My Brother

by Charles Sheffield

  Popular names were given only in Arabic — completely unintelligible to me. I had to rely on my memory of the full Latin names of each family.

  Anilidae, Uropeltidae, Typhlopidae, Colubridae — not what I needed at all (but I shivered to myself when I thought about what I did need). The snakes had all been assigned to one set of enclosures, within the general area of the reptiles. Here were the egg-eaters, Dasypeltidae, and farther on I found Pythonidae — the big constrictors. I could handle them, but they wouldn’t do. Nor would the large tanked enclosure of Hydrophidae, the sea snakes.

  At last, three large fenced areas next to each other. Crotalidae, Viperidae, Elapidae: all the worst of the poisonous snakes. I stood in deepening darkness and pondered what I would find in each habitat. Crotalidae meant diamondback rattlesnake, water moccasins, copperheads, fer-de-lance, and pit vipers. Perhaps bushmasters, too, though it was hard to keep them alive in captivity. Elapidae would be most dangerous of all, hooded and spitting cobras, coral snakes, kraits, mambas, and death adders. Neurotoxic venom, nerve poisons that would kill but might not cause instant agony; also, I didn’t think I could handle them — they were bad-tempered, agile, and unpredictable. A black mamba would be up to twelve feet long, and in my present condition it could travel a lot faster than me. Steer clear of the Elapidae.

  **Steer clear of all of them.** The shadow thought quivered in my brain, and I paused for a moment. This was one area where I would be a lot braver than Leo. And I had to be.

  Each fenced area was protected by chain gates with double safety catches. They were designed to keep out small and inquisitive children, but not a determined adult. After a few moments of careful manipulation I eased open the gate of the middle enclosure and went inside. I left it open behind me. This was the home of the Viperidae, the vipers and adders. Hemolytic poisons, instant agony when you were struck by one of the worse species. I had seen the effects of the hemotoxins, and I knew how quickly the swelling and the pain would start. It took all of my will power to go down onto my hands and knees, ignore the pain from my bleeding calf, and begin to inch forward into the darkness. The enclosure was big, perhaps fifty yards across, and in that space the surface varied from dry desert to a lush irrigated area.

  Just enough light left for me to see where I was going. I knew what I wanted: Bitis gabonica, the Gaboon Viper.

  No matter which snake I went near, there was a high risk. The Gaboon Viper had two big advantages. It was nocturnal, so it would just now be waking; and although it looks hideous it is sluggish in habits and doesn’t attack or run away when you get near. It flattens into the sand.

  I knew where to look. Along the western side of the rocks, where the sun’s heat still lingered. The big danger was that I would in my dizzy and exhausted condition stumble across a snake and annoy it enough to strike. A big Gaboon Viper has fangs two inches long, and injects enough venom to kill five men.

  The one that I found was a huge specimen, six feet long and four inches across the body. The heart-shaped head turned lazily as I came close, and the thick body snuggled closer to the side of the ledge of rock. It made no attempt to escape, but sounded an angry blowing hiss and jabbed at my handkerchief when I held it forward.

  The sand was cooling rapidly, giving up its stored heat to the cloudless sky. I took off my jacket, draped it around the body of the snake, and lifted it with both hands just behind the head. The lidless eyes shone a glassy silver-white in the darkness, and the elliptical pupils stared up at me. As the bloated body wriggled from side to side, the blowing hiss became a steady rhythm. As each breath was expelled the top of the ugly head flattened a little. I shivered, and held on tightly. Gradually, the noise grew less. The snake was infuriated, but it could do no more than open its jaws wide and reveal the monstrous fangs.

  I slid my way, step by cautious step, up a rocky incline that led to the artificial peak at the center of the enclosure. This was a dangerous time. It was too dark to see what lay in front of my feet, and the nocturnal snakes were waking.

  Behind me I heard muttered words from outside the main enclosure, and saw the reflected flame of a cigarette lighter. Scouse came first, with Zan just behind him. He was following my tracks across the sand. Pudd’n was a reluctant third, well behind the other two.

