Battleground (34 page)

Arch checked the notes. “Context. That was another of the untranslatable words, meaning it never showed up in the datastream. You'd expect ‘interesting' there, wouldn't you?”

“I wonder,” Hanna said slowly, “if they're inventing new words.”

Arch consulted more notes. “Kit thinks so. What he translated as ‘beautiful' started out, he thinks, as the highest degree of ‘pleasant' with additions of ‘interesting' and a reference to the visual. It must be a long word in the original.”

Hanna looked again at the outline of contents, began to navigate through the text, skipping around. Much of it read like a series of handbooks, detailing directions for everything from maintenance of looms to forecasting weather. Here was a tide table (insanely complicated, with three moons—and Metra had proposed landing a boat?) and descriptions of ocean currents between That Place and a numbered island, the number meaning nothing to Hanna.

She began to key searches for specific topics: Reproduction. Young
(n.).
Offspring. Infant. Child. Abundant God. God. Holy Man. Demon. As an afterthought she added: Facilitators.

Nothing.

She sat back with the reader in her lap, frustrated. How much more material was hidden at That Place? Could Kwek somehow be enlisted to obtain the rest? Could Metra be induced to let her go back to the surface and sneak it out herself? She wanted to talk to Jameson, who was now in a position to make Metra do any damn thing Hanna wanted her to do, if he approved.

She tried to put a call through to him, but it was night where he was too and he was not to be disturbed—according to the family home in Arrenswood's capital city, which had not been programmed by Jameson himself but by his relatives, and which told her she was not on the list of people authorized to reach him at any hour. Her name was on one of its lists, though. The list was called: “Banned.”

It hurt. She was surprised to find that it hurt very much indeed.

•   •   •

Jameson was not asleep, though the house didn't know it. Mickey had tottered into his unlocked room in silence, and somehow, silently, gotten onto the bed, and started to cry abruptly, miserably, and loudly.

What the
hell . . .

Mickey, with a fine sense of timing, waited until Jameson managed to sit up and order lights on before scrambling into his arms and escalating to howls.

Thera appeared in the doorway, still getting into a robe, hair wild. The adults exchanged astonished looks over Mickey's head. It was not possible to exchange words without shouting; Mickey was too loud. The Dog appeared behind Thera, assessed the situation, charged the bed and threw itself on Mickey, licking the child's face and whimpering with concern.

“Nightmare,” Thera said a little later, when Mickey had gotten some words out between diminishing sobs.

“He doesn't have nightmares.”

“He just had one,” Thera pointed out.

Mickey had accepted a hug from Thera, but clung to Jameson. The boy's tearful face was uncertain now, but no longer afraid. Something, evidently, had been pursuing him in his dream; it had been large and threatening; that was all he had been able to tell them.

“Why now? What did he have to eat tonight?”

“Nothing unusual. He's in a new place, he's had a lot of excitement, and there's been a certain amount of tension, especially this evening—”

Jameson's sister had come to visit, and she had had a lot to say about his caring for Hanna ril-Koroth's son. He had not allowed her to say it in Mickey's presence, but even a child as young as Mickey must sense something malevolent in Portia's look, and what she had not said, at their brief meeting. Along with an unattractive satisfaction, because she too had heard the rumor Jameson bitterly regretted starting.

Later—because sleep did not come back easily—he lay awake and wondered what Hanna meant to do with Mickey when she returned. D'neeran children were raised less by a parent than by a community; the kinship group was only part of it. Surely she did not intend to swoop into the house on Earth, scoop up Mickey, bear him off without warning, and keep him to herself—she who was half a stranger to her son, her image and voice still familiar thanks to hours of holo and video recordings, but the memory of her scent and touch surely fading.

No, he decided. Hanna had changed, certainly, but she had not changed that much. She would let Mickey keep his ties to Jameson and Thera; she would not force him to break them.

Which meant, of course, that she would have to retain some tie to Jameson too, whether she wanted to or not.

We'll see just how finished it is,
he thought.

H
ANN
A HAUNTED LINGUISTICS,
begrudging Kit's people their deliberate pace. She wanted to go home—back, at least, to Earth. She wanted Mickey. She wanted to make arrangements for a life.

Ejected from Linguistics, she tried to kill time: tidied her quarters, took exercise, took a meal, tried to think about Battleground, thought about Mickey instead.

Fretted.

It can't be that hard to break a Battleground code. It must be simple, a cipher made by minds and hands, no match for our computers.

•   •   •

“No,” said Kit, “it wasn't hard. But it's strange stuff.”

“Strange meaning—”

“See for yourself. I suppose you want a reader? Maybe two? What happened to the two you had? Don't lose them like you did that translator, all right?”

Hanna looked at him closely. He wasn't even trying to keep the smile pasted on his face. He was jittery. The content of the deciphered material had done that to him.

“Just send what you've got to my quarters,” she said soothingly. “I'll load it from there.”

