Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  In his hand he clutched the memimal. At intervals it meowed.

  He had no plan in his head. To a four-year-old the world is a confusing place at the best of times, and even the most familiar of surroundings are perpetually springing new surprises, some pleasant, some not. And Moses was not an entirely normal four-year-old. He was wonderful with animals, totally unpredictable with people. He could disappear into himself for hours and ignore the rest of the world, and you never knew what would trigger it.

  He had enjoyed the ride in the car, but he had not enjoyed being separated from his mother. Even very young humans have a deep-seated instinct for emotional undercurrents, and Moses had sensed that his mother was frightened. Even though she had talked brightly; indeed because she had talked too brightly.

  though Moses could not articulate such an analysis. Things just seemed wrong. He hated it when people said one thing with their tongues and another with their body language. To him, the lie was glaring—the insincere smile shouted its dishonesty. That was what he so loved about animals—they hardly ever told lies. Except for the bonobos, but they were such charming liars.

  Even though the Mwinyis were saying nice things and pretending to act like parents, he'd known straightaway that he had to get away from those horrid people with their fixed smiles and hard eyes.

  As usual, it had been easy. Grown-ups have such a simple-minded view of the capabilities of the young. The screws securing the window had been loose, and his nimble fingers had quickly teased them out using a paper clip that he had found in the trash bin under the table.

  He slowed down to catch his breath, and his eyes darted this way and that, looking for a place to hide. He had learned that trick long ago. If you run away and remain visible, they soon catch you. Grown-ups are slow thinkers, but out in the open they can move surprisingly fast.

  He had come to the edge of the village, and now he was trotting alongside fields of maize, twice his height and more, cobs ripening in the African sunshine, their sheaves of surrounding leaves halfway to a dry brown—funny horsetaillike tendrils hanging down from their tips as they nestled close to the thick upright stems.

  He finally noticed that the memimal was meowing and silenced it with a sharp command.

  Moses had a natural sense of direction. He had watched the many twists and turns of the police car as it made its way from Gooma Facility to the nearby town of Nambosa, and again when he had been taken to the Mwinyis' residence at the edge of the village. Now he stopped, caught his breath, found a suitable tree, and shinned up it. Not far away, people were working in the fields, harvesting root crops. Away and to his right he saw a familiar shape, the outcrop of rock known locally as the Crocodiles Nose (after a tribal myth of some improbability with a highly amusing punch line). Ma sometimes took him there on one of their many walks. Ma was all right, she hardly ever told him lies. He didn't explicitly work out that he could find his way home from the Crocodiles Nose; it was more that he instinctively homed toward anything familiar. He scrambled down the tree, picked his direction, and began running again.

  His instincts told him to hide. But where!

  A side track led up a short cutting to an abandoned shed— some kind of farm building, maybe one that had been used for storage. The roof had fallen in and one wall was half collapsed. Weeds had grown into the gap, over and around the fallen rubble. Birds had made a scruffy nest atop one wall.

  He wriggled between the bars of an old, broken gate, not noticing that he had dropped the memimal in the scramble. He knew from experience that hiding inside buildings didn't always work—grown-ups sometimes looked in such places. But up in the corner, where part of the collapsed roof jutted out over the top of the wall, that was the kind of place they never thought of searching. He scrambled up the sloping edge of the gap in the wall, using it as a staircase, and squeezed in beneath the jutting sheet of recycled plastic.

  He was certain that nobody had seen him take refuge.

  He was tired, hungry, and thirsty, but more than that, he was scared. Scared that those horrible people who had taken him away from Ma would find him and drag him back again; scared because his mother wasn't at home where she ought to be.

  Bad people had taken Ma away.

  He squinted and watched the sun climbing higher in the sky. Before the heat became too great, he ought to look for something to drink—

  He heard voices.

  Two policemen appeared on the path below, talking loudly, their heavy boots making slapping sounds against the sun-baked mud of the track.

