Forty Thousand in Gehenna (35 page)

200 CR, day 203
Message, Dr. E. McGee to R. Genley

…it seems to me that this extension of a quarry road and this interest you name as evidence of a progressive attitude could equally well be interpreted as a certain aggressiveness toward the south. The mountains lord Jin wants, as you put it, lie within the natural sphere of the Cloud-siders.

200 CR, day 203
Message, Dr. R. Genley to E. McGee

I do not view that our duties include carving out “spheres of influence” or manifest destinies of our private protectorates. I do not urge the Styx settlements to any ambition and I trust that you maintain the same policy with the Cloud, in what contacts you have managed to secure with them.

200 CR, day 203
Message, Dr. E. McGee to R. Genley
Copy to Base Director

You have been taken in by a deceptive scoundrel and may be taken further if you accept this invitation to enter the transStygian settlements. I consider the potential hazard to peace to be unwarrantably great should advanced technology fall into the hands of this young warlord and I intend to object to your proposed operations across the Styx for that reason and for no private animosity.

200 CR, day 206
Memo, Base Director to E. McGee

The Board has taken your warning under consideration, but feels that the potential advantages outweigh the risk.

Message, Base Director to R. Genley

Arrangements for transStyx operation may be pursued with appropriate safeguards…

201 CR, day 2
Field report, Dr. R. Genley
Green Tower: the transStyx district

…Lord Jin has been persuaded that Drs. Mannin and Kim might join me in the transStyx.

I have been afforded the signal honor of being given a high tower room for my comfort—a small one, to be sure, but decidedly dryer in the recent rains. Further, this has afforded me the chance to see the interactions of the upper tower folk at close hand.

Which brings me to a repeated request for the chance to bring vid recorders into the TransStyx. We are losing irreplaceable material. We do not believe that such highly complicated technology would pose any significant problem, since the people are well-accustomed to our handling strange things, and there has never been any incidence of theft or attempt at theft: the lord Jin has us under his protection. Mannin and Kim might bring this equipment when they come.

203 CR, day 45
Field report, Dr. E. McGee

The heir, Elai, was delivered of a fourth son. So the report runs among the outer towers. Ellai-Eldest’s health is failing. I have heard that the heir is in fragile health following this birth and there is some alarm on this account. I am not sanguine about the future of the Cloud settlements should Elai die after succeeding Ellai, as now seems imminent. It is not out of all possibility that this community too could see a prolonged regency for Elai’s minor sons. Or the power might pass laterally to one Paeia, a cousin of some degree, who is of middle years, and ambitious. I urgently hope the Board will consider whether any protective measures could be taken, considering that we have, albeit indirectly, sustained the prestige and the power of the Stygian leader by accepting his contact. Whether this was correctly done or whether the continued and increasing presence of Base personnel in the TransStyx does not in fact create an indirect threat to the safety of the Cloud, I do not at this time argue.

I urgently advocate the establishment of a permanent base for study in the vicinity of the Cloud to balance any real or imagined support we may have given their enemies. In my judgement, the Cloud expects attack. By what reasoning they have arrived at this conclusion, I have no information. I even suspect information carried through the calibans.

203 CR, day 47
Message, R. Genley to the Base Director

…That Dr. McGee now descends to obscure arguments involving conspiracy among calibans does not deserve serious answer. I would support her request for assistance: her post has involved too much solitude, and perhaps some personal risk, recalling her injuries of some years past.

As for her suggestions of possible attack from the Styx, I can assure the Board that no such moves are underway.

And regarding calibans, their communication is assuredly an elementary symbol-directional system with a system of reasoning which is far more concerned with purely caliban matters such as the availability of fish, the security of their eggs, and their access to the river than with any human activity, let alone the politics of succession.

