The Township

GRANDFATHER WAS A TREE.

Father grew trux, in fifteen colours.

Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them. Around we go, and round…

A house ran amok in Fifteenth Street the day the soldiers of the Emperor Across the River came to Mathembe’s township. The sound of the armoured carriers in the streets of Chepsenyt frightened it. Split into its components it was a thing of little intelligence, easily frightened. One of the big, dazzle-painted metal machines had lurched to a halt across the end of Fifteenth Street and the house had panicked. Civilians and soldiers and house units like long hexagonal centipedes, or wheels, or domes on soft-running plastic treads, or concertinas with legs; all running around in the street, the civilians trying to round up the house units, the soldiers trying to round up the civilians.

The Rajavs had wanted to have the house reassembled by night. Now it did not look like they would ever find all the components of their home again. Mathembe shooed away a big, skittering thing like a walking umbrella that was making a dash for the trux pens. It would have alarmed the young organicals, sent them careering into each other, wheels spinning. The Rajavs were moving up to the Proclaimer end of town. Twelve generations had lived and died on Fifteenth Street, now they had packed their lives into five trux and disassembled their house into its components. They had been working since before the edge of the world dipped beneath the sun. Mathembe had been fascinated. She had never seen a house come apart before. Twelve generations, and now they were going. They did not care who knew the reason for their going. Intimidated out of their own homes: Mr Rajav shouted it in the streets for all to hear. Threatening letters, obscene notes, attempts to burn law-abiding citizens out of their own homes. The Ghost Boys. That was who were behind it. The Ghost Boys. Thugs, the lot of them. Louts.

It had not been much of a fire. A half-hearted bomb attack that had left a few scorch marks on the walls, soon cleaned off. Not even worth troubling the police in Timboroa over. Mathembe suspected her younger brother Hradu’s involvement. He and Kajree Rajav had been friends until the Word of God had come from the tabernacle and Mr Rajav had forbidden his son to keep company with idolatrous Confessors.

They would go to their own kind, the Rajavs, they would stay not one moment longer among those they had always thought of as friends, always treated as good neighbours, and who all along had wanted them out, wanted their home burned and them dead, wanted the skins of every Proclaimer in Chepsenyt flayed and nailed to their front doors.

And now they were dashing about trying to round up the fleeing, panicked sections of their house.

The armoured carrier turned. Its metal tracks squealed dreadfully on the ceramic cobbles. It came down Fifteenth Street. Mr Rajav shouted at it to go back, go away, but the machine came on, so hard and pressing that the soft contours of the street barely seemed capable of containing it. Standing half out of a hatchway was a soldier in the black uniform of the Emperor Across the River. He was shouting but no one could hear what he was saying because of the people’s voices shouting and the din of the engine. No soldier likes to go unnoticed. He swung the big black heavy machine gun on its mount so that it pointed upwards, fired. Five, ten, twenty shots. At the sound of the shots tearing the air apart the people fell silent and still. The pieces of dismembered house ran where they willed while the people listened to what the soldier had to say to them.

The Emperor Across the River required that all citizens of Chepsenyt township in the Prefecture of Timboroa present themselves at the town centre. Forthwith.

All citizens?

All citizens. Forthwith.

The soldier was very young. He had the pale hair and skin of the people from across the river. The long pale hair was tied back in the military fashion and fastened with a clasp bearing the symbol of the Emperor: a hand with a heart in its palm. He spoke the Old Speech grammatically enough for one not born to it, though his ’cross-river accent sent the inflections staggering hither and yon. The hands that rested on the black heavy machine gun seemed to Mathembe too young and soft for such devices. Tinny trebly music came from the open cockpit.

Mr Rajav, small and very very angry, stood before the hard metal face of the troop carrier and the soldier with the pale, soft hands.

‘I am a loyal Proclaimer, a true subject of the Emperor, you cannot mean me, you cannot include me and my family with those of questionable loyalty.’ He licked his lips with a tiny dart of the tongue, left and right, so; looked from side to side, so, as he said the words ‘those of questionable loyalty’.

‘All citizens,’ the carrier commander said in his grammatically correct Old Speech. The carrier’s engines blared into life. Black smoke puffed from exhaust ports. The vehicle came slowly down Fifteenth Street. Its squeaking tracks left ugly, regular scratches on the glass cobbles. Mr Rajav stood before it, small and very very angry. So angry and proud he could not see what Mathembe could see: that the carrier was not going to stop. Ten metres five metres three metres, then it was as if Mr Rajav had been touched with the illuminating wand of one of the Ykondé Saints. He saw the advancing carrier for what it was, an unstoppable irresistible wall of metal. He jumped to one side as the machine brushed past him. The soldiers of the Emperor Across the River within laughed. Mathembe could hear their laughter, and the loud dance music from their cockpit radio.

Mr Rajav was white and trembling. The street value of his loyalty had shocked him. The house units ran wild and capering down Fifteenth Street toward the paddies and orchards.

The people gathered at the Founding Tree; Confessors, and loyal Proclaimers. The Founding Tree was the heart and root of Chepsenyt township. From it had grown every house and garden and paddy, every shit beetle and glo-globe and ceramic cobble scratched by the tracks of the war machines of the Emperor Across the River. The tree had been planted uncounted thousands of years of dreaming ago when the Green Wave broke across the barren land and the Ahleles had gone striding out, covering whole prefectures in a single stride, calling out the heart-names, the cell-names of every living thing and binding them to their service. The Founding Tree stood, as befitted its legendary stature (though there was nothing much to look at, you had to see it with the eyes of faith) in a large, glass-cobbled square surrounded by half-dead half-bankrupt shops that sold nothing of any significance and cafés where the old people played their endless games of fili and got drunk and garrulous on bad wine.

Five armoured carriers were parked around the edge of the square. A young trux nuzzled up to one mistaking it for a syrup digester. Laughing, the soldiers drove the little mound of blue synthetic flesh away but it kept nuzzling back again. It was only content when one of the soldiers fed it a stick of chocolate. When all the people were gathered, Confessor and Proclaimer, an officer stepped forward. He was dressed in the black combat uniform of the Emperor’s army. Beside him was a tall metal pole topped with a cross-bar. The cross-bar was wrapped in a cloth. When he was certain, quite certain, that every eye was fixed on him, the officer in black pulled a release cord. The wrapping came undone and fell to the ground.

A cry went up from the people in the porcelain square.

Fixed to a rack at the top of the pole were five heads.

They were long dead, those heads. Lips had shrunk away from gums. Eyes, hair had fallen out, the skin was shrivelled and leathery. Long dead, but still alive. The organicals clutching greedily to their severed necks maintained them. They were alive though dead, and they would speak.

This is what the heads said.

The heads said that they had been foolish and vain and proud in raising their hands against the righteous, fair and good government of the Emperor Across the River. They said that an eternity would not hold enough sorrow for how they had misled young men and women and incited them to insurrection against the Radiant Personage of the Emperor. They said forever would not be long enough to live out the guilt they felt for having caused the deaths of these fine young men and women. They asked the forgiveness of the people of Chepsenyt township. They begged the forgiveness of the Emperor Across the River. Most of all, they craved the forgiveness of those they had so vilely misled under the banner of the Warriors of Destiny.

When the heads had spoken, the officer in black took down the pole and wrapped the heads in their cloth. The soldiers woke themselves, woke the engines of their carriers and one after the other drove away through the narrow streets and closes of Chepsenyt, tapping their fingers to the music on the cockpit radios.

‘My God,’ Mathembe’s Father said at the table when the world had risen above the sun and the glo-globes hovering in the corner of the room had stirred and turned on their cool yellow light. ‘My God, it would almost make you want to join the Warriors of Destiny, it would.’

Mathembe’s Mother gave her husband a look that warned against saying such things in front of Hradu. It was the impressionability of the young that had led so many into the Warriors of Destiny and to eternity as heads on poles. Impressionability, and the idealism of youth.

‘Still,’ Mathembe’s Mother said, ‘they did not have to do that; not that with the heads, that was barbaric. Inhuman. They try to teach us that the way of the empire is more civilised than the ways we have lived for four thousand years, and they put heads on poles. They did not have to do that. They were wicked and stupid people,’ (this, for Hradu, chewing his food absently, round-eyed with fascination: his parents talking sedition) ‘but they did not have to do that. It would have been enough to have sentenced them to servitude. Maybe for a long time, maybe twenty, maybe fifty years, but not to do that.’

Mathembe rapped the back of Hradu’s hand with her spoon for he had grown so enrapt in the conversation that he had forgotten to chew and the food was dribbling from his mouth. She remembered the time when there had been a public absolving in Founding Tree Square. Her parents had not thought it a suitable spectacle for a young girl—it had been years before puberty—but she had taken herself surreptitiously along and lost herself in the crowd. There had been the Town Procurator in his sash of office, and a State Executor who had come down from Timboroa on a government traix. It was clearly an event of some import: Chepsenyt’s snack vendors and tea sellers had left their established pitches to patrol the edge of the crowd. There were scuffles between them as they vied for customers.

A reverent hush fell as the victim and convict entered the square. The case was a celebrated one. The convict had been found guilty of rape and had been sentenced by the court at Timboroa to the organical service of his victim until such time as she forgave him. Mathembe’s Father remembered the case. He had been of the same generation as victim and culprit when the crime had taken place. He had known them both. Now, after fifteen years serving the woman he had raped, fifteen years working in her plantations and paddies as a gardener-organical, the rapist was to be forgiven.

