Forty Thousand in Gehenna

Forty Thousand in Gehenna

by C. J. Cherryh

I

DEPARTURE

i

T‑190 hours

Communication, Union Ministry of Defense,

to US Venture

in dock at Cyteen Station

ORIG: CYTHQ/MINDEF/CODE111A/USVENTURE

ATTN: Mary Engles, capt. US VENTURE

Accept coded packet; navigation instructions contained herein. US CAPABLE and US SWIFT will accompany and convoy. Mission code: WISE. Citizens will board on noncitizen manifest, identifiable by lack of tattoo number. Sort from noncitizens on boarding and assign aboard VENTURE. Tally will be 452 including all uniformed military personnel and dependents. Treat with due courtesy. AZI class personnel will be billeted in special hold preparation, 23000 aboard US VENTURE, remainder apportioned to CAPABLE and SWIFT. Due to sensitive nature of first boardings, urge rapid processing up to number 1500; delays beyond that point will not expose civilian personnel to discomfort and/or breach of cover. No station personnel are to be permitted within operations area once loading has begun. Security will be posted by HQ. Should an emergency arise, call code WISE22. All libertied crew must be recalled before D‑0500 to assure smooth functioning of boarding procedures. Mission officer Col. James A. Conn will present credentials and further orders regarding disposition of citizen and noncitizen personnel. Official cover has the convoy routed to mining construction at Endeavor: use this in all inship communications.

ii

T‑190 hours

Communication: Cyteen HQ, Defense Ministry

to US Venture

docked at Cyteen Station

ORIG: CYTHQ/MINDEF/CODE111A/COLBURAD/CONN/J.

PROJ287:

Military Personnel:

Col. James A. Conn, governor general

Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, It. governor

Maj. Peter T. Gallin, personnel

M/Sgt. Ilya V. Burdette, Corps of Engineers

Cpl. Antonia M. Cole

Spec. Martin H. Andresson

Spec. Emilie Kontrin

Spec. Danton X. Morris

M/Sgt. Danielle L. Emberton, tactical op.

Spec. Lewiston W. Rogers

Spec. Hamil N. Masu

Spec. Grigori R. Tamilin

M/Sgt. Pavlos D. M. Bilas, maintenance

Spec. Dorothy T. Kyle

Spec. Egan I. Innis

Spec. Lucas M. White

Spec. Eron 678‑4578 Miles

Spec. Upton R. Patrick

Spec. Gene T. Troyes

Spec. Tyler W. Hammett

Spec. Kelley N. Matsuo

Spec. Belle M. Rider

Spec. Vela K. James

Spec. Matthew R. Mayes

Spec. Adrian C. Potts

Spec. Vasily C. Orlov

Spec. Rinata W. Quarry

Spec. Kito A. M. Kabir

Spec. Sita Chandrus

M/Sgt. Dinah L. Sigury, communications

Spec. Yung Kim

Spec. Lee P. de Witt

M/Sgt. Thomas W. Oliver, quartermaster

Cpl. Nina N. Ferry

Pfc. Hayes Brandon

Lt. Romy T. Jones, special forces

Sgt. Jan Vandermeer

Spec. Kathryn S. Flanahan

Spec. Charles M. Ogden

M/Sgt. Zell T. Parham, security

Cpl. Quintan R. Witten

Capt. Jessica N. Sedgewick, confessor‑advocate

Capt. Bethan M. Dean, surgeon

Capt. Robert T. Hamil, surgeon

Lt. Regan T. Chiles, computer services

Civilian Personnel: list to follow:

Secretarial personnel: 12

Medical/surgical: 1

Medical/paramedic: 7

Mechanical maintenance: 20

Distribution and warehousing: 20

Security: 12

Computer service: 4

Computer maintenance: 2

Librarian: 1

Agricultural specialists: 10

Geologists: 5

Meteorologist: 1

Biologists: 6

Education: 5

Cartographer: 1

Management supervisors: 4

Biocycle engineers: 4

Construction personnel: 150

Food preparation specialists: 6

Industrial specialists: 15

Mining engineers: 2

Energy systems supervisors: 8

TOTAL MILITARY 45

TOTAL CIVILIAN SUPERVISORY 296

TOTAL CITIZEN STAFF 341; TOTAL NONASSIGNED DEPENDENTS: 111; TOTAL ALL CITIZENS: 452

ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL:

list to follow:

“A” class: 2890

“B” class: 12389

“M” class: 4566

“P” class: 20788

“V” class: 1278

TOTAL ALL NONCITIZENS: 41911

TOTAL ALL MISSION: 42363

Male/female ratio approx. 55%/45%

DEPENDENTS LIST WILL FOLLOW

NONCITIZEN LIST WILL APPEAR ON MANIFEST

iii

T‑56 hours

On Cyteen Dock, restricted area

The place was large and cold and somehow the instructions lost themselves in so strange a place. Jin 458‑9998 walked where he was told, feeling the chill in his body and most especially on his skull where they had shaved off all his hair. 9998s were darkhaired and handsome and they were A‑s, important in the order of things; but the orderliness in his world had been upset. They had taken him into the white building on the farm and given him deepteach that told him the farm was no longer important, that he would be given a new and great purpose when he got where he was going, and that there would be other tapes to tell him so, very soon.

“Yes,” he had said, because that was the appropriate acknowledgement, and the change had not vastly disturbed him at the outset. But then they had taken him, still muzzy with trank, into the med wing, which he never liked, because nothing good ever happened there, and they had taken his clothes and had him lie down on a table, after which they had shaved all the hair off him, every bit but his eyelashes, and shot him full of so many things that they used all of one arm and started on the other. It hurt, but he was used to that. He was only dismayed when he saw himself in the glass going out, and failed to recognize himself–a destruction of all his vanity.

“How do you feel about this?” the supervisor had asked him, the standard question at a change; and he searched his heart as he was supposed to do and came up with a word that covered it.

“Erased.”

“Why do you feel that way?”

“I look different.”

“Is that all?”

He thought about it a moment. “I’m leaving the farm.”

“What’s worst?”

“My looks.”

“It’s to keep you clean for a while. While you’re being shipped. Everyone has it done. They won’t laugh at you. They won’t notice you. It’ll grow back in a few weeks and you’ll have a new assignment. Tapes will explain it to you. It’s supposed to be very good. They’re taking only very expensive contracts like yours.”

That had cheered him considerably. He stopped minding the shaving and the paperthin white coveralls and the loss of himself. He stood up then and started to leave.

“Goodbye, Jin,” the supervisor said, and a little panic hit him at the thought that he was never again going to see this man who solved all his problems.

“Will someone there help me?” he asked.

“Of course there’ll be someone. Do you want to shake hands, Jin? I think they’re going to pass you a lot higher than you are here. But you have to be patient and take things as they come.”

He came back, feeling strange about taking a born‑man’s hand, and very proud in that moment. “I’ll miss you,” he said.

“Yes. But the tapes will make you happy.”

He nodded. That was so. He looked forward to it, because he was not thoroughly happy at the moment, and his ears were cold and his body felt strangely smooth and naked under the cloth. He let go the supervisor’s hand and walked out, where another attendant took him in tow and led him to a building where others as shaven as himself were waiting. The sight hit him with deep shock–that he knew some of them, and had trouble recognizing them at all; and they looked at him the same way. There were four other 9998s and they all looked alike, all like him; and there were three 687s, and seven of the 5567s–and all the small traits by which they knew each other as individuals were obliterated. Panic settled into him afresh.

“Which are you?” one of his own twins asked.

“I’m Jin,” he said softly. “Are we all going to the same place?”

“Jin?” A female voice. “Jin–” It was one of the 687s; it was Pia, making room for him on the bench which ran round the room, among the others. He came and sat down with her, grateful, because Pia was a friend and he wanted something familiar to cling to. Her face was vastly changed. Pia’s hair was dark as his own and it was all gone, her eyes staring out vast and dark from a lightly freckled face. They wound their fingers together for comfort in the space between them. He looked down. The hands were still like Pia’s; the manners were still hers.

But she was back of him in the line somewhere, and they had mixed in a lot of strange azi from elsewhere, types he had never seen before, and the place was cold and miserable. The line stopped and he unfocused his eyes, waiting, which was the best way to pass the time, thinking on pleasanter images such as the tapes gave him when he earned tapetime above his limit. But he could not conjure the same intensity as the tape, and it never quite overcame the cold. No one spoke; it was not a time for speaking, while they were being transferred. They had instructions to listen for. No one moved, because no one wanted to get lost, or to merit bad tape, which seemed very easy to earn in a situation like this, one for which no tape had ever prepared them.

They had ridden a ship up to this place. He had seen ships fly but had never imagined the sensation. His heart had gone double beats during the flight, and he had been terrified for a while, until he had gotten used to the sensation. But no sooner had he done that than they had entered a new state with other and worse sensations one atop the other. This time someone had thought to speak to them and to assure them it was safe.

Then they had knocked into something and they were advised they were at dock, that they were getting out on Cyteen Station, which was a star at night in the skies of Cyteen, and which he had watched move on summer nights. The news confused him, and of a sudden the door opened and blinded them with light. Some cried out: that was how disturbed they were. And they walked out when they were told, not into the shining heart of a star, but into a very large and very cold place, and were herded this way and that and bunked in a cold barn of a place where the floors all curved up. People walked askew and things tilted without falling over. He tried not to look; he became afraid when he looked at things like that, which suggested that even solid realities could be revised like tape. He wanted his fields back again, all golden in the sun, and the warmth on his back, and the coolth of water after work, and swimming in the brook when they had gotten too hot in summers.

But he could read and write, and presently as they were led along he read things like CYTEEN STATION and DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY; and A MAIN and A 2 and CUSTOMS and DETENTION. None of it was friendly, and least of all did he like the word detention, which led to bad tape. Others could read too, and no one said anything; but he guessed that everyone who could read had a stomach knotted up and a heart thudding up into the throat the same as his.

“This way,” a man with a supervisor’s green armband said, opening a door for their line. “You’ll get tape here, by units of fifty. Count off as you go in.”

Jin counted. He was 1‑14, and a born‑man passed him a chit that said so. He took his chit in hand and filed in behind the first.

It was more med. He followed his file into the whitewalled and antiseptic enclosure and his heart which had settled a moment started again into its now perpetual state of terror. “You’re afraid,” they told him when they checked his pulse. “Don’t be afraid.”

“Yes,” he agreed, trying, but he was cold with his coveralls down to his waist and he jerked when one of the meds took his arm and shot something into it.

“That’s trank,” the woman said. “Cubicle 14 down the hall. You’ll have time enough to hook up. Push the button if you have trouble.”

“Thank you,” he said and put his clothes back to rights, and walked where she aimed him. He went in and sat down on the couch, which was cold tufted plastic, not like the comfortable bed at home. He attached the leads, already feeling his pulse rate slowing and a lethargy settling into his thinking, so that if someone had come into the cubicle that moment and told him they might put him down, the news would have fallen on him very slowly. He was only afraid now of bad tape; or unfamiliar tape; or tape which might change what he was and make him forget the farm.

Then the warning beep sounded and he lay back on the couch, because the deepteach was about to cycle in, and he had just that time to settle or fall limp and hurt himself.

It hit, and he opened his mouth in panic, but it was too late to scream.

CODE AX, it gave him, and then a series of sounds; and wiped all the careful construction of his values and cast doubt on all his memories.

“Be calm,” it told him as the spasms eased. “All A class find this procedure disorienting. Your fine mind and intelligence make this a little more difficult. Please cooperate. This is a necessary procedure. Your value is being increased. You are being prepared for a duty so vastly important that it will have to be explained in a series of tapes. Your contract has been appropriated by the state. You will be in transit on a ship and nothing will divert you from your purpose, which is a secret you will keep.

“When you step out in a new world you will be beside a river near a sea. You will work at the orders of born‑men. You will be happy. When you have made a place to live you will make fields and follow other orders the tapes will give you. You are very fortunate. The state which holds your contract is very happy with you. We have every confidence in you. You can be very proud to be selected for this undertaking.

“Your bodies are very important. They will be under unusual stress. This tape will instruct you in precautionary exercise. Your minds will be important where you are going. You will be given instruction in that regard in this session. Please relax. You will be very valuable when we are done.

“You will be more and more like a born‑man. The state which owns your contract is very pleased with you. This is why you were selected. Your genetic material is very important. You are to create born‑men. This is only one of your many purposes. Is there a female you have formed a close friendship with?… Pia 86‑687, thank you, yes, I am checking… Yes, this individual has been selected. This is an approved mating. You will both be very happy… Yes or no, respond at the tone: do you feel comfortable with this? A technician is standing by…thank you, Jin 458, your selfconfidence is a mark of your excellent background. You should feel very proud in this…”

iv

T‑48 hours

Cyteen Dock

It was all restricted area, and the dock crews were some of them security people from the station offices–in case. Col. James Conn walked the dock with an eye to the ordinary foot traffic beyond. Alliance merchanters were common here in Union’s chief port, under the treaty that ceded them trade rights across the Line; and no one was deceived. There were spies among them, watching every movement Union made, interested in everything. It was a mutual and constant activity, on both sides of the Line. They moved freely up the curving horizon, in small groups, keeping to the blue‑line pathways through the military docks, looking without seeming to look, and no one stopped them. The holes in the net were all purposeful, and the right information had been leaked by all the appropriate sources to let the Alliance folk think they knew what was going on. This was not Conn’s department, but he knew that it was done.

Gantries lined the dock, one idle, three supporting ships’ lines. US Swiftwas coming in later in the watch; Capablewould follow. There were more ships, but those were normal military traffic, small. Crews took their liberties, knowing nothing specific yet, hand‑picked crews, so what passed in bars was worthless, excepting a few, who spread the desired rumors. That was Security’s doing, their design. One could surmise shells within shells of falsity and deception; a man could trust nothing if he fell into Security’s way of thinking.

A line officer could get uneasy in such business. Conn hadgotten uneasy, in times less certain, but he saw round the perimeters of this and knew its limits, that this was not a hot one. There were civs in this one, and civs had rights; and those civs gave him reassurance in the packet he carried, unheralded by security, in his inside pocket.

He reached Venture’s dock, number one white berth, and climbed the access ramp into the tube itself. That was where the first real security appeared, in the form of two armed and armored troopers who barred his way to the inner lock–but so would they on any warship.

“REDEX,” he said, “Conn, Col. James A.”

“Sir.” The troopers clattered rifles to their armored sides. “Board, sir, thank you.”

They were Venturepersonnel. Spacer command, not of his own service. He walked through the hatch and into the receiving bay, to Venture’s duty desk. The officer on duty stopped reading comp printout in a hurry when he looked up and saw brass. “Sir.”

Conn took his id from his pocket and slid it into the receiver.

“Id positive,” the duty officer said. And into the com: “Tyson: Col. James Conn to see the captain.”

That was as arranged–no formalities, no fanfare. He was a passenger on this ship, separate, no cooperative command. Conn collected the aide and walked with him up to the lift, small‑talked with him on the way, which was his manner…none of the spit and polish of the spacegoing Elite Guard. Special operations was his own branch of the service, and that of the highest officers in his immediate staff. And after thirty years service, with a little arthritis that got past the pills–rejuv delayed just a shade too long–he had less spit and polish about him than he had started with.

A new start. They had persuaded him with that. Jean was gone; and the mission had fallen into his lap. A change seemed good, at this stage in life. Maybe it was that for Beaumont, for Gallin, for some of the others he knew were going. There might be a separate answer for the science people, who had their own curious ambitions, and some of whom were married to each other; or were sibs; or friends. But those of them who came out of the old service–those of them carrying some years–out of that number, only Ada Beaumont was taking advantage of the Dependents allowance and taking a husband along in a mission slot. The rest of them, the nine of them who had seen the war face‑on, came solo like the freshfaced youths. The years had stripped them back to that. It was a new life out there, a new chance. So they went.

The lift opened, let him and the aide out on the main level. He walked into the captain’s office and the captain rose from her desk and met him with an offered hand. A woman of his own years. He felt comfortable with her. He surprised himself in that; generally he was ill at ease with spacers, let alone the black‑uniformed Elite like Mary Engles. But she offered a stout and calloused hand and used a slang out of the war, so that he knew she had dealt with the ground services before. She sent the aide out, poured them both stiff drinks and sat down again. He drew a much easier breath.

“You saw service in the ’80, did you?” he asked.

“Ran transport for a lot of you; but old Reliancesaw her better days, and they stripped her down.”

“ Reliance. She came in on Fargone.”

“That she did.”

“I left some good friends there.”

She nodded slowly. “Lost a few too.”

“Hang, it’s a better run this time, isn’t it?”

“Has to be,” she said. “Your boarding’s set up. You have orders for me?”

He opened his jacket and took out the envelope, passed it to her. “That’s the total list. I’ll keep out of your way during transit. I’ll instruct my command to do the same.”

Another nod. “I always liked special op. Easy passengers. You just keep the science lads and the dependents out of the way of my crew and I’ll think kindly on you forever.”

Conn grinned and lifted the glass. “Easy done.”

“Huh, easy. The last such lot I dropped was glad to get off alive.”

“What last lot? You do this weekly?”

“Ah.” Engles sipped at her glass and arched a brow. “You’ll not be telling me I’m to brief you on that.”

“No. I know what the program is. And the ship knows, does she?”

“We have to. What we’re doing, if not where. We’re the transport. We’ll be seeing you more than once, won’t we? Keep us happy.”

“By then,” Conn said, “any other set of faces is going to come welcome.”

Engles gave a one‑sided smile. “I expect it will. I’ve run a few of these assignments. Always like to see the special op heading it up. Far less trouble that way.”

“Ever had any trouble?”

“Oh, wehaven’t.”

He lifted a brow and drained the glass. There were photofaxes on the office walls, ships and faces, some of the photos scarred and scratched. Faces and uniforms. He had a gallery like that in his own duffle. The desk had a series of pictures of a young man, battered and murky. He was not about to ask. The photos never showed him older. He thought of Jean, with a kind of grayness inside…had known a moment of panic, the realization of his parting from Cyteen, boarding another ship, leaving the places Jean had known, going somewhere her memory did not even exist. And all he took was the pictures. Engles offered him a half glass more and he took it.

“You need any special help in boarding?” Engles asked.

“No. Just so someone gets my duffle on. The rest is coming in freight.”

“We’ll take your officers aboard at their leisure. Science and support personnel, when they arrive, are allotted a lounge to themselves, and they’ll kindly use it.”

“They will.”

“A lot smoother that way. They don’t mix well, my people and civs.”

“Understood.”

“But you have to make it mix, don’t you? I sure don’t envy you the job.”

