After a half hour of quiet, he resumed his customary internal discourse. “So, as I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted: this guy watches the truck drive off, absolutely flabbergasted, and finally pulls himself together and calls the cops. They come, he tells, and they’re very professional. ‘We have to have some kind of lead. Did you dig the license number?’ ‘No. All I saw was that hairy elephant.’ ‘What kind of truck was it?’ ‘I don’t know. All I could look at was that goddam mammoth.’ ‘All right, what kind of mammoth was it?’ ‘You mean there’s different kinds?’ ‘Why yes. The Asian mammoth has big floppy ears. The American mammoth has small, tight ears. Which kind did this one have?’”
He fell asleep on that question.
He was awakened by a tumult. He scrambled to his feet, opened the palace door and looked out. The kampong was jammed with Maori; shouting, singing, stamping, pounding drums. The twelve tribal chiefs were advancing, carrying Te Uinta’s six-foot royal shield and royal spear, both of which Winter recognized instantly.
“Ears! Ears!” he muttered. “How could I tell? That goddam mammoth was wearing a stocking over his head.”
That was his last clutch on Solar English. Now he was completely reverted, thinking and acting in Maori. He stepped outside the door, naked and regal, and when the delegation arrived, he touched each chieftain on the heart, murmuring the formal greeting. They shouldered the shield and he permitted himself to be raised onto it, standing tall and unafraid for all to see.
He was carried the full circuit of the kampong three times, and the excitement was deafening. The shield was lowered to the ground and still he stood, proud and expectant. A priest—actually a shaman—appeared for the unction, carrying an urn of oil. Long-buried memory stirred, and Winter knew it was the fat from his adoptive father’s body. He was anointed; top of head, eyes, sunburst cheeks, breast, palms and loins.
“Now is crowned King of the Seven War Canoes,” the shaman shouted. “Of Hawaiki, Apai, Evava, and Maori. R-og Uinta, son and next heir to our last king departed.”
Te Uinta’s diadem, a wide band of silver and jet threads, was bound around Rogue’s head.
“He and no other!” the shaman challenged.
Dead silence.
The chieftains advanced and placed Te Uinta’s royal fighting spear in Rogue’s hand like a scepter, and there was pandemonium. Now he must go out to kill a mammoth single-handed and prove his royal right to rule.
The Ganymede mammoth is yet another example of cosmic eccentricity (Demi Jeroux prefers to call it “The Cosmic Marâtre”) aided and abetted by Man.
One of the Solar’s favorite foods (barring kinky religious sects) is pork. Now pigs are wonderful people. They’re bright, active, and superbly adaptable. They really don’t want to lie in a coma and stink; it’s only the ones gorged on garbage and fattening in muddy styes that do. Anyone who’s ever seen a clean, active sow galloping happily in a meadow, surrounded by a cluster of her playful piglets, knows that. Unhappily, when pork is bred for weight, it must wallow in mud to support its mass, and it snores and stinks to high heaven, which is how most of us see pigs.
But a Dome can’t cope with animal stenches (it has enough trouble coping with people) so the breeders and butchers appealed to the genetic mavins to engineer a hog species that could survive in paddocks outside a Dome in the near-anaerobic, murderous Ganymede environment.
The genetic engineers were delighted with the odd challenge and selected the Tamworth, one of the oldest breeds of pigs, as the best candidate. The Tamworth is hardy, active and prolific, and closely related to the wild boar. The head, body, and legs are long, and the ribs deep and flat. Its disposition leaves much to be desired.
The geneticists back-bred the Tamworth; that is, reversed the development of the pig back to its wild origins by selective breeding, while they evolved its hardiness into a tolerance for anaerobic conditions, rooting for oxygen among other needs. The result was the Ganymede “Astroboar” which was raised at minimum cost and sold to the Solar at fashionable prices. It was advertised with:
DO NOT BE A PARTY-POOPER!
ASTROBOAR WILL MAKE HOSTS SOOPER!