  “Salkind! We know you’re there. Better give up now, an’ we’ll go easy on you.” Scouse sounded furious, his voice cold and calm. I felt sorry for anyone who had to rely on his goodwill. “We’ll have you soon. Don’t think you can get away. Come out of hiding, or we’ll make it that much worse for you.”

  They were inside the sandy arena, no more than twenty paces from me. I didn’t dare to breathe. My arms were aching from holding the weight of the snake, and my head chose this moment to turn the whole world into dizzy pinwheeling patterns of colored stars. I gritted my teeth and hung on, willing the whirling scene to stabilize.

  Scouse was ten paces away. Five, coming confidently forward with his gun in one hand. He knew I was unarmed, and Zan and Pudd’n were backing him up.

  Three paces. Two. It had to be timed precisely.

  As he moved up to the last ledge, I shook the snake to bring it to a higher point of fury, and swung it forward.

  Scouse had been walking with his eyes still down to the bloodied track my feet had made. The Gaboon Viper opened its jaws wide and sank the fangs into his exposed neck, just to the right of his Adam’s apple. For one moment Scouse was quite motionless, rigid against the sudden weight of the snake. Then he gave a high-pitched, horrified scream, dropped the gun to the sand, and grabbed at the bloated body. The viper hung on for a few seconds, then the jaws slackened. As it came free of his throat, the fangs sank deep into his right forearm.

  The pain came at once. Unlike Dixie , Scouse carried no prototype of the Belur introsomatic chips. He was screaming, thrashing at the snake and staggering from side to side on the rocky hillside.

  Behind him, Zan flicked on her cigarette lighter. By its light she caught her first good view of Scouse and his murderer. He had stopped screaming now, and was reduced to a horrible gargle, deep in his swelling throat.

  Most people are afraid of snakes, perhaps because they don’t understand them. But for one person in twenty, phobia goes beyond normal fear to absolute panic and horror. Zan was the one in twenty. When she saw the twisting body of the Gaboon Viper her mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. The flickering flame of the lighter showed neck tendons strained to dark cords, and her whole body began to tremble. Her eyes bulged white against the flawless tan complexion. Without making any move to help Scouse, she dropped the cigarette lighter, turned, and ran blindly across the broad arena. At the edge of it lay a smooth wall, waist high. She scrambled over, a pale blur in the night.

  I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

  **Don’t help her. She deserves whatever she gets.**

  The warning words stuck in my throat. Zan was out of this area and into the enclosure that held the Elapidae. She was making a mindless run straight across the rock-strewn surface.

  Sixty yards would take her to the outer wall. Before her lay a terra incognita that could hold anything: spectacled cobras, a lurking hamadryad, or tiny and deadly kraits. A few drops of venom from an Australian tiger snake would kill a man or woman in a few minutes.

  Zan ran on.

  **It is over now, but we were close. Long before I understood Tippy’s mind, I knew her body. I never fathomed what drove her to offer agony rather than ecstasy, but I remember the treasure-house of warm secrets beneath her fashionable clothing. All that is gone, forever past recall. Weep for Tippy, the way she might have been. The way I thought she was.**

  She was running on; twenty yards, then thirty. Nothing tangled her feet, nothing flashed fangs at her calves. I stooped to the sand, feeling about for the lighter that she had dropped. Scouse had staggered to lean against the rock, and slowly subsided to lie groaning facedown on the rough surface. I ignored him, reaching cautiously past the Gaboon Vip
er to pick up the lighter.

  Ten yards more and Zan would be at the wall. As I straightened up, she was suddenly gone from view. Another moment, and she gave a scream of pure terror, a heartstopping ululation that rose higher and higher in pitch and seemed to go on forever.

  All around me, the Zoo woke to the sound. I heard the answering bark and howl of desert dogs, cracking screams from the macaque monkeys, the angry roar and bellow of the big cats. My head seemed to split open with the sounds.

  **I was drowning, choking on the warm blood in my throat. The helicopter was down, I had fallen away from the controls, and part of the broken rotor had skewered me neatly through the right side. I had to hold on, pass on the word…**

  More sounds and sights. Colored ribbons danced around me, red and green and violet, matching their sinuous movement to the animal cries that filled the zoo. In the other enclosure, something had jerked upright and was running blindly back towards me. It collided with the waist-high wall and scrabbled at the smooth surface, while an eerie portamento wail came muffled from its throat.

