Slavemakers

by Joseph Wallace

  The only good-bye that meant much to Kait but, in the end, it was only a little more meaningful than the one she’d exchanged with Jack. In the end, what could either of you say when one was sailing off the end of the world and the other was not?

  You could mouth heartfelt platitudes, which was what Sheila murmured into Kait’s ear as they embraced. “Your father would be so proud of you,” she said. “Both your fathers.”

  Kait was quiet.

  “I want you to come home,” Sheila said next. Then she stiffened a little, as if the words had surprised her, and she was wondering if she’d said too much.

  Kait tightened her grip but still did not speak.

  She felt as much as heard Sheila’s sigh, which unexpectedly turned into a laugh.

  “But as long as you’re out there,” she said, sounding a little like Trey would have, “for God’s sake, would you finally find whatever the hell it is you’re looking for?”

  Kait nodded. And then, surprising herself, she found that she was crying.

  * * *

  THE ANCHOR LIFTED. The wind filled the sails, and the ship began to move, slowly and creakily at first, as if stretching stiff muscles, then faster over the smooth swells. A single noddy tern dipped and wheeled above the wake.

  Kait, back on deck, watched the crowd on the beach as the ship left them behind. Though Jack and his friends hadn’t come, most other Fugians had.

  Mariama, Sheila waving, Nick. At first she could recognize their faces. Even when distance began to blur the details, she knew them by shape and posture.

  As they receded into the distance, becoming patches of color against the white sand, all Kait could think was: There are so few of them.

  About ten minutes later, the ship reached the forested headland that lay to Refugia’s south and went around it, and the people left behind were lost to view. Several members of the Trey Gilliard’s crew watched until the last instant, and most of them were crying.

  But Kait had long since turned away, and though her eyes were wet as well, her tears were of relief.

  Finally, she would learn who else was out there.

  Finally, she would be able to see.

  FIVE

  NINE HOURS LATER, Malcolm stood on the bow of the Trey Gilliard. So far the crew had handled everything smoothly, and the breeze filling the sails on the three square-rigged masts was allowing them to maintain a steady speed.

  To the west, the afternoon sun shone out of a clear blue sky of a kind they rarely saw in the forest. Heavy towers of cloud hung over the land, a green-brown mass two miles to the east. Tropical Africa, the thick rain forests that lay to the south of Refugia.

  As Malcolm watched, the clouds were lit by lightning, then again. “Glad to be here ’stead of there,” he said to the man standing beside him.

  “Yeah.” Ross McKay smiled. “Glad to be anywhere new.”

  Malcolm shifted his gaze. A big pod of dolphins, dozens and dozens of them, had met the boat not twenty minutes after they’d set sail, and now, hours later, they were still everywhere in the calm blue waters, some riding the bow wave, others in the wake, and still others leaping out of the water on all sides, shedding shining droplets from their silver-gray bodies, adults and babies all effortlessly keeping up with the ship.

  “Dolphins communicate,” Ross said, turning his head for a moment to look at Malcolm. “They have language.”

  “Yeah,” Malcolm said. “I know. And know what else?”

  Ross shook his head.

  “I think that for years now, dolphin old-timers, geezers, been passing down stories about these huge toys that would come rumbling through their oceans. These big floating things that would split the water and create these roller coasters for them to ride on.”

  Ross was smiling. “You think?”

  “Yeah. I do. And I’ll bet the young’uns would just shake their heads and roll their eyes, and when the geezers weren’t around, they’d say, ‘Bloody galahs! What are they goin’ on about?’”

  He paused to watch three dolphins crest the wake simultaneously. “And then it all turns out to be God’s truth, the geezers were right all along, and now none of them are going to let us out of their sight.”

  Smiling, those pale eyes of his widening at the thought, Ross leaned against the railing to watch the show.

  Malcolm found himself thinking of how Shapiro would have mocked his flight of fancy.

  Which made him want to share it with her. And he knew where she’d be right now: She’d headed into the cabin that would serve as her onboard laboratory soon after departure and hadn’t made an appearance since.

  Another person who was happy to be here. Happy as she was capable of, at least.

  “Hey,” Malcolm said. “Back in a mo’. Don’t let these guys take off.”

  Ross shook his head. “Oh, they aren’t going anywhere!”

  * * *

  SHAPIRO DID LOOK happy. In this little cabin at the stern, the ship’s combined laboratory and surgical suite, she seemed . . . relaxed. At ease. Free.

  When Malcolm entered, she was bent over the one toy, the one treasure, she had allowed herself on this journey: the nineteenth-century Wenham binocular microscope that sat on the wooden table she was using as a desk. All polished brass and shining glass in the sunlight coming in through the cabin’s sole porthole, it was the only relic from the Last World that she cared about.

  “Dr. Maturin,” Malcolm said.

  Shapiro straightened and peered at him over her shoulder. “Captain Aubrey.” Then, “Are you just going to stand there goggling at me? If so, I’m going back to work. I’m losing the light.”

  “Come up on deck,” he said. “There’s a sight to see.”

  “The dolphins?” She nodded toward the porthole. “I saw.”