“New world,” he said, a shrug. The liquor made him numb. He felt disconnected, and at once in a familiar place, a ship like a dozen other ships, a moment lived and relived. But no Jean, That was different. “It works because it has to work, that’s all. They need each other. That’s how it all fits together.”

Engles pressed a button on the console. “We’ll get your cabin set up. Anything you need, you let me know.”

The aide came back. “The colonel wants his cabin,” Engles said quietly.

“Thanks,” Conn said, took the hand offered a second time, followed the black‑uniformed spacer out into the corridors, blinking in the warmth of the liquor.

The scars were there…the aide was too young to know; scars predating the clean, the modern corridors. The rebellion at Fargone; the war–the tunnels and the deep digs…

Jean had been with him then. But twenty years the peace had held, uneasy detente between Union and the merchanter Alliance. Peace was profitable, because neither side had anything to gain in confrontation…yet. There was a border. Alliance built warships the Accord of Pell forbade; Union built merchant ships the Accord limited to farside space…cargo ships that could dump their loads and move; warships that could clamp on frames and haul: the designs were oddly similar, tokening a new age in the Between, with echoes of the old. Push would come to shove again; he believed it; Engles likely did.

And the Council must believe it…making moves like this, establishing supply, the longterm advantage of bases on worlds, which were unstrikable under the civilized accords; most of all assuring an abundance of worldbred troops who could not retreat. Union seeded worlds, strategically placed or otherwise…every site which could marginally support human life…an entrenched, immovable expansion which would bottle Alliance in close to their own center and thoroughly infiltrate any territory Alliance might gain in war or negotiations.

The building of carrier ships like Venturewas part of it.

And the other part rested in the hands of special op, and employees of the government who for various reasons, volunteered.

v

T‑20 hours

Cyteen dock

The lines fell into order, white‑clad, shaven headed, a slow procession across the dock, and no one paid it more than the curiosity the event was due–the loading of cloned‑man workers onto transports, which always shocked Alliance citizens and sent a shiver up the staunchest of Union backbones. It was an aspect of life most citizens never had to see, the reminder of the lab‑born ancestry of many of them–the labor pool on which worlds were built. Azi workers served in citizen homes, and worked on farms and took jobs others found undesirable–quiet and cheerful workers in the main.

But these were quiet indeed, and the lines were unnaturally patient, and the shaved heads and faces and the white sameness was grim and without illusion.

And to stand in that line–himself shaven and blank except for the small blue triangle on his right cheek and a number on his hand–Marco Gutierrez felt a constant panic. Keep the eyes unfocused or fixed, they had said onworld, when they were loaded onto the shuttles. Don’t worry. The numbers you’re wearing are specially flagged in the comp. The same system that lets the azi all get the right tape will get you no worse than an informational lecture. They’ll know who you are.

The azi frightened him–all of them, so silent, so fixed on what they did and where they went. He stared at the whiteclad shoulders in front of him, which by the hips belonged to a woman, but he could not tell for sure from the back. There were sets of these workers, twins and triplets, quads and quints. But of some he had seen only a single example, unique. He had not gotten a wrong tape when they passed through the lab: he had lain down under the machine terrified that they might slip him a wrong one, and he might end by needing psychiatric help–his mind, his mind, that was his life, all the years of study–But it had come out right, and he had only the dimmest impression of what they had fed him–

Unless–the thought occurred to him–that was the same confidence all of them in the lines had, and they were all being deceived and programmed. The imagination that something might have been done to him without his knowledge sent the sweat coursing over a shaved, too‑smooth body. He trusted his government. But mistakes were made with the push of a computer key. And sometimes the government had done harsh things in harsh times–and lied–

Eyes blank. He heard noises, the crash of machinery, and the movement of vehicles. He was aware of people on the sidelines staring at them; at him. It was hard not to be human, hard not to turn and look, or to shift the feet or to fret in line or make some small random movement–but the azi did not.

At least some of these close to him must be citizens like him. He had no idea how many. He knew that some of his colleagues were with him, but he had lost track of them, in the shifting of the lines. They were boarding. They went toward the ship; and they moved with incredible slowness.

There had been a time, in that white‑tiled room on Cyteen where he and others of his group had last been human–that they had been able to laugh about it; that they made jokes and took it lightly. But that was before they had been taken singly into the next room and shaved, before they had had a number stamped on them and individually gotten the instruction on behavior, before they had fallen into the lines at the shuttleport and been lost.

There was no more humor in it, no more at all. There was terror…and humiliation, the violation of privacy, the fear of coercion. All he had to do to back out now was to turn and walk away from the line, which no azi could do; and something was holding him there, a constraint he believed was his own volition, his courage keeping him where he was.

But lately all realities had shifted. And he was no longer certain.

What, he thought as the line inched its way toward the access ramp, in sight now, what if things had gone totally wrong? And what if the people who were to recognize him did not?

But the tape had been harmless; and therefore the computer had the number right.

He trusted. And inched up the ramp step by step, never making a move some azi in front of him had not made. He picked the quietest and the steadiest for his models, in the hope that others behind him were likewise taking their cues from him.

The line entered the dark of the hold, and they approached a desk, one by one; one by one the azi held out their right hands for the inspection of the clerks.

But none of them were pulled out of line, and Gutierrez’ heart beat harder and harder.

His own turn came, and he offered his falsely tattooed hand to the recorder, who took it and wrote down the number. The slip went to a comp tech. “Move on,” a supervisor said, and Gutierrez moved, less and less in command of his knees. He passed the inner lock in the same shuffling line, and a kind of paralysis had set in, past the time that he thought he should have made a protest–that it was too great a silence to break, that hypnotic oneness that drew him into step and kept him there.

“789‑5678?” a male voice asked him. He looked that direction; one could look, when a number was called. A guard beckoned him. He came; and they called another number and another, so that now there were a group of them being called out of the lines and let into a side corridor.

“You’ll just come this way,” the guard said. “We’ve got your id all set up; you’re all right and your gear is boarded. They’ll get you all, don’t worry.”

Gutierrez followed the black‑uniformed guard, through that corridor and along the curving halls which became difficult to walk without leaning, a turn aft now, and another turn which brought them to a lift. The guard opened the door for them, and motioned them into the car.

“Push 3R,” the guard said, while the lift filled with more and more of them until some had to wait outside. “3R’s your section; someone’s waiting for you topside.”

Gutierrez pushed the buttons and the door closed. The car shot up against the direction of G and let them out again, where a second guard waited with a clipboard. “Room R12,” the guard said, and slapped a keycard into his hand. “Name?”

“Gutierrez.” It was his again, name and not number. They called off another man to room with him: Hill, the name was. “Next,” the guard said, and the lift was already headed down again, with name after name called off and all of them headed down the corridor.

In silence. Deathly silence. “We’re clear,” Gutierrez said suddenly, and turned and looked at the rest of them, at shaved, hollow faces, male and female, hairless, browless, at eyes which had gone from blankness to bleak fatigue. “We’re clear, hear it?”

There were some braver than the others–a female face startlingly naked without brows, a too‑thin mouth that twisted into a struggling grin; a darkskinned man who looked less naked, who shouted out a cheer that shocked the silence. Another reached up and rubbed the tattoo on his cheek; but that would have to wear off, as the hair would have to grow back. “You’re Hill?” Gutierrez asked of his assigned roommate. “What field?”

The thin, older man blinked, wiped a hand over his shaved skull. “Ag specialist.”

“I’m biology,” Gutierrez said. “Not a bad mix.”

Others talked, a sudden swelling of voices; and someone swore, which was what Gutierrez wanted to do, to break the rest of the restraints, to vent what had been boiling up for three long days. But the words refused to come out, and he walked on with Hill–26, 24, the whole string down past the crosscorridor and around the corner: 16, 14, 12… He jammed the keycard in with a hand shaking like palsy, opened the door on an ordinary little cabin with twin bunks and colors, cheerful green and blue colors. He stood inside and caught his breath, then sat down on the bed and dropped his head into his hands, even then feeling the tiny prickle of stubble under his fingertips. He felt grotesque. He remembered every mortifying detail of his progress across the docks; and the lines; and the medics; and the tape labs and the rest of it.

“How old are you?” Hill asked. “You look young.”

“Twenty two.” He lifted his head, shivering on the verge of collapse. If it had been a friend with him, he might have, but Hill was holding on the same way, quietly. “You?”

“Thirty eight. Where from?”

“Cyteen. Where from, yourself?”

“Wyatt’s.”

“Keep talking. Where’d you study?”

“Wyatt’s likewise. What about you? Ever been on a ship before?”

“No.” He hypnotized himself with the rhythm of question and answer…got himself past the worst of it. His breathing slowed. “What’s an ag man doing on a station?”

“Fish. Lots of fish. Got similar plans where we’re going.”

“I’m exobiology,” Gutierrez said. “A whole new world out there. That’s what got me.”

“A lot of you young ones,” Hill said. “Me–I want a world. Any world. The passage was free.”

“Hang, we just paid for it.”

“I think we did,” Hill said.

And then the swelling in his throat caught Gutierrez by surprise and he bowed his head into his hands a second time and sobbed. He fought his breathing back to normal–looked up to find Hill wiping his own eyes, and swallowed the shamed apology he had had ready. “Physiological reaction,” he muttered.

“Poor bastards,” Hill said, and Gutierrez reckoned what poor bastards Hill had in mind. There were real azi aboard, who went blankly to their berths wherever they might be, down in the holds–who would go on being silent and obedient whatever became of them, because that was what they were taught to be.

Lab specialists would follow them in three years, Gutierrez knew, who would bring equipment with which the new world could make its own azi; and the lab techs would come in expecting the fellowship of the colony science staff. But they would get none from him. Nothing from him. Or from the rest of them–not so easily.

“The board that set this up,” Gutierrez said quietly, hoarsely, “they can’t have any idea what it’s like. It’s crazy. They’re going to get people crazy like this.”

“We’re all right,” Hill said.

“Yes,” he said; but it was an azi’s answer, that sent a chill up his back. He clamped his lips on it, got up and walked the few paces the room allowed, because he could now; and it still felt unnatural.

vi

T‑12 hours

Aboard Venture

docked at Cyteen Station

“Beaumont.” Conn looked up from his desk as the permission‑to‑enter button turned up his second in command. He rose and offered his hand to the special forces captain and her husband. “Ada,” he amended, for old times’ sake. “Bob. Glad to draw the both of you–” He was always politic with the spouses, civ that Bob Davies was. “Just make it in?”

“Just.” Ada Beaumont sighed, settled, and took a seat. Her husband took one by her. “They pulled me from Wyatt’s and I had a project finishing up there…then it was kiting off to Cyteen on a tight schedule to take the tapes I guess you had. They just shuttled us up, bag and baggage.”

“Then you know the score. They put you somewhere decent for quarters?”

“Two cabins down. A full suite: can’t complain about that.”

“Good.” Conn leaned back, shifted his eyes to Bob Davies. “You have a mission slot in Distributions, don’t you?”

“Number six.”

“That’s good. Friendly faces–Lord, I love the sight of you. All those white uniforms…” He looked at the pair of them, recalling earlier days, Cyteen on leave, Jean with him… Jean gone now, and the Beaumont‑Davies sat here, intact, headed out for a new world. He put on a smile, diplomat, because it hurt, thinking of the time when there had been four of them. And Davies had to survive. Davies, who lived his life on balance books and had no humor. “At least,” he said charitably, “faces from home.”

“We’re getting old,” Beaumont said. “They all look so young. About time we all found ourselves a berth that lasts.”

“Is that what drew you?”

“Maybe,” Beaumont said. Her seamed face settled. “Maybe there’s about one more mission left in us, and one world’s about our proper size about now. Never had time for kids, Bob and me. The war–You know. So maybe on this one there’s something to build instead of blow up. I like to think…maybe some kind of posterity. Maybe when they get the birthlabs set up–maybe–no matter what the gene‑set is; I mean, we’d take any kid, any they want to farm out. Missed years, Jim.”

He nodded somberly. “They give us about a three year lag on the labs, but when that lab goes in, you’re first in line, no question.–Can I do anything for you in settling in? Everything the way it ought to be?”

“Hang, it’s great, nice modern ship, a suite to ourselves–I figure I’ll take a turn down there and see where they’re stacking those poor sods below. Anyone I know down there?”

“Pete Gallin.”

“No. Don’t know him.”

“All strange faces. We’re up to our ears in brighteyed youth, a lot of them jumped up to qualify them…a lot of specs out of the state schools and no experience…a few good noncoms who came up the hard way. Some statistician, fry him, figured that was the best mix in staff; and we’ve got the same profile in the civ sector, but not so much so. A lot of those have kin elsewhere, but they know there’s no transport back; blind to everything else but their good luck, I suppose. Or crazy. Or maybe some of them don’t mind mud and bugs. Freshfaced, the lot of them. You want kids, Beaumont, we’ve got kids, no question about it. The whole command’s full of kids. And we’ll lose a few.”

A silence. Davies shifted uncomfortably. “We’re going to get rejuv out there, aren’t we? They said–”

“No question. Got us rejuv and some crates of Cyteen’s best whiskey. And soap. Real soap, this time, Ada.”

She grinned, a ghost out of the tunnels and the deeps of Fargone, the long, long weeks dug in. “Soap. Fresh air, sea and river to fish–can’t ask better, can we?”

“And the neighbors,” Davies said. “We’ve got neighbors.”

Conn laughed, short and dry. “The lizards may contest you for the fish, but not much else. Unless you mean Alliance.”

Davies’ face had settled into its habitual dour concern. “They said there wasn’t a likelihood.”

“Isn’t,” Beaumont said.

“They said–”

“Alliance might even know what we’re up to,” Conn said… Davies irritated him: discomfiting the man satisfied him in an obscure way. “I figure they might. But they’ve got to go on building their ships, haven’t they? They’ve got the notion to set something up with Sol, that’s where their eyes are at the moment.”

“And if that link‑up with Sol does come about–then where are we?”

“Sol couldn’t finance a dockside binge. It’s all smoke.”

“And we’re sitting out there–”

“I’ll tell you something,” Conn said, leaned on his desk, jabbed a finger at them. “If it isn’t smokescreen, they swallow our new little colony. But they’re all hollow. Alliance is all trade routes, just a bunch of merchanters, no worlds to speak of. They don’t care about anything else at the moment…and by the time they do, they’re pent in. We might be fighting where we’re going, give or take a generation–but don’t expect any support. That’s not the name of what we’re doing out there. If they swallow us, they swallow us. And if they swallow too many of us, they’ll find they’ve swallowed something Alliance can’t digest. Union’s going to be threaded all through them. That’s what we’re going out there for. That’s why the whole colonial push.”

Davies looked at his wife. A crease deepened between his eyes.

“Jim isn’t only special op,” Beaumont said, “he’s out of the Praesidium. And it doesn’t hurt to know that…in closed company. I have–for the past half dozen years. That’s why Jim always got transferred to the hot spots. Isn’t it, Jim?”

Conn shrugged, vexed–then thinking it was the truth, that there was no more cover, no more of anything that mattered. “Jim’s getting to be an old man, that’s all. It looked like a good assignment. My reasons are like yours. Just winding down. Finding something to do. Praesidium asked. This is a retirement job. I’ve got a good staff. That’s all I ask.”

So they were on their way, he thought when he had packed Beaumont and Davies off, Beaumont to a tour below and Davies to his unpacking and settling in. They were sealed in, irrevocably. Venturewould use an outbound vector decidedly antiterrene, as if she and her companion ships had a destination on the far side of Union space instead of the outlying border region which was their real object; she had a false course filed at Cyteen Station for the obstinately curious.

So the auxiliary personnel, military and otherwise, found their way aboard among azi workers; and military officers chanced aboard as if they were simply hopping transport, common enough practice.

It was all very smooth. No mission officer took official charge of anything public; it was all Venturepersonnel down there on the docks seeing the azi aboard, and seeing to the lading of boxes labeled for the Endeavor mines.

The clock pulsed away, closer and closer to undock.

II

THE VOYAGE

OUT

Military Personnel:

Col. James A. Conn, governor general

Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, It. governor

Maj. Peter T. Gallin, personnel

M/Sgt. Ilya V. Burdette, Corps of Engineers

Cpl. Antonia M. Cole

Spec. Martin H. Andresson

Spec. Emilie Kontrin

Spec. Danton X. Morris

M/Sgt. Danielle L. Emberton, tactical op.

Spec. Lewiston W. Rogers

Spec. Hamil N. Masu

Spec. Grigori R. Tamilin

M/Sgt. Pavlos D. M. Bilas, maintenance

Spec. Dorothy T. Kyle

Spec. Egan I. Innis

Spec. Lucas M. White

Spec. Eron 678‑4578 Miles

Spec. Upton R. Patrick

Spec. Gene T. Troyes

Spec. Tyler W. Hammett

Spec. Kelley N. Matsuo

Spec. Belle M. Rider

Spec. Vela K. James

Spec. Matthew R. Mayes

Spec. Adrian C. Potts

Spec. Vasily C. Orlov

Spec. Rinata W. Quarry

Spec. Kito A. M. Kabir

Spec. Sita Chandrus

M/Sgt. Dinah L. Sigury, communications

Spec. Yung Kim

Spec. Lee P. de Witt

M/Sgt. Thomas W. Oliver, quartermaster

Cpl. Nina N. Ferry

Pfc. Hayes Brandon

Lt. Romy T. Jones, special forces

Sgt. Jan Vandermeer

Spec. Kathryn S. Flanahan

Spec. Charles M. Ogden

M/Sgt. Zell T. Parham, security

Cpl. Quintan R. Witten

Capt. Jessica N. Sedgewick, confessor‑advocate

Capt. Bethan M. Dean, surgeon

Capt. Robert T. Hamil, surgeon

Lt. Regan T. Chiles, computer services

Civilian Personnel: to be assigned:

Secretarial personnel: 12

Medical/surgical: 1

Medical/paramedic: 7

Mechanical maintenance: 20

Distribution and warehousing: 20

Robert H. Davies

Security: 12

Computer service: 4

Computer maintenance: 2

Librarian: 1

Agricultural specialists: 10

Harold B. Hill

Geologists: 5

Meteorologist: 1

Biologists: 6

Marco X. Gutierrez

Education: 5

Cartographer: 1

Management supervisors: 4

Biocycle engineers: 4

Construction personnel: 150

Food preparation specialists: 6

Industrial specialists: 15

Mining engineers: 2

Energy systems supervisors: 8

TOTAL MILITARY 45

TOTAL CIVILIAN SUPERVISORY 296

TOTAL CITIZEN STAFF 341; TOTAL NONASSIGNED DEPENDENTS: 111; TOTAL ALL CITIZENS: 452

ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL:

“A” class: 2890

Jin 458‑9998

Pia 89‑687

“B” class: 12389

“M” class: 4566

“P” class: 20788

“V” class: 1278

TOTAL ALL NONCITIZENS: 41911

TOTAL ALL MISSION: 42363

Male/female ratio approx. 55%/45%

i

T‑00:15:01

Communication: Cyteen Dock HQ

CYTDOCK1/USVENTURE/USCAPABLE/USSWIFT/STANDBY UNDOCK.

