Stand on Zanzibar

context (4)

THE SUBJECT MATTER

(HUMAN BEING You’re one. At least, if you aren’t, you know you’re a Martian or a trained dolphin or Shalmaneser.

If you want me to tell you more than that, you’re out of luck. There’s nothing more anybody can tell you.

—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

tracking with closeups (3)

NO YOU DON’T!

“So what do we do?” Sheena Potter demanded for the umpty-fourth time. “And don’t take another trank—it’s all I can do to get through to you as it is!”

“You’re trying to give me ulcers,” said her husband Frank.

“You sheeting liar.”

“Then you’re doing it inadvertently, and that means you’re not fit to be allowed loose on the street, let alone breed your species.” Frank spoke from the elevated, almost Olympian level of dispassion due to the five tranks he’d taken already this anti-matter.

“You think I want to breed? That’s a different song you’re singing from the usual, isn’t it? Let’s have you carry the little bastard—they can do that now, pump you full of female hormones and implant in the visceral cavity.”

“You’ve been watching Viewers’ Digest. No, that’s wrong. You must have taken it off SCANALYZER. That’s even more sensational.”

“Dreck! It was Felicia who told me when I was last down at the night-school—”

“Lot of good your classes are doing you! You’re still as stiff as Teresa! When do they progress you to elementary Kama Sutra?”

“If you were more than half a man you’d have taught me yourself—”

“The lack of response is in the patient not the agent, which is why I—”

“Now you’re quoting ad copy, not even a news programme but a plug put out by some dribbling—”

“I should have had more sense than to marry a block who’d only had a few clumsy highschool—”

“I should have had more sense than to marry a man with colourblindness in the family—”

There was a pause. They looked around at the apartment. On the wall between the windows there was a pale patch, the same colour as the paint had been originally when they moved in. The picture which had occupied the pale area was in the red plastic crate near the door. Next to the red plastic crate were five green ones (may be tubed with padding); next to them were a dozen black ones (may be tubed without padding); and there were also two white ones which were a moderately convenient height for sitting on—the purpose Frank and Sheena were putting them to.

There was nothing in the drinks cabinet. Except a little dust and some dried spilt wine.

There was nothing in the icebox except a thin frosting on the deepfreeze section which would automatically be melted off the next time the comptroller cycled to “defrost.”

There were no clothes in the bedroom closet. The disposall was grinding quietly to itself, half-choking on a batch of disposable paper garments and the twenty-odd pounds of unused perishables from the freeze.

The auto-seals had clicked across the power sockets; no child had ever lived here, but it was against the law for any socket not to be auto-sealed when the appliance connected to it was removed.

There was a file of documents lying on the floor at Frank’s feet. It included a two-person tourist-class ticket for Puerto Rico; two ID cards of which one was stamped HEREDICHRO and the other SUSTOHEREDICHRO; twenty thousand dollars’ worth of travellers’ cheques; and a report from the New York State Eugenic Processing Board which began “Dear Mr. Potter, I regret to have to inform you that inception of pregnancy by your wife with or without you as the father is punishable under Para. 12, Section V, of the New York State Parenthood Code as at present enforced…”

* * *

“How did I know the J-but-O’s were going to ban me? The baby-farming lobby must be worth trillions of dollars and that amount of money talks!”

He was a vaguely good-looking man, rather lean, rather dark, his air and bearing older than one would expect from his chronological age of thirty.

“Well, I’ve always said I’d be willing to adopt! We could get on an adoption list and have an unwanted child in less than five years for sure!”

She was an exceptionally lovely natural blonde, plumper than her husband, dieted to the currently fashionable dimensions, and aged twenty-three.

“What’s the point of going?” she added.

“Well, we can’t stay here! We’ve sold the apt and spent some of the money!”

“Can’t we go somewhere else?”

“Of course we can’t go somewhere else! You heard about the people they shot last week trying to sneak into Louisiana—and how far would twenty thousand bucks go in Nevada?”

“We could go there and get pregnant and come home—”

“To what? We’ve sold the apartment, don’t you understand? And if we’re here past six poppa-momma they can jail us!” He slapped his thigh with his open palm. “No, we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ll have to go to Puerto Rico and save up enough to make it over to Nevada, or maybe bribe someone to give us a passport for Peru, or Chile, or—”

There was a clang from the front door.

He looked at her, not moving. At last he said, “Sheena, I love you.”

She nodded, and eventually managed a smile. “I love you desperately,” she said. “I don’t want somebody else’s secondhand child. Even if it didn’t have any legs, I’d love it because it was yours.”

“And I’d love it because it was yours.”

Another clang. He rose to his feet. On the way past her, to let the moving gang in, he kissed her lightly on the forehead.

continuity (3)

AFTER ONE DECADE

Emerging from the library, Donald Hogan looked first north, then south, along Fifth Avenue, debating which of half a dozen nearby restaurants he should go to for lunch. The decision seemed unreachable for a moment. He had been holding down his present job for ten years, almost; sooner or later he was bound to go stale.

Perhaps one shouldn’t have one’s greatest ambition realised in full at the age of twenty-four…?

He had, very probably, another fifty years to go; he had a calculable chance of a decade beyond that. And when he accepted the offer they’d made him he hadn’t raised the matter of retirement, or even resignation.

Oh, they’d have to let him retire eventually. But he had no idea whether he’d be permitted to resign.

