Genetopia (10 page)

She swung the cane, beating at them.

Flint stepped back and slammed the gate down on the pen’s side, bolting it home. He had no idea what he would do, could not even think what might be his options.

He turned, and saw Gillam advancing along the top of the pens, another whipping cane in his hand, a look like thunder on his face.

Immediately Lise started to yell and wail, her little dark hands clutching at the bars of the pen, trying to force the gate open from within.

Flint worked his way sidestep along the gangway but Gillam was making rapid progress.

Flint glanced over his shoulder into the fierce waters of the Farsam. And then he stepped over the side, plunging into water, opaque and brown and chill as the mountain tops from where it came.

Chapter 8

He thought he would never even break the surface and he thought, too, that maybe that would be for the best.

He opened his eyes to darkness–stinging, muddy water scouring his eyeballs instantly. His senses were numbed by the utter cold, and his limbs hung loose, dragged only by the surging of the current, tugged this way and that, that way and this. He had no sense of his position in the water, his depth; no sense of whether he was rising or sinking, or merely suspended in a current at some indeterminate depth.

It was the fiery pain in his lungs that prevented him from succumbing to the river’s cold embrace. More and more, all he wanted to do was inhale, fill his lungs, and yet he knew that if he did so the river’s hold on him would be final, its cold, silty fingers penetrating his lungs, stilling his raging heart.

He had never wanted anything so intensely! He felt his head filling with madness, voices urging him to breathe,
breathe, breathe!

Something snagged around his ankle, coiling up his lower leg.

The voices stilled and he jacknifed his body, flapped his arms, and a hand brushed against a warm fibre wrapped around his shin.

He remembered the land anemones anchored to the trees overhanging the Transom at Greenwater, long tentacles trailing into the water. For an instant, he believed he could pull himself up to the surface along one of these tentacles.

But no ... he thought that the thing had come from below, not above. It had been reaching up from the riverbed. He was getting his bearings.

He fumbled at his belt, found the machete. He couldn’t swing it–the waters were too thick, too resistant to sudden movement.

He stabbed down, sluggishly. Felt the blade’s flat side strike his knee.

He felt his senses starting to darken, knew he did not have long. Did the tentacles carry some kind of numbing poison, or was it just the lack of air finally finishing him?

The grip eased. The blade must have struck home.

The coils fell away from his leg and Flint felt the machete handle slip from his grasp... lost.

He arched his back and pushed with his feet against the water. Arms above his head, cupped hands pulling down in a clumsy parody of swimming.

He broke the surface, drew air, lungs afire. Slumped back in the water, head just above the surface, coughing and retching, wishing that he was dead.

Eventually–the passage of time meant nothing to him now–he rolled onto his front and started to kick. The shore was a distant green fringe, the river violent and cold. He knew there were many snapping turtles in the river here, athough most were too small to attack a grown man, but he didn’t know what else might lurk in the depths. He remembered the wheeling flock of gulls, where the rivers met: there was clearly food for scavengers here, and probably food for predators, too.

He fought the urge to swim harder. He was not a strong swimmer: he must pace himself if he ever wanted to set foot on dry land.

~

The shore loomed forbiddingly.

He had swum so far, his strokes mechanical and repetitive like the instinctive movements of a bladder plant, and now...

The shore of the river Elver at Trecosann consisted of gentle, muddy shelves lined with swamp grasses and rushes–so benign a shore that the clan had had to excavate a berthing channel for the town’s docking facilities.

As he swam he had held dear the prospect of crawling ashore onto a shingle beach, or pulling himself through the soft clutches of river grass.

Yet now he trod choppy water, staring up at the rocks. A mass of stained white boulders huddled by the river, grey foam smashing against their flanks.

The current tugged him in towards the vortices at the foot of the cliffs and he allowed himself to be drawn towards the rocks.

A glancing blow knocked the air from his lungs but his instinct, by now, was refined by desperation. The fingers of one hand wedged themselves into a cleft in the rock, skin tearing, but still his grip held.

Another hand found a crack between two boulders and he hauled himself up so that his chest was clear, his hips, and then a foot found purchase and he pushed up.

