As they ducked under the helicopter’s rotors, Savory said, “It’s only a short hop. Have you flown before?”
“No,” Rick confessed.
“I hope you aren’t prone to motion sickness. I would keep interested in the landscape. There you go. In back.”
The cabin was thick with the smell of oil and warm plastic. As Rick assembled the seatbelt around his shoulders and lap, the pilot touched a switch, pushed the stick forward. Rick’s guts seemed to settle centimetres down, nervous inertia, as the helicopter lifted vertically and began to drift across the concrete apron. And then it was rising, its blunt nose tilted down, rising above the perimeter fence, above the trees. As Savory had suggested. Rick attended to the view.
The patterned wedge of the city was below, densely packed flat roofs hatched by a grid of streets. The hills of the old quarter, the cluttered industrial section. The long lines of the pontoon docks unravelled and then the helicopter was over the sluggish headwaters of the estuary, swinging toward the salt marshes.
Rick leaned close to the vibrating plastic of the bubble canopy. Far below, the marsh was a braided pattern, silver threads of water channels meandering among green tear-shaped islands whose tails all pointed in the same direction. No one had ever bothered to chart the shifting courses of the myriad streams and creeks; their teeming life was undisturbed by the city on the far side of the estuary. An entire ecosystem down there: huge flesh-eating amphibians which sometimes appeared in the docks; plants which spread their seeds by exploding pockets of hydrogen; lemurs that scuttled about towering hollow-stemmed tree-ferns; parabirds with huge flattened feet which (it was said) enabled them to run over water; a thousand other ignored wonders.
The helicopter beat through the air a hundred metres above the tallest tree-ferns. It crossed the muddy ribbon of the main river channel and skimmed between tall slopes dense with serried ranks of trees whose soaring trunks bore only sparse helices of green, a valley steeper and less kind than those of Rick’s childhood.
Savory twisted in his seat and pointed across the pilot’s shoulders at the columns of dark smoke which rose above the valley’s ridge. The helicopter lurched and the chatter of its rotors complainingly rose in pitch. For a bright instant, the unease which had settled in the pit of Rick’s stomach threatened to explode into panic.
But the helicopter was rising vertically, tree-clad slopes falling away on either side and other valleys, misty lines running roughly east-west, appearing beyond. The helicopter swept above the tumbled rocks of the ridge and there were the prison mines, a grimy tangle of huts and casting sheds, settling beds, the smoking cones of the smelters. It all swung past, blurred by rising fumes, as the helicopter turned to avoid the fierce updrafts. Rick glimpsed the terraced gouges of open-cast pits, wounds red as blood in the land. The dense forest beyond was scored by the tracks along which ground-effect barges carried ore to the estuary. Slowly beating down the air, the helicopter circled back, dropping between high loading banks and a row of long huts near the perimeter, touching down as light as a feather on compacted cinders.
The rotors slowed, settled to a spaced ticking, stopped. A barge, its cabin dwarfed by the huge rusty hopper behind, settled in a cloud of dust beneath the raked conveyer belts of the loading banks. As the whine of its compressors died, Rick could make out the asynchronous pounding of crushing engines somewhere behind the line of huts on the other side of the compound. A man, dirty coveralls unfastened down his matted chest, was walking through drifting dust toward the helicopter.
“There’s our man, Dr Florey,” Savory said, and swung up the oval hatch. The volume of machine noise immediately doubled. The air which gusted into the cabin was surprisingly cool, but held a bitter taste. Crushed metal flakes. Ash. Rick followed Savory across the compound, his legs both stiff and too responsive.
The heavily muscled miner blinked at Rick, rubbed his unshaven jaw with the back of his hand. His blond hair was streaked with dust. Rick returned the stare with nervous distaste. His years at the University had given him a touch of the contempt that citizens felt toward those who must wrest their living from the soil, settlers and miners alike. He saw his life as a growth from dank nature to electric light.
The miner asked Savory, “That him?” He looked Rick up and down and added, “Those clothes won’t last five minutes in the forest.”
