alt.human (35 page)

My guts: more the memory of pain than pain itself. My head: swirling, confused; struggling to make sense of what had just happened.

“!¡
perturbed
¡! Hnh,” I click-grunted. “Yes, I think so. Just lost my footing. I’m good. All good.”

I clambered to my feet, brushed the needles from my legs and hands, and started to walk.

The forest was just normal forest again, and my head was my own. I was okay. Or going mad. Or falling sick.

I carried on walking.

Chapter Thirty-Two

T
HE RIVER WAS
much narrower now, cutting a deep course through land that was steadily climbing.

We were coming towards the mountains, I was sure of it. The forest had changed, the land was rising, even the air had a different feel, a different taste.

We still could not see anything beyond the trees, though.

The forest phreaked again as we climbed a steep incline.

The trees were thinner here, and a dusting of snow covered the rocks. Looking back, we could see across the tops of the trees and onwards over the forest canopy, a rolling sea of deepest green, going on forever into the distance.

Ahead of us were just rocks and trees, climbing sharply, and somewhere the roar of the river.

And a great wall.

A wall so high I could not see the top. A wall of mottled shades of brown and grey.

Swelling suddenly, a chorus filled the air, like the children before but this time more jarring, more discordant, cutting right through me.

To my left, Frankhay had stopped in his tracks, eyes wide, mouth partly open.

“!¡
gut-wrenching terror
¡! It’s... that’s...”

He pointed.

I took a few steps closer, peered at the wall, and the mottles of brown resolved themselves one by one. A face. A torso. Legs sticking out, arms flailing.

I stepped closer, closer, shocked and drawn.

The wall was a barrier of human flesh, of bodies welded together, still living, still moving as if struggling to break free. Legs, arms, bellies, genitals, chests, faces... knots of dark hair, on heads and crotches and chests.

And they were crying, and wailing, sobbing, groaning, mumbling, shouting, all adding up to an almighty chorus. I remembered riding the commensal sidedog in Laverne, escaping the watchers, sharing the space with Hope, her head in mine and mine in hers and hearing that chorus. This was what it must be like to be her. All of the time.

I looked around for her, and she was a short distance down the rocky slope, on her knees with her head in her hands.

I looked up and there were crows, rising and landing, rising and landing, pecking at bare flesh, cackling and cawing, and the flesh was red as well as brown and there was an edge of pain to the wailing and crying.

Closer to the wall, Saneth and Skids stood, talking animatedly. Skids was waving and gesturing, more energised than I had seen him since we were pups together in Cragside.

“!¡
shocked
¡! What is it?” I gasped, struggling up the slope to stand with them. “What’s happening?”

Skids turned and his eyes were alight.

“!¡
excited
¡! It’s the ’singer!” he said. “It senses us. It’s reshaping the world around us. We must be close.... We must be close to Harmony!”

I peered at the bodies, writhing and twisting, struggling to break free. A man’s dark eyes stared back at me, beseeching. He opened his mouth and wriggling white maggots spilled out. By his side a woman wailed, her jaws locked open, her throat deep, red, reverberating with her cry.

“!¡
uncertain
¡! It doesn’t exactly seem to be welcoming us,” I said.

“!¡
impatient
¡! Come on,” said Skids. “Follow me.”

And with that he turned, approached the wall, pushed his hands forward into a seam where bodies joined, as if parting curtains, and plunged in.

H
OPE KNEW THERE
was something wrong. She could feel it long before the forest started to twist and reform itself around them. She felt it as a force, pulling at the shapes inside her head.

She walked with Saneth as their path started to climb. The old chlick was slow now, panting in the cold air.

The forest was a tangle of trunks like bundles of wire, slender, twisting around each other, a nightmare tangle from which she felt she might never escape, might never want to escape.

Soon she was alone, Saneth and the others lost in the convolutions of the wildwood. She pushed on, until the gaps between the trunks were barely enough to let her pass. Finally she could progress no further. The space between the tangled trunks had reduced to the size and shape of her body, as if it were a cast made from clay. She could stay here forever, a baby in an artificial womb.

