Stand on Zanzibar (15 page)

“Of course, prostitutes are becoming harder and harder to find these days. When I was a young man, there were some among my fellows who—ah—resorted to such persons, and I thought they were to be pitied, because clearly they had not come to terms with the built-in, as it were, faculty for expressing affection which is implied in the act which has not only the perpetuation of our species as its goal but also the giving of delight by one person to another or others.

“(
?
)

“When I say ‘others’, of course, I have in mind the regrettable fact that we human beings are far short of perfect and in a sense the full achievement of this heaven-sent faculty for pleasing one’s life’s partner is, like other human activities, one requiring testing and practice before the ultimate skill is achieved, and thus and therefore we find people who marry and genuinely regret that they chose this particular partner to whom in the upshot they are not after all suited and from whom with regret we part them regretfully because …

“Well, anyway. (
Never realised before how heavy and sweaty these idiotic robes can become!
)

“Lots of people don’t get this point, as you very well know. I mean, ever since the great schism of the late twentieth century, we’ve been treated to the nauseating spectacle of some head-in-the-sand bigots over there in Madrid bombarding what are supposed to be their fellow Catholics with a succession of bulls and encyclicals and what-not just because the Church of Rome cottoned on to the basic truth that there’s more to making love than manufacturing a series of babies who can be splashed with a bit of holy water and sent off to heaven to keep the hallelujahs flying and recognised the need for the contraceptive pill. But here’s this Pope Eglantine going on about how you mustn’t interfere with divine ordinances and give your other kids a chance to grow up in comfort so they can become rounded adult human beings, oh no, you must never ever enjoy yourself with anybody else except to procreate as though there weren’t enough of us around treading on each other’s heels and getting in the way all the time and taking away the bread from our mouths practically because they’re so greedy and selfish and Christ it’s enough to make you want to turn Muslim, really it is, because they’re promised a string of perpetually virgin houris when they die and what else is the contraceptive pill except a here-and-now counterpart of that no mucking about when your wife gets her belly full and night after night lying alone and unable to sleep for the pressure and you know literally it gets to be an
ache
after a while and all those sheeting idiots like Augustine who had his fun when he was a kid with the women of the streets and then turned around and forbade it for everyone else I think he had the pox and it got into his spinal fluid and brought on GPI and if it weren’t for the fact that he’s probably impotent anyone would think the same thing had happened to Pope Eglantine and his gang of Right Catholics. Why don’t I shut up and stop stuffing your ears with nonsense when you ought to be stuffing some other organ entirely?”

Consequence:
the congregation was extremely disturbed.

continuity (6)

AUCTION BLOCK FOR ME

“Mr. House.” The tone absolutely neutral. “We met earlier today. Sit down, won’t you? It’ll have to be on the bed, I’m afraid—or perhaps you’d rather we adjourned to one of the public lounges downstairs?”

“No, this is fine,” Norman said distractedly, lowering himself on the very edge of the narrow bed. His eyes roamed randomly from point to point in the small room.

“May I offer you some refreshment? I recall that you don’t take alcohol, but perhaps coffee, or—”

“No thanks. I’ll smoke, though, if you don’t mind.”

“Ah, Bay Golds! That’s the brand I used to favour—no, I won’t, thank you. I gave it up. I was using it as a refuge from clear-headedness, and once or twice I nearly visited disaster on myself in consequence.”

Skirmishing. Abruptly Norman found the words to speak his mind. With the reefer in his hand still unlit, he said, “Look, Mr. Masters, let me say what I’ve come to say and then get out and stop bothering you. Mainly, it’s that I know I didn’t make a very good impression on you at lunchtime.”

Elihu leaned back in his chair, crossed his right leg over his left, put the tips of his fingers together, and waited.

“I’m not talking about the kind of impression Old GT and the rest of the high muckamucks brought me in to make on you. That has nothing to do with me as a person—it’s all the corporation image bit, here’s an enlightened employer with coloured VPs, and it’s stale news. The big companies have been doing it for fifty or sixty years and all it’s done is assuage a part of their guilt. What I’m apologising for is the impression
I
set out to make.”