T‑00:2:15

CYTDOCK1/USVENTURE/YOU ARE NUMBER ONE FOR DEPARTURE.

T‑00:0:49

USVENTURE/CYTDOCK1/SEQUENCE INITIATED/THANK YOU

STATIONMASTER/HOSPITALITY APPRECIATED/ENDIT.

ii

T00:0:20

Venture; en route

They moved. The stress made itself felt, and in spite of the tapes which had instructed them how all this would be, Jin 458 felt the shudder and shift of weight through the thousands of bodies jammed into the aisles of the bunks–stacks of bunks which leaned crazily together like watchtowers, stacks already filled with bodies, azi all crowded up together and holding onto each other as they had been told to do. In spite of all the instruction, Jin felt afraid, deep inside, not letting it out. A sigh went up, one united breath, when the weight stopped and they had the falling‑sensation again.

“Hold tight,” a voice told them over public address, and they held, a painful clenching of hands on shoulders and on the frames of the bunks and whatever they could hold to, so that they would not come drifting loose when the weight came back again.

And come it did, with a crash and rumble of machinery, an authoritative settling of feet firmly back to the floor and of clothes on bodies, a kind of crawling sensation far from pleasant.

“That’s it,” the PA told them. “We have G now. You can let go and find your places. You’re berthed by alphabetic and numeric sequence. If you can’t find your bunk, report to the door where you came in.”

Jin stood still waiting as the press of bodies slowly sorted itself out, until it became possible to move again, and people who had been jammed into the bunks were coming down the ladders to find their proper places. He could see a tag where he was, bunk M 234‑6787.

“The center aisle,” the PA voice said again, “is M 1 through M 7. Row two spinward is M 8 through N 1…”

Jin listened, shrank aside as azi needed to pass him to get to their places. So they were bunked by alphabet and birth‑order, not by gene‑set. He would not be near his sibs. It was all very confusing, but they were being told what to do and it was all, he supposed, moving with considerable organization under the circumstances.

It was hard to hold on with the ship moving as it was and people stumbled into him, thrown by the movement and the floor curve. Everyone hurried, at the pace of the PA voice, which kept throwing instructions at them. He reasoned that if MNO was spinward of the aisle, then J had to be the other direction, and when he had a clear space he went, handing his way along the bunk rails and not letting go, along aisles and past rows until he had come to a K and turned toward the front of the ship. He found himself among J designations, to his relief, and he kept searching, as others did, having figured out the system, passing muddled wanderers who were probably under T class, unable to read.

He located it–refuge, berth J 458‑9998, right on the bottom, so that he would not have to climb the ladders which towered up and up atilt in the eerie slantwise way that things were built on the curved floor of the ship. If he sat up on top, he thought, he could look straight into the chasms of other rows sideways to his floor. It was that huge a room and that much curve; and he was glad not to have that view. He sat down at his assigned place, feet over the edge; and all at once another of the J’s showed up. This J, another 458 but of gene‑set 8974–must come from some other farm, but he could not be sure with the shaving. The man clambered up the ladder over him and the bunk next upstairs gave slightly as his bunkmate climbed in and swung his feet over the edge. Jin sat still, bent over because of the low overhead. He was tired, very glad to sit down, and he felt a great deal safer enclosed by the four uprights and other groundlevel bunks all around him. Another J found the bunk at his head, which was more company; and more Js went up the ladder.

It was all going very fast now, with comforting efficiency: they had managed to do it all right. Soon people were sitting all about him. Someone took the other decklevel bunk next to his, and he saw people on either side, and facing him and angling away down the diagonal view through the uprights. The room was getting quiet again, even the nonreaders having mostly found their places, so that the PA sounded even louder. He had already spotted the small packet the PA told them about next, the plastic case lying on the pillow, and there was a massive stirring as thousands of azi reached and took theirs as he did–as they opened the covers and found hygiene kits and schedules.

“Read your schedule for exercise,” the voice instructed them. “If you don’t read, you will have a blue card or a red card. Blues are group one. Reds are group two. I will call you by those numbers; you will have half an hour at a time.”

It was not much time. Jin was already plotting how he could adjust his personal routine to follow it. There were more instructions, where one went for elimination and how one reported malaise, and instruction that they must sit or lie in the bunks at all other times because there was no room for people to walk about. “A great deal of the time we will play tape,” the voice promised them, which cheered Jin considerably.

He felt uncertain what his life had meant up to this point. He remembered well enough. But the importance he had attached to things was all revised. His life now seemed more preparatory than substantive. He looked forward to things to come. There would be a world, he believed; and he was called on to build it. He would become more and more like a born‑man and he would be on this assignment for the rest of his life, one of the most important assignments even born‑men hoped to get. All of this was due to his good fortune in having been born in the right year, on the right world, of the right gene‑set, and of course it was due to his excellent attention to his work. There would be only good tape for him, and when he had gotten where he was going, when he looked about him at a new land, there were certain things which would have to be done at once, with all the skill he had. People believed in him. They had chosen him. He was very happy, now that all the disturbing things were over, now that he could sit in his own bunk and know that he was safe…and he would have just about enough time to understand it all before they would be there, so the tape promised.

There would be Pia, for instance. He would have liked to have found Pia in all this crowd, and asked her whether the tape had talked to her about him. But he thought that it had. Usually they were very thorough about such details. And likely they had known even what he would answer: perhaps their own supervisor had had a hand in it, reaching out to take care of them, however far they had come from their beginnings. He and Pia would make born‑men together and the tape said that this would be as good as the reward tapes, a reward anytime they liked as long as they were off duty. He had a great deal of new information in that regard to think on, and information about the world they were going to, and lists of new rules and procedures. He wanted to succeed in this new place and impress his supervisors.

The PA finished instructing them. They were to lie flat on their bunks, and soon they would be asked to take trank from the ampoules given them in their personal kit. He arranged all this where he could find it, taped the trank series to the bedpost, and lay down as he was supposed to do, his head on his hands. He would be very busy for the future. He was scheduled for exercise in the 12th group, and when it was called, he wanted to proceed to the right place as quickly as possible and to plan a routine which would do as much as possible for him in the least amount of time.

He had never been so taut‑nerved and full of purpose–never had so much to look forward to, or even imagined such opportunity existed. He loved the state which first ordered his creation and now bought his contract and saw to every detail of his existence. It created Pia and all the others and took them together to a new world it planned to give them. Into the bargain it had made him strong and beautiful and intelligent, so that it would be proud of him. It felt very good to be what he was planned to be, to know that everything was precisely on schedule and that his contractholders were delighted with him. He tried very hard to please, and he felt a tingling of pleasure now that he knew he had done everything right and that they were on their way. He smiled and hugged it all inside himself, how happy he was, a preciousness beyond all past imagining.

A tape began. It talked about the new world, and he listened.

iii

T00:21:15

Venture log

“…outbound at 0244 m in good order. Estimate jump at 1200 a. All personnel secure under normal running. US Swiftand US Capablein convoy report 0332 m all stable and normal running.”

iv

T28 hours Mission Apparent Time

From the personal journal of Robert Davies

“…9/2/94. Jump completed. Four days to bend a turn after dump and we’re through this one. Out of trafficked space. We’re coming to our intended heading and now the worst part begins. Four more of these–this time without proper charts. I never liked this kind of thing.”

v

T15 days MAT

Lounge area 2, US Venture

“That’s clear on the checks,” Beaumont said, and Gutierrez, among other team chiefs, nodded. “All equipment accounted for. Venture’s been thorough. Nothing damaged, nothing left. The governor–you can call him governor from now on–wants a readiness report two days after third jump. Any problem with that?”

A general shaking of heads, among the crowd of people, military and civilian, present in the room. They filled it. It was not a large lounge; they were crowded everywhere, and the bio equipment was accessible only in printout from Swift, which swore it had been examined, that the cannisters were intact and the shock meters showed nothing disastrous. More of their hardware rode on Swiftand Capablethan on Venture. They could get at nothing. It was a singularly frustrating time–and after two weeks mission apparent time it was still humiliating to sit in the presence of military officers or ship’s crew, who had never gone through the shaving, who had no idea of the thing that bound them together, who had.

And when it broke up, when Beaumont walked out, grayhaired and venerable and with her sullen special op bearing, there was a silence.

A moving of chairs then. “Game in R15,” one of the regs said. “All welcome.”

“Game in 24,” a civ said. “40,” another added. It was what they did to pass the time. There was a newsletter, passed by hand and not on comp, which told who won what, and in what game; and that was what they did for their sanity. They paid off in favor points. This was a reg, a military custom:–because where we been, Matt Mayes put it, ain’t no surety we get free cash; but favor points, that’s a loan of something or a walk after something or whatever: no sex, no property, no tours, no gear–cut your throat if you play for solid stakes. Favor points is friendly. Don’t you get in no solid game: don’t you bet no big favors. You’re safe on favor points. You do the other thing, the Old Man’ll collect all bets and shut down the games, right?

Got us reg civs, was the way the regs put it. They’re reg civs, meaning the line was down and the regs, the military, swept them into the games and the bets and otherwise included them. And it was a strange feeling, that all their pride came from the stiff‑backboned regs, like Eron Miles, whose tattooed number was real, because he came out of the labs, who recovered his bearings as fast as any of them whose numbers were wearing dim. It was We; and the officers and the governor were They. That was the way of it.

And even further removed was the spacer crew–who gambled too, for credits, in other games, because their voyage was a roundtrip and they would go on and on doing missions like this. The spacers pushed odds–even following the route a probeship crew had laid out for them, themselves following a drone probe: Venturewent with navigational records and all the amenities, but it was a nervous lot of spacers all the same, and none of the games mixed–Wouldn’t gamble with you, the conversation was reported between spacer and reg: Cheap stakes.

People remembered the room numbers, with the manic attention they deserved, because it was the games that took one’s mind off an approaching jump–that let them forget for a while that they were travelling a scarcely mapped track that had the spacers hairtriggered and locked in their own manic gamblings.

Cheap at any price, that little relaxation, that little forgetting. One forgot the hazards, forgot the discomforts to come, forgot to imagine, which was the worst mistake of all.

There were assignations, too: room shiftings and courtesies–for the same reasons, that with life potentially short, sex was a stimulus powerful enough to wipe out thinking. And liquor was strictly rationed.

It took a cultivated eye to discover the good points of any of them at the moment, but it was appreciated all the more when it happened.

vi

T20 days MAT

Number two hold, Venture

It was duty, to walk the holds–inspecting what was at hand, because so much of the mission was elsewhere, under other eyes, on the other ships. Conn bestirred himself in the slow days of transit between jumps–surprised the troops and civilians under his authority with inspections; and visited those reeking holds where the azi slept and ate and existed, in stacked berths so close together they formed canyons towering twenty high in places, the topmost under the glare of lights and the direct rush of the ventilating fans and the nethermost existing in the dark of the canyons where the air hardly stirred. All the bunks were filled with bodies, such small spaces that no one could sit upright in them without sitting on the edge and crouching, which some did, perhaps to relieve cramped muscles…but they never stirred out of them except with purpose. The hold stank of too many people, stank of chemicals they used to disinfect and chemicals they used in the lifesupport systems which they had specially rigged to handle the load. The stench included cheap food, and the effluvia of converter systems which labored to cope with the wastes of so large a confined group. The room murmured with the sound of the fans, and of the rumbling of the cylinder round the core, a noise which pervaded all the ship alike; and far, far softer, the occasional murmur of azi voices. They talked little, these passengers; they exercised dutifully in the small compartment dedicated to that purpose, just aft of the hold; and dutifully and on schedule they returned to their bunks to let the next scheduled group have the open space, their sweating bodies unwashed because the facilities could not cope with so many.

Cloned‑men, male and female. So was one of the specs with the mission, lab‑born; and that was no shame, simply a way of being born. Tape‑taught, and that was no shame either: so was everyone. The deep‑teach machines were state of the art in education. They poured the whole of the universe in over chemically lowered thresholds, while the mind sorted out what it was capable of keeping, without exterior distractions or the limitations of sight or hearing.

But the worker tapes were something else. Worker tapes created the like of these, row on row of expressionless faces staring at the bottom of the bunk above them day after day–male and female, bunked side by side without difficulty, because they presently lacked desires. They regarded their bodies as valuable and undivertible from their purpose, the printout said regarding them. They would receive more information in transit–the PA blared with silken tones, describing the world they were going to. And there were tapes to give them when they had landed–tapes for all of them, for that matter. Tapes for generations to come.

He walked through–into the exercise area, unnoticed, where hundreds of azi worked in silence. Their exercise periods, in which crew or troops might have laughed and talked or worked in the group rhythms that pulled a military unit’s separate minds into one–were utterly narcissistic, a silent, set routine of difficult stretchings and manipulations and calisthenics, with fixed and distant stares or pensive looks. No talk. No notice of an inspecting presence.

“You,” he said to one taller and handsomer than the average of these tall, handsome people, and the azi stopped in his bending and straightened, an immediate, flowerlike focussing of attention. “How are you getting along?”

“Very well, sir.” The azi breathed hard from his exertions. “Thank you.”

“Name?”

“Jin, sir; 458‑9998.”

“Anything needed?”

“No, sir.” The dark eyes were bright and interested, a transformation. “Thank you.”

“You feel good, Jin?”

“Very good, sir, thank you.”

He walked back the way he had come–looked back, but the azi had resumed his exercises. They were like that. Azi had always made him uncomfortable, possibly because they were not unhappy. It said something he had no wish to hear. Erasable minds…the azi; if anything upset them, the tapes could take it away again.

And there were times he would have found it good to have peace like that.

He passed through the hold again, unnoticed. They were undeniably a group, the azi, like the rest of the mission topside. They maintained themselves as devotedly as they would maintain anything set in their care, and their eyes were set on a rarely disturbed infinity, like waking sleep.

He had no idea, much as he had studied them, what thoughts passed in their heads at such times–or if there were any thoughts at all.

And he went topside again, into the silence that surrounded him in this long waiting, because Ada Beaumont and Pete Gallin handled the details. He studied the printouts, and dispatched occasional messages to the appropriate heads of departments. There were his pictures, set on his desk; and there were memoirs he was writing–it seemed the time for such things. But the memoirs began with the voyage…and left out things that the government would not want remembered. Like most of his life. Classified. Erasable by government order. He put it on tape, and much of it was lies, why they came and what they hoped.

Mostly he waited, like the azi.

vii

T20 days MAT

Gutierrez, from a series of free lectures in lounge 2.

“…there’s as varied an ecology where we’re going as on Cyteen…somewhat more so, in respect to the vertical range of development; somewhat less, since you don’t have the range of phyla–of types of life. Plants…that’s algae, grasses, native fruits, pretty much like Cyteen, all the way up to some pretty spectacular trees–” (pause for slide series) “I’ll repeat those in closer detail later, or run them as often as you like. This is all stuff that came from the survey team. But the thing you’ll have heard about already, that’s the calibans, the moundbuilders. They’re pretty spectacular: the world’s distinct and crowning achievement, as it were. The first thing I want to make clear is that we’re not talking about an intelligence. The bias was in the other direction when the Mercury survey team landed. They looked at the ridges from orbit and thought they were something like cities. They went down there real carefully, I can tell you, after all the orbiting observations.” (slide) “Now let me get you scale on this.” (slide) “You can see the earthen ridge is about four times the man’s height. You always find these things on riverbanks and seacoasts, on the two of the seven continents that lie in the temperate zone–and this one’s going to neighbor our own site. The moundbuilders happen to pick all the really good sites. In fact you could just about pick out the sites that are prime for human development by looking for mounds.” (slide) “And this is one of the builders. Caliban is a character in a play: he was big and ugly. That’s what the probe crew called him. Dinosaur’s what you think, isn’t it? Big, gray dinosaur. He’s about four to five meters long, counting tail–warm‑blooded, slithers on his belly. Lizard type. But trying to pin old names on new worlds is a pretty hard game. The geologists always have a better time of it than the biologists. They deny it, but it’s true. Look at that skull shape there, that big bulge over the eyes. Now that brain is pretty large, about three times the size of yours and mine. And its convolutions aren’t at all like yours and mine. It’s got a place in the occipital region, the back, that’s like a hard gray handball, and pitted like an old ship’s hull; and then three lobes come off that, two on a side and one on top, shaped like human lungs, and having a common stem and interconnecting stems at several other places along their length. They’re frilled, those lobes–make you think of pink feathers; and then there’s three of those handball‑things in the other end of the skull, right up in that place we call the frontal lobes of a human brain, but not quite as big as the organ behind. Now that’s the brain of this citizen of the new world. And if it didn’t connect onto a spinal cord and have branches, and if microscopy didn’t show structure that could answer to neurons, we’d have wondered. It’s a very big brain. We haven’t mapped it enough to know what the correspondences are. But all it does with that big brain is build ridges. Yes, they dissected one…after they established the behavior as instinct‑patterned. You do that to a certain extent by frustrating an animal from a goal; and you watch how it goes about the problem. And if the answer is wired into the brain, if it’s instinct and not rationality, it’s going to tend to repeat its behavior over and over again. And that’s what a caliban does. They’re not aggressive. Actually, there’s a smaller, prettier version–” (slide) “The little green fellow with all the collar frills is called an ariel. A‑r‑i‑e‑l. That’s Caliban’s elvish friend. Now he’s about a meter long at maximum, nose to tail, and he runs in and out of caliban burrows completely unmolested. They’re fisheaters, both the calibans and ariels, stomachs full of fish. And they’ll nibble fruits. Or investigate about anything you put out for them. None of the lizards are poisonous. None of them ever offered to bite any of the probe team. You do have to watch out for caliban tails, because that’s two meters length of pretty solid muscle, and they’re not too bright, and they just could break your leg for you if they panicked. The ariels can give you a pretty hard swipe too. You pick them up by the base of the tail and the back of the neck, if so happens you have to pick one up, and you hold on tight, because the report is they’re strong. Why would you want to pick one up? Well, not often, I’d think. But they apparently run in and out of caliban burrows, very pretty folk, as you see, and no one’s ever caught an ariel doing a burrow of its own: all play and no work, the ariels. And the probe team found them in their camp, and walking through their tents, and getting into food if they had a chance. They haven’t got any fear at all. They and the calibans sit on top of the food chain, and they haven’t got any competition. The calibans don’t seem to get anything at all out of the association; it’s not certain whether the ariels get anything out of it but shelter. Both species swim and fish. Neither species commits aggression against the other. The ariels are very quick to get out of the way when the calibans put a foot down, while in the human camp, the ariels sometimes went into a kind of freeze where you were in danger of stepping on one, and they’d be stiff as a dried fish until a second after you’d pick them up, after which they’d come to life in a hurry. There’s some speculation that it’s a panic reaction, that the overload of noise and movement in the camp is just too much for it; or that it thinks it’s hidden when it does that. Or maybe it’s picking up something humans don’t hear, some noise from the machinery or the com. Its brain is pretty much like the Caliban’s, by the way, but the handball organs are pink and quite soft.

