The Jungle

by David Drake

  Wilding grinned, cat-smooth himself. He pointed a languid finger toward the boulevard. “Oh,” he said, “I was thinking about them, Francine. What is it that they really want?”

  The woman’s stance did not change, but all the softness went out of her features. “Why ask me?” she said in a brittle voice. “How would I know?”

  They were no longer flirting.

  “Because you should know,” he said. “Because I want to know.”

  Since he was host, he had not drunk heavily. There was enough alcohol in his brain to free the sharp-edged knowledge that he usually hid under an urbane exterior: he was a Wilding. For all practical purposes, he was the Wilding.

  While Francine was a tart whom Tootles, Chauncey Callahan, had lifted from the gutter.

  Her dress was a metallic sheath. It fitted Francine’s hard curves as a scabbard of hammered silver would fit a scimitar. The natural color of her hair was black, and she wore it black tonight. It formed a pair of shoulder-length curls to frame her face, heart-shaped and carefully expressionless at this moment.

  A door opened onto the balcony below. Half a dozen slurred, cheerful voices prattled merrily. “And then,” Glory McLain trilled, “he wanted her to lie in cold water, I mean really cold, before she came to bed, and—”

  The McLain girl’s voice lowered into the general babble. The balcony was thirty feet below the penthouse roof; the partiers were unaware that there was anyone above them.

  Francine moved away from the railing with a sinuous motion. She did not glance down to betray her concern about being seen—by Tootles, by someone who would mention the fact to Tootles.

  Wilding stepped to the side also. “Don’t they ever want a better life, Francine?” he said softly.

  Fireworks began to spell letters across the dome: W-Y-O.…

  Common people cheered and drank, while aristocrats gossiped about necrophilia.

  The penthouse roof was planted with grass and palmettoes. The seedstock had come to Venus in the colony ships rather than being packed into terraforming capsules. It had not been exposed to the actinic radiation and adaptive pressures which had turned the Earth-sprung surface life into a purulent hell.

  Francine spread the fingers of one hand and held them out against a palmetto frond, as if to compare her delicacy with the green coarseness.

  “They don’t want anything better,” she said. She turned to look at Wilding. “They don’t deserve anything better,” she added fiercely. “If they did, they’d have it, wouldn’t they? I bettered myself!”

  There was a pause in the fireworks and the sound of the crowd in the street. “… and I don’t mean young girls, either…” drifted up from the balcony.

  Wilding turned to look out over the railing. He stayed back from the edge so that he could see the half the width of the boulevard while remaining hidden from the partiers on the balcony. In the boulevard women who might have been prostitutes danced a clog-step with partners of all ages, accompanied by a hand-held sound system.

  “They’ve got energy,” Wilding said. “They could do.… something. Instead, what they get is a constant round of shortages and carouses.”

  He felt the warmth of Francine’s body. When he turned, she was standing next to him again.

  “Artificial hatred of neighboring keeps,” he went on, astounded at the harshness in his own voice. “Artificial wars, fought by mercenaries—”

  Francine’s dress had a high neck and covered her ankles. The fabric was opaque but so thin and tight that the shimmering fireworks displayed her nipples with nude clarity. She was breathing rapidly.

  “—under artificial conditions,” Wilding said, “so that war can be entertainment but not destroy the planet the way Earth was destroyed. But that’s not the only way Mankind can die, is it?”

  “Prince Hal,” the woman said in whispered desperation. She took his hands in hers. Her palms were clammy.

  He’d drunk too much, or—

  But he must have drunk too much. “Those people down there could colonize the surface some day,” Wilding said. He enfolded the woman’s small hands in his own, trying instinctively to warm her. “They could colonize the stars. All they need are leaders.”

  “Prince Hal,” Francine begged, “don’t talk like this. Please? You’re scaring me.”

  “You’re afraid of change,” Wilding said. “The mob’s afraid of change, everybody’s afraid of change. So Wyoming Keep has the Twelve Families, and all the other keeps have their equivalents. Comfortable oligarchies determined to preserve the status quo until the whole system runs down. And no leaders!”

