Battleground (9 page)

Another pause. When it had gone on for a long time he said, “I was beginning to think some kind of personal parent-child relationship was universal among sentient species.”

“Evidently not,” Hanna said. “We thought two genders were standard for optimal evolution, too, until we came into contact with Uskos. Now we know that one will work, under certain conditions. Reproduction here might require three.”

“What?” he said, but she went on without answering.

“The dialogue was about crèche issues. I will give staff sociologists the details I have. But mostly I watched for other things they thought about, in the intervals when they weren't talking.

“
The female is changing roles. She is—” Hanna was choosing words even more carefully now. “She has been in a nurturing mode . . . nurturing, in this context, meaning no more than nursing. She is moving toward a, a warrior role, a fighting mode. It feels instinctual, cyclical, but still there is the sense of a, a—a structure of some sort, directed from outside—military? Governmental? I don't know.”

“What about—”

“The male has filled a military role too, and will do it again, but he's at—the center of the reproductive cycle? While she's emerging from it?”

“You are asking me?”

“Just thinking. Of the best way to describe it. He's immersed in caretaking and mating. They think about mating a
lot
. There's an enormous reward there, I think.”

This time the pause was very long. Finally he said, “Go on. Is there more?”

“There's something there that scares me,” she said unexpectedly. “When they think about mating, it's not about a particular mate. It's only about intense pleasure and an impersonal drive. It's compulsive.”

“Sounds like sex to me,” he said dryly.

“No, no. Stop thinking like a human male. I think,” she said slowly, “I think there is an actual third party involved. When they think of mating there is another presence in their thoughts.”

“Who?”

“I can't see it. It's like they
don't
see it. Their perception of it, the sense they have of it, is purely tactile. Physically—physically, it might be quite small. And it might—” Her voice wavered. “I think it might not look like the ones I've been calling the male and the female at all.”

They were both silent, thinking about it. Jameson felt an unaccustomed prickle in his spine. Something that could scare Hanna? Something about, of all things, sex, that could scare Hanna?

He said suddenly, “What inhibitions do you have, Hanna?”

He half expected her to say
None, as you very well know,
but there had to be something.

After a while she said slowly, “I'm biased against impersonal sex. Even putting aside you and Michael, going back all the way to the first boy I made love with—I remember every boy, every man, I took to bed. Well, maybe not . . . do you remember every woman you've been with? Of course not. I can't give you a list with the names of every man who's pleasured me, either. But you'd recognize your lovers again. You'd know them. And you would have emotions along with the memories. ‘This one was good company': a memory with pleasant connotations. ‘That one lied': lingering anger, perhaps. ‘This one wanted to use me. That one genuinely liked me.' That's human thinking, for both male and female. It comes naturally to us; there's some of that lasting personal connection to our sexual partners in all except the sickest individuals among us. No, even in them, twisted though it is.”

She knew what she was talking about. She had known one of those human-seeming horrors. She had been present when Michael Kristofik put a monster to death.

He said, “We designate those individuals as evil—”

“They
are
evil.”

“Is that what you sense?”

“No . . . No. There's no sense of malice where a human spirit should be. This element—” her voice was going dreamy now—“this element is part of a coherent gestalt. It's integral to what these beings are. Oh . . .” Her voice changed again, hardened. “I see now. The impersonality touched something in me that is still sensitized. I just wish I could have killed them slowly,” Hanna said.

It sounded like a non sequitur, but it was not. Hanna had personally killed two men who had raped her, and one of Michael Kristofik's companions had killed the other two. Hanna had seemed to regard it as the appropriate penalty for what they had done. Apparently she now thought it had been too lenient.

He gave her more time, finally prompted her: “And?”

“Nothing else,” she said, suddenly sounding tired. “Nothing I can pull out as a viable thread.”

“Well, what you have is substantial. This is going to be interesting,” he added, half to himself.

“What? The crèches? How they mate?”

“All of it. F'thal, Girritt, Zeig-Daru, Uskos—we knew nothing whatsoever about those populations prior to actual contact. For the first time we're assembling a body of knowledge
before
we talk to them for the first time.”

She murmured something; he did not think he could have heard her correctly. She could not have said,
I don't like them,
not Hanna, and he said, “What was that, please?” and she said more loudly, “I don't like them.”

It was so unexpected that he could not respond immediately, and she went on. “It isn't just the compulsive nature of their mating, the absence of emotion toward another individual. It's that same impersonal attitude toward the young. Every single sentient species we've encountered has one thing in common: the deep, loving attachment to their children. Adults will even sacrifice themselves for other adults' children, simply because they are children. I don't think,” she said, her voice becoming very quiet, “anyone on that whole world feels love.”

He took a deep breath. He could not tell how deeply she was disturbed by the idea; he could not even ask so intimate a question when everything they said was laid out in transcripts seen by many other eyes. He had to be as impersonal in his response as the creatures of Species Y.

“Very well,” he said. “We'll treat it as a hypothesis for now. We may find evidence to overturn it. Until tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Endit, then.”

•   •   •

Here was another difference. The scholars said, puzzled, that the religious and military texts picked up from old transmissions were curiously one-dimensional. There seemed to be no cultural layering. Even allowing for the limited subject matter, they said, the chief characteristic was repeti
tion.

In contrast, they brought up titles from Earth's civilization, where cultures were layered richly one on another. The
Gallic Wars.
The
Holy Bible.

•   •   •

“Status, please.”

“The culture appears to lack layering because there is none. Past is assumed to resemble present. Future, it is assumed, will mirror past.”

