Forty Thousand in Gehenna (17 page)

No answer.

He was gasping and sweating by the time he reached the top of the last ridge, with the town and Camp in front of him all lit up in floods. He stood there leaning over, his hands on his knees, getting his breath, and as soon as the pain subsided he started moving again.

For a very little he would have given up his searching then, having no liking for going into the main Camp—for going to Gutierrez—Pardon, sir, has your daughter gotten home? I left her on the cliffs and when I got back she was gone…

He had never seen Gutierrez angry; he had no wish to face him or Flanahan; but he reckoned that he might have no choice.

And then, when he had only crossed the fringes of the town, running along the road under the floodlights—“Hey,” a maincamper shouted at him: “You—did you come up from the azi town?”

He skidded to a stop, recognized Masu in the dark, one of the guards. “Yes, sir.” A lie, and half a lie: he had cut across the edge of it and so come up from the town.

“Woman’s missing. Out of bio. Flanahan-Gutierrez.—They’re supposed to be looking down in town. Are they? She went out this morning and she hasn’t gotten back. Are they searching out that way?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and the sweat he had run up turned cold. “They don’t know where she is?”

“Get the word down that way, will you? Go back and pass it.”

“I’ll get searchers up,” he said, breathless, spun about and ran, with what haste he could muster.

They would find out, he kept thinking in an agony of fear. The main Camp found everything out, whatever they tried to hide. They would know, and he and his brothers would be to blame. And what the main Camp might do then, he had no idea, because no human being had ever lost another. He only knew he had no wish to face her people on his own.

The sun came up again, the second sun since Jane was gone; and Gutierrez sat down on the hillside, wiped his face and unstopped his canteen for a sip to ease his throat. They had it gridded off, searchers in all the sections between the Camp and the cliffs and the Camp and the river. His wife reached him, sank down and took her own canteen, and there was a terrible, bruised look to her eyes.

The military was out there, in force, by pairs; and azi who knew the territory searched—among them the young azi who had come to him and Kate to admit the truth. A frightened boy. Kate had threatened to shoot him. But that boy had been out all the night and roused all the young folk he could find…had gone out again, on no knowing what reserves. It was not just the boy. It was Jane. It was the world. It had given her to them. But Jane thought in Gehenna-time; thought of the day, the hour. Had never seen a city. Had no interest in her studies—just the world, the moment, the things she wanted…now. Everything was now.

What good’s procedure? she would say. She wanted to understand what a shell was, what the creature did, not what was like it elsewhere. What good’s knowing all those things? It’s this world we have to live in. I was born here, wasn’t I? Cyteen sounds too full of rules for me.

The day went, and the night, and a new day dawned with a peculiar coldness to the light—an ebbing out of hope. His wife said nothing, slumped against him and he against her.

“Some run away,” he offered finally. “In the azi town—some of them go into the hills. Maybe Jane took it into her head—”

“No,” she said. Absolute and beyond argument. “Not Jane.”

“Then she’s gotten lost. It’s easy in the mounds. But she knows—the things to eat; the way to survive—I taught her; she knows.”

“She could have taken a fall,” his wife said. “Could have hurt herself—Might be too wet to start a fire.”

“All the same she could live,” Gutierrez said. “If she had two legs broken, she could still find enough within reach she could get moisture and food. That’s the best guess: that she’s broken something, that she’s tucked up waiting for us—She’s got good sense, our Jane. She was born here, isn’t that what she’d say?”

They did it to bolster their own courage, shed hopes on each other and kept going.

Jane screamed, came awake in the dark and stifled the outcry in sudden terror—the smell of earth about her, the prospect of hands which might touch… But silence, no breathing nearby, no intimation of human presence.

She lay still a moment, listening, her eyes useless in this deep and dark place where they had brought her. She ached. And time was unimportant. The sun seemed an age ago, a long, long nightmare/dream of naked bodies and couplings in a dark so complete it was beyond the hope of sight. She was helpless here, robbed of every faculty and somewhere in that time, of wit as well.

