by Greg Bear
Everybody seemed unconcerned, relaxed...
I dropped one arm over the side and dabbled my fingers. The water was cold, but not bone-chilling. Before I could react, a silvery creature the size of a small trout swifted from the depths and plunged something sharp into my thumb. Jerking, clamping my jaw to still a startled yelp, I yanked my hand out, sucked away a drop of blood, and wiped the thumb quickly on my dark socks. A prick; nothing more. Nobody had noticed. I thought, the river knows me, as well, now.
The sky gleamed like old polished silver at zenith, bluing only above the horizon. Farther downriver, buildings appeared in more clearings, closely attended by lizboo: boathouses, some sort of small factory with smoke pouring from a thin black stack and men marching across a clearing in black aprons, loading wagons. I saw only a few tractors, and of course there would be no horses or oxen; the Lenk group had brought no animals with them.
A small farm nestled between walls of lizboo like a brown postage stamp on red and purple and black paisley. Silos, but no barns. Out of place, my mind said, but it actually looked quite lovely, familiar in my gut, though I had never seen such a thing in actual experience. I imagined fields of crops—grain and vegetables, biomass ponds—inland, away from the river, perhaps scattered between or spread across the low plateaus northeast of Calcutta, as Redhill described: human intrusions that Liz apparently tolerated. As we passed the farm, a young man in blue and brown workits—overalls of an ancient cut—came out on a small dock and waved to us. Randall and Shatro returned his wave.
“There's a reception downriver, above Calcutta,” the young man shouted, his voice cracking with youth and excitement. “I'd pull in and wait it out.”
“What kind of reception?” Randall asked.
“Enough said. You might be spies.”
Randall shook his head and waved his thanks for the slender warning, but we did not pull in.
“A reception?” Shatro asked nervously.
“I think he means Calcutta isn't going to let the flatboats pass,” Randall said.
“What can they do?”
“I'd like to find out.”
Shatro started to object, but shut his mouth and lowered his head. Randall stood at the bow, glaring downriver. We all listened. Larisa moaned beneath the shade.
“We should land the woman,” Shatro said.
Randall did not seem to hear him.
“Perhaps Ser Olmy would like to get out, too,” Shatro added.
I shook my head. I was as curious as Randall to see what sort of response the town might mount.
A few shots like snapping sticks sounded down the river. We all jumped as one.
Randall told Shatro to bring the launch about and run the motor at quarter speed, letting us drift with the current, but more slowly. An island covered with pure black lizboo split the Terra Nova half a kilometer ahead. “That's where I would do it,” Randall said. “Which way ... right or left?”
“I would take my flatboats around both sides,” I said.
“Both sides flow deep,” Randall said. “But the best side is to the east, left. It's the widest. A lazy, self-assured pilot would go to the left ... And that's where I'd put my pickets and lay my traps. The Brionists are arrogant bastards, Ser Olmy. They think they know more than we do. They think we've become sheep.”
More wide-spaced shots, then a steady series of crack-crack-crack-crack, frantic shouting, a boom. A puff of smoke rose above the trees, whirling. “Left,” Randall called out, and Shatro turned the tiller to veer us east of the island.
In the silva along the left bank, men and women stood peering downriver, talking. Some waved and grinned like fools as we passed; others shouted warnings. “Skirmish ahead! Pull in!”
Randall shook his head and ignored them. Shatro was becoming more and more agitated, sweat standing out on his pale face. He stared grimly forward with his pale blue eyes as if expecting the boat to be swallowed.
We rounded a stand of lizboo on a narrow sand spit. Randall increased the turns on the motor. At less than a kilometer an hour, we descended toward the three Brionist flatboats. Nets and ropes had been strung across the river and the flatboats were caught in them. Men had been pulled off into the water by the ropes and swam around their boats, heads bobbing in the current. One man hung from a sagging rope, feet dragging in the river, dead. On the eastern bank, shots rang out from behind cover of small shacks and lizboo trunks. The men on the flatboats were returning fire as best they could, but they were exposed, and more and more of them were falling to the deck or into the water. The air filled with more cries and shouting.
