Stand on Zanzibar

context (9)

GUNCRIT

“People who feel the need to foul up their perceptions with hop or Yaginol or Skulbustium simply aren’t turned on to the essential truth that the real world can always be identified by its unique characteristic: it, and it only, can take us completely by surprise.

“Take two lumps of greyish metal and bring them together. Result: one wrecked city.

“Could anyone have predicted or envisaged that until they knew enough about the real world to calculate the properties of a substance called Uranium-235?

“People are going around marvelling at the fact that there’s a solid scientific basis for palmistry. Anybody with a grain of intelligence could have said, directly the notion of the genetic code was formulated, that there was no a priori reason why the pattern of the folds in the palm should not be related to a person’s temperament by way of an association of genes sharing the same chromosome. Indeed, there were all kinds of reasons for assuming this actually was so, because we aren’t totally stupid—as I’ve pointed out before—and unless there was in palmistry some element of relevance to real experience we’d have given it up and gone chasing some other will-o’-the-wisp. There’s no shortage of them.

“But it took forty years for someone to conduct a properly rigorous study of the subject and demonstrate that the suspicion was well-founded. This I do find remarkable—or disheartening might be a better word.

“All right: what should you be surprised at, these days?

“The fact that, having learned so much about ourselves—the designs on our palms being just one example of the way we’ve analysed ourselves down to the constituent molecules, so that we can claim to be in sight of the day when we won’t merely be able to ensure the sex of our offspring (if we can afford the fee) but also to choose whether we’ll have a math genius in the family, or a musician, or a moron (some people might like to breed a moron for a pet, I guess…)—having got to this state, then, we know less about our reactions in the mass than we do about the behaviour of non-human things like a lump of U-235.

“Or maybe it’s not so amazing. Without being totally stupid, we do display a tremendous aptitude for it.”

—You: Beast by Chad C. Mulligan

(HISTORY Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can’t even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

tracking with closeups (9)

POPPYSEED

Was this really a drab corner of the world, or was it only apparently drab because she was back from orbit? To a place like this one had to come walking firm and heavy on one’s own two feet, just in case when they did the analyses they thought to check for what was usually there, but according to people who should know the end-products should be flushed out by a thirty-six hour abstinence, which was freefalling.

But it made one so easily bored.

Detail by detail: the plastic walls, of a faded yellow; the windows turned to part-opaque because the sun was shining on the far side of them; various posters displayed in frames, setting forth miscellaneous regulations you were supposed to comply with; benches apparently designed to make the users uncomfortable so that persons of no fixed abode would not care to keep returning on pointless visits for the sake of a seat and a little warmth; and everywhere the smell of staleness, of dust and ancient paper and old shoes.

The only touch in the place which suggested nature was in the floor, covered by tiles with a design of dead leaves embedded under a clear plastic surface. But even that was a failure, for when one looked directly down at the tiles one noticed the way the pattern repeated, and if one looked obliquely, the leaves disappeared behind a mist of scratches and scrapes, the legacy of uncountable feet that had crossed the room, and all one could see was a generally dung-brown expanse.

“Not much longer.”

“Better not be.”

The other people waiting glanced up, the fact of speech being a distraction and a stimulus. They were all women, from twenty to fifty, and all further advanced than Poppy, some with their bellies protruding far on to their laps, others as yet barely showing a roundness. These latter would presumably have come to hear the result of their karyotypings. Poppy shuddered at the idea of having fluid from her womb drawn off through a needle, and wondered how many of these women would have to be officially emptied of their offspring.

As though to enter the protective aura of her femininity, being the only man present, Roger crowded close and put his arm around her shoulders. She reached up to stroke his hand and smiled sidelong at him.

She was a strikingly lovely girl, even dressed as usual in three-quarter puffed slax that needed laundering and a shapeless bluzette meant to fit a much bigger woman. She had a fine-boned oval face highlighted with big dark eyes and framed with black braids, and just enough tawny admixture to her complexion to make her seem feral. And, as yet, her pregnancy had done nothing except improve the line of her bust.

She giggled at a private thought, and Roger squeezed her with his encircling arm.

“Miss Shelton,” said a disembodied voice. “And—ah—Mr. Gawen!”

“That’s us,” Roger said, and rose to his feet.

Through the door which opened for them on their approach they found a tired-faced man of early middle age seated at a table beneath a picture of the King and Queen and their two—count them, a responsible number, two—children. Ranked before him were piles of forms and a number of sterile-sealed containers with spaces on the lids for writing names and numbers.

“Sit down,” he said, hardly looking at them. “You’re Miss Poppy Shelton?”

Poppy nodded.

“And—ah—how long?”

“What?”

“How long since you became pregnant?”

