Stand on Zanzibar (39 page)

“And remember, too, that as far as she’s concerned you’re exactly what you claim to be. She has
no
inside data. The man who has—the man who acts as our link to Jogajong—is a freelance, a Pakistani immigrant called Zulfikar Halal. While it’s wholly convincing that he will want to sell exclusive information to someone like yourself, representing one of the world’s biggest beam agencies, this piece of the cover must be reserved until you’re in sight of the successful completion of the assignment.

“Which is, in the full official version: to investigate the claim made by the Yatakangi government regarding the optimisation of future births; to file normal press dispatches on it, some of which will actually be used by programmes up to and including SCANALYZER, by the way; and to seek out—with all due diligence, as the phrase goes—proof that the claim can’t be substantiated.

“When you have it, you’re to rendezvous with Jogajong and give it to him in full. The disappointment resulting from refutation of the claim, so our computers tell us, may well spark the wave of indignation that sweeps him to power in place of Solukarta.”

“And supposing I don’t find such proof?”

Delahanty looked bewildered. “You’re to keep at it until you do, or until you’re recalled. I thought that went without saying.”

“You miss my point. I read all the scientific papers Sugaiguntung ever published, while I was on standby.” The jargon phrase tripped lightly off Donald’s tongue; what did feel uncomfortable was saying “I”—it seemed like laying false claim to someone else’s work. “And if there’s anyone alive in the world today who can make the promise come true, it’s Sugaiguntung.”

“Our computer evaluations show the project is uneconomic,” Delahanty answered stiffly. “You’ve just been through eptification, so you know what techniques exist already to make optimised individuals. But we can’t even afford to eptify our adult population
en masse,
let alone apply prenatal techniques that call for vast numbers of skilled tectogeneticists.”

“But what if he’s made a breakthrough to something quick and easy? Suppose he’s envisaging a modified Gershenson technique—say by immersing the ovum in a solution of a template organic?”

“In that case, obviously, we’ve got to have the details. And very, very fast.”

Donald hesitated. He said eventually, “I saw Sergeant Schritt at Guinevere Steel’s party.”

“I wager you did,” Delahanty sighed. “So did everyone else. I can’t really blame the poor bleeder, I guess—but he’ll be no more use to me.”

His tone made it clear that he didn’t intend to pursue the subject, but he went on regarding Donald thoughtfully. “I should have made more allowance for your not being able to follow the news,” he continued at length. “You must put that right at once, because a lot has happened since the claim was made public. To give you a rough idea, multiply Schritty’s reaction by a thousand.”

Chad Mulligan, Donald recalled—and the recollection was like the echo of a dream—made it a million.

“You get the picture? Very well, then. I’ll wish you luck and send you on your way. Unless you have any more questions?”

Donald shook his head. The one thing Delahanty had not said straight out was perfectly clear; whether the process could be made to work or not, it must not be allowed to work in Yatakang.

tracking with closeups (15)

OUR PARENTS’ FEET WERE BLACK

After the greetings, the sisterly and the sister-in-lawly kisses, the invitations to sit down and the how have you been since we saw you lasts: an absolute dead pause, as though neither Pierre Clodard, nor his sister Jeannine, nor his wife Rosalie, had anything to say to one another.

The house, in a sought-after district of Paris within easy walk of the Bois de Boulogne, was the one which Etienne Clodard
père
had bought on coming home unwillingly from Africa following Algeria’s independence. The whole of it, but this
salon
in particular, retained the flavour of another continent and another century. The layout, betrayed North African influences in the long low couches against the walls, the use of a carpet not to walk on but as a wall-hanging, the small tables on one of which rested a set of tiny copper cups for Algerian coffee, each nestling in its own hollow in a tray of beaten brass with formalised Arabic script enamelled around the rim. In absolute contrast the room also memorialised what Etienne Clodard the ex-colonial administrator had thought of as proper Parisian elegance when he was out there in the heat and barbarity of Africa: the florid wall-paper, the heavy glazed chintz of the curtains, the two intrusive overstuffed armchairs.

