Stand on Zanzibar

context (17)

FEELING THE OVERDRAFT

“Yes, my name’s Chad Mulligan. I’m not dead, if that was going to be the subject of your next silly question. And I don’t give a pint of whaledreck about what you called up to say to me, even if you are from SCANALYZER. If you want me to talk I’ll talk about what I want to, not what you want me to. If that’s acceptable plug in your recorders. Otherwise I’m cutting the circuit.

“All right. I’m going to tell you about the poor. You know where to look for a poor man? Don’t go out on the street like a sheeting fool and pick on a street-sleeper in filthy clothes. Up to a few days ago the man you picked on might have been me, and I’m worth a few million bucks.

“And you don’t have to go to India or Bolivia or Beninia to find a poor man, either. You have to go exactly as far as the nearest mirror.

“At this point you’ll probably decide to switch off in disgust—I don’t mean you, codder, taking this down off the phone, I mean whoever gets to hear it if you have the guts to replay it over SCANALYZER. You out there! You’re on the verge of going bankrupt and you aren’t paying attention. I don’t suppose that telling you will convince you, but I’m offering the evidence, in hopes.

“A codder who lives the way I’ve been living for the past three years, without a home or even a suitcase, isn’t necessarily poor, like I said. But free of the things which get in the way of noticing the truth, he has a chance to look the situation over and appraise it. One of the things he can see is what’s changed and what hasn’t in this brave new century of ours.

“What do you give a panhandler? Nothing, maybe—but if you do cave in, you make it at least a fin. After all, his monthly licence costs him double that. So he’s not really poor. Costs have gone up approximately sixfold in the past fifty years, but fifty years ago you were liable to give a panhandler a quarter or a half. Relatively, panhandlers have moved up on the income ladder.

“You haven’t.

“The things which have gone up the standard, average, six times include your typical income, the cost of food and clothing, the cost of the gewgaws without which you don’t feel you are anybody—a holographic TV, for instance—and rents and housing costs generally, like heating charges.

“The things which have come down a little include intraurban transportation—that’s to say, a New York token, which I cite because I’m a New Yorker by adoption now, costs only eighty cents instead of the dollar twenty or so it would cost if it had kept pace with everything else—and, to most people’s surprise, taxes, which finance things we’re not going to carp about such as medicare and education. These aren’t bad at present, by the way.

“But what’s gone up, way way up? Things like water. Did you know you’re paying eleven times as much for water as people did fifty years back, and you’re not managing to use any more than they did then because there isn’t any more?

“And recreation space! Did you know that having a decent-sized open space within easy walking distance adds thirty per cent to your assessment for urban taxes?

“And health itself! I’m not talking about hospital care—that’s okay these days. I’m talking about natural, normal, everyday health with its resistance to infection and abundant energy.

“You can probably recognise the New Poor, as the phrase calls them. You may not know how; you may indeed be puzzled about how you can tell when they’re wearing clean clothes and carrying all kinds of lovely doodads which may not be the year after next’s model but are serviceable and numerous. You can tell them, though—can’t you?

“Well, what you recognise them by is the fact that they don’t spend—they can’t spend—on the things you add to keep yourself going. They eat mass-produced force-grown meat. So do you, but you add protein capsules and B12. They drink pasteurised imperishable milk. So do you, but you take calciferol tablets. They eat battery eggs. So do you, but you take Vitamin A. And even with all this, you probably also take Wakup pills, energisers, tranks, niacin, riboflavin, ascorbic acid—I’ve been going through a friend’s medicine cabinet, and they’re all there.

“Even so, you’re losing out. You’re falling further and further behind.

“I used a fifty-year baseline a moment ago. Let’s use one again. What have you got that’s new, around the place? The fifty years from 1910 to 1960 saw the arrival in the average Western home, and a good few non-Western ones, of the telephone, the radio, the television, the car of unlamented memory, plastics, the washing-machine, the electric stove, iron, toaster and mixer, not to mention the freezer, the hi-fi set, and the tape-recorder.

“I’ve been around the place where I’m staying, which belongs to a highly paid executive with one of our biggest corporations. I cannot find one single object which is as revolutionary as the things I just listed. True, the TV is holographic—but the holographic principle was discovered in the 1930s, catch that? They were ready to apply it to TV by 1983 or 1984, but it didn’t come in for another decade after that. Why not?

“Because you couldn’t afford it.

“Same with the screen on your phone. They had videophone service operating in Russia in the 1960s. You couldn’t afford it until the eighties. And that’s supposed to be new, anyway—thirty years old already?

“Why do you think you get such a generous trade-in allowance when you switch from next year’s model of some gadget to the year after next’s? Because some of the parts are going to be put right back into the new sets, and what can’t be cannibalised will be sold as precious—I repeat, precious—scrap.

“The biggest single building project in this country right now is costing a hundred million buckadingdongs. What do you think it is? You’re wrong. It’s a jail.

“Friends, you don’t have to go to India or Africa to find people existing on the borderline of poverty. You are. Our resources are stretched to the point where reclaiming a gallon of water so someone can drink it a second time costs eleven times more than it did in 1960. TV you can live without, a phone you can live without, but water? Uh-huh! We don’t starve to death, but if you want a diet that’s fit to match your unprecedented tallness and muscularity you pay not six times as much as your grandfather did but more like nine to ten times, depending on how you take in your vitamins and other supplements.

