Genetopia (11 page)

A great globular mass of flesh nestled in the clearing, as if dropped from a great height. Oracle’s skin was thick and encrusted with foul growths, dead white flakes lifting and settling with its inner heavings. Dark veins pulsed across its surface, melon-like tumours clustered around its girth, fissures and sphincters opened and closed at many points on its slick, greasy hide.

And the air was heavy with Oracle’s secretions, far more intense than any Flint had ever experienced at Trecosann’s Oracle.

“Master,” a soft, seductive voice said. Oracle knew he was here. It had sensed him coming, had tasted his scent on the air.

“Master. Oh, Master! Tell me ... of ... tell me of ... the wooooorld.”

Its voice soft, its voice breathless and unpractised, Oracle spoke to him, soothed him.

“Master ... tell me...”

Oracle sat in a quagmire of its own making, a shiny green swamp surrounding it, its smartfibre filaments reaching out through the marshy groundwater, down into the bedrock itself. Oracle sat at the centre of its swampy home, Flint realised, and although he had not entered Oracle, he was already surrounded by it, engulfed by it.

That slick around Oracle’s base... It reminded Flint of the changing vats Callum tended at Trecosann. Oracle was mad, Oracle was corrupt–Oracle was
changed
.

And Oracle wanted him.

Dark forms around Oracle’s base. Not cancerous eruptions as he had first thought, not distorted polyps.

They were bodies.

Human, perhaps. Some smaller: children, or mutts, or beasts from the wilds.

All drawn in by Oracle.

He wondered how long ago this settlement had died, how long its Oracle had sat here, deprived of company, deprived of the input its kind so craved. Driven mad by loneliness and change, sole survivor of an ancient settlement.

And even as he wondered this, he was on his knees, crawling over the swamp grass towards Oracle.

He couldn’t stop. His will... his flesh... too weak to resist Oracle’s pull.

It was the sound of voices that saved him. A steady chant breaking through the cloak of madness Oracle had cast over him.

He tottered on the brink of the glowing pool that surrounded Oracle.

“Tell meeee...” the thing urged him. “Tell me ... of the world!”

Leaning forward, supported on all fours, almost falling, he heard the chanting.

The slumped shapes of the fallen clustered around Oracle’s flanks. Bodies. Flesh darkened and collapsed around bones, skin crisped and husk-like and yet the things were still alive, or at least animated in some way!

Slowly, a head turned towards him. Sunken eyes studied him, a skeleton-mouth grinned, a narrow tongue flicked across tightly-stretched lips.

Another lump moved, almost completely covered in encrustations of some kind of fungus. Eyes stared.

“Tell me...”

The chanting came from farther away.

Conscious again, he realised that he was blanking out for long intervals, giving himself up to Oracle’s chemical inducements.

He looked down and saw his green reflection in the striated surface of the pool, smelt the familiar sweet sulphur smell of the changing vats. He was leaning so far forward that he might easily topple.

It would be so easy to give himself, to become, to join... Oracle.

The chanting. Voices.

He pushed himself back from the brink, sat back on his heels, teetering, dizzy.

Back, he twisted, caught himself, started to crawl away, hating himself for doing so, hating himself for wanting to stay with Oracle.

He came to a broken wall and pulled himself to his feet, gasping for breath.

Oracle was some way back now, lost to sight behind the trees and the undergrowth, and still its pull was intense.

There was light ahead, a thinning of the trees.

He staggered in that direction, brushing aside drapes of moss and realising as he did so that only days before the thought of merely touching a forest growth like this would have chilled him to the core. Now, it was in his way so he pushed it aside.

He emerged on a narrow rocky shore and looked out across the grey waters of the river Farsam.

Out in the middle of the channel, a line of people–no: golden-fleeced mutts, he realised–were walking on the water, taking great, exaggerated strides and chanting to keep themselves in time with each other.

The mutts were walking against the current.

Flint stared.

It was a low boat, he saw now. Two humans sat at the rear of the craft, heads close together, talking to each other. The mutts were driving the boat somehow, the energy from their tread giving the boat the power to fight the river’s current.

He had found the Riverwalkers, he realised.

“Hey!” he called out, waving his arms. “Hey! Over here!”

But they didn’t hear him, didn’t see him.

Soon they were lost to sight.

~

They had been a figment of his fevered imagination, he thought, as he worked his tortuous way through the jungle, staying as close to the river as he could manage. A vision conjured up by the mind-altering scents with which the mad Oracle had filled the air.

