Africa Zero (2 page)

I
began to get annoyed. “Madam, either you are going to shoot or not. I tire of
this ridiculous megalomaniacal badinage. What is it to be?” By this time I had
turned side-on to her and was ready to move.

“Wait,”
she sounded unsure now, but the rifle did not waver.

“You
are—” I began, then mid-sentence I was springing sideways. Her gun flashed.
There was surprisingly little concussion at her end, but half a metre from my left
shoulder a proximity-shell burst and I felt lumps of shrapnel impacting on my
skeleton. Then I was heading straight at her. She re-aimed. I moved aside again
and the shell went off somewhere behind me. Then I was on her. I brought her
down, knocked the rifle away, then caught her right arm as it raked for my face
like a grapple. In that moment my eye-shutters clicked down. Her expression
became one of angered horror. I saw it through a grid. My eyes were then
mirrored spheres. As the inferior motors of her arm whined in protest at my
grip and she battered at me ineffectually with her left fist of flesh I
considered what to do next. Normally my reaction to threat is to kill its
source, but she had been genuinely concerned about the mammoth, and for that I
decided to be forgiving. I stood and hoisted her to her feet. She continued to
struggle and then kicked me in the synthiflesh genitals.

When
I showed no reaction she slumped, panting, and watched me warily.

“I
experience no pain,” I said, and the storm shutters came up, “but I can be
damaged aesthetically.” I then considered releasing her and in that moment the
motors of her arm whined loudly. Obviously I had not been getting through to
her. She would get it in a moment. I remained still. She continued to struggle
for a moment, a mad look on her face, then she looked down at her wrist in
disbelief. The penny dropped. She ceased to struggle.

“Please
do not kill Jethro Susan,” came a lisping voice from nearby.

I
looked round, then up at a dark form crouching on one of the stunted boughs of
the baobab. The shape opened out and launched with a silent flap of its batlike
wings and dropped down to my right. A Pykani: mahogany black leaning to
translucence, a childlike body, shaped orange hair, and the white tips of fangs
projecting over her bottom lip. She folded her wings on landing and made a
curious warding gesture towards the felled mammoth.

“I
consider a serious attempt on my life fair reason to kill the one who makes
that attempt,” I said, testing.

The
Pykani advanced until she was looking up at me. “But as we both well know,
no-one has made a serious attempt on your life in many hundreds of years,
Collector.”

“Spitfire,”
I said, recognising this Pykani and incidentally noting the look of shock
appear on Jethro Susan’s face.

“Will
you release Jethro Susan?”

I
looked at the woman. “As long as she promises to make no further attempt on
me.” She nodded. I released her. She glanced to where her gun lay and decided,
prudently, to leave it there.

“That’s
why I couldn’t break your grip,” she said.

I
nodded. “Yes, your arm is necessarily limited by its anchorages. The force
required only to match mine would have ripped it from your body.” I looked at
her closely. “I presume it is only your arm that is synthetic?”

She
shook her head. “Most of the right hand side of my torso,” she touched her
breast self-consciously, “and my right leg below the knee.”

I
turned to Spitfire. “You sent for me.”

“Yes,”
said the Pykani, “and you have come, Collector.”

“Someone,
or something, is killing the mammoth,” I stated.

Spitfire
flared her wings and made that warding gesture again. “Let us leave this place
of death and I will tell you woes, Collector.”

I
turned away and headed back to the mammoth to get my shirt and pack. When I
returned to them Jethro Susan had retrieved her rifle and shouldered a pack of
her own.

“Come
south. We will await you, Collector and Jethro Susan,” said Spitfire, and with
that she launched herself into the air and soon was out of sight. Jethro Susan
eyed me nervously.

“I
have heard of you,” she said by way of understatement.

“Hardly
unusual,” I said and proceeded to wipe drying gore from my arms and chest with
handfuls of moss.

“I
apologise for the mistake I made.”

“Accepted.”

“Why
am I still alive?”

I
considered that, wondering just what she had heard about me. I decided to
answer her honestly.

