XII

It took the shuttle crew several weeks to reestablish themselves in the protective lagoon and extract from its warm waters a toolbox full of yellow persuasion. The gold was produced in the form of thick-walled straws. Will assumed it had been condensed around some kind of tube or wire. The toolbox was sturdy enough to hold it all, but he worried about the handle breaking. It was heavy enough that he had to shift the load repeatedly from one hand to the other.

“You’re sure you trust me with this?” he asked T’var. “I’ve got a small fortune here. I could go ashore and disappear and you’d have to start all over again.”

“Why would you do that?” wondered the short Second-of-Command.

“You’re right: I wouldn’t. You have your cause and I have mine. I’m going to use what’s in here to prove to you that you’re wasting your time on my world.”

The Human was very confident, T’var mused. His words repeatedly contradicted the claims of the xenopsychs. Claims were not proof, however, of either thesis. That would come only with additional study.

This world, he realized, represented a great gamble. Too great, if an injured interfacer was to be believed. Second-of-Medicine was of similar mind, but the concerns of two members of the medical staff counted for very little in conference. For now T’var found himself agreeing with the majority. This world offered confusion, but not danger. If its mysteries could be unraveled then its promise might be fulfilled.

The shuttle carried a tender, an air-repulsion craft designed to give a survey crew the ability to explore the surface of new worlds. It was not large, but it would serve to transport Will to the mainland under cover of darkness.

He’d never been farther inland than the port of Belize City, but he knew that the country was mostly undeveloped rain forest and swamp, a steamy refugee from a Somerset Maugham novel brought forward from the 1920s and set down whole and intact in the present day. Air traffic was sparse and the main roads little traveled. They should have no difficulty crossing the coastline unobserved.

They set him down near the main highway, promising to meet him at the same spot in a week’s time. Will was not sanguine about his chances.

“You may find me waiting for you by myself,” he told T’var, “the gold notwithstanding. But I’ll do my best.”

“You will choose a representative sample of your people.” The Wais was speaking to insure that at this critical moment there were no misunderstandings. The bird-thing looked more comfortable than the S’van.

“Of course,” Will lied. He had no intention of being so imprecise. There might be a number of soldiers on leave in the city. The British maintained a substantial garrison in their ex-colony, to keep chauvinistic Guatemalans at bay, and the Americans used the country as a base for training their own soldiers in tropical warfare. The last thing Will wanted was to recruit a mob of poorly paid would-be soldiers of fortune.

No, the people he picked up would be much more selectively “representative” than that. Soldiers and even ex-soldiers he would avoid like the archaic attitudes they represented.

The ship’s techs wanted several dozen specimens. Will patiently explained that a group that large would invariably attract unwanted attention, even in laid-back Belize. He did not add that the greater the number of people he brought back, the more likely it was to include one or two individuals of the aberrant type the scientists were looking for. So he had several reasons for wanting to keep the group small.

If he could convince enough people, the Weave would have its representative sampling of Humanity … only it would be a sample acquired and filtered through William Dulac’s convictions and beliefs.

He could not recruit outright pacifists. If he was that obvious then his alien patrons might abandon him and begin again elsewhere. He had to satisfy them that the people he brought back were truly representative of their species.

The absence of nocturnal traffic which had allowed the shuttle’s tender to set him down unobserved meant that he would have to lug the toolbox and its heavy contents all the way into the city. His legs were threatening to give out when a white-bearded farmer driving a pickup truck nearly as old as himself offered a ride the rest of the way in. So grateful was Will for the lift that he readily climbed in back with the load of bananas, heedless of the large tarantulas that often traveled with them.

The ride into town was hard on his spine but mercifully devoid of arthropod companionship. He hopped off, gave the old man a U.S. dollar, shouldered his backpack, and hefted the toolbox as he headed up a narrow dirt street flanked by multistory buildings of stucco and clapboard.

Belize was a backwater country full of poor but charming people whose hopes throughout history had been repeatedly devastated by hurricanes and indifference. The city was crowded with citizens unable to find work on the plantations, fishing boats, or in the nascent tourist industry. A few Victorian structures and stolid churches which had somehow survived the city’s repeated inundations were bright spots among the otherwise ramshackle architecture.

A small but clean hotel offered temporary refuge from the tropical night. Hiding the toolbox as well as possible he collapsed on the bed and slept till late morning.

After a meal of broiled fish and bottled water he was ready to go to work.

