Stand on Zanzibar (16 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“A private problem … Oh, why try and hide it? The shiggy I’ve been keeping around lately turned out this evening to be an industrial spy; my roomie discovered an eavesdropping gadget hidden in a polyorgan she brought with her.” Norman gave a harsh laugh. “Anything you want to know, just ask—I can always claim she was the one who got away with the secret.”
“I’d rather you told me openly if you tell me at all.”
“Yes, I shouldn’t have said that. Go ahead.”
“What do GT’s people think is my purpose in approaching them?”
“I don’t know. No one has told me.”
“Have you figured it out for yourself?”
“Not exactly. I was talking about it with my roomie earlier this evening. But we didn’t reach any definite conclusion.”
“Well, suppose I were to say my intention is to sell my dearest friend into slavery to The Man, and that I believe it’s for his own good—what then?”
Norman’s mouth rounded slowly into an O. He snapped his fingers. “President Obomi?” he said.
“You’re a very intelligent man, Mr. House. Well—your verdict?”
“But what have they got that GT might want?”
“It isn’t GT as such. It’s State.”
“Not willing to risk another Isola-type crisis?”
“You’re beginning to amaze me, and I’m not joking.”
Norman looked uncomfortable. “To be frank, it was one of the ideas my roomie and I were tossing around. If I hadn’t heard it from yourself, though, I’d never have credited it.”
“Why not? GT’s annual profit is almost fifty times the gross national product of Beninia; they could buy and sell many of the underdeveloped countries.”
“Yes, but even granting their ability to do it, which I can’t contest, the question remains: what is there in Beninia that GT might want?”
“A twenty-year rehabilitation project that will create an advanced industrial bridgehead in West Africa, serviced by the best port on the Bight of Benin, able to compete on their own terms and on their own
ground
with the Dahomalians and the RUNGs. State has a computer analysis which suggests that the intervention of a third force is the only factor likely to prevent a war over Beninia when my good friend Zad dies—and that day can’t be as far off as I’d like it to be. He’s working himself into his grave.”
“And this will belong to GT?”
“It’ll be—mortgaged to GT, let me put it that way.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“But if the alternative is war—?”
“From the inside, from the status of a junior VP in the corporation, I say that war itself isn’t as foul as what GT can do to a man’s self-respect. Listen!” Norman leaned forward earnestly. “Do you know what they’ve duped me into doing? I subscribe to these Genealogical Research outfits, these near-crank businesses which claim to trace your descent on the basis of your genotype. And do you know I haven’t commissioned
one
to track my Afram heritage? I don’t know where my black ancestors came from to within two thousand miles!”
“And supposing it’s a cousin of yours—and mine—who gives the order and the armies march into Beninia! What’s going to be left of the country? The loser is going to scorch the earth behind him when he retreats, and there will be nothing left except rubble and corpses!”
Norman’s intensity faded. He shrugged and nodded. “I guess you’re right. We’re all human beings, after all.”
“Let me tell you the scheme. GT will float a loan to finance the operation, and State will buy a fifty-one percent interest through front agents—mainly African banks. GT will guarantee five per cent per annum for the twenty-year period of the project, and publish estimates of a yield in excess of eight per cent. That’s solidly based, by the way, on State’s computations; when they give the data to Shalmaneser they expect it to be confirmed. Then they’ll recruit the teaching staff, mainly among people who were colonial administrators and so on in the old days, people who are used to West African conditions. The first three years will go on diet, sanitation and building. The next decade will go on training—a literacy drive first, then a technical education programme designed to make eighty per cent of the population of Beninia into skilled workers. I see you’re looking incredulous, but I say I believe this will work. There’s no other country in the world where you could bring it off, but in Beninia you can. And the last seven years will go to build the factories, install the machine-tools, string the powerlines, level the roads—everything else, in short, to leave Beninia as the most advanced country on the continent, South Africa not excepted.”
“Allah be merciful,” Norman said softly. “But where do you get the power to feed into the lines?”