“Interiorly, the snout is odd too, in both species. That gentle swelling behind the nostril slits is a chamber filled with cilia. Hairlike projections, but flesh. And they’re rife with bloodvessels. So are the organs that seem to correspond to lungs. Filled with cilia. Like a nest of worms. They expel water when they come up from a dive: they sit on the shore and heave and it comes out the nostril slits. So they’re taking in water; and they’re getting oxygen out of it. Gills and lungs at once. They can handle river water and estuary water, but no one’s observed them diving at sea. They may have relatives that do. We’re a long way from knowing how many different varieties of lizards there are. But the present count is about fifty‑two species under the size of the ariels. And a lot are aquatic.

“There are flying lizards–for the naturalists among you that know what bats are–rather like bats and rather not; warmblooded, we reckon–the probe crew never caught any, but the photo stills” (Slide) “–rather well suggest bats; that’s a terrene form. Or Downbelow gliders, of which no one’s yet got a specimen. We don’t know a thing about them, but their agility in the air, along with the fact that calibans and ariels are warmblooded–suggest that they’re the world’s closest approach to a mammal. This is the item we’ve got a particular caution on. They’re fairly rare in the area, but they do swarm. The wingspan is half a meter, some larger. They could bite; could carry disease: could be venomous–we don’t know. Because they might be something like a mammal, we’re a little more concerned about contamination with them. There’s no good being scared of them. I’m talking about remote possibility precautions. Everything’s new here. You don’t find easy correspondences in lifeforms. All the can’ts and won’ts you ever heard can be revised on a new world. Nature’s really clever about engineering around can’ts. Insects can’t get above a certain size…except that insect is a terrene category term, covering things with chitin and certain kinds of internal structure; but what we meet in the Beyond can differ quite a bit. And our world has some oddities.” (slide) “Like the hoby mole. That’s a meter long, half a meter wide, engorges earth like a burrowing worm. That tiny annular segmentation is chitin, and they’re very soft. Yes, they are something like an insect, and if you put a spade through one by accident, don’t touch the remains. They exude an irritant that sent a member of the probe team to sickbay for two days. So there’s also a caution out on this one.

“There are snakes. They’re coldblooded and they’re constrictors. At least the samples were. We don’t rule out poison. Possibly we’re being alarmist in that regard: human prejudice. But poison in a legless structure seems to be a very efficient hunting mechanism and it’s proven so on two worlds besides Earth.

“And the fairy flitters.” (slide) “These little glider lizards are about fingersized, the wings are really rib extension, and if you set a lantern near the trees, you’ll get a halo of flitters. They don’t really fly, mind, they glide. The iridescence lasts as long as they live. You only see it in the photos, not in the lab specimens. They eat putative insects, they’re utterly harmless, and probably beneficial to the farming effort. They’ll cling to anything when they land, and you just disengage them gently and set them back on a branch. They’ll fly right back to the light. As long as there’s no trees near our camp lights, we won’t have trouble with flitters piling up there. But they’ll be all over you if you carry a light through the woods, and I’m afraid we’re going to have trouble with vehicle headlights. It’s a shame to think of killing any of them. They’re far too beautiful. We’re going to try to devise something that might drive them off. Ideas are welcome.

“Fish–beyond counting. Saltwater and freshwater. No poisons yet detected. Edible. We’ll want to be sure to stick to varieties that have already been tested; and bio will run tests on new species as they’re brought in. You’ll learn to recognize the species so you know what to eat and what to bring us.”

“Microorganisms. We’re very fortunate in that regard. No one picked up a parasite. No one got sick. No one developed allergies, either. We don’t get careless, though. And particularly where you have mammal analogues, we don’t get careless. There’s a phenomenon we call biological resonance, for want of a better name. That’s when two worlds’ microorganisms set up housekeeping together and develop new traits over a period of years; when they cooperate. So–the medical staff is going to have a long lecture on this topic–you have to report every contact with a new lifeform, especially if you accidentally touch something, which is not a good idea. And you report every runny nose and every cough and every itch‑ We do have a biological isolation chamber we can set up. If someone turns out to be in really serious trouble and nothing else will work, we can put you in a bubble for three years until a ship comes back and lifts you off. Short of that we have antihistamines and all kinds of other alternatives, up to the autoimmune lot, so there’s no good becoming obsessive about the chance of contamination; but there’s no good being cavalier about things, either. If you drop down in a faint, it’s really helpful if you’ve already told us you got stung by something that morning or that you’d been digging down on the beach. You’re all going to have to keep your wits about you and be able to give a meticulous account of your whereabouts and your contacts with any and everything. The thing you forget to mention could be the key that we need to figure out what’s wrong with you. And that’s partly my business, because I have to form a picture of every ecosystem, so that if your contact with something harmful was on the beach, for instance, I have a good idea what to look for. And the faster I can answer questions, the safer you are. That’s why I have to ask everyone in the mission to be bio’s eyes and ears. Leave the hands and the touching to us, where you have any doubts. Humans can be compatible with all kinds of ecosystems; don’t kill anything, just move it over. This world doesn’t have any predators to argue with us; and we’ve got the construction sites planned so that eventually we’re going to intersperse urban development with wild areas and wildlife safeguards. The optimum development areas are also the optimum sites for some of the world’s most interesting inhabitants, and there’s no reason why protected habitat can’t exist side by side, theirs and ours. It has to do with attitude toward the wild. It has to do with knowledge and not fear. We’re not turning this world into Cyteen. We’re turning it into something uniquely its own. People who come here will be able to see the old world right along with the most modern development. Caliban habitat right in the middle of a city. Humans are very flexible. We can just extend a road a bit and locate a loading dock around a critical area; and that’s what we’ll do. That’s why there’s a land bank being set up. When you own land, you’ll have title to a certain value of land, but not any specific land, and that lets the governor’s office and the bio department create a preserve where needed, and it protects you and your descendants against any financial damage. You can’t own caliban habitat. That has to be left. On the other hand, to prevent their encroachment on us, there will be barrier zones, usually residential, surrounding any contact point–like, for instance, the caliban mounds near the landing site. In the theory that lifeforms get along better with each other than lifeforms get along with roads and factories, there’ll be housing built along the line that turns only windows in that direction, not doors, not accesses. Once we determine the actual boundary of an area, that’s where the permanent building will go. And you’ll be up against a protected zone, so your actual maintenance on that side will be handled through the bio department. City core will be industrial. All city growth will be handled through the creation of similar enclaves along roadways. This is the way it is in the charter. I think you understand it. I just want to explain how the bio section relates to the construction agency and to the governor’s office and why we’ll have some functions linked in with security and law enforcement. We have a constituency, which is the ecosystem we’re entering. We also represent the human ecosystem. We work out accommodations and bring those before other departments, who have to adjust to the facts as we present them. We don’t really have authority. Nature has that. We just find out the facts as they exist; the decision’s already made–that the two systems have to exist in balance. A world where humans come in at the top of the food chain is easily thrown out of balance. Those of you who are stationborn will appreciate that quite readily. It’s like a station, like Pell, for instance, where two biosystems exist in complement. Very tricky lifesupport setup, one looping into the other, and each benefitting the other. But when you start from the beginning you can do that, and make them balance. We look to have station manufacture for the really heavy and polluting industries. All the departments will be doing these seminars and we’ll go on doing them after we land, making tapes for the azi and for future generations. All of this is going to be priceless stuff. And mostly history’s going to make liars out of us, but, we sincerely hope, not in our hopes for the place.

“I’ll be going over the ecosystem from the microorganisms up in the more detailed session tomorrow; and I’ll be doing it again for my own staff in a morning session day after tomorrow. Check your schedules, and if you find you want to sit in on that lecture you’re quite welcome. It’s going to be pretty detailed, but after the other session it might make fair sense. Session to begin tomorrow morning is Zell Parham on security and law, this room, 0700 mainday…

“Game in R12.”

viii

T20 days MAT

“…The world is to be loved,” the taped voice whispered, and Jin accepted it deeply, wholly. “The things you will find there are beautiful. All the things that really belong to the world are to be protected; but you will build there. Born‑men will tell you where you will build and if life is taken in the building, that is as it must be. If you can spare a living thing you will do so, if it is your choice alone. You will observe certain cautions in touching wild things. You will report all such contacts to your supervisors, just as born‑men have to report them.

“You will work in the fields; and it may be you will take lives. That will be an accident and there is no guilt.

“You will catch fish and eat them, and this is the order of nature. There is no guilt in this. Fish are there for your use, and they feel very little pain.

“You will become part of this world, and if ever people came to harm it you would take up weapons to defend it. In that, you might kill, and you would not have guilt. But if ever you had to take up weapons, you would be trained, and the governor would tell you.

“You will work because you are strong and because your work is very important. You will have a right to be very proud of what you do, and when it is all done well, you will be closer to being born‑men.

“The government which holds your contract is very pleased with you. You’re learning very well. Soon you will get born‑man tapes teaching you the nature of the world, and in very little time you will step out on your land. Through all the difficulties you will experience you can find occasion for pride that you will overcome them all. Every difficulty will make you stronger and wiser, and you will fit more and more perfectly into the world. Be happy. Not everything will be pleasant, but every difficulty will give the pleasure of its solution, and the confidence that you are as intelligent and as fine as the promise of your gene‑set. The government believes in you. The born‑men will take care of you and you will take care of them, because where they are wiser than you, you are very strong and you have the capacity to become wise. Love the land. Love the world. Care for the born‑men, and expect their care for you. You have every right to be proud and happy…”

Jin lay relaxed, dissolved in the pleasure of approval–stirred, as much as anything moved him in this time, with the anticipation of his becoming. There had never been such azi as themselves, he was persuaded, and he had only believed he was ordinary because no one had ever pointed out to him his uniqueness. He saw his descendants in vast numbers, his genetic material, and Pia’s, who was quite as wonderful, ultimately mixed with all the other specially chosen material. They were made of born‑manmaterial: he had never realized this until the tape told him. The capacity was in them, and it was awakening.

He thought on this, having a capacity for sustained concentration that could knit together the most complex of problems. This capacity could be turned to pure reason. He had never had it called upon in quite this way. In fact, it was discouraged, because an azi’s understanding was full of gaps which could mislead. But this special capacity which born‑men lost in the distractions of their sense‑overloaded environments–could make him very wise as the total sum of his knowledge increased. Of this too, he was proud, knowing that a 9998 was extraordinarily capable in this regard. It would make him loved, and secure, and born‑men would never give him bad tape.

“Highest life native to the world are the Calibans,” the tape told him. “And if you understand them, they will do you no harm…”

ix

T42 days MAT

Venture log

“…arrival Gehenna system 1018 hours 34 minutes mission apparent time. US Swiftand US Capableto follow at one hour intervals…”

“…estimate Cyteen elapsed time: 280 days; dates will be revised on recovery of reliable reference.”

“…confirm arrival US Swifton schedule.”

“…confirm arrival US Capableon schedule.”

“…insert into orbit Gehenna II scheduled 1028 hours 15 minutes mission apparent time. All systems normal. All conditions within parameters predicted by Mercury probe. System arrival now determined to be possible within narrower margin to be calculated for future use. Systemic positions were accurately predicted by Mercury probe data. Venturewill make further observations during exit from Gehenna system…”

x

T42 days MAT

US Venture

Office of Col. James A. Conn

It was there, real and solid. The world. Gehenna II, the designation was; Newport, he reckoned to record the name. Their world. Conn sat at his desk in front of the viewer with his hands steepled in front of him and looked at the transmitted image, trying to milk more detail from it than the vid was giving them yet. The second of six planets, a great deal blue and a great deal white, and otherwise brown with vast deserts, sparsely patched with green. Not quite as green as Cyteen. But similar. The image hazed in his eyes as he thought not of where he was going, but of places he had been…and of Jean, buried back home; and what she would say, when they had been like Beaumont and Davies, travelling together. Even the war had not stopped that. She had been there. With him. There existed that faint far thought in his mind that he had committed some kind of desertion, not a great one, but at least a small one, that he had hoped for happiness coming here, for something more to do. He left her there, and there was no one to tend her grave and no one who would care. That had seemed such a small thing–go on, she would say, with that characteristic wave of her hand when he hung his thoughts on trivialities. Go on, with that crisp decisiveness in her voice that had sometimes annoyed him and sometimes been so dear: Lord, Jamie, what’s a point in all of that?

Something had gone out of him since Jean was gone: the edge that had been important when he was younger, perhaps; or the quickness that crackle in Jean’s voice had set into him; or the confidence–that she was there, to back him and to second guess him.

Go on, he could hear her saying, when he pulled out of Cyteen; when he took the assignment; and now–go on, when it came down to permanency here.

Go on–when it came to the most important assignment of his life, and no Jean to tell it to. It all meant very little against that measure. For the smallest evening with her face looking back at him–he would trade anything to have that back. But there were no takers. And more–he knew what lived down there, that it was not Cyteen, however homelike it looked from orbit.

The light over the door flashed, someone seeking entry. He reached across to the console and pushed the button–“Ada,” he said curiously as she came in.

“Ah, you’ve got it,” she murmured, indicating the screen. “I wanted to make sure you were awake.”

“No chance I’d miss it. I’d guess the lounge has it too.”

“You couldn’t fit another body in there. I’m going down to 30; the officers are at the screen down there.”

“I’ll come down when the vid gets more detail.”

“Right.”

She went her way. Bob Davies would be down there. Jealousy touched him, slight and shameful. There would be Gallin and Sedgewick and Dean and Chiles; and the rest of the mission…

One horizon, one site for years ahead. Blueskyed. Grounded forever. That was what it came to. And whatever private misgivings anyone had now, it was too late.

Look at that, he could imagine Jean saying. And: Don’t take stupid chances, Jamie.

Don’t you, he would say.

He looked back at the image, at the bluegreen world that was not home at all. The whole thing was a stupid chance. An ambition which Jean had never shared.

“Col. Conn,” the com said, Mary Engles’ voice. “Are you there, colonel?”

He acknowledged, a flick of the key. “Captain.”

“We’ve got a fix on the landing site coming up.”

A shiver went over his skin. “What do you reckon in schedules?”

“We’re going to ride here one more day and do mapping and data confirmation before we let you out down there. You’ll want that time to order your sequence of drop. I’ll be feeding you the shuttle passenger slots, and you fill them up at your own discretion. The equipment drop is all standard procedure with us, and we’ve got all that down as routine. You handle your own people according to your own preferences. You will need some of the construction personnel in your initial drop. I’d like to ask you to stay on board until the final load. In case of questions.”

“Good enough. I’ll wait your printout.”

“We have suggestions, based on experience. I’ll pass them to you, by your leave.”

“No umbrage, captain. Experience is appreciated.”

“A professional attitude, colonel, and appreciated in turn. Printout follows.”

He opened the desk cabinet, took out a bottle and a glass and poured himself a drink, soothed his nerves while the printout started spilling onto his desk.

Everything would have to be packed. Mostly there were the microfax books and the study tapes, that were precious. Uniforms–there were no more uniforms where they were going. They became citizens down there. Colonists. No more amenities either, in spite of the cases of soap. He meant to have a shower morning and evening during the unloading. It was that kind of thing one missed most under the conditions he was going to face. Soap. Hot water. Pure water. And a glass of whiskey in the evenings.

The printout grew. On the screen, the tighter focus came in. It agreed with the photos in the mission documents.

Patterns showed up under tight focus…the same patterns which the probe had abundantly reported, curious mounds near seacoasts and rivers, vast maze designs which interrupted the sparse green with tracings of brown lines, loops and rays stretching over kilometers of river‑bank and coastline.

That was where they were going.

xi

T43 days MAT

Communication: mission command

“…First drop scheduled 1042 hours 25 minutes mission apparent time. Capt. Ada Beaumont commanding. Selected for first drop: M/Sgt. Ilya V. Burdette with five seats; M/Sgt. Pavlos D. M. Bilas, with five seats; M/Sgt. Dinah L. Sigury, two seats; Cpl. Nina N. Ferry, one seat; Sgt. Jan Vandermeer, one seat; Capt. Bethan M. Dean, one seat; Dr. Frelan D. Wilson, one seat; Dr. Marco X. Gutierrez, one seat; Dr. Park Young, one seat; Dr. Hayden L. Savin, one seat; workers A 187‑6788 through A 208‑0985, thirty seats.”

xii

T43 days MAT

Venture loading bay one

“He’s not coming,” Ada Beaumont said quietly, rested her hand on her husband’s back, kept her eyes front, on the movement of machinery, the loading of cannisters onto the lift, an intermittent clank and crash.

Bob Davies said nothing. Nothing was really called for, and Bob was careful with protocols. Ada stayed still a moment–looked aside where some of the ship’s crew were rigging the ropes to channel boarding personnel to the lift–but the bay up on the frame was empty yet, the shuttle on its way up from Venture’s belly, close to match‑up with the personnel dock. The lift yonder would take them by groups of ten, synch them out of Venture’s comfortable rotation, to let them board the null G shuttle. The azi were to go first, taking the upright berths in the hold and to the rear of the cabin, and then the citizen complements would follow, in very short sequence.

But Conn stayed in his quarters. He had rarely come out of them since their arrival in the system. The ship was crowded; departments were busy with their plans: possibly no one noticed. He played cards and drank with the two of them–he had done that, at the end of watches, regularly. But he never came out among the staff.

“I think,” Ada Beaumont said more quietly still, when the crew was furthest from them and only Bob could possibly hear. “I think Jim shouldn’t have taken this one. I wish he’d take the out he still has and go back to Cyteen. Claim health reasons.”

And then, in further silence, Bob venturing no comment: “What he actually said was–‘You handle things. You’ll be doing that, mostly. The old man just wants to ride it out easy.’”

“He wasn’t that way,” Bob said finally.

“It’s leaving Cyteen. It’s Jean, I think. He never showed how bad that hurt.”

