Forty Thousand in Gehenna (29 page)

184 CR, day 05
General Report, Gehenna Base to Alliance Headquarters

…The situation has remained stable over the past half decade. The detente between the Styx settlement and the Cloud River settlements continues in effect. Contacts with both settlements continue in an unprecedented calm. A Stygian tower has risen on the perimeter of the Base. In accordance with established policy the Base has made no move to prohibit construction or movement.

…The two settlements are undergoing rapid expansion in which some see an indication that humanity on Gehenna has passed a crisis point. The historical pattern of conflict has proceeded through the forested area outside Base observation, minor if constant encounters between Stygians and Cloud River settlers involving some loss of life, but never threatening the existence of either, excepting the severe and widespread hostilities of CR 124-125, when flood and crop failure occasioned raids and widespread destruction. The current tranquil period, with its growth in population and food supply, is without precedent. In view of this historical pattern, and with careful consideration of long-range objectives, the Base respectfully requests permission to take advantage of this opportunity to establish subtle and non-interfering ties with both sides in the hope that this peaceful period may be lengthened. This modified and limited intervention seems justified in the hope of establishing Gehenna as a peaceful presence in the zone.

185 CR, day 200
Message, Alliance HQ to Gehenna Base

…extend all cooperation to the Bureau agents arriving with this message, conducting extensive briefings and seminars on the Gehenna settlements…

…While the Bureau concurs that conditions warrant direct observation and increased contact, the Bureau cautions the Mission that prohibitions against technological imports and trade continue. In all due consideration of humanitarian concerns, the Bureau reminds the Mission that the most benign of interventions may result in premature technological advances which may harm or misdirect the developing culture…

185 CR, day 201
Gehenna Base, Staff Meeting

“…meaning they’re more interested in the calibans than in human life,” Security said glumly.

“In the totality,” the Director said. “In the whole.”

“They want it preserved for study.”

“We could haul the Gehennans in by force,” the Director said, “and hunt them wherever they exist, and feed them tape until they’re model citizens. But what would
they
choose, umn? And how many calibans would we have to kill and what would we do to life here? Imagine it—a world where every free human’s in hiding and we’ve dismantled the whole economic system—”

“We could do better for them than watch them.”

“Could we? It’s an old debate. The point is, we don’t know what we’d be doing. We take it slow. You newcomers, you’ll learn why. They’re
different
. You’ll learn that too.”

There were guarded looks down the table, sensitive outworlder faces.

“
Different
, on Gehenna,” the Director said, “isn’t a case of prejudice. It’s a fact of life.”

“We’ve studied the culture,” the incoming mission chief said. “We understand the strictures. We’re here to review them.”

“
Different,”
the Director said again. “In ways you won’t understand by reading papers or getting tape.”

“The Bureau appreciates the facts behind the designation. Union…is interested. Surveillance is being tightened for that reason. The quarantine makes them nervous. They wonder. Doubtless they wonder. Perhaps they’ve begun to have apprehensions of something beyond their intentions here. There will be negotiations. We’ll be making recommendations in that regard too. This
difference
will have its bearing on policy.”

“Union back on Gehenna—”

“That won’t be within our recommendations. Release of data is another matter. A botched alien contact, happening in some other Union recklessness, might not limit its effects so conveniently to a single world. Release of the data is a possibility…educating Union to what they did here.”

There were frowns. The Director’s was deepest. “Our concern is human life here. Now. Our reason for the request—”

“We understand your reasons.”

“We have to do something with this generation or this settlement may take abrupt new directions.”

“Fears for your own security?”

“No. For what this is becoming.”

“The difference you noted.”

“There’s no time,” the Director said, “that I can see any assimilation of Gehenna into Alliance…without the inclusion of humans who think at an angle. You can tape them. You can try to change them. If you don’t understand what they are now, how do you understand them when they’ve come another hundred years, another two hundred on the same course? If you don’t redirect them—what do you do with them? Perpetual quarantine—into the millennia? Governments change. Policies change. Someday somebody will take them in…and
what
they take in…is being shaped in these first centuries. We have a breathing space. A little peace. The chance of contact.”

