Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (74 page)
Another voice said, “Don’t worry, he’s leaving us, and not before time.”
“Ah-hah? Where’s he going?”
“Africa. That’s far enough away.”
I didn’t tell anyone—I didn’t even tell Penelope for fear she might …
He paid up and left carrying his purchases. Drunk, the two men followed him. He didn’t know their names. They began calling out to everyone they passed, saying, “Hey look! Don’t you know who he is? He’s Pope Eglantine’s special representative, the daddy of them all!”
It being Saturday there were a lot of people about.
“Someone came and asked me about him the other day. Something about a woman with two prodgies he deserted down in Ellay.”
“What?”
“Helen something, he said. Helen—Jones?”
All looking, listening, curious.
“But he has three right here in the block. That makes five.”
“Five?”
“Five!”
At a drinks dispenser someone emptied his plastic cup and threw it. It tapped lightly on Eric’s arms folded over the cans and packs he had brought from the store.
“Hey, big man making five prodgies! And left the one with two, did you? Whassamatter, wouldn’t she breed any more Right Catholics for you?”
Not recognised, a figure out of nightmare, someone in his way, compelling him to stop.
“Going to have a nice cosy evening all by yourselves giving the next one a good start in life? Plenty of liquor, plenty of joints to get you in the mood? Maybe you need the lift to lay that fat cow. I know I would!”
“So fix that!”
Hands tugging at the things he carried. Weakly he tried to struggle free. They pulled it all away from him.
“Whassamatter, codder? Want it back?”
“Give it here—it’s mine, I paid for it!”
“Not so fast, darling, not so fast! Hey, Shirley, want a pack of joints? Plenty here! Doug, how about some beer?”
“No, stop it, stop it—”
“Harry, catch the pack, he’s getting wild.”
Going from hand to hand, shiggies’ as well as men’s, always marginally faster than he could react to intercept it. His breath was lacerating now and his eyes were blurred.
“Why don’t you complain to Pope Eglantine, darling? Get him to call down the wrath of heaven on us! You’re a good boy, aren’t you—always breeding like you’re told to!”
“You heard about his first wife down in Ellay with the two kids before he moved up here?”
“Dirty bleeder—”
“Trying to run away now he’s been found out, wants to go to Africa they told me—”
“Just because he’s got a clean genotype—”
“Shows off the Populimit Bulletin all the time and then it turns out—”
“Probably burns it on the altar secretly and apologises for buying it—”
“Always screaming and crying, two of them at once, can’t hardly sleep for the racket—”
“My boy says his daughter wanted to know why we don’t have girl twins like they do—”
“Dirty bleeder—”
The next thing thrown was one of the cans of beer. It hit Eric’s forehead and left a cut; he was suddenly blinking away blood.
“On the orbit, darling! Square on the orbit! Hey, let me—”
Crash.
“Don’t let him get away, he’s trying to get away—”
“Say, if he likes to breed so much why don’t we—?”
“Got him again! Donna, you want to have a shot? Here—”
“Catch him, Doug! Right, sparewheels, let’s—”
“Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ah-
ha-ha
-ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
”
“Lookitim lookitim look!”
“Have to wash before he goes to see the Pope again—”
“No wonder she threw him out, two children looking like that—”
“Five—”
“Right Catholic—”
“Stop him!”
“Ouch! Christ, the bleeder’s—”
“See what you did to my sparewheel? I’m going to—”
And they did.
When it was over and they got scared they took him down to the rapitrans and when nobody except the people who already knew were watching they pushed him over the edge of the platform in front of an incoming car and said he fainted suddenly or committed suicide—versions differed but of course with the word having leaked out about the poor shiggy called Helen he abandoned in Ellay and the five prodgies and the secret Right Catholic beliefs and all the rest of it nobody inquired too closely.
* * *
When Stal saw news about it on the TV he was pretty well satisfied but by then Zink had found someone who thought he could get the stuff ready-cured out of the packing station and would split the profits sixty-forty.
