Stand on Zanzibar (60 page)

The situation was so absurd he found himself having to repress a hysterical giggle, and Sugaiguntung looked alarmed, as though suspecting that he might be choking. He gestured at the nurse to come forward, but Donald mastered his fit of idiot amusement.

“I feel like laughing at myself for not recognising you,” he mumbled. “I’m very sorry—won’t you sit down?”

Very cautiously—presumably because of the sword-cut across his buttocks—Sugaiguntung lowered himself to the chair Totilung had vacated. Leaning forward with an earnest expression, he said, “Sir, I understand you’re a reporter. Since you might now be writing my obituary…” He hesitated. “Well, such a debt can never be repaid. But possibly there’s something I could do that would be of professional use? An exclusive interview, a guided tour of my laboratories? Ask as much of my time as you like. But for you, I’d have no time at all.”

Like a man on the border of drunkenness trying not to give away the state he is in, Donald fought to order his chaotic thoughts. Helped by the trank, he grew calm. Reviewing in memory what Sugaiguntung had just said, he was struck by the curious turn of phrase he had employed, and a relay closed in that part of his mind where he stored tiny details noted long ago, about such matters as not snapping one’s fingers in Yatakang.

Christ, that would be a dirty trick to play on him! But I’m soiled already, and it would short-cut me out of this hateful, horrible country …

He studied Sugaiguntung from the corner of his eye. He knew the scientist was in his middle fifties. Perhaps that made him old enough to adhere to some of the ancient ways which the Solukarta government was propagandising against. It was worth taking the chance.

There was, or had been, a Yatakangi belief that if one man saved another’s life, the man saved must put himself—once only—absolutely at his rescuer’s disposal, to do something if need be which would cost the life the rescuer had earned. Not until he fulfilled this obligation could he call his life his own again.

He said suddenly, “All right, professor. There is one thing I want from you.”

Sugaiguntung cocked his head alertly.

“Professor, I’m not just a reporter.”
I’m an expert assassin—STOP THAT!
“I took my degree in biology and wrote my doctorate thesis in palaeogenetics. The reason I was sent here—the reason why it was so ridiculous for me not to have recognised you at once—well, I’m here to cover the genetic optimisation programme, of course. As I understand it, your government has pledged itself to do two things, and used your name as a guarantee that they will be done. First they’re going to clean up Yatakangi heredity and ensure that only sound stock survives. And then they’re going to breed an improved model of man.

“Experts in my country find it hard to believe that with its present resources of trained geneticists your government can keep even the first part of its promise, and nobody at all except yourself could bring about the second.

“So let me ask you straight out whether it can be done. Because if not—well, sure I’d like to have an exclusive interview, sure I’d like to tour your labs. But it would be a waste of time.”

Hearing himself speak, he wondered if he was being a fool. As Keteng had said, Americans lacked subtlety, and that was about the crudest possible approach.

There was a silence which seemed to drag on towards eternity. He could hardly credit his senses when at last he saw Sugaiguntung move his head once from side to side:
no.

Forgetful of bruises and cuts, he jerked himself into a sitting position. He ignored the nurse as she darted to adjust the head of the bed.

“Professor, do you mean—?”

Sugaiguntung leapt from his chair and began to pace back and forth. “If I don’t confide the truth to someone,” he snapped with un-Yatakangi fierceness, “I shall myself go out of my mind! I shall turn mucker like my miserable student today! Mr. Hogan!” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “I’m a loyal and patriotic citizen of my country—this is my home and I love it dearly! But is it not a man’s responsibility to save what he loves from the stupidity of someone else?”

Donald nodded, astonished at the reaction he had called forth, like peering down the crater of Grandfather Loa and finding that the mists had parted to show bright lava, red as flowers.

“Someone has been a fool!” Sugaiguntung said passionately. “I have seen the success of our government, the change and the benefits it has brought—are they to be thrown away and with them everything
I
have struggled for? Mr. Hogan!” He halted and faced Donald. “You’d heard my name before this—this announcement was made?”

