Military Personnel:
Col. James A. Conn, governor general
Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, lt. governor
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. Tamlin
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 Witt
M/Sgt. Thomas W. Oliver, quartermaster
Cpl. Nina N. Ferry
Pfc. Hayes Brandon
Lt. Romy T. Jones, special forces
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
Security: 12
Computer service: 4
Computer maintenance: 2
Librarian: 1
Agricultural specialists: 10
Harold B. Hill
Geologists: 5
Meterologist: 1
Biologists: 6
Marco X. Gutierrez
Eva K. Jenks
Education: 5
Cartographer: 1
Management supervisors: 4
Biocycle engineers: 4
Construction personnel: 150
Food preparation specialists: 6
Industrial specialists: 15
Mining engineers: 2
Energy systems supervisors: 8
TOTAL MILITARY 45
TOTAL CITIZEN STAFF 341; TOTAL NONASSIGNED
DEPENDENTS: 111; TOTAL ALL CITIZENS: 452
ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL:
“A” class: 2890
Jin 458–9998
Pia 86–687
“B” class: 12389
“M” class: 4566
“P” class: 20788
“V” class: 1278
TOTAL ALL NONCITIZENS: 41911
TOTAL ALL MISSION: 42363
i
Day 03, Colony Reckoning
Newport Base, Gehenna System
The hatch opened, the ramp went down, and Conn looked about him . . . at stripped earth, at endless blocks of two-man tents, at the shining power tower and the solar array that caught the morning sun. Beyond them was the river and on their left, the sea. From the origin of the river, mountains rose; and forest skirted them; and plains running down to this site, with forest spilling onto it from another low surge of hills behind the shuttle landing. He knew the map in his sleep, what was here now and what would come. He inhaled the warm air, which was laden with a combination of strange scents; felt the gravity which was different from the standard G of ships and a little different than that of Cyteen. He felt a slight sense of panic and refused to betray it.
The staff waited, solemn, at the foot of the ramp. He walked down—he wore civilian clothes now, no uniform; and took the hand of Ada Beaumont and of Bob Davies and of Peter Gallin . . . in shock at the change in them, at shaved heads and shaved faces, when the rest of the mission was now at least well-stubbled.
“I didn’t authorize this,” he said to Ada Beaumont. Tem-per surged up in him; outrage. He remembered they had witnesses and smothered the oath. “What’s going on?”
“It seemed,” Beaumont said firmly, “efficient. It’s dirty down here.”
He swept a glance about him, at the sameness; at military officers converted to azi-like conformity. Beaumont’s democracy. Beaumont’s style. He scowled. “Trouble?”
“No. My initiative. It seemed to create a distinction down here—apart from regulations. I apologize, sir.”
In public. In front of the others. He took a grip on himself. “It seems,” he said, “a good idea on that basis.” He looked beyond them, and about him—at the last load coming off the last shuttle flight, his personal baggage and less essential items, and the last few techs. He let his eyes focus on the mountains, on the whole sweep of the land.
On the far bank of the river rose grassy mounds, abrupt and distinctive. He pointed that way. “Those are the neighbors, are they?”
“That’s the caliban mounds, yes, sir.”
He stared at them. At uncertainty. He wished they had not been so close. He scanned the camp, the tents which stretched row on row onto the plain at their right . . . azi, above forty thousand azi, a city in plastic and dust. The earthmovers whined away, making more bare dirt. Permanent walls were going up in the center of the camp, foamset domes, obscured by the dust of a crawler. “What’s in?” he asked Beaumont. “Got the hookup?”
“Power’s functioning as of half an hour ago, and we’re shifted off the emergency generator. We’re now on the Newport Power Company. They’re laying the second line of pipe now, so we’ll have waste treatment soon. Hot water’s at a premium, but the food service people have all they need.”
He walked with them, beside Beaumont, gave a desultory wave at workers who had come out with a transport to carry the baggage to camp. He walked, electing not to use the transport . . . inhaled the dust and the strangeness and the unfamiliar smell of sea not far distant. In some respects it was like Cyteen. There was a feeling of insulation about him, a sense of unreality; he shook it off and looked about him for plant life that might prove to his senses that he was on an alien world—but the earthmovers had scraped all that away. There were only the azi tents, all of them in neat lines stretching away into the dust; and finally the camp center, where earthmovers dug the foundations for more plastic foam construction, where dome after dome had already sprung up like white fungus among the tents, one bubbled onto the next.
They were thirty six hours into the construction.
“You’ve done a good job,” he said to Ada Beaumont, loudly, amends for the scene at the ramp, in which he had embarrassed himself. “A good job.”
“Thank you, sir.”
There was caution there. In all of them. He looked about him again, at the entourage of department heads who had begun to follow them, at others who had joined them in their walk into the center of the camp. “I’ll be meeting with you,” he said. “But it’s all automatic, isn’t it? Meetings aren’t as important as your building and your job schedules. So I’ll postpone all of the formalities. I think it’s more important to get everyone under shelter.”
There were nods, murmurs, excuses finally as one and another of them found reason to move off.
“I’d like to find my own quarters,” Conn said. “I’m tired.”
“Yes, sir,” Beaumont said quietly. “This way. We’ve made them as comfortable as possible.”
He was grateful. He squared his shoulders out of the slump they had acquired, walked with her and with Bob and Gallin in that direction. She opened the door of a smallish dome bubbled onto the main one, with a plastic pane window and a door sawed out of the foam and refitted on hinges. There was a bed inside, already made up; and a real desk, and a packing mat for a rug on the foamset flooring.
“That’s good,” he said, “that’s real good.” And when the company made to leave: “Captain. Can I talk to you a moment?”
“Sir.” She stayed. Bob Davies and Pete Gallin discretely withdrew, and the reg who had brought some of the luggage in deposited it near the door and closed the door on his way out.
“I think you know,” he said, “that something’s wrong. I imagine it bothered you—my not being down here.”
“I understand the procedure calls for the ranking officer to stay on the ship in case—”
“Don’t put me off.”
