Genetopia (14 page)

The Riverwalkers chanted but Flint did not know the words. Instead, he closed his eyes and thought of his sister. Was she alive still? Was she in some haul-boat with mutts and the Lost?

Afterwards, he showed Tallofmind the bracelet he had removed from Rendel’s wrist. “This is my sister’s,” he said, “but Rendel was wearing it. Rendel came from a trading settlement on the main river route to Farsamy. I have to go to Farsamy.”

Tallofmind nodded. “You won’t get there on foot,” he said. “Bide your time. We will see what can be done.”

~

Flint stumbled, again, and all around children giggled.

He squatted on his haunches and grinned wryly.

“Stand,” Sister Judgement said patiently. “Breathe and hold. Find the Joyous Breath, Brother Flintheart.”

He stood, raised his hands above his head and pressed the palms together, savouring the way it forced his ribcage to expand.

“Rhythms and Clouds,” Judgement said, and immediately the children started to slice air with flat hands, their mechanical motions keeping perfect time to Shuza’s bone drum.

Judgement stood before Flint and looked up at him. Here, in a class of six and seven year-olds, he towered above his teacher, too.

“Patience,” she said now, to Flint alone. “You must pass through the seven stages of clumsiness before your mind is free to roam through your body. Only then will you find that all parts of your body move as one, a single machine in tune with the Lord’s will.”

“But... you told me before that every part of the body must be allowed to move independently.”

“As part of the Lord’s pattern,” corrected Judgement. “The two are not in conflict. Flow with softness and continuity, Brother Flintheart, and all will follow and you will be whole before the Lord.”

Seesthroughlies had insisted that Flint learn the fighting meditation discipline they called Lordsway using the same phrase: “Learn to become whole before the Lord, Flintheart, and your mind and body will become a single machine.”

Judgement placed the flat of her hand against Flint’s naked belly, pressing the curled body hair flat. “Everything comes from here,” she said. “Your true centre. Concentrate, Flint, and feel the stillness and balance coming from here.”

Even after she withdrew her hand he felt the imprint of her fingers. And then he sensed something else, a feeling of calmness spreading.

“Rhythm and Clouds, Flint.”

And he felt the drum’s pulse instantly. He focused on the still centre Judgement had shown him, and started to slice the air with flat, stiffened hands–a man among children, although he felt more a dwarf among giants.

~

Tallofmind showed him the work they were carrying out on the podhuts just inside Restitution’s stockade defences.

One of the first things he had seen upon entering the settlement had been the scaffolding encasing these podhuts, sculpted cane cages being used to guide the growth of new cells.

Now, the short Riverwalker scrambled up the scaffolding above Flint, beckoning for him to follow. “Most of these podhuts are grown from tubers supplied from the fields at Beshusa,” said Tallofmind. “But here we are experimenting with growing our own. It is a skill that we do not traditionally have, but we Riverwalkers learn what we need. It is merely a matter of applying engineering principles.”

“The Riverwalker way,” said Flint, smiling to show that his comment was meant positively. He had come to understand that much of these people’s beliefs could be summarised in the same way: applying engineering principles to the body, to the mind, to their surroundings. “We are all machines, no?”

Tallofmind grinned, and plucked at his dense beard.

They talked of themselves as machines, constructed by the Lord. They talked of the changed Oracle as a “lost wisdom machine”; of the changing vectors in the dipping vats as “tiny machines loaded with the power of the Lord”.

“The Lord built us,” said Tallofmind now. “And He built the mutts beneath us. He changed nature so that it deferred to True Humankind and kept us at the top, through the destruction of what some call Biogiddeon and others call Armageddon or the Fall and on into the end times in which we now live.”

He waved a hand slowly, encompassing Restitution and beyond. “The whole world is the Lord’s judgement machine,” he said. “And it’s thinning us out for eternal paradise or starting all over as new people, new beings. You stay saved, Flintheart, do you hear me?”

~

Seesthroughlies came to him at the Communary shortly after dawn the following day.

Flint sensed his arrival, somewhere in the periphery of his awareness, but he hung onto his centre, holding the Joyous Breath and the rapture of oneness of mind and body.

Seesthroughlies waited.

