The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  But before industrialization, before prosperity, before anything else, came education. He had gone from the bush to the presidency in a single lifetime, had translated the entire body of Shakespeare’s work into Swahili, had given form and structure to his country’s constitution, and he knew that before everything came literacy. While his people lived in grass huts, other men had harnessed the atom, had reached the Moon, had obliterated hundreds of diseases, all because of the written word. And so while Kenyatta became the Mzee, the Wise Old Man, he himself became Mwalimu. Not the President, not the Leader, not the Chief of Chiefs, but the Teacher.

  He would teach them to turn away from the dark heart and reach for the sunlight. He created the ujamaa villages, based on the Israeli kibbutzim, and issued the Arusha Declaration, and channeled more than half his country’s aid money into the schools. His people’s bellies might not be filled, their bodies might not be covered, but they could read, and everything would follow from that.

  But what followed was drought, and famine, and disease, and more drought, and more famine, and more disease. He went abroad and described his vision and pleaded for money; what he got were ten thousand students who arrived overflowing with idealism but devoid of funds. They meant well and they worked hard, but they had to be fed, and housed, and medicated, and when they could not mold the country into his utopia in the space of a year or two, they departed.

  And then came the madman, the final nail in Tanzania’s financial coffin. Nyerere labeled him for what he was, and found himself conspicuously alone on the continent. African leaders simply didn’t criticize one another, and suddenly it was the Mwalimu who was the pariah, not the bloodthirsty butcher of Uganda. The East African Union, a fragile thing at best, fell apart, and while Nyerere was trying to save it, Kenyatta, the true capitalist, appropriated all three countries’ funds and began printing his own money. Tanzania, already near bankruptcy, was left with money that was not honored anywhere beyond its borders.

  Still, he struggled to meet the challenge. If that was the way the Mzee wanted to play the game, that was fine with him. He closed the border to Kenya. If tourists wanted to see his game parks, they would have to stay in his country; there would be no more round trips from Nairobi. If Amin wanted to slaughter his people, so be it; he would cut off all diplomatic relations, and to hell with what his neighbors thought. Perhaps it was better this way; now, with no outside influence, he could concentrate entirely on creating his utopia. It would be a little more difficult, it would take a little longer, but in the end, the accomplishment would be that much more satisfying.

  And then Amin’s air force dropped its bombs on Tanzania.

  * * *

  The insanity of it.

  Nyerere ducks a roundhouse right, Amin guffaws and winks to the crowd, Ali stands back and wishes he were somewhere else.

  Nyerere’s vision has cleared, but blood keeps running into his left eye. The fight is barely two minutes old, and already he is gasping for breath. He can feel every beat of his heart, as if a tiny man with a hammer and chisel is imprisoned inside his chest, trying to get out.

  The weights attached to Amin’s ankles should be slowing him down, but somehow Nyerere finds that he is cornered against the ropes. Amin fakes a punch, Nyerere ducks, then straightens up just in time to feel the full power of the madman’s fist as it smashes into his face.

  He is down on one knee again, fifty-seven years old and gasping for breath. Suddenly he realizes that no air is coming in, that he is suffocating, and he thinks his heart has stopped … but no, he can feel it, still pounding. Then he understands: his nose is broken, and he is trying to breathe through his mouth and the mouthpiece is preventing it. He spits the mouthpiece out, and is mildly surprised to see that it is not covered with blood.

  “Three!”

  Amin, who has been standing at the far side of the ring, approaches, laughing uproariously, and Ali stops the count and slowly escorts him back to the neutral corner.

  The pen is mightier than the sword. The words come, unbidden, into Nyerere’s mind, and he wants to laugh. A horrible, retching sound escapes his lips, a sound so alien that he cannot believe it came from him.

  Ali slowly returns to him and resumes the count.

  “Four!” Stay down, you old fool, Ali’s eyes seem to say.

  Nyerere grabs a rope and tries to pull himself up.

