Stand on Zanzibar (5 page)
Authors: John Brunner
He dragged from the wall each in turn of the masks. He tore away the coloured straw hair from them, poked out the jewelled eyes, broke loose the ivory teeth. He stabbed through the sounding heads of both the drums with one of the spears.
The task complete, he turned off the light, left and locked the room, and at the first disposall chute he came to throw away the one and only key.
Stock cue VISUAL:
cliptage, wholescreen, atmospheric-type, orchestrated, first favouring copter views and MCU’s New Jersey Turnpike Jam 1977 (¾ million cars o/w 16,000-odd had to be crushed in situ) intercut w crush-hour shots Fifth Ave., Oxford St., Red Sq.; later favouring cretins, morons, phocomeli.
Live cue SOUND:
“Today we congratulate Puerto Rico on the defeat it’s inflicted on the baby-farming lobby. People who have celebrated their twenty-first find it hard to believe that a mere thirty years ago highways and cities were choked to strangulation point with masses of allegedly moving metal that got in each other’s way so much we finally saw sense. Why worry about two tons of complicated steel gadgetry you won’t need when you get where you’re going—that won’t even get you there in reasonable time? Worse yet—which measurably shortens your life through cancer or bronchitis thanks to the stench it emits!
“Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves
are
living creatures. We don’t want the same to happen to us. That’s why we have eugenic legislation. Praise the J-but-O State for joining the majority of us who have seen the danger coming and resolved to put up with the minor inconveniences it entails when we decide to control the human elements of the big scene we inhabit.
“This has been a Greater New York Times editorial slot.”
Everything about Norman Niblock House was measured: as measured as a foot-rule, as measured as time.
Item
the degree to which he allowed himself to lighten his skin and straighten the kinks in his hair and beard, so that he could exploit the guilt-reaction of his colleagues while still managing to get next to the shiggies who did most for his cod.
Item
the soupçon of eccentricity he manifested in his behaviour, as much as could ordinarily be tolerated in a junior VP of a big corporation and that much over the limit which said he was not a man to trifle with.
Item
the amount and nature of the work he arranged to have channelled to his office, selected so the visits of other zecks found him engaged in vastly important transactions.
* * *
He had been recruited to the company under the provisions of the Equal Opportunity Act which bound corporations like General Technics to employ the same ratio of whites to Aframs as was found in the country at large, plus or minus five per cent. Unlike some of his intake, he’d been welcome with a sigh of relief by the then vice-president in charge of personnel and recruitment, who had almost given up hope of finding enough Aframs willing to accept the standards of their host society. (A doctorate? What’s a doctorate? A piece of paleass’s toilet-paper.)
Norman N. House, D.Sc., was a prize. Knowing that, he’d made the race to win him long and hard.
Perceptive for the third time in his life (the first time: picking his parents; the second: sideswiping the only other contender for the post he now held down), the VP noticed that his new subordinate had a talent for impressing his personality on people he had never met before and was unlikely to meet again. They said later that he had House style. It meant that while he could bear to forget others he hated the idea that they should forget him.
The VP, envying this talent, took to cultivating Norman House in the hope that some of it might rub off on him. The hope was unfounded. Either a man is born with the gift or he learns it by conscious application over twenty years. Norman was then twenty-six and had been applying himself for the requisite two decades.
But the VP was tossed a few glib, helpful snippets.
“What I think of him? Well, his papers are good” (spoken judiciously, willing to make allowances) “but to my mind the man who has to wear MasQ-Lines is basically unsure of his own competence. They pad the frontal area, you know.”
The VP, who had six pairs, never wore them again.
“What do I think of her? Well, she profiles okay on the testing sheet, but to my mind any girl who wears a Forlon&Morler Maxess top over a pair of impervious slax is the type who won’t go through with what she starts.”
The VP, who had invited her to dinner and expected to be paid in the current contemporary coin, excused himself on grounds of imaginary illness and went grumpily home to his wife for the night.
