Stand on Zanzibar (9 page)
Authors: John Brunner
And if he was going to give up his job, he wanted it to be on his own terms, not because he’d been fired for incompetence.
With a slight shudder he surveyed the avenue. Buildings tall as canyon walls closed it in, channelling the human traffic under the diffusely bright cover of the Fuller Dome. Of course, that didn’t protect the whole of Greater New York, only Manhattan, which it had re-endowed with its former attraction and enabled to win back more inhabitants than it had lost in the late-twentieth-century rush to the suburbs. Doming the entire city would have been out of the question on grounds of cost alone, though engineering studies had shown the feasibility of the project.
New York with its thirteen million people, however, was falling further and further back from the status it had once enjoyed as the world’s largest city. It could not be compared with the monstrous conurbations stretching from Frisco to Ellay or from Tokyo to Osaka, let alone the true giants among modern megalopoli, Delhi and Calcutta with fifty million starving inhabitants apiece: not cities in the old sense of grouped buildings occupied by families, but swarming antheaps collapsing into ruin beneath the sledgehammer blows of riot, armed robbery and pure directionless vandalism.
Nonetheless, though it had shrunk to medium size by contemporary standards, this was still as large a city as Donald felt he could stand, and it still possessed a certain magnetism. The biggest employer of them all, State, dominated the West Coast; here were the next biggest, the super-corporations that were countries within a country. Ahead loomed the colossal ziggurat of the General Technics tower bridging three complete blocks, and it filled him with a sense of gloom. If he did quit—if it were possible for him to quit when they had pumped going on three-quarters of a million dollars of public money into him—his only future would lie in just such a mausoleum as that.
And look what it’s done to Norman House!
Across the hugely enlarged sidewalks the people thronged like insects, milling at the access points to underpasses and the subway. On the central, official-business-only emergency lane prowl cars cruised or paused, occasionally pulling over to make way for ambulances and fire trucks. Either side of the centre, the huge humming buses without engines—drawing their power from flywheels spun up to maximum revolutions when they turned around at the end-points of their journey—hauled their loads of up to two hundred passengers, sliding at two-block intervals into pickup bays and allowing the electric cabs to overtake. No internal combustion engine had been legal in the city since they put up the dome; the disposal of CO
2
and anthropotoxins from the people themselves was as much as the ventilation system could handle, and on warm days their exuded moisture sometimes overloaded the conditioners, precipitating a kind of drizzle underneath the dome.
How do we stand it?
He had chosen to live in New York because he had been born here, and because it headed the short list of suitable residences they gave him to choose from—cities possessing the kind of library facilities needed in his job. But this was the first time he had looked at it, really looked with both eyes and full attention, in perhaps as long as seven years, and everywhere he turned he found that another straw had been piled on the camelback of the city. He had noticed the street-sleepers when he came back from college, but he hadn’t noticed that there were hundreds of them now, pushing their belongings on little makeshift trolleys and being moved on, moved on by the police. He hadn’t noticed the way people, when they were jostled, sometimes spun around and shot their hands to bulging pockets before they realized it wasn’t a mucker on their heels. And speaking of muckers: he hadn’t really connected with the world he knew when the news reports described one who’d taken out seven victims in Times Square on a busy Saturday night …
Panic clawed at him, the same kind of panic he’d experienced on the only occasion when he ventured to try Skulbustium, the sense that there was no such person as Donald Hogan but only one among millions of manikins, all of whom were versions of a Self without beginning or end. Then, he had screamed, and the man who had given him the drug advised against a repetition, saying he
was
his persona and without it would dissolve.
In other words: there was nothing inside.
Just ahead of him, two girls paused to examine a display in the window of a store. They were both in the height of fashion, one wearing a radio-dresslet whose surface pattern formed a printed circuit so that by shifting her buckled belt to right or left she could have her choice of broadcasts fed into the earpiece nestling under her purple hair, the other in a skintight fabric as harshly metallic as the case of a scientific instrument. Both had chromed nails, like the power terminals of a machine.
