Taylor Five (10 page)

But he was tying the knot again, and doing it much better than Tay.

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry, thank you.”

The rucksack was on the boardwalk. Uncle had been carrying it. After Donny died, Tay had forgotten that orangutans don’t carry rucksacks. She’d been letting him take turns. He was part of the team, after all. She fetched it and put it on her own back, making sure the waistband was clipped tight. They shoved the raft out into the water—Uncle did most of the shoving—and scrambled on board. At once, caught by a powerful eddy, it began to swing around like a live thing. But it couldn’t get free; and the looped rope slid along the hawser, just the way it was supposed to do.

“Aru Batur,” whispered Tay, staring passionately at the shore she was leaving. “I’ll come back, Donny. We’ll come back for you, my little brother.”

Then the river took over, and she could think of nothing except trying to keep the raft steady and keep that rope moving along. Uncle sat clinging to the side, staring at the rushing water with an expression of horror. Tay stood in the middle with her pole. The river was deep, deeper than Tay could guess, and the current was fierce. She fought doggedly, gritting her teeth and muttering,
“I’m a copy of a remarkable person!”
But her arms got very tired: and this time Uncle couldn’t help.

About two-thirds of the way across they met with disaster. A massive tree trunk came racing toward them from upstream. Tay thought it was going to swing by without touching them, but there were branches sticking out, hidden under the surface. A snag caught them and dragged the raft sideways. Tay lost her footing. She dropped the pole. It was lucky she did or she’d have been left stranded, hanging on to it in midstream. The tree trunk snatched the raft away, so violently that the guide rope parted. The drowned tree and the raft went whirling around, all tangled together, Tay and Uncle being flung about like rag dolls—

“Push it off us! Push it off us!” yelled Tay. But the tree trunk, unbalanced by its new burden, heaved itself up, tipping the raft upside down. The water closed over Tay’s head. She popped up to the surface and saw Uncle in the branches of the drowned tree, staring at her, terrified, as he was swept away.

“I’m coming!” she yelled. “Hang on!”

She struck out. She couldn’t fight the current, she had to let it take her, straight into the arms of the raft-snatcher tree. In a confusion of splashing, with brown foamy water in her throat and nose and eyes, she grabbed on to a branch and clung there.

“Jump!” she yelled. “You’ve got to jump, Uncle! There’s rapids and you’ll get killed. Come on, remember I’m really Pam, I can save us, only
jump
!”

And he was in the water with her, grabbing onto her frantically.

“Kick for the bank!” she screamed, and choked, and went under—

Somehow, between them, they managed it. They escaped from the current. They drifted, they swam, and at last they clambered out, into the waterlogged roots of the trees on the eastern bank; and up onto solid ground.

Tay got on her hands and knees and threw up a lot of muddy water.

“Have I still got the rucksack?” she croaked. She was too dizzy to tell.

Uncle took her hand and held it to the straps. Yes, she still had the rucksack. . . . When she could manage to see straight, she took it off and checked to see what had survived. The radiophone was safe, and her torch, both still wrapped in plastic bags but wet through anyway. Tins of food, a water bottle, the map and the piece of Donny’s blanket that she had brought with her, to have something of his . . . the Shakespeare, very bedraggled. The compass was zipped into her shorts pocket, with her pocketknife and the matches. The map was useless. What was missing? She was sure there should be something else. Something important.

“Oh, Uncle! We’ve lost Clint’s important papers! They were in here, I’m sure. Do you remember when you last saw them?”

She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen that slick black package. She asked Uncle again, but he just offered her the Shakespeare.

“Not the book.
Different
papers with writing. Clint’s papers—”

Uncle held out his empty hands.

“No, I don’t remember either. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to be done.”

