Stand on Zanzibar

context (6)

ONE COMES OUT WHERE …

Beninia (ben-IN’-ya): country W. Africa, N. of Bight of Benin. 6330 sq. mi. Est. pop. (1999) 870,000. *Port Mey (127,000). Fishing, agriculture, handicrafts.

Brit crown col. & protectorate 1883–1971. Indep. repub. 1971–date.

85% Shinka, 10% Holaini, 3% Inoko, 2% Kpala, 30% Xian, 30% Muslim, 40% misc. pagan.

“… and remains today one of the cruellest legacies of colonial exploitation, a country which owes its present gross overpopulation to an influx of refugees from tribal conflicts in adjacent territories and almost completely lacks the natural resources to support itself. Recipient of endless UN aid, it has been reduced to the status of a beggar in the comity of nations despite President Obomi’s proud rejection of Chinese ‘technical assistance’. With the unfortunate fate of some of the former French colonies before him, possibly he was wise in the long term, but the long term is not yet here and the short term promises famine and plague…”

(NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed—not by its residents—Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

“Old Zad’s been in that job for going on forty years and I can’t help wondering whether the reason he sticks it is because he wants to or whether there simply isn’t anyone else in the whole benighted country fit to take over his chair!”

continuity (5)

HEAR HEAR

Victoria came out of Norman’s bedroom wearing a white lei and Maxess lounging pants—two tight tubes of shimmering gold to thigh-height, ornamented behind with frills that were gathered into a bobbing rosette at her bottom, and a heavy gold fringe three layers deep hanging from a cord stretched hipbone to hipbone. It wasn’t, obviously, getting dressed that had taken her so long, but perfecting the rest of her appearance. Her almost white hair was spindled into the fashionable antenna style, her veins were traced with blue—what some wit had nicknamed “printed circuit-lation”—and her nails, nipples and contact lenses were chromed.

Glancing at the men only long enough to determine that they were deep in conversation, she crossed the room to the corner where her polyorgan was set up. Using the earphones so as not to disturb them with her pracising, she began for the uncountableth time to rehearse a simple exercise with three beats in the left hand and five in the right.

* * *

As always when someone asked him about a subject outside his speciality, Donald was embarrassingly aware of the extent of his ignorance. However, when he had summed up what he could recall of Beninia—privately wondering all the time why Norman didn’t simply go to the phone and punch for an encyclopedia connection—the Afram looked honestly impressed.

“Thanks. You’ve reminded me of several points I’d forgotten.”

“Why the sudden interest in such an insignificant country?” Donald probed.

Norman hesitated. He glanced at Victoria, decided that with the unheard booming of the organ in her ears she could not be eavesdropping, and gave a wry smile.

“You don’t have any in GT’s company secrets, do you?”

“Of course not,” Donald said with a trace of huffiness, and prepared to rise and collect another drink.

On the verge of anger—trust a paleass to misunderstand me!—Norman controlled himself.

“Sorry, that’s not what I meant.” He swallowed hard. “I meant: you don’t mind if I mention something which strictly I ought not to?”

“I promise it won’t go any further,” Donald assured him, settling into his chair again. What could all this be leading up to? Norman was unprecedentedly nervous, twisting his hands together as though he could wring out the sweat that moistened their palms.

“Tell me why you think Old GT, plus the corporation treasurer and the senior VP in charge of projects and planning, should invite Elihu Masters to lunch, put me on display like a—like a cabaret turn, and then discuss nothing repeat nothing but generalities.”

He uttered the words with a kind of fierceness, for they symbolised what might be an important breakthrough.

Donald was startled at being taken into Norman’s confidence after so long a period of mere mutual politeness—shading occasionally into acrimony. Careful to conceal his reaction, he mulled over the name.

“Elihu Masters?… Oh! He used to be our ambassador in Haiti, didn’t he? Then they sent him to Beninia, and there were a lot of rumours about a demotion—hints of some kind of scandal.”

Norman sighed. “We Aframs are as touchy as flayed skin, aren’t we? There were accusations of prejudice, too, and all sorts of sinister machinations. I doubted the rumours about a scandal, because I’d followed his career with some interest and everyone I knew who’d met him spoke very highly of his integrity, but as to the rest of it … Well, the idea of him being sent off to ferment in some quiet backwater didn’t fit.”

