Africa Zero (18 page)

“You
won’t question him now,” he said.

For
a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about, then I remembered the pilot I
had left in the tank. I tried to feel some sympathy for the man, but all that
came out was a snort as I tried to suppress a laugh.

“He
not there anymore,” said Gurt.

That
did it. I cracked and sat laughing with ash and smoke swirling about me. Gurt
looked at me in his puzzled way for a moment then he, too, started to laugh.
Eventually we staggered to our feet and headed away from the burning area. It
was only at nightfall when we sat at a fire, over which Gurt roasted half a
springbok downed by shrapnel, that he asked me what had happened.

“Some
of the families have weapons in orbit. That was the blast from a satellite sun
laser,” I explained.

“Sun
laser?” he asked.

I
wondered if he would understand. I did my best to explain.

“A
laser beam is coherent light . . . light that has all its photons travelling in
parallel. It’s usually generated by crystals that lase, like rubies...”

“Ruby
laser,” Gurt said.

“Yes
... A sun laser is a huge solar collector that focuses sunlight into one point.
At that point is something called a cohering field which does the same job as a
ruby, but in one hit. No material object would stand the temperatures involved.
Sun lasers were used in some of the big engineering projects.” I pointed at the
half moon that showed part of the labyrinthine bases on its face. “They used
them to bore the lunar caverns and to smelt the asteroids for the materials to
build bases.”

Gurt
stared at the moon as if seeing it for the first time. I realised then that I
had been right about him: he was an intelligent primitive. He had a huge
ability to learn, and to absorb information. Obviously until now he’d had few
sources of information and no teachers. I decided I should take on those roles.

“Where
do you come from, Gurt?” I asked.

“Ankatra,”
he enlightened me.

“Where
is that from here?”

He
pointed vaguely southeast.

“How
far?” I asked with infinite patience.

“Don’t
know. We in machines and rooms and I falling,” he said.

I
took that in and chewed it over. ‘Falling’ inclined me to think Gurt had at
some point been in a spacecraft or on a station.

“What
happened in the rooms?”

“They
studied us. They took bits of us away. They wanted to see how strong and how
fast we were. Horl showed them. He killed one of them. They burned him.”

“What
then?”

“We
went to sleep and woke up in a pen. We escape in the night then God soldiers
find us and shoot at us. I escape then caught and God soldiers keep me. I
escape again.”

I
had a sudden intimation of what might be going on.

“How
many of you at the colony?” I asked.

“Many
thousand,” Gurt answered proudly. It was obviously a number he had only
recently mastered.

“What
was it like there?”

“We
fighting all the time about lemu rights.”

“Lemu
rights?”

“Meat.”

Oh
hell.

“Do
you have another name for this colony?” I asked.

“Gascar,”
he replied.

I
sat back and thought about that one. The last time I had been to Madagascar
there had only been a few widely-spaced human settlements. That had been four
centuries ago. Someone had obviously made a few changes there since. I
considered all that had happened in the light of his story. Perhaps I had been
arrogant to assume that the Family gun ships had been sent to dispose of me. It
sounded to me like someone had been running a secret project, had loused, then
sent the ships in to clean up. My meeting Gurt had obviously been a large
spanner in the works. Now, whoever had been running that project, thought
myself and the sauraman dead. We had to get to JMCC. I had to find out what the
hell was going on.

* * *

Gurt
learned fast. Over the next few days I spoke non-stop on any subject that took
my interest, and anything I thought might be of interest to him. As we walked I
would point out a ruin and give him a potted history, or I would point out a
genetically-adapted plant and do the same. I told him about the Pykani and the
mammoth and one night when a devil shriek echoed down from the sky I told him
about the Great African Vampires. More and more often he asked questions, and
his questions rapidly gained coherence.

“Why
did the ice come?” he asked me one evening.

“That
was a big surprise for everyone. I told you about the resource wars and how the
Corporations took power from the Governments?”

