Stand on Zanzibar (47 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“Well, I don’t think it would be terribly convenient,” Karen said. “I told you, I have exams hanging over me—”
“Ah, but surely it’s bad, isn’t it, to work at full pressure all the time before exams? You’d benefit from the chance to relax for an evening.” Victor flavoured his voice with all the coaxing he could.
“Fasten it, Brian!” she snapped sideways at the half-seen person in her room. “If you and Tom can’t keep quiet I throw you out, catch? Sorry, Vic,” she added, facing the camera again. “But—no, I don’t think so, thanks all the same.”
There was a frozen instant in which the only sound was from the bathroom overhead: Mary stepping out of her tub.
Eventually Victor said, and knew he sounded both idiotic and peeved, but couldn’t help it, “Why
not?
”
“Look, Vic, I really am very very sorry. I shouldn’t have done it because I realised afterwards you’d probably make a big scene of it and I can’t. I don’t want to, candidly, but even if I did I couldn’t. I just happened to be on my own in Cheltenham and you really were very sweet to me when I was feeling a bit lonely and it was a very interesting evening hearing you talk about the old days especially what you said about Africa because I was able to come back and tell Tom some things he didn’t know and he comes from there—”
“But if you mean that why wouldn’t you like—?”
“Vic, I’m
terribly
sorry, honestly I am. I should have told you straight out, I guess, but I didn’t know how you’d react and I didn’t want to upset you because lots of people do get a bit upset.” Her pretty face wore an unhappy look which he couldn’t for the life of him believe was pretence.
“You see, I’m spoken for here. I’m in a triple with Brian and Tom and we’ve got a good thing going for us and I just don’t go outside unless—you know—it’s an accidental thing, like my being away looking up those old parish records. So all I can say is it would be very nice to have you drop in and say hullo when you come to Bristol but don’t hope for any more. Is that horribly blunt?”
The past reached out and closed a dead hand on Victor’s brain. He looked past Karen’s worried face and made sense of two shapes immobilised at her insistence in the background of the small square picture. Like badly unfocused photos, they still conveyed their essential identity: one pale and one dark male figure, both bare to the waist, with some sort of blurred pale bar over the shoulder of the dark one. In exact painful words, Karen’s two boy-friends sitting on something low, probably a divan-bed, one with his arm around the other.
And that “other”—she had just said so—an African.
The bathroom door overhead opened. He switched off the phone and moved away from it, mechanically. He had not formulated another coherent thought apart from fury before Mary appeared in a towelling robe and asked him to fix her a drink from the liquor console.
He complied grumpily, aware that he must not let his anger show through, yet incapable of putting on a cheerful expression. Mary asked him, as was inevitable, “Who were you talking to on the phone?”
“I called Bristol,” Victor said, more or less without lying. “I’ve been thinking about that housing development over there, and wondering if it would be worth our while to sell up and go somewhere a bit more isolated.”
“What did they say?”
“I didn’t get any joy.”
Mary sipped her drink, frowning. She frowned a lot nowadays, and it was turning her once-pretty face into a mask of aging wrinkles. Victor noticed the fact and thought with detachment of how that brief phone-call had altered the reaction it had conjured up in him only an hour ago.
Then, drunk on the memory of Karen, he had been thinking:
I could leave her, if there are young girls available, I could have a grand fling before I finally lose the urge
…
Such thoughts at his age seemed ridiculous in modern terms, but he had never adjusted to modern terms. He realised now with resignation that he never would. “Celebrating his twenty-first” was a privilege time had stolen away.
“This drink tastes terrible,” Mary said. “Are you sure you set the machine right?”
“What? Oh, damn it! Of course I’m sure! It’s been mucking me about the past few days and nobody can come to fix it before the weekend.”
“Talk about progress!” Mary said with a scowl. “Our head boy in Lagos would have died rather than make a mess of a cocktail like this.”
She gulped the rest of it down anyhow, with a grimace, and set aside the glass. “I’ll go and get dressed, then,” she added. “What time are the Harringhams expecting us—noon, or half past?”
