Taylor Five (18 page)

Tay’s ticket to London had been canceled because she had to come back to Kandah and join the search for Uncle. She didn’t answer at once: she didn’t know what to say. Everything depended on what happened to Uncle. . . .

“So I’d be Tay Walker, an orphan with a trust fund, and not your daughter?”

“Mmm. That’s about it.”

“What do
you
want?”

Pam stared ahead of her. “I want you to be happy, that’s all.”

Tay listened to the noises of the night, and thought about the way that she had been made. It was very strange to think that her cells, and her M-389 altered gene profile, had become the source of a medicine as powerful against disease as penicillin had once been. Human beings are supposed to
make
discoveries, not be discoveries. . . . It’s as if I’m a tree, she thought. Or a fruit, or an animal. She thought of the great forest trees, the guardians of life, that she had loved so dearly. The forest must be felled, and nothing would make up for that loss. But there are always new things, she thought: and this time, something new is also a someone: a girl called Tay Walker, with all her memories and griefs and hopes and dreams. And this was life, good and bad so closely woven together. And this was science too: the great romance of finding out, by accident or on purpose, stretching back through history, and reaching on ahead—

Correction, she thought. Not Tay Walker. Taylor
Five
Walker.

That’s me. That’s who I am. It was very strange to know she had a brother and a sister (she thought of them as brother and sister, the other Lifeforce Teenagers): when she had thought she had no family at all. But she couldn’t think about them now.

In the morning they made their own breakfast: coffee and sweet rolls for Pam, juice and rolls for Tay, who didn’t like coffee. The Kandahnese soldiers were very friendly, but Tay couldn’t talk to them. She flinched when they came near. With their camouflage fatigues and their rifles they looked exactly like the rebels who had stopped Clint. Whenever she looked at them, she remembered the terrible look in the eyes of those other men, and she felt sick. The officer in charge knew she was the daughter of the orangutan refuge wardens, and he could see she was unhappy with the escort. He tried to reassure her.

“I hope you will love Kandah again someday,” he said in English. “You will remember that this is a beautiful country, and you have been happy here.”

Tay shook his hand: but she didn’t feel much better.

Now only thirty kilometers of dirt road and rough track stood between Tay and the place which had once been her beloved home. But they were not going to the refuge clearing—though Pam would have to go there soon, when the search was made for the bodies of her friends. This time they set out along the track that led from Aru Batur to the valley where Tay’s brother lay. The farmhouse where Tay had looked for help and found none had been burned out, sometime in the last few days. They drove past the blackened framework. Soon after that the track became too narrow for vehicles. Some of the soldiers stayed behind. The others, carrying a stretcher and other necessary things, kept their distance behind the young girl and the older woman—so alike in their jungle clothes, their golden-brown hair; in the way they walked, in the set of their shoulders and the way they glanced around them, that they could have been twins of different ages. There were no more traces of the fire. Everything was green. They made their way along the side of the clear, rippling water of the little tributary of the Waruk.

“Look,” said Tay. She pointed to a pale strip of tattered plastic tied around a branch. It was one of the signs she’d left, on her way back from Aru Batur the second time. “I put that there. I tore up a T-shirt and an old carrier bag that I’d picked up in Aru Batur market. I used the T-shirt first. The plastic means we’re getting near.”

She looked ahead and saw, with a stab of mingled grief and tenderness, the river beach where she had spent her little brother’s dying days. Where she had talked to Donny, and sung him the songs he liked best, and cuddled him, and laid him down to rest. The burial cairn was still there, covered in a heap of green branches.

The branches were fresh.

Tay stopped, when she saw that. “Pam,” she said, “I can’t talk to the soldiers. Will you ask them to stay back? That’s Donny’s grave, and Uncle’s here. I knew he would be.”

Pam spoke to the officer, then she and Tay went on alone.

They came to the cairn. Tay knelt on the pale sand. “This is where he died,” she said softly. “We didn’t move him. Uncle didn’t want to move him, or bury him. . . . Oh, I know it was me. I know I was m-making up that Uncle talked to me. But I remember it still, and what I remember about Uncle is
true,
inside. We couldn’t save Donny. When I had to give him the morphine, I knew he was going to die. On the last evening . . . well, I can’t talk about it. He died, and we buried him, and look, Uncle’s put green branches. He’s made Donny a sleeping nest, like a mother ape looking after her baby—”

She stopped. She had seen movement in the green shadows of the valley side. She touched Pam lightly on her arm, and Pam nodded. She moved off, to let the two companions mourn their dead together in peace.

