“So! It is done! Your pilot is on his way back to Morondava. Razi, mon ami, free these good people.”
He was not the same man who had walked off just a little while ago. The hail-fellow-well-met façade was as thin as a coat of paint and riddled with cracks. Something had happened, something had rattled him. And Rick could guess just what.
Laffite seemed to imagine himself something of a rogue, a freebooter of sorts like his namesake, bending the rules, breaking the laws, dodging the authorities. A smuggler. A modern-day Jean Lafitte. But Rick was pretty sure that until today he’d never been a party to murder.
He’d crossed a line that didn’t permit crossing back. A part of him had died up there on that rim.
“So we’re prisoners here until you decide to leave?” Laura said as Razi cut her zip tie.
A weak smile. “You are not my prisoners. You are prisoners of circumstance.”
“Not much difference.”
“No-no. You are free to jump in the channel and start swimming any time you wish.”
Laura’s tone turned bitter. “Right. Like any of us can swim a hundred miles.”
“Actually longer, considering how the current will drag you steadily southward.”
She rose, rubbing her wrists. “How long till you head back?”
Razi had cut Keith free second, and now approached Rick.
“That depends,” Laffite said. “Hold on a second, Razi.” He stepped closer to Rick and stood over him. “I have gathered the impression, Monsieur—Hayden, is it not?”
“Right. Like the planetarium.”
“I have no idea what that means. Regardless, in the short time since we have met I have gathered the impression that you are a rather dangerous man and that it would not be in my best interests to free your very quick hands.”
You got that right, froggy.
“I sense a proposal coming.”
“You are perceptive. I have also gathered the impression that you are a man of breeding who will keep his word. So, if you will give me your word as a man that you will not attack me or Razi or Bakari, or sabotage any of our equipment, I will free you.”
Your word as a man …
He’d heard the phrase in movies but never in real life. But yeah, he could live with that deal … within limits. Certainly not forever. Because threatening Laura’s life came with a price tag. Someday, someway, a reckoning would come.
Another reason to make the promise popped into his head: He’d spotted a loophole.
“Okay. I will give you my word not to initiate force, but I will defend myself and these two from any sort of attack.”
“That is only fair, I guess.”
He continued to stare down at Rick.
“What?”
“I saw how you looked at me when I returned. I understand your anger for threatening your woman, but it was necessary to make you cooperate. You see that, don’t you?”
Rick forced his jaw muscles to relax. “I see it.”
“I am not sure I believe you. That is why I am having second thoughts.”
Laura said, “Look, if he says he won’t attack you, he won’t. You can take it to the bank. He’s a Boy Scout in that regard.”
A Boy Scout … that was a first.
“Very well. But I will also need your word that you will not try to escape either.”
“You mean swim away?”
“Do not play the fool. I mean try to steal the Sorcière.”
Damn! That had been the loophole.
“Okay. No escape attempts either.”
“Bon. Razi?” He pointed to Rick.
As Razi cut the tie, Rick saw a way to go for the knife but … he’d given his word.
As Rick stood and stretched his back and knees, Laura spoke.
“When I asked you how long till we head back, you said ‘That depends.’ Depends on what?”
“On the success of what we are about to attempt. If we succeed, we will spend the next day or two filling the cages with captured dapis. If we fail, we will pack up and head home tomorrow.” A brief, sour smile twisted his lips. “Which means you will be hoping for failure, I know. But that is the way it is. Do you wish to watch?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Rick said.
“Then watch from here. And be silent.”
As Laffite walked off toward Razi and Bakari where they were fiddling with one of the live traps, a shadow began to stretch across the area. Rick looked around. He couldn’t see the rim through all the greenery, but from the angle of the light he figured the sun was sinking behind it.
With the coming of the shadow, the constant chatter of the dapis grew silent, but only briefly. The air suddenly filled with a high-pitched howling, a variety of tones, growing in volume, clashing at first but gradually changing pitch and blending into a single note, loud as all hell.
He turned to Laura. “They’re singing?”
She shrugged, her blue eyes filled with wonder.
The dapis held the note forever. At least it seemed like forever. And then, like someone cutting power to an amp, they stopped. After a few seconds of silence—probably to catch their breaths—their chatter resumed.
Rick found Laura giving him a wide-eyed stare as she spread her hands in bewilderment. “What the—?”
“It’s a ceremony,” Keith said. “They do it every evening when the sun drops out of view and again in the morning when it crests the rim.”
“A ‘ceremony’?” Laura said. “But they’re animals.”
“Not just ‘animals.’ They’re primates, and very smart ones.”
“But doesn’t a sun ceremony imply awareness of something, I don’t know, bigger than yourself?”
Keith nodded. “Yes, it does.”
The thought gave Rick a chill—not across his skin, but through his brain.
“Don’t you find that just a little bit … creepy?”
“More than a little,” Keith said. “It means their 3998 gene is actively coding.”
“And you want to wipe them out?” Laura’s tone was scolding. “Seriously?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. He waved an arm at the dapis watching from the trees.