  I took four hesitant paces towards the wall and flicked the lighter to the maximum setting of its gas jet.

  Zan was leaning against the wall. Squirming dark tendrils hung from her face and shoulders, and another dark band circled her neck. As I watched, one clinging to her cheek dropped loose and wriggled away across the sand.

  She had fallen face-first into a nest of the spectacled cobra, and a dozen of the young had attacked her. The foot-long snakes, venomous from the moment of birth, had buried their fangs in her cheeks and neck. One clung fast to her lower lip. Another, entangled in her blouse, wriggled with fangs buried in her right breast. An ooze of blood and gelatinous liquid ran from a deep wound on her left eye, past a flap of torn eyelid that hung loose against her cheek.

  “Zan! Pull them off — they inject more venom, the longer they bite.”

  She was past hearing. After a few more seconds shuddering against the wall, she turned and ran headlong back across the open enclosure. In a few paces she was too far away to be seen with the cigarette lighter’s flame. I heard an angry hissing, another scream of horror from the darkness, and a frenzied threshing.

  Then I had to think of myself. Every movement I made brought nausea and confusion. I lurched back to where Scouse lay silent on the sand. His neck had swollen until it was as wide as his head, and his face was a purple-black mask. He had asphyxiated as his windpipe was flattened in the congested throat.

  **Don’t go near the snake. Get the jacket — got to get the jacket.**

  Slowly, weak and shaky as a ninety-year-old, I carefully bent and picked up my rumpled coat. Dark drops of venom spattered the sleeve, but the thin box of the Belur Package still sat in the left pocket. I put the jacket on, rummaged in the sand and gravel for another thirty seconds, then wearily straightened.

  I had one last barrier to surmount, and I knew in my aching bones that it would be too much for me. No matter how I tried, I would never be able to climb out of the Zoo, over that wall. And Pudd’n was somewhere in the darkness ahead. From the moment that I thrust the viper at Scouse, there had been no sound from the entrance to the enclosure, but I knew Pudd’n was there, waiting for me.

  My left leg had lost all feeling. I dragged myself slowly forward on my hands and knees. My left hand was flat on the sand, my right supported me on its clenched knuckles. Each time that I allowed my head to hang down, the ground tilted and reared like a squall-hit ship.

  **All the effort, two years and three continents, to end like this. Crawling, bleeding, weaker and weaker. But Scouse and Mansouri won’t get it now.**

  In front of me, the gate to the enclosure; standing there like a statue in my path, Pudd’n. I came up to sit back on my haunches, fished the cigarette lighter from my left pocket, and snapped it into flame. Pudd’n blinked as the light met his eyes, but he did not move. I tried to speak, failed, cleared my throat and tried again.

  “All right, Pudd’n. It’s your move now. Scouse is dead, and Xantippe won’t live more than an hour or two. Come and get it. The Belur Package is right here, in my pocket.”

  He stared down at me. His big face was pale, like a wax mask, and he looked sick and haggard. He shook his head slowly, without speaking.

  “Did you hear me?” I said. “I’m done for. I couldn’t fight a baby. What now, Pudd’n?”

  He sighed, and a shudder shook his whole body.

  “I saw it,” he said at last. “Saw what happened to Scouse an’ Zan. Christ, I could spew my ring. I’ve always been scared of snakes.”

  “Well? What now? You still after the package?”

  He shook his head again. “I’m done with that bleeder, it’s been all bad luck. You get out of here. I won’t stop you.”

  He took a step back, outside the enclosure.

  I moved my right hand forward and up, to show him Scouse’s pistol that had been hidden in my sleeve and closed fist. “You just bought your own life, Pudd’n. I won’t stop you, either. Get out of this place. Don’t go near the enclosures. Keep to the paths, and go out over the wall. Better get a move on, before I change my mind.”

  He had jerked backwards at the sight of the gun. Now he nodded and moved again, turning towards the dark path behind him. As the flame of the lighter dimmed, he was gone, crunching away along the gravel.