The Procurator read aloud the declaration of forgiveness. The woman assented. The State Executor went to the tall, spindly gardener-organical, all legs and arms and fingers and eyes and did something that Mathembe could not quite see because the crowd all pushed forward for a better look. She had tried to press through, press through the tight-pressed bodies and the craning necks and the voices asking What’s going on what’s happening can you see? and when she pressed to the front she saw a ball of tangled floss, like a silken cocoon within which a dark, not-quite-human shape moved. The sun had crossed the sky, the vendors had traded their teas and wines and snacks. When Mathembe was quite sure that nothing was going to happen and was about to go home, the silk cocoon had torn, ripped, from top to bottom, and a man tumbled out onto the glass cobbles, naked and wrinkled and far, far more than fifteen years older than when he had been changed in that same square into an organical.

She remembered the way he had looked at his hands, as if they were friends he had not seen for many many years.

‘Pray God you never get sentenced to serve a Proclaimer,’ the voice on her right hand had said. ‘They never forgive.’

She thought about that naked man kneeling dumbfounded on the cobbles as her parents hid away the true extent of their outrage at the speaking heads for fear that their children might see it. He might have been her father, that naked, kneeling man.

After the meal she went to visit her Grandfather. He had been dead almost a year but still was not fully absorbed into the Ancestor Tree. Her Grandmother (little more than a single, sunlit memory of an old woman shaping birds from plasm and setting them humming and flapping around the conservatory), had been drawn into the Dreaming in less than a half-year, so Mathembe’s Mother said. The old Grandfather had always been a bad-tempered, stubborn, feisty spirit.

His death was widely believed to have been an act of political defiance when the New Namers came to Chepsenyt township in the early spring of the previous year. You would not have thought such grey, drab little people capable of the disruption they were to unleash upon Chepsenyt. You would not have thought as you saw them walking from street to street, house to house, pointing and writing things down in their recorders that they would take away the names of everything, the ancient names, warm and familiar from hundreds of generations of usage, from the people’s mouths and give them dry, lifeless streams of meaningless syllables in their place.

As part of the ongoing process of the cultural assimilation of Mathembe’s land into the wider civilisation of the Empire, New Speech, the language that the Emperor in his Jade City used for his love-making and his law-giving, was to be given equal status with Old Speech. It was intended that, through proper education, Old Speech would become obsolete and be replaced by New Speech, thus tying the Transfluvial provinces indissolubly into the greater life of the Empire. To this end, Inspectors, trained linguists all, were despatched the length and breadth of the land to change the cumbersome phonemes of Old Speech into syllables that sat comfortably on the tongue of the Emperor and his governors.

The New Namers, those grey men and grey women, had come in their soft, grey mechanical car with its Imperial crest and its pall of choking vapours and would hardly have been noticed in Chepsenyt save that where it went spreading its black foul-smelling fumes the names of the houses and gardens and closes changed, only by a vowel here, a consonant there, a diphthong elsewhere, a glide vowel shifted, a glottal stop modulated to make them pronounceable to tongues conditioned to New Speech until in the end, when the grey car drove away up the road to Timboroa, there was no township of Chepsenyt, no closes or gardens or streets or houses, only a pile of names that sounded like the names they had worn since the Green Wave broke across the land but which were totally without meaning. Nonsense names. Babblings.

The coming and going of the New Namers was one of the few events that united Confessors and Proclaimers. The new name-plates in curvilinear Imperial that went up on the road into Chepsenyt vanished the same night they were erected: the work, so the township gossips had it, of an unholy and unique alliance between the Confessor Ghost Boys and the junior members of the Proclaimer Spirit Lodges. Advocate Kalimuni, the Filelis’ neighbour and prominent in the Proclaimer community, wrote in his official capacity to the Prefect of Timboroa protesting on behalf of the loyal Proclaimers of Chepsenyt whose rights and cultural heritage as a distinct and unique grouping were being eroded without regard for one thousand years of history. Though fluent in both tongues—New Speech was the language of the law and the courts—Dr Kalimuni wrote the letter in Old Speech. It was a very beautiful letter. Dr Kalimuni was considered one of Chepsenyt’s finest ideographers.

The advocate Kalimuni and Mathembe’s Grandfather had been firmest friends. Their friendship was of the kind that is nourished by the friends’ total inability to agree upon a single point. Over their endless games of fili under the awning of the Teahouse of the Celestial Blossom, they had argued Proclaimerism versus Confessorism, Imperialism versus Nationalism, organic technology versus inorganic technology with such vehemence that proprietor Murangeringi had been on the verge of calling the constabulary at Tetsenok to restore peace to the glass squares of Chepsenyt. They had once argued long into the starfilled night, long after the chairs had settled back into their sleeping configuration and the awning had retracted, over the colour of a speed-dog that sat across the square from them scratching at parasites. They argued in Old Speech, of course, for it was the language of dissent and laughter. Now even the word ‘speed-dog’ had been reduced to meaningless sounds.

As a Confessor, Mathembe’s Grandfather could not resort to the law and organs of government with the same facility as Proclaimer Kalimuni. Nevertheless, he too played his part in the protest against the New Namers. He embarked upon a word boycott. He refused to call by name anything that had been renamed by the Emperor’s linguists. A point, a nod, a shrug, a general indication of ‘that there’ or ‘this here’ or ‘yonder thing’ was all he would permit himself. People were reduced to monosyllabic grunts: family, friends of many years’ standing; grunt. Whole districts of township, prefecture, nation and world became a thitherwards toss of the head. He spat them all out as if they were shit and ashes on his tongue.

In his boycott, Mathembe felt solidarity with him. His silence was not as complete as hers, but it was a bond between them. They became eloquent in silence. Even at the end when it was obvious to all that his dying was upon him and the time to enter the Dreaming and the fellowship of his ancestors nigh, he had obdurately refused to allow words tainted by the hand of the Emperor Across the River to remain on his lips. He had summoned the advocate Kalimuni (by grunt and general indication) and demanded that he draw up a will that made sure everyone received their dues without actually having to be mentioned by name. He became legendary: the township came to know him as the man who was starving himself to death on silence. Though, as he confided to Mathembe, ‘No one ever died for want of words in his mouth, or you’d be dead long ago, granddaughter of mine. No, you have it right. Never to speak at all: that is the highest, the noblest protest.’

Unto the very end when the people from the House of Heads came with their ritual masks and valises of organic technology to lop off the head, connect it to its support systems and transport it, closed-eyed and cyanotic, to the Grove of the Ancestors, he had refused to call Mathembe by name. Even when he had felt the dying break over him like a cold, drowning wave and he had cried out for someone to help him, hold him, please, hold him—though he knew that the journey into the Dreaming is one we must all make alone—he had called out, son of mine, daughter-in-law of mine, granddaughter of mine!

After the head had been grafted into the Fileli family tree, many in the township came to congratulate it for having protested unto death. The head did not acknowledge their presence. The people went away, hushed and reverent. The head was obviously in deep communion with the ancestors in the Dreaming, the great network of roots and synapses that underpinned the physical landscape into which the individual consciousness of the dead passed.

The head was doing nothing of the sort. The head was maintaining in death the protest it had made in life. It would not accept the praise and platitudes of those who honoured it for doing something they had not the integrity to do themselves. It closed its ears to their words. It would not even recognise Dr Kalimuni when he came to visit his old friend. It was a bold thing for the Advocate Kalimuni to do—if the shrine moderator learned that he had been to visit a pagan Ancestor Grove, he would have been Named and quite possibly shunned by his co-religionists. Proclaimers, when they died, were gathered straight into the person of God. Mathembe admired their confidence. The Dreaming might not be heaven but it was a fairly safe bet on some form of immortality, and required no undue exercise of faith.

The only visitor that earned a flicker of recognition was Mathembe. She established a fuller communication with her Grandfather in death than she had ever been able to achieve in life. Her visits to the Ancestor Grove became daily affairs. When the forests fell silent in that space between evening and night and the glo-globes began to stir themselves into luminescence, she would slip through the forest gate into the perpetual penumbra beneath the great trees that stood in the Grove of the Ancestors. Twisted, gnarled trunks, knotted and carbuncled, extended upwards twenty, thirty, forty metres before arching into a dense canopy of branches and red leaves. Dead ancestors cast dark shadows. Each knot, each gnarl and whorl on the trunks was a soul—a head ten, a hundred, a thousand years old that had been absorbed into the flesh of the tree. If some seemed like faces it was because they were faces: lips, noses, eyes of wood, bearded and haired with red leaves, a slow metamorphosis from flesh life to root life. In the deeper shadows between the root buttresses tiny lights glowed: vials of bioluminescents, placed there with bread and fruit and wine as an offering to the dreamers. Anticipations of oracles to be given, heart-thanks for oracles received. The souls of the dead flying free through the neural matrix of the roots could access an incalculable wealth of information. Occasionally they might be cajoled into offering insight and wisdom on specific problems of the living. Occasionally. More often than not they preferred to remain incommunicado within the nirvana-communion of the Dreaming, the ecstasy of being everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, simultaneous and instantaneous at once. The dead surrendered their existenceless existence grudgingly and resented demands to solve problems that would yield to the simple application of common sense. Small wonder the popular belief that the dead were a testy crew.

