Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (61 page)
He said, “What do you think of your government now, Professor?” His tone lent barbs to the words.
“I am afraid for my country if it remains in power,” Sugaiguntung whispered.
“What do you want? What would you most like?”
“What would I like?” Sugaiguntung blinked. “I should like—I should like to be free of this pressure. I am becoming set in my ways, I am fifty-four years old, but I have ideas I’ve not yet tried, I can teach younger people what I know and cannot write down … I should like to be what I trained to be, a scientist, instead of a political figure-head!”
“Do you see any chance of getting what you want so long as this government remains in power in Yatakang?”
There was a long silence. At last Sugaiguntung said, “I have hoped, and gone on hoping. Now … Now I have to pretend that there is still hope.”
“You must give me a letter of authority,” Donald said after some thought. “You must write that I can come to your private address for an interview—put down where I have to go. You can have what you want. I swear it, I will make sure that you can have what you want.”
“Hello, you out there, furious at the Eugenics Processing Board for denying you the right to parenthood! Wouldn’t be so bad if paternalism were out of fashion altogether, would it? But it’s inner than in. You put up with a hundred and one things that are forbidden ‘for your own good’, and if there’s anything you
are
allowed to do it’s probably for the good of the people who could forbid it and don’t.
“I’m lucky, since they tell me I have a couple of good healthy prodgies—matter of fact, they’ve both called me recently since they learned I hadn’t returned my phosphorus to the planetary pool. Their calls set me thinking about the chances I took when I started them on their merry way, and some of the facts I’ve dug up are kind of scary. I mean, without a computer analysis would you ordinarily do something that gave eight chances out of a hundred of saddling you for ten, fifteen years—maybe for life—with a greedy, demanding and stupid animal?
“Right. I’m talking about a subnormal child.
“Digging around, I came up with an estimate given to a reporter in Stockholm in 1959 by Professor Linus Pauling, the man who hung a name and identity on a disease called phenylketonuria. That’s the earliest place I’ve found the hard, cold figure of eight per cent, and I’m too lazy to look any further right now.
“Pauling said: approximately two of every hundred babies born in communities for which records existed suffered from some kind of congenital disorder, and the few studies which had at that time been continued to puberty suggested the eventual total might run as high as eight. This would include speech defects, alexia, colour-blindness and assorted other handicaps not detectible by inspection of a new-born infant.
“Not all these, naturally, were hereditary. Many were the result of intrauterine or natal trauma. The genotype of a spastic might be admirable.
“However, a barrel of dreck has been thrown down over the neat dividing line between hereditary, due to the genes, and congenital, due to accident. None of the experts, let alone members of the lay public, that I’ve talked to has been able to agree on the cause of the difficult cases without an expensive and time-consuming study of the parental germ-plasm.
“You see, traumata—which is Greek for ‘bruises’ but means outside interference in this case—include the consequence of excessive exposure to X-rays in the womb, infection of the mother with German measles, ingestion of a carcinogenic or mutagenic substance which gets to the gonads, hitripping on Yaginol while you’re pregnant—and that’s so addictive there are some mothers-to-be you could write on with a hot iron, ‘It’ll deform your baby!’ and they’d say get off my orbit, you’re crowding me down—and additionally the gradual deposition in body-tissue of long-life radioactives such as radio-strontium, radio-iodine, radio-caesium and radio-carbon …
et caetera.
“And these things have just about counteracted the advances in medical science which have eliminated the traditional causes of spasticism. You decide to have that kid, you’re still bucking an eight per cent risk that if he reaches puberty he’ll suffer from a congenital disorder.
“Mark you, some of them are pretty minor. For instance, pollen-allergy is hereditary, not congenital even, but modern antidotes make it possible for a child with pollen-asthma to lead a fairly normal life. Sounds like nothing, doesn’t it—these days?
“Except that before he dies that child will likely have spent seventy-five thousand bucks on antidotes!
