Stand on Zanzibar (20 page)

What did strike him as unusual was the sound of talking. Everywhere he heard people gossiping, a luxury for which the day allowed no time.

Hint: these people know each other, say hullo.

Anonymous to him but acquainted among themselves, they grouped in little knots of four or five all over the sidewalks. He had half-assumed they were street-sleepers, until he realised that even by modern standards there were too many of them and began to spot the genuine article: sad-eyed men and women—and children too—clinging to their bags of belongings, waiting for midnight and the legal chance to lie down wherever space presented itself.

“Are you weary, are you heavy-laden? Come to Jesus, come and rest in his bosom!” A woman minister on the steps of a store-front church, addressing the passers-by through a hand shouter.

“No thanks,
madam,
I fly a straight-type orbit!” yelled a passing yonderboy, and his sparewheels screeched laughter and clapped him on the back. The yonderboy was Afram and so was the minister. The proportion of Aframs in view was five or six times higher than by day.

They look at me with curiosity. Is colour a clue?

But that was a false lead. Bit by bit he pinned down the true reason. He was dressed in the conservative, slightly behind-the-style clothes he generally wore. Most of the people he passed either were shabby, like the street-sleepers, who often as not wore disposables meant for one wearing, kept on for ten, or had taken the fall of darkness as a signal to let their imaginations run riot. Not only the yonderboys with their fantastical puffed shirjacks designed to give the impression of enormous muscles, but the older folk too were gaudy as peacocks in scarlet and turquoise, ebony and chrome. They strutted in everything from RUNG-type robes to a coat of paint and a few strategic feathers.

Answer: it feels like a foreign country.

He gave a thoughtful nod. There was a Caribbean mood in these people’s casual employment of the street as an extension of their homes. It must have been triggered by the erection of the dome, building on and amplifying the high-summer tradition and extending it throughout the year.

*   *   *

The character of the neighbourhood began to change. He found himself being accosted by shills.

“White noise concert in progress, codder! Only a fin!”

“Excerpts from the Koran in English, live reading, sure to be of interest to an intelligent person such as yourself!”

“Hear the truth which the government screens from you! Recording direct from Peking giving all the facts!”

When he had gone a mile or more the grins and gestures of people he passed led him to discover a small luminescent poster attached unfelt to his back. Annoyed, he removed and read it.

This codder doesn’t know where to. On Triptine he’d be there before he had time to worry.

A GT promotion? Hardly. It was notorious that the government discouraged excessive zeal by the Nark Force, because psychedelics drained away so much potential subversion, but there were still—officially—laws in most states. He balled it up and threw it at a trashcan.

A lean, rather scholarly-looking Afram fell in beside him and kept tossing him sidelong glances. When they had gone a score of paces together he cleared his throat.

“Weren’t you at—?”

“No,” Donald said. “Spit the string and I’ll tell you if I’m interested, which’ll save your time and mine.”

The Afram blinked. After another few strides he shrugged. “No complaints about that, Father?”

“No.”

“Want your genotype read? Show me your palms. A fin gets you a strict scientific commentary—I have certificates.”

“Thanks, I can afford genalysis.”

“But no prodgies, hm?” The Afram looked wise. “Could be the trouble is with the Eugenics Board—no, don’t tell me. However bad it is there are ways to fix it. I have certain contacts, and if you can afford genalysis you can probably afford their services.”

“I’m clean,” Donald said with a sigh.

The Afram stopped dead. Involuntarily Donald did the same and turned so they were facing each other.

“You son of a bleeder,” the Afram said. “Here all I’m carrying is sickle-cell anaemia which in the malarial belt is actually advantageous, and they won’t let
me
though I’ve been married three times.”

“So why don’t you try the malarial countries?” Donald snapped. He slipped his hand into the pocket containing the Jettigun.

“A typical paleass remark!” the Afram sneered. “Why don’t you go back to Europe, then?”

Abruptly Donald’s annoyance faded. He said, “Look, cousin, you should meet my roomie and learn better. He’s Afram too.”

