He’s like Elai was, quiet, grownup‑like.
Is even childhood one of our illusions? Or is this forced adulthood what’s been done to us out here?
Us. Humans. They are still human; their genes say so.
But how much do genes tell us and how much is in our culture, that precious package we brought from old Earth?
What will we become?
Or what have they already begun to be?
They look like us. But this researcher is losing perspective. I keep sending reassurances to Base. That’s all I know to do.
I think they accept me. As what, I’m far from sure.
xxxv
204 CR, day 232
Cloud Towers
Ma‑Gee, they called her in the camp. A woman had come from another tower carrying a river‑smoothed stone the size of those only the big browns moved, and laid it at McGee’s feet, in the gathering of First Tower.
“What does that mean?” McGee had asked Elai afterward.
“Nest‑stone,” Elai had said. “Brings warmth from the sun. Baby‑gift. That’s thanks.”
“What do I do?” McGee had asked.
“Nothing,” Elai said. “No, let it be. Some caliban will take it when it wants one.”
Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee
Every time I think I understand they do something I can’t figure.
A woman dropped a stone at my feet. It was warm from the sun. Calibans do that to hatch the eggs. It represented a baby somehow, that was important to her. She didn’t cry. Cloud River folk don’t, that I’ve ever seen. But she was very intense about what she did. I think she gave up status doing it.
Mother love?
Do they love?
How do I end up asking such a question? Sometimes I know the answer. Sometimes I don’t.
Elai has some feeling for me. My friend, she says. We talk–we talk a great deal. She listens to me. Maybe it was her health that made her what I saw, that separated her from her sons.
The calibans swim to sea when their people die. One didn’t. It died on the shore today. People came and skinned it. Other calibans ate it. What it died of I don’t know.
It took all day to disappear. The people collected the bones. They make things out of bone. It’s their substitute for metal. They consider it precious as we might value gold. They’re always carved things, things to wear. They have wood for other things. A few really old iron blades: they take care of those. But they have caliban bone for treasure.
They have native fiber for cloth; but leather is precious as the bone. Only riders have all leather clothes. They get patched. They don’t ever throw them away, I’d guess. It’s like the bone. A treasure. This colony was set where it had no metals, had no domestic animals, no resources except their neighbors. I think they would choose another way if they had one. But they do what they can. They won’t hunt; not calibans, at least, and there’s nothing else to hunt, on land.
They’re digging on the bank again. The calibans are. Across the river. Elai says they may have some new tower in mind, but that it looks to her like more burrows.
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
But Elai wouldn’t say.
I’m sure orbiting survey has picked it up. I’ve put it in my report as indeterminate construction. They’ll want some interpretation.
I’m not sure Elai knows.
xxxvi
204 CR, day 290
Cloud Towers
On the summit of First Tower, under a dying summer sun:
“MaGee, what is it like to fly?”
Elai asked questions again, questions, and questions. But now she thought of ships.
“Like sitting on something that shakes,” McGee said. “You weigh a little more than usual sometimes, sometimes less: it makes your stomach feel like it’s floating. But up there the river would look like a thread. The sea looks flat, all smoothed out and shining like the river at dawn; the mountains look like someone dropped a wrinkled cloth; the forests like waterweed.”
Elai’s eyes rested on hers. That spark was back behind them, that thing that adulthood had crushed. Sadness then. “I won’t ever see these things,” she said.
“I haven’t,” McGee said, “in a good many years. Maybe I won’t again. I don’t think so.”
For a long while Elai said nothing. The frown deepened moment by moment. “There is a Wire in the sky.”
“No.”
“So you could go when you like.”
McGee thought about that one, not sure where it led.
“Could we?” Elai asked. “We say that the Wire keeps your stone towers safe. But is that so, MaGee? The ships come and go from inside there to outside. I think that Wire keeps us away from ships. My boats, MaGee, what could they find, but places like this one? They couldn’t find where we came from. We’d just go back and forth, back and forth, on rivers and on seas, and find more islands. But we couldn’t go up. You watch us from the sky. How small, you say. How small. What did we do, MaGee, to be shut away?”
McGee’s heart was beating very fast. “Nothing. You did nothing. How do you know all this, Elai? Did you figure it?”
“Books,” Elai said finally. “Old books.”
“Could I,” asked McGee, and her heart was going faster still, “could I see these books?”
Elai thought about it and looked at her very closely. “You think something might be important to you in these books? But you know where we came from. You know everything there is to know–don’t you, MaGee?”
“I know the outside. Not the inside. Not things I’d like to know.”
“Like what?”
“Calibans. Like how you know what they’re saying.”
“Books won’t tell you that. Books tell about us, where the lines started. How we got to the Cloud and how it was then. How the Styx‑siders began.”
“How did they?”
Elai thought again, frowning, opened her hand palm up. “Can’t say it so you’d understand. It’s Patterns.”
Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee
There are a thousand gestures that have meaning among Cloud River folk, gestures which I think are the same for Styxside. Often they actually use stones, which some folk carry in their pockets or in small bags; but particularly the riders have a way of expressing themselves in sign, pretending the fingers are dropping pebbles. Or picking them up. There’s no alphabetic system in this. The signs are true signs, having a whole meaning in the motion.
But they do write. Counting both sign and writing there’s considerable education among these people, no mean feat considering the diversity of the systems.
Concerning communication with the calibans, there are some concepts that pass back and forth. A caliban can ‘ask’ a human a direction and basic intentions. I can get old Scar to respond to me as far as I want to go up, meaning to the roof. Or down.
There are the Weirds. There are always the Weirds. They care for the children and they function somewhere between priesthood and janitorial duties. They keep the burrows clean. The calibans seem to take pleasure in being touched by them. Most Weirds are thin: high activity, a diet more of fish and less of grain, a lack of sunlight. But in general they seem healthy physically. In any human society off Gehenna their sanity would be in question. It is uncertain whether this is a mental aberration peculiar to the culture, as certain human cultures historically have spawned certain disorders with more frequency than others, or come up with completely unique maladies.