Bob Davies ducked his head. There was noise in the corridor to the left. Some of the azi were coming up. The clock ran closer and closer to their inevitable departure. He reached and took his wife’s hand–himself in the khaki that was the uniform of the day for everyone headed planetward, civ or military. “So maybe that’s why he can sit up here; because he can lean on you. Because he knows you’ll do it. You can handle it. And there’s Pete Gallin. He’s all right.”

“It’s no way to start out.”

“Hang, he can’t make every launch down here.”

“ I’dbe here,” Beaumont said. She shook her head. The azi line entered the bay, brighteyed, in soiled white coveralls; weeks with no bathing, some of them with gall sores from the bunks. There were already difficulties. Some of the details regarding the azi were not at all pretty, not the comfortable view of things the science people or even the troops had had of the voyage. At least Conn had been down seeing to the azi, she gave him that. He had been down in the holds during the voyage, maybe too often.

Now Conn handed it to her. She knew the silent language. Had served with Conn before. Knew his limits.

He had been drinking–a lot. That was the truth she did not tell even Bob.

xiii

T43 days MAT

Venture communications log

“ Ventureshuttle one: unloading now complete; will lift at ready and return to dock. Weather onworld good and general conditions excellent. Landing area is now marked with the locator signal…”

“ Ventureshuttle two now leaving orbit and heading for landing site…”

xiv

T45 days MAT

Venture hold, azi section

“Passage 14,” the silk‑smooth voice intoned, “will be J 429‑687 through J 891‑5567; passage 15…”

Jin smiled inwardly, not with the face, which was unaccustomed to emotion. Emotion was between himself and the tape, between himself and the voice which caressed, promised, praised, since his childhood. He had no need to show others what he felt, or that he felt, unless someone spoke directly to him and entered the bubble which was his private world.

When the time came, he listened to the voice and gathered himself up along with the rest of them in his aisle, stood patiently as everyone lined up, coming down the ladder to join them. And then the word was given and the file moved, out the door they had not passed since they had entered the ship, and through the corridors of the ship to the cold room which admitted them to the lift chamber. The lift jolted and slid one way and the other, and opened again where there was no gravity at all, so that they drifted–“Hold the lines,” a born‑man told them, and Jin seized the cord along with the rest, beside a silver clip on the line. “Hold to the clips with one hand and pull yourselves along gently,” the born‑man said, and he did so, flew easily upward along the line in the company of others, until they had come to the hatch of the ship which would take them to the World.

It was more lines, inside; and they were jammed very tightly into the back of the hold while more and more azi were loaded on after them. “Secure your handgrips,” a born‑man told them, and they did so, locking in place the padded bars which protected them. “Feet to the deck.” They did the best they could.

It took a short time to load. They were patient, and the others moved with dispatch: the hatch closed and a born‑man voice said: “Hold tight.”

So they went, a hard kick which sent them on their way and gave them the feeling that they were lying on the floor on top of each other and not standing upright. No one spoke. There was no need. The tape had already told them where they were going and how long it would take to get there, and if they talked, they might miss instruction.

They believed in the new world and in themselves with all their hearts, and Jin was pleased even in the discomfort of the acceleration, because it meant they were going there faster.

They made entry, and the air heated, so that from time to time they wiped sweat from their faces, crowded as they were. But weight was on their feet now, and it was a long, slow flight as the engines changed over to ordinary flight.

“Landing in fifteen minutes,” the born‑man voice said, and soon, very soon, the motion changed again, and the noise increased, which was the settling of the shuttle downward, gentle as the settling of a leaf to the ground.

They waited, still silent, until the big cargo hatch opened where they had not realized a hatch existed. Daylight flooded in, and the coolth of outside breezes flooded through the double lock.

“File out,” the voice told them. “Go down the ramp and straight ahead. A supervisor will give you your packets and your assignments. Goodbye.”

They unlocked the restraints line by line in reverse order to that in which they had loaded, and in that order they went down the ramp.

Light hit Jin’s eyes, the sight of a broad gray river–blue sky, and green forest of saplings beyond a hazy shore–the scars of a camp on this one, where earthmovers were already at work tearing up the black earth. Clean air filled his lungs, and the sun touched the stubble on his head and his face. His heart was beating hard.

He knew what he had to do now. The tapes had told him before and during the voyage. He had reached the real beginning of his life and nothing but this had ever had meaning.

III

LANDING

Military Personnel:

Col. James A. Conn, governor general

Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, It. governor

Maj. Peter T. Gallin, personnel

M/Sgt. Ilya V. Burdette, Corps of Engineers

Cpl. Antonia M. Cole

Spec. Martin H. Andresson

Spec. Emilie Kontrin

Spec. Danton X. Norris

M/Sgt. Danielle L. Emberton, tactical op.

Spec. Lewiston W. Rogers

Spec. Hamil N. Masu

Spec. Grigori R. Tamilin

M/Sgt. Pavlos D. M. Bilas, maintenance

Spec. Dorothy T. Kyle

Spec. Egan I. Innis

Spec. Lucas M. White

Spec. Eron 678‑4578 Miles

Spec. Upton R. Patrick

Spec. Gene T. Troyes

Spec. Tyler W. Hammett

Spec. Kelley N. Matsuo

Spec. Belle M. Rider

Spec. Vela K. James

Spec. Matthew R. Mayes

Spec. Adrian C. Potts

Spec. Vasily C. Orlov

Spec. Rinata W. Quarry

Spec. Kito A. M. Kabir

Spec. Sita Chandrus

M/Sgt. Dinah L. Sigury, communications

Spec. Yung Kim

Spec. Lee P. de Witt

M/Sgt. Thomas W. Oliver, quartermaster

Cpl. Nina N. Ferry

Pfc. Hayes Brandon

Lt. Romy T. Jones, special forces

Sgt. Jan Vandermeer

Spec. Kathryn S. Flanahan

Spec. Charles M. Ogden

M/Sgt. Zell T. Parham, security

Cpl. Quintan R. Witten

Capt. Jessica N. Sedgewick, confessor‑advocate

Capt. Bethan M. Dean, surgeon

Capt. Robert T. Hamil, surgeon

Lt. Regan T. Chiles, computer services

Civilian Personnel:

Secretarial personnel: 12

Medical/surgical: 1

Medical/paramedic: 7

Mechanical maintenance: 20

Distribution and warehousing: 20

Robert H. Davies

Security: 12

Computer service: 4

Computer maintenance: 2

Librarian: 1

Agricultural specialists: 10

Harold B. Hill

Geologists: 5

Meteorologist: 1

Biologists: 6

Marco X. Gutierrez

Eva K. Jenks

Education: 5

Cartographer: 1

Management supervisors: 4

Biocycle engineers: 4

Construction personnel: 150

Food preparation specialists: 6

Industrial specialists: 15

Mining engineers: 2

Energy systems supervisors: 8

TOTAL MILITARY 45

TOTAL CITIZEN STAFF 341; TOTAL NONASSIGNED DEPENDENTS: 111; TOTAL ALL CITIZENS: 452

ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL:

“A” class: 2890

Jin 458‑9998

Pia 86‑687

“B” class: 12389

“M” class: 4566

“P” class: 20788

“V” class: 1278

TOTAL ALL NONCITIZENS: 41911

TOTAL ALL MISSION: 42363

i

Day 03, Colony Reckoning

Newport Base, Gehenna System

The hatch opened, the ramp went down, and Conn looked about him…at stripped earth, at endless blocks of two‑man tents, at the shining power tower and the solar array that caught the morning sun. Beyond them was the river and on their left, the sea. From the origin of the river, mountains rose; and forest skirted them; and plains running down to this site, with forest spilling onto it from another low surge of hills behind the shuttle landing. He knew the map in his sleep, what was here now and what would come. He inhaled the warm air, which was laden with a combination of strange scents; felt the gravity which was different than the standard G of ships and a little different than that of Cyteen. He felt a slight sense of panic and refused to betray it.

The staff waited, solemn, at the foot of the ramp. He walked down–he wore civilian clothes now, no uniform; and took the hand of Ada Beaumont and of Bob Davies and of Peter Gallin…in shock at the change in them, at shaved heads and shaved faces, when the rest of the mission was now at least well‑stubbled.

“I didn’t authorize this,” he said to Ada Beaumont. Temper surged up in him; outrage. He remembered they had witnesses and smothered the oath. “What’s going on?”

“It seemed,” Beaumont said firmly, “efficient. It’s dirty down here.”

He swept a glance about him, at the sameness; at military officers converted to azi‑like conformity. Beaumont’s democracy. Beaumont’s style. He scowled. “Trouble?”

“No. My initiative. It seemed to create a distinction down here–apart from regulations. I apologize, sir.”

In public. In front of the others. He took a grip on himself. “It seems,” he said, “a good idea on that basis.” He looked beyond them, and about him–at the last load coming off the last shuttle flight, his personal baggage and less essential items, and the last few techs. He let his eyes focus on the mountains, on the whole sweep of the land.

On the far bank of the river rose grassy mounds, abrupt and distinctive. He pointed that way. “Those are the neighbors, are they?”

“That’s the caliban mounds, yes, sir.”

He stared at them. At uncertainty. He wished they had not been so close. He scanned the camp, the tents which stretched row on row onto the plain at their right…azi, above forty thousand azi, a city in plastic and dust. The earthmovers whined away, making more bare dirt. Permanent walls were going up in the center of the camp, foamset domes, obscured by the dust of a crawler. “What’s in?” he asked Beaumont. “Got the hookup?”

“Power’s functioning as of half an hour ago, and we’re shifted off the emergency generator. We’re now on the Newport Power Company. They’re laying the second line of pipe now, so we’ll have waste treatment soon. Hot water’s at a premium, but the food service people have all they need.”

He walked with them, beside Beaumont, gave a desultory wave at workers who had come out with a transport to carry the baggage to camp. He walked, electing not to use the transport…inhaled the dust and the strangeness and the unfamiliar smell of sea not far distant. In some respects it was like Cyteen. There was a feeling of insulation about him, a sense of unreality; he shook it off and looked about him for plant life that might prove to his senses that he was on an alien world–but the earthmovers had scraped all that away. There were only the azi tents, all of them in neat lines stretching away into the dust; and finally the camp center, where earthmovers dug the foundations for more plastic foam construction, where dome after dome had already sprung up like white fungus among the tents, one bubbled onto the next.

They were thirty six hours into the construction.

“You’ve done a good job,” he said to Ada Beaumont, loudly, amends for the scene at the ramp, in which he had embarrassed himself. “A good job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

There was caution there. In all of them. He looked about him again, at the entourage of department heads who had begun to follow them, at others who had joined them in their walk into the center of the camp. “I’ll be meeting with you,” he said. “But it’s all automatic, isn’t it? Meetings aren’t as important as your building and your job schedules. So I’ll postpone all of the formalities. I think it’s more important to get everyone under shelter.”

There were nods, murmurs, excuses finally as one and another of them found reason to move off.

“I’d like to find my own quarters,” Conn said. “I’m tired.”

“Yes, sir,” Beaumont said quietly. “This way. We’ve made them as comfortable as possible.”

He was grateful. He squared his shoulders out of the slump they had acquired, walked with her and with Bob and Gallin in that direction. She opened the door of a smallish dome bubbled onto the main one, with a plastic paned window and a door sawed out of the foam and refitted on hinges. There was a bed inside, already made up; and a real desk, and a packing mat for a rug on the foamset flooring.

“That’s good,” he said, “that’s real good.” And when the company made to leave: “Captain. Can I talk to you a moment?”

“Sir.” She stayed. Bob Davies and Pete Gallin discretely withdrew, and the reg who had brought some of the luggage in deposited it near the door and closed the door on his way out.

“I think you know,” he said, “that something’s wrong. I imagine it bothered you–my not being down here.”

“I understand the procedure calls for the ranking officer to stay on the ship in case–”

“Don’t put me off.”

“I’ve had some concern.”

“All right. You’ve had some concern.” He took a breath, jammed his hands into his belt behind him. “I’ll be honest with you. I reckoned you could handle the landing, the whole setup if you had to.–I’m feeling a bit of strain, Ada. A bit of strain. I’m getting a little arthritis. You understand me? The back’s hurting me a bit.”

“You think there’s a problem with the rejuv?”

“I know I’m taking more pills than I used to. You use more when you’re under stress. Maybe it’s that. I’ve thought about resigning, going back to Cyteen on a medical. I’ve thought about that. I don’t like the thought. I’ve never run from anything.”

“If your health–”

“Just listen to me. What I’m going to do–I’m going to take the command for a few weeks; and then I’m going to step down and retire to an advisory position.”

“Sir–”

“Don’t sir me. Not here. Not after this long. I just wanted to tell you the stuffs failing on me. That’s why we have redundancies in the system, isn’t it? You’re the real choice, you. I’m just lending my experience. That’s all.”

“If you want it that way.”

“I just want to rest, Ada. It wasn’t why I came. It’s what I want now.”

“There’s still that ship up there.”

“No.”

“I’ll take care of things, then.” She put her hands in her hip pockets, blinked at him with pale eyes in a naked‑skulled face, showing age. “I think then–begging your pardon…it might be a wise, thing under the circumstances–to take a joint command and ease the moment when it comes.”

“Eager for it, are you?”

“Jim–”

“You’ve already started doing things your way. That’s all right.”

“The staff has wondered, you know–your absence. And I think if you talked to them frankly, made it clear, your health, your reasons–you really are a figure they respect; I think they’d be glad to know why you’ve suddenly gone less visible, that it’s a personal thing and not some upperlevel friction in command.”

“Is that the rumor?”

“One’s never sure just what the rumors are, but I think that’s some of it. There’s a little bit of strain.”

“Troopers and civs?”

“No. Us and Them. The visible distinction–” She rubbed her shaved scalp, selfconsciously returned the hand to her pocket. “Well, it solved an immediate problem. People get tired and they get touchy; and I went and did that on the spot, that being the way I knew how to say it. And the rest of the staff followed suit. Maybe it was wrong.”

“If it solved the problem it was right. I’ll talk to them. I’ll make everything clear in my own way.”

“Yes, sir.” Soft and quiet.

“Don’t respect me into an early grave, Beaumont. I’m not there yet.”

“I don’t expect you to be. I expect you’ll be around handing out the orders. I’m your legs, that’s the way I see it.”

“Oh, you see further than that. You’ll be governor. I think that’ll suit you.”

She was silent a moment. “I considered it a matter of friendship. I’d like to keep it on that basis.”

“I’ll rest a bit,” he said.

“All right.” She tended to the door, stopped and looked back. “I’ll warn you about the door–you have to keep the door closed. Lizards have discovered the camp. They’ll get into tents, anything. And the window–they come in windows if you have the lights on and the windows open. We try not to carry any of the flitters back to the camp, but a few have made it in, and they’ll make a nuisance of themselves.”

He nodded. Loathed the thought.

“Sir,” she said quietly, left and softly tugged the thick door shut. He lay down on the bed, his head pounding in a suspended silence–the absence of the ventilation noises and the rotation of the ship and the thousand other subtle noises of the machinery. Outside the earthmovers growled and whined and beeped, and human voices shouted, but it was all far away.

The arthritis story was real. He felt it, wanted a drink; and tried to put it off–not wanting that to start, not yet, when someone else might want to call.

He had to hold off the panic, the desire to call the ship and ask to be lifted off. He had to do it until it was too late. He had never yet run; and he was determined it would not be this time, this last, hardest time.

ii

Day 03, CR

That evening (one had to think in terms of evening again, not main‑day and alterday, had to learn that things shut down at night, and everyone slept and ate on the same schedules)…that evening in the main dome, Conn stood up at the staff mess and announced the changes. “Not so bad, really,” he said, “since there’s really a need for a governing board and not a military command here. Headquarters and the Colonial Office left that to our discretion, what sort of authority to set up, whether military or council form; and I think that there’s a level of staff participation here that lends itself to council government. All department heads will sit on the board. Capt. Beaumont and I will share the governorship and preside jointly when we’re both present. Maj. Gallin will take vicechairman’s rank. And for the rest, there’s the structural precedence in various areas of responsibility as the charter outlines them.” He looked down the table at faces that showed the stress of long hours and primitive conditions. At Bilas, with a bandage on his shaven temple. That had been bothering him: the thoughts wandered. “Bilas–you had an accident?”

“Rock, sir. A tread threw it up.”

“So.” He surveyed all the faces, all the shaven skulls–commissioned officers and noncoms and civs. He blinked, absently passed a hand over his thinning, rejuv‑silvered hair. “I’d shave it off too, you know,” he said, “but there’s not much of it.” Nervous laughs from the faces down the table. Uncertain humor. And then the thread came back to him. “So we’ve got the power in; got electricity in some spots. Camp’s got power for cooking and freezing. Land’s cleared at least in the camp area. We’ve all got some kind of shelter over our heads; we’ve done, what, seven thousand years of civilization in just about three days?” He was not sure of the seven thousand years, but he had read it in a book somewhere, how long humankind had taken about certain steps, and he saw eyes paying earnest attention to what sounded like praise. “That’s good. That’s real good. We’ve got excuse for all of us to slow down soon. But we want to do what we can while the bloom’s on the matter, while we’re all motivated by maybe wanting a hot shower and a warmer bed. What’s the prospect on the habitats? Maybe this week we can start them? Or are we going to have to put that off?”

“We’re looking,” Beaumont said, beside him, seated, “at getting all the personnel into solid housing by tomorrow, even if we have to take crowded conditions. So we’ll be dry if it rains. And we’re putting a good graded road through the azi camp, to help them under the same conditions. We’re clearing and plowing tomorrow; looking at maybe getting the sets in the ground for the garden in three more days; maybe getting general plumbing out to the azi camp.”

“That’s fine,” Conn said. “That’s way ahead of schedule.”

“Subject to weather.”

“Any–”

“Hey!” someone exclaimed suddenly, down the table, and swore: people came off the benches at that end of the table. There was laughter and a man dived under the table and came up with a meter long green lizard. Conn stared at it in a daze, the struggling reptile, the grinning staffer and the rest of them–Gutierrez, of the bio section.

“Is that,” Conn asked, “a resident?”

“This, sir–this is an ariel. They’re quick: probably got past the door while we were coming into the hut.” He set it down a moment on the vacated section of the long table, and it rested there immobile, green and delicate, neck frills spread like feathers.

“I think it better find its own supper,” Beaumont said. “Take it out, will you?”

Gutierrez picked it up again. Someone held the door for him. He walked to it and, bending, gave it a gentle toss into the darkness outside.

“Been back a dozen times,” Bilas said. Conn felt his nerves frayed at the thought of such persistence.

