Genetopia (18 page)

“And did Pil tell you of the deal he is negotiating with the Riverwalkers?” asked Janosofritt.

Henritt put a hand on his friend’s arm. “He tells me everything,” he said. “I’m in charge, see? He has to tell me, doesn’t he?” The Riverwalkers were from an engineering enclave upstream from Farsamy. When Pil completed the negotiations they would supply bonded engineers to Clan Ritt in exchange for mere promisory notes for supply of materials.

So much business! Henritt’s first trip in charge had been a huge success.

And to complete his triumph, Henritt had managed to see off the rival bids and only a short time earlier he had taken the female mutt into the protection of his clan’s trade delegation. Now she was in a wagon at their lodgings. It had been a good day.

Just then, a girl at the bar caught his eye. She was plain, but well proportioned. He leaned even closer to Janos, nodded towards the girl. “Whaddya think?”

“I suppose you don’t have to look at the vat while you’re stirring the fibres,” said Janos.

Henritt clapped his friend on the back and stood, then went across to the bar. It looked to be a promising night.

~

Back at the lodgings. Head aswim with drink and narcotics, Henritt leaned on a doorframe to steady himself.

He’d come back alone. Janos was still out there with some whitewood salesman he’d met earlier in the day. Wendoftenka, the girl at the bar, had been fun, had rutted like the world was about to end, but had to get back to her lodgings before her clanfolk came looking for her.

So here he was, drugged and sexed out, end of a long day... why didn’t he just go on up to that feathered mattress the clan was paying for?

Their wagons and carriages were out back. This was where their mutts slept, under the shelter of the clan’s vehicles. The new one... she was still inside one of the wagons.

His eyes were already adjusted to the dark, but inside it was even gloomier.

He knew where she was from the sounds she made: feet on floor, breathing.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Just checking.”

He could make out her shape now, backed into the farthest corner, hands held in front of her as if to protect herself. “No touch,” she gasped.

“You speak?”

Her voice was quiet, the words strangely formed.

“Good girl work hard. No touch.”

He couldn’t place the accent. “Where are you from?” he asked. Then, “What town is it you been outta?” he added, trying to remember how to talk Mutter.

“No touch,” she repeated. And, again, he was struck by the animal in the human, the human in the animal, of her nature.

He backed out, locked the door, pissed long and hard against the wheel of the wagon, then made his way inside the lodging house.

~

He dreamed of her, the bitch, although by morning all that lingered were a few fleeting fragments, startling in their mundanity. A half-formed image of her backed into a dark corner:
No touch
. Her easy, rolling gait as he had led her back to the lodging house after his successful purchase. Dark eyes: brown on golden tan, as if cast in resin.

He ate fleshfruit on the way to the market, drank copiously from the bladder Janos carried, trying to clear his head for the day’s trading and negotiations. He thought, again, of Wendoftenka, heard her cries repeated in his head. He wondered if he would see her again later. He felt suddenly reinvigorated, ready for the day and night to come, for the triumphant return to Rittasan the day after.

Later, the wild-eyed Riverwalker returned to the stall, his manner agitated, as if he had been chewing jaggery all through the night.

The Walker just stood there, head lowered, staring at Henritt with upturned eyes.

“We spoke before,” the Riverwalker finally said.

“And?” said Henritt. The trade deal with the Riverwalkers was in the bag and he felt in no mood for confrontations he did not understand. He could afford to dismiss this fool, he calculated.

“I come from Minster Place,” said the Walker. “I have spoken to Makkibern Elthom about... about a mutt. Young, female, with chestnut hair and yellow eyes.”

“And?” Henritt repeated, wondering why a Riverwalker would be so taken with a particular mutt–even one so fit. “Why are you telling me this?”

“She was bought by... someone who sounded like you.”

Henritt shrugged. “Farsamy’s a big place,” he said. “There must be plenty of people who look like me.” He smiled, now. “Anyway: plenty more mutts out there, aren’t there?”

He turned away, exchanged a few words with Janos, and when he looked back he saw the dejected back of the Riverwalker, heading off through the crowd.

