The man who got out when the bubble top popped open was skinny, tall, dark-complected and quite young looking—for what that's worth, since young looking is pretty much what everybody is these days. He was quite peculiar looking, too, because he was wearing full city clothing, long pants and long sleeves, with little ruffs of some kind of fur at the cuffs and colar. (A fur collar! In equatorial Africa!) He gave Brudy a quick, dismissive glance, looked Shelly and me over more thoroughly and ordered, "Take me to the Old Ones."
That was pure arrogance. When I sneaked a look at my indicator, it did not show a pass for his vehicle, so he had no right to be on the reservation in the first place, whoever he was. Brudy moved toward him warningly, and the newcomer stepped back a pace. The expression on Brudy's face wasn't particularly threatening, but he is a big man. We're all pretty tall, being mostly Maasai; Brudy is special. He boxes for fun whenever he can get anybody to go six rounds with him, and he looks it. "How did you get in?" Brudy demanded, his voice the gravelly baritone of a leopard's growl. What made me think of that was that just about then the mother leopard herself did give a ragged, unfocused little coming-awake growl.
"She's waking up," Shelly warned.
Brudy has a lot of confidence in our aversion training. He didn't even look around at the animals. "I asked you a question," he said.
The man from the hover craned his neck to see where the leopard was. He sounded a lot less self-assured when he said, "How I got in is none of your business. I want to be taken to the Old Ones as soon as possible." Then he squinted at the leopard, now trying, but tailing, to. get to her feet. "Is that animal dangerous?"
"You bet she is. She could tear you to shreds in a minute," I told him—not lying, either, because she certainly theoretically could, if she hadn't had her own aversion training. "You'd better get out of here, mister."
"Especially since you don't have a pass in the first place," Shelly added.
That made him look confused. "What's a 'pass'?" he asked.
"It's a radio tag for your hover. You get them at the headquarters in Nairobi. If you don't have one, you're not allowed on the reservation."
" 'Allowed,'" he sneered. "Who are you to 'allow' me anything?"
Brudy cleared his throat. "We're the rangers for this reservation, and what we say goes. You want to give me an argument?"
Brudy can be really convincing when he wants to be. The stranger decided to be law-abiding. "Oh, all right," he said, turning back to his hover; he'd left the air-conditioning going and I could hear it whine as it valiantly tried to cool off the whole veldt. "This petty bureaucracy crap stinks, but I'll go back to Nairobi and get the damn pass."
"Maybe you will and maybe you won't," Shelly said. "We don't want the Old Ones disturbed any more than we can help, so you'll need to give them a pretty good reason."
He was already climbing into the vehicle, but he paused long enough to give her a contemptuous look. "Reason? To visit the Old Ones? What reason do I need, since I own them?"
II
The next morning all us rangers had to pitch in, because the food truck had arrived. Brudy and Carlo were unloading little packets of rations from the Food Factory in the Mombasa delta while the rest of us kept the Old Ones in order.
I don't know why the Old Ones needed to be kept orderly in the first place. For most people that Food Factory stuff is the meal of last resort— that is, it is unless it's been doctored up, when you can hardly tell it from the real thing. The Old Ones chomp the untreated stuff right down, though. That's natural. CHON-food is what they grew up on, back when they were floating around out in the Oort cloud. The Old Ones had come running in from all over the reservation when they heard the truck's food bell. Now they were all pressing close to the vehicle, all fifty-four of them, chattering "Gimme, gimme!" at the top of their voices as they competed for the choicest bits.
When I came to work at the reservation I had only seen the Old Ones in pictures. I knew they all had beards, males and females alike. I hadn't known then that even the babies did, or did as soon as they were old enough to grow any hair at all, and I hadn't known about the way they smelled.
The ancient female we called "Spot" was pretty nearly the smelliest of the lot, but she was also about the smartest, and about as close as they had to a leader. And, well, she was kind of a friend. When she saw me she gave me an imploring look. I knew what she wanted. I helped her scoop up half a dozen of the pink and white packets she liked best, then escorted her out of the crowd. I waited until she had scarfed down the first couple of packets, then tapped her on the shoulder and said, "I want you to come with me, please."
Well, I didn't say it like that, of course. All of the Old Ones have picked up a few words of English, but even Spot was a little shaky on things like grammar. What I said was, "You," pointing at her, "come," beckoning her toward me, "me," tapping my own chest.
She went on chewing, crumbs of greasy-looking pale stuff spilling out of the corners of her mouth, looking suspicious. Then she said, "Is for?"
I said, "Is because today's the day for your crocodile-aversion refresher." I said it just like that, too. I knew that she wasn't going to understand every word but headquarters wanted us to talk to them in complete sentences as much as we could, in the hope they might learn. To reinforce the process I took her by one skinny wrist and tugged her away.
She had definitely understood the word "crocodile," because she whimpered and tried to get free. That did her no good. I had twenty kilos and fifteen centimeters on her. I let her dally long enough to pick up a couple of extra food packets. Then I put her in our Old Ones van, the one that never stops smelling of the Old Ones, so we never use it for anything else. I picked five more Old Ones pretty much at random and waved them in. They got in, all right. That is, they followed Spot, because she was the leader. They didn't like it, though, and all of them were cackling at once in their own hopelessly incomprehensible language as I drove the van to the river.
It was a pretty day. Hot, of course, and without a cloud in the sky. When I turned off the motor it was dead silent, too, not a sound except the occasional craaack of a pod coming in from Low Earth Orbit to be caught in the distant Nairobi Lofstrom Loop. I took a deep breath. Even the air smelled pretty, a dry scent of spiky grass and acacias. Times like that are when I'm glad I decided to take my park-ranger job instead of lawyering or doctoring, the way my patents wanted me to go.
The place in the river where the hippos hang out is what we call the Big Bend. The stream makes pretty nearly a right-angle turn there, with a beach on the far side that gets scoured out every rainy season. There are almost always fifteen or twenty hippos doing whatever they feel like doing in the slack water at the bend—basically just swimming around, sometimes underwater, sometimes surfacing to breathe. And there's almost always a croc or two squatting patiently on the beach, waiting for one of the babies to stray far enough away from the big hippos to become lunch.
This time there were three crocs, motionless in the hot African sun. They lay there with those long, toothy jaws wide open, showing the yellowish inside of their mouths—I guess that's how they keep from being overheated, like a pet dog in hot weather. What it looks like is that they're just waiting for something edible to come within range. Which I guess is also true, and why I can't help getting sort of shivery inside whenever I see one. So did the Old Ones. They were whimpering inside the van, and I nearly had to kick them out of it. Then they all huddled together, as far from the river bank as I would let them get, shaking and muttering fearfully to each other.