She pulled back.

She’d stopped breathing for a moment there, stopped wanting to breathe.

Her momentum tipped her over backwards and she landed on her butt on the hard ground. The jarring pain through her spine shattered the illusion around her.

She rolled over and found herself on her knees at the foot of a rocky slope which emerged from the forest. The others were ahead of her, standing before a vast wall made of writhing, flailing, human bodies.

The wall... the bodies... they were calling, singing, crying.

To her.

The chorus drowned out the voices in her head, replaced them with a massed presence that threatened to swamp her.

She didn’t know what to do.

She wanted to turn and run. She wanted this desperately.

She wanted to block out the chorus, but even with her hands jammed hard over her ears, the awful sound rang through her.

She rocked back on her heels and looked up at the towering wall. If anything, it reached higher now, more densely packed with bodies and body parts.

She saw the birds then, the wild, ragged crows, swirling in flocks around the human cliff-face, landing on people’s heads and shoulders, pecking at soft, exposed parts.

She saw a face with one eye gouged out, a crow tugging at the wound, flapping to retain balance. She saw a pair of crows scrabbling for purchase on the thickly matted hair of one man’s chest, one bird slithering down, tangling its claws in the thicker hair at the man’s groin where it merged with the top of a woman’s head.

She saw a baby, crying with a needle-sharp wail. A woman with dark, rotting teeth. Another woman, breasts raked by a bird’s claws, blood streaming down her torso to her swollen, pregnant belly. A man, his face a wild tangle of grey beard, matted with drool and puke, eyes glazed and staring.

She saw each of them.

She heard each of them.

She felt their presences inside her skull. Crowding, jostling, pressing.

She grabbed her head in her hands again, and realised she was wailing as if she were part of the wall.

“!¡
COMFORTING | INTRIGUED
¡! S
CHOLAR
pup, scholar pup.”

A rough hand rested on her back. She turned her head a little, and saw Saneth leaning over her, touching her, trying to soothe her. A cool presence, a quiet one.

“!¡
gently persuasive
¡! Scholar pup, we must go. The others have left us behind.”

The chlick’s false eye swivelled, and Hope looked up the hill to the wall and saw that they were alone now, just the two of them at the foot of the awful wall.

“What is it?” she gasped. “It’s in my head. It’s everywhere. I... I can’t take it!”

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! It is a defensive mechanism. A barrier. A wall. It is a reshaping of the reality of this locale.”

“It’s not real?”

“!¡
patiently explaining to junior scholar
¡! It is real. It is reality. It is just a different reality from the one that would normally occupy this locale. It is a barrier that has been sung in response to our intrusion.”

“Intrusion?”

“!¡
encouraging junior scholar
¡! We have reached Harmony. The protective starsinger has detected our presence and does not yet know that we are friendly. Yet also it does not know that we are
not
friendly. Caught in this dilemma, it tries to scare us off without doing any physical harm. The ’singer takes its responsibilities seriously. This is all perfectly safe. Consider it an amusement, a distraction, if you will.”

Hope looked at the wall, the tangled, torn bodies. The chorus of wails still smothered her senses.

An
amusement?

“What is it?” she asked. “Where did it come from?”

Saneth’s eye swivelled from the wall back to Hope. “!¡
amused | patronising
¡! ‘Where did it come from?’” she-he asked. “It came from you, Hope Burren. All that is this came from you.”

S
HE STOOD BEFORE
the wall, so close that if she were inclined she could reach out and touch the cheek of the woman before her, the woman wedged into a mass of flesh. The woman stared back at her from large, dark eyes. A man’s hairy buttocks sat on her shoulder; a slender arm emerged from behind her ribs; a child’s hand clung to hers, but the rest of the child was lost in the mass of flesh.

“From me?” asked Hope. “All of this?”

