Текст книги "Forty Thousand in Gehenna"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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It was indisputably a mound…on their side of the river; and new as last night. The old mounds lay directly across that gray expanse of water, about a half a kilometer across at this point–the Styx, they called it, a joke–the way they called the world Gehenna at this stage, for the dust and the conditions; Gehenna II, Gehenna Too, like the star, and not Newport. But Styx was fast getting to be the real name of this place, more colorful than Forbes River, which was the name on the maps. The Styx and the calibans. A mingling of myths. But this one had gotten out of its bounds.

“I’d really like to have an aerial shot of that,” Jenks said. “You know, it looks like it’s matched up with the lines on the other side.”

“Maybe it has to do with orientation to the river or the sun,” Gutierrez reckoned. “If we knew why they built mounds at all.”

“Might use some kind of magnetic field orientation.”

“Might.”

“Whatever they’re doing,” Norris said, “we can’t have them doing this in the fields. This area is gridded out for future housing. We’ve got to set up some kind of barrier that these things are going to respect; we need to know how deep they dig. Can’t put up a barrier if we don’t know that.”

“I think we could justify bothering this one,” Gutierrez said, without joy in the prospect.

“It’s not guaranteed to be as deep a burrow as they can get,” Jenks said. “After all, it’s new. I don’t think it would mean anything much if you dug into it. And the other mounds are all in protectorate.”

“Well, the bio department made the protectorate,” Norris said.

“The bio department won’t budge on that,” Gutierrez said. “Sorry.”

A silence. “Then what we have to do,” said Ogden, “is put it back across the river.”

“Look,” Norris said, “we could just put one of the building barriers up against it and if it tunnels under, then we’ll know, won’t we? A test. It’s on the riverside. It won’t be digging below the watertable, not without getting wet.”

“They’re gilled, aren’t they?”

“They may be gilled, but I don’t think any tunnels would hold up.” Norris squinted into the morning sun and considered a moment. “By the amount of dirt and the dryness of it–What’s the function of the mounds? You figure that out?”

“I think,” Gutierrez said, “it rather likely has something to do with the eggs. They do lay eggs. Probably an elaborate ventilation system, like some of the colony insects; or an incubation device, using the sun. I think when we get to examining the whole system, the orientation might have to do with the prevailing winds.”

“Let’s have a look,” said Jenks.

“All right.” Gutierrez stood up, brushed off his trousers and waited on Norris and Ogden, walked down the face of the last hill the earth‑movers had stripped. They headed toward the mound, down across the grassy interval.

As they reached the trough, a stone’s cast from the mound of disturbed grass and dark earth, a darkish movement topped the crest of the mound and whipped up into full view, three meters long and muddy gray.

Everyone stopped. It was a simultaneous reaction. The safety went off Ogden’s rifle.

“Don’t shoot,” Gutierrez said. “Don’t even think of shooting. Just stand still. We don’t know what their eyesight is like. Just stand still and let it think; it’s likely to be curious as the ariels.”

“Ugly bastard,” Norris said. There was no dispute about that. The ariels prepared them for beauty, moved lively and lightly, fluttering their collar fronds and preening like birds. But the caliban squatted heavily on its ridge and swelled its throat, puffing out a knobbed and plated back collar, all one dull gray and smeared with black mud.

“That’s a little aggression,” Jenks said. “Threat display. But it’s not making any move on us.”

“Lord,” Ogden said, “if thosestart waddling through the base they’re going to need room, aren’t they?”

“It eats fish,” Gutierrez reminded them. “It’s more interested in the river than in anything else.”

“He means,” Jenks said, “that if you stand between that fellow and the river you’re a lot more likely to get run down by accident. It might run for its mound access; or for the river. If it runs.”

“Stay put,” Gutierrez said, and took a cautious step forward.

“Sir,” Ogden said, “we’re not supposed to lose you.”

“Well, I don’t plan to get lost. Just stay put. You too, Eva.” He started forward, moving carefully, watching all the small reactions, the timing of the raising and lowering of the knobbed collar, the breathing that swelled and diminished its pebbly sides. The jaws had teeth. A lot of them. He knew that. A thick black serpent of a tongue flicked out and retreated, flicked again. That was investigation. Gutierrez stopped and let it smell the air.

