Stand on Zanzibar (14 page)
Authors: John Brunner
And he was gone.
* * *
Eventually Donald discovered that the pain he could feel in his palms was due to the way he was digging his nails into the flesh. He straightened his fingers with deliberate slowness.
That dirty son of a bleeder—what right has he to…?
The anger paled like a dying fire, and left behind a sour feeling of self-contempt. He swallowed his new drink at a gulp, hardly tasting it.
It couldn’t just be the revelation of Victoria’s treachery that had shifted Norman off his gyros so violently. He must have known that his invariable habit-pattern of bringing in three or four new shiggies a year to the apartment—and always the same physical type—was setting him up for industrial espionage. It was risky for a company shiggy to accept such assignments, but when the target was a VP of General Technics the pay was bound to be tempting.
I wonder what corporation hired her.
But that was irrelevant. Somehow, everything seemed irrelevant, except one wholly incongruous central point: Norman had been on the verge of making a confidant of his roomie for the first time ever, and instead he had been driven into a shouting rage and gone storming away in search of one of his fellow Aframs.
Donald stood in the empty room and thought of the thirteen million people all around him, the population of Greater New York. The idea made him feel fearfully, intolerably alone.
Confidential:
Cases have been reported of the term “little red brother” being used by units of the marine and naval forces deployed from Isola. Officers are instructed to remind their men that the officially-approved terms are “chink”, “slit-eye”, “yellowbelly” and “weevil.” Use of softass civilian terms is to be severely punished.
“What they could not hold by force of arms they are trying to win back by the power of their foreign money! We must drive out these parasites, these immoral bloodsuckers who corrupt our womanhood, mock our sacred traditions and scoff at our prized national heritage!”
KEEP OUT!
Allships urgentest allships urgentest
following storm Thursday night mines are loose and drifting at approaches to Bordeaux Roads stand by till daylight and await go signal from units of Common Europe Navy.
“What I want to know is, how much longer is that damned government of ours going to take this lying down?”
PRIVATE!
“Our enemies skulk on every side, waiting for us to relax our vigilance. But we shall not give them the chance they seek to fall on and devour us. We shall stand firm, and our nation shall be purged of dross in the pure fire of self, sacrifice.”
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
To all Party bureaux:
Revisionism and backsliding has been noted with concern in the following Departments …
“Yeah, but what I mean, even if he does have a clean genotype a guy with a proper sense of social responsibility just doesn’t
have
five kids in this day and age! I don’t care if he does get the Populimit Bulletin in his mail—that could be a cover, couldn’t it? No, I say he must be one of these Right Catholic bleeders. And I want him out!”
BEWARE OF THE DOG
“What rightfully, legally and historically belongs to us lies groaning under the heel of a foreign tyrant!”
THESE PREMISES PROTECTED BY SAFE-T-GARD INC.
“It is not enough that we ourselves should enjoy freedom. We shall not be truly free until everyone alive can make the same sincere and honest claim.”
NO RIGHT OF WAY
“It is not enough that we ourselves should enjoy freedom. There are those in our very midst who extol the virtues of an alien way of life which we know to be evil, hateful and wrong!”
NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN SHINE ON YOUR HEAD
“Dirty Reds—”
My country ’tis of thee
NATIONALS RIGHT LANE ALIENS LEFT LANE
“Capitalist hyenas—”
There’ll always be an England
BLANKES NIEBLANKES
“The wogs begin at Calais—”
Vive la France!
FLEMING WALLOON
“Bloody nignogs—”
Deutschland über Alles
YORUBA IBO
“Goddamn people next door—”
Nkosi Sikelele Afrika
YOURS MINE
“They’re all mad bar thee and me and thee’s a little queer—”
MINE!
MINE!!
MINE!!!
(PATRIOTISM A great British writer once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the decency to betray his country.
Amen, brothers and sisters! Amen!
