“He died.”
“You’re his daughter. They said you might talk to us. We’d like you to come and do that. Aboard the ship, if you’d like.”
“Won’t go there.” Her heart beat very fast, but she kept her face set and grim and unconcerned. They had guns. She saw that. “Sit.”
They looked uncomfortable or offended. One squatted down in front of her, a man in blue weave with a lot of metal and stripes that meant importance among born‑men. She remembered.
“Pia’s your name.”
She nodded shortly.
“You know what happened here? Can you tell us what happened here?”
“My father died.”
“Was he born?”
She pursed her lips. All the rest knew that much, whatever it meant, because it had never made sense to her, how a man could not be born. “He was something else,” she said.
“You remember the way it was at the beginning. What happened to the domes?” The gesture of a smooth, white hand toward the ruins where calibans made walls. “Disease? Sickness?”
“They got old,” she said, “mostly.”
“But the children–the next generation–”
She remembered and chuckled to herself, grew sober again, thinking on the day the born‑men died.
“There were children,” the man insisted. “Weren’t there?”
She drew a pattern in the dust, scooped up sand and drew with it, a slow trickling from her hand.
“Sera. What happened to the children?”
“Got children,” she said. “Mine.”
“Where?”
She looked up, fixed the stranger with her stronger eye. “Some here, some there, one dead.”
The man sucked in his lips, thinking. “You live up in the hills.”
“Live right here.”
“They said you were out of the hills. They’re afraid of you, sera Pia.”
It was not, perhaps, wise, to make Patterns in the dust. The man was sharp. She dumped sand atop the spiral she had made. “Live here, live there.”
“Listen,” he said earnestly, leaning forward. “There was a plan. There was going to be a city here. Do you know that? Do you remember lights? Machines?”
She gestured loosely toward the mirrors and the tower, the wreckage of them amid the caliban burrowings in main camp. “They fell. The machines are old.” She thought of the lights aglow again; the town might come alive with these strangers here. She thought of the machines coming to life again and eating up the ground and levelling the burrows and the mounds. It made her vaguely uncomfortable. Her brother was right. They meant to plow the land again. She sensed that, looking into the pale blue eyes. “You want to see the old Camp? Youngers’ll take you there.”
And on the other side there was lack of trust, dead silence. Of course, they had seen the mounds. It was strange territory.
“Maybe you might go with us.”
She got up, looked round her at the townfolk, who tried to be looking elsewhere, at the ground, at each other, at the strangers. “Come on then,” she said.
They talked to their ship. She remembered such tricks as they used, but the voices coming out of the air made the children shriek. “Old stuff,” she said sourly, and reached for Old Jin’s stick that he had had by the door, leaned on it as if she were tired and slow. “Come on. Come on.”
Two of them would go with her. Three stayed in the village. She walked with them up the road, in amongst the weeds and ruins. She walked slowly, using the stick.
And when she had gotten into the wild place she hit them both and ran away, heading off among the caliban retreats until her side ached and she needed the stick.
But she was free, and as for the mounds, she knew how to skirt them and where the accesses were to be avoided.
She came by evening into the wooded slopes, up amongst the true, rock‑hearted hills.
Someone whistled, far and lonely in the woods where flitters and ariels darted and slithered. It was a human sound. One of the watchers had seen her come.
Home, the whistle said to her. She whistled back; Pia, her whistle said. There were friends and enemies here, but she had her knife and she brought away a comb and her father’s stick, confident and set upon her way.
At least Old Jin had not been crazy. She knew that now. She had seen the ships come, and she remembered the born‑men who had lived in the domes, who had died and mingled their types with azi, some in the hills and some few scratching the land with wooden plows.
There were ships again and born‑men to own the world.
Azi marching in rows, her brother Jin had said. But she was not azi and she would never march to their orders.
v
Strangers.
Green wrinkled his nose and blinked in the light, perceiving disruption in the Pattern made on the plain. There was a new motion now. He felt the stirrings underground recognizing it.
The disquiet grew extreme. He dived back into the dark, finding his way with body and direction‑sense rather than with eyes. Small folk skittered past him as he went, muddy slitherings of long‑tailed bodies past his bare legs as he stooped and hastened along in that surefooted gait he had learned very long ago, hands before him in the dark, bare feet scuffing along the muddy bottom. His toes met a serpentine and living object in the dark, his skin felt an interruption in the draft that should blow in this corridor, his ears picked up the sough of breathing: he knew what his fingers would meet before they met it, and he simply scrambled up the tail and over the pebble‑leathery back, doing the great brown less damage than its blunt claws could do to him in getting past. The brown gave a throaty exhalation, flicked an inquisitive tongue about his shoulders and when he simply scurried on, it slithered after.
It wanted to know then. It was interested. Green darted up again, taking branches of the tunnels which led nearer the strangers. He was, after all, Green, and old, almost the oldest of his kind, in his way superior to the elder brown which whipped along after him. It wanted to know; and he changed his plans and darted up again to daylight to show it.
When he had come to the light again, up where trees crested the mound, where he had free view of the town and the shining thing which had come to rest in the meadow, the brown squatted by him to look too.
He made the Pattern for it. He offered up what he had, making the spirals rightwise up to a point and leftwise thereafter.
The brown moved heavily and seized up a twig fallen from the trees, crunched it in massive jaws. The crest was up. The eyes were more dark than gold. Green sat with the muscles at his own nape tightening, lacking expression for his confusion. The brown was distraught. It was everywhere evident.
It nosed him suddenly, directing him back inside the mound. He reached the cool safe dark and still it pushed at him, herding him toward the deepest sanctuary.
There were others gathered in the dark. They huddled together and in time one of the browns came to herd them further.
It was days that they travelled in that way, until they had come far upriver, to the new mounds, and here they stayed, able to take the sun again, here where calibans made domes and walls and caliban young and grays came out to sun, heedless of the danger westward.
vi
T51 days MAT: Alliance Probe Boreas ;
Report, to be couriered to Alliance Security Operations under seal COL/M/TAYLOR/ASB/SPEC/OP/NEWPORT‑PROJECT/
…initial exploration in sector A on accompanying chart #a‑1 shows complete collapse of Union authority. The prefab domes are deserted, overgrown with brush. The solar array is indicated by letter aon chart #a‑1, lying under the wreckage of the tower; brush has grown over most of it. Inquiry among inhabitants produces no clear response except that the fall occurred perhaps a decade previous. This may have been due to weather.