Forty Thousand in Gehenna

by C. J. Cherryh

  If he sat up on top, he thought, he could look straight into the chasms of other rows sideways to his floor. It was that huge a room and that much curve; and he was glad not to have that view. He sat down at his assigned place, feet over the edge; and all at once another of the Js showed up. This J, another 458 but of gene-set 8974— must come from some other farm, but he could not be sure with the shaving. The man clambered up the ladder over him and the bunk next upstairs gave slightly as his bunkmate climbed in and swung his feet over the edge. Jin sat still, bent over because of the low overhead. He was tired, very glad to sit down, and he felt a great deal safer enclosed by the four uprights and other groundlevel bunks all around him; Another J found the bunk at his head, which was more company; and more Js went up the ladder.

  It was all going very fast now, with comforting efficiency: they had managed to do it all right. Soon people were sitting all about him.

  Someone took the other decklevel bunk next to his, and he saw people on either side, and facing him and angling away down the diagonal view through the uprights. The room was getting quiet again, even the nonreaders having mostly found their places, so that the PA sounded even louder. He had already spotted the small packet the PA told them about next, the plastic case lying on the pillow, and there was a massive stirring 32

  Forty Thousand in Gehenna

  as thousands of azi reached and took theirs as he did— as they opened the covers and found hygiene kits and schedules.

  "Read your schedule for exercise," the voice instructed them. "If you don't read, you will have a blue card or a red card. Blues are group one. Reds are group two. I will call you by those numbers; you will have half an hour at a time."

  It was not much time. Jin was already plotting how he could adjust his personal routine to follow it. There were more instructions, where one went for elimination and how one reported malaise, and instruction that they must sit or lie in the bunks at all other times because there was no room for people to walk about. "A great deal of the time we will play tape," the voice promised them, which cheered Jin considerably.

  He felt uncertain what his life had meant up to this point. He remembered well enough. But the importance he had attached to things was all revised.

  His life now seemed more preparatory than substantive. He looked forward to things to come. There would be a world, he believed; and he was called on to build it. He would become more and more like a born-man and he would be on this assignment for the rest of his life, one of the most important assignments even born-men hoped to get. All of this was due to his good fortune in having been born in the right year, on the right world, of the right gene-set, and of course it was due to his excellent attention to his work. There would be only good tape for him, and when he had gotten where he was going, when he looked about him at a new land, there were certain things which would have to be done at once, with all the skill he had. People believed in him. They had chosen him. He was very happy, now that all the disturbing things were over, now that he could sit in his own bunk and know that he was safe… and he would have just about enough time to understand it all before they would be there, so the tape promised.

  There would be Pia, for instance. He would have liked to have found Pia in all this crowd, and asked her whether the tape had talked to her about him. But he thought that it had. Usually they were very thorough about such details. And likely they had known even what he would answer: perhaps their own supervisor had had a hand in it, reaching out to take care of them, however far they had come from their beginnings. He and 33

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  Pia would make born-men together and the tape said that this would be as good as the reward tapes, a reward anytime they liked as long as they were offduty. He had a great deal of new information in that regard to think on, and information about the world they were going to, and lists of new rules and procedures. He wanted to succeed in this new place and impress his supervisors.

  The PA finished instructing them. They were to lie flat on their bunks, and soon they would be asked to take trank from the ampoules given them in their personal kit. He arranged all this where he could find it, taped the trank series to the bedpost, and lay down as he was supposed to do, his head on his hands. He would be very busy for the future. He was scheduled for exercise in the 12th group, and when it was called, he wanted to proceed to the right place as quickly as possible and to plan a routine which would do as much as possible for him in the least amount of time.

