Stand on Zanzibar (11 page)
Authors: John Brunner
But a company is no substitute for kinship.
Like to ask why he dislikes Guinevere so much. I can take her or leave her and she always has useful people to her parties, so I don’t give a pint of whaledreck. Footnote: I must try to discover when that phrase leaked into common parlance; it was the sludge left when you’d rendered blubber down for oil, if I remember right. Maybe it was public guilt when they found it was too late to save the whales. The last one was seen—when? ’Eighty-nine, I think.
* * *
I envy Donald the element of detachment in his makeup. I’d never dare tell him, though. Could be it’s only what mine is: a mask. But Guinevere is such a … and he hardly notices. What annoys him about her proposed party is like he said, the anachronism of treating the twentieth century as a lump. And it wasn’t. Who should know better than one of us?
I’m behind the times. Prophet’s beard, I’m practically obsolete. So I’m a VP for the world’s richest corporation—have I succeeded in terms personal to myself? I’ve just chopped my way through the soft rotten feelings of ancestral guilt these WASPs suffer from till I’ve reached my nice cosy comfortable den. And here I am.
How long till sunset prayer this evening, by the way?
* * *
But the Guineveres of our world are no more than the spray on the top of the wave. It forms spectacular transitory patterns, but the ground-swell is what alters the coastlines. I can feel currents of it from where I’m sitting.
Imagine a VP of a big corporation sharing an apartment, forty years ago, with an alleged independently wealthy dilettante. They’d never have promoted him to the job in the first place. They’d have looked around for some type with a presentable wife, wouldn’t have cared that the couple ate each other’s hearts out in private and shipped their kids off to boarding-school and summer camp and any other place they could to get them out of the way. Nowadays they wouldn’t give a pint of whaledreck even if we were sleeping together. It doesn’t breed, and that’s good. Everybody boasting about their children, complaining about not being allowed children—but they couldn’t have pushed the eugenics laws through if people hadn’t secretly felt relieved. We’re at the precipice where even our own children add intolerably to the task of coping with our fellow human beings. We feel much more guilty these days about resenting other people’s children than we do about the existence of people whose impulses don’t involve propagating the species.
Come to think of it, there’s a psychological as well as a physical sense in which we reproduce our kind. And we’ve tended to push the physical one further and further back in our lives. A lot of us have given it up altogether. We owe our intelligence—what there is of it—to having stretched the cub-period, the dominance of the
Lustprinzip
, beyond all reasonable bounds. Wonder if this is another way of stretching it still further. That would account for the development of the shiggy circuit, the fact that the world’s big cities are alive with women who’ve never had a permanent home, but live out of a bag and sleep a night, a week, half a year wherever there’s a man with an apartment to share. I must see if Mergendahler has published anything about this—it sounds like his field. I wish to God Mulligan hadn’t quit; we need him to tell us where we are, we need his insight like we need food!
* * *
No, it’s not Donald I should show the door to. It’s Victoria. He’s told me a score of times about my preoccupation with paleass shiggies, and I never listened, but he’s right. Prophet’s beard, all this talk about emancipation! Just one of the shiggies who’ve been in and out of this apartment like doses of aperient was stunningly beautiful and solid-ground sensible and marvellous in bed
and
a whole, rounded, balanced sort of person. And that was Gennice, that Donald brought home, not me, and I was unappreciative because she was a brown-nose. I must be off my gyros. I must be busted clear out of my nappy old plantation-bred skull!
Emancipated! Allah be just to me, I’m a worse prisoner of historical circumstance than the oldest Red Guard in Peking!
* * *
I wonder if we’ve been around each other long enough for him to think of me as Donald-a-person instead of Donald-a-WASP. I wonder if his impression of me is accurate. For the sake of absolute security I guess I should take him up on the threat he made, and move away. Being exposed for such a long time so intimately to one person is what the Colonel would call erosive. Funny how that one word he used has stuck in my mind so long … Still, no doubt they keep their eyes on me. They’ll tell me if they think I’m endangering my cover.