The caliban sat a moment more. Turned its head with reptilian deliberation and regarded him with one vertically slit jade eye the size of a saucer. The collar lifted and lowered. Gutierrez took another step and another, right to the base of the mound now, which rose up three times his height.

Of a sudden the caliban stood up, lashed its tail and dislodged clods of earth as it stiffened its four bowed legs and got its belly off the ground. It dipped its head to keep him in view, a sidelong view of that same golden, vertical‑slitted eye.

That was close enough, then. Gutierrez felt backward for a step, began a careful retreat, pace by pace.

The caliban came down toward him the same way, one planting of a thick‑clawed foot and a similar planting of the opposing hind foot, one two three four, that covered an amazing amount of ground too quickly. “Don’t shoot,” he heard Eva Jenks’ voice, and was not sure at the moment that he agreed. He stopped, afraid to run. The caliban stopped likewise and looked at him a body length distant.

“Get out of there,” Jenks yelled at him.

The tongue went out and the head lifted in Jenks’ direction. It was over knee high when it was squatting and waist high when it stood up; and it could move much faster than anticipated. The tail moved restlessly, and Gutierrez took that into account too, because it was a weapon that could snap a human spine if the caliban traded ends.

The collar went flat again, the head dipped and then angled the same slitted eye toward him. It leaned forward slowly, turning the head to regard his foot; and that leaning began to lessen the distance between them.

“Move!” Jenks shouted.

The tongue darted out, thick as his wrist, and flicked lightly about his booted, dusty foot; the caliban retracted it, serpentined aside with a scraping of sod, regarded him again with a chill amber eye. The tail swept close and whipped back short of hitting him. Then in remote grandeur the caliban waddled back and climbed its mound. Gutierrez finally felt the pounding of his own heart. He turned and walked back to his own party, but Jenks was already running toward him and Ogden was close behind, with Morris following.

Gutierrez looked at Jenks in embarrassment, thinking first that he had done something stupid and secondly that the caliban had not done what they expected: it had not gone through the several days of Highland‑approach the probe team reported.

“So much for the book,” he said, still shaking. “Might be pushing on the mating season.”

“Or hunting.”

“I think we’d better try to establish a concrete barrier here, right on that hill back there.”

“Right,” Morris said. “And draw the line all around this area.”

Gutierrez looked back at the caliban, which had regained its perch on the mound. When animals violated the rules on a familiar world it indicated a phase of behavior not yet observed: nesting, for instance.

But curiosity in a species so formidably large–

“It didn’t follow the book,” he muttered. “And that makes me wonder about the rest of the script.”

Jenks said nothing. There was a limit to what bio ought to speculate on publicly. He had already said more than he felt politic; but there were people out walking the fields still relying on Mercury probe’s advice.

“I’d just suggest everyone be a bit more careful,” he said.

He walked back up the hill with the others following. The first front had sprinkled them with rain, quickly dried. There was weather moving in again that looked more serious–on the gray sea, out among the few islands which lay off the coast, a bank of cloud. There was that matter to factor in with the environment.

Might the weather make a difference in caliban moods?

And as for construction, if the weather turned in earnest–

“The foam’s not going to set too easy if we get that rain,” he said. “Neither will concrete. I think we may have to wait…but we’d better get to the maps and figure where we’re going to set that concrete barrier.”

“Two criteria,” the engineer said. “Protection from flood and our own access to areas we need.”

“One more,” Jenks said. “The calibans. Where they decide to go.”

“We can’t be warping all our plans around those lizards,” Morris said. “What I’d like to do instead, by your leave–is put a charged fence out here and see if we can’t make it unpleasant enough it’ll want to leave.”

Gutierrez considered the matter, nodded after a moment. “You can try it. Nothing that’s going to disturb the colony across the river. But if we can encourage this fellow to swim back to his side, I’d say it might be better for him and for us.”

Gutierrez looked at the clouds, and over his shoulder at the mounds, still trying to fit the behavior into patterns.

vi

Day 58 CR

The fog retreated in a general grayness of the heavens, and the wind blew cold at the window, snapping at the plastic. The heat seemed hardly adequate. Conn sat wrapped in his blanket and thinking that it might be more pleasant, privacy notwithstanding, to move into the main dome with the others. Or he could complain. Maybe someone could do something with the heater. With all that expertise out there, gathered to build a world–surely someone could do something with the space heater.

