Forty Thousand in Gehenna (33 page)

“If Genley’s right, it won’t. If I’m right, it would send a wrong signal not to. Not doing it might signal that we’re weak. And that could equally well endanger Genley.”

“You seriously think these Styxsiders could look at this Base and think we’re without resources.”

“This base has fallen before. Despite all its resources. I think it could be a very reasonable conclusion on their part. But I wouldn’t venture to say just what they think. Their minds are at an angle to ours. And there’s the possibility that we’re not dealing just with human instinct.”

“Calibans again.”

“The Gehennans take them seriously, however the matter seems to us. I think we have to bear that in mind. The Gehennans think the Calibans have an opinion. That’s one thing I’m tolerably sure of.”

“Your proposal?”

“What I said. To take all our avenues.”

The Director frowned, leaned forward and pushed a button on the recorder.

Report from field: R. Genley

The Stygians remain, watching us as we watch them. Today there was at least a minor breakthrough: one of the Stygians approached our shelter and looked us over quite openly. When we came toward him he walked off at a leisurely pace. We reciprocated and were ignored.

Styxside

“Sit,” said Jin; and Genley did so, carefully, in the firelit circle. They took the chance, he and Mannin together—a wild chance, when one of the young Stygians had come a second time to beckon them. They walked alone into the camp, among the calibans, unarmed, and there was the waft of alcohol about the place. There were cups passed. Quickly one came their way as they settled by the fire.

Genley drank first, trying not to taste it. It was something like beer, but it numbed the mouth. He passed the wooden cup on to Mannin and looked up at Jin.

“Good,” said Jin—a figure that belonged in firelight, a figure out of human past, leather-clad, his young face sweating in the light and smoke, his eyes shining with small firesparks. “Good. Genley. Mannin.”

“Jin.”

The face broke into a grin. The eyes danced. Jin took the cup again. “You want to talk to me.”

“Yes,” Genley said.

“On what?”

“There’s a lot of things.” Whatever was in the drink numbed the fingers. Distantly Genley was afraid. “Like what this drink is?”

“Beer,” Jin said, amused. “You think something else, Gen-ley?” He drank from the same cup, and the next man filled it again. They were all men, twelve of them, all told. Three fiftyish. Most young, but none so young as Jin. “Could be bluefish in a cup. You die that way. But you walk in here, you bring no guns.”

“The Base wants to talk. About a lot of things.”

“What do you pay?”

“Maybe it’s just good for everyone, that you and the Base know each other.”

“Maybe it’s not.”

“We’ve been here a long time,” Mannin said, “living next to each other.”

“Yes,” said Jin.

“Things look a lot better for the Styx recently.”

Jin’s shoulders straightened. He looked at Mannin, at them both, with appraising eyes. “Watch us, do you?”

“Why not?” Genley asked.

“I speak for the Styx,” Jin said.

“We’d like to come and go in safety,” Genley said.

“Where?”

“Around the river. To talk to your people. To be friends.”

Jin thought this over. Perhaps, Genley thought, sweating, the whole line of approach had been wrong.

“Friends,” Jin said, seeming to taste the word. He looked at them askance. “With starmen.” He held out his hand for the cup, a line between his brows as he studied them. “We talk about talking,” Jin said.

189 CR, day 30
Message, R. Genley to Base Director

I have finally secured a face to face meeting with the Stygians. After consistently refusing all approach since the incident with Dr. McGee, Jin has permitted the entry of Dr. Mannin and myself into his camp. Apparently their pride has been salved by this prolonged silence and by our approach to them.

Finding no further cause for offense, they were hospitable and offered us food and drink. The young Stygian leader, while reserved and maintaining an attitude of dignity, began to show both humor and ease in our presence, altogether different than the difficult encounter of four days ago.

I would strongly urge, with no professional criticism implied, that Dr. McGee avoid contact with the Styxsiders in any capacity. The name McGee is known to them, and disliked, which evidences, perhaps, both contact between Styx and Cloud, and possibly some hostility, but I take nothing for granted.