~

Clans Coltar, Treco, Willarmey, Tenka, Beshuzami... Henritt stood back and allowed Pilofritt to recount the long list of settlements they had made at Farsamy. He was tired from the journey home and he took the opportunity to rest and to observe Kymeritt Elkardamy. His father was attentive, the clan head absorbing the success of the trade delegation with customary efficiency.

But he was drawn... like a child with a new toy, a new pet. He wanted to investigate the goods they had purchased, the bladderpumps grown by a new technique developed by Clan Treco, the quickfibres harvested from wild, imbuto-tainted beds in the far west–a new germ-line of much promise. He wanted to talk to the two Riverwalker engineers, now bonded to Clan Ritt. Their expertise and innovation would be a valuable addition to the clan’s production base as surely as their preaching would prove an irritation.

And yet, as Henritt had known, he was drawn more than anything to the mutt called Taneye. Now... now that Pilofritt had run out of momentum, Kymeritt circled her, checking her over for corruption, for signs of ill health.

“She is well-muscled,” said Henritt. Sometimes it paid to state the obvious. “The cleanest mutt in Farsamy. She is docile–no sign of any taint. Speaks a little Mutter. I think she will work well alongside Stutter and the others in the fibre pods.”

“We don’t really need any more in the pods, or elsewhere, for that matter,” said Kymeritt. “But yes, she looks like good stock. Sedge can isolate her until we know she’s clean, then you can supervise her training. Pilofritt tells me you paid far too much for her.”

Henritt nodded. “Nearly twice the appropriate rate,” he admitted. “Clan Beren saw me as a naïve and foolish trader to pay so much over the odds. Their swagger made it far easier for me to negotiate such a good rate for the fibre contract we arranged with them the following day. And anyway, I thought you would like her.”

Kymeritt barked a short laugh and put an arm around his son’s shoulders. “You are a Ritt through and through, my boy,” he said.

~

“She haunts me,” he confessed. “In my dreams ... my waking thoughts. People talk. I heard Janos this morning, gossiping with Sedge. He said I’m losing my grip, that my balls must be bigger than my brain.”

He was half-dreaming now, drifting in the lucid-trance induced by Oracle’s all-enveloping pherotropic mist.

The Ritt Oracle was discreetly tucked away on an overgrown island halfway down the stepped terrace of their main paddyfield area. It was approached along a narrow, raised track, either side fringed by bamboo and tall rushes with rice lagoons beyond. Oracle itself was a fleshy dome, its skin pocked with throbbing veins and grossly bulging tumours, with tangles of vine and creeper heaped high across its arched roof. Some said Oracle had formed the island itself, as silt accreted around its deeply rooted neural network of smartfibres.

Now Henritt sat cross-legged in Oracle’s inner cavity, the entranceway sealed over, the only light glowing redly through Oracle’s fleshy walls. The only sounds, apart from his own voice, were the liquid rushings in Oracle’s vascular system, the steady, low boom of its hearts.

Oracle spoke, its melancholy tones so intimate it might be communicating directly with Henritt’s mind. “You are young and free. There is no shame in what you say.”

“She’s a mutt!”

A new scent, a musky, sweaty, after-sex thing, subduing him, placating him. “Mutts are human too.”

“But... tainted... corrupted.”

He’d been supervising Taneye’s training, as his father had instructed. Making sure Sedge didn’t treat the newcomer too harshly–he knew how territorial the mutts could sometimes be.

Supervising too closely, Janos had said this morning. Too attentively.

“You could keep the mutt as a plaything.”

But... he was fearful of what may follow. “I can’t get her out of my head.”

Another change in atmosphere, in intensity. “The mutt: she has been isolated?”

He nodded, shying away from the implication of Oracle’s words.

“But you have been monitoring her progress closely?”

“She’s clean! No sign of taint.”

“Except in your thoughts, your dreams. Perhaps your affliction runs deeper than mere masculine urges.”

Oracle was toying with him, he realised. Trying to frighten him, and succeeding. “No,” he said decisively. “I am healthy. I am clean. The mutt has not tainted me!”

“And, like any young purebred man, your balls are sometimes bigger than your brain.”

He was about to reply but stopped himself, recognising Oracle’s wisdom, its manipulation of his reasoning so that he could see himself as he was: a randy young man, no more. He smiled, bowed his head, was thankful again for Oracle’s presence among them.

