Suicide Kings wc-20

by George R. R. Martin

  “Rebels and Leopard Men. If you’re lucky.”

  Leopard Men? Rebels? What the heck was going on over there? What the heck had happened to Lucien? Wally couldn’t help it: “Holy cow! Leopard Men?” The soldiers over by the Quonset hut looked up from their private conversation. Worrying about Lucien had got him worked up; he’d asked a little more loudly than he’d intended.

  “It doesn’t bloody matter, does it? Since you’re not going over there.” Finch had a strange look in his eye, like he was saying one thing but meant something else. “All you need to know is that they’d shoot you dead the moment they noticed you.” He punctuated the last with a sharp jerk of his head, pointing his horn toward the lake and, by extension, the PPA.

  “Well, look, buddy, bullets don’t-”

  Jerusha clapped a hand on Wally’s arm. “Thanks for the warning. We wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.” She emphasized “misunderstandings.” Then she tugged at Wally. “We’ll trust you to hire a boat for us.”

  Once out of earshot from Finch, Wally asked her, “What if he gets a boat that won’t go across the lake?”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem, Wally. I think Finch had our number the minute he laid eyes on us. He thinks we’re on a secret mission for the Committee.”

  They followed the road to a narrow bend. In one direction, from where they’d walked, Finch unloaded more crates from his battered Cessna. In the other direction, around the bend, Wally got his first glimpse of the outskirts of Kasoge.

  It wasn’t all that different from the other villages they’d visited. The buildings he saw were a random assortment of wood, mud-brick, and sometimes metal siding. They gave the impression of having been built, or rebuilt, from whatever was handy at the time. Wind sighed through the trees that grasped at a bright tropical sky. It carried with it the earthy smell of jungle, the dead-fish-and-fresh-water scent of the lakeshore, and the stink of the garbage fires. The smoke stung Wally’s eyes.

  From above, in Finch’s plane, Africa had seemed like a paradise that stretched from horizon to horizon. But down on the ground, Wally noticed different things. Like the garbage fires. People just collected their trash into piles on the street. When the piles grew large enough, they were burned. He figured that was because they didn’t have a city dump and regular garbage collection like back home. It made sense. They did what they could.

  Still, Wally had been real disappointed when he’d discovered that the smoke from the garbage fires obscured his view of the stars. He’d figured that being in Africa would mean he could see all sorts of stars. And different from the ones he knew.

  For all the beauty, Africa sure wasn’t a paradise. Even here, in Tanzania. And Finch’s warnings about the PPA hadn’t done anything to make Wally feel better about Lucien. He wished he could just grab a boat and get over to Kalemie.

  Wally and Jerusha stepped off the road, out of the way of a truck. When it passed, he saw that a long board had been nailed to the back of the truck, and several bicyclists coasted along by gripping the board. One fellow had fixed his bike chain with lengths of wire.

  They stopped at a pavilion built from irregular panels of corrugated aluminum fastened atop brick stanchions. Like he had at the last village, where they’d stopped the night before, Wally drew a lot of attention. He plopped down on a bench and zipped open his pack.

  “Want a snack?”

  “Yeah, actually.” Jerusha looked at his pack. “What do you have in there?”

  “I brought some peanut butter. It’s good on bananas.”

  A funny little smile blossomed on Jerusha’s face. “Hold on a sec,” she said. She wandered over to a spot near the tree line, upwind of the fires. There she dug into her pouch and dropped something on the ground. She returned to the pavilion a few moments later, carrying a golden yellow thing a little larger than a pear.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a mango.” Jerusha took the knife from her sack and deftly skinned the fruit in long, wide strips.

  “Oh. I’ve never had a mango before.”

  Again, that smile. She didn’t look up from peeling the mango, but she said, “Yes you have. And you liked it, too.”

  “I have?”

  “At the embassy. Remember? All the fruit on the table at breakfast?”

  “I remember some pineapple and bananas, because I like those, and some orange stuff, too. It was pretty good.”

  “That orange stuff was a mango. And I could tell you liked it, because you ate an entire bowl of mango slices.”

