Forty Thousand in Gehenna

He doubted now. He was no longer sure of things. His son, whom sometimes they loved, who came to them and hugged them and made them feel as if the world was right again, had contrary thoughts, and strayed, and somehow an azi was supposed to have the wisdom to control this born‑man child. Sometimes he was afraid–of his son; of the unborn one in Pia’s belly.

When the ship comes, the azi used to say.

But they stopped saying that. And nothing was right since.

IV

THE SECOND

GENERATION

Military Personnel:

Col. James A. Conn, governor general, d. 3 CR

Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, It. governor, d. year of founding

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 d. CR 3

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

Jane E. Flanahan‑Gutierrez b. 2 CR

Education: 5

Cartographer: 1

Management supervisors: 4

Biocycle engineers: 4

Construction personnel: 50

Food preparation specialists: 6

Industrial specialists: 15

Mining engineers: 2

Energy systems supervisors: 8

ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL:

“A” class: 2890

Jin 458‑9998

Pia 86‑687

Jin Younger b. year of founding

Mark b. 3 CR

Zed b. 4 CR

Tam b. 5 CR

Pia Younger b. 6 CR

Green b. 9 CR

“B” class: 12389

“M” class: 4566

Ben b. 2 CR

Alf b. 3 CR

Nine b. 4 CR

“P” class: 20788

“V” class: 1278

i

Year 22, day 192 CR

It was a long walk, a lonely walk, among the strange hills the calibans raised–but her brothers were there, and Pia Younger kept going, out of breath by now, her adolescent limbs aching with the running. She always ran on this stretch of the trail, where the mounds and ridges were oldest and overgrown with brush. She never admitted it to her brothers, but it disturbed her to cross this territory. Here. With them.

Ahead were the limestone heights where the old quarry was; the elders had built the town with limestone, but they took no more stone there nowadays except what they could bribe her brothers to bring down. Afraid, that was it; elders were afraid to cross the territory of the calibans. Youngers had this place, the deep pit where they had done blasting in the old days, and they owned the pile of loose stone that they loaded up and brought back when they wanted to trade. A lot of the youngers in the azi town came here, her brothers more than most, but the elders never would; and the main‑Camp elders, they huddled in their domes and defended themselves with electric lights and electric wires.

She caught a stitch in her side and slowed to a limp when she reached the old trail, which had been a road once upon a time, a rain‑washed road paved with limestone chips and overgrown with small brush and weeds and fallen away so that in some places it was wide enough for one walker only. She looked back when she made the turn–it was that kind of view that the eye had to go to, that sprawling perspective out over all the world, the lazy S of the Styx and the mounds of the calibans like wrinkled cloth strewn on both sides of it, some under the carpet of trees and some new and naked; and caliban domes that mimicked the domes of the main Camp.

Calibans had never made domes, her father said, until they saw the domes of main Camp; but they made them now, and larger and grander, raising great bald hills on this side and that of the Styx. Beyond them were the solid hills, the natural hills; and then the fields all checkered green and brown; and the rusting knot of giant machines–and the tower, the big shining tower that caught the sun and fed power to the little cluster of domes before the graveyard and the sea. All of that, in one blunt sweep of the eye, the whole world: and this height owned it all. That was why her brothers came here, to look down on all of it; but she was sixteen–not yet, her brothers said to her. Not yet for you.

What her parents said to her coming here–but they did everything the Council said; and saying no was part of it.

She began to run again, uphill, pushing past the brush, careless now because there was nothing but snakes to worry about up here in the day; and calibans ate snakes, and noise frightened both, so she made all the noise she could.

A whistle caught her ear, above her on the rim; she looked up, at a head that appeared over the rim of the cliffs, head and shoulders, black hair blowing on the wind. Her brother Zed. “I’ve got to come up,” she called.

“Come on up, then,” he called back. One had to be Permitted to come up to the heights; and she dusted her hands on her coveralls and came up the last few turns…stopped on that bald crest of stone slabs and scant brush and sat down panting for breath on the lefthand slab of the two that served them for a gate, there by a bitterberry. All her elder brothers were up here. And Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez. Her eyes caught that with shock and jealousy. Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez, from the main Camp, of the dark skin and the curling black hair…there with all the boys; and she knew at once what they had been doing up here–it was in her brothers’ eyes, like summer evening heat. They looked older, suddenly, like strangers. Jane looked that way too, disheveled clothes, her coveralls unzipped to here, staring at her as if she had been dirt. Her four older brothers, Jin and Mark and Zed and Tam; and the boys from down the row in town, Ben and Alf and Nine. They fronted her like a wall, her brothers the dark part of it and the Ben/Alf/Nine set all red and blond. And Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez.

“You let her up here,” Ben said to Zed. “Why let herup here?”

“I know what you’re doing,” Pia said. Her face felt red. She was still gasping for breath after the climb; she caught a mouthful of air. Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez sat down on another rock, her hands on either side of her, flaunting sex and satiation. “You think,” Pia gasped, “you think it’s anything? Jin, our father sent me. To find you all. Green’s run off again. They want you back to help.”

Her brothers settled, one by one, all but her brother Jin, who was eldest; who stood there with his face clouded and his hands caught in his belt. Green: that was the sixth of them. Youngest brother.

“That boy’s gone”Ben said, with that disgust everyone used about Green; but: “Quiet,” Jin Younger said, in that tone that meant business, that could frighten elders into listening to whatever Jin wanted to say. “How long?”

“Maybe since morning,” Pia said hoarsely. “They thought he was off with some boys. He ran off from them. They didn’t send anyone back to tell. Pia’s looking in the Camp; but Jin’s out in the hills. Hunting this way. He asked us, Jin; our father askedus. He’s really scared.”

“It’s going to get dark.”

“Our father’s out there, all the same. And he doesn’t know anything. He could fall in a burrow, he could. But I don’t think he’ll quit.”

“For Green.”

“Jin–” She talked only to Jin, because he made up the minds of the rest. “He asked.”

“We’d better go,” Jin said then; so that was it: the others ducked their heads and nodded.

“What do we do with that brother of yours,” Ben asked, assuming they were going too, “if we find him?”

“Hey,” Jane said, “hey, I have to get back to the Camp. You said you’d walk me back to the Camp.”

“ I’llwalk you back,” Pia said with a narrow look. “That trail down’s really bad. A careless body might slip.”

“You’d better watch who you talk to,” Jane said.

“ Azi. That what you reckon, maincamper? Think I’m scared? You watch yourself.”

“Shut up,” Jin said.

“One of you,” said Jane, “has to get me back. I can’t wait around while you track that brother of yours down–I know; I know all about him.”

“We’ll be back. Just wait.”

“He’s gone, don’t you think that? When they go, they go.”

Pia gathered herself up again without a word, started off down the road without a backward look, hot inside; and before she had gotten to the first downslope there was a skittering of pebbles and a following in her wake: the whole troop of her brothers was gathered about her, and the down‑the‑row boys too.

“Wait!” Jane shouted after the lot of them. “Don’t you go off and leave me up here.” And that was satisfaction. They would get her down–later. When they had seen to Green again. A stream of words followed them, words they swore by in the main Camp in the longest string Pia had ever heard. Pia marched down the winding track without looking back, hands in her pockets.

“That Green,” Ben muttered. “Going to do what he likes, that’s what. Going to get to what he wants sooner or later.”

“Quiet,” Jin Younger said, and Ben kept it to himself after that, all the long way down.

It was better going back. In company. Pia began to pant with exhaustion–her tall brothers had long legs and they were fresh on the track, but she kept going, with the stitch back in her side, not wanting to admit her tiredness. Green–as for Green, Ben might be right. She had five brothers and the last was wild; was thirteen, and wandered in the hills.

And those who did that–they went on wandering; or whatever they did, who gave up humankind.

It was the third time…that Green had gone.

“This time,” Pia said out of her thoughts, between gasps for air, “this time I think we have to get him, us. Because I don’t think our father can find him fast enough.”

“This time–” Jin Younger said, walking beside her, themselves out of hearing of the others if he kept his voice low, “this time I think it’s like Ben said.”

He admitted that to her. Not to the others. And it was probably true.

But they kept going all the same, down into the woods the Calibans had grown, among the mounds and the brush in the late afternoon. “Where’s Jin hunting?” Jin Younger asked.

Pia pointed, the direction of the Camp. “From Camp looking toward the river. That’s what he thought–the river.”

“Probably right,” Jin Younger said. “Probably right for sure.” He squatted down, cleared ground with the edge of his hand, took a stick and scratched signs as the others gathered. “I think Mark and I had better find our father: that’s furthest. And Zed and Tam, you go the middle way; Ben, you and Alf go with them and split off where you have to go up to cover the ground; and Nine, you and Pia go direct by the river way. Pia’s got most chance of talking to Green: I want her there where he’s most likely to go. We draw a circle around him and sweep up our father too, before some caliban gets him.”

That was Jin Younger: that was her brother, whose mind worked like that, cool and quick. Pia got up from looking at the pattern and grabbed Nine’s hand–Nine was eighteen, like Zed; and red and gold and freckled all over. They all moved light and quick, and in spite of the prospect in front of them, Pia went with a kind of relief, that she was doing something, that she was not her mother, searching the town because she had to do something, even a hopeless thing, lame as Pia elder was, worn out from Green, aching tired from Green–

Lose him this time, Pia thought, in her heart of hearts. Let him go this time, to be done with it; and no more of that look her parents had, no more of doing everything for Green.

But if they lost him, they had to have tried. It was like that, because he was born under their roof, stranger that he was.

They took the winding course through the brush‑grown mounds, she and Nine, hand in hand, hurried past the gaping darknesses under stones, that were caliban doorways–sometimes saucer‑big eyes watched them, or tongues flicked, from caliban mouths mostly hid in shadow and in brush.

And the way began to be bare and slithery with mud, and tracked with clawed pads of caliban feet, which was a climbway calibans used from the Styx or a brook that fed it. Ariels scurried from their track, whipping their tails in busy haste; and flitters dived in manic profusion from the trees–some into ariel mouths. Pia brushed the flitters off, a frantic slapping at the back of her neck, protecting her collar, and they jogged along singlefile now, slid the last bit down to the flat, well‑trampled riverside, where calibans had flattened tracks hi the reeds of the bogs, and clouds of insects swarmed and darted.

Desolation. No human track disturbed the mud flats.

“We just wait,” Pia said. “He can’t have gotten past us unless he went all the way around the heights to the east.” She squatted down by the edge of the water and dipped up a double handful, poured it over her head and neck, and Nine did the same.

“Why don’t we take a rest?” Nine suggested, and pointed off toward the reeds.

“I think we ought to walk on down the way toward the rocks.”

“Waste of time.”

“Then you go back.”

“I think we could do something better.”

She looked suddenly and narrowly at him. He had that look they had had up there, with Jane. “I think you better forget that.”

He made a grab at her; she slapped his hand and he jerked it back.

“Go after that Jane,” she said, “why don’t you?”

“What’s wrong with you? Afraid?”

“You go find Jane.”

“I like you.”

“You’ve got no sense.” He scared her; her heart was pounding. “Jane and all of you, that’s all nice, isn’t it? But I say no, and you’d better believe no.”

He was bigger than she, by about a third. But there were other things to think of, and one was living next to each other in town; and one was that she always got even. People knew that of Pia Younger; it was important to have people believe that, and she saw to it.

And finally he made a great show of sulking and dusting his hands off. “I’m going back,” he said. “I don’t stay out here for nothing.”

“Sure, you go back,” she said.

“You’re cold,” he said. “I’ll tell how you are.”

“You tell whatever you like; and when you do, I’ll tell plenty too. You make me sound bad, you make my brothers sound the same. We figure like that. You’re three and we’re six. You make up your mind.”

“You’re five now,” he said, and stalked off.

Afterward she found her hands sweating, not sure whether it was because of the sun or her temper or the thought that she could have had Nine, who was not bad for a first; but he was ugly inside, if not out. And lacking that reason, she thought of her mother, and how she had been young before Green started growing up. She thought about babies and the grief her mother had had of them, and that dried the sweat all at once.

So they might be five now. Green might be gone. And that might cure them of all their troubles at once, if only they could prove they had searched; if they could get Green out of Jin and Pia’s minds.

They went out to get their mother and father back for their own: that was why they went. That was why she had known that her brother Jin would come.

And if Nine had run back to his brothers, Pia still meant to stay where her brother said, to watch the bank. The rocks offered the most likely vantage, where the cliffs tumbled down to the Styx, where calibans sunned themselves and where anyone headed upriver had to go.

She had no fear of her brother Green. It was the others of his sort she had no desire to meet; and she wanted somewhere to watch unseen.

ii

The sun was halfway down the sky, and Jin elder moved with a sense of desperation, his breath short and shallow, his senses alive with dread on all sides. The wooded mounds surrounded him, offered dark accesses out of which calibans could come. Young ones challenged him, man‑sized, athwart his path, and he scrambled aside on the hill and kept going.

He might call aloud, but Green would never answer to his name, hardly spoke at all, and so he did not waste the breath. It was a question of overtaking his son, of finding him in this maze when he had no wish to be found. It was impossible, and he knew that. But Green was his, and whatever Green was, however strange, he tried, as his wife tried, in the town, already knowing her son was gone–searching among the thousands of houses, asking faces that would go blank to the question–“Have you seen our son? Have your children heard from him? Is there anyone who knows?”–They would shut the doors on her as they would on the night or on a storm, not to have the trouble inside with them, whose houses were secure. Pia had no hope; and he had none, except in his rebel children, his other sons and his daughter, who might possibly know where to look, who ran wild out here–but not as wild as Green.

He slowed finally, out of breath, walked dizzily among the mounds. Now the sun was behind them, making pockets of dark. A body moved, slithered amid the thick brush, among the trees which had grown here, this side of the river. The sight was surreal. He recalled bare meadow, and gentle grass, and the first beginnings of a mound; and caliban skulls piled behind main dome. But all that was changed; and a forest grew, all scrub and saplings. Fairy flitters came down on his shoulders, clung to his clothing, making him think of bats; he beat them off and recalled that they were lives–which touched a faint, far chord in him, of guilt and of dread. The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.

A heavy body thrust itself from a hole–a caliban flicked its tongue at him; an ariel scurried over its immobile back and fled into the dark inside. He started aside, ran, slowed again with a pain in his side…sat down at last, against the side of a mound, by one of the rounded hills, the domes the calibans made.

And leapt up again, spying a white movement among the saplings on the ridge. “Green,” he called.

It was not Green. A strange boy was staring down at him, squatting naked atop the ridge–thin, starved limbs and tangled hair, improbable sight in the woods. It was the image of his fears.

“Come down,” he asked the boy. “Come down–” Ever so softly. Never startle them; never force–It was all his hope, that boy.

And the boy sprang up and ran, down the angle of the hill among the brush; Jin ran too–and saw the boy dive into the dark of a caliban access, vanishing like nightmare, confirming all that he had dreaded to know, how they lived, what they were, the town’s lost children.

“Green,” he called, thinking that there might be others, that his son might hear, or someone hear, and tell Green that he was called. But no answer came; and what the mound had taken in, it kept. He moved closer, climbed the slope with all his nerves taut‑strung. He went as far as the hole and put his head inside. There was the smell of earth and damp; and far away, down some narrow tunnel, he heard something move. “Green,” he shouted. The earth swallowed up his voice.

He crouched there a moment, arms flung across his knees, despair thicker about him than before. His children had all gone amiss, every one; and Green, the different one was stranger than all the strange children he had sired. Green’s eyes were distant and his mind was unknowable, as if all the unpleasantness of the world had seeped into Pia while she carried him, and infected his soul. Green was misnamed. He was that other face of spring, the mistbound nights when calibans prowled and broke the fences; he was secret things and dark. He had lost himself, over and over again; had shocked himself on the fences, sunk himself in bogs–had lost himself into the hills, and played with ariels and stones, forgetting other children.

Jin wept. That was his answer now that he was like born‑men and on his own. He mourned without confidence that there would be comfort–no tapes, now; nothing to relieve the pain. He had to face Pia, alone; and that he was not ready to do. He pictured himself coming home with daylight left, giving up, when Pia would not. When he failed her, she would come out into the hills herself: she was like that, even frail as she grew in these years. Pia, to lose a son, after all the pain–

He got up, abandoning hope of this place, kept walking, brushing the weeds aside in the trough between the mounds, going deeper and deeper into the heart of the place. All the way to the river–that was how far he must go, however afraid he was, all along this most direct track from the village to the river, as close as he could hew to it.

Brush stirred above him on a ridge: he looked up, expecting Calibans, hoping for his son–

And found two, Jin and Mark, standing on the wooded ridge above him, mirrors of each other, leaning on either side of a smallish tree.

“Father,” Jin Younger said–all smug, as if he were amused. And hostile: there was that edge always in his voice. Jin 458 faced his son in confused pain, never knowing why his children took this pose with him. “A little far afield for you, isn’t it, father?”

“Green is lost. Did your sister find you?”

“She found us. We’re all out looking.”

Jin elder let the breath go out of him, felt his knees weak, the burden of the loss at least spread wider than before. “What chance that we can find him out here?”

“What chance that he wants to be found?” Mark asked, second‑born, his brother’s shadow. “That’s the real matter, isn’t it?”

“Pia–” He gestured vaguely back toward the camp. “I told her I could go faster, look further–that you’d help; but she’ll try to come–and she can’t. She can’t do that anymore.”

“Tell me,” Jin Younger said, “would you have come for any of us? Or is it just Green?”

“When you were four and five–I did, for you.”

Jin Younger straightened back as if he had not expected that. He scowled. “Sister’s gone on down by the river,” he said. “If we don’t take Green between us, there’s no catching him.”

“Where’s Zed and Tam?”

“Oh, off hereabouts. We’ll find them on the way.”

“But Pia’s on the river alone?”

“No. She’s got help. Anyhow, Green won’t hurt her. Whatever else, not her.” Jin Younger slid down the slope, Mark behind him, and they caught their balance and stopped at the bottom in front of him. “Or didn’t that occur to you when you sent her into the hills by herself?”

“She said she knew where you were.”

