It might have scored a point. Or lost one. Ellai’s face gave no hints. “What are you doing here?”
“We don’t intend to have a ring of Styx towers cutting us off from any possible contact with you. If we encourage you to build closer towers, it could mean more fighting and we don’t want that either.”
“If you don’t intend to interfere with anyone, how do you plan to stop the Styx‑siders building towers?”
“By coming and going in this direction, by making it clear to them that this is a way we go and that we don’t intend to be stopped.”
Ellai thought that over, clearly. “What good are you?”
“We give the Styx‑siders something else to think about.”
Ellai frowned, then waved her hand. “Then go do that,” she said.
There was a stirring among the gathering, an ominous shifting, a flicking and settling of caliban collars and a pricking‑up of the Caliban’s beside Ellai.
“So,” said McGee, uneasy in this shifting and uncertain whether it was good or ill, “if we come and go and you do the same, it ought to make it clear that we plan to keep this way open.”
An aged bald man came and squatted by Ellai’s side, put his spidery fingers on the caliban. Ellai never looked at him.
“You will go now,” Ellai said, staring at McGee. “You will not come here again.”
McGee’s heart speeded. She felt ruin happening, all her careful constructions. She kept distress from her face. “So the Styxsiders will say what they like and build where they like and you aren’t interested to stop it.”
“Go.”
Others had moved, others of the peculiar sort gathering about Ellai, crouched in the shadows. Calibans shifted. An ariel skittered across the floor and whipped into the caliban gathering. Of the sane‑looking humans there seemed very few: the woman nearest Ellai’s chair, a leather‑clad, hard‑faced type; a handful of men of the same stamp, among their gathering of dragons, among lamp‑like eyes and spiny crests. The eyes were little different, the humans and the dragons–cold and mad.
A smaller, gray caliban serpentined its way to the clear center of the floor with a stone in its jaws and laid it purposely on the floor. Another followed, placing a second beside it, while the first retrieved another rock. It was crazy. The craziness in the place sent a shiver over McGee’s skin, an overwhelming anxiety to be out of this tower, a remembrance that the way out was long and dark.
A third stone, parallel to the others, and a fourth, dividing her from Ellai.
“The way is open now,” Ellai said.
Go, that was again, last warning. McGee turned aside in disarray, stopped an instant looking straight at Elai, appealing to the one voice that might make a difference.
Elai’s hand was on Scar’s side. She dropped it and walked a few paces forward–walked with a limp, as if to demonstrate it. Elai was lame. Even that had gone wrong.
McGee went, through the dark spirals, out into the unfriendly sun.
xx
189 CR, day 43
Report, E. McGee
…I succeeded in direct contact; further contacts should be pursued, but cautiously…
189 CR, day 45
Memo, office of the Director to E. McGee
Your qualification of the incident as a limited success seems to this office to be unfounded optimism.
xxi
189 CR, day 114
Styxside
Genley looked about him at every step along the dusty road, taking mental notes: Mannin trod behind him, and Kim; and in front of them the rider atop his caliban, unlikely figure, their guide in this trek.
Before them the hitherside tower loomed, massive, solid in their eyes. They had seen this at distance, done long‑range photography, observed these folk as best they could. But this one was within their reach, with its fields, its outbuildings. Women labored in the sun, bare‑backed to the gentle wind, the mild sun, weeding the crops. They stopped and looked up, amazed at the apparition of starmen.
189 CR, day 134
Field Report: R. Genley
…The hitherside tower is called Parm Tower, after the man who built it. The estimates of tower population are incorrect: a great deal of it extends below, with many of the lower corridors used for sleeping. Parm Tower holds at least two thousand individuals and nearly that number of Calibans: I think about fifty are browns and the rest are grays.
The division of labor offers a working model of theories long held regarding early human development and in the degree to which Gehenna has recapitulated human patterns, offers exciting prospects for future anthropological study. One could easily imagine the ancient Euphrates, modified ziggurats, used in this case for dwellings as well as for the ancient purpose, the storage of grain above the floods and seasonal dampness of the ground.
Women have turned to agriculture and do all manner of work of this kind. Hunting, fishing, and the crafts and handcrafts, including weaving, are almost exclusively a male domain and enjoy a high status, most notably the hunters who have exclusive control of the brown Calibans. Fishers employ the grays. The grays are active in the fields as well, performing such tasks as moving dikes and letting in the water, but they are directed in this case by the class called Weirds. Weirds are both male and female, individuals who have so thoroughly identified with the calibans that they have abandoned speech and often go naked in weather too cool to make it comfortable. They do understand speech or gesture, apparently, but I have never heard one speak, although I have seen them react to hunters who speak to them. They maneuver the grays and a few browns, but the calibans do not seem to attach to them as individuals in the manner in which they attach to the hunter‑class.
Only hunters, as I have observed, own a particular caliban and give it a name. It should also be mentioned that one is born a hunter, and hunter marriages are arranged within towers after a curious polyandrous fashion: a woman marries her male relatives’ hunting comrades as a group; and her male relatives are married to their hunting comrades’ female sibs. Younger sisters usually marry outside the tower, thus minimizing inbreeding; they are aware of genetics, though, curiously enough, they have reverted to or reinvented the old term “blood” to handle the concept. There is no attempt to distinguish full brother‑sister relationship from half. In that much the system is matrilineal. But women of hunter class are ornaments, doing little labor but the making of clothes and the group care of children in which they are assisted by women relieved from field work. All important decisions are the province of the men. I have observed one exception to this rule, a woman of about fifty who seems to have outlived all her sibs and her band. She wears the leather clothing of a rider, has a caliban and carries a knife. She sits with the men at meals and has no association with the wives.
Crafts and fisher‑class women work in the fields with their daughters. Male children can strive for any class, even to be a hunter, although should a lower class male succeed in gaining a caliban he may have to fight other hunters and endure considerable harassment. There is one such individual at Parm Tower. His name is Matso. He is a fisher’s son. The women are particularly cruel to him, apparently resenting the possibility of his bringing some fisher‑sib into their society should he join a hunter‑group.
Over all of this of course is Jin himself. This is a remarkable man. Younger than most of his council, he dominates them. Not physically tall, he is still imposing because of the energy which flows from him. The calibans react to him with nervousness‑displays, a reaction in which his own plays some part: this is a beast named Thorn, which is both large and aggressive. But the most of it is due to Jin’s own force of personality. He is a persuasive speaker, eloquent, though unlettered: he is a hunter, and writing is a craft: he will not practice it.
He has survived eight years of guardianship to seize power for himself at sixteen, effectively deposing but not killing his former guardian Mes of the River Tower, from what I hear. He is inquisitive, loves verbal games, loves to get the better hand in an argument, is generous with gifts–he bestows ornaments freehandedly in the manner of some oldworld chief. He has a number of wives who are reserved to him alone but these are across the Styx. At Parm Tower he is afforded the hospitality of the hunter‑class women, which is a thing done otherwise only between two bands in payment of some very high favor. This lending of wives and the resultant uncertainty of parentage of some offspring seems to strengthen the political structure and to create strong bonds between Jin and certain of the hunter‑bands. Whether Jin lends his wives in this fashion we cannot presently ascertain.