Collected Short Fiction, page 842
“You call yourself Will White?”
“That’s my name.”
“If you’re really white—” He grinned at his own amusement. “What are you doing with this black witch doctor?”
“Ram Chenji is my friend.”
“You’ve made the wrong friend.”
I tried to tell our story, but he was impatient with my halting language.
“That’s enough.” He cut me off and beckoned the guard to take me out. “You’re on your way to Periclaw. You can try your tales on the high commission.”
Yet the agent never sent me back to prison. Perhaps the agent’s wife persuaded him to hear our story. Perhaps he wanted it simply for his reports to Periclaw. Still with no sign of belief, he had a sudden willingness to listen to our adventures on those other worlds beyond the trilithon on Mt. Anak. I was installed in a decent room and allowed to join his staff at decent meals.
Bound upriver, the former agent was leaving his black mistress behind. I was on the dock when a packet docked to pick him up. Outraged and screaming at him, she thrust the squalling baby at his face. He stalked away. She followed, pleading. He shook her off. She drew a dirk and struggled with the guards until they dragged her and the baby away to the jail.
Though the new agent had only a dozen men, he lined them up for inspection as if they had been a company and assured the refugees camped on the dock that they had nothing to fear from the rebels.
“No organization,” he told me. “No discipline. No leadership.” He made a derisive shrug. “Your black friend, son of a god or just another con artist, he’s leading the fools to the slaughterhouse.”
Bom in Periclaw, son of a wealth plantation owner, he had the same contempt for the Norlaners on the ruling high commission.
“White-bellied spiders, fat on the blood they suck out of us! Sky-high excise taxes on river trade. Sky-high duties on every bale of cotton we ship north and every ounce of anything we have to buy. They’re bleeding us dead.”
The high commission acted at last. A gunboat arrived with supplies for the station and orders to rush me down the river. Half a dozen refugee families were waiting on the dock, hoping to escape with whatever they had been able to salvage from their abandoned homes, but the little boat had no space for them.
The crew was tiny. The mulatto engineer and black firemen had double duty as gunners at the long cannon on the foredeck. The captain was a white Norlaner, a loud angular man with a thick black moustache. Just out of military training, he was inflated with his new authority and proud to be white in a world of blacks.
He had no time for me, no interest in my story. The pilot was a better companion, an affable little man who called himself White Water Kel, so dark I though he had black blood. He listened to all I had to say about Earth and the trilithons, and liked to talk about the river and himself.
“Water’s high,” he told me. “Monsoon rains upstream.”
The river ran fast where we were, a wide brown flood that lay flat from bank to tree-walled bank. Only a few hours out, we overtook a floating log. A human figure stood balanced on it, waving a broken branch. As we came near, I recognized Kenleth. I begged the pilot to pick him up. He was willing but the captain balked.
“Let the beggar swim. We’ve got ten thousand like him waiting on the banks.”
I kicked my sandals off as we passed by, dived off the rail, and swam to the log. No act of heroism. The water was warm and I’d spent my high school summers as a lifeguard at the municipal pool. Kenleth grinned, dropped his branch, and helped me climb on the log.
The captain yelled lurid curses at me, words I hadn’t learned, but he stopped the engine and launched a small boat to pick us up. Kenleth thanked my shyly and said he was starving. I got the cook to bring him a banana and a broiled fish left from breakfast. He devoured them and talked.
“A bad time,” he said. “The raiders broke through the fence and got in the house. They took everything. The food off the table and my mother’s books and my father’s guns. I was afraid. I hid in the cellar. They burned the house over me.
“The air got hot and smoke got strong. I was trapped there a long time, afraid the roof would fall in. It didn’t, but I was still caught there in the dark. I tried to get out when things got quiet, but some had fallen on the door. I couldn’t get out till I found a tunnel that took me to the well.
“The raiders and my folks were gone when I climbed out. They never took the fort. The flag was still there and I heard the cannon boom, but the new agent called me a mongrel pup when I begged him to help me. All I could do was follow the raiders and try to find my mother again.
