The Men in the Jungle Read online

  “Thanks Soph… I needed that from you. When this is over, I’ll make it up… I’ll make up a lot of things…”

  Abruptly, he felt the sharp twinge of an emotion with no name. “So much for today’s confessional,” he said with exaggerated harshness. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, three Confedollars in the collection plate and back to business as usual. It’s about time I looked in on Willem. He should have something resembling a guerrilla force by now. That compound that burned down could’ve been an accident, but they say no one escaped alive, and that sounds like we’re in business in the jungle too. Time we started coordinating. I’ll be going out in the morning. Want to come with?”

  “I think I can live without the stimulating company of old Chrome-dome for a while longer. Just tell him how much I miss him. I’ll pass on the outing. After all, a woman’s place is in the home.”

  “I’ve seen better armies in toy boxes,” Fraden said, glancing around the guerrilla camp again, and then back at the harried-looking face of Willem Vanderling. The camp was a vast disappointment. It was far smaller than he had expected it to be at this point, and it was a mess, with guns and equipment scattered all over the clearing. About thirty near-naked men sprawled torpidly around the camp, and Willem should’ve been able to recruit at least double that number by now. Moreover, a strange ’boat had just landed and the soldiers were lying around as if an off-worlder dropped in every other Tuesday.

  “What’s going on?” Fraden snapped. “Why so few Sangrans? Why in blazes are they all sitting around playing with themselves? Where in hell are your sentries? Why—”

  “Take it easy, man, for chrissakes, take it easy!” Vanderling whined. “You don’t know the half of it. This mudball is impossible! And they’re all sitting around because they’re all bombed on herogyn.”

  “They’re what?” Fraden roared. “Have you completely flipped? Where in hell did they get ahold of herogyn? And why aren’t you doing anything about it?”

  “Because I gave it to them. I had to.”

  “You…” It was one of those rare moments when Bart Fraden was struck speechless. Giving herogyn to partisan troops was like performing a brain operation with a shovel. When they were bombed, they couldn’t beat off a squad of Space Scouts, and if they ever went all the way into withdrawal… Brrrr! You had to maintain a razor-fine balance, and if you goofed just once, you had had it.

  “It would seem that you’ve got some explaining to do,” Fraden said thickly. “Some mighty fancy explaining. What’s been going on while you’ve been on your own?”

  They sat down in front of a rude hut next to Vanderling’s ’boat, and Vanderling told him.

  “I don’t get it, Bart, I just don’t get it,” Vanderling said. “It’s like there isn’t a testicle on the whole planet. I never heard of anyone getting their asses as thoroughly kicked as these damned Sangrans, but they just won’t fight. They won’t even think about it. After I knocked over Brother Boris’ joint with my gang of heads—and believe me, that was no cakewalk—I thought I had it made. I mean, with the local poobah and his hired guns out of the way, I figured every yokum in every village on this estate would be hot to join up. No dice. All the same. Go into a village, and try to get ’em to join up, and they, just sit around on their fat asses in front of their stinking huts, and maybe some cretin says he wonders what the next Brother will be like or maybe the goddamned quota will be lower. When I explain that there ain’t gonna be no next Brother, that we’re gonna wipe ’em all out, they just start yelling about ‘blasphemy’ and how it’s ‘against the Natural Order’ and not one of ’em’ll join up. So—”

  “So you figured the only way to raise an army is to make ’em herogyn-heads, eh?” Fraden said sourly.

  “You got it. At least this way, they fight.”

  “Willem, I’ve seen better heads than yours on beers! We need maybe ten, fifteen thousand men to take over this crummy planet. Maybe you think the herogyn will last forever at that rate? What happens when we run out? And how do we use kill-crazy ’heads for political warfare?”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “You’re telling me something I don’t know?” Fraden rasped.

  “So what’s your idea, genius?”

  “I want to see one of these villages. I want to talk to the people. Even nuts don’t act like nuts without a reason, and when I know what that reason is, I’ll be able to find a way around it.”

  “Now? Our boys will be bombed out of their skulls for the next five hours.”

  “Roll your damned herogyn-heads into a tight wad and stuff ’em!” Fraden snarled. “Get me a snipgun, and we’ll pay a visit to our future constituents all by our little-bitty selves!”