“With all the years they have at their disposal . . .”

A sigh. Was that melancholy in the deep voice? But probably only Hanna would hea
r it.

Jameson was one of a handful of humans whose immune systems were fundamentally incompatible with anti-senescence techniques, the prospect of their turning deadly always present. It was not the only reason he continued to resist his enduring attraction to Hanna, but it was an important one. Chronologically, he was no more than thirty years her senior. In terms of life span, there could be no estimate. It depended on whether the next attempt killed him or not.

Hanna was one of the few people who knew it. She could imagine what he thought of squandered centuries.

•   •   •

Expect the unexpected,
she had told her Contact Education students.
Better yet, dispense with expectations.
She was pretty good at that, she thought. Even allowing for the possibility that she was starting to believe her own legend, she thought she was pretty good at that.

Until she detached fro
m the mind of a Battleground child and found herself, with no apparent gap in time, screaming at someone in Communications to get her through to Earth
now
, she had to see her son's face
right now—!

That ended, and she woke up seconds (it seemed) later in a darkened room. She was in sickbay. She knew she was sedated; had been forcibly sedated.

“Coming around,” someone said.

“Hanna?” said Jameson's voice. “Can you hear me?”

“Starr . . .” A whisper.

She sat up slowly. She was sore all over, especially her jaw, which felt like it had taken an efficient left cross. She picked up an image from one of the shadowed figures around her—picked it up from the man's nervousness at her movement. There had been some kind of fight, she had been at the center of it, had started it, had beaten up somebody in Communications, had finally been overpowered.

She uttered a soft expletive. The people around her stirred.

“What happened?” Jameson said, almost casually.

She turned her head and he was standing there. It was holo, of course. He held Mickey's hand.

Something leaped in her chest. Longing shook her; she drank in the sight of her child. She must have made a move to get up and go to him, because Jameson put out a warning hand. She felt, then, the distrust that surrounded her. People were afraid of her. She made herself hold still.

“Mommy!” said the little boy, laughing with joy, but he didn't try to run to her either. He knew the difference between reality and holography. Children learned that early.

“Mickey . . .” Her voice was unsteady. She calmed herself, a tremendous effort. Never mind the people around her. She would do nothing that might frighten Mickey.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Did I hurt anyone?”

Jameson answered. “Not seriously.”

The tension in the room began to ease. She could not take her eyes off Mickey. Her arms ached for him.

She said slowly, “There was a child, a boy. Only it was like touching the consciousness of an insect. Not even a mammal. More intelligent than an insect, but confined, limited, like being in a box—” She shuddered. “I got it mixed up with Mickey. I had to make sure nobody'd done that to
him
.”

“As you see . . .”

Mickey bounced up and down, steady enough on his feet with a hand to hold. He was happy, his eyes bright. They were not his father's eyes; they were the eyes of his paternal grandmother, almost black.
Hers were dark
, Michael had said,
she hid things in them.

“Mommy home?” Mickey asked, the words astonishingly clear. “Mommy someday?”

“Someday . . .” she said, and pain filled her. He was talking and she was not there to hear him; she had not even known it.

She found that she was pushing at her hair, a habit almost abandoned. It had been a habit of the ghost.

Jameson said, “I'm curious as to why this happened. I believe there's often a kind of emotional backlash when you break from the trance state, yes? But you appeared to be—I've seen Communications' visual log—in some sort of fugue. That's not usual, unless I've misunderstood the process.”

“You didn't misunderstand. It's never happened to me before and I've never heard of its happening to another Adept.”

“A new factor, then. Not just the contact with an alien mind. That's not new; even these aliens are no longer new to you.”

He looked down at Mickey, who was watching something outside the holo field; who suddenly laughed, pulled away from Jameson's hand, and wobbled off toward whatever fine thing beckoned.

Come back!
she wanted to cry out; she leaned toward the image, and felt all the eyes that watched her. She could see Mickey's nursery suite dimly, like a ghost of itself, and a glow that suggested it was bright with sunshine. Jameson must have gone straight home and commandeered the child as soon as he was notified of Hanna's outbreak.

“A new factor. Having a child?” Hanna said.

“Maybe. That's about as primal as instinct gets.”

“I must have thought—oh, that something had been
done
to the child. Because I know—” Her voice wavered. “Because I know a little boy and he's not limited at all. He never will be. I won't let it happen.”

“Nor will I.” Jameson looked away from her, in the direction Mickey had gone. There was a sudden flurry of unexpected noise: sharp yaps, a shout of laughter from Mickey.

“You got him a
Pup
?” Hanna said.

“Of course not. He's got a young Dog,” Jameson said, meaning an animal that had not been genetically tailored to remain cuddly all its life. He added, “It's a Mutt.”

“Mutts are imports! They cost a fortune!”

“There is also a Cat.”

“But you detest Kits—”

“An infant Cat. An Alley Cat.”

“Oh, God,” Hanna said.

•   •   •

Hope Metra issued an order that prohibited Hanna from attempting further telepathic contact with the beings of Battleground. Hanna told Jameson about the order, and waited with interest to see how long it would take her director to trump Metra's commissioner.

Not “if.” Just how long.

Jameson had regained the prestige he had lost when he was forced to leave the Coordinating Commission. Alien Relations and Contact had been elevated to department status in the first place because Jameson's former Commission colleagues did not want him wasted on Heartworld. Under Jameson, the department had gone from being the object of horrified fascination to an object of fascinated respect; it had become a force. Hanna thought negotiations on a compromise might take a day or two, but she was still contemplating her bruises when Jameson contacted her.