And then he heard the chanting again, in the distance.

Moments later, he emerged into a clearing where the trees and undergrowth had been cleared, a buffer zone between the wilds of the jungle and the home of the Riverwalkers.

A tall wooden stockade lay ahead of him and as he approached he saw faces peering out of window slits, and figures gathering on the top of the wall, pointing and gesturing.

He looked down at himself. His clothing was filthy with mud and debris from the forest. He staggered into the open, limping heavily on the leg that had been injured by Tarn and then seized by some river creature. He clutched his injured hand to his chest.

If the madness in his eyes reflected the madness in his head, then he must look a deranged sight indeed.

“Knowsbetter?” he gasped. “Is Knowsbetter here?”

Some distance short of the stockade he stopped, convinced that they would not let him in and that they could not be blamed for turning him away.

He dropped to his knees.

“Knowsbetter...?” he gasped, and then fell forward onto his face.

Chapter 9

He opened his eyes and they were all around him. The sky was near-white with glare from the morning sun and so it was hard to distinguish details in the silhouetted forms looming over him. There were six or seven of them: the men with thick beards and all with some kind of ornamentation–dangling beads and other odd shapes–tied into their hair.

The Riverwalkers had found him.

Rock grated against his cheek as he stirred.

“Knowsbetter?” he gasped. “Is Knowsbetter here? Is this Restitution?”

There was a low rumble of voices, heads turning, hands gesturing. They carried spears, he saw, held ready to strike.

Something tapped his cheek and he turned his head, saw that it was the blunt end of a spear. A man looked down at him. “Wha’ make you ask for Knowsbetter?” the man said.

They were talking to him in Mutter, Flint realised. It was understandable, given his rough appearance and the strange manner of his arrival.

He tried to concentrate. Tried to fight the exhaustion that smothered his reasoning.

“I... I...”

He tried to push himself upright but immediately the spear butt swung low, struck his wrist and he collapsed face down on the dusty ground.

More angry exchanges, words impossible to distinguish. Darkness at the edges of his vision.

~

They made him stand, gesturing and prodding with spears and mutt sticks.

Upright, he swayed vertiginously. A sharp prod in his left buttock set him moving. It took all his concentration simply to walk at first.

Sparse grasses and thorn bush grew in the cleared area between jungle and stockade, and a profusion of tiny green lizards skittered out at every footfall. He found himself fascinated by the tiny details. He shuddered. He decided that he must be suffering the after effects of his sickness, or of the mad Oracle’s chemical attractants and hallucinogens.

In the periphery of his vision he saw his captors, their hair tied in long tails down their backs. All had smartfibre chains around their heads, threaded through tiny carved bones and beads that changed colour continually. They wore long, plain cloaks under which he knew they would be barefoot.

The stockade was taller than the one at Greenwater, faced with smooth planking that would make it hard to climb. High gates retracted as they approached, sliding smoothly into the wall itself.

His foot struck a rock and he stumbled.

Instantly a spear prodded at him. “Up on you feet,” a young woman snapped.

They passed through the stockade and entered a grove of cultivated fleshfruit trees. Instantly, Flint’s stomach clamoured to be filled. He looked all about, dizzy.

Figures from the top of the stockade looked down, voices jabbered, sticks thrust.

He staggered on.

The settlement was a short distance farther. He narrowed his eyes against the glare and saw the bulbous shapes of podhuts, lined up in rows. Some were caged in bamboo scaffolding, new compartments being grown, shaped by the exoskeleton of cane. Restitution seemed a healthy place, a growing town.

They came to the first of the podhuts, at last, and people emerged to look at the small procession, to stare at the sorry creature their neighbours were driving into town.

Flint’s breath rasped painfully now, his steady progress maintained by frequent prods from behind.

More faces, staring. Wide eyes, the whites almost luminous against dark skin. The people wore simple cloaks, men and women alike. Few wore hats or hoods, he saw. He remembered that Knowsbetter had disdained protection from the sun, too. Differing constitutions and immunity, perhaps, or simply different attitudes to risk.

They came to a small square and by now a sizable crowd had gathered around them. Sticks and staring faces... Flint felt dizzy again, confused. Suddenly he was back in Trecosann. A boy, barely nine years old. Staring faces. A mutt stick in his hand, its surface smooth in his small grip, its point specially sharpened for the occasion. Pointing and thrusting. Flint and others guiding the beasts into the changing vats.

