Stand on Zanzibar (30 page)

“You heard what happened? Thought they were being clever. Found someone in the Eugenics office who was open to—ah—persuasion and got themselves a forged genalysis. Went to a private clinic, and the karyotype said they were going to have a mongoloid idiot. Twenty-five thousand buckadingdongs it cost them to get that gene certificate, and they had to have the kid aborted after all!”

“We got ours through the Olive Almeiro Agency. Very big operation. Naturally it can’t be passed off as our own—my wife is even fairer than I am and the kid is dark, hair, skin, eyes, the whole shtick—but we could have waited five, six years for a baby to match our own genotype and then not been able to afford the cost.”

“So when these two had finished Shalmaneser said where’s the baby? And they said oh, you have to wait nine months for that.”

“Look, I don’t mind panhandlers as such—in fact I think it’s a damned good idea to license them because at least that gives you the option of choosing whether you’re going to support a given individual case instead of simply taxing you and passing the money on in welfare allotments to wastrels and vagabonds. But the way the union has got whole districts of the city sewn up now and insists on kickbacks and drives non-members out of the area—that’s more than I can swallow!”

“Oh, are those the new Too Much joints? May I try one? I heard very good things about the strain. Thanks. I hope Gwinnie doesn’t recognise them or she’ll make us pay forfeit on them and I don’t like the look in her eye. She’s building up to something really nasty, I suspect.”

“The draft got his balls. They’re cracking down very hard at the moment. Did everything he could—turned up for the board with mother in tow, wearing one of her dresses, orbiting like crazy, and they took him anyway. He’s in that horrible army hospital St. Faith’s right this minute undergoing aversion therapy for ambivalence
and
tripping both at once. It’s absolutely inhuman, and of course if it works when he comes back he won’t want to know any of his old friends, he’ll be one of their automatic push-button people, a good solid respectable citizen. Doesn’t it make you want to weep?”

“One thing about this crazy party, I do depose—I never expected to see so many shiggies at Guinevere’s place looking like shiggies instead of like sterile-wrapped machines. Do you suppose she’s testing the temperature to see if she should move the Beautiques over to the natural trend?”

“Happened all in a moment. One second, just a bunch of people walking down a street, not going any place in particular, and the next, these brown-noses clanging on big empty cans with sticks like drummers leading an army and all sorts of dreck flying through the air and windows being smashed if they weren’t out already and screaming and hysteria and the stink of panic. Did you know you can actually smell terror when people start rioting?”

“Louisiana isn’t going to last much longer, you know. There’s a bill up for next session in the state legislature which will ban child-bearing by anyone who can’t prove three generations of residence. And what’s worse they’re only offering five to two against it being passed. The governor has his two prodgies now, you see.”

“I was in Detroit last week and that’s the most eerie place I ever did set foot. Like a ghost town. All those abandoned factories for cars. And crawling with squatters, of course. Matter of fact I went to a block party in one of them. You should hear a zock group playing full blast under a steel roof five hundred feet long! Didn’t need lifting—just stand and let the noise wipe you out.”

“It’s more than a hobby, it’s a basic necessity for modern man. It fulfils a fundamental psychological urge. Unless you know that if you have to you can kill someone who gets in your way, preferably with your bare hands, the pressure from all these people is going to cave you in.”

“I graduated with a master’s rating on throwing knives and a grade one rating on hand-to-hand. I already have a marksman certificate on bolt-guns, and next I’m intending to collect one for projectile weapons—rifles, pistols and crossbows.”

“Sure you can come around, but don’t hope for too much. I’m living in a group, you see, and there are eight of us, so I don’t feel much need for variety. Also we have two kids and our shrinker says they have positively Polynesian emotional stability so the last thing I want is to interfere with a setup that’s paying such fine dividends. It’s the extended family bit, of course.”

“Nevada’s mavericking again, did you hear? There’s a bill up for next session to recognise polygamy and institute proper marriage and divorce laws to cover it. Up to groups of ten, I think it says in the draft.”