“It’s going to be tidal, solar, and deep-sea thermal. Mainly the latter. The temperature gradient between the surface and the sea-bed at those latitudes could apparently run a whole country much larger than Beninia.”
Norman hesitated. “In that case,” he ventured at length, “the raw materials will presumably be coming from MAMP?”
A new cordiality entered Elihu’s manner. “As I said before, Mr. House, you suddenly astonish me. When we met earlier today your—ah—superficial image was so flawless as to conceal from me this sort of perceptivity. Yes, that’s going to be the carrot with which we coax the GT donkey into agreement: the promise of a built-in market that will enable them to put the MAMP mineral deposits to work.”
“On the basis of what you’ve told me,” Norman said, “I presume they jumped at the idea.”
“You’re the first person at GT to hear the full details.”
“The—? But why?” Norman’s question was almost a cry.
“I don’t know.” Elihu seemed suddenly weary. “I guess because I’d kept it to myself too long, and you were here when it broke loose. Shall I call Miss Buckfast and tell her I want you sent to Port Mey to conduct the initial negotiations?”
“I—wait a moment! What makes you so sure she’ll consent when you haven’t even explained the project to her?”
“I’ve met her,” Elihu said. “And I only need to meet someone once to know if this is the sort of person who’d like to own nine hundred thousand slaves.”
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice
Take stock, citizen bacillus,
Now that there are so many billions of you,
Bleeding through your opened veins
Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific,
Of that by which they may remember you.
Gravestones, citizen bacillus?
“Here lies in God the beloved husband
Of Mary, father of Jim and Jane”?
But they closed the cemetery at Fifth and Oak
And put up an apartment block on it.
Ideas, citizen bacillus?
They raised you literate and educated,
Equipped to exercise initiative.
But now our technological society
Insists you behave as a statistic.
Products, citizen bacillus?
It’s not by any means improbable
You possess advanced crafts and skills.
But there’s a tape in the chemical milling machine
Accurate to one molecular diameter.
A son, citizen bacillus?
Apply to the Eugenic Processing Board,
Give them a sample of your genotype.
But be prepared to hear it’s disallowed
And don’t complain in hearing of your neighbours.
No, no, citizen bacillus!
Here is your monument and it stands high!
The cars which you wore out, the clothes you tore,
The cans you emptied, furniture you broke,
And all the shit with which you clogged the drains.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice …
Until very recently Eric Ellerman had thought that this was the worst time of the day, the interval between waking and arriving at his job, spent steeling himself afresh each morning for the ordeal of facing his colleagues. But there seemed to be no “worst time” any longer.
It was purely and simply hell to be alive.
From the breakfast alcove where he was gulping his second cup of synthetic coffee—the three-child tax had taken away his chance of buying the real thing—he could see the morning sun glinting on miles of green-houses, rising from the far side of the valley, climbing up over the hill and vanishing into the next dip. Above them loomed a gigantic orange sign: FOR ME IT’S HITRIP OF CALIFORNIA EVERY TIME, SAYS “THE MAN WHO’S MARRIED TO MARY JANE”!
But how much longer can I live in sight of my work?
Through the flimsy wall separating him from the children’s room came the fractious squalling of the twins, neglected while Ariadne dressed Penelope ready for school. She was crying again too. How much longer before the hammering from the next apartment started? He cast a nervous glance at his watch and discovered that he had time to finish his drink.
“Arry! Can’t you quiet them?” he called.
“I’m doing my best!” came the fierce reply. “If you’d give me a hand with Penny that’d help!”
And, as though the words had been a signal, the banging from next door began.
Ariadne appeared, hair tousled, negligee hanging open to show the way her belly was sagging, shoving Penelope in front of her because the child was rubbing both tear-swollen eyes and refusing to look where she was going.
“All yours,” Ariadne snapped. “And I wish you joy of her!”
Abruptly Penny darted forward, throwing out her arms. One small hand struck the cup Eric was holding and the last of its contents shot across the windowsill and dribbled towards the floor.
“You little bleeder!” Eric exploded, and slapped her with his open palm.
