Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

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Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 9

by Anonymous Author


  'Fashion?' they would say. 'Then you ought to have perhaps a few scabs and sores. But your lungs are infected – listen to the timbre of your cough. That is hardly fashion!'

  Another (a visitor from Mont L'Or) said 'I spent last year breeding eating beasts for fun. They sometimes get sick, and their coughs sound like yours.' (Beasts bred to be eaten are not usually given nanotechnology, dear stone). 'Why does your dotTech not cure you of the infection?'

  'Perhaps it is malfunctioning,' I said, weakly.

  But this was an absurd thing to say, of course. It was impossible for dotTech to malfunction. Everybody knows that. People gave me strange looks. So I said: 'I have no dotTech in my body.'

  'Why? Are you from the Wheah?'

  But I decided it was not a good idea to pretend to be from the Wheah. People in the t'T do not trust the Wheah, and with good reason. Everybody knows that they are barbarians, ignorant of the benefits of civilisation. It would make people mistrust me even further than they already did. So I said, 'I have certain personal beliefs. Every seven years I purge myself of dotTech, and reacquire it after forty days.'

  People did not like the sound of this. 'How absurd!'

  'Ridiculous.'

  'Unheard of.'

  'I suppose,' said one woman, covered in slick black mud, having been diving in the river, 'that you will be going South then?'

  'South?' I asked.

  'That's where the extremists, the types with peculiar personal beliefs, all go,' she said, and dived back into the water.

  I decided the South was the best place to go. I would find some remote place, perhaps deep in the jungles, and hide out for several months. When I thought enough time had passed I would re-emerge and fly on to Nu Hirsch Fallow.

  2nd

  So Stone,

  I travelled south by raft. This is how Rainers mostly move about their own world. Some rafts are huge; barges a kilometre long that drift down or power up the broad rivers of the northern continent. Others are smaller: floats a few metres long; or single stools on which the traveller perches (the stool's legs extend below the water in four buoyant globes balanced against the shift of the current by simple processing chips). Others turn themselves into floats, embedding buoyant patches under the skin and rolling and floating down the river like driftwood. The dotTech ensures that they don't drown, and apparently (so I heard) it is the most soothing and pleasant way to travel. But I could not travel this way.

  I boarded a raft, paying the ferryman in certain thin green leaves that are shaped like spearpoints, and which are used as 'money', like banknotes. Since these leaves (and a great variety of other types of leaves) grow abundantly all over Rain this economic transaction is something of an empty ritual. But, nonetheless, it is a ritual to which everybody adheres with a remarkable tenacity. When I first tried to board the raft, the raftsman refused me, and pointed out some of the money trees growing at the water's edge. I remonstrated, but he was firm. So I made my way over to these trees and picked some of the leaves. Back to the raft, and the raftsman happily took these 'banknotes' from me, shuffled them so that they made a neat pile, pressed them flat and placed them in a broad rush-weave wallet.

  'What exactly,' I asked, crossly, 'is the point of this transaction?'

  'On Rain,' he replied, 'everybody is rich! Money grows on trees!'

  Now, on most of the worlds I have visited (and I have travelled to many) money is unknown. There is no need to regulate the exchange of consumption of goods when manufacture is universal and virtually free. There are worlds, it is true, that apply a state-regulated money system, mostly for the use of obscure, unique or distantly-traded items. But I had never encountered a 'money' system as irrational as this one. Nonetheless I paid, kept my silence, and found a place on the raft.

  The raft was two dozen tall treetrunks roped together, overlaid by a network of smaller branches. Most of the deck space – hundreds of square metres – was empty.

  There were a few slant roofed buildings, storerooms mostly, at the back; and one fairly large overhung space for those who had not acquired the Rainers' taste for sleeping outside in the rain.

  3rd

  Stone,

  As I said, it rained all the time on this world. The planet was close to the sun, and the rain was warm, but its incessant fall began to depress me.

