Forty Thousand in Gehenna

  Someone swore.

  "It's not right," another said. That was more than true.

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  They waited two hours, expecting approach: it failed, except for a few small lizards.

  But trails of smoke went up, among the trees and the huts— the smoke of evening fires.

  iii

  There had been a sound like thunder, disturbing the too-close sick-room where the old man lay, amid a clutter of wornout blankets. An ariel perched on the windowsill, and another enjoyed a permanent habitation in the stack of baskets by the door. The sound stopped. "Is it raining?" Jin elder asked, stirring from that sleep that had held him neither here nor there. Pia tried to tell him something.

  And he was perplexed, because Jin Younger was there too, that tall man sitting on the chest by Pia. There was silver in his son's beard, and in Pia's hair. When had they gotten so old?

  GENEALOGY 58 CR

  But Pia— his Pia— was dead long ago. Her sibs had gone close after her; the last of his had gone this spring. All were dead, who had known the ships. None had lived so long as he— if it was life, to lie here dreaming.

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  There was none that recalled the things he remembered. The faces confused him, not clear types such as he had known, but still, much like those he had known.

  "Mark," he called; and: "Green?" But Mark was dead and Green was lost, long ago. They told him Zed had vanished too.

  "I'm here," someone said. Jin. He recalled them, and focused on the years in the curious way things would slip into focus and go out again. His children had come back to him, at least Jin and Pia had.

  "I don't think he understands." Pia's voice, a whisper, across the room. "It's no good, Jin."

  "Huh."

  "He always used to talk about the ships."

  "We could take him outside."

  "I don't think he'd even know."

  Silence a moment. Darkness a moment. He felt far away.

  "Is he breathing?"

  "Not very strong. —Father. Do you hear? The ships have come."

  Over the fields of grain, high in blue skies, a thin splinter of silver. He knew what it was to fly. Had flown, once. It was a hot day. They might swim in the creek when they were done with harvest, with the sun heating the earth, and making the sweat run on his back.

  "Father?"

  Into the bright, bright sun.

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  iv

  Pia-now-eldest walked out into the light, grim, looked round her at the knot of hangers-on… the young, the scatter of children they had sent to Jin. "He's gone," she said.

  Solemn faces. A handful of them, from about a hand of years to twice that.

  Solemn eyes.

  "Go on," Pia said, and picked up a stick. "We get first stuff. Get. Go to Old Jon. Go to Ben. Go wherever you like. There's nothing for you here."

  They ran. Some cried. They knew her right arm— one of the Hillers, who seldom came into town at all, Pia Eldest— no timid towndweller they could put anything off on. She followed them with her eyes, down the row of ramshackle limestone houses, the last ragtag lot of youngers Old Jin had had. They might be kin or just strays. The old man had been readier than most to take them in. The worst stayed with Old Jin. He never hit them, and they had stolen his food until Pia found it out; and then there had been no more stealing, no.

  She went inside, into the stench of the unkept house, into the presence of the dead, suddenly lacking an obligation, realizing that she had nothing more to do. Her brother Jin was going through the chest, and laid claim to the other blanket besides the one Old Jin was wrapped in. She frowned at that, stood there leaning on her stick.

  "You don't want anything?" Jin asked her. He stood up, a half a head taller. They wore their hair short, alike; wore boots of caliban hide and shirts and breeches of coarse town weave; looked like as all Old Jin and Pia's offspring. "You can have the blanket."

  That surprised her. She shook her head, still scowling. "Don't want anything. Got enough."

  "Go on. You fed him the last three years."

  She shrugged. "Your food too."

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  "You made the trips."

  "So. No matter. Didn't do it for that."

  "Owe you for the blanket," her brother said.

  "Collect it someday. What's town to us? I don't want what smells of it."

  Jin looked aside, on the small and withered form beneath the other blanket. Looked at her again. "We go?"

  "I'll wait for the burying."

  "We could take him up in the hills. There's those would carry."

  She shook her head. "This is his place."

  "This." Jin rolled the razor and the plastic cup into the blanket, tucked them under his arm. "Filth. Get up to the hills. Those new born-men—they'll come here. They'll be trouble, that's all. Jin's ships. He thought everything the main-campers did was all right. How could he know so much and so little?"

  "I had myself a main-camper once. He said— he said the old azi had to think like Jin, that's all."

  "Maybe they did. Anything the main-campers wanted. Only now there's new main-campers. You remember how it was. You remember what it was, when old Gallin had the say in main-camp. That's what it'll be again.

  You mind me, Pia, you don't wait for the burying or they'll have you plowing fields."

  She spat, half a laugh.

  "You mind me," Jin said. "That's how it was. Mark and Zed and Tam and I— we ran out on it."

  "So did I. It wasn't hard." She took a comb Jin had left. "This. I'll keep this."

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  "They'll be coming here."

  "They'll bring things."

