“We should,” Gutierrez said, also on his feet, “mobilize the town, dig foundations that go far down; we ought to make the barriers we meant to make at the beginning. We can shoot them–we can level the mounds–and it happens all over again. Time after time. It never works. There’s more going out there than we understand. Maybe another species–we don’t know. We don’t know their habits, their interrelations, we don’t know what drives them. We shoot them and we dig them out and it never works.”
“We mobilize the azi,” Gallin said. “We give them arms and train them–make a force out of them.”
“For the love of God, what for?” the advocate cried. “To march on calibans? Or to shoot their own relatives?”
“There has to be order,” Gallin said. He had gained weight over the years. His chins wobbled in his rage. He looked up at them. “There has to be some order in their lives. The tape machines are gone, so what do we give them? I’ve talked to Education. We have to have some direction. We make regiments and sections; we mount guard; we protect this camp.”
“From what?” Gutierrez asked. And added, because he knew Gallin, because he saw the insecure anger: “Sir.”
“Order,” Gallin said, pounding the able for emphasis. “Order in the world. No more dealing with runaways. No more tolerance.”
Gutierrez sank down again, and the confessor‑advocate sat down. There was a murmuring from the others, an undertone of fear.
The calibans had come closer and closer over the years and they had found no occasion to say no.
But he had qualms when he saw the azi marshalled out for drill, when he saw them given instruction to kill. He walked back on that day with a lump in his gut.
Kate and Jane met him, daughter like mother–so, so alike they stood there, arms about each other, with satisfaction in what they saw. A change had come about in Jane. She had never had that hard‑eyed look before she went out into the mounds. She had grown up and away, to Kate’s side of the world. No more curiosity; no more inquiring into the world’s small secrets: he foresaw silence until that threat out there was swept away, until Jane saw the world as safe again.
While azi marched in rows.
ix
Pia Younger set the bucket down inside the door, in the two room house that was theirs, a house hung with clothes and oddments from the rafters–drying onions, dried peppers, plastic pots balanced on the beams, and her own bed in this corner, her parents’ bed in the other room. And rolled pallets that belonged to her brothers, who prepared for another kind of leaving.
Her mother sat outside–a woman of silences. She went out again and stooped to take her mother’s hand, where she sat sharpening a hoe–stroke, stroke of a whetstone across the edge. Her father–he was off with the boys. Her mother paid little attention…had paid little at all to the world in recent days. She only worked.
“I’m going out,” Pia Younger said. “I’m going to see how it goes.” And quietly, in a hushed voice, bending close and taking her mother’s hands: “Listen, they’ll never catch Green. They’ll go up the river, all the lost ones do. Don’t worry about them shooting him. They can’t.”
She felt guilty in the promise, having no faith in it, having no love for her brother. And it all failed with her mother anyway, who went on with her sharpening, stone against steel, which reminded her of knives. Pia drew back from Pia elder and as quietly drew away. She lifted her eyes to the borders of the town, where another kind of camp was in the making.
Her father was out there following born‑man orders; her brothers pretended to. And very quietly, Pia elder never noticing, Pia Younger walked down the street the opposite way, then cut through at the corner and doubled back again.
She watched the weapons‑practice from the slope of the caliban‑raised hill near the town, crouched there, as she daily watched these drills. The fields went unattended; the youngest deserted the work. And she knew what her brothers said among themselves, that they would only pretend, and carry the weapons, but when it got to attacking the calibans and the runaways, they would run away themselves. Her father did not know this, of course. Her father carried arms the way he did other things the officers asked of him. And that was always the difference.
Herself, she sat thinking on the matter, how drear things would be if her brothers should go, if all their friends should follow them.
Sixteen years was almost grown. She sat making up her mind, thinking that she would go already if not for the danger of the guns and the weapons, that they might mistake her for one of the Weirds out there. Her parents would not understand her leaving. But they understood nothing that was different from themselves; and she had known long ago that she was different. All the children were.
Most of the day she watched; and that night her brothers did not come home. Her father came; neighbors came. They waited dinner. The blanket rolls waited against the wall. And her parents sat in silence, ate finally, asked no questions even of each other, their eyes downcast in that silence in which her parents suffered all their pain.
Officers came in the night, rapped on the door and asked questions–wrote down the names of her missing brothers while Pia hovered behind her parents, wrapped in her blanket and shivering not from cold, but from understanding.
x
“We have to move,” Jones said–atop the hill, where they had set up the observation post; and Kate Flanahan nodded, looking outward over the mounds. She shifted her fingers on the woven strap of the gun she carried on her shoulder. “We’ve got the location of the runaways: we’re getting radio from Masu and his lot, with the site under observation. We get this settled. Fast. We’ve turned back two hundred deserters at the wire–it’s falling apart. We get the human element out of this thing, get those runaways routed out of there before we have every azi‑born in town headed over the hill. They’re deserting in troops–got no sympathy for this operation; and there never was any need of drafting that many. This unit; Emberton’s up the way–we’ll get it stopped. No more runaways then; and then we can get the older workers to start building that barrier. Any questions before we move?”
There were none. Flanahan had none; had hate–had that, for her daughter’s suffering, for the hush that had fallen on Jane, the loss of innocence. For her daughter who sat inside or fell to the studies which she had always hated, because it filled her mind.
“Move out,” Jones said, and they moved, filed out quietly through the hills, amid the brush and the trees of the mounds. Some of Bilas’ crew brought the demolitions. Vandermeer had a projectile gun, and gas cannisters to flood the mound and make it unpleasant for the refugees. And a few shots after that–
The orders were not to kill. But Flanahan reckoned that accidents might happen; there might be excuse. She was looking for one.
They walked, moving cautiously, making as little disturbance as possible…but the way they knew, had it down precisely–the spot where Emberton’s unit had set up shop, watching the accesses, watching the runaways come and go.
They came on a sentry: that was Ogden, one of their own–and gathered him up into their small band: eight of them, in all, counting borrowings from Maintenance–and Emberton was arriving with her escort a little earlier, to take personal command up on the ridge. From now on it was careful stealth: and they broke as few branches as possible, disturbed the brush only where they had to. Flitters troubled them, brushed aside when they would light and cling. A fevered sweat ran on Flanahan’s arms and body–a chance, finally, to do something. To take arms against the confusion that had marked all their efforts in Gehenna. A few shots fired, a little healthy fear on the part of the azi‑born: that would settle it.
And then they might build again.
Flanahan was breathing hard when they topped the ridge: the gun was no small weight and she was years out of training. So were they all–Jones with his waist twice its former girth; Emberton gray with rejuv. She saw the tactical op chief in conference with Masu and Tamilin and Rogers as they came up, into that area where Masu and Kontrin and Ogden had sat out observing the situation throughout.