Stand on Zanzibar (33 page)
Authors: John Brunner
* * *
When they entered the apt, Chad set off on a survey of the premises without asking permission, peering into each room in turn and shaking his head as though in wonderment. Over his shoulder he said, “Like coming back to a dream, know that? Like waking, and going back to sleep next night, and finding the dream’s been going on without you and here you are entering it at a later stage.”
“Do you think the kind of life you’ve been living the past few years is—is more real, then?” Elihu inquired. No one had invited him to sit down; because it was closest he took Norman’s favourite Hille chair and settled his bulk in it with much adjustment of his Beninian robe. He set aside his velvet-and-feathers headdress, rubbing the line it had indented across his forehead.
“More real? Sheeting hole, what a question! But the whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily. “To quote myself—the habit that persuaded me I ought to quit trying to influence people because I’d run out of new ways to express my ideas—where was I? Oh yes. The real world can take you by surprise, can’t it? We just saw it happen at Gwinnie’s party. The real world got up in the middle of the apt and did it ever shake the foundations of those people!”
Sober, Norman said, “What’s the effect going to be, do you think?”
“Christ, why do you have to treat me as a Shalmaneser-surrogate? That’s the trouble with you corporation zecks—you trade your faculty of independent judgment against a bag of cachet and a fat salary. Mind if I help myself to a drink?”
Norman started. He pointed mutely at the liquor console, but Chad was already there scanning the dials.
“I saw some of the effect right there at the party,” Donald said. He wanted to shiver, but the muscles of his back refused to respond to the urge. “There was a man—doesn’t matter who. I read his lips. He was saying something about a girl he’d lost because he wasn’t allowed to be a father.”
“You can multiply him by a million as a start,” Chad said, raising a whistler from the console’s outlet. “Maybe a lot more. Though that party was hardly a fair sample. The sort of people who go to such romps are on average too selfish to make parents.”
He poured the whistler down his throat in a single gulp, nodded approval at the impact it made, and dialled another.
“Just a second,” Elihu put in. “Mostly, people talk as though it’s the parents who are the selfish ones. And this alarms me. I mean, I can see how having three, four or more children could be regarded as selfish. But two, which only maintains a balance—”
“It’s classic economic jealousy,” Chad said with a shrug. “Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it. When I was a cub the basis for this resentment was relative intelligence. I recall some people back in Tulsa who spread slanderous gossip about my parents for no better reason than that my sister and I were way ahead of all the other pupils in our school. Now the scarcity item is prodgies themselves. So two things happen: people who’ve been barred by a eugenics board, feeling they’ve been unjustly deprived, hide their sour-grapes pose behind a mask of self-righteousness—and a lot of people who can’t face the responsibility of raising prodgies seize on this as an excuse to copy them.”
“I have a grown son,” Elihu said after a moment. “I expect to be a grandfather in a year or two. I haven’t felt this effect you’re talking about.”
“Nor have I, on the personal level, but that’s mainly because I don’t like to choose my friends among the kind of people who react that way. Mark you, I’m not much of a father except in the biological sense—my marriage caved in. Also my books act as a splendid surrogate for the basic function children perform for their parents.”
“Which is?” Norman demanded in a faintly hostile tone.
“Temporal extension of personal influence over the environment. Children are a pipeline into the posthumous future. So are books, works of art, notoriety and sundry other alternatives. But you can’t have a score of millions of frustrated parents using authorship to sublimate their problems. Who’d be their audience?”
“As far as I’m aware I have no desire for children,” Norman said challengingly. “Despite my religion! A lot of Aframs feel the way I do because our prodgies would be raised in what remains a foreign and intolerant setting!”
“Oh, someone like you acts as his own child-surrogate,” Chad grunted. “You’re too sheeting busy making yourself over in a preconceived image to want to spend time licking a cub into shape as well.”
Norman rose half out of his chair, an indignant retort on his lips. With it still unuttered he contrived to turn the movement into reaching for a reefer from the box on the nearest table.
