Gutierrez walked the edge of the camp, out near those fields, and surveyed the work. The houses at his right, the azi camp, were many of them of stone now, ramshackle, crazy building; but all the azi built their own shelters in their spare time, and sometimes they found it convenient to build some walls in common…less work for all concerned. If it stood, the engineers and the Council approved it; and that was all there was to it.
He and Kate did something of the like, needing room: they built onto their dome with scrap stone, and it served well enough for an extra room, for them and for small Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez.
Another Caliban had come into the meadow. They came, Gutierrez reckoned, when the seasons turned, and whenever the autumn approached they were obsessed with building burrows. If thoughts at all proceeded in those massive brains. He argued with Council, hoping still for his expedition across the river; but it was weeding time; but it was harvest time. Now a caliban was back and he proposed studying it where it was.
And if it undermines the azi quarters, Gallin had objected, head of Council; or if it gets into the crops–
“We have to live here,” Gutierrez had argued, and said what no one had said in Council even yet: “So there’s not going to be a ship. And how long are we going to sit here blind to the world we live on?”
There was silence after that. He had been rude. He had destroyed the pretenses. There were sullen looks and hard looks, but most had no expression at all, keeping their terror inside, like azi.
So he went now, alone, before they took the guns and came hunting. He walked past the fields and out across the ridge and down, out of easy hail of the camp, which was against all the rules.
He sat down on the side of the hill with his glasses and watched the moundbuilders for a long time…watched as two Calibans used their blunt noses and the strength of their bodies to heave up dirt in a ridge.
About noon, having taken all the notes of that sort he wanted, he ventured somewhat downslope in the direction of the mound.
Suddenly both dived into the recesses of their mound.
He stopped. A huge reptilian head emerged from the vent on the side of the mound. A tongue flicked, and the whole caliban followed, brown, twice the size of the others, with overtones of gold and green.
A new kind. Another species…another gender, there was no knowing. There was no leisure for answers. All they knew of calibans was potentially overturned and they had no way to learn.
Gutierrez took in his breath and held it. The brown–six, maybe eight meters in length–stared at him a while, and then the other two, the common grays, shouldered past it, coming out also.
That first one walked out toward him, closer, closer until he stared at it in much more detail than he wanted. It loomed nearly twice a man’s height. The knobby collar lifted, flattened again. The other two meanwhile walked toward the river, quietly, deliberately, muddy ghosts through the tall dead grass. They vanished. The one continued to face him for a moment, and then, with a sidelong glance and a quick refixing of a round‑pupilled eye to be sure he still stood there…it whipped about and fled with all the haste a caliban could use.
He stood there and stared a moment, his knees shaking, his notebook forgotten in his hand, and then, because there was no other option, he turned around and walked back to the camp.
That night, as he had expected, Council voted to hunt the Calibans off the bank; and he came with them in the morning, with their guns and their long probes and their picks for tearing the mound apart.
But there was no caliban there. He knew why. That they had learned. That all along they had been learning, and their building on this riverbank was different than anywhere else in the world–here, close to humans, where calibans built walls.
He stood watching, refusing comment when the hunters came to him. Explanations led to things the hunters would not want to hear, not with the ships less and less likely in their hopes.
“But they didn’t catch them,” Kate Flanahan said that night, trying to rouse him out of his brooding. “It failed, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. And nothing more.
xv
Year 3, day 230 CR
“Jin,” the elder Jin called; and Pia called with him, tramping the aisles and edges of the camp. Fear was in them…fear of the outside, and the chance of calibans. “Have you seen our son?” they asked one and another azi they met. “No,” the answer was, and Pia fell behind in the searching as Jin’s strides grew longer and longer, because Pia’s belly was heavy with another child.
The sun sank lower in the sky, and they had gone much of the circuit of the camp, out where the electric fence was. That riverward direction was young Jin’s fascination, the obsession of more than one of the rowdy children in the camp.
“By the north of the camp,” an azi told him finally, when he was out of breath and nearly panicked. “There was some small boy playing there.”
Jin went that way, jogging in his haste.
So he found his son, where the walls stopped and the land began to slope toward the watermeadow. White slabs of limestone were the last wall there, the place they had once stacked the building stone. And little Jin sat in the dirt taking leftover bits of stone and piling them. An ariel assisted, added pebbles to the lot–turned its head and puffed up its collar at so sudden an approach.
“Jin,” Jin senior said. “Look at the sun. You know what I told you about wandering off close to dark. You know Pia and I have been hunting for you.”
Little Jin lifted a face which was neither his nor Pia’s and looked at him through a mop of black hair.
“You were wrong,” Jin said, hoping that his son would feel shame. “We thought a caliban could have gotten you.”
His son said nothing, made no move, like the ariel.
Pia arrived, out of breath, around the white corner of the last azi house. She stopped with her hands to her belly, cradling it, her eyes distraught. “He’s all right,” Jin said. “He’s safe.”
“Come on,” Pia said, shaken still. “Jin, you get up right now and come.”
Not a move. Nothing but the stare.
Jin elder ran a hand through his hair, baffled and distressed. “They ought to give us tapes,” he said faintly. “Pia, he wouldn’t be like this if the tape machines worked.”
But the machines were gone. Broken, the supervisors said, except one, that the born‑men used for themselves.
“I don’t know,” Pia said. “I don’t know what’s right and wrong with him. I’ve asked the supervisors and they say he has to do these things.”
Jin shook his head. His son frightened him. Violence frightened him. Pick him up and spank him, the supervisors said. He had hit his son once, and the tears and the noise and the upset shattered his nerves. He himself had never cried, not like that.
“Please come,” he said to his son. “It’s getting dark. We want to go home.”
Little Jin carefully picked up more stones and added them to his pattern, the completion of a whorl. The ariel waddled over and moved one into a truer line. It was all loops and whorls, like the ruined mounds that came back year by year in the meadow.
“Come here.” Pia came and took her son by the arms and pulled him up, scattering the patterns. Little Jin kicked and screamed and tried to go on sitting, which looked apt to hurt Pia. Jin elder came and picked his son up bodily under one arm, nerving himself against his screams and his yells, impervious to his kicking as they carried him in shame back to the road and the camp.