“Have you noticed any predators on the island? I haven’t. More than that, no competitors for the food supply either. If any of those ever existed here, the dapis wiped them out and claimed the top of the food chain. Now we arrive, probably the first intrusion on their environment in millions of years. We’ve awakened something in them. They’re stimulated by our presence, they’re responding to us, they’re learning from us. We’ve changed them and they’ll never be quite the same.”
“Learning how?” Rick said.
“They watch everything, drinking it all in. That’s why whatever Laffite is planning here at the moment will fail. He may capture one or two with his net, but that will be it. He’ll have initial success because they’ve never encountered a net before. But as soon as they see how it works, they’ll either circumvent it or avoid it.”
“And you want to wipe them out?” Laura repeated. “That’s almost…”
“Genocide?” Keith said. “I feel the same way. That’s why Marten is necessary.”
“But why? I still don’t understand.”
Keith’s expression turned impatient. “We’ve already had this discussion.”
Yes, they had, and Rick didn’t want to suffer through that save-humanity-from-itself nonsense.
“So how did they catch the first one?” he said. “The one with the broken leg.”
“In one of the traps. But that was the last one they caught that way.”
“I’m not surprised,” Rick said. “Not after seeing those tapes of Mozi out at Schelling.”
Keith looked surprised. “You were at Schelling?”
“All part of tracking you down, bro.”
“I could be impressed. I could even be touched.”
“‘Could be’?” Laura said.
Yeah, Rick thought. That’s m
y bro.
Keith’s smile seemed almost self-deprecating. “Well, easier said than done.”
Wow. Was that a flash of self-awareness?
Keith pointed to Laffite and company. “I think they’re about ready.”
It looked like they’d baited the trap and set the spring door, and now they were fanning out from it.
They’d suspended the net from trees, tying its corners to branches so that it bellied down over the trap like a giant black veil of mourning. Rick guesstimated its area at about 400 square feet, more than enough to trap a few unwary dapis.
The three humans had donned heavy-duty fireman gloves. Bakari stationed himself at the far end, holding two of the tethering cords; on the near side, Laffite and Razi each held one. They didn’t have to wait long before four dapis scampered down from the trees and skipped-bounded toward the trap.
“That’s the weirdest form of locomotion I’ve ever seen,” Laura whispered.
“They’re largely arboreal,” Keith said. “I’ve been watching them since I got here. They spend their days leaping from branch to branch, almost flying, so it makes sense they’d incorporate leaps when traveling over ground.”
As soon as the four dapis reached the trap, Laffite waved an arm and all three men pulled their cords. They must have been tied with slip knots because the cords fell free, allowing the net to drop. Spotting the dark mesh wafting down, the dapis stared up at it with apparent fascination. Too late they realized that this might not be a good thing and started to flee. They managed one leap before the net engulfed them.
“Well,” Laura said, her voice heavy with disappointment, “that’s four for the cage.”
“The last four,” Keith said. “I guarantee no dapi will ever venture under that net again.”
The trapped dapis began screeching and struggling against the mesh. Their fellows in the trees above took up the cry, scrambling about and making agitated jumps from branch to branch. Laffite and Razi high-fived each other and, walking on the net, headed for the cluster as Bakari approached from the far side.
Rick noticed that the dapis under the net weren’t taking their capture lying down.
“They’d better hurry,” he said. “They’re starting to chew their way through.”
Laffite and the brothers must have realized this too because they picked up their pace.
And then …
… it began to rain dapis.
Suddenly the air was full of them, leaping from the trees onto the trappers, landing on shoulders and arms and heads, clawing or taking a quick bite, and then leaping off to be replaced by another. Human cries and roars of shock and pain and rage mixed with the screeches of the attacking dapis.
Laffite, Bakari, and Razi were stumbling around in ragged circles as they batted and grabbed frantically at their attackers. But the dapis never stayed put long enough to take any damage. As he staggered about, Bakari’s foot caught in the netting and he went down onto his hands and knees. One of the larger females landed on his back and jumped up and down, screeching and thrusting her long, skinny, hairy arms up in victory like Rocky at the top of the museum steps. She pulled his knife from its sheath and raced over to the trapped dapis where she began cutting at the net.
She wasn’t alone. Other dapis had knives and were using them to the same end.
It ended as quickly as it had begun, leaving the three humans atop the net and no dapis beneath it—only four ragged holes where they’d been. The assault hadn’t been a true attack, merely a delaying tactic to allow the rescuers time to cut their trapped fellows free. As soon as they were loose and headed for safety, the raid was called off.
But not the noise.
Rick didn’t understand dapi noise. Did they have a language? Whatever, the sounds they were making now were different from anything he’d heard before.
“Is that cheering or jeering?” he said to no one in particular.
Bakari was still on his hands and knees. The female who’d jumped on his back dropped from the trees and stood a dozen feet in front of him where she repeated her Rocky victory dance, waving his knife above her head, then scampered back to a branch.
“Jeering,” Keith said.
