Battleground (31 page)

Nakeekt was proud of the agricultural arrangements:
These red ovoids, you see, must be milled and then boiled because in their natural state they are poisonous. We make them into cakes. The cakes have different tastes, depending on what is baked into them. We send them sometimes to Wektt and Rowtt. The mill is behind the warren where I live . . .

Tracks of carts and barrows showed in long grasses, winding toward the settlement. So one of those smaller buildings, Hanna thought, is only a mill. That one, at least, is no dark secret.

What is brown-red is pleasant roasted, and is often eaten with a substance that we make from fruits gathered on an island we go to when tides permit. We have not been able to grow those fruits here, so far.

They walked on a path beside a stream—another curve of the stream they had seen at first—and found a rough pavement of rocks laid for footing in a hollow that was always muddy.

Sometimes we walk these paths, alone or with others, only to look at what is around us, because it is pleasant.

Hanna had seen Kwek in one of the clearings, bending to harvest russet tubers among waist-high stalks with silver-edged leaves, learning about the work done here. Kwek had looked up with the expression that meant a smile, her ears had waved gently, and Hanna had waved a hand and turned away. She wondered if they were telling Kwek lies, too.

•   •   •

The sun was low when they got back to the settlement. Hanna and Gabriel had been awake for more than twenty-four hours, and the long afternoon of walking weighed on them.

“Perhaps we will return tomorrow,” Gabriel said to Nakeekt.

“I think,” said Hanna, “we will stay here tonight, if Nakeekt agrees. Perhaps there are rooms where no one lives, where we could sleep.”

She felt Nakeekt's uneasiness at the proposition. But Nakeekt said, “Very well, if that is what you wish.”

•   •   •

This time they brought food from the pod and ate with their hosts in a communal hall. It was the first time Hanna had seen so many Soldiers together in one place. They did call themselves that, Nakeekt said when Hanna asked. The word, with all its connotations, meant “people” on this world.
But they look different from those in Rowtt,
she thought, but could not think why.

After the meal she and Gabriel were shown to rooms on the sixth story of the w
arren where Nakeekt herself lived, rooms near hers, but they did not go to sleep right away.

•   •   •

Gabriel satisfied himself that his room—billet, Soldiers called it—was clean, that the padded platform was comfortable enough, and the lightweight spread on it sufficiently warm for a night in this climate. But he had a question for Hanna, and he found his way into a hallway and around two corners to her door.

Come in!
she said when he tapped on it, and he did not hear audible words but felt that odd sensation of something inside his skull being tou
ched, and a ripple of melancholy he thought might have brushed him along with the words, and he pushed the door open and went in.

There was a small electric light next to the bed-platform, its glow just visible in the fading light from a large window. Hanna sat on the edge of the platform, a corner of the coverlet held carelessly in one hand as if she had started to pull it back and forgotten what she was doing. Her face was serious. Gabriel had come to ask why they were staying the night—she had not offered a reason to Nakeekt—but the question vanished. Hanna had taken off her boots and trousers and loosened her hair. Her shirt was long enough for decency—barely. One leg was tucked under her, but the other extended lightly to the floor, gleaming and graceful, and abruptly she was not his First Contact expert, she was not the iconoclast whose work he had studied with admiration; she was sensuous and provocative and unbearably desirable. He couldn't find breath to speak, and then he could, and the words came out of some other man's mouth: “Would you like some company? I mean would you like, would you like me to stay with you tonight?”— aware of the ambiguity of the words, the ambivalence of his hope.

He understood much later that the long following pause came because she was bringing her mind back from somewhere else—from a bed she would not sleep in again. At last she smiled. It was a gentle smile. She got up and came to him and kissed him once, quickly, on the cheek, and then she just shook her head and said, “No. Thank you.”

“Ah.”

He did not know if what he felt was regret or relief. He said humbly, “I'd be terrible at it anyway.”

“Why do you think that?”

“No experience,” he explained.

But she shook her head again. “You have a loving and generous heart, Gabriel. That's a fine starting place. Besides, I would tell you exactly what to do.”

He was halfway back to his own room when the last words sank in—
I would tell you exactly what to do
—

The images they conjured made him dizzy all the rest of the way, and he forgot that he had never asked his simple question.

•   •   •

So once again Hanna lay on a platform in a place inhabited by Soldiers, weary again, and again it was night. Rowtt, a place of war, had never slept. There had been Soldiers awake to greet the first team of human observers; sentinels and workers had gone about their tasks, crèches demanded care regardless of the hour, and only the Holy Man, whom she now knew as Tlorr, had clearly been preparing to rest. Here the community's day wound down like an Ear
thly day toward night.

She had not had time to think of the difference between people here, and people in Rowtt, that she had felt upon arrival. Now she could attend to it, and her circumstances, like a refined mirror of that first night, showed her the size of the difference.

These might as well be a different species,
she thought.
It does not seem right to think of them as Soldiers. They are more like Kwoort than like the others. But not like him either.

She was not in trance, and could not, she thought, afford to go into it. It had one thing in common with the stimulants she could not use: the body would eventually claim what was owed, and the press of fatigue she felt was too strong to be safely put aside for long. She meant to do some snooping before the night was over, but not telepathically, and meanwhile it would be good and advisable to sleep. There was plenty of time; the inhabitants of This Place would sleep hours longer than she would. They might post a sentinel or two, but those could be perceived and avoided. There had been no locks on any door she had seen, and opening those she was curious about should be a silent matter.

For now she lay passive and receptive, catching fragments of thought like snatches of conversation, waiting for sleep to come when it would.

•   •   •

The first inner voice she heard was Gabriel's, and he thought of Hanna. She should have veered away quickly from these private thoughts, but surprise held her for a moment: he was thinking that he understood now how carnal love might be holy.
An act of worship
, he thought,
worship of creation and the Creator, a reflection of His love.

