A Call to Arms

by Alan Dean Foster

He was surprised and disappointed to learn that what music the Massood possessed was simple and straightforward. In contrast, the Hivistahm and particularly the S’van utilized highly developed musical languages and were delighted to supply him with examples.

  Listening to a S’van contrapuntal song cycle through an expandable playback device as the shuttle dropped away from the ship helped him to forget that he was traveling through empty space. The music was soothing, relaxing, like listening to a brace of waterfalls engaged in friendly debate. Easy to see why his own music had shocked them.

  It wasn’t the dissonance. There was plenty of that in the recordings they gave him. It was the rhythmic progressions that made them uneasy.

  What am I doing here? he thought abruptly as the shuttle bumped through cloying atmosphere on its plunge toward a looming Caribbean. I should be composing, not recruiting the unsuspecting for a visit to an alien lab.

  If not him, he knew, they would find someone else. Someone who might have a less sophisticated view of the world than himself, who might unconsciously perpetuate a false impression. It was incumbent on him to see this through.

  It shouldn’t take much to convince Caldaq and his people that they were wasting their time here. He would simply pass over anyone in uniform, anyone who even looked like a soldier. Ordinary people, that was the ticket. Not that Belize was a hotbed of military tradition anyway.

  People would disbelieve him, might even laugh at him outright. More than one would assume he was some kind of smuggler. But he had been supplied with enough gold to overcome the reluctance of a few. These would follow him out of greed if not curiosity. If they bolted at the sight of Caldaq’s people, so much the better. It would only serve to reinforce his thesis that a parochial humanity would be useless in any interstellar conflict.

  Whereupon the representatives of the mysterious Weave would depart, leaving him to get on with his composing and his world to practice its increasingly peaceful ways. As for the driven Amplitur and their unfathomable Purpose, it was not unreasonable to assume they might be defeated by the resolute forces of the Weave long before they ever encountered mankind. Hadn’t Caldaq admitted that Earth lay far off the beaten interstellar track? No, they would be shown conclusively what Will had been trying to tell them all along and then they would go, leaving him with a little gold of his own and, if he was lucky, recordings of their music to inspire and infuse his work with the exotic for the next twenty years. He felt no compunctions at keeping both. Teaching paid next to nothing, while the history of musical patronage was old and respected. Wagner had his Ludwig of Bavaria. Will Dulac had the Massood.

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  It took the shuttle crew several weeks to reestablish themselves in the protective lagoon and extract from its warm waters a toolbox full of yellow persuasion. The gold was produced in the form of thick-walled straws. Will assumed it had been condensed around some kind of tube or wire. The toolbox was sturdy enough to hold it all, but he worried about the handle breaking. It was heavy enough that he had to shift the load repeatedly from one hand to the other.

  “You’re sure you trust me with this?” he asked T’var. “I’ve got a small fortune here. I could go ashore and disappear and you’d have to start all over again.”

  “Why would you do that?” wondered the short Second-of-Command.

  “You’re right: I wouldn’t. You have your cause and I have mine. I’m going to use what’s in here to prove to you that you’re wasting your time on my world.”

  The Human was very confident, T’var mused. His words repeatedly contradicted the claims of the xenopsychs. Claims were not proof, however, of either thesis. That would come only with additional study.

  This world, he realized, represented a great gamble. Too great, if an injured interfacer was to be believed. Second-of-Medicine was of similar mind, but the concerns of two members of the medical staff counted for very little in conference. For now T’var found himself agreeing with the majority. This world offered confusion, but not danger. If its mysteries could be unraveled then its promise might be fulfilled.

  The shuttle carried a tender, an air-repulsion craft designed to give a survey crew the ability to explore the surface of new worlds. It was not large, but it would serve to transport Will to the mainland under cover of darkness.

