The Braided World (6 page)

He walked away feeling as though he had just run an obstacle course, blindfolded. He thought Captain Darrow would have emerged from this meeting with more to show for himself. But the man was dead, damn him.

Nick Venning sat in the canoe, watching the paddles dip as the Dassa soldiers sped them along the middle of the river. All other craft gave way before them, and the current was with them, speeding their trip. Rain fell, denting the gray river to a swath of hammered steel. The canoe the king provided had a roof on it, supported by poles. They were all soaking wet anyway, but it kept the deluge off.

Behind him, Nick heard Zhen's complaints, though she was riding in a small screened-in cabin. She grumbled just loud enough for him to hear: “… cooped up for weeks in this stinking place and now can't see a stinking thing.”

She hated going abroad covertly, and hated having Nick for an escort, although Anton had pushed hard for this trip
to the shuttle for her to conduct diagnostics. He'd put Nick in charge, but without a side arm. Anton Prados kept their sole weapon for himself.

Nick turned halfway around. “Want me to continue my travelogue, or you just feel like venting?” He thought he'd done a good job describing what he saw of the submerged delta system: bits of bridges, trees, islets. But Zhen was in a mood.

“I want to vent.”

“Fine, then. Knock yourself out.”

He was tired of talking anyway, when there was so much to see. Through the downpour, he could just make out the larger world of Vidori's kingdom, his city called Lolo—although it was like no city he'd ever seen, and still wasn't
seeing
, it being seasonally drowned. Plying this tributary, the Puldar, were hundreds of skiffs and larger canoes, going about their business of trading and traveling, unfazed by the rain and the obstacle course of submerged objects.

In the prow of his canoe sat two other individuals: a Dassa noblewoman, back straight as a broom handle, and behind her a hoda, huddled and miserable. These would be Zhen's test subjects once they reached the shuttle. He was sure no one had bothered to tell the hoda woman where she was going and why. He would have done so, but he was separated from her by the three soldiers propelling the craft forward.

They passed a skiff laden with crates of fruit. On top of this cargo, a Dassa man and woman lay with each other, his hand roaming freely over her, and her moans carrying an unwelcome glimpse of high passion. Unwelcome, but Nick stared. It was difficult not to, though the crew had seen this kind of careless display before.

Zhen poked her head out of the tent. “Don't act like a country boy” she said, following his gaze.

“I'm not.” But, the thing was, this Dassa man was bringing the woman to climax, it seemed, simply by touching her legs. No Dassa in the vicinity paid the slightest attention.

“You're staring,” Zhen said. “Don't be an idiot.”

The canoe was out of range now.
Thankfully
, Nick thought, picking up the Dassa saying. He truly would have chosen not to be confronted with Dassa intimate moments. But it wasn't as though the Dassa were looking for an audience; they simply had no boundaries. They were free of shame—and, some of the crew said, decency. Free as they were in this respect, the act of swimming in the variums— every morning, no less—had become so culturally charged that release was assured in those brief dips. It was intriguing. Disturbing. That the getting of children began in so stark, so lonely a manner.

Zhen growled, “I suppose you're in anthropological heaven.”

He let that pass. Normally quiet and eerily focused on business, Zhen had a mean tongue when in a bad mood. He wondered that the old woman had chosen her for the mission. But Zhen was a big-time scholar, with a reputation in microbial biology.

“Goddamn muddy hells, answer me, Venning.”

Cai Zhen called everyone by their last name, since she went by hers.

“Keep your nose in the tent,” he answered. “I wouldn't want our crew virgin to get excited.” He couldn't imagine Zhen doing it with anyone, publicly
or
privately.

“Up yours, Venning.”

He let her have the last word, and that seemed to satisfy her for now.

