Operation ares, p.11
Operation Ares, page 11
But neither what he had read or what he had seen was at all like the actual place he was in now There were no frowning stone walls, no guard cowers. Only this mud and the barbed-wire fence and the barracks-like brick dormitories.
“Here’s where you bunk,” the guard said, stopping at a door. “You goin' to be able to get your clothes off by yourself?”
Nonny held up his hands, looking by the light of the yellow bulb over the dormitory door at the tips of his fingers. They were dark with blood where the nails had been pulled off, and he found himself unable to guess whether they would still function or not.
“Well, if you can’t”—the guard pushed open the splintering door—“ask somebody to help you. Don’t be afraid of them, they’re all just like you in there.”
In a way, John Castle admitted to himself, it was fun. If there were nothing at stake, if he had no responsibilities and the Peaceguard could not possibly find him here, he might actually come to enjoy what he was doing.
His right arm had been encased in plaster by the “special” doctor Tia Marie had called for him; but the fingers were clear and of some help as he laced the top back on the little drum.
As he tied the last knot, tightening the thongs with his teeth, he heard slow, firm steps in the hall outside his door and knew whom to expect.
She opened the door and stepped into the room she had given him, fifer wide brown face as impassive as a statue’s.
He rose. “Good morning, Madame.”
“You will call me by my name, John. I have told you that before. We are all one in siblinghood, we Hunters. There are no titles.”
“Of course,” he said, and added, “I keep forgetting, Tia Marie." White he spoke he studied her, wondering at the mixture of races that could have given so dark a complexion with her clear blue eyes, and combined that ageless hawk-face with the stature of a giantess. ,
He got a chair for her after clearing it of a litter of small prisms and lenses he had left on it the night before. It was an old kitchen chair, but she accepted it as though it were a throne, gathering her voluminous skirt about her with the motion of a queen settling herself in her coronation robes. The skirt was scarlet, and she wore a scarlet cloth over hair he suspected might be graying but had never seen. Her breasts were bare.
“In the future, John, you are to a
"I'll be happy to, but since it is your chair, in your room, and you don’t bother to knock when you come into any room in your building, it’s a bit difficult to remember.”
“You should keep in mind, John, that it is of more importance that I do not quarrel with you, than that you do not quarrel with me.”
He nodded gravely.
“Have you studied the books I lent you?”
“Yes, I have.”
“You have still an interrogative in your mind. What is it?”
He rummaged among the books lying on his bed.
“Tante, not tia, is the French word for aunt; and this book has the name Maria de Alarcón written on the flyleaf. Tia is Spanish.”
“So you are asking if Maria de Alarcón is my real name? No, it is not, John. You may find anything written inside the cover of an old book. Would you be satisfied if I told you that I was bom of French-speaking parents among the Spanish-speaking people of South America?”
“I’m afraid not. I’d want to ask a great many more questions, Tia Marie.”
She gave him one of her very rare smiles. “Understand that I do not so tell you, John. Because it is not true and I never say anything but the truth. When Japhet brought you to me, all bleeding, you had no questions. You only wanted a place to hide and perhaps someone to bandage you. I have told you before that only Hunters can stay here, and my Hunters do not ask always* who is she? From where does she come?”
John shrugged apologetically and gestured toward the pile of books. “I’m trying to leam”
“To try is nothing. To succeed,*4 she leaned forward slightly in her chair and a hint of animation came into her broad impassive face, “is all! You read, but you do not say, that may be so, I shall think about that. You say, prove, prove! Why do you believe the King came when Mona, a nothing, a silly child, wished he should? You would not have gotten free of those peacemen were it not for that, would you John?”
“All right, how’s this?” He smiled, hoping that what he was about to say would not precipitate, a serious quarrel, but stung into replying. “You Hunters parade the streets at night—you call it Hunting, but let that pass—with your spears. On big occasions you let your pet lion out of his cage and take him with you. No leash or chain or anything—"
Tia Marie interrupted to ask, “And how do I do that, ha?” “Training, I assume. But on that night—and it was after midnight, the time you usually lead the Hunters out—he got out of control. He’s accustomed to dark streets with no one on them but a few chem-heads. This time there were people and lights and a lot of noise. He got curious and ran ahead of you to investigate. No peaceguard is going to tackle a lion with nothing but an electric goad, so everyone ran. The lion smelled Charley’s Wood; he wasn’t hungry, but he was curious so he stayed around."
“You have an answer for everything, John, but we shall make a Hunter of you yet. Your friend Japhet has done well for me, and you will also. He knows much of traps and woodcraft, yet he says that you are cleverer than he.”
“Not at those things,” John Castle said. On the day after Charley’s death, while he had lain almost helpless in a hidden room in this maze of a building Tia Marie owned and used as the temple of her cult, Japhet had explained the “job” he had mentioned over drinks the day before. By some instinct for talent Tia Marie had located him shortly after he had come to New York and engaged him to teach her followers to set snares for small game and the tricks of tracking. John suspected that she had even loaned him reference material* but he had heard Japhet give his informal lectures since and they were impressive.
