Stand on Zanzibar (29 page)

“Act normally!”

“That’s what I said. Like keep your voice down when you talk about the—uh—subject of importance, hm?” Another of the insincere smiles.

*   *   *

SITUATION
: same.

*   *   *

“Darling, that’s a wild rig you’re sailing under!”

“Gwinnie, I’m so glad you like it!”

“But aren’t those Nipicaps a trifle out of period…?”

*   *   *

Sudden tension. A personal silence for all the screaming of the records in the background. A shifting of several of Guinevere’s closest sparewheels to encircle the victim and savour the inaugural forfeit of the evening.

“I—uh—I…”

“Well, I mean, I should know, darling, since I have them made specially for the Beautique and sell them by the literally
thousands!
And they only made their splash two years ago.”

“Forfeit!” someone said decisively, and there were grins.

“Ye-es, I think so. And it sort of writes itself, doesn’t it? Take it off, darling, from
there
”—shoulder—“to
there
”—waist.

Sickly embarrassed but complying: result, the strange hermaphrodite. Scalp to neck, elaborate coiffure, immaculately painted face with eyebrows arched and lashes lengthened and lips clear red and earrings jangling; waist to floor, skirt and hose and jewelled 1988-style boots; between them, that incongruous bare male chest with good solid muscle and hair in concentric curves swirling out from the nipples.

“I think that’ll do nicely,” Guinevere said with satisfaction, and those around chortled and clapped her and each other on the back and those as yet out of range of her decisions relaxed and began to chatter loudly again.

*   *   *

SITUATION
: same but with an admixture of high nervous laughter.

*   *   *

“Darling, of course I’m only really well grounded in feminine fashions, but I do seem to detect something a teeny bit incongruous in that outfit you’re wearing…?”

“Well”—swallow hard—“ah … as a matter of fact—”

“Darling, don’t prevaricate. You know how much I detest prevarication.”

“Forfeit! Forfeit!”

“Well, Gwinnie dear, it’s as old as I could lay hands on, honestly it is.”

“No doubt, darling, but you’ve been to lots of my parties and I’m sure you’ve had as much fun out of seeing other people pay forfeits as they’re going to get out of you. Now let’s see. What would be appropriate? Bearing in mind that it’s early yet, so because of that and because we like you a whole great slobbering lot we’ll want to keep it a mild one, won’t we?”

*   *   *

SITUATION
: less laughter, more tension.

*   *   *

“Sadistic bitch, isn’t she?”

“You should see her when she gets on to an Afram, Mr. Mulligan.”

“If you call me ‘Mr. Mulligan’ one more time I’ll throw this liquor all over your smart period-piece.” Gulp. “Cancel that—I’ll break the glass on your ought-to-be-nappy skull. Anyway, she’s wrong.”

“What?”

“She’s wrong. But that’s irrelevant, I guess. If that’s the way her guests like her to run her parties I’ll just sit quietly here and give thanks to any deity who may exist that I ran into intelligent company. Elihu, I’d like to know something more about this place Beninia. There are some highly anomalous factors in what you’ve been telling me—”

“Excuse me, Chad,
please.
How did you mean, ‘she’s wrong’?”

“Norman, you do have eyes, hm? And you’re blessed with a reliable memory, hm? The hole, then! What were
you
wearing in the summer of 2000? Something like that, I’ll wager.”

“The summer of—? Prophet’s beard, of course! I’m an idiot.”

“You belong to an idiotic species. I even wrote a book to draw attention to the fact. I was idiotic myself to think it would do any good.”

He turned back to Elihu and waved his empty glass without looking away to his right, hoping that a passing waiter would take it in exchange for a full one.

Norman shouldered his way through the people crowding close around Guinevere and her intended victim. He heard suggestions: “Take it off and put it back to front! Take off everything that’s newer than the century! Make it look a bit older—like by tearing a few holes in it at the right places!”

“Just a second, Gwinnie,” he said boredly, triumphantly.

“What do you want to do, Norman—arbitrate?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. That looks like a year 2000 garment to me. How about it, friend?”

“Why, it says right here on the label that it is, but—”

“Twentieth century, then.”

“What? Norman, you’re spouting dreck. Go away. Now I think what we ought to do is—”

“The twenty-first century didn’t begin until a minute past midnight January first 2001.”

