by Linda Nagata
She jumped into her shorts, then checked the drift of her hair in the projection on the wall of the transition room. “He the Jiang-Tibayan contact?”
“No.” Allende sounded puzzled. “He doesn’t seem to have any connection with Summer House. But he has a patient—a young woman he calls Phousita—he believes she’s been infected by an uncataloged Maker, but he hasn’t been able to identify its structure. He seems very fond of her; very protective.”
“You’ve picked her up?”
“Uh, no. We haven’t been able to find her yet.” After a moment of heavy silence, Allende added reluctantly: “Actually, we haven’t found a trace of the Maker since detaining Choy.”
“Love and Nature,” Kirstin hissed softly. “It’s mutated.” She studied her reflection in the mirror, remembering her days with Leander and how he’d used the Maker to change and change and change again, leading the police on a merry chase that only ended when she’d betrayed him.
What worked once could work again. “You say this Choy is fond of the girl?” she asked Allende. “Then ask him if he’ll help us find her. Suggest to him that if he does not, we can’t be responsible for her safety.” She smiled at her image. Choy would understand the social structure of the Spill. And her ghost could ride an ex-cop as easily as it could ride any other dog.
Chapter
12
Phousita blinked as bright sunlight fell across her eyes. She sighed and stretched, watching sparkles of refracted light dance across her lashes. She’d gone to sleep in the shade, but the sun had moved across the sky until now her skin burned. Time to move.
Suddenly, a new scent came to her. She sat up abruptly, shoving her matted hair out of her eyes. It was the angel; somehow she knew it. He was drawing nearer.
She looked around cautiously, but saw no one. Where was Arif?
When they’d been running from the dog, she’d told him they must bathe in the river to erase every trace of their old scents. But he’d insisted they go for a swim. The river had been chugging between its concrete banks, swollen by rain in the distant mountains. She’d sobbed in terror as he’d dragged her into the muddy waters, fighting him with every step until she could no longer find the bottom. Then she had no choice but to cling to him as he rode the wild current nearly a mile downstream. The river echoed his raging mood. When he finally sought the bank, he carried her up the steep concrete slope, set her stumbling on her feet, then screamed at her for ten minutes, hitting her periodically with his cupped hand for emphasis. He screamed, but he said nothing. He was only venting his rage. The clan had lost everything, the children were scattered, dogs pursued them, and he’d sold himself for her. And for what? She’d be dead soon. Plague would take her. Despite his unfailing service in her behalf. Why, look what he’d endured for her today! And all because of tuan. (As if it were her fault.) Why did we plant tuan? he screamed. (He knew it was his fault.) What is happening to our lives?
She couldn’t answer that. All she could do was calm him, concocting a spell in her tears that would enter his body and lull his mind toward sleep. She couldn’t allow him to return to the clan now, not in this mood. He’d beat the children, hurt them senselessly, and maybe, maybe, the Knives would finally turn on him.
So she’d collapsed at his feet, sobbing apologies, declaring her unworthiness, begging forgiveness. He kicked her once and turned away. But then he reconsidered, as she knew he would. He returned to her, crouched at her side and slipped his arm around her shoulders. She looked up at him, raised her head to rest it against his shoulder. With her fingers she rubbed at her tears. Then she touched his lips, and moments later a veil fell across his anger. He sighed. She felt his tense body begin to relax. “I’m very tired,” she said plaintively. “I can’t go on, I need to rest. Please help me one more time.”
He nodded. Together they explored the riverbank until they found shelter amongst the tumbled concrete blocks of a broken foundation. Arif picked out a patch of shade near the water. He dragged an old beggar out of it, then urged him away with a few hard kicks. Phousita watched him sorrowfully, but said nothing. “Sit down, you stupid woman!” he barked. She obeyed and he settled next to her. They’d listened to the river flow as they gradually drifted into sleep.
