Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (69 page)
In darkness alleviated only by a grey patch where light from the mast-head lamp soaked through the slats over the air-vent, Sugaiguntung uttered a whimper.
“Don’t worry,” Donald said, unable to prevent it sounding like a forlorn hope.
“Mr. Hogan, I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing. I—I may have fallen into a pattern of habit instead of taking a decision.”
“I don’t understand.” The scrap of anthropological information read years ago leaked back to consciousness. “Oh—yes, I think I do. You mean there’s a custom. Someone who saves your life buys a lease on it.”
“It is what I was taught as a child, and there is a great deal of irrationality left in us moderns. I have never been near to death before except once from a virus I caught. And that was while I was still a boy. One was supposed to buy back one’s right to free will by doing something at the—oh!—the behest of the one who saved you, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s good English for it. A bit antique but good English.” Donald spoke absently; he had just caught the sound of seine-nets splashing into the water. Any minute now the filling of the hold with fish would begin, and would have to be repeated heaven knew how often before the boat could head for the far shore of the Strait.
Sugaiguntung went on, like a recording: “I know as a scientist that burning a cone of incense can do nothing to appease a volcano, yet when my wife lighted one for Grandfather Loa I smelt its smoke in the house and somehow I—I felt better for it. Do you understand that?”
Donald thought of Norman sending away to his string of Genealogical Research Bureaux and gave a sour chuckle. “I guess so,” he admitted.
“But, you see, I had been thinking: what would they remember me for if the mucker had killed me? Not for the things I am proud of, my rubber-trees and my bacteria that I tailored to suit human needs. They would have remembered me for something I myself did not promise to do, which I myself could not have done! They would have grown to think of me as an impostor, wouldn’t they?” There was a pleading tone to the words, as though Sugaiguntung was desperately seeking justification for his own decision.
“Very likely,” Donald agreed. “And it wouldn’t have been fair.”
“No, precisely, it wouldn’t have been fair.” Sugaiguntung repeated the words with a kind of relish. “Nobody has the right to steal the reputation of someone else and use it to prop up a false claim. That is definite. I shall have a chance to tell the truth now, shan’t I?”
“You’ll have every facility you could possibly want.”
Abruptly a hatch squealed open and the first of the netfuls of fish came squirming loathsomely down into the hold, to die gasping in a foreign element. More followed, and more, until they were a mass that screened the two hiding men from anyone merely peering in at the hatch.
What unexpectedly turned Donald’s stomach was that they made a noise as they died.
The world reduced slowly to a dark stinking nowhere.
* * *
He had almost drifted into sleep because that was the only available escape-route when the skipper called very softly from the hatch.
“Mr. Hogan! We have been lucky—the patrol-boat on duty here is going the other way and we can watch her lights. Be quick and we can put you ashore now!”
Stiffly Donald forced his way over the slippery mounds of fish, their scales clinging to him and giving him patches of phosphorescence like a Yatakangi ghost in a temple painting. When he had levered himself out of the hatch—by touch, because the skipper had extinguished the masthead light—he turned and helped Sugaiguntung out. Soaking from the water which had puddled on the floor of the hold as the fish drained, they stood together shivering on the flimsy deck.
“I have made a signal to the sentries who hide in the trees over there,” the skipper whispered. “They know we are friendly and will not fire on us.”
“What are your crew doing?” Donald asked, seeing that the two other men were leaning over the bow and groping into darkness.
“There is a cable on the sea-bed,” the skipper said. “We do not want to make any noise with the engine and the wind is too light to move us quickly … Ah!”
With a faint splashing the crewmen recovered the cable. To it, they attached a grapple; then, straining their muscles, they began to haul the boat inshore. The sky was heavily clouded, but even so Donald could make out the difference between black sky and black land. A few lights on the slopes of Grandfather Loa, away to their left, flickered mockingly.
The boat jolted and Sugaiguntung caught at his arm, almost knocked off balance.
“Quickly—go ashore now!” the skipper urged. “I see the patrol-boat’s light coming back this way.”