The red ape came slipping out of the trees. Tay just stood there. He bounded toward her, and the ape and the human girl hugged each other tightly. Tay started to cry. The orangutan, ragged and thin after his long, lonely trek from the coast, rocked her in his long shaggy arms, stroking her hair. There’s a time when you daren’t let go, there’s a time when tears have to attack you unawares. There’s a time when you know it will be all right to cry. At last Tay wiped her eyes. Totally unafraid, she unpeeled Uncle’s powerful arms and looked him in the face.

“Uncle, I left you alone with strangers. I know it was wrong. I understand now. You’d taken me back to the other humans. Then you’d done what you knew Clint wanted, and you didn’t want to go on. You were mourning for him. That’s why you were the way you were, wasn’t it? That’s why you wouldn’t take any notice of me—”

Pam came over to them. Uncle didn’t move away, but he grunted warily.
“Hnnh?”

“It’s all right, Uncle,” said Tay, taking hold of the ape’s hand. “She’s our friend. She had to keep you shut up because of Philippe. She couldn’t help that. And she’s
not
going to send you away to live in a zoo.” She stared at her gene mother defiantly.

“Hmm,” said Pam. “I don’t know about that. We’ll decide what’s best—”

Uncle made a long lip, eying Tay sideways, as if he understood every word.

“He wants to stay with me,” said Tay, chin up. She and Uncle were standing together at the eaves of the forest, and she was not going to go a step further without him by her side. “I know he does. He came back here because I’d left him alone. But he can’t stay in the forest, and he doesn’t want to die, so he has to stay with me. He can’t be in a zoo, not even the best zoo in the world. He’s a person, and he needs me, and I need him. And you’re my mum, so I expect you to fix it.”

Uncle looked at Pam with wise round eyes.

“All right,” said Pam gravely. “We’ll work something out. I promise.”

Uncle grunted again, this time in what sounded like satisfaction. He freed his hand from Tay’s grip, touched the green branches that covered Donny’s grave with his long, graceful fingers; and brought his fingers to his lips, again and again. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

“We aren’t going to leave Donny behind,” Tay told him. “I wish we could, in a way. But we can’t. That’s what we’re here for, Uncle, as well as finding you—”

The ape seemed to follow this explanation. He squatted down, picked up one of the branches, put it aside and started tugging at the stones underneath.

“Hey, no!” exclaimed Pam, shocked. “No, not you! Don’t do that! You don’t have to do that. The soldiers will do the work, we only had to show them the place. Leave it, Uncle! We have to take Tay away from here—” He paid no attention. Thin and worn as he was, he was still immensely strong. He had no trouble lifting one of the river boulders that he’d put in place weeks ago. He tossed it aside and looked at the woman and the girl, making a crooning sound.

“That’s his Clint noise!” cried Tay. “What is it, Uncle? What are you trying to tell us?”

“
Clint!
” sounded Uncle again. He pulled out, from behind the stone that he’d removed, a square bundle of black plastic. He sniffed it all over and hugged it in his arms.

“Oh!” gasped Tay, amazed. “It’s Clint’s package!”

“The package you told me was lost crossing the river?” said Pam.

“That’s what I thought. That’s when I noticed it was gone. I emptied the rucksack after we’d had to swim for it, to see what we’d lost, and Clint’s package wasn’t there—”

“He must have decided it belonged here,” said Pam softly. “You were burying Donny. Uncle must have decided that this cairn should be Clint’s memorial, too. . . .” She hunkered down, putting herself on a level with the ape. “Uncle, may I take that? I don’t know how much you understand, cousin. But I loved Clint too, and that’s his last work. He didn’t want it buried. He wanted it to live.”

“Uncle wants to live,” whispered Tay. “He came back to Donny’s grave to die, because he thought I didn’t need him anymore. But I’m here, and so he wants to live. I think. . . . I think Clint told him he had to look after us, no matter what—”

“Your choice, Uncle,” said Pam, holding out her hands. “Do you want me to have that?”

Uncle grunted, looked at the sky and handed the package over.

“Thank you.”

