The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (24 page)

Read The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge Online

Authors: Vernor Vinge

BOOK: The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
10.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The half-raised harpoons were thrown. Cardona went down instantly, transfixed by three of the weapons. Several other men were hit and felled. The natives drew their knives and ran forward, taking advantage of the confusion that the harpoons had created. A painfully loud BAM erupted beside Ribera’s ear as Delgado fired his pistol, picking off the leader of the natives. The crewmen recovered from their shock, began firing at the aborigines. Ribera whipped his pistol from a pouch at his side and blasted into the swarm of primitives. Their single-shot pistols emptied, the scientists and crew were reduced to knives. The next few seconds were total chaos. The knives rose and fell, gleaming more redly than the water in the cove. The anthropologist half stumbled over squirming bodies. The air was filled with hoarse shouts and sounds of straining men.
The groups were evenly matched and they were cutting each other to pieces. In some still calm part of his mind Ribera noticed the returning boats of the astrologers. He glimpsed the crewmen aiming their muskets, waiting for a clear shot at the primitives.
The turbulence of the fray whirled him about, out of the densest part of the fight. They had to disengage; another few minutes and there wouldn’t be one in ten left standing on the beach. Ribera screamed this to Delgado. Miraculously the man heard him and agreed; retreat was the only sane thing to do. The Sudaméricans ran raggedly toward their boat, with the natives close behind. Sharp cracking sounds came from over the water. The crewmen in the other boats were taking advantage of the dispersion between pursuers and pursued. The Sudaméricans reached their boat and began pushing it into the water. Ribera and several others turned to face the natives. Musket fire had forced most of the primitives back, but a few still ran toward the shore, knives drawn. Ribera reached down and snatched a small stone from the ground. Using an almost forgotten skill of his “gentle” childhood, he cocked his arm and snapped the rock forward in a flat trajectory. It caught one of the natives dead between the eyes with a sharp
smack
. The man plunged forward, fell on his face, and lay still.
Ribera turned and ran into the shallow water after the boat. He was followed by the rest of the rearguard. Eager hands reached out from the boat to pull him aboard. A couple more feet and he would be safe.
The blow sent him spinning forward. As he fell, he saw with dumb horror the crimson harpoon which had emerged from his parka just below the right side pocket.
Why? Must we forever commit the same blunders over and over, and over again?
Ribera didn’t have time to wonder at this fleeting incongruous thought, before the redness closed about him.
A GENTLE BREEZE, CARRYING THE HAPPY SOUNDS OF DISTANT PARTIES, ENTERED the large windows of the bungalow and caressed its interior. It was a cool night, late in summer. The first mild airs of fall made the darkness pleasant, inviting. The house was situated on the slight ridge which marked the old shoreline of La Plata; the lawns and hedges outside fell gently away toward the general plain of the city. The faint though delicate light from the oil lamps of that city defined its rectangular array of streets, and showed its buildings uniformly one or two stories high. Farther out, the city lights came to an abrupt end at the waterfront. But even beyond that there were the moving, yellow lights of boats and ships navigating La Plata. Off to the extreme left burned the bright fires surrounding the Naval Enclosure, where the government labored on some secret weapon, possibly a steam-powered warship.
It was a peaceful scene, and a happy evening; preparations were almost complete. His desk was littered with the encouraging replies to his proposals. It had been hard work but a lot of fun at the same time. And Buenos Aires had been the ideal base of operations. Alfredo IV was touring the western provinces. To be more precise, el Presidente Imperial and his court were visiting the pleasure spots in Santiago (as if Alfredo had not built up enough talent in Buenos Aires itself). The Imperial Guard and the Secret Police clustered close by the monarch (Alfredo was more afraid of a court coup than anything else), so Buenos Aires was more relaxed then it had been in many years.
Yes, two months of hard work