“I’ve had some concern.”
“All right. You’ve had some concern.” He took a breath, jammed his hands into his belt behind him. “I’ll be honest with you. I reckoned you could handle the landing, the whole setup if you had to.—I’m feeling a bit of strain, Ada. A bit of strain. I’m getting a little arthritis. You understand me? The back’s hurting me a bit.”
“You think there’s a problem with the rejuv?”
“I know I’m taking more pills than I used to. You use more when you’re under stress. Maybe it’s that. I’ve thought about resigning, going back to Cyteen on a medical. I’ve thought about that. I don’t like the thought. I’ve never run from anything.”
“If your health—”
“Just listen to me. What I’m going to do—I’m going to take the command for a few weeks; and then I’m going to step down and retire to an advisory position.”
“Sir—”
“Don’t sir me. Not here. Not after this long. I just wanted to tell you the stuff’s failing on me. That’s why we have redundancies in the system, isn’t it? You’re the real choice, you. I’m just lending my experience. That’s all.”
“If you want it that way.”
“I just want to rest, Ada. It wasn’t why I came. It’s what I want now.”
“There’s still that ship up there.”
“No.”
“I’ll take care of things, then.” She put her hands in her hip pockets, blinked at him with pale eyes in a naked-skulled face, showing age. “I think then—begging your pardon . . . it might be a wise thing under the circumstances—to take a joint command and ease the moment when it comes.”
“Eager for it, are you?”
“Jim—”
“You’ve already started doing things your way. That’s all right.”
“The staff has wondered, you know—your absence. And I think if you talked to them frankly, made it clear, your health, your reasons—you really are a figure they respect; I think they’d be glad to know why you’ve suddenly gone less visible, that it’s a personal thing and not some upper-level friction in command.”
“Is that the rumor?”
“One’s never sure just what the rumors are, but I think that’s some of it. There’s a little bit of strain.”
“Troopers and civs?”
“No. Us and Them. The visible distinction—” She rubbed her shaved scalp, selfconsciously returned the hand to her pocket. “Well, it solved an immediate problem. People get tired and they get touchy; and I went and did that on the spot, that being the way I knew how to say it. And the rest of the staff followed suit. Maybe it was wrong.”
“If it solved the problem it was right. I’ll talk to them. I’ll make everything clear in my own way.”
“Yes, sir.” Soft and quiet.
“Don’t respect me into an early grave, Beaumont. I’m not there yet.”
“I don’t expect you to be. I expect you’ll be around handing out the orders. I’m your legs, that’s the way I see it.”
“Oh, you see further than that. You’ll be governor. I think that’ll suit you.”
She was silent a moment. “I considered it a matter of friendship. I’d like to keep it on that basis.”
“I’ll rest a bit,” he said.
“All right.” She tended to the door, stopped and looked back. “I’ll warn you about the door—you have to keep the door closed. Lizards have discovered the camp. They’ll get into tents, anything. And the window—they come in windows if you have the lights on and the windows open. We try not to carry any of the flitters back to the camp, but a few have made it in, and they’ll make a nuisance of themselves.”
He nodded. Loathed the thought.
“Sir,” she said quietly, left and softly tugged the thick door shut. He lay down on the bed, his head pounding in a suspended silence—the absence of the ventilation noises and the rotation of the ship and the thousand other subtle noises of the machinery. Outside the earthmovers growled and whined and beeped, and human voices shouted, but it was all far away.
The arthritis story was real. He felt it, wanted a drink; and tried to put it off—not wanting that to start, not yet, when someone else might want to call.
He had to hold off the panic, the desire to call the ship and ask to be lifted off. He had to do it until it was too late. He had never yet run; and he was determined it would not be this time, this last, hardest time.
ii
Day 03, CR
That evening (one had to think in terms of evening again, not mainday and alterday, had to learn that things shut down at night, and everyone slept and ate on the same schedules) . . . that evening in the main dome, Conn stood up at the staff mess and announced the changes. “Not so bad, really,” he said, “since there’s really a need for a governing board and not a military command here. Headquarters and the Colonial Office left that to our discretion, what sort of authority to set up, whether military or council forms; and I think that there’s a level of staff participation here that lends itself to council government. All department heads will sit on the board. Capt. Beaumont and I will share the governorship and preside jointly when we’re both present. Maj. Gallin will take vicechairman’s rank. And for the rest, there’s the structural precedence in various areas of responsibility as the charter outlines them.” He looked down the table at faces that showed the stress of long hours and primitive conditions. At Bilas, with a bandage on his shaven temple. That had been bothering him: the thoughts wandered. “Bilas—you had an accident?”
“Rock, sir. A tread threw it up.”
“So.” He surveyed all the faces, all the shaven skulls—commissioned officers and noncoms and civs. He blinked, absently passed a hand over his thinning, rejuv-silvered hair. “I’d shave it off too, you know,” he said, “but there’s not much of it.” Nervous laughs from the faces down the table. Uncertain humor. And then the thread came back to him. “So we’ve got the power in; got electricity in some spots. Camp’s got power for cooking and freezing. Land’s cleared at least in the camp area. We’ve all got some kind of shelter over our heads; we’ve done, what, seven thousand years of civilization in just about three days?” He was not sure of the seven thousand years, but he had read it in a book somewhere, how long humankind had taken about certain steps, and he saw eyes paying earnest attention to what sounded like praise. “That’s good. That’s real good. We’ve got excuse for all of us to slow down soon. But we want to do what we can while the bloom’s on the matter, while we’re all motivated by maybe wanting a hot shower and a warmer bed. What’s the prospect on the habitats? Maybe this week we can start them? Or are we going to have to put that off?”
“We’re looking,” Beaumont said, beside him, seated, “at getting all the personnel into solid housing by tomorrow, even if we have to take crowded conditions. So we’ll be dry if it rains. And we’re putting a good graded road through the azi camp, to help them under the same conditions. We’re clearing and plowing tomorrow; looking at maybe getting the sets in the ground for the garden in three more days; maybe getting general plumbing out at the azi camp.”
