Stand on Zanzibar (65 page)
Authors: John Brunner
Beside him, Bronwen whispered invitations to lose himself in animal sensation, but he was drained of the capacity to respond. He told her to be quiet and let him think, and at once regretted it because out of the darkness a moron-face emerged, slack silly mouth reflected in a gash below. He repressed a moan and rolled over on his side, terrified.
There’s got to be a way—think, think!
Gradually possibilities developed towards plans. The mucker’s image faded, taking with it his sense of sick dismay, and it was replaced by a vague pride in what he was being relied on to do—an act that could determine the course of history.
I know how to get at Sugaiguntung. I know how to contact Jogajong. Between the two it’s just a matter of …
His body relaxed, and was rested even as his busy mind shaped and patterned the events of the day.
* * *
At eight o’clock he sent for breakfast and picked his way through many small dishes of cold fried and pickled delicacies—fish, fruit, vegetables. Gulps of scalding tea washed down the food. Bronwen, as naked as she had been all night, served him silently and made sure he was replete before taking any herself.
He found he liked that. It was sultanesque. It was foreign enough to match the strange country he had wandered to.
Couldn’t imagine Gennice doing it …
“I have to go out,” he said eventually. “Perhaps I’ll see you again this evening.”
She smiled and embraced him while he was thinking that if he did see her again something would have gone disastrously wrong. But it was bad to imagine such catastrophes. He put on his clothes, equipped himself, slung his communikit over his shoulder and went down brazenly to the main lobby.
It was morning-busy, but there were, in addition to the staff and clients, people of every possible colour who were simply sitting around until they spotted him. Then they closed in like sharks approaching a wounded swimmer, raising cameras, recorders and voices.
“Mr. Hogan you must—Mr. Hogan let me please—listen and I will—”
A fat Arab woman who had reacted faster than the others put a camera practically under his nose. He snatched it away and threw it in the face of a Japanese on the other side of him. When a burly turbaned Sikh got in his way he hit him with the side of his hand and stepped over his falling body. At the side of the main door there was an indoor palm in a pot, which he jumped at and pulled over, delaying all of the reporters except a persistent African whom he had to kick in the shins. The man stumbled and tripped up the next person coming after him, which gave Donald the chance to get out on the street and signal an empty cab.
A car with two impassive men in it followed him: proof of Totilung’s promise, he guessed. He offered his driver fifty talas if he could lose them, and the man took him through a series of narrow alleys half-blocked by bazaar-stalls, contriving eventually to get a herd of goats between his own vehicle and the one following.
Well pleased, Donald paid the man off and changed to a rixa next time they passed one. He could do nothing to make himself wholly inconspicuous, owing to his complexion and appearance, but at least for the moment no one knew for sure where he was.
Three rixas later, he reached the vicinity of Sugaiguntung’s home. He had no expectation of finding the professor in, unless his doctors had insisted that he rest following the attack by the mucker, but he wasn’t here to take advantage of the promised interview.
Scouting the district on foot, he found it to be much as he had guessed from the city-maps he had seen—quiet, prosperous, aloof from the bustling life of the centre of the city, having a fine view of the Shongao Strait. There were houses here, not apts, each one enclosed by a wall and surrounded by gardens—either set with flowers and shrubs in the Western style, or paved, gravelled and ornamented with water-worn rocks. Only three wide roads traversed the area, to allow taxis and delivery-trucks access. For the rest, especially on the seaward, lower side, there was only a maze of paths which he explored with his ears always open for the approach of a curious stranger.
Fortunately, he had picked a quiet time. The heads of families would mostly be at work, the children in school, the servants cleaning house or away marketing.
Sugaiguntung’s own home was in the shape of a very short-legged T, set in a garden of pentagonal form with its shortest side fronting a road. He walked all around except along that short side, where there was a bored policeman swinging a truncheon, noting certain interesting facts such as the location of a stunted tree which overhung the wall and the presence in the house—silhouetted against a window-wall—of a dumpy woman busy at her chores.