  The Sangran village was an untidy collection of about fifty small, doorless, thatched huts clustered in a very rough circle on one bank of a stagnant little stream. Behind the village, dominating it like a monument, was a great mound of dried red clay peppered with large round holes about the size of manholes. The clay mound was a full sixty feet tall, and as Fraden emerged from the nearby jungle which followed the stream to the periphery of the village, with Vanderling trailing glumly a pace behind, he saw a huge green insect, the size of a half-grown child, with, eight chitinous legs the first two of which were carried above the body like arms and strangely intelligent-looking small black eyes on its large head, emerge from one of the holes in the clay mound and skitter off into the cultivated fields beyond the village.

  “Bug,” Vanderling muttered as they approached the circle of huts. “Must be dozens of them in that thing, what they call a Bughill. You should see ’em in the fields, working the crops in teams. Gives me the creeps.”

  Fraden grunted, wrinkled his nose as they passed inside the circle of huts. The bare earth was littered with all manner of garbage and ordure. A few dozen scrawny, naked children played torpidly about the clearing. They were unbelievably filthy. Women with drawn, empty faces and pendulous, flaccid breasts, wearing only rude skirts that were little more than loincloths, looked up from mortars where they were grinding grain or cook fires where they were baking gray, tortillalike bread with only perfunctory interest at the two armed men. Here and there, an old man stuck his head out of a hut. Children, old men, women, garbage, ordure, all stank to high heaven like some monstrous, fetid locker room.

  “Where are all the men?” Fraden asked Vanderling.

  “Too early in the day,” Vanderling said. “They’re all out tending the Meatanimal herds.”

  “But I thought you wiped out the local Killers when you sacked the estate…?”

  Vanderling shrugged. “I told you these yokums are idiots. They’re out being good boys till the next Brother shows up.”

  “Well, let’s talk to one of those old geezers,” Fraden said, leading Vanderling over to one of the doorless huts and stepping inside. The inside of the windowless hut was dark, hot and dank. A wizened old man sat on a pile of straw nibbling listlessly on a piece of hard, flat bread. He looked up with hollow, rheumy eyes but said nothing.

  “I’m Bart Fraden,” Fraden said. “This is Marshal Vanderling. We’re off-worlders. We’re here to bring freedom to the people of Sangre. What’s your name?”

  “Oakly,” the old man grunted. “What’s freedom?”

  Fraden shook his head. “Freedom is when you can do what you want to, not what the Brothers tell you. Freedom is when there are no more Killers and no more Brothers to keep you in slavery.”

  “No Brothers, who’s t’rule?” the old man said. “No Killers, who’s t’kill?”

  “You rule!” Fraden said. “You rule yourselves. And nobody kills. You grow food for yourselves, work only for yourselves, run your own lives. That’s freedom.”

  The old man scowled. “I understand,” he said, “This ‘freedom,’ it’s blasphemy, is all. Y’bring blasphemy. Don’t want no blasphemy. ’Gainst the Natural Order.”

  “It’s the Natural Order for you to be slaves? It’s the Natural Order for
the Brothers to take you and torture you for their own pleasures and butcher you when they’re through and feed you to the Sadians?”

  “Y’understand,” the old man said. “Natural Order. Way it is, way it’ll always be. We’re good Animals here. Don’t listen t’no blasphemy,”

  “Look at this dump!” Fraden snapped. “Look at the slop you eat! Look at you, you’re skinny as a rail! You like starving?”

  “Don’t starve. Everyone eats. Y’Brothers and y’Killers eat y’Meatanimals, Y’Sadians eat y’useless Animals. Y’Animals eat y’food that y’Bugs grow. Natural Order.”

  I’m wasting my time here, Fraden thought Maybe the local chief…?

  “Where’s the chief?” he said. The old man stared at him blankly. “The head man? The big cheese? The most important man in the village?”

  “Y’mean y’Keeper? Keeper’s hut’s behind y’Bughill. Keeper’s getting old. I’m second oldest, he dies, I’m Keeper. Maybe he dies soon.”

  Fraden turned, stepped halfway out of the hut. “And how old are you, old-timer?” he asked.