189 CR, day 35
Cloud Towers

There was surprisingly little difficulty getting to the Towers of the Cloud. There looked to be, even more surprising, only slightly more difficulty walking among them.

McGee came alone, in the dawning, with only the recorder secreted on her person and her kit slung from her shoulder, from the landing she had made upriver. She was afraid, with a different kind of fear than Jin had roused in her. This fear had something of embarrassment, of shame, remembering Elai, who would not, perhaps, understand. And now she did not know any other way but simply to walk until that walking drew some reaction.

There would be a caliban, she had hoped, on this rare clear winter day: a girl on a Caliban would come to meet her, frowning at her a bit at first, but forgiving her MaGee for her lapse of courtesy.

But none had come.

Now before her loomed the great bulk of the Towers themselves, clustered together in their improbable size.
City
, one had to think. A city of earth and tile, slantwalled, irregular towers the color of the earth, spirals that began in a maze of mounds.

She knew First Tower, nearest the river: so Elai had said. She passed the lower mounds, through eerie quiet, past folk who refused to notice her. She passed the windowed mounds of ordinary dwellings, children playing with ariels, calibans lazing in the sun, potters and woodworkers about their business in sunlit niches in the mounds, sheltered from the slight nip of the wind, walked to the very door of First Tower itself.

A trio of calibans kept the inner hall. Her heart froze when they got up on their legs and made a circle about her, when one of them investigated her with a blunt shove of its nose and flicked a thick tongue at her face.

But that one left then, and the others did, scrambling up the entry into the Tower.

She was not certain it was prudent to follow, but she hitched up her kit strap and ventured it, into a cool earthen corridor clawed and worn along the floor and walls by generations of caliban bodies. Dark—quite dark, as if this was a way the Cloudsiders went on touch alone. Only now and again was there a touch of light from some tiny shaft piercing the walls and coming through some depth of the earthen construction. It was a place for atavistic fears, bogies, creatures in the dark. The Cloudsiders called it home.

In the dim light from such a shaft a human shape appeared, around the dark winding of the core. McGee stopped. Abruptly.

“To see Ellai,” she said when she got her breath.

The shadow just turned and walked up the incline and around the turn. McGee sucked in another breath and decided to try following.

She heard the man ahead of her, or something ahead, heard slitherings too, and pressed herself once against the wall as something rather smallish and in a hurry came bolting past her in the dark. Turn after turn she went up following her guide, sometimes now past doorways that offered momentary sunlight and cast a little detail about her guide: sometimes there were occupants in the huge rooms inside the sunless core, on which doors opened, flinging lamplight out. In some of them were calibans, in others knots of humans, strangely like the calibans themselves in the stillness with which they turned their heads her way. She heard wafts of childish voices, or adult, that let her know ordinary life went on in this strangeness.

And then the spiral, which had grown tighter and tighter, opened out on a vast sunpierced hall, a hall that astounded with its size, its ceiling supported by crazy-angled buttresses of earth. She had come up in the center of its floor, where a half a hundred humans and at least as many calibans waited, as if they had been about some other business, or as if they had known she was coming—they had
seen
her, she realized suddenly, chagrined. There might easily be lookouts on the tower height and they must have seen her coming for at least an hour.

The gathering grew quiet, organized itself so that there was an open space between herself and a certain frowning woman who studied her and then sat down on a substantial wooden chair. A caliban settled possessively about it, embracing the chairlegs with the curve of body and tail and lifting its head to the woman’s hand.

Then McGee saw a face she knew, at the right against the wall, a girl who was grave and frowning, a huge caliban with a raking scar down its side. A moment McGee stared, being sure. The child’s face was hard, offering her no recognition, nothing.

She glanced quickly back to the other, the woman. “My name is McGee,” she said.

“Ellai,” said the woman; but that much she had guessed.

“I’m here,” McGee said then, because a girl had taught her to talk directly, abruptly, in a passable Cloud-side accent, “—because the Styx-siders have come to talk to us; and because the Base thinks we shouldn’t be talking to Styx-siders without talking to Cloud-side too.”

“What do you have to say?”

“I’d rather listen.”