“The raiders took a trail back into the forest where we used to go to look for nuts and fruit. I followed all day and the next, with nothing to eat. I was afraid of snakes and crocodiles and jungle fevers, but I went on till I couldn’t find the trail any farther. I was lost and hungry.
“All I could to was wander on and sleep at nights on the ground. Finally I came to the river and water I could drink. That log came drifting past. I swam out and climbed on it.” He caught my hand. “I thank you, Ty Will. You saved my life.”
I gulped and put my arm around him.
“I’ve lost my mother and Ty Hake.” Anxiously, he peered into my face.
“Please, can I stay with you?”
It took me a minute to answer. Something about him brought back dreams of my own that had faded long ago. My colleagues and my students had become my family. Feeling as lost and helpless as he was, I was in no position to care for anybody. The responsibility seemed overwhelming. I had to get my breath.
“Okay,” I told him. “If you want to take your chances with me.
He blinked at me through tears his eyes.
“Thank you, Ty Will!”
18.
Next morning we needed to refuel. White Water followed the channel markers to a pier built of unpeeled logs. The Norlan flag flew from a pole over a rough wooden shelter. I saw stacks of firewood ready, but the place seemed abandoned. The men tied us up beside the pier and began pitching chunks of wood aboard. I heard a hail before they were done, and saw a long dugout coming around the bend above us. The paddlers brought it near. I recognized Toron in the bow, poling it closer. Ram stood behind him, waving a palm leaf.
“Will?” he shouted. “We heard you were on the way. We want to talk.”
The captain called his men to the cannon. He found a megaphone and shouted a command for the dugout to stand clear. Toron stabbed his pole into the mud to stop it where it was. He was nearly naked, yellow tiger-strips around his torso. Ram looked just as strange, in a black beret pulled down to his eyes and a long robe dyed in a pattern of purple, green, and black. Yet he still carried the battered nylon backpack he had brought from home. He waved the palm leaf again.
“Toron’s speaking for the rebels,” he shouted. “They want to offer a truce.”
“Black vermin!” the captain snarled. “What sort of truce do they expect?” Ram beckoned Toron to bring the dugout closer. The captain raised the megaphone. “Keep away, or we’ll blow you out of the water.”
“I know him,” I told the captain. “He’s a friend of mine. We came here together from my own world. The rebels captured him. Listen to him, please.”
The captain shook his head, with a skeptical scowl at me.
“Tell him I know the rebels,” Ram shouted. “Toron’s speaking for them. We want to talk to the high commission, if he’ll grant us safe passage to Periclaw.”
“Hah.” The captain sniffed. “I have no authority to offer safe passage to anybody.”
“Maybe so,” White Water said. “But let’s hear them talk.”
“Barter with those black vermin? The high commission would laugh.”
“Maybe not,” White Water insisted. “These men are risking their lives to talk. The intelligence service ought to be interested in what they have to say.” The captain scowled and let them tie up at the dock. White Water had the gangplank lowered. The engineer went down to search Ram and Toron for weapons. Ram laid down his jungle knife. Toron refused to leave his ancient blade. They left him on the dock, but Ram was allowed to climb aboard.
He embraced me.
“A long haul back to Portales! A lot has happened since I saw you.”
He offered his hand to the captain. “Good of you, sir. If you can take us down to Periclaw—”
The captain ignored his hand and had White Water pat him down and search his pack for weapons. He swung to me. “You say you know this man?”
“We came here together,” I said. “Through those old stone pillars on Mount Anak. You’ve heard our story.” The captain grunted and swung to Ram.
“What’s your business with the high commission?”
“Peace,” Ram said. “An offer of peace.”
The captain bristled. “We’ll have peace when these jungle apes come to their senses.”
Yet he huddled with White Water and let us into his cabin. We sat around a little table, the engineer ready with his gun behind us. Silently waiting, the captain glared at us.