—
The Hipcrime Vocab
by Chad C. Mulligan)
In New York Elihu Masters preferred not to stay at a hotel, nor even at the home of one of his many friends, though he knew some of them were hurt by his repeated refusals. Instead he took a room at the United Nations Hostel, and if—as on this visit—the premises were so crowded that all they could find for him was a poky overgrown closet where the bed folded back to the wall so the occupant could get at the bathtub underneath, that was cool.
He was afraid of falling in love with his own country as his old friend Zadkiel Obomi had done, to the point where his precariously fostered, deliberately chosen commitment to the species man would cave in under pressure from the plight of his fellow Americans. Today he had come perilously close to doing exactly that. The spectacle of that youthful VP at General Technics had made him so indescribably sad …
He had not yet brought into the open the reason for his approach to General Technics, but he didn’t doubt that they would have submitted the facts to Shalmaneser and received an assessment that was very close to the truth. Too much of his life was a matter of public record: his personal request for transfer to Beninia, for example, when in the normal course of events he should have been the next ambassador to Delhi and afterwards reaped one of the real plum jobs—Paris, perhaps, or even Moscow. There had been such a clamour about his going to Beninia, especially from the Children of X …
He sat in the room’s only chair, facing but not seeing a wall-flat TV screen on which the marvel of holographic signal transmission presented images that seemed solid and changed their appearance and perspective if one moved from side to side of the picture. The set had recently shown him a SCANALYZER programme, and the details of Pacific fighting and vandalism, of anti-Right Catholic riots and muckers at large, had depressed him into a near-stupor.
Lax in one hand he held a book recommended to him by a friend, one which had appeared a few months after his departure for Beninia. He’d heard the author’s name before, naturally; he was rated by those who should know as among the handful of truly great sociological
vulgarisateurs
in the tradition of Packard and Riesman.
But he’d announced this book as his swan-song, and true to his promise—according to the friend who’d loaned it to him—since its publication he had vanished. Rumour said he was dead by his own hand. Indeed, the despair that breathed through his mocking definitions reminded Elihu of nothing so much as Wells’s
Mind at the End of its Tether
, that grim epitaph for human aspiration, and suggested that the rumour might be right.
He stirred now and looked at it afresh. The cover showed a barrel of gunpowder with a train fizzing across the floor. Doubtless that design had been chosen by the publisher, not by Chad Mulligan himself—he was aware of the twenty-first century and would never have permitted anything so archaic if he’d been informed in time.
In fact, Mulligan …
Elihu gave a slow nod. He had to concede that he was impressed, as one might be by a doctor who declined to mislead his patients with false reassurances. Mulligan might have understood the motives which could take the bright star of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps to the shabby, run-down slums of Port Mey instead of the clean modernity of Moscow. He might even, though himself a Caucasian, have comprehended the choice such a man felt was facing him: either to give himself up to the crying needs of his own people, who in this brave new century were still the trapped ones, spawning the majority of the muckers (though the newscasts by policy never mentioned their colour), the majority of the dicties (though most of them couldn’t afford Skulbustium or Triptine and poisoned themselves on kitchen-brewed Yaginol or scraped poppy-juice from the slit pods with the backs of dirty knives), the ones who said, “I don’t have to ghetto where I’m going because I was born here!”—or else determinedly to give love only to friends, and loyalty only to the entire human race.
Black or not black, this man Elihu Masters could not identify any better with the greedy bosses in Bamako and Accra, alternating between wheedling overtures to Beninia and shrieks of rage at each other designed to distract their own people from inter-tribal squabbling, than he could with the board of General Technics. Let the Dahomalians and the RUNGs fight their shadow-wars, utter their rival boasts about which country was the more industrialised, the more powerful, the more ready to spring to the defence of its national integrity; for him, the fact that Zadkiel Obomi could juggle four language-groups—two of which were intruders anyhow, descendants of refugees from twentieth-century tribal massacres in adjacent territories—and keep them singing under circumstances which might have been expected to lead to civil war, was the grand achievement of all Africa.
And perhaps … of the whole world.
