by Neal Asher
Africa Zero
Neal Asher
part one
As the sun sunk behind the horizon I gathered lumps of bark from a huge preconvulsion baobab dying a hundred-year-death on the cliff top. By the time I had a fire going the moon was filling the night with mercury light, reflected from its labyrinth etched face, and hyraxes were screeching like murder victims from the heather trees behind me. It was for comfort really, the fire; for that old comfort born in the hidden psyche when men crouched in caves and feared the night, the last time the ice was here. I had no need of the heat or of cooked food. Few earthly extremes of temperature were dangerous to me and the sustenance I took was poison to flesh.
While staring into the flames I slowly altered the spectrum of my hearing. The screeching of the hyraxes became a low gasping and other sounds began to impinge; the mutter of cooling rock and the strained whispering of the heather trees. Then, a sound I had not heard in twenty years: the low infrasonic rumbles that were the conversation of mammoth. I listened for a while and realised I was smiling, then I stood from my fire, walked to the baobab at the edge of the Break and looked out over the silvered foothills.
Behind me the Atlas Mountains of Old Morocco still held back the ice that had swamped Europe. Six centuries in the past the hills below me had been bare, and arid where they faded into the Sahara desert. Five centuries ago the wasteland had begun to bloom as water vapour, blown down off the ice, condensed and fell in storms still told of around the campfires of bushmen. Now the hills were thick with vegetation, and wild with the fauna that fed on it including, of course, the mammoth. But it was not the ice that had caused their return.
Far below me a lone bull was tusking bark from a huge groundsel tree and muttering to himself like a grouchy old man. I watched him for a while and felt an affinity with those men in ancient Siberia to whom this creature had been all life and a lord of death, and who had hunted it to extinction. Men not so different from he who had resurrected it. I remembered the first herd: cloned from ten thousand years old carcases preserved in the Siberian tundra, gestated in the wombs of elephants, and kept as a tourist attraction in a national park in North Africa. Perhaps they would have remained no more than that—a novelty. But then had come the thinning of the human race.
To begin with, the compulsory sterilization of one in three people was introduced planet-wide. Then air-transmitted HIV’s and more virulent diseases had appeared. It was open to conjecture whether they had evolved or been manufactured. The nightmarish creatures that appeared and fed on the out-of-control third-world population had certainly been gene-spliced. The dictums at that time had been: better not to be born than to be born and starve to death. Your neighbour dies so you might live. The human race cannot be strong while the weak breed: the human race must be prey. Some called it a catastrophe and against the teaching of God. Others called it the choice of survival.
During the chaos of that time, as ten billion people fought for insufficient resources and the encroaching ice sucked the planet dry, during the water wars, plagues, brief atomic conflicts, and desperate strivings to become established beyond Earth, the mammoth had broken free and roamed across North Africa. While millions then billions of humans died the mammoth burgeoned. I always considered this a beautiful irony and a kind of justice: humans had been too busy killing each other to notice. But then it is easy for me to make such judgements. I ceased to be human in many ways over two thousand years ago.
In time the bull finished with the tree and dozed in the moonlight with his four metre tusks resting on the ground. I turned away to head back for my fire, but then, suddenly, his trumpeting shattered the night. As the hyraxes fell silent I turned back to the Break. Something... something of flickering silver and shadow darted round him then was gone before I could upgrade my vision. Pykani? I doubted it. They would be in the air; dark bat shapes singing their calming songs as they moved in for blood. They would not have startled him. I waited and watched his heat and the red colours, but the shape did not reappear. At length I returned to my fire, troubled, but not unduly so.
* * *
The bright flames flickered and died like night spectres and the bark collapsed to black-edged rubies. I considered the possibility of sleep and rejected it. I had slept for three hours a couple of days ago up on the ice and I would not need to sleep again for several weeks. Boredom drove me into fugue and I listened like a yogi to the oh-so-accurate ticking of my body clock as the altered moon traversed its arc and the hyraxes raised Cain. An hour before sunrise the sky began to lighten. Only then did I come out of fugue and kick dirt over the cooling ashes of my fire. Time to move on.
* * *
The Break was a new addition to the Atlas Mountains. When the ice had first reached the coast of Old Morocco it was as if it had suddenly rested its entire weight there and tipped a plate on which the mountains rested. The event was The Convulsion and The Break was the further edge of that plate. It was heaved from the Atlas foothills in less than a year, seven centuries ago.
Under the baobab I removed my boots and put them in my pack. Then I removed the synthiflesh coverings of my fingers and toes and placed them in my pack as well. The sky was lighter then, pink tinted to the east, and that light glinted like blood off the knurling on the inner faces of my metal fingers: a reminder of what I am and what I am not. Shouldering my pack I moved to the edge, lowered myself over, and began to descend, driving my fingers and toes like pitons into the mossy crevices in the rock. At first I was careful. Even for me a fall from such a height could kill. As the sun breached the horizon I was two hundred feet down with another hundred to go. One bad moment then when a huge black scorpion did its damnedest to sting my face and I jerked away, pulling a slab from the cliff face and abruptly found myself hanging by one hand, watching the slab crash into the jungle below. Synthetic or not my reactions are still flesh, much to my chagrin. Fifty feet from the ground and I was scrabbling down the cliff face like a spider. I dropped the last twenty feet straight into the rosette of a giant lobelia, scattering sunbirds like a treasure of sapphires and emeralds. Once free of the flattened plant it took me some time to clean the sap from myself before I could replace my coverings and return to a semblance of humanity. Then, booted and fingered again, I made my way into the greenery.
