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“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.
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.