Saneth inclined her-his body. “!¡
approval of junior scholar
¡! The starsinger of Harmony reached out. It sensed our approach. It explored us, seeking to find our weaknesses. To tempt us or scare us into turning away. It tried different things that it found in the minds of those it penetrated, but finally it settled on that which was the most powerful among our group. !¡
indignant | affronted
¡! It settled on
you
, Hope Burren. It found what was in your head and made it newly real.”

Hope stared at the woman in the wall. Somehow it was less horrific if she concentrated on the one rather than the many. The voices in her head, cast into reality. This was what it was like.

“The bridge in your head that connects you to the condensate of all that is human, the thing that you think of as your
voices
,” said the ancient chlick. “That is what the ’singer found. !¡
affronted
¡! The lauded one considers that the chlick’s mental defences defeated the ’singer, or why would it cast a wall of human voices when it could have all the richness from within the lauded one? !¡
disingenuous
¡! The lauded one is proud to have withstood the great singer of the All’s attentions in such a manner as this.”

Hope filtered out the chlick’s defence of her-his dented pride. The voices in her head had quietened. They really were close to Harmony.

“How do we get there?” she said, interrupting Saneth’s rambling. “Where are the others?”

“!¡
approval of junior scholar
¡! They passed within,” said Saneth, indicating the wall with a hooked hand. “The pup that is Skids has a confidence in the ways of the ’singers. He saw through what this is and realised that one in possession of a boldness and willingness to act would gain passage.”

“What did he do?” She was starting to get frustrated with the chlick’s roundabout ways.

“!¡
approving
¡! He led the way. !¡
encouraging
¡! Go ahead. Push through.”

Hope took a step forward. She avoided the bit where the woman clung to the missing child’s hand and chose the other side, where the bare skin of the woman’s side butted against an ill-defined slab of flesh that could have been torso, or a fold of large thigh.

She reached out.

The flesh was warm to her touch and slick with sweat. It reminded her of encounters in the rooms above the bars of Tween, back in Angiere, a sense of urgency and need. It reminded her of a hand on the arm or back, a touch, a squeeze, an intimacy giving reassurance and bonding. It reminded her of all things human, and she realised that this was exactly what it was, this mass of flesh and need and passion and anger: it was all things human.

The flesh yielded, parted, in response to her touch.

Without giving herself time to reconsider, she plunged forward.

The wall folded around her, and it was like being in the sidedog again, a wet enfolding, a moment of panic as she realised she couldn’t breathe, followed by the understanding that she did not have to breathe. The voices in her head fell silent, as the voices around her rose in a wild clamour.

She pushed on, but it was like the forest again, that first recasting of realities as the trees had closed in, twisting and tangling and steadily constricting the space until there was only a Hope-sized niche and she could move no more.

She could stay here. Become part of the wall, part of the mass of humanity. She could never trouble herself again with people like me, like Marek, with our demands on her, our expectations, our judgement.

She could... just... stop... moving.

But something pulled her back from the brink of giving in, something spoke to her, sang to her.

Wrong as this whole thing was, the mass of bodies, the wailing and crying and distress... underlying it all was a sense that something more than this was wrong. A discord in the reality that was being sung.

She pushed, but it was like being smothered in a mass of warm clay. Nothing gave.

She tried to twist, to wriggle an arm or a leg free, to engineer some kind of space to move in, but all around her the skin pressed, the raw, open flesh smothered, the hair tangled across her face, in her nose, in her mouth...

She could not move.

She had become a part of the wall.

She began to drift.

I
SAVED HER,
again.

In Hope’s mind, as her body started to meld with those around her, she drifted back to Precept Square, remembering.

Remembering lingering on the fringes, and then seeing that Callo and Marek were there, getting caught up in the general round-up of humans in the Square.

Penned in by jagwire, realising that when her turn came, the grunts would find that she had no right to be there, and she would be seized, interrogated, punished, returned to a hospital like the one that had been destroyed so they could carry on doing to her whatever it was that they had been doing to her.