Beyond the patch of lobelias, I pushed my way through a five-foot thicket of putrescent-smelling plants I could not put a name to, but these thinned out to give way to wild banana plants, groundsels hung with sulphurous yellow lichen, and a ground covering of bracken. Soon I reached the remains of the groundsel, of which the mammoth had made a meal, and there, where the jungle had been flattened, found progress easier. All around this area frogs were chirruping noisily, perhaps because they could now see the venomous spiders that hunted them. As I advanced, a python the thickness of my torso observed me speculatively from a tree, tested my scent with his tongue, then lost interest. At one point I heard something stalking me, but it soon went away. I was exposed on that narrow path, but I knew that if I stayed with the mammoth I would eventually encounter those I had come to see.
* * *
I smelt it an hour before I found it. The smells were not of carrion. The corpse was too fresh to have decayed. They were the smells of the blood and broken intestines of a huge ruminant. It was the bull I had seen the night before.
Three lions were feeding in a desultory manner while other scavengers were squabbling for their share. A mortuary of vultures held raucous autopsy: over their black feather suits their gory heads were hooked like question marks as they shrugged ‘don’t knows’ at each other, then ‘what the hells?’ as they tipped them back to swallow choice bloody morsels. A pack of hyenas yipped and snarled round a leg that had been torn away. It must have taken the wh
ole pack of them to drag the joint to where it lay, and from where they kept a wary eye on the lions, but there was plenty for all it would seem, else the lions would have been driven away. Other birds, small foxes, wild dogs, and feral cats had homed in on the bounty. Even a group of black-skinned frogs had crawled from the undergrowth to lap at a pool of blood.
Leaning against the trunk of a vine-choked baobab I switched off my sense of smell, but even then I could taste the blood in the air. It was a grisly scene. I looked at the lions and did not believe their claim. Three lions did not bring down and dismember something weighing nigh on thirty tons. Three lions did not shatter four-metre long tusks and break open a skull ten centimetres thick. I looked at the carnage with a clinical eye. I knew of only a few things that could do this: a roving tyrannosaur, but they were rare on the ground now as they tended to chase after people and end up on the wrong end of a missile launcher, and anyway, it would still have been feeding; the Chuthrat Dragon, which I knew to be on another continent; or man. This looked like the work of man. It looked as if a human being had taken out this mammoth with something like a laser. I advanced to hold my own autopsy.
Snarling, the hyenas moved out of my way then closed back in on their meat once I was past. One of the lions was not so obliging. It climbed to its feet, its stomach bulging ridiculously, and growled a warning at me. I continued my advance knowing that if I attempted to circle, it would probably move in front of me out of pure contrariness. As I drew closer, it stooped down and shuffled its back legs in preparedness to pounce. I timed my move carefully, knowing full stomach or not a lion can move with devastating alacrity. Snarling, it sprang straight at me—claws and teeth and a trail of bloody saliva. I stepped aside and caught it a blow on the shoulder, not too hard, just enough to send it cartwheeling through the air with a startled howl. It hit the ground and was up in an instant, its tail thrashing from side to side, then with clumsy dignity it retreated and watched me. Its two fellows, I noted, had been closing in from the sides and now pulled back, one to flop down panting, the other to clean itself conspicuously.
Once by the head of the mammoth I ignored the lions as I unshouldered my backpack and took off my shirt. The skull, I noted, was split cleanly, and the tusks had been sheared as if with a saw. Their faces looked almost polished. I pulled the two gory halves of the skull apart and probed around inside for shrapnel or the remains of some other projectile. I found none. I then inspected the outside of the head for sign of burning or at least singeing. No sign. I stepped further back, blood up my arms and across my chest, and tried to determine by the angle of fall, the surroundings, something, anything.
“Hold it right there, you bastard!”
I turned slowly. A woman stood about twenty feet from me. She was white, which was a surprise, had cropped blond hair, and was dressed in one of those grey, practically indestructible, monofilament coveralls. From this I deduced she must be a member of one of the corporate families that had come down to Africa during the Great Migration. For a moment I also thought she might be like me. Her right hand was of metal, tungsten ceramal like my own, but without a synthiflesh covering. But taking into account she held her rifle left-handed I guessed that the hand might be all that was synthetic about her.
“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” she said viciously.
“And what might that be?” I asked, relieved as I studied her weapon. It was not the disintegrator I had first assumed it to be. A pulse of antiphotons will do to me what it does to all matter. What she held was a projectile weapon, though admittedly a high tech one.
“You,” she replied.
I considered that for a moment: either she knew who I was and had a grudge, in which case she had been very stupid to come after me with such inferior armament, or her assumptions were mistaken.
“I did not kill this mammoth,” I said.
“Hah!” It was not even a laugh. “I saw you bat that lion aside. What have you got? Cybernetic implants? Is that what you used on the mammoth? Or is that too close in for you? What did you use, a ten mil flack rifle?”
I did not particularly admire her logic. “I restate. I did not kill this mammoth.” I turned to fetch my shirt and pack.
“Hold it!”
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 retur
ned 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.”
