She heard the man ahead of her, or something ahead, heard slitherings too, and pressed herself once against the wall as something rather smallish and in a hurry came bolting past her in the dark. Turn after turn she went up following her guide, sometimes now past doorways that offered momentary sunlight and cast a little detail about her guide: sometimes there were occupants in the huge rooms inside the sunless core, on which doors opened, flinging lamplight out. In some of them were calibans, in others knots of humans, strangely like the calibans themselves in the stillness with which they turned their heads her way. She heard wafts of childish voices, or adult, that let her know ordinary life went on in this strangeness.
And then the spiral, which had grown tighter and tighter, opened out on a vast sunpierced hall, a hall that astounded with its size, its ceiling supported by crazy-angled buttresses of earth. She had come up in the center of its floor, where a half a hundred humans and at least as many calibans waited, as if they had been about some other business, or as if they had known she was coming— they had seen her, she realized 272
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suddenly, chagrined. There might easily be lookouts on the tower height and they must have seen her coming for at least an hour.
The gathering grew quiet, organized itself so that there was an open space between herself and a certain frowning woman who studied her and then sat down on a substantial wooden chair. A Caliban settled possessively about it, embracing the chairlegs with the curve of body and tail and lifting its head to the woman's hand.
Then McGee saw a face she knew, at the right against the wall, a girl who was grave and frowning, a huge caliban with a raking scar down its side.
A moment McGee stared, being sure. The child's face was hard, offering her no recognition, nothing.
She glanced quickly back to the other, the woman. "My name is McGee,"
she said.
"Ellai," said the woman; but that much she had guessed.
"I'm here," McGee said then, because a girl had taught her to talk directly, abruptly, in a passable Cloud-side accent, "—because the Styx-siders have come to talk to us; and because the Base thinks we shouldn't be talking to Styx-siders without talking to Cloud-side too."
"What do you have to say?"
"I'd rather listen."
Ellai nodded slowly, her fingers trailing over the back of her caliban.
"You'll answer," Ellai said. "How is that boy on Styx-side?"
McGee bit her lip. "I don't think he's a boy any longer. People follow him."
"This tower near your doors. You let it be."
"We don't find it comfortable. But it's not our habit to interfere outside the wire."
"Then you're stupid," Ellai said.
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"We don't interfere on Cloud-side either."
It might have scored a point. Or lost one. Ellai's face gave no hints. "What are you doing here?"
"We don't intend to have a ring of Styx towers cutting us off from any possible contact with you. If we encourage you to build closer towers, it could mean more fighting and we don't want that either."
"If you don't intend to interfere with anyone, how do you plan to stop the Styx-siders building towers?"
"By coming and going in this direction, by making it clear to them that this is a way we go and that we don't intend to be stopped."
Ellai thought that over, clearly. "What good are you?"
"We give the Styx-siders something else to think about."
Ellai frowned, then waved her hand. "Then go do that," she said.
There was a stirring among the gathering, an ominous shifting, a flicking and settling of Caliban collars and a pricking-up of the Caliban's beside Ellai.
"So," said McGee, uneasy in this shifting and uncertain whether it was good or ill, "if we come and go and you do the same, it ought to make it clear that we plan to keep this way open."
An aged bald man came and squatted by Ellai's side, put his spidery fingers on the caliban. Ellai never looked at him.
"You will go now," Ellai said, staring at McGee. "You will not come here again."
McGee's heart speeded. She felt ruin happening, all her careful constructions. She kept distress from her face. "So the Styxsiders will say what they like and build where they like and you aren't interested to stop it."
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"Go."
Others had moved, others of the peculiar sort gathering about Ellai, crouched in the shadows. Calibans shifted. An ariel skittered across the floor and whipped into the caliban gathering. Of the sane-looking humans there seemed very few: the woman nearest Ellai's chair, a leather-clad, hard-faced type; a handful of men of the same stamp, among their gathering of dragons, among lamp-like eyes and spiny crests. The eyes were little different, the humans and the dragons— cold and mad.
A smaller, gray caliban serpentined its way to the clear center of the floor with a stone in its jaws and laid it purposely on the floor. Another followed, placing a second beside it, while the first retrieved another rock.
It was crazy. The craziness in the place sent a shiver over McGee's skin, an overwhelming anxiety to be out of this tower, a remembrance that the way out was long and dark.
A third stone, parallel to the others, and a fourth, dividing her from Ellai.
"The way is open now," Ellai said.
Go, that was again, last warning. McGee turned aside in disarray, stopped an instant looking straight at Elai, appealing to the one voice that might make a difference.
Elai's hand was on Scar's side. She dropped it and walked a few paces forward— walked with a limp, as if to demonstrate it. Elai was lame. Even that had gone wrong.
