Stand on Zanzibar

context (20)

THE PROS AND CONS OF A LUNATIC SOCIETY

“Thank you for that kind introduction, Madam Chairman. Well, ladies and gentlemen—you will forgive me for sitting down while I address you, I’m sure, because coming home from Moonbase Zero after a long stay is rather like getting up after being bedridden for a month and carrying one’s own weight under six times the lunar gravity is a tiring task.

“I thought I might begin by answering some of the questions which people most commonly ask me, and to which I assume the answers aren’t very widely known or else they wouldn’t crop up so often. As you know, my speciality is psychology, so people very often say to me, ‘Isn’t it a terrible strain living up there on the Moon—isn’t it a hostile, terrifying environment?’

“They’re always surprised when I say no, not nearly as bad as right here on Earth. But that’s the literal truth. You see, on the Moon you know exactly how the environment can be hostile to you. You know that if you puncture a tunnel-wall, or snag your suit, you’re in danger of death, or at least of losing a limb to dehydratory gangrene when the sphincter at the next joint inwards seals off the empty section of the suit. You know that if you forget to switch your suit to reflecting before crossing a patch of open ground in full sunlight you’ll bake before you return to shadow, and if you don’t cut in your heaters when you go out at night your feet will be frostbitten within fifty metres.

“More important than that, though, you know you’re in an environment where co-operation is essential to survival.

“There are no strangers on the Moon. I’ve had my life saved three separate times by people I’d never met before and one of them was a Chinese. I’ve done the same—and this is not in any sense boasting because it’s a fact of lunar existence—for two people, one a professional colleague and one a novice I hadn’t even spoken to since his arrival a week earlier.

“Living-space is at a premium, of course, and we’re all jammed together in a sort of immobile submarine, but we’re hand-picked for our ability to make allowances for the failings of our fellow human beings, and anyone who doesn’t measure up to the intensive demands of the lunar base is shipped home fast. Perhaps some of you have seen a play called ‘Macbeth of Moonbase Zero’, Hank Sodley’s remake of the Shakespeare original, in which this paranoid establishes contact with aliens who can predict the future? The whole thing’s a nonsense, because paranoia loses its meaning on the Moon. You are being threatened, and you can learn and control the forces threatening you.

“Down here on Earth, though, you may walk around the corner and find yourself confronting a mucker with an axe or a gun. You may catch a strain of antibiotic-resistant germs. You may—especially here on the West Coast—run into one of the little pranks invented by the funny people who treat sabotage as an amusing hobby. You have absolutely no way of telling whether that innocuous stranger over there is about to haul out a weapon and attack you, or blow a disease your way, or explode an incendiary bomb in your disposall tube.

“In short, life on the Moon is much more like Bushman society prior to European contamination, or the basal culture of the Zuñi, than it is like life here in California or Moscow or Peking.

“That’s why we Lunatics don’t regard our environment as intolerable. Muckers don’t develop where people feel that everyone else is on their own side rather than out to undermine them. Diseases can be controlled almost down to single organisms because we have the finest sterilisation facilities imaginable—just let a little space and raw sunlight in, and you’ve cooked every known terrestrial germ to a faretheewell. Lunar-native organisms, of course, can’t infect human bodies. And as for playing dangerous pranks with sabotage gadgets, this is literally unthinkable.

“Now when I’ve explained that, people usually say how odd it is to find the staff of one of mankind’s most advanced scientific projects behaving more like Bushmen than modern Americans. That is, if they’ve seen the point of my earlier explanation.

“So I have to say no, it’s the reverse of odd, it’s a simple consequence of the fact that the lunar environment contains a fixed number of variables. Human beings can cope with big plain facts like seasons or lunar night and day, like drought or vacuum, like a pestilence among the game animals they feed off or a rocket going astray and crashing a load of provisions into a mountainside. What we can’t cope with is seven billion competing members of our own species. You have too many incalculable variables to make a rational response when a crisis occurs.

“And one more thing, too. There’s no one on the moon who doesn’t know that he’s making a contribution to the whole. Not a day goes past but you can point to something you’ve done and say, ‘I achieved that today!’ It may be physical, like adding an extension to the living accommodation, or it may be intangible, like adding to our stock of stellar observations, but it’s indescribably satisfying. These days, an urban psychiatrist here on Earth thinks twice about handling a case with a rural background, but up there I’ve been responsible for the mental welfare of people not only from different countries but of different religions and different ideologies, and I’ve never had a major problem from it.

“When I get this far people usually flinch and inquire nervously whether that includes the little red brothers. And I can say nothing else except that trying to subvert vacuum or a solar storm will get you one place and that’s a grave.

“Of course I’m including Chinese! Like I said, I owe my life to a Chinese colleague, a man we’d exchanged with the staff of the communist observatory at Aristarchus. And down here in the middle of the Pacific, which apart from Antarctica is the only part of the planet that you can compare to the Moon for loneliness and lack of life-supports, all you can think of doing is blasting each other. It makes me sick. Madam Chairman, somebody had better get me a trank, and maybe then I’ll be able to get on with the cosy tourist-type gossip I have down here in the rest of my notes. Right now I don’t think I could read it without vomiting.”

continuity (25)

DADDY OF THEM ALL

There was one local touch in the suite they assigned to Norman for his stay at the Embassy: a sixteenth-century mask of carved wood stained in shades of stark red, black and white, mounted on the wall at the head of his bed. Otherwise he might still have been in the States, apart from the fact that occasionally the power seemed to fluctuate and the lighting grew momentarily yellow.

