Leo Frankowski - CONRAD'S QUEST FOR RUBBER

The young women of the tribe were all very appreciative of the small gifts my men gave to them, and the elders of the tribe were seen to be actively encouraging their daughters to please us.

I would be most embarrassed if my mother ever heard about the mass sexual orgy that ensued. While I had made no promises to Maude concerning my own chastity, it had been my firm intention to stay sexually true to her. This proved to be impossible in the induced madness that enveloped us.

Perhaps I am merely making excuses for my own conduct, but in later conversations with my men, I learned that the most subdued of them copulated with at least seven of the natives, and I have mental images of literally dozens of different young ladies under me. We could not possibly have been that virile without some sort of external stimulation!

That drink would make a very profitable product if sold in Europe, but I don't think the Church would approve of its sale!

All this fornication was accompanied by equally heavy drinking by everyone in the village. I thought that my own people drank too much, but we were but children compared to these native villagers. They continued on with the party long after we were comatose. At least, when I awoke in the night to relieve myself, the dancing and drinking were still going strong, with not an explorer in sight near the campfire.

It was the following afternoon before most of us departed that village.

We left a lance of men behind, confident that they would get along well with the natives.

That evening, we thanked Jane, the warrior woman, for her help. We gave her a knife, a machete, and an axe, along with some necklaces she liked, a sharpening stone, and a bag of salt tablets that all of the natives craved. We then offered to take her back to her home village.

Jane refused to go. It seems that by spanking her for spitting on me, I had permanently dishonored her somehow in the eyes of her tribe. She said that when she swam out to our boat and tried to kill me, she had done it because she had already been drummed out of her tribe. She had come expecting us to kill her.

It was rather like what they say a Musselman does when he can no longer stand the pain of being alive. He puts on his best clothes, prepares his best weapons, mounts his best horse, and charges into his enemies, trying to kill as many of them as possible before they kill him. The custom is called "Running Amok."

Further conversation with our former captive convinced us that if we simply ejected her from the boat, without friends to guard her back, she would soon die in the forest. She had been useful to us thus far, and while we all found her masculine mannerisms in combination with her feminine body to be offensive, after consultation with my knights, I decided to let her stay aboard.

Over the next few weeks, we established three more trading stations and survived three more orgies, which the locals insisted on. When we tried to back out, they became extremely insulted, and it was only with great difficulty that we repaired the breach.

A number of changes came over Jane. As her body paint began to wear away, she looked like she was dying of some horrible skin disease. She made no attempt at replacing it, and in a few weeks the color was gone. The dye in her hair was growing out more slowly, but whatever dye she had used to stain her nipples and privy members seemed to be permanent. When someone questioned her about it, the painful process she described seemed to be something like tattooing.

When I asked her about her body paint, she said that she no longer had the right to wear her tribe's colors.

One of my men noticed her smearing herself with a clear tree sap and asked her about it. She said that it kept the insects from biting.

Now, this was a wonderful thing to hear, since we were constantly plagued by the little bastards. As things were, you had your choice of wearing a complete set of clothes, and suffocating, or you could strip down and be eaten by the mosquitoes. Naturally, he tried the stuff out.

It turned out that it did not exactly repel the bugs, but rather, it made your skin so sticky that they stuck to you but could not bite through the glue, so you did not get bitten. You had to learn to ignore the insects buzzing on your skin, and if you were going to wear the stuff at all, you had to go completely naked. It had the habit of gluing your clothes to your body.

At first we thought we had a salable product here, but on later thought, we decided that its limitations were too great for it to have a market in Europe. In time, however, we all got to using the stuff regularly, washing it off and replacing it twice daily.

But a bigger change in Jane was in her bearing, or maybe it was in her self-image. Perhaps it had something to do with being around heterosexual people, and noticing the way my men and I reacted to pretty native girls. Tomaz noticed it first.

He said, "Is it just me needing a woman, sir, or is Jane starting to act feminine?"

I said that maybe she was starting to pick up on our customs. I suggested that if he was thinking of getting physical with her, it was up to them, but I followed the lead of Lord Conrad and recommended he take it slow. If anything ever developed between the two, I never heard of it.

It had been raining nonstop for weeks, and joking reports from the lookouts contained sightings of Noah's Ark. I let it go and even laughed about it. Anything that raised the men's spirits was good.

At about this time, the radio died for good. The wet, the funguses, and the insects did electronic components no good at all. With the old style spark-gap transmitters and coherer-type receivers, you could putter with the things and completely rebuild them when you had to, and in time it would work again, after a fashion. With these modern things, well, once a tube burned out, it was useless, and no amount of fiddling, hard work, or prayer did you any good at all. We were out of tubes, and everything else was rusting vigorously.