“What I think of the annual report? Well, the graphing is up on last year’s, but the noise level generated by this operation suggests it could be fifteen to eighteen per cent higher than it is. I’m wondering if it’ll last.”
The VP, who had been dithering, decided to retire at fifty with the Grade One bonus stock issue instead of hanging on to collect the Grade Three entitlement, double the size, due at sixty. He sold the stock as soon as he acquired it and chewed his nails while he watched its value creep up month by month. Eventually he shot himself.
It was his suspicion that the rise of GT stock might be due to his own replacement by Norman which killed him.
* * *
Norman walked briskly towards the general elevator. He declined to use the one that led directly from street-level to the wall behind his desk: “It’s ludicrous for someone who deals with people not to mingle with the people he’s dealing with, isn’t it?”
At least one of the senior VP’s had lately stopped using his private elevator too.
But in any case, he was going up.
Waiting, there was one of the company shiggies. She smiled at him, not because they were acquainted—he preferred to let it be felt that someone who relied on the firm to get him shiggies was less of a man than Norman House—but because the time and effort he invested in trifles like not using a private elevator paid off in the common belief that of all the twenty VP’s in the company the most approachable and sociable was Mr. House. Stockboys toting crates in GT’s West Virginia electronics plant shared the opinion, never having set eyes on him.
The smile he automatically returned was forced. He was edgy. An invitation to take lunch on the presidential floor with the senior zecks might be accounted for in two main ways: there might be promotion in the offing, although the grapevine he assiduously cultivated had brought him no hint of it; or, far more likely, they might be planning yet another review of the staffing system. He had endured two such since inheriting his present job, but they were a nuisance, and sometimes he could not hang on to people he had schemed for months to slot into influential posts.
The hole! I can cope with these paleasses. I did it before.
The descending light of the elevator showed and a soft chime rang out. Norman returned his attention to the here and now. A clock over the door, keyed like all those in the GT tower to the famous critonium master clock, indicated 12–44 poppa-momma. If he let the shiggy take the car down, he’d be a measured minute late for lunch with the Highly Important Personages.
That should be about right.
When the car arrived, he waved the girl past him. “I’m going up,” he told her.
Promotion in the offing or not, he meant it.
* * *
The predicted few moments behind schedule, he emerged on the presidential floor. Synthetic grass hushed under his feet as he walked towards the group gathered alongside the swimming-pool. Four of the shapeliest of the company shiggies were disporting themselves nude in the water. He thought of the recurrent joke question—“Why doesn’t GT pioneer company codders?”—and had trouble masking his amusement as he was greeted by Old GT herself.
Merely by looking at Georgette Tallon Buckfast one could not have guessed she was both an extraordinary person and an extraordinary artifact. One had to be told that she was ninety. She looked at worst sixty: plump, well-favoured, crowned with enough of her own brown hair to belie the old charge that she was more male than female. True, close study of her bosom might reveal the inequality which betrayed her use of a cardiac pacemaker, but nowadays many people wore such accessories by the time they were seventy or even younger. Only intensive prying had led Norman to knowledge of the lung-tissue transplant, the plastic venous valves, the kidney graft, the pinned bones, the vocal cords replaced because of cancer.
According to reliable estimates she was somewhat richer than the British royal family. Wealth like that could buy health, even if only by instalments.
With her were Hamilcar Waterford, the company treasurer, much younger than Old GT but looking older; Rex Foster-Stern, senior VP in charge of projects and planning, a man of Norman’s own height and build who affected Dundreary whiskers and what the Children of X sneeringly termed a “non-partisan tan”; and an Afram whose features had a tantalisingly familiar cast, though he was not someone Norman had seen around the GT tower before—fiftyish, stocky, bald, Kenyatta beard, looking tired.
Norman considered a new explanation for his having been invited to this luncheon. Last time he had encountered a middle-aged stranger at such a function it had been a retired admiral GT was thinking of adding to the board for the sake of his service contacts. He had gone to a hovercraft manufacturer instead, so nothing had come of it. But if this was another of the same, Norman was going to be as insolent as he could manage without jeopardising his career. No kinky-knobbed Uncle Tom was going to be slotted into a high board chair above Norman House.
