Stand on Zanzibar (27 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“I hope I’m not seeming too inquisitive,” Donald ventured. “But—well, over the past ten years the whole thing has become more and more unreal to me, until just lately I’ve had trouble convincing myself that activation was still a possibility.”
“That’s an honest comment,” Delahanty approved. “I keep telling Washington myself that they should risk breaches of cover and make random activations to keep operatives alert, even if it’s no more than giving them token assignments during their official vacations. More coffee?”
“I haven’t finished my first cup yet, thanks.”
“Mind if I do? Anyone else…? Right! Let’s get to the nub of it, shall we?” Delahanty leaned back and crossed his legs. “Boat camp, Ellay, six poppa-momma tomorrow. We have travel documents for you, free passage warrant and so forth—Sergeant French will give them to you in a minute. Between now and then, what have you by way of appointments?”
“Tomorrow?”
“I know—the suspense will make it difficult. But that’s the way the planet spins, I’m afraid. Appointments?”
Donald put one hand to his forehead. “I guess nothing—Oh. A party tonight. Guinevere Steel’s.”
“Go to it by all means, but don’t let anyone slip you anything, of course. Did you hear about the case the other day when someone smeared the stuff they call ‘Truth or Consequences’ on the pulpit rail of a cathedral and a respected bishop said some highly unclerical things to his congregation?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The regular news channels didn’t carry it—caved in by pressure-groups, I imagine. But it happened, and by all accounts it must have been spectacular. Don’t let it happen to you, that’s all. The rest of your instructions are in the packet French will give you. You’ll receive a call in the morning notifying you of some financial trouble in a company you’re supposed to have a lot of stock in, and that’ll be the reason for your departure; the reason for your staying away will be a rather charming shiggy whom I regret to say you aren’t actually scheduled to enjoy, but who’ll serve as a highly convincing alibi to anyone flying a reasonably straight orbit.”
Sergeant Awden grinned to himself.
“You mean I’m going to be away a long time?” Donald demanded.
“I don’t know.” Delahanty swallowed the last of his coffee and rose. “However, that’s the programme and I didn’t draft it. There’s a full computer evaluation in Washington, presumably.”
“Can’t you at least tell me”—the half-forgotten phrase rose to his lips like a bubble from decaying weed on the bottom of a stagnant pool—“whether it’s a field job?”
“Oh yes!” Delahanty seemed surprised. “I thought that was implicit in your linguistic speciality. Yatakangi, I believe.”
“They’re going to
send
me to Yatakang?” Donald was on his feet without realising, hands clenched to stop them shaking. “But that’s absurd! I mean, all I did was take a high-pressure lang-lab course the best part of ten years ago, and—”
“Lieutenant,”
Delahanty said with dangerous emphasis, “you don’t have to worry about your ability to do the job. You’ll be made able to do it.”
“I—what?”
“Made able. You’ve run across commercial advertisements for a process called eptification, I imagine?”
“Y-yes.”
“And thought it was another misleading come-on?”
“I guess so. What’s that got to do with—?”
“
We
eptify people. And it works. If there’s nobody available who’s equipped for a particular job, we make someone over until he is equipped. Don’t worry; you’ll manage—assuming the job to be done is humanly feasible. Reflect on that and relax. But I guess you should go suck a trank as well.”
Delahanty gestured to his sparewheels. French handed a sealed official packet to Donald, who accepted it in numb fingers, and they all muttered a good morning as they filed out, leaving him feeling small and scared and regretting that he hadn’t managed to die.
After a while, he was sufficiently recovered to consider arranging for someone at the party to slip him some of the drug Delahanty had warned him against.
IF YOU CAN’T BEAT THEM BEAUT THEM
BEAUTIQUE said letters suspended in empty air, and underneath ever so discreetly the name of Guinevere Steel. Beyond the lettering, indicative of the lavish personal attention one might be sure of getting, a blonde, a brunette and a redhead waiting with expectant expressions for
you
, madame, each one an immaculate product of the Beautique’s art, finished to molecular tolerances, gleaming, shimmering, polished not like diamonds but like the parts that went into Shalmaneser where nothing could be allowed to go wrong. Their clothing concealed only those sections of their bodies where the raw material the cosmeticians had had to work with left something to be desired.
