The Men in the Jungle Page 12

  Fraden ambled off in the direction of Vanderling’s hut. He frowned as he saw that Willem and those two ’heads of his, Gomez and Jonson, were waiting for him outside. That was another thing that was starting to bug him—Willem kept those two herogyn-heads around him like a pair of matched Dobermans. “Colonels” Gomez and Jonson! Chiefs of staff, Willem called ’em. Willem was starting to take this Field Marshall crap a little too seriously. A Field Marshal commanding less than two hundred men… Why couldn’t he see how ludicrous it was? Next thing you know, he’ll be carving himself a swagger stick—though come to think of it, he carries that snipgun around as if it were a goddamned swagger stick. Fraden laughed wryly to himself. When he starts wearing a monocle, he thought, I’ll have to cut him down to size!

  “Well, how’s the gunfodder collecting going, Bart?” Willem Vanderling said, as he, his two colonels, Fraden, and Olnay, who had just joined them, sat around the crude table in front of Vanderling’s hut, Gomez and Jonson grinned like a pair of matched sycophants. Fraden saw that Olnay was scowling, measuring the two herogyn-heads with harrowed blue eyes, eyes that showed both fear and contempt.

  “Let’s not get into the habit of making cracks like that, even in private,” Fraden said. “It might come out in public at the wrong time. Last I counted, we had seventy-five volunteers. Coming in at about the rate of three a day.”

  “That really stinks!” Vanderling said. “We’ve still got more officers than slobs… er, men”

  “Let’s take a whole village,” Gomez said, his small eyes gleaming wolfishly beneath his red hair. “Y’Animals got no weapons. Be easy. We could take hundred men, then take more o’y’villages. We could get hundreds o’soldiers like that, thousands.”

  “You mean hundreds of prisoners,” Fraden said. “Who needs prisoners?”

  “We’ll make y’Animals fight!” Jonson declared vehemently. “They fight or we kill ’em. Kill a few, the rest will fight.”

  “He’s got a point,” Vanderling said, perhaps a shade too quickly for it to have all been spontaneous. “We’re getting nowhere your way.”

  “The only point he’s got,” Fraden snapped, “is the one on top of his head! This is a revolution, remember? To win a revolution, you’ve got to get the people on your side. You can’t do it by enslaving them. You can’t do it by scaring them, either—especially since they’re already twice as scared of the Killers than they ever could be of us. And how would you like to march in front of a bunch of armed men you’ve impressed? How long do you think you’d stay alive? You leave the recruitment problem to me. You stick to your line of evil and I’ll stick to mine. I don’t tell you how to fight your battles, do I?”

  “But you sure as hell tell me where and when to fight,” Vanderling whined. “They got about a hundred Killers going through the villages about twenty miles from here picking up Animals. We could hit ’em tonight, get fifty or sixty of ’em. The way you’ve got us working just makes no sense. Ambush five Killers here, ten there, hardly ever even hit an estate compound. What kind of a way to fight a war is that? We hit those Killers tonight, we kill more in an hour than we have all week.”

  “You’ve got it all ass-forward, Willem,” Fraden said. “We’ve got what, less than two hundred men? To have any chance against a hundred Killers, you’d have to commit ’em all risk being totally wiped out. At this early stage, we attack for only one reason—to get weapons and to get away with ’em. To do that, you’ve got to completely wipe out whoever you attack, and with Killers that means you need at least a three-to-one advantage plus the surprise of an ambush. Those babies can fight; you know that better than I do. Less than two hundred men—we’ve got just a toehold here, and you want to risk losing it completely, and for what? Pointless killing!”

  “So what do we do, just sit around and play with ourselves?”

  Fraden sighed. What was wrong with Willem? Was the damned planet getting to him or something? The military mind… kill the enemy, and damn the torpedoes! Doesn’t he realize that if the Brotherhood gets really stirred up at this point, they can send a couple thousand Killers in here, root us out, and finish us? If they weren’t so hot to get victims for the madness-pogrom, if they weren’t obsessed with getting a new source of Omnidrene, they’d probably be doing it already. Later on, when we’ve got thousands of guerrillas instead of a couple hundred, we can handle that. But now… making ourselves look like anything more than a nuisance would be sheer suicide.