“But at others. Like that drum. Does it work?”
For some reason he did not want to show it yet. He shook his head. “It will by tonight, though.”
“I would be very pleased, John, if it did. Wc will have important company tonight." She stood up, and though she gave no other indication of excitement he knew somehow that the excitement was there. “I will tell you, and you only, so that you will have my drum for me. But you must tell no one else. It is the President himself, President Huggins.”
“Who?”
“I tell you the President of the Republic, President Charles H. Huggins!”
“Oh,” he said. “You mean the constitutional president/
She looked at him closely. “Ah, you are as foolish about this as you are about Hunting, John. You think this emergency one, this Boyde is the only reality.”
“So far the emergency’s lasted twenty years,” John said dryly.
“And I,” Tia Marie tapped herself just above the point where her large brown breasts met, “have lasted much longer than that. You see only the substance of things, John, and never the shadow—but shadows are as real as substances, only more difficult to see.”
“Any physicist would have to agree with that, but the fact remains that the presidency today, the elective constitutional presidency, is a farce. Boyde uses it as a happy pasturing ground for old bureaucrats; they get to run for president and live in old Washington, where they won’t be in the way.” “Does it not strike you, John, that there may be something ironic about this?” Tia Marie laid her hand on the doorknob. “You, a hunted criminal, explaining to me who am called a Huntress, the impotence of the President of the United States? Last week, before you came, we were all so pleased a man who owns a clothing store joined us. You see, such a man is a very important person in the eyes of my people.”
She paused and looked at him, her broad face impassive. “In any case, John, I want you to meet President Huggins at our door and escort him into the Chamber. It is a great honor for you; I hope you realize that/
He nodded, taken aback. “Why me?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it be better if someone more knowledgeable . . .”
“Everyone else I have now to send would perhaps repel such a man with incoherent talking, or make him laugh. You have said in the past you were grateful to me because I took you into my house and did not tell; now I want your big payment. You think this man is nothing. Very well, so be friendly and respectful and make him interested. For me”
With grace which never failed to surprise him in so massive a woman, she was through the door and gone. He could hear her bare feet padding away down the hall.
Somehow her departure left him feeling that he had been defeated. For a few minutes he poked around the little room in frustration, pushing at the heaps of parts and tangles of wire that littered it. The Hunters, he knew by now, were Tia Marie. Without her overpowering personality the organization could not survive a month; but strangely that knowledge made him think better, not worse, of the views she taught her disciples. The popular, easy, “sensible” theory, as he had learned from his scientific reading, is nearly always wrong.
Tia Marie believed, or pretended to believe, that the entire structure called civilization was an illusion cast by man upon mankind. She told the people who came to the twilight meetings held in this tenement that they were savages living amid canyons of stone, and that they had never been and could never be anything else. It made no difference that the canyons had been built by other savages like themselves. The fact that the concrete upon which they stood had once been a green fertile island meant only that there was less game now. Even so, she pointed out, there were still far more animals than humans on the island; rats, cats, stray dogs, starlings, sparrows, pigeons. Peregrine falcons nested a thousand feet above the ground.
On this simple concept she grafted a whole structure of witchdoctor-craft and shamanism. The books she had lent him—he picked one up, then threw it back on the bed in disgust— dealt mostly with this phase of the cult. Astrology and animism, spiritualism and the Seven Works.
And this phase of Hunting, be knew, was* mostly spurious.
Tia Marie, who said she never spoke untruth, had not the slightest scruple against staging a miracle. He was forced to admit to himself that be sometimes rather enjoyed helping her.
He decided it was time to go downstairs and check the night’s preparations and find out just when he was to greet President Huggins. Holding the tom-tom carefully upright and ignoring the twinges of pain he still felt in his right ankle, he made his way dawn to the Great Council Chamber.
John Castle was waiting at the curb when the oversized black limousine pulled up. Six militiamen with machine pistols rode on and in it, and jumped out to form a bristling protective corridor between car and building before the chauffeur ushered out the man who (John realized with something of a shock) was in fact the lineal successor of Washington and Lincoln.
President Charles Huggins was a portly man of more than seventy. He had a round, white face, colorless eyes behind old-fashioned gold-rimmed glasses, and something of the stooping and hesitant manner of an old clerk. Looking at the teacher, first at the cast on his arm, then at his face and very ordinary, rather shabby, clothing, he asked, “This is . . . ?" His voice was the weak sighing of old age and poor health.
“We are the Hunters,” John said as impressively as he could. “I have been delegated to guide you to the Great Council Chamber, Mr. President.”
“Ah, good.” The old man peered about him shortsightedly. “You don’t mind if my guards here go with me, do you?”
“Whoever you wish to bring comes to us as an honored guest. We welcome them.”
