23
TOKSVILLE
Set against a backdrop of somber mountains, the City of the Tok gleamed like an icefall in the midmorning light. No, thought Bucky, that’s too weak a word for it. It blazes. Scintillates. Beams. Fulgurates. At this distance, the very shapes of the buildings were obscured by spicules of light that leaped and danced from the city. Beside him, Dawn breathed shallowly, holding his hand.
“My God,” Buck said. “Is it built of diamonds?”
“Not entirely,” said Clickrasp. “Mainly daub and wattle, but every house has a diamond or two set in the walls. It creates rather a pleasing effect, don’t you think? Particularly in this light.”
“Rather,” Buck answered sourly.
“Yes, the stones are fairly common in this vicinity. Not much utility to them, but my people have a deep aesthetic sense, and our craftsmen are expert at cutting and polishing. We use them for urban decoration, and in some of our weapons. But apart from that they are of little value in our economy, which as I explained is still basically on the hunting and gathering level. Well, shall we get on? I’m sure the damsels of Tok are eagerly awaiting your arrival, Bwana Buck.” He smiled mischievously and stepped out.
Yes, the damsels of Tok, Bucky thought. After a dinner last evening of broiled pangolin and stewed monkey brains, Clickrasp had explained to them the reason for their capture. They were reclining around the fire, Bucky and Dawn wrapped under the leopard-skin rug, Clickrasp playing a casual game of mumblety-peg with his diamond-bladed knife. His phallus was still in a splint, though he claimed it felt much better this evening than last.
“As you may have surmised,” he began, “we Tok are not of the same species as you Homo sapiens. I’ve studied as many anthropological texts as I could procure, during various raids, and have concluded that we are the last of the line called Homo erectus. No puns, please. The only true test of specific difference between animals of the same genus, of course, is whether or not members of the opposite species can ‘breed true.’ That is to say, Dawn and I might well be able to produce a child between us, but would that child then be able to reproduce itself? If so, we are of the same species, regardless of any apparent difference in physiology, such as size, color of skin, amount of body hair, even so striking a difference in kind as this.” He slapped his cock, then winced. “But if the child proved sterile, then we are definitely of different species. The mule, as you well know, is the classic example of this natural law. Product of the horse, Equus caballus, and the donkey, Equus asinus, the poor chap is larger than both its parents, a trait known commonly as ‘hybrid vigor,’ but unfortunately is doomed to a childless life. Sterile as a surgeon’s gloves.” He smiled sadly and shook his head in lamentation for the miserable mule.
“A long time ago,” he continued, “up until the days of my great-grandfather’s rule, we routinely mated with our captives of your species. Yes, and we produced offspring. But those offspring were sterile. So sad. You see, we Tok revere children far more than we do, say, diamonds. Yet the ‘mules’ that dropped from these couplings were colossal creatures. Larger even than the Watutsi of Rwanda and Burundi. But muscled like Tok. Very strong indeed. And smart? You wouldn’t believe it. One of them, a young lady named Ygrxx, once memorized the entire first volume of the Britannica between breakfast and lunch.
“You may have noticed that our heads are larger, proportionally and in true displacement, than yours. My measurements show that the average Tok brain displaces two thousand cubic centimeters, while the average Homo sapiens cranium contains only fifteen hundred. Our musculature is also superior to yours, despite our smaller size. In my youth, if you’ll pardon the boast, I could bench-press four hundred and fifty pounds. And I stand only four foot eight. So you can imagine what the hybrid vigor of these sapiens-erectus crosses would be like. These ‘wise-peckers’ as one might call them.”
He paused again, scraped a tendril of cold, congealed cerebral matter from a monkey skull that lay beside the fire, and sucked it from his fingernail.
“And now a brief digression,” he continued. “You’ve doubtless wondered how it is that I, a prehuman by your standards, came to speak fluent English and to acquire such a fund of botanical, zoological, and anthropological lore. The answer: Mungo Park.” He waited, smiling tentatively, to see if the name meant anything to them. Bucky nodded slowly. Mungo Park, first great English explorer of Africa, the Scots physician who settled the question of the Niger, then returned to Africa and disappeared at the falls of Busa in 1806.