  “I’ll tell you what you do,” Fraden said. “They’ll be breaking up into groups, trucking Animals into their main camp, right? So you take maybe thirty men and set up an ambush on one of the roads, well away from the main concentration. You knock over two, three, four trucks, one at a time, and split before the main force finds out what’s happening. That way you get a few dozen guns or so, you lose only a few men, kill a couple dozen Killers, and you free twenty or thirty Sangrans to run back to their villages and spread stories about the irresistible guerrillas in the jungle.”

  “I dunno, Bart,” Vanderling said. “My… ah, officers are getting… uh… restless for some real action.” Gomez and Jonson nodded, gritted their teeth. They were edging into herogyn-withdrawal.

  “Well, I do know,” Fraden said. “Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of action soon enough. And if they get too restless, just give ’em a little more herogyn.” Vanderling’s “chiefs of staff” nodded again, for once agreeing with Fraden. “You had better get started now if you want to be set up by dusk,” Fraden said. “And don’t take more than ten of your… officers, the rest should be volunteers. I don’t want a single one of the Sangrans you free hurt or killed. The name of the game is Robin Hood. See that you keep it in mind.”

  As Vanderling and the two herogyn-heads went off to prepare the ambush, Fraden held Olnay back. “I’ve got plans for you, Colonel,” he said, “I need a man to set up and control a rumor mill and an espionage setup, and I think you’re it. Interested?”

  “T’give orders?” Olnay said, his eyes lighting up with ill-concealed anticipation. “T’tell y’Animals what t’do like a Brother? I’m interested! But what’s y’rumor mill?”

  Fraden grimaced inwardly. Olnay was the best he had to work with and all he was really interested in was playing Brother! Well, at least he had some ambition. It could be used.

  “It’s really quite simple,” Fraden said. “You pick recruits you think you can trust You send ’em back to their villages to do what everyone else does. The Animals shouldn’t even know they’re guerrillas. They report back to you and tell you what’s going on and you tell me. Sometimes I’ll have a story, a lie, sometimes, that I want spread. I’ll tell it to you, you tell it to your agents when they report and the agents spread it in their villages. It’s all very simple, eh? But simple as it is, it’ll let us spread whatever propaganda we want to every village, and the villagers won’t even know where the stories are coming from. Think you can run a setup like that?”

  “Sure,” Olnay said unhesitatingly. “Just tell ’em what t’do, what t’say. Easy. But why? Why bother t’tell y’Animals lies and stories?”

  Fraden shook his head. Go explain the theory and practice of political warfare to a Sangran! he thought. Still, might as well give it a small try…

  “Look,” he said, “why did you join up in the first place?”

  “Heard y’talkng in m’village about killing y’Killers and y’Brothers and running things ourselves,” Olnay said. “Couple days later, y’Killers came and took ten Animals, and only a couple weeks after they took y’quota. Remembered what y’said about y’Brothers being out t’drive us all nuts, bleed us t’death. Figured that had nothing t’do with y’Natural Order, decided that if y’Brothers didn’t care about y’Natural Order, why should I? Better t’kill than t’die. So I joined y’People’s Army.”

  A textbook example, Fraden thought. “So if you hadn’t heard about what was really going on, you might still be in your village, or more likely nuts in Sade by
now,” he said. “I can’t be everywhere—but agents can. Tell the people what you want them to hear, and you get ’em to do what you want ’em to do.”

  “Without killing any o’em?” Olnay said wondrously. “Just with y’stories? That’s y’propaganda?”

  “That’s it,” Fraden said.

  “So y’tell me, and I tell m’agents, and they tell y’Animals, and y’Animals do what we want ’em to? Like y’were Moro and I was y’Killers?”

  That’s one way of looking at it, Fraden thought sourly. The Sangran way. “If you want to look at it that way,” he said. “What do you say?”