The President bobbed his head. “Fine, fine . . . There will be four more later on.” With one of bis frail hands he gripped John's left arm at the biceps. “Earlier this evening I dined with an old friend, a man who was with me at the Bureau of Commerce, and he asked me to lend them to escort him home, since it was getting so late. They'll be along.”
"I will have a brother assigned to lead them to us,” John said, as he steered the old man.
“I hear you do some marvelous things here.”
“We have seen through the veil. Consider how marvelous the works of the sighted must seem to the blind.” Privately John wondered where the President's information had come from. Some White House servant, perhaps.
“You can even talk to the dead?”
"They are not dead,” John intoned. “What once has had existence has always existence, though you do not see it. But we see it.” They had reached the door of the Great Council Chamber and he paused before it impressively. “Now I must warn you that the Council has already begun. It is timed to the stars and cannot be hastened or delayed for even the most illustrious man. When you go in remember what I have told you. The past lives, the great trees of the forest you would say was once here still surround you upon all sides.”
He opened the door of the firelit chamber. The cultists thronged it, but a place had been cleared near the fire for the President and his bodyguards. John led them to it, then stepped away, intending to Join Japhet near the wall. “Wait,* Huggins said in a hoarse whisper. He motioned John to sit beside him. A militia woman, an Oriental girl, gave him her place.
The cultists ignored them. Their attention was fixed on the fire, and on Tia Marie who stood behind it with a rattle made from a human skull and thighbone in her hands. “What is she doing?” the President whispered.
In point of fact John did not know what she was doing, so he said only, “She is our leader, our great Huntress.”
In a shocked voice President Huggins said suddenly, “All these people have spears!”
“They are Hunters. The spears are ritual implements.” Suddenly and Loudly Tia Marie's deep voice dominated the room. “He is here.”
The cultists replied in a murmuring chorus, “He is here.” For a moment John thought they were referring to the President; then he realized that this was something begun earlier, before they had entered.
“He is standing beside me.”
“He is standing beside her.”
Suddenly a woman in the back of the room shrieked, “I sees him! I sees him! He's big, tall an4 got a feather in his hair, feathers on his spear!”
Tia Marie, with a motion like a dancer’s, picked up the tom-tom which had been standing concealed behind one of the fire stones. She passed it over the fire, and as she placed it on top of the stone a rhythmic thudding filled the room. John heard Huggins say under his breath, “That’s just a recording.” Now Tia Marie was holding up a new object, a black mask no wider than a human face but a yard long, with pouched, mysterious eyes. She put it on and stepped onto one of the fire stones, beside the tom-tom. “In the forests,*' she said, “the animals have come back to us.”
“They have come back.”
“They grow.”
“They grow.”
“The great bears were gone, but they have returned.”
“They have returned.”
There was a disturbance at the back of the room, and John Castle turned his head to look. Dimly he could see four more military caps moving into the room, and remembered that he had forgotten to send someone to guide the remainder of Huggins’ bodyguard down. Obviously they had found their way in without help.
“They said they were gone. They dug their dry bones and put them in glass cases, but they are here.”
“They are here.”
Gradually the sounds of animals were beginning to be heard with the tom-tom. A bird whistled, then a frog croaked its deep spring song.
“They said the leopards went away with the retreat of the ice, but they are here.”
“They are here.”
“They say the hyenas went, but they are here.”
“They arc here.”
In an angry whisper, Huggins said to John, “Those are' African animals.” He had apparently forgotten the Pro Tem Government’s position that all troublesome animals were native.
“They were American animals during the Pliocene,” John whispered, “and they’re back again.”
“They said the King was gone, but the King is here.”
“The King is here.”
The roar of a lion seemed to shatter the air of the Chamber. It ended in a bone-rattling snarl of fury. In John's ear the President hissed, “Why that’s nothing but a record; you people are a bunch of frauds.”
Even while he spoke a sour, fetid odor was joining the wood-smell of the fire. There was a discontented grunting. In a sweeping gesture Tia Marie pulled off her mask and holding it at arm's length spun completely around on her stone. Then there was a lion beside her, snarling and spitting, looking first at her, and then with terrible eyes at the cultists. The bodyguard on the President’s left leveled his machine pistol at the lion; John leaned across the President and slapped the muzzle down, then pulled three pieces of burning wood from the fire, giving one to Huggins and one to the bodyguard. Around them the cultists who were close enough to the fire were doing the same thing.
The King was no toothless old relic. There was a serious danger that he might attempt to leap the burning brands. He paced back and forth, twice gathering himself to spring. At John’s side Huggins was rigid with fear.
Tia Marie bent forward, thrusting her face toward the lion. “King,” she shouted, “bring us game!”
With the rest of the cultists John shouted, “Bring us game!”
“Bring deer!” The tom-tom throbbed.
In the dim room the firelight seemed to vibrate with the demanding voices. “Bring deer!”
“Bring buffalo!”
“Bring buffalo!”
“Wild cattle!”
The lion was gathering himself a third time, every muscle rippling. As the cultists began the response he shot diagonally upward, over the torches. Women screamed and men shrieked like women.