To Donald, there was no way of distinguishing between one and another of the many boat-lights dotting the Strait. He was not inclined to argue with an expert, however.
“What reason can you give for coming here if you’re challenged?” he asked.
“We shall say we wanted to get rid of a
latah
-fish
.
”
“What’s that?”
“It’s poisonous. It has spines that make a man mad if they prick him. They would not dare to walk ashore and look for it in the dark because it is dangerous after it is dead.” The skipper thrust at his shoulder, pushing him forward. “But be quick—if they are going to come and talk to us they will wonder why it took so long to throw a small fish into the bushes!”
Donald scrambled down over the side away from the patrol-boat, as the skipper advised. Up to his ankles in the soft sand, he turned to help Sugaiguntung down. He felt the scientist trembling uncontrollably as they touched.
“Straight inland!” the skipper whispered. “Someone will come to meet you. It won’t be a ghost!”
And with that bitter Yatakangi joke he at once had the boat freed from the sand and turned about.
Trying not to make too much noise, Donald guided Sugaiguntung on to dry land. There was only a fringe of sand before their legs were clutched at by stringy grasses and then by shrubs. Casting about, Donald found what might be a path and headed along it, Sugaiguntung two paces behind.
“Stop!” someone said very quietly in Yatakangi.
Donald obeyed, so quickly that Sugaiguntung bumped into him and clutched at him. Now Donald distinctly heard the scientist’s teeth chattering.
Christ, can’t he take it a little smoother? At least this is his own country—he hasn’t been picked up and dumped half a world away from home.
But home had proved as hostile as any jungle, of course.
One—two—three sentries emerged from concealment. It was just possible to see that their heads were misshapen; they all wore black-light glasses. Two of them carried guns and stood back warily while the third, holding only a black-light projector, studied Donald and his companion. Satisfied about their identity, he said, “Follow us! Make as little noise as possible!”
Then there was a time of blind walking down a tunnel that twisted and turned like the intestines of a snake. It must have been cleared out, shaped and reinforced from the actual greenery hiding it, and very efficiently—Donald never caught a glimpse of the sky beyond. Eventually it began to rise.
Sugaiguntung sobbed with exhaustion and the man leading the way slackened his pace a trifle, for which Donald was glad. His sense of direction had lasted almost this far, but was beginning to let him down for lack of external data to supplement his judgment. As far as he could tell, they had headed towards Grandfather Loa—was it his slopes they were now breasting? He towered to nine thousand feet and it would be ridiculous to try and make Sugaiguntung go very far up such a mountain.
Abruptly the man ahead gestured for them to halt. Panting, they did so. There was a half-heard exchange with another hidden sentry. Given the chance to think about something other than walking too fast uphill, Donald realised that the temperature had dropped sharply from its daytime peak, yet ahead there was warm air—he could feel it on his face.
“Go past me,” said the man who had answered the sentry’s challenge. Donald and Sugaiguntung complied.
Within another ten yards they found themselves in a small roofed-over clearing, half-walled by two outcrops of sloping ground. At the far side of it was a dark patch which appeared to be a cave, no more than four feet high. Sitting on the stumps of the trees which had been cut down to make the clearing, then—Donald’s darting eyes spotted clues that could never have been seen from overhead—grafted to standing trees and bent together to provide a camouflage screen, were about eight or nine men and women wearing drab clothes and slung about with weapons. The warm air which he had noticed blowing against his face emanated from a heater in the centre of the group.
One of them rose.
“Mr. Hogan?” he said in a good English accent. “My name is Jogajong. Welcome to my headquarters. You have struck a great blow for freedom in Yatakang tonight. Dr. Sugaiguntung, we are honoured by your presence.”
The scientist mumbled something Donald did not catch.
“While this is not a luxury hotel,” Jogajong said, “I believe we can offer adequate hospitality while you are waiting for the submarine to come and collect you. You need not be afraid that the heater will attract infra-red detectors—in that cave there a hot spring sometimes bubbles up and gives off warm gas. The nearest peasant habitation is nearly a kilometre away. I have more than a hundred loyal guards on the approach paths. And, as I imagine you know in view of the way you were brought here, I have many good friends among the common people. Sit down, please. Are you hungry, thirsty, wishing for a cigarette?”
