It was a time before he gathered his wits at all. He levered himself up on his arm, squinted up at the light as the silhouette of a Weird set a large bowl of water in front of him. He bent and cupped up water to drink and wash the sickness from his mouth, drank again and again and splashed clean water over his face while his hands shook and spilled a lot of it in his lap. He blinked at the old man, having gotten used to insanity and expecting more of it.
“Speak,” the old man said softly.
A rock might have spoken. The old man sat. A smallish ariel rested in his lap. His fingers played with it, stroking its ruffled fringes.
Jin needed a time to consider. He wiped his face yet again, drew his knee up and rested his arm on it because he was not steady even sitting. He looked at the old man very long. “Why am I here?” he asked finally, as still, as hushed. But the old man did not answer, as crazed as the rest of them. Or that was not the speech the old man wanted. The silence between them went on, and Jin hugged his knee against him to keep himself from shaking. There was warmth here. It streamed through the window, circulated with the air. Summer went on outside as if it had never stopped. “They found me by the river,” Jin said then, precisely, carefully, in a voice hardly more than a whisper. He recalled the shooting of the caliban and blocked that from his mind, focussing narrowly on the old man in front of him, whose skull was naked of hair, whose thin beard was white and clean. Clean. He never thought to see cleanliness again. He reeked of mud and sweat and excrement; his clothes were caked with filth. “It must have been days ago–” He went on talking, reckoning for the first time that someone was listening to him. “They brought me across the river. I don’t know why.”
“Name.”
“Jin.”
The aged head lifted. Watery dark eyes focussed on his for a long and quiet time. “My name is Green.”
The name hit his mind and settled, a cold, cold feeling. Family stories. They knew each other. He saw that. “Let me go,” he said. “Let me out of here.”
“Someday,” Green whispered, a rusty sound like something long unused. A long silence. “A brown is dead.”
“An accident. No one meant it.”
Green simply stared, then took pebbles from his lap and placed them in a line on the earthen floor. The ariel watched, then scrambled over his knee and onto the hardpacked earth, a flailing of limbs. It stood up on its legs, flicked its collar, studying the matter with one cocked eye. Then it began to move the pebbles, laying them in a heap.
“Let me leave,” Jin said hoarsely, focussing with difficulty. “It was an accident.”
“Do you understand this Pattern?” Green asked. “No.” He answered himself, and gathered up the stones, laid them down again, only to have the ariel move them into a heap. It went on and on.
“What do you want with me?” Jin asked at last. A tremor had started in his arms, exhaustion, and a pain in his gut. “Can’t we get it done?”
“Look at this place,” Green said.
He lifted his eyes and looked around him, the earthen walls, the window, the rammed‑earth floor scored with claws far larger than the ariel’s. The Weirds crouched in shadow beneath the window.
Green clapped his hands, twice, echoing in the stillness. And far away, down somewhere in the shadows something stirred. There was a sough of breath, and that something was large.
Jin froze, his arms locked about his knees. He looked at the window, at sunlight, at a way of escape or dying.
“No hurt,” Green said softly.
It came up from below, a whuff of breath, a dry scraping of claws, the thrusting of a blunt, bony‑collared head up out of the entry to the room, a head as large as the entry itself. Jin scrambled back until he felt the wall behind him, and more of it kept coming, a brown, but a bigger brown than ever he had seen. Its eyes were green‑gold. Its crest was touched with green. It settled on its belly, curling its tail around the curving of the wall beyond Green, reaching from side to side of the room, and the Weirds never stirring from where they sat. The brown craned its neck, turned a fistsized eye in Jin’s direction, came up on its legs and moved closer.
Jin shut his eyes, felt warm breath and the flickering of its tongue about his face and throat. The tongue withdrew. The head turned again to stare at him with an eye large as a human head. The tongue licked out, thick as his arm.
“Be calm,” Green whispered. Jin huddled against the wall, beside huge clawed feet. The head swung over him, overshadowing him; and quietly it bent and nudged him with its jaws.
He cried out; it whipped away, dived down into the dark of the access with a last slithering of its tail. Jin stayed where he was against the wall, shivering.
“Others died,” Green whispered, sitting again where he had sat, calmly placing his stones one after the other. No, the stones said, chilling with hope. Green gathered up the stones again, strewed them one after the other, went on doing this time after time while the ariel crouched near and watched, while the rougher, ragged Weirds crouched watching in their silence.
Jin wiped his mouth and grew quieter, the shivers periodic. He was not dead. He had not died. There was an anger stored away inside him, anger at what he was, that he could not stop shivering, because they could do whatever they liked. He remembered what he had suffered, and how he had screamed, and how all his wit and hunter’s skill had let him down. He no longer liked being what he had been–vulnerable; he would never be again what he had been–naive. All his life people must have seen these things in him. Or all his kind were like him. He loathed himself with a deep and dawning rage.
xv
Year 89, day 222 CR
Main Base
Dean came into the lab, stood, hands behind him, coughed finally when Spencer stayed at work. Spencer turned around.
“Morning,” Spencer said.
“Morning, sir.” He kept his pose, less than easy, and Spencer frowned at him.
“Something wrong, Dean?”
“I heard–”
“Is this panic all over the town, then?”
“The soldiers moved last night. To the wire.”
“An alarm. An empty one.”
“Hillers haven’t shown up in days.”
“So I understand.” Spencer came closer, rested his portly body against the counter and leaned back, arms folded. “You here to say something in particular, Dean?”
“Just that.”
“Well, I appreciate your report. I reckon the hillers are a little nervous, that’s all.”
“I don’t know what I can learn out there in town if there aren’t any hillers coming in.”
“I think you serve a purpose.”
“I’d really like to be assigned inside.”
“You’re not nervous, are you?”
“I just really think I’m not serving any purpose out there.”
“It’s rather superstitious, isn’t it? I detect that, in the town.”
“They’re quite large, sir. The calibans.”
“I think you serve as a stabilizing influence in the town. You can tell them that the station’s still up there watching and we don’t anticipate any movement. It’s probably due to some biocycle. Fish, maybe. Availability of food. Population pressures. You’re an educated man, Dean, and I want you right where you are. We’ve got a dozen applications for Base residency in our hands, a rush on applications for one open job. That disturbs me more than the calibans. We’ve got a whole flood of field workers on the sick roster. I’m talking twenty percent of the workers. Not a fever in the lot. No. We’re not pulling you inside. You stay out until the crisis is over.”
“That could be a while, Dr. Spencer.”
“You do your job. You keep it down out there. You want your privileges, you do your job, you hear me? No favors. You talk to key people and you keep the town quiet.”
“Yes,” Dean said. “Sir.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and nodded a good morning, trying to manage his breathing while he turned and walked out.
His mother was dead. Last month. The meds had not saved her this time: the heart had just gone. The town house was empty except when he moved in. His neighbors hardly spoke, coveting the house so conveniently sharing a wall with their overcrowded one. He had no friends: older than the adolescent scholars, he was anomaly in his generation. He had no wife or lover, being native and untouchable on the main base side of the line, outsider and unwanted in the town.