Stand on Zanzibar

context (8)

ISOLATION

“At bottom the human species finds idealism an uncomfortable posture. Prime evidence of this can be found in the way neither of the two groups locked in irresoluble conflict around the Pacific has been able to achieve its stated goal—even though, given the lucid, simple, obviously attractive statement of either of their ideals, an impartial observer might wonder why commitment had not ensued like sunrise after night.

“‘Give the wealth back to the people who created it!’ Here’s an ideal capable of generating crusades among people who interpret it as expropriating greedy landlords, sharing out land so that every family may enjoy reasonable nutrition and repudiating debts to moneylenders at usurious rates of interest. Having hit on this, the Chinese charged ahead—until they overreached themselves. They became unable to distinguish between the evils they were preaching against and those traditional influences which literally constituted the way of life of people they hoped to recruit to their cause. In short order they fell into the same pit as their rivals, who had for decades ignored the plain and simple fact that to a starving man ‘freedom’ implies a full rice-bowl—or, if he has an exceptional imagination, a healthy ox to pull his plough. It has nothing to do with voting for a political delegate.

“Analogously with the way the Tsarist army deserted en masse during the First World War, not because of Bolshevik impact on the soldiers but because they were sick of fighting and wanted to go tend their farms, the eager early recruits to the red flag discovered that while they were dying abroad the things they wanted to guard were being undermined at home. So they quit. China, like Russia before her, found she was surrounded by a gaggle of heirs to the mantle of the late Marshal Tito, not a few of whom were themselves within China’s boundary.

“However, by that time, thanks to ineptitude, racial prejudice against them, fighting the right wars with the wrong weapons, and general mismanagement of their affairs, the opposition (or if you prefer, which I don’t because I’d rather not identify with such a bunch of incompetents, ‘our side’) was so far in arrears that the greatest single territorial gain to date in a contest which bids fair to outdo the Hundred Years’ War both for duration and for inconclusiveness only restored a rough balance and didn’t tip the scales the other way.

“We can’t even claim in honesty that it was the result of foresight and planning—only that when the grabbing was good, we grabbed. Don’t believe anyone who tries to claim that the existence of Isola is proof of the superiority of the Western system. The Chinese couldn’t have taken over. There was no form of discontent they could have exploited. How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people concerned is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?

“Life in the Philippines had become intolerable well before the civil war of the 1980s. The state of things obtaining (which some accounts misname anarchy, but which any decent dictionary will tell you was nothing of the sort, but free-enterprise capitalism gone out of its skull) was on the verge of ruining the country permanently. The annual average of unsolved murders was running around 30,000 in a population of under fifty million. In the eyes of the inhabitants of the Sulu Archipelago, where most of them were committed, the offence for which they revolted against and ultimately assassinated President Sayha was that he interfered in their traditional right to slaughter and steal. This was unforgivable.

“Oh, doubtless there were some among the people who gave that celebrated majority of eighty-eight per cent in the plebiscite on secession who hoped that being policed and governed by Big Brother in Washington would ensure them a quieter life, free them from the need to fit bullet-proof shutters and plant man-traps in their gardens. Far more, however, seem to have hoped that the bait on the hook (full States’ rights and a billion dollars of aid) would offer another and fatter cake of which they could snatch their slice.

“Which of these parties saw its dream fulfilled? Dear reader, you must be joking. That vaunted billion-dollar aid budget went nowhere near the natives’ pockets. It was spent on roads, airfields, port facilities and fortifications. And, while it’s true that the smugglers and black-marketeers who had hitherto rampaged unchecked had their hinder ends smartly kicked, to get rid of them the new owners imposed martial law and it hasn’t been lifted since 1991!

“Dubbed ‘Isola’ on the grounds that Montana was a mountainous territory and the new acquisition was an island territory, the Junior State went from the frying-pan into the fire. However, the Americans had been desperately in need of bases closer to the Asian mainland than what they currently had, and they were reasonably well satisfied.

“The Chinese, on the other hand, when they tried a counterstroke by wooing Yatakang, were disappointed. The Yatakangi are descendants of the former dominant people in South-East Asia and firm believers in the traditional military dictum that the first thing you do after contracting an alliance is prepare plans for the day when your ally welshes on you. Just because they’re Asiatics it doesn’t follow that they’re going to invite their yellow fellows into their beds. Nor, because they haven’t performed the Peking kotow, should it be assumed (as some blockbottoms I know in Washington have assumed) that they are all set to become the second Isola. Why should they? Things are peachy down in Yatakang; it’s among the world’s great nations, by Asian standards it’s fabulously wealthy, and it can enjoy the game of playing off Washington against Peking until doomsday, on present evidence.

“Until doomsday? Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration. There’s one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture known as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between ‘ideals’, and with luck they won’t have left their genes behind because they’ll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they’re too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. And after that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.”

—Better ? than ? by Chad C. Mulligan

continuity (7)

ARMS AND IDLENESS

Donald felt pitted and pendulumed in the vacant apt. Almost, he could have welcomed the return of Victoria and the need to act as though nothing had happened until Norman programmed the law to pick her up.

He dialled for a meal from the block kitchens, but between ordering it and its arrival his appetite seemed to be eroded by apathy. He put on a recent record he had bought and sat down to watch the play of colour on the screen which matched the music; it had hardly begun before he was on his feet again and tramping restlessly about. None of the TV channels which he checked offered a programme to interest him. A day or two before someone had persuaded him to get a polyforming kit. He opened its box and considered starting a copy of Rodin’s Kiss, but halted his hand in mid-movement and let the lid fall shut again.

Furious with himself, he stared out the window. The Manhattan-pattern was at its most brilliant at this time of the evening—an Aladdin’s Cave of multicoloured lights, gorgeous as the stars at the centre of the galaxy.