“Noon,” Victor said. “Better hurry.”
When she had gone, he fixed himself a drink too—manually—and stood gazing out the room’s window-wall at the encroaching hordes of interchangeable houses across the valley. Thoughts flickered in his mind like a series of projected slides that had been shuffled out of coherent order.
Over a hundred million people in this damned island and they let these blacks come and go as they want.
She seemed like a decent girl and suddenly it turns out that she …
Bloody machine cost a fortune and doesn’t work properly. Have to send for repairmen and they make you wait. Back home it was done by servants and if one of them didn’t work there was always another to be hired and trained.
Decadent, dirty-minded, obsessed with sex like the black brutes we tried to get some sense and civilisation into!
Try telling that to Karen and make her understand, try explaining the spaciousness and real leisure in the life I had to leave behind. Mary understands; she comes from the same background. We can at least share our grouses if nothing more.
Which, he realised dully, meant that there could never have been any substance in his brief dream of leaving her and going off for a few wild-oat years before he ran out of energy. His marriage to Mary had lasted; his others, to English-born girls, hadn’t. And the same on her side, too: she had been married before to someone who didn’t understand. A row between himself and her didn’t have to be explained away and excused—she felt the same aching disappointment with the world as he did.
Some people had adjusted, come home after having well-paid jobs in Africa or Asia tugged out from under them, accepted inferior posts at home and worked their way back up. He’d tried and tried, but it never suited him—sooner or later there was a crisis, a loss of temper, a complaint, and an interview with the management … He wasn’t poor, they had enough to live on. But they had no purpose, and almost no occupation.
He wanted to turn back time, and could not.
At least, though, he and Mary had not been allowed children—he had used up his permitted maximum of three in his second marriage, and the two boys and the girl were in their middle twenties now, which meant they had probably just escaped the full impact of the decadence claiming Karen.
If they hadn’t …
But that he would rather not know. If he couldn’t get from life the only thing he desired—return to the colonial society he had been brought up in—he preferred that the world turn its back on him and leave him to mope undisturbed.
Arrayed like a tribunal on one side of the vast palatial office: G. T. Buckfast, face like thunder; the skeletal Dr. Raphael Corning from State; Hamilcar Waterford and E. Prosper Rankin.
Grouped like victims of a trial where they were denied both counsel and knowledge of the charges: Norman House and Rex Foster-Stern.
“It’s been leaked,” Old GT said, and the three others flanking her nodded in comical unison.
Victoria?
The thought crossed Norman’s mind like a shooting-star, and although he stamped on its traces—
the hole, that’s impossible!
—it left a charred streak.
He said, “Sorry, GT, I don’t understand. I’d have thought the first inkling of a leak would come from a buying wave in MAMP stock, and that hadn’t happened up to this morning.”
“The fact remains,” insisted Old GT. “Isn’t that right, Prosper?”
Rankin scowled and repeated his nod, his eyes on Norman.
But the past few days of solid and surprising achievement had lent Norman a heady sense of his own capability. He said, “Who’s supposed to be in the secret and how?”
“Common Europe,” Waterford said, biting the name off like crunching a candy-bar. “As a whole, to judge by what our informants are passing along.”
“Accordingly,” said Old GT, “we’re going to have to reconsider everything about the project, which was predicated on secrecy. The costings, the estimated time, the returns, the—”
“The people,” Rankin cut in. “Much more important, GT. We shall have to turn our entire personnel upside-down and shake out their pockets.”
“Which is your responsibility still, Norman,” GT confirmed.
“Now just a second,” Norman said, feeling reckless.
Victoria? A search like that would not only waste time, it’d be bound to bring me under scrutiny too, because this case involves not millions but billions.
“I agree with Norman,” Foster-Stern said unexpectedly.
“I don’t appreciate statements like this without adequate evidence to back them, GT. You realise you’re calling in question the discretion of my entire department? We’re the ones who have handled the hypothetical data.”
A vision of endless reams of green printouts from Shalmaneser blinded Norman for a second. Facing the whole thing again from the start, the hypothesis being amended to assume loss of secrecy, appalled him.