“I’m just going to tell you about a few odds and ends you don’t have because you can’t afford them, and I’ll quit. You could have in your home a domesticated computer of approximately Rehoboam standard, that would give you access to as much knowledge as most provincial libraries as well as handling your budget problems, diagnosing and prescribing for illness and teaching you how to cook a cordon bleu meal. You could have real polyform furniture that changed not only its shape but its texture, like Karatands do, over a range from fur to stainless-steel slickness. You could have a garbage disposal system that paid for itself by reclaiming the constituent elements of everything fed into it and returning them as ingots of metal and barrels of crude organics. You could have individual power-units for every single powered device you own, which would save the purchase price within months and render you immune from overload blackouts in winter.

“Shut up just a moment—I’ve nearly finished.

“When I say you could have them, I don’t mean all of you. I mean that if you did, your next-door neighbour wouldn’t, or in the case of big things on an urban scale, that if your city did the next city along the line wouldn’t. Is that clear? The knowledge exists to make all these things possible, but because we are so damned nearly broke on a planet-wide basis your home contains virtually nothing that your grandfather wouldn’t immediately recognise and know how to use without being told, and what’s more he’d probably complain about the stink of uncleared garbage from the street and he might even complain about your stink because water was cheaper in his day and he could take as many showers and even tub-baths as he felt like.

“All right, codder, I know perfectly well you’ve been trying to interrupt me and say you can’t possibly use all that on SCANALYZER. But how about showing Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sleeping on the street in Calcutta some time?”

continuity (20)

THE SHADOW OF GRANDFATHER LOA

The tight adjustable harness passengers were not supposed to unfasten throughout the flight, because at this height emergencies arose so quickly, constricted Donald and made him think of straitjackets and padded cells. The whole passenger compartment could become exactly that—a padded cell—in the event of accident. An express had once collided with the tumbling third stage of a satellite launcher, its orbit decaying back to atmosphere, but all the sixty-seven occupants had lived.

That’s right. That’s wise. We need padded-cell protection from our own mad cleverness.

Also, of course, it was a womb, carrying its litter to a destination they could not see. For all the passengers knew, they might be borne to Accra instead of Gongilung, emerge blinking among tall black strangers instead of short yellow ones.

Donald rather hoped for that.

But when the can was cracked—for his exclusive benefit—he was spilled on to the Gongilung expressport just as promised. Mechanically, watched by the curious eyes of his companions, he made his way to the exit and stepped on to the travolator that would deliver him package-fashion into the arrivals hall. Glancing sidelong through its windows, he realised with jarring astonishment that he was looking at two things he had never seen before in his life.

Only fifty yards away, a Chinese express nursed at the refuelling bay, its long sides marked with the symbol of the red star and white sun. And beyond, veiled but not screened by a drizzle of light rain, was the first active volcano he had ever set eyes on.

Why—that must be Grandfather Loa!

What he had previously seen on maps acquired actuality. Nine thousand feet high, the mountain brooded over the Shongao Strait, smoking ruminatively, sometimes stirring like a drowsy old man dreaming of his youth and shaking a few rocks down the far side of the cone. There had been a strait on that side too, until 1941, but now there was a narrow land bridge made of lava and ash. Grandfather Loa had taken about two thousand lives on that occasion, mostly fishermen killed by the tsunami. He was not in the monster class with Krakatoa, boasting thirty-six thousand victims, but he was a powerful and dangerous neighbour.

On this side, then, the long narrow island of Shongao, bearing Gongilung the capital city and several others of considerable importance. Beyond the volcano, the smaller and rounder island of Angilam. To the left, or east as he was standing, the long catena of the archipelago swung in an arc that if extended would encounter Isola; to the right, the islands diffused more and were scattered into a rough hexagon. It was a popular image among Yatakangi writers to compare their country to a scimitar, the westernmost islands forming the pommel. And here, at the hilt, was the centre of control.

He was staring with such fascination that he stumbled off the end of the travolator when the moving belt brought him to the fixed floor of the arrivals hall. Confused, struggling to retain his balance, he almost bumped into a girl in the traditional costume of shareng and slippers who was regarding him with an expression of cool contempt.

He had chiefly written and read, not spoken, Yatakangi since completing his original high-pressure course in the subject; his grip on the subtle Asiatic sounds had lessened. Attempting to undo the bad impression he had just created, he essayed a formal Yatakangi apology anyway, but she ignored it so completely he wondered if he had garbled it.

Consulting a radiofaxed copy of the express’s passenger manifest, she said, almost without the trace of an accent, “You will be Donald Hogan, is that correct?”

He nodded.

“Go to Post Five. Your baggage will be delivered.”

At his muttered thanks she at least inclined her head, but that was all the attention he received before she moved on to greet passengers descending from an adjacent travolator. His face hot with embarrassment, Donald walked across the hall towards a row of long counters such as one might see at any expressport, divided into posts each manned by an immigration officer and a customs man, uniformed in off-white with black skullcaps.

He was very conscious of being stared at. He was the only Caucasian in sight. Almost everyone else was of Asian extraction: local-born, or Chinese, or Burmese. There were some Sikhs at Post One, and scattered about there were a few Arabs and a solitary African negro. But no concessions were made to non-Asians; the only signs he could see were in Yatakangi, Chinese Cyrillic and Indonesian.

Reaching the line before Post Five, he fell in behind a family of prosperous expatriate Chinese—expatriate, clearly, because Yatakangi was the language they discussed him in. Their small daughter, aged about eight, marvelled loudly at how pale and ugly he was.

