Six Blind Men & an Alien (9 page)

    "It will be much harder to hide pigs on flat ground," said another leader.

    "We will help them think of ways to hide them. Do not forget: yesterday you would have said you could not hide your villages’ pigs so that the Germans could not find them."

    "Sooner or later they will find then, or they will ask for something else," said a leader. "Our women, perhaps."

    "This is just the first step," said B’narr. "You say they have superior weapons?"

    "Yes."

    "Do they claim
all
of Africa?"

    "What is Africa?" asked one of the leaders.

    "Do they claim all the land there is?" said B’narr, re-wording the question.

    "No. Only Tanganyka."

    "But why, if they have the best weapons?"

    "The British have similar weapons."

    B’narr smiled. "And where are the British?"

    "I do not know where they come from," said the leader, "but they rule Kenya."

    "Where is Kenya?"

    The leader pointed to the north. "There."

    "How far is it?"

    "A day’s march, maybe a little less."

    "There is your answer," said B’narr.

    He was met with confused frowns.

    "The Germans didn’t invent their powerful weaponry to conquer
you
. So they must have created it to match some other tribe’s weaponry, and you have told me that tribe is the British. After the first step, which is hiding the pigs, the Germans will demand something else. Then you will send representatives to the British a day’s march away and complain about your treatment at the Germans’ hands and tell them that you would much rather be ruled by them. And at the same time, you will have Kenyan tribes on the other side of the border complain to the Germans that they cannot stand British rule."

    Suddenly there were smiles among his audience.

    "You will volunteer to help each side as camp attendants. You will cook and wash their clothes and do whatever menial tasks they give you. And every time a soldier from either side dies in battle, you will appropriate his weapon and ammunition. When the military you are serving is small enough, you will poison their food. If it is larger, you will find ways, through children who are always above suspicion, to let the other side know where it is. And when the two sides have decimated each other, and one is totally destroyed or at least so badly beaten that it gives up all claim to any territory, you will have enough weaponry and enough experience to annihilate the winning side." He paused. "It will not happen overnight, and it will not be easy. But if you are determined enough, it
can
happen."

    "You look like a monster," said the tallest leader. "But you think like a
laibon
or a
mundumugu.
" He stared coldly at Bira. "Why did our own
mundumugu
never think of these things."

    Bira made no answer, but simply glared hatefully at B’narr.

    "I have a question," said Goru.

    "Yes?" said B’narr.

    "What will
you
want for all this?" said Goru. "Do you wish to be acknowledged the
jumbe kwa kijumbe
?"

    "The chief of chiefs?" repeated B’narr. He shook his head. "No, I have no desire to rule anyone. I am interested only in seeing justice done."

    "Truly?"

    "Truly."

    "You make it hard to think of you as a man," said Goru.

    The other leaders laughed at that, all except Bira.

    "We will meet again every day until we have every detail planned," said B’narr. "We must know exactly where to build the enclosure. We must make certain there are no impassable hazards for the pigs that are lower down the mountain. We must know which boys we are going to trust to be our runners. We must map out their routes not only on the mountain but on the plains beyond the mountain. We must be prepared for every eventuality. I have given you a lot to think about. I suggest you go back to your villages and consider what I have said, and we will meet here at the same hour tomorrow."

    The men left, and B’narr returned to the glacier. He considered building a hut-he’d seen them constructed in a matter of hours-and joining the village, but decided his voice would carry more authority if he was not a member of any particular village.

    They met the next day, and the day after that, and after that. They built the enclosure in such a spot that it could not be seen from more than a few hundred feet away, and then they practiced running the pigs up to it. The boys who had been chosen to be the runners were drilled over and over again.

    And then came the day they had been waiting for. A squad of German soldiers visited the mountain and demanded their porcine tax. Village after village explained that a disease had wiped out all the pigs.

    The Germans entered every hut, certain that the villagers were hiding pigs-and finally one of the Germans called the others over to a spot just beyond the village.

    "Look!" he said, pointing at a pile of dung. "That is
fresh
! These people are lying to us!"

    From his vantage point on the glacier B’narr saw that the Germans had reached the mountain. That didn’t surprise him. The whole plan depended on their coming sooner or later. But then he heard the rifle shots.
That
surprised him. There was a shot every ten minutes, from mid-morning to late afternoon.

    He decided to make sure the Germans were gone before he appeared, so he remained where he was until sunrise, when he made his way down to the Goru’s village. To his surprise he found all the leaders waiting for him.

    "How did it go?" he asked.

    "While you hid on your glacier, the Germans killed one child from every village!" snarled Goru, his face reflecting his rage and hatred.

    "We listened to you instead of to Bira," said the tall leader. "We will never make that mistake again."

    "What happened?" demanded B’narr.

    "What happened is our fault for listening to a creature that pretends to be a man. Instead, let me tell you what
will
happen. You will return to the snow and ice, and you will live out your life there. If any of us ever sees you below the snow after today, we will kill you, slowly and painfully."

    "But how did the Germans find out?" insisted B’narr. "Didn’t you move all the pigs?"

    "I will count to fifty," said the tall leader. "If you are still here when I am finished, I will kill you myself."

    B’narr looked from one face to another, and could find nothing but hatred and fury. He turned and began running up to the ice cap. There were no sounds of pursuit, and he slowed to a fast walk after a few minutes.

    As he reached the tree line, he found Bira waiting for him.

    "I
told
them you were a devil," he said. "In the end my magic was stronger than yours."