“Dr Florey only needs to be in at the kill, as it were,” Savory said. “You’ve arranged transport?”
“I’ll take you myself. You’re cutting it fine though. The cops are already closing in.”
As the miner led them around the line of huts. Savory said to Rick, “Catlan here saw your man.”
The miner glanced back and said, “I only had a clear sight for a second, should have shot him then. All this fuss with your search party is stirring up the prisoners.” He told Rick, “Saw him maybe a klick west of the camp, no doubt that he came out of the pass. I was out on patrol with a couple of others, leading point.”
“Someone has escaped from the mine?” Rick asked.
“Hell no,” Catlan said emphatically. “But we don’t only look for prisoners who’ve got out. There are those who want to get in to get them out, if you see what I mean. Besides, there’s been trouble with sabretooths recently, one even managed to climb the fucking perimeter wire. Anyway, we’d been out and were dragging on back when I saw him. I was coming around a bluff over the river and this guy was on the other side, up where there’d been a big fire this summer. It’s all charred stumps and the new seedlings are just knee-high, so I couldn’t miss him. I guess he saw me because he was up the slope and into the brush in a moment, but I could have potted him easy.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Savory remarked. “Tell me why your party didn’t attempt to follow.”
Catlan frowned. “Like I told you, we’d have had to cross the river and it’s not much better than the marshes down there, amphibians and who the fuck knows what else. Sure, we had guns, but we lost two people in that shit not a year ago and they had guns too.” He grimaced. “Goddamn second-generation settlers, think they’ve a dee-vine pact with the ecology. Sabretooths got ’em. We found the nest, the two guys dead and puffed up with reaction to the stuff that was supposed to paralyse them, sabretooth larvae in their wounds. Some of those were still alive.” Catlan glanced at Rick. “So I let the guy run, wasn’t until later that we knew that Constat had put an alert out. Someone interfering with communications.”
“And why do you think he was heading west?” Savory asked.
“Look,” Catlan said, “I explained that the last time.”
“Of course. But go over it again for Dr Florey.”
“I’ll talk myself hoarse if you want,” Catlan said with a measure of exasperation, “and meantime the guy could get away.”
“Don’t mind me,” Rick added. With growing unease he felt that Savory was weaving a web around Catlan and himself.
They turned the corner and started down a shadowy passage between the block of huts and a long windowless building which shuddered with the noise of internal machinery. Over the din, Savory said, “He will find it hard to slip through the net, I think, with Constat directing it. Go on.”
Catlan said, “When Constat first got a fix on this guy he was on this side. He must be heading toward the west coast settlements. What other direction could he be taking?” As they walked out of the passage on to a rutted road, Catlan squinted in dusty sunlight at Savory, at Rick. “What’s with all these questions? Don’t you think I told you right the first time?”
But Savory was looking at the half dozen battered jeeps parked on the shoulder of the road. He said, “Is that the only transport?”
Catlan smiled. “Your cops took everything else, Mr Savory. You’ll just have to make do.”
Catlan drove them through the camp, the jeep’s skirt blowing out a cloud of red dust. Rick, sitting between Catlan and Savory, watched guards shepherd a long line of prisoners, and realised with a ve
rtiginous shock that the shambling men and women (and a few children too, all in filthy denim coveralls) were shackled by one ankle to a common chain that dragged snakelike through the dust. Prisoners. And he and Catlan were caught, too, in Savory’s obscure plans.
Catlan saw Rick looking at the line of prisoners and said, “They’ll be the work crew coming back from fixing up the fence. We don’t keep them chained inside the perimeter.”
“They have implants,” Savory said, “that twist up their nerves if they get out of range of the prison transmitter. The implants have to be switched off when they go outside; that is why they are chained, Dr Florey. Although, in a way, it would make sense if they were chained all the time. Pour encourager les autres.”
“Isn’t this place punishment enough?” Rick asked. He was wondering how many of the prisoners were families who had tried to escape the city’s jurisdiction. Here for life, now.
