Kid

Chapter 14 of Microcosmia

Microcosmia

Chapter Fourteen

Kid

…

Vane’s emergency surgery aboard a US submarine on maneuvers off Madinat ash-Sha’b, his surprise entry into the Gulf of Aden on a pirated ship under Eritrean registry, and his subsequent ignominious removal from said ship via winch on a jerry-rigged stretcher of broken pallets and dung-covered rags, were, taken together, Honey’s worst nightmare come true, but the Foundation jumped on it so quickly, and with so much attitude, that its prime interest left the hospital three weeks later facing little worse than a tough lecture and chilly interview. After sitting for two grueling hours in the American ambassador’s office like a schoolboy in detention, Vane, his shoulder in a plaster cast and his left arm in a sling, was interrogated by three nameless men in suits, who permitted him to return to the Danakil on the condition he permanently keep his nose out of Eritrea. They were surprisingly cool on the whole Scheherazade issue, and frankly skeptical of his account of Franco’s plans, but boy, were they ever pissed about his black market purchases. And they took his neat warships manual, and refused to give it back. Vane slunk from the office, sulking, unable to shake the feeling he wasn’t considered mature enough to run around the Horn of Africa unsupervised.

Denise Waters, his guardian angel, got right to work on new warehouses and a friendly corridor, using Mudhead as Vane’s personal financial go-between. She fought for peace, fought for time, fought for Vane; directing trifles to Washington, routing important calls to beleaguered bureaucrats in Addis Ababa.

Vane’s former employees, like the rats they were, threatened Mudhead into wringing the rest of their pay out of Honey’s Djibouti courier by way of Banke Internationale, grabbed the cash, smuggled out the stingers, and disappeared into the frying shadows of Duomoa, one of the hottest and most desolate cities on Earth. Mudhead, his loyalty to Vane grown profound out of the tragedy, clung steadfastly to the night-scope rifle, the minaret-shaped spyglass, and his master’s crusty-trusty jile. Long hours were spent delicately repairing the beautiful robes of flowing black silk. The salvageable foods, supplemented by a massive, highway-robbery buyout in Tedjoura, came the long way; south by rail on the Djibouti City-Addis Ababa line. Some fifty miles down the track, where Honey began earnest construction on the Vane Depot, the goods were loaded onto surplus troop transports for carriage over the desert to Mamuset.

With his newfound responsibilities and awesome capital power, Mudhead really came into his own. He hired hundreds of pastoralists to pave a single-lane road through the desert, and hundreds more to work the Danakil end, while the daily parade of supplies made its way by ATV and camel train. Although this ninety mile road was completed, amazingly, in less than a month, it was all too slow for Mudhead. He demanded more out of Tibor, more out of Honey, more out of his rocketing employees. The Depot was erected with dizzying speed, using both lumber imported by rail and whatever material the drought had spared. In time the Vane Depot would become a major landmark and oasis; a bazaar-like stopover in the middle of nowhere for weary travelers on the DC-AA line. Waters supported the development with a Mamuset Ready Fund, stocking the Depot’s strongbox with birrs, francs, and dollars. Mudhead, during Vane’s absence a man of near-superhuman stature, made regular flights to the Depot with Kid and his favorites, who fought savagely for a chance to ride in the plane until the problem was solved by selecting only the best-mannered. The youngsters were sent from the Depot with survival packs containing coin samples to entice Afar, Amhara, and Tigriya pastoralists. Others left Mamuset by camel, while still others were dropped off at strategic spots near sites yet occupied by skeleton tribes. The incentive--paid labor and adoption into Mamuset--was a strong one, but tribal recruits were few, for to many such a life-saving course was tantamount to defection. Scouts had better luck with nomad groups, who obediently and listlessly trudged to the Depot as if it were one more watering hole. They then trekked, toting stamped picks and shovels, to temporary crew sites, or to permanent marked-off sections in the desert. Once employed, they put their backs into it sunup to sundown, camping on their half-mile sections jealously, chasing off supervisors driving section-to-section with food and fresh drinking water. Sides of the developing road were marked by flagged stakes, each section including a turn-out space for opposing traffic. At the outset these stakes were in many places arbitrary, clambering along slopes and into gullies.

