that evoked stillness in eternity:
Oh sages standing in God's holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall—

The Holy Man began to speak, and Gabriel forgot about poetry. There were whistles, clicks, words with a cadence that might have been speech, but the translator produced a steady stream of
not translatables
. What a time for it to malfunction!

“Holy sage,” Gabriel said, reverently in spite of himself, because he faced a thinking creature of some God that might also be his, “I am here to hear about your beliefs and to tell you about mine, but I don't think the translator is working. Can you understand what I'm saying? I can't understand you—”

“Yes,” said the being, “believe,” and soared into punctuated babble again. The few macroscopic parts of the translator weren't substantial enough to grab and shake, Gabriel's impulse; he could only wait for a pause in what the Holy Man was saying. He waited for what seemed like eternity but was probably minutes, transfixed by the movement, the strangeness, and he began to notice things about the Holy Man that he hadn't seen at once. The creature was stick-thin, taller than Gabriel by a head; once, when he went momentarily still, he looked like a dressed-up mantis. It was when he started up again that Gabriel saw the real oddity: no facial expressions accompanied the stream of gibberish. The mouth moved with speaking and the tongue flickered constantly, but all the other muscles of the face, and the eyes, were fixed. Gabriel thought of something he had seen on Co-op as a child, after his parents were killed and he lived briefly in Gergowan with a cousin's family. The whole brood had gone to see the New Year maskers, crowding the street on a cold night while costumed men—nearly all of them were men—roared and danced to drive the dark away. One of them ran up to Gabriel, gesturing mock threats, swollen to inhuman size in animal guise. The arms waved, the legs flailed, the wild activity kept the cold away; the figure swung a torch in either hand. But the animal head was rigid and the animal face never changed. Clearly the thing was alive, but it did not have the face of a living thing, not even of any animal; it had the face of something alive in body but not in soul. Gabriel had thought of the devil then, and he thought of the devil now.

He didn't even believe in the devil any more.

The enormity of this impression was only beginning to show itself when he heard a soft whisper in Standard:
The translator's all right. He's speaking a language we haven't heard before—or else it's schizophasia . . .

He looked at the communicator on his wrist, but it wasn't showing anything. The whisper came again:
No, no, it's Dema, don't you know me? You have to get used to telepathy. There is nothing wrong with the translator.

“What are you
—
?”

Hush! Don't talk out loud! Think the words like you were going to say them.

Spooked, Gabriel couldn't think at all. The Holy Man had kept right on going, but the sounds were coming faster now, and the volume was rising. The jitters seemed to have sped up, too.

“Holy One,” he said. “Holy One?”

“Kill,” the translator said suddenly.

“Are you talking about killing?” Gabriel said to the Holy Man.

“Death,” said the translator, picking something out of the stream of sounds. “Demon,” it said, and seconds later, “Compression query—”

Kwoort burst into the gray chamber. “What are you doing to the Holy One?” he said.

All Gabriel could think was
Where's Hanna?
and the whisper said
Coming
and flooded him with reassurance.

Hanna came in then, eyes abnormally wide, anxiety a cloud around her.

“He has done nothing,” she said. “Kwoort Commander, you have deceived us. This is not the Holy Man from whom you take orders. Is he even a Holy Man at all?”

Kwoort made a fast turn in her direction and seemed to catch himself on the edge of a violent movement. He said, “He is what Holy Men become.”

For a few seconds Hanna was as still as Kwoort. Finally she said, “Kwoort Commander, I do not understand what you are doing. Do you understand, yourself?”

•   •   •

“That was a Holy Man, all right, or used to be,” she said later, “and he's a babbling idiot.”

She had barely spoken on the flight back to
Endeavor
, told the captain in an absentminded way that she would talk to her later, and taken Gabriel with her to report to Jameson. She a
nd Gabriel, and Jameson's holographic image, this time complete, shared her small cabin instead of a common-access conference room. Probably the captain could monitor whatever happened here, but maybe she wouldn't.

Gabriel and Hanna sat side by side on Hanna's narrow bed while Hanna talked. Jameson, listening in a space hundreds of light-years distant, seemed to take up most of the rest of the room. He looked very real, and standing he was very tall, and Gabriel moved a little so that he could see both of them. Hanna was making small restless movements. Jameson made hardly any, as if there were only so many nerves between them, and she had most of them.

“Kwoort's so different from most Soldiers he stands out like a solar flare,” she said.

Jameson said, “Is that an emotional reaction, or an objective observation?”

“Both, I suppose. He's being pulled in different directions, he's—I can't even conceptualize it, much less pin it down in words. It's not that there's more than one personality; there's definitely only one, a strong one. He reminds me a little of you,” Hanna said. Jameson's expression changed to surprise, and Hanna said, “The intensity. ‘I burn,' he told me. But your fire is controlled. His isn't.”

They looked at each other in stillness for a moment. Something changed, subtly.
What's that?
Gabriel thought, then recognized, belatedly, the current of pure sensuality between the man and woman who were so far apart. Jameson had acknowledged Gabriel's presence and since then had not looked away from Hanna. Gabriel felt sick with embarrassment. And appalled, his eyes on Hanna's parted lips, at his own answering surge of lust.

Hanna took a deep breath and moved a little; the context changed. Something that had opened in Jameson's face closed again. Finally he did look at Gabriel. He said, “What were your impressions?”

“Mine?” Gabriel said, startled.

“What did you learn from this encounter?”

