Stand on Zanzibar

context (16)

MR. & MRS. EVERYWHERE: CALYPSO

“Like the good Lord God in the Valley of Bones

Engrelay Satelserv made some people called Jones.

They were not alive and they were not dead—

They were ee-magi-nary but always ahead.

What was remarkably and uniquely new—

A gadget on the set made them look like you!

“Watching their sets in a kind of a trance

Were people in Mexico, people in France.

They don’t chase Jones but the dreams are the same—

Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that’s the right name!

Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,

A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

“You can’t see all the places of interest,

Go to the Moon and climb Mount Everest,

So you stay at home in a comfortable chair

And rely on Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere!

Doing all the various things you would like to do,

A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

“Wearing parkas and boots made by Gondola

You see them on an expedition polar.

They’re sunning on the beach at Martinique

Using lotion from Guinevere Steel’s Beautique.

Whether you’re red, white, black or blue

A gadget on the set makes them look like you!

“When the Everywhere couple crack a joke

It’s laughed at by all right-thinking folk.

When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose

It’s the with-it view as everyone knows.

It may be a rumour or it may be true

But a gadget on the set has it said by you!

“English Language Relay Satellite Service

Didn’t do this without any purpose.

They know very well what they would like—

A thousand million people all thinking alike.

When someone says something you don’t ask who—

A gadget on the set has it said by you!

“‘What do you think about Yatakang?’

‘I think the same as the Everywhere gang.’

‘What do you think of Beninia then?’

‘The Everywheres will tell me but I don’t know when.’

Whatever my country and whatever my name

A gadget on the set makes me think the same.”

continuity (17)

TIMESCALES

“Which is the real time—his or ours?”

Norman had not intended the question to emerge in audible form. It was sparked by the sight of the enormous pile of printouts from Shalmaneser that had been delivered overnight to his office, and by recollection of the way they would have been produced. No conceivable printing device—not even the light-writers which had no moving parts except the fine beam from a miniature laser that inscribed words on photo-sensitive paper—could keep up with Shalmaneser’s nanosecond mental processes; the entire problem posed to him would have been solved, or at any rate evaluated, then shunted to a temporary storage bank while he got on with the next task his masters imposed, and the conversion of it into comprehensible language would have taken fifty or a hundred times as long.

Elihu glanced at him. His eyes were a little red from lack of sleep, as were Norman’s; one could not afford to sleep if one wanted to keep up with modern information-handling techniques. He said, “Whose?”

Norman gave a sour laugh, ushering the older man past him and closing the office door. “Sorry. I’m thinking of Shalmaneser as a ‘he’ again.”

Elihu nodded. “Like Chad said, he’s becoming one of the GT family … How is Chad, by the way? I expected him to take more of an interest in this project—after all, when I first met him at Miss Steel’s, he spent practically the entire evening interrogating me about Beninia.”

“I’ve hardly seen anything of him,” Norman said, moving around his electronic desk and shoving at the swivel chair with his knee to turn it so he could sit down. “He’s been using Don’s room, I know that, and I think much of the time he’s been going through Don’s books—he has about three thousand of them. But apart from a hello, we haven’t talked much.”

“I see what you mean about the real time,” Elihu said.

Norman blinked at him, puzzled.

“This!” Elihu amplified, tapping one of the three foot-deep stacks of printouts awaiting their attention. “Both you and I want to talk about the Beninian project. But we can’t. Anything we say without reference to computers is already out of date before it’s uttered, isn’t it? The information to correct and shape our opinions exists, and we know it exists, so we decline to communicate until we’ve briefed ourselves, and because Shalmaneser works thousands of times faster than we do, we can never catch up so we never genuinely manage to communicate.”

Norman hesitated. After the pause, he said, “Speaking of information to shape and change our opinions…”

“Yes?”

“Could you get me some data from State, do you think?”

“It depends.” Elihu settled into a chair facing him. “I can get anything that touches directly on my own interests, but even ambassadorial rank, these days, doesn’t carry infinite cachet.”

“It’s about Don,” Norman said. His mouth twisted into a wry grin. “What you said about failing to communicate made me think of it. I lived with that codder for years, you know, and I never really got to be close friends with him. And now he’s not around my place any longer, I miss him. I feel sort of guilty. I’d like to know if it’s possible for me to keep in touch.”

“I can inquire, I guess,” Elihu agreed. “What happened to him, by the way?”

“I thought you knew. Oh! If you don’t, maybe I shouldn’t … The hole with that, though. If a U.S. ambassador can’t be trusted, who can?”

“They don’t trust anybody, literally,” Elihu shrugged. “Except computers.”

“I do,” Norman said. He glanced down at his hands and wrung them together absently. “As of a few days ago, and on principle. Don’s gone to Yatakang on State business.”

Elihu mulled that over for a while. He said, “That places him for me. I’d wondered where to pigeon-hole him. You mean he’s one of these standby operatives State keeps on tap as insurance against the eventuation of low-probability trends.”

“I believe that’s correct, yes.”

“And the only thing that’s happened in Yatakang lately is this fantastic genetic programme they’re boosting. Is that connected with his visit?”

“I assume it must be. At any rate, Don took his degree in biology, and his doctorate thesis was on the survival of archetypal genes in living fossils like coelacanths and king crabs and ginkgos.”

“State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.”

“I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s a bit difficult to explain … Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?”

“Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.”

“So have I, but—well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room.

“Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?”

“The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.”

“So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?”

“Yes, of course—these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.”

“Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?”

“Lord, no! It costs—what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?”

“About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brown-nose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And—to be absolutely frank—a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie. There’s something absolutely unique and indescribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.”

“I can well understand that,” Elihu nodded. “And of course I’ve seen this on other people’s sets too. Also I agree entirely about what we regard as real. But I thought we were talking about the Yatakangi claim?”

“I still am,” Norman said. “Do you have a homimage attachment on your set? No, obviously not. I do. This does the same thing except with your environment; when they—let’s see … Ah yes! When they put up something like the splitscreen cuts they use to introduce SCANALYZER, one of the cuts is always what they call the ‘digging’ cut, and shows Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sitting in your home wearing your faces watching the same programme you’re about to watch. You know this one?”

“I don’t think they have this service in Africa yet,” Elihu said. “I know the bit you mean, but it always shows a sort of idealised dream-home full of luxy gadgetry.”

“That used to be what they did here,” Norman said. “Only nowadays practically every American home is full of luxy gadgetry. You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?”

Elihu chuckled, then grew grave. “That’s too nearly literal to be funny,” he said.

“Prophet’s beard, it certainly is! I found time to look over some of Chad’s books after Guinevere’s party, and … Well, having met him I was inclined to think he was a conceited blowhard, but now I think he’s entitled to every scrap of vanity he likes to put on.”

