Chapter 5

The pilot was waiting for them up—or down—river, but he was surprised to see them again.

“I left a voice mail for your supervisor and told him I thought you was dade.” He was from Alabama and had found a market for his pilot services in the less accessible reaches of the Amazon River basin in Brazil. When Americans came here and had a reason to get into the rain forest—usually university researchers and such—they were drawn to the American-speaking pilot. He charged a premium for friendliness.

Remo didn’t want friendliness or any other kind of social interaction.

The pilot was sitting on the pontoon of his water-landing helicopter and watching them come. The silence was uncomfortable. These two seemed mad at each other. The pilot tried hard to lighten the mood. “But you ain’t dade!”

“No. We are not.” The dark-haired younger fellow was the grumpy sort. The old Far Eastern man was off in his own world, but a young white fellow had no business being so off-putting.

“You all ready to head on home?”

“Yes.” The young man stepped off the shore onto the pontoon—no small thing, since the helicopter had drifted eight feet or more out into the sluggish waters of the small Amazon tributary.

“Man alive, you a track star or something?”

Then the old man, who had to be in his nineties, made the same leap, as if it were nothing. The pilot decided his eyes were playing tricks and he had to be a lot closer to the bank than he thought.

“Let’s go,” the young one griped. He was twisting his hands as if he was nervous or mad or something. The man had wrists as fat as a skinny girl’s leg. He slipped into the rear of the helicopter. They moved smooth, those two. The chopper wasn’t exactly stable on the water and usually it was rocking and rolling when passengers came aboard.

“I’ll just get the line,” the pilot said.

The old man waved his hand at the taut cable, and the cable snapped with a twang. The old man got in; the pilot concluded the geezer had to have been packing some sort of Ginsu knife up his sleeve.

There was definitely more to these guys than met the eye.

“Find what you was looking for?” the pilot asked as he went through the start-up routine.

Nobody answered. The pilot shut up and took off.

“You were obstinate and childish. I tire of your tirades.” Chiun spoke in Korean, the one language besides English in which Remo was fluent.

“I’m tired of being the brunt of everybody’s myths and legends. Did you set me up for that, Chiun? Were you trying to teach me some god-awful lesson?”

“I set nothing up.”

“Seems like everything fell right into place.”

“Nothing fell into anything. I am not playing puppeteer.”

“What were you doing on that mountain all night?”

Chiun sighed. He was looking out the windows, watching the jungle below them and the rotors above. One of the rotors had a slight vibration that was probably harmless, but Chiun intended to monitor it carefully. “I went with the Caretaker to see the place from which he spoke to Sa Mangsang. You recognized his voice, I assume?”

Remo had recognized the voice of the Caretaker. It had been the voice he heard chanting, arising from the living rock of a basalt island in the Pacific Ocean. It had been the Caretaker’s lullaby to an elder god, which lulled the great being and helped Remo and Chiun send Sa Mangsang back into his comatose state.

If they had not done so—if Sa Mangsang had gained sufficient strength to exert his will over Remo—then the world would not be carrying on in its typical, heedless fashion. In fact, there might not have been a world left. Remo pondered for a moment how the Caretaker’s voice was heard a half-world away. He seriously doubted this fellow had been vacationing in the South Pacific lately.

Then he mentally waved away the thought. It was just one more minor mystery. He’d had enough of all mysteries, great and small. He wanted to think about earthly things.

Remo and Chiun had gone to the island, newly risen from the ocean and serving as the apex of a drain in the ocean floor. Somehow, Sa Mangsang had opened a channel for the water into the mantle of the earth. The water became superheated and flowed back to the surface, exploding out of the earth’s crust in the form of miles-high geysers of boiling steam. The geysers had come from the ocean near the Hawaiian Islands and from a place in the Rocky Mountains. And it had erupted from the Amazon jungle, where it killed every living thing for miles around it.

But these geysers were only the side effect. Two geysers also formed in the Antarctic, where the millions of gallons of water froze—and stayed. In its solidified form, it didn’t return to the oceans like the water from the other geysers. It just kept piling up as more and more ice. Sa Mangsang, true to his prophecy, was draining the oceans dry.

Desperate scientists had come up with a hundred different eventual outcomes—none of them good. Some said that Earth would shift in its orbit. Some said the climate would become radically unstable. Some said the weight of the ice would build up to such a degree it would impact the actual drifting of the continental tectonic plates.

Whatever the outcome was, they concluded that the human race would not be around to see it all happen. Climate extremes would have wiped out everybody soon enough.

There was more to the looming catastrophe, of which the world knew nothing. Sa Mangsang would feed off the “sensitive” people of the world, consuming them for the vital nutrients their specially tuned minds gave him.

Remo might have been used as the delivery boy. If Sa Mangsang had succeeded in holding Remo in his thrall… But Sa Mangsang failed—with the help of the gentle chant of a man in a cave in the Amazon rain forest.

“You’re right,” Remo said. “I should have thanked the Caretaker. If it weren’t for his chanting, Sa Mangsang would have turned me into his gopher.”

Chiun said, “On the mountain, the Caretaker showed me the cave where his legend is engraved. There was a speaking tube there. I did not know of its existence.”

Remo wanted to stay irritated, but he was also curious. “How’d the bird fit into all of it?”

