“What I want to know is, how much longer is that damned government of ours going to take this lying down?”
PRIVATE!
“Our enemies skulk on every side, waiting for us to relax our vigilance. But we shall not give them the chance they seek to fall on and devour us. We shall stand firm, and our nation shall be purged of dross in the pure fire of self, sacrifice.”
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
To all Party bureaux: Revisionism and backsliding has been noted with concern in the following Departments …
“Yeah, but what I mean, even if he does have a clean genotype a guy with a proper sense of social responsibility just doesn’t have five kids in this day and age! I don’t care if he does get the Populimit Bulletin in his mail—that could be a cover, couldn’t it? No, I say he must be one of these Right Catholic bleeders. And I want him out!”
BEWARE OF THE DOG
“What rightfully, legally and historically belongs to us lies groaning under the heel of a foreign tyrant!”
THESE PREMISES PROTECTED BY SAFE-T-GARD INC.
“It is not enough that we ourselves should enjoy freedom. We shall not be truly free until everyone alive can make the same sincere and honest claim.”
NO RIGHT OF WAY
“It is not enough that we ourselves should enjoy freedom. There are those in our very midst who extol the virtues of an alien way of life which we know to be evil, hateful and wrong!”
NIGGER DON’T LET THE SUN SHINE ON YOUR HEAD
“Dirty Reds—”
My country ’tis of thee
NATIONALS RIGHT LANE ALIENS LEFT LANE
“Capitalist hyenas—”
There’ll always be an England
BLANKES NIEBLANKES
“The wogs begin at Calais—”
Vive la France!
FLEMING WALLOON
“Bloody nignogs—”
Deutschland über Alles
YORUBA IBO
“Goddamn people next door—”
Nkosi Sikelele Afrika
YOURS MINE
“They’re all mad bar thee and me and thee’s a little queer—”
MINE!
MINE!!
MINE!!!
(PATRIOTISM A great British writer once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the decency to betray his country.
Amen, brothers and sisters! Amen!
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
tracking with closeups (6)
WHICH SIDE AM I ON?
In New York Elihu Masters preferred not to stay at a hotel, nor even at the home of one of his many friends, though he knew some of them were hurt by his repeated refusals. Instead he took a room at the United Nations Hostel, and if—as on this visit—the premises were so crowded that all they could find for him was a poky overgrown closet where the bed folded back to the wall so the occupant could get at the bathtub underneath, that was cool.
He was afraid of falling in love with his own country as his old friend Zadkiel Obomi had done, to the point where his precariously fostered, deliberately chosen commitment to the species man would cave in under pressure from the plight of his fellow Americans. Today he had come perilously close to doing exactly that. The spectacle of that youthful VP at General Technics had made him so indescribably sad …
He had not yet brought into the open the reason for his approach to General Technics, but he didn’t doubt that they would have submitted the facts to Shalmaneser and received an assessment that was very close to the truth. Too much of his life was a matter of public record: his personal request for transfer to Beninia, for example, when in the normal course of events he should have been the next ambassador to Delhi and afterwards reaped one of the real plum jobs—Paris, perhaps, or even Moscow. There had been such a clamour about his going to Beninia, especially from the Children of X …
He sat in the room’s only chair, facing but not seeing a wall-flat TV screen on which the marvel of holographic signal transmission presented images that seemed solid and changed their appearance and perspective if one moved from side to side of the picture. The set had recently shown him a SCANALYZER programme, and the details of Pacific fighting and vandalism, of anti-Right Catholic riots and muckers at large, had depressed him into a near-stupor.
Lax in one hand he held a book recommended to him by a friend, one which had appeared a few months after his departure for Beninia. He’d heard the author’s name before, naturally; he was rated by those who should know as among the handful of truly great sociological vulgarisateurs in the tradition of Packard and Riesman.
But he’d announced this book as his swan-song, and true to his promise—according to the friend who’d loaned it to him—since its publication he had vanished. Rumour said he was dead by his own hand. Indeed, the despair that breathed through his mocking definitions reminded Elihu of nothing so much as Wells’s Mind at the End of its Tether, that grim epitaph for human aspiration, and suggested that the rumour might be right.
He stirred now and looked at it afresh. The cover showed a barrel of gunpowder with a train fizzing across the floor. Doubtless that design had been chosen by the publisher, not by Chad Mulligan himself—he was aware of the twenty-first century and would never have permitted anything so archaic if he’d been informed in time.
In fact, Mulligan …
Elihu gave a slow nod. He had to concede that he was impressed, as one might be by a doctor who declined to mislead his patients with false reassurances. Mulligan might have understood the motives which could take the bright star of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps to the shabby, run-down slums of Port Mey instead of the clean modernity of Moscow. He might even, though himself a Caucasian, have comprehended the choice such a man felt was facing him: either to give himself up to the crying needs of his own people, who in this brave new century were still the trapped ones, spawning the majority of the muckers (though the newscasts by policy never mentioned their colour), the majority of the dicties (though most of them couldn’t afford Skulbustium or Triptine and poisoned themselves on kitchen-brewed Yaginol or scraped poppy-juice from the slit pods with the backs of dirty knives), the ones who said, “I don’t have to ghetto where I’m going because I was born here!”—or else determinedly to give love only to friends, and loyalty only to the entire human race.