He was instructing one of the servants—a local boy of about fourteen who spoke a minimum of usable English—where to stow his bags, when the intercom sounded and he found it was Elihu calling.

“There was a memo from Zad in my mail-tray,” the ambassador said. “We’re to dine at Presidential Palace at eight-thirty; he’ll have the ministers of finance, education and foreign affairs to meet us. Can you present a preliminary brief?”

“I guess so,” Norman shrugged. “Does he want the whole GT team or just me?”

“He doesn’t specify, but I think it might make sense to establish the maximum of personal contact right away. Will you inform the others? And I’ll warn him there will be six of us—no, seven, come to think of it, because Gideon should be there too. He speaks pretty good Shinka, and we may need that.”

“I’d assumed anyone of cabinet rank would speak English here,” Norman said after a pause.

“African English and American English are going separate ways,” Elihu grunted. “You’d be surprised at some of the changes that have taken place. Be ready to leave by eight-fifteen, then, please.”

Norman nodded and cut the circuit. He turned to the boy, who was hanging up his clothes, almost relieved to be able to give him something else to do. Personal service in the States had grown to be a thing you confined to the business field; to have it done in a domestic context was vaguely unsettling.

“You know which rooms the other Americans have been put in?”

“Yessah!”

“Go and ask them to come and see me as soon as possible, please.”

“Yessah!”

* * *

He had finished the unpacking himself by the time the first of his colleagues entered: Consuela Pech, a pretty girl of mainly Puerto Rican extraction whom Rex Foster-Stern might have chosen for his representative either because she was the optimum candidate or because he’d been sleeping with her and grown bored and seized the chance to move her out of his way. Norman had barely had time to exchange a greeting with her when the three others came in together: the economists delegated by Hamilcar Waterford largely because they were both brown-noses, Terence Gale and Worthy Lunscomb, and the linguist whose acquaintance Norman had made only just before leaving, Derek Quimby, a chubby fair man with an air of perpetual bewilderment.

“Sit down, all of you,” Norman invited, and took a seat facing them as they grouped in a semi-circle. “We’re being kicked straight into orbit this evening—having dinner with the president and three of his ministers—and I thought we should review our initial presentation. Derek, you won’t be particularly involved at the first stage, but I gather you have some specialised local knowledge which may indicate weakness in our thinking now and then, so I’d be pleased if you’d point out any such difficulty, right?”

Derek nodded and swallowed largely.

“Fine. Consuela, if I know Rex, your dept has armed you with everything we’d normally use in putting over a project at home. How much of it can be scaled down for an over-dinner discussion?”

“I insisted on them giving me material for three different levels of presentation,” Consuela said. “I can tackle this easily. Also I can tackle a delegate committee with up to twenty personalised approaches, and I can tackle a meeting of the Beninian parliament with the full complement of sixty-one members present, on a screen-and-speaker basis.”

“Excellent!” Norman said, amending his previous guess about the girl’s aptitude for this job. “Now the minister of finance is going to be there, and he’s the man most likely to jump to our side. It can’t be any fun at all handling the budgetary problems in a country like this which is permanently on the verge of bankruptcy. Terence, I want you and Worthy to sweeten him right at the start with some costings. Don’t worry about precision, just get it into his head that this chunk of ground has suddenly acquired colossal economic potential. Now there’s a good chance, remember, that we know more about the economics of this area than he does—we have the benefit of Shal’s analyses and in accordance with the old saw about the high cost of being poor I doubt if Beninia has ever been able to afford comparable service from the Common Europe computers. Don’t lean too heavily on superior information. Ease him into thinking that it’s his, not our, local knowledge that’s making the scheme viable. Clear?”

Worthy said, “Can be tried. What do we know about him as a person, though?”

“I’ll arrange for Elihu, or Gideon perhaps, to let you have a character-sketch while we’re on the way to the palace. Consuela, let’s go back to you. The minister of education is your first target because so much of the scheme is predicated on bringing up the literacy and skilled-labour level in under a decade. I want you to begin by seeing if you can get her to macluhan the local situation. Bring her around to the subject of how traditional attitudes condition people’s reaction to local information. She’ll probably react well, since she must have been educated abroad—there isn’t a centre of higher learning here worth the name apart from this privately owned business college you presumably know about.”

“I can give you some tips,” Derek put in, addressing Consuela. “Some highly suggestive things have happened to the English vocabulary the colonial régime left behind here.”

“Thank you, Derek,” Norman said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for from you. Now let’s look at a question we haven’t faced as yet. What’s our biggest single obstacle to acceptance for this scheme?”

