Stand on Zanzibar (46 page)
Authors: John Brunner
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.
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.