Текст книги "Forty Thousand in Gehenna"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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“I belong in the camp,” she said, taking the kind of stance she used when she expected something of the azi who served. “I want to go through the maze. You understand? You take me through.”

The figure beckoned, never speaking a word. It began to move off through the brush as vague as ever it had been.

“Wait a minute,” she said; and panic was in her mind–wondering how she was going to explain all this when she got home. She was going to be late. The fugitive showed no interest in helping her and they would be turning out search parties when it got dark. It was already beyond easy explaining–I was lost, mother, father; I was fishing; I got back in the mounds–“Wait!”

Brush moved behind her. She looked about, saw a half dozen others, who held out hands toward her, silent. “Oh, no,” she told them. “No, you don’t…” Her heart was crashing against her ribs. “I’m going on my own, thank you. I’ve just changed my mind.” She saw the eyes of some, the curious intensity, like the eyes of ariels. Crazy, every one. She edged back. “I have to get home. My friends are looking for me right now.”

They came closer, a soft stirring among their ranks, some of them in coveralls and some in only the remnant of clothing, or in blankets and sheeting. And strange, and silent and without sanity.

She remembered the other one, the one behind her–turned suddenly and gave a muffled outcry, face to face with the boy, close enough to touch–“You keep your hands to yourself,” she said, trying to keep the fear from her voice, because that was her chiefest hope–that there were still the town ways instilled in them, still the habit of obeying voices that had no doubt when they gave commands. “Be definite,” her mother had taught her, special op and used to moving people, “and know what you’re going to do if they refuse,”; but her father–“Know what you’re poking your finger at,” he said, whenever she was stung. She stared at the boy, a wild frozen moment before she realized the others were closing from behind.

She whirled, one desperate effort to shock them all and find an opening; but they snatched at her, at her clothing–wrong timing, she thought in utter selfdisgust, and only half thought that she might die. She hit one of them and laid him out the way her mother had taught her, but that was only one of them: the others caught her hair and held her arms. And some of them had clubs, showing her what might happen if she yelled.

Go along with it, she thought; none of the Weirds had ever killed. They were strange, but they had never yet kept their minds at anything: they would lose interest and then she might get away.

They tugged her arms, drew her with them…and this she let happen, noticing everything, every landmark. Jin and his brothers would find her; or she might get away; or if she could not, then her father would come looking, with her mother and the specials who knew the hills and the mounds. The camp would come with guns; and then they would be sorry. The important thing now was not to startle them into violence.

The way they walked twisted and turned in the maze, among wooded ridges and through thickets, until she had only the sunset to rely on for direction. Now she began to feel lost and desperate, but something–be it common sense or despair itself–still kept her from sudden moves with them.

They came to a hill, one of the caliban domes. A boy crouched there, dark of hair, who beckoned her inside, into the dark, gaping entry.

“Oh, no, I won’t. They’ll miss me, you understand. They’ll come–”–Hunting, she had almost said, and swallowed the very thought of shooting calibans. They were the Lost, these boys, this strange band. A shiver ran over her skin.

“Come.” The boy stretched out a hand, fingers spread upward, closed his fist with a slow intimation of power, so real it seemed to narrow all the space in the region, to draw in all that was. A second time he beckoned. Hands closed about her arms, propelled her forward…in a kind of paralysis–they brought her to him, this beautiful young man.

“Green,” she murmured, knowing him. It was his brothers’ look on him, but changed. Mad. Crazed.

And others came, older than he, male and female.

“They’re looking for you,” she said. “You’d better go.”

But then one of the young men came down from atop the hillside, came close to her, that same far distance in his expression. She might have been a stone. She was not really afraid of him for that reason–until he put his hand on her breast.

“They won’t like that,” she said, “the people in the camp.” And then she wished she had not said that at all; her wish was to get out of here alive, and threatening them was not the way to assure that. The youth fingered her clothing, and began at the closing of it. She stood quite, quite still, not minded to lose her life to these creatures.

He was beautiful beneath the dirt. Most were, who came of azi lines. They were gentle in their moves–all of them curiously gentle, stroking her hair, touching her now without violence, so that it began to wander somewhere between nightmare and dream.

v

“She’s not here,” Jin Younger said, looking about the rocks and scrub of the summit–looked at his brother as if Mark could comprehend any more than he what kind of craziness had taken Jane Gutierrez off the heights. “She’s just not here.”

