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ships, but not prevented them. If something were wrong, the ship would hang off in space at one of the jump points and repair it and get underway again, which might take time.
He waited, day by day.
But Bob Davies lay down to sleep one late spring night and took all the pills the meds had given him. It was a full day more before anyone noticed, because Davies lived alone, and all the divisions he usually worked had assumed he was working for someone else, on some other assignment. He had gone to sleep, that was all, quietly, troubling no one.
They buried him next to Beaumont, which was all the note he had left wanted of them. It was Beaumont's death that had killed Davies: that was what people said. But it was the failure of the ship that prompted it, whatever Davies had hoped for— be it just the reminder that Somewhere Else existed in the universe; or that he hoped to leave. Whatever hope it was that kept the man alive— failed him.
James Conn went to the funeral by the sea. When it was done, and the azi were left to throw earth into the grave, he went back to his private dome and poured himself one drink and several more.
A fog rolled in that evening, one of those fogs that could last long, and wrapped all the world in white. Shapes came and went in it, human shapes and sometimes the quiet scurryings of the ariels; and at night, the whisper of movements which might be the heavier tread of calibans— but there were fences to stop them, and most times the fences did.
Conn drank, sitting at the only real desk in Gehenna; and thought of other places: of Jean, and a grassy grave on Cyteen; on the graves by the sea; on friends from the war, who had had no graves at all, when he and Ada Beaumont had had a closeness even he and Jean had never had… for a week, on Fargone; and they had never told Jean and never told Bob, about that week the 12th had lost a third of its troops and they had hunted the resistance out of the tunnels pace by pace. He thought on those days, on forgotten faces, blurred names, and when the dead had gotten to outnumber the living in his thoughts he found himself comfortable and safe. He drank with them, one and all; and before morning he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
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xiv
Year 3, day 189 CR
The grain grew, the heads whitened, and the scythes went back and forth in azi hands, the old way, without machines; and still the ships delayed.
Gutierrez walked the edge of the camp, out near those fields, and surveyed the work. The houses at his right, the azi camp, were many of them of stone now, ramshackle, crazy building; but all the azi built their own shelters in their spare time, and sometimes they found it convenient to build some walls in common… less work for all concerned. If it stood, the engineers and the Council approved it; and that was all there was to it.
He and Kate did something of the like, needing room: they built onto their dome with scrap stone, and it served well enough for an extra room, for them and for small Jane Flanahan-Gutierrez.
Another caliban had come into the meadow. They came, Gutierrez reckoned, when the seasons turned, and whenever the autumn approached they were obsessed with building burrows. If thoughts at all proceeded in those massive brains. He argued with Council, hoping still for his expedition across the river; but it was weeding time; but it was harvest time. Now a caliban was back and he proposed studying it where it was.
And if it undermines the azi quarters, Gallin had objected, head of Council; or if it gets into the crops—
"We have to live here," Gutierrez had argued, and said what no one had said in Council even yet: "So there's not going to be a ship. And how long are we going to sit here blind to the world we live on?"
There was silence after that. He had been rude. He had destroyed the pretenses. There were sullen looks and hard looks, but most had no expression at all, keeping their terror inside, like azi.
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So he went now, alone, before they took the guns and came hunting. He walked past the fields and out across the ridge and down, out of easy hail of the camp, which was against all the rules.
He sat down on the side of the hill with his glasses and watched the moundbuilders for a long time… watched as two calibans used their blunt noses and the strength of their bodies to heave up dirt in a ridge.
About noon, having taken all the notes of that sort he wanted, he ventured somewhat downslope in the direction of the mound.
Suddenly both dived into the recesses of their mound.
He stopped. A huge reptilian head emerged from the vent on the side of the mound. A tongue flicked, and the whole caliban followed, brown, twice the size of the others, with overtones of gold and green.
A new kind. Another species… another gender, there was no knowing.
There was no leisure for answers. All they knew of calibans was potentially overturned and they had no way to learn.
Gutierrez took in his breath and held it. The brown— six, maybe eight meters in length— stared at him a while, and then the other two, the common grays, shouldered past it, coming out also.
That first one walked out toward him, closer, closer until he stared at it in much more detail than he wanted. It loomed nearly twice a man's height.
The knobby collar lifted, flattened again. The other two meanwhile walked toward the river, quietly, deliberately, muddy ghosts through the tall dead grass. They vanished. The one continued to face him for a moment, and then, with a sidelong glance and a quick refixing of a round-pupilled eye to be sure he still stood there… it whipped about and fled with all the haste a caliban could use.
He stood there and stared a moment, his knees shaking, his notebook forgotten in his hand, and then, because there was no other option, he turned around and walked back to the camp.
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That night, as he had expected, Council voted to hunt the Calibans off the bank; and he came with them in the morning, with their guns and their long probes and their picks for tearing the mound apart.