She lay there gathering it again, lay there waking up to the fact that, having done what they had done, the Weirds were gone, and she was alone in this place. She imagined the beating of her heart, so loud it filled up the silence. It was terror, when she thought that she had long since passed the point of fear. She was discovering something more of horror—being lost and left. Isolation had never dawned on her in the maelstrom just past.

Think
, her father would say; think of all the characteristics of the thing you deal with.

Tunnels, then, and tunnels might collapse: how strong the roof?

Tunnels had at least one access; tunnels might have more; tunnels meant air; and wind; and she felt a breeze on naked skin.

Tunnels were made by calibans, who burrowed deep; and going the wrong way might go down into the depths.

She drew a deep breath—moved suddenly, and as suddenly claws lit on her flesh and a sinewy shape whipped over her. She yelled, a shriek that rang into the earth and died, and flailed out at the touch—

It skittered away…an ariel; a silly ariel, like old Ruffles. That was all. It headed out the way Ruffles would head out if startled indoors…and it knew the way. It went toward the breeze.

She sucked in wind again, got to hands and knees and scrambled after—up and up a moist earth slope, blind, keeping low for fear of hitting her head if she attempted to stand. And a dim light grew ahead, a brighter and brighter light.

She broke out into the daylight blind and wiping at her eyes…saw movement then, and looked aside. She scrambled to her feet, seeing a human shape—seeing the azi-born young man crouched there, the first who had touched her. Alone.

“Where are the rest of them?” she asked. “Hiding up there?” There was brush enough, in this bowl between the mounds, up on the ridges, all about.

And then a sweep of her eye toward the left—up and up toward a caliban shape that rested on the hill, four meters tall and more—brown and monstrous, huger than any caliban she had imagined. It regarded her with that lofty, onesided stare of a caliban, but the pupil was round, not slit. The feet clutched the curved surface and a fallen branch snapped beneath its forward leaning weight as the head turned toward her. She stared—fixed, disbelieving when it moved first one leg and then the other, serpentining forward.

Then the danger came home to her, and she yelled and scrambled backward, but brush came between her and it, and trees, as she climbed higher on the further slope.

No one stopped her. She looked back—at the caliban which threaded its way among the trees; again at the azi-born, who sat there placid in the path of that monster. Very slowly the young man got to his feet and walked toward the huge brown caliban—stopped again, looking back at her, his hand on its shoulder.

She began to run, up and over the mound—scrambling among the brush and the rocks. A gray caliban was there, down the slope and another—near her, that jolted her heart. It lashed about in the brush, caliban-like: it skittered down the slope and along the ridge, headed toward the river past the rocks—it must be going to the river…

In a flash she realized where she likely was, near rocks that thrust through the mounds: rocks and the river below the cliffs.

She stopped running when she had spent her breath, slumped down amongst the trees and took stock of herself, her remnant of clothing, that she put to rights with trembling hands. She sat there in the brush with tears and exhaustion tugging at her, and she fought the tears off with swipes of a muddy hand.

“Hey,” someone said; and she started, whirled to her knees and half to her feet, like something wild.

From the Camp: they were two of the men from the Camp, Ogden and Masu. She stood up, shaking in the knees, and the blood drained from her face, sudden shame as she stood there with her clothes in rags and her pride in question. “There,” she yelled, and pointed back over the ridge, “there—they caught me and dragged me off—they’re there…”

“Who?” Masu asked. “Who did? Where?”

“Over the ridge,” she kept crying, not wanting to explain, not wanting anything but to see it wiped out, the memory and the smiling, silent lot of them.

“Take care of her,” Masu said to Ogden. “Take care of her. I’ll round up the others. We’ll see.”

“There’s Calibans,” she said, looking from one to the other of them. Ogden took her arm. Her coveralls were torn almost beyond staying on; she reached to cover herself and gasped for breath in shock. “There’s calibans—a kind no one ever saw—” But Ogden was pulling her away.

She looked back when Ogden had hastened her off with him. Fire streaked across the sky, and she stared at the burning star.

