Marantha, Stays, Deadeye, and me went back with the listening post rider to meet Nkuma. By the time we reached him, he was surrounded by Razai and was getting ready to head back into the western desert to gather up more protos. It took a considerable amount of leaning on him before he agreed to sit down and have some rations. His eyes were wide and wild, and his hands shook like an alk twenty hours dry. He sat between Marantha and me, and across the fire cube from him sat a blacker than hell old guy proto named Lomon Paxati. About half a dozen protos squatted in the shadows behind Nkuma.
"Talk to me," I said.
Nkuma finished off three ration bars and half a bottle of water before he stopped trembling. "He hasn't eaten since he met my ship," said the proto. Paxati was as tall as me and was unusually skinny. His eyes were sunken into his head but they were alive with a messiah light. His voice was very deep and his accent was clipped making him sound almost Brit. He wore a lined silver-metallic poncho that doubled as a parka and desert sheet. Beneath his left elbow was his shoulder pack containing his rations and belongings. His bunch had been issued gloves and leggings, too. It kind of made me wonder why the UTR had been so damned cheap with the load from Earth. Maybe they figured we were maggot meat anyway, so why go first class?
After taking another swallow of water, Nkuma nodded toward Paxati. "All black. All of the prisoners on that ship. All black."
I looked again at Lomon Paxati. He had long delicate fingers and the air of a bank clerk. He just didn't vibe like a shark. "What're your bones, man?" I asked.
Paxati's eyebrows went up. He smiled and held out his hands. "Calcium, I suppose."
There were a few chuckles from the shadows, and from Nkuma. He shook his head. "No, Lomon. Bando wants to know what you did."
"Did?"
Nkuma nodded. "Sure. Tell him what you did to get sent to Tartaros. What're you guilty of, man?"
Lomon Paxati gave a sheepish smile and shrugged as he held out his hands. "I'm afraid I am guilty of being elected president of the duly constituted government of the Planet Kvasir."
I looked back at Nkuma. He was rubbing his arms against the cold and slowly shaking his head as he looked into the dull orange glow of the fire cube. "Man, they solved their race problem on Kvasir all right. The blacks they didn't kill, they packed off to Tartaros. Men, women, children, everyone."
Great, I thought. Just what we need. More children and a shipload of straightmeats.
Nkuma glanced at me. "I guess you want to know what I've been doing."
"There was a point back there when I was going to put a crease between your horns for leaving me with the only shooter in the middle of sixteen thousand angry sharks."
"I know you said not to chase them down, that they were too far away, but I just couldn't leave them to the desert. Not after what the fools who followed me toward the mirage went through." He moistened his lips and looked back at the fire cube. "I almost didn't make it to the first ship. That was Lomon's."
His eyes grew haunted and his voice fell to a whisper. "Bando, it was like when we met the sharks from Mihviht, except the blacks from Kvasir were already divided up into gangs and were busy killing each other. They're straightmeats, too. No sharks." He looked me in the eyes. "I had to conduct three trials. I executed five men and a woman. The woman was the mother of three children. All three of them watched me drill their mama."
"You keep any kind of record?"
Nkuma nodded toward Lomon. "He's my clerk. Don't worry, he's not a cockroach; he's a philosophy professor."
I scratched my head. "That might be even worse."
The president laughed, and it seemed genuine. Maybe he'd be okay.
Nkuma looked up at the belly of the Spider. "Who knows how many ships they have dumping cons here? No one, I guess. I must've seen twenty exhaust trails the last couple of days." He looked down at the fire cube, now burned down to an orange point of light.
"Once I'd explained about the Forever Sand, the mirage, and about the Razai, I started off toward the signal flares you had Stays send up at night. We'd only marched for a few hours when another ship put down just north of us, close." He indicated Lomon Paxati and the few who were standing in the shadows.
"A couple of these birds volunteered to go with me to meet the new ship. The second ship was from Earth. They were the twenty-sixth load from back home."
