Stand on Zanzibar (24 page)

The woman gave Donald a look of pure butch loathing and switched off the recorder. “The drecky bleeder,” she said. “As if we weren’t on a tight enough schedule. But okay.”

“Wait there,” the man said. “We can’t get to you without we go right around the end and come back.”

“What about this one?” asked the woman, pointing to Norman.

“Get a stretcher party. If there’s time before any more of them wake up and start causing trouble.”

Grilles whined and groaned as they retracted and slammed back, making a crazy metallic counterpoint to the footsteps of the pair while they retraced their path to the end of the line of cells. That was what he was in, Donald now realised, though the original layout had been overlaid with several alterations until now at last the limit had been reached and there was no more space unless you simply closed the prisoners into drawers like coffins and extracted them like solving a glass-puzzle.

They reached him eventually and he stumbled out ahead of them towards a tiled corridor where another woman took him in charge and showed him to an office without occupants.

“Wait here,” she said. “Someone will come to see you in a moment.”

The moment stretched. Donald sat on a hard chair and put his head in his hands, wondering if he was now going to throw up.

Behind his closed eyelids he saw a pattern of human bodies laid out under a mesh of wire.

*   *   *

“Your name Hogan?”

Donald started. A man with captain’s shoulder-badges had entered the room and was going around the corner of the central table to sit at its far side. He held a file of papers.

“Y-yes.”

“Apparently you know something about how the trouble got started tonight.” The captain opened a drawer of the table, pulled out the mike of a recorder and clicked over a switch. “Let’s have it.”

“I got in a psuedo cab and…” Wearily, recital of the details.

The captain nodded. “Yeah. We had a report there was one of those bleeders working the area—Christ knows why, you’d think they’d work an uptown district where people use cabs more, where they carry more cash or credit cards than they do down your manor.”

“It’s not my manor.”

“Then whatinole were you doing there?”

“I—uh—I’d been for a walk.”

“You what?” The captain looked at him unbelievingly. “Do you do this kind of thing often?”

“N-no. I just suddenly realised I’d got out of the habit of going out in the evenings unless I was going somewhere particular, like to call on people. So I—”

“Christ. Don’t make a habit of it, will you? We have enough trouble to handle without you adding to the pile.”

“Now look!” Donald was beginning to recover; indignation made his back straighten. “It’s not my fault if a pseudo—”

“No? Look at yourself, then!”

Confused, Donald glanced down at clothes smeared with the garbage that had been hurled into the street around the prowlie, and the sight made his nausea return in full force. He said weakly, “I’m a mess, but—”

“Mess has nothing to do with it. How many people did you see on that manor who were dressed like you? You were marked as an intruder at once. It didn’t have to be a pseudo cab that made you the spark for an explosion—it could have been an Afram yonderboy and his sparewheels making mock, or a mugger estimating you as prosperous, or anything. You did a damn-fool thing, and as a result my department has better than two hundred extra people in this building, which wasn’t meant to cope with half its present occupants!”

“I don’t see what right you have to talk to me like that!” Donald flared. “Have you caught the driver of the cab along with the couple of hundred innocent people you’ve swept up off the street?”

“You’re free with your figures, aren’t you?” the captain said in a soft voice. “A couple of hundred
innocent
people? I doubt it. The cabdriver may well be among them if he was slow in running, and that cuts it by one, you must admit that if no more. Also we have, I expect”—and he raised his hand to count finger by finger the groups he was listing—“the vandals and looters who smashed the window of a store and made off with most of its stock of liquor and reefers, plus the people who chopped down a street-light, plus the people who damaged one of my prowl cars, plus any number of people who flooded a street with decaying garbage and created a health hazard, and certainly several dozens who were excessively ready with assorted weapons, like a gun used to bring down one of my patrol copters and—the clubs with which the pilot was beaten to death. You were saying…?”

“They killed him?” Donald said slowly.

“You can’t do much to revive a man whose skull has been smashed open and his brains spilled on the street. Can you?”

“Oh my God,” Donald said.

“I don’t believe in God,” said the captain. “I wouldn’t care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to. Get the hole out of here before I charge you with incitement to riot.”

He turned off the recorder and dropped the mike back in its drawer, which he slammed shut. “And if I had time,” he concluded, “I believe I very well might do that!”

Donald forced himself to his feet, trembling. He said, “You mean a man can be forbidden to walk the streets of his own home town nowadays just because something might happen to him like happened to me?”

“You calculate the odds,” the captain said. “So far, we have evidence of one hundred per cent certainty that it does happen. Get out before I change my mind—and take your brown-nosed roomie along with you,
please.
He’s still in no state to get home by himself, but I’d appreciate the extra space to move around.”

context (11)

COME OUTSIDE AND SAY THAT

“To my mind the most frightening book ever published is Lewis F. Richardson’s
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels.
You’ve probably never heard of it even though its relevance to the mess you’re in is at least as great as that of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species,
which you learned about in fourth grade. And that’s because it’s so completely terrifying only those ‘experts’ who are adequately armoured with preconceived contrary ideas which will enable them to disregard Richardson’s work completely ever get to study it.

“The subject, of course, is one which you think you’re an expert on, too—just as was the case when Darwin started stirring things up. People
knew
they were conscious, intelligent beings and apparently if they conceded the resemblance between themselves and the animals they were well acquainted with they attributed it to a lack of imagination on the part of the Creator—or perhaps even lauded a proper Puritan parsimony in His unwillingness to waste a good working design after it had been field-tested by the apes.

“So you believe that it’s in the interests of your family, friends and compatriots when you doll yourself up in uniform, take the gun you’re issued and go off to a messy death in the swamps of some place you wouldn’t visit on vacation even if you were a centenarian who’d been every place else bar Mars.

