Stand on Zanzibar (19 page)

Rotting. Just rotting. What kind of a life is that?

Then the Watch-&-Ward Inc. lock on the downstairs door clicked open to a key, and he saw a girl coming up the stairs: her face beautiful, her body shrouded in a street-cloak that reached below her knees. She was carrying a bag of groceries. On noticing him she gave him a mechanical smile and put her hand to Bennie’s door-handle.

She stopped while he was still digesting the air of residency she displayed.

“Does Bennie have someone with him?” she demanded.

“Uh—Arthur went in. Took some sugar.” Gerry swallowed hard.

“That’s all right then,” the girl said, and twirled off her cloak. Gerry’s breath stopped altogether for a while. Under the cloak she was wearing a Forlon&Morler housfit of a type which his sister had once tried to wear around the apt, only to have her parents put their feet down with shrieks of horror. It consisted of two long boots of red mesh, supported with a soft red cord around her waist, and that was that.

Bennie’s room opened and Arthur appeared. “Ah—Neek!” he said with relief. It sounded like “Neek”.

“Thanks,” the shiggy said. “But not necessary. I’ll get him to eat—he likes my cooking.”

“All yours, then,” Arthur said with a parodied bow. “You don’t know Gerry, do you? Gerry Lindt—Monique Delorne!”

The shiggy gave a preoccupied nod and vanished into Bennie’s room. Arthur dusted his hands and walked past Gerry to let him into his own.

“That’s under control,” he said with satisfaction. “Come on in—come on!”

Gerry complied with a backward glance, but Bennie’s door was shut fast.

Nothing had changed in the cramped space Arthur called home since his last visit, bar minor details. It was still in incredible chaos and the smell still suggested decay, as though the bric-à-brac constituted a domestic garbage pile. That was part of Arthur too, however; one could scarcely imagine him in any other setting.

For a moment he almost regretted coming. You couldn’t expect someone like Arthur to be properly appreciative of anyone else volunteering to defend his chosen way of life. And yet there was something so sickly about the approval expressed by people who
were
appreciative …

“The draft got your balls, I hear,” Arthur said. “Correct?”

Gerry nodded and swallowed. “I have to report down at Ellay in the morning.”

“Goodbye, then,” Arthur said briskly. “Well, that’s over with. What can I offer you?”

“Ah—what?”

“I said goodbye. Wasn’t that why you came around? And having got that out of the way I offered you—well—whatever I can offer you. I believe I have some vodka, and I know I have some pot, and I also have some of this new stuff Triptine that GT’s putting out, one of their few justifications for existing. At least, so Bennie tells me. I haven’t got around to trying it myself because people of my blood-group are extra susceptible and I’m liable to hitrip for three or four days. So I’ll wait for a free weekend. Well?”

“Ah—a drink, maybe.”

“Clear yourself a chair, then, and I’ll fix it.”

Gerry found new places for a box of unlabelled tapes and two used disposable plates and sat down. He looked about him with a sudden urge to fix his surroundings on his memory. The room was a mess because it had so much in it, and Arthur was too impatient to impose a system, but merely shifted whatever was in his way to a new location.

The things that got in his way, however, were endlessly fascinating. Most of them were Asiatic: figurines, ornaments, embroideries, manuscripts in magnificent calligraphy, incense pans, musical instruments, prints of classic paintings. But there were also a wagon-wheel, and an Indian drum, and a silver flute, and uncountable books, and—

“Gerry!”

With a start, he accepted the glass being waved under his nose.

Settling into his own chair, Arthur regarded him contemplatively. “Hmmm! I was wrong, wasn’t I? We didn’t get over the subject of your departure just by disposing of the goodbyes. It’s sunk its teeth right into your veins.”

Gerry nodded.

“You surprise me sometimes,” Arthur shrugged. “You’re not the adventurous type, yet here you’re letting yourself be ripped out of your cosy regular environment by someone whose decisions are arbitrary because they’re irrational.”

“I don’t quite catch.”

“No? All generals are psychotic. All soldiers are out of their skulls. Matter of strict psychological fact—they’ve had their territoriality stamped on and they can’t recover. I hoped you’d figure this out. Even Bennie did, and you’re brighter than him.”

