Genetopia by Keith Brooke Page A

pools were a human construction, a channelling and concentration of the tools of nature.
    It was here that Stopover’s changing vats had been formed: clay-walled troughs, their sides lined with smartfibre, an arm-span wide and deep enough to submerge someone of Dinah’s stature. Or Taneyes’.
    Mas’ Torbern had decided to dip the two Lost females, just as Dinah had anticipated. “One too sullen to be any good,” Dinah had heard him say this afternoon. “Just like her mother. And the other too damned spiteful.” Wipe them clean now and they might still be ready in time for sale at Farsamy Carnival.
    But the timing!
    Today was the day of smoke and flight, and the changing vats were only a short distance from what the fisherfolk called the Widdy Gates, where the mangrove swamp was at its thickest, where cover was best.
    Dinah had seen the wisp of smoke scratching the upriver sky earlier today. A sign. On her rounds she had sung as usual, but today her song had been of Harmony and freedom and readiness, her Mutter-pidgin little different to the masters’ ears but loaded with meaning for a small number of those in the holding pens.
    Mas’ Torbern drank from a bladder he had been carrying slung from a cord loop at his wrist. “Right,” he said. “Time for a fresh start for you!”
    He gestured and Tender stepped over to Lariss and took the girl by the arm. Tender was bulky and almost hairless, bred for hard labour. His hand easily encircled the girl’s upper arm.
    Dinah watched, horrified as ever at this spectacle, at the ease with which the masters would do such a thing. The changing brew they used here was distilled with the help of expertise from clan Treco: changing vectors would subdue and subvert anyone exposed to them, leaving them pliant and malleable, putty to be reformed and reshaped at will.
    At a signal from Mas’ Torbern, Tender moved towards the changing vat and the girl shuffled along at his side. Enchebern took her now, and Torbern took her other arm. Between them they guided her to the top of the steps that led down into the changing brew.
    Torbern pushed, and the girl teetered forward and placed a foot in the brew. Her expression never changed from one of blank incomprehension. Dinah wondered what horrors she had endured already: perhaps the change could be a blessing for some, she mused.
    Taneyes was watching her, terror in her stained eyes.
    Dinah went to her, offered her a drink of sweetwater from a bladder. It was her role to offer comfort and care, both before and after.
    She wanted to look away, but didn’t. “We be no-powered under the Big Mas’,” she said, hoping her words conveyed her inability to offer more than comfort.
    Taneyes swallowed, then looked across Dinah’s shoulder to where the girl was now knee-deep in the brew. “Before the little masters, too,” she said.
    Dinah pictured, somewhere within the stockade, hands on smartfibre locks, the fibres relaxing in response to the touch. Holding pens opening. And later: questions and beatings, investigations to find who had accidentally left the four pens unsealed.
    She looked away, down towards the thickening screen of trees, where mangroves clustered together. Some said the trees concealed convoluted ribbons of raised ground, paths that twisted through the swamp, away from Stopover Island. Dinah had never been closer than this before, had never had the chance, but she knew the stories to be true. She knew the paths through the swamps were the first stage on the Highway to Harmony, the path to liberty for those few mutts who were free of the gut-love for true humans that bound Dinah and her kind into service.
    She looked up at the stockade, expecting at any moment to see figures there, voices raised, all going wrong because Mas’ Torbern had chosen this precise time to dip two recalcitrant Losts.
    Nothing. Not yet.
    “Make you brave,” Dinah murmured to Taneyes. “Me be look after you.”
    The girl: waist-deep, pausing,