  It made little difference to me. I had fallen forward, vaguely aware of the sand against my cheek. The clear desert sky was filling with stars, bright points of green and blue and orange that swelled and burst around me. The whole heavens lit up, filling with pulsating rosy flame.

  **Hold tight. Don’t give up now.**

  Dark nebulae were invading the field of stars. All around, the heavens dimmed and faded.

  I fought to put my hand in my pocket, pull out the bottle of blue pills.

  Too late. My fingers were losing their sense of touch, I could not open the glass phial. I raised it to my mouth and gripped the plastic in my teeth, biting at the stopper. Glass broke, ground between my molars. My tongue bled as I spat the broken bottle out onto the sand, swallowed, swallowed again. Two pills, ten pills, what difference did it make?

  The last tide was going out, sweeping away from the sandy shore. I was helpless to fight it, drifting into the night. Axons linking, synapses closing, the floodgates wide open.

  **Goodbye, Ameera. Goodbye, Rabiyah.** Goodbye, Tess.

  The old tall story again. “So what happened to you then, Bill?”

  “What happened to me? Why, I died, of course.”

  - 18 -

  I was awake, flat on my back and staring up at a grey ceiling. Creaks and clattering came from all sides, then a whir of machinery and the sound of running water. Finally, I heard the squeak of leather boots.

  Impossible to sleep. I sighed, gave up the fight, and opened my eyes. Sir Westcott Shaw slowly came into focus, frowning down at me. He grunted as he saw my eyes flicker open.

  “What’s the point of patchin’ you up, when you go off and get torn to bits again? Open your mouth.”

  “Where am I?” It came out as a throaty gurgle.

  “Where do you think? Back where you started, in Intensive Care. Wider, an’ keep it open.”

  He was shining a light down my throat, and moving my tongue around with a spatula. It hurt like hell.

  “How did I get here?” I mumbled, as soon as he stopped poking about. “I thought I was dying.”

  “We’re all dying.” He looked across at the bank of meters sitting by the bedside. “But you don’t seem to be goin’ any faster than the rest of us. Move your eyes, an’ follow my finger.” He passed his hand slowly across my face: up, down, left, right.

  “I was in the Riyadh Zoo.” The memory blurred back like a bad dream. “Who brought me here?”

  “I did, soon as you were stable enough to be moved.” He stopped waving his fingers in front of my eyes. “The doctors out there wanted to slice open your skull — didn’t like the EEG readin
gs, said you had meningitis an’ a brain tumor. They only phoned me because our hospital discharge was in your wallet. I had a lot of trouble with ’em. An’ I had one hell of a job gettin’ the Riyadh Police to let you go, what with a dead man an’ a sick woman in that zoo with you. I told ’em—”

  “Sick woman?” It took my fuzzied concentration a few seconds to interpret his words. “You mean a dead woman.”

  “Uh-uh.” He shook his head firmly. “I saw her. She’d been bitten a lot, but they were small wounds — not much venom in ’em. They got you both out quick, so there wasn’t much danger she’d die. I’ll bet she’s discharged by now.”

  Zan. Alive. The old blend of terror and excitement tingled inside me. Where was she now? On her way here? I started to lever myself toward the side of the bed.

  “But you were somethin’ else,” went on Sir Westcott. He pushed me back firmly onto the pillow. “I told ’em you’d die for sure unless we got you over here sharpish. Does this hurt?”

  He twisted the lower part of my left calf in a way that brought me upright and cursing, and nodded happily at my reaction. “Good. You’re a madman, Salkind, I hope you know that. You were brought in here missing a quart of blood, with a skin infection, abrasions, a hundred and three temperature, two bullet wounds, and a blood pressure of fifty over twenty. I suppose that’s your idea of takin’ it easy?”

  Infections, abrasions, bullet wounds — and all for nothing? I struggled to sit up straighter and grabbed at his arm. “My jacket. What happened to it? In the left hand pocket, a little box—”

  “The Belur Package?” He again pushed me back to the pillow. “We got that all right — your friend Chandra told us you might be carrying somethin’ interesting. We found it, an’ it’s being looked at by the right people. But some of the chips have ’em baffled.”