Forty Thousand in Gehenna

“Yes,” he said. If he had seen no other way he would have surrendered for his family’s sake, for nothing else; but what ma Elly wanted suddenly fell into place with all his instincts. Of course that was where they would try to go. Of course that was where they had to try. Only–his mind shuddered under the truth it had kept shoving back for the last few moments–the invaders would get the old, the weak, the children: the calibans would have them, and the darts would strike down those that stood to fight. All that might get away was a family like his, with all its members able to run, even old ma Elly. Coward, something said to him; but–Fool, that something said when he thought of fighting calibans and darts at night.

He took up a bundle of something his wife gave him, and very quietly went to the door and looked out into the commons, where calibans moved between them and the common‑hall lights. It was quiet yet. “Come on,” he said, “keep close. Pia, go last.”

“Yes,” she said, a hunter herself, for all she was fifteen. “Go on. I’m behind you.”

He slipped out, strung his bow, nocked an arrow as he went around the side of the house, toward the slope of the hill.

A gray thrashed toward him, sentry in the bushes. He whipped the bow up and fired, one true venomed shot. The gray hissed and whipped in its pain, and he ran, down the slope, collected his family again at the bottom, out of breath as they were, and started off again, a jog for a time, a walk, and then a mild run, gaining what ground they could, because he heard panic behind him.

“Fire,” Pia breathed.

He looked back. There was. He saw the glow. Houses were afire.

“Keep walking,” ma Elly said, a gasp for air. “Keep walking.”

A noise broke at their backs, a running, but not of caliban feet. Cloud aimed an arrow, but it was more of their own coming.

“Who are you?” Cloud hissed at them. But the runners just kept running–of shame, perhaps, or fear. His own family went as fast as it could already, and soon he carried young Tam, and Dal took the books from ma Elly, who tottered along at the limit of her strength.

He wept. He did not know it until he felt the wind on his face turn the tears cold. He looked back from time to time at the glow which marked the end of what he knew.

And if the calibans would hunt them further, if they had a mind to, he knew nowhere that they were safe. He only hoped they would forget. Calibans did, or seemed to, sometimes.

xvii

The Town

The snap of wires, flares in the dark–there was screaming, above all the commotion of people running in the streets.

They surged at the gates, at the wire, but the Base never saw them.

“Open up,” Dean cried, screamed, lost among the others. “Open the gates–”

But the Base would not. Would never open the gates at all, to let a rabble pour into their neat concrete gardens, come too near their doors, bring their tradecloth rags and their stink and their terror. Dean knew that before the others believed it. He turned away, ran, panting, crying at once, stopped in a clear place and looked over his shoulder at nightmare–

–at a seam opening in the earth, at houses beginning to fold in upon themselves under the floodlights and collapse in heaps of stone–at the rip growing and tilting the slabs of the paved road, and under the crowd itself, people falling.

A renewed screaming rang out.

The rift kept travelling.

And suddenly in the dark and the floodlights a monstrous head thrust up out of the earth.

Dean ran, everything abandoned, the way the calibans themselves had opened, across the ruined fields.

Once, at screams, a thin and pitiful screaming from behind, he looked back; and many of the lights had gone out, but such as were left shone on a puff of smoke, a billowing cloud amid the tall concrete buildings of main Base…and there was a building less than there had been.

The calibans were under the foundations of the Base. The Base itself was falling.

He ran, in terror, ran and ran and ran. He was not the only one to pass the wires. But he stayed for no one, found no companion, no friend, nothing, only drove himself further and further until he could no longer hear the screams.

xviii

In the Hills

They found him in the morning, among the rocks; and Cloud raised his bow, an arrow aimed across the narrow stream–because everything had become an enemy. But the townsman, wedged with his back to the rocks, only lifted a hand as if that could stop a flint‑headed arrow and stared at them so bleakly, so wearily that Cloud lowered the bow and put the arrow away.

“Who are you?” Cloud asked when they squatted across the narrow stream from each other, while his sister Pia and his wife and son tended ma Elly, bathing her face and holding water for her to drink. “What name?”

“Name’s Dean,” the other said, hoarse, crouching there on his side with his arms about his knees and his fine town clothes in rags.

“Name’s Cloud,” Cloud said; and Dal came beside him and handed him some of the food they had brought, while the stranger sat across the stream just looking at them, not asking.

“He’s hungry,” Pia said. “We give him just a bit.”

Cloud thought about it, and finally took a morsel of bread and held it out to the townsman on his side.

The man unwound himself from his crouch and got up and waded across the stream. He took the bit they offered him and sank down again, and ate the bread very slowly. Tears started from his eyes, ran down his face, but there was never expression on it, never a real focus to his eyes.

“You come from town,” ma Elly said.

“Town’s gone,” he said.

There was none of them could think of what to say then. Town had always been, rich and powerful.

“Base buildings fell,” he said. “I saw it.”

“We go south,” Cloud said finally.

“They’ll hunt us,” Pia said.

“We go down the coast,” Cloud said, thinking through it, where the food was, where they could be sure of fresh water, streams coming to the sea.

“South is a big river,” said Dean in a quiet voice. “I know.”

They took the townsman with them. They found others as they went, some of their own kin, some that were only townsmen who had run far enough and fast enough–like themselves, those who could run, and those who would run, for whatever reason.

Others drifted to them, and sometimes calibans came, but kept their distance.

xix

Message from Gehenna Station to Alliance Headquarters

couriered by AS Winifred

“…intervention of station‑based forces has secured the perimeter of the Base. Casualties among Base personnel are fourteen fatalities and forty six injuries, nine critical… All personnel except security forces and essential staff have been lifted to the station.

“Destruction in the town is total. Casualties are undetermined. Twenty are confirmed dead, but due to the extensive damage and the hazard of the ground, further search is not presently an option. Two hundred two survivors have reached the aid stations set up at the Base gate for treatment of injuries: most told of digging themselves free. Under the cover of darkness Calibans return to the ruin and dig in the rubble. Accompanying tape #2shows this activity…

“The hiller village also suffered extensive damage and orbiting survey has seen no sign of life there. The survivors of the town and village have scattered…

“The Station will make food drops attempting to consolidate the survivors where possible… The Station urgently requests exception to the noninterference mandate for humanitarian reasons. The mission recommends lifting the survivors offworld.”

xx

Message: Alliance Headquarters Science Bureau to Gehenna Station

couriered by AS Phoenix

“…with extreme regret and full appreciation of humanitarian concern the Bureau denies request for lifting of the non‑interference mandate under any circumstance…

“Gehenna Base will be reestablished under maximum security with equipment arriving aboard this courier…

“It is Bureau policy that no interference be permitted in the territory of unconsenting sapience, even in benevolent intention…

“The Station will extend all possible cooperation and courtesy to Bureau agent Dr. K. Florio…”

xxi

Year 90, day 144 CR

Staff meeting: Gehenna Station

“It is a tragedy,” Florio said, making a fortress of his hands in front of him. He spoke quietly, eyed them all. “But those who disagree with policy have their option to be transferred.”

There was silence from the rest of the table, poses like his own, grim faces male and female. Old hands at Gehenna Station. Seniority considerable.

“We understand the rationale,” the Director said. “The reality is a little difficult to take.”

“Are they dying?” Florio asked softly. “No. The loss of life is done. The human population has stabilized. They’re surviving very efficiently down there.” He moved his hands and sorted through the survey reports. “If I lacked evidence to support the Bureau decision–it’s here. The world is put through turmoil and still two communities reassert themselves. One is well situated for observation from the Base. Both are surviving thanks to the food drops. The Bureau will sanction that much, through the winter, to maintain a viable population base. The final drop will be seed and tools. After that–”

“And those that come to the wire?”

“Have you been letting them in?”

“We’ve been delivering health care and food.”

Florio frowned, sorted through the papers. “The natives brought up here for critical treatment haven’t adjusted to Station life. Severe psychological upset. Is that humanitarian? I think it should be clear that good intentions have led to this disaster. Good intentions. I will tell you how it will be: the mission may observe without interference. There will be no program for acculturation. None. No firearms will be permitted onworld. No technological materials may be taken outside the Base perimeter except recording instruments.”

There was silence from the staff.

“There is study to be pursued here,” Florio said more softly still. “The Bureau has met measurable intelligences; it has never met an immeasurable one; it has never met a situation in which humanity is out‑competed by an adaptive species which may violate the criteria. The Bureau puts a priority on this study. The tragedy of Gehenna is not inconsiderable…but it is a double tragedy, most indubitably a tragedy in terms of human lives. For the calibans–very possibly a tragedy. Rights are in question, the rights of sapients to order their affairs under their own law, and this includes the human inhabitants, who are not directly under Alliance law. Yes, it is an ethical question. I agree. The Bureau agrees. But it extends that ethical question to ask whether law itself is not a universal concept.

“Humans and calibans may be in communication. We are very late being apprised of that possibility. Policy would have been different had we known.

“If there were any question whether humans were adapted to Gehenna, that would have to be considered–that humans may have drifted into communication with a species the behaviors of which twenty years of technologically sophisticated research and trained observation has not understood. This in itself ought to make us question our conclusions. In any question of sapience–in any definition of sapience–where do we put this communication?

“Suppose, only suppose, that humans venture into further space and meet something else that doesn’t fit our definitions. How do we deal with it? What if it’s spacefaring–and armed? The Bureau views Gehenna as a very valuable study.

“Somehow we have to talk to a human who talks to calibans. Somehow what we have here has to be incorporated into the Alliance. Not disbanded, not disassembled, not reeducated. Incorporated.”

“At the cost of lives.”

The objection came from down the table, far down the table. From Security. Florio met the stare levelly, assured of power.

“This world is on its own. We tell it nothing; we give it nothing. Not an invention, not a shred of cloth. No trade goods. Nothing. The Station will get its supplies from space. Not from Gehenna.”

“Lives,” the man said.

“A closed world,” Florio said, “gains and loses lives by its own rules. We don’t impose them. By next year all aid will have been withdrawn, food, tools, everything including medical assistance. Everything.”

There was silence after. No one had anything to say.

xxii

Year 90, day 203 CR

Cloud’s Settlement

The calibans came to the huts they made on the new river in the south, and brought terror with them.

But the shelters stood. There was no undermining. The grays arrived first, and then a tentative few browns, burrowing up along the stream.

And more and more. They fired no arrows, but huddled in their huts and tried not to hear the calibans move at night, building walls about them, closing them about, making Patterns of which they were the heart.

Calibans spared the gardens they had made. It was the village they haunted, and even by day ariels and grays sat beneath the sun.

“They have come to us,” said Elly, “the way they came to Jin.”

“We have to stay here,” said an old man. “They won’t let us go.”

It was true. They had their gardens. There was nowhere else to go.

xxiii

Settlement on Cloud’s River

“…They came from a place called Cyteen,” Dean said, by the hearth where the only light was in their common shelter, and the light shone on faces young and old who gathered to listen. He had the light, but he told it by heart now, over and over, explaining it to children, to adults, to townsmen and hillers who had never seen the inside of modern buildings, who had to be told – so many things. Ma Elly and her folk sat nearest, Cloud with that habitual frown on his face, and Dal listening soberly; and Pia and young Tam solemn as the oldest. Twenty gathered here, crowded in; and there were others, too many to get into the shelter at once, who would come in on their turn. They came because he could read the books, more than Elly herself – he could tellwhat was in them in ways the least could understand. Cloud valued him. Pia came to his bed, and called him my Deanin a way proud and possessive at once.

In a way it was the happiest period of his life. They cared for him and respected him; they listened to what he had to say and took his advice. He gave them a tentative love, and they set him in a kind of special category – except Pia, who made him very special indeed; and Cloud and Dal who adopted him and ma Elly who talked about the past with him and Tam who wanted stories. At times the village seemed all, as if the other had never been.

But he could read more than he could say. He interpreted; it was all that he could do. He was alone in what he understood and he understood things that tended to make him bitter, written in the hands of long‑dead men who had seen the world as strangers. He could go to the wire again. They might take him back. But the bitterness stood in the way. The books were his, his revenge, his private understanding –

Only sometimes like tonight when calibans moved and shifted in the village, when he thought of the mounds which crept tighter and tighter about their lives –

– he was afraid.

VII

ELAI

i

178 CR, day 2

Cloud River Settlement

She was born into a world of towers, in the tallest of the Twelve Towers on the sandy Cloud, and the word went out by crier to the waiters below, huddled in their cloaks in a winter wind, that Ellai had an heir and the line went on.

Elai she was, in the new and simpler mode her mother had decreed–Elai, daughter of the heir to the Twelve Towers and granddaughter of the Eldest herself; and her mother, when her grandmother laid her red and squalling in her arms, clutched her with a tenderness rare in Ellai Ellai’s‑daughter–a kind of triumph after the first, stillborn, son.

Calibans investigated the new arrival in her cradle, the gray builders and the dignified browns, coming and going where they liked in the towers they had built. An ariel laid a stone in the cradle, for sun‑warmth, as she did for her own eggs, of which she had a clutch nearby. A gray, realizing someone’s egg had hatched, brought a fish, but a brown thoughtfully ate it and drove the gray away. Elai enjoyed the attention, the gentle nudgings of scaly jaws that could have swallowed her whole, which touched ever so carefully. She watched the flutter of ariel collars and the blink of huge amber eyes as something designed to amuse her.

When she walked, tottering between Ellai’s hands and an earthen ledge of her mother’s rooms, an ariel watched–and soon learned to scamper out of the way of baby feet. They played ariel games, put and take the stone, that sometimes brought squalls from Elai, until she learned to laugh at skillful theft, until her stones stayed one upon the other like the ariels’.

And the day her grandmother died, when she was hustled into the great topmost hall to put her small hand in Ellai Eldest’s and bid her goodbye–Scar got up and followed her out of the room, the great brown which was her grandmother’s caliban–and never would return. It was a callous desertion: but Calibans were different, that was all, and maybe Ellai Eldest understood, or failed to know, sinking deeper into her final sleep, that her life’s companion had gone away and traded allegiances.

But there was consternation in the Tower. Ellai’s presumed heir, Ellai‑almost‑eldest, stood watching it. There was silence among the servants, deathly silence.

Ellai Eldest passed. The caliban Scar should have pined over its dead, or suicided after the manner of its kind, refusing food, or swimming out to sea. Instead it luxuriated, hugely curled about young Elai on the floor, bearing the stumbling awkwardness of young knees in its ribs and the slaps and roughness of infant play. It simply closed its eyes, head lifted, collar lowered, as if it basked in sunlight instead of infant pleasure. It was happy this evening. The child was.

Ellai‑Now‑Eldest reached beside her own chair and met the pebbly hide of her own great brown, Twig, which sat quite, quite alert, raising and lowering her collar. If Scar had felt no urge to die, then Scar should have come to her, driven Twig away and appropriated herself, the new eldest, First in First Tower. Her own Twig could not dominate this one. She knew. At that moment Ellai foresaw rivalry–that she would never wholly rule, because of this, so long as that unnatural bond continued. She feared Scar, that was the truth. Twig did. So did the rest. Digger, Scar had been named, until his forays with Ellai‑now‑deceased against the intruders from the Styx, coming as they would the roundabout way, through the hills; then he had taken that raking cut that marked his ribs and renamed him. Scar was violence, was death, was power and already old in human years. And he might at this moment drive Twig away as an inconsequence.

He chose the child, as if Ellai in her reign over the Twelve Towers was to be inconsiderable, and the servants and the rulers of the other eleven Towers could see it when they came in the morning.

There was nothing that Ellai could do. She considered it from every side, and there was no way to undo it. Even murder crossed her mind, and infanticide: but this was her posterity, her own line, and she could not depend on another living heir, or tolerate the whispers, or dare the calibans. It had to be accepted as it was, and the child treated with tenderness. She was dangerous otherwise.

Children.

A child of eight sat in power on the distant Styx, Jin 12, with the old man dead. And Scar took to Elai. The Styx would stay quiet for at least a decade or so. And then–

A chill afflicted her. Her hand still stroked the plated scales of Twig’s beautiful skull.

Scar had simply bypassed her, this caliban whose occupation was conflict, as if all her reign was inconsequence, as if she were only preface. It portended peace, then, while children grew. A decade or so of peace. She would have that, and if she were wise, she would use it well, knowing what would come after her.

ii

184 CR, day 05

General Report, Gehenna Base to Alliance Headquarters

…The situation has remained stable over the past half decade. The detente between the Styx settlement and the Cloud River settlements continues in effect. Contacts with both settlements continue in an unprecedented calm. A Stygian tower has risen on the perimeter of the Base. In accordance with established policy the Base has made no move to prohibit construction or movement.

…The two settlements are undergoing rapid expansion in which some see an indication that humanity on Gehenna has passed a crisis point. The historical pattern of conflict has proceeded through the forested area outside Base observation, minor if constant encounters between Stygians and Cloud River settlers involving some loss of life, but never threatening the existence of either, excepting the severe and widespread hostilities of CR 124‑125, when flood and crop failure occasioned raids and widespread destruction. The current tranquil period, with its growth in population and food supply, is without precedent. In view of this historical pattern, and with careful consideration of long‑range objectives, the Base respectfully requests permission to take advantage of this opportunity to establish subtle and non‑interfering ties with both sides in the hope that this peaceful period may be lengthened. This modified and limited intervention seems justified in the hope of establishing Gehenna as a peaceful presence in the zone.

iii

185 CR, day 200

Message, Alliance HQ to Gehenna Base

…extend all cooperation to the Bureau agents arriving with this message, conducting extensive briefings and seminars on the Gehenna settlements…

…While the Bureau concurs that conditions warrant direct observation and increased contact, the Bureau cautions the Mission that prohibitions against technological imports and trade continue. In all due consideration of humanitarian concerns, the Bureau reminds the Mission that the most benign of interventions may result in premature technological advances which may harm or misdirect the developing culture…

iv

185 CR, day 201

Gehenna Base, Staff Meeting

“…meaning they’re more interested in the calibans than in human life,” Security said glumly.

“In the totality,” the Director said. “In the whole.”

“They want it preserved for study.”