  Sometimes the rain would come down hard and sudden, like stones – making, dear stone, as hard a smacking noise when hitting the ground as you might if dropped from on high, a broken rattle that was multiplied a million-fold. In open places the rain drew sharp lines down across the field of vision, and crashed on to the concrete roads and squares, throwing up a carpet of splashes close to the ground like tassels. Away from the roads in the forests the rain vexed the canopy of trees, flickering through the leaves and making them jerk and twitch constantly. There the noise was more like a clatter of applause. My favourite place to watch the harder sort of rain was by the river, with the stuttering symphony of white noise behind me and the broad, flat plane of water dotted and dappled with thousands of spreading circles. Ripples swelling, spilling outwards like light-spheres leaving exploding stars. Rings sketched in animated growth and then vanishing, replaced before they had disappeared by more rings. A model of impermanence.

  Then, briefly (never for very long) the sky would empty of water, the rain would clear away, the last few droplets would shed themselves from overhangs and branches like miniature fluid fruit. The air would be possessed by the most exquisite, clean-earth, ozone smell.

  Then the rain would start again. There were many varieties of rain on that world. Sometimes it would be soft, falling as delicately as pollen and seemingly as dry; this sort of rain would leave particles standing on people's clothes as perfect as miniature jewels. Sometimes the rain would flurry in clouds of small droplets, billowing up and round like smoke. Rain is touched by the colours around it. In the air, each drop is sunlight; on the road, pressed against and running into the earth, the water flows as darkness.

  Sometimes it would come down straight, vertical. Sometimes it would come down italics. Every now and again two storm fronts would collide and the winds would get mixed up and fierce; then it might blow so hard the rain would flee horizontally. Once, I remember, as I munched a soggy tuber for my lunch, the wind was so capricious that it blew the rain upwards at a slight angle.

  Newcomers to the planet tended to run through the rain, to sprint, from shelter to shelter. But after a few days on Rain you realised that this was fruitless; there was no escape from the water. Water was, in a way, the point of Rain. You accepted it, revelled in it even. I have never before or since encountered a culture so fluid, so intermixed with all manner of fluids – the rains from above, the river and seas below; human sweat and spit, piss and mucus, tears and semen, everybody on the world ran and dribbled. The passage of water, draining away, was a sort of cultural emblem: it was to do with the impermanence of life – even the life we lead in the t'T with all its dotTech enhancements. Everything flows, said the Rainers' existence. Flow with it. Everything drains away; enjoy the now.

  Most of the artifacts of that culture were temporary. The beds, for instance, were mattresses of leaves (not the money-leaves; another variety called pujes); they lasted a few nights but swiftly rotted and were replaced. Travel, as I have said, was on rafts made of wood; these planks and trunks broke apart after a few weeks in the water, rotted by the moisture and infested by insects.

  The insects! Ugh. There were no flying varieties, because (I suppose) the rain was too hard and frequent to allow small creatures to move through the air. But there were all manner of crawling insects, swimming insects, burrowing insects.

  There was one variety that laid eggs in my skin. I shudder to recollect it, dear stone. How I wish I had a skin as hard and impervious as yours, the flesh underneath as unyielding. For most of the inhabitants of Rain, of course, these maggots were no problem – the dotTech would destroy any infestation and repair the damaged skin
. But I had no dotTech in my body. There were sores on my legs, particularly my calves, that itched (I have told you, I think, what this word means). I scratched these sores and made them bloody. They became infected. Sometimes I would pluck maggots from the wounds. I had to do this in private, of course, to avoid drawing attention to myself even further. I took to wearing long trousers[8], despite the heat. When people - mostly people went naked on Rain – when they commented on my peculiar attire I told elaborate lies about family tradition, obscure fashions, whatever came into my head.

  The maggots came from a water-borne insect. I only suffered them after I came on the raft. When I realised that this was where these creatures came from I took care to keep myself away from the water, and purchased a knife with my few remaining money-leaves. I wanted the knife so that I could dig the maggots out of my skin. But, despite causing much pain and blood loss, I could not seem to rid myself of the parasites.

