Текст книги "Forty Thousand in Gehenna"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Possibly poor health care and limited food have worked to keep the rate of increase somewhat lower than average, although families observed are large. Possibly there was a conflict. Possibly there was decimation by conflict or disease. Based on information given by townsmen, nomadism may be a factor to be considered both in population estimates and in politics. The town numbers perhaps as many as 70, 000, with extremely crowded conditions. There are small outlying settlements of less than 1000 individuals sharing town fields, and probably established for convenience.

The heart of the town is limestone slab construction, but the outlying districts and later additions to central district houses are brick and timber, indicating change of supply or change in technological level. Access to the limestone of the central hills may have been cut off, perhaps marking some change of affairs regarding hill communities and the town, but it would be speculation at this point to draw any conclusion.

There is division of labor into brickmaking, pottery, weaving, agriculture. There are no domestic animals: clothing is linenlike, from the cultivation of local plants. There has been a successful economic adaptation to locally available materials, and insofar as success of a colony might be its ability to remain viable without offworld supply, Newport, or Gehenna as the locals name it, has achieved at least a tenuous success.

The atmosphere is overall agrarian and tranquil, although our military advisors persist in warnings that they may be awaiting the departure of the ship and attempting to secure an advantage of surprise. The scientific mission doubts this, but will of course take suggested precautions. The mission for its part has advised that extreme precautions extend to native lifeforms.

From Section D, mission report

Dr. Cina Kendrick

…Intelligence is not, as indicated above, a scientific term. I have objected to the description sapiencein previous studies and again take issue with biological studies which attempt to attach this imprecise assessment of adaptive and problem‑solving capacities to non‑human lifeforms.

Two considerations must be made. First, that an organism’s behaviors may be survival‑positive in one environment and not in another, and second that its perceptive apparatus, its input devices, may be efficient for one environment but not for another. The quality imprecisely described as intelligence is commonly understood to describe the generalization of an organism, i.e, its capacity to adapt by the use of analogy to a variety of situations and environments.

On the contrary even the concept of analogis anthropocentric. Logicis another anthropocentric imprecision, the attempt to impose an order (binary, for instance, or sequential) on observations which themselves have been filtered through imprecise perceptive organs.

The only claim which may be made for generalization as a desirable trait is that it seems to permit survival in a multitude of environments. The same may be said of generalization as part of the definition of intelligence, particularly when intelligence is used as a criterion of the inherent value of an organism or its right to life or territory when faced with human intrusion. Generalization permits migration in the face of encroachment; and it permits one species to encroach on another, which adds another dimension to natural selection. But when extended to intrusion not over another mountain ridge within the same planetary ecology and the same genetic heritage, but instead to intrusion of one genetic heritage upon another across the boundaries of hitherto uncrossable space, this value judgement loses some credibility.

The dominant lifeform on Gehenna II is a scaly endothermic quadruped without aesthetic attraction. The description that leaps too readily to mind is reptile, which does not adequately describe an interior structure which is not reptilian or pertinent to any previously catalogued lifeform; it does not describe behaviors such as mound‑building or suggest reasons for an advance into human “territory”. Nor does it adequately describe the adaptive process by which this lifeform succeeds in the face of a human colony armed with modern weapons, furnished with heavy construction equipment, and established with the precedent of many previous successes.

I dissent from the mission opinion which seeks to debate whether the Union colony may have “contaminated” a sapience. I dissent not to condone the intrusion of humankind into this ecosystem, but to protest a proceeding which will attempt on the basis of quantitative anthropocentric standards to determine the relative value of a lifeform against the desire of humankind to possess what this world has held until now unique within the rules established by its own genetic heritage.

Report, document E

Dr. Carl Ebron

Observation indicates human sites scattered through the hills to such an extent that it would take years and force to lift human presence off this planet. The colonists of the town might obey a summons to be lifted off. It is doubtful that others would be receptive, and the result of any attempt to remove the human population would be a scattering of human presence on a world where humanity can survive without technology. The end result is still contamination, and possibly hostility which might be exploited centuries hence. We are ironically faced with a first‑contact situation involving our own species, a situation fraught with the direst potential hazard to zonal stability and peace.

