Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 20

They walked to her, then, not in a rush but all together. They circled her slowly and they trampled thebananas and they held onto her with their trunks. Tears had streamed down their faces. "You talk like our mothers talked," one of them had said, Donna never knew which one, and that sentence had made headlines from Cape Town to Tokyo. Donna had just held onto them. None of them could say much, then. Somehow that hadn't surprised anyone.

Later, they talked.

And that night, after the reporters had left, after the boys had all had a chance to talk to their charges, after Joyce had packed her equipment and left them in a temporary silence again, Donna had gone alone into her quiet house. She kept photos of her husband on a bureau in the hallway, and she stopped there. She picked one up, one of the young ones. He'd been just a ranger in the park system then. No one had guessed that he'd go on to become superintendent of the entire colonial park system in British East Africa. He'd have loved this day, she knew. "You've missed so much, Frank," she whispered. He'd been dead fifty years. The longevity medicines were giving her a much longer life than he'd been able to have. She looked up into the mirror and tried to imagine herself pretty like she'd been back then: hair still blonde, not grey; thin and able to fit decently into jeans, not heavy and fit only for dresses; young, like Frank in the photo. How he'd fussed about her sentimentality. "You can't care for all the little animal orphans," he'd said. No one had guessed what kind of life's work that would lead to, either. She'd dusted off the photo with her sleeve and put it back. I wish you had been here today, Frank, she had thought.

Elizabeth touched Donna's shoulder with her trunk. Donna reached up and stroked Elizabeth's leg. It seemed as if, the older Donna got, the more memory seemed to take over her life. She found that now she could sit for hours doing nothing but remember times in the past. Elizabeth, more than any of her human friends, never seemed to mind. She understood. She never forced her to rush back to the present. Elephants, after all, had had ages of experience managing the accurate memories of long lives.

"The juveniles will talk/speak/trust you now," Elizabeth said, gently.

"What did you tell them?"

"How you cared/loved/fed me when I was alone like them. How you've kept nature/Nulongwe/a park in the center/middle/heart of the human capital. How they will be safe/protected/warm with you there."

Safe, Donna thought. She wished she could completely believe that. The city of Nairobi now surrounded tiny Nairobi National Park. It was an island of nature circled by a sea of humanity. Few things were truly safe there, and nothing was isolated. By day you could hear traffic on the highways. At all hours you could hear jets flying in for landings at Nairobi International. At night, if you listened hard enough, you could hear the cacophony of music from all the open windows of all the highrise apartment complexes built mile after mile along the park boundaries. But Elizabeth was right. Nairobi was where they should go. The Dutch emba.s.sy would help them with the CDs, and many nations would help her protect the young elephants.

Donna had gotten stiff sitting. Elizabeth wrapped her trunk around Donna's middle and helped her up.

Donna stood for a moment looking at the juveniles, and they looked at her. She walked over to them, stiffly, and they let her touch them. She reached down and hugged them and cried with them, not so much for what they were going through as for her memories of all the elephants like them she had cared for. There was nothing else to do then. Not even words to speak.

The Kenyan military offered guards and a driver, and Donna accepted the offer. If the Ugandans had any idea what Sam had brought out, they'd be looking for it. Donna reached into her sweater pocket and touched the wrapped CDs. She was glad for an armed guard. Besides, she was too tired to drive herself back to Nairobi. It was late evening, and it had been a long day.

Sam had been stabilized enough for transport to Nulongwe National Hospital in Nairobi, and they needed to get him there fast. He was bleeding internally and would soon need another transfusion. Donna watched from the back seat of her Land Rover while they loaded Sam onto a truck. The juveniles were traveling in the same truck since being near Sam rea.s.sured them. Donna would follow along behind.

While they finished securing Sam, Donna took out her laptop, clicked open a geosat connection, and went online. Her fingers were stiff. While the laptop made the connection, she rubbed her fingers, trying to limber them up so that she could type. The new drugs helped control the arthritis, but there was still no cure.

It was wet along that part of the border, and in the evening chill the damp made her hands ache. When she could type, she sent an e-mail to a friend at the Dutch emba.s.sy asking him to meet her when they arrived at the hospital.

The driver and guard climbed onto the front seat. The driver said h.e.l.lo, then looked away. The guard was all business, all watchfulness, rifle at the ready.

