The River

THREE NAMES:

On the day that the captain’s second grandson was born, a school of deep-river dolphins was sighted, an auspicious omen meaning that here, waving its minuscule hands, screwing up its minuscule eyes, was one whose blood was mingled with river water deep and clear, indissolubly bound by the soul to the flow of the water. On the day that Two—to which his family-name of Number-Two-Grandson-of-the-Fifty-Ninth-Captain was abbreviated—was given his crew-name Feeder-of-Heads—Feeder thereafter—a raft-island, an occasional agglomerate of hybrid biotech, was spotted. On the raft-island grew seven fan trees. In each of the seven fan trees perched seven birds. Around each of the seven birds that perched on the seven trees floated seven shimmering bubbles. That, according to the old people on the aft deck, more than halfway both geographically and spiritually to the Well of Spirits, was the best of all possible signs, though none were able to calculate whether the seven times seven times seven portended favour in love, fortune in business, length of years, multiplicity of descendants or enormous genitalia.

Number-Two-Grandson-of-the-Fifty-Ninth-Captain-Feeder-of-Heads received his third, and, unless by some catastrophe of succession he became captain, last name, his state-name: Junior Undersecretary-to-the-President three days before the exodus from Ol Tok.

Three names, one name:

Unchunkolo was the third by direct descent to bear the name on the river. Sister ships, birthed at the once-in-a-generation Great Meetings, bore other names; their genelines were not pure, unsullied. Only Unchunkolo the third could trace her ancestry to that first Unchunkolo that had carried settlers from the Empire shore across the waters to new lands a thousand years ago. Now with three hundred years of river water beneath her blunt bows, the time was drawing near for Unchunkolo to pass seed and matronymic to another.

Unchunkolo. No definite article. Never the Unchunkolo. Tell me this, when you go up to town on the country bus to trade, to buy a little, sell a little, deal a little, drink a little wine and tea, do you say, today I am going to the Timboroa, the Cucuyonbayé, the Lapsanjabet? When you meet a woman in the cool of the shade trees by the light of the moon, when you tell your friends the next day what you did there, and where, and how often, do you say, tonight I will take the Jhelé out dancing, tonight I will sing to the Lititta by the light of the moon with a small guitar; today in the cool of the shade trees I shall ask the Luwayo to be my partner? Unchunkolo. No definite article.

In her three centuries she has grown with the twelve generations that have lived and reproduced and died within her body, putting out new decks and ramps, shooting up derricks and gantries, cupolas and pergolas and gazebos, bridges and davits and companionways, growing accommodation pods, agricultural blisters, sending out domes and arches of plastic flesh. And all that time the great muscle machine that is her beating heart has turned that big stern wheel, pushing rafts of lighters and barges and pontoons loaded with organochemical processors, meatplants, live-fur tanks, consumer electronics, mass-market shoes, pulp timber from port to port all along the river. Before that beating heart falls still and her family that is her crew abandon her to the current that will take her down to Elder Sea and the forgetting, she will have pushed an entire planet’s weight of merchandise up and down that big river.

Three names, one name.

No name.

The river is like God. As you draw closer to it, the names fade, as you pass into it all names are dissolved into its waters. You hinterland people horizoned all your lives by land, who have never known the scent of deep waters or felt the pull of the flow in your spirits, you mining town and mill town people have names for it. Names like Lualaba and Ganjacee and Tubinreya. Many names, many tongues, all of them the same: Mother of Waters. And you teeming millions to whom the throb of ferryboat engines among islands, the sight of great rafts of timber or baled waterweeds or organochemical plants like small floating cities are as familiar as the colour of your children’s hair, you who take your livelihood, your eating and drinking and washing from it and return every night to your homes along the riverine coast; it is more than Mother of Waters. It is The River. No more. No less.

But to you river people, you who are bound by the waters of your wombs to it all your lives; you captains, you engineers, you clansfolk, you lifters and loaders and crane operators, you fisherpeople, you sweet brown diving girls, you ferrymen, you pilots and navigators, it is not even The River. It is something deeper and more reverential than that. You call it she.

She is looking kind today.

I think she is going to blow up bad today.

I had a load far down, you know, where she runs out into the sea.

She.

Before Empire and province, she was.

Before Proclaimer and Confessor, she was.

Before the Daughter Worlds, before the stars themselves were reached, and let go again as a child will abandon an outgrown toy, she was.

Before Green Wave, before Grey Age, before organical and mechanical, before the great technological breakthrough that enabled the human nervous system to directly manipulate DNA, she was.

Before all science, before all knowledge, before all history, before all legend, she was.

Before the word, she was. Before the name. Before man. Before ice, before fire, before earth and sky, she was.

While Unchunkolo and her nineteen sisters were still shrouded in the night fog that rose from the river, Two was up out of his hammock and about his business. His bed on the rear deck, close by the Well of Spirits where his ancestors dreamed eternity away, had become markedly less comfortable since First Mate had bought a new red automobile on the Empire side of the river and, suddenly stuck for storage, had suspended the thing from a derrick above Two’s dreaming head. One does not sleep well with a ton of Imperial steel creaking and swaying above one’s head. And these days of days, Two needed his sleep. With the refugee crisis, he had risen to temporary prominence in Unchunkolo’s political system.

He woke with a grumble and a shiver. Work to do. The camera crews were coming. You heard them before you saw them; the drone of organical outboards in the mist. Then you saw the prickle of light from their riding lights, then, moments later, the long grey shadows darting, knifing out of the rolls of cold-water fog. Pirogues, outriggers, each with its complement of soundpersons tapping meters and checking power packs and camerapersons bitching about light levels and the bilgewater that was ruining their five-hundred-a-pair all-terrain boots and reporters applying bags under their eyes and a little judicious grime so that half a planet of viewing public would be convinced that they were sharing the living hell of the thousands of refugees stranded in mid-channel by a ghastly comedy of political fudging and not, in fact, fresh from steak-and-wine breakfasts in the Riverside Hotel.

As Junior Undersecretary to the President, Two had been given the job of liaising with the news teams. Onshore it would have fallen to External Affairs and his Cousin Lifter, a girl a year older than Two into her body in no small manner and who had made it no secret that she wished to be equally into Two’s, would have been Ship’s Liaison. But here the reporters came to the ship, so it was Internal Affairs. External Affairs claimed to retain control of the language brainplants, which invariably meant an official visit from Junior Undersecretary to the Foreign Minister Lifter and some minutes of minor sexual harassment.

A pirogue drew along Unchunkolo’s monolithic flank, engine idling, eating water with a voracious gobble of hydrocarbons and froth. The news team came trepidaciously up the access ramps. The wide-mouthed woman with the very clean hair who was the chief correspondent seemed to find the notion of living flesh and hair matting under her feet repugnant.

‘In the name of the captain and crew of the Mercantile Para-State of Unchunkolo the Third, you are most welcome aboard,’ said Two in the half-dozen languages he had memorised. Straight New Speech. Good. All riverboat folk were born bilingual. ‘I am here to assist you in every possible way. If there is anything you require, I shall do my best to arrange it for you.’

Requirements were: One toilet. A drink—Oh God!—of something. A fistful of analgesics. And none of those endorphin-secreting mould patches, either. Something to eat. The food in the hotel is shit, dear, shit. And they wouldn’t happen to have an omnidirectional high-impedance microphone, would they?

Bloody savages.

The cameraperson wanted shots of the meat fighting when the black marketeers came. Which they did an hour or so after the camera crews; they were more chary of their boats in the fog, they could not afford the insurance. Looks good, women fighting for food. Gets the sympathy glands going. Maybe we could go down the pointy end, what do you call it, the bow? yes, there so, lead on, no we do not want shots of mothers with babies dear thing, we are inundated, positively inundated with shots of mothers with babies and, well, frankly, dear thing, it does not work any more. Gets anaesthetised to it eventually, does your Joe Television. Burns? Burns darling. Where? Body and chest, that all right? Yes, that would be all right. We will get back to you in a minute, yes, just a minute. If you’ll sign this release form. Facial burns? Can we use facial burns? No? Sorry, can’t use facial burns. Oh now, this is good. This is very good. Yes, come on, lovely lighting, lovely God-shot with the sun breaking through the fog banks. Wonderful. Just hold it, excuse me, you people, could you just hold that pose, just stay where you are, one moment longer?

No we cannot hold, we will not hold, why should we hold for you smelling of steak and wine breakfast in the Riverside Hotel? No, here come the traders, cutting in in their dinghies and outriggers, the traders standing up and smiling and holding up cartons of baby milk and fresh flopping fish expiring their last in the clearing fog of early morning and fresh green mangoes and plastic-wrapped slabs of brownmeat and whitemeat and breadapple, vials of glittering viruses protruding from between their fingers; why should we hold it for you to hell with you piss on you shit on you if I hold for you I will miss my place at the rail someone will get there before me with their radio or watch or family ornaments or piece of jewellery or clothes or boots or handkerchiefs or antique tea sets or holy medals or anything and everything that might be negotiable.

But the cameras moved through them regardless, catching the reaching hands and the imploring faces and the traders standing in their boats weighing and judging and valuing and transacting or not transacting and the correspondent saying that she had never seen human need and suffering on such a scale before nor such a display of naked human greed and avarice as the traders who came out in their boats every morning to little by little take away the people’s lives and that the twenty riverboats held off the Imperial coast by gunboats could only be days, days away from a major human catastrophe and the cameraperson was shouting hold it hold it, you got to see this, this is classic, classic television and a woman too distraught to display any emotion but desperate bewilderment was holding out her baby to the traders, legs walking upon the water, take it take it, I do not want anything in return only take it away from this please and the traders were shaking their heads and grinning no profit no gain no trade not negotiable not transactable no deal no sale no value no worth.

Then the strong ones came. They pushed the weak ones, the women, the children, the old and the young, they pushed them aside. Those who had not learned their proper place in the order of things, who dared to raise a fist in defiance, they were smashed down. Men beat other men with that straight-armed blow brought straight down on the head that is so terrifying to see because it is so unlike the glamorous gorgeous violence of television or wakinéma, that is the violent heart of man exposed. And women too were fighting now, in that way women fight that is based upon the idea of thrusting fingers up to the knuckles in your enemy’s eyesockets.

Good good great great classic television classic television naked human drama at its finest.

The Televisual Uncertainty Principle: the act of turning a television camera upon something changes its very nature. The act of watching in your family room in your café on your ionospheric cruiser on the stratoscraper videowall on your wrist in the depths of the forest, makes it different. Without the cameraperson and the soundperson and the correspondent, there is no suffering.

It had been different, then. Before the cameras. There had been a quiet dignity among the people as they crowded off the ferryboats onto Unchunkolo’s barges and lighters; a sense of solidarity; families had helped each other make shelters out of plastic sheeting and empty containers and plastic chemical drums; hoarded food was brought out and shared, those with radios had stood them on upturned plastic drums for added resonance and all had gathered around to listen to the cool, calm, utterly unbelievable Voice of the Empire reading reports of an entire land dragged by one misfired shot into a piecemeal, directionless uprising. This was not the dream of the heroes. This was not the great rising by the moon. This was Ghost Boys attacking fortified army posts armed only with the spirits of the ancestors. This was Kiminini and Kimilili smoked out of their police station, hamstrung and dragged to bloody pulp behind their traix around and around and around Tetsenok Square. This was Proclaimer districts sacked and burned. This was Imperialists turned out of their beds, lined up against some café wall and shot through the left eye. This was Warriors of Destiny and Imperial forces in pitched battle on the burning streets of Ol Tok. This was vicious as two drunken women fighting in an alleyway. This was as cruel as a father raping his daughter. There was no beauty in this. There was no nobility in this. This was war.

In the night as Unchunkolo drifted past the burning shore she and her sisters from Ol Tok were joined by small flotillas putting out from each of the rightbank ports they passed, loaded to the waterline with the fearful and the hopeful and the just damned tired. The captains conferred by the satellites that went tumbling high high above the fighting land: Yembé, the major port of Kulubaye Prefecture, lay sixty kilometres to the south. There perhaps they might find haven. Sixty-three ships, more riverboats than had ever been gathered in stream at one time, ran south with the flow to Yembé. Gunboats met them under the dawn sky; low, black Imperial cutters, built low and fast, like speed dogs. Yembé was closed. Yembé had been seized by the rebels and was now under siege by Imperial forces.

Yembé was a plague city.

Warriors and Imperials were fighting it out street by street with biological weapons and isolation suits.

On their bridges, the captains activated teleconferencing facilities never used within living memory.

Where?

Where the riverboat people had ever gone when the flow was hard against them. South. Into the Thousand Islands.

Now even Thousand Islands and what they had found there was far behind, churned up into white wake, and Two sat on a mooring bollard where Unchunkolo’s thick plastic lips nuzzled against the steel and wood of the barges watching the reaching hands and the pressing bodies and the darting, invasive cameras.

The woman correspondent with the bobbed fair hair wanted an interview. Could the riverboat boy translate?

Yes, the Junior Undersecretary to the President could.

Bloody savages.

You. Yes, you. We would like to talk to you. Tell him we would like to talk to him. Ask him how long he has been here.

He has been here since the night of the fire. In Ol Tok. Three weeks.

And is he alone, or does he have family with him?

He has a wife and five children. His youngest child—the name translates as Thankfully-the-Last—is very sick.

And has he had any food from the relief agencies?

The last meal he had was two days ago. He has bartered for food with the boat-traders. He has not heard of any supplies, any relief agencies. He asks, is this a joke? If it is, he apologises for not appreciating the humour.

Could you ask him if he or his family have received any medical treatment?

He says that the healers come every day at noon: the foreign doctors—he thinks they are from the United Republics. No, he has not had any treatment from them, though his children are receiving viral treatment for diarrhoea and dehydration. It is from drinking river water, he says. The healers are very good but they have limited medical supplies. That is why he has not gone himself; he thinks they should be kept for those that need them more.

What would he say if we were to tell him that international relief could be here by nightfall?

He would say thank you very much, but he does not need international relief. He does not need powdered milk and foodplants with A Gift From The People of the United Republics on them, he does not need teams of international healers from the Heptarchy; all he needs for himself and his family is the Empire to withdraw its gunboats and open its ports to its own citizens.

Has he heard reports that the rebellion in his home province has been largely put down and that a general call to dump arms and surrender is likely?

He says that if rumours were meat there would be none hungry on these boats.

Okay, thank you. Thank him will you? Oh jeez, almost forgot. Here’s twenty. Should get him something from the boat-traders, something for his little girl, what does he call her, Thank-God-That’s-It-Over? So, how much of this can we use, then?

Not sure. Five, maybe ten per cent? I hate it when they get cynical. Makes them look like ungrateful bastards.

Still, the children were good.

