by Greg Egan
As they sat under the tree recuperating, Seth began to feel nauseous. But his stomach was not rejecting the meal: the source of his discomfort was an overpowering odor, a suffocating, excremental stench that had risen up out of nowhere.
“You do smell that, don’t you?” he asked Sarah. He was about to speculate about the presence of a large, decaying animal cadaver somewhere upwind, but there was no wind to speak of.
“It’s disgusting,” she replied, peering into the undergrowth with an appalled curiosity, as if the source might abruptly reveal itself. But if she was as baffled as he was about the odor’s origin, the remedy was clear. “We need to get away from here.”
The light was fading, and there wasn’t much prospect of locating more fruit by pinging from the ground, so they decided to head back to the campsite. The stench kept them moving briskly at first, but then it fell away with surprising speed, robbing them of the extra impetus. Once it was gone Seth found himself dawdling lethargically, his limbs aching and his stomach heavy. It took all the discipline he could muster not to beg to be allowed to stop and rest, and when he glanced at Sarah he suspected that she would not have needed much persuading.
She groaned suddenly. “That smell? It was from the fruit!”
“What?” Seth took one from his pack and sniffed it; it was as inoffensive as bark.
Sarah grimaced, impatient with his obtuseness. “The fruit made us hate the smell of the tree. It drove us away, so we wouldn’t leave the seeds too close.”
Seth pondered the idea, unsure whether he felt resentful or amused. “Everybody needs to find their way south,” he conceded. And if they’d tried fleeing to the north, no doubt they would have found a malodorous gradient arranged to discourage them.
“Didn’t I say that already?” Judith was definitely amused. “In the end, none of us gets to choose where we’re going.”
upon their return they found the camp deserted, but Seth wasn’t worried; it was hard to judge the time in the forest, but it looked as if the sun had barely set. He bathed the cuts on his arms and face in the stream, then gathered dry leaf litter and twigs for a fire.
“So where are the others?” Sarah asked, glancing out into the deepening gloom as Seth arranged the pile of fuel beneath the cone guard.
“They probably found some food source worth persisting with,” he said. “If we’d reached that tree a bit later, we might still be there, trying to finish what we started.”
Seth kept the fire burning brightly, recalling his own return from the raid on Lida. But by his sixth trip into the undergrowth to gather more fuel, his optimism was wavering.
“Maybe they’ve set up their own camp for the night,” Sarah suggested. “If one of them’s injured, and just needs to rest overnight.”
“Maybe.” Seth could imagine situations where that might make more sense than going for help.
Judith said, “If they’re not back by morning we can mount a search, but until then I think it’s best to wait.”
“We should take turns sleeping,” Sarah decided. “If there’s going to be a search, we need to be rested.”
“All right.” Seth waited for her to lie down beside the fire, then realized that she was expecting him to go first, and he was weary enough not to argue.
When Sarah prodded him awake, Seth saw that she’d kept the fire burning, but the air was cold enough to convince him that it was sometime between midnight and dawn.
“No sign of them?” he asked, rising to his feet.
“No.”
“Raina and Amina survived the steamlands; there’s nothing in this forest that they can’t deal with. I bet someone’s just sprained a muscle.”
Sarah said, “Wake me if you get tired, or when it gets light.”
Seth sat by the fire, rubbing his arms. «You can sleep if you want to,» he told Theo. There was enough fuel stockpiled to last all night, and he could feed and tend to the fire without side vision.
«No, it’s my job to help keep you awake.»
«All right.» Seth wasn’t so proud as to insist that he could do that unaided. «I know it’s just simple geometry,» he said, «but it was still amazing to see so far south when we were up in that tree.»
«I have an idea for how to take that further,» Theo confided.
«Really? If it involves taller trees, I’m not sure I’m ready.»
«Have you got a small bag, made of light cloth?» Theo asked. «Like the ration bags for bechelnuts?»
«Sure.» Seth rummaged in his pack and found exactly what Theo had described. «Does it need to be empty?»
«Yes.»
There were only four nuts left; this was a good excuse to eat them. «All right. Now what am I meant to do with it?»
«Spread the opening as wide as you can,» Theo instructed him, «then hold it upside down over the fire.»
Seth walked up to the fire. It was not so fierce that the warmth was unpleasant when he stretched his arms out directly above the flames.
«Hold the seams by your fingertips, so your hands aren’t above the bag at all,» Theo said.
Seth complied.
«Now let go of the bag.»
«You want me to burn it?»
«If you’re worried about that, be ready to catch it if it falls.»
«If it falls?»
«Humor me,» Theo begged him.
Seth let his fingers part. Caught in the updraft from the fire, the bag rose up as high as his face before tipping over and starting to tumble; he brought his hands together and trapped it before it could get out of control.
«This is your idea for getting higher than the treetops?» Seth restrained himself from mocking the failed experiment too mercilessly, biting back an uncharitable quip about the value of experiencing the real heft of things as only a Walker could. «Even if you set a whole forest on fire, I doubt the updraft would be strong enough to keep a person from falling.»
«It’s not about the updraft,» Theo replied. «It’s about the reason for the updraft.»