Wondering whether to embarrass them in revenge for his own discomfiture a moment earlier, by letting them know he understood what they were saying, he tried to distract himself by enumerating the ways in which this place differed from an expressport hall at home. The list was shorter than he had expected. The décor, of fierce greens and reds, matched the wet tropical climate of sea-level Shongao—up in the hills that spined the island, it was a trifle cooler but not much drier. There were about as many advertising displays as at home, though fewer of the items were commercial because more public services were under state control. Among them, too, were several political ones, including a couple that praised Marshal Solukarta for his promise to optimise the population. Many airlines had big displays on the walls: Chinese, Russian, Arab, Japanese, even Afghan and Greek. There were the inevitable cases showing local curios and souvenirs, and visible—though not audible—there was a thirty-three-inch holographic TV playing to people in the departures lounge separated from this hall by a pane of tinted glass.

As though to spite him, the line he had been assigned to was moving more slowly than its neighbours. Eventually he could foresee himself envying the people around him who were accustomed to sitting on the floor, and who did not mind looking absurd if they frog-hopped forward when the line moved.

The delay seemed to be due to a Japanese in front of the Chinese family, apparently a salesman for Japind, because his open bags contained scores of samples of goods Donald recognised, including Jettiguns. The official behind the counter was checking each one off in a bulky manual. Donald added one more to the list of differences; at home, they would have a computer reading at each customs point to cost the duty.

Fretting at the delay, he noticed that the line at Post Six had reduced to one person, a very attractive Indian girl in a microsari that swathed her slender body only to mid-thigh—a fashion, so he’d heard, which the Indian government encouraged because it reduced the demand for textiles. Her slim legs tapered to tiny gold sandals, her long dark hair was piled on her head to emphasise her patrician profile, and she wore the ancient style of nose-jewel in her left nostril—a curious atavism when the rest of her was so modern.

Were Yatakangi officials so hidebound that they would refuse to transfer his bags to the next position when the shiggy had gone?

He was still wondering whether to ask, when he realised that the girl was having trouble. The customs officer dealing with her was leaning forward aggressively, and the immigration man next to him was gesticulating with her passport.

Judging by the behaviour of the Chinese family, it wasn’t bad manners to be openly inquisitive here. Donald strained his ears. At first he couldn’t make out what was being said; then he realised the customs man was skinning his language down to a kind of baby-talk, and the girl wasn’t getting his meaning even so.

Nobody else had yet joined his line. He debated whether to ask the Chinese family to keep his place, decided he’d better not risk addressing them in Yatakangi, and strode over to the girl’s side.

“You probably speak English,” he said.

She turned to him with frank relief, while the men behind the counter scowled. “Yes, I do!” she said, with the strong north-western lilt the British had nicknamed Bombay Welsh. “But I don’t speak a word of Yatakangi!”

Then she placed his own accent, and started to frown. “But—aren’t you an American?”

“That’s right.”

“Then—”

“I do speak the language. Not many of us do, but a few. Have you any idea what the trouble is?”

She shook her head, eyes wide under the small red caste-mark decorating her high forehead.

The customs man said sharply to Donald, “What do you want?”

Fishing deep in memory for the inflections to correspond with words habit made him see, rather than hear, Donald said, “The lady doesn’t understand you. I will explain to her if you tell me—slowly, please.”

The two officials exchanged glances. At length the immigration man said, “We do not allow prostitutes to enter our country.”

For an instant Donald was baffled. Then he saw what they meant, and almost laughed. He turned to the shiggy.

“They think you’re a prostitute,” he said, and grinned.

Surprise, horror, and finally matching amusement showed in her expression.

“But why?”

Donald risked the guess he had arrived at. “Are you a widow, by any chance?”

“Yes—how could you…? Oh, of course: I had someone write it on my passport in Yatakangi before I left home.”

“No, I didn’t read it off your passport. What’s happened is that you’ve run foul of a couple of local conventions. First off, the clothes you’re wearing.”

The girl glanced down at her body, self-consciously.

“Yatakangi national dress is the shareng, which is like one of your old-time saris except that it’s gathered between the legs into a sort of Turkish trouser arrangement. The only women who wear a skirt as short as yours are high-powered businesswomen and—ah—good-time girls. And second, most Yatakangi prostitutes describe themselves as widows for official purposes; it’s not considered a disgrace for a woman who’s lost her husband to get other men to support her.”

“Oh my goodness!” the girl said, eyes wider than ever.

“And to cap the lot, the written word for ‘widow’ can actually become the slang term for ‘tart’ if the writer isn’t very careful. I’ll see if I can sort it out.”

He turned back to the impatient officials and explained with a maximum of flowery phrasing. Their faces relaxed a trifle, and after some discussion they proposed a compromise.

“They say,” Donald translated, “that if you’ll change into something more becoming to a respectable woman they’ll let you go through. You may take a change of costume out of your bags and go to the ladies’ powder-room over there.” He pointed. “But they advise you to get some Yatakangi clothes as quickly as possible, or there may be some more awkward consequences.”

“I can imagine,” the girl said with a twinkle. “Thank you very much. Now let’s see if I have anything that won’t offend them.”

She rummaged in her bags. Donald, seeing that the Japanese salesman was still having trouble, stood by and watched. Finally she produced a full-length sari in green and gold and held it up for him.

“This is really for formal evening wear, but it’s all I brought with me. Will it do?”

