Pia pointed, the direction of the Camp. “From Camp looking toward the river. That’s what he thought–the river.”
“Probably right,” Jin Younger said. “Probably right for sure.” He squatted down, cleared ground with the edge of his hand, took a stick and scratched signs as the others gathered. “I think Mark and I had better find our father: that’s furthest. And Zed and Tam, you go the middle way; Ben, you and Alf go with them and split off where you have to go up to cover the ground; and Nine, you and Pia go direct by the river way. Pia’s got most chance of talking to Green: I want her there where he’s most likely to go. We draw a circle around him and sweep up our father too, before some caliban gets him.”
That was Jin Younger: that was her brother, whose mind worked like that, cool and quick. Pia got up from looking at the pattern and grabbed Nine’s hand–Nine was eighteen, like Zed; and red and gold and freckled all over. They all moved light and quick, and in spite of the prospect in front of them, Pia went with a kind of relief, that she was doing something, that she was not her mother, searching the town because she had to do something, even a hopeless thing, lame as Pia elder was, worn out from Green, aching tired from Green–
Lose him this time, Pia thought, in her heart of hearts. Let him go this time, to be done with it; and no more of that look her parents had, no more of doing everything for Green.
But if they lost him, they had to have tried. It was like that, because he was born under their roof, stranger that he was.
They took the winding course through the brush‑grown mounds, she and Nine, hand in hand, hurried past the gaping darknesses under stones, that were caliban doorways–sometimes saucer‑big eyes watched them, or tongues flicked, from caliban mouths mostly hid in shadow and in brush.
And the way began to be bare and slithery with mud, and tracked with clawed pads of caliban feet, which was a climbway calibans used from the Styx or a brook that fed it. Ariels scurried from their track, whipping their tails in busy haste; and flitters dived in manic profusion from the trees–some into ariel mouths. Pia brushed the flitters off, a frantic slapping at the back of her neck, protecting her collar, and they jogged along singlefile now, slid the last bit down to the flat, well‑trampled riverside, where calibans had flattened tracks hi the reeds of the bogs, and clouds of insects swarmed and darted.
Desolation. No human track disturbed the mud flats.
“We just wait,” Pia said. “He can’t have gotten past us unless he went all the way around the heights to the east.” She squatted down by the edge of the water and dipped up a double handful, poured it over her head and neck, and Nine did the same.
“Why don’t we take a rest?” Nine suggested, and pointed off toward the reeds.
“I think we ought to walk on down the way toward the rocks.”
“Waste of time.”
“Then you go back.”
“I think we could do something better.”
She looked suddenly and narrowly at him. He had that look they had had up there, with Jane. “I think you better forget that.”
He made a grab at her; she slapped his hand and he jerked it back.
“Go after that Jane,” she said, “why don’t you?”
“What’s wrong with you? Afraid?”
“You go find Jane.”
“I like you.”
“You’ve got no sense.” He scared her; her heart was pounding. “Jane and all of you, that’s all nice, isn’t it? But I say no, and you’d better believe no.”
He was bigger than she, by about a third. But there were other things to think of, and one was living next to each other in town; and one was that she always got even. People knew that of Pia Younger; it was important to have people believe that, and she saw to it.
And finally he made a great show of sulking and dusting his hands off. “I’m going back,” he said. “I don’t stay out here for nothing.”
“Sure, you go back,” she said.
“You’re cold,” he said. “I’ll tell how you are.”
“You tell whatever you like; and when you do, I’ll tell plenty too. You make me sound bad, you make my brothers sound the same. We figure like that. You’re three and we’re six. You make up your mind.”
“You’re five now,” he said, and stalked off.
Afterward she found her hands sweating, not sure whether it was because of the sun or her temper or the thought that she could have had Nine, who was not bad for a first; but he was ugly inside, if not out. And lacking that reason, she thought of her mother, and how she had been young before Green started growing up. She thought about babies and the grief her mother had had of them, and that dried the sweat all at once.
So they might be five now. Green might be gone. And that might cure them of all their troubles at once, if only they could prove they had searched; if they could get Green out of Jin and Pia’s minds.
They went out to get their mother and father back for their own: that was why they went. That was why she had known that her brother Jin would come.
And if Nine had run back to his brothers, Pia still meant to stay where her brother said, to watch the bank. The rocks offered the most likely vantage, where the cliffs tumbled down to the Styx, where calibans sunned themselves and where anyone headed upriver had to go.
She had no fear of her brother Green. It was the others of his sort she had no desire to meet; and she wanted somewhere to watch unseen.
ii
The sun was halfway down the sky, and Jin elder moved with a sense of desperation, his breath short and shallow, his senses alive with dread on all sides. The wooded mounds surrounded him, offered dark accesses out of which calibans could come. Young ones challenged him, man‑sized, athwart his path, and he scrambled aside on the hill and kept going.
He might call aloud, but Green would never answer to his name, hardly spoke at all, and so he did not waste the breath. It was a question of overtaking his son, of finding him in this maze when he had no wish to be found. It was impossible, and he knew that. But Green was his, and whatever Green was, however strange, he tried, as his wife tried, in the town, already knowing her son was gone–searching among the thousands of houses, asking faces that would go blank to the question–“Have you seen our son? Have your children heard from him? Is there anyone who knows?”–They would shut the doors on her as they would on the night or on a storm, not to have the trouble inside with them, whose houses were secure. Pia had no hope; and he had none, except in his rebel children, his other sons and his daughter, who might possibly know where to look, who ran wild out here–but not as wild as Green.
He slowed finally, out of breath, walked dizzily among the mounds. Now the sun was behind them, making pockets of dark. A body moved, slithered amid the thick brush, among the trees which had grown here, this side of the river. The sight was surreal. He recalled bare meadow, and gentle grass, and the first beginnings of a mound; and caliban skulls piled behind main dome. But all that was changed; and a forest grew, all scrub and saplings. Fairy flitters came down on his shoulders, clung to his clothing, making him think of bats; he beat them off and recalled that they were lives–which touched a faint, far chord in him, of guilt and of dread. The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.
A heavy body thrust itself from a hole–a caliban flicked its tongue at him; an ariel scurried over its immobile back and fled into the dark inside. He started aside, ran, slowed again with a pain in his side…sat down at last, against the side of a mound, by one of the rounded hills, the domes the calibans made.
And leapt up again, spying a white movement among the saplings on the ridge. “Green,” he called.
It was not Green. A strange boy was staring down at him, squatting naked atop the ridge–thin, starved limbs and tangled hair, improbable sight in the woods. It was the image of his fears.
“Come down,” he asked the boy. “Come down–” Ever so softly. Never startle them; never force–It was all his hope, that boy.
And the boy sprang up and ran, down the angle of the hill among the brush; Jin ran too–and saw the boy dive into the dark of a caliban access, vanishing like nightmare, confirming all that he had dreaded to know, how they lived, what they were, the town’s lost children.