  He’d never been farther inland than the port of Belize City, but he knew that the country was mostly undeveloped rain forest and swamp, a steamy refugee from a Somerset Maugham novel brought forward from the 1920s and set down whole and intact in the present day. Air traffic was sparse and the main roads little traveled. They should have no difficulty crossing the coastline unobserved.

  They set him down near the main highway, promising to meet him at the same spot in a week’s time. Will was not sanguine about his chances.

  “You may find me waiting for you by myself,” he told T’var, “the gold notwithstanding. But I’ll do my best.”

  “You will choose a representative sample of your people.” The Wais was speaking to insure that at this critical moment there were no misunderstandings. The bird-thing looked more comfortable than the S’van.

  “Of course,” Will lied. He had no intention of being so imprecise. There might be a number of soldiers on leave in the city. The British maintained a substantial garrison in their ex-colony, to keep chauvinistic Guatemalans at bay, and the Americans used the country as a base for training their own soldiers in tropical warfare. The last thing Will wanted was to recruit a mob of poorly paid would-be soldiers of fortune.

  No, the people he picked up would be much more selectively “representative” than that. Soldiers and even ex-soldiers he would avoid like the archaic attitudes they represented.

  The ship’s techs wanted several dozen specimens. Will patiently explained that a group that large would invariably attract unwanted attention, even in laid-back Belize. He did not add that the greater the number of people he brought back, the more likely it was to include one or two individuals of the aberrant type the scientists were looking for. So he had several reasons for wanting to keep the group small.

  If he could convince enough people, the Weave would have its representative sampling of Humanity… only it would be a sample acquired and filtered through William Dulac’s convictions and beliefs.

  He could not recruit outright pacifists. If he was that obvious then his alien patrons might abandon him and begin again elsewhere. He had to satisfy them that the people he brought back were truly representative of their species.

  The absence of nocturnal traffic which had allowed the shuttle’s tender to set him down unobserved meant that he would have to lug the toolbox and its heavy contents all the way into the city. His legs were threatening to give out when a white-bearded fanner driving a pickup truck nearly as old as himself offered a ride the rest of the way in. So grateful was Will for the lift that he readily climbed in back with the load of bananas, heedless of the large tarantulas that often traveled with them.

  The ride into town was hard on his spine but mercifully devoid of arthropod companionship. He hopped off, gave the old man a U.S. dollar, shouldered his backpack, and hefted the toolbox as he headed up a narrow dirt street flanked by multistory buildings of stucco and clapboard.

  Belize was a backwater country full of poor but charming people whose hopes throughout history had been repeatedly devastated by hurricanes and indifference. The city was crowded with citizens unable to find work on the plantations, fishing boats, or in the nascent tourist industry. A few Victorian structures and stolid churches which had somehow survived the city’s repeated inundations were bright spots among the otherwise ramshackle architecture.

  A small but clean hotel offered temporary refuge from the tropical night. Hiding the toolbox as well as possible he collapsed on the bed and slept till late morning.

  After a meal of broiled fish and bottled water he was ready to go to work.

  Streets which had been deserted the previous
evening were full of people going nowhere in a great hurry. Clumps of vacant-eyed men accreted on street corners, waiting for destiny to tap them on the shoulder. Women chattered and popped in and out of tiny storefront markets, juggling groceries and babies with equal agility. Children skipped like water bugs around and through the surging mass of adults, laughing because they could not comprehend the poverty in which they dwelt, finding joy in a muddy puddle or an empty liter bottle of 7-Up.

  Lebanese immigrants with S’van-black mustaches hammered and sawed on a new store in the shape of a mosque. A dread-locked Rastafarian stumbled up the street, unable to surmount the half-foot-high curb. No one spared him a glance. A little man who looked like a Mayan bas-relief sprung to life sat on a corner of cracked concrete, arms crossed atop his knees as he uncomprehendingly observed the bustle of a mobile civilization.