Gutierrez took his seat again, and so did the others.

“Any of the big ones?” Conn asked.

“Just ariels,” Gutierrez said. “They get into the huts and tents and we just put them out. No one’s been hurt, us or them.”

“We just live with them,” Conn said. “We knew that, didn’t we?” He felt shaky, and sat down again. “There are some things to do. Administrative things. I’d really like to get most of the programs launched in our tenure. The ships–leave in a few hours. And we don’t see them again until three years from now. Until they arrive with the technicians and the setup for the birthlabs, at which point this world really begins to grow. Everything we do really has to be toward that setup. The labs, when they arrive, will be turning out a thousand newborns every nine months; and in the meanwhile we’ll have young ones born here, with all of that to take care of. We’ve got azi who don’t know anything about bringing up children, which is something Education’s got to see to. We’ve got mapping to do, to lay out the pattern of development down to the last meter. We’ve got to locate all the hazards, because we can’t have kids running around falling into them. Three years isn’t such a long time for that. And long before then, we’re going to have births. You’ve all thought of that, I’m sure.” Nervous laughter from the assembly. “I think it’s going to go well. We’ve got everything in our favor. Seven thousand years in three days. We’ll come up another few millennia while we’re waiting, and take another big step again when the ships get those labs to us. And this place has to be safe by then. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

A glass lifted: Ilya Burdette, down the table. “For the colonel!” All the glasses went up, and everyone echoed it. “For the captain!” someone else yelled; and they drank to Beaumont. It was a good feeling in the place. Noisy.

“What about beer?” someone yelled from the second table. “How many days before beer?”

Tired faces broke into grins. “Ag has a plan,” a civ yelled back. “You get us fields, you get your beer.”

“To beer!” someone shouted, and everyone shouted, and Conn laughed along with the rest.

“Civilization,” someone else yelled, and they drank down the drinks they did have, and the sweat and the exhaustion and the long hours seemed not to matter to them.

iii

Venture log

“Departure effected, 1213 hours 17 minutes mission apparent time. En route to jump point, all systems normal. US Swiftand US Capableare following at one hour intervals. Last communication with ground base at 1213 hours indicated excellent conditions and progress ahead of schedule: see message log. Estimate jump point arrival at 1240…”

iv

Day 07, CR

Jin stepped forward as the line moved closer to the small makeshift table the supervisors had set up among the tents. He wore a jacket over his coveralls in the morning chill. The air was brisk and pleasant like spring on the world he had left. He remained content. They were clean again, besides the dust that he had to rub off his face and hands, that ground itself into his clean coveralls. They had the pipe laid, and the pumps set up, bringing clean water up to the camp, so that they had been able to shower under a long elevated pipe with holes in it–bracing cold, and there was no soap, but it had been good all the same. They could shower, they had been informed, anytime they came offshift, because there was plenty of water. There were bladed razors they could shave with, but they could let their hair and brows grow again. Faces had their expression back–almost. His head would be darkening with hair again, although he had not seen a mirror since Cyteen. He could feel it, and more, he had seen a sib or two about the sprawling camp, so he knew: he looked better.

And he tingled with excitement, and was hollowed by no small insecurity, because this line they were standing in, early in the morning, had to do with final assignments.

It all went very quickly. The comp the supervisor used was a portable. The born‑man plugged in the numbers as given and it sorted through them and came up with assignments. Some azi were turned aside, to wait longer; some went through without a hitch. The man in front of him went through.

“Next,” the born‑man said.

“J 458‑9998,” he said promptly, and watched it typed in.

“Preferred mate.”

“P 86‑687.”

The man looked. One could never see the screens, whatever the operators knew, whatever the screens gave back. The machine was full of his life, his records, all that he was and all they meant him to be.

The man wrote on a plastic square and gave it to him. “Confirmed. Tent 907, row five. Go there now.”

The next azi behind him was already giving her number. Jin turned away–all his baggage in hand, his small kit with the steel razor and the toothbrush and the washcloth: he was packed.

5907 was no small hike distant among the tents, down the long rows of bare dust and tents indistinguishable except for tags hung at their entries. Other walkers drifted ahead of him, azi likewise carrying their white assignment chits in hand, in the early morning with the sun coming up hazy over the tents and the small tracks and serpentine tail‑marks of ariels in the dust. An ariel wandered across the lane, leisurely, paying no heed at all to the walkers, stopped only when it had reached the edge of a tent, and turned a hard eye toward them. There were more than twenty thousand tents, all set out to the east of the big permanent domes the born‑men had made for themselves. Jin had helped set up the tents in this section, had helped in the surveying to peg down the marker lines, so that he had a good idea where he was going and where number 5907 was. He met cross‑traffic, some of the azi from other areas, where other desks might be set up: it was like a city, this vast expanse of streets and tents, like the city he had seen the day they went to the shuttle port, which was his first sight of so great a number of dwellings.

Forty thousand azi. Thousands upon thousands of tents in blocks of ten. He came to 901 and 903 and 905, at last to 907, a tent no different than the others: he bent down and started to go in–but she was already there. She. Squatting at the doorflap, he tossed his kit onto the pallet she had not chosen, and Pia sat there crosslegged looking at him until he came inside and sat down in the light from the open tentflap.

He said nothing, finding nothing appropriate to say. He was excited about being near her at last, but what they were supposed to do together, which he had never done with anyone–that was for nighttime, after their shift was done. The tape had said so.

Her hair was growing back, like his, a darkness on her skull; and her eyes had brows again.

“You’re thinner,” she said.

“Yes. So are you. I wished we could have been near each other on the voyage.”

“The tape asked me to name an azi I might like. I named Tal 23. Then it asked about 9998s; about you in particular. I hadn’t thought about you. But the tape said you had named me.”

“Yes.”

“So I thought that I ought to change my mind and name you, then. I hadn’t imagined you would put me first on your list.”

“You were the only one. I always liked you. I couldn’t think of anyone else. I hope it’s all right.”

“Yes. I feel really good about it.”

He looked at her, a lift of his eyes from their former focus on the matting and on his knees and hands, met eyes looking at him, and thought again about what they were supposed to do together in the night–which was like the cattle in the spring fields, or the born‑men in their houses and their fine beds, which he had long since realized resulted in births. He had never known azi who did the like: there were tapes which made him imagine doing such things, but this, he believed, would be somehow different.

“Have you ever done sex before?” he asked.

“No. Have you?”

“No,” he said. And because he was a 9998 and confident of his reason: “May I?” he asked, and put out his hand to touch her face. She put her hand on his, and it felt delicately alive and stirred him in a way only the tapes could do before this. He grew frightened then, and dropped his hand to his knee. “We have to wait till tonight.”

“Yes.” She looked no less disturbed. Her eyes were wide and dark. “I really feel like the tapes. I’m not sure that’s right.”

And then the PA came on, telling all azi who had located their assignments to go out and start their day’s work. Pia’s eyes stayed fixed on his.

“We have to go,” he said.

“Where do you work?”

“In the fields; with the engineers, for survey.”

“I’m with the ag supervisor. Tending the sets.”

He nodded–remembered the call and scrambled for his feet and the outside of the tent. She followed.

“5907,” she said, to remember, perhaps. She hurried off one way and he went the other in a great muddle of confusion–not of ignorance, but of changes; of things that waited to be experienced.

Should I feel this way? he would have liked to have asked, if he could have gone to his old supervisor, who would sit with him and ask him just the right questions. Should I think about her this way? But everyone was too busy.

There would be tape soon, he hoped, which would help them sort out the things they had seen, and comfort them and tell them whether they were right or wrong in the things they were feeling and doing. But they must be right, because the born‑men were proceeding on schedule, and in spite of their shouts and their impatience, they stopped sometimes to say that they were pleased.

This was the thing Jin loved. He did everything meticulously and expanded inside whenever the supervisor would tell him that something was right or good. “Easy,” the supervisor would say at times, when he had run himself breathless taking a message or fetching a piece of equipment; would pat his shoulder. “Easy. You don’t have to rush.” But it was clear the supervisor was pleased. For that born‑man he would have run his heart out, because he loved his job, which let him work with born‑men in the fields he loved, observing them with a deep and growing conviction he might learn how to be what they were. The tapes had promised him.

v

Day 32, CR

Gutierrez stopped on the hillside, squatted down on the scraped earth and surveyed the new mound heaved up on this side of the river. Eva Jenks of bio dropped down beside him, and beside her, the special forces op Ogden with his rifle on his knees. Morris, out of engineering, came puffing up the slope from behind and dropped down beside them, a second rifle‑carrier, in case.

It was indisputably a mound…on their side of the river; and new as last night. The old mounds lay directly across that gray expanse of water, about a half a kilometer across at this point–the Styx, they called it, a joke–the way they called the world Gehenna at this stage, for the dust and the conditions; Gehenna II, Gehenna Too, like the star, and not Newport. But Styx was fast getting to be the real name of this place, more colorful than Forbes River, which was the name on the maps. The Styx and the calibans. A mingling of myths. But this one had gotten out of its bounds.

“I’d really like to have an aerial shot of that,” Jenks said. “You know, it looks like it’s matched up with the lines on the other side.”

“Maybe it has to do with orientation to the river or the sun,” Gutierrez reckoned. “If we knew why they built mounds at all.”

“Might use some kind of magnetic field orientation.”

“Might.”

“Whatever they’re doing,” Norris said, “we can’t have them doing this in the fields. This area is gridded out for future housing. We’ve got to set up some kind of barrier that these things are going to respect; we need to know how deep they dig. Can’t put up a barrier if we don’t know that.”

“I think we could justify bothering this one,” Gutierrez said, without joy in the prospect.

“It’s not guaranteed to be as deep a burrow as they can get,” Jenks said. “After all, it’s new. I don’t think it would mean anything much if you dug into it. And the other mounds are all in protectorate.”

“Well, the bio department made the protectorate,” Norris said.

“The bio department won’t budge on that,” Gutierrez said. “Sorry.”

A silence. “Then what we have to do,” said Ogden, “is put it back across the river.”

“Look,” Norris said, “we could just put one of the building barriers up against it and if it tunnels under, then we’ll know, won’t we? A test. It’s on the riverside. It won’t be digging below the watertable, not without getting wet.”

“They’re gilled, aren’t they?”

“They may be gilled, but I don’t think any tunnels would hold up.” Norris squinted into the morning sun and considered a moment. “By the amount of dirt and the dryness of it–What’s the function of the mounds? You figure that out?”

“I think,” Gutierrez said, “it rather likely has something to do with the eggs. They do lay eggs. Probably an elaborate ventilation system, like some of the colony insects; or an incubation device, using the sun. I think when we get to examining the whole system, the orientation might have to do with the prevailing winds.”

“Let’s have a look,” said Jenks.

“All right.” Gutierrez stood up, brushed off his trousers and waited on Norris and Ogden, walked down the face of the last hill the earth‑movers had stripped. They headed toward the mound, down across the grassy interval.

As they reached the trough, a stone’s cast from the mound of disturbed grass and dark earth, a darkish movement topped the crest of the mound and whipped up into full view, three meters long and muddy gray.

Everyone stopped. It was a simultaneous reaction. The safety went off Ogden’s rifle.

“Don’t shoot,” Gutierrez said. “Don’t even think of shooting. Just stand still. We don’t know what their eyesight is like. Just stand still and let it think; it’s likely to be curious as the ariels.”

“Ugly bastard,” Norris said. There was no dispute about that. The ariels prepared them for beauty, moved lively and lightly, fluttering their collar fronds and preening like birds. But the caliban squatted heavily on its ridge and swelled its throat, puffing out a knobbed and plated back collar, all one dull gray and smeared with black mud.

“That’s a little aggression,” Jenks said. “Threat display. But it’s not making any move on us.”

“Lord,” Ogden said, “if thosestart waddling through the base they’re going to need room, aren’t they?”

“It eats fish,” Gutierrez reminded them. “It’s more interested in the river than in anything else.”

“He means,” Jenks said, “that if you stand between that fellow and the river you’re a lot more likely to get run down by accident. It might run for its mound access; or for the river. If it runs.”

“Stay put,” Gutierrez said, and took a cautious step forward.

“Sir,” Ogden said, “we’re not supposed to lose you.”

“Well, I don’t plan to get lost. Just stay put. You too, Eva.” He started forward, moving carefully, watching all the small reactions, the timing of the raising and lowering of the knobbed collar, the breathing that swelled and diminished its pebbly sides. The jaws had teeth. A lot of them. He knew that. A thick black serpent of a tongue flicked out and retreated, flicked again. That was investigation. Gutierrez stopped and let it smell the air.

The caliban sat a moment more. Turned its head with reptilian deliberation and regarded him with one vertically slit jade eye the size of a saucer. The collar lifted and lowered. Gutierrez took another step and another, right to the base of the mound now, which rose up three times his height.

Of a sudden the caliban stood up, lashed its tail and dislodged clods of earth as it stiffened its four bowed legs and got its belly off the ground. It dipped its head to keep him in view, a sidelong view of that same golden, vertical‑slitted eye.

That was close enough, then. Gutierrez felt backward for a step, began a careful retreat, pace by pace.

The caliban came down toward him the same way, one planting of a thick‑clawed foot and a similar planting of the opposing hind foot, one two three four, that covered an amazing amount of ground too quickly. “Don’t shoot,” he heard Eva Jenks’ voice, and was not sure at the moment that he agreed. He stopped, afraid to run. The caliban stopped likewise and looked at him a body length distant.

“Get out of there,” Jenks yelled at him.

The tongue went out and the head lifted in Jenks’ direction. It was over knee high when it was squatting and waist high when it stood up; and it could move much faster than anticipated. The tail moved restlessly, and Gutierrez took that into account too, because it was a weapon that could snap a human spine if the caliban traded ends.

The collar went flat again, the head dipped and then angled the same slitted eye toward him. It leaned forward slowly, turning the head to regard his foot; and that leaning began to lessen the distance between them.

“Move!” Jenks shouted.

The tongue darted out, thick as his wrist, and flicked lightly about his booted, dusty foot; the caliban retracted it, serpentined aside with a scraping of sod, regarded him again with a chill amber eye. The tail swept close and whipped back short of hitting him. Then in remote grandeur the caliban waddled back and climbed its mound. Gutierrez finally felt the pounding of his own heart. He turned and walked back to his own party, but Jenks was already running toward him and Ogden was close behind, with Morris following.

Gutierrez looked at Jenks in embarrassment, thinking first that he had done something stupid and secondly that the caliban had not done what they expected: it had not gone through the several days of Highland‑approach the probe team reported.

“So much for the book,” he said, still shaking. “Might be pushing on the mating season.”

“Or hunting.”

“I think we’d better try to establish a concrete barrier here, right on that hill back there.”

“Right,” Morris said. “And draw the line all around this area.”

Gutierrez looked back at the caliban, which had regained its perch on the mound. When animals violated the rules on a familiar world it indicated a phase of behavior not yet observed: nesting, for instance.

But curiosity in a species so formidably large–

“It didn’t follow the book,” he muttered. “And that makes me wonder about the rest of the script.”

Jenks said nothing. There was a limit to what bio ought to speculate on publicly. He had already said more than he felt politic; but there were people out walking the fields still relying on Mercury probe’s advice.

“I’d just suggest everyone be a bit more careful,” he said.

He walked back up the hill with the others following. The first front had sprinkled them with rain, quickly dried. There was weather moving in again that looked more serious–on the gray sea, out among the few islands which lay off the coast, a bank of cloud. There was that matter to factor in with the environment.

Might the weather make a difference in caliban moods?

And as for construction, if the weather turned in earnest–

“The foam’s not going to set too easy if we get that rain,” he said. “Neither will concrete. I think we may have to wait…but we’d better get to the maps and figure where we’re going to set that concrete barrier.”

“Two criteria,” the engineer said. “Protection from flood and our own access to areas we need.”

“One more,” Jenks said. “The calibans. Where they decide to go.”

“We can’t be warping all our plans around those lizards,” Morris said. “What I’d like to do instead, by your leave–is put a charged fence out here and see if we can’t make it unpleasant enough it’ll want to leave.”

Gutierrez considered the matter, nodded after a moment. “You can try it. Nothing that’s going to disturb the colony across the river. But if we can encourage this fellow to swim back to his side, I’d say it might be better for him and for us.”

Gutierrez looked at the clouds, and over his shoulder at the mounds, still trying to fit the behavior into patterns.

vi

Day 58 CR

The fog retreated in a general grayness of the heavens, and the wind blew cold at the window, snapping at the plastic. The heat seemed hardly adequate. Conn sat wrapped in his blanket and thinking that it might be more pleasant, privacy notwithstanding, to move into the main dome with the others. Or he could complain. Maybe someone could do something with the heater. With all that expertise out there, gathered to build a world–surely someone could do something with the space heater.

Two weeks of this kind of thing, with the waves beating at the shore and driving up the river from a monster storm somewhere at sea: water, and water everywhere. The newly cleared fields were bogs and the machinery was sinking, even sitting still. And the chill got into bones and the damp air soaked clothes so that none of them had had warm dry clothing for as long as the fog had lain over them. Clothes stank of warmth and mildew. Azi lines huddled in the drizzle and collected their food at distribution points and went back again into the soggy isolation of the tents. How they fared there Conn had no true idea, but if they had been suffering worse than the rest of the camp, then Education would have notified the staff at large.

A patter began at the window, a spatter of drops carried by a gust. When the wind blew the fog out they had rain and when the wind stopped the fog settled in. He listened to the malevolent spat of wind‑driven water, watched a thin trickle start from the corner that leaked; but he had moved the chest from beneath it, and put his laundry on the floor to soak up the leak that pooled on the foamset floor. There was no sound but that for a while, the wind and the beat of the drops; and solitude, in the thin, gray daylight that came through the rain‑spattered plastic.

It was too much. He got up and put his coat on, waited for a lull in the rain and opened the door and splashed his way around to the front door of the main dome onto which his smaller one abutted, a drenching, squelching passage through puddles on what had been a pebbled walk.

He met warmth inside, electric light and cheerfulness, the heat of the electronics and the lights which were always on here; and the bodies and the conversation and the business. “Tea, sir?” an azi asked, on duty to serve and clean in the dome; “Yes,” he murmured, sat down at the long table that was the center of all society and a great deal of the work in the staff dome. Maps cluttered its far end; the engineers were in conference, a tight cluster of heads and worried looks.

The tea arrived, and Conn took it, blinked absently at the azi and muttered a Thanks, that’s all, which took the azi out of his way and out of his thoughts. A lizard scuttled near the wall that separated off the com room: that was Ruffles. Ruffles went anywhere she/he liked, a meter long and prone to curl around the table legs or to lurk under the feet of anyone sitting still, probably because she had been spoiled with table tidbits. Clean: at least she was that. The creature had come in so persistently she had acquired a name and a grudging place in the dome. Now everyone fed the thing, and from a scant meter long, she had gotten fatter, passed a meter easily, and gone through one skin change in recent weeks.