“We could haul the Gehennans in by force,” the Director said, “and hunt them wherever they exist, and feed them tape until they’re model citizens. But what would theychoose, umn? And how many calibans would we have to kill and what would we do to life here? Imagine it–a world where every free human’s in hiding and we’ve dismantled the whole economic system–”

“We could do better for them than watch them.”

“Could we? It’s an old debate. The point is, we don’t know what we’d be doing. We take it slow. You newcomers, you’ll learn why. They’re different. You’ll learn that too.”

There were guarded looks down the table, sensitive outworlder faces.

“ Different, on Gehenna,” the Director said, “isn’t a case of prejudice. It’s a fact of life.”

“We’ve studied the culture,” the incoming mission chief said. “We understand the strictures. We’re here to review them.”

“ Different,”the Director said again. “In ways you won’t understand by reading papers or getting tape.”

“The Bureau appreciates the facts behind the designation. Union…is interested. Surveillance is being tightened for that reason. The quarantine makes them nervous. They wonder. Doubtless they wonder. Perhaps they’ve begun to have apprehensions of something beyond their intentions here. There will be negotiations. We’ll be making recommendations in that regard too. This differencewill have its bearing on policy.”

“Union back on Gehenna–”

“That won’t be within our recommendations. Release of data is another matter. A botched alien contact, happening in some other Union recklessness, might not limit its effects so conveniently to a single world. Release of the data is a possibility…educating Union to what they did here.”

There were frowns. The Director’s was deepest. “Our concern is human life here. Now. Our reason for the request–”

“We understand your reasons.”

“We have to do something with this generation or this settlement may take abrupt new directions.”

“Fears for your own security?”

“No. For what this is becoming.”

“The difference you noted.”

“There’s no time,” the Director said, “that I can see any assimilation of Gehenna into Alliance…without the inclusion of humans who think at an angle. You can tape them. You can try to change them. If you don’t understand what they are now, how do you understand them when they’ve come another hundred years, another two hundred on the same course? If you don’t redirect them–what do you do with them? Perpetual quarantine–into the millennia? Governments change. Policies change. Someday somebody will take them in…and whatthey take in…is being shaped in these first centuries. We have a breathing space. A little peace. The chance of contact.”

“We understand that. That’s what we’re here to determine.”

“A handful of years,” the Director said, “may be all we have.”

v

188 CR, day 178

Cloud River Settlement

There was land across the saltwater and Elai dreamed of it–a pair of peaks lying hazily across the sea.

“What’s there?” she had asked Ellai‑Eldest. Ellai had shrugged and finally said mountains. Mountains in the sea.

“Who lives there?” Elai had asked. And, No one, Ellai had said. No one, unless the starships come there. Who else could cross the water?

So Elai set her dreams there. If there was trouble where she was, the mountains across the sea were free of it; if there was dullness in the winter days, there was mystery in the mist‑wreathed isle across the waves. If there was No, Elai, and Wait, Elai, and Be still, Elai–on this side of the waves, there was adventure to be had on that side. The mountains were for taking and the unseen rivers were for swimming, and if there were starships holding them, then she would hide in burrows till they took their leave and she and a horde of brave adventurers would go out and build their towers so the strangers could not argue with their possession. Elai’s land, it would be. And she would send to her mother and her cousin Paeia, offering them the chance to come if they would mind herrules. The Styxsiders could never reach them there. The rivers there would never flood and the crops would never fail, and behind those mountains would be other mountains to be taken, one after the other.

Forever and forever.

She made rafts of chips of wood and sailed them on the surge. They drifted back and she leaned close and blew them out again. She made canopies for passengers on her most elaborate constructions, and did straw‑dolls to ride, and put on pebbles for supplies and put them out to sea. But the surge toppled the stones and swept off the dolls and the raft came back again, so she made sides so the passengers should stay, carved her rafts with a precious bone knife old Dal had made her, and set them out with greater success.

If she had had a great axe such as the woodcutters used, then she might build a real one: so she reckoned. But she tried her bone knife on a sizeable log and made little progress at it, until a rain swept it all away.

So she sat on the shore with Scar, bereft of her work, and thought how unfair it was, that the starships came and went so powerfully into the air. She had tried that too, made ships of wood and leafy wings that fell like stones, lacking the thunderous power of the machines. One dreamed. At least her sea‑dreams floated.

The machines, she had thought, made wind to drive them. If only the wind which battered at the shore could get all into one place and drive the ships into the sky. If only.

She saw leaves sail, ever so much lighter on the river’s face, whirling round and about. If she could make the ships lighter. If she could make them like the leaves… If they could be like the fliers that spread wings and flew… She made wings for her sea‑borne ships, pairs of leaves, and stuck them up on twigs, and to her delight the ships did fly, if crazily, lurching over the water and the chop until they crashed on rocks.

If she had a woodcutter’s skill, if she could build something bigger still–a great sea‑ship with wings–

She sailed carved ships at least to the rocks an easy wade offshore, and imagined those rocks as mountains.

But always the real, the true mountains were across the wider sea, promising and full of dreams.

She watched the last of her ships wreck itself and it all welled up in her, the desire, the wishing, that she could be something more than ten years old and superfluous to all the world. She could order this and that about her life–she had what she wanted in everything that never mattered. She could have gone hungry: she was willing to go hungry in her adventures, which seemed a part of war: she had heard the elders talking. She was willing to sleep cold and get wounds (Cloud Oldest had dreadful scars) and even die, with suitable satisfaction for it–the fireside tales were full of that, a great deal better than her grandmother who had slept out her end (but it was her youngly dead uncle they told the best stories of)–in all she could have done any of these things, imagining herself the subject of tales. But she had no axe and her knife was fragile bone.

She did have Scar, that she relied on for consolation, for near friendship, for pride. He had fought the Styx‑folk. When she climbed up to his back she was something more than ten. He played games with her. He was adult and powerful and very, very dangerous, so that Ellai herself had taken her aside and lectured her severely about responsibility. She could feel the power of him, that she could lie on and be rough with and laugh at boys who were still playing at stones with ariels, who teased her with their adolescent manhood and retreated in real fear when Scar shouldered his way into any imagined threat they posed. Then they remembered what he was–and Scar was ever so coy about it, giving way to lesser browns belonging with the elders: biding his time, that was what, only biding his time until his rider grew up to him.

Scar knew her. Only the rest of the world misapprehended what she was. She waited for this revealing with a vast discontent, and the least gnawing doubt, looking at the great brown lump sunning himself with a caliban smirk, among the rocks above the beach.

She whistled, disconsolate with her shipwreck. One lamplike eye opened, the tongue flickering. Scar heaved himself up on his legs in one sinuous rise and looked at her, lifting his collar. He was replete with fish. Satisfied. But because she wanted he came down, lazy with the sun, presenting his bony side jaws for a scratching, the soft underjaw for a stroking.

She touched him, so, and he sank down on his full belly and heaved a sigh. She reached up behind the collar for that bony ridge which helped her mount, planted a bare sandy foot on his foreleg and swung up astride. Her boots and breeches were up there on the rocks: they had had their swim in the saltwater and the seat of her scant undergarments was still wet from a recent wade among the rocks for vantage. Scar’s pebbly hide was hardly comfortable to bare legs and partly bare bottom, but she tapped her foot and headed him for the sandy part of the shore, to cool them both in the sea, to salve her melancholy in games.

They went onto the shelf of sand, a great smooth ripple spreading out around them, a twisting motion to which she swayed as Scar used his tail and hit that buoyant stride that was the freest thing in the world, she reckoned, short of flying. Scar did not take this water into his nose: it was too bitter for him and too salt. He kept his head aloft and paddled now, soaking her.

And then this madness came on her as she looked at the mountains beyond the sea, clearer than ever on this warm day.

She whistled softly, nudged him with her toes and heels, patted him with her hands. He turned, first his head and then the rest of him down to his tail, so that she felt the shift of him, every rippling of muscle, taking this new direction. The waves splashed up and broke about Scar’s face, so that he lifted his head still higher and fought the harder, great driving thrusts of his body. Salt was in her mouth and it was hard to see with the sting of it in her eyes, hard to keep her grip with the lurching whip of Scar’s body through the waves, the constant working of his shoulders. In a salt‑hazed blink she realized they were beyond the rocks, well beyond, and of a sudden they were being carried aside from their course. She used her heel, she urged at Scar: he twisted his whole body trying to fight it, and still they were losing against the rush of water.

In some remote area of her mind she was afraid: she was too busy hanging on, too busy trying to discover a way out of it to panic. She kicked at Scar when he turned into the rush and then they were going much faster.

Something breached near them. A steamy plume blew on the wind, and vanished, and then the fear got through. She tried to see where that breaching dark shape had gone, and quite as suddenly something brushed them, a back bigger than any three browns broke the water right next to them and Scar was jolted under her, twisting suddenly, flailing in a roll that left her clinging only to the collar.

He ducked under, a brief twist of the body, and then he moved with all the fluid strength he could use. She clung to his bony plates and skin till her fingers ached, holding her breath, and then she lost him. She launched out on her own in sure, desperate strokes, looking for the surface, blind, and knowing there was something else nearby, something that might take half her body in a gulp, and the moving water resisted her strokes, wanting to pull her down.

She surrendered one direction, gathered speed and broke through to light in a spray of droplets, sucked air and water into her throat and coughed and flailed to stay afloat.

She felt the contact coming under the surface, a shock of water, a numbing blow against her legs. She swam in utter panic, striking out for the shore, the distant pale sand that wavered in her streaming eyes. Other water‑shocks flashed about her–a body brushed hers, a claw raked her and threw her under. She kept swimming, weaker now, failing and choking, driving herself long after she stopped seeing where she was going and after she knew the weak motions of her arms and legs could never make it.

Then her knees hit sand, and she hurled herself a lung‑wracking length further, sprawled on the shelf in shallow water, sucking air in great gulps and with her arms threatening to collapse and drown her in the shallows.

“Scar,” she managed to call, and struck the water with her palm the way she would to call him up, but there was not a ripple. She wept with strangling sobs for breath, wiped her salt‑stung eyes and nose, tried to walk and inched her way up the slope, flailing with swimming strokes while she could, crawling‑swimming in the extreme shallows because that was all she could do. She turned about again looking at the sea in panic.

Then a body broke the surface close in, and she sobbed for breath and tried to get up, but it was Scar rising out of the sea, his wedge‑shaped head coming closer until he could get his bowed legs under him and serpentine his weary way up the slope. He vomited water, but not the way he would coming out of fresh. His jaws trailed mucus and he dipped his head and washed himself, coughing in great wounded gasps. He snorted his nose clear and dipped his head again, suffering from the salt, pawing at his face in misery. There was a raking wound on his rump that wept clouds of blood. She got up in shaky haste and felt something wrong with herself, looked and saw the blood clouding away from her calf through the shallow water.

She cast a panicked look toward the shore, saw a human figure standing there. “Help,” she called out, thinking this one of the riders come hunting her. And then she thought not, because the outlines were wrong.

Scar was moving now, striding surely if slowly toward the shore. She joined him, limping, feeling the pain now, coughing and wiping her eyes and hurting in her chest. The blood leaked away too quickly. She moved with some fear because of it, and the figure was clearer in her eyes–no one from the Towers, not in that strange bright garb. It was a star‑man staring at her, witnessing all that had happened, and she stopped at the water’s edge ahead of Scar, bleeding into the sand, feeling the life leak out of her in one rush of sickness.

She had to sit down and did, examining the deep gash that ran a hand’s length across her thigh, deep into the muscle. It made her sick to see it. She tried to stop the blood with her fingers and then thought of her clothes far up the shore, which was all she had for bandages excepting her halter, and it was leaking out too fast, making her dizzy and sick.

Scar came up the beach, hissing. She looked up, saw the star‑man both closer and standing quite, quite still with Scar’s collar up like that and his tail tip flicking. Elai’s heart pounded and her head spun. They were stranger than Weirds, the star‑folk. Lately they came and went and just stood and watched the workers in the fields, but this one had something more in mind, and herself sitting here bleeding to death of her own stupidity.

“Can I help?” the star‑man called to her, at least that was what it sounded like, and Elai, sitting there and trying to hold her life inside with her bare fingers and her head none too clear, thought about it and gave a whistle that called Scar back, because the star‑man was carrying a pack that might have help in it of some kind. Scar hardly liked it, but the star‑man came cautiously closer and closer, standing over her finally and bending down out of the sunglare–a woman after all, with her hair silky fine and her clothes of stranger‑cloth and glittering with metal bits and wealth and colored patches. Elai frankly stared open‑mouthed as this apparition knelt down by her and opened her pack, taking out this and that.

“That’s bad,” the star‑man said, moving her fingers off the wound.

“Fix it,” Elai said sharply, because she was scared and it hurt; and because it seemed a star‑man who could make ships fly might do anything.

The star‑man took the tops off jars and unwrapped bandages, and hissed cold foam onto her leg, at which Elai winced. But very quickly it stopped hurting and the foam went pink and red and white, but the blood stopped too. Elai drew a great breath and let it go, relaxing back onto her hands in the confidence now that she was right and the star‑folk could fix whatever they had a mind to. The pain just stopped. At once. She felt in command of things again, while Scar put his big blunt head down closer to give everything a one‑sided examination. There was only a little queasiness in Elai’s stomach while she watched the star‑man work, while she put sticky stuff all over the wound somewhat the color of her leg. “Now you let that dry,” the star‑man said.

Elai nodded gravely, drew her leg back from the star‑man’s hands in the sudden conviction it was a little less than herself to be sitting here mostly naked and sandy and half drowned. She looked the other way, while Scar took up a protective posture, his head shading her from the sun.

“You think you can walk?” the star‑man asked.

Elai nodded, once and shortly. She pointed down the beach, where the point they had started from was out of sight. “My clothes are there.” Go get them, she meant. The star‑man seemed not to take the hint and Elai frowned, suspecting star‑folk of pride.

“You can send someone to get them,” Elai said.

The star‑man frowned too. She had bright bronze hair, a dusting of freckles. “I don’t think I’d better do that. Maybe you’d better not talk about this much, umn?”

Elai picked up a handful of sand and patterned it aimlessly, commentary on the matter. “I’m Elai,” she said. “Ellai’s daughter.”

“ ThatEllai.”

Elai looked up, liking the surprise she caused, lifted her chin toward the sea. “We’d have crossed the sea, only the river comes out into the sea too strong.”

“You hit a current. But there was something else out there too.”

“The sea‑folk.” The memory assailed her confidence, made her think of Scar, hovering over her, and she got up, holding to him, and favoring her leg. Her head spun. She leaned against his ribs looking at the cut he had got. “Fix his too.”

“He might not like that.”

The star‑man was scared, that was what. Elai turned a wicked glance at her. “He won’t bite. Go on.”

The star‑man did it, taking up her medicines; and Scar flinched and hissed, but Elai patted him and stopped him from more than a whip of his tail and a ducking of his head. “Hai,” she said, “hai, hai, hai,” and Scar stood still for it. She reached as if to mount, which worked: Scar settled, flicking his tail and stirring up the sand, his collar jerking in ill temper. But her dizziness came back and she leaned there against Scar’s shoulder looking at the star‑man as she finished, and Scar put his head about, likewise looking after his one‑sided fashion.

“Going now,” Elai said, and set her foot to mount.

“You might fall off,” the star‑man said critically.

Elai just stared, letting the spinning‑feeling stop.

“I think I’d better walk back with you in case,” the star‑man said.

“I’m going after my clothes.” Elai climbed up, after which her head really spun, and she reeled badly when Scar rose up on his four legs at once. She caught her breath and focussed her eyes and started Scar back down the beach, out into the water where the rocks came down.

“Don’t do that,” the star‑man called, panting along after them, but over the rocks. “You’ll get the leg wet.”

She tucked that leg up behind Scar’s collar and gritted her teeth through his lurching about, his more‑than‑casual pace which sent him whipping along in serpentine haste, throwing her constantly to one point of balance and the other. He hated her to lock her legs because of his breathing. She gripped the bony plates with her hands, feeling the sweat break out on her, but eventually he clambered over the rocks to the place where she had left her breeches and her boots and the vest she wore over her halter.

She climbed off and got everything, and shrugged the vest on, wrapped the boots up in the breeches and just sat down a while until she could get her head to stop whirling and her heart to stop pounding. It seemed a very long way home now. There was the Seaward Tower, and the New Tower was closer, but she had no desire to show her face there, Ellai’s daughter, limping in half‑naked and half‑minded and not able to get her breeches on. She hauled herself up again and clutched her bundle to her as she crawled up and over Scar’s shoulder to set herself on his neck. He was patient now, understanding she was in trouble: he came up gently and searched back and forth for the easy ways up the slope, and meanwhile she held onto her clothes and onto him and let the sky and the grass and the distant view of the nearer two Towers pass in a giddy haze.

Suddenly there was a thumping and a panting and the star‑man came jogging to catch up with them from the side, having found her way up off the beach onto the grassy flats.

Scar looked askance at that. Elai tapped her bare toes at him and soothed him with her hand, blinked hazily as the star‑man caught up and strode along with them, jogging sometimes to stay even.

“What do you want?” Elai asked.

“To see you get home. To see you don’t fall off.” This between gasps.

She slowed Scar down. The star‑man plodded along with her pack, breathing hard and coughing.

“My name’s Elai,” Elai said again pointedly.

“You said that.”

“Elai,” she repeated, scowling at the rudeness of this concerned stranger.

“MaGee,” the star‑man said, whether duly reprimanded or only then figuring out what was due. “I really don’t want to make a stir about this, understand. I’ll just see you get where you’re going. What were you doing swimming out there?”

Elai considered sullenly. It was her dream, which she had never talked about to anyone, a private thing which had gone badly, humiliatingly wrong.

“I watched you,” MaGee said. “You chase one of your rafts out? Your river‑in‑the‑sea could just about drown you, hear?”

Elai lifted her head. “There was the seagoer out there. That was what stopped us, not the river.”

“A little outmatched, weren’t you?”

She was not sure, but it sounded insulting. “They’re big.”

“I know they’re big. They have teeth, you know that?”

“Scar has teeth.”

“Not like those.”

“Where did you see one?”

MaGee’s face took on a careful look. “Just say I know, umn? Next boat you lose, you let it go.”