The sun had set when they started out. They planned to drive through the night and arrive in Nairobi late morning. The few miles of paved road outside Kitale soon ended. It was dirt road after that for sixty miles, Donna knew, but the road was graded and well-maintained. They'd soon connect with the National Highway System. She started typing again. She sent a note to her twenty-six-year-old great-granddaughter who was flying down from London in three weeks to spend a month. She'd have no idea of the work that lay ahead! She sent e-mail to her staff advising them of the juvenile elephants. They had so many preparations to make, chief among them the laying up of vast stores of sunscreen. Those young elephant hides hadn't toughened yet, and they no longer had older relatives to stand under for shade.

The road grew rougher. Donna had to stop typing and hang onto her laptop. The red tail-lights of the truck with Sam and the juveniles bounced along ahead of her. The guard glanced back, then looked straight ahead again. The rough road jarred them all back and forth.

She could not type until the road grew smooth again, so she sat there with her thoughts. She thought about Elizabeth. Elizabeth had witnessed the murders of her mother and grandmother and older brothers, and she had stood off in a thicket and watched as the poachers had chainsawed the ivory out of her family's faces. Park rangers had found Elizabeth and brought her to Donna because they had not known what else to do. Donna hadn't known what to do with an elephant baby either, except try and keep trying-one look at her little, terrified, vulnerable self in the back of the ranger's truck had been all it had taken to change both their lives: Donna had loved Elizabeth, and she had done everything she could to help her-some of it wrong.

Manuals on the care and feeding of elephant babies hadn't existed in those days. But they'd made it. That had been when Frank had managed the park system, and those had been good days, Donna thought, good days. She and Frank had imagined that if they just worked hard enough they could do so many things to make the world a better place, that they could change so many things that needed to be changed. It had all seemed, if not easy, at least possible.

Elizabeth had needed to hang onto Donna. People had laughed to see Donna try to go about her ch.o.r.es with Elizabeth, trunk wrapped around an arm, right beside her. They would not have laughed had they been the ones to get up in the night to comfort Elizabeth when she woke screaming from her nightmares. Elizabeth had needed physical touch, even if the touch had come from someone of another species: even if the touch had come from someone of the same species that had killed her family.

The juveniles would be like Elizabeth, Donna knew-tough work.

But at least they'd be able to talk to each other. She and Elizabeth had not, not until they had both become old ladies. Donna wished she could have talked to all the orphaned animals she had helped over the years, not just the elephants.

The Land Rover jarred her back and forth again. The road from Kitale to the highway had not been this rough when she'd driven it in the morning-or she had been better at avoiding the potholes. Donna looked out the window. The moon had not risen, and it was dark. She realized she could not really be sure what direction they were traveling. The road jarred her again.

Something was not right.

She clicked open the geopositioning program on her laptop, and found their position.

They were not on the main road. They were not heading east. They were on a road leading north out of Kitale. She looked up at the men sitting in front of her, but said nothing. She clicked on the road to find out where it led.

The program magnified the map of Kitale District. The road they were on forked two miles ahead. One fork led directly west to a little-used crossing into Mt. Elgon National Park in Uganda/Nulongwe, site of the recent ma.s.sacres. The other led northwest six miles to another crossing into Uganda.

Donna suddenly felt cold and alone and old. At first, she did not know what to do. Obviously the drivers and the guards were not Kenyans-Ugandans had somehow replaced them-unless Kenyans were involved in this, too, and genocide was shortly to begin in Kenya.

She started typing e-mail messages. She expected the guard to make her stop any minute, so she typed faster and faster-d.a.m.n the spelling. She realized the guard probably hadn't stopped her yet because he hadn't wanted to alarm her until he absolutely had to. She could not let him know that she knew what was happening-if he realized that, he would take away her laptop. Donna forced herself to remain calm. She sent e-mail to Elizabeth and everyone else she could think of asking for help, but she did not know who among the humans she could trust, really, if Kenya were gearing up for ma.s.s murder. She sent the messages anyway.

People would at least know what had happened to her and Sam and the juveniles.

Even as she sent the e-mail, however, Donna knew that help could not reach them before they crossed the border. Only murder moved quickly in this part of the world. She and Sam, the juveniles-and the CDs-would not survive half an hour in Uganda.