Lately, several of his acquaintances—he made a policy of not having friends—had noticed that he was looking older than his age and had developed a tendency to lapse into brown studies. They had wondered what on earth could be the matter with him. But if someone had been in a position to say, “Donald’s wondering if he can quit his job,” even the most intimate of all those acquaintances, the man with whom he shared an apartment and an endless string of shiggies, would have looked blank.

“Job? What job? Donald doesn’t work. He’s a self-employed dilettante!”

Approximately five people, and a Washington computer, knew otherwise.

* * *

“Sit down, Donald,” the Dean said, waving an elegant hand. Donald complied, his attention on the stranger who was also present: a woman of early middle age possessed of delicate bone-structure, good taste in clothes and a warm smile.

He was a trifle nervous. In the last issue of the university’s student journal he had published some remarks which he later regretted making public, though if pressed honesty would compel him to admit that he had meant them and still did mean them.

“This is Dr. Jean Foden,” the Dean said. “From Washington.”

The alarming possibility of having his post-graduate grant discontinued on the grounds that he was an ungrateful subversive loomed up in Donald’s mind. He gave the visitor a chilly and rather insincere nod.

“Well, I’ll leave you to get on with it, then,” the Dean said, rising. That confused Donald even more. He would have expected the old bastard to want to sit in on the discussion and giggle silently—here’s one more intransigent pupil up for the axe. His mind was therefore barren of possible reasons for summoning him when Dr. Foden produced and displayed the student journal in question.

“I was very struck by the article of yours in here,” she said briskly. “You feel there’s something wrong with our teaching methods, don’t you, Don? Mind if I call you Don?”

“Not if you don’t mind my calling you Jean,” Donald said in a sullen tone.

Musing, she looked him over. Four-fifths of the contemporary population of North America counted as handsome or beautiful; balanced diet and adequate inexpensive medical care had finally seen to that. And now that the first eugenic legislation was beginning to bite, the proportion was liable to increase. Nonetheless, there was something out of the ordinary about Donald Hogan. His women usually said it was “character”. Once an English exchange student had told him it was “bloody-mindedness”, and he had accepted the term as a compliment.

He had brown hair and beard, he was a little below average height, he was well-muscled, he wore the typical clothes of a turn-of-the-century student. Externally, then, he conformed. But somewhere underneath …

Dr. Foden said, “I’d like to hear your views.”

“They’re on the page for you to read.”

“Rephrase them for me. Seeing something in print often helps one to make a fresh assessment.”

Donald hesitated. “I haven’t changed my mind, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said at length. The stench and crackle of burning boats was vivid to him.

“I’m not asking for that. I’m asking for maximum concision instead of this—this rather rambling complaint.”

“All right. My education has turned me, and practically everyone else I know, into an efficient examination-passing machine. I wouldn’t know how to be original outside the limited field of my own speciality, and the only reason I can make that an exception is that apparently most of my predecessors have been even more blinkered than I am. I know a thousand per cent more about evolution than Darwin did, that’s taken for granted. But where between now and the day I die is there room for me to do something that’s mine and not a gloss on someone else’s work? Sure, when I get my doctorate the spiel that comes with it will include something about presenting a quote original unquote thesis, but what it’ll mean is the words are in a different order from last time!”

“You have a fairly high opinion of your own ability,” Dr. Foden commented.

“You mean I sound conceited? I guess I probably do. But what I’m trying to say is I don’t want to take credit for being massively ignorant. You see—”

“What are you going to do for a career?”

Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. “Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.”

“Ah-hah. Interested in a salary of fifty thousand per to do—essentially—nothing but complete your education?”

There was one talent Donald Hogan did possess which the majority of people didn’t: the gift of making right guesses. Some mechanism at the back of his mind seemed ceaselessly to be shifting around factors from the surrounding world, hunting for patterns in them, and when such a pattern arose a silent bell would ring inside his skull.

Factors: Washington, the absence of the Dean, the offer of a salary competitive with what he could hope to earn in industry, but for studying, not for working … There were people, extremely top people, whom specialists tended to refer to disparagingly as dilettanti but who dignified themselves with the title “synthesist”, and who spent their entire working lives doing nothing but making cross-references from one enclosed corner of research to another.

It seemed like too much to hope for, coming on top of his expectation, moments back, that his grant was to be discontinued. He had to put his hands together to stop them trembling.

“You’re talking about synthesis, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m from the Dilettante Dept—or more officially, from the Office of Research Co-ordination. But I doubt if you have in mind exactly what I’m going to propose. I’ve seen the graphs of your scholastic career, and I get the impression that you could make yourself into a synthesist if you wanted to badly enough, with or without a doctorate.” Dr. Foden leaned back in her chair.

“So the fact that you’re still here—griping, but putting up with things—makes me suspect you don’t want to badly enough. It’ll take a good fat bribe to make you opt for it. I think nonetheless you may be honest enough to stay bribed. Tell me, given the chance, what would you do to round out your education?”

Donald stammered over his answer, turning crimson at his own inability to utter crisp, decisive plans. “Well—uh—I guess … History, particularly recent history; nobody’s taught me about anything nearer to home than World War II without loading it full of biased dreck. All the fields which touch on my own, like crystallography and ecology. Not omitting human ecology. And to document that I’d like to delve into the written record of our species, which is now about eight thousand years deep. I ought to learn at least one non-Indo-European language. Then—”

“Stop. You’ve defined an area of knowledge greater than an individual can cover in a lifetime.”