But there was no caliban there. He knew why. That they had learned. That all along they had been learning, and their building on this riverbank was different than anywhere else in the world— here, close to humans, where calibans built walls.
He stood watching, refusing comment when the hunters came to him.
Explanations led to things the hunters would not want to hear, not with the ships less and less likely in their hopes.
"But they didn't catch them," Kate Flanahan said that night, trying to rouse him out of his brooding. "It failed, didn't it?"
"Yes," he said. And nothing more.
xv
Year 3, day 230 CR
"Jin," the elder Jin called; and Pia called with him, tramping the aisles and edges of the camp. Fear was in them… fear of the outside, and the chances of calibans. "Have you seen our son?" they asked one and another azi they met. "No," the answer was, and Pia fell behind in the searching as Jin's strides grew longer and longer, because Pia's belly was heavy with another child.
The sun sank lower in the sky, and they had gone much of the circuit of the camp, out where the electric fence was. That riverward direction was young Jin's fascination, the obsession of more than one of the rowdy children in the camp.
"By the north of the camp," an azi told him finally, when he was out of breath and nearly panicked. "There was some small boy playing there."
Jin went that way, jogging in his haste.
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So he found his son, where the walls stopped and the land began to slope toward the watermeadow. White slabs of limestone were the last wall there, the place they had once stacked the building stone. And little Jin sat in the dirt taking leftover bits of stone and piling them. An ariel assisted, added pebbles to the lot— turned its head and puffed up its collar at so sudden an approach.
"Jin," Jin senior said. "Look at the su
n. You know what I told you about wandering off close to dark. You know Pia and I have been hunting for you."
Little Jin lifted a face which was neither his nor Pia's and looked at him through a mop of black hair.
"You were wrong," Jin said, hoping that his son would feel shame. "We thought a caliban could have gotten you."
His son said nothing, made no move, like the ariel.
Pia arrived, out of breath, around the white corner of the last azi house.
She stopped with her hands to her belly, cradling it, her eyes distraught.
"He's all right," Jin said. "He's safe."
"Come on," Pia said, shaken still. "Jin, you get up right now and come."
Not a move. Nothing but the stare.
Jin elder ran a hand through his hair, baffled and distressed. "They ought to give us tapes," he said faintly. "Pia, he wouldn't be like this if the tape machines worked."
But the machines were gone. Broken, the supervisors said, except one, that the born-men used for themselves.
"I don't know," Pia said. "I don't know what's right and wrong with him.
I've asked the supervisors and they say he has to do these things."
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Jin shook his head. His son frightened him. Violence frightened him. Pick him up and spank him, the supervisors said. He had hit his son once, and the tears and the noise and the upset shattered his nerves. He himself had never cried, not like that.
"Please come," he said to his son. "It's getting dark. We want to go home."
Little Jin carefully picked up more stones and added them to his pattern, the completion of a whorl. The ariel waddled over and moved one into a truer line. It was all loops and whorls, like the ruined mounds that came back year by year in the meadow.
"Come here." Pia came and took her son by the arms and pulled him up, scattering the patterns. Little Jin kicked and screamed and tried to go on sitting, which looked apt to hurt Pia. Jin elder came and picked his son up bodily under one arm, nerving himself against his screams and his yells, impervious to his kicking as they carried him in shame back to the road and the camp.
While their son was small they could do this. But he was growing, and the day would come they could not.
Jin thought about it, late, lying with Pia and cherishing the silence… how things had gone astray from what the tapes had promised, before the machines had broken. The greatest and wisest of the born-men were buried over by the sea, along with azi who had met accidents; the ships were no longer coming. He wished forlornly to lie under the deepteach and have the soothing voice of the tapes tell him that he had done well.
He doubted now. He was no longer sure of things. His son, whom sometimes they loved, who came to them and hugged them and made them feel as if the world was right again, had contrary thoughts, and strayed, and somehow an azi was supposed to have the wisdom to control this born-man child. Sometimes he was afraid— of his son; of the unborn one in Pia's belly.
When the ship comes, the azi used to say.
But they stopped saying that. And nothing was right since.
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IV
THE SECOND GENERATION
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Military Personnel:
Col. James A. Conn, governor general, d. 3 CR
Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, It. governor, d. year of founding Maj. Peter T. Gallin, personnel
M/Sgt. Ilya V. Burdette, Corps of Engineers
Cpl. Antonia M. Cole
Spec. Martin H. Andresson
Spec. Emilie Kontrin
Spec. Danton X. Norris
M/Sgt. Danielle L. Emberton, tactical op.
