Colony, page 24
Her hair was plastered down over her face. Water dripped from her nose, her chin. Her clothes were stuck to her body, molding every curve, outlining her navel, her nipples, her ribs.
“There is no shelter near here,” she hollered back. “And we mustn’t stop. They’ll catch up with us.”
“Not in this storm,” David yelled.
“We can’t stop,” she insisted.
“Then at least let me drive.”
He took over the handlebars and she clung to him, shivering, teeth chattering, as he leaned forward to peer through the solid sheets of rain.
It was terrifying and exhilarating. David had read about storms, had seen tapes of hurricanes and tornadoes. But this was real. He could feel the stinging cold of the raindrops lashing him, forcing him to close his eyes to slits. The thunder was overpowering, awesome, earthshaking. The lightning seared every nerve in his body as it split the darkness.
No wonder our ancestors worshipped them, David thought. Lightning and thunder. They reduce you to insignificance. I'm an ant, a bacterium, a molecule scuttling across the landscape. Theirs is the power to terrify you into worship. The power and the beauty. Gods, visible gods. So much bigger and more powerful than we are!
Then the more pragmatic part of his mind wondered if the lightning wouldn’t be drawn to them, on this broad, flat, treeless pampa.
We ought to stop and lie down alongside the shoulder of the road, he thought, and keep this metal bike a good distance away from us.
But instead he drove on, with Bahjat shuddering behind him.
The rain ended at last and the clouds scudded past, revealing a crystalline, star-filled night sky. David knew that the bike’s batteries wouldn’t go all night without recharging, so he began to look for a town, a village, a solitary house in the darkness. Nothing. Only darkness from horizon to horizon.
It was almost dawn when they saw a shack on a little rise far up off the road. In the gray early light David turned the bike off the paved road and they started bouncing across the grass up toward the shack’s sagging wooden door.
The battery chose that moment to give out, and David had to pedal—teeth clenched, legs straining—the rest of the way to the shack.
“Bring... the bike inside,” Bahjat said, her voice terribly weary, her face gray with exhaustion. “Don’t let them... see it... from the air.”
It was an old vaquero line shack, where the cattleman’s riders could shelter themselves overnight in the days before helicopters and electrobikes. Apparently now it was still used by occasional campers, because the wooden one-room structure was still standing, unpainted but weatherproofed. There were four bunks inside and even some canned food on the shelves above the sink. The shack had been built over a well; the sink had an old-fashioned manual pump standing at its side.
Bahjat was trembling uncontrollably and she started to cough as soon as she lay down on the bunk.
“You’ve caught a cold,” David said, putting a hand to her forehead. It was hot. “Maybe worse.”
“And you?” she asked between coughs.
“I’m all right,” he replied.
“We can’t stay here for long.”
“You can’t travel if you’re sick.”
“Yes... I can.”
David went to the stock of canned foods. Most of them were self-heating. He pulled the tops off two cans of soup and one of meat stew. They started sizzling immediately. Sitting on the edge of her bunk, he helped Bahjat drink the soup directly from the can. There were no dishes, no utensils, no glassware.
And no medicines.
“The road...” Bahjat said. “We can hitch a ride… There must be trucks…”
“With two-way radios and full descriptions of us from the police, or army, or whatever,” David said. He helped her eat part of the stew, and her coughing abated. He finished the stew himself, despite her feeble warnings that he would catch her germs by eating from the same can. Then he drank his soup, filled two of the cans with clear, cold water from the pump, and left them both beside Bahjat.
“Get some sleep,” he said. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
“I’m cold,” she said.
David scanned the cabin carefully. There were no blankets, not even sheets. The sun coming through the window was warm, but the sunlight wouldn’t reach the bunk, which was built into the wall and couldn’t be moved. So he undressed her and laid her still-damp clothes in the square of sunlight on the planks of the floor. Then he undressed himself and went back to her.
Like a baby sparrow, he thought, looking at her nude body, frail and beautiful.
He stretched out beside her and took her in his arms. She curled into his body, still shivering slightly. He held her tightly, then started rubbing her bare back and buttocks with his hands. She coughed a few times, then fell asleep. He did, too, with his last waking thought the realization that exhaustion is a stronger force than passion.
The sound of an engine awoke David. His eyes flicked open and he was instantly awake, alert. The wooden slats of the ceiling. Bahjat nestled in his arms. And a heavy internal combustion engine droning toward their cabin. Not an electrobike. Not a helicopter. A truck, maybe.
Carefully, he disengaged his arms from the sleeping girl. Her breathing was heavy, rasping, almost a wheeze. The sunlight had moved across the floor from where he had laid their clothes. But they were dry now.
David quickly draped Bahjat’s skirt and blouse over her naked body, then scooped up his own pants and shirt and pulled them on.
Through the cabin’s window he could see the road arrowing straight out to the horizon. A big tractor-trailer rig was puffing along the highway, the sign painted on its white flanks proclaiming that it carried DON QUIXOTE CERVESA in its refrigerated innards.
No way to get to the road and flag it down, David told himself. Probably a mistake to even try. But she needs a doctor, or at least a pharmaceutical dispenser.