  “Forty-seven,” the old man said.

  Fraden goggled. Sangre’s year was shorter than Earth’s! This old hulk was not much over forty standard years. And he was the second oldest man in the village!

  The Keeper’s hut was on the other side of the Bughill, Fields of grain spread out before it, and Fraden saw dozens of green Bugs, the sun glinting off their chitinous bodies, moving methodically, clipping off stands of the tall grain with the flexible pincers on their forward pair of limbs.

  With Vanderling trailing glumly behind, he entered the hut and was nearly bowled over by the stench, a fetid, rotten odor coming from the thing in the center of the hut: a huge, green distended sack with a small head, so gross that the eight tiny stub-legs did not reach the ground. A tiny, shrunken old man was holding up a clay jug of raw alcohol to the thing’s small mouth, and the creature was lapping it up greedily. A dozen other such jugs sat on the bare earth floor.

  The old man whirled, dropped the jug, sloshing the stuff on the pulsating body of the green thing. “Y’bother me when I’m feeding the Brain!” he snapped. “Y’bother y’Keeper! During harvest, too. Want y’Bugs t’run wild? Want t’starve?”

  Then he saw the snipguns, bowed low. “Y’Kiilers!” he said. “Got guns! Forgive, masters. Y’didn’t look like Killers. Meant no blasphemy.”

  “We’re… ah… from a long way off,” Fraden said. “Things are different where we come from. We want to find out how things are run in this village.”

  “Y’came t’the right Animal,” the old man said. “I’m Keeper here. Not for me, whole village starves and y’Brother he don’t have no one t’tend his Meatanimals. I give orders t’y’Brain here. Brain makes y’Bugs do their job.”

  “You mean that thing can actually talk to the Bugs?”

  The Keeper goggled. “Y’must be from far away!” he said. “Got no Bugs on your estate? Y’Bughill, it’s like one Animal. Y’brain, it don’t talk t’y’arm. Y’Bughill’s got a brain too, this one here. I tell it what t’do, y’Bugs just do it. Long as y’Brain is drunk; Otherwise, y’Bugs just do for ’emselves. Y’Brothers, they take y’Brain when it’s just a grub, booze it, give it t’y’village and y’Keeper keeps it boozed. So y’Keeper really grows all y’food, so’s y’Animals can eat and work for y’Brother. Don’t y’know y’Natural Order?”

  “So you’re the most important man here…” Fraden said slowly. “Well, what if all the rest of the village refused to tend the Meatanimals? Then you would really rule here.”

  “Y’crazy? Y’Killers’d come here and kill y’whole village!”

  “What if you had guns? What if you fought the Killers?”

  “Y’talkin’ blasphemy! What kinda Killers’re you, t’talk blasphemy?”

  “We—”

  “Thir? Thir? Order, thir?” the Brain began to croak in a creaky, metallic voice.

  “Got not time t’talk now,” the Keeper said, picking up the jug and holding it up to the Brain’s mouth. “Y’Brain ain’t very smart; got t’keep repeating y’orders, or y’Bugs run wild. Y’found out what y’want t’know anyway, masters. We’re good Animals here, don’t have no truck with blasphemy. Tell y’Brother that.” He turned, ignored them, began talking to the Brain: “Y’finish y’south field, y’go on t’y’north field, then y’…”

  Fraden shrugged, led Vanderling outside.

  “Well, genius,” Vanderling smirked, “there’s your damned ‘high revolutionary potential!’ How’s it grab you?”

  “I still say it’s sky-high,” Fraden said. “But it’s locked in stasis. Things have been this bad so long that they’ve come to accept it. But the moment you have any change at all in a setup like this, it’ll blow sky-high.”

  “Yeah, and just how do you go about making things any better?”

  “Better? You don’t make things better; you make ’em worse. And fortunately, we’ll have some help in doing that.”

  “Help? From who?”

  Fraden laughed. “From Moro,” he said, “Who else?”

  As he wandered through the corridors of the Palace of Pain in the general direction of the Throne Room, Bart Fraden was something less than confident in his ability to make things in the countryside worse. Thing was, things were about as bad as they could possibly be without making the whole system utterly, unworkable and how could he snow Moro into doing that?

