Genetopia (6 page)

Flint trotted along the walkway, almost missing his footing at one point and plunging headlong into the thick, scummy water.

Soon he was in a street slick with the green froth of the algae.

Mesteb and his party were still by the gates, chatting with Peter and some of the other townsfolk.

Clarel was there, too–so calm on the surface yet here she was, eager to find out what news Mesteb brought.

Mesteb was a tall, broad-shouldered man, unhooded despite the sun’s glare, his long hair threaded with silver, tied back from his face. His eyes had the look of someone who had lost much, betraying his normally jovial nature.

He spotted Flint and instantly gave a slight shake of his head. “Clarel tells me you’re looking for your sister,” he said. “The two of you are the talk of Trecosann: the runaways. Everyone knows what a bastard Tarn is.” He glanced briefly at Clarel, then, as if only just remembering that Tarn was her brother.

“She didn’t run away,” said Flint. It was a conclusion he was finally starting to believe. “She took nothing with her. I checked her room and nothing was gone. Amber’s impulsive, but she’s not stupid: she wouldn’t just go off with nothing. And if she had fled she would have come here.”

She might never have made it this far, of course.

Or she might never have left Trecosann voluntarily in the first place.

He remembered play-fighting on the Leaving Hill.
We’d just sell you to the mutt trade
, he had teased her. And he remembered the Tallyman’s appraising eyes, putting a price on Amberlinetreco Eltarn.

~

He peered at his aunt from under the wide-brimmed hat she had given him. His presence made her uncomfortable, he knew, but she tried hard to hide it.

She had followed him out here to a rocky promontory that cut straight out into the Transom’s flow. Great rubber trees hung out over the river. Lines of land anemones clung to the underside of the trees’ boughs, feathery tentacles trailing down to the water, trapping moths, birds, fish in their downy grip.

Flint held a long, arching cane across the water, its tip raking the current, accumulating a knot of algae: glistening, glutinous stuff.

“What will you do, Flintreco?”

Where Tarn used his fullname as a weapon, distancing himself from his own son with inappropriate formality, Clarel used it to draw him in: Flint of Clan Treco–he belonged. People cared.

It was a calculating use of his fullname, too: a deliberate gesture. Warmth and spontaneity were hard for Clarel. Flint had seen it often in Chendreth’s looks, the hurt at the distance Clarel maintained even from her lover. The affection between the two of them was so brittle, he was impressed that it endured.

He raised the cane, watched water dripping from the captured algae, then dipped it again.

“She may be dead,” he said. “In which case I am wasting my time. She may have run away and I have simply got it wrong that she would head here–maybe she has gone to Farsamy, after all. She may have run away and fallen into the hands of traders, or she may have been sold directly into the trade.

“If she is still alive out there then all that I can do is spread word. You told me yourself that Clan Treco is more dispersed than most: there are Trecosi in most of the major settlements of the region. I even know some of these people from their visits to Trecosann.

“I’m a free man, Aunt Clareltreco. I intend to travel and ask people to watch out for a foolish girl with chestnut hair and jaundiced eyes.”

“Your mother...”

Clarel stopped and Flint waited for her to go on.

“Your mother is a difficult woman,” she said. “I don’t defend my brother–I was glad when Mesteb told you that the people of Trecosann are finally seeing him for the beast that he is. No, I don’t defend him. But I do think that he and Jescka deserve one another. He’s devoted to her, despite everything: that’s why Amber’s presence affected him so ... so adversely.”

“What do you mean? What are you telling me?”

“If Tarn never treated Amber like a daughter, it was because he had good reason,” said Clarel.

Hindsight. A lens that sharpens recollection, reshapes memories.

“My mother took lovers?” He had known. But he hadn’t made the connection. He had known that she had a lover, once, but that was more recent than Clarel implied.

Clarel nodded. “Mesteb has been one,” she said. “But there have been others, too. Mesteb confessed to me last year, when he was sick with the gripes and scared it might be changing fever. He wanted to off-load his guilt while he could. So he told me. And he told me why he stopped seeing her. He couldn’t stomach her visits to the seed patch.”

Flint moaned, turned away. He knew the euphemism: visit the seed patch and that’s where you find the mutts.

