Forty Thousand in Gehenna

by C. J. Cherryh

  Forty thousand azi. Thousands upon thousands of tents in blocks of ten.

  He came to 901 and 903 and 905, at last at 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."

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  "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.

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  "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.

  v

  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. Norris, 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, 73

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  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."

  "I think we could justify bothering this one," Gutierrez said, without joy in the prospect.

  "It's not guaranteed to be as deep a burrow as they can get," Jenks said.

  "After all, it's new. I don't think it would mean anything much if you dug into it. And the other mounds are all in protectorate."

  "Well, the bio department made the protectorate," Norris said.

  "The bio department won't budge on that," Gutierrez said. "Sorry."

  A silence. "Then what we have to do," said Ogden, "is put it back across the river."

  "Look," Norris said, "we could just put one of the building barriers up against it and if it tunnels under, then we'll know, won't we? A test. It's on 74

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  the riverside. It won't be digging below the watertable, not without getting wet."

  "They're gilled, aren't they?"

  "They may be gilled, but I don't think any tunnels would hold up." Norris squinted into the morning sun and considered a moment. "By the amount of dirt and the dryness of it— What's the function of the mounds? You figure that out?"

  "I think," Gutierrez said, "it rather likely has something to do with the eggs. They do lay eggs. Probably an elaborate ventilation system, like some of the colony insects; or an incubation device, using the sun. I think when we get to examining the whole system, the orientation might have to do with the prevailing winds."

  "Let's have a look," said Jenks.

  "All right." Gutierrez stood up, brushed off his trousers and waited on Norris and Ogden, walked down the face of the last hill the earthmovers had stripped. They headed toward the mound, down across the grassy interval.

  As they reached the trough, a stone's cast from the mound of disturbed grass and dark earth, a darkish movement topped the crest of the mound and whipped up into full view, three meters long and muddy gray.

  Everyone stopped. It was a simultaneous reaction. The safety went off Ogden's rifle.

  "Don't shoot," Gutierrez said. "Don't even think of shooting. Just stand still
. We don't know what their eyesight is like. Just stand still and let it think; it's likely to be curious as the ariels."

  "Ugly bastard," Norris said. There was no dispute about that. The ariels prepared them for beauty, moved lively and lightly, fluttering their collar fronds and preening like birds. But the caliban squatted heavily on its ridge and swelled its throat, puffing out a knobbed and plated black collar, all one dull gray and smeared with black mud.

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  "That's a little aggression," Jenks said. "Threat display. But it's not making any move on us."

  "Lord," Ogden said, "if those start waddling through the base they're going to need room, aren't they?"

  "It eats fish," Gutierrez reminded them. "It's more interested in the river than in anything else."

  "He means," Jenks said, "that if you stand between that fellow and the river you're a lot more likely to get run down by accident. It might run for its mound access; or for the river. If it runs."

  "Stay put," Gutierrez said, and took a cautious step forward.

  "Sir," Ogden said, "we're not supposed to lose you."

  "Well, I don't plan to get lost. Just stay put. You too, Eva." He started forward, moving carefully, watching all the small reactions, the timing of the raising and lowering of the knobbed collar, the breathing that swelled and diminished its pebbly sides. The jaws had teeth. A lot of them. He knew that. A thick black serpent of a tongue flicked out and retreated, flicked again. That was investigation. Gutierrez stopped and let it smell the air.

  The caliban sat a moment more. Turned its head with reptilian deliberation and regarded him with one vertically slit jade eye the size of a saucer. The collar lifted and lowered. Gutierrez took another step and another, right to the base of the mound now, which rose up three times his height.

  Of a sudden the caliban stood up, lashed its tail and dislodged clods of earth as it stiffened its four bowed legs and got its belly off the ground. It dipped its head to keep him in view, a sidelong view of that same golden, vertical-slitted eye.

  That was close enough, then. Gutierrez felt backward for a step, began a careful retreat, pace by pace.

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  The caliban came down toward him the same way, one planting of a thick-clawed foot and a similar planting of the opposing hind foot, one two three four, that covered an amazing amount of ground too quickly. "Don't shoot," he heard Eva Jenks' voice, and was not sure at the moment that he agreed. He stopped, afraid to run. The caliban stopped likewise and looked at him a body length distant.

  "Get out of there," Jenks yelled at him.

  The tongue went out and the head lifted in Jenks' direction. It was over knee high when it was squatting and waist high when it stood up; and it could move much faster than anticipated. The tail moved restlessly, and Gutierrez took that into account too, because it was a weapon that could snap a human spine if the caliban traded ends.

  The collar went flat again, the head dipped and then angled the same slitted eye toward him. It leaned forward slowly, turning the head to regard his foot; and that leaning began to lessen the distance between them.

  "Move!" Jenks shouted.