“The bird was a gift to the Caretaker from his grandfather, who mentored him. The grandfather fetched the egg for his protégé and was killed from the fall. The bird hatched, and the people believed it was the reincarnation of the dead Caretaker.”

“Maybe he’s in there, but he’s not alone. When he was talking sense, the bird spoke like the head of a committee. What about the dirty ditties?”

The parrot had displayed a vast repertoire of bawdy limericks—in English.

“The legacy of an anthropologist who lived with the People many years ago.”

Remo nodded absently. “You know I didn’t fulfill any stupid prophecy.”

“I know nothing of the kind.”

“Look, I was bored. I had no clue how long you were going to be hiking the foothills. Call me a neat freak— I just wanted to tidy up the place. When I started seeing all the greenery under the bodies, it made me feel good. After the drug lord ran out of steam, I buried the rest of the villagers and buried all the dead animals. I had to stand under a waterfall for an hour to get the smell off.”

Chiun nodded. “You should have stood under it for two hours.”

“The point is, I was just passing the time.”

“What of the new People?”

“That was a hundred percent the bird’s doing. I found him flapping around the tree about midmorning with the kid. The bird told me he had more People on their way. Of course, you can’t put faith in what the bird says, so I climbed up the tree and watched him until I spotted more People. He was leading them to the tree where the boy was. I figured I might as well fix up the village, feed the kid, get the supplies.”

“Restore the village for the new People,” Chiun concluded.

“So call me Suzy Homemaker. But don’t call me Qetzeel the Destroyer.”

“I did not call you Qetzeel.”

“You believed the old man.”

“The Caretaker’s faith served him well, Suzy. Why should I not believe what he believes? He has seen the legend of his creation reenacted before his eyes. The People are made anew. They were gathered together around the only survivor, the Caretaker, and this is precisely how the People came into being in their previous incarnation. And in the incarnation before that.”

Remo saw green under the helicopter. It went off in every direction. The jungle was huge. But when they were on the ground, in the midst of the dead zone, it had felt like the entire world was dead.

“What do you mean, the time before that?” he asked suddenly. “You mean this happens over and over?”

Chiun was still staring out the window. “That is the legend of the People.”

“And the Caretaker is always the one who survives to reform the new People?”

Chiun nodded. “So the legend says. I know not if it is true. I do not know what catastrophe comes to slay the people—if it is not always Sa Mangsang.”

Remo became angry again. “So why didn’t you tell the Caretaker to move the damn People somewhere else? Obviously, that patch of real estate ain’t safe. Maybe if they moved away from the cave with the speaking tube, they wouldn’t get wiped out over and over.”

Chiun considered that. “The Caretaker’s role is not to care for the People, Remo. Even the man himself does not realize the scope of his destiny. He is the Caretaker of Sa Mangsang. He lives to do what this man did—speak to Sa Mangsang—or to train a protégé to carry on for him. The People’s purpose is to sustain the lineage of Caretakers.”

Remo chewed on that and he didn’t like the taste of it. “So, we just set those People up to die?”

“Not this generation, or the next, but some generation in the future.”

“That stinks. They’re pawns. They ought to be told what they’re being used for.”

“Used by whom?”

“I don’t know,” Remo said. “Somebody.”

“And if there were no People?” Chiun asked. “There would be no Caretaker. If there was no Caretaker, there would have been no voice to lull Sa Mangsang into slumber. Where would the world be, Remo, if not for this band of orphans adopted into this special purpose?”

Remo twisted his fists and clenched his lips. “Dammit! I hate all this crap. What’s it supposed to mean? I’m just like one of the People, Chiun?”

“I did not say this,” Chiun replied.

“I’m an orphan. I’m destined to serve some great purpose and fulfill some old-time prophecy. I’m just like the People, huh? Dammit all to hell, what’s it take for a guy to get a little bit of control over his own life?”

Chiun frowned. “Few men control their own destiny.”

“But most people have real-world problems. They don’t go running around having their sailboat blown off course by Zeus in heaven. Or whatever high-and-mighty deity of the day is meddling in my affairs.”

Chiun pointed out, “But look at the greatness such destiny has bestowed upon you, Remo. You have achieved what no other white man before you ever achieved—you are blessed with the mastery of the art of Sinanju. It is a rare and precious gift.”

“Yeah.”

“You doubt this?” Chiun demanded.

“I’m just wondering what life would have been like if I hadn’t been the answer to everybody’s myths and expectations.” Remo saw the glimmer of an outpost of civilization in the distance. “What if I’d had a regular life?”

“Fah!” Chiun dismissed it with a wave. “You would be dead. Or obese and filthy.”

“But I’d be master of my own destiny.”

“You would be master of a hovel on a rank street in the city of New Jersey. You would doubtless be cuckolded by your strident wife and disdained by your belligerent children. You would spend your days directing traffic on street corners and your weekends watching sports programs on the television.”

“Sounds okay.”

“It sounds repulsive. You would probably shoot yourself in the head with a clumsy firearm out of sheer boredom.”

“Maybe.”

“You would never have found your sire. You would never have known you were linked by blood to the Sun On Jo people. Thus, you would never have known that you are blessed with the greatness of the glorious lineage of Sinanju. Blood much polluted by other strains of humanity, yes, but still tinged with a measure of excellence.”

Remo felt the world cloud his thoughts. “Fate did have it in for me.”

Chiun looked out the window, watching the ugly Brazilian outpost loom large underneath them.