Barsk (18 page)

The question of how to travel to a neighboring island had never come up before. In his own way, and all unknowing, he'd been bound by the same cultural restrictions that kept the Fant of his home from interacting with him. The
Mistakes of Nature
almost never lasted through infancy. Those few that had, did not survive to adulthood, and so the need to wander from home had never occurred among his kind. Abominations always belonged to their neighborhoods, abandoned in the public meeting space soon after birth and reared grudgingly and at arm's length by committee, without any warmth or love. It was no more possible for one to board a boat or raft and cross the water to visit another island than it was for a Fant to fly. And yet, every child of Barsk had heard the story of Pholo, however apocryphal it might be. Whether real or simply metaphorical, a Fant had flown. Pizlo couldn't fly, but Pholo's story offered precedent enough for him to defy both custom and propriety. He set out for Zlorka, two islands' distance north of Keslo.

The main university in the western archipelago had been built on Zlorka, and to hear Jorl speak of it, it was the most cosmopolitan spot on the planet. Its northern edge touched the equator, and a harbor there housed the anchoring end of the planet's sole space elevator.

Pizlo's mesh bags made it difficult to travel by a direct route, so he walked and ran by turns along the vast maze of boardways that snaked through the Civilized Wood until he reached a balcony on its northern most point. From there he hugged his bags tightly to his body and hurtled into trees. With the ease of endless practice he began to climb down and drop. Even so, he descended much more slowly than his normal pell-mell method, exercising more care so his supplies didn't snag on anything along the way. The extra time allowed him the luxury of grabbing handfuls of tasty leaves and nuts as he traveled, stuffing his mouth and filling his daypouch for later. By late afternoon he stood upon a narrow beach, little more than a strip of sand and gravel that marked the space between the ocean and the beginning of the forest. A light rain fell, but the wind whipped nearly sidewise. He felt the impacts like a myriad of tiny stones striking him without pause, but as ever Pizlo took no pain from any of it.

He sat on the sand and unpacked all of his “purchases,” setting aside the emergency item—a self-inflating survival boat—and redistributing the rest into his bags and daypouch. He spent a while working out how to activate his prize, but soon enough he had it open and with a twist of a knob it expanded into a shallow disk of bright yellow fabric. Pizlo piled his bags into the craft and dragged it the few steps to the water's edge. The tide lapped at his feet, beckoning, but he paused and did not enter the boat.

“I'm going now,” he said, turning back to the forest, but actually addressing the entire island. Pizlo cocked his head, waiting for something that never arrived, and then shrugged. He glanced up at the clouded sky, shielding his sensitive eyes from the rain, and repeated, “I'm leaving, Keslo. This is new. It feels bad, but I'm doing it anyway. Just so you know.”

He stepped into the surf, wading away from shore and pulling his boat after him. When he was in up to his waist he spun around and rolled over its side, landing on his back in the bottom. He let the tide carry him out while he got himself settled with his daypouch in his lap and a long-handled paddle gripped in both hands. Dipping the paddle into the water and his trunk into his daypouch where he'd stored the nuts from his shopping, he set out from his home island for the first time, a unique event in the entire history of Barsk.

“I bet this would count toward an aleph,” he said, munching on some nuts as he paddled away.

The meager afternoon light gave way to full dusk. The wind died down and the rain went from unfelt stinging to unnoticed patter. Dusk eased into gentle darkness. Pizlo kept paddling. At other times of day there would be dozens of rafts and boats in the water between Keslo and Telba, the next island to the north and a bit west, but the trip required a short span and rarely did anyone feel the need to complicate it by making landfall at night. Pizlo had the water to himself, sparing any other Fant the confusion and horror of encountering him in such an unimaginable place. He was well past Telba by midnight, keeping his course unerringly, as if the ocean's swells themselves passed word to him.

The rain increased again though the wind did not. Fat drops fell straight down and Pizlo had to divide his time between paddling and bailing as the tiny craft rode low with rainwater. He didn't have a map in his head so much as a precise sense of where he was, where he'd been, and where he wanted to be. At a point roughly halfway between Telba and Zlorka the rain eased off and he could concentrate exclusively on paddling again.

