Stand on Zanzibar (10 page)
Authors: John Brunner
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.
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!”
