Forty Thousand in Gehenna (22 page)

Year 72, day 130 CR
The Hills

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

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

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

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

“New buildings this spring.”

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

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

“They made the mounds flat.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No, ma Pia.”

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

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

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

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

“I can write my name,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

His face went hot.

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

“Tell me.”

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

“She died birthing a baby. I know.”

“Birthing’s hard.”

“Lots do it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year 72, day 198 CR
Main Base, Gehenna

“Are you,” the man asked, “scared?”

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

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

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

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

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

He viewed it all with suspicion.

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

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

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

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

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