“Don’t know, MaGee. Don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe so.”
“They’ll kill. Like at the Styx towers.”
“The strong ones’ll come this way,” Elai said. She was hoarse. This talk tired her. She made an impatient gesture. “All those Styxside men, too mean; all those women, too stupid–Life would kill them, here. Land will kill them. Most. Maybe not all.” The frown reappeared between her brows. “Or maybe Styxside way just grows up again. Don’t know.”
Somewhere at the depth of her McGee was shocked. “You mean these Styxsiders did something the calibans didn’t like. That thatwas what killed them.”
Elai shrugged. “They ate grays.”
“For years, Elai–”
“It got worse, didn’t it? They went on and on; they got themselves the likes of Jin; he pushed.” Elai made a motion of her fingers, indicating boundaries. “Calibans aren’t finished with this pattern, MaGee, here on the Cloud. Cloud stands. That’s what it meant, out there.”
“And they’d have stopped your ships the same way?”
“Maybe.” Elai heaved a breath. “Maybe not. Old Scar would swim. Maybe he thought the same as me. That old sea‑folk, he was just bigger than Scar, that’s all. Or maybe that was ourlimit and he was saying so.”
McGee saw pictures in her mind, squatting there with her fist against her lips: saw every caliban on Gehenna in every river valley making mounds much alike, except on Styx and Cloud. “Boundaries,” she said, and looked up, at Elai. But Elai had shut her eyes again, closing her out.
She looked at Din, at the boy huddled in the corner with his caliban. The hall was eerily vacant. Only a single ariel lurked in the shadows. Of all the communications that had once flowed from this place, one small green watcher. There was always one.
McGee hugged her knees and thought and thought, the patterns that had been since they had come home, lines and mounds across the river, beyond her to read.
And Scar dying on the shore, slowly, snapping now and again at grays who came too close.
She could not bear it longer. She got up and walked out, down the access, down the corridors in the dark, where voices were hushed, where desertions had begun, deep below, calibans and Weirds at their work, which might be undermining or shoring up, either one.
Dain gave her a curious look as she passed the lower door; a handful more of the riders had joined him, armed with spears; so no one got into First Tower yet. It seemed sure that they would. Everything was at a kind of rest, Paeia plotting in her tower, Taem’s in uproar, non‑communicant, now that Taem was dead, heirless; and other towers turned secretive. The fishers still plied their trade; folk went out to farm. But they did so carefully, disturbing as little as they could; and strange calibans had come: they saw them in the river, refugees from the battle, maybe Styxside calibans, maybe calibans that had never come near humans before. If anyone knew, the Weirds might, but Weirds kept their own counsel these days.
She stood there looking out to the shore, where Scar still sat like some rock under the sun.
“Still alive,” said Dain. His own caliban was about, not with him, not far either. She spied it with its collar up, just watching.
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.