Stand on Zanzibar (41 page)
Authors: John Brunner
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.
“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.)
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.