Streets which had been deserted the previous evening were full of people going nowhere in a great hurry. Clumps of vacant-eyed men accreted on street corners, waiting for destiny to tap them on the shoulder. Women chattered and popped in and out of tiny storefront markets, juggling groceries and babies with equal agility. Children skipped like water bugs around and through the surging mass of adults, laughing because they could not comprehend the poverty in which they dwelt, finding joy in a muddy puddle or an empty liter bottle of 7-Up.

Lebanese immigrants with S’van-black mustaches hammered and sawed on a new store in the shape of a mosque. A dread-locked Rastafarian stumbled up the street, unable to surmount the half-foot-high curb. No one spared him a glance. A little man who looked like a Mayan bas-relief sprung to life sat on a corner of cracked concrete, arms crossed atop his knees as he uncomprehendingly observed the bustle of a mobile civilization.

The faces of Belize City were a microcosm of Humanity, stained with an abnormal amount of sweat. The country was a dumping ground, the depression at the bottom of the Caribbean funnel where the adventurous and disaffected ended up when there was nowhere else to go, no more islands to hop. Representative of Humanity, yes. The lower end.

It owed this legacy as well as the prevalence of the English language to the British colonial government from which the present independent administration was not far removed. The country was full of British and other expatriates who had found in this corner of Central America their place in the sun. American and German tourists lingered in the few souvenir shops, in a hurry to purchase something, anything of local manufacture so they could get back to the contemporary beach resorts and air-conditioning of Ambergris Cay. Sunburned, healthy young Scandinavians in lederhosen and too-heavy hiking boots smiled painfully at everything as they marched energetically up and down the streets.

There were Hindus; descendants of small brown men who had been imported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations; Meskito Indians fleeing insurrection in Nicaragua; even blue-eyed natives who were the descendants of Confederate settlers arrived here on the heels of the Civil War. They had come hoping to reestablish the grandeur that had been the Old South.

But there was no grandeur to be found in Belize, unless it was in its mountains and jungles, rivers and reefs. Certainly there was no grandeur in Belize City, a community built on land so low that high tides periodically washed the raw sewage which flowed down the river right back up the main streets.

He avoided the two stores where he occasionally purchased supplies for his boat, concentrating instead on what passed for the touristy end of town. Broken gold straws crammed into the deep pockets of his pants rested heavily against his legs as he ate lunch in a bad Chinese restaurant and studied the crowd. How to approach someone, and who to pick? People shambled and shuffled past his table, alternately staring at the ground or conversing with companions.

It was too crowded here, in the center of town. Paying for lunch and praying for his digestion, he decided to try the insipid waterfront, soon found himself strolling along the unimpressive breakfront which held back the sloshing, garbage-laden ocean.

He sat down on a smooth-topped stone and stared out to sea, wishing he was back on his boat working with his MIDI and keyboard, wondering how to proceed, wishing he’d never heard of Massood and S’van, O’o’yan and Lepar, the Weave and the Amplitur and their eon-old conflict.

But heard he had, and it was up to him to keep not only himself but the entire Human race out of it. That’s not for us, he knew. We still have plenty of our own problems to sort out. We haven’t time to deal with someone else’s troubles.

“Mister, you got a dime?”

Turning atop the rock, Will found himself face-to-face with a boy who looked to be about twelve but was probably closer to fifteen. Skinny and malnourished, he wore a torn short-sleeve shirt and frayed shorts. No shoes. A second boy, aged too soon, stood nearby. He might have been sixteen, or twenty-five. Both looked hungry, and not just for food.

“Sure.” Will smiled and dug into a pocket. His fingers encountered a four-inch length of gold pipe. “That your friend over there?”

The boy gestured with his head. “That my bro, mon. Got a dime for him, too?”

“Your parents know you two are out begging?”

The boy smiled ingenuously. “Of course, mon. You think we orphans or som’ting?”

“You kids going to school?”

“Hey look, mon.” The youth retreated a step. “You got some money, we thank you. Don’t give us no lectures.”

“Take it easy.” Will smiled back. “I’m no preacher.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You kids ever get to the movies? You know, cinema?”

“Movies?” The boy regarded him warily. “Sure, mon.”

“Who do you like?”

“Who you think, mon?” Skinny arms and legs wildly assaulted the air. “Chuck Norris, mon. Bruce Lee. All those guys.”

“You like to fight, huh?”

The boy hesitated. “Sometime, maybe. What you want, mon? My bro and me don’ do no weird stuff.”

“How’d you two like to make some real money? How’d you like to meet some … aliens. Like in the movies. You know … people from another world?”

“Hey, we seen stuff like that. Our friend, he’s got a VCR. You crazy, mon.”

