The Genocides

The reason Neil had not protested was that he had not heard. Orville’s voice had been drowned out by the roar of the water, which acres and acres of thirsty Plants were siphoning from the lake bottom. Orville explained his theory several times over when they had backed off to a quieter spot. Then Blossom tried.

“Neil, look, it’s very simple—the only way away from the lake is down. Because if we try to move along at this level, we can as easily be going east—farther on into the lake—as west—away from it. If we had the lamp, we could use your compass, but we don’t have the lamp. We might just go along north or south and follow the shore. There’s no telling how much area beneath the lake Daddy explored last winter. We just have to go down. Do you understand?”

Orville took advantage of this occasion to have some private words with Buddy: “What the hell—let’s leave him here if he doesn’t want to go with us. It’ll be his own fault if he drowns.”

“No,” said Buddy, “that wouldn’t be right. I want to do this by the book.”

“Okay, I’ll go,” Neil told Blossom, “but I think it’s a lot of hooey. I’m only agreeing for your sake. Remember that.”

Down: the sap was in spate. It jostled their bodies together or tore them apart as casually as floodwaters bearing off the trees of the riverbank. Strong currents dashed them against the walls of the root wherever the curves were too sharp or too steep. Days of climbing were retraced in minutes.

Deeper down: the stream became less chill, grew thicker, like pudding coming to a boil. But its pace did not slacken. It was like going down a ski trail on a piece of cardboard. At least they need not worry about repeating their mistake: it was no longer possible to move “upstream” toward the lake.

At this depth there were now whole stretches where the hot sap filled the entire hollow of the root. Hoarding a lungful of air, Orville (who was the first to test any new passage) followed the current resistlessly and hoped. There had always been some branch root feeding into the flooded root from above, too small to ascend through perhaps but large enough to butt one’s head into for a breath of air. But the next time, of course, there might not be such an opening. There might only be a dead end.

That fear—that the current was leading them down a blind alley—absorbed their whole attention. More and more often their bodies were swept into entangling networks of the sap-swollen capifiaries that lined the unexplored passages. Once Orville was caught in such a net where the root had split abruptly in two. Buddy and Blossom, next behind, found him there, his legs moving only as the current moved them. His head had struck against the hard wedge separating the two branches of the root. He was unconscious, perhaps drowned.

They hauled at his pants leg, and his pants slid right off his narrow hips. Then they each took a foot and pulled him out. A short distance away they found an area where the root, sloping gently upward, was only half-filled with sap. Buddy embraced Orville in a bear hug and began squeezing the water out of his lungs rhythmically. Then Blossom tried mouth-to-mouth respiration, which she’d learned in Red Cross swimming classes.

“What are you doing?” Neil asked. Unfamiliar sounds made him nervous.

“She’s giving Orville artificial respiration,” Buddy answered testily. “He half-drowned back there.”

Neil reached out fingers to confirm this. The fingers came between Orville’s mouth and Blossom’s, then clamped down tightly over Orville’s. “You’re kissing him!”

“Neil!” Blossom screamed. She tried to tear away her brother’s fingers, but even desperation did not lend her sufficient strength. One can only be desperate so long, and she’d passed that limit long ago. “You’ll kill him!”

Buddy struck a blow in the direction he supposed Neil to be, but it glanced off Orville’s shoulder. Neil began to drag Orville’s body away.

“He doesn’t have pants on either,” Neil fretted.

“They came off when we were pulling him out. We told you that, remember?”

The sudden deprivation of oxygen, coming after their efforts at revival, proved to be exactly the stimulus Orville required—he came to.

When the body he was carrying began to stir, Neil let go abruptly, spooked. He had thought Orville was dead, or very nearly.

Buddy and Neil then had a long debate on the propriety of nudity (both in the particular case of Orville and in general) under the present, exceptional circumstances. The argument was mainly a pretext on Buddy’s part to give Orville a chance to regain his strength. “Do you want to get back to the surface,” Buddy asked, “or do you want to stay down here and be drowned?”

“No!” Neil said, yet once more. “It isn’t right. No!”

“You’ve got to choose. Which is it?” Buddy was pleased to discover that he could play on Neil’s fears as easily as on a harmonica. “Because if we’re going to go up, we’ll have to go up together, and we’ll need some kind of rope.”

“We had a rope.”

“And you lost it, Neil.”