And:
NO FATSO
NO SALTSO
NO CHOLESTER ALSO
LIVE LONGER ON THE HOG
LIVE HIGHER ON ASTROBOAR
An occasional pig would break out of a paddock and take to the rills. The breeders shrugged. It wasn’t worthwhile chasing them and anyway they were bound to die, but here the Cosmic Caper took a hand. Somewhat like those first primal fish stranded on beaches by the ebbing tide and surviving nevertheless, these rare independents survived nevertheless, rooting the frozen terrain for subsoil mosses and lichens. They lived precariously, they encountered each other, they mated, many died, the most adaptable evolved into the strange breed that Ganymede calls The Mammoth.
Actually, they’re more a gigantic wild boar than elephant. They can stand nearly two meters high at the shoulder, whereas the original Mammuthus stood closer to four. Their ears are elephantine to absorb as much sunlight as possible. They’re hairy, like the woolly mammoth. Their upcurved tusks are enormous for rooting in frozen soil.
The original Tamworth breed was omnivorous and so are the Ganymede mammoths, plus the fact that survival desperation has turned them cannibal. In temperament they’re pure wild boar; irascible, vicious, attacking. They reduce survival to a deadly bottom line.
This was the half-ton number that Winter had to track and kill. “And I don’t even like pork,” he thought.
He was in a vacsuit, helmeted, air-tanked, carrying the long-bladed hunting spear and belted with a Slice Knife to bring the heart back as a trophy, and then eat for its sympathetic magic. The Maori wanted their ruler to acquire the wild ferocity of the mammoth, which is why tradition demanded the kill once a year.
“And which is ridiculous for me,” Winter argued. “I’m a sissy Solar.” But he was talking to himself in Maori.
The terrain was lunar and jagged; mantle rock, shale, slate, igneous outcrops, black obsidian—a glassy souvenir of Ganymede’s volcanic past—the splintered cleavages revealing the sickly white remains of mineral-anabolic fungi; one of the foods the mammoth feed on in addition to themselves. (Give life one chance in a thousand, and it will seize it and never let go.)
An hour out of the Dome, Winter came across the first mammoth sign, droppings in the form of conical pats. The mammoth feeds and excretes constantly. He followed the trail cautiously, saw it joined by others, and came at last to a shallow crater scattered with pats.
He grunted. “Mammoth kampong.”
Then the hunter took over. “Mistake Te Uinta made. They all make, and get killed. You don’t go in after the mammoth; you’re fighting his savvy. Make him come after you and fight yours. Yes.”
A glance at the sinking spotlight sun and giant limb of Jupiter on the horizon. An hour until the three-day night began. Enough time before the quasi-nocturnals came out to feed.
He backtracked, searching, and located a small crater with a ten-foot-high rim. Meteor impact, probably. The crater floor was cracked, crazed schist. He nodded, loped to the obsidian outcrop he had passed and collected long glass splinters, careful not to pierce his vacsuit. With his metal soles he kicked and shattered off even longer stalacts. These he planted in the crazed cracks of the crater floor, close to the ten-foot rim. It was a bed of spikes awaiting a fakir.
He stood erect, breathed hard, swallowed saliva and tried to fill the attached urine sac. He reached back over his shoulder and opened the tank valve to full blast until the vacsuit stretched to Santa Claus dimensions. He bent forward, dove a hand through the taped anal flap and whipped the urine sac between his legs and out. By the time he had the flap resealed and the air pressure adjusted, his urine was frozen.
Winter climbed over the ten-foot crater rim and trekked back to the mammoth kampong, dropping chips of his urine which he cracked off with the Slice Knife. The kampong was still emp
ty, but the sun had set, the stars were brilliant, and Saturn dominated the sky, looking like a lobed light bulb, the rings not quite distinguishable to the unaided eye. Winter dumped the last of his urine, ground his soles into it, and tramped more trail back to the outer edge of the crater rim. There he waited with spear and knife.
He was forced to stand; that brief exposure had frostbitten his rump painfully.
He waited, keeping faith with the territorial challenge of alien urine.
