by Greg Egan
«Ask them if they’re ready for some gifts.»
Theo replied, «Go ahead.»
Gripping the wall tightly with one hand, Seth reached into his pockets and passed up the salvaged bars, one by one—holding them beside the window and waiting for an occupant of the room to slide them out of his grasp. The axial bars had to pass through the gap at an unwieldy angle, but he managed to coordinate the handover with his silent collaborator without so much as a tap of stone on stone. He retreated from the window as slowly as he’d approached it, straightening his body and lowering his hands until he was merely standing beside the wall with an aching back and a few more scratches on his palms.
«If you were a better throw, you could have just tossed them through the window,» Theo joked.
Seth decided to stay beside the wall, rather than hide somewhere along the riverbank while his friends worked on the bars of their prison. No one in the house could see him here, but the more he moved about, the more he risked being heard. And if something happened inside that required his intervention, it would be better to be as close as possible.
He strained his ears for any rhythmic scraping or creaking, and was reassured to hear nothing. He’d resisted the urge to offer Raina and Amir any advice as to how they should attack the task, and he hardly needed to tell them that they could use a shirt wrapped around the work site to muffle the sound.
Theo said, «Catch!»
Seth stretched an arm out under the window and a piece of stone struck it before bouncing to the ground. Neither impact was silent, but both were quieter than if the fall had been uninterrupted. He squatted down and felt around for the object; it took a while to assess it by touch alone, but it seemed to be an entire, unbroken bar. «From the window?» he asked Theo. «Or did they drop a tool?»
«From the window.»
They must have chipped away at one of the mortises where the bar slotted into place, until the gap was large enough to work it loose. Seth resumed his position, with his arm out ready for a repeat performance. «Any response from the guards when it fell?»
«No. The two at the door are telling each other idiotic jokes, and downstairs is still completely silent.»
Seth only learned of the next bar’s removal when the news reached him via Theo; Amir had managed to hold onto it. The third bar was the same. «Someone’s showing promise for a second career as a burglar,» he said.
«We’ll all need something to keep us busy in retirement,» Theo replied.
There was a loud cracking sound, and two pieces of stone landed on Seth’s arm. Bizarrely, they both stayed put—they were short enough not to overbalance. He reached across and gathered them up, as if it mattered now whether they fell or not.
Theo said, «Someone just woke up.»
Seth remained flat against the wall. A lamp was lit in the northern room downstairs, illuminating a patch of the riverbank with sudden, startling brightness. Then he heard shouted instructions to the guards upstairs, to check on the prisoners.
Amir landed on the ground with a thud, and crouched for a moment in the lamplight. Without even tipping his head westward, he set off to the north. The moment he was out of the way, Raina jumped down to the same spot. West-facing, she must have seen Seth skulking against the wall, but she betrayed no sign of it; the escapees were taking care to do nothing that might give away his position.
As Raina bolted north, Seth heard hurried footsteps approaching from the south side of the house. If he ducked under the window and made it to the north side, the guards might not see him as they passed. He’d have a chance to slink away through the streets, while the pursuit remained confined to the riverbank.
Or he could make himself useful.
Seth moved quickly into the darkness to the south, then as three guards came around the corner he sprinted back again, straight toward the leading figure. He collided with the woman and pinned her against the wall, then kicked one of her feet out from under her and sent her toppling northward. She cried out in panic and clutched at his shoulders, but he took her hands and thrust them away, then sidled along beside her tilting body with his arms outstretched, keeping her trapped, blocking the safe fall to the west. The fabric of her clothing scraped against his own with an unnerving rasp that rose in pitch as it ascended ever faster—while some visceral part of him, balking as much at this uncontrolled acceleration as the cruelty of the act, implored him to bring the motion to a halt.
As her comrades rushed to her aid, Seth fled, but he’d confined the hapless guard to the plane of the wall long enough for her head to have risen higher than the building. He sped north along the riverbank, weaving between the reeds, listening for the aftermath. There was no impact, no screams of pain, so his victim must have been caught before she hit the ground—but he’d managed to tie up his would-be pursuers for as long as it took them to maneuver her to safety.
«Can you raise Aziz and Amina?» he asked Theo.
«I’m already talking to them.»
«So what’s the plan?»
«Keep running.» Theo hesitated. «We’re being pinged now. The guards can see us.»
«Just us, or the others?»
«Just us so far.»
Seth picked up his pace a little, but after so long without food or sleep even fear could not do much to revive his flagging strength. This route had been difficult enough to traverse when he’d been moving much more slowly; now every step on the uneven ground felt perilous. «Can you tell how many are following us?» Theo wasn’t pinging to the south at all, presumably because he still felt that offered some advantage.
«Five. Three closest to us, two in the rear. I swear there are lizards smarter than these Siders: the two behind need not have given themselves away, but they’re all pinging with the same strength and sweep, as if they had no choice.»
