Stand on Zanzibar (64 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“And there’s one other thing you left out of your own calculations, Kitty.” Norman hesitated. “I guess it was owing to modesty, but there are times when modesty has drawbacks. Mr. President, may I address you a compliment which will probably sound fulsome but I assure you is quite sincere?”
“Elihu will tell you I’m as vain as the next man,” Obomi said, and chuckled.
“Well, it made me very sceptical when he told me about this country for the first time,” Norman said. “I didn’t see how a broken-down hole-in-corner place like Beninia could be as good as he claimed. I
still
don’t see how! All I know is this—here’s a place where there aren’t any murders, there aren’t any muckers, there aren’t any tempers lost, there aren’t any tribal squabbles, there aren’t any riots, there’s nothing of what people in supposedly more fortunate countries have come to take for granted. Yet your people are poor, sometimes hungry, pretty often sick, living in leaky huts and scratching up the ground with wooden ploughs hauled by scrawny oxen … Prophet’s beard, I can’t even hear myself say it without thinking it’s ridiculous! But what I wind up thinking is—is that I half-wish the slave-traders hadn’t steered clear of Beninia. Because I’d be rather proud to think my own African ancestors came from Shinka stock.”
There: it was out. Breathing heavily, Norman sought for a response among the people gathered at the table. Elihu was nodding like a benign Buddha, as though this was precisely what he’d expected, and the cabinet ministers were exchanging embarrassed grins. Of his own team, the only one he could see without twisting his head and staring was Derek Quimby, at the end of the line, and the little tubby linguist was apparently nodding violent agreement, not a reaction one would look for from a Caucasian in Beninia.
Obomi said finally, “Thank you, Norman. I appreciate that. It’s the way I’ve always felt about my compatriots, and it’s good to hear visitors agree with what I might otherwise mistake for parochialism. Well, are we decided, then?”
Everyone signified assent.
“Excellent. We shall present the project to Parliament for ratification as soon as possible, and then you’ll go right ahead with the loan and with your campaign to recruit the foreign advisors. That’s correct, Norman?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Norman said.
* * *
Going out of the room, Gideon Horsfall drew him aside with a conspiratorial air.
“Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “Beninia would digest you! And here you are—digested!”
Shalmaneser is a Micryogenic
®
computer bathed in liquid helium and there’s no sign of Teresa.
When Eric Ellerman tried to get at the Too Much cultivating section of the Hitrip plant, they asked some very awkward questions.
They gave Poppy Shelton clearance when they karyotyped the embryo and she celebrated with a party. Roger caught some bleeder trying to slip her a cap of Yaginol and knocked him arse over eyebrows.
Norman Niblock House is in virtually sole charge of the Beninia project.
Guinevere Steel is wondering how to reconcile that metallic name she adopted with the trend towards a more natural look that is going to dominate the fashion scene by fall.
Frank thinks Sheena has become quite unreasonable. After all, in a little while the baby will start to show and it’s simply not legal.
Arthur Golightly found something else he’d forgotten he owned.
Donald Hogan proved to be the right man for the job just as the Washington computers promised.
Stal Lucas has pretty well made up his mind about the shiggy Eric Ellerman was supposed to have had in Ellay. Her name was Helen and she was a blonde of five foot five.
Philip Peterson has just lost another girl-friend.
Sasha Peterson thought she was
quite
unsuitable.
Victor and Mary Whatmough had a row after the Harringhams’ cocktail party but they’re used to that.
Elihu Masters is delighted at having been able to do his old friend the right sort of favour.
Gerry Lindt’s first offence became the second. And the third. And …
Professor Dr. Sugaiguntung is afraid for his country.
Grace Rowley is dead.
The Right Honourable Zadkiel F. Obomi is under sentence of death from his doctors.
Olive Almeiro is in serious trouble with the Spanish authorities for advertising genuine Castilian ova for sale.
Chad C. Mulligan couldn’t give up being a sociologist after all, but since he hates the idea he’s mostly drunk these days.