Then she had an idea. She turned up her translator and switched it to Transmit Only mode. "Do you mind if I sing?" she asked the men in the front seat. "I think singing makes time on the road pa.s.s more quickly, don't you?"

The guard scowled at her. The driver looked at her in the rear-view mirror, grinning. She started singing.

In French. Her translator was programmed to translate what she said in English, Swahili, or French.

French was the only language of the three she thought the two people in the Land Rover with her might notunderstand. They would not know what her translator was broadcasting far and wide in subsonics.

She set their current position and the story of what had happened to any jaunty tune that came to mind.

She asked for help in "Frere Jacques" and repeated their coordinates in "La Ma.r.s.eillaise."

She could only hope there were enough elephants in the area to hear her broadcasts and rush to block the two forks of the road they were on.

And save the CDs, above all.

The translator vibrated against her chest. She felt the subsonics it was broadcasting.

She kept watching out the windows for the enormous forms she hoped to see moving there in the darkness.

The truck and the Land Rover took the first fork in the road. Donna sang about that. They were maybe one mile now from the border. The guard scowled at her more and more. She just smiled and kept singing. She imagined he must think her a foolish old woman to sing like this in her thin, reedy voice-oblivious, apparently, to her own kidnapping.

Suddenly the Land Rover braked, and she was slammed into the back of the front seat. Her laptop went tumbling onto the floor. Both the driver and the guard swore in Luganda, which answered one question: these men weren't Kenyans.

"What happened?" she asked in English, not wanting to let them know she understood their cursing.

Neither answered. The driver and the guard both got out of the Land Rover. Donna opened her door and got out, too. The truck ahead of them had skidded to an abrupt halt two feet short of an enormous acacia tree felled across the road.

"Stay in! Stay in!" the guard shouted at her. "You don't know what could be out here."

"I have to check on Sam and the juveniles," Donna said. She started toward the truck. The guard c.o.c.ked his rifle, and Donna stopped. She wondered if he were going to shoot her there, while they were still inside Kenya, but he and the other guard set out patrolling the oval perimeters of light cast by the headlights of both vehicles. The drivers stood talking in low voices by the open driver's-side door of the truck. One of them lit a cigarette.

Donna started walking forward again. Her footsteps sounded loud on the gravel road. She could not tell if the tree had been recently pushed over or if it had lain across the road for a long time, but the leaves looked green in the headlights. She stepped onto the fender, climbed up the guardrail, and looked in on Sam and the juveniles.

The sudden stop had shoved Sam against the cab of the truck. The juveniles were huddled around him, terrified. When they saw her, they rushed to one side and banged the guardrail with their feet, trying to get out and away.

She'd panicked them with her subsonic broadcasts. She hadn't thought far enough ahead to realize that they and Sam would hear.

She wanted to get the juveniles out of that truck.

She climbed down in with them. "I'm going to open the back," she whispered in French. "When I do, jump out and run-in different directions. Don't stay together. But first take these."

She looked around for the guards and the drivers, and could not see them. She crouched down in shadow, took the CD package out of her pocket, and tore it open. Putting a CD in each of the juveniles' translators was dangerous, but this might be their only chance of saving them. They certainly would not survive in her sweater pocket or hidden somewhere in the truck.

Sam grunted his approval of her plan. "Good/ inventive/necessary action," he rumbled. "Take/ accept/receive them quickly," he told the juveniles. "Outside, find other elephants. You will look/blend/seem like other juvenile/adolescent/young elephants to humans. Be brave/strong/fast."

One by one, they came up to Donna. She inserted the CDs into the drives in the sides of their translators, and listened to the gentle whirs as the translators read and accepted them. She locked each drive shut.

"Good luck," she whispered to the juveniles after she'd finished the last one. She stood up slowly and looked around. One of the guards was walking toward them, his body and rifle a silhouette in the headlights. "Get back inside the Land Rover," he told Donna. "We're scouting routes through the brush to drive around this tree. We'll be moving soon."

"I must see to Sam's bandages," Donna lied.

The guard shrugged and walked off. Donna watched him go, then she started for the back of the truck.

She had to open it, and the juveniles had to run for it now. After that, she'd sit down with Sam. He was too sick, and she was too old to run.

