From behind, Tony, who had approached without a sound on soft-soled shoes, raised and fired a diadermic syringe at the nape of Donald’s neck. As though he had often practised the movement, he dropped it into one of his side-pockets and had his hands back in position to catch Donald as he slumped towards the floor.
“I’m sorry about that, sir,” he said to no one in particular. “It does happen with eptification for military purposes occasionally, that you get this exaggerated reaction. Of course you shouldn’t take any notice of what he said about wanting to demonstrate his skill on people—it’s part of the mental disorder he’s suffering as a result of his very difficult time over there in Yatakang. Perhaps you’ll excuse me; I’d better call an ambulance and get him back to the hotel before he wakes up. I only gave him a very light shot, just enough to relax him and…”
While he was speaking, the others remaining transfixed, he was carrying Donald towards the door. The sound of it closing behind him seemed to awaken the rest of the company from trance.
But none of them seemed anxious to say anything until Chad jumped up and began to pace the floor, occasionally shooting a venomous glance after Tony and his limp burden.
“Highest achievement! Faugh! I’ve heard about this dirty business of military eptification and it strikes me as the foulest thing one man can do to another, worse by far than killing him clean!”
“He talked about ‘the other’ Donald, and about having the right to use his name because he was dead,” Norman said. He tried to repress a shudder, and failed. “Allah be merciful! I wouldn’t have thought it possible … And I was saying I’d offer him a job with the project if he wanted one.”
He glanced at Elihu, and was shocked to see the ambassador’s face suddenly as old as Obomi’s.
“So Sugaiguntung is dead,” Chad said. “And Donald killed him. Well, it’s only to be expected, isn’t it? And according to Donald he did know, after all, how to carry out the improvements he’d promised.” He hesitated. “I’m inclined to think that was probably true, aren’t you? Everyone I know who’s grounded in the subject agreed that if anyone alive could do it Sugaiguntung was the man. Christ, doesn’t it make you sick?” He whirled suddenly, facing the others, and pounded his fist into his palm.
“Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!”
“Well, I guess if we put it to Shalmaneser—” Norman began, but Chad cut him short, stamping his foot.
“Norman, what in God’s name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?”
* * *
There was no comment from anyone else. After a while, Chad walked dejectedly towards the door, head down. Norman nodded to Gideon and Elihu and followed him. He caught Chad up in the foyer and put his arm around his stooped shoulders.
Staring straight ahead of him, Chad said, “Sorry about that. I guess it’s better to be saved by a machine than not to be saved at all. And I guess, too, if they can tinker with bacteria they could synthesise whatever this stuff is that makes the Shinka peaceable. Christ, what does it matter if we have to take brotherly love out of an aerosol can? It’s contagious stuff no matter where you get it from.”
Norman nodded. His mouth was very dry.
“But it’s not right!” Chad whispered. “It’s not something to be made in a factory, packaged and wrapped and sold! It’s not something meant to be—to be dropped in bombs from UN aircraft! That’s what they’ll do with it, you know. And it isn’t right. It isn’t a product, a medicine, a drug. It’s thought and feeling and your own heart’s blood. It isn’t right!”
He ran forward suddenly, heels crashing on the hard tiled floor of the foyer, and tore open the double doors to the outside. On the steps beyond he halted, threw back his head, and shouted to the city, to Africa, to the world.
“God damn you for crazy idiots! All of you! You’re not fit to manage your own silly lives! I know you’re fools—I’ve watched you and wept for you. And … Oh my God!”
His voice cracked to a breathy moan.
“I love you! I’ve tried not to, and I can’t help it. I love you all…”
* * *
A long time later, when people had come from all the rooms to see what the shouting was about—Elihu, Gideon, scores of anonymous faces—he allowed Norman to take his hand and lead him quietly away.
the happening world (16)
OBITUARY
BUCKFAST Georgette Tallon (“Old GT”): of a cerebral haemorrhage; at the headquarters of the corporation she founded and devoted her life to; in her 91st year.
ELLERMAN Eric Charles: by suicide quote/unquote; on the track of the rapitrans system serving his home block; aged 33.
HOGAN Donald Orville: by military eptification; at Boat Camp, Ellay; he is survived by Donald Hogan Mark II.
LINDT Gerald Shamus, Pvt. U. S. Army: by partisan action; at Ellay; aged 19.
NOAKES Benjamin Ralph (“Bennie”): hitripping once too often, a trifle too far; at his home; aged 24.
PETERSON Philip Hugh Clarence: from the bolt of a policeman’s gun; at the apt of one of his victims; aged 20.
PETERSON Sasha Maureen (née Wilde): by her son’s hand; at her home; aged 44.
ROWLEY Grace Jane: from senility complicated by a broken heart; in an official institution for the aged poor; aged 77.
SHELTON Poppy: by a fall; on the ground outside the window of her home; aged 23.
SUGAIGUNTUNG Lyukakarta Moktilong (Dr. Med., Dr. Biochem., Prof. Tectogen. Dedication Univ.): by a knife-thrust in the femoral artery; in the lonely waters of the Shongao Strait; aged 54.
WHATMOUGH Victor Ernest: by a gunshot “while the balance of his mind was disturbed” at his home; aged 60.
* * *
Also victims of muckers, rioting, sabotage, partisan activity, disease, overdose of drugs, accident, warfare, old age …
* * *
Despite the foregoing, the human race by tens of thousands would be knee-deep in the water around Zanzibar.
tracking with closeups (32)
THE COOL AND DETACHED VIEW
Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.
Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.”
context (28)
A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS
This non-novel was brought to you by John Brunner using Spicers Plus Fabric Bond and Commercial Bank papers interleaved with Serillo carbons in a Smith Corona 250 electric typewriter fitted with a Kolok black-record ribbon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Brunner was born in 1934. His first novel, Galactic Storm, was published in 1951 under the house name of Gill Hunt. In 1953 he sold his first story to Astounding Science Fiction as John Loxmith. With the sale of Threshold of Eternity (1959) and The Hundredth Millennium (1959) to Ace Books in the United States, he took up writing full time both under his own name and as Keith Woodcott. During the next six years he managed to write an astonishing twenty-seven novels for Ace along with work for other publishers. As the 1960s progressed, Brunner’s stories became more ambitious and experimental, culminating in Stand on Zanzibar in 1968. This was to win the Hugo Award in 1968, the British Science Fiction Award in 1970, and the French Prix Apollo in 1973. His next three major novels, The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider (1975), explored different dystopian futures, making the four books a series of sorts. During the 1970s his health suffered and this slowed down his output subsequently. He died in 1995 while attending the World Science Fiction Convention at Glasgow.
Also by John Brunner
Galactic Storm (1951)
The Brink (1959)
Echo in the Skull (1959)
&nbs
p; The World Swappers (1959)
Threshold of Eternity (1959)
The Hundredth Millennium (1959)
The Atlantic Abomination (1960)
The Skynappers (1960)
Sanctuary in the Sky (1960)
Slavers of Space (1960)
Meeting at Infinity (1961)
The Super Barbarians (1962)
Times Without Number (1962)
Secret Agent of Terra (1962)
Castaways’ World (1963)
The Rites of Ohe (1963)
The Astronauts Must Not Land (1963)
The Dreaming Earth (1963)
Listen! The Stars! (1963)
The Space-Time Juggler (1963)
Endless Shadow (1964)
To Conquer Chaos (1964)
The Crutch of Memory (1964)
The Repairmen of Cyclops (1965)
Day of the Star Cities (1965)
Telepathist (1965)
The Squares of the City (1965)
Enigma from Tantalus (1965)
The Long Result (1965)
The Altar on Asconel (1965)
A Planet of Your Own (1966)
Born Under Mars (1967)
The Productions of Time (1967)
Quicksand (1967)
Bedlam Planet (1968)
Father of Lies (1968)
Double, Double (1969)
Timescoop (1969)
The Jagged Orbit (1969)
The Wrong End of Time (1971)
The Dramaturges of Yan (1972)
The Sheep Look Up (1972)
The Stone That Never Came Down (1973)
Web of Everywhere (1974)
Total Eclipse (1974)
The Shockwave Rider (1975)
The Infinitive of Go (1980)
Players at the Game of People (1980)
The Crucible of Time (1983)
The Tides of Time (1984)
The Shift Key (1987)
Children of the Thunder (1989)
AS KEITH WOODCOTT
I Speak for Earth (1961)
Ladder in the Sky (1962)
The Psionic Menace (1963)
The Martian Sphinx (1965)
SHORT STORIES
No Future in It (1962)
Now Then (1965)
No Other Gods But Me (1966)
Out of My Mind (1968)
Not Before Time (1968)
The Traveler in Black (1971)
From This Day Forward (1972)
Time-Jump (1973)
The Book of John Brunner (1976)
Foreign Constellations (1980)
The Best of John Brunner (1988)
Praise for Stand on Zanzibar
“Brunner was an angry man, angry at injustice and cupidity and cynicism—and this desperate novel, along with its companion, The Sheep Look Up, was meant to be a wake-up call to a world slumbering in the opium dream of consumerism; in the hazy certainty that we humans were in charge of nature.
“Science fiction is not about predicting the future; it’s about elucidating the present and the past. Brunner’s 1968 nightmare is crystallizing around us, in ways he could not have foreseen then.
“If the right people had read this book, and acted in accordance with its precepts and spirit, our world would not be in such precarious shape today. Maybe it’s time for a new generation to read it.”
—Joe Haldeman
“An enormously ambitious novel … still one of the mightiest chunks of ‘future reality’ that any SF writer has given us to chew over.”
—Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels
“The resulting vision has a cumulative, sometimes overpowering effect.”
—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
“An interesting experiment, because it marks a stage along the road midway between pulp and social commentary.”
—Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree
“A well-conceived book—a satisfyingly complete vision.”
—Mike Harrison, New Worlds
“The first true science fiction novel.”
—Judith Merril, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
“Takes your breath away. It is beyond detailed quibble.”
—Algis Budrys, Galaxy
“Stand on Zanzibar is a brilliant and dangerous book.”
—Norman Spinrad, Amazing Stories
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
STAND ON ZANZIBAR
Copyright © 1968 by John Brunner
Foreword copyright © 2011 by Bruce Sterling
All rights reserved.
An Orb® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brunner, John, 1934–1995.
Stand on Zanzibar / John Brunner. — 1st Orb trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7653-2678-2
I. Title.
PR6052.R8S73 2011
823'.914—dc22
2011013458
First Orb Edition: August 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-7884-2
First Orb eBook Edition: August 2011
1 Preamble to doctorate thesis submitted by Mrs. Kitty Gbe of Port Mey, Beninia: Univ. of Ghana, Legon, Accra, 1989 (xii + 91 pp., 3 illus., map).
2 Op. cit. p. 4.
3 Ibid. p. 18.
4 From “Tales of Our African Brethren: Folklore of Beninia and the Gold Coast” by The Rev. Jerome Coulter, DD: London 1911 (vi + 347 pp., col. frontis., 112 line drgs. in text).
5 From “Begi, an African ‘Jack the Giant Killer’” by Roger F. Woodsman in Anthropological Communications, vol. XII, no. 3.
6 Gbe, op. cit. p. 80.
John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends