He ran back to the village in the hills and told his father, who sent young runners out to find her, but they could not, they never could, Pia being Pia and better than any of them in the wild.
It was days before he cried, and then only for a moment. He imagined she found the calibans, that being what she wanted.
He thought of calibans all his life, thought of them in getting his son and telling him tales, and seeing some of his kin go down to the camp in the plain. Calibans moved close again after ma Pia went away. He was never sure if she had found them, but that thing was sure.
x
Year 72, day 198 CR
Main Base, Gehenna
“Are you,” the man asked, “scared?”
The boy Dean stared at him, sitting where he was on the edge of the doctor’s table in the center of the Base, and the answer was yes, but he was not about to say as much to this Base doctor. Children did this, he knew, went into the Base and learned. And he was here halfgrown as he was because they started taking older ones now, special older ones, who ran off from their work in the fields and lazed about working with their hands or being a problem to the supervisors. He had been a problem. He had told the field boss how to arrange the shifts, and the boss had not liked that; so he had walked offshift, that was all. He had had enough of the man.
Only they took people who bucked what was and soldiers visited their houses and brought them into the Base, behind the inmost wire, to go into the study like they took the children their families sold into going here every day for extra credit at the store.
They did this to children, so he was not going to admit he was scared. They went on asking him questions… Do you read or write? Does anyone you know read and write?–He said nothing. His name was Dean, which was a born‑man name. His mother had told him that, and taught him to write his name and read the signs. But he figured it was theirs to find out.
“My mother get the store allowance?” he asked finally, reckoning if there was good to be gotten out of this, it might as well be hers.
“Depends on how you do,” the man with the book said, turning him back his own kind of answer. “You do real well, Dean, and you might get a lot more than that.”
He viewed it all with suspicion.
“Now we’re going to start out with lessons, going to let you watch the machines, and when you’ve got beyond what they can teach you, then you get paid; and if you think you want to learn more than that–well, we’ll see. We’ll see how you do.”
They put him in front of a machine that lighted up and showed him A and made the sound. It went to B then and showed him AB. They showed him how to push the buttons, and make choices, and he blinked when the machine took his orders. Possibilities dawned on him. He ran the whole range of what they wanted of him.
“I can read,” he said, taking a chance, because of a sudden he saw himself using machines, like them, like what his name meant to him–being different than the others–and he suddenly, desperately, wanted not to be put out of this place. “I’m born‑man. And I can read. I always could.”
That got frowns out of them, not smiles. They went outside the door and talked to each other while he sat with his shoulders aching from sitting and working so long and hoping that he had not done the wrong thing.
A woman came into the room, one of them, in fine clothes and smelling the way born‑men smelled in the Base, in the tall buildings, of things other than dirt and smoke. “You’re going to stay the night,” she said. “You’ve done very well. We’re going to make up more questions for you.”
He did not know why–he should have been relieved to know that he had done well. But there was his mother not knowing what might have happened; and he was thirteen and not quite a man, to know how to deal with this.
But the Base was authority, and he stayed.
Their questions were not A and B. They involved himself, and all the things he thought were right and wrong, and all the things he had ever heard. They asked them over and over again, until his brain ached and he did what he had never done for anyone but his own mother: he broke down and cried, which broke something in him which had never been broken before. And even then they kept up their questions. He stilled his sobs and answered what they wanted, estimating that he had deserved this change in himself because he had wanted what no townsman had. The barrage kept up, and then they let him eat and rest.
In the morning or whatever time he woke–the building had no windows–they brought him to a room and put a needle in his arm so that he half slept; and a machine played facts into his awareness so that his mind went whirling into cold dark distances, and the world into a different perspective: they taught him words for these things, and taught him what he was and what his world was.
He wanted to go home when he waked from that. “Your mother’s sent lunch for you,” they told him kindly. “She knows you’re well. We explained you’ll be staying a few more days before you come and go.”
He ate his mother’s bread in this strange place, and his throat swelled while he swallowed and the tears ran down his face without his even trying to stop them, or caring that they saw. He knew what they did to the children then. The children laughed and wrote words in the dust and hung about together, exempt from work because they had their hours in the Base school. But he was no child; and if he went back into the town now he would never be the man he had almost been. That thing in him which had broken would never quite repair itself; and what could he say in the town?–I’ve seen the stars. I’ve seen, I’ve touched, there are other worlds and this one’s shut because we’re different, because we don’t learn, because–Because the town is what it is, and we’re very, very small.
He was quiet in his lessons, very quiet. He took his trank, and listened to the tapes, having lost himself already. He gave up all that he had, hoping that they would make him over entirely, so that he could be what they were, because he had no other hope.
“You’re very good,” they said. “You’re extremely intelligent.”
This gave him what cheer he had.
But his mother cried when he went back to her quiet as he had become; it was the first time she had ever cried in front of him. She hugged him, sitting on the bed which was the only place to sit in their small and shabby house, and held his face and looked in his eyes and tried to understand what he was becoming.
She could not. That was part of his terror.
“They give me credit at the store,” he said, searching for something to offer her in place of himself. “You can have good clothes.”
She cleaned the house after, worked and worked and worked as if she somehow imagined to herself the clean white place that he had been, as if she fought back by that means. She washed all the clothes and washed the rough wood table and turned the straw mattresses, having beaten the dust out of them outside; and scrubbed the stone floor and got up and dusted even the tops of the rafters with a wet cloth to take away the dust. The ariels who sometimes came and went dodged her scrubbing and finally stayed outside. And Dean carried water and helped until the neighbors stared, neighbors already curious what had happened.
But when it was all still, it was only the old house all unnaturally clean, as if she had scrubbed it raw. And they ate together, trying to be mother and son.
“They wanted to teach me to write,” he said. “But I already knew. You taught me that.”
“My dad taught me,” she said, which he knew. “We’re born‑men. Just like them.”
“They say I’m good.”
She looked up from her soup and met his eyes, just the least flicker of vindication. “’Course,” she said.
But he hedged all around the other things, like knowing what the world was. He was alone, with things dammed up inside he could never say.