My own recommendation is a quarantined observation point, allowing what has begun here to take as natural a course as is possible under regrettable circumstances. The other logical solution, a thorough sterilization of the entire area of possible contamination, the elimination of both human and native lifeforms in the hope of preserving a planet from contamination, is Draconian and unthinkable. We are human beings. Our morality constrains usfrom such a decision as might undo an evil. I do not know whether this is (a term to which Dr. Kendrick would object) intelligenton humanity’s part, but it is certain that nothing on this world offers us resistance or seems to mean us harm, and I see no choice but the maintenance of the status quo until such time as a more informed decision might be made.

Document G: Dr. Chandra Cartier

I respectfully dissent from Drs. Kendrick and Ebron. Dr. Kendrick’s thesis, taken in the extreme, might be extended to every lifeform on every world, but I believe that the hazard on Gehenna is more specific, without claiming that it is mindful or sapient. The danger is in ourselves, that humankind and human civilization have failed so miserably here and that we are raising atavistic suspicions of aliens in our midst. I object to the proposition that human beings be quarantined and observed in poverty, disease, and ignorance to protect the supposed value of native life which has not evidenced any creative capacity. I object to the proposition that there is not relative value involved, the value of human beings trapped in a situation of squalor and futility, neither of which may be scientific terms, but both of which have stark value on a world whose last civilized inhabitants named it Hell. I propose on the contrary that it would be a crime against humanity to wall ourselves off from these people. On the contrary, we should bring hospitals, educational facilities, and bring these survivors into the modern age, at least to the extent that they become capable of transforming Gehenna into a viable colony. From the neolithic to the space age may be too great a leap for one generation; but metal plows and engines to pull them are not too great a leap; rejuv and modern medicine are not too great a leap; aid in years of bad weather, advice in agriculture, the judicious importation of plants and livestock, all these things are minimal response to this human suffering. I do not dignify with a response the suggestion advanced by Dr. Ebron that neither humankind nor native life might count against the ideal of ecological restoration: he is correct; the idea is inhuman. As for Dr. Kendrick’s debate of values, it is attractive only in the abstract. Taken in substance it would have starved our species out of existence as soon as it had conceived the theory: our intelligence, whether anthropocentric or otherwise, advises us that we have ensured the survival of terrene species by our actions. Whales survive in the oceans of Cyteen; bears and seals and other species on Eversnow. Was this moral? Is it moral for us to have left our ancestral Sun? Human history is collision, not stasis. It is inhuman not to preserve these people in a reasonable quality of life. There must be a perimeter established here within which humanity can retreat to remain human; and that perimeter must be defended with whatever measures are necessary until investigation has established what we have done on this world. The fact that this world has reduced one well‑equipped human effort to the neolithic is eloquent enough argument that humankind has to be wiser in its dealings with this environment and what lives here.

vii

Alliance HQ to Newport/Gehenna Mission

Couriered by AS Boreas

…Equipment and personnel arriving with this message will permit the expansion of a secure perimeter to include the landing site and town and fields as well as a river access. Establishment of permanent health care and educational facilities for Newport/Gehenna citizens should be given a high priority, but security of Alliance personnel and equipment must not be compromised in the process, regarding force of nature or force of arms, and not excluding the possibility of action by Union agents or native lifeforms.

This office has contacted Union colonial offices with a further request for data on humanitarian grounds and there has been some negotiation opened in this matter, but progress is likely to be minimal and slow.

In the absence of further information, the mission is instructed to establish a perimeter as wide as possible without conflict and within the limits of available equipment and security and tactical considerations. Conflict is to be avoided with humans and native life, but this prohibition does not extend to the function of effective fencing devices. The Bureau draws no conclusion on the sapience or competency of the Calibans and awaits further data which the mission will supply.

