Battleground

by Terry A. Adams

  She said, “No. Because you’ll be weak. Physically weak, at the least, if you even survive. You might even be afraid, because this time might be the one that kills you. And you don’t want anybody to see it. Let me be with you.”

  He shook his head, a fractional movement, and said nothing. But there might have been speculation in his eyes.

  “Think about it,” she said.

  And then she did leave.

  • • •

  She walked out fast and nearly collided with Gabriel, who was hovering. He looked at her face and said, “What’s wrong?”

  Everything in her mind was a kaleidoscope and she could not focus on anything. “Were you listening?” she said, and he said, “Of course not!”

  “Oh, sorry, no, I keep thinking—”

  She kept perceiving him as if he were one of the D’neerans, any one of whom might have been “listening” whether they wanted to or not, unless they consciously blocked out the thoughts behind a conversation.

  Gabriel put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re upset,” he said. “Is it about the mission?”

  “No!”

  She took a few steps along the corridor but stopped because she really did not know where she wanted to go. Gabriel said something she didn’t hear, because she was thinking that Jameson never lied to her when they were together—but then, when they were together, she might sense it if he tried, and he knew it.

  She thought: He thinks I’m difficult to love?

  Gabriel moved in front of her, both hands on her shoulders now, wanting, she saw, to embrace her. Gabriel did not think she was difficult to love.

  “We have to get ready to go to Wektt,” she said. She only had to look up a little to meet his eyes. He did not tower over her as Jameson did.

  His fingers moved on her shoulders, an unconscious caress.

  “What did Commissioner Jameson do to upset you so much?”

  “He implied that he loves me,” she said. “Obliquely. Of course, obliquely.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said—”

  She stopped, then, and shook her head. “I told him to prove it,” she said. “I told him to do something I don’t think he can possibly do.”

  Gabriel wanted very much to know what that was, she saw—saw that whatever it was, Gabriel was confident he could do it—but he didn’t ask. Instead he said, “What if he does?”

  “I hope he doesn’t. I think.”

  Chapter II

  HANNA LOOKED AT THE dynamic model they had started building with such hope, given up when observers were evacuated from Battleground. Given up by others because the flow of data had been halted; given up by Hanna because she had forgotten about it.

  Her fingers moved across the control pad, navigating, lingering to open précis of reports. Kit had incorporated everything Linguistics had learned or deduced from the datastream; here too were distillations of the reports Hanna had made during the approach to Battleground. But not the texts pilfered from That Place, and: Nothing here about love, she thought, wondering at her distress, wondering at her ambivalence.

  She knew some of the truth of Battleground now; Kwoort’s appearance in Wektt had given her part of the horrific mystery at its heart. Easy to kill, easy to condemn generation after generation to early death in battle when there was no honoring of sacrifice, no love felt by parent toward child or mate toward mate. One thing was certain: Battleground had nothing to do with—

  Love—and neither do I, she thought.

  But it would be so easy, for a woman who was weary of storms. I could play the game, she thought, and what was I doing, myself, except raising the stakes, playing the game after all, in what I said. He might even offer marriage according to his culture’s customs, flout his society, inflame his family. I know he would, if the threat of personality adjustment became critical. And though the thought of being bound in such a way repels me, that threat would be sufficient. Who would dare to Adjust a commissioner’s spouse, wife of a Jameson of Heartworld?

  No one.

  The easy way, for the weary. And security for Mickey for all his life.

  Arch was right to ask if that word, “corruption,” meant anything to me. It’s exactly what I contemplate now.

  • • •

  The model spun lazily in the air. Gabriel was enraptured.

  “I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said.

  “Not even at your school? They’re used a lot in education.”

  “The abbey’s equipment doesn’t run to frills.”

  Hanna’s tiny cabin was dark, and the insubstantial structure glowed with light and now, enlarged, nearly filled it. The interlocking threads were color-coded, and glittered at points Hanna had decided were crucial nodes. Some points phased in and out, a brilliant blue-white: they were questions. Hanna had made alterations. She had added one that when activated would say: Creators query? She had downgraded the issue of whether Soldiers might be inclined toward interstellar aggression, and if their technology would support it. It had been at the center of the structure; Hanna had moved it off to the side. Another point represented the facilitators. Now she guided that one to the model’s heart, intensely bright.

  Gabriel glanced at her and was distracted. Rainbows shimmered on her face.

  She reached out again, and the facilitator-question shone like a star at her fingertip.

  “It’s time to tell me the rest of what you learned from Tlorr,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  She withdrew her hand from the model and took one of his. “Come here,” she said. She pulled him to the bed and said, “Sit down.”

  Light shimmered on them and he thought, Say instead, lie down. Say, lie with me—

  “I’m not trying to seduce you,” she said, and paused. Perhaps Yet hovered on her lips. He hoped.