“You I don’t mind about,” the Afram said. “The fewer of you who fly straight orbits the better. But it’s a thing to weep about, you having a brown-nose roomie. Another generation, you’ll have melanin-high skin on the list of disallowed genes!”

He spat deliberately an inch from Donald’s feet and spun on his heel.

Depressed by the encounter, Donald walked on. He was barely aware of the distance he covered. Occasional stimuli made an impact on him—the banshee wail of a prowlie’s siren, children fighting over an insult, the ever-present music—but he was preoccupied.

The Afram’s reference to the malarial countries had sparked a train of thought, bringing back to mind what Norman had said earlier about Beninia. As ever, his computer-active subconscious had been stirring his information into new patterns.

State would want to know why Elihu Masters was making an approach to GT. Assumption: State does know why. If either the Dahomalians or the RUNGs persuade Beninia to federate, the disappointed party will have to fight or lose face. The only things that can prevent war are (a) President Obomi, who isn’t immortal, and (b) the intervention of an outside force they could join in railing against. In which case—!

He had it, all of a sudden. Three hours’ reading, five days a week bar vacation for ten years, had stocked his memory with all the information necessary to envisage the plan as it had to be.

But in the very instant it came to him, the knowledge was kicked to the back of his mind. Stopping dead, he wondered where in the name of God he was.

By the street-signs he had reached the lower East Side, an area presently at the bottom of the cycle of death and renewal that sometimes made the city seem like an organism. At the end of last century there had been a brief moment of glory here; decade by decade the would-be connectors had followed the intellectuals and the pseudos eastwards from the Village into the ruined area close to the river, until by 1990 or so this had been a high-price zone. But the wheel turned further, and the bored and prosperous moved out. Now the grace of the elegant buildings was crumbling again under a bright masking of advertisements:
flagging vigour calls for Potengel, MasQ-Lines take the world in their stride, ask the man who’s married to Mary Jane …
Across the display slanted the unrelated diagonals of fire-escapes, spotted with piles of garbage like forest fungi.

Donald turned slowly around. There were fewer people on the streets here. The very air breathed a sense of decay. Only a few minutes’ walk away was the brilliance and activity he had left behind without noticing, so it was small wonder the residents preferred not to spend their time here. The stores were closed except for the few that could afford automated pay-out clerks, and those were almost vacant of customers. There was no silence—there was no silent place in the city—but every sound which came to his ears seemed to be distant: not in that building but the next, not on this street but a block away.

Facing him now was one of the luxuries the architects had included when they worked this district over twenty years ago—an adventure playground elaborated into the gap between two tall buildings, a monkey-puzzle in three dimensions calculated so that a careless child could fall no further than one short level. For a moment his mind refused to accept the connection between the lines and forms he saw, and anything with solidity. Then the perspective separating near from far enabled him to grasp the image and he realised he was looking at a sort of Riemann ladder of concrete and steel silhouetted from behind by the last of the unbroken lamps on the struts.

Something moved among the frightful artificial branches. Donald, uncertain whether it was human, eased his hand into his pocket and began to wriggle his Karatand over his fingers.

The monstrous creature loomed, incredibly flexible, down the lip of a miniaturised precipice, and took on reality—a shadow, cast by a child passing in front of the surviving lamp.

Donald let out a great gasp of relief. The idea occurred to him that he must have been slipped a psychedelic, and then, when he discounted actual ingestion, he found himself wondering if perhaps the air was charged with the fumes of some drug affecting his perceptions.

Mechanically tugging the Karatand towards his wrist, he beat a retreat towards his own manor.

Unexpectedly, because this was not a cab-hiring district, he spotted a cruising taxi within a hundred yards. He called to the driver, who acknowledged him with a wave shadowed on the windshield.

Purring, the vehicle drew level with him. He made to get in as the driver activated the hydraulic door-controls.

Not so fast.

The words were as clear in his mind as if someone had spoken them from inside the passenger compartment. He delayed removing his hand from the door-pillar and looked for anything which might have alarmed him.