~

Flint released a breath that had been like sweet nectar in his lungs. Slowly, awareness grew of the morning dew on the moss beneath his calloused soles, of trumpeting dawn oaks celebrating the breeze, of an emerald-glinting millipede as thick as his thumb ascending the stone wall that surrounded the Communary’s small shrine yard.

“Tallofmind tells me you want to go to Farsamy,” said Seesthroughlies.

Flint nodded slowly, moving still with softness and continuity. Sister Judgement had taught him well and quickly.

He tightened the tie on his loin cloth and took his cloak from the wall.

“We always send a delegation to Carnival,” said Seesthroughlies. “Leave with us tomorrow.”

Chapter 11

He had watched the Riverwalkers’ boats from the stockade on many occasions, marvelling at the way they appeared to glide across the water, but this was the first time he had been in one.

Now, he sat at the prow of one of the long, narrow vessels, almost at the level of the water. The boat was constructed from a translucent quickfibre membrane, stretched over a skeleton of ribcanes. When he placed a hand against the boat’s skin it felt warm to the touch, and he could feel the river’s currents surging beneath.

He sat with Tallofmind and Judgement and three others. Behind them, five rows of paired mutts worked the boat’s treadles. Each mutt leaned slightly forward, holding onto a curved ribcane spar, raising one foot and then another and then pressing down on the angled, flat surface of a small bladder. Their actions pumped fluid around a living network of veins that lined the boat’s walls, driving a series of paddles at the stern. And, when seen from a distance, the mutts appeared to be walking on the water.

Flint remembered the first time he had seen one of these boats. He had stared at it from the jungle in delirious wonder.

He turned to Judgement, now, and saw how the merciless sunlight picked out a tracery of lines on her brow, around her eyes and her mouth. “No goods?” he asked. Farsamy Carnival was the biggest market of the year, a time when clans from all around gathered to trade their specialist wares and produce.

Judgement smiled and placed a hand on the side of her head. “In here,” she said simply.

Flint nodded. The Riverwalkers boasted the finest engineers of the True, and they traded on their expertise. Many of the Riverwalkers on these four boats would not return to Restitution after Carnival, perhaps staying away for several years, joining other clans as bondsmen and spreading the Lord’s word.

Already–it was still only mid-morning–Flint heard the roar of the waters where the two great rivers joined, the smaller Transom feeding into the river Farsam.

He looked down and saw smudges of dark movement through the boat’s thin skin. Snapping turtles, he recalled, and other tentacled monsters in the depths. Suddenly the boat felt far too flimsy for such a journey.

He gripped the side.

“This is where I nearly drowned,” he said to Judgement.

There was an expression of sympathy on her face as she looked down into the waters, and then out across the river.

He could see the mouth of the Transom, now, and the clouds of silver gulls squabbling over scraps in the surf where the two rivers joined.

The boats passed below the chalky cliffs and Flint saw that they were barely twice his height in places. They looked to be an easy climb and yet the sheer sense of devastation he had felt upon reaching them before was still with him.

He breathed deep and held the air in his lungs, felt the panic-laden memories receding.

Up ahead, he saw a haul-boat heading south. He thought of Amber. Such thoughts were rarely far from his mind, but now they had a well-worn feel about them. They were an established part of his existence, something that gave his days shape.

He knew that his last realistic chance was rapidly approaching. If he did not find Amber in Farsamy then he would have little chance of finding her at all.

~

“She is about so high–” a hand, held flat at the level of his breastbone “–with chestnut hair to her shoulders. The whites of her eyes are jaundiced from childhood illness. She is a True daughter of Clan Treco. She may be travelling independently, but I am fairly certain that she has been abducted and sold into servitude as a bondsman.”

The same response: a regretful shake of the head, a shrug of shoulders, a mumbled apology, but no, they had not seen such a young woman.

Beshusa was a town made of flesh. Its streets were lined with podhuts, grown from tubers cultivated for many tens of generations by Clan Beshusami. The huts squeezed together, fleshy walls conjoined, held rigid by exoskeletal ribcanes and fibre-plates. The walls were transparent in places, networked with nerves and veins; in others they were the sheer black of night, or varied jungle colours; birds nested in nooks and crevices and in tangled tufts of body hair growing from the buildings. Vines and air plants grew from pockets in the walls, and hummingbirds and great, gaudy butterflies flitted and hovered before extravagant blossoms that may have been growing on the huts or may have been growing
from
the huts themselves.

