That got frowns out of them, not smiles. They went outside the door and talked to each other while he sat with his shoulders aching from sitting and working so long and hoping that he had not done the wrong thing.
A woman came into the room, one of them, in fine clothes and smelling the way born‑men smelled in the Base, in the tall buildings, of things other than dirt and smoke. “You’re going to stay the night,” she said. “You’ve done very well. We’re going to make up more questions for you.”
He did not know why–he should have been relieved to know that he had done well. But there was his mother not knowing what might have happened; and he was thirteen and not quite a man, to know how to deal with this.
But the Base was authority, and he stayed.
Their questions were not A and B. They involved himself, and all the things he thought were right and wrong, and all the things he had ever heard. They asked them over and over again, until his brain ached and he did what he had never done for anyone but his own mother: he broke down and cried, which broke something in him which had never been broken before. And even then they kept up their questions. He stilled his sobs and answered what they wanted, estimating that he had deserved this change in himself because he had wanted what no townsman had. The barrage kept up, and then they let him eat and rest.
In the morning or whatever time he woke–the building had no windows–they brought him to a room and put a needle in his arm so that he half slept; and a machine played facts into his awareness so that his mind went whirling into cold dark distances, and the world into a different perspective: they taught him words for these things, and taught him what he was and what his world was.
He wanted to go home when he waked from that. “Your mother’s sent lunch for you,” they told him kindly. “She knows you’re well. We explained you’ll be staying a few more days before you come and go.”
He ate his mother’s bread in this strange place, and his throat swelled while he swallowed and the tears ran down his face without his even trying to stop them, or caring that they saw. He knew what they did to the children then. The children laughed and wrote words in the dust and hung about together, exempt from work because they had their hours in the Base school. But he was no child; and if he went back into the town now he would never be the man he had almost been. That thing in him which had broken would never quite repair itself; and what could he say in the town?–I’ve seen the stars. I’ve seen, I’ve touched, there are other worlds and this one’s shut because we’re different, because we don’t learn, because–Because the town is what it is, and we’re very, very small.
He was quiet in his lessons, very quiet. He took his trank, and listened to the tapes, having lost himself already. He gave up all that he had, hoping that they would make him over entirely, so that he could be what they were, because he had no other hope.
“You’re very good,” they said. “You’re extremely intelligent.”
This gave him what cheer he had.
But his mother cried when he went back to her quiet as he had become; it was the first time she had ever cried in front of him. She hugged him, sitting on the bed which was the only place to sit in their small and shabby house, and held his face and looked in his eyes and tried to understand what he was becoming.
She could not. That was part of his terror.
“They give me credit at the store,” he said, searching for something to offer her in place of himself. “You can have good clothes.”
She cleaned the house after, worked and worked and worked as if she somehow imagined to herself the clean white place that he had been, as if she fought back by that means. She washed all the clothes and washed the rough wood table and turned the straw mattresses, having beaten the dust out of them outside; and scrubbed the stone floor and got up and dusted even the tops of the rafters with a wet cloth to take away the dust. The ariels who sometimes came and went dodged her scrubbing and finally stayed outside. And Dean carried water and helped until the neighbors stared, neighbors already curious what had happened.
But when it was all still, it was only the old house all unnaturally clean, as if she had scrubbed it raw. And they ate together, trying to be mother and son.
“They wanted to teach me to write,” he said. “But I already knew. You taught me that.”
“My dad taught me,” she said, which he knew. “We’re born‑men. Just like them.”
“They say I’m good.”
She looked up from her soup and met his eyes, just the least flicker of vindication. “’Course,” she said.
But he hedged all around the other things, like knowing what the world was. He was alone, with things dammed up inside he could never say.
And they had asked him things no one talked about–like the old things: like the books–the books they said the Hillers had. He had said these things not because he was innocent, but because he was afraid, because he was tired, because they wanted these things very, very badly and he was afraid to lie.
He sat across the rough table from his mother and ate his soup, afraid now to have her know how much of a stranger he had already become.
xi
“He’s not Unionist,” the science chief said. “The psych tests don’t turn up much remnant of it. No political consciousness, nothing surviving in his family line.”
“The mother’s got title to a two bed house,” security said, at the same long table in an upper level of the education facility. “Single. Always been single. Says the father’s a hiller and she doesn’t know who.”
“Different story from the boy,” said education. “The father’s got born‑man blood, he says. But he doesn’t know who. We’ve interviewed the mother: she says the boy’s got only herblood and her father was a doctor. She’s literate. She does some small medical work in the town. Not getting rich at it. We give it away; she gets paid in a measure of flour. Hasn’t done any harm at it.”
“Remarkable woman. I’d suggest to bring her in for tests.”
“Might have her doing clinic work,” the mission chief said. “Good policy, to reward the whole family.”
“We’re forming a picture,” the science chief said. “If we could locate the books that are supposed to exist–”
“The constant rumor is,” security said, “that the hillers have them. If they exist.”
“We don’t press the hillers. They’ll run on us.”
“If there are literates among the hillers, and books, Union materials–”
“We do what we can,” the mission chief said. “Short of a search, which might drive the material completely underground.”
“We know what the colony was. We know that the calibans moved in on them. Something we did scared them off right enough. Maybe it was the noise of the shuttle. But somewhere the first colony lost control, and cleared out of this place. Went to the hills. The azi stayed in the town. The Dean line, a couple of others trace back to the colonists; but there’s a hiller line among traders from one Elly Flanahan, and a lot of Rogerses and Innises and names that persist that aren’t like azi names. Somethingturned most of the colonists to the hills, completely away from this site. The azi tended to stay, being azi. The flood hypothesis is out. Policy split is possible…but there’s not much likelihood of it. The old camp seemed to have been purposely stripped, just people moving out. And calibans all over it. Tunnelled all under it. The earthmovers sunk and near buried. That’s caliban damage, that’s all.”
“We have a pretty good picture,” science said. “It’s far from complete. If there are records–if there was anything left but anomalies like this boy Dean–”