“That’s fine,” Conn said. “That’s way ahead of schedule.”
“Subject to weather.”
“Any—”
“Hey!” someone exclaimed suddenly, down the table, and swore: people came off the benches at that end of the table. There was laughter and a man dived under the table and came up with a meter long green lizard. Conn stared at it in a daze, the struggling reptile, the grinning staffer and the rest of them—Gutierrez, of the bio section.
“Is that,” Conn asked, “a resident?”
“This, sir—this is an ariel. They’re quick: probably got past the door while we were coming into the hut.” He set it down a moment on the vacated section of the long table, and it rested there immobile, green and delicate, neck frills spread like feathers.
“I think it better find its own supper,” Beaumont said. “Take it out, will you?”
Gutierrez picked it up again. Someone held the door for him. He walked to it and, bending, gave it a gentle toss into the darkness outside.
“Been back a dozen times,” Bilas said. Conn felt his nerves frayed at the thought of such persistence.
Gutierrez took his seat again, and so did the others.
“Any of the big ones?” Conn asked.
“Just ariels,” Gutierrez said. “They get into the huts and tents and we just put them out. No one’s been hurt, us or them.”
“We just live with them,” Conn said. “We knew that, didn’t we?” He felt shaky, and sat down again. “There are some things to do. Administrative things. I’d really like to get most of the programs launched in our tenure. The ships—leave in a few hours. And we don’t see them again until three years from now. Until they arrive with the technicians and the setup for the birthlabs, at which point this world really begins to grow. Everything we do really has to be toward that setup. The labs, when they arrive, will be turning out a thousand newborns every nine months; and in the meanwhile we’ll have young ones born here, with all of that to take care of. We’ve got azi who don’t know anything about bringing up children, which is something Education’s got to see to. We’ve got mapping to do, to lay out the pattern of development down to the last meter. We’ve got to locate all the hazards, because we can’t have kids running around falling into them. Three years isn’t such a long time for that. And long before then, we’re going to have births. You’ve all thought of that, I’m sure.” Nervous laughter from the assembly. “I think it’s going to go well. We’ve got everything in our favor. Seven thousand years in three days. We’ll come up another few millennia while we’re waiting, and take another big step again when the ships get those labs to us. And this place has to be safe by then. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
A glass lifted: Ilya Burdette, down the table. “For the colonel!” All the glasses went up, and everyone echoed it. “For the captain!” someone else yelled; and they drank to Beaumont. It was a good feeling in the place. Noisy.
“What about beer?” someone yelled from the second table. “How many days before beer?”
Tired faces broke into grins. “Ag has a plan,” a civ yelled back. “You get us fields, you get your beer.”
“To beer!” someone shouted, and everyone shouted, and Conn laughed along with the rest.
“Civilization,” someone else yelled, and they drank down the drinks they did have, and the sweat and the exhaustion and the long hours seemed not to matter to them.
iii
Venture log
“Departure effected, 1213 hours 17 minutes mission apparent time. En route to jump point, all systems normal. US Swift and US Capable are following at one hour intervals. Last communication with ground base at 1213 hours indicated excellent conditions and progress ahead of schedule: see message log. Estimate jump point arrival at 1240. . . .”
iv
Day 07, CR
Jin stepped forward as the line moved closer to the small makeshift table the supervisors had set up among the tents. He wore a jacket over his coveralls in the morning chill. The air was brisk and pleasant like spring on the world he had left. He remained content. They were clean again, besides the dust that he had to rub off his face and hands, that ground itself into his clean coveralls. They had the pipe laid, and the pumps set up, bringing clean water up to the camp, so that they had been able to shower under a long elevated pipe with holes in it—bracing cold, and there was no soap, but it had been good all the same. They could shower, they had been informed, anytime they came offshift, because there was plenty of water. There were bladed razors they could shave with, but they could let their hair and brows grow again. Faces had their expression back—almost. His head would be darkening with hair again, although he had not seen a mirror since Cyteen. He could feel it, and more, he had seen a sib or two about the sprawling camp, so he knew: he looked better.
And he tingled with excitement, and was hollowed by no small insecurity, because this line they were standing in, early in the morning, had to do with final assignments.
It all went very quickly. The comp the supervisor used was a portable. The born-man plugged in the numbers as given and it sorted through them and came up with assignments. Some azi were turned aside to wait longer; some went through without a hitch. The man in front of him went through.
“Next,” the born-man said.
“J 458–9998,” he said promptly, and watched it typed in.
“Preferred mate.”
“P 86–687.”
The man looked. One could never see the screens, whatever the operators knew, whatever the screens gave back. The machine was full of his life, his records, all that he was and all they meant him to be.
The man wrote on a plastic square and gave it to him. “Confirmed. Tent 907, row five. Go there now.”
The next azi behind him was already giving her number. Jin turned away—all his baggage in hand, his small kit with the steel razor and the toothbrush and the washcloth: he was packed.
5907 was no small hike distant among the tents, down the long rows of bare dust and tents indistinguishable except for tags hung at their entries. Other walkers drifted ahead of him, azi likewise carrying their white assignment chits in hand, in the early morning with the sun coming up hazy over the tents and the small tracks and serpentine tailmarks of ariels in the dust. An ariel wandered across the lane, leisurely, paying no heed at all to the walkers, stopped only when it had reached the edge of a tent, and turned a hard eye toward them. There were more than twenty thousand tents, all set out to the east of the big permanent domes the born-men had made for themselves. Jin had helped set up the tents in this section, had helped in the surveying to peg down the marker lines, so that he had a good idea where he was going and where number 5907 was. He met cross-traffic, some of the azi from other areas, where other desks might be set up: it was like a city, this vast expanse of streets and tents, like the city he had seen the day they went to the shuttle port, which was his first sight of so great a number of dwellings.
Forty thousand azi. Thousands upon thousands of tents in blocks of ten. He came to 901 and 903 and 905, at last to 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.”
