Battleground (27 page)

But it was customary to obtain permission first, before you did something like that.

She sighed, lay down again, and went back to sleep.

THAT PLACE

F
IVE DAYS PASSED,
and nothing in particular happened. Nothing that made it into the history texts.

•   •   •

Gabriel could not pray.

He knelt beside his bed. At some time in the last hours the bowed head and clasped hands had become a head laid in misery on helpless folded arms. He was stiff and he was cold. He had come desperately seeking the place where ego dissolved in the paradox containing
all that existed, perceptible and imperceptible, known and unknown, that which was at once wholly action and wholly stillness. He had not been able to escape the prison of flesh and the chaos of thought.

feed on us, you see, and our pleasure so intense

When he tried to pray all that came was a passionate plea:
Take me now, take me out of this universe—

But You made it, so it must be good. You made them, so there must be goodness in them. It must be I who cannot see . . .

The door had been sounding a request for entry for some time before he heard it. He waited a full minute longer for the caller to give up and leave, but the annoying chirps went on. Finally he got up and hobbled to the portal and ordered it open without even waiting to find out who was there. It didn't matter; he would tell them to go away.

Hanna stood there, looking up at him, and he said nothing.

She said, “I thought you might want something to eat.”

He was silent. After a minute she moved forward and he stood back automatically so that she would not have to shove her way into the room. She was carrying a handled box. His room was larger than hers and had one of the ubiquitous all-purpose tables against one wall, where he kept an upright crucifix and some antique books of devotion, leaving no room for the box. She opened it and began taking out sealed containers, one-handed, awkwardly because the box was a clumsy thing, and something moved in his heart, as it did sometimes when he watched a child patiently work at a task that was almost beyond him. He went to her and took the box, holding it while she finished taking out the contents.

“I didn't bring any meat,” she said. “I didn't know if you eat it.”

“Thank you,” he said, “but I'm not hungry.”

“I'm never hungry when I'm upset, either. People are always trying to get me to eat. I always thought it was so I'll stay healthy enough to do what they want, but maybe it's—because it's something you can do for somebody, when you can't help them any other way.”

She uncovered plates and sat down. Gabriel watched her take a bite of a creamy egg dish.“This is pretty good,” she said. “Please? Maybe if you taste it you'll be able to eat some more.”He sat down and began to eat. It tasted like sawdust to him, but if he concentrated, he could get it down. His order did not approve of prolonged fasting, except in specific circumstances and under guidance, and especially did not approve of it as an emotional indulgence.
Take the gift when it is given and give thanks
, he had been told, and that was what he taught.Presently Hanna said, “Tell me what happened with Tlorr.”

Gabriel put down his fork and closed his eyes.

She said, “It can't be that bad.”

“Maybe not to you,” Gabriel said, and heard the resentment in his voice. “You just observe, don't you? You're used to this. You made friends with Zeigans, for God's sake.”

“Well, not immediately,” she said. “And I don't ‘just observe.' True-humans do that . . . Do you think the Polity would let me stop doing this? No,” she answered herself. “They mean to get a lot more work out of me, and they've got a way to enforce my cooperation. For the foreseeable future. You don't think I'm enjoying this experience, do you? You heard me practically beg to get out of here!”

Gabriel folded his hands on the table and tried to collect his thoughts. “Eat,” she said, and he said, “Be quiet,” in the you-better-shut-up-
now
teacher-tone he had perfected. She looked up with laughter in her eyes, but said nothing.

He said eventually, “Tlorr told me about the facilitators.”

“Tell me.”