But now the shade had gone, and so had Arif. Phousita stretched again, feeling renewed, refreshed. Not at all stiff from her nap on the unyielding concrete. So strange. Of course hunger had begun to gnaw once again at her belly. She tossed her head and her nostrils flared. She caught Arif’s scent—very strong—and the scent of the angel, more nebulous. But he’s coming, she realized with growing excitement. He’ll be here soon.
She followed Arif’s trail around a large block of concrete to the river’s edge. He squatted in the sun, his feet in the water while his fingers strained the river for fluff. He’d already collected a fair pile of it on the concrete bank. Sudden fear set her heart pounding. “Arif!” she cried. “Get back! Get away from the water. You know the ‘Surgence will shoot you. Arif!”
He looked at her calmly. “The Resurgence has done all they can do to us today. They’re celebrating.”
“They are not!” Burning the warehouse had been nothing to them. He knew that. He knew they’d be back. He’d chosen to disregard it. He’d been pushed beyond his limit, and he would hide no longer today, even if it meant his death.
“You’re hungry again, aren’t you?” Arif accused, turning around to gather up the pile of fluff he’d collected. “This is for you.” He held it out to her.
She stared at it. Saliva started to flow in her mouth.
He laughed at her, then walked up the concrete bank and sat down, pulling her down beside him. “Eat,” he commanded. “I won’t have you running off again tonight.”
She ate, staring at the water, too ashamed to look at Arif. As she finished the last of it, she suddenly realized the scent of the angel had grown much stronger. She stood, staring upstream, her nostrils testing the air. Arif watched her suspiciously. “He’s coming,” she said.
“Who?”
She shook her head. Arif cursed her. After a moment: “There. See?” she said, pointing up the river. But Arif was already on his feet, gazing at the spectacle approaching along the riverbank.
A raucous crowd of at least a hundred people waded through the edge of the racing water or negotiated the steep bank, whooping and yelling, stumbling into each other as they sought to keep up with an object being swept along by the current.
“It’s him,” Phousita said, her voice soft with amazement. “Look at his golden hair.”
The angel clung—or he’d been trapped—in a tangle of deadwood. Only his head showed above the water. She couldn’t tell if he was now alive. He’d been dead; she knew that. She could remember casting him in the river. There had been much fear and anger and a need to hide his body. “The river.” Someone had said it. Afterward no one was quite sure who. “The river will obliterate his corpse.”
She turned to Arif. “Look how they pursue him. They wait for him to wash up against the bank.”
Arif’s mouth turned in a wicked smile. “Sure. He must be rich. I’ll take him myself!”
“Yes,” she said, with a nod of satisfaction. “He is for us.”
Arif leapt into the river. Phousita watched his hard body slice the water like a spear. He surfaced several meters away and struck off across the current. Smiling, she sat down to wait. The evil sorcerer had arranged everything so well.
The river seemed to be without end. Swollen by rain in the mountains, it raged through the city, sweeping up filth and debris that had accumulated on its banks, giving up nothing. Sandor couldn’t escape it. He struggled to swim but he had no strength. The river rolled him over and over, filling his eyes and nose with grit, forcing silty water down his throat. He retched and sputtered, fighting to keep his head above the surface. Now and then he caught sight of the shore: dilapidated buildings leaning precariously over the water, fine estates, burned-out ruins, luxurious
gardens, ramshackle structures whose function he couldn’t guess. The river swept him past it all and he began to wonder if it would ultimately sweep him all the way to the sea. He imagined himself lost in the blue waters of the ocean, circling sharks below and gray seabirds overhead. The fierce light of the sun turning the waves to gold—
He cried out as something struck him in the head. He turned and lunged for the object, felt a solid something under his hands. He clung with primate tenacity to the broken stump of an uprooted tree. It felt like heaven to him, the perfect float. He kept his face out of the water for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty, breathing, pumping oxygen into his starving tissue. The shore began to look less distant. His shaking hands began to calm.
He pressed his head against a pillow of wood, wondering how long he’d be able to hold on to this precarious raft, how long before the river rolled it over. He found himself staring at his forearm, at a puncture wound where the local cops had ripped out his ID chip.