  The faces of Belize City were a microcosm of Humanity, stained with an abnormal amount of sweat. The country was a dumping ground, the depression at the bottom of the Caribbean funnel where the adventurous and disaffected ended up when there was nowhere else to go, no more islands to hop. representative of Humanity, yes. The lower end.

  It owed this legacy as well as the prevalence of the English language to the British colonial government from which the present independent administration was not far removed. The country was full of British and other expatriates who had found in this corner of Central America their place in the sun. American and German tourists lingered in the few souvenir shops, in a hurry to purchase something, anything of local manufacture so they could get back to the contemporary beach resorts and air-conditioning of Ambergris Cay. Sunburned, healthy young Scandinavians in lederhosen and too-heavy hiking boots smiled painfully at everything as they marched energetically up and down the streets.

  There were Hindus; descendants of small brown men who had been imported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations; Mesquite Indians fleeing insurrection in Nicaragua; even blue-eyed natives who were the descendants of Confederate settlers arrived here on the heels of the Civil War. They had come hoping to reestablish the grandeur that had been the Old South.

  But there was no grandeur to be found in Belize, unless it was in its mountains and jungles, rivers and reefs. Certainly there was no grandeur in Belize City, a community built on land so low that high tides periodically washed the raw sewage which flowed down the river right back up the main streets.

  He avoided the two stores where he occasionally purchased supplies for his boat, concentrating instead on what passed for the touristy end of town. Broken gold straws crammed into the deep pockets of his pants rested heavily against his legs as he ate lunch in a bad Chinese restaurant and studied the crowd. How to approach someone, and who to pick? People shambled and shuffled past his table, alternately staring at the ground or conversing with companions.

  It was too crowded here, in the center of town. Paying for lunch and praying for his digestion, he decided to try the insipid waterfront, soon found himself strolling along the unimpressive breakfront which held back the sloshing, garbage-laden ocean.

  He sat down on a smooth-topped stone and stared out to sea, wishing he was back on his boat working with his MIDI and keyboard, wondering how to proceed, wishing he’d never heard of Massood and S’van, O’o’yan and Lepar, the Weave and the Amplitur and their eon-old conflict.

  But heard he had, and it was up to him to keep not only himself but the entire Human race out of it. That’s not for us, he knew. We still have plenty of our own problems to sort out. We haven’t time to deal with someone else’s troubles.

  “Mister, you got a dime?”

  Turning atop the rock, Will found himself face-to-face with a boy who looked to be about twelve but was probably closer to fifteen. Skinny and malnourished, he wore a torn short-sleeve shirt and frayed shorts. No shoes. A second boy, aged too soon, stood nearby. He might have been sixteen, or twenty-five. Both looked hungry, and not just for food.

  “Sure.” Will smiled and dug into a pocket. His fingers encountered a four-inch length of gold pipe. “That your friend over there?”

  The boy gestured with his head. “That my bro, mon. Got a dime for him, too?”

  “Your parents know you two are out begging?”

  The boy smiled ingenuously. “Of course, mon. You think we orphans or som’ting?”

  “You kids going to school?”

  “Hey look, mon.” The youth retreated a step. “You got some money, we thank you. Don’t give us no lectures.”

  “Take it easy.” Will smiled back. “I’m no preacher.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You kids ever get to the movies? You know, cinema?”

  “Movies?” The boy regarded him warily. “Sure, mon.”

  “Who do you like?”

  “Who you think, mon?” Skinny arms and legs wildly assaulted the air. “Chuck Norris, mon. Bruce Lee. All those guys.”

  “You like to fight, huh?”

  The boy hesitated. “Sometime, maybe. What you want, mon? My bro and me don’ do no weird stuff.”

  “How’d you two like to make some real money? How’d you like to meet some… aliens. Like in the movies. You know… people from another world?”

  “Hey, we seen stuff like that. Our friend, he’s got a VCR. You crazy, mon.”

  “Am I?” Will drew one of the gold straws from his pocket, showed it to the boy. In the dim tropical light it shone like the sun. His eyes grew wide.