His palms and fingers had long since blistered, and the blisters broken open. Pizlo only noticed that the paddle slipped in his grip a bit more than before and attributed it to the rain.

Well before dawn, Pizlo paused. He
felt
something. He had no sensation of pain from his bleeding hands nor any awareness of the strained muscles that had spread across his back. The cramps in his legs from sitting too long in place made him awkward but otherwise caused no discomfort. Rather, an insight had come upon him, like the moment when he'd understood that the glyphs Jorl had shown him could stand for sounds, or the time he finally realized that it wasn't his difference that made Tolta talk to him but her own. Pizlo had arrived at the equator, and he knew it.

Since rounding Telba, he had paddled northeast, aiming not to reach Zlorka at its nearest point, but to come upon it from the side and then circle around toward its northern face. The harbor of the space elevator awaited him. He turned his boat due west, paddling ahead in the dark, and soon after could make out light. A faint glowing strand rose up out of the mist, disappearing as it climbed. A bit later, he came ashore, the line between water and beach visible in the light from the elevator. His legs folded uselessly beneath him when he tried to climb out of the boat. He'd ruined his hands. Shreds of skin that had once been blisters hung from them and the tender flesh beneath bled freely. He gazed briefly at them, seeking patterns in their shape like an augur of flesh, but found nothing and shrugged. He smeared the blood across his thighs and calves as he pushed his hands across them, working cramps from the muscles. On his third attempt, Pizlo stood well enough to stumble from the boat. He slung his daypouch across his chest. He meant to grab his bags but since letting go of the paddle, his fingers still refused to move properly. He used his trunk instead. Standing in water to his waist, stomping back and forth to make his legs and feet work as they should, he pushed his boat back into the water.

“Thank you,” he said to the boat, drawing out the moment, never having known a boat before, not knowing if he would again.

He scrambled out of the surf and onto the beach, stumbling like a child who had discovered his parents' liquor chest and sampled with the delight of a natural experimentalist. He pressed the fingers of both hands against his chest, forcing them to flex until he could make them do it of his own volition. Only when his body was working again more or less as it should, did he lift his gaze to the light of the elevator and examine his surroundings.

The space elevator rose out of a complex of buildings. The nearer ones looked much like structures you might find in the Civilized Wood of any island, though built on a larger scale. Pizlo imagined they served as home to those Fant who labored here, day in and out, meeting the barges bringing the pharmaceuticals from those islands responsible for that sort of manufacturing, and loading them into the gleaming cargo pods that sat on nearby tracks leading into edifices like nothing else on Barsk. Each pod was as big as Tolta's house, like a giant cube but with the corners cut off leaving flat triangles and no points. The pods and the tracks they rested upon showed more metal and plastic than Pizlo had ever imagined existing in one place. And the inner buildings rose up in angles not from nature, like monster houses seen only in a nightmare. The tracks flowed into the nightmare, even now with no workers attending them, creeping more slowly than he could walk, to what at first seemed the monster's maw, but which Pizlo realized was only a passage to their true destination. He stared up at the shining beanstalk and counted. Every hundred heartbeats or so, another pod tumbled into the maw and out of sight, and a different one further along in the process rose up in the shaft of light, leaping upward into the sky like it had learned to fly.

Pizlo stumbled to the far end of the tracks, his gait improving by the time he arrived. Dozens of pods sat on rollers, gradually drifting closer to a space where the tracks began, emerging from a housing in the ground. He could see a series of hooks that came up from below, rumbling like thunder as they pulled down the center of the tracks so they hooked on the pods and carried them along the tracks. Likely hundreds of cargo pods had been packed the previous day and left to slide one by one onto the tracks and await their turn up the beanstalk. These were the remaining ones from the day's work. The process would begin again in the morning. Pizlo planned to be far away by then.

