Shaka II (2 page)

    I frowned. “That can’t be. Wolf is a Class M star. Nothing can live in orbit around a Class M star.”

    “Nothing does now,” he said meaningfully. “You should not be so quick to believe European and American astronomers. What we killed would give you nightmares for the rest of your life. You should be grateful such things can’t evolve on a Class G star.”

    “Did they give you nightmares?” I asked.

    He looked almost amused. “I am not like you,” he said.

    It wouldn’t be long before I learned just how unlike me he was.

    

    

    When he was a child, he always found a way to get what he wanted. He never cried, never screamed, never threatened-but somehow things would always work out for him. His methods were subtle. The children who stood in his way never showed up cowed or beaten…but twice they never showed up again at all.

    Robert told me that his opponent for the office he wanted was Hector ole Kunene, a nondescript little civil servant who was being given the job as payment for his loyalty to the party over the years. Both sides agreed that he deserved the office, and he was running unopposed.

    “Will you run as an independent, then?” I asked.

    He shook his head. “I have a party.”

    “Oh?”

    “The Zulu Party.”

    I frowned. “There is no Zulu Party,” I said.

    “There is now.”

    “Shall I assume you are its only member?” I asked with a smile.

    “You would be mistaken,” he said seriously. “You are also a member.”

    “I am?” I said, surprised.

    He nodded. “I must repay you for the generosity you have shown me tonight,” he said. “You will come to Ulundi with me and be my assistant.”

    “I have a job and a home right here.”

    “Leave them,” he said with a look of contempt. “Come with me and you shall be rewarded beyond your expectations.”

    “I am happy where I am,” I said. “I love the children I teach, and Ulundi is a crowded, filthy, dangerous city.”

    That amused smile again. “Do you think Ulundi is my destination? It is merely a brief stop along the way, nothing more.”

    “Pretoria?” I asked, amazed at his raw ambition.

    “Soon.”

    “And beyond that?”

    “We shall see.”

    “Every twenty years or so someone envisions himself as the new Shaka,” I said. “Yet thirty-five million Zulus are still living in Natal Province, and we are still without power of any kind-military, political, or economic. Why should anyone believe you are the One we have been waiting for?”

    “I do not claim to be anyone’s reincarnation,” he said. “And as a Zulu, you should know that his name was Tchaka, not Shaka, which is the Europeans’ corruption of it.”

    “You still haven’t answered my question,” I persisted. “Why should we believe in you? What have you done thus far to inspire confidence?”

    “I am just beginning,” he said.

    “And have accomplished nothing.”

    He reached into a pocket and tossed something to me. “Here is the nothing I have accomplished.”

    They were medals. More to the point, they included three of the highest medals the American Space Fleet had to offer.

    “This is very impressive,” I said. “I had no idea. We heard nothing of this here in Natal.”

    “It was nothing,” he said. “I could fight or I could die. I chose not to die. But it will impress the voters, who have always been more concerned with bravery than accomplishment.”

    “Winning these medals was a major accomplishment,” I corrected him. “A splendid one.”

    “Well,” he said, “let us hope the public is as easily beguiled by them as you are.”

    “These three,” I said, indicating the three medals for Outstanding Bravery. “What particular actions were they for?”

    “This one,” he said, “was for attacking the enemy’s flagship while in a small shuttlecraft.” He snorted contemptuously. “As if I had a choice. The shuttle was three thousand miles away from the mother ship when the enemy suddenly appeared between us.”

    “And the other two?”

    He shrugged. “I’ve no idea. You would have to ask the man I took them from.”

    “You stole them?” I asked.

    “Only after he attacked me in a drunken rage and I killed him. If he was brave enough to win them, and I was brave enough to defend myself and take them away from him, then I won them by proxy.” A quick smile. “And I will make sure no one asks me about their origin during the campaign.”

    “You have only one month before the election,” I noted. “Perhaps it will not come up.” Then: “When will you go to Ulundi to begin campaigning?”

    “As soon as you take me there,” he replied.

    “I can’t,” I said. “I told you-I have a job and responsibilities.”

    “Forget them,” he said. “You are working for me now.”

    “I am?” I said with a smile. “When is payday?”

    “Soon,” he said with no show of embarrassment.

    “Soon,” I repeated sardonically.

    “And often.”

    I knew I should refuse, that I should put him on public transport to Ulundi the next morning and show up at my job, as boring and poorly paid as it was, but I must confess that I was curious to watch him campaign-he always had such control of his emotions that I wanted to see how he whipped a crowd into a frenzy while remaining cool and collected himself. Then, too, if he was successful, if he actually gained a modicum of political power, there was the possibility that I could do more good for more people than just teaching one impoverished group of children. I would miss them, and I hoped they would miss me, but if things worked out, maybe I could help them more in Ulundi than in the classroom.

    I called in sick, we arrived in Ulundi the next afternoon, Robert registered his party and announced his candidacy, and then we took a room in a hotel that was one step above being a flophouse.

    The next morning Hector ole Kunene failed to show up at a small breakfast for the party faithful. He didn’t appear for a noon interview and an afternoon rally, and in fact was never seen again.

    And twenty-seven days later Robert ole Buthelezi, representing the Zulu Party, won an uncontested election for the office of Clerk of Records.

    It didn’t seem like much at the time, but years later historians would want all the details, however insignificant.

    

    

    When Robert took office, he gave me an imposing title-Vice Chairman and Confidential Advisor-but I was just a glorified filing clerk. I suppose I should have quit after the first week and gone back home, but my paycheck after that week was more than I made in a month as a teacher. I couldn’t figure it out-I was clearly a flunky, nothing more-but somehow when Robert put through the voucher for my salary no one argued with him. Which was probably just as well; Robert did not lose very many arguments. I sent half of my check to the school, and decided to stay.