“She’s got to have tried it on her own,” Mark said, no less than what Jin had in his own mind. Jin pushed past his brother at the narrow passage up among the rocks and started down the trail at a run.

“We’ve got to get the rest of us,” Mark called after him. “We’ve got to get some help fast.”

“You go,” Jin called back, and kept going. His brother yelled other things after him, and he ignored them.

The sun was throwing the last orange light into the clouds, glinting like fire off the solar array down in the camp, like miniature suns; and around that brightness was the dark. She had come to them, this main Camp woman, her own choice, come to him in particular, because he had that about him, that he could impress any woman he liked–he and his brothers. She came into the wild country, against all the rules and regulations: that was her choice too; and he was not one to turn away such favors. It had been good, up on the ridge. Good all day, because Flanahan‑Gutierrez was like them, wild.

But he should have reckoned, he chided himself, that a maincamper who would have had the nerve to come up here with them would not cower atop the hill waiting; with more nerve than sense, she would not stay put.

And Flanahan‑Gutierrez was more than born‑man, she had a father on Council; and a mother in the guards. That was more than trouble.

“Jane,” he called, plunging off the trail and into the most direct course through the mounds. It was twilight this low among the hills, deep dusk, so that he pushed his way blindly among the brush, for the moment losing his way, finding the trail again. “Jane!”

But he could see her with her anger and her born‑man ways, just walking on, hearing his voice and ignoring it–determined to find her own way home. If she had started immediately after they had left the hill, she might almost have made it through the mounds by now, might be coming out among the hills just this side of town.

That was his earnest hope.

But the further he went, in the dark now, with sometimes the slither and hiss of calibans attending him–the more he feared, not for his safety, but for what an ignorant born‑man might do out here at night. One could get by the calibans; but there were pits, and holes, and there were the Weirds like Green, who lurked and hid, who had habits calibans did not. Flitters troubled him, gliding from the trees. He brushed them aside and jogged where he could, out of breath now. “Jane!” he called. “Jane.”

No answer.

He was gasping and sweating by the time he reached the top of the last ridge, with the town and Camp in front of him all lit up in floods. He stood there leaning over, his hands on his knees, getting his breath, and as soon as the pain subsided he started moving again.

For a very little he would have given up his searching then, having no liking for going into the main Camp–for going to Gutierrez–Pardon, sir, has your daughter gotten home? I left her on the cliffs and when I got back she was gone…

He had never seen Gutierrez angry; he had no wish to face him or Flanahan; but he reckoned that he might have no choice.

And then, when he had only crossed the fringes of the town, running along the road under the floodlights–“Hey,” a maincamper shouted at him: “You–did you come up from the azi town?”

He skidded to a stop, recognized Masu in the dark, one of the guards. “Yes, sir.” A lie, and half a lie: he had cut across the edge of it and so come up from the town.

“Woman’s missing. Out of bio. Flanahan‑Gutierrez.–They’re supposed to be looking down in town. Are they? She went out this morning and she hasn’t gotten back. Are they searching out that way?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and the sweat he had run up turned cold. “They don’t know where she is?”

“Get the word down that way, will you? Go back and pass it.”

“I’ll get searchers up,” he said, breathless, spun about and ran, with what haste he could muster.

They would find out, he kept thinking in an agony of fear. The main Camp found everything out, whatever they tried to hide. They would know, and he and his brothers would be to blame. And what the main Camp might do then, he had no idea, because no human being had ever lost another. He only knew he had no wish to face her people on his own.

vi

The sun came up again, the second sun since Jane was gone; and Gutierrez sat down on the hillside, wiped his face and unstopped his canteen for a sip to ease his throat. They had it gridded off, searchers in all the sections between the Camp and the cliffs and the Camp and the river. His wife reached him, sank down and took her own canteen, and there was a terrible, bruised look to her eyes.