  The Bugs kept the “Animals,” as they thought of themselves, in just enough food to keep them alive to raise Meatanimals for the Brothers and the Killers and to provide a bottomless source of victims and slaves. The average Animal had a small chance of ending up in the arena or as a slave or in the Public Larder—what with fifteen million Animals on the planet and only a few thousand Brothers. The old mathematics of tyranny—if the heavy hand of the ruler fell only on a comparatively small percentage of the population, the rest would sit still no matter what happened.

  The trick was to get Moro to spread the terror, take ten Sangrans for a “quota” where now he was taking one. But how? As it was, the Brotherhood satisfied every vagrant whim, took as many for the quotas as they needed, A huge new demand had to be somehow created, a demand that would make them triple, quadruple the quotas, or worse. But what conceivable…?

  Brother Theodore lurched by him, not even noticing him, totally bombed on Omnidrene. Good thing there was so much of the stuff in the ship; they were gobbling the stuff up at a rate he hadn’t believed possible. And if the supply ever ran low, they’d be desperate for…

  Bong!

  “Of course!” Fraden cried to himself. Christ, there it was all the time! No one knew how much Omnidrene there really was on the ship; they had only his word for it. What if Moro thought it was running out? What if he told Moro…?

  Fraden shivered. It was a grisly idea, but it would work. If he had the stomach to do it, to plunge the planet into an orgy of torture and… Thousands would suffer, he told himself, but in the end, the rest would be free. Wasn’t that what counted? Either do it, Bart, or hang up and leave. Break a few thousand eggs and make an omelet, or give up and let the men who had… who had made him a murderer have their kicks for the next three centuries too. That was where the revolution racket was at, after ah!

  He steeled himself, quickened his pace, headed for the Throne Room. Drastic situations required drastic solutions, he told himself. A surgeon amputates limbs to save the whole body; well, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he?

  “Well?” Moro rumbled. “What is it, Brother Bart? It had better be important. I don’t enjoy being disturbed at my pleasures, and this exhibition is proving most entertaining.”

  Moro and Fraden were alone in the room. The great television screen that formed one wall showed a hideous spectacle; ten men were chained together by their left wrists in pairs. One of each pair held a long knife in his right hand, the other a flaming torch. The men with the knives were burned ail over their bodies; those with the torch
es were covered with bleeding gashes. The camera was looking down into some kind of pit, and as the men fought, they stumbled about in a sea of large insects, about cat-size, which seemed to form the living floor of the pit. One of the pairs fell to the floor—and jumped up screaming, covered with a score of the horrors, which clung to their flesh by sharp mandibles.

  The hideous sight and the screams of the men steeled Fraden’s wavering will. Anything was justified if it helped to destroy monsters who enjoyed this kind of filth. Anything. Even…

  Fraden averted his eyes from the horror, stepped closer to the raised throne on which Moro sat, his pig-eyes gleaming, his gross body shaking with delight mixed with annoyance at the disturbance.

  “It’s important all right,” Fraden said. “It’s about the Omnidrene. Turn off the audio, so we can hear ourselves think.”

  Frowning heavily, Moro reached out to the console before him, and the screaming stopped. “Well?”

  “The Brothers are taking the stuff like there’s no tomorrow,” Fraden said. “I’ve never seen so much taken so fast They’re making pigs out of themselves.”

  “The pleasures of others are no concern of yours!” Moro snapped. “You keep that ridiculous female slave of yours, the one with the tongue like a dagger, all to yourself and no one complains, although Brother Theodore… But it’s none of his business, just as how much Omnidrene anyone takes is none of yours. Each to his own pleasures.”

  “I consider my life my own business,” Fraden said. “Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Moro stared at him stupidly for a moment. It was hard to tell when he was on Omnidrene and when he wasn’t. He was cleverer than the others—or he wouldn’t be Prophet for very long. He used the drug sparingly and seemed to have the addiction under some control. Right now, he seemed slightly high, which was just about the way Fraden wanted him.

  “I stay alive as long as the Omnidrene keeps coming, right?” he said. “No more Omnidrene, no more Brother Bart.”