Stand on Zanzibar

  “I am not in a big hospital,” the girl said with a trace of sadness in her face. “I can give an antipyretic and a heroic dose of ascorbic acid. But what I should need is the specific, fremonium chlorhydrate with apyrine, and we have none. I will see if some can be got from Gongilung, of course.”

  “Does it last long?”

  “Three days, four perhaps. After that there is lasting immunity.” The girl was offhand in her manner. “Sometimes there is delirium on the second day.”

  By now Jogajong had been informed and appeared at the mouth of the cave, tousled from sleep. He listened to the girl’s report, nodding.

  “Keep him warm and comfortable. Give him much to drink,” he said. “It isn’t bad, it happening now. There’s nowhere he could go in any case.”

  * * *

  By the evening of the first day, Donald was wishing he had brought his stock of tranks with him. He needed them to keep calm. Culture tabs reported that he was not, as he half-suspected, suffering from the same fever as Sugaiguntung, but he felt feverish with impatience. Jogajong could hardly have avoided noticing, but even sitting here in this jungle hideout he had things to do, so it was late in the day before he had a chance to approach Donald and address him with pure Yatakangi politeness.

  “You’re not used to waiting, Mr. Hogan—that’s plain!”

  “I don’t know what I’m used to,” Donald sighed. “I spent most of my life, up till a short time ago, in a routine which I was sick of. Suddenly I was picked out of it and tossed into this chaos. And life goes so much faster here I’ve become just as sick of this in ten days as I was of the other after ten years.”

  At the far side of the clearing one of Jogajong’s young officers appeared, holding up a phang with a dead snake skewered on the point. He displayed it for his leader, saluting, and was rewarded with a grin of approval.

  “Was it a very poisonous snake, or something?” Donald inquired at random.

  “No, not poisonous. Good to eat, a delicacy. We don’t lead a very luxy life here.

  “Good to eat!” Donald almost started to his feet. “Well, if you say so, I guess…” He mopped his face, hating the clammy sulphurous smell from the volcanic vent, which today had been especially active, they said, loading the immobile wet air of the clearing with fumes that could not blow away.

  “I apologise for the routine and its attendant boredom you’re having to endure here,” Jogajong said, and Donald could not tell if he was being sarcastic. “I would arrange a diversion—take you out with us on a small raid, perhaps—but at present the climate of opinion is not much in my cause’s favour, and what is more I believe you are a valuable person not to be risked in that way.”

  Donald thought about that for a while. He said at length, “Is it because of the—uh—the climate of opinion that you’re stuck here?”

  “Precisely. It was envisaged that I should begin to work openly when I was landed here. There is a great deal of support for my cause among the common people, if not among the wealthy. The opposition party is not strong in Gongilung although some groups—fisherfolk, as you know, some intellectuals and the building trades especially—are loyal. On the more distant islands the administration of entire communities is in our hands and I hoped to launch a popular campaign and if necessary declare independence and withstand siege. Unfortunately the claim about the optimisation of the next generation postponed that action. Thanks to what you have done, of course, the lie will be shown up for what it is and the indignation that follows will provide a suitable impetus for the revolution.”

  He spoke as though he had the authority of an evaluation by Shalmaneser to back his views. Possibly, Donald realised, he had—at least, the Washington computers must have analysed his chances pretty well before he was brought back here from the States.

  He said, “But if the Solukarta government hadn’t dug this trap for themselves, you’d honestly have started a civil war?”

  Jogajong shrugged. “It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?”

  “What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.

  “I come from a country where life has been held cheap for centuries,” Jogajong said. “I know the price of mine. But one must make one’s own price and enforce it.”

  “Most people don’t get the chance,” Donald muttered.

  “I didn’t quite hear that…?”

  “I said most people don’t get the chance!” Donald snapped. “Have you heard any news from Gongilung since I arrived? Was anything said about a building that was blown up?”

  “Blown up? It was reported that some collapsed owing to an explosion, but they said it was due to the bad sewers. Often we find pockets of methane that can be set on fire.”

  “Whaledreck. I had to use a bomb to get rid of a pestilential policewoman.” Donald looked at his hands. “How many people were killed?”

  “Not many,” Jogajong said after a pause. “Seventeen, eighteen—I think that is what they reported to me.”

  “Women and children among them?” Donald’s voice grated in his own ears.

  “All women and children,” Jogajong said. “It was to be expected. The men were at their work.” He leaned towards Donald and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Don’t distress yourself over them. Think as I do that they died in the cause of their country.”

  “They didn’t die in my cause,” Donald said, and shook off the hand.

  “A cause that your country shares with mine,” Jogajong insisted.

  “That’s true,” Donald said. “Your country, mine, every other country in the world, has the same cause and what it does is, it takes people who don’t give a pint of whaledreck for it and sends them off to kill women and children. Yes, it’s the cause of every country on earth! And you know what I call that cause? I call it naked stinking greed.”