The military was out there, in force, by pairs; and azi who knew the territory searched–among them the young azi who had come to him and Kate to admit the truth. A frightened boy. Kate had threatened to shoot him. But that boy had been out all the night and roused all the young folk he could find…had gone out again, on no knowing what reserves. It was not just the boy. It was Jane. It was the world. It had given her to them. But Jane thought in Gehenna‑time; thought of the day, the hour. Had never seen a city. Had no interest in her studies–just the world, the moment, the things she wanted…now. Everything was now.

What good’s procedure? she would say. She wanted to understand what a shell was, what the creature did, not what was like it elsewhere. What good’s knowing all those things? It’s this world we have to live in. I was born here, wasn’t I? Cyteen sounds too full of rules for me.

The day went, and the night, and a new day dawned with a peculiar coldness to the light–an ebbing out of hope. His wife said nothing, slumped against him and he against her.

“Some run away,” he offered finally. “In the azi town–some of them go into the hills. Maybe Jane took it into her head–”

“No,” she said. Absolute and beyond argument. “Not Jane.”

“Then she’s gotten lost. It’s easy in the mounds. But she knows–the things to eat; the way to survive–I taught her; she knows.”

“She could have taken a fall,” his wife said. “Could have hurt herself–Might be too wet to start a fire.”

“All the same she could live,” Gutierrez said. “If she had two legs broken, she could still find enough within reach she could get moisture and food. That’s the best guess: that she’s broken something, that she’s tucked up waiting for us–She’s got good sense, our Jane. She was born here, isn’t that what she’d say?”

They did it to bolster their own courage, shed hopes on each other and kept going.

vii

Jane screamed, came awake in the dark and stifled the outcry in sudden terror–the smell of earth about her, the prospect of hands which might touch… But silence, no breathing nearby, no intimation of human presence.

She lay still a moment, listening, her eyes useless in this deep and dark place where they had brought her. She ached. And time was unimportant. The sun seemed an age ago, a long, long nightmare/dream of naked bodies and couplings in a dark so complete it was beyond the hope of sight. She was helpless here, robbed of every faculty and somewhere in that time, of wit as well.

She lay there gathering it again, lay there waking up to the fact that, having done what they had done, the Weirds were gone, and she was alone in this place. She imagined the beating of her heart, so loud it filled up the silence. It was terror, when she thought that she had long since passed the point of fear. She was discovering something more of horror–being lost and left. Isolation had never dawned on her in the maelstrom just past.

Think, her father would say; think of all the characteristics of the thing you deal with.

Tunnels, then, and tunnels might collapse: how strong the roof?

Tunnels had at least one access; tunnels might have more; tunnels meant air; and wind; and she felt a breeze on naked skin.

Tunnels were made by calibans, who burrowed deep; and going the wrong way might go down into the depths.

She drew a deep breath–moved suddenly, and as suddenly claws lit on her flesh and a sinewy shape whipped over her. She yelled, a shriek that rang into the earth and died, and flailed out at the touch–

It skittered away…an ariel; a silly ariel, like old Ruffles. That was all. It headed out the way Ruffles would head out if startled indoors…and it knew the way. It went toward the breeze.

She sucked in wind again, got to hands and knees and scrambled after–up and up a moist earth slope, blind, keeping low for fear of hitting her head if she attempted to stand. And a dim light grew ahead, a brighter and brighter light.

She broke out into the daylight blind and wiping at her eyes…saw movement then, and looked aside. She scrambled to her feet, seeing a human shape–seeing the azi‑born young man crouched there, the first who had touched her. Alone.

“Where are the rest of them?” she asked. “Hiding up there?” There was brush enough, in this bowl between the mounds, up on the ridges, all about.

And then a sweep of her eye toward the left–up and up toward a caliban shape that rested on the hill, four meters tall and more–brown and monstrous, huger than any caliban she had imagined. It regarded her with that lofty, onesided stare of a caliban, but the pupil was round, not slit. The feet clutched the curved surface and a fallen branch snapped beneath its forward leaning weight as the head turned toward her. She stared–fixed, disbelieving when it moved first one leg and then the other, serpentining forward.

Then the danger came home to her, and she yelled and scrambled backward, but brush came between her and it, and trees, as she climbed higher on the further slope.