He said, more to himself than the others, “Prophet’s beard, I hardly know who I am any more, so…”
Donald repressed an exclamation at hearing his own predicament so patly echoed. But before he could speak, Elihu had put another question to Chad.
“Granting you’re right, what’s going to happen if this breakthrough in Yatakang takes away the excuse for forbidding parenthood on eugenic grounds? I mean, if you can have a healthy, normal child even if genetically it isn’t yours, it’s one step closer to the natural process than adoption, and I know dozens of people who’ve adopted and been apparently quite satisfied.”
“Why don’t you ask Shalmaneser? Sorry, Elihu—didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that I really have decided to give up trying to keep track of the human race. Some of our behaviour is so unbelievably irrational…” Chad rubbed tired eyes with his knuckles. “Sorry,” he said again. “I can make a guess. There’s going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that’s a safe catch-all prophecy.
Whatever
happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble. But if you want to know what an expert thinks, why don’t you ask Don, not me? You have a degree in biology or something, don’t you?” he concluded, addressing Donald directly.
“Yes, that’s right.” Donald licked his lips, resenting having been drawn into the conversation when all he wanted to do was sit and be miserable on his own. For the sake of politeness he tried to order his thoughts.
“Well … Well, there’s nothing radically new about the first half of the Yatakangi programme, if what the man at the party said was correct. The techniques for optimising your population by ensuring only children of good heredity get born have existed for decades—you could even say for centuries, because if all you want to do is select, you can do it by conventional breeding methods. But I assume they’re talking about something more ambitious. Even so, you can donate semen, you can reimplant an externally fertilised ovum if it’s the mother’s heredity that’s at fault rather than the father’s—the hole, that’s available as a commercial service right here in this country! It’s expensive, and sometimes it takes three or four attempts because the ovum is very fragile, but it’s been being done for years. And if you’re prepared to stand the cost of missing a dozen launch windows before the tectogeneticists achieve a viable nucleus, you can even have a parthenogenetic embryo—a clone, as they call it. There isn’t anything so new in this claim from Yatakang.”
There was a pause. Norman said at length, “But the second stage, the bit about deliberately modifying the children into supermen…?”
“Wait a minute,” Chad cut in. “Donald, you’re wrong. It seems to me there are two very new factors involved even before you get on to the point Norman just raised. First off, a scarcity product is suddenly not going to be scarce any more. You can’t carve up and distribute fair shares of the available healthy prodgies, though people have been trying to do exactly that, by forming these clubs you keep running into which give non-parents a night or two a week to look after other members’ prodgies. What’s the population of Yatakang, though—something over two hundred million isn’t it? There’s no
question
of scarcity if the government intends to carry out its promise on that scale.
“And the second new factor, which is even more important, is this:
somebody else has got it first
.”
He let the words lie heavy in the air like a haze of smoke for long seconds before he gulped the last of his drink and gave a sigh.
“Well, I’d better go find a hotel, I guess. If I’m coming back from the gutter to join the merrymaking on the eve of Ragnarök I might as well go the whole hog. Find myself an apt tomorrow, load it with all the goodies people go for nowadays … Anyone know a good interior decorator I could call up and tell to get on with the job without bothering me?”
“Where have you been living, then?” Norman demanded. “Oh—the hole. I didn’t mean to be inquisitive.”
“I haven’t been living anywhere. I’ve been sleeping on the street. Want to see my permit?” Chad reached inside his fancy-dress suit and produced his greasy billfold. “There!” he added, extracting a card. “This is to certify—etcetera. And the hole with it.”
He stuffed the billfold back in his pocket and tore the permit into four pieces.
The others exchanged glances. Elihu said, “I didn’t realise you’d carried your policy of opting out quite that far.”
“Opting out? There’s only one way to do that, the same as throughout history: you kill yourself.