  Francine lifted Wilding’s hand to her mouth. She pressed it with her teeth and lips, an action somewhere between a kiss and a nibble. He could feel her heart beating.

  More fireworks went off to amuse the Carnival crowd.

  “It’s nothing but a jungle life,” Wilding whispered.

  The woman stepped back and raised her hands to her neckline. There was hard decision in her eyes. “All right, Prince Hal,” she said. “You want a leader? Then I’ll lead you!”

  Francine touched a catch. Her garment slid away to become a pool at her feet. She was nude beneath it. Her body was hairless and perfect.

  “And you’ll like where I take you, honey,” she added with practiced enthusiasm.

  EPILOGUE

  SEPTEMBER 5, 387 AS. 1751 HOURS.

  “Here ye go, buddy,” said the short, grinning thug with the scarred face. He tapped on the door marked CHIEF OF STAFF. “Mr Brainard’ll fix you up just fine, I’ll bet.”

  The Callahan kept his face impassive, though a vein stood out from his neck. He did not care to lose his temper in front of underlings.

  The man who had brought him from the guarded entrance to here, when he had demanded to be taken directly to the Wilding, was named Leaf. The Callahan knew Leaf by reputation—rather better than he wished were the case.

  The Chief of Staff’s office was opened from the inside by another thug. This one was named Caffey, and the Callahan knew of him also.

  “Gen’leman to see Mr Brainard, Fish,” Leaf said with a broad smile.

  He was play-acting; both of them were. This was nothing but a show, with the Callahan forming both the straight man and the audience.

  Caffey raised an eyebrow. “Alone?” he said.

  He was a marginally smoother character than Leaf. At any rate, the muted beige tunic and trousers affected by all the Association functionaries had a civilian appearance on Caffey, while the garments seemed to be a prison uniform when Leaf wore them.

  Looks were immaterial. Leaf and Caffey had equal authority as the Association’s Commissioners of Security. They were equally brutal, equally ruthless; and equally dedicated to their job.

  “There’s half a dozen more come with him,” Leaf said, “but one at a time seemed safer. The rest ’re cooling their heels in the guardroom. Unless they got smart with Newton, in which case they’re just cooling.”

  Caffey chuckled. “Takes a real direct view, that boy. Too dumb to get tricky, I s’pose.”

  “The men you’re talking about are the Council of the Twelve Families,” said the Callahan, finally stung to a response. “Not a street gang! We’re here to meet with the Wilding.”

  Leaf grinned. “Not a street gang, I guess,” he said. The soft change of emphasis made his words a threat.

  Caffey looked over his shoulder. His stocky body still blocked the doorway. “D’ye want to see Mr Callahan, sir?” he called, proving he had known perfectly well from the beginning who he was dealing with.

  “Of course, Fish,” answered the unseen within. “I’d be delighted.”

  Caffey stepped aside, gestured the Callahan mockingly forward, and closed the door behind himself.

  Brainard sat at a desk which was large and expensively outfitted, but cluttered with hard copy. He had the tired, worn appearance of a man older than his chronological age. His face and hands were flecked with minute dimples. Plastic sur
gery had not quite restored the texture Brainard’s skin had had before jungle sores ate into it.

  The Wilding’s chief of staff did not look hard or dangerous. The Callahan had reason to know that Brainard was both those things, and more.

  “I didn’t come to talk with you, Brainard,” the Callahan said. “My business—our business—is with the Wilding.”

  Brainard shrugged. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing the Callahan to one of the comfortable chairs facing the desk. “Since you’re going to talk to me anyway.”

  He smiled at his visitor. The expression was as precise as the click of a gunlock. “And as a suggestion, Mr Callahan … unless you refer to him as Director Wilding, I’m the only one you are going to talk to this afternoon.”

  The walls of the Chief of Staff’s office were decorated with holographic views recorded on the surface of Venus. The images were not retouched for propaganda purposes.

