Africa Zero (13 page)

“Hold
it right there, you bastard!”

I
spun round, slipped, and tried to catch hold of a branch. The branch snapped
and I fell backwards off the log to land with a heavy thump.

When
I came up spitting leaves from my mouth I said, “I suppose you’ve been waiting
for that for a long time?”

Jethro
Susan’s laughter was music.

I
was twenty metres up in the branches of a prairie elm—a splicing of elm,
redwood, and stinging nettle—and so intent on collecting the microscopic seeds
of the orchid that I didn’t notice the men until they were below me. As soon as
I heard the voices I looked down and instantly became curious: I did not
recognise the uniform, though it had parallels in the far distant past, and as
far as I knew no-one on Earth had been taking slaves for at least a hundred
years.

There
were four men dressed in black, with skirted helmets of mirror metal on their
heads, and rapid-fire projectile weapons in their hands. They were guarding a
neck-yoked and manacled party of about twenty ragged men and women. These
people were loaded down with equipment that I focused in on and identified as a
variety of fuel-driven cutting implements. I watched them pass under the tree
then after securing my sampling pack to a branch, I scrambled to the ground and
followed.

The
buzz of the chain saws located the group for me when for a short time I lost
sight of them, and if that had not been enough the fall of a hundred-foot elm
would have been. I sneaked in close and watched them from a ridge tangled with
lianas and infested with poisonous spiders the size of apples. The creatures
were tenacious, but after testing their fangs on my skin a few times they soon
lost interest.

The
slaves, now freed from their yokes but still manacled, were stripping the
branches from the elm and cutting away the top shattered section. The guards
had seated themselves at a vantage and were smoking something which, by the
giggles, I figured was not tobacco. I settled down to watch, only mildly
annoyed at the destruction of this fine tree. The loss of one or two of them
would be no problem, but if these people went into wholesale lumber-jacking I
knew I would have to do something. The tree orchid had only just managed to get
a foothold here.

In
the hour that followed they cut the tree into thirty-foot sections then split
it into rough planks as thick as a man’s body. When these were stacked, one of
the slaves approached the guardsmen. Something was said, perhaps about the work
being completed, and one of the guardsmen rose and followed the slave back to
the tree. When he got there he walked to one of the slaves who was lying on the
ground, stood over him, and began shouting. This second slave slowly dragged himself
upright and as he did so I noticed the other guardsmen had risen and were
approaching also. When I turned my attention back to the first guard I saw him
strike the slave in the belly with his weapon. I don’t know what came over me
then. I should not have interfered. I rose from my bed of spiders and began
walking down the slope. The guards saw me immediately, and grouped together to
watch me approach. Their stance was hesitant at first, then after something was
said, casually arrogant.

“Good
morning,” I said.

A
guard, with burnt-black skin and a ginger goatee, grinned with wide white teeth
and turned to one of his companions. This one was a short bow-legged bushman.

“The
Lord Provides,” he said.

The
bushman looked at me warily then pointed his weapon at me. I did not consider
this a civil greeting and considered killing him, but my curiosity was roused,
and dead men don’t answer questions.

“There’s
no need for that,” I said mildly.

“You
are correct,” said ginger beard. “You have come here unarmed to offer your
services to the Drowned God. Why should we threaten you?” As he said this his
companions moved forwards and ranged themselves about me. I kept a wary eye on
the bushman as he moved close in to my left.

“Drowned
god?” I wondered.

“You
are unenlightened,” said ginger beard. “Enlighten him, Chakra.”

The
rifle butt struck me in the base of the spine and bounced. Chakra swore as I
turned towards him. He hurriedly stepped back. I snatched his rifle from his
hands before he could get too far and snapped it in half, then I turned back to
ginger beard. He now had his weapon pointed at me, as did the rest of them.
Some new religious cult, I surmised. There seemed little more worth learning. I
regretted the impulse that had brought me to this confrontation, and I was
annoyed by the predictable behaviour of these men.

“Who
are you?” asked ginger beard.

