by Ian Stewart
At that point she got an urgent message from Prudence. Earlier, the police had found Moses' memimal: now some scraps of his clothing had turned up in an area known to be frequented by hyenas.
Just as Carlesson had planned.
On the northwestern outskirts of Ningming, jumbled streets of low-quality housing gave way to run-down industrial areas— a labyrinth of disused, collapsing warehouses, contaminated yards, and abandoned, rusting machinery. Clinging to the edges of this derelict wasteland was a straggling shantytown— makeshift homes fashioned from stolen boards, battered sheets of corrugated iron, damp piles of rotting floor coverings, and plastic containers that had once held industrial chemicals. Here individuals, families, even extended families of ten or fifteen people lived in appalling poverty, dependent on erratic handouts of food from local officialdom plus whatever they could beg, steal, or very rarely earn. In Free China there were tens of thousands of these shantytowns—no part of Ant Country differs significantly from any other—and at least thirty million people eked out a miserable existence within them. Occasionally a medical team would suddenly descend on one of them, treat the simpler ailments and diseases, vaccinate every child they could lay hands on, and depart as quickly as they could contrive without being seen to have shirked their allotted job. This was not done out of any sense of compassion, but in order to prevent epidemics among the remainder of the population. In Free China, few people starved, but nearly everyone was undernourished; few died of curable diseases, but many were sickly. The system—inasmuch as there was one—kept a huge number of people alive, but only an elite few derived much enjoyment from it.
Rats infested the abandoned sheds of vanished industries and made constant incursions into the shantytowns. And where there were rats, packs of wild dogs would collect by the hundreds. The city officials tolerated the dogs because they helped keep down the rats. The shanty dwellers lost the occasional baby to a hungry dog, but mostly they kept the dogs at bay, confined to the most derelict areas.
Between the dogs and the shanties was a buffer zone, perhaps a quarter of a mile across at its widest. The zone was the abode of gangs of street children—mostly children abandoned by the shanties when a parent died of some disease or got badly injured in a fight and succumbed to any of a dozen resulting infections. The shanties got some help from the city, but the street children got no help at all. The medical teams considered the buffer zones too dangerous to operate in—and not just because of the disease and the feral dogs.
In the buffer zones, starvation was a constant presence.
The Moon was almost full, but its light hardly penetrated the narrow streets between stark high-rise apartment blocks. Navigating by a single dimmed floodlight, not much stronger than the beam of a torch, an armored truck rolled off the cracked concrete street onto rubble and mud, and pushed its way through darkened, debris-covered alleyways until it could no longer advance without wrecking too many of the shanty people's pathetic homes. The vehicle slithered to a halt in a pile of something wet and slimy, and a small patrol consisting of four men climbed out. They were well armed, but they didn't look at all like soldiers. The night was torn to shreds by the constant wailing of children and the coughing of adults; the smell of close-packed, impoverished humanity was atrocious.
The buildings were lower now, and the moonlight could break through to ground level. The scene that it illuminated was surreal, horrifying; a Dantean vision of hell.
A large sack was passed out of the vehicle, and one of the men slung it over his shoulder. Efficiently but nervously, with many glances to the side or behind, the squad made its way between the shanties. Everywhere, inquisitive heads popped out of openings, but as soon as they saw weapons they ducked inside again—save for one old woman, clearly crazy, who sat naked under a flap of sacking and screamed incomprehensible curses at them. One of her hands was missing, crudely amputated just above the wrist.
The patrol carried its burden to the edge of the street children's buffer zone and paused for a few moments. Above the wails and coughs came the pack cries of wild dogs. Very nervous now, the men advanced a few dozen yards into the jumble of wrecked buildings until they came to the edge of an open space, overgrown with weeds and littered with rubbish.
They dropped the sack none too gently onto the ground and backed away, eyes flickering from shadow to shadow in anticipation of trouble. A few minutes later, their vehicle was beating a hasty but still cautious retreat along the foul alleyways of the shantytown, back to the comparative safety of the city.
