Stand on Zanzibar

context (21)

LETTER

“Dear Norman: This must be the first letter I’ve written in over three years. Talk about old habits dying hard … I guess what I really want to do is set down some notes for an article, but addressing a mass audience I’m sick of. I’ve done it in books and journals and over TV and at lecture-meetings and I’ll probably revert to that eventually because my skull threatens to burst with all the pressure inside, but the time I spent down in the gutter got me used to talking to a person, one at a time, and what I really need is to be able to turn into a million of myself and go out and have a million separate conversations because that’s the only way you ever establish communications. The rest is just exposure to information, and why should anybody look at one wave on a sea?

“I really appreciate your loaning me the apt. Some people called up who hadn’t heard you were due to leave, and if my books did nothing else they got me a modicum of notoriety, so I’m invited to sundry forthcoming events in your place. I’ll try not to disgrace you, but by God it’ll be tough.

“It’s very curious coming back, at one blow, from the bottom to the top of this society we’ve constructed. It doesn’t look any better from this angle. I remembered that opinion, but I guess the melancholia it generated when I first reached it is alien to my temperament. I know it was what inspired Hipcrime—I felt getting outside the regular conformist orbit was the only route a sane man could take.

“But there isn’t an outside. Talking about ‘society’s outcasts’ or ‘opting out’ is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they’re benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term ‘out’ is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There’s no place for ‘outside’ to be.

“Where, for example, would your fellow Aframs, of the type who disclaim paleass-style living, find themselves if the society they so despise fell to bits? Hypothesise a plague which affects only people of Caucasian descent (as a matter of fact it exists, and the Chinese field-tested it in Macao about three to four years back, but the news was quietly stifled and I only heard about it by accident). Getting rid of us with our damnable arrogance wouldn’t cure the human race of its hereditary diseases.

“I’m beginning to wonder whether I ought not to copy the example of those people out on the West Coast who seem to have taken up sabotage as a kind of hobby. Something is horribly wrong with our setup, and they’re adopting a proper scientific technique to determine what. (I don’t know if anyone has pointed this out before—I suspect not. I have a disgusting habit of jumping to private conclusions which makes me wonder if I’m really living in a fantasy world not shared by anyone else.)

“Said scientific technique is to alter one, and only one, of the variables at a time, to see what effect the change has on the total interaction and hence deduce the function of the force you’re tampering with. Trouble is, of course, the impact is randomised, and no one is in a position to analyse the results.

“I guess maybe I’ll try and do it, since there are no other volunteers. I’ll head for California and start a study of the consequences of disorganising a city.

“No, that’s a hitrip-type illusion, to be honest. I never will do it, nobody will do it. I’m too scared. It would be on a par with climbing down the shaft of a fusion generator to watch the plasma whiz around the bottle. Somebody send us a Martian anthropologist, for heaven’s sake!

“Did you ever wonder how a doctor feels, faced with a disease he can’t cure, which he knows is so contagious he’s liable to catch it off the patients he can’t help? That’s me at this minute. Christ, I’m a rational being—of a sort—rational enough, at least, to see the symptoms of insanity around me. And I’m human, the same as the people I think of as victims when my guard drops. It’s at least possible I’m even crazier than my fellows, whom I’m tempted to pity.

“There seems only one thing to do, and that’s get drunk.

“Regards—Chad Mulligan”

continuity (26)

HERE COMES A CHOPPER

The government maintained its press liaison bureau on the top floor of a fifteen-storey block well towards the inland side of Gongilung. Having presented his papers of accreditation to a bland, unsmiling official, Donald wandered across the reed-mat flooring towards a window that give him a fine view over the city.

To his left, crowning a hill, rose the white towers of the university. He stared at them, wondering in which of them Sugaiguntung worked. What could have happened to a man like that to make him a mere stalking-horse for a propaganda claim? Long pressure, no doubt, was capable of caving in even a genius whose independence of thought had laid the foundations for his country’s continuing prosperity.