“You
did.”

“Well,
it was the Corporations that got us into space. They knew that Earth was
getting used up. With the fossil fuels down to their last dregs they knew we’d
soon not have the resources for a concerted space-effort, and that we’d end up
trapped on Earth and knocked back into the Stone Age by repeated environmental
disasters. They made the effort and got us into space, leaving Earth to its
steady global warming. That global warming was well underway when a comet
completed its twenty-thousand year orbit and struck, right in the middle of
what was then called America—there’s nothing but volcanic islands there now.
The debris flung up brought about a darkness that lasted long enough to kill
two thirds of life on Earth. The humans and animals that survived, walked out
into the beginning of an ice age. Earth’s orbit had been perturbed enough to
bring that about.”

Gurt
quietly digested this then the questions started. I had to tell him about the
Stone Age, America, what Earth’s orbit was, and what fossil fuels were. When
the conversation got onto fossils I made the mistake of mentioning dinosaurs
and his relation to them. That conversation led on to basic genetics. He wanted
to know so much and I was forced to ask him just how much of this he was
remembering. This question puzzled him. I quizzed him about some things I had
told him the day before and he recited them back at me verbatim. I realised
then that he, like myself, did not have the capacity to forget. He took in
knowledge sponge-like. Some of the words he might not understand, but he would
not forget them and eventually he would find something to which he could apply
them.

On
our fourth day of travel we reached JMCC. The ground complex squatted on the
plain like a huge metallic crab. It was five kilometres in diameter, but less
than half-a-kilometre in height. Windows below the smooth dome of the roof
glinted like beady eyes. Off to one side,  partially hidden by the complex, was
the fenced-off landing field, a scattering of control towers, and two behemoths
of flying-wing shuttles. To the people of Earth the corporate families are
notoriously reclusive. This is only because they had no great interest in
Earth. Their interests are in the space above it. As we walked towards the
complex I explained this to Gurt and he asked me what precisely were their
interests. I told him wealth, power, pleasure—no different to the interests of
Earth people. When we were about a kilometre out, an AG ground car shot out
towards us. Things had changed somewhat since that time I came here carrying
Jethro Susan’s dying human body, before going off to hunt down a body for her
much like my own. Then, JMCC were using wheeled ground cars driven by diesel
engines. This had been the result of a slow decline in their fortunes and the
loss of certain technologies. Because of me they had those technologies back
now.

The
car drew to a halt before us, its doors hissed open, and a man and a woman in
monofilament coveralls stepped out. Both of them were helmeted and carried QC
laser carbines. The woman spoke first.

“Who
are you and what do you want?” she asked, eyeing Gurt. I, of course, looked
completely human and did not have an APW strapped across my back.

“I’m
the Collector,” I said.

She
looked at me without disbelief and centred the snout of her laser on my chest.

“I’ll
be needing proof of that, of course,” she said.

Internally
I sent a signal to a superconductor nerve nexus. The nerve interlinks to my
left hand autodetached. It went numb. I reached across and pressed the two
pressure points to break the seal, then I stripped off my hand covering. I held
up the skeletal hand of ceramal, which is mostly what I’m made of.

“You
have to understand, if you are who you say you are, that I’ll need more proof
than that. Twenty years ago the Enmarks sent an agent here with a ceramal arm.
He passed himself off as the Collector for three days and did a lot of damage
before Jethro Susan came back from her tour of the orbital stations and he was
found out...” She pointed to a distant acacia. “We nailed him there.”

“Oh
well,” I said, reaching up to my neck and pressing a sequence of soft spots.
Another internal signal caused interlinks to detach. The synthetic muscle that
gave my face expression detached as well. My face went dead and still. I pulled
it off.

It
was a good trick that I’d done many times. The expressions of the two went from
calm competence to a species of sick fear. I turned and grinned at Gurt—I
wasn’t capable of any other expression at that moment—and he grinned back. I
think he was faking it a bit.