  “Oh.” Wally felt himself blushing. “You saw that?”

  “Yep.” After skinning the mango, she sliced it, neatly excising a large pit from the center. She dried the pit and put it in a pocket of her belt.

  Childish laughter echoed across the street. A pair of kids not much older than Lucien ran down the street, trailing a homemade kite: a plastic garbage bag, two long sticks, and about a million little scraps of string tied together into one long string. The kids had two shoes between them; one wore the left shoe, the other the right.

  Wally wondered if Lucien had ever flown a kite. Maybe Wally could show him.

  They ate in companionable silence, watching the kids.

  “Jerusha?”

  “Yeah?”

  Wally looked at his feet, not wanting to embarrass her. “I’m real glad you decided to come along.”

  Jackson Square

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  There’s a shot of the French Quarter on TV. At first, it looks like there’s been a freak snowstorm. But as the camera zooms in closer, you can see that there are bubbles everywhere. People are wading knee-deep through them, kicking them up in the air. Sometimes they pop and everyone laughs.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the reporter says. “It’s been raining bubbles here for three days now. We’ve been trying to talk to Michelle Pond, the Amazing Bubbles, to find out when this will end.”

  Michelle rolled her eyes. She’d refused interviews because she really didn’t know how much longer it would go on. She was definitely lighter, and she thought she was getting smaller, but there was still so much energy in her. She looked up at the TV again.

  The next shot was of a playground. Kids were shrieking and laughing as they slid into the masses of iridescent bubbles. They picked up bubbles and threw them at each other. Some popped immediately, but most bounced harmlessly off their targets.

  Then another shower of bubbles began, and the children held out their arms and let the bubbles rain down on them.

  9

  Friday,

  December 4

  Lake Tanganyika

  Tanzania

  “Crossing over into the PPA would be very unwise,” Barbara Baden said, line static hissing underneath her voice. “Don’t. Things are getting very dicey there. The war, the Leopard Society, Tom Weathers

  …”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Jerusha told her, standing on the dock where the boat they’d hired was moored. Mist was rising from the lake, and the jungle around them was noisy with stirring life. “I’m just helping Wally nose around a bit.”

  “Good,” Barbara said. “Be very careful, and stay in touch.”

  “Sure will,” Jerusha told her and snapped the phone shut.

  “Sure will what?” Wally asked. He was scrubbing furiously at his left shoulder with an S.O. S pad. Finch was a few feet away, talking to the boat’s owner. Their kit sat in bundles around them, looking heavy in the dawn light, but Wally seemed barely able to stand still now that they were so close to Lucien.

  Jerusha lifted a shoulder. “Nothing important.” She wondered whether she should tell him what Barbara was saying about the PPA, but she was certain it wouldn’t change Wally’s mind. If she refused to go with him, he’d just go alone. Jerusha wasn’t quite sure why, but she knew she couldn’t let him do that. He needs you, and you…

  Finch interrupted the thought. “Hamisi here doesn’t much like the ide
a of going over to the PPA side of the lake,” he said. “He’s saying he needs another hundred dollars. For the risk.”

  “You already negotiated the price. We’ve already paid him fifty.”

  Finch shrugged. “Now he wants more. Or, he says, he won’t do it. Can’t say I blame the bloke. The PPA’s not a place I want to get too near myself, with the things I’ve been hearing. You’re lucky to have found anyone who’s foolish enough to ferry you across.” He waved at Hamisi, who stood watching them from where the boat was tied up. “You want to talk to him yourself?”

  “I’ll pay you back when we get home, Jerusha,” Wally interjected. His foot was tapping on the pier, shaking the wooden planks, which already bowed under his weight.

  Jerusha sighed. “Offer him another fifty,” she told Finch. The man shrugged and went back to Hamisi. After a heated exchange, he came back. “Got him to agree to an additional seventy. Best I can do. Or the two of you can try to find someone else, or better yet, stay here. Your call.”

  Jerusha looked at Wally. “All right,” she said. “Seventy.”