“Not true!” Donald was gathering confidence by the moment. “Of course you can’t if you’ve been taught the way I have, on the basis of memorising facts, but what one ought to learn is how to extract patterns! You don’t bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books. You don’t memorise log and sine tables; you buy a slide-rule or learn to punch a public computer!” A helpless gesture. “You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.”

Dr. Foden was nodding. “You seem to have the right basic attitude,” she acknowledged. “However, I must put on my Mephistopheles hat at this point and explain the conditions that attach to the offer I’m making. First, you’d be required to read and write fluent Yatakangi.”

Donald blanched slightly. A friend of his had once started on that language and switched to Mandarin Chinese as an easier alternative. However …

He shrugged. “I’d be willing to shoot for that,” he said.

“And the rest of it I can’t tell you until you’ve been to Washington with me.”

Where a man called Colonel—Donald was not told if he had a name of his own—said, “Raise your right hand and repeat after me: ‘I Donald Orville Hogan … do solemnly declare and attest…’”

* * *

Donald sighed. Back then, it had seemed like the fulfilment of his wildest dreams. Five mornings a week doing nothing but read, under no compulsion to produce any kind of results—merely requested to mention by mail any association or connection he spotted which he had reason to believe might prove helpful to somebody: advise an astronomer that a market research organisation had a new statistical sampling technique, for instance, or suggest that an entomologist be informed about a new air-pollution problem. It sounded like paradise, especially since his employers not only did not care what he did with the rest of his time but suggested he make his experience as varied as possible to keep himself alert.

And in under ten years—he had to face the truth—he was getting bored. He could almost wish that they’d pull the second string attached to his work, the one which had caused him so much heart-searching.

Lieutenant Donald Orville Hogan, you are hereby activated and ordered to report immediately repeat IMMEDIATELY to—

“Oh, no!”

“Something wrong with you, blockbottom?” a harsh voice rasped inches from his ear. A sharp elbow jostled him and a scowling face stared into his. Confused, he discovered that without realising he must have made his decision about what restaurant to patronise today, and wandered down into the milling crowd that streamed the whole length of Fifth Avenue.

“What? Oh—no, I’m all right.”

“Then stop acting like you’re off your gyros! Look where you’re going!”

The angry man he’d collided with pushed past. Mechanically, Donald put one foot in front of the other, still rather dazed. After a few moments, he concluded that the advice was worth taking. Perhaps part of his trouble was that he’d fallen into such an automatic routine he had lost the alertness and interest in the world around which had attracted Dr. Foden to him ten years back, in which case he was unlikely to get the option of resigning his job. More probable was what he’d half-feared when with a flourish of trumpets and a ruffle of drums they declassified Shalmaneser, and he’d foreseen automation making even synthesists obsolete.

And if he was going to give up his job, he wanted it to be on his own terms, not because he’d been fired for incompetence.

With a slight shudder he surveyed the avenue. Buildings tall as canyon walls closed it in, channelling the human traffic under the diffusely bright cover of the Fuller Dome. Of course, that didn’t protect the whole of Greater New York, only Manhattan, which it had re-endowed with its former attraction and enabled to win back more inhabitants than it had lost in the late-twentieth-century rush to the suburbs. Doming the entire city would have been out of the question on grounds of cost alone, though engineering studies had shown the feasibility of the project.

New York with its thirteen million people, however, was falling further and further back from the status it had once enjoyed as the world’s largest city. It could not be compared with the monstrous conurbations stretching from Frisco to Ellay or from Tokyo to Osaka, let alone the true giants among modern megalopoli, Delhi and Calcutta with fifty million starving inhabitants apiece: not cities in the old sense of grouped buildings occupied by families, but swarming antheaps collapsing into ruin beneath the sledgehammer blows of riot, armed robbery and pure directionless vandalism.

Nonetheless, though it had shrunk to medium size by contemporary standards, this was still as large a city as Donald felt he could stand, and it still possessed a certain magnetism. The biggest employer of them all, State, dominated the West Coast; here were the next biggest, the super-corporations that were countries within a country. Ahead loomed the colossal ziggurat of the General Technics tower bridging three complete blocks, and it filled him with a sense of gloom. If he did quit—if it were possible for him to quit when they had pumped going on three-quarters of a million dollars of public money into him—his only future would lie in just such a mausoleum as that.

And look what it’s done to Norman House!

Across the hugely enlarged sidewalks the people thronged like insects, milling at the access points to underpasses and the subway. On the central, official-business-only emergency lane prowl cars cruised or paused, occasionally pulling over to make way for ambulances and fire trucks. Either side of the centre, the huge humming buses without engines—drawing their power from flywheels spun up to maximum revolutions when they turned around at the end-points of their journey—hauled their loads of up to two hundred passengers, sliding at two-block intervals into pickup bays and allowing the electric cabs to overtake. No internal combustion engine had been legal in the city since they put up the dome; the disposal of CO2 and anthropotoxins from the people themselves was as much as the ventilation system could handle, and on warm days their exuded moisture sometimes overloaded the conditioners, precipitating a kind of drizzle underneath the dome.

How do we stand it?