Donald sniffed the air. As though reminded of its duty by Jogajong’s words, a puff of brimstone-scented gas wafted from the cave-mouth and made him think of hell.
But there was something reassuringly confident about the rebel leader’s greeting. It gave him time to review what he had just lived through, and at once the moment of greatest terror—greater even than when Sugaiguntung put on the light inside his house and revealed him at the glass door—claimed his attention.
He said, “What happened to Zulfikar Halal?”
There was a pause. Jogajong only shrugged.
“He told me it would be expensive to buy transport across the Strait!” Donald insisted in a voice tinged with shrillness. “I gave him a thousand talas, and the bleeder didn’t show up!”
“He lied anyway,” Jogajong said without emotion. “We have good communications with your countrymen here, and as soon as we heard what you hoped to do we made arrangements of our own. There were six boats waiting beyond their usual time of sailing tonight, and any of them would have brought you to me—not because they were bribed, but because I asked it of them.”
“You mean I never need have gone to him at all?”
“That’s correct.”
Donald clenched his fists. “Why, that dirty—!”
“Yes, he is a weak link in my chain,” Jogajong nodded. “I prefer always to rely on my own countrymen. But of course your people feel that espionage is a filthy business and it is better to put the dirt on someone else’s hands. I shall make a report; he will not have the chance to deceive anyone else.”
“What will you do?” Fury made Donald eager to hear of torture: slow fires, nails pulled out by the roots.
“A word in the right place will ensure his arrest,” Jogajong murmured. “And the jails of Gongilung are not the next thing to Paradise … Don’t concern yourself. You have done more than enough, and his treachery did not in the upshot mean that your bravery was wasted.”
Donald sighed and relaxed. What the rebel leader said was obviously true. He glanced around the clearing again.
“How long do we have to wait—have they told you?”
“Until the level of activity among the aquabandits has dropped enough to give the submarine a chance of coming through unmolested.”
“Major Delahanty said something about that. How long?”
“I would estimate three to five days,” Jogajong said equably. “If necessary we can mount a certain—ah—distracting event to lure their forces away, but it would be better not to. The disappearance of someone so eminent as Dr. Sugaiguntung is going to give a great deal of trouble to the Solukarta régime anyhow. I hope they are prevented from concealing the truth; the suspicion that he may have left of his own free will could do incalculable good for my cause.”
Donald rubbed his chin. “Hmmm! Are you sure it would be better if the news leaked out?”
“Definitely, sir.”
“Could you get an anonymous message to someone at the Gongilung press club?”
“Easily. I had in fact thought of doing that, but I would need the names of people who would take such information seriously, not write it off as mere rumour.”
“I can give you a name,” Donald said.
“Excellent!” Jogajong hesitated and glanced at the other people in the clearing, silent on their tree-stump stools. “But for this moment you will excuse me—I must complete the staff conference I’m holding. Later we can talk more fully, yes?”
Donald gave a dull nod.
Staff conference? Why not? Things must have been like this in more countries than I could count—Russia, China, Cuba, South Africa … A handful of men and women meeting in a secret lair, and then suddenly coming out and turning as though by magic from fugitives to cabinet ministers! Who should know better than I do how quick and easy such a transformation is?
And to plot Yatakang’s next revolution on the threshold of a volcano seemed perfectly, inexpressibly apposite.
When Jeff Young read about the trap set for the party of soldiers coming ashore from Boat Camp he put two and two together. The same partisan who had bought the aluminophage from him had asked for monofilament wire of a type which happened to be in store at the metalworking shop. One of the gossip sheets had circulated his way recently, apparently, and drawn his attention to some uses for the stuff based on traps which Maquis used to set in World War II for dispatch-riders on motorcycles, except that in those days they had to use piano-wire and because it was thicker and easier to see its employment was generally confined to twilight.