“You think there was a deeper reason behind the transfer?” Donald suggested. “I guess that’s possible, but—well, would it have anything to do with GT? I don’t see how, on the face of it, but of course you’re the one who’d be in a position to judge that.”

After a momentary hesitation, Norman said, “My first idea was that it might have a connection with MAMP.”

“The Mid-Atlantic Mining Project?” Donald thought that over for a few seconds, then shrugged. “I did hear on the grapevine that GT was getting frustrated about having tapped a mineral treasure-trove which it can’t afford to exploit—is that the case, in fact?”

“Pretty well,” Norman admitted. “The point is, it would cost just about as much to bring usable ore to the surface from MAMP as it does to produce it from more conventional sources; they’ve tried and tried and they’ve failed to figure out a way of cheapening their methods. Current prices represent irreducible rock-bottom for anything from MAMP, but competing producers would cheerfully slice their profits to make GT look silly by undercutting them. GT would have to compete at a loss, and that’s a crazy way to exploit a rich strike of ore, isn’t it?”

“So what connection could Beninia have with MAMP?”

“None that I can see. It’s not a market. It’s too poor to buy even at a discount. Which leaves GT out of the picture and apparently brings in State.”

Donald rubbed his chin. “How? Of course, it’s an open secret that both the Dahomalians and the RUNGs are after Port Mey. It has potentially one of the finest harbours on the Bight of Benin. Right now, I gather, it’s not much more than a fishing-port, but if it were properly dredged … Hmmm! Yes, I suppose State might have an interest in maintaining Beninian independence.”

“What’s in it for State, though—Port Mey as a naval base?”

“We have our—uh—pocket republic of Liberia just around the corner. In any case, it’s too vulnerable; a well-trained army could isolate the city in half a day, and occupy the whole country in forty-eight hours.”

“On the general principle of the thing, to keep it out of the hands of its expansionist neighbours?”

“I doubt if State would meddle to that extent even if President Obomi came and begged them on bended knee. Look what happened over Isola! That was twenty years ago and the storm of protest still throws up ripples occasionally, even though the union was made on the basis of a plebiscite.”

Norman’s jaw dropped suddenly, as though inspiration had struck him. Donald waited to see if he was going to voice it, then ventured a guess of his own.

“Are you wondering whether Masters approached GT, rather than the other way around?”

“Prophet’s beard, Donald, are you developing a latent psi faculty? That is precisely what I was wondering! You wouldn’t expect a man like Masters to be thinking of leaving the diplomatic service for a luxy boardroom job with more prestige than honest work. He’s a good deal too young to retire, and a good deal too successful to be bought out of his chosen career. Nothing was said during lunch, either, to suggest GT was trying to recruit him—though actually, like I told you, nothing much was said about anything.”

Silence fell anew. Donald’s mind was busy with the implications of what Norman had told him, and he was prepared to wait for more to follow rather than risk diverting the conversation by making a remark of his own. However, Norman had fallen to staring at his own left hand, swivelling it back and forth on the wrist as though he had never seen it before. If he did propose to say something else, it was taking him a long while to put it into words.

And when at last he did seem about to speak, Victoria forestalled him, tugging off her earphones and swinging to face him.

“Norman! Are we going to do anything this evening?”

Norman started and checked his watch. He jumped to his feet. “Excuse me! I’m overdue for evening prayers. I’ll be back in a moment, Donald.”

“I don’t get an answer?” Victoria prompted.

“Hm? Oh—no, I don’t feel in the mood. Ask Donald.”

She did so with a cock of one cycloidally arched eyebrow. He hesitated before replying; not having a shiggy of his own to offer Norman at the moment, he had enjoyed little of Victoria’s company these past two weeks. But the sight of her flawless artificial perfection irritated him by reminding him of Guinevere Steel and the products of her celebrated Beautique.

“No, thanks,” he muttered, and went to collect the drink he’d set out for several minutes ago.

“In that case you won’t mind if I go out for a while,” Victoria said pettishly, opening the door.

“Stay out as long as you like,” Norman said over his shoulder, heading for his bedroom and the prayermat laid out facing Mecca.

The door slammed.

Left to himself, already half-regretting the fact that he had declined Norman’s offer, Donald wandered about the wide living-room. Only part of his attention was on his surroundings; the rest of his mind was taken up with puzzled reflection on Norman’s uncharacteristic behaviour.