A scrabbling climb put Ruffles onto a stack of boxes. Conn drank his tea and stared back at her golden slit eyes. Her head turned to angle one at him directly. She flared her collar and preened a bit.

“Help you, sir?” That was Bilas, making a bench creak as he sat down close by, arms on the table. Non‑com and special op colonel–they had no distinctions left. Protocols were down, everywhere.

“Just easing the aches in my bones. Any progress on that drainage?”

“We got the pipe in, but we have a silting problem. Meteorology says they’re not surprised by this one. So we hear.”

“No. It’s no surprise. We got off lightly with the last front.”

Another staffer arrived, carrying her cup–Regan Chiles dropped onto a bench opposite, scavenger‑wise spotting a body in authority and descending with every indication of problems. “Got a little difficulty,” she said. “Tape machines are down. It’s this salt air and the humidity. We pulled the most delicate parts and put them into seal; but we’re going to have to take the machines apart and clean them; and we’re really not set up for that.”

“You’ll do the best you can.” He really did not want to hear this. He looked about him desperately, found fewer people in the dome than he had expected, which distracted him with wondering why. Chiles went on talking, handing him her problems, and he nodded and tried to take them in, the overload Education was putting on Computer Maintenance, because inexpert personnel had exposed some of the portable units to the conditions outside. Because Education had programs behind schedule…and shifted blame.

“Look,” he said finally, “your chain of command runs through Maj. Gallin. All this ought to go to him.”

A pursed lip, a nod, an inwardness of the eyes. Something was amiss.

“What answer did Gallin give you?”

“Gallin just told us to fix it and to cooperate.”

“Well, you don’t go over Gallin’s head, lieutenant. You hear me.”

“Sir,” Chiles muttered, clenched her square jaw and took another breath. “But begging the colonel’s pardon, sir–my people are going shift and shift and others are idle.”

“That’s because your department has something wrong, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll talk to the other departments.” He was conscious of Bilas at his elbow, witness to it all. “I stand by Gallin, you hear. I won’t have this bypassing channels.–Drink the tea, lieutenant; both of you. If we have any problems like that, then you keep to chain of command.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir,” Bilas murmured.

He stayed there, sipping the tea, himself and Chiles and Bilas; and soon others came up the table to intimate their troubles to him, so that his stomach knotted up again in all the discomfort he had left his quarters to avoid.

And finally after he had drunk several cups of tea and had to go out to avail himself of the latrine in back of the dome, he headed back to his own quarters with his collar turned up and an ache in his bones that felt like dull needles. An ariel slithered through a puddle in his path, miniature mariner, swimming for a moment, more intent on direction than convenience, which was the habit of ariels.

A siren disturbed the air. He looked about him in the pale gray haze, tried to get location on it, and thought it was coming from somewhere near the fields.

vii

Day 58 CR

They brought Ada Beaumont back in a sheet with the blood and the rain soaking it, and Bob Davies following along after the litter with his clothes soaked and stained with mud and blood, and that look in his eyes that was nowhere, and nowhen, as if he had backed away from life.

Conn came out into the rain and looked down at the smallish bundle on the stretcher–stared confusedly, because it was always ridiculous how something as large across life as Ada, a special op who had survived Fargone and the war and the Rising, who had been wiry and cagy and full of every trick the enemy never expected–could come down to an object so small and diminished. Men and women stood with their eyes hazed with tears, in the fog and the mist, but Bob Davies just stared in shock, his face gone ghastly pale; and Conn put his hands in his pockets and felt a panic and a hollowness in his gut.

“It was a caliban burrow,” Pete Gallin said, wiped the water out of his eyes with a bloody, abraded hand. “Andresson–saw it happen.”

“Andresson.” Conn looked at the man, a thin and wispy fellow with distracted eyes.

“We were fixing that washout up there and she was talking to me on the rig when the ground behind her feet just–went. This big crawler behind her, parked, nobody on it–just started tipping for no cause. She went under it; and we had to get the winch, sir–we got another crawler turned and got the winch on it, but it was one of those lizard burrows, like–like three, four meters down; and in that soft ground, the crawler on it–the whole thing just dissolved…”

“Take precautions,” Conn said; and then thought that they were all expecting him to grieve over Beaumont, and they would hate him because he was like this. “We can’t have another.” There was a dire silence, and the bearers of the litter just stood there in the rain shifting the poles in their hands because of the weight. Their cropped heads shed beads of water, and red seeped through the thin sheeting and ran down into the puddles. “We bury in the earth,” he said, his mind darting irrecoverably to practical matters, for stationers, who were not used to that. “Over by the sea, I think, where there’s no building planned.”

He walked away–like that, in silence. He did not realize either the silence or his desertion until he was too far away to make it good. He walked to his own quarters and shut the door behind him, shed his wet jacket and flung it down on the bench.

Then he cried, standing there in the center of the room, and shivered in the cold and knew that there was nothing in Pete Gallin or in any of the others which would help him. Old as he was getting and sick as he was getting, the desertion was all on Ada’s side.

He was remarkably lucid in his shock. He knew, for instance, that the burrowing beyond the perimeters was worse news than Ada’s death. It threw into doubt all their blueprints for coexistence with the calibans. It spelled conflict. It altered the future of the world–because they had to cope with it with only the machines and the resources in their hands. When the weather cleared they would have to sit down and draw new plans, and somehow he had to pull things into a coherency that would survive. That would save forty thousand human lives.

Promotions had to be done. Gallin had to be brought up to co‑governor: Gallin–a good supervisor and a decent man and no help at all. Maybe a civ like Gutierrez–Gutierrez was the brightest of the division chiefs, in more than bio; but there was no way to jump Gutierrez over others with more seniority. Or Sedgewick–a legal mind with rank but no decisiveness.

He wiped his eyes, found his hand trembling uncontrollably.

Someone splashed up to the door, opened it without a by your leave, a sudden noise of rain and gust of cold. He looked about. It was Dean, of the medical staff.

“You all right, sir?”

He straightened his shoulders. “Quite. How’s Bob?”

“Under sedation. Are you sure, sir?”

“I’ll be changing my clothes. I’ll be over in the main dome in a minute. Just let me be.”

“Yes, sir.” A lingering look. Dean left. Conn turned to the strung clothesline which was his closet and his laundry, and picked the warmest clothes he had, still slightly damp. He wanted a drink. He wanted it very badly.

But he went and set things right in the dome instead–met with the staff, laid out plans, unable finally to go out to the burial because of the chill, because he began to shiver and the chief surgeon laid down the law–which was only what he wanted.

Tired people came back, wet, and shivering and sallow‑faced. Davies was prostrate in sickbay, under heavier sedation after the burial–had broken down entirely, hysterical and loud, which Ada had never been. Ever. Gallin sat with shadowed eyes and held a steaming cup in front of him at table. “You’re going to have to survey the area,” Conn said to him, with others at the table, because there was no privacy, “and you’re going to have to keep surveying, to find out if there’s more undermining.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ruffles, on her stack of boxes, flicked her tongue. Conn regarded her balefully past Gallin’s slumped shoulder and bowed head. “It was an accident,” he said. “That’s all there is to say about it. We just don’t intend to have another one.”

“Sir,” Gallin said, “that caliban mound on this side of the river… I’d like to break that up.”

Conn looked at Gutierrez, who had his mouth clamped tight. “Gutierrez?”

“I’d like to know first,” Gutierrez said, “if that’s the source of the tunnelling in the camp or not. If we don’t know for sure, if we’re just guessing–we’re not solving the problem at all.”

“You’re proposing more study.”

“I’d like to do that, sir.”

“Do it, then. But we’re going to have to probe those tunnels and know where they go.”

“I’ll be on that–tonight, if you like.”

“You map it out on paper tonight. And we get a team out at daybreak to probe the ground. We don’t know for certain it is the Calibans at all, do we?”

“No,” said Gutierrez. “That’s the point. We don’t know.”

Conn gathered up the bottle on the table in front of him, that they had used to lace the tea, and poured himself the long postponed drink. His hand shook violently in the pouring so that he spilled a little. He sipped at it and the liquor went into him, settling his battered nerves.

Ruffles scrambled from her perch and hit the floor, put on her best display. One of the techs slipped from the table and got her a morsel of food, which vanished with a neat dart of the head and a choking motion.

Conn finished his drink, excused himself, put his jacket on and walked back to his own quarters around the bending of the walk. The rain had stopped, in the evening. The electric lights in the compound and scattered throughout the azi camp were haloed in the mist. He stopped there on the puddled gravel walk, cold inside, looked out over all the camp, seeing what they had come to do slipping further and further away.

viii

Day 58 CR

“They put her in the ground,” Pia said, very soft, in the comfort of their pallet; and Jin held to her for comfort in the dark. “They buried her in the ground, and they all stood around and cried.”

This was a revelation–the death of a born‑man. They were accustomed to azi mortality. Azi died, and they carried the body to the white building on the farm, and that was the end of the matter. If one was a good type, then there was the confidence that others of one’s type would go on being born. There was pride involved in that. And that meant something.

But they saved nothing of Ada Beaumont. There were no labs to save it.

“I wish we could have tapes,” Jin said. “I miss them.”

Pia hugged him the tighter, buried her face against his shoulder. “I wish the same thing. There was a mistake about the machine falling on the captain. I don’t know what. I think we could have been at fault. I wish we knew.”

“They say they can’t use the machines in the bad weather.”

“When there are labs again,” Pia said, “when we have good tape again, it’s going to be better.”

“Yes,” he said.

But that was a very long time away.

He and Pia made love in the dark; and that replaced the tapes. It came to him that they were happier than the born‑man who had died, having no one of her own type surviving, at least here on this world. But there were other 9998s and 687s. And they made love because it was the warmest and the pleasantest thing they could do, and because they were permitted.

This made born‑men; and an obscure sense of duty dawned on Jin, that if one had died, then one had to be born. This was why they had been chosen, and what they had to do.

The rain stopped, and the sun came back in the morning, with only a ragged bit of cloud. The world was different under this sun. The crawlers stood off in the cleared fields, muddy with yesterday’s accident, and a great pit remained around which born‑men began to probe. And the world was different because there was a dead born‑man lying alone by the sea, with a marker that let the grave be seen across the camp.

Jin walked to his supervisor’s table, set up in the roadway under this new sun, and applied for the day’s work; but instead of doing more survey, he was given a metal rod and told to push it into the earth. He was to call the supervisor if it seemed that the dirt was looser than it ought to be. He went out among others and probed until his shoulders ached, and the born‑man Gutierrez and his crew took down all that they found.

ix

Day 162 CR

The domes rose, with the sun hot and the sea beating blue and white at the shore; and Conn sat in his chair in front of the main dome, under the canopy, because the heat was never that great, and the breeze pleased him. An ariel waddled across the dust near the walk and squatted there just off the gravel path, in the shadow of Conn’s own adjacent dome. It built–instinctive behavior, Gutierrez maintained. It had brought a pebble and added it to the stack it was making–not a pebble from the walk, thank you, but a larger one, painstakingly found elsewhere, presumably just the right pebble, for reasons only another ariel might grasp. It made circles of stacks. It built domes too, Conn thought distantly; but its domes failed, collapsing into nests. The last few stones always knocked the efforts down, lacking the trick of a keystone. So it seemed. But that was a fancy: too much of domes, too much of a preoccupation with them lately. The ariel built lines and patterns out from its collapsed stacks of stones, loops and whorls and serpentines. Rudimentary behavior like the moundbuilding Calibans, Gutierrez had said. Probably it originated as a nesting behavior and elaborated into display behaviors. Both sexes built. That had disappointed Gutierrez.

No more Calibans this side of the river, at least. The mounds remained, across the river, but azi with spades had taken the mound this side apart. It was stalemate, the calibans forbidden their mounds this side, the crawlers and earthmovers standing still, mothballed, now that all the major building and clearing was done.

The ship would come, bringing them the supplies and lab facilities they needed; and then the machines would grind and dig their way further across the landscape around that ell bend between the river and the forest, making foundations for the lab and the real city they planned.

But the nearer focus was still tents. Still tents. More than twenty thousand tents, dull brown under the sun. They tried, having hunted the last determined caliban off this shore; but the crawlers had reached the point of diminishing returns in maintenance, needing the supplies the ship would bring. Up the rivercourse the azi blasted at limestone and hauled it back in handpulled wagons, laboriously, as humans had hauled stone in the dawn of human building, because they dared not risk the crawlers, the last of them that worked on parts cannibalized from the others. The azi labored with blasting materials and picks and bare hands, and there was a camp of two dozen tents strung out there too, at the limestone cliffs where they quarried stone.

Perhaps it might have been wiser to have moved the whole site there, to stony ground–knowing now that Calibans burrowed. But they had spent all their resources of material and fuel. The domes stood, so at least the staff had secure housing. The fields were planted, and the power systems and the equipment were safe so long as they kept the calibans away.

Conn studied his charts, traced again and again the changes they had had to make in plans. The cold this spring had hurt his hands; and the joints twisted and pained him, even in the summer sun. He thought of another winter and dreaded it.

But they survived. He knew the time of the landing that would come, down to the day, year after next; and mentally he marked off every day, one to the next, with all the complexities of local/universal time.

The ship, he was determined, would take him home. He would go back to Cyteen. He thought that he might live through the jumps. Might. Or at least he would not have to see more of this world.

Newport, he had called it. But Gehenna had stuck instead. It was where they were; it described their situation. Like Styx for the Forbes River, that began as a joke and stayed. When a wheel broke on one of the carts or when it rained–Gehenna’s own luck, they said; and: What do you expect, in Hell?

They came to the Old Man and complained: Conn solved what he could, shrugged his shoulders at the rest. Like Gallin. Finally–like Gallin. “That’s your problem,” was Gallin’s line, which had gotten to be a proverb so notorious Gallin had had to find different ways of saying it. A sad fellow, Gallin, a bewildered fellow, who never knew why he deserved everyone’s spite. Conn sat placidly, waited for problems to trickle past the obstacle of Gallin, soothed tempers–kept the peace. That was the important thing.

A figure slogged down the lane, slumpshouldered and forlorn, and that was Bob Davies, another of the casualties. Davies worked the labor accounts, kept the supply books, and went off the rejuv of his own choice and over the surgeons’ protests. So there were two of them getting old. Maybe it showed more on Davies than on him–balding and growing bowed and thin in the passage of only a few months.

“Morning,” Conn wished him. Davies came out of his private reverie long enough to look up as he went by. “Morning,” Davies said absently, and went back to his computers and his books and his endless figuring.

That was the way of it now, that as fast as they built, the old pieces fell apart. Conn turned his mind back to the permafax sheets in his lap and made more adjustments in the plans which had once been so neatly drawn.

Two things went well. No, three: the crops flourished in the fields, making green as far as the eye could see. And Hill’s fish came up in the nets so that a good many of them might be sick of fish, but they all ate well. The plumbing and the power worked. They had lost some of the tape machines; but others worked, and the azi showed no appreciable strain.

But the winter–the first winter…

That had to be faced; and the azi were still under tents.

x

Day 346 CR

The wind blew and howled about the doors of the med dome. Jin sat in the anteroom and wrung his hands and fretted, a dejection which so possessed him it colored all the world.

She’s well, the doctors had told him; she’s going to do well. He believed this on one level, having great trust in Pia, that she was very competent and that her tapes had given her all the things she had to know. But she had been in pain when he had brought her here; and the hours of her pain wore on, so that he sat blank much of the time, and only looked up when one of the medics would come or go through that inner corridor where Pia was.

One came now. “Would you like to be with her?” the born‑man asked him, important and ominous in his white clothing. “You can come in if you like.”

Jin gathered himself to unsteady legs and followed the young born‑man through into the area which smelled strongly of disinfectants–a hall winding round the dome, past rooms on the left. The born‑man opened the first door for him and there lay Pia on a table, surrounded by meds all in masks. “Here,” said one of the azi who assisted here, and offered him a gown to wear, but no mask. He shrugged it on, distracted by his fear. “Can I see her?” he asked, and they nodded. He went at once to Pia and took her hand.

“Does it hurt?” he asked. He thought that it must be hurting unbearably, because Pia’s face was bathed in sweat. He wiped that with his hand and a born‑man gave him a towel to use.

“It’s not so bad,” she said between breaths. “It’s all right.”

He held onto her hand; and sometimes her nails bit into his flesh and cut him; and betweentimes he mopped her face…his Pia, whose belly was swollen with life that was finding its way into the world now whether they wanted or not.

“Here we go,” a med said. “Here we are.”

And Pia cried out and gave one great gasp, so that if he could have stopped it all now he would have. But it was done then, and she looked relieved. Her nails which had driven into his flesh eased back, and he held onto her a long time, only glancing aside as a born‑man nudged his arm.

“Will you hold him?” the med asked, offering him a bundled shape: Jin took it obediently, only then realizing fully that it was alive. He looked down into a small red face, felt the squirming of strong tiny limbs and knew–suddenly knew with real force that the life which had come out of Pia was independent, a gene‑set which had never been before. He was terrified. He had never seen a baby. It was so small, so small and he was holding it.

“You’ve got yourselves a son,” a med told Pia, leaning close and shaking her shoulder. “You understand? You’ve got yourselves a little boy.”

“Pia?” Jin bent down, holding the baby carefully, oh so carefully–“Hold his head gently,” the med told him. “Support his neck,” and put his hand just so, helped him give the baby into Pia’s arms. Pia grinned at him, sweat‑drenched as she was, a strange tired grin, and fingered the baby’s tiny hand.

“He’s perfect,” one of the meds said, close by. But Jin had never doubted that. He and Pia were.

“You have to name him,” said another. “He has to have a name, Pia.”

She frowned over that for a moment, staring at the baby with her eyes vague and far. They had said, the born‑men, that this would be the case, that they had to choose a name, because the baby would have no number. It was a mixing of gene‑sets, and this was the first one of his kind in the wide universe, this mix of 9998 and 687.

“Can I call him Jin too?” Pia asked.

“Whatever you like,” the med said.

“Jin,” Pia decided, with assurance. Jin himself looked down on the small mongrel copy Pia held and felt a stir of pride. Winter rain fell outside, pattering softly against the roof of the dome. Cold rain. But the room felt more than warm. The born‑men were taking all the medical things away, wheeling them out with a clatter of metal and plastics.