  He had never been so taut-nerved and full of purpose— never had so much to look forward to, or even imagined such opportunity existed. He loved the state which first ordered his creation and now bought his contract and saw to every detail of his existence. It created Pia and all the others and took them together to a new world it planned to give them. Into the bargain it had made him strong and beautiful and intelligent, so that it would be proud of him. It felt very good to be what he was planned to be, to know that everything was precisely on schedule and that his contractholders were delighted with him. He tried very hard to please, and he felt a tingling of pleasure now that he knew he had done everything right and that they were on their way. He smiled and hugged it all inside himself, how happy he was, a preciousness beyond all past imagining.

  A tape began. It talked about the new world, and he listened.

  iii

  T00:21:15

  Venture log

  …outbound at 0244 m in good order. Estimate jump at 1200 a. All personnel secure under normal running. US Swift and US Capable in convoy report 0332 m all stable and normal running."

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  iv

  T28 hours

  Mission Apparent Time

  From the personal journal of Robert Davies

  …9/2/94. Jump completed. Four days to bend a turn after dump and we're through this one. Out of trafficked space. We're coming to our intended heading and now the worst part begins. Four more of these— this time without proper charts. I never liked this kind of thing."

  v

  T15 days MAT

  Lounge area 2, US Venture

  "That's clear on the checks," Beaumont said, and Gutierrez, among other team chiefs, nodded. "All equipment accounted for. Venture's been thorough. Nothing damaged, nothing left. The governor— you can call him governor from now on— wants a readiness report two days after third jump. Any problem with that?"

  A general shaking of heads, among the crowd of people, military and civilian, present in the room. They filled it. It was not a large lounge; they were crowded everywhere, and the bio equipment was accessible only in printout from Swift, which swore it had been examined, that the cannisters were intact and the shock meters showed nothing disastrous. More of their hardware rode on Swift and Capable than on Venture. They could get at nothing. It was a singularly frustrating time— and after two weeks mission apparent time it was still humiliating to sit in the presence of military officers or ship's crew, who had never gone through the shaving, who had no idea of the thing that bound them together, who had.

  And when it broke up, when Beaumont walked out, grayhaired and venerable and with her sullen special op bearing, there was a silence.

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  Forty Thousand in Gehenna

  A moving of chairs then. "Game in R15," one of the regs said. "All welcome."

  "Game in 24," a civ said. "40," another added. It was what they did to pass the time. There was a newsletter, passed by hand and not on comp, which told who won what, and in what game; and that was what they did for their sanity. They paid off in favor points. This was a reg, a military customs:—because where we been, Matt Mayes put it, ain't no surety we get free cash; but favor points, that's a loan of something or a walk after something or whatever: no sex, no property, no tours, no gear— cut your throat if you play for solid stakes. Favor points is friendly. Don't you get in no solid game: don't you bet no big favors. You're safe on favor points. You do the other
thing, the Old Man'll collect all bets and shut down the games, right?

  Got us reg civs, was the way the regs put it. They're reg civs, meaning the line was down and the regs, the military, swept them into the games and the bets and otherwise included them. And it was a strange feeling, that all their pride came from the stiff-backboned regs, like Eron Miles, whose tattooed number was real, because he came out of the labs, who recovered his bearings as fast as any of them whose numbers were wearing dim. It was We; and the officers and the governor were They. That was the way of it.

  And even further removed was the spacer crew— who gambled too, for credits, in other games, because their voyage was a roundtrip and they would go on and on doing missions like this. The spacers pushed odds—even following the route a probeship crew had laid out for them, themselves following a drone probe: Venture went with navigational records and all the amenities, but it was a nervous lot of spacers all the same, and none of the games mixed— Wouldn't gamble with you, the conversation was reported, between spacer and reg: Cheap stakes.

  People remembered the room numbers, with the manic attention they deserved, because it was the games that took one's mind off an approaching jump— that let them forget for a while that they were traveling a scarcely mapped track that had the spacers hairtriggered and locked in their own manic gamblings.

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  Forty Thousand in Gehenna

  Cheap at any price, that little relaxation, that little forgetting. One forgot the hazards, forgot the discomforts to come, forgot to imagine, which was the worst mistake of all.

