Colony, page 27
It haunted him all through the evening meal of meat chunks and ash-roasted potatoes. David smiled to himself when he tasted the meat: rabbit, one of the staples of Island One. But instead of going to his pallet once the hut’s fire had sunk into embers, he stepped outside into the sighing night winds of the mountains.
It was a clear, cold night. David walked through the sleeping village, a borrowed itchy wool blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He stared up at the stars, trying to figure out why he felt the way he did, what was happening inside him. High overhead the unblinking beacon of Island One rode serenely above him.
Slowly, as the stars slid across the bowl of night, David began to understand what his feelings were. He owed Bahjat’s life to these people, and his own. They could have refused him, turned him away. He would have died in this mountain wilderness before he could have found help. And Bahjat would have died before him.
What can I do to repay the debt I owe them? David asked himself, looking up at the star-like image of Island One. For a moment he wished he could talk it over with Dr. Cobb; he’d know what to do.
No, he told himself. I must figure this problem out for myself No computers can help me. All by myself.
He spent the night at it, walking around the village’s scant perimeter. Twice he noticed the chief had come out of the hut to watch him, never leaving the hut’s doorway, never interrupting his walking and thinking as he circled the village again and again.
They had everything they needed, everything they wanted. They lived in harmony and peace with this rugged environment. But soon all of that would be wiped away, carved out of the mountains by civilization’s encroaching earth-moving machines. A new town to house the exploding billions of the cities and farms. An airport, an industrial complex. Whatever they were building those few kilometers down the road, they would be building another one in a few years, closer, perhaps right here.
There was nothing David could do to stop that from happening. But maybe... He looked up at the sky once again. It was turning gray with dawn. Island One had set below the saw-toothed horizon.
Before he left this village, David realized, he had to give them something, something of his own—something that would serve as a symbol, a pledge, to show his gratitude and to leave a promise with them. But what? He had nothing to give, only the clothes on his back, his boots, the gun. He would need them all when he returned to the world of cities and rebellion and violence. And the villagers had shown no interest in any of them.
Then it struck him. A gift that had no real value at all, but which was deeply symbolic. As the sun rose and began tinting the snowy peaks, David knew what he had to do.
He slept the morning away, and then he went to see Bahjat. The old healer let him into the hut, but squatted inside the doorway, watching them both.
Bahjat was thinner than before, the bones of her face sharper. But her eyes were clear.
He spent the afternoon with her. The old woman let Bahjat get up and walk around the village with David. Four young girls followed them at a respectful distance.
“I think I’ll be able to travel by tomorrow. My legs feel strong. I’m just a little light-headed.”
David said, “That’s the altitude. We must be two thousand meters above sea level, at least.”
“Where are we?” she asked. “What happened? I remember the truck, and then a plane...”
David began telling her about being intercepted by the Peruvian jet fighters, and how the pilot left them stranded here in the mountains.
“But the Indians have taken good care of us, and they showed me a road that must lead to a town sooner or later. The pilot said we were about fifty kilometers from Ciudad Nuevo, and if your friends are still there...”
“You took me with you? When you could have left me for the police to pick up and gotten away by yourself?”
Surprise, David said, “Yes, I suppose I did.”
“Don’t you realize that if I make contact with the PRU, they will consider you to be our prisoner?”
He shrugged. “I never thought of that.”
The next morning the chief led David out of his hut as soon as they had finished their clay bowls of grainy gruel. The whole village seemed to know that their visitors were leaving. The older healer led Bahjat out of her hut, and as the two of them met in the village’s central open area, everyone else clustered about them.
Silently, solemnly, the chief presented them each with red and blue blankets.
“They’re beautiful,” Bahjat said as she accepted hers. “Where do they get them?”
“Maybe they keep sheep someplace farther up in the mountains,” David said. “Or they trade pelts for them.”
Others came forward and presented them with sacks of grain and small, ornately decorated eating bowls.
“For our journey,” Bahjat said.
David nodded, remembering the gift that he had decided to give. He stepped toward the chief and pointed to the knife in the man’s twine belt.
A frown crossed the chief’s face, but slowly he pulled the knife from its leather sheath and handed it to David. The whole village was silent, watching.
David went back to the small pile of treasures they had given him and took the little bowl in his left hand. Then, with the knife in his right hand, he made a swift slash across the meaty back of his forearm. It wasn’t deep, but it stung and quickly started dripping blood.
The villagers gasped. Bahjat’s mouth fell open. David handed the knife back to the chief and then put the bowl beneath the cut. Several drops of blood spattered into it. He handed the bowl to the chief.
“It’s the only thing I have to offer,” David said, “for now.”
The chief was clearly moved. He held the bowl in one outstretched hand, the bloody knife in the other. He raised them both and turned for the whole village to see. A murmur of approval went up.
“You’re still bleeding,” Bahjat whispered.
“It’ll stop in a minute,” David said. “I’ve got a very strong clotting factor.”
And then he realized what the chief was going to do.