He had chosen to live in New York because he had been born here, and because it headed the short list of suitable residences they gave him to choose from—cities possessing the kind of library facilities needed in his job. But this was the first time he had looked at it, really looked with both eyes and full attention, in perhaps as long as seven years, and everywhere he turned he found that another straw had been piled on the camelback of the city. He had noticed the street-sleepers when he came back from college, but he hadn’t noticed that there were hundreds of them now, pushing their belongings on little makeshift trolleys and being moved on, moved on by the police. He hadn’t noticed the way people, when they were jostled, sometimes spun around and shot their hands to bulging pockets before they realized it wasn’t a mucker on their heels. And speaking of muckers: he hadn’t really connected with the world he knew when the news reports described one who’d taken out seven victims in Times Square on a busy Saturday night …

Panic clawed at him, the same kind of panic he’d experienced on the only occasion when he ventured to try Skulbustium, the sense that there was no such person as Donald Hogan but only one among millions of manikins, all of whom were versions of a Self without beginning or end. Then, he had screamed, and the man who had given him the drug advised against a repetition, saying he was his persona and without it would dissolve.

In other words: there was nothing inside.

Just ahead of him, two girls paused to examine a display in the window of a store. They were both in the height of fashion, one wearing a radio-dresslet whose surface pattern formed a printed circuit so that by shifting her buckled belt to right or left she could have her choice of broadcasts fed into the earpiece nestling under her purple hair, the other in a skintight fabric as harshly metallic as the case of a scientific instrument. Both had chromed nails, like the power terminals of a machine.

The display that had caught their attention was of genetically moulded pets. Processes that already worked well with viruses and bacteria had been applied to their germ-plasm, but on this more complex level the side-effects were excessively random; each pet on show probably stood proxy for five hundred that never left the lab. Even so, the solemn, over-sized bushbaby in the window looked miserably unhappy for all the splendour of its purple pelt, and the litter of bright-red Chihuahua pups below staggered continually as though on the verge of epilepsy.

All that seemed to concern the girls, however, was that the bushbaby’s colour almost exactly matched the hair of the one in the radio-dresslet.

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then …

Shaking all over, Donald changed his mind about a restaurant and turned blindly into a bar to drink instead of eat his lunch.

In the afternoon he called on an out-of-work poetess he knew. She was sympathetic, asked no questions, and allowed him to sleep off his drunk in her bed. The world looked a little better when he woke.

But he wished desperately that there could be someone—not this girl necessarily, not even a girl at all, just a person—to whom he could explain why it was he had been moaning in his sleep.

the happening world (3)

DOMESTICA

Straight well-pos’ned Afram seeks roomie view long Ise luxy 5-rm apt Box NZL4

“Yes I do have three rooms but no you can’t even if you have been evicted. Whatinole would I do with that gang of sheeting lizzies you tail behind you? I don’t care if you are equipoised! I don’t share with anyone who’s not flying my strictly straight-type orbit!”

In Delhi, Calcutta, Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin, Los Angeles; in Paris, Rome, Milan, Cairo, Chicago … they can’t jail you any longer for sleeping rough, so it’s no use hoping.

There just isn’t that much room in the jails.

Afram girl seeks lodg’g. Versatile. Box NRT5

LUXY APTS IDEAL FAMILIES ONLY $100,000 MINIMUM 3 RMS ALL DIVISIBLE!

Acceleratube Commuterservice makes it possible for YOU to work in Los Angeles, reside in the fresh-air expand-your-chest atmosphere of Arizona, transit time ninety minutes!

“This is Laura. Natural blonde, of course—honey, slip ’em down and demonstrate. Ah—the sharing bit is understood, presumably?”

“I hope so.”

“So do I.”

Laura giggled.

Jettex is practical as well as luxy—ask the folk from the Mountain States who can hold down city-centre jobs thanks to our five-minutely crush-hour service!

“Just a formality, if you don’t mind. Young lady, hold out your hand … Thanks. It’ll take five minutes. Hang on … Sorry, we can only give you a transient’s pass for this state. Congratulations, though—hope it’s a baby.”

WHEN THE PRESSURE GETS TO THE BLOWOFF POINT YOU’LL BE GRATEFUL FOR GT’S KEYS TO EASIER LIVING. TRANKS, PROPHYLACTICS, ARE ONLY THE START OF THE STORY. OUR AIDS TO NORMAL FEMALE BIOLOGICAL FUNCTIONING ARE APPROVED BY ALL STATE CODES.

“Prophet’s beard, Donald, if I’d known you had a thing about dark meat I could have had my pick of—”

“Then why don’t you try a brunette some time, say an Italian type? Someone who’s fed nothing but stark white sliced-and-wrapped is apt to want some wholemeal granary now and then!”

But in any household problems like this are bound to arise.

Olive Almeiro Agency offers you the chance of a lifetime. We have a wider range of good-heredity adoptables than any other agency in our field. Offer not good in following states: New York, Illinois, California …

BE IT ENACTED THAT: carriage of the genes listed in Appendix A below shall ipso facto be grounds for abortion upon presentation of the mother at any Eugenics Processing Board in the following …

“Who are you going to get in to replace Lucille?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t thought about it yet.”

POPULATION STRETCHING TO LIMIT. Reports today from official sources hint that immigrants to this state with residents’ qualifications more recent than 30th March last will be given choice of sterilisation or removal.

We’ve celebrated our twenty-first. Have you? Liberal association seeks broadminded couples, triples, to enlarge the scope of our activities. We have FOURTEEN children in the group already!

“Prophet’s beard, Donald…!”

“I’m sorry, I’ve said I’m sorry! But can I help getting bored with your line of shiggies? Laura was Scandahoovian, Bridget was Scandahoovian, Hortense was and Rita was and Moppet was and Corinne was. I think you’re in a rut, to be frank.”