Mathembe moved between moss-carpeted root buttresses glowing in their dark recesses with a thousand tiny bioluminescent stars. Prayer wands, each bearing a paper petition impaled on the end, bent and whispered their messages to the souls of the dead as wind stirred the grove. You had to be careful of those long, thin wands in the twilight between the trees. Only the season before an old woman coming to nag her dead husband of his selfishness on leaving her a widow had tripped, fallen, and needed a new left eye grown in by the medicals. No uncertain petition to leave on a prayer wand, a left eyeball. She had died the following season. Prayer answered. Mathembe slipped between the swaying prayer wands. Half dendrified heads rolled their eyes to watch her pass by. Framed by wooden lips forever half-open, moss-green tongues shaped silent syllables.

Her Grandfather’s head was the lowest on the tree that had sent the souls of two hundred generations of Filelis into the Dreaming. The callous of wood immediately above him, that still bore a caricature of a face, was Mathembe’s Grandmother. Her absorption into the Dreaming had been swift and blessed: Mathembe’s Grandfather had told Mathembe that he had searched long for her along the roots and fibres of the matrix but always in vain. He wondered that she might have transferred her spirit onto one of the Saint-ships that on rare occasions entered planetary space and sent her mind flying out across the universe among the Daughter Worlds. It was a great sorrow to him that beyond the loneliness of death could be the loneliness of the Dreaming.

Mathembe came every day to tell her Grandfather how his township was faring on its journey through history. Great things and small things: those things that make a history: how the township educators had been given language implants for New Speech which they were to distribute to every child of educable age and those adults who expressed an interest. How the shopkeepers and café owners had been ordered by law to display a picture of the Emperor Across the River in the glory of his regalia in a prominent position in their establishments. How her mother feared that Hradu was falling under the unhealthy influence of a gang of boys some years his senior: not that they might bully him, as boys inevitably will, or sexually humiliate him, as boys inevitably will, but that they might lead him into the Ghost Boys, which had been a semi-respectable society in her and her husband’s young days but now seemed little more than a direct artery into the Warriors of Destiny. How those men, and women too, who called themselves Warriors of Destiny had vowed to drive the soldiers of the Emperor Across the River back across that wide river of his, back to his Jade City, so that this land which had been so long a province might be a nation once again. All these things she told him, everything, the hows, the whys, the wherefores of the life of the living. She thought she understood something of the loneliness of the death. She understood separation.

Mathembe clapped her hands. It was an abrupt, almost shocking sound in the holy peace of the grove. The heads of the recently departed awoke in consternation. When they saw that it was only that strange rude girl, they returned to their dreaming.

‘Ignore them,’ her Grandfather said. ‘Bores. The lot of them. Bores. And farts. Can’t even get a good game of fili out of them, always slipping into the Dreaming and forgetting the moves. Not one of them the match of the Advocate, and he a left-handed Proclaimer. So, granddaughter of mine, what has been happening in this wicked world of yours?’

She told him. She told him about the Rajav family and the house units running wild in the streets. She told him about the big metal troop carriers and the soldiers of the Emperor Across the River with their long pale hair tied back and the music that accompanied them as they drove to war. She told him about the shooting and the people gathered in Founding Tree Square to hear what the heads of the dead rebels had to say to them. She told him all this. Not with words. She had no use for words, for language. She told him with a speech deeper and more articulate than language. She told him with the speech of her entire body: with mime, and dance, and sly, brief facial expressions, with looks and glances and mummery, with posture and pose and poise. She told him in her language, the only language she would speak, that seemed so clumsy and open to misinterpretation when broken into its component names but which, when performed by a young woman in the dark of the evening shade beneath the ancestors of Chepsenyt, becomes far far more than its constituents. It becomes more expressive, more lucid, more liquid and graceful than any spoken language. Language that transcends speech and becomes a new kind of silence. Movement that transcends motion and becomes a new kind of stillness.

And Mathembe stopped.

Something had moved in the darkness between the Ancestor Trees. She scooped round cobbles from the ground. It was said by those who see politics at the bottom of their soup bowls there was no part of the land where glass cobbles could not be found buried in the soil, thus proving the continuity of biotechnological civilisation. Even the earth beneath your feet serves in the struggle for nationhood. Mathembe hefted the solid, round cobble in her hand. She could throw far, hard. She could throw further than any of the boys who came calling for Hradu.

Again.

It moved. Soft rustling of disturbed vegetation. Closer now, movement, sound, and now a smell to join them. She flared her nostrils, frowned at the smell of something so familiar she could not identify it in isolation.

These things, when they happen, happen suddenly. Suddenly, a flurry of movement, suddenly, a bustle of sound, suddenly, a face staring at her over the roof buttresses of a tree not twenty metres from her. She cried out wordlessly.

The face was not a human face. It was a face of triangles: triangle eyes, down-turned triangle mouth, twin triangular slots for nostrils, huge triangular flaps of ears to each side, all on a long, thin triangular face marked with a stark black-and-white maze pattern.

Not a face. A mask.

She let fly her cobble with a yell of anger but the mask was too fast for her. The mask’s wearer crashed and leaped away through the roots and the prayer wands. Grandfather’s head hurried it on its way with a stream of oaths and imprecations.

It had been no ordinary mask, such as a child might make for a crèche group pageant. This mask she had seen before in one of the semi-religious festivals when the young men paraded the icons of the Ykondé Saints through the streets to the doors and windows of every Confessor household in Chepsenyt and had their piety rewarded with wine. It was a Ghost Boy pneuma mask. For all the strength of her arm that could out-throw every boy on Fifteenth Street, Mathembe no longer felt safe and private in the Grove of Ancestors. Its spirit of darkness and contemplation had been violated by the aggressive, sexual spirit of the pneuma mask.

The masks themselves were not dangerous. Until you put them on they were bland, flaccid sheets of flesh; then their integral circuitry took up your dominant emotion and amplified it and moulded the mask’s shape and colouring into the expression of that emotion. Some models featured pheromone-generating glands. That would account for the unfamiliar-in-its-familiarity smell.

The masks themselves were not dangerous. The wearers of the masks could be, when the emotion-enhancing circuitry fed back that emotion to the wearer in a self-reinforcing loop. When the wearer was a Ghost Boy and could claim immunity, invulnerability and infallibility for being in the possession of an angel, then the masks could be very dangerous indeed. How long had he been watching her? Days? Weeks? Her skin felt unclean, with the itching, crawling of many insects. She was angry, angry, and impotent in her anger. She flung a second glass cobble with all her might out into the dark and the soft glowing of votive lights; and another, and another, and another. The violation of her privacy could not have been any greater if he had spied upon her cleaning herself during her period.

The next afternoon the boys came calling for Hradu to come out with them and do whatever it was boys did that involved much idle hanging around street corners. Mathembe drove them away with stones and sun-dried shit from the trux pens.

It is the holy day. In the darkness before the world tips its edge beneath the sun, old Jashar Cantor has climbed the one hundred and two steps of the tower. One hundred and two steps, each in total darkness. He thinks of each step as a prayer, the tower as a parable of his personal journey to God. One hundred and two steps, once a week, for fifty years. He must have climbed halfway to heaven by now. As the first red limb of the sun appears, he flexes his old muscles in the cold and swings the heavy wooden hammer against the metal gong with deceptive, long-practised ease. As the dawn light comes spilling across the top of the forest that enfolds Chepsenyt like a mother’s womb, his voice goes out with the boom of the gong, out across the rooftops and treetops of Chepsenyt. There are other, stronger singers in the congregation of the shrine but none have the unearthly plangency of Jashar. The voice of an angel—say it low. Proclaimerism does not admit angels, nor saints, nor holy men. Each Proclaimer is all the holy men, saints and angels that are necessary. Each Proclaimer may ultimately; will, ultimately, become God through oneness with him. The song of Jashar Cantor goes out across rooftops and forest. Out in the dawn light that grows in strength and definition with every passing moment are two dark shapes moving above the forest. Hunting. Jashar does not see them. He sings the goodness and holiness of God and the light of this world is darkness to him compared to the greater light of God.

The helicopters turn, rise up. The helicopters tilt their noses downward and head away together, very fast, over the top of the forest.

In the houses at the high end of the township, the Proclaimers make themselves ready. They have been making themselves ready since before dawn. That is the Proclaimer way, to rise in the darkness and make themselves ready. The children are complaining that they are hungry. This, too, is the Proclaimer way; to fast from the preceding sunset until their return from the tabernacle. The way of the most pious, that is. Come on children, hurry up, we are going to be late. Oh, I suppose God won’t notice one little biscuit. Go on. Don’t tell your mother. Have you got your hat? Where’s your hat? Neesa, have you seen Ajad’s hat? Well, give it back to him at once. Right. Can we go now?

