Logan's Search (7 page)

As they watched, the police paravane lifted free of the plain, angled south, whirred to a tiny glinting dot in the cloudless bowl of sky, then vanished completely.

Leaving them alone.

They had been given a meager ration of water, just enough to keep them alive until the hunters picked up their trail. They wore the basic garb of the condemned: heavy shoes, thin cotton trousers, a sleeved bodyshirt, and a long-billed cap to help fend off the murderous sun. The latter was a necessity, since many bare-headed prisoners had died of sunstroke in earlier days, cheating the Masai of their kill.

There were no lions left to slay. Thus, the pride of a Masai depended on how swiftly and efficiently he could hunt down and execute a condemned man or woman.

Logan and Jessica were, of course, weaponless.

“What do they kill with?” asked Logan.

“Spears,” said Jessica. “Tribal tradition. No honor for them in anything else.” “On foot?”

“No, they ride some kind of animal.”

“Couldn’t,” said Logan. “No animals left here.” He kicked idly at a bleached buffalo bone half-buried in scrub grass.

“What difference does it make?” asked Jessica tensely. “They’re coming for us. That’s the only fact that matters.”

Logan narrowed his eyes, peering through the heat haze toward a pale blue range of mountainous hills riding the plain’s edge.

“If we can make it to those hills, we’ll have a better chance.get into the rocks and high grass.”

“Chance?” She smiled wanly. “We’ve no chance, Logan. No matter where we go they’ll find us and they’ll kill us. That’s their job and they’re very good at it.”

“Well, our job is to stay alive,” said Logan. “So let’s get moving.”

Before sentence had been passed, Logan had attempted to reach Francis, but no outside contacts were allowed prime citystate violators. He had been stripped of his DS rating and, with it, his potential admission to Godbirth. Which meant he had failed totally in his mission. Once his time had run out here, the aliens would abandon him—whether he lived or died on the Serengeti.

Logan refused to think about this. He had locked his mind on a single goal: survival. Somehow, he would outwit the hunters who stalked him. He and Jessica would survive.

With canteens slung over their shoulders, they set out across the softly rolling grassland toward the range of northern hills.

The African sun was fierce, an unwinking yellow-white eye of fire, brimming the noon sky, heat-blasting the land. To Logan and Jessica, laboring toward the dim blue hills, it was as if the door of an immense sky-furnace had been opened upon them.

Within a single mile their clothing was sweat-soaked, their ears ringing from the heat.

Logan stopped to look back, shading his eyes.

Jessica stood, head down, gasping from the fiery assault.

“They’re coming,” said Logan softly.

She blinked tears of salt from her eyes. “How many?”

“I make it…three.”

Jess nodded. “They usually hunt in a trio.”

“And you were right,” said Logan. “They are mounted. Horses, I think. Probably flown in for them.”

Logan estimated the distance left to the edge of the plain. “Cuts our time down, them having horses,” he said. “We’ll have to run. That’s the only way we’ll make it.”

“In this heat?” She stared at him. “Under this sun?”

He took a quick swallow from his canteen and capped it again. She followed his example. 

“It’s the only sun we’ve got,” he said.

“I can’t see how you expect to—”

“Don’t talk. Waste of energy.”

And he broke into a jogging trot, Jessica beside him.

On and on…across the great plain, moving around the heaped bones of elephant and oryx, using ancient trails trod by beasts a century dead, over patches of sandy loam, past solitary clumps of wind-shaped trees.

On and on.

The hills deepened in color. Closer. But the hunters were closer too—close enough now for Jessica to identify the creatures they rode.

“Marabunta!” she said, standing loosely, looking back, dragging furnaced air into her lungs.

Logan had also stopped. Now he twisted toward her, questioning the word.

“Warrior ants,” she said. “That’s what they’re called by the Masai.”

He squinted at them in disbelief. “But they—they’re the size of
horses!
”

“Could be a mutation,” said Jess. “Insects can survive when animals can’t.”

“Keep going,” Logan told her. “We can make it. We’re almost there.”

They continued to run, throats hot, tongues swollen, their eyes stinging with salt—faint with heat exhaustion. And Logan thought, This is how it was for Doyle, in the desert. Hunters behind with death in their hands and no future ahead, the sun raw on his back, pain racking his legs.

