Battleground (3 page)

Without turning to look at him, or waiting for a response, she began.

“My many-times-great grandmother was named Constanzia Bassanio. She was born on Earth, and she was a member of the first completely telepathic generation. Whatever plans the governments of Earth had for telepaths when they started the so-called New-Human Genetic Project had been dropped. They were already afraid of what they saw in people like Constanzia's mother and father. They were terrified of children like Constanzia. And that fear seeped into the population of Earth like poison.”

He wasn't interrupting, at least.

“By the time Constanzia was six, no one identified as a telepath was safe anywhere on Earth. Many were murdered. So were others who were not telepaths; it was enough to point a finger and shout ‘New-human!' and a mob would form.

“The governments of Earth built an enclave—a sanctuary, they called it—and moved the entire population of the New-Human Project into it. There were fifty to sixty thousand people there, all telepaths. Except the guards. They had to be true-human, because it's hard for telepaths to learn to fight. We feel other people's pain. And that first generation had not learned to block, even when it meant the difference between surviving and—not.”

Charpentier had not moved. The tea was ready. Hanna filled two mugs and set them on the small table nearby. She still did not look at Charpentier, and she didn't stop talking either.

“Constanzia spent her entire childhood and adolescence in that enclave. Conditions were humane, but if she wanted to go out, she had to have an armed true-human escort. In time, people stopped asking to go out. At some point the guards had begun to feel that they were not guarding the telepaths from true-humans, but the other way around.”

Hanna sat down and sipped tea.

“All this guarding was getting expensive. So the governments of Earth built another enclave, this one on Earth's airless moon, where there was no population to guard against—or to guard. Earth's satellite keeps one face always to the planet, a spectacular sight. I've seen it. But the enclave was built deep inside. The people in it never saw the home they had been torn from, and they never saw the sun.

“This enclave was segregated by gender. The governments of Earth were afraid to kill some sixty thousand people outright. There would have been a terrible outcry, even with the endemic hatred of telepaths. But this way the problem would, so to speak, die out. No more telepathic children, no more problem. And meanwhile the entire population was well away from Earth.

“The governments of Earth were so used to guarding, however, that they kept it up. It couldn't have been easy for the guards, either. A telepath doesn't just tell you he's in pain; he makes you feel it with him. But by then the character of the true-humans chosen to be guards had by necessity changed. They were selected, so to speak, to be impervious to the suffering of others. At least that. I will not say they were chosen specifically to enjoy it. But many of them, it appears, did.

“The first weeks were terrible. The guards could not stand the bombardment of emotion. They urgently needed to force the captives to stop projecting their fear and grief, their loneliness at being separated from spouses and lovers and children, and they turned to violence. Many people were beaten, including Constanzia. It's said she was badly scarred.

“It's hard to keep beating innocent people if you see them as people, so steps were taken to make the people seem less human. They cut off Constanzia's lovely hair and shaved her scalp. The family story says her hair was much like mine, black as space, and that she wore it long, as I do. The story says she even looked like me—and perhaps she did, but no images from those days survive.

“That phase didn't last long. The governments of Earth found a solution: the telepaths' water supply was infused with strong sedatives.

“And that was supposed to be the end of it—all the telepaths half-awake, half-asleep, until the last of them died.”

Chain Charpentier suddenly came to the table and sat down. He said, “This must have been just after my ancestors left. How did yours get out?”

“With the help of good people,” Hanna said. “And they were true-humans.

“They were wealthy, but not wealthy enough to fund a settlement ship. It wasn't a settlement ship that went to D'neera, but a strung-out fleet, one ship at a time, as the rescuers scrambled for the money to buy them. Worse than that: fertile, Earth-like planets were in high demand. In return for giving up such a lovely piece of real estate, the governments of Earth, or corrupt officials, required payment for each and every refugee allowed to leave, even the smallest infant, even the unborn child Constanzia was carrying. There was a price on each of my ancestors' heads, Mr. Charpentier.

“Not all the ships made it to D'neera. There was no one in the Lunar enclave experienced in spaceflight, and there was time only for hasty, last-minute training. Desperation training. There was a time limit, you see. An amnesty period, the governments of Earth called it . . .

“Not everyone on Luna got off, either. Some of them died there, after many years, drugged and alone,” she said, and saw Charpentier shudder.

“The order of departure was fixed by lottery. Constanzia was one of the last to make it out. But—would you like to hear a happy ending to one story, Mr. Charpentier? Constanzia and the man she loved had conceived a child just before the removal to Luna. On the very night before it began, it's said. She was pregnant all those months in the deeps of the moon. And her lover found her on the last ship, and he was there when the next of my line, their daughter Melisande, was born. They went on to have two more children, both sons, and they were together until they died.

“And that's the end of my story,” Hanna said.

Charpentier finally drank his cold tea. He set the mug down with a thump. He said, “Well, do you want to get some work done or not?”

It was still grudging, but it was consent.

•   •   •

It
was late afternoon when they had their tea, and they did not start work until the next morning. Hanna had only gone back to the module assigned her in the Oversight complex. She looked around at Dwar with enjoyment as she returned to the Archives office at Town Center next day. There were deciduous trees in the region of Dwar and they were in full leaf; it was summer here, and a hydra-headed fountain splashed vigorously in the town's main square. The day was warm, the square quiet, and Hanna stood for a while by the fountain, admiring the bursting joy of the water and feeling fresh wind on her face. She was accustomed to the confinement of spacecraft, but journeys in space always reminded her that a simple variable of terrestrial worlds—changing weather—was a treasure. Dwar too was a jewel in its gentle way. Its builders had used warm brown native stone for most structures, and laid roadways of crushed white rock. It made for a pleasing contrast, and Hanna, surrounded by the fantastic architecture of Admin's city for too long, took her time getting to Archives.