He could hear that singing in memory now, over the thump-thump beat of pestles in mealie mortars because there were no surplus hides for luxuries like drumheads. To that insistent rhythm he found himself speaking aloud.
“It’s not that it’s good to live in squalor!” he exclaimed, and slapped the book on his palm for emphasis. “It’s that they haven’t been taught the ways we more sophisticated folk know to hate each other!”
He knew that was nonsense the moment he had said it. Human beings were deluding themselves when they claimed that hatred was something they had to be taught. Hatred of rivals, of intruders on private property, of the more powerful male or the more fertile female, was implicit in the psychological structure of mankind. And yet the fact remained: he had sensed in Beninia a sort of happiness in face of poverty he had never detected anywhere else.
Possibly it’s due to Zad himself? No, that’s equally nonsensical. Not even Jesus, not even Mohammed, not even the Buddha, could have made such a claim. Yet I’m sure it’s an objective phenomenon! Maybe, when GT moves in, they’ll put the facts to Shalmaneser and come up with the explanation.
But that was more ridiculous than ever, a pure piece of self-excusatory rationalising. The only facts available to be fed into a computer were public knowledge: Beninia was a small country, assailed by famine, run by its president and a handful of talented subordinates long past the point where its larger neighbours had given up and federated into colonial-language groups. In the background loomed certain curious historical problems, such as the reason why the Arab slave-traders ignored Shinkas when assembling parties for sale to European purchasers, why despite an unwarlike tradition that tribe had never been subjugated by its neighbours, why under the British colonial government there had never once been a revolutionary party set up, why …
“What the hell is the
good
of worrying about it?” Elihu said, once more addressing the walls of the room. “I love the place, and when they get love down to a bunch of factors you can analyse with a computer there’ll be nothing left of whatever makes it worth being human!”
Scene:
a cathedral during morning service.
Cast:
Bishop and congregation.
Detail:
a smear along the front rim of the pulpit. It was applied with a paintbrush and consists of a vesicant (formula related to mustard gas but a sight more efficient) and a hallucinogen (GT’s catalogue reference AKZ-21205 converted by boiling with dilute sulphuric acid into the product nicknamed “Truth or Consequences”).
Prediction:
when the Bishop closes his hands, as he invariably does, on the pulpit rail …
Truth:
“I take my text from the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, from the seventeenth chapter, and from the first verse of that chapter. Hr-
hm!
‘I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.’
“Now I have no doubt that some of you—(
ouch! What in the name of…?
)—will have been a trifle shocked (
what can possibly have made my hands smart like this?
) at the choice of text which I’ve made—quite deliberately, I assure you (
perhaps it’ll wear off if I try and ignore it
)—in order to dramatise in the most violent possible fashion a truth which some people, professedly Christians like ourselves, have closed their eyes to. (
It burns like hellfire!
)
“The point which I want to make, which I hope to convince you needs to be made, is this—and it’s quite a simple one. Because the Book from which I took my text is that among all others which is relevant to everyday human experience, it does not shun some of the less palatable aspects of our lives. It does not express approval of them, naturally, but it certainly does not censor, as it were, the home truths about us which we have to face squarely if we are to lead the kind of lives it’s our Christian duty to attempt. (
Ah, that’s better, it’s coming down to a sort of warm glow like gloves.
)
“And because Man has a spark of the divine in his nature, the founders of our Church did not shrink from using very human—one might almost say crudely human—analogies in their teaching.
“The analogy of the prostitute, who sells her body for gain, is one which a few generations ago might have been regarded as distasteful by a great number of people. But the fact that our society called such people into existence was itself a shame—a disgrace, one might call it, using the strict technical aspect of the term ‘grace’. Fortunately we have come to recognise some concomitant aspects of the responsibility with which we have been charged by being created in material bodies, and among these is a recognition of the fact that the fact that the choice of the symbol of marriage between our Lord and His bride the Church was no accident—that, in short, the union between man and wife is an expression of love, an expression of love, in other words—ah—an expression of
love.
(
I hope they won’t notice if I lean back against the pillar behind me!
)