“Boat.”

“Raft.”

“Ship,” Elai concluded, and frowned. “You fly, MaGee?”

MaGee shrugged.

“How do you catch the wind?” Elai asked, suddenly on that track, with a star‑man at hand and answering questions. “How do you get the wind to blow the ships up?”

She thought she might be answered. There was of a sudden such a look in this MaGee’s pale eyes. “Maybe you’ll figure that out someday,” MaGee said, “when you’re grown.”

There was a sullen, nasty silence. Elai gnawed on it, and her leg was hurting again. She ignored it, adding it up in her mind that star‑man medicine was fallible. Like star‑men. “Your ships ever fall down?”

“I never saw one do it,” MaGee said. “I don’t hope to.”

“If my ships had the wind,” Elai said, “they could go anywhere.”

“They’re quite good,” MaGee said. “Who taught you?”

“I taught me.”

“I’ll bet not. I’ll bet someone told you.”

“I don’t tell lies.”

“I guess you don’t,” MaGee said after a moment of looking up at her as she walked along at Scar’s side. “They’re good ships.”

“Your medicine doesn’t work,” Elai said. “It hurts.”

“It’s going to if you keep hanging that leg down like that.”

“I haven’t got anywhere else to put it, have I?”

“I guess you don’t. But it’s going to hurt until you can lie down and get it level.”

“Huh,” Elai said, frowning, because she really wished the star‑man could do something. But she was mollified about the ships. Proud, even. A star‑man called them fine. “How did you know about the river?”

“The word is current. Like in the river. The sea has them. Really strong ones.”

Elai stored that away in her mind. “What makes them?”

MaGee shrugged again. “You do ask questions, don’t you?”

Elai thought about it. “Where do rivers start from, anyway?”

MaGee grinned, laughing at her, at which she frowned the harder.

“Someday,” Elai said, “Scar and I will just go up the Cloud and see.”

MaGee’s grin perished into something quite like belief. “I shouldn’t listen to your questions.”

“Why?”

“Why, why, and what? I’ll get you home, that’s what. And I’ll thank you if you don’t say I helped you.”

“Why? Don’t they like that?”

“Questions and questions.” MaGee hitched the pack up on her shoulder and plodded on, panting with the pace.

“What makes the ships fly?”

“I’m not going to answer your questions.”

“Ah. You know, then.”

MaGee looked up, sharp and quick, the distance to Scar’s back. “You talk to him, do you?”

“Scar?” Elai blinked, patted Scar’s shoulder. “We talk.”

“When you make Patterns on the ground, what do you do?”

Elai shrugged.

“So, there are some things you don’t talk about, aren’t there?”

Elai made the gesture of spirals. “Depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“Depends on how Scar is and what he wants and what I want.”

“You mean the same thing means different things.”

Elai shrugged, blinked, confused.

“How do you know?” MaGee pursued.

“Tell me how the ships go.”

“How much does Scar understand? Like a man? Like that much?”

“Caliban things. He’s the biggest caliban in the Towers. He’s old. He’s killed Styx‑siders.”

“Is he yours?”

Elai nodded.

“But you don’t trade calibans, do you? You don’t own them.”

“He came to me. When my grandmother died.”

“Why?”

Elai frowned over that. She had never clearly thought that out, or she had, and it hurt her mother that Scar had not gone to her: that was not for saying out loud.

“That’s a very old caliban, isn’t he?” MaGee asked.

“Maybe he is.” Elai patted him again.

“How many years?”

“Where do star‑folk come from?”

MaGee grinned again, slowly, and Elai felt a little triumph, swaying lightheadedly this side and that. The Cloudside towers passed into view now. The precious time passed.

“Do you live at the Base, MaGee?”

“Yes.”

She thought a moment, and finally brought her dearest dream into the light. “Have you been to the mountains out there, the ones you see from the beach?”

“No.”

“Is that very far?”

“Is that what you sail your ships for?”

“Someday I’ll build a big one.”

Silence from MaGee.

“I’ll go there,” Elai said.

“That ship would have to be big,” MaGee allowed.

“How big?”

“Questions again.”

“Is it far, MaGee?”

“As far as from the New Tower to the Base.”

“Do people live there?”

MaGee said nothing, but stopped, and pointed to the Towers. “That’s home, isn’t it?” MaGee said.

Elai dug her fingers into the softness of Scar’s hide beneath the collar, felt the power that was hers now, understood what was the star‑folk’s power, and felt something partly anger, partly loss. “Come to the beach tomorrow,” she said.

“I don’t think I can,” MaGee said. “But maybe.”

Elai memorized the face, the look of MaGee. If, she thought, I led thousands like this starman, I would take the islands, the Styx, the heavens everyone came from.

But MaGee kept the secrets to herself, and did not belong to her or to her mother.

“ Hai,”she yelled at Scar, and rode him off at a pace that sent jolting spears of pain through her leg, that had her swaying when she arrived in her own lands, to the solicitude of those that met her.

vi

188 CR, day 178

Memo, office of the Director to staff member Elizabeth McGee

Appreciating potential difficulties, the Director nevertheless considers this a prime opportunity for further study.

vii

The Cloud Towers

Elai lay fitfully that night, with Weirds to soothe Scar in his restlessness, with a firebowl boiling water for compresses they laid on her leg. Figures moved like nightmare about her, and Scar fretted and hissed, not trusting any of them. Even her mother came, asking coldly after her safety, questioning her what had happened.

“Nothing,” she said.

Ellai scowled at that; but Ellai’s Twig came no further than the outer passage of her room, fretting and hissing on her own. The temperature of the situation rose steadily so that–“See to her,” her mother snapped at those who tried, and went away, collecting Twig and getting no answers.

It was like that the next day and the next. The leg bothered her, and the small rides she could take in days after that turned up no sign of the star‑folk. No MaGee. No answers. Nothing.

She sat on Scar’s shoulders and stared out to sea, or at the river, or vented her moodishness on the Weirds, who said nothing and only did those services for Scar she was too tired to do.

And then one day MaGee was there–on the beach, watching her.

“MaGee,” Elai said, riding up to her, trying not to sound as if it mattered. She slid down from Scar–trying not to limp, but she did.

“How is that leg?” MaGee asked.

“Oh, not so bad.”

It was not what she wanted to discuss with MaGee. It was the world that mattered, and every question in it. Elai sat and Patterned idly while she asked and answered–she got very little, but that little she stored away, building and building.

“Help me make a ship,” she asked MaGee.

But MaGee smiled and said no. That was always the way of it.

And the days passed. Sometimes MaGee was there and sometimes not.

And then, day after bitter day, Magee was not there at all.

She rode Scar as far as the Wire, a great long distance, and slid down at the gate through which star‑folk came and went, in sight of a Styx‑tower in the far distance, which reminded her that there were those who rivaled the Cloud Towers to gain star‑brought secrets.

“I want to see MaGee,” she said to the guard at the gate, and all the while she was comparing the Cloud‑towers and this place, and thinking how strong and disturbingly regular it was. On the other side of the Wire, ships landed, and she hoped to see one, looking beyond the guard without seeming to stare–but there was none.

The guard wrote… wroteon a paper, at which performance Elai could not help but wonder. He sent his companion inside with that message, and she must stand and wait…trying in her discomfiture to talk to the guard, who looked down at her through the Wire, who talked to her in a strange accent worse than MaGee’s, and who made little of her, as if she was a child.

“My name’s Elai,” she said, pointing loftily back toward the Towers. “From First Tower.”

The guard refused to be impressed. Her face burned.

“Tell MaGee to hurry,” she said, but the man stood where he was.

Eventually the message came back, and the guard waved his hand at her, dismissing her. “The Director says no,” the guard said.

Elai mounted Scar and rode away. She had surrendered enough of her dignity, and it hurt. It hurt enough that she cried on the way home, but she was dry‑eyed and temperful when she came among her own, and never admitted where she had been, not to all the anxious questions.

viii

Memo, Base Director to staff member Elizabeth McGee

…commends you for excellent observations and requests you write up your reports in detail for transmission and publication. The Director feels that further investigation should extend in other directions and requests you hold yourself ready…

Memo, E. McGee to Base Director in the offices of Gehenna Base

…The Styxsiders have turned reluctant for contact. Genley’s report on my desk indicates a team member suffered injury as the team retreated from a caliban within the permitted zone of observation. The team is anxious to return to the Styx; I would discourage this while the Calibans show reluctance.

Report, R. Genley to Base Director transmitted from field

Dr. McGee is overcautious. The incident involved a sprained wrist as the team cleared the immediate vicinity of a caliban engaged in mound‑building. No Styxsider was present.

Message, E. McGee to R. Genley Copy to Base Director

The cooperation between calibans and humans is close enough to warrant alarm at this attack.

Message, R. Genley to Base Director transmitted from field

I do not agree with Dr. McGee’s hypothesis. We are under observation by Styxsiders. Retreat now would give an impression of fear. I object to McGee’s treatment of the data we transmit.

Base Director to R. Genley in field

Continue with caution. Measured risk seems justified.

Memo, E. McGee to Base Director

I am applying for a return to the field. We are losing an opportunity. We already have sufficient observations of calibans. Genley’s approach is producing no useful results. We should use the approaches we do have on the Cloud and draw the Styx into contact on their own initiative. The Styx is notpeaceful. This very silence is a danger signal. I am sending another personal advisement to Genley. All others have been disregarded. I am concerned. I urge the Board to act quickly to recall this mission before some serious incident occurs.

Message, E. McGee to R. Genley

Pull back. Conduct your investigations on this side. The Calibans’ moundbuilding is the equivalent of a wall. They are telling you you are not wanted there.

Message, R. Genley to Base Director

I have received another communication from Dr. McGee. Her theories are based on communication with a single minor child, and earnest as I am sure her concern is, and not based on any eagerness to advance her own studies, I do not feel that her theories, preliminary as they are, and drawn from such a source, ought to become the official standard for dealing with this culture. Independent assessment and cross‑check of observations is essential to this mission. Dr. McGee is making a basic error in applying her Cloud River study to the Styx: she assumes that the development here is the same, when by all evidence of dwelling‑patterns it is not.

I am frankly concerned that the Board has assigned Dr. McGee to the writing of reports based on my data. I would like to see these before they are sent.

Message, E. McGee to R. Genley transmitted from Base

You are committing a basic error in the assumption that calibans do not themselves constitute a single culture which lies at the foundations of both Cloud and Styx.

As for the reports, be assured that they will be written up with more professionalism than your suggestion contained.

Message, Base Director to R. Genley in the field

The Board will make assignments by its own consensus. The Board has every confidence in Dr. McGee.

Memo, Base Director to E. McGee

You are more valuable in your present assignment inside the Base. The Board will assess and determine the proper assignment of personnel. Where is the write‑up on the Styxside data? Documents is complaining about short schedules.

We have a shuttle due to make that Document pickup in four days.

ix

The Cloud Towers

She designed ships in her mind, great ones, which she intended to build when she was in Ellai’s place. She gave orders to the Weirds and experimented with her stick‑and‑leaf fliers off the very top of the First Tower.

Her tiny constructions wrecked themselves at the base of the Tower. And some of the fishers had the bad grace to laugh, while Ellai looked at her askance–not reprimanding her: Ellai never reprimanded her in things that might do her harm.

Her mother hoped, Elai thought obscurely, for accidents–to her person or to her pride. Sometimes she caught her mother with that look in her eyes. Like Twig, bluffing and blustering and making way for Scar because Scar had the power and all the world knew it.

It was not even hate. It was too reasonable for that. Like the calibans. They simply knew who was first.

“I met a starman,” Elai said to her mother, one more thing between them. “She stopped the bleeding when I hurt my leg. Like that. We talked about flying. And lots of things.”

“Stop throwing things off the Tower,” her mother said, precise in her counterattack. “People laugh at you.”

“I never hear them.”

“Keep at it and you will.”

x

188 CR

Report: Dr. Elizabeth McGee to Alliance Science Bureau

for Dr. R. Genley; Dr. E. McGee; Dr. P. Mendel; Dr. T. Galliano; Dr. T. Mannin; Dr. S. Kim

…The Cloud River settlement exists in a loose unity called, if they understand a name, the Cloud Towers.

The administrative organization is difficult to analyze at a distance. Each of the twelve Cloud Towers seems to have its hereditary ruler, male or female, with no clearly observed pattern of allegiances, while the First Tower seems to have the right to call up all the population in defense or attack–after what, if any, co‑deliberation is unclear, in their more or less perpetual distrust of the Styxdwellers. Presumably one Ellai daughter of Ellai, who seems to have no official title, has the hereditary right to give orders in the largest and oldest of the Towers, which gives her by extension the right to “give orders” (the language of my informant) to rulers of other towers in some but not all situations; and to individuals of her tower and other towers, but not in all situations.

If this seems confusing, it seems to reflect a power structure generally controlled by seniority, heredity, lines of descent, and traditions and divisions of responsibility which are generally understood by the community, but which may not be codified or clearly worked out. Another source of confusion may be the level of understanding of my informant, due to her youth, but to my observation, this youth understands the system far better than she is willing or able to communicate.

By far the largest number of individuals in the Cloud Towers are fishers or farmers, most of the latter operating in cooperatives, although again, this system seems to vary from tower to tower in a fashion which suggests a loose amalgamation or federation of independent traditions of rule…

Concerning the fisheries, the fishing technique seems to involve the calibans, who do the fishing in partnership with humans who derive the benefit: generally the gray calibans fish, although some browns do so… There is trade among the towers, in the form of barter… Another caliban/human cooperation exists in construction: evidently the calibans rear the towers and humans do the modifications or supervise the modifications. Both humans and calibans of all types inhabit the towers, including also the ariels…

A typical tower population includes the underground shelters of fishers and farmers and artisans who may, however, live in subterranean shelters skirting the towers or as part of the spiral which culminates in the crest: there seems to be as much of a tower extended underground and round about as in the tower‑structure itself.

The inhabitants of each upper tower seem to be the ruler, the elders, a number of riders, persons of some hereditary importance, a number of Calibans who come and go at will, and another class about which I have been able to gather only limited information, which seems linked to the care of the Calibans…

…Elai herself… The girl has an amazing precocity. There were times that I wondered whether she derived some of her inquisitiveness and above all her use of forms and techniques more advanced than what is practiced elsewhere, from some record or restricted educational system to which she might have access as Ellai’s heir. But I have watched her approach a new situation and discover an answer with a facility which makes me believe completely that this precocity is genuine.

I confess to a certain awe of this ten year old. I think of a young da Vinci, of an Eratosthenes, a naive talent perhaps tragically limited by Gehenna. And then I recall that this is the heir who may live to direct the Cloud Towers.

Concerning Dr. R. Genley’s (attached) photographic analysis of the towers of the Styxsiders, the Twelve Towers of the Cloud may offer some useful comparison.

The Cloud Towers (considering the two anomalous seaward towers as a village unto themselves, partially separate in politics) seem by the description of my informant to be comparable to a polis, an urban center in which there is much interaction among the Towers. The Styx Towers, each surrounded by tracts of cultivated land, are, at least in situation, reminiscent of feudal castles, while the Cloud Towers seem to maintain both a system of small gardens within their group and wide grainfields surrounding the Towers as a whole. When I asked my informant who works in the fields she said farmers work there, but everyone works at harvest…

I asked my informant why the towers do not suffer in the rainy season. She said that there is always damage, but indicated, as we have observed in the construction of the Styx tower, that the walls are composed not only of earth but of rock and timber and kiln‑fired tile. In spite of her age she seemed certain of her observation and indicated that repair and building are a constant activity carried on by gray calibans as well as the human inhabitants, and that the aristocratic‑seeming riders and the class she calls Weirds do a great deal of this repair. I asked whether she was a rider. She answered that she was. Does the heir work? I asked. She laughed at the question and said that everyone had to work…

In the matter of the new Styx construction my informant offered the opinion, contrary to the reports of Drs. Genley and Kim, hereto appended, that the recent construction of the Stygian tower near the Base, is less concerned with watching the Base than with providing a staging area for further hostilities against the Cloud River.

The power structures among Stygians as among Cloudsiders seem indistinct, although the external observations of the long silence from the Styx, combined with the Cloud River informant’s statements that the Styx ruler is young, seem to indicate a hereditary authority which may have been awaiting the majority of the young Stygian ruler. Precisely what manner of social organization or power structure is in effect during this period is therefore a guess.

xi

188 CR, day 344

Cloudside

It had begun slowly, a tenderness about the wound, and that had been going on for weeks. Maybe, Elai thought, it was the cold. Old Cloud limped worse with his old wounds when it rained, and complained a great deal. But whenever she complained it meant not going outside and it meant having the nurses hovering about her, so she kept from limping.

It was healing, she reckoned. By spring it would be well. A little discomfort was only natural.

But the scar went red and the place went hot and finally she could not help but limp.

So the nurses noticed; and they brought old Karel to look at it. And Karel got out his knives.

They gave her bitterweed boiled up to kill the pain, but the tea made her sick at her stomach and left her only doubly miserable. She clamped her jaws and never yelled, only a scant moaning while old Karel hunted away in the wound he had made; and the sweat went cold on her. “Let me go,” she said to the riders who had come to help Karel hold her still; and mostly they did, except when the knife went deep and the sweat broke out on her and she threw up.

Karel held up a bit of something like a small bone. Her mother Ellai came to see.

“Seafolk spine,” Karel said. “Left in the wound. Whoever wrapped that leg up, never looked to see. Never should have left it that way.”

He laid the spine aside and went back to his digging with the knife; they gave her more tea and she threw that up too, the several times they gave it to her.

Afterwards her mother only looked at her, as she lay limp and buried in blankets. Scar was somewhere down below, with Weirds to keep him quiet; only Twig was in the room, and her mother just stood there staring at her, whatever went on behind her eyes, whether that her mother was thinking she was less threat now, whether she just despised the intelligence of the daughter she had birthed.

“So your starman knows everything,” her mother said.

Elai just stared back.

xii

189 CR, day 24

Message, R. Genley to Base Director

Weather has made observation difficult. Persistent fogs have obscured the riverside now and we have only limited view.

