Stand on Zanzibar (73 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“Shalmaneser, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ambassador, you lot out there and anybody else who may have snuck in on the astral plane! It is not for nothing that I begin by naming Shalmaneser rather than—there
is
a line taking all this through to Shal, I suppose? Yes? Good. I made his acquaintance a few hours ago and I completely revised my opinion of him, which was that like other computers I’ve had dealings with he was a moron, magnified, but nonetheless a moron who had to be told everything to be done in little itsy-bitsy steps. I was mistaken.
“My compliments to the design team who said they were going to develop a machine that could exercise conscious volition. My felicitations to Dr. Ibusa, who’s going to enjoy the benefits of that—and who probably doesn’t realise it yet. As far as I know this is the first public announcement of the achievement and that’s because I seem to be the first person who’s realised.”
There was a definite stir among the staffers, mostly people in Rex’s department. Norman, a little relieved that Chad was actually delivering a coherent address and not shouting insults or farting into the mikes, sat up straighter on his chair.
“It’s just as well you have Shal running the Beninia project, by the way,” Chad continued. “Unless there was
somebody
looking after it who knew what he was getting mixed up in, it would be a grand recipe for sending the country to hell in a handbasket. Even my friend Norman House, who hasn’t had the praise he deserves for thinking more about the people living over there than about what the project can do to line the shareholders’ bank accounts, overlooked the little thing I just referred to—Shal’s acquisition of the faculty possessed only by intelligent creatures which is known as orneriness, or over the water in England as ‘bloody-mindedness’, which seems to me to be the ideal term.”
By now the members of the board were looking rather nervous. Norman saw Waterford lean towards Rankin and whisper. For himself, he thought he might be going to enjoy Chad’s tirade after all. He took another drag on his Bay Gold.
“What do you do with somebody who tells you you’re out of your skull? It’s an annoying and deflating experience, isn’t it? It’s like trying to get a machine to do what it was designed for and finding it won’t.
“But a machine you can send off for repair, or trade in for a more reliable model. You can’t trade in people who bug you; you can only dodge out of their way, and sometimes this isn’t possible either. Sitting over there in Asia are a holovalot of people who disagree with us violently enough to make us boil our brains, so for as much of the time as we can we pretend they don’t exist. Until they kill our sons, or sink our ships, or do something else we can’t ignore.
“Right. Shal was told about Beninia, and what he replied amounted to this—‘I don’t believe you!’ And he was sheeting well justified. I’ll tell you why!
“This is a fine fat wealthy country and we’re scared. We think any moment we may walk around a corner and meet a mucker. We think we may dial California and find a slit-eye answering the phone out there. Without anybody warning us we may find ourselves mixed up in a riot and tossed in jail for no legal reason except we were there. This happened to Norman House just a short time ago, by the way.
“Beninia is a poky, poverty-stricken, broken-down little country which oughtn’t on the face of it to exist. But if they don’t have any wars there, and they haven’t had a murder in fifteen years, and there isn’t a word in the language to say ‘angry’—only a way to say ‘insane’—well, who’d believe that if someone came along and said it in conversation?
“I wouldn’t. I’d say the same thing I say to a little red brother when he tells me how lovely the garden is in China.
“This, in case you haven’t heard, is why I came to make Shalmaneser’s acquaintance. I’m not handing out compliments now—I’ve moved on to the brickbat stage, and believe me there are some people out there who deserve to be snowed under with barrels of dreck for abdicating their responsibilities as thinking individuals. Did
you
think, the same as Shal did, that the people who fed data about Beninia back to GT were all liars, out to deceive and con you?
“Communism doesn’t make a country a paradise on earth, but it has made an overcrowded underendowed country like China into a problem the world’s really rich countries can’t ignore. Something’s working there, and it’s probably not what its own citizens think it is—never mind. The evidence exists.
“If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence. Codders and shiggies, didn’t anyone tell you that while you were in school?