Other things on board were wearing out and rotting much faster than usual. I was finding mushrooms growing in my locker, and any food that was not sealed in a glass jar or one of the new metal cans was rotten. It was good that we had mostly stopped wearing clothes, because our supply of uniforms wouldn't have lasted out the season, let alone a whole year.

The wood that our boat was made out of was starting to rot, as well. It was brand-new, first-quality oak, most of it, and it was rotting! Before long I had three men navigating the boat, and eleven more working to keep it repaired!

With the four trading posts we had set up — with a lance of men at each — I had only two lances left on board. The plan was to go another gross miles upstream, map the river, and set up a fifth post if we found a suitable site. Then we would go back and visit the other posts. I hoped that at least one of them still had a working radio.

We rounded a bend in the huge river and found ourselves steaming across a huge lake. At least two other boats should have been ahead of us, but when we had a radio, neither of them had mentioned the lake to us. Still, they could not possibly have missed it.

Besides being very large, the lake had other peculiarities as well. There were trees growing right out of the water, and in some areas they grew so thick they blocked out the sun. The trees back home would drown if their roots were flooded, but there were thousands of kinds of strange trees in this forest, and most of them seemed to be healthy.

Jane could offer no advice, since her home was a gross miles away. Being a primitive, she was much like a peasant in never before having been far away from home. The lake was as new to her as it was to us.

We steamed on, keeping the north bank in sight in accordance with my instructions. We were surprised to find that some of the huge trees in their watery meadows had people living in them. I would have investigated further, but other problems surfaced.

Two men acquired painful infections in their privy members, with a white pus dripping out. I had never seen the like of it, and there was no mention of it in the medical manual. The salves we had were ineffective, and there was nothing for it but to wait and see if it went away.

The next day, eight of the sixteen people we had on board came down with a severe fever. Often delirious, they could do little but lie in their beds and either shiver or sweat profusely.

Again, none of our medications did these men any good, and their temperatures grew alarmingly high.

The day after, four more people were down with the fever. There were no longer enough of us to manage the boat, take care of the sick, and map the shoreline. When I felt myself getting light-headed, I had the boat tied up to one of the trees in the middle of the lake. There was nothing left that we could do but go to bed and see whether or not we would survive.

The fever came and went for many days. Most of the time, you were flat on your back, unable to move. Occasionally, you felt almost normal, for a while, and then you could get up and help out with those who were more badly off.

Only Jane stayed healthy, and I think that without her we all would have died.

I don't know how long we stayed tied to that tree. I lost all sense of time, and often there was no one awake enough to keep the logbook up to date. Jane by this time was speaking a mixture of Polish and Pidgin, but no one had even begun to teach her to read or write. As it was, she did yeoman service keeping us in water and food.

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN MARCH 10, 1251, CONCERNING DATE UNKNOWN, 1250

AFTER I don't know how many weeks or months, I awoke feeling almost healthy and certainly hungry. I called out, but no one answered. The room was dark, more so than the lowered blinds could account for. The bed wasn't level. As I looked around in the gloom, it seemed the floor had an undulating quality about it, and that the walls were no longer straight.

Sure that I was still delirious, I closed my eyes again and slept.

When I awoke once more, the room was somewhat lighter, but all else was the same. The floor really was bumpy and bent, the screened walls were far from straight, and the ceiling sagged. There were strange forest sounds about me, and I was sure the boat was no longer afloat.

I went to remove the sheet that covered me, and for the first time noticed my hand. It looked ancient and wrinkled, and my fingernails were incredibly long, longer than they had ever been, longer even than those that some European highborn ladies cultivate to prove they never have to work.

I fumbled for my bayonet, on the nightstand, to trim my nails with. When I pulled it from the sheath, it was rusty. I dropped it, and it knocked a deep dent in the floor.

Had months gone by? Years?

I touched my face, my beard, and found it to be very long, longer than my fingers. Before I fell sick, I had been cleanshaven.

I called out again, and again, no one answered.

Was I truly alone? Could all the others be dead? Surely they would never abandon me!

With great effort, I sat up in the bed and twisted so my feet were on the floor. I marveled at how thin my thighs had become. I felt my chest, and could feel every rib under my fingers.

I stood, shaking, and slowly made my way to the kitchen, expecting to see the remains of bodies scattered around. It was not as bad as I feared. Most of the beds in the common room were gone. There were four beds left, and they showed signs of use.

The kitchen was untidy, the breakfast dishes unwashed, but the scraps on them were no more than a few hours old. There was cold food left in a pot. I found a spoon, sat down, and ate. I drank a canteen filled with water, and then stumbled to the door to relieve myself in the latrine at the stern. The forest came right up to the doorway. There was no sign of the lake that we steamed in on. The Magnificent Maude was sitting on the forest floor, her formerly straight lines all bent and slumped, and she was in the process of rotting away. Ants swarmed over the hull.