Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (22 page)
“We’ll have to ask the doc,” Roger said. His face had settled into an expression of tranquil certainty. “The doc’s helped lots of others besides us and he’s bound to know.”
He took her hand and they walked, the only two real people in the universe, down a street paved with jewels toward a land of love.
“All right, I’ll grant you that it’s ridiculous to spend years training highly qualified medical personnel and psychologists and so on and then set them to a job that’s going to show no tangible results because the material they’re working with is hopeless from the beginning, like imbeciles. I’ll even concede the bit about such people having a nasty power complex and liking to lord it over helpless human vegetables, though that’s something I really need to be convinced about before I’ll swallow it entirely. And I certainly won’t contest the fact that there
are
too many of us—the news is evidence enough for me, what with all these famines they’re having in Asia and plague still cropping up in Latin America and the development of this seasonal nomadism in Africa because half the year the land won’t support the people who are on it. All this I’m giving you without argument.
“But are we adopting the
right
measures to cope? Look at haemophilia, for example; it didn’t stop victims of it being the crowned heads of Europe, and most of them showed up pretty well compared to some of the right bleeders who’d kept their thrones warm before the gene put in an appearance. You’re not going to tell me that Henry VIII of England or Ivan the Terrible was a descendant of Queen Victoria. Or take the way some of the states have banned people with web-fingers and web-toes; you’ll find plenty of doctors to argue that’s no more than an adaptation that got started in the days when men were beach-creatures inhabiting swamps and shallows and living mostly off weed and shell-fish.
“And how about schizophrenia? They’re still trying to settle it for sure whether the chemical symptoms are due to a stress reaction or whether they’re innate and some people are merely more prone to it but can be kept safe in the correct environment.
I
don’t believe there’s a genuine hereditary effect at all—I think it’s just that we tend to copy the behaviour-patterns of our family, and it’s one of these in-group extended responses like infanticide being higher among the children and grandchildren of bad, affectionless families regardless of their genotype. You have schizoid-prone parents, you learn the action pattern, and that’s that.
“And how about diabetes? It’s crippling, admittedly, and you have to lean on a chemical crutch. But—well, my own name’s Drinkwater, which almost certainly means that some of my ancestors, like French people named Boileau and Germans named Trinkwasser, must have been hereditary diabetic polydipsomaniacs.
“And if there’d been eugenic legislation back in the days when people were adopting surnames, they’d have been forbidden to have children and I wouldn’t be here now.
“Don’t you understand?
I wouldn’t be here!
”
Like the monstrous shaped negative-plate of an explosive forming press the environment clamped itself on the personality of Donald Hogan, as a hand clenched around a lump of putty will leave the ridges between fingers, the imprint of the cuticular pattern. He felt his individuality squirt away from him into the darkness, carrying off in solution his power to conceive and act on decisions, reducing him to a reactive husk at the mercy of external events.
Some social theorists had argued that urban man was now at the point of unstable equilibrium; the camel’s back of his rationality was vulnerable to a straw. Gadarene swine rooting and grunting at the top of a hill overlooking the sea, people sensed this, said the theorists, and therefore when there was an option to do otherwise they did not venture to crowd themselves still further into the already crammed cities. In countries such as India there was no alternative; starvation was slower in an urban community because people were closer to the distribution points for subsistence rations, and mere lethargy induced by hunger reduced friction and outbursts of violence to a sporadic level. But comparatively well-nourished American and European populations might be tipped over the precipice with no more warning than the sort of aura of irritability for which one carried a pack of tranks.
The last coherent thought Donald was capable of formulating declared that it was one thing to have read of this risk, another altogether to watch it being proved real.
Then the world took over and he was lost.
