Diffusion Box Set

by Stan C. Smith

“I would need other parts.”

  “What kind of parts?”

  “The parts could come from many things.”

  “Could you use this tree?” Bobby patted a fig tree as he passed it.

  At this point Quentin jumped in. “Bobby, that’s a bad idea. Promise me you won’t ask it to do that.”

  Bobby’s shoulders slumped. “Maybe just an herbivore?”

  Quentin shook his head. “Until we know more about it, don’t ask it to make anything.”

  Eventually Bobby seemed to run out of questions, and the group pushed on in silence. Morning turned to afternoon, creating a sauna beneath the canopy’s cover. Afternoon turned to evening, and still they trudged on. When the rain started, it washed away some of Quentin’s sweat, but it didn’t help their progress. Much of the ground had baked hard during the day, but the rain made walking perilous again. No one objected when Samuel suggested they stop.

  They followed the same plan for making camp. Bobby collected fruits with help from Mbaiso, the only tree kangaroo still following them. Before long they were sitting under a new shelter, eating the fruits and the last of the khosül. Again the Addison replica sat in the open. Bobby asked it a few random questions but then lay on his side, clearly exhausted.

  “Goodnight everyone,” Bobby said.

  Ashley and Carlos did the same. Lindsey squeezed Quentin’s hand once and lay down. Samuel, at the opposite end of the lean-to, rose and moved to Quentin’s end. He pardoned himself and sat next to him.

  “I don’t suppose you have a plan upon our arrival at a village,” Samuel said quietly.

  “What do you mean?” Quentin said, but he was pretty sure he understood.

  Samuel eyed the Addison replica. “Quentin, in order to prevent my worst fears, we must reveal the Lamotelokhai only to those least likely to become intoxicated by its influence. You need only to think of your son Addison to know this is true.”

  Quentin looked at him sharply.

  “I am sorry,” Samuel said. After a pause he went on. “The world is no doubt full of men capable of becoming monsters, given the means to do so. It is upon us to see that the Lamotelokhai does not become the property of such men. We must reveal it to those you would know to be true of purpose. Do you believe the men of position in your home country are to be trusted with such power?”

  Quentin sputtered a laugh, but then he thought about this. “Depends who we’re talking about. But it’ll be as safe there as in any country. Much safer than in some.”

  “Then that is where we should take it. But having a destination does not make the journey easy. We must have a plan for when we reach a village, for surely we soon will.”

  Quentin shifted in the mud and eyed the Lamotelokhai, which watched them without expression. He turned back to Samuel. “If we’re lucky, the village we find will have a radio. If they do, we’ll call for help and a plane will pick us up and take us to Jayapura.”

  Samuel looked baffled, and Quentin sighed. “I imagine we can get that far without much suspicion. After that, I don’t know. They’ll want to do medical exams, vaccinations, stuff like that. They’re going to wonder why we’re all perfectly healthy.” Quentin nodded at the Lamotelokhai. “And then there’s that thing.”

  “You are worried,” the thing said. “Why?”

  Quentin could see no reason to hide anything. “We want to take you to my home, the United States. We’re worried that people will stop us. They will examine us to see if we are healthy. We’re worried that when they examine you they’ll see that you’re not a real person. Then they might try to keep you and use you to do bad things.”

  “How will they examine me?”

  “They’ll listen for your heart beating. They’ll take samples of your blood. Maybe they’ll X-ray you so they can see your insides.”

  “I will make myself look real to them.”

  Quentin studied the thing’s face. Why should he doubt that it could do this? It had made an extinct cuscus out of its own arm.

  “Let us hope that you can,” Samuel said. “There remains one other matter, however.” He looked directly at Quentin. “If it is to be Addison, then you must call it by that name. We cannot continue to call it the Lamotelokhai.”

  Quentin sighed again. He turned to the figure. “Samuel is right. We will have to call you Addison.” He pointed to the others one at a time. “I want you to call them Ashley, Carlos, and Bobby. They are Addison’s friends. Lindsey is Addison’s mother. You call her Mom.” Quentin paused. “And you call me Dad. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Samuel lowered himself into the mud and placed both hands behind his head as a pillow. “It appears we have a plan.” He closed his eyes.