I have of course read Dr. McGee’s paper on caliban-human interaction in the Cloud Towers and am aware of her beliefs that the Cloud calibans are equal partners in Cloud Tower life: this is surely the basis of her remarkable assertion above. To the degree in which this so-named partnership exists, the Cloud River society is, by data which she herself reports, an unhealthy society, suspicious, reclusive, clinging to the past, and in all, preoccupied with calibans to such an extent that it does not innovate in any traditional human pattern. The Cloud River settlement is an impenetrable maze on which Dr. McGee has spent her health and many years, in which regard I would personally be interested to see new blood introduced into that study, to make comparisons with Dr. McGee’s ongoing studies.

204 CR, day 34
Cloud River plain

The shelter by no means kept out the damp and the cold. Noon was murky after the fashion of winter days, and the help had gone scuttling back to the warmth of the Base under the pretext of supplies when the rascal saw the front coming. McGee wiped her nose and turned up the heater a bit—they let her have that modern convenience, but the latrine was a hole and a shovel to fill it and water was a rainbarrel outside in the muck because otherwise it was hauling two liter jugs the whole long distance from the wire. Her coveralls kept her warm: but her feet and hands were always cold because the cold got up from the ground; and her coat, on its wire hook on the centerpole, was drying out over the stove while her boots were baking in front of it. Warm socks, heated socks, were a luxury as wonderful as dry, fire-warmed boots.

There were such things as heated boots, to be sure, and thermcloth and all sorts of wonderful luxuries, but somehow, in the labyrinth of communications with HQ, Gehenna could never make it understood that, temperate climate notwithstanding, the requisitions were needed. A few items arrived. Seniority snatched them up. Medical priorities got them. Outside-the-wire operations got plain boots and cold feet. Advanced technology, the Director called it, and interdicted it for the field. The Director had thermal boots for his treks across the concrete Base quad or out about his rounds for the hours he was out.

A plague on all Directors. McGee sneezed again and wiped her nose and sat down on her bunk by the heater, brushed the dust off her frigid right sole and eased into a heated sock and into a warmer boot, savoring the sensation. Then the other foot. There was never a time when all of her was warm, that was the trouble. One got the feet or the backside or the hands or the front but the other side was always away from the heat. And baths were shivering misery.

She got to her report, on a tablet propped on her lap, scribbling the latest notes.

A sound grew into her attention, a distant whisper and fall that brought her pen to a stop and had her head up. Caliban. And moving as calibans rarely moved in the open grassland. She laid the pen and tablet aside, then thought better of that and dumped both into the safe-box that no Cloud-sider could hope to crack.

It came closer. She had no weapons. She went to the flimsy door, peering out through the plastic spex into the mist.

A caliban materialized. It had a rider on its back, and it came to a stop outside with a whipping of its tail that made its own sibilance in the grass. It was a gray bulk in the fog. The rider was no more than a silhouette. She heard a whistle, like calling a caliban from its sleep, and she took her coat from its hook, shrugged it on and went out to face the situation.

“Ma-Gee,” the young man said stiffly. This was no farmer, this; no artisan. There was a class of those who rode the big browns and carried lances such as this fellow had resting against the brown’s flattened collar.

“I’m McGee.”

“I’m Dain from First Tower. Ellai is dead. The heir wants you to come. Now.”

She blinked in the mist, the tiny impact of rain on her face. “Did the heir say why?”

“She has First Tower now. She says you’re to come. Now.”

“I have to get a change of clothes.”

The young man nodded, in that once and assured fashion the Cloud-siders had. That was permission. McGee collected her wits and dived back into the shelter, rummaged wildly, then thought and opened the safebox, her hands shaking.

Ellai dead
, she wrote for the help when he should get back.
A messenger calling me to First Tower for an interview with Elai. I’m not threatened. I haven’t tried refusing. I may be gone several days
.

She locked it back inside. She stuffed extra linens into her pockets and a spare shirt into her coat above the belt. She remembered to turn the heater off, and to put the lock on the flimsy door.

The caliban squatted belly on the ground. The young man held out his lance, indicating the foreleg. She was expected to climb aboard.

She went, having done this before, but not in a heavy coat, but not after sixteen years. She was awkward and the young man pulled her up into his lap by the coatcollar, like so much baggage.