Our bunch had been the first load. I nodded as I silently congratulated the bottom line boys in the Ministry of Justice. The crowbar hotels must finally be putting out the vacancy signs. There was something else to think about. What had happened to those twenty-four other loads of convict-exiles from Earth? Maybe four hundred thousand men and women. The chances were that the ones who were still alive were struggling to reach the Green Mountain Mirage before their water ran out. That didn't even count the cons being dumped by other planets. I think it was just getting through to me how close we had come to death, and how the special nature of the Razai was what had been keeping us in the running.
"They hadn't been on the sand three hours when we got to them," Nkuma continued. "Two murders there. Two more trials. Two more executions."
"What about the third ship?" asked Marantha.
Again Nkuma moistened his lips. He wrapped his arms around his middle and bent over as Marantha struck another fire cube. "The third ship contained the entire population of the Cumaris Institute for the Criminally Insane."
It was as though an ice cold eel slithered down my spine. "You didn't tell them about us, did you?"
Nkuma looked at me for a bit. Then he reached beneath his sheet and pulled out his copy of The Law of the Razai. He held the papers out toward me. "I did what it says in here. The past is done past and they could join the Razai or do the desert on their own. Most of them joined."
"I can't believe it," I said. "Don't we have enough rubber hotel meat of our own? Did you have to bring in the whole Tiltin' Hilton? How many of them?"
"It was a standard pit ship. Sixteen, seventeen thousand." Nkuma let the hand holding the papers fall to his lap. He sat there staring at them. "It's the law. What happened before the landing is done past. Everyone is free to join whatever leader he or she wants. Besides," he said as he looked up at me, "that was the only ship we met out there where I didn't have to kill somebody to get their attention."
"I guess that's a plus." I rubbed my eyes as I thought. Maybe the shadow talkers from Cumaris were crazy enough to believe in what's happening on Tartaros without being shown. I glanced at my fellow RCs. For the first time Deadeye's cool menacing smugs were gone. He looked worried. So did Marantha. We'd never had a not guilty by reason of insanity plea. I didn't think I'd know what to do with one if it landed on me. Stays grinned and held out his hands. "This is Tartaros, Chief. Things're different here, including the rules and definitions."
Marantha nodded. "Who knows what the definition of insane is, or even if the law has to define it."
Deadeye frowned and shifted into deep thought. I let out an involuntary sigh and looked at Nkuma. "I don't know, man. This is an awful lot to chew."
Nkuma gave me a malicious grin. "We saw two more ships put down close enough on the way in. I sent four new RCs out to meet each one."
"You made new cops?"
"We needed more. I was the only RC in sight." He leaned forward a bit, his face anxious. "I want to go back out there, Bando. That's what I want to do: greet the protos when they come in. We need the bodies to fight the Hand, and doing this'll help heal me a bit."
"Man," I said, "You got your legs wrapped around a ten ton ghost and you're riding it for glory."
He stared at me with hooded brown eyes. At last he said, "What's your point?"
"No point." I thought back to the bus ride from the prison to the spaceport. I had been sitting near the window and Nkuma was next to me on the aisle. Across from him had been the ex-priest we all called Fodder, who was being ridden by a few ghosts of his own. Nkuma had been amusing himself by tormenting the guilt-ridden
man.
Maybe Nkuma thought he had found a way around the red suit. Anyway, we needed the additional bodies. I got to my feet as a thought occurred to me.
"What is it, Chief?" asked Marantha.
"Signal flares. We stopped firing them once the bunch from Mihviht came in. I've got to get someone back on the gun to help steer in all these new groups." I looked down at Nkuma. "Okay, man. You get to drive the welcome wagon. Work out some way to keep in contact with all of your groups and with me, and make sure your copies of the law are up to date. Bring some Razai with you. It's too much to do by yourself. I'll try and get some water to you."
Nkuma cocked his head back toward the shadows. "Come up into the light." A small crowd of sharks stood and moved in close. He looked at me. "I'm bringing these guys. There are a couple from each ship, and a couple of Razai wanted to go, too. And I have my clerk."