Also, despite everything, Victoria had existed in his life.
He said fiercely, “GT! I tell you something straight—shall I? I think you’re doing something you’ve never done before in your business career, overlooking the obvious.”
GT bridled and flushed. Norman had admired her ability for years; finding that she didn’t know one of her own VP’s was a Muslim and hence a non-drinker had breached that wall of unalloyed respect and implied that she preferred to put up with, rather than actively promote, the modern standards that encouraged brown-noses in industry.
But he was surprised at himself, even so; telling off the founder of General Technics was a step clear outside his old patterns of behaviour.
“In what way?” GT demanded frigidly.
“I’ve been too preoccupied with the specifically African aspect of the project to follow what other departments were doing,” Norman said, thinking fast on his feet. “But now I think of it, the data which were fed to Shalmaneser must have been gathered by somebody. Ah … Yes, here’s an example. Our market costings include items like transportation of raw materials once they’re landed from MAMP. Was the information in store or did we have to go look for it?”
GT and Rankin exchanged glances. After a pause, Rankin said, “Well, the African market has been a very minor one for us up till now.”
“In other words we had to send someone out to make inquiries,” Norman snapped. “Add another thing: we’re comparatively ignorant of African attitudes, so we’re anticipating recruitment of former colonial advisors to help us avoid silly mistakes. Shalmaneser had an estimate of the number of potential recruits. How was it arrived at?”
“We had it from our London office,” GT grunted.
“And how did they get it? I’ll wager they commissioned a survey, and somebody noticed that General Technics was interested in something they hadn’t previously considered. Add still another point: who do we have on the spot in Beninia?”
“But—” began Waterford.
“Nobody,” Norman said, without waiting for him. “We have agents in Lagos, Accra, Bamako and other main cities in the West African region, but Beninia is a piddling little hole-in-corner country we’ve never cared about. Bamako is in a former French territory, Lagos and Accra were formerly British—where do the former colonial territories get their commercial and governmental data processed?”
There was a blank expression on GT’s face which was pure joy to Norman.
“I see what you’re setting course for,” Dr. Corning said slowly—the first words he had uttered during the discussion. “The ex-colonial powers offer a discount on computer-time to their former dependent territories, which is substantial enough for them to have relied on the Fontainebleau centre rather than developing their own.”
“Thank you, doctor,” Norman said in triumph. “Do I have to spell it out, GT? This corporation of ours is like a state within a state—as Elihu said to me when he first mentioned the Beninia project, we could buy and sell a lot of the underdeveloped countries. Any move we make is going to attract the attention of European rivals, and you may lay to it that corporations like Krupp and ICI and Royal Dutch Shell have bought themselves codes for the Fontainebleau computers that make a nonsense of attempts at secrecy. In any case, the Common Europe Board has a vested interest in seeing that big profitable projects go to their firms and not ours. They might have passed on the information their intelligence services picked up, quite legitimately; as to the whole of Common Europe knowing about the Beninia project, I think you’re understating the case. I’ll wager it’s already been evaluated by Sovcompex and by now there’s a good chance the data are going to K’ung-fu-tse in Peking!”
Foster-Stern was nodding vigorously, Norman saw with pleasure.
Stunned, GT said, “But if you’re right—and I admit you probably are, blast it!—we might as well cancel the whole idea!”
“GT, I said you’re overlooking the obvious,” Norman exclaimed. “We have one thing Common Europe hasn’t and never can have, and the Russians can’t have and the Chinese can never dream of having. We’ve
got
MAMP, it exists, and it’s sitting on a strike of raw materials adequate to underpin the Beninia project. Where is Common Europe going to get competitive quantities of ore? They’re the oldest industrialised area of the world; their seams of coal and iron are played out. The only possible competition I’ve been worried about is Australia—the Outback is the last mining region in the world which hasn’t been fully exploited. But Australia is notoriously underpopulated. Where can they find ten thousand spare technicians to move
en masse
to Beninia for even the preliminary stages, let alone the actual development phase?”
