Stand on Zanzibar (34 page)

I’m sick of them. The brown-noses are the worst, lording it over us spics when our ancestors came here as conquerors and theirs came as slaves, but just about any Yanqui gives me morning-sickness.

The silent joke lightened her mood enough to permit her to say, “All right, send them in. And what did you say was the name?”

“Potter,” said the intercom.

They came in holding hands, and stared at her covertly while settling in the chairs she waved them to. One could almost hear the mental comment: “so this is the famous Olive Almeiro!” After a while, the wife’s attention wandered to the display of dolls, and the husband cleared his throat.

“Señora Almeiro, we—”

“You got caught with your pants down,” Olive cut in.

Frank Potter blinked. “I don’t quite—”

“You don’t imagine you’re unique, do you? What’s your trouble—colour-blindness?”

“That’s right. And my wife is sure to pass it on, so—”

“So you decided to migrate and because Nevada is expensive and Louisiana doesn’t like being used as a conception refuge you chose Puerto Rico and the legislature shot your ship out from under. What do you want me to do about it?”

Taken aback by the baby-farmer’s curtness, Frank exchanged glances with his wife, who was very pale.

“It was on the spur of the moment,” he admitted. “We thought you might be in a position to help us.”

“To adopt? I doubt it. If you are willing to consider adoption you need have moved no further from New York than New Jersey.” Olive fingered her jowl. “You probably want me to disguise a child of your own as an adoptee. It’s already on the way, isn’t it?”

Frank flushed to the roots of his hair. He said, “How could you possibly—?”

“I told you you’re not unique. Was it intentional?”

“I guess so.” He stared at the floor, miserably. “We decided to celebrate our decision to move, you see. But we didn’t realise it had happened so quickly. We didn’t find out until we’d arrived here.”

“They didn’t spot it at Immigration? No, come to think of it, they only check women arriving from abroad and from the maverick states. In that case you’re already in a cleft stick. Either the prodgy was conceived in New York State where you’d been specifically forbidden to start one, or it was conceived here where transmission of your genes is now illegal, or between the two which makes it a prohibited immigrant the moment it leaves the womb. So…?”

“We thought maybe if we went out of the country altogether,” Sheena whispered.

“And got me to adopt it back in, and reunite you with it?” Olive gave a humourless chuckle. “Yes, I do that sort of thing. For a flat fee of a hundred thousand.”

Frank started. “But that’s far more than—!”

“Than the cost of a regular adoption? Certainly. Adoption is legal, subject to certain conditions. What you’re proposing is not.”

There was silence. Eventually Olive said, having savoured their discomfort, “Well, Mr. Potter, I’d suggest the only solution for you is to start over. I can recommend GT’s line of abortifacients, and I know a doctor who won’t insist on the kind of pregnancy check he’s supposed to carry out before prescribing them. Then I could put you on my regular waiting list. Beyond that I can’t be any help.”

“There
must
be something else we can do!” Frank almost jumped out of his chair. “We want our own prodgies, not someone else’s second-hand! Over in Yatakang they’ve just announced they can—”

Olive’s face went as hard as marble. She said, “You will oblige me by leaving, Mr. Potter.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” A podgy hand stabbed a button on her desk.

Sheena plucked at her husband’s arm. “She’s an expert, Frank,” she said in a dead voice. “You’ve got to take her word for it.”

“No, this is too much! We came in to make a civil inquiry and—”

“The door behind you is open,” Olive said. “Good morning.”

Sheena turned and headed for the exit. After a moment in which he looked ready to scream with fury, Frank let his shoulders droop and followed her.

*   *   *

When they had gone, Olive found herself panting from the effort of self-control. She pronounced a curse on the government of Yatakang and felt a little better.

But her hatred was new and raw; like a dressed burn it hurt despite salving.