“Would you want me to be
like
Bennie?” Gerry grimaced. “So he dodged—so what use did he make of the two years he saved? He’ll be dead before he’s thirty from the stuff he keeps pouring down his throat!”

“By his own hand,” Arthur said. “You have the right to kill you. Nobody else does.”

“I thought you were in favour of euthanasia.”

“Signing the release is the self-directed blow. The rest is simple mechanics, on a par with waiting for the bath to fill with blood after you’ve slashed your wrists.”

“But this just isn’t adequate,” Gerry said doggedly. He felt the need to justify his decision to someone, and to make Arthur understand his viewpoint would be a special triumph. “The fact remains, there are people I owe a debt to, and there are other people out there willing to take away everything up to and including their lives. The hole! I saw an example of it just ten minutes ago when I passed the wreck of Ackleman’s—you know, the sporting-goods store across the way from my home?”

Arthur grinned. “You expect me to display righteous wrath? I think the guns and ammunition looted from Ackleman’s are better off in the hands of people with ideals than they would have been in the hands of the fat bourgeois slobs around your district who don’t have anything to defend and would just have let them off nervously at random.”

“At random! Christ, wasn’t it you who told me about these people who make a hobby of random sabotage?”

“Now don’t get confused the way most people do, Gerry. A codder who’s taken up sabotage for a hobby isn’t on the same footing as someone who loots a gunsmith’s for weapons. He strikes out at random because he doesn’t know what it is in his environment that’s bugging him. Partisans at least have a theory about what’s wrong, and a plan to put it right.”

“And how long would you last under the kind of government they’d like to impose on us?” Gerry demanded.

“Oh, they’d have me out and shoot me the first day they took charge. Anyone like me is intolerably subversive to an authoritarian régime, because I’m not interested in imposing my ideas by force on other people.”

“But a moment ago you were saying no one has a right to take away other people’s lives. If they have no right to do it, there can’t be anything wrong in trying to stop them.”

“Two wrongs,” Arthur sighed, suddenly seeming to lose interest in the discussion. “Want to find out what’s going to become of you, by the way?”

“What?”

Arthur reached to the floor beside his chair and lifted up a book. He blew the dust off. “Old standby,” he said in an affectionate tone. “Haven’t used you as much as you deserve lately, have I? You’ve consulted the Book of Changes before, haven’t you?” he added to Gerry.

“Yes. You showed it to me when I first met you.” Gerry drained his glass and set it aside. “I told you I thought it was a load of dreck.”

“And I told you it works for the same reason there’s no such thing as art. I quoted the Balinese who don’t have a word for it, but merely try to do everything as well as possible. Life’s a continuum. I must have said that to you because I say it to everyone. Did I teach you to use the yarrowstalks?”

“No.”

“Then get out three coins, matched if possible. I’d lend you some of mine but I have absolutely no idea where my taels have got to under all this garbage. If my name was Mary I’d march my lambs through here and they’d bring their taels behind them.”

“Arthur, are you orbiting?”

“Descending, descending. This new Too Much strain from Hitrip is—for once and by a miracle—all the advertising claims it to be. Like a pack to take along with you in the morning?”

“I don’t believe I’d be allowed to. It says something on the draft notice.”

“That figures. One of the standard techniques for breaking a man down into a soldier is to take away the joy that might make him feel life was worth living even for the man on the other end of his gun. Got those coins?”

Choosing three from his pocket, Gerry thought:
I was right to avoid Arthur until it was too late to change my mind. He’s so damned certain of his cynical views and I’m not sure about anything—not even about this ancient oracle being a load of dreck.

The coins tossed, the hexagram drawn, Arthur stared at the result.
“Pi,”
he said, not bothering to consult the book. “With a moving line in the second place. ‘What is required is that we unite with others in order that all may complement and aid one another through holding together’—want to read the full version for yourself?”

Gerry laughed and shook his head. “You know what I think of fortunetelling!”

“Yes, I do, and it’s a shame you won’t take it seriously. Because I don’t like what your moving line does to the hexagram. It turns it into
K’an,
doubled—‘repetition of danger’. In other words, sparewheel, unless you’re very careful you’re in trouble.”

