Legacy (Eon, 1) Page 8

The banks of the river revealed an immense monotony of silva, with little change in color or elevation. Red and black, browns and purples, no green. Tens of kilometers from the banks, mountains rose, and silva balloons clustered along the base of the mountains; but from this distance, a hundred meters from either shore, I could see little more than black trunks, parasols and fans, and the legs and pink crowns of cathedral trees.

  The river smelled of pure fresh water, bland but invigorating. Peering into the dark clarity, I saw dappled silver blurs move flash and undulate us. Redhill's encyclopedia said that creatures of Petain's zone, zone five, dominated the Terra Nova to its roots deep in Elizabeth's Land. Some of the riparian scions were as large as whales, easily capable of toppling a boat. A picture showed a sinuous monstrosity, twenty meters in length, crude eyes arrayed in a cross on its flat forehead, blunt tusks mounted on nose, no mouth. Its function within the river, its use to the zone five ecos, was not known.

  I imagined such a thing sliding beneath our boat in the deep blue water and actually enjoyed the shiver I felt. Awe at nature was a much cleaner emotion than any I had been feeling lately.

  Larisa fell asleep, head lolling with mouth open. Randall sat on a bench beside me, letting Shatro take the tiller, and offered me a bar of gum. Chewing gum seemed quite the habit here.

  “Ser Cachemou is known up and down the river,” Randall said in a low voice. “A loud and foolish woman. If her husband left her to go to Hsia, he may have had better reason than most.” He confided a wry grimace. “What were you doing in the silva?”

  “I've always wanted to do research,” I said. “Science” was a word rarely used by divaricates. “I've spent the last two years studying on my own.” I felt very vulnerable with this man; he probably knew more about the silva than anyone on the river, and certainly more than I could have gleaned from Jan Fima, the Dalgesh report, and Redhill's encyclopedia. “It's not been easy. I should have studied more ... Before going into the silva.”

  Randall chuckled. “Very likely. Did you really get sampled?”

  The small prick on my cheek had almost healed. “She says I did. Something flying struck me in the dark and drew blood, but Liz doesn't do that twice, does she?”

  “No,” Randall said. He smiled and went aft to rig a shade for the woman.

  Left to myself, with nothing to do but study the river and the endless silva, I took out Nkwanno's slate and resumed my study. I still could not access the scholar's personal records, but judging from clues left in several small open files, Nkwanno had used a few key words that he changed every few months. I wondered who he thought would read his private documents. I could not put the right words together yet, but all his public references were open to me.

  As we drifted downriver, I searched for a history, and found several, all unfinished, all with the hallmarks of enthusiastic amateurs.

  The immigrants had come here, thirty-seven Lamarckian years before, emerging from a gate near the present site of Calcutta. Lenk named their landfall (its measure then unknown) after his wife, Elizabeth. They had been woefully unprepared. It took months to sort out Lamarckia's possible contributions to diet and the need for raw materials. For the first ten years, starvation was a major problem.

  I punched through dozens of stills of gaunt, hollow-eyed settlers clearing lizboo scions, planting grains and fruit trees and vines, toppling cathedral trees for their strong, light, woody trunks. Lenk's recordists made videos of determined mothers and fathers carrying the first children born on Lamarckia, babies wrapped in worn cloth, parents in rags.

  Among the two thousand had been seven doctors with less than a ton of medical supplies, little of it advanced; here, Lenk had insisted on doctrinal purity. Some, apparently, had ignored or interpreted his instructions, but not enough to avert serious medical problems, including fatal allergic reactions to certain scions. Hungry, desperate people had eaten many things without going through proper procedures.

  The faces in the pictures and movies haunted me: gaunt, frightened but steadfast, sure of themselves. All Thistledown's citizens regarded themselves as pioneers and explorers, but Lenk's people had embarked on an adventure qualitatively different from Thistledown's journey, and with far less chance of success.

  Along the banks on both sides, black and brown pipes several meters wide reached down to the river, mouths half-submerged. Booming, sucking sounds came across the water, enormous organic pumps at work, drawing water from the river and transporting it inland. Every few kilometers we passed these pipes, part of Liz's immense hydraulic system, circulating water for all of her scions.