His sons looked at him in that way his sons had, of making him feel slow and small. They were born‑men, after all, and quick about things, and full of tempers. “Come on,” Jin Younger said; and they went, himself and these sons of his. They shamed him, infected him with tempers that left him nothing–his sons who ran off to the wild, who took no share of the work in the fields, but cut stone when the mood took them, and dealt with born‑men for it in trade, their own discovery. Well enough–it was not calibans that drew them; but laziness. He tried to guide them, but they had never heard a tape, his sons, his daughter…who ran after her elder brothers.

Who left her youngest brother to himself; while Green–started down a path all his own.

Jin thought that he might have done better by all of them. In the end he felt guilt–that he could not tell them what he knew, and how: that once there had been ships, that ships still might come, that there was a purpose for the world and patterns they were supposed to follow.

It was the first time, this walk with his eldest sons, that they had ever walked in step at all–young men and a man twice their age, the first time he had ever come with them on their terms. He felt himself the child.

iii

The way was strange along the bank, the reeds long since left behind, where the river undercut the limestone banks and made grottoes and caves. The calibans had taken great slabs of stone and heaved them up in walls–no caprice of the river had done such things. It was a shadowed place and a hazardous place, and Pia refused to go into it. She perched herself on a rock above the water, arms about her knees, in the shadows of the trees that arched out from rootholds in the crevices of the stone. Moss grew here, in the pools; fish swam, black shapes in the ripples, and a serpent moved, a ripple through the shallow backwaters of the river. Ariels and flitters left tracks on the delicate sand, washed up on the downstream side of the stones, and at several points were the grooves calibans made in their coming up from the river, deep muddy slides.

She looked up and up, where the cliffs shadowed them, scrub trees clinging even to that purchase. There were caves up there. Possibly ariels found them accessible, but no human could climb that face. Bats might nest there. There might possibly be bats, though they came infrequently to the river.

And very much she wished for her brothers…the more when something splashed and moved.

She turned; caught her breath at the sight of the coveralled figure which had come up behind her among the rocks.

“Green,” she said softly, ever so quietly. Her youngest brother looked back at her, out of breath, with that strange, sober stare he used habitually. “Green, our father’s looking for you.”

A dip of the head, one of Green’s staring nods, his eyes hardly leaving her. He knew, Green meant; she knew how to read him.

“You know,” she said, “how upset they’ll be.”

A second nod. There was no hint of distress on Green’s face. No feeling at all. She remembered why she hated this brother, this feelingless nothing of a brother who had changed everything when he came.

“You don’t care.”

Green blinked, solemn as one of his leathery pets.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “Doing what? You want to starve?”

A shake of the head.

“Speak to me. Once, speakto me.”

Green sank down on his haunches on the bank and gathered up a stone, laid it flat on another one. He no longer listened.

“That’s nice,” she said. For one desperate moment she thought of warning him off, telling him the others were coming, so that he would run off, would escape, so that they would never again have to worry about him. But the words stuck in her throat, an ultimate dishonesty–not for themselves, but because it would be hard to look at her father and claim Green had run away.

She sidled closer while her brother made patterns with the stones…sidled closer, snatched suddenly at his arm and spoiled his pattern. He came up flailing and splashing into the margin of the water, twisted in her grip, and of a sudden her foot skidded on wet moss, spilling them both.

He twisted loose. “Green,” she yelled after him, as he went skittering this way and that among the higher rocks.

But he was gone, and she was sitting in the water, soaked and shaken to think that finally he had gotten away. She was jolted by the fall–embarrassed and no small bit angry that he had outdone her, her little brother.

But gone. They were free of him. Finally free.

She gathered herself up then and laved off her hands and muddy coveralls, settled herself finally to dry off and wait.

And when her brothers brought her father with them down the banks of the river, she rose up off her rock to meet them in the twilight.

“He pushed me,” she said as dourly as she could. “He hit me and he got away.”

She was not sure what to expect–focused only on her father’s eyes.

“Did he hurt you?” Jin elder asked, which question warmed her heart with a warmth she had hardly felt since she was small. There was concern there; care for her. He took her into his arms and hugged her as he had done when she was small, and in that moment she looked beyond him, at her brothers; and at Nine and his kin, with a warning and a triumph in her smile.

She was someone again, with Green gone. She looked at Jin Younger, and Mark and Zed and Tam, and they knew what she had done. They had to know, that she had not struggled half hard enough; and why. So she was one of them: co‑conspirator. Murderer, perhaps.

“You tried,” Jin elder said. But she had no twinge of conscience, looking up into his face, because, at least in intent, she had done that much.

“Go back with father,” Jin Younger said. “We’ll search further.”

“No,” Jin elder said. “Don’t. I don’t want that.”

Because he was afraid of this place, Pia thought; he took care for them now and not for Green. He had given up, and that was sweet to hear; that was what they had wanted to hear.

“I’ll look,” Jin Younger insisted, and turned away, up the bank, up among the rocks, never asking which way Green might have gone. It was the wrong way; and Mark went off that way too, toward the cliffs where Jin was leading. So she understood.

“We’d better get home,” Zed said. “It’s getting dark. He’s off into the wild places. And there’s no help in all of us wandering around out here.”

“Yes,” Jin elder said finally, in that quiet way he had, that resigned things he could no longer mend. For once Pia felt a shame not for him, for the simple answers her father gave, but on their account; on her own. Yes. Like that. After walking through territory that was a terror to him. Yes. Let’s go home. Let’s tell mother how it is.

Her brothers were in no wise bound after Green. They had no interest in Green. They had left themselves a maincamper up on the cliffs and night was falling; it was time to go get Jane Gutierrez down before she went silly with panic. Games were done. The night was coming. Fast.

And as for her brother, as for Green, spending the night out in the cool damp, slithering underearth where he chose to be–

She shivered in the circle of Jin elder’s arm, turning back to the way along the shore. Nine and his brothers had already begun to walk back, having nothing to do with her father, and less with their own; besides, Nine had reason to avoid her now. So Jin elder was their possession, theirs, finally, the way he had been before Green existed.

iv

The sun sank, casting twilight among the stones, and Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez walked briskly down the trail among the mounds. Her knees shook just slightly as she went, making the downhill course uncertain. Fear was a knot in her stomach; and she cursed the azi‑born, the beautiful, the so‑beautiful and so hollow. Stay away from them, her mother said–stay away. And her father–said nothing, which was his habit. Or he delivered lectures on ships and birth‑labs and plans gone amiss, and why she ought to think about her future, which she had no desire at all to hear.

Beautiful and hollow. No hearts in them. Nothing like them in the main Camp, no men so beautiful as Jin and his brothers, who were made to fill up the world with their kind. She wanted them; lowered herself to go off in the hills with them, like their own wild breed; and then their half‑minded brother took to the hills as crazy as everyone expected of him, and they left her–just walked off and left her, up in the wild and the oncoming dark, as if she were nothing, as if it was nothing that Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez came out of the camp and wanted them.

Anger stiffened her knees; anger kept her going down the road into the brushy wild below the cliffs. She walked among the mounds, guided herself by the little sun that filtered through the trees atop the mounds.

And suddenly–a moving in the brush–there was a boy. Her heart lurched, clenched tight, settled out of its panic. She stopped, facing the boy in the halflight, among the brush. His coveralls were ragged, his hair too long. But he was human at least. Weirds, they called them, like Green, who lived wild among the mounds. But he was only a boy, not even in his teens–and a better guide, she suddenly hoped, than Jin and the lot of his friends had proved.

“I belong in the camp,” she said, taking the kind of stance she used when she expected something of the azi who served. “I want to go through the maze. You understand? You take me through.”

The figure beckoned, never speaking a word. It began to move off through the brush as vague as ever it had been.

“Wait a minute,” she said; and panic was in her mind–wondering how she was going to explain all this when she got home. She was going to be late. The fugitive showed no interest in helping her and they would be turning out search parties when it got dark. It was already beyond easy explaining–I was lost, mother, father; I was fishing; I got back in the mounds–“Wait!”

Brush moved behind her. She looked about, saw a half dozen others, who held out hands toward her, silent. “Oh, no,” she told them. “No, you don’t…” Her heart was crashing against her ribs. “I’m going on my own, thank you. I’ve just changed my mind.” She saw the eyes of some, the curious intensity, like the eyes of ariels. Crazy, every one. She edged back. “I have to get home. My friends are looking for me right now.”

They came closer, a soft stirring among their ranks, some of them in coveralls and some in only the remnant of clothing, or in blankets and sheeting. And strange, and silent and without sanity.

She remembered the other one, the one behind her–turned suddenly and gave a muffled outcry, face to face with the boy, close enough to touch–“You keep your hands to yourself,” she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice, because that was her chiefest hope–that there were still the town ways instilled in them, still the habit of obeying voices that had no doubt when they gave commands. “Be definite,” her mother had taught her, special op and used to moving people, “and know what you’re going to do if they refuse,”; but her father–“Know what you’re poking your finger at,” he said, whenever she was stung. She stared at the boy, a wild frozen moment before she realized the others were closing from behind.

She whirled, one desperate effort to shock them all and find an opening; but they snatched at her, at her clothing–wrong timing, she thought in utter selfdisgust, and only half thought that she might die. She hit one of them and laid him out the way her mother had taught her, but that was only one of them: the others caught her hair and held her arms. And some of them had clubs, showing her what might happen if she yelled.

Go along with it, she thought; none of the Weirds had ever killed. They were strange, but they had never yet kept their minds at anything: they would lose interest and then she might get away.

They tugged her arms, drew her with them…and this she let happen, noticing everything, every landmark. Jin and his brothers would find her; or she might get away; or if she could not, then her father would come looking, with her mother and the specials who knew the hills and the mounds. The camp would come with guns; and then they would be sorry. The important thing now was not to startle them into violence.

The way they walked twisted and turned in the maze, among wooded ridges and through thickets, until she had only the sunset to rely on for direction. Now she began to feel lost and desperate, but something–be it common sense or despair itself–still kept her from sudden moves with them.

They came to a hill, one of the caliban domes. A boy crouched there, dark of hair, who beckoned her inside, into the dark, gaping entry.

“Oh, no, I won’t. They’ll miss me, you understand. They’ll come–”–Hunting, she had almost said, and swallowed the very thought of shooting calibans. They were the Lost, these boys, this strange band. A shiver ran over her skin.

“Come.” The boy stretched out a hand, fingers spread upward, closed his fist with a slow intimation of power, so real it seemed to narrow all the space in the region, to draw in all that was. A second time he beckoned. Hands closed about her arms, propelled her forward…in a kind of paralysis–they brought her to him, this beautiful young man.

“Green,” she murmured, knowing him. It was his brothers’ look on him, but changed. Mad. Crazed.

And others came, older than he, male and female.

“They’re looking for you,” she said. “You’d better go.”

But then one of the young men came down from atop the hillside, came close to her, that same far distance in his expression. She might have been a stone. She was not really afraid of him for that reason–until he put his hand on her breast.

“They won’t like that,” she said, “the people in the camp.” And then she wished she had not said that at all; her wish was to get out of here alive, and threatening them was not the way to assure that. The youth fingered her clothing, and began at the closing of it. She stood quite, quite still, not minded to lose her life to these creatures.

He was beautiful beneath the dirt. Most were, who came of azi lines. They were gentle in their moves–all of them curiously gentle, stroking her hair, touching her now without violence, so that it began to wander somewhere between nightmare and dream.

v

“She’s not here,” Jin Younger said, looking about the rocks and scrub of the summit–looked at his brother as if Mark could comprehend any more than he what kind of craziness had taken Jane Gutierrez off the heights. “She’s just not here.”

“She’s got to have tried it on her own,” Mark said, no less than what Jin had in his own mind. Jin pushed past his brother at the narrow passage up among the rocks and started down the trail at a run.

“We’ve got to get the rest of us,” Mark called after him. “We’ve got to get some help fast.”

“You go,” Jin called back, and kept going. His brother yelled other things after him, and he ignored them.

The sun was throwing the last orange light into the clouds, glinting like fire off the solar array down in the camp, like miniature suns; and around that brightness was the dark. She had come to them, this main Camp woman, her own choice, come to him in particular, because he had that about him, that he could impress any woman he liked–he and his brothers. She came into the wild country, against all the rules and regulations: that was her choice too; and he was not one to turn away such favors. It had been good, up on the ridge. Good all day, because Flanahan‑Gutierrez was like them, wild.

But he should have reckoned, he chided himself, that a maincamper who would have had the nerve to come up here with them would not cower atop the hill waiting; with more nerve than sense, she would not stay put.

And Flanahan‑Gutierrez was more than born‑man, she had a father on Council; and a mother in the guards. That was more than trouble.

“Jane,” he called, plunging off the trail and into the most direct course through the mounds. It was twilight this low among the hills, deep dusk, so that he pushed his way blindly among the brush, for the moment losing his way, finding the trail again. “Jane!”

But he could see her with her anger and her born‑man ways, just walking on, hearing his voice and ignoring it–determined to find her own way home. If she had started immediately after they had left the hill, she might almost have made it through the mounds by now, might be coming out among the hills just this side of town.

That was his earnest hope.

But the further he went, in the dark now, with sometimes the slither and hiss of calibans attending him–the more he feared, not for his safety, but for what an ignorant born‑man might do out here at night. One could get by the calibans; but there were pits, and holes, and there were the Weirds like Green, who lurked and hid, who had habits calibans did not. Flitters troubled him, gliding from the trees. He brushed them aside and jogged where he could, out of breath now. “Jane!” he called. “Jane.”

No answer.

He was gasping and sweating by the time he reached the top of the last ridge, with the town and Camp in front of him all lit up in floods. He stood there leaning over, his hands on his knees, getting his breath, and as soon as the pain subsided he started moving again.

For a very little he would have given up his searching then, having no liking for going into the main Camp–for going to Gutierrez–Pardon, sir, has your daughter gotten home? I left her on the cliffs and when I got back she was gone…

He had never seen Gutierrez angry; he had no wish to face him or Flanahan; but he reckoned that he might have no choice.

And then, when he had only crossed the fringes of the town, running along the road under the floodlights–“Hey,” a maincamper shouted at him: “You–did you come up from the azi town?”

He skidded to a stop, recognized Masu in the dark, one of the guards. “Yes, sir.” A lie, and half a lie: he had cut across the edge of it and so come up from the town.

“Woman’s missing. Out of bio. Flanahan‑Gutierrez.–They’re supposed to be looking down in town. Are they? She went out this morning and she hasn’t gotten back. Are they searching out that way?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and the sweat he had run up turned cold. “They don’t know where she is?”

“Get the word down that way, will you? Go back and pass it.”

“I’ll get searchers up,” he said, breathless, spun about and ran, with what haste he could muster.

They would find out, he kept thinking in an agony of fear. The main Camp found everything out, whatever they tried to hide. They would know, and he and his brothers would be to blame. And what the main Camp might do then, he had no idea, because no human being had ever lost another. He only knew he had no wish to face her people on his own.

vi

The sun came up again, the second sun since Jane was gone; and Gutierrez sat down on the hillside, wiped his face and unstopped his canteen for a sip to ease his throat. They had it gridded off, searchers in all the sections between the Camp and the cliffs and the Camp and the river. His wife reached him, sank down and took her own canteen, and there was a terrible, bruised look to her eyes.

The military was out there, in force, by pairs; and azi who knew the territory searched–among them the young azi who had come to him and Kate to admit the truth. A frightened boy. Kate had threatened to shoot him. But that boy had been out all the night and roused all the young folk he could find…had gone out again, on no knowing what reserves. It was not just the boy. It was Jane. It was the world. It had given her to them. But Jane thought in Gehenna‑time; thought of the day, the hour. Had never seen a city. Had no interest in her studies–just the world, the moment, the things she wanted…now. Everything was now.

What good’s procedure? she would say. She wanted to understand what a shell was, what the creature did, not what was like it elsewhere. What good’s knowing all those things? It’s this world we have to live in. I was born here, wasn’t I? Cyteen sounds too full of rules for me.

The day went, and the night, and a new day dawned with a peculiar coldness to the light–an ebbing out of hope. His wife said nothing, slumped against him and he against her.

“Some run away,” he offered finally. “In the azi town–some of them go into the hills. Maybe Jane took it into her head–”

“No,” she said. Absolute and beyond argument. “Not Jane.”

“Then she’s gotten lost. It’s easy in the mounds. But she knows–the things to eat; the way to survive–I taught her; she knows.”

“She could have taken a fall,” his wife said. “Could have hurt herself–Might be too wet to start a fire.”

“All the same she could live,” Gutierrez said. “If she had two legs broken, she could still find enough within reach she could get moisture and food. That’s the best guess: that she’s broken something, that she’s tucked up waiting for us–She’s got good sense, our Jane. She was born here, isn’t that what she’d say?”

They did it to bolster their own courage, shed hopes on each other and kept going.

vii

Jane screamed, came awake in the dark and stifled the outcry in sudden terror–the smell of earth about her, the prospect of hands which might touch… But silence, no breathing nearby, no intimation of human presence.

She lay still a moment, listening, her eyes useless in this deep and dark place where they had brought her. She ached. And time was unimportant. The sun seemed an age ago, a long, long nightmare/dream of naked bodies and couplings in a dark so complete it was beyond the hope of sight. She was helpless here, robbed of every faculty and somewhere in that time, of wit as well.

She lay there gathering it again, lay there waking up to the fact that, having done what they had done, the Weirds were gone, and she was alone in this place. She imagined the beating of her heart, so loud it filled up the silence. It was terror, when she thought that she had long since passed the point of fear. She was discovering something more of horror–being lost and left. Isolation had never dawned on her in the maelstrom just past.

Think, her father would say; think of all the characteristics of the thing you deal with.

Tunnels, then, and tunnels might collapse: how strong the roof?

Tunnels had at least one access; tunnels might have more; tunnels meant air; and wind; and she felt a breeze on naked skin.

Tunnels were made by calibans, who burrowed deep; and going the wrong way might go down into the depths.

She drew a deep breath–moved suddenly, and as suddenly claws lit on her flesh and a sinewy shape whipped over her. She yelled, a shriek that rang into the earth and died, and flailed out at the touch–

It skittered away…an ariel; a silly ariel, like old Ruffles. That was all. It headed out the way Ruffles would head out if startled indoors…and it knew the way. It went toward the breeze.

She sucked in wind again, got to hands and knees and scrambled after–up and up a moist earth slope, blind, keeping low for fear of hitting her head if she attempted to stand. And a dim light grew ahead, a brighter and brighter light.