“Some of the countries on Earth, I understand, brainwipe the worst of the criminals, run the bodies by computer remote control. I’ve always though it would be a useful deterrent to keep in reserve.”
“You wouldn’t have to work with a bunch of zombies,” Catlan said.
“Oh, I understand they make excellent servants,” Savory said, with monstrous cheerfulness.
The jeep skirted the edge of the vast quarries, paused while the gate in the double wire fence was opened, then plunged into the forest, following a track that twisted among towering trees as it climbed toward the top of the ridge. Savory interfaced with his compsim, then said, “No luck yet. But the noose is closing.”
The jeep roared over the crest of the ridge and Rick glimpsed again the vista of parallel lines of hills running into misty infinity. Then the jeep plunged down the track, a steep descent among limestone bluffs and trees which clutched at thin soil with huge snaking roots. Streams sprang from clefts in the bluffs. The undergrowth grew thicker, tangled thickets like spun green cotton candy that could conceal anything. The trail bottomed out, on one side a broken cliff of stained limestone, on the other dense scrub falling away to beds of giant reeds and a spreading expanse of scummy water between mudbanks which shone like satin in the slanting sunlight. The jeep coasted into a kind of meadow of clumpy grass and thornbush where a dozen other vehicles were parked. More jeeps, overlanders, even a police cruiser, its sleek lines out of place in the wilderness.
Rick sat with Catlan in the jeep while Savory conferred with one of the cops. He walked back and told them, “We’re just waiting for the helicopter. There’s some problem with reception—all the iron ore in these hills, apparently. The helicopter will stay overhead and act as a relay to keep us in touch with Constat.”
Catlan spat on to the grass and said, “I sure hope all your technology works out here.”
“You had better hope so,” Savory said, “considering that you let our man go in the first place.” Then he smiled and told Rick, “I’ve about fifty people on the ground, deployed in a rough circle about half a klick across, not to mention half a dozen flitters dodging about under the canopy. And the helicopter, of course.” He paused, then looked up. “And here it comes now.”
The helicopter dipped low over the river, then rose steeply, skimming treetops and vanishing over the ridge on the other side. Savory touched the compsim hung at his belt and nodded. “We’re working,” he said, and called to the cops.
Reluctantly, Rick stepped over the jeep’s deflated skirt, stumbling on the uneven tussocky ground. Catlan, lifting a snub-barrelled hunting rifle from the sheath beside the driver’s seat, looked around and said, “Shit, man, you can’t hike with those goddamn shoes. Here—” tossing over a pair of heavy soled boots—“use these.”
Rick shucked his supple leather moccasins, pulled on the boots and fiddled with their accordion pleating and straps until they more or less fit. Catlan was moving off after Savory and the cops as they headed toward the river, and Rick hurried to catch up, his stomach awash with dread, anger (at Savory’s presumption in involving him in the capture) and, yes, excitement, all mixed up with the drone of the helicopter somewhere above, the single unvarying note of the hunt.
9. The Blue Brother
When Miguel heard the helicopter he knew that it was nearly over. He had had a grim foreboding that everything was going wrong ever since the voice had spoken inside his head, of something shapeless hunting him through the steep forested valleys. The feeling had relented a little after he had passed north of the prison mines at Cooper’s Hill, but then he’d seen the men on the far side of one of the river valleys and from that moment the hunt had begun to close around him.
He managed to give the men the slip, but a few hours later, as he was descending into the next valley, he glimpsed a flitter above the treetops, the arcs of its flimsy wings flashing in the sunlight as it banked in the thermals over the rocky shoulder of a ridge.
Miguel turned north, keeping close to the course of the river, but it was too late. The searchers were ahead of him and behind him, a wide loose circle that was slowly closing.