Awkward pause. Someone: “Sheeting hole, I think he’s right.”

“Dreck. I recall distinctly on New Year’s 2000 we all—”

“And the commentators did say that wasn’t right, it comes back to me now.”

“The hole, let’s make him do it anyway.”

“No, got to fly by the course we set in the first place.”

Silence in the immediate vicinity.

“Gwinnie, I’m dreadfully afraid he’s right. He is, you know.”

Nods.

“Well, how funny! Lucky for him you came along, isn’t it, Norman? Never mind, sparewheels, there’s bound to be someone else. Break it up and let it fall free, hm?”

And, as she contrived to brush against Norman on her way to match orbits with a circulating waiter: “Fix you later, you clever brown-nose!”

“You’re welcome to try, darling,” Norman said. “You’re welcome to try.”

*   *   *

SITUATION
: suddenly and to Guinevere’s enormous chagrin, a real party flying high and free in a genuine party-type orbit.

*   *   *

“Chad Mulligan? Never in a million lightyears!”

“I so testify.”

“Not the fat Afram?”

“No, the one with the beard.”

“The lean Afram?”

“Sheeting hole!
No!
The WASP talking to both of them.”

“Christ, everybody’s been saying he was dead!”

*   *   *

“Mel, I think some time later on we might break out a few caps of that stuff I asked you to bring. There’s a too-clever bleeder here I’d like to fetch down from orbit.”

*   *   *

“Hi, Don. Elihu, this is my roomie Donald Hogan—Chad Mulligan, Don.”

“Hi. Now, as I was saying, what McLuhan didn’t foresee although he came sheeting close to it was—”

“I’m delighted to meet you, Mr. Masters, but this is about the last place I’d have expected to run into you.”

“When Norman called on me the other night he mentioned this party and said I should come if I wanted to see the kind of problems Aframs still have to cope with in this country, so I thought it over and decided he was probably right, I ought to.”

“You won’t get the full measure of Guinevere’s ingenuity just standing by and watching, sir. You need to
be
someone like Norman, who’s about on her own level, not someone with cachet like yours.”

“Why?”

“If you’d turned up wearing your ordinary street-clothes she’d only have made you pay some kind of nominal forfeit—standing on your head for ten seconds, or singing a song, or taking off your shoes. Something that wouldn’t have interfered with your enjoyment of the rest of the party, I mean.”

“That’s what one generally expects at a forfeits party, isn’t it?”

“There’s been a change since you went abroad, sir.”
Why all this “sirring”? Must be a subconscious response to the fact that as of this morning I’m officially Lieutenant Hogan!
“A few years ago that was true. Not any more.”

“I see. I think. Give me examples.”

“Oh … Well, I’ve seen her compel guests to daub themselves all over with ketchup—and shave their heads bald—and crawl around the floor on hands and knees for an hour, until she got tired of enforcing that—and, if you’ll forgive me going into such details, to piss themselves. That comes later and is used to get rid of people she doesn’t want to stay around when the orgy starts.”

“That goes without saying, does it?”

“Oh yes.”

“Is that why people stand for such treatment?”

Chad Mulligan broke in; for the past few moments, unnoticed, he had abandoned the conversation he was having with Norman and had been listening to Donald and Elihu.”

“Sheeting hole, no! At least I’ll wager it’s not why Norman keeps coming, unless you’ve got a well-concealed masochistic streak—hey, Norman?”

“Some people come out of masochism, definitely,” Norman shrugged. “They like to be publicly humiliated. You can generally spot them; they’re blatantly infringing whatever the rule of the evening is, but steering clear of Guinevere’s direct attention until fairly late when they’ve drunk enough or smoked or ingested whatever they need to give them sufficient offyourass for the show-down. Then they go in for cringing and begging to be let off and being jeered at for spoilsports—the whole shtick—and generally they come while they’re getting the treatment. Which of course makes everything free-falling for them and that’s why they accepted the invitation anyway. Harmless, mostly.”

“I was asking about you, not them,” Chad said impatiently.

“Me? I keep coming here because—okay, I’ll open up wide. It’s a constant challenge. She’s a mean bitch, but she’s never yet caved me in on one single forfeit, and there have been times when there were thirty or forty of her pet sparewheels yelling for me to pay one. That’s why I keep on accepting. And frankly it seems to me like a damned stupid reason. This one is going to be my last, and if you weren’t here, Chad, and if I hadn’t conned Elihu into coming, I’d have left already.”

