“How big is that?”

“The complex is a kilometer wide. The peak is forty meters wide at base of the most extreme slope and twenty high. Have you ever seen the like?”

Dean shook his head. “No.” He glanced up. “But then I’ve never seen a caliban. Except the pictures.”

“They didn’t like sharing the Base. They moved out.”

“But they’re moving back. On the river. Your pictures–You won’t get that hunter to go across the Styx, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t think you will. I don’t think you ought to push at the hillers where it regards calibans.”

“Why?”

A shrug. “I just don’t think you should.”

“That’s not the kind of answer you draw your pay for.”

“I think it’s dangerous. I think the hillers could get anxious. The calibans are already close. They won’t like them stirred up, that’s what.”

“They hunt them?”

Another shrug. “They trade in leather. But there’s calibans and calibans. Different types.”

“The browns.”

“The browns and the grays.”

“What’s the difference?”

A third shrug. “Hillers hunt grays. They know.”

“Know what?”

“Whatever they know. I don’t.”

“There was this caliban,” Spencer said carefully. “We’d been up to the mound to take those pictures, this Jin and I. Alone. And we got back to the troops, and this caliban came out of the river. They shot it and it slid back in. ‘It was a brown,’ the hunter said. Like that. And then: ‘Go away fast.’ What do you make of that?”

Dean just stared a moment, dead‑faced the way he would when something bothered him. “Did you?”

“We left.”

“I reckon he did, too. Fast and far as he could. Hewon’t come to your gate, no.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he’s going to be scared a long, long time. He’ll never come to you.”

“Would he be that afraid?”

“He’d be that afraid.”

“Of what? Of calibans? Or Weirds?”

A blink of the dark eyes. “Whatever’s worth being afraid of. Hillers would know. I don’t. But don’t go out there. Don’t send the soldiers outside the wire, not another time.”

“I’m afraid I don’t make that decision.”

“ Tell them.”

“I’ll do that,” Spencer said frowning. “You don’t think the search is worthwhile, do you?”

“You won’t find him.”

“Keep your ears open.”

“I’d thought about sleeping in my own quarters tonight.”

“I’d rather you stayed in the town–just keep listening.”

“For what?”

“Hiller talk. All of it. What if I offered you a bonus–to go outside the wire?”

Dean shook his head warily. “No. I don’t do that.”

“Townsmen have gone to the hills before.”

“No.”

“Meaning you won’t. Suppose we put a high priority on that.”

Dean sat very still. “Townsmen know I’m from inside. Hillers may be stirred up right now. And if they are, and if they knew where I came from–”

“You mean you think they’d kill you.”

“I don’t know what they’d do.”

“All right, we’ll think about that. Just go back to the town and listen where you can.”

“All right.” Dean got up, walked as far as the door, looked back. He looked as if he would like to say something more, but walked away.

Spencer stared at his pictures, ran the loop again.

Calibans had tried the wire last night down by the river. They had never done that, not since Alliance came to the world.

There had to be precautions.

xiv

Year 89, day 208 CR

Styxside

He might be mad: or he wished he were, in the dark, in the silence broken only by slitherings and breathings and sometimes, when his sanity had had all it could bear, by his screams and sobs. His screaming could drive them back a while, but they would be back.

They put no restraint on him. They needed none but the darkness and the earth, the hardpacked earthen walls that he could feel and not see in the absolute and lasting night. His fingers were torn and maybe bleeding: he had tried to dig his way to safety, even to dig himself a niche in which to put his back, so that he could defend himself when they came at him, but he had no sense which way the outside was, or how deep they had taken him–he might be trying to dig through the hills themselves. He found a rock once, and battered one of his attackers with it, but they used their needles and had their revenge for that, a long, long time–like the times he had tried to crawl away, feeling his blind way through the dark, until he had ended with the hissing blast of a Caliban’s breath in his face, the quick scrabble of claws, the thrusting of a great blunt nose that knocked him off his feet–lying there with a great clawed foot bearing down on his ribs and throat until human hands arrived with needles; or running into such hands direct–No, there was no fighting them. He did not know why he did not die. He thought about it, young as he was, and thinking he could smother himself in the earth, that he could dig himself a grave with his lacerated fingers and hide his face in it and stop his breathing with dirt. He dug, but they always came when they heard him digging–he was sure that they heard. So he kept still.

They brought him raw fish to eat, and water to drink which might or might not be clean. At such times they touched him, constant touches like the nagging of children, and then more than other times he thought of dying, mostly because feeding was the one thing they did to keep life in him. He was always cold. Mud caked on his clothes and his skin, dry and wet by turns, wherever in the earthen maze they had moved him last. His hair was matted with filth. His clothes were torn, laces snapped with his struggles, and he tried to knot them back together because he was cold, because clothes were all the protection he had.

He lay still finally, weaker than he had begun, with druggings and struggles and food that sometimes his stomach heaved up or that his body rejected in cramping spasms; and even his condition did not repulse the females among them, who tormented him with some result at the beginning, when it took all of them, sealing up the exits and herding and hunting him through the narrow dark, and hauling him down with weight of numbers–but they got nothing from him now, nothing but a weary misery, terror that they might kill him in their frustration. That was what he had sunk to. But they were always silent, gave him no hint of humor or anger or whether they were themselves quite mad. He was himself passing over some manner of brink; he even knew this, in a far recess of his mind where his self survived. If he were set out again on the riverside–he thought of Styx as the outside, having lost all touch with the sunny hills–if he were set outside to see the daylight again, the sun on the water, the reeds in the wind–if he were free–he did not think he would laugh again. Or take sunlight for granted. He would never be a man again in the narrow sense of man–because sex had not gone dead in him, but become personless, unimportant; or in the wider sense, because he had been gutted, spread wide, to take into his empty insides all the darks and slitherings underearth, all the madness and the windings underground. He had nothing in common with humanity. He felt this happening, or realized it had happened; and finally knew that this was why he had not died, that he had reached a point past which he had more interest in this darkness, the sounds, the slitherings, than he had in life. It had all begun to give him information. His mind received a thousand clues in the midst of its terror, grew tired of terror and concentrated on the clues.

They came for him. He thought it might be food when he heard them, but food smelled, and he caught no such smell, so he knew that it was himself they wanted, and he lay quite still, his heart speeding a little, but his mind reasoning that it was only inconvenience, a little pain to get through like all the other pains, and after that he would still be alive, and still thinking, which was something still more promising than dying was.