“Have you ever done sex before?” he asked.
“No. Have you?”
“No,” he said. And because he was a 9998 and confident of his reason: “May I?” he asked, and put out his hand to touch her face. She put her hand on his, and it felt delicately alive and stirred him in a way only the tapes could do before this. He grew frightened then, and dropped his hand to his knee. “We have to wait till tonight.”
“Yes.” She looked no less disturbed. Her eyes were wide and dark. “I really feel like the tapes. I’m not sure that’s right.”
And then the PA came on, telling all azi who had located their assignments to go out and start their day’s work. Pia’s eyes stayed fixed on his.
“We have to go,” he said.
“Where do you work?”
“In the fields; with the engineers, for survey.”
“I’m with the ag supervisor. Tending the sets.”
He nodded–remembered the call and scrambled for his feet and the outside of the tent. She followed.
“5907,” she said, to remember, perhaps. She hurried off one way and he went the other in a great muddle of confusion–not of ignorance, but of changes; of things that waited to be experienced.
Should I feel this way? he would have liked to have asked, if he could have gone to his old supervisor, who would sit with him and ask him just the right questions. Should I think about her this way? But everyone was too busy.
There would be tape soon, he hoped, which would help them sort out the things they had seen, and comfort them and tell them whether they were right or wrong in the things they were feeling and doing. But they must be right, because the born‑men were proceeding on schedule, and in spite of their shouts and their impatience, they stopped sometimes to say that they were pleased.
This was the thing Jin loved. He did everything meticulously and expanded inside whenever the supervisor would tell him that something was right or good. “Easy,” the supervisor would say at times, when he had run himself breathless taking a message or fetching a piece of equipment; would pat his shoulder. “Easy. You don’t have to rush.” But it was clear the supervisor was pleased. For that born‑man he would have run his heart out, because he loved his job, which let him work with born‑men in the fields he loved, observing them with a deep and growing conviction he might learn how to be what they were. The tapes had promised him.
v
Day 32, CR
Gutierrez stopped on the hillside, squatted down on the scraped earth and surveyed the new mound heaved up on this side of the river. Eva Jenks of bio dropped down beside him, and beside her, the special forces op Ogden with his rifle on his knees. Morris, out of engineering, came puffing up the slope from behind and dropped down beside them, a second rifle‑carrier, in case.
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.