The silver-haired man, looking as solemn and strong as the mountains themselves, put the cup to his lips and drank David’s blood.
“Inshallah!” Bahjat said softly.
Then the chief deftly cut his own arm and let the blood drip into the bowl. He handed it back to David.
“You’re not going to...” Bahjat’s voice choked off as David drank the chief’s blood.
The villagers shouted. The chief raised his hand and rested it solidly on David’s shoulder. He said not a word; none was needed. They simply stood there for a long moment while the whole village watched and the mountain winds sighed and moaned above them.
At last the chief stepped back. David picked up the food and blankets, and he and Bahjat started on their way. The chief sent two men to lead them through the forest and down to the road. He himself retired to his hut, too moved to make the short journey himself.
By the time the sun was high, David and Bahjat were trudging down the paved highway, alone again. They had skirted the construction site, choosing instead to find the town where they had a chance of linking up with a local PRU group.
“But what was that ceremony all about?” Bahjat was asking.
“I wanted to give them something to show how grateful we were for their kindness to us.” David’s arm throbbed slightly, but the bleeding had long since dried up. “They saved our lives, after all.”
“Yes, but... blood?”
“That’s all I had. And it has a deep meaning for them. I think we’ve been officially adopted as members of their tribe.”
“You have,” Bahjat said. “They ignored me.”
Grinning at her, he said, “We could go back and repeat the ceremony for you. I’m sure they’d be very glad...”
“Never mind!”
They walked along the empty highway for a while, under the warming afternoon sun. Then Bahjat asked, “How did you get me to the village if I was unconscious when the plane landed up there?”
“I carried you,” David said absently. He was still thinking about the villagers and what he could do to help them.
“You carried me? All the way to the village?”
“It wasn’t far.”
“And then you stayed there while I was sick for two more days and nights?”
David nodded.
“Why did you stay with me?”
“You were sick. I couldn’t leave you.”
She stopped and grabbed at his arm. “But don’t you realize that we’re enemies? I hijacked your space shuttle. You want to go to Messina; that’s the last place in the world that I want to be. When we reach the town I’m going to contact my friends and you’ll be our prisoner, our hostage.”
Tapping the gun at his waist, David said, “Maybe you’ll be my prisoner.”
Bahjat shook her head. “You couldn’t get very far without my help.”
“And you would have been in a police hospital in Argentina without my help,” he countered.
“So you expect me to be grateful.”
“I expect you...” David stopped, took a deep breath, and then began walking again. “Look,” he said, “can’t we just be friends and leave the politics aside?”
“That’s impossible,” Bahjat said firmly.
“Well, impossible or not, we’d better give it a try. We’re going to be walking down this road together for a long time, it seems to me. And if your friends in Ciudad Nuevo aren’t any better than the people we’ve contacted so far, we may be on the road even longer.”
Bahjat said nothing. David kept on walking and she stayed alongside him. After a while he began singing a song she had never heard before. She tried to frown at him, but she found herself smiling back, instead.
~~~
To: Dr. Cyrus S. Cobb
From: Mr. T. Hunter Garrison
Subject: Operation Proxy
Phase I of the operation is now essentially complete, and Phase II will be initiated shortly. As you know, Phase II will escalate very quickly and reach its planned objectives in less than three months. At that time, the evacuation phase of the operation will begin. All preparations aboard Island One must be finished, therefore, within sixty calendar days of receipt of this memorandum. DESTROY AFTER READING!
~~~
TWENTY-SEVEN
T. Hunter Garrison sat in the sweltering hot greenhouse at the far end of his quarters atop the Garrison Tower and watched the holographic cross-country conference. The hologram screen in the greenhouse was full-sized. It gave the illusion that the greenhouse was cut in half: where Garrison sat was a hot, humid tropical garden filled with orchids, ferns, lianas; where Leo and the other rebels sat was a crazy-quilt conference table, with a different background behind each of the two dozen guerrillas.
Garrison leaned forward in his powerchair’s enfolding softness, his bald head glistening as he watched the revolutionaries arguing. He wore only a sweat-soaked terry-cloth robe of royal blue. No one else was in the greenhouse with him.
He had plugged in to every one of Leo’s conferences since the first one several months earlier. He had listened to every detail of their planned nationwide uprising. It was doomed to fail, of course, but Leo had the right idea—strike hard and don’t count the costs.
The time to strike was very near. Garrison had been supplying arms to the guerrillas in each of twenty-four cities all summer long. It looked like an impressive arsenal to them, but the old man knew exactly how far it would take them.
“We’re gonna tear it all down, man,” said the bushy-haired youth from Los Angeles. “They’ll think an earthquake hit ’em.”
“The question is, when?” Leo said calmly.
“We’re ready to go.”
“So’re we!”
Most of the men and women around the electronically created conference table nodded enthusiastically.
“Hey, there’s still somethin’ botherin’ me about this whole operation,” said the woman who headed the Kansas City rebels. She wore turquoise and beads and a circlet around her head, but to Garrison she looked more black than red.