Over the years she had built up a huge network of necessary contacts, expended a million dollars in bribes, risked prosecution a score of times, secure in the belief that products of contemporary tectogenetic skill such as cloned embryos could never compete with traditional “unskilled labour”. She had begun when only two states, California and New York, had eugenic legislation, and Puerto Rico was full of overburdened mothers with passable genotypes prepared to let a fifth or sixth baby go for adoption to some rich Yanqui. As the eugenics laws spread and grew teeth, as voluntary sterilisation after the third child became commonplace, she developed alternatives. A clean genotype, while still desirable, posed less of a problem than proving the adoptee was an American citizen when for brown-nose parents-to-be it hailed from Haiti, for gringos from Chile or Bolivia.

With much trouble and care she had mothered an enterprise that coped with all the difficulties. Now, suddenly, the sheeting Yatakangis had laid a long black shadow of disaster half around the world. They were not merely offering for free a chance hitherto denied to all but the richest families—they were intending to insist on it. The child born of any womb could be a genius, a Venus, an Adonis …

And if their further claim was true, who would want a run-of-the-mill child when there were going to be improved versions with unguessable new talents?

From her desk she picked up its only ornament, a conch-shell of exceptionally vivid colouring, and threw it at the window overlooking the busy city. It fell in pieces to the floor. The glass was unmarked, and the universe outside was still there.

continuity (14)

THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

There was no longer a real world. It receded from him like the half-grasped images of a dream: epitome of the uncertainty principle, torn asunder by the effort of clutching them. It was already hazy when he committed himself to the East River acceleratube, and the last shreds dissipated behind the plane which arced him across the continent on the fringe of empty space, where the stars might be like white-hot needles if they could be seen.

They were, of course, not seen. Through radiation shielding and crash protection and layers of heat insulation that at re-entry glowed (by report) dull red, the stars could not penetrate to the eyes of Donald Hogan.

He thought of Chad Mulligan asking when last he saw the stars—asking when Norman last got wet in the rain—fading, illusory, spawn of a drug. A woman in the next seat spent the journey chuckling to herself, making a wholly personal trip, and he sometimes caught a sweetish whiff of something she had in a smelling-bottle with a foam wad closing the neck. He thought at one point she was going to offer it to him, but she changed her mind.

Why kill a man you’ve never seen before? The pilot of the shot-down copter, whose skull the crowd had smashed, seemed more real to him than Norman, than Chad, than anyone. The abstract truth of that death grew solid in his mind, making him think of Haldane’s argument that an intelligent bee would conceive ideas like “duty” to be concrete.

If they wished to, legally they could put a weapon in his hand and tell him to go across the Pacific Conflict Zone to kill strangers. They did it daily to hundreds of young men picked by an anonymous computer. The New York rioters had been armed, too, and that was called crime. Between that act and this ran only the tenuous dividing line called an order.

From whom? In these days, from a man? Probably not. His illusion on Fifth Avenue outside the library, therefore, was not illusion.
First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then…?

Then you serve machines. It was obvious. It followed so logically it was almost comforting. And Guinevere was right after all to make the clients of her Beautiques into glossy factory products.

It was even clear why people, including Donald Hogan, were willing to accept the instructions of a machine. Many others besides himself must have discovered that serving human beings felt like treachery—like selling out to the enemy. Every man and woman
was
the enemy. Biding their time, perhaps, masking their intentions with fine polite words, but in the end clubbing to death you, a stranger on their own home street.

*   *   *

They opened the can-container of the plane and spilled the passengers like pilchards into the warm hesitant sun of early Californian summer. The expressport was featureless, like an aircraft carrier, its passenger terminal and service depots sheltered by a thickness of earth from the risk of a crash and an explosion. Accordingly what he saw of the sunlight was through armour-glass, and he did not smell the salt air off the ocean but the perfumed exhaust of the conditioning system. The burrow-like passages divided him from the last vestiges of the world he had left on the other coast, seeming to force his thinking into an analogue of their uncompromising square section with sharp right angles where they joined. Everything seemed new and improbable, as though he were under a drug that destroyed perceptual sets. The spectacle of so many men and women in uniform was a source of wonder: the olive-drab of Army, the dark blue of Navy, the light blue of Air, the black and white of Space. The PA system uttered cryptic orders full of numerical and lettered codes until in addition to visual confusion he began to lose control over his auditory faculties, imagining that he was in a country he had never heard of where they spoke the staccato language of machines:
01101000101
 …

