Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  She leaned on her elbow, face supported by one hand. "Has to be a private grudge. Somebody whose position would be threatened if my discovery was to be believed. A commercial competitor—no, that doesn't sound right, what would they stand to gain? An old enemy—Lord knows, I've got plenty of those, but this doesn't have their smell. No, it has to be—an academic competitor! Someone whose reputation would be threat—" She stopped, a terrible thought pushing itself into her mind. Oh, shit. "I'll tell you who it might be, Jonas. Charlie sodding Dunsmoore."

  "Who?"

  "Sir Charles Dunsmoore, president of the International Archaeological Society. We—we had a professional dispute, years ago ... He got me kicked out of grad school. . . Nasty business, the bastard walked all over me and enjoyed every minute of it. Hate the swine, and it's mutual. . . Jonas, this is just the sort of dirty trick Dunsmoore would pull."

  Jonas mulled the information over. It would be a mistake to leap to conclusions. "Pru, I know the X backwards. I could—"

  "Waste of time if you're thinking of an Xsearch. If it's Dunsmoore, he'll have covered his back very thoroughly. You'll never connect him to anything. He's as slippery as a weasel dunked in castor oil."

  "Yeah, but—okay, okay, I'm sure you're right. Confident bugger, then? Yes, I know the type—" A thought struck him. "Wait. . . Pru, listen! The story is going to fall apart when the police find out that the document is a forgery. Won't take them long. So Dunsmoore's aim must have been to discredit you temporarily. And that plan makes no sense unless ..." He snapped his fingers. "Trouble. It has to be an improvised holding operation. Something quick-'n'-dirty to buy enough time to set up the real whammy."

  Ohhhh. "That's really encouraging. Now I'll be looking over my shoulder all the time." She saw fear flood into his face. "Metaphorically. Dunsmoore never resorts to violence. It's too honest for him." Stick to what's important, girl. "Jonas, since you claim to know so much about the Xnet, maybe you can help me with a few other tiny problems. First, get me in contact with my sister in Africa—untraceably."

  Jonas actually blushed. "Sorry, Pru. Untraceable communications over the X need special equipment. Mine is half a continent away."

  "Too bad. The other one is, I can't get a buyer for the wheelers. I've tried my usual clients, but nobody's taking the bait. I need a different approach, something unorthodox."

  Jonas tried to think. "Tricky, not really my line . . . Wait. Wait a minute. Angie Carver! Woman we interviewed for Weird Xzine. You will love this lady, Prudence, you really will. She owns a museum."

  Prudence laughed without humor. "Jonas, in matters of archaeology you're an innocent abroad. Museums don't have the kind of money that I'm after."

  Jonas shrugged elaborately, hands palm up, fingers spread. "This isn't the usual kind of museum."

  7

  Gooma Zoodiversity Facility, 2210

  When the police car pulled to a halt outside Gooma Facility, Charity had been feeding the bonobos. These astonishingly humanlike chimpanzees were her special favorites, and she often stood and watched them socializing for hours. They were noticeably more lightly built—the jargon was "gracile," an elegant word that she rather liked—than the common chimp. The babies, of course, were cute and cuddly— like all babies, she reminded herself. It's a universal evolutionary protection mechanism. But the one that intrigued her the most was Pogo, an old male with wise eyes and an unsettlingly direct way of making his wishes felt.

  She heard the whir of the electric engine, and the driver clambered out. Charity wondered what he had come for. There were a few local policemen who often dropped by the facility for a cup of coffee and a chat—or just to watch the animals, as she was doing. But this face was unfamiliar.

  "Charity Odingo?"

  She nodded. "How can I help you?"

  "I am Jairus Mwanga, special constable." He looked distinctly embarrassed. "I am here to arrest you on charges of—"

  "What.?" Charity was on the edge of panic. "Surely there must be some mistake?" My God, do they really want Prudence and somebody's got the names mixed up? Her mind raced, out of gear.

  Stolidly the special constable tried again. "To arrest you on charges of fraud and handling counterfeit works of art." He fumbled in the pocket of his uniform shirt.

  Charity slumped into the nearest chair, her mind awhirl. It must have something to do with Prudence. What had her sister gotten up to this time? But there were more urgent worries. "Moses! What will happen to Moses?"