Probably imagination. I’m jumpy enough—

But no. Affixed to the air-conditioning nozzles was a device that automatically sent a radio signal to police headquarters if the driver dozed a passenger. It had been tampered with; the plastic seal certifying its annual inspection had discoloured to a warning red. He’d hailed a pseudo, one of the cabs whose drivers dozed their victims illegally and took them to be robbed in a dark side-street.

The door slammed. But not all the way. Even with the force of the hydraulics behind it, it could not crush the impact-sensitive Karatand which Donald had left in its way. There was a clang of hammered metal and a jar that travelled clear to his elbow, but he retained enough presence of mind not to snatch back his hand.

By law, these cabs were designed so that they could not be driven away unless the doors were closed. But Donald’s strength was inadequate to force his way out.

Impasse.

Behind the armour-glass of his cabin, the driver hit the door-controls again and again. The door slammed back and forth, but the Karatand endured. Suddenly very calm, Donald stared at the driver, but the man was too wary to let his face be seen even in the rear-view mirror. It was twisted to the side so that it covered his licence photograph, and its function had been taken over by a miniature TV unit.

What am I going to do now?

“All right, Shalmaneser!”

The voice made him start as it boomed from the speaker set in the roof.

“I’ll open up, you hit the sidewalk and we’ll say no more about it, how’s that?”

“No,” Donald said, surprised at his own determination.

“You can’t get out unless I let you.”

“You can’t drive off unless I let you.”

“Hoping for a prowlie to come by, hm? Fuzzy-wuzzies don’t pass this way if they can help!”

“Somebody’s going to notice a cab with the hire sign lit sitting in the middle of the street and not moving.”

“Who said it was lit?”

“You can’t turn it off without you closing the door!”

“Think not? I cut out the police alarm, didn’t I?”

“And it shows—you turned the seal red.”

“You’re the first in two weeks noticed that. Last one I chopped the fingers off.”

Donald licked his lips and eyed the adjacent sidewalks. Although this district was comparatively empty, it was not wholly unpopulated. An old Afram woman was this very moment approaching. He leaned to the gap in the door and called out.

“Lady! Fetch the police! This cab’s a pseudo!”

The old woman stared at him, crossed herself, and hurried by.

The driver gave a sour laugh. “You don’t know what it’s like around here, do you, Shalmaneser? Got left out of your programming!”

Donald’s heart sank. He was on the point of admitting defeat and offering to hit the sidewalk, when a movement at the corner of the street attracted him.

“You said prowlies don’t come this way,” he exclaimed.

“Right.”

“Then how about that one closing from behind?”

The driver stared at his TV unit, dismayed.

Does he think I’m bluffing? That’s no bluff—it’s a hundred per cent genuine prowl car!

Armoured, armed with gas and flame, the police car pussyfooted towards the stationary cab. The driver sounded his move-along siren.

“Take your hand off the pillar,” the hackie said. “I’ll balance the deal for you. What you want? I have contacts—Skulbustium, Yaginol, shiggies, name it and I’ll fix it.”

“No,” Donald said again, this time triumphantly.

He could see the silhouettes of the men in the prowlie now. Also, by this time, half a dozen people had gathered on the sidewalk. A couple of them were teenage Aframs, who shouted something indistinct at the police and doubled up in laughter.

The door of the prowlie opened, and Donald relaxed. A matter of seconds now—

Except that the moment the fuzzy-wuzzy stood up on the street, a hail of garbage pelted him from nowhere. He yelled a curse, hauled out his bolt-gun and sent a shot high into the darkness towards the adventure playground. Someone screamed. The standers-by dived for cover. The driver piled out of Donald’s cab and the policeman loosed another shot at him but missed. A whole can of garbage came slamming down from a higher level now, contents first, then can, squelch, then
crash.
Another policeman leaned out of the car and fired at the approximate source of the attack.

Belatedly aware that the door was no longer pressing on his hand, Donald scrambled out, shouting for the police to stop wasting their shots and go after the hackie. The man peering from the prowlie’s window saw him only as a human shape and fired at him. The hiss of the bolt searing past his ear made him gulp and stumble for the sidewalk.