Also in plain sight was a sleek young man garbed in the traditional style of an artist from the
Quartier Latin
about 1890—floppy beret over his left ear, smock with a huge bright bow at the neck, and tapered check trousers ending in high-sided boots. In deference to the original image he was affecting there were three or four stripes of random colour on the hem of the smock supposed to represent smears of paint, but they were entirely symbolic. He was as sterile and designed as the girls beside him.
One could see no further into the premises from the street than the partition against which the girls were ranged, a changeochrome surface flowing with impermanent colours weighted to favour the girls’ costumes.
He marched in, wondering with casual amusement how long it would take those eager, alert, welcoming expressions to dissolve.
* * *
Guinevere sensed that something was wrong before anyone had a chance to tell her. There was normally a particular kind of quiet buzz from the body of the shop, a variable but never-ceasing susurrus accompanying the gentle relaxing music that oozed on to the air from dozens of hidden speakers. A false note entered it, and she looked up, head cocked on one side, from the list of final preparations she was making against tonight’s party.
Half-convinced she had been misled, she activated the internal scanners and looked over the main salon. Screened by floor-to-ceiling curtains of imperviflex, the clients sat or lay enjoying the luxy atmosphere while their imperfections were soaked, or filed, or painted away. Mrs. Djabalah in Post 38 was requiring slightly more than the conventional services from her masseuse again, Guinevere noticed with resignation, and scribbled herself a memo to surcharge the bill by a hundred per cent. So long as the girl herself didn’t complain—and there was something rather magnificent about the Djabalah woman’s six feet two of statuesque ebony …
She took a long shot down the central passageway separating the posts and caught a glimpse of a commotion near the entrance. Abruptly alarmed—if that could be seen from the street it had to be stopped
now
—she switched to the storefront viewers.
At the same moment a nervous voice whispered from the intercom, “Gwinnie, there’s the most awful man down here shouting at us. I think he’s drunk. And he niffs like a whole barrel of whaledreck. Can you blast off and cope with him?”
Guinevere told him crisply. “I’m on my way.”
But she spared time for one rapid survey of her appearance in the mirror.
She found the intruder confronting Danny-boy, her chief usher—him of the Parisian artist’s smock—and growling belligerently. Fortunately, to call it “shouting” was an exaggertion, so the customers in even the nearest posts were unlikely to have noticed anything wrong. Moreover the blonde member of the come-hither team had shown enough presence of mind to move the changeochrome partition so it screened the disgusting stranger from outside.
He was a hulking man, well over six feet, and probably strong in spite of his revolting condition. His hair hung in lank strands all over his collar and merged into a beard and moustache that might as well never have been trimmed, but served as a soup-filter and catch-all for scraps of food. There was a singed indentation in the right lower edge of the moustache as though from smoking hand-rolled joints to the last fraction of a roach. His sweaterette had once been red but was now patched, smeared and streaked with other colours, and if his slax had ever fitted him that must have been years ago; now the waistband had given up struggling against the encroachment of his belly. His feet were planted four-square on her lovely hand-inlaid floor in things that might have been loafers but now were incrustations of garbage totally concealing any fabric that might separate dirt from skin.
He broke off his tirade at Guinevere’s approach. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “You must be Steely Gwin from Port of Sin—I’ve heard such a lot about you! I even wrote a poem about you once. Just a second … Ah yes—‘Girls made up by Guinevere Steel Look a treat but are lousy to feel. She turns meat that was cute Into plasticised fruit With the juices locked under the peel.’ One of those shiggies called you Danny-boy, didn’t she?” he added to the quaking usher. “That should make you feel right at home, then. Limericks are Irish too.” He hee-hawed with laughter and rocked on his heels.
“Want to hear another? ‘If you fancy a shiggy and seize her, And find she’s as cold as Teresa, She isn’t a freak, It’s because the Beautique—’”
Guinevere said with all the dignity she could command, “What do you want in here?”
“Whatinole do you think I want? One of your window-display dummies?” He gestured with black-tipped fingers at the cowering come-hither girls. “Thanks, if I need an inflatable masturbator I’ll build my own. Ah, whatinole do you
think
somebody wants who comes into a place like this?”
“You must be drunk or orbiting,” Guinevere snapped. “I don’t believe you know where you are.” She cast a nervous glance at the wall-clock. The current hour’s appointments were nearly up, and if the clients were to emerge and see this revolting specimen blocking their exit … “Danny-boy, you’ll have to call the police. I don’t see anything else for it.”