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” Quentin whispered. He settled onto his side and put one arm around Lindsey’s mud-crusted shoulder.

  “Goodnight, Dad.”

  Quentin raised his head and stared. The thing sat motionless, watching him.

  “Goodnight, Addison.”

  Chapter Four

  “There are others with us.”

  It was the voice of the Lamotelokhai—Addison’s voice. The meaning of the words took hold, and Bobby sat up, scraping his head on the rough edge of the shelter’s sago leaves. The Lamotelokhai sat in the same spot from the night before. But it was pointing. Bobby’s gut tightened. He looked where it pointed. Even in the gloomy morning light he saw them immediately. Three Papuan men stood there watching them.

  “Look, you guys! People!” Bobby cried, louder than he’d meant to.

  Suddenly everyone was awake, mumbling or staring dumbly at the strangers. The Papuans shot nervous glances at each other. Bobby could see that they were not from Sinanie’s tribe. They looked old, with scars and rashes. And their bodies were thin, the skin stretched over the bones.

  “Do not fear them,” Samuel said. “It is a hunting party.”

  This was obvious. The men wore no clothing except tightly fitted penis gourds. Two of them held bows and arrows in their hands. The third man carried a shotgun on his shoulder, holding it by the fat barrel with one hand. In the other hand he held a dead tree kangaroo by its tail. Bobby stared at it until he was sure it was not the same species as Mbaiso.

  Samuel approached them with his arms out. “Nggé, gu mbakha-to-fosü le-bo?”

  The Papuans shook their heads. Samuel tried the ancient Papuans’ language again. From what Bobby could tell, he was trying to tell them they were looking for a village.

  The man with the shotgun spoke a long string of words. Most of them Bobby had never heard before, but he heard lekhingga, which he was sure meant far away. And there were some words of pidgin mixed in: waitman, which meant white people, and balus, which meant airstrip or airplane.

  Bobby remembered every word of pidgin he’d learned in Wamena, so he moved to Samuel’s side. Bobby said, “Mipela laikim bilong yu helpim. We need your help.”

  The man with the shotgun smiled and answered, “Mipela nogat wailis. Mipela bringim yu long viles wantaim wailis.”

  Bobby turned to the others. “He says they don’t have a radio, but they’ll take us to a village that does.” Everyone stared at him. “It’s pidgin. I learned it in Wamena.”

  “Yet again you surprise me, Bobby,” Samuel said. He turned to the others. “We should make haste before they withdraw their offer.”

  There was no breakfast to eat and no gear to pack. Mrs. Darnell and Ashley said they were going to the lady’s room and went off together. While the others waited, the strangers stared at the Lamotelokhai. Even though the thing looked similar to the rest of them, there were differences. Its white skin and curly hair were clean. And there was the strange way it quietly watched everything that was happening, never really helping or taking part, but always watching.

  When Mrs. Darnell and Ashley came back, the shotgun man pointed at the Lamotelokhai and spoke to his friends. They stared at it and nodded. Samuel stepped up and said, “Very well, then. Shall we go?” He wa
ved for the men to lead.

  They didn’t move. They were now looking at the trees above. The shotgun man spoke to one of the others, who raised his bow and nocked an arrow.

  Bobby looked where they pointed. Suddenly his heart was in his throat. Mbaiso was climbing down the tree toward them. The tree kangaroo was very near, an easy shot for someone good with a bow.

  “No, don’t!” Bobby cried and rushed forward. But he was too late. The man released the arrow. Bobby turned in time to see it pierce Mbaiso. Its force tore the kangaroo from the tree. Mbaiso hit the ground with a sickening pop, and then lay there, not moving.

  Bobby looked back at the men, who seemed surprised by his outburst. “He’s our friend!” he said. “Wantok. Friend!”

  The shotgun man held up his dead tree kangaroo. “Abus. Kaikai.”

  Bobby ran to Mbaiso. The arrow protruded from both sides of his body, but the kangaroo’s eyes were open, and they turned to Bobby as he knelt down. Bobby assumed Mbaiso could survive the arrow but feared what would happen if the Papuans got their hands on him. They might try to skin him and cut him up for food.