  “Five!” I bought you all the time I could, say the eyes, but I can’t protect you if you get up again.

  Nyerere gathers himself for the most difficult physical effort of his life.

  “Six!” You’re as crazy as he is.

  Nyerere stands up. He hopes Maria will be proud of him, but somehow he knows that she won’t.

  Amin, mugging to the crowd in a grotesque imitation of Ali, moves in for the kill.

  * * *

  When he was a young man, the president of his class at Uganda’s Makerere University, already tabbed as a future leader by his teachers and his classmates, his fraternity entered a track meet, and he was chosen to run the four-hundred-meter race.

  I am no athlete, he said; I am a student. I have exams to worry about, a scholarship to obtain. I have no time for such foolishness. But they entered his name anyway, and the race was the final event of the day, and just before it began his brothers came up to him and told him that if he did not beat at least one of his five rivals, his fraternity, which held a narrow lead after all the other events, would lose.

  Then you will lose, said Nyerere with a shrug.

  If we do, it will be your fault, they told him.

  It is just a race, he said.

  But it is important to us, they said.

  So he allowed himself to be led to the starting line, and the pistol was fired, and all six young men began running, and he found himself trailing the field, and he remained in last place all the way around the track, and when he crossed the finish wire, he found that his brothers had turned away from him.

  But it was only a game, he protested later. What difference does it make who is the faster? We are here to study laws and vectors and constitutions, not to run in circles.

  It is not that you came in last, answered one of them, but that you represented us and you did not try.

  It was many days before they spoke to him again. He took to running a mile every morning and every evening, and when the next track meet took place, he volunteered for the four-hundred-meter race again. He was beaten by almost thirty meters, but he came in fourth, and collapsed of exhaustion ten meters past the finish line, and the following morning he was re-elected president of his fraternity by acclamation.

  * * *

  There are forty-three seconds left in the first round, and his arms are too heavy to lift. Amin swings a roundhouse that he ducks, but it catches him on the shoulder and knocks him halfway across the ring. The shoulder goes numb, but it has bought him another ten seconds, for the madman cannot move fast with the weights on his ankles, probably could not move fast even without them. Besides, he is enjoying himself, joking with the crowd, talking to Ali, mugging for all the cameras at ringside.

  Ali finds himself between the two men, takes an extra few seconds awkwardly extricating himself—Ali, who has never taken a false or awkward step in his life—and buys Nyerere almost five more seconds. Nyerere looks up at the clock and sees there is just under half a minute remaining.

  Amin bellows and swings a blow that will crush his skull if it lands, but it doesn’t, the huge Ugandan cannot balance properly with one hand tied behind his back, and he misses and almost falls through the ropes.

  “Hit him now!” come the yells from Nyerere’s corner.

  “Kill him, Mwalimu!”

  But Nyerere can barely catch his breath, can no longer lift his arms. He blinks to clear the blood from his eyes, then staggers to the far side of the ring. Maybe it will take Amin twelve or thirteen seconds to get up, spot him, reach him. If he goes down again then, he can be saved by the bell. He will have survi
ved the round. He will have run the race.

  * * *

  Vectors. Angles. The square of the hypotenuse. It’s all very intriguing, but it won’t help him become a leader. He opts for law, for history, for philosophy.

  How was he to know that in the long run they were the same?

  He sits in his corner, his nostrils propped open, his cut man working on his eye. Ali comes over and peers intently at him.

  “He knocks you down once more, I gotta call it off,” he says.

  Nyerere tries to answer through battered lips. It is unintelligible. Just as well; for all he knows, he was trying to say, “Please do.”

  Ali leans closer and lowers his voice.

  “It’s not just a sport, you know. It’s a science, too.”

  Nyerere utters a questioning croak.

  “You run, he’s gonna catch you,” continues Ali. “A ring ain’t a big enough place to hide in.”

  Nyerere stares at him dully. What is the man trying to say?