Donald looked at Chad Mulligan. He still only half-believed that this was the genuine article, but the resemblance to the pictures on the jackets of Mulligan’s books was unmistakable—the keen eyes peering out from under heavy brows, the hair combed diagonally back, the neatly trimmed moustache and beard setting off the cynical line of the mouth. There was a more dissipated look to the face in reality than there had been in the publicity shots, but maybe that was due to age rather than actual surrender.

He hoped so.

*   *   *

“Darling, you do the zock marvellously! You have the genuine free-fall touch!”

“Why, Gwinnie, that’s sweet of you.”

“There’s just one trouble, darling. The zock is strictly a this-minute dance, isn’t it?”

“Forfeit! Forfeit!”

“I’m afraid they’re right, darling, much as it pains me to insist. Don’t you know any of the
old
dances? How about the shaitan? That goes to this kind of rhythm, I think.”

“Of course it does, Gwinnie. I’m terribly sorry, I should have thought. You want me to do the shaitan for my forfeit?”

“That’s right. But—somebody hand me that dish of honey from the table there?
Thank
you, lover-girl. Hold this in between your elbows while you’re demonstrating it.”

“But—
Gwinnie!
It’ll get all over everything!”

“That’s the idea, darling. Come on now, and make with the whole bit. I want to see you touch the floor with the back of your head.”

*   *   *

“Well, yes, I am a bit out of sorts, I guess. You see, I’m taking this metabolic-rebalancing course that the Orbital Clinic provides for people who don’t respond to Triptine—you’ve heard about that? Uh-huh. And there’s one drecky drawback, which is it makes you much more susceptible to colds, so I’m full to
here
with counteragents and what with one thing and another my hormones and enzymes are going over Niagara in a barrel. I say, is that twentieth-century or nineteenth?”

“Of course, it’s public knowledge that if the Nark Force was given the funds and support it needs to enforce the legislation it’s supposed to the government would be out on its ear tomorrow. But the discontent needed for a genuine revolution is being drained off into orbit somewhere and that suits Washington fine.”

“So they got these two volunteers, you see, this codder and this shiggy who didn’t give a pint of dreck about doing it in public, and they laid on this exhibition of human reproductive processes for Shalmaneser.”

“No matter what they say I can’t tolerate adherents to a cult which doesn’t respect the human rights of non-members. That’s bigotry irrespective of what verbal haze you generate around it. And these Right Catholics with their insistence on unrestricted breeding are trespassing on the human rights of everyone else’s children. They sheeting well ought to be banned.”

“Right across the block from where my brother-in-law lives. And such a mild-mannered old codder too, he said. Just picked up this butcher’s cleaver and chopped the heads off the kids he was looking after, then went up on the roof with this crate of empty bottles, and started hurling them down on the people below. Killed one, blinded another, had to be fused by a police copter. Could be
anybody
, you see—and without universal personality-profiling how can one be sure who’s going to turn mucker?”

“Well, we’re pretty lucky, you see. We managed to get into a club—about fifteen couples, all celebrated their twenty-first, very nice people—and there’s a sitting rota so we get to look after the prodgies of members who have clean genotypes. There are nearly a dozen altogether and one of the shiggies is supposed to be preg with twins. Marvellous. We can reckon on having prodgies around the place at least one night a week. It’s not like having one’s own, but—well, there’s no help for it. We have schizophrenia on both sides of the marriage and the risk is far too great.”

“Oh no. Philip is much too young to come along to a party like this. Time enough later on to become sophisticated and cynical and debauched like us oldsters, that’s what I keep telling him. Of course he doesn’t like it—goes on all the time about what other parents allow their prodgies to do at his age—but one doesn’t want to see the bloom of innocence rubbed off too soon, does one? You’re only young once, after all.”

“Frank and Sheena? Oh, they went to Puerto Rico. Didn’t have any choice—they’d sold the apt, bought the tickets, got jobs out there … But they were
furious!
Said they were going to get out of the States altogether as soon as possible so they could after all have their own prodgies. But lord knows where they can go. Can’t see them roughing it in some benighted backwater country for long, myself, and of course they’d never be allowed back if they did start a family after being forbidden to do so here.”