Out they come with their heads respectfully hatted, led down by voice and banging gong through the glass streets that wind between the houses to the tabernacle. In his house at the low end of town Dr Kalimuni unhooks his Book of Witnesses from behind his ears, removes the reader from his right temple and rises to answer the voice and the banging, banging gong. Hurry hurry, quick quick. Lajmee the warden is busy with water and soap washing a crude sketch of a man from the doorpost of the tabernacle. He must have it all washed away before the congregation arrives and are defiled by looking upon the representation of a human. It is no defilement to the one who washes it away, it would seem. Confessor louts. Nothing better to do. I suppose they think they are so clever and funny, hah hah.

There is always one late one, always one running for the door as it is closing, clutching hat to head, dragging children one two three four behind. It is always the same one. Now the banging banging banging gong and the singing voice can cease and Jashar Cantor descend the one hundred and two steps. Now the people are assembled in the presence of God, cross-legged on the neatly swept court under God’s heaven. The men take their Books of Witnesses from their cases, hook them behind their ears, or lay them in their laps if they are the very old, family models, press the readers to their temples. They always close their eyes while waiting for the inspiration of God and so can never see what the women and children see, that they all sit in exactly the same way, left elbow propped on left thigh, left forefinger pressed contemplatively to lips.

The men wait for the inspiration of God as the scriptures tumble through their frontal lobes. The children fidget and play visual games with the blue sky and the floaters in their eyes. They are thinking about lunch. The women poke them in their fidgeting, which is no way at all to stop someone from fidgeting. They are thinking about lunch too. And sex. And Mrs Anjalati across the road, the things she gets up too. And new clothes for the children. And are they safe when they go down to the tabernacle for religious instruction, with all those Confessor children hanging around the way they do? A thousand and one thoughts. All in the silence under the presence of God.

They come suddenly; so fast they are on top of the noise of their own approach. There is just enough of a warning for everyone to look up as the two black helicopters storm overhead in a threshing of rotors. The sound of the engines booms in the confines of the tabernacle like a drum. The downwash from their blades sends the carefully swept dust swirling up in choking clouds and hats rolling every way.

Have they no respect? Those were helicopters of the Emperor. Fellow Proclaimers. You think so? I tell you, to those from across the River, there is no difference. They look at us and they look at the Confessors and all they see are meatmen. That is what they call us, you know, meatmen. But what business have they to be flying about on the holy day anyway? Security. Everything is equally holy and equally profane in the name of security. Anyway, they are not true Proclaimers like we are true Proclaimers. They are Proclaimers in name only, their faith means nothing to them. Nominalism. It has not stood the test of fire and tribulation.

The presence of God is not a place you rush into apologising that you are so busy, so much to do, sorry. You would rush like that into the presence of the Emperor in the Jade City, would you? Preparations must be made, disciplines, stillings and quietings. Peace. Stillness. Silence. Let the inner spaces expand and be filled with the presence of God, let the word of the Book of Witnesses wash over you until the hand of God illuminates one particular canto and impels you to share it with your brothers and sisters. Silence. Stillness, peace. A presence touches you, a vast singing space through which shafts of golden light move, ineffably, inexorably.

Oh, what is that now?

Voices. In animated, excited conversation. Men’s voices, women’s voices, the high, thrilled voices of children. Why do they have to stop right outside? And why, when their voices are so loud, can you not make out a single word they are saying? So you have to strain all the more to listen and in the end what you are listening to is not the voice of God at all but the voices from outside. Silver laughter of women. Deeper, brazen laughter of men. Music, from radios. Hands clapping feet tapping, women singing along with the songs they seem to have been born knowing. The slap of children’s running feet on the glass cobbles, the sharper, more self-conscious voices of the teenagers. Wheels: trux, drawing up outside. You ready? We’re ready. You got? We got.

God burn you all, damn Confessors; for your idolatry, for your superstition, for your obdurate refusal to embrace true religion, for your rebellious spirits, for your feckless ways, for your manifold offences towards God’s Elect, but most of all, most unforgivably of all, for being able to laugh and talk and tap your fingers and feet to music while we Proclaimers are here in the tabernacle keeping silence waiting for God to speak.

There was to be a trux hunt. Mathembe’s Father and some of the other growers in the township had arranged it. At any time there was a considerable population of feral trux wild in the forests around Chepsenyt. Some were cullings that had escaped and against the odds reached maturity, some those that had developed a spark of wilfulness in their rudimentary brains and broken free from their conditioning, some the descendants of trux that had gone feral generations before. Whatever their pedigree, or lack thereof, the wild trux were valued by the growers for their hybrid vigour and the genetic strength life in the wild conferred; attributes useful to the often overrefined domestic strains.

There had been complaints from among the poorer landowners that wild trux already rampant in the common foraging lands in the forest’s fringes were beginning to encroach upon their gardens and plantations. Trux were catholic and enthusiastic converters of vegetation to muscular energy, feral populations totally defoliated entire tracts of forest in a matter of days and legends abounded of plagues of trux reducing townships to famine level, devouring gardens, trees, houses, people, anything in their paths. Mathembe’s Father had always treated such tales with professional contempt. ‘Look,’ he had said, taking a young Mathembe and younger Hradu down to the pens. ‘They metabolise complex sugars. There is no conceivable way any trux could eat a human being. They eat fruit, plants, and mech-syrup. We would probably poison them. Anyway, they haven’t any teeth.’

Teeth or not, even a small family group could leave the smaller landholders of Chepsenyt destitute, forced to borrow heavily from the commercial genebanks, or live hand to mouth from the common foraging. They had approached Mr Fileli who had approached the other truxers and over wine and cakes (more wine, much more wine than cakes) in a street café they had arranged the hunt. It was not until the morning of the hunt as the people were gathering with their bottles of wine and flasks of mate and picnic lunches that they remembered this was the Proclaimer holy day and that Nasmir Jhirabha, one of the most important truxers in Timboroa Prefecture, would not be able to come. Holy day or no, Nasmir Jhirabha came, in his boots and jacket of many pockets and broad, grinning, bearded face, radio-staff clenched in his great left fist. Doubtless he would be Named before the congregation. God could wait. Trux could not.

First to go out would be the runners. To be a runner was an honour only bestowed upon the youngest and fittest. Their task was to run up beside the trux and slap a dazzler on it. Each runner was equipped with a belt pouch of these devices—organic circuits that, correctly placed, overloaded the trux’s rudimentary nervous system with hallucinations and forced it to an introspective, dazed halt. Even in the dense understorey of the forest, trux were capable of a surprising turn of speed when startled. It was something to brag about, if you were a boy and wanted to impress a girl, or even another boy, that you had run down a trux.

The truxers themselves and the older, less spry members of their retinues followed more sedately behind with docility circuits to brand and control their dazzled trux. Last of all came the very oldest and very youngest, laying out the great common picnic in clearings deep in the forest that had been hallowed for this purpose since the time of the Green Wave.

It had been a long time since there had been a trux hunt in Chepsenyt. That time, Mathembe had wanted to go with her Father but he had told her she was too small, she must go with her Grandfather and Grandmother in Red Trux to help with the food. She had seen the runners go loping and whooping and whistling into the forest and wished she could have gone with them. —Next time, her Father had promised, when you are bigger. Now was the next time. She had the belt pouch of dazzlers. She had her radio on a thong about her neck. She had her running shoes laced tight and close onto her feet. She went to stand with the other young men and women who had been chosen to be runners. The young men were playing about trying to smack each other on the head with their dazzlers. The organic circuitry could deal synaesthetic shocks if they hit right; the smell of blue and the colour of cold and the sound of light. There were slaps and yells and laughter. Nasmir Jhirabha shouted at them to stop messing about. The boys jeered him because he was a Proclaimer. When the young men saw Mathembe in her running shoes and tights and belt pouch and radio around her neck they laughed.

Oh yes, and how are you going to tell them where to go when you find a trux? Not bothering to add, if you find a trux.

Mathembe shrugged eloquently, dismissively raised the second object on a thong around her neck to her lips. It was a clay ocarina in the shape of a fat bird. She played a trill of notes and the boys did not laugh then because what she played was exactly the sound that the forest made at the place where two enormous fan trees rose from a grove of wild brownmeat. On her ocarina she could imitate the music of any part of the forest and anyone listening on their radio staffs who knew the forest would know within metres where they would find the trux.

Mathembe’s Father and the other truxers were looking around them to see if there were any more still to come, which was the cue for the runners to stir themselves and jostle for the best exits. As always, the young men pushed themselves to the front under the eternal, erroneous impression that they were more deserving than the young women. The truxers conferred among themselves. Heads nodded. Nasmir Jhirabha bellowed out, ‘All right then, let’s be off.’

Whooping and jeering and calling out wild, ebullient meaningless syllables, the runners went striking out through the paddy fields and forest gardens, leaping and ducking and weaving between the bulbous sacs of the wine fermenters and the spindle trees with their encircling clouds of bobbin flies on long silk threads. Gardener organicals fled from the breaking wave of ululating, wildly-coloured young bodies, went down waving stick-like manipulator arms. The young men and women of Chepsenyt hurdled over them, onward, out into the greater forest beyond.