  “Addison, help me!” Bobby cried.

  The Lamotelokhai came over and knelt next to Bobby. The Papuans gathered around, apparently curious about all the fuss.

  “We can’t let these men have the mbolop,” Bobby said to Addison. “Can we send Mbaiso back to the tree house village, like we talked about before?”

  The Lamotelokhai grabbed the arrow, snapped it in half next to Mbaiso’s body, and then pulled it out from the other side.

  Bobby glanced at the Papuans, worried they would be mad about the broken arrow. The men watched but didn’t interfere. Addison grabbed Mbaiso’s arms and lifted him onto his haunches. He sat like that for some time, looking into Mbaiso’s eyes. Finally he let go. Mbaiso scampered back to the tree and climbed to the first horizontal limb. After looking down at them for a moment, he then moved higher to where the branches meshed with other trees. Soon he was out of sight, moving upstream, back the way they had come. Bobby stared at the spot in the trees, and he realized he would never see Mbaiso again.

  “M wé! Mayokh, gu laléo-lu!” cried one of the Papuans. All three of them stared wide-eyed at Addison. If they weren’t suspicious about him before, they definitely were now.

  This could ruin everything. Bobby rose to his feet, thinking furiously. He spoke to the Papuans. “Bilong balus.” He then used his hand to show how their airplane fell from the sky, and he made a crashing sound. “Mipela lus. Bilong tumbuna kam helpim, luk mbolop.” The men didn’t respond and Bobby tried to say it differently by rearranging words. What he wanted to say was, “Our plane crashed, we were lost, and our ancestors came to help us, looking like tree kangaroos.”

  The men frowned at each other, probably because they weren’t buying the story. The forest sounds seemed to grow louder to fill the uncomfortable silence that followed. Finally the man with the shotgun said something to his friends, and the Papuans turned and walked away. No one else moved. When the men realized they weren’t being followed, they stopped.

  “Bihainim!” one of them called out, and waved for them to come along.

  Despite the Papuan hunters’ bedraggled appearance, they forged ahead relentlessly, showing no signs of fatigue. Quentin hadn’t seen the river for some time, and there was no visible trail, but the men seemed to know exactly where they were going. After perhaps three hours of walking, in which Quentin estimated they’d covered only three miles, the terrain began to change. The relatively flat lowlands of the river valley gave way to more densely vegetated hills, slowing their progress even more.

  The Papuans showed considerable patience toward the slower Americans. Quentin lost track of the number of times the men stopped to wait for them. They would sit cross-legged on the ground, smiling at the stragglers as they caught up. When everyone was assembled they would rise to their feet and say, “Viles no longwe,” which meant, the village is not far. And the walking would start again.

  This continued through the morning and into the afternoon. And still the village was ‘no longwe.’ Progress became agonizingly slow. At any given time they were either climbing a hill or descending one. They had not eaten or drank all day, and this was showing its effects. Finally, Lindsey insisted that they take a break.

  “We’re tired and thirsty,” she said to the men. “We need to rest.”

  They didn’t respond, so Bobby spoke up. “Um, plis. Les. Malolo. Kaikai. Wara.”

  The men exchanged some words and then seemed to reach an agreement. They set their weapons down. The Papuan with the shotgun held up his tree kangaroo. “Mipela kaikaim mbolop. Wara.” He motioned for them all to sit.

  “Thank you,” Lindsey said.

  One of the hunters produced a knife and began skillfully removing the skin from the kangaroo’s haunch. Bobby and Carlos moved closer to watch. The two other hunters cleared a depression in the ground for a fire. Samuel left to find fruits, mumbling his doubts of success without the tree kangaroos.

  The Papuans apparently had no matches to start the fire. They found two branches as thick as Quentin’s wrist and laid one of them flat on the ground. They set the second branch so that its end was propped up by the first. One of them gathered an armful of tree bark. Using his teeth, he pulled toothpick-thin fibers from the bark and placed them on the ground until there was a pile resembling a bird’s nest. He bit into the bark and with some effort pulled loose a much heavier fiber, about as thick as a pencil. He shoved the bird’s nest of fibers into the gap under the propped-up branch and then pushed the larger cord through the gap so that he could hold the ends of it on either side. He pulled up on the cord while resting one foot on the top branch to hold it down. He pulled first on one end of the cord and then the other, like he was trying to saw through the branch with it. The sawing became faster. There was no smoke, but the man didn’t seem discouraged, and he worked at it with practiced skill.