The children were beaut. Well, if I can talk the captain on this shit bucket into letting us use his satellite link, I will get this edited down and wire it. More would be better, though. Yes! yes, yes, you there, yes you, with the burns…

The river was wide at Yembé, twenty kilometres wide, wide enough for a whole fleet to ghost past on the edge of the horizon out of the sight of the quarantine flags and the pyres of smoke going up in steady, parallel columns. Helicopters shadowed the fleet; dirty, irritating insects, probing and sniffing with an angry drone of engines. The ships pressed on. On the barges the refugees gathered by moonlight and listened to the voices of the radios. They had radios, then. The Voice of the Empire, always calm, always collected, always cool and right and reasonable, told them of immense victories and utter routs, of anarchy punished and order restored and the bright name of the Emperor carried like a banner into the vile dens of lawlessness and rebellion.

No one believed one word of it. But they listened, because lies are more comforting than silence.

All night they ran with their cargo down the current. With morning came the Thousand Islands. South of Yembé the river broke, as if confused by its sudden loss of impetus, into a labyrinth of forested islands and shifting sand bars. No maps existed of the shoals and shallows of Thousand Islands; every winter flood rearranged entire geographies: whole islands, thickly forested, often inhabited, could be eroded away in a single season; dreams, hopes, dreads carried down in a thin film of silt to the delta where the cities on the edge of Elder Sea stood upon strata of sedimented memory. On this stretch of the run south the navigator’s art came into its own; her skill at interpreting the sonar map of the river bed the difference between a cargo delivered as per contract and perhaps an entire season stranded on a sand bar waiting for the level to rise with the winter rains. River legend had it that many inhabited islands were the remains of the ships and crews that had run aground; the ships’ organical systems colonised the bleak sand bars and eventually dissolved into plastic ribs and spars, draped with weed and creeper, while the crew’s descendants sported in sybaritic barbarism within the dark enfolding forest.

Thousand Islands, and the rain. The barges were a patchwork of coloured plastic sheeting where the refugees had rigged makeshift shelters from discarded cargo coverings. The slow, heavy rain was a drumbeat roar on the stretched plastic, the river alive with falling drops. Unchunkolo pushed through the grey veils of rain, seeking out true channels. High walls of vegetation drew close enough, it seemed, to touch. Dark-trunked trees leaned over the deep-water channel, rain beat on leaves. Soon, very soon, the leaves must close overhead altogether and condemn Unchunkolo and her sisters to eternal wanderings in this labyrinth of channels and islands. The refugees, unnerved by the cry of Unchunkolo’s echo-location system, huddled by families and friends beneath their plastic sheets, watched the tall, rain-wet trunks of the trees slip past; fearful, threatened, exiled to an implacably alien place. The great convoy of ships pushed their clutch of barges and lighters through the falling rain towards the heart of the Thousand Islands, synapses twitching the huge slabs of engine-muscle to dead slow ahead.

In riverine culture the islands were the traditional place of refuge and sanctuary. History became lost in the pattern of shoals and bars; questions tangled in the web of channels. Two’s family were a pragmatic people; their credit rating would not permit the ferrying of a nation’s dispossessed up and down river indefinitely. Unchunkolo doubled the tail of a long tear-drop-shaped island into the main channel and its crew saw that they were not the only ones to have thought of space and time to think among the Thousand Islands.

When Two had first seen the fleet that set out from dying Yembé, he had thought he had seen every riverboat there could be. Now he was confronted with the paucity of his imagination. Hundreds, each with its family of barges, lighters and pontoons glittering with a thousand rain-jewelled plastic shelters. Unchunkolo ghosted between the outer pickets of the riverboat navy, the threshing of her big wheel echoing eerily from the walls of hanging vegetation. In the deep-water channel the ships were moored so close their attendant craft formed an unbroken surface over the water. The captain in her chair gave a sign. Unchunkolo’s beating heart stopped, auxiliary thrusters churned water thick with floating faeces and plastic chocolate wrappers. Ports opened beneath the hull; thick tentacles terminating in anchorheads and holdfasts thrust into the bottom ooze, sought purchase. The great mass of ship and lighters shuddered and lay still in the water.

While the captains talked by satellite or visited each other in launches—the drone of their organical outboards magnified by the silent waiting trees—the families tried to salvage what world events had left them of their former lives. The transfiguration of drudgery: God may more easily be found in the bottom of a sinkful of dirty pans than in the reflection of light from a coin as it sinks into the depths of a holy well. Upon this theology the Proclaimer Ghanda Lartha order have built an entire spirituality of contemplation in the ordinary, of kitchen gods and divinity in dusting and the saintliness of toilet bowls first thing in the morning.

And how might the angel of inspired drudgery seem?

To Two/Feeder-of-Heads/Junior-Secretary, repairing the coarse hair matting on Unchunkolo’s forward decks, it seemed like a girl. Most of his visions tended to be of girls. A tall girl, stick thin, smoke-stained—as they were all of them smoke-smudged, they wore it like a baptismal sign—hair an unruly shock of dreadlocks growing as the spirit willed, but her eyes had locked with his for an instant of mutual recognition as sentient creatures, soul-black eyes, and communication had crackled between them like the lightning along the edge of a summer storm in high latitudes. Those eyes, that touch, had driven a spike into the heart of him that pinned him tossing and turning to his hammock suspended above the pit of his ancestors. Twice more he had seen her, once standing at the rail gazing down into the water, once crouched by the waterline, washing herself, the filthy water running down her face and neck, plastering her thin tee-shirt over her breasts. Her lips were parted, her eyes shut: private ecstasy. His mouth had gaped open. His eyes had opened wide as moons. And he had not even realised he was staring until the friendly blow on his back broke the spell and the voice of Number Three Son-Farmer had said, ‘Yes, there are some mighty good ones down there, but mark my words, they would cut your meat off as soon as look at you and stick it in a sandwich.’

Twice more he had seen her, and then Unchunkolo in a confederation of nineteen sister ships had slipped moorings and run under the night for the Imperial shore. There had been no refuge among Thousand Islands. No sanctuary. No sanctuary either, behind them, on the right bank. You did not need to hear the radio reports of the fighting. Even among the Thousand Islands the smoke was clearly visible, like the smoke from an entire nation burning. The ships turned away from the burning land and made for the left bank, a tight arrowhead of vessels aimed at the heart of an Empire’s conscience. The little Imperial cutters with their fearsome weaponry that could blow a riverboat out of the water with a single volley had come scoring out from the left bank harbours and said There is no shelter here, there is no sanctuary, our borders are closed our harbours sealed. At every port for a thousand kilometres upstream and down, those little gunboats had come cutting out, turning them away: away, keep away, we will not let you onto our soil; if we let you, then we let the ship after you, and the ship after that, and the ship after that, and where will it end? They could not go forward. They could not go back. So the twenty ships of the refugee fleet picked a port—any port—on the Imperial side, formed a loose convoy in mid-channel, and dropped anchor. One by one, the great engine-muscles stopped.

Where will it end?

It will end with food riots down on the lighters. It will end with mothers giving the rice from their mouths to their children and men with heavy fists stealing it from them. It will end with captains opening lockers that have been sealed for all living memory and breaking out small arms. It will end with the younger, fitter, stronger men slipping into the river at the dark of the night to work their way along Unchunkolo’s waterline to climb up into the hydroponics pod and cut a breadapple, a head of brownmeat, a cob of cereal, a bladder of milk. It will end with the riverboat people hiding what they had been sparing to share with the refugees behind lines of weapons. It will end in raids, concerted attacks. It will end with bodies rolling into the river to be carried away down the great waters to Elder Sea, and ghastly necklaces of heads strung along the flanks of the lighters, rooticles writhing in the water. It will end with dysentery and diarrhoea-stained decks and a sullen silence broken only by the cries of children who do not understand helpless rage, and the outboards of the dawn convoys of camerapersons and soundpersons and foreign correspondents practising expressions of grim resolution.

Black-haired, soul-eyed girl, what became of you? Another headless body rolled into the river in the darkness before dawn; are you sick, swollen, dreadful down in the holds where not even the camera crews dare to go; is your head tied in a figure-of-four lashing and slung with all those others on ropes over the bows? You will pardon me if I do not look because I do not think I could bear to see you dark-haired soul-eyed girl with your hair lank and wet and your eyes dim and spiritless and the river running through your open mouth. He thought about her often, the thrice-seen girl, while the cameras hovered like flies around the pot-bellied children and the men without facial burns. And, when the news teams had completed their ritual handing-out of packets of chocolate and wunder-gum in day-glo wrappers and gone back to their pirogues, Two went back to his heads and told them about his dark-haired, soul-eyed girl.

Two enjoyed the company of the dead. They gave no orders. They were not cranky or irritable. They took no offence nor offered any. Their open mouths held no insults, no sarcasms, none of the sharp implements of language that the girls wielded so skilfully to which he had always been peculiarly vulnerable. Among the dead he could muse and think and imagine. The dead let him be himself. He could tell them his holiest secrets, open the tabernacle of his heart to them and they would not be shocked. They would not condemn, they would not laugh or use cutting pointed words against him.

All you woodenheads, all you souls and ancestors, could you not fix it with God, or, barring God, one of the Ykondé Saints would do, or even an angel, to arrange things so that she doesn’t have to be dead; you know who I am talking about, her, that girl I saw, the one I am always telling you about; just fix it so that she is not dead. And maybe that I could get to see her again. Would it be too much to ask if I could actually get to meet her? And that she would like me the way I like her? Or is that nota proper prayer, is that one of the kind that God does not answer because it is not for spiritual things but for something selfish and of the ego? But it would not be selfish for her still to be alive, I would settle even for that. That will do.

Inaccessibility turned her into a lover of almost divine mystique. Mind much occupied, Two picked over the network of rooticles that sustained the heads, crushing parasites between his fingers, scraping off mosses and fungal infestations. Minor gnawings by rodents he patched with cellsplice, but there were fresh breaks in the neural nets, torn rooticle ends oozing ichor, support vines twisted and wrenched. A larger menace was abroad in the tangle of roots and creeper. Two squeezed himself into the rent in the fabric of the clan Dreaming. Repair work on this scale was beyond his skill: this required the songs of Uncle Farmer. If Uncle Farmer had songs to spare for the dead. The decay in the hydroponics bubbles’ ecosystems caused by the ravages of the past few weeks was accelerating out of control. Catastrophic ecological collapse threatened. The needs of the living were more important than the dignity of the dead.

In the intimate, pulsing dankness among the roots, something moved. Two’s hand flashed out. Gossamer wings crumpled and broke, stumps whirred futilely, wire legs beat. Another one. First the wheeled reptile. Then the suckering, clinging, climbing thing that had stuck to his arm and left round weals when he had torn it away. Now, this needle-proboscised dragonfly. Like the others, it fell apart in his ungentle hands. Segments of quivering plastic flesh, like one of Secretary O’Education’s three-dimensional toys he had never as a child been able to put together to make a trux or an aeroplane or a boat. The fragments he stuffed into his belt pouch: the Department of Agriculture could recycle the flesh.

Then he saw the face move. He was certain of it. Certain of it. It had moved. Deep among the dreaming roots and vines of the primal forests of the spirit, one of the heads had returned to life, tearing its way out to light and life through centuries’ accumulation of root and tendril. Something that generated perverse creatures like flies from evil.

Do you know where all the insects in the world come from? Eldest Engineer, his great-grandfather on the patronymic, now among the heads himself, had taught him once by way of catechism. They are created by the friction between the two spiritual worlds, that of God and that of the Empire of the self, rubbing past each other, and the energy of their friction cascades through the hierarchy of spiritual tiers to emerge as dark and noisome insects in our world.

He did not stop shaking until he was on deck in the broad light of late afternoon, light that in its utter certainty pours uncertainty upon the things of shadows.

Uncle Farmer found the chunks of decaying plasm in Two’s belt pouch amusing.

‘Some talent here,’ he said, twisting and turning the segments, trying to fit them together again. ‘This is quite clever stuff.’

‘Someone made that?’

‘Given a few million years, plasm might, just might, evolve into something like this. This has the feel of hands all over it. Clever stuff. Shame to have to recycle it. Still, the plants…’

Two followed him through the film door into the hydroponics bubbles. Death, decay, despair. Bark hung in yellowing sheets, foliage blackened and wilted, stems and trunks crushed and flattened; sheets of fungal and bacterial infections swathes of purple and white. Farmer lifted a fistful of rooting compound, opened his hand in Two’s face. He gagged on his first breath. Its stench was that of the rotting, dying humanity down on the barges, all its pain and hopelessness and desperation distilled.

‘Aerobes, anaerobes, pseudo-rhizobacters, mycilloids, symbiotics shot to hell, the lot of them. Ecosystem is falling to pieces around me and I cannot do a thing to stop it. If I had a month—God, give me just a month—without touching it, maybe we could start the symbiotic cycles running again. You take something out, you got to put something back. First law of ecology. It was never designed for this level of forced overproduction, but dear God, are we going to let them starve?’

‘Maybe we should just blow the barges free, write them off and get out of here.’

‘Sweet saints you are a hard-hearted bastard to be a nephew of mine.’ The fragments of shattered dragonfly went into the digester and were reduced by voracious enzymes to undifferentiated cells. ‘We are still losing stuff though. Someone is getting in here. I am certain of it. At night. Taking the best too. I am going to have to talk to Aunt Captain about security.’

‘How are they getting in?’ The humid, fetid atmosphere beneath the yellow filter-plastic bubble was oppressive.

‘The seals are intact, the bubble shows no signs of knife-wounds. The only conclusion is through the floor. The environmental conditioning system.’

‘Can that be done?’

‘It is a warren down there, nephew-of-mine. When I was a brat, I used to hide out down there for days on end and no one ever found me. One time they were dragging the bottom by the time I decided to come out. Get all over the ship through the air system. Saw my younger brother, your Uncle Manifest, being conceived.’

And then Two saw it. And in the same instant that he saw, his uncle saw it also. A movement among the withered leaves. A dart. A dash. A flicker among the roots…Two had the speed of youth. The thing writhed in his grip. Chitinous legs churned but the dangerous-looking mandibles remained locked around the slab of whitemeat it had snipped from the stand.

‘Would you look at that,’ said Uncle Farmer in naked admiration. ‘Now that really is something. Give it here. Here boy, give it here.’

The creature fixed its stalk-eyes on Farmer, released a mandible and took the top half-centimetre off his right thumb. Two was not certain which impressed him more, the surprising amount of blood that pumped from the mutilated thumb, or the richness and variety of his Uncle’s swearing. Between the two, the creature made good its escape in full possession of both whitemeat and a bloody hunk of raw thumb.

Under no circumstances would Two spend another night in his hammock above the pit of souls. Better to suffer humiliation by the younger, unnamed boys in the male dormitory for having returned to official childhood. Ten-year-olds’ taunts, and the nods and winks of the girls, who by custom remained in community on the Deck of the Women until partnering, were preferable to having nose, ears, fingers, toes, penis, testicles snipped off by stalking scissor-creatures and being delivered, trussed and rolled like a festival meat, to the sucker of souls waiting in the roots and heads. Lifter, pausing in her eternal weight-training, sensuous muscles oily and beautiful, took especial pains to despise him.