“My great-grandfather captured Dr. Park,” Clickrasp went on. “Rather than eat him on the spot—he and his hunting party were sated with the brains of an elephant they had killed the previous day—my worthy ancestor brought Dr. Park here, as a sort of pet at first. Thus, unwittingly, we revolutionized our lives. For Dr. Park was an exceptional man—tall, strong, very brave, and very loving. He quickly mastered our language and taught us his own. He inculcated us with a reverence for natural history, and in subsequent raids we captured volume on volume of taxonomic texts, along with works of history, poetry, geography, geology, linguistics, mathematics, and the like. Amazing what the British will pack along while ‘roughing it.’ From Dr. Park we learned who we are, and from us he learned how to fit into Africa.”
“What became of him?” Bucky asked.
“He died at eighty-seven after breaking a hip on a butterfly-collecting expedition. I’ll show you his grave when we get home—and his collections. Our national treasure. But I am getting too far ahead of myself. Right now we want to discuss your, er, immediate future. It was Dr. Park, at any rate, who finally convinced my ancestor of the immorality of mating between Tok and Homo sapiens. He was a deeply religious man, with many of the inhibitions that came to full flower later, in the Victorian period. But since that time, many things have changed in the world, and we have managed to keep abreast of those developments. The pressures of expanding tribes around us have driven us deeper and deeper into the mountains, and since Park’s day we Tok have declined greatly in numbers, our total population today amounting to no more than five hundred odd souls. We are pressed on all sides by enemies—the newly emerged African nations that lust after our land, the ever-grasping Europeans who desire our diamonds. We want only to live in peace, here on our plateau, nibbling brains and watching the fair African sunlight play through our diamond windows. But you will not let us. So now you are going to help us, like it or not.
“You, dear Bucky, are going to stud. You will inseminate as many fecund Toklettes as your puny member can handle. You are going to copulate until your corneas fall out, as they say, and then stick a few more. Don’t worry, we have drugs that will aid you in your duties, and believe me, Tok maidens are nubile. And you, fair memsahib, you are going to breed as well. Our womenfolk recently developed an herbal potion, K’zchr we call it, that speeds the estrus cycle so that a damsel such as yourself can drop a child every three months. And in most cases, the births are multiple. During an experimental run last year, I personally begat twenty-seven young from three women in a nine-month period. All of them triples.” He grinned winningly. “Once the old pestle’s back in shape,” he said, “we’ll shoot for quadruples, hey?”
“And what are you going to do with these ‘mules,’ as you call them?” Bucky asked. “Send them out into the real world with diamond-headed spears to get gunned down in harness? They’ve got cannon and airplanes and flamethrowers and machine guns out there. Your pestle is just going to produce a lot of mortar victims.”
Clicky giggled. “A good pun, if a bit grim. Let me assure you, however, that I have already taken steps to procure modern armaments for my troops. Agents are at work abroad. What’s more, we don’t intend to range very far beyond the plateau—only far enough to set up advance lines of resistance in the event of an invasion. Our main line, naturally, will be the scarp itself. We expect to have trouble from air strikes, perhaps even lose the City of the Tok in its entirety, but our rain forest should prove every bit as
protective as those of Southeast Asia were for the Vietcong. We can hold out.”
“Still,” Dawn broke in, “it will take years before these ‘mules’ of yours are old enough to fight. And from what you say, the invasion will come sooner rather than later.”
“Correct on the last point,” Clicky replied, “but you aren’t aware of another unique feature of Tok physiology. Thanks to our ‘primitive’ nature, our young mature—physically at least—quite rapidly. Our infants walk within a week of birth, drop their milk teeth at four months, and reach their full height at one year. They fill out a bit later, but by my reckoning they should be able to handle firearms at nine months, at least defensively. With the warriors I have available now, once the weapons arrive, can bloody any invader’s nose and thus buy time until my first generation of hybrids comes of fighting age.”
“It’s awful,” Dawn cried, shuddering.