Mudhead intended the new road to be a model of construction, and a vast improvement over Vane’s original Mamuset Highway. The African had learned a great deal during his months as Vane’s second in command, but had always frowned on the easygoing, aesthetic approach. Mudhead’s workers, driven to exhaustion and proud to a fault, took seriously every aspect of their jobs. Even in the dark they could be found single-mindedly chipping away at hillsides, filling and tamping depressions, tidying perfectly straight borders. And, once they’d begun to personalize their sites, those roving supervisors, climbing out of jeeps with parcels and flashlights, approached the pickaxe-wielding workers at great peril.

In this manner--with limitless energy and immeasurable pride--a clearly definable pass was created with astounding rapidity. Crews spanned gorges not with suspended or vaulted bridges, but with dynamite and biceps. Great boulders were rolled into these gaps or blasted from their walls, to be cemented with any stone that could be ported. Amhara and Afar vied to outwork each other, sometimes with a viciousness that would have certainly panicked Vane into declaring an immediate holiday. But Mudhead, knowing better, encouraged segregation by grouping these ages-old competitors on opposing gorge-sides and putting them to work racing toward the center, realizing that, upon each impending violent clash at points of convergence, the competing teams would simply rush back to begin the next level. Those completed spans were then packed with dirt. Terrified steamroller drivers were taunted across every inch. And the moment Mudhead’s crew laborers had cash in hand, they began stoically walking the new road back to the Depot, where they patiently applied for more work.

Both Depot and road were regularly monitored by Ethiopian officials, and constantly wondered over by passing fares. It was only natural that imaginations should embroider upon observation, and that those imaginations should be further fired by rumors and gossip. One day, just before his friend was scheduled to be released from the hospital, Mudhead paid a visit bearing a Los Angeles Times Column Left article pulled off the Internet. Vane had been persistent news in the gossip rags since his eccentric father’s death. He was rumored dead, in cahoots with the Mob, partying in the Aegean, and searching for Morgan’s treasure with super-sophisticated equipment. Rumors only slightly more accurate popularly vilified him as a swaggering Egyptian overlord using thousands of slaves to construct a monolithic idol to himself.

This heartless, flamboyant character, assembled from gossip originating half a world away, had earned the paper nickname Kid Rameses. Apparently the Times had purchased, from at least one of these rags, information considered reliable and newsworthy. The article described how Cristian Vane, perennially-soused continent-jumping billionaire playboy, had recently been involved in a shootout while running drugs on the Red Sea. The article wasn’t sure how the escapade correlated with rumors of secretive doings on a farm in Ethiopia, whether he’d been growing cannabis or poppies there, or even if the pampered American adventurer, now kept under wraps in an international clinic for strung-out rock stars, had survived the relations-straining Red Sea battle.

Vane stewed for days over this swashbuckling criminal image fabricated by the sensational press. Fortunately he had constructive distractions that continually forced him to refocus. In moments alone he thought only of Mamuset’s new Highway, of his great responsibility, and of the enormous lesson he was still in the process of learning. That old guy in the desert was right: ego’s a monster. When it comes to seeing the big picture, the worst thing you can do is get bogged down in your microcosm’s details. Designing Mamuset had been possible from afar; micromanaging the completed project was another animal altogether. And as Vane got better, reality found new ways to wear him back down. He tried to run his world from bed, but remotely keeping the peace between squatting workers bordered on a full-time job. Supervisors were in and out of his room all day long. Again and again he was pushed to arbitrate fights between Afar and Amhara crews over rights to work as little as a few square yards of earth.

A similar bullheadedness possessed those individuals in charge of half-mile sections. Once their jobs were completed they became entrenched; refusing to be relocated, distrusting the asphalt-runners and threatening the rovers. While awaiting steamrollers, these workers grew meticulous with their plots, smoothing the new road surface ahead of the crews, cleaning stakes and trimming flags. As soon as the rollers became apparent as articulated heat waves, these men positioned themselves as human barriers. Not until they were paid in full on the spot would they relinquish their sites. When that last birr kissed their palms they took their camels offroad and began the long trek back to apply for more work.

* * *

Homecoming was tough for Vane.