  The tongue darted out, thick as his wrist, and flicked lightly about his booted, dusty foot; the caliban retracted it, serpentined aside with a scraping of sod, regarded him again with a chill amber eye. The tail swept close and whipped back short of hitting him. Then in remote grandeur the caliban waddled back and climbed its mound. Gutierrez finally felt the pounding of his own heart. He turned and walked back to his own party, but Jenks was already running toward him and Ogden was close behind, with Norris following.

  Gutierrez looked at Jenks in embarrassment, thinking first that he had done something stupid and secondly that the caliban had not done what they expected: it had not gone through the several days of flight-and-approach the probe team reported.

  "So much for the book," he said, still shaking. "Might be pushing on the mating season."

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  "Or hunting."

  "I think we'd better try to establish a concrete barrier here, right on that hill back there."

  "Right," Norris said. "And draw the line all around this area."

  Gutierrez looked back at the caliban, which had regained its perch on the mound. When animals violated the rules on a familiar world it indicated a phase of behavior not yet observed: nesting, for instance.

  But curiosity in a species so formidably large—

  "It didn't follow the book," he muttered. "And that makes me wonder about the rest of the script."

  Jenks said nothing. There was a limit to what bio ought to speculate on publicly. He had already said more than he felt politic; but there were people out walking the fields still relying on Mercury probe's advice.

  "I'd just suggest everyone be a bit more careful," he said.

  He walked back up the hill with the others following. The first front had sprinkled them with rain, quickly dried. There was weather moving in again that looked more serious— on the gray sea, out among the few islands which lay off the coast, a bank of cloud. There was that matter to factor in with the environment.

  Might the weather make a difference in caliban moods?

  And as for construction, if the weather turned in earnest—

  "The foam's not going to set too easy if we get that rain," he said. "Neither will concrete. I think we may have to wait… but we'd better get to the maps, and figure where we're going to set that concrete barrier."

  "Two criteria," the engineer said. "Protection from flood and our own access to areas we need."

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  "One more," Jenks said. "The calibans. Where they decide to go."

  "We can't be warping all our plans around those lizards," Norris said.

  "What I'd like to do instead, by your leave— is put a charged fence out here and see if we can't make it unpleasant enough it'll want to leave."

  Gutierrez considered the matter, nodded after a moment. "You can try it.

  Nothing that's going to disturb the colony across the river. But if we can encourage this fellow to swim back to his side, I'd say it might be better for him and for us."

  Gutierrez looked at the clouds, and over his shoulder at the mounds, still trying to fit the behavior into patterns.

  vi

  Day 58 CR

  The fog retreated in a general grayness of the heavens, and the wind blew cold at the window, snapping at the plastic. The heat seemed hardly adequate. Conn sat wrapped in his blanket and thinking that it might be more pleasant, privacy notwithstanding, to move into the main dome with the others. Or he could complain. Maybe someone could do something with the heater. With all that expertise out there, gathered to build a world— surely someone could do something with the space heater.

  Two weeks of this kind of thing, with the waves beating at the shore and driving up the river from a monster storm somewhere at sea: water, and water everywhere. The newly cleared fields were bogs and the machinery was sinking, even sitting still. And the chill got into bones and the damp air soaked clothes so that none of them had had warm dry clothing for as long as the fog had lain over them. Clothes stank of warmth and mildew.

  Azi lines huddled in the drizzle and collected their food at distribution points and went back again into the soggy isolation of the tents. How they fared there Conn had no true idea, but if they had been suffering worse than the rest of the camp, then Education would have notified the staff at large.

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  A patter began at the window, a spatter of drops carried by a gust. When the wind blew the fog out they had rain and when the wind stopped the fog settled in. He listened to the malevolent spat of wind-driven water, watched a thin trickle start from the corner that leaked; but he had moved the chest from beneath it, and put his laundry on the flo
or to soak up the leak that pooled on the foamset floor. There was no sound but that for a while, the wind and the beat of the drops; and solitude, in the thin, gray daylight that came through the rain-spattered plastic.

  It was too much. He got up and put his coat on, waited for a lull in the rain and opened the door and splashed his way around to the front door of the main dome onto which his smaller one abutted, a drenching, squelching passage through puddles on what had been a pebbled walk.

  He met warmth inside, electric light and cheerfulness, the heat of the electronics and the lights which were always on here; and the bodies and the conversation and the business. "Tea, sir?" an azi asked, on duty to serve and clean in the dome; "Yes," he murmured, sat down at the long table that was the center of all society and a great deal of the work in the staff dome. Maps cluttered its far end; the engineers were in conference, a tight cluster of heads and worried looks.

  The tea arrived, and Conn took it, blinked absently at the azi and muttered a Thanks, that's all, which took the azi out of his way and out of his thoughts. A lizard scuttled near the wall that separated off the com room: that was Ruffles. Ruffles went anywhere she/he liked, a meter long and prone to curl around the table legs or to lurk under the feet of anyone sitting still, probably because she had been spoiled with table tidbits.