Out there: all those millions of people … Like looking up at the sky and wondering which of those suns shine on beings like ourselves. Christ: when did I last look up at the night sky?

He was suddenly appalled. These days, a great many people never left their homes at night except for some specific purpose, when they could call a cab to the door and expose themselves for no longer than it took to cross a sidewalk. It wasn’t inevitably dangerous to wander the night streets of the city—the hundreds of thousands who did still do so were proof enough of that. In a country of four hundred millions there were two or three muckers per day, yet some people acted as though they couldn’t get past the next corner without being attacked. There were rollings, robberies and rumbles; there were even riots.

But there must still be room, surely, for an ordinary person to go about ordinary business?

The habit had settled on Donald’s mind unnoticed, like gradually thickening fog. He had stopped going out after six or seven in the evening for the mere sake of not being at home. Most weekends there was a party; between times, friends of Norman’s called or they were invited to join someone for dinner, or a concert, or a freevent. And the cab that came to fetch them was driven by a man or a woman secure behind armoured glass, its doors could only be opened from the dashboard, and affixed to the neat little nozzle of the air-conditioning system was a certificate stating that the sleepy-gas cylinders had been approved by the City Licensing Authority. For all its smoothness and fuel-cell silence, it was like a tank, and encouraged the feeling that one was venturing on to a battlefield.

What do I know any longer about my fellow human beings?

He sensed a recurrence of his panic at lunchtime, and a desperate need to talk to someone to prove that there really were other people in the world, not just puppets on intangible strings. He approached the phone. But that wouldn’t do—just conversing with an image on a screen. He wanted to see and hear strangers, to be reassured of their independence from himself.

Breathing hard, he made for the apartment door. At the threshold he checked and returned to his bedroom, to tug open a drawer at the bottom of the built-in closet. Under a pile of disposable paper shirts he found what he was looking for: a Jettigun, the cartridge-charged gas-pistol marketed by GT under licence from Japanese Industries of Tokyo, and a Karatand.

He debated whether to put it on, turning it over and examining it curiously while reaching his decision because he had never really looked at it since the day he bought it. It was in effect a palmless glove made of impact-sensitive plastic about a quarter-inch thick. Pressed, pinched, drawn on or off the hand, it remained flexible and nearly as soft as good leather. Struck against a resistant surface, its behaviour changed magically, and while the interior stayed soft to act as a cushion against bruising, its outer layer became as rigid as metal.

He thrust his fingers into it and spun around, slamming his fist at the wall. There was a solid thud, and the muscles of his upper arm and shoulder complained, but the Karatand reacted as designed. It was several seconds before he could straighten his fingers against the resistance of the relaxing plastic.

In the box in which he had bought and stored it, there was a leaflet showing with diagrams the various standard ways of employing it: crudely, as he had just done, by balling a fist, or, more delicately, using the side of the palm and the tips of the bunched fingers. He read through the whole text with anxious attention until it suddenly occurred to him that he was behaving precisely as he did not wish to—on the assumption that he was leaving for a mission into enemy territory. He peeled the Karatand off and stuffed it into his pocket along with the Jettigun.

If that phone were to ring, and the Colonel were on the screen activating me, telling me to report for duty at once—this is how I would feel.

And that can’t be true. Because if the mere prospect of going out at night caves me in like this, being activated would break me into little pieces.

He shut the door with conscious care and headed for the elevators.

the happening world (6)

STREET SEEN

“I can’t see heaven but I credit hell—

I live in New York so I know it well.

When they shut out heaven with the Fuller Dome

God gave it up and He went home.”

ONE WAY NORTHBOUND

“Gotta go dump my passenger—pulled a bolt-gun and I had to doze the bleeder. Dicty, of course. Spotted him right away, but dreck, if I turned down every dicty who wants a ride I’d never get a fare after seven poppa-momma … So anyhow: I’ll be off call until I’ve sworn out the complaint.”

UNDERPASS

Rooms by the hour $3.

“Heard the new one about Teresa?”

ONE WAY WESTBOUND

Licensed panhandler, City of Greater New York. Muldoon Bernard A. No. PH2 428 226.

PEDESTRIANS ONLY

“So I said to him look block I said I’ve celebrated my twenty-first even if you haven’t. I said I didn’t treat your daughter like a whore because I never met a freaking whore because they’re as obsolete as your idea of a shotgun wedding. I said come to that isn’t it better my way than what she’s getting up to with that freaking lizzie of a stepmother of hers. He didn’t know about that. Took the fuel out of his jets, I do depose!”

ONE WAY SOUTHBOUND

Menu $8.50, $12.50, $17.50.

“Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere hit Times Square yesterday—it’ll be crowded.”

KEEP TO THE RIGHT

Show nitely—and do we mean SHOW!

ONE WAY EASTBOUND

“Say, I—uh—know my way around the block better than most people. Care I should do you a small favour? Now I have at present just a trifle more Yaginol than I can personally use, and…”

WAIT

Public lectures daily, demonstrations Wednesday and Friday. Auparishtaka, Sanghataka, Gauyuthika, etc. Coaching by experts. Enrol here any time. Mrs. Grundy Memorial Foundation (may dogs grub up her bones).

“They programmed Shalmaneser with the formula for this stiffener, see, and…”

WALK

Colossal unbelievable impossible bargains! Store of a million miracles! Cruisers welcome subject to evidence of cash or credit.

DO NOT LOITER

“Attention attention—we have reports of a pseudo cab working the lower East Side, dozing and rolling passengers. Stop and check all cabs vicinity Sixth Street Avenue B.”

NO SPITTING

Office space for rent, or would convert to dwelling at client’s expense.

