Battleground Read Free

hopes and fled home. She did not think Hal would finish the course.
    She had not let him see that, though. In theory, she should not have been able to hide it from him. But she was a telepathic Adept, one of a rare class even on her own world. And in some part of her brain forever subtly, materially changed, she had acquired an immense power from the group mind of the alien People of Zeig-Daru—the power to block as much of her thought as she wished from any human telepath.
    No one except Starr Jameson knew this, and there was another thing she had not told even him (though he must suspect). While she taught her students how to keep from slipping into true-humans’ thoughts uninvited—difficult for a D’neeran—and how, in the interests of harmony, they should never, ever attempt to probe those thoughts, she had long since dispensed with her own scruples. If true-humans wanted to lie to her explicitly or by omission, she had decided, they were fair game.
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    The document was headed simply:
    â€œReport to Archives.
    â€œI’m writing this because our grandchildren might want to know about it someday.
    â€œThis place, the town of Dwar on New Earth, has been visited by nonhumans.
    â€œThere were only a few of them and they only stayed a few days. They didn’t show any sign of hostility but they didn’t respond to friendly overtures, either. Mostly they just walked around and looked at things. They seemed to prefer to sit under trees and talk to each other most of the time. Maybe this was some kind of rest stop for them. I said there were only a few, but that could mean we only saw a few at a time, not necessarily the same ones every time. They looked so strange to us that they would have had to stay longer for us to learn to tell them apart. And they were here, or some were here, two or three times a day, with gaps in between, so maybe they were on some kind of rotation. We assume they were using a shuttle, unless there’s some way to build a starship small enough to land on a planet. Earth couldn’t, when our ancestors left, but they said it wouldn’t be long, so why couldn’t somebody else?
    â€œAnyway, they came down in the meadowland out past Li Chen’s farm. Nobody saw the first landing, but once we knew what to look for we could see their craft coming and going from there, and after they left we went over to look, and that was obviously the place they used for landing.
    â€œWe talked about them a lot while they were here, and we’ve talked about them since. This is a consensus report, so I’m including everything that everybody saw.
    â€œIt doesn’t seem like much now. A lot of us tried as best we could, with gestures and single words, to start some kind of language exchange, but they just flapped their ears at us and walked away. Same thing when we tried drawing pictures. Same thing when we offered them food. We have no idea what it meant when they flapped those ears, which they did with each other, too. Maybe it meant they were laughing.
    â€œI don’t know how far we could have gotten in a language exchange anyway, because I don’t think we could make the same sounds they do. Maybe because of the way their mouths are made, a lot of the language we heard when they were talking to each other consisted of whistling. They use clicks, too, almost as much as the whistling. They do use words (we assume they were words) along with that, though. It’s really kind of a musical language to listen to, but I don’t think a human being could ever speak it.
    â€œI guess the best thing I can do is explain what they looked like. We’re agreed on that.
    â€œThey’re shaped like human beings, but slender and taller than we are, at least these were all taller than any of us, by maybe thirty centimeters on the average. Arms and legs proportionate by our standards to the human head and torso, but