  Ten hours into the journey, Randall divided a loaf of bread between the four of us. “Wine?” he asked, offering a small ceramic jug. Larisa ate her bread in delicate nibbles, staring at the far shore, but refused the wine, scooping water from the river instead.

  I accepted a cup. The wine was heavy and sweet, with a bitter aftertaste. I carefully did not make a face. Randall, focused on my reaction, seemed dissatisfied.

  “You didn't say where you studied ... Though I assume at Jakarta, since that's where most of the Datchetongs have lived since Lenk brought us here.”

  “I studied independently,” I said.

  Randall squinted. “I'm as fond of Liz as anyone ... But I can't imagine being alone in the silva for years. I'd go slaps. What was it like?”

  “Hard,” I said. I grinned. “I almost did go slaps.”

  “You're a cautious man, Ser Olmy.”

  “Being alone does it,” I said.

  He shaded his eyes, searching the overgrown banks. “There are a couple of camps along here. Prospectors, small crop farmers, gatherers. Characters. I promised to look in on one. Kimon Giorgios is his name. He likes being alone, too.”

  I followed Randall's gaze to the western bank. The lizboo arborids were hung with orange sausage-shaped pods as much as two meters long, dangling over the water like a thickly tasseled fringe. Through the fringe, I saw a pale brown smudge hidden among the shiny black trunks. “Is that a house?” I asked.

  Randall rose to a crouch, hands on his knees, and murmured, “Yesss. Sharp eyes, Olmy.”

  The boat pushed slowly into a narrow branch of the main river. Amid lizboo and thick clumps of phytids, five cathedral trees surrounded a small clearing. An elegantly crafted small house stood in the clearing. Hinged window covers raised on stakes propped up in the dirt gave it the appearance of an old, crippled bird trying valiantly to fly.

  Shrill whistling broke out on the opposite shore and was taken up by the silva around the house. The sound bothered neither Randall nor Shatro, so I did not act surprised, either.

  Randall hailed the house. No one answered. He gestured for Shatro to take us in closer. We pushed up onto the bank beside the clearing.

  “Giorgios has been up and down this river for years,” Randall said. “He knows it better than anyone. Someone looking for a guide ... like Janos Strik...” He didn't finish his thought. We stepped off the prow and walked up the bank, listening to whistles echo back into the depths of the silva. Larisa stayed under the shade Randall had rigged, peering out at us like a small, frightened animal. Randall and Shatro walked around the house and Randall called Giorgio's name. Still no answer.

  Randall entered the house through the front door. A startled curse was followed by a relieved chuckle. A scion the size of a cat, tubular red body mounted on three long, thin legs, stalked through the front door with slow dignity, pointed what might have been its head at the shore and the boat, and turned to walk into the jungle.

  Randall came out of the house shaking his head. “He's been gone for days. Liz is starting to move in.” He climbed into the launch. Shatro and I pushed the boat off the bank and climbed in after him. Randall took the tiller and guided us back to the middle of the main body of the river.

  Randall nodded as if keeping time with some inner tune. “He'd have shut the house up if he'd left voluntarily. Never left it open for longlegs. He's well-known on the
river. Everyone knows he's the best guide upstream.”

  Larisa shouted, “They took him!” Her voice rang across the river and was met with more high whistling from both shores.

  “If they were smart, they probably did,” Randall said.

  Shatro sat in the bow and said little, but scanned the river constantly.

  Twelve kilometers from Calcutta, the banks of the Terra Nova grew in height and narrowed to form a deep gorge only fifty meters wide. The launch rushed through the gorge with thrilling speed. Randall took the tiller, and we avoided the few rocks and quick, broad eddies without mishap.

  I observed large pink parasols waving like huge hands on the rims of the gorge. Black and electric blue creepers hung down the sheer, mist-shiny black walls, pulsing as they pumped water from the river to the silva above. After several kilometers, the walls dropped again and we passed through low, flat countryside, populated by thick canopies of lizboo and punctuated by the ubiquitous cathedral trees.