“Now if you’ve been turned down by the Eugenic Processing Board, what’s happened is that they’ve assessed the risk of you having a handicapped child not at eight but at eighty per cent. You may disagree with them on the definition of a handicap—this recent row over dichromatism, for example. They have solid achievements to their credit, though. Fifty years ago Pauling said it would take twenty generations for all the recessives due to radioactive fallout to appear; now, they have tabs on enough of them to say they’ll be eliminated in fewer than twelve. That ought to cheer up your ten-times-great-grandchildren, if any!
“But I tell you this, having looked at you for a good many years with the maximum cynicism I could contrive. There’s nothing so good about
you
that it deserves to be physically perpetuated in the body of your own born child. You’re hiding behind that Eugenics Board decision to conceal the fact that you’re really evading the responsibility of looking after a person who’s eventually got to go and face the world alone. You don’t want to risk him coming back and saying it was your fault he didn’t emerge a winner in the game of life. I know some people, even, who are lying about their clean genotype, pretending to a hereditary handicap to excuse their childless state.
“Why can’t they be honest about it? I’m in favour of people who don’t breed, mostly. But not because I prefer dogmatic homosexuals, or because I favour religious fanatics like the Divine Daughters, who put on celibacy to mask their borderline hysteria. No! Only because a person who doesn’t insist on the expensive luxury of being a parent frees himself, or herself, to become a parent for one of the underprivileged children we already have.
“If you’ve been forbidden to start a prodgy, you
know
there are potential adoptees around who are superior to anything you could breed. Wouldn’t you like to raise a child to be brighter than you are, more successful, handsomer, sexier, healthier?
“No, you sheeting well wouldn’t. You’d prefer it to stay in a public orphanage where substandard nutrition will reduce its intelligence and lack of maternal affection will turn it into an unsuccessful neurotic.
“When a species becomes terrified of its own young, it appears to be scheduled for the grand disposall down which went the dinosaurs. Some of us, as I’ve just demonstrated, are afraid in case their prodgies will prove inferior to themselves, which is halfway rational, but some are afraid they’ll be the opposite, and that’s insane. Now you’re erecting an Asiatic scientist you’d never heard of before a couple of weeks back into a Messiah-figure. All right, suppose Sugaiguntung
can
do as they maintain and tailor a baby to specification? What are you going to ask for?
“Cleverer than you? But you don’t want to spend your old age feeling you’re a drag on your prodgies.
“Stupider than you? But you don’t want to waste the rest of your life looking after a fool.
“What you want is one which is guaranteed to behave itself until it’s old enough to run away from home, so that forever after you can complain about the ingratitude it displayed. But I doubt whether even Sugaiguntung can build that into an ovum with warranty of success.”
—
From an article which an over-eager journal commissioned Chad Mulligan to write when they realised he wasn’t after all dead
Linguistic evaluation suggests the earliest form of the name “Begi” is transliterable rather as “Mpengi” and in consequence it is generally rendered “winter-born”. The more close rendering would be “child of dry season”. December and January in northern Beninia (where he was supposedly born) are both least humid months of every year.
It has been suggested the name was originally “Kpegi” (i.e. “foreigner”) but this would not give rise to the “Mpengi” form mentioned above. In any case Shinka superstition has it that a child conceived at the breaking of the maximum summer rains (hence born in midwinter) is likely to be livelier than average. Attempts to show that Begi was in fact a solar myth originating in latitudes where seasons are marked enough to foster concepts of death and rebirth of the sun are tantalising, but fruitless in the absence of any other than oral evidence, though it is highly possible that prehistoric cross-cultural interaction provided some elements of the Begi myth which has descended to us. On the other hand …
1
BEGI AND HIS GREEDY SISTER
One day Begi was lying on the floor near a basket of fried chicken his mother had made for a festival. His sister thought Begi was asleep and took the largest chicken-leg and hid it under the roof.
When the family gathered to eat Begi refused what he was offered from the basket. He said, “There is a bigger bird roosting under the roof.”