And speaking of pressure …

From here, for the first time, he could see the physical evidence for something he had intellectually been aware of and never digested into his emotions—a parallel to the feeling he had had the night he walked out into the city he thought of as home and discovered he could trigger a riot by his presence.

With only a hundred-odd scattered islands to contain them, Yatakang boasted a population of two hundred and thirty millions. At an average of over two million people per island that meant this was one of the most crowded areas on the face of the globe. And from here he could see the crowding.

Even the sides of Grandfather Loa himself were dotted with huts, and winding paths linked them and led down to the shore.

He thought of Chad Mulligan’s dictum about the pressure which made citizens of ancient Rome think that joining the eunuch priesthood of Cybele was an easy way out, and shuddered. Here was a modern counterpart: what pressure made people feel that scratching a living from the slopes of a live volcano was better than moving to a safe distance from its possible eruption?

A voice from behind said softly, “Mr. Hogan!”

He turned, to find the same official as before confronting him.

“Director Keteng will see you now,” the man told him.

* * *

Director Keteng was a portly man with a chill manner who sat behind a rampart of communications equipment, as if he had decided to frame himself in every possible attribute of his rôle as patron of the transmission of information. It seemed to Donald that Bronwen had been right; the Solukarta government, for all its policy of eliminating superstitious attitudes, had managed only to transfer their scope from inanimate idols to living—and fallible—human beings. This office was a shrine, effectively, dedicated to a god not of news but of what the people were allowed to hear.

At a curt gesture, Donald sat down facing Keteng.

“You speak Yatakangi?”

“A little.”

“It is not a popular language among American students. Why did you learn it?”

Donald repressed a desire to strangle this pompous fool in the cables of his own innumerable phones. He said in as mild a tone as he could muster, “I had the chance to learn a non-Indo-European language and chose Yatakangi because it was said to be very difficult.”

“You had no special interest in Yatakang?”

Ah.

Lying fluently, Donald answered, “My college training was in genetics, and the greatest living geneticist is one of your compatriots. That was one of the important reasons.”

But flattery was not something this man reacted to. He shrugged. “You have never come here before. Now you do come, you are not exactly—shall we say?—in a great hurry. As a specialist in genetics, it is doubtless news of our genetic optimisation programme which attracts you.”

“Yes, that’s so. The public interest which the announcement has created in my country surprised my employers, so it was quite a long time before they took the decision to send me here. But—”

“Your countrymen do not believe the truth of our claim,” Keteng said flatly. “Do you?”

Donald hesitated. “I hope that what you say can be done,” he said at last. “It’s been some years, though, since Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung published full details of his current work, so—”

“He had been engaged on secret research for the government,” Keteng said. “Research of that kind in your country is mostly of two types: first, it is done so that one corporation can make more profit than its rivals, and you have spies who make a living out of uncovering company secrets and selling them to competing firms; or, second, it is concerned with more efficient ways to kill people. In this country it has been concerned with more efficient ways to have people born and grow up as intelligent adults able to make important contributions to their native land. Have you any opinion on these contrasting attitudes?”

“As a geneticist I cannot help admiring the programme you’ve announced and Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung’s reputation is not the least significant warranty for its future success.”

Donald hoped that equivocal reply did not betray the fury which Keteng’s contemptuous tone had inspired in him.

“It is clear that you, like all Americans, do not approve of the existence of people who can do better than you at anything,” Keteng grunted. “However, since your people have finally deigned to pay attention to this major breakthrough, it behoves me to facilitate your conveyance of the facts to them. I shall give you now a card of authorisation entitling you to the rights legally accorded to foreign reporters, a letter for the surgeons at Dedication University so that you may have your sterilisation operation conducted without charge, and a schedule of the press conferences arranged for the coming week. Is there anything else you wish to inquire about before you leave?”

“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.

Never go against an armed man without a weapon if there’s one in reach. If there’s not one in reach, get in reach of one!

There was nothing to snatch and wield. There was a solid wall, a tiled pavement, pillars anchored to carry a heavy roof, and a sterile oriental garden without a living tree from which to tear a whip-like twig.

