Stand on Zanzibar (31 page)

“The bleeder slipped her a cap of Yaginol while she was preg and of course they had to abort the phocomelus. She’s suing him.”

“Thinking of cutting out to join one of these communities in Arizona.”

“Dead set on going into the space service but I guess he’ll grow out of it when he discovers shiggies.”

“Sold my shares in Hitrip like a sheeting idiot and then two months later they announced the Too Much strain and I guess I lost fifty thousand buckadingdongs on the deal.”

“So they programmed Shalmaneser with the formula for Triptine, you see, and then these jokers fed in the question How Hi is a Chinaman.”

“I think instead of increasing it to four months’ vacation they should operate two shifts on monthly rotation. Of course it would cost but the degree to which it would increase the self-respect of the employees would more than make up for it.”

“Most of them seem to be at it in the roof-garden. Want to go and watch, get some pressure up for later?”

“I think these cigarettes are horrible. Made my throat so sore. And my guts are all sour and nasty. Did people really use twenty in a day?”

“They call it streamlining, of course, but what it comes down to is they’re undermining my responsibility in the firm and I’m going to fight tooth and claw to hang on to what I’ve got. If I have to play it dirty that’ll be their fault, not mine.”

“It makes genuine three-dimensional poetry possible for the first time in history. Right now he’s experimenting with motion added, and some of the things he’s turned out are hair-raising.”

“You hold the knife this way, see?”

“Refuse to teach their children to read and write, say it handicaps them for the post-Gutenberg era.”

“Not many people have spotted it but there’s a loophole in the Maryland eugenics law.”

“A polyformer for water-sculpture, quite new.”

“Of course I don’t love Henry the way I love you but the shrinker did tell me I ought to occasionally.”

“I’m just cutting jets for a prayer or two but I’ll be back—don’t get involved with anyone else.”

“That makes seventeen different mixtures I’ve tried, and I’d better have some antalc, right away.”

“I think it was bitchy not to tell Miriam it was pig-meat.”

“They’re trying to ranch the orange ones in Kenya but apparently so far only the pale-blue ones will breed true in the wild state.”

“I think I’m going to shake off my holding in MAMP. It’s been years after all and by this time I’m wondering if the rumours about the big strike were just propaganda.”

“Had a chance to talk to Chad Mulligan? Nor have I. I was wondering whether to be really twentieth-century and go ask for his autograph.”

“Campaign to get whales back by breeding up from smaller aquatic mammals but the cost is astronomical!”

“Blew up three bridges before the fuzzy-wuzzies fused them and one of them turned out to be in the same class as my son Hugh.”

“I’m sorry to snivel like this but it’s damned unfair having him killed in a stupid sheeting accident like that and now being married to someone who’s not allowed to father prodgies. And he was only six, he couldn’t even read yet!”

“Watch out for Guinevere—I think she’s building up to the big staged ones. I’m going up to the other floor for a bit. Some of the things she does when she’s in that mood don’t strike me as funny.”

“I got on fine with Don and to be quite honest I half-hoped he’d ask me to make it permanent. But I couldn’t stand his roomie.”

“Of course it can’t be the Chinese who supply them with sabotage equipment. Explosives and thermite maybe, but not the tailored bacteria they used to bring down that apartment building in Santa Monica.”

“So Shalmaneser said how high is a Chinaman? I don’t know, but if he’s any higher than I am we might as well quit because they have us beat.”

“Accused of reviving thuggee—you know, Kali-worship?—and the crowd stormed the court and set them free.”

“Spend my vacation taking that induced-schizophrenia course they offer at the Leary Clinic—think it’ll broaden my horizons.”

“Wanted to be burned alive in protest against the draft but the directors of the company apparently decided it was interfering in politics and not in accordance with their corporation charter so he tried to do it by himself and they put him out before he’d done more than sustain third-degree burns. Going to jail for ten years, I gather. Evasion.”

“A
totally
corrupt police-force is the next best to a perfectly honest one. Ours is quite livable with. Mark you, it takes a bit of time occasionally finding out who’s bidding against you, but there are only a few possibilities in a small community like ours.”

“So when he said he had a clean genotype but he was going to be sterilised anyway I lost my temper—can you blame me?”

“It’s twentieth-century for me to be jealous, isn’t it? You keep away from my wife or I’ll get Gwinnie to make you pay forfeit for behaving in a twenty-first century manner!”

“I’m going to have to find out more about Beninia, Elihu. I can’t really believe what you say is true.”

“I got two glasses of the ’98 Château Lafite before it ran out and believe me it was quite an experience.”

“Have you tried it intravenously? You can get diadermic guns for about forty or fifty bucks, and it makes a galaxy of difference to the lift.”

“Talking about clearing the old Renault factory but it’ll be like civil war—there are sixty thousand squatters on the ground and apparently some of them have bolt-guns and the place is crawling with old projectile weapons of course because they went over to sporting guns when they closed.”

“Told me about this public execution he went to in Algeria and it got me so excited I just couldn’t help myself. Why don’t you ask him about it? He did say he bivs occasionally.”

“So she told her to smear her belly with apple-butter and let the sparewheel lick it off. She’s getting nasty, darling. Next time it won’t be licking, it’ll be biting. Want to blast off for home?”

“Look out, he’s got a knife!”

“But the whole aesthetic of holographic television is being called in question by Eldred’s work.”

“I’ve taken over the selection programme for the Museum of Last Week, did you hear? How about letting me have some of your stuff?”

