Stand on Zanzibar (55 page)
Authors: John Brunner
He saw their nods, but knew it wasn’t for their benefit he had added that final emphatic warning. It was for himself.
I haven’t seen or sensed the proof of it yet, but Elihu swears to it and I think I have to believe him. It’s only fair and just that sometimes making a fat profit should coincide with doing long-term good, and chances come too seldom for us to miss even one of them.
Now that he had finally seen Beninia, though, he was irrationally afraid that he had built himself an illusion at long range, and next week or next month he might cease to be able to accept that he was doing good. And if that happened there would be no other handy prop with which to underpin the shattered parody of purpose that justified his life.
* * *
A short while later he was terrified to realise that when he spoke that apparently clear injunction to himself and his colleagues all he had done was mouth the words. He had not, even he himself had not, taken in the full implications of the statement.
At the Presidential Palace a magnificently robed major-domo nearly seven feet high ushered them into an ante-room where black servants were bringing aperitifs and trays of tiny African hors-d’oeuvres to the assembled company: Mrs. Kitty Gbe, education; Dr. (Econ.) Ram Ibusa, finance; Dr. (PPE) Leon Elai, foreign affairs; and President Obomi.
Upon seeing whom, Elihu strode forward unceremoniously and embraced him. Drawing back, he said, “Zad! My God, this is terrible! You look ten years older and it’s only been a couple of months!”
“I have no more gods,” the president said. He drew back from the embrace and forced a smile. “It’s wonderful to see you back here, anyway, Elihu. There was a moment when I feared—but never mind that, I have good doctors and they keep me going somehow. Will you not introduce me to your distinguished fellow countrymen?”
He blinked his surviving eye at Norman and his companions.
“Why—ah—of course,” Elihu said. “Let me present first Dr. Norman Niblock House, of General Technics’ board…”
Norman held out his hand. “I’m honoured to meet you, sir,” he said. “And I hope very much that we’ve worked out a way to solve some of your country’s problems, and that you’ll find it acceptable.”
“Is it, Elihu?” President Obomi inquired, glancing at the ambassador.
“I’ve done my best to get you what you asked for,” Elihu said.
“Thank you,” Obomi smiled. “You must explain it to us over dinner, Dr. House. I know it’s a shame to spoil good food with business, and my chef will be infuriated, but time is running out for me and—well, I’m sure you’ll appreciate my plight.”
He turned to Consuela as Elihu named her and ushered her forward, while Norman stepped back in a daze. Automatically he waved aside a tray of drinks that a servant held before him.
The matter can’t be settled that easily! Surely there will have to be argument, persuasion, a selling job?… How about these ministers of his? Are they as prepared as he is to take someone else’s word when the whole future of their nation is at stake?
He stared at them, the one plump woman and the two medium-sized men with their cheeks scarred in traditional designs, and could not detect anything less than satisfaction in their expressions. The truth began to sink through the sluggish water of his mind.
When Elihu compared Obomi to the head of a family, I thought he was just invoking an analogy. But this is how a family welcomes friends with a proposition to make—offers food and drink, deals first with personal matters, gets around to the irritating questions of business later. They aren’t looking on us as foreign delegates: ambassador, representatives of a giant corporation. It’s more as though …
At that point he almost lost track of the inspiration that was slowly emerging to awareness. He got it back in the voice of Chad Mulligan, asking whether anyone knew an interior decorator he could tell to do up an apartment for him with the latest modern gewgaws.
That’s it.
He took a deep breath.
A country or a super-corporation had behaviour-patterns distinct from smaller groups, let alone individuals. Needing something done, they briefed diplomatic missions, or put out a contract to tender, or in some other fashion formalised and ritualised their action, and if they failed to prepare thoroughly enough there was calamity.
The President of Beninia, needing something done, had acted just the way Elihu described, but until this moment Norman had failed to grasp the exactness of the comparison—like a paterfamilias he had turned to an old friend whom he trusted and explained his needs, and when the friend came back with his expert proposal …
It was settled.