She broke out into the daylight blind and wiping at her eyes…saw movement then, and looked aside. She scrambled to her feet, seeing a human shape–seeing the azi‑born young man crouched there, the first who had touched her. Alone.

“Where are the rest of them?” she asked. “Hiding up there?” There was brush enough, in this bowl between the mounds, up on the ridges, all about.

And then a sweep of her eye toward the left–up and up toward a caliban shape that rested on the hill, four meters tall and more–brown and monstrous, huger than any caliban she had imagined. It regarded her with that lofty, onesided stare of a caliban, but the pupil was round, not slit. The feet clutched the curved surface and a fallen branch snapped beneath its forward leaning weight as the head turned toward her. She stared–fixed, disbelieving when it moved first one leg and then the other, serpentining forward.

Then the danger came home to her, and she yelled and scrambled backward, but brush came between her and it, and trees, as she climbed higher on the further slope.

No one stopped her. She looked back–at the caliban which threaded its way among the trees; again at the azi‑born, who sat there placid in the path of that monster. Very slowly the young man got to his feet and walked toward the huge brown caliban–stopped again, looking back at her, his hand on its shoulder.

She began to run, up and over the mound–scrambling among the brush and the rocks. A gray caliban was there, down the slope and another–near her, that jolted her heart. It lashed about in the brush, caliban‑like: it skittered down the slope and along the ridge, headed toward the river past the rocks–it must be going to the river…

In a flash she realized where she likely was, near rocks that thrust through the mounds: rocks and the river below the cliffs.

She stopped running when she had spent her breath, slumped down amongst the trees and took stock of herself, her remnant of clothing, that she put to rights with trembling hands. She sat there in the brush with tears and exhaustion tugging at her, and she fought the tears off with swipes of a muddy hand.

“Hey,” someone said; and she started, whirled to her knees and half to her feet, like something wild.

From the Camp: they were two of the men from the Camp, Ogden and Masu. She stood up, shaking in the knees, and the blood drained from her face, sudden shame as she stood there with her clothes in rags and her pride in question. “There,” she yelled, and pointed back over the ridge, “there–they caught me and dragged me off–they’re there…”

“Who?” Masu asked. “Who did? Where?”

“Over the ridge,” she kept crying, not wanting to explain, not wanting anything but to see it wiped out, the memory and the smiling, silent lot of them.

“Take care of her,” Masu said to Ogden. “Take care of her. I’ll round up the others. We’ll see.”

“There’s Calibans,” she said, looking from one to the other of them. Ogden took her arm. Her coveralls were torn almost beyond staying on; she reached to cover herself and gasped for breath in shock. “There’s calibans–a kind no one ever saw–” But Ogden was pulling her away.

She looked back when Ogden had hastened her off with him. Fire streaked across the sky, and she stared at the burning star.

“That’s a flare,” Ogden said. “That’s Masu saying we found you.”

“There are people,” she said, “people living in the mounds.”

“Hush,” Ogden said, and squeezed her hand.

“It’s so. They live there. The Weirds. With the calibans.”

Ogden looked at her–old as her father, a rough man, and big. “I’m going to get you out of here,” he said. “Can you run?”

She caught her breath and nodded, shaking in all her limbs. Ogden seized her hand and took her with him.

But they met others, coming their way…and one was her father and the other her mother. She might have run to meet them: she had the strength left. But she did not. She stopped still, and they came and hugged her, her mother and then her father, and shed tears. She was dry of them.

“I’m going back after Masu,” Ogden said. “It may be trouble back there.”

“They should get them,” Jane said, quite, quite coldly. She had gotten her dignity back, had found it again, used it like a cloak between her and her parents, despite her nakedness.

“Jane,” her father said–there were tears in his eyes, but her own were still dry. “What happened?”

“They caught me and dragged me in there. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her father hugged her, and her mother did. “Come home,” her mother said, and she walked with them, no longer afraid, no longer feeling anything but a cold distance between herself and what had happened.

It was a far way, to the Camp; and her father talked about medics. “No,” she said to that. “No. I’m going home.”

“Did they–?” That her mother found the question hard struck her as strange, and ominous. Her face burned.

“Oh, yes. A lot of times.”

viii

“There has to be law,” Gallin said, in Council, in the dome–looked down at all the heads of departments. “There has to be law. We rout them out of there and we have to do something with them. It was a mistake to sit back and let it go on. We can’t be having this…this desertion of the young. We set up fences; we organize a hunt and clear the mounds.”

“They’re our own kind,” the confessor‑advocate objected, rising from her chair, grayhaired and on the end of her rejuv. “We can’t take guns in there.”

“We should,” Gutierrez said, also on his feet, “mobilize the town, dig foundations that go far down; we ought to make the barriers we meant to make at the beginning. We can shoot them–we can level the mounds–and it happens all over again. Time after time. It never works. There’s more going out there than we understand. Maybe another species–we don’t know. We don’t know their habits, their interrelations, we don’t know what drives them. We shoot them and we dig them out and it never works.”

“We mobilize the azi,” Gallin said. “We give them arms and train them–make a force out of them.”

“For the love of God, what for?” the advocate cried. “To march on calibans? Or to shoot their own relatives?”

“There has to be order,” Gallin said. He had gained weight over the years. His chins wobbled in his rage. He looked up at them. “There has to be some order in their lives. The tape machines are gone, so what do we give them? I’ve talked to Education. We have to have some direction. We make regiments and sections; we mount guard; we protect this camp.”

“From what?” Gutierrez asked. And added, because he knew Gallin, because he saw the insecure anger: “Sir.”

“Order,” Gallin said, pounding the able for emphasis. “Order in the world. No more dealing with runaways. No more tolerance.”

Gutierrez sank down again, and the confessor‑advocate sat down. There was a murmuring from the others, an undertone of fear.

The calibans had come closer and closer over the years and they had found no occasion to say no.

But he had qualms when he saw the azi marshalled out for drill, when he saw them given instruction to kill. He walked back on that day with a lump in his gut.

Kate and Jane met him, daughter like mother–so, so alike they stood there, arms about each other, with satisfaction in what they saw. A change had come about in Jane. She had never had that hard‑eyed look before she went out into the mounds. She had grown up and away, to Kate’s side of the world. No more curiosity; no more inquiring into the world’s small secrets: he foresaw silence until that threat out there was swept away, until Jane saw the world as safe again.

While azi marched in rows.

ix

Pia Younger set the bucket down inside the door, in the two room house that was theirs, a house hung with clothes and oddments from the rafters–drying onions, dried peppers, plastic pots balanced on the beams, and her own bed in this corner, her parents’ bed in the other room. And rolled pallets that belonged to her brothers, who prepared for another kind of leaving.

Her mother sat outside–a woman of silences. She went out again and stooped to take her mother’s hand, where she sat sharpening a hoe–stroke, stroke of a whetstone across the edge. Her father–he was off with the boys. Her mother paid little attention…had paid little at all to the world in recent days. She only worked.

“I’m going out,” Pia Younger said. “I’m going to see how it goes.” And quietly, in a hushed voice, bending close and taking her mother’s hands: “Listen, they’ll never catch Green. They’ll go up the river, all the lost ones do. Don’t worry about them shooting him. They can’t.”

She felt guilty in the promise, having no faith in it, having no love for her brother. And it all failed with her mother anyway, who went on with her sharpening, stone against steel, which reminded her of knives. Pia drew back from Pia elder and as quietly drew away. She lifted her eyes to the borders of the town, where another kind of camp was in the making.

Her father was out there following born‑man orders; her brothers pretended to. And very quietly, Pia elder never noticing, Pia Younger walked down the street the opposite way, then cut through at the corner and doubled back again.

She watched the weapons‑practice from the slope of the caliban‑raised hill near the town, crouched there, as she daily watched these drills. The fields went unattended; the youngest deserted the work. And she knew what her brothers said among themselves, that they would only pretend, and carry the weapons, but when it got to attacking the calibans and the runaways, they would run away themselves. Her father did not know this, of course. Her father carried arms the way he did other things the officers asked of him. And that was always the difference.

Herself, she sat thinking on the matter, how drear things would be if her brothers should go, if all their friends should follow them.

Sixteen years was almost grown. She sat making up her mind, thinking that she would go already if not for the danger of the guns and the weapons, that they might mistake her for one of the Weirds out there. Her parents would not understand her leaving. But they understood nothing that was different from themselves; and she had known long ago that she was different. All the children were.

Most of the day she watched; and that night her brothers did not come home. Her father came; neighbors came. They waited dinner. The blanket rolls waited against the wall. And her parents sat in silence, ate finally, asked no questions even of each other, their eyes downcast in that silence in which her parents suffered all their pain.

Officers came in the night, rapped on the door and asked questions–wrote down the names of her missing brothers while Pia hovered behind her parents, wrapped in her blanket and shivering not from cold, but from understanding.

x

“We have to move,” Jones said–atop the hill, where they had set up the observation post; and Kate Flanahan nodded, looking outward over the mounds. She shifted her fingers on the woven strap of the gun she carried on her shoulder. “We’ve got the location of the runaways: we’re getting radio from Masu and his lot, with the site under observation. We get this settled. Fast. We’ve turned back two hundred deserters at the wire–it’s falling apart. We get the human element out of this thing, get those runaways routed out of there before we have every azi‑born in town headed over the hill. They’re deserting in troops–got no sympathy for this operation; and there never was any need of drafting that many. This unit; Emberton’s up the way–we’ll get it stopped. No more runaways then; and then we can get the older workers to start building that barrier. Any questions before we move?”

There were none. Flanahan had none; had hate–had that, for her daughter’s suffering, for the hush that had fallen on Jane, the loss of innocence. For her daughter who sat inside or fell to the studies which she had always hated, because it filled her mind.

“Move out,” Jones said, and they moved, filed out quietly through the hills, amid the brush and the trees of the mounds. Some of Bilas’ crew brought the demolitions. Vandermeer had a projectile gun, and gas cannisters to flood the mound and make it unpleasant for the refugees. And a few shots after that–

The orders were not to kill. But Flanahan reckoned that accidents might happen; there might be excuse. She was looking for one.

They walked, moving cautiously, making as little disturbance as possible…but the way they knew, had it down precisely–the spot where Emberton’s unit had set up shop, watching the accesses, watching the runaways come and go.

They came on a sentry: that was Ogden, one of their own–and gathered him up into their small band: eight of them, in all, counting borrowings from Maintenance–and Emberton was arriving with her escort a little earlier, to take personal command up on the ridge. From now on it was careful stealth: and they broke as few branches as possible, disturbed the brush only where they had to. Flitters troubled them, brushed aside when they would light and cling. A fevered sweat ran on Flanahan’s arms and body–a chance, finally, to do something. To take arms against the confusion that had marked all their efforts in Gehenna. A few shots fired, a little healthy fear on the part of the azi‑born: that would settle it.

And then they might build again.

Flanahan was breathing hard when they topped the ridge: the gun was no small weight and she was years out of training. So were they all–Jones with his waist twice its former girth; Emberton gray with rejuv. She saw the tactical op chief in conference with Masu and Tamilin and Rogers as they came up, into that area where Masu and Kontrin and Ogden had sat out observing the situation throughout.

The runaways were still there. Kate Flanahan crept up with the others, near the edge. The word passed among their crouching ranks. Vandermeer armed the projectile gun with the gas cannisters, aimed at the access of the mound they faced. And right in front of them a pair of the fugitives sat naked, sunning their bony, muddy limbs.

Of the calibans, no sight; and that was just as well: less confusion. Jones put the safety off his rifle, and Flanahan did the same, the sweat colder and heavier on her with the passing moments. Those ragged creatures down there, those fugitives from all that was human, they had hurt Jane…had humiliated her; had cared nothing for what they did, for their pleasure; and Jane would never be the same. She wanted those two. Had one all picked out.

“Move,” the order came from Jones; and they did as they had arranged, pasted a few shots near the visible fugitive, came down the slope. Flanahan whipped off a shot, saw the taller of the two go down like he was axed.

And then the ground pitched underfoot, went soft, slid: there were outcries. One was hers. Trees were toppling about them. Of a sudden she was waistdeep in earth and still sliding down as the whole slope dissolved.

She let go the rifle, used her hands to fight the cascading earth; but it went over her, pinning her arms, filling her mouth and nose and eyes; and that and the pressure were all, pain and the crack of joints.

xi

So they failed. Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez understood that when her father came to her to break the news…but she had understood that already, when the radio had been long silent, and the rumor went through the Camp. She took it quietly, having abandoned the thought that her life would proceed as she wanted. Little surprised her.

Her father settled into silence. His calibans went unhunted, after all; but Kate was gone, and calibans had killed her. He smiled very little, and a slump settled into his shoulders in the passing months.

He offered to have the doctors rid her of it, the swelling presence of the child in her belly; but no, Jane said, no. She did not want that. She paid no attention to the stares and the talk among the youths who had been her friends. There was herself and her father; there was that…and the baby was at least some of Kate Flanahan; some of her father, too; and of whatever one of the lostlings had sired it.

When it came she called her daughter Elly–Eleanor Kathryn Flanahan, after her mother: and her father took it into his arms and found some comfort in it.

Jane did not. Jin’s daughter, it might be; or one of his brothers’. Or something that had happened beneath the hill. She fed it, cared for it, saw a darkhaired girl toddling for her father’s hands, or going after him with smaller paces, or squatting to play with Ruffles–at this she shuddered, but said nothing–Elly followed her grandfather everywhere, and he showed her flitters and snails and the patterning of leaves.

That was well enough. It was all Jane asked of life, to keep a little peace in it.

The fields went smaller. The azi who had fled did some independent farming, over by the cliffs, so the rumor ran. Gallin died, a cough that started in the winter and went to pneumonia; that winter carried off Bilas too. They went no longer outside the Camp–the Calibans came here, too…made mounds on the shore, between them and the fishing; and only that roused them to fight the intruders back.

But the calibans came back. They always did.

Jane sat in the summer sun the year her father died, and saw Elly half grown–a darkhaired young woman of wiry strength who ran with azi youths. She cared not even to call her back.

That was the way, at the end of it all, she felt about the child.

xii

Year 49, day 206 CR

There were more and more graves–of which the born‑man Ada Beaumont had been the first. Jin elder knew them all: Beaumont and Davies, Conn and Chiles, Dean who had birthed his son; Bilas and White and Innis; Gallin and Burdette, Gutierrez and all the others. Names that he had known; and faces. One of his own sibs lay here, killed in an accident…a few other azi, the earliest lost, but generally it was not a place for azi. Azi were buried down by the town, where his Pia lay, worn out with children; but he came here sometimes, to cut the weeds, with a crew of the elders who had known Cyteen.

So this time he brought the young, a troop of them, his daughter Pia’s children and three of his son Jin’s; and some of Tam’s, and children who played with them, a rowdy lot. They trod across the graves and played bat‑the‑stone among the weeds.

“Listen,” Jin said, and was stern with them until they stopped their games and at least looked his way. “I brought you here to show you why you have to do your work. There was a ship that brought us. It put us here to take care of the world. To take care of the born‑men and to do what they said. They built this place, all the camp.”

“Calibans made it,” said his granddaughter Pia‑called‑Red and the children giggled.

“ Wemade it, the azi did. Every last building. The big tower too. We built that. And they showed us how, these born‑men. This one was Beaumont: she was one of the best. And Conn–everyone called him the colonel; and he was stronger than Gallin was… Stop that!” he said, because the youngest Jin had thrown a stone, that glanced off a headstone. “You have to understand. You behave badly. You have to have respect for orders. You have to understand what this is. These were the born‑men. They lived in the domes.”

“Calibans live there now,” another said.

“We have to keep this place,” Jin said, “all the same. They gave us orders.”

“They’re dead.”

“The orders are there.”

“Why should we listen to dead people?”

“They were born‑men; they planned all this.”

“So are we,” said his eldest grandson. “We were born.”

It went like that. The children ran off along the shore, and gathered shells, and played chase among the stones. Ariels waddled unconcerned along the beach, and Jin 458 shook his head and walked away. He limped a little, arthritis setting in, that the cold nights made worse.

He worked in the fields, but the fields had shrunk a great deal, and it was all they could do to raise grain enough. They traded bits and pieces of the camp to their own children in the hills–for fish and grain and vegetables, year by year.

He walked back to the camp, abandoning the children, avoiding the place where the machines that had killed Beaumont rusted away.

Some azi still held their posts in the domes, and the tower still caught the sun, a steel spire rising amid the brush and weeds. Flitters glided, a nuisance for walkers. Ariels had the run of all the empty domes in maincamp, and trees grew tall among the ridges which had advanced across the land, creating forests and grassy hills where plains and fields had been. Most of the born‑men had gone to the high hills to build on stone, or their children had. In maincamp only the graves had human occupants.

He was old, and the children went their own way, more and more of them. His son Mark was dead, drowned, they said, and he had not seen the rest of his sons in the better part of a year. Only his daughter Pia came and went from them, and brought him gifts, and left her children to his care…because, she said, you’re good at it.

He doubted that, or he might have taught them something. The shouts of children pursued him as he went; they played their games. That was all. When they grew up they would go to the hills and go and come as they pleased. Himself, he kept trying with them, with life, with the world. This was not the world born‑men had planned. But he did the best he knew.

V

OUTSIDE

i

Excerpt, treaty of the new territories

“Union recognizes the territorial interests of the Alliance in the star systems variously named the Gehenna Reach or the MacLaren Stars; in its turn the Alliance will undertake to route fifty percent of trade with these systems through Union gateway ports after such time as a positive trade balance has been achieved;…further…that the defense of these territories will be maintained jointly by the terms of the Accord of Pell…”

ii

Private apartments, the First of Council, Cyteen Capital

“It’s only come a few years ahead of expectations.” Councillor Harad’s face, naturally long, was longer still in his contemplation. He paused, poured himself and the Secretary each a glass of wine–lifted his, thoughtfully. “This is our purchase. Pell wine, from the heart of Alliance.”

“You would have opposed the signing.”

“Absolutely not.” Harad sipped slowly and settled again in his chair. The window overlooked the concrete canyons of the city and the winding silver sheen of the Amity River. Outside, commerce came and went. “As it is, Alliance ships go on serving our ports. No boycott. And the longer that’s true–the less likely it becomes. So the colonies were well spent. They’ll keep the Alliance quite busy.”