“What for?” the stranger demanded in an aggrieved tone. “What do I do? All I want is to be beautified.”
“To be what?” Guinevere said. Her breath ran out on the third word. “You must be insane! We don’t accept male clients anyway, let alone—let alone
objects
like you!”
“No?” The intruder took a threatening pace closer to her. “New York State Code provisions on discrimination, any commercial establishment offering a service to the general public and declining to accept a prospective client on racial, linguistic, religious or
sexual
grounds shall forthwith have its licence revoked!”
Belatedly Guinevere realised that the man neither spoke nor acted as she felt would match his appearance.
“In any case I know perfectly well you don’t discriminate. Apart from Danny-boy—and you’re not going to tell me
he
doesn’t get you to help him with that impeccable surface sheen!—my old beddy Doll Clark has been coming here for years and he still has his balls. What do you want I should do? Come back in a kilt wagging my hips?”
Guinevere said, with a faint sensation of unreality as though someone had slipped her a cap of Yaginol, “I can ask for proof of ability to pay, at least. And if you could meet my rates you wouldn’t be walking around stinking like”—she borrowed Danny-boy’s simile because it was definitive—“a whole barrel of whaledreck!”
“Oh, if credit is all that’s eating on you—!” The stranger made a face. “Here!”
He reached inside his sweaterette and produced a thick wad of documents. Flipping through them like a dealer riffling a new deck of cards, he extracted one and held it out.
“That do?”
“Hold it so I can read it,” Guinevere snapped. “I don’t want to touch it, or you.”
She looked. It was a bank credit authorisation good for a thousand dollars at sight of bearer. But that wasn’t what shook her to the core. It was the name neatly printed across the bottom, under the picture of a much younger man with his moustache and beard trimmed into Louis-Napoleon elegance.
“But he’s dead!” she said faintly. “Danny-boy! Surely Chad C. Mulligan is dead!”
“Who?” Danny-boy looked blank for a moment. Then: “Did you say
Chad
Mulligan?”
“Dead?” said the filthy stranger. “Christ, no. And if you make me stand around much longer I’ll prove it conclusively. Come on, come on!”
The clock crept towards the final five minutes of the current session. Any second now the first of the clients being attended to would leave the shelter of the curtains. Guinevere swallowed hard. Which of her assistants could be persuaded to handle this job for a hundred-dollar bonus?
“Danny-boy,” she whispered, “take Mr. Mulligan in charge and do whatever he wants.”
“But, Gwinnie—!”
“Do as I tell you!” She stamped her foot.
After all, he is a considerable celebrity …
Forcing herself to overcome her nausea, she said, “Forgive me, won’t you, Mr. Mulligan? But—well, this is rather an incongruous guise to find you in!”
“Incongruous my insalubrious hole,” Chad Mulligan grunted. “It’s the same way I’ve been looking for the past two years or more. What I’m going to find incongruous is what I’ll be like after your mechanics have overhauled me. But I’m giving up. I’m quitting. The sheer God-blasted inertia of this asinine species has defeated me. I can’t make people pay me attention whether I argue, or bellow, or daub myself with shit. I propose to pretty myself up and join the rest of you Gadarene swine in debauching myself magnificently to death. All right, where do you want to put me so your other customers won’t see the state I’m in?”
And he added over his shoulder as Danny-boy led him away: “Send someone out for a quart of liquor, will you? I need something to nerve me for this.”
BE KIND TO YOUR FORFEITED FRIENDS
LOCALE
: since it was illegal by city ordinance to occupy that much space by herself what Guinevere had done was to make a settlement on her husband whom she was divorcing largely because his name was Dwiggins and get him to buy with it the vacant apartment below her penthouse and then lease it to her for an indefinite period at a peppercorn rent which was not illegal and the chief method by which the ostentatiously wealthy in the modern super-crowded city secured for themselves that ultimate in contemporary status symbols a home many times larger than one person could reasonably require—to wit two rooms one above the other forty-eight feet by thirty-two, two (ditto) thirty by eighteen, two (ditto) twenty-one by eighteen, four bathrooms
en suite
and two not, four additional toilets, two kitchen-eateries, and a roof-garden which Guinevere had had as it were hollowed out by an ingenious architect so that it became a bower with its main level corresponding to the lower apartment and the upper containing the automatic watering and fertilising sprays together with the artificial sunlight lamps required to keep the plants and flowers healthy.