  “Did you see any heliophiles this far south?” Randall asked. We had been quiet since leaving the deserted cabin, and he seemed to want to break the grim mood. I did not know what heliophiles were, so I shook my head.

  “Some years they travel south of Moonrise, but I haven't seen them recently. They're taking a different role in Liz's scheme, I think ... You must have relied on diospuros.”

  “Kept me alive most of the time,” I said. Edible after soaking in water and cooking, high in usable protein and sugars, sweet and meaty to the taste, diospuros had been one of the first phytids used successfully for food. If Randall was testing me, however, he would soon catch me up.

  “Did you see whitehat feeding on diospuros?”

  “No,” I said. “I saw them sucking on lizboo.”

  “That's their habit this far north. South of here, where we haven't depleted them, they seem to prefer diospuros.” Randall seemed satisfied with this, and kept silent for the next few kilometers.

  The sun felt good on my hands as I clasped the launch's gunwale. Much of the time, the sky was veiled by thin, high ice-crystal clouds, diffusing the sun's hot disk into an incandescent pearl. I shifted forward and leaned back, closing my eyes in the bright, milky glare. My neck muscles had bunched with something ... tension, I supposed. I could not remember having felt tense in years—if ever. The implants and supplements I had given up for this mission had smoothed so many of my body's basic reactions; I seemed to be experiencing a new kind of existence, or at least one largely forgotten.

  My vision blurred and I drifted into a musing doze, also a novel experience.

  I jerked and lifted my head, blinking at a shadow leaning over me.

  Shatro handed me a tin of biscuits. He spoke softly, diffidently. “We'll see Calcutta in an hour.”

  The river broadened and the current slowed again. Larisa came out from under the shade and sat well apart from me, staring at nothing in particular but away from the boat, lips pursed, brows elevated as if in unending surprise. On Thistledown, her family would take her in for a mental refresh. Even divaricates recognized mental dysfunction.

  Randall joined me with his own tin of biscuits. “You've not heard much news recently, then.”

  I liked Randall, felt that he was sympathetic, but I was not looking for more conversation. I needed much more time to study, to avoid being caught up in stupid mistakes. “Yes,” I said. “I apologize for my ignorance.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “The political situation has changed since you left ... Calcutta?”

  “Calcutta,” I said.

  “Passed through Moonrise.”

  “On my way upriver, yes.”

  “Brion sent his dogs out to savage the north coast last year. They've ransacked seven villages and stolen everything they could get their hands on ... including children.”

  “Why take children?” Shatro asked, shaking his head. “It doesn't figure, a hungry community stealing children.”

  “They may not be hungry anymore, if the stories are to be trusted. We don't talk with Naderville much now,” Randall said. “Somebody in Naderville may have made some calculations and realized we'll outstrip them in population and influence in the next generation. Their women are exhausted and they can't make their baby machines work. Stealing kids in populations as small as ours makes sense, if you can feed and raise them.”

  I had heard nothing about baby machines. Nkwanno's references did not mention them either. Divaricates had never believed in ex utero gestation and birth. “Nobody's fought back?” I asked.

  Randall gave me one of his appraising looks. “Lenk doesn't seem to have the stomach for a war. I think he hopes Naderville will just fade away. But they've regained a lot of strength in the last year. Of course, when they communicate with us at all, they publicly disavow General Beys ... But he delivers his goods to Naderville, all the same.”

  We sat in silence for a moment. Then Randall said, “Do you have anyplace to stay in Calcutta?”

  “Hospice,” I said. “No money.”

  “No need to stay in hospice. Why not stay with my family while you wait to testify? Might be a couple of days.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I'm not very presentable. I've been on my own for so long...”

  “We've been down south on the Terra Nova for the last two weeks,” Randall said. “I'm sure you've seen interesting things, even if you don't know how to interpret them. There aren't enough researchers on this planet that we can afford not to talk with each other.”

  Six kilometers above Calcutta, the geology changed abruptly. The land became bumpy and rugged. The silva thinned, leaving cathedral trees and a few scattered lizboos rising like game markers on a low rolling carpet of vivid purple and sky blue. Pale gray granite hills rose to the west, capped by thick, violet phytids.