Last night the calibans came close. We could hear them moving around the shelter. When we went outside they retreated. We are using all due caution.

xiii

189 CR, day 24

The Base Director’s office

“Genley,” McGee said, “is in danger. I would remind you, sir, the Base has fallen before. And there were warnings of it. Take the calibans seriously.”

“They’re far from Base, Dr. McGee.” The Director leaned back, arms locked across his middle. The windows looked out on the concrete buildings, on fog. “But this time I do agree with you. There’s a possibility of a problem out there.”

“There’s more than a possibility. The rainy season seems to act on the calibans, and everything’s stirred up on Styxside.”

“What about your assessment of the calibans as a culture? Doesn’t this weather‑triggered behavior belong to something more primitive?”

“Do we sunbathe in winter?”

“We’re talking about aggression.”

“Early humans preferred summer for their wars.”

“Then what does this season do for calibans?”

“I wouldn’t venture an answer. We can only observe that it docs something.”

“Genley’s aware of the problem.”

“Not of the hazards. He won’t listen to those.”

The Director thought a moment. “We’ll take that under advisement. We know where you stand.”

“My request–”

“Also under advisement.”

xiv

189 CR, day 25

R. Genley to Base Director.

…I have made a contact. A band of Stygians riding calibans has shown up facing our camp oh our own side of the Styx this foggy morning. There was no furtiveness in their approach. They stopped a moment and observed us, then retreated and camped nearby. Mist makes observation difficult, but we can see them faintly at present.

189 CR, day 25

Base Director to R. Genley

Proceed with caution. Weather forecast indicates clearing tonight and tomorrow, winds SW/10‑15.

Drs. McGee, Mannin, and Galliano are on their way afoot to reach your position with 10 security personnel. Please extend all professional cooperation and courtesy. Use your discretion regarding face to face contact.

xv

189 CR, day 26

Styxside Base

They reached the camp by morning, staggering‑tired and glad enough of the breakfast they walked in on, with hot tea and biscuits.

“Hardly necessary for you to trek out here,” Genley said to McGee. He was a huge florid‑faced man, solid, monument‑like in the khaki coldsuit that was the uniform out here. McGee filled out her own with deskbound weight‑gain. Her legs ached and her sides hurt. The smell of the Styx came to them here, got into everything, odor of reeds and mud and wet and cold, permeating even the biscuits and the coffee. It was freedom. She savored it, ignoring Genley.

“I expect,” Genley went on, “that you’ll follow our lead out here. The last thing we need is interference.”

“I only give advice,” she said, deliberately bland. “Don’t worry about your credit on the report.”

“I think they’re stirring about out there,” said Mannin from the doorway. “They had to have seen us come in.”

“Weather report’s wrong as usual,” Genley said. “Fog’s not going to clear.”

“I think we’d better get out there,” McGee said.

“Have your breakfast,” Genley said. “We’ll see to it.”

McGee frowned, stuffed her mouth, washed the biscuit down, and trailed him out the door.

The sun made an attempt at breaking through the mist. It was all pinks and golds, with black reeds thrusting up in clumps of spiky shadow and the fog lying on the Styx like a dawn‑tinted blanket.

Every surface was wet. Standing or crouching, one felt one’s boots begin to sink. Moisture gathered on hair and face and intensified the chill. But they stood, a little out from their camp, facing the Stygians’ camp, the humped shapes of calibans moving restlessly in the dawn.

Then human figures appeared among the calibans.

“They’re coming,” McGee said.

“We just stand,” said Genley, “and see what they do.”

The Stygians drew closer, afoot, more distinct in the morning mist. The calibans walked behind them, like a living wall, five, six of them.

Closer and closer.

“Let’s walk out halfway,” said Genley.

“Not sure about that,” said Mannin.

Genley walked. McGee trod after him, her eyes on the calibans as much as the humans. Mannin followed. The Security fieldmen were watching them. No one had guns. None were permitted. If they were attacked, they might die here. It was Security’s task simply to escape and report the fact.

Features became clear. There were three elder men among the Stygians, three younger, and the one foremost was youngest of the lot. His long hair was gathered back at the crown; his dark beard was cut close, his leather garments clean, ornamented with strings of river‑polished stones and bone beads. He was not so tall as some. He looked scarcely twenty. He might be a herald of some kind, McGee thought to herself, but there was something–the spring‑tension way he moved, the assurance–that said that of all the six they saw, this was the one to watch out for.

Young man. About eighteen.

“Might be Jin himself,” she said beneath her breath. “Right age. Watch it with this one.”

“Quiet,” Genley said. He crouched down, let a stone slip from his clenched hand to the mud, let fall another pebble by that one.

The Stygians stopped. The calibans crouched belly to the ground behind them, excepting the biggest, which was poised well up on its four legs.

“They’re not going to listen,” McGee said. “I’d stand up, Genley. They’re not interested.”

Genley stood, a careful straightening, his Patterning‑effort abandoned. “I’m Genley,” he said to the Stygians.

“Jin,” said the youth.

“The one who gives orders on the Styx.”

“That Jin. Yes.” The youth set his hands on hips, walked carelessly off to riverward, walked back again a few paces. The calibans had all stood up. “Genley.”

“McGee,” McGee said tautly. “He’s Mannin.”

“ MaGee. Yes.” Another few paces, not looking at them, and then a look at Genley. “This place is ours.”

“We came to meet you in it,” said Genley. “To talk.”

The young man looked about him, casually curious, walking back to his companions.

This is an insult, McGee suspected without any means to be sure. He’s provoking us. But the young face never changed.

“Jin,” McGee said aloud and deliberately, and Jin looked straight at her, his face hard. “You want something?” McGee asked.

“I have it,” Jin said, and ignored her to look at Genley and Mannin. “You want to talk. You have more questions. Ask.”

No, McGee thought, sensing that civility was the wrong tack to take with this youth. “Not interested,” she said. “Genley, Mannin. Come on.”

The others did not move. “We’ll talk,” Genley said.

McGee walked off, back to the camp. It was all she had left herself to do.

She did not look back. But Genley was hard on her heels before she had gotten to the tent.

“McGee!”

She looked about, at anger congested in Genley’s face. At anger in Mannin’s.

“He walked off, did he?” she asked.

xvi

189 CR, day 27

Main Base, the Director’s office

She expected the summons, stood there weary and dirty as she was, hands folded. She had come back to Base with three of the security personnel. She had not slept. She wanted a chair.

There was no offer. The Director stared at her hard‑eyed from behind his desk. “Botched contact,” he said. “What was it, McGee, sabotage? Could you carry it that far?”

“No, sir. I did the right thing.”

“Sit down.”

She pulled the chair over, sank down and caught her breath.

“Well?”

“He was laughing at us. At Genley. He was provoking Genley and Genley was blind to all of it. He was getting points off us.”

“The sound tape doesn’t show it. It shows rather that he knows you.”

“Maybe he does. Rumors doubtless travel.”

“And you picked this up too, of course.”

“Absolutely.”

“You lowered Genley’s credibility.”

“Genley didn’t need help in that. This Jin is dangerous.”

“Might there be some bias, McGee?”

“No. Not on my side.”

There was silence. The Director sat glaring, twisting a stylus in his hands. Behind him was the window, the concrete buildings of the Base. Safety behind the wire. Beneath them detectors protected the underground, listened for undermining. Man on Gehenna had learned.

“You’ve created a situation,” the Director said.

“In my professional judgement, sir, it had to be done. If the Styx doesn’t respect us–”

“Do you think respect has to matter, one way or another? We’re not in this for points, McGee, or personal pride.”

“I know we’ve got a mission out there on the Styx with their lives riding on that respect. I think maybe I made them doubt their calculations about us. I hope it’s good enough to keep Genley alive out there.”

“You keep assuming hostility exists.”

“Based on what the Cloudsiders think.”

“On a ten year old girl’s opinion.”

“This Jin–every move he made was a provocation. That Caliban of his, the way it was set, everything was aggression.”

“Theories, McGee.”

“I’d like to renew the Cloudside contact. Pursue it for all it’s worth.”

“The same way you turned your back on the Styxsiders?”

“It’s the same gesture, yes, sir.”

“What about your concern for the Styxside mission? Aren’t you afraid that would precipitate some trouble?”

“If Genley’s right, it won’t. If I’m right, it would send a wrong signal not to. Not doing it might signal that we’re weak. And that could equally well endanger Genley.”

“You seriously think these Styxsiders could look at this Base and think we’re without resources.”

“This base has fallen before. Despite all its resources. I think it could be a very reasonable conclusion on their part. But I wouldn’t venture to say just what they think. Their minds are at an angle to ours. And there’s the possibility that we’re not dealing just with human instinct.”

“Calibans again.”

“The Gehennans take them seriously, however the matter seems to us. I think we have to bear that in mind. The Gehennans think the Calibans have an opinion. That’s one thing I’m tolerably sure of.”

“Your proposal?”

“What I said. To take all our avenues.”

The Director frowned, leaned forward and pushed a button on the recorder.

xvii

Report from field: R. Genley

The Stygians remain, watching us as we watch them. Today there was at least a minor breakthrough: one of the Stygians approached our shelter and looked us over quite openly. When we came toward him he walked off at a leisurely pace. We reciprocated and were ignored.

xviii

Styxside

“Sit,” said Jin; and Genley did so, carefully, in the firelit circle. They took the chance, he and Mannin together–a wild chance, when one of the young Stygians had come a second time to beckon them. They walked alone into the camp, among the calibans, unarmed, and there was the waft of alcohol about the place. There were cups passed. Quickly one came their way as they settled by the fire.

Genley drank first, trying not to taste it. It was something like beer, but it numbed the mouth. He passed the wooden cup on to Mannin and looked up at Jin.

“Good,” said Jin–a figure that belonged in firelight, a figure out of human past, leather‑clad, his young face sweating in the light and smoke, his eyes shining with small firesparks. “Good. Genley. Mannin.”

“Jin.”

The face broke into a grin. The eyes danced. Jin took the cup again. “You want to talk to me.”

“Yes,” Genley said.

“On what?”

“There’s a lot of things.” Whatever was in the drink numbed the fingers. Distantly Genley was afraid. “Like what this drink is?”

“Beer,” Jin said, amused. “You think something else, Gen‑ley?” He drank from the same cup, and the next man filled it again. They were all men, twelve of them, all told. Three fiftyish. Most young, but none so young as Jin. “Could be bluefish in a cup. You die that way. But you walk in here, you bring no guns.”

“The Base wants to talk. About a lot of things.”

“What do you pay?”

“Maybe it’s just good for everyone, that you and the Base know each other.”

“Maybe it’s not.”

“We’ve been here a long time,” Mannin said, “living next to each other.”

“Yes,” said Jin.

“Things look a lot better for the Styx recently.”

Jin’s shoulders straightened. He looked at Mannin, at them both, with appraising eyes. “Watch us, do you?”

“Why not?” Genley asked.

“I speak for the Styx,” Jin said.

“We’d like to come and go in safety,” Genley said.

“Where?”

“Around the river. To talk to your people. To be friends.”

Jin thought this over. Perhaps, Genley thought, sweating, the whole line of approach had been wrong.

“Friends,” Jin said, seeming to taste the word. He looked at them askance. “With starmen.” He held out his hand for the cup, a line between his brows as he studied them. “We talk about talking,” Jin said.

189 CR, day 30

Message, R. Genley to Base Director

I have finally secured a face to face meeting with the Stygians. After consistently refusing all approach since the incident with Dr. McGee, Jin has permitted the entry of Dr. Mannin and myself into his camp. Apparently their pride has been salved by this prolonged silence and by our approach to them.

Finding no further cause for offense, they were hospitable and offered us food and drink. The young Stygian leader, while reserved and maintaining an attitude of dignity, began to show both humor and ease in our presence, altogether different than the difficult encounter of four days ago.

I would strongly urge, with no professional criticism implied, that Dr. McGee avoid contact with the Styxsiders in any capacity. The name McGee is known to them, and disliked, which evidences, perhaps, both contact between Styx and Cloud, and possibly some hostility, but I take nothing for granted.

xix

189 CR, day 35

Cloud Towers

There was surprisingly little difficulty getting to the Towers of the Cloud. There looked to be, even more surprising, only slightly more difficulty walking among them.

McGee came alone, in the dawning, with only the recorder secreted on her person and her kit slung from her shoulder, from the landing she had made upriver. She was afraid, with a different kind of fear than Jin had roused in her. This fear had something of embarrassment, of shame, remembering Elai, who would not, perhaps, understand. And now she did not know any other way but simply to walk until that walking drew some reaction.

There would be a caliban, she had hoped, on this rare clear winter day: a girl on a Caliban would come to meet her, frowning at her a bit at first, but forgiving her MaGee for her lapse of courtesy.

But none had come.

Now before her loomed the great bulk of the Towers themselves, clustered together in their improbable size. City, one had to think. A city of earth and tile, slantwalled, irregular towers the color of the earth, spirals that began in a maze of mounds.

She knew First Tower, nearest the river: so Elai had said. She passed the lower mounds, through eerie quiet, past folk who refused to notice her. She passed the windowed mounds of ordinary dwellings, children playing with ariels, calibans lazing in the sun, potters and woodworkers about their business in sunlit niches in the mounds, sheltered from the slight nip of the wind, walked to the very door of First Tower itself.

A trio of calibans kept the inner hall. Her heart froze when they got up on their legs and made a circle about her, when one of them investigated her with a blunt shove of its nose and flicked a thick tongue at her face.

But that one left then, and the others did, scrambling up the entry into the Tower.

She was not certain it was prudent to follow, but she hitched up her kit strap and ventured it, into a cool earthen corridor clawed and worn along the floor and walls by generations of caliban bodies. Dark–quite dark, as if this was a way the Cloudsiders went on touch alone. Only now and again was there a touch of light from some tiny shaft piercing the walls and coming through some depth of the earthen construction. It was a place for atavistic fears, bogies, creatures in the dark. The Cloudsiders called it home.

In the dim light from such a shaft a human shape appeared, around the dark winding of the core. McGee stopped. Abruptly.

“To see Ellai,” she said when she got her breath.

The shadow just turned and walked up the incline and around the turn. McGee sucked in another breath and decided to try following.

She heard the man ahead of her, or something ahead, heard slitherings too, and pressed herself once against the wall as something rather smallish and in a hurry came bolting past her in the dark. Turn after turn she went up following her guide, sometimes now past doorways that offered momentary sunlight and cast a little detail about her guide: sometimes there were occupants in the huge rooms inside the sunless core, on which doors opened, flinging lamplight out. In some of them were calibans, in others knots of humans, strangely like the calibans themselves in the stillness with which they turned their heads her way. She heard wafts of childish voices, or adult, that let her know ordinary life went on in this strangeness.

And then the spiral, which had grown tighter and tighter, opened out on a vast sunpierced hall, a hall that astounded with its size, its ceiling supported by crazy‑angled buttresses of earth. She had come up in the center of its floor, where a half a hundred humans and at least as many calibans waited, as if they had been about some other business, or as if they had known she was coming–they had seenher, she realized suddenly, chagrined. There might easily be lookouts on the tower height and they must have seen her coming for at least an hour.

The gathering grew quiet, organized itself so that there was an open space between herself and a certain frowning woman who studied her and then sat down on a substantial wooden chair. A caliban settled possessively about it, embracing the chairlegs with the curve of body and tail and lifting its head to the woman’s hand.

Then McGee saw a face she knew, at the right against the wall, a girl who was grave and frowning, a huge caliban with a raking scar down its side. A moment McGee stared, being sure. The child’s face was hard, offering her no recognition, nothing.

She glanced quickly back to the other, the woman. “My name is McGee,” she said.

“Ellai,” said the woman; but that much she had guessed.

“I’m here,” McGee said then, because a girl had taught her to talk directly, abruptly, in a passable Cloud‑side accent, “–because the Styx‑siders have come to talk to us; and because the Base thinks we shouldn’t be talking to Styx‑siders without talking to Cloud‑side too.”

“What do you have to say?”

“I’d rather listen.”

Ellai nodded slowly, her fingers trailing over the back of her caliban. “You’ll answer,” Ellai said. “How is that boy on Styx‑side?”

McGee bit her lip. “I don’t think he’s a boy any longer. People follow him.”

“This tower near your doors. You let it be.”

“We don’t find it comfortable. But it’s not our habit to interfere outside the wire.”

“Then you’re stupid,” Ellai said.

“We don’t interfere on Cloud‑side either.”

It might have scored a point. Or lost one. Ellai’s face gave no hints. “What are you doing here?”

“We don’t intend to have a ring of Styx towers cutting us off from any possible contact with you. If we encourage you to build closer towers, it could mean more fighting and we don’t want that either.”

“If you don’t intend to interfere with anyone, how do you plan to stop the Styx‑siders building towers?”

“By coming and going in this direction, by making it clear to them that this is a way we go and that we don’t intend to be stopped.”

Ellai thought that over, clearly. “What good are you?”

“We give the Styx‑siders something else to think about.”

Ellai frowned, then waved her hand. “Then go do that,” she said.

There was a stirring among the gathering, an ominous shifting, a flicking and settling of caliban collars and a pricking‑up of the Caliban’s beside Ellai.

“So,” said McGee, uneasy in this shifting and uncertain whether it was good or ill, “if we come and go and you do the same, it ought to make it clear that we plan to keep this way open.”

An aged bald man came and squatted by Ellai’s side, put his spidery fingers on the caliban. Ellai never looked at him.

“You will go now,” Ellai said, staring at McGee. “You will not come here again.”

McGee’s heart speeded. She felt ruin happening, all her careful constructions. She kept distress from her face. “So the Styxsiders will say what they like and build where they like and you aren’t interested to stop it.”

“Go.”

Others had moved, others of the peculiar sort gathering about Ellai, crouched in the shadows. Calibans shifted. An ariel skittered across the floor and whipped into the caliban gathering. Of the sane‑looking humans there seemed very few: the woman nearest Ellai’s chair, a leather‑clad, hard‑faced type; a handful of men of the same stamp, among their gathering of dragons, among lamp‑like eyes and spiny crests. The eyes were little different, the humans and the dragons–cold and mad.