Some of Pierre’s friends said it was impossible to tell whether the house reflected the way his mind worked or whether his mind had been conditioned by the house.

He was a person of some elegance and presence: a nervous, lean man whose avocation of playing the piano might have been guessed even without seeing the handsome instrument occupying the best-lit corner of the room. Further, one might have predicted his actual preference for Debussy and Satie without exploring the rack of recordings flanking the narrow screen of his early-model holographic reproducer. His black hair was beginning to recede a little. For a while when he was younger he had conformed to the current tendency of beardedness, but a few years ago he had shaved his chin and cheeks, leaving only a neat moustache to stress the sensitivity of his mouth.

What in him emerged as handsomeness of a refined, rather intellectual and potentially weak kind, was recognisable in his sister Jeannine as something marginally less than beauty. Like him—and both their parents—she was thin and dark, but with paler complexion, lighter bones and larger eyes. At forty-one the only clue to her actual age lay in the lined skin around her eyes and at the base of her throat; otherwise she might have passed for thirty.

Rosalie, on the other hand, was a total contrast: buxom, plump-cheeked, with bright china-blue eyes and fair brown hair. Normally she was a cheerful person, but—for some reason she wished she could discover, because she hated it as an intolerable failing—the presence of her husband and her sister-in-law in the same room at the same time made her vacant and gloomy.

With a desperate effort to restore gaiety, she said, “Jean-nine! May I make you some coffee, or would you rather have liquor?”

“Coffee would be excellent,” Jeannine said.

“And some kief?” Pierre suggested. He took up a chased silver box from the nearest of the many low coffee-tables, releasing as he lifted the lid the curious fragrance of the best Moroccan hashish.

Bustling, Rosalie left the room, unable to disguise her eagerness to be gone. When the door had closed Jeannine looked at its old-fashioned moulded panels, barely inclining towards the light Pierre was offering.

She said, “I hope you’re not finding life as difficult as I am.”

Pierre shrugged. “We get along, Rosalie and I.”

“There must be more to be had than simply ‘getting along’,” Jeannine said with a kind of obstinacy.

“You’ve had a quarrel with Raoul,” Pierre said, naming the latest of his sister’s many lovers.

“Quarrel? Hardly. One doesn’t quarrel any longer. One lacks the energy. But—it’s not going to last, Pierre. I can feel the disillusionment gathering.”

Pierre leaned back on his couch. He preferred couches to the big armchairs, though the latter were better scaled to his length of leg. He said, “I can almost measure the progress of your
affaires du coeur
by the number of times you come to call on us.”

“You think I treat you as a wailing wall?” Jeannine gave a bitter little chuckle. “Perhaps so—but can I help it if you are the only person I can talk to openly? There’s something between us which outsiders can never enter. It’s a precious thing; I’m sparing with it.”

She hesitated. “Rosalie senses it,” she added finally. “You can see the effect on her when I arrive. That’s another reason why I come only when I need to very much.”

“Do you mean she makes you feel unwelcome?”

“That? No! She’s the soul of courtesy. It’s only that she like the rest of the world cannot understand what she has never experienced.” Jeannine straightened, stabbing her kief cigarette through the air as though it were a teacher’s pointer indicating words on a blackboard. “Consider,
chéri
, that we are not unique, being expatriates! Since they cut down the barriers between the countries of this tired old continent there must be fifty nationalities in Paris alone, and not a few of them—such as the Greeks—are better off than they would have been at home. As we are.”

“At home?” Pierre echoed. “Our home is nowhere. It never existed except in father’s and mother’s minds.”

Jeannine shook her head. “I don’t believe they could have been discontented in a fine city like Paris unless they had been truly happy in a real country.”

“But they grew more and more to talk only of good things. They forgot about the bad. The Algeria they imagined has gone forever under a wave of disorder, assassinations and civil war.”

“Yet it made them happy. You can’t deny that.”

Pierre gave a sigh and a shrug.

“In short, we’re not expatriates, you and I. We’re extemporates, exiled from a country that vanished even before we were born, of which our parents made us citizens without intending to.” She paused, searching her brother’s face with sharp dark eyes. “I see you understand. I never knew you not to understand.”