Mathembe ran alone. She chose to do so. The boys were tedious with their constant competing to out-man each other. The girls took a more relaxed pace but their constant chattering about the boys was no less tedious. It was easy for Mathembe to thread herself between the trees and isolate herself as the perimeter of runners expanded. She was always happiest to run alone. It was not that she feared the company of others, as many solitaries do; their friendship or otherwise was irrelevant to her. She was content to have many acquaintances at the expense of true friends. Solitude was her sacrament. The presence of others stifled her naïve spirituality. In solitude with the greater congregation of the forest, she passed into a spiritual grace of self-loss where, for brief, numinous moments, she became aware of herself as a tiny, transient lightning flicker of consciousness moving with incomprehensible speed through the colossal slow sentience of the trees. She had run out of herself into the selflessness of the forest. She felt that if she could only give her consciousness some final, microscopic push a subtle boundary would be crossed and she would perceive it all; the runners spreading out through the trees, the truxers and their retinues behind them, the old people laughing and dancing to the radio and making preparations in the forest clearings, the wild trux moving in the deeper fastnesses.

Is this what it is like to be dead? Is this the Dreaming, is this the consciousness of the roots of the trees?

She had passed from the edgelands where human biotectured life and primal vegetation coexisted into the deep forest. Tieve trees rose sheer thirty forty fifty metres from the forest floor before breaking into a dense canopy of dark leaves. No ray of light penetrated the forest floor; Mathembe ran in an almost nocturnal darkness over the interlocking hexagonal tiles of lichen. Here a parasitic fungus had colonised a tieve’s root buttresses and bioluminescent spheres as large as herself cast a green glow, there land corals had established themselves and built fantastic intricate spires and towers and crests tens of metres high. She avoided a tangled holdfast of roots and lines; cables draped with moss ran up into the darkness and anchored clutches of gently swaying photosynthetic balloons. Beneath the tendrils with which they filtered aerial bacteria were clusters of balloon-lings like ripe fruit, soon to be released to drift across the roof of the forest until they might find a place to strike anchorhold. From the canopy came a continuous symphony of voices: chitterings, twitterings, boomings, risings and fallings, glissandos, arpeggios, sonorous bellings and chimings. The creatures that inhabited the understorey went about their businesses in darkness and silence. Mathembe ran on. She felt she could run through this dark, singing place until the world ended. She had given up her Mathembe-ness and had been given a new identity, a new nature, a new spirit. The Proclaimer doctrine that men might beyond the edge of time unite with God and so become him, shone in a new light. To give up the lesser to become the greater: she understood that. But how dearly the lesser clings to the little it calls its own.

She had long forgotten all about trux, or dazzlers, or radio.

Some perceptions come to you slowly, piecemeal. A gradual accumulation of quanta of data until between one moment and the next you know. A certain deeper darkness within the darkness of the deep forest. A certain regularity within the greater irregularity of whistles and whoops and distant calls. A certain pattern in the patternlessness that mimics your own: and you are aware that you are not alone. There is another, running with you, pacing you step for step, never falling behind, never drawing ahead, out there among the trees. You stop, you try to listen over the panting of your lungs and the hammer-beats of your heart. Nothing to hear but the sound of the forest murmuring its great incoherent mantra to itself. You start to run again. You look to your side, just a glance: do you see something move, just that quantum of thought out of synchronisation with you? Something? Someone?

You run on but it is not the same now. It is not the high and holy passion, it is not a divine fire. It has been sullied. Stained. Like the Kapsabet man whose wife is raped by bandits. He loves her none the less, he loves her more than ever, but it is not the same.

Once you have seen it, once you have connected those happenings and made the invisible visible, it cannot hide itself from you.

Tieve trees stood close and tall, shoulder to shoulder in a tight stand. Mathembe’s shoes skidded on the damp leaves that covered the hexagons of lichen in the clearing as she slid to a stop. She crouched behind a root buttress, the clay beak of the little ocarina bird raised to her lips. She did not know how far she had come, whether she was within the range of the little radio organical around her neck.

The something came flickering and weaving out of the shadows between the trees, zig by zag, closer. Moving into and out of cover. A small, bird-like cry escaped her lips as the figure appeared like a vision of an angel before her. The alienness of the mask, the sharp, triangular pneuma mask with its sharp angles and pointedness startled her. She touched her lips to the mouthpiece of the ocarina. The boy’s voice, barely broken, and labouring, sounded incongruous behind the thrusting, assertive mask.

‘I am sorry. I did not mean to frighten you. I will take it off if you like.’ Then, remembering there would be no answers to any of his questions: ‘Would you like that?’

A nod.

The boy’s face, barely of age and flushed from his exertions, came out from behind the angular aggression of the mask. He set the thing down by the tieve roots. Separated from the animating psyche, the features softened and ran, the mouth became a round hole gaping at the light beyond the leaf canopy. Insubstantial tendrils of sexual experiment and wondering and wanting went curling and coiling between the long, nude trunks of the trees.

‘You are so hard to get to talk to,’ the boy said, a somethingteen of no particular significance Mathembe vaguely recognised as one of those boys who lolled at the outermost tables in the cafés, or toyed with traix on the empty lot at the end of Twelfth Street. ‘All I wanted to do was get to talk to you, I thought the trux hunt would be a good time. I have never run so hard in my life. I thought I was going to die.’ He laughed, punched his chest with his fist, invited her to laugh too. Mathembe laughed, silently. ‘This is a nice place, isn’t it?’

Mathembe realised the boy was afraid of her. It filled her with an evil pleasure, that realisation.

‘A nice place,’ he said, looking around. ‘You like places like this, don’t you? I like places like this too: this is a really nice place for me. The Ancestors; that is a nice place too. I go there a lot, to be on my own. I have seen you there; you go there a lot too, I suppose you find it a good place to think and feel and be alone. I need that a lot, to think and feel and be alone, I suppose you do too. You know, some of the others, they think you are odd, funny; they say things about you: well, I do not want to repeat them because they are not nice; they are not nice, the others, they are stupid, but I, well, I think you are sort of nice—I have seen you in the Ancestor Grove and I think here is someone I could like who thinks like me and I do not mind that you don’t talk, that is all right, you have your reasons for that, I am sure, and I would not ask you to, honest, I would not want to make you do anything you would not want to; so: do you think it would be all right, hm? would you mind, would you like to, would you, can I, do you mind if I, just one little…’ and all the time the pheromones were curling and coiling from the pneuma mask and he was coming towards her one step at a time, one small step at a time, and he was opening his mouth and she was opening her mouth and when she stabbed her tongue into his mouth he was shocked, he had not expected this, not like this, had something gone wrong? and then she was lifting up her shirt to let him touch her breasts and his head was going round he was going to die oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god, reaching out to touch, gently, fearfully, dreadfully, those breasts, those big, flat nipples, oh god oh god oh god he had never imagined, never dreamed.

And next he knew he was reeling in a sudden explosion of hallucination, of angels that tasted of rust and yellow and blue music and boxes that sounded vaguely of folding and unfolding and refolding endlessly out of each other to fall what what what? in the leaf litter on top of the melting, sagging pneuma mask.

Mathembe tucked the dazzler back into her belt pouch, tucked her shirt back into her tights, pouted her lips at him and ran off through the trees, playing a mocking, defiant, laughing music on her ocarina.

Reeling, humiliated, still not certain what had happened, the boy felt a vile stickiness on his chest. Exploring fingers pulled away a cloying, stinking mass of synthetic flesh. The pneuma mask lay smashed beneath him, exuding a malodorous yellow pus from its wounds.

The old people and the children are waiting with food and wine in a deepwood clearing. Some of the children find it a little alarming to be so entirely surrounded by trees. The trees, they say, are looking at them. That, say the old men with the plastic wine flagons, is entirely possible. With that certain, so, roll of the eyes. Look at the lie of the land, the way the trees grow in such a regular way: story and legend have it that there was once a township here where you are now standing. A town full of people and their lives. Now, there are only trees. If there are faces in the trees, they are the faces of those long-ago people, looking out from thousands of years of dreaming.

And the children, properly alarmed now, roll their eyes, so, and ask—what happened to it?

And the evil old men with the plastic wine bottles who have nothing better to do with their time than alarm children say—God destroyed it. Like that. Rubbed out. Because (and here they grin maliciously) of all the nasty, horrible little children who would not believe what their elders told them.

Then the old women scold the old men and tell them to get a move on and be useful and stop frightening the children, honest kids, it is all just stories, just made up, not a word of truth in it, but the seed has been sown and cannot be taken back.

Mathembe’s Father was pleased. Ten trux, corralled behind a neural-shock net, branded with his circuitry and purring with artificially induced contentment. The young men were disconsolate. For all their whooping and cheering and leaping, not one trux. The young women were pleased. Between them they had run down and dazzled thirty-three trux that day. Mathembe’s Father had bought them all drinks, they passed the wine bottles round and let the wine run down their chins and long, slender throats in mockery of the boys. Mr Fileli passed the bottle to his daughter. ‘Ten trux!’ he shouted, more than a little drunk. Mathembe smiled for him but she had seen in the edge of her vision the boy who had touched her breasts sliding out from the trees into the rear of the celebration.

‘Ten trux!’ Mathembe’s Father said to Nasmir Jhirabha, waving the wine bottle as a taunt between friends.

‘Mine are not all back yet,’ said Nasmir Jhirabha. ‘I have still one runner team out. We will see what they have when they come back.’

What they had when they came back was not wild trux.

Even before they had entered the clearing Mathembe could tell from the way they came crashing and whistling back through the woods that what they had found was not trux. They came bursting into the clearing, glazed, with sweat and excitement, shouting, ‘Look what we found, look what we found, look, look!’

