Stand on Zanzibar (57 page)
Authors: John Brunner
Never go against an armed man without a weapon if there’s one in reach. If there’s not one in reach, get in reach of one!
There was nothing to snatch and wield. There was a solid wall, a tiled pavement, pillars anchored to carry a heavy roof, and a sterile oriental garden without a living tree from which to tear a whip-like twig.
And the mucker was about to kill the prostrate man.
The phang rose in a high energy-profligate arc to be slammed down and divide the body like a pig’s dead carcase. Through the glass door of the clinic whitened faces paler than any Asiatic’s ought to be gazed fascinated, hypnotised, frozen to stillness with horror.
Donald was alone on a fifty-foot stretch of the walkway, and no one was close bar the man on the ground, the injured in the sand-garden, and the mucker.
The sword was at the apex of its swing and he launched himself off the balls of his feet. He hit the mucker with his shoulder and it was like charging a wooden statue, the flesh was so rigid with insanity. It was too late to countermand the decision to slash, but the man went off balance as Donald passed behind him, one hand cushioning his collision with the wall and diverting him like a bounced ball to a point out of reach. The phang met tiles, not flesh, and rang with a metal scream and turned in the mucker’s hand and lost him his dry grip, making the hilt slippery with blood, and shed some of the sharpness of its edge. Also the jar made the steel-stiff muscles of the man’s arm disobey him for a second.
Weapon.
In the middle of the sand-garden, five rocks smoothed by water into curves and holes. He went for them, remembering where the mucker had been and trying to calculate so that he could throw without aiming when he got to the little pile. The nearest was heavier than it looked and that wasted his calculations. The flung rock passed the mucker at shoulder level and fell to the floor and the mucker raised the phang again and made to spring straight at Donald—
And his foot landed on the rounded stone and slid from under him.
There was only one other rock he could hope to throw: a whitish one with a hole to hold it by weighing seven or eight pounds. He lobbed it at the mucker’s groin, exposed by the parting of his legs in a skidding fall, and it and the mucker landed on the floor together, hammering his testicles against the pavement.
Incapable of feeling pain in his present state, the mucker was not immune to the reflex consequences of a blow in the genitals or on the coccyx. His breath stopped from the latter, and there seemed to be universal silence, for Donald had lost the power to recognise anything but that ghastly gulp and grunt.
Yet he was superoxygenated by now, of course. He would not miss the ability to fill and empty his lungs …
He clawed the sword back from where it had fallen and Donald threw a handful of sand in his eyes while he was spending time on that. The blade whistled again, and this time touched Donald on the right forearm with a sting like a bee.
Weapon.
He had used up what there was: two rocks, sand. The sand had blinded only one of the mucker’s eyes and losing parallax would not bother him. He was up on his feet, armed, about to jump at Donald from the foot-higher vantage of the walkway.
Weapon.
Donald saw it. And damn them.
The mucker made his leap and Donald fell sideways and the phang bit into sand and was slow in recovery. (It was as though the man were an extension of the weapon, not the weapon of the man.) He rolled and kicked and his shod foot met the mucker’s elbow just above the joint and opened his fingers, making him release the phang. A second kick, badly aimed but helpful enough, put the hilt out of reach and the mucker recovered his breathing reflex and was able to scream a curse and went for the weapon without caring what part of it he grasped and took the blade, not the hilt, and cut open two of his own fingers and picked it up and threw it at Donald who had to duck the whirling arc of steel and threw himself after it and Donald got one leg under him and put his head down and met the mucker’s nose and mouth with the crown of his own head and chopped inwards with both hands at the sides of the mucker’s waist and used all the strength in the leg which was beneath him to lift himself off the ground with the sand shifting and threatening to betray him and pitch forward with his head still down and butt the mucker’s nose flat against his face and his head against the providentially placed rocks in the middle of the sand-garden.
But that’s not my weapon.
He felt momentarily stupid. The mucker wasn’t fighting back. He was underneath and gone limp and at his nape, which was in Donald’s field of vision about as close as he could take a proper focus, there was a big rock that he must have hit as he tumbled backward.
But I had a weapon, didn’t I?
A little foggily he remembered what it was, and rose to his feet and brought the mucker with him and got up over the edge of the walkway and ignored the man with the cut buttocks lying near the glass door of the clinic and likewise the people behind it who were scattering backwards with exclamations of dismay and used his weapon.
Which was, as he had been taught, a sheet of glass that could be smashed to make cutting edges.
He saw without interest as he turned the mucker over that there was already a smear of blood on his nape from the contusion the rock had caused. Then he used the head as a hammer and broke the door and cut the man’s throat on one of the pieces that remained in the frame.
He said in Yatakangi to the frightened little people beyond the door, “You pig-fucking yellow cowards. You shit-eating children born from a buggered arsehole. You piss-coloured piles of carrion. You dung-flies. You prickless and ball-lacking catamites. You street-walking widows who never had a man except for money. You cock-sucking blood-licking arse-kissing defilers of sacred shrines, you brainless heartless gutless cockless offspring of an imbecile and a deformed cow, you flea-bitten child-robbers who poisoned your fathers and raped your mothers and sold your sisters to the Dutch and carved up your brothers for sale in a butcher’s shop, you gutter-hugging traders in second-hand excrement, why didn’t
you
do anything about this?”
And after that he realised that he was carrying a corpse and he had cut both his hands so that he could not tell whether the blood dripping down his chest was his own or the mucker’s and he understood what he had just done and he let the body fall and crumbled on top of it and began to cry.