He looked at Elihu squarely for the first time. “Tell me honestly: what did you think of me?”

“Think of you?” Elihu echoed, and gave a sad chuckle. “I didn’t get the chance to form an opinion of you. I’ll tell you what I thought of the way you were coming on, if you like.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“You were demonstrating to the distinguished visitor that you could be an even bigger bleeder than GT’s chief executives.”

There was a pause. Eventually Elihu dropped his hands to his lap. “Well, I’ve answered your question, and by your silence you haven’t had much benefit from it. Now answer one of mine. What happened to you when you were called down to the disturbance in Shalmaneser’s vault?”

Norman swallowed gigantically, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Nothing of much importance,” he muttered.

“I don’t believe you. When you came back you were on your automatic pilot; there wasn’t a spark of genuine personality in anything you did or said throughout the meal, just a set of conditioned reflexes operating well enough to fool anyone except maybe a psychologist—or a diplomat. I’ve learned to tell the difference, just by walking into a room, between an honest negotiator and a delegate instructed merely to parrot his government’s official standpoint. You may be able to lie to the WASPs you work for, but I’ve grown old in the study of human deceit, and I
know.
”

He leaned forward and took Norman’s left hand in his. He probed between the tendons with the tips of his fingers. For a moment Norman was too astonished to react; then he snatched himself loose as though he had been stung.

“How did you guess?” he said.

“I didn’t. An old man—I suppose you’d call him a witchdoctor—taught me muscle-reading in the back streets of Port-au-Prince while I was ambassador to Haiti. I thought for a moment you must have suffered some sort of major injury to that hand, but I can’t feel the effects of one. Whose hand was it, then?”

“My three times great-grandfather.”

“Back in slavery days?”

“Yes.”

“Cut off?”

“Sawn off. Because he hit his boss and knocked him into a creek.”

Elihu nodded. “You must have been very young when you heard about it,” he suggested.

“Six, I think.”

“A bad thing to tell a child that age.”

“How can you say that? It was the kind of important thing kids my age needed to be told! Six wasn’t too young for me to have learned that the kid I liked most on our block, the one I thought of as my best friend, was ready at a minute’s notice to join with other kids I didn’t like and call me a dirty nigger bastard.”

“Have you noticed you don’t hear that used so much any longer—that particular insult? Probably you wouldn’t have. I notice the shifts in usage because I spend years at a time out of the country, and the process has gone quite a long way whenever I return. Nowadays where you used to say ‘bastard’ you tend to say ‘bleeder’ instead—to mean ‘haemophiliac’, I assume.”

“What?” Confused, Norman shook his head.

“If the point isn’t clear, I’ll deal with it in a moment. How did this story about your ancestor affect you?”

“I used to get pains in this arm.” Norman held it out. “They called it rheumatism. It wasn’t. It was psychosomatic. I used to dream of being held down and having it sawn through. I’d wake up screaming and mother would yell at me from the next room to shut up and let her get her sleep.”

“Didn’t you tell her you were having nightmares?”

Norman looked at the floor between his feet. He shook his head. “I guess I was afraid she might scold my great-grandfather and forbid him to talk to me about it.”

“Why did you want him to? Never mind—you don’t have to spell it out. What happened today that connected with this traumatic at age six?”

“A Divine Daughter tried to wreck Shalmaneser with an axe. Chopped the hand off one of our technicians.”

“I see. Can they put it back?”

“Oh yes. But the surgeons said he might lose some of the motor functions.”

“And you walked in on this, from cold?”

“Prophet’s beard—
cold!
I didn’t know it was more than one of their sheeting demonstrations, slogan-shouting and waving banners around!”

“Why hadn’t your company police taken care of it before you arrived?”

“Worse than useless. Said they didn’t dare fire from the gallery for fear of hitting Shalmaneser, and by the time they made it to floor level I’d fixed her.”

“So you did fix her. How?”