He tested the spear shaft. It was spun glass and had the strength and resilience of a vaulting pole.
He waited.
He collected a small pile of rounded stones which would not tear his gloves.
He waited.
He waited.
A bull boar came at last, snuffling silently at the urine défi, icy iron hair bristling, bloody crusted eyes rolling, flap ears vibrating, giant tusks gleaming in the starlight, half a ton of mammoth menace. Winter picked up a stone, threw it hard and missed. He threw three more before he hit the beast and caught its angry attention. Winter leaped, waved, threw another stone, darted forward, shook the spear, darted back and threw still another stone which caught the mammoth full on the snout.
The beast finally made the furious connection and charged, tail up, head lowered, tusks poised to rip from crotch to neck. It took all Winter’s nerve to freeze and observe the attack like a matador estimating the speed of his enemy. At the last possible moment he turned, sprinted three steps, and pole-vaulted over the crater rim to land just beyond the bed of glass spikes. He spun around on his knees. The mammoth had pursued him, scrambled over the rim, and plunged into the spike bed. It was thrashing in agony from a dozen stabs piercing the soft belly. Its blood was freezing as it poured out.
Winter got to his feet, looked for the spear, then remembered it had dropped outside the crater rim. He shuddered slightly, realizing the risk he had run. If the beast hadn’t fallen onto the spikes…! Anyway, there was no need to administer a finishing stroke; the mammoth would be dead in a matter of minutes.
He watched the violent death. Then his sharp vigilance was caught by flying stone fragments. He looked. It was the bull’s sow, struggling over the edge of the crater rim. She had followed at a slower pace.
The sow slid down the inner wall, rolled safely against the last standing spikes, smashing them flat, and was on her legs, another half-ton of fury. Winter felt a grinding inside him; this was vero hand-to-hand, a true test, and with the deadliest opponent of all, a sow-bitch.
The beast came at him, trampling and spurning the twitching body of the bull with her chisel hooves. Her mouth was gaping, showing huge, jagged teeth which could crack rock. Winter teetered back and forth in half-steps, trying to time the momentum of her charge. He held his arms high, flashed them down when the jaws were a foot away, seized her heavy ears and yanked himself up and over the snout in a half-gainer like a Cretan bull-dancer, and was mounted on the sow’s back, clutching the thick hair.
She bucked, pitched, and yawed high in the light gravity. He held fast with legs and one hand while with the other he drew the Slice Knife. He cut the lady’s throat.
He brought both hearts back to the Maori dome spitted on the blade of Te Uinta’s spear.
It was a joyous celebration. Winter was the first ever to bring off a double kill, and that was welcomed as a glorious omen. He was indeed Double-King R-og, and the proof was the two hearts roasting over a fire.
There were drums pounding, not in classic Terran 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 rhythms, but in traditional Maori style which has no regular beat because they’re telling a story, with punctuation, pauses, comments and elaborations.
There were girls and women dancing, again not in structured Terran steps. They too were acting out ancient Maori sagas with symbolic gestures telling of wars won, enemies conquered, heroes mating and producing mighty child-men who would someday lead the Maori to even greater victories.
There was feasting; young crocodile, probably stolen from the Afro Domes, anaconda, ten-pound frogs, imported shark, mule, and barbecued mammoth. No point in leaving those two carcasses for their friends and relations to devour. And there was opium and hemp bought from the Turkish Domes.
With exquisite timing, before the festival could start falling apart, the shaman conducted Winter to the platform on which he’d been crowned, standing on his father’s shield. Now the two mammoth hearts were roasting on it. This was the climax.
The shaman bowed, stepped down, and joined the tribal chiefs circling the earthen dais. Winter picked up the spit, burning his hands but refusing to flinch before his people. He took a giant bite out of the first heart, chewed the scorching meat, again without flinching, and swallowed. Pandemonium! He repeated the ritual with the second heart but this time the joy was cut off in mid-shout. He looked around at his people in amazement and then at the shaman and chieftains who were backing away from the dais in terror.
“What?” he called.
The shaman could only point at Rogue’s feet.