From the shore came war whoops and more shots. A sizzling pipe bomb flew over the river and bounced on the deck of the leftmost flatboat, rolled into the water, and exploded, sending up a plume of spray. Another landed squarely on the cabin, rolled to the starboard side, blew up, and propelled a cloud of splinters high into the air. Yet a third landed on the middle boat and a man plucked it up to toss it away. It exploded in his hand and his arm and head vanished. On the shore, mingled cries of horror and cheers met this sight, and more cheers as the headless body crumpled and slid off the deck.
I felt a sick excitement. My stomach knotted and I clenched sweaty hands. I smelled gunpowder and burning and something else—I presumed it was blood. My skin crawled and my throat closed and I choked at the thought of breathing the vapor of somebody else's blood.
All three flatboats were hopelessly caught. From their decks now came cries of surrender, and a few men stood with hands raised, throwing their weapons into the water.
“No quarter!” someone bellowed from the shore, no doubt a student of history. Shots continued, but fewer in number. The rightmost of the flatboats was taking on water and listing badly. Other sounds came to us, muffled, like trapped animals crying out. Randall stood in the bow, brow creased. “Fates and breath,” he said. “There are prisoners in that boat.”
He walked aft, took the tiller from Shatro, swung the launch around again and propelled us at full speed down the river, directly toward the fight. Shatro scrambled to the middle of the launch. “Where are we going?” he shouted.
“That boat is going to founder,” Randall said.
Shatro sat beside Larisa, who stared straight ahead like a doll, frightened out of her wits.
The cries from inside the listing flatboat came louder now. A few bullets zizzed past our heads until voices on the banks shouted that we were not Brionists. The river was backing up behind the flatboats, fifteen meters ahead, and we began to yaw in an eddy. Randall took advantage of the eddy and steered us to the right. The rightmost flatboat, heeling onto its starboard side, suddenly threw open its cabin hatches and seemed to erupt. Heads, arms, legs poured onto the deck: children, I saw, over two dozen of them.
I could not help crying out, and Randall nodded grimly, tears on his cheeks falling in twin glittering streams. The children leaped and fell off the tilting deck into the water. A man carrying two babies lost his balance and also fell. For a moment, he held the babies up, then let them go and swam to save himself.
I thought of ants falling from a floating leaf.
The water was filled with bobbing heads: a few Brionist soldiers, but mostly children of all ages. Our boat moved in among them and Shatro and I immediately began grabbing arms, legs, heads, pulling children into the boat, five, six, eight, nine, I lost count. Larisa remained rooted to her seat, staring left and right like an antique toy. A young girl with slick wet hair climbed over her, crying out, “I know you! I know you!” and tried to hug her. Larisa pushed her away with frightened disgust.
More boats came from the shore now, dinghies and smacks and canoes. The river filled with boats.
A crouching soldier on the flatboat mechanically aimed and shot his rifle into the rescuers. As if in a dream, I watched him take aim, fire, and turned to see a splash of water beside a boat, or a man scream and grab his chest, lurching backward. The soldier's expression was calm, indifferent. I stared
at him for what seemed minutes but could only have been a few seconds.
A small body came out of the water in Randall's arms and he passed it to me. I immediately laid it on the forward bench and began artificial respiration. It was a young boy. His skin was warm and his eyes open, staring. I dreaded he was already dead. But after a few of my puffed breaths he shut his eyes tight, coughed up water and vomited, and started to breathe, and then to scream and thrash. I spat the sour taste of vomit from my mouth and handed him to an older boy, who cradled him in a skinny lap.
I looked up, took another child from Shatro, and then another, and saw that our launch held too many, was in danger of tipping over itself. We had drifted with the current past the flatboats. A few men still huddled on the decks, but most had retreated within the cabins.
