He walked the quadrangle of Base, among the tall outworlder buildings, among strange concrete gardens which disturbed him to look at, because they made no sense in their forms of twisted concrete, and he saw obscure comparisons to Patterns, which hillers made to confuse townsmen. Just beyond the enclosure made by the buildings and their concrete walls, he entered the gatehouse where he stripped and hung his Base clothes in a locker, and changed to townsman coveralls, drab and worn. They were a lie; or the other clothes were: he was not, this morning, sure.
He went out again, passed the guard who knew him, the outworlder guard who looked at him and never smiled, never trusted him, always checked at the tags and the number on his hand as if they had changed since yesterday.
The guard made his note in the record, that he had left the Base. Dean went out, from concrete garden to a concrete track that led into the town, making a T north and south, one long true street which was all the luxury the town had. The rest were dirt. The buildings were native stone and brick; and the clinic, which was featureless concrete–that was the other gift from the Base. Dirt streets and ordinary houses raised by people who had forgotten architects and engineers. They had a public tap on every street; a public sewer to take the slops, and a law to make sure people took the trouble. There was a public bath, but that stank of its drains, and kept the ground around it muddy, to track in and out. There were fields as far as the hills, golden at this time of year; and the sentry towers; and the wire, wire about the fields, about the town, and concrete ramparts and guardstations about the Base. The wire made them safe. So the outworlders said.
xvi
Year 89, day 223 CR
The Hiller Village
A caliban came at twilight, carrying a rider, a thing no one had ever seen; it came gliding out of the brush near old Tom’s house and another one came after it. A small girl saw it first and stood stock still. Others did the same, excepting one young man who dived into the common hall and brought the whole village pouring out onto the rocky commons.
It was a man on the Caliban’s shoulders, all shadowy in the twilight, the caliban itself indistinct against the brush, and a second caliban, smaller, came after with a man sitting on that one too. The calibans stopped. Weirds materialized out of the brush around the camp, shadows in the fading colors of night’s edge, some naked and some wearing dull‑hued bits of clothes.
The man sitting on the Caliban’s neck–the first one–lifted his arm. “You’ll leave this place,” the voice came ringing out at them, speech from a Weird…and that alone was shock enough, but the caliban moved forward, light and slow as the clawed feet could set themselves on the stone, and the hillers gathered on the doorstep of the common‑hall gave backward like the intaking of a breath. There were hunters among them, but no one had brought weapons to evening meal; there were elders, but no one seemed to know what to say to this; there were children, and one of the youngest started to cry, setting off an infant, but parents hugged their faces against their shoulders and frantically hushed them.
Other calibans were around the camp, some with riders, moving ghostlike through the brush. And smaller calibans, like the witless grays. And smaller still, a handful of the village ariels came slithering out into the empty space between calibans and hall and froze there, heads up, fringes lifted, a thing peculiarly horrid, that creatures the children kept for pets should range themselves with such an invasion.
“The village is done,” the intruder said. “Time to move. Calibans are coming–tonight. More and more of them. The times change. These strangersinside the wires, these strangers that mark you to go through their gates, that take food enough from the town to get fat, they’ve got everything. And they shoot browns. That doesn’t do, no, that doesn’t do at all. There’s no more time. There’s new Patterns, across the river, there’s things no outsider ever saw, there’s a safe place I’ll bring you to, but this place…this village is going to be for the wind and the ariels tomorrow, like the domes they tell about, like those, dead and dark. The stone underfoot won’t protect you. Not now.”
“That’s Jin,”someone said under his breath, a tone of horror, and the name went whispering through the village. “That’s Jin, that was lost on riverside.”
“Jin,” a man’s voice said, and that was Jin Older, who pushed his way out in front of everyone, with tears and shock in his voice. “Jin, come down from that, come here. This is your people, Jin.”
Something hissed. Jin Older slapped at something in his neck about the time his wife pushed through the crowd to get to him; and other kin–but Jin Older fell down, and a few tried to see to him, but one broke to ran for cover–a second hissing, and that woman staggered and sprawled.
“Take what you want,” Jin shouted, pointing a rigid arm at the village about them. “What you’ll need, you gather up–But plan to leave. You thought you were safe here, built on rock. But you leave these buildings, you just leave them for the flitters and be glad. You move now. They won’t like waiting.”
And then: “ Move!” he shouted at them, because no one did, and then everyone did, a panicked scattering.
Cloud reached his own house, out of breath, and fumbled in the dark familiar corner for his bow, with only the fireplace coals to see by. He found his quiver on the peg, slung that to his shoulder and turned about again facing the door as a flurry of running steps came up to it, a flood of figures he knew even in the dark.
“It’s me,” he said before they could take fright–his wife Dal, his sister Pia, his grandmother Elly and his own son Tam, eight years old. His wife hugged him; he hugged her one‑armed, and hugged his son and sister too. Tam was crying as he made to go; ma Elly put herself in his way.
“No,” Elly said. “Cloud, where are you going?”
He was afraid at the thought of shooting humans and calibans, but that was what he was off to, what was about to happen out there–what had already started, on the invaders’ side. He heard shouting, heard the hiss of calibans. Then he heard faint screams.
“Come back here.” Ma Elly clenched his shirt, pulled at him with all her might, a stout woman, the woman who had mothered him half his life. “You’ve got a family to see to, hear?”
“Ma Elly–if we don’t stop them out there together–”
“You’re not going out there. Come back here. They’ll kill you out there, and what good is that?”
His wife held him, her arms added to ma Elly’s, and young Tam held to his waist. They pulled him inside, and he lost his courage, lost all the fire that urged him to go out and die for them, because he was thinking now. Then what? ma Elly asked, and he had no answer, none. He patted his wife’s shoulder, hugged his sister. “All right,” he said.
“Gather everything,” ma Elly said, and they started at it, in the dark. Young Tam tossed a log on the hearth–“ No,”Cloud said, and pulled the boy back and raked the log out with a stick before it took light, a scattering of coals. He took the boy by the shoulders and shook him. “No light. Get all the clothes you can find. Hear?”
The boy nodded, swallowed tears and went. Cloud looked rightward, where ma Elly was down on her knees among the scattered coals wrestling with the flagstones.
He squatted down and levered it up for her with his knife, asked no question as she pulled up the leather‑wrapped books that were the treasure of Elly’s line. She hugged them to her and he helped her up while the business of packing went on around them. “Not going to live in any caliban hole,” ma Elly muttered. He heard her voice break. He had not heard Elly Flanahan cry since his mother died. “You hear me, Cloud. We go out that door, we keep going.”