. Many important people had to be informed, and confidentially. But the replies had been almost uniformly enthusiastic, and it appeared that the project wasn’t known to those who would destroy its goal; though of course the simple fact that so many people had to know increased the chances of disclosure. But that was a risk that had to be taken.
And
, thought Diego Ribera,
it’s been two months since the Battle of Bloody Cove
. (The name of the inlet had arisen almost spontaneously.) He hoped that the tribe hadn’t been scared away from that spot, or, infinitely worse, driven to the starvation point by the massacre. If that fool Enrique Cardona had only kept his mouth shut, both sides could have parted peacefully (if not amicably) and some good men would still be alive.
Ribera scratched his side thoughtfully. Another inch and he wouldn’t have made it himself. If that harpoon had hit just a little further up … Someone’s quick thinking had added to his initial good luck. That someone had slashed the thick cord tied to the harpoon which had hit Ribera. If the separation had not been made, the cord would most likely have been pulled back and the harpoon’s barb engaged. Even as miraculous was the fact that he had survived the impalement and the poor medical conditions on board the
Vigilancia.
Physically, all the damage that remained was a pair of neat, circular scars. The whole affair was enough to give you religion, or, conversely, scare the hell out of you … .
And come next January he would be headed back, along with the secret expedition that he had been so energetically organizing. Nine months was a long time to wait, but they definitely couldn’t make the trip this fall or winter, and they really did need time to gather just the right equipment.
Diego was taken from these thoughts by several dull thuds from the door. He got up and went to the entrance of the bungalow. (This small house in the plushiest section of the city was evidence of the encouragement he had already received from some very important people.) Ribera had no idea who the visitor could be, but he had every expectation that the news brought would be good. He reached the door, and pulled it open.
“Mkambwe Lunama!”
The Zulunder stood framed in the doorway, his black face all but invisible against the night sky. The visitor was over two meters tall and weighed nearly one hundred kilos; he was the picture of a superman. But then, the Zulunder government made a special point of using the super-race type in its dealings with other nations. The procedure undoubtedly lost them some fine talent, but in Sudamérica the myth held strong that one Zulunder was worth three warriors of any other nationality.
After his first outburst, Ribera stood for a moment in horrified confusion. He knew Lunama vaguely as the Highman of Trueness—propaganda—at the Zulunder embassy in Buenos Aires. The Highman had made numerous attempts to ingratiate himself with the academic community of la Universidad de Buenos Aires. The efforts were probably aimed at recruiting sympathizers against that time when the disagreements between the Sudamérican Empire and the Reaches of Zulund erupted into open conflict.
Wildly hoping that the visit was merely an unlucky coincidence, Ribera recovered himself. He attempted a disarming smile, and said, “Come on in, Mkambwe. Haven’t seen you in a long time.”
The Zulunder smiled, his white teeth making a dazzling contrast with
the rest of his face. He stepped lightly into the room. His robes were woven of brilliant red, blue, and green fibers, in defiance of the more somber hues of Sudamérican business suits. On his hip rested a Mavimbelamake 20-millimeter revolver. The Zulunders had their own peculiar ideas about diplomatic protocol.
Mkambwe moved lithely across the room and settled in a chair. Ribera hurried over and sat down by his desk, trying unobtrusively to hide the letters that lay on it from the Zulunder’s view. If the visitor saw and understood even one of those letters, the game would be over.
Ribera tried to appear relaxed. “Sorry I can’t offer you a drink, Mkambwe, but the house is as dry as a desert.” If the anthropologist got up, the Zulunder would almost certainly see the correspondence. Diego continued jovially, desperately trying to dredge up reminiscences. (“Remember that time your boys whited their faces and went down to la Casa Rosada Nueva and raised hell with the—”)
Lunama grinned. “Frankly, old man, this visit is business.” The Zulunder spoke with a dandyish, pseudo-Castilian accent, which he no doubt thought aristocratic.
“Oh,” Ribera answered.
“I hear that you were on a little expedition to Palmer Peninsula this January.”
