Battleground (25 page)

“It's nothing,” Gabriel said softly; for a moment she thought he had read her mind, but then she said, “What do you mean, what's nothing?”

“What's making you so restless. It's just electricity. Like the air is charged.”

“It is charged, isn't it,” she said, not a question.

“I shouldn't have agreed to this meeting so quickly. I think that was a mistake.”

They were nearly at the structure, and there had been no sign of life. Hanna stopped, shifted the light to her left hand and reached out to Gabriel with her right. He took it and they stood for a minute holding hands like timid children, looking not at each other but at the silent building. Hanna said, “The mistakes are adding up, aren't they.”

“I hope not,” Gabriel said.

The door opened and Kwoort came out, light behind him only for a moment before the door shut it in. Hanna felt the dark between them thicken. She reached out to touch his thought, the easy perception, easy as seeing, all wrong
,
sluggish. But she knew that the figure, a vaguer darkness, was Kwoort.

Kwoort did not move. Finally Hanna took her hand from Gabriel's and walked toward him.

She said, “Greetings, Kwoort Commander,” the courtesy empty in her mouth.

“Guest,” he said from the darkness, bare acknowledgment.

“Why have you summoned us?” she asked.

“I require answers to questions,” he said.

“As do I,” said Hanna, but she tensed even further.

Hanna's previous experience of beings (some human) who had required answers of her was appalling. Trance protected the practitioner from physical pain, but Hanna had concluded some time past that the optimum solution to any such threat was the immediate death of whoever or whatever threatened her.
No more goddamned unarmed First Contacts,
she thought, and felt Gabriel stir uneasily behind her.

“You have lied to me,” Kwoort said.

“I have not lied, Kwoort Commander. None of us have.”

“You can speak to the mind,” he said. “Speak to mine!”

So he did know. But why had he not said it openly, in that earlier, aborted meeting?

After a rather long pause she said, “You suspected that we have this ability, I know . . . and it was your expressed desire to use it in your wars that caused us to decide on concealing it. We are not the enemies of anyone on this world; we will not fight with you or against you. The ability I possess cannot be taught. It is inborn, and only in a small minority. I am the only human being of this expedition to have it—” Protecting the others, if protection was needed. “It cannot be useful to you. And so it was concealed.”

“You should not have concealed it,” he said.

“Maybe not.” Mistakes, mistakes! “But put yourself in my place, if you will. I did not know you well; I do not know you now. If you thought I possessed an ability that might aid you in war, would I not fear that you might seize me, as you seized my comrade early in this day, and try to force me to use the ability to your benefit?”

“What is to stop me, if I think it good to do that?”

Gabriel had come up beside her. He touched her hand. She knew what he meant her to do, perceive his thought, so she tried, and it should have been easy and was not. She thought the words he formed might be:
Don't talk about power, don't talk about weapons. Don't raise the level of aggression.

“I will speak to you alone,” Kwoort said. “It will not stop you from speaking to your holy man's mind, will it? But if you have finally told me the truth, he cannot speak to yours . . . we will see. And my Holy Man would speak with him about Abundant God.”

“Kwoort Commander, how many summers does this Holy Man have?”

“Tlorr has seven hundred and fifty summers. Why is that of interest?”

“Because you yourself have seven hundred and twelve. Why have you not yet become Holy?”

There was a silence, and then Kwoort said, “Only Abundant God knows the time when he will take one of us to himself.”

She could not sense what he felt as he said that, though she tried. But she thought of the suicide statistics among humans who felt they had outlived life.

Kwoort whispered: “Speak, I said. Speak to my mind. Speak the truth to my mind.”

“I cannot ‘speak' it,” Hanna said. “Not in words. I can do that with humans and other beings with whom I share a spoken language. You and I do not. What I might perceive in you, and can communicate to you, can only be an amalgam of images and emotions, though our minds independently transmute them to words.”

“You lie!”
he roared, so loudly that his cry drowned out the translator, and Hanna saw the source of the strength of his conviction: questions asked of the Warrior who had not been, and perhaps should have been, assassinated. Her answers must have been inaccurate or incomplete.

“I do not lie! Yes, I know more, when you speak, than you say! I know that you had an informant! But did she not tell you—”

She realized then that she had trapped herself in another lie. Dema had “spoken to the mind,” and Kwoort knew it; he knew that at least one other human being on
Endeavor
was capable of it; now he might think all of them were. She would have to tell him all of the truth.

Only five,
she said to him,
four besides myself,
and tried to show him images of their faces. The effort was enormous and she knew that she had not succeeded. But the number had gotten through.

She watched Kwoort absorb the knowledge. Watched only with her eyes, because her mind was filled with shadow as deeply as her eyes. He could never have had this experience before, the certain knowledge that another being told the truth, and her perception of his experiencing it should have been just as absolute, but it was not. It was clouded, this sense that she most trusted was uncertain, and it seemed that even if a light shone suddenly in the night, it would illuminate only treacherous wisps of fog.

Presently he said, “The Holy Man waits for your fellow-Soldier”—a word as close to the Standard “friend” as the translator could get.

“I will not allow him to go alone,” Hanna said.

“The Holy Man will not harm him.”

And she couldn't tell if that was true or not; she cursed the drug that clouded her perception.

“It's all right,” Gabriel murmured against her ear. “I have to do this. This is what I'm here for. The others are monitoring us, aren't they?”

“They're supposed to be,” she said softly. “I can't tell!”

“Do you trust them?” he whispered.

“My team? Of course.”

Kwoort said loudly, “Order him.”

“We are not Soldiers, Kwoort Commander. My friend has the right to refuse.”

“But I don't refuse,” Gabriel said, and walked forward.

He followed a thin beam of light to the building and Hanna stood silent while the door opened and closed, shutting him from her sight.

