Forty Thousand in Gehenna (25 page)

“Why didn’t they make it like the town?”

“Because they don’t like to do things like us. Spirals are like them. Maybe they got it from the calibans. I figure they did. They do spirals sometimes—like in the dust. You talk with them to trade—they squat down and draw when they don’t like much what you’re telling them.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hiller do that.”

“Wouldn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Like when you send me out to ask things hillers won’t say when you ask it. Like when a hiller’s dealing with somebody in Base clothes it’s one way; and when it’s a townsman that hiller’s more and less hard to deal with. They price you way high if they think they can; but they don’t give you the eye, they don’t do hiller tricks when they bargain. Like spitting in the dirt. Like looking off. Like writing patterns.”

“Patterns. What patterns?”

“Spirals. Like two of them squatting down in the dirt and letting the dust run out of their hands or drawing with their fingers—one does one thing and one does a bit on it, while they’re thinking over a deal. And they make you think they’ve forgotten you’re standing there. But maybe they’re talking to each other that way. Maybe it’s nothing at all. That’s why they do it. Because we won’t know. And we’re supposed to wonder.”

Spencer sat and stared at him so long that Dean finally looked his way. “Somehow that never got into your reports.”

“I never thought it was much. It’s all show.”

“Is it?” Spencer pulled two more pictures from the lot, one of an eastern hemisphere river, one of the north shore, a mosaic going toward the sea, including all the effluence of the Styx, and the Base and both town and hiller settlement. He pointed out the places, the encroachment of calibans toward the sea on the far side of the river, the faint shadowing at the end of ridges. “They’re different. The spirals of calibans everywhere in the world but here—are looser. They don’t make hills. See the shadow cast from the centers, here, here and here—that’s a tall structure. That’s a peak in the center of those spirals. Let me get you a closeup.” He searched and pulled another out, that showed the structure, a spiral winding into a miniature mountain, slid that in front of Dean. “You understand what I’m saying now? Only here. Only across from the Base. Is that a caliban structure?”

“How big is that?”

“The complex is a kilometer wide. The peak is forty meters wide at base of the most extreme slope and twenty high. Have you ever seen the like?”

Dean shook his head. “No.” He glanced up. “But then I’ve never seen a caliban. Except the pictures.”

“They didn’t like sharing the Base. They moved out.”

“But they’re moving back. On the river. Your pictures—You won’t get that hunter to go across the Styx, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t think you will. I don’t think you ought to push at the hillers where it regards calibans.”

“Why?”

A shrug. “I just don’t think you should.”

“That’s not the kind of answer you draw your pay for.”

“I think it’s dangerous. I think the hillers could get anxious. The calibans are already close. They won’t like them stirred up, that’s what.”

“They hunt them?”

Another shrug. “They trade in leather. But there’s calibans and calibans. Different types.”

“The browns.”

“The browns and the grays.”

“What’s the difference?”

A third shrug. “Hillers hunt grays. They know.”

“Know what?”

“Whatever they know. I don’t.”

“There was this caliban,” Spencer said carefully. “We’d been up to the mound to take those pictures, this Jin and I. Alone. And we got back to the troops, and this caliban came out of the river. They shot it and it slid back in. ‘It was a
brown
,’ the hunter said. Like that. And then: ‘Go away fast.’ What do you make of that?”

Dean just stared a moment, dead-faced the way he would when something bothered him. “Did you?”

“We left.”

“I reckon he did, too. Fast and far as he could.
He
won’t come to your gate, no.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he’s going to be scared a long, long time. He’ll never come to you.”

“Would he be that afraid?”

“He’d be that afraid.”

“Of
what
? Of calibans? Or Weirds?”

A blink of the dark eyes. “Whatever’s worth being afraid of. Hillers would know. I don’t. But don’t go out there. Don’t send the soldiers outside the wire, not another time.”

“I’m afraid I don’t make that decision.”

“
Tell them
.”

“I’ll do that,” Spencer said frowning. “You don’t think the search is worthwhile, do you?”

“You won’t find him.”

“Keep your ears open.”

“I’d thought about sleeping in my own quarters tonight.”

“I’d rather you stayed in the town—just keep listening.”

“For what?”

“Hiller talk. All of it. What if I offered you a bonus—to go outside the wire?”

Dean shook his head warily. “No. I don’t do that.”

“Townsmen have gone to the hills before.”

“No.”

“Meaning you won’t. Suppose we put a high priority on that.”

Dean sat very still. “Townsmen know I’m from inside. Hillers may be stirred up right now. And if they are, and if they knew where I came from—”

“You mean you think they’d kill you.”

“I don’t know what they’d do.”

“All right, we’ll think about that. Just go back to the town and listen where you can.”

“All right.” Dean got up, walked as far as the door, looked back. He looked as if he would like to say something more, but walked away.

Spencer stared at his pictures, ran the loop again.

Calibans had tried the wire last night down by the river. They had never done that, not since Alliance came to the world.

There had to be precautions.

Year 89, day 208 CR
Styxside

He might be mad: or he wished he were, in the dark, in the silence broken only by slitherings and breathings and sometimes, when his sanity had had all it could bear, by his screams and sobs. His screaming could drive them back a while, but they would be back.

They put no restraint on him. They needed none but the darkness and the earth, the hardpacked earthen walls that he could feel and not see in the absolute and lasting night. His fingers were torn and maybe bleeding: he had tried to dig his way to safety, even to dig himself a niche in which to put his back, so that he could defend himself when they came at him, but he had no sense which way the outside was, or how deep they had taken him—he might be trying to dig through the hills themselves. He found a rock once, and battered one of his attackers with it, but they used their needles and had their revenge for that, a long, long time—like the times he had tried to crawl away, feeling his blind way through the dark, until he had ended with the hissing blast of a Caliban’s breath in his face, the quick scrabble of claws, the thrusting of a great blunt nose that knocked him off his feet—lying there with a great clawed foot bearing down on his ribs and throat until human hands arrived with needles; or running into such hands direct—No, there was no fighting them. He did not know why he did not die. He thought about it, young as he was, and thinking he could smother himself in the earth, that he could dig himself a grave with his lacerated fingers and hide his face in it and stop his breathing with dirt. He dug, but they always came when they heard him digging—he was sure that they heard. So he kept still.

