A whistle caught her ear, above her on the rim; she looked up, at a head that appeared over the rim of the cliffs, head and shoulders, black hair blowing on the wind. Her brother Zed. "I've got to come up," she called.
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"Come on up, then," he called back. One had to be Permitted to come up to the heights; and she dusted her hands on her coveralls and came up the last few turns… stopped on that bald crest of stone slabs and scant brush and sat down panting for breath on the lefthand slab of the two that served them for a gate, there by a bitterberry. All her elder brothers were up here.
And Jane Flanahan-Gutierrez. Her eyes caught that with shock and jealousy. Jane Flanahan-Gutierrez from the main Camp, of the dark skin and the curling black hair… there with all the boys; and she knew at once what they had been doing up here— it was in her brothers' eyes, like summer evening heat. They looked older, suddenly, like strangers. Jane looked that way too, disheveled clothes, her coveralls unzipped to here, staring at her as if she had been dirt. Her four older brothers, Jin and Mark and Zed and Tam; and the boys from down the row in town, Ben and Alf and Nine. They fronted her like a wall, her brothers the dark part of it and the Ben/Alf/Nine set all red and blond. And Jane Flanahan-Gutierrez.
"You let her up here," Ben said to Zed. "Why let her up here?"
"I know what you're doing," Pia said. Her face felt red. She was still gasping for breath after the climb; she caught a mouthful of air. Jane Flanahan-Gutierrez sat down on another rock, her hands on either side of her, flaunting sex and satiation. "You think," Pia gasped, "you think it's anything? Jin, our father sent me. To find you all. Green's run off again.
They want you back to help."
Her brothers settled, one by one, all but her brother Jin, who was eldest; who stood there with his face clouded and his hands caught in his belt.
Green: that was the sixth of them. Youngest brother.
"That boy's gone," Ben said, with the disgust everyone used about Green; but: "Quiet," Jin Younger said, in that tone that meant business, that could frighten elders into listening to whatever Jin wanted to say. "How long?"
"Maybe since morning," Pia said hoarsely. "They thought he was off with some boys. He ran off from them. They didn't send anyone back to tell.
Pia's looking in the Camp; but Jin's out in the hills. Hunting this way. He asked us, Jin; our father asked us. He's really scared."
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"It's going to get dark."
"Our father's out there, all the same. And he doesn't know anything. He could fall in a burrow, he could. But I don't think he'll quit."
"For Green."
"Jin—" She talked only to Jin, because he made up the minds of the rest.
"He asked."
"We'd better go," Jin said then; so that was it: the others ducked their heads and nodded.
"What do we do with that brother of yours," Ben asked, assuming they were going too, "if we find him?"
"Hey," Jane said, "hey, I have to get back to the Camp. You said you'd walk me back to the Camp."
" I'll walk you back," Pia said with a narrow look. "That trail down's really bad. A careless body might slip."
"You'd better watch who you talk to," Jane said.
" Azi. That what you reckon, maincamper? Think I'm scared' You watch yourself."
"Shut up," Jin said.
"One of you," said Jane, "has to get me back. I can't wait around while you track that brother of yours down— I know; I know all about him."
"We'll be back. Just wait."
"He's gone, don't you think that? When they go, they go."
Pia gathered herself up again without a word, started off down the road without a backward look, not inside; and before she had gotten to the first 113
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downslope there was a skittering of pebbles and a following in her wake: the whole troop of her brothers was gathered about her, and the down-the-row boys too.
"Wait!" Jane shouted after the lot of them. "Don't you go off and leave me up here." And that was satisfaction. They would get her down— later.
When they had seen to Green again. A stream of words followed them, words they swore by in the main Camp in the longest string Pia had ever heard. Pia marched down the winding track without looking back. hands in her pockets.
"That Green," Ben muttered. "Going to do what he likes, that's what.
Going to get to what he wants sooner or later."
"Quiet," Jin Younger said, and Ben kept it to himself after that, all the long way down.
It was better going back. In company. Pia began to pant with exhaustion—her tall brothers had long legs and they were fresh on the track, but she kept going, with the stitch back in her side, not wanting to admit her tiredness. Green— as for Green, Ben might be right. She had five brothers and the last was wild; was thirteen, and wandered in the hills.
And those who did that— they went on wandering; or whatever they did, who gave up humankind.
It was the third time… that Green had gone.
"This time," Pia said out of her thoughts, between gasps for air, "this time I think we have to get him, us. Because I don't think our father can find him fast enough."
"This time—" Jin Younger said, walking beside her, themselves out of hearing of the others if he kept his voice low, "this time I think it's like Ben said."
He admitted that to her. Not to the others. And it was probably true.
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But they kept going all the same, down into the woods the Calibans had grown, among the mounds and the brush in the late afternoon. "Where's Jin hunting?" Jin Younger asked.