•   •   •

I wi
ll begin by saying that I have little hope of accomplishing the goal toward which my intention is directed, because it lies beyond the farthest reach of hope. It does not even resemble a desirable dream, except in one way. Those of us who dream have in common this experience, that sometimes we do not remember we have dreamed, but later when we are awake, something moves in our minds and there is almost the memory of something we dreamed, but when we try to remember it we cannot. It is painful, to see those wisps for a moment and feel they were of unmatched importance but to see only their shadow and know they have disappeared for all time. My goal is just like that. It is impossible to reach. It is only a wisp.

I do not know if anyone has ever attempted this goal. Probably someone has. Possibly many have tried it. If they have their efforts are gone and they have left no trace. I do not think my effort will leave traces either, and I do not know why I am compelled to attempt this goal which is impossible to reach.

It is to make a history of the world. I would like to write down how we became what we are and what we have done and what has happened to us.

Nakeekt,
Hanna thought, after she had read only a few words.
It can be no other.

No such history can be complete. I do not even see how I might find a structure for it. I question and continue to question each person who comes here, asking what they know. It is not even what they know, it is what they have heard, that someone might once have known.

Those who come here are unusual. They have lived long, some so long that the end-change comes soon after they arrive. After that my questions, not hopeful to start with, find no answers at all. But I mine the memories of all of them, for all the time they have left. Everyone here has lived long enough to hear whispers, and those on whom this place has exerted its call, are those who have wondered about the whispers and so remember them.

The whispers are suspect. Some reach so far back that there are hints no God made us, but not-Soldiers that were like but unlike us. Even when the origins of the whispers might be closer it is impossible to be sure how much weight to assign to any of them. It is impossible to guess when the events or conditions the whispers are about occurred. It is impossible to assign them a chronology, although sometimes I try. Sometimes, if I let my mind travel over them enough, I can create structures. But perhaps the structures are not true.

There are the rocks, like the one Kteengt brought which I keep in my billet, that bear impressions of the remains of animals no one has seen alive. There may be many such stones, because there are stories of others from mines, and stories about bones turned to rock that were found when emplacements were dug. Some were seen by a Soldier who is here, as I write this, in the forty-fifth summer of this place, because he was one of those making such an emplacement. I make the assumption that rocks are old, therefore these bones are old. So that is the start of a structure. Some questions do not even have traces of answers, there is nothing on which to build the start of a structure. There is nothing left to say how we know even what we know, who the Soldiers were that made the first data machines or where they were. A Warrior came from Wektt bearing an object found in the desert surrounding that place, it is a small flat object made of a substance no one else there had ever seen nor has its like been seen by anyone else here, even though all of us have many summers. I cannot break it and I cannot melt it. Who made it? When? There are not even any whispers of the makers. There are no stories.

And when there is a story, often I cannot even say that the subject is approximately old, or approximately new. I do not know how many people have passed a story from one to another or how twisted it has been in the passing, or how much of it is missing. Few survive long enough to come to the change of thought that brings them here, and for every story that someone comes and tells, thousands upon thousands must be lost forever.

There was a break in the text. Kit had added a note:
No additional references
. Hanna looked further. There were images of the original pages, in miniature; what she had just read took up three of them. She had made no effort to assign pages to groups based on which drawer they had been in, but she guessed that what she had just read was no more and no less than the pages contained in one drawer.

After a while she scrolled back and read again:
Some reach so far back that there are hints no God made us, but not-Soldiers that were like but unlike us . . .

That was what the physiologists thought had happened.

And if they were right, just where were the makers? Did they plan on ever coming back?

I hope not . . .

She thought of calling Jameson. Remembered she could not reach him and turned back to the text.

Kit had noted, at the start of the next page, that the script was that of another person. What came next settled a chill deep in her bones.

I began to think of what could be done when I had only one hundred and fifty-seven summers. I had already begun to dream and I had begun to have strange sensations, but I did not know how unusual that was, so early in life, until another hundred summers had passed. I was learning, at that earlier time, how to fix injuries. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that much more could be done to fix people's wounds, but there is always cohort upon cohort waiting for battle, and people do not mind dying, so it seemed acceptable to me that it should be so. It is acceptable to me even now, as long as our numbers multiply so enormously in the year of a single summer that soon everyone would die for lack of nourishment if we were not always at war. Without it we might feed on one another. It is said that has happened, although it is attributed to the influence of the Demon, and it is said the Demon's purpose is to gain so complete a victory that fighting must cease, so that all of us must turn to consuming one another.

In the year when I first began to wonder if it might be different, I was part of a troop that was ordered to Continent Three, which then was under the control of a power with which Rowtt was at war, as we were at war with Wektt, indeed we were all at war with each other. We were given the task of finding and destroying certain aboveground settlements. There were many everywhere at the time. There are fewer now, and no settlements of any kind on Continents Two and Three.

