Forty Thousand in Gehenna (47 page)

Here was dark, and fire, and they collected the leavings of the war.

Perhaps they would find the rest, Genley; Kim.

“Ask him,” she asked one of the riders at last, “where the other star-men are.”

“He says,” that rider reported back to her, “that this Jin killed the rest.”

“Huh,” she said, and the dried fish she was eating went dryer yet in her mouth and unpalatable. She found another depth of herself, that she could still harbor a resentment toward the dead. But she did. She wished in a curious division of her thoughts that even Mannin would try to run; that the whole matter might be tidy. And that horrified her.

“Someone should take Mannin to the Wire,” she said, for Elai’s hearing.

Elai waved a hand.

So a rider named Cloud did that, who had a caliban who was willing to go. They went off into the dark and the last of the starman matter was settled.

It was not what mattered, on the Cloud.

205 CR, day 168
Base Director’s Office

“…It’s down,” the secretary said, wild-eyed and distressed, breathless from the other office, leaning on the desk forgetful of protocols. “The tower, sir—it’s down, just—
fell
. I looked up in the window one minute and it was going down—”

There were scattered red lights on the desk com. One was an incoming station message, on that reserved channel; more were flicking on.

“The Styx tower,” the director said, striving for calm.

“The face of it—just hung there a moment like gravity had gone, and then it went down in all this dust—”

The account went on, mild hysteria. The Director pushed the button for the fax from station.

“…Urgent: your attention soonest to accompanying survey pictures. Styx towers eight, six, two in collapse…”

The door was open. Security showed up, agitated and diffident, red-faced in the doorway.

“You’ve seen it,” the man said.

“My secretary saw it go. What’s going on out there? Station says we’ve got more towers down. Maybe others going.”

“Try Genley again?”

The Director considered it, thought it through, the governing principle of all dealings across the wire. “Try any contact you like. But no one goes outside.”

“If there are injured out there—”

“No aid. No intervention. You’re sure about our own subground.”

“Systems are working.”

“Try McGee again. Keep trying—Get back to work,” he told the secretary, who went out a shaken man. He wanted a drink himself. He was not about to yield to that. He wanted the pills in his desk. He withheld the reassurance. The desk com was still full of red lights, not so many as before, but still a bloody profusion of them. Another winked out.

“Prepare a report,” he told Security. “I want a report. We’ve got observers coming in. I want this straightened up.”

“Yes, sir,” Security said, and took that for dismissal.

More of the lights were going out. His secretary was back at work. Things had to be set in order: there had to be reports with explanations. His hands were shaking. He began to think through the array of permissions he had given, the dispatch of agents. Those would be reviewed, criticized. There had to be answers ready, reasons, explanations. The Bureau abhorred enigmas.

McGee
, he thought, cursing her, setting his hope in her, that all reports now indicated that the Cloud was unaffected.

One native site to show the visitors. One native site to showcase; and McGee could get access to it—surmising McGee was still alive.

He started composing messages to the field while the reports came in, one and the other of the Stygian towers going down.

Everywhere. There was death out there, wholesale. Optics picked up the movements of calibans. The two settlements went to war or something like a war and calibans went berserk and destroyed one side, overthrowing towers, burrowing through planted fields, everything, while the apparently solid earth churned and settled.

“There’s a rider coming to the wire,” they told him later that day, when he had sent message after message out. “He’s carrying someone.”

And later: “Sir, it’s Mannin.”

“What happened?” he asked, brushing past the medics, shocked at the emaciation, the slackjawed change in the man on the stretcher, there in the foyer of the med building. “Mannin?”

He got no sensible answer, nothing but babble of riversides and calibans.

“Where did you come from?” he asked again.

Mannin wept, that was all. And he deputed someone to listen and report; and came back later himself only when the report began to be coherent, news of going upriver, of seeing McGee, of Genley and Kim murdered in cold blood.

So he went to hear it, sat by the bedside of a man who had gone to bone and staring eyes, who looked the worse for being shaven and clipped and turned into something civilized.

“Going to shuttle you up to station,” he said when Mannin had done. “There’s a ship due. They’ll get you back to Pell.”