  Ten minutes later, Finch had tossed the rope from the pier into the boat where they were sitting. The boat smelled equally of old fish and grimy diesel oil; the deck was filthy and slick, the bench seats only slightly less so. Hamisi fiddled with the controls in the small cabin; the engine snorted blue exhaust and bubbles churned at the rear of the boat. “Good luck to the both of you,” Finch called as the bow began to cut through the dark water of the lake. “You’re going to bloody need it.”

  Jerusha tried to put that last bit out of her mind as she watched Finch’s body dwindle into the distance and mist.

  Thirty miles across-that’s what Finch said it was-a trip that would take at least three hours, according to Hamisi, who didn’t understand English but could converse-haltingly-in Jerusha’s French. The Congo had always used French as an official, tribally neutral official language, a practice retained by the PPA, and Hamisi had originally come from the PPA, long ago. Three hours…

  The lake water seemed to drift slowly past the hull as the mist lifted in the rising sun, but there was no sign of the other side of the lake. She could see other boats out on the water: schooners with white sails, distant fishing boats with their snarls of nets, pleasure craft lifting bows high out of the water. The horizon ahead of them was unbroken water seeming eternally fixed despite their own movement. The landscape was beautiful, though: the deep lake, the walls of green mountains behind them and parading off into the distance, a rain squall spreading darkness well to the north, and thunderheads looming in the distance. It reminded her of the wild beauty of Conrad’s description of the Congo.

  Wally didn’t glance around at the scenery. He sat in the exact middle of the boat, staying very still and looking out at the water apprehensively. “Wally, you okay?”

  He gave a shrug and worked his steam-shovel mouth. “All this water,” he said. “Cripes, I used to love swimming, back before my card turned. But now…” He tapped his chest with his fist, a sound like a trash can colliding with a Dumpster. “Can’t swim. Don’t like water.”

  “It’ll be over soon. Just hang on.” She rubbed at the back of her neck with her hand, kneading the ache that threatened to become a headache. And then there’s the jungle, and the rains, and the rivers we’ll probably have to cross there, and getting across Lake Tanganyika again afterward…

  After a time, Jerusha realized that she could finally see the smudge of the PPA coastline. The blue-hazed humps there crawled toward them, far too slowly for Jerusha’s comfort, but reachable now. The boat puttered steadily forward, and Jerusha was beginning to think that the crossing was, despite Finch’s pessimism, to be uneventful.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Wally said.

  He was pointing northward. A black dot was slicing through the water: a patrol boat, with a white wake tracing its path. At about the same time that they noticed it, the boat shifted course toward them. Hamisi, at the wheel, cursed.

  “Can’t you beat them to the shore?” Wally asked hopefully. He pointed to where the trees reached the lake. Hamisi scowled. He spat a long, loud harangue in what Jerusha assumed was Kiswahili. “What’d he say?” Wally asked Jerusha. She could only shake her head.

  Someone on the patrol gunboat was shouting through a megaphone in French. “Shut off your engine!”

  Hamisi looked at Jerusha. She didn’t know what to tell the man. The command was repeated, and this time the machine gun mounted on the craft sent a long white line spattering into the lake just ahead of them. White smoke drifted away from the muzzle, the noise echoing back at them belatedly from the shore. Hamisi slapped at the key; the engine went silent as the waves swayed the boat from side to side.

  Wally grabbed at the gunwale for balance as the patrol boat circled them at twenty yards or so. “Jerusha,” he said, “just stay behind me if they start firing, and I’ll… I’ll…”

  “You’ll what? Swim over to get to them?” The crestfallen apology on his face made her regret the words even as she said them. Her hands slid over her seed belt, her fingers slipping into the enclosures to touch the seeds there. Out here, there was nowhere to hide. If they wanted them dead, all they need do was pepper their sorry little craft with holes and watch them sink. They could capture them just as easily.

  Jerusha had no intention of seeing what a PPA prison might be like. Wally’s strength meant little here, if there was no ground on which to stand. Hamisi was already backing away from the wheel of the boat, his hands up.

  “Wally,” Jerusha said. “Hands up.”