“They may just lift the colonists off, you know. And if one colony should resist, we’ll have a crisis on our hands.”

“They won’t. There’ll be no untoward incident. Maybe Alliance knows they’re there. We’ll have to break that news, at least, now the treaty’s signed. They’ll take that hard, if they don’t know. They’ll be demanding records, access to files. They’ll know, of course, the files will be culled; but we’ll cooperate. That’s at the bureau level.”

“It seems to me a halfwitted move.”

“What?”

“To give up. Oh, I know the logic: hard worlds to develop; and we’ve hurried Alliance into expansion–but all things considered, maybe we should have thrown more into it. We may regret those worlds.”

“The economics of the time.”

“But not our present limits.”

Harad frowned. “I’ve looked into this. My predecessor left us a legacy. Those worlds were all hard. I’ll tell you something I’ve known since first I opened the file. The Reach colonies were all designed to fail.”

The Secretary favored him with a cold blue stare. “You’re serious.”

“Absolutely. We couldn’t afford to do it right. Not in those years. It was all going into ships. So we set them up to fail. Ecological disaster; a human population that would survive but scatter into impossible terrain. That’s what they’ll find. No mission was ever backed up. No ships were dispatched. The colonists never knew.”

“Union citizens–Union lives–”

“That was the way of it in those days. That’s why I supported the treaty. We’ve just dictated Alliance’s first colonial moves, handed them a prize that will bog them down in that direction for decades yet to come. Whatever they do hereafter will have to be in spite of what they’ve gained.”

“But the lives, Councillor. Those people waiting on ships that never came–”

“But it accomplished what it set out to do. And isn’t it, in all accounts, far cheaper than a war?”

VI

RE‑ENTRY

Military Personnel:

Col. James A. Conn, governor general d. 3 CR

Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, It. governor, d. year of founding

Maj. Peter T. Gallin, personnel, d. 34 CR

M/Sgt. Ilya V. Burdette, Corps of Engineers, d. 23 CR

Cpl. Antonia M. Cole, d. 32 CR

Spec. Martin H. Andresson, d. 22 CR

Spec. Emilie Kontrin, d. 31 CR

Spec. Danton X. Norris d. 22 CR

M/Sgt. Danielle L. Emberton, tactical op., d. 22 CR

Spec. Lewiston W. Rogers, d. 22 CR

Spec. Hamil N. Masu, d. 22 CR

Spec. Grigori R. Tamilin, d. 22 CR

M/Sgt. Pavlos D. M. Bilas, maintenance, d. 34 CR

Spec. Dorothy T. Kyle, d. 40 CR

Spec. Egan I. Innis, d. 36 CR

Spec. Lucas M. White, d. 32 CR

Spec. Eron 678‑4578 Miles, d. 49 CR

Spec. Upton R. Patrick, d. 38 CR

Spec. Gene T. Troyes, d. 42 CR

Spec. Tyler W. Hammett, d. 42 CR

Spec. Kelley N. Matsuo, d. 44 CR

Spec. Belle M. Rider, d. 48 CR

Spec. Vela K. James, d. 25 CR

Spec. Matthew R. Mayes, d. 29 CR

Spec. Adrian C. Potts, d. 27 CR

Spec. Vasily C. Orlov, d. 44 CR

Spec. Rinata W. Quarry, d. 39 CR

Spec. Kito A. M. Kabir, d. 43 CR

Spec. Sita Chandrus, d. 22 CR

M/Sgt. Dinah L. Sigury, communications, d. 22 CR

Spec. Yung Kim, d. 22 CR

Spec. Lee P. de Witt, d. 48 CR

M/Sgt. Thomas W. Oliver, quartermaster, d. 39 CR

Cpl. Nina N. Ferry, d. 45 CR

Pfc. Hayes Brandon, d. 48 CR

Lt. Romy T. Jones, special forces, d. 22 CR

Sgt. Jan Vandermeer, d. 22 CR

Spec. Kathryn S. Flanahan, d. 22 CR

Spec. Charles M. Ogden, d. 22 CR

M/Sgt. Zell T. Parham, security, d. 22 CR

Cpl. Quintan R. Witten, d. 22 CR

Capt. Jessica N. Sedgewick, confessor‑advocate, d. 38 CR

Capt. Bethan M. Dean, surgeon, d. 46 CR

Capt. Robert T. Hamil, surgeon, d. 32 CR

Lt. Regan T. Chiles, computer services, d. 29 CR

Civilian Personnel:

Secretarial personnel: 12

Medical/surgical: 1

Medical/paramedic: 7

Mechanical maintenance: 20

Distribution and warehousing: 20

Robert H. Davies, d. 3 CR

Security: 12

Computer service: 4

Computer maintenance: 2

Librarian: 1

Agricultural specialists: 10

Harold B. Hill, d. 32

CR Geologists: 5

Meteorologist: 1

Biologists: 6

Marco X. Gutierrez, d. 39 CR

Eva K. Jenks, d. 38 CR

Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez, CR 2–CR 50

Elly Flanahan‑Gutierrez, b. 23 CR–

Education: 5

Cartographer: 1

Management supervisors: 4

Biocycle engineers: 4

Construction personnel: 50

Food preparation specialists: 6

Industrial specialists: 15

Mining engineers: 2

Energy systems supervisors: 8

ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL.

“A” class: 2890

Jin 458‑9998

Pia 86‑687, d. 46 CR

(chart)

“B” class: 12389

“M” class: 4566

“P” class: 20788

“V” class: 1278

i

Communication: Alliance security to AS Ajax “…survey and report.”

ii

Year 58, day 259 CR

The ship came down, all long‑range contact negative, and settled at the site the orbiting scan had turned up.

And Westin Lake, Alliance Forces, ordered the hatch opened on a close view of the land; on a sprawl of human‑made huts, on an eerie wilderness beyond, a landscape different than the sketchy Union charts told them they should find.

Someone swore.

“It’s not right,” another said. That was more than true.

They waited two hours, expecting approach: it failed, except for a few small lizards.

But trails of smoke went up, among the trees and the huts–the smoke of evening fires.

iii

There had been a sound like thunder, disturbing the too‑close sickroom where the old man lay, amid a clutter of wornout blankets. An ariel perched on the windowsill, and another enjoyed a permanent habitation in the stack of baskets by the door. The sound stopped. “Is it raining?” Jin elder asked, stirring from that sleep that had held him neither here nor there. Pia tried to tell him something.

And he was perplexed, because Jin Younger was there too, that tall man sitting on the chest by Pia. There was silver in his son’s beard, and in Pia’s hair. When had they gotten so old?

But Pia– hisPia–was dead long ago. Her sibs had gone close after her; the last of his had gone this spring. All were dead, who had known the ships. None had lived so long as he–if it was life, to lie here dreaming. There was none that recalled the things he remembered. The faces confused him, not clear types such as he had known, but still, much like those he had known.

“Mark,” he called; and: “Green?” But Mark was dead and Green was lost, long ago. They told him Zed had vanished too.

“I’m here,” someone said. Jin. He recalled then, and focused on the years in the curious way things would slip into focus and go out again. His children had come back to him, at least Jin and Pia had.

“I don’t think he understands.” Pia’s voice, a whisper, across the room. “It’s no good, Jin.”

“Huh.”

“He always used to talkabout the ships.”

“We could take him outside.”

“I don’t think he’d even know.”

Silence a moment. Darkness a moment. He felt far away.

“Is he breathing?”

“Not very strong.–Father. Do you hear? The ships have come.”

Over the fields of grain, high in blue skies, a thin splinter of silver. He knew what it was to fly. Had flown, once. It was a hot day. They might swim in the creek when they were done with harvest, with the sun heating the earth, and making the sweat run on his back.

“Father?”

Into the bright, bright sun.

iv

Pia‑now‑eldest walked out into the light, grim, looked round her at the knot of hangers‑on…the young, the scatter of children they had sent to Jin. “He’s gone,” she said.

Solemn faces. A handful of them, from about a hand of years to twice that. Solemn eyes.

“Go on,” Pia said, and picked up a stick. “We get first stuff. Get. Go to Old Jon. Go to Ben. Go wherever you like. There’s nothing for you here.”

They ran. Some cried. They knew her right arm–one of the Hillers, who seldom came into town at all, Pia Eldest–no timid towndweller they could put anything off on. She followed them with her eyes, down the row of ramshackle limestone houses, the last ragtag lot of youngers Old Jin had had. They might be kin or just strays. The old man had been readier than most to take them in. The worst stayed with Old Jin. He never hit them, and they had stolen his food until Pia found it out; and then there had been no more stealing, no.

She went inside, into the stench of the unkept house, into the presence of the dead, suddenly lacking an obligation, realizing that she had nothing more to do. Her brother Jin was going through the chest, had laid claim to the other blanket besides the one Old Jin was wrapped in. She frowned at that, stood there leaning on her stick.

“You don’t want anything?” Jin asked her. He stood up, a half a head taller. They wore their hair short, alike; wore boots of caliban hide and shirts and breeches of coarse town weave; looked like as all Old Jin and Pia’s offspring. “You can have the blanket.”

That surprised her. She shook her head, still scowling. “Don’t want anything. Got enough.”

“Go on. You fed him the last three years.”

She shrugged. “Your food too.”

“You made the trips.”

“So. No matter. Didn’t do it for that.”

“Owe you for the blanket,” her brother said.

“Collect it someday. What’s town to us? I don’t want what smells of it.”

Jin looked aside, on the small and withered form beneath the other blanket. Looked at her again. “We go?”

“I’ll wait for the burying.”

“We could take him up in the hills. There’s those would carry.”

She shook her head. “This is his place.”

“This.” Jin rolled the razor and the plastic cup into the blanket, tucked them under his arm. “Filth. Get up to the hills. Those new born‑men–they’ll come here. They’ll be trouble, that’s all. Jin’s ships. He thought everything the main‑campers did was all right. How could he know so much and so little?”

“I had myself a main‑camper once. He said–he said the old azi had to think like Jin, that’s all.”

“Maybe they did. Anything the main‑campers wanted. Only now there’s new main‑campers. You remember how it was. You remember what it was, when old Gallin had the say in main‑camp. That’s what it’ll be again. You mind me, Pia, you don’t wait for the burying or they’ll have you plowing fields.”

She spat, half a laugh.

“You mind me,” Jin said. “That’s how it was. Mark and Zed and Tam and I–we ran out on it.”

“So did I. It wasn’t hard.” She took a comb Jin had left. “This. I’ll keep this.”

“They’ll be coming here.”

“They’ll bring things.”

“Tape machines. They’ll catch the youngers and line us up in rows.”

“Maybe they should.”

“You thinking like him?”

She walked away to the door, looked out above the abandoned, caliban‑haunted domes and the fallen sun‑tower where vines had had their way, where the town stopped. The ship sat there in the distant plain, shining silver, visible above the roofs.

“You don’t go,” Jin argued with her, coming and taking her shoulders. “You don’t be going out there talking to those born‑men.”

“No,” she agreed.

“Forget the stinking born‑men.”

“Aren’t we?”

“What?”

“Born‑men. We were born here.”

“I’m going,” Jin said. “Come along.”

“I’ll walk with you to the trail.” She started on her way. There was nothing to carry but the staff, and what Jin chose to keep; and behind them, the town would break in and steal.

So Old Jin was gone.

And she was sitting by the doorway when they brought the New Men to her.

They disturbed her with their strangeness, as they disturbed the town. There were those who were ready to be awed by them, she saw that, but she looked coldly at the newcomers and kept her mind to herself.

Their clothes were all very fine, like the strange tight weave which the looms the town made nowadays could never duplicate. Their hair was short as Killers wore it and they smelled of strange sharp scents.

“They say there was a man here who came on the ships,” the first of them said. He had a strange way of talking, not that the words were unclear, just the sound of them was different. Pia wrinkled her nose.

“He died.”

“You’re his daughter. They said you might talk to us. We’d like you to come and do that. Aboard the ship, if you’d like.”

“Won’t go there.” Her heart beat very fast, but she kept her face set and grim and unconcerned. They had guns. She saw that. “Sit.”

They looked uncomfortable or offended. One squatted down in front of her, a man in blue weave with a lot of metal and stripes that meant importance among born‑men. She remembered.

“Pia’s your name.”

She nodded shortly.

“You know what happened here? Can you tell us what happened here?”

“My father died.”

“Was he born?”

She pursed her lips. All the rest knew that much, whatever it meant, because it had never made sense to her, how a man could not be born. “He was something else,” she said.

“You remember the way it was at the beginning. What happened to the domes?” The gesture of a smooth, white hand toward the ruins where calibans made walls. “Disease? Sickness?”

“They got old,” she said, “mostly.”

“But the children–the next generation–”

She remembered and chuckled to herself, grew sober again, thinking on the day the born‑men died.

“There were children,” the man insisted. “Weren’t there?”

She drew a pattern in the dust, scooped up sand and drew with it, a slow trickling from her hand.

“Sera. What happened to the children?”

“Got children,” she said. “Mine.”

“Where?”

She looked up, fixed the stranger with her stronger eye. “Some here, some there, one dead.”

The man sucked in his lips, thinking. “You live up in the hills.”

“Live right here.”

“They said you were out of the hills. They’re afraid of you, sera Pia.”

It was not, perhaps, wise, to make Patterns in the dust. The man was sharp. She dumped sand atop the spiral she had made. “Live here, live there.”

“Listen,” he said earnestly, leaning forward. “There was a plan. There was going to be a city here. Do you know that? Do you remember lights? Machines?”

She gestured loosely toward the mirrors and the tower, the wreckage of them amid the caliban burrowings in main camp. “They fell. The machines are old.” She thought of the lights aglow again; the town might come alive with these strangers here. She thought of the machines coming to life again and eating up the ground and levelling the burrows and the mounds. It made her vaguely uncomfortable. Her brother was right. They meant to plow the land again. She sensed that, looking into the pale blue eyes. “You want to see the old Camp? Youngers’ll take you there.”

And on the other side there was lack of trust, dead silence. Of course, they had seen the mounds. It was strange territory.

“Maybe you might go with us.”

She got up, looked round her at the townfolk, who tried to be looking elsewhere, at the ground, at each other, at the strangers. “Come on then,” she said.

They talked to their ship. She remembered such tricks as they used, but the voices coming out of the air made the children shriek. “Old stuff,” she said sourly, and reached for Old Jin’s stick that he had had by the door, leaned on it as if she were tired and slow. “Come on. Come on.”

Two of them would go with her. Three stayed in the village. She walked with them up the road, in amongst the weeds and ruins. She walked slowly, using the stick.

And when she had gotten into the wild place she hit them both and ran away, heading off among the caliban retreats until her side ached and she needed the stick.

But she was free, and as for the mounds, she knew how to skirt them and where the accesses were to be avoided.

She came by evening into the wooded slopes, up amongst the true, rock‑hearted hills.

Someone whistled, far and lonely in the woods where flitters and ariels darted and slithered. It was a human sound. One of the watchers had seen her come.

Home, the whistle said to her. She whistled back; Pia, her whistle said. There were friends and enemies here, but she had her knife and she brought away a comb and her father’s stick, confident and set upon her way.

At least Old Jin had not been crazy. She knew that now. She had seen the ships come, and she remembered the born‑men who had lived in the domes, who had died and mingled their types with azi, some in the hills and some few scratching the land with wooden plows.

There were ships again and born‑men to own the world.

Azi marching in rows, her brother Jin had said. But she was not azi and she would never march to their orders.

v

Strangers.

Green wrinkled his nose and blinked in the light, perceiving disruption in the Pattern made on the plain. There was a new motion now. He felt the stirrings underground recognizing it.

The disquiet grew extreme. He dived back into the dark, finding his way with body and direction‑sense rather than with eyes. Small folk skittered past him as he went, muddy slitherings of long‑tailed bodies past his bare legs as he stooped and hastened along in that surefooted gait he had learned very long ago, hands before him in the dark, bare feet scuffing along the muddy bottom. His toes met a serpentine and living object in the dark, his skin felt an interruption in the draft that should blow in this corridor, his ears picked up the sough of breathing: he knew what his fingers would meet before they met it, and he simply scrambled up the tail and over the pebble‑leathery back, doing the great brown less damage than its blunt claws could do to him in getting past. The brown gave a throaty exhalation, flicked an inquisitive tongue about his shoulders and when he simply scurried on, it slithered after.

It wanted to know then. It was interested. Green darted up again, taking branches of the tunnels which led nearer the strangers. He was, after all, Green, and old, almost the oldest of his kind, in his way superior to the elder brown which whipped along after him. It wanted to know; and he changed his plans and darted up again to daylight to show it.

When he had come to the light again, up where trees crested the mound, where he had free view of the town and the shining thing which had come to rest in the meadow, the brown squatted by him to look too.

He made the Pattern for it. He offered up what he had, making the spirals rightwise up to a point and leftwise thereafter.

The brown moved heavily and seized up a twig fallen from the trees, crunched it in massive jaws. The crest was up. The eyes were more dark than gold. Green sat with the muscles at his own nape tightening, lacking expression for his confusion. The brown was distraught. It was everywhere evident.

It nosed him suddenly, directing him back inside the mound. He reached the cool safe dark and still it pushed at him, herding him toward the deepest sanctuary.

There were others gathered in the dark. They huddled together and in time one of the browns came to herd them further.

It was days that they travelled in that way, until they had come far upriver, to the new mounds, and here they stayed, able to take the sun again, here where calibans made domes and walls and caliban young and grays came out to sun, heedless of the danger westward.

vi

T51 days MAT: Alliance Probe Boreas ;

Report, to be couriered to Alliance Security Operations under seal COL/M/TAYLOR/ASB/SPEC/OP/NEWPORT‑PROJECT/

…initial exploration in sector A on accompanying chart #a‑1 shows complete collapse of Union authority. The prefab domes are deserted, overgrown with brush. The solar array is indicated by letter aon chart #a‑1, lying under the wreckage of the tower; brush has grown over most of it. Inquiry among inhabitants produces no clear response except that the fall occurred perhaps a decade previous. This may have been due to weather.

