Текст книги "Forty Thousand in Gehenna"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“MaGee,” said Elai, having wakened.

“First,” McGee murmured in respect.

“What would you advise?”

“Advise?” Perhaps Elai was delirious, perhaps not. Elai made no more patterns, sat with her arms beneath the blankets, alone. McGee shrugged uneasily. “I’d advise you eat something.”

Elai failed to react to that. Just failed. There was long silence. It went like this, through the hours.

“First,” McGee said, working her hands together, clenching them and unclenching. “First, let’s go…just use some sense and eat something, and you and I’ll just walk out of here. To the Wire, maybe, maybe somewhere else. You can just walk away. Isn’t that good advice?”

“I could make a boat,” Elai said, “and go to the islands.”

“Well, we could do that,” McGee said, half‑hoping, half‑appalled, shocked at once by Elai’s dry laugh. Elai slipped forth a hand, opened thin fingers in mockery, dropping imaginary stones. Forget that, old friend.

“Listen, I don’t intend to put up with this, Elai.”

Elai’s eyes more than opened, the least frownline creased her brow. But she said nothing.

“Styx towers are down,” McGee said. “What’s that going to mean in the world?”

A second throwing‑away gesture. “Should have made the boats,” Elai said. “But they’d have taken down our towers.”

“Who?” There was a cold wind up McGee’s back. “What do you mean they’d have taken down the towers? Calibans? Like Jin’s towers? Like they’re doing there? What are you talking about, First?”

“Don’t know, MaGee. Don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe so.”

“They’ll kill. Like at the Styx towers.”

“The strong ones’ll come this way,” Elai said. She was hoarse. This talk tired her. She made an impatient gesture. “All those Styxside men, too mean; all those women, too stupid–Life would kill them, here. Land will kill them. Most. Maybe not all.” The frown reappeared between her brows. “Or maybe Styxside way just grows up again. Don’t know.”

Somewhere at the depth of her McGee was shocked. “You mean these Styxsiders did something the calibans didn’t like. That thatwas what killed them.”

Elai shrugged. “They ate grays.”

“For years, Elai–”

“It got worse, didn’t it? They went on and on; they got themselves the likes of Jin; he pushed.” Elai made a motion of her fingers, indicating boundaries. “Calibans aren’t finished with this pattern, MaGee, here on the Cloud. Cloud stands. That’s what it meant, out there.”

“And they’d have stopped your ships the same way?”

“Maybe.” Elai heaved a breath. “Maybe not. Old Scar would swim. Maybe he thought the same as me. That old sea‑folk, he was just bigger than Scar, that’s all. Or maybe that was ourlimit and he was saying so.”

McGee saw pictures in her mind, squatting there with her fist against her lips: saw every caliban on Gehenna in every river valley making mounds much alike, except on Styx and Cloud. “Boundaries,” she said, and looked up, at Elai. But Elai had shut her eyes again, closing her out.

She looked at Din, at the boy huddled in the corner with his caliban. The hall was eerily vacant. Only a single ariel lurked in the shadows. Of all the communications that had once flowed from this place, one small green watcher. There was always one.

McGee hugged her knees and thought and thought, the patterns that had been since they had come home, lines and mounds across the river, beyond her to read.

And Scar dying on the shore, slowly, snapping now and again at grays who came too close.

She could not bear it longer. She got up and walked out, down the access, down the corridors in the dark, where voices were hushed, where desertions had begun, deep below, calibans and Weirds at their work, which might be undermining or shoring up, either one.

Dain gave her a curious look as she passed the lower door; a handful more of the riders had joined him, armed with spears; so no one got into First Tower yet. It seemed sure that they would. Everything was at a kind of rest, Paeia plotting in her tower, Taem’s in uproar, non‑communicant, now that Taem was dead, heirless; and other towers turned secretive. The fishers still plied their trade; folk went out to farm. But they did so carefully, disturbing as little as they could; and strange calibans had come: they saw them in the river, refugees from the battle, maybe Styxside calibans, maybe calibans that had never come near humans before. If anyone knew, the Weirds might, but Weirds kept their own counsel these days.

She stood there looking out to the shore, where Scar still sat like some rock under the sun.

“Still alive,” said Dain. His own caliban was about, not with him, not far either. She spied it with its collar up, just watching.