And the mucker was about to kill the prostrate man.

The phang rose in a high energy-profligate arc to be slammed down and divide the body like a pig’s dead carcase. Through the glass door of the clinic whitened faces paler than any Asiatic’s ought to be gazed fascinated, hypnotised, frozen to stillness with horror.

Donald was alone on a fifty-foot stretch of the walkway, and no one was close bar the man on the ground, the injured in the sand-garden, and the mucker.

The sword was at the apex of its swing and he launched himself off the balls of his feet. He hit the mucker with his shoulder and it was like charging a wooden statue, the flesh was so rigid with insanity. It was too late to countermand the decision to slash, but the man went off balance as Donald passed behind him, one hand cushioning his collision with the wall and diverting him like a bounced ball to a point out of reach. The phang met tiles, not flesh, and rang with a metal scream and turned in the mucker’s hand and lost him his dry grip, making the hilt slippery with blood, and shed some of the sharpness of its edge. Also the jar made the steel-stiff muscles of the man’s arm disobey him for a second.

Weapon.

In the middle of the sand-garden, five rocks smoothed by water into curves and holes. He went for them, remembering where the mucker had been and trying to calculate so that he could throw without aiming when he got to the little pile. The nearest was heavier than it looked and that wasted his calculations. The flung rock passed the mucker at shoulder level and fell to the floor and the mucker raised the phang again and made to spring straight at Donald—

And his foot landed on the rounded stone and slid from under him.

There was only one other rock he could hope to throw: a whitish one with a hole to hold it by weighing seven or eight pounds. He lobbed it at the mucker’s groin, exposed by the parting of his legs in a skidding fall, and it and the mucker landed on the floor together, hammering his testicles against the pavement.

Incapable of feeling pain in his present state, the mucker was not immune to the reflex consequences of a blow in the genitals or on the coccyx. His breath stopped from the latter, and there seemed to be universal silence, for Donald had lost the power to recognise anything but that ghastly gulp and grunt.

Yet he was superoxygenated by now, of course. He would not miss the ability to fill and empty his lungs …

He clawed the sword back from where it had fallen and Donald threw a handful of sand in his eyes while he was spending time on that. The blade whistled again, and this time touched Donald on the right forearm with a sting like a bee.

Weapon.

He had used up what there was: two rocks, sand. The sand had blinded only one of the mucker’s eyes and losing parallax would not bother him. He was up on his feet, armed, about to jump at Donald from the foot-higher vantage of the walkway.

Weapon.

Donald saw it. And damn them.

The mucker made his leap and Donald fell sideways and the phang bit into sand and was slow in recovery. (It was as though the man were an extension of the weapon, not the weapon of the man.) He rolled and kicked and his shod foot met the mucker’s elbow just above the joint and opened his fingers, making him release the phang. A second kick, badly aimed but helpful enough, put the hilt out of reach and the mucker recovered his breathing reflex and was able to scream a curse and went for the weapon without caring what part of it he grasped and took the blade, not the hilt, and cut open two of his own fingers and picked it up and threw it at Donald who had to duck the whirling arc of steel and threw himself after it and Donald got one leg under him and put his head down and met the mucker’s nose and mouth with the crown of his own head and chopped inwards with both hands at the sides of the mucker’s waist and used all the strength in the leg which was beneath him to lift himself off the ground with the sand shifting and threatening to betray him and pitch forward with his head still down and butt the mucker’s nose flat against his face and his head against the providentially placed rocks in the middle of the sand-garden.

But that’s not my weapon.

He felt momentarily stupid. The mucker wasn’t fighting back. He was underneath and gone limp and at his nape, which was in Donald’s field of vision about as close as he could take a proper focus, there was a big rock that he must have hit as he tumbled backward.

But I had a weapon, didn’t I?

A little foggily he remembered what it was, and rose to his feet and brought the mucker with him and got up over the edge of the walkway and ignored the man with the cut buttocks lying near the glass door of the clinic and likewise the people behind it who were scattering backwards with exclamations of dismay and used his weapon.