Reliable couple seek babyminding opportunities, one or several days p.w. (Certificates avlble. Webtoe only drawback) Box NPP2

BE IT ENACTED THAT: carriage of the genes listed in Appendix B below shall ipso facto be grounds for sterilisation of any male child achieving the age of puberty after …

“Ah, go to hell!”

“That’s a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.”

“Stop trying to play on my WASP guilt feelings. Sometimes I wonder how you’d make out in a genuinely nonracial society.”

“There aren’t any. Give you another generation, you’ll add the genes for dark skin-pigment to the list of—”

Leo Branksome! Come home! Being sterilised isn’t going to make us love you any the less! You’re our boy, our only son, and running away was a stupid thing to do! And you’re only fourteen, remember! Your adoring but miserable parents.

“Thirty-four? And you have a clean genotype? My God, I ought to push this glass in your face! All we’ve got is a suspicion, not even proof but a suspicion, that Harold’s mother had sickle-cell anaemia and I’d give my right arm for children and you smug bastard can stand there and—”

tracking with closeups (4)

MASKER AID

Conscious that she was a walking advertisement for her own processes, conscious that not even the brilliant lights of the video technicians would reveal a flaw in her cosmetic garb, conscious with particular pleasure of the fact that the woman they had sent to interview her was conspicuously less well turned-out, Guinevere Steel cooed at the microphone.

“Why, the success of my Beautiques is due to two factors: the ability of my customers to recognise who does and who doesn’t keep that quantum-jump ahead of transient fashions, and equally their ability to judge what does and what does not offer real value for money!”

She preened.

Indeterminably aged, she wore a bluzette of shimmering yellow because her complexion was in the Goyaesque-tan range; it moulded her bosom into almost perfect cycloidal curves, peaked on either side with a pair of her own remote-controlled Nipicaps—activated at the moment because they would show to excellent advantage on a video screen. They were always at the wearer’s disposal; should she be interested in the man—or woman—she was talking to, she could dilate them without doing more than press her arm to her side; conversely she could deflate them, and there were few more ego-undermining things a woman could do to a block than let it be seen how her erogenous tissue lost interest.

She wore a skirtlet that was no more than an overgrown belt because she had extremely graceful legs. They tapered to jewelled slippers because she had high, springy arches, but not to bare feet because those arches had been reconstructed and on the left foot one of the scars still showed.

She had her hair in four parallel rolls, dyed silver; her finger- and toe-nails were chromed more brilliantly than mirrors and flashed back the light of the lamps at the camera’s lens.

About seventy per cent of her skin was revealed, but none of it was bare except perhaps among the roots of her hair. Apart from the pearly masking on her face, she wore whole-body matting, a personal blend of her own Beautique’s skin tinter, and altogether nearly thirty other products which left a detectable deposit on the epidermis. As a final touch her surface veins had been delicately traced in blue.

“Why, I think it’s contemporary in the way it ought to be,” she told the microphone. “We don’t live in the world of our ancestors, where dirt, and disease, and—and what one might call general randomness dictated how we lived. No, we have taken control of our entire environment, and what we choose by way of fashion and cosmetics matches that achievement.”

“But the current trend towards a more—more natural look,” the interviewer ventured.

“What counts is how the person looking at you is affected,” Guinevere said complacently. “It affects you, too, of course—to be totally confident, as we make our clients, of the impression you’re going to create is the only thing that really matters.”

“Thank you, Miss Steel,” the interviewer murmured.

* * *

That much out of the way, Guinevere marched back into her private office. With the door safely shut, she could drop into her chair and let the bitterness leak out into the set of her mouth, the narrowness of her eyes.

Lighting a Bay Gold, she stared at her reflection.

Totally confident? In this business, where tomorrow the man in the case or the girl-friend, whichever, might decide to get to closer quarters? The more elaborate and fragile and lovely the cosmetic job, the greater the effect—and the worse the letdown when it had been kissed, and caressed, and wrestled with. There were seventeen Beautiques now, one for every year she had been in the business, each licensed after careful appraisal to a manager who had to have worked for three months directly under Guinevere herself, who was trained to exacting standards and had contracted to pay a fat commission for the privilege of using the name. Every rational precaution had been taken, but who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?

Got to distract myself. Got to have some new ideas.

She thought for a while.

Eventually she scribbled a list and reached for the switch of the phone, after another quick glance at herself to make sure the image on the screen would be fitting.

A forfeits party. Always a good way to make other people look small. And at the head of the list that haughty brownnose Norman House—which meant having his dismal roomie along. Plus everyone else who had failed to fall down and worship lately.

Forfeits for what? Twentieth century, how about that? Ancient Rome or somewhere a bit more exciting would be better, but that was the sort of area where you’d expect people like that drecky Donald Hogan to know more than the organisers about what was and what wasn’t correct for the period. Hire a professional arbitrator, some nose-in-book student maybe specialising? No. Tried that once, didn’t work. Glummy boy was shocked by some of the forfeits and caved in—correction, avoiding forfeit: chickened in—not that, either. Out? Up? Check a dictionary of twentieth-century usage.

And if let’s say Mel Ladbroke could be persuaded to come, and bring some of that fascinating new stuff they’re experimenting with at the hospital …

With a sort of savage delight she stabbed at the buttons of the phone.

You say one word, make one gesture, even, that’s not in the context and I’m going to make you piss your pants, you horrible black bastard.

continuity (4)

ROOMIE NATION

When Donald reached home at six poppa-momma, Norman was there already, sitting in his favourite Hille chair, feet up on a hassock, scanning his day’s mail. To his roomie’s hello he returned merely a distracted nod.