‘Ghoulies, ghosties, tattiebogles, Twosie? Let me get rid of them for you. Down in the deep dark pit, among the roots and the heads…’

Some ghoulies ghosties and tattiebogles must be exorcised by oneself. He was glad now of the camera crews that came speeding out of the pearl-grey morning fog in their hired pirogues with their pockets bulging full of chocolate and day-glo wunder-gum. They got him away from the smirking and whispering of his crew siblings.

‘Maybe soon we can all go home,’ said the tall thin black correspondent who spoke a language the name of which Two could not even pronounce unaided. When Two looked puzzled—more at translation glitches than context—the correspondent said, ‘Have you not heard? There is talk of a cease-fire. While your country has been tearing itself to pieces, secret negotiations have been going on between the Empire and your Warriors of Destiny.’

They are not my Warriors of Destiny, it is not my country, thought Two but the brainplant had not given him sufficient command of the language to wield small ironies.

But the word had gone whispering through the barges, along the railings where the men sat with their legs dangling above the water, under the plastic sheets—intolerably hot and steamy and smelling of sick and mould in the heat of a world turned full-face to the sun—up ramps down stairs, along walkways, diving down into the hold where the heart of the great agony beat, along the rows of children all lying with their heads turned to the left and the mothers squatting behind them, monolithic in their hopelessness, and the healers of many lands busy busy busy, for if they stopped being busy for just one moment they would have broken down in despair. The word: Cease-fire. The word: negotiations. The word: victory. The word: return.

It has been raining all day. Since the dawn light, rain, coming down. Raining on all your hopes and plans and dreams. The day wears on. The rain grows heavier. You stare out of your window at the rain sheeting endlessly down. Towards evening you notice a change. Something high in the atmosphere, a shifting of barometric boundaries, a repolarisation of ions, something, and you know it is going to end. The rain falls as heavily. The clouds are as low and grey and depressing. Nothing is different, but everything is changed. An end is coming.

Eventually Lifter’s scorn forced Two to return to the pit. When he got there, there was an extra head. It was deep in the oldest levels, deep among the roots and tendrils of the long long dead. The head of an old man, bearded, wild-haired, eyes closed, mumbling to himself. Two timorously parted the screen of vines and masks. It was not long-dendrified wood, this head, cracked and seamed with knots and boreholes. This head was flesh and blood and bone. This head was alive. It opened its eyes. Looked at him.

Jaws snapped in Two’s face. A little creature stood bobbing malevolently on its muscular hind legs while Two fought himself free from the matrix.

A skull. On legs.

The head had smiled at him.

Shit on ghosts. Shit on demons. Shit on mysterious smiling heads. Shit on all creatures crawling creeping flying biting stinging slashing. Somebody was playing with him.

Two took a splicer from his belt pouch, prodded it towards the skull-creature. It lunged, snapped. Two’s hand darted, caught the creature by the back of its head. Tiny fierce teeth clashed, legs windmilled.

‘Got you, you little prick.’ Uncle Farmer held the splicer into which the creature’s teeth were embedded up in front of his face.

‘Now this is good. This is very good. You have to be very good indeed to be able to play games with this stuff. Good, and a total waste of talent. Pissing around with clever clever little things like that when they could be saving all this.’

Two could not bear to look at the brown rot that was all that remained of Unchunkolo’s gardens. Farmer dropped the kicking creature into the recycler. ‘I do not have the talent to do it. What am I? A farmer, that is what, I sow things, I grow things, I harvest things, I keep things running but all I am is the captain of this thing and not the engineer. I cannot make it work any more and there is no one who can.

‘If they are going to end this war, they had better end it sooner than later so we can get the hell back to shore before we all start eating each other.’

As Two went back to his appointed place, it was as if Uncle Farmer’s words had made him aware of something which had always been apparent but which he had never until now noticed.

Unchunkolo: home, family, world, was disintegrating. The decay of the hydroponics bubbles was a symptom of the decay of the whole ship. Moulds and parasitic infestations clung and found hold on bulkheads and decks. Unthinkable once. Now there was no one to clean them away. The moss which carpeted the decks was patchy and scabbed with rusts. No hand to tend to it. Derricks and masts wilted; river barnacles and other encrustations had colonised the once-pristine hull; tangles of weed had found anchor-hold on the keel and surrounded the ship in a floating halo of green fronds. The very skeleton of the ship felt frail and porous beneath Two’s hands: the ship was devouring itself in its attempts to sustain the throng of refugees. Even Unchunkolo’s scent, the spicy, verdant smell of vital organicals, was changed. Unchunkolo smelled of sickness. Unchunkolo smelled of death and decay.

The head was gone from its place in the Ancestor well. Torn rooticles dripping support serum and ripped neural nets marked the place where it had been. That night, Two made his preparations to catch the prankster. He battened down behind the port-side syrup tank with a quilt and a cockle radio for the long night watch. The river spoke its unending syllables to him, moon and stars left silver tracks in the unquiet water, the radio whispered about the happening world and when the happening world grew too much interspersed it with music.

The familiar pattern of shadows around the mouth of the pit was disturbed. Two was instantly alert. One hand emerged. Two hands. Then quick, lithe as a salamander, a figure darted from the hole to the rail and threw something over. Two slipped from cover while the figure was turned away from him. He could not claim the pneumatic musculature of his cousin in Foreign Affairs but he thought himself an adequate match for any wraith, demon or hobgoblin of the night.

The figure at the rail turned, startled by a venting of gas from Unchunkolo’s bowels. Two’s jaw dropped.

The figure had two heads. And before Two could think, it was on him. Two reared up, seized the two-headed figure around the waist. The figure screamed a desperate wordless animal scream. Its second head fell to the deck with a weighty thump.

‘Sweet suffering God!’ the fallen head shouted and started to wail in obvious agony. Two found himself entangled with a small but incredibly ferocious something that clawed and bit and kicked and hit out with rock-hard hands until Two, scratched kicked punched, knew he could hold it no longer and planted his fist square in its face.

Bone cracked beneath his knuckles. The furious fighting something fell still. While the second head’s wails subsided into a general moaning, Two dragged the demon to the rail. Voices, weaving lights: the sound of battle had roused the watch.

A girl. Filthy, hair matted into greasy dreadlocks. Blood ran through the fingers that cupped the smashed nose, tears ran from her eyes. Over her shoulders was slung a webbing contraption that had held the fallen head. While the crew shone their torches on the wailing head, unable to right itself, shouting that its skull was cracked, cracked open, see if it was not, brutes barbarians Proclaimers Imperialist thugs, Two gently lifted the girl’s hands away from her nose.

God. God god god god god.

Her. Her her her her her.

Two prayed heartful thanks to his ancestors. God did answer prayers like that.

They would never let him keep her. Never.

Within Two’s remembering Unchunkolo’s Justice Department had been called upon only once and that once to settle a patrilineage claim by the Floating Heavens clan for a percentage of Unchunkolo’s genetic wealth. It was generally reckoned by the riverboat community at large that greed had stimulated the claim: the palimony a successful suit would ensure would be more than enough to restore the fortunes of the recession-stricken Floating Heavens. Their case was strong: a Floating Heavens had sired Unchunkolo the Third out of Unchunkolo the Second. The court had gone with popular opinion: descent and clan affiliation amongst all the river people was and always would be matrilineal.

For the three days during which the girl had been held in one of the unmarried women’s private cabins she had not spoken a single word. Now there was to be a stowaway trial. Under normal circumstances there would have been no case to answer; the stowaway would have been put off at the next port, or—as had been known in the less civilised past—directly into the river, but the head had requested asylum and with the eyes of the world television news hovering around every bulkhead, a hearing seemed the only face-saving alternative.

As Junior Undersecretary to the President, Two held a brevet rank in the Justice Department. His role was to record the proceedings onto brainplants for ship’s archives, a task that demanded neither effort nor skill but required attention to every word of the proceedings.

The tribunal comprised Chief Justice, his eldest grandmother, entering the ship’s chapel which had been designated Courthouse ProTem on a walking frame, steadied by Advocate General—Two’s cousin Second Engineer—and Chief Prosecutor, Senior Accountant, Two’s least favourite uncle. The Quorum, the body of ordinary crewpersons who would vote upon the hearing, were already seated cross-legged on the floor; the defendant, Mathembe Fileli (he liked that name!) was slumped sullenly, legs stretched out before her, chin sunk on her chest, nose decorated with an incongruously bright patch, the head (a disembodied head, a strange and unnatural thing to be sure) in a plastic bucket on the deck beside her. The news teams lounged by the doors, taking in the sun and drinking canned beer.

Two checked the brainplants looped behind his ear, the readers pressed to his forehead. Old Chief Justice—the position was traditionally held by a woman, their sense of justice was more highly developed than men’s—was helped to the floor, the camera crews sauntered in out of the sun and the hearing opened.

Chief Prosecutor stated that the accused had stowed away on board Unchunkolo without the cognisance or permission of the captain, in so doing causing damage to vital and sensitive ship systems. Without let or leave she had entered the ship’s agricultural modules and taken food, a crime all the more heinous on account of Unchunkolo’s parlous state and the more morally reprehensible given the degree of want among her fellow refugees down on the barges.

Chief Prosecutor concluded his case by regretting that it was not within the court’s powers to impose a more severe sentence than deportation from the ship, some punishment that would properly express his moral outrage and indignation at the accused’s monstrous selfishness in the face of the suffering of others. He trusted court and Quorum to vote for deportation and expressed indignation that the crew’s time should have been wasted on such a blatant and thoroughgoing thug as this Mathembe Fileli.

Advocate General said that the head would speak in defence of its granddaughter and itself.

No harm had been intended, said the head, placed on top of its upturned plastic bucket, as the cameras cut and wove for a close view of something they knew their viewers would find inspirationally gross. Had they the wherewithal, they would gladly make reparations for any damage done. The stolen food was not denied, but could theft be considered a sin in the midst of starvation? On the matter of the stowing away, the head begged the court to remember that his granddaughter had suffered traumatic separation from not only of her father, but also, during the chaotic flight from Ol Tok, her mother, brother and uncle. Yet Mathembe Fileli had vowed that she would not rest until she had reunited her family, and if that meant hiding aboard ship in the hope that, after the refugees were all resettled, she might travel the length of the river to continue the search, that surely was a minor misdemeanour to be set against the sanctity of the family?

The sanctity of the family, the head had learned, was important among the riverboat people. They would understand.

‘When the ports open, there will be refugee camps where her family might be sheltered. But there are many many ports, many many refugees. The odds of finding them, I will admit, are slim. The river is very great, but at least aboard ship she has a chance. On the land she has no chance. No chance at all. In a single day this great ship can cover what would take one girl a week, a month to walk on foot. Would you deny her the right to seek her family?’

At the back a crewperson nodded in agreement.

Old Chief Justice spoke.

‘Mr Fileli, I take it I may call you that; down in those barges there are a thousand people who can make exactly the same plea. Are we to let every one of them come swarming onto Unchunkolo and sail her up and down the river like some pleasure barge until they find their lost ones? This is a commercial ship, Mr Fileli, if we make exceptions for one, we must make exceptions for all and Unchunkolo cannot withstand that.’

A rumble among the Quorum.

‘Now, has anyone else anything to say before the Quorum votes?’

‘Yes.’ By the door, among the cameras and sound booms. Uncle Farmer. ‘A question. Did you make this?’

Cameras swivelled and refocused as he held high a plasmtoy in the shape of a miniature trux.

Mathembe stood up, frowned at the organical. Nodded. Yes.

‘Then I submit the Quorum votes to extend sanctuary to this girl and her Grandfather. Because a person who can do this…’ tiny plastic wheels turned and reversed, eye-lights opened, a sheen of colours flowed across the pelt ‘…is the person who can save our farm pods.’

Chief Justice addressed Department of Agriculture.

‘Are you sure of this?’

‘What I am sure of is that in five days those bubbles are not even going to be safe to enter.’

Chief Justice pressed her fingertips together in deliberation.

‘Mathembe Fileli, are you willing to attempt to regenerate our agricultural ecosystems?’ The head made to speak, Mathembe nudged the pot. A nod. A Yes. ‘Judgement is reserved. Mizz Fileli will attempt to regenerate ship’s agricultural modules. Ship’s crew will extend every courtesy to Mizz Fileli and assist her in every means possible. Mizz Fileli…’ The old woman leaned forward, held Mathembe in her gaze. She spoke in words the microphones would not hear. ‘You do realise that you are not exonerated. The charges against you still stand. As I have said, we are a commercial enterprise. We will not tolerate freeloaders. However, we will countenance paying passengers. Succeed and we will gratefully take you wherever you wish to go. Fail, and you are off this ship. Got that, girl?’

Chief Justice rose to her feet, flicking away the helping hands of Chief Prosecutor and Advocate General.

‘The business of this court of the Justice Department of the Mercantile Para-State of Unchunkolo the Third is concluded in this time and place. God save Unchunkolo and all who sail upon her.’

The walking frame clicked across the chapel floor. As if charmed, a dancing procession of cameras microphones and correspondents fell in behind.

Judgement reserved, Mathembe Fileli and her Grandfather’s head passed from the jurisdiction of the Justice Department to Internal Affairs and, after much bidding, bartering and bribing, to the supervision of Two.

‘Skinny little shit,’ said Cousin Lifter. ‘No ass less tits. Probably crawling with bugs. Things that make your dick swell up the size and colour of a cucumber.’

Two was gratified by the envy for privately his attempts to ingratiate himself with this answer to his prayers had been frustrated. Mathembe Fileli gave him no more regard than she did the balls of plasm that were rapidly filling the aft deck: less, a plasmal was at least a useful creature. Two persevered. It was ordained by Higher Powers (the Kind that are Always Capitalised), therefore it would come to pass. In time. Give it time.

‘I mean, it is quite all right by me if you do not want to speak,’ he said as Mathembe harvested a crop of undifferentiated plasmals from a plastic sheet suspended by its four corners, twisting some apart into their components, stowing the rest in a barrel. ‘In fact. I rather like it. It is cute. Most girls have too much to say, they never shut up, yakyakyak, I mean, what do they find to talk about so much?’ Mathembe filled the reservoir with sewage from a tank, plunged her bare arm shoulder deep in the liquid shit, seeding the growth medium. ‘Okay. So. I understand. So, maybe it is not that you do not speak, it is that you cannot speak. I have heard of that, there are some people are immune to the language viruses in the womb and are born not able to speak or write.’ A handful of semi-solid shit hit him in the face.

But she smiled. Definitely, she smiled. He watched with a warm glow at the base of his belly as she worked on, never pausing, never resting.

And later she spoke to him. Not with words. She came up behind him and punched him on the shoulder. But it was as close to her talking to him as he would come. The head, who had watched the day’s events with contemptuous interest, translated.

‘She needs parallel port interfacers and cable.’

‘I can get that. How many?’

‘Two for every head in the Spirit Well.’

Two gaped.

‘We would not have even a quarter of that.’

‘That is what she needs.’

