A caliban had moved into the watermeadow again. They wanted to hunt it and Gutierrez left this to Security. He had no stomach for it. Best they hunt it now, before it laid eggs. But all the same the idea saddened him, like the small collection of caliban skulls up behind the main dome.
Barbaric, he thought. Taking heads. But the hunt had to be, or there would be more tunnelling, and the azi houses would fall.
He dusted himself off finally, started up and down the road toward the domes, having started the hunters on their way.
Man adjusted–on Gehenna, on Newport. Man gave a little. But between man and calibans, there did not look to be peace, not, perhaps, until the ship should come. There might be an answer, in better equipment. In the projection barriers they might have made work, if the weather had not been so destructive of equipment…if, if, and if.
He walked back into the center of camp, saw the Old Man sitting where he usually sat, under the canopy outside main dome. The winter had put years on the colonel. A stubble showed on his face, a spot of stain on his rumpled shirt front. He drowsed, did Conn, and Gutierrez passed him by, entered quietly into the dome and crossing the room past the long messtable, poured himself a cup of the ever‑ready tea. The place smelled of fish. The dining hall always did. Most all Gehenna smelled of fish.
He sat down, with some interest, at the table with Kate Flanahan. The special op was more than casual with him; no precise recollection where it had started, except one autumn evening, and realizing that there were qualities in Kate which mattered to him.
“You got it?” Kate asked.
“I headed them out. I don’t have any stomach left for that.”
She nodded. Kate trained to kill human beings, not wildlife. The specials sat and rusted. Like the machinery out there.
“Thought–” Gutierrez said, “I might apply for a walkabout. Might need an escort.”
Kate’s eyes brightened.
But “No,” Conn said, when he broached the subject, that evening, at common mess.
“Sir–”
“We hold what territory we have,” the colonel said. In that tone. And there was no arguing. Silence fell for a moment at the table where all of them who had no domestic arrangements took their meals. It was abrupt, that answer. It was decisive. “We’ve got all we can handle,” the colonel said then. “We’ve got another year beyond this before we get backup here, and I’m not stirring anything up by exploring.”
The silence persisted. The colonel went on with his eating, a loud clatter of knife and fork.
“Sir,” Gutierrez said, “in my professional opinion–there’s reason for the investigation, to see what the situation is on the other bank, to see–”
“We’ll be holding this camp and taking care of our operation here,” the colonel said. “That’s the end of it. That’s it.”
“Yes, sir,” Gutierrez said.
Later, he and Kate Flanahan found their own opportunity for being together, with more privacy and less comfort, in the quarters he had to himself, with Ruffles, who watched with a critical reptilian eye.
“Got a dozen specs going crazy,” Kate said during one of the lulls in their lovemaking, when they talked about the restriction, about the calibans, about things they had wanted to do. “Got people who came here with the idea we’d be building all this time. Special op hoped for some use. And we’re rotting away. All of us. You. Us. Everyone but the azi. The Old Man’s got this notion the world’s dangerous and he’s not letting us out of camp. He’s scared of the blamed lizards, Marco. Can’t you try it on a better day, make sense to him, talk sense into him?”
“I’ll go on trying,” he said. “But it goes deeper than just the calibans. He has his own idea how to protect this base, and that’s what he means to do. To do nothing. To survive till the ships come. I’ll try.”
But he knew the answer already, implicit in the Old Man’s clamped jaw and fevered stare.
“No,” the answer came when he did ask again, days later, after stalking the matter carefully. “Put it out of your head, Gutierrez.”
He and Flanahan went on meeting. And one day toward fall Flanahan reported to the meds that she might be pregnant. She came to live with him; and that was the thing that redeemed the year.
But Gutierrez’ work was slowed to virtual stop–with all the wealth of a new world on the horizon. He did meticulous studies of tiny ecosystems along the shoreline; and when in the fall another caliban turned up in the watermeadow, and when the hunters shot it, he stood watching the crime, and sat down on the hillside in view of the place, sat there all the day, because of the pain he felt.
And the hunters avoided his face, though there was no anger in his sitting there, and nothing personal.
“I’m not shooting any more,” a special op told him later, the man who had shot this one.
As for Flanahan, she had refused the hunt.
xii
Year 2, day 290 CR
The weather turned again toward the winter, the season of bitter cold rain and sometime fogs, when the first calibans wandered into the camp. And stayed the night. They passed like ghosts in the fog, under the haloed lights, came like the silly ariels; but the calibans were far more impressive.
Jin watched them file past the tent, strange and silent except for the scrape of leathery bodies and clawed feet; and he and Pia gathered little Jin against them in the warmth of the tent, afraid, because these creatures were far different than the gay fluttery green lizards that came and went among the tents and the stone shelters.
“They won’t hurt us,” Pia said, a whisper in the fog‑milky night. “The tapes said they never hurt anyone.”
“There was the captain,” Jin said, recalling that, thinking of all their safe tent tumbling down into some chasm, the way the born‑man Beaumont had died.
“An accident.”
“But born‑men shoot them.” He was troubled at the idea. He had never gotten it settled in his mind about intelligence, what animals were and what men were, and how one told the difference. They said the calibans had no intelligence. It was not in their gene‑set. He could believe that of the giddy ariels. But these were larger than men, and grim and deliberate in their movements.
The calibans moved through, and there were no human sounds, no alarms to indicate harm. But they laced the tentflap and stayed awake with little Jin asleep between them. At every small sound outside they started, and sometimes held hands in the absolute dark and closeness of the tent.
Perhaps, Jin thought in the lonely hours, the calibans were angry that born‑men hunted them. Perhaps that was why they came.
But on the next day, when they got up with the sun, a rumor of something strange passed through the camp, and Jin went among the others to see, how all the loose stones they had stacked up for building had been moved and set into a low and winding wall that abutted a building in which azi lived. He went to work with the others, undoing what the calibans had done, but he was afraid with an unaccustomed fear. Until then he had feared only born‑men, and known what right and wrong was. But he felt strange to be taking down what the calibans had done, this third and unaccountable force which had walked through their midst and noticed them.
“Stop,” a supervisor said. “People are coming from the main camp to see.”
Jin quit his work and sat down among the others, wrapped tightly in his jacket and sitting close to other azi…watched while important born‑men came from the main domes. They made photographs, and the born‑man Gutierrez came with his people and looked over every aspect of the building. This born‑man Jin knew: this was the one they called when they found something strange, or when someone had been stung or bitten by something or wandered into one of the nettles. And there was in this man’s face and in the faces of his aides and in the faces of no few of the other born‑men…a vast disturbance.
“They respond to instinct,” Gutierrez said finally. Jin could hear that much. “Ariels stack stones. The behavior seems to be wired into the whole line.”
But calibans, Jin thought to himself, built walls in the night, silently, of huge stones, and connected them to buildings with people in them.