  “Look at the color on the hills this spring,” Randall said. “Brightest I've seen in many years. Wonder if Liz has changed a specification or two?”

  Shatro examined the hills through a pair of binoculars. He saw my interest and loaned them to me. I looked at the hills, a clump of lizboo two hundred meters from the bank, and saw a group of two-necked cleaners working on the arborids’ parasols and fans. Their eyeless heads swept from leaf to leaf with slow, sure motions, reminding me both of dinosaurs and microscopic tardigrades. I returned the binoculars to Shatro.

  “Ser Randall and I found seven more varieties of lizboo, all specialized to different mineral conditions,” Shatro said. “We've been measuring oxygen production in the deep silva.”

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Elementary, really,” Randall said. “Lenk gave us a commission to make sure Liz isn't headed toward another flux. The silva really isn't an important source of oxygen. Negligible, actually. Most of it comes from the coastal oceans. Dissociation of water, we presume—though we don't know. But oxygen levels in the silva could point to changes in the scion mix. It's important work, but rather dull.”

  I began to wonder how long I could hold out in conversation, as a visitor in Randall's house, without being unveiled as a complete fraud.

  I wondered when the Brionists would return to Moonrise and stake their claim. Would the disciplinary or the citizens of Calcutta oppose them? I tried to imagine this Brion, about whom there was nothing in Redhill: an ambitious petty dictator, I guessed, clothed in a ridiculous uniform.

  Shatro cut the motor and the launch drifted with the stream. Breezes carried unfamiliar scents—tomato juice, ginger.

  From the south, upriver, I heard the thin, flat whine of more motors. Three large flat-bottom boats were gaining on us. Clutching a half-eaten biscuit, Randall stepped aft and stared at them. With disgust, he crumpled the biscuit and threw it between the thwarts. “Here they come, the bold bastards,” he growled.

  Soon the three boats were less than a hundred meters away. Uniformed men crowded their decks, perhaps a hundred in all. Each flatboat was about fifteen meters long and six or seven across the beam, with shallow drafts and
long, wide cabins large enough to store farm and other equipment. No women were visible on deck. They would all be back home, I thought, rearing more children for Brion.

  The men standing around the cabins were mostly brown, a few blacks and whites, the familiar Thistledown mix. They wore tan trousers and loose-fitting white shirts. Most carried their large rifles prominently. Some smiled and talked in low voices as the boats passed the launch. The rest said nothing and just stared at us, rifles poised.

  “What do you know about a village upriver, called Moonrise?” Randall called to the boats. His face reddened as he got no answer. Larisa retreated to the shade and lay down, covering her face with her hands.

  A slight restless milling on the flatboats. We were very close. They could kill us all if they chose.

  “What about a citizen named Giorgios? Kimon Giorgios?”

  The boats motored ahead of us. We faced the men on the rear, faces young and old, all indifferent.

  “Where are the rest of you?” Randall called, a little foolishly, I thought. We sat waiting for an answer, but nobody replied in words. Instead, the men on the boats lifted their rifles and pointed them just over our heads, teeth shining behind the glistening black barrels.

  A high, ululating shout rose from the boats. The men lifted their hands and rifles and sang out again, voices echoing from the edge of the silva. The gray boats’ harmonizing electric whines sounded like a leftover taunt.

  “They're going to pass through Calcutta in broad daylight, and ahead of us,” Shatro said.

  “We're about six kilometers south of Calcutta,” Randall said. “Won't even talk with us. Absolute contempt. The bastards.”

  The silva grew lush again, lizboo with fringes of pods packed thick along both sides. On the northern bank, a glistening black sand beach pushed into the silva and along the river. A party of picnickers lazed over their midday meal, watching us. The men waved politely. They might have waved at the gray boats as well; they did not seem concerned. Three naked children splashed in the river, their musical shouts and screams rising above the liquid lapping of the river against the boat hulls. I wondered if the children had been called in to hide when the flatboats passed.