  “T’make y’Animals obey, like I was a Brother…” Olnay murmured abstractedly, with the hungry expression of a lifelong hermit who had just discovered sex. “I tell and they do… T’rule, almost. T’be like a Brother, instead of y’Animal, change places in y’Natural Order! Sounds good, sounds real good. I’m y’Animal.”

  He looked at Fraden, smiled. “Could almost say I’m y’man,” he said, savoring the words. “Yeah, Bart… I’m y’man!”

  Bart Fraden lay awake in the middle of the night, but it was not the lumpy straw mattress which prevented him from drifting back to sleep as Sophia, warm and naked against him, had: Something was itching at his mind, percolating up from the cellars of his subconscious, demanding entrance to the living room of his mind.

  He knew the feeling well. His belly was trying to talk to him. He had enough insight into himself and his line of evil to have learned long ago, back in the Belt Free State, back, even, in Greater New York, that some things you just had to wait for, wait for your belly to solve. You could call it inspiration, or the ability of the subconscious to integrate more data than the conscious—or simply your guts talking to you.

  It was the difference between a technician and an artist, a cold political schemer and a charismatic figure, and Fraden considered himself very much the latter. You could fabricate the most elaborate, clever plots imaginable, but if your belly didn’t talk to you when that moment for inspiration came, you were nowhere.

  And the moment for inspiration was now. Sangre should be boiling over, but it wasn’t. All the ingredients for a revolution were there—the ruthless, despotic oligarchy, the tortured, brutalized people, the prospect of something else, something better, that the Free Republic brought to the planet—but nothing was really happening. It was a tight, closed system, locked in stasis. But like all such systems, the right touch, the right little inspiration, would shatter it like crystal.

  He felt his belly working on that inspiration, but he knew that there was no way to force it to the surface ahead of its time, consciously. Yet he also knew that anything could trigger the revelation—a word, a sound, a smell.

  It was so goddamned frustrating, like an egg inside you dying to be laid…

  He felt Sophia move against him. “You awake?” he whispered.

  “Uh…” she grunted, cuddling closer, rubbing her face on his chest. “I am now,” she said bad-temperedly. “What’s with you? Why can’t you go to sleep and let me get some sleep too? You just lay there making waves, thinking so hard the gears grinding in that head of yours keep me awake.”

  “Would you believe that it’s because the mere presence of your luscious body fills me with a lust that won’t let me—” She kneed him gently in the stomach.

  “Okay, okay, so you bore me silly. Seriously, I feel on the verge…”

  “On the verge of what?” she grunted tiredly.

  “That,” he sighed, “is what’s keeping me awake.”

  “Huh?”

  “Soph, this planet is a powder keg. By now, every village in this area knows about the Revolution and the People’s Army and the madness-pogrom. They should be joining up in droves, but they’re not. There’s some factor, some little string just dying to be pulled, and I just can’t seem to find the handle…”

  “Why don’t you ask old Chrome-dome?” Sophia suggested.

  “Willem?”

  “Sure. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed? Bullethead is really digging this mudball. At last, he’s found his kind of people: bloodthirsty killers, sadists, and cannibals. Sangre is like old home week for Chrome-dome. You want to know how these cruds think—assuming for the sake of argument that they do think—ask Bullethead. He thinks more like them every day.”

  “Soph, for crying out—”

  He felt her prop herself up on her elbows, saw the vague shape of her head shake slowly in the darkness. “Bart, Bart, love of my life,” she said, “what in hell am I going to do with you? You’re the closest thing to a man that I’ve ever run across. One could stretch a point and say that you have a brain. You get things done, you can manipulate swine like Moro and the rest of the fetid creatures on this unlovely glob of mud for your own more or less reasonable purposes without becoming one of them. So why won’t you get it through your thick skull that most men aren’t like you, particularly a thug like Bullethead! I’ve known plenty of what you’d call strong men, and I’ve never stuck with one as long as I’ve stuck with you. Haven’t you ever wondered why?”

  “I thought you were wild for my body.”

