Forty Thousand in Gehenna (9 page)

“Rock, sir. A tread threw it up.”

“So.” He surveyed all the faces, all the shaven skulls—commissioned officers and noncoms and civs. He blinked, absently passed a hand over his thinning, rejuv-silvered hair. “I’d shave it off too, you know,” he said, “but there’s not much of it.” Nervous laughs from the faces down the table. Uncertain humor. And then the thread came back to him. “So we’ve got the power in; got electricity in some spots. Camp’s got power for cooking and freezing. Land’s cleared at least in the camp area. We’ve all got some kind of shelter over our heads; we’ve done, what, seven thousand years of civilization in just about three days?” He was not sure of the seven thousand years, but he had read it in a book somewhere, how long humankind had taken about certain steps, and he saw eyes paying earnest attention to what sounded like praise. “That’s good. That’s real good. We’ve got excuse for all of us to slow down soon. But we want to do what we can while the bloom’s on the matter, while we’re all motivated by maybe wanting a hot shower and a warmer bed. What’s the prospect on the habitats? Maybe this week we can start them? Or are we going to have to put that off?”

“We’re looking,” Beaumont said, beside him, seated, “at getting all the personnel into solid housing by tomorrow, even if we have to take crowded conditions. So we’ll be dry if it rains. And we’re putting a good graded road through the azi camp, to help them under the same conditions. We’re clearing and plowing tomorrow; looking at maybe getting the sets in the ground for the garden in three more days; maybe getting general plumbing out to the azi camp.”

“That’s fine,” Conn said. “That’s way ahead of schedule.”

“Subject to weather.”

“Any—”

“Hey!” someone exclaimed suddenly, down the table, and swore: people came off the benches at that end of the table. There was laughter and a man dived under the table and came up with a meter long green lizard. Conn stared at it in a daze, the struggling reptile, the grinning staffer and the rest of them—Gutierrez, of the bio section.

“Is that,” Conn asked, “a resident?”

“This, sir—this is an ariel. They’re quick: probably got past the door while we were coming into the hut.” He set it down a moment on the vacated section of the long table, and it rested there immobile, green and delicate, neck frills spread like feathers.

“I think it better find its own supper,” Beaumont said. “Take it out, will you?”

Gutierrez picked it up again. Someone held the door for him. He walked to it and, bending, gave it a gentle toss into the darkness outside.

“Been back a dozen times,” Bilas said. Conn felt his nerves frayed at the thought of such persistence.

Gutierrez took his seat again, and so did the others.

“Any of the big ones?” Conn asked.

“Just ariels,” Gutierrez said. “They get into the huts and tents and we just put them out. No one’s been hurt, us or them.”

“We just live with them,” Conn said. “We knew that, didn’t we?” He felt shaky, and sat down again. “There are some things to do. Administrative things. I’d really like to get most of the programs launched in our tenure. The ships—leave in a few hours. And we don’t see them again until three years from now. Until they arrive with the technicians and the setup for the birthlabs, at which point this world really begins to grow. Everything we do really has to be toward that setup. The labs, when they arrive, will be turning out a thousand newborns every nine months; and in the meanwhile we’ll have young ones born here, with all of that to take care of. We’ve got azi who don’t know anything about bringing up children, which is something Education’s got to see to. We’ve got mapping to do, to lay out the pattern of development down to the last meter. We’ve got to locate all the hazards, because we can’t have kids running around falling into them. Three years isn’t such a long time for that. And long before then, we’re going to have births. You’ve all thought of that, I’m sure.” Nervous laughter from the assembly. “I think it’s going to go well. We’ve got everything in our favor. Seven thousand years in three days. We’ll come up another few millennia while we’re waiting, and take another big step again when the ships get those labs to us. And this place has to be safe by then. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

A glass lifted: Ilya Burdette, down the table. “For the colonel!” All the glasses went up, and everyone echoed it. “For the captain!” someone else yelled; and they drank to Beaumont. It was a good feeling in the place. Noisy.

“What about beer?” someone yelled from the second table. “How many days before beer?”