But it took him until the time of their departure, after midnight, to convince himself that he was right, and most of the following day to make his colleagues understand.
“Dear Norman: This must be the first letter I’ve written in over three years. Talk about old habits dying hard … I guess what I really want to do is set down some notes for an article, but addressing a mass audience I’m
sick
of. I’ve done it in books and journals and over TV and at lecture-meetings and I’ll probably revert to that eventually because my skull threatens to burst with all the pressure inside, but the time I spent down in the gutter got me used to talking to
a
person, one at a time, and what I really need is to be able to turn into a million of myself and go out and have a million separate conversations because that’s the only way you ever establish communications. The rest is just exposure to information, and why should anybody look at one wave on a sea?
“I really appreciate your loaning me the apt. Some people called up who hadn’t heard you were due to leave, and if my books did nothing else they got me a modicum of notoriety, so I’m invited to sundry forthcoming events in your place. I’ll try not to disgrace you, but by God it’ll be tough.
“It’s very curious coming back, at one blow, from the bottom to the top of this society we’ve constructed. It doesn’t look any better from this angle. I remembered that opinion, but I guess the melancholia it generated when I first reached it is alien to my temperament. I know it was what inspired
Hipcrime
—I felt getting outside the regular conformist orbit was the only route a sane man could take.
“But there isn’t an outside. Talking about ‘society’s outcasts’ or ‘opting out’ is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they’re benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term ‘out’ is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There’s no place for ‘outside’ to
be.
“Where, for example, would your fellow Aframs, of the type who disclaim paleass-style living, find themselves if the society they so despise fell to bits? Hypothesise a plague which affects only people of Caucasian descent (as a matter of fact it exists, and the Chinese field-tested it in Macao about three to four years back, but the news was quietly stifled and I only heard about it by accident). Getting rid of us with our damnable arrogance wouldn’t cure the human race of its hereditary diseases.
“I’m beginning to wonder whether I ought not to copy the example of those people out on the West Coast who seem to have taken up sabotage as a kind of hobby. Something is horribly wrong with our setup, and they’re adopting a proper scientific technique to determine what. (I don’t know if anyone has pointed this out before—I suspect not. I have a disgusting habit of jumping to private conclusions which makes me wonder if I’m really living in a fantasy world not shared by anyone else.)
“Said scientific technique is to alter one, and only one, of the variables at a time, to see what effect the change has on the total interaction and hence deduce the function of the force you’re tampering with. Trouble is, of course, the impact is randomised, and no one is in a position to analyse the results.
“I guess maybe I’ll try and do it, since there are no other volunteers. I’ll head for California and start a study of the consequences of disorganising a city.
“No, that’s a hitrip-type illusion, to be honest. I never will do it, nobody will do it. I’m too scared. It would be on a par with climbing down the shaft of a fusion generator to watch the plasma whiz around the bottle. Somebody send us a Martian anthropologist, for heaven’s sake!
“Did you ever wonder how a doctor feels, faced with a disease he can’t cure, which he knows is so contagious he’s liable to catch it off the patients he can’t help? That’s me at this minute. Christ, I’m a rational being—of a sort—rational enough, at least, to see the symptoms of insanity around me. And I’m human, the same as the people I think of as victims when my guard drops. It’s at least possible I’m even crazier than my fellows, whom I’m tempted to pity.
“There seems only one thing to do, and that’s get drunk.
“Regards—Chad Mulligan”
The government maintained its press liaison bureau on the top floor of a fifteen-storey block well towards the inland side of Gongilung. Having presented his papers of accreditation to a bland, unsmiling official, Donald wandered across the reed-mat flooring towards a window that give him a fine view over the city.
To his left, crowning a hill, rose the white towers of the university. He stared at them, wondering in which of them Sugaiguntung worked. What could have happened to a man like that to make him a mere stalking-horse for a propaganda claim? Long pressure, no doubt, was capable of caving in even a genius whose independence of thought had laid the foundations for his country’s continuing prosperity.
And speaking of pressure
…
From here, for the first time, he could see the physical evidence for something he had intellectually been aware of and never digested into his emotions—a parallel to the feeling he had had the night he walked out into the city he thought of as home and discovered he could trigger a riot by his presence.
With only a hundred-odd scattered islands to contain them, Yatakang boasted a population of two hundred and thirty millions. At an average of over two million people per island that meant this was one of the most crowded areas on the face of the globe. And from here he could see the crowding.
Even the sides of Grandfather Loa himself were dotted with huts, and winding paths linked them and led down to the shore.
He thought of Chad Mulligan’s dictum about the pressure which made citizens of ancient Rome think that joining the eunuch priesthood of Cybele was an easy way out, and shuddered. Here was a modern counterpart: what pressure made people feel that scratching a living from the slopes of a live volcano was better than moving to a safe distance from its possible eruption?
A voice from behind said softly, “Mr. Hogan!”
He turned, to find the same official as before confronting him.
“Director Keteng will see you now,” the man told him.
* * *
Director Keteng was a portly man with a chill manner who sat behind a rampart of communications equipment, as if he had decided to frame himself in every possible attribute of his rôle as patron of the transmission of information. It seemed to Donald that Bronwen had been right; the Solukarta government, for all its policy of eliminating superstitious attitudes, had managed only to transfer their scope from inanimate idols to living—and fallible—human beings. This office was a shrine, effectively, dedicated to a god not of news but of what the people were allowed to hear.
At a curt gesture, Donald sat down facing Keteng.
“You speak Yatakangi?”
“A little.”
“It is not a popular language among American students. Why did you learn it?”
Donald repressed a desire to strangle this pompous fool in the cables of his own innumerable phones. He said in as mild a tone as he could muster, “I had the chance to learn a non-Indo-European language and chose Yatakangi because it was said to be very difficult.”
“You had no special interest in Yatakang?”
Ah.
Lying fluently, Donald answered, “My college training was in genetics, and the greatest living geneticist is one of your compatriots. That was one of the important reasons.”
But flattery was not something this man reacted to. He shrugged. “You have never come here before. Now you do come, you are not exactly—shall we say?—in a great hurry. As a specialist in genetics, it is doubtless news of our genetic optimisation programme which attracts you.”
“Yes, that’s so. The public interest which the announcement has created in my country surprised my employers, so it was quite a long time before they took the decision to send me here. But—”
“Your countrymen do not believe the truth of our claim,” Keteng said flatly. “Do you?”
Donald hesitated. “I hope that what you say can be done,” he said at last. “It’s been some years, though, since Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung published full details of his current work, so—”
“He had been engaged on secret research for the government,” Keteng said. “Research of that kind in your country is mostly of two types: first, it is done so that one corporation can make more profit than its rivals, and you have spies who make a living out of uncovering company secrets and selling them to competing firms; or, second, it is concerned with more efficient ways to kill people. In this country it has been concerned with more efficient ways to have people born and grow up as intelligent adults able to make important contributions to their native land. Have you any opinion on these contrasting attitudes?”
“As a geneticist I cannot help admiring the programme you’ve announced and Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung’s reputation is not the least significant warranty for its future success.”
Donald hoped that equivocal reply did not betray the fury which Keteng’s contemptuous tone had inspired in him.
“It is clear that you, like all Americans, do not approve of the existence of people who can do better than you at anything,” Keteng grunted. “However, since your people have finally deigned to pay attention to this major breakthrough, it behoves me to facilitate your conveyance of the facts to them. I shall give you now a card of authorisation entitling you to the rights legally accorded to foreign reporters, a letter for the surgeons at Dedication University so that you may have your sterilisation operation conducted without charge, and a schedule of the press conferences arranged for the coming week. Is there anything else you wish to inquire about before you leave?”