“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.
“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, 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 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.
“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.
All 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, verticalslitted eye.
That was close enough, then. Gutierrez felt backward for a step, began a careful retreat, pace by pace.
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.”
“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.”
“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.
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 floor 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. Clean: at least she was that. The creature had come in so persistently she had acquired a name and a grudging place in the dome. Now everyone fed the thing, and from a scant meter long, she had gotten fatter, passed a meter easily, and gone through one skin change in recent weeks.
A scrabbling climb put Ruffles onto a stack of boxes. Conn drank his tea and stared back at her golden slit eyes. Her head turned to angle one at him directly. She flared her collar and preened a bit.
“Help you, sir?” That was Bilas, making a bench creak as he sat down close by, arms on the table. Non-com and special op colonel—they had no distinctions left. Protocols were down, everywhere.
“Just easing the aches in my bones. Any progress on that drainage?”
“We got the pipe in, but we have a silting problem. Meteorology says they’re not surprised by this one. So we hear.”
“No. It’s no surprise. We got off lightly with the last front.”
Another staffer arrived, carrying her cup—Regan Chiles dropped onto a bench opposite, scavenger-wise spotting a body in authority and descending with every indication of problems. “Got a little difficulty,” she said. “Tape machines are down. It’s this salt air and the humidity. We pulled the most delicate parts and put them into seal; but we’re going to have to take the machines apart and clean them; and we’re really not set up for that.”
“You’ll do the best you can.” He really did not want to hear this. He looked about him desperately, found fewer people in the dome than he had expected, which distracted him with wondering why. Chiles went on talking, handing him her problems, and he nodded and tried to take them in, the overload Education was putting on Computer Maintenance, because inexpert personnel had exposed some of the portable units to the conditions outside. Because Education had programs behind schedule . . . and shifted blame.
“Look,” he said finally, “your chain of command runs through Maj. Gallin. All this ought to go to him.”
A pursed lip, a nod, an inwardness of the eyes. Something was amiss.
“What answer did Gallin give you?”
“Gallin just told us to fix it and to cooperate.”
“Well, you don’t go over Gallin’s head, lieutenant. You hear me?”
“Sir,” Chiles muttered, clenched her square jaw and took another breath. “But begging the colonel’s pardon, sir—my people are going shift to shift and others are idle.”
“That’s because your department has something wrong, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll talk to the other departments.” He was conscious of Bilas at his elbow, witness to it all. “I stand by Gallin, you hear? I won’t have this bypassing channels.—Drink the tea, lieutenant; both of you. If we have any problems like that, then you keep to chain of command.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sir,” Bilas murmured.
He stayed there, sipping the tea, himself and Chiles and Bilas; and soon others came up the table to intimate their troubles to him, so that his stomach knotted up again in all the discomfort he had left his quarters to avoid.
And finally after he had drunk several cups of tea and had to go out to avail himself of the latrine in back of the dome, he headed back to his own quarters with his collar turned up and an ache in his bones that felt like dull needles. An ariel slithered through a puddle in his path, miniature mariner, swimming for a moment, more intent on direction than convenience, which was the habit of ariels.
A siren disturbed the air. He looked about him in the pale gray haze, tried to get location on it, and thought it was coming from somewhere near the fields.
vii
Day 58 CR
They brought Ada Beaumont back in a sheet with the blood and the rain soaking it, and Bob Davies following along after the litter with his clothes soaked and stained with mud and blood, and that look in his eyes that was nowhere, and nowhen, as if he had backed away from life.
Conn came out into the rain and looked down at the smallish bundle on the stretcher—stared confusedly, because it was always ridiculous how something as large across life as Ada, a special op who had survived Fargone and the war and the Rising, who had been wiry and cagey and full of every trick the enemy never expected—could come down to an object so small and diminished. Men and women stood with their eyes hazed with tears, in the fog and the mist, but Bob Davies just stared in shock, his face gone ghastly pale; and Conn put his hands in his pockets and felt a panic and a hollowness in his gut.
“It was a caliban burrow,” Pete Gallin said, wiped the water out of his eyes with a bloody, abraded hand. “Andresson—saw it happen.”
“Andresson.” Conn looked at the man, a thin and wispy fellow with distracted eyes.
“We were fixing that washout up there and she was talking to me on the rig when the ground behind her feet just—went. This big crawler behind her, parked, nobody on it—just started tipping for no cause. She went under it; and we had to get the winch, sir—we got another crawler turned and got the winch on it, but it was one of those lizard burrows, like—like three, four meters down; and in that soft ground, the crawler on it—the whole thing just dissolved . . . .”
“Take precautions,” Conn said; and then thought that they were all expecting him to grieve over Beaumont, and they would hate him because he was like this. “We can’t have another.” There was a dire silence, and the bearers of the litter just stood there in the rain shifting the poles in their hands because of the weight. Their cropped heads shed beads of water, and red seeped through the thin sheeting and ran down into the puddles. “We bury in the earth,” he said, his mind darting irrevocably to practical matters, for stationers, who were not used to that. “Over by the sea, I think, where there’s no building planned.”
He walked away—like that, in silence. He did not realize either the silence or his desertion until he was too far away to make it good. He walked to his own quarters and shut the door behind him, shed his wet jacket and flung it down on the bench.
Then he cried, standing there in the center of the room, and shivered in the cold and knew that there was nothing in Pete Gallin or in any of the others which would help him. Old as he was getting and sick as he was getting, the desertion was all on Ada’s side.
He was remarkably lucid in his shock. He knew, for instance, that the burrowing beyond the perimeters was worse news than Ada’s death. It threw into doubt all their blueprints for coexistence with the calibans. It spelled conflict. It altered the future of the world—because they had to cope with it with only the machines and the resources in their hands. When the weather cleared they would have to sit down and draw new plans, and somehow he had to pull things into a coherency that would survive. That would save forty thousand human lives.