No one stopped her. She looked back–at the caliban which threaded its way among the trees; again at the azi‑born, who sat there placid in the path of that monster. Very slowly the young man got to his feet and walked toward the huge brown caliban–stopped again, looking back at her, his hand on its shoulder.

She began to run, up and over the mound–scrambling among the brush and the rocks. A gray caliban was there, down the slope and another–near her, that jolted her heart. It lashed about in the brush, caliban‑like: it skittered down the slope and along the ridge, headed toward the river past the rocks–it must be going to the river…

In a flash she realized where she likely was, near rocks that thrust through the mounds: rocks and the river below the cliffs.

She stopped running when she had spent her breath, slumped down amongst the trees and took stock of herself, her remnant of clothing, that she put to rights with trembling hands. She sat there in the brush with tears and exhaustion tugging at her, and she fought the tears off with swipes of a muddy hand.

“Hey,” someone said; and she started, whirled to her knees and half to her feet, like something wild.

From the Camp: they were two of the men from the Camp, Ogden and Masu. She stood up, shaking in the knees, and the blood drained from her face, sudden shame as she stood there with her clothes in rags and her pride in question. “There,” she yelled, and pointed back over the ridge, “there–they caught me and dragged me off–they’re there…”

“Who?” Masu asked. “Who did? Where?”

“Over the ridge,” she kept crying, not wanting to explain, not wanting anything but to see it wiped out, the memory and the smiling, silent lot of them.

“Take care of her,” Masu said to Ogden. “Take care of her. I’ll round up the others. We’ll see.”

“There’s Calibans,” she said, looking from one to the other of them. Ogden took her arm. Her coveralls were torn almost beyond staying on; she reached to cover herself and gasped for breath in shock. “There’s calibans–a kind no one ever saw–” But Ogden was pulling her away.

She looked back when Ogden had hastened her off with him. Fire streaked across the sky, and she stared at the burning star.

“That’s a flare,” Ogden said. “That’s Masu saying we found you.”

“There are people,” she said, “people living in the mounds.”

“Hush,” Ogden said, and squeezed her hand.

“It’s so. They live there. The Weirds. With the calibans.”

Ogden looked at her–old as her father, a rough man, and big. “I’m going to get you out of here,” he said. “Can you run?”

She caught her breath and nodded, shaking in all her limbs. Ogden seized her hand and took her with him.

But they met others, coming their way…and one was her father and the other her mother. She might have run to meet them: she had the strength left. But she did not. She stopped still, and they came and hugged her, her mother and then her father, and shed tears. She was dry of them.

“I’m going back after Masu,” Ogden said. “It may be trouble back there.”

“They should get them,” Jane said, quite, quite coldly. She had gotten her dignity back, had found it again, used it like a cloak between her and her parents, despite her nakedness.

“Jane,” her father said–there were tears in his eyes, but her own were still dry. “What happened?”

“They caught me and dragged me in there. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her father hugged her, and her mother did. “Come home,” her mother said, and she walked with them, no longer afraid, no longer feeling anything but a cold distance between herself and what had happened.

It was a far way, to the Camp; and her father talked about medics. “No,” she said to that. “No. I’m going home.”

“Did they–?” That her mother found the question hard struck her as strange, and ominous. Her face burned.

“Oh, yes. A lot of times.”

viii

“There has to be law,” Gallin said, in Council, in the dome–looked down at all the heads of departments. “There has to be law. We rout them out of there and we have to do something with them. It was a mistake to sit back and let it go on. We can’t be having this…this desertion of the young. We set up fences; we organize a hunt and clear the mounds.”

“They’re our own kind,” the confessor‑advocate objected, rising from her chair, grayhaired and on the end of her rejuv. “We can’t take guns in there.”

“We should,” Gutierrez said, also on his feet, “mobilize the town, dig foundations that go far down; we ought to make the barriers we meant to make at the beginning. We can shoot them–we can level the mounds–and it happens all over again. Time after time. It never works. There’s more going out there than we understand. Maybe another species–we don’t know. We don’t know their habits, their interrelations, we don’t know what drives them. We shoot them and we dig them out and it never works.”

“We mobilize the azi,” Gallin said. “We give them arms and train them–make a force out of them.”