~

He wanted to be alone with his thoughts, but instead he encountered Pilofritt and Janosofritt where the track from Oracle joined the main track from the paddies into Rittasan. He could tell immediately that they knew where he had been, and why he had needed to consult Oracle.

He met the two bonded’s looks steadily. Janosofritt’s smirk was irritating enough, but Pilofritt’s casual arrogance was infuriating. “Do you not think that you should show me some respect?” Henritt demanded.

Pil paused–through insolence, rather than hesitance–and in that time his eyes never left Henritt’s. “I am a bondsman,” he said, finally. “Not a mutt. Unthinking subservience is ingrained in mutts, but not in me. You are my master and I am bonded to your clan, but my respect is something you must earn, just as your father has done.”

In that instant, in Pil’s defiance and Janos’ amusement, Henritt saw himself as others did. Perhaps it was a clarity of vision retained from the pherotropic atmosphere of Oracle’s interior, perhaps it was simply the attainment of a final level of insight. Now he finally understood that in others’ eyes he was immature, a fool, a source of amusement and ridicule.

He pushed past the two bondsmen and stalked towards the settlement. He was angry without understanding where to direct his wrath, within or without; his head was hurting, a result of his temper and the after-effects of Oracle’s intimacy. And he was mightily embarrassed.

Back in Rittasan things were no better. He saw accusation, ridicule, in people’s eyes. Where before he would have seen admiration and respect, now he saw that they humoured him, laughed at him, undermined him with their gossip and rumour.

He came to the low arched building where they dormed a lot of the clan’s mutts.

With barely a thought, he pulled the door aside and passed within. He turned automatically to the left, eyes coming to rest on the enclosure at the far end where Taneye and some of the other young females spent much of their time. The flap was open, but the figure within was not the mutt he had bought. He looked more closely and saw that it was Calig, a male mutt he and Willemritt had played with as children.

The mutt was sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth as if demented. When he looked up, Henritt saw immediately what must have happened. “What did you do?” he demanded of the creature.

There was pain and confusion in Calig’s eyes. “Pretty one,” he said, in his stumbling Mutter. “Pretty one done run out this place.”

Again: “What did you do?”

Calig’s hand reached down under his loincloth and tugged at his genitals. He smiled now. “Calig done want pretty one be make manthing happy.” Then he stopped smiling, let his hand fall away. “Pretty one done hit Calig. Pretty one done run out this place.”

“Which way?” Even to his own ears Henritt’s voice sounded pitiful, the desperation painful to hear. “Which way pretty one done run?”

~

He had been on the road for some considerable time before realisation dawned on him. This was the first time he had ventured beyond Rittasan unaccompanied, a purebred human on his own in the wildlands between clan territories.

What was he doing? What was it that had stolen into his thoughts and drawn him into such a rash course of action?

He paused, looked all around. To one side of the track pink canes as thick as his thigh loomed high, forming a near-impenetrable barrier between Henritt and the jungle. They looked like bellycane, but he could not be sure. Here in the wildlands, so much that looked familiar was impure, corrupt.

To the other side of the track, ragged thorn bushes and clumps of tall grass clustered tightly, as if stacked one on the other. What looked like thicket oaks towered over the bushes, multiple rubbery trunks bursting from the undergrowth in groups of six and twelve. Up in the canopy, bunches of meat fruit hung and, camouflaged against the leaves, a small party of tree martens grazed.

He had left without thought, without even pause to gather provisions. He was thirsty, but did not dare pluck any of the fleshfruit from nearby branches. He had simply rushed from Rittasan in the direction indicated by poor, distraught Calig. The mutt could not be blamed: it was in his nature to respond to Taneye’s powerful sexual signals, just as it was in his nature to be pathetically subservient to all purebred humans. He was only a mutt.

Henritt continued on his way. With dense jungle to either side, she must have stayed on the track. She could not be far ahead. They would both be back in Rittasan before nightfall.

~

But with the sun swollen and red above the hills, Henritt had still not found her. Already, he had crossed several junctions where he might easily have guessed wrong; the jungle all around was thinner, too–she might even have left the track altogether. If she was scared then that was even more likely.