*   *   *

GRAPH GUINEVERE
: an early peak followed by a flat low line marked at its inception by Norman’s correction of her judgment regarding the man in the year 2000 suit. Since then, a state of suppressed anger, punctuated by only enough minor forfeits to keep that hard core of her sparewheels contented. Saving up the remainder—all noted with sharp eyes and double-checked mentally to avoid a second similar gaffe—for an unusually extensive series of set-piece forfeits at the end of the evening. Included with question-marks, people like the ambassador who has completely wasted his cachet and Chad Mulligan’s into the bargain by talking together non-stop throughout the evening despite several attempts to make them circulate. Trust a brown-nose to foul things up, ambassador or no.

GRAPH DONALD HOGAN
: a jagged line varying between sick dismay masked with polite and occasionally quite interesting chat to Elihu, Chad, Gennice and other acquaintances, and raw fury at being dogged by Sergeant Schritt. Four separate attempts to corner the man from Bellevue privately and perform that quasi-suicidal act of obtaining from him some sort of lifter or whatever that would enable him to break his cover under the pretence of being slipped a cap by someone unknown. Shortly, the line due to snap up into the unknowable hyperbolic future course of the activated spy.

GRAPH GENNICE
: a high-level curve with a lot of peaks of amusement and enjoyment because she’s very fond of her new man, but with occasional wistful dips caused by wondering whether it’s her departure that made that nice Don Hogan feel so low tonight.

GRAPH CHAD AND ELIHU
: an early plateau low on the scale, then a simultaneous rise and a long, long parallel run not across the regular chart of the party but away from it at an angle of their own, pacing each other and still rising.

GRAPH NORMAN
: an early peak caused by so successfully scoring off Guinevere, followed by a slow decline with occasional bumps tending towards determination to see her look equally foolish if she tries to involve him in a set-piece forfeit or towards self-disgust because he prizes such a petty achievement.

GRAPH THE PARTY
: a planar representation hillocking over the roof-garden where those interested mostly in sex congregated early and heavily indented in the vicinity of Donald, Norman, Guinevere herself and one or two more, otherwise generally on an acceptably high level although a good many people have had the edge taken off their enjoyment by the aura radiating from Guinevere by now consulting in whispers with certain chosen sparewheels and who can be sure what infelicity, what incongruity, as minor as having referred to a post-turn-of-century artwork has given her the opening for another arrowed forfeit?

*   *   *

“If Gwinnie picks on me I’m going to give her a present. From this firm that sends people around to invade your apt and wreck the furniture!”

Now I can get the two shiggies, the fat and the thin ones, to change clothes, which ought to be good for five minutes and a few giggles, and during that time slip Norman a cap of
 …

*   *   *

“What was that?”

“That girl with the hideous caped outfit, I think—I saw Gwinnie consulting a history of costume in the other room just now.”

“Excuse me, do you mind saying that again?”

*   *   *

Like a cool breeze soughing through the room: a wave of interest and curiosity.

*   *   *

“No, that weird codder Lazarus hasn’t been through the mill yet and I never knew him to miss. He loves being humiliated, gives him the strangest kind of lift, apparently.”

“Are you sure? Who told you?”

“I made a wager with myself that she’d pick on Renée—you know, the fat shiggy with the glandular thing they can’t cure, like a big sagging jelly? She always gets hit hard.”

And what I’m going to do to Norman will make history. Not this time the cunning brown-nose doesn’t get off lightly! That codder with the Black Belt in case he tries to duck out, to be safe. Where is he? Not involved with
another
shiggy!

“But it must be pure propaganda! I mean, so far not even the dogs and cats and bushbabies they’ve made over for pets are…”

“Is something going on over there?”

“Let’s find out, shall we?”

“Darlings, how convenient for me to have caught you talking to each other! You see, I’m terribly afraid that—”

“If SCANALYZER carried it the news must have been processed by Shalmaneser so it’s at least possible. Unless they carried it in the rumour slot, was that it?”

*   *   *

It began to dawn on Guinevere by slow degrees that for the first time ever since she took to throwing forfeits parties the arrival of her well-briefed gang of sparewheels in the neighbourhood of the victims chosen for the first of the grand forfeits, the set-pieces that would include dialogue and climax in acts of maximum humiliation to get rid of people she was tired of knowing, had not signalled silence and giggling and craning of necks and climbing on furniture for a better view. Instead, on the far side of the room, a large number of the guests were talking to each other with serious faces, apparently sceptical but not scoffing. She waited a moment. A few people drifted away from the unidentified focus of attention and others joined; somebody hurried out of the room and came back with half a dozen friends also to be told—whatever the news might be.

“Hullo!” Norman said softly. “What’s going on? Guinevere isn’t getting the rapt audience she counts on.”

“Think war’s broken out?” Chad muttered and grabbed a fresh drink from a passing tray.

Alarm transfixed Donald like a lightning strike. The randomness of his activating this morning, unaccountable in terms of what the news channels were carrying, made him think for a moment that it could all too easily be war.

“Chad, what did you say about crying wolf in
The Hipcrime Vocab?
”

“Howinole do you expect me to remember? I’m drunk!”

“Wasn’t it something about—?”

“Ah, sheeting hole! I said it was an ad-hoc form of Pavlovian conditioning adopted by those with a lust for power to prevent the people due to be slaughtered in the next war from taking them out and humanely drowning them. Okay?”

“Why do you hate Miss Steel so much?” Elihu asked Norman under his breath.

“I don’t hate her personally, though if she were enough of a person to be worth such a strong emotion I think I easily could. What I hate is what she represents: the willingness of human beings to be reduced to a slick visual package, like a new television set—up-to-the-minute casing, same old works.”