  “You gotta close with him, grab him. Don’t give him room to swing. You do that, maybe I won’t have to go to your funeral tomorrow.”

  Vectors, angles, philosophy, all the same when you’re the Mwalimu and you’re fighting for your life.

  * * *

  The lion, some four hundred pounds of tawny fury, pulls down the one-ton buffalo.

  The hundred-pound hyena runs him off his kill.

  The twenty-pound jackal winds up eating it.

  And Nyerere clinches with the madman, hangs on for dear life, feels the heavy blows raining down on his back and shoulders, grabs tighter. Ali separates them, positions himself near Amin’s right hand so that he can’t release the roundhouse, and Nyerere grabs the giant again.

  * * *

  His head is finally clear. The fourth round is coming up, and he hasn’t been down since the first. He still can’t catch his breath, his legs will barely carry him to the center of the ring, and the blood is once again trickling into his eyes. He looks at the madman, who is screaming imprecations to his seconds, his chest and belly rising and falling.

  Is Amin tiring? Does it matter? Nyerere still hasn’t landed a single blow. Could even a hundred blows bring the Ugandan to his knees? He doubts it.

  Perhaps he should have bet on the fight. The odds were thousands to one that he wouldn’t make it this far. He could have supplied his army with the winnings, and died honorably.

  * * *

  It is not the same, he decides, as they rub his shoulders, grease his cheeks, apply ice to the swelling beneath his eye. He has survived the fourth round, has done his best, but it is not the same. He could finish fourth out of six in a foot race and be re-elected, but if he finishes second tonight, he will not have a country left to re-elect him. This is the real world, and surviving, it seems, is not as important as winning.

  Ali tells him to hold on, his corner man tells him to retreat, the cut man tells him to protect his eye, but no one tells him how to win, and he realizes that he will have to find out on his own.

  Goliath fell to a child. Even Achilles had his weakness. What must he do to bring the madman down?

  * * *

  He is crazy, this Amin. He revels in torture. He murders his wives. Rumor has it that he has even killed and eaten his infant son. How do you find weakness in a barbarian like that?

  And suddenly, Nyerere realizes, you do it by realizing that he is a barbarian—ignorant, illiterate, superstitious.

  There is no time now, but he will hold that thought, he will survive one more round of clinching and grabbing, of stifling closeness to the giant whose very presence he finds degrading.

  Three more minutes of the sword, and then he will apply the pen.

  * * *

  He almost doesn’t make it. Halfway through the round Amin shakes him off like a fly, then lands a right to the head as he tries to clinch again.

  Consciousness begins to ebb from him, but by sheer force of will he refuses to relinquish it. He shakes his head, spits blood on the floor of the ring, and stands up once more. Amin lunges at him, and once again he wraps his small, spindly arms around the giant.

  * * *

  “A snake,” he mumbles, barely able to make himself understood.

  “A snake?” asks the cornerman.

  “Draw it on my glove,” he says, forcing the words out with an excruciating effort.

  “Now?”

  “Now,” mutters Nyerere.

  * * *

  He comes out for the seventh round, his face a mask of raw, bleeding tissue. As Amin approaches him, he spits out his mouthpiece.

  “As I strike, so strikes the snake,” he whispers. “Protect your heart, madman.” He repeats it in his native Zanake dialect, which the giant thinks is a curse.

  Amin’s eyes go wide with terror, and he hits the giant on the left breast.

  It is the first punch he has thrown in the entire fight, and Amin drops to his knees, screaming.

  “One!”

  Amin looks down at his unblemished chest and pendulous belly, and seems surprised to find himself still alive and breathing.

  “Two!”

  Amin blinks once, then chuckles.

  “Three!”

  The giant gets to his feet, and approaches Nyerere.

  “Try again,” he says, loud enough for ringside to hear. “Your snake has no fangs.”

  He puts his hand on his hip, braces his legs, and waits.

  Nyerere stares at him for an instant. So the pen is not mightier than the sword. Shakespeare might have told him so.