  Mwanga stared at her. "Moses? Who's Moses?"

  "My son. Asleep in his room. He's only four years old!"

  "Oh. Nobody told me about a child. Wait a moment." Mwanga found what he was looking for, pulled out a flat-form card printer, infraredded it to his wristnode, and printed out a copy of the standard caution, which he handed to her. Then he had to explain to her how to enter a certified notice of receipt into her own 'node to satisfy legal requirements. She tried several times to raise the question of Moses, but Mwanga seemed able to handle only one item at a time, saying merely, "We'll fix the child in a moment." By the time she had satisfied him. Charity was weeping in frustration and fear and Mwanga was becoming more and more flustered.

  He spoke rapidly into his 'node, and after a few moments a reply from someone senior must have come through, because he grunted a couple of times and then said, "Moses, he comes along with you. We've got a court order. They'll look after him at the station."

  She was too confused to think straight. "But he won't like sleeping in a cell!"

  Mwanga shook his head. "He won't stay at the station, lady. The desk sergeant will sort him out good, don't you worry."

  "Oh." She knew Milton Obote, and she wasn't sure that having him sort Moses out was much improvement on a night in a cell, but by then she had worked her way around to another worry. "The animals! Who's going to feed and water my animals?"

  That set off another round of gabbling into the 'node. More grunts. "We'll take care of that at the station, too."

  Mwanga waited patiently while she roused Moses and dressed him. The boy, bleary-eyed, stared at the policeman. Then his eyes opened wide, and without warning his face took on the unreadable mask that so baffled her.

  "Who's that. Ma?"

  "That's a nice gentleman who has come to take us both for a ride in his car," Charity said, not quite lying—or, at least, so she hoped. Moses gave her a funny look.

  She turned to the constable. "I'll just call a few friends to sort out the anim—"

  "No." Mwanga was adamant. "Wait till we get to the station, okay? Your animals'll be fine for a few hours."

  True or not, she had little choice. She shepherded Moses into the rear of the police car and climbed in beside him. Only then did she notice that his shirt was all lumpy at the front.

  She investigated as the car drove them away from Gooma Facility.

  Oink!

  Moses had brought the memimal.

  Prudence wasn't impressed. The Carver Museum of Human History, in her opinion, looked pretty damned ordinary. All the usual exhibits, every one a hologram. A very large copy of the Rosetta stone dominated the entrance hall, revoking slowly Just beyond was Syhda, of course: the world's oldest fossilized human ancestor, a specimen generally held to be Australopithecus ajaren-sis, though Prudence doubted it very much; the original had been dug up near Peninj, just to the north of the Olduvai Gorge, where so many of the early ancestors of humanity had been found over the last few centuries. In Prudence's opinion it was almost certainly a prehuman ape, probably a species of Paran-thropus, very likely P. ignavus. The Goldin brothers always claimed that fragments of bone found nearby proved the creature to be a tool maker, but several apes used rudimentary tools—such as sticks or strands of grass to poke ants out of their nest and eat them—so she remained unconvinced.

  She pointed out as much to Jonas, who laughed. "Trust me. I want you to meet my friend Angie." He peered around. "She's usually pottering about among the exhibits, talking to th
e customers—" He broke off and grabbed the attention of a passing assistant, who muttered vaguely and pointed toward a distant doorway They made their way past the exhibits (A reproduction of Mona Lisa, how crass, thought Prudence) to the Mycenaean Hall, cutely decorated with a tiled maze and a fiberglass minotaur.

  "There she is! Angie! Angie! Over here!"

  A severe-looking and rather large woman carrying a plastic bucket looked up, frowned for a moment, then gave a brief smile of recognition. She put the bucket down and strode majestically over to them. She gave Jonas a piercing look. "Why, if it isn't Jonas Kempe! How's the vidivid business? Who's this, then? New girlfriend?" She gave Prudence a quick once-over. It was like being appraised at a market; Pru half expected the woman to lever her lips back to look at her teeth. "Looks a lot more sensible than that Cash woman hanging on your arm when you interviewed me."