I
thought I could resign from society. The hole I could! Man’s a gregarious animal—not very social, but damnably gregarious—and the mass simply won’t let the individual cut loose, even if the bonds are no more than police permits for sleeping rough. So I came back, and here I am in this idiotic outfit of grandfather’s clothes, and…”
He scowled and threw the scraps of card at a disposall. One of them missed and fluttered to rest on the carpet like a dying moth.
“I could fix you a room at the UN Hostel,” Elihu suggested. “The accommodation is basic, but it’s convenient and cheap.”
“Cheap doesn’t bother me. I’m a multimillionaire.”
“What?”
Norman exclaimed.
“Sure—thanks to the bleeders who bought my books and refused to act on what I said in them. They’re set in college courses, they’re translated into forty-four languages … I’m going to spend some of this credit for a change!”
“Well, in that case…” Norman let the words die away.
“What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say you were welcome to spread your tatami here,” Norman explained. “Assuming Donald doesn’t mind. I don’t know how soon they’ll be sending me to Beninia, but I’m bound to be away a fairly long time. And—ah—I’d count it a privilege to have you as a guest.” He sounded uncomfortable.
“Chad can have my room as of tomorrow night,” Donald said, and thought too late of the shiny spike he had been shown, hidden under the Hille chair.
But the hole with that.
Norman turned to him incredulously. “What happened? What decided you to leave?”
“I’ve been told to,” Donald said.
What will they do to me for this? I don’t know. I don’t care.
He leaned his head back and sleep came while his eyelids were still sliding down.
Fat, black-haired, slightly sallow, with a big red mouth and bright dark eyes, Olive Almeiro looked the very model of a peasant materfamilias, except that her arms were weighed down by bracelets of emeralds and diamonds. The image of motherhood was part of her stock-in-trade. In fact she had never even married, let alone borne children.
Nonetheless, she insisted on her staff calling her “señora” rather than “señorita”, and in a sense she was entitled to the aura of maternity. She had stood proxy-mother, so to speak, to more than two thousand adoptees.
They had provided her with her floating home, the yacht
Santa Virgen
(a name from which she derived wry amusement); with the office-building she owned and operated from; with an international reputation; with all the comfort she could buy and a second fortune in reserve to purchase more.
It was just as well they had done all this before today.
Her office, windowed on all four sides, was decorated with dolls from every period of history: ancient Egyptian clay animals, Amerind toys of knotted and coloured straw, carved wooden manikins from the Black Forest, velvet teddy-bears, Chinese figurines made from scraps of priceless silk …
Imprisoned behind glass, too precious to be touched by the fingers of a child.
She said to the phone, staring out across the blue morning waters of the ocean, “What’s it going to do to us?”
A distant voice said it was too soon to tell.
“Well, work it out and do it fast! As if the trouble we’re having with the dichromatism bit wasn’t enough, these bleeders in Yatakang have to—ah, never mind. I guess we could always move to Brazil!”
She cut the connection with a furious gesture and leaned back in her polychair, swivelling it so that instead of the calm blue sea she faced the teeming city on the landward side.
After a while she pressed an intercom switch. She said, “I’ve made up my mind. Unship the Lucayo twins and the Rosso boy that they sent from Port-au-Prince. Before we dispose of them they’ll eat as much as we can make in profits.”
“What do you want us to do with them then, señora?” asked the voice from the intercom.
“Leave ’em on the steps of the cathedral—put ’em out to sea in a basket—why should I have to tell you what to do, so long as you unship them?”
“But, señora—”
“Do as I say or you’ll be out to sea in a basket yourself.”
“Very well, señora. It’s only that there’s this Yanqui couple who want to see you, and I thought perhaps…”
“Oh yes. Tell me about them.”
She listened, and within the minute had summed them up. Doubtless having given up everything at home—their jobs, their apt, their friends—for the sake of a legal conception in Puerto Rico, they had been cornered by the J-but-O State’s unexpected ratification of the dichromatism law and were now driven back to considering adoption, which they could have arranged without leaving the mainland.