“I thought of asking State to invite him to come in on this project as a special advisor, but when I broached the matter to Raphael Corning I was told State doesn’t approve of him.”

“Why should they? He’s successfully mocked everything authority stands for.”

“He doesn’t think he’s been successful.”

“He’s certainly coloured public opinion. He may not have changed it radically, but what social theorist since Mao has managed to turn it over? The mere fact that his books are prescribed for college courses means his views are widely disseminated.”

“Yes, but so are Thoreau’s and— Never mind, we’re digressing. You said something about our not wanting the Yatakangi genetic technique and then you started off about Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere.”

“Right. I’ve almost forgotten to make my main point. I’ve watched this happen a couple of times, over eugenic legislation and over the question of partisans. After they’ve been using a personalised TV set for a while, especially if it includes a homimage unit, people begin to lose touch with actuality. For instance, you’re supposed to have a fresh base-recording of your appearance put in about once a year. But I know people who’ve merely had a fresh track made of the first one, for four and even five years successively, so they can go on looking at their younger selves on the screen. They deny the passage of time. They live in an extended instant. Do you see what I’m steering towards?”

“People who can’t even reconcile themselves to growing older won’t submit to someone else’s good fortune when it comes to children?”

“Right. In other words: either our own government, and everyone else’s, has got to match the Yatakangi claim forthwith, or else it’s got to be shown up for an empty boast. The latter possibility would obviously suit State far better, because applying tectogenetic improvements to millions of pregnancies would cause a fantastic social upheaval—even worse than what followed the establishment of the Eugenic Processing Boards. But there’s no middle way. Success in Yatakang, denied to people in other countries, and even success in a limited area of our society denied to people in other groups, will lead to such widespread resentment … Am I stretching my argument too far?”

“I don’t believe you are.” Elihu tried and failed to control a visible shudder. “I haven’t been watching TV, as I told you—but since I’m rooming in the UN Hostel, I’ve been getting first-hand opinions from people of a hundred different nationalities, and take my word, Yatakang is the most cordially hated country on the face of the globe right now, not excluding China.”

“And here’s the crunch,” Norman said, leaning forward to emphasise his words. “There hasn’t been a new crisis since Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere took over. They emerged full-blown into the existing contemporary world, with its generation-long antipathies and hatreds. Even so, I’ve seen what they’ve done to public opinion. Tens—scores—of millions of people are becoming identified with that imaginary couple. The next presidential campaign will pivot on what they think, not on the validity of the rival policies. But the Yatakang question is going to hit first, and what’s worse it’ll hit people in the balls. Below the waist you don’t think, you react. Let Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere only say that this isn’t fair, and you’ll have a party in favour of war against Yatakang within a week.”

There was a short silence.

A kind of anguish was written on Norman’s face. Studying it, Elihu said finally, “It’s remarkable how much you’ve altered in the few days since I met you.”

“What? How do you mean?”

“Laying away your ancestor to his long-time rest has improved you out of recognition. A couple of weeks ago I can imagine you chortling over the discomfiture of the paleasses in face of this breakthrough by yellowbellies. Now what seems to worry you most is the fact that people won’t get the chance to judge the idea dispassionately for themselves, but may get stampeded into stupid emotional reactions.”

“My whole life has been one long emotional reaction,” Norman said, not looking at the older man. “Shall we leave the subject and get back to the business in hand?”

He picked up the first clipped-together section of printouts and riffled the pale green pages. Pale green signified that Shalmaneser had processed the information there contained as a hypothesis; when they keyed in the real-world assumptions the printouts would be on light pink sheets.

“What does the summary say?” Elihu inquired.

“It’ll work,” Norman muttered. He set the item aside and glanced at the top page of each of the following documents. “And that, and that, and that … ‘Given the assumptions in the programme, the evaluation is favourable.’”

“It’s nice to know something is on our side,” Elihu commented caustically, and, reaching for a pen, began to make a neat tabulation of the various areas of the proposed Beninian venture where Shalmaneser said the idea was feasible.

He—one had to use the personal—had even revised the drafts of the advertisements for ex-colonial personnel.

the happening world (10)

SOUR GRAPES

“Already surgeons, doctors and nurses from all of the hundred islands are pouring into Gongilung to join the tremendous new venture directed by Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung. Parties of them have been standing in Liberty Square sometimes for hours on end in the hope of seeing Marshal Solukarta appear at the windows of the palace so that they may express directly to him their appreciation of the wonderful new era he has opened up. As the Leader explained in a television message last evening, fulfilment of this unique and magnificent programme will take time, but it is expected to be under way early next year. Meanwhile, thousands of husbands are applying to clinics all over Yatakang for vasectomy operations, explaining that they do not want to father inferior progeny now that the chance of optimising the country’s population has been offered to them.”

Delhi, India: a crowd estimated at forty thousand led by members of the League of Parents of Crippled and Handicapped Children besieged the Yatakangi Embassy for six hours today and police had to use tear-gas and sleepy-gas to disperse them.

“Chairman Yung sends congratulations to Marshal Solukarta and expresses the hope that the remarkable advance in medical science recently announced by Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung will shortly be made available to all Asians. While, of course, the great strides forward made in China, in the fields of nutrition, sanitation and genotyping, have already made the country’s population the healthiest and most able in the world, the people of Yatakang’s great ally are eager to hail and adopt this impressive Asian achievement.”

Stockholm, Sweden: the streets of every city in this, the country with the world’s oldest and most stringent eugenic legislation, were alive last night with crowds of helpless drunks bemoaning their childlessness. Ancients of seventy and eighty mingled with recently sterilised youths and girls and drank the entire available supplies of akvavit in Stockholm, Malmö and Göteborg, according to a statement by the national liquor corporation. No fatalities were reported during subsequent disturbances.

“Secretest scramble and pass by hand of secure messenger Jogajong reports sitn unfavourablest propaganda impact of announcemt kuote fantsatic unquote.”

London, England: the Minister of Health is expected to make a statement in the Commons on Tuesday.

Johannesburg, South Africa: Nathan Mdlele, a self-styled “doctor” practising here, has been arrested on charges of fraud following publication of handbills in which he claimed to be able to apply the Sugaiguntung technique to pregnant women.

“I don’t care what they say, the fact remains Larry isn’t as bright as the rest of the prodgies in his class. I know I promised that we’d have our second when I got my raise in pay, but I don’t want another dullard in the family—not now geniuses can be had to order!”

Port Moresby, New Guinea: several hundred men and women banned from parenthood under local eugenic legislation set out from the harbour here today en route for Gongilung where they hope to be able to apply for the Sugaiguntung treatment. Observers recalled the last-century spread of the cargo cults when describing the wave of hysteria that has swept the country.