Tay had looted the shops at Aru Batur. She didn’t think that was wrong. She’d filled the rucksack with supplies again. Some of the stuff she’d looted—tins of food mostly—was at the bottom of the river now, but they could survive for days and days. All she had to do was keep Uncle cheerful and keep them both going. If they’d managed to stay attached to the ferry hawser, there’d have been a road in front of them now. But they’d been swept downstream, so instead there was another of those walls of trees.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she told him, forgetting that to Uncle the trees were his natural home. “There’s only a thin band of forest here. Then it’s the dry corner of Kandah. It’s open country, savannah: low hills and a few trees but mostly grass. I don’t think we should try to get back to the road now. We’re better off just heading east by our compass. We’ll come out of the trees soon, and then we’ll be able to see for miles.”

Uncle took to the branches, Tay found the best route she could. The shy animals and birds of the forest floor didn’t show themselves, but she heard them rustling and stirring; and that made her feel at home. Hornbills called, and once a troupe of monkeys crashed by, far overhead. The going wasn’t hard. There were paths made by animals or people; she just switched from one to another, keeping her heading near to the east. They had left Donny’s grave at dawn. Before sunset, quite unexpectedly, Tay reached the eaves of the forest. She stood looking out over a wide-open country, under a sky colored green and pink with the reflected sunset.

Uncle was suddenly beside her, appearing silently as he always did.

“Over there,” said Tay, pointing. “That’s where we’re going. That’s where the coast is. There’s nothing to stop us now.”

She lay down, head buried in her arms, and began to cry.

The orangutan crouched beside her and patted her shoulder gently.

They rested overnight. At dawn Tay decided they should still follow the compass, rather than try to get back to the road. The ruined map was no use, but if they simply kept going east they must hit the coastal highway, and then they couldn’t help finding the Marine and Shore Station’s mooring. She thought it was about a hundred kilometers. Say, five days walking . . .           She explained this to Uncle, making it sound as easy as she could.

The savannah country of the dry corner of Kandah was very hot in this season. Tay cut the piece of Donny’s blanket in two, gave half to Uncle and told him he should wrap it around his head and shoulders. He understood her very quickly. Then she walked stubbornly through the straw-colored scrub, and the ape kept pace with her: until the heat was so great it was frightening. They took shelter under an acacia tree. The earth was red and cracked, it reminded Tay of burned flesh.

“We’ll need to find water,” said Tay. “We’ll find some roots for you to eat. We’ll dig for edible roots in the ground. Once, when Pam Taylor was—”

She couldn’t remember the story. She took out the Shakespeare and read some of
Henry V
to him instead. Uncle listened attentively.

When she was tired of reading, she gave him the book. He turned the pages carefully, one by one, but he wouldn’t read aloud—

She had been drinking water, but she hadn’t eaten anything since before Donny died. She had no appetite, but she opened a tin and forced herself so that Uncle wouldn’t be worried. The sun dazzled through the branches of the acacia. Tay felt as if she was falling apart, dissolving into the hot whiteness. She decided she’d better start walking again. She must keep on. That was all there was left. Everything else was gone.

“I knew there was something wrong with me,” she said. “When I was a very little girl I knew, because of the blood samples and things. When Donny was a baby I noticed
he
didn’t have to have bits of him sent away to the labs: that’s how I knew. I was afraid it meant I was going to die. Then they told me I was a test-tube baby, and I was sad, but I thought it was okay, really. And then they told me I had no father, and I still thought it was okay, because it was a great achievement and a medical benefit, and I don’t remember everything they said, but . . . Then I saw the headlines in the newspapers, and I don’t know why but I suddenly felt so awful.”

She had tried to keep her fears to herself because she knew that Mum and Dad loved her, and she didn’t want them to feel bad. But now everything had been stripped away. She had nothing left but the truth.

“Maybe it’s because I know I can’t have a normal life. They say Lifeforce will protect me, but they’ve told everyone about the clones now, and of course people will find out who we are, me and the other four, and come after us, and make our lives a misery—”

The heat was so fierce that her sweat had dried up. She sat down in the crackling grass, under the dazzling sun. She ought to get into the shade. . . .