The sack had been lying on the ground for less than a minute when the first street children scuttled out from their hiding places to find out what fate had delivered to their doorstep. They carried sharpened poles, crude spears to beat off rats and dogs. One, who acted like a gang leader, wore a knife made from sections of an old tin can wrapped around a length of bone, tucked into a strip of cloth tied around his waist. Most were naked, and all of them were encrusted with filth.
The leader motioned to several of the children to watch out for dogs. He bent down, sniffed suspiciously at the sack, and pulled back the opening.
Moses' terrified face stared up at him.
Few events could surprise the street children anymore, but this one was beyond their experience. Two of them dragged Moses out of the sack, scraping his knees painfully on the rough ground. He was still bound. Xi Ming-Kuo had seen no reason to take any risks. If the fates wished to preserve the child, then they would contrive for his bonds to be loosened. If not, the added handicap would surely settle the issue.
Moses was desperately hungry; no one had fed him for days. His last drink had been dirty water in a bowl on the floor, ten or fifteen hours before. He had no idea where he was or who had brought him here.
The street children turned him onto his back. Looking up, he saw strange, dirt-smudged faces. But he saw more than that. He saw fear that verged on insanity, murder, and a peculiar kind of greed. He had always been able to read people's emotions from their body language—people, after all, were just another kind of animal, and from the time he could walk he'd had an amazing intuitive understanding of virtually any animal. He had quickly learned to keep quiet about his ability to read people, though.
The gang leader—an unusually vicious child named Tan— bent down to peer closely at Moses. Tan had seen plenty of new street children arrive in the buffer zone during the few years of his young life, but never one with a black face. Tied up with rope and deposited on his, Tan's, territory, by adults. Not the usual sickly looking half-dead man or woman with child in tow, the ones that came from the shanties to dispose of excess kids or because they were on the verge of death. Healthy, well-fed adults of a kind Tan had never seen.
Well fed. Now, that was an idea. Street children were always hungry, and they would eat anything that came their way.
Black meat was meat, like any other.
He spoke a few words in the street children's primitive pidgin, and Moses was dragged into an upright position. Tan pulled his tin knife from his belt and waved it in Moses' face. With one hand he grabbed the child's stubby hair, and with the other he laid the blade across Moses' throat. He muttered something vile and laughed, a few of the others joining in. Moses could read their every action, the way they all deferred to the leader, even though several were older, their ill-concealed fear . . . their hunger.
"Stand up!" Tan tried to haul Moses to his feet, but the ropes made this difficult. With a curse, Tan hacked at the ropes with his knife until they fell away, several now stained with Moses' blood. He hauled again, and Moses found himself teetering up-right on numbed legs. He ached everywhere. As they began to drag him farther out into the moonlight, circulation began to return to his limbs. It was pure agony.
Tan made him kneel beside a low, flat rock, the street children's version of a sacrificial altar. Moses could see murder in the gang leader's every motion. He could almost feel the knife sliding into his throat, the blood pouring out, his nec
k gaping open as his head lolled back on severed muscles . . .
A wild dog howled— very close.
A new kind of fear crept over their faces as they looked furtively around for the source of the noise. Then, in a cacophony of barks and snarls, a pack of dogs burst into the open from behind a collapsed wall of brick. They were little more than skin and bone, mangy mongrels resulting from generations of uncontrolled interbreeding, some large, some small, some short-haired, some long-haired, some with hair that was so matted you couldn't tell how long it ought to be.
The street children looked at Tan, who made an instant assessment of the size of the pack, turned, and fled. Within a few seconds the entire gang had gone to ground among the ruined buildings, and Moses was surrounded by a pack of ravenous dogs.