  “Come up,” he said again.

  She opened her mouth, but before she could argue, someone was standing behind Malcolm in the doorway. The short, compact figure of Dylan Connell, who was fifteen when the Last World ended but somehow had already become an expert sailor by then. He’d helped build the boat, and as its first officer, he was the only one permitted to interrupt Malcolm and Shapiro.

  “Need you to see something up top,” he said, not wasting any more words than he usually did.

  Malcolm asked no questions. With Shapiro, curious now, accompanying them, he followed Connell back onto the deck. This time he didn’t pay any attention to the dolphins, or even to a whale he glimpsed breaching with a gigantic splash in the calm water to the west.

  Instead, he headed straight toward the small cluster of people gathered on the port side of the ship, just beyond the second mast. Ross and Kait and Fatou Konte, and a couple of others.

  They were all looking toward shore, where the clouds, lifting and dispersing as they did most evenings over Refugia, were tinged orange and purple by the low-angled sunlight.

  Malcolm didn’t need to ask what they were looking at. He could see it for himself: a thick column of gray-black smoke rising from some hidden spot just inland.

  Beside him, Shapiro said, “Huh.”

  Ross McKay said, “Wildfire? Lightning strike?”

  Malcolm shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

  “Agree.” McKay was frowning. “You don’t get many wildfires in humid forest, anyway.”

  “Unless people are clearing the land for agriculture,” Shapiro said, “and set it.”

  Saying what everyone had been thinking.

  People.

  People made fires that looked like that.

  “Do we go investigate?” Kait asked.

  Everyone looked at Malcolm. Already the column of smoke was slipping behind them. The clouds over the forest were turning gray as the sun fell toward the horizon.

  “How far have we come?” he asked Dylan. “About a hundred kilomete
rs?”

  “More or less,” the first officer said.

  “That’s still Guinea-Bissau.” After a moment, he shook his head. “There are reefs along here, treacherous as hell, and all our navigation charts are too fucking old. It’s not worth the risk.”

  There was silence. Then Kait said, “One hundred kilometers is about sixty miles, isn’t it?”

  No one answered.

  “Sixty miles south of Refugia,” she said.

  Already, the smoke was out of sight. It might never have existed. Yet Malcolm could tell that it had awoken the imaginations of the small group who’d seen it. Cast the world in a new light, filled it with new possibilities.

  Malcolm’s heart was pounding. He knew he was the one playing the galah now, acting like a fool. But all he could think right now was . . .

  Maybe.

  They were a journey around the African continent away, weeks—months—of sailing that could, and probably would, end in disaster long before he ever found out for sure. Most likely he would never learn the truth.

  But, still . . . maybe. The column of smoke, the possibility that it signified the presence of a human colony, told him that maybe Chloe was still alive.

  Call him a galah, but at that moment, Malcolm Granger was, for the first time in years, happy.

  SIX

  Lamu Fort, Kenya

  THE BREEDING CHAMBERS reeked of sweat and urine and shit and filthy mammal. They smelled like the cages in a zoo Jason had visited once when he was a child—not one of the big, antiseptic ones in places like the Bronx and San Diego, but a run-down, out-of-the-way menagerie in some little Southwestern town he’d driven through with his parents. The kind with bare cages containing things like a patchy lion or a morose, drooling bear or a pile of stinking rattlesnakes.

  The odor of sweat and urine and shit and despair.

  Of all the places in the slave camp, this was the one Jason hated the most. It was also where he spent the most time—in these endless, identical stone-walled chambers, lit only by small square glassless windows high on their outer walls and located deep within the heart of the limestone-and-coral fort.

  One of his jobs was tending to the creatures imprisoned here. The little, large-eyed antelopes, the sullen bat-eared foxes, the huge, squeaking mass of pouched rats.

  And the primates most of all: black-and-white colobus monkeys, vervets, and baboons that were so beyond the point of hopelessness that their eyes were as dull as sewn-on buttons on an old doll.

  And the humans, too. Those who had once been human. Never a huge number of them, but always some.

  His responsibility, Jason’s, all of them. Keeping some of them alive to breed, others to be parasitized, used as hosts for the thieves’ young.

  Jason didn’t know how the mind decided which individuals deserved to live, which to die. But after twenty years in the camp, he was pretty certain that it knew exactly what it was doing. That it had a far clearer view of the world, of the hierarchy of life on earth, than the human species had ever possessed.

  And him? He just had to keep the captives alive long enough for them to fulfill the thieves’ purpose.

  The pouched rats were easiest to care for. Give them grain, give them old meat, and they did fine. Or at least they did well enough to produce a population that numbered in the hundreds and occupied a whole row of chambers on the western edge of the fort.

  The rats were easiest, but under his care, the population of antelopes, foxes, and other mammals had gradually expanded as well. And the primate population, too. Even among primates—all kinds of primates—the urge, the necessity, to breed never seemed to go away.

  Every year more hosts, and more thieves.

  * * *

  SWEAT AND URINE and shit and despair and . . . thief.

  That smell above all, though after all this time Jason barely noticed it. Though he couldn’t help but notice the thieves themselves, the thousands that infested the breeding chambers.