If that is what she needs, that is what she shall get, swore Two who had seen her half-mocking half-smile as a sexual challenge.

‘We would not have even a quarter of that,’ said Two’s elder sister, Assistant Quartermaster. She put out a call for all hands to turn in brainplants to the Quartermasters.

‘Less than five hundred,’ she said, shaking her head at the small heap of organicals on the deck. Infant Quartermasters-to-be, her nephews and nieces, ran about arresting any caught crawling away from the bright lights into cool dark corners. ‘Just what is she going to do with them anyway?’

Two had an outrageous notion.

‘Less than five hundred,’ he said to Mathembe Fileli. She punched him on the shoulder, lifted a brainplant and a plasmal in each hand. Look. See. She broke the plasmball apart into its components, twisted a filament of genetic material out of the brainplant and closed the open ball around it. The plasmal fissured, creased, folded, realigned itself into the flesh-coloured comma of a brainplant. Mathembe snapped the genetic filament, threw both brainplants into a tank of water, picked up a fresh brainplant and plasmal, placed them in Two’s empty useless hands.

Watch. Learn. Do. Break. Twist. Close. Fold. Break, twist, close, fold. Break twist close fold. Breaktwistclosefold: Two’s prayer, without those words, he would have lost the rhythm of his hands. Mathembe hissed in exasperation when occasional clumsinesses let the plasmal fall and burst on the deck, when the hair-thin filament of extruded genetic material snapped before he could insert it into the open flesh. Break. Twist. Close. Fold. Hour after hour. Break. Twist. Close. Fold. Two’s shoulders ached. Two’s wrists hurt like the aftermath of a marathon session of masturbation. Two was hungry, tired, dizzy with the passage of the sun across the open aft deck. Plasmal after plasmal fell from fingers that no longer obeyed his commands. Mathembe brushed away his apologies, sent him to rest in the shade.

An affectionate punch. He woke with a cry, with a start; what, where, when, have I been asleep, have I been drooling, do I smell? Dark. Orange streamers of cloud across a violet sky. Stars huge above him, the moon the eye of God; ’ware your soul, your sins, your midnight shames and private pruriences; how naked are you while you are sleeping and all can see your soul on your face? She stood over him, face full of moonshadows: a creature of legend, of river-mud and story. She beckoned, come, was halfway to the Ancestor Pit without ever looking back to see if he was behind her.

Of course he was.

With the night, when the boundaries between life and Dreaming grew vague, the spirits that inhabited the pit drew close to the edge of the world. Every shadow, every rustle, every movement among the roots was an ancestor returning to briefly reanimate his wooden mask. Child of signs and portents, Two would have been quite unnerved but for the workmanlike air with which Mathembe set about the task of fastening brainplant to mask, wrapping arms and legs around vines, clawing out fingerholds in empty eyesockets as she reeled off lengths of neural cable and hooked it to the brainplants. An impatient click of the fingers: quit dreaming, there is work to be done. Nothing here to scare a big boy. Two gathered the nerve fibres into sheaves and bound them with plastic cable clips. By moonshadow and the riding lights of the refugee fleet, he watched her moving around in the depths of the pit; lithe, dextrous, indefatigable.

Early autumn meteors fell burning all along the wounded river and in the space of time it takes a meteor to cross the sky and expend its glory he had fallen in love with her. And the work was transfigured. He plaited the sheathes of nerves into cables, and it was wonderful. He spliced the nerve endings into brainplants and it was not work, it was an offering, a love token. He heaved plastic-bag-loads of plasmals through the film door into the stinking decay of the farm modules and though the stench was unbearable, it was a good stench. Though the labour seemed neverending, it was a labour of love. She smiled at him more often now, glancing up as if by some telepathic prompt while they pressed the brainplants into the dormant flesh.

He understood what she intended to do. The plan was audacious. Brilliant. It could not possibly work. She was going to use the collected information-processing capacity of Unchunkolo’s dead to programme the changes in the codon sequences that would transform plasmals to food plants. All in a single night.

Then the last brainplant was embedded in the last plasmal and everything was checked and everything was ready and the sky was lightening around the sunward edge of the world. Mathembe Fileli surveyed her work and it was good. She entered the farm bubble. Two followed. Mathembe turned. Touched a hand to his chest. Sudden, striking, like some carnivorous creature, she kissed him hard on the mouth, and was gone before he could react, the module door sealed behind her.

The work might be hers alone now, but he would keep vigil. He would watch over her. He sat by the door, back pressed upright and resolute against the translucent wall.

Two was asleep before the horizon was below the sun and the camera crews came arrowing out of the silver mist.

He woke with the start of someone who is woken rather than wakes of his own accord. Hot sun. High above. Screw up the eyes against the glare. How long? That long? What had woken him; is she finished, is it done? The plastic bubbles were opaqued with mist, beaded with condensation. Dark shapes within. The door was still sealed against him.

Then what? The curving plastic wall beneath his cupped hands was vibrating.

After weeks of silence, the engines were running. Confirmation: the deck beneath his feet quivered to a series of shocks. Riverbed anchorholds being released. As Two took the steps up to the main deck three at a time the fabric of the ship shuddered to a deeper note. Sirens bellowed; Two reached the upper deck as the stern wheel began to turn. The noon sun struck rainbows from the cloud of spray and droplets around the turning wheel. Like some huge heavy creature returning to life after long hibernation, Unchunkolo moved.

And she was not alone. From the vantage of the higher decks, Two saw that every ship in the fleet was moving now, moving with one intent, towards the Empire shore. The air was split with sirens, the pirogues and outriggers of the news teams darted and wove between the slow-moving riverboats. Beyond the edge of the fleet the Imperial gunboats that had held them in midstream so long formed into an escort. Two joined a throng of fellow crewpersons at the rail, cheering and waving with ragged enthusiasm to their counterparts on the sister ships.

‘What happened?’ he yelled over the bellowing sirens at Sister Quartermaster.

‘They let us in.’

‘I can see that. Why?’

‘The civil war is over,’ shouted Cousin Department of Trade and Commerce.

‘You mean the War of Independence,’ said Nephew Fifth Loader. ‘That is what history is going to call it. The War of Independence.’

‘You mean the Warriors of Destiny beat the Empire?’

‘Let us say that the Empire realised that, though the Warriors could not beat it, neither could it beat the Warriors,’ said Sister Quartermaster in his ear. ‘Not and hope to retain any credibility in the international community.’

‘The Warriors beat them!’ roared Lifter. ‘Fair and square. They hammered them. The Emperor licked ass and gave them everything they wanted.’

‘Not quite everything,’ said Second Cousin Engineer.

‘How long do you think that pissy little excuse for a state is going to last? A year? I say, give it three months, and they will be begging Ol Tok to take them in.’

‘What?’ asked Two, churned and turned like river water by the rush of history over him.

‘The Warriors agreed to the Empire’s demand that nine northern prefectures be excluded from the new state,’ said Sister Quartermaster. ‘They remain a province of the Empire, a semi-autonomous Proclaimer homeland.’

‘Who cares?’ shouted Uncle Sixth, who was two years younger than Two, his nephew. ‘Who cares? They have opened the ports, we can dump this lot and get back to work. Whatever they call themselves now, these countries are still going to need riverboats.’

‘It was part of the cease-fire agreement,’ said Quartermaster, his guide to this new world order that had sprung, wholly formed, from the brows of the politicians in a single night. ‘The Empire sets up resettlement camps while power is handed over and civil order restored.’

‘Hostage camps, that is what they are,’ shouted Fifth Loader. ‘Guarantees of good behaviour from the Warriors, so they will not continue with the war to kick the Proclaimers out of that tin-pot little country of theirs and bring real unity.’

‘Unity out of the barrel of a gun,’ said Sister Quartermaster quietly, thinking she would not be heard, but Fifth Loader heard, and would have rounded on her but for Senior Engineer, Two’s father, saying, ‘Nations. Free States. Empires. Look at those poor bastards down there.’ On Unchunkolo’s barges and lighters, on the barges and lighters of every ship pushing steadfastly for shore, the people rejoiced. Old women clapped their hands to God and wept blatantly. Old men danced, arms held out, fingers clicking. Men clapped and chanted and waved their fists. Women drummed their hands on the plastic decks and whistled and made shrill ululating cries and hugged each other and hugged their children and hugged their men. Fathers pranced unsteadily with their children on their shoulders. Mothers danced to the music of radios that had been kept hidden from the traders, shifting from foot to foot, children at their hips. Babies waved their arms and cried in incomprehension. Children grinned and ran with cautious carefreeness, chasing each other. A din of cheering, whistling, singing, drumming went up from Unchunkolo, from every refugee ship, counterpointed by the ceaseless blaring of the sirens. But it was a dark carnival. In the heart of the celebration, there was a restraint, a needle of sorrow.

‘Look at them,’ said Two’s father again. ‘Do they care in whose name they get their handful of rice and spoonful of meat on a plastic plate? Do they care that the land is partitioned, do you see them debating the status of the nine northern prefectures? Learn sense, kids. Flags and politics; leave them both alone because they burn all of us together.

‘You think it is all over the moment we tie alongside the wharf and sort out compensation? You think, off they go, and on comes a new cargo and off we sail and goodbye to the lot of them, now everything is the way it was before? I tell you, it has not even begun to begin yet. Ask yourself this; they know where their meal tonight is coming from, but do you?’

Alone of all those gathered at the rail, Two did.

The interiors of the domes were still inscrutable behind the slow trickles of condensation. Two cupped his hands against the plastic, shouted her name. No acknowledgement from the dark masses in the mist.

‘It is over! You can go now!’

He tried the outer airlock door. It was unsealed. Cocooned in mist, Two stepped into the day after creation.

A carpet of moss breaks beneath his feet into a mosaic of rainbow-coloured hexagons: flaws and fractures of colour dart away before him as he advances step by slow step. Yellow polymer bubbles swell on every side, some the size of his fist, some the size of his head, some large enough to envelope him whole; they burst, noiselessly, in sprays and sparkles of spores; they fill the air with intimate, evocative scents: body smells, musks, sweats, pheromones, secretions, hormonal perfumes that have him swooning and roaring and sweating and trembling all at once. Bulbous striped gourds vent spray and mist from trumpet mouths; a constant warm rain settles upon his body. All is swelling, all is engorging, all is tumescent, all is ripening and bursting; pods split open to drop gelatinous seeds, fat fruit squeezes from tight-stretched lips, flesh-coloured cauls and fungal prepuces peel back as meaty stamens and shafts thrust into the air. Clumps of tendrils wave, reach for ankles, calves; tight spirals of vegetation uncoil into flexing ferns, parables and paradigms of chaos theory. Above his head the tight-folded glandes of new trees shudder and burst into fronds and bracts: symbiotic vines colonise trunks and branches and unfold trembling blooms, knee-high blisters in the moss carpet split, clouds of winged insects swarm up around Two, cluster for a moment at lips and nostrils, tasting, scenting, before darting for the true scent of the flowers. Beetles skitter around his feet, small slithering things, small scuttling things with too many legs or too many eyes or too many graspers and snippers; the unseen gardeners of this symbiotic Eden. He pushes his way between hanging sheets of skin, inward, onward, dizzy and hallucinating with the smell of greenness and growingness and ripe warm flesh. Half-transformed plasmals cluster around his lower legs sucking genetic information from his skin, he brushes them away hardly noticing that he does so. Giant rumps of meat rise up on either side almost to the top of the dome, squeezing from their pericarps like obscenely bared buttocks, pillows of flesh; wine gourds bubble and gurgle and fart fermentation gases. The fronds close over his head, force him to crouch, onward, forward, led by the crazing and cracking of the carpetmoss before him. Hormones, pheromones, ketones, esters, mmmm stamens, pistils, slowly opening deep-sucking flowers, things that burst wetly, invitingly; slow but irresistible thrustings, conception gestation fecundity, vegetable pressure, onward, inward, into the secret vegetable heart vast and slow opening before him in the intimate darkness like the ancient secrets of womanhood, like a lotus; leaves peeling back, one by one by one by one, enter. Penetrate. Pierce.

There he found her, asleep in the heart of her creation, enfolded by petals. She was naked but for a ragged pair of shorts. Brainplants clung to her flesh, her head was a medusa of cables and interfacers. The warm constant rain dripped from the leaves and ran down her body. Gently, reverently, Two knelt, unhooked the brainplants. Over much of her body, patches of skin, some the size of his thumb, had been torn away. He understood. As he thought, it had been outrageous. She had used her own flesh as a template from which to shape all this life, all this growing, all this fecundity. Her flesh, and her dreaming, amplified by the linked intellects of the ancestors and programmed into the dormant plasmals. She murmured in her sleep, beat soft fists at the air. Words came to edge of articulation, and fled, afraid. Wordless even in the dream of creating. Two never loved her again as purely as he did in that moment, among the alien flora.

The hearing was perfunctory and satisfactory. In the space of a single night Mathembe was changed from freeloader and stowaway to something between a deity and a mascot. Two defended her with vigorous dedication from things from which she required no defence.

He bought her the plastic sun shades from one of the outrigger junksellers because he knew she would look fantastic in them, that with her dark provincial skin and beautifully broken provincial nose and liquid provincial way of moving through the crowds she would turn every fair-haired light-skinned Imperial head. She thought them frivolous in her task of searching among the piles of possessions and people and exasperated Imperial officials with personal organisers strewn across Khelamjabheri quayside for her family. But she wore them because it pleased him. And she did look fantastic. And she did turn the head of every longshoreman and forklift driver and international refugee aid worker as they went along the concrete piers and quays, Two grinning three steps behind, filled with vicarious pride that his Mathembe should be so admired.

Mathembe could not understand the computer.

When she heard that they were searching for Displaced Persons, the Refugee Administrator had been glad to give them access to the data space: ‘for all the good it will do you’ (trickling a thin oh-God-the things-I-have-seen stream of smoke from her cheroot into the air). ‘The whole bloody thing is a shambles. Totally overloaded. But, if it means one family less sleeping under plastic tonight, I am more than happy.’

‘It stores and processes information,’ Two explained. ‘Really no different from the Dreaming net, except that everything is mechanical. This is the Empire now.’

She stroked the screen, touched the alphanumerals.

‘It should configure to Old Speech.’ Two touched the display, the screen cleared, came alive with sinuous Old Speech phonemes. Mathembe clapped her hands softly, pressed her palms together in an unconscious attitude of prayer.

‘Just enter the name,’ Two prompted. ‘There, on the screen. Write it with your finger.’

F.I.L.E.L.I.

‘Touch enter.’

ENTER.

The screen blanked. Mathembe threw up her hands in consternation.

‘It is all right. It takes a moment or two to search.’

SEARCH COMPLETED.

‘Look. It has got one. Now…’

HARD COPY.

Shreel of printer.

‘Temporary transit area seven; row six, bivouac forty-four.’

Mathembe was already tugging at his arm.

