Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (78 page)
There was a monstrous eruption of bubbles from one of the inflated compartments, and the last of them turned dark. He snatched back the knife, a roaring in his ears and a tingling all over his skin.
“Femoral artery,” Sugaiguntung said, now as before without any trace of emotion. “Don’t try to staunch it. I won’t let you. It is the least I can do to repay my people for the treachery I committed, doubting the word of those who knew better than I myself did. I have been … disloyal … but I go to join my ancestors in a way which…”
His head lolled suddenly to one side, and his upturned face showed a faint, enigmatic smile to the stars the parting mist had now revealed.
There was even yet not enough light to show the colour of the water, but Donald knew it was red. Staring, letting go the knife, letting go the rope, he saw it glow brighter and brighter, the brilliance of lava, and Grandfather Loa erupted in his brain and claimed the latest victim of all the uncounted thousands slain by his wrath.
When the submarine surfaced and he was dragged aboard, he had stopped screaming, but only because his throat was too raw to utter another sound.
When the girl Dora Kwezi appeared at the door of the schoolroom Frank Potter did not at first notice her. He had his back to the class, writing up a passage on the board and practically shouting over his shoulder because of the drumming of the rain on the roof. She had to call him twice before he heard her.
“Mr. Potter! Mr. Potter sir!”
He turned. She was splashed with mud almost to the knees and her frock was pasted to her handsome young body with the rain. What could have brought her out in this frantic hurry?
“Mr. Potter, please come to your missus!”
Oh my God. But it can’t be. Please God, it can’t be—it’s too soon, another five weeks!
“Go on with what I was telling you to do,” he said mechanically to the class, adding to the oldest boy as he passed his desk at the rear, “I rely on you to keep order, Lemuel!”
Then he seized his umbrella, opened it, and dived out into the pouring rain in Dora’s wake.
Across the squelching quagmire of the village “square”, up the verandah steps and into the small bungalow assigned to them. When they first came here Sheena had looked about her in despair and begun by listing all the things it didn’t have which she regarded as essential to mere survival. There wasn’t even a piped water-supply; a tank on the roof had to be filled from a water-truck at weekly intervals.
Yet it was a place where they could have their child, legally …
“She in the bedroom!” Dora said, pointing, and Frank thrust past her, dropping the umbrella without bothering to close it.
Sheena was stretched out on the bed with her eyes closed, her face very pale, her belly stretched large as a pumpkin under her too-tight dress. Beside her, bathing her face with a rag and iced water, was the nearest approach this forsaken little village could boast to a doctor: Dora’s mother Mamma Kwezi, the midwife and layer-out.
“Is it—?” Frank demanded, and could not finish.
Mamma Kwezi said with a shrug, “It is soon, but I have seen early pains before.” Her English was good but thick with Shinka consonants.
Frank dropped beside the bed and took Sheena’s hand. On his touch, she opened her eyes and gave him a wan smile that almost at once died into a grimace of pain.
He said inanely, “How long since it started?”
“Over two hours, I suppose…” Her voice was harsh.
“Why didn’t you tell me before, for heaven’s sake?”
“But it’s far too soon, Frank! It ought to happen next month some time!”
“It is bad to be afraid,” Mamma Kwezi said. “I was born, you were born—it is a thing for everyone, after all.”
“But if the baby is five whole weeks premature, then—” Frank checked himself, belatedly aware that this was the worst kind of talk to let Sheena hear.
“Yes, it will be weak, that cannot be helped,” Mamma Kwezi sighed.
“We’ve got to get her out of here—to a proper hospital!”
Mamma Kwezi looked at him with big round eyes. She gestured to Dora, hovering in the background, and relinquished to her the task of bathing Sheena’s hot face. Drawing Frank aside, she regarded him sadly.
“How will you take her, sir? The road to Lalendi is all mud, and in this rain—”
“I’ll phone for a copter!”
But even as he spoke the words he knew they were ridiculous. The pelting rain was practically a solid sheet of water now, the last violent spate before the winter dry period set in.