“What Richardson demonstrated in essence (and what has been reinforced by the small handful of people who’ve followed up his work over the past half-century) was that war follows a stochastic distribution: that’s to say, it’s neither absolutely random, nor yet is it definable in a systematic pattern, but something between the two. The pattern is there, but we cannot attribute one-for-one a causal relationship that would account for every specific case.

“In other words, the incidence of war is independent of the volitional element. It makes no odds whatever whether a rational decision has been taken—war, like the weather, just happens.

“Much earlier than Richardson, before World War I, in fact, Norman Angell had shown that the idea of fighting a war for profit was obsolete. The victors would pay a heavier cost than the losers. He was right, and that First World War proved the fact. The second one hammered it home with everything up to and including nuclear weapons. In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you’ve been catching the news lately you’ll have noticed it’s being done more than ever. The Chinese go on bleating about the withering away of the state and never stop conducting a series of harassing skirmishes on their neighbours’ territory that compels them with true Marxist inevitability to regiment and regulate their population. The Americans and their allies—what few we have left—boast of their unprecedented degree of personal freedom and submit their sovereignty to a computer in Washington, known as the draft selector, which every day condemns several hundreds of them to a death as pointless as that of the Roman gladiators. Put it this way: suppose there were a mindless idiot on your block (and until GT produces proof that Shalmaneser really can develop intelligence I shall go on regarding computers of whatever breed as
idiots savants
), and once a week his mental condition cycled into a state where he needed to tear someone else apart with his nails and teeth—and the consensus among your neighbours was that every family in turn should detail one of its members to stroll along to where this idiot lived and lie down for him to slaughter …

“There: I told you you were an expert on this subject. This is exactly what the draft does, except that it doesn’t take the sort of member your family might spare—grandma aged 107 who’s been senile for years, for example, or that baby who somehow crept through the filter of eugenic legislation and wound up with phenylketonuria. It takes the handsomest, healthiest, most vigorous, and nobody else.

“Remind you of something? It should do; the folk imagination has occasional curious insights and one of them has been repeated for uncountable millennia. From Andromeda chained on her rock to the maidens offered up to the dragon St. George slew, the theme of destroying the most precious, the most valuable, the least replaceable of our kinfolk recurs and recurs in legend. It tells us with a wisdom that we do not possess as individuals but certainly possess collectively that when we go to war we are ruining ourselves.

“But you’re an expert on this, aren’t you? You know very well that it’s thanks to the Confederate dead, or the victims of the Long March, or the heroic pilots of the Battle of Britain, or self-incinerated
kamikazes,
that you’re here, today, enjoying your wonderful daily life so full of pleasure, reward, love, joy and excitement.

“Actually I’ll wager that it’s rather more full of anxiety, problems, economic difficulties, quarrels and disappointments, but if you’re so attached to them I shan’t be able to shake you loose. Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction. But I have no doubt you steer clear as much as you can of anything so masterful.”

—
You’re an Ignorant Idiot
by Chad C. Mulligan

tracking with closeups (11)

THE SEALED TRAIN

“Close now,” said the navigator. He was also the pilot, insofar as there was a human pilot. The course-setting and control were mostly done by computers, but if their delicate machinery were to be disabled by—say—a near-miss with a depth-charge, a man could continue to function after sustaining injuries that would put computers out of action.

The intelligence officer shivered a little, wondering whether this man he shared the fore-compartment of the sub with would be as reliable in emergency as he claimed. However, there had been no contact with the enemy so far.

Overhead, under a clear sky and very little wind, the surface of the Shongao Strait must be almost like a mirror, rippled only by tides and currents. The sub itself, creeping along the deepest part of the channel, would not visibly disturb the water.

“That’s it to within a few yards,” the navigator said. “I’ll put up the listeners now. Better go warn the cargo.”

The intelligence officer looked back along the spinal tunnel of the vessel. Just big enough for a man to ease himself through, it framed Jogajong’s head in a circle of light.

Sealed train … Lenin …

But it was hard to think in those terms. The agelessly youthful Asian, who was in fact over forty but could have passed for ten years less, with his neatly combed black hair and sallow skin, had none of the charismatic quality of a man like Lenin.

Perhaps revolutionaries on your own side never do seem so impressive? How about our own Founding Fathers?

Annoyed for no definable reason, the intelligence officer said, “I don’t care for the way you keep calling him ‘the cargo’. He’s a man. An important man, what’s more.”

“On the one hand,” said the navigator in a slightly bored tone, “I prefer not to think of the people I deliver out here as if they
were
people. It’s a lot better to think of them as expendable objects. And on the other, he’s a yellowbelly same as the rest of them out here. It’s your business to tell them apart, I guess, but for me they all look like monkeys.”

As he spoke he had been operating the controls which released the listeners, allowing them to bob gently to the surface. Now he activated them, and the hull was suddenly alive with the night noises of the world above: the murmur of waves, the screeching of parakeets disturbed at their roosts, and the immense plop-plopping of something very close at hand.

“Turtle,” the navigator said, amused at the way his companion started. “Friendly. At least I hope so. You’d be the one to know if the slit-eyes had started to enlist them on their side, hm?”

The intelligence officer felt himself flushing, and concealed the fact by turning to climb along the spinal tunnel. The navigator, behind him, chuckled just loudly enough.

The bleeder. I hope he doesn’t return from his next mission.

The sounds from the listeners had already alerted Jogajong. By the time the intelligence officer completed his crawl down the tunnel, he was ready except for his helmet. He was clad in a flotation-suit of pressure-sensitive plastic which would resist the water rigidly until he surfaced, then relax to allow him to swim ashore. Empty, it could be infected with a small vial of tailored bacteria and reduced to an amorphous mess on the beach.