But before she could open the back of the truck, they heard an enormous cracking-and screams.

Another acacia slammed down onto the road ahead of them. From the screams, and the moans that followed, she guessed it had pinned one of the guards. The other guard shot off into the darkness.

There was more crashing, from all sides now. Dark forms taller than the truck rushed past them. Therewere three shots, and a few screams. Something was bashed against the hood of the truck again and again.

Blood spattered across them all.

It was over quickly. Suddenly trunk after trunk lifted in toward them, smelling them, asking how they were.

Donna cried with relief. "We've got to get out of here," she told them, wiping her eyes once. "Ugandan troops aren't far away. They surely heard the shooting."

Donna climbed onto the bloodied driver's seat and managed to back up the truck, then drive it around the Land Rover and onto the road again. She set out for Kitale. Maybe thirty elephants-she could not count them all-ran along beside them, a mighty escort.

Donna was never so glad to see the lights of any city as she was to see the lights of Kitale coming back into view.

Elephants by the hundreds rushed out to meet them, Elizabeth in the front.

Again she hugged Donna tightly. Again Donna hugged her back.

But Sam was not doing well. Another bull elephant volunteered to give blood, and Red Cross nurses began transfusing Sam right there in the truck.

"Call the Americans or the British," Donna said. "Ask them to come for us."

Both came, and the Danes with them. The Americans sent a military transport helicopter from the U.S.S.

Delaware, in port in Momba.s.sa. They loaded Sam and seven other critically injured elephants inside and flew off. Donna and the CDs flew away inside a British emba.s.sy helicopter. The juveniles would come later in a truck from the Isak Dinesen Foundation. Donna would be waiting for them.

As they flew along, Donna's spirits lifted. They weren't flying just over Kenya, not yet anyway. They were flying over Kenya and Nulongwe. If the CDs and testimony and satellite photos led to trials and intervention, Nulongwe might yet persist. If humanity moved its great armies to protect the elephants, who could harm them?

It might happen, Donna thought. It might yet happen.

The sky brightened with the dawn. The greening plains below them emerged out of darkness. She watched Kenya/Nulongwe pa.s.s by below her. The names of those countries were so beautiful, she thought, like the land. Both countries had mottoes. Some thought it quaint for a country to have a national motto, but Donna liked them: in Kenya, harambee, "pulling together"; in Nulongwe, darumbyla, "looking forward."

Far off, Donna saw sunlight sparkling on waters. The Indian Ocean was catching first light. Donna reached into her pocket and held onto the CDs. She realized she was a part of humanity pulling together with the elephants.

She dared look forward with hope.

Author's Note The character of Donna Pendrick is based on Daphne Sheldrick, director of the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Orphanage in Nairobi National Park, Kenya. Sheldrick has dedicated much of her life to saving orphaned animals of all species, but especially elephant orphans. Her compa.s.sionate work is celebrated around the world. To learn more about her work and the orphanage, go to www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org. The site contains pictures and information about the elephant orphans Sheldrick is currently raising, daily journal entries by their keepers, updates on elephants reintroduced into the wild, and information on East African conservation efforts.

Gene Wolfe

COPPERHEAD.

The telephone in the study rang ten minutes before the news came on. The new President picked it up and said h.e.l.lo.

"Mister President?"

"Speaking." Only eighteen people were supposed to have the number. For an instant, the new President wondered how many actually did.

"This is Marsha. Boone's killed himself."

The new President was silent, conscious that there were a thousand things to say and unable to say even the least of them. In his mind's eye he saw the leaves, a drift of red, yellow, and gold autumn leaves at the foot of the tree on the hill. Leaves still touched with green here and there, and the stirring under those leaves.

"He left a note. I haven't been able to find out what was in it."

"Don't."

"Don't?"

"It will be damaging to us in some way. They'll find out, Marsha, and they'll throw it in our faces. We'll know a lot more about it than we want to then, and you're needed for other things."

"He was my husband, Mr. President. The divorce-"

"I know."

"It wasn't-wasn't final. Not yet. I want to know why he killed himself."

He recalled it exactly. "There was a crash in Idaho in August," the general had said. "We found this in the wreckage."

"Are you still there, Mr. President?"

The irony almost overcame him, but he managed to say, "Still here."