Which was, as he had been taught, a sheet of glass that could be smashed to make cutting edges.

He saw without interest as he turned the mucker over that there was already a smear of blood on his nape from the contusion the rock had caused. Then he used the head as a hammer and broke the door and cut the man’s throat on one of the pieces that remained in the frame.

He said in Yatakangi to the frightened little people beyond the door, “You pig-fucking yellow cowards. You shit-eating children born from a buggered arsehole. You piss-coloured piles of carrion. You dung-flies. You prickless and ball-lacking catamites. You street-walking widows who never had a man except for money. You cock-sucking blood-licking arse-kissing defilers of sacred shrines, you brainless heartless gutless cockless offspring of an imbecile and a deformed cow, you flea-bitten child-robbers who poisoned your fathers and raped your mothers and sold your sisters to the Dutch and carved up your brothers for sale in a butcher’s shop, you gutter-hugging traders in second-hand excrement, why didn’t you do anything about this?”

And after that he realised that he was carrying a corpse and he had cut both his hands so that he could not tell whether the blood dripping down his chest was his own or the mucker’s and he understood what he had just done and he let the body fall and crumbled on top of it and began to cry.

the happening world (12)

THE GENERAL FEELING

“You do realise what it means, don’t you? In effect, all

“You do realise what it means, don’t you? In effect, all

“You do realise what it means, don’t you? In effect, all

our children are going to be handicapped!”

our children are going to be handicapped!”

our children are going to be handicapped!”

“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up

“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up

“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up

against people who can think better than us?”

against people who can think better than us?”

against people who can think better than us?”

“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t

“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t

“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t

you? You can—”

you? You can—”

you? You can—”

“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being

“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being

“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being

morons and cripples.”

morons and cripples.”

morons and cripples.”

“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an

“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an

“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an

expert in genetics to Yatakang?”

expert in genetics to Yatakang?”

expert in genetics to Yatakang?”

“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously

“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously

“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously

there must be something in it.”

there must be something in it.”

there must be something in it.”

“But the government seems to be trying to convince people

“But the government seems to be trying to convince people

“But the government seems to be trying to convince people

it’s a lie.”

it’s a lie.”

it’s a lie.”

“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to

“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to

“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to

do the same for us.”

do the same for us!”

DO THE SAME FOR US!”

“DO THE SAME FOR US!”

“DO THE SAME FOR US!”

“DO THE SAME FOR US!”

“DO THE SAME FOR US!”

“DO THE SAME FOR US!”

(UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage. See also DISHONESTY, SNEAKY, UNDERHAND and JUST LUCKY I GUESS.

—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

continuity (27)

MANSCAPE

Near the road, high grass flushed green with summer wet, set with low bushes, punctuated with trees. Tethered on expensive chains because they could gnaw through rope or leather, goats strained to crop the tree-bark and kill the trees though there was plenty of grazing closer to the pegs they circled. Chains apart, the road seemed like the only human intrusion into a beast-plant universe, and not the road as such because wild nature was reclaiming it, pitting its surface with holes that held bowlfuls of mud, but its idea of straightness.

Yet the manufactures of man came into view and went again. Every mile or two there were plots of ground trenched for vegetables surrounding a hamlet built in traditional Beninian style of timber and thatch. Some of the wealthier families’ homes were turtle-plated in a riot of colours, the owners having taken old cans, oil-drums, even sheets of metal from abandoned cars, and after flattening them with mallets lapped them together as carefully as medieval armour to protect the wood against wet, rot and termites.

Maps of the district had been kept up to date by a makeshift system involving as much gossip and rumour as actual surveying, but even if they had been revised last week by a team of UN geographers Norman would still have found it hard to relate that out there with this flapping on his knee. He had to say painfully to himself, “Those two hills must correspond to these markings, so this is where they would mine river-clay and bake it into porous filters for the plastics plant at—where?—Bephloti…”

The insect humming of the engine beneath their vehicle’s floor droned down to a grumble. Steering, Gideon Horsfall said, “Sheeting hole, I hoped we’d make it clear to Lalendi before I had to swap cylinders. I’ll pull down off the road when we get around the bend.”

