Stand on Zanzibar (56 page)

“I was instructed to seek a personal interview with Sugaiguntung at the earliest opportunity,” Donald said.

“The Professor Doctor is far too busy to spend time chatting with foreigners,” Keteng snapped. “If you look at the programme I’m giving you, however, you’ll see he is scheduled to make a public appearance at the press conference the day after tomorrow. You will have a chance to question him then along with other correspondents.”

Donald’s temper, fraying steadily under Keteng’s purposeful gibes, now threatened to give way entirely.

“What keeps Sugaiguntung so busy?” he demanded. “No reasonable scientist would have allowed his programme to be made public until all the preliminary work was finished. This kind of thing makes people suspect that the work
isn’t
finished—that the announcement is exaggerated, if not worse.”

“No doubt,” Keteng said with heavy irony, “that is the report you have been instructed to send back for the edification of your compatriots. You Americans lack subtlety. Go up to the university clinic and you’ll see what keeps all of us ‘so busy’ in Yatakang! We haven’t subsided into decadence of the sort that allows you to think in terms of finishing a job and then relaxing. We have plans that will occupy us for the next generation, because we don’t accept the idea of ‘good enough’. We aim at perfection. And the Professor Doctor shares that view. Is that all?”

No, it’s not even the beginning.
But Donald swallowed the words unuttered and rose obediently to his feet.

For the time being, in fact, it would make sense to treat all official suggestions as orders. Keteng had told him to go to the university and look it over for himself while he was there for the compulsory operation. He hailed a rixa immediately he left the building and told the driver that was where he wanted to go.

It was an uphill pull for the slim and wiry pedaller, but the journey would have had to be slow even down a one-in-three incline. All the approach streets in the vicinity of the university were cramfull of people. With a student body of over sixty thousand, Dedication University was an academic foundation of respectable size, but these people, Donald noted with interest, were not all students. They were of assorted ages from teens to borderline senility; one could tell where there was a particularly ancient member in the crowd because those surrounding him or her formed an ad-hoc bodyguard to keep away the press. Honouring old age was still a live tradition here.

After a while, as the rixa crept through the throng, he began to wonder whether any of these people were students. What few remarks he caught clearly—he did not want to lean out from the rixa and show himself off, drawing attention for his Caucasion features—made him think that they were visitors from other islands. If that was true, since at a rough guess there were ten or twelve thousands of them in the mile and a half he had traversed, there was a good solid basis for the official claims about a public welcome for the genetic programme.

For, dotted about here and there, he saw tired and dispirited youths and girls carrying slogan-boards, and all of them made reference to Sugaiguntung.

Hmmm … Going to the university in the hope of catching a glimpse of the great man?

Ahead loomed the wall enclosing the university precincts: a seven-foot barrier of pure white ornamented with the stylized whorls and strokes of Yatakangi calligraphy—widely employed, like Arabic script in Egypt, as a frieze-motif on all public buildings. In weatherproof enamels of red, blue, green and black, durable testaments to the greatness of Yatakang and the wisdom of Solukarta shut out the crowd of intending sightseers.

At the only gate he could see, there were not merely police on duty, their buff uniforms patched with sweat and the holster-flaps turned back from the butts of their bolt-guns, but also a number of young people wearing armbands of the national colours, red, blue and green, who seemed to be trying to address the surging visitors ranged all along the wall, pushing and exhorting. Straining his ears over the hubbub, he thought he distinguished a few comprehensible phrases: “You must be patient—the doctor in your village will be told what to do—work hard and eat well or your children won’t be healthy whatever we do…”

Donald gave a nod. This must be the kind of evidence on which Deirdre Kwa-Loop had based her statement about the consequences of disappointing the people of Yatakang.

The rixa-driver finally managed to deposit him close to the gate. To the policeman who came to investigate he showed his passport and the letter from Keteng authorising him to attend the university clinic without charge. The policeman read the document slowly and summoned two of the brassarded youths who passed nearby. With their aid, the eager crowd was kept back from the gate while it was briefly opened to pass Donald inside the wall.