  The economy of the boat, I realised as we drifted down stream, was different from the general economy. Because the raft did not call in at any riverside stops it was not possible to replenish the supply of leaf-money by simply picking it off the trees. This introduced an added piquancy to transactions: scarcity. I understood that for many of the travellers this was one of the thrills of the trip, to explore this strange archaic mode of economic relation. Bargaining, bartering, buying, selling. I kept myself apart from that; but I had not bothered to stock up on leaves before coming aboard, so I was 'poor'.

  We ate fish, mostly, drawn from the populous river in several dragnets slung behind the raft which had the added advantage of slowing our drift through the more rapid stretches of water. We pulled these in from the river three times a day and ate the fish raw. I was infested, I believe, with tapeworm from these meals. For variety of diet we could pick out several types of floating mushroom-fungi that grew on the surface of the river. This grey-yellow vegetable could grow to many square metres in size if unmolested; but the sweetest flesh was from plants no bigger than a metre across. As the raft drifted past, we could reach over and pluck this stuff out of the water. Since the fish were all bought and sold, and since I had no leaf-money left now, I mostly ate these fungi, on the days when I was lucky enough to snatch them from the river.

  And so we travelled downriver, day after day.

  The scenery started to change. The banks of the river grew taller on either side, until eventually the river was running through a deep gorge cut into chalk. Then the river widened, the banks slipping away from us on either side towards the horizons, and we approached the sea.

  Here the raftsman had to earn his leaves; he dropped net sacks filled with some sort of mulch over the side of the raft. These reacted with the water, or with something in the water (I wasn't paying much attention, too concerned with the misery of my infected legs); the heat generated bubbled in the river and shunted the raft away. Using this crude means of propulsion and navigation the raft moved over to one of the cliff walls and followed it out into the sea itself. Then we drifted along the coast.

  Eventually the raft pitched up at a busy southern port, built into a series of shelved-out cliffs overhung at the top with jungle. Through limited conversation with the other passengers on the raft – I tried not to say too much to any one of them – I discovered that ascetic religious retreats existed in the forest on top of the cliff.

  'How do I ascend?' I asked, for my legs now were weak and pained.

  'There are cut-stone stairs,' they told me.

  I was sorry to hear this; the famous 'primitive' styling of this world was now nothing more than an annoyance to me. I was ill, infected, infested with maggots in my legs, dizzy and amazingly weary. Sleep seemed to make no difference to my tiredness. I began to fear, genuinely, that I was going to die like an antique human – die of disease. I was also so hungry that my stomach was sending electric stabs of pain up through my torso. For the last day and a half of the journey there had been no food but fish (the water mushrooms did not grow in the salt water), and I had no leaves with which to buy this food. I had salvaged a thoroughly chewed fishbone with some fibres of flesh still on it, but that had been all.

  I disembarked and matters seemed to get worse. The quayside was crowded with people griddle cooking and selling all manner of fish and squid. Experienced travellers, who had hoarded a proper store of leaf-money hurried to savour this food, and the smell was an exquisite torment to my hungry senses. I don't think anything else in my life has smelt so promising. But when I tried to obtain this food, the griddle-men and women turned me away. 'No money,' they said, relishing the absurd archaism of their positions, 'no food.'

  'Do the money trees grow at the top of the cliff?' I asked. They nodded.

  'So I must climb to the top, gather the leaves and come down again to pay you?' I asked, incredulously.

  'No money, no food,' they insisted.

  'But this is absurd! I need the food now. Give me the food and I will collect the leaves afterwards. I am hungry!'

  Still the mantra: 'No money, no food.'

  'But I cannot climb the cliff!' I wailed. 'I am . . .' But I held back from confessing how thoroughly debilitated I was. The obviously raddled nature of my face, the cuts on my hands that were not healing, my cough, my exhausted staggering gait, all these things were already attracting attention. Soon questions would follow questions, and after that the news would spread that a fellow without dotTech in his body was in the port of Raintown-on-Sea. Without dotTech? How strange! What is he? Is he Wheah? No? Wait – I heard of an escapee from the jailstar – is it he? The 'police' would follow shortly afterwards.

