A Home for the Old Ones

2

The next morning we all 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.

Personally, I couldn't see why the Old Ones needed to be kept orderly. For most people that standard 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. Naturally enough. It's what they grew up on, back when they were living on that first Food Factory itself, out in the Oort Cloud. They had come from all over the reservation when they heard the food bell. Now they were all pressing close to the truck, 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 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 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 the one who was 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 actually 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, "What for?"

I said, "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, so they'd 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 wasn't going to do her any 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 another five of them 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 language as I drove the van to the river.

It was a pretty day. Hot, of course, but 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 orbit to be caught in the Nairobi Lofstrom Loop. The place 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 it is that they like to do in the slack water at the bend—just swimming around, sometimes underwater, sometimes surfacing to breathe, is what it looks like. And there's almost always a croc squatting patiently on the beach, waiting for one of the babies to stray far enough away from the big ones 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 try to 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 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 riverbank as I would let them get, shaking and muttering fearfully to each other.

Fortunately they didn't have long to wait, because Geoffrey was right behind us in the truck with the goat projector. That was Geoffrey's own invention, and before I came he used to use live goats. I put a stop to that. We raise the goats for food and I'm not sentimental about slaughtering them, but I made sure the ones we used for aversion training were dead already.

While he was setting up, I gave myself a minute to enjoy the hippos. They're always fun, big ones the size of our van and little ones no bigger than a pig. The thing is, they look to me like they're enjoying themselves, and how often do you see a really happy extended family? I'm sure the big ones were aware of our presence, and undoubtedly even more aware of the crocs on the bank, but they seemed carefree.

"Okay, Grace," Geoffrey called, hand already on the trigger of the launcher.

"You may fire when ready," I said to him, and to the Old Ones: "Watch!" They did, scared but fascinated, as the goat carcass soared out of the launcher and into the water, well downstream from the hippo families so there wouldn't be any accidents.

You wouldn't think a crocodile could run very fast, with those sprawly little legs and huge tail. You'd be wrong. Before the goat hit the water all three of the crocs were doing their high-speed waddle down to the river's edge. When they hit the water, they disappeared; a moment later, all around the floating goat, there were half a dozen little whirlpools of water, with an occasional lashing tail to show what was going on under the surface. The show didn't last long. In a minute that goat was history.

I glanced at the hippos. They hadn't seemed to pay any attention, but I noticed that now all the big ones were on the downstream side of the herd and the babies were on the other side, away from the crocs.

"Show's over," I told the Old Ones. "Back in the van!" I said, pointing to make sure they understood. They didn't delay. They were all shivering as they lined up to climb back in, one by one. I was just about to follow them in when I heard Geoffrey calling my name. I turned around, half in the van, and called, "What's the problem?"

He pointed to his communicator. "Shelly just called. You know that guy who claims he owns the Old Ones? He's back!"

All the way back I had one hand on the wheel and my other hand on my own communicator, checking with Shelly—yes, the son of a bitch did have a pass this time—and then with Nairobi to see why they'd allowed it. The headquarters guy who answered the call was Bertie ap Dora. He's my boss, and he usually makes sure I remember that. This time he sounded really embarrassed. "Sure, Grace," he said, "we issued a pass for him. We didn't have any choice, did we? He's Wan."

It took me a moment. Then, "Oh, my God," I said. "Really? Wan?" And when Bertrand confirmed that Wan was who the mysterious stranger was, identity checked and correct, it all fell into place. If it was Wan, he had been telling the truth. He really was the owner of the Old Ones, more or less, because legally he was the man who had discovered them. Well, that didn't actually make much sense in my book. If you stopped to think about it, Wan himself had been discovered as much as the Old Ones had. However, it didn't have to make sense. That was the way Gateway

Corp. had ruled—had given him property rights in the place where the Old Ones had been discovered and ownership of everything on the site—and nobody argued with the findings of Gateway Corp.

The thing about the Old Ones was that they had been found on a far-out, orbiting Heechee artifact, and it was the Heechee themselves who had put them there, all those hundreds of thousands of years ago when the Heechees had come to check out Earth's solar system. They were looking for intelligent races at the time. What they discovered were the ancestors of the Old Ones, the dumb, hairy little hominids called australopithecines. They weren't much, but they were the closest the Earth had to the intelligent race the Heechee were looking for at the time, so the Heechee had taken away some breeding stock to study. And when the Heechee got so scared that they ran off and hid in the Core, all the hundreds of millions of them, they left the australopithecines behind. They weren't exactly abandoned. The Heechee had provided them with the Food Factory they inhabited, so they never went hungry. And so they stayed there, generation after generation, for hundreds of thousands of years, until human beings got to Gateway. And, the story went, one of those human beings, and the only one who survived long enough to be rescued, was the kid named Wan.

As soon as I got to the compound, I saw him. He wasn't a kid anymore, but he wasn't hard to recognize either. His size picked him out; he wasn't all that much taller than some of the Old Ones, a dozen or so of whom had gathered around to regard him with tepid interest. He was better dressed than the Old Ones, though. In fact, he was better dressed than we were. He'd forgotten about the fur collars—sensibly enough—and the outfit he was wearing now was one of those safari-jacket things with all the pockets that tourists are so crazy about. His, however, was made of pure natural silk. And he was carrying a riding crop, although there wasn't a horse within five hundred kilometers of us. (Zebras don't count.)

As soon as he saw me, he bustled over, hand outstretched and a big, phoney smile on his face. "I'm Wan," he said. "I don't blame you for the misunderstanding yesterday."

Well, there hadn't been any misunderstanding and I didn't feel any blame, but I let it go. I shook his hand briefly. "Grace Nkroma," I said. "Head ranger. What do you want here?"

The smile got bigger and phonier. "I guess you'd call it nostalgia. Is that the word? Anyway, I have to admit that I'm kind of sentimental about my Old Ones, since they sort of took care of me while I was growing up. I've been meaning to visit them ever since they were relocated here, but I've been so busy—" He gave a winsome little shrug, to show how busy he'd been.

Then he gazed benevolently around at the Old Ones. "Yes," he said, nodding. "I recognize several of them, I think. Do you see how happy they are to see me? And I've brought them some wonderful gifts." He jerked a thumb at his vehicle. "You people had better unload them," he told me. "They've been in the car for some time, and you should get them into the ground as soon as possible." And then he linked arms with a couple of the Old Ones, and strolled off, leaving us to do his bidding.