  "No sign of the little bastard," said one. Moses didn't understand the word, but he recognized the uniform and he didn't like the tone of voice. Bad people. He huddled in the shadows, trying to be as quiet as a mouse like the heroine in one of his favorite stories.

  "Wombaga said he saw the child go past headin' in this direction," replied the second policeman.

  "Old fool's drunk most of the time. You can't rely on his memory, or his sense. Probably made the whole story up."

  "Maybe— No!" The policeman pounced and held up a lumpish foam shape. "This toy belonged to the child!" He shoved it in his belt: this was evidence. He looked around, saw the shed, pointed. The other nodded. They wrenched the gate open, snapping off several brittle staves in the process. Their feet crunched on the rubble.

  "Looks deserted."

  "Oh, yeah? See where those plants have been bent over?"

  "Probably an animal."

  Moses became aware of a faint slithering sound close by. Below, the two men rummaged in the ruins of the shed.

  "Watch out for rats and snakes."

  "Nothin' here 'cept beetles and spiders."

  "Let's go, then. He must have dropped the toy as he ran past."

  "No, I got kids of my own. You'd be amazed how clever they are at hidin' . . . I'll take a look up there." He began to climb the broken wall, heading straight for Moses' hideaway.

  "Careful," his companion warned. "Could be scorpions!"

  "Yeah. An' you watch out for stampeding rhinos, okay? Don't you tell me how to go abou—"

  An instant before the man's head reached a position where he couldn't fail to notice the child, the source of the slithering noise made itself apparent. A huge python, six inches thick and at least twelve feet long, flowed past Moses and straight at the man. He yelled and fell off the wall to the ground beneath. He picked himself up, and both men ran off, stopping only when they had regained the main path.

  "Like I said, scorpions I don't mind," said the man who had fallen. "Snakes —ugh!"

  "No kid'd be up there," said the other.

  "No," the first hurriedly agreed. "Where did that snake go?"

  "No idea. Into the bushes somewhere."

  "The kid must've gone farther along the path. Let's go after him. I hate snakes."

  The sunset was spectacular. The whole western sky acquired an orange glow. Streaky wisps of cirrostratus hung across the horizon like wreathed trails of smoke, set in dark relief against the glowing backdrop of the sky. To the east, random clumps of cirrus shone salmon pink in the afterglow.

  Skeins of geese straggled across the darkening heavens like the strings of a tattered fishing net. Lengthening shadows pointed skeletal fingers at the onrushing darkness.

  Covered in dust, his face tear-streaked, his feet sore and blistering, Moses limped from isolated tree to isolated tree, skirting clumps of brushwood. He had been walking since midafternoon, and the village was far behind him.

  The familiar silhouette of the Crocodile's Nose still seemed as far away as ever.

  He was desperately thirsty. His lips were cracked and bleeding, his throat parched. He had no clear conception of "death," not as applied to himself, so he could not recognize that unless he found water within a few hours he would collapse and die . . . but he knew he had to find water, and quickly He had seen dead animals in times of drought and he knew that without food and water, animals stopped working.

  He just didn't kno
w that the same applied to people.

  Animals . . . The animals knew where there was water. Moses would follow the animals.

  First, though, he had to find some animals to follow, and that wasn't so easy. There were birds, but they either sat immobile on tree branches or flashed past so quickly that his eyes could scarcely follow them. Snakes didn't help, either—mostly they lurked in slack coils in the central hollows of grass tussocks, or else they slithered away at his approach.

  Distantly he heard the howling of a hyena pack.

  He turned in that direction and began to pick his painful way toward them.

  Hyenas, despite their loutish appearance, do not lack courage. A lone hyena will take on a single lioness; a pack will attack a pride of lionesses and dispossess them of their kill, no matter how hungry the big cats are. A human child poses no terrors for these tenacious beasts. It never occurred to Moses that hyenas were dangerous. It never occurred to him that any animals were dangerous. To him, they weren't, because he could virtually read their minds.

