“You let her up here,” Ben said to Zed. “Why let herup here?”
“I know what you’re doing,” Pia said. Her face felt red. She was still gasping for breath after the climb; she caught a mouthful of air. Jane Flanahan‑Gutierrez sat down on another rock, her hands on either side of her, flaunting sex and satiation. “You think,” Pia gasped, “you think it’s anything? Jin, our father sent me. To find you all. Green’s run off again. They want you back to help.”
Her brothers settled, one by one, all but her brother Jin, who was eldest; who stood there with his face clouded and his hands caught in his belt. Green: that was the sixth of them. Youngest brother.
“That boy’s gone”Ben said, with that disgust everyone used about Green; but: “Quiet,” Jin Younger said, in that tone that meant business, that could frighten elders into listening to whatever Jin wanted to say. “How long?”
“Maybe since morning,” Pia said hoarsely. “They thought he was off with some boys. He ran off from them. They didn’t send anyone back to tell. Pia’s looking in the Camp; but Jin’s out in the hills. Hunting this way. He asked us, Jin; our father askedus. He’s really scared.”
“It’s going to get dark.”
“Our father’s out there, all the same. And he doesn’t know anything. He could fall in a burrow, he could. But I don’t think he’ll quit.”
“For Green.”
“Jin–” She talked only to Jin, because he made up the minds of the rest. “He asked.”
“We’d better go,” Jin said then; so that was it: the others ducked their heads and nodded.
“What do we do with that brother of yours,” Ben asked, assuming they were going too, “if we find him?”
“Hey,” Jane said, “hey, I have to get back to the Camp. You said you’d walk me back to the Camp.”
“ I’llwalk you back,” Pia said with a narrow look. “That trail down’s really bad. A careless body might slip.”
“You’d better watch who you talk to,” Jane said.
“ Azi. That what you reckon, maincamper? Think I’m scared? You watch yourself.”
“Shut up,” Jin said.
“One of you,” said Jane, “has to get me back. I can’t wait around while you track that brother of yours down–I know; I know all about him.”
“We’ll be back. Just wait.”
“He’s gone, don’t you think that? When they go, they go.”
Pia gathered herself up again without a word, started off down the road without a backward look, hot inside; and before she had gotten to the first downslope there was a skittering of pebbles and a following in her wake: the whole troop of her brothers was gathered about her, and the down‑the‑row boys too.
“Wait!” Jane shouted after the lot of them. “Don’t you go off and leave me up here.” And that was satisfaction. They would get her down–later. When they had seen to Green again. A stream of words followed them, words they swore by in the main Camp in the longest string Pia had ever heard. Pia marched down the winding track without looking back, hands in her pockets.
“That Green,” Ben muttered. “Going to do what he likes, that’s what. Going to get to what he wants sooner or later.”
“Quiet,” Jin Younger said, and Ben kept it to himself after that, all the long way down.
It was better going back. In company. Pia began to pant with exhaustion–her tall brothers had long legs and they were fresh on the track, but she kept going, with the stitch back in her side, not wanting to admit her tiredness. Green–as for Green, Ben might be right. She had five brothers and the last was wild; was thirteen, and wandered in the hills.
And those who did that–they went on wandering; or whatever they did, who gave up humankind.
It was the third time…that Green had gone.
“This time,” Pia said out of her thoughts, between gasps for air, “this time I think we have to get him, us. Because I don’t think our father can find him fast enough.”
“This time–” Jin Younger said, walking beside her, themselves out of hearing of the others if he kept his voice low, “this time I think it’s like Ben said.”
He admitted that to her. Not to the others. And it was probably true.
But they kept going all the same, down into the woods the Calibans had grown, among the mounds and the brush in the late afternoon. “Where’s Jin hunting?” Jin Younger asked.
Pia pointed, the direction of the Camp. “From Camp looking toward the river. That’s what he thought–the river.”
“Probably right,” Jin Younger said. “Probably right for sure.” He squatted down, cleared ground with the edge of his hand, took a stick and scratched signs as the others gathered. “I think Mark and I had better find our father: that’s furthest. And Zed and Tam, you go the middle way; Ben, you and Alf go with them and split off where you have to go up to cover the ground; and Nine, you and Pia go direct by the river way. Pia’s got most chance of talking to Green: I want her there where he’s most likely to go. We draw a circle around him and sweep up our father too, before some caliban gets him.”
That was Jin Younger: that was her brother, whose mind worked like that, cool and quick. Pia got up from looking at the pattern and grabbed Nine’s hand–Nine was eighteen, like Zed; and red and gold and freckled all over. They all moved light and quick, and in spite of the prospect in front of them, Pia went with a kind of relief, that she was doing something, that she was not her mother, searching the town because she had to do something, even a hopeless thing, lame as Pia elder was, worn out from Green, aching tired from Green–
Lose him this time, Pia thought, in her heart of hearts. Let him go this time, to be done with it; and no more of that look her parents had, no more of doing everything for Green.
But if they lost him, they had to have tried. It was like that, because he was born under their roof, stranger that he was.
They took the winding course through the brush‑grown mounds, she and Nine, hand in hand, hurried past the gaping darknesses under stones, that were caliban doorways–sometimes saucer‑big eyes watched them, or tongues flicked, from caliban mouths mostly hid in shadow and in brush.
And the way began to be bare and slithery with mud, and tracked with clawed pads of caliban feet, which was a climbway calibans used from the Styx or a brook that fed it. Ariels scurried from their track, whipping their tails in busy haste; and flitters dived in manic profusion from the trees–some into ariel mouths. Pia brushed the flitters off, a frantic slapping at the back of her neck, protecting her collar, and they jogged along singlefile now, slid the last bit down to the flat, well‑trampled riverside, where calibans had flattened tracks hi the reeds of the bogs, and clouds of insects swarmed and darted.
Desolation. No human track disturbed the mud flats.
“We just wait,” Pia said. “He can’t have gotten past us unless he went all the way around the heights to the east.” She squatted down by the edge of the water and dipped up a double handful, poured it over her head and neck, and Nine did the same.