His eyes began to close. In his mind the roar of the river was transformed into the soft, pelting rush of rain falling in the vertical forests of Summer House. He clung to a tree branch to keep from falling in the easy gravity and napped while the monkeys foraged through the trees.
A hand clasped his arm and yanked him off his perch. He surged forward to keep from falling. Water closed over his head as his arm was twisted behind his back. Someone was holding him underwater! He writhed helplessly. Then suddenly he was jerked backward; an arm crossed his chest like a steel strap. Air washed into his lungs. “Pay me,” a gritty voice hissed in his ear. He could feel a rough hand searching his back, his buttocks, his abdomen. “Nothing?” his rescuer cried, a single word that exposed a mountain of frustration. “You have nothing! Why do they follow you on the bank if you’ve already been stripped?”
The arm that held him above the water was suddenly gone. He slipped beneath the surface. Water flooded his nose and eyes. He kicked hard and burst once again into sunlight. “Help me!” he screamed, his head swiveling wildly as he searched for the other. “I can pay. Don’t leave me here.”
Someone seized him by his hair. “What can you pay?”
“Money, goods, whatever you want.” He reached back to grab his rescuer’s wrist. He would not be left behind!
“I command many knives. If you don’t pay me, I will kill you.”
“The House will pay. Take me out of the river. Need to call home. No rivers in Summer House. No fascists—” He choked on a mouthful of water. “Vertical forests . . . have you been there? I’m still there. Everything alive . . . but me. I live here now. Die here. . . .” He listened to his own babble, unable to stop it. Eventually, the roar of the river overwhelmed all other sound. Its voice poured through his ears and into his mind, dissolving his thoughts until they ran together in a pleasant, bubbling stream.
He lay on a hard surface that refused to conform to his body or yield in any way. The afternoon sun glared from a golden sky, blistering his bare skin, blinding him. He groaned and turned his head. A monster crouched at his side. A horrible yellow clown-monster with violet eyes, a hooked nose at least five inches long, and cheeks so round they looked as if they’d been stretched over billiard balls.
Dismissing the vision as a product of his injuries, he turned his head the other way. A pretty young woman smiled at him. She had lovely brown eyes and dark tangled hair tied loosely behind her neck. A worn gray breastcloth encircled a generous chest; a faded yellow sarong hid her legs. He suspected faulty judgment, for she seemed no larger than a child of seven or eight.
He smiled at her. Lifting a hand, he touched her flushed cheek just to be sure she was real.
But someone slapped his hand away. She pulled back, startled. Sandor turned his head. The monster still crouched on his other side. He swallowed hard, wondering if the rules that governed this fantasy allowed the monster to eat him.
The monster spoke: “Where’s your money?” The same gritty voice that had pulled him from the river.
“Have to call home,” Sandor croaked. His throat was swollen, his voice almost gone.
The pretty woman spoke to the beast. Her words ran like music, though Sandor couldn’t understand them. The creature growled something in return. Strong hands grasped him under his arms, hauled him to his feet. With help he could stand. The pretty woman took his hand and smiled encouragement. With the assistance of her monster he began to walk. “My name is Sandor Jiang-Tibayan,” he told her. “I belong to Summer House. Please, I must call home.”
She looked distressed. Her gaze shifted to her pet.
“She doesn’t understand English,” the creature growled.
“What’s her name?”
“Nothing, to you.”
They climbed the bank and threaded their way through a village of crude shanties inhabited by dull-eyed, bony children. They reached a street. There were no vehicles, though foot traffic ran fairly heavy as shabbily dressed men and women pursued their business. “You have a phone, tuan?” Sandor asked.
The monster laughed. “Tuan? You are tuan, though the river almost had you. Call me Arif. I have no phone. I have no home. I have no money. But then, neither do you.”