Two weeks of this kind of thing, with the waves beating at the shore and driving up the river from a monster storm somewhere at sea: water, and water everywhere. The newly cleared fields were bogs and the machinery was sinking, even sitting still. And the chill got into bones and the damp air soaked clothes so that none of them had had warm dry clothing for as long as the fog had lain over them. Clothes stank of warmth and mildew. Azi lines huddled in the drizzle and collected their food at distribution points and went back again into the soggy isolation of the tents. How they fared there Conn had no true idea, but if they had been suffering worse than the rest of the camp, then Education would have notified the staff at large.

A patter began at the window, a spatter of drops carried by a gust. When the wind blew the fog out they had rain and when the wind stopped the fog settled in. He listened to the malevolent spat of wind‑driven water, watched a thin trickle start from the corner that leaked; but he had moved the chest from beneath it, and put his laundry on the floor to soak up the leak that pooled on the foamset floor. There was no sound but that for a while, the wind and the beat of the drops; and solitude, in the thin, gray daylight that came through the rain‑spattered plastic.

It was too much. He got up and put his coat on, waited for a lull in the rain and opened the door and splashed his way around to the front door of the main dome onto which his smaller one abutted, a drenching, squelching passage through puddles on what had been a pebbled walk.

He met warmth inside, electric light and cheerfulness, the heat of the electronics and the lights which were always on here; and the bodies and the conversation and the business. “Tea, sir?” an azi asked, on duty to serve and clean in the dome; “Yes,” he murmured, sat down at the long table that was the center of all society and a great deal of the work in the staff dome. Maps cluttered its far end; the engineers were in conference, a tight cluster of heads and worried looks.

The tea arrived, and Conn took it, blinked absently at the azi and muttered a Thanks, that’s all, which took the azi out of his way and out of his thoughts. A lizard scuttled near the wall that separated off the com room: that was Ruffles. Ruffles went anywhere she/he liked, a meter long and prone to curl around the table legs or to lurk under the feet of anyone sitting still, probably because she had been spoiled with table tidbits. Clean: at least she was that. The creature had come in so persistently she had acquired a name and a grudging place in the dome. Now everyone fed the thing, and from a scant meter long, she had gotten fatter, passed a meter easily, and gone through one skin change in recent weeks.

A scrabbling climb put Ruffles onto a stack of boxes. Conn drank his tea and stared back at her golden slit eyes. Her head turned to angle one at him directly. She flared her collar and preened a bit.

“Help you, sir?” That was Bilas, making a bench creak as he sat down close by, arms on the table. Non‑com and special op colonel–they had no distinctions left. Protocols were down, everywhere.

“Just easing the aches in my bones. Any progress on that drainage?”

“We got the pipe in, but we have a silting problem. Meteorology says they’re not surprised by this one. So we hear.”

“No. It’s no surprise. We got off lightly with the last front.”

Another staffer arrived, carrying her cup–Regan Chiles dropped onto a bench opposite, scavenger‑wise spotting a body in authority and descending with every indication of problems. “Got a little difficulty,” she said. “Tape machines are down. It’s this salt air and the humidity. We pulled the most delicate parts and put them into seal; but we’re going to have to take the machines apart and clean them; and we’re really not set up for that.”

“You’ll do the best you can.” He really did not want to hear this. He looked about him desperately, found fewer people in the dome than he had expected, which distracted him with wondering why. Chiles went on talking, handing him her problems, and he nodded and tried to take them in, the overload Education was putting on Computer Maintenance, because inexpert personnel had exposed some of the portable units to the conditions outside. Because Education had programs behind schedule…and shifted blame.

“Look,” he said finally, “your chain of command runs through Maj. Gallin. All this ought to go to him.”

A pursed lip, a nod, an inwardness of the eyes. Something was amiss.

“What answer did Gallin give you?”

“Gallin just told us to fix it and to cooperate.”

“Well, you don’t go over Gallin’s head, lieutenant. You hear me.”

“Sir,” Chiles muttered, clenched her square jaw and took another breath. “But begging the colonel’s pardon, sir–my people are going shift and shift and others are idle.”

