Genetopia by Keith Brooke Page B

his hooded head, Flint was thirsty. He had long since drained the last of the podhut’s sweetwater with which he had replenished his water bladder. Earlier, with the sun lower and the trees affording shade, it had not been so bad, but as the heat had increased he had drunk too greedily.
    He checked the water bladder again, but it had not miraculously been refilled.
    He moved to the side of the trail, under the shelter of a great claw-leaved tree fern. He pulled his hood back, and felt the heat recede just a little. He studied the fern’s scaly trunk for signs of infestation before squatting and leaning back against it. He had seen many long lines of army ants today, memories of childhood stings increasing his awareness of the hazards of even everyday things.
    There were sounds all around. Insects hummed and creaked and pipped, birds cried high in the canopy, other creatures–rats, lizards, more birds, perhaps–snuffled and scuffled on the forest floor.
    He straightened his leg, the injured knee supported now by bindings and a poultice prepared by Lizabel.
    The inherent respect for True humans was widespread in the wilds, too, Flint knew, but clearly it did not extend to the biting insects. Where the backs of his hands had been exposed they were covered in pink welts. What if vectors of the changing fevers could be transmitted by these tiny creatures, he wondered, scratching all around the most recent bite?
    He blocked the thought, aware that he was spooking himself.
    Eyes adjusted to the shade now, he saw that the forest thinned a short way in, and in the pool of light he saw bulbous clusters of fleshfruit hanging low.
    He studied the ground carefully, head full of children’s terror tales of snakes and venomous spiders the size of a grown man’s head, of mantrap plants that would close around the legs of the unsuspecting and slowly suck their victims deeper into the dissolving digestive juices held in bladders beneath the ground.
    There was just a thick layer of dead leaves, twigs, a scampering black beetle as long and narrow as Flint’s little finger.
    Tree and fern trunks stood vertical and little else grew in the shade of the forest floor.
    Flint moved further from the trail, passing through the forest to where another screen of vegetation thickened at the edge of the clearing.
    He drew the machete and swept it down once through the greenery, and then again. Several small moths erupted from the leaves, whirring into the sunlight.
    He stepped through.
    Fleshfruit hung, fat and purple, paired side by side in a bunch as long as Flint’s arm.
    So tempting, but he knew he wouldn’t dare eat from this bunch, wouldn’t risk even a taste of their sweet, meaty juices. There was so much richness in this biological wonderland between settlements, so much diversity and fecundity. And yet the abundance was illusory: all this richness and so much of it could easily be corrupt, tainted within. He would have to be foolish, or desperate indeed, to risk eating or drinking anything he found in the wildlands.
    Some of the riper fruit had already come away from the top of the bunch but there was no sign of them on the ground. The insects and rats would take care of such fallings, but there could easily be larger beasts here.
    Flint looked around, remembering Jemmie’s advice that he should never leave the trail.
    He stepped back through the opening he had hacked and then paused to get his bearings. It would be so easy to lose one’s way in the jungle.
    It was only a matter of paces across the bare forest floor to the tree fern where he had sheltered from the sun on the edge of the trail to Greenwater.
    He hesitated under the grasping fronds of the fern.
    Ahead, on the trail, was a small figure. A woman, or a girl, with long dark hair and downy, fleecy clothing.
    Flint stepped out, broke into a run, and then stopped and called aloud. “Amber!”
    Please, let it be Amber!
     
     

Chapter 5
    Only twenty paces separated them when the