“I had myself a main‑camper once. He said–he said the old azi had to think like Jin, that’s all.”

“Maybe they did. Anything the main‑campers wanted. Only now there’s new main‑campers. You remember how it was. You remember what it was, when old Gallin had the say in main‑camp. That’s what it’ll be again. You mind me, Pia, you don’t wait for the burying or they’ll have you plowing fields.”

She spat, half a laugh.

“You mind me,” Jin said. “That’s how it was. Mark and Zed and Tam and I–we ran out on it.”

“So did I. It wasn’t hard.” She took a comb Jin had left. “This. I’ll keep this.”

“They’ll be coming here.”

“They’ll bring things.”

“Tape machines. They’ll catch the youngers and line us up in rows.”

“Maybe they should.”

“You thinking like him?”

She walked away to the door, looked out above the abandoned, caliban‑haunted domes and the fallen sun‑tower where vines had had their way, where the town stopped. The ship sat there in the distant plain, shining silver, visible above the roofs.

“You don’t go,” Jin argued with her, coming and taking her shoulders. “You don’t be going out there talking to those born‑men.”

“No,” she agreed.

“Forget the stinking born‑men.”

“Aren’t we?”

“What?”

“Born‑men. We were born here.”

“I’m going,” Jin said. “Come along.”

“I’ll walk with you to the trail.” She started on her way. There was nothing to carry but the staff, and what Jin chose to keep; and behind them, the town would break in and steal.

So Old Jin was gone.

And she was sitting by the doorway when they brought the New Men to her.

They disturbed her with their strangeness, as they disturbed the town. There were those who were ready to be awed by them, she saw that, but she looked coldly at the newcomers and kept her mind to herself.

Their clothes were all very fine, like the strange tight weave which the looms the town made nowadays could never duplicate. Their hair was short as Killers wore it and they smelled of strange sharp scents.

“They say there was a man here who came on the ships,” the first of them said. He had a strange way of talking, not that the words were unclear, just the sound of them was different. Pia wrinkled her nose.

“He died.”

“You’re his daughter. They said you might talk to us. We’d like you to come and do that. Aboard the ship, if you’d like.”

“Won’t go there.” Her heart beat very fast, but she kept her face set and grim and unconcerned. They had guns. She saw that. “Sit.”

They looked uncomfortable or offended. One squatted down in front of her, a man in blue weave with a lot of metal and stripes that meant importance among born‑men. She remembered.

“Pia’s your name.”

She nodded shortly.

“You know what happened here? Can you tell us what happened here?”

“My father died.”

“Was he born?”

She pursed her lips. All the rest knew that much, whatever it meant, because it had never made sense to her, how a man could not be born. “He was something else,” she said.

“You remember the way it was at the beginning. What happened to the domes?” The gesture of a smooth, white hand toward the ruins where calibans made walls. “Disease? Sickness?”

“They got old,” she said, “mostly.”

“But the children–the next generation–”

She remembered and chuckled to herself, grew sober again, thinking on the day the born‑men died.

“There were children,” the man insisted. “Weren’t there?”

She drew a pattern in the dust, scooped up sand and drew with it, a slow trickling from her hand.

“Sera. What happened to the children?”

“Got children,” she said. “Mine.”

“Where?”

She looked up, fixed the stranger with her stronger eye. “Some here, some there, one dead.”

The man sucked in his lips, thinking. “You live up in the hills.”

“Live right here.”

“They said you were out of the hills. They’re afraid of you, sera Pia.”

It was not, perhaps, wise, to make Patterns in the dust. The man was sharp. She dumped sand atop the spiral she had made. “Live here, live there.”

“Listen,” he said earnestly, leaning forward. “There was a plan. There was going to be a city here. Do you know that? Do you remember lights? Machines?”

She gestured loosely toward the mirrors and the tower, the wreckage of them amid the caliban burrowings in main camp. “They fell. The machines are old.” She thought of the lights aglow again; the town might come alive with these strangers here. She thought of the machines coming to life again and eating up the ground and levelling the burrows and the mounds. It made her vaguely uncomfortable. Her brother was right. They meant to plow the land again. She sensed that, looking into the pale blue eyes. “You want to see the old Camp? Youngers’ll take you there.”

And on the other side there was lack of trust, dead silence. Of course, they had seen the mounds. It was strange territory.

“Maybe you might go with us.”

She got up, looked round her at the townfolk, who tried to be looking elsewhere, at the ground, at each other, at the strangers. “Come on then,” she said.

They talked to their ship. She remembered such tricks as they used, but the voices coming out of the air made the children shriek. “Old stuff,” she said sourly, and reached for Old Jin’s stick that he had had by the door, leaned on it as if she were tired and slow. “Come on. Come on.”

Two of them would go with her. Three stayed in the village. She walked with them up the road, in amongst the weeds and ruins. She walked slowly, using the stick.

And when she had gotten into the wild place she hit them both and ran away, heading off among the caliban retreats until her side ached and she needed the stick.

But she was free, and as for the mounds, she knew how to skirt them and where the accesses were to be avoided.

She came by evening into the wooded slopes, up amongst the true, rock‑hearted hills.

Someone whistled, far and lonely in the woods where flitters and ariels darted and slithered. It was a human sound. One of the watchers had seen her come.

Home, the whistle said to her. She whistled back; Pia, her whistle said. There were friends and enemies here, but she had her knife and she brought away a comb and her father’s stick, confident and set upon her way.

At least Old Jin had not been crazy. She knew that now. She had seen the ships come, and she remembered the born‑men who had lived in the domes, who had died and mingled their types with azi, some in the hills and some few scratching the land with wooden plows.

There were ships again and born‑men to own the world.

Azi marching in rows, her brother Jin had said. But she was not azi and she would never march to their orders.

v

Strangers.

Green wrinkled his nose and blinked in the light, perceiving disruption in the Pattern made on the plain. There was a new motion now. He felt the stirrings underground recognizing it.

The disquiet grew extreme. He dived back into the dark, finding his way with body and direction‑sense rather than with eyes. Small folk skittered past him as he went, muddy slitherings of long‑tailed bodies past his bare legs as he stooped and hastened along in that surefooted gait he had learned very long ago, hands before him in the dark, bare feet scuffing along the muddy bottom. His toes met a serpentine and living object in the dark, his skin felt an interruption in the draft that should blow in this corridor, his ears picked up the sough of breathing: he knew what his fingers would meet before they met it, and he simply scrambled up the tail and over the pebble‑leathery back, doing the great brown less damage than its blunt claws could do to him in getting past. The brown gave a throaty exhalation, flicked an inquisitive tongue about his shoulders and when he simply scurried on, it slithered after.