“What is it?” asked Leo.
“Well... we’re gonna hit the streets and start shootin’ up everything, okay. But we know we can’t hold out against the Army. They can bomb the shit outta us, gas us, hit us with tanks, planes, ever’thing. And they’ll have the World Government backin’ ’em up, too, with more troops. So what’s the good of all this? Lotta brothers an’ sisters gonna get killed. For what?”
“I know,” Leo said. “We’ve hassled this out a thousand times.”
“Make it a thousand and one,” she said, unsmiling.
Leo nodded ponderously. “We gotta show the nation, the people, the world, that we’re willin’ to fight for what’s ours. Eighty percent of this country’s black or brown or yellow. An’ we got eighty percent of the unemployment, the hungries, the sick. They got the big piece of the pie—the white-asses. We’re gonna show ’em we want our fair share.”
The woman gave a small shrug.
“By strikin’ at the same time all across the country,” Leo went on, “we’ll show ’em that we’re organized. They got to take our demands seriously. We ain’t no little bunch of street hustlers cryin’ in the welfare line.”
“Yeah, but when they bring in the Army...”
“We’re gonna show ’em that not even the fuckin’ Army can protect them from us. Sure, they’ll beat us back after we strike. But by then it’ll be too late for Mr. Average White-ass Citizen. He’s gonna be hurt! We’re gonna hit him and hit him hard!” Leo thumped a fist on the table.
“Every city in this country’s gonna be a burnin’ mess by the time we get through.”
“Don’t sound like much to me,” the Kansas City woman said, “considerin’ all the deads we gonna get.”
“Yeah. An’ the Tet Offensive was called a defeat for the Viet Cong. But they won the war, baby.”
“Ten years later.”
Leo smiled. “Not ten. Less than ten.”
“What bugs me,” another man blurted out, “is where all the guns are comin’ from.”
“Yeah. Who’s bein’ so good to us?”
“Or settin’ us up for a trap?”
“No trap,” Leo said. “The weapons are from people who want to help us.”
“Who? And why?”
“I can’t tell you that. Besides, you’re better off not knowin’.”
“You know who, though?”
“Damn’ right.”
Garrison grinned to himself. Several of them around the conference table had tried to trace the arms shipments back to their sources. But they were amateurs at cloak-and-daggering. They knew their way around city streets, but how could they match the skills and power of the giant corporations?
“Okay, okay,” Leo was saying. “We still got the big question: When do we strike?”
“Sooner the better; can’t keep these guns hidden forever.”
“We’re ready to go now.”
“A couple days, at most.”
“Okay,” Leo said. “It’s Monday. We strike on... Thursday, at noon, Eastern Time.”
“Nine A.M. out here,” said the Los Angeles lad.
“Hey, Thursday’s Thanksgiving Day!”
Leo chuckled. “Yeah, so it is. Good. Catch ’em with their turkeys.”
They all laughed.
“Any objections?”
No one spoke.
“Then it’s noon, Eastern Time, this Thursday. Good luck.”
The three-dimensional picture on Garrison’s holoscreen fell to pieces as, one by one, the twenty-four individual segments winked off. But Leo’s image remained at the far end of the otherwise blank screen, sitting alone, his shining black face lost in thought.
He’s their leader, all right, Garrison thought. One of these days we’ll have to let him die—after he's done what we need him to do.
Leo turned and looked into the camera. He seemed to be staring straight at Garrison. The old man’s fingers quivered over his armrest keyboard, ready to turn off the picture.
“Garrison, you watchin’ me?”
The old man was not surprised to hear Leo speak to him. He tapped a button on his keyboard to transmit his image.
“I’m watching you, Greer.”
Leo grunted. “Thought so.”
“You seem to have become a national leader,” Garrison said.
“Fuckin’ right, I am.”
With an impatient snort, Garrison said, “You can drop the gutter language now, Greer. I’m not impressed by it.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But maybe the gutter’s got me hooked, Garrison. I am Leo now. Greer’s dead—or at least he’s sleepin’ pretty fuckin’ hard.”
“The gutter hasn’t hooked you. You’re hooked on power.”
“Same’s you, man.”
Garrison considered a moment. “That’s right, boy. Same as me. Power. That’s where it’s at.”
“Damn’ right,” Leo said. “You taught me that years ago, back when I was playin’ football. You didn’t own franchises; you owned leagues.”
“I still do,” Garrison said.
“How come you’re helpin’ us so much?” Leo asked, his voice hardening. “Think we’ll kill ourselves off?”
“Most likely.”
“We won’t, you know. Lots of us will die, but there’s an awful lot of us, man. We’re gonna tear the guts outta every big city in your U.S. of A.”
“Go right ahead.”
Leo’s eyes narrowed. “What’s in this for you? Why you helpin’ us?”
“That’s my business. You just go ahead and do what you think you’ve got to do. Let me worry about my white ass.”