The priorities of the mission will be as follows:

to secure the area of its own operation

to determine whether any activity of any other outside agency might exist; if so, to take appropriate measures

to secure the area of the town and adjacent villages necessary for establishment of a viable economy

to assist colonists with medical and educational facilities

to encourage trade with the center of colonization in preference to trade with those in outlying areas, with a view of centralization of economy and facilities and the establishment of an Alliance‑influenced capital which will tend to draw scattered human settlements toward the landing site by the attraction of food and stability, minimizing future political difference

to educate all available citizenry in hygiene, agriculture, small manufacture, and government

to defend against encroachment by native agency by the use of whatever force is minimally sufficient to deter the attempt, up to and including lethal arms.

Closely following this equipment delivery another ship will follow, bringing a station module and personnel for the core of a permanent manned orbiting port, which will monitor the majority of Newport planetary surface and serve, with the addition of a shuttle by future shipment, to maintain constant surveillance and flow of supplies.

It is not Bureau policy to permit a colony to suffer failure from neglect. The human inhabitants regardless of origin are now an Alliance polity but must be dealt with under Section 9 procedures as a first contact. The mission is urged to provide answers to questions of local sapience, and particularly to assist the station when operational in determining what planetary areas might be developed without contact with high lifeforms.

Of high priority, therefore, is the establishment of a landing area at Newport Base…

viii

Newport Base briefing room

“Then the decision is to exploit,” Ebron said, “in potential disregard of native life.”

“It’s a political decision,” said Kendrick. “We’re in the proposed path of expansion. They wantGehenna. That’s what it comes to. Union seeded it, we cultivate it–they’re happy, you understand that? They’re actually relieved the population’s sunk to the stone age. And devil take the calibans.”

“That’s off the record,” Cartier said.

Kendrick drew a breath and let it go again. “That’s off the record. Of course it’s off the record. You had your way, didn’t you?”

“No,” said Cartier. “Unfortunately I didn’t.”

ix

Year 72, day 130 CR

The Hills

It was many a day that Pia Elder sat atop her hill, watching the coming and going in the camp, a long hard walk for an old woman, and the first such walk of the spring. Cloud was panting when he had come so far, and relieved that the old woman was here.

His heart was beating very hard when he came up the slope, partly because the old woman was sitting very still (but she often did that) and his mother had done that when she was dead; and partly because he was afraid of this old woman, who was thin and dry as a stick and strange enough to do things like this, coming out before dawn to look at a place she would not go.

“Ma Pia,” he said very quietly, and circled to the side of her and came facing her, squatted down with his elbows tucked between his knees. It was cold in the morning wind. He was cold. He shivered, looking into a face wrinkled like old fruit and eyes like black Styx stone, water‑smoothed and cold. She let her hair grow. Neglect, he guessed. “Ma Pia, father he wished was you well, ma Pia.”

A while longer the implacable eyes gave him nothing. Then Pia Elder lifted a bony arm from beneath her blanket.

“New buildings this spring.”

He looked, turning his head and turning on his haunches. It was so that there were more buildings in the camp, tall and strange buildings. Perhaps the old woman was being conversational with him. He looked back at her hoping that it would be easy to get her home.

“They’ve smoothed the mounds, levelled the way to the river,” the old woman said. “But you don’t remember how it was.”

“They made the mounds flat.”

“And they go on building. See how the fields go, right across the plain; see where the fences go.”

“Mustn’t touch them fences, the power’ll hurt you.”

She whipped out her arm straight toward him, snapped her fingers. It had as well been a blow; might have been if she had had her stick in her hand. He clenched his arms in shock. “Them fences.”

“Those fences, ma Pia.” He was trembling, from the hour, the cold, the old woman’s eyes.

“Who taught you to talk? Stupid Nine’s lot?”

“No, ma Pia.”

“You talk, hear? Not like Nine’s breed. Not like my brother Jin’s either. You know why, boy?”

“To go and come,” he recited. “To be like born‑men, like them–” He stammered on the word and the cold. The old woman’s eyes bore down on him and he swallowed and picked his word. “Like them down there in the camp.–To be born‑man.”