Around the bend there was another of the interchangeable hamlets, except that this was one of the fourteen per cent of the country’s villages which possessed a school and a clinic. It was the wrong day for the clinic, a plain white concrete hut with large-lettered signs in English and Shinka, but the school was busy. As yet, in this region, the summer rains were only intermittent; the full drenching flow would follow in three weeks. Accordingly the teacher—a fat young man with a fan and spectacles of an old-fashioned pattern—was conducting his class under a grove of low trees. They were boys and girls from about six to twelve, clutching UN-issued plastic primers and trying not to let themselves be distracted by the appearance of the car.

It wasn’t yet raining, but it was horribly humid. Norman, clammy from head to toe, thought about the energy required to get out and stand up. He asked Gideon whether he needed help in swapping cylinders. Twisting around to take a pair of fresh ones—one hydrogen, one oxygen—from a crate on the back seat, Gideon declined the offer.

But Norman got out anyway, and found he was looking at the verandah-like frontage of a house on which a small group of women were assembled, and one man, middle-aged, very thin, who lay among them on a low trestle-table. They were wringing cloths in buckets of water and wiping his skin, and he seemed to be making no effort to co-operate.

A little puzzled, he asked Gideon, “What’s the matter over there? Is the man ill?”

Gideon didn’t look at once. He dropped the cylinder-tray at the back of the car, unclipped and reconnected the gas-hoses, and gathered up the empties for return to store before following Norman’s gesture.

“Ill? No, dead,” he said absently, and went to put the cylinders inside the car.

One of the older pupils of the school, squatting cross-legged at the back of the class, raised his hand and asked something of the teacher.

“Is something wrong?” Gideon demanded, realising that Norman had made no move to get back in the car.

“Not really,” Norman said after a pause. “It’s just that I … Well, you see, I’ve never seen a corpse before.”

“It doesn’t look any different from a living person,” Gideon said. “Except it doesn’t move, and it doesn’t suffer. The hole, I was afraid of that. Do you mind being a visual aid to the schoolmaster for five minutes?”

The women had finished their task of washing the corpse; they poured out the dirty water on the ground and a piglet came over to lap at a puddle it formed. From the long poles supporting the thatch over the verandah, a few chickens solemnly looked down. One of the women fetched a galvanised tub full of something sticky and white and began to daub the corpse’s face, using a bundle of hen’s feathers tied on a twig.

“What’s that for?” Norman asked Gideon.

“What? Oh, the white paint? Relic of early missionary interference, I gather. All the pictures of saints and angels they saw when they were being converted to Christianity had white skins, so they decided to give their dead a better chance of admission to heaven.”

The entire class of children rose to their feet and waited for the teacher to walk past, take station at their head, and lead them over towards the car.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” the fat young man said affably. “My class has requested permission to put a few questions to you. Since they have little chance to travel about themselves, perhaps you’d indulge them.”

“Certainly,” Gideon said with only the trace of a sigh.

“Thanks awfully. First, may we know where you come from?” The teacher turned and held out his hand expectantly to one of the older pupils, who gave him a rolled map in bright colours and simplified outlines. Those children who were not too much attracted by the car or the preparation of the corpse craned to see whereabouts in the world Gideon would point to.

When his finger stabbed down in the area of New York, there was a concerted sigh.

“Ah, you’re American!” the teacher said. “Sarah, we learned about America, didn’t we? What do you know of that great country so far away?”

A serious-mannered girl of thirteen or so, one of the oldest pupils, said, “America has over four hundred million people. Some of them are brown like us but most of them are Cock…”

She hesitated.

“Cauc…” corrected the teacher.

“Caucasian,” Sarah managed. “The capital is Washing-ham—”

“Washing—?”