“Of course, hundreds of times.”

“In connection with what?”

“Tailored bacteria as good as any in the world. A strain of rubber-tree which is the envy of competing countries. A mutated
Tilapia
which feeds millions who would otherwise be sick from lack of protein. A—”

“Thank you,” Sugaiguntung cut in. “Sometimes, just lately, I have come to imagine that I dreamed it all. But did you hear any mention of four apes which killed themselves?”

“
Suicide?
By an ape? But I thought your work on apes was the basis for—”

“Oh, there’s one who still survives.” Sugaiguntung dismissed the remaining specimen with a wave of his hand and resumed his pacing. “But I judge that you know something of psychology as well as biology, yes? An ape which can conceive a way to kill itself is already sharing part of what sets man aside from other animals. If I do not have to explain that fact to you, perhaps I can make clear to you something else which I’ve failed to convey to—to certain persons in authority here.”

He clenched his fists on the air, as though physically attempting to mould words out of nothing.

“Forgive me if I express my thoughts clumsily. I hardly know myself what I’m afraid of, but I do know very definitely that I’m afraid. I say without pride, Mr. Hogan—believe me, without pride at all, because what I thought of as a divine gift has turned to an intolerable burden—there is truly no one else in the world who has done what I have done. Consider! One of the other things which is ours alone is language, the power to grasp symbols and associations in the mind and conjure with objects and events that are not present to real perception. I amended the genes of an orang-outang, and I made five infants who could share that with us, too. But we made language, we—men! These were apes, and the world they grew up into was human, not belonging to them. I think that is why four of them found ways to leave that world. The fifth is alive. You can meet him if you wish, talk to him—he can speak a few hundred simple words…”

“But this is fantastic!” Donald burst out, thinking of the scores, the hundreds of gene-moulded pets he had seen, miserable proxies for thousands more which had proved non-viable, less fitted for life after human tampering than their natural progenitors.

“You’re impressed? Then let me ask you this: what would you have done if they’d come to you as they came to me and said, enough trials with apes which are inferior, your country demands that you work with human germ-plasm and if there are failures you must put them aside like any experiment which has gone wrong?”

“You mean you haven’t yet succeeded with human material?”

“Success—what is success?” Sugaiguntung countered bitterly. “I suppose in some sense I’ve succeeded. Many times I’ve taken the nucleus from a donor cell and transplanted it to an ovum and it grew; sometimes I’ve touched, bent, altered a chromosome, and people have had healthy children of their own flesh and blood which might otherwise have been sickly or insane … They were satisfied, I think. Perhaps you can call that success.”

“Have you tried to mend Solukarta’s gene for porphyria?”

“That too,” Sugaiguntung admitted, not surprised to hear that Donald knew of the well-guarded secret. “It has a side-effect. There would be a cleft palate.”

“It could be repaired surgically—”

“With a Cyclops eye and a permanent fontanelle.”

“I see. Go on.”

“I hardly know how to.” Seeming not to look at his environment, but to stare beyond the walls into the unguessable future, Sugaiguntung seated himself again by touch. “The code for a man is more complex, but not essentially different from that for a bacterium; it says divide and combine instead of divide and diffuse, but nonetheless it says
divide.
”

He paused. Aching with impatience, Donald said, “But if you can endow an ape with the ability to use language, it sounds as though you’re in reach of exactly what your government has promised!”

“Hm?” Sugaiguntung started. “Oh yes—with the knowledge we now have, using cloning techniques and tectogenetic alteration of faulty genes, Yatakang could be more or less free of congenital disorders in another century.”

“But that’s not what they’re laying claim to!”