He looked down. The platform was crawling with small living things emerging from the earth. They had no discernible shape. They were grey, hairy mounds that seemed to blunder aimlessly in search of something.
“Mammoth souls!” a horrified voice cried from the crowd. “They’re the mammoth souls. Souls of the royal kills.”
Winter was badly shaken by this unknown but couldn’t reveal it. Certainly a king couldn’t back away in fright. In the heavy silence, he repeated the ceremonial eating of the hearts, replaced the spit, turned and strode slowly and proudly off the dais, never deigning to look down at the mysteries creeping underfoot. Yael says it was a superb performance, and back in the royal palace he congratulated Rogue.
“Thanks, Jay. My God, I was scared.”
“So was I.”
“D’you believe in life after death? Ghosts? Revenants? That sort of occult?”
“Certainly not for animals.”
“Me neither. Then what were those things crawling around my feet? Not mammoth souls.”
“We’ll find out,” Yael said. “I’ve got one.”
“What?”
“I grabbed a ‘soul’ when we started back to the palace.”
“Where is it?”
“Right here.”
Yael opened his ceremonial cloak, shook a fold, and down dropped a small, grey, hairy mound which began an uncertain crawling. “Looks like mammoth hide,” Yael murmured. He touched the top of the creeping mound, explored gently, twitched it once and then picked it up, revealing what was underneath.
“Why, it’s a baby horseshoe crab covered with mammoth hide,” he exclaimed.
“Don’t touch it,” Winter said sharply. “That’s no baby crab. It’s a mature Kring centipede with a carapace, and it’s deadly poisonous.”
Yael jerked back out of danger. Winter stood up and crushed the creature with one powerful stamp of his shod foot. Then he began to pace.
“So that’s the picture,” he said at last.
“What picture, son?”
“Look at it, Jay. Kringpedes are underground types. What’s under the kampong and dais?”
“The Dome power plant.”
“So they came up from there.”
“It seems likely.”
“Where they could be caught, put into mysterious costume, and teased into burrowing up to me on the dais.”
“That’s rather extreme, son.”
“Jay, an overt hit on me was tried before I was crowned. They still want me wiped but now that I’m official royalty it can’t be overt anymore. There’d be hell to pay.”
“True.”
“Then how about a poisoning by dead souls? King R-og must have offended the gods and been punished. The superstitious Maori would buy that and make no objections to his succession.”
“That terrorist group again?”
“Still, Jay, still.” He shook his head doggedly. “I’ve got to settle this or there’ll never be peace.”
/>
“Have you any idea who they are, Rogue?”
“Not the faintest.”
“Then how can you settle it?”
“I’m going down into the power plant after them. That’s strictly off-limits, so it’s probably their cell. Certainly they sent the doom of the gods up from there. See you, Jay,” and he was gone.
The plant was an enormous dark cellar crowded with what seemed to be upright steel boilers with friendly arms around each others’ shoulders. In fact they were the linked energy units, all in locked armor casing to protect them from damage and tampering. Lantern light glowed near the center of the plant, but Winter’s view was blocked by the silhouetted boiler units. He advanced silently, threading and twisting through the maze, one hand on the hilt of the ritual Slice Knife which he still wore. The sound of low voices came; then full view.
Three women and two men around a lantern in close conference. His heart wrenched and he shook his head again. “But I should have guessed,” he thought. The women were his stepsisters. Winter stepped forward into the lantern light, making no attempt to walk silently. The five turned and saw who it was. There was a long moment of confrontation. All of them understood.
Winter motioned to the men. “Go,” he said. “This is a family affair.”
The men hesitated until his sisters nodded. Winter and the women were left alone.
After another silence he said, “I should have known when you didn’t show at the coronation, but I was occupied with so many new things.”
No answer.
“Kuiti, Tapanu, Patea, you’re all looking well.”
They were; tall, handsome women in their late forties, starting to grey, not yet gone to fat.
“But why? Why?”
“We are the only true bloodline.”
THE DECEIVERS Page 7