Tired faces broke into grins. “Ag has a plan,” a civ yelled back. “You get us fields, you get your beer.”

“To beer!” someone shouted, and everyone shouted, and Conn laughed along with the rest.

“Civilization,” someone else yelled, and they drank down the drinks they did have, and the sweat and the exhaustion and the long hours seemed not to matter to them.

Venture
log

“Departure effected, 1213 hours 17 minutes mission apparent time. En route to jump point, all systems normal.
US Swift
and
US Capable
are following at one hour intervals. Last communication with ground base at 1213 hours indicated excellent conditions and progress ahead of schedule: see message log. Estimate jump point arrival at 1240…”

Day 07, CR

Jin stepped forward as the line moved closer to the small makeshift table the supervisors had set up among the tents. He wore a jacket over his coveralls in the morning chill. The air was brisk and pleasant like spring on the world he had left. He remained content. They were clean again, besides the dust that he had to rub off his face and hands, that ground itself into his clean coveralls. They had the pipe laid, and the pumps set up, bringing clean water up to the camp, so that they had been able to shower under a long elevated pipe with holes in it—bracing cold, and there was no soap, but it had been good all the same. They could shower, they had been informed, anytime they came offshift, because there was plenty of water. There were bladed razors they could shave with, but they could let their hair and brows grow again. Faces had their expression back—almost. His head would be darkening with hair again, although he had not seen a mirror since Cyteen. He could feel it, and more, he had seen a sib or two about the sprawling camp, so he knew: he looked better.

And he tingled with excitement, and was hollowed by no small insecurity, because this line they were standing in, early in the morning, had to do with final assignments.

It all went very quickly. The comp the supervisor used was a portable. The born-man plugged in the numbers as given and it sorted through them and came up with assignments. Some azi were turned aside, to wait longer; some went through without a hitch. The man in front of him went through.

“Next,” the born-man said.

“J 458-9998,” he said promptly, and watched it typed in.

“Preferred mate.”

“P 86-687.”

The man looked. One could never see the screens, whatever the operators knew, whatever the screens gave back. The machine was full of his life, his records, all that he was and all they meant him to be.

The man wrote on a plastic square and gave it to him. “Confirmed. Tent 907, row five. Go there now.”

The next azi behind him was already giving her number. Jin turned away—all his baggage in hand, his small kit with the steel razor and the toothbrush and the washcloth: he was packed.

5907 was no small hike distant among the tents, down the long rows of bare dust and tents indistinguishable except for tags hung at their entries. Other walkers drifted ahead of him, azi likewise carrying their white assignment chits in hand, in the early morning with the sun coming up hazy over the tents and the small tracks and serpentine tail-marks of ariels in the dust. An ariel wandered across the lane, leisurely, paying no heed at all to the walkers, stopped only when it had reached the edge of a tent, and turned a hard eye toward them. There were more than twenty thousand tents, all set out to the east of the big permanent domes the born-men had made for themselves. Jin had helped set up the tents in this section, had helped in the surveying to peg down the marker lines, so that he had a good idea where he was going and where number 5907 was. He met cross-traffic, some of the azi from other areas, where other desks might be set up: it was like a city, this vast expanse of streets and tents, like the city he had seen the day they went to the shuttle port, which was his first sight of so great a number of dwellings.

Forty thousand azi. Thousands upon thousands of tents in blocks of ten. He came to 901 and 903 and 905, at last to 907, a tent no different than the others: he bent down and started to go in—but she was already there. She. Squatting at the doorflap, he tossed his kit onto the pallet she had not chosen, and Pia sat there crosslegged looking at him until he came inside and sat down in the light from the open tentflap.

He said nothing, finding nothing appropriate to say. He was excited about being near her at last, but what they were supposed to do together, which he had never done with anyone—that was for nighttime, after their shift was done. The tape had said so.

Her hair was growing back, like his, a darkness on her skull; and her eyes had brows again.

“You’re thinner,” she said.

“Yes. So are you. I wished we could have been near each other on the voyage.”

