Forty Thousand in Gehenna

A hiss broke in front of him and the head of a great brown loomed up, jaws gaping. He skidded to a stop, slapped instinctively at a sharp sting on his cheek and felt a dart fall from under his fingers. The brown in front of him turned its head to regard him with one round golden eye while he felt that side of his face numb, his heart speeding. His extremities lost feeling, his knees buckled: he flung up an arm to protect his eyes as brush came up at him, and lacked the strength to move when he landed among the thorny branches. They were all about him, the human shapes, silent. Gentle hands tugged at him, turning him onto his back, so that a lacery of cloudy sky and branches swung into his vision.

He was not dying. He was numb, so that they could gather him up and carry him but he was not dead when they carried him toward the hole in the earth, and realizing this, he tried to fight, in a terror deeper than all his nightmares. But he could not move, not the least twitch of a finger, not even to close his eyes when dirt fell into his face, not to close his mouth or swallow or use his tongue, even to cry out when the dark went around him and he was alone with them, with their silence and their touches.

xiii

Year 89, day 208 CR

Main Base

“No sign of this hiller,” Spencer said.

“No, sir,” Dean said, hands behind him.

Spencer frowned, turned from his table fully facing Dean–an intense young man, his assistant, with a shock of thick black hair and a coppery skin tone and a faded blue number on his hand that meant townsman, at least intermittently. Presently Dean was doing field work, meaning he was back in the town again. “How did you hunt for him?” Spencer asked.

“Asking other hillers. Those who come to trade. Theyhaven’t seen him.”

“They know him?”

Dean took the liberty and sat down on the other stool at the slanted desk full of reports, pulled it under him. He smelled of recent soap, never of the fields. Meticulous in that. He had ambitions, Spencer reckoned. He was good–in what they let him do. “Name’s known, yes. There’s a kind of split–I don’t pick up all of it; I’ve given you notes on that. At any rate, there was this very old azi–You want his history?”

“Might be pertinent.”

“The last azi survivor. His brood went for the hills. That’s the ancestry. You hearabout that line, but you don’t see them. None of them are registered to come into the camp. There’s an order among hillers. The ones we get around here–they’ll talk easy on some things. But I didn’t get an easy feeling asking about this fellow Jin.”

“How–not easy?”

A shrug. “Like first it was no townsman’s business; like second, that maybe this particular hiller wouldn’t be dealing with a townsman.”

“How did you put it to them?”

“Just that I had come on something that had to do with this Jin. I thought it was clever. After all, his ancestor was hereabouts. And it used to be that townsmen would trade found‑things to the hills. I didn’t say anything more than that. They might get curious. But if this man’s a bush hiller, it could be a while.”

“Meaning he might be out of their settlement and out of touch.”

“Meaning that, likely. It seemed to be a good bit of gossip. I imagine it’ll go on quick feet. But no news yet.–You mind if I ask what I’m looking for?”

Spencer clamped his lips together, thinking on it, reached then and dragged a set of pictures down from the clutter on the desk, arranged them in front of Dean.

“That’s the Styx.”

“I see that,” Dean said.

Spencer frowned and livened the wallscreen, played the tapeloop that was loaded in the machine. He had seen the tape a score of times, studied it frame by frame. Now he watched Dean’s face instead, saw Dean’s face go rigid in the light of the screen, seeing the caliban and then the human come out of the mound. Dean’s whole body gave back, hands on the edge of the tabletop.

“Bother you?”

Dean looked toward him as the tape looped round again. Spencer cut the machine off. Dean straightened with a certain nonchalance. “Not particularly. Calibans. But someone got real close to do that tape.”

“Not so far upriver. Look at the orbiting survey.”

Spencer marked the place, difficult to detect under the general canopy of trees. Dean looked, looked up, without the nonchalance. “This have to do with the hiller you’re looking for, by any chance?”

“It might.”

“You take these?”

“You’re full of questions.”

“That’s where you and the soldiers went. Upriver last week. Looking for calibans.”

“Might be.”

“This hunter–this Jin–He was there? He guided you?”

“You don’t like the sound of it.”

Dean bit at his lip. “Not a good idea to go up on calibans like that. Not a good idea at all.”

“Let me show you something else.” Spencer pulled a tide of pictures down the slope of the desk. “Try those.”

Dean turned and sorted through them, frowning.

“You know what you’re looking at?”

“The world,” Dean said. “Seen from orbit.”

“Pictures of what?”

A long silence, a shuffling of pictures. “Rivers. Rivers all over the world. I don’t know their names. And the Styx.”

“And?”

A long silence. Dean did not look around.

“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?”