  He looked surprised at that. “We can’t just give up.”

  “ They have to think we will,” she told him, nodding toward the gunboat. She lifted her own hands. “Go on,” she said, and reluctantly Wally raised his own huge arms; there were large orange spots on his underarms.

  The gunboat circled once more, then moved in toward them. When it passed in front of Jerusha, only an arm’s length from their boat, she threw the seeds in her hand and opened her mind to her wild card power.

  Kudzu vines were already sprouting wildly from the seeds before they even hit the gunboat’s deck and the water near the hull. Some curled rapidly around the crew members as they tried to draw guns, while others fouled the twin propellers of the craft. Jerusha could hear the groan of the patrol boat’s engine as it tried to force the props to turn. Then-with a whine and a cloud of white smoke-the engine cut off entirely.

  “Hamisi!” Jerusha shouted in French. “Let’s go! Hate! ”

  Hamisi pressed the starter and water gurgled as they started to move, slowly, along the length of the patrol boat. The crew members were shouting, tearing kudzu from around themselves. Jerusha had been unable to toss the small seeds far enough to reach the machine-gun mount-it swung around to follow them and she heard the man ratchet a slide back. She took a baobab seed from her pouch: she wasn’t certain she could toss it that far. “Rusty!” she said. “Here. Throw this onto the boat.”

  Wally took the seed from her, tossed it high and long. The seed rang on the deck as the baobab sprouted roots and its strange crown-a dozen years’ growth done in a breath. The deck plates groaned metallically as the thick roots plunged downward seeking water and earth. One branch tipped the machine gun’s barrel up, and tracers laced the sky as it chattered.

  Jerusha bent the tree with her mind, tilting it so that the gunboat began to lean. Water suddenly burst around the new baobab’s girth. The gunboat listed over entirely in the space of a few breaths, the half-dozen crew members beginning to scream. Jerusha had the vines fling them overboard, releasing them at the same time.

  “Go!” she shouted to Hamisi. “Allez! Au rivage! Rapidement!” She pushed him toward the cabin of their boat as the gunboat crew flailed at the water, grasping for the baobab’s branches even as the gunboat turned entirely on its side, the hull now facing them. The baobab floated low in the water as Hamisi’s engine coughed and roared. They moved away
from the men, who were waving their arms and calling out to them.

  “Good toss,” Jerusha told Rusty.

  He grinned. She thought that if he could have blushed, he would have. “It was nothin’,” Wally said. “But cripes, that was pretty terrific, Jerusha.”

  She gave him a quick, fading smile. She could feel the baobab dying in the water, drowning without earth to sustain it. The crew of the gunboat was still shouting, their voices fainter now; the tree would serve as a raft until someone noticed them. I’m sorry, she whispered to it. I’m sorry. “Let’s get to the shore before reinforcements show up.” She stared at the slopes there, pointing to the nearest point of land. “There,” she told Hamisi. “Take us there.

  …”

  Jackson Square

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  For once, Michelle isn’t in the pit.

  This is a nice looking place. But she’s still afraid. No, Michelle thinks. Adesina is afraid.

  There are small buildings in a circular layout. They’re nicer than any of the houses in Adesina’s village. These are sturdy, built from concrete blocks and are painted in bright primary colors and all the roofs are brick red. They have glass in the windows and she sees power lines running from generators to each building. There’s gravel laid out on the ground so the walkways won’t turn to mud when it rains. There’s even a pretty painted sign: Kisa… something Hospital for Children. Michelle can’t quite make it out.

  Even though she’s frightened, Adesina is awed by this place. She’s never been anywhere so nice before. A woman comes out of the red building. She wears a white coat and carries a clipboard. Something about her frightens Adesina and she cowers with the other children. The woman walks by each child, pointing at each one, then gesturing to one side of the path or the other.

  After the children are divided, they’re taken to different buildings. Adesina goes into the green building. She likes the color green, but not today. Today she hates it. She’s crying and she wants her mother and father. One of the other children pinches her and tells her to stop being such a baby. But Adesina doesn’t care. She doesn’t mind being a baby now.