The worst part was his pre-dawn cruise with an over-competent second-in-command, in a gift-laden Isis, on a road as smooth as polished glass. A thousand crew workers and section laborers proudly lined the way, each man waving a custom-made welcoming torch. But Vane, weary of ordering Mudhead to flash the Land Rover’s brights in response, slumped gloomily in his seat and nursed his battle wound with the dignity befitting a returning commander. Mudhead didn’t brag, or in any manner acknowledge his success--he seemed light years above that sort of thing; and that was another thorn in Vane’s craw. The CO’s initial compliments quickly tapered to grunts of approval, then to surly silence. Who were these people really waving at? By the time they’d reached the new Onramp, Vane’s mind was made up. He tore off his sling and used it to buff his turban’s sapphire, fluffed out his fresh-as-daisies black silk robes, and rose majestically behind his microphone while the citizens of Mamuset were being wakened by a chord like thunder.

For some reason the Afar appeared none the worse for his absence. Rather, they embodied Mudhead’s description of loyal dogs; patiently guarding the house while awaiting Master’s inevitable return.

But Mudhead’s analogy described behavior in a world of tooth and nail, against readily identifiable foes engaged in clearly defined assaults upon territory, propriety, and, ultimately, upon principle. That analogy did not embrace unknowable assailants cropping up in the dead of night, nor did it include the senseless dismembering of women, children, and animals. That kind of assault, on both body and soul, produced a much different reaction in the Afar--a very African reaction.

It happened one tranquil night, not long after that uncomfortable homecoming. Vane was lying flat on his back in an open field, watching the stars clumping and dispersing pyrotechnically while the plastic earth played with his shoulders and heels; nibbling here, massaging there, rolling over his ankles and wrists like warm water--clamping, gently but firmly, on his throat and limbs, tenderly pulling him down. He might have been swallowed without the least resistance, had not the exquisite peace been broken by a single electrifying scream. Vane tried to sit up, but the clamps only tightened. With all his strength he raised his head and forced his eyes wide.

An entirely naked, brightly painted savage leaped up just beyond his splayed feet, screaming insanely. The savage’s flesh, wherever unpainted, showed jet-black; its ivory-white eyes, lacking both irises and pupils, took up fully half its face. Vane somehow tore himself free and rose weightlessly, in slow motion, all the while struggling to free his lead-heavy jile from its sheath.

That strange screaming face transformed as it approached; first becoming a black leopard’s mask, then a scarab’s pinched mandible, and finally the rock-hard face of Mudhead, burning with deceit. As Vane watched, gaping, Mudhead’s face morphed into John Beregard’s spewing death mask, which in turn became the self-despising, negative-image face of Cristian Vane himself. Still screaming, the savage reached for him, its yellow nails like curling bamboo shoots.

The jile was anchored to the ground. Vane, his veins standing out on arms and forehead, snarled and strained until he’d torn it free. He swung the dead weight in an arcing motion, lopping off an arm before the jile’s tip, passing its zenith, fell like a shot to the ground. The savage screamed at its spurting stump, leaned in hard, and slashed at Vane’s face with its remaining claw. Again throwing all his will to the task, Vane swung his jile in a counter-arc, chopping off his assailant’s other arm at the elbow. The savage came on. Vane totally lost it; backpedaling while swinging the weapon side to side, screaming in return, hacking off one leg, hacking off the other. But the limbless monster continued to advance, a lurching, gory trunk swinging four gushing stumps. With a final effort Vane swung his jile like a Louisville slugger, cleanly decapitating the thing. The headless torso flopped around for a minute, jerked violently, and stopped.

Vane was all done in. He stumbled up to the settling head one frame at a time, saw his own dismembered hand drift off to lift it by the hair, saw the head turn under his fingers, scream maniacally, and bite down hard. Vane dropped it and staggered backward, the still-screaming head pursuing him like a bloody flesh ball, its eyes now huge empty sockets in a wildly contorted face. Vane saw it as through a camera’s blood-spattered lens, bouncing erratically as it neared, growing larger and larger until its gnashing, spewing, screaming mouth filled his vision.

He sat bolt-upright, marinated in sweat. The ghastly wash of a full moon was seeping between his Domo’s wide-open gills, capping the furniture with a fuzzy white veneer. He held his breath.