“Yeah, that’s what it looks like.” The female was now acting as cheerleader—make that jeerleader—for the rest of the dapis. “But why Bakari?”
“Because he’s the one who broke the little male’s leg.”
Rick couldn’t help grinning. “And she just so much as said, ‘You’re my bitch now.’ Ooh, burned!”
Bakari jumped to his feet and stalked away from the net in the direction of the tents. At his departure, the jeering doubled in volume.
As he passed them, his face and arms were bleeding from numerous bites and scratches, his expression a mask of pure rage.
Well, Rick thought, looks like we’re gonna find out if the Marlin is on the island or still on the boat.
But when Bakari returned he was carrying a spear instead of a rifle. He walked straight to the edge of the net. Laffite tried to stop him, grabbing his arm in an attempt to dissuade him, but Bakari roughly pushed him aside.
Above, the female dapi was waving the knife and still acting as jeerleader when Bakari set his feet and raised the spear over his shoulder.
“Oh, no!” Laura gasped. “He’s not really—”
Rick tried to turn her around. “Don’t look.” But she wouldn’t turn.
Bakari let the shaft fly. The dapi had her back to him, facing her fellows, and didn’t see it coming. The steel spearhead pierced her through, jutting from her breast bone as she was flung forward by the force of the impact.
She hit the ground on her side, kicked once or twice, then lay still.
And from the dapis in the trees … dead silence.
“Oh, this is not good,” Keith said. “Not good at all. Because they watch … they watch and they learn.”
14
Amaury and Razi finished folding the net, useless now because of the holes the dapis had cut through it. But holes could be repaired. Amaury wasn’t so sure about the damage Bakari had caused.
“Because of what your brother has done,” he told Razi in Portuguese, “the dapis will fear us now.”
“Yes,” Razi said. “They will fear us. And that means they will respect us. They had no respect.” He held out his scratched and bitten arms, the oozing blood dried now. “Look what they did to us.”
Amaury examined his own arms. They looked the same.
“They were only helping their fellows.”
“Yes, but they jumped on us because they did not fear us or respect us. They will not jump again.”
“Fear or respect or whatever you call it … as a result they will be harder to catch after this. Much harder.”
Bad enough that Bakari had killed that female, he hadn’t stopped there. He’d retrieved his knife from beside her body and cut off her head, then held her up by her feet to drain her blood onto the weeds. That done, he’d found a sapling, stripped off its leaves, and set her head onto the crotch of its slim branches.
But it got worse. He’d gathered up dead wood and started a fire. Next he gutted her, then sat down and began skinning her.
And through it all, the horde of dapis watched in silence.
As Amaury and Razi walked back, carrying the netting, they passed the sapling with the dapi’s head. Her big, sightless blue eyes seemed to regard them reproachfully. Then they came to Bakari who had begun roasting her limbs over the fire. He did not look up as they passed.
Amaury found Jeukens and the other two by the tents.
“How could you let that happen?” the woman said.
“I wish very much that it had not happened, but I have no control over Bakari.”
“It’s barbaric.”
He waited until he and Razi had stowed the netting next to the tents, then turned to her.
“You are an intelligent woman, I have no doubt, but you are ignorant of the native ways here. The brothers ar
e Shangaans. They and other Bantu tribes do their share of farming and raising livestock, but they also eat the wildlife. Boars, monkeys, even the occasional gorilla. It’s called ‘bushmeat’ and what he has done is no more barbaric than one of your fellow New Yorkers shooting and field dressing a deer for its venison.”
“But-but these primates are special.”
“Not to a Shangaan. They’re just another source of bushmeat.”
She seemed to give up on arguing. Good. He was too tired to argue, and hated being in the position of defending Bakari. The Shangaan had taken a deteriorating situation and made it immeasurably worse. If Razi weren’t here, Amaury could see himself pulling out the Marlin and shooting Bakari—and this time he would pull the trigger. With the greatest enthusiasm.
“I think we should leave now,” Jeukens said.
“You have no say in when we leave,” Amaury told him. “I and only I shall decide, and I have already decided we shall leave tomorrow as soon as it is light.”
“Well, that’s a relief!” the woman said.
“Fine,” Jeukens said. “But am I allowed to suggest that we sleep on the boat then?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“You and your men, especially Bakari, have introduced a level of aggression to this island that I doubt these creatures have ever seen.”
The big man, Rick, who had been standing aside in stony silence, looked at Laura. “Like a crab in a fish tank.”
This meant nothing to Amaury but appeared to hold some significance for the woman. He ignored it and replied to Jeukens.
“You are being dramatic. I know animals. In any colony there is always aggression to determine who is alpha and who is not.”
“That’s normal and natural. This is different. They watched us use knives, then stole them and used them to free their brothers. Now they’ve watched one of their own speared, dismembered, and roasted.”
“It is unfortunate, I agree, but what can I do?”
“You can get us off this island!” Jeukens said.
“We leave tomorrow. What are you afraid of?”
Jeukens pointed to the trees. “They learn, damn it! They learn by watching, and Bakari just put on one hell of a workshop.”