And then, in a final miraculous surge, they were into the blue hills.

Shade. Coolness. Relief.

But no time to rest.

Now a boulder-filled streambed, carpeted in dry white pebbles, with interlacing brush and trees so thickly massed that a tunnel of green formed around them; the smell of wild growth was overpowering, in direct contrast to the arid, burned-ash smell of the plain.

Into high papyrus grass, flowing up five feet above their heads, past yellow-blossomed thorn, around giant trees whose vein-tangled roots snagged at their shoes.

Now into a steep-plunging ravine, grasping at vines to slow their descent, stumbling, sliding downward along a sandy ridge.

At the bottom, in the thick dry silt, under the shade of wide high-trunked trees, they fell to their knees, fighting for breath, holding on to each other like lost children.

“Something…to…” Logan found it almost impossible to form words; his lips were split and bleeding,

“…use.”

“To use?” Jessica looked at him in confusion. “Against them…to…fight them.”

She watched him uproot one of the heavy, long-stalked reeds that grew in profusion along the side of the ravine. From his bodyshirt Logan withdrew a jagged-edged bone fragment which he’d found on one of the ancient animal trails. Using strips of vine, he lashed this sharp bone to the end of the reed.

“Spear!” He waved it in triumph.

A sudden spill of gravel and loose stones from the upper ledge of the ravine. The hunters!

Logan put a hand on Jessica’s shoulder, drawing her silently back into the blue-black shadow of the reeds.

Where they waited.

If I can get one of them with this, Logan told himself, gripping his crude weapon, then I can use his spear on the others. I can handle three of them.

But even if you’re successful, an inner voice told him, more will come. They’ll keep coming, by threes, until they kill you. No way to win. If Doyle had killed both of us back on the desert, more Sandmen would have come. The system works for the hunters, not the hunted.

No way to win.

They had circled, come in from the far side, picking their way carefully along the powdery-dry bed of the ravine, knowing that their quarry was hiding here, run to ground and exhausted, while they were fresh and full of the hunt.

They scanned every thrust of rock, every ridge, every ledge and tree shadow, spears firm in their burnished hands. It was good to hunt again, good to ride the swift marabunta after the condemned ones, good to trail and trap and kill.

Their leader was Duma, named for the cheetah. Tall and slim-bodied, as were all his people, he sat tree-straight in the ant’s high saddle, hair swinging behind his shoulders in a roped braid. Raised tribal scars marked his chest and forehead. Duma had been on many hunts, and his skill with a spear was unmatched. Never had Duma missed a living target.

He was the son of their chief, Nyoka, and proud father of the boy who rode beside him this day: eight-year-old Swala, a handsome youth, lithe and quick—and aptly named for the gazelle. This was Swala’s first hunt, and his father knew he would do well.

With them rode Nyati—the buffalo—a wise tracker who knew every vine and thorn bush, every ridge and rock and rolling green hill within the Serengeti.

Two masters—and a brave boy who hoped, this day, to become a man.

Duma smiled. The first kill I will take for myself, as elder, for this is custom on a hunt—but the second kill shall be reserved for my son. It shall be Swala’s. This had been agreed to by Nyati. The veteran tracker would hold back. For Nyati, there would be other days, other kills, as there had been before— as many as the faces of the night moon.

Beneath Duma, the marabunta paused to swing its giant clicking antennae toward a patch of reed-shadow near the inner ravine wall. The sharp clicking alerted the others.

All were stopped, eyes probing the bank.

“
There
, Father!” shouted young Swala, pointing at Jessica. “A condemned one! Behind the rock.” She stood up, poised to run, inviting the spear of Duma.

He drew back his muscled arm, spearhead glinting in the leaf-filtered sunlight banding the ravine floor. But he did not loose the weapon.

A snake-hiss of sound, and a bone-tipped reed buried itself deep in the warrior’s scarred chest just above the heartline. Silently, he toppled from the saddle.

“Father! My father!” cried Swala. He was confused and frightened; his mount swayed back nervously as he fought to control it.