“No!” he cried out, panic suddenly ripping loose. He twisted, saw looks of sudden alarm on the faces of those guiding him.

Sticks raised to thrust, spears raised to strike home.

Flint flailed his arms, backing away from them.

He came to a wall and pressed against it, felt the podhut’s pulse deep within. Steady, ceaseless, comforting.

He slid down the wall until his chin came to rest on his knees, and around him the Riverwalkers closed in.

~

“My name is Flintreco Eltarn,” he said. His throat was raw and painful but he was determined to talk clearly in order to communicate to them that he was a true human, despite what they may think. “I come from Trecosann. Knowsbetter visited Trecosann several years ago and told us all about Restitution. Is he here?”

He was in the centre of a square, somewhere in the settlement he believed to be Restitution. Banana leaves arched overhead, a canopy quickly constructed by young boys to protect him from the midday sun.

Twist-woven loops of smartfibres coiled around both of his ankles. They anchored him to the bedrock softly but securely, tightening only when he struggled.

Before him now, a short man of middle years squatted on his haunches, his greying beard forming a curtain that swept across his knees. Beads and small white figurines had been tied throughout his thick hair. He studied Flint closely, head angled slightly, something like amusement in his eyes.

“Cherry said he’d found a monkey,” the man said now, in a voice as high and soft as a young woman’s. “If you hadn’t called for Knowsbetter you’d probably have been left to the Lord’s judgement.” He reached into the bag slung from his shoulder, produced a bladder and handed it to Flint. The water it held was sweet and cool.

There were real monkeys in the jungle, but Flint knew that this man used it in the sense more commonly used as an insult: a distorted, changed creature bearing some human traits, lower than a mutt or even a common domestic beast.

“I am a true human,” said Flint. “I understand why your people should doubt me, but I am True. I was lost in the jungle. What can I do to prove myself?”

The man smiled now. “Oh, you’ll get your opportunity,” he said. “We live in a time of trials. We must all prove ourselves in the eyes of the Lord.”

~

Flint sat in his shelter, knees drawn up to his chest, biding his time. He took comfort in the fact that they had taken him within their stockade and provided him with water and a few wedges of fleshfruit.

As the afternoon passed, he had slept uncomfortably and fitfully, had watched hawks soaring high on thermals, watched ranks of children practising martial arts in the street, swinging legs and clubs with disturbing synchrony of movement, unified by high-pitched chanting. People had passed, all turning to stare at him: the freak, the monkey.

The sun was swollen and orange in the western sky now, floating lazy above the treetops. The dry, menacing heat in the air was beginning to ebb away, much as the aches and pains in his body were finally starting to subside.

Flint felt more at ease now than at any time since he had left Trecosann.

He waited, and finally they came.

There were four of them, including the one who had been tending to him during the day.

They stood before him and bowed their heads, hands held out before them in some gesture akin to supplication. Some kind of formal greeting, Flint decided.

The one with neat ranks of narrow bones hanging from the quickfibre band across his forehead spoke first. “Welcome to Restitution,” he said. “I apologise for your quarantine, but you arrived under somewhat peculiar circumstances. We trust in the Lord, but our fellow men must earn our trust.” He smiled at this and Flint suspected that his words were some kind of play on a catechism or saying.

Something in his voice suddenly penetrated Flint’s consciousness. “Knowsbetter?” he asked, staring at the man’s evenly sculpted features. He should have been older than this, Flint thought, but then memory can be misleading sometimes.

The man shook his head. “My uncle,” he said. “I have not seen him in fifteen years, since he took to the road. I heard last year that he had found his judgement on the road to Rittasan.”

Dead, Flint assumed, from the finality of the man’s choice of words. Decoding these people’s words was like trying to follow Mutter, he thought: familiar words used in different ways, with subtly different meanings.

“My name is given as Seesthroughlies,” the man continued. He held a hand out to indicate his three companions. “My brothers’ names are given as Judgesothers, Teller and Tallofmind.” The last was the short man who had tended to Flint during the day.

Flint wondered suddenly if these names were those they used among themselves, or names created just for his use. He recalled Knowsbetter’s fondness for word games, and the debates in Trecosann about what was to be inferred from the old preacher’s choice of name.

“My name is Flintreco Eltarn–”

“He gives himself a name!” Judgesothers interrupted.

“Before the eyes of the Lord!”

“He is not a Riverwalker,” Seesthroughlies reminded them.