* * *
FOCUS
: the prowlie. White-painted, trapezoidal vehicle thirteen feet long by seven wide, its wheels out of sight underneath for protection against shots, dispersed around the flat slab tank of the fuel-cell powering it, its forward cabin for four men windowed with armour-glass and additionally screened with retractable wire grilles, its rear section designed for carrying off arrestees and if necessary the injured having a solid metal drop-down tailgate with stretcher rails and a sleepy-gas air-circulation system. On the nose, two brilliant white lights with a field of 150°, one extinguished because the driver had waited too long to roll up the wire screen and protect it; on each corner of the roof other lights with adjustable beam-spread; revolving in a small turret on the roof, a gas-gun shooting fragmenting glass grenades to a distance of sixty yards; under the skirt, for ultimate emergency use only, oil-jets that could flood the adjacent street with a small sea of fire to keep back attackers while the occupants waited out the period till help arrived, breathing through masks from a stored-air system. It was vulnerable to mines, to three successive hand-gun bolts striking within about two inches of each other on the shell, or to the collapse of a building, but to nothing else encountered during an average urban riot. However, its fuel-cell was inadequate to push out of the way either the stationary cab ahead, whose brakes were automatically set because its door was open, or the lamp-post dropped across its stern, which had now been wedged in position with much sweating and swearing against its own stump on the one side, and a well-anchored mailbox on the other.
FOREGROUND
: materialised as though from air, crowding the sidewalk, scores—hundreds—of people, mostly Afram, some Puerto Rican, some WASP. One girl with an electronic accordion, fantastically loud at maximum volume, making windows rattle and eardrums hum, shrieking a song through a shouter which others took up and stamped to the rhythm of:
“What shall we do with our fair city, dirty and dangerous, smelly and shitty?”
Clang on the body of the prowlie whatever they could find to throw—lumps of concrete, garbage, bottles, cans. How long before the gas-gun and the flaming oil?
SETTING
: the uniform twelve-storey faces of the buildings, each occupying a block or half a block, hardly punctuated by the canyon streets because the abandonment of cars within the city meant that a one-way lane for the use of official vehicles or cabs was enough. Buses ran only to the next corner left, two corners away right. The sidewalks were defined by four-inch concrete barriers, small enough to step over, high enough to prevent any legally passing vehicle from running into a pedestrian. On the face of almost every building, some sort of advertising display, so that spectators in upper rooms looked out of shabby oceans, the middle of a letter O, or the crotch of a receptive girl. A single exception to the cliff-wall nature of the street was formed by the adventure playground, like the intrusion of Einstein into the ordered world of Euclid.
DETAIL
: the face of the building against which he cowered, opposite the playground, was ornamented more than the average of its neighbours, possessing both a broad stoop above street-level for access to the interior and a number of integral buttresses, flat-faced, arranged in pairs with a gap of about two feet between each, tapering from a thickness of two feet at the bottom to nothing at the level of the fourth floor. One of these embrasures sufficed to shield him from light, the passing and re-passing rioters, and the hurling of improvised missiles. Clanging of metal above made him look up. Someone was trying to get the retractable fire-escapes to angle outwards from the wall instead of straight down, so that from their vantage point things could be dropped on the roof of the trapped prowlie.
* * *
Fsst-crack. Fsst-crack. Whir-fsst-crack.
Gas-gun.
Grenades smashing against the walls of the buildings, each releasing a quart of sluggish vapour that oozed down into the narrow culvert of the street. The first victims coughed, howled and keeled over, having sucked in a full concentrated dose, and those lucky enough to be out of range of the first salvo ducked to the ground and hustled away crouching.
Fsst-crack. Whir-fsst-crack.
The girl whose mouth he had cut was staggering away from the middle of the street, coming towards him. Possessed of some vague impulse to help, Donald emerged from the shelter of the embrasure between the buttresses and called to her. She came because she heard a friendly voice, not seeing who spoke, and a clubbed arm slammed at the back of his left shoulder. From the corner of his eye he saw the hand was Afram. He ducked, dodged. The gas-gun crashed grenades on this side of the street now, and the first whiffs made breathing hateful. Those who had evaded gassing so far were taking to the skeletal branches of the playground like archetypal proto-man eluding a pack of wolves. The girl saw her brother, who had hit Donald, and together they hurried to the corner of the street, forgetting him. He followed because everyone was going away in one direction or another.
