Stand on Zanzibar (71 page)
Authors: John Brunner
Rex jerked forward another half-pace like a marionette, his mouth open. All around the vault, which was now in dead silence except for the echo of Chad’s voice and the soft humming of Shalmaneser’s mental processes, Norman saw jaws drop correspondingly.
Obvious!
The pause, though, stretched, and stretched, until it was intolerable. One more second, Norman thought, and he was going to scream. And—
“That a force of unknown nature is acting on the population and causing them to behave differently from known patterns of human reaction under comparable circumstances elsewhere.”
“Shal,” Chad said softly, “such a force exists, and is at present being investigated by experts to determine its nature. I tell you three times!”
He spun his chair through half a circle and got to his feet. It was only then that Norman saw how, despite the chill in the vault, he was running with sweat and sparkling drops of it were forming on the ends of his beard.
“All right,” he said wearily. “Try him now.”
The tension snapped. Someone Norman didn’t know darted forward to the chair Chad had vacated and hurled a question into the mike. The answer came back: “The estimated return for the Beninia project will be—”
“Hold!”
The man looked at Rex. “I think he’s done it, sir,” he exclaimed.
“Someone get me a drink!” said Chad Mulligan.
The banked machines playing over the tape-recorded reports of the Metropolitan Police prowl-cars for the past twelve hours—mainly for the benefit of the computer responsible for crime-prevention—made a note of a particular section on a particular spool and shortly afterwards sent it, flagged with a code-number, to a detective sergeant in the Analytical Department.
The code ran 95 (eugenic infraction)—16 (drug trafficking)—01 (female)—22 (probable age)—01 (applicable to a single individual).
Quirking his mouth at the idea of a eugenic infraction being the responsibility of a single individual, the sergeant spun the report-tape forward to the appropriate point, already knowing what to expect: a shiggy in a state of unmistakable pregnancy had been observed orbiting on some psychedelic or other, and just in case it was Yaginol the matter ought to be looked into.
The sergeant, as part of his training, had been shown a few Yaginol-induced foetuses. Some of them had made members of the course under instruction vomit. He himself had managed to restrain the impulse, but if he had a nightmare nowadays he imagined himself the father of such a monster, lacking eyes, or limbs, or perhaps worst of all the entire brain, the skull being open at the fontanelle to show that inside there was nothing but air.
* * *
From now on, the doctor said, she had to be consistent. She would have to put up with the cyclothymic variations which normally would have indicated it was time to shift from Skulbustium to something else—Yaginol, for a man or a shiggy who wasn’t pregnant, Triptine for one who was. Triptine was better than Skulbustium, the hitrip not being so dependent on the groundmood, but Skulbustium was much easier to come by and the whole idea was to bring into the world a baby who would never see the ordinary, drab, loathsome city called London, but always the private wonderland where Poppy spent her life. So when the doctor said she must choose something and stick to it until the child was born, she chose Skulbustium for fear supplies of Triptine might be interrupted. It was still fairly new, and she didn’t know anyone who was homecooking it yet.
But it was bad on the days when her normal glandular rhythms cycled towards depression.
When the police came to the tall apartment block where she shared a flat with Roger and another couple named Sue and Ted, she was in a down phase.
The two constables who paid the call weren’t interested in making work for themselves. They said so in as many words to Ted, who answered the door, and most people wouldn’t have expected otherwise. At worst, a bloody-minded fuzzy-wuzzy would sniff the air and tell you to come along and there’d be a fine which was a nuisance and you’d have to stretch your credit for the next lift. Today, even that wasn’t on the programme. All they wanted was to make certain a pregnant girl, known to the Eugenics Board and answering the description in the report from the prowl-car, wasn’t using Yaginol and threatening to visit a handicapped child on the community.
Poppy heard Ted say, “No, of course she’s not. She wouldn’t be such a sheeting fool.”
“Have to take her for a little ride, though, codder. To a doctor, that’s all.”
The world was a place of echoing colours, mostly drab—the colour-range of shit. The world was a place of tingling smells, making her nose run and her eyes water. The world was a place of indefinable menace, that clad her skin in the crawling caress of invisible cold snails. They figured out afterwards she must have been trying to hide, but what she opened wasn’t a closet-door. It was a window.
Twenty-seven storeys above the hard flagstones of the drab, loathsome city called London.
They gave Donald and Sugaiguntung inflatable mattresses in the mouth of the cave, which was an armoury and a communications centre. Concealed from the outside by a sudden bulge in the wall, there was a TV set and a whole miniature studio of radio and phone gear. But it had to be operated with discretion; volcanoes did not mask the tell-tale traces of electronic equipment as they did heat.
In the early morning when Donald awoke from unrestful slumber Sugaiguntung was tossing and turning and his teeth were chattering. Alarmed, Donald felt his forehead. His skin was hot and dry and he complained of feeling nauseated.
A call was answered by a girl in drab green battledress who stripped off Sugaiguntung’s clothes and applied culture tabs and took his temperature. She said finally, “It is what we call jungle fever. Everyone catches it who comes here. It is not dangerous.”
“Can’t you give him anything for it?” Donald demanded.
“I am not in a big hospital,” the girl said with a trace of sadness in her face. “I can give an antipyretic and a heroic dose of ascorbic acid. But what I should need is the specific, fremonium chlorhydrate with apyrine, and we have none. I will see if some can be got from Gongilung, of course.”
“Does it last long?”
“Three days, four perhaps. After that there is lasting immunity.” The girl was offhand in her manner. “Sometimes there is delirium on the second day.”
By now Jogajong had been informed and appeared at the mouth of the cave, tousled from sleep. He listened to the girl’s report, nodding.
“Keep him warm and comfortable. Give him much to drink,” he said. “It isn’t bad, it happening now. There’s nowhere he could go in any case.”