But he stayed silent and finally she said, “It might be important, Gabriel. If nothing else, it's a blank spot in our knowledge of them, because when they talk about reproduction they're vague, and when they think about it there's nothing clear, just an impression of sensation. It might be ecstasy, but memories of strong sensations are just—sketches. They don't convey substance. I went back and looked at the physiologists' reports, trying to figure out what Kwoort was offering that he thought would be fair exchange for what he was asking. I just tried to talk to Cinnamon's team again, but they were all asleep. They seem to sleep a lot,” she said doubtfully; a look of puzzlement crossed her face. It cleared and she said, “So I read their reports instead. They weren't there long enough to learn much. In terms of primary anatomy, Soldiers have analogues to human reproductive organs, both internal and external. Males have penises—two to a male—and females have two vaginas for impregnation, though there's a separate birth canal. That's surprising, but—why not? Nature likes redundancy.

“Both sexes, however, have an additional external organ that seems to be specifically associated with sexual activity. Soldiers talked about it freely and didn't mind exhibiting it to the team. It presents as bodily sites that appear to be randomly distributed all over the torso, front and back and sides. The subjects said there's no special pattern in their arrangement, and individuals have varying numbers of them. When they're not in reproductive mode—and none of the subjects were—the sites appear as small, folded depressions, anywhere from one to twelve centimeters across. They probably connect with a neural network, and maybe with a separate vascular system, though that's not clear. That was Matthew Sweet's guess; the Soldiers couldn't explain it in terms satisfactory to the translator. The sites are receptors for the facilitators, apparently. But so far nobody has seen a facilitator. So what did Tlorr tell you? Is what I've just said consistent?”

“It's consistent,” Gabriel said. He pushed his plate away.

“Drink some milk,” Hanna said. “Come on, Gabriel. Are you embarrassed? Are you uncomfortable talking about sex? Or are you only uncomfortable talking about it with me?”

Gabriel had waked two mornings ago with the sleeping Hanna in his arms and in a state of high arousal—for a few seconds, until the memory of the benighted trip to the surface came crashing back. He had gotten out of bed—almost leaped out of it—grabbed his boots, and fled.

“I don't know what the facilitators look like either,” Gabriel said. “I know they fasten onto the people—onto those receptor sites, I suppose—and there's some kind of exchange. It nourishes the facilitators. And they pump something in, or trigger something . . .”

He fell silent again. Hanna said, “Spit it out.”

“I don't think the translator was working right.”

“You're not just uncomfortable,” Hanna said accurately. “You—you loathe it. Whatever it is.”

seen that destruction with my own eyes and might live to feel God's power again

He said carefully, “They make Soldiers aggressive. Very aggressive. But only toward specific targets. Like anyone who tries to prevent reproduction.”

“I don't understand,” Hanna said, frowning. “You mean they react aggressively toward someone who tries to interfere with them when they're mating? You see that in a lot of species, one animal distracted by the need to fight another off. But not in all of them, and never in the sentient species we've seen until now. They do the competing beforehand, more subtly, of course, like humans—well, usually—and do the mating in private. I didn't think these beings fought each other about it at all. I thought they just did it at random, at the right times.”

“It's not about competing for mates,” Gabriel said. “It's a lot more complicated than that. If I understood Tlorr, it extends to destroying research directed toward population control. And massacring researchers. Tlorr said she saw it happen herself. There was some ambiguity—she might have been part of it—”

torn limb from limb and the facilitators also inflict pain exquisite as

He felt a surge of nausea. Hanna said, “Gabriel?” in alarm.

“Excuse me,” he said thickly, turned over his chair getting up, and ran for the lavatory.

When he came out the chair was upright, the food, to his relief, had disappeared back into the box, and Hanna was turning over the pages of a twentieth-century translation of St. John of the Cross. He sat heavily on the bed. The combination of Hanna and a bed reminded him that he had another problem at least as serious as an alien civilization he did not understand and was trying not to hate. She looked up from the book, and he wondered if she knew what he was thinking.

“Yes,” she said. “You can't help projecting. Some people do it a lot. I could shut it out, but I like how your mind feels, so I don't want to.”

“Do,” he said. “Please.”

“Why? Everyone needs to be understood. And comforted, when they're unhappy. This—
The Dark Night of the Soul
—is this your comfort?”

“You can read that?” he said, distracted.