He glanced back toward the bunk. Bahjat was sitting up. One arm shielding her breasts, the hand gripping her opposite shoulder, as if she were posing for a painting.
But David saw the dark circles beneath her eyes. She coughed and it sounded painful.
“We mustn’t stay here,” she said.
“I know.”
“There will be other trucks.”
“But they’ll radio the police, won’t they?”
She tried to smile. “Let me tell you how a properly trained guerrilla hitches a ride on a truck.”
Crouched along the edge of the highway, David waited tensely. A dozen times he thought he heard the sound of a truck motor. Each time it was only his eager imagination. Once a helicopter flew overhead and David hid himself and the bike under the tall yellowish grass by the roadside. The copter apparently saw nothing; it fluttered away without even circling the area.
Finally, he really did hear a truck approaching. Looking back, he saw Bahjat atop the shack’s roof; she waved once to him and disappeared. David wheeled the bike onto the highway and left it there, on its side.
“I hope this works,” he muttered, his hand moving to the butt of the pistol he had tucked in his waistband. That was their only alternative if this truck didn’t stop.
He dashed back toward the cabin and saw Bahjat running toward him. He picked her up off her feet and raced toward the road again. She tried to protest, but her words turned into coughing.
They hunched down along the shoulder of the highway a dozen meters back from where the bike lay.
The truck huffed to a stop and the two drivers climbed languidly down from their cab to stare at the bike. They looked at each other and shrugged. Then they scanned the landscape. David and Bahjat hugged the ground.
The taller of the two drivers scratched his head and said something in Spanish. It sounded like a question and had the word terroristas in it.
The shorter man laughed and gestured toward the truck. His partner shook his head and said something about policia. The shorter man spat on the ground.
“Policia! Pah!”
After a few more exchanges, they set the bike up on its wheels and rolled it around to the rear of the truck. The taller man seemed much more reluctant than his partner, who happily punched the combination code on the trailer’s tail-door lock. David watched his fingers carefully.
Grunting, they lifted the bike off the pavement and pushed it inside the trailer. Then they slammed the big double doors shut and headed back for the cab. David yanked Bahjat by one arm, scuttling up to the rear of the trailer. She cupped her free hand over her mouth and bent over double. He tapped out the same code on the combination lock’s buttons, and the tail door popped open.
The truck was starting to move as he boosted Bahjat up inside it. He had to run to catch up, grab the frame of the open door, and swing himself up inside the dark interior. Slowly, carefully, he shut the door. The lock clicked and they were plunged into darkness.
It took a few moments for their eyes to adjust to the gloom. The truck’s interior was stacked high with see-through plastic crates of furniture.
“Too bad it’s all in crates,” David said over the hum of the engine and tires. “We’ve got a comfortable house full of sofas and chairs in here.”
Bahjat’s voice was a croupy whisper. “It’s fine,” she said. “We are safe... for the time being.”
She collapsed into David’s arms.
~~~
Many people reacted to the Solar Power Satellites the way they had reacted a generation earlier to nuclear energy—with their glands instead of their brains. The rioting in Delhi when the first Solar Power Satellite rectenna farm was opened up near the Indian capital was typical of the hysteria that greeted the Solar Power Satellites in many places. Somebody put out the rumor that the microwave radiation from the satellite was being beamed directly into the city at night, for the purpose of sterilizing the women!
You'd think the idiots would welcome some form of painless birth control, with famine victims piling up like autumn leaves all over India, and plagues sweeping the country, too. But no. They rioted instead. Killed hundreds. Smashed up the rectenna farm so badly that the local power company went broke. No skin off our noses; we just aimed the satellite at North Africa, where they were taking in power to sell to Europe. And India remained poor and needy.
The Indian Government wouldn't move an inch; coming to the aid of the power company would've been political suicide. Even when the World Government tried to intervene, its people were beaten, threatened, and one or two of them were kidnapped and murdered. Gruesomely.
All because of a stupid rumor....
—Cyrus S. Cobb,
Tapes for an unauthorized autobiography
~~~
TWENTY-FOUR
The quickest, easiest, and most reasonable route out of the Argentinian interior lay eastward, toward the country’s long coastline, where there were cities and seaports and airfields from which you could head north to Brazil and ultimately to the United States, or across the Atlantic to Africa or Europe.
So David and Bahjat headed westward, deeper into the hinterlands, toward the rugged mountains that separated Argentina from Chile.
At first they had no choice. They hunkered down among the crates of furniture in the back of the tractor-trailer they had sneaked into and rode where the truck took them. Bahjat was weak and feverish; she slept most of the time.
The truck finally stopped in Santa Rosa. David held a hand over the sleeping Bahjat’s mouth to muffle any cough as the two truck drivers swung the rear doors open and hauled the bike out. David glimpsed a narrow street of cracked blacktop, with weeds springing up amid the ancient paving. Dingy, dilapidated two-story buildings of stucco or cement. We’re not at the trucking terminal, he knew.