“That’s
... fairly conclusive,” said the man.

The
woman said nothing for a moment, then, “We’ll bring you to Jethro Susan. She
will know for sure. First I’ll have that APW please ... Collector.”

I
nodded to Gurt and he handed the weapon over. We got into the ground car and
they took us into the complex. Sometimes it bugs me what I have to go through
just to prove who I am, but I guess passport photos and fingerprints are out of
the question.

* * *

It
was eighty years since I had last spoken to Jethro Susan. We’d got along fine
for about forty years then we’d just drifted apart as she developed interests
in JMCC, of which she had been a part from the beginning, and I went back to my
collecting and, as she put it, “Playing your lethal little games.” There was no
particular acrimony between us, nor did we have any great interest in each
other. I had no wish to lord it in JMCC and live mostly enclosed in metal. I
like the wildernesses of Earth. I had always liked them. Earth was mine. Since
we had gone separate ways some hundred and sixty years ago we had met on and
off about once every twenty years. Either she came to find me to get my
deciding vote on some JMCC policy decision, or I returned to the complex for
equipment, and on an occasion when a bounty hunter came after me with an atomic
shear, for repairs. The last time I came in had been to use the laboratories to
grow orchids from a speck of DNA I had extracted from an ancient bottle of
perfume, and thence from them to obtain seeds. It was those orchids that I established
in my forest.

Susan
was home this time. On the last occasion she came down in a shuttle to confirm
my identity. As the lift took us up to the Corporate boss’ apartments I felt
slightly anxious about meeting her. Gurt was back to his usual apparent reserve,
but I could see his eyes darting about as he took everything into that
wonderfully absorbent brain of his. The doors opened and we walked in with the
guards either side of us. Susan stood up from behind a desk that was a slab of
petrified wood polished to a sheen and supported in a thick water-oak frame.
She gestured at the guards.

“You
may leave us,” she said.

“Are
you sure ... ? “ asked the woman.

“I’m
sure. If anyone was to turn up now, with a sauraman, I’d have expected it to be
him,” she said wearily.

I
looked around at the room.

“You’ve
redecorated,” I said inanely.

The
circular chamber had been floored with soft-screen tiles set to react to
pressure. From each step I took ripples of coloured light spread out across the
floor. From me there were more ripples than from Gurt or the guards, but then I
weighed as much as them all together. Behind one glassed wall had been mounted
the preserved body of a female GAV with her wings spread in flight and her
fangs exposed in a snarl—at least I assume she was the real thing and not
merely a projected image. Behind the desk was a panoramic window with a view
over the curve of the dome and out over the landing field. As we walked in I
observed a heavy lifter rising under the impetus of AG, then tilting when it
was high up and accelerating away with a blast of thrusters that put a blue
flame halfway across the sky.

The
guards backed into the lift and the doors slid closed on them. I advanced to
one of the tubular glass chairs before the desk and sat down. The chair creaked
alarmingly, but managed to take my weight. Gurt looked slightly unsure of
himself for a moment, then he quickly walked forward and sat in another of the
chairs. Susan sat back down in her chair and put her feet on her desk. She
looked good: long black hair hanging loose, elfin face with azure eyes, and a
lean and boyish figure. But then, she could look just how she liked. She could
build up an  age of the body and face she wanted in her computer, sent it down
to the synthetics department, and have a new body covering ready for her in a
couple of days. Underneath she was like me; a skeleton of ceramal filled with
hardware that was ancient, yet state-of-the-art, as the art had yet to be
improved on.

“Well?”
she asked me.

“There’s
an Army of God out there that considers me a demon. There’s thousands of
sauramen living on Madagascar. Gurt here is an escapee from some sort of Family
study or assessment of his kind. Me and him have been ducking APWs, gun ships,
and one satellite strike over the last week or so. How are things with you?” I
said.

She
looked very carefully at Gurt and ignoring my sarcasm said, “Family project?”