by Angel Wedge
And that was how I came to leave Sante Benedicté, sandwiched between my escorts Marcos and a giant square-jawed muscle man who had been introduced as Sarge. The Jeep we were in was a dull brown, but you could hardly tell under a coating of grey dust that I would soon learn built up on everything around here. It had become a thick slime thanks to the humidity, and then dried in to sun to become a cross between paint and natural cement.
Both guards sat stoically, staring at the trees ahead as if they could make a road appear through force of will. In the driver’s seat up front, a soldier named Bourchèvale made an attempt at rapid fire banter as he drove, one hand on the wheel and one on a cigar. The other two remained impassive in the face of his camaraderie, but he seemed quite content to carry on his conversation as a monologue. They probably disapproved of his tone, or the cigar, or what may well have been truly filthy soldiers’ jokes; but although he didn’t have a rank pin on his hat or cuff, he seemed to have the respect of the other men. I couldn’t comment on the jokes: Bourchèvale recognised I was a foreigner, so addressed me in in a jumbled mix of Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and English words. Though I could mostly follow the languages of the empires that had once colonised this region, all four at once was a stretch beyond me.
I turned to look back at the city as the Jeep idled just inside the boundary fence. The city was a low jumble of brick, mud, and concrete blocks on the far side of the silent airplanes. I would have liked to visit it, but now that wouldn’t be an option. Turning the other way, I ran my eyes up and down the mud-caked fence panels. They were dirty, but still new with only the faintest trace of rust where vertical and horizontal wires were soldered together.
“To keep the animals out,” Marcos said, almost making me jump out of my skin, “The Bardjuso says farmers cannot bring their produce into the city if there is any chance it may end up sold across the border, and the Fampino say they cannot keep the trucks in the warehouses, so between all the black-coats,” he turned his head away here to spit on the ground, clearly some matter of strong feeling, “meat that’s going to the North has to stay in trucks at the airfield, and so a fence is needed to keep wild animals away from the smell of hot meat.”
I nodded, it sounded just the kind of mess I’d expect from a group of power-grabbing, bureaucratic departments without real oversight. But to me, a fence with only 3 gates was a threat as well as a joke, a promise of encroaching tyranny. I couldn’t wait to get away from the turbulent politics, and out to a lab where there were only the UN scientific committee and their researchers.
Back then, I never expected guns or knives to feature so prominently in this report.
* * *
The expedition to Lucretia Falls had started out pretty much as I expected, and I didn’t see any clues then to just how many different security measures were in place. The Jeep had come in along a narrow track which barely seemed wide enough for it, and when we saw the dome rising up above the trees ahead, I thought it was the first sight of a gigantic, modern complex. From the number of scientists who were known to be there – and Paul’s secret briefing folder named quite a few more than the one he was officially allowed to give me – I’d half expected it to be a town in itself, maybe as large as Sante Benedicté. But here was just a single building, white painted walls with a couple of decorative pillars in front of the main entrance. From the outside it looked like someone had decided to clone a Mediterranean hotel, but didn’t have enough windows and ornaments to cover every side and left large areas of blank walls instead. The building was a pretty plain cuboid, three floors high, with the observation dome and two smaller towers rising up on top of it. Inside, the feeling of being in a hotel continued as I was shown up to my room and found that almost everyone I met was either Benedictean hospitality staff or other foreign guests.
I didn’t know then that it was built right on the clifftop, and that most of the facility was accessible where you might normally expect a sub-basement to be. I could hear the dull roar of hundreds of gallons of water surging into the plunge pool, so I quickly guessed that Lucretia Falls was named after an actual waterfall, but I assumed it was somewhere nearby through the jungle. As Marcos helped me to carry my suitcases up to the room I’d been assigned, I quickly realised that most of the others coming to this show – journalists, some politicians who wanted to be able to say they’d been here, scientific inspectors from the UN, and representatives of the different nations who were funding the investigation here – had brought some kind of personal assistant or servant with them. I worried a little that I might be lost as the only one without someone to fetch whatever I needed, or to carry messages back into town if the satellite dishes on the roof failed. Marcos solved that problem by volunteering to stay on. He put the suggestion very diplomatically, but also trusted me enough to explain that the local government wanted to be sure their faith in me and Paul was well founded.
The inside looked even more like a hotel, with most of what I saw in the first couple of days being white-painted corridors with hard-wearing burgundy carpets. Unlike most developed world hotels, though, the staff here didn’t seem to be making neatness a major priority. There was a visible line of dust down the outside edge of each corridor, and in the conference rooms we were shown to while one scientist after another gave a little press conference on his work, the tabletops were polished to a high shine but the windows were often thick with dust that had turned into a paste in the humidity. My guess there was that these guest areas had been left unmaintained for a few months, only for the staff to throw themselves energetically into the most obvious tasks when they were told that important visitors were coming.