“No, a hovercraft! That can get through mud, it can get through anything.”
“Yes, sir. But can it get here from Lalendi, and back, in … well, two more hours?”
“Will it be that soon?”
“It will not be any longer. I have felt a—” Mamma Kwezi put her hand on her own ample belly, at a loss for the word.
“Contraction?”
“Yes. The water will break in a little while, I think.”
Frank’s world slipped off its axis and spun crazily. Mamma Kwezi put a sympathetic hand on his arm.
“She is a good healthy girl, sir, and you too are a strong father for the child. I am very experienced and careful and I have good medicines and the book they sent from Port Mey with the newest advice which I have read and remembered. It is not like an old juju-woman.”
“No, Mamma, I’m sure you’re—you’re going to do fine.” Frank swallowed hard. “But if the baby is going to be so weak and small…!”
“We will take good care of it. Now do go and talk on the phone to Lalendi. Have sent a car. Get to help me a good English-type doctor and say what is the trouble. Once I saw in Lalendi a special cradle with very strong air in big cans which is good for babies.”
Christ. Long ago and far away before that damned Eugenics Board ruling, I was planning to have Sheena take hyperbaric oxygen therapy during the pregnancy …
But techniques like that seemed unbelievable in the setting of this village built of timber and scrap with only a handful of modern houses in the centre: the school, this bungalow, the clinic, the library … Even those not modern, slab-sided huts on a grand scale made of concrete in cheap standard panels. Here where TV was something the whole village gathered to watch in a sort of crude cinema, here where there was one phone, no street-lighting, nothing but fluorescents in the homes instead of luminous ceilings, no this, no that …
How many thousand years of history could a man bridge in a day? Here he stood, nominally a citizen of a country whose wealth made the fabled powers of antiquity seem like beggars, sharing with naked cavemen the same sense of terror before the incomprehensible process of man becoming man.
He looked at the window. The word had got around. In the rain, eyes large and round under their improvised hoods, the women of the village were gathering as though to join in the traditional rituals which he had seen accompanying all the births since his arrival. His fist clenched and began to rise, framing a threatening gesture to drive them away. It stopped at hip-height and the fingers straightened.
At home they denied me the right to be a father. It is not home any longer, cannot be. I’ve thrown in my lot with these people. I like them. Some of them are becoming good friends. If I have to suffer a few of the things they endure—well, a man must pay for what his heart desires …
He went to the door and stepped out. One of the women gathered called uncertainly the formula for good luck at the time of a birth: “Brother, may you have a child like Begi!”
He was not yet fluent in Shinka, though he had been studying it diligently in his limited spare time, but he had heard the ritual exchange often enough to give the traditional answer.
“Begi brought good fortune wherever he went—if he comes to us let all share the joy!”
They relaxed and grinned and nudged one another. He smiled back and added in English, “Here, don’t stand in the rain. Come up on the verandah.”
And there, pushing through the women from the far side, were Chief Letli and his oldest son, who both bore the remarkable name of Bruce after a District Officer who had once been stationed at Lalendi. The chief called out.
“Mr. Potter, you are going to the phone? There is no need—my son spoke to the hospital and they will send out a hovercraft with a nurse and all the medicines!”
For an instant the words did not register; he continued forward until he was about to step off the the verandah. Then he stopped dead.
But I didn’t even have to ask. I never thought of asking anyone to do it for me. Something’s wrong with me. In a time of trouble should people not be able to ask help without feeling demeaned?
He thought about that a lot while he was waiting by the bed for his child to emerge into the world.
* * *
It was a girl. She was still alive when they got her into the oxygen tent, and the nurse who had come from Lalendi did terrifying things with pipes and needles connected to a buzzing machine driven from the ambulance’s engine. The local women watched with awe, some of them praying audibly. Words like “intravenous nourishment” and “maintenance of the uterine environment” meant nothing to them, and little more to Frank. But eventually he understood that what was being done to the helpless mite was making her welcome in a hostile world, restoring her to the warmth and support she had enjoyed inside her mother’s body.
