The Brave New World - 164 Smelly Business

The next item on Samir’s agenda for this particular Earth day was seeing Paul Leduc, the supermarket owner. He’d agreed to deliver food, food he’d imported from the New World, to Leduc’s store. He’d agreed to deliver so much that it had to be broken into instalments, and the first instalment was due at the beginning of the month.

Samir loaded five kilos of fruit and vegetables into his backpack, and put another five kilos of dried fish on the rear carrier of his bicycle. This was nearly half of all the food in the storeroom; he really couldn’t take any more. He wheeled his bicycle down the path leading to his house and onto the lane that led to the main road.

The air smelled odd, as if someone was burning trash not too far away. Samir looked at the soldiers digging holes for the corner posts of the barracks building. A couple of them raised their heads to look at him and smiled and waved, and he waved back. Feeling reassured, he mounted his bike and started pedaling.

He saw the source of the odor hanging in the air soon after he’d turned into the main road. A column of smoke rose above the sea of roofs of corrugated sheet metal stained with rust. He could also see smoke twisting up into the sky from a couple of spots further away. A shiver of dread ran down his back; he gritted his teeth and hit the pedals harder, speeding up.

It was good that he did. A couple of youths ran out from a passage between the buildings and it was obvious that they wanted to intercept him, and failed only because he was going too fast for them to do so. A stone swished through the air a hand’s breadth from Samir’s ear, and bounced on the road ahead of his bike.

Samir swerved to the center of the road and stood up on the pedals and kept going as fast as he only could. When he finally reached the supermarket, he was drenched in sweat and gasping for breath.

There was a thin ring of people surrounding the supermarket – skinny, ugly people in dirty clothes. They reminded Samir of the scum that formed around the rim of a pot with boiling soup. Luckily, the deliveries gate was open to admit an ox-drawn cart half-full of sacks and crude crates.

Samir skidded to a stop right behind it, and was relieved to see that one of the guards at the gate recognized him. They exchanged nods, and a moment later he was inside the delivery compound and the gate was clanging shut to an accompaniment of protesting shouts.

“Samir!” Leduc exclaimed, rising from his seat. “It’s so good to see you. You brought goods for me?”

“Some, yes,” said Samir. He slung his back pack off his shoulders and put it on the desk and said:

“You never told me you’re going into the New World.”

“I didn’t?” Leduc seemed to be genuinely surprised. Then his face cleared, and he said:

“Of course. We haven’t seen each other for a few days. Yes, I got a colonizer’s license. I was forced to. All of my old suppliers are out of business. My whole supply chain has simply ceased to exist. If it goes on like this, I’ll have to close down the store.”

“You can’t do that!” cried Samir, horrified. Leduc’s supermarket figured largely in his plans.

“I can, and I will if I have to. Did you see what’s happening outside?”

“I saw some people,” Samir said cautiously.

“They’re are all waiting for the right moment to storm the store, and steal everything I’ve got. And half my security force is missing. Those idiots all bought implants, and replicated in the New World. They’re all busy getting rich. The ones that are here have already died of thirst and hunger over there. A few were killed. Can you imagine? I only hire the best. A couple of my security guards have won bodybuilding contests. And they were killed by some guy with a kid. The kid had a bow and plenty of arrows and they were helpless.”

“Why don’t you take a look at what I’ve brought,” Samir said quickly. Leduc acquiesced. After a while, he declared:

“This isn’t much. I hope you’re bringing more, soon.”

“Four to five days,” said Samir. He swallowed, and asked:

“You founded your own colony?”

“Yes. A long way from here, though. Launching in or near Mumbai is crazy. It’s like arriving in a nudist colony. A hostile nudist colony, not like one of those places that used to exist where everyone smiled and said you were beautiful no matter how ugly you were. I went all the way up to Vaitarna River and hired a boat, and launched from Jhow Island. There were some naked fools already present there, but I had nine good men with me and we sorted them out quickly. Some stayed with us, some left. Know what I mean?”

The look Leduc gave Samir clearly indicated that he had already come to a conclusion regarding the killers of his security guards in the New World. Samir had told Leduc quite a lot about his colony in order to win him over to his plan; now he regretted it. He realized it was one of those moments that involved a clear-cut choice. He could lie and make an enemy for life, or he could be frank and maybe, just maybe, he would gain a friend. He said:

“I think I might have killed those people of yours. I ran into a couple of fellows who tried to take over one of my settlements. They just wouldn’t listen. I had no choice.”

“Oh,” Leduc said. He massaged one of the mangoes Samir had brought him, and said:

“Don’t worry about it. They bought their implants without consulting me. They paid their price.”

He put the mango he’d been caressing back on his desk, and added:

“We have to work closely together, you and I. It’s the only way we’ll survive. Do you know what’s happening in the city? People are running around and slitting each other’s throats. They’ve been told that the moment the New World is opened up everything will be just fine within days. The only thing that has been keeping them down was hope. A lot of those fools sold everything they had to buy an implant. And two days later – after a couple of weeks in the New World – they crash and burn.”

“Crash and burn?”

“The Americans have this expression for total failure,” Leduc said. “It’s very graphic, very convincing. Whenever the Americans come up with something, it’s very graphic and convincing. Even when it’s completely stupid.”

Samir wasn’t sure what Leduc was talking about. He seemed to have gone off into a kind of trance. Samir waited politely for a while, then said:

“I wanted to get a few things from you. Tea, sugar, flour, cooking oil.”

Leduc stared at him as if Samir had gone mad.

“You’re sure you don’t want any champagne?” he asked.

After a difficult twenty minute question-and-answer session followed by some shouts and curses, Samir left with three hundred-gram packs of leaf tea, a kilo of sugar and another of flour, and a two-liter jug of cooking oil. It cost him one rupee and twenty paise in the new currency. The money Rani had brought the previous day was reduced to a small handful of copper coins.

It was outrageous, and he told Leduc so. Leduc said:

“Samir, this may be the last tea you ever get to buy from me. I don’t own a tea plantation. My supplier doesn’t own a tea plantation, either. He buys tea from a warehouse at the railroad station. The trains aren’t working. My supplier has gone out of business. I’m giving you tea I meant to keep for myself. When you want to buy tea again, go and talk to someone else. Or maybe start your own plantation.”

“It takes years to harvest tea from a plantation,” Samir said. “You must be joking.”

“I’m not joking. I’m completely serious. It’s the whole situation that’s a joke. Nothing’s working any more.”

“It’s too quick to tell,” Samir said. “I think things will get straightened out.”

“They’ll be straightened out into a rod that will get rammed up your backside. Listen, I’m depending on you to make the deliveries we’ve arranged. I can promise you a pack of tea whenever you make a delivery. For twenty paise. In coin.”

“A single pack of tea? Hundred grams?”

“Yes. And twenty paise will amount to less than half price; I can easily charge half a rupee. You know why I’ll be giving you my own tea for less than half price? It’s because I’m grateful. Not for the colonial goods, no, I didn’t mean that, I’m grateful for the goods. But I’m grateful even more for killing those two morons I’ve got working for me.”

“I don’t understand,” Samir said.

“They stopped caring about their jobs. All they cared about was the New World. Now they are working as hard as ever.”

Leduc paused. He gave Samir a meaningful look and said:

“Don’t leave through the front gate. They are guarding the front gate.”

“I came through the delivery gate at the back,” Samir said.

“If I were you, I’d go the way I came,” said Leduc.

NOTICE

This work is available to read online exclusively at Webnovel.com.

https:///book/15767933905886705

If you are reading it at a different site, it has been copied and reproduced without the author’s consent. The owner of that site is a thief.