“I don't think I learned anything. Communications confirmed that the translator was working. But the Holy Man didn't say more than half a dozen translatable words. Was he supposed to be—” Gabriel stopped. “I wonder,” he said. “Speaking in tongues? Do you know what that is?”

“More or less,” Jameson said. “It's been discredited, but it's still practiced here and there.”

“Yes,” Gabriel said, “although I'm inclined to the view that special conditions were operating in the early church.”

Jameson nodded as if he had some familiarity with the view. Hanna looked blank.

Gabriel added, “The whole meeting looks pointless. Meaningless.”

“It had to have some meaning to Kwoort,” Hanna said. She did not look at Gabriel; he was forgotten again, by both of them. “He wanted to know about breeding. About conception control. That was what it sounded like, but it doesn't make sense. A civilization that can develop space travel just has to have done that kind of research. Humans did; all the other Outsiders did. And he showed us what Holy Men become, that's what he called it. He wanted me to see it. Maybe he did that because of what I said about his sanity, and he wanted to show me what will happen to him, without telling me directly. That babbling idiot is his future. God! I said he reminded me of you,” she told Jameson. “How would you feel if that was your future?”

“It might be,” he said, and Hanna said involuntarily, “No!”—startling Gabriel, who knew something had just been said under the surface but did not know what it was.

Jameson ignored it and said, “What the hell are the dynamics of the change, then?”

Hanna said, “I think the Holy Man I touched originally, the female, is actually in an earlier stage than Kwoort, even if she's chronologically older. That one is not, fortunately, aggressive toward us. When I looked at her she was thinking only of the planetary war, thinking only of whether we could provide her with something that would give Rowtt an advantage.”

“And when she reaches that final stage? Would she be replaced by Kwoort?”

“What difference would that make? He's moving toward it himself, how could he replace her? I don't know if we even need to know the dynamics!” she said with sudden passion. “What if we just file some reports and interdict the place?”

“As we interdicted Zeig-Daru, but completely this time, without the distance contact and automated trade? Leave, and make no further contact?”

“Exactly.”

Jameson looked at her oddly. He said, “What happened to your curiosity? I can remember when you'd do anything to get your hands on an alien civilization.”

“Then you will remember that one of them got their hands on
me.
Remember, as long as you're remembering, my apprehension when Uskos first made contact. The fact that contact with Uskos was beneficent did not negate the fear I still carried from the earliest contacts with Zeig-Daru. I'm not afraid, exactly. It's more that a series of unpleasant incidents are affecting me. How extreme must my fear for Mickey have been that it could break me out of the trance-state like it did? That's not supposed to even be possible! I hate the way they think about mating. I don't like it that there's no art, no poetry. I don't like it that a young female who wants to look pretty is going to become a Warrior who breeds on some kind of cue with whatever Soldier is getting the same cue. I don't like what happened to me when that couple was mating. I don't like—”

“What couple?” said Jameson.

“Didn't I—ah. I didn't report that, did I?”

There was an odd silence. Gabriel watched the two of them stare at each other. Finally Hanna said, “I was in contact with a couple that was mating. The pleasure they experienced was so intense that it aroused me. Tremendously. In
trance!
That's not supposed to be possible, either! I broke out of trance and damn near had sex with Joseph and Bella on the spot, right here on the floor.”

“But you didn't?” said Jameson.

Hanna shook her head. They kept staring at each other.

“You don't have to deny yourself intimacy, you know.”

“You are getting things mixed up,” Hanna said. “If all I wanted was pleasure and release, I could have it with anybody, if I liked him well enough. Why do you think you're the only man I've had since Michael died? I would have entrusted myself to no man in the universe after that, except you. I loved Michael with all that I am, but I did not forget that I loved you first. Remember that, when you speak of intimacy.”

Jameson took a step forward, as if he could really cross into the same space. Then he stopped and looked again at Gabriel, and Gabriel said, “Would you like me to leave?”

Hanna said nothing. Jameson sighed and stepped back slowly, reluctantly it seemed. He said, “No. We can discuss personal matters another time. Hanna, you seem to be suggesting that we close out this mission and never return because you find these beings . . . unpleasant. That's remarkable, coming from you.”

“Don't trivialize it,” she said.

“I'm not doing that. But there are good reasons to continue. We might want to carry on reasonable dialogues with Kwoort after he attains ultimate authority. We can't dismiss that hope. We need to know everything about him you can get. If you can you need to become his friend.”

“His
friend!
I don't see why. I don't see why we can't leave them to their godforsaken, perpetual warring and hope to make contact with some more rewarding species. Or you could give me a chance to go back to Uskos and do more work there. I like it there. I want Mickey to play with some younglings while he's little. I'll bet you could think up a reason to authorize me to do that, couldn't you?”

“Not immediately,” Jameson said, “and not if you insist on prematurely writing off and abandoning a previously unknown civilization. I urge you to think of this, Hanna. You said the currently dominant Holy Man was interested only in the possibility of our providing some means of advantage in the ongoing war. But by your own account, Kwoort is now fully aware of telepathy, and sees the possible advantage in that. I wonder if, supposing we pull out now, he might, in the future, come looking for
us.
I think we should deal with him here and now instead of waiting for that.”

“But he said nothing about it today. It's gotten buried under this obsession with breeding. Anyway, he'll never come looking for us.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“There's no reason to think they've retained knowledge of interstellar spaceflight. Kwoort won't come looking for us because he can't.”