Africa Zero (14 page)

It
is also a fact that I am called The Collector for a very good reason: I am a
collector and curator of the genetic heritage of Earth. I value this diversity
more than anything else, because once lost such complexity is lost forever. It
can be replaced. There are technologies in existence for the creation of
complex life. Without its genetic information, a buttercup can still be
recreated from pictures, but it won’t be a buttercup. Picky, but that’s me I
guess. It is that side of my nature that saved my attacker’s life.

The
man was naked, squat, and heavily muscled. He was light-skinned and had curious
diamond-pattern markings extending up his back and over the top of his head. He
swung his length of chain at me very hard and, as I later discovered, had I
been truly human it would have literally taken my head off. I caught this chain
and drew him towards me—he was still manacled at the other end—with the
intention of breaking his neck. It was when I saw that the markings were in
fact scales that I let him live. Here was something I had heard about and
dismissed as the workings of fabulists. Here was a sauraman: a splicing of human
DNA and DNA built from imprints on fossilised bones.

“Desist—I’m
not your enemy,” I said.

The
man continued to struggle against me even though he could not escape from the
hand I had round his neck. I considered rendering him unconscious, but had no
idea of the strength of his skull. It is true that, had I killed him, I would
still have had access to his DNA, but I was curious. And when you have lived
for as long as me, something of interest can be a life saver—ennui being the
greatest killer of my kind.

I
tripped him and sat him on the ground. He kept fighting me even from there,
hooking blows at me, with his left hand, that would have caved in the ribs of a
normal human. As he fought me I saw that his eyes had slotted pupils that were
dilated—he could see in the dark. I threw him to his back and pinned him with
my knee. Releasing his throat I reached round and caught his left wrist. Still
he fought, attempting to throw me off. I noted a degree of surprise in his
expression when he discovered that he could not lift me. Yet he simply would
not give up. I was beginning to get a little irked and considered taking the
risk of knocking him unconscious when I heard the soldiers approaching through
the forest behind. I tilted my head to the sound and abruptly the sauraman was
still underneath me. His hearing had to be superb if he heard them as well.

“These
are the enemy,” I said.

The
sauraman just lay there and stared at nothing. Damn, I’d killed him, I thought.
I was about to release him when I realised he was playing dead as do some of
the snakes to which he was distantly related. I also wondered if he understood
my words. Perhaps he did not. Perhaps he thought I was with the soldiers and
playing possum like this, now he knew my strength, was the only way he could
escape. I had to show him that I was on his side. I could kill to do this, but
this would put me in danger of losing him should he run or losing him should he
join in with the slaughter. I took another option.

I
listened until the soldiers were close, to be sure that even a man with
less-than-average hearing would hear them. They were still a way off, but they
made no effort at silence or concealment these soldiers of God. Abruptly, as if
I had only just heard them, I released my holds on the sauraman and leapt up. I
then fled into the forest. What happened next I should, in retrospect, have
expected. Here was a man who had been caught, enslaved, and brutalised by this
‘Army of God’. Here also was a man who could see in the dark, was perhaps three
times stronger than a normal man, and was, to put it bluntly, a predator. I had
been a surprise to him. He had perhaps thought me some kind of forest demon.
His tormentors he knew and he had them right where he wanted them.

I
had gone perhaps a hundred metres before I realised he had not fled with me. I
stopped and listened and realised that he was circling back. He was good, very
good. I had to have my hearing at its optimum to catch him sneaking back upon
the soldiers. I crept back after him, worried for his safety. I need not have
worried.

There
were five soldiers. Four of them were armed with Opteks and one carried an APW.
This I discerned after climbing an elm to get above the undergrowth for a
better view. They were walking through the darkness with torches, talking, and
smoking cannabis cigarettes. The sauraman was lurking in the undergrowth five
metres ahead of them. He had not been evading capture when I had come upon him,
but lying in wait. He came at them from the side, his chain swinging in a tight
vicious arc. I saw one soldier standing for a moment minus his head and another
going over with the side of his head caved in. The former had been the one with
the APW. A torch bounced off a tree and lay flickering on the ground. My
sauraman went into the next soldier and drove his hand into his guts. There was
a high pitched scream and he was discarding a handful of intestines. An Optek
stuttered in the darkness, but I did not see it fired as by then I was down my
tree and moving in.