  “I’m waiting!” bellows the giant, mugging once more for the crowd.

  Nyerere realizes that it is over, that he will die in the ring this night, that he can no more save his army with his fists than with his depleted treasury. He has fought the good fight, has fought it longer than anyone thought he could. At least, before it is over, he will have one small satisfaction. He feints with his left shoulder, then puts all of his strength into one final effort, and delivers a right to the madman’s groin.

  The air rushes out of Amin’s mouth with a woosh! and he doubles over, then drops to his knees.

  Ali pushes Nyerere into a neutral corner, then instructs the judges to take away a point from him on their scorecards.

  They can take away a point, Nyerere thinks, but they can’t take away the fact that I met him on the field of battle, that I lasted more than six rounds, that the giant went down twice. Once before the pen, once before the sword.

  And both were ineffective.

  Even a Mwalimu can learn one last lesson, he decides, and it is that sometimes even vectors and philosophy aren’t enough. We must find another way to conquer Africa’s dark heart, the madness that pervades this troubled land. I have shown those who will follow me the first step; I have stood up to it, faced it without flinching. It will be up to someone else, a wiser Mwalimu than myself, to learn how to overcome it. I have done my best, I have given my all, I have made the first dent in its armor. Rationality cannot always triumph over madness, but it must stand up and be counted, as I have stood up. They cannot ask any more of me.

  Finally at peace with himself, he prepares for the giant’s final assault.

  GUEST OF HONOR

  Robert Reed

  Being the Guest of Honor at an important and high-powered function is usually a position to be desired, but, in the decadent world of ultrarich immortals portrayed in the poignant and haunting story that follows, it’s an honor you might well be advised to avoid—if you can.

  A relatively new writer, Robert Reed is a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and he has also sold stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, and elsewhere. His books include the novels The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, and Down the Bright Way, and most recently a new novel, Beyond the Veil of Stars, has just been published. His stories have appeared in our Ninth and Tenth Annual Collections. He lives in Li
ncoln, Nebraska.

  * * *

  One of the robots offered to carry Pico for the last hundred meters, on its back or cradled in its padded arms; but she shook her head emphatically, telling it, “Thank you, no. I can make it myself.” The ground was grassy and soft, lit by glowglobes and the grass-colored moon. It wasn’t a difficult walk, even with her bad hip, and she wasn’t an invalid. She could manage, she thought with an instinctive independence. And as if to show them, she struck out ahead of the half-dozen robots as they unloaded the big skimmer, stacking Pico’s gifts in their long arms. She was halfway across the paddock before they caught her. By then she could hear the muddled voices and laughter coming from the hill-like tent straight ahead. By then she was breathing fast for reasons other than her pain. For fear, mostly. But it was a different flavor of fear than the kinds she knew. What was happening now was beyond her control, and inevitable … and it was that kind of certainty that made her stop after a few more steps, one hand rubbing at her hip for no reason except to delay her arrival. If only for a moment or two.…

  “Are you all right?” asked one robot.

  She was gazing up at the tent, dark and smooth and gently rounded. “I don’t want to be here,” she admitted. “That’s all.” Her life on board the Kyber had been spent with robots—they had outnumbered the human crew ten to one, then more—and she could always be ruthlessly honest with them. “This is madness. I want to leave again.”

  “Only, you can’t,” responded the ceramic creature. The voice was mild, unnervingly patient. “You have nothing to worry about.”

  “I know.”

  “The technology has been perfected since—”

  “I know.”

  It stopped speaking, adjusting its hold on the colorful packages.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she admitted. Then she breathed deeply, holding the breath for a moment and exhaling, saying, “All right. Let’s go. Go.”

  The robot pivoted and strode toward the giant tent. The leading robots triggered the doorway, causing it to fold upward with a sudden rush of golden light flooding across the grass, Pico squinting and then blinking, walking faster now and allowing herself the occasional low moan.