Black or not black, this man Elihu Masters could not identify any better with the greedy bosses in Bamako and Accra, alternating between wheedling overtures to Beninia and shrieks of rage at each other designed to distract their own people from inter-tribal squabbling, than he could with the board of General Technics. Let the Dahomalians and the RUNGs fight their shadow-wars, utter their rival boasts about which country was the more industrialised, the more powerful, the more ready to spring to the defence of its national integrity; for him, the fact that Zadkiel Obomi could juggle four language-groups—two of which were intruders anyhow, descendants of refugees from twentieth-century tribal massacres in adjacent territories—and keep them singing under circumstances which might have been expected to lead to civil war, was the grand achievement of all Africa.
And perhaps … of the whole world.
He could hear that singing in memory now, over the thump-thump beat of pestles in mealie mortars because there were no surplus hides for luxuries like drumheads. To that insistent rhythm he found himself speaking aloud.
“It’s not that it’s good to live in squalor!” he exclaimed, and slapped the book on his palm for emphasis. “It’s that they haven’t been taught the ways we more sophisticated folk know to hate each other!”
He knew that was nonsense the moment he had said it. Human beings were deluding themselves when they claimed that hatred was something they had to be taught. Hatred of rivals, of intruders on private property, of the more powerful male or the more fertile female, was implicit in the psychological structure of mankind. And yet the fact remained: he had sensed in Beninia a s
ort of happiness in face of poverty he had never detected anywhere else.
Possibly it’s due to Zad himself? No, that’s equally nonsensical. Not even Jesus, not even Mohammed, not even the Buddha, could have made such a claim. Yet I’m sure it’s an objective phenomenon! Maybe, when GT moves in, they’ll put the facts to Shalmaneser and come up with the explanation.
But that was more ridiculous than ever, a pure piece of self-excusatory rationalising. The only facts available to be fed into a computer were public knowledge: Beninia was a small country, assailed by famine, run by its president and a handful of talented subordinates long past the point where its larger neighbours had given up and federated into colonial-language groups. In the background loomed certain curious historical problems, such as the reason why the Arab slave-traders ignored Shinkas when assembling parties for sale to European purchasers, why despite an unwarlike tradition that tribe had never been subjugated by its neighbours, why under the British colonial government there had never once been a revolutionary party set up, why …
“What the hell is the good of worrying about it?” Elihu said, once more addressing the walls of the room. “I love the place, and when they get love down to a bunch of factors you can analyse with a computer there’ll be nothing left of whatever makes it worth being human!”
context (7)
BULL FIGHT
Scene: a cathedral during morning service.
Cast: Bishop and congregation.
Detail: a smear along the front rim of the pulpit. It was applied with a paintbrush and consists of a vesicant (formula related to mustard gas but a sight more efficient) and a hallucinogen (GT’s catalogue reference AKZ-21205 converted by boiling with dilute sulphuric acid into the product nicknamed “Truth or Consequences”).
Prediction: when the Bishop closes his hands, as he invariably does, on the pulpit rail …
Truth: “I take my text from the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, from the seventeenth chapter, and from the first verse of that chapter. Hr-hm! ‘I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.’
“Now I have no doubt that some of you—(ouch! What in the name of…?)—will have been a trifle shocked (what can possibly have made my hands smart like this?) at the choice of text which I’ve made—quite deliberately, I assure you (perhaps it’ll wear off if I try and ignore it)—in order to dramatise in the most violent possible fashion a truth which some people, professedly Christians like ourselves, have closed their eyes to. (It burns like hellfire!)
“The point which I want to make, which I hope to convince you needs to be made, is this—and it’s quite a simple one. Because the Book from which I took my text is that among all others which is relevant to everyday human experience, it does not shun some of the less palatable aspects of our lives. It does not express approval of them, naturally, but it certainly does not censor, as it were, the home truths about us which we have to face squarely if we are to lead the kind of lives it’s our Christian duty to attempt. (Ah, that’s better, it’s coming down to a sort of warm glow like gloves.)
“And because Man has a spark of the divine in his nature, the founders of our Church did not shrink from using very human—one might almost say crudely human—analogies in their teaching.
“The analogy of the prostitute, who sells her body for gain, is one which a few generations ago might have been regarded as distasteful by a great number of people. But the fact that our society called such people into existence was itself a shame—a disgrace, one might call it, using the strict technical aspect of the term ‘grace’. Fortunately we have come to recognise some concomitant aspects of the responsibility with which we have been charged by being created in material bodies, and among these is a recognition of the fact that the fact that the choice of the symbol of marriage between our Lord and His bride the Church was no accident—that, in short, the union between man and wife is an expression of love, an expression of love, in other words—ah—an expression of love. (I hope they won’t notice if I lean back against the pillar behind me!)