She started walking, walked all the way out past the nets where Scar sat. The place stank, a dry fishy stench like stagnant water, like caliban and rot. Not dead yet. But his skin hung like bits of old paper, and his ribs stuck out through what whole skin there was as if it were laid over a skeleton. The eyes were still alive, still blinked. He moved no more than that.

She picked up a rock. Laid it down. Went and gathered another, caliban sized. She struggled with it, and set it onto the other. Of smaller ones she built the rest of a spiral, and the small spur that gave direction. An ariel came and helped her, trying to change the pattern to what was; she pitched a pebble at it and it desisted. She wiped her brow, wiped tears off her face and kept building, and saw others had come, Dain and his folk. They stared, reading the pattern, First Tower built taller than the rest, the uncomplex thread that went from it toward a thing she had made square and alien.

Dain invaded the pattern, severed the line with his spearbutt, defying her.

Scar moved: his collar fringe went up. Dain looked at that and stayed still. No Cloudsider moved.

McGee hunted up more rocks. Her clothes were drenched with sweat. The wind came cold on her. There were more and more watchers, riders and calibans of First Tower.

“Paeia will come,” Dain said. “MaGee–don’t do this.”

She gave him a wild look, lips clamped. He stepped back at that. The crowd grew, and there was unearthly quiet. A gray moved in and tried to change the pattern. Scar hissed and it retreated to the fringes again, only waiting. McGee worked, more and more stones. Bruised ribs ached. She limped, sweated, kept at it, making her statement that was not in harmony with anything ever written in the world.

Dain handed another man his spear then and carried stone for her, leaving her to place it where she would; and that made it swifter, the building of this pattern. She built and built, lines going on to a settlement by the Styx, going outward into the sea, going south to rivers she remembered– Elai, the statement was, expansion. Links to the starmen. The starmen–She built for creatures who had never seen the stars, whose eyes were not made for looking at them, made the sign for riverand for going up, for dwelling‑placeand sunwarmth, for food/fishand again for warmthand multitude, all emanating from the Base.

A fisher came into the pattern, bringing more stones; so others came, bringing more and more. Growing things, one patterned. A woman added a Nesting‑stone. Ariels invaded the structures, clambered over them, poked their heads into crevices between stones, put out their tongues to test the air and the madness of these folk.

McGee lost track of the signs; some she did not know. She tried to stop some, but now there were more and more; and Weirds watching on the side. It was out of control, going off in directions she had never planned. “Stop!” she yelled at them, but they went on building the starman theme, wider and wider.

She sat down, shaking her head, losing sight of the patterns, of what they did. She wiped her face, hugged herself, and just sat there, more scared than she had been in the war.

She looked up in a sudden silence and saw Elai there, in a place the crowd had made–Elai, arriving like an apparition, her person still in disarray, Din and his smallish caliban trailing in her wake.

“MaGee,” Elai said; it was a whipcrack of a voice, thin as it was. There was rage.

“MaGee’s crazy,” McGee said. She stood up. “Don’t the Weirds have the right to say anything they like?”

“You want them to take us down, MaGee, like they took Jin?”

Scar hissed and turned his head, one plate‑sized eye turned toward Elai. That was all. Then he wandered off, avoiding the pattern, while humans scrambled from his path.

He went to the river. McGee saw him going in, turned to watch Elai’s face, but Elai gave no sign of grief, nothing.

“You’re a fool,” Elai said in a weak voice, and started back again.

Paeia was in her way, astride her big brown, with armed Second Tower riders at her side.

Elai stopped, facing that. Everything stopped for a moment, every movement. Then Elai walked around to the side. They exacted that of her, but they stood still and let her do it.

They stood there surveying the pattern. They stood there for a long time, and eventually the crowd found reasons to be elsewhere, one by one.

McGee went when those nearest her went, limping and feeling the wind cold on her sweat‑drenched clothes.

A lance brushed her when she passed Paeia on her way back. She looked up, at Paeia’s grim, weathered face, at eyes dark and cold as river stones.

“Fool,” Paeia said.

“That’s two that have told me,” McGee said, and backed off from the speartip and walked away, expecting it in her back. But they let her pass.

lx

Message: Base Director to E. McGee

Repeat: Urgent you report: we have Bureau representatives incoming. They’re bringing Unionside observers. There will be data essential to your work…

lxi

Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee

Elai’s no worse. No better. Paeia hasn’t come through the door. I did one thing, at least, with my meddling–They’re waiting. They’re just waiting to know what the calibans are going to do now that I’ve done what I did.