Temporary transit area seven was a vast echoing warehouse filled with the cries of children and dusty beams of light from the rooflights. All planes and verticals, pillars and sheet-metal roofing; alien and intimidating to the people brought up among softer, non-Euclidian geometry. Larger family groups were housed in empty cargo containers; all others had a space allotted to them by a number in Imperial script spray-painted on the concrete floor.

Row six. Bivouac forty-four. An old man sat on the concrete cradling a streetball stick and red plastic helmet, deep in shock. Mathembe and Two were not inclined to intrude into his private grief.

‘There will be others,’ said Two, afraid that in her anger Mathembe would throw his plastic sunglasses into the oil-stained river. ‘Many many many others. It is a big river.’

It was a big river.

And there were others.

Many many many others.

The Filelis who lived under guns and quarantine on an island where the Emperor had once sent his prisoners.

The Filelis who lived under six plastic sheets in a football stadium.

The Filelis who came trudging from their metal hut through a quagmire of mud, shit and tropical rain to see if this girl at Control could really, truly be their missing daughter.

The Filelis who, with a few others, had tried to grow a community from the poor polluted exhausted soil of the Empire in the shadow of a chemical plant.

The Filelis who lived for their own protection behind barbed wire and blades in a pulpwood-forest clearing because every tree for the last three kilometres of the very long bus ride was hung with signs saying EAT THE MEATMEN.

The Filelis who lived sixteen in three rooms in a city-centre apartment block that would have been condemned but for the refugee crisis, graced with sweeping panoramas to the west of an expressway, to the east of a forest of satellite dishes, to the north of a construction site and to the south of another terminal apartment block looking back at them.

The Filelis who lived under the sound-footprint of the orbital shuttle port, their nights lit red by the glare of launch lasers and landing lights, all as mute and articulate as Mathembe from the night-and-day scream of spacecraft and super-heated steam.

The Filelis who invited Mathembe into their cardboard and plastic shanty and offered wine and fruit and breadmeat from the scabby, diseased garden that was their commemoration of home: the communion of the dispossessed.

So so many Filelis.

‘Like I said, it is a big river,’ was Two’s only comment.

Mathembe’s work under Uncle Farmer in the agriculture bubbles earned her passage; she made spending money selling biotoys to the girls she was domiciled with on the Deck of the Women. She saved her small change until she had enough to buy a jacket. She bought it from a chain-store in the Imperial port city of Fijjahal. It was silver plastic. It shone brilliantly in the bright lights and chrome of the city store. Two almost died from admiration of Mathembe in her shades and silver jacket moving like a sweet dark silhouette through the smoggy streets of Fijjahal. It caused him almost physical pain when she took the beautiful silver jacket to a tee-shirt printers and had computer-assembled videofits of her family annealed onto back, front and sleeves. To complete the violation, she made Two take a marker pen and write, in his neat, big, New Speech: HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE? THEY ARE MY FAMILY. THEIR NAME IS FILELI.

Now whenever Unchunkolo docked at the left-hand shore, Mathembe wore the jacket. It cost her all her money and was no more successful than the computer search.

Sail on Unchunkolo, with your cargoes of timber and organo-chemicals and consumer electronics and mass-market shoes. A thousand years of pride, a thousand years of solitude, while around you changes of millennial dimensions unfold across the land. No midwife attends the birth of a nation. No mother nurtures it. When the umbilical is cut, it is alone on the dark plains of history. It must stand and walk unaided, it must learn to feed, and to run and to fight, there are yellow-eyed creatures of the night hungry for its territory and resources. Can it feed its people, can it shelter and educate them, can it afford them wealth and health, can it protect them? These are the tasks of nations.

No. The tasks of nations are these: in the face of ecological collapse and genetic bankruptcy, in the cold wind from beneath the wing of famine, to have every locomotive and country bus and government organical and police station and mail slot and telecomm point and municipal glo-globe stand and public library and state genebank and law court and public park redecorated in the green silver and black of the new Free State. That is the first and great task of a nation. And the second is like unto it: to send serious little men from ministries and departments that never needed to exist before roaring around the countryside on green silver and black traix de-naming everything that had been renamed by those self-same little men in the days when the traix had been Imperial black. The task of nations is to send the five ragged riverboats that have been requisitioned (with vain promises of compensation) to form the new nation’s navy into the offing beyond Ol Tok to bombard the city with thirty thousand enns’-worth of fireworks to proclaim the birth of a new state. The task of nations is to prove the credibility of the new House of Deputies by pouring forth a torrent of legislation: banning all non-organical technology, making it an offence to be found with a word of New Speech on your lips, ordering all the shops and stores with nothing in them to paint out their bilingual signs and repaint them monolingually, changing all the street names so that no one can find their way around any more, banning all neon and holograms so that those who wander in search of renamed shops on renamed streets wander in darkness both metaphorical and physical, establishing a religion with fifteen major saints, six hundred and thirty enlightened sub-saints and thirty-eight thousand nine hundred and twelve angels as the only way to God, giving absolute licence to anyone wearing a pneuma mask in public as being ‘under the guidance of the saints’ and therefore immune from legal restraint, fining you for public disrespect to the dead, or for not displaying the portrait of the new Free State president in your café, shop, market stall, school or shrine, or, best of all, decreeing an eternal and indissoluble territorial claim over the partitioned northern prefectures. These are the true tasks of nations, while children scuttle through the smoking hulks of Ol Tok’s great houses hunting wild organicals for food, while Free State troopers, those roaring boys who had risen against the Imperial black with a whoop and a rebel yell, lay out lines of the dead, mouths green from eating organical flesh, along their nation’s cobbled roadsides.

Idiocy is, at least, even-handed. The northern prefectures—now renamed God’s Country—responded to the territorial threat from their new neighbours as the Proclaimers have ever done, with paranoid fears of racial and cultural genocide, and mobilised themselves into a militia one million strong armed with hunting weapons and fowling pieces. When the unclean horde of Confessor berserkers thirsting for the blood of Proclaimer babies failed to come pouring over the green hills of Asmathi Prefecture, the enshrined paranoia turned upon the enemy within, the native Confessor population who every second of every day plotted the downfall and destruction of the Proclaimer state. Decree likewise followed decree: all the nation must be registered according to religion. Proclaimer or Confessor, left-handed or right-handed, and zoned according to religious affiliation. A single right-handed grandparent was enough to have you and your family rezoned and moved to a Confessors-only district, to be partner to a Confessor enough to cost you your job in the new Civil Service and have your weapons licence and franchise revoked. Those northern prefectures under the shadow of the great north woods also saw orgies of mail slot, public tram and telecomm point repainting, of street, shop and district renaming. When colours and tongues become political weapons, that is the sign of a sick and sinful society.

Twenty-nine southern, Confessor prefectures. Nine northern, Proclaimer prefectures. Each with the power to legislate, jurisdict, tax, administer, budget, educate, police, defend, and send its people stepping one after the other into war. God, those are terrible powers. Each shackled by the sacred principles of democracy to tyrannic majorities and eternally disenfranchised minorities. Confessor over Proclaimer, Proclaimer over Confessor. Well, then, if they do not like it here, let them go back there. Always there, a word that is almost a spit, a sneer, a flick of the head rather than name the bastard nation.

And so they did.

They went back. Busloads and boatloads and trainloads of them, by aircraft and spacecraft and private vehicle, by trux and traix and foot. On either side of the new, bristling border they queued for hours, kilometre after kilometre of them snaking back into the heartlands of the detested countries. With joy in their hearts they crossed the border. And they found camps. They are a universal human condition, camps. There is a refugee in the heart of every one of us. Resettlement camps. Transit camps. Temporary accommodation centres. Call them what you will. They sprang up along either side of the new, jagged border like malformed teeth; clusters of hastily grown biotecture domes and sanitation units, red dirt roads scraped raw by trux wheels, people from ministries and departments resplendent in new national colours filling forms, filling forms, filling forms. Around every border crossing, around every border town, around every port for a thousand kilometres up and down the river; camps.

Those on the Proclaimer side of the border at least attempted to be true to their description as temporary, those on the Confessor side rapidly acquired the uneasy sense of permanence. Reasons: excuses: many many more Confessors made the crossing south than Proclaimers went north. That, and the fact that the emigration officials of God’s Country demanded an exit tax from every departing Confessor equal to eighty per cent of their worldly goods. It was a small country, God’s Country, it needed to hold on to all the exchequer it could.

Sail on, then, Unchunkolo, abreast the flow of history, untouched and untouching, untroubled and troubling no one, carrying them up and down, rich and poor, northerner and southerner, with all their burdens of lives and expectations, sail on, upon your centuries-long voyage past the shores of time.

She knew it was him from the way he looked at the noonday sky and sat down stiffly, legs crossed, in a sunny but secluded part of the foredeck. She did not need to see him open his Book of Witnesses and press the readers to his temples, she did not need to hear him mumble his mind-clearing exercises so that the pure word of God might shine through him, undimmed by the clutter of life in interesting times. It was him.

For two days and a night Unchunkolo had pushed the three barge-loads of Proclaimers north to their homeland. Captain reckoned it would be the last of the great migrations: Unchunkolo had had to tender for the charter. The bid Father Lading had submitted was better than penury, but only just. In these days of economic war between the Empire and its new independent neighbour, any work was better than lying up in harbour growing tumours on the hull. Three, four months ago, when the flow of migrants had been at its greatest, the captains could have named their price. The Proclaimers tended to agree a better rate than the Confessors, but then the Proclaimers had not had to pay the eighty per cent exit tax. But for the subsidies the God’s Country government paid to the riverboat people, the Confessors would have been left squatting on the quayside.

The old man finished his devotions, folded away his Book of Witnesses, rose stiffly from the rough hair decking. Suddenly Mathembe was terrified. The answers to questions that had defined her life were there standing at the rail, observing the slow passage of the many-coloured shore, and she was not certain she could bear those answers.

No Lady of the Beer Bottle to pray to here. The decision and responsibility were hers entirely.

She left him at his rail watching the slow passage of the land where he could no longer live, went to her cubby and put on her silver picture jacket. Then, stormed with doubts like flocking dark birds, she went and tugged the old man’s sleeve.

He knew her instantly.

‘My dear girl! My dear dear girl! Mathembe Fileli.’

The tears of the old still embarrassed her. And then it was as if a cloud had cast a sudden dark shadow across a fruitful land.

‘But there is so much we must talk about. So much. Your family, your Grandfather…’ Then he-noticed the pictures on Mathembe’s silver jacket, and Two’s good New Speech. ‘Forgive me. I see that times have been as hard with you as they have with me. Harder, I do not doubt. You are aboard this ship as crew rather than passenger? That is quite an accomplishment, I salute you. But then I always reckoned you to be a woman of no small consequence, Mathembe Fileli. Tell me, would it be possible for you to obtain permission from your superior to take tea with me?’

The small travelling tea-set was exquisite. Then everything about Dr Kalimuni had been exquisite. The precision with which he weighed and measured the tea, poured the boiling water: exquisite.

As any good lawyer will draw out a story, with hints and suggestions and leading questions, Dr Kalimuni drew out the story of Mathembe’s sundering from and subsequent search for her family. Like any good lawyer, he was adept in non-verbal communication, trained to observe and act upon the little truths that spill out in the nervous ticking of the witness’s foot, the twitch, the wringing of the hands. He listened patiently, and sympathetically, as a good lawyer must, and asked many questions. Many times the tiny, exquisite teapot on its alcohol burner was recharged with boiling water.

Then he told his own story. He told it with many small sips of tea, with much trembling of the hands, rattling of the white cup against the white saucer.

Jadamborazo had been small enough to retain the village vendetta mentality where everyone knows everyone, and big enough for the anonymous viciousness of the city where no one knows anyone. With help from his brother, a healer—a fine gentleman without one microgram of bigotry in his body, Dr Kalimuni was at pains to point out—he had re-established the legal practice. In a lawless place, in lawless times, there was no shortage of employment for the Advocate Kalimuni. From cases of stoning Imperial troops or spraypainting slogans on walls to charges of possession of arms and even treasonable murder, Dr Kalimuni had enjoyed no small measure of success in the Imperial courts.

‘The small town, Mizz Fileli; the great sociological bastard. Beware small-town mentality, it is sure death to the soul. There is but one law in the small town and that is the opinion of one’s peers.’

First the keeper of the shrine where he worshipped every Holy Day. Then the master of the Red Hand Lodge. Then the chairman of the local Advocates’ Association. All were shown politely into his book-lined study with its views of his brother’s exquisite gardens. All were served tea from the exquisite white tea set. All questioned the sincerity of his faith. The Red Hand Lodge master had said it most nakedly and honestly. ‘How can you, a loyal Proclaimer, defend this nation’s enemies? How can you defend traitors and murderers, people who, you can be sure, if they ever got the whip hand, would show no mercy to us? They are talking about you down in the Confessor ghettos like you are some kind of saviour, Kalimuni. Remember where your loyalties lie.’

‘My loyalties lie where they have always lain,’ Dr Kalimuni, who was a member of no lodge, who worshipped his god according to his own conscience, had replied smoothly. ‘With the principles and processes of law. Without which, sir, we would be less than the beasts of the forest. Less than beasts, sir.’

But nowhere, and least of all Jadamborazo, was immune to the plague of violence that spread across the land that hot summer, that catalysed a decades-long process of polarisation so that by the first fall of the leaf in the forests that encircled Jadamborazo it was a town no more, but two armed, baying camps; the Proclaimers down in the valley and floodplain, the Confessors in the encircling hills and valleys that defined this tributary of the great river. Ghost-Boy squads chose nightly victims from the telecomm directory; young Spirit Lodge bloods selectively eliminated jeepney drivers with destination boards for the wrong end of town. The pressure for Kalimuni to conform, to come off his fence (the most heinous of crimes in either camp) mounted. His brother pleaded with him, for the sake of his reputation, to give up defending Confessors charged with political offences. Dr Kalimuni’s careful, exquisite arguments were as incomprehensible as abstract art to this ancient, primal philosophy. One cannot be neither, nor. One must be either, or. Conform, Kalimuni, conform, remember who and what you are. Hammering away, hammering away, hammering away; then, abruptly, the coercion ceased, and there was silence. Total, complete silence. Those who are not for us must be against us.

Then the Ghost Boys shot his brother in mistake for the Grand Master of the Jadamborazo Spirit Lodges, with whom he was accustomed to play fili every Tuesday evening. They shot him with a neural scrambler. He was lucky. He would only be confined to a mobile support unit for the remains of his life, a spasming, palsied ruin of a man, unable to speak, unable to walk, unable to control the least motor function.

‘I learned this speech of the heart from him,’ Dr Kalimuni said. His hands shook so that scalding tea slopped over the brim. He set the tiny, translucent cup down. ‘That is how I am able to read you so well, my dear Mathembe. I think that he must have been trying to ask me to do it from the very first, but I was not then literate enough to understand what he was asking of me. Or perhaps it was that I did not want to admit that he could ask such a thing. Of course it was a sin. But then so is slander, so is gossip, so is swearing, so is going with the head uncovered on the Holy Day, so is forgetting one word of God in his holy book, and any one of those sins is enough to cast one for ever into Khirr. A house may burn with a single match. And God may forgive any sin, in time.’ The Advocate smiled. ‘I shall certainly make good representation of my case to him, and my brother who has gone before me will be no hostile witness, I think.’

