And they wanted to take the baby away too. Jin looked up at them desperately when they took it from Pia’s arms, wanting for one of a few times in his life to say no.

“We’ll bring him right back,” the med said ever so softly. “We’ll wash him and do a few tests and we’ll bring him right back in a few moments. Won’t you stay with Pia, Jin, and keep her comfortable?”

“Yes,” he said, feeling a tremor in his muscles, even so, thinking that if they wanted to take the baby back again later, after Pia had suffered so to have it, then he wanted very much to stop them. But yes was all he knew how to say. He held on to Pia, and a med hovered about all the same, not having gone with the rest. “It’s all right,” Jin told Pia, because she was distressed and he could see it. “It’s all right. They said they’d bring it back. They will.”

“Let me make her comfortable,” the med said, and he was dispossessed even of that post–invited back again, to wash Pia’s body, to lift her, to help the med settle her into a waiting clean bed; and then the med took the table out, so it was himself alone with Pia.

“Jin,” Pia said, and he put his arm under her head and held her, still frightened, still thinking on the pleasure they had had and the cost it was to bring a born‑man into the world. Pia’s cost. He felt guilt, like bad tape; but it was not a question of tape: it was something built in, irreparable in what they were.

Then they did bring the baby back, and laid it in Pia’s arms; and he could not forbear to touch it, to examine the tininess of its hands, the impossibly little fists. It. Him. This born‑man.

xi

Year 2, day 189 CR

Children took their first steps in the second summer’s sun…squealed and cried and laughed and crowed. It was a good sound for a struggling colony, a sound which had crept on the settlement slowly through the winter, in baby cries and requisitions for bizarre oddments of supply. Baby washing hung out in the azi camp and the central domes in whatever sun the winter afforded–never cold enough to freeze, not through all the winter, just damp; and bonechilling nasty when the wind blew.

Gutierrez sat by the roadside, the road they had extended out to the fields. In one direction the azi camp fluttered with white flags of infant clothing out to dry; and in the other the crawlers and earthmovers sat, shrouded in their plastic hoods, and flitters nested there.

He watched–near where limestone blocks and slabs and rubble made the first solid azi buildings, one‑roomed and simple. They had left some chips behind, and an ariel was at its stone‑moving routine. It took the chips in its mouth, such as it could manage, and moved them, stacked them, in what began to look like one of the more elaborate ariel constructions, in the shadow of the wall.

A caliban had moved into the watermeadow again. They wanted to hunt it and Gutierrez left this to Security. He had no stomach for it. Best they hunt it now, before it laid eggs. But all the same the idea saddened him, like the small collection of caliban skulls up behind the main dome.

Barbaric, he thought. Taking heads. But the hunt had to be, or there would be more tunnelling, and the azi houses would fall.

He dusted himself off finally, started up and down the road toward the domes, having started the hunters on their way.

Man adjusted–on Gehenna, on Newport. Man gave a little. But between man and calibans, there did not look to be peace, not, perhaps, until the ship should come. There might be an answer, in better equipment. In the projection barriers they might have made work, if the weather had not been so destructive of equipment…if, if, and if.

He walked back into the center of camp, saw the Old Man sitting where he usually sat, under the canopy outside main dome. The winter had put years on the colonel. A stubble showed on his face, a spot of stain on his rumpled shirt front. He drowsed, did Conn, and Gutierrez passed him by, entered quietly into the dome and crossing the room past the long messtable, poured himself a cup of the ever‑ready tea. The place smelled of fish. The dining hall always did. Most all Gehenna smelled of fish.

He sat down, with some interest, at the table with Kate Flanahan. The special op was more than casual with him; no precise recollection where it had started, except one autumn evening, and realizing that there were qualities in Kate which mattered to him.

“You got it?” Kate asked.

“I headed them out. I don’t have any stomach left for that.”

She nodded. Kate trained to kill human beings, not wildlife. The specials sat and rusted. Like the machinery out there.

“Thought–” Gutierrez said, “I might apply for a walkabout. Might need an escort.”

Kate’s eyes brightened.

But “No,” Conn said, when he broached the subject, that evening, at common mess.

“Sir–”

“We hold what territory we have,” the colonel said. In that tone. And there was no arguing. Silence fell for a moment at the table where all of them who had no domestic arrangements took their meals. It was abrupt, that answer. It was decisive. “We’ve got all we can handle,” the colonel said then. “We’ve got another year beyond this before we get backup here, and I’m not stirring anything up by exploring.”

The silence persisted. The colonel went on with his eating, a loud clatter of knife and fork.

“Sir,” Gutierrez said, “in my professional opinion–there’s reason for the investigation, to see what the situation is on the other bank, to see–”

“We’ll be holding this camp and taking care of our operation here,” the colonel said. “That’s the end of it. That’s it.”

“Yes, sir,” Gutierrez said.

Later, he and Kate Flanahan found their own opportunity for being together, with more privacy and less comfort, in the quarters he had to himself, with Ruffles, who watched with a critical reptilian eye.

“Got a dozen specs going crazy,” Kate said during one of the lulls in their lovemaking, when they talked about the restriction, about the calibans, about things they had wanted to do. “Got people who came here with the idea we’d be building all this time. Special op hoped for some use. And we’re rotting away. All of us. You. Us. Everyone but the azi. The Old Man’s got this notion the world’s dangerous and he’s not letting us out of camp. He’s scared of the blamed lizards, Marco. Can’t you try it on a better day, make sense to him, talk sense into him?”

“I’ll go on trying,” he said. “But it goes deeper than just the calibans. He has his own idea how to protect this base, and that’s what he means to do. To do nothing. To survive till the ships come. I’ll try.”

But he knew the answer already, implicit in the Old Man’s clamped jaw and fevered stare.

“No,” the answer came when he did ask again, days later, after stalking the matter carefully. “Put it out of your head, Gutierrez.”

He and Flanahan went on meeting. And one day toward fall Flanahan reported to the meds that she might be pregnant. She came to live with him; and that was the thing that redeemed the year.

But Gutierrez’ work was slowed to virtual stop–with all the wealth of a new world on the horizon. He did meticulous studies of tiny ecosystems along the shoreline; and when in the fall another caliban turned up in the watermeadow, and when the hunters shot it, he stood watching the crime, and sat down on the hillside in view of the place, sat there all the day, because of the pain he felt.

And the hunters avoided his face, though there was no anger in his sitting there, and nothing personal.

“I’m not shooting any more,” a special op told him later, the man who had shot this one.

As for Flanahan, she had refused the hunt.

xii

Year 2, day 290 CR

The weather turned again toward the winter, the season of bitter cold rain and sometime fogs, when the first calibans wandered into the camp. And stayed the night. They passed like ghosts in the fog, under the haloed lights, came like the silly ariels; but the calibans were far more impressive.