“This new homimage attachment is the best I’ve ever seen.”

DOGS FOULING SIDEWALK WILL BE DESTROYED

Psychometrist, clairvoyante, offers guidance to the insecure.

BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS

“It’s like the universe was a hole, catch me? And I’m all spread out thin around the sides, catch me? And then sometimes it’s like the room turns inside out and I’m the spots on the six sides of the dice. Or else—ah, why should I bother talking to a block like you?”

RAPID TRANSIT

Municipal ordinance no. 1214/2001. Persons of no fixed abode to register at nearest police station and obtain permits before sleeping rough.

“It trips you further and faster than the Everywheres can manage!”

SANITARY CONVENIENCES

Joe’s Joints—N.Y. brands $3 for 10, out-of-state brands $5, $6.

STOMP THAT ROACH! BEWARE OF FIRE!

“Hey codders! Shade and fade—there’s a prowlie on the next block!”

DO NOT PLACE NOXIOUS REFUSE IN UNLIDDED RECEPTACLES

“What shall we do with our fair city.

Dirty and dangerous, smelly and shitty?

If you’re a friend of New York town

You’ll find you a hammer and smash it down.”

tracking with closeups (8)

ILL WIND

If I’d guessed it was going to lead to this, Gerry Lindt told himself furiously, I think I’d have dodged!

The atmopshere in the apt was like a funeral parlour’s, all hushed voices and tiptoeing, as though the stiffly-worded official form propped beside his bed were the symptom of an incurable disease.

It was only a draft notice. Thousands of them must be issued every day, which meant it was a rather ordinary thing. Not, naturally, inevitable—it could be dodged in a great many ways, some legitimate, some dishonest. None of the legitimate ways was open to Gerry: nineteen years old, rather handsome with his fair curly hair and blue eyes, and in perfect physical health. And although he knew all about the alternative methods—one could hardly be nineteen and male and not know them—they scared him marginally more than the idea of facing the little red brothers.

Friends of his, whom he had known since he could talk, had cheerfully adopted them: doused themselves in perfume and sat petting with each other in public places to establish homosexuality (though this was a chancy device and might lead to being drafted anyway, with a violent course of aversion therapy as soon as they were under military law); gone out on mugging expeditions and been deliberately clumsy to obtain criminal convictions with the coveted annotation “Anti-social”; left pro-Chinese pamphlets where school or college authorities would be sure to come across them; maimed themselves; or even—and this was what terrified Gerry worst—caught themselves a heavy habit, preferring the risk of being institutionalised to that of being inducted.

So, tomorrow, enter Private Lindt.

He looked around his room. Because it had been his almost all his life, he had grown accustomed to its narrow dimensions; it was half one of the original rooms of the apt, divided when his sister was born. Now he was over six feet tall, though, he could span it on the short axis, and he could foresee that when he came back on furlough he would be dismayed at its tininess.

At the moment it was more cramped than ever, because he had been sorting things from the closet in careful compliance with the instructions on the draft notice: recruits are required to bring …

But the sorting and packing was all done, and it was still early evening. He listened to the surrounding noises. He could hear the three distinct footfalls of his father, his mother and his sister, moving around, clearing away the supper things, restoring the furniture to its former positions.

I can’t stand the idea of spending the whole of this evening in their company. Is that bad? Does it make me an unnatural son? But Sis staring at me with goggling eyes as though measuring me for a coffin because she thinks that block Jamie is God this week and he says only people with suicidal tendencies refuse to dodge the draft—and Mom bravely keeping back the tears so that I feel any moment I’ll bust out snivelling too—and Pa … Well, if he says to me once more, “Son, I’m proud of you!” I think I’ll break his neck.

He took a deep breath and prepared to run the gauntlet.

“Where are you going? Surely you’re not going out on your last evening?”

Last evening. The condemned man ate a hearty supper.

“I’m going to wander around the neighbourhood for a bit, say goodbye to a few people. Won’t be long.”

And made it. Without half as much trouble as I expected.

He was so relieved, it was not until he actually stepped outside the building that he realised he had no clear idea of where he was bound. Stopping in his tracks, he looked about him, savouring the slightly salt freshness of the night breeze which promised to drive away the thin scattering of cloud veiling the sky.

So many things weren’t matching the pattern he’d subconsciously expected. Leaving home to be on his own for the first time, so he’d vaguely gathered from hints in novels and TV plays, he should have felt some kind of reinforced attachment to this his childhood home, sensed half-forgotten details stamping themselves on his mind. But a moment ago he’d been thinking that when he next returned he’d be dismayed at the size of his room, and now, out of doors, he was thinking the same as usual: that someone ought to clear all this litter from the roadway, paper, plastic, foil, cans, packs and packages; that it was more than time they repaired the gashed store-front cattycorner across the intersection, where “partisans” had looted a sporting-goods dealer for a supply of weapons; that in general this home of his left a lot to be desired.

Equally misty at the back of his mind had been the idea of a girl to keep him company on this last night before enlistment. He had seldom needed to go to special trouble since he was fifteen to find a shiggy, but his parents were of the older generation—like any parents—and while they had never objected to his staying away all night he had not yet plucked up courage to have a girl in and sleep with him. He had planned to make his declaration of masculinity tonight, when they would feel ashamed to complain. Yet here he was, on his own. All the girls he liked most had sheered off when they learned he was going to let the draft get his balls, and the shock of their unanimous rejection had so thrown him off his gyros he hadn’t managed to replace them yet.

Of course, there were places enough where he could be reasonably sure of picking up a shiggy, but that didn’t seem appropriate. If what he’d heard was to be relied on, he’d be doing a lot of that during his service, without the option.