Five. Seth couldn’t think of any way that this could end well. The three in the front would easily overpower him, and then it might take just one to restrain him. Even if they had no allies that they could summon quickly, they had the advantage of local knowledge, and they were probably better rested than their former prisoners. In the end, they’d run down Raina and Amir, and everything he’d done would have been in vain.
But as he listened to the clumsy thudding of his footsteps, the river’s susurration rose up from the darkness.
He said, «Tell the others I’m going to swim for the eastern shore. Aziz and Amina should be far enough ahead to ping the water and see if anyone comes after me.» If any of the guards followed him in, dunking their already dysfunctional Siders, they were unlikely to be able to determine the location of the people pinging them—and even if they did, Walkers trying to convey those details to their comrades back on land over the noise of the river would be as good as mute.
«Passing it on,» Theo replied. His tone made it clear that the plan dismayed him—but if he’d had a better one, now would have been the time to argue for it.
As Seth swerved to avoid a clump of tall reeds, his balance faltered and he slipped on the treacherous mud. He managed to catch himself, but when he tried to speed up again he felt a throbbing in his ankle.
Theo conveyed the leaders’ verdict: «Amina says that if it looks safe, the others will follow you and meet you on the bank. If not, don’t stop until you’re back at the campsite.»
«Do they know how to get to the campsite?» Seth willed himself to forget the pain and hurtle forward; if he could summon a burst of speed that put him out of range of the Sleepsiders behind him, there’d be no need for him to test the waters or create a diversion.
«I’ve told them how to find it,» Theo assured him.
Seth stopped fooling himself: he was not outrunning anyone. He swerved to the east and forced himself not to stop as the ground sloped precipitously and he careered forward into the water. It was not the elegant dive he’d imagined, but as he landed face down old habits took over and his arms began a methodical stroke, before he’d even raised his head to breathe.
/> The water was freezing, swift, and turbulent. With his pingers drenched, Theo could show him nothing. When he looked up, Seth could see two faint lights on the eastern shore, but with every few strokes the beacons shifted visibly as the current carried him north.
In that direction at least, he was moving much faster than he could have on land. Even if his pursuers had chosen to follow him into the dark water, they’d have little hope of keeping track of him. All he had to do was make it across the river without drowning.
As he left the riverbank behind, the vagaries of the current began buffeting him mercilessly. Each unbalanced shove turned him away from true east, exposing him to more of the water’s fury. Seth lost sight of the lights on the far shore and struggled to correct himself, picturing the falling woman growing ever taller, and his own spine snapping from the pressure as he was pummeled by an ever-widening portion of the river’s flow. His agitation turned to panic and he felt himself floundering.
Theo said, «Calm yourself.»
«I’m turning too far—»
«Let yourself turn, you don’t need to fight it.»
«The water will break me.»
«It would rather flow around you. But the more of it you block, the more it resists your motion, and the more you average out the forces. You can’t go into free fall.»
Seth spluttered in the darkness, lifted his mouth clear of the water, and took a deep breath. Then he forced himself to relax, and he began making long, slow, even strokes, pretending that he was back in some placid creek that he could cross ten times effortlessly. He felt the growing pressure of the water against his body—but it was coming from both sides, squeezing him more than it was twisting him. He lost all sense of his orientation, and just advanced, stroke by stroke, along whatever path the river had chosen for him. It didn’t matter. The current would sweep him north, out of Thanton, and nothing in the world had the power to turn him entirely away from the east. Wherever he was going, the shore was ahead. He only needed to persist.
For a long time he maintained his rhythm, holding on to his memories of sunlit water, counting laps of his imaginary creek and setting the total back to three every time it rose too close to ten. But then cold and fatigue began to dispel the reverie, and the muscles along the side of his body that aided his arms with each in-stroke turned to rags.
«I’ve got nothing left,» he told Theo.
«We’re nearly there.»
«How can you tell? You’re as blind as I am.» Seth couldn’t blame him for trying; he would have told any lie himself if he’d thought it would save them.
«I can’t ping the bank, but I can hear it in the sound of the water. We’re close.»
Seth wished he’d had a more convincing story. «You think you know how the sound of this river changes, closer to the bank? When did you learn that?»
Theo said, «When you jumped in at the other shore.»
Seth’s arms were aching beyond endurance, but if Theo couldn’t take on that burden himself, he’d done everything in his power to make it tolerable. «Then you’d better keep listening, so you can stop me before I get a mouthful of sand.»
Seth swung his right arm out wide to lengthen his stroke, cupped his hand and drew it in, screaming silently. The same on the left. The same on the right. Whiteness flared across his vision, and when he closed his eyes it remained. He tried to count another lap of the creek, but all his dishonest subtractions came rushing back at him, correcting the total: twelve, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-seven.
«We’re close,» Theo promised.
«I can’t do this any more.» Seth let his arms flop beneath him, and his body tipped back.
His feet struck something solid. The water was barely waist high.
Seth heard himself emitting some kind of faint noise, like an attenuated mixture of laughter and sobbing. He waded through the shallows, still pushed around by the current, giving every step his full attention so as not to lose his balance.