On the other hand, the prefab domes sit amid a convolute system of ridges identical to those observed throughout the riverside and named in orbiting survey reports 1‑23. We have found the caliban mounds predicted by Union information on the site, but there is no close agreement between present circumstance and Union records. If one example might illustrate the disturbing character of the site, chart #a‑1 may serve: it is inconceivable that the original colony would have established their domes and fields in the center of the mound system. What was level terrain in the Union records is now a corrugated landscape overgrown with brush. When asked what became of the residents of the domes, the townsmen answer that some of them came to the town, and some went to the hills. Orbiting survey does show (chart #a‑2) a second settlement in the hills about ten kilometers from the town, but considering the potential risk of extending interference without understanding the interrelation of the systems, the mission has confined itself to the perimeter outlined for the colony.

There was, however, one interview with a woman, one Pia, no other name known, who has vanished from the community after assaulting mission personnel she had agreed to guide (see sec. #2 of this report) and who may have retreated to the hills. (The transcript of the Pia interview is included as document C, sec. 12. The economy of the town and that of the dwellers in the hills are perhaps linked in trade: see documents in C section, especially sec. 11. )

When questioned regarding the Calibans the townsmen generally look away and affect not to have heard; if pressed, they refuse direct answer. The interviewers have not been able to ascertain whether the townsmen hold the calibans in some fear or whether they distrust the interviewers.

The mission finds the townsmen politically naive, existing in a neolithic lifestyle. The individual Pia recalled technology, and no inhabitants seem surprised at modern equipment, but if there is any technology among them other than a few items originally imported from offworld, the mission has not observed it. They plow with hand‑pushed wooden plows, have no metals except what was originally imported, and apparently do not have high temperature forging techniques necessary to work what metal they do have. Weaving and pottery are known, and may conceivably have been an independent discovery. If there is ritual, religion, or ceremonies of passage, we have yet to discover them, unless there is in fact some superstition regarding the calibans.

There is no writing except in primitive accounts of food inventory. Spelling is not regular, nor is the majority literate beyond the capacity to make tallies. There has been some linguistic change, on which we might derive more information if we knew the world of origin of these Union colonists and the azi (see document E). The accent is distinctive after less than a century of isolation, indicative of a very early breakdown of formal education; but the forms of standard grammar remain, not uncommon in azi‑descended populations where precise adherence to instruction has been tape‑fed as a value.

The local nomenclature has changed: few townsmen recognize Newport as the name of the colony. Their word for their world is Gehenna, while the primary is called simply The Sun, and the principal river on which they have settled they name Styx. The literary allusion is not known to them.

There is no indication that the inhabitants understand any political affiliation to Union, or that there will be any active opposition to Alliance operations or governance.

There is, however, a second and more serious consideration, and it is one which the mission hesitates, in the absence of more evidence, to present to the Bureau. While Union documents describe the highest lifeform as nonsapient, evidence points to caliban intrusion into human living area during the colony’s height. It would be speculative at this point to suggest that caliban activity may have led directly to the decline of the colony, but it is remarkable that the decline has been so thorough and so rapid. Dissension and political strife among the colonists might have disrupted human civilization, but the town, of considerable population, does not show any fear or carry any weapons excepting utilitarian objects such as knives or sticks, and does not threaten with them. We do not yet have a census, but the town is a little smaller than we would expect. Granted the usual Union colonial base, the world population in fifty years might well exceed a hundred thousand by natural reproduction alone.

Possibly poor health care and limited food have worked to keep the rate of increase somewhat lower than average, although families observed are large. Possibly there was a conflict. Possibly there was decimation by conflict or disease. Based on information given by townsmen, nomadism may be a factor to be considered both in population estimates and in politics. The town numbers perhaps as many as 70, 000, with extremely crowded conditions. There are small outlying settlements of less than 1000 individuals sharing town fields, and probably established for convenience.

The heart of the town is limestone slab construction, but the outlying districts and later additions to central district houses are brick and timber, indicating change of supply or change in technological level. Access to the limestone of the central hills may have been cut off, perhaps marking some change of affairs regarding hill communities and the town, but it would be speculation at this point to draw any conclusion.

There is division of labor into brickmaking, pottery, weaving, agriculture. There are no domestic animals: clothing is linenlike, from the cultivation of local plants. There has been a successful economic adaptation to locally available materials, and insofar as success of a colony might be its ability to remain viable without offworld supply, Newport, or Gehenna as the locals name it, has achieved at least a tenuous success.

The atmosphere is overall agrarian and tranquil, although our military advisors persist in warnings that they may be awaiting the departure of the ship and attempting to secure an advantage of surprise. The scientific mission doubts this, but will of course take suggested precautions. The mission for its part has advised that extreme precautions extend to native lifeforms.

From Section D, mission report

Dr. Cina Kendrick

…Intelligence is not, as indicated above, a scientific term. I have objected to the description sapiencein previous studies and again take issue with biological studies which attempt to attach this imprecise assessment of adaptive and problem‑solving capacities to non‑human lifeforms.

Two considerations must be made. First, that an organism’s behaviors may be survival‑positive in one environment and not in another, and second that its perceptive apparatus, its input devices, may be efficient for one environment but not for another. The quality imprecisely described as intelligence is commonly understood to describe the generalization of an organism, i.e, its capacity to adapt by the use of analogy to a variety of situations and environments.

On the contrary even the concept of analogis anthropocentric. Logicis another anthropocentric imprecision, the attempt to impose an order (binary, for instance, or sequential) on observations which themselves have been filtered through imprecise perceptive organs.

The only claim which may be made for generalization as a desirable trait is that it seems to permit survival in a multitude of environments. The same may be said of generalization as part of the definition of intelligence, particularly when intelligence is used as a criterion of the inherent value of an organism or its right to life or territory when faced with human intrusion. Generalization permits migration in the face of encroachment; and it permits one species to encroach on another, which adds another dimension to natural selection. But when extended to intrusion not over another mountain ridge within the same planetary ecology and the same genetic heritage, but instead to intrusion of one genetic heritage upon another across the boundaries of hitherto uncrossable space, this value judgement loses some credibility.

The dominant lifeform on Gehenna II is a scaly endothermic quadruped without aesthetic attraction. The description that leaps too readily to mind is reptile, which does not adequately describe an interior structure which is not reptilian or pertinent to any previously catalogued lifeform; it does not describe behaviors such as mound‑building or suggest reasons for an advance into human “territory”. Nor does it adequately describe the adaptive process by which this lifeform succeeds in the face of a human colony armed with modern weapons, furnished with heavy construction equipment, and established with the precedent of many previous successes.

I dissent from the mission opinion which seeks to debate whether the Union colony may have “contaminated” a sapience. I dissent not to condone the intrusion of humankind into this ecosystem, but to protest a proceeding which will attempt on the basis of quantitative anthropocentric standards to determine the relative value of a lifeform against the desire of humankind to possess what this world has held until now unique within the rules established by its own genetic heritage.

Report, document E

Dr. Carl Ebron

Observation indicates human sites scattered through the hills to such an extent that it would take years and force to lift human presence off this planet. The colonists of the town might obey a summons to be lifted off. It is doubtful that others would be receptive, and the result of any attempt to remove the human population would be a scattering of human presence on a world where humanity can survive without technology. The end result is still contamination, and possibly hostility which might be exploited centuries hence. We are ironically faced with a first‑contact situation involving our own species, a situation fraught with the direst potential hazard to zonal stability and peace.

My own recommendation is a quarantined observation point, allowing what has begun here to take as natural a course as is possible under regrettable circumstances. The other logical solution, a thorough sterilization of the entire area of possible contamination, the elimination of both human and native lifeforms in the hope of preserving a planet from contamination, is Draconian and unthinkable. We are human beings. Our morality constrains usfrom such a decision as might undo an evil. I do not know whether this is (a term to which Dr. Kendrick would object) intelligenton humanity’s part, but it is certain that nothing on this world offers us resistance or seems to mean us harm, and I see no choice but the maintenance of the status quo until such time as a more informed decision might be made.

Document G: Dr. Chandra Cartier

I respectfully dissent from Drs. Kendrick and Ebron. Dr. Kendrick’s thesis, taken in the extreme, might be extended to every lifeform on every world, but I believe that the hazard on Gehenna is more specific, without claiming that it is mindful or sapient. The danger is in ourselves, that humankind and human civilization have failed so miserably here and that we are raising atavistic suspicions of aliens in our midst. I object to the proposition that human beings be quarantined and observed in poverty, disease, and ignorance to protect the supposed value of native life which has not evidenced any creative capacity. I object to the proposition that there is not relative value involved, the value of human beings trapped in a situation of squalor and futility, neither of which may be scientific terms, but both of which have stark value on a world whose last civilized inhabitants named it Hell. I propose on the contrary that it would be a crime against humanity to wall ourselves off from these people. On the contrary, we should bring hospitals, educational facilities, and bring these survivors into the modern age, at least to the extent that they become capable of transforming Gehenna into a viable colony. From the neolithic to the space age may be too great a leap for one generation; but metal plows and engines to pull them are not too great a leap; rejuv and modern medicine are not too great a leap; aid in years of bad weather, advice in agriculture, the judicious importation of plants and livestock, all these things are minimal response to this human suffering. I do not dignify with a response the suggestion advanced by Dr. Ebron that neither humankind nor native life might count against the ideal of ecological restoration: he is correct; the idea is inhuman. As for Dr. Kendrick’s debate of values, it is attractive only in the abstract. Taken in substance it would have starved our species out of existence as soon as it had conceived the theory: our intelligence, whether anthropocentric or otherwise, advises us that we have ensured the survival of terrene species by our actions. Whales survive in the oceans of Cyteen; bears and seals and other species on Eversnow. Was this moral? Is it moral for us to have left our ancestral Sun? Human history is collision, not stasis. It is inhuman not to preserve these people in a reasonable quality of life. There must be a perimeter established here within which humanity can retreat to remain human; and that perimeter must be defended with whatever measures are necessary until investigation has established what we have done on this world. The fact that this world has reduced one well‑equipped human effort to the neolithic is eloquent enough argument that humankind has to be wiser in its dealings with this environment and what lives here.

vii

Alliance HQ to Newport/Gehenna Mission

Couriered by AS Boreas

…Equipment and personnel arriving with this message will permit the expansion of a secure perimeter to include the landing site and town and fields as well as a river access. Establishment of permanent health care and educational facilities for Newport/Gehenna citizens should be given a high priority, but security of Alliance personnel and equipment must not be compromised in the process, regarding force of nature or force of arms, and not excluding the possibility of action by Union agents or native lifeforms.

This office has contacted Union colonial offices with a further request for data on humanitarian grounds and there has been some negotiation opened in this matter, but progress is likely to be minimal and slow.

In the absence of further information, the mission is instructed to establish a perimeter as wide as possible without conflict and within the limits of available equipment and security and tactical considerations. Conflict is to be avoided with humans and native life, but this prohibition does not extend to the function of effective fencing devices. The Bureau draws no conclusion on the sapience or competency of the Calibans and awaits further data which the mission will supply.

The priorities of the mission will be as follows:

to secure the area of its own operation

to determine whether any activity of any other outside agency might exist; if so, to take appropriate measures

to secure the area of the town and adjacent villages necessary for establishment of a viable economy

to assist colonists with medical and educational facilities

to encourage trade with the center of colonization in preference to trade with those in outlying areas, with a view of centralization of economy and facilities and the establishment of an Alliance‑influenced capital which will tend to draw scattered human settlements toward the landing site by the attraction of food and stability, minimizing future political difference

to educate all available citizenry in hygiene, agriculture, small manufacture, and government

to defend against encroachment by native agency by the use of whatever force is minimally sufficient to deter the attempt, up to and including lethal arms.

Closely following this equipment delivery another ship will follow, bringing a station module and personnel for the core of a permanent manned orbiting port, which will monitor the majority of Newport planetary surface and serve, with the addition of a shuttle by future shipment, to maintain constant surveillance and flow of supplies.

It is not Bureau policy to permit a colony to suffer failure from neglect. The human inhabitants regardless of origin are now an Alliance polity but must be dealt with under Section 9 procedures as a first contact. The mission is urged to provide answers to questions of local sapience, and particularly to assist the station when operational in determining what planetary areas might be developed without contact with high lifeforms.

Of high priority, therefore, is the establishment of a landing area at Newport Base…

viii

Newport Base briefing room

“Then the decision is to exploit,” Ebron said, “in potential disregard of native life.”

“It’s a political decision,” said Kendrick. “We’re in the proposed path of expansion. They wantGehenna. That’s what it comes to. Union seeded it, we cultivate it–they’re happy, you understand that? They’re actually relieved the population’s sunk to the stone age. And devil take the calibans.”

“That’s off the record,” Cartier said.

Kendrick drew a breath and let it go again. “That’s off the record. Of course it’s off the record. You had your way, didn’t you?”

“No,” said Cartier. “Unfortunately I didn’t.”

ix

Year 72, day 130 CR

The Hills

It was many a day that Pia Elder sat atop her hill, watching the coming and going in the camp, a long hard walk for an old woman, and the first such walk of the spring. Cloud was panting when he had come so far, and relieved that the old woman was here.

His heart was beating very hard when he came up the slope, partly because the old woman was sitting very still (but she often did that) and his mother had done that when she was dead; and partly because he was afraid of this old woman, who was thin and dry as a stick and strange enough to do things like this, coming out before dawn to look at a place she would not go.

“Ma Pia,” he said very quietly, and circled to the side of her and came facing her, squatted down with his elbows tucked between his knees. It was cold in the morning wind. He was cold. He shivered, looking into a face wrinkled like old fruit and eyes like black Styx stone, water‑smoothed and cold. She let her hair grow. Neglect, he guessed. “Ma Pia, father he wished was you well, ma Pia.”

A while longer the implacable eyes gave him nothing. Then Pia Elder lifted a bony arm from beneath her blanket.

“New buildings this spring.”

He looked, turning his head and turning on his haunches. It was so that there were more buildings in the camp, tall and strange buildings. Perhaps the old woman was being conversational with him. He looked back at her hoping that it would be easy to get her home.

“They’ve smoothed the mounds, levelled the way to the river,” the old woman said. “But you don’t remember how it was.”

“They made the mounds flat.”

“And they go on building. See how the fields go, right across the plain; see where the fences go.”

“Mustn’t touch them fences, the power’ll hurt you.”

She whipped out her arm straight toward him, snapped her fingers. It had as well been a blow; might have been if she had had her stick in her hand. He clenched his arms in shock. “Them fences.”

“Those fences, ma Pia.” He was trembling, from the hour, the cold, the old woman’s eyes.

“Who taught you to talk? Stupid Nine’s lot?”

“No, ma Pia.”

“You talk, hear? Not like Nine’s breed. Not like my brother Jin’s either. You know why, boy?”

“To go and come,” he recited. “To be like born‑men, like them–” He stammered on the word and the cold. The old woman’s eyes bore down on him and he swallowed and picked his word. “Like them down there in the camp.–To be born‑man.”

A moment more the old woman stared at him shivering in front of her; and then she opened her blanket, inviting him into the warmth of her arms. He came, because she frightened him and she had never done this since he was small; and because his teeth were chattering from the morning chill. He was ten. He was old enough to be afraid of her body, which had stopped being woman or man, so old she was, so thin and hard and frail at once that she had stopped being anything he understood. She smelled of smoke and herbs when her arm and the blanket enfolded him; she felt like one of the ariels, all dry and strange. Her hair was white and coarse when he looked up at her. Her arm hugged him with an unsuspected tenderness, waking memories of earliest years, of being a child, and she rocked him–ma Pia, whose face did not know how to laugh.

“I had a brother,” she said. “His name was Green. He went away into the mounds. Before that he forgot how to talk. You never do that. You never do that, young Cloud.”

“I can write my name,” he said.

The arm tightened about him. “Every year more buildings down there. They want us to come. They make their fences and they want us inside. Sometimes I think I’d like to go down and see–but they’ve changed it all. And our kind doesn’t get into the center of it, just the town. There were domes. There were born‑men that lived there. I remember. I remember the day the ships came back and there was a forest where the center of the buildings is now; and mounds; and the calibans weren’t all upriver. Nothing could move them, until the ships came, and the fences, and then the calibans left, and all the Weirds with them, right up the Styx, and to Otherside. So Green went. I think he must be dead now. It was a long time ago.”

He was silent, victim of this outpouring of old things, frightening things, because he saw the buildings growing too, constantly changing.

“Your father was my oldest boy. You look like him, those eyes.”

“Where’d you get my grandfather?” He went brave of a sudden, and twisted about and looked into her eyes.

“Don’t know,” she said. “I found that boy.” That was always the answer. And then: “I think I got him off a born‑man’s son.” She ruffled his hair. “Maybe off a Weird, what would you say?”

His face went hot.

“No,” she said. “I don’t remember. That’s the way it is. It’s cold. I’m walking back.”

“Tell me.”

The old lips pursed. “I think I got him off this born‑man. I do think I did. He was a pretty boy. Such pretty hair, like yours. Name was Mayes. He came into the hills but he never stood the first winter. So fine he was–but he just faded out. My boy had none of that. He was strong. But your mother–”

“She died birthing a baby. I know.”

“Birthing’s hard.”

“Lots do it.”

“Lots die.” She gripped his face in a hard, thin hand, turned his eyes toward her, and the blanket fell away, so that he was cold. “She was Elly Flanahan‑Gutierrez; and she had hair like yours. She was a born‑man’s daughter. Her mother went down in the mounds and came out pregnant.”

He shook his head, teeth chattering. She would not let him go. “My father was Jin, my mother Pia; they had numbers. Born‑men made them. They had me, and Jin; Mark–he’s dead, long time, and Zed–you never knew him: he hunted, and one day he didn’t come back; and Tam Oldest; and me; and Green who went into the mounds. And Old Jin, the second Jin, he had Jin Younger; and Pia Younger; and Tam Younger; and Cloud Eldest; and Sunny and others he didn’t know and no one did. Maybe Elly Flanahan. Maybe. Zed had nobody. But he could have had Elly. If he did it was his only that anyone knows. Tam Oldest had Tam Youngest and Jin Youngest and Red Pia and Cloud Oneeye. Or maybe he had Elly Flanahan. And Green–he was thirteen when he went into the mounds and Jane Flanahan did, and you know, Cloud Youngest, you look most like Green. Hehad hair like that and eyes like that, and you’re small like he was small. Maybe it was Green. Or maybe it was a hundred more, eh? who live in the dark in the mounds. You talk, Cloud, you read and you write your name, and maybe someday you go down to the new camp and plow the fields.”