  It did occur to him that where there were hyenas, there would be food animals for them. His mother had explained all about food animals, in terms that a four-year-old would comprehend. Although Charity's maternal instincts were strong, and her chief urge was to protect her son against the cruelties of the world until he became old enough to understand them, she was also a trained field zoologist with an old-fashioned distaste for pretty lies. The Disneyfied picture of happy, carefree animals at play in a perfect world was not one that she cared to put over on anybody, least of all her own offspring. So Moses had been given an extensive course in the true nature of animal existence, and he knew that some animals killed others and ate them, and that many animals stole the food that others had killed, ganging up on them if need be. That was how it was, and Charity had tried to explain how silly it was to endow animals with human characteristics. So although he didn't know the words, he knew that it was stupid to speak of the cowardly hyenas stealing food from the noble lions. The hyenas merely adopted their own, very effective tricks to get food—and if the lions couldn't compete, tough.

  Hyenas, then, meant food animals—and food animals meant water. He knew that much.

  The sun continued to set: soon darkness would fall. He limped on.

  He could smell the water hole now. And the odor of departed animals—zebra, gazelle, rhinoceros . . . When the sun began to set, they had left the water hole—zebras and gazelles to their herds and rhinos to their solitary devices. The water hole was dangerous enough during the day. At night, the hyenas were king.

  Moses staggered ankle-deep into viscous, liquid mud. It tripped him, and he splashed face down. Sobbing, he pushed himself into a kneeling position, scraped his eyes as clean as he could manage, and crawled a dozen yards toward the glint of the water's murky surface. He was almost there when the hyena stepped out of hiding. They both jumped, and stood nose to nose, barely a yard apart.

  He could smell the animal's warm breath. It was foul.

  The hyena opened its jaws and snarled, showing sharp teeth. It barked half a dozen times, the call-sign of its pack.

  Moses took a deep breath—and barked back at it.

  The hyena wasn't expecting that. It backed off a few feet, snarling.

  Somehow Moses knew that it would be wrong to snarl back. Instead, he barked again, but he put a whine into his voice, the kind of whine he'd heard baby hyenas making. He instinctively made the whine sound a hit like the pack's call-sign—not too close, not too different.

  Now the hyena was nonplussed. The prey wasn't behaving like prey It was behaving more like a hyena, like a pup from his own pack. But it wasn't a pup. The hyena had never seen anything less like a pup.

  And yet. . . there was something about the prey's body language, the way it held its pose for an instant, the way it moved its head . . .

  The hyena backed away a little farther. Something was wrong ... it felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  Moses whined again and tossed his head from side to side, glancing sideways to avoid direct eye contact.

  The hyena paused, growled uncertainly deep in its throat. . . then slunk away into the darkness.

  Moses had known that it would. He didn't know how he'd known, but he knew. With animals, he always knew.

  He bent his head and drank deep from the muddy, fouled water. He spat lumps of floating solid matter from his mouth.

  At that moment, it tasted like nectar.

  He coughed, staggered fully to his feet, and squelched through the mud away from the water, toward a solitary acacia tree. He scrambled up, ignoring scrapes and cuts, and made his way to a fork about fifteen feet above the ground. He wedged himself in as firmly as he could.

  Within seconds, he was asleep.

  A moment later, the veldt was lit only by starlight.

  The Hunter packed up his gear, the work of a few minutes, and checked the action of his crossbow. It was getting light, and he couldn't afford to waste the daylight.

  Testing the wind to make sure it hadn't changed direction from the previous evening, he made his way carefully toward an outcrop of rocks that overlooked the water hole.