No: he needed to call on someone he’d known for a length of time. He thought of his friends one by one, and came to the upsetting conclusion that there was virtually nobody he could trust not to say the same nauseating things as his family.

Except maybe …

He clenched his fists. There was one person he could be sure would not utter fulsome and revolting platitudes, whom he had not been to see since deciding he would accept his draft notice because he was unsure of his own ability to resist his persuasive counter-arguments. But now that it was too late to change his mind, it would be interesting, at least, to hear Arthur Golightly’s reaction.

* * *

Arthur lived, not in a block of apts, but in an early twentieth-century house that had long ago been subdivided to accommodate as many people as it had rooms. It was called “bachelor dwellings” but what it amounted to was a shabby tenement.

Nervously, Gerry pressed the ancient bell and announced himself over the intercom.

“Gerry! Come on up,” said a vaguely mechanical voice, and the door swung open.

He encountered Arthur on the first-story landing: a scruffy coloured man in his late thirties, wearing shorts and a pair of loafers. His beard blended without detectable margin into the mat of hair on his chest. Gerry wished the hair continued further down than his solar plexus; he was developing a wobbly pot-belly that could have done with some concealment. However, his display of it was of a piece with his rejection of conformity, and if you objected to that you objected to his total existence.

He was carrying a dish of something white and powdery with a spoon stuck in it, and had to move it from right to left before he could shake Gerry’s hand.

“Won’t keep you a moment,” he apologised. “But Bennie apparently didn’t eat anything yet today, and I think I ought to get some sugar down him for energy, if nothing else.”

He thrust open one of the doors giving on to the landing, and Gerry had a brief glimpse of a young man, in his middle twenties, stretched out on a chair and wearing even less than Arthur was. He shuddered and walked on to the other end of the landing, to wait outside Arthur’s door and try not to hear the coaxing words that drifted towards him.

Rotting. Just rotting. What kind of a life is that?

Then the Watch-&-Ward Inc. lock on the downstairs door clicked open to a key, and he saw a girl coming up the stairs: her face beautiful, her body shrouded in a street-cloak that reached below her knees. She was carrying a bag of groceries. On noticing him she gave him a mechanical smile and put her hand to Bennie’s door-handle.

She stopped while he was still digesting the air of residency she displayed.

“Does Bennie have someone with him?” she demanded.

“Uh—Arthur went in. Took some sugar.” Gerry swallowed hard.

“That’s all right then,” the girl said, and twirled off her cloak. Gerry’s breath stopped altogether for a while. Under the cloak she was wearing a Forlon&Morler housfit of a type which his sister had once tried to wear around the apt, only to have her parents put their feet down with shrieks of horror. It consisted of two long boots of red mesh, supported with a soft red cord around her waist, and that was that.

Bennie’s room opened and Arthur appeared. “Ah—Neek!” he said with relief. It sounded like “Neek”.

“Thanks,” the shiggy said. “But not necessary. I’ll get him to eat—he likes my cooking.”

“All yours, then,” Arthur said with a parodied bow. “You don’t know Gerry, do you? Gerry Lindt—Monique Delorne!”

The shiggy gave a preoccupied nod and vanished into Bennie’s room. Arthur dusted his hands and walked past Gerry to let him into his own.

“That’s under control,” he said with satisfaction. “Come on in—come on!”

Gerry complied with a backward glance, but Bennie’s door was shut fast.

Nothing had changed in the cramped space Arthur called home since his last visit, bar minor details. It was still in incredible chaos and the smell still suggested decay, as though the bric-à-brac constituted a domestic garbage pile. That was part of Arthur too, however; one could scarcely imagine him in any other setting.

For a moment he almost regretted coming. You couldn’t expect someone like Arthur to be properly appreciative of anyone else volunteering to defend his chosen way of life. And yet there was something so sickly about the approval expressed by people who were appreciative …

“The draft got your balls, I hear,” Arthur said. “Correct?”

Gerry nodded and swallowed. “I have to report down at Ellay in the morning.”

“Goodbye, then,” Arthur said briskly. “Well, that’s over with. What can I offer you?”

“Ah—what?”

“I said goodbye. Wasn’t that why you came around? And having got that out of the way I offered you—well—whatever I can offer you. I believe I have some vodka, and I know I have some pot, and I also have some of this new stuff Triptine that GT’s putting out, one of their few justifications for existing. At least, so Bennie tells me. I haven’t got around to trying it myself because people of my blood-group are extra susceptible and I’m liable to hitrip for three or four days. So I’ll wait for a free weekend. Well?”

“Ah—a drink, maybe.”

“Clear yourself a chair, then, and I’ll fix it.”

Gerry found new places for a box of unlabelled tapes and two used disposable plates and sat down. He looked about him with a sudden urge to fix his surroundings on his memory. The room was a mess because it had so much in it, and Arthur was too impatient to impose a system, but merely shifted whatever was in his way to a new location.

The things that got in his way, however, were endlessly fascinating. Most of them were Asiatic: figurines, ornaments, embroideries, manuscripts in magnificent calligraphy, incense pans, musical instruments, prints of classic paintings. But there were also a wagon-wheel, and an Indian drum, and a silver flute, and uncountable books, and—

“Gerry!”

With a start, he accepted the glass being waved under his nose.

Settling into his own chair, Arthur regarded him contemplatively. “Hmmm! I was wrong, wasn’t I? We didn’t get over the subject of your departure just by disposing of the goodbyes. It’s sunk its teeth right into your veins.”

Gerry nodded.

“You surprise me sometimes,” Arthur shrugged. “You’re not the adventurous type, yet here you’re letting yourself be ripped out of your cosy regular environment by someone whose decisions are arbitrary because they’re irrational.”

“I don’t quite catch.”