“I’m a Hiller.” It was protest. His shivers were convulsive. “My ma she wasn’t what you say.”

“Call your oldest Elly,” the old woman said, making him believe she was crazy as they said. “Or Green. And you teach them to talk, hear me, Cloud?” She drew with her finger on the ground, among the dead grass, as if she had forgotten him. “This is the sun rising.” A backwards spiral. “This is setting. Or change. Pebbles one on the other, that’s building. There’s the big browns and the stupid grays and the little greens. And there’s those have seen the seafolk beach in the river in the dark before the ships came back. There’s a thing I saw–it was like caliban but not. Only one. It was big, Cloud. In the river near the sea. I never saw the like again. Lots of things I could never tell the olders. And now there’s lots of things I can’t tell the youngers. Is that fair?”

“I’m cold, ma Pia. I’m cold. Please let’s go. My father told me come.”

“Here.” She took off the blanket from about her shoulders–she wore leather with fringes, all the clothes she ever wore–she wrapped it about his shoulders and stood up with the staff she had had by her in the grass. She moved slowly, grimacing lines deeper into her wrinkled face. And when he got to his feet she tousled his hair again, touched his face in a gentle way ma Pia had never used. And then she walked away toward the north.

“Ma Pia!” Cloud cried, exasperated. He clutched her blanket about him and ran after, the edges fluttering as he hurried. “Ma Pia, that’s the wrong way. That’s the river that way.” The old were like that, forgetting where they were. He was embarrassed for her, for fierce old Pia, and angry for all she had said, and grateful for the blanket. “It’s this way.”

She stopped and stood. “Thought I might go down to the camp today. But there’s no one there to see. Thought I might like a hot meal and maybe look at the machines, like old days. But they make fences down there, and you have to ask to come in and ask to come out and they might think I was old and sick, eh? I’d die if they shut me in. And that’s no way to go. Our village stinks, you know that, Cloud, it smells like the town down there smells, like it smelled the day the first Jin died. I’m tired of stink. I think I’ll take a walk upriver, see where the calibans have gone.”

“Ma Pia, that’s a long walk. I don’t think you ought to do that.”

She smiled, a face that was set with years of scowls. It shook his world, that smile, so that he knew he had never known her. “I think I might about make it,” she said. “Mind you talk, Cloud. Mind you read and write.”

And she walked away. He was guilty, coward, standing there, but she never called him after her. She’s an older, he thought, she’s oldest of the old, like the hills themselves, she is. She knows whether she wants a boy at her heels. She knows how to find her way to home. She knows where she’s going and how far she means to walk. And: She’s beautiful, he thought, which he had never thought in his life about Pia Oldest, but she was, tall and straight and thin, with the wind dancing in the fringes of her clothes and the gray ropes of her hair–going away from him because she wanted to.

He ran back to the village in the hills and told his father, who sent young runners out to find her, but they could not, they never could, Pia being Pia and better than any of them in the wild.

It was days before he cried, and then only for a moment. He imagined she found the calibans, that being what she wanted.

He thought of calibans all his life, thought of them in getting his son and telling him tales, and seeing some of his kin go down to the camp in the plain. Calibans moved close again after ma Pia went away. He was never sure if she had found them, but that thing was sure.

x

Year 72, day 198 CR

Main Base, Gehenna

“Are you,” the man asked, “scared?”

The boy Dean stared at him, sitting where he was on the edge of the doctor’s table in the center of the Base, and the answer was yes, but he was not about to say as much to this Base doctor. Children did this, he knew, went into the Base and learned. And he was here halfgrown as he was because they started taking older ones now, special older ones, who ran off from their work in the fields and lazed about working with their hands or being a problem to the supervisors. He had been a problem. He had told the field boss how to arrange the shifts, and the boss had not liked that; so he had walked offshift, that was all. He had had enough of the man.

Only they took people who bucked what was and soldiers visited their houses and brought them into the Base, behind the inmost wire, to go into the study like they took the children their families sold into going here every day for extra credit at the store.

They did this to children, so he was not going to admit he was scared. They went on asking him questions… Do you read or write? Does anyone you know read and write?–He said nothing. His name was Dean, which was a born‑man name. His mother had told him that, and taught him to write his name and read the signs. But he figured it was theirs to find out.

“My mother get the store allowance?” he asked finally, reckoning if there was good to be gotten out of this, it might as well be hers.

“Depends on how you do,” the man with the book said, turning him back his own kind of answer. “You do real well, Dean, and you might get a lot more than that.”

He viewed it all with suspicion.

“Now we’re going to start out with lessons, going to let you watch the machines, and when you’ve got beyond what they can teach you, then you get paid; and if you think you want to learn more than that–well, we’ll see. We’ll see how you do.”

They put him in front of a machine that lighted up and showed him A and made the sound. It went to B then and showed him AB. They showed him how to push the buttons, and make choices, and he blinked when the machine took his orders. Possibilities dawned on him. He ran the whole range of what they wanted of him.

“I can read,” he said, taking a chance, because of a sudden he saw himself using machines, like them, like what his name meant to him–being different than the others–and he suddenly, desperately, wanted not to be put out of this place. “I’m born‑man. And I can read. I always could.”

That got frowns out of them, not smiles. They went outside the door and talked to each other while he sat with his shoulders aching from sitting and working so long and hoping that he had not done the wrong thing.

A woman came into the room, one of them, in fine clothes and smelling the way born‑men smelled in the Base, in the tall buildings, of things other than dirt and smoke. “You’re going to stay the night,” she said. “You’ve done very well. We’re going to make up more questions for you.”

He did not know why–he should have been relieved to know that he had done well. But there was his mother not knowing what might have happened; and he was thirteen and not quite a man, to know how to deal with this.

But the Base was authority, and he stayed.

Their questions were not A and B. They involved himself, and all the things he thought were right and wrong, and all the things he had ever heard. They asked them over and over again, until his brain ached and he did what he had never done for anyone but his own mother: he broke down and cried, which broke something in him which had never been broken before. And even then they kept up their questions. He stilled his sobs and answered what they wanted, estimating that he had deserved this change in himself because he had wanted what no townsman had. The barrage kept up, and then they let him eat and rest.

In the morning or whatever time he woke–the building had no windows–they brought him to a room and put a needle in his arm so that he half slept; and a machine played facts into his awareness so that his mind went whirling into cold dark distances, and the world into a different perspective: they taught him words for these things, and taught him what he was and what his world was.

He wanted to go home when he waked from that. “Your mother’s sent lunch for you,” they told him kindly. “She knows you’re well. We explained you’ll be staying a few more days before you come and go.”

He ate his mother’s bread in this strange place, and his throat swelled while he swallowed and the tears ran down his face without his even trying to stop them, or caring that they saw. He knew what they did to the children then. The children laughed and wrote words in the dust and hung about together, exempt from work because they had their hours in the Base school. But he was no child; and if he went back into the town now he would never be the man he had almost been. That thing in him which had broken would never quite repair itself; and what could he say in the town?–I’ve seen the stars. I’ve seen, I’ve touched, there are other worlds and this one’s shut because we’re different, because we don’t learn, because–Because the town is what it is, and we’re very, very small.

He was quiet in his lessons, very quiet. He took his trank, and listened to the tapes, having lost himself already. He gave up all that he had, hoping that they would make him over entirely, so that he could be what they were, because he had no other hope.

“You’re very good,” they said. “You’re extremely intelligent.”

This gave him what cheer he had.

But his mother cried when he went back to her quiet as he had become; it was the first time she had ever cried in front of him. She hugged him, sitting on the bed which was the only place to sit in their small and shabby house, and held his face and looked in his eyes and tried to understand what he was becoming.

She could not. That was part of his terror.

“They give me credit at the store,” he said, searching for something to offer her in place of himself. “You can have good clothes.”

She cleaned the house after, worked and worked and worked as if she somehow imagined to herself the clean white place that he had been, as if she fought back by that means. She washed all the clothes and washed the rough wood table and turned the straw mattresses, having beaten the dust out of them outside; and scrubbed the stone floor and got up and dusted even the tops of the rafters with a wet cloth to take away the dust. The ariels who sometimes came and went dodged her scrubbing and finally stayed outside. And Dean carried water and helped until the neighbors stared, neighbors already curious what had happened.

But when it was all still, it was only the old house all unnaturally clean, as if she had scrubbed it raw. And they ate together, trying to be mother and son.

“They wanted to teach me to write,” he said. “But I already knew. You taught me that.”

“My dad taught me,” she said, which he knew. “We’re born‑men. Just like them.”

“They say I’m good.”

She looked up from her soup and met his eyes, just the least flicker of vindication. “’Course,” she said.

But he hedged all around the other things, like knowing what the world was. He was alone, with things dammed up inside he could never say.

And they had asked him things no one talked about–like the old things: like the books–the books they said the Hillers had. He had said these things not because he was innocent, but because he was afraid, because he was tired, because they wanted these things very, very badly and he was afraid to lie.

He sat across the rough table from his mother and ate his soup, afraid now to have her know how much of a stranger he had already become.

xi

“He’s not Unionist,” the science chief said. “The psych tests don’t turn up much remnant of it. No political consciousness, nothing surviving in his family line.”

“The mother’s got title to a two bed house,” security said, at the same long table in an upper level of the education facility. “Single. Always been single. Says the father’s a hiller and she doesn’t know who.”

“Different story from the boy,” said education. “The father’s got born‑man blood, he says. But he doesn’t know who. We’ve interviewed the mother: she says the boy’s got only herblood and her father was a doctor. She’s literate. She does some small medical work in the town. Not getting rich at it. We give it away; she gets paid in a measure of flour. Hasn’t done any harm at it.”

“Remarkable woman. I’d suggest to bring her in for tests.”

“Might have her doing clinic work,” the mission chief said. “Good policy, to reward the whole family.”

“We’re forming a picture,” the science chief said. “If we could locate the books that are supposed to exist–”

“The constant rumor is,” security said, “that the hillers have them. If they exist.”

“We don’t press the hillers. They’ll run on us.”

“If there are literates among the hillers, and books, Union materials–”

“We do what we can,” the mission chief said. “Short of a search, which might drive the material completely underground.”

“We know what the colony was. We know that the calibans moved in on them. Something we did scared them off right enough. Maybe it was the noise of the shuttle. But somewhere the first colony lost control, and cleared out of this place. Went to the hills. The azi stayed in the town. The Dean line, a couple of others trace back to the colonists; but there’s a hiller line among traders from one Elly Flanahan, and a lot of Rogerses and Innises and names that persist that aren’t like azi names. Somethingturned most of the colonists to the hills, completely away from this site. The azi tended to stay, being azi. The flood hypothesis is out. Policy split is possible…but there’s not much likelihood of it. The old camp seemed to have been purposely stripped, just people moving out. And calibans all over it. Tunnelled all under it. The earthmovers sunk and near buried. That’s caliban damage, that’s all.”

“We have a pretty good picture,” science said. “It’s far from complete. If there are records–if there was anything left but anomalies like this boy Dean–”

“We pull the town tighter in,” the mission chief said. “We continue the program, while we have the chance.”

“Only with the town itself.”

“Militarily–” security said, “the only answer. We can’t get the hillers. Not without the town at a more secure level than it is. We can’t ferret the hillers out. Can’t.”

“There’s division of opinion on that.”

“I’m telling you the departmental consensus. I’m telling you the longrange estimate. We don’t need hardened enemies on this world. We don’t use the fist.”

“The policy stands,” the mission chief intervened, a calm voice and firm. “The town first. We can’t reach into the hiller settlement.”

“The calibans–”

“We just keep an eye on that movement. If the caliban drift in our direction accelerates, then we take alarm.”

“The drift is there,” science said. “The mounds exist, a kilometer closer than last season.”

“Killy has a breeding cycle theory that makes a great deal of sense–that this advance and retreat has something to do with a dieoff–”

“We make theories at a distance. While the ban holds on firsthand observation–”

“We do what we can with the town,” the mission chief said, “before we take any action with the calibans. We don’t move until we’re absolutely secure.”

xii

Year 89, day 203 CR

Styxside

They were born‑men and townsmen and they came up the river with a great deal of noise, a sound of hardsoled boots and breaking of branches and sometimes splashing where a stream fed into the Styx. Jin was amazed and squatted on a rock to see, because there had never in his lifetime come such a thing, people from inside the barrier come from behind their fences and down the Styx.

They saw him there, and some of them aimed their guns from fright. Jin’s heart froze in him from shock and he moved no muscle until the seniormost of them waved the guns away and stopped the rest of the column in the kind of order townsmen liked.

“You,” the man said. “Hiller?”

Jin nodded, squatting on his rock, his eyes still alert for small movements of weapons. He had his arms about his leatherclad knees, but there was brush beside him and he could bound away with one fast spring if they went on being crazy.

“You got your number, hiller?”

Jin made a pursing of his lips, his eyes very much alert. “Got no number, born‑man. I hunt. I don’t trade behind your wire.”

The man came a little closer, looking up at him on his rock. “We’re not behind the wire now. Don’t need a number. Want to trade?”

“Trade what?”

“You know calibans, hiller?”

Jin half‑lidded his eyes. “O, so, calibans. Don’t touch them, born‑man. The old browns, they don’t take much to hunters. Or strangers come walking ’long the Styx.”

“We’re here to study,” another man said, leaving the others to come closer. He was an older man with gray hair. “To learn the calibans. Not to hunt.”

“Huh.” Jin laughed hiller‑fashion, short and soft. “The old browns don’t fancy being learned. You make tapes, old born‑man, you make tapes to teach you calibans? They go away from you, long time ago. Now you want them back? They make your buildings fall, they drag you under, old born‑man, take you down with them, down in the dark under ground.”

“I’ll go up there,” a young man said; but: “No,” the old man said. “He’s all right. I want to hear him.–Hiller, what’s your name?”

“Jin. What’s yours?”

“Spencer. You mind if I come up there?”

“Sir–” the man said, with the weapons. But the old man was coming up the side of the rocky slope, and Jin considered it and let him, amused as the old born‑man squatted down hiller‑fashion facing him.

“You know a lot about them,” Spencer said.

Jin shrugged, not displeased at respect.

“You hunt them?” Spencer asked. “You wear their hides.”

“Grays,” Jin said, rubbing his leather‑clad knee. “Not the browns.”

“What’s the difference?”

It was a stupid question. Jin studied the old man, conceived an outrageous idea, because it was a pleasant old face, a comfortable face, on this slightly fat man with wrinkled skin and fine cloth clothes. Fat was prosperity, just enough. An important man who climbed up a rock and sat with a young hunter. Jin grinned, waved a dismissing hand. “You tell the rest of them go home. They make too much noise. I take you upriver.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Make the calibans mad, that noise. You want to see, I show you.”

Ah, the old man wanted the bargain. He saw it in the eyes, pale, pale blue, the palest most wonderful blue he ever saw. And the old man got down off his rock and went to the armed young leader and argued, in harder and harder words.

“You can’t do that,” the young man said.

“You turn them around,” the old one said, “and you report how it was.”

In the end they each got half, because the old man was going on and the rest were waiting here.

“Not far,” Jin said easily. He bounced down off his rock, a soft landing on softsoled boots, and straightened with a nod to the old man in the way that they should go.

“He hasn’t made a deal,” the armed man said. “Dr. Spencer, he’s no townsman; we’ve got no number on him.”

“Maybe if you had,” Spencer said, “he wouldn’t be any good out here.”

The armed man said nothing. Jin motioned to the old one. It was a lark. He was fascinated by these people he had never seen so close at hand, in their fine cloth and hard boots. He reckoned this man for someone–not just a townsman but from the buildings where no one got, not even town folk, and least of all hillers.

And never a hunter who had no number on his hand, for passing the fences and going and coming into the born‑man territory.

“Come on,” he said to the old man Spencer. “You give me a shirt, all right?” He knew that such folk must be rich. “I show you calibans.”

The old man came with him, walking splayfooted down the bank, shifting the straps of all sorts of things he carried. Flitters dived and splashed among the reeds and the old man puffed on, making noise even in walking, a helpless sort in the way no hiller child was helpless.

I could rob this man, Jin thought, just because robbery did happen, high in the hills; but it was a kind of thought that came just because he thought it was trusting of the old man to be carrying all that wealth and going off with a stranger who was stronger and quicker and knew the land, and he was wondering whether the old man knew people robbed each other, or whether inside the camp such things never happened.

He found the calibans where he knew to find them, not so very far as they had been a hand of years ago. Even ariels were more plentiful, a lacery of trails across the sandy margin. Ariels, grays, even browns had turned up hereabouts, and all the lesser sorts, the hangers‑about: it was a rich season, a fat season.

“Look,” he said and pointed, showing the old man a ripple amid the Styx, where the broad marshy water reflected back the trees and the cloudy sky.

The old man stopped and gaped, trying to make out calibans; but there was no seeing that one clearly. It was fishing, and need not come up. They kept walking around the next bank, where mounds rose up on all sides of them, and trees thrust their roots in to drink from the dark hollows. It was forest now, and only leaves rustled.

“They’re all about us,” he told the man, and the man started violently and batted at a flitter which chanced at that moment to land on his neck. The startlement made Jin laugh. “Listen,” Jin said, and squatted down, so the old man squatted too, and paid attention when he pointed across the water, among the trees. “Over there–across the water–that’s theirs. That’s theirs all the way to the salt water, as far as a man can walk. They’re smart, those calibans.”

“Some of you–live in there. I’ve heard so. Could I talk with one?”

Jin’s skin prickled up. He looked toward the safe side of the river, toward familiar things. “Tell you something, old born‑man. You don’t talk to them. You don’t talk about them.”

“Bad people?”

Jin shrugged, not wanting to discuss it. “Want a caliban? I can whistle one.”

“They’re dangerous, aren’t they?”

“So’s everyone. Want one?” He did not wait, but gave out a low warble, knowing what it would do.

And very quickly, because he knew a guard had been watching all this tramping about near the mound, a caliban put its head up out of the brushy entrance and a good deal more of the caliban followed.