I didn’t think it through. I tried to tell the calibans they couldn’t lose Elai, that was all, tried explaining she could make the Base itself rational‑tried to explain starmen. Tried to tell them about their world and what they were missing, and O dear God, I did something no one’s ever done: I went and did a human pattern in terms they could read. I tried to say there was good in starmen, that there’s life outside–and they took it away from me, the Cloudsiders, they started telling it their way, their own legends–they were talking about themselves.

No one’s moving. The calibans have gone off–most of them. Elai’s eating again, at least I got her to take a little soup this morning; that was a triumph. Dain helped. Everyone’s going about quiet, really quiet.

And across the river there’s building going on, within sight of the towers. The calibans are in debate. I think they must be. Patterns rise and fall incomplete. There’s no reason in it that makes sense yet. They reform the old pattern and then tear it up again in new elaborations, and they do things I don’t make sense of.

Paeia’s been forestalled. This is no time to upset the calibans.

lxii

Message: station to Base

AS Wyverninbound from Cyteen. Visitors aboard.

lxiii

Cloudside

There was restlessness that night. McGee heard it starting in the depths, vague echoes of movements, stirrings and slitherings down below, and she shivered, lying on her bed, on the earthen ledge in her own quarters, wrapped in her rough blankets.

It grew. Her heart began beating in a panic like night fears, and she scrambled up, threw on her clothes without seeking any light: she went blind as she had learned to do, running up the spiral turns of the hall–So others came, men and women running either way, some down toward the exit from the tower, some few up, as she ran, up toward the hall where they kept firelight these last nights, since it had become Elai’s refuge.

Elai was there, awake. Dain was; and young Din; and Maeri, and others, pale and distressed faces. They brought no weapons; their calibans had deserted them, save for Din’s.

The access gave up a flood of ariels, like a plague of vermin scrabbling across the floor, like the first feeling outward of some vast beast; in that flood a few grays hove up through the access pit, up the ramp, casting their heads about, putting out their tongues.

What came then was huge, was bigger than Scar had been, a caliban that, up on his legs, was halfway to the ceiling–No one’s, that brown. The riders gave back from it, even Dain; McGee stood sweating, out of its convenient path, lacking the courage to fling herself for a mouthful in its direct route to Elai.

Elai sat still, image‑like in her wooden chair. Her hands were in her lap. It put out a tongue, leaned forward, leaned, put out a foot and made that a step and a second pace, that closed the distance. The tongue investigated, barely touched Elai’s robes; and other calibans were coming, invading all the halls, a noisy scrabbling flood below.

We’ll fall, McGee thought, imagined First Tower in collapse, them dying in a cascade of earth at the same time as every other human on the Cloud, the Base under attack, Styx going under yet again.

The big brown’s collar crest went down. He turned himself, his long tail sweeping their circle wider, but that was a settling at Elai’s side, half up on his forelegs. The crest went up again.

“Dear God,” McGee breathed, when she remembered to breathe, but they were half the hall deep in calibans now, and there was hissing and snapping as the calibans defined territory, as Dain’s brown moved in clearing rivals, and Maeri’s showed up, and young Din scrambled for cover in McGee’s arms, the young brown Twostone hissing and lashing its tail in front of them, holding its ground against larger ones.

There was order made. Elai put out a hand and appropriated the big brown. His crest flicked, in something like pleasure.

McGee caught another breath. Her chest hurt. She clenched Din in her arms and the boy struggled. She let him go, remembering he was Cloudsider, and at most times independent. No one moved beyond that for a very long time, until calibans had stopped milling and crests were down.

A gray came to the middle of the floor and spat up a fish. The big brown leaned forward and ate it. The gray got out of the way in haste.

“Paeia will be disappointed,” Elai said, and looking at McGee: “So, MaGee?”

McGee ignored her limbs which still felt dissolved and the sweat that was running on her skin, lifted her chin and managed a grand indifference. “You had old Scar a long time; you never figured he wasn’t important of his kind? He picked you from way back. You’re not a warleader. If they wanted one they’d have had Jin just as easy. They wanted you, First, for some reason.”

