“Mark,” he called; and: “Green?” But Mark was dead and Green was lost, long ago. They told him Zed had vanished too.
“I’m here,” someone said. Jin. He recalled then, and focused on the years in the curious way things would slip into focus and go out again. His children had come back to him, at least Jin and Pia had.
“I don’t think he understands.” Pia’s voice, a whisper, across the room. “It’s no good, Jin.”
“Huh.”
“He always used to talkabout the ships.”
“We could take him outside.”
“I don’t think he’d even know.”
Silence a moment. Darkness a moment. He felt far away.
“Is he breathing?”
“Not very strong.–Father. Do you hear? The ships have come.”
Over the fields of grain, high in blue skies, a thin splinter of silver. He knew what it was to fly. Had flown, once. It was a hot day. They might swim in the creek when they were done with harvest, with the sun heating the earth, and making the sweat run on his back.
“Father?”
Into the bright, bright sun.
iv
Pia‑now‑eldest walked out into the light, grim, looked round her at the knot of hangers‑on…the young, the scatter of children they had sent to Jin. “He’s gone,” she said.
Solemn faces. A handful of them, from about a hand of years to twice that. Solemn eyes.
“Go on,” Pia said, and picked up a stick. “We get first stuff. Get. Go to Old Jon. Go to Ben. Go wherever you like. There’s nothing for you here.”
They ran. Some cried. They knew her right arm–one of the Hillers, who seldom came into town at all, Pia Eldest–no timid towndweller they could put anything off on. She followed them with her eyes, down the row of ramshackle limestone houses, the last ragtag lot of youngers Old Jin had had. They might be kin or just strays. The old man had been readier than most to take them in. The worst stayed with Old Jin. He never hit them, and they had stolen his food until Pia found it out; and then there had been no more stealing, no.
She went inside, into the stench of the unkept house, into the presence of the dead, suddenly lacking an obligation, realizing that she had nothing more to do. Her brother Jin was going through the chest, had laid claim to the other blanket besides the one Old Jin was wrapped in. She frowned at that, stood there leaning on her stick.
“You don’t want anything?” Jin asked her. He stood up, a half a head taller. They wore their hair short, alike; wore boots of caliban hide and shirts and breeches of coarse town weave; looked like as all Old Jin and Pia’s offspring. “You can have the blanket.”
That surprised her. She shook her head, still scowling. “Don’t want anything. Got enough.”
“Go on. You fed him the last three years.”
She shrugged. “Your food too.”
“You made the trips.”
“So. No matter. Didn’t do it for that.”
“Owe you for the blanket,” her brother said.
“Collect it someday. What’s town to us? I don’t want what smells of it.”
Jin looked aside, on the small and withered form beneath the other blanket. Looked at her again. “We go?”
“I’ll wait for the burying.”
“We could take him up in the hills. There’s those would carry.”
She shook her head. “This is his place.”
“This.” Jin rolled the razor and the plastic cup into the blanket, tucked them under his arm. “Filth. Get up to the hills. Those new born‑men–they’ll come here. They’ll be trouble, that’s all. Jin’s ships. He thought everything the main‑campers did was all right. How could he know so much and so little?”
“I had myself a main‑camper once. He said–he said the old azi had to think like Jin, that’s all.”
“Maybe they did. Anything the main‑campers wanted. Only now there’s new main‑campers. You remember how it was. You remember what it was, when old Gallin had the say in main‑camp. That’s what it’ll be again. You mind me, Pia, you don’t wait for the burying or they’ll have you plowing fields.”
She spat, half a laugh.
“You mind me,” Jin said. “That’s how it was. Mark and Zed and Tam and I–we ran out on it.”
“So did I. It wasn’t hard.” She took a comb Jin had left. “This. I’ll keep this.”
“They’ll be coming here.”
“They’ll bring things.”
“Tape machines. They’ll catch the youngers and line us up in rows.”
“Maybe they should.”
“You thinking like him?”
She walked away to the door, looked out above the abandoned, caliban‑haunted domes and the fallen sun‑tower where vines had had their way, where the town stopped. The ship sat there in the distant plain, shining silver, visible above the roofs.
“You don’t go,” Jin argued with her, coming and taking her shoulders. “You don’t be going out there talking to those born‑men.”
“No,” she agreed.
“Forget the stinking born‑men.”
“Aren’t we?”
“What?”
“Born‑men. We were born here.”
“I’m going,” Jin said. “Come along.”
“I’ll walk with you to the trail.” She started on her way. There was nothing to carry but the staff, and what Jin chose to keep; and behind them, the town would break in and steal.
So Old Jin was gone.
And she was sitting by the doorway when they brought the New Men to her.
They disturbed her with their strangeness, as they disturbed the town. There were those who were ready to be awed by them, she saw that, but she looked coldly at the newcomers and kept her mind to herself.
Their clothes were all very fine, like the strange tight weave which the looms the town made nowadays could never duplicate. Their hair was short as Killers wore it and they smelled of strange sharp scents.
“They say there was a man here who came on the ships,” the first of them said. He had a strange way of talking, not that the words were unclear, just the sound of them was different. Pia wrinkled her nose.
“He died.”
“You’re his daughter. They said you might talk to us. We’d like you to come and do that. Aboard the ship, if you’d like.”
“Won’t go there.” Her heart beat very fast, but she kept her face set and grim and unconcerned. They had guns. She saw that. “Sit.”
They looked uncomfortable or offended. One squatted down in front of her, a man in blue weave with a lot of metal and stripes that meant importance among born‑men. She remembered.
“Pia’s your name.”
She nodded shortly.
“You know what happened here? Can you tell us what happened here?”
“My father died.”
“Was he born?”
She pursed her lips. All the rest knew that much, whatever it meant, because it had never made sense to her, how a man could not be born. “He was something else,” she said.
“You remember the way it was at the beginning. What happened to the domes?” The gesture of a smooth, white hand toward the ruins where calibans made walls. “Disease? Sickness?”
“They got old,” she said, “mostly.”
“But the children–the next generation–”
She remembered and chuckled to herself, grew sober again, thinking on the day the born‑men died.
“There were children,” the man insisted. “Weren’t there?”
She drew a pattern in the dust, scooped up sand and drew with it, a slow trickling from her hand.
“Sera. What happened to the children?”
“Got children,” she said. “Mine.”
“Where?”
She looked up, fixed the stranger with her stronger eye. “Some here, some there, one dead.”
The man sucked in his lips, thinking. “You live up in the hills.”
“Live right here.”
“They said you were out of the hills. They’re afraid of you, sera Pia.”
It was not, perhaps, wise, to make Patterns in the dust. The man was sharp. She dumped sand atop the spiral she had made. “Live here, live there.”
“Listen,” he said earnestly, leaning forward. “There was a plan. There was going to be a city here. Do you know that? Do you remember lights? Machines?”