A communal moan rose up from the men and the drinking cup was filled and passed.
“We are cut off,” Malink added.
Sarapul shrugged. “All the people in this book, they shit. It does not matter. They die. It does not matter. If we put them all in a big boat and sank it, you would not even know for six months when the Sky Priestess gives you her old copy, and it still would not matter. This is stupid.”
“But look!” Malink pointed to a picture of a man with unnaturally large ears, “This man is a king and he wishes to be a tampon. It is quoted.”
Sarapul scrunched up his face, his wrinkles folding over each other like venetian blinds, while he tried to figure out what, exactly, a tampon was. Finally he said, “I was a tampon once, back in the old days, before you were born. All warriors became tampons. It was better then.”
“You have never been a tampon,” Malink stated, although he couldn’t be sure. “Only a king may be a tampon. And now, without People, we will never know if this man who would be a tampon succeeded. It has been a dark day.”
The cup had come around again to Sarapul and he drained it before answering. “Tell me of this dream you had.”
“I should not speak of it.” Malink pretended to be engaged in the magazine.
Sarapul pushed on. “The Sky Priestess said that Vincent spoke to you of a pilot. Is that true?”
Malink nodded. “It is true. But it is only a dream or the Sorcerer would have known.”
Sarapul was torn now. This was his chance to discredit the Sorcerer and his white bitch, but if he told Malink about the man in the tree, then he would lose his chance to taste the long pig again. Then again, he found them first, and he was willing to share the meat. “What if your dream was true?”
“It was just a dream. Vincent speaks to us only through the Sky Priestess now. She has spoken.”
“Vincent smoked and she says smoking is bad. Vincent was an enemy of the Japanese and now she has Japanese guards inside the fence. She lies.”
Some of the men moved away from the circle. It was one thing to drink with a cannibal, but it was quite another to tolerate a heretic. (Of the twenty men in the circle, three of the elders were named John, four who had been born during Father Rodriquez’s tenure were named Jesus [Hey-zeus], and three of the younger men were named Vincent.) They were a group that honored the gods, whoever the gods might be that week.
“The Sky Priestess does not lie,” Malink said calmly. “She speaks for Vincent.”
Sarapul pinched the flame of his cigarette with his ashy fingers, then popped the stub into his mouth and began to chew as he grinned. “Your dream was true, Malink. I have seen the pilot. He is on Alualu and he is alive.”
“You are old and you drink too much.”
“I’ll show you.” Sarapul leaped to his feet to show that he was not drunk, and in doing so scared the hell out of the younger men. “Come with me,” he said.
26
Swing Time
Kimi had freed his hands and feet with the knife, only to find that he could not reach the rope suspending him from the middle of his back. Now he was forced to follow Tuck’s plan of swinging like a human pendulum until he could grab the pilot’s rope and cut him down. Roberto hung upside down from a nearby branch, wondering why his friends were behaving like fighting spiders.
Tucker found he could only hold his head up for a few seconds at a time before dizziness set in, so he watched the navigator’s swinging shadow to gauge his distance. “One more time, Kimi. Then grab the rope.” It bothered him some that when he was cut loose he would fall six feet and land face-first in the coral gravel, but he was learning to take things as they came and figured he would deal with that on the way down.
“I hear someone,” Kimi said. On the apex of his arc, he grabbed for Tuck’s rope, missed, and accidentally raked the knife across the pilot’s scalp.
“Ouch! Shit, Kimi. Watch what you’re doing.” Tuck braced himself for the next attack, which never came. He looked up to see that Kimi’s arc had been stopped in mid-swing. A rotund gray-haired native had caught the navigator around the waist and was prying the knife out of his hand.
Tuck felt the hope drain out of him. The leathery old cannibal stood amid a group of twenty men. All of them seemed to be waiting for the fat guy to say something. It was time for a last-ditch effort.
“Look, you motherfuckers, people are expecting me. I’m supposed to be flying medical supplies for a big-time doctor, so if you
fuck with me you’re all going to die of the tropical creeping crud and I won’t give you so much as a fucking aspirin.”
The native released Kimi into the hands of two younger men and regarded Tuck. “You pilot?” He said in English.
“Damn right I am. And I’m sick and infected and stuff, so if you eat me you’re going to die like a gut-shot dog—and in addition I would like to add that I don’t taste anything like Spam.” Tuck was breathless from the diatribe and he was starting to black out from trying to hold his head back.
The native said something in his own language, which Tuck took to be “Cut him down,” because a second later he found himself falling into the arms of four strong islanders who lowered him to the ground.
Tucker’s arms and legs burned as the blood rushed back into them. Above him he saw a circle of moonlit brown faces. He managed to grab enough breath to squeak, “Soon as I’m on my feet, your asses are mine. You all might as well just go practice falling down for a while so you’ll be used to it. Just order the body bags now ’cause when I’m done, you’re going to look like piles of chocolate pudding. They’ll be cleaning you up with shovels—you…” Tuck’s breath caught in his throat and he passed out.
Malink looked at his old friend Favo and smiled. “Excellent threat,” he said.
“Most excellent threat,” Favo said.
Sarapul pushed his way through the kneeling men. “He’s dead. Let’s eat him.”
“He no like that,” Kimi said. “Not even for free.”
The Sorcerer heard the lab door open and turned from his microscope just
in time to catch her as she ran into his arms.
“Did you see, ’Bastian? Was I great or what?”
He held her for a second, smelling the perfume in her hair. “You were great,” he said. When he released her, there were two pink spots on his lab coat from the rouge she had rubbed on her nipples.
She skipped around the lab like a little girl. “Malink was shaking in his shoes,” she said. Well, not in his shoes, but you know what I mean.” She stopped and looked into the microscope. “What’s this?”
He watched a delicate line of muscle run down the back of her thigh and postulated what kind of genetics went into preserving a
body like that on Chee-tos and vodka. He thought a lot about genetics lately. “I’m doing the last of the tissue typing. I should be finished in a couple of days.”
She said, “Did you like ‘String of Pearls’ better than ‘In the Mood’?”
High Priestess of the nonsequiter, Sebastian thought. “It was perfect. You were perfect.”
She moved away from the microscope and paced around the table, frowning now, as if she was working on an equation in her head. “I’ve been thinking about ‘Pennsylvania 6-5000,’ putting the ninjas in top hats and tails in kind of a chorus line. You know, they could carry me across the runway and pause and shout the chorus. There’s no singing on the re-cording; they would just have to shout. I mean, if we have to have them around, they might as well do something.” She stopped pacing and turned to him. “What do you think?”