“Washington. There are fifty-two states. At first there were thirteen but now there are four times that number. America is very rich and powerful and it sends us good seed for planting, new kinds of chickens and cows which are better than the ones we used to have, and lots of medicines and disinfectants to keep us healthy.”

She suddenly smiled and gave a little skip of pleasure at her own success in the brief recitation.

“Very good,” Gideon approved.

A boy next to Sarah, about her own age, raised his hand. “I should like to ask you, sir—”

Norman felt inclined to let his mind wander. No doubt this was one of the regular public-relations jobs Gideon had to cope with when he went about the country in this incredibly informal manner—which struck Norman as absurd: the First Secretary of the U. S. Embassy stopping off at random in an isolated village and chatting with children! But he had his mind too full trying to organise his perceptions.

He had discovered why organising them was so difficult a few seconds ago. The sight of a corpse being made ready for burial, matter-of-factly in the view of everyone, was a shock to him. In sterile modern America one was intellectually aware that death could be a public event, from heart-failure or more messily through the intervention of a mucker, but hardly anyone had actually seen a mucker on the rampage, and emotionally and for all daily purposes one assumed it was something that took place tidily in a hospital out of sight of everyone except experts trained to handle human meat.

But people do die.

In the same way, Beninia was a continuing shock. Taken in by eye and ear, the canned information supplied by Shalmaneser and the GT library was manipulable, digestible, of a familiar sort. Confronted with language, smell, local diet, the sticky hot early-summer air, the clutch of mud around his shoes, he was in the same plight as a Bushman trying to make sense of a photograph, exhausted by the effort to bridge the gap between pre-known symbol and present actuality.

Yet it had to be done. Isolated in the air-conditioned GT tower, one might juggle for a thousand years with data from computers and pattern them into a million beautiful logical arrays. But you had to get out on the ground and see if the data were accurate before you could put over the programming switches on Shalmaneser from “hypothetical” to “real”.

His attention shot back to here and now as though a similar switch had been pulled in his own mind. He had heard, in memory, the rest of the boy’s question.

“—how the Chinese can do so much damage in California!”

Gideon was looking baffled. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you,” he said after a moment.

“You must forgive the child, sir,” the teacher said, plainly embarrassed. “It’s not the most tactful subject—”

“I’ll answer any question, tactless or not,” Gideon said. “I didn’t quite follow, that’s all.”

“Well, sir,” the boy said, “we have a television set here, and teacher makes us older ones watch the news programme after school before we walk home, so we see a lot about America. And there’s often a piece about damage done by Chinese infiltrators in California. But if Americans are either like you, or like English people, and the Chinese are like what we see on television, with their funny eyes and different skins, why can’t you recognise and catch them?”

“I get the point,” Norman said gruffly. “Like me to handle that, Gideon?” He pushed himself away from the roof of the car where he had been leaning and approached the group of children, his eyes on the questioner. Not more than thirteen at the oldest, yet he had phrased his inquiry in first-class English with a slight British inflection. Learned off one of the Common Europe news-commentators, probably. Still, it was an achievement at his age.

“What’s your name, prodgy?”

“Simon, sir. Simon Bethakazi.”

“Well, Simon, you’re probably old enough by now to know how it feels when you do something silly you wouldn’t like other people to find out about. Not because you’d be punished, but because people would laugh at you—or because they thought of you as one of the cleverest boys in the school and a clever boy oughtn’t to have done such a stupid thing. Catch?”

Simon nodded, face very intent.

“Only sometimes things happen which are too big to hide. Suppose you—hmmm! Suppose you knocked over a jug of milk and that was all the milk in the house? And it was your fault but you’d been doing something silly to make it happen, like seeing if you could hang by your feet from the rafters.”

Simon looked blank for a second and the teacher, smiling, said something in Shinka. His face cleared and he had to repress a grin.

“Well—you might try and put the blame on someone else … No, you wouldn’t do that, I’m sure; you’re a good boy. You might try and blame it on a pig that tripped you up, or a chicken that startled you and made you fall over.

