I had never seen anything like it. The trees of the Hangings and the crags were nothing to the towering behemoths of this forest, a variety I did not recognise; the darkness beneath the canopy was like night, even in the middle of the day.
The farmland was neatly ordered, wheeled robot workers straddling the rows, each bushy, unidentifiable plant uniform in height, spread, colour.
We made camp in the woodland clearing on the bank of the river where our broken-down tug had come to shore, nudged and steered by its partner.
Sitting around a roaring fire, we debated what to do next.
“!¡
hierarchy
¡! So what now? Where do we go from here? We can’t all fit on one boat. We’ve seen plenty of farmland hereabouts, though. Plenty of easy pickings. I say we find a place to settle, build ourselves a new Laverne.” That was Herald. Middle-aged and short of sight, he’d barely done a day’s physical labour in his life. He clearly saw himself as our new leader, and was trying to establish himself in that role.
I knew he was wrong, but didn’t feel up for the fight. Right now we needed to get some food and rest, not rush into big decisions.
Frankhay took up the argument instead. “!¡
hierarchy
|
dismissive
¡! Do you not think it a tad rude to hitch along with the Hays and then start telling us what it is we should do?” he asked. His voice was smooth like a concealed knife. It was exactly the tone he had used with me on my visit to the Loop, when he had leaned close, spoken softly, and pressed a blade against my throat.
The tension was broken by a soft moan from the sidedog commensal. It had been standing in the shadows, close to where Hope sat. I wondered then if it was unwell, or was finally suffering from the injuries it had picked up – I remembered the burning sting of beam weapons striking our flesh when Hope and I had ridden within it.
Then the sidedog gave a big shudder and another gurgling moan and I realised what was happening. It lifted its front legs, folding itself backwards.
A head emerged from its fleshy internal folds and then the sidedog heaved and expelled a wet, squirming mass onto the ground. The thing it had ejected twisted, straightened, stood: a chlick. Everyone backed away, except for Jerra, who now had his blunderbuss trained on the alien. Then I recognised the gnarled grey skin and the false, staring eye. I stepped forward into the line of fire, and said, “!¡
calm authority
¡! No. It’s okay. It’s Saneth. We know this one.” I surprised myself at how grateful I was that the ancient chlick had made it.
Saneth stood before me and gave an almost imperceptible dip of the upper body. “!¡
admiring junior scholar
¡! Such turbulent times,” she-he said, addressing me. “The sidedog is like an armoured suit for one such as we in these circumstances, but it is that it is !¡
great humour
¡! an unbecoming and status-lowering mode of being.”
The chlick turned, taking in the rest of the gathered humans, and said, “!¡
superior | matter-of-fact
¡! We emerged both because sitting within was unbecoming and because we wished to make the observation that it is that this is not the most propitious place in which to wish to make settlement.”
I wasn’t sure if she-he referred to settling on a course of action or actually choosing to settle. Saneth’s words seemed a bit garbled, but then perhaps the double-meaning was intentional.
Frankhay turned on Saneth. “!¡
authority | menace
¡! We sent you out of the Loop,” he said. “And if you go over-asserting yourselves we’ll do just the same again. You hear?”
I turned away, frustrated that we had descended to fighting and territory-grabbing so quickly.
I went to sit with Hope and she gave a quick smile as I lowered myself beside her. I didn’t know what to make of her. I found myself drawn to her just as I found myself puzzled by her. She seemed other, she seemed more, she seemed... I thought that maybe it was just a sex thing. When we settled to sleep she snuggled in against me; I responded and she moved slightly, aware and neither encouraging nor discouraging.
I wrapped an arm around her and drifted, exhaustion taking me swiftly.
H
OPE DIDN’T SLEEP.
She lay in my arms, grateful for the protection, aware of every softening of my body as I slipped into sleep. Aware of the sounds of the forest, the insect chirps and clicks and whines, the hoots and cries, some distant, some nearby. Aware of the people, the tensions between them, the way the Cragside survivors formed a knot a little apart from the Hays, the way Marek, separate from the others, kept casting proprietorial glances in her direction.