“I
am sometimes referred to as the Collector. Now, I merely came down here to ask
who you are and how many of these trees you intend to take down.”

“We
will take as many as the Bishop requires.”

I
noticed that the bushman’s face had taken on an unhealthy pallor, as had the
face of the one white-skinned guard. They, I assumed, were the only two that
knew of me.

“Sir,”
said the whitey. “It would be best not to take this any further.”

“Yes,
you are perhaps right,” said ginger beard, and put three rapid-fire shots into
my chest.

I
staggered back and swore. Now I was really annoyed. There had been no need for
that. As I regained my balance I saw the bushman sprinting away just as fast as
he could and whitey backing away nervously. I stepped forward as ginger beard
fired again, took his rifle off him and swung it in a short arc ending at his
companion’s head. With a crunch that one’s head deformed and he dropped to the ground.
Before ginger beard could react, I took hold of the front of his uniform,
lifted him off the ground, and looked round at whitey. He turned and ran.

“Now,”
I said. “I would like some answers. What is this wood for? And where is it to
be taken?”

He
made some gagging sounds so I lowered him to the ground so he could reply.

“The
wood... is for the Cathedral to the Greater God. It goes south... south into
Cuberland.”

“I
see, now, your uniform. I do not recognise it.”

“We
are soldiers in the Army of God,” he replied, as if this was meant to impress
me.

“How
many trees do you intend to cut down in this region?”

“The
cathedral is a great work!”

“How
many trees?”

“I
don’t know.”

“How
large is this army of god?”

He
did not seem inclined to reply to this question so I reached out with my other
hand and snapped his wrist. After he’d stopped yelling, he became a little more
co-operative.

“We
are... five thousand.”

“And
presumably there is a priesthood as well?”

“Yes
... I do not know how many... Please! I don’t know.”

That
seemed about as much as I needed to know so I then checked through his pockets
until I found a set of rough-cast keys. These I tossed to the slave who had not
yet dared to rise from the ground. He grinned at me viciously, selected a key,
then unlocked his manacles. As soon as he had done this he tossed the keys to
another of the slaves and rushed to pick up one of the weapons.

“What
are you doing? They are the property of the Drowned God!”

I
considered killing him then and there, but after looking round at the gathering
slaves I realised that here were people more eager for the job. I threw him
down in the dirt and wandered over to have a look in the packs the guards had
left at their vantage.

The
first two packs I opened contained nothing but food and spare ammunition. The
third pack I opened contained a much thumbed book written in Urtak Swahili.
From this I discovered the doctrine of the Drowned God and found it little
different from all the forms of fundamentalism I had encountered down the years.
The whole mess was a weird distortion of Christianity. Their god was called
Jesu Christos. There was no trinity. Their main icon was the chair he was
drowned in by John Batiste. He died for our sins apparently. I thought him a
bit premature. As I speed-read this book I kept an eye on the slaves and saw
that out of one of the planks they had made a pole with a suspicious-looking
spike carved on the end. This they had set in the ground and were meticulously
sanding and removing the tip of the point from. Ginger beard was lying on the
ground tied to a plank and weeping. I opened the last pack to see what else I
could find.

The
last pack contained all sorts of strange paperwork. There was a list of
punishments for crimes ranging from heresy to petty theft. The cult of the
Drowned God was very big on severe punishment. It looked to me as if ginger
beard was about to get number twenty-four on the list: the punishment for
assaulting a soldier of the army of God. I watched them as they greased the end
of the spike with lubricant removed from the cutting implements. As they
started to strip off ginger beard’s clothes I wandered over and methodically
smashed the saws. These at least would not be used to cut down any more trees.
The chief slave approached me when I had finished.

“Collector,
we thank you,” he said with a bow.

“Think
nothing of it,” I said as ginger beard was carried screaming to the spike with
ropes tied to his ankles. “Why did you blunt it?” I asked.

“A
sharp spike will penetrate vital organs and he would die too quickly. This way
it will take him days.”

