“That’s enough stories,” Elai said. “Some things a boy has no need to know.”
“Maybe,” said McGee, “tomorrow. Maybe.”
“Go away,” said Elai. “I’m tired of boys.”
Din scowled. His caliban was still up and darting with its tongue, testing the air for enemies.
“Take your brothers with you,” said Elai. “Hey!”
Nurses came, the two old women, fierce and silent, half Weirds themselves. There was no escape for the boys. Rowdiness and loud voices near Scar were not wise. So they went away.
And Elai kept sitting in the sun, caliban‑like, basking on the ledge against the wall. All about the towers the fields were golding. Between them, like skirts, gardens remained green atop the odd mound‑houses of the fishers and workers; weirs sat on riverside like lopsided cages, and fish hung drying beside rows and rows of drying washing and drying fisher‑ropes and nets.
McGee smiled in the tight, quiet way of Tower‑folk, minor triumph. She knew what she did. Elai was well‑pleased, if one knew how to read Tower‑folk gestures. Her heir had come from silence to questions, from sullen disdain to a hurting need to know; and from disdain of Elai to–perhaps a curiosity and a new reckoning what his mother was; for quite unexpectedly since spring Elai had begun to flourish like a hewn tree budding, had put on weight: muscle was in the way Elai moved now. It might have been the exercises, the antibiotics against persistent lowgrade fever, the vitamins and trace‑minerals. McGee herself was not sure; but there were differences in diet on the Cloud, and she hammered them home to Elai.
“Fish guts,” Elai had said in disgust.
“Listen to me,” McGee had said. “Styxsiders eat grays. They get it that way. Grays eat all the fish. Fish eat other fish. Whole. You won’t eat grays, so you’ll have to do better with the fish. Net the little ones. Smoke them. They’re not bad.”
“I like the pills fine,” Elai said.
“Haven’t enough for everyone,” said McGee. “Want healthy people?”
So the nets. And soups and such. And fish dried against the wintertime when fishing was scant.
Interference, they would call it behind the Wire.
xxxiv
Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee
So I ask the boy questions. I tell him stories. The sullenness is gone. Used to look at me like I was something too vile to think on. Used to look at his mother the same way, but there’s respect when he talks to her now.
What I find here between Elai and her sons is strange. We talk in cultural terms about maternal instinct. It’s different here. I don’t say Elai doesn’t have any feeling for her sons. She talks with some disturbance of losing one baby, but I draw no conclusions whether the distress is at the discomfort without reward, at the failure, at some diminution of her self‑respect–or whether it’s what we take for granted is universal in human mothers.
Here is an instance where we have adjusted data to fit the desire, since it is ourselves we measure. The human species is full of examples of motherhood without feeling. Can a researcher impugn motherhood? Or have we been wrong because it was as a species safer to construct this fantasy?
How many such constructs has the species made?
Or is it the attribute of an advanced mind, to make such constructs of an abstract nature in its folklore when its genetic heritage doesn’t contain the answer? Folklore as an impermanent quasi‑genetics? Do all advanced species do such things? No. Not necessarily.
Or I am wrong in what I see.
They are Union; they came out of labs.
Two hundred years ago. There’s been a lot of babies born since then.
Elai’s sons had different fathers. Some Cloud Tower folk pair for what seems permanence. Most don’t. I asked Elai if she chose the fathers. “Of course,” she said. “One was Din, one was Cloud, one was Taem. And Marik.”
So the boys have the father’s name. I haven’t met the mates. Or we haven’t been introduced. Elai said something that shed some light on it: about Taem: “That man’s from New Tower. Scar and that caliban were trouble; he ran. Got rid of that one.”
“Killed him?” I asked, not sure whether she was talking about the caliban or the man.
“No,” she said, and I never did find out which one.
But Taem rules what they call the New Tower over by the sea. And I think it’s the same Taem. Relations seem cordial at least at a distance.
I say Elai has no motherhood. I found the relationship between herself and her sons chilling, like a rivalry, one in which the dominancy of the Calibans seemed to have some bearing; and Taem’s lack of one, his silence–Elai’s resignation, no, her acceptance of his condition. (Humans bearing children to give to calibans?)
But today I picked up something I hadn’t realized: that Elai treats her heir as an adult. Cloud can run about being a baby; Weirds take care of him, and those two old women. Taem–no one knows what Taem needs, but the Weirds see he gets it, I suppose. Only this six year old is no child. God help us, I haven’t seen a child in twenty years excepting natives, but that’s no six year old of any mindset I’m used to.
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.