  "Tape machines. They'll catch the youngers and line us up in rows."

  "Maybe they should."

  "You thinking like him?"

  She walked away to the door, looked out above the abandoned, caliban-haunted domes and the fallen sun-tower where vines had had their way, where the town stopped. The ship sat there in the distant plain, shining silver, visible above the roofs.

  "You don't go," Jin argued with her, coming and taking her shoulders.

  "You don't be going out there talking to those born-men"

  "No," she agreed.

  "Forget the stinking born-men."

  "Aren't we?"

  "What?"

  "Born-men. We were born here."

  "I'm going," Jin said. "Come along."

  "I'll walk with you to the trail." She started on her way. There was nothing to carry but the staff, and what Jin chose to keep; and behind them, the town would break in and steal.

  So Old Jin was gone.

  And she was sitting by the doorway when they brought the New Men to her.

  They disturbed her with their strangeness, as they disturbed the town.

  There were those who were ready to be awed by them, she saw that, but she looked coldly at the newcomers and kept her mind to herself.

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  Their clothes were all very fine, like the strange tight weave which the looms the town made nowadays could never duplicate. Their hair was short as Hillers wore it and they smelled of strange sharp scents.

  "They say there was a man here who came on the ships," the first of them said. He had a strange way of talking, not that the words were unclear, just the sound of them was different. Pia wrinkled her nose.

  "He died."

  "You're his daughter. They said you might talk to us. We'd like you to come and do that. Aboard the ship, if you'd like."

  "Won't go there." Her heart beat very fast, but she kept her face set and grim and unconcerned. They had guns. She saw that. "Sit."

  They looked uncomfortable or offended. One squatted down in front of her, a man in blue weave with a lot of metal and
stripes that meant importance among born-men. She remembered.

  "Pia's your name."

  She nodded shortly.

  "You know what happened here? Can you tell us what happened here?"

  "My father died."

  "Was he born?"

  She pursed her lips. All the rest knew that much, whatever it meant, because it had never made sense to her, how a man could not be born. "He was something else," she said.

  "You remember the way it was at the beginning. What happened to the domes?" The gesture of a smooth, white hand toward the ruins where calibans made walls. "Disease? Sickness?"

  "They got old," she said, "mostly."

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  "But the children— the next generation—"

  She remembered and chuckled to herself, grew sober again, thinking on the day the born-men died.

  "There were children," the man insisted. "Weren't there?"

  She drew a pattern in the dust, scooped up sand and drew with it, a slow trickling from her hand.

  "Sera. What happened to the children?"

  "Got children," she said. "Mine."

  "Where?"

  She looked up, fixed the stranger with her stronger eye. "Some here, some there, one dead."

  The man sucked in his lips, thinking. "You live up in the hills."

  "Live right here."

  "They said you were out of the hills. They're afraid of you, sera Pia."

  It was not, perhaps, wise, to make Patterns in the dust. The man was sharp.

  She dumped sand atop the spiral she had made. "Live here, live there."

  "Listen," he said earnestly, leaning forward. "There was a plan. There was going to be a city here. Do you know that? Do you remember lights?

  Machines?"

  She gestured loosely toward the mirrors and the tower, the wreckage of them amid the caliban burrowings in main camp. "They fell. The machines are old." She thought of the lights aglow again; the town might come alive with these strangers here. She thought of the machines coming to life again and eating up the ground and levelling the burrows and the mounds.

  It made her vaguely uncomfortable. Her brother was right. They meant to 160

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  plow the land again. She sensed that, looking into the pale blue eyes. "You want to see the old Camp? Youngers'll take you there."

  And on the other side there was lack of trust, dead silence. Of course, they had seen the mounds. It was strange territory.

  "Maybe you might go with us."

  She got up, looked round her at the townfolk, who tried to be looking elsewhere, at the ground, at each other, at the strangers. "Come on then,"

  she said.

  They talked to their ship. She remembered such tricks as they used, but the voices coming out of the air made the children shriek. "Old stuff," she said sourly, and reached for Old Jin's stick that he had had by the door, leaned on it as if she were tired and slow. "Come on. Come on."

  Two of them would go with her. Three stayed in the village. She walked with them up the road, in amongst the weeds and ruins. She walked slowly, using the stick.

  And when she had gotten into the wild place she hit them both and ran away, heading off among the caliban retreats until her side ached and she needed the stick.

  But she was free, and as for the mounds, she knew how to skirt them and where the accesses were to be avoided.

  She came by evening into the wooded slopes, up amongst the true, rock-hearted hills.

  Someone whistled, far and lonely in the woods where flitters and ariels darted and slithered. It was a human sound. One of the watchers had seen her come.

  Home, the whistle said to her. She whistled back; Pia, her whistle said.

  There were friends and enemies here, but she had her knife and she brought away a comb and her father's stick, confident and set upon her way.