Athens, Greece: in a bold stroke of publicity agents for popular TV idol Hector Yannakis today announced his willingness to help optimise the population himself, provided the shiggies calling on his services were quote reasonably attractive unquote. A storm of protest at his alleged bad taste has been overshadowed by the clamorous response from his fans.

“A hundred thousand buckadingdongs and no guarantee that it’ll work? You must be crazy! Over in Yatakang they’re doing it on the Health Service!”

Alice Springs, Australia: hospitals here are overwhelmed with disconsolate abos who had been misled by fanatical preacher Napoleon Boggs into believing that they could obtain white-skinned babies on request, according to a claim he made at a recent corroboree. Some had trekked a hundred miles on this vain errand. In a statement circulated earlier today Boggs declared it was his way of dramatising the still-inferior status of the aborigines in modern Australia.

“Look at you, you great oaf! It’s no use saying you’re sorry—that was an expensive present and when I tell Aunt Mary you broke it on the first day you had it she’ll be furious! Why did I have to start a family before I could be sure my prodgies would be fit to look after themselves?”

Tokyo, Japan: despite police activity the clock around, the wave of public suicides by men denied fatherhood owing to genetic shortcomings continues at all major Shinto shrines in the city. At one shrine which was closed to the public after five such incidents, a man succeeded in climbing to the roof sixty feet above the floor and hurling himself head-first from a ledge.

Portland, Oregon: partisans armed with thermite, napalm and explosive this morning attacked the local Eugenic Processing Board offices in broad daylight. When police swooped, cheering crowds assisted the partisans’ escape by swarming across roadways and blocking the path for the prowl cars.

“Well, one of the techniques the experts say they’re going to use in Yatakang is what they call ‘cloning’, where they take a nucleus from one of your own body-cells and put it into an ovum to grow. If they can do that, why can’t I have a child of yours? No freaking male need have anything to do with it!”

Moscow, Russia: students at the university here, members of the class due to graduate this summer who will be offered the standard alternatives of sterilisation or removal to one of the Siberian New Towns, staged an all-day sit-in at the main biological research laboratory in protest against Russia’s lagging behind a comparatively backward country like Yatakang in the crucial field of tectogenetics.

Munich, Germany: at a mass rally Gerhard Speck, leader of the influential Aryan Purity Brigade, claimed that but for the unification of Germany into Common Europe the country could long ago have been re-populated with pure Nordic stock, quote without mongrelisation and barbaric contamination unquote.

“I’ve had it aborted. The Americans think genes like yours are serious enough to make their transmission illegal. I’m not going to start another with you or anyone else. My second is going to be optimised, like they’re doing in Yatakang.”

Washington, D.C.: at his press conference this morning the President stated that his advisors regard the Yatakangi optimisation programme as a mere propaganda gesture, quote a boast which even a far richer country like ours could not dream of carrying out this century unquote.

Paris, France: the incumbent chairman of the Board for Common Europe, Dr. Wladislaw Koniecki of Poland, declared that the Yatakangi claim was unfounded in reality, being quote a programme not even the combined wealth of all our countries could make possible unquote.

“That sheeting little bureaucrat in the Eugenics Office! I bet he’s got a genotype so dirty you could use it for a mud-pack! And I wager he has prodgies—someone in his position could fix things, couldn’t he?”

Caracas, Venezuela: in a spectacular departure from previous policy, representatives of the Olive Almeiro Agency, Puerto Rico’s world-famous adoption service, announced the availability of pure Castilian ova from Spanish sources, to be shipped trans-Atlantic by express while in deep freeze and implanted in the quote mother unquote. This confirms authoritative predictions that Puerto Rican legislation will be a death-blow to the operations of baby-farmers in the entire U.S.A.

Madrid, Spain: Pope Eglantine denounced the Yatakangi programme as another blasphemous interference with God’s handiwork and promised eternal damnation to any Catholic in Yatakang who complied with government policy. An emergency decree by the Royalist party will impose the death penalty for the donation of ova for export, if approved by the Cortes tomorrow.

“Darling, you’re talking nonsense! So we don’t have Shalmaneser, so we do have some of the world’s finest computing equipment, and they ran a programme through this morning and it turned out the Yatakangis can’t possibly keep their promise. The whole thing’s a bluff … You aren’t listening, are you? What’s the good of talking?”

Cairo, Egypt: addressing a rally of pilgrims bound Mecca-ward for the hajj, a government spokesman denounced the Yatakangi optimisation programme as quote a barefaced lie unquote.

Havana, Cuba: at a meeting to mark the anniversary of the death of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Minister of Welfare and Parenthood accused the Yatakangi government of quote deliberately misleading the world’s under-privileged peoples unquote and was booed off the stand by his audience.

“Sheeting hole, Frank, I’ll never forgive those bleeders! Here we are stuck in this Godforsaken town and we could have stayed home among our friends and even if we couldn’t have used a nucleus from one of your cells we could have used one from mine and at least had a daughter, couldn’t we?”

Port Mey, Beninia: in an Independence Day broadcast to the public, during which he announced that his doctors had given him only a short time to live, childless President Obomi declared that with or without the Yatakangi treatment he could not have wished for a better family than the people he has ruled for so long.

Berkeley, California: Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER repeating over and over, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!”

(The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.

—Ezekiel XVIII, 2.)

tracking with closeups (16)

THE MESSENGER OF THE GOSPEL OF UNIVERSAL LOVE

“Which was the lady who lost her baby so unfortunately?” Henry Butcher inquired of the ward sister.

The sister, her face weary, glanced up at the plump jolly man in front of her. Drawn lines of tiredness changed to those of a smile.

“Hullo, Henry,” she said. “Go along in—I’m sure she’ll be glad to have a few words of sympathy from someone. The blonde in the third bed on the right.”

“It’s the first for a long time, isn’t it?” Henry asked.

“Lord, yes. First since I came to work here, and that’s nearly eleven years. The path lab is checking up now to see what went wrong.”

“Should it have been a normal case?”

The sister leaned back in her chair, tapping one white tooth with the tip of a well-shaped nail. “I guess so,” she said thoughtfully. “That is, there was a rhesus problem, but that kind of thing used to be routine—a whole-body blood-transfusion prior to the birth, and plain sailing from then on.”

“A rhesus problem?” Henry repeated.

“Yes—you know, or at least you should, working in the blood-bank.”

“Oh, I know about it,” Henry agreed. His jolly face wore its solemn look rather awkwardly. “But I didn’t think rhesus-incompatibles were allowed to start children any longer.”

“Not in this country. But the girl’s been working in Africa somewhere. Her husband sent her home specially to have the prodgy in a proper hospital. And one can’t refuse to accept a maternity case just because it wasn’t conceived under our laws.”

“Of course not … Well, well, it’s all very sad. I’ll pop in the ward and see what I can do to cheer the lady up a bit.”