Wife, housekeeper? More likely the latter. Donald recalled a report that Sugaiguntung’s wife, a woman older than himself to whom he had been married almost twenty years, had drowned while boating four or five years ago, but no mention of a second marriage.
He was about to make one more tour when the peace of the morning was interrupted by the appearance, trudging up the main road, of a party of dedicated-looking youths and girls carrying slogan-boards praising Sugaiguntung and Solukarta. Their intention was clearly to gawp at the great man’s home. Although it provided a distraction for the policeman, who ran to meet them and engaged in fierce argument with the leaders, their arrival meant that thirty or forty curious pairs of eyes were staring in Donald’s direction. He melted away behind the wall and began to work towards the seashore, along the route by which he would have to take the professor if he persuaded him to leave.
He lunched in a reed-thatched inn and watched a juggler with a tame monkey while the other patrons—who had seen many more monkeys than Caucasians—watched him. Beginning to grow alarmed, he abandoned his last glass of local rice-beer when he decided that the proprietor was spending too long staring at him.
He doubled away inland for a bit before returning to the waterfront during the siesta period. Apart from fishermen dozing in the shade of their beached praus, there were few people about, but nonetheless he wandered along to a totally deserted stretch before he discreetly produced a compass which had been included in his equipment. By its aid he determined which of the six or seven dark indentations he could see in the green shoreline at the foot of Grandfather Loa must be the one leading to Jogajong’s secret encampment.
About then it began to rain again, and he made his way back into the city, heading for the office of the man on whom he must rely to get across the Strait, the so-called freelance reporter Zulfikar Halal. He found him on the third floor above a carpet importer’s warehouse, fast asleep amid the pungent scent of hashish.
Christ. This is my contact with Jogajong?
Halal himself was shabby and unshaven; the room was littered with old newspapers, labelless tape-spools and packets of holographic photos. Obviously this was not merely his office but his home, for a screen in the corner failed to hide a heap of tumbled clothing and shoes. However …
Donald woke him with some difficulty. Startled, Halal forced his eyes to focus and looked first bewildered, then scared. Scrambling to his feet, he said, “
Hazoor!
Is your honour not the reporter, the American reporter?”
“That’s right.”
Halal licked his lips. “
Hazoor
, forgive me, I was not expecting you to come here in this fashion! I was told—” He recollected himself, darted to the door and peered out. Satisfied there was no one eavesdropping, he nonetheless continued in a whisper.
“I thought your honour was not supposed to contact me until much later, until—”
“There isn’t going to be a much later,” Donald snapped. “Sit down and listen hard.”
He outlined what he wanted, and when, and Halal’s eyes rolled.
“
Hazoor!
It is risky, it is difficulty, it is expensive!”
“The hole with the cost. Can you do it?” He produced a roll of fifty-tala bills and fanned them with his thumb.
“Your honour,” Halal said fawningly, fascinated by the money, “I will do my best, by the grave of my mother I swear it.”
Donald felt a little frightened. For all that Delahanty had vouched for this Pakistani, he neither looked nor acted like a trustworthy agent. Still, there was no one else. Short of stealing a boat to cross the Strait, he had to put himself in Halal’s hands.
He said toughly, hoping to impress the other, “I don’t want you to do your best. I want you to do what I’ve told you to do—understand? If you let me down … Well, you heard how I tackled that mucker at the university?”
Halal’s mouth gaped open. “That is true? I thought it a piece of bazaar nonsense!”
“With these hands,” Donald said. “And if you fail me I shall take you and wring the blood from you like water from a wet washcloth. I promise that on
my
mother’s grave.”
* * *
He was back, now, in the bazaar quarter where his taxi of the morning had lost his pursuers. There was one more thing to attend to before the city re-awoke from its siesta, and he would have to hurry.
He picked his way between rows of merchants’ stalls closed up while their owners slumbered, until in a little side-alley he spotted a phone-booth well concealed from passers-by. Someone had voided his bowels on the floor, but that was a minor nuisance. He kept a careful watch all the time he was composing his two messages on the communikit, his disguised gas-gun in his hand. He was very much aware that the moment he put in his call to the nearest Engrelay satellite someone might realise he was the caller.
