Stand on Zanzibar (59 page)
Authors: John Brunner
There was a period of silence except for the humming of the motor and occasional complaints from the suspension. At last Norman said, “I told you I’d never seen a dead body before. I don’t know how I could have said that.” He swallowed enormously, his throat seeming to be blocked against the admission he was trying to make. “Because … Well, the other day I
killed
somebody.”
“What? Who?”
“A Divine Daughter. She took an axe to Shalmaneser. She’d already chopped the hand off one of our technicians.”
Gideon thought that over. He said eventually, “There’s a Shinka proverb.”
“What?”
“You have many years to live—do things you will be proud to remember when you’re old.”
THE OLD LADY UNDER THE JUGGERNAUT
The decision to schedule it for clearance and development
Was taken at a meeting with all the due formality
By the people’s democratically elected representatives
None of whom had been inside—only to the doorstep
Briefly during canvassing for the last election
Which was when they smelt the smell and knew they didn’t like it.
A junior executive from the Health Department
Said it was unthinkable that children and old people
Should nowadays exist in such Victorian squalor.
He named fires with open flames, he named splintered wooden floorboards,
Windows with single panes, toilets without airtight lids.
Committee members shuddered and agreed on the removal.
Notices were sent to sixty-seven heads of families—
The list compiled from records of electoral returns.
A date was fixed for transfer to brand-new accommodation.
Objections could be entered as the law demanded.
If the number of objections exceeded thirty-three per cent
The Minister of Housing would arrange a public hearing.
Not included in the data was a woman called Grace Rowley.
In accordance with instructions the electoral computer
Having failed to register her form for three successive years
Marked her as non-resident, presumed removed or dead.
However, to be certain, it did address her notice.
No answer was recorded before the scheduled date.
* * *
It happened to be the morning of her seventy-seventh birthday.
She awoke to noises that she had never heard in her life.
There were crashes and landslide sounds and engines roaring.
When she got up, frightened, and put on her greasy coat
Over the unwashed underclothes she always slept in,
She found two strange men going through her other room.
The passing years had filled it with mementoes of a lifetime:
Shoes that had been fashionable when she was a pretty girl,
A gift from a man she had often wished she’d married,
The first edition of a book that later sold a million,
A cracked guitar to which she had once sung lovesongs,
A Piaf record bought during Piaf’s heyday.
A voice said, “Christ, Charlie, this is worth a fortune.”
Wrapping an ornament, a newspaper informed him
Of the triumphant success of the first manned Moon-landing.
A voice said, “Christ, Charlie, did you ever see such junk?”
Names were strewn broadcast: Dylan, Brassens, Aldous
Huxley, Rauschenberg, Beethoven, Forster, Mailer,
Palestrina …
Like silt deposited by the river of time in oozy layers
The sludgy heritage of passing fashion-generations
Testified to the contact of Miss Rowley with her world.
And somehow the strain … old age … the contact broke, anyway.
Looking up and suddenly discovering her staring at them,
The men, who were both young, thought, “Oh my God.
Oh my God.”
* * *
With the authority of the committee, democratically elected,
They took away Grace Rowley and they put her in a Home.
By authority of the committee, democratically elected,
They auctioned her belongings apart from her clothing
And prosperous antique dealers purchased some of it
And sold at huge profit to collectors and even museums.
When the question next came up of excessive public outlay
On the maintenance in council accommodations of senior citizens,
It was explained that Miss Rowley’s belongings when sold
Had more than defrayed the cost of accommodating her
Because she had lived for only another month, and moreover
A medical school had saved them the price of a funeral.
FROM HERE ON DOWN IT’S UPHILL ALL THE WAY
Someone fetched a diadermic syringe and shot through the blood masking Donald’s wrist, wishing on him a premature night. When he awoke it was real night; darkness lay on the windows of the room where he found himself, as complete as if the glass had been magicked to an ebony mirror. His cut hands had been dressed and his bruises swabbed with something to reduce their ache. Watching by him in the glow of a self-luminous wall-panel was a very small girl in nurse’s coverall and sterile mask.
It was raining again. He heard the sound of it on the walls, soft as a slack drum. He moved his hands and felt the faint remaining sting from all the many gashes he had inflicted on himself, and his vision turned the pure red of new blood and he moaned.
Prepared, the girl gave him another shot, into the muscles of his exposed upper arm, presumably a trank of some kind. It left him with a dull ache, but the horror declined to the bearable intensity of nightmare. She counted his pulse while it was taking effect and he lay there not objecting. He could feel the pulse himself against her fingertips. When it was down to a rate he judged to be in the middle seventies she rose and went to the door.
Through it he heard raised voices, a man’s and a woman’s, harshly arguing. The man said he wanted to go in and the woman said he would have to wait no matter who he was. Eventually she won and marched into Donald’s room.
She was big for a Yatakangi, about five feet seven and solid, not wearing a shareng but a man’s tunic and breeches and boots that thumped on the plastic floor. Her hair was cut short and she carried a recorder with a pistol grip. Behind her followed two buff-uniformed policemen who combined to close the door and shut out the nurse and the other, unseen speaker.
“You’re feeling better?” the woman asked.
Donald nodded.
“Good. Our medical treatment is of the highest standard, of course.” She gestured to one of the policemen, who seized a chair and placed it where she could face the bed. “I am State Police Superintendent Totilung. It is necessary for me to ask you some questions.”
“Before charging me with murder, I suppose,” Donald said.
“If that is an American joke please take notice that I cannot spare the time for social chatter.” Totilung settled her big firm buttocks on the narrow seat and pointed the recorder at him like the muzzle of a blunderbuss.
“Who was he?” Donald said suddenly.
“What?”
“The man I killed—who was he?”