“Don’t lie to me,
darling.
I saw that codder’s blip go up on your screens the moment he asked you to dance. I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again, I don’t mind you bivving it privately but I won’t stand for it in public. So I’m an old-fashioned block, so I’m still your wife and if you want me to stay that way you behave when you’re in company—catch me?”

“So Shalmaneser said well, if it takes nine months, why were you in such a sheeting hurry at the end? Haw-haw-haw!”

“I’ve been hoping to have a word with Chad Mulligan, but I can’t pry him away from those Aframs he’s talking to. I want to ask him whyinole when all our dreams are about wide-open spaces and room to move and breathe we like to cram ourselves together at parties till we can’t hardly cross the floor of a room without shoving aside twenty other people.”

“Look, lover, you carry it off very well but I fly a perfectly straight orbit and what’s more I’m married so why don’t you find someone who likes to biv and stop harassing me?”

“I got one of these super disposalls, too, because the garbage clearance down our block is five weeks—catch me,
five!
—overdue. And the first day I try to use it comes in this sheeting little pest and says I’m violating the clean-air laws. Great balls of dreck, clean air! There hasn’t been any clean air in our neighbourhood for sheeting weeks because of rotting dreck all over the streets and now it’s beginning to block the passages!”

“Yes, but what’s the use of arguing about politics these days? Isn’t such a thing as politics. There’s just a choice between the ways you’re going to cave in through force of circumstances. Look at Common Europe, look at Russia, look at China, look at Africa. The sheeting pattern’s the same except in some places it’s gone further than others.”

“Look, Schritt—all
right!
Look,
Helmut!
If you don’t get off my orbit and let me fall free for a bit I’m going to stand right up where everyone can hear me and pull rank, do you hear me? I don’t give a pint of whaledreck if Chad Mulligan does sound subversive to you—he happens to be talking to our ambassador to Beninia and I’m interested in what they’re saying. I was told to carry on with my ordinary activities and if you’ve read my original brief you sheeting well ought to know that it includes being interested in everything relevant or not relevant to my assignment. Now go dig a hole and lie down in it!”

“Things are getting tough again in India, apparently. It’s the protein that was lost when the slit-eyes poisoned the Indian Ocean. And by the way, I hear the containment programme is running behind—a current spilled over past one of the barrages and they’ve been hauling out contaminated fish as far north as Angola.”

“I have this new autoshout of GT’s that programmes itself on a signal from the satellite. Haven’t missed a show in three weeks through rescheduling. Should get one.”

“I use nothing but Kodak Wholopan R myself. The rating is 2400, to start with, which means there’s practically nothing you can’t catch, and there’s ninety-five per cent recovery on a division factor of twenty, which means you never need more than one print and a pair of scissors.”

“No, that’s what’s so extraordinary. Freefly-suiting is
terrific
exercise, a sort of dynamic tension method because all your muscles are working against each other. Of course, you have to watch your calcium balance like a spy, but there are treatments which actually improve it over normal Earthside levels now.”

“The acceleratube makes commuting perfectly possible. I can get to work quicker from Buffalo than I used to when I lived in Elizabeth.”

“I think I’ll have to take copter lessons.”

“You know that magnificent new block in Delaware that we spotted from the plane as we were coming in and thought what a great place it could be to live? Well, I just met someone who told me what it’s meant for, and unless you feel like going out and shooting a fuzzy-wuzzy we can kiss the dream goodbye. It’s a sheeting jail, that’s what it is—a new maxecurity jail!”

“We’re going to have to do as they’ve done in London and Frankfurt. We’re going to have to make better use of the space already enclosed by the cities we have. In London they’ve more or less given up the idea of streets except for arterial throughways. They’re building over them and leaving nothing but tubeways for passenger transit.”

“It just sort of folded like a leaky accordion, all thirty storeys of it. Girders bulged outwards, floors lay down on top of each other, and
squelch
, all the people who were living in it—I think they said nine hundred—were flattened out like sardines in a sandwich. Apparently when they programmed the computer which designed it they forgot to instruct it to allow for the weight of the occupants.”