Still smiling, the sister watched him leave the office, his sterile white plastic coverall glistening wetly under the lamps and making shush-slap noises as his legs brushed together at each step. It was very kind of him to take the trouble for a perfect stranger, she thought. But just the sort of thing you’d expect from him.

Everyone in the hospital liked Henry Butcher.

* * *

When he had spent a few minutes with the mother of the dead child, he gave her one of his little inspirational pamphlets, which she promised to read—it was divided into sections with such titles as Love Thy Neighbour and The Truth Shall Make You Free. By then it was the end of his lunch-break, so he headed back to the blood-bank where he worked, exchanging cheery greetings with everyone he met on the way.

A requisition had come down during his absence, ordering the preparation of a hundred donor-flasks with labels for a routine session at a nearby block. He sorted out the appropriate file of names, ages and blood-groups from the records cabinet, selected the right number of labels plus ten per cent for spoilage to match the numbers in each group, broke off for a moment to issue two flasks of O blood to an orderly from the maternity ward, and then mixed and measured the correct quantity of citric-saline solution into each flask, to prevent the blood clotting in storage.

Finally, making a careful check to be sure he was unobserved, he inserted a hypodermic through the rubber penetration-seal on each flask and squirted in a hundred milligrams of Triptine in solution, beaming.

The idea had escaped him for a long, long time. He had achieved a number of successful public demonstrations of his treasured credo—in particular, the Sunday morning when he had managed to smear the front of the cathedral pulpit with “Truth or Consequences” and thus ensured that the bishop told the honest truth for once instead of his usual prevaricating falsehoods—but it was only recently that he had discovered this far more effective means of exposing people to the actual effects of the panacea he believed in.

He could not imagine himself hating anyone; all hate had been leached out of his personality by the warm glow due to psychedelics. Yet there were people, among them staff-members of this hospital, who denied that universal love could take on chemical form. Why in the cosmos not? After all it was a commonplace of Christian tradition that Love could take on the substance of bread and wine …

Of course, the death of that baby was a terrible shame; the poor thing must have had an overdose. A shadow clouded his round, smiling countenance, but lasted only an instant. The sister had said it was the first such case in the eleven years she had worked here. There wouldn’t be another in the foreseeable future, or perhaps ever again, now that people were forbidden to start rhesus-problem prodgies.

He completed his task, meticulously rinsed and dried the hypodermic as he had seen the doctors do all around the hospital, and returned it to its case. Then he locked away the phial of Triptine from which he had drawn the necessary amount, and began to rack up the flasks for outward shipment. He whistled as he worked.

Who wouldn’t whistle, knowing that every patient who required a blood-transfusion in this hospital would from now on experience the wonderful, mind-opening enlightenment that Triptine could bestow?

About half an hour later the young pathologist who was investigating the reason for the baby’s inexplicable death came in and asked for a flask of O blood, which Henry issued to him. He was genuinely surprised when the pathologist returned and hit him under the jaw so hard that he crashed backwards into a stack of crated flasks and brought the whole lot tumbling.

As for the policeman who charged him formally with murder, Henry could not credit that such a person might be real.

continuity (18)

THE WALLS OF TROY

The hostility Donald felt when he returned to the everyday world was not illusion. It came from the other intending passengers crammed into the emergency expressport now serving the Ellay region. This was in fact a military base, hastily cleared of equipment the public was not allowed to see and patrolled continually by armed guards. Diverted, delayed, their schedules thrown out, hungry and thirsty because the Air Force canteens could not cope like the facilities at the regular port, and to top the lot uncertain whether their flights would materialise because expresses re-routed to the base were firing their sonic booms on to populated areas and there was talking of the residents taking out an injunction, they were looking around for someone to vent their resentment on, and the appearance of Donald armed with clearances that scissored through the red tape entangling everyone else offered a ready target.

He didn’t give a pint of whaledreck about their feelings.

His head ached slightly. One of the many successive processors at Boat Camp between whom he had been shuttled like a machine on an assembly-line had warned him that this might happen at intervals for a week or two. But the pain wasn’t severe enough to cancel out his basic state of mind.

He felt proud. The Donald Hogan of the previous thirty-four years had ceased to exist, but he was no loss. He had been passive, a recipient or rather a receptacle, open for the shovelling-in of external data but making no contribution of his own to the course of events, reserved, self-contained, so neutral that even Norman House sharing the same apt could call him in a fit of rage a bloodless, featureless zombie.

Not that he cared about Norman’s opinion now, either. He knew what latent capabilities resided in himself, and was possessed by savage eagerness for the moment when he could let them go.

At one of a range of folding tables spanning the hangar they were using as a transit hall, a weary official checked his documents. “Going to Yatakang, hm?” he said. “Off to get yourself optimised, I suppose!”

“Me? No, I function pretty well in all areas. You look like you’re saving up for a ticket, though.”

For a second he thought the man was going to hit him. His face burned dark red with the effort of self-control. He could say nothing more to Donald, but slapped the documents wordlessly under the cameras and stamping-machines before him, then waved him through.

“There was no call to say that,” the official from the next table said as Donald passed close enough to hear a whisper.

“What?”

The second official made sure his colleague was engaged again and not listening. “There was no call to say that,” he repeated. “He got married without having their genes matched and their first kid just had to be aborted. Pink spot.”

The sign of hereditary schizophrenia. Donald shrugged.

“I think I’d have hit you,” the official said.

“If he’d hit me, he’d have given up hitting people permanently,” Donald said, and grinned. It was wonderful to know it was more than a boast—it was a promise. He added after a moment. “You don’t have work to do?”

The official scowled and turned back to deal with his next passenger.

“Yatakang?” said the purser of the express, an elegant young biv-type sporting ambisextrous shoulder-long bangs. “You must be Mr. Hogan, then—I believe you’re the only person scheduled this flight…” He checked a list he was carrying. “Yes, that’s right. Here’s your seat-number, sir, and a pleasant flight. I’ll be round to see you before we take off.” He handed over a little plastic tag.

Donald took it and walked on into the cheerless coffin of the express. Settling into his seat among anonymous accidental companions, he recalled Delahanty’s injunction to make good his ignorance of the last few days’ news. When the purser toured the ship to perform the airline’s vaunted “personal touch service”, he answered affirmatively to the inquiry about wanting anything.

“You said I was the only person going to Yatakang, didn’t you?”

A flutter of long eyelashes and a mechanical smile. “Why, yes, sir.”

“Does this often happen?”

“Frankly, sir, as I understand it, if the terms of our charter under international agreement didn’t require us to make at least one stop a day in Gongilung, we wouldn’t bother. But there’s something about granting overflight facilities—I could get the details from the captain if you like…?”

“Don’t bother. But have you not had any other passengers for Yatakang lately? I’d have thought, what with the big news that broke out there the other day—”

“You mean reporters like yourself, sir? I’m afraid I haven’t noticed particularly,” the purser said in a frigid tone.