  “For chrissakes, Bart, I’m being serious! I’ve got expensive tastes, so I need a man who can get things for me, a man who can dominate, a man who can use other men to his own advantage, to be blunt about it, That’s you, in spades. I’m a first-line chick and I need a first-line man. But the kicker is that most men whose line of evil is using other men end up being like the men they use. You don’t see that because you’re not that way. But the Willem Vanderlings are. There he is, leading a gang of kill-crazy herogyn-heads against even more bloodthirsty Killers. How can he not become more and more like the men he’s leading and the men he’s fighting—especially since that’s always been his bag in the first place? You’re a politician and a hedonist—you use situations like this to make life comfortable for Number One. You’ve got plenty of nice, healthy vices. Bnt Bullethead’s a soldier, and his only vice is killing. What’s a war, anyway, but a long series of individual murders? And Bullethead enjoys every one of ’em. War is a means to you, but it’s an end to him. Now he’s got himself a whole gang of playmates who feel the same way. He doesn’t have to kid himself any more. Now he can be a bloody murderer and proud of it.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Freud,” Fraden said. “Pardon my stupidity, but you miss the whole point. Which is that as long as the war is a means to me and an end to him, I control Willem. Each to his own pleasures, as Moro would say. I’m not worried about Willem, what’s bothering me—”

  “Just what in hell is bugging you tonight?” she said.

  “Huh? HUH? What did you say?” Fraden blurted excitedly.

  “What’s the matter with you? All I asked is what’s bugging you…?”

  “That’s it! That’s it! What’s wrong with me? Why didn’t I see it before?”

  “What in hell are you raving about?”

  He pulled her to him, kissed her eyes, her lips, both nipples, laughing insanely all the while. “The Bugs!” he shouted. “The Bugs! You’re brilliant! You’re a genius! The Bugs! The Bugs! Sure, it’s got to be the Bugs!”

  “Have you completely flipped?”

  He silenced her with a long, long kiss, moved his hands over her body in sheer exuberance. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and murmured “Vive la insanity,” as he enveloped her. Their lovemaking was short, intense, wordless, and utterly satisfying.

  And only when it was over, and they lay easily in each other’s arms, did the outside world intrude, did Fraden become aware of the commotion going on in the camp outside.

  Pulling on his pants, he arose, stood in the open doorway of the hut. Sophia wrapped something around her, joined him, put her arm around his waist.

  In the flickering orange light of half a dozen small campfires, Fraden saw that Willem and his men had returned to camp. The division in the small group of men returning to camp was all too apparent. The bulk of them, the volunt
eers, trooped wearily in first, laden with captured rifles and morningstars and bandoliers of ammunition. They deposited the booty in the armory huts and then quickly retired to their makeshift barracks.

  But as Fraden watched uneasily, Willem’s ten herogyn-heads, strutting, laughing harshly, twitching convulsively in herogyn-withdrawal, clustered around Willem’s hut, their eyes gleaming greedily in the firelight, their lips drawn into tight, toothy grins of anticipation.

  Vanderling emerged from the hut with a handful of blue pills. Fraden was disgusted at his manner. Vanderling was grinning vulpinely, his eyes—was it merely a trick of the firelight?—glowing with an animal satisfaction. As he passed out the pills, he slapped backs, laughed, was slapped in return.

  The herogyn-heads gobbled the pills, sat down on the damp earth, babbling to each other like a troop of baboons after a successful day’s foraging.

  And Willem sat with them, sat with them, nodding, grinning proprietarily like a wise old wolf supervising the division of the pack’s kill. He sat with them as the herogyn was absorbed into their bloodstreams, as one by one they quieted, as their eyes began to glaze over, as they began to fall into dull-eyed, slack-jawed torpor. Only when the last of them was lying quietly unasleep on the ground, dreaming herogyn dreams, did Vanderling give them one last approving look, grin like a crocodile and retire into his hut.

  Bart Fraden turned to face Sophia. She opened her mouth to say something, saw the look in his eyes, stared back, her wry green eyes, tiny fey smile, saying “I told you so” far better than any words could.

  She laughed, breaking the tension of the moment. “Come, come, Bart,” she said. “You look as if someone told you there was no Santa Claus. Boys will be boys! Fun and games! Fun and games!”