Couriered by AS Boreas

…Equipment and personnel arriving with this message will permit the expansion of a secure perimeter to include the landing site and town and fields as well as a river access. Establishment of permanent health care and educational facilities for Newport/Gehenna citizens should be given a high priority, but security of Alliance personnel and equipment must not be compromised in the process, regarding force of nature or force of arms, and not excluding the possibility of action by Union agents or native lifeforms.

This office has contacted Union colonial offices with a further request for data on humanitarian grounds and there has been some negotiation opened in this matter, but progress is likely to be minimal and slow.

In the absence of further information, the mission is instructed to establish a perimeter as wide as possible without conflict and within the limits of available equipment and security and tactical considerations. Conflict is to be avoided with humans and native life, but this prohibition does not extend to the function of effective fencing devices. The Bureau draws no conclusion on the sapience or competency of the Calibans and awaits further data which the mission will supply.

The priorities of the mission will be as follows:

to secure the area of its own operation

to determine whether any activity of any other outside agency might exist; if so, to take appropriate measures

to secure the area of the town and adjacent villages necessary for establishment of a viable economy

to assist colonists with medical and educational facilities

to encourage trade with the center of colonization in preference to trade with those in outlying areas, with a view of centralization of economy and facilities and the establishment of an Alliance‑influenced capital which will tend to draw scattered human settlements toward the landing site by the attraction of food and stability, minimizing future political difference

to educate all available citizenry in hygiene, agriculture, small manufacture, and government

to defend against encroachment by native agency by the use of whatever force is minimally sufficient to deter the attempt, up to and including lethal arms.

Closely following this equipment delivery another ship will follow, bringing a station module and personnel for the core of a permanent manned orbiting port, which will monitor the majority of Newport planetary surface and serve, with the addition of a shuttle by future shipment, to maintain constant surveillance and flow of supplies.

It is not Bureau policy to permit a colony to suffer failure from neglect. The human inhabitants regardless of origin are now an Alliance polity but must be dealt with under Section 9 procedures as a first contact. The mission is urged to provide answers to questions of local sapience, and particularly to assist the station when operational in determining what planetary areas might be developed without contact with high lifeforms.

Of high priority, therefore, is the establishment of a landing area at Newport Base…

viii

Newport Base briefing room

“Then the decision is to exploit,” Ebron said, “in potential disregard of native life.”

“It’s a political decision,” said Kendrick. “We’re in the proposed path of expansion. They wantGehenna. That’s what it comes to. Union seeded it, we cultivate it–they’re happy, you understand that? They’re actually relieved the population’s sunk to the stone age. And devil take the calibans.”

“That’s off the record,” Cartier said.

Kendrick drew a breath and let it go again. “That’s off the record. Of course it’s off the record. You had your way, didn’t you?”

“No,” said Cartier. “Unfortunately I didn’t.”

ix

Year 72, day 130 CR

The Hills

It was many a day that Pia Elder sat atop her hill, watching the coming and going in the camp, a long hard walk for an old woman, and the first such walk of the spring. Cloud was panting when he had come so far, and relieved that the old woman was here.

His heart was beating very hard when he came up the slope, partly because the old woman was sitting very still (but she often did that) and his mother had done that when she was dead; and partly because he was afraid of this old woman, who was thin and dry as a stick and strange enough to do things like this, coming out before dawn to look at a place she would not go.

“Ma Pia,” he said very quietly, and circled to the side of her and came facing her, squatted down with his elbows tucked between his knees. It was cold in the morning wind. He was cold. He shivered, looking into a face wrinkled like old fruit and eyes like black Styx stone, water‑smoothed and cold. She let her hair grow. Neglect, he guessed. “Ma Pia, father he wished was you well, ma Pia.”

A while longer the implacable eyes gave him nothing. Then Pia Elder lifted a bony arm from beneath her blanket.

“New buildings this spring.”

He looked, turning his head and turning on his haunches. It was so that there were more buildings in the camp, tall and strange buildings. Perhaps the old woman was being conversational with him. He looked back at her hoping that it would be easy to get her home.

“They’ve smoothed the mounds, levelled the way to the river,” the old woman said. “But you don’t remember how it was.”

“They made the mounds flat.”

“And they go on building. See how the fields go, right across the plain; see where the fences go.”

“Mustn’t touch them fences, the power’ll hurt you.”

She whipped out her arm straight toward him, snapped her fingers. It had as well been a blow; might have been if she had had her stick in her hand. He clenched his arms in shock. “Them fences.”

“Those fences, ma Pia.” He was trembling, from the hour, the cold, the old woman’s eyes.

“Who taught you to talk? Stupid Nine’s lot?”

“No, ma Pia.”

“You talk, hear? Not like Nine’s breed. Not like my brother Jin’s either. You know why, boy?”

“To go and come,” he recited. “To be like born‑men, like them–” He stammered on the word and the cold. The old woman’s eyes bore down on him and he swallowed and picked his word. “Like them down there in the camp.–To be born‑man.”

A moment more the old woman stared at him shivering in front of her; and then she opened her blanket, inviting him into the warmth of her arms. He came, because she frightened him and she had never done this since he was small; and because his teeth were chattering from the morning chill. He was ten. He was old enough to be afraid of her body, which had stopped being woman or man, so old she was, so thin and hard and frail at once that she had stopped being anything he understood. She smelled of smoke and herbs when her arm and the blanket enfolded him; she felt like one of the ariels, all dry and strange. Her hair was white and coarse when he looked up at her. Her arm hugged him with an unsuspected tenderness, waking memories of earliest years, of being a child, and she rocked him–ma Pia, whose face did not know how to laugh.

“I had a brother,” she said. “His name was Green. He went away into the mounds. Before that he forgot how to talk. You never do that. You never do that, young Cloud.”

“I can write my name,” he said.

The arm tightened about him. “Every year more buildings down there. They want us to come. They make their fences and they want us inside. Sometimes I think I’d like to go down and see–but they’ve changed it all. And our kind doesn’t get into the center of it, just the town. There were domes. There were born‑men that lived there. I remember. I remember the day the ships came back and there was a forest where the center of the buildings is now; and mounds; and the calibans weren’t all upriver. Nothing could move them, until the ships came, and the fences, and then the calibans left, and all the Weirds with them, right up the Styx, and to Otherside. So Green went. I think he must be dead now. It was a long time ago.”