A shareng-clad girl carrying a folded umbrella greeted him as he stepped out across a tiled platform. He was in a court with a fountain and a sand-garden in the middle, and cloisters all around it under pagodaed roofs. The cloisters were ramped so that on this, the entrance side of the court, their continuation was on a level below the street he had left; from under the platform he could hear a jabber of voices and many walking feet. Standing, or shoving a way through, there were at least a hundred students in his field of view.

“Good afternoon, sir,” the girl said, using a stock Yatakangi honorific from the root meaning “senior”.

“Good afternoon,” Donald replied, looking her over and noting that she also wore a brassard. “I am to go to the clinic here.” He held out Keteng’s letter.

“I will escort you, sir,” the girl said. “I am on stranger guidance duty today. If at any time you need information ask someone wearing a band like this.” She recited the words with a bright, forced smile, but her tone suggested tiredness. “Please come along.”

She led him down a short steep flight of stairs to the cloisters passing beneath the platform, opening her umbrella as she did so. It served, apparently, as a gangway warning; Donald saw several students tap their companions on the shoulder and move them aside.

The walk was a long one. He had arrived on the wrong side of the precinct. Without a guide he could have got hopelessly lost five or six times. Their route took them past more than a score of separate buildings, which the girl identified for him.

“Asiatic languages section—history section—oceanography section—geography and geology section…”

Donald paid little attention. He was far more interested in the young people he encountered. Keteng was right, he admitted reluctantly. There was an air of almost frantic busyness unlike the atmosphere at any American university he had ever visited. Even the few students he saw who were just standing about were talking—he heard them—about their studies, not about shiggies or what to do at the weekend.

“Biochemistry—genetics and tectogenetics—and here we are at the clinic!”

He came back to the here and now with a start. The girl was holding a door open for him; beyond it, he glimpsed the international pastel décor and sniffed the international disinfectant odour of a hospital.

“You said that that was the genetics department?” he demanded, gesturing to the last building they had passed.

“Yes, sir.”

“The department in which the famous Dr. Sugaiguntung works?”

“Yes, sir.” This time the girl’s smile seemed not to be forced; there was genuine pride in her voice, too. “I have the honour to work in that department. I am studying directly under him.”

Donald framed a flowery phrase including gratitude for her help, admiration of her beauty and a good deal about the plight of a foreign stranger. Contacting one of Sugaiguntung’s own students would be an incredible stroke of good fortune!

But before he could speak she had folded her umbrella and marched briskly away. Twenty students had crowded between him and her by the time he reacted.

And there was a nurse eyeing him from inside the clinic’s door, about to address him. He sighed. All he could do was mark down the salient features of the genetics building in his mind’s eye, in case he got the chance to return here.

Making this quick final survey, he noticed something that struck him as strange about the passing students. There were many fewer smiles than one might expect among people who felt they were achieving great things. Nodding or waving to friends, they maintained looks of serious concentration.

And the girl who had brought him over from the gate had sounded tired.

Exhausted from being driven too hard? That would fit. Dedication was the outstanding one of all Yatakang’s many centres of higher education; competition to get in must be fierce, with millions of families uging their children on.

The thought made him nervous. He wasn’t used to being among people who admired dedication to the degree where they would wear themselves out. At home, it had become unfashionable. He turned to speak to the nurse and explain his reason for calling here.

Just as he did so, there was a scream. Jerking his gaze back, he saw a ripple run through the students closer to the genetics building, and something rose above the close-packed dark heads. Light glinted on it. He recognised its unique shape at once: a phang, the Yatakangi scimitar to which these people were so fond of comparing their sword-sweep of islands.

The single scream blurred into an unvoiced howling and a boy stumbled weeping out on to the immaculate face of the sand-garden that here too separated the white towers and the pagodaed walks. He was bleeding brilliant red from a slash across his chest. After two yards he fell and began to leak his life into the ground, writhing.

