“But they didn’t catch them,” Kate Flanahan said that night, trying to rouse him out of his brooding. “It failed, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. And nothing more.
xv
Year 3, day 230 CR
“Jin,” the elder Jin called; and Pia called with him, tramping the aisles and edges of the camp. Fear was in them…fear of the outside, and the chance of calibans. “Have you seen our son?” they asked one and another azi they met. “No,” the answer was, and Pia fell behind in the searching as Jin’s strides grew longer and longer, because Pia’s belly was heavy with another child.
The sun sank lower in the sky, and they had gone much of the circuit of the camp, out where the electric fence was. That riverward direction was young Jin’s fascination, the obsession of more than one of the rowdy children in the camp.
“By the north of the camp,” an azi told him finally, when he was out of breath and nearly panicked. “There was some small boy playing there.”
Jin went that way, jogging in his haste.
So he found his son, where the walls stopped and the land began to slope toward the watermeadow. White slabs of limestone were the last wall there, the place they had once stacked the building stone. And little Jin sat in the dirt taking leftover bits of stone and piling them. An ariel assisted, added pebbles to the lot–turned its head and puffed up its collar at so sudden an approach.
“Jin,” Jin senior said. “Look at the sun. You know what I told you about wandering off close to dark. You know Pia and I have been hunting for you.”
Little Jin lifted a face which was neither his nor Pia’s and looked at him through a mop of black hair.
“You were wrong,” Jin said, hoping that his son would feel shame. “We thought a caliban could have gotten you.”
His son said nothing, made no move, like the ariel.
Pia arrived, out of breath, around the white corner of the last azi house. She stopped with her hands to her belly, cradling it, her eyes distraught. “He’s all right,” Jin said. “He’s safe.”
“Come on,” Pia said, shaken still. “Jin, you get up right now and come.”
Not a move. Nothing but the stare.
Jin elder ran a hand through his hair, baffled and distressed. “They ought to give us tapes,” he said faintly. “Pia, he wouldn’t be like this if the tape machines worked.”
But the machines were gone. Broken, the supervisors said, except one, that the born‑men used for themselves.
“I don’t know,” Pia said. “I don’t know what’s right and wrong with him. I’ve asked the supervisors and they say he has to do these things.”
Jin shook his head. His son frightened him. Violence frightened him. Pick him up and spank him, the supervisors said. He had hit his son once, and the tears and the noise and the upset shattered his nerves. He himself had never cried, not like that.
“Please come,” he said to his son. “It’s getting dark. We want to go home.”
Little Jin carefully picked up more stones and added them to his pattern, the completion of a whorl. The ariel waddled over and moved one into a truer line. It was all loops and whorls, like the ruined mounds that came back year by year in the meadow.
“Come here.” Pia came and took her son by the arms and pulled him up, scattering the patterns. Little Jin kicked and screamed and tried to go on sitting, which looked apt to hurt Pia. Jin elder came and picked his son up bodily under one arm, nerving himself against his screams and his yells, impervious to his kicking as they carried him in shame back to the road and the camp.
While their son was small they could do this. But he was growing, and the day would come they could not.
Jin thought about it, late, lying with Pia and cherishing the silence…how things had gone astray from what the tapes had promised, before the machines had broken. The greatest and wisest of the born‑men were buried over by the sea, along with azi who had met accidents; the ships were no longer coming. He wished forlornly to lie under the deepteach and have the soothing voice of the tapes tell him that he had done well.
He doubted now. He was no longer sure of things. His son, whom sometimes they loved, who came to them and hugged them and made them feel as if the world was right again, had contrary thoughts, and strayed, and somehow an azi was supposed to have the wisdom to control this born‑man child. Sometimes he was afraid–of his son; of the unborn one in Pia’s belly.
When the ship comes, the azi used to say.
But they stopped saying that. And nothing was right since.
IV
THE SECOND
GENERATION
Military Personneclass="underline"
Col. James A. Conn, governor general, d. 3 CR
Capt. Ada P. Beaumont, It. governor, d. year of founding
Maj. Peter T. Gallin, personnel
M/Sgt. Ilya V. Burdette, Corps of Engineers
Cpl. Antonia M. Cole
Spec. Martin H. Andresson
Spec. Emilie Kontrin
Spec. Danton X. Norris
M/Sgt. Danielle L. Emberton, tactical op.
Spec. Lewiston W. Rogers
Spec. Hamil N. Masu
Spec. Grigori R. Tamilin
M/Sgt. Pavlos D. M. Bilas, maintenance
Spec. Dorothy T. Kyle
Spec. Egan I. Innis
Spec. Lucas M. White
Spec. Eron 678‑4578 Miles
Spec. Upton R. Patrick
Spec. Gene T. Troyes
Spec. Tyler W. Hammett
Spec. Kelley N. Matsuo
Spec. Belle M. Rider
Spec. Vela K. James
Spec. Matthew R. Mayes
Spec. Adrian C. Potts
Spec. Vasily C. Orlov
Spec. Rinata W. Quarry
Spec. Kito A. M. Kabir
Spec. Sita Chandrus
M/Sgt. Dinah L. Sigury, communications
Spec. Yung Kim
Spec. Lee P. de Witt
M/Sgt. Thomas W. Oliver, quartermaster
Cpl. Nina N. Ferry
Pfc. Hayes Brandon Lt. Romy T. Jones, special forces
Sgt. Jan Vandermeer
Spec. Kathryn S. Flanahan
Spec. Charles M. Ogden
M/Sgt. Zell T. Parham, security
Cpl. Quintan R. Witten
Capt. Jessica N. Sedgewick, confessor‑advocate
Capt. Bethan M. Dean, surgeon
Capt. Robert T. Hamil, surgeon
Lt. Regan T. Chiles, computer services
Civilian Personneclass="underline"
Secretarial personneclass="underline" 12
Medical/surgicaclass="underline" 1
Medical/paramedic: 7
Mechanical maintenance: 20
Distribution and warehousing: 20
Robert H. Davies d. CR 3
Security: 12 Computer service: 4
Computer maintenance: 2
Librarian: 1
Agricultural specialists: 10
Harold B. Hill
Geologists: 5
Meteorologist: 1
Biologists: 6
Marco X. Gutierrez
Eva K. Jenks
Jane E. Flanahan‑Gutierrez b. 2 CR
Education: 5
Cartographer: 1
Management supervisors: 4
Biocycle engineers: 4
Construction personneclass="underline" 50
Food preparation specialists: 6
Industrial specialists: 15
Mining engineers: 2
Energy systems supervisors: 8
ADDITIONAL NONCITIZEN PERSONNEL:
“A” class: 2890
Jin 458‑9998
Pia 86‑687
Jin Younger b. year of founding
Mark b. 3 CR
Zed b. 4 CR
Tam b. 5 CR
Pia Younger b. 6 CR
Green b. 9 CR
“B” class: 12389
“M” class: 4566
Ben b. 2 CR
Alf b. 3 CR
Nine b. 4 CR
“P” class: 20788
“V” class: 1278
i
Year 22, day 192 CR
It was a long walk, a lonely walk, among the strange hills the calibans raised–but her brothers were there, and Pia Younger kept going, out of breath by now, her adolescent limbs aching with the running. She always ran on this stretch of the trail, where the mounds and ridges were oldest and overgrown with brush. She never admitted it to her brothers, but it disturbed her to cross this territory. Here. With them.