The soldier with the rifle had been shot and lay over the gunwale, blood dripping from his ruined head into the river.
A few shots still rang out, from the boats and from the shore, but the children were the main concern of most of the citizens.
Randall gave Shatro the tiller again and shouted at Larisa to help keep the children calm. She did not move. The launch carried perhaps twenty-five boys and girls, the youngest barely two, the oldest twelve or thirteen, all terrified, pasty white or olive green with shock. A small boy's body lay in bottom of the boat, staring with the slack empty look of the dead. The boat smelled of fear and urine and vomit. “Put in to shore,” Randall told Shatro. “Olmy, help me get these children to the port side ... to the left.” I helped rearrange five of the youngsters, moving them bodily if they were too stunned or frightened to respond.
The launch ran up onto a small black sand beach, nearly knocking me off my feet. A tall, wiry older girl fell into the water and clambered ashore on her own, hair streaming sand and water, face set with determination to stay alive and get away from the madness.
Three women and two men came out of the silva behind the beach and helped us unload the children.
“Where are they from?” a matronly, tall woman with graying hair asked. She gripped two children by their arms. One kicked his feet in the water and began to scream.
“I don't know,” Shatro answered.
“From Moonrise, perhaps,” Randall suggested.
How many villages had had their children stolen?
A man in soaked brown pants and clinging white shirt swam to the beach and stood in the shallows, lurching ashore. He glanced at us, saw we were busy tending to the children, and tried to run into the silva, but two strong young men in workits carrying large sticks blocked his path. “Who are you?” one asked him.
“I give up,” he said breathlessly.
They took him away, whacking him on the shoulders and back with their fists.
The children were led or walked on their own back into the silva, and the launch bobbed gently in the water now that it was lighter, beginning to come around stern first and pull off the beach. A single boy of five or six had stayed in the boat. He gripped the gunwale with both hands and looked over his shoulder at me.
“My name is Daniel Harrin,” he said. “My family is dead. Where do I go?”
Other than the dead boy still in the bottom, he was the last in our care. I sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder. “We'll find you a place, Daniel,” I said.
Larisa had somehow managed to get ashore, where she squatted on the sand, as helpless and useless as ever. I felt a sudden flash of hate mixed with pity for her. So many primitive emotions in one hour; I felt drained.
Randall moored the boat with a line and anchor, and stood in the water beside us, staring at me and at the boy.
“Where have we gone so wrong?” he asked.
4
Calcutta rose along the scallops and harbors of the west bank like a magnificent card castle, more lovely than I expected. Yellow and white walls rose from the surrounding red and black and pink silva. The late-afternoon sun burnished the tops of the low, planar, angular buildings like white gold. The walls merged with steps descending past level parks and warehouses to the river, where the waters slopped and slid.
As the boat cruised past the outlying sections of the city—if it could be called a city, having less than five thousand residents—I saw that most of the buildings were made of painted xyla, probably lizboo or cathedral tree. Foundations and retaining walls were concrete and granite. Of steel and plastic I saw little. Broad glass windows faced the east and the river. That meant furnaces and manufacturing.
The launch passed a few other boats. Shatro and Randall sat in the rear, Larisa back beneath the shade, and I took the bench near the bow. We had been relieved of the dead boy and we had cleaned the bottom of the boat as best we could with buckets of water and rags.
I could not clear my head of the sounds and smells. Vomit from the boy I had breathed life back into stained my shirt and pants. Parts of me still saw and analyzed, but the center of my thoughts was a numb grayness. I could not sleep yet but I wanted to fall asleep. The closest I could come to sleep was to sit on the bench and stare and try not to remember too clearly.
I had never felt strong parental instincts until I saw the children in the water. Now, behind the grayness, flashes of horror and unconditional love for the children, and animal hatred, the urge to wrap my hands around the necks of the Brionists, all came and went like lightning behind clouds.
I would have to work hard to keep my objectivity. My mission was to study Lamarckia, not to become involved in immigrant politics.