  She sat and tugged at his hand until he sat too. The bed felt soft and springy. The warmth of her body stole around him. If she felt what that did to him she ignored it.

  “I know part of what drives them, but not all of it,” she said. “You have to tell me the rest of what Tlorr said. Try this. Start—”

  “What part? What’s the part you know?”

  “The reason for their unceasing war,” she said. “It’s population control. Period. They avoid starvation and survive as a species only by killing each other in enormous numbers. The average Soldier doesn’t have any idea that’s the reason he’s dying; he thinks he’s doing it for his god, he thinks the enemy’s goal is to force starvation and cannibalism on the defeated, he’s been told that from the crèche onward no matter which side he’s actually on. In fact the sides are interchangeable. The Holy Men cooperate for maximum mortality; they even move back and forth and fill each other’s places. The capacity for imagination is there in all Soldiers, but it’s suppressed through the prime breeding years, so the capacity for inquiry and dissent is suppressed too. Those who survive long enough—begin to wonder. To question. And if they live to a very great age, like the Holy Men, they understand the truth. But they do nothing to change it. They do nothing, or can do nothing, to exert control where it could be used without turning to war—reproduction. Controlling birth instead of killing each other. Why? Tell me what Tlorr told you.”

  He hesitated still, trying to absorb what she had said. Said so bluntly, as if there were nothing terrible about it.

  “Tlorr didn’t say why,” he said. “It seemed to be a given.”

  “Tell me what she said anyway. Start slowly.” Her voice was impersonal. “You prayed, I remember, as we went there. We came out and walked forward and saw Kwoort. He wanted me to order you to go in to Tlorr, and I wouldn’t. You chose to go. That was brave.”

  “I didn’t feel brave,” he said.

  “No, but you went. You went through the door. Was Tlorr there alrea
dy? Waiting for you?”

  “Yes, she was there.”

  “Just standing, walking around, what?”

  “Just standing. Why?”

  “I’m trying to see the context,” she said, and he understood suddenly that she meant to turn him toward objectivity.

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re just pictures. Just words.” She went on, “I only got a glimpse of her. What does she look like? Does she look like the first one, the completely crazy one?”

  “They all still look alike to me,” Gabriel confessed. “Don’t they to you?”

  “Not at all. No more than you and I look alike. Did she act like the first one?”

  “No,” Gabriel said with certainty. “The first one was restless. He never stopped moving. Tlorr stood still. Just gestured now and then. She opened the upper pair of eyes when I came in. She did something with her mouth.”

  “Smiled?”

  “I don’t know what it was.”

  “It looks like this.”

  He nodded at the image in his mind. “Yes. She smiled.”

  “Who spoke first?”

  She reached up suddenly and smoothed the curls at his temple. He looked at her and began to smile, turning his head to her touch. The dark memory became lighter.

  “She spoke first. She greeted me and told me her name.”

  He looked at the skeins of light cradling them and thought back to that gray chamber.

  You are not really there now, Hanna said, you are only watching. Only listening.

  “I had to keep trying different ways of saying things,” Gabriel said slowly. “Listening for the ‘untranslatable’ cues, finding other words. She said—”

  • • •

  What did you think we are here to talk about?

  Umm—Kwoort Commander said you wish to talk about your god.

  What did he say he wishes to talk about with your fellow-Soldier?

  Speaking to the mind, I think.

  Is that what you want to talk about?

  No, I want to talk about your god.

  Kwoort has already told me about your god. You can’t explain it. Your translating devices are good, but they fail when you talk of your god.

  We can find common words, surely.

  I’m not so confident. Have you seen your god manifested? Have you seen its power?

  I see him manifested in the kindness with which—ah. That did not translate.

  You see.

  Tell me then how yours is manifested.

  In his power.

  Mine has power too. But that power is too great for me to comprehend. So is his love—oh. His—the ways in which people express his—the best ways in which people act toward each other and the best sensations they have with each other—those are images of my god’s actions and sensations with his people. That is how I see him manifested. Good. That translated.

  Yes. It did. But I still do not understand what you mean. My god is the fire of life and it is our duty to make his fire blaze brighter in our increasing numbers. To experience his fire in the creation of Soldiers and experience it ever more strongly in death.

  Well, we are less concerned with numbers than with teaching the young how to live rightly—oh. Teaching them to live as God would have them live. But we cherish—um, we encourage life. We nurture it, as a parent—oh. As, as a crèche does a child.

  Kwoort has been told that your people circumvent the creation of life. Your god does not seem powerful enough to stop that.

  I don’t understand you.

  Kwoort has been told that you are surprised at the abundance of our breeding. The not-Soldiers who went to crèches expressed surprise.

  It surprises us, yes.

  Why? Why does your god permit your interference in this? Ours does not permit it in us.

  I still don’t understand.

  Abundant God has made us so that we must join at the times of his choosing and sends his facilitators to ensure this. He has given us the means of making crèches so that our young survive until they are old enough to fight and kill and die.