Donald confirmed with the officials that it was passable, and she thanked him again and vanished into the ladies’ room.

And the salesman was still arguing. Donald hesitated; then he suggested to the officials, who were leaning back for a breather, that they might perhaps just this once move his bags from the adjacent post…?

With a bad grace they conceded that they might. Their surliness puzzled Donald. He wondered whether they suspected him of misleading them about the girl’s profession, or whether they expected a bribe. But he dared not offer anything; the Solukarta régime had one achievement to its credit, the elimination of venality among public employees. It was not until the bags had been fetched—to the annoyance of the Chinese family—that he suddenly realised the true reason.

I’m a round-eye. If it weren’t for my speaking a little of the language, they’d happily keep me waiting till Doomsday.

He stared at the immigration man as he flipped through the green American passport he held, and read the correctness of his guess in the downward turn of the other’s mouth. He swallowed hard. This was a new experience for him, and it was going to take getting used to.

“So now!” the official said. “You are a reporter, I see. What brings you to Yatakang?”

I’m going to have to be very polite. Donald said, “The genetic optimisation programme. It has excited great interest.”

“That is true,” the customs man said with a smirk, glancing up from his scrutiny of Donald’s belongings. “We have had reporters from all over the world coming to Yatakang since it was announced.”

“Except America,” the immigration official countered. “In fact, as I have heard, the Americans and other”—he used a word for European which corresponded approximately to the Afram term “paleass”—“are denying the honesty of the claim.” He scowled at Donald.

“You say it has excited great interest?”

“Because of it I have been sent here.”

“And took a week on the journey?” the immigration man said, curling his lip. He looked at the passport again, very thoroughly, page by page. Meantime his colleague turned over the contents of Donald’s bags, not so much searching them as stirring them about. Pride smarting, Donald stood in silence and waited for them to get bored.

Finally the immigration man slapped the passport shut and held out his other hand. He said something Donald did not understand, and he asked for a repetition.

“Show me your proof of unfatherliness!”

“I have no children,” Donald ventured.

The immigration man raised an eyebrow to his colleague. “Listen!” he said, as though addressing an idiot. “While you are in Yatakang you must not make a child. It will interfere with the optimisation programme. Show me the paper which certifies”—this time he used easier turns of phrase than the verbal shorthand of the first request—“that you cannot make children.”

They want a certificate of sterilisation. That’s something that bleeder Delahanty missed!

“I’m not sterile,” he said, using a term which included impotence and unmanliness in its referents and trying to sound as though he had been insulted.

The immigration man pressed a stud on the counter and swivelled his chair around. A door in the far wall opened to reveal a man in a medical coverall carrying a medikit, a docustat and a fat reference book. Seeing Donald he stopped dead.

“That one?” he called. On receiving a gesture of confirmation he stepped back and exchanged his medikit for another, similar one. Returning, he gave Donald a searching look.

“You speak English?” he demanded.

“And Yatakangi!” Donald snapped.

“You understand what is necessary?”

“No.”

“It is the law for foreigners to be sterile while they are in our country. We do not wish to have our genetic pool contaminated. You have not sterility certificate?”

“No, I haven’t.”

What are they going to do—send me home?

The man in the coverall nipped through his book and found a table of dosages. Having run his finger down and across it, he clicked open his medikit.

“Chew this,” he said, proffering a white pill.

“What is it?”

“It confers forty-eight hours’ sterility in a man of your race and build. Otherwise you have three alternatives: you must consent to immediate vasectomy, you may accept exposure to sufficient radiation to incapacitate your gonads, or you may get on the next plane leaving. This you understand?”

Slowly Donald reached for the pill, wishing he could break the arrogant yellowbelly’s neck instead.

“Give me the passport,” the man in the coverall continued, switching to Yatakangi. From his docustat he extracted a self-adhesive label, which he placed over the centre front panel of the passport.

“You can read this, yes?” he said, reverting to English and showing the label to Donald.

The label said that if he did not report to a hospital within twenty-four hours for a reversible sterility operation he would be jailed for one year and deported after confiscation of his goods.

The pill tasted of dust and ashes, but he had to swallow it, and along with it his nearly uncontrollable fury at the glee with which these slit-eyed runts were witnessing the discomfiture of a white man.

tracking with closeups (18)

IN MY YOUNG DAYS

Victor Whatmough waited to hear his wife Mary close the door of the bathroom, and still a little longer until he distinguished the noise of splashing which meant she was actually in the tub. Then he went to the phone and punched the number with shaking fingers.

Waiting, he listened to the quiet sough of the breeze in the trees outside the house. His imagination transmuted the tap-tap of one branch against another into a sort of drumming, as though to mark the march of the houses advancing over the far crest of the valley which his home overlooked. They had occupied the summit of the hill like an army taking station for an assault on an untenable position. In another few years, this gracious villa set among rolling fields to which he had unwillingly retired would be surrounded. He had bought as much as he could of the nearby land, but now the developers were actually in sight, none of his neighbours would forego the chance of immense profit and sell their ground for what he could afford to pay. And who would buy this empty ground off him, except those same developers he hated?

His mind clouded briefly with visions of wild youths in gangs, roaming the district at night and breaking windows, of small boys clambering over his fences in search of fruit, trampling down his beautifully kept flowerbeds and making off with the jewel-bright stones from the rockery he had assembled from half a dozen different countries.

