Neal L. Asher - Africa Zero

Africa Zero

Neal Asher

Asthe sun sunk behind the horizon I gathered lumps of bark from a hugepreconvulsion baobab dying a hundred-year-death on the cliff top. By the time Ihad a fire going the moon was filling the night with mercury light, reflectedfrom its labyrinth etched face, and hyraxes were screeching like murder victimsfrom the heather trees behind me. It was for comfort really, the fire; for thatold comfort born in the hidden psyche when men crouched in caves and feared thenight, the last time the ice was here. I had no need of the heat or of cookedfood. Few earthly extremes of temperature were dangerous to me and thesustenance I took was poison to flesh.

Whilestaring into the flames I slowly altered the spectrum of my hearing. Thescreeching of the hyraxes became a low gasping and other sounds began toimpinge; the mutter of cooling rock and the strained whispering of the heathertrees. Then, a sound I had not heard in twenty years: the low infrasonicrumbles that were the conversation of mammoth. I listened for a while andrealised I was smiling, then I stood from my fire, walked to the baobab at theedge of the Break and looked out over the silvered foothills.

Behindme the Atlas Mountains of Old Morocco still held back the ice that had swampedEurope. Six centuries in the past the hills below me had been bare, and aridwhere they faded into the Sahara desert. Five centuries ago the wasteland hadbegun to bloom as water vapour, blown down off the ice, condensed and fell instorms still told of around the campfires of bushmen. Now the hills were thickwith vegetation, and wild with the fauna that fed on it including, of course,the mammoth. But it was not the ice that had caused their return.

Farbelow me a lone bull was tusking bark from a huge groundsel tree and mutteringto himself like a grouchy old man. I watched him for a while and felt anaffinity with those men in ancient Siberia to whom this creature had been alllife and a lord of death, and who had hunted it to extinction. Men not sodifferent from he who had resurrected it. I remembered the first herd: clonedfrom ten thousand years old carcases preserved in the Siberian tundra, gestatedin the wombs of elephants, and kept as a tourist attraction in a national parkin North Africa. Perhaps they would have remained no more than thata novelty.But then had come the thinning of the human race.

Tobegin with, the compulsory sterilization of one in three people was introducedplanet-wide. Then air-transmitted HIVs and more virulent diseases hadappeared. It was open to conjecture whether they had evolved or beenmanufactured. The nightmarish creatures that appeared and fed on theout-of-control third-world population had certainly been gene-spliced. Thedictums at that time had been: better not to be born than to be born and starveto death. Your neighbour dies so you might live. The human race cannot bestrong while the weak breed: the human race must be prey. Some called it acatastrophe and against the teaching of God. Others called it the choice ofsurvival.

Duringthe chaos of that time, as ten billion people fought for insufficient resourcesand the encroaching ice sucked the planet dry, during the water wars, plagues,brief atomic conflicts, and desperate strivings to become established beyondEarth, the mammoth had broken free and roamed across North Africa. Whilemillions then billions of humans died the mammoth burgeoned. I alwaysconsidered this a beautiful irony and a kind of justice: humans had been toobusy killing each other to notice. But then it is easy for me to make suchjudgements. I ceased to be human in many ways over two thousand years ago.

Intime the bull finished with the tree and dozed in the moonlight with his fourmetre tusks resting on the ground. I turned away to head back for my fire, butthen, suddenly, his trumpeting shattered the night. As the hyraxes fell silentI turned back to the Break. Something... something of flickering silver andshadow darted round him then was gone before I could upgrade my vision. Pykani?I doubted it. They would be in the air; dark bat shapes singing their calmingsongs as they moved in for blood. They would not have startled him. I waitedand watched his heat and the red colours, but the shape did not reappear. At lengthI returned to my fire, troubled, but not unduly so.

* * *

Thebright flames flickered and died like night spectres and the bark collapsed toblack-edged rubies. I considered the possibility of sleep and rejected it. Ihad slept for three hours a couple of days ago up on the ice and I would notneed to sleep again for several weeks. Boredom drove me into fugue and Ilistened like a yogi to the oh-so-accurate ticking of my body clock as thealtered moon traversed its arc and the hyraxes raised Cain. An hour beforesunrise the sky began to lighten. Only then did I come out of fugue and kickdirt over the cooling ashes of my fire. Time to move on.

* * *

TheBreak was a new addition to the Atlas Mountains. When the ice had first reachedthe coast of Old Morocco it was as if it had suddenly rested its entire weightthere and tipped a plate on which the mountains rested. The event was TheConvulsion and The Break was the further edge of that plate. It was heaved fromthe Atlas foothills in less than a year, seven centuries ago.

Underthe baobab I removed my boots and put them in my pack. Then I removed thesynthiflesh coverings of my fingers and toes and placed them in my pack aswell. The sky was lighter then, pink tinted to the east, and that light glintedlike blood off the knurling on the inner faces of my metal fingers: a reminderof what I am and what I am not. Shouldering my pack I moved to the edge,lowered myself over, and began to descend, driving my fingers and toes likepitons into the mossy crevices in the rock. At first I was careful. Even for mea fall from such a height could kill. As the sun breached the horizon I was twohundred feet down with another hundred to go. One bad moment then when a hugeblack scorpion did its damnedest to sting my face and I jerked away, pulling aslab from the cliff face and abruptly found myself hanging by one hand,watching the slab crash into the jungle below. Synthetic or not my reactionsare still flesh, much to my chagrin. Fifty feet from the ground and I was scrabblingdown the cliff face like a spider. I dropped the last twenty feet straight intothe rosette of a giant lobelia, scattering sunbirds like a treasure ofsapphires and emeralds. Once free of the flattened plant it took me some timeto clean the sap from myself before I could replace my coverings and return toa semblance of humanity. Then, booted and fingered again, I made my way intothe greenery.

Beyondthe patch of lobelias, I pushed my way through a five-foot thicket ofputrescent-smelling plants I could not put a name to, but these thinned out togive way to wild banana plants, groundsels hung with sulphurous yellow lichen,and a ground covering of bracken. Soon I reached the remains of the groundsel,of which the mammoth had made a meal, and there, where the jungle had beenflattened, found progress easier. All around this area frogs were chirrupingnoisily, perhaps because they could now see the venomous spiders that huntedthem. As I advanced, a python the thickness of my torso observed me speculativelyfrom a tree, tested my scent with his tongue, then lost interest. At one pointI heard something stalking me, but it soon went away. I was exposed on thatnarrow path, but I knew that if I stayed with the mammoth I would eventuallyencounter those I had come to see.

* * *

Ismelt it an hour before I found it. The smells were not of carrion. The corpsewas too fresh to have decayed. They were the smells of the blood and brokenintestines of a huge ruminant. It was the bull I had seen the night before.

Threelions were feeding in a desultory manner while other scavengers were squabblingfor their share. A mortuary of vultures held raucous autopsy: over their blackfeather suits their gory heads were hooked like question marks as they shruggeddont knows at each other, then what the hells? as they tipped them back toswallow choice bloody morsels. A pack of hyenas yipped and snarled round a legthat had been torn away. It must have taken the whole pack of them to drag thejoint to where it lay, and from where they kept a wary eye on the lions, butthere was plenty for all it would seem, else the lions would have been drivenaway. Other birds, small foxes, wild dogs, and feral cats had homed in on thebounty. Even a group of black-skinned frogs had crawled from the undergrowth tolap at a pool of blood.