Mike Resnick - Shaka II

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“He is a monster!” said Bettina.

“I am not denying that,” I said. “If he wasn’t one to begin with, he has become one.”

“Well, then?” demanded Peter.

“Most of the people worship him,” I said. “But each day more and more of them hate and fear him.”

“You are making our point.”

I shook my head. “They also hate and fear those who serve him. They hate the military and the police—and most of all, they hate his brothers and sisters, who have been elevated to positions of authority.” I stared at the four of them. “He is all that is keeping us alive.”

“I am willing to trade my life for his,” said Sarah. “I loathe him! I never wanted to be brought here in the first place. I was literally kidnapped from my home in Durban in the middle of the night.”

“He knows you hate him,” Peter said to her. “He will never give you the opportunity to kill him.” There was a long, pregnant pause. “It must be you, John,” he continued, turning to me. “You have been with him the longest. He is often alone with you. You have his confidence.” Another pause. “You must be the one to do it.”

“No one and nothing has his confidence except Nandi,” I said. “He would know the moment I approached him. He knows my mind better than I do. I could not hide it from him.”

“Nonsense,” said Peter. “All it takes is self-control.”

“Even if I could get near him without his knowing what I had in mind, he is a force of Nature,” I said. “I cannot defeat him.”

“You mean you will not,” he said angrily.

I shook my head. “I mean I cannot.”

“Then I will,” said Sarah. She turned and stalked out of the room, followed by Joseph and Bettina.

“She will fail,” I said.

“Probably,” agreed Peter. “But at least she is not afraid to try.”

“She will be just as dead.”

“Is that all you have to say?” demanded Peter.

“What do you want me to say?” I replied.

“That it is time to be rid of him.”

“He is a monster,” I said. “I told you that. I disagree with his methods. You know that too.” I paused uncomfortably. “But we were nothing for half a millennium, and in a tiny handful of years he has given us an empire.”

“We do not need one,” said Peter firmly.

“You do not understand,” I said.

“Enlighten me.”

“You know how many enemies the Zulus made building this empire, how many people we killed, how many governments we threatened and humiliated,” I said. “What will happen to us if we lose it?”

He seemed about to argue the point, then turned abruptly and walked out.

Nothing untoward happened the next two days, and I decided Sarah had thought better of it. Tchaka was preoccupied with reports that there were sentient beings on the fourth planet circling Epsilon Indi, and he had decided that it was in the Empire’s best interest to form an alliance with any race that was not yet allied with Earth.

He spent hours with Hlatshwayo as the astrologer studied the solar alignments (which struck me as ridiculous, since we were no longer within twenty light-years of the Earth’s solar system) and cast a number of horoscopes. Finally he determined that Morgan Raziya, another half-brother, should be the one to make contact with Epsilon Indi IV. Tchaka consented, but he didn’t have much faith in Morgan’s abilities, or anything else about him except his paternal bloodline, and he decided to send four well-armed ships with him, rather than a single, unarmed, non-threatening diplomatic ship.

“This is our first true step into the galaxy, John,” he said to me after Hlatshwayo had left. He paused to pet Nandi, who had been sitting on his lap for the past half hour. “Perhaps,” he said to her, “I shall make you the Queen of the entire Indi system.” He turned to me. “What would you think of that, my brother?”

The quickest way to assure a painful death was to tell exactly what I thought of it. “I fear she may have some difficulty communicating with her staff,” I said carefully.

Tchaka chuckled in amusement. “It might keep them on their toes, considering the consequences.” He planted a kiss on Nandi’s round face. “She has never had any trouble making her wishes known to me.”

I must have been feeling exceptionally bold, because I replied: “Perhaps that is because she does not speak to you on matters of policy.”

He stared at me, and for a moment I thought I had gone too far, but eventually he went back to petting Nandi and discussing his plans for expanding the empire.

I dined alone, as usual, went back to my quarters, and watched a holo until I fell asleep. I was up at sunrise, as usual, and a few minutes later I began making my way to my office.

There were three new stakes in front of the Royal Palace. Skewered on one of them was the barely-breathing Sarah Khubeka. The other two were empty.

I walked by my office and went directly to Tchaka’s, where I found two of his elite security team standing at attention in front of him. Finally he nodded to two more guards, who marched them out at gunpoint.

“What happened?” I asked.

“My sister—the one from Durban—tried to kill me last night.”

“I saw her as I arrived,” I said.

“The two men you saw just now had found out what she planned and warned me.” He smiled a humorless smile. “I made sure I was wearing my ceremonial robes, with my body armor hidden beneath it. She fired two bullets and one laser burst into it before I took her weapons away from her and turned her over to my bodyguards.”

“If they warned you, why were they being taken out at gunpoint?”

“They are to be impaled on each side of her,” said Tchaka. “Surely you saw the empty stakes.”

“But if their information saved your life…” I began, puzzled.

“It is because of them that I must kill my sister!” he yelled, his face contorted in fury.

I suddenly found myself looking back on what I had said to Peter Zondo, and thinking that there was very little a hostile galaxy could do to us that Tchaka wouldn’t do first.

18.

The empire grew. We added four more new worlds in the next half year, and Earth remained preoccupied with more immediate threats. Tchaka kept building the military against the day that Earth was finally able to concentrate on the upstart Zulu Empire, but that day seemed to keep receding into the future.

The colony worlds thrived under his firm rule. There were no jobless, no homeless; if a man couldn’t find gainful employment elsewhere, he was transferred to the nearest farm on the nearest world. We tried to establish a market for our goods among Earth’s enemies, but being aliens—and some were very alien indeed—they had scant use for most of the items we wished to sell or trade. This caused Tchaka to send us further afield, spreading our population to still more uninhabited worlds that would need our goods.

The alien races did want something a few of our mining worlds possessed: fissionable materials. But that was the one thing Tchaka wouldn’t trade or sell them, on the reasonable assumption that the alien worlds were not trading for a planetary power source. That meant they wanted the materials for weapons or to power their ships, and those were two advantages he had no intention of giving them.

He began taking walks around the centers of whatever cities he was visiting on his worlds, always accompanied by half a dozen bodyguards, and of course by Nandi. If one did not know better he almost looked like a man taking his pet out for a walk—except that Nandi had never worn a leash in her life, looked like no other pet in the whole of human history, and far from being merely a pet she was officially the Queen of the Epsilon Indi and the Delta Pavonis systems. Tchaka always had a small lizard or two in his pocket or the folds of his ceremonial robes, and delighted in tossing them in the air and seeing her tongue shoot out and wrap itself around them on the way down.

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