“My doctor says about six weeks. I went to him when I missed my period and he told me to come along here as soon as I was sure it wasn’t irregularity.”

“I see.” The man behind the table wrote on a form. “And you’re the father, are you, Mr. Gawen?”

“If Poppy says so, yes, I am.”

The man gave Roger a sharp glare as though suspecting levity. “Hah! Well, it always helps to have the putative father turn up. These days one can’t rely on it, of course. And you want it to go to term, Miss Shelton?”

“What?”

“You actually want to bear the child?”

“Of course I do!”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. Most of the women who come in here arrive armed with everything they can think of in the hope of being granted an abortion—lists of diseases they caught as children, the story of how grandma became senile after her hundredth birthday, or some specious bit of string tied to a child on the next block who’s rumoured to have German measles. Are you getting married?”

“Is that required by law, too?” Poppy snapped.

“No, unfortunately. And I don’t like your tone, young woman. The things that are—as you put it—‘required by law’ are a simple matter of human ecology. With almost a hundred million people in this overcrowded island of ours, it would make very little sense to continue wasting our resources both material and human on such pointless undertakings as training phocomeli or cleaning up after morons. All the advanced countries of the world have come around to this point of view now, and if you want to evade the legal restrictions on child-bearing you’ll have to go to a country that can’t afford decent medical care for you anyway. Here at least you’re assured that your child will on the one hand have no hereditary disabilities and on the other enjoy adequate protection from pre- and post-natal risks. What you make of the child after it’s born is up to you.”

Poppy giggled again, and Roger clamped his hand on her arm to shut her up.

“If the lecture’s over…?” he hinted.

The man shrugged. “All right. Did your doctor tell you what you were to bring with you?”

Roger unloaded containers from the sagging pockets of his shirjack. “Urine samples—hers and mine. Semen sample in this plastic envelope. Nail parings, hair clippings, saliva and nasal mucus, all here.”

“Good.” But the man didn’t sound pleased. “Stretch out your hand, Miss Shelton.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

He jabbed at the back of her finger with a needle, squeezed out a drop of blood, adsorbed it on a sheet of filter paper and placed it in a labelled envelope.

“And you, Mr. Gawen.”

The process repeated, he leaned back in his chair. “That’s all for today, then. If there’s no immediately apparent hereditary defect you’ll be allowed to continue the pregnancy until the thirteenth week when you must present yourself at a hospital for karyotyping. You’ll be notified in about three days. Good morning.”

Poppy lingered. “What happens if it’s disallowed?” she said after a moment.

“Depends. If it’s because of something you’re carrying, abortion and sterilisation. If it’s because of something he’s carrying that you contribute a recessive to, abortion and orders not to start another one together.”

“And if I don’t turn up to have it aborted?”

“You get want-listed, arrested if you’re caught, and jailed. In any case, no hospital in the country will accept you in its maternity unit, no midwife will attend you, and if the child is born deformed it will be institutionalised.” The man relented a little. “It probably sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But I’m afraid it’s part of the burden of responsibility towards the next generation that we in the present day have had to accept.”

Poppy giggled once more and Roger, flushing with embarrassment, led her out.

On the street, she flung her arms around him and jumped up and down.

“Roger, we’re going to make it, we’re going to make it!”

“I hope so,” he said with less enthusiasm.

“Oh, you’re an old pessimist. Must be because you’re down on the surface. Got anything with you?”

“I have some Skulbustium gum. But isn’t that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid?”

“No, the doc said it was only Yaginol that was likely to harm the kid.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely. I asked him specially and that’s what he told me.”

“Okay, then.”

He extracted the pack from his pocket and together they chomped on the vaguely aniseed-flavoured chicle lumps, waiting for the lift to catch them. They stared at their surroundings in search of clues. At the far end of the grimy London street barriers had been erected with big signs on them stating that the road was closed for development; as at many places in the metropolis the plan was to build over the original roadway and leave only pedestrian passages.

Bit by bit the red and white poles of the barriers began to seem like the stems of exotic plants, the red in particular glowing hot as fire. The memory of the drab official waiting-room, of the unpleasant bureaucrat who had interviewed them, receded into a dream-like distant past. Poppy, one hand on her belly to bless the miracle taking place there with a willed contact, grew round-eyed in awe.

“He’s going to see this world, isn’t he?” she whispered. “Not that one—not that shit-floored dingy horrible kind of world, but a beautiful place that never stops being exciting. Roger, which of the lifters comes out in the milk? I’ve got to make sure he never sees the ugly world at all!”

“We’ll have to ask the doc,” Roger said. His face had settled into an expression of tranquil certainty. “The doc’s helped lots of others besides us and he’s bound to know.”

He took her hand and they walked, the only two real people in the universe, down a street paved with jewels toward a land of love.