Forty Thousand in Gehenna (23 page)

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

But the Base was authority, and he stayed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This gave him what cheer he had.

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

She could not. That was part of his terror.

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

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

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

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

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

“They say I’m good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Only with the town itself.”

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

“There’s division of opinion on that.”

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

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

“The calibans—”

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

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

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

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

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

Year 89, day 203 CR
Styxside

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

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

“You,” the man said. “Hiller?”

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

“You got your number, hiller?”

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

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

“Trade what?”

“You know calibans, hiller?”

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

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

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

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

“Jin. What’s yours?”

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

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

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

Jin shrugged, not displeased at respect.

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

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

“What’s the difference?”

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

“I can’t do that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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