She wrenched away, inexplicable tears coming to her eyes.
What a strange man,
she thought.
First I'm an occasion of s
in, now a potential—what? Partner in worship?

Ego tempted her to see what else Gabriel thought about her; loneliness tempted her to stay near his amiable spirit; simple humanity tempted her too; she was so convinced there was nothing good on Battleground that she did not want to let herself slip through Soldiers' thoughts again. She had been in This Place long enough to know that the idyll Nakeekt wanted her to see was illusory. And secrecy implied fear.

This opportunity could not be wasted, because there might not be another, and she emptied her mind again.

Thoughts of roughing out more clearings. Difficult: there is a limit to the number of metal tools available, it will be some time until more can be procured from the mainland, and the wood of some trees is so hard that other tools are made from it, and can only be worked with metal.

One of the differences she had sensed came into focus: problem-solving was not a habit of the average Soldier of Rowtt. And this was not one exceptionally aged or clever mind; several of Nakeekt's people were discussing it.

Thoughts of sounds-in-an-orderly-sequence-of-tones.

Someone thought of music. They were inventing that too.

Someone despaired.
It's near, now's the time to withdraw and prepare, better than my friend's fate, he waited too long and now waits to die in numbness, in near-sleep, would he wish mine or Nakeekt's to be the hand of death—

Hanna sat up. She found herself shivering, she had seen a flash of the structure Nakeekt had kept them away from, where someone waited for death. Why? How? She wanted to probe. Reminded herself it would not be wise. But who—?

She lay down and composed herself again. The room was silent. Slowly she moved toward sleep. More flashes, but now they were perceptions of Soldiers performing routine tasks, concrete, simple, and relaxing.

Cleaning dishes in great openwork baskets passed from one vat of hot water to another, mixing batters for cakes for the morning meal, tipping food scraps from barrows in outdoor enclosures for compost.

It was soothingly reminiscent of duties she had performed in rotation for her House.

But now there was:

A clear image of lowering, yes, a polished coffin, into flames, and smoke rising to the sky until the coffin and what it contained fell to ashes.

Not burnt offerings, then, but cremation. She would remember that, but sleep was winning. Now, finally, Nakeekt—no, not Nakeekt, it was one sitting next to Nakeekt and he was talking with Nakeekt in a low voice, as if afraid of being overheard by outsiders—
That would be us,
Hanna thought, but drowsily. They talked of a room, and hidden things in the room
. And I think I know where that room might be, and that is why we stay the night,
Hanna thought as she slid into sleep, and hours passed.

•   •   •

She woke with tears in her eyes and didn't know why they were there. She might have been dreaming of something left behind: D'neera, Michael. Innocence or Mickey. Even Starr. There were so many possibilities.

Whatever it was, the novelty of this bed, this deeply dark room, brought her quickly to wakefulness, and she dried the tears with her sleeve and made herself think of what she had to do.

The chronometer in her com unit told her it was late evening on
Endeavor
, and past the middle of the night at This Place—far enough past it for the Soldiers here to be in the deepest sleep of the night, as they proved to be when she opened her mind. Many of them were dreaming, too. She had not touched many dreaming minds from space, and she had not realized then that the very rarity of it might be significant. Here, apparently, it was the norm. That must be significant too.

Dreaming is a function of the unconscious mind, as we understand the term,
she thought.
What is the connection?
And now too, more alert than she had been when dinner was taken, she could pin down the visible difference between these people and the common run of Soldiers. She had seen them most often with the organs she called past-eyes open. It was the exception in Rowtt, but not here.
There is a connection there too
, she thought.

She slid off the platform and dressed in the dark. Her room was on the perimeter of the building. Gabriel's, the first one they had been shown to, opened on an inner hallway, and did not have a window. There was a steady sound of rain from outside, and she went to the window and looked out. She had given up hope of avoiding another Battleground storm, but this one was gentle. The breeze had died with nightfall and the rain fell soft and straight; it was not lashed by wind, and she heard no thunder. From here she could make out the fronts of two more buildings, and angled portions of two others. Light shone in a ground-floor room in the warren that faced her window, and there was another light farther away, on the third or fourth floor of a structure partly visible. The lights shimmered behind the quivering curtain of rain. That didn't mean no one was awake in dark rooms. She had filled some of the time on
Endeavor
with more reports, and her guess that Soldiers saw well in the dark had been right.

She stood there for a little while, deciding where to go. She dearly wanted a look inside that cottage where someone's friend might wait for death, but the conversation sensed just before sleep seemed more important. She had a clear impression of the interior areas Nakeekt had avoided, and when she turned from the window she thought she knew exactly where she was going. She would get wet, and it worried her. It meant she would leave a trail of footprints when she entered the building she wanted.

She had brought a light from the pod, slipping it into a pocket when Gabriel turned away because she suspected that the planning of furtive acts would trouble him. She put the translator on, though she hoped she would not meet any Soldiers tonight, and folded the coverlet over her arm; her white shirt would glow like a lamp to Soldiers' eyes, and she would cover it with the darker substance. She found the way from her room to an interior well with zigzag ramps piercing the center of the building, and moved down them to the bottom silently, using the light at its dimmest. She heard no doors opening and sensed no one stirring. The ground floor was uninhabited, but she and Gabriel had gotten a thorough look at it. This warren housed none of the hidden places. She veered into a side hallway, well away from the major entrances, and went out a lesser way into the rain.

The buildings were set in no regular pattern. The one she had left was at the outskirt of the settlement; she wrapped the coverlet around her and made for one nearer the center, keeping close to walls when she could, the light off now, mud making for uncertain footing. The coverlet kept off the rain and she was glad for it; the night was not as warm as she had expected.