I shook my head. "I'm keeping your clerk. Appoint another one." I raised my head and looked at the new squad of RCs that would be running the welcome wagon. Big Dom was one of the Razai that had volunteered to stick with Nkuma. He had followed Nkuma to the mirage and back, and there must have been something the yard monster saw in Nkuma that he liked.
"You all got copies of the law?" They nodded and muttered in the affirmative, and one more class graduated from the Razai Police Academy.
At the end of the line was a Razai shark wearing one of the Kegel Gang sheets. I studied the guy's face. He was a haystack with graying hair and a haunted expression of his own. It wasn't until we had left Nkuma and his bunch behind and were halfway back to the walking column that I remembered who it was: Fodder, the priest on the prison bus who was all frocked up.
As we walked I spent a ment pondering how the sharks I knew were morphing out, becoming something different. Killers were mutating into sources of wisdom, terrorists were getting into social work, sex perverts and the burnt brain set were becoming responsible, and it wasn't just Tartaros. There were plenty gangs on Tartaros made up of the usual assortment of losers and bone grinders who hadn't changed a bit. But the Razai was different. I asked myself why, thinking that if I could answer that question I'd have a valuable piece of truth in my grasp. Was it because of the law? Before I could explore the question or the answer there was a shout from up ahead. A mounted shark came trolloping between the dunes shouting my name.
"Nicos! Bando Nicos!"
We all called him down. He pulled up his steam snorting lughox in front of us and dismounted. It was Slicker Toan, partners with Minnie McDavies in the walking column RCs. It never failed to stun me how big, clumsy, and stupid Slicker looked. A trim cover for a nimble-fingered brain.
"Slicker, what is it?"
His answer tied the pink ribbon on the end of my thirteenth day on Tartaros.
"Bando, Nazzar's best ten just reported Kegel's Gang riding up from the south! They're armed, there must be twenty-five, thirty thousand of them, and they're looking for us!"
We went back to the Rear Guard and got Mig Rojas to cut loose four critters for us, we mounted up, and Slicker led us toward the east.
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The Dark Time
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We trolloped toward the walking column until we had to rest the critters. While they puffed and we walked, my brain cooked. There were just too many things in my face. It was like the snowball from Hell doubling in size every few turns as it lurched down the side of an erupting volcano on a crumbling ridge separating a river of molten lava from a smoking bottomless pit. We were seventy thousand sharks with another thirty thousand or more on the way, and I couldn't even imagine seventy thousand, much less think in terms of leading them in to tangle with Boss Kegel's army. I was already juggling the anvil. I figured it wouldn't be long before some chup tossed me the lit sticks of dynamite.
Since it was thirty thousand armed and mounted Kegeleros coming at us against our twelve or thirteen hundred rifles, there wasn't much point in thinking about trading taps with our neighbors from the south. Among our options, a high speed stroll in the opposite direction seemed smart, but I was no general. For all that mattered, I was no boss or cop, either.
Just to put hair on it, only three thousand out of our seventy thousand sharks had any idea why the Razai was what it was, or had any reason to fight Kegel. The rest of them didn't know any more than a sand bat about what they'd be fighting for. They'd had the law read to them, and some of them had seen Bad Blue as he dropped the lead on pretty little Tani Aduelo, but they didn't know what the alternative was.
Tartaros without the law was crawling on your face and either killing or begging for every scrap of food. It was bending over or spreading your legs to anyone with power. Under the bosses the fist, the cutter, and the gun was power. Tartaros without the law was that forest of skeletons back there on the sand, along with the hundreds and thousands of corpses whose blood had been soaked up by the sand.
The Law of the Razai put the power in the hands of the people. The yard shark had the right to life and he had the right to vote on who protected that right. The Law didn't protect territory, money, cockroach fees, or power; it protected us. It was funny to think that when Pussyface died he thought his whole life had been a total waste. Considering our cards, maybe Pussyface had died in a turd shirt. Caught between the soldiers of the Hand and the Kegeleros it didn't look like the Razai had many rides left on its ticket.
