She started walking, walked all the way out past the nets where Scar sat. The place stank, a dry fishy stench like stagnant water, like caliban and rot. Not dead yet. But his skin hung like bits of old paper, and his ribs stuck out through what whole skin there was as if it were laid over a skeleton. The eyes were still alive, still blinked. He moved no more than that.
She picked up a rock. Laid it down. Went and gathered another, caliban sized. She struggled with it, and set it onto the other. Of smaller ones she built the rest of a spiral, and the small spur that gave direction. An ariel came and helped her, trying to change the pattern to what was; she pitched a pebble at it and it desisted. She wiped her brow, wiped tears off her face and kept building, and saw others had come, Dain and his folk. They stared, reading the pattern, First Tower built taller than the rest, the uncomplex thread that went from it toward a thing she had made square and alien.
Dain invaded the pattern, severed the line with his spearbutt, defying her.
Scar moved: his collar fringe went up. Dain looked at that and stayed still. No Cloudsider moved.
McGee hunted up more rocks. Her clothes were drenched with sweat. The wind came cold on her. There were more and more watchers, riders and calibans of First Tower.
“Paeia will come,” Dain said. “MaGee–don’t do this.”
She gave him a wild look, lips clamped. He stepped back at that. The crowd grew, and there was unearthly quiet. A gray moved in and tried to change the pattern. Scar hissed and it retreated to the fringes again, only waiting. McGee worked, more and more stones. Bruised ribs ached. She limped, sweated, kept at it, making her statement that was not in harmony with anything ever written in the world.
Dain handed another man his spear then and carried stone for her, leaving her to place it where she would; and that made it swifter, the building of this pattern. She built and built, lines going on to a settlement by the Styx, going outward into the sea, going south to rivers she remembered– Elai, the statement was, expansion. Links to the starmen. The starmen–She built for creatures who had never seen the stars, whose eyes were not made for looking at them, made the sign for riverand for going up, for dwelling‑placeand sunwarmth, for food/fishand again for warmthand multitude, all emanating from the Base.
A fisher came into the pattern, bringing more stones; so others came, bringing more and more. Growing things, one patterned. A woman added a Nesting‑stone. Ariels invaded the structures, clambered over them, poked their heads into crevices between stones, put out their tongues to test the air and the madness of these folk.
McGee lost track of the signs; some she did not know. She tried to stop some, but now there were more and more; and Weirds watching on the side. It was out of control, going off in directions she had never planned. “Stop!” she yelled at them, but they went on building the starman theme, wider and wider.
She sat down, shaking her head, losing sight of the patterns, of what they did. She wiped her face, hugged herself, and just sat there, more scared than she had been in the war.
She looked up in a sudden silence and saw Elai there, in a place the crowd had made–Elai, arriving like an apparition, her person still in disarray, Din and his smallish caliban trailing in her wake.
“MaGee,” Elai said; it was a whipcrack of a voice, thin as it was. There was rage.
“MaGee’s crazy,” McGee said. She stood up. “Don’t the Weirds have the right to say anything they like?”
“You want them to take us down, MaGee, like they took Jin?”
Scar hissed and turned his head, one plate‑sized eye turned toward Elai. That was all. Then he wandered off, avoiding the pattern, while humans scrambled from his path.
He went to the river. McGee saw him going in, turned to watch Elai’s face, but Elai gave no sign of grief, nothing.
“You’re a fool,” Elai said in a weak voice, and started back again.
Paeia was in her way, astride her big brown, with armed Second Tower riders at her side.
Elai stopped, facing that. Everything stopped for a moment, every movement. Then Elai walked around to the side. They exacted that of her, but they stood still and let her do it.
They stood there surveying the pattern. They stood there for a long time, and eventually the crowd found reasons to be elsewhere, one by one.
McGee went when those nearest her went, limping and feeling the wind cold on her sweat‑drenched clothes.
A lance brushed her when she passed Paeia on her way back. She looked up, at Paeia’s grim, weathered face, at eyes dark and cold as river stones.
“Fool,” Paeia said.
“That’s two that have told me,” McGee said, and backed off from the speartip and walked away, expecting it in her back. But they let her pass.
lx
Message: Base Director to E. McGee
Repeat: Urgent you report: we have Bureau representatives incoming. They’re bringing Unionside observers. There will be data essential to your work…
lxi
Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee
Elai’s no worse. No better. Paeia hasn’t come through the door. I did one thing, at least, with my meddling–They’re waiting. They’re just waiting to know what the calibans are going to do now that I’ve done what I did.
I didn’t think it through. I tried to tell the calibans they couldn’t lose Elai, that was all, tried explaining she could make the Base itself rational‑tried to explain starmen. Tried to tell them about their world and what they were missing, and O dear God, I did something no one’s ever done: I went and did a human pattern in terms they could read. I tried to say there was good in starmen, that there’s life outside–and they took it away from me, the Cloudsiders, they started telling it their way, their own legends–they were talking about themselves.
No one’s moving. The calibans have gone off–most of them. Elai’s eating again, at least I got her to take a little soup this morning; that was a triumph. Dain helped. Everyone’s going about quiet, really quiet.
And across the river there’s building going on, within sight of the towers. The calibans are in debate. I think they must be. Patterns rise and fall incomplete. There’s no reason in it that makes sense yet. They reform the old pattern and then tear it up again in new elaborations, and they do things I don’t make sense of.
Paeia’s been forestalled. This is no time to upset the calibans.
lxii
Message: station to Base
AS Wyverninbound from Cyteen. Visitors aboard.
lxiii
Cloudside
There was restlessness that night. McGee heard it starting in the depths, vague echoes of movements, stirrings and slitherings down below, and she shivered, lying on her bed, on the earthen ledge in her own quarters, wrapped in her rough blankets.
It grew. Her heart began beating in a panic like night fears, and she scrambled up, threw on her clothes without seeking any light: she went blind as she had learned to do, running up the spiral turns of the hall–So others came, men and women running either way, some down toward the exit from the tower, some few up, as she ran, up toward the hall where they kept firelight these last nights, since it had become Elai’s refuge.