They brought him raw fish to eat, and water to drink which might or might not be clean. At such times they touched him, constant touches like the nagging of children, and then more than other times he thought of dying, mostly because feeding was the one thing they did to keep life in him. He was always cold. Mud caked on his clothes and his skin, dry and wet by turns, wherever in the earthen maze they had moved him last. His hair was matted with filth. His clothes were torn, laces snapped with his struggles, and he tried to knot them back together because he was cold, because clothes were all the protection he had.

He lay still finally, weaker than he had begun, with druggings and struggles and food that sometimes his stomach heaved up or that his body rejected in cramping spasms; and even his condition did not repulse the females among them, who tormented him with some result at the beginning, when it took all of them, sealing up the exits and herding and hunting him through the narrow dark, and hauling him down with weight of numbers—but they got nothing from him now, nothing but a weary misery, terror that they might kill him in their frustration. That was what he had sunk to. But they were always silent, gave him no hint of humor or anger or whether they were themselves quite mad. He was himself passing over some manner of brink; he even knew this, in a far recess of his mind where his self survived. If he were set out again on the riverside—he thought of Styx as the outside, having lost all touch with the sunny hills—if he were set outside to see the daylight again, the sun on the water, the reeds in the wind—if he were free—he did not think he would laugh again. Or take sunlight for granted. He would never be a man again in the narrow sense of man—because sex had not gone dead in him, but become personless, unimportant; or in the wider sense, because he had been gutted, spread wide, to take into his empty insides all the darks and slitherings underearth, all the madness and the windings underground. He had nothing in common with humanity. He felt this happening, or realized it had happened; and finally knew that this was why he had not died, that he had reached a point past which he had more interest in this darkness, the sounds, the slitherings, than he had in life. It had all begun to give him information. His mind received a thousand clues in the midst of its terror, grew tired of terror and concentrated on the clues.

They came for him. He thought it might be food when he heard them, but food smelled, and he caught no such smell, so he knew that it was himself they wanted, and he lay quite still, his heart speeding a little, but his mind reasoning that it was only inconvenience, a little pain to get through like all the other pains, and after that he would still be alive, and still thinking, which was something still more promising than dying was.

But they gathered about him, a great lot of them by the sounds, and jabbed him with one of their needles. He screamed, outraged by that trick, of a sudden wild as a caliban could go. He struck at them, but they skipped silently out of reach. Something slithered across his chill-numbed legs, and that was an ariel, who ran where they liked in the mounds. He struck at it with a shudder, but it eluded him. Then he sat still, waiting while the numbness crept over him, while his mouth seemed full of fluff and his extremities went dead.

They gathered him up then, feeling over his body to be sure which way he was lying, dragged at his wrists to take him through the narrow tunnel, while he was as paralyzed as he had been when they brought him into this place. His mind still worked. He wished that they would turn him over on his belly because dirt fell into his eyes.

Then there began to be daylight, and they were going up,
up
, and out of the tunnel into the glaring sun. Light crossed his eyes like a knife, brought tears, and vanished again in a whirl of leaves living and dead as one of them slung him up and over his shoulder.

They passed him then to another, who did not support him, but held him about the chest and dragged him into the river. The shock of water got to him. He tried again to move, to throw his head, to at least get air; but a hand cupped his chin and the water took all but his face and sometimes washed over him. He choked, incapable of moving as his limbs dragged through the water. Terror grew too much then. The senses dimmed, from want of air, from the hammering of his heart—and then they were hauling him out on the other side, and took up his sodden, leather-clad body sideways while his head fell lowest and a spasm of his throat and stomach sent up a thin stream of choking fluid. His limbs took on a little life, a slight degree of response, but now they dragged him up again, pulling him up a brushy mound on the opposite side of the river, and the dark took them all back again.

He convulsed once, a spasm which emptied out his stomach, lay still and shallow-breathing when it had passed, and the hands which had let him go when he doubled up took him again by the wrists and collar and by the knees, carrying him in rapid jolting through the dark. He heard a sound, a faint protest from his own throat, and stopped it, silent as this whole world was silent. He had lain for unguessable time in the dark learning the rules and now they stripped all the rules away. He was truly gone now. The paralysis of his body had receded to a kind of numbness, but he failed to do anything to help himself, blind, completely blind, and fainting for long black periods hardly distinguishable from his waking in the dark, except that the fainting was without pain, and that such periods were gratefully frequent.

They stopped finally. He thought perhaps that they had gotten to some place which satisfied them, and that they might go away and let him lie, which was all he wanted, but they stayed: he heard their panting breaths close by, and the small movements they made. He heard the skittering of ariels and the slither of one of the calibans in the vast silence. Perhaps, he thought, they meant him some harm when they had rested. Maybe they were renegades or crazier than the rest, with a notion to have privacy for their sport. He meant to fight them if it got to that, make them stick him again, because that brought some numbness.

One moved, and the others did, fingering him with their blind touches; he struck once, but they got his arms and legs and simply picked him up again, having had their rest. He knew what they could do, and had no desire for the needle under those terms, and even made feeble attempts to cooperate when they had come to a low place, so that finally it seemed to get through to them that he would go with them on his own. More and more they let him carry himself for brief periods, taking him up when he would stumble, when his exhaustion was too extreme.