If I were to come straight out and tell Norman: “I’m not a lazy slob parasitising off inherited wealth and making like a poor man’s cousin to a synthesist because I haven’t any creative talent—I’m a spy…!”
I’d be stupid.
Wonder if I’m going to get nightmares again, like in the a plane tomorrow to God knows where. Oh, surely they’re early days, dreaming of a call in the middle of the night and not likely to pull me out of cold storage now? It’s been ten years, and I’m adapted, and even if I sometimes get depressed I like things as they are. I’d prefer not to have to adjust to someone else as I’ve done to Norman. I used to imagine I could manage without friends so intimate it would be cruel to keep up the lie where they were concerned. I don’t think I can. But at least in Norman’s case I can excuse not telling him the truth on the grounds that it’s too late; we’ve shared too much already. If I had to get this close to someone else I don’t think I could maintain my pretence.
Lord, I hope the forecast of their needs was wrong when they sent Jean Foden and enlisted me!
It’s all breaking loose at once. Someone’s stirred my mind with a stick. Anybody would think I’d been ingesting Skulbustium instead of just my regular brand of pot. I have to hitch on to something fast, or I’ll break to bits.
I’ve never really talked, like you’d say
talked
, to that codder in the other chair. I wonder if I can. Because if I can, that’ll mean something did happen to me today, it wasn’t just a momentary shock.
But I can’t approach it cold. Work up to it by a roundabout route.
* * *
The quickest way to find out what he thinks about me, of course, might perhaps be to ask him…?
* * *
“Donald—”
“Norman—”
They both laughed a trifle uneasily.
“What were you going to say?”
“No, no—you go ahead.”
“All right, I will. Donald, what can you tell me to refresh my memory about Beninia??”
“Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy. (I say ‘we,’ but if you’re a bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm’s length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.)
“We still haven’t digested the truth that evolution applies to mental functions, too—that because a dog is a dog, a dolphin a dolphin, it has an awareness and sense of personal identity distinct from ours but not necessarily inferior. Is an apple inferior to an orange?
“But I’m trying to tell you what’s happening to you, not what’s happening to Crêpe Suzette your neurotic poodle. A good veterinary psychologist can probably be located by calling Information. You wouldn’t believe him if he started telling you how much you have in common with that pet of yours, and likely you won’t believe me. But if I annoy you sufficiently you may at least try to think up arguments to demonstrate how wrong I am.
“Basically, then: you have two things in common. You’re a pack-animal; so is a dog. You’re a territorial animal; so is a dog. (The fact that we mark our manors with walls instead of urine is irrelevant.)
“The depiction of Man the Noble Savage standing off the wolves at the cave entrance, all by himself with a club, while his mate and their young cower in the background, is so much whaledreck. When we were at the stage of taking refuge in caves our habit was almost certainly to congregate in troupes the way baboons still do, and when the dog-baboons move in everyone else—note that
everyone!
—moves out. I mean like lions will shift the scene, and a lion is not what you’d call a defenceless creature.
“Lions are rather solitary, tending to work by couples over a manor which affords them adequate game for subsistence. Or not, depending on outside pressure from other members of the species. (Try owning a whole tomcat and you’ll see the process in miniature.) Pack-animals have the evolutionary edge—in combination they’re deadly. Lions learn this as cubs and then ignore the practice, which is why baboons can cave them in.
“NB: I said ‘everyone’, not ‘everything’. You wouldn’t recognise your ancestors as people, but they were, and you still are. Those ancestors were arrogant bastards—how else did they become boss species on our ball of mud? You’ve inherited from them just about everything that makes you human, apart from a few late glosses such as language. You got territoriality along with the rest. If somebody trespasses on it you’re liable to turn killer—although if you don’t like the idea you can kill yourself, which is among our few claims to uniqueness.
“Territoriality works this way. Take some fast-breeding animals like rats—or even rabbits, though they’re herbivorous rodents, not carnivores as we are—and let them multiply in an enclosure, making sure at all stages they have enough food and water. Early on you’ll see them behaving in the traditional rat fashion when conflicts arise: the quarrellers will square up to one another, feint, jab, charge and withdraw, the victory going to the more efficient braggart. Also the mothers will take good care, rat-style, of their young.