“No? All generals are psychotic. All soldiers are out of their skulls. Matter of strict psychological fact—they’ve had their territoriality stamped on and they can’t recover. I hoped you’d figure this out. Even Bennie did, and you’re brighter than him.”

“Would you want me to be like Bennie?” Gerry grimaced. “So he dodged—so what use did he make of the two years he saved? He’ll be dead before he’s thirty from the stuff he keeps pouring down his throat!”

“By his own hand,” Arthur said. “You have the right to kill you. Nobody else does.”

“I thought you were in favour of euthanasia.”

“Signing the release is the self-directed blow. The rest is simple mechanics, on a par with waiting for the bath to fill with blood after you’ve slashed your wrists.”

“But this just isn’t adequate,” Gerry said doggedly. He felt the need to justify his decision to someone, and to make Arthur understand his viewpoint would be a special triumph. “The fact remains, there are people I owe a debt to, and there are other people out there willing to take away everything up to and including their lives. The hole! I saw an example of it just ten minutes ago when I passed the wreck of Ackleman’s—you know, the sporting-goods store across the way from my home?”

Arthur grinned. “You expect me to display righteous wrath? I think the guns and ammunition looted from Ackleman’s are better off in the hands of people with ideals than they would have been in the hands of the fat bourgeois slobs around your district who don’t have anything to defend and would just have let them off nervously at random.”

“At random! Christ, wasn’t it you who told me about these people who make a hobby of random sabotage?”

“Now don’t get confused the way most people do, Gerry. A codder who’s taken up sabotage for a hobby isn’t on the same footing as someone who loots a gunsmith’s for weapons. He strikes out at random because he doesn’t know what it is in his environment that’s bugging him. Partisans at least have a theory about what’s wrong, and a plan to put it right.”

“And how long would you last under the kind of government they’d like to impose on us?” Gerry demanded.

“Oh, they’d have me out and shoot me the first day they took charge. Anyone like me is intolerably subversive to an authoritarian régime, because I’m not interested in imposing my ideas by force on other people.”

“But a moment ago you were saying no one has a right to take away other people’s lives. If they have no right to do it, there can’t be anything wrong in trying to stop them.”

“Two wrongs,” Arthur sighed, suddenly seeming to lose interest in the discussion. “Want to find out what’s going to become of you, by the way?”

“What?”

Arthur reached to the floor beside his chair and lifted up a book. He blew the dust off. “Old standby,” he said in an affectionate tone. “Haven’t used you as much as you deserve lately, have I? You’ve consulted the Book of Changes before, haven’t you?” he added to Gerry.

“Yes. You showed it to me when I first met you.” Gerry drained his glass and set it aside. “I told you I thought it was a load of dreck.”

“And I told you it works for the same reason there’s no such thing as art. I quoted the Balinese who don’t have a word for it, but merely try to do everything as well as possible. Life’s a continuum. I must have said that to you because I say it to everyone. Did I teach you to use the yarrowstalks?”

“No.”

“Then get out three coins, matched if possible. I’d lend you some of mine but I have absolutely no idea where my taels have got to under all this garbage. If my name was Mary I’d march my lambs through here and they’d bring their taels behind them.”

“Arthur, are you orbiting?”

“Descending, descending. This new Too Much strain from Hitrip is—for once and by a miracle—all the advertising claims it to be. Like a pack to take along with you in the morning?”

“I don’t believe I’d be allowed to. It says something on the draft notice.”

“That figures. One of the standard techniques for breaking a man down into a soldier is to take away the joy that might make him feel life was worth living even for the man on the other end of his gun. Got those coins?”

Choosing three from his pocket, Gerry thought: I was right to avoid Arthur until it was too late to change my mind. He’s so damned certain of his cynical views and I’m not sure about anything—not even about this ancient oracle being a load of dreck.

The coins tossed, the hexagram drawn, Arthur stared at the result. “Pi,” he said, not bothering to consult the book. “With a moving line in the second place. ‘What is required is that we unite with others in order that all may complement and aid one another through holding together’—want to read the full version for yourself?”

Gerry laughed and shook his head. “You know what I think of fortunetelling!”

“Yes, I do, and it’s a shame you won’t take it seriously. Because I don’t like what your moving line does to the hexagram. It turns it into K’an, doubled—‘repetition of danger’. In other words, sparewheel, unless you’re very careful you’re in trouble.”

“I’ve thought about the risks. I don’t need a mystic book to tell me that going into the army can lead to danger.”

Arthur ignored the interruption. “Know what I think? I think the moving line goes into effect tomorrow, when you change from uniting with others to exposing yourself to danger.”

“But I am ‘uniting with others’! Could there be a clearer way of saying ‘join the army’—in the context of that book?”

“Oh yes. But no clearer way to say ‘stay with your family and friends’.”

Gerry rose stiffly to his feet. “I’m sorry, Arthur,” he said. “I hoped you’d realise my mind was made up and it was too late to try and argue me out of it.”

“Oh, I concede that. I’m only trying to show you what you’re doing. Does that make you want to sit down and go on talking?”

“I’m afraid not. I only called to say goodbye. And there are other people I ought to visit before I go to bed.”

“As you like. But do me a favour.” Arthur began rummaging in a pile of books. “Take this along with you and read it in your spare time—if they allow you any. Don’t bother giving it back. I know it more or less by heart.”

“Thanks,” Gerry took the book he was given and thrust it distractedly into his pocket, not even looking to see what it was called.

“Know something?” Arthur went on. “I have a feeling you need this experience in the army, after all. I only wish the odds against you coming back alive were a bit better.”