“Exceptionally good freevent the other night. It was literally indescribable because it was so abstract. I still haven’t got over it.”

“What it does is sort of
invert
the responses—for example I never found anything in my life quite so funny as the B Minor Mass. And let’s face it, you know, in the ultimate analysis that’s a
proper
response in contemporary terms.”

“Yes, I knew somebody who applied to them. Wanted to go out being gored by a bull in front of a big cheering audience, believe it or not. So they fixed it, got the setup from Mexico, wrung the buckadingdongs out of him and the cost ran to plenty, of course, and he had a heart attack from overexcitement before they turned the bull loose, so back he went to hospital to be revived and he ran out of funds while he was getting better and in the end he just signed an ordinary release and they withdrew his prosthetics. A débâcle on a grand scale, but still a débâcle!”

“He and his sister joined the Mrs. Grundy Memorial Foundation and some sheeting little prig turned up some forgotten ordinance and the case comes up next week. Going to be a major point of principle at stake.”

“Skiing in Patagonia, I think. We were going to spend it under the Caribbean, but Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere go there such a lot we’re afraid it’ll be dreadfully crowded.”

“She’s quite marvellous. All I did was give her that lock of my mother’s hair and she told me the most fantastic things—I mean, I never knew mother had all those affairs, one after the other, and most of them with brown-noses! I knew I was right not to trust her with what father left!”

“The Vedantas, of course, say something quite contrary.”

“One of these Antarctic treks, probably. I hate the snow but whereinole else is there that Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere haven’t been recently? I can’t stand all these interchangeable people!”

“The future is inherently perfectly knowable. All the faculty takes to develop is the proper kind of exercise and meditation.”

“You sound as though you fell in love with Beninia right from the start. Was it just because you knew and admired Zadkiel Obomi or was there something else to it?”

“There’s this tour to Khajuraho which sounds like fun, with all those parties planned around the erotic sculptures on the old temples, but apparently the tourists have to go there under armed guard because of danger from native robbers and frankly I don’t see how I could enjoy it to the full with a circle of gunmen standing all around me.”

“This marvellous recording of the Ninth which puts you right in the middle of the choir—when the Ode to Joy lets loose it’s like an earthquake!”

“I’ve been painting some Jackson Pollocks with my polyformer this week and it’s left my arms stiff as fenceposts.”

“Moonbase Zero is more like a submarine than anything else. I really admire the people who stay there for a whole tour—some of them stick it for over six months, you realise?”

“Our shrinker recommended sending Shirley to this new school at Great Bend and I think that’s a marvellous idea but Olaf has these dreadfully antique views about juvenile eroticism and says they lay too much emphasis on sensuality, so I’m going to file for divorce and get custody and then Wendy and I will take her out there ourselves.”

“Makes you wonder how our ancestors ever managed to breed such a sheeting horde of human beings when every time you felt like it you had to take off all these layers and layers of cloth.”

“I think I’m going to sue them even though they didn’t give me a guarantee. I mean, eight thousand isn’t to be dropped like an empty pack of reefers, is it? And all the pup did when we got it home was sit around snivelling and pee on the floor every half-hour. The prodgies were heart-broken, of course, because they did so much want a green dog and they just wept and wept so I’m sure it was traumatic for them. Edna says I should have gone to some other company who’ve cut down the side-effects, but believe me I’m not going to risk another gene-moulded pet. They can make do with a regular cat next time.”

“Well, if your genotype is okay, why don’t you just get yourself preg by someone else who’s also clean? Me, for example? I have my genalysis with me, as it happens.”

“Charlie, got any stiffener with you? I just had this shiggy in the roof-garden and I promised Louise as well and I don’t want to be left dangling when the big scene takes over later.”

“This mutated cactus with the huge orange flowers that last for weeks after they’re cut, but you have to keep them under a glass bell because they do stink rather, a bit like rotting meat.”

“I never took to polyforming. Rather stay with my old hobby of vicarious music. Blocky it may be, but I don’t have the talent to go through a Cage score on my own jets, and I do love the feeling of actually creating the sounds with my fingers.”