Forty Thousand in Gehenna (36 page)

“I heard. I didn’t report it. I figured that Jin knows enough.”

“Oh, he’ll know, that one. The calibans will say.”

McGee looked at her.
Calibans
, she thought. Her skin felt cold, but she felt the heat in the room. Sweat ran at her temples. “Mind if I shed the jacket? Am I staying that long?”

“You’re staying.”

She started to unzip. She looked up again as the tone got through in its finality. “How long?”

Elai opened her hand, fingers stiff and wide, a deliberate, chilling gesture. “Did I teach you that one, MaGee?”

All stones dropped. An end of talk. “Look,” McGee said. “You’d better listen. They’ll want me back.”

“Go down. They know a place for you. I told them.”

“Elai, listen to me. There could be trouble over this. At least let me send a message to them. Let one of your riders take it back to the hut. They’ll look there. I don’t mind staying. Look, I
want
to be here. But they have to know.”

“Why? The stone towers aren’t where you live.”

“I work for them.”

“You don’t now. Go down, MaGee. You can’t tell me no. I’m Eldest now. You have to remember that.”

“I need things. Elai—”

Elai hissed between her teeth. Scar rose up to his full height.

“All right,” McGee said. “I’m going down.”

It was a small room on the outer face of the tower. It was even, McGee decided, more comfortable than the hut—less drafty, with opaque shutters of some dried membrane in woodset panes. They opened, giving a view of the settlement; and a draft, and McGee chose the warmth.

Dry, clay walls, formed by some logic that knew no straight lines; a sloping access that led to the hall, with a crook in it that served for privacy instead of a door; a box of sand for a chamberpot—she had asked those that brought her.

They would bring food, she decided. And water. She checked her pockets for the c-rations she always carried, about the fields, when a turned ankle could mean a slow trip home. There was that, if they forgot; but she kept it as an option.

Mostly she tucked herself up crosslegged on what must be a sleeping ledge, or a table, or whatever the inhabitant wanted it to be—tucked herself up in her coat and her good boots and was warm.

She had had to ask about the sand; she had no idea now whether she was to sit on the ledge or eat on it. She was the barbarian here, and knew it, asea in more waves than Elai had been that day, that sunny faraway day when Elai tried for islands and boundaries.

But she was free, that was what. Free. She had seen enough with her trained eye to sit and think about for days, for months; and facts poured about her, instead of the years’ thin seepage of this and that detail. It was perhaps mad to be so well content. There was much to disturb her; and disturb her it would, come dark, with a door that was only a crookedness in the hall, in a room already scored with caliban claws. A Tower shaped by calibans.

The room acquired its ariel while she sat. She was not surprised at that. One had come sometimes to the hut, as they came everywhere outside the wire, insolent and frivolous.

This one dived out and in a little time a larger visitor came, a gray, putting his blunt head carefully around the bend of the accessway, a creature twice man-sized. It came serpentining its furtive way up to look at her.

Browns, next
, McGee thought, staying very still and tucked up as she was.
O Elai, you’re cruel. Or aren’t we
—
who take our machines for granted?

It opened its jaws and deposited a stone on the floor, wet and shiny. It sat there contentedly, having done that.

The grays had no sense, Elai had told her once. It stayed there a while and then forgot or lost interest or had something else to do: it turned about and left with a whisk of its dragon tail.

The stone stayed. Like a gift. Or a barrier. She was not sure.

She heard someone or something in the doorway, a faint sound. Perhaps the caliban had set itself there. Perhaps it was something else. She did not go to see.

But the slithering was still outside when they brought her food, a plate of boiled fish and a slice of something that proved to be mush; and water to drink. Two old women brought these things. McGee nodded courteously to them and set the bowls beside her on the shelf.

No deference. Nothing cowed about these two sharp-eyed old women. They looked at her with quick narrow glances and left, barefoot padding down the slope and out the crook of the entry in the gathering dark.

McGee ate and drank. The light faded rapidly once it had begun to go. After that she sat in her corner of the dark and listened to strange movings and slitherings that were part of the tower.