By this time Donald was sufficiently recovered from the fit of depression he had experienced at lunchtime to note the various clues to Norman’s state of mind which the visible evidence afforded. Being a Muslim, Norman refused to touch alcohol, but marijuana was traditionally socialised in the Muslim countries of Africa and he permitted himself to unwind the day’s accumulated tension with a few reefers. Despite the excessive cost—every state which had legalised pot discriminated against that grown outside its own boundaries with a fierce tariff—he smoked the brand appropriate to a junior vice-president of GT: the acknowledged field-leader, Bay Gold. One rested in an ashtray at his side, but its smoke was winding up unheeded.

Furthermore, on the floor at his feet, as though tossed aside in a moment of impatience, there lay a Wholographik picture, an endless flowing series of echoingly rhythmical light and dark lines, along the edge of which was printed the colophon of the Genealogical Research Bureau.

Donald had long ago learned to accept as a foible his roomie’s susceptibility to the various gimcrack Genealogical Research outfits that catered, in this progeny-obsessed age, for people worried about their genotype. It was the first time he had ever known Norman not to fetch his monochrome reader immediately and study the latest come-on they had sent him.

Conclusion: something had disturbed Norman very badly, shifted him clear off his regular orbit.

Accordingly he made no attempt to start a conversation, but carried on with his own arriving-home routine: check the phone for personal calls recorded while he was out—there were none—collect the mail, which was as ever bulky and mainly commercial, from his delivery slot, and pour himself a little whisky from the liquor console before settling down in his own chair.

But he did not at once proceed to read the mail. Instead, he looked over his surroundings with a shadow of nervousness as though expecting this familiar setting too to take on the kind of strangeness he had experienced out on the street at lunchtime.

The open living-area reached directly from the entrance door was the section of the apartment they used in common. Even so, it bore little trace of Donald Hogan. It had been decorated and partly furnished before Norman agreed to accept him as a roomie; on moving in, he had contributed certain items like this chair, and a few ornaments Norman approved of, and the liquor console—not being a drinker, Norman had previously owned nothing but the kind of small wine-frame bottle-holder imposed by convention on a householder entertaining non-Muslim friends. Those things did not, on inspection, add up to a paradigm of Donald Hogan. Moreover, all of them were to be found on the same side of the room, as though an undefined boundary ran between the occupants of the apartment.

On the other hand, one could hardly say the place reflected Norman’s personality, either. The realisation was a minor surprise to Donald. But all of a sudden he saw that there was a pattern implicit in Norman’s choice both of furnishings and of colours. The shimmering russet of the walls, the facsimile William Morris design of the carpet, the Picasso, the Pollock and the Moore—even the worn Hille chair—seemed calculated, as though without warning a high corporation zeck might walk in and look around, then nod over the impression derived from the layout and decide that Norman House was a good steady type, worthy of promotion.

Donald repressed a shudder, wondering if the attempt to convey an aura of solidity and reliability might be aimed at himself as well as other, more influential, visitors.

Exactly one thing in the room jarred—his own possessions, that could be seen, were too neutral to matter, which was presumably why Norman had allowed them to remain out here on public display—and that was the polyorgan standing behind Norman’s chair in the extreme corner of the room, the property of his current shiggy Victoria. It was marginally too modern, too gaudy, to fit in with the rest of the décor. But that, inevitably, would be transient.

Perhaps Norman’s bedroom was a more honest reflection of him? Donald concluded that was unlikely. His own was not, because in theory at least, if not at present in practice, it was shared by a visiting shiggy. Additionally each of them had another small room for total privacy. Donald had never set foot over the threshold of Norman’s, though he had glimpsed it through the open door. He had seen too little to judge if that was genuinely personalised. His own—probably not. It was more of a library than anything else, and half the books had been chosen on orders from his employers, not to suit his own tastes.

If the consequences of having to share an apartment were as negative as this, he thought, how would he justify his and Norman’s preference for it and the widespread incidence of the habit, to a foreigner from a less healthy—hence less crowded—country, or to an old man who remembered when the first aspiration of a successful bachelor was a place entirely of his own?

Well … there was one obvious advantage, plus a number of minor additional ones. The easiest to see was that sharing enabled both of them to enjoy a standard of accommodation which for spaciousness and comfort exceeded what either could have afforded alone. Even on his GT salary Norman would have been hard put to it to live this well otherwise, what with the way prices had rocketed since the Fuller Dome was erected.

Some of the additional inducements were almost equally plain, like the shiggy-trading which was taken as a matter of course. Others were subtler, like the convenience of being able to let strangers assume that they were not just living together but living together. It grew so tiresome to be asked over and over again, “But if you’re allowed to be a father, why aren’t you?”

* * *

There was nothing in his own mail to attract his interest; Donald dumped the whole lot into the disposall. Sipping his drink, he grew aware that Norman had glanced at him, and he forced a smile.

“Where’s Victoria?” he inquired, for lack of any other subject.

“Showering down. She smells, and I told her so.” Norman’s tone was absent, but behind the words Donald could detect all the inverted snobbery of the modern Afram.