Promotions had to be done. Gallin had to be brought up to co-governor: Gallin—a good supervisor and a decent man and no help at all. Maybe a civ like Gutierrez—Gutierrez was the brightest of the division chiefs, in more than bio; but there was no way to jump Gutierrez over others with more seniority. Or Sedgewick—a legal mind with rank but no decisiveness.
He wiped his eyes, found his hand trembling uncontrollably.
Someone splashed up to the door, opened it without a by your leave, a sudden noise of rain and gust of cold. He looked about. It was Dean, of the medical staff.
“You all right, sir?”
He straightened his shoulders. “Quite. How’s Bob?”
“Under sedation. Are you sure, sir?”
“I’ll be changing my clothes. I’ll be over in the main dome in a minute. Just let me be.”
“Yes, sir.” A lingering look. Dean left. Conn turned to the strung clothesline which was his closet and his laundry, and picked the warmest clothes he had, still slightly damp. He wanted a drink. He wanted it very badly.
But he went and set things right in the dome instead—met with the staff, laid out plans, unable finally to go out to the burial because of the chill, because he began to shiver and the chief surgeon laid down the law—which was only what he wanted.
Tired people came back, wet, and shivering and sallow-faced. Davies was prostrate in sickbay, under heavier sedation after the burial—had broken down entirely, hysterical and loud, which Ada had never been. Ever. Gallin sat with shadowed eyes and held a steaming cup in front of him at table. “You’re going to have to survey the area,” Conn said to him, with others at the table, because there was no privacy, “and you’re going to have to keep surveying, to find out if there’s more undermining.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ruffles, on her stack of boxes, flicked her tongue. Conn regarded her balefully past Gallin’s slumped shoulder and bowed head. “It was an accident,” he said. “That’s all there is to say about it. We just don’t intend to have another one.”
“Sir,” Gallin said, “that caliban mound on this side of the river . . . I’d like to break that up.”
Conn looked at Gutierrez, who had his mouth clamped tight. “Gutierrez?”
“I’d like to know first,” Gutierrez said, “if that’s the source of the tunnelling in the camp or not. If we don’t know for sure, if we’re just guessing—we’re not solving the problem at all.”
“You’re proposing more study.”
“I’d like to do that, sir.”
“Do it, then. But we’re going to have to probe those tunnels and know where they go.”
“I’ll be on that—tonight, if you like.”
“You map it out on paper tonight. And we get a team out at daybreak to probe the ground. We don’t know for certain it is the calibans at all, do we?”
“No,” said Gutierrez. “That’s the point. We don’t know.”
Conn gathered up the bottle on the table in front of him, that they had used to lace the tea, and poured himself the long postponed drink. His hand shook violently in the pouring so that he spilled a little. He sipped at it and the liquor went into him, settling his battered nerves.
Ruffles scrambled from her perch and hit the floor, put on her best display. One of the techs slipped from the table and got her a morsel of food, which vanished with a neat dart of the head and a choking motion.
Conn finished his drink, excused himself, put his jacket on and walked back to his own quarters around the bending of the walk. The rain had stopped, in the evening. The electric lights in the compound and scattered throughout the azi camp were haloed in the mist. He stopped there on the puddled gravel walk, cold inside, looked out over all the camp, seeing what they had come to do slipping further and further away.
viii
Day 58 CR
“They put her in the ground,” Pia said, very soft, in the comfort of their pallet; and Jin held to her for comfort in the dark. “They buried her in the ground, and they all stood around and cried.”
This was a revelation—the death of a born-man. They were accustomed to azi mortality. Azi died, and they carried the body to the white building on the farm, and that was the end of the matter. If one was a good type, then there was the confidence that others of one’s type would go on being born. There was pride involved in that. And that meant something.
But they saved nothing of Ada Beaumont. There were no labs to save it.
“I wish we could have tapes,” Jin said. “I miss them.”
Pia hugged him the tighter, buried her face against his shoulder. “I wish the same thing. There was a mistake about the machine falling on the captain. I don’t know what. I think we could have been at fault. I wish we knew.”
“They say they can’t use the machines in the bad weather.”
“When there are labs again,” Pia said, “when we have good tape again, it’s going to be better.”
“Yes,” he said.
But that was a very long time away.
He and Pia made love in the dark; and that replaced the tapes. It came to him that they were happier than the born-man who had died, having no one of her own type surviving, at least here on this world. But there were other 9998s and 687s. And they made love because it was the warmest and the pleasantest thing they could do, and because they were permitted.
This made born-men; and an obscure sense of duty dawned on Jin, that if one had died, then one had to be born. This was why they had been chosen, and what they had to do.
The rain stopped, and the sun came back in the morning, with only a ragged bit of cloud. The world was different under this sun. The crawlers stood off in the cleared fields, muddy with yesterday’s accident, and a great pit remained around which born-men began to probe. And the world was different because there was a dead born-man lying alone by the sea, with a marker that let the grave be seen across the camp.
Jin walked to his supervisor’s table, set up in the roadway under this new sun, and applied for the day’s work; but instead of doing more survey, he was given a metal rod and told to push it into the earth. He was to call the supervisor if it seemed that the dirt was looser than it ought to be. He went out among others and probed until his shoulders ached, and the born-man Gutierrez and his crew took down all that they found.
ix
Day 162 CR
The domes rose, with the sun hot and the sea beating blue and white at the shore; and Conn sat in his chair in front of the main dome, under the canopy, because the heat was never that great, and the breeze pleased him. An ariel waddled across the dust near the walk and squatted there just off the gravel path, in the shadow of Conn’s own adjacent dome. It built—instinctive behavior, Gutierrez maintained. It had brought a pebble and added it to the stack it was making—not a pebble from the walk, thank you, but a larger one, painstakingly found elsewhere, presumably just the right pebble, for reasons only another ariel might grasp. It made circles of stacks. It built domes too, Conn thought distantly; but its domes failed, collapsing into nests. The last few stones always knocked the efforts down, lacking the trick of a keystone. So it seemed. But that was a fancy: too much of domes, too much of a preoccupation with them lately. The ariel built lines and patterns out from its collapsed stacks of stones, loops and whorls and serpentines. Rudimentary behavior like the moundbuilding calibans, Gutierrez had said. Probably it originated as a nesting behavior and elaborated into display behaviors. Both sexes built. That had disappointed Gutierrez.