Elai just stared at her, her hand resting on the big brown’s shoulder. Jaw set, eyes hard. The First of First Tower was not prone to displays.

“His name’s Sun,” she said.

Message: Base Director to E. McGee

Repeat: urgent you respond. We have a shuttle landing. We have a Dr. Ebhardt, Unionside, with aides, coming in. This is an official instruction: this office is taking the position that some damage to the com must have occurred and therefore no reprimand will be lodged. I add to this an earnest personal plea: I am concerned with your welfare and urge you to consider your professional and personal interests and to respond to this message by whatever means may be accessible to you. Dr. Mannin’s brief report of you indicates that you are well and in a position to have gathered valuable material. I am sure that the arriving mission will make every effort to accommodate you within its policies and I am sure will not wish to interfere in your work. It would, however, be of great help if we could have your direct input.

lxiv

Message: E. McGee to Base Director

transmitted from Cloud River

This is not a time or place for interference. I regret the misfortune of the Styx River mission. Keep your observers at a distance. Calibans are very uneasy just now. Report follows.

lxv

205 CR, day 298

Cloudside

The thing grew on the riverside, taking shape out of the reeds they had floated down. Calibans had nudged it this way and that, still prowled round it of nights to see what new thing it was becoming, with their tying and their braiding, not an easy matter; but MaGee had unbent enough to give some advice, being less pure a starman than she had been. The sun came up on a new thing every morning; and Elai watched this business of boatbuilding from the crest of First Tower with a certain forlorn distress.

Dain would try this thing. MaGee persuaded her the First of First Tower was too important to be laughed at if it was a little cranky at the start; and when it was proved, then she would try it.

She looked out over all the land, toward the horizon this morning; and saw a thing before any sentry saw it.

Metal flashed in the sun, in the sky. It was a ship from the Base, but not going up. Coming their way. It had gone crazy, was going to fall. She could hear the sound of it now, a sound like distant thunder.

Work stopped on the shore. Folk looked up, everywhere.

It was coming their way. Elai’s heart turned over in her, but she stood her ground (the First of First would not run, would not show fear) with her fists clenched on the rim of the tower, her eyes fixed on this visitor.

It was coming down, carefully, not falling. Elai became sure of that. She turned, whistled to Sun, passed her distressed offspring who had dropped their game of tag with the calibans.

“ MaGee!” she shouted in anger, on her way down. “ MaGee–”

They kept to their side of the river, these intruders. Elai had a closer view of the ship as Sun carried her up and out of the river, the water rolling off her leathers, off his hide. Out of the tail of her eye she saw MaGee with Dain and a dozen others of her riders. They were all armed. She was. The spear she had in hand seemed futile, but she carried it all the same, to make these strange starmen figure where was their limit.

She tapped Sun, making him understand that she meant to stop. Sun took his time about it. The other riders drew even with her. And one of the starmen came out from the shadow of that shining ship–not much larger than her boat, this ship. It had flattened the grass in a circle about it. It was quiet now. The thunder had stopped. And they wanted to talk: that was clear too.

“MaGee,” she said, “see what they want.” And: “MaGee,” she added, making MaGee stop after she had slid down from behind Dain: “You don’t go with them.”

“No,” MaGee agreed, and walked out to that man, looking like a rider herself, lean and leather‑clad, her graying hair, her fringes blowing in the wind that whipped at them, that made the fine blue cloth the starman wore do strange small flutters, showing how soft it was. They were rich, the starmen. They had everything. They brought their ship to show what they could do, overshadowing the boat there on the shore. To impress. They could have come afoot. They had done that before. Or in their crawlers, that they used sometimes, that made noise and disturbed the ariels for days.

It was all show, theirs against hers.

She waited, spear held crosswise. Paeia was one who had come out, with her heir, grim and disapproving, waiting for mistakes. And MaGee went out to this starman and talked a while, just talked; after a time MaGee folded her arms and shifted her weight and seemed not to fear attack, but she looked down much and seldom at the starmen, saying things with the way she stood that seemed uneasy.

Then she came back, and looked up at her on Sun. “First,” she said, “they want to talk to you. To tell you they’re wanting to talk trade.”

Elai frowned.

“It’s this new lot,” MaGee said carefully, “they want some things changed. Trade would mean medicines. Maybe metal. You need that.”