There were several days of presentations and speeches laid on for us. Some were quite interesting, but I could tell the other reporters were getting impatient. I quickly learned that Faulkner had called in specialists with all kinds of different specialities, from many different parts of the world, and many of them were glad to give the press a lecture on their particular obsessions. Some of them were doing research that needed to be carried out in the jungle, like Abramovich and Corliss. For some of them this might be because they were using the native flora and fauna, while others had experiments that might benefit from the hot, humid climate. Others, like Paler and Tanaka, had come to complete their personal projects. They were willing to come out to the jungle either because they were seeking advice from other experts already here, or because Faulkner’s wise investments meant he could offer the best equipment for all his labs. Still more scientists, including the Committee chairman Igor Barishkov, had come because of some legislative or bureaucratic hurdle in their home countries, some cases more serious than others if the reports in John’s file were to be believed. Most of the scientists had gone home after the Lucretia Falls Oversight Committee took over the complex, but some had been allowed to stay until their experiments were at a stage where they could more practically be moved. As long as they weren’t doing anything spectacularly dangerous, the US marines and then the UN soldiers who had slowly replaced them allowed the scientists to get on with what they did best.
By the time it came to Dr Wellesley’s presentation on a chromatography technique which she believed would massively reduce the cost and time of genetic fingerprinting, I was almost the only person in the audience. The politicians didn’t understand and the journalists didn’t care, feeling like they were guests at some kind of science fair. I made some excuse to talk to Wellesley, and complimented her thoroughness. I wished she could have got more recognition for her work, but it seemed she hadn’t known what kind of facility this was when she first came out here. In a half hour of conversation, I learned almost everything I wanted to know about the labs. Now I knew that Faulkner had been working on some big project in secret, telling others only what they needed to know. I knew that he’d spared no expense in recruiting experts in a dozen different fields, to ensure that if there was anything he needed advice on there was a specialist close at hand. About the on
ly thing she couldn’t tell me was what Faulkner’s big project had been.
I was still waiting, though, for the main attraction. On day 6, our timetable showed a presentation by Dr Barishkov, which nearly everyone was eager to see more about. He was theoretically the head of the Oversight Committee now, as he was the only person who vaguely understood what Faulkner had been trying to do. He had been a wanted man in his home country, but the United Nations had agreed that he would be allowed to go free after he helped them to clean up the mess. From my briefing packets, he seemed quite confident that he could untangle Faulkner’s eccentric notes with enough precision to wind down the experiments safely and without further outrage. I wondered if any of the other reporters had thought to wonder whether the man had seen Faulkner’s daughter here. What research could he be involved in that would be so important he could turn a blind eye to a kidnapped young girl?
Chapter 13 — Landmarks & Memories
I stopped only when I needed to, resting. The jungle was dangerous, but hadn’t tried to kill me yet. As long as I was careful on uneven ground, and as long as the food in my pockets lasted, I’d be okay. I just hoped the predators I’d been warned about so many times, the tigers that were like gods to the natives, didn’t find me as I wandered through their home. But I couldn’t keep running all day and night, I had to camp sooner or later, and I found lost fragments of unpractised skills coming back to me from when I’d been in other jungles years before.
When my body was too tired to run any farther, I flipped through Lucretia’s diary in search of more clues. I didn’t fully understand it at first, the stories filtered through a child’s worldview, but eventually I began to piece together what had really happened to her. Later, I would learn more about the many stories that wound together at Lucretia Falls, and then I would be able to properly understand what I was reading.
Some of the sections I stared at in confusion, unable to make any sense out of the pencil scrawl. I knew I’d be able to decipher them later as long as I managed to escape the jungle. For now, I could only speculate what I was missing, why the diary entries changed half way through from a legible if childish handwriting back to the random lines of a toddler. I knew some day I’d better understand what Lucy had been through when she wrote these things…
Lucy padded softly through the jungle. She carried a knife she’d borrowed from one of the lab’s security men. It was massive, designed for cleaving through whole networks of vines in a single stroke. She couldn’t use it properly because the handle just didn’t seem to be the right shape for her small hands. It didn’t really matter though, she didn’t have much trouble finding a path through the undergrowth. There were animal tracks here, and places people had walked before, and even if a few days of foliage had grown over the track, she could squeeze through the gaps or clamber over the bundles.
There were some advantages to being small, and she intended to use them while she still could. Her body was changing, she knew, she wasn’t a child any more. Nurse Chǎ had told her that this was going to happen some day, but it had still been a major surprise to find herself with so many strange feelings she couldn’t control or understand. She’d started to think maybe this was all part of being an adult, that all the older people working at the lab were ruled by a committee of urges and hormones and the brain only occasionally got the casting vote. It would explain why they did so many terrible things to each other. Well, if she was going to be like the rest of them soon, she wanted to take advantage of her size and youthful grace while she could.
She knew Father would be upset that she was out here. He had never liked her going anywhere on her own, but now she didn’t feel safe cooped up in Lucretia Falls. Even the name of the place was a bad omen, a reminder that so many people wanted to hurt her because they were jealous of Father’s vision.