In sick amazement Donald envisaged himself as the carrier of a new and strange disease: the infective agent for riot and slaughter. He had only arrived in this city today, and …

One didn’t have to have previous experience of this phenomenon. One knew, instantly. It was a fact of modern life—or death. Just a few yards from him, past a barrier to vision composed of abruptly panicking students, was a person who had gone over the edge of sanity and decided to run
amok.

The demand it made on his perceptions was too great for him to take the whole scene in. He saw single facets of it: the bleeding boy, the fear-stricken survivors, and then a girl in a slashed shareng who stumbled out as the boy had done, making deep footprints in the sand-garden, holding one of her own small breasts against herself with her hand and staring down at the monstrous gash which had almost separated it from her body—too stunned to cry, able only to stare and suffer.

The mucker had chosen a perfect site to gather victims. Cramped into the walkway at the point where people leaving the high genetics building were hampered by doors, there was no need to seek targets, only to chop and chop. The blade swung into sight again, sowing spatters of blood on walls and faces and backs, and slammed down butcher-wise, cleaving meat and bone. Overhead, faces appeared at windows, and a long way off a buff-uniformed man with a drawn bolt-gun came in sight, fighting his way through the press of fright-crazed students. A third victim collapsed off the walkway like a jointless dummy, this one a youth with his brains spilling out to the day.

The mad yelling turned to a word, and the word was a name, and the name was—Donald didn’t understand why—“Sugaiguntung!” Why should he be sent for? Was the mucker not human, but one of the modified orang-outangs he’d produced? The possibility seemed wild, but no wilder than the idea that he should have walked into a mucker directly upon his arrival.

Without realising what he was doing, he found himself trying to get a clear sight of the killer, and because he stepped away from the clinic door his retreat—available, not yet used—was cut off. A pack of terror-blind students crushed past him, one of them falling and unable to rise for an eternal moment, knocked back and back to sprawl on the pavement as careless legs and feet battered him.

Not
a student. The fact impressed itself on Donald at the same instant as another, far more urgent. The person who had fallen was a man of middle age, growing stout, and—a rarity among Yatakangis—bald at the crown of his head. But that was a snapshot, meaningless. What counted was that the mucker had come after him.

Donald’s mind chilled as though someone had cracked his skull like that of the dead boy a few yards distant, then poured it full of liquid helium. He felt a control and detachment like a cryogenic computer, and time ceased for a while to be linear and became pictorial.

This is a classic portrait of the mucker phenomenon. The victim is a thin youth a little above average height for his ethnic group, sallow, black-haired and dressed in conventional garb spotted with fresh blood. His eyes, which are black-irised, are fixed wide open, and the pupils are doubtless dilated though the contrast is too low for me to see them. His mouth is also open and his chin is running with saliva. There is a little froth on the left cheek. His breathing is violent and exhalation is accompanied by a grunt—haarrgh ow haarrgh ow! His muscular tensions are maximised; his right sleeve has split from the pressure of the biceps. He has a convulsive grip on his phang and all his knuckles are brightly pale against his otherwise sallow skin. His legs are bowed and his feet planted firmly apart like a sumo wrestler’s when confronting an opponent. He has a conspicuous erection. He is in a berserk frame of reference and will not feel any pain.

With that realisation, a question came—what in God’s name am I to do?—and time re-started.

The phang whistled and stung Donald’s face with drops of blood hurled at him so fast he could feel them like gale-driven needles of rain. He jumped back, the man on the ground made another attempt to get up, the mucker almost lost balance cancelling the violence of the blow he had aimed at Donald and diverted the blade to the man on the ground and with the very tip of it managed to write a line of pain across his bumping buttocks.

Weapon.

Someone had said that to Donald Hogan: a variant Donald Hogan, the Mark II man who had learned nearly a thousand different ways to end a human life.