“The way things are set up now, casualties are very low! Why, they haven’t lost more than—”

“There are some people,” Arthur interrupted, “more likely than others to do everything, including succeed and fail. You’re the type to refuse disillusionment. You’re likely to go on looking for the—the glory, whatever—that accounts for men wanting to risk their lives in battle, and you won’t have found it so you’ll volunteer for some idiotic mission and kick those odds up to a thousand to one against you, and…” He turned over his hand as though spilling a pile of sand from the palm.

Gerry stood rock-still for a long moment; then, abruptly, he tugged open the door and went out.

As he passed Bennie Noakes’s room, he heard faint noises: a creak, a sigh, a chuckle.

Rotting himself to death with all that dreck he takes! And he’s got that shiggy, that beautiful shiggy, and I’ve got …

In that instant he knew he could not disbelieve Arthur’s prophecy about his fate.

It couldn’t be Boot Camp. It had to be Boat Camp. It was on pontoons isolated from the shore by a mile of water. That hadn’t stopped desertions, but it did mean that only the strongest swimmers reached the beach.

There, at long tables, the new recruits had to strip naked and turn out their pockets. A captain accompanied by a top sergeant walked slowly down the far side of each table examining everything, while another sergeant made certain the trembling draftees stood still or else. The captain stopped opposite Gerry and turned around the book Arthur had given him so that he could read the title.

“The Hipcrime Vocab,” the captain said. “Put him under arrest, sergeant—possession of subversive literature.”

“But—!” Gerry exploded.

“Fasten it, soldier, or there’ll be another charge along with that.”

Gerry bit back his fury. “Permission to speak, sir,” he said formally.

“Granted.”

“I’ve never even opened the book, sir. Somebody gave it to me last night and I just left it in my pocket and—”

“It’s been read and re-read until the pages are practically falling out,” the captain said. “Add one, sergeant—lying to an officer.”

They let him off lightly with twenty-four hours’ punishment drill.

As the captain deigned to remark, it was, after all, a first offence.

continuity (8)

THE CAMEL’S BACK

It was almost a shock to Donald to discover how normal the night-time city appeared. It was less crowded than by day because of the phobia he himself had fallen victim to, but that was actively pleasant and made him feel he had gone back in time to the days when he was fresh from college and there had been a million fewer bodies to jostle against on the sidewalk.

Did I not expect the same stores to be in the same places as by day?

He wanted to laugh aloud at his own forebodings. Nonetheless, something was strange. By degrees his mind edged towards recognition of it; it was the kind of problem he was good at, working from hint to clue without having to give the matter his entire attention.

The night was loud. Music came from everywhere, mostly hits from the current popparade in which two or even three disparate rhythms clashed randomly on semitonal discords but sometimes classical—in a hundred yards he identified Beethoven, Berg, Oyaka. That, however, was true of the day as well, especially since the makers of radio-dresslets had begun to fit speakers to their garments instead of phones.

What did strike him as unusual was the sound of talking. Everywhere he heard people gossiping, a luxury for which the day allowed no time.

Hint: these people know each other, say hullo.

Anonymous to him but acquainted among themselves, they grouped in little knots of four or five all over the sidewalks. He had half-assumed they were street-sleepers, until he realised that even by modern standards there were too many of them and began to spot the genuine article: sad-eyed men and women—and children too—clinging to their bags of belongings, waiting for midnight and the legal chance to lie down wherever space presented itself.

“Are you weary, are you heavy-laden? Come to Jesus, come and rest in his bosom!” A woman minister on the steps of a store-front church, addressing the passers-by through a hand shouter.

“No thanks, madam, I fly a straight-type orbit!” yelled a passing yonderboy, and his sparewheels screeched laughter and clapped him on the back. The yonderboy was Afram and so was the minister. The proportion of Aframs in view was five or six times higher than by day.

They look at me with curiosity. Is colour a clue?

But that was a false lead. Bit by bit he pinned down the true reason. He was dressed in the conservative, slightly behind-the-style clothes he generally wore. Most of the people he passed either were shabby, like the street-sleepers, who often as not wore disposables meant for one wearing, kept on for ten, or had taken the fall of darkness as a signal to let their imaginations run riot. Not only the yonderboys with their fantastical puffed shirjacks designed to give the impression of enormous muscles, but the older folk too were gaudy as peacocks in scarlet and turquoise, ebony and chrome. They strutted in everything from RUNG-type robes to a coat of paint and a few strategic feathers.

Answer: it feels like a foreign country.

He gave a thoughtful nod. There was a Caribbean mood in these people’s casual employment of the street as an extension of their homes. It must have been triggered by the erection of the dome, building on and amplifying the high-summer tradition and extending it throughout the year.

* * *

The character of the neighbourhood began to change. He found himself being accosted by shills.

“White noise concert in progress, codder! Only a fin!”

“Excerpts from the Koran in English, live reading, sure to be of interest to an intelligent person such as yourself!”

“Hear the truth which the government screens from you! Recording direct from Peking giving all the facts!”

When he had gone a mile or more the grins and gestures of people he passed led him to discover a small luminescent poster attached unfelt to his back. Annoyed, he removed and read it.

This codder doesn’t know where to. On Triptine he’d be there before he had time to worry.

A GT promotion? Hardly. It was notorious that the government discouraged excessive zeal by the Nark Force, because psychedelics drained away so much potential subversion, but there were still—officially—laws in most states. He balled it up and threw it at a trashcan.

A lean, rather scholarly-looking Afram fell in beside him and kept tossing him sidelong glances. When they had gone a score of paces together he cleared his throat.

“Weren’t you at—?”

“No,” Donald said. “Spit the string and I’ll tell you if I’m interested, which’ll save your time and mine.”

The Afram blinked. After another few strides he shrugged. “No complaints about that, Father?”

“No.”

“Want your genotype read? Show me your palms. A fin gets you a strict scientific commentary—I have certificates.”