  There were assignations, too: room shirtings and courtesies— for the same reasons, that with life potentially short, sex was a stimulus powerful enough to wipe out thinking. And liquor was strictly rationed.

  It took a cultivated eye to discover the good points of any of them at the moment, but it was appreciated all the more when it happened.

  vi

  T20 days MAT

  Number two hold, Venture

  It was duty, to walk the holds— inspecting what was at hand, because so much of the mission was elsewhere, under other eyes, on the other ships.

  Conn bestirred himself in the slow days of transit between jumps—surprised the troops and civilians under his authority with inspections; and visited those reeking holds where the azi slept and ate and existed, in stacked berths so close together they formed canyons towering twenty high in places, the topmost under the glare of lights and the direct rush of the ventilating fans and the nethermost existing in the dark of the canyons where the air hardly stirred. All the bunks were filled with bodies, such small spaces that no one could sit upright in them without sitting on the edge and crouching, which some did, perhaps to relieve cramped muscles… but they never stirred out of them except with purpose. The hold stank of too many people, stank of chemicals they used to disinfect and chemicals they used in the lifesupport systems which they had specially rigged to handle the load. The stench included cheap food, and the effluvia of converter systems which labored to cope with the wastes of so large a confined group. The room murmured with the sound of the fans, and of the rumbling of the cylinder round the core, a noise which pervaded all the ship alike; and far, far softer, the occasional murmur of azi voices.

  They talked little, these passengers; they exercised dutifully in the small compartment dedicated to that purpose, just aft of the hold; and dutifully and on schedule they returned to their bunks to let the next scheduled 37

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  group have the open space, their sweating bodies unwashed because the facilities could not cope with so many.

  Cloned-men, male and female. So was one of the specs with the mission, lab-born; and that was no shame, simply a way of being born. Tape-taught, and that was no shame either; so was everyone. The deep-teach machines were state of the art in education. They poured the whole of the universe in over chemically lowered thresholds, while the mind sorted out what it was capable of keeping, without exterior distractions or the limitations of sight or hearing.

  But the worker tapes were something else. Worker tapes created the like of these, row on row of expressionless faces staring at the bottom of the bunk above them day after day— male and female, bunked side by side without difficulty, because they presently lacked desires. They regarded their bodies as valuable and undivertible from their purpose, the printout said regarding them. They would receive more information in transit— the PA blared with silken tones, describing the world they were going to. And there were tapes to give them when they had landed— tapes for all of them, for that matter. Tapes for generations to come.

  He walked through— into the exercise area, unnoticed, where hundreds of azi worked in silence. Their exercise periods, in which crew or troops might have laughed and talked or worked in the group rhythms that pulled a military unit's separate minds into one— were utterly narcissistic, a silent, set routine of difficult stretchings and manipulations and calisthenics, with fixed and distant stares or pensive looks. No talk. No notice of an inspecting presence.

  "You," he said to one taller and handsomer than the average of these tall, handsome people, and the azi stopped in his bending and straightened, an immediate, flowerlike focussing of attention. "How are you getting along?"

  "Very well, sir." The azi breathed hard from his exertions. "Thank you."

  "Name?"

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  Forty Thousand in Gehenna

  "Jin, sir; 458-9998."

  "Anything needed?"

  "No, sir." The dark eyes were bright and interested, a transformation.

  "Thank you."

  "You feel good, Jin?"

  "Very good, sir, thank you."

  He walked back the way he had come— looked back, but the azi had resumed his exercises. They were like that. Azi had always made him uncomfortable, possibly because they were not unhappy. It said something he had no wish to hear. Erasable minds… the azi; if anything upset them, the tapes could take it away again.

  And there were times he would have found it good to have peace like that.

  He passed through the hold again, unnoticed. They were undeniably a group, the azi, like the rest of the mission topside. They maintained themselves as devotedly as they would maintain anything set in their care, and their eyes were set on a rarely disturbed infinity, like waking sleep.