A moment more the old woman stared at him shivering in front of her; and then she opened her blanket, inviting him into the warmth of her arms. He came, because she frightened him and she had never done this since he was small; and because his teeth were chattering from the morning chill. He was ten. He was old enough to be afraid of her body, which had stopped being woman or man, so old she was, so thin and hard and frail at once that she had stopped being anything he understood. She smelled of smoke and herbs when her arm and the blanket enfolded him; she felt like one of the ariels, all dry and strange. Her hair was white and coarse when he looked up at her. Her arm hugged him with an unsuspected tenderness, waking memories of earliest years, of being a child, and she rocked him–ma Pia, whose face did not know how to laugh.

“I had a brother,” she said. “His name was Green. He went away into the mounds. Before that he forgot how to talk. You never do that. You never do that, young Cloud.”

“I can write my name,” he said.

The arm tightened about him. “Every year more buildings down there. They want us to come. They make their fences and they want us inside. Sometimes I think I’d like to go down and see–but they’ve changed it all. And our kind doesn’t get into the center of it, just the town. There were domes. There were born‑men that lived there. I remember. I remember the day the ships came back and there was a forest where the center of the buildings is now; and mounds; and the calibans weren’t all upriver. Nothing could move them, until the ships came, and the fences, and then the calibans left, and all the Weirds with them, right up the Styx, and to Otherside. So Green went. I think he must be dead now. It was a long time ago.”

He was silent, victim of this outpouring of old things, frightening things, because he saw the buildings growing too, constantly changing.

“Your father was my oldest boy. You look like him, those eyes.”

“Where’d you get my grandfather?” He went brave of a sudden, and twisted about and looked into her eyes.

“Don’t know,” she said. “I found that boy.” That was always the answer. And then: “I think I got him off a born‑man’s son.” She ruffled his hair. “Maybe off a Weird, what would you say?”

His face went hot.

“No,” she said. “I don’t remember. That’s the way it is. It’s cold. I’m walking back.”

“Tell me.”

The old lips pursed. “I think I got him off this born‑man. I do think I did. He was a pretty boy. Such pretty hair, like yours. Name was Mayes. He came into the hills but he never stood the first winter. So fine he was–but he just faded out. My boy had none of that. He was strong. But your mother–”

“She died birthing a baby. I know.”

“Birthing’s hard.”

“Lots do it.”

“Lots die.” She gripped his face in a hard, thin hand, turned his eyes toward her, and the blanket fell away, so that he was cold. “She was Elly Flanahan‑Gutierrez; and she had hair like yours. She was a born‑man’s daughter. Her mother went down in the mounds and came out pregnant.”

He shook his head, teeth chattering. She would not let him go. “My father was Jin, my mother Pia; they had numbers. Born‑men made them. They had me, and Jin; Mark–he’s dead, long time, and Zed–you never knew him: he hunted, and one day he didn’t come back; and Tam Oldest; and me; and Green who went into the mounds. And Old Jin, the second Jin, he had Jin Younger; and Pia Younger; and Tam Younger; and Cloud Eldest; and Sunny and others he didn’t know and no one did. Maybe Elly Flanahan. Maybe. Zed had nobody. But he could have had Elly. If he did it was his only that anyone knows. Tam Oldest had Tam Youngest and Jin Youngest and Red Pia and Cloud Oneeye. Or maybe he had Elly Flanahan. And Green–he was thirteen when he went into the mounds and Jane Flanahan did, and you know, Cloud Youngest, you look most like Green. Hehad hair like that and eyes like that, and you’re small like he was small. Maybe it was Green. Or maybe it was a hundred more, eh? who live in the dark in the mounds. You talk, Cloud, you read and you write your name, and maybe someday you go down to the new camp and plow the fields.”

“I’m a Hiller.” It was protest. His shivers were convulsive. “My ma she wasn’t what you say.”