We marched across Continent Three an entire summer. My unit had heavy losses and when we were recalled, only two or three besides myself had survived the whole time. But as fighters died they were replaced by others and we continued to carry out our orders.

Near the end of this time we came upon a small town that was different. It was not on the maps provided to us and we found it by accident. There were three hundred Soldiers but there was not even one crèche, and the get lived along with the Soldiers and Warriors until they reached the time of their own breeding. It had not grown by more than fifty Soldiers within the lifetimes of those who lived there. Our scouts captured and brought back a Soldier from there who told us this unbelievable thing. I was interested in this unique settlement, and I was senior enough then in spite of my youth to have killing the Soldier delayed so that I could ask him questions.

He said that the time for mating rarely came for them and so the facilitators did not often come, and when they did, there would be only one or two issue. He said Soldiers had lived there for many summers and it was believed that only one Soldier and one Warrior had come there and started the place. It was believed that something was wrong with those two, because the facilitators seldom came from the start, many infants died at birth or were born dead, and also many born alive were carried to barren places and left to die soon after birth because they were not right, while others died within a summer or two although the reason was not apparent. This still happened, down to the present day. So the settlement had grown only slowly, though it had been there for a very long time.

That was all he said. I don't know if he could have said more. Our Commander was impatient to move on to settlements that were on the map because those were the ones we were ordered to destroy, and the Commander told us to kill the Soldier and all the rest of them. So we did that, and continued to the next target designated for attack.

In the years that followed I thought often of those Soldiers, and wished that I had found a way to examine their bodies, because it seemed obvious to me that in some way they differed from the rest of us, although there was no difference in their outward appearance. I knew that because I saw plenty of them dead, and had my part in killing them. Therefore it must follow that the difference was internal.

Although I could not examine the bodies of those Soldiers that were different, I had innumerable opportunities to examine the bodies of the normal. I do not know how many Soldiers I cut and fixed as the years went by, nor how many I killed, sometimes in battle but sometimes while I cut them, who might have recovered by themselves. In some years the orders were to fix only those whose wounds were slight and let the others die or end their lives myself. When those were the orders we were quick to dispose of the dead and there were few wounded to fix, so I had little chance for deep study of the system of reproduction. What I knew at the start of my service, what was taught to me then, was superficial. It was sufficient to make a Soldier able again to fight or work. If I wanted more knowledge of internal structures, I had to get it myself, and keep the real object of my study secret, because everyone knows what happens to those foolish enough to wonder about reproduction if those coming to the time of mating find out what they are doing. So I told no one what I wondered.

The years that I spent, studying! Ten summers might go by between one slight fact and the next, and always there was the likelihood that I would not survive to find another, so that often I wondered why I sought the knowledge anyway, and at other times the desire seemed so hopeless that I tried to forget it. But I could not. When I knew my breeding time was coming on me, each time, I could not keep from trying to list and order the sensations I felt that preceded the coming of the facilitators. I could not write those things down. If anyone found such a list, such an ordering, that would be enough to draw retribution from those who were in their time, and worse, from their facilitators, so I only kept the lists in my mind, and sometimes I thought even that was dangerous, and if someone looked at me in an unusual way I feared he could see my thoughts. But even that could not keep me from wondering, though as the cycle progressed I would forget for a time, until it was finished.
I do not know why. At those times and those times only my mind would hide its own knowledge from itself and I do not understand why, unless somehow I knew I could not be at war with myself, I could not both be breeding, and at the same time think about not breeding. But each time when it was finished, each time I emerged from a crèche, the memory would return, and I would take up the task again, hopeless though I thought it.

A time came when there was no fixing at all, there was only killing, and I gave up my studies because there was no opportunity to pursue them. I did not think the opportunity would come again, but it did, because some one of the powers of the time developed a new weapon that destroyed with magnificent effect. This weapon was used to wipe the power that held Continent Three from the face of the world, and next to do the same thing to Continent Two. Both Wektt and Rowtt, on Continent One, survived. But in those places too countless cities were destroyed with this weapon, and Soldiers were no longer so expendable as to be dispatched even if their wounds were severe, and fighting even ceased for a time.

When it resumed, for a time, there was a period when I had my chance. I became more skilled than any other Cutter in repairing injuries inside the body, teaching myself to bring life back to bodies that would have died. Inevitably the range of injuries was broad. Inevitably I had the opportunity to study the effects of the removal or disabling of this organ or that. I did this for half a hundred summers, even though the recovered were sent away to duty as soon as they were able, but I faithfully sought them out, as many as I could find of those who had suffered injuries to the organs of reproduction, because I thought the answer would lie there. But those, I found, still experienced, in the customary cycle, all the sensations that caused them to desire breeding. The facilitators would come even though a Soldier could no longer successfully join with a mate, and if it was a Warrior who could join physically but could not produce infants, that did not matter either. Still the facilitators came, and still she mated, though she bore no issue. When I determined that that was the case, I did not think I would ever find the answer I looked for.