He started poking at one of the waiting pods. His fingers still didn't work well, but the sensitive nubs of his trunk were more than capable of working the latches on an access panel and he soon opened it. The inside of the hatch had a packet of pages. The light from the elevator made the headers legible. They read “inventory” in the circular glyphs of the Fant, and presumably the same thing in the boxy marks used by the Alliance. Pizlo braced his arms on either side of the hatch and pulled himself in, his bags banging against the sides before following him. He had enough room to stand up, but an adult would have had to hunch over. He stood in a narrow corridor made by the walls of stacked containers of assorted pharmaceuticals to left and right and underneath. He bumped to either side and jumped up and down but nothing moved. Either they were too heavy, or they'd been bolted in place, maybe both.

Looking back out, he could see the buildings of the complex slowly sliding as his cargo pod edged ever closer to the track. He took some time to examine the inside surface of the hatch, making sure he could open it from within before closing it and shutting out the bit of light and the sound and smell of the ocean. In total darkness he explored his corridor, taking his time to turn at every junction and to double back again until he'd covered every pace. He imagined some Alliance sapient, probably from one of the smaller races like a Geom or Marmo, purposefully striding where he had roamed, comparing the cargo in the pod to some manifest in hand.

He settled himself in a corner, his back against the intersection of two walls of containers, and put his bags down. Everything jolted once, and a faint rumbling echoed around him. His pod had arrived onto the main track at last and a hook was pulling it slowly closer to the entrance of the elevator. Now that he was here, the efforts of the long day caught up with him. He'd never been so tired, but as much as he wanted to close his eyes and sleep, he needed to deal with thirst and hunger first. His fingers felt all puffy, but at least his hands had stopped being slippery. He held a water container in place with the heels of his hands and opened it with his nubs, dropping his trunk into it as soon as the lid came free and slurping up the entire contents. Next he went through all the sweet grasses and succulent fruit from one of his mesh bags and ate until it was almost empty before putting it away. He set the empty bottle aside, carefully putting the cap back in place; he didn't know how long he would have to be in here, but he didn't want to make a mess for that hypothetical Marmo, and so he might be refilling the container before he left.

Thirst quenched and belly full, Pizlo curled up tight, shoving his damaged hands into his armpits and tucking his trunk under his crossed arms. He dropped into a deep and dreamless sleep even before his cargo pod had worked its way to the elevator. The rumbling of the track stopped, and while he slumbered he entered the shaft of the beanstalk and began to climb, faster than anything he had ever imagined.

 

SEVENTEEN

DEAD VOICES

TWENTY-SEVEN
other Fant had been on the ship that abducted Rüsul—twenty-eight if he counted the young man who so clearly did not belong—and they had come from all different islands, from both the eastern and western archipelagos. Despite a long life, he hadn't known any of them, though a few recognized his name or had known someone who had met someone who owned one of his carvings. The internment facility was different. Nearly two hundred others had been snatched up from the ocean on their respective voyages to what they'd imagined to be the final journey of their lives.

He had no sooner finished being “processed” by a pair of utterly disinterested Feln when a trunk fell upon his shoulder and a familiar voice exclaimed “It is you! By my grandfather's tusks, I swore I'd never forget the scar on your ear no matter the years that passed.”

An ancient Eleph stood behind him, arms akimbo and as grim an expression on her face as any Rüsul had known. “Phas? Can it be? I've not seen you since—”

“Since you jilted me and went off with another woman, you old bastard!”

Never smart when it came to women, Rüsul didn't even try to stop the laughter that came burbling out of him. “That was always your problem, confusing a man's free choice with a personal attack. And I have to think I made the right choice. After two children and more years together than I ever deserved, my mate never once got mad enough to tear into me like you did.”

The other Fant slapped Rüsul's shoulder again and gave out a loud whoop, revealing her initial anger as mere pretense. “Two kids? Well, I should probably be thankful that she got you instead of me. I wasn't ready for children for a long while, and I learned quick enough not to become involved with men who didn't want to wait.”