Logan ignored the boy. He charged straight at the second hunter, yanking Nyati’s leg violently, pulling him from the ant’s saddle and knocking the spear from his hand.

An upper-neck chop slammed the Masai, stunned, into the silt. Logan scooped up the fallen spear, preparing to drive it into the man’s bronzed back, when he heard Jess scream, “Marabunta!”

Duma’s warrior ant was in full attack. The giant insect reared up, its shining, razored antennae slashing air, its red and black body towering directly over Logan.

He spun sideways, but his upper shoulder was opened to the bone by one of the whipping antennae. The ant moved in, sensing its advantage, jaws wide, ready to finish the kill. Again Logan pivoted, and, using his good arm, plunged Nyati’s spear into the creature’s bulbous right eye.

Incredibly, smoke and sparks poured from the wound as the creature went berserk, wildly thrashing its immense, segmented body to left and right.

A robot, marveled Logan, the thing’s a robot!

Now the frenzied ant’s left antenna swung up to knock young Swala from the saddle; the boy fell heavily to the floor of the ravine, striking his head on a silt-covered rock. He did not move as the maddened machine-creature reared up to crush him.

Logan sprang between them, driving the boy’s spear full-strength into the ant’s vulnerable underchest. The great dark insect spun crazily to smash head-on into the ravine wall, exploding as it hit, showering the area with bits of broken metal. Then it lay unmoving, silent, its clockwork interior gutted.

Logan knelt by the unconscious young Masai. Jess was already there, cradling the boy’s bleeding head.

“He’s all right,” she told Logan.

Nyati had seen it all, seen what this brave white condemned one had done. He had saved Swala’s life.

He had slain the marabunta.

Nyati had seen, and he would remember.

He would never forget.

The trip across the hot plain to the Masai village was painful for Logan. His shoulder throbbed under the still-powerful afternoon sun, and the makeshift sling bandage was stiff with blood. Jessica had cleaned the wound with water from the canteens, but there was very little to be done by way of remedy until they reached the village.

Jessica rode one of the massive warrior ants with Swala, who was subdued and aloof, while Logan followed on the second machine-creature. Nyati ran lightly and easily beside him, sleek-muscled legs pistoning over the grass. The Masai was in awe of Logan and considered it an honor that the white one had chosen his mount.

A mile short of the village they were met by a horde of swift-running Masai children who circled Logan and Jessica with saucered eyes. Most of the children had never seen a condemned one alive, and certainly not astride a marabunta! Ah, what a wondrous sight this was!

By now the sun had lost most of its force. Afternoon was slowly shading into African night as they dismounted before the hut of the chief.

Nyati, who spoke both English and Swahili, would be their translator. He would tell the chief of Logan’s deeds.

“You are to wait here,” said Nyati.

And he entered the hut, pushing the reluctant Swala ahead of him. The boy did not relish facing his grandfather; in his eyes he had behaved like a child, and his grandfather would surely berate him. His father lay dead in a ravine and Swala was not yet a man. It was a day to curse forever!

Outside, the children still circled, gazing wordlessly at the white ones. The adult members of the tribe, in tall brown clusters, kept to a distance, equally curious but uncertain, awaiting the word of their chief. His wisdom would direct them. “What happens now?” asked Jessica.

“We wait,” said Logan. “We stay alive if the chief figures he owes me for saving his grandchild—but we die if he figures me a murderer for killing his son. It could go either way.”

She frowned. “Your shoulder’s bleeding again.”

“I’ll be all right,” said Logan.

They stood there awkwardly for several long minutes, their fate undecided. Logan ignored the throbbing pain in his shoulder, grateful to have reached the village, grateful for this second chance at life.

Then Nyati appeared, glancing behind him, toward the hut.

“He comes.” From the tracker’s impassive face it was impossible to guess what the chief might be planning.

Nyoka came out to meet them, looking solemn—a reed-thin, handsome man of indeterminate age, though obviously he was not young. (In this world, Logan realized, the Masai lived and died here in the Serengeti, beyond Sleep, in their own private stratum of society.)

Nyati had explained that their chief was named after the snake. “He is very wise, like the serpent of old,” the tracker had told them. “He speaks only wisdom. His words are true, always.”