* * *
By the evening of the first day, Donald was wishing he had brought his stock of tranks with him. He needed them to keep calm. Culture tabs reported that he was not, as he half-suspected, suffering from the same fever as Sugaiguntung, but he felt feverish with impatience. Jogajong could hardly have avoided noticing, but even sitting here in this jungle hideout he had things to do, so it was late in the day before he had a chance to approach Donald and address him with pure Yatakangi politeness.
“You’re not used to waiting, Mr. Hogan—that’s plain!”
“I don’t know what I’m used to,” Donald sighed. “I spent most of my life, up till a short time ago, in a routine which I was sick of. Suddenly I was picked out of it and tossed into this chaos. And life goes so much faster here I’ve become just as sick of this in ten days as I was of the other after ten years.”
At the far side of the clearing one of Jogajong’s young officers appeared, holding up a phang with a dead snake skewered on the point. He displayed it for his leader, saluting, and was rewarded with a grin of approval.
“Was it a very poisonous snake, or something?” Donald inquired at random.
“No, not poisonous. Good to eat, a delicacy. We don’t lead a very luxy life here.
“Good to eat!” Donald almost started to his feet. “Well, if you say so, I guess…” He mopped his face, hating the clammy sulphurous smell from the volcanic vent, which today had been especially active, they said, loading the immobile wet air of the clearing with fumes that could not blow away.
“I apologise for the routine and its attendant boredom you’re having to endure here,” Jogajong said, and Donald could not tell if he was being sarcastic. “I would arrange a diversion—take you out with us on a small raid, perhaps—but at present the climate of opinion is not much in my cause’s favour, and what is more I believe you are a valuable person not to be risked in that way.”
Donald thought about that for a while. He said at length, “Is it because of the—uh—the climate of opinion that you’re stuck here?”
“Precisely. It was envisaged that I should begin to work openly when I was landed here. There is a great deal of support for my cause among the common people, if not among the wealthy. The opposition party is not strong in Gongilung although some groups—fisherfolk, as you know, some intellectuals and the building trades especially—are loyal. On the more distant islands the administration of entire communities is in our hands and I hoped to launch a popular campaign and if necessary declare independence and withstand siege. Unfortunately the claim about the optimisation of the next generation postponed that action. Thanks to what you have done, of course, the lie will be shown up for what it is and the indignation that follows will provide a suitable impetus for the revolution.”
He spoke as though he had the authority of an evaluation by Shalmaneser to back his views. Possibly, Donald realised, he had—at least, the Washington computers must have analysed his chances pretty well before he was brought back here from the States.
He said, “But if the Solukarta government hadn’t dug this trap for themselves, you’d honestly have started a civil war?”
Jogajong shrugged. “It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?”
“What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.
“I come from a country where life has been held cheap for centuries,” Jogajong said. “I know the price of mine. But one must make one’s own price and enforce it.”
“Most people don’t get the chance,” Donald muttered.
“I didn’t quite hear that…?”
“I said most people don’t get the chance!” Donald snapped. “Have you heard any news from Gongilung since I arrived? Was anything said about a building that was blown up?”
“Blown up? It was reported that some collapsed owing to an explosion, but they said it was due to the bad sewers. Often we find pockets of methane that can be set on fire.”
“Whaledreck. I had to use a bomb to get rid of a pestilential policewoman.” Donald looked at his hands. “How many people were killed?”
“Not many,” Jogajong said after a pause. “Seventeen, eighteen—I think that is what they reported to me.”
“Women and children among them?” Donald’s voice grated in his own ears.
“All women and children,” Jogajong said. “It was to be expected. The men were at their work.” He leaned towards Donald and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Don’t distress yourself over them. Think as I do that they died in the cause of their country.”
“They didn’t die in
my
cause,” Donald said, and shook off the hand.
“A cause that your country shares with mine,” Jogajong insisted.
“That’s true,” Donald said. “Your country, mine, every other country in the world, has the same cause and what it does is, it takes people who don’t give a pint of whaledreck for it and sends them off to kill women and children. Yes, it’s the cause of every country on earth! And you know what I call that cause? I call it naked stinking greed.”
There was a short silence. Jogajong spoke stiffly to end it.
“That is hardly the attitude I’d have expected from an American officer!”
“I’m not an American officer. They gave me a rank because it was a convenient way of blackmailing me into behaving myself. As ‘Lieutenant’ Hogan I can be arrested and tried secretly by court-martial if I don’t do as I’m told. Apart from that I’m a very dull, ordinary kind of codder with one natural aptitude and one that’s been trained on me by means I never dreamed were possible. My natural aptitude eventually bored me, but my taught one makes me hate the sight of myself.”
“In my country,” Jogajong said, “a man who thinks like you goes voluntarily to join his ancestors. Or used to in the old days. Now, the usurper Solukarta has copied your Christian habits and closed that way of escape. Which is a reason why we have so many muckers, I think.”
“Possibly.” In the old days of a month ago, Donald might have been intrigued by that suggestion; now he let it pass. “But I’m not at the suicide level yet. I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”
“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”
“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”
Jogajong’s face froze into a scowl. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hogan,” he said, rising. “I see little point in continuing this conversation.”
“That makes two of us,” Donald agreed, and turned his back.
* * *
And the next day was much the same except that, as the nurse had warned, Sugaiguntung passed into delirium for several hours. Donald sat beside him in the cave, listening to ramblings in Yatakangi whose hypnotic effect kept driving him off into musings of his own and sometimes into sleep. However, in the evening one of the fisherfolk from Gongilung risked his life and brought some of the necessary drug from a pharmacy there, and the delirium was over by the time Donald found he was ready for sleep.
Also the next day was like the first.