Jogajong is encamped with a small group of loyal followers waiting for the current mood of wild enthusiasm in favour of the Solukarta régime to die away.
Pierre Clodard has mentioned the idea of divorcing his wife Rosalie, but so far only to his sister Jeannine.
Jeff Young sold that batch of GT aluminophage, and it did very satisfactory damage.
Henry Butcher is in jail.
There’s a new Begi story. Nobody knows where it got started. It’s called “Begi and the American”.
Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere have not yet been to Yatakang. If they go, all hell will break loose.
Occasionally Bennie Noakes says, “Christ! What an imagination I’ve got!”
Meanwhile, back at the planet Earth, it would no longer be possible to stand everyone on the island of Zanzibar without some of them being over ankles in the sea.
(POPULATION EXPLOSION Unique in human experience, an event which happened yesterday but which everyone swears won’t happen until tomorrow.
—
The Hipcrime Vocab
by Chad C. Mulligan)
THE CLIMAX OF MORE THAN A LIFETIME OF ACHIEVEMENT
It was not a good day for Georgette Tallon Buckfast. It had begun with her weekly checkup and the doctor had said she was over-exerting herself again. She told him he was a liar, and when he pointed to the mute evidence of her body—high levels of fatigue-products, excessive blood-pressure—she cursed it and him.
“I’m putting through a deal bigger than you could even think of!” she snapped. “Bigger than even I have handled before! All you have to do is keep me going!”
The body was becoming a burden. She would have liked to trade it in for a new model. But all the medical experts could do was add to it, supplement it, furnish it with props.
She could not accept that with the funds that sufficed to buy a whole country she could not buy health.
It’s not as though I’m being greedy. I’m not asking for youth and beauty.
Why should she? She had never been beautiful; gradually she had come to feel beauty would have been a handicap, put a brake on her ambitions. As for youth, they called her “Old GT” and she found it flattering. It put the creation whose initials she shared on the same footing as other “old” concepts—Old Faithful, Old Glory …
Now, today, with the culmination of her greatest ever gamble, it was right that there should be some ceremony, some formality. If only it didn’t have to be here, in this chilly computer shrine …
Alert, an attendant saw to it that she was more warmly insulated, and the irritation passed. Waiting for the exact, pre-set moment, her mind wandered.
I worried about Elihu’s recommendation, never thought too highly of young House, but in my time I’ve learned to recognise when a man digs in his heels. And we could have pulled him out if we’d had to. But instead he’s managed to sell the entire Beninian government and tomorrow I shall no longer be running just a corporation but a whole country I’ve never seen!
“Ready now, ma’am,” a soft voice advised her, and she stared at the enigmatic shape of Shalmaneser, which she had made possible and did not understand.
I wonder if God sometimes feels that way about His creatures.
She liked speech-making and show because she fed on tributes to herself, but the mood of the times was against it. She rationed it, warily, to people who might appreciate it: meetings of stockholders who liked to sense the majesty and solemnity of a multi-billion dollar enterprise. This was only a gathering of staffers, most of whom were scientists not connected to the big scene of real life. Down there, a man in white moving some switches, watched attentively by his colleagues and the assembled members of the board. Consultations. It all seemed to be taking an appallingly long time.
Surely one of those reports said something about Shalmaneser reacting in nanoseconds?
“What’s going on?” demanded Old GT.
Her secretary went to inquire, and spent another long time in whispered discussion, and eventually came back with a man who looked very worried indeed.
“I hate to have to tell you this, ma’am,” he informed Old GT. “But something appears to be slightly wrong somewhere. I imagine we’ll sort it out soon but it’ll require a bit of work.”
“What?”
“Well, ma’am…” The man’s face grew actively unhappy. “As you know, we’ve run scores of programmes through Shalmaneser in connection with this Beninia project, and he’s functioned perfectly in all of them. It just so happens that today—”
“Come to the point, you fool!”
“Yes, ma’am.” The man wiped his face with the back of his hand. “All those other programmes were run on a hypothetical basis, the entire group of assumptions being ‘given’ and derived from our own researches. What we’ve done now is to switch over the optimum programme, the one we’ve decided to put into practice, so that it enters Shalmaneser’s real-world consciousness and interacts with everything else he knows about the world.”