Pia pointed, the direction of the Camp. "From Camp looking toward the river. That's what he thought— the river."
"Probably right," Jin Younger said. "Probably right for sure." He squatted down, cleared ground with the edge of his hand, took a stick and scratched signs as the others gathered. "I think Mark and I had better find our father: that's furthest. And Zed and Tam, you go the middle way; Ben, you and Alf go with them and split off where you have to go up to cover the ground; and Nine, you and Pia go direct by the river way. Pia's got most chance of talking to Green: I want her there where he's most likely to go.
We draw a circle around him and sweep up our father too, before some caliban gets him."
That was Jin Younger: that was her brother, whose mind worked like that, cool and quick. Pia got up from looking at the pattern and grabbed Nine's hand— Nine was eighteen, like Zed; and red and gold and freckled all over. They all moved light and quick, and in spite of the prospect in front of them. Pia went with a kind of relief, that she was doing something, that she was not her mother, searching the town because she had to do something, even a hopeless thing, lame as Pia elder was, worn out from Green, aching tired from Green—
Lose him this time, Pia thought, in her heart of hearts. Let him go this time to be done with it; and no more of that look her parents had, no more of doing everything for Green.
But if they lost him, they had to have tried. It was like that, because he was born under their roof, stranger that he was.
They took the winding course through the brush-grown mounds, she and Nine, hand in hand, hurried past the gaping darknesses under stones, that were caliban doorways— sometimes saucer-big eyes watched them, or tongues flicked, from caliban mouths mostly hid in shadow and in brush.
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And the way began to be bare and slithery with mud, and tracked with clawed pads of caliban feet, which was a climbway calibans used from the Styx or a brook that fed it. Ariels scurried from their track, whipping their tails in busy haste; and flitters dived in manic profusion from the trees—some into ariel mouths. Pia brushed the flitters off, a frantic slapping at the back of her neck, protecting her collar, and they jogged along singlefil
e now, slid the last bit down to the flat, well-trampled riverside, where calibans had flattened tracks in the reeds of the bogs, and clouds of insects swarmed and darted.
Desolation. No human track disturbed the mud flats.
"We just wait," Pia said. "He can't have gotten past us unless he went all the way around the heights on the east." She squatted down by the edge of the water and dipped up a double handful, poured it over her head and neck, and Nine did the same.
"Why don't we take a rest?" Nine suggested, and pointed off toward the reeds.
"I think we ought to walk on down the way toward the rocks."
"Waste of time."
"Then you go back."
"I think we could do something better."
She looked suddenly and narrowly at him. He had that look they had had up there, with Jane. "I think you better forget that."
He made a grab at her; she slapped his hand and he jerked it back.
"Go after that Jane," she said, "why don't you?"
"What wrong with you? Afraid?"
"You go find Jane."
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"I like you."
"You've got no sense." He scared her; her heart was pounding. "Jane and all of you, that's all nice, isn't it? But I say no, and you'd better believe no."
He was bigger than she, by about a third. But there were other things to think of, and one was living next to each other in town; and one was that she always got even. People knew that of Pia Younger; it was important to have people believe that, and she saw to it.
And finally he made a great show of sulking and dusting his hands off.
"I'm going back," he said. "I don't stay out here for nothing."
"Sure, you go back," she said.
"You're cold," he said. "I'll tell how you are."
"You tell whatever you like; and when you do, I'll tell plenty too. You make me sound bad, you make my brothers sound the same. We figure like that. You're three and we're six. You make up your mind."
"You're five now," he said, and stalked off.
Afterward she found her hands sweating, not sure whether it was because of the sun or her temper or the thought that she could have had Nine, who was not bad for a first; but he was ugly inside, if not out. And lacking that reason, she thought of her mother, and how she had been young before Green started growing up. She thought about babies and the grief her mother had had of them, and that dried the sweat all at once.
So they might be five now. Green might be gone. And that might cure them of all their troubles at once, if only they could prove they had searched; if they could get Green out of Jin and Pia's minds.
They went out to get their mother and father back for their own: that was why they went. That was why she had known that her brother Jin would come.
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And if Nine had run back to his brothers, Pia still meant to stay where her brother said; to watch the bank. The rocks offered the most likely vantage, where the cliffs tumbled down to the Styx, where calibans sunned themselves and where anyone headed upriver had to go.
She had no fear of her brother Green. It was the others of his sort she had no desire to meet; and she wanted somewhere to watch unseen.
ii
The sun was halfway down the sky, and Jin elder moved with a sense of desperation, his breath short and shallow, his senses alive with dread on all sides. The wooded mounds surrounded him, offered dark accesses out of which calibans could come. Young ones challenged him, man-sized, athwart his path, and he scrambled aside on the hill and kept going.