She kept telling herself that should some dragon come upon her in the dark, should some monster come through the doorway and nudge her with its jaws—that she should take it calmly, that
Elai
ruled here; and Scar; and no caliban would harm Elai’s guest.

If that was what she was.

“Good morning,” said Elai, when Elai got around to her again, on the grayly-sunlit crest of First Tower, on its flat roof beneath which stretched the Cloud, lost in light mist, the gardens, the fields, the fisher-digs with their odd-shaped windows and bladder-panes shut against the chill. People and calibans came and went down at the base. McGee looked over, and beyond, at towers rising ghostlike out of the mist. And she delayed greeting Elai just long enough.

“Good morning,” she said as she would say long ago on the shore, when she had been put to waiting, or when child-Elai had put her off somehow—a lift of the brow and an almost-smile that said: my patience has limits too. Perhaps to vex Elai risked her life. Perhaps, as with Jin, it was a risk not to risk it. She saw amusement and pleasure in Elai’s face, and mutual warning, the way it had always been. “Where’s Scar?” McGee asked.

“Fishing, maybe.”

“You don’t go to the sea nowadays.”

“No.” For the moment there was a wistful look on the thin, fragile face.

“Or build boats.”

“Maybe.” Elai’s head lifted. Her lips set. “They think I’ll die, MaGee.”

“Who?”

Elai reached out her hand, openfingered, gesturing at all her world.

“Why did you send for me?” McGee asked.

Elai did not answer at once. She turned and gazed at an ariel which had clambered up onto the waisthigh wall. “Paeia my cousin—she’s got Second Tower; next is Taem’s line over at the New Tower. My heir’s six. That Jin on Styxside—he’ll come here.”

“You’re talking about who comes after you.”

Elai turned dark eyes on her, deepset and sullen. “You starmen, you know a lot. Lot of things. Maybe you help me stay alive. Maybe we just talk. I liked that. The boats. Now I could do them. Real ones. But who would go in them? Who would?
They
never talked to MaGee. But now you’re here. So my people can look at you and
think
, MaGee.”

McGee stood staring at her, remembering the child—every time she looked at her, remembering the child, and it seemed there was sand in all directions, and sea and sky and sun, not the fog, not this tired, hurt woman less than half her age.

“I’ll get things,” she said, deciding things, deciding once for all. “You let me send word to the base and I’ll get what I can. Everything they’ve given the Styxsiders. That, for a start.”

Elai’s face never changed. It seemed to have forgotten how. She turned and stroked the ariel, which flicked its collar fringes and showed them an eye like a green jewel, unwinking.

“Yes,” Elai said.

204 CR, day 41
Base Director’s Office

“Dr. Genley’s here,” the secretary said through the intercom, and the Director frowned and pushed the button. “Send him in,” the Director said. He leaned back in his chair. Rain pattered against the window in vengeful spats, carried on the wind that whipped between the concrete towers. Genley had done some travelling to have gotten here this fast, from Styxside. But it was that kind of news.

Genley came in, a different man than he had sent out. The Director stopped in mid-rock of his chair and resumed the minute rocking again, facing this huge, rawboned man in native leather, with hair gone long and beard ragged and lines windgraven into his face.

“Came to talk about McGee,” Genley said.

“I gathered that.”

“She’s in trouble. They’re crazy down on Cloudside.”

“McGee left a note.” The Director rocked forward and keyed the fax up on the screen.

“I heard.” Genley no more than glanced at it.

“Have the Styxsiders heard about it?”

“They got word. Someone got to them. Com wasn’t any faster at it.”

“You mean they found it out from some other source.”

“They know what goes on at the Cloud. I’ve reported that before.” Genley shifted on his feet, glanced toward a chair.

“Sit down, will you? Want something hot to drink?”

“Like it, yes. Haven’t stopped moving since last night.”

“Tyler.” The Director punched the button. “Two coffees.” He rocked back and looked at Genley. “It seems to be a new situation down there. This ruler of the Cloud Towers is apparently well-disposed to McGee. And this office isn’t disposed to risk disturbing that.”

Genley’s face was flushed. Perhaps it was the haste with which he had come. “She needs communications down there.”

“We’ll be considering that.”

“Maybe some backup. Four or five staff to go in there with her.”