She tore through the wrapping with shaking hands. There were computer disks inside, and a stack of typescript. “Ah,” she breathed. “It’s . . . I think this is Clint’s new book.”

“Is that important?”

“He was such a scatterbrain. We only have his notes, and an early draft. This is the whole thing. Yes, it’s important. It’s something saved, Tay. It’s something saved.”

Pam went to tell the soldiers that Donny’s grave was found, leaving Tay and Uncle to make their last farewells alone. “This will be Donny’s grave forever,” said Tay. “It doesn’t matter where they take his body; or if we never come back. Donny will always be here, and we will be with him, by this stream in the forest.”

We will always be with Donny, agreed Uncle. He’ll always be with us.

And if Tay made up his words, still it wasn’t make-believe.

The spirit of the great forest, distilled into this narrow valley, folded its arms around the river beach, and two mourners, and a cairn buried in green boughs. Tay knew that this time there was nothing left undone, and it really was farewell.

They went to join Pam, hand in hand. The soldiers came and did what had to be done.

t
he kidnapped staff from the refuge were not released. They were traced, after several more weeks, to a rebel stronghold in the highlands. All those who had survived the weeks of captivity also survived when the Kandahnese army surrounded the place and convinced the rebels to surrender. Before that time Mary and Ben Walker’s bodies had been recovered from the ruins in the refuge clearing; and his friends had learned that Clint had been “executed,” the same day he was captured. The forest fires of that summer, though they had seemed so terrible on the ground, made a small scar on the thousands on thousands of hectares of remaining forest. The Sultan of Kandah, once more secure in power, set aside another Lifeforce reserve, and in time Tessa Mahakam became warden of a new refuge. After the publicity around the events of that summer, and his tragic death, Dr. Suritobo’s book,
The Forest People: Our Gentle Cousins
, sold ten million copies in the first week it was published. All the profits went to wildlife conservation. It didn’t do anything to change the fate of the forests.

Taylor Five Walker traveled halfway round the world, with her gene mother and the bodies of her dead, to England. There was a funeral and a memorial service, at which a lot of people said they were very sorry, and what wonderful people Tay’s mum and dad had been. Pam returned to her work after that, but Tay stayed in England for a while, living with her aunt and uncle in Southampton; and going to visit the cousins who were her only relatives on Mum’s side. She was one of the three Lifeforce Teenagers who were willing to talk to the media. While she was in England, she gave a few interviews for the newspapers and on radio (she refused to appear on television).

“Lifeforce gave me my childhood,” she said. “They didn’t have to do that. They could have kept us away from everything human and normal and studied us to death. But they weren’t like that. They were real, human people. They did what they did because they thought they had no alternative, and they tried to do it well. I’ll always be glad that I lived in the great forest and knew the red apes in their natural home. I’ll always be glad I had those years with Mum and Dad and Donny, even though it ended so terribly. And I’m very glad to have been partly the means of giving M-389 medicines to the world. Now I’m going to try and go on having a wonderful time. . . . I’m going to
live
, do good things and be happy: because that’s what my mum and dad and Donny would have wanted. I’m going to have an amazing life.”

Several months after the events of that summer she was back in Singapore. She was going to live there, with her gene mother, until she went to the Inheritors College, where she would meet Takami Three Abe and Nancy One Delacroix; and maybe the other two extraordinary ordinary teenagers, if they changed their minds. Pam was going to come with her, to make a home for Tay—and one other person who was very important to both of them. Pam would work at Lifeforce Canada for as long as Tay was at college. They would not be parted.

She walked into the bustling arrivals hall at Changi Airport, and her heart stopped. She remembered another day, a different, small and shabby airport hall. She heard again her brother’s clear voice, shouting joyfully—
Hey! There’s my sister!

No Donny.

But Pam Taylor was there, and with her, looking as plump and well brushed as a shaggy, shambling orangutan can ever be, was Uncle. The girl and the ape stood looking into each other’s eyes, remembering everything. The gibbons in the bamboo stand. A cake with green and yellow icing. The voices forever stilled, from the chorus that had sung “Rivers of Babylon,” coming down from the outcrop, on Mary Walker’s birthday. Nothing would be lost, because everything would be remembered and woven into the tapestry that was Uncle; that was Taylor Five. They told each other this, silently. Then they turned, hand in hand, to face the unknown future.