“I
see,” I said as I went to collect my specimen pack. Behind me the screams
reached a crescendo then became interspersed with agonised groans. I felt
nothing.

* * *

My
next encounter with those who styled themselves The Army of God was not long
after my first and not wholly unexpected. I had remained in and about the
forest of elms to await developments. I had no doubt that a report of my
actions would reach the Clergy, though not necessarily from the escaped
soldiers—such men might not consider it politic to be the bringers of such bad
news, it might be unhealthy for them.

This
time it was no guard detail leading slaves that came to the forest but a
disciplined military unit of twenty-five men and women.

I
watched their cautious approach from deep in the forest, hidden in the shade of
dark-green cycads. I considered coming out to face them but numbering their
weapons I decided against this. Hits from such weapons would be unlikely to
kill me, but the bullets could entirely strip my outer covering and I would
then have a long trek to one of the complexes to get another. It was fear of
inconvenience rather than fear of death that caused me to stay hidden.

After
removing their comrade from his stake—I believe he had finally died sometime
the night before their arrival—the unit methodically searched the area. This
they did for three days before setting up permanent camp on the edge of the
forest. I watched as radio messages were passed, then watched again as on the
morning of the third day another guard detail came into the area with a couple
of hundred slaves. Many of the slaves carried nice gleaming chain saws with
ceramal teeth and compact power-dyn engines. I reckoned these had come from one
of the corporate families and felt a hint of unease. What, I wondered, had been
bartered in exchange for these tools? Most Earth-bound organisations had no
currency to interest those hugely wealthy satellite-based families. It was
perplexing, and whereas I had been about to intervene and ask about the cutting
of trees, I held back. This was fortunate. Over the next two days I came to
notice that though most of the soldiers carried rapid-fire Opteks, there were
others amongst them who carried weapons I at first could not identify. I was
wondering if perhaps some group, separate from the families, had reinvented the
QC laser, when my wonderings were answered.

Though
worn to the bone by their treatment there was still spirit in some of the
slaves. I recognised some of them by tribal marking and physical
irregularities. There were proud people here only awaiting their chance. It was
in the night that some of them took that chance.

Being
very much a spectator in all things, I had flicked my vision over to infrared,
and secured myself in the top of an elm to watch for the night. The moon, with
its face ordered and cut like an integrated circuit, was full, but more often
than not clouds obscured its light. I suppose it had not occurred to the guards
that it wasn’t a good idea to provide the slaves with tools that could cut
through their forged ironchains as easily as they cut the wood of the trees. A
chain saw started in the middle of the night and of a sudden there was chaos
down below. Slaves were bolting into the forest and guards were running back
and forth and shouting. Then there was a stuttering purple flash and I saw a
man momentarily silhouetted before he disintegrated. Abruptly I felt quite
vulnerable up in my tree. Someone had provided these people with weapons that could
kill me. I was less than amused as I descended from the tree and crept into the
shadows, and more than a little confused: like the chainsaws, such weapons had
to come from one of the corporate families. Perhaps one of them had some sort
of agenda beyond sacred profit.

* * *

Stalking
away from the camp in the darkness I extended the range and depth of my
hearing, as well as my sight, as a precaution. I heard him before I saw him. It
was the severed metre of chain he held in his right hand that I heard clinking
in the night. He was one of the slaves who had escaped. This much was obvious.
One of the ‘Army of God’ would not have been slinking in the bushes like this.
He was almost certainly going to attack me.

It
is a fact, unfortunate to many, that I do not hold human life in high regard.
Let’s face it: evolution has provided human beings with a more than adequate
facility for survival. This is why the culling of the human race had become a
necessity within the history of my span; why the Great African Vampires had
been engineered to feed on human beings; and why human beings had been
engineered into the vampiric Pykani so they could feed on easily renewable
resources like mammoth blood. The cull had saved us as a race by freeing
sufficient resources to enable us to get into space and find lebensraum there.
Us ... how readily I use that word: I who ceased to be human a thousand years
ago.