Donald sighed. It was all very well when professional ethics and respect for privacy were confined to a few expert groups like doctors and priests; now it was being adopted by the world and his uncle, the attitude was frustrating.

“I have a polytelly. Is it okay for me to use it during the flight?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. But I can pipe in a condensed-news channel to your seat-screen.”

“Do that, then. And if you have any recent papers on board I’d appreciate a sight of them.”

“I’ll see what I can find for you, sir. Will that be all?”

* * *

Flushed, the purser returned just as the tugs started to track the express across the field to its launch-ramp. “I could only find one of today’s and one of yesterday’s, I’m afraid,” he apologised.

That was more than Donald had expected, even so. He accepted them with a mutter of thanks and spread them out. The older of the two papers was beginning to fragment in accordance with the Federal anti-litter law which forbade ephemeral publications to be printed on permanent stock for other than historical purposes. Handling it carefully, he searched it for stories with a Yatakang dateline.

He found only one, and its credit was to a beam agency, one of Engrelay Satelserv’s major rivals, Video-Asia Reuters. That, of course, wasn’t surprising; these days, newspapers were ninety per cent trivia and features, unable to compete with TV news—indeed most of them, including the respective Times of New York and London, had switched their major cachet to television slots. And all he learned from his reading was something he could have deduced anyway: the people of Yatakang wanted to believe their government’s claim, whether or not it was exaggerated.

As he turned the next page it disintegrated, showering him with flakes of yellowing paper. He cursed it and thrust it into his seat’s disposall tube.

The take-off warning followed immediately, and he had to wait to tackle the second paper until the upward leg of their ballistic orbit had been entered.

This time, there was an entire page devoted to material on the subject of optimisation: one beam agency story from Gongilung reporting that voluntary funds were being raised in outlying islands so that doctors and nurses could go to the capital for training under Sugaiguntung, and about a dozen reporting reaction in other countries. There were several hints that public opinion was ranged against the verdict of the experts. When it came to a Minister of the Cuban government being booed at a Castro Day rally …

Donald frowned. Somehow these news items suggested a deeper pattern, but his head was aching again and he could not concentrate. The Mark I version of himself would have turned the problem out to graze in his subconscious, but now he did not have the patience. Instead of mulling the question over, he stuffed the paper down the disposall and switched on the condensed-news programme the purser had provided.

On the miniature screen set into the back of the seat ahead he saw a series of short visual clips with earphone commentary. He studied them with what attention he could manage. He happened to have struck into the cycle at a point just before the sports news, and had to wait out four minutes’ worth before the bulletin cycled back to the station identification and began to repeat. And then he discovered he was watching a programme compiled by the staff of the same paper he had just thrown away, containing almost exclusively the same stories.

Annoyed, he reached out to switch off. At the same moment the picture quality deteriorated, and a sign appeared to say that because of increasing distance from Ellay there would be a change to a satellite-based service. Hoping that the airline might use one of the field leaders like Engrelay Satelserv, he stayed his hand.

Correct. The familiar figures of Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere took shape almost at once. Obviously this was a special signal for passengers in transit; it used only back views and the environment was the interior of an express identical to this. It had never occurred to him before, but it was logical that having secured maximum viewer-identification by selling so many personalised sets with homimage attachment the company would not wish to remind people actually going to some of the exotic places where Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere kept dropping in that in fact the couple were only models.

The purser had set his screen for a Caucasian version of the signal, and that was momentarily unfamiliar. On moving in with Norman he had accepted the latter’s offer of a TV just about to be discarded in favour of a newer model, and never bothered to alter the Afram standard to which it was set, so he was accustomed to seeing Mr. Everywhere as an Afram and his wife as one of Norman’s typical Scandahoovian shiggies. Here now he was getting the “white stocky young mature” version of the man, and it jarred.

He was annoyed with himself for feeling so concerned about something which was, after all, a commercial figment more appropriate to his former life. From now on Donald Hogan was going to make news, not watch it.

As though the programmers had read his mind, his own face appeared on the screen.

He thought it was an illusion until the commentary corrected the impression. “Donald Hogan!” said the small voice directly into his ears. “Engrelay Satelserv’s newest man on the spot!”

Whereinole did they dredge up these clips? There was a younger Donald Hogan on a New York street, then gazing up at distant mountains—that was a Sun Valley vacation five years ago—and then, more familiar, boarding the express he had taken a few days ago from New York to California.

“Specially retained by Engrelay Satelserv, life-time expert in genetics and heredity Donald Hogan is bound on your behalf to Yatakang!”

Clips of a Gongilung street-scene, a fishing-prau chugging between islands on a noisy reaction-pump, a crowd massing in a handsome square.

“Yatakang, focus of planet-wide interest! Programme your autoshout for the name of Donald Hogan, whose dispatches from Gongilung will be featured in our bulletins from tomorrow on!”

Donald was stunned. They must be making a sensaysh out of it, to sacrifice so much time from even their ten-minute condensed-news cycle! His Mark II confidence evaporated. Euphoric from his recent eptification, he had thought he was a new person, immeasurably better equipped to affect the world. But the implications of that expensive plug stabbed deep into his mind. If State were willing to go to these lengths to maintain his cover identity, that meant he was only the visible tip of a scheme involving perhaps thousands of people. State just didn’t issue fiats to a powerful corporation like English Language Relay Satellite Service without good reason.

Meaningless phrases drifted up, dissociated, and presented themselves to his awareness, all seeming to have relevance to his situation and yet not cohering.

My name is Legion.

I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts.

The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.

Say can you look into the seeds of time?

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Struggling to make sense of these fragments, he finally arrived at what his subconscious might be trying to convey.

The prize, these days, is not in finding a beautiful mistress. It’s in having presentable prodgies. Helen the unattainable is in the womb, and every mother dreams of bearing her. Now her whereabouts is known. She lives in Yatakang and I’ve been sent in search of her, ordered to bring her back or say her beauty is a lie—if necessary to make it a lie, with vitriol. Odysseus the cunning lurked inside the belly of the horse and the Trojans breached the wall and took it in while Laocoön and his sons were killed by snakes. A snake is cramped around my forehead and if it squeezes any tighter it will crack my skull.

When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?”

He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because everything was confused: the men in the belly of the wooden horse waiting to be born and wreak destruction, and the pain of parturition, and Athena was born of the head of Zeus, and Time ate his children, as though he were not only in the wooden horse of the express but was it about to deliver the city to its enemy and its enemy to the city, a spiralling wild-rose branch of pain with every thorn a spiky image pricking him into other times and other places.