“Am I?” Will drew one of the gold straws from his pocket, showed it to the boy. In the dim tropical light it shone like the sun. His eyes grew wide.

“Hey mon, that ain’t real, is it?”

“Call your brother over. I have a business proposition for the two of you.”

By the end of the third day he had recruited not only the two orphaned brothers but a friend of theirs, a powerfully built fisherman who sometimes gave them shelter. He was also the blackest black man Will had ever seen, as black as the water beneath a Mississippi pier on a moonless night. There was no color in him whatsoever, not a smidgen of beige or chocolate brown.

There was also the middle-aged expatriate he had encountered in his own hotel, originally from the southeast of England but lately of many local bars. He’d been elegantly drunk, though not so drunk that he failed to identify the gold Will showed him as the real article. Whimsically he agreed to participate. “It will be a real lark,” he laughingly insisted. Will wondered what his reaction would be when he found himself confronted by Caldaq.

The man had come to Central America on sabbatical and had chosen to stay, held by cheap liquor and the certain knowledge that he was accomplishing absolutely nothing with his life back home in Surrey. So there was plenty of time to indulge in whatever diversion a crazy American could concoct, right? When sober enough he could identify every country together with its major cities, principal exports, important topographic features, and fifty-four different local brands of beer. A useful addition to Will’s group, yes? He was ready for whatever adventure happened to come his way so long as adequately noncorrosive booze was made available in modest quantity.

There was the young man with the dreadlocks, a Rastafarian—like the one Will had seen stumbling down the city’s main thoroughfare, a cannabis smoker for sure, yes mon, but not stoned when Will talked to him—who readily embraced the opportunity to meet some real as opposed to smoke-induced aliens. Will smiled to himself as he contemplated what Caldaq’s reaction might be to this particular specimen of Humanity. It would be interesting to watch the Wais attempt to translate when the man’s every alternate word was well nigh incomprehensible. Will only hoped he would remember to show up at the hotel at the appointed time.

Another pair of candidates materialized in the form of a pair of students from Sydney, would-be intellectuals out to experience the world before returning home to make as much money as possible while vegetating on the beaches of the Gold Coast pretending they were doing something for the future of mankind. Will ignored their pretensions as readily as he welcomed their presence.

Seven was a good number, but Will wished for a few more and he was running out of time. Tomorrow night the shuttle’s tender would return to the place where he had been dropped off, eighty miles up the central highway. He and his flock would be expected to be there to meet it.

His recruits seemed to arrive in pairs, like Ken Woods and Tamy Markowitz. They were a painfully earnest young couple who were, in Markowitz’s words, “scouting out potential honeymoon sites.”

“So we won’t waste our time and money on a place where we don’t think we’ll have a good time,” Woods added.

Their particular jejune brand of insensible preyuppie reasoning was precisely what Will was looking for, but he had a hard time convincing them to come along. Eventually they agreed. Not to meet aliens, which they didn’t believe for a second, nor for the gold. They agreed because they found, fascinating the people Will had already recruited and Markowitz turned out to be a would-be professional photographer. It would be a wonderful opportunity for her to observe and photograph a diverse collection of people in a restricted setting. Will wasn’t even sure what she looked like because he rarely saw her face. It seemed as if a single-lens reflex was all that existed above her neck.

They would probably bolt when the tender arrived, he thought, and certainly when Caldaq or T’var put in an appearance. He kept them anyway because that reaction in itself would be instructive.

Nine, then, as motley and unlikely a group as one could imagine even in Belize, assembled outside the hotel the following night. He’d rented a full-size van from a local car-hire, though for the amount of gold he’d slipped the attendant on duty at the time he could probably just as easily have bought the vehicle outright.

After seeing to the stowing of luggage on the van’s roof rack he put the mumbling Rastafarian in the front seat next to his own, the two local youths immediately behind with their fisherman friend next to the door, where he would have a little extra legroom. The two Australians struggled into the back, where they could chat with the expatriate teacher. Woods and Markowitz obligingly split up.

He was climbing into the driver’s seat when an old woman confronted him.

“Excuse me, sir.” Her voice was soft, her English good, and she was overdressed in broad-beamed hat and clean white dress, as if for church. Beneath one arm she carried a large wicker basket.

“Can I help you, granny?”

She smiled, a gentle upcurving of the corners of her mouth. “There are stories in the city of a white stranger who carries gold.”

Will looked around, suddenly wary. It was dark out and even here, in front of the hotel, sufficiently desperate men would not hesitate if they thought the prize commensurate with the risk.

“Belize City is full of stories.” Even in the poor light he could see that she was missing all four front teeth.