He thought of a black child who had come into the compound at home, when he was about eighteen, to steal eggs. That one hadn’t come back—had hardly been able to leave. But take a stick to some dirty urchin in this strange new Britain, and the next caller would be a policeman with an assault charge to be answered in court.

The phone’s screen lit, and there was Karen glowing with all the freshness of her nineteen years. He came back to the present with a start, worrying about how his own image would show on the screen at her end. It shouldn’t be too bad, he assured himself; for all his sixty years he was presentable still, being of a durable wiry build, and the grey at his temples and on the tips of his beard only added distinction to his appearance.

“Oh—hullo, Vic,” Karen said without noticeable enthusiasm.

He had made a rather astonishing discovery a week ago, that had undermined his previous dogmatic distaste for modern Britain. In the person—to be precise, in the body—of Karen, he had discovered that there could be contact across the gulf of the generations. He had met her in a quiet hotel in Cheltenham, where he had dropped in for a drink after some business with his lawyers, got talking with her, and without any fuss whatever had been invited upstairs to her room.

She wasn’t local, of course. She was studying at Bristol University, and to check on some ancient records connected with a historical research programme she had come to spend a couple of days in the neighbourhood.

She had been a revelation to him: on the one hand interested in what he had to tell her about his early life, spent partly at school hereabouts and partly in Nigeria, where his family had hung on and hung on until finally the xenophobia of the eighties had made their position untenable; on the other, delightfully matter-of-fact about sex, so that he had not even felt embarrassed about his own impaired capacity for orgasm. He was a thrice-married man, but none of his wives—least of all Mary—had given him so much unalloyed pleasure.

Maybe there was something to justify the changes in his world, after all.

He cleared his throat and smiled. “Hello there, Karen!” he said in a bluff manner. “Keeping well?”

“Oh yes, thanks. A bit busy—it’s getting towards exam time now and life is hectic—but otherwise I’m fine. You?”

“Better than I’ve been for ages. And I don’t have to tell you who deserves the credit for that, do I?” He tried to make his words arch and conspiratorial.

Something—no: someone moved in the ill-focused background of the room where Karen’s phone was located. A blurred human figure. Victor felt a spasm of alarm. He had thought in terms of being discreet as regards Mary, but not—for some unaccountable reason—as regards Karen.

He said, “Well—ah … Why I called you up: I’m thinking of coming over to Bristol some time in the next few days. I have a bit of business to attend to. I thought I could take the chance of dropping in on you.”

A voice—a male voice—said something which the phone did not pick up clearly, and Karen told the interrupter to fasten it for a moment. Conscientiously, Victor added that to the stock of current phrases he had decided to compile so as not to seem intolerably antique. One said “antique”, not old-fashioned or even square; one said “fasten it” instead of telling someone to shut up; one jocularly insulted a person by calling him a “bleeder”, because terms like bastard and bugger had ceased to be pejorative and become simply descriptive. Victor had had some difficulty reconciling himself to the last-mentioned. A preference for one’s own sex had been something literally unspeakable when he was Karen’s age, and to hear her include it in characterising someone she knew as casually as if she were talking about his having red hair was highly disturbing.

On the other hand, she had managed to convey the impression that it might be rather a good thing to have “celebrated one’s twenty-first”—to have shed the irrelevant preconceptions of the last century and decided to enjoy the world as it was, faults and all.

“Well, I don’t think it would be terribly convenient,” Karen said. “I told you, I have exams hanging over me—”

“Ah, but surely it’s bad, isn’t it, to work at full pressure all the time before exams? You’d benefit from the chance to relax for an evening.” Victor flavoured his voice with all the coaxing he could.

“Fasten it, Brian!” she snapped sideways at the half-seen person in her room. “If you and Tom can’t keep quiet I throw you out, catch? Sorry, Vic,” she added, facing the camera again. “But—no, I don’t think so, thanks all the same.”

There was a frozen instant in which the only sound was from the bathroom overhead: Mary stepping out of her tub.

Eventually Victor said, and knew he sounded both idiotic and peeved, but couldn’t help it, “Why not?”

“Look, Vic, I really am very very sorry. I shouldn’t have done it because I realised afterwards you’d probably make a big scene of it and I can’t. I don’t want to, candidly, but even if I did I couldn’t. I just happened to be on my own in Cheltenham and you really were very sweet to me when I was feeling a bit lonely and it was a very interesting evening hearing you talk about the old days especially what you said about Africa because I was able to come back and tell Tom some things he didn’t know and he comes from there—”

“But if you mean that why wouldn’t you like—?”

“Vic, I’m terribly sorry, honestly I am. I should have told you straight out, I guess, but I didn’t know how you’d react and I didn’t want to upset you because lots of people do get a bit upset.” Her pretty face wore an unhappy look which he couldn’t for the life of him believe was pretence.

“You see, I’m spoken for here. I’m in a triple with Brian and Tom and we’ve got a good thing going for us and I just don’t go outside unless—you know—it’s an accidental thing, like my being away looking up those old parish records. So all I can say is it would be very nice to have you drop in and say hullo when you come to Bristol but don’t hope for any more. Is that horribly blunt?”

The past reached out and closed a dead hand on Victor’s brain. He looked past Karen’s worried face and made sense of two shapes immobilised at her insistence in the background of the small square picture. Like badly unfocused photos, they still conveyed their essential identity: one pale and one dark male figure, both bare to the waist, with some sort of blurred pale bar over the shoulder of the dark one. In exact painful words, Karen’s two boy-friends sitting on something low, probably a divan-bed, one with his arm around the other.