“The Chinese would have to be very clever indeed to do all the damage they’re supposed to. But because America is a big and rich and proud country we don’t like admitting that there are some people who aren’t happy—who are so unhappy, in fact, they want to change the way things are run. But there are only a few of them, not enough to make the changes happen. So they lose their tempers and they break things, same as people do anywhere.

“And there are some other people who would also like to change things, but who haven’t got around to using bombs yet, or setting houses on fire. If they thought there were many more like themselves, they might decide to start too. So we like to let it be thought that it’s really someone else’s fault. Do you understand?”

“It may be a trifle sophisticated for him,” the teacher said aside to Norman.

“No, I understand.” Simon was emphatic. “I’ve seen somebody lose his temper. It was when I went to stay with my cousin in the north last year. I saw an Inoko lady and gentleman having a quarrel.”

Incredulous words rose to Norman’s lips. Before he could utter them, however, Gideon had coughed politely.

“If you’ll excuse us, we have to get on our way,” he said.

“Of course,” the teacher beamed. “Many thanks for your kindness. Class, three cheers for our visitors! Hip hip—”

* * *

Back on the road, Norman said, “And what would State think of that—uh—presentation?”

“It was honest,” Gideon said with a shrug. “It’s hardly what they’ll hear over the TV, but it’s honest.”

Norman hesitated. “There was something I wanted to ask, but it seems foolish … The hole! Why was young Simon so eager to stress that he’d seen someone lose his temper?”

“That’s a very bright kid. And sophisticated.”

“Anyone could see he’s no simpleton! But I asked—”

“He could say that in English. He couldn’t have said it in Shinka, which is his native language, and that’s good for a boy barely into his teens, isn’t it?”

Norman shook his head in bewilderment.

“Ask this linguist—what’s his name? The one you brought with you.”

“Derek Quimby.”

“Ah-hah. Ask him if you can express the idea of losing your temper in Shinka. You can’t. You can only use the word which means ‘insane’.”

“But—”

“I’m telling you.” Gideon guided the car around a wide curve, seeking a route between potholes. “I don’t speak the language well myself, but I can get along. Facts are: you can say ‘annoyed’ or even ‘exasperated’, but both those words came originally from roots meaning ‘creditor’. Someone you get angry with owes you an apology in the same way you’re owed money or a cow. You can say ‘crazy’ and put one of two modifiers on the front of it—either the root for ‘amusing’ or the root for ‘tears’. In the latter case, you’re talking about someone who’s hopelessly out of his mind, sick, to be tended and cleaned up after. In the former, you’re inviting people to laugh at someone who’s lost his temper, but will return to normal sooner or later.”

“They regard anger as being literal insanity?”

“They don’t regard it as being important enough to have a separate word to label it, that’s all I can say.”

“But people must lose their tempers occasionally!”

“Of course they do. I’ve even seen Zad lose his temper. But that wasn’t at anybody—it was the day his doctors told him he must retire or die. Did him a power of good, too, like any catharsis. What they don’t do is go crazy-mad and smash things that they’ll regret later. I’ve been here more than two years and I haven’t seen a parent hit a child. I haven’t seen a child hit another child. Trip him over, yes, or jump out at him from around a corner and pretend to be a leopard. You know what the Mandingo used to say about the Shinka in the old days?”

Norman gave a slow nod. “They were magicians who could steal the heart out of a warrior.”

“Right. And the way they do it is by dodging passion. I don’t know how they manage it, but there’s the record. A thousand or more years in the same spot, not bothering anyone, and like I said the day you arrived they swallowed up the Holaini and the Inoko and Kpala immigrants … Shall I tell you something you really won’t believe?”

“You already did.”

“I mean really. Laying out that corpse and painting its face white reminded me. The first Christian missionary to come here was a Spanish friar called Domingo Rey. You know the Spanish had a trading post not far from Port Mey, an outstation for Fernando Po? There’s a marker on the site you could go and look at if you have time.

