Forty Thousand in Gehenna

by C. J. Cherryh

  They stopped finally. He thought perhaps that they had gotten to some place which satisfied them, and that they might go away and let him lie, which was all he wanted, but they stayed: he heard their panting breaths close by, and the small movements they made. He heard the skittering of ariels and the slither of one of the calibans in the vast silence. Perhaps, he thought, they meant him some harm when they had rested. Maybe they were renegades or crazier than the rest, with a notion to have privacy for their sport. He meant to fight them if it got to that, make them stick him again, because that brought him numbness.

  One moved, and the others did, fingering him with their blind touches; he struck once, but they got his arms and legs and simply picked him up again, having had their rest. He knew what they could do, and had no desire for the needle under those terms, and even made feeble attempts to cooperate when they had come to a low place, so that finally it seemed to get through to them that he would go with them on his own. More and more they let him carry himself for brief periods, taking him up when he would stumble, when his exhaustion was too extreme.

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  And then there was a confusion in the dark, a meeting, he thought, and a different smell about those they met. He was pushed forward, let go, taken again, and after that snatched up again, so that he knew he was in different hands. Tears leaked from his eyes. The others had understood something, he had gotten something through to the others to better his condition, and they changed the game again— snatched him off and hauled him along with more roughness than before. He went limp and let them do what they liked, afraid of needles, afraid of utter helplessness. Such strength as he had left in him, he saved, that being the only canniness he had left.

  They climbed. He gathered his mind from the far corners of its retreat and tried to think again, getting information again— ascent, spirals, dry earth.

  And light. He tried to lift his head from its backward tilt, could not hold it, watched the light grow in his upside down vision, making a hazy silhouette of the man who had his arms.

  An earthen chamber with light coming from a window. A man sitting on the floor, another shadow in his hazed vision.

  They let him down. He lay there a moment, frozen in the silence of them, turned his head to the seated man— one of their own, but old, the oldest man he had ever seen, bald and withered and clothed in a oneshouldered robe that held at least the memory of red. The others squatted in their rags.

  The old man sat and waited.

  It was a time before he gathered his wits at all. He levered himself up on his arm, squinted up at the light as the silhouette of a Weird set a large bowl of water in front of him. He bent and cupped up water to drink and wash the sickness from his mouth, drank again and again and splashed clean water over his face while his hands shook and spilled a lot of it in his lap. He blinked at the old man, having gotten used to insanity and expecting more of it.

  "Speak," the old man said softly.

  A rock might have spoken. The old man sat. A smallish ariel rested in his lap. His fingers played with it, stroking its ruffled fringes.

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  Jin needed a time to consider. He wiped his face yet again, drew his knee up and rested his arm on it because he was not steady even sitting. He looked at the old man very long "Why am I here?" he asked finally, as still, as hushed. But the old man did not answer, as crazed as the rest of them. Or that was not the speech the old man wanted. The silence between them went on, and Jin hugged his knee against him to keep himself from shaking. There was warmth here. It streamed through the window, circulated with the air. Summer went on outside as if it had never stopped.

  "They found me by the river," Jin said then, precisely, carefully, in a voice hardly more than whisper. He recalled the shooting of the caliban and blocked that from his mind, focussing narrowly on the old man in front of him, whose skull was naked of hair, whose thin beard was white and clean. Clean. He never thought to see cleanliness again. He reeked of mud and sweat and excrement; his clothes were caked with filth. "It must have been days ago—" He went on talking, reckoning for the first time that someone was listening to him. "They brought me across the river. I don't know why."

  "Name."

  "Jin."

  The aged head lifted. Watery dark eyes focussed on his for a long and quiet time. "My name is Green."

  The name hit his mind and settled a cold, cold feeling. Family stories.

  They knew each other. He saw that. "Let me go," he said. "Let me out of here."

  "Someday," Green whispered, a rusty sound like something long unused.

  A long silence. "A brown is dead."

  "An accident. No one meant it."

  Green simply stared, then took pebbles from his lap and placed them in a line on the earthen floor. The ariel watched, then scrambled over his knee and onto the hardpacked earth, a flailing of limbs. It stood up on its legs, flicked its collar, studying the matter with one cocked eye. Then it began to move the pebbles, laying them in a heap.

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  "Let me leave," Jin said hoarsely, focussing with difficulty. "It was an accident."

  "Do you understand this Pattern?" Green asked. "No." He answered himself, and gathered up the stones, laid them down again, only to have the ariel move them into a heap It went on and on.

  "What do you want with me?" Jin asked at last. A tremor had started in his arms, exhaustion, and a pain in his gut. "Can't we get it done?"

  "Look at this place," Green said.

  He lifted his eyes and looked around him, the earthen walls, the window, the rammed-earth floor scored with claws far larger than the ariel's. The Weirds crouched in shadow beneath the window.