  "No, no, Angie. I told you then, Cashew is just a colleague. Always was, still is, okay?" Angie gave him a look that showed that she hadn't believed it then and she wasn't about to concede it now, but said nothing. "And Prudence here isn't a girlfriend, either—she's just somebody that I want you to help."

  Angie scented intrigue. This was getting interesting.

  "Angie owns the museum," Jonas told Prudence, trying to get the conversation back on course.

  "Inherited it from Mikhail, my seventh husband," Angie told Prudence blithely, giving her a special "woman-to-woman" look. "Wore him out like all the others. The first one, Henry was his name . . . owned his own stable of Thoroughbreds. And the hotel chain, of course. The second, Jean-Louis, owned several airlines. Osborne, my third—well, he'd inherited some tourist complexes in Bali and Tahiti from an aunt. Yoshiki, number four—"

  "Angle," said Jonas, "has more money than God."

  "That," said Angle, "is because I haven't got much God, Jonas." It was clearly a standing joke between them.

  "Seems to me," said Prudence bluntly, "that you haven't got much taste, either."

  Angle seemed unperturbed. "Ah, a straight talker. Now, just what do you mean by that, young lady?"

  Prudence gestured at the exhibits. "Holograms. Fiberglass junk. Plastic clichés. All the obvious stuff, and none of it real."

  "Oh, that old tat?" Angle laughed. "Honey, you are so right— so very right. But it's what brings the public in, you see, and by statute I can only keep the lease on this building if I haul at least twenty thousand of the buggers through my doors every year." Angle took her by the arm. "Jonas: is she okay?" He nodded. "You'd better be right, Jonas." She came to a decision. "Yeah, she's okay, she knows how to keep her mouth shut. Anyway, I can buy better lawyers than the government, any day . . . it's not a big risk." Angle turned to Prudence. "You want to see some real exhibits, my dear, you just come along with me. And you, too, Jonas." She winked at Prudence. "You and I will get along just fine, young lady, but I must ask you not to reveal what you are about to see to anyone. Now, let me tell you about Maddison, my fifth husband—a major league basketball player he was, and by heck, he ... "

  In response to a code punched in by Angle, the elevator went down several more levels than its panel showed. When the door opened, there was only darkness. Angle reached for the light switch. "You want something real? Then look at"—she flipped the switch—"this!"

  It took a few seconds for Prudence's eyes to adjust.

  No, it can't he.

  The underground room was huge. Everywhere were benches and boxes, tables and glass-fronted cabinets. Facing her was a large slab of rock propped up against one wall. It was painted with what looked like animals, in blacks, browns, rust-reds, dull greens . . .

  "Like it?" said Angle.

  "It looks like a cave painting," said Prudence. She stepped closer. "Just like a cave painting. It's a remarkable reproduction, Angle, but I thought we were going to see something real."

  "That ain't no reproduction, honey"

  Prudence stared at her, eyes wide. "But private collectors aren't allowed to own real cave paintings! The IAS won't—"

  Angle patted Prudence's shoulder. "What the International Archaeological Society don't see, its heart don't grieve over. Now you understand why you were sworn to secrecy. This old thing is one of my favorites—look at the way that bull's flank curves . . . It's from a tributary of the Dordogne, and I used some of Henry's money to rescue it before the cave got washed out by mudslides when some damn fool defied a court order and started chopping down the trees on the hillside."

  Jonas gave Prudence a proud smile. "Angle may hoard illicit artifacts, Pru, but ecologically speaking she's as pure as the driven snow."

  "It's a fetish of mine," said Angle. "Gotta do it right, girl. Otherwise I can't live with myself." She paused, then shrieked with laughter. "And I certainly can't live without myself!" It was clearly another old favorite.

  Prudence was moving from one bench to another, almost at a run, eyes widening at every step. "An ichthyosaur! I've never seen one so big! My God, are those really stone chippings made by Homo hahilis? Skulls! You've got—oh, no, I don't believe it, a whole skeleton!"

  "Minus several toes and a kneecap," said Angle. "Maybe one day I'll get a complete specimen."

  "Most of my customers would kill for— Angle, what the devil is this?" Prudence held up a large fossilized bony structure. "Part of a dinosaur?"