And that “other”—she had just said so—an African.

The bathroom door overhead opened. He switched off the phone and moved away from it, mechanically. He had not formulated another coherent thought apart from fury before Mary appeared in a towelling robe and asked him to fix her a drink from the liquor console.

He complied grumpily, aware that he must not let his anger show through, yet incapable of putting on a cheerful expression. Mary asked him, as was inevitable, “Who were you talking to on the phone?”

“I called Bristol,” Victor said, more or less without lying. “I’ve been thinking about that housing development over there, and wondering if it would be worth our while to sell up and go somewhere a bit more isolated.”

“What did they say?”

“I didn’t get any joy.”

Mary sipped her drink, frowning. She frowned a lot nowadays, and it was turning her once-pretty face into a mask of aging wrinkles. Victor noticed the fact and thought with detachment of how that brief phone-call had altered the reaction it had conjured up in him only an hour ago.

Then, drunk on the memory of Karen, he had been thinking: I could leave her, if there are young girls available, I could have a grand fling before I finally lose the urge …

Such thoughts at his age seemed ridiculous in modern terms, but he had never adjusted to modern terms. He realised now with resignation that he never would. “Celebrating his twenty-first” was a privilege time had stolen away.

“This drink tastes terrible,” Mary said. “Are you sure you set the machine right?”

“What? Oh, damn it! Of course I’m sure! It’s been mucking me about the past few days and nobody can come to fix it before the weekend.”

“Talk about progress!” Mary said with a scowl. “Our head boy in Lagos would have died rather than make a mess of a cocktail like this.”

She gulped the rest of it down anyhow, with a grimace, and set aside the glass. “I’ll go and get dressed, then,” she added. “What time are the Harringhams expecting us—noon, or half past?”

“Noon,” Victor said. “Better hurry.”

When she had gone, he fixed himself a drink too—manually—and stood gazing out the room’s window-wall at the encroaching hordes of interchangeable houses across the valley. Thoughts flickered in his mind like a series of projected slides that had been shuffled out of coherent order.

Over a hundred million people in this damned island and they let these blacks come and go as they want.

She seemed like a decent girl and suddenly it turns out that she …

Bloody machine cost a fortune and doesn’t work properly. Have to send for repairmen and they make you wait. Back home it was done by servants and if one of them didn’t work there was always another to be hired and trained.

Decadent, dirty-minded, obsessed with sex like the black brutes we tried to get some sense and civilisation into!

Try telling that to Karen and make her understand, try explaining the spaciousness and real leisure in the life I had to leave behind. Mary understands; she comes from the same background. We can at least share our grouses if nothing more.

Which, he realised dully, meant that there could never have been any substance in his brief dream of leaving her and going off for a few wild-oat years before he ran out of energy. His marriage to Mary had lasted; his others, to English-born girls, hadn’t. And the same on her side, too: she had been married before to someone who didn’t understand. A row between himself and her didn’t have to be explained away and excused—she felt the same aching disappointment with the world as he did.

Some people had adjusted, come home after having well-paid jobs in Africa or Asia tugged out from under them, accepted inferior posts at home and worked their way back up. He’d tried and tried, but it never suited him—sooner or later there was a crisis, a loss of temper, a complaint, and an interview with the management … He wasn’t poor, they had enough to live on. But they had no purpose, and almost no occupation.

He wanted to turn back time, and could not.

At least, though, he and Mary had not been allowed children—he had used up his permitted maximum of three in his second marriage, and the two boys and the girl were in their middle twenties now, which meant they had probably just escaped the full impact of the decadence claiming Karen.

If they hadn’t …

But that he would rather not know. If he couldn’t get from life the only thing he desired—return to the colonial society he had been brought up in—he preferred that the world turn its back on him and leave him to mope undisturbed.

continuity (21)

MORE HASTE

Arrayed like a tribunal on one side of the vast palatial office: G. T. Buckfast, face like thunder; the skeletal Dr. Raphael Corning from State; Hamilcar Waterford and E. Prosper Rankin.

Grouped like victims of a trial where they were denied both counsel and knowledge of the charges: Norman House and Rex Foster-Stern.

“It’s been leaked,” Old GT said, and the three others flanking her nodded in comical unison.

Victoria?

The thought crossed Norman’s mind like a shooting-star, and although he stamped on its traces—the hole, that’s impossible!—it left a charred streak.

He said, “Sorry, GT, I don’t understand. I’d have thought the first inkling of a leak would come from a buying wave in MAMP stock, and that hadn’t happened up to this morning.”

“The fact remains,” insisted Old GT. “Isn’t that right, Prosper?”

Rankin scowled and repeated his nod, his eyes on Norman.

But the past few days of solid and surprising achievement had lent Norman a heady sense of his own capability. He said, “Who’s supposed to be in the secret and how?”

“Common Europe,” Waterford said, biting the name off like crunching a candy-bar. “As a whole, to judge by what our informants are passing along.”

“Accordingly,” said Old GT, “we’re going to have to reconsider everything about the project, which was predicated on secrecy. The costings, the estimated time, the returns, the—”

“The people,” Rankin cut in. “Much more important, GT. We shall have to turn our entire personnel upside-down and shake out their pockets.”

“Which is your responsibility still, Norman,” GT confirmed.

“Now just a second,” Norman said, feeling reckless. Victoria? A search like that would not only waste time, it’d be bound to bring me under scrutiny too, because this case involves not millions but billions.