  Especially in the cool of night, when they came to these cramped, enclosed spaces to absorb the heat their captives radiated. Coating the rough stone walls and ceilings, sometimes crouched still, sometimes moving in a black-and-bloodred mass or flying—a sudden buzz of wings—to a new spot.

  Jason hated coming here at any time of day. But it was worst when it was crowded with thieves. Not because he feared them or because they disgusted him. After twenty years never out of their sight, he was long past fear and disgust.

  Except, perhaps, self-disgust.

  No. Because the temptation nearly overcame him when they were closest at hand. The almost unstoppable urge to plunge his hand, his whole body, into the mass. To see how many he could mangle before they rose and stung him to death.

  But deep down he knew they wouldn’t kill him. After he crushed a few—an inconsequential few—the rest would clear away. And let him live, because he was too important. Too important a slave.

  But others? Weaker individuals? Less useful ones? They could easily be singled out, killed—or, worse, implanted, impregnated—because of him. He’d seen it happen often enough.

  That was Jason’s biggest fear, really his only fear by now: that the thieves, his masters, would let him live but kill others in his name.

  Kill Chloe in his name.

  So he never gave in to temptation.

  Or, at least, he hadn’t yet.

  * * *

  IN THE LATE afternoons, Jason would go back to the chambers to retrieve the bodies of any animals that had died during emergence—or for any other reason—and carry them up to the oven.

  The giant pouched rats didn’t usually need his help. They just ate whoever had stopped breathing, and for whatever reason. They were so efficient that Jason rarely found more than a few scraps of oily fur left by the time he made his late-afternoon inspection.

  With other species, he had to clean out any new corpses. The cells containing the monkeys, for example, and also those that held the human slaves.

  Or, to be more accurate, the slaves that had once been human.

  * * *

  JASON WAS STILL human. He’d been thirty-four when the end came. He remembered what life had been like before though he wished he didn’t. It was when he remembered most clearly that he most wanted to leap off one of the fort’s parapets, or plunge into a mass of thieves and dare them to do to him what he could not do to himself.

  He wasn’t the only human. There were others in the slave camp, though fewer every year. Fewer of them, and more who had lost the humanity they’d once possessed.

  But neither of these groups mattered, the human and the once human. They were both just transitional phases in the thieves’ plan, the scattered remnants of the billions who’d existed before the end came. Two decades in, they were still essential for the tasks they’d been given, but soon enough—in a matter of years, not further decades—they’d be easily, effortlessly, replaced.

  Replaced by those who had been born here. Born into slavery and thus knowing no other life.

  A generation from now, none would remember, or need the drugs the thieves pumped into their systems to make them forget. And the new generation would be perfect, malleable, unquestioning.

  At that point, Jason believed, the human race would be truly extinct, and all that would remain would be slaves cloaked in a mockery of the human form.

  * * *

  JASON NEVER WENT to the cells, the breeding chambers, alone. Sometimes he’d be with one of the born slaves, but more often a ridden one. Someone who had once been human—whom Jason might have known as a human—but who now did whatever its thief rider commanded.

  Or, rather, never questioned the tasks it was given to do.

  Jason had no idea what brew of drugs the riders poured into their subjects. He’d been a parasitologist back before the thieves took over, so his area of expertise hadn’
t been wasps and their toxins.

  He did know that the thieves’ ability to use chemicals to control the behavior of other species—to enslave them—was typical of wasps, and of the earth’s creatures in general. Humans might have thought they’d invented slavery, but in truth they’d been way late to the game.

  He remembered reading a journal article about a wasp that injected neurotoxins into the head of a cockroach. The roach was immediately enslaved, following the wasp back to its burrow and waiting patiently for the wasp to lay eggs inside it.

  And toxins were just part of the equation. At the very end, just before Jason’s own free life ended, he’d learned of a wasp that injected a virus along with an egg into its host. Some kind of beetle, it had been, though he couldn’t remember what. Maybe a ladybug?

  But that wasn’t the important thing. What mattered was that wasps were strong and clever enough even to enslave viruses—themselves organisms able to ravage life on earth—and turn them to their own purposes. In this case, the virus, replicating inside the host’s body, would transmit the wasp’s commands. And the helpless beetle would abandon all its own natural behaviors to do nothing but guard the cocoon in which the newly emerged wasp would live.

  Nor were mammals immune from enslavement. Every day, his own life proved it.

  * * *

  THIS AFTERNOON, HE’D come to the breeding chambers to retrieve the corpses of a pair of colobus monkeys. He was accompanied this time by a ridden slave, lost in whatever dreams filled the minds of these creatures. Its rider was perched on the back of its neck, the stinger sliding in and out of its flesh in some complex pattern Jason would never understand. The ridden slave, as always, oblivious to the insertion of the needle.

  Jason had known this slave’s name once, he thought.

  As the surviving monkeys huddled in the back of their cell, he and the ridden slave picked up the stiffening bodies. Eyeless, of course, their thick black-and-white fur coarse and matted with blood, the swellings on their abdomens now as soft and flaccid as popped balloons.