He had always thought Tarn’s cruel jibes at Amber’s nature related to her illness as a child, not to her parentage!

If Clarel’s claims were true then the only wonder was that Amber had not been exposed on the Leaving Hill as a pup, or that Tarn had not sold her into the trade at his first opportunity. Only Jescka could have stopped him, he realised.

Chapter 6: Dinah’s story

Dinah sniffed. She tasted change on the pre-twilight air. She knew that was not usually a good thing to taste.

She returned to her work, sluicing the swill buckets in a stream of brown water channelled through bamboo pipes direct from the river Elver.

She hummed herself a little tune. It was one her mother had taught her when she was not much more than a pup. An insect buzzed in her ear. Quick as a striking whipsnake, she enclosed it in one of her fleshy fists and slipped it into her mouth. It tasted of blood.

She stacked the last of the collapsible buckets by the outflow and wiped her hands on her frayed, off-white pinafore.

Flies and change. Strange tastes. She would remember this day as the day of flies and change.

Dinah was smart like that. Mutts could be blessed in many ways, but memory was not usually one of them. Old Ellis at the leisure house in Beshusa had taught her the trick of remembering things by hanging them on labels in your head. Already the day of flies and change was the day when two pups had died in the pens; when Nico had given her a white flower from the swamp trees; and now it was the day when Mas’ Torbern had returned–she could smell his sweet sweaty smell above all the other approaching scents on the air–with Mas’ Enchebern and a group of many visitors for Dinah to attend to.
Many
, for Dinah, was a number greater than the number of fingers on both hands.

Dinah didn’t apply labels to all the days she passed through, but only to those she felt to be important in some way. Today, for instance, she only chose to mark as significant when she tasted her returning master.

He had been away since the previous morning. That meant that Dinah had been able to get on with her chores without too much hindrance or hurt, but now that she knew he was returning, she felt her heart hastening with pleasure and pride.

She emerged from the work cabin into the fading light of the day. Maddy was there already, shifting her weight from foot to foot in the dusty square. The poor thing didn’t know what was happening, only that
something
was happening, confusion clear on her ape-like features.

Dinah hugged her, holding her friend’s head to her soft breasts. “Masters coming,” she said, explaining to the poor, feeble-minded creature. “Me done smell masters coming home.”

She took Maddy’s hand and led her to where a series of wooden rungs were lashed to the stockade wall. She led the way up the ladder, climbing to the walkway from where the two could look out from the transit camp.

They were standing on the side of the morning sun, which meant that they could look out across the overgrown waters of the Little Elver. This part of the river was a wide, shallow channel that cut through a meander formed by the main river, separating Stopover Island from the mainland. A short way downstream, Dinah could see the thick green ridge of the causeway that joined her home to the mainland.

Yes! There, where the trees and vegetation thinned and the causeway fell away to be replaced by a slender living wood bridge, she saw a line of people and mutts. Too far away to identify the individuals, but she knew her master Torbern was there. She clutched Maddy’s hairy arm in anticipation and love and dread.

~

Dinah and Maddy scampered through the camp to make preparations for their master’s arrival. Stopover was a big camp, as large as any in the Ten, she had once been told. There were many masters in Stopover and, although Dinah was quite naturally in the thrall of them all, her bond to her own master was the most intense. She knew that her devotion to Mas’ Torbern was something bonded deep in the matter of her body, a gut thing–she was, after all, a clever mutt: she understood far more than most, far more than she would ever let on. Knowledge did not–
could
not–alter her ingrained devotion to her master, though. She loved Mas’ Torbern more than she could love a pup of her own.

All around the two of them, a fug of animal smells blanketed the dry air. The dirt track they followed was one of many that formed a grid pattern in this part of the camp, the paths bounding sunken holding pens set chest-deep in the ground. Each pen was enclosed by a picket fence made from slender wooden poles interwoven with smartfibres and roofed in with fibre netting. Hands gripped the poles, and faces peered out at the two hurrying mutts.

As Dinah and Maddy went on their way, the two of them sang old songs of family and devotion and Harmony–Dinah singing the words and Maddy humming the tunes in her gravelly, surging contralto.

And around them, voices rose from the holding pens, joining their song.