Uncle was there, watching her sadly.

“Do you know what a clone is?” she said. “It’s the artificial production of an embryo that is genetically identical to a preexisting organism. But clones happen naturally all the time. Identical twins are DNA clones of each other, as identical as me and Pam. Plants that grow from cuttings are clones. But human beings are supposed to be different from each other unless they are born twins, and I’m not different from Pam. You know what that means? It means I’m not a human being.” She looked at her hands and realized that under the brown, dirty skin there must be wires and little tubes. She imagined that in each of the tiny little tubes there would be a face. It would be the face she could see in a mirror, but it didn’t belong to her.

“I wanted to ask them,
Why did you do this to me?
But I can’t ask them why, because there isn’t any ‘me.’ I’m not a real person, I’m a thing.”

She dug in her pocket, pulled out her knife and opened it.

Uncle drew in his breath with a worried
ssushh
ing noise.

“Don’t be scared, I’m not doing any harm. I just want to see the wires.”

She held out her left hand and sliced the knife blade down. She didn’t feel any pain. She couldn’t feel pain, she was only a clone. She couldn’t see the wires, so she lifted the blade to slice again. She wasn’t trying to hurt herself, she just wanted to see the truth. She was so absorbed in what she was doing, she yelled aloud when something suddenly grabbed her. It was Uncle. She struggled, crying and yelling . . . but Uncle was much stronger. He took the knife.

“Give it back!” she screamed.

The great ape bared his teeth at her. He threw the knife so that it flew away in a wide arc, and it vanished. He held Tay’s right hand to his furry cheek, crooning at her gently.

Blood dripped from her cut palm.
Now
it was hurting.

“Oh,
Donny
. Donny. Mum and Dad. Clint . . . You’re all gone. I’ll never see you again!”

Uncle put his arm around her and raised her to her feet. She wept against his shoulder as he led her to a patch of shade. There they sat, huddled together, until the dusk.

Then they walked, until it was very dark.

They rested, until it began to be light: they walked, until the sun was hot. Tay talked to Uncle, and Uncle talked to her. She knew he spoke. He told her that the two of them must not die, they must live and keep going, because otherwise nobody would know. Tay told him about sitting in the car park in Kandah City with Donny, the day Donny came home from the summer holidays. She had felt as if she was a package—with something
not human
inside. She was still a package, but now she was a package carrying all the people she loved.

Donny and Tay, and Dad, and Mum. And Clint, and Lucia, and everyone—

So many different memories, like different facets of a jewel. She held within her the last time she had seen Mum’s face . . . the last time she had seen her dad, grinning and waving as he counted the votes for the Saturday-night movie. She held within her Donny, and the way he had smiled the night when they had watched the fireflies. These memories were as good as DNA, they didn’t belong to anybody else, they didn’t belong to Pam Taylor. She remembered her dad saying,
It’s not the DNA, it’s what you do with it.
This must be what he had meant. She would never have thought it all out herself, she was too tired and thirsty, but when Uncle had explained it to her, she understood.

She walked. When it was so dark she couldn’t see, she lay down and slept. When there was light, she ate something and walked again. Uncle was always beside her, and for his sake she had to keep on. She had to eat, and persuade him to eat. When their water bottle was running dry, she wouldn’t have cared. But she had to look after Uncle, so she had to search until they found a pool where she could fill it.

They had long, serious conversations.

Sometimes they saw wild buffalo; or a wild pig family would charge out of the straw-dry grass and thunder away, curly tails in the air. Once there were helicopters in the sky: and then Tay and Uncle hid themselves. Maybe they walked two days, maybe for several days. Time didn’t have much meaning on the journey Tay was making. The numbers on the pedometer made no sense; she wasn’t sure how to tell east on the compass anymore. It didn’t seem to matter.