A scream tore across the still night like nails on a blackboard, followed a moment later by two others a hundred yards apart. Mongrels, howling in response, were immediately muted by owners, leaving only the nervous grunts of camels and cattle. To Vane, still in that half-conscious realm between slumber and full wakefulness, it all seemed an extension of the dream. He focused his senses. Half a minute later the screaming was renewed.

He’d just swung his legs off the bed when his door burst open to reveal the black-and-white ghost of Mudhead, hunched in a skewed rectangle of moonlight. Vane fumbled on his robes and, barefoot, stumbled up the Steps on his friend’s heels. From their vantage on Top Step, Mamuset’s dully glowing Streetlamps created a false impression of security and serenity. It was dead-quiet.

“Why,” Vane whispered, “isn’t anybody moving? Who’s been doing all that screaming?”

“Visitor,” Mudhead whispered back. “Mamusetman now stoneman. Try no-noise hide.”

“Hide from what?”

Another shriek, perhaps a quarter-mile away. The response, much nearer to their right, was quickly followed by a few seconds of commotion inside a Domo. Complete silence. Mudhead bent to his tripod. Vane, for some reason compelled to tiptoe, pulled his Massawa rifle from between the Big Clock and Grid Map. He spun off the wing nuts that secured the binoculars to their mounting, balanced his rifle’s barrel just above the trigger guard, and crouched to peek into the night scope’s blood-red unreality. Mamuset was a shantytown in Hell, the distant East Rim a dead ridge on Mars. He swept left to right, very slowly, until a pair of screams gave him a fix. A lanky black figure came loping out of a Domo, something in his hand glinting dully. Vane’s free eye squinted. The man, painted head to foot, was naked except for a thatch skirt, a massive necklace, and an oversize mask made up to frighten. A second later the figure was lost from view.

“Not one of ours.”

“Three…” Mudhead counted, “…four. Now two more on Street. Run crazy.”

“Let me see.” Vane peered into Mudhead’s mounted binoculars. Thermal imaging produced bright-line features vacillating from startlingly clear to irksomely muddy. The digital processors that made night detection possible created an artificial, two-dimensional image interrupted by a near-continuous vertical shift. Trying to control this shift only produced spikes, abstracted from moonlight, that broadened and shimmered with the least vibration. But Vane was able to locate his original culprit, and at least four others running Domo to Domo. He picked out a definite pattern: black form runs into Domo brandishing some kind of sword, scream of terror, scream of triumph, distant answering cry. He stepped back to his rifle, and found it slippery in his hands. Vane heard his voice say, “Sorry, Mudhead.”

“Sorry why?”

He took a very deep breath, trying to imagine his next move as a harmless, video game experience. “I don’t know. Maybe saying it first will make this easier.” Squinting into his eyepiece, he focused on one of those big ugly Halloween masks and froze. Just as its owner opened his mouth to scream, Vane simultaneously squeezed the trigger and slammed shut his eyes.

The shot, coming as it did in the razor stillness between screams, snapped and reverberated through Mamuset like the crack of a buggy whip. He briefly opened his scope eye, saw the mask jerk back and disappear. Vane’s face twisted into a godawful grimace, and for an instant time screeched to a halt. Then dogs were barking hysterically, and Mudhead was shouting beside him. Vane sagged, his trembling fingers releasing the rifle as though it were a hot frying pan’s handle. The gun fell butt-first between his big toes and he jumped back three feet.

“Real money shot,” Mudhead said appreciatively. “Man down. Otherman run to Rim.” He stepped aside. “Quick look.” Vane shook his head, his hands gripping the hard knot of his stomach. “Okay, Bossman. Stay put.” Mudhead melted off the Stage. In two minutes Isis’s horn was sounding on Stage Street. Vane pitched down the Steps and toppled into the passenger seat. Mudhead threw her into first.

By now every dog was howling bloody murder. Mudhead, guided only by his impression from the Stage, hurtled around corners to a Domo indistinguishable from its neighbors. In the front Yard of that Domo a few Afar were curiously creeping past Vane’s hard-flung, very spattered kill. Most of the population remained indoors.