The display that had caught their attention was of genetically moulded pets. Processes that already worked well with viruses and bacteria had been applied to their germ-plasm, but on this more complex level the side-effects were excessively random; each pet on show probably stood proxy for five hundred that never left the lab. Even so, the solemn, over-sized bushbaby in the window looked miserably unhappy for all the splendour of its purple pelt, and the litter of bright-red Chihuahua pups below staggered continually as though on the verge of epilepsy.
All that seemed to concern the girls, however, was that the bushbaby’s colour almost exactly matched the hair of the one in the radio-dresslet.
First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then …
Shaking all over, Donald changed his mind about a restaurant and turned blindly into a bar to drink instead of eat his lunch.
In the afternoon he called on an out-of-work poetess he knew. She was sympathetic, asked no questions, and allowed him to sleep off his drunk in her bed. The world looked a little better when he woke.
But he wished desperately that there could be someone—not this girl necessarily, not even a girl at all, just
a person
—to whom he could explain why it was he had been moaning in his sleep.
Straight well-pos’ned Afram seeks roomie view long Ise luxy 5-rm apt Box NZL4
“
Yes
I do have three rooms but
no
you can’t even if you have been evicted. Whatinole would I do with that gang of sheeting lizzies you tail behind you? I don’t care if you are equipoised! I don’t share with anyone who’s not flying my strictly straight-type orbit!”
In Delhi, Calcutta, Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin, Los Angeles; in Paris, Rome, Milan, Cairo, Chicago … they can’t jail you any longer for sleeping rough, so it’s no use hoping.
There just isn’t that much room in the jails.
Afram girl seeks lodg’g. Versatile. Box NRT5
LUXY APTS IDEAL FAMILIES ONLY $100,000 MINIMUM 3 RMS ALL DIVISIBLE!
Acceleratube Commuterservice makes it possible for YOU to work in Los Angeles, reside in the fresh-air expand-your-chest atmosphere of Arizona, transit time ninety minutes!
“This is Laura. Natural blonde, of course—honey, slip ’em down and demonstrate. Ah—the sharing bit
is
understood, presumably?”
“I hope so.”
“So do I.”
Laura giggled.
Jettex is practical as well as luxy—ask the folk from the Mountain States who can hold down city-centre jobs thanks to our five-minutely crush-hour service!
“Just a formality, if you don’t mind. Young lady, hold out your hand … Thanks. It’ll take five minutes. Hang on … Sorry, we can only give you a transient’s pass for this state. Congratulations, though—hope it’s a baby.”
WHEN THE PRESSURE GETS TO THE BLOWOFF POINT YOU’LL BE GRATEFUL FOR GT’S KEYS TO EASIER LIVING. TRANKS, PROPHYLACTICS, ARE ONLY THE START OF THE STORY. OUR AIDS TO NORMAL FEMALE BIOLOGICAL FUNCTIONING ARE APPROVED BY ALL STATE CODES.
“Prophet’s beard, Donald, if I’d known you had a thing about dark meat I could have had my pick of—”
“Then why don’t you try a brunette some time, say an Italian type? Someone who’s fed nothing but stark white sliced-and-wrapped is apt to want some wholemeal granary now and then!”
But in any household problems like this are bound to arise.
Olive Almeiro Agency offers you the chance of a lifetime. We have a wider range of good-heredity adoptables than any other agency in our field. Offer not good in following states: New York, Illinois, California …
BE IT ENACTED THAT: carriage of the genes listed in Appendix A below shall
ipso facto
be grounds for abortion upon presentation of the mother at any Eugenics Processing Board in the following …
“Who are you going to get in to replace Lucille?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t thought about it yet.”
POPULATION STRETCHING TO LIMIT. Reports today from official sources hint that immigrants to this state with residents’ qualifications more recent than 30th March last will be given choice of sterilisation or removal.
We’ve celebrated our twenty-first. Have you? Liberal association seeks broadminded couples, triples, to enlarge the scope of our activities. We have FOURTEEN children in the group already!
“Prophet’s beard, Donald…!”
“I’m sorry, I’ve said I’m sorry! But can I help getting bored with your line of shiggies? Laura was Scandahoovian, Bridget was Scandahoovian, Hortense was and Rita was and Moppet was and Corinne was. I think you’re in a rut, to be frank.”