The death of his brother succeeded where the shrine keeper, the Lodge master and the Association president failed. In guilt, grief and anger, Dr Kalimuni examined his conscience and professional morality with the full magnification of his inquisitorial mind. He saw doubts like a squall line cloud the horizon of his certainty. The pillars of his life, his impartiality, his impeccability, his incorruptibility, cracked and fell in the storm of uncertainty. But for the Revolution, or the War of Independence, according to one’s polarity, that engulfed the whole land, he would have resigned. There was no longer any law to resign from. When rumours of an Imperial capitulation sent two-thirds of the Proclaimer population north towards the imagined welcome of their co-religionists, Dr Kalimuni remained. He did so more as an act of personal expiation than of hope for a new order. But a new order came, and, after the painting of telecomm points and mail slots and the renaming of all the streets, found itself in need of lawyers. A letter, on official Free State Justice Department headed notepaper and written in impeccable Old Speech, offered Dr Kalimuni (renamed Kalingimungili) the post of District Prosecutor. No longer capable of certainty himself, Dr Kalingimungili withdrew into retreat to hear the pure and untarnished word of God. And in the silence of his brother’s exquisite garden it seemed to him that the pure and untarnished word of God was stay. He wrote to the Department accepting the position with thanks and at the proper time and proper place presented himself to the new prefectural authorities to receive his Letters of Office.

On the plaza outside the Prefecture Council offices he saw those same thugs who had crippled his brother swaggering along with rings of office on their fingers, laughing and swaggering and receiving the praises and adulations of their people. He realised then how easily a man may hear his own cowardice and ease and call it the pure and untarnished word of God.

‘It is a cold, hard land, God’s Country,’ said Dr Kalimuni, ‘and not welcoming to warm-blooded creatures like we Timboroa folk. But at least I will not be asked to dispense the justice of murderers. Do you think my conscience will be clear then? I am at heart too simple a soul for these complex times. It is the great gift of God, simplicity of heart, I would not be arrogant enough to claim this humility for myself, but I do know that I am adrift in history.

‘My maternal ancestors are Asmathi folk, from the border country, where the hills that once I loved wholly are now divided so that now I must love one side and hate the other. I do not have the trick of that kind of love.’ He looked into his empty tea bowl, divining the life of Kalimuni from the shredded leaves. ‘Oh, we are all very strong on what we are not, but weak on what we are. To define something in terms of what it is not, that is the disease of our times, can you understand that? A Proclaimer can tell you what he is against but not what he is for; a Confessor knows he is anti-Proclaimer but has no conception of what it means to be pro-Confessor. Empire Out! but what in? What you are is what you are against; That is bastard thinking. Hurt will come to the hearts of us all from it.’

The great river flowed past, wide and slow.

‘If only you would speak, Mathembe Fileli. You and all like you, if only you would speak out and say, enough of this, if only you would even once refuse to let us death-haunted, bigoted old people speak your words for you. Go on, speak, say something. What have you to say about this world you have been given by us? Do you like it, do you hate it, do you want it, and if not, what do you want in its place? How will you change things, what will you make better, what will you make worse, what will you make different? Speak. Say it out. Why are we so afraid to ask for the things we truly desire?

‘I am sorry. I was unforgivably insensitive. I have found this troubling worm of anger in my spirit. We learn most about ourselves in tribulation.’ A wind from the east stirred Dr Kalimuni’s sparse hair. ‘All this time and I have avoided the one question I know is the only question you wish answered. Very well, I shall answer it.’

This is the tale that Dr Kalimuni told Mathembe that sunlit autumn afternoon of the second day of the voyage to God’s Country. The story of her Father.

And they drive and they drive and they drive. All day they drive, it seems, though who can know? Inside the armoured troop carrier there is neither day nor night, nor light, nor time, nor distance, nor any certainty. There is only the sound of the tracks, the endless sound of the endless tracks, grinding on, for ever. The sound, and the smell. The smell of shit and piss, the smell of sweat; the fear smell of men who have been confined together in the hot, stinking dark without food, without water, without any place to relieve themselves, for a time without time, driving and driving and driving.

When you are in the dark with nothing to see, nothing to hear but the roar of engines, nothing to smell but the stink of your own shit, when you can feel nothing but the numb vibration of the seat beneath you, the bulkhead behind you, your mind retreats into strange dark corners; places where time stretches, where time contracts, where hours pass in the space of a few breaths and the interval between the tick and tock of your heart spans the rise and fall of whole creations; places where you feel yourself swelling like a great star-filled festival blimp to encompass the universe, or dwindling to a speck, a dot, a subquantal fragment falling between the cracks in reality. You hear the pure white noiseless roar of heaven and the helpless bellowing of hell. And still the armoured carrier drives on, drives and drives and drives.

When it stops the silence and darkness are so complete they seem like death. You cannot believe that the din of engines, the numbing vibration, have ended. But someone speaks and you realise you are not dead. The carrier has stopped. Stopped dead. Someone hammers on the door, let us out let us out let us out for the love of sweet God let us out. No one answers. In the stinking darkness a spirit of community is born; where one fails many hands may succeed. You beat your fists bloody on the metal walls of the carrier, roar and shout until your head spins with the roaring echoes thundering back at you in the cramped metal box. You cannot see the blood on your fists, you can only feel the warm slow trickle of it down your palms, down your wrists, down your arms.

No one comes.

And you begin to be afraid. It is a different type of fear from the fear you had when you were moving, for while you were moving you had at least the hope of a destination, but the fear of being stopped is much worse. I will tell you the nature of this fear. It is the fear that no one will ever come, that the soldiers have left you here sealed in this dark box to die. To you sitting here in the broad light of day that sounds a ludicrous fear. When you are in the dark, in the hot, stinking dark, without food, without water, it makes you afraid. Very very afraid.

There is a worse fear than that. The first fear paralyses you, leaves you freezing even in this sweaty heat. But the second fear, that is the fear that guts you. What if you have already died, died without your knowing it? What if there really is a hell? What if this is that hell, that you will stay for ever in this darkness, this heat, this hunger and thirst and foulness and fear? That is the fear you keep to yourself, for once it is spoken aloud the screaming will start and never end, all hope abandoned.

But you think about it. Your mind comes back to it time and time again. Everything is a reminder that you are in hell. The conversations you try to strike with the men you cannot see on either side of you: how many tens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of years might it take for every possible topic of conversation to be exhausted? But hell is for ever, the time will surely come—nothing can stop it—when you reach the limits of language, and then, when every possible topic of conversation has been exhausted, you are damned to start again, repeat these conversations not ten times, not a thousand times, not a million times, but an infinite number of times, over and over and over and over.

My God, that is a terrible fear. Eternity. You dare not contemplate it too long, too closely, for it will drive your spirit to madness. But in the darkness, in the heat and hunger and thirst and foulness, there is nowhere else for it to turn.

And the door opens. The light! It is a physical pain, stabbing into the heart of you.

Out. Out. Everyone out. Patches of lesser brightness within the white glare are soldiers. They look like angels. The sight of them, so pure and bright and holy, makes you want to cry. You love them. You love them with a purer and brighter and holier love than you have ever loved before. You would do anything for them, anything, because they have saved you, they have delivered you from the hell in the metal box. Line up. Over there. Move. Kneel. Hands on heads. On heads. Yes yes, look, see, how fast I move, how low I bend to kneel, how flat my hands are on top of my head, do I please you?

Blink blink blink away the light dazzle. Little by little the world makes itself visible to you. You are at a military base, kneeling in the chewed-up dirt in a long line of shit-stinking men and boys with your hands on your head. There are trees, vegetation, blue sky, soft white cumulus. The earth beneath your legs is wet, the leaves and bracts of the trees glisten with recent rain. God, you think, you will never complain at the rain again.

Then the soldiers come, and with them, the third fear. That is the final fear, for the other fears were imaginary, but the third fear is real.

These are not Imperial soldiers who arrested you at the checkpoint outside Timboroa. These are black and brown uniforms, the black of the Empire, the brown of the land’s soil. They are the militia. An officer comes along the line, an officer in a black and brown uniform. He has a stick with which he touches each man and boy on the side as he passes down the line. He looks at you. He touches his stick to your side and you wish you could feel the ecstatic release of your bladder relaxing and the piss running down your legs and all the fear with it. But you are dry as a thigh bone in hell. He stands in front of you, tapping his stick against his leg, tap tap tappy-tap tap, checking a list of names.

He calls out five names.

One of them is your name. The soldiers come. They put their hands under your shoulders and lift you and take you away. No no God no no you beg. The soldiers laugh. Dumb hick, they say, do you not know you are free to go? You are taken into the militia base to be washed and fed and given clean clothing. The rest remain kneeling on the damp soil with their hands on their heads. They are the friends and neighbours among whom you have lived your whole adult life. The soldiers have made the men and the boys take their clothes off. They stand naked with their hands on their heads. Some have had their hands bound behind them with metal wire. It is not your problem now says the fat grinning guard who is escorting you and the other four who have names that sound like yours. He pushes you in a not unfriendly way into the building with the flat of his weapon. We are all friends here, he says, offering you his left hand.

But though they feed you and wash you and give you clean clothes that almost fit and telecomm for vehicles to come and take you to where you want to go, they are not your friends. They are foul and boorish men, ignorant and violent. It frightens you, their ignorant violence. All you have in common with them is the sound of your name and the hand with which you write it. But that is what is important.

The black and brown officer comes personally to offer you his apologies and to see you off. He salutes you with his stick as you are driven away in a foul-smelling smoky Imperial automobile. It drives past a row of small trees; thirty-seven you count, standing in a long row rooted in the rain-damp earth.

And you die there, on the skin-upholstered rear seat of the black Imperial automobile.

River night welled up from the dark waters. Indigo sky; a line of red above the western shore the remains of day. Lights ghosted by; a sister running with the flow. Sirens greeted each other.

‘Of course I filed charges as soon as I reached Jadamborazo. It was a simple matter to find out where I had been held, and on whose orders. Of course it came to nothing; the great lie of democracy, its essential paradox, is that democracy is first to be sacrificed when its security is at risk. Every state is totalitarian at heart; there are no ends to the cruelty to which it will go to protect itself.

‘Forgive me. Cynicism is a sin, and a particularly vile and choking one. It gave me bitter satisfaction to hear on the radio news some months later that the Regional Detention Centre where I had been held had been attacked by the Warriors of Destiny, its garrison slaughtered and it burned. I have been back, I could not be wholly free until I did, can you understand that? It is a shell. The Warriors of Destiny were uncharacteristically thorough. Strangely, none of the man-trees were touched. Thirty-seven trees. They were quite tall then, quite beautiful. Your father is tenth from the right. He was beside me all the time in the troop carrier, by my right-hand side. He stood beside me in the line when I and those five others were called out. Next to him is the rebel boy he tried to shelter, on his right-hand side.’

Dr Kalimuni held up his hands. He studied them minutely.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘No more shaking. How remarkable.’ And he laughed a short, sour laugh and Unchunkolo drove on into the night, towards the north. Then, after silence, he said,

‘Your Grandfather, he is still with you?’

Mathembe nodded, indicated the rear of the ship, where the head was temporarily accommodated among Unchunkolo’s dreamers.

‘I would like to see him one last time. I feel I should beg his forgiveness, but for what I am not certain. Surviving, probably. Is there anyone on this ship has a fili board? I should most like to play with him one final game.’

They did not speak again for the morning brought Anadhrapur and the coast of God’s Country. Beautiful Anadhrapur, beneath the trees. The Proclaimers thronged the decks for their first view of the beautiful town. They pointed and waved to relatives, actual and imagined, on the quayside. They rushed from the ship, down the companionways, onto the quay, they could not wait to touch the ground of God’s Country. Some kissed the concrete. Some kissed the immigration officials. Some kissed each other. Home. Home. They were home at last.

‘God, what happened to the town?’ asked Lifter, up on the high deck with Mathembe Fileli. Once Lifter realised that Two’s admiration of Mathembe was not reciprocated, she allowed herself to like the no-ass-less-tits refugee. She admired toughness wherever she found it.

Shrug. Meaning: what can happen to a town? A house, yes, a street, yes, a district, perhaps; a town?

‘Half of the town is missing. Gone. There, there, and there.’ Her hands described entire geographies. ‘Those hills there, there used to be houses, paddies, gardens, trees. What happened to them?’

‘Rezoning,’ said passing First Supercargo. ‘Have you not heard? The hills have been rezoned a Proclaimers-only district. The Confessors have been cleared out.’

‘With their houses, orchards, paddies and gardens too?’ Oh fatal curiosity. Before they went ashore, Lifter made Mathembe wear a scarf in Unchunkolo’s colours around her head.

‘If there is stuff going on, we do not want to get mistaken for Confessors. Even if we are.’

The initial rejoicing of the Proclaimers had broken into eddies of confusion and disillusion, clusters of homecomers stood around on the quayside with their possessions piled around them, all wearing the distinctive semi-frowns of people who have arrived in heaven and are not sure if it’s exactly what they had imagined. Mathembe saw Dr Kalimuni talking to an immigration officer in the new colours of God’s Country, blue and gold. She turned up the collar of her HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE? jacket against him.

The streets of beautiful Anadhrapur were thick with soldiers in the blue and gold uniforms of God’s Country. Blue and gold dazzle-painted battletrux dozed in the shade of her many trees.

‘Something going down here I do not like,’ growled Lifter. Voices hailed them from a dozing battletrux.

‘Yo, bitches!’

‘You can have the big one. Me, I like them skinny.’

‘Like hell. They are Confessors, can you not see?’

‘Eyes, boy, eyes, look, riverboat bitches. Got the colours of that boat came in this morning.’

‘That makes a difference?’

‘That makes a difference.’

Mathembe laid her hand on Lifter’s shoulder. Peace, sister.

‘If they had tried, I would have torn their balls off. I used to love this town. What do they think they are doing to it?’

Then they emerged from the web of bright clean cobbled footpaths and leafy shaded courts and saw what it was they had done to the town Lifter had loved so well.

Above the line of the hundred-metre level, Anadhrapur did not exist. The tops of the low hills and bluffs that tumbled down to the river were covered in a layer of pale green glaze. Lobes and runnels of the stuff had flowed some tens of metres down the streets, banked against walls on the upslope side of houses. Mathembe knelt, touched the pale green translucent stuff, sniffed it. Smooth but slightly sticky, like semi-polymerised synthetic flesh. It smelled of mornings, fresh and cool.

An open, upturned hand: what is it?

‘The old hilltop districts of Anadhrapur. Confessortown, all its houses and factories and shops and streets and gardens and orchards.’

How? Mathembe’s open mouth demanded.

‘Genebombed. Reduced. My God.’

A tilt of the head, a frown. I do not understand.