“You
are alive because your threat to me was out of anger for the mammoth and
because I managed to disarm you before you could cause me further damage. Had I
a weapon you would have been dead. Had your motives been otherwise you would
have been dead.”

“Clear
enough,” she said, her face white.

I
thought then how difficult it must be for mere mortals to meet a living legend
and hated myself for the conceit. After wiping myself down as best I could I
inspected myself and decided it was not enough, and folded my shirt and put it
in my pack before hoisting my pack onto my shoulder. I do adhere to a certain
regimen of personal cleanliness, and this time, even though I had not used my
synthetic sweat-glands or stomach for some time, there was the smell of
putrefying blood to consider.

“Shall
we?” I said, gesturing to the south. And so we set out, leaving the vultures
and hyenas to their quarrelsome feeding.

Once
away from the blood trampled clearing I glanced at the companion I had
acquired.

“Jethro
Susan ... I take it you are from one of the corporate families?”

She
looked at me with a kind of wary awe I found both endearing and annoying.

“Yes,
the Jethro Manx Canard Combine.”

“What
brings you out here?”

She
looked at the gleaming claw of her hand. “Ten years ago I was involved in an
inter-Family conflict. I got caught on the edge of an explosion. I had to be
rebuilt like this because it seems that the boosted immune system I have makes
it nearly impossible for my body to  accept grafting. JMCC members are noted
for physical perfection. I became a pariah.”

I
glanced at her again, wondering if she was lying.

“Surely
your body will accept grafts of its own tissue, vat-grown limbs and the like?”

“No,”
she shook her head, “my immune system was boosted to cope with doppleganger
parasites. Apparently, as I grew up my tissue was marked in some way, the
genome itself . . . that mark is impossible to find let alone transcribe, what
with selfish DNA there to blur matters.”

Not
her words, but the look of bitter anger on her face, told me she was not lying.
Her words gave me pause though. Had things gone so far downhill?

“Ah,
at least you have some body,” I said by way of consolation. Not something I am
very good at.

She
looked at me. “For a moment I forgot... Collector.” She seemed to find the
honorific difficult. “Your entire body, but for your brain and some nerve
tissue is ... manufactured.”

“Fair
bit of that as well. It’s held in a mutating super-conductor web at zero K and
connected into various sensory sub systems.”

“If
you don’t mind me asking ... How old are you?”

“I
do mind.”

Which
killed that conversation stone dead. I guess we are all sensitive about
something.

Hours
of walking and pushing through tangled growth brought us to another clearing
and the flicker of a fire in evening light. Three of the Pykani were cooking
food that I assumed was for Jethro Susan. I squatted by the flames and removed
my pack. She slumped by the fire nearer to the Pykani than to me. She looked
exhausted. Only then did I realise how she must have struggled to keep with the
pace I naturally set. I looked across at Spitfire.

“Have
you water?”

The
Pykani stood, took up a gourd, and handed it to me. I washed out my mouth with
some then proceeded to wash the dried blood from my arms, my torso, and from
under my fingernails. Only when I had finished that and was pulling pieces of
shrapnel from my shoulder did anyone speak.

“You
have come,” said the Pykani next to Spitfire, who I recognised as her mate.

“Yes,”
I said, trying to remember his name. Had it been Hurricane? “How many mammoth
have been killed?”

“At
our last census it was seven hundred this way. Twenty five by other methods.”

At
that moment I remembered to turn my sense of smell back on and with it came a
flush of anger—redolent of fire smoke and the roasted mammoth flesh Jethro
Susan was eating.

“What
more can you tell me?”

“The
Silver One has been seen.”

I
closed my eyes. And it comes to this: the obligations of life eternal.

“I
will find ... that one,” I said.

Jethro
Susan looked from the Pykani to me in confusion, but I felt no urge to relieve
her of it. As I said before, there are some things to which even I am
sensitive. And there is old pain.

“The
herds move south for the winter. I take it the killer moves with them?”

“Thus
far,” said Hurricane. Yes, it was Hurricane. I looked at Spitfire. “How long
has this killing been going on?”