No more calibans this side of the river, at least. The mounds remained, across the river, but azi with spades had taken the mound this side apart. It was stalemate, the calibans forbidden their mounds this side, the crawlers and earthmovers standing still, mothballed, now that all the major building and clearing was done.
The ship would come, bringing them the supplies and lab facilities they needed; and then the machines would grind and dig their way further across the landscape around that ell bend between the river and the forest, making foundations for the lab and the real city they planned.
But the nearer focus was still tents. Still tents. More than twenty thousand tents, dull brown under the sun. They tried, having hunted the last determined caliban off this shore; but the crawlers had reached the point of diminishing returns in maintenance, needing the supplies the ship would bring. Up the rivercourse the azi blasted at limestone and hauled it back in handpulled wagons, laboriously, as humans had hauled stone in the dawn of human building, because they dared not risk the crawlers, the last of them that worked on parts cannibalized from the others. The azi labored with blasting materials and picks and bare hands, and there was a camp of two dozen tents strung out there too, at the limestone cliffs where they quarried stone.
Perhaps it might have been wiser to have moved the whole site there, to stony ground—knowing now that calibans burrowed. But they had spent all their resources of material and fuel. The domes stood, so at least the staff had secure housing. The fields were planted, and the power systems and the equipment were safe so long as they kept the calibans away.
Conn studied his charts, traced again and again the changes they had had to make in plans. The cold this spring had hurt his hands; and the joints twisted and pained him, even in the summer sun. He thought of another winter and dreaded it.
But they survived. He knew the time of the landing that would come, down to the day, year after next; and mentally he marked off every day, one to the next, with all the complexities of local/universal time.
The ship, he was determined, would take him home. He would go back to Cyteen. He thought that he might live through the jumps. Might. Or at least he would not have to see more of this world.
Newport, he had called it. But Gehenna had stuck instead. It was where they were; it described their situation. Like Styx for the Forbes River, that began as a joke and stayed. When a wheel broke on one of the carts or when it rained—Gehenna’s own luck, they said; and: What do you expect, in Hell?
They came to the Old Man and complained: Conn solved what he could, shrugged his shoulders at the rest. Like Gallin. Finally—like Gallin. “That’s your problem,” was Gallin’s line, which had gotten to be a proverb so notorious Gallin had had to find different ways of saying it. A sad fellow, Gallin, a bewildered fellow, who never knew why he deserved everyone’s spite. Conn sat placidly, waited for problems to trickle past the obstacle of Gallin, soothed tempers—kept the peace. That was the important thing.
A figure slogged down the lane, slumpshouldered and forlorn, and that was Bob Davies, another of the casualties. Davies worked the labor accounts, kept the supply books, and went off the rejuv of his own choice and over the surgeons’ protests. So there were two of them getting old. Maybe it showed more on Davies than on him—balding and growing bowed and thin in the passage of only a few months.
“Morning,” Conn wished him. Davies came out of his private reverie long enough to look up as he went by. “Morning,” Davies said absently, and went back to his computers and his books and his endless figuring.
That was the way of it now, that as fast as they built, the old pieces fell apart. Conn turned his mind back to the permafax sheets in his lap and made more adjustments in the plans which had once been so neatly drawn.
Two things went well. No, three: the crops flourished in the fields, making green as far as the eye could see. And Hill’s fish came up in the nets so that a good many of them might be sick of fish, but they all ate well. The plumbing and the power worked. They had lost some of the tape machines; but others worked, and the azi showed no appreciable strain.
But the winter—the first winter . . .
That had to be faced; and the azi were still under tents.
x
Day 346 CR
The wind blew and howled about the doors of the med dome. Jin sat in the anteroom and wrung his hands and fretted, a dejection which so possessed him it colored all the world.
She’s well, the doctors had told him; she’s going to do well. He believed this on one level, having great trust in Pia, that she was very competent and that her tapes had given her all the things she had to know. But she had been in pain when he had brought her here; and the hours of her pain wore on, so that he sat blank much of the time, and only looked up when one of the medics would come or go through that inner corridor where Pia was.
One came now. “Would you like to be with her?” the born-man asked him, important and ominous in his white clothing. “You can come in if you like.”
Jin gathered himself to unsteady legs and followed the young born-man through into the area which smelled strongly of disinfectants—a hall winding round the dome, past rooms on the left. The born-man opened the first door for him and there lay Pia on a table, surrounded by meds all in masks. “Here,” said one of the azi who assisted here, and offered him a gown to wear, but no mask. He shrugged it on, distracted by his fear, “Can I see her?” he asked, and they nodded. He went at once to Pia and took her hand.
“Does it hurt?” he asked. He thought that it must be hurting unbearably, because Pia’s face was bathed in sweat. He wiped that with his hand and a born-man gave him a towel to use.
“It’s not so bad,” she said between breaths. “It’s all right.”
He held onto her hand; and sometimes her nails bit into his flesh and cut him; and betweentimes he mopped her face . . . his Pia, whose belly was swollen with life that was finding its way into the world now whether they wanted or not.
“Here we go,” a med said. “Here we are.”
And Pia cried out and gave one great gasp, so that if he could have stopped it all now he would have. But it was done then, and she looked relieved. Her nails which had driven into his flesh eased back, and he held onto her a long time, only glancing aside as a born-man nudged his arm.
“Will you hold him?” the med asked, offering him a bundled shape: Jin took it obediently, only then realizing fully that it was alive. He looked down into a small red face, felt the squirming of strong tiny limbs and knew—suddenly knew with real force that the life which had come out of Pia was independent, a gene-set which had never been before. He was terrified. He had never seen a baby. It was so small, so small and he was holding it.