“Believe me, sir,” Ram begged him. “I know the rebels. They’re fighting to take the river back and throw you whites off the continent. No real good for them. Disaster for Norlan. We want to offer something better.”
The captain sniffed.
“Like what?” White Water asked.
“If you care to hear it, sir.” The captain kept a stony face, and Ram turned to White Water. “Toron’s an envoy from the elders of the corath brotherhood. Not a government, exactly, but it’s the organization behind the rebellion.” He nodded at the captain. “A force Periclaw ought to respect. They have the gunboats, but the elders have the jungle.”
“Bluff enough!” the captain muttered. “What do they want?”
“Respect, sir. Recognition of the brotherhood as a sovereign nation. Liberation for its slave citizens. Fair pay for labor. Free trade on the river. Tax-free exports to Norlan.”
“That’s all the want?” The captain scowled. “What they get will be the hook through their ribs.”
“Listen, sir. The deal they want will be good for them but better for Periclaw. They offer you peace. Security for your colony on the delta and your traffic on the river. Untaxed export of the food and fuel you need in Norlan. Isn’t that enough?”
The captain grunted scornfully.
“Look at the alternative,” Ram urged him. “I’ve met the native historians.”
“Historians? Black animals that can’t read or write?”
“They’re learning,” Ram said. “They’re here on the ground. They study what they find the ruins of the lost empire. I brought an artifact I think should help us persuade the high commission. Would you like to see it, sir?”
“Jungle junk!” the captain snorted. “They peddle it to tourists.”
“Give them a chance,” White Water urged. “Intelligence might like to see it.” The captain shrugged and let Ram open his backpack. He dug out a thin little box like the one Derek found in the room where he slept on the planet of the robots. The captain shrank away as if it had been a viper.
“It doesn’t bite.” Ram turned to White Water. “I’m told that it came out of a sealed vault under a ruined temple of Sheko. The natives are terrified by a legend that she breathed death on the place. A white explorer dug it out. His porters stole it. Three of them died of a nasty jungle rot.”
The captain blinked uneasily, his hand near his gun.
“I’ve heard the story.” White Water picked up the object, frowned at it, passed it back to Ram. “What is it?”
“Take a look.”
Ram lifted the lid. A rainbow of colors lit an array of symbols. Sound pealed out of it, deep notes that throbbed to a rhythmic beat at, lifted to a melancholy wail, and slowly died away. The symbols faded into darkness. Stars appeared, and the silver dust of the Milky Way. Bright constellations swam across the screen. One star grew. A planet in orbit around it swelled to show seas and continents.
“Africa!” Ram whispered to me. “They’ve been there.”
I saw the shape of it, then a green plain edged with volcanic cones. It spread wide. I saw animals: wildebeest, antelope, ostriches, and elephants. They raised their head, froze, scattered in panic from a rocket ship descending on a cushion of fire. The rocket dissolved into a tall black trilithon. Strange machines crawled out of it, and then a file of dark-skinned men and women.
“That’s us,” Ram said. “A couple hundred thousand years ago, arriving from wherever we were born.”
They vanished, and I saw a single human figure standing alone on a bare mountaintop. An aged black, scarred and bent, leaning on a cane. He spoke in a strange high voice, trilling syllables I had never heard. That uncanny music rolled again, and his voice gave way to a page of the symbols we had seen on the monuments of other worlds.
Ram touched a key. The screen went black. He closed the box.
“What’s that?” the captain muttered. “A book,” Ram said. “And maybe a computer, if we knew how to work it. The elders have recovered several of them. They can’t decipher the text. Not yet, but the images are enough to reveal something about the civilization that left all the ruins in the jungle. They take this for a history of the Grand Dominion. That’s their name for the lost empire.”
“So what?”
“If you will grant us safe passage, we want to show this to Periclaw. I think it will help persuade the high commission to talk.”
“Not likely!”
