Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

Philippe and Hélène Ponto turned out in person at midday to greet Philippe’s father (and Hélène’s former guardian), Mr. Raphaël Ponto, the supreme industrialist, banker, speculator and visionary, whose titanic career had been an inspiration both to his son and the world at large. Accompanying the elder Ponto was his wife Josephine, herself well-noted for her role as an officeholder representing the Radical Feminist Party. And rounding out the party were Philippe’s sisters, Barbe and Barnabette, along with their spouses and offspring.

Philippe, a handsome moustachioed man barely past his first bloom of youth, clasped his stout father to his bosom, heedless of rumpling his official sash of office or of the impress of his many medals into his own and his father’s chest. They stood upon the high, broad and busy aerial platform where the express from Paris had just docked.

“Father, I cannot believe you have finally made it to this new land whose creation owes everything to your own guidance and exemplary career.”

Mr. Ponto, a stout and convivial iteration of his child, responded with bluff, hearty warmth and self-abnegation. “Well, you know that a few small matters have kept me busy till now, during the year or two of Helenia’s creation. The takeover of Portugal as a second pleasure park along the lines of Italy, for instance. But there was simply no way I would miss the official inauguration of such a monumental achievement. You have much to be proud of this day, my son!”

Philippe made some humble rejoinders of his own, before moving to greet his mother and siblings in similar open-hearted fashion. Meanwhile, Mr. Ponto’s eye falling on Hélène, the elder man turned to his daughter-in-law, who so far had held back from the familial mingling.

“Why, Hélène, you look so distracted! Daydreaming perhaps? A privilege of youth. Still, it is most undiplomatic behaviour on this splendid state occasion. I thought my days of lecturing you were over. But perhaps I shall have to take you once more in hand!”

Hélène, a slim, attractive, blonde woman of average build, did not respond immediately to her father-in-law’s mix of chafing and jollying. Instead, she continued to stand at the ornate cast-iron railing of the platform, gazing up into the sky.

There above the city of Pontoville hung the daytime Moon.

The perpetual orb filled nearly the entire sky.

Some short time ago, Earth scientists had drawn the satellite much closer to its primary, by means of electrical attraction. Precisely speaking, the distance from one globe to another was now just six hundred and seventy-five kilometres, or roughly the gap between Paris and Lyons. Moreover, the rotation and gravitic interactions of the two planets had been locked and stabilized, so that the Moon neither rose nor set any longer, but remained perpetually in the sky over Pontoville, as a tribute to the importance of this new nation.

It was this very orb that seemed now to transfix Hélène. She murmured mysterious words at the blank visage of Selene, words which Mr. Ponto could interpret as he approached his daughter-in-law.

“Alpha, we await your coming. Alpha, we are ready—”

Mr. Ponto laid a hand on Hélène’s shoulder, and the woman started, as if an electrical current had passed through her. She turned her face away from the lunar surface, its most minute details plain as the creases in one’s palm, even by day, and addressed her father-in-law.

“Oh, sir, it is so good to see you! I am glad you have arrived!”

“Now, that is more like the reception I expected, dearest.”

The reunited family consorted pleasantly for a few more minutes, amidst the hurly-burly of additional arrivals, with Hélène and her sisters-in-law exchanging news about the latest fashions of each continent. But their chatter was cut short by Philippe’s exclamation.

“I see it! Jungle Alli’s ship! The famed Smoke Ghost !”

All eyes turned to follow Philippe’s pointing finger. The President of a continent was as excited as a schoolboy. Here came the second party for whom he had deigned a personal reception.

Moving swiftly through the sky like some celestial pirate ship, the Smoke Ghost radiated a louche elan not exhibited by any other craft. Suspended beneath a balloon shaped like a recumbent odalisque of Junoesque proportions, its baroque gondola was scarred by hard travel and not a few bullet impacts. As the craft approached the docking platform, the dashing figure behind the wheel inside the pilothouse could be more and more clearly discerned.

Jungle Alli, christened Alice Bradley at birth.

Alice Bradley had been born to Mary Hastings Bradley and Herbert Bradley in Chicago, the “second city” of the Mormon interior of North America. Directly from her first juvenile stirrings of reason and independence, she had resisted the conventional life outlined in advance for her, utterly rejecting a future that included the infamous Mormon polygamous marriage. Partly to tame her rebellious spirit, her parents had sent her to a private girls’ school, Les Fougères, in Lausanne, Switzerland. But this rigid institution suited young Alice no better than her native patriarchy, and at age sixteen, in 1931, she had run away.

The next news of the renegade Alice Bradley came most unexpectedly from the heart of darkest Africa. At this time, the continent was not totally pacified and integrated into the twentieth century as it is today, with its productive citizens indistinguishable—save for the hue of their skin—from their Paris or Berlin cousins. Pockets of sub-Saharan barbarism still existed, and one of the most brutish tribes were the Niam-Niams of Central Africa. Cannibals one and all, they derived their name from their blood-curdling war-cry of “Nyama! Nyama!” Otherwise, “Flesh! Flesh!” Feared by natives and Europeans alike, the Niam-Niams maintained an inviolate sphere of privacy and secrecy.

But even this hostile bubble had eventually to be pierced by the superior forces of technology, culture and capitalism, and in 1940 a trading expedition from Marseilles entered the main Niam-Niam village under a flag of truce.

Imagine the consternation and discomfiture of the Europeans to discover, ruling over the cannibals, a young white woman!

Not precisely white any longer, after nearly a decade under the tropical sun. Nut-brown and nearly naked, save for a lion-skin skirt, with whip-cord muscles and long blonde tresses matted into elflocks hanging down to her shapely rump, Alice Bradley exhibited teeth stained brown and filed to points. She sat on a crude throne, clutching a feather-adorned spear. And she hailed the newcomers in the Niam-Niam tongue.

After overcoming their initial shock, the traders awoke Alice’s long-disused French and were able to converse. She detailed a long history of conquest, first over the Niam-Niams themselves by one lone sixteen-year-old girl equipped with no more than a Krupp repeating rifle, sixty pounds of backpacked cartridges, and an infinite supply of bravado and courage, and then, at the head of her adopted clan, of all the neighbouring tribes.

When asked tentatively what her ultimate aims and goals were, Alice Bradley grinned in her ghastly fashion and replied simply, “Freedom.” When asked if that goal were incompatible with her return to civilization, Alice said, “Not at all—so long as it’s on my terms.”

Thus began the public career of the astonishing woman soon dubbed by journalists everywhere “Jungle Alli.”

For the next two decades, employing her obediently savage (and presumably dietarily reformed) cannibals as shock troops, Jungle Alli participated in the taming of the Dark Continent. Up and down the broad expanse of Africa, a mercenary in service of whichever government could afford her, Jungle Alli contributed to the establishment of law and order in pursuit of profit and fame. Her exploits became world famous, from the overthrow of the dictator of Senegambia to the suppression of the Tuaregs of Biskra. Hundreds of pulpy novels, hardly exaggerated, had been written with her as the star.