“Cowards,” he mumbled, looking everywhere but down.

“Not coward. Afarman fierce fighter. But fight man, not spirit.”

Vane peered at the sprawled body. The top half of its head was a bloody plateau. “Looks pretty solid to me.”

Both men knelt. The Afar trickled out of doors. A feminine wail poured from a Domo across the Street. A pair of oxen smashed through an adjacent Yard. Somewhere children were chanting a family member’s name. A light crowd grew around the costumed American and his grim African friend. Mudhead picked up the dead man’s bloody machete by the fat of its blade, turned it in his fingers and gently set it back down. Vane lifted a corner of the mask with his thumb. It was heavy and quite large, secured by skull-and chin straps. A strangely familiar design: sharp horns, pointed tongue, long fangs, wild eyes. Underneath, what was left of the face was in repose and unpainted. He kept pushing the mask until the mess above the brow was covered. Vane’s initial adrenaline rush had passed, and he was gradually acknowledging something reserved for blue-moon fantasies: he had just killed a man.

“Recognize this mask?” his mouth asked.

Mudhead stood up. “Not Africaman.”

“You’re sure?”

“Hollywoodman.”

“What?”

Mudhead toed the painted horns and fangs, the clumsy thatch skirt. “Hollywood.” He nudged the multilayered bone necklace. The resulting clatter was certainly plastic. “Hollywood.” His big toe traced the swirls of body paint. “All Hollywood.”

Vane lifted the machete by its handle. “And this? This is Hollywood too?”

“This,” Mudhead said somberly, “Port Massawa.”

“You think?”

“All,” Mudhead extrapolated, “message Mamuset. Port Massawaman mean send Bossman scare.”

“But why not just take me out? What’s the point in killing innocent people?”

“No.” Mudhead shook his head. “Bossman still long way understand Africaman. Slow terror important. Quick death no big deal. Revenge long sweet feast. Dead Bossman,” he said, performing an abruptly-halted ballet with his fingers, “no more dance for Port Massawaman.” He watched a wave of black spiders scurrying up North Rim and nodded to himself. “Mudahid bet doughnut Massawa truck wait outside. Mudahid up bet one: Port Massawaman only tickle. Next time many more. But not Hollywoodman.” His ramrod forefinger directed Vane to the smashed face between them. “Next time real deal.” He peeled a mat off of Isis’s floor and draped it over the face.

The dark sheikh, rising slowly, found himself the awkward nucleus of a very primitive, very curious crowd. “Damn it, Mudhead, you’re right! A troop of Cub Scouts could take this place.” He appeared to gain confidence in standing erect. “Nobody pushes C.H. Vane around, man. Nobody!” He whooshed back a step, imagining himself a swirling, philosophic Zorro. The crowd did not whoosh with him. Vane tucked in his butt and pulled snug his wilting robes. “Mr. Mudahid,” he said with dignity, “I’m deputizing you.” The word seemed so out of place he felt compelled to address his people. “In America,” he said expansively, “to deputize means to bestow certain powers on the spot. Anybody can be a deputy. It could be you, or you. Or you! That’s because in America, man, nobody, but nobody is better than anybody else!” His words trailed off. “It’s a democracy,” he tried. The ring of faces waited. Vane deflated like a black toy balloon, mumbling, “Actually, it’s more of a democratic republic.”

Mudhead glared, turned, and delivered the most abrasive monologue Vane had ever heard. The crowd tightened with him, standing tall. It was a short speech. Mudhead turned back.

“Everyman understand. Tomorrow Afar fist rise with sun.” His normally reserved expression became frankly sardonic. “Democratman,” he said, sweeping his arm, “bring Bossman equal share Massawaman heart.” He inclined his head. “Unum.”

Vane looked man to man. There must have been a hundred standing around him now, waiting. It was like being surrounded by strings of black ping pong balls with white-painted eyes. “Okay then,” he said, nodding snappily. “Okay! If you guys need me, I’ll be in the War Room.”

* * *

Daybreak found Vane pacing the Stage like a caged beast. He hadn’t slept a wink; mentally repositioning bugs, tossing and turning through fantasies of valor and praise. What was it he’d told Mudhead…he’d said a rich man in this part of the world could equip a private army. It was just a matter of shifting Denise into high gear, and maybe throwing a few bones Tibor’s way.