And they wanted to take the baby away too. Jin looked up at them desperately when they took it from Pia’s arms, wanting for one of a few times in his life to say no.

“We’ll bring him right back,” the med said ever so softly. “We’ll wash him and do a few tests and we’ll bring him right back in a few moments. Won’t you stay with Pia, Jin, and keep her comfortable?”

“Yes,” he said, feeling a tremor in his muscles, even so, thinking that if they wanted to take the baby back again later, after Pia had suffered so to have it, then he wanted very much to stop them. But yes was all he knew how to say. He held on to Pia, and a med hovered about all the same, not having gone with the rest. “It’s all right,” Jin told Pia, because she was distressed and he could see it. “It’s all right. They said they’d bring it back. They will.”

“Let me make her comfortable,” the med said, and he was dispossessed even of that post–invited back again, to wash Pia’s body, to lift her, to help the med settle her into a waiting clean bed; and then the med took the table out, so it was himself alone with Pia.

“Jin,” Pia said, and he put his arm under her head and held her, still frightened, still thinking on the pleasure they had had and the cost it was to bring a born‑man into the world. Pia’s cost. He felt guilt, like bad tape; but it was not a question of tape: it was something built in, irreparable in what they were.

Then they did bring the baby back, and laid it in Pia’s arms; and he could not forbear to touch it, to examine the tininess of its hands, the impossibly little fists. It. Him. This born‑man.

xi

Year 2, day 189 CR

Children took their first steps in the second summer’s sun…squealed and cried and laughed and crowed. It was a good sound for a struggling colony, a sound which had crept on the settlement slowly through the winter, in baby cries and requisitions for bizarre oddments of supply. Baby washing hung out in the azi camp and the central domes in whatever sun the winter afforded–never cold enough to freeze, not through all the winter, just damp; and bonechilling nasty when the wind blew.

Gutierrez sat by the roadside, the road they had extended out to the fields. In one direction the azi camp fluttered with white flags of infant clothing out to dry; and in the other the crawlers and earthmovers sat, shrouded in their plastic hoods, and flitters nested there.

He watched–near where limestone blocks and slabs and rubble made the first solid azi buildings, one‑roomed and simple. They had left some chips behind, and an ariel was at its stone‑moving routine. It took the chips in its mouth, such as it could manage, and moved them, stacked them, in what began to look like one of the more elaborate ariel constructions, in the shadow of the wall.

A caliban had moved into the watermeadow again. They wanted to hunt it and Gutierrez left this to Security. He had no stomach for it. Best they hunt it now, before it laid eggs. But all the same the idea saddened him, like the small collection of caliban skulls up behind the main dome.

Barbaric, he thought. Taking heads. But the hunt had to be, or there would be more tunnelling, and the azi houses would fall.

He dusted himself off finally, started up and down the road toward the domes, having started the hunters on their way.

Man adjusted–on Gehenna, on Newport. Man gave a little. But between man and calibans, there did not look to be peace, not, perhaps, until the ship should come. There might be an answer, in better equipment. In the projection barriers they might have made work, if the weather had not been so destructive of equipment…if, if, and if.

He walked back into the center of camp, saw the Old Man sitting where he usually sat, under the canopy outside main dome. The winter had put years on the colonel. A stubble showed on his face, a spot of stain on his rumpled shirt front. He drowsed, did Conn, and Gutierrez passed him by, entered quietly into the dome and crossing the room past the long messtable, poured himself a cup of the ever‑ready tea. The place smelled of fish. The dining hall always did. Most all Gehenna smelled of fish.

He sat down, with some interest, at the table with Kate Flanahan. The special op was more than casual with him; no precise recollection where it had started, except one autumn evening, and realizing that there were qualities in Kate which mattered to him.

“You got it?” Kate asked.

“I headed them out. I don’t have any stomach left for that.”

She nodded. Kate trained to kill human beings, not wildlife. The specials sat and rusted. Like the machinery out there.

“Thought–” Gutierrez said, “I might apply for a walkabout. Might need an escort.”

Kate’s eyes brightened.

But “No,” Conn said, when he broached the subject, that evening, at common mess.

“Sir–”

“We hold what territory we have,” the colonel said. In that tone. And there was no arguing. Silence fell for a moment at the table where all of them who had no domestic arrangements took their meals. It was abrupt, that answer. It was decisive. “We’ve got all we can handle,” the colonel said then. “We’ve got another year beyond this before we get backup here, and I’m not stirring anything up by exploring.”

The silence persisted. The colonel went on with his eating, a loud clatter of knife and fork.

“Sir,” Gutierrez said, “in my professional opinion–there’s reason for the investigation, to see what the situation is on the other bank, to see–”

“We’ll be holding this camp and taking care of our operation here,” the colonel said. “That’s the end of it. That’s it.”

“Yes, sir,” Gutierrez said.

Later, he and Kate Flanahan found their own opportunity for being together, with more privacy and less comfort, in the quarters he had to himself, with Ruffles, who watched with a critical reptilian eye.

“Got a dozen specs going crazy,” Kate said during one of the lulls in their lovemaking, when they talked about the restriction, about the calibans, about things they had wanted to do. “Got people who came here with the idea we’d be building all this time. Special op hoped for some use. And we’re rotting away. All of us. You. Us. Everyone but the azi. The Old Man’s got this notion the world’s dangerous and he’s not letting us out of camp. He’s scared of the blamed lizards, Marco. Can’t you try it on a better day, make sense to him, talk sense into him?”

“I’ll go on trying,” he said. “But it goes deeper than just the calibans. He has his own idea how to protect this base, and that’s what he means to do. To do nothing. To survive till the ships come. I’ll try.”

But he knew the answer already, implicit in the Old Man’s clamped jaw and fevered stare.

“No,” the answer came when he did ask again, days later, after stalking the matter carefully. “Put it out of your head, Gutierrez.”

He and Flanahan went on meeting. And one day toward fall Flanahan reported to the meds that she might be pregnant. She came to live with him; and that was the thing that redeemed the year.

But Gutierrez’ work was slowed to virtual stop–with all the wealth of a new world on the horizon. He did meticulous studies of tiny ecosystems along the shoreline; and when in the fall another caliban turned up in the watermeadow, and when the hunters shot it, he stood watching the crime, and sat down on the hillside in view of the place, sat there all the day, because of the pain he felt.

And the hunters avoided his face, though there was no anger in his sitting there, and nothing personal.

“I’m not shooting any more,” a special op told him later, the man who had shot this one.

As for Flanahan, she had refused the hunt.

xii

Year 2, day 290 CR

The weather turned again toward the winter, the season of bitter cold rain and sometime fogs, when the first calibans wandered into the camp. And stayed the night. They passed like ghosts in the fog, under the haloed lights, came like the silly ariels; but the calibans were far more impressive.

Jin watched them file past the tent, strange and silent except for the scrape of leathery bodies and clawed feet; and he and Pia gathered little Jin against them in the warmth of the tent, afraid, because these creatures were far different than the gay fluttery green lizards that came and went among the tents and the stone shelters.

“They won’t hurt us,” Pia said, a whisper in the fog‑milky night. “The tapes said they never hurt anyone.”

“There was the captain,” Jin said, recalling that, thinking of all their safe tent tumbling down into some chasm, the way the born‑man Beaumont had died.

“An accident.”

“But born‑men shoot them.” He was troubled at the idea. He had never gotten it settled in his mind about intelligence, what animals were and what men were, and how one told the difference. They said the calibans had no intelligence. It was not in their gene‑set. He could believe that of the giddy ariels. But these were larger than men, and grim and deliberate in their movements.

The calibans moved through, and there were no human sounds, no alarms to indicate harm. But they laced the tentflap and stayed awake with little Jin asleep between them. At every small sound outside they started, and sometimes held hands in the absolute dark and closeness of the tent.

Perhaps, Jin thought in the lonely hours, the calibans were angry that born‑men hunted them. Perhaps that was why they came.

But on the next day, when they got up with the sun, a rumor of something strange passed through the camp, and Jin went among the others to see, how all the loose stones they had stacked up for building had been moved and set into a low and winding wall that abutted a building in which azi lived. He went to work with the others, undoing what the calibans had done, but he was afraid with an unaccustomed fear. Until then he had feared only born‑men, and known what right and wrong was. But he felt strange to be taking down what the calibans had done, this third and unaccountable force which had walked through their midst and noticed them.

“Stop,” a supervisor said. “People are coming from the main camp to see.”

Jin quit his work and sat down among the others, wrapped tightly in his jacket and sitting close to other azi…watched while important born‑men came from the main domes. They made photographs, and the born‑man Gutierrez came with his people and looked over every aspect of the building. This born‑man Jin knew: this was the one they called when they found something strange, or when someone had been stung or bitten by something or wandered into one of the nettles. And there was in this man’s face and in the faces of his aides and in the faces of no few of the other born‑men…a vast disturbance.

“They respond to instinct,” Gutierrez said finally. Jin could hear that much. “Ariels stack stones. The behavior seems to be wired into the whole line.”

But calibans, Jin thought to himself, built walls in the night, silently, of huge stones, and connected them to buildings with people in them.

He never felt quite secure after that, in the night, although the born‑men went out and strung electric fences around the camp, and although the calibans did not come back. Whenever the fogs would come, he would think of them ghosting powerfully through the camps, so still, so purposeful; and he would hug his son and Pia close and be glad that no azi had to be outside by night.

xiii

Year 3, day 120 CR

The air grew warmer again, and the waiting began…the third spring, when the ships should come. All the ills–the little cluster of forlorn human graves beside the sea–seemed tragedy on a smaller scale, against the wide universe, because the prospect of ships reminded people that the world was not alone. “When the ships come,” was all the talk in camp.

When the ships came, there would be luxuries again, like soap and offworld foods.

When the ships came, the earthmovers would move again, and they would build and catch up to schedule.

When the ships came, there would be new faces, and the first colonists would have a distinction over the newcomers, would own things and be someone.

When the ships came, there would be birthlabs and azi and the population increase would start tipping the balance on Gehenna in favor of man.

But spring wore on past the due date, with at first a fevered anticipation, and then a deep despair, finally hopes carefully fanned to life again; a week passed, a month–and When became a forbidden word.

Conn waited. His joints hurt him; and there would be medicines when the ship came. There would be someone on whom to rely. He thought of Cyteen again, and Jean’s untended grave. He thought of–so many things he had given up. And at first he smiled, and then he stopped smiling and retreated to his private dome. He still had faith. Still believed in the government which had sent him here, that something had delayed the ships, but not prevented them. If something were wrong, the ship would hang off in space at one of the jump points and repair it and get underway again, which might take time.

He waited, day by day.

But Bob Davies lay down to sleep one late spring night and took all the pills the meds had given him. It was a full day more before anyone noticed, because Davies lived alone, and all the divisions he usually worked had assumed he was working for someone else, on some other assignment. He had gone to sleep, that was all, quietly, troubling no one. They buried him next to Beaumont, which was all the note he had left wanted of them. It was Beaumont’s death that had killed Davies: that was what people said. But it was the failure of the ship that prompted it, whatever Davies had hoped for–be it just the reminder that Somewhere Else existed in the universe; or that he hoped to leave. Whatever hope it was that kept the man alive–failed him.

James Conn went to the funeral by the sea. When it was done, and the azi were left to throw earth into the grave, he went back to his private dome and poured himself one drink and several more.

A fog rolled in that evening, one of those fogs that could last long, and wrapped all the world in white. Shapes came and went in it, human shapes and sometimes the quiet scurryings of the ariels; and at night, the whisper of movements which might be the heavier tread of calibans–but there were fences to stop them, and most times the fences did.

Conn drank, sitting at the only real desk in Gehenna; and thought of other places: of Jean, and a grassy grave on Cyteen; on the graves by the sea; on friends from the war, who had had no graves at all, when he and Ada Beaumont had had a closeness even he and Jean had never had…for a week, on Fargone; and they had never told Jean and never told Bob, about that week the 12th had lost a third of its troops and they had hunted the resistance out of the tunnels pace by pace. He thought on those days, on forgotten faces, blurred names, and when the dead had gotten to outnumber the living in his thoughts he found himself comfortable and safe. He drank with them, one and all; and before morning he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

xiv

Year 3, day 189 CR

The grain grew, the heads whitened, and the scythes went back and forth in azi hands, the old way, without machines; and still the ships delayed.

Gutierrez walked the edge of the camp, out near those fields, and surveyed the work. The houses at his right, the azi camp, were many of them of stone now, ramshackle, crazy building; but all the azi built their own shelters in their spare time, and sometimes they found it convenient to build some walls in common…less work for all concerned. If it stood, the engineers and the Council approved it; and that was all there was to it.

He and Kate did something of the like, needing room: they built onto their dome with scrap stone, and it served well enough for an extra room, for them and for small Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez.

Another Caliban had come into the meadow. They came, Gutierrez reckoned, when the seasons turned, and whenever the autumn approached they were obsessed with building burrows. If thoughts at all proceeded in those massive brains. He argued with Council, hoping still for his expedition across the river; but it was weeding time; but it was harvest time. Now a caliban was back and he proposed studying it where it was.

And if it undermines the azi quarters, Gallin had objected, head of Council; or if it gets into the crops–

“We have to live here,” Gutierrez had argued, and said what no one had said in Council even yet: “So there’s not going to be a ship. And how long are we going to sit here blind to the world we live on?”

There was silence after that. He had been rude. He had destroyed the pretenses. There were sullen looks and hard looks, but most had no expression at all, keeping their terror inside, like azi.

So he went now, alone, before they took the guns and came hunting. He walked past the fields and out across the ridge and down, out of easy hail of the camp, which was against all the rules.

He sat down on the side of the hill with his glasses and watched the moundbuilders for a long time…watched as two Calibans used their blunt noses and the strength of their bodies to heave up dirt in a ridge.

About noon, having taken all the notes of that sort he wanted, he ventured somewhat downslope in the direction of the mound.

Suddenly both dived into the recesses of their mound.

He stopped. A huge reptilian head emerged from the vent on the side of the mound. A tongue flicked, and the whole caliban followed, brown, twice the size of the others, with overtones of gold and green.

A new kind. Another species…another gender, there was no knowing. There was no leisure for answers. All they knew of calibans was potentially overturned and they had no way to learn.

Gutierrez took in his breath and held it. The brown–six, maybe eight meters in length–stared at him a while, and then the other two, the common grays, shouldered past it, coming out also.

That first one walked out toward him, closer, closer until he stared at it in much more detail than he wanted. It loomed nearly twice a man’s height. The knobby collar lifted, flattened again. The other two meanwhile walked toward the river, quietly, deliberately, muddy ghosts through the tall dead grass. They vanished. The one continued to face him for a moment, and then, with a sidelong glance and a quick refixing of a round‑pupilled eye to be sure he still stood there…it whipped about and fled with all the haste a caliban could use.

He stood there and stared a moment, his knees shaking, his notebook forgotten in his hand, and then, because there was no other option, he turned around and walked back to the camp.

That night, as he had expected, Council voted to hunt the Calibans off the bank; and he came with them in the morning, with their guns and their long probes and their picks for tearing the mound apart.

But there was no caliban there. He knew why. That they had learned. That all along they had been learning, and their building on this riverbank was different than anywhere else in the world–here, close to humans, where calibans built walls.

He stood watching, refusing comment when the hunters came to him. Explanations led to things the hunters would not want to hear, not with the ships less and less likely in their hopes.

“But they didn’t catch them,” Kate Flanahan said that night, trying to rouse him out of his brooding. “It failed, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. And nothing more.

xv

Year 3, day 230 CR

“Jin,” the elder Jin called; and Pia called with him, tramping the aisles and edges of the camp. Fear was in them…fear of the outside, and the chance of calibans. “Have you seen our son?” they asked one and another azi they met. “No,” the answer was, and Pia fell behind in the searching as Jin’s strides grew longer and longer, because Pia’s belly was heavy with another child.

The sun sank lower in the sky, and they had gone much of the circuit of the camp, out where the electric fence was. That riverward direction was young Jin’s fascination, the obsession of more than one of the rowdy children in the camp.

“By the north of the camp,” an azi told him finally, when he was out of breath and nearly panicked. “There was some small boy playing there.”

Jin went that way, jogging in his haste.

So he found his son, where the walls stopped and the land began to slope toward the watermeadow. White slabs of limestone were the last wall there, the place they had once stacked the building stone. And little Jin sat in the dirt taking leftover bits of stone and piling them. An ariel assisted, added pebbles to the lot–turned its head and puffed up its collar at so sudden an approach.

“Jin,” Jin senior said. “Look at the sun. You know what I told you about wandering off close to dark. You know Pia and I have been hunting for you.”

Little Jin lifted a face which was neither his nor Pia’s and looked at him through a mop of black hair.

“You were wrong,” Jin said, hoping that his son would feel shame. “We thought a caliban could have gotten you.”

His son said nothing, made no move, like the ariel.

Pia arrived, out of breath, around the white corner of the last azi house. She stopped with her hands to her belly, cradling it, her eyes distraught. “He’s all right,” Jin said. “He’s safe.”

“Come on,” Pia said, shaken still. “Jin, you get up right now and come.”

Not a move. Nothing but the stare.

Jin elder ran a hand through his hair, baffled and distressed. “They ought to give us tapes,” he said faintly. “Pia, he wouldn’t be like this if the tape machines worked.”

But the machines were gone. Broken, the supervisors said, except one, that the born‑men used for themselves.

“I don’t know,” Pia said. “I don’t know what’s right and wrong with him. I’ve asked the supervisors and they say he has to do these things.”

Jin shook his head. His son frightened him. Violence frightened him. Pick him up and spank him, the supervisors said. He had hit his son once, and the tears and the noise and the upset shattered his nerves. He himself had never cried, not like that.

“Please come,” he said to his son. “It’s getting dark. We want to go home.”

Little Jin carefully picked up more stones and added them to his pattern, the completion of a whorl. The ariel waddled over and moved one into a truer line. It was all loops and whorls, like the ruined mounds that came back year by year in the meadow.

“Come here.” Pia came and took her son by the arms and pulled him up, scattering the patterns. Little Jin kicked and screamed and tried to go on sitting, which looked apt to hurt Pia. Jin elder came and picked his son up bodily under one arm, nerving himself against his screams and his yells, impervious to his kicking as they carried him in shame back to the road and the camp.

While their son was small they could do this. But he was growing, and the day would come they could not.

Jin thought about it, late, lying with Pia and cherishing the silence…how things had gone astray from what the tapes had promised, before the machines had broken. The greatest and wisest of the born‑men were buried over by the sea, along with azi who had met accidents; the ships were no longer coming. He wished forlornly to lie under the deepteach and have the soothing voice of the tapes tell him that he had done well.