“Even now—Norman, are you listening or have you gone to sleep?” Chad turned around and peered past the edge of the podium. “Ah yes, there you are. Easy to spot you—you have built-in advantages. Even now, like I was saying, a person as nominally intelligent as Norman hasn’t drawn the inevitable conclusion from what it took to persuade Shalmaneser the reports about Beninia were true. There’s something going on there, something working among the people, which you and I don’t know about. Norman! You asked to hire me and I said the hole with that, and then you changed your mind—well, so did I. Hired or not hired, I want to know what it is!”
He thumped the podium with his clenched fist and the microphones jumped.
“Sheeting hole, when’s the next express for Beninia? Dr. Ibusa, do I have to have a visa or can I just go? I like the idea of a country where there aren’t any riots and there aren’t any muckers and there aren’t any wars and there aren’t any lots of other things which make me despair for the human race! Until I was told about Beninia I thought they were all wiped out like Samoa and the Bushmen by Christianity and firewater and downright greed.
“I hate long speeches. Also I’ve drunk too much. I’d better sit down.”
* * *
There was a long silence. Eventually a spattering of applause went around the hall and died. The woman from State sitting next to Norman turned to him and said, “Well, he said a few nice things about you, Mr. House, and I’m sure you deserve them.”
“I deserve to have my head shrunk,” Norman answered curtly, getting to his feet.
“What?”
“I’m a fool!” Norman snapped, and walked away.
Dear Friend—I write to you as one who has already supported some of my ventures dedicated to Justice, Right and the Natural Law of White Supremacy. You have no doubt heard how those pro-communist Devils in Washington have sold out more of our irreplaceable natural resources to a gang of lousy black beggars in Beninia. I propose to …
“And speaking of foreign aid: I think we may justly cite the recently announced Beninia project as an undertaking which combines to the highest degree enlightened self-interest with the support of the deserving. I only regret that our present Administration preferred to operate through intermediaries instead of…”
CHAIRMAN YUNG SLAMS U S
DUBS BENINIA PROJECT ‘NAKED ECONOMIC AGGRESSION’
Your board is pleased to report that after certain minor initial difficulties the Beninia project is well under way. The fullest assistance has been forthcoming from the Beninian government, and the latest evaluation from Shalmaneser …
“The hole! I saw where it said on SCANALYZER that they haven’t fought any wars for themselves—not ever. If they don’t have the spunk to stand up for themselves they must be a pretty gutless bunch, and I don’t think we ought to give away…”
GT HOLDINGS BLAST OFF
2005
PRICE CEILING SHATTERED
Just because they put a few of their darker-skinned lackeys out front, don’t think this isn’t a white operation. In Beninia they are spitting on the bodies of our ancestors who died at Sharpeville and Bloemfontein, at Durban and Witwatersrand …
“My parents met in the Peace Corps. Dad says Beninia looks like another of the same sort of thing as what they did. Suppose I volunteered; would you…?”
CAIRO ATTACKS BEN PROJ AS ‘JEWISH PLOT’
GOVT SPONSORS BOYCOTT OF GT MERCHANDISE
Dear President Obomi—I saw on TV where it said your country doesn’t have any muckers. Well my boy Andy was killed by one and I have two other sweet prodgies I don’t want the same to happen to so please tell me how I can …
“What business we have meddling in affairs on another continent I don’t know. When there’s so much amiss over here you’d think we ought to…”
BRITISH PREMIER PRAISES BENINIA PROJECT
OTHER EUROPEAN REACTION GUARDED, HOSTILE
(LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the two following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you mustn’t,” and “I can but you mustn’t.”
—
The Hipcrime Vocab
by Chad C. Mulligan)
Eric Ellerman had expected them at least to tell him when they ran out of patience, give him some kind of a warning.
But they didn’t.
After the first encounter, Stal Lucas and his sparewheels allowed three days. They found him on the rapitrans again, predictable as sunrise, heard his excuses, and told him to do better.