Before she could dwell any more on her experiences over the last few weeks, she emerged from the trees and found herself dazzled by brilliant sunlight. She threw her hands up instinctively to shield her eyes, and it took several minutes before her vision adapted enough to enjoy the view. In the last place anyone would expect, there was a break in the jungle canopy and it almost seemed like the sun was coming from below. This was the cliff edge, where a wide band of softer rock had allowed the River Lama to carve out a deep, steep sided valley.
Here the vegetation couldn’t grow to cover the view. A chunk of harder rock sixty yards wide had been driven into a clearing on the cliff edge, to provide a viewpoint that would endure. Until there was some soil to cover the bare rock, the foliage couldn’t grow back to obscure it. The concrete path leading up here was already split by plants boring up through its surface, though, and the jungle was starting to encroach on the island. Roughly in the centre of the area, guardrails that had once been bright chrome flanked a pedestal. On top of that, tilted so that even a child could read it, was a bright piece of metal with an image etched on it. Lucy was already familiar with the picture – the original drawing in pencil and crayon was taped inside the front of her diary – and had seen the sparkle of sunlight off the metal many times from the balconies on the other side of the valley. But this was the first time she’d actually come out here, and she wished it could have happened when she was in a better mood to appreciate the beauty of the scene.
The picture was of Lucretia Falls. Not the lab and all the buildings that supported it, but the waterfall in its natural state just a handful of years before. On the opposite wall, a spur of granite channeled the river out of its underground course like an enormous, natural faucet thundering into a pool from which the waters rushed away to the East. In the drawing, there was a dark green mass of trees both above and below, the steepness of the valley nearly obscured by the canopy. But now, the trees were cleared for quite some distance around the falls.
The pool was surrounded by fields where simple crops could be grown, allowing them to live without regular visits to the city. Relations between the lab and the Benedicteans had always been strained, because it wasn’t quite clear to anyone whether the building should be paying taxes to the remote government in Oimbawa, or to one of the neighbouring countries. Dr Faulkner had decided they should obey no laws except their own and those demanded by the local tribes.
Around the farming areas were dozens of outbuildings that were occupied by the natives of this land. They were the people who ensured that the corridors were swept, the generators fueled, the lights on and the scientists fed. And right at the centre of the compound, surrounded by the pool on two sides and backed into the cliff, was the main laboratory. Nobody could even get close without coming through the little village, and the men with bodies like teak would stop anyone who tried. The farmers and cleaners didn’t like sharing their land with people whose skin was darker, but the tribesmen didn’t hurt anybody and the people of Benedictean ancestry had eventually accepted that it was better to have the tribes guarding the fences than outside them, peering in. They kept the compound safe from wild animals, and deterred any attack by soldiers from the neighbouring countries, so the two groups of natives had got used to each other’s company.
The tribesmen didn’t like talking to Lucy, but then few people did. At least they were respectful about it. They didn’t talk about her like she wasn’t there, or act like she was stupid just because she was young. They bowed their heads slightly, and paused their conversation until she was out of sight. It was a little strange, and sometimes she got the impression that they didn’t quite believe she was real. There had been other girls living with her in the hospital ward, she’d liked to to think of them as her sisters even though that was a long way from the truth. Many of them were gone now, buried in the rich earth deep within the caverns, and nobody seemed to be quite sure why Lucy was so different. They wouldn’t talk to her about it, keeping absolutely silent in her presence. They thought she wasn’t old enough to talk about life and death, but she knew she was very mature for her age.
On top of the cliff w
as what looked like a building on the surface, something you could find anywhere in the world, but it was topped by three towers like a kind of fairytale castle. In the community of Lucretia Falls, that building was a special place where there were less workers and more important people. They were in charge of everything here, and Father was right at the top of the group. ‘First among equals’ he called himself, but the others all called him Professor like it was the most important title in the world. He was literally at the top of the team as well, with two of the three towers being places that nobody else could go. One was the sanctuary, his own private turret where he could get away from whatever was worrying him. The middle one was the communications tower, with three satellite dishes and a big antenna on the top. That was the only tower that anyone else had a reason to go to. And then looming over the whole complex, at the top of three floors with spiraling staircases around the outside, was the Observation Room. It was like the top half of a giant glass ball, made from four massive pieces of glass, and it let you look out over the tops of the trees in all directions. The glass was cloudy now, dirty, and Lucy wasn’t allowed to go up there. Nobody except Father went up there, and nobody could give her a clear answer when she asked why.
The biggest part of Lucretia Falls, though you couldn’t see much of it from here, was inside the cliff itself. The river flowed underground, and had changed course many times over the years, cutting out different tunnels. Lucy had been amazed when she read about it in one of the few books Nurse Chǎ had managed to get for her. But now, the edges of the granite spur that carried most of the water had been shored up, with rows of tiny rooms along both sides of the underground river extending a hundred yards back into the cliff. That had left a whole maze of tunnels in the cliff, at many different heights, and now there were homes built into nearly all of them. Bridges over the pool allowed some of the lab buildings to extend into the lower tunnels and provide an indoor connection between the cliff-foot complex and the labs in the cliff itself. Lucy had spent a lot of the last three years confined to a hospital ward that overlooked the pool, until a kind of garden on a floating platform had been put in to give her somewhere to sit and relax.