They stepped up onto the lobe of plasm, walked out across the gently undulating greenness.

‘They must have ordered everyone out, put up a containment field and then genebombed it. Reduced everything within the field to organic sludge. With all the Confessors gone, they can reseed it and all those wonderful fare-paying Proclaimers down on the dock will have beautiful new homes and gardens.’

The plasm beneath their plastic-soled deckboots was mottled and whorled with spirals in forty shades of green; the dead hilltops sparkled in the heat of the midday sun. Lifter shook her head.

‘My God. My God. My God.’

Mathembe touched her arm.

Not everyone…

Her face was beautiful, framed within the whirls and eddies of plasm, her hair frozen for ever in free-fall, every curl and coil and lock perfect, preserved. Her lips were parted as if with final words embedded in them. Her hands reached up through the thin film of green that separated her from the sky, locked open by rigor mortis. Gnawing, pecking creatures come scavenging across the green genefields had reduced the hands to bloody bones and shreds of skin.

‘Pleading,’ said Lifter. ‘Please God, keep it off me.’

Or offering? Mathembe mimed a woman with her last drowning breath holding her baby out of the solidifying plasm.

‘Saved, or eaten?’ said Lifter.

But Mathembe’s heart was still now, tranquil. The woman was not her mother.

That night Unchunkolo took on new cargo. The Confessors came from the warehouses and loading sheds along Anadhrapur’s quays where they had been hidden away all day. They wore their best clothes and their children were very clean. Captain and the Department of Foreign Affairs had struck the deal that morning: out of the eighty per cent exit tax, the Anadhrapur regional authorities would subsidise the cost of chartering the ship to take them down two day’s sail across the border to the resettlement camps.

Summoned from his nest above the pit of souls by an untoward-ness in the familiar rhythm of Unchunkolo’s night music, Two found her sitting by the aft deck rail beneath a moon and stars hanging frighteningly close and huge. She was a ghost by moonlight in white tee-shirt and leggings, though the night was cold in these northern waters. Two’s breath steamed as he stood, wrapped in his quilt, unsure of his emotional courage.

Strange things lay under her hands. Micro-trees, micro-trux, tiny flittering helicopter creatures. As he watched she rubbed a ball of plasm between her hands, opened her fingers to reveal a tiny model house in her palm. She set it among the trees to join the others in her micro-township and Two saw that what he had taken to be trees were in fact homunculi, legs fused together, uplifted arms splintering into branches, twigs, leaves. Thirty-seven of them. A proper forest. Mathembe picked up a toy trux. Wheels spun, miniature motor muscles throbbed. From her silver belt pouch she produced a firestarter. Fire in the night lit her face yellow. With exquisite care she held the tiny creature over the gas flame. It kindled, caught, blazed up. A snap of fingers, Mathembe dropped the trux; blazing, keening, it ran hither, thither, burning, dying across the deck and fell with a hiss into the receiving river.

Then with her firestarter at its highest setting, Mathembe waved a curtain of flame over her miniature town. Houses, tree-creatures, trux, all went raving up in burning.

‘Mathembe, what are you doing?’

She turned, saw him standing there beneath the swaying shadow of First Mate’s suspended automobile. She growled, deep in her throat which anyone who has a growling animal will tell you is the most dangerous growl of all. By the dying light of her burning toys, fingers hooked into claws. Canines bared.

‘Mathembe?’ He waited her out, stared her down, and the moonlight tumbled from the wake of churned water from the big turning wheel. ‘Mathembe?’

And she was a bundle of greasy dreadlocks and white rags huddled by the rail, sobbing inconsolably.

‘It is all right,’ said Two. ‘Everything is all right now.’ What a great and damnable lie. He went to her. They sat wrapped in each other. He traced the track of her tears down her face with the edge of his thumbs. He pushed the lank, black hair out of her eyes, rubbed at the smoky smudges on her face.

‘Is it your family?’

Yes Mathembe mimed, No, but Two had not the literacy for mixed messages. Rummaging in her silver pouch, Mathembe found a black marker pen. FATHER, Mathembe wrote on the thigh of her white leggings. MY FATHER IS DEAD.

‘Oh shit. Oh, sorry.’

She drew a thick black vertical line across his lips. Say nothing.

‘Was that what that man you were talking to told you? The Proclaimer? That bastard…’

A sudden black slash across his face. Shut up, you know nothing.

GOOD FRIEND. This on the inside of her right leg. MY FRIEND. DR KALIMUNI.

‘How did it happen?’

SOLDIERS. And on her belly and right thigh she drew in little stick hieroglyphs the death of Chepsenyt and the flight of the refugees and the arrest of the men folk. It was not told simply, nor quickly, Two’s many questions were answered with little annotations: MILITIA, PROCLAIMER TOWN, WARRIORS/DESTINY. Across her shoulders and chest she told the story of her father’s death. TRUX. DARKNESS. HUNGER. FEAR. Each underscored by rows of tightly drawn spirals, the picto-gram of endlessness. And, between her small breasts, the terminal tree, shoots and twigs and roots coiling out along arms, into navel, knotting around spine around hips down legs into groin.

‘Mathembe…Shit.’

She sat, wreathed in the heat of her own breath, eyes dark but brilliant.

TREES FIRE FLEEING, she wrote on her left calf. ALL MY LIFE, RUNNING, DRIVEN.

‘Driven by what?’

She circled the hem of the white leggings with tiny, precise ideograms. THINGS OUTSIDE ME.

‘Things like what?’

PEOPLE. POLITICS. RESPONSIBILITY. FAMILY. GRANDFATHER.

‘What do you think you should do?’

DO NOT KNOW. Circled in black, three, four, five, six times. Do not know do not know do not know do not know do not know do not know do not know.

‘But what do you want?’

GRANDFATHER THINKS SHOULD STAY. MAKE NEW LIFE.

Again: ‘But what do you want?’

And, in tiny scribbles on her left flank: me back.

‘Do you want to stay with us?’ With me, he almost said. This time he understood the yes, no.

‘Why?’

GUILTY. And before he could repeat his question: TIRED. ANGRY. GUILTY. Mathembe circled the RESPONSIBILITY on her ankle, and the words FAMILY, FATHER, GRANDFATHER.

‘And what are you going to do?’

Black circle. Around and around the symbol for DO NOT KNOW. Then the black fibre pen slashed out the DO NOT KNOW.

Do know. Know with sudden and utter certainty. A trailing hand: Two, come.

Come where?

Here. She pointed with the black pen down into the pit of souls. She uncapped it with her teeth—a gesture that shivered Two with a totally unexpected erotic thrill—and slowly encircled the symbols MY FATHER on her white thigh.

A shift in the current, a stir in the night wind, set First Mate’s new automobile swaying on its derrick.

FIND FATHER. FIND TRUTH. TRUTH WILL SET FREE. AT LEAST…Mathembe growled, there was no more room on her body for words. Seizing Two’s arm, she rolled up his sleeve and continued on his skin…THEN WILL BE ABLE TO DECIDE FOR ME.

They worked quickly. They worked silently. They worked with the desperate efficiency of people who dare not be found out in their madness.

‘God, what if the crew…’ Two protested, ‘God, what if you cannot get back? God, what if…’ Each time, Mathembe struck him across the face with the black fibre-marker scar of her disdain. Coward.

Hooking the interfacers onto the heads in the pit, running out the sheaves of neural cable, splicing in the brainplants: Hurry up now, there is not much time.

‘This is impossible,’ Two said as Mathembe fixed the brain-plants around her head. In Chepsenyt, then, her mother had spent painstaking hours teasing and tying Mathembe’s hair into coils and ringlets. She had been too young to understand the pure joy a parent can take from its child’s hair. How sad her mother had been when she had had to shave her head against the infestations of Gangerabili. ‘This is stupid, Mathembe please, do not do this.’

A click of the fingers. Help me, stupid. And he did, hooking up the brainplants until her head was a mass of sucking, oozing connections meatwired into the Dreaming. He did it because he was stupid, and loved her. Cocooned at the centre of the web of neural linkages, Mathembe lay back on the deck, closed her eyes and sent the mental command whispering along her nervous system. In a cascade of synaptic fire, the brainplants came alive and Mathembe Fileli’s Mathembe-Fileliness swept out from her in a wavefront of expanding consciousness.

Nothing. Rushing howling nothing. This is the Dreaming? This blackness, this darkness; is death then death, annihilation, and the Dreaming only fond hopes and illusions attached to knots of complexity in the matrix?

Where are you, father, my father? Hear your daughter, she wants you.

Did her headlong flight into nothing slow, did she perceive somewhere a limit to this limitless domain, a boundary where she might be turned back upon herself and her Mathembe-Fileliness flicker like a holographic goddess out of a pattern of standing waves along the edge of eternity?

First the sleep, then the dreaming.

Darkness again, but not the darkness that was before. A close, claustrophobic darkness, pressing in close, enfolding womb-like on all sides. Earth. She is a seed of consciousness buried in the earth, held within the husk of her own skull. Summer warmth and winter cold, soft percolating rains and bone-dry droughts wash over her, pain and pleasure to her dreaming senses; they call to her, Dream-Mathembe curled up within herself, a seed in a womb of earth. She feels new life tear within her; roots rip free from her, questing along deep buried mineral traces, scenting for water, shoots thrust up like begging hands searching for the light. With a cry she bursts into the light; uncoils summoned by light; she cries aloud in her spirit at the touch of the rain on her new skin. Moons and seasons wheel past in seconds—for time itself is an invention of the human mind—and timeless second by timeless second Mathembe grows, pressing her roots deep deep ah God! into the nonsubstance of the Dreaming, splitting and schisming into branches, twigs roaring upward upward outward outward towards the light, and the final ecstatic eruption into leaves, each leaf a lens through which she perceives the electromagnetic rainbow of this dreaming place, entire, naked, one thing, unfiltered, unanalysed, undisguised by human consciousness. With her ten thousand chlorophyll eyes she feels moons and suns and stars slow in their precipitous wheel above her, slow, slow, and settle into their diurnal pattern.

Years passed. Seconds. There was a time of heat and with it, fruit, a ripening, a swelling, a filling that was joy like she had never known before; things that moved too fast for her vegetable perceptions to focus on devoured the fruit on the branch but that too was a filling, fecund joy. After the time of heat there was a time of cold and Mathembe screamed ten thousand screams for every leaf that withered and died and blew away on the wind from the north. Naked and blind. But within the keeping of her thick bark, her heart was safe and warmed, turned inward in contemplation.

Spring touched her while winter’s fist was still closed around her, a spiritual, sensual, sexual stirring, a hormonal warmth waking in her imaginary belly, building, mounting, growing hotter, hotter, smelting and melting and reducing her in a storm of enzymes and genetic information to formlessness, an idea, a potential, a possibility. In winter’s depth the promise of spring tried her and moulded her, month after month she screamed in the fires that were burning her, shaping her according to her golden dreams and darkest sorrows. She fought within the confines of her wooden cocoon, struggled, but spring was not yet come in all its strength and joy, time is not yet the voices down among the roots whispered to Mathembe trapped and delirious within the tree, but time will be soon.

The first touch of the sun split her skin open like a knife. The dry brittle bark fissured, patches of skin and wood flaked and fell as the trunk cracked. Something silver stirred within.

An arm reached for the light. The tree shrieked, shook to renewed tremors. The outstretched hand opened, palm up, to catch the light. The long narrow slit in its trunk spasmed, opened wider. A leg now. A silver leg, a hip. Mathembe struggled, the umbilicals and placentories that had sustained her through the transforming winter tore free, dripped translucent golden ichor. Mathembe wrestled torso into the sun. With her free hand she wiped the gum from her eyes. Light burst upon her. Primal light. She screamed. And was free.

Naked, she knelt huddled on a tapestry of many-coloured mosses. Sun dried the webs and drips of birth-ichor on her skin to transparent film that cracked and fell to dust as she tested, tasted, tried thrilling new muscles. Mathembe stood, enthralled by her resurrection body, gazing at her new hands, new breasts, new thighs and calves and feet and arms and belly.

She was silver. She was beautiful, beautiful as she had only dreamed she could be beautiful. She shook out her long steel-coloured hair and the dreadlocks rang like bells, threw back her head to rejoice in the play of her new muscles, the stretch of her silver skin. Light filled her eyes, blue sky, white clouds, framed by the towers and spires of forest trees.

She turned from the contemplation of her new self to her surroundings. She was alone and naked in a small forest clearing. On every side wild primal woods enclosed her; brilliant, vibrant, ringing with life and colour. Life called to life from every branch and pillar, the air was iridescent with the hum of winged creatures, tame as the trees, that came hurrying to her outstretched fingers. Mathembe giggled in delight and that was the greatest wonder of all.

In this place after life, the injunction was gone. She was free to laugh, and cry, and speak.

‘Mathembe,’ she spoke aloud and at the touch of her voice a thousand creatures rose singing and flocking from the forest. All perfect and unsullied as the first morning after Creation. This was how it must have been in the footsteps of the Ahleles, as Janeel and Oboluwayé came creeping from their crèche-pods within the earth to survey the transformation of their world. Like that nursling humanity, Mathembe went naked and unashamed, naming all the creatures that rose up before her, setting the spires and huge parasol fungi trembling with the sound of her name.

She recognised this after-place. It was the forest of her childhood, the deep woods around Chepsenyt where she had played in her solitude, changed, transformed, made perfect in death. Dark clouds covered the sky. Mathembe took shelter from the brief, heavy rain in a stand of parasol fungi the least of which was three times her height. Sudden squall winds stirred the land corals and trumpet trees. Mathembe curled her silver body around the fungus stalk. Presently she slept.

Within the Dreaming, she dreamed. She dreamed that the dark clouds grew darker still. Lightning punished the earth, and thunder. Distant thunder. It was strange, this thunder of the dreaming within the Dreaming, it had a double-tone, like the beating of a heart. No. Like the beating of Proclaimer drums. No. Like footsteps, forever approaching yet never drawing nearer. Like the footsteps of the Ahleles. In her dream within a dream, she waited, and listened and a storm wind shook the forest like rags and lightning bolted and bolted and bolted, crazy mad crashing lightning and within the dream within the dream she grew afraid, and the footsteps crashed upon the earth but never drew any nearer.

Then she slept. And after the sleep, she dreamed again. She dreamed that she was talking with an angel of God, a bright and shining angel, holy and stunning, who was telling her the secrets of God and the Just Men Made Perfect who were the Ykondé Saints and all she thought was how fantastic he looked and that she wanted very very much to do it with him.

Then she woke from the dream within the Dreaming and saw that the angel had been no dream at all.

He sat upon a stool of land coral across the small clearing where the parasol fungi grew. He was as naked and unashamed as Mathembe. His skin was bronze to her silver. But she knew he was an angel because of the wings on his back. He was not as inhumanly handsome as the angel in her dream, but he was powerfully attractive. She wondered if it was a sin to think of sex in the Dreaming. She wondered if it was a sin to envy an angel his wings. They were deeply wonderful wings. They were like silk and diamond, they glittered in the shafts of light that fell through the tumultuous forest into this small glade so that at times they seemed not to be there at all. Great proud sweeping gossamer wings. Wonderingly, Mathembe touched them. A cascade of chiming music swept the glade.