“You do realise what it means, don’t you? In effect, all
“You do realise what it means, don’t you? In effect, all
“You do realise what it means, don’t you? In effect, all
our children are going to be handicapped!”
our children are going to be handicapped!”
our children are going to be handicapped!”
“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up
“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up
“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up
against people who can think better than us?”
against people who can think better than us?”
against people who can think better than us?”
“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t
“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t
“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t
you? You can—”
you? You can—”
you? You can—”
“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being
“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being
“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being
morons and cripples.”
morons and cripples.”
morons and cripples.”
“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an
“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an
“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an
expert in genetics to Yatakang?”
expert in genetics to Yatakang?”
expert in genetics to Yatakang?”
“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously
“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously
“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously
there must be something in it.”
there must be something in it.”
there must be something in it.”
“But the government seems to be trying to convince people
“But the government seems to be trying to convince people
“But the government seems to be trying to convince people
it’s a lie.”
it’s a lie.”
it’s a lie.”
“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to
“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to
“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to
do the same for us.”
do the same for us!”
DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
(UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage. See also DISHONESTY, SNEAKY, UNDERHAND and JUST LUCKY I GUESS.
—
The Hipcrime Vocab
by Chad C. Mulligan)
Near the road, high grass flushed green with summer wet, set with low bushes, punctuated with trees. Tethered on expensive chains because they could gnaw through rope or leather, goats strained to crop the tree-bark and kill the trees though there was plenty of grazing closer to the pegs they circled. Chains apart, the road seemed like the only human intrusion into a beast-plant universe, and not the road as such because wild nature was reclaiming it, pitting its surface with holes that held bowlfuls of mud, but its idea of straightness.
Yet the manufactures of man came into view and went again. Every mile or two there were plots of ground trenched for vegetables surrounding a hamlet built in traditional Beninian style of timber and thatch. Some of the wealthier families’ homes were turtle-plated in a riot of colours, the owners having taken old cans, oil-drums, even sheets of metal from abandoned cars, and after flattening them with mallets lapped them together as carefully as medieval armour to protect the wood against wet, rot and termites.
Maps of the district had been kept up to date by a makeshift system involving as much gossip and rumour as actual surveying, but even if they had been revised last week by a team of UN geographers Norman would still have found it hard to relate that out there with this flapping on his knee. He had to say painfully to himself, “Those two hills must correspond to these markings, so this is where they would mine river-clay and bake it into porous filters for the plastics plant at—where?—Bephloti…”
The insect humming of the engine beneath their vehicle’s floor droned down to a grumble. Steering, Gideon Horsfall said, “Sheeting hole, I hoped we’d make it clear to Lalendi before I had to swap cylinders. I’ll pull down off the road when we get around the bend.”
Around the bend there was another of the interchangeable hamlets, except that this was one of the fourteen per cent of the country’s villages which possessed a school and a clinic. It was the wrong day for the clinic, a plain white concrete hut with large-lettered signs in English and Shinka, but the school was busy. As yet, in this region, the summer rains were only intermittent; the full drenching flow would follow in three weeks. Accordingly the teacher—a fat young man with a fan and spectacles of an old-fashioned pattern—was conducting his class under a grove of low trees. They were boys and girls from about six to twelve, clutching UN-issued plastic primers and trying not to let themselves be distracted by the appearance of the car.
It wasn’t yet raining, but it was horribly humid. Norman, clammy from head to toe, thought about the energy required to get out and stand up. He asked Gideon whether he needed help in swapping cylinders. Twisting around to take a pair of fresh ones—one hydrogen, one oxygen—from a crate on the back seat, Gideon declined the offer.
But Norman got out anyway, and found he was looking at the verandah-like frontage of a house on which a small group of women were assembled, and one man, middle-aged, very thin, who lay among them on a low trestle-table. They were wringing cloths in buckets of water and wiping his skin, and he seemed to be making no effort to co-operate.
A little puzzled, he asked Gideon, “What’s the matter over there? Is the man ill?”
Gideon didn’t look at once. He dropped the cylinder-tray at the back of the car, unclipped and reconnected the gas-hoses, and gathered up the empties for return to store before following Norman’s gesture.
“Ill? No, dead,” he said absently, and went to put the cylinders inside the car.
One of the older pupils of the school, squatting cross-legged at the back of the class, raised his hand and asked something of the teacher.
“Is something wrong?” Gideon demanded, realising that Norman had made no move to get back in the car.
“Not really,” Norman said after a pause. “It’s just that I … Well, you see, I’ve never seen a corpse before.”
“It doesn’t look any different from a living person,” Gideon said. “Except it doesn’t move, and it doesn’t suffer. The hole, I was afraid of that. Do you mind being a visual aid to the schoolmaster for five minutes?”
The women had finished their task of washing the corpse; they poured out the dirty water on the ground and a piglet came over to lap at a puddle it formed. From the long poles supporting the thatch over the verandah, a few chickens solemnly looked down. One of the women fetched a galvanised tub full of something sticky and white and began to daub the corpse’s face, using a bundle of hen’s feathers tied on a twig.
“What’s that for?” Norman asked Gideon.
“What? Oh, the white paint? Relic of early missionary interference, I gather. All the pictures of saints and angels they saw when they were being converted to Christianity had white skins, so they decided to give their dead a better chance of admission to heaven.”