Right after Strauss he began the militarization of Mamuset, repeating the manual of arms hourly. The Afar dutifully mimicked his actions, using wooden pallet ribs in place of rifles, while Mudhead barked out commands in Saho. With great ceremony Kid was made Site Sergeant, and permitted to wear Vane’s turban during drills. Site Sergeant Kid was the most thorough instructor imaginable, swaggering Square to Square and Street to Street, inspecting pallet ribs dawn to dusk and making sure every Afar male moved with speed and precision.

Vane was finding himself. He plagued the Foundation with calls; at first beseeching, then commanding. Within a week Mamuset’s mail plane took Mudhead to the Depot, where a Honey agent produced a wicker basket full of American cash. Mudhead, flown at ground level over a terrain familiar only to lizards, was put down in the outskirts of Massawa. The cold black soldiers in dark glasses paid scant attention to another basket-toting beggar inching down a crooked little street into a crooked little cinema.

For the next eight days drills were interspersed with rampart construction, a seamless process featuring chains of human worker-ants continuously porting miscellaneous material up Streets and Inner Slopes in order to fashion Rim Bulwarks. A typical Bulwark was roughly the size of a railroad car--basically a skeleton of bound wood ribs stuffed with debris and covered by a staked canvas tarp. Each Bulwark supported a standing aluminum ladder, that its flat roof might be accessed by marksmen. Bulwarks were separated by a space of twenty feet. In those spaces Mamusetans quickly built thatched Guard Posts, sturdy little huts modeled on the circular Amharic wattle-and-daub homes. But they differed from those solid-wall traditional homes, in that each Post utilized a single high broad window yielding a 180 degree desert vista. A Guard’s status was hard won and jealously sought. Posts were communally provisioned and universally envied; provided with, thanks to Vane’s hyper first-day spending spree, high-tech surveillance equipment, Post-to-Post “Intercoms,” and personal Nissan pickup trucks. Vane intended they also be provided with semi-automatic weapons, flare guns, and manually-operated sirens. Rim Road was quickly hewn, along with a series of steep Inner Slope ramps. Only the Mamusetans’ near-maniacal industriousness made it all come together so quickly. A casual observer would have seen countless crews busily attacking solid earth with the most basic of tools, with improvised wedges and levers, with bare hands. But unlike members of paid or compelled crews--pacing themselves or relaxing the moment the crew boss had passed--these workers approached their tasks passionately; wrestling for positions, shoving one another to be first to break a stone or fill a hole.

In the middle of construction Mudhead arrived on Vane’s old An’erim-Massawa Highway, riding shotgun in a tractor hauling a forty-eight foot, kemlite-lined Dorsey reefer with a malfunctioning refrigeration system. Windshield and doors were peppered with stickers indicating the rig had passed inspections by Eritrean military police. The trailer was backed into Dock, where Mudhead joined Vane, Kid, and a pair of strong pickax-wielding Afar. The driver unlocked the door and the Mamusetans rolled it up.

A blast of white cold burst from the trailer. Inside was a solid wall of frozen food: two whole sides of beef and three cheese wheels in bas relief, with chickens, pork butts, and lamb shoulders cemented in haphazardly. Everything was coated by a thick ice glaze.

“Now,” Vane said, addressing the two adults, “one guy on each side and start breaking away toward the middle. We’re cutting a corridor.” Halfway through Mudhead’s translation Kid stepped up to show his stuff. He bowed and saluted Vane sharply, clicked his bony ankles together, performed a dizzying about face, and snapped out an order. The two adult Afar produced their pickaxes at parade rest. In a brisk, efficient move, the Site Sergeant snatched one in each hand. Without further ado he began assaulting the ice wall, swinging both pickaxes insanely.

The men all jumped back, battered by flying chunks of frozen meat. “Wait!” Vane called out. “Damn it, Kid, that’s an order!” But Kid only swung with greater ferocity, grunting and yelping as he alternated swings left and right. Soon a jagged niche appeared between the sides of beef. Kid attacked this niche wildly, metal ringing on metal, occasionally embedding one pick and using the other to smash it free. When the first side of beef broke away it took a 3 x 5 piece of the trailer wall with it. Kid, with this advance, went berserk, all the men backing off for their lives as his pickaxes became whirling, slashing blurs. Five minutes later he staggered out into their embrace, his arms shaking out of his control, both tools solidly embedded. But he’d managed to clear a walkway through almost four feet of ice-locked meat and bone.