“Anyway, this friar did a very un-Christian thing. He went out of his mind and drowned himself after he’d been here seven years. He was convinced he’d been trapped by Satan. He’d learned enough Shinka to start preaching, and started off with some of the parables and highlights of the gospel, and to his dismay the people he talked to said no, you’ve got that wrong, it wasn’t anyone far away called Jesus but our own man Begi who did that. You know about Begi?”

“I don’t think I do,” Norman said after a pause.

“Any briefing on Beninia that leaves Begi out of account isn’t worth having,” Gideon grunted. “I guess you’d call him a folk-hero, a sort of Jack character, or maybe like this Anancy that you find in the West Indies. His name apparently means ‘winter-born’, and they say he always used to carry a blunt spear and a shield with a hole in it—to look through. And as you might expect the stories about him were more to the Shinka taste than those about Jesus.

“The one which allegedly drove the poor friar out of his skull—want to hear it?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

Gideon eased the car down a particularly rutted stretch of road, avoiding potholes. “Well, the stories say he’d reached a ripe old age and enormous popular esteem because he’d made wizards look foolish and overcome a sea-monster and even got the better of his grandfather’s ghost, so everybody used to bring problems to him. And one time the boss Holaini, the Emir—which the Shinka turned into ‘Omee’, incidentally, meaning ‘indigestion’; they love bad puns—the Emir, anyway, got sick of the way the Shinka kept outsmarting their lords and masters. Like for instance they’d imposed a swingeing tax and people went to Begi and complained, and he said why don’t you drive your fertile cows into the Holaini bull-pens and give them back their own calves when you pay the tax? Which sort of tickled their sense of humour. And, by the way, he said, according to the story, ‘Give the Emir what belongs to the Emir!’”

“Render unto Caesar?” Norman muttered.

“You’ve hit it. So finally the Emir sent messengers to demand who was playing these underhand tricks, and Begi owned up and off he went, and the Emir pegged him out on an anthill in the traditional style. And when his old blind father the chief came to visit him in his last moments, he said the Shinka shouldn’t hold his death against the Holaini because they were too stupid to see the point of what he had said to them.”

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?”

“Your being raised as a Baptist saves me explaining a lot of things to you, doesn’t it? I guess if Friar Rey had been a bit more sophisticated he’d have thought of the possibility that some Christian legends had reached here on the grapevine, like the story of Buddha is supposed to have got to Rome and led to his being canonised as St. Josaphat—you heard that one? But I guess the climate of ideas wasn’t on his side in those days.

“Well, what it boils down to is that Begi already enshrined the Shinka concept of a perfect man, tolerant, level-headed, witty—the whole shtick. It wasn’t till some more broad-minded missionary hit on the notion of saying that Begi was a prophet sent to the Shinka that Christianity made any progress here. And nowadays you’ll hear Shinkas saying that Begi had better sense than Jesus because he brought his teaching to people who understood it, while Jesus overreached himself and preached to people like the British who can’t have understood or they wouldn’t behave as they do.”

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.”

tracking with closeups (20)

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.

continuity (28)

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.

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.

He said, “What do you think of your government now, Professor?” His tone lent barbs to the words.

“I am afraid for my country if it remains in power,” Sugaiguntung whispered.

“What do you want? What would you most like?”

“What would I like?” Sugaiguntung blinked. “I should like—I should like to be free of this pressure. I am becoming set in my ways, I am fifty-four years old, but I have ideas I’ve not yet tried, I can teach younger people what I know and cannot write down … I should like to be what I trained to be, a scientist, instead of a political figure-head!”

“Do you see any chance of getting what you want so long as this government remains in power in Yatakang?”

There was a long silence. At last Sugaiguntung said, “I have hoped, and gone on hoping. Now … Now I have to pretend that there is still hope.”

“You must give me a letter of authority,” Donald said after some thought. “You must write that I can come to your private address for an interview—put down where I have to go. You can have what you want. I swear it, I will make sure that you can have what you want.”