Conn looked at Gutierrez, who had his mouth clamped tight. “Gutierrez?”
“I’d like to know first,” Gutierrez said, “if that’s the source of the tunnelling in the camp or not. If we don’t know for sure, if we’re just guessing–we’re not solving the problem at all.”
“You’re proposing more study.”
“I’d like to do that, sir.”
“Do it, then. But we’re going to have to probe those tunnels and know where they go.”
“I’ll be on that–tonight, if you like.”
“You map it out on paper tonight. And we get a team out at daybreak to probe the ground. We don’t know for certain it is the Calibans at all, do we?”
“No,” said Gutierrez. “That’s the point. We don’t know.”
Conn gathered up the bottle on the table in front of him, that they had used to lace the tea, and poured himself the long postponed drink. His hand shook violently in the pouring so that he spilled a little. He sipped at it and the liquor went into him, settling his battered nerves.
Ruffles scrambled from her perch and hit the floor, put on her best display. One of the techs slipped from the table and got her a morsel of food, which vanished with a neat dart of the head and a choking motion.
Conn finished his drink, excused himself, put his jacket on and walked back to his own quarters around the bending of the walk. The rain had stopped, in the evening. The electric lights in the compound and scattered throughout the azi camp were haloed in the mist. He stopped there on the puddled gravel walk, cold inside, looked out over all the camp, seeing what they had come to do slipping further and further away.
viii
Day 58 CR
“They put her in the ground,” Pia said, very soft, in the comfort of their pallet; and Jin held to her for comfort in the dark. “They buried her in the ground, and they all stood around and cried.”
This was a revelation–the death of a born‑man. They were accustomed to azi mortality. Azi died, and they carried the body to the white building on the farm, and that was the end of the matter. If one was a good type, then there was the confidence that others of one’s type would go on being born. There was pride involved in that. And that meant something.
But they saved nothing of Ada Beaumont. There were no labs to save it.
“I wish we could have tapes,” Jin said. “I miss them.”
Pia hugged him the tighter, buried her face against his shoulder. “I wish the same thing. There was a mistake about the machine falling on the captain. I don’t know what. I think we could have been at fault. I wish we knew.”
“They say they can’t use the machines in the bad weather.”
“When there are labs again,” Pia said, “when we have good tape again, it’s going to be better.”
“Yes,” he said.
But that was a very long time away.
He and Pia made love in the dark; and that replaced the tapes. It came to him that they were happier than the born‑man who had died, having no one of her own type surviving, at least here on this world. But there were other 9998s and 687s. And they made love because it was the warmest and the pleasantest thing they could do, and because they were permitted.
This made born‑men; and an obscure sense of duty dawned on Jin, that if one had died, then one had to be born. This was why they had been chosen, and what they had to do.
The rain stopped, and the sun came back in the morning, with only a ragged bit of cloud. The world was different under this sun. The crawlers stood off in the cleared fields, muddy with yesterday’s accident, and a great pit remained around which born‑men began to probe. And the world was different because there was a dead born‑man lying alone by the sea, with a marker that let the grave be seen across the camp.
Jin walked to his supervisor’s table, set up in the roadway under this new sun, and applied for the day’s work; but instead of doing more survey, he was given a metal rod and told to push it into the earth. He was to call the supervisor if it seemed that the dirt was looser than it ought to be. He went out among others and probed until his shoulders ached, and the born‑man Gutierrez and his crew took down all that they found.
ix
Day 162 CR
The domes rose, with the sun hot and the sea beating blue and white at the shore; and Conn sat in his chair in front of the main dome, under the canopy, because the heat was never that great, and the breeze pleased him. An ariel waddled across the dust near the walk and squatted there just off the gravel path, in the shadow of Conn’s own adjacent dome. It built–instinctive behavior, Gutierrez maintained. It had brought a pebble and added it to the stack it was making–not a pebble from the walk, thank you, but a larger one, painstakingly found elsewhere, presumably just the right pebble, for reasons only another ariel might grasp. It made circles of stacks. It built domes too, Conn thought distantly; but its domes failed, collapsing into nests. The last few stones always knocked the efforts down, lacking the trick of a keystone. So it seemed. But that was a fancy: too much of domes, too much of a preoccupation with them lately. The ariel built lines and patterns out from its collapsed stacks of stones, loops and whorls and serpentines. Rudimentary behavior like the moundbuilding Calibans, Gutierrez had said. Probably it originated as a nesting behavior and elaborated into display behaviors. Both sexes built. That had disappointed Gutierrez.
No more Calibans this side of the river, at least. The mounds remained, across the river, but azi with spades had taken the mound this side apart. It was stalemate, the calibans forbidden their mounds this side, the crawlers and earthmovers standing still, mothballed, now that all the major building and clearing was done.
The ship would come, bringing them the supplies and lab facilities they needed; and then the machines would grind and dig their way further across the landscape around that ell bend between the river and the forest, making foundations for the lab and the real city they planned.
But the nearer focus was still tents. Still tents. More than twenty thousand tents, dull brown under the sun. They tried, having hunted the last determined caliban off this shore; but the crawlers had reached the point of diminishing returns in maintenance, needing the supplies the ship would bring. Up the rivercourse the azi blasted at limestone and hauled it back in handpulled wagons, laboriously, as humans had hauled stone in the dawn of human building, because they dared not risk the crawlers, the last of them that worked on parts cannibalized from the others. The azi labored with blasting materials and picks and bare hands, and there was a camp of two dozen tents strung out there too, at the limestone cliffs where they quarried stone.
Perhaps it might have been wiser to have moved the whole site there, to stony ground–knowing now that Calibans burrowed. But they had spent all their resources of material and fuel. The domes stood, so at least the staff had secure housing. The fields were planted, and the power systems and the equipment were safe so long as they kept the calibans away.
Conn studied his charts, traced again and again the changes they had had to make in plans. The cold this spring had hurt his hands; and the joints twisted and pained him, even in the summer sun. He thought of another winter and dreaded it.
But they survived. He knew the time of the landing that would come, down to the day, year after next; and mentally he marked off every day, one to the next, with all the complexities of local/universal time.
The ship, he was determined, would take him home. He would go back to Cyteen. He thought that he might live through the jumps. Might. Or at least he would not have to see more of this world.
Newport, he had called it. But Gehenna had stuck instead. It was where they were; it described their situation. Like Styx for the Forbes River, that began as a joke and stayed. When a wheel broke on one of the carts or when it rained–Gehenna’s own luck, they said; and: What do you expect, in Hell?
They came to the Old Man and complained: Conn solved what he could, shrugged his shoulders at the rest. Like Gallin. Finally–like Gallin. “That’s your problem,” was Gallin’s line, which had gotten to be a proverb so notorious Gallin had had to find different ways of saying it. A sad fellow, Gallin, a bewildered fellow, who never knew why he deserved everyone’s spite. Conn sat placidly, waited for problems to trickle past the obstacle of Gallin, soothed tempers–kept the peace. That was the important thing.