What they had brought back from the forest was a young man and a young woman. Their hair was long and dishevelled, they smelled of human filth and damp forest, they looked cold and tired and undernourished and hunted, their clothes were the colour of mud and mould, stained with the juices and dyes of the forest, but everyone could see quite clearly the patches on their shoulders that carried the device of a trefoil knot.

The symbol of the Warriors of Destiny.

‘Look what we found, look, look!’ the leader of the runners shouted again. The people of Chepsenyt murmured uneasily at this apparition at their feast. Mathembe’s Father looked for Nasmir Jhirabha but the big Proclaimer had taken himself apart, pretending business with his trux in their corral.

‘They’re Warriors of Destiny,’ the leader said proudly, which the people did not want to hear for until the words were said they could have pretended that they were not. ‘Warriors of Destiny. They are on the run. They have been on the run for weeks. Those helicopters that came today were looking for them. They have been in the forest for weeks. Weeks.’

Again the people murmured uneasily. Then a man pushed to the front: Mr Kakamega, a traix producer. He was fortysomething but still not married. Because of his business, the boys of the township hung around him, and he around them. He was well known for his political opinions and never afraid to offer them unsolicited. He stepped forward and thrust wine bottles into the hands of the woman Warrior of Destiny.

‘Fine welcome Chepsenyt gives to strangers!’ he shouted. ‘What a fine, welcoming town, that has not a mouthful of meat and a spit of wine to wash it down with for wanderers lost in the forest. Chepsenyt of the welcomes. Well, you are welcome. I make you welcome.’ He brought the young man and the young woman to the sheet spread out on the ground and bade them sit beside him and gave them food and drink. They ate as ones who have not seen food for months. They ate warily, each mouthful taken with a dart of the eyes here, there, watching. The people returned to their groups of family and friends and tried to eat and drink again. Someone turned on a radio, but it was not the same. Like the evil, invisible parasitic fly that the vintners say turns wine in the fermentory to vinegar, the day had turned sour in their mouths.

Only the most extraordinary of circumstances would bring Kimilili and Kiminini the policepersons roaring up the road from Tetsenok in their regulation shorts, boots, gloves and helmets astride their regulation Timboroa Prefecture traix. They were not twins; the two big women were not even related, nor even particularly alike physically, apart from a shared bigness. The people of the cluster of townships they policed named them Kimilili and Kiminini because, faced with two women in regulation shorts, boots, gloves and helmets, roaring about the countryside on huge regulation powertraix, they had inevitably concluded that they must be lovers. Another enduring legend that sprang up more or less simultaneously in the townships of their patrol was that the big, clunky three-wheeled traix they rode were actually two young men who had dared once to make passes at them. Kimilili and Kiminini, knowing good public relations when they heard it, did nothing to quash these rumours. Mostly they contented themselves with verbally harassing pedestrians from a street café table in Tetsenok where they were stationed, only emerging from myth to reality on their annual visits to the townships to check up on organical licensing and ensure that royalty statements were up to date and correct. It must have been something quite out of the ordinary to have called them away from shouting insults at passing jeepney-drivers to a piss-hole like Chepsenyt township.

The problem when an entire township is under suspicion is where to start questioning.

True to their legend, they parked their traix in Founding Tree Square, straightened their regulation shorts boots gloves helmets, rested right hands so on shock sticks, and marched between the evil old men sipping tea and pondering fili moves at their shady tables into the café and up to the bar. Two pairs of gloved hands flat on the counter.

‘Of course, being a loyal subject of the Empire and a law-abiding citizen, you would naturally report to the authorities the occurrence of any disloyal or seditious activity in your neighbourhood.’

‘Of course,’ said the proprietor, topping off two cups of raqi.

‘As we thought.’ Two smiles appeared beneath the reflecting data-display visors.

Because no one could ever accuse them of a lack of thoroughness in pursuing their investigations, Kimilili and Kiminini asked the same question at every café in Founding Tree Square. Then, because it was getting on for lunch time, they asked the kekab hawker grilling skewers of whitemeat over a radiant element on the corner of First Street. They asked the pastry vendor on the corner of Second Street and First Circular. They asked at the hot nut stall outside the town bourse. Satisfied of the unquestioned loyalty of the citizens of Chepsenyt township, they were crossing Founding Tree Square to their dozing traix when a boy old enough to know better was heard to whisper to his friends, to impress them with his daring, ‘It’s the dike-bikes.’

Quick as a knife, Kiminini had him over the handlebars while Kimilili had his pants down and the end of her shock stick pressed to his perineum.

‘We do not like disrespect.’

‘We do not like rudeness.’

‘It creates a common, unpleasant atmosphere.’

‘It breeds disrespect for the law.’

‘We do not like rude people. We especially do not like rude boys.’

The boy squirmed and whimpered as the blunt end of the shock stick pressed harder.

‘You see this traix?’

‘Mighty fine organical, isn’t it?’

‘Well, this was once a little boy.’

‘Just like you.’

‘He was a rude little boy.’

‘Worse, he was rude to us.’

‘Now he is getting used to the idea of having my ass on his face every day for the next fifty years.’

‘You like the idea of having my ass in your face?’

‘I think he does.’

‘I think he does too.’

The stick pressed harder, harder. The boy cried out but the big women held him firmly. People were gathering at a discreet distance.

‘However, we are feeling merciful.’

‘Instead, we are going to ask you a question.’

‘And if you answer it truthfully, we might let you go.’

‘But if you lie, I am going to pull the trigger on my shock stick.’

‘It is up high.’

‘Very high. High as it will go.’

‘So, once they clean the shit and piss off the walls…’

‘You can kiss goodbye to any thoughts you might have had of things to do with that pathetic object.’

‘You see, we have heard rumours.’

‘Reports.’

‘Things folk have been saying about this shit-pit of a township.’

‘And we have been sent to find out if they are true or not. So…’

‘Question is…’

‘Is anyone harbouring Warriors of Destiny?’

The boy glanced at his friends, at the people gathered at a discreet distance.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Oh, I am not certain if I believe that.’

‘Nor am I.’

‘You sure, boy?’

‘I’m sure.’

The shock stick withdrew and rammed painfully home.

‘Still sure?’

‘Yes! Yes!’

‘I am still not totally convinced.’

‘Nor am I. Maybe I should shock him.’

‘Maybe you should. So. One final time, and if we do not like your answer, we will blow your ass all over this square. You are sure no one in this township is harbouring two escaped Warriors of Destiny?’

‘Yes!’ the boy howled. ‘Yes, yes, yes! God, yes, I am sure!’

The shock stick withdrew.

‘Thank you.’

‘Now pull your pants up you little bastard and get out of my sight.’

As the boy fled back to his friends, sobbing and clutching at the waistband of his shorts, a true hero now for not having told his township’s deepest darkest secret under torture, Kimilili and Kiminini woke their traix and rode back to their office in Tetsenok to report to Timboroa that they were satisfied that the tip-off that two Warriors of Destiny had found refuge in Chepsenyt was false.

When she heard the news, Mathembe’s Mother wrote it out in a note and gave it to Mathembe to take to her Father, who was out on the Bad Year Hill. It had been his forty-second birthday three weeks before, the most unfortunate age a man can be. He had been lucky on the trux hunt, but did not wish to press the Saints twice, so, while stoutly maintaining that it was all a load of superstitious balls, nevertheless obtained the requisite forty-two small items of value and went out along the forest paths to the shrine of Kilimam Bé, patroness of a man’s middle years. Confessorism was a hard belief to systematise: fifteen Saints-major, six hundred and thirty Saints-minor and thirty-eight thousand nine hundred and twelve angels, all busy on their divine businesses, were difficult to pin down to any one place at any one time, any one solid doctrinal statement; responsibilities and fields of influence overlapped; petty rivalries and jealousies between the exalted could have disastrous results if your prayers and supplications were addressed to the wrong spiritual being. And over all, within all, lurked the intangible, invisible congregation of the dead, millions upon millions of disembodied consciousnesses spinning their way to heaven through the neural matrix of the Dreaming. Worship the divine essence in all things was the final rendering down of Confessorism, so that it was at heart the identical twin of Proclaimerism, to which it claimed to be implacably opposed. As these things tend to be.

The Bad Year Hill was an ancient earthwork in a clearing some couple of kilometres by forest paths from Chepsenyt. Legend had it that it predated the Green Wave and was the burial chamber of prehistoric automobiles possessed of evil spirits that had killed their owners. No one had ever been sufficiently inclined to excavate and investigate the truth of the legend; Mathembe’s people regarded all mechanical contrivances as in some way harbouring the darkness of Nyakabindi, the evil under the sea. At the top of the small hill was the shrine to the Saint—unlike many of the deep-wood shrines of the Ykondé Saints, it was well cared for. The reason for its upkeep was the four flights of steps that led up the hill to the shrine, of twenty-seven, forty-two, sixty-six and seventy-eight steps respectively, one step for each of the misfortunate years of a life. The tradition was that the one seeking to avert the danger inherent in the year climb the appropriate staircase, place an object of value on each of the steps, and finally clap hands three times before the shrine to attract the attention of the saint, light a biolamp and impale a supplication for good fortune and prosperity on a prayer wand. While in a township of Chepsenyt’s size there might not be many people of the dangerous age at any time, the ages of nineteen, twenty-three, thirty-one, thirty-five, forty, forty-six, fifty-two, fifty-three, sixty-three, sixty-nine, seventy-two, seventy-nine, eighty, ninety-one and one hundred and twelve were reckoned to be years of minor danger, averted by an offering to the shrine keeper, so the Bad Year Hill was always kept wealthy, healthy and holy.