  Yes, I understand about the crèches. We also have the means to build homes—ah—places for our young. And the means to feed them and ensure their health. But I don’t understand why you have no choice in the joining. You speak of mating?

  Yes, the union of Soldiers and Warriors and facilitators.

  I don’t understand about the facilitators. What is a facilitator? I don’t think any of us have seen one.

  Have you seen mating?

  No.

  Then you have not seen facilitators.

  • • •

  “And I don’t want to see them,” Gabriel said. “I can’t give you rest of the conversation as accurately. I started feeling—”

  Sick. Sick with horror.

  Hanna had stretched out on her stomach, frowning as she listened. Gabriel found that reporting the first part of the conversation had muted the impact of the rest. It was at a distance, far away from this small darkened space with the rainbow-lights shining like a child’s grand toy. He found himself telling her about the dual role of the facilitators: the ecstasy with which they rewarded the mating act and the nourishment they somehow got from it, and the part they played in destroying anyone who might threaten generation. Tlorr had not explained how they forced ordinary Warriors and Soldiers into merciless mobs.

  But Hanna said, “There was something about that in what the Cutter said, the surgeon. If word gets out . . . and spreads to the people who are actively mating . . . and there’s some sort of symbiotic relationship with the facilitators, some kind of feedback loop that activates the behavior . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. She did not say anything for some time. It was Gabriel who broke the silence.

  “Do you think what they get out of mating is the most intense thing most of them, maybe any of them, ever feel?”

  She was resting on her folded arms; when she moved it was to clasp her hands and put them lightly on his knee. It was too much; he could not help touching her hair, and he felt the sensation in every cell. She sat up quickly, breaking the contact.

  “Pay attention,” she said. “We’ve only got a few hours,” and Gabriel thought: She could teach me a lot in a few hours.

  “Not now,” she said, but there was a glint of laughter in her eyes, the first he had seen in a long time. And not now wasn’t no. “Stop it,” she said. “Concentrate, all right? You might be right about the intensity, especially if Matthew Sweet is right about that neural network. I’ll tell you something, though. When I was with the mating couple? You heard me tell Starr about that. Well, I was aware of the male and the female, but I did not perceive a third sentient being with them. I don’t think the facilitators are sentient. I wish I knew what they are.”

  “You can identify non-sentient life too, though, can’t you? Can’t you observe the minds of animals?”

  “Oh, yes. But there was nothing—well, nothing I was in any condition to notice.”

  “What do—oh.” He remembered. I was aroused, she had said. Intensely. And suddenly he was, too.

  It hung in the air between them until he reached for her. But she stopped his hands, taking them in her own.

  “You said you’d made an absolute break with Starr. You’re free now,” he said.

  “But you’re not.”

  “I am,” he said. “I don’t know who I’ll be when we come out of this, but it won’t be who I was before. It’s not because of you. It was time. I think, I think I understood that I wasn’t being fair to the children. Some of the older men who’d been in the world before even tried to tell me. That hard as I tried I still only had this narrow perspective. Maybe someday I’ll go back. But it won’t be for a long time, and I won’t be who I was.”

  “All the same . . .” They looked
at each other, not moving, holding hands lightly in the air as if they were preparing to dance. Words were there too, words she did not say because—he saw before she did—she did not know what she wanted to say.

  “I think,” he said, “you’re afraid of hurting me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I love you—as a friend. But only that. That would be enough for me, if we became lovers for a time. I don’t know if it would be enough for you.”

  They were almost whispering, hands still clasped, the barest touch.

  Time to take some risks . . .

  “I’m willing to find out.”

  He leaned forward finally. “One kiss,” he said, “just one,” and touched his lips to hers. She let go of his hands and cradled his face, her fingers like feathers or tender new leaves, and his hands on her back were light as shadows, a communion of cells. Light flowed over them and through them, caressing. They kissed softly for a long time, and he found his inexperience no burden; he had, it seemed, a natural talent for kisses.

  • • •

  The door closed and Hanna turned back into the glimmering room, feeling very young. She had forgotten the sweetness of being regarded as a precious treasure; she had almost forgotten what it was to feel this heat. Now she knew she could desire Gabriel as he desired her. She had said, We should take this no farther and he had said, But only not now and she had said, It would only be a little, for a while, and he had said, I don’t mind. And maybe, she thought, he would not.

  Reluctantly, aware of time pressing, she turned her attention to the mission and thought of what she might do with the hours that were left before the descent to Wektt. Seek information, she thought. That was the only thing she could do, and there was only one way to get it. She would have to do it in secret, though; in trance.

  She moved through the glowing model and spoke the command to shut it down, and darkness fell.

  Now there was nothing but the slight glow from the base of a wall, too dim to cast shadows. She sank to the floor and in the dark bowed her head and reached for the inevitable: Kwoort, of course.