“I agree with Norman,” Foster-Stern said unexpectedly.

“I don’t appreciate statements like this without adequate evidence to back them, GT. You realise you’re calling in question the discretion of my entire department? We’re the ones who have handled the hypothetical data.”

A vision of endless reams of green printouts from Shalmaneser blinded Norman for a second. Facing the whole thing again from the start, the hypothesis being amended to assume loss of secrecy, appalled him.

Also, despite everything, Victoria had existed in his life.

He said fiercely, “GT! I tell you something straight—shall I? I think you’re doing something you’ve never done before in your business career, overlooking the obvious.”

GT bridled and flushed. Norman had admired her ability for years; finding that she didn’t know one of her own VP’s was a Muslim and hence a non-drinker had breached that wall of unalloyed respect and implied that she preferred to put up with, rather than actively promote, the modern standards that encouraged brown-noses in industry.

But he was surprised at himself, even so; telling off the founder of General Technics was a step clear outside his old patterns of behaviour.

“In what way?” GT demanded frigidly.

“I’ve been too preoccupied with the specifically African aspect of the project to follow what other departments were doing,” Norman said, thinking fast on his feet. “But now I think of it, the data which were fed to Shalmaneser must have been gathered by somebody. Ah … Yes, here’s an example. Our market costings include items like transportation of raw materials once they’re landed from MAMP. Was the information in store or did we have to go look for it?”

GT and Rankin exchanged glances. After a pause, Rankin said, “Well, the African market has been a very minor one for us up till now.”

“In other words we had to send someone out to make inquiries,” Norman snapped. “Add another thing: we’re comparatively ignorant of African attitudes, so we’re anticipating recruitment of former colonial advisors to help us avoid silly mistakes. Shalmaneser had an estimate of the number of potential recruits. How was it arrived at?”

“We had it from our London office,” GT grunted.

“And how did they get it? I’ll wager they commissioned a survey, and somebody noticed that General Technics was interested in something they hadn’t previously considered. Add still another point: who do we have on the spot in Beninia?”

“But—” began Waterford.

“Nobody,” Norman said, without waiting for him. “We have agents in Lagos, Accra, Bamako and other main cities in the West African region, but Beninia is a piddling little hole-in-corner country we’ve never cared about. Bamako is in a former French territory, Lagos and Accra were formerly British—where do the former colonial territories get their commercial and governmental data processed?”

There was a blank expression on GT’s face which was pure joy to Norman.

“I see what you’re setting course for,” Dr. Corning said slowly—the first words he had uttered during the discussion. “The ex-colonial powers offer a discount on computer-time to their former dependent territories, which is substantial enough for them to have relied on the Fontainebleau centre rather than developing their own.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Norman said in triumph. “Do I have to spell it out, GT? This corporation of ours is like a state within a state—as Elihu said to me when he first mentioned the Beninia project, we could buy and sell a lot of the underdeveloped countries. Any move we make is going to attract the attention of European rivals, and you may lay to it that corporations like Krupp and ICI and Royal Dutch Shell have bought themselves codes for the Fontainebleau computers that make a nonsense of attempts at secrecy. In any case, the Common Europe Board has a vested interest in seeing that big profitable projects go to their firms and not ours. They might have passed on the information their intelligence services picked up, quite legitimately; as to the whole of Common Europe knowing about the Beninia project, I think you’re understating the case. I’ll wager it’s already been evaluated by Sovcompex and by now there’s a good chance the data are going to K’ung-fu-tse in Peking!”

Foster-Stern was nodding vigorously, Norman saw with pleasure.

Stunned, GT said, “But if you’re right—and I admit you probably are, blast it!—we might as well cancel the whole idea!”

“GT, I said you’re overlooking the obvious,” Norman exclaimed. “We have one thing Common Europe hasn’t and never can have, and the Russians can’t have and the Chinese can never dream of having. We’ve got MAMP, it exists, and it’s sitting on a strike of raw materials adequate to underpin the Beninia project. Where is Common Europe going to get competitive quantities of ore? They’re the oldest industrialised area of the world; their seams of coal and iron are played out. The only possible competition I’ve been worried about is Australia—the Outback is the last mining region in the world which hasn’t been fully exploited. But Australia is notoriously underpopulated. Where can they find ten thousand spare technicians to move en masse to Beninia for even the preliminary stages, let alone the actual development phase?”

“They couldn’t,” Dr. Corning said with authority.

There was a pause. At length GT said, looking down at her hands to avoid meeting Norman’s eyes, “I owe you an apology, Norman. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that we’d hit a case of conventional industrial espionage. It’s a strange thing for me to admit, but—well, I guess I just am not used to handling projects of this colossal size. At least I can offer by way of excuse the fact that Raphael didn’t correct me on behalf of State, which is used to such mammoth undertakings.”

“State,” Corning said with grim humour, “is also used to highly effective and systematic spying.”

Hamilcar Waterford had been brooding to himself in silence. He said now, “If what Norman says is correct—and especially as regards the ability of big European corporations to penetrate the security of information processed at Fontainebleau, I’m inclined to think he’s on to something—then what can we do to minimise the impact of it? My impression is there’s nothing we can do except accelerate the project to the greatest possible degree.”

Corning nodded. “While Common Europe, Russia and Australia can probably be discounted, the Chinese might just consider it worthwhile to starve their people for another generation in order to buy the Beninian bridgehead. They’ve had notoriously poor luck on the continent lately, but they’re indefatigable in trying.”

