Filaria - Brent Hayward [24]
“So, which way?” Tran so bent at the waist, hands on his hips. The crab struggled and glared up at him. “And if we’re not over the spot where the lake god lives in half an hour, you’re dead. You’re as good as dinner. Is that clear?”
“No eat,” the crab sputtered, coming up to speak. “No kill!”
“Which way?”
Turning awkwardly in the net, legs flailing, the crab said, “Me no seeth. No seeth god. No net? Let swim? You follow?”
Tran so Phengh laughed. “Nice try, crab. I can see this isn’t going to work. Let’s go home and boil you.”
“Here here!” One claw had come free, gesturing across the water, towards the east. Hand to brow, Tran so looked in that direction, saw more decrepit boats, more grey lake, more grey shacks crammed against the shore that ran parallel to the great wall. Not long ago, the lake had extended beyond where these shacks had been haphazardly built. Some of the older ones, raised up on stilts, originally constructed for access by boat, now loomed high and dry over the others. Farther away, the entire vista vanished into mists, but Tran so could just make out a phantom shape of the massive, tubular structure — imaginatively known in Hoffmann City as the tube — stretching up from water to ceiling. Within this tube, they said, lived the god of all gods. Or was a passageway to the god of all gods. So they said.
“You sure it’s that way?” Tran so Phengh asked.
“Yeth.” If a crab could sound despondent, this one did.
Beginning to pole away from the beach — using the slat he had previously claimed — Tran so pushed the raft through flotsam, which piled under the blunt nose of the craft and spilled to the sides. He shoved larger pieces away. Behind, the wake of open water quickly closed in again. His familiar spot on the beach slipped away.
Some of the vessels they passed showed evidence of ownership; a tiny man, slumped in an equally tiny canoe, watched Tran so pole by. More dead than alive, skin blistered with growths, like fish roe. The black eyes followed.
On another raft, two thin men jerked each other off.
Tran so nodded cursory greetings. His gesture was not acknowledged.
Soon the water was too deep for the slat to touch bottom, but Tran so was still able to maneuver his raft, pushing off the assortment of floating or submerged obstacles. Before much longer, they were out on the open lake, bobbing under the dim lights of the ceiling, negotiating wrecks and huge, floating masses of flora that looked like worn brown carpets. Dried flotation bulbs of these growths provided more than a day of delirium and feverish sexual appetites, memories of which forced Tran so to painfully recall his wife’s lost passion; now, Minnie sue’s body had withered to nothing more than a frail, hot skeleton, housing a blackened heart. A heart kept beating long after everything else had died.
Shuddering, Tran so Phengh looked over his shoulder, as if he might see his wife as she once had been, perhaps waving from the beach, but it was only Hoffmann City, sprawling as far as he could see, masses of shacks and lean-tos and communal housing disappearing into the haze. A fire burned somewhere in the whores’ district. Smoke hung over the quartier, rising slowly, forming a vortex whose peak rose, whirling, to be sucked up into a massive vent. Was the smoke coming from a pyre, he wondered, where diseased bodies of the dead burned, or had atheists struck again, an act of terrorism in the faces of the many gods?
Above the city, up near the ceiling, skirting the funnel of smoke, circled a small group of what appeared to be some form of aerial creature. Perhaps an unfamiliar deity? Though these entities were remote, Tran so Phengh was sure he had never seen their likeness before. Perhaps they were gods called in from another city to try to extinguish the conflagration, searching for the cause