«That’s too subtle for me.» Seth suspected that it was just bluster, but he wasn’t going to start an argument about it.
«I need to think it through some more,» Theo admitted. «When it’s clearer to me, I’ll try to explain it.»
«All right.» Seth sat and gazed into the fire, hoping the shared vision would prove inspiring, or at least not send them both to sleep.
sarah woke unprompted as the canopy began to brighten with the dawn. She glanced inquiringly at Seth, read the answer in his face, then stretched wearily and rose to her feet.
“Where do we look for them?” he asked.
“We should follow the stream,” she suggested.
Judith said she’d seen Raina and Amir setting out along the bank as the groups had parted, so everyone agreed that this was the best strategy.
The stream flowed from the south, and though they’d lost sight of it on their journey north—it must have petered out, veered west, or gone underground—when they pursued it in the opposite direction it proved to be a more useful landmark. Seth had been expecting to arrive at a point where the water emerged from the ground as a spring, leaving them with nowhere to go, but instead they kept encountering distributaries that had forked off into the forest, and upstream from each junction the flow only grew stronger and the water deeper.
Beside the stream the undergrowth became taller and more lush. Pale vines appeared, draping the trees, dotted with gray-and-orange puffballs. Seth didn’t doubt that they’d be as poisonous as their northern cousins, which sometimes appeared on the walls of derelict buildings—but every child was taught to avoid them, and it was inconceivable that Raina or Amir would have been foolish enough to mistake them for food.
Whatever animals the forest sheltered were proving shy so far; Seth caught fleeting glimpses of lizards fleeing from his feet, and heard movement in the treetops that might have been scampers, but it was clear that most of the fauna remained hidden. He wondered if some fierce predat
or, last seen by the ancients, might live on in this isolated jungle. He’d been taught that the laceraters had been hunted to extinction, or at the very least driven closer to the nodes than anyone ventured, but if the creatures’ sole encounters with civilization now consisted of picking off unwary surveyors, who would bring back word to the cities and ensure that the textbooks were rewritten?
“Do you hear that?” Theo asked.
Seth paused and strained to discern something more than burbling water, rustling branches, and insect chirps, afraid of where his imagination might lead him. “Is that rain?” He raised his palms toward the canopy, but however much water was pattering against the leaves, none was reaching his skin.
“It must be falling nearby,” Judith said.
As they continued upstream the noise grew louder, and Seth felt a fine spray dampening his face, though it remained so light that he couldn’t tell if it was falling straight down or wafting in on the wind. But the sound did not accord with this delicate mist; it seemed worthy of a torrential downpour.
They followed a bend in the stream, and the rain, finally, slanted down upon them in a palpable drizzle, bouncing noisily off the foliage above. But where the weight of the water forced the leaves aside, it opened up enough chinks in the canopy to show that the sky overhead was bright and cloudless. Seth had never encountered a sun-shower before where the elements were in such stark contrast—though perhaps the forest was distorting his perceptions, by amplifying the noise of the rain while concealing the rain-clouds themselves.
The stream led them deeper into the miniature storm, as if it were revealing its source. But it had been flowing at least since Amir reached the forest—and there’d been no trace of storm-clouds in the sky as they approached across the desert.
At the next bend, Theo’s vision showed the trees suddenly thinning away to the south. But if the forest came to an end here, in its place was no desert or grassland: the stream was emerging from a body of water so vast that nothing could be seen beyond it.
Seth struggled to make sense of the geometry. The surface of the water was neither flat nor horizontal: it arched into the air, rising higher than the trees around it, a vortex of splintered and braided torrents crashing together, sending a false rain spraying out over the forest.
“It’s some kind of waterfall!” Sarah shouted.
They approached as close as they dared without risking being drowned or deafened, and did their best to interpret the unnerving spectacle. There had to be a river flowing in from the south, running uphill and then hitting a peak here, sending water flying through the air in a mighty parabolic fountain. But the ground on the far side of the peak was apparently steep enough to drive the water back up again, traveling in the opposite direction. Where the two flows collided, the spatter was more than enough to pass for a rainstorm. But the remaining mass of circulating water couldn’t spin itself into an ever-larger reservoir forever, and as this airborne lake lost energy, it leaked away into the forest, giving rise to their stream and a dozen others.
They had found an unmapped river—perhaps one to rival the Zirona. In any other circumstances they would have been jubilant, but Seth felt numb and hollow.
As they headed back toward the camp, Theo said, “Those falls could change shape in an instant. If they were standing in the wrong place when the counterflow pushed the flow aside . . .”
Seth wasn’t ready to assume the worst. “Or they could be sitting under a tree somewhere, injured by a falling branch, or sick from a bad choice of fruit. We just have to keep searching.”
“Of course,” Judith agreed.
Sarah was quiet. Seth tried to think of something more that he could say to lift her spirits, but then he decided that Judith was better placed for the job.
When they reached the campsite Seth saw that the note he’d left pinned to Raina’s tent was missing. He sidled quickly up to the tent, calling out her name. But there was no reply, and the tent was empty.