“That’s a flare,” Ogden said. “That’s Masu saying we found you.”

“There are people,” she said, “people living in the mounds.”

“Hush,” Ogden said, and squeezed her hand.

“It’s so. They live there. The Weirds. With the calibans.”

Ogden looked at her—old as her father, a rough man, and big. “I’m going to get you out of here,” he said. “Can you run?”

She caught her breath and nodded, shaking in all her limbs. Ogden seized her hand and took her with him.

But they met others, coming their way…and one was her father and the other her mother. She might have run to meet them: she had the strength left. But she did not. She stopped still, and they came and hugged her, her mother and then her father, and shed tears. She was dry of them.

“I’m going back after Masu,” Ogden said. “It may be trouble back there.”

“They should get them,” Jane said, quite, quite coldly. She had gotten her dignity back, had found it again, used it like a cloak between her and her parents, despite her nakedness.

“Jane,” her father said—there were tears in his eyes, but her own were still dry. “What happened?”

“They caught me and dragged me in there. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her father hugged her, and her mother did. “Come home,” her mother said, and she walked with them, no longer afraid, no longer feeling anything but a cold distance between herself and what had happened.

It was a far way, to the Camp; and her father talked about medics. “No,” she said to that. “No. I’m going home.”

“Did they—?” That her mother found the question hard struck her as strange, and ominous. Her face burned.

“Oh, yes. A lot of times.”

“There has to be law,” Gallin said, in Council, in the dome—looked down at all the heads of departments. “There has to be law. We rout them out of there and we have to do something with them. It was a mistake to sit back and let it go on. We can’t be having this…this desertion of the young. We set up fences; we organize a hunt and clear the mounds.”

“They’re our own kind,” the confessor-advocate objected, rising from her chair, grayhaired and on the end of her rejuv. “We can’t take guns in there.”

“We should,” Gutierrez said, also on his feet, “mobilize the town, dig foundations that go far down; we ought to make the barriers we meant to make at the beginning. We can shoot them—we can level the mounds—and it happens all over again. Time after time. It never works. There’s more going out there than we understand. Maybe another species—we don’t know. We don’t know their habits, their interrelations, we don’t know what drives them. We shoot them and we dig them out and it never works.”

“We mobilize the azi,” Gallin said. “We give them arms and train them—make a force out of them.”

“For the love of God, what for?” the advocate cried. “To march on calibans? Or to shoot their own relatives?”

“There has to be order,” Gallin said. He had gained weight over the years. His chins wobbled in his rage. He looked up at them. “There has to be some order in their lives. The tape machines are gone, so what do we give them? I’ve talked to Education. We have to have some direction. We make regiments and sections; we mount guard; we protect this camp.”

“From what?” Gutierrez asked. And added, because he knew Gallin, because he saw the insecure anger: “Sir.”

“Order,” Gallin said, pounding the able for emphasis. “Order in the world. No more dealing with runaways.
No more tolerance.”

Gutierrez sank down again, and the confessor-advocate sat down. There was a murmuring from the others, an undertone of fear.

The calibans had come closer and closer over the years and they had found no occasion to say no.

But he had qualms when he saw the azi marshalled out for drill, when he saw them given instruction to kill. He walked back on that day with a lump in his gut.

Kate and Jane met him, daughter like mother—so, so alike they stood there, arms about each other, with satisfaction in what they saw. A change had come about in Jane. She had never had that hard-eyed look before she went out into the mounds. She had grown up and away, to Kate’s side of the world. No more curiosity; no more inquiring into the world’s small secrets: he foresaw silence until that threat out there was swept away, until Jane saw the world as safe again.

While azi marched in rows.

Pia Younger set the bucket down inside the door, in the two room house that was theirs, a house hung with clothes and oddments from the rafters—drying onions, dried peppers, plastic pots balanced on the beams, and her own bed in this corner, her parents’ bed in the other room. And rolled pallets that belonged to her brothers, who prepared for another kind of leaving.