“I’ve thought about the risks. I don’t need a mystic book to tell me that going into the army can lead to danger.”

Arthur ignored the interruption. “Know what I think? I think the moving line goes into effect tomorrow, when you change from uniting with others to exposing yourself to danger.”

“But I am ‘uniting with others’! Could there be a clearer way of saying ‘join the army’—in the context of that book?”

“Oh yes. But no clearer way to say ‘stay with your family and friends’.”

Gerry rose stiffly to his feet. “I’m sorry, Arthur,” he said. “I hoped you’d realise my mind was made up and it was too late to try and argue me out of it.”

“Oh, I concede that. I’m only trying to show you what you’re doing. Does that make you want to sit down and go on talking?”

“I’m afraid not. I only called to say goodbye. And there are other people I ought to visit before I go to bed.”

“As you like. But do me a favour.” Arthur began rummaging in a pile of books. “Take this along with you and read it in your spare time—if they allow you any. Don’t bother giving it back. I know it more or less by heart.”

“Thanks,” Gerry took the book he was given and thrust it distractedly into his pocket, not even looking to see what it was called.

“Know something?” Arthur went on. “I have a feeling you need this experience in the army, after all. I only wish the odds against you coming back alive were a bit better.”

“The way things are set up now, casualties are very low! Why, they haven’t lost more than—”

“There are some people,” Arthur interrupted, “more likely than others to do everything, including succeed and fail. You’re the type to refuse disillusionment. You’re likely to go on looking for the—the glory, whatever—that accounts for men wanting to risk their lives in battle, and you won’t have found it so you’ll volunteer for some idiotic mission and kick those odds up to a thousand to one against you, and…” He turned over his hand as though spilling a pile of sand from the palm.

Gerry stood rock-still for a long moment; then, abruptly, he tugged open the door and went out.

As he passed Bennie Noakes’s room, he heard faint noises: a creak, a sigh, a chuckle.

Rotting himself to death with all that dreck he takes! And he’s got that shiggy, that beautiful shiggy, and I’ve got …

In that instant he knew he could not disbelieve Arthur’s prophecy about his fate.

It couldn’t be Boot Camp. It had to be Boat Camp. It was on pontoons isolated from the shore by a mile of water. That hadn’t stopped desertions, but it did mean that only the strongest swimmers reached the beach.

There, at long tables, the new recruits had to strip naked and turn out their pockets. A captain accompanied by a top sergeant walked slowly down the far side of each table examining everything, while another sergeant made certain the trembling draftees stood still or
else.
The captain stopped opposite Gerry and turned around the book Arthur had given him so that he could read the title.

“The Hipcrime Vocab,”
the captain said. “Put him under arrest, sergeant—possession of subversive literature.”

“But—!” Gerry exploded.

“Fasten it, soldier, or there’ll be another charge along with that.”

Gerry bit back his fury. “Permission to speak,
sir,
” he said formally.

“Granted.”

“I’ve never even opened the book, sir. Somebody gave it to me last night and I just left it in my pocket and—”

“It’s been read and re-read until the pages are practically falling out,” the captain said. “Add one, sergeant—lying to an officer.”

They let him off lightly with twenty-four hours’ punishment drill.

As the captain deigned to remark, it was, after all, a first offence.

continuity (8)

THE CAMEL’S BACK

It was almost a shock to Donald to discover how normal the night-time city appeared. It was less crowded than by day because of the phobia he himself had fallen victim to, but that was actively pleasant and made him feel he had gone back in time to the days when he was fresh from college and there had been a million fewer bodies to jostle against on the sidewalk.

Did I not expect the same stores to be in the same places as by day?

He wanted to laugh aloud at his own forebodings. Nonetheless, something was strange. By degrees his mind edged towards recognition of it; it was the kind of problem he was good at, working from hint to clue without having to give the matter his entire attention.

The night was loud. Music came from everywhere, mostly hits from the current popparade in which two or even three disparate rhythms clashed randomly on semitonal discords but sometimes classical—in a hundred yards he identified Beethoven, Berg, Oyaka. That, however, was true of the day as well, especially since the makers of radio-dresslets had begun to fit speakers to their garments instead of phones.