Then Old GT said, “Elihu, let me introduce Norman House, who’s our VP i/c personnel and recruitment,” and the world shifted to a different axis.
Elihu. Elihu Rodan Masters, career diplomat, U. S. Ambassador to Beninia. But whatinole could GT want with a snake’s-tongue scrap of land like that, stuck wedgewise into Africa with neither skills nor natural resources to be exploited?
There was no time for speculation, though. He put out his hand, cutting short GT’s introduction with the gesture. “No real need to introduce anyone to Mr. Masters, ma’am,” he said briskly. “Someone with his kind of personal distinction is environment-forming for all of us, and I feel I know him well though I never had the chance to shake with him before.”
In Old GT’s face—for a woman who had built herself both a giant corporation and a huge personal fortune, she was surprisingly bad at controlling her expression—Norman could see annoyance at being interrupted struggling with satisfaction at the prettiness of the compliment.
“Drink?” she said finally, the latter winning out.
“No thanks, ma’am,” Norman answered. “It’s against the word of the Prophet, you know.”
Beninia, hm? Something to do with opening an African market for MAMP? Over half a billion bucks tied up in that, and no place to sell the produce of the richest mineral strike since Siberia—it can’t go on. But Beninia can’t even afford to feed its own population from what I hear …
Plainly embarrassed at having forgotten or not known that one of her own VP’s was a Muslim, Old GT took refuge in testiness. The House style was proof against that. Pleased with the turn the talk was taking, extremely aware of Master’s eyes on him, Norman thoroughly enjoyed the ten minutes of conversation which preluded their adjournment to table. In fact he took it so much for granted that the buzz of the phone a minute or two after one o’clock was to herald the serving of the meal that he continued with the story he’d been telling—a mild anti-Afram joke suitable for mixed company, well salted with the derogatory term “brown-nose”—until GT shouted at him the second time.
“House!
House!
There’s trouble with a gang of visitors being shown over Shalmaneser! On your orbit, isn’t it?”
Preserving his exterior calm by reflex, Norman rose from his polychair.
If this is something they’ve laid on to screw me, I’ll give them dreck for dinner. I’ll—
“Forgive me, Mr. Masters,” he said in a slightly bored tone. “I’ll only be a minute or two, I’m sure.”
And headed for the elevator, seething.
“Talk about launch windows all it means some pudding-hole zeck knotted his strings Shalmaneser-pizzleteaser whyinole waste the time come all this way to New York better weather even without a dome fit to freeze your cod off in here better shiggies wearing less and better pot to cap the lot eight today already here it is not yet one poppa-momma and hardly a heist in a haywagon”
* * *
Inside the vault housing Shalmaneser: cool. Waiting for the launch window, which is a decorative way of saying when the GT guide is good and ready to start, this fact has already decided several of the crowd one hundred nine strong (some of whom are tourists some of whom are genuine potential recruits lured by the handouts and TV plugs of the GT Corp. some of whom have seen themselves here so often in the personae of Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere that they couldn’t tell you why they bothered to make the visit in reality and some of whom are GT’s own plantees primed to speak up at the right moments and give the impression of Things Happening) that they aren’t going to be interested in what they’re shown. Cold! In May! Under the Manhattan Fuller Dome! And clad in Nydofoam sneakers, MasQ-Lines, Forlon&Morler skirtlets and dresslets; strung about with Japind Holocams with Biltin g’teed Norisk LazeeLaser monochrome lamps, instreplay SeeyanEar recorders; pocket-heavy with Japind Jettiguns, SeKure Stunnems, Karatands to be slipped on
as easily as your grandmother drew on her glove.
Uneasy, watching their accidental companions on this guided tour.
Well-fed.
Shifty-eyed, slipping tranks into their chomp-chomp jaws.