“It's the language used on New Earth. It's changed there over the years, but I can read this. It doesn't seem like it would be as helpful as ordinary human compassion, though.”

“Which is a reflection of the compassion of Christ. I can't accept what you're offering, Hanna.”

“I do not,” she said, “go to bed with men to demonstrate compassion. That's not what I meant.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean—”

“That's what you were thinking about. I just meant being with you. A friend to talk to, if you want.”

So tempting. So innocent. She meant it, too, and there was
Take the gift when it is given . . .

But he couldn't take this one. The time was coming, no, it was here, to decide about the direction of his future, but he did not mean to decide on the basis of passion for a woman. Though it went beyond lust. He could not forget—he wished he could forget!—that she had reached out from her own trouble and sought to help him. That
Gabriel, dear?
had been irresistible.

He said gently, “Friendship is not all I would want, and that's the problem. Leave me alone, Hanna. For my sake.”

She looked at him in silence for a moment, started to speak, changed her mind, and got up and picked up the box. At the door she did speak; she said, “Do you want me to tell you if I find out any more about That Place?”

“I guess so,” he said. “But in public. In a common area.”

“All right,” she said simply, and left him.

•   •   •

The climatologist said there were, in fact, places on Battleground that had consistently good weather. He said That Place was, in fact, one of them.

Hanna was suspicious. “You mean,” she said, “we go down there and the sun will be shining? Blue sky? No lightning? All that?”

“Well, it does depend on when you go,” said the climatologist. “There's a storm system moving in that direction now.”

“Figures,” Hanna said.

•   •   •

No one was paying much attention to Kwek. She thought this was probably a good thing.

She wasn't afraid of these not-Soldiers . . . not exactly. They were exceedingly strange, but not frightening. They only filled her with uncertainty, and that had begun before she even met the one called Arkt, when she got the casual order to tell the not-Soldier that was coming whatever it wanted to know.

The what?—
she thought an animal was meant.

It is a not-Soldier but it talks, it comes from another star.

She wasn't sure she had heard that right until the minute Arkt came into her workspace, and even then she had thought she was dreaming. Strange creatures did wander around in dreams, the most unlikely things happened as if they were a matter of course, accepted without surprise—but only in dreams. The Soldier who escorted Arkt didn't seem to think anything odd was happening. But then, the Soldier probably didn't dream. Kwek had known only a handful who did; she herself had only begun to dream some thirty summers ago.

The first occurrences were far apart; she was not even sure when it had happened the first time, and she could not put the name “dreams” to what she experienced at first, thinking them memories of things she had really done. But she knew Soldiers who appeared in some of these episodes, and she soon discovered that they did not have the same memories. She still did not think of the pseudo-memories as especially strange—perhaps her recollection was faulty, or the others were wrong—until she “remembered” crouching behind a rock and taking a direct hit from a blast so huge that it devastated the whole valley around her but left her unharmed. Obviously, this could not have happened. For a time, as the frequency of the phenomena increased, she continued to mention them to others, saying
What is this, does it happen to you?
But it didn't seem to happen to anyone else, nor was anyone interested, and so, since it was relevant to nothing, she stopped bothering.

She first heard the word “dream” one day when she was in the company of two high-ranking Commanders and one of them, describing an impossible event to the other, used it. She learned then that she was, if in the minority, not unique. Dreaming was a phenomenon that appeared from time to time, she was told, and was universal among commanders. Not that she—not that any individual—had a strong likelihood of surviving long enough to become a Commander, but it did appear to be a marker of some kind, which was interesting.

She did not seriously examine the possibility that Arkt was not a dream until the two of them were on the way, with a not-Soldier described as “transport personnel,” to the not-Soldiers' spaceship. But by the time her short interrogation on arrival was over she no longer questioned the reality of her situation, and she was simply relieved at being moved from place to place on the spaceship, reminiscent of the orders that moved her from place to place among Soldiers. Long stretches with nothing to do felt like normal life, and so did mild suspense at where she would end up next.