“The tape asked me to name an azi I might like. I named Tal 23. Then it asked about 9998s; about you in particular. I hadn’t thought about you. But the tape said you had named me.”

“Yes.”

“So I thought that I ought to change my mind and name you, then. I hadn’t imagined you would put me first on your list.”

“You were the only one. I always liked you. I couldn’t think of anyone else. I hope it’s all right.”

“Yes. I feel really good about it.”

He looked at her, a lift of his eyes from their former focus on the matting and on his knees and hands, met eyes looking at him, and thought again about what they were supposed to do together in the night—which was like the cattle in the spring fields, or the born-men in their houses and their fine beds, which he had long since realized resulted in births. He had never known azi who did the like: there were tapes which made him imagine doing such things, but this, he believed, would be somehow different.

“Have you ever done sex before?” he asked.

“No. Have you?”

“No,” he said. And because he was a 9998 and confident of his reason: “May I?” he asked, and put out his hand to touch her face. She put her hand on his, and it felt delicately alive and stirred him in a way only the tapes could do before this. He grew frightened then, and dropped his hand to his knee. “We have to wait till tonight.”

“Yes.” She looked no less disturbed. Her eyes were wide and dark. “I really feel like the tapes. I’m not sure that’s right.”

And then the PA came on, telling all azi who had located their assignments to go out and start their day’s work. Pia’s eyes stayed fixed on his.

“We have to go,” he said.

“Where do you work?”

“In the fields; with the engineers, for survey.”

“I’m with the ag supervisor. Tending the sets.”

He nodded—remembered the call and scrambled for his feet and the outside of the tent. She followed.

“5907,” she said, to remember, perhaps. She hurried off one way and he went the other in a great muddle of confusion—not of ignorance, but of changes; of things that waited to be experienced.

Should I feel this way? he would have liked to have asked, if he could have gone to his old supervisor, who would sit with him and ask him just the right questions. Should I think about her this way? But everyone was too busy.

There would be tape soon, he hoped, which would help them sort out the things they had seen, and comfort them and tell them whether they were right or wrong in the things they were feeling and doing. But they must be right, because the born-men were proceeding on schedule, and in spite of their shouts and their impatience, they stopped sometimes to say that they were pleased.

This was the thing Jin loved. He did everything meticulously and expanded inside whenever the supervisor would tell him that something was right or good. “Easy,” the supervisor would say at times, when he had run himself breathless taking a message or fetching a piece of equipment; would pat his shoulder. “Easy. You don’t have to rush.” But it was clear the supervisor was pleased. For that born-man he would have run his heart out, because he loved his job, which let him work with born-men in the fields he loved, observing them with a deep and growing conviction he might learn how to be what they were. The tapes had promised him.

Day 32, CR

Gutierrez stopped on the hillside, squatted down on the scraped earth and surveyed the new mound heaved up on this side of the river. Eva Jenks of bio dropped down beside him, and beside her, the special forces op Ogden with his rifle on his knees. Morris, out of engineering, came puffing up the slope from behind and dropped down beside them, a second rifle-carrier, in case.

It was indisputably a mound…on their side of the river; and new as last night. The old mounds lay directly across that gray expanse of water, about a half a kilometer across at this point—the Styx, they called it, a joke—the way they called the world Gehenna at this stage, for the dust and the conditions; Gehenna II, Gehenna Too, like the star, and not Newport. But Styx was fast getting to be the real name of this place, more colorful than Forbes River, which was the name on the maps. The Styx and the calibans. A mingling of myths. But this one had gotten out of its bounds.

“I’d really like to have an aerial shot of that,” Jenks said. “You know, it looks like it’s matched up with the lines on the other side.”

“Maybe it has to do with orientation to the river or the sun,” Gutierrez reckoned. “If we knew why they built mounds at all.”

“Might use some kind of magnetic field orientation.”

“Might.”

“Whatever they’re doing,” Norris said, “we can’t have them doing this in the fields. This area is gridded out for future housing. We’ve got to set up some kind of barrier that these things are going to respect; we need to know how deep they dig. Can’t put up a barrier if we don’t know that.”