Forty Thousand in Gehenna (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year 3, day 120 CR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He waited, day by day.

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

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

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

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

Year 3, day 189 CR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly both dived into the recesses of their mound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he said. And nothing more.

Year 3, day 230 CR

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

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

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

Jin went that way, jogging in his haste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a move. Nothing but the stare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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