Mathembe found her Father on the next to last step. Beneath him were assorted breadapples, paper cups of rice, holy medals, almost-expended telecomm cards, unused bus tickets, cans of beer, pairs of socks, old shoes, numbering forty. Too young for living dangerously, Mathembe ran up the wide steps. Her Father opened the message, read it carefully.

‘The bastards. They have hobbled Nasmir Jhirabha’s trux,’ he said. ‘All of them. Not one has escaped. The bastards.’

The note fell from his fingers and became the forty-first object on the Bad Year Hill and he went straight away to apologise to Nasmir Jhirabha on behalf of his fellow townsfolk.

The forty-second step remained bare.

‘It is not your fault,’ said Nasmir Jhirabha to Mathembe’s Father. ‘You have no part in it, you have no need to apologise. Your hands are clean.’

‘But those whose hands are not clean are Confessors, and I must apologise for my own people,’ Mathembe’s Father said.

Nasmir Jhirabha looked at Mathembe’s Father in that way that people do who have walked past a certain house every day of their lives without seeing it. Until this moment.

‘They did a thorough job,’ Mathembe’s Father said to his wife as she sat in the conservatory shaping balls of plasm into little singing creatures and setting them scurrying about the floor. ‘With blades. Some he can heal, but it will mean missing the Timboroa Solstice auctions and he cannot afford to do that.’

‘Ghost Boys.’

‘Who else? As if Nasmir Jhirabha would have called in those two buffoons that think of themselves as police persons. He knows how it is here. Chepsenyt is not that kind of place.’

‘Someone did if he did not,’ said Hradu. Mathembe shot him a glare that dared him, just dared him to say one word more.

‘Chepsenyt is becoming that kind of place,’ said Mathembe’s Mother as the little wheeled creatures hurried around her feet and Mathembe wondered how she could mime maimed and mutilated trux to her Grandfather.

That night the helicopters came.

You are asleep in your bed. No, you think you are asleep in your bed. You are in that half awake, half aware state when even the familiarities of your own room are strange and unfamiliar. Awake, or dreaming? You cannot be certain. You had dreamed of a great thrashing blade moving in space, carving slices off the edge of the world as it moves along its orbit; the sound of its thrashing fills the universe, the thrash of destruction, and you rush to the window to look out and see the street full of people running as the great blade comes down out of the sky. All around you is a great beating noise and you do not know whether it has come from the dream inside your head into the outside, or from the outside into your head.

The thrashing sound fills your room, fills the air, fills up the spaces in your lungs and between the joints of your bones with its beating beating beating. There is a light in the room, a curious light from an angle you have never seen a light come from before, casting shadows angular and frightening because of their unfamiliarity. A hard white light that seems to hiss, it is so bright. The shadows it casts look sharp enough to cut, cut through the dream, cut the dream to flying, tattered shreds.

Awake. This is no dream.

The street was full of people. People with hastily pulled on clothes flapping and flying in the downwash of the helicopter blades; the helicopter blades beating and beating and beating, shredding the whole world with their cutting. The long dry dust of the spring heat was driven up by the blades. It choked the people, blinded them, set them coughing and blinking. The people shaded their eyes with their hands to try to look past the searchlights that cast long, sharp, unwavering shadows to see the helicopters. Voices boomed from loudspeakers, distorted with overamplification but still audible above the beating of the helicopter engines.

Out, out, everybody out, that was what they were saying. Out into the streets, everybody, out. Young or old or man or woman, Confessor or Proclaimer, out. Now.

Mathembe pulled on hasty day clothes. She collided with her Mother and Hradu in the door. She saw the expression on her Mother’s face. Hradu looked scared. Her Mother’s look was something of an altogether greater order of magnitude.

The searchlight beams played across the people who lived in Fifteenth Street. It seemed to burn in Mathembe’s face, to burn into her soul and find and accuse there darknesses she had not known existed. She stood judged by the light. Then the helicopter swung its beam up and away, and all the others with it. The helicopters turned in mid-air. The beams played across their fuselages as they manoeuvred through the air: black painted metal with curious protrusions and protuberances. Organicals grafted clumsily to Imperial technology. The heart-in-hand crest of the man in the Jade City was momentarily illuminated. The helicopters dipped their noses and went in for landings in the paddies and orchards around Chepsenyt.

Someone among the people gathered in Fifteenth Street swore, gently, the names of all the Ykondé Saints. ‘The militia,’ he said.

Organicals grafted to Imperial machinery.

Mathembe remembered her Mother teaching her plasm lore: always roll your apprentice pieces and experiments back into balls of synthetic life again. ‘You can’t let them escape,’ she had said. ‘They go wild and fierce loose in the environment. There is nothing wilder and fiercer than one of your own gone feral.’

The beating of the helicopter engines died away. There was a new sound in the cobbled streets. The sound of running feet. Soldiers in the black of the Emperor Across the River and the brown of the Prefecture police. A company of soldiers came into Fifteenth Street and formed a line opposite the people. They looked fat and stupid and unfit. They looked like boys who have been allowed to play with guns.

Struggling with the tie of his sleeping gown, Dr Kalimuni stamped up to the nearest meat-faced soldier. He was very angry. Mathembe had thought she had seen him angry before when she or Hradu had committed some minor misdemeanour that involved him or his home. That had not been anger.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded in a voice like winter. ‘What do you think you are doing, waking the dead and pulling honest people out of their beds? Well? Where is your commanding officer? I will not waste my breath on men in the ranks. Bring me your officer.’

The meat-faced militiaman stared past Dr Kalimuni. An officer in a black and brown uniform with the shoulder flashes of the Timboroa Prefecture Local Defence Regiment stepped forward. This soldier did not look fat or stupid or unfit. He was lean and small and supernaturally calm. Clearly, Dr Kalimuni could not read his small but perilous madness, for he marched up to the officer, saying, ‘I am an advocate, I know the law, and I know there are proper procedures to be followed. Proper procedures! Show me your authorisation. Where is your authorisation? Show it to me.’

Without ever taking his eyes off Dr Kalimuni, the officer gave a quiet order to his men. The fat, meat-faced soldiers elbowed past the people standing in the street. Two went to each house and began to search.

‘This is an outrage,’ said Dr Kalimuni, but his fury was burned up and turned to ash. The black and brown officer whispered something to him no one else in Fifteenth Street could hear. The advocate went very pale and quiet. The black and brown officer remained impassive as a stone.

The beep beep of his communicator was only a small noise but to the people in Fifteenth Street it was like needles through their ears. The officer listened, impassive as a stone, then spoke. Shortly. Tersely. The doors of all the houses on Fifteenth Street opened and the soldiers came bulling and blustering out. Some were carrying bottles of wine they had liberated from the cellars of the treacherous in the name of the Emperor Across the River. One was munching down a sandwich he had made from bread and whitemeat and pickles. They came through the people. The people dared to look at them as they pressed through. The militiamen unslung their weapons and, holding them like clubs, pushed the people up Fifteenth Street to its junction with Third Circular. As they came to the junction Mathembe could see people being pushed down the other streets by the militia into a rough circle around the intersection.

There under the plastic weapon-muzzles of a group of militiamen stood Mr Kakamega and the two young Warriors of Destiny.

‘Stay where you are all of you,’ said the black and brown militia officer. From the brown and black ranks behind the encircled people came the hard, plastic rattle of weapons being turned the right way around.

The officer gave an order.

Three soldiers unclipped tools from their battle packs and started to dig three holes outside Mr Kakamega’s house. The prisoners struggled but the soldiers held them firm. The young man began to cry. The young woman swore and cursed imaginatively. The shovellers dug up spadefuls of ceramic cobbles and chocolate black earth. The shovels dug and dug. Under the guns of their militia, the people watched the shovels dig. The sobbing of the young man grew fainter and less coherent, a burble of fear. A small pool of liquid had formed on the cobbles at his feet. Mathembe closed her eyes. It was a shameful thing to see a man piss himself. The people watched and the shovels dug and dug and dug and when the holes were deep enough the officer gave a new order. The prisoners were stripped naked and their arms and legs tied with wire. The wire was twisted tight with pliers so that it cut deeply into the flesh. The soldiers wrestled them towards the holes. The young woman fought, trying to kick and punch and bite. Blood seeped from where the wire had cut her skin. The soldiers would always be stronger. The diggers buried the three prisoners thigh deep in the chocolate black soil.

Then the black and brown officer addressed the people. The young man and woman were members of a proscribed organisation; terrorists, rebels against the rightful rule of the Emperor Across the River. They were guilty of countless crimes against the Emperor, acts of sedition, sabotage and murder. The traix grower Kakamega was guilty of aiding and abetting enemies of the Empire in their crimes and thus warranted the same punishment due any enemy of the Emperor.

‘Sergeant, execute sentence,’ said the officer.