How? Industrial security had kept pace with advances in espionage; literally, they counted every leaf of the Too Much strain, by running an automatic camera connected to a computer along the huge hydroponic tanks. He thought of stealing part of a leaf and trying to make it take as a cutting; he dropped the fragment inside his shoe and tried to get past the gate sniffers with it. But they detected the aroma given off by the uncured leaf and although they accepted his excuse that it must have fallen into his shoe by accident it just so happened that on the same day one of the water technicians was fool enough to try and get out with a whole stem of the plant, apparently for his own use. After that, security was unbelievable for a while.
He told Stal and the yonderboy wasn’t interested. He said this time next week, or …
Copy the genetic structure from a cured leaf? Couldn’t be done without the kind of equipment he employed in the lab, and he couldn’t afford to keep a Jeans-Whitman molecular analyser in his kitchen. In any case, every pack of Too Much that left the premises was bombarded with radiation designed to blur the key genes. One would have to buy a thousand joints before one could be sure of establishing the correct pattern.
He quarrelled with Ariadne worse than ever and once he hit Penelope so hard he was frightened of himself. She did not cry over the bruise, but went away in a corner and nursed it. When he came after her to try and apologise and comfort her she fled from him.
He thought of asking a friend for advice, but there wasn’t anyone. People at the plant had never been close to him, and since the word got around that Ariadne was pregnant again they had been keeping their distance—so far away, he could not even nail the lie.
The day before Stal had promised to waylay him again he decided firmly that he must report what had happened to the authorities and ask for help. He put in an application to see the director responsible for the tectogenetic section. The director listened to the story in the morning and nodded thoughtfully over it. In the afternoon he called Eric back and had him sit in on a telephone conversation with a police lieutenant who appeared to be convinced that Eric was marketing his story to attract attention.
“No, of course I didn’t see what kind of shoes they were wearing! They cornered me in a crowded rapitrans car! No, I don’t have any way of getting in touch with them—they said they’d find me again, they know where I live.”
Probably the director had mentioned things like his not getting the expected raise awarded to everyone else after the success of the Too Much strain; probably he’d said something about having three prodgies, and all girls at that—anti-social, work falling off, incipient paranoia …
The police lieutenant told him to string Stal along and see what else he could find out and then maybe there would be some action. Meantime he was busy and couldn’t spare a man to keep watch over an adult citizen.
The next morning’s conversation consisted in two sentences and a quadruple shrug.
“You have what we asked for, darling?”
“Look, if you’d only let me explain you’d see why it’s so difficult!”
Shrug.
* * *
It was so long coming—days on days, and the hints and clues subtle as the dropping temperature before a storm. A resident in their block usually friendly, becoming curt. Penelope coming back from school in tears and refusing to be comforted. Ariadne being deliberately short-changed at the block store and losing the argument because people in the line behind shoved her until she had to grab the groceries and run. Someone unknown spitting in a culture he was working on at the labs. A red cross smeared in lipstick on the door of the apt.
He told Ariadne eventually that he was going to apply to GT for a post in Beninia because it said they wanted people in every possible discipline and that must include competent geneticists. She said she didn’t want her children growing up in some filthy foreign country. He lost the first stage of the argument. It was won for him when she caught the Gadsden boy and some of his sparewheels tormenting Penelope, telling her they were going to make her have lots of babies and she’d die but she would go to heaven because that was what all Right Catholics were supposed to do. They had got as far as taking off her panties.
In his innocence he had assumed that once his letter of application was in the mail it was safe; the slot in the wall of the apt was supposed to feed directly to a mail-canister collected by the Post Office twice a day. He’d forgotten that the address itself told a long, long story.
Saturday evening he went for some liquor and joints to help ease the passage of time. In the store someone jostled him and said loudly, “Crowded around here! And some people I could name don’t help!”