Spec. Lewiston W. Rogers
Spec. Hamil N. Masu
Spec. Grigori R. Tamilin
M/Sgt. Pavlos D. M. Bilas, maintenance
Spec. Dorothy T. Kyle
Spec. Egan I. Innis
Spec. Lucas M. White
Spec. Eron 678-4578 Miles
Spec. Upton R. Patrick
Spec. Gene T. Troyes
Spec. Tyler W. Hammett
Spec. Kelley N. Matsuo
Spec. Belle M. Rider
Spec. Vela K. James
Spec. Matthew R. Mayes
Spec. Adrian C. Potts
Spec. Vasily C. Orlov
Spec. Rinata W. Quarry
Spec. Kito A. M. Kabir
Spec. Sita Chandrus
M/Sgt. Dinah L. Sigury, communications
Spec. Yung Kim
Spec. Lee P. de Win
M/Sgt. Thomas W. Oliver, quartermaster
Cpl. Nina N. Ferry
Pfc. Hayes Brandon
Lt. Romy T. Jones, special forces
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Sgt. Jan Vandermeer
Spec. Kathryn S. Flanahan
Spec. Charles M. Ogden
M/Sgt. Zell T. Parham, security
Cpl. Quintan R. Witten
Capt. Jessica N. Sedgewick, Confessor-advocate Capt. Bethan M. Dean, surgeon
Capt. Robert T. Hamil, surgeon
Lt. Regan T. Chiles, computer services
Civilian Personnel:
Secretarial personnel: 12
Medical/surgical: 1
Medical/paramedic: 7
Mechanical maintenance: 20
Distribution and warehousing:20
Robert H. Davies d. CR 3
Security: 12
Computer service: 4
Computer maintenance: 2
Librarian: 1
Agricultural specialists: 10
Harold B. Hill
Geologists: 5
Meteorologist: 1
Biologists: 6
Marco X. Gutierrez
Eva K. Jenks
Jane E. Flanahan-Gutierrez b. 2 CR
Education: 5
Cartographer: 1
Management supervisors: 4
Biocycle engineers: 4
Construction personnel: 50
Food preparation specialists: 6
Industrial specialists: 15
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Mining engineers: 2
Energy systems supervisors: 8
ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL:
"A" class: 2890
Jin 458-9998
Pia 86-687
Jin Younger b. year of founding
Mark b. 3 CR
Zed b. 4 CR
Tam b. 5 CR
Pia Younger b. 6 CR
Green b. 9 CR
"B" class: 12389
"M" class: 4566
Ben b. 2 CR
Alf b. 3 CR
Nine b. 4 CR
"P" class: 20788
"V" class: 1278
i
Year 22, day 192 CR
It was a long walk, a lonely walk, among the strange hills the calibans raised— but her brothers were there, and Pia Younger kept going, out of breath by now, her adolescent limbs aching with the running. She always ran on this stretch of the trail, where the mounds and ridges were oldest and overgrown with brush. She never admitted it to her brothers, but it disturbed her to cross this territory. Here. With them.
Ahead were the limestone heights where the old quarry was; the elders had built the town with limestone, but they took no more stone there nowadays except what they could bribe her brothers to bring down. Afraid, that was it; elders were afraid to cross the territory of the calibans. Youngers had this place, the deep pit where they had done blasting in the old days, and they owned the pile of loose stone that they loaded up and brought back when they wanted to trade. A lot of the youngers in the azi town came 110
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here, her brothers more than most, but the elders never would; and the main-Camp elders, they huddled in their domes and defended themselves with el
ectric lights and electric wires.
She caught a stitch in her side and slowed to a limp when she reached the old trail, which had been a road once upon a time, a rain-washed road paved with limestone chips and overgrown with small brush and weeds and fallen away so that in some places it was wide enough for one walker only. She looked back when she made the turn— it was that kind of view that the eye had to go to, that sprawling perspective out over all the world, the lazy S of the Styx and the mounds of the Calibans like wrinkled cloth strewn on both sides of it, some under the carpet of trees and some new and naked; and caliban domes that mimicked the domes of the main Camp.
Calibans had never made domes, her father said, until they saw the domes of main Camp; but they made them now, and larger and grander, raising great bald hills on this side and that of the Styx. Beyond them were the solid hills, the natural hills; and then the fields all checkered green and brown; and the rusting knot of giant machines— and the tower, and the big shining tower that caught the sun and fed power to the little cluster of domes before the graveyard and the sea. All of that, in one blunt sweep of the eye, the whole world: and this height owned it all. That was why her brothers came here, to look down on all of it; but she was sixteen— not yet, her brothers said to her. Not yet for you.
What her parents said to her coming here— but they did everything the Council said; and saying no was part of it.
She began to run again, uphill, pushing past the brush, careless now because there was nothing but snakes to worry about up here in the day; and calibans ate snakes, and noise frightened both, so she made all the noise she could.
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