“You’ve got yourselves a son,” a med told Pia, leaning close and shaking her shoulder. “You understand? You’ve got yourselves a little boy.”
“Pia?” Jin bent down, holding the baby carefully, oh so carefully—“Hold his head gently,” the med told him. “Sup-port his neck,” and put his hand just so, helped him give the baby into Pia’s arms. Pia grinned at him, sweat-drenched as she was, a strange tired grin, and fingered the baby’s tiny hand.
“He’s perfect,” one of the meds said, close by. But Jin had never doubted that. He and Pia were.
“You have to name him,” said another. “He has to have a name, Pia.”
She frowned over that for a moment, staring at the baby with her eyes vague and far. They had said, the born-men, that this would be the case, that they had to choose a name, because the baby would have no number. It was a mixing of gene-sets, and this was the first one of his kind in the wide universe, this mix of 9998 and 687.
“Can I call him Jin too?” Pia asked.
“Whatever you like,” the med said.
“Jin,” Pia decided, with assurance. Jin himself looked down on the small mongrel copy Pia held and felt a stir of pride. Winter rain fell outside, pattering softly against the roof of the dome. Cold rain. But the room felt more than warm. The born-men were taking all the medical things away, wheeling them out with a clatter of metal and plastics.
And they wanted to take the baby away too. Jin looked up at them desperately when they took it from Pia’s arms, wanting for one of a few times in his life to say no.
“We’ll bring him right back,” the med said ever so softly. “We’ll wash him and do a few tests and we’ll bring him right back in a few moments. Won’t you stay with Pia, Jin, and keep her comfortable?”
“Yes,” he said, feeling a tremor in his muscles, even so, thinking that if they wanted to take the baby back again later, after Pia had suffered so to have it, then he wanted very much to stop them. But yes was all he knew how to say. He held on to Pia, and a med hovered about all the same, not having gone with the rest. “It’s all right,” Jin told Pia, because she was distressed and he could see it. “It’s all right. They said they’d bring it back. They will.”
“Let me make her comfortable,” the med said, and he was dispossessed even of that post—invited back again, to wash Pia’s body, to lift her, to help the med settle her into a waiting clean bed; and then the med took the table out, so it was himself alone with Pia.
“Jin,” Pia said, and he put his arm under her head and held her, still frightened, still thinking on the pleasure they had had and the cost it was to bring a born-man into the world. Pia’s cost. He felt guilt, like bad tape; but it was not a question of tape: it was something built in, irreparable in what they were.
Then they did bring the baby back, and laid it in Pia’s arms; and he could not forbear to touch it, to examine the tininess of its hands, the impossibly little fists. It. Him. This born-man.
xi
Year 2, day 189 CR
Children took their first steps in the second summer’s sun . . . squealed and cried and laughed and crowed. It was a good sound for a struggling colony, a sound which had crept on the settlement slowly through the winter, in baby cries and requisitions for bizarre oddments of supply. Baby washing hung out in the azi camp and the central domes in whatever sun the winter afforded—never cold enough to freeze, not through all the winter, just damp; and bone-chilling nasty when the wind blew.
Gutierrez sat by the roadside, the road they had extended out to the fields. In one direction the azi camp fluttered with white flags of infant clothing out to dry; and in the other the crawlers and earthmovers sat, shrouded in their plastic hoods, and flitters nested there.
He watched—near where limestone blocks and slabs and rubble made the first solid azi buildings, one-roomed and simple. They had left some chips behind, and an ariel was at its stone-moving routine. It took the chips in its mouth, such as it could manage, and moved them, stacked them in what began to look like one of the more elaborate ariel constructions, in the shadow of the wall.
A caliban had moved into the watermeadow again. They wanted to hunt it and Gutierrez left this to Security. He had no stomach for it. Best they hunt it now, before it laid eggs. But all the same the idea saddened him, like the small collection of caliban skulls up behind the main dome.
Barbaric, he thought. Taking heads. But the hunt had to be, or there would be more tunnelling and the azi houses would fall.
He dusted himself off finally, started up and down the road toward the domes, having started the hunters on their way.
Man adjusted—on Gehenna, on Newport. Man gave a little. But between man and calibans, there did not look to be peace, not, perhaps, until the ship should come. There might be an answer, in better equipment. In the projection barriers they might have made work, if the weather had not been so destructive of equipment . . . if, if, and if.
He walked back into the center of camp, saw the Old Man sitting where he usually sat, under the canopy outside main dome. The winter had put years on the colonel. A stubble showed on his face, a spot of stain on his rumpled shirt front. He drowsed, did Conn, and Gutierrez passed him by, entered quietly into the dome and crossing the room past the long messtable, poured himself a cup of the ever-ready tea. The place smelled of fish. The dining hall always did. Most all Gehenna smelled of fish.
He sat down, with some interest, at the table with Kate Flanahan. The special op was more than casual with him; no precise recollection where it had started, except one autumn evening, and realizing that there were qualities in Kate which mattered to him.
“You got it?” Kate asked.
“I headed them out. I don’t have any stomach left for that.”
She nodded. Kate trained to kill human beings, not wildlife. The specials sat and rusted. Like the machinery out there.
“Thought—” Gutierrez said, “I might apply for a walk-about. Might need an escort.”
Kate’s eyes brightened.
But “No,” Conn said, when he broached the subject, that evening, at common mess.
“Sir—”
“We hold what territory we have,” the colonel said. In that tone. And there was no arguing. Silence fell for a moment at the table where all of them who had no domestic arrangements took their meals. It was abrupt, that answer. It was decisive. “We’ve got all we can handle,” the colonel said then. “We’ve got another year beyond this before we get backup here, and I’m not stirring anything up by exploring.”
The silence persisted. The colonel went on with his eating, a loud clatter of knife and fork.
“Sir,” Gutierrez said, “in my professional opinion—there’s reason for the investigation, to see what the situation is on the other bank, to see—”
“We’ll be holding this camp and taking care of our operation here,” the colonel said. “That’s the end of it. That’s it.”
“Yes, sir,” Gutierrez said.
