A Feast Unknown

by Philip José Farmer

  Doc had been born in 1903, I learned when the two were quarreling about the best sign in the zodiac. He was now 65 years old, but he looked as if he were still 30.

  They did not seem bitter that he had not shared his secret of prolonged youth with them. They spoke as if he had offered it to them, but they had turned it down.

  I could not believe this. I assumed that I misunderstood them. There was the possibility that they had been over fifty when the offer was made. In that case, the elixir was only able to slow down aging somewhat. By the time they were ninety, they would have aged physically to about seventy. Perhaps, on considering the price they must pay for this slight prolongation of life, they had rejected it. What, after all, was an extra thirty years or so of life?

  But when a man was offered a chance to live at least 30,000 years, then the price looked small.

  I liked to think so.

  But listening to them, I was forced to dwell a little on that which I had pushed away because it was too painful. Had I, by becoming a god, become less of a man?

  9

  Now I knew what Doc Caliban’s ultimate goal might be. He meant to kill me, for some reason, but the end of his journey could lie in the mountains to the west, where I also intended to journey.

  I began to get more uneasy. Not that I expected him to try to kill me now. It was obvious that he was “toying” with me. Also, it was obvious that the old men had instructions to talk as freely as they pleased. Caliban wanted me to learn much about him. The more I knew, the more “equal” would be the hunted and the hunter.

  I felt angrier. Up to now, every enemy had done his best to make the situation as unequal as possible. But Caliban was treating me contemptuously.

  Very well. Let him have his contempt. If he really intended to fight me to the death with only his bare hands, he was not going to frighten me.

  I would leave now for the mountains, where I had an engagement for which I would be late if I did not start now. Doctor Caliban, if he was to make the same destination on time, would do better to start on the journey at once.

  I inched backwards. Then I stopped. A bronze cloud had scudded into the light of the campfire.

  There were empty shadows. A second later, as if stepping from the wings of a stage, the man, the bronze cloud, was there.

  The two old men started, even though they must have experienced this noiseless unannounced jack-in-the-boxery many times before.

  Doctor Caliban was at least four inches taller than I. His body was superb, massive yet beautifully proportioned. The bones of skull and torso looked very thick, and his skull was long-shaped. He was the only other man, besides myself, and some of the Nine, who had such heavy bones. Which meant he had more foundation for muscular attachment and for larger muscles than most men.

  His skin was a pale bronze. His hair, which was of medium length and parted on the right, was a darker bronze. It looked like a metal cap that had been welded onto his skull. And though he was too far away for me to determine accurately his eye color, I got the impression they were light-green.

  His face was extremely handsome and regular. It was masculine, yet almost beautiful. It also looked familiar, though I had never seen him before.

  He spoke in a deep resonant voice, like a bronze bell’s. His speech was even and regular with none of the hesitations, pauses, vague exclamations, or broken off sentences and phrases that distinguish the speech of most humans.

  “Lord Grandrith, the Noble Savage, the titled man-ape, is watching you two,” he said.

  He looked into the shadows at the exact spot where I lay. He laughed and pulled from his belt a round object I recognized a moment later as a grenade. He pulled the pin and with a swiftness that might have dazzled a leopard, tossed it at me.

  It would have landed just out of arm’s reach if I had not moved forward. I caught it and hurled it back at him and then was gone into the bush. I looked back. He was standing with his hands on his hips, his back bent backward, head thrown back, and laughing. The grenade was at his feet, and the two old men had dived away—very swiftly for 80-year-olds—and were hugging the ground.

  The blacks were standing up and asking questions, but they could not see the grenade and so did not know what was causing the commotion. A big Negro stepped out of the tent with a rifle. I had not seen him before. He looked as if he were a Yankee.

  Doc Caliban said, loudly, “It’s a dummy! I just wanted to test his reactions! They’re very good! The best I ever saw outside of my own!”

  Simmons, getting up, spoke in a squeaky voice that was comical issuing from such a squat long-armed brutish man. “Doc! When’re you going to cut out this crap! If he killed Trish, why don’t you kill him and get it over with?”

  10

  Usually, I don’t think in the human categories of good and evil. Those who would kill me are enemies. Just that and nothing more. I kill them without having to justify the deed by classifying them as evil.

  But seeing this very handsome man, I experienced a feeling of genuine evil, of the anti-good. The hairs rose on the back of my neck as if a demon of a native African religion had pulled them up with his cold hands of wind.

  It was a feeling I did not like.

  I decided to leave for the mountains. However, about twenty yards from the camp, I came across a large aluminum-sided wooden-floored cage lying on its side, the door open. I sniffed at it, and I knew not only that it had held a lion, I knew which lion. I also knew why I had been attacked by a hungry lion that had no business in this area. Doc Caliban had not only loosed it at me, he had probably spent some time conditioning it to attack human beings.

  If he had wanted an estimate of me, he now had it.

  I lifted the cage above my head—it only weighed about 200 pounds—and carried it to a tree I had noticed a moment ago. This was tall and thin and had all the characteristics required for my sudden plan. I never learned its English name—if it had one—but knew it by the Bandili word, ndangga.