A smaller, gray caliban serpentined its way to the clear center of the floor with a stone in its jaws and laid it purposely on the floor. Another followed, placing a second beside it, while the first retrieved another rock. It was crazy. The craziness in the place sent a shiver over McGee’s skin, an overwhelming anxiety to be out of this tower, a remembrance that the way out was long and dark.

A third stone, parallel to the others, and a fourth, dividing her from Ellai.

“The way is open now,” Ellai said.

Go, that was again, last warning. McGee turned aside in disarray, stopped an instant looking straight at Elai, appealing to the one voice that might make a difference.

Elai’s hand was on Scar’s side. She dropped it and walked a few paces forward–walked with a limp, as if to demonstrate it. Elai was lame. Even that had gone wrong.

McGee went, through the dark spirals, out into the unfriendly sun.

xx

189 CR, day 43

Report, E. McGee

…I succeeded in direct contact; further contacts should be pursued, but cautiously…

189 CR, day 45

Memo, office of the Director to E. McGee

Your qualification of the incident as a limited success seems to this office to be unfounded optimism.

xxi

189 CR, day 114

Styxside

Genley looked about him at every step along the dusty road, taking mental notes: Mannin trod behind him, and Kim; and in front of them the rider atop his caliban, unlikely figure, their guide in this trek.

Before them the hitherside tower loomed, massive, solid in their eyes. They had seen this at distance, done long‑range photography, observed these folk as best they could. But this one was within their reach, with its fields, its outbuildings. Women labored in the sun, bare‑backed to the gentle wind, the mild sun, weeding the crops. They stopped and looked up, amazed at the apparition of starmen.

189 CR, day 134

Field Report: R. Genley

…The hitherside tower is called Parm Tower, after the man who built it. The estimates of tower population are incorrect: a great deal of it extends below, with many of the lower corridors used for sleeping. Parm Tower holds at least two thousand individuals and nearly that number of Calibans: I think about fifty are browns and the rest are grays.

The division of labor offers a working model of theories long held regarding early human development and in the degree to which Gehenna has recapitulated human patterns, offers exciting prospects for future anthropological study. One could easily imagine the ancient Euphrates, modified ziggurats, used in this case for dwellings as well as for the ancient purpose, the storage of grain above the floods and seasonal dampness of the ground.

Women have turned to agriculture and do all manner of work of this kind. Hunting, fishing, and the crafts and handcrafts, including weaving, are almost exclusively a male domain and enjoy a high status, most notably the hunters who have exclusive control of the brown Calibans. Fishers employ the grays. The grays are active in the fields as well, performing such tasks as moving dikes and letting in the water, but they are directed in this case by the class called Weirds. Weirds are both male and female, individuals who have so thoroughly identified with the calibans that they have abandoned speech and often go naked in weather too cool to make it comfortable. They do understand speech or gesture, apparently, but I have never heard one speak, although I have seen them react to hunters who speak to them. They maneuver the grays and a few browns, but the calibans do not seem to attach to them as individuals in the manner in which they attach to the hunter‑class.

Only hunters, as I have observed, own a particular caliban and give it a name. It should also be mentioned that one is born a hunter, and hunter marriages are arranged within towers after a curious polyandrous fashion: a woman marries her male relatives’ hunting comrades as a group; and her male relatives are married to their hunting comrades’ female sibs. Younger sisters usually marry outside the tower, thus minimizing inbreeding; they are aware of genetics, though, curiously enough, they have reverted to or reinvented the old term “blood” to handle the concept. There is no attempt to distinguish full brother‑sister relationship from half. In that much the system is matrilineal. But women of hunter class are ornaments, doing little labor but the making of clothes and the group care of children in which they are assisted by women relieved from field work. All important decisions are the province of the men. I have observed one exception to this rule, a woman of about fifty who seems to have outlived all her sibs and her band. She wears the leather clothing of a rider, has a caliban and carries a knife. She sits with the men at meals and has no association with the wives.

Crafts and fisher‑class women work in the fields with their daughters. Male children can strive for any class, even to be a hunter, although should a lower class male succeed in gaining a caliban he may have to fight other hunters and endure considerable harassment. There is one such individual at Parm Tower. His name is Matso. He is a fisher’s son. The women are particularly cruel to him, apparently resenting the possibility of his bringing some fisher‑sib into their society should he join a hunter‑group.

Over all of this of course is Jin himself. This is a remarkable man. Younger than most of his council, he dominates them. Not physically tall, he is still imposing because of the energy which flows from him. The calibans react to him with nervousness‑displays, a reaction in which his own plays some part: this is a beast named Thorn, which is both large and aggressive. But the most of it is due to Jin’s own force of personality. He is a persuasive speaker, eloquent, though unlettered: he is a hunter, and writing is a craft: he will not practice it.

He has survived eight years of guardianship to seize power for himself at sixteen, effectively deposing but not killing his former guardian Mes of the River Tower, from what I hear. He is inquisitive, loves verbal games, loves to get the better hand in an argument, is generous with gifts–he bestows ornaments freehandedly in the manner of some oldworld chief. He has a number of wives who are reserved to him alone but these are across the Styx. At Parm Tower he is afforded the hospitality of the hunter‑class women, which is a thing done otherwise only between two bands in payment of some very high favor. This lending of wives and the resultant uncertainty of parentage of some offspring seems to strengthen the political structure and to create strong bonds between Jin and certain of the hunter‑bands. Whether Jin lends his wives in this fashion we cannot presently ascertain.

We apparently have the freedom to come and go with the escort of one or the other hunters. Jin himself has entertained us in Parm Tower hall and given us gifts which we are hard put to reciprocate.

The people are well‑fed, well‑clothed and in all have a healthy look. Jin enumerates his plans for more fields, more towers, wider range of his hunters to the north…

Memo, E, McGee to Committee

It seems to me that it is a deceptively easy assumption that these Styxsiders are recapitulating some naturalcourse of human society. This is selective seeking‑out of evidence to fit the model Dr. Genley wishes to support. He totally ignores the contrary evidence of the Cloud Towers, who have grown up in a very different pattern.

Message from field: R. Genley

I thank the committee for the inclusion of the reports.

As for Dr. McGee’s assertion that I am selecting my data, I would be interested to see this presented in full, rather than in an inter‑office memo, if she has obtained any new data from the Cloud.

As for the earlier data I am of course familiar with it. It is not surprising that one of the communities has managed to cling to their ancestral ways and, in their unstressed river‑plain environment, lack the impetus to change. It is inconceivable that their ways would survive except for the circumstance of their origin which flung them into close community: they were, be it remembered, a settlement of refugees. They are not coping well. Their cultivated areas are small. They do not hunt widely, if at all. They are predominantly fishers, which is an occupation, at least as practiced on Gehenna, which does not require physical strength.

The critical difference is the necessity of physical strength in the hunter culture of the Styx, a difference which should be self‑evident given the biological realities of the human species.

Memo, E. McGee to Committee

Copy transmitted to R. Genley

It is a difficult task to extricate the observer from the observation. I do not believe we are out here at considerable expense to seek to reaffirm theories dearly held by our various disciplines, but to faithfully record what exists, and secondly to challenge, where appropriate, theories which become questionable in the light of observed fact.

It is possible that the entanglement of the observer with the observation throughout history, along with the sorrowful fact that in general only the winners write the accounts of wars, has tended to advance certain cultural values in the place of fact, when these values are confused with fact by the observer.

Fact: two ways of life exist on Gehenna.

Fact: more than one way of life has existed in humanity’s cradles of civilization.

I propose that, instead of arguing old theories which have considerable cultural content, we consider this possibility: that humanity develops a multiplicity of answers to the environment, and that if there must be a system of polarities to explain the structure around which these answers are organized, that the polarity does not in and of itself involve gender, but the relative success of the population in curbing those individuals with the tendency to coerce their neighbors. Some cultures solve this problem. Some do not, and fall into a pattern which exalts this tendency and elevates it, again by the principle that survivors and rulers write the histories, to the guiding virtue of the culture. It is not that the Cloud River culture is unnatural. It is fully natural. It is, unfortunately, threatened with extinction by the hand of the Styxsiders, who will need centuries to attain the level of civilization already possessed by the Cloud. Barbarians win because civilizations are inherently more fragile.

Message from the field: R. Genley

I again urge Dr. McGee to present her theories formally when she can reestablish sufficient contact with the culture she is describing to secure corroborative and specific observations.

xxii

190 CR

Unedited text of message

Dr. E. McGee to Alliance HQ

couriered by AS Pegasus

[Considering the personal difficulty of continuing in this position–]

[Considering the contribution which I feel I might make elsewhere and the personal disappointment]–

[Considering the–]

[Considering the unfortunate circumstances which have incurred, I suspect, some personal animosity on the part of the Cloud‑siders–]

Considering the difficulty of life on Gehenna and my personal health, I would like to make application for immediate transfer from the project. [I feel that my work here is at a standstill and that the–] At the present level of activity my assistants are fully competent to conduct my project and I would urge the Bureau to appoint Dr. Leroy H. Cooper to the post. He has shown himself to be a skilled and dedicated investigator. [I feel that a certain cultural and personal bias on the part of the–] I wish my application for transfer to cast no shadow on the mission or the staff here. My reasons are medical and personal, involving a sensitivity to certain irritants present in the area…

xxiii

191 CR, day 202

Message, Alliance HQ

to Dr. E. McGee, Gehenna Base

…with thorough sympathy for your medical difficulties, the Bureau still considers your presence in the project to be of overriding value, in view of the expense and difficulty of personnel adjustments. So it is with regret that we must reject your application for transfer…

…We have analysed the facilities available at Gehenna both on the Base and at the Station for alleviation of your difficulties and have made shipment of medicines which we feel will provide a wider range of treatment alternatives…

191 CR, day 205

Prescription, Base pharmacy

for Dr. E. McGee

…for insomnia, take one capsule at bedtime. ALCOHOL CONTRAINDICATED.

xxiv

200 CR, day 33

Field report: E. McGee

…rumor which I have picked up from the usual New Tower source indicates that the heir, Elai, has given birth to a second son. Due to the tenuous nature of my contact with these sources and the need for caution I cannot yet confirm…

xxv

200 CR, day 98

Styxside

“Genley,” Jin said, in the warmth of Parm Tower, in the closeness that smelled of brew and Calibans and smoke and men. A hand came out and rocked his shoulder, pressed with strong fingers. “You write about me. What do you write?”

“Things.”

“Like what, Genley?”

“The way you live, the things you do. Like your records. Like the things you write down.”

“You make the starmen know me.”

“They know you.”

Jin clapped his shoulder. They were mostly alone. There was only Parm and his lot drowsing in the corner. The hand fell from his arm. “That Mannin, that Kim, always scratching away–You know, Gen‑ley, they have fear. You know how I know they have fear? It’s in the eyes. They’re afraid. You watch them. They don’t look in my eyes. You do.”

Genley did, without flinching. Jin buffeted his arm and laughed when he had done it.

“You are my father,” Jin said.

Mannin would have taken notes on that. Asked questions: was it a common thing to say? Genley went on staring him in the eye, too solid for Jin to shake, in any sense.

“My father,” Jin said, still holding his arm. “Who asks me questions, questions, questions what I do. I learn from your questions, Gen‑ley. So I call you my father. Why doesn’t my father ask me gifts?”

“What should I ask for?”

“A man should have women. You want the women, Gen‑ley, you go down…anytime you like. Not hunter women: trouble, hunter women. But all the others. Anytime you like. You like that?”

200 CR, day 120

Field report: R. Genley

…The lord Jin has made considerable progress toward further stabilizing the government. The reports of dissent in the TransStyx have died down following a personal visit of one of his aides to that side and indications are that the chief of the opposition is now supporting his authority.

Memo, E. McGee to Base Director

Copy to R. Genley in field

The lordJin?…

xxvi

200 CR, day 203

Field report: R. Genley

…In all, Jin 12’s new programs are succeeding. Agriculture is up another 5 percent this year, for a total of 112% increase since his accession. Roadbuilding, a totally new development, has made possible the delivery of limestone to the hitherside tower, another of Jin’s ideas, gathered from observation, I surmise, of our own constructions inside the wire. The mission has continually observed the zero trade restriction and most carefully has withheld information, but it could be the mere presence of the Base is a goad to the energetic Styxside culture, accelerating their dissatisfaction with conditions as they are. Looking as they do through the wire at a permanent city, observing woven clothing and a wealth of metal, they are discontent with what they have. The lord Jin is particularly anxious for metal, but sees no present possibility of obtaining it. The choice which placed the colony in a fertile deep plain has ironically made that particular advancement difficult until explorations reach the mountainous southeast. The road to the quarries is part of a push in this direction, making possible, if not wheeled transport, the rapid transit of mounted traffic.

There has been another development, in the surprising invitation of the lord Jin for me to visit the farside settlements, an opportunity providing some hazards, but altogether attractive in terms of opening even wider contacts with this unprecedented culture. I have told the lord Jin that this will require some consultation and I hope for the Director’s consent…

200 CR, day 203

Message, Dr. E. McGee to R. Genley

…it seems to me that this extension of a quarry road and this interest you name as evidence of a progressive attitude could equally well be interpreted as a certain aggressiveness toward the south. The mountains lord Jin wants, as you put it, lie within the natural sphere of the Cloud‑siders.

200 CR, day 203

Message, Dr. R. Genley to E. McGee

I do not view that our duties include carving out “spheres of influence” or manifest destinies of our private protectorates. I do not urge the Styx settlements to any ambition and I trust that you maintain the same policy with the Cloud, in what contacts you have managed to secure with them.

200 CR, day 203

Message, Dr. E. McGee to R. Genley

Copy to Base Director

You have been taken in by a deceptive scoundrel and may be taken further if you accept this invitation to enter the transStygian settlements. I consider the potential hazard to peace to be unwarrantably great should advanced technology fall into the hands of this young warlord and I intend to object to your proposed operations across the Styx for that reason and for no private animosity.

200 CR, day 206

Memo, Base Director to E. McGee

The Board has taken your warning under consideration, but feels that the potential advantages outweigh the risk.

Message, Base Director to R. Genley

Arrangements for transStyx operation may be pursued with appropriate safeguards…

xxvii

201 CR, day 2

Field report, Dr. R. Genley

Green Tower: the transStyx district

…Lord Jin has been persuaded that Drs. Mannin and Kim might join me in the transStyx.

I have been afforded the signal honor of being given a high tower room for my comfort–a small one, to be sure, but decidedly dryer in the recent rains. Further, this has afforded me the chance to see the interactions of the upper tower folk at close hand.

Which brings me to a repeated request for the chance to bring vid recorders into the TransStyx. We are losing irreplaceable material. We do not believe that such highly complicated technology would pose any significant problem, since the people are well‑accustomed to our handling strange things, and there has never been any incidence of theft or attempt at theft: the lord Jin has us under his protection. Mannin and Kim might bring this equipment when they come.

xxviii

203 CR, day 45

Field report, Dr. E. McGee

The heir, Elai, was delivered of a fourth son. So the report runs among the outer towers. Ellai‑Eldest’s health is failing. I have heard that the heir is in fragile health following this birth and there is some alarm on this account. I am not sanguine about the future of the Cloud settlements should Elai die after succeeding Ellai, as now seems imminent. It is not out of all possibility that this community too could see a prolonged regency for Elai’s minor sons. Or the power might pass laterally to one Paeia, a cousin of some degree, who is of middle years, and ambitious. I urgently hope the Board will consider whether any protective measures could be taken, considering that we have, albeit indirectly, sustained the prestige and the power of the Stygian leader by accepting his contact. Whether this was correctly done or whether the continued and increasing presence of Base personnel in the TransStyx does not in fact create an indirect threat to the safety of the Cloud, I do not at this time argue.

I urgently advocate the establishment of a permanent base for study in the vicinity of the Cloud to balance any real or imagined support we may have given their enemies. In my judgement, the Cloud expects attack. By what reasoning they have arrived at this conclusion, I have no information. I even suspect information carried through the calibans.

203 CR, day 47

Message, R. Genley to the Base Director

…That Dr. McGee now descends to obscure arguments involving conspiracy among calibans does not deserve serious answer. I would support her request for assistance: her post has involved too much solitude, and perhaps some personal risk, recalling her injuries of some years past.

As for her suggestions of possible attack from the Styx, I can assure the Board that no such moves are underway.

And regarding calibans, their communication is assuredly an elementary symbol‑directional system with a system of reasoning which is far more concerned with purely caliban matters such as the availability of fish, the security of their eggs, and their access to the river than with any human activity, let alone the politics of succession.

I have of course read Dr. McGee’s paper on caliban‑human interaction in the Cloud Towers and am aware of her beliefs that the Cloud calibans are equal partners in Cloud Tower life: this is surely the basis of her remarkable assertion above. To the degree in which this so‑named partnership exists, the Cloud River society is, by data which she herself reports, an unhealthy society, suspicious, reclusive, clinging to the past, and in all, preoccupied with calibans to such an extent that it does not innovate in any traditional human pattern. The Cloud River settlement is an impenetrable maze on which Dr. McGee has spent her health and many years, in which regard I would personally be interested to see new blood introduced into that study, to make comparisons with Dr. McGee’s ongoing studies.

xxix

204 CR, day 34

Cloud River plain

The shelter by no means kept out the damp and the cold. Noon was murky after the fashion of winter days, and the help had gone scuttling back to the warmth of the Base under the pretext of supplies when the rascal saw the front coming. McGee wiped her nose and turned up the heater a bit–they let her have that modern convenience, but the latrine was a hole and a shovel to fill it and water was a rainbarrel outside in the muck because otherwise it was hauling two liter jugs the whole long distance from the wire. Her coveralls kept her warm: but her feet and hands were always cold because the cold got up from the ground; and her coat, on its wire hook on the centerpole, was drying out over the stove while her boots were baking in front of it. Warm socks, heated socks, were a luxury as wonderful as dry, fire‑warmed boots.

There were such things as heated boots, to be sure, and thermcloth and all sorts of wonderful luxuries, but somehow, in the labyrinth of communications with HQ, Gehenna could never make it understood that, temperate climate notwithstanding, the requisitions were needed. A few items arrived. Seniority snatched them up. Medical priorities got them. Outside‑the‑wire operations got plain boots and cold feet. Advanced technology, the Director called it, and interdicted it for the field. The Director had thermal boots for his treks across the concrete Base quad or out about his rounds for the hours he was out.

