Siberia (16 page)

I nodded, hearing my mother’s voice in my mind, my mama telling little Rosita the magic words:
Insectivora,
Lagomorpha, Rodentia, Artiodactyla, Chiroptera, Carnivora.

“The marine mammals were lost.”

Yagin gave me a sharp look, and cleared his throat. “Hrrmph, indeed. Well, I was saying: these little primitives”—he gestured at the kits: they darted away from the shadow of his hand—“are recreated from an early stage of mammal evolution. Their name is Haramiya. The real creatures lived in the Mesozoic era, about two hundred fifty million years ago. We sow the DNA spores in a little very special nutrient gel—”

New-treat, I thought.

“—which produces these little things. To develop to the second stage, a different type animal for each order, they need to eat normally, and to have contact with their surrogate mother. All the other species can be induced to express in the laboratory, or they may be revealed by stress.”

“They can change
very
strangely,” I said, thinking of Toothy.

“So I believe,” said Yagin, giving me that
hungry
look again, “though I have never seen it. The compressed genomes are full of tricks. Nobody but your mama knows how it was done, but there’s a little something from the fungi and slime-molds, for astonishing speed of growth. Something from the insects, for the metamorphosis—the shape-changing. Oh, a lot of clever tricks! The
Rodentia
”—he tapped Toothy’s green-capped tube—“as I remember, has something from the aphids. This type animal, which is a lemming, is actually born pregnant, so she can quickly establish numbers: that’s going to be necessary, for the ecology of predator and prey. That must be something to see!” He raised his eyebrow, looking at me: but I wasn’t going to tell him anything I didn’t have to.

“But then they aren’t really the same as the wild animals.”

Yagin shrugged. “Of course, the foreign additions would be snipped out of their genes before the breeding populations were reared, for release into the wild. That was the plan. To your mama and dadda, the clever tricks were not important. Just a means to an end, that they meant to throw away.”

The groove between his brows was suddenly sharper and deeper. The kits shot into a huddle, and I hoped Yagin didn’t guess that this meant I was scared.

“If you want them,” I said, “why don’t you just take them?”

“Because they are yours!” The scary tension went out of him, and he laughed. “Didn’t she tell you? Then watch this. This is very entertaining, it’s a party trick.”

He reached for the lab case. I was shocked to the core when he actually touched my mama’s magic case, but I didn’t protest. Briskly, he covered his mouth and nose with a mask, slicked gloves onto his hands, and made up a dish of Toothy starter, his big hands very neat with the tiny glassware. Then he took my wrist, used the sharp lip of a dropper to scrape my skin and put the skin scraping in another tiny dish, with a dab of nutrient. He shook the dishes gently.

“What are you doing?”

“Oooh, just watch, little girl.”

When he was satisfied that something was happening he used his gloved fingertips to push the two dishes around the tabletop, chuckling through his mask. I saw how the mixture in one dish
moved,
trying to get near to the mixture in the other. Wherever Yagin put the kit dish, the starter climbed the side of the glass, as if it was alive: trying to get near to
. . .
to the dish with
me
in it.

“It’s imprinting,” said Yagin. “Imprinting at the level of the genes. The chemical bases themselves, they think you are their mother. Or Life itself! Every cell of every Lindquist would die for you, as the cells of your own body would gladly die to save your life.” He stripped off his gloves and mask, and began to clean the dishes. “On your side, well, human emotions are more complex. But you are fond of them?”

The kits were still in a frightened huddle. I set my hand down beside them, and let them scramble into my palm: put them back in the nutshell and sealed it.

“I think you know a lot,” I said, “but you don’t understand much.”

“Now I’ve offended you. She will have taught you to see spiritual beauty in the way the Lindquists love you, and you love them. I’m sure she did. Manya always had to drag in something spiritual. The cold fact is, this bond between the kits and their keeper was engineered, it is just a chemical trick, for their protection.”

My mother’s name was Maria. I had never heard anyone call her
Manya
that I remembered, but the nickname stirred something in me. Lost memories.

“I like Mama’s way of seeing things better.”

He roared with laughter. “Of course you do! But you’re going to trust me anyway? You won’t try to run away again?”

I suddenly thought that he’d probably been drinking. When I looked around I saw the bottle, a tall thin bottle standing on the floor by his chair, uncorked, half full of clear liquid. I would bet there were others somewhere. I glanced at the door of the hut, and then wished I’d controlled my eyes. Yagin wasn’t as drunk as all that. He was smiling as if he could read my mind.