But he thought he had got away with it until, gathering up his equipment and making to open the door of the booth, he recognised Totilung standing on the far side of the narrow alley.
Begi came to a village where the people believed in omens, signs and portents. He asked them, “What is this about?”
They said, “We pay that old wise woman and she tells us what day is best to hunt, or court a wife, or build a new house, or bury the dead so that ghosts will not walk.”
Begi said, “How does she do that?”
They said, “She is very old and very wise and she must be right because she has become very rich.”
So Begi went to the house of the wise woman and said, “I shall go hunting tomorrow. Tell me if it will be a good day.”
The woman said, “Promise to pay me half of anything you bring home.” Begi promised, and she took bones and threw them on the ground. Also she made a little fire with feathers and herbs.
“Tomorrow will be a good day for hunting,” she said.
So next day Begi went into the bush taking his spear and shield and also some meat and a gourd of palm-wine and rice boiled and folded in a leaf and wearing his best leopard-skin around him. At night he came back naked without anything at all and went into the wise woman’s house.
He broke a spear on the wall and with the head he cut in half a shield that was there and gave away half the meat she had and half the rice she had to the other people and poured out on the ground half her pot of palm-wine.
The old woman said, “That is mine! What are you doing?”
“I am giving you half of what I brought back from my hunting,” said Begi.
Then he tore off half the old woman’s cloak and put it on and went away.
After that the people made up their own minds and did not have to pay the old woman anything.
Still a little dazed, having been called from bed, Norman stared at the face in the phone-screen. It was that of E. Prosper Rankin, the company secretary of GT.
“Norman, I thought I’d better call you at once and tell you the news before it breaks over the TV. You may have to take some urgent precautionary measures. Old GT has had a cerebral haemorrhage and isn’t expected to last the day.”
The identity of initials between creator and creation filled Norman’s mind briefly with a vision of the GT tower bursting apart in its upper storeys and pouring dark red blood from its windows. He said after a pause, “What should we do here, then—slack the tempo?”
“The exact opposite,” grunted Rankin. His manner indicated that he had not expected Norman to mouth any conventional professions of regret. Georgette Tallon Buckfast, all her life, had been a person to admire but not to love. “The first effect is bound to be a wave of panic selling in GT shares and all the subsidiary companies. Our estimates are that prices will drop by thirty to forty million today regardless of what we do. We desperately need something to kick them back up again as soon as possible.”
“And you’re counting on the Beninia project to provide the rebound.” Norman frowned. “Well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t—we secured our parliamentary ratification yesterday, on schedule, and Dr. Ram Ibusa is making arrangements to fly to New York with me and sign the contracts on behalf of the government.”
“I see a reason why it shouldn’t,” Rankin countered grimly. “I haven’t told you what the shock was which caved in Old GT.”
Premonition filled Norman’s mind with the sound of earthquakes.
“When we switched Shalmaneser’s own programme for the project from ‘hypothetical’ to ‘actual’, he rejected it. And the technicians can’t find out why.”
“But—!” Norman groped for words. “But Shal must have some sort of grounds for the rejection!”
“Oh, the first thing they did was ask him pointblank why. He spat back everything he’d been fed about Beninia and its people and announced that it was inconsistent with the larger mass of data already in store.” Rankin pounded fist into palm. “And that’s absurd! Every last item has been checked out on the ground by you and your team … Any ideas?”
Norman shook his head, numbed.
“Well, you’d better start thinking hard. My feeling is that we’re going to have to launch the project anyhow and pray for a miracle to save us from calamity. If we don’t get out the grand slam publicity in forty-eight hours at the latest, a calamity of a different kind is due beyond doubt. According to a digest of data about Beninia which I viewed the other day, the people there were alleged by their neighbours to be pretty competent wizards. You’re on the spot—go see if they can conjure up the miracle we need!”