A plague on all Directors. McGee sneezed again and wiped her nose and sat down on her bunk by the heater, brushed the dust off her frigid right sole and eased into a heated sock and into a warmer boot, savoring the sensation. Then the other foot. There was never a time when all of her was warm, that was the trouble. One got the feet or the backside or the hands or the front but the other side was always away from the heat. And baths were shivering misery.

She got to her report, on a tablet propped on her lap, scribbling the latest notes.

A sound grew into her attention, a distant whisper and fall that brought her pen to a stop and had her head up. Caliban. And moving as calibans rarely moved in the open grassland. She laid the pen and tablet aside, then thought better of that and dumped both into the safe‑box that no Cloud‑sider could hope to crack.

It came closer. She had no weapons. She went to the flimsy door, peering out through the plastic spex into the mist.

A caliban materialized. It had a rider on its back, and it came to a stop outside with a whipping of its tail that made its own sibilance in the grass. It was a gray bulk in the fog. The rider was no more than a silhouette. She heard a whistle, like calling a caliban from its sleep, and she took her coat from its hook, shrugged it on and went out to face the situation.

“Ma‑Gee,” the young man said stiffly. This was no farmer, this; no artisan. There was a class of those who rode the big browns and carried lances such as this fellow had resting against the brown’s flattened collar.

“I’m McGee.”

“I’m Dain from First Tower. Ellai is dead. The heir wants you to come. Now.”

She blinked in the mist, the tiny impact of rain on her face. “Did the heir say why?”

“She has First Tower now. She says you’re to come. Now.”

“I have to get a change of clothes.”

The young man nodded, in that once and assured fashion the Cloud‑siders had. That was permission. McGee collected her wits and dived back into the shelter, rummaged wildly, then thought and opened the safebox, her hands shaking.

Ellai dead, she wrote for the help when he should get back. A messenger calling me to First Tower for an interview with Elai. I’m not threatened. I haven’t tried refusing. I may be gone several days.

She locked it back inside. She stuffed extra linens into her pockets and a spare shirt into her coat above the belt. She remembered to turn the heater off, and to put the lock on the flimsy door.

The caliban squatted belly on the ground. The young man held out his lance, indicating the foreleg. She was expected to climb aboard.

She went, having done this before, but not in a heavy coat, but not after sixteen years. She was awkward and the young man pulled her up into his lap by the coatcollar, like so much baggage.

xxx

204 CR, day 34

Cloud River

The child had become a woman, darkhaired, sullen‑faced–sat in Ellai’s chair in the center of the tower hall, and Scar curled behind that chair like a humped brown hill, curled his tail beside her feet and his head came round to meet it from the other direction, so he could eye the stranger and the movement in the hall.

Then the elation McGee had felt on the way was dimmed. It had been dimming all the way into the settlement and reached its lowest ebb now, facing this new ruler on the Cloud, this frowning stranger. Only the caliban Scar gave her hope, that the head stayed low, that he turned his head to look at her with one gold, round‑pupilled eye and had the collar‑crest lifted no more than halfway. They were surrounded by strangeness, with other calibans, with other humans, many of the shave‑headed kind, crouching close beside calibans. And weapons. Those were there too, in the hands of leather‑clad men and women. Elai wore a robe, dull red. Like the shave‑skulls. She was thin as the shave‑skulls. A robe lay across her lap. Her hands were all bone. Her face was hollowed, febrile.

And the child looked out at her from Elai’s face, with eyes cold as the calibans’.

“Elai,” said McGee when the silence went on and on, “there wasn’t any other way for me to come. Or I would have.”

The sullenness darkened further. “Ellai is dead. Twig has swum to sea. I sent for you, MaGee.”

“I’m glad you sent,” she said, risking her death; and knew it.

For a moment everything was still. A gray moved, putting itself between them.

Scar lunged with a hiss like water on fire, jaws gaping, and seized the hapless gray, holding it, up on his own four legs, towering beside the chair. Thoughtfully he held it. It was stiff as something dead. He dropped it then. It bounced up on its legs and scurried its sinuous way to the shadows, where it turned and darted out its tongue, licking scaly jaws. Scar remained statue‑like, towering, on his four bowed legs. The crest was up, and McGee’s heart was hammering in her ears.

An ariel came wandering between Scar’s thick‑clawed feet, and set a stone between them, a single pebble. Scar ignored it.

“MaGee,” said Elai, “what does it say?”

“That I should be careful.”

Laughter then, laughter startling on that thin face, an echo of the child. “Yes. You should.” It died then into a frown as if the laughter had been surprised out of her, but a trace of it remained, a liveliness in the eyes. Elai waved a thin arm at all about her. “Out! Out, now! Let me talk to this old friend.”

They moved, some more reluctantly than others. Perhaps it was ominous that many of the calibans stayed. Silence fell in the retreat of steps down the well in the center of the floor, the shifting of scaly bodies. Scar continued to dominate the hall, still curled round the chair. But he settled, flicking his collar‑crest, running his thick dark tongue round his jaws.

“Ellai is dead,” said Elai again, with all that implied.

“So everything is changed.”

Elai gathered herself up. The laprobe fell aside. She was stick‑thin. She limped like an old woman in the few steps she took away from the chair. An ariel retreated from her feet. For a moment Elai gazed off into nothing, somewhere off into the shadows, and it was a deathshead that stared so, as if she had forgotten the focus of her thoughts, or gathered them from some far place.

“Sixteen years, MaGee.”

“A long time for me too.”

Elai turned and looked at her. “You look tired, MaGee.”

The observation surprised her, coming from what Elai had become. As if a little weathering counted on her side, a fraying of herself in the sun and wind and mists. “Not used to riding,” she said, turning it all away.

Elai stared, with an irony the child could never have achieved. It went to sour laughter. She walked over and patted Scar on his side. The lamplike eyes blinked, one and then the other.

“I’m Elai‑eldest,” she said, a hoarse, weary voice. “You mustn’t forget that. If you forget that you might die, and I’d be sorry, MaGee.”

“What do I call you?”

“Elai. Should that change?”

“I wouldn’t know. Can I ask things?”

“Like what?”

Her pulse sped with fear. She thought about it a moment more, then shrugged. “Like if there’s anything I can do to help you. Can I ask that?”

The stare was cold. Laughter came out, as suddenly as the first time. “Meaning can you notice what you see? No, MaGee my friend. You can not. My heir is six. My oldest. They have nearly killed me, those boys. The last died. Did you hear?”

“I heard. I didn’t report it. I figured that Jin knows enough.”

“Oh, he’ll know, that one. The calibans will say.”

McGee looked at her. Calibans, she thought. Her skin felt cold, but she felt the heat in the room. Sweat ran at her temples. “Mind if I shed the jacket? Am I staying that long?”

“You’re staying.”

She started to unzip. She looked up again as the tone got through in its finality. “How long?”

Elai opened her hand, fingers stiff and wide, a deliberate, chilling gesture. “Did I teach you that one, MaGee?”

All stones dropped. An end of talk. “Look,” McGee said. “You’d better listen. They’ll want me back.”

“Go down. They know a place for you. I told them.”

“Elai, listen to me. There could be trouble over this. At least let me send a message to them. Let one of your riders take it back to the hut. They’ll look there. I don’t mind staying. Look, I wantto be here. But they have to know.”

“Why? The stone towers aren’t where you live.”

“I work for them.”

“You don’t now. Go down, MaGee. You can’t tell me no. I’m Eldest now. You have to remember that.”

“I need things. Elai–”

Elai hissed between her teeth. Scar rose up to his full height.

“All right,” McGee said. “I’m going down.”

It was a small room on the outer face of the tower. It was even, McGee decided, more comfortable than the hut–less drafty, with opaque shutters of some dried membrane in woodset panes. They opened, giving a view of the settlement; and a draft, and McGee chose the warmth.

Dry, clay walls, formed by some logic that knew no straight lines; a sloping access that led to the hall, with a crook in it that served for privacy instead of a door; a box of sand for a chamberpot–she had asked those that brought her.

They would bring food, she decided. And water. She checked her pockets for the c‑rations she always carried, about the fields, when a turned ankle could mean a slow trip home. There was that, if they forgot; but she kept it as an option.

Mostly she tucked herself up crosslegged on what must be a sleeping ledge, or a table, or whatever the inhabitant wanted it to be–tucked herself up in her coat and her good boots and was warm.

She had had to ask about the sand; she had no idea now whether she was to sit on the ledge or eat on it. She was the barbarian here, and knew it, asea in more waves than Elai had been that day, that sunny faraway day when Elai tried for islands and boundaries.

But she was free, that was what. Free. She had seen enough with her trained eye to sit and think about for days, for months; and facts poured about her, instead of the years’ thin seepage of this and that detail. It was perhaps mad to be so well content. There was much to disturb her; and disturb her it would, come dark, with a door that was only a crookedness in the hall, in a room already scored with caliban claws. A Tower shaped by calibans.

The room acquired its ariel while she sat. She was not surprised at that. One had come sometimes to the hut, as they came everywhere outside the wire, insolent and frivolous.

This one dived out and in a little time a larger visitor came, a gray, putting his blunt head carefully around the bend of the accessway, a creature twice man‑sized. It came serpentining its furtive way up to look at her.

Browns, next, McGee thought, staying very still and tucked up as she was. O Elai, you’re cruel. Or aren’t we– who take our machines for granted?

It opened its jaws and deposited a stone on the floor, wet and shiny. It sat there contentedly, having done that.

The grays had no sense, Elai had told her once. It stayed there a while and then forgot or lost interest or had something else to do: it turned about and left with a whisk of its dragon tail.

The stone stayed. Like a gift. Or a barrier. She was not sure.

She heard someone or something in the doorway, a faint sound. Perhaps the caliban had set itself there. Perhaps it was something else. She did not go to see.

But the slithering was still outside when they brought her food, a plate of boiled fish and a slice of something that proved to be mush; and water to drink. Two old women brought these things. McGee nodded courteously to them and set the bowls beside her on the shelf.

No deference. Nothing cowed about these two sharp‑eyed old women. They looked at her with quick narrow glances and left, barefoot padding down the slope and out the crook of the entry in the gathering dark.

McGee ate and drank. The light faded rapidly once it had begun to go. After that she sat in her corner of the dark and listened to strange movings and slitherings that were part of the tower.

She kept telling herself that should some dragon come upon her in the dark, should some monster come through the doorway and nudge her with its jaws–that she should take it calmly, that Elairuled here; and Scar; and no caliban would harm Elai’s guest.

If that was what she was.

“Good morning,” said Elai, when Elai got around to her again, on the grayly‑sunlit crest of First Tower, on its flat roof beneath which stretched the Cloud, lost in light mist, the gardens, the fields, the fisher‑digs with their odd‑shaped windows and bladder‑panes shut against the chill. People and calibans came and went down at the base. McGee looked over, and beyond, at towers rising ghostlike out of the mist. And she delayed greeting Elai just long enough.

“Good morning,” she said as she would say long ago on the shore, when she had been put to waiting, or when child‑Elai had put her off somehow–a lift of the brow and an almost‑smile that said: my patience has limits too. Perhaps to vex Elai risked her life. Perhaps, as with Jin, it was a risk not to risk it. She saw amusement and pleasure in Elai’s face, and mutual warning, the way it had always been. “Where’s Scar?” McGee asked.

“Fishing, maybe.”

“You don’t go to the sea nowadays.”

“No.” For the moment there was a wistful look on the thin, fragile face.

“Or build boats.”

“Maybe.” Elai’s head lifted. Her lips set. “They think I’ll die, MaGee.”

“Who?”

Elai reached out her hand, openfingered, gesturing at all her world.

“Why did you send for me?” McGee asked.

Elai did not answer at once. She turned and gazed at an ariel which had clambered up onto the waisthigh wall. “Paeia my cousin–she’s got Second Tower; next is Taem’s line over at the New Tower. My heir’s six. That Jin on Styxside–he’ll come here.”

“You’re talking about who comes after you.”

Elai turned dark eyes on her, deepset and sullen. “You starmen, you know a lot. Lot of things. Maybe you help me stay alive. Maybe we just talk. I liked that. The boats. Now I could do them. Real ones. But who would go in them? Who would? Theynever talked to MaGee. But now you’re here. So my people can look at you and think, MaGee.”

McGee stood staring at her, remembering the child–every time she looked at her, remembering the child, and it seemed there was sand in all directions, and sea and sky and sun, not the fog, not this tired, hurt woman less than half her age.

“I’ll get things,” she said, deciding things, deciding once for all. “You let me send word to the base and I’ll get what I can. Everything they’ve given the Styxsiders. That, for a start.”

Elai’s face never changed. It seemed to have forgotten how. She turned and stroked the ariel, which flicked its collar fringes and showed them an eye like a green jewel, unwinking.

“Yes,” Elai said.

xxxi

204 CR, day 41

Base Director’s Office

“Dr. Genley’s here,” the secretary said through the intercom, and the Director frowned and pushed the button. “Send him in,” the Director said. He leaned back in his chair. Rain pattered against the window in vengeful spats, carried on the wind that whipped between the concrete towers. Genley had done some travelling to have gotten here this fast, from Styxside. But it was that kind of news.

Genley came in, a different man than he had sent out. The Director stopped in mid‑rock of his chair and resumed the minute rocking again, facing this huge, rawboned man in native leather, with hair gone long and beard ragged and lines windgraven into his face.

“Came to talk about McGee,” Genley said.

“I gathered that.”

“She’s in trouble. They’re crazy down on Cloudside.”

“McGee left a note.” The Director rocked forward and keyed the fax up on the screen.

“I heard.” Genley no more than glanced at it.

“Have the Styxsiders heard about it?”

“They got word. Someone got to them. Com wasn’t any faster at it.”

“You mean they found it out from some other source.”

“They know what goes on at the Cloud. I’ve reported that before.” Genley shifted on his feet, glanced toward a chair.

“Sit down, will you? Want something hot to drink?”

“Like it, yes. Haven’t stopped moving since last night.”

“Tyler.” The Director punched the button. “Two coffees.” He rocked back and looked at Genley. “It seems to be a new situation down there. This ruler of the Cloud Towers is apparently well‑disposed to McGee. And this office isn’t disposed to risk disturbing that.”

Genley’s face was flushed. Perhaps it was the haste with which he had come. “She needs communications down there.”

“We’ll be considering that.”

“Maybe some backup. Four or five staff to go in there with her.”

“If feasible.”

“I have to state my opposition to sending McGee in there without any help. I have experienced staff. Maybe they wouldn’t be accepted down there. But someone else ought to be in there.”

“Do I hear overtones in that?”

“Are we on the record?”

“Not for the moment.”

“I’m not sure McGee’s stable enough to be in there alone. I’m not sure anyone is.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there are times that my staff and I have to get together and remind ourselves where we came from. And I don’t think McGee has the toughness to stand up to them alone. Mentally. It gets to you. It will. You have to start out tough and stay that way. The Weirds–you’ve read my report on the Weirds…”

“Yes.”

“That’s how strange human beings can get, living next to Calibans. And I’m afraid McGee’s primed to slip right over into it. She’s wanted this too long, too badly. I’m afraid she’s the worst candidate in the world to be sitting where she is.”

The Director considered the man, the leather, the stone ornaments, the unruly hair and beard. Genley brought a smell with him, not an unwashed smell, but something of earth and dry muskiness. Woodsmoke. Something else he could not put a name to. “Going native, you mean.”

“I think she went, as far as she knew how, years ago. I mean, no kid of her own, a woman, after all–Finding that kid on the beach. You know how that could be.”

The Director looked at Genley narrowly, at the clothes, the man. “You mean to say some people might find things they wanted outside the wire, mightn’t they? Something–psychologically needful.”

For some reason the ruddiness of Genley’s scowling face deepened.

“I haven’t any reason,” the Director said, “to question McGee’s professional motives. I know you and McGee have had your problems. I’ll trust you to keep them to a minimum. Particularly under the circumstances. And I won’t remind you how this office would view any leak of information on the Cloud to Styxside–and vice versa.”

The red was quite decisive now. It was rage. “I’ll trust that warning will likewise be transmitted to McGee. I can tell you–this Elai is understood as trouble.”

“On Styxside.”

“On Styxside.”

“McGee reports Elai’s health as fragile. This woman doesn’t sound like a threat.”

Genley’s lips compacted, worked a moment. “She’s got a mean caliban.”

“What’s that mean?”

Genley thought about the answer. The Director watched him. “It’s a perception the natives have; I’ve mentioned this before in the reports–That the social position of humans relates to caliban dominance. Those that have the meanest and the toughest stand highest.”

“Where do you stand? Where are you without one? What’s it mean, if the calibans aren’t together to fight it out.”

“It affects attitude. That woman down on the Cloud has an exaggerated idea of herself, that Elai, inherited this caliban when she was young–that’s what they say.”

“So they expect she’ll move on them.”

“They reckon she’ll push. One way or the other.”

“Tell me, you’re not backing McGee’s assertions, are you, that we’re dealing with calibans as well as humans out there.”

“No.” That answer was firm. “Absolutely not. Except as the Cloud‑siders may do some kind of augury whereby they thinkthe calibans have an opinion. The old Romans, they used to plan their days by the behavior of geese. The flight of birds. Must have worked at least as well as calibans. They got by.”

“Different brain size, geese and calibans.”

“Biologists can argue that point. Look at the Weirds. There’s a good example of humans that talk to calibans. They crawl around underground, let the gray fishers feed them, don’t talk, don’t interact with the rest of humankind except to take orders and shove dirt around. You want the caliban vote, ask a Weird and see if you get any answer. Sir. McGee will learn that pretty quick if she wants to do some honest work out there.”

“I’m aware of your differences of opinion. Is it possible this is a difference of the cultures you’re observing?”

“I doubt it.”

“But you don’t draw conclusions.”