“And—?”
“He’s rejected it out of hand, ma’am. Says it’s absurd.”
Black fury flooded up from the bottom of Old GT’s mind, engulfing first her belly, where it made her guts seem to twist into knots and pull tight, then her lungs, which gasped air and strained to fill with gases suddenly turned to sluggish pitch, then her heart, which thundered and battered at her ribs as though it would break out of their cage, her throat and tongue which grew stiff, cracking like old dry paper folded and pressed, and at last her brain, which composed the thought:
“!!!!!”
* * *
“Get the doc!” someone said.
“Xx xxx xx,” said someone else.
“_____”
“.….”
“ ”
.
The phone went again. Cursing, Donald stumbled to the switch. At first there was only a loud background noise, as of many people hurrying to and fro. Suddenly a woman’s voice blared at him, charged with anger.
“Hogan? You there? This is Deirdre Kwa-Loop! Engrelay head office just called me. There was a bargain, remember? Four hours on a beat!”
Stunned, Donald stared at the phone as though he could look along the cable despite the lack of a screen and see the face of the person he was talking to.
“Nothing to say, huh? I’m not surprised! I should have known better than to trust one of you bleeders! Well, I’ve been around this scene a while. I’m going to fix it so you never get—”
“Fasten it!” Donald snapped.
“The hole I will! Listen to me, paleass—”
“Where were you while I was tangling with a mucker?” Donald roared. In the mirror adjacent to the phone he saw the light in Bronwen’s room go on, a peach-coloured glow.
“Whatinole has that got to do with it?”
“A hundred people saw that mucker nearly kill Sugaiguntung! What did you want me to do—count off four hours and call you by a critonium clock? The word must have been all around the press club within five minutes!”
Heavy breathing. At length, reluctantly: “Well, after about four poppa-momma things are usually quiet, and—”
“So what you did you went out on the town, hm?”
No answer.
“
I
see,” Donald said with heavy sarcasm. “You thought I’d hire a gang of messengers and tell them, ‘I made a promise to this woman who can’t cover her own stories—you have four hours to find out where she’s hiding herself!’ Know where I was four hours after it happened? Drugged into coma at the university clinic! Will you take
that
as an excuse?”
Silence.
“The hole with you, then—I’m going back to bed!”
He cut the circuit. Almost at once, the phone buzzed again.
“Sheeting hole! What is it?”
“Management, Mr. Hogan,” said a young man’s voice, very nervous. “Is very many persons wish talk with you. Is saying most urgent, sir.”
Donald changed to Yatakangi and spoke loudly enough for the sound at the other end to carry if it wasn’t directionalised.
“Tell them to go peddle their grandmother’s urine. If there is another call on this phone before nine o’clock I shall have you—you personally—wrapped in the hide of a gangrened cow and hung up for the buzzards, do you understand?”
One thing I never appreciated before I came here: Yatakangi is a very satisfying language to invent insults in.
He thought for a while. Eventually he gathered up his clothes, his communikit and anything else that looked as though it might come in handy in the morning, carried them through into Bronwen’s room, and bolted the door from the far side before rejoining her.
This time, however, he did not manage to go back to sleep. It was as though his mind had sent unpleasant information garnered from Delahanty’s earlier call and the events of the day down echo-delay circuits of varying lengths, and all the echoes had coincided at this point in time.
He only vaguely noticed what he had been half-expecting: footsteps in the corridor, a thunderous knocking on his own room’s door, chinking and scratching sounds as someone tried a pass-key. But he had remembered to put over the deadlock. The would-be intruder cursed and went away, probably regretting the bribe he had given the reception clerk for the room number.
That, though, was less important than the conflicting thoughts and images reverberating in the gong of his skull. Ten years of behaving like a sponge, doing no more than absorb second-hand information, had not equipped him for action of the kind now expected of him. Even the new version of himself produced by eptification could not cope with the demands on him.