~

“Drink for our guests, mutt! You done listen?”

Dinah ducked her head, cowed by the violence in her master’s voice. Love hurt, she knew, but she was a good mutt and she could only do as he bid.

She took a mug thrust at her by one of her master’s guests. He was a big man, muscle softened by good living, his square face rounded by a thick growth of dark beard. She dipped her ladle in the urn of mulled herbal wine and filled the mug. The man took it from her, his look sliding uneasily across her face.

Dinah smiled inwardly and took another mug to fill. They did not keep her here for her looks, she knew. She was heavily built–a perk from working in the transit camp’s slop-house–and her face bore the scars of past mistreatment.

Dinah had spent her early years in Lady Leder’s leisure house in Beshusa. Running errands from room to room, she had quickly learnt what kind of leisure it was that the masters enjoyed with her mother and the other mutts and humans owned by the fearsome Lady Leder. The physical contortions sometimes seemed funny to her, but the intensity was unmistakable: her mother was often hurt by the customers, but the power they had over her was an awesome thing. It was the normal devotion of mutt to master taken to an extreme level. In later years, Dinah had known mutts addicted to jaggery residue and she had seen that it was a similar thing: her mother hooked on the masters and the things they did to her.

Dinah had so wanted to be like her mother. But, regardless, the day had come when Lady Leder had sold her to an architect-grower across town, dismissing her distress with a surprised, “But you’re fat and you’re ugly and you’re far too clever for my clientele, my dear thing.”

“Lights!”

Dinah hurried around the big, gloomy verandah where Mas’ Torbern was entertaining his guests. Roofed-over with great banana leaves and livermoss, the verandah was rapidly filling with darkness as evening took hold. Threaded through the walls were translucent tubes filled with Artesian glow-water. Dinah stroked them into action and the area pooled with warm light.

As she did so, she stole surreptitious glances at the masters around her. Four of them were outsiders, guests in Stopover. She recognised them from previous visits. They came often to do business with Mas’ Torbern and the other mutt traders. The big bearded man was Mesteb from Clan Treco and now he was talking with Mas’ Torbern and Mas’ Enchebern.

Her own master, Torbern, was dwarfed by Mesteb. Dressed in a side-pinned cloak and long trousers that hung loosely from his wiry frame, Torbern had shaggy black hair, a thin beard and narrow eyes set deep in an angular face. Every movement of his, every gesture and expression, had an air of command and confidence to it. It was natural enough that Dinah should think such a thing, but she saw that he had this effect on the True humans around him, too. They deferred to him, almost as mutt deferred to master.

Just then a chattering sound rose from the holding pens just beyond the verandah, where Maddy was fussing over the new arrivals.

Dinah hurried across and dropped through a gate into the low-level pen. Maddy had spilt most of a bucket of water onto the dusty ground and now she muttered curses at the new stock.

Dinah put a hand briefly on her friend’s back and felt the poor thing trembling, fearing punishment for the mishap.

The new stock had been split into single sex groups and put in a number of holding pens upon their arrival. There were four different varieties of mutts in eight pens to Dinah’s left, and two more in four pens to her right.

This was the pen for the female Lost and now they crowded around Dinah and Maddy–curious, more than anything, Dinah decided. There were five of them. Three were True humans who must have been changed at some time in their lives. Most likely they had fallen victim to one of the changing plagues that occasionally spread through the human population.

The remaining two were harder to categorise. One was a child of maybe ten summers, tall and slim and staring blank-faced at Dinah. The other was older, almost into womanhood, full-figured, dark-haired, and the most striking thing about her was the golden tint in the whites of her eyes.

Both these two had the air of the True about them and Dinah felt immediately subservient to them. And yet she knew that both must be corrupt in some subtle way. Many children of the True were born with deviations from the norm, in many various ways. Where their flaws were obvious they were exposed to the elements as pups–better that then let them live. But sometimes the deviations were more subtle and only emerged in later life. Dinah had seen many like these two: raised and nurtured among the True and later disowned. Some were turned out into the wilds, but most were sold into the mutt trade. They were usually trouble, their upbringing making it hard for them to adapt to their new circumstances. Their natures had to be subdued and shackled if they were to adjust.