Totilung bit back a sharp retort, probably scheduled to have been along the lines, “I’m asking the questions, not you!” She said with ill grace, “A student who had been overworking. His family expected too much of him, they say.”
I thought it must be something like that.
Donald knuckled his temples with his bandaged fists. “Go ahead, Superintendent,” he sighed. “What can I tell you that the witnesses can’t? There were plenty of people watching.”
“True. Constable Song was among them”—she gestured at one of the policemen accompanying her—“but the crowd prevented him getting a clear shot at the man who ran
amok.
”
“I remember,” Donald said. “I caught a glimpse of him trying to get along the walkway.” The trank kept his voice under control; without it he thought he would have screamed.
I didn’t have to kill him. He was already unconscious!
“All this is wasting time,” Totilung said. “Now! You are Donald Hogan, a reporter working for English Language Relay Satellite Service?”
“Ah—yes.”
“You came to the university ostensibly to undergo the sterilisation compulsory for foreigners?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but added, “That has been attended to, by the way.”
Donald’s hand, against his will, leapt to his genitals. Unsmiling, Totilung said, “There will be no scar or discomfort. And they assure me that an operation to reverse the effect would definitely be successful.”
Donald withdrew his hand like a guilty child caught playing with himself. He said angrily, “Why bother to question me? You know things about me that I don’t know myself!”
Totilung ignored that. She said, “We examined your papers and other belongings. Also your body. You are physically in good health with some trace of a stimulant drug no doubt taken to counteract the time-gain on your flight from America—correct?”
Donald gave a wary nod. Luckily there was a jar of just such a drug in his baggage at the hotel. But he had taken none of it; the trace they had detected must be the last residue of what he had been given during eptification.
“In our records there has never been a case of an unarmed man overcoming a mucker before,” Totilung said. “Of course, we have very few muckers, and the enlightened system under which we now live is helping to reduce the number still further.” She included that assertion without much conviction, as though it were a required propaganda claim. “However, we have made theoretical studies of such people, and our experts conclude that the reaction of a mucker, not being subject to rational judgment, are faster than those of a person in a normal state of mind. Yet I have to accept what many witnesses tell me: you defeated one much younger than yourself and what’s more armed with a phang. So what I want to know is this—what makes you such an efficient killing machine?”
Nobody had told Donald how to answer that question. It had apparently not occurred to those who had trained him that his talent might be revealed at a time and place he had not chosen. He said weakly, “I—I don’t know.”
“Are you a trained athlete? Some of our psychologists believe that athletes who break records can voluntarily enter a berserk state.”
“No—uh—no, I’m not. I keep myself in good shape, but that’s all.”
“And you were not drugged, and you were not in such a blind rage that you might be regarded as
amok
yourself. This—”
“I think I was,” Donald said.
“What?”
“I think I was in a blind rage. I saw all these people running away from one boy just because he had a sword. And there was this man lying on the ground who was trying to get up and couldn’t make it and in another minute he’d have been dead as well.” He forced himself to an upright position and glared at Totilung.
“It made me ashamed—
that’s
what did it! It made me ashamed to see them running to save their own skins and not one trying to help the man on the ground!”
Hurt by the gibe because it came from a foreigner, and worse yet from a round-eye, Totilung said stiffly, “But when a mucker—”
“Yes, someone had told them you can’t cope with a mucker! But I did it, didn’t I? I got so furious at seeing this herd of cowards, I went for him. I
must
have been mad with rage, or…”
He checked himself. Totilung said, “Go on. Say what you were going to say.”
“Or else I wouldn’t have pushed him through the glass door.” Nausea boiled up his stomach at the memory.
Totiling sat quite still for a good thirty seconds, her square masculine face giving no clue to her thoughts. At last she switched off the recorder and rose.
“There is a lot more I should like to know,” she said. “But as things are…” She shrugged. “I will add only a word of warning.”
“What?”
“We in Yatakang do not much care for expert assassins who drop in from other countries. From now on until you leave I shall make sure that you are watched—partly because of what you have done, much more because of what you may be going to do.”
She turned on her heel and Constable Song leapt to open the door for her. Across the threshold as she went out Donald heard her say to someone, “All right, you can see him now.”
* * *
Yatakangi medical treatment might have helped Donald’s abused body; it couldn’t reach in to salve his horrified mind. Thirty-four years of easygoing existence had not prepared him to hear someone call him an expert assassin and realise it was a true description. Distracted, he barely paid attention when his new visitor came in accompanied by the same nurse he had found by his bed on waking.
“Mr. Hogan?” the man said, and repeated, “Mr. Hogan…?”
Donald forced his head to turn, and recognised the man with the bald crown whose life he had saved from the mucker. Upright instead of sprawling, he now had a tantalising air of familiarity, as though long ago his face had appeared on a TV screen.
He uttered a mechanical greeting in Yatakangi. The man responded in good English. “Please, let me speak your language—it’s a long time since I had the opportunity. English is—ah—out of fashion here these days … Well! Sir, I wish first of all to express my gratitude and admiration, but I think words are too feeble to do that.”
It’s the last thing in the world I’d want to be admired for, and as for thanks I don’t deserve them.
But it was too great an effort to explain that. Donald sighed and gave a nod. He said, “Ah—I don’t believe I know your name.”
“My name is Sugaiguntung,” said the man.
I believe in logic, the sequence of cause and effect, and in science its only begotten son our law, which was conceived by the ancient Greeks, thrived under Isaac Newton, suffered under Albert Einstein …
That fragment of a “creed for materialists” which a friend in college had once shown to him rose through Donald’s confused mind. Simultaneously he seemed to be thinking
I don’t believe in coincidences like this
and
it was right outside the building where he works
and
Christ what a time to find myself face to face with him.