“That’s because your department has something wrong, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll talk to the other departments.” He was conscious of Bilas at his elbow, witness to it all. “I stand by Gallin, you hear. I won’t have this bypassing channels.–Drink the tea, lieutenant; both of you. If we have any problems like that, then you keep to chain of command.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir,” Bilas murmured.

He stayed there, sipping the tea, himself and Chiles and Bilas; and soon others came up the table to intimate their troubles to him, so that his stomach knotted up again in all the discomfort he had left his quarters to avoid.

And finally after he had drunk several cups of tea and had to go out to avail himself of the latrine in back of the dome, he headed back to his own quarters with his collar turned up and an ache in his bones that felt like dull needles. An ariel slithered through a puddle in his path, miniature mariner, swimming for a moment, more intent on direction than convenience, which was the habit of ariels.

A siren disturbed the air. He looked about him in the pale gray haze, tried to get location on it, and thought it was coming from somewhere near the fields.

vii

Day 58 CR

They brought Ada Beaumont back in a sheet with the blood and the rain soaking it, and Bob Davies following along after the litter with his clothes soaked and stained with mud and blood, and that look in his eyes that was nowhere, and nowhen, as if he had backed away from life.

Conn came out into the rain and looked down at the smallish bundle on the stretcher–stared confusedly, because it was always ridiculous how something as large across life as Ada, a special op who had survived Fargone and the war and the Rising, who had been wiry and cagy and full of every trick the enemy never expected–could come down to an object so small and diminished. Men and women stood with their eyes hazed with tears, in the fog and the mist, but Bob Davies just stared in shock, his face gone ghastly pale; and Conn put his hands in his pockets and felt a panic and a hollowness in his gut.

“It was a caliban burrow,” Pete Gallin said, wiped the water out of his eyes with a bloody, abraded hand. “Andresson–saw it happen.”

“Andresson.” Conn looked at the man, a thin and wispy fellow with distracted eyes.

“We were fixing that washout up there and she was talking to me on the rig when the ground behind her feet just–went. This big crawler behind her, parked, nobody on it–just started tipping for no cause. She went under it; and we had to get the winch, sir–we got another crawler turned and got the winch on it, but it was one of those lizard burrows, like–like three, four meters down; and in that soft ground, the crawler on it–the whole thing just dissolved…”

“Take precautions,” Conn said; and then thought that they were all expecting him to grieve over Beaumont, and they would hate him because he was like this. “We can’t have another.” There was a dire silence, and the bearers of the litter just stood there in the rain shifting the poles in their hands because of the weight. Their cropped heads shed beads of water, and red seeped through the thin sheeting and ran down into the puddles. “We bury in the earth,” he said, his mind darting irrecoverably to practical matters, for stationers, who were not used to that. “Over by the sea, I think, where there’s no building planned.”

He walked away–like that, in silence. He did not realize either the silence or his desertion until he was too far away to make it good. He walked to his own quarters and shut the door behind him, shed his wet jacket and flung it down on the bench.

Then he cried, standing there in the center of the room, and shivered in the cold and knew that there was nothing in Pete Gallin or in any of the others which would help him. Old as he was getting and sick as he was getting, the desertion was all on Ada’s side.

He was remarkably lucid in his shock. He knew, for instance, that the burrowing beyond the perimeters was worse news than Ada’s death. It threw into doubt all their blueprints for coexistence with the calibans. It spelled conflict. It altered the future of the world–because they had to cope with it with only the machines and the resources in their hands. When the weather cleared they would have to sit down and draw new plans, and somehow he had to pull things into a coherency that would survive. That would save forty thousand human lives.

Promotions had to be done. Gallin had to be brought up to co‑governor: Gallin–a good supervisor and a decent man and no help at all. Maybe a civ like Gutierrez–Gutierrez was the brightest of the division chiefs, in more than bio; but there was no way to jump Gutierrez over others with more seniority. Or Sedgewick–a legal mind with rank but no decisiveness.

He wiped his eyes, found his hand trembling uncontrollably.

Someone splashed up to the door, opened it without a by your leave, a sudden noise of rain and gust of cold. He looked about. It was Dean, of the medical staff.

“You all right, sir?”

He straightened his shoulders. “Quite. How’s Bob?”

“Under sedation. Are you sure, sir?”

“I’ll be changing my clothes. I’ll be over in the main dome in a minute. Just let me be.”