“Thanks, I can afford genalysis.”

“But no prodgies, hm?” The Afram looked wise. “Could be the trouble is with the Eugenics Board—no, don’t tell me. However bad it is there are ways to fix it. I have certain contacts, and if you can afford genalysis you can probably afford their services.”

“I’m clean,” Donald said with a sigh.

The Afram stopped dead. Involuntarily Donald did the same and turned so they were facing each other.

“You son of a bleeder,” the Afram said. “Here all I’m carrying is sickle-cell anaemia which in the malarial belt is actually advantageous, and they won’t let me though I’ve been married three times.”

“So why don’t you try the malarial countries?” Donald snapped. He slipped his hand into the pocket containing the Jettigun.

“A typical paleass remark!” the Afram sneered. “Why don’t you go back to Europe, then?”

Abruptly Donald’s annoyance faded. He said, “Look, cousin, you should meet my roomie and learn better. He’s Afram too.”

“You I don’t mind about,” the Afram said. “The fewer of you who fly straight orbits the better. But it’s a thing to weep about, you having a brown-nose roomie. Another generation, you’ll have melanin-high skin on the list of disallowed genes!”

He spat deliberately an inch from Donald’s feet and spun on his heel.

Depressed by the encounter, Donald walked on. He was barely aware of the distance he covered. Occasional stimuli made an impact on him—the banshee wail of a prowlie’s siren, children fighting over an insult, the ever-present music—but he was preoccupied.

The Afram’s reference to the malarial countries had sparked a train of thought, bringing back to mind what Norman had said earlier about Beninia. As ever, his computer-active subconscious had been stirring his information into new patterns.

State would want to know why Elihu Masters was making an approach to GT. Assumption: State does know why. If either the Dahomalians or the RUNGs persuade Beninia to federate, the disappointed party will have to fight or lose face. The only things that can prevent war are (a) President Obomi, who isn’t immortal, and (b) the intervention of an outside force they could join in railing against. In which case—!

He had it, all of a sudden. Three hours’ reading, five days a week bar vacation for ten years, had stocked his memory with all the information necessary to envisage the plan as it had to be.

But in the very instant it came to him, the knowledge was kicked to the back of his mind. Stopping dead, he wondered where in the name of God he was.

By the street-signs he had reached the lower East Side, an area presently at the bottom of the cycle of death and renewal that sometimes made the city seem like an organism. At the end of last century there had been a brief moment of glory here; decade by decade the would-be connectors had followed the intellectuals and the pseudos eastwards from the Village into the ruined area close to the river, until by 1990 or so this had been a high-price zone. But the wheel turned further, and the bored and prosperous moved out. Now the grace of the elegant buildings was crumbling again under a bright masking of advertisements: flagging vigour calls for Potengel, MasQ-Lines take the world in their stride, ask the man who’s married to Mary Jane … Across the display slanted the unrelated diagonals of fire-escapes, spotted with piles of garbage like forest fungi.

Donald turned slowly around. There were fewer people on the streets here. The very air breathed a sense of decay. Only a few minutes’ walk away was the brilliance and activity he had left behind without noticing, so it was small wonder the residents preferred not to spend their time here. The stores were closed except for the few that could afford automated pay-out clerks, and those were almost vacant of customers. There was no silence—there was no silent place in the city—but every sound which came to his ears seemed to be distant: not in that building but the next, not on this street but a block away.

Facing him now was one of the luxuries the architects had included when they worked this district over twenty years ago—an adventure playground elaborated into the gap between two tall buildings, a monkey-puzzle in three dimensions calculated so that a careless child could fall no further than one short level. For a moment his mind refused to accept the connection between the lines and forms he saw, and anything with solidity. Then the perspective separating near from far enabled him to grasp the image and he realised he was looking at a sort of Riemann ladder of concrete and steel silhouetted from behind by the last of the unbroken lamps on the struts.

Something moved among the frightful artificial branches. Donald, uncertain whether it was human, eased his hand into his pocket and began to wriggle his Karatand over his fingers.

The monstrous creature loomed, incredibly flexible, down the lip of a miniaturised precipice, and took on reality—a shadow, cast by a child passing in front of the surviving lamp.

Donald let out a great gasp of relief. The idea occurred to him that he must have been slipped a psychedelic, and then, when he discounted actual ingestion, he found himself wondering if perhaps the air was charged with the fumes of some drug affecting his perceptions.

Mechanically tugging the Karatand towards his wrist, he beat a retreat towards his own manor.

Unexpectedly, because this was not a cab-hiring district, he spotted a cruising taxi within a hundred yards. He called to the driver, who acknowledged him with a wave shadowed on the windshield.

Purring, the vehicle drew level with him. He made to get in as the driver activated the hydraulic door-controls.

Not so fast.

The words were as clear in his mind as if someone had spoken them from inside the passenger compartment. He delayed removing his hand from the door-pillar and looked for anything which might have alarmed him.

Probably imagination. I’m jumpy enough—

But no. Affixed to the air-conditioning nozzles was a device that automatically sent a radio signal to police headquarters if the driver dozed a passenger. It had been tampered with; the plastic seal certifying its annual inspection had discoloured to a warning red. He’d hailed a pseudo, one of the cabs whose drivers dozed their victims illegally and took them to be robbed in a dark side-street.

The door slammed. But not all the way. Even with the force of the hydraulics behind it, it could not crush the impact-sensitive Karatand which Donald had left in its way. There was a clang of hammered metal and a jar that travelled clear to his elbow, but he retained enough presence of mind not to snatch back his hand.

By law, these cabs were designed so that they could not be driven away unless the doors were closed. But Donald’s strength was inadequate to force his way out.

Impasse.

