So they might be five now. Green might be gone. And that might cure them of all their troubles at once, if only they could prove they had searched; if they could get Green out of Jin and Pia’s minds.

They went out to get their mother and father back for their own: that was why they went. That was why she had known that her brother Jin would come.

And if Nine had run back to his brothers, Pia still meant to stay where her brother said, to watch the bank. The rocks offered the most likely vantage, where the cliffs tumbled down to the Styx, where calibans sunned themselves and where anyone headed upriver had to go.

She had no fear of her brother Green. It was the others of his sort she had no desire to meet; and she wanted somewhere to watch unseen.

ii

The sun was halfway down the sky, and Jin elder moved with a sense of desperation, his breath short and shallow, his senses alive with dread on all sides. The wooded mounds surrounded him, offered dark accesses out of which calibans could come. Young ones challenged him, man‑sized, athwart his path, and he scrambled aside on the hill and kept going.

He might call aloud, but Green would never answer to his name, hardly spoke at all, and so he did not waste the breath. It was a question of overtaking his son, of finding him in this maze when he had no wish to be found. It was impossible, and he knew that. But Green was his, and whatever Green was, however strange, he tried, as his wife tried, in the town, already knowing her son was gone–searching among the thousands of houses, asking faces that would go blank to the question–“Have you seen our son? Have your children heard from him? Is there anyone who knows?”–They would shut the doors on her as they would on the night or on a storm, not to have the trouble inside with them, whose houses were secure. Pia had no hope; and he had none, except in his rebel children, his other sons and his daughter, who might possibly know where to look, who ran wild out here–but not as wild as Green.

He slowed finally, out of breath, walked dizzily among the mounds. Now the sun was behind them, making pockets of dark. A body moved, slithered amid the thick brush, among the trees which had grown here, this side of the river. The sight was surreal. He recalled bare meadow, and gentle grass, and the first beginnings of a mound; and caliban skulls piled behind main dome. But all that was changed; and a forest grew, all scrub and saplings. Fairy flitters came down on his shoulders, clung to his clothing, making him think of bats; he beat them off and recalled that they were lives–which touched a faint, far chord in him, of guilt and of dread. The world was full of life, more life than they could hold back with guns or fences; it came into the town at night; it seduced the children and year by year crept closer.

A heavy body thrust itself from a hole–a caliban flicked its tongue at him; an ariel scurried over its immobile back and fled into the dark inside. He started aside, ran, slowed again with a pain in his side…sat down at last, against the side of a mound, by one of the rounded hills, the domes the calibans made.

And leapt up again, spying a white movement among the saplings on the ridge. “Green,” he called.

It was not Green. A strange boy was staring down at him, squatting naked atop the ridge–thin, starved limbs and tangled hair, improbable sight in the woods. It was the image of his fears.

“Come down,” he asked the boy. “Come down–” Ever so softly. Never startle them; never force–It was all his hope, that boy.

And the boy sprang up and ran, down the angle of the hill among the brush; Jin ran too–and saw the boy dive into the dark of a caliban access, vanishing like nightmare, confirming all that he had dreaded to know, how they lived, what they were, the town’s lost children.

“Green,” he called, thinking that there might be others, that his son might hear, or someone hear, and tell Green that he was called. But no answer came; and what the mound had taken in, it kept. He moved closer, climbed the slope with all his nerves taut‑strung. He went as far as the hole and put his head inside. There was the smell of earth and damp; and far away, down some narrow tunnel, he heard something move. “Green,” he shouted. The earth swallowed up his voice.

He crouched there a moment, arms flung across his knees, despair thicker about him than before. His children had all gone amiss, every one; and Green, the different one was stranger than all the strange children he had sired. Green’s eyes were distant and his mind was unknowable, as if all the unpleasantness of the world had seeped into Pia while she carried him, and infected his soul. Green was misnamed. He was that other face of spring, the mistbound nights when calibans prowled and broke the fences; he was secret things and dark. He had lost himself, over and over again; had shocked himself on the fences, sunk himself in bogs–had lost himself into the hills, and played with ariels and stones, forgetting other children.

Jin wept. That was his answer now that he was like born‑men and on his own. He mourned without confidence that there would be comfort–no tapes, now; nothing to relieve the pain. He had to face Pia, alone; and that he was not ready to do. He pictured himself coming home with daylight left, giving up, when Pia would not. When he failed her, she would come out into the hills herself: she was like that, even frail as she grew in these years. Pia, to lose a son, after all the pain–

He got up, abandoning hope of this place, kept walking, brushing the weeds aside in the trough between the mounds, going deeper and deeper into the heart of the place. All the way to the river–that was how far he must go, however afraid he was, all along this most direct track from the village to the river, as close as he could hew to it.

Brush stirred above him on a ridge: he looked up, expecting Calibans, hoping for his son–

And found two, Jin and Mark, standing on the wooded ridge above him, mirrors of each other, leaning on either side of a smallish tree.

“Father,” Jin Younger said–all smug, as if he were amused. And hostile: there was that edge always in his voice. Jin 458 faced his son in confused pain, never knowing why his children took this pose with him. “A little far afield for you, isn’t it, father?”

“Green is lost. Did your sister find you?”

“She found us. We’re all out looking.”

Jin elder let the breath go out of him, felt his knees weak, the burden of the loss at least spread wider than before. “What chance that we can find him out here?”

“What chance that he wants to be found?” Mark asked, second‑born, his brother’s shadow. “That’s the real matter, isn’t it?”

“Pia–” He gestured vaguely back toward the camp. “I told her I could go faster, look further–that you’d help; but she’ll try to come–and she can’t. She can’t do that anymore.”

“Tell me,” Jin Younger said, “would you have come for any of us? Or is it just Green?”

“When you were four and five–I did, for you.”

Jin Younger straightened back as if he had not expected that. He scowled. “Sister’s gone on down by the river,” he said. “If we don’t take Green between us, there’s no catching him.”

“Where’s Zed and Tam?”

“Oh, off hereabouts. We’ll find them on the way.”

“But Pia’s on the river alone?”

“No. She’s got help. Anyhow, Green won’t hurt her. Whatever else, not her.” Jin Younger slid down the slope, Mark behind him, and they caught their balance and stopped at the bottom in front of him. “Or didn’t that occur to you when you sent her into the hills by herself?”

“She said she knew where you were.”

His sons looked at him in that way his sons had, of making him feel slow and small. They were born‑men, after all, and quick about things, and full of tempers. “Come on,” Jin Younger said; and they went, himself and these sons of his. They shamed him, infected him with tempers that left him nothing–his sons who ran off to the wild, who took no share of the work in the fields, but cut stone when the mood took them, and dealt with born‑men for it in trade, their own discovery. Well enough–it was not calibans that drew them; but laziness. He tried to guide them, but they had never heard a tape, his sons, his daughter…who ran after her elder brothers.