  So I bit at my lip to stop myself talking and began the long ascent up the carved stone steps of the port. It was agonising; a terrible endurance test. My whole body cried for me to stop, to lie down, but the higher I got the more I became convinced that if I stopped and slept I would simply die. So I staggered up. Rain beat down upon my head like a fevered pulse. Warm water flew into my face, my eyes, my mouth.

  About halfway up there was an open square where the rainwater was collected into a shallow pool. Revellers were splashing about in this broad space, dancing, kicking the water up in great combs of spray. I clung to the low wall and tried to make my way round, but the added problem of moving through the water wrong-footed me and I fell.

  "Wellhello again,' said a voice. 'How charming to meet with you again!'

  It was Enkida, the woman who had been so insistent with me on the elevator from orbit. She was soaked, her feathers and other adornments gone. So was her hair; now there was only a short dark stubble over the crown of her head. But her skin glistened with health and her eyes were lively. I, on the other hand, must have looked ghastly indeed.

  'Wellhello,' I croaked.

  'Your fashion statement has been taken further I see,' said Enkida, nodding at me. It was hard for me to concentrate, but it seemed to me that she was impressed. Perhaps in her original culture it was a high-status thing to do, to adhere to a fashion statement even at the expense of one's own well-being. I tried to get up, slipped and fell painfully upon my right knee. My arms were trembling with exhaustion, or sickness.

  'I'm hungry,' I gasped. 'No leaves. I've had no food.'

  'Dear me,' said Enkida smiling. 'I've plenty of leaves. Let me buy you something cooked.'

  She helped me up and to the back of this public pool, past the milling, splashing people. Their faces passed like a phantasmagoria in my fevered consciousness; all beaming and happy, many with enormously enlarged nostrils, and outrageously broad or long noses. I stumbled, but Enkida helped me up.

  Together we reached the far side of the pool. Enkida collected her rush-weave wallet where it was just lying on the stairs (and I thought to myself how stupid I had been; how easy it would have been simply to steal somebody else's leaves on the harbour-front). Then she helped me out and up a brief flight of stairs into a lengthy alleyway running along the cliff. Here were shops, stalls, people walking up and down. At the
nearest trolley, covered with a rainguard, a woman was grilling strips of some grey-white mottled meat. Enkida 'bought' several ribbons of this savoury stuff, picking it up with little wooden spikes provided and helping me eat it.

  It felt so good that I am afraid to say I almost passed out; and that I certainly lost control of my bladder. Not that this last thing mattered in that culture, where everything was wet all the time. The rainwater rinsed me clean soon enough.

  'Thank you,' I gasped. 'You have saved my life, Ithink.' This was no mere pleasantry on my part.

  'How silly you are!' she giggled. Then she leant closer to my blotched face and breathed, 'Are you on heat yet?'

  I had almost forgotten my lie to her from earlier, but remembered just in time. 'Yes,' I said. 'I mean, no, not at the moment.'

  'Soon, I hope?'

  'Yes,' I gabbled, desperate to sleep. 'Soon. I must sleep, I really must.'

  Smiling she helped me through a carved-stone doorway into a broad public room. There were woven-leaf mattresses arranged in rows, several of which were occupied with sleeping individuals. But most of all the space was beautifully, wonderfully dry. I stumbled forward, and I believe I was asleep before I reached the floor.

  Islept for a long time, I think; waking only to turn and sleep again. From time to time Iwould wake thirsty, but too weary to do anything but imagine that Iwas rising and stepping outside to drink from one of the troughs of rainwater in the street. Then Iwould fall asleep again, dry and dissatisfied. I would wake with my right arm buzzing and awkward with discomfort; without the dotTech it is easy to squash it underneath yourself when you sleep, and it complains. I rolled over and flapped the arm loosely like a wing to try and shake off this odd sparkly numbness. Then I fell asleep again on my other side only to wake again with my left arm similarly afflicted.

 

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