“Yes, sir.” A lingering look. Dean left. Conn turned to the strung clothesline which was his closet and his laundry, and picked the warmest clothes he had, still slightly damp. He wanted a drink. He wanted it very badly.

But he went and set things right in the dome instead–met with the staff, laid out plans, unable finally to go out to the burial because of the chill, because he began to shiver and the chief surgeon laid down the law–which was only what he wanted.

Tired people came back, wet, and shivering and sallow‑faced. Davies was prostrate in sickbay, under heavier sedation after the burial–had broken down entirely, hysterical and loud, which Ada had never been. Ever. Gallin sat with shadowed eyes and held a steaming cup in front of him at table. “You’re going to have to survey the area,” Conn said to him, with others at the table, because there was no privacy, “and you’re going to have to keep surveying, to find out if there’s more undermining.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ruffles, on her stack of boxes, flicked her tongue. Conn regarded her balefully past Gallin’s slumped shoulder and bowed head. “It was an accident,” he said. “That’s all there is to say about it. We just don’t intend to have another one.”

“Sir,” Gallin said, “that caliban mound on this side of the river… I’d like to break that up.”

Conn looked at Gutierrez, who had his mouth clamped tight. “Gutierrez?”

“I’d like to know first,” Gutierrez said, “if that’s the source of the tunnelling in the camp or not. If we don’t know for sure, if we’re just guessing–we’re not solving the problem at all.”

“You’re proposing more study.”

“I’d like to do that, sir.”

“Do it, then. But we’re going to have to probe those tunnels and know where they go.”

“I’ll be on that–tonight, if you like.”

“You map it out on paper tonight. And we get a team out at daybreak to probe the ground. We don’t know for certain it is the Calibans at all, do we?”

“No,” said Gutierrez. “That’s the point. We don’t know.”

Conn gathered up the bottle on the table in front of him, that they had used to lace the tea, and poured himself the long postponed drink. His hand shook violently in the pouring so that he spilled a little. He sipped at it and the liquor went into him, settling his battered nerves.

Ruffles scrambled from her perch and hit the floor, put on her best display. One of the techs slipped from the table and got her a morsel of food, which vanished with a neat dart of the head and a choking motion.

Conn finished his drink, excused himself, put his jacket on and walked back to his own quarters around the bending of the walk. The rain had stopped, in the evening. The electric lights in the compound and scattered throughout the azi camp were haloed in the mist. He stopped there on the puddled gravel walk, cold inside, looked out over all the camp, seeing what they had come to do slipping further and further away.

viii

Day 58 CR

“They put her in the ground,” Pia said, very soft, in the comfort of their pallet; and Jin held to her for comfort in the dark. “They buried her in the ground, and they all stood around and cried.”

This was a revelation–the death of a born‑man. They were accustomed to azi mortality. Azi died, and they carried the body to the white building on the farm, and that was the end of the matter. If one was a good type, then there was the confidence that others of one’s type would go on being born. There was pride involved in that. And that meant something.

But they saved nothing of Ada Beaumont. There were no labs to save it.

“I wish we could have tapes,” Jin said. “I miss them.”

Pia hugged him the tighter, buried her face against his shoulder. “I wish the same thing. There was a mistake about the machine falling on the captain. I don’t know what. I think we could have been at fault. I wish we knew.”

“They say they can’t use the machines in the bad weather.”

“When there are labs again,” Pia said, “when we have good tape again, it’s going to be better.”

“Yes,” he said.

But that was a very long time away.

He and Pia made love in the dark; and that replaced the tapes. It came to him that they were happier than the born‑man who had died, having no one of her own type surviving, at least here on this world. But there were other 9998s and 687s. And they made love because it was the warmest and the pleasantest thing they could do, and because they were permitted.

This made born‑men; and an obscure sense of duty dawned on Jin, that if one had died, then one had to be born. This was why they had been chosen, and what they had to do.

The rain stopped, and the sun came back in the morning, with only a ragged bit of cloud. The world was different under this sun. The crawlers stood off in the cleared fields, muddy with yesterday’s accident, and a great pit remained around which born‑men began to probe. And the world was different because there was a dead born‑man lying alone by the sea, with a marker that let the grave be seen across the camp.

