Alexandrian Light
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1990 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was
created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All other rights are reserved. Thank
you for honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company,
www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
The rain continued to drive into the trees
above them, dripping from the highest canopies to the shorter trees, then onto
the lower vines and creepers. It dribbled along the leaves to fall finally in
heavy dollops that Pereira called gotarãos. The two men sat outside the
small tent that sheltered the radio, their tools, and the dynamite. Both
listened carefully to the transmissions on the military band, though Hacker
understood no Portuguese.
The garrison at Obidos,
Pereira told Hacker, was falling to the Soviets.
Hacker again pulled the length of cloth from his
knapsack. Even in this grey light its colors were brilliant and shifted subtly
across the spectrum as his hands moved beneath it. A drop fell and pooled there.
Hacker turned the cloth over, and the water rolled off. He felt where it had
been. Dry. But the material seemed too soft, too natural to repel so completely.
The shifting colors shimmered hypnotically.
Pereira
had switched bands and had more news. Someone was bombing Manaus. If it was the
Americans, they would be able to stop the Soviet convoy on the Amazon and shield
the paratroops who had dropped hours ago into Cairo.
So it was the Americans who would arrive here first.
It didn't matter. Hacker and Pereira had made up their minds hours ago when they
had pieced together what was happening and why. They had decided how they would
act, and that decision meant that it mattered little who arrived first.
If the Americans found them, they would see Hacker
as a traitor. Traitors didn't get trials these days. If the Soviets were to
arrive first, they would see Hacker as a saboteur. In either case, Pereira was
an accomplice.
Their one chance for survival, aside
from the unlikely possibility of remaining undetected in the jungle, had been to
be captured by the Sino-Japanese. Hacker reasoned that, of the three
superpowers, they were the least imperialistic. They were more interested in
maintaining the balance of power than in getting an edge on the Soviets and the
Americans. The Sino-Japanese might even welcome the two geologists as heroes.
But the Asians were still crossing the Andes from Peru. Their army would be the
last on the scene.
Pereira killed the radio. The
paratroops cutting their way through the jungle would arrive soon, and air
support much sooner. They could put it off no longer.
Together they gathered their dynamite.
*
* *
The walk to the site was much easier than
the first time when they had hacked their way through with machetes to
investigate what they had assumed was a meteorite impact. It had seemed like an
adventure, a fine excuse to leave off the serious work of their geological
survey.
* * *
Not a hundred meters from where they had
left the tent, there it was, cracked open like two nut halves on the black
jungle floor. The child-sized bodies were covered with a fabric that changed
colors as Hacker moved around to examine them again. Not human, but, mangled
though they were, not unimaginably alien. Tetrapods. Close-set, forward-looking
eyes. Membranes that might be ears. Openings that might be mouths, once capable
of uttering who-knows-what extraordinary thoughts and wondrous sounds. About
them lay pieces of their fantastic machinery.
Strange, Hacker thought, but these twisted bodies
sticky with red blood did not repulse him. In their strangeness, in the slight
swelling of their forms, they seemed somehow angelic. And that, he thought, was
the problem. Who knows what swords angels may bear?
As he and Pereira packed the dynamite inside the
ship, piled in the bodies and mysterious objects, Hacker wondered; Who am I,
doing this?
A Viking in Ireland?
An Ostrogoth chieftain?
Cortez?
He connected the
caps and spooled out wire as he walked back into the jungle. He set down the
equipment and went back to push the two halves of the small ship together in
order to maximize the blast damage. He stepped back for a last look, and he
knew. Goths, Vikings, Conquistadors, all had been great vandals. But he was none
of these. He knew better than any of them what he was destroying. He was like
one of Caesar's centurions, standing in the libraries of Alexandria, torch
aloft-- overawed and admiring-- before letting the
torch fall.
* * *
Out of the explosion grew another sound: the
beating of metal wings. A helicopter gunship roared over their heads. Then
another, and another.
Hacker stuffed the length of
cloth, shimmering now red, now gold, now blue and green, into his knapsack. And
the rain came falling in the huge drops Pereira called gotarãos, following them
into the jungle, flooding their footprints away.
Published by Alexandria Digital
Literature. (http://www.alexlit.com/)
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