  Quentin’s fatigue was catching up with him. Lindsey and Ashley were already resting on the ground, so he joined them.

  Ashley lay with her arms crossed over her face, and she spoke in a muffled tone, “I don’t suppose they told you how much farther it is.”

  Quentin had to hold his breath to cross his stiff legs. “I’m sure they know what they’re doing.”

  Lindsey raised her brows at him as if questioning this. She then patted Ashley’s ankle. “He’s right, Ash. You’ll be with your family in a few days.”

  “You live on a farm, don’t you Ashley?” Quentin said.

  Ashley didn’t move her arms from her face. “We have horses, but it’s not really a farm. Lori and Brent aren’t the farming types.”

  “Lori and Brent?”

  “My parents. They don’t like to get dirty. They have a guy who does all the work.”

  “They’ll be thankful to learn you’re alive,” Lindsey said.

  Ashley laughed. “I bet a bunch of people will be. They’ve probably filed a butt-load of lawsuits.”

  Quentin and Lindsey exchanged glances. They had avoided discussing this.

  Ashley seemed to sense their uneasiness. She sat up. “Don’t worry, they won’t blame you two. They’ll probably blame the school, and maybe the airplane company. What about you guys? You have families that are worried, too, right?”

  Lindsey smiled. “Yes, Mom and Dad and my brother.”

  “Do they live in Newton?”

  “In Columbia. I grew up there. My folks own The Real Macaw.”

  “Seriously? Lori and Brent love to eat there! They like the cowboy room. What’s that one called?”

  “The Tucson room,” Lindsay said. “I grew up in the Macaw. I worked there when I was your age, all the way through college.”

  Quentin had not eaten at The Real Macaw—named for the scarlet macaw, Aristotle, Lindsey’s family kept in the sitting room—until he had met Lindsey. The first floor of the Victorian home had been converted into a restaurant. Four restaura
nts, actually—four different dining rooms, each with a different theme. Lindsey’s parents, Tucker and Rita, had converted the place before she was born, and she had grown up living in the upper floor.

  They talked about the restaurant for a few minutes, and then Ashley said to Quentin, “What about you, Mr. D?”

  A vivid memory flooded Quentin’s mind: his father, sitting at the dinner table, pushing his food around with his fork but not eating. Since returning from their family trip to revisit the Papuan tribe, his skin had started to sag on his cheeks and his eyes seemed larger. Only a boy then, Quentin had been terrified that his dad was transforming into a stranger—someone who hardly ever spoke. Quentin’s mom asked how Quentin’s day was, and she listened with tight lips as he gave his obligatory report. Quentin eyed his dad as he talked, but his dad never looked back at him. This was the last time the three of them had eaten together at the table.

  Quentin realized Ashley was watching him, waiting. “My mom lives in Springfield,” he said. “I imagine she’s concerned.”

  Ashley paused. “I heard your dad...” She trailed off, obviously regretting going that far.

  Quentin glanced at Lindsey and she shrugged pensively.

  “My dad decided he had made a mistake. He was the kind of guy who, when he decided something, that was it. And he was prone to dark moods. He and my mom brought the outside world to a remote Papuan tribe—thought they were doing something good at the time. Nine years later, they found out otherwise.” Quentin shifted his stiff legs. “The tribe had changed. I guess my dad believed he was responsible for that.”

  “How did the tribe change?” Ashley asked.

  “For the worse. Or for the better—depends who you ask.” Quentin shook his head. He had said enough. He turned away and saw Bobby and Carlos watching every slice and hack of the Papuan’s knife. Addison—the Lamotelokhai—sat to the side, appearing every bit as human as the rest of them. A tendril of smoke and an orange glow came from the nest of fibers as one of the Papuans blew on it.

  “They got it going!” Bobby said, actually clapping his hands with excitement.