  He had no idea, much as he had studied them, what thoughts passed in their heads at such times— or if there were any thoughts at all.

  And he went topside again, into the silence that surrounded him in this long waiting, because Ada Beaumont and Pete Gallin handled the details.

  He studied the printouts, and dispatched occasional messages to the appropriate heads of departments. There were his pictures, set on his desk; and there were memoirs he was writing— it seemed the time for such things. But the memoirs began with the voyage… and left out things that the government would not want remembered. Like most of his life.

  Classified. Erasable by government order. He put it on tape, and much of it was lies, why they came and what they hoped.

  Mostly he waited, like the azi.

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  Forty Thousand in Gehenna

  vii

  T20 days MAT

  Gutierrez, from a series of free lectures in lounge 2

  "…there's as varied an ecology where we're going as on Cyteen…

  somewhat more so, in respect to the vertical range of development; somewhat less, since you don't have the range of phyla— of types of life.

  Plants… that's algae, grasses, native fruits, pretty much like Cyteen, all the way up to some pretty spectacular trees—" (pause for slide series) "I'll repeat those in closer detail later, or run them as often as you like. This is all stuff that came from the survey team. But the thing you'll have heard about already, that's the calibans, the moundbuilders. They're pretty spectacular: the world's distinct and crowning achievement, as it were.

  The first thing I want to
make clear is that we're not talking about an intelligence. The bias was in the other direction when the Mercury survey team landed. They looked at the ridges from orbit and thought they were something like cities. They went down there real carefully, I can tell you, after all the orbiting observations." (slide) "Now let me get you scale on this." (slide) "You can see the earthen ridge is about four times the man's height. You always find these things on riverbanks and seacoasts, on the two of the seven continents that lie in the temperate zone— and this one's going to neighbor our own site. The moundbuilders happen to pick all the really good sites. In fact you could just about pick out the sites that are prime for human development by looking for mounds." (slide) "And this is one of the builders. Caliban is a character in a play: he was big and ugly.

  That's what the probe crew called him. Dinosaur's what you think, isn't it?

  Big, gray dinosaur. He's about four to five meters long, counting tail—warmblooded, slithers on his belly. Lizard type. But trying to pin old names on new worlds is a pretty hard game. The geologists always have a better time of it than the biologists. They deny it, but it's true. Look at that skull shape there, that big bulge over the eyes. Now that brain is pretty large, about three times the size of yours and mine. And its convolutions aren't at all like yours and mine. It's got a place in the occipital region, the back, that's like a hard gray handball, and pitted like an old ship's hull; and then three lobes come off that, two on a side and one on top, shaped like human lungs, and having a common stem and interconnecting stems at several other places along their length. They're frilled, those lobes— make 40

  Forty Thousand in Gehenna

  you think of pink feathers; and then there's three of those handball-things in the other end of the skull, right up in that place we call the frontal lobes of a human brain, but not quite as big as the organ behind. Now that's the brain of this citizen of the new world. And if it didn't connect onto a spinal cord and have branches, and if microscopy didn't show structure that could answer to neurons, we'd have wondered. It's a very big brain. We haven't mapped it enough to know what the correspondences are. But all it does with that big brain is build ridges. Yes, they dissected one… after they established the behavior as instinct-patterned. You do that to a certain extent by frustrating an animal from a goal; and you watch how it goes about the problem. And if the answer is wired into the brain, if it's instinct and not rationality, it's going to tend to repeat its behavior over and over again. And that's what a caliban does. They're not aggressive. Actually, there's a smaller, prettier version—" (slide) "The little green fellow with all the collar frills is called an ariel. A-r-i-e-l. That's Caliban's elvish friend. Now he's about a meter long at maximum, nose to tail, and he runs in and out of caliban burrows completely unmolested. They're fisheaters, both the calibans and ariels, stomachs full of fish. And they'll nibble fruits.