  The zebras and gazelles held no interest for him. Their hides had some value, but it was traditional medicines that he was after. With a high-powered rifle he could have gone for rhino horn and made himself an easy fortune, but that was not the way of the Hunters. You can't down a rhino with a crossbow. Carlesson was hoping for a leopard. Or, if he was really lucky, a cheetah. Even a lion cub would do . . . The bones of all the big cats were in short supply. The more difficult the Diversity Police made it to hunt them, the more their value soared. The economics made restrictions counterproductive. For a moment he let his mind wander, to all the good things he would be able to do and buy when he'd made a kill ... to Kandinsky, left alone to die a miserable death . . . Then he shook his head, to drive the distracting thoughts away. He was a Hunter, and a Hunter always stayed focused on his target.

  Out among the long grass, a quarter of a mile away, he saw three lionesses slinking through the grass, crouched low to the ground, shoulder blades and haunches prominent, tails swishing, their necks stretched out so that in profile you could see the funny little beards they wore beneath their chins. They were stalking a distant zebra herd. Then, more easily than he'd ever hoped, his target presented itself. From behind a line of nearby bushes came two cheetahs, an adult and a cub. Obviously the adult was a female, the cub's mother.

  The female was being very cautious. She raised her head and sniffed the air, alert for any sign of danger. But the wind wafted the Hunter's scent away from her. And both she and her cub needed to drink. One step at a time, she edged toward the water hole, while the cub kept close to her side.

  Moses opened his eyes, tried to stretch his painful limbs, and nearly fell from his perch. His head ached, his whole body ached, he felt terrible. He was plastered with dried mud.

  He held on to a branch for a few seconds while memory returned. He turned his head to look at the water hole and saw the cheetahs. He sucked in his breath.

  It was Zemba and Mbawa.

  He began to scramble down the tree. To his childish way of reasoning, Zemba and Mbawa equated with "home." It didn't occur to him that they had been released onto the plains, and home could be fifty miles away

  He didn't see the Hunter behind his rock pile, but he heard the snap of the crossbow release and the dull twock as the quarrel slammed into Mbawa's flank. The mother cheetah was knocked sideways into the dust, where for a few seconds she lay, kicking. Then she stopped moving. Blood trickled from her nostrils and the corner of her mouth.

  Zemba padded over to her mother and sniffed at the corpse. She knew something was wrong. She nuzzled her mother's fur, but the big cat didn't move. She began to make curious chirping sounds.

  Moses hit the ground running. "Zemhyyyyyy!"

  Startled, the Hunter leaped to his feet. He hadn't had time to reload the crossbow, so
his hand dropped to the hilt of his knife. Then he relaxed.

  It was just a kid.

  Moses noticed the Hunter, gasped, and skidded to a halt.

  "Don't be frightened, kid. I won't harm you." The Hunter's smile was predatory. Moses turned and ran for his life. There was a tight clump of thorny bushes where he might scramble through at ground level. . .

  The Hunter caught up with him before he'd gotten halfway Moses kicked and bit and screamed, but the Hunter merely tucked him under one arm, then sat on him and tied the child's hands and feet with a length of rope from his pack. Then he walked casually over to where the cub was whining at its dead mother and slit the baby chetah's throat.

  Dollar signs danced in his head. Three-quarters of a million! This was some initiation, and no mistake. It would go down in the Hunters' annals. Kandinsky, the experienced one, had screwed up, but the novice had come home with a fortune in cheetah bone.

  Moses was screaming incoherently. He had seen everything.

  Carlesson's training hadn't included kids, but it had included witnesses. Witnesses were expendable. The prime directive of the Hunt was secrecy.

  He could slit the kid's throat as easily as a baby cheetah's.

  The kid had stopped screaming now and was staring at him. Carlesson found the stare unnerving; he couldn't recognize what he saw in the child's eyes. It wasn't fear, it wasn't hatred. It was . . . alien. The child was very young—a boy, to judge by its clothing and haircut, not that you could see much through the thick layer of cracked mud. Carlesson's eyes flickered to his knife, then back to the kid, who was now trying desperately to wriggle away from him, despite the sharp rocks and the thorny underbrush.

  A part of him couldn't help admiring the kid's courage. At that age, in similar circumstances, he'd have been reduced to quivering jelly.