He heard a tiny sound by him, a whirring kind of thing. He shot out a hand at the machinery the man carried. “Don’t do that. Don’t make sounds.”

It stopped at once. “They pick that up.”

“You just don’t make sounds.”

“It’s big”

Children said that, when they first saw the old browns. Jin pursed his lips again, amused. “Seen enough, old born‑man. Beyond here’s his. And no arguing that.”

“But the ones–the humans–that go inside–Is it wrong to talk about that? Do you trade with them?”

He shook his head ever so slightly. “They live, that’s all. Eat fish.” Above them on the ridge the caliban raised its crest, flicked out a tongue. That was enough. “Time to move, born‑man.”

“That’s a threat.”

“No. That’s wanting.” He heard something, knew with his ears what it was coming up in the brush, grabbed the born‑man’s sleeve to take him away.

But the Weird crouched there, all long‑haired and smeared with mud, head and shoulders above the brush.

And the born‑man refused to move.

“Come on,” Jin said urgently. “Come on.” Out of the tail of his eye, in the river, a ripple was making its way toward them. The man made his machinery work once more, briefly. “There’s another one. There’s too many, born‑man. Let’s move.”

He was relieved when the man lurched to his feet and came with him. Very quietly they hurried out of the place, but the old man turned and looked back when the splash announced the arrival of the swimmer on the shore.

“Would they attack?” the born‑man asked.

“Sometimes they do and sometimes not.”

“The man back there–”

“They’re trouble, is all. Sometimes they’re trouble.”

The old man panted a little, making better speed with all his load.

“What do you want with calibans?” Jin asked.

“Curious,” the old man said. He made good time, the two of them going along at the same pace. “That’s following us.”

Jin tracked the old man’s glance at the river, saw the ripples. “That’s so.”

“I can hurry,” the old man offered.

“Not wise. Just walk.”

He kept an eye to it–and knowing calibans, to the woods as well. He imagined small sounds…or perhaps did not imagine them. But they ceased when they had come close to the curve of the river where the rest of the born‑men waited.

They were nervous. They got up from sitting on their baggage and had their guns in their hands. Out in the river the ripples stopped, beyond the reeds, in the deep part.

“They’re there,” the old man said to the one in charge of the others. “Got some data. They’re stirred up some. Let’s be walking back.”

“Got a shirt owed me,” Jin reminded them, hands on hips, standing easy. But he reckoned not to be cheated.

“Hobbs.” The old man turned to the younger, and there was some ado while one of the men took off his shirt and passed it over. The old man gave it to Jin, who looked it over and found it sound enough. “Jin, I might like to talk with you. Might like you to come to the town and talk.”

“Ah.” Jin tucked his shirt under his arm and backed off. “You don’t put any mark on me, no, you don’t, born‑man.”

“Get you a special kind of paper so you can come and go through the gates. No number on you. I promise. You know a lot, Jin. You’d find it worth your time. Not just one shirt. Real pay, town scale.”

He stopped backing, thinking on that.

And just then a splash and a brown came up through the reeds, water sliding off its pebbly hide. It came up all the way on its legs.

Someone shot. It lurched and hissed and came–“No!” Jin yelled at them, running, which was the wise thing. But they shot with the guns, and it hissed and whirled and flattened reeds in its entry into the river. The ripples spread and vanished in the sluggish current. It went deep. Jin crouched on his rock and hugged himself with a dire cold feeling at his gut. There was shouting among the folk. The old man shouted at the younger and the younger at the others, but there was a great quiet in the world.

“It was a brown,”Jin said. The old man looked up at him, looking as if he of all of them halfway understood. “Go away now,” Jin said. “Go away fast.”

“I want to talk with you.”

“I’ll come to your gate, old born‑man. When I want. Go away.”

“Look,” the younger man said, “if we–”

“Let’s go,” the old man said, and there was authority in his voice. The folk with guns gathered up all that was theirs and went away down the shore. The bent place stayed in the reeds, and Jin watched until they had gone out of sight around the bend, until the bank was whole again. A sweat gathered on his body. He stared at the gray light on the Styx, trying to see ripples, hoping for them.

But brush whispered. He stood up slowly, on his rock, faced in the direction of the sound.

Two of the Weirds stood there, with the rags of garments that Weirds affected, their deathly pale skins streaked with mud about hands and knees. Their backs were to the upriver. Their shadowed eyes rested on him, and he grew very cold, reckoning he was about to die. There was nowhere to run but the born‑men’s wire. The hiller village could never hide him; and he would die of other reasons if he was shut away behind the wire and numbered.

One Weird lifted his head only slightly, a gesture he took for a summons. He might cause them trouble. He was minded to. But somewhere, not so far away and not in sight either, would be another of them, or two or three. They would move if he denied them. So he leapt down from his rock and came closer to the Weirds as they seemed to want.

They parted, opening a way for him to go, and a quiet panic settled into him, because he understood then that they intended to bring him back with them upriver. Desperately he looked leftward, toward the Styx, toward the gray sunlight mirrored among the reeds, hoping against all expectation that the brown the born‑men had shot would surface.

No. It was gone–dead, hurt, no one might know. A gentle hand took his elbow, ever so gently tugging at him, directing him where he had to go if he had any hope to live.

He went, retracing the track he and the old man had followed, and now the Weirds held him by either arm. The one on his left deftly reached and relieved him of his belt knife.

He could not understand–how they moved him, or why he did not break and run; only the death about him was instant and what was ahead was indefinite, holding some small chance. There was no reckoning with the Weirds or with the browns. There was no understanding. They might bring him back to the mounds and then as capriciously let him go.

The turns of the Styx unwound themselves until the sky‑shining sheet was dimmed in the shade of trees, until they reached the towering ridges and the tracks he and the old man had made when they had stopped.

Perhaps they would hold him here and the old brown would come out and eye him as calibans would, and lose interest as calibans would, and they would let him go.

No. They urged him up the slope of the mound, toward the dark entryway in the side of it, and he refused, bolted suddenly out of their hands and down among the brush at the right, breaking twigs and thorns on his leather clothing, shielding his face with his arms.

A hiss broke in front of him and the head of a great brown loomed up, jaws gaping. He skidded to a stop, slapped instinctively at a sharp sting on his cheek and felt a dart fall from under his fingers. The brown in front of him turned its head to regard him with one round golden eye while he felt that side of his face numb, his heart speeding. His extremities lost feeling, his knees buckled: he flung up an arm to protect his eyes as brush came up at him, and lacked the strength to move when he landed among the thorny branches. They were all about him, the human shapes, silent. Gentle hands tugged at him, turning him onto his back, so that a lacery of cloudy sky and branches swung into his vision.

He was not dying. He was numb, so that they could gather him up and carry him but he was not dead when they carried him toward the hole in the earth, and realizing this, he tried to fight, in a terror deeper than all his nightmares. But he could not move, not the least twitch of a finger, not even to close his eyes when dirt fell into his face, not to close his mouth or swallow or use his tongue, even to cry out when the dark went around him and he was alone with them, with their silence and their touches.

xiii

Year 89, day 208 CR

Main Base

“No sign of this hiller,” Spencer said.

“No, sir,” Dean said, hands behind him.

Spencer frowned, turned from his table fully facing Dean–an intense young man, his assistant, with a shock of thick black hair and a coppery skin tone and a faded blue number on his hand that meant townsman, at least intermittently. Presently Dean was doing field work, meaning he was back in the town again. “How did you hunt for him?” Spencer asked.

“Asking other hillers. Those who come to trade. Theyhaven’t seen him.”

“They know him?”

Dean took the liberty and sat down on the other stool at the slanted desk full of reports, pulled it under him. He smelled of recent soap, never of the fields. Meticulous in that. He had ambitions, Spencer reckoned. He was good–in what they let him do. “Name’s known, yes. There’s a kind of split–I don’t pick up all of it; I’ve given you notes on that. At any rate, there was this very old azi–You want his history?”

“Might be pertinent.”

“The last azi survivor. His brood went for the hills. That’s the ancestry. You hearabout that line, but you don’t see them. None of them are registered to come into the camp. There’s an order among hillers. The ones we get around here–they’ll talk easy on some things. But I didn’t get an easy feeling asking about this fellow Jin.”

“How–not easy?”

A shrug. “Like first it was no townsman’s business; like second, that maybe this particular hiller wouldn’t be dealing with a townsman.”

“How did you put it to them?”

“Just that I had come on something that had to do with this Jin. I thought it was clever. After all, his ancestor was hereabouts. And it used to be that townsmen would trade found‑things to the hills. I didn’t say anything more than that. They might get curious. But if this man’s a bush hiller, it could be a while.”

“Meaning he might be out of their settlement and out of touch.”

“Meaning that, likely. It seemed to be a good bit of gossip. I imagine it’ll go on quick feet. But no news yet.–You mind if I ask what I’m looking for?”

Spencer clamped his lips together, thinking on it, reached then and dragged a set of pictures down from the clutter on the desk, arranged them in front of Dean.

“That’s the Styx.”

“I see that,” Dean said.

Spencer frowned and livened the wallscreen, played the tapeloop that was loaded in the machine. He had seen the tape a score of times, studied it frame by frame. Now he watched Dean’s face instead, saw Dean’s face go rigid in the light of the screen, seeing the caliban and then the human come out of the mound. Dean’s whole body gave back, hands on the edge of the tabletop.

“Bother you?”

Dean looked toward him as the tape looped round again. Spencer cut the machine off. Dean straightened with a certain nonchalance. “Not particularly. Calibans. But someone got real close to do that tape.”

“Not so far upriver. Look at the orbiting survey.”

Spencer marked the place, difficult to detect under the general canopy of trees. Dean looked, looked up, without the nonchalance. “This have to do with the hiller you’re looking for, by any chance?”

“It might.”

“You take these?”

“You’re full of questions.”

“That’s where you and the soldiers went. Upriver last week. Looking for calibans.”

“Might be.”

“This hunter–this Jin–He was there? He guided you?”

“You don’t like the sound of it.”

Dean bit at his lip. “Not a good idea to go up on calibans like that. Not a good idea at all.”

“Let me show you something else.” Spencer pulled a tide of pictures down the slope of the desk. “Try those.”

Dean turned and sorted through them, frowning.

“You know what you’re looking at?”

“The world,” Dean said. “Seen from orbit.”

“Pictures of what?”

A long silence, a shuffling of pictures. “Rivers. Rivers all over the world. I don’t know their names. And the Styx.”

“And?”

A long silence. Dean did not look around.

“Caliban patterns,” Spencer said. “You see them?”

“Yes.”

“Want to show you something more.” Spencer found the aerial shot of the hiller village, thatched huts and stone walls, winding walls, walls that bent and curved. He put a shot of the Base and town and fields next to it, a checkerboard geometry. “Don’t you find something remarkable in that? Have you ever seen it?”

Dean sat still, his eyes only on the pictures under his hands. “I think any townsman would tend to understand that.”

“How do you mean?”

“The founders laid out the town streets. Hillers made the hiller village.”

“Why didn’t they make it like the town?”

“Because they don’t like to do things like us. Spirals are like them. Maybe they got it from the calibans. I figure they did. They do spirals sometimes–like in the dust. You talk with them to trade–they squat down and draw when they don’t like much what you’re telling them.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hiller do that.”

“Wouldn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like when you send me out to ask things hillers won’t say when you ask it. Like when a hiller’s dealing with somebody in Base clothes it’s one way; and when it’s a townsman that hiller’s more and less hard to deal with. They price you way high if they think they can; but they don’t give you the eye, they don’t do hiller tricks when they bargain. Like spitting in the dirt. Like looking off. Like writing patterns.”

“Patterns. What patterns?”

“Spirals. Like two of them squatting down in the dirt and letting the dust run out of their hands or drawing with their fingers–one does one thing and one does a bit on it, while they’re thinking over a deal. And they make you think they’ve forgotten you’re standing there. But maybe they’re talking to each other that way. Maybe it’s nothing at all. That’s why they do it. Because we won’t know. And we’re supposed to wonder.”

Spencer sat and stared at him so long that Dean finally looked his way. “Somehow that never got into your reports.”

“I never thought it was much. It’s all show.”

“Is it?” Spencer pulled two more pictures from the lot, one of an eastern hemisphere river, one of the north shore, a mosaic going toward the sea, including all the effluence of the Styx, and the Base and both town and hiller settlement. He pointed out the places, the encroachment of calibans toward the sea on the far side of the river, the faint shadowing at the end of ridges. “They’re different. The spirals of calibans everywhere in the world but here–are looser. They don’t make hills. See the shadow cast from the centers, here, here and here–that’s a tall structure. That’s a peak in the center of those spirals. Let me get you a closeup.” He searched and pulled another out, that showed the structure, a spiral winding into a miniature mountain, slid that in front of Dean. “You understand what I’m saying now? Only here. Only across from the Base. Is that a caliban structure?”

“How big is that?”

“The complex is a kilometer wide. The peak is forty meters wide at base of the most extreme slope and twenty high. Have you ever seen the like?”

Dean shook his head. “No.” He glanced up. “But then I’ve never seen a caliban. Except the pictures.”

“They didn’t like sharing the Base. They moved out.”

“But they’re moving back. On the river. Your pictures–You won’t get that hunter to go across the Styx, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t think you will. I don’t think you ought to push at the hillers where it regards calibans.”

“Why?”

A shrug. “I just don’t think you should.”

“That’s not the kind of answer you draw your pay for.”

“I think it’s dangerous. I think the hillers could get anxious. The calibans are already close. They won’t like them stirred up, that’s what.”

“They hunt them?”

Another shrug. “They trade in leather. But there’s calibans and calibans. Different types.”

“The browns.”

“The browns and the grays.”

“What’s the difference?”

A third shrug. “Hillers hunt grays. They know.”

“Know what?”

“Whatever they know. I don’t.”

“There was this caliban,” Spencer said carefully. “We’d been up to the mound to take those pictures, this Jin and I. Alone. And we got back to the troops, and this caliban came out of the river. They shot it and it slid back in. ‘It was a brown,’ the hunter said. Like that. And then: ‘Go away fast.’ What do you make of that?”

Dean just stared a moment, dead‑faced the way he would when something bothered him. “Did you?”

“We left.”

“I reckon he did, too. Fast and far as he could. Hewon’t come to your gate, no.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he’s going to be scared a long, long time. He’ll never come to you.”

“Would he be that afraid?”

“He’d be that afraid.”

“Of what? Of calibans? Or Weirds?”

A blink of the dark eyes. “Whatever’s worth being afraid of. Hillers would know. I don’t. But don’t go out there. Don’t send the soldiers outside the wire, not another time.”

“I’m afraid I don’t make that decision.”

“ Tell them.”

“I’ll do that,” Spencer said frowning. “You don’t think the search is worthwhile, do you?”

“You won’t find him.”

“Keep your ears open.”

“I’d thought about sleeping in my own quarters tonight.”

“I’d rather you stayed in the town–just keep listening.”

“For what?”

“Hiller talk. All of it. What if I offered you a bonus–to go outside the wire?”

Dean shook his head warily. “No. I don’t do that.”

“Townsmen have gone to the hills before.”

“No.”

“Meaning you won’t. Suppose we put a high priority on that.”

Dean sat very still. “Townsmen know I’m from inside. Hillers may be stirred up right now. And if they are, and if they knew where I came from–”

“You mean you think they’d kill you.”

“I don’t know what they’d do.”

“All right, we’ll think about that. Just go back to the town and listen where you can.”

“All right.” Dean got up, walked as far as the door, looked back. He looked as if he would like to say something more, but walked away.

Spencer stared at his pictures, ran the loop again.

Calibans had tried the wire last night down by the river. They had never done that, not since Alliance came to the world.

There had to be precautions.

xiv

Year 89, day 208 CR

Styxside

He might be mad: or he wished he were, in the dark, in the silence broken only by slitherings and breathings and sometimes, when his sanity had had all it could bear, by his screams and sobs. His screaming could drive them back a while, but they would be back.

They put no restraint on him. They needed none but the darkness and the earth, the hardpacked earthen walls that he could feel and not see in the absolute and lasting night. His fingers were torn and maybe bleeding: he had tried to dig his way to safety, even to dig himself a niche in which to put his back, so that he could defend himself when they came at him, but he had no sense which way the outside was, or how deep they had taken him–he might be trying to dig through the hills themselves. He found a rock once, and battered one of his attackers with it, but they used their needles and had their revenge for that, a long, long time–like the times he had tried to crawl away, feeling his blind way through the dark, until he had ended with the hissing blast of a Caliban’s breath in his face, the quick scrabble of claws, the thrusting of a great blunt nose that knocked him off his feet–lying there with a great clawed foot bearing down on his ribs and throat until human hands arrived with needles; or running into such hands direct–No, there was no fighting them. He did not know why he did not die. He thought about it, young as he was, and thinking he could smother himself in the earth, that he could dig himself a grave with his lacerated fingers and hide his face in it and stop his breathing with dirt. He dug, but they always came when they heard him digging–he was sure that they heard. So he kept still.

They brought him raw fish to eat, and water to drink which might or might not be clean. At such times they touched him, constant touches like the nagging of children, and then more than other times he thought of dying, mostly because feeding was the one thing they did to keep life in him. He was always cold. Mud caked on his clothes and his skin, dry and wet by turns, wherever in the earthen maze they had moved him last. His hair was matted with filth. His clothes were torn, laces snapped with his struggles, and he tried to knot them back together because he was cold, because clothes were all the protection he had.

He lay still finally, weaker than he had begun, with druggings and struggles and food that sometimes his stomach heaved up or that his body rejected in cramping spasms; and even his condition did not repulse the females among them, who tormented him with some result at the beginning, when it took all of them, sealing up the exits and herding and hunting him through the narrow dark, and hauling him down with weight of numbers–but they got nothing from him now, nothing but a weary misery, terror that they might kill him in their frustration. That was what he had sunk to. But they were always silent, gave him no hint of humor or anger or whether they were themselves quite mad. He was himself passing over some manner of brink; he even knew this, in a far recess of his mind where his self survived. If he were set out again on the riverside–he thought of Styx as the outside, having lost all touch with the sunny hills–if he were set outside to see the daylight again, the sun on the water, the reeds in the wind–if he were free–he did not think he would laugh again. Or take sunlight for granted. He would never be a man again in the narrow sense of man–because sex had not gone dead in him, but become personless, unimportant; or in the wider sense, because he had been gutted, spread wide, to take into his empty insides all the darks and slitherings underearth, all the madness and the windings underground. He had nothing in common with humanity. He felt this happening, or realized it had happened; and finally knew that this was why he had not died, that he had reached a point past which he had more interest in this darkness, the sounds, the slitherings, than he had in life. It had all begun to give him information. His mind received a thousand clues in the midst of its terror, grew tired of terror and concentrated on the clues.