Norman closed his eyes and palmed them. His voice barely audible between his hands, he said, “I saw a liquid helium leak once, from a pressurised hose. That gave me the idea. I got one of the pipes and—and I sprayed her arm. Froze it solid.
Crystallised
it. The weight of her axe snapped it off.”

“They can’t put her hand back then, presumably.”

“Prophet’s beard, no. It must have spoiled instantly—like a frosted apple!”

“Are you facing serious consequences from this? Are you going to be arraigned for maiming her, for example?”

“Of course not.” The words were half-contemptuous. “GT looks after its own, and in view of what she was trying to do to Shalmaneser … We’ve always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that.”

“Well, if it’s not the consequences it must be the act itself. How has it made you feel about yourself?”

Norman let his hands fall. He said bitterly, “You missed your vocation, didn’t you? You should have been a shrinker.”

“My neuroses aren’t the kind you can project on to other neurotics. I asked you something, and unless I’m much mistaken it’s what you came here to talk about, so why not get it over with?”

The forgotten reefer went waveringly to Norman’s lips. He got it lit, drew in and held the first puff. After half a minute, he said, “How I feel about myself? I feel I’ve been conned. I feel ashamed. I finally evened the score. I got a trophy—I got a paleass’s hand. And how did I get where I could take that off? By following the rules for living that The Man laid down. And they’re no good! Because what use is that hand to my long-ago ancestor? He’s
dead!
”

He drew on the reefer again and this time held the smoke for a full minute.

“Yes, I think he probably is,” Elihu agreed after a few moments’ reflection. “As of today. Think he needs to be mourned?”

Norman gave a quick headshake.

“Right.” Elihu resumed his original position, elbows on chair-arms, fingertips together. “A short while ago I remarked on something that apparently struck you as irrelevant—the fact that you don’t hear people calling each other ‘bastard’ so much any more. It’s important. To be born out of wedlock doesn’t signify, any more than it did in slavery days when our forefathers and mothers didn’t marry—they simply bred. What you do hear used as an insult is a word that probably means ‘haemophiliac’. It matches the preoccupations of our society; it’s become detestable, anti-social, to have children if you’re carrying a harmful gene like that one. Are you on my orbit now?”

“Things change,” Norman said.

“Exactly. You aren’t six years old any longer. A boss can’t do to his subordinates what a long-ago white man did to your three times great-grandfather. But is the world a paradise because of those truisms?”

“Paradise?”

“Of course not. Aren’t there enough problems to handle in present time, that you should brood over ancient ones?”

“Yes, but—” Norman made a helpless gesture. “You don’t know what sort of a dead end I’ve been lured down! I’ve been working on the current version of myself for years, for decades! What am I to do?”

“That’s for you to work out.”

“It’s easy enough to say ‘work out’ the answer! You’ve been away from this country for years at a time, you said so yourself. You don’t know what The Man is like, even nowadays—you don’t know how he leans on you all the time, needles you, goads you. You just haven’t experienced
my
life.”

“I guess that’s a fair comment.”

“For example…” Norman gazed without seeing at the wall behind Elihu’s head. “Heard of a woman called Guinevere Steel?”

“I gather she’s responsible for the mechanical styles women are affecting here at the moment, as though they were built in a factory and not born of a mother.”

“Right. She’s planning to hold a party. It’ll be a microcosm of what I mean, all there in the one apartment and dripping slime. I should drag you along with me, and then perhaps you’d—”

He stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly appalled at what he was saying and who he was saying it to.

“Mr. Masters, I’m dreadfully sorry! I have no business to talk to you this way!” Rising to his feet, covered in embarrassment. “I ought to be thanking you very sincerely for your tolerance, and here I am insulting you and…”

“Sit down,” Elihu said.

“What?”

“I said sit down. I haven’t finished, even if you have. Do you feel you owe me anything?”

“Of course. If I hadn’t been able to talk to somebody tonight, I think I’d have gone insane.”

“How well you express my feelings,” Elihu said with ponderous irony. “May I take it that right now you aren’t excessively concerned with GT’s company secrets remaining inviolate?”

“I know too damned well that they aren’t.”

“I’m sorry?” Elihu blinked.