    Ulundi wasn’t Johannesburg or Pretoria, but it was still far more sophisticated than the town where I had been living. A monorail circled the city, two matching skyscrapers reached for the clouds, and the city’s power was now supplied by nuclear energy.

    Each evening I stopped by a local restaurant on my way back to my rented room. From time to time Robert would choose to eat there, but never alone. Invariably he was in the company of men I did not know. Some were very well-dressed, and often had their government ID tags still affixed to their tunics. Others were poorly-dressed, and made no attempt to hide the fact that they carried weapons. It made no difference to Robert; he was equally at home with all of them.

    Well, perhaps I should reword that: he was equally comfortable and self-contained with either group. I don’t know for a fact that I ever saw him actually enjoy another man’s company. I know that he enjoyed the company of women, but not in that way and not in public.

    We had been in Ulundi for about four months when he finally invited me out to dinner. It was the first meal we had eaten together since we had arrived in the city. He took me to a posh restaurant, where all the staff seemed to know him (as did many of the diners), and we were escorted to a table in the farthest corner of the room.

    “This is my regular table here,” he said as we sat down. “I do not believe any other diners can overhear me here as long as I keep my voice down.”

    “I would think they have very little interest in governmental record-keeping anyway,” I said.

    He laughed, the first laugh I had heard him utter since he returned after his ten-year absence.

    “If there was any doubt that we are brothers, that eradicates it,” he said. “Our father had a sense of humor too-or so I have been told.” Neither of us remembered much of Buthelezi, who had wandered off one day and never returned. In truth, we had no idea if he was still alive.

    “I am sure it will be a very fine meal,” I said, “and I will speak so softly no one can possibly overhear me, but I still don’t know why I am here.”

    “To make plans, of course.”

    “Just me?” I asked. I stared at him curiously. “Am I being fired?”

    “No, and no,” he said. “But if we are to move to Pretoria in a few months, we must prepare.”

    “Are we moving to Pretoria?”

    He nodded his head. “I told you we would not be in Ulundi for long.”

    “You have found a better job?” I asked.

    “I have served my apprenticeship,” he answered. “It is time to become President.”

    “Based on three medals, two of which aren’t yours, and four months as Clerk of Records in a backwater province?” I said.

    “It is a backwater province,” he replied. “It is time to leave it.”

    “I have no problem with that,” I said. “But to think you can become the President of all South Africa…”

    “It is the logical next step in the progression.”

    “The progression?” I said, surprised. “You mean there’s more?”

    He looked at me rather sadly, the way you might look at a pet that will never understand what you are trying to teach it.

    “There is more.”

    “The Presidency of South Africa”-an impossibility in itself-“isn’t enough?”

    “When Tchaka became king of the Zulus, Zululand was perhaps ten square miles,” he shot back. “Was that enough?”

    “He controlled only ten square miles; the President controls hundreds of thousands,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

    “Only in degree,” replied Robert. “His world covered the southern tip of Africa. Mine extends as far as the eye can see.”

    “So did his,” I argued.

    Robert gave me another sad smile reserved for pets of limited intelligence. “He never looked up.”

    

    

    Lloyds of London had the odds against him at 200-to-1 with eleven weeks to go. The one casino in Las Vegas that booked bets on it lowered it to 175-to-1 in case there was a sympathy vote for the poor clerk who had the temerity to buck the entrenched political machine. Robert borrowed a thousand rands and bet on himself.

    Two months before the election there was a debate between the three leading candidates. Well, actually, the two leading candidates and Robert. It was held in a stadium in Cape Town, rather than a holo studio, and some forty thousand people were in attendance. It was a bright, sunlit day, as almost all days on the Cape are, and it was estimated that more than eighty million people, in South Africa and elsewhere, were watching on their Tri D’s and their computers’ holoscreens.

    They were about half an hour into the debate when it happened. Three gunmen-one armed with a laser gun, two with projectile pistols-burst onto the floor of the stadium. They must have been hiding in the laundry facilities in the back of the visiting teams’ clubhouse, and had killed half a dozen security men along the way. They raced onto the field where one of the network anchors was acting as moderator for the debate. One of them started yelling something-the sound system couldn’t pick it up-and then they began firing their weapons. The guards were taken by surprise, and soon lay dead on the stadium floor.

    One man fired a shot at Robert, who threw himself to the ground. The bullet hit a woman in the stands. She screamed and pitched forward, dead.

    The President was crouching down behind his podium, and the man with the laser pistol was burning his way through it. Two shots tore into the other candidate, blood spurted out of his throat, and he collapsed, writhing and twisting frantically for a few seconds, then lay absolutely still in an ever-increasing pool of his own blood.

    And then, just as everyone thought there was more slaughter to come, Robert got to his feet and raced to the man with the laser, hurling himself against the man’s back and sending him sprawling. Somehow he got his hand on the gun as the two went down in a heap and he came up firing. The first blast of deadly light turned one of the pistols to molten metal, the second went right between the third man’s eyes. The man whose gun had melted threw himself at Robert, which was all but suicidal: I don’t think Robert had ever lost a fight since he began building his body up after that one experience as a boy. He reached out a long, powerful arm, grabbed the man by the throat, lifted him off the ground until the wild thrashing became feeble twitching, and then literally threw him away.

    The first gunman, the one with the laser whom he had disarmed, got up, took one look into Robert’s eyes, didn’t like what he saw, spotted some police running onto the field, and raced to them, his arms in the air, screaming that he surrendered.