There was a short, brilliant glow in the clouds, a louder sound of thunder from the dark. Hanna could not seem to stir, as if the weight of weariness her body did not feel had been diverted to her will. Kwoort came down the shallow steps from the doorway.

That got her to move; she backed up. She tried to tell herself it was because of Gabriel's warning—
don't raise the level of aggression
—and knew that was not true. It was because she could not detect Kwoort's intent.

She said—it was not one of the questions she had meant to ask—“Are you unusual, Kwoort Commander, in your liking for the outdoors, even in the electric night?”

“I am unusual,” he agreed. He walked not straight toward her, but as if he would pass her on his way to another destination. She turned her head, watching, and at the same time sought for Gabriel. She could not feel him.

She had not shifted the light she held, pointing almost at her feet, but Kwoort, though he walked slowly, moved without hesitation. She said, “I think your eyes are superior to mine in the dark.”

“Extinguish the light,” he suggested.

She shrugged and turned it off. Then she thrust it into a pocket in case she needed her hands free to protect herself. The night became unrelieved black. The mutter of thunder, louder, drowned any sound Kwoort might make, but her unreliable extra sense told her he was now at her left and almost behind her. She turned toward where he ought to be. She felt unbalanced in the dark, with no visual cues. Then he really was behind her, and she turned further, uncertainly, and felt him stop.

“This speaking to the mind,” he said. “Do you use it with your enemies?”

“We have no enemies.”

“You lie,” he said. “Everything that lives has enemies. Can you say that to my mind and not lie?”

There have been enemies,
she said, felt the drugged slowness, but she could show him the shadow of a battle in space in which she had taken part.
We seek, always, peace,
she said, or made him feel, and managed to show him, though dimly, the network of trade and reciprocity that characterized the Polity. Those five worlds, at least—Earth and Willow, Colony One and Co-op and Heartworld—had never fought each other.

Her eyes were adjusting and she found that there was a little ambient light. She could just make out Kwoort, as a shadowy figure; at least she knew for sure where he was. She could see nothing of his face, but it hardly mattered. She knew little about the meanings of Soldiers' expressions, she had not even asked Kit about them; telepathy was a surer guide. Or it had been, until tonight.

He said again, almost a whisper: “Speak to my mind. This way of seeing would be useful against enemies.”

“It can be useful, Kwoort Commander, but I will not—we will not—use it against your enemies. They are not ours. Is that the only answer you require?”

“No, here is another. How can you be persuaded to use it for the Holy Man?”

“I cannot think of any persuasion that would be sufficient.”

“Then I would hear of your breeding,” he said. “How do you breed?”

And she knew that the shift was not as abrupt as it sounded, but she could not see the transition, as she might have, with luck, if his mind had been open to her.

She said, after only a little hesitation, “Any of us could have told you that. We are mammals, just as you are. Our young are born with immature brains and bodies; they suckle until they can feed themselves; they require unceasing care for several summers, and much care for some summers more. Maturity comes much more slowly than it comes to Soldiers.”

“No! I mean, what is the mechanism of conception!”

“Did our specialists in the body not offer that information? Males and females join sexual organs, and conception results. The role of the ‘facilitators' among your people is unclear. We have nothing of the kind, and I do not know who they are.”

“They are not a ‘who.' They are a ‘what.'”

There was a wave of fury and bitterness, a flash of what he felt like a jolt of static, there and gone. Hanna blinked.

“We heard of their existence, but there has not been time to pursue the subject,” she said. “Nothing and no one plays such a role in our mating. Among us, a female and male mutually agree that they will mate, and develop a bond that may last for years, or even for life. They nurture, together with close kin, their own young. There are countless variations, but that is the basic model. It has proved optimally successful in the course of human evolution.”

Kin
did not translate, nor did
evolution
. It did not seem important.

Kwoort had circled closer. “I do not believe in your ‘mutual agreement.' Bloodless,” he said. There was a sound from the translator that suggested ambiguity. Hanna tried to reach into Kwoort's mind, to find out more clearly what he meant. She failed. She put her hands to her face, moved unconsciously, needing more distance between them, stumbled and nearly fell. She had never, ever communicated with an alien without full command of telepathy, a potent tool to start with, formidable since her studies with Adept masters, and she could not rely on the translator either because it could not tell her when Kwoort lied. She was blinded by more than the night, and the thunder, coming closer, filled her ears.

She tried to widen her perception, seeking the D'neerans on
Endeavor
, felt nothing; sought Gabriel, sensed him dimly. He was intent on something, perceiving no danger. But would he know danger before it had him by the throat?

“I do not know what you mean by ‘bloodless,'” she said.

“Is there no urgency? It seems logical! Planned!”

“Logic often plays a part; often it does not. There may be planning, or not.”

“It seems you know nothing of the body's desire to mate! That is beyond understanding!”

“I see I have given you entirely the wrong impression,” Hanna said, startled. “The part desire plays can hardly be exaggerated. Often it overrides both logic and planning; ultimately it is responsible for nearly all
 . . .
breeding. Often, not always, there is love as well,” she said, thinking of her beautiful son and how he had come to be, and heard that
not translatable
chime. Kwoort could not know what she meant by
love . . .
which in any case came in many varieties that did not include sexual desire.

“Desire,” said Kwoort, ignoring the untranslatable word. “So you do know it. And what is your reward in its fulfillment?”

He had come closer still. The sky lit up and there was a boom of thunder, deafening; Hanna moved, stumbled, retreated, and had to turn again to face him, unnerved. Other conversations with other aliens had been just as strange, but she had been able to draw on their thoughts, glimpse their goals.

She said, “At its best, there are long years of happiness.”

But the last word did not translate.