  To the Callahan’s right, huge land-clearing equipment tore at the jungle. On the wall over the door, other machinery formed barracks blocks and small bungalows from stabilized earth. On the visitor’s left, humans of both sexes inspected an experimental plot of vegetables growing beneath an ultraviolet screen.

  The wall behind Brainard did not carry a hologram. An automatic rifle hung there in a horizontal rack. To even the Callahan’s inexperienced eye, the weapon was in poor condition. The metal surfaces were scarred, and fungus had pitted the plastic stock and fore-end.

  The Callahan grimaced, then sat down. Forcing himself to look Brainard in the eyes, he said, “All right. What is it that he really wants?”

  Brainard smiled. This time the expression was almost gentle. “Just what he says he wants, Mr Callahan,” he said.

  The Council had—the Callahan had; he was the Council and they all knew it—offered Brainard a bribe early on in the process. Brainard had sent back a polite note with the money—enough money to have set him up for life in any keep on Venus.

  The next night, a mob of thousands of Association supporters had sacked and burned Callahan House. A Patrol detachment stood by and watched. They were outnumbered fifty to one by the rioters.

  Patrol Headquarters directed the detachment to open fire. The on-site Patrol commander countermanded the order immediately. He realized that the men on the mob’s fringes had the deeply tanned skin of Free Companions—and that the objects outlined against their cloaks were surely automatic weapons.

  “Listen, Brainard,” the Callahan snarled, “the time for playing games is over! You’re a practical man. You know that the notion is impossibly expensive.”

  “Expensive, of course,” Brainard said. “And while we pay Free Companions to defend large surface settlements, neighboring keeps will raid our fishing grounds.” He leaned forward. His tunic touched the papers on his desk and made them rustle. “But the fishing grounds are played out, and the settlements will be exporting protein in a few years.” Brainard’s eyes were hard and empty, like a pair of gun muzzles.

  “It’s not impossible, Mr Callahan,” he said. “And it’s not expensive at all, compared to the centuries of phony war that you and yours have kept going!”

  The Council made approaches to Leaf and Caffey after the attempt to subvert Brainard failed. This time the money did not come back—but neither did the agents carrying it.

  Three days later, one male member of each of the Twelve Families was kidnapped. The operations were simultaneous and went off flawlessly, though several guards were killed in vain attempts to interfere.

  The victims were dumped in front of the Council Building the next morning. They were alive, but they had been shaved bald and their skin dyed a bright blue.

  After that debacle, the Callahan shelved what he had thought of as his final contingency plan. He was afraid to think about what would happen if he attempted assassination—and failed.

  “Phony wars, Brainard?” the Callahan sneered. “It’s real lives your master’s scheme will cost, and there’ll be a lot of them. Has he thought of that?”

  Brainard’s fingers gently explored the dimples on his cheek. It was a habitual gesture, an unconscious one. “We’ve seen death before, Mr Callahan,” he said tonelessly. “People die no matter what. This way—” His eyes had gone unfocused. Now they locked on the Callahan. “This way they have a chance to die for something. And they’re willing to. By God, they’re willing to!”

  “Yes, because you’ve stirred them up!” the Callahan shouted. He gripped the arms of his chair fiercely, as if to hold himself down.

  Brainard chuckled unexpectedly. He slid his chair back and stood with an easy motion. “That’s right, Mr Callahan,” he said. “Because we stirred them up. Because we’re leading them. But—” The relaxed voice and posture vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Brainard pointed his index finger at his visitor and went on, “—the common people are willing to go. And they’re going to go. The only choice the Twelve Families has now is to support the process.” Brainard’s features changed. For the first time, the Callahan saw the face of the man who directed the activities of killers like Leaf and Caffey. “Or be burned out of the way,” Brainard said, voice husky. “Like so much honeysuckle.”

  The Callahan stared across the desk at Brainard. He had never before in his life hated a human being as much as he hated this man—and his master.

  But he had not ruled Wyoming Keep for twenty years by being a fool.