“Well, well, no hurry. I have been waiting for this since you and your mama were sent to Siberia. I can wait a little longer for your trust.”

“‘Siberia’? We were sent to a Wilderness Settlement.”

He leaned over and picked up his bottle, and offered it to me. I shook my head. “Siberia? Once it was a cold place far away, where people who offended the government were sent to freeze and starve. Now it’s Siberia everywhere. The whole world has been sent to Siberia, we’re all in Siberia.”

He knocked back a large gulp of what I thought was vodka, and heaved a sigh. “No hurry. We’re stuck here for a while. You can’t go anywhere until the storm has blown itself out, and before then I will persuade you that I’m your friend.”

I didn’t want to go on talking to him. I got up and went to the window, and pushed the curtain aside. It was double glass, proving that this hut had once belonged to someone rich. I could hear the storm, buffeting the log walls: all I could see was a whirling blank. I watched the snow, while Yagin stared at the stove, nursing his vodka bottle. There was something he hadn’t told me, but it was obvious. The Lindquists were
valuable,
extremely valuable, like gold and jewels. Maybe the Fitness Police would destroy them, but other people would want to get hold of them and use those clever tricks my mama and dadda had invented—to make new factory animals, to do all sorts of things. If Yagin had saved my life, if he had been following me to protect me all this time, wasn’t it just because I was valuable too? He’d just shown me how important I was, to anyone who wanted to develop the kits.

But I longed to trust him.

There was only one room in the cabin, and one bed. It had a mattress that rustled, and smelled of something dusty and sweet. I slept there: Yagin slept on the floor, on blankets spread over a heap of brushwood that he’d brought in from the wood store. He had a stack of canned food, and a supply of vodka. He wouldn’t let me go outside at all. He fetched fuel from a wood store, and filled the cooking pan with packed snow, to melt for fresh water. There was a privy bucket in a closet he called the bathroom: Yagin would go out into the blizzard to empty it. Whenever he went outside he would lock the door behind him, and lock it and bar it again when he came back. He kept the key on a string around his neck. I spent my time reading—he had some books with him, in his big pack. I put the nail box away in my knapsack, and he seemed to accept that he wasn’t going to see the kits again.

He started sewing me a jacket and a cap, out of doubled blanket and some thick oilcloth stuff he’d found in the cabin. He was very handy at sewing.

On the day we first saw a gleam of daylight through our window, he went out to fill the snow pan and was gone a long time. He came back saying the wind had dropped and the barometer on his sledge was set fair. We might leave, tomorrow or the next day. I said, “That’s good!” But Yagin didn’t look happy. The crease between his brows looked as if it had been gouged with a chisel.

I was looking at the Fitness Police guide, which Yagin liked to leave around, in the hope of getting me to talk about the Lindquists again. His hand came down over my shoulder, and touched the page.

“
Artiodactyla,
” he said. “The even-number toe-walkers.”

I remembered my mama trying to teach me that difficult word.

“
Digitigrade
is another name for those families,” said Yagin, sitting down. “
Finger-walkers,
but toes or fingers, it’s all the same. The five-fingered limb, it’s something all of us mammals share. A shrew, a mole, a monkey; an ape, a beaver, a man: we all have paws of the same design. The cattle families adopted mutations that made them lose some of their fingers and toes, because that proved useful for running. Look at the bones. You can see the underlying pattern and how the pattern has shifted. They are walking on their toenails, which we call their hooves.”

He picked up my hand and folded down the thumb, and then the two outer fingers, against my palm.

“
Artiodactyla
means even-toed, it could be two or four. In the more developed species it’s usually two toes, though you can often see the other two, tucked away. Imagine a great hippopotamus on tiptoe, in a ballet skirt.”

I didn’t know what a hippopotamus was.

“A water horse,” said Yagin. “Smooth-skinned, very fat. They used to live in rivers. You won’t find them on that card. They are long gone, gone forever.”

He dropped my hand, took the cooking pan to the stove, and sat there.