“Sir, they should. The Grand Dominion is dead. Something killed it. I don’t know what. Neither do the elders, but they have scholars working to recover its lost science.”
“Scholars? When they can’t read or write.”
“They’re learning.” Ram pushed the book across the table. “Periclaw should give them a hearing. If you’ll give us a safe conduct—”
“To that black bastard? I’d hang him first.”
“If you feel that way,” Ram said, “I’ll go alone.”
“If you’re that kind of fool.” The captain shrugged and squinted at the box. “Just get that infernal machine out of my cabin.”
Ram went down to huddle with Toron and his men. They climbed back into the dugout and pushed it away. Ram stood watching until it was gone beyond the bend.
“To pay my way.”
He took off his robe to sweat with the crew, loading the rest of the firewood. We steamed on again when that was done, down the mud-colored Blood. He shared the cabin with Kenleth and me. I wanted to hear about where he had been, but he was slow to talk.
“Later,” he said, and shook his head. “Too much has happened since I saw you. Too much you’d never believe.” He stood silent for a time, gazing into the jungle behind us. “I need Lupe to help me decide what I am.”
He slept most of the afternoon and woke with a haunted face.
“What a dream!” He grimaced and blinked at me. “At first I thought we were back at home at one of our poker nights. Lupe was about to serve her guacamole salad, but then she was Little Mama, reading the script in that artifact. It was a message from Derek and Lupe They were lost in a stranger world than this, hiding from the hoppers. And then—”
His shoulders hunched uneasily.
“It’s all too much. Too much that gets me down.” He sat rubbing his eyes as if still half asleep. “I learned my science from Derek and Lupe. It’s meant to make life simple. Nice clean answers to everything. But my life was never that simple.”
We anchored before sunset in the shallows off a sandbar, where we were out of the current. The engineer dropped a hook over the rail and pulled up a magnificent silver-colored fish that he grilled for dinner. The fireman found papayas ripe in a field on the bank.
I recall that meal as an unexpected moment of pleasure. The fish and fruit were excellent. The captain sat watching Ram with silent suspicion, but White Water opened a bottle of very good wine to play the jovial host. Ram laughed at his tall tales of life on the river as if all his problems had been forgotten.
Night had fallen before we got back to the cabin. While I was fumbling in the dark for a match to light a candle, Ram closed the door and took off his cap. light filled the room. When he looked at me, I saw that it came from his birthmark, shining like something incandescent.
19.
The anchored ship was soundless that night, except for the muffled thump of the watchman’s boots on the deck and the far-off howl of some jungle thing we never saw. I sat down on my berth, staring in amazement as Ram lifted his wrist to read his watch by the glow from his forehead.
“The crown of worlds?” I felt almost afraid to speak. “I always wondered. Did it ever shine before?”
“Never.”
The mark shone brighter when he raised his head to look at me, but he was silent till I asked, “You say things have happened to you?”
“A long story. I’ve been initiated into the corath brotherhood.” He paused, and his voice had fallen when he spoke again. “Things I don’t understand. I almost hate to tell you. I don’t want to make a stranger of you.”
“No danger. Just tell me.”
“I’ll try.” He nodded soberly. “If you won’t call me crazy.”
Lying on his berth in the hot and silent cabin, he began to talk.
“It was Toron who got me out of Hake’s compound. He’d seen the mark, of course, but he took it for a tattoo. Took me for one more ambitious pretender to the legacy of Anak. It wasn’t shining then, but he thought he could use me as a figurehead leader for the revolt. I’ve lived a sort of epic in the jungle since.”
A steamy breath of it came through the window, a thin sharp scent of strange blooms and strange decay. I felt grateful for its cool feel on my naked skin. Kenleth lay snoring softly on the floor.
“The whites dread the jungle, but it’s a loving mother to the blacks. Feeds them, shelters them, hides them from the slavers. Derek and Lupe would give their skins for a chance at their culture and their history. I’ve tried to pick up what I could.