You dirty black bastard …

Since Norman was apparently disinclined to prolong the exchange, he let his attention wander back to the Wholographik picture on the floor. He remembered the latest come-on he’d seen, one which Norman had left lying around in this room; it had claimed accurate genetic analysis given nothing more than one nail-paring from each of the subject’s parents. That was such a flagrant lie he’d considered reporting it to the Better Business Bureau. Even in this year of grace you had only a sixty-forty chance of proving who your father was on such slender evidence, let alone of tracking back into the Caucasian side of what was predominantly an Afram heredity.

But he had changed his mind about making the complaint, for fear of infringing his cover.

God, if I’d known it was going to be such a lonely life I think I’d have …

“Hi, Donald,” Victoria said, emerging from Norman’s bathroom in a veil of steam and Arpège Twenty-first Scentury. She walked past him and threw one leg challengingly across Norman’s lap. “Smell me now! Okay?”

“Okay,” Norman said, not raising his head. “Go put some clothes on, then.”

“You’re a bleeder. Wish I didn’t like you.”

But she complied.

On the sound of the bedroom door shutting, Norman cleared his throat. “By the way, Donald, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you going to do something about—?”

“When I find someone suitable,” Donald muttered.

“You’ve been saying that for weeks, damn it.” Norman hesitated. “Frankly, I’ve been thinking I might be better off if I took in Horace in your place—I know he’s looking for a spare tatami.”

Suddenly alarmed, but concealing his reaction, Donald gazed directly at his roomie. Overlaid on his image he saw, as brilliantly as if she had still been in the room, Victoria: a high-Scandahoovian natural blonde, the only type Norman had ever brought into the apartment.

Does he mean it?

His own last steady, Gennice, had been his favourite: not one of the shiggies working the executive circuit like most of the ones they’d had in, but a woman with a strongly independent personality, almost forty and born in Trinidad. The reason he hadn’t replaced her was partly lack of inclination, partly the impression that he wouldn’t find her equal in a hurry.

He felt bewildered all over again, almost nauseatingly confused—the last thing he would have expected in his own home. He had imagined that he had made an accurate assessment of Norman, identified and typed him as the sort of self-conscious Afram who was uneasily balanced between insistence on having a white roomie and ill-concealed annoyance at that roomie’s preference for Afram girls. But Horace, to whom he’d referred a moment previously, was shades darker than Norman himself.

He was relieved when the phone went. Answering the call, reporting over his shoulder to Norman that it was Guinevere Steel inviting them to a forfeits party, he was able to complete in his mind, privately, the conclusion he had come to. Norman must have undergone a traumatic experience today.

If he’d come right out and said so, though, he’d have risked Norman putting his threat into effect; the Afram hated anyone to see beneath the calm mask he usually maintained.

And I don’t think I could face adjusting all over again to a stranger the way I’ve adjusted to Norman. Even if I can’t claim that we’re friends.

* * *

“What’s the theme of this forfeits party, by the way?”

“Hm?” Pouring himself another slug of whisky, Donald turned his head. “Oh—twentieth century.”

“Talk and behave in period, is that the idea?” On Donald’s nod: “Sort of stupid thing you’d expect from her, isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s stupid,” Donald agreed, only half his mind on what he was saying. “She lives so obsessively in the here-and-now she probably thinks the twentieth century was a solid arbitrary chunk of thought and behaviour. I doubt if she remembers she was in it herself a decade ago. So we’ll have people going around saying ‘twenty-three skiddoo!’ and ‘give me some skin daddy-o!’ and wearing niltops with New Look skirts all in one hopeless, helpless bungle.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” Norman said. “You make it sound even worse than I imagined.”

“What were you thinking of?” Donald said. Half-sensed at the back of his mind there was a need to talk—it didn’t have to be about the shock he’d experienced earlier. Any kind of talk would do provided he could open out and feel he wasn’t being secretive. The strain of never really communicating with anyone was getting on his nerves.

The corners of Norman’s mouth turned down to hint at bitterness. “Why, I’ll wager I’m the first Afram on her guest-list, and since I’ve accepted I’ll remain the only one, and someone’s going to be programmed to make like—let’s say—Bull Clark. And she’ll get a bunch of her entourage to gang together and claim a forfeit off me for not Uncle-Tomming.”

“You really think so? Whyinole did you accept, then?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Norman said with a trace of grim satisfaction. “A lot of other things happened last century besides what Guinevere likes to remember, and I shall take pleasure in stuffing them up her aristocratic nose.”

There was a silence. Both of them felt it as intolerably long. Norman had smoked barely half his Bay Gold, not enough to elasticate time for him, but because he had trespassed to the edge of the subject above all others where people like himself preferred not to be too open, he could not continue, a fact of which Donald was well aware. For him, though, the grouped references to the twentieth century had started his mind working on a train of association which forked and forked until he could no longer tell which point was relevant to what had been said at the beginning and which was not.

* * *

Perhaps I shouldn’t have made that remark about putting Donald out and taking in Horace. One thing about keeping company with a WASP, especially a worrisome intellectual type like Donald: our private problems are far enough apart not to reinforce and multiply each other.

* * *

Wonder what did happen to Norman today? Something’s shaken him, no doubt of it. What does it feel like to be inside his skull? The Children of X can’t approve of codders like him, and his obsession with blue-eyed blondes. The company probably laps it up, of course; that big turnover in the eighties and nineties still casts its shadow. “The ideal company wife nowadays is an extremely ugly member of another racial group with no known father and two Ph.D.’s!”

But a company is no substitute for kinship.