Even the road surfaces were lined with networks of fibres, linking the buildings so that the city was, in truth, a single organism, a communal creature grown to house Clan Beshusami and its followers.

Half a day’s travel downriver from the joining of the Transom and the Farsam, Beshusa was an ideal stopping place for the Carnival party from Restitution.

Flint moved on, away from the cluster of old men that had gathered by a bulbous drinking fountain on a street corner. The Riverwalkers were staying in a rooming house that overlooked the Farsam, but he had left them at the first opportunity. He would travel with them to Farsamy tomorrow, but now he had to take the chance to make enquiries, to see if, by any small chance, anyone knew of Amber.

He had been to Beshusa once before, travelling as a boy of eleven with a Trecosi group led by Callum and his wife of the time, Ann. There was a Treco clanhouse in Beshusa, and some clan business or other had demanded a visit from Trecosann. Flint had known little of the detail even then, and what he had known had been quickly forgotten–a wedding, or death, he supposed. But it had been an opportunity for young Flint to travel with his uncle and the others and his abiding memory was the sense of freedom, a lifting of weight.

Now, he recalled that his cousin, Mallery, had also been in the party, and the sisters Lessa and Nettie, and others whose names and features evaded the reach of his memory.

A handful of images lingered from that visit. He remembered the crowding, fleshy buildings, and their gaudy growths and efflorescences, but he did not recall the intensity of smell of the place: heady floral scents mingling with something sharp; an underpinning odour of decay, ever present; the meaty smell like split fleshfruit that could make you feel hungry or nauseous or sometimes both.

And he remembered the sense of being somewhere crowded, with people all about. Many were even strangers to each other, which was an unfamiliar phenomenon to someone not of the city–so many people passing in the street without even a nod of recognition.

It would be easy to lose oneself in such a place.

~

Night had fallen, cool and dark, the moon and stars lost behind clouds. The only light came from tubes of glow-water arranged in pictograms on the fronts of buildings, and spilling out from the podhuts’ interiors.

There was someone in the clanhouse, or lights, at least.

He had found his way to another street-corner drinking fountain and splashed his face with cool water. Head clearer, he remembered his childhood visit here, staying in the Trecosi clanhouse. Stopping people in the street, he asked them the way to the clanhouse, asked them where a member of Clan Treco should go when new in Beshusa, and they had directed him here.

The clanhouse was a swollen two-storey podhut on an intersection between one of Beshusa’s main thoroughfares and a sidestreet lined with more brewhouses and brothels. Semi-naked women–and mutts!–displayed themselves in windows and open doorways, chatting to each other, chewing gum, calling to passers-by. He did not remember it like this from his childhood visit, but then he could easily have been ignorant of these buildings’ functions at that innocent age.

He came to the clanhouse and saw movement behind translucent window panels, heard voices from the building’s slitted vents. In the gutter, street rats pulled at emptied fruit skins discarded by passers-by.

He paused, stood straight and inhaled, hanging onto the Joyous Breath as Sister Judgement had taught him.

There was a rattle by the door which he spun, but no one responded so he pressed at the door panel and passed through when it retracted from his touch.

He was in a small lobby, pausing in an arched entrance to the main hall. A bar counter had grown along the far wall and the air was thick with the smoke of headsticks. Four men sat at a bench by the window panel, sucking on beer tubes and passing sticks around. A young couple sat in a corner, bodies pressed close, part-enfolded by their fleshy seat, giggling and murmuring. A woman stood behind the bar, stroking its smooth flank as if she enjoyed the feel of its leathery hide.

He approached her, aware of eyes following him.

“Good evening, Walker,” said the woman.

A stranger here, they did not even recognise him as one of their own in his Riverwalker cloak and head chain, his new growth of beard.

He nodded in greeting. “Sweetwater,” he said, and then he gestured at a dish of dried porkapple strips. “And some of these.” He took a few shillings from the drawstring pocket in the cuff of his cloak, money that Judgement had given him shortly after they had arrived in Beshusa. He allowed the barwoman to take three of the ceramic coins from his hand, and sat at the bar with his drink.

After a time of silence, in which he ate and drank and gathered his thoughts, Flint said to the woman, “I came here once before, many years ago.”

“That would be before my time here,” she said, amenably. Flint saw that her entire neck vibrated as she spoke, like that of a calling tree frog.