A clock told him what time it was and his watch assured him the clock was a liar. Posters warned him about danger from spies and he began to be afraid of himself because he was a spy. A rope fence hung on coloured metal poles isolating a branch corridor down which char-marks and bright scratches suggested an explosion. An unknown hand had chalked on the wall DREKY REDS. A man went by holding his head consciously high: eyes aslant, complexion marginally yellow, a Nisei badge pinned to his shirjack seeming like the flimsiest of armour. More uniforms, this time the blue and black of police, scrutinising everyone. On galleries there were zoom TV cameras and a team of four men were collecting all the fingerprints that accumulated on the escalator handrails and taking them to a computer readin to be checked against headquarters files. ASK THE MAN WHO’S MARRIED TO MARY JANE.

But STOMP THAT ROACH.

“Lieutenant Hogan?” a voice said. TUNE IN AND TURN ON TO THE WORLD IN A RADIO-DRESSLET.

But KEEP THE WORLD AT BAY THROUGH SAFE-T-GARD INC.

“Lieutenant Hogan!” HERE TODAY AND GONE TODAY IS THE PIDGIN WE PLUCK.

But SEE IT THROUGH THE EVERYWHERES’ EYES …

He wondered if Sergeant Schritt was supposed to have been on his plane; he wondered if the man had managed to get as drunk as he wanted; he wondered if oblivion had brought surcease. That was the last and final courtesy he paid to the dead alien world of the past decade. It was out of reach now, receding along the fourth dimension at the speed of light. It had been his, private, like the illusions of a hitripper, and as Chad had promised the real world had reserved its unique power to take him by surprise.

He said, listening with interest to the disbelief in his voice, “Yes, I’m Hogan. Were you sent to meet me and take me to Boat Camp?”

*   *   *

Among the dead-whale hulls of military craft soiling the once-fine beaches, the incongruously small, incongruously bright and incongruously noisy cockleshell of a cushioncraft ferried him and his anonymous companion over the rolling inshore surf towards the Devil’s Island bulk of Boat Camp on the skyline. Clambering among the struts supporting the vast main platform as though preparing to return to the simpler and less dangerous universe of the race’s monkey ancestors, recruits in full combat gear struggled to evade their sergeant’s wrath.

*   *   *

“I sent to Washington to have you re-evaluated,” said the colonel he was brought to see. “It’s something I’d have thought they’d make sure you appreciated before recruiting you, let alone activating you—that no individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative. However, I see your special aptitude is pattiducking, so you have a marginal chance of being right more often than most people. Don’t do it again, is all.”

“My special aptitude is what—sir?”

“Pattiducking! Pattern generation by deductive and inductive reasoning!” The colonel pushed his fingers through his hair in a combing movement.

Another barrier went up between Donald and the man he had believed himself to be. It made no real difference—the past was already out of reach. But he had always cherished that talent as something particularly his own, and in a ghostly fashion he was hurt to find it was well enough known to have a nickname.

“What is it I’m not supposed to do again, sir?” he demanded.

“Jump to conclusions, of course!” the colonel rapped. “I guess you decided it was a foregone conclusion that your mission was connected with this new genetics programme, but you sheeting well shouldn’t have pre-guessed an official decision to shed the cover Delahanty gave you.”

Shed?… Oh. He means tell Norman and the others that I’d been instructed to leave New York.

Donald shrugged and remained silent.

“You have your sealed orders with you?” the colonel asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Give them here.”

Donald handed over the package. The colonel scanned the documents it contained and placed them in a chute alongside his desk labelled
Destruct Secret Material.
Pressing a button, he sighed.

“I don’t yet have the full details of your revised cover,” he said. “As I understand it, though, the official announcement from Yatakang means that more foreign visitors than usual can be fed into the country convincingly by the regular channels. You’ll find them a sight easier than the irregular ones.” His eyes wandered to the office’s single window, which overlooked a parade-floor where a group of raw draftees were doubling to and fro.