“Mr. Hogan, don’t you understand? I’m not
interested
in what claims have been made! They’re political, not scientific.” Sugaiguntung drew a deep breath. “Mr. Hogan, what
is
a man? Some of him is the message passed down the centuries in a chemical code—but very little. Take a human baby and let it grow among animals as a feral child. At puberty is that a human being, even though it can mate and breed its physical form? No, it’s a bad copy of the animal it was raised by! Listen, there is a point on a chromosome which I can touch—I think I can touch—and after fifty, a hundred failures, I can give a baby forebrain development which might be to ours as my orang-outangs’ to their mothers’. Who is going to teach that child? When four out of my five apes killed themselves because we could not teach them how to live except as humans—and they weren’t human! I could touch another place where certain muscles and bones are coded and make a man who stands three metres high with bones thick enough to bear his weight and muscles to run and jump and throw. I am less sure of this because huge strength was not required in my apes. But I think I might do it. Perhaps he’d have pink eyes and no hair, but…”

A chill permeated Donald’s body. He said, “But then you could breed supermen.”

“I can read the pattern of your nuclei like a street-map of this city,” Sugaiguntung said without conceit. “Give me a million cells from your body—breed them in cultures from a shaving of skin you wouldn’t miss, wouldn’t feel—and I will tell you why, in chemical terms, you are the height you are, why your hair is that colour, why you are pale-skinned and not dark, why you are intelligent and have good digestion and the life-line in the palms of your hands forks a centimetre from the root. I haven’t looked—they’re under bandages. But your type has a galaxy of associated characteristics, as does anyone’s.

“I could transplant a clone-nucleus from one of these cells and give you an identical twin who was your son. I could with luck say there was a good chance of making him taller than you, stronger, more agile, conceivably even more intelligent by a few per cent. If you insisted on a blond I could probably make him a blond. I’ll go further: if you wanted a girl I could make you a fair imitation. It would have some male attributes—a flat chest, a moustache. But it would not have a penis.”

“If you can do this already, though, in twenty-five more years—”

“After that time, who will have taught my government not to make claims it cannot justify?” Sugaiguntung cut in.

Donald leaned back in the bed, his head beginning to ache. He said, “I’m sorry, I’m hopelessly confused. By the sound of it, you can carry out the
second
part of the optimisation programme, the one everybody thinks is far-fetched, while the first, which is based credibly on present knowledge, is the one that can’t be managed … Have I understood you?”

Sugaiguntung shrugged. “I know what level of intelligence is required to make a good tectogeneticist. The Yatakangi gene-pool won’t provide the—the
army
of them which the programme calls for in less than a century. Not if anything else in the country is to be kept going in the meanwhile.”

“Does the government realise this?”

“I have said it openly and often, and they answered that they were the best judges of political expediency, I should go back to my laboratories and do as I was told.” Sugaiguntung hesitated. “In this country, as I’m sure is true for yours also, one inclines to believe the specialist. But to specialise is to be ignorant, and there are certain inflexible facts…”

“If they run into those facts,” Donald suggested, “they’re likely to soft-pedal the first part of the programme, and emphasise the second—mount a crash project to produce modified and improved human beings!”

“Which they must not!” Sugaiguntung said, marking each word by pounding fist into palm. “Out of my five apes four killed themselves. We took very great care. But for our precautions they might have killed a man. You can pen and guard a super-ape. Which among us humans will try to control a super-human? It will not be stopped from killing if it desires to kill.”

Almost inaudibly he added, “You of all people should understand. It is only a few hours since you yourself killed.”

*   *   *

He should not have said that. Donald had been within arm’s reach of his old self: accustomed to accepting information dispassionately, organising it like pieces of a puzzle until new patterns emerged. He had barely even worried about the fact that he was not recording—like a genuine reporter—what the scientist said to him; he relied on his long training to sift and absorb the salient points.

Faced with a reminder of what he had done, however, there was only one way he could digest the circumstances and remain rational—to accept himself anew as Donald Hogan Mark II, the eptified killer to whom murder was all in the day’s work.

He knew he must exploit the vital and unique admissions Sugaiguntung had made. Against that, he felt pity for the genius scientist whose love of country had led him to complicity in a lie, blessing a propaganda stunt, and infringement of his most dearly held ideals. The strain of reconciling them was intolerable. Part of him folded away to the subconscious level, like atoms in a strained molecule awaiting the opportunity to release their stored energy at the compound’s flashpoint.