A
soldier came running towards me through the dark, firing at the bushes and the
trees. I stepped behind one of the trees, waited until he was opposite me then
reached out and chopped him across the back of his neck. As he went down, I
heard the last soldier yodelling in agony. Then there was silence. I walked
towards that last scream and the sauraman came from it to me. In the darkness
we stood about five metres apart and looked at each other. The sauraman now
held an Optek that he pointed at me. I expected him to use it and that finally
I would have to kill him. He did not. He grunted and went back to the four dead
soldiers. I followed.

“You
understand now that I am not your enemy?” I asked.

The
sauraman ignored me while he raided the dead. For my own peace of mind I went
and took up the APW and its spare power packs. He looked at me for a moment
then continued with what he was doing. He stripped the least bloody of the
corpses and fashioned his jacket into a loin cloth held with a belt. The
clothing would not have fitted his squat and muscular frame any other way. Two
of the soldiers had rucksacks into which he put spare ammunition, money,
knives—anything of value or utility. He was very thorough. The Opteks he tied
together with the pair of trousers. He made a carry strap from another belt. I
looked at his haul and thought he would certainly have trouble carrying it all
until it became evident, when he dumped the two rucksacks in front of me, that
he did not expect to. I obliged him by picking them up. Into one of them went
the spare power packs. He then demonstrated that he could have carried it all,
for he took up the roll of Opteks, belts with holstered pistols and other items
such as water bottles and the like, on one shoulder. Over his other shoulder he
slung the stripped corpse, before setting out at a jog into the forest. I
followed, content at the moment to just go with the flow. He interested me.

That
night I suppose we travelled ten kilometres into the forest. My companion, with
unerring senses, found a place where trees had fallen to provide a cosy
shelter. He dumped the corpse outside and his loot inside. I put the two
rucksacks inside as well. From the APW I removed the power pack before putting
it inside. Once this was done he built a fire and ignited it with one of the lighters
taken from one of the soldiers. I squatted at the other side of the fire while
he went about this, and in the dull twilight I studied him more closely.

His
hands were thick-fingered, and rather than fingernails he had hard curved claws
as blunt as a dog’s. He was completely hairless and completely scaled. Those
scales on his head and down his back were the largest and most evident, being
thumbnail-sized. The rest of his body was covered with scales only a couple of
millimetres across. Halfway up his forearms and up the back of his calves he
had spur claws. His eyes, as I have mentioned, had slotted pupils. They were
the eyes of a snake. His ears were pointed, and I have to wonder if that
feature was a conceit of the geneticist who had spliced his kind. His teeth
were all canines. As I discovered, shortly after he had lit his fire, he was a
meat eater and not particularly choosy about where his meat came from. I’d
wondered why he had wanted the corpse.

With
the fire going the sauraman used a knife to remove one leg from the soldier’s
corpse. The calf muscle he cut into strips to hang on sticks over the flames.
While these were cooking, he separated out the thigh, spitted it, and had it
high over the flames to cook through. The strips were done by the time the
larger piece of meat began to sizzle and give of the aroma of roasting pork. He
ate two or three of the strips before remembering his manners and holding out a
stick for me. I demurred, not because of any feeling of disgust, but because my
energy source is something that only has to be renewed every five hundred
years. Anyway, he looked hungry. When he insisted I pointed at myself.

“Collector,”
I said.

He
ate the meat off the end of the stick and then repeated my name quite
precisely. He then pointed to himself.

“Gurt,”
he said, then he offered me another human satay. He didn’t get it. I’m not so
arrogant as to think that everyone on Earth knows my name and knows what I am.
But I’ve been around for a long while and it is infrequent that I come across
any who do not. I thought we’d better get things sorted there and then. I
pointed at myself again.