Reliable couple seek babyminding opportunities, one or several days p.w. (Certificates avlble. Webtoe only drawback) Box NPP2
BE IT ENACTED THAT: carriage of the genes listed in Appendix B below shall
ipso facto
be grounds for sterilisation of any male child achieving the age of puberty after …
“Ah, go to hell!”
“That’s a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.”
“Stop trying to play on my WASP guilt feelings. Sometimes I wonder how you’d make out in a genuinely nonracial society.”
“There aren’t any. Give you another generation, you’ll add the genes for dark skin-pigment to the list of—”
Leo Branksome! Come home! Being sterilised isn’t going to make us love you any the less! You’re our boy, our only son, and running away was a stupid thing to do! And you’re only fourteen, remember! Your adoring but miserable parents.
“Thirty-four? And you have a clean genotype? My God, I ought to push this glass in your face! All we’ve got is a suspicion, not even proof but a suspicion, that Harold’s mother had sickle-cell anaemia and I’d give my right arm for children and you smug bastard can stand there and—”
Conscious that she was a walking advertisement for her own processes, conscious that not even the brilliant lights of the video technicians would reveal a flaw in her cosmetic garb, conscious with particular pleasure of the fact that the woman they had sent to interview her was conspicuously less well turned-out, Guinevere Steel cooed at the microphone.
“Why, the success of my Beautiques is due to two factors: the ability of my customers to recognise who does and who doesn’t keep that quantum-jump ahead of transient fashions, and equally their ability to judge what does and what does not offer real value for money!”
She preened.
Indeterminably aged, she wore a bluzette of shimmering yellow because her complexion was in the Goyaesque-tan range; it moulded her bosom into almost perfect cycloidal curves, peaked on either side with a pair of her own remote-controlled Nipicaps—activated at the moment because they would show to excellent advantage on a video screen. They were always at the wearer’s disposal; should she be interested in the man—or woman—she was talking to, she could dilate them without doing more than press her arm to her side; conversely she could deflate them, and there were few more ego-undermining things a woman could do to a block than let it be seen how her erogenous tissue lost interest.
She wore a skirtlet that was no more than an overgrown belt because she had extremely graceful legs. They tapered to jewelled slippers because she had high, springy arches, but not to bare feet because those arches had been reconstructed and on the left foot one of the scars still showed.
She had her hair in four parallel rolls, dyed silver; her finger- and toe-nails were chromed more brilliantly than mirrors and flashed back the light of the lamps at the camera’s lens.
About seventy per cent of her skin was revealed, but none of it was bare except perhaps among the roots of her hair. Apart from the pearly masking on her face, she wore whole-body matting, a personal blend of her own Beautique’s skin tinter, and altogether nearly thirty other products which left a detectable deposit on the epidermis. As a final touch her surface veins had been delicately traced in blue.
“Why, I think it’s contemporary in the way it ought to be,” she told the microphone. “We don’t live in the world of our ancestors, where dirt, and disease, and—and what one might call general randomness dictated how we lived. No, we have taken control of our entire environment, and what we choose by way of fashion and cosmetics matches that achievement.”
“But the current trend towards a more—more natural look,” the interviewer ventured.
“What counts is how the person looking at you is affected,” Guinevere said complacently. “It affects you, too, of course—to be totally confident, as we make our clients, of the impression you’re going to create is the only thing that really matters.”
“Thank you, Miss Steel,” the interviewer murmured.
* * *
That much out of the way, Guinevere marched back into her private office. With the door safely shut, she could drop into her chair and let the bitterness leak out into the set of her mouth, the narrowness of her eyes.
Lighting a Bay Gold, she stared at her reflection.
Totally confident? In this business, where tomorrow the man in the case or the girl-friend, whichever, might decide to get to closer quarters? The more elaborate and fragile and lovely the cosmetic job, the greater the effect—and the worse the letdown when it had been kissed, and caressed, and wrestled with. There were seventeen Beautiques now, one for every year she had been in the business, each licensed after careful appraisal to a manager who had to have worked for three months directly under Guinevere herself, who was trained to exacting standards and had contracted to pay a fat commission for the privilege of using the name. Every rational precaution had been taken, but who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