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  At least Old Jin had not been crazy. She knew that now. She had seen the ships come, and she remembered the born-men who had lived in the domes, who had died and mingled their types with azi, some in the hills and some few scratching the land with wooden plows.

  There were ships again and born-men to own the world.

  Azi marching in rows, her brother Jin had said. But she was not azi and she would never march to their orders.

  v

  Strangers.

  Green wrinkled his nose and blinked in the light, perceiving disruption in the Pattern made on the plain. There was a new motion now. He felt the stirrings underground recognizing it.

  The disquiet grew extreme. He dived back into the dark, finding his way with body and direction-sense rather than with eyes. Small folk skittered past him as he went, muddy slitherings of long-tailed bodies past his bare legs as he stooped and hastened along in that surefooted gait he had learned very long ago, hands before him in the dark, bare feet scuffing along the muddy bottom. His toes met a serpentine and living object in the dark, his skin felt an interruption in the draft that should blow in this corridor, his ears picked up the sough of breathing: he knew what his fingers would meet before they met it, and he simply scrambled up the tail and over the pebble-leathery back, doing the great brown less damage than its blunt claws could do to him in getting past. The brown gave a throaty exhalation, flicked an inquisitive tongue about his shoulders and when he simply scurried on, it slithered after.

  It wanted to know then. It was interested. Green darted up again, taking branches of the tunnels which led nearer the strangers. He was, after all, Green, and old, almost the oldest of his kind, in his way superior to the elder brown which whipped along after him. It wanted to know; and he changed his plans and darted up again to daylight to show it.

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  When he had come to the light again, up where trees crested the mound, where he had free view of the town and the shining thing which had come to rest in the meadow, the brown squatted by him to look too.

  He made the Pattern for it. He offered up what he had, making the spirals rightwise up to a point and leftwise thereafter.

  The brown moved heavily and seized up a twig fallen from the trees, crunched it in massive jaws. The crest was up. The eyes were more dark than gold. Green sat with the muscles at his own nape tightening, lacking expression for his confusion The brown was distraught. It was everywhere evident.

  It nosed him suddenly, directing him back inside the mound. He reached the cool safe dark and still it pushed at him, herding him toward the deepest sanctuary.

  There were others gathered in the dark. They huddled together and in time one of the browns came to herd them further.

  It was days that they travelled in that way, until they had come far upriver, to the new mounds, and here they stayed, able to take the sun again, here where calibans made domes and walls and caliban young and grays came out to sun, heedless of the danger westward.

  vi

  T51 days MAT: Alliance Probe Boreas; Report, to be couriered to Alliance Security Operations under seal COL/M/TAYLOR/ASB/SPEC/OP/NEWPORT-PROJECT/

  …initial exploration in sector A on accompanying chart #a-1 shows complete collapse of Union authority. The prefab domes are deserted, overgrown with brush. The solar array is indicated by letter a on chart #a-1, lying under the wreckage of the tower; brush has grown over most of it.

  Inquiry among inhabitants produces no clear response except that the fall occurred perhaps a decade previous. This may have been due to weather.

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  On the other hand, the prefab domes sit amid a convolute system of ridges identical to those observed throughout the riverside and named in orbiting survey reports 123. We have found the caliban mounds predicted by Union information on the site, but there is no close agreement between present circumstance and Union records. If one example might illustrate the disturbing character of
the site, chart#a-1 may serve: it is inconceivable that the original colony would have established their domes and fields in the center of the mound system. What was level terrain in the Union records is now a corrugated landscape overgrown with brush. When asked what became of the residents of the domes, the townsmen answer that some of them came to the town, and some went to the hills. Orbiting survey does show (chart #a-2) a second settlement in the hills about ten kilometers from the town, but considering the potential risk of extending interference without understanding the interrelation of the systems, the mission has confined itself to the perimeter outlined for the colony.

  There was, however, one interview with a woman, one Pia, no other name known, who has vanished from the community after assaulting mission personnel she had agreed to guide (see sec. #2 of this report) and who may have retreated to the hills. (The transcript of the Pia interview is included as document C, sec. 12. The economy of the town and that of the dwellers in the hills are perhaps linked in trade: see documents in C

  section, especially sec. 11.)

  When questioned regarding the calibans the townsmen generally look away and affect not to have heard; if pressed, they refuse direct answer.

  The interviewers have not been able to ascertain whether the townsmen hold the calibans in some fear or whether they distrust the interviewers.

  The mission finds the townsmen politically naive, existing in a neolithic lifestyle. The individual Pia recalled technology, and no inhabitants seem surprised at modern equipment, but if there is any technology among them other than a few items originally imported from offworld, the mission has not observed it. They plow with hand-pushed wooden plows, have no metals except what was originally imported, and apparently do not have high-temperature-forging techniques necessary to work what metal they do have. Weaving and pottery are known, and may conceivably have been an independent discovery. If there is ritual, religion, or ceremonies of 164