“Caliban patterns,” Spencer said. “You see them?”
“Yes.”
“Want to show you something more.” Spencer found the aerial shot of the hiller village, thatched huts and stone walls, winding walls, walls that bent and curved. He put a shot of the Base and town and fields next to it, a checkerboard geometry. “Don’t you find something remarkable in that? Have you ever seen it?”
Dean sat still, his eyes only on the pictures under his hands. “I think any townsman would tend to understand that.”
“How do you mean?”
“The founders laid out the town streets. Hillers made the hiller village.”
“Why didn’t they make it like the town?”
“Because they don’t like to do things like us. Spirals are like them. Maybe they got it from the calibans. I figure they did. They do spirals sometimes–like in the dust. You talk with them to trade–they squat down and draw when they don’t like much what you’re telling them.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hiller do that.”
“Wouldn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like when you send me out to ask things hillers won’t say when you ask it. Like when a hiller’s dealing with somebody in Base clothes it’s one way; and when it’s a townsman that hiller’s more and less hard to deal with. They price you way high if they think they can; but they don’t give you the eye, they don’t do hiller tricks when they bargain. Like spitting in the dirt. Like looking off. Like writing patterns.”
“Patterns. What patterns?”
“Spirals. Like two of them squatting down in the dirt and letting the dust run out of their hands or drawing with their fingers–one does one thing and one does a bit on it, while they’re thinking over a deal. And they make you think they’ve forgotten you’re standing there. But maybe they’re talking to each other that way. Maybe it’s nothing at all. That’s why they do it. Because we won’t know. And we’re supposed to wonder.”
Spencer sat and stared at him so long that Dean finally looked his way. “Somehow that never got into your reports.”
“I never thought it was much. It’s all show.”
“Is it?” Spencer pulled two more pictures from the lot, one of an eastern hemisphere river, one of the north shore, a mosaic going toward the sea, including all the effluence of the Styx, and the Base and both town and hiller settlement. He pointed out the places, the encroachment of calibans toward the sea on the far side of the river, the faint shadowing at the end of ridges. “They’re different. The spirals of calibans everywhere in the world but here–are looser. They don’t make hills. See the shadow cast from the centers, here, here and here–that’s a tall structure. That’s a peak in the center of those spirals. Let me get you a closeup.” He searched and pulled another out, that showed the structure, a spiral winding into a miniature mountain, slid that in front of Dean. “You understand what I’m saying now? Only here. Only across from the Base. Is that a caliban structure?”
“How big is that?”
“The complex is a kilometer wide. The peak is forty meters wide at base of the most extreme slope and twenty high. Have you ever seen the like?”
Dean shook his head. “No.” He glanced up. “But then I’ve never seen a caliban. Except the pictures.”
“They didn’t like sharing the Base. They moved out.”
“But they’re moving back. On the river. Your pictures–You won’t get that hunter to go across the Styx, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t think you will. I don’t think you ought to push at the hillers where it regards calibans.”
“Why?”
A shrug. “I just don’t think you should.”
“That’s not the kind of answer you draw your pay for.”
“I think it’s dangerous. I think the hillers could get anxious. The calibans are already close. They won’t like them stirred up, that’s what.”
“They hunt them?”
Another shrug. “They trade in leather. But there’s calibans and calibans. Different types.”
“The browns.”
“The browns and the grays.”
“What’s the difference?”
A third shrug. “Hillers hunt grays. They know.”
“Know what?”
“Whatever they know. I don’t.”
“There was this caliban,” Spencer said carefully. “We’d been up to the mound to take those pictures, this Jin and I. Alone. And we got back to the troops, and this caliban came out of the river. They shot it and it slid back in. ‘It was a brown,’ the hunter said. Like that. And then: ‘Go away fast.’ What do you make of that?”
Dean just stared a moment, dead‑faced the way he would when something bothered him. “Did you?”
“We left.”
“I reckon he did, too. Fast and far as he could. Hewon’t come to your gate, no.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he’s going to be scared a long, long time. He’ll never come to you.”
“Would he be that afraid?”
“He’d be that afraid.”
“Of what? Of calibans? Or Weirds?”
A blink of the dark eyes. “Whatever’s worth being afraid of. Hillers would know. I don’t. But don’t go out there. Don’t send the soldiers outside the wire, not another time.”
“I’m afraid I don’t make that decision.”
“ Tell them.”
“I’ll do that,” Spencer said frowning. “You don’t think the search is worthwhile, do you?”
“You won’t find him.”
“Keep your ears open.”
“I’d thought about sleeping in my own quarters tonight.”
“I’d rather you stayed in the town–just keep listening.”
“For what?”
“Hiller talk. All of it. What if I offered you a bonus–to go outside the wire?”
Dean shook his head warily. “No. I don’t do that.”
“Townsmen have gone to the hills before.”
“No.”
“Meaning you won’t. Suppose we put a high priority on that.”
Dean sat very still. “Townsmen know I’m from inside. Hillers may be stirred up right now. And if they are, and if they knew where I came from–”
“You mean you think they’d kill you.”
“I don’t know what they’d do.”
“All right, we’ll think about that. Just go back to the town and listen where you can.”
“All right.” Dean got up, walked as far as the door, looked back. He looked as if he would like to say something more, but walked away.
Spencer stared at his pictures, ran the loop again.
Calibans had tried the wire last night down by the river. They had never done that, not since Alliance came to the world.
There had to be precautions.
xiv
Year 89, day 208 CR
Styxside
He might be mad: or he wished he were, in the dark, in the silence broken only by slitherings and breathings and sometimes, when his sanity had had all it could bear, by his screams and sobs. His screaming could drive them back a while, but they would be back.
They put no restraint on him. They needed none but the darkness and the earth, the hardpacked earthen walls that he could feel and not see in the absolute and lasting night. His fingers were torn and maybe bleeding: he had tried to dig his way to safety, even to dig himself a niche in which to put his back, so that he could defend himself when they came at him, but he had no sense which way the outside was, or how deep they had taken him–he might be trying to dig through the hills themselves. He found a rock once, and battered one of his attackers with it, but they used their needles and had their revenge for that, a long, long time–like the times he had tried to crawl away, feeling his blind way through the dark, until he had ended with the hissing blast of a Caliban’s breath in his face, the quick scrabble of claws, the thrusting of a great blunt nose that knocked him off his feet–lying there with a great clawed foot bearing down on his ribs and throat until human hands arrived with needles; or running into such hands direct–No, there was no fighting them. He did not know why he did not die. He thought about it, young as he was, and thinking he could smother himself in the earth, that he could dig himself a grave with his lacerated fingers and hide his face in it and stop his breathing with dirt. He dug, but they always came when they heard him digging–he was sure that they heard. So he kept still.