Dinah looked at the two, and wondered how much of a fight they would put up.

From Maddy’s snuffling curses, she guessed that one of the two had snatched at the water, causing her to spill it. She remembered tasting change on the air, and now she realised that it may have been trouble, too, that she had anticipated.

~

Mas’ Torbern led them around the holding pens, gesturing expansively down at the mutts. “Finest cages you could find,” he said to his guests.

Dinah followed at a safe distance, ready to respond to her master’s commands. Unlike most mutts, she could follow the full speech of the True, as long as they did not speak too fast or have particularly strange accents, as some of the guests had.

Mas’ Torbern’s words were true–the holding pens were, indeed, well constructed–but he was simplifying things for his audience.

All mutts talked of freedom, of living in a place they called Harmony where they were in charge of their own destinies. In Harmony everyone had a place, their strengths respected, their weaknesses supported. In Harmony, diversity was embraced, not feared, and humankind took many directions.

Most mutts, however, would never consider actually
trying
to escape to Harmony from even the poorest conditions. Their in-grained devotion to True humans was enough to keep them in place. So, to a large extent, these pens were overkill.

But in some mutts the devotion was not so strong and, in some, changing illnesses had weakened it so much that they would be willing to try to escape. And then there were the fallen humans, the Lost, in whom the devotion was not inherent: they learnt subservience at the hand of masters like Torbern. The Lost learnt to obey through fear and discipline, not love, and it was in these fallen humans that the desire to escape was strongest.

And so the holding pens of Stopover had been built to contain the keenest escapees. Even the nimblest of mutties–midget mutts destined to work high in the fleshfruit trees–would be secure in the holding pens of Stopover.

“Finest cages,” Mas’ Torbern repeated. “Keep ’em all in their place. None of ’em get out of Stopover, ’cept on a haul-boat.”

“Why the mutthounds, then?” asked one of the guests.

The pens were secure, but Dinah knew that most escapes took place elsewhere in Stopover: from the exercise yards, from the fields and fleshfruit groves, from the haulboats moored at the docks. The mutthounds were used to track them down.

Mas’ Torbern gave a high, drawn-out whistle between fingers and teeth and immediately the hounds started barking and howling from their kennels by the causeway.

And in instant response, all chatterings and murmurings from the mutt pens fell silent.

Mas’ Torbern grinned, teeth white in the spreading gloom. “Scares the shit out of ’em,” he said softly.

~

They stopped by the pen that held the five Lost females and, for some reason, Dinah felt her pulse quickening. She prided herself on understanding the workings of her mind and body but she did not know why she should feel nervous now.

Overhead, clouds of tiny bats swirled in the darkening air. Dinah watched their twitchy flight, then looked away.

She saw that Mas’ Torbern was watching one of the females. The pretty one with the golden tint in her eyes.

Dinah looked away again, across the ranked cage-tops to the dark fringe of the enclosing stockade and the towering trees beyond.

When she looked back, her master was still watching the pretty one, and leaning across to exchange words with Mas’ Enchebern.

Enchebern opened the pen’s gate and leaned in, over the heads of the enclosed females. He pointed at the pretty one, and said, “You. Come here to me. You hear me?”

Pretty one pretended not to understand, but one of the older females nudged her and hissed a few words of Mutter close to her face. Relieved, no doubt, that it wasn’t her they summoned.

Reluctant, the pretty one edged forward and at another gesture from Enchebern, climbed out of the pen.

She was wearing a thin tunic and loose trousers. Fine clothes for one in such a position. She held herself proudly, too.

“Get this one a drink,” said Mas’ Torbern, and Dinah hurried over to the urn to draw a small mug of mulled wine.

When she returned she stopped uncertainly, holding the drink out before her.

Mas’ Torbern held the pretty one’s chin between thumb and finger, tipping her face up so that it was illuminated by the silvery light of the near-full moon.

“Mestebtreco,” said Torbern. “One of yours, no?”

The big bearded man nodded.

“Maybe we should keep this one, eh, Mesteb?” Mas’ Torbern ’s hand moved down to the pretty one’s breasts and then pulled at the clasp of her tunic, splitting it open at the front. He cupped a breast with the hand. “What do you say, Mesteb?”