“This
is the second year, Collector,” she said, as wise in my ways as all the peoples
of the plains, and not prepared to ask the questions she might. It was
otherwise with Jethro Susan.

“This
Silver One... I have heard of it.”

I
looked at her and looked away. The Pykani observed her as if embarrassed by her
gaucherie, but I could see that they were eager to hear how I might reply to
her. I decided to tell them a little of it.

“It
is a call to me,” I said, “I think, perhaps, in the end this is my
responsibility. What more might call me than the killing of my mammoth?”

Jethro
Susan looked at me calculatingly then down at her silver claw. I think it was
then that she understood what the Silver One might be. The Pykani, there were
four of them, two who remained silent, looked at me with burning eyes. They had
caught the nuance: my mammoth. Again I looked at them, knowing they were owed
an explanation.

“Why
am I called Collector?” I asked.

An
old, hairless Pykani, who until then had remained silent, was quick to answer.
“You are called Collector because you collect the genetic heritage of those who
might be driven extinct. You are the curator of species—saving what might be
lost.” He looked to Spitfire. “My daughter has told me how you bearded the
Great African Vampire in his home on the ice and collected tissue from the
birth that comes after from his mate.”

I
nodded. “It has always been my purpose to preserve life.”

Jethro
Susan looked at me as if I had just told them I was a giraffe. I smiled. “Yes,
life, not individuals.” I looked back at the Pykani. “Your myths are true. I
tell you this because of your trust in me. It was I whostripped viable DNA from
the corpses of mammoth taken from the Siberian tundra and made it whole enough
to inject into the eggs of elephants.”

With
this they would have to be satisfied. I did not tell them that it was also I
who spliced human DNA with that of the vampire bat to produce a people capable
of utilising the reusable resource the mammoth represented, or that it was I
who created the Great African Vampires to cull the human race. There is such a
thing as too much knowledge. I looked to Jethro Susan and saw stunned awe
registered on her face. I had answered one of her questions. She now had some
idea of my age.

* * *

That
night I sat and watched the stars as the mutilated face of the electric moon
beamed down and Jethro Susan slept. Lost in philosophical thought I wondered
how the face of that moon, changed so certainly by the human race, might affect
the minds of all those born to see its light. It occurred to me then that I had
seen changes I had not registered until that moment. Many people now, I felt,
lived with a greater assurance of their position in the universe: a higher
sense of worth and an acceptance of responsibility. I looked at the huddled
form of Jethro Susan and realised I would have to acknowledge this and that I
could not just march south now as arbitrary judge and executioner. For the sake
of humanity, at last, I would have to delegate some of the responsibility and
accept a companion. That decision made I stared at the far stars until morning,
guessing what wonders unfolded in the colonies.

* * *

The
bloody, hung-over eye of time breached the horizon to a strident chorus of
black frogs. Knowing human frailty well, but distantly, I waited for Jethro
Susan to wake. While I waited, the Pykani returned from a night’s feeding and
flying. Shortly after they arrived, greeted me, then went to doze in the
groundsels, Jethro Susan thrashed in her sleep and grabbed at her ceramal hand
as if it were a source of torment to her, then she woke.

She
jerked and rolled over, staring at the mossy ground as her breathing quickened
with her wakening. I watched her as she coughed and spat and pushed herself
upright, and I felt a pang of something half forgotten, something human.
Bleary-eyed, she took up a gourd, drank, then looked at me.

“Do
you never sleep?” she asked me.

“Infrequently,”
I replied, then, “do you wish to come with me?” I was anxious, now that the
night had passed, to be on my way.

She
shook her head as if dispelling cobwebs before replying. “I had hoped as much.
Would I delay you?”

I
considered that. Every moment of delay would mean more dead mammoth, yet I
estimated the mammoth population to be over a hundred thousand, so they were in
no danger of extinction, though I knew that what killed them could eventually
bring them to it.

“Responsibility,”
I said, and it was a key word. I let it rest there for a moment, but I could
see she did not understand me.