“Of course, prostitutes are becoming harder and harder to find these days. When I was a young man, there were some among my fellows who—ah—resorted to such persons, and I thought they were to be pitied, because clearly they had not come to terms with the built-in, as it were, faculty for expressing affection which is implied in the act which has not only the perpetuation of our species as its goal but also the giving of delight by one person to another or others.
“(?)
“When I say ‘others’, of course, I have in mind the regrettable fact that we human beings are far short of perfect and in a sense the full achievement of this heaven-sent faculty for pleasing one’s life’s partner is, like other human activities, one requiring testing and practice before the ultimate skill is achieved, and thus and therefore we find people who marry and genuinely regret that they chose this particular partner to whom in the upshot they are not after all suited and from whom with regret we part them regretfully because …
“Well, anyway. (Never realised before how heavy and sweaty these idiotic robes can become!)
“Lots of people don’t get this point, as you very well know. I mean, ever since the great schism of the late twentieth century, we’ve been treated to the nauseating spectacle of some head-in-the-sand bigots over there in Madrid bombarding what are supposed to be their fellow Catholics with a succession of bulls and encyclicals and what-not just because the Church of Rome cottoned on to the basic truth that there’s more to making love than manufacturing a series of babies who can be splashed with a bit of holy water and sent off to heaven to keep the hallelujahs flying and recognised the need for the contraceptive pill. But here’s this Pope Eglantine going on about how you mustn’t interfere with divine ordinances and give your other kids a chance to grow up in comfort so they can become rounded adult human beings, oh no, you must never ever enjoy yourself with anybody else except to procreate as though there weren’t enough of us around treading on each other’s heels and getting in the way all the time and taking away the bread from our mouths practically because they’re so greedy and selfish and Christ it’s enough to make you want to turn Muslim, really it is, because they’re promised a string of perpetually virgin houris when they die and what else is the contraceptive pill except a here-and-now counterpart of that no mucking about when your wife gets her belly full and night after night lying alone and unable to sleep for the pressure and you know literally it gets to be an ache after a while and all those sheeting idiots like Augustine who had his fun when he was a kid with the women of the streets and then turned around and forbade it for everyone else I think he had the pox and it got into his spinal fluid and brought on GPI and if it weren’t for the fact that he’s probably impotent anyone would think the same thing had happened to Pope Eglantine and his gang of Right Catholics. Why don’t I shut up and stop stuffing your ears with nonsense when you ought to be stuffing some other organ entirely?”
Consequence: the congregation was extremely disturbed.
continuity (6)
AUCTION BLOCK FOR ME
“Mr. House.” The tone absolutely neutral. “We met earlier today. Sit down, won’t you? It’ll have to be on the bed, I’m afraid—or perhaps you’d rather we adjourned to one of the public lounges downstairs?”
“No, this is fine,” Norman said distractedly, lowering himself on the very edge of the narrow bed. His eyes roamed randomly from point to point in the small room.
“May I offer you some refreshment? I recall that you don’t take alcohol, but perhaps coffee, or—”
“No thanks. I’ll smoke, though, if you don’t mind.”
“Ah, Bay Golds! That’s the brand I used to favour—no, I won’t, thank you. I gave it up. I was using it as a refuge from clear-headedness, and once or twice I nearly visited disaster on myself in consequence.”
Skirmishing. Abruptly Norman found the words to speak his mind. With the reefer in
his hand still unlit, he said, “Look, Mr. Masters, let me say what I’ve come to say and then get out and stop bothering you. Mainly, it’s that I know I didn’t make a very good impression on you at lunchtime.”
Elihu leaned back in his chair, crossed his right leg over his left, put the tips of his fingers together, and waited.
“I’m not talking about the kind of impression Old GT and the rest of the high muckamucks brought me in to make on you. That has nothing to do with me as a person—it’s all the corporation image bit, here’s an enlightened employer with coloured VPs, and it’s stale news. The big companies have been doing it for fifty or sixty years and all it’s done is assuage a part of their guilt. What I’m apologising for is the impression I set out to make.”
He looked at Elihu squarely for the first time. “Tell me honestly: what did you think of me?”
“Think of you?” Elihu echoed, and gave a sad chuckle. “I didn’t get the chance to form an opinion of you. I’ll tell you what I thought of the way you were coming on, if you like.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“You were demonstrating to the distinguished visitor that you could be an even bigger bleeder than GT’s chief executives.”
There was a pause. Eventually Elihu dropped his hands to his lap. “Well, I’ve answered your question, and by your silence you haven’t had much benefit from it. Now answer one of mine. What happened to you when you were called down to the disturbance in Shalmaneser’s vault?”
Norman swallowed gigantically, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Nothing of much importance,” he muttered.
“I don’t believe you. When you came back you were on your automatic pilot; there wasn’t a spark of genuine personality in anything you did or said throughout the meal, just a set of conditioned reflexes operating well enough to fool anyone except maybe a psychologist—or a diplomat. I’ve learned to tell the difference, just by walking into a room, between an honest negotiator and a delegate instructed merely to parrot his government’s official standpoint. You may be able to lie to the WASPs you work for, but I’ve grown old in the study of human deceit, and I know.”