heap. “We’re going all the way down to the salt-water reservoir. It’ll be fun, we’ve not told anyone, and the personality won’t see us. We could meet anything down there, pirates or monsters. And we might find some treasure. I’ll bring it back, and I’ll be the most famous captain in all of the habitat.” He scrambled to his feet again, eyes shining. “
“Another time, I promise.”
There were shouts from the other boys as the raft was pushed into the fast-flowing stream. It bobbed about at alarming angles for a few seconds before gradually righting itself. The boys started to pile on.
Thetis’s head swivelled between Syrinx and the raft, desperately torn. “Promise? Really promise?”
“I do.” She reached out and held his head between her hands, and kissed him lightly on his brow.
“Syrinx!” He squirmed in agitation, colouring as the other boys launched into a flurry of catcalls.
“Here,” she said, and took off a slim silver necklace with an intricately carved pale jade stone the size of a grape. “Wear this, it’ll be like I’m there with you. And next time I visit, you can tell me all about it.”
“Right!” And he ran for the raft, splashing through the shallows as he fumbled to fasten the chain round his neck. “Don’t forget, come back. You promised.”
How far will he go?she asked sinon as a soaking Thetis was hauled over the edge of the raft by a couple of his friends.
As far as he wishes.
And how long will it last?
As long as he wants.
Daddy!
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be flippant. Probably about ten or fifteen years. You see, even childhood will ultimately pale. Games that defy adults and friends that mean the whole world are all very well, but a major part of what a ten-year-old is, is the wish to be old; his actions are a shadow of what he sees as adult behaviour. There is an old saying, that the boy is the father of the man. So when he has had his fill of adventure and realizes he will never be that man, that he is a sterile child, his identity will fade out of the multiplicity into the overall personality. Like all of us will eventually, Sly-minx, even you.
You mean he will lose hope.
No. Death is the loss of hope, everything else is merely despair.
The children were paddling now, getting the hang of the raft. Thetis was sitting at the front shouting orders, in his element. He looked round, smiled and waved. Syrinx raised a hand.
Adamists lose hope,she said. The
Adamists are incomplete. We know we will continue after the body dies; in some way, some fraction of us will linger for hundreds of millennia. For myself, I cannot even contemplate abandoning the multiplicity segment of the personality, not with you and my other children and grandchildren to watch over. Perhaps in ten or fifteen generations, when I can conjure up no sense of attachment, then I may seek full unity with the habitat personality, and transfer my allegiance to all Edenists. But it will be a very long time.
Adamists have their religions. I thought their gods gave them hope.
They do, to the very devout. But consider the disadvantage under which the ordinary Adamist labours. The mythical kingdom, that is all their heaven can ever be, beyond ever knowing. In the end, such belief is very hard for poor sinful mortals to retain. Our afterlife, however, is tangible, real. For us it is not a question of faith, we have fact.
Unless you are Thetis.
Even he survives.
Some of him, a stunted existence. Floating down a river that will never end.
Loved, treasured, welcomed, eternal.
The raft disappeared round a bend, a clump of willows blocking it from sight. High-pitched voices drifted through the air. Syrinx let her hand drop. “I will visit you again, big brother,” she told the empty gurgling stream. “Again and again, every time I come back. I will make you look forward to my visits and the stories I bring, I will give you something to hope for. Promise.”
In her room she looked up at the darkened indistinct landscape far above. The axial light-tube had been reduced to a lunar presence masked by the evening’s first rain-clouds.
Syrinx closed her mind to the other Edenists, closed it to the voidhawks flying outside, closed it to the habitat personality. Only
Emerging from the jumble of doubt and misery was the tenuous wish that the Adamists were right after all, and there was such a thing as God, and an afterlife, and souls. That way Thetis wouldn’t be lost. Not for ever.
It was such a tiny sliver of hope.
If there is a God, and if somewhere my brother’s soul is intact, please look after him. He will be so alone.
Chapter 07
Over a thousand tributaries contributed towards the Juliffe’s rapacious flow, a wrinkled network of rivers and streams gathering in the rainfall over an area of one and a half million square kilometres. They emptied themselves into the main course at full volume throughout the whole two hundred and ninety-five days of Lalonde’s year, bringing with them immense amounts of silt, rotting vegetation, and broken trees. The turbulence and power of the huge flow was such that the water along the last five hundred kilometres turned the same colour and thickness as milky coffee. By the time it reached the coast the river’s width had swollen to over seventeen kilometres; and the sheer weight of water backed up for two thousand kilometres behind it was awesome. At the mouth it looked as though one sea was bleeding into another.
For the final hundred-kilometre stretch, the banks on the northern side were non-existent; marshland extended up to a hundred and fifty kilometres into the countryside. Named the Hultain Marsh after the first reckless ecological assessment team member to venture a few brief kilometres inside its fringes, it proved an inhospitable zone of reeds and algae and sharp-toothed lizard-analogue animals of varying sizes. No human explorer ever managed to traverse it; the ecological evaluators contented themselves with Hultain’s sketchy report and the satellite survey pictures. When the wind blew from the north, it carried a powerful smell of corruption over the river into Durringham. To the city’s residents the Hultain Marsh had virtually assumed the quality of myth, a repository of bad luck and ghoulish creatures.
The land on the Juliffe’s southern side, however, rose up to twelve metres above the surging brown waters. Sprawling aloof along the bank, Durringham was relatively safe from the most potent of the Juliffe’s spring floods. Poised between spaceport and water, the city was the key to colonizing the entire river basin.
The Juliffe provided the Lalonde Development Company with the greatest conceivable natural roadway into Amarisk’s interior. With its tributaries extending into every valley in the centre of the landmass, there was no need to hack out and maintain expensive tracks in the jungle. Abundant wood provided the raw material for boat hulls, the simplest and cheapest form of travel possible. So shipbuilding swiftly became the capital’s principal industry, with nearly a quarter of its population dependent on the success of the shipyards.
Captains under contract to the LDC would take newly arrived colonist groups upriver, and bring down the surplus produce from the established farms to be sold in the city. There were several hundred boats docking and sailing every day. The port with its jetties and warehouses and fishmarkets and shipyards grew until it stretched the entire length of the city. It was also the logical place to site the transients’ dormitories.
Jay Hilton thought the dormitory was tremendously exciting. It was so different from anything in her life to date. A simple angled roof of ezystak panels eighty metres long, supported by a framework of metal girders.