  “Hey mon, that ain’t real, is it?”

  “Call your brother over. I have a business proposition for the two of you.”

  By the end of the third day he had recruited not only the two orphaned brothers but a friend of theirs, a powerfully built fisherman who sometimes gave them shelter. He was also the blackest black man Will had ever seen, as black as the water beneath a Mississippi pier on a moonless night. There was no color in him whatsoever, not a smidgen of beige or chocolate brown.

  There was also the middle-aged expatriate he had encountered in his own hotel, originally from the southeast of England but lately of many local bars. He’d been elegantly drunk, though not so drunk that he failed to identify the gold Will showed him as the real article. Whimsically he agreed to participate. “It will be a real lark,” he laughingly insisted. Will wondered what his reaction would be when he found himself confronted by Caldaq.

  The man had come to Central America on sabbatical and had chosen to stay, held by cheap liquor and the certain knowledge that he was accomplishing absolutely nothing with his life back home in Surrey. So there was plenty of time to indulge in whatever diversion a crazy American could concoct, right? When sober enough he could identify every country together with its major cities, principal exports, important topographic features, and fifty-four different local brands of beer. A useful addition to Will’s group, yes? He was ready for whatever adventure happened to come his way so long as adequately noncorrosive booze was made available in modest quantity.

  There was the young man with the dreadlocks, a Rastafarian—like the one Will had seen stumbling down the city’s main thoroughfare, a cannabis smoker for sure, yes mon, but not stoned when Will talked to him—who readily embraced the opportunity to meet some real as opposed to smoke-induced aliens. Will smiled to himself as he contemplated what Caldaq’s reaction might be to this particular specimen of Humanity. It would be interesting to watch the Wais attempt to translate when the man’s every alternate word was well nigh incomprehensible. Will only hoped he would remember to show up at the hotel at the appointed time.

  Another pair of candidates materialized in the form of a pair of students from Sydney, would-be intellectuals out to experience the world before returning home to make as much money as possible while vegetating on the beaches of the Gold Coast pretending they were doing something for the future of mankind. Will ignored their pretensions as readily as he welcomed their presence.

  Seven was a good number, but Will wished for a few more and he was running out of time. Tomo
rrow night the shuttle’s tender would return to the place where he had been dropped off, eighty miles up the central highway. He and his flock would be expected to be there to meet it.

  His recruits seemed to arrive in pairs, like Ken Woods and Tamy Markowitz. They were a painfully earnest young couple who were, in Markowitz’s words, “scouting out potential honeymoon sites.”

  “So we won’t waste our time and money on a place where we don’t think we’ll have a good time,” Woods added.

  Their particular jejune brand of insensible preyuppie reasoning was precisely what Will was looking for, but he had a hard time convincing them to come along. Eventually they agreed. Not to meet aliens, which they didn’t believe for a second, nor for the gold. They agreed because they found fascinating the people Will had already recruited and Markowitz turned out to be a would-be professional photographer. It would be a wonderful opportunity for her to observe and photograph a diverse collection of people in a restricted setting. Will wasn’t even sure what she looked like because he rarely saw her face. It seemed as if a single-lens reflex was all that existed above her neck.

  They would probably bolt when the tender arrived, he thought, and certainly when Caldaq or T’var put in an appearance. He kept them anyway because that reaction in itself would be instructive.

  Nine, then, as motley and unlikely a group as one could imagine even in Belize, assembled outside the hotel the following night. He’d rented a full-size van from a local car-hire, though for the amount of gold he’d slipped the attendant on duty at the time he could probably just as easily have bought the vehicle outright.

  After seeing to the stowing of luggage on the van’s roof rack he put the mumbling Rastafarian in the front seat next to his own, the two local youths immediately behind with their fisherman friend next to the door, where he would have a little extra legroom. The two Australians struggled into the back, where they could chat with the expatriate teacher. Woods and Markowitz obligingly split up.