As he had done on the days previous, Donald spent the daylight hours wandering around the clearing, brooding, or sitting on one of the tree-stump seats trying not to have to think. His isolation was self-aggravated. There was news to be had; despite the postponement of their intended uprising, Jogajong’s organisation was active, with many spies and agents—at least one in every town of Yatakang, delivering frequent reports. Jogajong made a great show of openness towards Donald, introducing and praising him to anyone of importance who made his way to the camp, but the pretence rang hollow. Whenever there was business to discuss someone was assigned to make sure Donald did not approach the speakers too closely.
Not that he was concerned about that. Human affairs, even on the scale of revolution in a country of over two hundred million, had begun to dwindle in his mind during the interminable hours of waiting. He stared into the trees and saw the luxuriance of their leaves and blossoms fed by the cycle of putrefaction; on that spot, ten thousand years ago, there was conceivably such another tree … but where was man? Fat, somehow obscene fungi clung here and there to tree-trunks, attended by insects. Lower, there were snakes, bugs, scorpions against which he had been counselled never to put his shoes on without shaking them, nor lie down without examining his bedding. Higher, there were birds of species he could not name except for the brightest parakeets which chattered to one another in shrill, grating voices. There were many other creatures in the jungle, but most of them were afraid of the smell of man and kept their distance.
He listened to the wind soughing in the upper branches. When it rained, he hated the irregularity of the splashing and dripping it induced. Patternless, it mocked at pattern, hence at reason. The air was never free of an oppressive smell, either from rotting vegetation or from the volcanic vent, and like a man condemned to slake his thirst from muddy ponds he began to imagine that there was a special taste to air, like the taste of pure water, and sniffed the breeze hopefully when it blew from the seaward side, expecting some delirious miracle of inhalation.
But the idea of the sea also troubled him: enormous, massive, patient, capable of wrath, a hostile beast encircling the hostile giant of the jungle and equally ready to wash away the memory of man. He struggled to picture the hundred islands of Yatakang, a flourishing nation with science, technology, an advanced civilisation, and beyond it China, India, Europe, America. Fabled names, read from maps. This was no tidy arrangement of blue and green and brown on a flat sheet with neat square corners. This was a chaos. It belonged to Grandfather Loa, the Chronos of today who might choose at will to eat his children.
More than at anything else, he stared at the volcano, shrouded much of the time in mist, but occasionally appearing to his view as though the slumbering deity was fitfully aware of the mite whom he awed and remembered to make himself manifest.
Remembered: Bronwen, her sleek brown body and her statement so calmly uttered that he had known he was going to be needed to save Sugaiguntung. Brushing contact, ships that pass in the night. It seemed vaguely desirable that her leukaemia should overcome her. She carried more of him in her mind than he cared to part with to so casual an acquaintance.
Also Deirdre Kwa-Loop: how would Engrelay Satelserv explain the sudden fading from their programmes of the dispatches they had advertised so loudly? Ah, there would be a new sensation and they would ghost stories under his name to cover the gap until the fickle awareness of the public overlooked it altogether. As well try to recall the identity of each hair shed to the comb, each paring lost to the nail-scissors. Today, tomorrow,
sub specie aeternitatis
, small things to distract half-empty minds. Heedless, the presence of Grandfather Loa.
When a messenger came to report a radio contact with the patrols between here and Isola, and said something about a lull in aquabandit activity which made it possible to sneak in a submarine tonight, he barely paid attention. He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed.
* * *
The medicine had brought Sugaiguntung out of his fever but he was left very weak. Nausea had prevented him from keeping down any food for almost three days, and although he had recovered sufficiently to take a little broth and a spoonful or two of savoury rice, the nurse said she had had to compel him to swallow it. Donald abandoned his apathy for long enough to wonder about the advisability of taking him out to the submarine tonight. According to Jogajong the process had to be a complex one, involving a boat, radar-evasive protective suits, and floating alone on the water for anything up to hours before sonar showed it was safe for the submarine to surface and take them aboard. That it had been done successfully a great many times, including the occasion when Jogajong was taken away for training in insurgency, was no reassurance; there were also times on record where it had ended in blood and fire.