  "Customers?" Angle gave Prudence a much harder stare than before. "You're in the trade, aren't you? I thought I knew that face. Prudence . . . O'Donnell? No, no, wrong ethnic grouping— I know, Odingo! Ionian sulfur flowers! You're the one that got into all that bother with the police back in—"

  "It was all a mistake," said Prudence defensively. "Never reached a jury"

  "Sometime, not now, I want to talk to you about those sulfur flowers. Never quite approved of—"

  "The area got wiped flat when Pele erupted a few years ago."

  "Oh. That changes things, I guess. So the ones you brought back are the only specimens?"

  "Yes."

  "Good, I've got a dozen up at the far end in humidity-free containers. Should be worth a fortune now."

  "My God, Angle, they were worth a fortune then!"

  Angle nodded. "I think I sold Humphrey's meat-packing business in Argentina to get them. Husband number six, dear. Or was it one of his silver mines? Hard to remember, the old brain cells don't work so well as they once did." She snapped her fingers. "God, they don't! You were on the vidivid the other night, getting creamed by that Courtney bimbo." Prudence groaned. "You're in trouble, young lady, you know that? Police trouble. You—"

  "Yes, I know," said Prudence wearily. "But you haven't answered my question." She pointed to the fossil.

  "Oh, that. That's my thoat bone."

  "Throat bone?" Jonas interrupted, confused. "Throats don't have a—"

  "Thoat bone," said Angie. "It was found by the Second Mars Expedition. Pre-Pause."

  "You're not serious," said Prudence. "Pulling our legs? April Fools' joke? The thoat was a fictional invention of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There never were any real thoats."

  Angie rubbed her neck with one hand. "That's what the Second Mars Expedition thought," she said. "Until one of them found this."

  "Nuts."

  "Maybe. It was found by Silas Shatner, a communications engineer, while he was setting up the long-range antenna. He knew nobody would believe him, so he kept it quiet and stashed the fossil away in a toolbox. He sold it to a dealer for a few hundred dollars. I picked it up for seventy thou about ten years ago. I've had it analyzed in strictest confidence, and it's perfectly genuine, some kind of fossilized bone, totally unknown to palaeontology." She shrugged. "Of course, Shatner might have been lying when he said he found it on Mars." Angle's face looked troubled for a moment. "But if so . . . well, he took an awful lot of trouble to impregnate it with genuine Martian minerals. The molecular structure, you see. It's unmistakable, or so the archaeologists tell me. Anyhow, I decided to call it a thoat bone—-just in case it was."
<
br />   "Two million dollars?" Charity was aghast. "You know I can't raise that kind of money, William!"

  William Jumbe, her lawyer, nodded sympathetically Nyamwezi law wasn't very enlightened, and the accused didn't have as many rights as in some other countries. But even taking that into account, something wasn't right. Setting this ludicrous level for the bail bond proved it. Everybody knew that Charity Odingo was harmless, and with her beloved animals to look after there was no chance whatsoever that she would run away.

  "What about Moses? I want him back!"

  "Judge Peterson has signed a court order giving the state temporary responsibility for his welfare," Jumbe told her.

  "Peterson? He's crazy as a coot."

  "He's still a judge, and it's still a court order. I'll put in a challenge, but it all takes time. Obote has made arrangements for Moses to be packed off to stay at a residential care home run by the Mwinyi family. They're decent people and it's only a mile or two away."

  "William, how can I explain that to Moses?"

  "Tell him it's a special treat."

  "He'll know I'm lying, he always does. And what about my animals?" Eventually three strapping young men from Gooma village, who often acted as casual labor for Charity and between them knew how to care for all the animals, were picked up in the police car and given a list of instructions that she had printed out on the police station's computer.

  Obote's orders had come from very high up, in response to a request from the District of Columbia Police Department in Normerica. He told Charity that a Normerican attorney was already on his way aboard a Cape Airlines passenger jet. "When he arrives, I'm sure everything will be a lot clearer. In the meantime, I'm afraid you'll have to spend the night in our cell." Obote made it clear that he and his squad would do what they could to make her stay as brief and as comfortable as possible. No doubt it was all a mistake and would be sorted out once the attorney arrived from Normerica.