When he was clear of the water he knelt on the ground, waiting for the phantom lights in his head to fade.
Theo said, «Are you ready for some good news?»
«Always.»
«Raina and Amir both reached the shore before us, a bit to the south. I just told Aziz that you’ll wait for them to catch up.»
raina was worried that the guards might have procured boats and followed them down the river, so they set off into the desert as quickly as they could while they still had the advantage of night. Seth had never felt more comfortable marching into darkness; compared to the riverbank, an expanse of flat desert with the occasional rock was like a playground for coddled infants.
“Did they take you to Thanton by boat?” he asked Raina.
“Yes.”
“Do you know why they were in the forest?”
“They were gathering something that grows there, that apparently they’re unable to farm in the town.” Raina’s tone was becoming strained, so Seth stopped quizzing her. The abductees could tell their story later, once they’d all rested.
The dawn revealed that they’d left Thanton far behind. Seth soon got his bearings and led the way across the desert.
Just as he was beginning to wonder if he’d made a mistake, he saw Sarah standing on the outcrop waving her arms—and when the bedraggled expedition limped into camp she and Judith began an outpouring of relief. Seth hadn’t given much thought to their situation while he’d been away, but the long, lonely vigil with no information, wondering if they’d end up as the sole survivors, must have been hard to endure.
Raina waited until they were spent. “We need to eat, then we need to get moving. It’s still possible that Thanton will send out a search party.”
Seth limited himself to a single repeller-fruit; he was hungry enough to eat a dozen, but he was afraid of rushing and giving himself stomach cramps.
As they packed up the camp, Theo shared revelations he’d gleaned from Aziz and Amina. «It’s the puffballs in the forest. They don’t eat enough to poison themselves, but it’s still enough to damage the Siders.»
«Damage them, or just make them docile?»
«I can’t say for sure,» Theo admitted, «but from the way Aziz described the guards gloating about it, even if the poison vanished from their diet those Siders aren’t going to wake up and start quoting Hesethus.»
Ever since the bridge, Seth had been finding excuses not to dwell too deeply on the Siders’ lack of speech. But now the notion that they might merely have been rendered a little quieter and more compliant than their cousins struck him as so stupid that he was ashamed he’d entertained it for a moment, even as an unexamined placeholder for the truth he’d had no time to deal with. If every Sider was silent, all of the time, how likely was it that they’d learned even the Walkers’ language? And if they’d been raised from infancy with no language at all, what kind of stunted minds would they possess?
«There’s no chance that they’re using inspeech?»
Theo said, «The guards’ favorite taunt was, “How can you bear to have those parasites babbling away in your head?”»
The expedition set off to the north-east. Seth felt as if his body had been bludgeoned all over, but he could still put one foot in front of another on this soft, level ground, and each time weariness began to overtake him, he reminded himself of the magnitude of his good fortune. They were all still alive, and reunited. They had found a new river that could easily support Baharabad—and perhaps all five towns from the dying Zirona—so they were heading home with the best possible news.
Almost the best possible news.
“The next team will need to be well guarded,” he said. “Even if we build downstream from Thanton, taking nothing from their flow, I doubt they’ll be willing to make peace except by force of numbers.”
Amina said, “All the better if they fight us, so we have grounds to subjugate them.”
“You want there to be a war?” Sarah was appalled.
“I want Thanton crushed
.” Amina was unapologetic. “What they’re doing to their Siders is intolerable. We should attack them for that alone, never mind some contest over the river.”
Seth said, “But once Baharabad’s beside them, might that not civilize them?”
Amina made a sound of derision. “You think this is just a question of isolation? They’ve been wandering in the desert so long that they lost their way?”
“How else would you describe it?” Sarah demanded. “Everyone takes their values from the people around them. Thanton’s been alone too long, and it’s gone wild.”
Aziz said, “You’re talking about thousands of people, not a few dozen in some obscure cult. Whoever it was in Thanton that first had the idea to poison their Siders, the majority opinion at the time doesn’t seem to have been enough to dissuade them.”
Seth was beginning to wish that he hadn’t broached the subject at all. He peered ahead across the sand, trying to picture the moment when they could set up camp again, and he could finally sleep.
Theo chose that moment to join in, with a typically provocative contribution. “If the idea spread throughout Thanton, who’s to say it won’t spread throughout Baharabad?”
“I say it,” Sarah replied angrily. “We’re not like those people!”
“You mean we don’t have access to the same poison?” Judith interjected.
“There are puffballs all over the city,” Sarah retorted. “Did you ever hear of someone eating them to harm their Sider? Even once?”
“I doubt it’s the same species,” Aziz countered. “But even if it is, it could be a matter of how the plant is processed, or the exact dosage. Whether it’s a different plant, or just the knowledge of how to use it, the fact is that no one in Baharabad has ever had the means to treat their Sider that way. It doesn’t follow that no one ever wanted to.”