  There was a short silence. Jogajong spoke stiffly to end it.

  “That is hardly the attitude I’d have expected from an American officer!”

  “I’m not an American officer. They gave me a rank because it was a convenient way of blackmailing me into behaving myself. As ‘Lieutenant’ Hogan I can be arrested and tried secretly by court-martial if I don’t do as I’m told. Apart from that I’m a very dull, ordinary kind of codder with one natural aptitude and one that’s been trained on me by means I never dreamed were possible. My natural aptitude eventually bored me, but my taught one makes me hate the sight of myself.”

  “In my country,” Jogajong said, “a man who thinks like you goes voluntarily to join his ancestors. Or used to in the old days. Now, the usurper Solukarta has copied your Christian habits and closed that way of escape. Which is a reason why we have so many muckers, I think.”

  “Possibly.” In the old days of a month ago, Donald might have been intrigued by that suggestion; now he let it pass. “But I’m not at the suicide level yet. I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”

  “I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”

  “What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”

  Jogajong’s face froze into a scowl. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hogan,” he said, rising. “I see little point in continuing this conversation.”

  “That makes two of us,” Donald agreed, and turned his back.

  * * *

  And the next day was much the same except that, as the nurse had warned, Sugaiguntung passed into delirium for several hours. Donald sat beside him in the cave, listening to ramblings in Yatakangi whose hypnotic effect kept driving him off into musings of his own and sometimes into sleep. However, in the evening one of the fisherfolk from Gongilun
g risked his life and brought some of the necessary drug from a pharmacy there, and the delirium was over by the time Donald found he was ready for sleep.

  Also the next day was like the first.

  * * *

  So was the next.

  tracking with closeups (27)

  RECIPE FOR A MUCKER

  Philip Peterson had been at home all evening on his own, brooding. His mother had been invited to a party of the sort that … well, in her view that sort of party was unsuitable for her son because he wasn’t yet blasé and hardened like his old mother. Instead he held a small private party of his own, starting with three whistlers and going on to the reefer-box. It took a while for the lift of the pot to work through the bringdown of the alcohol, but the two fighting together gave him rather a pleasant feeling, as though he too were about to fight, or make love, or something of equal importance.

  At about eleven poppa-momma he called a girl he knew but she wasn’t in. After that he played some of his favourite zock recordings, the kind Sasha preferred not to hear while she was in the apt, and danced by himself around the room.

  He began to feel lethargic, and he didn’t want that, so he took one of Sasha’s Wakup pills from the store she kept in the drawer at the head of her bed which she fondly believed he didn’t know about, but all the pill did was prevent him from going to sleep, not make him feel lively. He put the lights out and sat down in a chair and played over the zock recordings again. They showed up much better in the dark and he could practically feel himself being drawn into them. His clothes began to get in his way so he took them off and strewed them around, walking a repetitious ellipse on the carpet. Eventually he grew hungry and went to see what there was that he could dial for and chose one of his favourites, cold roast ribs of real beef with salad, which he mainly selected when Sasha was out.

  (Later they drew attention to the “very underdone” code he had dialled and said learned things about masculinity symbols.)

  He was sitting by himself slicing the meat and spearing the salad at about five past three anti-matter when the main entrance tell-tale showed that someone had used the Watch-&-Ward Inc. key coded to this apt. He got up and turned off the recording he was watching and went and stood over by the door.

  The light from the corridor outside, when the door was opened, showed him Sasha giggly with her dress down around her waist and those fine plump curved rounded breasts exposed to the eager mouth of the stranger with her to whom she was saying sssh and wait a minute and do be quiet we don’t want to wake my son.

  He reached out as the door was closed but before the light was turned on and used the knife he had been cutting his meat with to slash away the rest of Sasha’s clothes. The material divided with a soft cry and the skin down her back from below her right shoulder-blade to her buttocks divided with a scream. Light. The stranger, still straightening from the adoring obeisance he was performing at the altar of her ripe mature womanhood, said something about holding it, what the—?

  Philip said, “What are you doing to my mother my mother my mother?” and at each repetition gestured with his right hand, which happened to be holding the very sharp steak-knife. On the third repetition the stranger turned his eyes up in their sockets and bubbled and lay down on the floor with both arms folded over the stab-wounds in his belly.

  A high, shrill voice was ringing from wall to ceiling to wall. Philip turned off his ears and used his eyes now they were becoming adjusted to the light again. Standing near the door there was a rather beautiful woman, not quite as young as she once was, but almost naked except for some rags she was clutching to her. Irresistibly attracted, he approached her, letting fall the thing his hand happened to be grasping at the time, and when she dodged his lips and insisted on keeping her own mouth wide in that ugly expression he forced it shut with his fingers. After a little while she stopped resisting and let him do what he wanted, which he did with a great deal of enthusiasm because somebody somewhere else a long time ago had kept on stopping him from doing it on some wholly ridiculous grounds about being too young darling. Of course I’m not too young. Here I am doing it aren’t I?