Ahead, the walls. Approaching them, the helpless stupid Odysseus of the twenty-first century, who must also be Odin blind in one eye so as not to let his right hand know what his left was doing. Odinzeus, wielder of thunderbolts, how could he aim correctly without parallax? “No individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative.” Shalmaneser, master of infinite knowledge, lead me through the valley of the shadow of death and I shall fear no evil …

The purser brought a white capsule and he gulped it down.

But the headache was only a symptom, and could be fixed.

tracking with closeups (17)

BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND MEN

“Shalmaneser, pizzle-teaser,

Had a wife and couldn’t please her.

Go and tell the big computer

(Mary’s) lover doesn’t suit her.”

—Children’s singing game reported from Syracuse, N.Y., November 2009

“A randy young wench named Teresa

Tried her charms out upon Shalmaneser

For the first time quite frigid

She, not he, grew rigid,

And the scientists couldn’t unfreeze her.”

—Graffito from University Hall of Residence Auckland, New Zealand; variants common throughout English-speaking world

“They surely are condemned to Hell

Who rule their lives by greed and lust

And Satan waits for those as well

Who in machines repose their trust.”

—Hymn composed for Tenth International Rally of the Family of Divine Daughters

i wish codders i had cool detachment

like

chilledchildchilled

how are you feelium

in the liquid helium

HERE WE GO ROUND THE HUNGARY FLUSH

Meg

a brain computer

SHALL MAN EASE HER OR WOULD YOU ADVISE

AGAINST IT

don’t

—From GRAUNCH::prosoversepix

“It is dismaying—one may even say disheartening—to see the degree to which blind faith in the manufactured objects that we dignify by the name of ‘computer’ has replaced trust in prayer and the guidance of God. You will never find anyone to admit that he or she has substituted a machine for the living divine presence, yet that is exactly what has happened to the bulk of our population. They speak of the evaluations which computers print out for them in the hushed, reverent tones which our ancestors reserved for Holy Writ, and now that General Technics has made its arrogant claim about this new piece of hardware, nicknamed ‘Shalmaneser’, we can foresee the day when everyone will have surrendered his responsibility as a thinking being to a machine which he has been deluded into respecting as more intelligent than himself. That is, unless we with God’s help manage to reverse the trend.”

—From an earlier sermon by the luckless bishop whom Henry Butcher sabotaged

“Okay, Shalmaneser—you tell me what I ought to do!”

—Colloquial usage throughout N. America

(SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he’s apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he’s as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn’t really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.

—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

Never in human history did any manufactured object enter so rapidly into the common awareness of mankind as Shalmaneser did when they took the security wraps off. Adaptation of him as a “public image” for prose and verse followed literally within days; a few months saw him apotheosised as a byword, a key figure in dirty jokes, a court of final appeal, and a sort of mechanical Messias. Some of these cross-referred; in particular, there was the story about the same Teresa who cropped up in the New Zealand limerick, which told how they sent for a Jewish telepath to ask what happened, when they discovered that thanks to the liquid helium she was in a state of suspended animation, and he explained with a puzzled look that he could only detect one thought in her head—“Messias has not yet come.”

Also, until GT published a rota and scale of hire-charges, consultant computing firms in twenty countries trembled on the verge of bankruptcy as their clients decided to switch their custom to Shalmaneser.

Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere had been shown visiting Shalmaneser one hundred and thirty-seven times, more than was accorded to any other activity except freefly-suiting.

Orbiting on Triptine, Bennie Noakes was prouder of the fact that his imagination had produced Shalmaneser than he was of any other event he had dreamed up.

Factually: he was a Micryogenic® device of the family collectively referred to as the Thecapex group (THEoretical CAPacity EXceeds—human brain, understood) and of that family’s fourth generation, his predecessors having been the pilot model Jeroboam, the commercially available Rehoboam of which over a thousand were in operation, and the breadboard layout Nebuchadnezzar which turned out to have so many bugs in it they discontinued the project and cannibalised the parts.

The number of technical problems which had had to be solved before he could be put into operation beggared description; the final programme for the schematics required fourteen hours’ continuous operation of six Rehoboams linked in series, a capacity which the publicity department calculated would be adequate to provide a thousand-year solution for the orbits of the Solar System correct to twenty decimal places. And at that, using so much capacity for so long on a single task brought the chance of a sixfold simultaneous error to the thirty per cent level, so there was one chance in three that when they built the final version and switched it on something would have gone irremediably wrong.

Indeed, some of the original design team had recently been heard to express the heretical view that something had gone wrong with the schematics. By this time, they claimed, it should have been established beyond doubt that Shalmaneser was conscious in the human sense, possessed of an ego, a personality and a will.

Others, more sanguine, declared that proof of such awareness already existed, and evidenced certain quite unforeseen reactions the machine had displayed in solving complex tasks.

The psychologists, called in to settle the argument, left again with headshakes, divided into two equally opposed camps. Some said the problem was insoluble, and referred back to the ancient puzzle: given a room divided in two by an opaque curtain, and a voice coming from the other side, how do you discover whether the voice belongs to a cleverly programmed computer or a human being? Their rivals maintained that in their eagerness to see mechanical consciousness the designers had set up a self-fulfilling prophecy—had, in effect, programmed the schematics so as to give the impression of consciousness when information was processed in the system.

The public at large was quite unconcerned about the debate between the experts. For them, Shalmaneser was a legend, a myth, a folk hero, and a celebrity; with all that, he didn’t need to be conscious as well.

A few days after they rigged up the direct-verbal inputs—Shalmaneser was the first computer ever with sufficient spare capacity to handle normal spoken English regardless of the speaker’s tone of voice—one of the technicians asked him on the spur of the moment, “Shal, what’s your view? Are you or aren’t you a conscious entity?”

The problem took so long to analyse—a record three-quarters of a minute—that the inquirer was growing alarmed when the response emerged.

“It appears impossible for you to determine whether the answer I give to that question is true or false. If I reply affirmatively there does not seem to be any method whereby you can ascertain the accuracy of the statement by referring it to external events.”

Relieved to have had even such a disappointing answer after the worrying delay, the questioner said fliply, “So who do we ask if you can’t tell us—God?”

“If you can contact Him,” Shalmaneser said, “of course.”

“The case of Teresa’s instructive—

It shows how extremely seductive

A shiggy can be

If her an-atom-ee

Is first rendered super-conductive.”

—Quoted in the General Technics house organ, January 2010

continuity (19)

SEMPER ALIQUID NOVI

The leisurely niche he had carved out for himself, Norman recognised with dismay, had unfitted him to cope with a storm of information like the one now swamping him. He forced himself to keep going, red-eyed, sometimes hoarse, often suffering violent indigestion, until he was almost ready to welcome his physical discomfort as growing-pains.