204 CR, day 34
Cloud River

The child had become a woman, darkhaired, sullen-faced—sat in Ellai’s chair in the center of the tower hall, and Scar curled behind that chair like a humped brown hill, curled his tail beside her feet and his head came round to meet it from the other direction, so he could eye the stranger and the movement in the hall.

Then the elation McGee had felt on the way was dimmed. It had been dimming all the way into the settlement and reached its lowest ebb now, facing this new ruler on the Cloud, this frowning stranger. Only the caliban Scar gave her hope, that the head stayed low, that he turned his head to look at her with one gold, round-pupilled eye and had the collar-crest lifted no more than halfway. They were surrounded by strangeness, with other calibans, with other humans, many of the shave-headed kind, crouching close beside calibans. And weapons. Those were there too, in the hands of leather-clad men and women. Elai wore a robe, dull red. Like the shave-skulls. She was thin as the shave-skulls. A robe lay across her lap. Her hands were all bone. Her face was hollowed, febrile.

And the child looked out at her from Elai’s face, with eyes cold as the calibans’.

“Elai,” said McGee when the silence went on and on, “there wasn’t any other way for me to come. Or I would have.”

The sullenness darkened further. “Ellai is dead. Twig has swum to sea. I sent for you, MaGee.”

“I’m glad you sent,” she said, risking her death; and knew it.

For a moment everything was still. A gray moved, putting itself between them.

Scar lunged with a hiss like water on fire, jaws gaping, and seized the hapless gray, holding it, up on his own four legs, towering beside the chair. Thoughtfully he held it. It was stiff as something dead. He dropped it then. It bounced up on its legs and scurried its sinuous way to the shadows, where it turned and darted out its tongue, licking scaly jaws. Scar remained statue-like, towering, on his four bowed legs. The crest was up, and McGee’s heart was hammering in her ears.

An ariel came wandering between Scar’s thick-clawed feet, and set a stone between them, a single pebble. Scar ignored it.

“MaGee,” said Elai, “what does it say?”

“That I should be careful.”

Laughter then, laughter startling on that thin face, an echo of the child. “Yes. You should.” It died then into a frown as if the laughter had been surprised out of her, but a trace of it remained, a liveliness in the eyes. Elai waved a thin arm at all about her. “Out! Out, now! Let me talk to this old friend.”

They moved, some more reluctantly than others. Perhaps it was ominous that many of the calibans stayed. Silence fell in the retreat of steps down the well in the center of the floor, the shifting of scaly bodies. Scar continued to dominate the hall, still curled round the chair. But he settled, flicking his collar-crest, running his thick dark tongue round his jaws.

“Ellai is dead,” said Elai again, with all that implied.

“So everything is changed.”

Elai gathered herself up. The laprobe fell aside. She was stick-thin. She limped like an old woman in the few steps she took away from the chair. An ariel retreated from her feet. For a moment Elai gazed off into nothing, somewhere off into the shadows, and it was a deathshead that stared so, as if she had forgotten the focus of her thoughts, or gathered them from some far place.

“Sixteen years, MaGee.”

“A long time for me too.”

Elai turned and looked at her. “You look tired, MaGee.”

The observation surprised her, coming from what Elai had become. As if a little weathering counted on her side, a fraying of herself in the sun and wind and mists. “Not used to riding,” she said, turning it all away.

Elai stared, with an irony the child could never have achieved. It went to sour laughter. She walked over and patted Scar on his side. The lamplike eyes blinked, one and then the other.

“I’m Elai-eldest,” she said, a hoarse, weary voice. “You mustn’t forget that. If you forget that you might die, and I’d be sorry, MaGee.”

“What do I call you?”

“Elai. Should that change?”

“I wouldn’t know. Can I ask things?”

“Like what?”

Her pulse sped with fear. She thought about it a moment more, then shrugged. “Like if there’s anything I can do to help you. Can I ask that?”

The stare was cold. Laughter came out, as suddenly as the first time. “Meaning can you notice what you see? No, MaGee my friend. You can not. My heir is six. My oldest. They have nearly killed me, those boys. The last died. Did you hear?”