‘May I touch your wings?’ said the angel.

‘I have no wings,’ said Dream-Mathembe.

‘No?’ said the angel. He touched her back. Mathembe screamed in pain. Her silver skin bulged, tore; bud wings, creased tight as moon-blooming flowers, unfolded and filled and blossomed. Strength poured through the wings; they could take her anywhere, anywhere she willed. Just one beat of her mind would take her there.

‘Now you are an angel too,’ said the angel. ‘Or at least, no less angel than I.’

He rose to his feet. He looked up the beams of light slanting into the glade. His wings beat and filled the glade with music.

‘Come,’ he said and leapt into the air, sliding with a shiver of wings up up the shafts of light. And without knowing how she did what she was doing, Mathembe followed. And it was as if she had been born knowing how to fly, that there had never been a time when she could not fly. The angel soared up up before her and she followed. The many-coloured forest fell away beneath her; she did not look down, she had eyes only for the beautiful bronze angel leading her up, up into the light; that, and the ecstatic rush of atmosphere along her silver body.

Is this how they do it, she wondered, on the wing, far above all human cares and woes?

Up they flew, and upwards, piercing the blue sky like javelins until Mathembe felt that if she looked down she would see the dream forest like a dot in space beneath her. And she did, and it was: a tapestry-coloured island adrift upon an ocean of clouds. Still they climbed and Mathembe saw other islands adrift on the ocean of clouds, forest worlds like the one where she had been born into this Dreaming, many many hours, days even, of flying distant. They flew up until the sky darkened, they flew to the very edge of space where the air should have been too thin for even an angel to live but her wings beat with undiminished strength and she realised that in the Dreaming, breathing, like eating and drinking and sleeping, was a pleasure to be taken at her discretion.

‘Come,’ the gorgeous angel said again, in air too thin to support words, and with a sudden, thrilling movement of his body, he was diving away from her, wings folded close to his back, arms tight to his sides, plummeting, hurtling, screaming for terminal velocity, faster faster. With a shriek of excitement, Mathembe furled her gossamer wings and followed.

At the speed of thought they flashed past the edge of the forest island and into the ocean of clouds. Mathembe saw faces in the clouds, blurred by the relativity of her headlong flight. Faces, dark bodies, row upon row, file upon file, and then they were under the cloud base. Beneath them spread a dull grey sea, tossed by many winds. Wings snapped open, crazy with G-force. Mathembe and the bronze angel broke their fall, wingtips creasing the surface of the planet-wide sea before they whipped up in a parabola.

‘Now do you see?’ said the bright and shining angel.

Mathembe saw. And what she saw shocked her.

Vast man-creatures toiled across a stone-grey sea, ankle deep in the breaking waters, each footstep leaving boiling wakes tens of kilometres long behind them. The more distant behemoths were half-hidden by the curvature of the world, feet in the ocean trenches, heads wreathed in clouds. With a flick and twist of wings, Mathembe followed the angel towards the closest of the man-creatures. With each beat the thing resolved itself in increasing detail.

The man-things, kilometres high, were composed of millions upon millions of human bodies lashed and roped together into a metal frame.

She drew nearer and saw how the men and the women and the children worked treadmills and pulled levers that transferred their individual energies to the mechanisms that moved the monster. She saw the knotted muscles and tearing sinews, the faces hollow with unending toil. There should have been sound. There should have been the sound of whole cities dying at once. There should have been the sound of a million voices crying out in common suffering. The man-things toiled on in silence, bearing paradise upon their bowed shoulders.

Wings beat. Mathembe and the angel flickered up through the cloud layer. The bowed head of the man-monster watched them with its man-eyes, its man-lips moved but the flash of flying silver by bronze was too fast, too bright to hear what it might say.

They looped over the edge of the forest island and, in a rainbow of wings, touched toes to the moss in a clearing among towering balloon-groves. Mathembe folded her wings about her like a cloak and asked, ‘Who are they?’ Imagining the damned, the sinful, the selfish or cruel or simply thoughtless or those who in some unthinking way might have offended against a god’s quixotic laws. The angel laughed. It is a strange and terrible thing, the laughter of angels.

‘Do you not know? They are the Proclaimers.’

Then it was as it often is in dreams, when strangers are recognised to be friends in strange bodies, and friends go unrecognised in their own, familiar forms. And angels may be fathers, and fathers angels.

‘There is no part of the land where the roots do not reach,’ said the angel who was her Father. ‘There is no place that is not part of the matrix. The Dreaming is everywhere. The Proclaimers believe that when they die they pass into the nearer presence of God but even they are part of the Dreaming. While their mortal bodies rot in the earth, the roots are reaching out through the soil, growing into their bodies, along their bones, filling their skulls and nerves, absorbing the dying memories of their self-hood from their neurons, drawing them back from death into the Dreaming, where they are blind, dumb, confused, easily preyed upon by those who have lived their whole fleshly lives in the knowledge of the Dreaming.

‘It is not paradise, you see. It is another stage of living, another kind of life. Heaven still awaits; but in this world as in the other world, there is sin, there is wickedness, there is evil, there are oppressors and oppressed. Except that here it is the Confessors who are the oppressors, and the Proclaimers the oppressed.’

No degree of oppression in the flesh-life, Mathembe thought, could warrant the terrible punishment the Confessors meted out to the Proclaimers in death. She could understand now their need for a hell, and why Confessor theology had never evolved the concept of a place of eternal punishment.

‘You made this.’ It was an accusation, and her Father knew it for what it was. ‘You brought me here, to this place you have made.’ Her words were clumsy, even in the Dreaming she had no skill with them.

‘You would blame me, after what they did to me?’ her Father’s spirit said. ‘You would blame me?’ He stood and the Dream-Mathembe saw that his bronze skin was stained with meander marks, a patina where roots and creepers had devoured his flesh-life body. Knot-holes marred his arms and legs. ‘But you are wrong. I did not make this place. This not my Dreaming. This is the Dreaming of all of us, hundreds of generations of Filelis. They are all here, my people, and your people. If you wish to blame anything, blame yourself, for the same genetic thread runs through you as through them. This is as much your place as theirs. They reached out through the matrix, and sought me, and caught me, and brought me here and I in my turn found you, hunting and lonely in the darkness, and grew you from a seed.’

‘But I am not dead,’ said Dream-Mathembe. ‘That is the difference. I can go back.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Her Father’s tone was suspicious now, severe. Was he jealous that Mathembe could still claim a life and a body to return to while he remained trapped within his forefathers’ dreaming?

‘Because I need to know.’

‘Need to know what?’

‘That my Mother and Hradu are still alive.’

‘Ah.’ Her father nodded slowly. ‘Death changes things, you see. Relationships, loves, hatreds; they exist on either side of death, but they are different things. They do not pass through death. What passes through death are memories of affections. From those memories we must try to rebuild our affections.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I have other loves, here.’

She struck her Father with her bright silver hand. And all the flying, fluting things went up as one thing with a thrum of wings.

‘You will find it so when your turn comes,’ he said. The angel wings unfolded. Her Father looked into the blue blue sky. ‘But I still remember affection. I still remember love. I still care for them, as I care for you.’ He lifted a little into the blue blue air. ‘I have not found them, either on any of the forest islands, or adrift in the matrix. They are still among the flesh-living.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Flesh-life and dream-life are as separate as flesh-life and what exists before birth. I cannot penetrate death as easily as you, or my father in his half-dead, half-alive state, may.’

‘Do you know where they are?’

Her Father shrugged. His iridescent wings shivered, a ripple of chiming music.

‘I have seen them. Not with my own eyes, of course, but through the eyes of others. A glimpse only, a moment in the corner of an eye. But it was them, do you think I could forget how they look?’

‘Where are they?’

‘Time does not have the meaning here it does in the flesh. They may be gone, moments, days, years.’

‘Where?’

‘The camps.’ Her Father rose to the level of the treetops. ‘If you find them, tell them what has happened. The family is the hope of the future, a genetic treasury passing down into further generations. Tell Hradu not to be angry for me, if you can, save him from his foolishness; tell your Mother she was not responsible, she has never been responsible; if you can, save her from the terrible guilt of always needing to be competent. But do not tell her what I have told you, about the nature of love in this place.’

And with a flash of bronze wings he was gone into the blue blue heaven.

Then Mathembe felt a tiredness come over her. It was not a tiredness she had willed herself, it was willed upon her by others, her ancestors, stronger in the Dreaming than she, rejecting her, casting her out of this place she had entered by false pretences, back into flesh-life again. She tried to fight against it but there were too many Filelis willing against her. Wrapped in her own wings she curled up on the carpetmoss. Sleep came upon her, time ceased to be. Again she dreamed in the Dreaming. She dreamed that sun and moon and stars accelerated in their courses until the sky was a ring of light above her. She dreamed that she slept beneath this streaking sky. Rains fell, winds blew covering her with dead leaves and bracts, snows drifted over her and beneath them the leaf litter decayed under bacterial attack into humus, into soil. New growth stabbed its roots into the heart of her, stab after stab after stab, the snows melted away and her rotting, decaying body put out shoots and circles of red-capped fungi. Mosses colonised her, ferns cartwheeled like fireworks from her sleeping body; in a swift succession of seasons bottle plants, windmill ferns, forest underscrub and finally full climax forest claimed her while her silver angel body rotted away to a spark, a glow of sleeping consciousness sinking deep within the earth.

Darkness enshrouded her. Like distant stars, other glows of sentience shone in the blackness; fellow souls travelling into death, in search of their personal heavens or hells. But Mathembe’s course was set against theirs, she fought the current that drew them deeper into the matrix; ahead light shone, true light and she fought towards it, fought against the tide of death that grew stronger the closer she willed herself towards the light of the world. The Dreaming tore at her, a rushing torrent now, but she fought on, she fought on, and the light grew brighter and she threw herself towards the light, into the light.

Home!

She opened her eyes.

Unchunkolo’s coarse hair matting was rough under her skin. The air was bitter cold and smelled of morning. A line of violet lit the eastern edge of the world. The deck beneath her thrummed: the never-failing pulse of engines. She looked at her body; poor and thin and scarred after the perfect silver of the angel-Mathembe. But it was her body. The neural linkages had been removed and lay around her on the deck, a corona of gently writhing biotech. Two knelt over her. He poured tea from a flask; scalding, almost flavourless. Mathembe sipped down the tea. She tapped his watch.

‘One hour twenty-seven minutes. Why, what did it seem to you?’

She shrugged, gestured. More tea. Two poured a cup and as he did he glimpsed for one unguarded moment the place in the back of Mathembe’s eyes where the true things are. He saw what it was she kept in there. He knew then that she would leave him.

She would let him come no further than the companionway. As the omens said, he had been born with river water in his soul and the land would have trapped him with its emotional gravity and destroyed him. He would have gone with her. It hurt, as the true things always hurt, hurt like a hooked knife twisted into your kidneys in an alley in the forgotten end of town. She zipped up her picture-jacket against the cold wind from the east. There was premonition of snow in that wind, the smell of ancient winters. He helped her to fix her Grandfather’s head to the webbing contraption that had so alarmed him, that time in the night when he had thought her a two-headed monster from the Dreaming. The monsters lurking in the Dreaming, he had learned, were altogether more huge and insidious and dreadful. The refugees streamed ashore, clutching the tiny things the Proclaimer Exit Tax had left them. ‘She is mad,’ the head said, angry to have been removed from its place in the psychic warmth of Unchunkolo’s Dreaming. ‘Why did you not do it with her? Maybe then she would not be going off on this mad chase through the shit end of the world. Well, now you have missed your chance. She would have been good.’ Two understood that they had never been destined to be lovers; the gods of the chemicals, the lords of the pheromones, had decreed it so; they had willed for him a rarer and richer relationship altogether.

They had smelled the camp while Unchunkolo was still a night’s sail upstream. They had smelled it on the east wind that blew down from the fire-scarred hillsides above Kilimambasa Old Town. It was the smell of piss and shit. It was the smell of raw, red, dead earth trampled into mud by many many feet. It was the smell of wood smoke and trash fires. It was the smell of bad water and rotting organicals. It was the smell of sicknesses that everyone had believed banished from the land thousands of years ago but which had only lain dormant, like Janeel and Oboluwayé in their crèche-pods, waiting for the turn of the world to spin their way. It was the smell of all these things which together transcended themselves and became above all the smell of one thing. Dispossession.

In the dark before the dawn, as Unchunkolo found river-bottom with her anchorholds, the camp seemed almost beautiful, crowning the ordered lights of Kilimambasa Old Town with a constellation of glo-globes and twinkling smudge fires. Then little by little the growing light dispelled the illusions: the dark skeletons of the big wind rotors on the shaved hilltops turning in the east wind; the pall of woodsmoke and hydrocarbon smog, the hacks and slashes of bare red earth, foot-worn, rain-scarred, deep into the flesh of the land; the ugly silver bubbles of the emergency shelters and feeding stations, the wind-flutter of the plastic shanties that huddled up against them, greedy whelps at the tit; the ragged thorn walls that enclosed attempts at gardens; the men, already in the dawn light assuming the posture of the dispossessed; squatting on heels, hands draped idly, uselessly over knees. Row upon row upon row of them, in doorways, in alleyways, against walls and fences, by jeepney stops and employment exchanges.

‘You cannot go there,’ Two had said. Mathembe had closed her right fist. Slowly, slowly. Resolution.

‘All you have is a notion, an idea, something told you in a dream.’

Sometimes a notion is all we need, she had said but she knew that even if she sailed with him to the end of her life he would never learn to read that.

At the top of the companionway she kissed him, as a soul friend kisses a soul friend, which was not how Two wanted to be kissed by her. Then without a wave, she turned and the steady flow of refugees—bewildered, horrified, relieved, delighted—took her away from him and with a tight singing sound in his ears that was the sound of feelings piling up layer upon layer upon layer he went up to the loading bridge and watched the bright plastic of her backpack pass through the lines of immigration officials and up into the meandering streets of Kilimambasa and the raw earth and smoke of the camp and there he saw it no more.

That night as Unchunkolo deadheaded south with the flow to pick up a tow of timber, he called on Cousin Lifter/External Affairs and they went down to the secret place where everyone went so in truth it was no secret place at all and there they did it until the stars faded and the edge of the world tilted beneath the sun and to their mutual and absolute astonishment they found that they enjoyed it, and enjoyed each other, and that the world was full of things they found interesting and could laugh at and cry at and enjoy and wonder at together and when the partnering banns were published on the captain’s door at the winter solstice their names appeared on the list and in the years to come they loved and lived and occasionally cheated on each other and occasionally rowed and occasionally had the junior crewpersons fleeing from their fights and attained high ranks in. ship, family and state and bore Unchunkolo many fine crewpersons as she sailed on, down along the big big river.