The Puldar tributary—
braid
was a better translation from the Dassa—was here defined by huts hugging the banks, hundreds of houses on stilts, some leaning against each other for support, as though their legs had gone wobbly. Most were humble affairs, single-story huts that were not much more than boxes. Some were connected by rope bridges or continuous porches. Underneath them coursed the Puldar, still a full meter from the wood floors. It was at its zenith, the Dassa said, or they would not be so relaxed
about the flooding. Carried along the current were masses of leaves, algae, dead birds, and limbs of trees, which the boaters nimbly dodged, nearly crashing into each other in the process. The middle of the river was for nobles, and in this trough Nick's canoe sped along.

The effortless movement of people and goods on the river system was just one example of the harmony and sustainability of the Olagong. Also, in Nick's view, there was the political stability of the Three Powers, the efficient distribution of wealth, the absence of poverty, the well-being of all children, and apparent freedom from disease. It was perhaps because of this ideal life that the concept of religion had never taken hold. The closest the Dassa came to worship was a sense of veneration for the rivers on which their lives depended. But even the rivers were not so much
sacred
as
treasured.
On the other side of the ledger, there was the chronic state of war, or at least unrest along the borders, and the fact that all this prosperity could in large part be attributed to slavery, an institution based on both race and gender in an inescapable linkage of social role and reproductive mode.

After a while Nick had the urge for company again, even Zhen's. “So what do you think you're going to find? With the imaging.” He waited to see if Zhen would hurl a stone or just converse.

“I try not to
guess
, Venning. It's called science.”

“Sure you do. It's called a hypothesis.”

“OK, my
hypothesis
is that one of them has a uterus and one of them doesn't.”

“Can't you tell by a, what is it—pelvic exam? You did those, right?”

“Yeeees,” Zhen said, as though winding up.

“And you thought that the hoda, at least, has one.”

“Need a visual to be sure.”

A dead monkey floated by. Though it looked like an Earth monkey, it had broad webs of skin between its limbs, which served for brief glides in the tree canopy. Its arms
were extraordinarily long, used for brachiating from limb to limb. A quasi-monkey then. They'd also seen quasi-river rats, with eyes, ears, and nostrils on the top of their heads so they could swim while searching for food. However, other local specimens were dead-on for Earth counterparts: mangrove, palmyra, mahogany, banyan. This did tend to be the case with plants more than animals.

The ship's science team theorized that the animals, if raised up from genetic information taken from the Dark Cloud, were mutated. There would have been extensive damage to the data in the Cloud, perhaps from radiation. Some of those mutations would have been beneficial. Or they might have been intentional on the part of the beings who sent the Message. The old race, now vanished. The theory of the Quadi could be myth, but the team was treating it seriously.
Someone
had put satellites in orbit.

If these beings had raised up the creatures of this world—from DNA code—then they might also believe that humans could do so. So they might have preserved the code
as code.
Somewhere. Presumably they would also have provided the scientific knowledge to bring the code to life— perhaps by describing some version of the Dassa variums. This was the direction of the science team's current thinking. Of course, it would all be more simple if the hoda represented a people that could mix with Earth populations, which was why Bailey liked that theory.

“So,” Nick continued, “if the hoda have uteruses… uteri?” Zhen didn't grace the question with a response. “If the hoda have them, then we might have hit the jackpot.”

“Jackpot? You think you're going to marry a hoda and bring her back with you? Or load up the ark full of Vidori's personal slaves and take ‘em home, like a cargo or something?”

“No, nothing like that…”

“Then how exactly might we have
hit the jackpot
, Lieutenant?”

“I hadn't thought that far. If we could reproduce with
the hoda, it would be a beginning, that's all. Instead of all the damn
endings
we've had on ship, at home, you name it. That's all I'm saying—I'm not trying to solve everything, or turn this into a goddamn kung fu match.” He bit his tongue. Zhen loved to have people go off on her. It was what she lived for.

She peeked her head out of the curtain, her eyes as hard as ball bearings. “The Dassa won't let the hoda have babies, will they? It's against the goddamn law.
Forbidden.
If that's the jackpot, then we're shit out of luck.” She yanked the curtain shut.

