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.
Hypothesis: this is a mental disorder uniquely produced by Gehennan culture with its reliance on calibans. Humans identify completely with the creatures on whom all humans rely for survival, and receive a certain special status which confirms them in their state.
Hypothesis: this is a specialized and successful adaptation of humankind to Gehenna, growing out of the azi culture which was left here in ignorance.
Hypothesis: Weirds cantalk to calibans.
xxxvii
204 CR, day 293
Cloud Towers, the top of First Tower
“You mean you can’t say it in words.”
“It’s not a word thing.” Elai laughed strangely and made a scattering gesture. “Oh, MaGee, I could tell it to Din and he’d know. I can’t figure how to do it.”
“Teach me to Pattern.”
“Teach you.”
“At least as much as the boy knows.”
“So you tell the stone towers? So they know if we got underneath the Wire? There was a time the towers fell. More than once. There was a time the whole Base sank in. We remember too.” Scar had stirred, putting himself between them and the ariel, which cleared the wall in a great hurry. Elai scratched the scaly jaw, looked at her beneath her brows. “They’re building them a new tower this year, the Styxsiders, closer to the Wire.”
“You think the Base is in danger?”
“Styx is trouble. Always is. You tell the stone towers that with your com.” She nodded toward the river, up it, toward the forested horizon. “Our riders move up there. They kill a few this year, I think. Maybe next. That’s in the Patterns.”
“How?” McGee asked. “Elai, how do you mean–in the Patterns?”
Elai stretched out her hand, swept it at all the horizon. “You write on little things. Calibans, they write large, they write mountains and hills and the way things move.”
A chill was up McGee’s back. “Teach me,” she said again. “Teach me.”
Elai stroked Scar’s jaw again, thoughts passing behind her eyes. “Calibans could make one mouthful of you.”
“Human beings?”
“Been known. I send you down with them–you could be in bad trouble.”
“I didn’t ask to go anywhere with calibans. I asked you to teach me. Yourself.”
“I’ve showed you all the things I can show. The things you want, MaGee–you got to go down to them. You can talk and talk to me; I can show you upand downand stopand such. But you really want to talk the Patterns, you got to talk to him.”One vast eye stared at her, gold and narrow‑pupilled in the light, a round of iris bigger than the sun. Scar was looking at her, sidelong, in his way.
“All right,” McGee said, scared enough to fall down where she was, but she put her hands in her pockets and looked casual as she could. “They smell fear?”
There was humor in Elai’s eyes, but it was Elai‑Eldest’s face, implacable. “You go down,” Elai said. “You go down and down as far as you can. I think Scar will go. I could be wrong.”
“How long will I be there? What will I eat?”
“They’ll tell you that. There’ll be the Weirds. They’ll take care of you. Be a child again, MaGee.”
204 CR, day 203
Message, E. McGee to Base Director, transmitted from field
Expect to be out of touch for a number of days due to rare study opportunity.