Jin walked to his supervisor’s table, set up in the roadway under this new sun, and applied for the day’s work; but instead of doing more survey, he was given a metal rod and told to push it into the earth. He was to call the supervisor if it seemed that the dirt was looser than it ought to be. He went out among others and probed until his shoulders ached, and the born‑man Gutierrez and his crew took down all that they found.

ix

Day 162 CR

The domes rose, with the sun hot and the sea beating blue and white at the shore; and Conn sat in his chair in front of the main dome, under the canopy, because the heat was never that great, and the breeze pleased him. An ariel waddled across the dust near the walk and squatted there just off the gravel path, in the shadow of Conn’s own adjacent dome. It built–instinctive behavior, Gutierrez maintained. It had brought a pebble and added it to the stack it was making–not a pebble from the walk, thank you, but a larger one, painstakingly found elsewhere, presumably just the right pebble, for reasons only another ariel might grasp. It made circles of stacks. It built domes too, Conn thought distantly; but its domes failed, collapsing into nests. The last few stones always knocked the efforts down, lacking the trick of a keystone. So it seemed. But that was a fancy: too much of domes, too much of a preoccupation with them lately. The ariel built lines and patterns out from its collapsed stacks of stones, loops and whorls and serpentines. Rudimentary behavior like the moundbuilding Calibans, Gutierrez had said. Probably it originated as a nesting behavior and elaborated into display behaviors. Both sexes built. That had disappointed Gutierrez.

No more Calibans this side of the river, at least. The mounds remained, across the river, but azi with spades had taken the mound this side apart. It was stalemate, the calibans forbidden their mounds this side, the crawlers and earthmovers standing still, mothballed, now that all the major building and clearing was done.

The ship would come, bringing them the supplies and lab facilities they needed; and then the machines would grind and dig their way further across the landscape around that ell bend between the river and the forest, making foundations for the lab and the real city they planned.

But the nearer focus was still tents. Still tents. More than twenty thousand tents, dull brown under the sun. They tried, having hunted the last determined caliban off this shore; but the crawlers had reached the point of diminishing returns in maintenance, needing the supplies the ship would bring. Up the rivercourse the azi blasted at limestone and hauled it back in handpulled wagons, laboriously, as humans had hauled stone in the dawn of human building, because they dared not risk the crawlers, the last of them that worked on parts cannibalized from the others. The azi labored with blasting materials and picks and bare hands, and there was a camp of two dozen tents strung out there too, at the limestone cliffs where they quarried stone.

Perhaps it might have been wiser to have moved the whole site there, to stony ground–knowing now that Calibans burrowed. But they had spent all their resources of material and fuel. The domes stood, so at least the staff had secure housing. The fields were planted, and the power systems and the equipment were safe so long as they kept the calibans away.

Conn studied his charts, traced again and again the changes they had had to make in plans. The cold this spring had hurt his hands; and the joints twisted and pained him, even in the summer sun. He thought of another winter and dreaded it.

But they survived. He knew the time of the landing that would come, down to the day, year after next; and mentally he marked off every day, one to the next, with all the complexities of local/universal time.

The ship, he was determined, would take him home. He would go back to Cyteen. He thought that he might live through the jumps. Might. Or at least he would not have to see more of this world.

Newport, he had called it. But Gehenna had stuck instead. It was where they were; it described their situation. Like Styx for the Forbes River, that began as a joke and stayed. When a wheel broke on one of the carts or when it rained–Gehenna’s own luck, they said; and: What do you expect, in Hell?

They came to the Old Man and complained: Conn solved what he could, shrugged his shoulders at the rest. Like Gallin. Finally–like Gallin. “That’s your problem,” was Gallin’s line, which had gotten to be a proverb so notorious Gallin had had to find different ways of saying it. A sad fellow, Gallin, a bewildered fellow, who never knew why he deserved everyone’s spite. Conn sat placidly, waited for problems to trickle past the obstacle of Gallin, soothed tempers–kept the peace. That was the important thing.

A figure slogged down the lane, slumpshouldered and forlorn, and that was Bob Davies, another of the casualties. Davies worked the labor accounts, kept the supply books, and went off the rejuv of his own choice and over the surgeons’ protests. So there were two of them getting old. Maybe it showed more on Davies than on him–balding and growing bowed and thin in the passage of only a few months.