“Yes,” Ribera replied stonily. Perhaps there was still a chance; perhaps Lunama didn’t know the whole truth. “And it was supposed to be a secret. If el Presidente Imperial found out that your government knew about it—”
“Come, come, Diego. That isn’t the secret you are thinking of. I know that you found what happened to the
Hendrik Verwoerd
and the
Nation.”
“Oh,” Ribera replied again. “How did you find out?” he asked dully.
“You talked to many people, Diego,” he waved vaguely. “Surely you didn’t think that every one of them would keep your secret. And surely you didn’t think you could keep something this important from us.” He looked beyond the anthropologist and his tone changed. “For three hundred years we lived under the heels of those white devils. Then came the Retribution in the North and—”
What a quaint term the Zulunders use for the North World War
, thought Ribera. It had been a war in which every trick of destruction—nuclear, biological, and chemical—had been used. The mere residues from the immolation of China had obliterated Indonesia and India. Mexico and America Central had disappeared with the United States and Canada. And North Africa had gone with Europe. The gentlest wisps from that biological and nuclear hell had caressed the Southern Hemisphere and nearly poisoned it. A few more megatons and a few more disease strains
and the war would have gone unnamed, for there would have been no one to chronicle it. This was the Retribution in the North which Lunama so easily referred to.
“—and the devils no longer had the protection of their friends there. Then came the Sixty-Day Struggle for Freedom.”
There were both black devils and white devils in those sixty days—and saints of all colors, brave men struggling desperately to avert genocide. But the years of slavery were too many and the saints lost, not for the first time.
“At the beginning of the Rising we fought machine guns and jet fighters with rifles and knives,” Lunama continued, almost self-hypnotized. “We died by the tens of thousands. But as the days passed
their
numbers were reduced, too. By the fiftieth day we had the machine guns, and
they
had the knives and rifles. We boxed the last of them up at Kapa and Durb,” (he used the Zulunder terms for Capetown and Durban) “and drove them into the sea.”
Literally
, added Ribera to himself.
The last remnants of White Africa were physically pushed from the wharves and sunny beaches into the ocean
. The Zulunders had succeeded in exterminating the Whites, and thought they succeeded in obliterating the Afrikaner culture from the continent. Of course they had been wrong. The Afrikaners had left a lasting mark, obvious to any unbiased observer; the very name Zulunder, which the present Africans cherished fanatically, was in part a corruption of English.
“By the sixtieth day, we could say that not a single White lived on the continent. As far as we know, only one small group evaded vengeance. Some of the highest-ranking Afrikaner officials, maybe even the Prime Minister, commandeered two luxury vessels, the
SR Hendrik Verwoerd
and the
Nation
. They left many hours before the final freedom drive on Kapa.”
Five thousand desperate men, women, and children crammed into two luxury ships
. The vessels had raced across the South Atlantic, seeking refuge in Argentina. But the government of Argentina was having troubles of its own. Two light Argentine patrol boats badly damaged the
Nation
before the Afrikaners were convinced that Sudamérica didn’t offer shelter.
The two ships had turned south, possibly in an attempt to round Tierra del Fuego and reach Australia. That was the last anyone had heard of them for more than two hundred years—till the
Vigilancia’s
exploration of the Palmer Peninsula.
Ribera knew that an appeal to sympathy wouldn’t dissuade the Zulunder from ordering the destruction of the pitiful colony. He tried a different tack. “What you say is so true, Mkambwe. But please, please don’t destroy these descendants of your enemies. The tribe on
the Palmer Peninsula is the only polar culture left on Earth.” Even as Ribera said the words, he realized how weak the argument was; it could only appeal to an anthropologist like himself.
The Zulunder seemed surprised, and with a visible effort shelved the terrible history of his continent. “Destroy them? My dear fellow, whyever would we do that? I just came here to ask if we might send several observers from the Ministry of Trueness along on your expedition. To report the matter more fully, you know. I think that Alfredo can probably be convinced, if the question is put persuasively enough to him.

Other books

Love in the Details by Becky Wade
Romance in Vegas - Showgirl! by Nancy Fornataro
The Binding Chair by Kathryn Harrison
The Ugly Duckling by Iris Johansen