Ellai nodded slowly, her fingers trailing over the back of her caliban. “You’ll answer,” Ellai said. “How is that boy on Styx-side?”

McGee bit her lip. “I don’t think he’s a boy any longer. People follow him.”

“This tower near your doors. You let it be.”

“We don’t find it comfortable. But it’s not our habit to interfere outside the wire.”

“Then you’re stupid,” Ellai said.

“We don’t interfere on Cloud-side either.”

It might have scored a point. Or lost one. Ellai’s face gave no hints. “What are you doing here?”

“We don’t intend to have a ring of Styx towers cutting us off from any possible contact with you. If we encourage you to build closer towers, it could mean more fighting and we don’t want that either.”

“If you don’t intend to interfere with anyone, how do you plan to stop the Styx-siders building towers?”

“By coming and going in this direction, by making it clear to them that this is a way we go and that we don’t intend to be stopped.”

Ellai thought that over, clearly. “What good are you?”

“We give the Styx-siders something else to think about.”

Ellai frowned, then waved her hand. “Then go do that,” she said.

There was a stirring among the gathering, an ominous shifting, a flicking and settling of caliban collars and a pricking-up of the Caliban’s beside Ellai.

“So,” said McGee, uneasy in this shifting and uncertain whether it was good or ill, “if we come and go and you do the same, it ought to make it clear that we plan to keep this way open.”

An aged bald man came and squatted by Ellai’s side, put his spidery fingers on the caliban. Ellai never looked at him.

“You will go now,” Ellai said, staring at McGee. “You will not come here again.”

McGee’s heart speeded. She felt ruin happening, all her careful constructions. She kept distress from her face. “So the Styxsiders will say what they like and build where they like and you aren’t interested to stop it.”

“Go.”

Others had moved, others of the peculiar sort gathering about Ellai, crouched in the shadows. Calibans shifted. An ariel skittered across the floor and whipped into the caliban gathering. Of the sane-looking humans there seemed very few: the woman nearest Ellai’s chair, a leather-clad, hard-faced type; a handful of men of the same stamp, among their gathering of dragons, among lamp-like eyes and spiny crests. The eyes were little different, the humans and the dragons—cold and mad.

A smaller, gray caliban serpentined its way to the clear center of the floor with a stone in its jaws and laid it purposely on the floor. Another followed, placing a second beside it, while the first retrieved another rock. It was crazy. The craziness in the place sent a shiver over McGee’s skin, an overwhelming anxiety to be out of this tower, a remembrance that the way out was long and dark.

A third stone, parallel to the others, and a fourth, dividing her from Ellai.

“The way is open now,” Ellai said.

Go
, that was again, last warning. McGee turned aside in disarray, stopped an instant looking straight at Elai, appealing to the one voice that might make a difference.

Elai’s hand was on Scar’s side. She dropped it and walked a few paces forward—walked with a limp, as if to demonstrate it. Elai was lame. Even that had gone wrong.

McGee went, through the dark spirals, out into the unfriendly sun.

189 CR, day 43
Report, E. McGee

…I succeeded in direct contact; further contacts should be pursued, but cautiously…

189 CR, day 45
Memo, office of the Director to E. McGee

Your qualification of the incident as a limited success seems to this office to be unfounded optimism.

189 CR, day 114
Styxside

Genley looked about him at every step along the dusty road, taking mental notes: Mannin trod behind him, and Kim; and in front of them the rider atop his caliban, unlikely figure, their guide in this trek.

Before them the hitherside tower loomed, massive, solid in their eyes. They had seen this at distance, done long-range photography, observed these folk as best they could. But this one was within their reach, with its fields, its outbuildings. Women labored in the sun, bare-backed to the gentle wind, the mild sun, weeding the crops. They stopped and looked up, amazed at the apparition of starmen.

189 CR, day 134
Field Report: R. Genley

…The hitherside tower is called Parm Tower, after the man who built it. The estimates of tower population are incorrect: a great deal of it extends below, with many of the lower corridors used for sleeping. Parm Tower holds at least two thousand individuals and nearly that number of Calibans: I think about fifty are browns and the rest are grays.