“We understand that. That’s what we’re here to determine.”

“A handful of years,” the Director said, “may be all we have.”

188 CR, day 178
Cloud River Settlement

There was land across the saltwater and Elai dreamed of it—a pair of peaks lying hazily across the sea.

“What’s there?” she had asked Ellai-Eldest. Ellai had shrugged and finally said mountains. Mountains in the sea.

“Who lives there?” Elai had asked. And, No one, Ellai had said. No one, unless the starships come there. Who else could cross the water?

So Elai set her dreams there. If there was trouble where she was, the mountains across the sea were free of it; if there was dullness in the winter days, there was mystery in the mist-wreathed isle across the waves. If there was No, Elai, and Wait, Elai, and Be still, Elai—on this side of the waves, there was adventure to be had on that side. The mountains were for taking and the unseen rivers were for swimming, and if there were starships holding them, then she would hide in burrows till they took their leave and she and a horde of brave adventurers would go out and build their towers so the strangers could not argue with their possession. Elai’s land, it would be. And she would send to her mother and her cousin Paeia, offering them the chance to come if they would mind
her
rules. The Styxsiders could never reach them there. The rivers there would never flood and the crops would never fail, and behind those mountains would be other mountains to be taken, one after the other.

Forever and forever.

She made rafts of chips of wood and sailed them on the surge. They drifted back and she leaned close and blew them out again. She made canopies for passengers on her most elaborate constructions, and did straw-dolls to ride, and put on pebbles for supplies and put them out to sea. But the surge toppled the stones and swept off the dolls and the raft came back again, so she made sides so the passengers should stay, carved her rafts with a precious bone knife old Dal had made her, and set them out with greater success.

If she had had a great axe such as the woodcutters used, then she might build a real one: so she reckoned. But she tried her bone knife on a sizeable log and made little progress at it, until a rain swept it all away.

So she sat on the shore with Scar, bereft of her work, and thought how unfair it was, that the starships came and went so powerfully into the air. She had tried that too, made ships of wood and leafy wings that fell like stones, lacking the thunderous power of the machines. One dreamed. At least her sea-dreams floated.

The machines, she had thought, made wind to drive them. If only the wind which battered at the shore could get all into one place and drive the ships into the sky. If only.

She saw leaves sail, ever so much lighter on the river’s face, whirling round and about. If she could make the ships lighter. If she could make them like the leaves… If they could be like the fliers that spread wings and flew… She made wings for her sea-borne ships, pairs of leaves, and stuck them up on twigs, and to her delight the ships did fly, if crazily, lurching over the water and the chop until they crashed on rocks.

If she had a woodcutter’s skill, if she could build something bigger still—a great sea-ship with wings—

She sailed carved ships at least to the rocks an easy wade offshore, and imagined those rocks as mountains.

But always the real, the true mountains were across the wider sea, promising and full of dreams.

She watched the last of her ships wreck itself and it all welled up in her, the desire, the wishing, that she could be something more than ten years old and superfluous to all the world. She could order this and that about her life—she had what she wanted in everything that never mattered. She could have gone hungry: she was willing to go hungry in her adventures, which seemed a part of war: she had heard the elders talking. She was willing to sleep cold and get wounds (Cloud Oldest had dreadful scars) and even die, with suitable satisfaction for it—the fireside tales were full of that, a great deal better than her grandmother who had slept out her end (but it was her youngly dead uncle they told the best stories of)—in all she could have done any of these things, imagining herself the subject of tales. But she had no axe and her knife was fragile bone.