~

He lay naked in the sun.

All children were taught at an early age that they should not expose themselves to the dry season sun, for at this time of year it was easy to burn. Those vulnerable would come out in crops of sun blisters: little brown growths of skin cells that would have to be excised and sealed before they could spread.

But Flint was cold, right through to the bone. His boots and clothes, heavy with chill water, lay spread out on the rocks to dry.

The sun felt good, dry heat tingling across skin sensitised by the scouring of the thick, gritty water.

Finally, he sat up, hugging his knees to his chest. His left leg was a livid pink up to the knee where it had been gripped beneath the river. He studied his left hand, raw and bloody from the rocks. He remembered Lizabel, the dentist’s daughter. She would have had something to heal his torn and injured skin.

He stared out across the waters of the Farsam which looked so deceptively benign from this elevation.

There was no sign of the haul-boat now.

He was on his own. All he had were his clothes and the short knife he had brought from Trecosann. All else–money, food, clothing, machete–was either on the haul-boat or lost in the depths of the river.

Behind him, the jungle was thick and forbidding.

In a cluster of chalk boulders nearby he found a fist-sized lump, almost a perfect sphere. He raised it with his good hand and smashed it against the side of a bigger rock. It split into two, with a few small fragments flying off under the shock of the impact. River flint. He placed the two pieces where he had rested, and then he retreated to the shade of an umbrella tree that grew from a crack between the rocks. The gesture was meaningless, but it comforted him to have left his signature in this small way.

He struggled in his head to sort out the geography. All the settlements, within Clan Treco territory and beyond, were connected by traditional routes through the wilds. He had a vague, patchwork understanding of the layout of the land: two days’ trek east of Trecosann lay Greenwater; one day east and then six days north up the Farsamy Way lay Berenwai. He knew of the three rivers: the Elver, the Transom and the Farsam. But it was hard to put it all together in his head.

He was on the east bank of the Farsam, at the point where the great river was fed by the Transom. If he could head south along this bank, he would eventually reach a crossing to Beshusa, he thought; and farther downriver, Farsamy itself.

He would have to travel through the jungle, though, for it grew right down to–and, indeed,
into
–the river where the terrain allowed.

He would never survive such a journey without eating and drinking from the jungle–food and drink that could easily be loaded with changing vectors and other poisons. Such a journey would kill him. Or, worse,
change
him.

The nearest settlement to the point where the rivers met–at least to Flint’s inadequate grasp of geography–was Restitution, home of the Riverwalkers.

The Riverwalkers were not a clan in the conventional sense of the term: a gathering of family groups of the True, bound by blood and history. The Riverwalkers formed a scattered community made up from many different clans. They boasted the finest engineers of the True, many of them joining other clans as bondsmen, trading on their skills and understanding. Many of them travelled, too, visiting settlements to preach and proselytise.

The only Riverwalker Flint had ever met was an old man who called himself–some said self-deprecatingly, others said arrogantly–Knowsbetter. Grey and frail, Knowsbetter travelled alone from town to town, staying for a few days here, a few days there. He charmed adults with his gentle insight and good manners; he intrigued children with tales of adventure in which the God-fearing Riverwalkers always found a peaceful end and all others died in manners both horrible and darkly funny.

The detail of his stories now escaped Flint, belying the Elders’ fears that the old man had been brainwashing the young, but one thing Knowsbetter had said had stuck: he had described his home among the Riverwalkers as “north of where the rivers meet ... you can hear the roar of the waters from the Communary”.

Flint did not know if the Riverwalkers’ settlement was on the east or west shore of the Farsam, but he could hear the roar of the rivers meeting loud in his ears so it could not be far.

As long as the old preacher had been telling the truth, of course.

~

For a time he was able to head north in the open, scrambling over the rocks that formed a low cliff above the river. Soon, however, the scattered trees–umbrellas and squat oaks and others he did not know–grew thicker.

Finally the rocky outcrop retreated and he was walking on spongy mud, matted with moss and grasses, which gave softly with every step. Soon even this ran out and he was confronted with thick, oozing mud and water, scattered trees even growing up from the waters of the river itself.