At the corner: late arrivals following a group of yonder-boys who had equipped themselves with sticks and big empty cans to make drums of, and howling with joy on seeing the stuck prowlie.
“Gas!”
The shouting faltered. There was a store across the road which had been open under automated supervision; the owner or manager had turned up and was hastily slamming the wire grilles over the display windows and the entrance, trapping three customers who seemed relieved rather than annoyed. An anonymous hand flung a rock through the last exposed window, which happened to have a liquor stand behind it. Cans and bottles thundered down, a heap of the former jammed the grille before it could rise and lock in place, and several of the crowd decided that was a better target than the prowlie.
Overhead a roaring noise. One of the tiny one-man copters capable of being manoeuvred between the tops of the high buildings and the Fuller Dome whose blushing underside formed Manhattan’s sky was scouting the scene to notify police headquarters of the extent of the disturbance. From a skylight somewhere away to the right there came a bang—an old-fashioned sporting gun. The copter wobbled and came down into the middle of the street, vanes screaming as the pilot fought for altitude. Mad with delight at having a fuzzy-wuzzy delivered into their hands the crowd went forward to greet him with clubs.
Donald fled.
On the next corner he found riot containment procedure already under way. Two water-trucks with hoses going were methodically washing people off the sidewalks into doorways. He turned at hazard in the opposite direction and shortly encountered sweep-trucks, paddywagons adapted with big snowplough-like arms on either side, serving the same purpose as the hoses but much less gentle. Keeping the crowd on the move was supposed to take away the chance of their organising into coherent resistance. Also another one-man copter droned down and started shedding gas-grenades into the street.
He was one of about fifty people being hustled and driven ahead of the official vehicles because they were off their own manor and had no place to go. He worked his way towards the wall of the building because some people, he saw, were dodging into hallways and vanishing, but at the first door he came close enough to to stand a fair chance of entering there were two Aframs armed with clubs who said, “You don’t live here, WASP—blast off before you get stung.”
At an intersection two hose-trucks and the sweep-truck he was running from coincided. A mass of people from all three streets was shoved into the fourth, taking them back towards the focus of the trouble. Now they were body to body, stumbling on each other’s heels and shrieking.
The prowlie was still stuck where it had been. Its driver sounded a blast of welcome to his colleagues in the sweep-truck. The gas had mostly dispersed, leaving victims choking and vomiting, but there was no end in sight to the riot. On the concrete arms of the playground men and women were still bellowing the song that the girl with the electronic accordion thundered out for them:
“Find you a hammer and SMASH IT DOWN!”
Virtually every window had been broken and glass crunched underfoot. The human beings were being shovelled together with the garbage into one vast rubbish pile, not only in the direction from which Donald was coming but from the other end of the street as well. The stock plan had been applied: close the area, keep ’em moving, jam ’em together and pack ’em off.
Adventurous mind-present youths jumped up on the arms of the sweep-truck as it passed the adventure playground and from there leapt to the security of the random concrete branches. Donald was too late to copy them; by the time he thought of it he had been forced on by.
Mindlessly he pushed and thrust and shouted like everyone else, hardly noticing whether it was a man or a woman he jostled, an Afram or a WASP. The gas-gun on the sweep-truck discharged grenades over his head and the booming music died in mid-chord. A whiff of the gas reached Donald’s nose and wiped away the last trace of rationality. Both arms flailing, careless of who hit him so long as he could hit back, he struggled towards the people from the opposite direction now impacting on the group he was enmeshed with.
Settling on the roofs with a howl of turbines: paddycopters to net and carry off the rioters, like some obscene cross between a spider and a vulture. He sobbed and gasped and punched and kicked and did not feel the answering blows. A dark face rose before his eyes and seemed familiar and all he could think of was the boy he had fired his Jettigun at, the one whose sister had attacked him in retaliation so that he struck her in the mouth and made her bleed. Terrified, he began to batter at the man confronting him.