Shortly, his random strolling brought him to the polyorgan. He had never inspected it closely since Victoria moved in. Of the very latest design, it folded up seat and all to the size of a suitcase and was light enough to lift on two fingers.

He admired the sleek changeochrome finish of the exterior, within the millimetre thickness of which light was split into its spectral components, making the material seem to have been dipped in rainbow paint. Idly, he put one of the headphones to his ear and tapped the keyboard.

A blasting discord threatened to shatter his eardrum.

He withdrew his hand as though the instrument had burned him and looked along the ranked controls for a volume switch. One instant before adjusting it, he was struck by a thought.

Victoria couldn’t have been playing with the volume at that level. She’d have been deafened. Why would she have set the volume to maximum before leaving the instrument to go out?

For no better reason than that this sort of petty inconsistency in his environment always piqued him—for the same reason, in fact, that he had been sufficiently dissatisfied with his education to attract the Dilettante Dept—he sat down at the console and began to explore the operation of the instrument.

It was less than five minutes before he discovered the spring-loaded switch activated by a little more pressure than the player would normally apply to the vibrato control lever resting against his right knee.

* * *

Wondering what he ought to do, he sat quite still until Norman emerged from the bedroom. As usual, his few minutes of ritual obeisance seemed to have restored his calm and good humour.

“You can’t play that thing, can you?” he inquired, as though perfectly prepared to discover Donald had been keeping the secret of his musical talent ever since his arrival in the apartment.

Donald came to a decision. There was something underlying Norman’s earlier unprecedented desire to confide in his roomie. One more slight shock might shake loose the last of his defensive barriers and open him up completely.

“I think you’d better come here and listen to this,” he said.

Puzzled, Norman complied, accepting the headphones Donald handed him.

“You want me to put them on?”

“No, just hold one to your ear. Now listen.” Donald pressed down a single key and a pure musical tone sounded.

“That seems to be—”

“Wait a second.” Donald pushed his knee hard against the vibrato control. The pure tone began to waver frantically until it was cycling a semitone up and down from its basic pitch. Harder still—

The musical tone ceased. A voice said, faintly but distinctly, “—precisely what I was wondering! You wouldn’t expect a man like Masters to be thinking of—”

Donald released the secret switch and the wavering tone returned, continuing until he took his finger off the key.

For long seconds Norman remained statue-still. Then, beginning with his hands, his whole frame began to tremble, more and more violently until he could barely stand upright. Donald rescued the headphones from his nerveless grasp one moment before he let them fall, and guided him sympathetically to a chair.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “But I thought you should know right away. Let me get you a trank, shall I?”

Eyes wide, fixed on nothing, Norman gave an abbreviated nod.

Donald fetched the pill and a cup of water to wash it down. He stood by until, from the cessation of the trembling, it was clear the drug had taken effect. Then he said, “Come now—they’re not going to hold it against you at GT, surely! They must know that anyone in your position is a prime target for indesp, and a gadget that clever isn’t something you’d stumble on except by accident, the way I did it.”

“I’m not worried about GT,” Norman said stonily. “GT is big enough and bastardly enough to look after its sheeting self. Leave me alone, will you?”

Warily Donald drew back, watching Norman with taut concentration. He ventured, “Two major shocks in the same day is—”

“Is none of your drecky business!” Norman snapped, and jumped to his feet. He had taken three strides towards the door before Donald found his voice again.

“Norman, you’re not going after Victoria, for goodness’ sake! There’s no point in—”

“Oh, shut up,” Norman said over his shoulder. “Of course I’m not going after that sheeting shiggy. If she has the gall to show her face here again I can shop her for industrial espionage, can’t I? And it’ll do my heart good, believe me.”

“Where are you going, then?”

On the threshold, Norman spun around to face Donald squarely. “What’s it to you? You’re a bloodless featureless zombie, as measured as a yardstick and colder than liquid air! You’ve never bought the right to know what I’m doing—with your dilettante’s detachment and your nonstop paleass politeness!” He was breathing in violent gasps despite the impact of the tranquilliser he had swallowed.

“But I’ll tell you anyway—I’m going to try and track down Masters so I can put right some of the damage I’ve done today!”

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.

the happening world (4)

SPOKEN LIKE A MAN

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)

tracking with closeups (6)

WHICH SIDE AM I ON?

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!”