Forty Thousand in Gehenna (12 page)

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.

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. “Support 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.

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 bonechilling 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 walkabout. 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.

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.