Forty Thousand in Gehenna (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

Desolation. No human track disturbed the mud flats.

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

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

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

“Waste of time.”

“Then you go back.”

“I think we could do something better.”

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

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

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

“What’s wrong with you? Afraid?”

“You go find Jane.”

“I like you.”

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

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

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

“Sure, you go back,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s Zed and Tam?”

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

“But Pia’s on the river alone?”

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

“She said she knew where you were.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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