Forty Thousand in Gehenna (38 page)

“What do I do?” McGee had asked.

“Nothing,” Elai said. “No, let it be. Some caliban will take it when it wants one.”

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

Every time I think I understand they do something I can’t figure.

A woman dropped a stone at my feet. It was warm from the sun. Calibans do that to hatch the eggs. It represented a baby somehow, that was important to her. She didn’t cry. Cloud River folk don’t, that I’ve ever seen. But she was very intense about what she did. I think she gave up status doing it.

Mother love?

Do they love?

How do I end up asking such a question? Sometimes I know the answer. Sometimes I don’t.

Elai has some feeling for me. My friend, she says. We talk—we talk a great deal. She listens to me. Maybe it was her health that made her what I saw, that separated her from her sons.

The calibans swim to sea when their people die. One didn’t. It died on the shore today. People came and skinned it. Other calibans ate it. What it died of I don’t know.

It took all day to disappear. The people collected the bones. They make things out of bone. It’s their substitute for metal. They consider it precious as we might value gold. They’re always carved things, things to wear. They have wood for other things. A few really old iron blades: they take care of those. But they have caliban bone for treasure.

They have native fiber for cloth; but leather is precious as the bone. Only riders have all leather clothes. They get patched. They don’t ever throw them away, I’d guess. It’s like the bone. A treasure. This colony was set where it had no metals, had no domestic animals, no resources except their neighbors. I think they would choose another way if they had one. But they do what they can. They won’t hunt; not calibans, at least, and there’s nothing else to hunt, on land.

They’re digging on the bank again. The calibans are. Across the river. Elai says they may have some new tower in mind, but that it looks to her like more burrows.

“What’s the difference?” I asked.

But Elai wouldn’t say.

I’m sure orbiting survey has picked it up. I’ve put it in my report as indeterminate construction. They’ll want some interpretation.

I’m not sure Elai knows.

204 CR, day 290
Cloud Towers

On the summit of First Tower, under a dying summer sun:

“MaGee, what is it like to fly?”

Elai asked questions again, questions, and questions. But now she thought of ships.

“Like sitting on something that shakes,” McGee said. “You weigh a little more than usual sometimes, sometimes less: it makes your stomach feel like it’s floating. But up there the river would look like a thread. The sea looks flat, all smoothed out and shining like the river at dawn; the mountains look like someone dropped a wrinkled cloth; the forests like waterweed.”

Elai’s eyes rested on hers. That spark was back behind them, that thing that adulthood had crushed. Sadness then. “I won’t ever see these things,” she said.

“I haven’t,” McGee said, “in a good many years. Maybe I won’t again. I don’t think so.”

For a long while Elai said nothing. The frown deepened moment by moment. “There is a Wire in the sky.”

“No.”

“So you could go when you like.”

McGee thought about that one, not sure where it led.

“Could we?” Elai asked. “We say that the Wire keeps your stone towers safe. But is that so, MaGee? The ships come and go from inside there to outside. I think that Wire keeps us away from ships. My boats, MaGee, what could they find, but places like this one? They couldn’t find where we came from. We’d just go back and forth, back and forth, on rivers and on seas, and find more islands. But we couldn’t go up. You watch us from the sky. How small, you say. How small. What did we do, MaGee, to be shut away?”

McGee’s heart was beating very fast. “Nothing. You did nothing. How do you know all this, Elai? Did you figure it?”

“Books,” Elai said finally. “Old books.”

“Could I,” asked McGee, and her heart was going faster still, “could I see these books?”

Elai thought about it and looked at her very closely. “You think something might be important to you in these books? But you know where we came from. You know everything there is to know—don’t you, MaGee?”

“I know the outside. Not the inside. Not things I’d like to know.”

“Like what?”

“Calibans. Like how you know what they’re saying.”

“Books won’t tell you that. Books tell about us, where the lines started. How we got to the Cloud and how it was then. How the Styx-siders began.”