He had hardly spoken to the scientist since he fell ill. His delirious ravings had had a certain fascination, like a white-noise concert, but last night when Donald returned to the cave he had only been snoring, and today he had lain quietly on his mattress, answering questions with nods or grunts. Once satisfied that the fever was abating, Donald had preferred to avoid him.
Now, with the question of their departure on his mind, he entered the cave and found the scientist sitting up crosslegged, wrapped in a blanket. He seemed to be lost in thought. When Donald asked if he felt well enough to endure the trip out to the submarine, his answer at first was a counterquestion.
“Can you get me pen and paper?”
“Never mind that,” Donald said roughly. “Do you feel all right now? They’ve arranged to take us away tonight.”
“I don’t want to be taken away,” Sugaiguntung said.
Was the fever still active in his wasted body? Donald asked again, “Do you feel better now?”
“Yes, much better, and I said I wanted paper. Is there any to be had?”
Donald hesitated and bit his lip. After a moment he uttered a promise to get some which he did not believe he could keep, and backed out of the cave. He went in search of Jogajong and found him talking with the nurse.
“Mr. Hogan,” he nodded politely. “I hear Dr. Sugaiguntung is recovering well and may be taken to the submarine as planned.”
“He’s just told me he doesn’t want to go,” Donald said. On hearing the words in his own voice, their impact came home to him.
To have done this, to have suffered this, and then to have nothing to show for it…?
His eyes met Jogajong’s, and for an instant he knew he was on the same plane as the rebel leader: he had, in this fragment of eternity, a cause in whose way nothing must be allowed to stand.
“What does he want to do, then?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
“He can’t stay here. The government has good computers. Soon they will notice the pattern of comings and goings centred on this island and draw a conclusion. We shall have to go to a base on another island where people are more sympathetic to the cause. It will be a long, hard trek through jungle and swamp and there will be many dangerous boat-crossings—not good for a sick and aging man.”
“Also he can’t go back,” Donald said, and added to himself:
if he could, I wouldn’t let him.
“In some ways,” Jogajong said after a little thought, “it is easier to transport an unconscious man.”
“So I would imagine.”
“It is presumably a last trace of the delirium due to the fever, isn’t it?”
“Of course.” They understood one another perfectly.
The nurse said, “But I gave him enough of the drugs to make sure he—”
Jogajong interrupted her. “You have had no trouble from him when you gave him medicine?”
She shook her head.
“Tonight then, a short while before we are due to send you on your way, Mr. Hogan…”
Donald, however, was scarcely listening. The problem settled, he had gone back to thinking of Grandfather Loa.
WHILE THE BALANCE OF HIS MIND WAS DISTURBED
“Mary!”
Standing by the window, staring with a bitter expression at the advancing tide of repetitive suburbs cresting the far side of the pleasant English valley, Mary Whatmough heard her husband’s voice calling her excitedly. She swallowed half the gin that was in the glass she held—she felt somehow guilty about pouring herself large drinks—and turned just as he entered the room, holding up a letter like a flag of triumph.
“It’s from the Beninia Consortium! Listen! ‘Dear—etc’—where are we? Yes, this is the important bit. ‘While we cannot hold out the hope of remuneration as generous as we would accord to an applicant with more specialised skills, we do believe that experience such as you described in your letter would prove valuable to our staff in the preliminary stages of the project. Please let us know when it would be convenient for you to call at our London office and discuss the matter personally.’”
Articulating carefully—the draught of gin had hit her rather harder and very much more quickly than she had expected—Mary said, “It sounds as though some of those blacks have finally seen sense, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious? They never were fit to run their own affairs, and now they’ve realised it and asked somebody in to help them who can.”
Victor folded the letter. Then, looking down at it, he began to pleat it into parallel strips. He said without raising his head again, “Ah—I don’t believe that’s exactly the thinking that underlies the project, my dear.”