“Call your oldest Elly,” the old woman said, making him believe she was crazy as they said. “Or Green. And you teach them to talk, hear me, Cloud?” She drew with her finger on the ground, among the dead grass, as if she had forgotten him. “This is the sun rising.” A backwards spiral. “This is setting. Or change. Pebbles one on the other, that’s building. There’s the big browns and the stupid grays and the little greens. And there’s those have seen the seafolk beach in the river in the dark before the ships came back. There’s a thing I saw–it was like caliban but not. Only one. It was big, Cloud. In the river near the sea. I never saw the like again. Lots of things I could never tell the olders. And now there’s lots of things I can’t tell the youngers. Is that fair?”

“I’m cold, ma Pia. I’m cold. Please let’s go. My father told me come.”

“Here.” She took off the blanket from about her shoulders–she wore leather with fringes, all the clothes she ever wore–she wrapped it about his shoulders and stood up with the staff she had had by her in the grass. She moved slowly, grimacing lines deeper into her wrinkled face. And when he got to his feet she tousled his hair again, touched his face in a gentle way ma Pia had never used. And then she walked away toward the north.

“Ma Pia!” Cloud cried, exasperated. He clutched her blanket about him and ran after, the edges fluttering as he hurried. “Ma Pia, that’s the wrong way. That’s the river that way.” The old were like that, forgetting where they were. He was embarrassed for her, for fierce old Pia, and angry for all she had said, and grateful for the blanket. “It’s this way.”

She stopped and stood. “Thought I might go down to the camp today. But there’s no one there to see. Thought I might like a hot meal and maybe look at the machines, like old days. But they make fences down there, and you have to ask to come in and ask to come out and they might think I was old and sick, eh? I’d die if they shut me in. And that’s no way to go. Our village stinks, you know that, Cloud, it smells like the town down there smells, like it smelled the day the first Jin died. I’m tired of stink. I think I’ll take a walk upriver, see where the calibans have gone.”

“Ma Pia, that’s a long walk. I don’t think you ought to do that.”

She smiled, a face that was set with years of scowls. It shook his world, that smile, so that he knew he had never known her. “I think I might about make it,” she said. “Mind you talk, Cloud. Mind you read and write.”

And she walked away. He was guilty, coward, standing there, but she never called him after her. She’s an older, he thought, she’s oldest of the old, like the hills themselves, she is. She knows whether she wants a boy at her heels. She knows how to find her way to home. She knows where she’s going and how far she means to walk. And: She’s beautiful, he thought, which he had never thought in his life about Pia Oldest, but she was, tall and straight and thin, with the wind dancing in the fringes of her clothes and the gray ropes of her hair–going away from him because she wanted to.

He ran back to the village in the hills and told his father, who sent young runners out to find her, but they could not, they never could, Pia being Pia and better than any of them in the wild.

It was days before he cried, and then only for a moment. He imagined she found the calibans, that being what she wanted.

He thought of calibans all his life, thought of them in getting his son and telling him tales, and seeing some of his kin go down to the camp in the plain. Calibans moved close again after ma Pia went away. He was never sure if she had found them, but that thing was sure.

x

Year 72, day 198 CR

Main Base, Gehenna

“Are you,” the man asked, “scared?”

The boy Dean stared at him, sitting where he was on the edge of the doctor’s table in the center of the Base, and the answer was yes, but he was not about to say as much to this Base doctor. Children did this, he knew, went into the Base and learned. And he was here halfgrown as he was because they started taking older ones now, special older ones, who ran off from their work in the fields and lazed about working with their hands or being a problem to the supervisors. He had been a problem. He had told the field boss how to arrange the shifts, and the boss had not liked that; so he had walked offshift, that was all. He had had enough of the man.

Only they took people who bucked what was and soldiers visited their houses and brought them into the Base, behind the inmost wire, to go into the study like they took the children their families sold into going here every day for extra credit at the store.

They did this to children, so he was not going to admit he was scared. They went on asking him questions… Do you read or write? Does anyone you know read and write?–He said nothing. His name was Dean, which was a born‑man name. His mother had told him that, and taught him to write his name and read the signs. But he figured it was theirs to find out.

“My mother get the store allowance?” he asked finally, reckoning if there was good to be gotten out of this, it might as well be hers.