Chain had petitioned Amir Almond for all the data he could get about D'neera, and about Hanna, and absorbed as much as he could while he waited. Hanna sensed that, but he did not say anything about it at first, so neither did she.

“We start where?” he asked.

“Well, let's re-run the searches Starr asked for, just as a check, and go on from there.”

“Starr? Jameson?”

“Contact,” she said absently, eyes on the text on a screen.

“That wouldn't be the one who used to run the Polity, would it?”

It appeared that Chain had not thoroughly absorbed several hundred years of history in a few months' time. He could hardly be blamed for that—especially by Hanna.

“No one commissioner ‘runs' the Polity,” she said patiently. “And their powers are limited. To some degree. It's complicated, Chain.”

“So he used to be
one
of the people running the Polity?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Hanna, trying not to laugh.

“And he's your boss?”

“Technically.”

“What does that mean, technically?”

She thought, to herself,
It means we sleep together.
Out loud she said with equal truth, “He wouldn't try to make a first contact himself. I wouldn't dream of trying to administer something like the department he heads.”

“These first contacts. You've done two of them?”

“And I'm here looking for a starting point for a third. Yes, Chain. That's what I do. That's what we'll be doing together, you and I.”

As they started the searches she heard him think:
Just wait till I tell people who this is!

She was getting used to being a legend.

They had a second keyword list ready before the first, predictably fruitless, search was done: anything and any combination they could think of having to do with aliens, nonhumans, starflight, spacecraft, and on and on. Chain threw in “strange beings” for good measure. Nothing, except for many alerts on “landings”; but those dealt with maintenance flights to the mothership.

“That's right, she's still up there,” Hanna said with interest. “And you still send people up?”

“On a regular basis. If the orbit starts decaying into the atmosphere, we're going to push her out toward space and wave good-bye.”

“Chain, why didn't your people do that long ago? It wouldn't have affected your mayday beacon, and you wouldn't have to worry about debris coming down on your heads. The thing's huge. It would break up coming down through atmosphere, but it could do a lot of damage. Why's it still there?”

“Sentimental attachment?” He shrugged. “I guess someplace inside we still like to think we're space travelers.”

Hanna nodded. It made sense to her. She said, “Let's see if Mi-o Roland ever put anything on record.”

She had not. In fact, except for a birth record for Mi-o Roland consistent with the chronology, there was no evidence the girl had ever existed, apart from the
Report to Archives
.

“Could she have changed her name?” Hanna said. “I forget—do women here customarily take their husbands' names?”

“Not usually,” he said, “but it's not consistent. It's an unusual first name, though. Let's try—”

Nothing.

“Could she have changed that too? It's a little awkward to pronounce. If she had wanted to change it to something easier, would it be a matter of public—well, no. That first search would have given us that.”

Chain said, “This is a land of small towns, Hanna. We've spread over one continent, no more, and we're spread thin at that. In a small town everybody knows your business anyway, so if you get around to reporting it to some central office—that's me, for now—fine. If you don't, nobody's going to fine you or whatever they do where you come from.
All
reporting is voluntary.”

He wore glasses; Hanna, who had never seen spectacles before, had examined them thoroughly. He took them off and laid them on the console where they worked. He looked sad. He said, “I've spent a lot of time with the Oversight historian. The kinds of questions she asked started me wondering. I've asked questions of my own, and Oversight's free with its library. It's different out there. With your people, I mean.”

He meant the five worlds of the Interworld Polity and the others within its sphere of influence. He had ceased to see Hanna as D'neeran.

He said, “We have a family named N'goto who make the finest porcelain you people have ever seen. Something about the clay on the riverbanks where they farm. The family developed the art of making it, oh, four hundred years ago? The rest of us buy it, sure. We ask for it a year in advance, usually a tea set for a marriage gift, and we pay the price the N'gotos ask, and it's a high one, and it's fair. We know how precious it is better than you Oversight people do.” (Hanna did not correct him. Oversight or Contact, it was all the Polity to him.) “The N'gotos don't have much time to spare from the land, and this is their art, and it's beautiful. Cherished.

“Now Oversight is talking about markets in the Polity, and the family's in an uproar.

“I see things coming, Hanna. I see things I don't like. They even say we have to stop calling this world New Earth, they say every colony ever settled wanted to call itself that and they all had to pick something else, and we'll have to do that too. Not everybody sees everything I've been thinking about, but we're
all
mad about that.”

“Understandably,” said Hanna, but she was thinking of the alternatives to change. Stagnation, for one. A turning in, a narrowing of vision, knowledge trickling away. Helplessness in the face of new threats. She thought of Plague, and Gadrah.

“Well, let's get back to work,” he said.

•   •   •

“No
thing,” Hanna said later to Jameson, light-years away. It was late night in Dwar; Hanna had stayed up to reach Admin in Jameson's morning. “I was reminded of the mothership, though. At the time of the incident, it was exactly where it is now—in orbit around New Earth. Surely the aliens would have boarded it. It's clearly a starship, at least, to any beings with experience with starships. If they were here for R&R—a reasonable hypothesis, based on the accounts—they would have checked it for threats. Do you think they might have left traces?”

She watched him think about it. She had always liked watching him think. The results were often surprising—and sometimes were direct hits on a target no one else had even seen.

“I wouldn't expect to find physical traces,” he said. “Not after generations of colonists making inspection trips. Presumably they would have noticed any damage or anything out of place—”

“—like alien picnic leavings—”

He gave her a startled look but said, “If they were curious about it, they might have tried to access the computers.”