  Green clapped his hands, twice, echoing in the stillness. And far away, down somewhere in the shadows something stirred. There was a sough of breath, and that something was large.

  Jin froze, his arms locked about his knees. He looked at the window, at sunlight, at a way of escaping or dying.

  "No hurt," Green said softly.

  It came up from below, a whuff of breath, a dry scraping of claws, the thrusting of a blunt, bony-collared head up out of the entry to the room, a head as large as the entry itself. Jin scrambled back until he felt the wall behind him, and more of it kept coming, a brown, but a bigger brown than ever he had seen. Its eyes were green-gold. Its crest was touched with green. It settled on its belly, curling its tail around the curving of the wall beyond Green, reaching from side to side of the room, and the Weirds never stirring from where they sat. The brown craned its neck, turned a fistsized pupil in Jin's direction, came up on its legs and moved closer.

  Jin shut his eyes, felt warm breath and the flickering of its tongue about his face and throat. The tongue withdrew. The head turned again to stare at him with an eye large as a human head. The tongue licked out, thick as his arm.

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  "Be calm," Green whispered. Jin huddled against the wall, beside huge clawed feet. The head swung over him, overshadowing him; and quietly it bent and nudged him with its jaws.

  He cried out; it whipped away, dived down into the dark of the access with a last slithering of its tail. Jin stayed where he was against the wall, shivering.

  "Others died," Green whispering, sitting again where he had sat, calmly placing his stones one after the other. No, the stones said, chilling with hope. Green gathered up the stones again, strewed them one after the other, went on doing this time after time while the ariel crouched near and watched, while the rougher, ragged Weirds crouched watching in their silence.

  Jin wiped his mouth and grew quieter, the shivers periodic. He was not dead. He had not died. There was an anger stored away inside him, anger at what he was, that he could not stop shivering, because they could do whatever they liked. He remembered what he had suffered, and how he had screamed, and how all his wit a
nd hunter's skill had let him down. He no longer liked being what he had been— vulnerable; he would never be again what he had been— naive. All his life people must have seen these things in him. Or all his kind were like him. He loathed himself with a deep and dawning rage.

  xv

  Year 89, day 222 CR

  Main Base

  Dean came into the lab, stood, hands behind him, coughed finally when Spencer stayed at work. Spencer turned around.

  "Morning," Spencer said.

  "Morning, sir." He kept his pose, less than easy, and Spencer frowned at him.

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  "Something wrong, Dean?"

  "I heard—"

  "Is this panic all over the town, then?"

  "The soldiers moved last night. To the wire."

  "An alarm. An empty one."

  "Hillers haven't shown up in days."

  "So I understand." Spencer came closer, rested his portly body against the counter and leaned back, arms folded. "You here to say something in particular, Dean?"

  "Just that."

  "Well, I appreciate your report. I reckon the hillers are a little nervous, that's all."

  "I don't know what I can learn out there in town if there aren't any hillers coming in."

  "I think you serve a purpose."

  "I'd really like to be assigned inside."

  "You're not nervous, are you?"

  "I just really think I'm not serving any purpose out there."

  "It's rather superstitious, isn't it? I detect that, in the town."

  "They're quite large, sir. The calibans."

  "I think you serve as a stabilizing influence in the town. You can tell them that the station's still up there watching and we don't anticipate any 210

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  movement. It's probably due to some biocycle. Fish, maybe. Availability of food. Population pressures. You're an educated man, Dean, and I want you right where you are. We've got a dozen applications for Base residency in our hands, a rush on applications for one open job. That disturbs me more than the calibans. We've got a whole flood of field workers on the sick roster. I'm talking twenty percent of the workers. Not a fever in the lot. No. We're not pulling you inside. You stay out until the crisis is over."

  "That could be a while, Dr. Spencer."

  "You do your job. You keep it down out there. You want your privileges, you do your job, you hear me? No favors. You talk to key people and you keep the town quiet."

  "Yes," Dean said. "Sir." He jammed his hands into his pockets and nodded a good morning, trying to manage his breathing while he turned and walked out.

  His mother was dead. Last month. The meds had not saved her this time: the heart had just gone. The town house was empty except when he moved in. His neighbors hardly spoke, coveting the house so conveniently sharing a wall with their overcrowded one. He had no friends: older than the adolescent scholars, he was anomaly in his generation. He had no wife or lover, being native and untouchable on the main base side of the line, outsider and unwanted in the town.

  He walked the quadrangle of Base, among the tall outworlder buildings, among strange concrete gardens which disturbed him to look at, because they made no sense in their forms of twisted concrete, and he saw obscure comparisons to Patterns, which hillers made to confuse townsmen. Just beyond the enclosure made by the buildings and their concrete walls, he entered the gatehouse where he stripped and hung his Base clothes in a locker, and changed to townsman coveralls, drab and worn. They were a lie; or the other clothes were: he was not, this morning, sure.