He nodded, looking back down at his drink, and then around the clan hall’s colourless interior. “I am of the clan,” he said. “I am Trecosi, from Trecosann.”

“Looks to me like you turned your back on the clan,” said one of the four men, coming over from his window table to stand at the bar. Upright, he was just tall enough to look down upon the seated Flint.

Flint glanced down at his cloak. “The Riverwalkers saved my life,” he said, “and they took me in.”

“You’re returning to the clan, then,” said the man, aggressively.

Flint ignored the challenge. He did not have an answer, and even if he did, he felt no obligation to share it.

He remembered why he was here.

“I’m looking for my sister,” he said. “Her name is Amberlinetreco Eltarn. She went missing from Trecosann–” how long ago? he had lost track “–some time ago... at the start of the dry season. I am spreading word through the clan, asking cousins to look out for her.”

A glimmer of recognition flitted over the man’s face. “The runaways,” he said. “Tarn’s kids.”

Word had clearly spread already.

Flint stood. “Not runaway,” he said. “I set out to find my sister after she disappeared. I believe she has been enslaved.”

Now the man had been joined by one of the others, a taller man, Flint’s equal in height and easily twice as bulky.

“Could be that you should go back to Trecosann,” said the second, his voice slow, considering. “Not turning your back on the clan and parading around in the Walkers’ clothes.” He turned to his companion. “What kind of Trecosi walks into a clanhouse looking like a mad preacherman from upriver?” he asked.

Flint made sure that his posture did nothing to betray his sudden fear. He remained seated, one hand on his sweetwater bladder, the other loose on the bar counter. He inhaled, clung onto the Joyous Breath, felt solidity deep in his belly, calm spreading outwards.

The two men were blocking his way to the exit. He noted that the barwoman had moved away along the counter, was looking studiously in the other direction. In the corner, the young couple were watching, silent.

He twisted at the waist, still seated but now facing the two men. “I am True Trecosi,” he said softly. “And I am a Riverwalker, too. I am looking for my sister and I hope she will find a true welcome if she finds herself in a clanhouse.”
A truer welcome than this
, he refrained from adding.

Their movements were slow and clumsy and he was surprised at how much time he had. He saw the look pass between the two men, and then the inexact lurch of the younger, taller man as he made to seize Flint’s arms.

They were drunk, he knew, and also they did not have the control to move with smoothness and continuity as a Riverwalker did. Mind and body were disjointed for the two men, movements uncoordinated, independent of one another.

He swayed to one side, a slight, almost imperceptible, movement, but enough to deflect the big man’s lunge, leave him staggering forward across the bar.

He slid from the stool and stood in a comfortable pose, knees and arms bent slightly, ready for action.

Rhythm and Clouds
, he thought, and he felt the steady pulse of the world around him, moved in tune with it.

The shorter man swung, hand open to slap or grab, and Flint swayed again, let the man stagger. Hands stiff, he jabbed, and took the big man in mid-strike, fingers burying themselves deep in his assailant’s solar plexus. The man’s eyes bugged and he folded forward, gasping and coughing.

Flint stepped through the gap between the two men and turned, his back to the door now.

He stepped back, out into the darkness, and was immediately surrounded by the noise of the night, the flow of bodies. No one followed him from the clanhouse.

He followed the main thoroughfare and soon was able to let himself in to the rooming house where the Riverwalkers were staying.

~

Farsamy had grown out across the river from which it took its name.

Or, at least, that’s how it appeared to Flintheart as the city came into view around a meander ahead of the Riverwalkers’ boats.

Jetties and piers extended out from where the west bank must be, encalming wide areas of water to form harbours for the many craft toing and froing all the time. Spaces between jetties had filled in with floating podhuts, riding on great, air-filled bladders. Flint recognised Trecosi expertise at work there, remembering the ’huts that rode the floodwaters at Greenwater during the wet season. Judging by the scale of the docklands, great areas of the city must be permanently afloat.

Beyond, taller buildings rose above the podhuts, some were clearly tuber-grown but others must rely on the older technologies, built of stone, cane and wood. North of the city, Gossamer Heights embraced Farsamy, a cupola of limestone hills bunched together at the southern end of Spinster’s Spine. A similar distance to the west of the city and out of sight to Flint, the river Elver would be approaching its end, meeting the river Farsam just south of Farsamy.