  After lassoing its top with my rope, I pulled it down with much straining until its top almost touched the ground. After securing the rope around the trunk of another tree, I wove the branches of the bent tree into a rough net near the top. This required the breaking of a number of branches, which might bring Caliban running. That was a chance I not only would take but welcomed. He, however, did not appear.

  The net of branches held the cage as well as I had hoped. I looked through the trees and saw that the two old men had returned to their chairs. They were talking so loudly that they covered any sound I might have made while constructing the catapult. A black brought them glasses with some dark liquid in it, and, between sips, they shouted what must have been insults at each other. The blacks were squatting on the other side of their fire and talking. The fire gleamed on their rolling eyeballs and teeth.

  I waited a while. Caliban stuck his head out of the tent once to say something to the old men. At that moment, I whacked the rope in two with the knife. There was a hum, a crack as the rope snapped past me, another hum, deeper, and a loud whish as the tree straightened. The cage flew up and out in a trajectory that came from accident and hope more than skill. But the result was admirable.

  The cage, turning over slowly, flew down towards Caliban’s tent. He burst out of it like a bronze shell from a 17th-century cannon. The two oldsters jumped up from their chairs, their drinks flying and their smokes falling out of their mouths as they looked around for the source of the noise. The blacks scattered, some running towards Caliban’s tent.

  Caliban kept on running and disappeared into the darkness, undoubtedly looking for me. The blacks were behind bushes and trees and looking at the crushed tent. Simmons was jumping up and down like an enraged chimpanzee and howling, “Oh, my God! My God! I shit in my pants! I was so scared, I shit in my pants!”

  Rivers was on the ground and rolling back and forth and laughing hysterically.

  For a moment, I thought of ambushing Caliban and getting this conflict
over with. I was restrained by knowing that he probably had the same goal as I and that I would meet him there. I wanted to find out if he could continue to track and harass me. I also wanted him to be even more convinced that he was dealing with a buffalo in the bush, not with an antelope.

  11

  The dawn was as gray as an old lion’s hopes for fresh meat. It quickly enough became bright and quick and sent its golden roar out over the savanna. The gold melted over the world, and the day was hot and sluggish.

  I trotted across the plain for an hour after the sun rose. I had been trotting all night and was thinking about holing up until late afternoon. The mountains, light-purplish and getting taller, were about thirty miles to the west now. Perhaps, if I pushed on, I could get there before dusk and even be part way up the flank of the nearest one.

  I kept on going. After a while, I was within a half-mile of a Kitasi village, a collection of about thirty huts, round, double-domed, and built of sticks, grass, and dried mud. The Kitasi were cattle herders, drinkers of blood, many-wived, and of ancestors who had mixed their Negro genes with dark Caucasian somewhere in the north a long time ago. In 1920, when I first encountered them, they wore bark-fiber loin coverings which projected fore and aft, looking from a distance like the paper boats that schoolboys make. In the old days, the Kitasi had killed their king as soon as gray appeared in his hair. The British had forced a halt to this custom, but the king died by “accident.” Then a white man had given the new king a bottle of hair dye, and the latest king might yet die of old age.

  At one time the Kitasi had been a powerful people. They had warred with the Masai, the Agikuyu, and the Bandili. The thirty villages of 20,000 population, as a result, were now six with about a thousand inhabitants. The Kitasi hated many people, but they hated me most of all, and with good reason.

  The men in the old stake-bed truck heading out from the village may have been told about me by radio and were looking for me. It was going southeast; I was going southwest. We were about a mile apart. Then they spotted me, and the truck swung around and raced towards me. I ran towards some acacia trees, a half a mile away, and got behind the nearest one as the truck pulled up, brakes screeching. It had stopped about a hundred yards away.

  There were three men in the cab and six on the bed. All got out of the truck. Three were armed with rifles that looked, from my distance, like pre-World War I Enfields. One carried a heavy spear and a machete in a sheath. Two had bows and wore quivers of arrows on their backs. One had a revolver, and the other two carried big axes.

  They talked awhile and then spread out in an ever-widening arc, the ends of which curved out towards me. A rifleman was on each end; the third rifleman was in the center. The two bowmen flanked him, and the spearman and the axemen were equidistant between the center man and the end men. The arc advanced slowly while the men shouted encouragement to each other or shouted insults and threats at me.

  So far, they did not know whether or not I had a revolver, but they did know I had no rifle. There were nine of them, and they should have charged me in the truck, swung broadside when near me, and then let loose with a volley. Afterwards, they could have jumped off the truck and charged me on foot. If they were brave and determined, they probably would have gotten me, even if I had killed a number of them.

  They preferred to take it cautiously. My reputation probably made them extra careful. When they were within 60 feet, they stopped. I remained on the other side of the tree. The riflemen on the ends ran even further outwards and then cut in so they could get behind me. I waited. I was naked and had only the knife, which had been worn down so much that it no longer had a good balance for throwing. I was going to have to depend upon speed, and I was not at my freshest after having run all night without eating and with little water.