Aware of the voices clamouring in her head.
Listen to the voices
.
There was something about this that wasn’t right.
Over by the river bank, Saneth stood with the sidedog. She wondered if the alien was struggling to settle or whether she-he needed sleep at all.
She looked around at the forest, lit in dark tangles by the glow of the dying fire. Trunks stood sentinel, branches intertwined. Nothing else grew among the trees, just as each carefully manicured farm strip had contained just one variety, all else eradicated by the patrolling bots.
And then she realised what it was that was bothering her. Should the wilds be ordered like this? Were these wildwoods at all, or rather just another carefully maintained form of agricultural plot?
She disentangled herself from my protective arm and sat up.
The fire... just a few glowing embers, now. The fine moss of the clearing: it looked as if it had spread around the fire, reclaiming burnt ground. Healing over.
Skids lay nearby, deep in a bed of moss, moss which had not been so deep and lush when we had found the clearing, moss that had started to wrap around his arms and legs, to creep up over his scalp, so that he appeared to be half-buried, or emerging from some primeval swamp, floating to the mossy surface.
Hope tugged at my arm and then scrambled over on hands and knees to Skids, pulling at his clothes until he woke with a start. He tried to sit and couldn’t, held back by the fine mesh of roots, a spongy blanket smothering and restraining him.
He tried again, and this time managed to pull himself upright.
By now, I was up and on my knees, only vaguely aware that I’d had to pull myself clear of the ground, my sleep-addled brain still struggling to understand what was happening.
“Look!” said Hope, waving her hand at the clearing. “The ground. The moss...”
I did, and I saw, and without yet understanding, as Hope did, that this clearing and this forest were just a different form of managed, protected land –
hostile
land. That the clearing was attacking us, and that we must learn not to trust anything in this new world we had entered.
W
E LOST NO
one, although if Hope had not alerted us when she did I wondered how much longer it would have been before we were trapped, absorbed, the clearing healed over as if we had never been there. It was an invaluable reminder that we should never allow ourselves to become complacent.
We made our escape on the one functioning tug, but that only lasted until a short time after dawn when its engine failed and we drifted back to shore.
We kept moving, our only goal to keep heading away from Laverne. From that point on we were on foot, following tracks that led through field and forest, for there was no alternative. It was hard not to watch every step, for fear that your foot would stick to the ground, start to sink, be taken over. It was hard not to study everything around us, the trees looming as if ready to lean over and smother us, the bots tending the farm strips apparently oblivious, but were they monitoring, reporting back, or might they lash out at us as pests to be eradicated from the neat order of the tended landscape? In the city we knew to watch for sentinels and grunts, but here – here everything was new and potentially hostile.
“You knew something like that would happen,” I said to Saneth as we walked. To our left, a dark wall of forest; to our right, neat rows of vines with the occasional glints of tiny bots crawling over them, through them. “You emerged from the sidedog to warn us.”
The chlick kept staring ahead, only its false eye swivelling to look at me. “!¡
lecturing junior scholar
¡! Many crops are bred with a strong imperative to self-repair,” she-he said. “That includes eradication of pest species and competitors. Out here, any plant may be laced with poisons, any animal may be hostile – engineered to be so, bred to be so, it may even be the sentient owner; any bot may be a dumb servitor or a deadly defender of its territory. Even the bugs can be deadly.”
“!¡
challenging
¡! You didn’t exactly try very hard to warn us, back in that clearing.”
“!¡
superior
¡! It was awareness of risk that was identified,” she-he said. “A lesson has been learned with greater efficacy than if it had merely been taught. You will adapt more rapidly now.”
Skids caught us then. “!¡
earnest
¡! But what if we want to learn from the lauded scholar?” he asked.
“!¡
amused | chiding
¡! You are not learning from lauded-one already?”