She reached over and gave his hand a squeeze.

“You’re not discussing Algeria again, are you?” Rosalie said, entering with the handsome coffee-jug that matched the tray of cups on permanent display. She sounded as though she was trying to make a joke of the question. “I keep telling Pierre, Jeannine—it may have been fine to live there in the old days, but I wouldn’t care to live there now.”

“Of course not,” Jeannine said with a forced smile. “Life in Paris is bad enough—why should anyone wish to go and live under the even grosser mismanagement of a native government?”

“Is life in Paris so bad, these days?”

“Perhaps you’re lucky and don’t notice it so much as I do, having this fine quiet home and nothing to do except look after it while Pierre reaps his fat salary from the bank! But I work, and in fashion advertising life isn’t so secure as in banking. There are more
salauds
to the square metre and they wield far more power!”

Pierre gave his sister a look of alarm. When she was in a particular mood kief sometimes loosened her tongue more than politeness would permit, and more than once—not with Rosalie but with his first wife—he had to smooth over serious rows based on something she let slip while she was high.

“But even
salauds
have their uses,” she continued. “That was what I came to tell you, Pierre. You’re aware that Raoul works for the Common Europe prediction department?”

Pierre nodded. The prediction department was a building at Fontainebleau that had once housed a NATO detachment; now it was filled with computers to which intelligence reports, commercial as well as military, were daily fed for trend analysis.

“Something rather interesting…” Jeannine went on. “You know, too, that the prediction department processes not only European material but also what our former colonies send, giving a discount rate for old times’ sake? And you’ve heard of the underwater mining project sponsored by the American corporation General Technics?”

“Naturally.”

“The Americans have been sending agents to price the cost of transporting bulk raw materials from Port Mey, in Beninia. Also the same company is conducting inquiries among former colonial administrators in London. Raoul tells me that the computers foresee a great new company being launched in Port Mey to handle all these minerals.”

There was a pause. Handing coffee to Jeannine, Rosalie looked in bewilderment from her to her husband and back, wondering at the look of wistful speculation that had appeared on both their faces.

“You’ve met Hélène, who used to work in Mali?” Pierre said at length, ignoring his wife.

“Yes. And you’ve met Henri, from Upper Volta?”

“Yes.”

“You seem to understand as much as the computers.”

“It follows very logically.”

“I don’t understand,” Rosalie said.

Pierre glanced at her with a sort of pity. “Why should a big American corporation be sounding out former colonial officials in London unless they were well aware of the ignorance Americans display regarding the African mentality?”

Before Rosalie could admit that the question had done nothing to enlighten her, Jeannine said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Americans are a little better than barbarians, one must concede.”

“But a country on the Bight of Benin, which has not benefited from French culture—”

“Part of it was settled by Berbers, and they for all their faults are cousins to the people of Algeria and Morocco.”

Rosalie said with sudden uncharacteristic mistress-in-her-own-house determination, “Will you two tell me what you are talking about?”

Brother and sister exchanged glances. One of Jeannine’s eyebrows rose, as though to say, “With a wife like her what do you expect?” Rosalie detected the action and flushed, hoping Pierre would disregard it for loyalty’s sake.

Instead, he copied it.

“I’m talking about going back to Africa,” Jeannine said. “Why not? I’m sick of France and the French who aren’t French any longer, but some sort of horrible averaged-out Common European mongrels.”

“What makes you so sure you’ll get the chance to go?” Pierre countered.

“Raoul says they’re intending to recruit advisors with African experience. There can’t be so many people to suit their requirements. After all,
chéri
, neither you nor I is a chick fresh from the shell!”

“
I
don’t want to go to Africa,” Rosalie said, and set her chin mutinously. “Jeannine, drink your coffee—it’ll be cold.”

She leaned forward to push the copper cup closer to her sister-in-law. Over her bowed back the eyes of brother and sister met, and each recognised in the other the matching half of a dream, that had been broken a long time ago like a coin divided between sweethearts faced with years of separation.