Maybe names like that no longer made sense to Mannin. He never even reacted to it.

Message: Base Director to E. McGee, in field.

Urgent that you report in: the Styx towers have all fallen. We see refugees but they do not come near the wire. We have recovered Dr. Genley’s notes, which shed new light on the situation. We assure you no punitive action is contemplated…

Message: Base Director to E. McGee, in field

Did you receive the last message? Please respond. The situation is urgent. Bureau is ferrying in an observer from Unionside, with documents that may bear on your studies. The situation for the mission is quite delicate, and I cannot urge strongly enough that you put yourself back in contact with this office at once, by whatever means.

205 CR, day 172
Cloud Towers

“No,” Elai said. “No com.” And McGee did not dispute it, only frowned, sitting there in the hall of First Tower where Elai sat. Elai had a blanket wrapped about her. She had not combed her hair; it stuck out at angles, webbed like lint. Her eyes were terrible.

Her heir was there—Din, who crouched in the corner with his juvenile caliban, with his eyes as dreadful as Elai’s own—frightened little boy, who knew too much. Din had his knife. It was irony that he was here, an heir defending his elder; but this seven year old had the facts all in hand. This seven year old had an aunt ready to take him when she could, to her own tower, to what befell a seven year old heir to a line that had lasted long on the banks of the Cloud.

Scar was dying—had never come up to First Tower, but languished on the shore. Elai only waited for this, the way she had waited for days, eating nothing, drinking little.

Quiet steps came and went, Weirds, who tended Elai. Taem never came; the nurses had Cloud kept somewhere away, as much in danger, but ignorant. A baby. Likeliest catspaw for Paeia if Din came to grief.

There was Dain, always Dain, at the doors below. Dain’s sister Maeri. The Flanahans were loyal still; would die in that doorway if they must. They were armed—but so were all the riders. And so far one could come and go.

“MaGee,” said Elai, having wakened.

“First,” McGee murmured in respect.

“What would you advise?”

“Advise?” Perhaps Elai was delirious, perhaps not. Elai made no more patterns, sat with her arms beneath the blankets, alone. McGee shrugged uneasily. “I’d advise you eat something.”

Elai failed to react to that. Just failed. There was long silence. It went like this, through the hours.

“First,” McGee said, working her hands together, clenching them and unclenching. “First, let’s go…just use some sense and eat something, and you and I’ll just walk out of here. To the Wire, maybe, maybe somewhere else. You can just walk away. Isn’t that good advice?”

“I could make a boat,” Elai said, “and go to the islands.”

“Well, we could do that,” McGee said, half-hoping, half-appalled, shocked at once by Elai’s dry laugh. Elai slipped forth a hand, opened thin fingers in mockery, dropping imaginary stones.
Forget that, old friend
.

“Listen, I don’t intend to put up with this, Elai.”

Elai’s eyes more than opened, the least frownline creased her brow. But she said nothing.

“Styx towers are down,” McGee said. “What’s that going to mean in the world?”

A second throwing-away gesture. “Should have made the boats,” Elai said. “But they’d have taken down our towers.”

“Who?” There was a cold wind up McGee’s back. “What do you mean they’d have taken down the towers? Calibans? Like Jin’s towers? Like they’re doing there? What are you talking about, First?”

“Don’t know, MaGee. Don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe so.”

“They’ll kill. Like at the Styx towers.”

“The strong ones’ll come this way,” Elai said. She was hoarse. This talk tired her. She made an impatient gesture. “All those Styxside men, too mean; all those women, too stupid—Life would kill them, here. Land will kill them. Most. Maybe not all.” The frown reappeared between her brows. “Or maybe Styxside way just grows up again. Don’t know.”

Somewhere at the depth of her McGee was shocked. “You mean these Styxsiders did something the calibans didn’t like. That
that
was what killed them.”

Elai shrugged. “They ate grays.”

“For years, Elai—”

“It got worse, didn’t it? They went on and on; they got themselves the likes of Jin; he pushed.” Elai made a motion of her fingers, indicating boundaries. “Calibans aren’t finished with this pattern, MaGee, here on the Cloud. Cloud stands. That’s what it meant, out there.”