A short time later, we came to a fork in the track. A little ahead of the rest of the group, we paused. “!¡
deferential
¡! Which way?” I asked.
“!¡
toying
¡! Which way to where?”
“!¡
assertive
¡! Harmony,” I said. “Which way to Harmony?”
Frankhay, Hope and a couple of the others caught us then.
“!¡
challenging
¡! So which way?” he asked, repeating my own question. “You know where we are, Saneth-ra” – I noted that for all his brusqueness, Frankhay still added the honorific to the chlick’s name – “you have maps in your head, you can tap into a web of data that none of
us
can see. Which way is safe, wire-head?”
“!¡
mocking
¡! It is that you want safe?” asked Saneth. “Or is it destiny you would prefer?”
“!¡
irritated
¡! A place where the ground doesn’t up and try to swallow you whole in the middle of the night would do me, for now,” said Frankhay.
“!¡
provocative
¡! Scholar pup wants Harmony,” said Saneth, indicating me with a swivel of the eye.
Frankhay glanced at me. “!¡
condescending
¡! A thief
and
a dreamer,” he said. He made no secret of not trusting me, of holding my pid-stealing past against me. I could live with that. I preferred that he was open in his hostility; better that than keep it hidden.
“Which way?” he asked again, and Saneth indicated the left-hand fork of the track.
“!¡
curious
¡! So what do you know of Harmony?” I asked Frankhay, as we resumed our journey.
“!¡
stand-offish | relaxing
¡! It’s like the bogeyman and the river gods,” said Frankhay. “A thing of stories. Something we tell each other to keep hope alive. A human place where we can be safe and free.”
“!¡
amused | provocative
¡! You do not believe in the bogeyman, and the gods of the river?” asked Saneth.
Frankhay stared at the chlick. “!¡
intense
¡! Maybe I do,” he said in a low voice. “Maybe I believe in them all.”
“!¡
toying
¡! So what is it to be, Clan-father Frankhay? Safety or destiny?”
That question... It would be with us throughout our journey, and in the end it would be what tore us apart.
Chapter Twenty-Four
S
TILL TO RESOLVE
the question of whether we were seeking some safe haven or if we really were in search of Harmony, our days fell into something of a routine.
Every evening, we made camp somewhere just off the track, doing all we could to assure ourselves that it was likely to be safe. Sometimes Saneth would advise, but other times she-he would remain aloof, leaving us to make our own choices and learn our lessons. We always posted look-outs, a curious kind of guarding where we were as much watching the ground and the vegetation as we were watching for intruders.
And during the day we walked. We didn’t really know where we walked, although some of us were quick to learn rudimentary navigation skills, so that we knew we were heading steadily east. If Frankhay was to believed, Saneth was the one who knew most: if the chlick was hooked into the aliens’ communications networks, then she-he must know where we were, and where we were heading. Even without a hook-up, the chlick’s knowledge of geography must be far greater than that of anyone else in our party.
Marek was another who almost certainly knew more than he let on. He had already made the journey from Angiere to Laverne, and I knew little about him: he could easily have travelled farther afield in the past. When it came down to it, I didn’t even know
what
he was. Was he a guardian like Callo and Sol had been? Some kind of artificial being in human form? It made sense that he was, or at least might be, and if that was the case, then what knowledge did he carry in his head? Might he even have access to the networks? I did not know, and I trusted him about as far as I trusted Saneth, which wasn’t very far at all.
Summer was drawing to a close as we made this journey. This blessed us with crops we could pilfer along the way, always being careful to guard against over-zealous bots – young Tuck lost a finger to one bot, but it could have been far worse. The late-summer abundance reminded us also that soon there would be no easy pickings, and we would have a winter to survive.
With every day that passed, the question of where we were going and how we would live grew more pressing.
A split was growing steadily within our number. Some – notably Saneth, Skids and Marek – held firm to the vision of a place called Harmony, where humankind could be free and equal. Others just wanted to find some quiet corner of the landscape where we could settle and hope to be overlooked.