“Cyborg,”
I said, wondering if he might know the word. He showed no reaction other than
to continue his munching. I held up my hand, sequenced the release program,
then stripped off the glove of synthe-flesh to reveal the skeletal ceramal hand
underneath. Gurt went very still as he looked at my hand. Suddenly he grinned,
which was not the reaction I had expected. He pointed with the stick from my
head down to my feet. I did a partial release at my neck to show ceramal
vertebrae and another to coyly expose the shine at my ankle. He grinned again
and continued with his eating. He didn’t offer me any more meat.

* * *

The
sun flooded the forest with green-filtered light. I listened to a family of
chimpanzees yelling and screaming the order of the hunt to each other as they
tracked and tore apart a spider monkey. Gurt slept in the shelter of the fallen
trees, finally succumbing after he had chewed the last fragment of flesh from
the thigh bone. The makings of his next meal he had hung in a nearby tree. I
thought him overly optimistic as I listened to hyenas and at least one big cat
making their various noises of anticipation.

While
Gurt slept I watched beetles, their carapaces exactly matching the fallen elm
leaves, bumbling about their business on the forest floor. I also observed a
brown bark mantis watching their activities with a similar if more predatory
interest. I do not need to sleep very much, and when I do it is only for
psychological reasons. My brain, flash-frozen and bio-gridded, sits inside my
ceramal skull unchanging. All those aspects of life that I have: memory, hate,
love, curiosity, are the programs of the synaptic computer linked to that grid.
To some it nay seem that I am less than human. I have always felt that I am
more.

The
synthetic-flesh covering that sheathes my nigh indestructible ceramal skeleton
is as sensitive as I wish it to be. I can feel pain, mostly I choose not to. I
can feel and sense the world with all the acuity of any man, and more. My
vision can range from infrared to ultraviolet and my hearing can extend into
ultra and infra-sound. I am as strong a machine as mankind has ever made. I
never tire and I never grow thirsty or hungry, yet I can eat and drink and
appreciate the experience. My sense of direction sucks though, and I was
wondering just then where exactly I was in the forest.

At
about midmorning Gurt woke without fuss, drained most of a water bottle,
pressed his hand against his stomach, then went off into the forest to attend
to a call of nature I had not heard in centuries. The pack of hyenas had drawn
closer by then and I heard one of them let off a yelping wail and run yipping
into the forest. Gurt, it would seem, was not a man to be overly troubled by
the beasts of the wilderness. With his strength, I suspected, he would not be
the kind to run for the nearest tree at the sight of a lion. More likely he
would eat the lion. Sitting there waiting for him I drained what was left in
the water bottle. It looked likely to be a hot day and I might need to sweat
for appearance sake.

“Gonna
kill ‘em,” he said, coming back to the fire wiping his hands on a fist full of
leaves. This was the first sign from him that he understood my every word.

“Who?”
I asked. Perhaps he meant the hyenas.

“God
soldiers,” he said.

“Ah.”

With
that he took up two of the Opteks and expertly checked their loads. He then
strapped one of the pistol belts around himself and filled a bag with spare
ammunition for all three weapons.

“Coming?”
he asked, when he was ready.

I
went and got the APW and a spare power pack, then I followed him into the
forest. Now, I thought, it’s time I learnt something about him.

“You’re
a sauraman,” I said.

He
grunted in the affirmative.

“Are
there many more like you?”

“Three,”
said he.

“Not
many.”

“Were
nine.”

“The
God soldiers?”

“Killed
em.”

As
you may have gathered, extracting facts from Gurt was akin to extracting teeth
from a crocodile, yet, despite his monosyllabic replies, I read into him a
degree of sophistication. He had accepted me immediately, and he handled
weapons with skill and familiarity. I don’t mean to say I thought him from some
apparently civilised society like that of the families. I think he was that
most precious of individuals: an intelligent savage.