She did have Scar, that she relied on for consolation, for near friendship, for pride. He had fought the Styx-folk. When she climbed up to his back she was something more than ten. He played games with her. He was adult and powerful and very, very dangerous, so that Ellai herself had taken her aside and lectured her severely about responsibility. She could feel the power of him, that she could lie on and be rough with and laugh at boys who were still playing at stones with ariels, who teased her with their adolescent manhood and retreated in real fear when Scar shouldered his way into any imagined threat they posed. Then they remembered what he was—and Scar was ever so coy about it, giving way to lesser browns belonging with the elders: biding his time, that was what, only biding his time until his rider grew up to him.

Scar knew her. Only the rest of the world misapprehended what she was. She waited for this revealing with a vast discontent, and the least gnawing doubt, looking at the great brown lump sunning himself with a caliban smirk, among the rocks above the beach.

She whistled, disconsolate with her shipwreck. One lamplike eye opened, the tongue flickering. Scar heaved himself up on his legs in one sinuous rise and looked at her, lifting his collar. He was replete with fish. Satisfied. But because she wanted he came down, lazy with the sun, presenting his bony side jaws for a scratching, the soft underjaw for a stroking.

She touched him, so, and he sank down on his full belly and heaved a sigh. She reached up behind the collar for that bony ridge which helped her mount, planted a bare sandy foot on his foreleg and swung up astride. Her boots and breeches were up there on the rocks: they had had their swim in the saltwater and the seat of her scant undergarments was still wet from a recent wade among the rocks for vantage. Scar’s pebbly hide was hardly comfortable to bare legs and partly bare bottom, but she tapped her foot and headed him for the sandy part of the shore, to cool them both in the sea, to salve her melancholy in games.

They went onto the shelf of sand, a great smooth ripple spreading out around them, a twisting motion to which she swayed as Scar used his tail and hit that buoyant stride that was the freest thing in the world, she reckoned, short of flying. Scar did not take this water into his nose: it was too bitter for him and too salt. He kept his head aloft and paddled now, soaking her.

And then this madness came on her as she looked at the mountains beyond the sea, clearer than ever on this warm day.

She whistled softly, nudged him with her toes and heels, patted him with her hands. He turned, first his head and then the rest of him down to his tail, so that she felt the shift of him, every rippling of muscle, taking this new direction. The waves splashed up and broke about Scar’s face, so that he lifted his head still higher and fought the harder, great driving thrusts of his body. Salt was in her mouth and it was hard to see with the sting of it in her eyes, hard to keep her grip with the lurching whip of Scar’s body through the waves, the constant working of his shoulders. In a salt-hazed blink she realized they were beyond the rocks, well beyond, and of a sudden they were being carried aside from their course. She used her heel, she urged at Scar: he twisted his whole body trying to fight it, and still they were losing against the rush of water.

In some remote area of her mind she was afraid: she was too busy hanging on, too busy trying to discover a way out of it to panic. She kicked at Scar when he turned into the rush and then they were going much faster.

Something breached near them. A steamy plume blew on the wind, and vanished, and then the fear got through. She tried to see where that breaching dark shape had gone, and quite as suddenly something brushed them, a back bigger than any three browns broke the water right next to them and Scar was jolted under her, twisting suddenly, flailing in a roll that left her clinging only to the collar.

He ducked under, a brief twist of the body, and then he moved with all the fluid strength he could use. She clung to his bony plates and skin till her fingers ached, holding her breath, and then she lost him. She launched out on her own in sure, desperate strokes, looking for the surface, blind, and knowing there was something else nearby, something that might take half her body in a gulp, and the moving water resisted her strokes, wanting to pull her down.

She surrendered one direction, gathered speed and broke through to light in a spray of droplets, sucked air and water into her throat and coughed and flailed to stay afloat.

She felt the contact coming under the surface, a shock of water, a numbing blow against her legs. She swam in utter panic, striking out for the shore, the distant pale sand that wavered in her streaming eyes. Other water-shocks flashed about her—a body brushed hers, a claw raked her and threw her under. She kept swimming, weaker now, failing and choking, driving herself long after she stopped seeing where she was going and after she knew the weak motions of her arms and legs could never make it.