Shaka II Read Free Page A

will be a very fine meal,” I said, “and I will speak so softly no one can possibly overhear me, but I still don’t know why I am here.”
        “To make plans, of course.”
        “Just me?” I asked. I stared at him curiously. “Am I being fired?”
        “No, and no,” he said. “But if we are to move to Pretoria in a few months, we must prepare.”
        “Are we moving to Pretoria?”
        He nodded his head. “I told you we would not be in Ulundi for long.”
        “You have found a better job?” I asked.
        “I have served my apprenticeship,” he answered. “It is time to become President.”
        “Based on three medals, two of which aren’t yours, and four months as Clerk of Records in a backwater province?” I said.
        “It is a backwater province,” he replied. “It is time to leave it.”
        “I have no problem with that,” I said. “But to think you can become the President of all South Africa…”
        “It is the logical next step in the progression.”
        “The progression?” I said, surprised. “You mean there’s more?”
        He looked at me rather sadly, the way you might look at a pet that will never understand what you are trying to teach it.
        “There is more.”
        “The Presidency of South Africa”-an impossibility in itself-“isn’t enough?”
        “When Tchaka became king of the Zulus, Zululand was perhaps ten square miles,” he shot back. “Was that enough?”
        “He controlled only ten square miles; the President controls hundreds of thousands,” I said. “There’s a difference.”
        “Only in degree,” replied Robert. “His world covered the southern tip of Africa. Mine extends as far as the eye can see.”
        “So did his,” I argued.
        Robert gave me another sad smile reserved for pets of limited intelligence. “He never looked up.”
        

5.
        
        Lloyds of London had the odds against him at 200-to-1 with eleven weeks to go. The one casino in Las Vegas that booked bets on it lowered it to 175-to-1 in case there was a sympathy vote for the poor clerk who had the temerity to buck the entrenched political machine. Robert borrowed a thousand rands and bet on himself.
        Two months before the election there was a debate between the three leading candidates. Well, actually, the two leading candidates and Robert. It was held in a stadium in Cape Town, rather than a holo studio, and some forty thousand people were in attendance. It was a bright, sunlit day, as almost all days on the Cape are, and it was estimated that more than eighty million people, in South Africa and elsewhere, were watching on their Tri D’s and their computers’ holoscreens.
        They were about half an hour into the debate when it happened. Three gunmen-one armed with a laser gun, two with projectile pistols-burst onto the floor of the stadium. They must have been hiding in the laundry facilities in the back of the visiting teams’ clubhouse, and had killed half a dozen security men along the way. They raced onto the field where one of the network anchors was acting as moderator for the debate. One of them started yelling something-the sound system couldn’t pick it up-and then they began firing their weapons. The guards were taken by surprise, and soon lay dead on the stadium floor.
        One man fired a shot at Robert, who threw himself to the ground. The bullet hit a woman in the stands. She screamed and pitched forward, dead.
        The President was crouching down behind his podium, and the man with the laser pistol was burning his way through it. Two shots tore into the other candidate, blood spurted out of his throat, and he collapsed, writhing and twisting frantically for a few seconds, then lay absolutely still in an ever-increasing pool of his own blood.
        And then, just as everyone thought there was more slaughter to come,