They came for him. He thought it might be food when he heard them, but food smelled, and he caught no such smell, so he knew that it was himself they wanted, and he lay quite still, his heart speeding a little, but his mind reasoning that it was only inconvenience, a little pain to get through like all the other pains, and after that he would still be alive, and still thinking, which was something still more promising than dying was.

But they gathered about him, a great lot of them by the sounds, and jabbed him with one of their needles. He screamed, outraged by that trick, of a sudden wild as a caliban could go. He struck at them, but they skipped silently out of reach. Something slithered across his chill‑numbed legs, and that was an ariel, who ran where they liked in the mounds. He struck at it with a shudder, but it eluded him. Then he sat still, waiting while the numbness crept over him, while his mouth seemed full of fluff and his extremities went dead.

They gathered him up then, feeling over his body to be sure which way he was lying, dragged at his wrists to take him through the narrow tunnel, while he was as paralyzed as he had been when they brought him into this place. His mind still worked. He wished that they would turn him over on his belly because dirt fell into his eyes.

Then there began to be daylight, and they were going up, up, and out of the tunnel into the glaring sun. Light crossed his eyes like a knife, brought tears, and vanished again in a whirl of leaves living and dead as one of them slung him up and over his shoulder.

They passed him then to another, who did not support him, but held him about the chest and dragged him into the river. The shock of water got to him. He tried again to move, to throw his head, to at least get air; but a hand cupped his chin and the water took all but his face and sometimes washed over him. He choked, incapable of moving as his limbs dragged through the water. Terror grew too much then. The senses dimmed, from want of air, from the hammering of his heart–and then they were hauling him out on the other side, and took up his sodden, leather‑clad body sideways while his head fell lowest and a spasm of his throat and stomach sent up a thin stream of choking fluid. His limbs took on a little life, a slight degree of response, but now they dragged him up again, pulling him up a brushy mound on the opposite side of the river, and the dark took them all back again.

He convulsed once, a spasm which emptied out his stomach, lay still and shallow‑breathing when it had passed, and the hands which had let him go when he doubled up took him again by the wrists and collar and by the knees, carrying him in rapid jolting through the dark. He heard a sound, a faint protest from his own throat, and stopped it, silent as this whole world was silent. He had lain for unguessable time in the dark learning the rules and now they stripped all the rules away. He was truly gone now. The paralysis of his body had receded to a kind of numbness, but he failed to do anything to help himself, blind, completely blind, and fainting for long black periods hardly distinguishable from his waking in the dark, except that the fainting was without pain, and that such periods were gratefully frequent.

They stopped finally. He thought perhaps that they had gotten to some place which satisfied them, and that they might go away and let him lie, which was all he wanted, but they stayed: he heard their panting breaths close by, and the small movements they made. He heard the skittering of ariels and the slither of one of the calibans in the vast silence. Perhaps, he thought, they meant him some harm when they had rested. Maybe they were renegades or crazier than the rest, with a notion to have privacy for their sport. He meant to fight them if it got to that, make them stick him again, because that brought some numbness.

One moved, and the others did, fingering him with their blind touches; he struck once, but they got his arms and legs and simply picked him up again, having had their rest. He knew what they could do, and had no desire for the needle under those terms, and even made feeble attempts to cooperate when they had come to a low place, so that finally it seemed to get through to them that he would go with them on his own. More and more they let him carry himself for brief periods, taking him up when he would stumble, when his exhaustion was too extreme.

And then there was a confusion in the dark, a meeting, he thought, and a different smell about those they met. He was pushed forward, let go, taken again, and after that snatched up again, so that he knew he was in different hands. Tears leaked from his eyes. The others had understood something, he had gotten somethingthrough to the others to better his condition, and they changed the game again–snatched him off and hauled him along with more roughness than before. He went limp and let them do what they liked, afraid of needles, afraid of utter helplessness. Such strength as he had left in him, he saved, that being the only canniness he had left.

They climbed. He gathered his mind from the far corners of its retreat and tried to think again, getting information again–ascent, spirals, dry earth.

And light. He tried to lift his head from its backward tilt, could not hold it, watched the light grow in his upside down vision, making a hazy silhouette of the man who had his arms.

An earthen chamber with light coming from a window. A man sitting on the floor, another shadow in his hazed vision.

They let him down. He lay there a moment, frozen in the silence of them, turned his head to the seated man–one of their own, but old, the oldest man he had ever seen, bald and withered and clothed in a oneshouldered robe that held at least the memory of red. The others squatted in their rags. The old man sat and waited.

It was a time before he gathered his wits at all. He levered himself up on his arm, squinted up at the light as the silhouette of a Weird set a large bowl of water in front of him. He bent and cupped up water to drink and wash the sickness from his mouth, drank again and again and splashed clean water over his face while his hands shook and spilled a lot of it in his lap. He blinked at the old man, having gotten used to insanity and expecting more of it.

“Speak,” the old man said softly.

A rock might have spoken. The old man sat. A smallish ariel rested in his lap. His fingers played with it, stroking its ruffled fringes.

Jin needed a time to consider. He wiped his face yet again, drew his knee up and rested his arm on it because he was not steady even sitting. He looked at the old man very long. “Why am I here?” he asked finally, as still, as hushed. But the old man did not answer, as crazed as the rest of them. Or that was not the speech the old man wanted. The silence between them went on, and Jin hugged his knee against him to keep himself from shaking. There was warmth here. It streamed through the window, circulated with the air. Summer went on outside as if it had never stopped. “They found me by the river,” Jin said then, precisely, carefully, in a voice hardly more than a whisper. He recalled the shooting of the caliban and blocked that from his mind, focussing narrowly on the old man in front of him, whose skull was naked of hair, whose thin beard was white and clean. Clean. He never thought to see cleanliness again. He reeked of mud and sweat and excrement; his clothes were caked with filth. “It must have been days ago–” He went on talking, reckoning for the first time that someone was listening to him. “They brought me across the river. I don’t know why.”

“Name.”

“Jin.”

The aged head lifted. Watery dark eyes focussed on his for a long and quiet time. “My name is Green.”

The name hit his mind and settled, a cold, cold feeling. Family stories. They knew each other. He saw that. “Let me go,” he said. “Let me out of here.”

“Someday,” Green whispered, a rusty sound like something long unused. A long silence. “A brown is dead.”

“An accident. No one meant it.”

Green simply stared, then took pebbles from his lap and placed them in a line on the earthen floor. The ariel watched, then scrambled over his knee and onto the hardpacked earth, a flailing of limbs. It stood up on its legs, flicked its collar, studying the matter with one cocked eye. Then it began to move the pebbles, laying them in a heap.

“Let me leave,” Jin said hoarsely, focussing with difficulty. “It was an accident.”

“Do you understand this Pattern?” Green asked. “No.” He answered himself, and gathered up the stones, laid them down again, only to have the ariel move them into a heap. It went on and on.

“What do you want with me?” Jin asked at last. A tremor had started in his arms, exhaustion, and a pain in his gut. “Can’t we get it done?”

“Look at this place,” Green said.

He lifted his eyes and looked around him, the earthen walls, the window, the rammed‑earth floor scored with claws far larger than the ariel’s. The Weirds crouched in shadow beneath the window.

Green clapped his hands, twice, echoing in the stillness. And far away, down somewhere in the shadows something stirred. There was a sough of breath, and that something was large.

Jin froze, his arms locked about his knees. He looked at the window, at sunlight, at a way of escape or dying.

“No hurt,” Green said softly.

It came up from below, a whuff of breath, a dry scraping of claws, the thrusting of a blunt, bony‑collared head up out of the entry to the room, a head as large as the entry itself. Jin scrambled back until he felt the wall behind him, and more of it kept coming, a brown, but a bigger brown than ever he had seen. Its eyes were green‑gold. Its crest was touched with green. It settled on its belly, curling its tail around the curving of the wall beyond Green, reaching from side to side of the room, and the Weirds never stirring from where they sat. The brown craned its neck, turned a fistsized eye in Jin’s direction, came up on its legs and moved closer.

Jin shut his eyes, felt warm breath and the flickering of its tongue about his face and throat. The tongue withdrew. The head turned again to stare at him with an eye large as a human head. The tongue licked out, thick as his arm.

“Be calm,” Green whispered. Jin huddled against the wall, beside huge clawed feet. The head swung over him, overshadowing him; and quietly it bent and nudged him with its jaws.

He cried out; it whipped away, dived down into the dark of the access with a last slithering of its tail. Jin stayed where he was against the wall, shivering.

“Others died,” Green whispered, sitting again where he had sat, calmly placing his stones one after the other. No, the stones said, chilling with hope. Green gathered up the stones again, strewed them one after the other, went on doing this time after time while the ariel crouched near and watched, while the rougher, ragged Weirds crouched watching in their silence.

Jin wiped his mouth and grew quieter, the shivers periodic. He was not dead. He had not died. There was an anger stored away inside him, anger at what he was, that he could not stop shivering, because they could do whatever they liked. He remembered what he had suffered, and how he had screamed, and how all his wit and hunter’s skill had let him down. He no longer liked being what he had been–vulnerable; he would never be again what he had been–naive. All his life people must have seen these things in him. Or all his kind were like him. He loathed himself with a deep and dawning rage.

xv

Year 89, day 222 CR

Main Base

Dean came into the lab, stood, hands behind him, coughed finally when Spencer stayed at work. Spencer turned around.

“Morning,” Spencer said.

“Morning, sir.” He kept his pose, less than easy, and Spencer frowned at him.

“Something wrong, Dean?”

“I heard–”

“Is this panic all over the town, then?”

“The soldiers moved last night. To the wire.”

“An alarm. An empty one.”

“Hillers haven’t shown up in days.”

“So I understand.” Spencer came closer, rested his portly body against the counter and leaned back, arms folded. “You here to say something in particular, Dean?”

“Just that.”

“Well, I appreciate your report. I reckon the hillers are a little nervous, that’s all.”

“I don’t know what I can learn out there in town if there aren’t any hillers coming in.”

“I think you serve a purpose.”

“I’d really like to be assigned inside.”

“You’re not nervous, are you?”

“I just really think I’m not serving any purpose out there.”

“It’s rather superstitious, isn’t it? I detect that, in the town.”

“They’re quite large, sir. The calibans.”

“I think you serve as a stabilizing influence in the town. You can tell them that the station’s still up there watching and we don’t anticipate any movement. It’s probably due to some biocycle. Fish, maybe. Availability of food. Population pressures. You’re an educated man, Dean, and I want you right where you are. We’ve got a dozen applications for Base residency in our hands, a rush on applications for one open job. That disturbs me more than the calibans. We’ve got a whole flood of field workers on the sick roster. I’m talking twenty percent of the workers. Not a fever in the lot. No. We’re not pulling you inside. You stay out until the crisis is over.”

“That could be a while, Dr. Spencer.”

“You do your job. You keep it down out there. You want your privileges, you do your job, you hear me? No favors. You talk to key people and you keep the town quiet.”

“Yes,” Dean said. “Sir.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and nodded a good morning, trying to manage his breathing while he turned and walked out.

His mother was dead. Last month. The meds had not saved her this time: the heart had just gone. The town house was empty except when he moved in. His neighbors hardly spoke, coveting the house so conveniently sharing a wall with their overcrowded one. He had no friends: older than the adolescent scholars, he was anomaly in his generation. He had no wife or lover, being native and untouchable on the main base side of the line, outsider and unwanted in the town.

He walked the quadrangle of Base, among the tall outworlder buildings, among strange concrete gardens which disturbed him to look at, because they made no sense in their forms of twisted concrete, and he saw obscure comparisons to Patterns, which hillers made to confuse townsmen. Just beyond the enclosure made by the buildings and their concrete walls, he entered the gatehouse where he stripped and hung his Base clothes in a locker, and changed to townsman coveralls, drab and worn. They were a lie; or the other clothes were: he was not, this morning, sure.

He went out again, passed the guard who knew him, the outworlder guard who looked at him and never smiled, never trusted him, always checked at the tags and the number on his hand as if they had changed since yesterday.

The guard made his note in the record, that he had left the Base. Dean went out, from concrete garden to a concrete track that led into the town, making a T north and south, one long true street which was all the luxury the town had. The rest were dirt. The buildings were native stone and brick; and the clinic, which was featureless concrete–that was the other gift from the Base. Dirt streets and ordinary houses raised by people who had forgotten architects and engineers. They had a public tap on every street; a public sewer to take the slops, and a law to make sure people took the trouble. There was a public bath, but that stank of its drains, and kept the ground around it muddy, to track in and out. There were fields as far as the hills, golden at this time of year; and the sentry towers; and the wire, wire about the fields, about the town, and concrete ramparts and guardstations about the Base. The wire made them safe. So the outworlders said.

xvi

Year 89, day 223 CR

The Hiller Village

A caliban came at twilight, carrying a rider, a thing no one had ever seen; it came gliding out of the brush near old Tom’s house and another one came after it. A small girl saw it first and stood stock still. Others did the same, excepting one young man who dived into the common hall and brought the whole village pouring out onto the rocky commons.

It was a man on the Caliban’s shoulders, all shadowy in the twilight, the caliban itself indistinct against the brush, and a second caliban, smaller, came after with a man sitting on that one too. The calibans stopped. Weirds materialized out of the brush around the camp, shadows in the fading colors of night’s edge, some naked and some wearing dull‑hued bits of clothes.

The man sitting on the Caliban’s neck–the first one–lifted his arm. “You’ll leave this place,” the voice came ringing out at them, speech from a Weird…and that alone was shock enough, but the caliban moved forward, light and slow as the clawed feet could set themselves on the stone, and the hillers gathered on the doorstep of the common‑hall gave backward like the intaking of a breath. There were hunters among them, but no one had brought weapons to evening meal; there were elders, but no one seemed to know what to say to this; there were children, and one of the youngest started to cry, setting off an infant, but parents hugged their faces against their shoulders and frantically hushed them.

Other calibans were around the camp, some with riders, moving ghostlike through the brush. And smaller calibans, like the witless grays. And smaller still, a handful of the village ariels came slithering out into the empty space between calibans and hall and froze there, heads up, fringes lifted, a thing peculiarly horrid, that creatures the children kept for pets should range themselves with such an invasion.

“The village is done,” the intruder said. “Time to move. Calibans are coming–tonight. More and more of them. The times change. These strangersinside the wires, these strangers that mark you to go through their gates, that take food enough from the town to get fat, they’ve got everything. And they shoot browns. That doesn’t do, no, that doesn’t do at all. There’s no more time. There’s new Patterns, across the river, there’s things no outsider ever saw, there’s a safe place I’ll bring you to, but this place…this village is going to be for the wind and the ariels tomorrow, like the domes they tell about, like those, dead and dark. The stone underfoot won’t protect you. Not now.”

“That’s Jin,”someone said under his breath, a tone of horror, and the name went whispering through the village. “That’s Jin, that was lost on riverside.”

“Jin,” a man’s voice said, and that was Jin Older, who pushed his way out in front of everyone, with tears and shock in his voice. “Jin, come down from that, come here. This is your people, Jin.”

Something hissed. Jin Older slapped at something in his neck about the time his wife pushed through the crowd to get to him; and other kin–but Jin Older fell down, and a few tried to see to him, but one broke to ran for cover–a second hissing, and that woman staggered and sprawled.

“Take what you want,” Jin shouted, pointing a rigid arm at the village about them. “What you’ll need, you gather up–But plan to leave. You thought you were safe here, built on rock. But you leave these buildings, you just leave them for the flitters and be glad. You move now. They won’t like waiting.”

And then: “ Move!” he shouted at them, because no one did, and then everyone did, a panicked scattering.

Cloud reached his own house, out of breath, and fumbled in the dark familiar corner for his bow, with only the fireplace coals to see by. He found his quiver on the peg, slung that to his shoulder and turned about again facing the door as a flurry of running steps came up to it, a flood of figures he knew even in the dark.

“It’s me,” he said before they could take fright–his wife Dal, his sister Pia, his grandmother Elly and his own son Tam, eight years old. His wife hugged him; he hugged her one‑armed, and hugged his son and sister too. Tam was crying as he made to go; ma Elly put herself in his way.

“No,” Elly said. “Cloud, where are you going?”

He was afraid at the thought of shooting humans and calibans, but that was what he was off to, what was about to happen out there–what had already started, on the invaders’ side. He heard shouting, heard the hiss of calibans. Then he heard faint screams.

“Come back here.” Ma Elly clenched his shirt, pulled at him with all her might, a stout woman, the woman who had mothered him half his life. “You’ve got a family to see to, hear?”

“Ma Elly–if we don’t stop them out there together–”

“You’re not going out there. Come back here. They’ll kill you out there, and what good is that?”

His wife held him, her arms added to ma Elly’s, and young Tam held to his waist. They pulled him inside, and he lost his courage, lost all the fire that urged him to go out and die for them, because he was thinking now. Then what? ma Elly asked, and he had no answer, none. He patted his wife’s shoulder, hugged his sister. “All right,” he said.

“Gather everything,” ma Elly said, and they started at it, in the dark. Young Tam tossed a log on the hearth–“ No,”Cloud said, and pulled the boy back and raked the log out with a stick before it took light, a scattering of coals. He took the boy by the shoulders and shook him. “No light. Get all the clothes you can find. Hear?”

The boy nodded, swallowed tears and went. Cloud looked rightward, where ma Elly was down on her knees among the scattered coals wrestling with the flagstones.

He squatted down and levered it up for her with his knife, asked no question as she pulled up the leather‑wrapped books that were the treasure of Elly’s line. She hugged them to her and he helped her up while the business of packing went on around them. “Not going to live in any caliban hole,” ma Elly muttered. He heard her voice break. He had not heard Elly Flanahan cry since his mother died. “You hear me, Cloud. We go out that door, we keep going.”