He turned to Flint. “Flint of Clan Treco, child of Tarn, Brother Cherrytree tells us you are a monkey, a facsimile of the human form put in our midst by the good Lord to test us. Brother Tallofmind here tells us that you claim to be a true human, fallen on unfortunate circumstances, that you turned to the Riverwalkers in the hope of the Lord’s mercy. Which of my brothers should I believe?”

“I am True,” said Flint, simply. “I come from Trecosann, where my family is long-established. My sister, Amberline, disappeared and so I set out to find her. Whether she has run away or been abducted, I intend to find her.”

He drank from the bladder Tallofmind had brought. “My cousins bought me passage on a haul-boat to Farsamy, but the crew... Both were Lost and when I learned this they turned on me. I was lucky to escape from them, even if it landed me on the bank of the river Farsam with no food, water or money.

“I worked out that I was several days’ travel through dense jungle from Beshusa and even farther from Farsamy. But I recalled the time, many years ago, when your uncle, Knowsbetter, came to Trecosann. His stories were popular with the children and he stayed for several days.”

He paused again and drank more sweetwater. “I remembered his description of Restitution: a short way north of where the Transom and the Farsam meet–not far from where I found myself stranded. I travelled north, staying close to the river where possible.”

“You found us easily enough?” asked Seesthroughlies. “You passed through the jungle without problem?”

Flint recalled the mad Oracle. “There was an Oracle,” he said. “One that has changed... It tried to lure me with its siren scents.”

“The Lost wisdom machine is a danger to all who travel south of here,” said Seesthroughlies. “It shields us from that direction–many of the Lost and the fallen go to their judgement there–but it is a grave trial for any of us who stray near.”

Flint thought of the perverted corpses, their dessicated flesh melded into the swollen walls of what Seesthroughlies called the Lost wisdom machine. “There were bodies,” he said. “Joined to the Oracle with smartfibres. They moved. They watched me, as if they were being kept alive by the thing.”

“Alive or dead,” said Teller. “They fell before the Lord.”

“Their judgement has found them,” agreed Seesthroughlies. He looked at Flint now with a measuring gaze. “You must have been close to the wisdom machine to see what you report,” he said.

Flint met the Riverwalker’s look. “I have been through a lot,” he said. “I am not easily defeated.”

He realised that his words were true and as he spoke he became suddenly aware of the gulf that had opened up between himself and the naive young man who had left Trecosann only a matter of days before.

~

Night in his makeshift shelter was cold, a steady breeze cutting through the clearing from the direction of the river Farsam.

Flint sat, huddled up, shivering. The jungle sounds were distant, only a few strange shrieks and cries carrying above the background buzz of insects and trees. Closer to, he heard the insistent rush of water. He realised that he may have misinterpreted old Knowsbetter’s words: “north of where the rivers meet ... you can hear the roar of the waters from the Communary”. He had thought that meant that you could hear the sound of the rivers meeting but the preacher could simply have meant that you could hear the sound of one of the rivers, as Flint now could.

He had been lucky, then, he realised, as he sat in the cold, anchored to the ground by the intimate ankle-embrace of twisted cords of smartfibres.

Later, someone–a woman, moving with hurried, apologetic movements–brought him a blanket. She scampered away immediately, not responding to his words of gratitude. The blanket was made of a coarse fibre, an animal wool, Flint thought. It smelt damp and mouldy, but then so too, in all probability, did Flint. It was a long thing, and he was able to wrap himself twice in it.

Soon, he was less chilled. He lay on his side, head raised on a fold of the coarse blanket, and managed to sleep.

~

The slow, insistent beat of a gong woke him when the sky was still dark, a red stain spreading up from the eastern horizon, limning the peaks of the distant hills with a golden halo.

His ankle bonds stretched far enough for him to shuffle behind the small shelter and piss in the dirt. Stomach cramps took him and he had to drop his breeches and let loose a jet of diarrhoea. He wiped himself with his left hand–the traveller’s way–and rinsed with what remained of the previous day’s sweetwater. When he looked back, he saw that three scrawny street rats had emerged to clean up after him.

When Tallofmind came with the woman a short time later, carrying between them a new bladder of water, a Riverwalker cloak and some food wrapped in a vine leaf, Flint said, “I think I may be ill.”

Tallofmind glanced at the woman. In the golden light of dawn, Flint saw that she was young and slim to the point of emaciation. He realised that her staring eyes were unseeing, and yet she was so attentive–turning her face in response to those around her. Following by sound and scent, he supposed.