    "Magic had nothing to do with it," said B’narr wearily.

    "We will call it magic when I speak to my people," answered Bira. A nasty smile crossed his face. "Whether it was magic or something else that moved the pig’s dung to where the Germans could not help but find it, the result was the same."

    "But why?" asked B’narr, truly puzzled.

    "Because I am the
mundumugu
, and this mountain and this tribe do not need another."

    B’narr was about to answer when armed warriors approached at a run, and he had to retreat to the glacier.

    The next morning he was beginning to move past the tree line to go hunting for his breakfast when he found himself facing three young men armed with spears.

    "Go back, creature!" yelled one of them. "You are not allowed here!"

    He retreated to the glacier, and walked totally around it over the next five days. Whenever he thought he had gone far enough and tried to go down past the tree line he was confronted by armed warriors.

    He didn’t give up. He circled the entire glacier regularly, but every time he tried to climb down off it he found his path barred.

    Weak from hunger and exhaustion, he finally returned to his cave.
This cannot be my fault
, he thought.
I have organized far more difficult and complicated protests
. They
messed it up. But how?

    He lay there for three days. He knew he was dying, and he found he didn’t mind that at all. If he was forbidden from doing what he was born to do, then life was meaningless anyway. But before he expired, he
had
to find out what had gone wrong.

    He got shakily to his feet, and was overwhelmed by dizziness and nausea. He leaned against a cave wall for a moment, then another, and finally he emerged onto the glacier. He walked laboriously for ten minutes, having difficulty balancing on the ice. The sun seemed exceptionally bright, and his eyes began tearing. He reached a hand up to wipe them off-and as he did so he lost his balance and fell heavily to the ice.

    He tried to get up and found that he couldn’t. He could feel his life ebbing away. Breathing became more difficult. He tried to focus his eyes, but everything remained blurry.

    
It shouldn’t have come to this,
he thought bitterly.
It was a perfect plan. Whatever happened, I wasn’t the one who failed. You should have been cheering me and singing my praises by now.

    He knew he would be dead in another few seconds, and one final thought crossed his mind:

    
I hope the Germans kill you all.

    

    

    "I’m starting to think that Hemingway never got up this high," said Ray Glover. "After all, he was an out-of-shape boozer. I’m in great shape and I still can’t catch my breath."

    "He was a fiction writer," said Jim Donahue. "So it’s possible he made it up. After all, in
The Green Hills of Africa
, which is still being sold as non-fiction, he seems to run into someone who wants to discuss literature every time he’s hiding in a blind waiting for some animal to come by, and no one ever called him on that."

    "If you go up and down the Coast, you can still find half a dozen hotels that brag that ‘Hemingway Slept Here," said Gorman. "According to the stories that have been passed down, he mostly drank there and slept where he fell or passed out."

    "Still, wouldn’t it be something if we
could
find the leopard?" I said.

    "We’ve already found something a thousand times more important," replied Donahue. "Maybe ten professors of literature give a damn whether the leopard was real or not, but if
this
"-he indicated the frozen body-"is what we all think it is,
everyone
will care."

    "Could it have been a snow leopard?" asked Glover. "I remember seeing one in a zoo once. That wouldn’t be so hard to believe, would it?"

    "You find a snow leopard up here and you got a real story," said Gorman. "They only live in Asia."

    Glover turned to me. "Is that right, Professor?"

    "Doctor," I said. "Or just Tony. And yes, it’s right. There are no snow leopards in Africa."

    "Papa would never have bothered writing the story if there were," added Gorman.

    "I wonder," said Donahue. "Could he have seen this fellow from a distance and
thought
it was a leopard?"

    "Always assuming that it’s been on the mountain that long, if Papa was close enough to know it was a body why didn’t he walk the last couple of hundred feet and see what it was?" asked Gorman.

    "Too drunk?" suggested Donahue.

    "If he was that drunk, he wouldn’t have spotted it or remembered it," said Gorman.

    I noticed that Bonnie wasn’t paying any attention to the conversation (not that it was worth listening to), but instead was staring intently at the body.

    To be continued-

    

    

    
They’re all wrong,
she thought.
The important thing isn’t what he was doing atop Kilimanjaro, but what he was doing on Earth at all. I don’t see any weapons, or any pouch or holster that might hold a weapon. Surely he didn’t come here just to see the top of a mountain-and if he did, then why not Fuji or Everest or even Pike’s Peak? Why this mountain? What secret was he trying to unearth? And no one else has remarked on the way his right hand seems to be reaching out. For what, I wonder? What could draw an unarmed alien to this place?

    
Bonnie Herrington, despite her gender, was the fifth blind man.

    

    

    His name was Quachama, and he had devoted his life to finding God. Not the way televangelists and born-again Christians do. No, they were no closer to God than the man on the street. In fact, if they misinterpreted His signs and signals and spread them to the masses, they were actually further.

    There was no mention ever made of God on his home planet. His race believed in self-sufficiency and hard work, they refused favors and had no use for sympathy or forgiveness, and somehow the notion of a Supreme Deity never took hold.

    It was when he was studying other worlds’ sentient races in school that Quachama first encountered the notion of God, and it fascinated him. If there
was
a God, why had He created the Universe, only to fill it with such suffering, so many hardships? Was it His purpose that each species would triumph over these obstacles? If it was, why did so many fail? And if it wasn’t, why had He put them there in the first place? Why had He allowed some races to split the atom, cure disease, and develop space flight, while other races remained planetbound, sick, and in primitive conditions?