“How did they?”

Elai thought again, frowning, opened her hand palm up. “Can’t say it so you’d understand. It’s Patterns.”

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

There are a thousand gestures that have meaning among Cloud River folk, gestures which I think are the same for Styxside. Often they actually use stones, which some folk carry in their pockets or in small bags; but particularly the riders have a way of expressing themselves in sign, pretending the fingers are dropping pebbles. Or picking them up. There’s no alphabetic system in this. The signs are true signs, having a whole meaning in the motion.

But they do write. Counting both sign and writing there’s considerable education among these people, no mean feat considering the diversity of the systems.

Concerning communication with the calibans, there are some concepts that pass back and forth. A caliban can ‘ask’ a human a direction and basic intentions. I can get old Scar to respond to me as far as
I want to go up
, meaning to the roof. Or down.

There are the Weirds. There are always the Weirds. They care for the children and they function somewhere between priesthood and janitorial duties. They keep the burrows clean. The calibans seem to take pleasure in being touched by them. Most Weirds are thin: high activity, a diet more of fish and less of grain, a lack of sunlight. But in general they seem healthy physically. In any human society off Gehenna their sanity would be in question. It is uncertain whether this is a mental aberration peculiar to the culture, as certain human cultures historically have spawned certain disorders with more frequency than others, or come up with completely unique maladies.

Hypothesis: this is a mental disorder uniquely produced by Gehennan culture with its reliance on calibans. Humans identify completely with the creatures on whom all humans rely for survival, and receive a certain special status which confirms them in their state.

Hypothesis: this is a specialized and successful adaptation of humankind to Gehenna, growing out of the azi culture which was left here in ignorance.

Hypothesis: Weirds
can
talk to calibans.

204 CR, day 293
Cloud Towers, the top of First Tower

“You mean you can’t say it in words.”

“It’s not a word thing.” Elai laughed strangely and made a scattering gesture. “Oh, MaGee, I could tell it to Din and he’d know. I can’t figure how to do it.”

“Teach me to Pattern.”

“Teach you.”

“At least as much as the boy knows.”

“So you tell the stone towers? So they know if we got underneath the Wire? There was a time the towers fell. More than once. There was a time the whole Base sank in. We remember too.” Scar had stirred, putting himself between them and the ariel, which cleared the wall in a great hurry. Elai scratched the scaly jaw, looked at her beneath her brows. “They’re building them a new tower this year, the Styxsiders, closer to the Wire.”

“You think the Base is in danger?”

“Styx is trouble. Always is. You tell the stone towers that with your com.” She nodded toward the river, up it, toward the forested horizon. “Our riders move up there. They kill a few this year, I think. Maybe next. That’s in the Patterns.”

“How?” McGee asked. “Elai, how do you mean—in the Patterns?”

Elai stretched out her hand, swept it at all the horizon. “You write on little things. Calibans, they write large, they write mountains and hills and the way things move.”

A chill was up McGee’s back. “Teach me,” she said again. “Teach me.”

Elai stroked Scar’s jaw again, thoughts passing behind her eyes. “Calibans could make one mouthful of you.”

“Human beings?”

“Been known. I send you down with them—you could be in bad trouble.”

“I didn’t ask to go anywhere with calibans. I asked you to teach me. Yourself.”

“I’ve showed you all the things I can show. The things you want, MaGee—you got to go down to them. You can talk and talk to me; I can show you
up
and
down
and
stop
and such. But you really want to talk the Patterns, you got to talk to
him.”
One vast eye stared at her, gold and narrow-pupilled in the light, a round of iris bigger than the sun. Scar was looking at her, sidelong, in his way.

“All right,” McGee said, scared enough to fall down where she was, but she put her hands in her pockets and looked casual as she could. “They smell fear?”