“The true horse is called
Perissodactyla,
odd-toed, and that could be three or one, but the developed horse runs on one toe, which has become a hard-rinded hoof. There is no Lindquist for the horse: the wild horses of Europe were lost, at the last moment. They never trotted onto the DNA ark. Maybe it doesn’t matter. They had vanished from the New World, for unknown reasons, until the Spanish took them back. Horses are like a folk song, weaving in and out of human history, disappearing here, reappearing there.
. . .
” He poked the melting snow in the pan, in a dissatisfied way. “What a
poverty
of life there is now. If this was the old days I would go hunting, in the still after the storm. I would bring back a brace of hares, or a fat young deer.”

“How can you want to kill them, if you want to help me keep them alive?”

“Because I’m an animal myself,” said Yagin, baring his teeth. “A tertiary consumer. I am designed to eat the weaker kinds, until I am eaten myself, by Death, who is always stronger. That’s natural predation, little girl. It does no harm.”

Yagin was a strange man. He explained things I was hungry to know, and then he’d say something that made me hate him, as if on purpose. Deliberately, I went to sit by the stove, poured a glass of vodka, and handed it to him.

“Which way do we go, when we leave here? Do you have a map?”

He closed one eye, and smiled. “Do you?”

I shrugged. I expected he’d searched my knapsack by now, sometime when I was asleep. There was nothing I could do about that.

“You still don’t trust me, do you?” He knocked back the spirit: scowled, and held out his glass again. “It’s a long way to the coast. Farther than you can walk on that poor weak leg of yours, that’s for sure.”

I poured more vodka. “Does your sled have enough fuel to get us there?”

“My sled has no fuel at all,” said Yagin ruefully. “I used it all searching for a stubborn little girl, when I found out that she had escaped from the slavers and run for it. But I know where there’s a fuel dump. I can’t take you there, it would be too risky. I’ll fill up and then come back for you.” He emptied his glass. “I know where these questions are leading. Get it into your head, every hand is against you out there. The slavers are looking for you, Little Father is looking for you, the Fitness Police are looking for you. Promise me you won’t try to make it on your own.”

“I solemnly promise. I will not try to make it on my own.”

Yagin sighed. “Ah, those black eyes.” He reached over and took my chin between his finger and thumb. “Your mother’s very eyes. But when I go to fetch the fuel, I’ll still lock you in!” He tossed his glass down. It didn’t break, it just rolled on the plank floor. “Time to eat. Let’s see if I have anything besides that damned stew.”

There was nothing but con stew, and fruit tea with syrup. It was tasty food by my standards, but Yagin was clearly used to something different. He ate without appetite, I finished most of the can. Then he got me to try on my cap and jacket. The jacket needed a little more sewing. He worked on it until it was ready, then he sat drinking, in gloomy silence, until he stumbled to his bed on the floor. The stove burned low. I went and knelt beside him, and stared at his sleeping face.

Yagin knew so much. But if he was somebody I should trust, why didn’t he tell me the one thing that would make me believe in him?

Who are you?

I wanted to fetch the photograph Mama had left for me out of my knapsack, but I didn’t dare, in case he woke up. I tried to imagine him younger, but I couldn’t see through the years. He was fast asleep, lying on his back and snoring. Carefully, I turned back the blanket, and the collar of his dingy shirt. At the base of his throat, on the right-hand side, just where it ought to be, I found the delicate little tattoo, a circlet of feathery green leaves. It was the Chervil Ring, the mark of the Biological Institute. I’d seen it on raggy textbooks at New Dawn College. Mama had told me that chervil is the first herb that the old-days people would plant, when they were making a new garden. It meant the renewal of life. Yagin had been a scientist at the Institute, like my mama. That was obvious from the things he’d told me; and the things he knew.

Mama’s tattoo had been defaced, when she was disgraced.

She had been betrayed by someone close to her. She had never
told
me that, exactly, but I’d always known it.

I tucked his shirt back, and the blanket. He didn’t look like waking; he was out cold. I went to his big backpack, which stood by the wall, and undid the fastenings. I was looking for more information, and for things to steal. There were chocolate bars, and a map: which I set aside to transfer to my knapsack (the map might be better than mine). Underneath the map were some folded clothes. A long black uniform coat, and a tunic with badges of rank. Of course. I saw in my mind’s eyes the Fitness Police standing in front of Little Father’s pincic table, and I knew, cold and hard, that Yagin had been one of those men.
. . .
He’d come alone at first, pretending to be a lone bounty hunter. When Little Father had refused to sell me, he’d come back with reinforcements.