Behind the armour-glass of his cabin, the driver hit the door-controls again and again. The door slammed back and forth, but the Karatand endured. Suddenly very calm, Donald stared at the driver, but the man was too wary to let his face be seen even in the rear-view mirror. It was twisted to the side so that it covered his licence photograph, and its function had been taken over by a miniature TV unit.

What am I going to do now?

“All right, Shalmaneser!”

The voice made him start as it boomed from the speaker set in the roof.

“I’ll open up, you hit the sidewalk and we’ll say no more about it, how’s that?”

“No,” Donald said, surprised at his own determination.

“You can’t get out unless I let you.”

“You can’t drive off unless I let you.”

“Hoping for a prowlie to come by, hm? Fuzzy-wuzzies don’t pass this way if they can help!”

“Somebody’s going to notice a cab with the hire sign lit sitting in the middle of the street and not moving.”

“Who said it was lit?”

“You can’t turn it off without you closing the door!”

“Think not? I cut out the police alarm, didn’t I?”

“And it shows—you turned the seal red.”

“You’re the first in two weeks noticed that. Last one I chopped the fingers off.”

Donald licked his lips and eyed the adjacent sidewalks. Although this district was comparatively empty, it was not wholly unpopulated. An old Afram woman was this very moment approaching. He leaned to the gap in the door and called out.

“Lady! Fetch the police! This cab’s a pseudo!”

The old woman stared at him, crossed herself, and hurried by.

The driver gave a sour laugh. “You don’t know what it’s like around here, do you, Shalmaneser? Got left out of your programming!”

Donald’s heart sank. He was on the point of admitting defeat and offering to hit the sidewalk, when a movement at the corner of the street attracted him.

“You said prowlies don’t come this way,” he exclaimed.

“Right.”

“Then how about that one closing from behind?”

The driver stared at his TV unit, dismayed.

Does he think I’m bluffing? That’s no bluff—it’s a hundred per cent genuine prowl car!

Armoured, armed with gas and flame, the police car pussyfooted towards the stationary cab. The driver sounded his move-along siren.

“Take your hand off the pillar,” the hackie said. “I’ll balance the deal for you. What you want? I have contacts—Skulbustium, Yaginol, shiggies, name it and I’ll fix it.”

“No,” Donald said again, this time triumphantly.

He could see the silhouettes of the men in the prowlie now. Also, by this time, half a dozen people had gathered on the sidewalk. A couple of them were teenage Aframs, who shouted something indistinct at the police and doubled up in laughter.

The door of the prowlie opened, and Donald relaxed. A matter of seconds now—

Except that the moment the fuzzy-wuzzy stood up on the street, a hail of garbage pelted him from nowhere. He yelled a curse, hauled out his bolt-gun and sent a shot high into the darkness towards the adventure playground. Someone screamed. The standers-by dived for cover. The driver piled out of Donald’s cab and the policeman loosed another shot at him but missed. A whole can of garbage came slamming down from a higher level now, contents first, then can, squelch, then crash. Another policeman leaned out of the car and fired at the approximate source of the attack.

Belatedly aware that the door was no longer pressing on his hand, Donald scrambled out, shouting for the police to stop wasting their shots and go after the hackie. The man peering from the prowlie’s window saw him only as a human shape and fired at him. The hiss of the bolt searing past his ear made him gulp and stumble for the sidewalk.

A hand reached up from the protection of a stoop and caught his ankle. The gesture might have been friendly but Donald could not tell. He tore his Jettigun from his pocket and fired it into the face of the man who had clutched at him.

A scream. A girl’s voice: “You do that to my brothah—!” Windows flinging open both sides of the street. Shouting kids, emerging from the senseless shadows of the adventure playground, delighted at the excitement and starting to hurl down whatever came handy—fragments of split concrete, cans and packages, plant-tubs. A dark, pretty face transformed by fury. The erratic brilliance of gun-bolts as the police fired wildly. Someone uttering a resonant Spanish curse: “May that lover of he-goats catch the clap and the pox!”

He struck out at the girl who was trying to claw his face, and remembered his Karatand too late. The metal-rigid glove slammed into her mouth and sent her moaning and bleeding into the middle of the street, into the fierce lights of the prowl car. The red trickling down her chin was brilliant as fire.

“Kill the bleeders!”

Where did they all come from?

Suddenly the street was alive, like an overturned ants’ nest, doors and passages vomiting people. Metal bars glinted, throats shrieked animal fury, windows shattered and glass rained slashingly on heads below. The prowlie’s siren added to the din and the two policemen who had ventured out climbed back in a second ahead of another salvo of garbage. Between the prowlie and the cab the injured girl rocked on her heels, moaned, dripped blood from her cut lip down her shimmering green dresslet. Donald shrank back into an embrasure decorating the wall of the nearest building, overlooked because the late arrivals had taken it for granted the police were responsible for the girl’s crying.

The prowlie tried to back up. Through its still-open window Donald heard its occupants shouting to headquarters for aid. A flame-gun belched at the base of a lamp-post and metal ran like lard in a pan. The post fell across the back of the prowlie and blocked its retreat. Yelling joyfully, scores of people ran to develop the improvised barricade into something more substantial. A can of oil was flung down and the flame-gun ignited it. Capering like dervishes, youths and girls taunted the police by its light. Someone scored a hit on the car’s left headlamp with a rock and it shattered. Too late the driver remembered to wind up the wire-mesh screens. Another scream of triumph and another rock, making the car’s roof boom like a steel drum. Paint chipped and fragments flew, one of them taking a stander-by in the eye so that he covered his face with both hands and shouted that he was blind.

That settled matters.

“Oh my God,” Donald said, and it was more of a prayer than he had uttered since he was a schoolchild. “It’s going to be a riot. It’s going—to be—a riot…!”