He might call aloud, but Green would never answer to his name, hardly spoke at all, and so he did not waste the breath. It was a question of overtaking his son, of finding him in this maze when he had no wish to be found. It was impossible, and he knew that. But Green was his, and whatever Green was, however strange, he tried, as his wife tried, in the town, already knowing her son was gone— searching among the thousands of houses, asking faces that would go blank to the question—
"Have you seen our son? Have your children heard from him? Is there anyone who knows?"— They would shut the doors on her as they would on the night or on a storm, not to have the trouble inside with them, whose houses were secure. Pia had no hope; and he had none, except in his rebel children, his other sons and his daughter, who might possibly know where to look, who ran wild out here— but not as wild as Green.
He slowed finally, out of breath, walked dizzily among the mounds. Now the sun was behind them, making pockets of dark. A body moved, slithered amid the thick brush, among the trees which had grown here, this side of the river. The sight was surreal. He recalled bare meadow, and gentle grass, and the first beginnings of a mound; and caliban skulls piled behind main dome. But all that was changed; and a forest grew, all scrub and saplings. Fairy flitters came down on his shoulder, clung to his clothing, making him think of bats; he beat them off and recalled that they 118
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were lives— which touched a faint, far chord in him, of guilt and of dread.
The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.
A heavy body thrust itself from a hole— a caliban flicked its tongue at him; an ariel scurried over its immobile back and fled into the dark inside.
He started aside, ran, slowed again with a pain in his side… sat down at last, against the side of a mound, by one of the rounded hills, the domes the Calibans made.
And leapt up again, spying a white movement among the saplings on the ridge. "Green," he called.
It was not Green. A strange boy was staring down at him, squatting naked atop the ridge— thin, starved limbs and tangled hair, improbable sight in the woods. It was the image of his fears.
"Come down," he asked the boy. "Come down—" Ever so softly. Never startle them; never force— It was all his hope, that boy.
And the boy sprang up and ran, down the angle of the hill among the brush; Jin ran too— and saw the boy dive into the dark of a caliban access, vanishing like nightmare, confirming all that he had dreaded to know, how they lived, what they were, the town's lost children.
"Green," he called, thinking that there might be others, that his son might hear, or someone hear, and tell Green that he was called. But no answer came; and what the mound had taken in, it kept. He moved closer, climbed the slope with all his nerves taut-strung. He went as far as the hole and put his head inside. There was the smell of earth and damp; and far away, down some narrow tunnel, he heard something move. "Green," he shouted. The earth swallowed up his voice.
He crouched there a moment, arms flung across his knees, despair thicker about him than before. His children had all gone amiss, every one; and Green, the different one, was stranger than all the strange children he had sired. Green's eyes were distant and his mind was unknowable, as if all the 119
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unpleasantness of the world had seeped into Pia while she carried him, and infected his soul. Green was misnamed. He was that other face of spring, the mistbound nights when Calibans prowled and broke the fences; he was secret things and dark. He had lost himself, over and over again; had shocked himself on the fences, sunk himself in bogs— had lost himself into the hills, and played with ariels and stones, forgetting other children.
Jin wept. That was his answer now that he was like born-men and on his own. He mourned without confidence that there would be comfort— no tapes, now; nothing to relieve the pain. He had to face Pia, alone; and that he was not ready to do. He pictured himself coming home with daylight left, giving up, when Pia would not. When he failed her, she would come out into the hills herself: she was like that, even frail as she grew in these years. Pia, to lose a son, after all the pain—
He got up, abandoning hope of this place, kept walking, brushing the weeds as
ide in the trough between the mounds, going deeper and deeper into the heart of the place. All the way to the river— that was how far he must go, however afraid he was, all along this most direct track from the village to the river, as close as he could hew to it.
Brush stirred above him on a ridge: he looked up, expecting calibans, hoping for his son—
And found two, Jin and Mark, standing on the wooded ridge above him, mirrors of each other, leaning on either side of a smallish tree.
"Father," Jin Younger said— all smug, as if he were amused. And hostile: there was that edge always in his voice. Jin 458 faced his son in confused pain, never knowing why his children took this pose with him. "A little far afield for you, isn't it, father?"
"Green is lost. Did your sister find you?"
"She found us. We're all out looking."
Jin elder let the breath go out of him, felt his knees weak, the burden of the loss at least spread wider than before. "What chance that we can find him out here?"
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"What chance that he wants to be found?" Mark asked, second-born, his brother's shadow. "That's the real matter, isn't it?"
"Pia—" He gestured vaguely back toward the camp. "I told her I could go faster, look further— that you'd help; but she'll try to come— and she can't. She can't do that anymore."
"Tell me," Jin Younger said, "would you have come for any of us? Or is it just Green?"
"When you were four and five— I did, for you."
Jin Younger straightened back as if he had not expected that. He scowled.
"Sister's gone on down by the river," he said. "If we don't take Green between us, there's no catching him."
"Where's Zed and Tam?"
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