Like to ask why he dislikes Guinevere so much. I can take her or leave her and she always has useful people to her parties, so I don’t give a pint of whaledreck. Footnote: I must try to discover when that phrase leaked into common parlance; it was the sludge left when you’d rendered blubber down for oil, if I remember right. Maybe it was public guilt when they found it was too late to save the whales. The last one was seen—when? ’Eighty-nine, I think.

* * *

I envy Donald the element of detachment in his makeup. I’d never dare tell him, though. Could be it’s only what mine is: a mask. But Guinevere is such a … and he hardly notices. What annoys him about her proposed party is like he said, the anachronism of treating the twentieth century as a lump. And it wasn’t. Who should know better than one of us?

I’m behind the times. Prophet’s beard, I’m practically obsolete. So I’m a VP for the world’s richest corporation—have I succeeded in terms personal to myself? I’ve just chopped my way through the soft rotten feelings of ancestral guilt these WASPs suffer from till I’ve reached my nice cosy comfortable den. And here I am.

How long till sunset prayer this evening, by the way?

* * *

But the Guineveres of our world are no more than the spray on the top of the wave. It forms spectacular transitory patterns, but the ground-swell is what alters the coastlines. I can feel currents of it from where I’m sitting.

Imagine a VP of a big corporation sharing an apartment, forty years ago, with an alleged independently wealthy dilettante. They’d never have promoted him to the job in the first place. They’d have looked around for some type with a presentable wife, wouldn’t have cared that the couple ate each other’s hearts out in private and shipped their kids off to boarding-school and summer camp and any other place they could to get them out of the way. Nowadays they wouldn’t give a pint of whaledreck even if we were sleeping together. It doesn’t breed, and that’s good. Everybody boasting about their children, complaining about not being allowed children—but they couldn’t have pushed the eugenics laws through if people hadn’t secretly felt relieved. We’re at the precipice where even our own children add intolerably to the task of coping with our fellow human beings. We feel much more guilty these days about resenting other people’s children than we do about the existence of people whose impulses don’t involve propagating the species.

Come to think of it, there’s a psychological as well as a physical sense in which we reproduce our kind. And we’ve tended to push the physical one further and further back in our lives. A lot of us have given it up altogether. We owe our intelligence—what there is of it—to having stretched the cub-period, the dominance of the Lustprinzip, beyond all reasonable bounds. Wonder if this is another way of stretching it still further. That would account for the development of the shiggy circuit, the fact that the world’s big cities are alive with women who’ve never had a permanent home, but live out of a bag and sleep a night, a week, half a year wherever there’s a man with an apartment to share. I must see if Mergendahler has published anything about this—it sounds like his field. I wish to God Mulligan hadn’t quit; we need him to tell us where we are, we need his insight like we need food!

* * *

No, it’s not Donald I should show the door to. It’s Victoria. He’s told me a score of times about my preoccupation with paleass shiggies, and I never listened, but he’s right. Prophet’s beard, all this talk about emancipation! Just one of the shiggies who’ve been in and out of this apartment like doses of aperient was stunningly beautiful and solid-ground sensible and marvellous in bed and a whole, rounded, balanced sort of person. And that was Gennice, that Donald brought home, not me, and I was unappreciative because she was a brown-nose. I must be off my gyros. I must be busted clear out of my nappy old plantation-bred skull!

Emancipated! Allah be just to me, I’m a worse prisoner of historical circumstance than the oldest Red Guard in Peking!

* * *

I wonder if we’ve been around each other long enough for him to think of me as Donald-a-person instead of Donald-a-WASP. I wonder if his impression of me is accurate. For the sake of absolute security I guess I should take him up on the threat he made, and move away. Being exposed for such a long time so intimately to one person is what the Colonel would call erosive. Funny how that one word he used has stuck in my mind so long … Still, no doubt they keep their eyes on me. They’ll tell me if they think I’m endangering my cover.

If I were to come straight out and tell Norman: “I’m not a lazy slob parasitising off inherited wealth and making like a poor man’s cousin to a synthesist because I haven’t any creative talent—I’m a spy…!”

I’d be stupid.

Wonder if I’m going to get nightmares again, like in the a plane tomorrow to God knows where. Oh, surely they’re early days, dreaming of a call in the middle of the night and not likely to pull me out of cold storage now? It’s been ten years, and I’m adapted, and even if I sometimes get depressed I like things as they are. I’d prefer not to have to adjust to someone else as I’ve done to Norman. I used to imagine I could manage without friends so intimate it would be cruel to keep up the lie where they were concerned. I don’t think I can. But at least in Norman’s case I can excuse not telling him the truth on the grounds that it’s too late; we’ve shared too much already. If I had to get this close to someone else I don’t think I could maintain my pretence.

Lord, I hope the forecast of their needs was wrong when they sent Jean Foden and enlisted me!

It’s all breaking loose at once. Someone’s stirred my mind with a stick. Anybody would think I’d been ingesting Skulbustium instead of just my regular brand of pot. I have to hitch on to something fast, or I’ll break to bits.

I’ve never really talked, like you’d say talked, to that codder in the other chair. I wonder if I can. Because if I can, that’ll mean something did happen to me today, it wasn’t just a momentary shock.

But I can’t approach it cold. Work up to it by a roundabout route.

* * *

The quickest way to find out what he thinks about me, of course, might perhaps be to ask him…?

* * *

“Donald—”

“Norman—”

They both laughed a trifle uneasily.

“What were you going to say?”

“No, no—you go ahead.”

“All right, I will. Donald, what can you tell me to refresh my memory about Beninia??”