“For the love of God, what for?” the advocate cried. “To march on calibans? Or to shoot their own relatives?”

“There has to be order,” Gallin said. He had gained weight over the years. His chins wobbled in his rage. He looked up at them. “There has to be some order in their lives. The tape machines are gone, so what do we give them? I’ve talked to Education. We have to have some direction. We make regiments and sections; we mount guard; we protect this camp.”

“From what?” Gutierrez asked. And added, because he knew Gallin, because he saw the insecure anger: “Sir.”

“Order,” Gallin said, pounding the able for emphasis. “Order in the world. No more dealing with runaways. No more tolerance.”

Gutierrez sank down again, and the confessor‑advocate sat down. There was a murmuring from the others, an undertone of fear.

The calibans had come closer and closer over the years and they had found no occasion to say no.

But he had qualms when he saw the azi marshalled out for drill, when he saw them given instruction to kill. He walked back on that day with a lump in his gut.

Kate and Jane met him, daughter like mother–so, so alike they stood there, arms about each other, with satisfaction in what they saw. A change had come about in Jane. She had never had that hard‑eyed look before she went out into the mounds. She had grown up and away, to Kate’s side of the world. No more curiosity; no more inquiring into the world’s small secrets: he foresaw silence until that threat out there was swept away, until Jane saw the world as safe again.

While azi marched in rows.

ix

Pia Younger set the bucket down inside the door, in the two room house that was theirs, a house hung with clothes and oddments from the rafters–drying onions, dried peppers, plastic pots balanced on the beams, and her own bed in this corner, her parents’ bed in the other room. And rolled pallets that belonged to her brothers, who prepared for another kind of leaving.

Her mother sat outside–a woman of silences. She went out again and stooped to take her mother’s hand, where she sat sharpening a hoe–stroke, stroke of a whetstone across the edge. Her father–he was off with the boys. Her mother paid little attention…had paid little at all to the world in recent days. She only worked.

“I’m going out,” Pia Younger said. “I’m going to see how it goes.” And quietly, in a hushed voice, bending close and taking her mother’s hands: “Listen, they’ll never catch Green. They’ll go up the river, all the lost ones do. Don’t worry about them shooting him. They can’t.”

She felt guilty in the promise, having no faith in it, having no love for her brother. And it all failed with her mother anyway, who went on with her sharpening, stone against steel, which reminded her of knives. Pia drew back from Pia elder and as quietly drew away. She lifted her eyes to the borders of the town, where another kind of camp was in the making.

Her father was out there following born‑man orders; her brothers pretended to. And very quietly, Pia elder never noticing, Pia Younger walked down the street the opposite way, then cut through at the corner and doubled back again.

She watched the weapons‑practice from the slope of the caliban‑raised hill near the town, crouched there, as she daily watched these drills. The fields went unattended; the youngest deserted the work. And she knew what her brothers said among themselves, that they would only pretend, and carry the weapons, but when it got to attacking the calibans and the runaways, they would run away themselves. Her father did not know this, of course. Her father carried arms the way he did other things the officers asked of him. And that was always the difference.

Herself, she sat thinking on the matter, how drear things would be if her brothers should go, if all their friends should follow them.

Sixteen years was almost grown. She sat making up her mind, thinking that she would go already if not for the danger of the guns and the weapons, that they might mistake her for one of the Weirds out there. Her parents would not understand her leaving. But they understood nothing that was different from themselves; and she had known long ago that she was different. All the children were.

Most of the day she watched; and that night her brothers did not come home. Her father came; neighbors came. They waited dinner. The blanket rolls waited against the wall. And her parents sat in silence, ate finally, asked no questions even of each other, their eyes downcast in that silence in which her parents suffered all their pain.

Officers came in the night, rapped on the door and asked questions–wrote down the names of her missing brothers while Pia hovered behind her parents, wrapped in her blanket and shivering not from cold, but from understanding.

x

“We have to move,” Jones said–atop the hill, where they had set up the observation post; and Kate Flanahan nodded, looking outward over the mounds. She shifted her fingers on the woven strap of the gun she carried on her shoulder. “We’ve got the location of the runaways: we’re getting radio from Masu and his lot, with the site under observation. We get this settled. Fast. We’ve turned back two hundred deserters at the wire–it’s falling apart. We get the human element out of this thing, get those runaways routed out of there before we have every azi‑born in town headed over the hill. They’re deserting in troops–got no sympathy for this operation; and there never was any need of drafting that many. This unit; Emberton’s up the way–we’ll get it stopped. No more runaways then; and then we can get the older workers to start building that barrier. Any questions before we move?”