“When the pen becomes crowded past a certain point, the fights won’t be symbolic any more. There’ll be corpses. And the mothers will start to eat their young.
“It’s even more spectacular in the case of solitary creatures. Put a female ripe for mating into too small a cage that’s already occupied by a healthy male, and he’ll drive her out rather than give way to the reproductive urge. He may even kill her.
“Very baldly, then: shortage of territory, of space to move around and call your own, leads to attacks on members of your own species in defiance even of the normal group-solidarity displayed by pack-animals. Lost your temper with anyone lately?
“However, being a member of a species that’s nothing if not ingenious, you’ve figured out two directions in which you can abstract your territoriality: one is to privacy, the other is to property.
“Of the two, the former is more animal and more reliable. Your base need is to have a manor defined against a peer group, but you don’t have to do as dogs, tomcats and sundry other species do—mark it out with a physical trace, then patrol it constantly to scare away intruders. You can abstract to a small enclosed area where no one else trespasses without your permission, and on this basis you can operate fairly rationally. One of the first concomitants of affluence is a rapid raising of privacy-standards: someone from a comparatively low-income background has to accept that his childhood will be lived in a crowded, busy environment—in contemporary household terms, one room of the dwelling (if it has more than one) will be a family-room and that’s the centre of operations. Someone from a more prosperous home, however, will take it for granted from about the time he learns to read that there’s a room where he can go in and shut the door against the world.
“This is why (a) men from wealthy backgrounds make better companions under privative conditions such as a Moon voyage—they don’t feel that their human environment is a permanent infringement of their right to a manor, no matter how thoroughly it’s been abstracted from the original referent of a piece of terrain (b) the standard route out of the slum or ghetto is crime—equals getting your own back on other members of your species who trespass continually on your manor; (c) gangs develop primarily in two contexts—first, in the slum or ghetto where privacy as a counterpart of the manor can’t be had and a reversion takes place to the wild state, with pack-hunting and the patrolling of an actual physical patch of ground; and second, in the armed services, where the gang is dignified by being called a ‘regiment’ or some other hifalutin dirty word but where the reversion to the wild state is deliberately fostered by deprivation of privacy (barracks accommodation) and deprivation of property (you don’t wear the clothes you chose and bought, you wear a uniform which belongs to US!!!). Fighting in an army is a psychotic condition encouraged by a rule-of-thumb psychological technique discovered independently by every son-of-a-bitch conqueror who ever brought a backward people out of a comfortable, civilised state of nonentity (Chaka Zulu, Attila, Bismarck, etc.) and started them slaughtering their neighbours. I don’t approve of people who encourage psychoses in their fellow human beings. You probably do. Cure yourself of the habit.
“We are breeding so fast that we cannot provide adequate privacy for our population. That might not be fatal—after all, it wasn’t until as a species we discovered affluence that the demand for it became overwhelming. But we’re undermining the alternative form of abstraction of territoriality, and deprived of both we’re going to wind up psychotic in the same way as a good soldier.
“The point of abstracting to property is that the manor forms an externalised aid to self-identification. Put a man in a sensory deprivation tank, he comes out screaming or shaking or … We need continual environmental reassurance that we are who we think we are. In the wild state, the manor provides such a reassurance. In the state we’ve been describing a few paragraphs back, the ability to shut ourselves away from the continually fluctuating pressure of our peers enables an intermittent reassessment of our identity. We can lean on a group of objects—a clever surrogate for a patch of ground—but only if they have (a) strong personal connotations and (b) continuity. The contemporary environment denies us both. The objects we possess weren’t made by ourselves (unless we’re fortunate enough to display strong creative talents) but by an automated factory, and furthermore and infinitely worse we’re under pressure every week to replace them, change them, introduce fluidity into precisely that area of our lives where we most need stability. If you’re rich enough you go and buy antiques and you like them as a pipeline into the past, not because you’re a connoisseur.