“Seth!” Sarah was behind him, pointing to the ground. The note had fallen off and become tangled in the undergrowth. But it had not been hard to spot; if anyone had returned, they would still have seen it and waited.
“We need to make a plan,” she said. “It’s unlikely that they would have gone east, out toward the desert. So we should start by doing a sweep along the stream’s west bank.”
by the fourth day of the search they were moving through parts of the forest so dense, and so distant from the water, that it was difficult to imagine anything that could have lured their companions here on a quick hunt for food, bypassing all the fruit and berries in more accessible locations. Seth forced his way through the waist-high undergrowth, inured to the thorns and the insect bites, trying to forget the previous night’s dream in which a careless step in precisely the same conditions had ended with his foot plunging deep into Amir’s putrefying corpse. In the dream, the search had been going on for a thousand days, and he’d been dreading the need to explain to Amir that the children born in his absence represented hope, not betrayal.
Back in the camp that night he sat hunched over his meal, listening to the crackling of the fire.
Judith said, “We need to keep looking—but not around here.”
“Where else would they be?” Sarah asked.
Theo said, “Suppose they reached the waterfall, but it was in a different state than the one in which we found it. Maybe it was easy for them to get past it and walk alongside the river itself. But when they tried to return, the way was blocked. So they had to make a detour.”
“Even with a detour they’d be back by now,” Seth replied.
“Not if they got into trouble,” Theo countered. “All the things we first imagined might have happened nearby might still have happened—but on the other side of the falls.”
“So we should search along the river,” Judith proposed. “But we don’t need to risk the waterfall. We can go around the edge of the forest.”
“That’s a plan,” Sarah said quietly.
Seth gave his assent. He’d grown wary of expecting too much every time someone came up with a plausible new scenario and made it sound as if success was imminent—but almost anything made more sense than pushing deeper into the forest.
they packed up the camp and set out into the desert. There was no reason to adhere precisely to the ragged boundary where the vegetation surrendered to the sand, so they followed a broad arc south-west. They knew that the river had to come in from the west, or Raina and Amina would have stumbled upon it at the same time as Amir and Aziz found the forest itself.
By midday they’d passed the southernmost part of the forest, so they headed west-north-west. Seth was beginning to wonder if there might yet be some flaw in their reasoning, and the river would simply fail to materialize, vanishing as inexplicably as their friends. But he kept his doubts to himself.
“This must be what lured the forest south,” Judith mused. “The rain was growing sparser, but the trees and the animals could smell the falls throwing moisture to the wind.”
“Maybe the other forest is heading here, too,” Theo suggested. “The one we missed.”
“We might even be around to see them merge,” Judith replied. “Not now, but when Baharabad arrives.”
Seth wished he could distract himself with their chatter, but it just aggravated his growing sense of unease. Perhaps the river ran underground, all the way from some subterranean reservoir in the steamlands, flowing up along a vast fissure that only came to the surface at the falls. How could anyone find their way here, when the maps were out of date, local knowledge was off limits, and every town, river, or forest might have drifted, split apart, vanished, or merged?
No one spoke for what felt like an hour. Then Sarah said, “There it is.”
Seth squinted to the west. In the distance, something glinted in the afternoon sun.
As they grew nearer, he saw a hint of grasslands along the banks. If the forest relied on the chaos of the waterfall to m
imic rain, apparently this more modest vegetation could survive on whatever moisture seeped through the ground, or lingered from sporadic flooding when a surge flowed up from the steamlands.
Seth was relieved that the landscape hadn’t proved unremittingly perverse after all, but it seemed likely now that it would take them until nightfall to reach the riverbank. The intervening desert stretched out in front of them, not malicious, but indifferent to the urgency of the task.
As he scanned the glistening ribbon of water, he noticed a smudge of earthen colors far to the south. At first he thought it was simply a barren region where the desert came closer to the banks than usual, but when he turned for a better look it was clear that it was not flat ground.
“There’s a town,” he said. Someone else had found this newborn river, long before the surveyors from Baharabad had arrived.
9
As night fell they set up camp in the desert, behind a low, crumbling outcrop, out of sight of anyone traveling directly between the forest and the town.
Seth tried to remain clear-headed, uncommitted to any one theory about the townspeople’s role in his friends’ disappearance. All of the old possibilities of misadventure by natural causes remained, but even if these strangers had played some part in the event, it need not have been malicious. For all he knew, they could have stumbled upon the surveyors unconscious in the jungle, and carried them back to town for medical treatment.
He and Sarah had nothing to burn for a campfire, sparing them the need to decide whether it would be a risk worth taking, so they sat in the dark eating the pink repeller-fruit.
Sarah said, “If they’re in the town, we need to remember that their cover story will be different, because they weren’t found with their instruments.”
“Right.” Seth had considered it comical when he’d had to memorize two completely different lies, but he hadn’t forgotten the version where they claimed to be diplomats, originally part of a larger party that had been set upon by marauders midway through their long journey west. It was only if they were pegged as surveyors that they were to pretend to hail from Sedington—a town so much smaller than Baharabad that the prospect of its thirsty population coming after someone else’s water might sound more like an opportunity than a threat.
