“Gehenna Base will be reestablished under maximum security with equipment arriving aboard this courier…
“It is Bureau policy that no interference be permitted in the territory of unconsenting sapience, even in benevolent intention…
“The Station will extend all possible cooperation and courtesy to Bureau agent Dr. K. Florio…”
xxi
Year 90, day 144 CR
Staff meeting: Gehenna Station
“It is a tragedy,” Florio said, making a fortress of his hands in front of him. He spoke quietly, eyed them all. “But those who disagree with policy have their option to be transferred.”
There was silence from the rest of the table, poses like his own, grim faces male and female. Old hands at Gehenna Station. Seniority considerable.
“We understand the rationale,” the Director said. “The reality is a little difficult to take.”
“Are they dying?” Florio asked softly. “No. The loss of life is done. The human population has stabilized. They’re surviving very efficiently down there.” He moved his hands and sorted through the survey reports. “If I lacked evidence to support the Bureau decision–it’s here. The world is put through turmoil and still two communities reassert themselves. One is well situated for observation from the Base. Both are surviving thanks to the food drops. The Bureau will sanction that much, through the winter, to maintain a viable population base. The final drop will be seed and tools. After that–”
“And those that come to the wire?”
“Have you been letting them in?”
“We’ve been delivering health care and food.”
Florio frowned, sorted through the papers. “The natives brought up here for critical treatment haven’t adjusted to Station life. Severe psychological upset. Is that humanitarian? I think it should be clear that good intentions have led to this disaster. Good intentions. I will tell you how it will be: the mission may observe without interference. There will be no program for acculturation. None. No firearms will be permitted onworld. No technological materials may be taken outside the Base perimeter except recording instruments.”
There was silence from the staff.
“There is study to be pursued here,” Florio said more softly still. “The Bureau has met measurable intelligences; it has never met an immeasurable one; it has never met a situation in which humanity is out‑competed by an adaptive species which may violate the criteria. The Bureau puts a priority on this study. The tragedy of Gehenna is not inconsiderable…but it is a double tragedy, most indubitably a tragedy in terms of human lives. For the calibans–very possibly a tragedy. Rights are in question, the rights of sapients to order their affairs under their own law, and this includes the human inhabitants, who are not directly under Alliance law. Yes, it is an ethical question. I agree. The Bureau agrees. But it extends that ethical question to ask whether law itself is not a universal concept.
“Humans and calibans may be in communication. We are very late being apprised of that possibility. Policy would have been different had we known.
“If there were any question whether humans were adapted to Gehenna, that would have to be considered–that humans may have drifted into communication with a species the behaviors of which twenty years of technologically sophisticated research and trained observation has not understood. This in itself ought to make us question our conclusions. In any question of sapience–in any definition of sapience–where do we put this communication?
“Suppose, only suppose, that humans venture into further space and meet something else that doesn’t fit our definitions. How do we deal with it? What if it’s spacefaring–and armed? The Bureau views Gehenna as a very valuable study.
“Somehow we have to talk to a human who talks to calibans. Somehow what we have here has to be incorporated into the Alliance. Not disbanded, not disassembled, not reeducated. Incorporated.”
“At the cost of lives.”
The objection came from down the table, far down the table. From Security. Florio met the stare levelly, assured of power.
“This world is on its own. We tell it nothing; we give it nothing. Not an invention, not a shred of cloth. No trade goods. Nothing. The Station will get its supplies from space. Not from Gehenna.”
“Lives,” the man said.
“A closed world,” Florio said, “gains and loses lives by its own rules. We don’t impose them. By next year all aid will have been withdrawn, food, tools, everything including medical assistance. Everything.”
There was silence after. No one had anything to say.
xxii
Year 90, day 203 CR
Cloud’s Settlement
The calibans came to the huts they made on the new river in the south, and brought terror with them.
But the shelters stood. There was no undermining. The grays arrived first, and then a tentative few browns, burrowing up along the stream.
And more and more. They fired no arrows, but huddled in their huts and tried not to hear the calibans move at night, building walls about them, closing them about, making Patterns of which they were the heart.
Calibans spared the gardens they had made. It was the village they haunted, and even by day ariels and grays sat beneath the sun.
“They have come to us,” said Elly, “the way they came to Jin.”
“We have to stay here,” said an old man. “They won’t let us go.”
It was true. They had their gardens. There was nowhere else to go.
xxiii
Settlement on Cloud’s River
“…They came from a place called Cyteen,” Dean said, by the hearth where the only light was in their common shelter, and the light shone on faces young and old who gathered to listen. He had the light, but he told it by heart now, over and over, explaining it to children, to adults, to townsmen and hillers who had never seen the inside of modern buildings, who had to be told – so many things. Ma Elly and her folk sat nearest, Cloud with that habitual frown on his face, and Dal listening soberly; and Pia and young Tam solemn as the oldest. Twenty gathered here, crowded in; and there were others, too many to get into the shelter at once, who would come in on their turn. They came because he could read the books, more than Elly herself – he could tellwhat was in them in ways the least could understand. Cloud valued him. Pia came to his bed, and called him my Deanin a way proud and possessive at once.
In a way it was the happiest period of his life. They cared for him and respected him; they listened to what he had to say and took his advice. He gave them a tentative love, and they set him in a kind of special category – except Pia, who made him very special indeed; and Cloud and Dal who adopted him and ma Elly who talked about the past with him and Tam who wanted stories. At times the village seemed all, as if the other had never been.
But he could read more than he could say. He interpreted; it was all that he could do. He was alone in what he understood and he understood things that tended to make him bitter, written in the hands of long‑dead men who had seen the world as strangers. He could go to the wire again. They might take him back. But the bitterness stood in the way. The books were his, his revenge, his private understanding –
Only sometimes like tonight when calibans moved and shifted in the village, when he thought of the mounds which crept tighter and tighter about their lives –
– he was afraid.
VII
ELAI
i
178 CR, day 2
Cloud River Settlement
She was born into a world of towers, in the tallest of the Twelve Towers on the sandy Cloud, and the word went out by crier to the waiters below, huddled in their cloaks in a winter wind, that Ellai had an heir and the line went on.