The sergeant opened a canister with a red bio-hazard symbol on it. He removed three round black seeds. Round and black and pitted, like the heads of long-dead ancestors. He wore gloves and moved cautiously, careful not to let the seeds touch his flesh.

He showed them to each of the prisoners.

The young man begged and moaned.

The young woman sneered and shouted slogans.

Mr Kakamega the traix grower said nothing.

The officer’s face was impassive and cold as a great stone.

The seeds sprouted the instant they touched the soil. Within seconds they had put out roots and shoots. Within one minute they had encased the prisoners to the waist in vines. Within five minutes they were wrapped head to toe in growth and their legs were turning to wood.

The black and brown officer made the people watch until the prisoners’ cries had ceased and the first branches were reaching out of their mouths and eye sockets. When there was nothing left of the young man and the young woman and Mr Kakamega the traix grower but three small trees bound in wire, he gave everyone five minutes to return to their homes and collect what they could. Five minutes. Not one instant more.

I am certain this is a question you have asked yourself. You lie awake in your bed at night next to the one you love and you wonder: if something were to happen to your home, if the soldiers were to come and order you into the street, you have five minutes: what would you take? Things of fiscal value, or things of sentiment? Documents, or photographs? Have you a plan, everything in one place where you can put your hand on it right away and lift it and run into the street with it should that night of dread ever fall? Or would you lift happenstance, piecemeal, guided by the heart and so find yourself on the street with an ornamental dog and your favourite recipe book and beloved old jacket in your arms and the chair in which you made love that night wrestled somehow, superhumanly, out the door and lying at your feet?

Five minutes.

Think about it. Count one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand and when you get to three hundred one thousand you are out of time, time is no more, whatever doom it is you have imagined has arrived.

Now it was the turn of the brown and black militiamen to watch. They watched the people carrying their piles of bedding and sewing machines and cabinets of crockery generations old and icons of saints and loved ones and files of memory circuits and old, fond-remembered love masks and racks of seedlings and copies of patent licences into the streets. Five minutes or no, the militiamen still had to go in and drag out a few who could not decide between this painting and that jar of preserved eggs, this bracelet and that wallet of document circuits and policies.

When everyone was out and standing by their heaps of salvage, the officer spoke into his communicator. At his word the helicopters that had been lying beating to themselves in the mud of the paddies rose up, all at once, and took up positions over the rooftops.

The downwash of their blades whipped the leaves of the three trees outside Kakamega the traix grower’s house.

The officer thumbed a button on his communicator and his voice was relayed through loudspeakers mounted on the helicopters. His voice spoke through the beating blades. It said that disloyalty was a terrible crime. Among Confessors, it was no more than could be expected, but to find it among Proclaimers was incredible. Intolerable. And the incredible, intolerable disloyalty was this: that, despite the warnings of the government on the radio and on the wall posters, despite the warnings of the two local police-persons and the visit of the heads of the traitors, it had still been brought to his attention that Chepsenyt township was harbouring Warriors of Destiny. If the whole town was guilty then of harbouring enemies of the Empire, the whole town would be punished.

He nodded. The barest, most imperceptible of nods. But enough for the eye behind the image-amplifying visors in the helicopters. The ugly, misshapen, swollen bulbs of clumsily grafted organicals opened and threw fire across Chepsenyt. The houses exploded into flames. The helicopters moved slowly, deliberately along the numbered streets and circulars, pausing over each rooftop to bring their weapons to bear and send the house raving up in a ball of fire. The helicopters burned the houses of the Confessors and the houses of the Proclaimers. All were alike to the Emperor Across the River. And because all were alike to the Emperor Across the River, the helicopters burned the house of the man who had telecommed the authorities at Timboroa and informed on Mr Kakamega.

Clutching their hastily gathered belongings, the people tried to flee but wherever they turned there were helicopters moving slowly, deliberately, throwing fire from their weapons. The houses of Chepsenyt, a thousand years a-growing, went up in a great cry of conflagration. Crazed by fire, central nervous networks destroyed, some of the houses split into their component units and stampeded, near mindless, through the streets. People went down beneath the millipede feet or the fat bulbous tyres or the plastic caterpillar tracks; children stood screaming, screaming as the flames went up all around them while parent fought parent in the mass of shouting, hurrying bodies to try to reach them.

When they had finished with the houses, the helicopters moved out over the paddies and orchards with the same slow deliberate-ness. The gun crews behind their datavisors slowly, deliberately took aim and sent trees orchards powerplants up in ecstasies of burning.

The trux in their pens behind the Fileli house were on fire. Mr Fileli grew them in fifteen colours but now they were all the colour of fire. Confined, they revved and spun their wheels and rammed into each other blinded by heat and pain. Mr Fileli shouted instructions over their wailing keens of agony but his wife and children knew what to do without need for orders. Mathembe was already swinging back the gate as her Father and Mother darted between the onrushing, blazing organicals. Her Mother had the control rod. There. In the middle of the rush, one that was not on fire. Mrs Fileli darted with the control rod, connected with the socket and swung herself up onto its pallet. She fought the panicked organical out of the stampede to a stand outside the collapsing ruins of the Fileli home. Mathembe and Hradu piled what small possessions they had managed to rescue onto the pallet while Mr Fileli stood like one vouchsafed a vision of God, staring at the runnels of blazing, molten synthetic flesh that ran over the cobbles down from the Proclaimer end of the township.

‘Come on man, what are you standing staring at?’ his wife shouted. ‘Over. Finished. Done. Get a move on.’

He heaved boxes of photographs and canisters of the plasm from which his wife made her toys up to Hradu on the trux but it was plain to any who could spare a glance that the eyes of his heart were fixed backwards, at his blazing, melting trux. In fifteen colours.

The exodus was forming up, family groups piling whatever they could on any available means of conveyance: trux, traix, drays, jeepneys, handcarts. Some had all their worldly goods balanced on house units. Some had all their worldly goods piled onto their backs. All were moving very slowly, very painfully, towards the Timboroa road.

‘Let’s go,’ said Mrs Fileli, twisting the control rod nervously in her fingers. The streets were almost deserted now, but for the spirits of burning. Even the soldiers had withdrawn to their pickup points.

‘No!’ Hradu shouted. ‘Mathembe is not here.’

‘Where the hell is she?’ Mr Fileli said.

In the act of loading the trux, Mathembe had noticed a change of pitch in the beating, beating of the blades and, looking up, had seen the helicopters moving. Away from the paddies and orchards. Towards the Ancestor Grove.

What is one more scream in the greater screaming of Chepsenyt dying? She ran like a runner in a trux hunt, ducking and weaving and darting between the burning homes and the families and the piled possessions. She ran, glancing up at the helicopters that moved with deliberate slowness above her. Her lungs were raw from smoke and exertion. The helicopters kept pace with her, one small running mote in the devastation below. She kicked open the forest gate. No thought for the dangers of prayer wands, no thought for unseen root holes. The helicopters took up station overhead. Wooden lips sunk deep into the Dreaming whispered to the runner. Votive biolights formed intimate constellations among the buttresses. The helicopters spread out to cover the Grove of the Ancestors with a canopy of engine noise.

Mathembe ran.

In the blister-mounts, weapons rolled to bear, like eyeballs in sockets.

Mathembe ran.

She could see him. Eyes closed in repose, serene in the root-dreaming. Wake up wake up wake up. But she did not have the words. She hooked her fingers into the holdfast that grafted him into the Ancestor tree, heaved. Heaved. Heaved. All the while silently shouting wake up wake up wake up. She glanced, panic-stricken, at the sky.

She could not see the stars for helicopters.

She braced her feet against the trunk, heaved. Heaved. Heaved. Heaved until her fingers felt they would rip. Heaved until her arms felt they would tear from her shoulders. Until her eyes and heart and lungs would burst. Until she felt she would pull the world from its orbit. Past the limits of her strength and will, she heaved.

And the head came free with a terrible tearing roaring mandrake shriek. Her Grandfather’s eyes opened wide in horror, his mouth gaped. She feared she had torn the head free but left the spirit disembodied within the matrix. No time, no time, for doubt. She went bounding back over the roots and prayer wands with the head—living, dead, dreaming—under her arm.

And the helicopters opened fire and the Ancestor trees exploded in pillars of flame. From deep in the Dreaming, the fifty thousand ancestors of Chepsenyt woke in fire and screamed as the trees came crashing down in showers of sparks and ash and Mathembe with the head wrapped in her shirt went leaping and darting between the falling, screaming ancestors. Burning flakes of ash settled on her skin and hair, she did not feel them, all she knew was the need to run and jump and dodge; that, and the forest gate thirty, twenty, ten metres in front of her.

She came running up Fifteenth Street like a minor demon from the Nyakabindi mystery play, a thing of flame and smoke with a head under its arm. Mathembe’s Mother goaded the trux to its best speed, Mathembe’s Father reached to scoop his daughter up onto the pallet. The trux turned and sped away up Fifteenth Street through the collapsing embers of Chepsenyt township. Behind it the fifty thousand ancestors came crashing down on top of each other in sparks and flame. At the corner of First Circular the trux passed three small trees that, by the grace of God, had escaped the burning. The enduring legacy of Chepsenyt township.

The black helicopters came in low for one final pass over their achievement, landed to pick up the troops, and clattered off somewhere to the north.