“You’re silly,” said his mother, but his sister knew what he meant.
He climbed up and got the chicken-leg and ate it.
“You stole it and put it there,” his sister accused. “You wanted to have the biggest piece.”
“No,” Begi said. “I dreamed that wanting to have the biggest piece was the best way to get the smallest.”
And he gave her the gnawed bone.
2
BEGI AND THE FOREIGN MERCHANT
Once Begi went to the big market in Lalendi. There he saw a merchant from another tribe. The man was selling pots he claimed were made of gold, but Begi went behind him and took a knife and tried to cut the metal. It would not cut like soft gold although it was shiny and yellow.
So Begi picked up the biggest pot and pissed on the ground underneath and put it back.
Then he went around to the front and there were many people wanting to buy those gold pots which Begi knew were only made of brass.
Begi said, “That is a fine big pot there. I need a pot like that to piss in at night.”
And everybody laughed, thinking he was a fool to put that liquid in a pot fit to hold the chief’s finest palm-wine.
“Piss in it and show me if it leaks,” Begi said. The merchant laughed with everyone else and did so, saying what a shame it was to defile such a valuable pot with urine.
Begi lifted it up when the merchant had finished and the ground underneath was wet with piss. He said, “I will not buy a pot no matter how fine it looks if it leaks when you piss in it.”
So all the people beat the merchant and made him give their money back.
3
BEGI AND THE SEA-MONSTER
After he had left the house of the fat old woman, Begi walked along the trail through the forest whistling the tune he had learned from her and plucking the five wooden tongues of the
kethalazi
—what the British nicknamed the “pocket piano” when they came much later to Begi’s part of the world.
A little bird heard him and fluttered down to the side of the trail, eager to listen to this fine new tune but a little afraid because Begi was a man.
Seeing how timid the bird was, Begi stopped on the path and sat down. He said, “Do not be afraid, little cousin. Do you want to learn my song? I will teach it to you if you will teach me one of yours.”
“That’s a good bargain,” said the bird. “But I can’t help being afraid of you. You’re as much bigger than I am as the monster from the sea is bigger than man-people.”
“Certainly you’re smaller than I am,” Begi said. “But your voice is far sweeter than mine. I have heard you make the whole forest echo with your melody. By the bye, though,” he added, “what is this monster you just mentioned?”
The bird told him that at a village near the sea, a day’s walk distant, a huge monster had come out of the water and caught two children and eaten them, and everyone had run away to hide in the bush.
“I am bigger than you are,” Begi said. “But I can’t sing better than you. Perhaps the monster is bigger than I am. It remains to be seen if he can think better than I do. I shall go there and find out.”
The bird said, “If you are not afraid of the monster I will try not to be afraid of you.” He perched on Begi’s head and dug his toes into the woolly hair there.
So Begi walked all day carrying the bird and teaching him to sing the old woman’s song. After many hours’ journey he came to the village where everyone had run away from the monster.
“Little cousin!” he said. “What is that I see on the horizon, where the dark blue water meets the light blue sky?”
The bird flew out over the sea to find out. When he came back, he said, “There is a storm coming. There are clouds and lightning.”
“Very good,” said Begi, and went to look for the monster.
There he was lying in the market square, as much bigger than Begi as Begi was bigger than the little bird, and the bird had all he could do not to fly off in terror. But he clung to Begi’s hair with all his might.
The monster roared at Begi, “Hey there, weakling! You come at the right time! I have finished digesting the children I had for breakfast and I’ll have you for my supper!”
“I’m hungry too,” said Begi. “I haven’t eaten today.”
“There’s something to eat sitting on your head,” the monster exclaimed. “You’d better make the most of it before I gobble you up!”
Privately to the bird, Begi whispered, “There’s no need to be afraid. I would rather hear you sing than make a meal of you. But I don’t believe this monster cares about music.”
Addressing the monster more loudly, he went on, “No! I’m saving this bird for the time when I’m so weak I cannot go and hunt for food.”