iii
185 CR, day 200
Message, Alliance HQ to Gehenna Base
…extend all cooperation to the Bureau agents arriving with this message, conducting extensive briefings and seminars on the Gehenna settlements…
…While the Bureau concurs that conditions warrant direct observation and increased contact, the Bureau cautions the Mission that prohibitions against technological imports and trade continue. In all due consideration of humanitarian concerns, the Bureau reminds the Mission that the most benign of interventions may result in premature technological advances which may harm or misdirect the developing culture…
iv
185 CR, day 201
Gehenna Base, Staff Meeting
“…meaning they’re more interested in the calibans than in human life,” Security said glumly.
“In the totality,” the Director said. “In the whole.”
“They want it preserved for study.”
“We could haul the Gehennans in by force,” the Director said, “and hunt them wherever they exist, and feed them tape until they’re model citizens. But what would theychoose, umn? And how many calibans would we have to kill and what would we do to life here? Imagine it–a world where every free human’s in hiding and we’ve dismantled the whole economic system–”
“We could do better for them than watch them.”
“Could we? It’s an old debate. The point is, we don’t know what we’d be doing. We take it slow. You newcomers, you’ll learn why. They’re different. You’ll learn that too.”
There were guarded looks down the table, sensitive outworlder faces.
“ Different, on Gehenna,” the Director said, “isn’t a case of prejudice. It’s a fact of life.”
“We’ve studied the culture,” the incoming mission chief said. “We understand the strictures. We’re here to review them.”
“ Different,”the Director said again. “In ways you won’t understand by reading papers or getting tape.”
“The Bureau appreciates the facts behind the designation. Union…is interested. Surveillance is being tightened for that reason. The quarantine makes them nervous. They wonder. Doubtless they wonder. Perhaps they’ve begun to have apprehensions of something beyond their intentions here. There will be negotiations. We’ll be making recommendations in that regard too. This differencewill have its bearing on policy.”
“Union back on Gehenna–”
“That won’t be within our recommendations. Release of data is another matter. A botched alien contact, happening in some other Union recklessness, might not limit its effects so conveniently to a single world. Release of the data is a possibility…educating Union to what they did here.”
There were frowns. The Director’s was deepest. “Our concern is human life here. Now. Our reason for the request–”
“We understand your reasons.”
“We have to do something with this generation or this settlement may take abrupt new directions.”
“Fears for your own security?”
“No. For what this is becoming.”
“The difference you noted.”
“There’s no time,” the Director said, “that I can see any assimilation of Gehenna into Alliance…without the inclusion of humans who think at an angle. You can tape them. You can try to change them. If you don’t understand what they are now, how do you understand them when they’ve come another hundred years, another two hundred on the same course? If you don’t redirect them–what do you do with them? Perpetual quarantine–into the millennia? Governments change. Policies change. Someday somebody will take them in…and whatthey take in…is being shaped in these first centuries. We have a breathing space. A little peace. The chance of contact.”
“We understand that. That’s what we’re here to determine.”
“A handful of years,” the Director said, “may be all we have.”
v
188 CR, day 178
Cloud River Settlement
There was land across the saltwater and Elai dreamed of it–a pair of peaks lying hazily across the sea.
“What’s there?” she had asked Ellai‑Eldest. Ellai had shrugged and finally said mountains. Mountains in the sea.
“Who lives there?” Elai had asked. And, No one, Ellai had said. No one, unless the starships come there. Who else could cross the water?
So Elai set her dreams there. If there was trouble where she was, the mountains across the sea were free of it; if there was dullness in the winter days, there was mystery in the mist‑wreathed isle across the waves. If there was No, Elai, and Wait, Elai, and Be still, Elai–on this side of the waves, there was adventure to be had on that side. The mountains were for taking and the unseen rivers were for swimming, and if there were starships holding them, then she would hide in burrows till they took their leave and she and a horde of brave adventurers would go out and build their towers so the strangers could not argue with their possession. Elai’s land, it would be. And she would send to her mother and her cousin Paeia, offering them the chance to come if they would mind herrules. The Styxsiders could never reach them there. The rivers there would never flood and the crops would never fail, and behind those mountains would be other mountains to be taken, one after the other.
Forever and forever.
She made rafts of chips of wood and sailed them on the surge. They drifted back and she leaned close and blew them out again. She made canopies for passengers on her most elaborate constructions, and did straw‑dolls to ride, and put on pebbles for supplies and put them out to sea. But the surge toppled the stones and swept off the dolls and the raft came back again, so she made sides so the passengers should stay, carved her rafts with a precious bone knife old Dal had made her, and set them out with greater success.
If she had had a great axe such as the woodcutters used, then she might build a real one: so she reckoned. But she tried her bone knife on a sizeable log and made little progress at it, until a rain swept it all away.
So she sat on the shore with Scar, bereft of her work, and thought how unfair it was, that the starships came and went so powerfully into the air. She had tried that too, made ships of wood and leafy wings that fell like stones, lacking the thunderous power of the machines. One dreamed. At least her sea‑dreams floated.
The machines, she had thought, made wind to drive them. If only the wind which battered at the shore could get all into one place and drive the ships into the sky. If only.
She saw leaves sail, ever so much lighter on the river’s face, whirling round and about. If she could make the ships lighter. If she could make them like the leaves… If they could be like the fliers that spread wings and flew… She made wings for her sea‑borne ships, pairs of leaves, and stuck them up on twigs, and to her delight the ships did fly, if crazily, lurching over the water and the chop until they crashed on rocks.
If she had a woodcutter’s skill, if she could build something bigger still–a great sea‑ship with wings–
She sailed carved ships at least to the rocks an easy wade offshore, and imagined those rocks as mountains.
But always the real, the true mountains were across the wider sea, promising and full of dreams.
She watched the last of her ships wreck itself and it all welled up in her, the desire, the wishing, that she could be something more than ten years old and superfluous to all the world. She could order this and that about her life–she had what she wanted in everything that never mattered. She could have gone hungry: she was willing to go hungry in her adventures, which seemed a part of war: she had heard the elders talking. She was willing to sleep cold and get wounds (Cloud Oldest had dreadful scars) and even die, with suitable satisfaction for it–the fireside tales were full of that, a great deal better than her grandmother who had slept out her end (but it was her youngly dead uncle they told the best stories of)–in all she could have done any of these things, imagining herself the subject of tales. But she had no axe and her knife was fragile bone.