  The Callahan stood up. “All right,” he said quietly. “Then I suppose we’d better support the process, hadn’t we? May I see Director Wilding now?”

  The two men walked down the hallway together, toward the office of the Director of the Surface Settlement Association.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 1947 (when Heinlein, Asimov, and DeCamp were in their prime) the Fifth World Science Fiction Convention was held in Philadelphia. Attendees voted on their favorite author.

  Henry Kuttner came in first.

  My initial contact with Henry Kuttner’s work came in 1958—though I didn’t know it at the time. My parents gave me a copy of The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology for my thirteenth birthday. Included—and the story that among so many classics really blew me away—was a novella titled Clash by Night, written by Lawrence O’Donnell.

  A year or two later I read Destination: Infinity, a Henry Kuttner novel set in the same milieu as Clash by Night. (Calling the novel a sequel would overstate the case, since the action takes place a thousand years later and the focus is wholly different.) The front matter noted that the novel had originally been serialized under the (much better) title Fury, and that the author of the serialized version was listed as “Lawrence O’Donnell.”

  I’d been a Kuttner fan before I knew it. I’m still a Kuttner fan.

  Henry Kuttner, often writing with his wife C. L. Moore (the solo author of Shambleau, a first story as remarkably good as those of Heinlein and Van Vogt), used many pseudonyms. Partly this was because Kuttner was very prolific, and the magazines of the day rarely published two or more stories under the same byline in an issue.

  Partly it was because Kuttner had started out as a writer in the ’30s, when he was still in his teens. Many of his early stories were imitative and marked more by enthusiasm and facility than skill. A friend at the time (probably Mort Weisinger) described Kuttner’s work filling the two semi-porn issues of Marvel Science Fiction as “Kill a monster, grab a tit. Kill a monster, grab a tit.”

  By the time Kuttner had improved his craft to a degree which put him in the first rank of his profession, his own name was ruined. In the 1940s, his best work came out under a variety of pseudonyms, particularly Lewis Padgett and (not often, but always exceptional) Lawrence O’Donnell.

  I should note that C. L. Moore certainly worked on Fury and probably on Clash by Night also. Her influence on her husband’s work goes beyond such direct involvement: even before the couple met, Kuttner was obviously imitating Moore’s style in his heroic fantasy writing.

 
Having said that, I add that when Ms Moore recopy-writed Fury and Clash by Night after Kuttner’s death, she did so under his name alone. I accept her assessment of Kuttner and Moore’s individual involvement in the pieces.

  Clash by Night is an adventure story, which is as important to me now as it was in 1958. It’s considerably more than that, however. The aspect that makes the story remarkable even today is Kuttner’s awareness that mercenary soldiers were in business.

  “Condottiere,” the title of the men who led the mercenary bands of the Italian Renaissance, is not a military term: it means quite simply Contractor, and that’s what the leaders were. The condottieri provided armed men instead of grain or timber; and they expected to make a businessman’s profit on their outlay.

  If you think that’s an obvious piece of economics, read other science fiction and fantasy works involving mercenaries—even many of those written long after Kuttner’s death.

  When Tor through Marty Greenberg offered me the chance to do a sequel to Clash by Night, I jumped at it. The Jungle is not, however, a Kuttner pastiche (I did that elsewhere). This time I set out to write a David Drake story set in the milieu of Kuttner’s Clash by Night, which is a very different thing. The Jungle could not possibly have been published in Astounding in 1943.

  But neither could I have written The Jungle had I not read and reread the stories by which Kuttner continued for as long as he lived to push the bounds of what was stylistically possible in science fiction. The man who wrote Private Eye and Home Is the Hunter, to take two not-quite-random examples, has a great deal to teach any writer who is willing to learn.

  Kuttner’s willingness to take risks, and his awareness that there’s more to style than “fine writing,” are the core of The Jungle. As I said above, this isn’t a Kuttner pastiche.

  But it is a homage to Henry Kuttner, and I hope he would have approved my use of his setting.

  —David Drake

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina

  Tor books by David Drake