“Eric, stop that!” Ariadne cried.
“Look what she’s done! It’s a miracle she didn’t soak my clothes with it!” Eric scrambled to his feet, dodging the dark-brown liquid as it trickled over the edge of the built-in folding table. “And shut up, you!” he added to his eldest daughter.
“You haven’t any right to call her dirty names!” Ariadne insisted.
“All right, I’m sorry—does that satisfy you?” Eric seized his lunch-bag. “But go and shut up those twins, will you? Before someone comes to the door to complain and sees you in that state! Don’t show yourself outside unless you’re wearing your new corset, for God’s sake. Maybe that’ll quiet some of the lying rumours that are going around.”
“I can’t do more than I’m doing already! I buy my pills at the block store making sure everyone can hear what I’m getting, I carry the Populimit Bulletin under my arm when I go out, I—”
“Yes, I know, I know! There’s no use telling me—try telling some of these sheeting neighbours of ours. But go and shut the twins up,
please!
”
Ill-temperedly, Ariadne went off to make the attempt, and Eric snatched at his eldest daughter’s hand. “Come along,” he muttered, heading for the front door.
They’re as good as telling me openly now that I ought to get a divorce. And maybe they’re right. I’m damned certain I should have gotten a raise for the work I put into developing the Too Much strain—heaven knows I need it
(
mustn’t say that, mustn’t, they’ll be convinced that it implies I really am what they think I am
)—
and maybe I would have but for what they assume about Arry …
He tugged the door open, thrust Penelope out into the corridor, and only then saw what was on the outside under the apartment number. Fixed to the panels with adhesive tape in the form of a rough cross, there was one of the crude plastic Mexican figures of the Virgin Mary which could be had for a dollar in local novelty stores, with a contraceptive pill jammed into its half-open mouth.
Underneath someone had chalked in hasty letters: “What’s good enough for her should be good enough for you!”
“A dolly!” Penelope exclaimed, forgetting her determination to go on crying until she was exhausted. “Can I have it?”
“No you can’t!” Eric roared. He ripped it down and stamped on it until it was a heap of coloured fragments, then scuffed at the chalked letters with the back of his hand to make them illegible. Penelope began howling all over again.
From the end of the corridor came a loud shrill snigger in the voice of a boy about ten or twelve. Eric whirled, but caught sight only of a foot and leg vanishing.
The Gadsden boy again. The little bleeder!
But it was no use making accusations. Smug in the knowledge he would never have more than his one child, clever enough at petty politics to have been elected blockfather thrice running, Dennis Gadsden would scarcely need even to deny the charge against his son.
Could I help it if our second cub turned out to be twins? Did I plan for all three of the bleeders to be girls? Sex-determination is expensive! It’s not illegal anyhow—we have clean genotypes, no diabetes, no haemophilia, nothing!
Not against the law, granted. But a drecky lot of difference that made. There wouldn’t have been—couldn’t have been—any eugenic legislation at all unless public opinion had already come around to the attitude that having three or more children was unfair to other people. In a country of four hundred million inhabitants raised on a dream of wide-open spaces where a man could do as he liked, it was logical enough.
We can’t live here much longer.
But—where else? They teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, thanks to the state tax on families larger than two children. Anywhere else in California the cost of travelling a longer distance to work would be prohibitive—and they’d have to move a good long way before they escaped the legacy of their reputation, even if they were to let one of the twins go for adoption. And although they’d avoid the tax by going over the border into Nevada, precisely because that maverick state had declined to impose child taxes and more than the minimum of eugenic legislation the cost of a home there was double or treble what it was in California.
Although—do I want to keep on at this job?
By a miracle, the elevator to the ground floor was empty apart from him and Penelope. He thought about the idea of quitting his job during the brief descent, and came to the same conclusion as always: unless he moved a long way off, divorced Arry—excessive fertility had been allowed as grounds in a Nevada court, though not yet in California or the other states of the union—and stripped himself of all associations with his family, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting another post comparable to his present one.