McGee went, through the dark spirals, out into the unfriendly sun.
xx
189 CR, day 43
Report, E. McGee
….I succeeded in direct contact; further contacts should be pursued, but cautiously….
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189 CR, day 45
Memo, office of the Director to E. McGee
Your qualification of the incident as a limited success seems to this office to be unfounded optimism.
xxi
189 CR, day 114
Styxside
Genley looked about him at every step along the dusty road, taking mental notes: Mannin trod behind him, and Kim; and in front of them the rider atop his caliban, unlikely figure, their guide in this trek.
Before them the hitherside tower loomed, massive, solid in their eyes.
They had seen this at distance, done long-range photography, observed these folk as best they could. But this one was within their reach, with its fields, its outbuildings. Women labored in the sun, bare-backed to the gentle wind, the mild sun, weeding the crops. They stopped and looked up, amazed at the apparition of starmen.
189 CR, day 134
Field Report: R. Genley
…. The hitherside tower is called Parm Tower, after the man who built it.
The estimates of tower population are incorrect: a great deal of it extends below, with many of the lower corridors used for sleeping. Parm Tower holds at least two thousand individuals and nearly that number of calibans: I think about fifty are browns and the rest are grays.
The division of labor offers a working model of theories long held regarding early human development and in the degree to which Gehenna has recapitulated human patterns, offers exciting prospects for future anthropological study. One could easily imagine the ancient Euphrates, modified ziggurats, used in this case for dwellings as well as for the ancient purpose, the storage of grain above the floods and seasonal dampness of the ground.
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Women have turned to agriculture and do all manner of work of this kind.
Hunting, fishing, and the crafts and handcrafts, including weaving, are almost exclusively a
male domain and enjoy a high status, most notably the hunters who have exclusive control of the brown calibans. Fishers employ the grays. The grays are active in the fields as well, performing such tasks as moving dikes and letting in the water, but they are directed in this case by the class called Weirds. Weirds are both male and female, individuals who have so thoroughly identified with the calibans that they have abandoned speech and often go naked in weather too cool to make it comfortable. They do understand speech or gesture, apparently, but I have never heard one speak, although I have seen them react to hunters who speak to them. They maneuver the grays and a few browns, but the calibans do not seem to attach to them as individuals in the manner in which they attach to the hunter-class.
Only hunters, as I have observed, own a particular caliban and give it a name. It should also be mentioned that one is born a hunter, and hunter marriages are arranged within towers after a curious polyandrous fashion: a woman marries her male relatives' hunting comrades as a group; and her male relatives are married to their hunting comrades'
female sibs. Younger sisters usually marry outside the tower, thus minimizing inbreeding; they are aware of genetics, though, curiously enough, they have reverted to or reinvented the old term "blood" to handle the concept. There is no attempt to distinguish full brother-sister relationship from half. In that much the system is matrilineal. But women of hunter class are ornaments, doing little labor but the making of clothes and the group care of children in which they are assisted by women relieved from field work. All important decisions are the province of the men. I have observed one exception to this rule, a woman of about fifty who seems to have outlived all her sibs and her band. She wears the leather clothing of a rider, has a caliban and carries a knife. She sits with the men at meals and has no association with the wives.
Crafts and fisher-class women work in the fields with their daughters.
Male children can strive for any class, even to be a hunter, although should a lower class male succeed in gaining a caliban he may have to fight other hunters and endure considerable harassment. There is one such individual at Parm Tower. His name is Matso. He is a fisher's son.
The women are particularly cruel to him, apparently resenting the 277
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possibility of his bringing some fisher-sib into their society should he join a hunter-group.
Over all of this of course is Jin himself. This is a remarkable man.
Younger than most of his council, he dominates them. Not physically tall, he is still imposing because of the energy which flows from him. The calibans react to him with nervousness-displays, a reaction in which his own plays some part: this is a beast named Thorn, which is both large and aggressive. But the most of it is due to Jin's own force of personality. He is a persuasive speaker, eloquent, though unlettered: he is a hunter, and writing is a craft: he will not practice it.
He has survived eight years of guardianship to seize power for himself at sixteen, effectively deposing but not killing his former guardian Mes of the River Tower, from what I hear. He is inquisitive, loves verbal games, loves to get the better hand in an argument, is generous with gifts— he bestows ornaments freehandedly in the manner of some oldworld chief. He has a number of wives who are reserved to him alone but these are across the Styx. At Parm Tower he is afforded the hospitality of the hunter-class women, which is a thing done otherwise only between two bands in payment of some very high favor. This lending of wives and the resultant uncertainty of parentage of some offspring seems to strengthen the political structure and to create strong bonds between Jin and certain of the hunter-bands. Whether Jin lends his wives in this fashion we cannot presently ascertain.