The two adult Afar left the pickaxes embedded. They fatigued the ice wall by rocking side to side on the handles, one man’s weight on each. A large section containing the second side and a wheel began to give. Vane and Mudhead stepped in to assist. Kid and the driver kicked out chunks sliding on the trailer’s floor. With four strong backs on it, the section immediately tore away. The men used their feet to shove the marlin-sized mass out onto the hot concrete platform.

The rest of the wall came away in substantial chunks. The hackers now encountered a barrier of wood and earth over Styrofoam slabs; actually one end of a huge mass surrounded by a foot-wide space stuffed with newspaper. This mass stood on a knee-high bed of pallets. Everything was iced over. The men used the blunt heads of their pickaxes to smash the ice veneer, then tore out all the paper and packing they could reach. The Styrofoam, wood, and earth came away easily, exposing stacked oblong crates wrapped in skins, canvas, and cloth.

The Afar wrestled off the top crate and eased it to the floor. It was quite heavy. Each crate measured four feet long by three feet wide by two feet deep. The trailer held eighty-four in all. Vane lifted out the lowered crate’s recessed top panel. Packed in straw, and wrapped in oilskins, were thirty-two M16A2s, laid butt-to-barrel. Vane plucked one out by its handle. He blew off pieces of caught straw and balanced it under Kid’s rolling eyes.

“The official rifle of the United States armed forces. Two thousand, six hundred and eighty-eight of ’em, if the head vulture can be trusted.” He laid a hand on Mudhead’s shoulder. “Mister Asafu-Adjaye, you done all right. And the rest of the stuff?”

“Siren, flare, more magazine come later. No problem search.”

“Excellent!” Vane posed menacingly with the rifle. The Afar grinned uncertainly. “It’s time to bring Mamuset into the so-called civilized world! Ring up Utility Squares! Roll out the pickups! And once these guns are stocked you can tell my people to lose their sticks. They’ll be using the real McCoy!”

From that moment on progress was smooth and practically effortless. While the Afar men were learning to handle their numbered weapons individually and in regiments, their women and children were training in a reloading exercise that rhythmically swept them between arbitrary field stations and Bulwarks. This maneuver, the Ripple, would come in handy down the road. Throughout training and drills, revolving Utility Square commanders distributed ammunition, graded results, and passed them to Kid, who was incapable of being pleased. And so gun-happy was Kid that Vane forbade the use of live ammunition during target practice. This drove Kid crazy. After a day of unbearable peace, he enlisted all the children of Mamuset to smack wood blocks together whenever men mock-fired their weapons. This drove Vane crazy. He retaliated by blasting rock music during drills, but succeeded only in further jazzing his manic Site Sergeant.

Soon Rim Road was completed, and all Posts and Bulwarks fully erected. Vane’s ammunition, hand-crank sirens, and miscellaneous materiel arrived at night by camel train.

The weeks passed. And as Mamuset rediscovered its center the punctual daily drills deteriorated to weekly random drills, much to Kid’s, and to the population’s, chagrin. Vane again stressed cultivation, exercise, and education. Rifles were assigned to numbered spaces in Utility Squares, just like any other implement.

The big scare was over.

For the first time a real lassitude descended on the crater. There were always new projects, always new problems, but interest plummeted with the passing of war fever. Days grew increasingly long, the Afar correspondingly less energetic.

And out of the great peace came a great boredom. Men tinkered, rather than worked. Greater free time meant greater leisure time. With leisure to bicker and side, the sense of purposeful community dissolved. The crater suffocated while Vane, resplendent in flowing black silk, grew impatient and crabby, pacing the Stage and alienating himself with petty outbursts and amplified asides.

He refused to acknowledge that the fabric of Mamuset was fraying, though in private he prayed long and hard for something to shake up the place. But, needful as he was, when the explosion came it caught him completely off guard.