There was humor in Elai’s eyes, but it was Elai-Eldest’s face, implacable. “You go down,” Elai said. “You go down and down as far as you can. I think Scar will go. I could be wrong.”

“How long will I be there? What will I eat?”

“They’ll tell you that. There’ll be the Weirds. They’ll take care of you. Be a child again, MaGee.”

204 CR, day 203
Message, E. McGee to Base Director, transmitted from field

Expect to be out of touch for a number of days due to rare study opportunity.

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

I made a tentative trip down to the depths. It is, predictably, dark down there. It’s full of calibans and Weirds, either one of which makes me nervous. No. I’m scared. I think—personally afraid in a way I’ve never been afraid of anything. Not even dying. This is being alone with the utterly alien. Vulnerable to it. Isn’t that an odd thing for a xenologist to fear most in all the world? Maybe that’s why I had to go into this work. Or why I got myself into this. Like climbing mountains. Because it’s there. Because I have to know. Maybe that has to do with fear.

Or craziness.

I think they would let me go if I asked. At least back upstairs. But I’ve got myself into one. Elai would say she told me so; but this is a thing—I don’t think there’s any going back from this, having asked for this chance. I can’t just be an outsider now. I just closed the door to that. If I go running now—it’ll be McGee, who failed. McGee, who was afraid. It would mark what Elai is, and where I can’t reach her, and I’d live here as something neither fish nor fowl.

So I don’t see anything else to do.

?
Cloud Tower: the lower section

There was food. McGee went to it by the smell, in the dark, not needing the calibans to guide her. But one was there. She had touched it, knew by the size, guessed by the texture of the skin that it was one of the grays.

Shepherds, she thought of them. She had been terrified at first, of the claws, the hard, bony jaws, the sinuous force of them. They had knocked her down, repeatedly, until she learned to use her ears.

There were other things in the dark: ariels. They skittered here and there and of them she had never been afraid, had kept them close when she could, because they seemed friendly.

There was a big brown hereabouts; she had felt the smoothness on his side. It was Scar, and Elai had lent him. She was grateful, and stayed close to him when she could.

Even of the Weirds she had lost her awe. They were strange, but gentle, and touched her with their spidery fingers, embraced her, held her when she was most afraid.

Once in this fathomless dark, in this waking sleep, she had been intimate with one, and more than once: that was the thing that she had most trouble to reckon with, that the thing she had dreaded most had happened, and that she had (perhaps) been the aggressor in it, having forgotten all she was, with some faceless man, a Weird, a voiceless priest of calibans.

She had lain listless for a long time after, for she had lost her objectivity, and she was compassless in more than the robbery of her senses.

Then:
McGee
, she thought,
you did that. That was you. Not their fault. What if it had been? Get up, McGee
.

And in one part of her mind:
He’ll know me, outside this place. But I won’t know him
.

And in another:
You don’t care, McGee. This is real. The dark. This place. It’s a womb for growing in
.

So grow, McGee.

She scrambled along the earthen walls, found the food left for her and ate, raw fish, which had become a neutral taste to her, something she had learned to abide. Something light skittered over her knees and she knew it was an ariel begging scraps. She gave it the head and bit by bit, the offal and the bones.

God knows what disease I’ll take
, the civilized part of her had thought, of muddy hands and raw fish.
I’m stronger than I thought
, she reckoned now. She had not reckoned a great deal about herself lately, here in the dark.
I’m wiser than I was
.

The ariel slithered away with a flick of its tail. That presaged something.

A gray came then. She heard it moving. She drew to the side of the passage in case it wanted through. It arrived with a whispering of its leathery hide against the earth, a caliban in quiet approach. It nosed at her; she patted the huge head and it kept nudging.
Move, move
. So she must.

She went with it, this caliban-shepherd, up and up.

This was different. There had been no such ascent in her other wanderings. They were going out to the light. Have I failed? she wondered. Am I being turned out? But no Weird had tutored her, none had been near her in—she had lost track of the time.