“What do they want back?”

“You,” MaGee said. Elai’s eyes met hers and locked, honest and urgent. “I’ll tell you what: they want to make sure you grow the right way, starman‑like. To be sure you’re something they can deal with someday. When you’re like them.” Her eyes slid aside, back again. “That dark one–that’s Dr. Myers; from the Base; the light one’s Ebhardt–from Union. From Cyteen.”

“Is thata Unioner?” Elai had heard of these strangers, these folk of the ship that never came. Her books had them in them. She looked with narrowed eyes on these visitors. “Hssst– Sun.”

Sun moved forward, a sudden long stride. The starmen fell back in disorder and recovered themselves. “You,” Elai said, “you’re from Cyteen, are you? From outside?”

“Maybe McGee’s told you,” Ebhardt began.

“You want trade? Give you what, starman?”

“What you have too much of. What we don’t have. Maybe carvings. Maybe fish.”

“Bone’s ours,”Elai said. The starman was insolent as she had thought; she tapped Sun in his soft skin, beneath the collar, and the collar went up. They retreated yet again, and beyond them another figure mounted half up the access to their ship. “But fish, maybe. Maybe things you want to know, starman. Maybe you’d like that better. Maybe you sit behind that Wire and ask your questions. This land’s mine. Cloud’s mine. All this–” She swept her arm about, a pass of her spear. “My name’s Elai, Ellai’s daughter, line of the first Cloud, the first Elly; of Pia, line of the first Jin when they made the world. And you’re on my land.”

They backed up from her. “McGee,” one said.

“I’d move,” MaGee said equably, from somewhere to the rear. “The First just told you she’d trade, and where; and you don’t want an incident, you really wouldn’t want an incident at the foundation of the world. I’d really advise you pack up and get this machinery out of here.”

There was some thinking about it. “First,” one said then, and both of them made a downcast gesture and began a retreat with more dignity than their last.

They took the ship away. The calibans just stood and looked up at it with curious tilts of their heads, and Elai did, sitting on Sun–waved her spear at them, adding insult to the matter. Her riders jeered at them. Paeia looked impressed for once, she and her heir.

“Come on,” Elai said to MaGee, touching Sun to make him put his leg out. “Ride behind me.”

VIII

OUTWARD

i

Year CR 305, day 33

Fargone Station

Union Space

One saw all sorts dockside, military, merchanters, stationers, dockers, the rare probe‑ship crewman. This was new, and the dock crew stared, not unlike other crews, all along the long, long metal curve, in the echoing high spaces that smelled of otherwhere and cold.

“What’s that?” someone wondered, too loud, and the young man turned and gave them back the stare, just for a moment, stranger estimating stranger: but this one looked dangerous…tall, and lean, and long‑haired, wearing fringed leather and white bone beads of intricate carving. He had a knife, illegal on the docks or anywhere else onstation. That they saw too, and no one said anything further or moved until he had gone his way ghostlike down the line.

“That,” said Dan James, dockman boss, “that’s Gehennan.”

“Heard there was something strange came in,” another man said, and ventured a look at a safely retreating back.

“Got his dragon with him,” James said; the docker swore and straightened up, satisfying effect.

“They let that thing loose?”

“Hey, they don’t letit anywhere. That thing’s human, it is. Leastwise by law it is.”

There were anxious looks. “You mean that,” one said.

The place was like other such places he had seen–he, Marik, son of Cloud son of Elai. He explored it in slow disdain, gathering information, which he would go home again to tell; and all the same he was excited by this knowledge, that they could travel so far and still find stations like Gehenna Station, that the universe was so large. He was wary in it. Cloud had taught him how to deal with strangers, not letting them tell him where he ought to go and where not, and what he ought to see and what he should be blind to.

Only he left Walker in her hold, where there was warmth. She would not like this cold; it would make her restless; and the sounds would irritate her, and besides, enough people came to her. Walker was not bored, at least, and had gotten used to strangers, enough to give them the lazy stare they deserved and to go on with her Pattern, figuring this trip out. He told her what he could. She was working on it.

Some things he was still working on himself. Like what the universe was like. Or what starmen wanted.

There was a problem, they said, a world that they had found. There was life on it, and it made no sense to them.

A Gehennan sees things a different way, they said. Just go and look–you and Walker.

So they would go and see.