A degree of circulation had returned now, and he found he could move his arms and legs. There was nowhere to run, but running was not what was on his mind. Finally, for the first time since he had watched the Hunter killing Mbawa and his beloved Zemba, he was in a situation that he understood perfectly
A pack of feral dogs is a hierarchy, just like a street gang. When the dogs encircling him began to advance, Moses unerringly picked out which was top dog. It was obvious. He immediately took several quick steps toward the pack leader—a challenge, of a kind, but not a direct one. If he was to survive this, he had to establish himself as top dog. The animal bared its teeth and snarled. Moses continued to advance, his hands held in a strange position. He made eerie whining sounds, then an abrupt, low-pitched snarl.
The dog was confused. The food animal was acting as if it were another dog. But it wasn't. The food animal was acting as if it were pack leader. But the dog knew who the leader was— him. Only now he was beginning to have doubts. Moses read the growing doubt in the pack leaders posture and drove home his advantage. After that, the animal never had a chance: its every thought was laid bare to its adversary . . .
Suddenly it was over, and the erstwhile pack leader was groveling in the dirt at the feet of the new leader. There was never the slightest doubt that the rest of the pack would accept the substitution.
Bewildered faces watched from holes in the rubble. Tan's mouth dropped open, and his knife fell to the ground. None of them had ever seen anything remotely like this. What manner of being was the black child? A demon? Very possibly, for now the pack of wild dogs was arranging itself at his feet in a ragged semicircle, like worshipers at a shrine.
Moses bared his teeth and spoke, a series of authoritative barks. One of the dogs slunk off between the buildings.
A moment later, to the utter astonishment of the onlooking street children, the animal reappeared. Between its jaws was a chunk of raw meat. It dropped the offering at the black child's feet and backed away.
Moses looked at the meat, and for a moment he felt very sick. It seemed to be a piece of a child's arm, partially decomposed. But he also felt very hungry, and it would ruin everything to back down now. The dogs were expecting him to eat it.
He picked it up, tore a strip off the meat with his teeth, and swallowed it.
It tasted foul. It tasted heavenly. It didn't matter what it tasted like. It was food.
9
The Cuckoo's Nest, 2210
The Lunar Automatic Deep Space Optical Comparison System was just one of the instruments that the neo-Zen Buddhists had squirreled away at the Moons two poles. There were radio telescopes, infrared telescopes, links to an X-ray telescope that floated outside the Earth's orbit at the Lagrange LI point, magnetometers . . . and endless banks of fast computers. The Way of the Wholesome had no need to cut corners.
Nagarjuna had not been the first to notice the inbound comet, though he had been the first to relay news about it to the High Lama of the Cuckoo's Nest. Half a dozen of the lunar monks had been keeping an eye on it ever since it had first come to their attention two months before. But the Cuckoo believed that it was good training for the novices out in the Belt to make them log in to LADSOCS and check out its findings for themselves.
In the few weeks since Nagarjuna had last logged in, they had gathered huge amounts of new data. The comet was about ten miles across, so its mass would be about twenty trillion tons. For a while they had suspected that it was bound for Jupiter, with a projected impact date somewhere around 2222, but its trajectory near the giant planet was complicated and their predictions were sensitive to small errors of observation. A lot depended on the precise position of Jupiter's satellites as the comet first swung past. If they didn't perturb the comet's path, it would swing very close to the giant planet, loop twice around the Sun in an orbit that would stay outside the asteroid belt, and then crash headlong into Jupiter's thick atmosphere.
If the moons did perturb the comet's path significantly, though, it could go almost anywhere. The closer the comet came to a moon, especially one of the more massive ones, the more its path could deviate from the one they had originally projected.
As the monks gathered more data, they became more and more confident of the comet's arrival time in the Jovian system, and it seemed that the incoming body would pass close by the planet as already predicted, but well away from any perturbing satellite. The Earth—and more importantly, the Belt—was safe.
Then one of them noticed something that caused a rethink.
Ironically, it was Cashew who first saw the newsflash icon popping into existence on her wristnode's tiny screen. By rights it should have been Jonas, but he was in the pool and wasn't wearing his 'node. He was splashing along in a lazy crawl when she sauntered up.