“Depends on how you do,” the man with the book said, turning him back his own kind of answer. “You do real well, Dean, and you might get a lot more than that.”

He viewed it all with suspicion.

“Now we’re going to start out with lessons, going to let you watch the machines, and when you’ve got beyond what they can teach you, then you get paid; and if you think you want to learn more than that–well, we’ll see. We’ll see how you do.”

They put him in front of a machine that lighted up and showed him A and made the sound. It went to B then and showed him AB. They showed him how to push the buttons, and make choices, and he blinked when the machine took his orders. Possibilities dawned on him. He ran the whole range of what they wanted of him.

“I can read,” he said, taking a chance, because of a sudden he saw himself using machines, like them, like what his name meant to him–being different than the others–and he suddenly, desperately, wanted not to be put out of this place. “I’m born‑man. And I can read. I always could.”

That got frowns out of them, not smiles. They went outside the door and talked to each other while he sat with his shoulders aching from sitting and working so long and hoping that he had not done the wrong thing.

A woman came into the room, one of them, in fine clothes and smelling the way born‑men smelled in the Base, in the tall buildings, of things other than dirt and smoke. “You’re going to stay the night,” she said. “You’ve done very well. We’re going to make up more questions for you.”

He did not know why–he should have been relieved to know that he had done well. But there was his mother not knowing what might have happened; and he was thirteen and not quite a man, to know how to deal with this.

But the Base was authority, and he stayed.

Their questions were not A and B. They involved himself, and all the things he thought were right and wrong, and all the things he had ever heard. They asked them over and over again, until his brain ached and he did what he had never done for anyone but his own mother: he broke down and cried, which broke something in him which had never been broken before. And even then they kept up their questions. He stilled his sobs and answered what they wanted, estimating that he had deserved this change in himself because he had wanted what no townsman had. The barrage kept up, and then they let him eat and rest.

In the morning or whatever time he woke–the building had no windows–they brought him to a room and put a needle in his arm so that he half slept; and a machine played facts into his awareness so that his mind went whirling into cold dark distances, and the world into a different perspective: they taught him words for these things, and taught him what he was and what his world was.

He wanted to go home when he waked from that. “Your mother’s sent lunch for you,” they told him kindly. “She knows you’re well. We explained you’ll be staying a few more days before you come and go.”

He ate his mother’s bread in this strange place, and his throat swelled while he swallowed and the tears ran down his face without his even trying to stop them, or caring that they saw. He knew what they did to the children then. The children laughed and wrote words in the dust and hung about together, exempt from work because they had their hours in the Base school. But he was no child; and if he went back into the town now he would never be the man he had almost been. That thing in him which had broken would never quite repair itself; and what could he say in the town?–I’ve seen the stars. I’ve seen, I’ve touched, there are other worlds and this one’s shut because we’re different, because we don’t learn, because–Because the town is what it is, and we’re very, very small.

He was quiet in his lessons, very quiet. He took his trank, and listened to the tapes, having lost himself already. He gave up all that he had, hoping that they would make him over entirely, so that he could be what they were, because he had no other hope.

“You’re very good,” they said. “You’re extremely intelligent.”

This gave him what cheer he had.

But his mother cried when he went back to her quiet as he had become; it was the first time she had ever cried in front of him. She hugged him, sitting on the bed which was the only place to sit in their small and shabby house, and held his face and looked in his eyes and tried to understand what he was becoming.

She could not. That was part of his terror.

“They give me credit at the store,” he said, searching for something to offer her in place of himself. “You can have good clothes.”

She cleaned the house after, worked and worked and worked as if she somehow imagined to herself the clean white place that he had been, as if she fought back by that means. She washed all the clothes and washed the rough wood table and turned the straw mattresses, having beaten the dust out of them outside; and scrubbed the stone floor and got up and dusted even the tops of the rafters with a wet cloth to take away the dust. The ariels who sometimes came and went dodged her scrubbing and finally stayed outside. And Dean carried water and helped until the neighbors stared, neighbors already curious what had happened.