Stand on Zanzibar (23 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“Donald! Stop it, Donald—
stop it!
”
More gas rained down from crunching grenades. He lost the energy needed to drive his fists and a modicum of sanity returned to him before he blacked out. He said, “Norman. Oh my God. Norman. I’m so—”
The apology, the recipient, the speaker, whirled together into nothing.
I saw scrawled on the corner of a wall scrawawawled on a wawawall caterwauled cattycorner on the wawall what did I see scrawled on the wawl I forget so it can’t be that important KNOW IN YOUR OWN HANDS WITH A POLY-FORMING KIT THE SENSATIONS OF MICHELANGELO AND MOORE OF RODIN AND ROUAULT
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(ART A Friend of mine in Tulsa, Okla., when I was about eleven years old. I’d be interested to hear from him. There are so many pseudos around taking his name in vain.
—
The Hipcrime Vocab
by Chad C. Mulligan)
Stretched out on the couch naked, hair dyed the fashionable bronze shade that everyone said suited her so well, a screen protecting the majority of her body from the scan of the camera on the phone but bathing her in the blue-white of the sunshine lamps, Sasha Peterson did not look her forty-four years. Rounded enough for her skin to be full and firm everywhere, on the shoulders, on the breasts tipped with carnelian nipples, on the belly underlined with hair dyed to match her head (never overlook anything, never give away anything, never never never miss a trick), she weighed a little more than she should have done but not enough to matter.
“Not exactly
suitable
,” she said. “Of course, Philip was disappointed when I said so, but I don’t believe in secrets between mother and son, which is of course the most intimate of all human relationships, isn’t it? If I feel strongly about something I speak my mind on the subject and of course I expect Philip to do the same. Excuse me just a moment, Alice. Darling!”
Fully dressed in slightly conservative clothing of a cut that had been popular among young men ten years before, Philip looked up from his chair the other side of the room. He was a husky youth of twenty with pimples that even the most modern dermal treatments had not totally conquered.
“Bring me another whistler, will you?”
A hand tipped immaculately with chrome polish held out an empty Jacobean glass whose cut-crystal facets caught and shattered the light of the sunshine lamps into diamond brilliance.
“Do you mind if I fix myself another, too?”
“I think not, darling. You’ve had one already, and you’re not—ah—
case-hardened
like your old mum, are you?” As he took the glass: “So I don’t expect we’ll be seeing any more of Lucy. It’s a shame because in some ways she’s quite a nice girl, and no one could say she’s not intelligent. But she’s—not to be too mealy-mouthed—a bit common, don’t you think? And she’s almost three years older than Philip, and I feel it makes such a disproportionate amount of difference at that age, don’t you? I mean, considering it percentage-wise, with Philip being only twenty as he is. Ah, thanks a trillion, lovey!” With one hand she reached up and ruffled her son’s hair as he bent over her before accepting the glass and setting it beside her.
“And while you’re up, sugar-loaf, light me another of those Bay Golds, will you? Be sure not to inhale it, though, won’t you?”
Philip crossed the room, opened the reefer-box, applied a flame to the tip and wasted the first eighth of an inch dutifully on the unappreciative air.
“I’m going to be on my own tonight anyway, though—he’s going to see that nice boy Aaron he was in the same class with when he was doing … Goodness, it’s about time you left, isn’t it, plum-pudding?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“No, gracious! Of course I don’t mind! But you’ll be back as soon as you can, won’t you?” She accepted the reefer with those same metal-gleaming claws. “Kiss your old mum goodbye, then, and give Aaron my regards.”
Peck-peck.
“Ah, you’re mother’s boy, aren’t you, Philip? See you later, then. Oh, by the way, Alice, the reason I called: I seem to remember you saying you knew somebody in the department who sorted matters out when a draft notice came in for the Wilkins boy. Well, we’ve had the inevitable trouble at last, and though it’s a lot of nonsense of course I was wondering whether…”
“Yes, Sasha,” Philip said in answer to the question she had long forgotten.
A vast expanded hollow human void, arms belly legs like tunnels thrumming to the disgusting pulse of nausea. Bit by bit and painfully drawn together by spider’s-web frail links and assembled into …
Person. Vomit-prone, bruised, aching, Donald Hogan. He would rather have stayed in the nowhere of unconsciousness but there was a sharp cut-off with the sleepy-gas the police department used; the side-effects were carefully restricted to nausea and weakness, the most undermining sensations.
He rolled on one side and discovered that support ended. Terror of falling blind jolted his full awareness back. He looked and grabbed simultaneously, hand reaching a metal bar, eyes receiving a crazy insoluble mystery of shapes and lines.
He had almost rolled off something that was more of a shelf than a bunk, but if he had done so he would have fallen mere inches to the floor; he was on the lowest level. He saw through a steel grille a stacked layer of horizontal compartments, each containing a human body, and foggily deduced that on this side of the grille there must be other similar compartments, one holding himself. A man and a woman in police uniform activated the roller to retract a grille separating one bank of prisoners from the next and the metal shrieked as it cleared their way. They walked, holding a recorder for notes that they exchanged according to whether the next subject was male or female, to a point level with his vision and began to search one of the unconscious captives. The one on the corresponding shelf to his own, he saw, was a girl lying in a pool of her own vomit.
“Jet along,” the policewoman said. “Some of this lot only got a whiff and they may be shaking out of it any minute.”
“All right. This one’s ID says he’s—”
Donald tried stupidly to sit up and discovered he had only nine inches clearance, but banging his head on the underside of the next shelf made a noise and attracted their attention.
“See what I mean?” said the woman, and turned with a sigh to speak through the partition of mesh. “Lie down—your turn will come!”
Donald forced his feet and one arm to the floor and then his whole incredible weight into a standing position, his hand clutching the side of the fourth shelf up to steady him. He said, “What’s going on? Where is this place?”
In both directions, as far as he could see by poor shielded lamps, human bodies laid out as if in a mortuary.
“Ah, fasten it,” said the woman, and turned her back.
“Listen! You picked up all these rioters but it was the driver of the pseudo cab—”
“Ah,
dreck!
” The policeman stamped his foot, an incongruously camp gesture because he was over six feet tall, brawny and broken-nosed, but nowadays … “All right, messy-mouth, what
is
it?”
“The way the riot got started! Did you find the driver of the cab?”
“What cab?”
“I was trapped in a pseudo cab, and I managed to stop him closing the door because I was wearing a Karatand and jammed it, and—”
“Anything about a cab on this?” the man said to the woman, who shrugged.
“Do I have time to find out why they got brought in?”
“So shut up and wait, messy-mouth,” the man told Donald. “Or I’ll gas you again. Now this one,” he resumed, the woman raising the mike of the recorder to collect his words, “is—”
Donald, astonished, saw and recognised the man whose pockets the policeman was searching.
“A vice-president of General Technics, and you’ll hear a lot more about
this!
”
“What?”
“That’s Norman House of GT!” Stretched out like a wax dummy, eyes tiredly closed, hands tossed at random on his chest by whoever brought him in.
“Right,” the man said slowly, inspecting the ID he had discovered. “How do you know?”
“He’s my roomie.”
The man and woman exchanged glances. “Prove it,” the man said, holding out his hand.
Donald searched his own pockets, finding that the Karatand and the Jettigun had gone—of course—and ultimately locating his own ID. He thrust it awkwardly through the intervening grille.
“The address checks,” the policeman admitted reluctantly. “Better get them out of here, Syl—can’t afford to buck GT.”