Chapter
13
Phousita strolled through a cloud forest, walking upright on the fifteen-meter-wide branch of a tree so tall it must span the distance from Earth to heaven. She looked up, and could see no top to the great tree. She looked down, and could see no ground, no roots, only more leaves and branches. Smaller trees (though still giants in her eyes) grew in the joints of the world tree. Ferns clung to their limbs, and the warm air was sweetly scented by a huge mass of brilliant red flowers borne by a trailing liana. The world tree also supported patches of sky: smooth puddles of light, each one as big as a neighborhood, aglow with a brilliant blue light like the sky over the Spill.
A monkey dashed past her, leaping off the branch-path, to land in the top of a banana tree. It reached down to a huge cluster of fruit, plump, and just turning yellow. Good banana, it signed, picking one. Share with you?
Phousita laughed. Sandor Jiang-Tibayan—for that was the angel’s name—looked at her as if she were a police dog ready to crush his head. She sighed. “Forgive me. It’s just that it’s . . .” So absurd. “So odd to think that a monkey could talk . . . talk with its hands.”
Sandor’s eyes widened. He shrank further against the black, mildew-stained wall of the tiny room the Knives had rented in a row of tenements three-quarters of a mile from the river. Rats galloped through the rafters and a pool of rust-colored water collected in one corner of the dirt floor. Sandor sat on a low shelf, just large enough that two people could sleep under it and two could sleep on top. He was still naked. He’d turned sideways to her so that his legs would hide his genitals. The brilliant afternoon sunlight that streamed through the open rectangle of the door lent his skin a translucent, milky glow. His hair gleamed gold. His thoughts were clean and bright and delightful in her mind, and his scent tasted good to her. Sandor Jiang-Tibayan. Even his name pleased her tongue.
“What monkey are you talking about?” he asked, suspicion a gathering cloud in his blue eyes. “And when did you learn English?”
Phousita bowed her head. “The monkey you call Sax,” she said softly. “I don’t know when I learned English.” She’d had need of the talent, and it had come. Another gift of the evil sorcerer. (Why did he choose me? And what purpose did he have for this boy, Sandor?) Fear fluttered in her chest. What was given could also be taken away. The evil sorcerer could abandon her at any moment. He could take Sandor away and leave her with nothing, once again. (I will burn incense. I will pray to his spirit.)
She devised a spell to calm the looming panic in her breast. Gently, she shooed away the tiny children who clustered at Sandor’s side and knelt to examine his wounds. In the cloud forest the first monkey had been joined by another. They moved away from the banana tree to continue their meal on a fruit that looked like guava, though it g
rew on a vine. The inner vision and the outer vision: her mind observed both with equal clarity. Did a goddess see the world like this? Through many eyes at once?
Sandor winced as she touched the burns on his chest. She knew his fear: of her, of the rats, of the poverty that surrounded him . . . of what had happened to him in the police station. Softly, she said: “It’s not your fault. Sometimes, it just happens. The cops hear a name, someone’s arrested. It matters little to them if a crime has really occurred.”
His face squeezed tight in remembered pain. Then his eyes opened and confusion filled his gaze. In his words she heard a desperate need to understand. “I didn’t know what they wanted, or why they—” His gaze darted away, to fix on a wide-eyed toddler standing at Phousita’s side.
“Perhaps they don’t know the reason either.” She pressed her fingertips firmly against the burns, and then against the shallow cut in his forearm. “I’ve touched you with a spell. These wounds will not sicken now.”
“A what?”
“A spell.” How could she explain to him the complexities of the invisible world that inhabited her fingertips? The tiny spirit-servants that could weave spells on command from infinitesimal grains of matter. She had no understanding of them herself, and possessed no words that might interpret them to others. For her, explanations weren’t necessary. A new instinct had roused within her, and as she knew how to eat and drink, so she knew how to heal with a touch. She sighed. “You need food, but we don’t have any now. If we can get more water, Sumiati will cook rice in the afternoon.”
Sumiati had been a hero today. When the dog had attacked the warehouse, she’d grabbed the stove and the rice pot, while ordering the children to save the rice before they fled together into the street. The hammocks had been lost though, and most of the plastic jugs. Also the collapsible plastic crates and the tarp that had been their home before they found the warehouse.