"Jonas?" she asked in a rather funny voice.
"Yes, sure, that's me." Then he noticed her face. "Problem?"
"I'm—I'm really not at all sure, Jonas." She tapped her wrist-node. "Drag yourself out of the water and take a look at this."
"Oh, come on, Cash, I'm on my thirty-fourth lap and my record is only forty-nine. And I don't feel at all tired, not yet."
"Don't be silly, Jonas. I think this may be more important than breaking your personal lap record."
He clambered out and wrapped himself in a huge towel. "Prudence and Charity fighting again?"
"No, I mean, they probably are—typical twins, and after what they've been through . . . Charity needs tact and understanding.
but Pm's so uptight—but this is different. Not a people thing, Jonas. A thing thing. And it's scary."
"Okay, let me see whatever it is that's so unmissable." A softly lit image sprung into being in midair between them. He stared at it. "Bloody hell."
"Well, you did suggest something of the sort to explain away your feeble navigation," she pointed out.
"Yeah, sure, but I didn't mean it seriously." A thought struck him. "Cash, is this some kind of joke? Trying to rub my nose in my failure? Because if so, I'd prefer not to have interrupted my record-breaking bid—"
It was hard for Cash to admit it, but. . . "Jonas, it looks like you didn't have a failure. You'll have to recalculate, but I have a feeling your navigation will turn out to be spot on. I probably owe you your week's salary back . . . with interest. I realize that it's a ridiculous way for the universe to conspire to rob me of my hard-earned winnings, but—"
"They've moved?"
"So the newsflash says."
"Jupiter's moons have moved?"
"Yes."
"Rubbish. They can't have."
She giggled, in an edgy kind of way. "Jonas, it was your theory!"
"Sure, but it was rubbish, too. You're saying I was right all along? Nuts. Okay, let's see some detail—maybe it's some crank with a home telescope and a lens to grind . . . Oh. Well, next best thing. Cash. It's the Loonies."
"I thought it said that the observations were made by the Buddhist base on the Moon."
"Exactly. Trouble is, they usually do superb astronomical work. Have to, they've got a Belt to protect, and an industrial empire." He scratched his head, still unable to believe the news. "What caused it? Near miss with a comet, knocked them out of
orbit?"
Cashew muttered into her 'node, calling up and rejecting displays until she found what she wanted. "No . . . says here that nobody has any idea what caused it."
"That's mad. Celestial bodies don't suddenly take it into their heads to disobey the law of gravity. Maybe lo had a massive volcanic eruption? That'd shift its orbit a little, and I guess there'd be a knock-on effect on the others."
Cashew zoomed in on the display she'd found. "Jonas, there's been a big shift. All four of the main inner moons rearranged themselves simultaneously into a completely new configuration. Took them less than a week!
"Mmmpppph ... it does say something about a comet, yes . . . But that one is still twelve years away from Jupiter, and originally"—she was skimming the item now, trying to precis it for Jonas—"it was expected to hit."
"Originally?"
Why did she feel so worried? "Before the moons moved, they'd worked out the comet's orbit, and—well, it was going to do something pretty complicated and then crash into Jupiter. But now—"
"Now that computation is in shreds. So where will it go now?"
"Doesn't say. Says they don't know."
But Jonas wasn't buying that. "Crap. Sure they'll have to assume that the moons' new configuration isn't going to change again, but they've got all the data. If they could predict it would hit Jupiter from the original data, it wouldn't take ten minutes to repeat the calculations with the new data. Any fool could do it. Damn it all, even I could ..."
His voice trailed off. He grabbed his 'node and started muttering into it, a stream of technobabble. He broke off to explain what Cashew had already worked out. "Cash, it's no harder than my navigation routine. I've got all the modules in there already, don't even need to dump any off the X. If the powers that be won't tell us what they must already know, then there has to be a reason ... So I'll just have to work it out for myself, right?" He bent himself once more to the task.