We apparently have the freedom to come and go with the escort of one or the other hunters. Jin himself has entertained us in Parm Tower hall and given us gifts which we are hard put to reciprocate.
The people are well-fed, well-clothed and in all have a healthy look. Jin enumerates his plans for more fields, more towers, wider range of his hunters to the north….
Memo, E. McGee to Committee
It seems to me that it is a deceptively easy assumption that these Styxsiders are recapitulating some natural course of human society. This is selective seeking-out of evidence to fit the model Dr. Genley wishes to support. He 278
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totally ignores the contrary evidence of the Cloud Towers, who have grown up in a very different pattern.
Message from field: R. Genley
I thank the committee for the inclusion of the reports.
As for Dr. McGee's assertion that I am selecting my data, I would be interested to see this presented in full, rather than in an inter-office memo, if she has obtained any new data from the Cloud.
As for the earlier data I am of course familiar with it. It is not surprising that one of the communities has managed to cling to their ancestral ways and, in their unstressed river-plain environment, lack the impetus to change. It is inconceivable that their ways would survive except for the circumstance of their origin which flung them into close community: they were, be it remembered, a settlement of refugees. They are not coping well. Their cultivated areas are small. They do not hunt widely, if at all.
They are predominantly fishers, which is an occupation, at least as practiced on Gehenna, which does not require physical strength.
The critical difference is the necessity of physical strength in the hunter culture of the Styx, a difference which should be self-evident given the biological realities of the human species.
Memo, E. McGee to Committee Copy transmitted to R. Genley'
It is a difficult task to extricate the observer from the observation. I do not believe we are out here at considerable expense to seek to reaffirm theories dearly held by our various disciplines, but to faithfully record what exists, and secondly to challenge, where appropriate, theories which become questionable in the light of observed fact.
It is possible that the entanglement of the observer with the observation throughout history, along with the sorrowful fact that in general only the winners write the accounts of wars, has tended to advance certain cultural values in the place of fact, when these values are confused with fact by the observer.
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Fact: two ways of life exist on Gehenna.
Fact: more than one way of life has existed in humanity's cradles of civilization.
I propose that, instead of arguing old theories which have considerable cultural content, we consider this possibility: that humanity develops a multiplicity of answers to the environment, and that if there must be a system of polarities to explain the structure around which these answers are organized, that the polarity does not in and of itself involve gender, but the relative success of the population in curbing those individuals with the tendency to coerce their neighbors. Some cultures solve this problem.
Some do not, and fall into a pattern which exalts this tendency and elevates it, again by the principle that survivors and rulers write the histories, to the guiding virtue of the culture. It is not that the Cloud River culture is unnatural. It is fully natural. It is, unfortunately, threatened with extinction by the hand of the Styxsiders, who will need centuries to attain the level of civilization already possessed by the Cloud. Barbarians win because civilizations are inherently more fragile.
Message from the field: R. Genley
I again urge Dr. McGee to present her theories formally when she can reestablish sufficient contact with the culture she is describing to secure corroborative and specific observations.
xxii
190 CR
Unedited text of message
Dr. E. McGee to Alliance
HQ couriered by AS Pegasus
[Considering the personal difficulty of continuing in this position—]
[Considering the contribution which I feel I might make elsewhere and the personal disappointment]—
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[Considering the—]
[Considering the unfortunate circumstances which have incurred, I suspect, some personal animosity on the part of the Cloud-siders—]
Considering the difficulty of life on Gehenna and my personal health, I would like to make application for immediate transfer from the project. [I feel that my work here is at a standstill and that the—] At the present level of activity my assistants are fully competent to conduct my project and I would urge the Bureau to appoint Dr. Leroy H. Cooper to the post. He has shown himself to be a skilled and dedicated investigator. [I feel that a certain cultural and personal bias on the part of the—] I wish my application for transfer to cast no shadow on the mission or the staff here.
My reasons are medical and personal, involving a sensitivity to certain irritants present in the area…
xxiii
191 CR, day 202
Message, Alliance HQ to Dr. E. McGee, Gehenna Base
…with thorough sympathy for your medical difficulties, the Bureau still considers your presence in the project to be of overriding value, in view of the expense and difficulty of personnel adjustments. So it is with regret that we must reject your application for transfer…
…We have analysed the facilities available at Gehenna both on the Base and at the Station for alleviation of your difficulties and have made shipment of medicines which we feel will provide a wider range of treatment alternatives…
191 CR, day 205
Prescription, Base pharmacy for Dr. E. McGee
…for insomnia, take one capsule at bedtime. ALCOHOL
CONTRAINDICATED.
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xxiv
200 CR, day 33
Field report: E. McGee
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