  He went out again, passed the guard who knew him, the outworlder guard who looked at him and never smiled, never trusted him, always checked at 211

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  the tags and the number on his hand as if they had changed since yesterday.

  The guard made his note in the record, that he had left the Base. Dean went out, from concrete garden to a concrete track that led into the town, making a T north and south, one long true street which was all the luxury the town had. The rest were dirt. The buildings were native stone and brick; and the clinic, which was featureless concrete— that was the other gift from the Base. Dirt streets and ordinary houses raised by people who had forgotten architects and engineers. They had a public tap on every street; a public sewer to take the slops, and a law to make sure people took the trouble. There was a public bath, but that stank of its drains, and kept the ground around it muddy, to track in and out. There were fields as far as the hills, golden at this time of year; and the sentry towers; and the wire, wire about the fields, about the town, and concrete ramparts and guardstations about the Base. The wire made them safe. So the outworlders said.

  xvi

  Year 89, day 223 CR

  The Hiller Village

  A caliban came at twilight, carrying a rider, a thing no one had ever seen; it came gliding out of the brush near old Tom's house and another one came after it. A small girl saw it first and stood stock still. Others did the same, excepting one young man who dived into the common hall and brought the whole village pouring out onto the rocky commons.

  It was a man on the caliban's shoulders, all shadowy in the twilight, the caliban itself indistinct against the brush, and a second caliban, smaller, came after with a man sitting on that one too. The calibans stopped.

  Weirds materialized out of the brush around the camp, shadows in the fading colors of night's edge, some naked and some wearing dull-hued bits of clothes.

  The man sitting on the Caliban's neck— the first one— lifted his arm.

  "You'll leave this place," the voice came ringing out at them, speech from 212

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  a Weird… and that alone was shock enough, but the caliban moved forward, light and slow as the clawed feet could set themselves on the stone, and the hillers gathered on the doorstep of the common-hall gave backward like the intaking of a breath. There were hunters among them, but no one had brought weapons to evening meal; there were elders, but no one seemed to know what to say to this; there were children, and one of the youngest started to cry, setting off an infant, but parents hugged their faces against their shoulders and frantically hushed them.

  Other calibans were around the camp, some with riders, moving ghostlike through the brush. And smaller calibans, like the witless grays. And smaller still, a handful of the village ariels came slithering out into the empty space between calibans and hall and froze there, heads up, fringes lifted, a thing peculiarly horrid, that creatures the children kept for pets should range themselves with such an invasion.

  "The village is done," the intruder said. "Time to move. Calibans are coming— tonight. More and more of them. The times change. These strangers inside the wires, these strangers that mark you to go through their gates, that take food enough from the town to get fat, they've got everything. And they shoot browns. That doesn't do, no, that doesn't do at all. There's no more time. There's new Patterns, across the river, there's things no outsider ever saw, there's a safe place I'll bring you to, but this place… this village is going to be for the wind and the ariels tomorrow, like the domes they tell about, like those, dead and dark. The stone underfoot won't protect you. Not now."

  "That's Jin," someone said under his breath, a tone of horror, and the name went whispering through the village. "That's Jin, that was lost on riverside."

  "Jin," a man's voice said, and that was Jin Older, who pushed his way out in front of everyone, with tears and shock in his voice. "Jin, come down from that, come here. This is your people, Jin."

  Something hissed. Jin Older slapped at something in his neck about the time his wife pushed through the crowd to get to him; and other kin— but Jin Older fell down, and a few tried to see to him, but one broke to run for cover— a second hissing, and that woman staggered and sprawled.

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  "Take what you want
," Jin shouted, pointing a rigid arm at the village about them. "What you'll need, you gather up— But plan to leave. You thought you were safe here, built on rock. But you leave these buildings, you just leave them for the Hitters and be glad. You move now. They won't like waiting."

  And then: "Move!" he shouted at them, because no one did, and then everyone did, a panicked scattering.

  * * *

  Cloud reached his own house, out of breath, and fumbled in the dark familiar corner for his bow, with only the fireplace coals to see by. He found his quiver on the peg, slung that to his shoulder and turned about again facing the door as a flurry of running steps came up to it, a flood of figures he knew even in the dark. "It's me," he said before they could take fright— his wife Dal, his sister Pia, his grandmother Elly and his own son Tarn, eight years old. His wife hugged him; he hugged her one-armed, and hugged his son and sister too.

  Tam was crying as he made to go; ma Elly put herself in his way.

  "No," Elly said. "Cloud, where are you going?"

  He was afraid at the thought of shooting humans and calibans, but that was what he was off to, what was about to happen out there— what had already started, on the invaders' side. He heard shouting, heard the hiss of calibans. Then he heard faint screams.