There was a moment of silence. Terence said at length, “Well—ah—the risk of not getting back the return we’re looking for! I mean, before we conduct our on-the-spot surveys we can’t be certain that—”

Norman was shaking his head vigorously.

“It’s not a monetary problem. It’s a personal one.”

“Whether we can sell it to the president,” Consuela said.

“Correct.” Norman leaned forward, injecting his voice with urgency. “I’ve said this before and I’m saying it again. You can’t regard Beninia as a modern, Western, administrative unit. Elihu has dinned this into me until I think I’ve got the image, but I want to be certain we all share it. This is more like a colossal family with nearly a million members than it’s like a nation in our sense. Let me refresh your memories about the way Elihu put it to the GT board. What President Obomi is looking for is a heritage to leave his people that will save them from being swallowed up in their powerful neighbours. He’s not going to look at this in terms of hard cash, except insofar as economic security will contribute to general welfare. Talk to him about food, not money; talk about building schools, not processing prodgies into mechanics and technologists; talk about healthy children, not about mileage of sewer-pipes. You get the image? You’re certain? Because what’s important is to fulfil the president’s hopes, not underpin the failing stocks in MAMP!”

He saw their nods, but knew it wasn’t for their benefit he had added that final emphatic warning. It was for himself.

I haven’t seen or sensed the proof of it yet, but Elihu swears to it and I think I have to believe him. It’s only fair and just that sometimes making a fat profit should coincide with doing long-term good, and chances come too seldom for us to miss even one of them.

Now that he had finally seen Beninia, though, he was irrationally afraid that he had built himself an illusion at long range, and next week or next month he might cease to be able to accept that he was doing good. And if that happened there would be no other handy prop with which to underpin the shattered parody of purpose that justified his life.

* * *

A short while later he was terrified to realise that when he spoke that apparently clear injunction to himself and his colleagues all he had done was mouth the words. He had not, even he himself had not, taken in the full implications of the statement.

At the Presidential Palace a magnificently robed major-domo nearly seven feet high ushered them into an ante-room where black servants were bringing aperitifs and trays of tiny African hors-d’oeuvres to the assembled company: Mrs. Kitty Gbe, education; Dr. (Econ.) Ram Ibusa, finance; Dr. (PPE) Leon Elai, foreign affairs; and President Obomi.

Upon seeing whom, Elihu strode forward unceremoniously and embraced him. Drawing back, he said, “Zad! My God, this is terrible! You look ten years older and it’s only been a couple of months!”

“I have no more gods,” the president said. He drew back from the embrace and forced a smile. “It’s wonderful to see you back here, anyway, Elihu. There was a moment when I feared—but never mind that, I have good doctors and they keep me going somehow. Will you not introduce me to your distinguished fellow countrymen?”

He blinked his surviving eye at Norman and his companions.

“Why—ah—of course,” Elihu said. “Let me present first Dr. Norman Niblock House, of General Technics’ board…”

Norman held out his hand. “I’m honoured to meet you, sir,” he said. “And I hope very much that we’ve worked out a way to solve some of your country’s problems, and that you’ll find it acceptable.”

“Is it, Elihu?” President Obomi inquired, glancing at the ambassador.

“I’ve done my best to get you what you asked for,” Elihu said.

“Thank you,” Obomi smiled. “You must explain it to us over dinner, Dr. House. I know it’s a shame to spoil good food with business, and my chef will be infuriated, but time is running out for me and—well, I’m sure you’ll appreciate my plight.”

He turned to Consuela as Elihu named her and ushered her forward, while Norman stepped back in a daze. Automatically he waved aside a tray of drinks that a servant held before him.

The matter can’t be settled that easily! Surely there will have to be argument, persuasion, a selling job?… How about these ministers of his? Are they as prepared as he is to take someone else’s word when the whole future of their nation is at stake?

He stared at them, the one plump woman and the two medium-sized men with their cheeks scarred in traditional designs, and could not detect anything less than satisfaction in their expressions. The truth began to sink through the sluggish water of his mind.

When Elihu compared Obomi to the head of a family, I thought he was just invoking an analogy. But this is how a family welcomes friends with a proposition to make—offers food and drink, deals first with personal matters, gets around to the irritating questions of business later. They aren’t looking on us as foreign delegates: ambassador, representatives of a giant corporation. It’s more as though …

At that point he almost lost track of the inspiration that was slowly emerging to awareness. He got it back in the voice of Chad Mulligan, asking whether anyone knew an interior decorator he could tell to do up an apartment for him with the latest modern gewgaws.

That’s it.

He took a deep breath.

A country or a super-corporation had behaviour-patterns distinct from smaller groups, let alone individuals. Needing something done, they briefed diplomatic missions, or put out a contract to tender, or in some other fashion formalised and ritualised their action, and if they failed to prepare thoroughly enough there was calamity.

The President of Beninia, needing something done, had acted just the way Elihu described, but until this moment Norman had failed to grasp the exactness of the comparison—like a paterfamilias he had turned to an old friend whom he trusted and explained his needs, and when the friend came back with his expert proposal …

It was settled.

But it took him until the time of their departure, after midnight, to convince himself that he was right, and most of the following day to make his colleagues understand.