“I’d suggest,” Norman said, savouring his ascendancy, “we ask Shalmaneser for the optimum plan out of those so far examined, and take that to Port Mey at once. Meantime, while negotiations are continuing, we can ask him to assess the likelihood of the competition getting to know the details. The Fontainebleau set-up is pretty good, but Shalmaneser is still ahead of any other computer in the world, which is a further ace we have in the hole.”

“That sounds sensible,” GT approved. “Will you find out from Elihu whether he can make the trip on short notice, Norman?”

“He can, I can say that straight off,” Norman declared. “Ever since President Obomi made that public announcement about his failing health, Elihu has been on emergency standby.”

GT slapped the desk. “Settled, then. Thank you, gentlemen, and once again my apologies for blasting off into an unjustified orbit.”

In the elevator car which they shared going down, Corning said to Norman, “GT’s not the only one who owes you an apology, by the way. When Elihu said you were the right man to hold the reins on the Beninia project, we checked what we had on you and our computers said he was probably wrong. I was in two minds about you for that reason. But today you’ve demonstrated you have a sense of proper proportion, and that’s a rare talent nowadays. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? There’s no substitute for real-life experience even in the age of Shalmaneser.”

“Of course not,” Foster-Stern muttered grumpily from the other side of the car. “Computers like Shalmaneser don’t deal in realities. Something like ninety-five per cent of what goes through that frozen brain of his is hypothetical.”

The car stopped and the doors opened for Norman’s floor. Corning reached past him and held them to prevent the automatic controls cycling. He said, “You play chess, either of you?”

“No, go is my game,” Norman said, and thought of the infinite pains he had taken to master it as the pastime to match his abandoned executive image.

“I like the L game myself,” Corning said, in a standard one-up ploy. “But the same applies in all of them. I mention chess simply because I ran across the phrase in a chess handbook. The author said that some of the finest melodies of chess are those which never actually get played, because the opponent sees them coming, of course. And he called one entire chapter ‘Unheard Melodies’, showing combinations that would have been masterly had the other player done what was expected of him.”

He gave a faint smile. “I suspect that GT is frustrated at the non-co-operation of our opponents.”

“Or else maybe lives ninety-five per cent of her life in imagination, like Shalmaneser,” Norman said lightly. “It sounds to me like an easy recipe for bumbling through life. One can hardly accuse GT of that, though—si monumentum requiris, and all that dreck.” He gestured at the magnificence of the GT tower surrounding them. The Latin tag, of course, also belonged to the period when he had been erecting his carefully designed image.

Somewhat to his surprise, he discovered that Foster-Stern was gazing at him in open-mouthed wonder.

“Is something wrong?” he demanded.

“What? Oh—no!” Foster-Stern recovered and gave a dazed headshake. “No, you’ve just given me an idea. And what’s more, one that none of our psychologists has ever brought to my notice, which is saying something. The stacks of half-baked theory they keep routing to my office—!”

Puzzled, Norman waited. Foster-Stern was hardly an expert in computer theory, or he would have been too busy in his own speciality to accept the appointment he held on the GT board, but since Projects and Planning Dept relied entirely on computers he could scarcely be ignorant about the subject, either.

“Look!” Foster-Stern continued. “You know we’ve been trying to get Shal to live up to what theory promises for a computer of his complexity and behave like a conscious entity?”

“Of course.”

“And—well, he hasn’t. Detecting whether he had would be a subtle problem but the psychologists say they could spot a personal preference, for instance, a bias not warranted by facts programmed in but by a sort of prejudice.”

“If that happened, wouldn’t Shalmaneser become useless?” Corning objected.

“Oh, not at all—the element of self-interest is absent from most of the problems he’s given. It would have to appear in some programme which directly affected his own future, putting it very roughly. He’d have to say something like, ‘I don’t want you to do that because it would make me uncomfortable’—that kind of thing, catch? And I’m beginning to wonder whether the reason he hasn’t behaved the way we expected is because of what you just instanced, Norman.”

Norman shook his head.

“What intelligent living creature could live ninety-five per cent of his existence on the hypothetical level? Shalmaneser is all awareness, without a subconscious except in the sense that memory banks don’t preoccupy him before they’re cued to help solve a problem to which they apply. What we shall have to do is try running him for an extended period on nothing but real-time and real-life programmes. Maybe then we’ll get what we’re after.”

Foster-Stern sounded really excited by now. Carried away by his enthusiasm, the others had failed to notice that two more GT staffers were patiently waiting for the brass to finish with the elevator and let them take a turn.

Suddenly perceiving them, Norman said, “Well, it’s a fascinating possibility, but way off my orbit, I’m afraid. Ah—you wouldn’t think of trying it out before we’ve set up the big one, would you?”

“Oh, of course not. We might have to clear down hypothetical stuff for a month or more, and that would take about a year to arrange, what with the schedules we already have contracted. Nonetheless … The hole, we’re blocking people, aren’t we? See you later, Norman, and congratulations on what you did upstairs just now.”

Norman stepped out into the corridor, feeling a little adrift. Something had happened to him that felt as though it repaid the hard work, the loss of sleep and even the indigestion he had suffered in the past few days. But the aftermath of outfacing GT had left him no energy to work out what that something might be.

The one thing which was clear undermined the sense of elation: he was now, very definitely, going to be pitchforked into the middle of Beninia while he still regarded himself as inadequately prepared.