  Nearby were several stones, two of which were of the right size and shape for throwing. I put the knife between my teeth and picked up a stone in each hand. The riflemen on both ends seeing this, shouted the news to the others. Then they started shooting at me.

  A bullet ricocheted off the tree. I darted around to the other side and started running at an angle from the men in the center of the arc. The rifleman there started to fire at me, and the bowmen shot their arrows. They missed. Immediately after the arrows were released, I cut back in the opposite direction. The second flight of arrows missed also, and though I heard some bullets, I was not hit.

  All of these men had been raised on tales about me and so regarded me as some sort of demon. They were very excited and apprehensive, and the fact that I ran towards them instead of away additionally rattled them. Moreover, under these conditions, my zigzagging made it even more difficult to hit me. And I am swift; I have been clocked at 8.6 seconds in the 100-yard dash, and I was barefooted.

  Yet they were brave men and stood their ground. (The Kitasi still eliminate their cowards before they reach 18, despite the watch that the British had kept on them.) They kept to their stations and fired at me, and the spearman and the two axemen ran towards me, shouting Kitasi war cries.

  I stopped briefly and cast a stone. It caught the rifleman on his head. He fell backwards, and I ran again, this time straight towards him. The youth with the revolver ran towards me, firing. I paid him no attention because he would hit me only by accident while he ran. The bowmen aimed again at me, while the axemen and spearman ran in towards me. I threw myself down and then jumped up and hurled my second stone. It struck the bowman on my left in the neck, and he fell down.

  The riflemen on the ends were running back now and firing as they ran. One of their bullets struck an axeman, and he was out of the fight.

  It had been nine. Suddenly, it was six. The spear went over my shoulder and thudded into the ground before me. I yanked it out, paused as bullets screamed by, and cast. The spear went through the shoulder of the youth with the revolver.

  I dived for the rifle by the first man I’d hit, rolled, and came up with it. It still had an unfired cartridge in it. I took my time and aimed, and the rifleman on the right threw up his arms, his weapon flying, and fell on his face. I picked up a cartridge off the ground beside a spilled box and inserted it in the breech and jumped to one side, went to one knee, and fired again. The last of the riflemen clutched his leg and fell down and kicked and screamed. I removed the bandolier from the corpse and slipped it over my shoulder.

  Sun flashed off an axehead as it turned over and over with me at the end of its arc through the air. I leaped to one side, inserted another cartridge, and killed the man who still had his axe. He fell a few feet from me; another two seconds and he might have split my skull.

  The others ran away. Since I was between them and the truck, they went on foot. I drove off in the truck. The fuel meter was broken, so I could not know how much gas I had left. It did not matter. I would drive until it ran out.

  I was happy. The fight had lifted me up, and I had a means for putting more distance more swiftly between me and my pursuers. I also noticed that I had not had an orgasm during the killings. This meant that the exertion and excitement had been too much for even that powerful aberrated behavior to appear, or it meant that I was still drained of seminal fluid, or it might mean that I was rid of my aberration. I was inclined to favor the second speculation.

  But I had water in several canteens in the truck and could rest for a while. The bumpy ride was, to me, a relaxation. And I was headed at a speed faster than I had hoped to attain this morning towards the people who could give me an answer, if anyone could.

  12

  The shadow slashed across the truck like a knife cutting apart my hopes of escape.

  The roar of the jets followed the shadow. Overhead, by 30 feet, the jet sped ahead, pulled up and around, and then came back in. In the brief look at it, I saw that it was a Kenyan Army plane, an English Huntley-Hawker.

  The jet came back only 20 feet above the ground and about fifty yards to my right. The pilot was trying to see if I was in the truck. He shot by, his black fac
e turned towards me. He grinned. Well he might. He carried rockets under his wings, pods of napalm, and, if these failed, or he did not want to waste them on one man, he could use his machine guns and the cannon.

  I began evasive action. It looked, however, as if my evading days were over. I had no cover near. Even if I had, I would have been burned or blasted out.

  The jet passed me and continued near the ground for perhaps 2000 feet. Then it pulled up to about a thousand and circled so that it would come in straight at me. Undoubtedly, though I could not see his features, he was still grinning. He was happy to be obliterating the white man, the fabled Lord Grandrith. He probably did not know the reason for the Kenyan government’s decision to destroy me. He may have heard stories about me, but, as an educated man, he would have been forced to laugh at the teller of them as an ignorant and superstitious man.

  Whatever he believed, he must have thought he had me powerless. He was the absolute master in this situation, and none of my demonic abilities would help me.

  He came down swiftly. I pressed on the accelerator, ready to swing the truck to the left the moment the rockets or napalm pods were loosed. They would be going so swiftly that even my reflexes would be too slow. But I was going to try evasion. Something . . .

  Overhead, something did develop. It was tiny and blue as the sky. It looked as if it were a bolt in the big door of the sky and someone had slammed it shut. It was blue and then it merged with the glitter of the sun on the jet, and both became a great red and white ball, expanding as the tiny missile and the rockets and the napalm and the fuel supply exploded.