“And they’d have stopped your ships the same way?”

“Maybe.” Elai heaved a breath. “Maybe not. Old Scar would swim. Maybe he thought the same as me. That old sea-folk, he was just bigger than Scar, that’s all. Or maybe that was
our
limit and he was saying so.”

McGee saw pictures in her mind, squatting there with her fist against her lips: saw every caliban on Gehenna in every river valley making mounds much alike, except on Styx and Cloud. “Boundaries,” she said, and looked up, at Elai. But Elai had shut her eyes again, closing her out.

She looked at Din, at the boy huddled in the corner with his caliban. The hall was eerily vacant. Only a single ariel lurked in the shadows. Of all the communications that had once flowed from this place, one small green watcher. There was always one.

McGee hugged her knees and thought and thought, the patterns that had been since they had come home, lines and mounds across the river, beyond her to read.

And Scar dying on the shore, slowly, snapping now and again at grays who came too close.

She could not bear it longer. She got up and walked out, down the access, down the corridors in the dark, where voices were hushed, where desertions had begun, deep below, calibans and Weirds at their work, which might be undermining or shoring up, either one.

Dain gave her a curious look as she passed the lower door; a handful more of the riders had joined him, armed with spears; so no one got into First Tower yet. It seemed sure that they would. Everything was at a kind of rest, Paeia plotting in her tower, Taem’s in uproar, non-communicant, now that Taem was dead, heirless; and other towers turned secretive. The fishers still plied their trade; folk went out to farm. But they did so carefully, disturbing as little as they could; and strange calibans had come: they saw them in the river, refugees from the battle, maybe Styxside calibans, maybe calibans that had never come near humans before. If anyone knew, the Weirds might, but Weirds kept their own counsel these days.

She stood there looking out to the shore, where Scar still sat like some rock under the sun.

“Still alive,” said Dain. His own caliban was about, not with him, not far either. She spied it with its collar up, just watching.

She started walking, walked all the way out past the nets where Scar sat. The place stank, a dry fishy stench like stagnant water, like caliban and rot. Not dead yet. But his skin hung like bits of old paper, and his ribs stuck out through what whole skin there was as if it were laid over a skeleton. The eyes were still alive, still blinked. He moved no more than that.

She picked up a rock. Laid it down. Went and gathered another, caliban sized. She struggled with it, and set it onto the other. Of smaller ones she built the rest of a spiral, and the small spur that gave direction. An ariel came and helped her, trying to change the pattern to what was; she pitched a pebble at it and it desisted. She wiped her brow, wiped tears off her face and kept building, and saw others had come, Dain and his folk. They stared, reading the pattern, First Tower built taller than the rest, the uncomplex thread that went from it toward a thing she had made square and alien.

Dain invaded the pattern, severed the line with his spearbutt, defying her.

Scar moved: his collar fringe went up. Dain looked at that and stayed still. No Cloudsider moved.

McGee hunted up more rocks. Her clothes were drenched with sweat. The wind came cold on her. There were more and more watchers, riders and calibans of First Tower.

“Paeia will come,” Dain said. “MaGee—don’t do this.”

She gave him a wild look, lips clamped. He stepped back at that. The crowd grew, and there was unearthly quiet. A gray moved in and tried to change the pattern. Scar hissed and it retreated to the fringes again, only waiting. McGee worked, more and more stones. Bruised ribs ached. She limped, sweated, kept at it, making her statement that was not in harmony with anything ever written in the world.

Dain handed another man his spear then and carried stone for her, leaving her to place it where she would; and that made it swifter, the building of this pattern. She built and built, lines going on to a settlement by the Styx, going outward into the sea, going south to rivers she remembered—
Elai
, the statement was,
expansion. Links to the starmen. The starmen
—She built for creatures who had never seen the stars, whose eyes were not made for looking at them, made the sign for
river
and for
going up
, for
dwelling-place
and
sunwarmth
, for
food/fish
and again for
warmth
and
multitude
, all emanating from the Base.