This was probably still the effect of wet season flooding, he realised, and in a few weeks this would be dry ground, but now it was impassable.

He had to head inland, away from the Farsam.

~

It would be so easy to lose himself in the jungle.

Through occasional gaps in the canopy, he made sure the sun was at his back. Still heading north.

This was no longer just a matter of looking for his sister, he knew. It was a simple matter of survival. All else was secondary.

Now the sun was at its greatest height.

He had been walking for most of the morning.

The jungle was patchy here. The forest floor was rocky and bare in places and in others it was choked by growth of tangleweed and thorn bushes, with trailing brushes of moss hanging from the trees.

Midday.

Flint realised something was wrong only moments before his knees buckled and he slumped to all fours, vomiting dark liquid onto the leaf litter that lay thick here.

He stared at the dark stain, fascinated. Instantly, beetles and other small creatures swarmed over his ejecta, craving its moisture, its nutrients.

His guts tightened and he retched again, dumping a smaller quantity of bileous dark scum onto the unsuspecting insects.

Dizzy, muddled, he slumped. Rolled onto his side. Drew his knees up, shivering and hot at the same time.

~

He woke to snuffling sounds, damp probings of his face.

He moved and a small animal chittered in alarm and scurried away.

He sat, peering around in the twilight gloom.

His brief glimpse of the animal had suggested it was some kind of rodent, something like the street rats that kept human settlements clean. That might explain why it had been puzzled by him, why it had done nothing to harm him: street rats, like mutts and many other species, could do nothing to harm a true human. Even out here in the wilds, subservience to humankind went deep, it seemed.

The sickness must have been a delayed reaction to his near-drowning in the Farsam. Or at least, that was what he hoped. The alternative–that he had picked up some jungle illness or fever–was too disturbing.

He felt okay now. Strong enough to move on.

The light was poor, but he could still see where he was going. He thought it wise to at least look for some kind of shelter for the night, not that he expected to sleep.

Darkness made him stop some time later, his only shelter a rocky, waist-high ridge that cut straight through the forest. He could hear a gentle background roar when he stopped moving, and he felt comforted when he realised that it was the sound of the river somewhere nearby.

His back to the flat stone of the ridge, he saw out a lonely vigil. The sounds of the jungle at night were different to those of the daytime: a lesser volume of animal noise, a steady hum that must be insect in origin, the cooing of oak flowers in the breeze, occasional shrieks and booms of night animals and birds.

He dozed occasionally, waking with a start each time, disoriented, confused, frightened.

~

The rocky ridge was the remains of a wall, he now saw. Morning light slanted through the trees, picking out skipping butterflies and scarlet bucket-flowers hanging from great, trailing lianas. Nearby, half-submerged by tangled growths of forest-floor scrub, there were other walls and fallen buildings.

A long-abandoned settlement. Was this all that remained of Restitution?

He remembered Knowsbetter’s words: yes, he could hear the river’s waters from here, although not the sound of the meeting rivers as the preacher had implied.

He followed the long wall that had provided shelter in the night. At its end there was a thinning in the jungle and great bunches of fleshfruit hung, bulbous and purple.

He was hungry and thirsty and yet he knew all too well that you should never eat the fruit of the wilds.

He turned away.

He found a clump of bellflowers. Moisture gathered in the cuplike bracts around the base of each flower. He knew he would not get far without at least something to drink and so he tipped one of the flowers up and supped at its sweet water.

The hunger did not go, but it eased.

He thought he could manage another day, drinking only water, but if he was still alone in the jungle after that he would have to find something to eat, relying only on his judgement to find food that was palatable and not corrupt.

He was walking, he realised, although he could not remember deciding to set out again.

Survival instinct, he decided.

Ahead, there was a thick screen of lianas, beaded with scarlet flowers. He had to get through.

His heart was racing, his head muzzy.

Oracle. He had to get to Oracle.

He tasted it on the air, the sweet pherotropic blanket descending on him, soothing his muddled thoughts.

Lucid-trance smothered him, even as he was out here in the jungle and not safely enfolded in Oracle.

Wrong, he realised.

Oracle doesn’t call. Oracle doesn’t reach out through the jungle to haul you in...