  But she wasn’t very exciting after the first time so he went and looked for a partner with a bit more energy and he got a coloured shiggy who happened to be in the elevator car and didn’t scream quite loudly enough and he was trying to persuade her white roomie whose apt she had been carrying the key for when someone who happened to be passing spotted him shoving her in through the door and the fuzzy-wuzzies fused him when he came out to look for the next one but that was too late.

  context (26)

  TO MYSELF ON THE OCCASION OF MY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  I made me in a sterile hospital.

  I’m sure the act, like me, was neat and clean.

  Blood, pain, or mess? I frankly don’t recall.

  I anyhow preferred to shift the scene

  And went to school to learn what I approve.

  Later I got a job and earned some cash

  And found a girl. Together we make love.

  One day, I guess, I’ll turn myself to ash

  But that’s a thought on which I don’t much dwell.

  To make quite certain I shall like me, I

  Strictly observe injunctions that I read:

  I scrub my skin to take away its smell,

  Put talcs and lotions on it when it’s dry …

  But scratch it and—God damn, I hurt, I bleed!

  continuity (38)

  NOT FOR SALE BUT CAN BE HAD ON APPLICATION

  “Thanks,” Chad said.

  Norman could hardly believe his ears. He said, “Whatinole are you thanking me for? Prophet’s beard, I should be down on hands and knees to you. I owe you—”

  He stopped suddenly. There were too many people in earshot for him to speak the truth: that it wasn’t the rescue of the GT investment planned for Beninia, but the salvation of the project itself along with everything he had personally committed to the idea, for which he wanted to express his gratitude. But the presidential floor of the GT tower was swarming with distinguished guests, including the team from State who behind their spokesman Raphael Corning had been supervising the venture. He was beset with them and fellow staffers and acquaintances until he had started to feel like the quarry of hounds. He had not even had the satisfaction of telling Elihu the good news; Waterford had immediately sent messengers in search of him and Ram Ibusa on the specially mounted tour they were making of the building.

  Chad sensed his mood and divined the reason behind it. He said with a wry smile, “It’s a drecky way to run a man’s life, isn’t it? You’re the crown of creation, codder, and you can’t stand it. But I guess one must learn to put up with it.”

  “I’ve started noticing the things wrong with it all over again since I came home,” Norman admitted.

  “I’ve never experienced them before. I spent a lot of my youth in the secluded groves of Academe—maybe that was what deluded me into thinking people would listen if I shouted at them loud enough, because my old students did at least pretend to be paying attention even if they never acted on what they were told … But I’ll have to get used, I suppose.”

  “What?”

  “You said you were going to hire me.”

  “But—” Norman stumble-tongued. “But you’ve done what I was going to hire you for! You put Shalmaneser back on the orbit we wanted him to fly, and—”

  “Norman, you’re contaminated,” Chad cut in. “You’re a nice guy and you’ve done me favours and the rest, but you’re contaminated. Look, spare-wheel!”

  Without turning his head he put the empty glass he was holding on a passing trolley and snatched another.

  “What did everyone say who was hanging around Shal while I had my little chat with him?”

  Suddenly irritated beyond endurance, Norman snapped, “You ought to drop the modesty act. It’s pseudo. It doesn’t suit you and you’re not good at it.”

  “You mean calling it a
little chat? The hole!” Chad swigged his new drink down. “Get it into your skull, will you? That’s the plain truth! I never make with the modesty act—I’m congenitally conceited and I long ago gave up trying to cure myself. But it’s not that I’m so damned good at anything. I just haven’t been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can’t be a simple one. When I told you you’d been contaminated I meant by that attitude, which is wider-spread than the common cold and just as undermining. Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong? In words of one syllable more or less: what Shal has done is exercise his built-in faculties—the ones everybody on the design team expected, hoped for, advertised as a colossal breakthrough in cybernetics and then refused to recognise when they saw them happening! Shal did exactly what you’re doing at this moment, and he was just as wrong as you are. He—”

  Inserted into the middle of the flow of words as neatly as a monofilament wire, the voice of Prosper Rankin: suave, ingratiating, and to Norman horrible.

  “Mr. Mulligan—or I believe I should say Doctor, should I not?”

  “Sure, I have more doctorates than a dog has fleas these days.” Chad turned, blinking, and Norman felt a stir of apprehension. “What other ailments may I cure for you besides the minor complaint I saw to already?”

  Rankin gave an insincere grin: was that a joke? “I’d hardly call it minor, though naturally we wouldn’t care for people to know just how worried Shalmaneser had us there for a while. We’re tremendously indebted for your insight and assistance—and on that subject, it occurred to me to wonder whether anyone had formally asked you to join our company at the banquet we’re having to mark the successful outcome of the Beninian negotiations. Norman has presumably told you about it.”

  “No, nobody’s invited me to come along to anything except this bierfest that’s going on now. And this I don’t mind because whoever does your catering appreciates good liquor.”