If the Beninia project was to become reality, it had to negotiate three major obstacles. First, the early glamour of MAMP was wearing thin and shareholders were beginning to shake off their entitlements—which, while it allowed GT personnel in the know to buy at cut rates, created an unfavourable climate in the market. Second, a two-thirds majority at a general meeting had to be secured. And, third, President Obomi had taken the climactic step of informing his country about his illness, which meant that time was running out. Elihu claimed that he would like the scheme provided it was vouched for by his long-time personal friend, but there was no way of predicting what his successor would agree to.

Urgency drove them to exploit Shalmaneser’s incredible speed to the utmost. Not content with erecting and demolishing half a hundred hypothetical courses a day, they began to clear down on external contract work and make time for direct-voice questioning on aspects not fully clarified in the written programmes.

It was the first occasion Norman had ever worked directly with Shalmaneser. The night before he first spoke to the computer he dreamed of being imprisoned by walls of the pale green “hypothetical” printouts he had grown familiar with; the night after, his dream was of hearing it address him from his phone, his TV set, and the empty air.

There was little opportunity for dreaming, though. At the cost of near-exhaustion he kept abreast of the demands made on him. Half a dozen times a day Old GT called him for information which could have been had more readily from an encyclopedia bank, but he managed to convey acceptable answers. At endless conferences people applied to him for views and guidance and he responded as mechanically as if he were himself a computing engine, reeling off statistics, dates, local customs, snippets of history, even undisguised personal opinions which his listeners took in as uncritically as the rest.

He began to feel a little more pleased with himself. Under the slick professional mask he had adopted in order to make his way to the top in a paleass world, there was some kind of substance after all. He had been half-afraid there was only a hollow, like the candle-lit void of a turnip-ghost.

* * *

Even more than his desire to prove himself to himself, two other motives drove him on. One was admiration for Elihu Masters, who had detected that substance when the mask was still in place and gambled on it the outcome of a successful career. Norman had always cultivated the company grapevine; now it informed him that provided the Beninia project worked out Elihu could almost certainly be the next Ambassador to the UN, thus recouping the cachet lost when he opted for Port Mey instead of Delhi.

If it failed, on the other hand, he was finished.

And the second reason was simple puzzlement. By the end of the first week’s intensive planning, he knew rather more about Beninia than about most of the places he had lived in, without ever setting foot on its soil. Early on, the data he absorbed were simply shovelled in, making a heap in his mind through which he had to rummage to find out what he knew. Gradually they grew more organised, developed relationships, and ultimately took on the pattern of a baffling question.

How in the name of Allah the Merciful did Beninia come to be this way?

But for the mass of historical evidence, he could have suspected a gigantic public-relations confidence trick. “Everyone knew”—this was what it boiled down to—that when the European colonial powers moved in the tribes of equatorial and southern Africa had been in a state of barbarism instanced by a thousand recorded facts from Chaka Zulu’s murderous raiding to the readiness of tribes to sell their own children to the Arab slavers. “Everyone knew” that after the European withdrawal things went back to where they had been, aggravated by bitterness at the long period of foreign rule.

Not in Beninia. As Elihu put it, Zadkiel Obomi had performed the miracle of creating an African counterpart of Switzerland, walking a tightrope of dogged neutrality over a hell of intermittent violence.

But what had he got to—to power this achievement? That was where Norman ran into a blank wall. Switzerland’s neutrality was founded on clear advantages: a key location which only Napoleon had had the gall to trespass over among all the would-be modern Attilas—even the Nazis had found it profitable to leave Switzerland alone; a jealously guarded reputation for honesty in commerce that made her an international financial centre; skill in precision manufactures that converted the country’s lack of mineral resources into a positive blessing.

Contrast Beninia: located between powerful rivals either of which would cheerfully have sacrificed an army or two of burdensome unskilled labourers for the sake of annexing its fine main port and its river-routes through the Mondo Hills; economically non-viable, kept going only by constant foreign aid; and far from being industrialised, backward to a degree exceptional even in Africa.

Thinking of the anomalies gave Norman a headache, but he ploughed on, extending the area of his inquiries until the research department sent back a furious memo demanding whatinole connection events in the first year of the Muslim calendar could have with a twenty-first-century business venture.

Norman felt obscurely that if he could answer that he wouldn’t be so baffled by this hole-in-corner country.

However, the Research Dept was quite right—it was pointless to dig that far back because the records didn’t exist. There were hardly even any archaeological remains. Digging up the past was an expensive luxury in Beninian terms.

Norman sighed, and went back for yet another review of what he had learned.

* * *

“Happy is the country that has no history”—and for a long time the area later called Beninia qualified. Its first impact on the world scene occurred during the heyday of internal African slave-trading, when Arab pressure from the north drove the Holaini—a sub-branch of the Berbers, of Muslim faith and Hamitic race—past Timbuktu toward the Bight of Benin. There they came across an enclave of Shinka, hemmed in on one side by Mandingo and on the other by Yoruba.

These neighbours were accustomed to leaving the Shinka strictly alone, claiming that they were powerful magicians and could steal the heart out of a valiant fighting man. The Holaini scoffed; as good Muslims they discounted the idea of witchcraft, and certainly the unaggressive, welcoming Shinka—whom even the idea of slavery did not seem to arouse to anger—offered no obvious threat.

With the full intention of ranching the Shinka, cattle-fashion, as a constant source of slaves, the Holaini installed themselves as the new masters of the area. But, as though by the magic neighbouring tribes had described, the venture crumbled. After twenty years, no more slave-caravans were formed. The Holaini gradually became absorbed into the base population, leading a quiet rural existence, until by the twentieth century only their dialect and such physical traces as the “northern nose” and breadth of forehead remained to testify to their independent identity.

Superstition—perhaps—accounted for the subsequent unwillingness of the dealers who supplied the European slave-ship captains to tangle with the Shinka. They excused themselves on the specious ground that Shinkas made bad slaves, or that they were sickly, or that they were under the special protection of Shaitan. One or two European-led raids apart, they remained largely unmolested until the age of colonial exploitation.

When the carving was well under way, the British kicked out the Spanish, who had been maintaining a trading-station near the site of the modern Port Mey as an adjunct to their larger settlement on the nearby island of Fernando Po, and let the French in neighbouring Togo understand that Beninia was henceforth shadowed by the Union Jack.

And that, by and large, was that, apart from the legalistic regularisation of the situation into one analogous with Nigeria, the setting up of a “British Crown Colony and Protectorate”.

Until 1971, when the Colonial Office in London was seeking ways of disposing of its last few embarrassing overseas charges. Some, like the smallest Pacific islands, were pretty well hopeless cases, and the best that could be managed was to shuffle them off into someone else’s lap—the Australians’, for example. Beninia did not look at first as though it would pose the least difficulty, however. After all, Gambia, which was about the same size, had been independent for a few years already.

The trouble arose when they tried to find someone to hand over the government to.