“Awful?” asked Clickrasp. “Awful that a leader should devise a plan to save his people? The entire record of human affairs during the past two centuries or more, not just in Africa but in the Americas and Asia as well, is one of the persecution and extermination of so-called primitive peoples by the so-called enlightened ones. The Bushmen of southern Africa, the Hottentots of German Southwest, the Ainu of northern Japan, countless tribes of Amerinds from the Aztecs to the Zuñi, the Ik of Uganda, the Tasaday of the Philippines, the Meo of Indochina, even the Eskimos of the Arctic. If these peoples have not been destroyed root and branch, then they have had their cultures stripped from them, leaving them soulless in a world they never made.” His eyes sparked verdant rage and he stood to his full four foot eight. “It was your people who did these things—not just the Americans and the Europeans, but all Homo sapiens. And to one another, not just the hundreds upon hundreds of species of ‘lesser animals’ like the bison and the peregrines and the whales. How dare you call me awful?”
He turned and scampered up a tree, climbing higher and higher into the darkness, until they saw his dim shape roll into a hammock high above the ground. Bucky could have sworn the Tok was crying.
“But we mean well, don’t we?” asked Dawn after a while. “You know, mankind?”
“That’s the propaganda, anyway,” said Buck.
But propaganda or not, Bucky thought, it was his world. And this little egomaniac with the outsized pecker was out to destroy it. Don’t be taken in by that “endangered species” bullshit, he warned himself. You’ve seen enough of politics to know that they all lie, they all try to make themselves look clean in the eyes of the world while they’re elbow-deep in guts. Or money. He smiled cynically to himself as he imagined Clickrasp at the United Nations, in striped trousers and a morning coat, fawned over by Third World leaders, then dining at Lutece on what he claimed was cervelles au beurre noire. Clickrasp charming on the Johnny Carson show, swapping one-liners with the Great Man. Clickrasp and Abe Beame riding in a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, waving at the hooks and faggots, the mayor at last able to gaze down at a guest …
But it wasn’t really funny. Yeah, it was a shit world back there, and Bucky had nothing to go back to. He was tired to death of the games he wrote about, his wife had left him because of his slobhood, the few women who would still have anything to do with him either spoke a different language or wanted money, which he didn’t have. But it was his world—dim, smoky bars where the talk and booze were warm, the few covers still full of grouse and woodcock, the trout streams and the bookstores. Here he would be a prisoner, and a prisoner at stud, to boot. He’d done that stud bit once before—trying for months on end to get his wife pregnant, to save their marriage with a kid, coming home early from work when she called to say her temperature was right, now was the time to do it. That’s when he learned to lie about his duty, at work at least, then dashing up from the Fleetwood station into the three-room apartment with the Miró prints on the walls, and those bookshelves she’d wanted from Paul McCobb, her head still full of rollers, smiling, and done her till he was raw. Then lying there in the suburban heat to hear the mothers on the playground, watching their children across the road. “Careful!”
Those voices.
Strange that he’d never knocked her up. Made a man feel he had some control over his seed, if not his jism.
Well, I’m older now, Bucky thought. Clickrasp wants a bedroom athlete, he’s looked the wrong way. Thumb out my eyeballs if you want, you friggin’ dwarf….
Suddenly Buck had a yearning in his legs, an itch he couldn’t scratch. He arched his toes, flexed his calves, scratched his ankles. Sure. The Guinea worm. He hadn’t thought about the Guinea worm in a long time. If the Guinea worm were back …
He looked up into the tree where Clickrasp slept.
Not now. Later, maybe …
Dawn rolled over in her sleep, her warm curple pressing against Bucky’s thigh. The fire had died down to a bed of coals. Bats swooped in the dark. Monkey skulls grinned from the shadows around the hearth. Why not take her now? I’d be doing her a service—might knock her up, give her nine months’ grace before Clicky and his pronged predators have a shot at her. All I’d have to do is sweet-talk her a bit, she’s scared and ready, just lie to her a bit like the pretty ones always expect…. But you said you’d never do that again, never betray a trust. And for all that he’s a woolgatherer, a bit of a poseur, Donn trusts you. What I’ve got to do is get her the hell out of here, and quick.
High overhead, Clickrasp growled in his sleep.