He eased the door open and saw the drivers wheel the bike into a cantina on the street corner. Through the grime-streaked cantina window he saw them greet a small, darkskinned, rat-faced man. The taller of the two drivers stayed at the bar, with the bike propped up against the wall beside him, while the other driver disappeared into a back room with the dealer. He came out a few moments later, beaming happily, and ordered drinks for everyone—there were six tired-looking men in the bar, and they all accepted a free drink smilingly.
David took Bahjat out of the truck and helped her to walk to the cantina. She was very weak. He had to hold her up.
“Where... what are you doing?”
“Are you strong enough to make a phone call to your friends in the PRU?” he asked. The few meters between the truck and the cantina seemed like a kilometer. No one was on the street; it was early afternoon. A dog yapped in an alley somewhere, but otherwise everything was still.
“Yes,” she answered weakly. “But, how?”
“Ssh! Leave it to me.”
When they stepped through the cantina's ancient swinging doors, everything inside stopped. No one moved. Talk ended in mid-word. All eyes focused on them.
David helped Bahjat across the bare plank floor and went straight to the dealer, who was again sitting at a table near the rear wall.
“I want to talk to you about a stolen electrobike,” he said.
The dealer looked perplexed. Out of the corner of his eye, David could see the two truck drivers at the bar. They looked terrified.
“In there,” said David, nodding toward the door that led into the back room.
The dealer got up from his table and led them into the back room. It was tiny. The bare plaster walls were covered with graffiti and crude drawings. But there was a shiny new picturephone on the chipped, lopsided table, as David had hoped there would be.
Easing Bahjat into one of the chairs, David turned to the dealer, who stood close to the door. David hooked a thumb into his waistband, next to the butt of the automatic, and smiled at the little man.
“You can keep the bike. All we want is to use your phone for a few minutes, and then, perhaps, to arrange for some transportation.”
He could see the dealer’s mind working. “Of course, sir,” the man said in good English. “You may use the phone freely; But transportation—that can be expensive.”
David nodded. “I understand.”
Bahjat tried to get through to Hamoud at their hideout villa above Naples, but he was too cautious to answer an unexpected call. Instead, through a circuitous route that went to a PRU phone in Cuba, then to a second phone in Mexico, and finally—by satellite relay—to Naples, the call eventually went through. Even then Hamoud would not speak directly, but had a young woman appear on the screen.
Coughing, face flushed, voice weak, Bahjat arranged for a credit transfer from the Italian bank they were using to the local outlet in Santa Rosa. The dealer mentioned a sum, Bahjat offered half of it, and they finally agreed on three-quarters. The Italian woman disappeared from the screen for a few moments, then came back and okayed the transfer. She cut off the connection abruptly.
The dealer poured drinks for them both and sent a runner out to the local automated bank outlet. The transfer would go through in minutes: computer-to-computer transactions worked with electronic speed as long as no human beings got in the way.
“The lady needs a doctor,” the dealer said as they waited for the messenger to return.
“Yes,” David agreed. “Can we find one here?”
The rat-faced man shrugged. “Once, Santa Rosa had an entire street of doctors. But our town is dying. All the jobs have gone, and the doctors have gone with them. We have one man, but he is out at the emergency station up in the hills; they have plague there. You don’t want to go there. Too dangerous. Plague.”
“Then where can we get her some medical attention?”
“I will arrange it,” the dealer said. “For no additional fee,” he added proudly.
Bahjat smiled at him. “We agreed to more than you expected?” she asked, her voice barely audible.
The man smiled back. “Money is no consideration when it comes to the well-being of such a beautiful young lady.”
The messenger burst into the tiny room then, grinning hugely. He pulled a wad of International dollars from one pocket of his skintight jeans, then yanked an equally thick handful of bills from the other.
“Ah,” the dealer sighed. “International dollars, too. They are worth much more than Argentinian pesos.”
His friendship assured, the dealer made a few phone calls and then personally drove Bahjat and David, in a dust-covered old station wagon that hummed with well-oiled power, to Santa Rosa’s rugged little airstrip. A small twin-turboprop plane was waiting for them, with a silver-haired pilot already at the controls, warming up the engines.
David and the dealer helped Bahjat into the plane. Then the dark-faced little man made a small bow to David.
“Vaya con dios” he said over the growl of the engines. “There will be a doctor waiting for you when you land. And be assured, my phone is not tapped by the police.”
David shook his offered hand, thinking to himself, I’m thanking a criminal for doing illegal things. Then he clambered into the plane and helped Bahjat buckle on her safety harness.
They took off with a roar, the plane shaking and quivering so much that David half-expected to see pieces rattling loose and falling away. But it all held together.
They sat side by side behind the pilot, a talkative, roundfaced, smiling man with strong, steady hands and an obvious paunch. The co-pilot’s seat was empty.
“I am flying ever since I was big enough to see over the control yoke and out the windscreen,” he said happily over the muffled roar of the engines. “Fly everywhere. You pay, I fly. Sometimes I fly for no pay, like when earthquakes come and people need help—food, medicines, you know.”
David looked at Bahjat, in the seat beside him. She seemed to be asleep. Her face was still flushed, her body roasting with fever.
“Where are we heading for?” David asked the pilot.
“Peru. Nobody looking for you there.”