That was Zhen for you. The woman would never trade ideas with someone in the soft sciences. She was oriented to data, as he was to people, so she discounted him. Like Anton, lately. So changed from the days of studies and grueling preparation at the academy, when Anton coached him in math and Nick returned the favor in linguistics. Changed since the day the old lady handed Anton the position without giving Nick a chance to argue his qualifications. She couldn't get past his background—all blue-collar, no refinement.

Meanwhile Anton was right at home eating state dinners and hobnobbing with the privileged; it was the life he was born to before he finally severed the apron strings and struck out on his own. Now he'd gotten up a friendship with Vidori. Anton
would
start at the top of the power pyramid and work down; it was hard-wired into him, though Anton, despising his father as he did, would be the first to deny it and say he wanted to be just plain military.
But just plain military
would not by any stretch of the imagination describe Anton Prados.

It described Nick Venning, though.

They turned out of the Puldar byway into the great River Sodesh, where the sky and water blurred into one gray swath for as far as Nick could see. Here, the boats thinned out. Larger craft plied the giant waterway, barges and long canoes, many with thatch roofs held up by poles
and bearing on top the cargoes of the braided lands. Some looked like they could not possibly remain upright, as tall and narrow as they were, but the Dassa were nothing if not water-born, and Nick gave up worrying they would tip over.

Nick saw that the hoda woman had laid out a small meal for her mistress, balancing the pink fruit on her knees to serve as a table. She leaned toward her mistress as the woman spoke to her, and then the hoda answered in sign, bringing a laugh from the noblewoman. It looked like the two might be friends on an outing. Except that one could not speak, and was a slave.

Nick wanted to know what the status of the hoda might be among the society of women known as the uldia. Slavery would be a complicated system; there would be factions and subtle differences in attitudes. The mission needed a captain with a wider perspective. Someone with a vision, who could see patterns and connections. That was what leaders did. It was what Captain Darrow would have done, God rest his soul.

The shuttle was intact, carefully guarded by a contingent of the king's guard. No doubt Vidori was eager to prevent it from falling into Voi hands.

It was eerie to be back in the shuttle after so long in the wood and water world of the Olagong. The noblewoman and the hoda stared around themselves at the metal environs, with its tangle of pipes and conduits.

Since Zhen wasn't yet a decent speaker of the Dassa language, she had Nick explain to the women what the procedure would be. He did his best, having memorized the anatomical terms in their language. Then Zhen took the women by the arm and led them into the exam room.

Nick sorted through his locker, cramming necessities into a stuff sack—at Anton's orders, leaving behind anything that was or might be construed as a weapon. That meant leaving behind the miniature scout drone. It operated
within a limited range, anyway, its main utility being advance scouting in a combat situation. Vidori wouldn't be told about such a device, since they intended to steer clear of escalating the warfare here.

After an hour, Zhen emerged from the lab with the two Dassa women.

“Well?” he asked in English.

To his surprise, Zhen answered him simply, clinically. “The hoda has all her physiology intact.” She glanced at the noblewoman. “The other has only a vestigial uterus. Nonfunctional.”

So, then. The Dassa didn't reproduce—normally. They'd
said
they didn't. But this settled it. There were variums here, somewhere. Tended by the uldia. He realized that he'd been hoping it was a communication error or a myth.

Zhen was thinking out loud. “Question is, how do we get two types of Dassa?”

At Nick's blank look, she went on, “Some of the science team think it happened with a reversion mutation. Now that we know there are two kinds of Dassa reproduction, I think the hoda are definitely revertants. It's one way it could make sense.”

“Revertants?”

Zhen
was indulging him. “Yeah, revertants. The way that works is, the Dassa reproductive system is, let's say, controlled by a knockout gene that was inserted into the middle of a key gene that regulates uterus formation. So the varium gene can direct, and is compatible with, the whole Dassa reproductive strategy. But if the inserted DNA is naturally unstable to some extent, then it is occasionally excised back out of the gene by a reversion mutation, thus knocking out the first gene's function. Happens all the time in genetic research, where we can alter mice by inserting a gene and blocking its readout into protein, like if a genetically altered red-eyed fruit fly gives rise to an offspring that has the original black eyes.”