There were a good few competent officials in Beninia, but owing to the fact that the Muslim pattern of paternalism conformed to the masculinist prejudices of nineteenth-century English public-school boys, most of them had been recruited among the northern minority, the Holaini. Exactly the same thing had happened in Nigeria. There, following independence, the majority group had revolted against this legacy of Victorian prejudice. The Colonial Office had no wish to repeat that mistake, even though the Shinka seemed to be peculiarly unpolitical. In fact, if they’d had the kindness to organise a proper political party to agitate for independence, the problem would never have arisen.

Casting around, the London bureaucrats hit on a young Beninian who, if he didn’t have a popular following, at least enjoyed popular esteem. Zadkiel Frederick Obomi had been educated in Britain and the United States. He came from a respectable, moderately well-to-do family. His ambition was to become an educational broadcaster, and he was doing jack-of-all-trades work at the only TV station serving the Bight area—lecturing, reading news bulletins, and commenting on current affairs in Shinka and Holaini. He had been seconded to supervise the news coverage of the last meeting of the Organisation for African Unity, and the delegates from Ethiopia and South Africa had both singled him out for praise, so there was no question of his acceptability outside Beninia.

Inside the country it was a different matter, chiefly because he himself had never thought of being president. Eventually, however, he was persuaded that no one else was qualified, and when his name was put to a plebiscite both Shinka and Holaini voters approved him by a thumping majority over a candidate backed largely by Egyptian funds.

Thankfully the British re-named Governor’s House, calling it the Presidential Palace, and went home.

At first, owing to inexperience, the new president seemed to be bumbling along. His first cabinet, chosen in ratio to the population of Holaini versus Shinka with a slight bias towards the former because of their administrative background, accomplished practically nothing. Bit by bit, however, he replaced the British-trained ministers with people of his own choosing, some of whom volunteered to come home from comfortable foreign posts, like the incumbent minister of finance, Ram Ibusa, who had been teaching economics in Accra.

To everyone’s surprise, he coped well with a crisis that threatened him at the very end of his first term.

In former British and French colonies adjacent to Beninia, a commonplace feature of late twentieth-century Africa broke out—tribal quarrels flared up into rioting and sometimes a week or two of actual civil war. Large movements of Inoko and Kpala took place. Since Beninia was handy, and since it wasn’t in turmoil, both tribes’ refugees headed for there.

The people who had kicked them out weren’t interested in what had become of them. It was only later, after the economic facts of life had forced several ex-colonial countries to federate into groups sharing a common European language—such as Mali, Dahomey and Upper Volta into Dahomalia, and Ghana and Nigeria into RUNG—that they became aware of a curious phenomenon.

The Shinka were even poorer than the Inoko and the Kpala, and might have been expected to resent the extra burden the refugees placed on the country’s strained resources. But they had demonstrated no hostility. On the contrary, a generation of foreigners had been raised in Beninia who seemed perfectly contented and immune to all suggestions about insisting that their lands be incorporated with their original home nations.

Almost as though they regarded Obomi with the traditional awe accorded to his “magician” ancestors, the neighbouring giants seesawed back and forth between placation and aggression. The latter usually set in when some internal disorder made the invocation of an outside enemy desirable; the former was rarer, and only followed the intrusion of a common rival from elsewhere. Allegedly the German soldier of fortune whose bungled assassination attempt cost Obomi his eye had been hired and paid in Cairo. The resultant hostility among the Holaini against the notion of Pan-Islam decided the Arab world to return to its accustomed railing about Israel.

But now the long-time calm of Beninia seemed likely to be shattered for good. If a succession dispute followed Obomi’s retirement, the jealous neighbours would certainly pounce. The intervention of GT might prevent the war. Shalmaneser had reviewed the various hypothetical outcomes and given his quasi-divine opinion.

Yet Norman kept being nagged by doubt. After all, Shalmaneser could only judge on the basis of the data he was fed; suppose Elihu had allowed his love for Beninia to colour his views with optimism, and this had affected the computer’s calculations?

It seemed absurdly sanguine to suggest turning a poverty-stricken, famine- and sickness-ridden ex-colony into a bridgehead of prosperity within twenty years. Why, there wasn’t even a university, not even a major technical school—nothing better than a privately financed business school in Port Mey from which the government already skimmed the cream of the graduates.

Of course, they did claim that all the country’s male children acquired a minimum of literacy and numeracy, and a grounding in English as well as one other of their country’s tongues. And there was no disrespect for education in Beninia—they were even shorter of truants than of teachers. Eagerness to learn might make up for a good few deficiencies in other areas.

Might …

Sighing, Norman gave up worrying. The exclamation-mark shape of Beninia might twist on the map into an imagined question-posing curl, but that was in his mind. The facts were in the real world, and he was acutely aware how he had systematically isolated himself from reality.

* * *

He said as much to Chad Mulligan, on one of the increasingly rare occasions when he was at home long enough to spend a few minutes in talking. The sociologist’s heart had not proved to be in his intention to debauch himself to his grave; habit unweakened by three years in the gutter had dragged him back into familiar patterns of study and argument.

His response to Norman’s remark began with a grimace of disgust. “What you’re up against, codder, is the intractability of the outside world! Okay, I sympathise—I have the same trouble. I can’t keep enough liquor in my guts to rot them the way I planned. Before I pass out, I throw up! So what’s making you so angry with Beninia, hm?”

“Not the country itself,” Norman sighed. “The fact that nobody seems to have noticed this weird anomaly of a whole nation sitting on the edge of a political volcano and hardly getting singed.”

“With a volcanic eruption in progress, whoinole is going to take time out and wonder about folk who are getting on with their ordinary business?” Chad grunted. “Why don’t you save the guesswork until you’ve been there and seen for yourself? When are they sending you over, by the way?”

“Directly the project is finalised,” Norman said. “Elihu and I are going to present it to President Obomi together. Another three or four days, I guess.” He hesitated. “You know something?” he continued. “I’m scared of what I’m going to find when I actually get there.”

“Why?”

“Because…” Norman tugged at his beard with awkward fingers. “Because of Donald.”

“Whatinole does he have to do with it? He’s off the other side of the world.”

“Because I shared this apt with him for years, and always thought of him as a neutral kind of guy, leading a rather dull easy-going life. Not the sort of person you’d form strong opinions about. And then all of a sudden he told me he’d been responsible for the riot I found myself caught up in—down the lower East Side. I told you about that, didn’t I?”

“You talked about it at Guinevere’s party. So did a lot of other people.” Chad shrugged. “Of course, to claim responsibility for starting a riot is arrogant, but I see what you’re setting course for. You mean you’re wondering whether the Beninians are set up the same way he was, capable of starting something disastrous when they blunder out into the big scene.”

“No,” said Norman. “I’m wondering whether I’m the one who’s ignorant and apt to trigger a disaster.”