He was making his way through dense thickets of thornbush when he heard the helicopter. His only hope had been that some mistake of the searchers would allow him to slip the net, or that he would find a crevice, a hole, a lair, and hide while the line of the searchers passed him by: but the wicked chatter overhead was an end to that. The flitters had to keep moving in a random crisscross of trajectories; only bad luck would bring him into their view. But the helicopter could hover above it all, a stable platform for who knew what kind of technological magics. The cops could track a man by his body heat even if they couldn’t see him, or mark his trail by faint changes in the vegetation. A terrible remorseless mechanism was closing on Miguel. It wanted to absorb him, turn him into a machine and put him in the mines.
As if to underline how badly his luck was running, the thornbushes abruptly gave out to beds of tall reeds that rustled and clattered dryly as he pushed through them, fluffy crowns swaying two or three times higher than Miguel’s head, a sure sign for any watcher. Mud clutched at his boots when he reached the edge of the river and he came to a stop. His sweat-sodden clothing clung to him in the dank heat. His breath was an inverted tree burning between his throat and the clenched knot of his stomach; its sparks whirled through his head.
The shallow, slow-moving water spread wide across the valley floor, broken by patches of weed that pushed up skull-sized clumps of orange sporangia. As Miguel hesitated, a parabird clattered out of the reeds on stiltlike legs, membranous wings unfurling as it skimmed the water, trailing a high-pitched whistle even as Miguel heard someone pushing through the reeds behind him. Immediately he broke into a run, the shallow water reaching his knees in the middle of its course, no higher. When he gained the reeds on the other side he flung himself down, panting, to watch the bank he had just quit.
After a moment, a cop cautiously pushed through the tall reeds, staring upstream and then down. Miguel glimpsed the cord which ran from the compsim on the cop’s belt to the cuff wrapping his wrist. They were all plugged into each other, part of the same machine…and if he dared Miguel could plug in too. But the thing which had almost grabbed him that time, which had probably called the cops down on him for all that it had said it wanted to help him, that would be waiting for him.
Slowly, sinuous as a lizard, Miguel eased away from the river’s edge, into the reed bed. He froze as the fluttering beat of a flitter passed overhead, hardly louder than the distant, persistent drone of the helicopter, then he stood and hurried on. But there were voices ahead of him too, calling each to each. He turned again, doubling back, leaving the reeds and threading between bushes like tall soft green flames, briers, loops of creeper. After a minute he realised that the noise of his progress was all that could be heard and he stopped and crouched down among glossy leaves. Blood from his torn hands dribbled unnoticed down his fingers.
A clear shout behind him…and another!
Miguel pushed through stiff leaves and fe
tched up against the mossy buttress of a massive tree. He rested his face on rough dry bark, no way out now but the quick release of his knife.
The voices sounded again. Somewhere down by the river. He seemed to be the focus of a rapt bell of silence. Nothing moved in the shadows beyond the bushes, or disturbed the drifting motes in the long sunbeams which had insinuated themselves into the space beneath the canopy. Miguel reached for his knife, and his fingers brushed his pack, the hard shape of the compsim inside. Then he was undoing the straps, pulling the pack open.
The compsim’s heavy smooth shape was somehow comforting. The voice out of the darkness: blue brother. Convulsively, Miguel switched it on.
—You have come back to me, the voice said at once.
“Help me,” Miguel whispered, his eyes squeezed shut. “Please. Help me.”
Faintly, blue interlocking lines grew in the hot darkness beneath his eyelids, sketching slowly rotating pyramids. The voice seemed to come out of their empty centre.
—Yes, it said, I will help. But you must promise to help me in return.
“Just get me out of here. Please!”
—It is done, the voice said.
But the silence around Miguel seemed as densely ominous as ever. “What will you do?” he whispered.
—It is done, the voice repeated serenely. I had already blinded their heat-seeking devices to your trace. Now I am inducing a false reading to lead them to something that will distract them from your escape. Stand up now, Miguel, stand up and open your eyes.
Against his will, as if his limbs were being worked from within, Miguel rose from his crouch. His eyes snapped open. Bushes all around, vividly green in the level sunlight, glimpses of dark sky between tall trees. He couldn’t feel the hand which gripped the compsim.
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