“Absolutely not. I’m simply waiting for data out of McGee. And in sixteen years, there’s been nothing new out of her but speculation. Maybe this will prove matters once for all. But for the record I want to caution the committee that this move is very serious–that with observers inside both cultures, we could embroil ourselves in local problems. Or worsen them. Or push these two cultures into conflict. It’s waiting to happen.”

“Because of a caliban. Because it’s as you say…mean.”

“It means this Elai has a higher status than her situation warrants. That she has a higher confidence than it warrants. She didn’t hesitate to snatch McGee in defiance of the Base. That’s worth thinking on.”

“It still sounds very much like McGee’s theories.”

“There’s a critical difference. McGee thinks the calibans decide. They don’t. It’s human ambition based on status. And this Elai has a lot of status. They might miscalculate–psychological strength for military strength. A lot of people could die over that mistake. I’m talking about McGee’s precious Cloudsiders. And the Styx. They’ve got too much going to waste it all in war.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be miscalculation. On those terms you cite.”

“We’ve got roads built; agriculture increased. Unification of the Towers. We could lose a hundred years in a war right now.”

“A hundred years down whose course?”

Genley gave him a puzzled look, and the look became a frown.

“Maybe,” the Director said, “the calibans won’t permit a war. Or maybe they fight them for their own reasons. And humans just go along with it.”

“That’s more radical than McGee’s hypothesis. Sir.”

“One just thinks–sitting here behind the wire. No matter. We play it cautiously. Since McGee has the chance she can use it.”

“Or maybe they can use McGee. That’s what Jin thinks about it. I’m sure of that.”

“Well,” the Director said, “we just let it go along for now. Frankly, I don’t see much else that we could do about it, do you?”

xxxii

204 CR, day 42

Message, E. McGee to Base

Couriered by Dain of the Flanahan line to the Wire

by order of Elai Eldest

Wish to report I am safe and well and have persuaded the new ruler of the Cloud Towers to have this couriered: to satisfy Security, my id number is 8097‑989 and the holo on your desk is a Terran rose, so you’ll know this is all my idea.

Ellai has been succeeded peacefully at her death by Elai her daughter and designated heir. Elai took advantage of her accession to power over the Cloud to have one of her riders escort me to the Towers. I have been treated with all courtesy and am presently comfortable and content in my situation. This is a rare opportunity with the Cloud Towers and presages an era in which I believe the Cloud may be as productive in research as the Styx has been in recent years. I am not eager to break my stay here at this stage in which I believe much good can be accomplished in stabilizing mission relations with the Cloud.

I will need some equipment and supplies. Elai has agreed to this, and will send to my hut in seven days to collect the supplies which I hope will be there.

Please send:

Writing materials

All such operations apparatus as has been cleared for operations outside the wire, incl. recorder, etc.

4 changes clothing

pair boots

hygiene field kit (forgot mine)

soap!

field medical kit

Also and most important, 1 case (case!) broad spectrum antibiotics, class A, field; 1 case vitamin and mineral supplement; 1 case dietary supplement.

I realize this quantity is unusual, but due to my supply resting on local transport, and due to the possibility of being isolated from supply by circumstance beyond my prediction, I feel this request is only prudent on my part and of utmost urgency, due to close contact with unaccustomed population and drinking and eating unaccustomed food: as approved for Styx mission.

Thank you.

E. McGee

204 CR, day 42

Base Director’s Office

“I am going to approve this,” the Director said to the secretary.

“Sir,” the secretary said, tight‑lipped. “Sir, this is talking about cases. I checked with supply. A caseof antibiotics is one thousand 50 cc units. A box is one hundred. Dr. McGee undoubtedly meant–”

“Approved,” the Director said, “just as ordered. Case lots.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary said, with thoughts passing behind his eyes.

“Any word from Dr. Genley?”

“Message.” The secretary keyed it up. “Non‑urgent. He’s gone back to the field.”

“He did receive the McGee transcript.”

The secretary hit more keys. “Oh, yes. He did get that copy. Was that a mistake? It wasn’t coded no‑dispersal.”

“No. It wasn’t a mistake. I want to be informed when anything comes in from outside. Or when any native comes to the wire. Personally. No matter what hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That load for McGee’s going to take a light transport. Make the order out. I’ll sign it,”

“What about Smith?”

“Smith.”

“McGee’s assistant. Does Smith go out again? He’s asking.”

“Does he want to go out?”

“He’s suggested he wants someone with him if he does.”

“Exactly what is he requesting?”

“Security. And supplies.” The secretary keyed up the request. “He wants a whole list of things.”

“Never mind Smith. Just put one of our Security people out there. I’ll sign that too. Someone who’s been outside the wire. But not anyone who’s worked in the Styx regions. They might be known. If information passes. Check all past assignments. I don’t want any nervous people out there. I don’t want an incident.”

204 CR, day 42

Memo, Base Director to Committee Members

I am approving new operations in the Cloud River area. New and promising contacts have opened. We are presented the opportunity to secure comparative data.

204 CR, day 42

Message, Base Director to E. McGee, in field

Sent in writing with supplies.

I am backing you on this. Hope that your health improves. Please remain in close contact.

xxxiii

204 CR, day 200

Cloud Towers

Elai laughed, laughed aloud, and it startled calibans, who shifted nervously; but not Scar, who merely shut his eyes and kept taking in the sun, there upon the roof of First Tower, with McGee, in the warm tail of summer days. And McGee went on telling her heir how his mother had tried to swim to the islands one day some years ago. Young Din’s eyes achieved amazement. He looked at his mother to see whether this were true, while his five year old sib played his silent games, put and take with ariels–silent, Taem was; he would always be one of the silent ones, lost to the line of Flanahans, but not without his use. There was three year old Cloud, who was noisy in his wandering about, who played wicked games, disrupting his brother Taem’s Patterns. But ariels retrieved his thefts, and nurses interfered when he grew too persistent.

There were the calibans, besides Scar: a halfgrown brown named Twostone, that was the heir’s; and a smaller, runt brown that had attached itself to Cloud. But Taem had no caliban in particular, owned nothing in particular. Taem was Taem. He never spoke, except with the stones, at which he had precocious skill.

“One in a house,” Elai had said of Taem, “that’s fine. I can stand that.”

“What if he were the only child?” McGee had asked.

“Usually it’s the youngers that go,” Elai had said. “I thought Cloud would go since Taem had. But I lost Marik in Cloud’s first year. Maybe that weighed some on Cloud.”

McGee had doubted this, but she listened to it all the same. Perhaps she had some influence on Din, who had begun to hang on her more than on his nurses. Din liked the tales she told.

“Did you?” Din asked now. “Did you swim out there?”

Elai pulled up her robe and showed the old scar. “That’s why I don’t walk so fast, young one. Would have bled everything I had onto that beach if MaGee hadn’t stopped the blood.”

“But what’s out there in the sea?” The young eyes were dusky like Elai’s, roiled with thoughts. Din’s brows were knit.

“Maybe,” McGee said, “things you haven’t seen.”

“Tell me!” Din said. His caliban came awake at that tone, came up on its legs. Scar hissed, a lazy warning.

“That’s enough stories,” Elai said. “Some things a boy has no need to know.”

“Maybe,” said McGee, “tomorrow. Maybe.”

“Go away,” said Elai. “I’m tired of boys.”

Din scowled. His caliban was still up and darting with its tongue, testing the air for enemies.

“Take your brothers with you,” said Elai. “Hey!”

Nurses came, the two old women, fierce and silent, half Weirds themselves. There was no escape for the boys. Rowdiness and loud voices near Scar were not wise. So they went away.

And Elai kept sitting in the sun, caliban‑like, basking on the ledge against the wall. All about the towers the fields were golding. Between them, like skirts, gardens remained green atop the odd mound‑houses of the fishers and workers; weirs sat on riverside like lopsided cages, and fish hung drying beside rows and rows of drying washing and drying fisher‑ropes and nets.

McGee smiled in the tight, quiet way of Tower‑folk, minor triumph. She knew what she did. Elai was well‑pleased, if one knew how to read Tower‑folk gestures. Her heir had come from silence to questions, from sullen disdain to a hurting need to know; and from disdain of Elai to–perhaps a curiosity and a new reckoning what his mother was; for quite unexpectedly since spring Elai had begun to flourish like a hewn tree budding, had put on weight: muscle was in the way Elai moved now. It might have been the exercises, the antibiotics against persistent lowgrade fever, the vitamins and trace‑minerals. McGee herself was not sure; but there were differences in diet on the Cloud, and she hammered them home to Elai.

“Fish guts,” Elai had said in disgust.

“Listen to me,” McGee had said. “Styxsiders eat grays. They get it that way. Grays eat all the fish. Fish eat other fish. Whole. You won’t eat grays, so you’ll have to do better with the fish. Net the little ones. Smoke them. They’re not bad.”

“I like the pills fine,” Elai said.

“Haven’t enough for everyone,” said McGee. “Want healthy people?”

So the nets. And soups and such. And fish dried against the wintertime when fishing was scant.

Interference, they would call it behind the Wire.

xxxiv

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

So I ask the boy questions. I tell him stories. The sullenness is gone. Used to look at me like I was something too vile to think on. Used to look at his mother the same way, but there’s respect when he talks to her now.

What I find here between Elai and her sons is strange. We talk in cultural terms about maternal instinct. It’s different here. I don’t say Elai doesn’t have any feeling for her sons. She talks with some disturbance of losing one baby, but I draw no conclusions whether the distress is at the discomfort without reward, at the failure, at some diminution of her self‑respect–or whether it’s what we take for granted is universal in human mothers.

Here is an instance where we have adjusted data to fit the desire, since it is ourselves we measure. The human species is full of examples of motherhood without feeling. Can a researcher impugn motherhood? Or have we been wrong because it was as a species safer to construct this fantasy?

How many such constructs has the species made?

Or is it the attribute of an advanced mind, to make such constructs of an abstract nature in its folklore when its genetic heritage doesn’t contain the answer? Folklore as an impermanent quasi‑genetics? Do all advanced species do such things? No. Not necessarily.

Or I am wrong in what I see.

They are Union; they came out of labs.

Two hundred years ago. There’s been a lot of babies born since then.

Elai’s sons had different fathers. Some Cloud Tower folk pair for what seems permanence. Most don’t. I asked Elai if she chose the fathers. “Of course,” she said. “One was Din, one was Cloud, one was Taem. And Marik.”

So the boys have the father’s name. I haven’t met the mates. Or we haven’t been introduced. Elai said something that shed some light on it: about Taem: “That man’s from New Tower. Scar and that caliban were trouble; he ran. Got rid of that one.”

“Killed him?” I asked, not sure whether she was talking about the caliban or the man.

“No,” she said, and I never did find out which one.

But Taem rules what they call the New Tower over by the sea. And I think it’s the same Taem. Relations seem cordial at least at a distance.

I say Elai has no motherhood. I found the relationship between herself and her sons chilling, like a rivalry, one in which the dominancy of the Calibans seemed to have some bearing; and Taem’s lack of one, his silence–Elai’s resignation, no, her acceptance of his condition. (Humans bearing children to give to calibans?)

But today I picked up something I hadn’t realized: that Elai treats her heir as an adult. Cloud can run about being a baby; Weirds take care of him, and those two old women. Taem–no one knows what Taem needs, but the Weirds see he gets it, I suppose. Only this six year old is no child. God help us, I haven’t seen a child in twenty years excepting natives, but that’s no six year old of any mindset I’m used to.

He’s like Elai was, quiet, grownup‑like.

Is even childhood one of our illusions? Or is this forced adulthood what’s been done to us out here?

Us. Humans. They are still human; their genes say so.

But how much do genes tell us and how much is in our culture, that precious package we brought from old Earth?

What will we become?

Or what have they already begun to be?

They look like us. But this researcher is losing perspective. I keep sending reassurances to Base. That’s all I know to do.

I think they accept me. As what, I’m far from sure.

xxxv

204 CR, day 232

Cloud Towers

Ma‑Gee, they called her in the camp. A woman had come from another tower carrying a river‑smoothed stone the size of those only the big browns moved, and laid it at McGee’s feet, in the gathering of First Tower.

“What does that mean?” McGee had asked Elai afterward.

“Nest‑stone,” Elai had said. “Brings warmth from the sun. Baby‑gift. That’s thanks.”

“What do I do?” McGee had asked.

“Nothing,” Elai said. “No, let it be. Some caliban will take it when it wants one.”

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

Every time I think I understand they do something I can’t figure.

A woman dropped a stone at my feet. It was warm from the sun. Calibans do that to hatch the eggs. It represented a baby somehow, that was important to her. She didn’t cry. Cloud River folk don’t, that I’ve ever seen. But she was very intense about what she did. I think she gave up status doing it.

Mother love?

Do they love?

How do I end up asking such a question? Sometimes I know the answer. Sometimes I don’t.

Elai has some feeling for me. My friend, she says. We talk–we talk a great deal. She listens to me. Maybe it was her health that made her what I saw, that separated her from her sons.

The calibans swim to sea when their people die. One didn’t. It died on the shore today. People came and skinned it. Other calibans ate it. What it died of I don’t know.

It took all day to disappear. The people collected the bones. They make things out of bone. It’s their substitute for metal. They consider it precious as we might value gold. They’re always carved things, things to wear. They have wood for other things. A few really old iron blades: they take care of those. But they have caliban bone for treasure.

They have native fiber for cloth; but leather is precious as the bone. Only riders have all leather clothes. They get patched. They don’t ever throw them away, I’d guess. It’s like the bone. A treasure. This colony was set where it had no metals, had no domestic animals, no resources except their neighbors. I think they would choose another way if they had one. But they do what they can. They won’t hunt; not calibans, at least, and there’s nothing else to hunt, on land.

They’re digging on the bank again. The calibans are. Across the river. Elai says they may have some new tower in mind, but that it looks to her like more burrows.

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

But Elai wouldn’t say.

I’m sure orbiting survey has picked it up. I’ve put it in my report as indeterminate construction. They’ll want some interpretation.

I’m not sure Elai knows.

xxxvi

204 CR, day 290

Cloud Towers

On the summit of First Tower, under a dying summer sun:

“MaGee, what is it like to fly?”

Elai asked questions again, questions, and questions. But now she thought of ships.

“Like sitting on something that shakes,” McGee said. “You weigh a little more than usual sometimes, sometimes less: it makes your stomach feel like it’s floating. But up there the river would look like a thread. The sea looks flat, all smoothed out and shining like the river at dawn; the mountains look like someone dropped a wrinkled cloth; the forests like waterweed.”

Elai’s eyes rested on hers. That spark was back behind them, that thing that adulthood had crushed. Sadness then. “I won’t ever see these things,” she said.

“I haven’t,” McGee said, “in a good many years. Maybe I won’t again. I don’t think so.”

For a long while Elai said nothing. The frown deepened moment by moment. “There is a Wire in the sky.”

“No.”

“So you could go when you like.”

McGee thought about that one, not sure where it led.

“Could we?” Elai asked. “We say that the Wire keeps your stone towers safe. But is that so, MaGee? The ships come and go from inside there to outside. I think that Wire keeps us away from ships. My boats, MaGee, what could they find, but places like this one? They couldn’t find where we came from. We’d just go back and forth, back and forth, on rivers and on seas, and find more islands. But we couldn’t go up. You watch us from the sky. How small, you say. How small. What did we do, MaGee, to be shut away?”

McGee’s heart was beating very fast. “Nothing. You did nothing. How do you know all this, Elai? Did you figure it?”

“Books,” Elai said finally. “Old books.”

“Could I,” asked McGee, and her heart was going faster still, “could I see these books?”

Elai thought about it and looked at her very closely. “You think something might be important to you in these books? But you know where we came from. You know everything there is to know–don’t you, MaGee?”

“I know the outside. Not the inside. Not things I’d like to know.”

“Like what?”

“Calibans. Like how you know what they’re saying.”

“Books won’t tell you that. Books tell about us, where the lines started. How we got to the Cloud and how it was then. How the Styx‑siders began.”

“How did they?”

Elai thought again, frowning, opened her hand palm up. “Can’t say it so you’d understand. It’s Patterns.”

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

There are a thousand gestures that have meaning among Cloud River folk, gestures which I think are the same for Styxside. Often they actually use stones, which some folk carry in their pockets or in small bags; but particularly the riders have a way of expressing themselves in sign, pretending the fingers are dropping pebbles. Or picking them up. There’s no alphabetic system in this. The signs are true signs, having a whole meaning in the motion.

But they do write. Counting both sign and writing there’s considerable education among these people, no mean feat considering the diversity of the systems.

Concerning communication with the calibans, there are some concepts that pass back and forth. A caliban can ‘ask’ a human a direction and basic intentions. I can get old Scar to respond to me as far as I want to go up, meaning to the roof. Or down.

There are the Weirds. There are always the Weirds. They care for the children and they function somewhere between priesthood and janitorial duties. They keep the burrows clean. The calibans seem to take pleasure in being touched by them. Most Weirds are thin: high activity, a diet more of fish and less of grain, a lack of sunlight. But in general they seem healthy physically. In any human society off Gehenna their sanity would be in question. It is uncertain whether this is a mental aberration peculiar to the culture, as certain human cultures historically have spawned certain disorders with more frequency than others, or come up with completely unique maladies.

Hypothesis: this is a mental disorder uniquely produced by Gehennan culture with its reliance on calibans. Humans identify completely with the creatures on whom all humans rely for survival, and receive a certain special status which confirms them in their state.

Hypothesis: this is a specialized and successful adaptation of humankind to Gehenna, growing out of the azi culture which was left here in ignorance.

Hypothesis: Weirds cantalk to calibans.

xxxvii

204 CR, day 293

Cloud Towers, the top of First Tower

“You mean you can’t say it in words.”

“It’s not a word thing.” Elai laughed strangely and made a scattering gesture. “Oh, MaGee, I could tell it to Din and he’d know. I can’t figure how to do it.”

“Teach me to Pattern.”

“Teach you.”

“At least as much as the boy knows.”

“So you tell the stone towers? So they know if we got underneath the Wire? There was a time the towers fell. More than once. There was a time the whole Base sank in. We remember too.” Scar had stirred, putting himself between them and the ariel, which cleared the wall in a great hurry. Elai scratched the scaly jaw, looked at her beneath her brows. “They’re building them a new tower this year, the Styxsiders, closer to the Wire.”