“It’s not drug money, is it? That would be an offense against God.”

“I’ve nothing to do with drugs.”

“Good,” she said firmly, hefting her basket. “I hear also that this stranger wants people to go with him for some mysterious purpose, and that for this he pays handsomely.” She indicated the van and its noisy inhabitants.

He did not wonder where or how she had heard. The Human telephone in Belize City was far more reliable and accurate than its electronic counterpart.

“I already have enough people.”

“I don’t take up much space,” she said, a plaintive note in her voice. “I want to go, too, if there is any chance to make some money.”

What would the Hivistahm scientists make of this one? Will mused. Still he hesitated, studying her carefully. He didn’t want anyone to die on him.

“Excuse me for saying so, but you don’t look very—” He hunted for a polite word. “—strong.” He checked his watch. Still ample time to make the rendezvous.

“I’m stronger than I look, sir. I’ve worked all my life. Just because I’m small and old don’t think I’m not strong. I do not know what it is you have in mind for your people, but I can tell you that I am a widow. My husband passed away two years ago. I have a son who works in San Pedro and he has a wife. By them I have, God be praised, two grandchildren, a boy and a girl. A third died last year.

“They cannot visit me because they have no money. I have no one in this city. I want to go with you, sir.”

Will softened. “Do you understand what we’re going to do? We’re going to meet people from another world and travel on their ship to a much bigger ship that waits in space halfway between here and the moon, where they will look at you and ask you questions.”

“Sir, I do not care what it is you want of me, if there is some money involved. I have never been out of Belize City in all my life, save for two trips to the capital. I want to make enough money to live close to my son and my grandchildren. I will do whatever you ask.”

Some good was going to come of this after all, he thought. “See if you can find room in back.” He looked into the night. “What about your luggage?”

She held up the basket. “I have everything I own in here. What else would I need?”

What else indeed, Will thought.

She started around to the other side, paused to look back at him. “Bless you, sir.”

Feeling better, he climbed in and shut the door behind him. “Don’t say that until you see what you’re getting yourself into.” In her own way, he knew, she was as blind to the reality of what was happening as the Rastafarian and the teenagers.

Gunning the engine, he turned around and abandoned the waterfront for a main road, trying to find his way to the central highway in the dark. Behind him his charges nattered away meaninglessly, ten Human beings chosen at random who would unwittingly do their part to convince Caldaq and his Hivistahm xenopsychs of mankind’s unsuitability as potential allies.

The half-drunk teacher expounded on irrelevancies to the Australian students while Markowitz snapped meaningless pictures like mad. The Rastafarian mumbled to himself, oblivious to the jokes the two teenagers made at his expense, while the dark fisherman stared silently out a side window.

It was late and they encountered very few oncoming lights. There had been none at all for more than half an hour by the time Will spotted the big tamarind tree he’d chosen for a landmark and pulled off the highway onto a dirt road. A bumpy mile beyond, the track ended in a shallow swamp. Of the tender’s previous touchdown there was no sign, the resurgent muck and resilient water plants having obliterated all evidence of its earlier visitation.

Will killed the engine and stepped out. “This is it.”

The eldest of the two teenage boys confronted him. “This isn’t it, mon. Where’s the gold you promised us?”

“Don’t you want to see the aliens first?”

The younger boy walked to the water’s edge, his tone more credulous than his brother’s. “Where are they?”

Will tilted his head back, scanning the dark cloud-filled sky. “They’ll be here. So will the gold.” He looked over at the older boy, whose expression eloquently declaimed that the whole world had conspired against him since the day of his birth. “Why don’t you give me a hand with the luggage?”

“Hey, mon, do it yourself, you heah? My bro and I, we already got ours.” He held up a package secured with twine.

Ken Woods gave Will a hand. So did the silent fisherman, whose body seemed fashioned of black rebars welded together.

When the pile of luggage had been unloaded Will checked his watch again. Things could get interesting if the tender failed to materialize. He didn’t look forward to spending the night at the edge of the swamp, fielding accusations and indignant inquiries while watching nervously for patrolling fer-de-lance.

As time passed complaints filled the air with increasing frequency. He knew he couldn’t hold them much longer. Eventually he would have to pass out the gold in the toolbox, turn the van over to his disgruntled recruits, and remain behind to greet his alien acquaintances with confessions of failure instead of the promised specimens.

Then suddenly, without any warning, there it was: a massive dark outline suspended in sky, slowly lowering toward them. It sang like a troll humming its babe to sleep, a deep-throated mechanical counterpoint to the oohs and aahs that now began to rise from his companions.