But in the morning, the Tok chieftain’s good humor had returned intact. During the march out of the jungle and across the rolling, high-grass plain that lay before the city, he chattered gaily to Dawn and Bucky about the local flora and fauna, attempting to teach them the Tok words for gemsbok and francolin and mimosa, laughing at their stiff-tongued failures, exulting whenever they got a glottal stop right. The other Tok were friendly, too, remembering Buck’s miraculous cure for spitting cobra venom, no doubt. They smiled at him and a few tried to speak to him in English. He smiled back and nodded approvingly even when they got it wrong. Then, finally, the city hove into sight.
“Home again,” sighed Clickrasp. “This city has been here since the beginning of time—or at least since the retreat of the last glaciation some twelve thousand three hundred years ago. When the Wúrm Glacier was down, the country north of here, now the Sahara, was a vast game plain. Perhaps the richest in the world. As I understand it, the glacier, which covered most of northern Eurasia and North America, blocked the flow of westerlies and forced them south, so that they dropped their rainfall on North Africa. All manner of wondrous beasts lived here then. What we see today is a mere vestige of the mammalian fecundity that obtained in Africa just so short a time ago. I’ll show you some bones and horns from that period in our family museum. But when the glacier retreated—and apparently it went fast, a mere few centuries for the retreat after some sixty thousand years of ice—the westerlies moved north, to Europe and Siberia and Canada, dropping their rain up there. The Sahara began to dry up, and our people moved south with the game. That’s when we built the city. It may be the oldest in the world, or at least the oldest that has survived.”
As they neared the gates, a crowd of Tok swarmed out to greet them. They clittered and grinned, dancing with joy at the return of the warriors. Some of the children—perfect physical copies of the adults except for size—jeered at the captives until Clickrasp chided them. Then they gazed awfully upward, particularly at Dawn, whose golden hair flowed in the cool breeze from the mountains. The women, Bucky noticed, were indeed nubile—pocket Venuses with tiny waists, sweepingly broad hips, and firmly packed buttocks tapering to trim, shapely legs. Clad only in hides draped loosely over their shoulders or hips, they were full-breasted as well, much more so than the only other women of that size with whom Bucky had had dealings—Japanese and Southeast Asian, mainly. Even the old women were lovely, smooth and sedate. Facially they resembled Asians, except for the uniformly green eyes. Their hair, long and
black, reached generally to the waist, and was held back from their shapely small ears with clasps adorned with precious and semiprecious stones. The fire opal seemed a favorite. None of them, oddly enough, wore diamonds as jewelry. That was fine with Buck: He had a deep suspicion of diamond-bright babes.
The walls of the city, which appeared to be of stone filled in with a tan, almost rosy mortar, were smoothly finished and tall, perhaps six feet thick at the base and tapering to half that at the crenellated tops, themselves perhaps eighteen feet above the ground. Skulls adorned the poles that flanked the heavy gray beech-wood gate. Some of them had diamonds set in the eye sockets that winked playfully as they passed. Dawn shivered slightly as they entered the city, then drew in her breath at the scene that lay before them. The houses, surrounded by tall flowering trees, were low half-timbered structures with rambling wings and thatched roofs, vaguely English Tudor in style, but the windows glistened with diamonds. The gravel-paved streets wound narrow and mazelike between the houses, everything gleaming white and brown and green, cleanly swept and tidy. The scent of flowers filled the cool air.
“Beautiful,” Dawn sighed. “Just exquisite.”
“Thank you, my lady,” said Clickrasp with a gentlemanly bow. “Of course we can’t take the entire credit for it. Dr. Park had quite an influence on the architectural style of the city as you see it today. Back in 1826, by your count, Mount Baikie erupted, and though the lava never reached us, the tremors destroyed most of the solid structures of the day. Dr. Park rebuilt his house in the Tudor style, and many of the Tok followed his example out of respect and affection. Dr. Park also taught us sanitation. He had discovered an underground river that, by chance, flows directly under the town. Only about forty feet down. He dropped a sewer into it, and showed us how to build conduits that would carry our wastes away. The river rises to the surface of the plateau some six miles to the south. The plant life there is amazingly rich.”
The Diamond Bogo Page 14