“You think the Base is in danger?”

“Styx is trouble. Always is. You tell the stone towers that with your com.” She nodded toward the river, up it, toward the forested horizon. “Our riders move up there. They kill a few this year, I think. Maybe next. That’s in the Patterns.”

“How?” McGee asked. “Elai, how do you mean–in the Patterns?”

Elai stretched out her hand, swept it at all the horizon. “You write on little things. Calibans, they write large, they write mountains and hills and the way things move.”

A chill was up McGee’s back. “Teach me,” she said again. “Teach me.”

Elai stroked Scar’s jaw again, thoughts passing behind her eyes. “Calibans could make one mouthful of you.”

“Human beings?”

“Been known. I send you down with them–you could be in bad trouble.”

“I didn’t ask to go anywhere with calibans. I asked you to teach me. Yourself.”

“I’ve showed you all the things I can show. The things you want, MaGee–you got to go down to them. You can talk and talk to me; I can show you upand downand stopand such. But you really want to talk the Patterns, you got to talk to him.”One vast eye stared at her, gold and narrow‑pupilled in the light, a round of iris bigger than the sun. Scar was looking at her, sidelong, in his way.

“All right,” McGee said, scared enough to fall down where she was, but she put her hands in her pockets and looked casual as she could. “They smell fear?”

There was humor in Elai’s eyes, but it was Elai‑Eldest’s face, implacable. “You go down,” Elai said. “You go down and down as far as you can. I think Scar will go. I could be wrong.”

“How long will I be there? What will I eat?”

“They’ll tell you that. There’ll be the Weirds. They’ll take care of you. Be a child again, MaGee.”

204 CR, day 203

Message, E. McGee to Base Director, transmitted from field

Expect to be out of touch for a number of days due to rare study opportunity.

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

I made a tentative trip down to the depths. It is, predictably, dark down there. It’s full of calibans and Weirds, either one of which makes me nervous. No. I’m scared. I think–personally afraid in a way I’ve never been afraid of anything. Not even dying. This is being alone with the utterly alien. Vulnerable to it. Isn’t that an odd thing for a xenologist to fear most in all the world? Maybe that’s why I had to go into this work. Or why I got myself into this. Like climbing mountains. Because it’s there. Because I have to know. Maybe that has to do with fear.

Or craziness.

I think they would let me go if I asked. At least back upstairs. But I’ve got myself into one. Elai would say she told me so; but this is a thing–I don’t think there’s any going back from this, having asked for this chance. I can’t just be an outsider now. I just closed the door to that. If I go running now–it’ll be McGee, who failed. McGee, who was afraid. It would mark what Elai is, and where I can’t reach her, and I’d live here as something neither fish nor fowl.

So I don’t see anything else to do.

xxxviii

?

Cloud Tower: the lower section

There was food. McGee went to it by the smell, in the dark, not needing the calibans to guide her. But one was there. She had touched it, knew by the size, guessed by the texture of the skin that it was one of the grays.

Shepherds, she thought of them. She had been terrified at first, of the claws, the hard, bony jaws, the sinuous force of them. They had knocked her down, repeatedly, until she learned to use her ears.

There were other things in the dark: ariels. They skittered here and there and of them she had never been afraid, had kept them close when she could, because they seemed friendly.

There was a big brown hereabouts; she had felt the smoothness on his side. It was Scar, and Elai had lent him. She was grateful, and stayed close to him when she could.

Even of the Weirds she had lost her awe. They were strange, but gentle, and touched her with their spidery fingers, embraced her, held her when she was most afraid.

Once in this fathomless dark, in this waking sleep, she had been intimate with one, and more than once: that was the thing that she had most trouble to reckon with, that the thing she had dreaded most had happened, and that she had (perhaps) been the aggressor in it, having forgotten all she was, with some faceless man, a Weird, a voiceless priest of calibans.

She had lain listless for a long time after, for she had lost her objectivity, and she was compassless in more than the robbery of her senses.

Then: McGee, she thought, you did that. That was you. Not their fault. What if it had been? Get up, McGee.

And in one part of her mind: He’ll know me, outside this place. But I won’t know him.

And in another: You don’t care, McGee. This is real. The dark. This place. It’s a womb for growing in.

So grow, McGee.

She scrambled along the earthen walls, found the food left for her and ate, raw fish, which had become a neutral taste to her, something she had learned to abide. Something light skittered over her knees and she knew it was an ariel begging scraps. She gave it the head and bit by bit, the offal and the bones.

God knows what disease I’ll take, the civilized part of her had thought, of muddy hands and raw fish. I’m stronger than I thought, she reckoned now. She had not reckoned a great deal about herself lately, here in the dark. I’m wiser than I was.

The ariel slithered away with a flick of its tail. That presaged something.

A gray came then. She heard it moving. She drew to the side of the passage in case it wanted through. It arrived with a whispering of its leathery hide against the earth, a caliban in quiet approach. It nosed at her; she patted the huge head and it kept nudging. Move, move. So she must.

She went with it, this caliban‑shepherd, up and up.

This was different. There had been no such ascent in her other wanderings. They were going out to the light. Have I failed? she wondered. Am I being turned out? But no Weird had tutored her, none had been near her in–she had lost track of the time.

Daylight was ahead, a round source of sun. She went more slowly now, to accustom her eyes, and the gray went before her, a sinuous shape moving like a shadow into what proved twilight, a riot of color in the sky.

But we have left the Towers, McGee thought, rubbing at her eyes. The river was before her. Somehow they had come out by the river, where caliban mounds were, beside the fisher nets.

I should find Elai, call the Base. How many days?

Something overshadowed her, on the ridge. She looked about, blinking in the light, with tears running down her face. It was a great brown.

Her gray had stayed. It offered her a stone, laying it near. She saw a nest of ariels, a dozen dragon‑shapes curled up in a niche in the bank, where stones had been laid. It was a strange moment, a stillness in the air. “Here I am,” she said, and the sound of her own voice dismayed her, who had not heard a voice in days. It intruded on the stillness.

An ariel wriggled out and offered her a stone. It stayed, flicking collar fringes, lifting its tiny spines.

She, squatted, took the stone and laid it down again.

It brought another, manic in its haste.

xxxix

204 CR, day 300

Message, R. Genley from transStyx, to Base Director’s office.

I am not receiving McGee’s regular reports. Should I come in?

Message, Base Director to R. Genley

Negative. Dr. McGee is still on special assignment.

Memo, Base Director to Security Chief

Refer all inquiries about Dr. McGee to me.

I am more than a little concerned about this prolonged silence from McGee. Prepare a list of options in this case.

Message, Base Director to Gehenna Station.

Request close surveillance of the Cloud River settlement. Relay materials to this office…

transStyx: Green Tower

“My father,” Jin said, in the sunlight, in the winter sun, when the wide fields of Green Tower lay plowed and vacant. Forest stretched about them to the east, the marsh to the west. The wind lifted Jin’s dark hair, blew it in webs; the light shone on him, on Thorn, lazy beside the downward access. “My father.” His voice was low and warm and his hand that had rested on the walls rested on Genley’s shoulder, drew him close, faced him outward as he pointed, a sweep about the land. “This is mine. This is mine. All the fields. All the people. All they make. And do you know, my father, when I took it into my hands I had one tower. This one. Look at it now. Look, Gen‑ley. Tell me what you see.”

There was a craziness in Jin sometimes. Jin played on its uncertainties, unnerved some men. Genley looked on him with one brow arched, daring to dare him back.

“Would you think,” Jin said, “that a man has tried to kill me today?”

It was not a joke. Genley saw that and the humor fell from his face. “When? Who?”

“Mes Younger sent this man. This was a mistake. Mes will learn.” Jin set both his hands on the rim of the wall, fists clenched. “It’s this woman, Gen‑ley. This woman.”

“Elai.”

“ MaGee.” Jin rounded on him, looked up at him, his face flushed with rage. “This conniving of women. This thing goes on. Jin is a fool, they say; he lets the starmen play with him. He listens to them while they talk to this Elai and this Elai learns anything she wants from MaGee. And if Jin is a fool, then fools can try him, can’t they?”

Genley took in his breath. “I’ve warned Base about this.”

“They don’t listen to you.”

“I’ll file a complaint with them if you’ve got something definite I can say to them. I’ll make them understand.”

Jin stared up at him, a shorter man. His veins swelled; his nostrils were white. “What would they like to hear?”

“What she’s doing. They don’t know where she is right now. Do you?”

“They don’t know where she is. She’s with Elai. That’s where she is.”

“Tell me what she’s doing and I’ll tell them.”

“ No!” Jin flung his arm in a gesture half a blow, strode off toward Thorn. The caliban had risen, his collar erect. Jin turned back again, thrust out his arm. “No more com, Gen‑ley. My father, who gives me advice. I’m sending you to Parm. You. This Mannin, this Kim.”

“Let’s talk about this.”

“No talk.” He flung the arm northward, an extravagant gesture. “I’m going north to kill this man. This man who thinks I’m a fool. You go to Parm Tower. You think, you think, Genley, what this woman costs.”

He disappeared down the access. Thorn delayed, a cold, caliban eye turned to the object of the anger, then whipped after Jin.

Genley stood there drawing deep breaths, one after the other.

xl

204 CR, day 321

Cloud Towers

“MaGee,” said Elai.

The star‑man looked at her, met her eyes, and Elai felt the stillness there. The stillness spread over all the room and into her bones. Her people were there. There were calibans. They brought MaGee to her, this thin, hard stranger with loose, tangled hair, who wore robes and not the clothes she had worn, who could have worn nothing and lost none of that force she had.

But MaGee was not MaGee of the seashore, of the summer; and she was not the child.

“Go,” Elai said, to the roomful of her people. “All but MaGee. Go.”

They went, quietly, excepting Din.

“Out,” said Elai, “boy.”

Din went out. His caliban followed. Only Scar remained. And the grays.

“A man came from behind the wire,” said Elai. “Four days ago. We sent him away. He asked how you were.”

“I’ll have to call the Base,” MaGee said.

“And tell them about Calibans?”

MaGee was silent a long while. It became clear she would not answer. Elai opened her hand, dismissing the matter, trusting the silence more than assurances.

“No words,” said MaGee finally, in a hoarse, strange voice. “You knew that.”

Elai gestured yes, a steadiness of the eyes.

And MaGee picked it up. Every tiny movement. Or at least–enough of them.

“I want to go back to my room,” MaGee said. “There’s too much here.”

Go, Elai signed in mercy. In tenderness. MaGee left, quietly, alone.

204 CR, day 323

Message, E. McGee to Base Director

Call off the dogs. Reports of my death greatly exaggerated. Am writing report on data. Will transmit when complete.

204 CR, day 323

Message, Base Director to E. McGee

Come in at once with full accounting.

204 CR, day 323

Message, E. McGee to Base Director

Will transmit when report is complete.

204 CR, day 326

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

I’ve had trouble starting this again. I’m not the same. I know that. I know–

xli

204 CR, day 328

Cloud Tower

Security had sent him. Kiley. A decent man. McGee had heard about him, or at least that something was astir, and then that it was Outsider; and when she heard that she knew.

She had put on her Outsider‑clothes. Cut her hair. Perfumed herself with Outsider‑smells. She went there, to the hall, where the riders would bring the Outsider.

“Kiley,” she said, when Elai said nothing to this intruder.

He was one of the old hands. Stable. His eyes kept measuring everything because that was the way he was trained. He would know when someone was measuring him.

“Good to see you, doctor,” Kiley said. “The Director’d like to see you. Briefly. Sent me to bring you.”

“I’m in the middle of something. Sorry.”

“Then I’d like to talk to you. Collect your notes, take any requests for supplies.”

“None needed. You don’t have to send me signals. I can say everything I have to say right here. I don’t need supplies and I don’t need rescue. Any trouble at the Base?”

“None.”

“Then go tell them that.”

“Doctor, the Director gave this as an order.”

“I understand that. Go and tell him I have things in progress here.”

“I’m to say that you refused to come in.”

“No. Just what I said.”

“Could you leave if you wanted to?”

“Probably. But I won’t just now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kiley said tautly.

“Let someone take him outside the Towers,” McGee said. “This man is all right.”

Elai made a sign that was plain enough to those that knew, and Maet, an older rider, bestirred himself and gave Kiley a nod.

Later:

You stay here, Elai said, not with words, but she made it clear as it had always been.

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

I can write again. It’s hard. It’s two ways of thinking. I have to do this.

There’s a lot–

No. Maybe I’ll write it someday. Maybe not. No one needs to know that. I’ve talked to calibans. A couple of ideas. Finally.

It’s not too remarkable, talking tocalibans. They pick up a lot of what we do.

But after all that time I was sitting there playing put and take with ariels and making no sense at all–they’re not at all bright, the ariels. You can put and take with them a long time, and then they get to miming your game; and then you don’t know who you’re playing with, yourself or it, because they pick up the way you do things. And the calibans just watching. Until the grays get to moving stones around. And then you know what they’ll do. You know what their body‑moves mean; and that this is a tower, and how they circle that, building it, protecting it. The grays say only simple things. Their minds aren’t much. It’s almost all body language. And a few signs like warningand stop hereand tower. And more I can’t read. This gray shoved dirt around as well as stones. It seemed to play or it was stupider than I thought then; it would come up with dirt sitting on its nose and blink to clear its eyes and dive down again and move more dirt until it built a ridge; and when it would stop, old Scar would come down off that mound and get it moving again, it and others, about three others, I don’t know how many. Maybe more.

And that circle was around me. It wasn’t threatening. It was like protection. It went this way and that, tendrils spiraling off from it, the way the ariels do.

I got brave. I tried putting a stone out in front of Scar, a sun‑warmed one. And that wasn’t remarkable. You can get something out of ariels with that move. But then he came down–stood there staring at me and I stood there staring back into an eye bigger than my head, so big he could hardly see me at that range, and then it dawned on me what his vision is like, that those eyes see in larger scale than I am. I’m movement to him. A hazy shape, maybe.

I got him to say a simple thing to me. He walked round me now that my Place was established; he told me there was trouble toward the northeast: he told me with body language, and then I could see how the spirals were, that the grays had made, that they were mapping the world for me. Conveying their land‑sense to smaller scale‑ Or his land‑sense. Or it was all feeding in, even the ariels.

Calibans write on the world. They write the world in microcosm and they keep changing it, and they don’t have tech. Technology can’t matter to them. Cities can’t. Or civilization. They aren’t men. But that big brain is processing the world and putting it out again; it added me to the Cloud Towers. It stood there staring past me with an eye too big to see me the way I see and all of a sudden I was awed–that’s not a word I use much. Really awed. I wanted to cry because I had gone non‑verbal and I couldn’t get it out and couldn’t take it in because my eyes and my brain aren’t set up for what I was seeing.

And now I’m scared. I’m writing up a report and they’ll think I’m crazy. I can hear what Genley will say: “Now they write. Pull McGee in. She’s been out too long.”

But I get up on the top of the Tower–how calibans must have loved the idea of towers! Their eyes are fit for that. And then I think of the square concrete Base we’ve built and I don’t feel comfortable. We bring our big earthmovers to challenge the grays and we build things with angles.

All over the world calibans build spirals. But here on Cloud and Styx they’ve gone to towers. And human gardens. We’re like the ariels. The grays. Part of the ecumene. Capacity was there. God knows if we touched it off or if we ourselves are an inconsequence to what they’ve been doing all this time, spreading over all the planet, venturing here and there–speaking the same language, writing the same patterns on every rivervalley in the world. But not the same. The spirals vary. They’re saying different things.

Like Styx and Cloud. Like isolate towers and grouped towers.

Two different Words for the world.

xlii

204 CR, day 355

Memo, Director’s office to R. Genley

This office finds it of some concern that reports from your group have become infrequent and much devoted to routine. You are requested to come in for debriefing. There is news concerning Dr. McGee’s effort.

204 CR, day 356

Memo, Base Director to Chief of Field Operations

Genley has failed response to a report. He may be temporarily out of contact, but considering the delicate relations of the two communities and the McGee situation I think we ought to view this silence with alarm. I am transmitting another recall to McGee. I do not think it will produce results, whether she is being held by force or that her refusal is genuine; but it seems one avenue of approach to the Genley matter. I do not consider it wise to inform McGee that Genley’s group is not reporting; we cannot rely on that report remaining secure, in any of several possibilities.

I am furthermore requesting orbiting observation be stepped up.

Advise all observers in the field to observe unusual caution.

Likewise, run a thorough check of all base detection and warning systems. Winter is on us.

205 CR, day 20

Excerpt, Director’s annual report, transmitted to Gehenna Station

…We will be sending up a great quantity of data gathered in the past year. We have enjoyed considerable successes this year in gathering data which still remains to be interpreted… We are still out of touch with the Styx mission and this remains a cause of some concern; and based on Dr. McGee’s study, that concern is increasing, although the chance still remains that Dr. Genley and his staff may have entered into an area of observation which is too sensitive to allow free use of communications…

The reprimand given Dr. McGee has been rescinded due to extraordinary mitigating circumstances. Special note should be made of this fact in all communication with the Bureau.

Her report, which we have placed next in sequence, is a document with which many of the staff take strong issue. Those contrary opinions will follow. But the Committee attaches importance to the report, historically significant in the unique situation of the observer, and containing insights which may prove useful in future analysis.

Report: Dr. E. McGee

…With some difficulty I have succeeded in penetrating the caliban communication system which makes impossible the withholding of any information between Styx and Cloud.

…I have noted that there is a tendency to use Gehennan as a designation for native‑born humans and caliban as distinct from this. This may be incorrect.

The communication mode employed by calibans is, with some significant exceptions, similar to the simple communications used by insects. It is assimplistic to compare the two directly as it would be to compare the vocalizations of beasts to human speech on the grounds that they are similarly produced. The caliban system is of such complexity that I have only been able to penetrate the surface of it, for the communication of such simple concepts as directions and desire for food…

…Part of my reluctance to report has been the difficulty of assimilating and systematizing such data; but more than this is the dismay that I have felt in increasing conviction that the entire body of assumptions and procedures on which my field of xenology is founded has to be challenged.