He said to Sheena, pale and weak, “It’s been a long time since the cavemen.”
She didn’t understand. But she smiled at him anyway.
Months had gone by since Norman had spared Donald more than a passing thought. He had wondered occasionally what had become of him; once, someone had commented on the political crisis developing between the States and Yatakang, which had briefly extended to a rupture of diplomatic relations and then somehow been smoothed over, and mentioned in passing the possible relevance of the backpedalling Engrelay Satelserv had indulged in to cover the cessation of the dispatches from Gongilung under Donald’s byline, which had begun spectacularly and ended even more so.
At that point Norman had made a mental note to try and find out, perhaps to ask Elihu to sound out State—and the next moment a problem had arisen and he had never acted on the intention.
Chad had said, rightly, that from now on Shalmaneser would be running Beninian affairs. But one could not abdicate all the responsibility to a machine. Some of it had to be processed, at least, by a human being empowered to make human decisions, and Norman was that person. For months he had moved in a state like a waking dream, barely concerned at what he ate or wore, impatient of his body when it grew tired, angry when its hormones imposed desires on him. All that counted was that the project should move smoothly, and in that at least he was well satisfied.
Ahead of schedule, they were transferring the control centre to an inflated dome on the outskirts of Port Mey. A new wide road connected it to the harbour, where dredgers had increased the draft of the ships it could accept by over a hundred per cent. Moles and sea-walls were going up: a colossal sludge-reservoir was being carved out of the coast a mile or two distant so that raw material from MAMP could be pumped up in slurry form through pipes bigger than a man was tall. Those pipes now were being reeled out on to the bed of the ocean by a fleet of five ships.
The proportion of coloured to white in Port Mey had suddenly been transformed as volunteers from a dozen countries outside Africa and GT staffers mingled with the natives. Housing developments, power-stations, vehicles, people—somehow, he had to keep their relationships clear in his mind.
So, when the message arrived on his desk one morning, he at first stared at it blankly.
Donald, it stated, had heard about the Beninia project and wanted to see it since it was being run by an old friend of his. Would Mr. House be so kind as to indicate whether a visit from Mr. Hogan would be convenient?
There was a signature appended. Also there was a call code—somewhere in Washington, by the pattern of the numbers. Norman told an operator to get him a circuit and went back to what he was doing.
Eventually the screen lit with a reply, on a poor satellite connection suffering much interference from a storm in progress. However, Norman could determine that he was speaking to someone in a hospital office, wearing a white coverall.
“I’m Dr. Oldham, Mr. House. I gathered you received my message about your friend Donald Hogan.”
“Yes, of course. What I wanted to know was why he has to go through you to find out if he can call on me? I’d be delighted to see him again.”
There was a pause. “I should perhaps explain,” Dr. Oldham said at length, “that I’m calling from St. Faith’s Hospital, not from Washington as you may have suspected from the code we use. I don’t know if the name means anything to you?”
Norman said slowly, “Yes, of course. You’re the army psychiatric centre, aren’t you?”
“That is correct.” Oldham coughed. “Your friend underwent some very disturbing experiences while he was in—ah—yes, of course, his presence in Yatakang was public knowledge, wasn’t it? To be candid, he’s been insane for a considerable time and he’s even now suffering from the after-effects. This was why I wanted to sound you out.”
“Prophet’s beard,” Norman said. “Whatinole did you bleeders do to him?”
“Mr. House, that’s a very—”
“If you’re speaking from St. Faith’s you’re an officer, I guess. Colonel—general?”
“Of course—colonel—but one doesn’t use the—”
“Never mind. Suppose you answer my question?”
Oldham said stiffly,
“Lieutenant
Hogan was in a sense wounded in his country’s service and any other attitude to what has happened would be improper and unjustified. I hope that’s clear.”
“Have it your way,” Norman sighed. “All right, let’s stick to the orbit we were flying. You want to know if he can come and look over the Beninia project. Yes, he most certainly can, and if you’ve decided to discharge him from the service I’ll be happy to hire him myself. Tell him so—it might cheer him up if he’s depressed about something.”