There were none. Flanahan had none; had hate–had that, for her daughter’s suffering, for the hush that had fallen on Jane, the loss of innocence. For her daughter who sat inside or fell to the studies which she had always hated, because it filled her mind.

“Move out,” Jones said, and they moved, filed out quietly through the hills, amid the brush and the trees of the mounds. Some of Bilas’ crew brought the demolitions. Vandermeer had a projectile gun, and gas cannisters to flood the mound and make it unpleasant for the refugees. And a few shots after that–

The orders were not to kill. But Flanahan reckoned that accidents might happen; there might be excuse. She was looking for one.

They walked, moving cautiously, making as little disturbance as possible…but the way they knew, had it down precisely–the spot where Emberton’s unit had set up shop, watching the accesses, watching the runaways come and go.

They came on a sentry: that was Ogden, one of their own–and gathered him up into their small band: eight of them, in all, counting borrowings from Maintenance–and Emberton was arriving with her escort a little earlier, to take personal command up on the ridge. From now on it was careful stealth: and they broke as few branches as possible, disturbed the brush only where they had to. Flitters troubled them, brushed aside when they would light and cling. A fevered sweat ran on Flanahan’s arms and body–a chance, finally, to do something. To take arms against the confusion that had marked all their efforts in Gehenna. A few shots fired, a little healthy fear on the part of the azi‑born: that would settle it.

And then they might build again.

Flanahan was breathing hard when they topped the ridge: the gun was no small weight and she was years out of training. So were they all–Jones with his waist twice its former girth; Emberton gray with rejuv. She saw the tactical op chief in conference with Masu and Tamilin and Rogers as they came up, into that area where Masu and Kontrin and Ogden had sat out observing the situation throughout.

The runaways were still there. Kate Flanahan crept up with the others, near the edge. The word passed among their crouching ranks. Vandermeer armed the projectile gun with the gas cannisters, aimed at the access of the mound they faced. And right in front of them a pair of the fugitives sat naked, sunning their bony, muddy limbs.

Of the calibans, no sight; and that was just as well: less confusion. Jones put the safety off his rifle, and Flanahan did the same, the sweat colder and heavier on her with the passing moments. Those ragged creatures down there, those fugitives from all that was human, they had hurt Jane…had humiliated her; had cared nothing for what they did, for their pleasure; and Jane would never be the same. She wanted those two. Had one all picked out.

“Move,” the order came from Jones; and they did as they had arranged, pasted a few shots near the visible fugitive, came down the slope. Flanahan whipped off a shot, saw the taller of the two go down like he was axed.

And then the ground pitched underfoot, went soft, slid: there were outcries. One was hers. Trees were toppling about them. Of a sudden she was waistdeep in earth and still sliding down as the whole slope dissolved.

She let go the rifle, used her hands to fight the cascading earth; but it went over her, pinning her arms, filling her mouth and nose and eyes; and that and the pressure were all, pain and the crack of joints.

xi

So they failed. Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez understood that when her father came to her to break the news…but she had understood that already, when the radio had been long silent, and the rumor went through the Camp. She took it quietly, having abandoned the thought that her life would proceed as she wanted. Little surprised her.

Her father settled into silence. His calibans went unhunted, after all; but Kate was gone, and calibans had killed her. He smiled very little, and a slump settled into his shoulders in the passing months.

He offered to have the doctors rid her of it, the swelling presence of the child in her belly; but no, Jane said, no. She did not want that. She paid no attention to the stares and the talk among the youths who had been her friends. There was herself and her father; there was that…and the baby was at least some of Kate Flanahan; some of her father, too; and of whatever one of the lostlings had sired it.

When it came she called her daughter Elly–Eleanor Kathryn Flanahan, after her mother: and her father took it into his arms and found some comfort in it.