In the dark Stays and Marantha were chewing over what we had on the Nance Damas shooting, and I could hear tiny scrapes and clicks as they took apart their weapons and cleaned them, another chance to do so not being guaranteed. I couldn't concentrate on the talk, but cleaning my piece was something I could do. I broke down the rifle, a little surprised at how quickly we had mastered the art of stripping and cleaning a rifle in the dark with no instruction. As I cleaned the piece, the physical activity put my head to rest for a couple of minutes. Soon, however, I was done and back in my own head, lost behind enemy lines.
Lomon Paxati was questioning Slicker about life on the big beach, and I owned up to myself why I had nabbed him from Nkuma. I didn't want to be boss. Worse than that, I had no business in the job. Hell, almost anyone in the old Razai would've jumped at the chance to be power one. A number of them had been bosses back in the crowbars. The only reason I could think of for Nance sticking me in the slot was that I didn't want it and would dump it back in her lap at the first opportunity. Of course that was exactly why I had no business being in the position in the first place.
I grabbed Paxati because I was a thief, murderer, and crowbar shark. He was a genuine elected president of a world population. He had to have a better idea than me about what to do and how to run things. I didn't tell him about it because there was something about him that bothered me. Until I knew what it was I wasn't going to be handing out any jobs.
Where do you go for the strength you don't have? The heebers, rag heads, and Jesus jammers all had answers to that, but Bando Nicos slithered his own path through the swamp. I reached to my kit bag and traced the outline of Big Dave's copy of Southey's Life of Nelson with my fingertips. I thought of the old sailor's defeat in the gun boat battle at that one French port. His ass kicked, a good friend in the maggot trough, Nelson quit the navy. He was in dark time, he resigned, and went to live in a place called Merton in Surrey.
He was finished, fed up, and funked. Right then I knew how he'd felt. What I wanted at that moment was to dump it all and be done with it. Maybe my Merton in Surrey would be hot and a little too gritty, but to be out from under all of that responsibility would be all the home I'd ever want.
There was a big difference between Nelson and me, though. He quit only after he got his ass kicked. I was made smart on the street and in the yard. I wanted to quit before my ass got kicked. There was another difference, too. When his country needed him he came back. I figured if I ever did take a stroll, I'd never have the guts to come bac
k. But what can you do about it when thousands might die because of a stupid mistake you might make? Hell, what can you do about it if, making no mistakes, thousands might die?
There was something else I remembered. Long before Nelson was a great hero and admiral, he was a young midshipman flattened and crippled by one more illness, failed in his duties and career because his health had failed him. His future was piss on a dog's hind leg and he was thinking of suicide.
The critters were rested and we stopped and mounted up. When we were moving again I scrounged a fire cube from Stays, struck and fixed it on my green stick, and looked through my Nelson until I found the admiral's own words. As I read them I was filled with how I had felt that first night in Greenville.
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"I felt impressed with a feeling that I should never rise in my profession. My mind was staggered with a view of the difficulties I had to surmount, and the little interest I possessed. I could discover no means of reaching the object of my ambition. After a long and gloomy reverie, in which I almost wished myself overboard, a sudden glow of patriotism was kindled within me and presented my king and country as my patron. 'Well, then,' I exclaimed, 'I will be a hero and, confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger!'"
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I knocked the fire cube to the sand and put the book back in my kit bag as I smoked my skull. Half the time that passage sounded like some of the spiritual awakening stories I'd heard at CSA meetings. Other times Nelson's thinking might as well've come out of the head of some kind of swamp critter from outer space.
I had been in the deep funk like the midshipman those first days in the Crotch. When Nelson used to talk about that desperate moment in his life, he used to say that from that time a radiant orb was suspended in his mind's eye, urging him on to renown.
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