Later, he and Kate Flanahan found their own opportunity for being together, with more privacy and less comfort, in the quarters he had to himself, with Ruffles, who watched with a critical reptilian eye.
“Got a dozen specs going crazy,” Kate said during one of the lulls in their lovemaking, when they talked about the restriction, about the calibans, about things they had wanted to do. “Got people who came here with the idea we’d be building all this time. Special op hoped for some use. And we’re rotting away. All of us. You. Us. Everyone but the azi. The Old Man’s got this notion the world’s dangerous and he’s not letting us out of camp. He’s scared of the blamed lizards, Marco. Can’t you try it on a better day, make sense to him, talk sense into him?”
“I’ll go on trying,” he said. “But it goes deeper than just the calibans. He has his own idea how to protect this base, and that’s what he means to do. To do nothing. To survive till the ships come. I’ll try.”
But he knew the answer already, implicit in the Old Man’s clamped jaw and fevered stare.
“No,” the answer came when he did ask again, days later, after stalking the matter carefully. “Put it out of your head, Gutierrez.”
He and Flanahan went on meeting. And one day toward fall Flanahan reported to the meds that she might be pregnant. She came to live with him; and that was the thing that redeemed the year.
But Gutierrez’ work was slowed to virtual stop—with all the wealth of a new world on the horizon. He did meticulous studies of tiny ecosystems along the shoreline; and when in the fall another caliban turned up in the watermeadow, and when the hunters shot it, he stood watching the crime, and sat down on the hillside in view of the place, sat there all the day, because of the pain he felt.
And the hunters avoided his face, though there was no anger in his sitting there, and nothing personal.
“I’m not shooting any more,” a special op told him later, the man who had shot this one.
As for Flanahan, she had refused the hunt.
xii
Year 2, day 290 CR
The weather turned again toward the winter, the season of bitter cold rain and sometime fogs, when the first calibans wandered into the camp. And stayed the night. They passed like ghosts in the fog, under the haloed lights, came like the silly ariels; but the calibans were far more impressive.
Jin watched them file past the tent, strange and silent except for the scrape of leathery bodies and clawed feet; and he and Pia gathered little Jin against them in the warmth of the tent, afraid, because these creatures were far different than the gay fluttery green lizards that came and went among the tents and the stone shelters.
“They won’t hurt us,” Pia said, a whisper in the fog-milky night. “The tapes said they never hurt anyone.”
“There was the captain,” Jin said, recalling that, thinking of all their safe tent tumbling down into some chasm, the way the born-man Beaumont had died.
“An accident.”
“But born-men shoot them.” He was troubled at the idea. He had never gotten it settled in his mind about intelligence, what animals were and what men were, and how one told the difference. They said the calibans had no intelligence. It was not in their gene set. He could believe that of the giddy ariels. But these were larger than men, and grim and deliberate in their movements.
The calibans moved through, and there were no human sounds, no alarms to indicate harm. But they laced the tentflap and stayed awake with little Jin asleep between them. At every small sound outside they started, and sometimes held hands in the absolute dark and closeness of the tent.
Perhaps, Jin thought in the lonely hours, the calibans were angry that born-men hunted them. Perhaps that was why they came.
But on the next day, when they got up with the sun, a rumor of something strange passed through the camp, and Jin went among the others to see, how all the loose stones they had stacked up for building had been moved and set into a low and winding wall that abutted a building in which azi lived. He went to work with the others, undoing what the calibans had done, but he was afraid with an unaccustomed fear. Until then he had feared only born-men, and known what right and wrong was. But he felt strange to be taking down what the calibans had done, this third and unaccountable force which had walked through their midst and noticed them.
“Stop,” a supervisor said. “People are coming from the main camp to see.”
Jin quit his work and sat down among the others, wrapped tightly in his jacket and sitting close to other azi . . . watched while important born-men came from the main domes. They made photographs, and the born-man Gutierrez came with his people and looked over every aspect of the building. This born-man Jin knew: this was the one they called when they found something strange, or when someone had been stung or bitten by something or wandered into one of the nettles. And there was in this man’s face and in the faces of his aides and in the faces of no few of the other born-men . . . a vast disturbance.
“They respond to instinct,” Gutierrez said finally. Jin could hear that much. “Ariels stack stones. The behavior seems to be wired into the whole line.”
But calibans, Jin thought to himself, built walls in the night, silently, of huge stones, and connected them to buildings with people in them.
He never felt quite secure after that, in the night, although the born-men went out and strung electric fences around the camp, and although the calibans did not come back. Whenever the fogs would come, he would think of them ghosting powerfully through the camps, so still, so purposeful; and he would hug his son and Pia close and be glad that no azi had to be outside by night.
xiii
Year 3, day 120 CR
The air grew warmer again, and the waiting began . . . the third spring, when the ships should come. All the ills—the little cluster of forlorn human graves beside the sea—seemed tragedy on a smaller scale, against the wide universe, because the prospect of ships reminded people that the world was not alone. “When the ships come” was all the talk in camp.
When the ships came, there would be luxuries again, like soap and offworld foods.
When the ships came, the earthmovers would move again, and they would build and catch up to schedule.
When the ships came, there would be new faces, and the first colonists would have a distinction over the newcomers, would own things and be someone.
When the ships came, there would be birthlabs and azi and the population increase would start tipping the balance of Gehenna in favor of man.
But spring wore on past the due date, with at first a fevered anticipation, and then a deep despair, finally hopes carefully fanned to life again; a week passed, a month—and When became a forbidden word.
Conn waited. His joints hurt him; and there would be medicines when the ship came. There would be someone on whom to rely. He thought of Cyteen again, and Jean’s untended grave. He thought of—so many things he had given up. And at first he smiled, and then he stopped smiling and retreated to his private dome. He still had faith. Still believed in the government which had sent him here, that something had delayed the 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; of the graves by the sea; of 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 of those days, of 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.
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 head of Council, had objected, 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.
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.
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.
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 sun. 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.”
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.