The tallest building rose from the city's center on a low hill, four rounded stories, each eccentric from a central axis, beneath cantilevered pagoda roofs and porches that to me seemed lovely if ancient: Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, I thought, a touch of Tibet, Shangri-la, trying to remember fragments of terrestrial art history that I had explored before all my memory supplements had been removed.
The missing information bothered me. I shuddered slightly, stumbling onto a lapse in some personal wisdom based on memory no longer accessible, like a missing molar. I hated that sensation. It made me feel reduced, less capable; it shook my confidence. What if I lurched into a crucial gap during an emergency?
But none of this really mattered compared to what we had just experienced.
The launch slid smoothly into a covered berth at the municipal dock. As Shatro secured the lines, I climbed out of the boat and took a deep breath, turned, and found Randall staring at me blankly. Suddenly he smiled. He looked like a wolf.
“We did some good back there,” he said. “We'll go to the court tomorrow and let them know you're here. You can stay with my family tonight.”
Larisa came out from under the shade, stiff with dignity or perhaps exhaustion. She barely looked at us. “I have family here,” she said. “I do not need your help.”
“Thomas wants you at the court,” Randall reminded her.
She nodded. “I will be there.” She glared at me. Her eyelids drew together and her face seemed full of hatred. “I do not need your help.”
We walked through the center of Calcutta to Randall's home. Shatro said his farewells and went off to his own home. He was unbonded, Randall said, and lived with an older man and woman in the Karpos neighborhood. “They raise fruits there. Pears and apples do well if you grind up lizboo parasols for fertilizer. They naturally give up the right nutrients for those trees. It's a luxury crop, but that's nothing against it.”
The courthouse, center of the district's legal proceedings, sat just below the elegant tower on Calcutta's highest hill. We walked up a long winding flight of steps lined with homes and shops. The tower, Randall said, was the Lenk Hub, seat of cross-district government and home of Lenk himself when he chose to come to Calcutta.
“It's really quite spare quarters for such a fine man,” Randall said.
“Do you know him?” I asked.
“Through Captain Keyser-Bach.”
The broad steps were caught in afternoon shadow, which seemed richly brown,
almost golden beneath the silver sky. The city smelled of cooking food, mostly yeasty bread smells and rich molasses smells, dust from carts rolling on the busy street below, orange and tomato and spice from the silva never completely absent. Children ran laughing and shrieking down the steps beside us, boys and girls from late infancy to middle childhood, wearing red shorts and white vests with green vertical stripes, tended by a young man with a bemused look, no doubt junior husband in a triad. Otherwise, the streets were quiet, the citizens polite, their clothes muted, generally browns and grays or greens, each however with one splash of color, a scarf or sash or belt, signifying solemnity within living joy. These traditions had held up well on Lamarckia.
I was relieved that not everything had fallen into chaos. After all I had heard of famine and hardship, I was surprised that Calcutta looked prosperous and its citizens well-fed.
At the top of the stairs, in a shaded courtyard graced with a single terrestrial tree—an ash, I thought, its limbs bare, not faring very well—we turned into a narrow alley. The houses that rose on either side were made of cut reddish lava held together by dark gray cement. An anonymous xyla doorway no different from the others pushed open with a creak at Randall's touch, and we entered cool shadow.
“Randall?” a woman called eagerly. “Erwin, is that you?”
“That's me,” Randall said. He smiled shyly, the wolf look gone. “That's my wife, Raytha. Head of family. I'm an infrequent extra here.”
Randall's family totaled seven: four children, age two to twelve, two younger girls and two older boys, who flocked around him with broad smiles and big eyes, simply glad to see their father; his wife Raytha, a plump, pretty woman the same age as he; and her mother, Kaytai Kim-Jastro. Ser Kim-Jastro was tall and straight and gray and formidable, and she did not hug Randall, but instead shook his hand and welcomed him back with deep gravity.