“If feasible.”

“I have to state my opposition to sending McGee in there without any help. I have experienced staff. Maybe they wouldn’t be accepted down there. But someone else ought to be in there.”

“Do I hear overtones in that?”

“Are we on the record?”

“Not for the moment.”

“I’m not sure McGee’s stable enough to be in there alone. I’m not sure anyone is.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there are times that my staff and I have to get together and remind ourselves where we came from. And I don’t think McGee has the toughness to stand up to them alone. Mentally. It gets to you. It will. You have to start out tough and stay that way. The Weirds—you’ve read my report on the Weirds…”

“Yes.”

“That’s how strange human beings can get, living next to Calibans. And I’m afraid McGee’s primed to slip right over into it. She’s wanted this too long, too badly. I’m afraid she’s the worst candidate in the world to be sitting where she is.”

The Director considered the man, the leather, the stone ornaments, the unruly hair and beard. Genley brought a smell with him, not an unwashed smell, but something of earth and dry muskiness. Woodsmoke. Something else he could not put a name to. “Going native, you mean.”

“I think she went, as far as she knew how, years ago. I mean, no kid of her own, a woman, after all—Finding that kid on the beach. You know how that could be.”

The Director looked at Genley narrowly, at the clothes, the man. “You mean to say some people might find things they wanted outside the wire, mightn’t they? Something—psychologically needful.”

For some reason the ruddiness of Genley’s scowling face deepened.

“I haven’t any reason,” the Director said, “to question McGee’s professional motives. I know you and McGee have had your problems. I’ll trust you to keep them to a minimum. Particularly under the circumstances. And I won’t remind you how this office would view any leak of information on the Cloud to Styxside—and vice versa.”

The red was quite decisive now. It was rage. “I’ll trust that warning will likewise be transmitted to McGee. I can tell you—this Elai is understood as trouble.”

“On Styxside.”

“On Styxside.”

“McGee reports Elai’s health as fragile. This woman doesn’t sound like a threat.”

Genley’s lips compacted, worked a moment. “She’s got a mean caliban.”

“What’s that mean?”

Genley thought about the answer. The Director watched him. “It’s a perception the natives have; I’ve mentioned this before in the reports—That the social position of humans relates to caliban dominance. Those that have the meanest and the toughest stand highest.”

“Where do you stand? Where are you without one? What’s it mean, if the calibans aren’t together to fight it out.”

“It affects attitude. That woman down on the Cloud has an exaggerated idea of herself, that Elai, inherited this caliban when she was young—that’s what they say.”

“So they expect she’ll move on them.”

“They reckon she’ll push. One way or the other.”

“Tell me, you’re not backing McGee’s assertions, are you, that we’re dealing with calibans as well as humans out there.”

“No.” That answer was firm. “Absolutely not. Except as the Cloud-siders may do some kind of augury whereby they
think
the calibans have an opinion. The old Romans, they used to plan their days by the behavior of geese. The flight of birds. Must have worked at least as well as calibans. They got by.”

“Different brain size, geese and calibans.”

“Biologists can argue that point. Look at the Weirds. There’s a good example of humans that talk to calibans. They crawl around underground, let the gray fishers feed them, don’t talk, don’t interact with the rest of humankind except to take orders and shove dirt around. You want the caliban vote, ask a Weird and see if you get any answer. Sir. McGee will learn that pretty quick if she wants to do some honest work out there.”

“I’m aware of your differences of opinion. Is it possible this is a difference of the cultures you’re observing?”

“I doubt it.”

“But you don’t draw conclusions.”

“Absolutely not. I’m simply waiting for data out of McGee. And in sixteen years, there’s been nothing new out of her but speculation. Maybe this will prove matters once for all. But for the record I want to caution the committee that this move is very serious—that with observers inside both cultures, we could embroil ourselves in local problems. Or worsen them. Or push these two cultures into conflict. It’s waiting to happen.”

“Because of a caliban. Because it’s as you say…mean.”

“It means this Elai has a higher status than her situation warrants. That she has a higher confidence than it warrants. She didn’t hesitate to snatch McGee in defiance of the Base. That’s worth thinking on.”