Battleground (55 page)

T
HE DOMICILE HAD TRANSPARENT
walls and its highest levels seemed to float in a bower of trees. It spilled down a river bluff and was located next to a great park that bordered, on the opposite edge, half an hour's walk away, Starr Jameson's property. The place had been purchased by Province Koroth at considerable expense, justified by the argument that many D'neerans would like to see Earth for themselves but did not go because there were no telepath-friendly accommodations. Evidently the price Hanna must pay for a home of her own was to become an innkeeper. If it meant the company of D'neerans, she was all for it. None seemed inclined to come immediately, however. It would take time for D'neerans to get used to the idea.

Mickey learned where the doors were, and the words to open them, at once. Gabriel programmed the doors to respond to a particular sequence of barks, and the Dog learned how to open them almost as quickly as Mickey. The Cat just sat by the wall wherever it chose and said
Meow
until someone came and picked it up and put it out. Sun and moonlight poured in from all sides; in the daytime it was seldom necessary to use artificial light.

Even so, Hanna spent much of her time outdoors, and did much of her work there, conversing, analyzing, posing questions to her students and answering more while she ran after Mickey and the Dog and went after the Cat when its transmitter said it had gotten too far away. She once delivered part of a lecture on F'thalian dual-brain communication while halfway up a tree, attempting to coax the Cat out of it. Adair Evanomen was stunned by the expense of the mobile holo unit that accompanied her, but was afraid to deny it. She was easier to get along with than he had expected, and she never went over his head—but she might.

This in spite of the fact that she rarely saw Starr Jameson. He survived A.S. again—alone—and resumed an old pattern of sporadic, short-lived affairs. After each, however, he came to see Hanna, each time asking, essentially,
Now?
She saw the loneliness that echoed hers (though no one else did) and her answer eventually changed from
No
to
Maybe next year or the year after that,
so perhaps his hope was justified. And she never did take off the ring.

She was known, among the few people who paid attention, for her choice of venue for seminars covering Battleground. For these sessions Gabriel, until he left Earth for Nova, was not a pupil but stood beside her. She conducted them at Admin, indoors, in tiny windowless rooms that felt unbearably confining. Her students consequently did not devote much attention to Battleground. Hanna said that was all right. The small population on Nova could not reproduce and soon would die out, and the civilization on Battleground, she told them, was not going to last long enough to warrant attention.

But at irregular intervals, she went to see Kwoort where he lay on the edge of life, the shell of his body retained for undisclosed reasons even though the researchers on Nova had specimens enough.
What do you do there,
she was asked, and answered:
I talk to a ghost.

But the ghost was not Kwoort's, as people supposed—except that once, and only once, she said:
I read the papers, the ones you kept in that sack, the only memory you could count on keeping. I read what you needed to write down.

Mostly, though, she looked at her life at these times; she acknowledged that she remained the Polity's tool; and the ghost she talked to was her own.

this is not the life we wanted,
one of them said.

it's what we have. it's not bad

can we change it

no we can't

do we want to

i don't know

i don't either

any more