He leaned forward and took Norman’s left hand in his. He probed between the tendons with the tips of his fingers. For a moment Norman was too astonished to react; then he snatched himself loose as though he had been stung.
“How did you guess?” he said.
“I didn’t. An old man—I suppose you’d call him a witchdoctor—taught me muscle-reading in the back streets of Port-au-Prince while I was ambassador to Haiti. I thought for a moment you must have suffered some sort of major injury to that hand, but I can’t feel the effects of one. Whose hand was it, then?”
“My three times great-grandfather.”
“Back in slavery days?”
“Yes.”
“Cut off?”
“Sawn off. Because he hit his boss and knocked him into a creek.”
Elihu nodded. “You must have been very young when you heard about it,” he suggested.
“Six, I think.”
“A bad thing to tell a child that age.”
“How can you say that? It was the kind of important thing kids my age needed to be told! Six wasn’t too young for me to have learned that the kid I liked most on our block, the one I thought of as my best friend, was ready at a minute’s notice to join with other kids I didn’t like and call me a dirty nigger bastard.”
“Have you noticed you don’t hear that used so much any longer—that particular insult? Probably you wouldn’t have. I notice the shifts in usage because I spend years at a time out of the country, and the process has gone quite a long way whenever I return. Nowadays where you used to say ‘bastard’ you tend to say ‘bleeder’ instead—to mean ‘haemophiliac’, I assume.”
“What?” Confused, Norman shook his head.
“If the point isn’t clear, I’ll deal with it in a moment. How did this story about your ancestor affect you?”
“I used to get pains in this arm.” Norman held it out. “They called it rheumatism. It wasn’t. It was psychosomatic. I used to dream of being held down and having it sawn through. I’d wake up screaming and mother would yell at me from the next room to shut up and let her get her sleep.”
“Didn’t you tell her you were having nightmares?”
Norman looked at the floor between his feet. He shook his head. “I guess I was afraid she might scold my great-grandfather and forbid him to talk to me about it.”
“Why did you want him to? Never mind—you don’t have to spell it out. What happened today that connected with this traumatic at age six?”
“A Divine Daughter tried to wreck Shalmaneser with an axe. Chopped the hand off one of our technicians.”
“I see. Can they put it back?”
“Oh yes. But the surgeons said he might lose some of the motor functions.”
“And you walked in on this, from cold?”
“Prophet’s beard—cold! I didn’t know it was more than one of their sheeting demonstrations, slogan-shouting and waving banners around!”
“Why hadn’t your company police taken care of it before you arrived?”
“Worse than useless. Said they didn’t dare fire from the gallery for fear of hitting Shalmaneser, and by the time they made it to floor level I’d fixed her.”
“So you did fix her. How?”
Norman closed his eyes and palmed them. His voice barely audible between his hands, he said, “I saw a liquid helium leak once, from a pressurised hose. That gave me the idea. I got one of the pipes and—and I sprayed her arm. Froze it solid. Crystallised it. The weight of her axe snapped it off.”
“They can’t put her hand back then, presumably.”
“Prophet’s beard, no. It must have spoiled instantly—like a frosted apple!”
“Are you facing serious consequences from this? Are you going to be arraigned for maiming her, for example?”
“Of course not.” The words were half-contemptuous. “GT looks after its own, and in view of what she was trying to do to Shalmaneser … We’ve always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that.”
“Well, if it’s not the consequences it must be the act itself. How has it made you feel about yourself?”
Norman let his hands fall. He said bitterly, “You missed your vocation, didn’t you? You should have been a shrinker.”
“My neuroses aren’t the kind you can project on to other neurotics. I asked you something, and unless I’m much mistaken it’s what you came here to talk about, so why not get it over with?”
The forgotten reefer went waveringly to Norman’s lips. He got it lit, drew in and held the first puff. After half a minute, he said, “How I feel about myself? I feel I’ve been conned. I feel ashamed. I finally evened the score. I got a trophy—I got a paleass’s hand. And how did I get where I could take that off? By following the rules for living that The Man laid down. And they’re no good! Because what use is that hand to my long-ago ancestor? He’s dead!”
He drew on the reefer again and this time held the smoke for a full minute.
“Yes, I think he probably is,” Elihu agreed after a few moments’ reflection. “As of today. Think he needs to be mourned?”
Norman gave a quick headshake.
“Right.” Elihu resumed his original position, elbows on chair-arms, fingertips together. “A short while ago I remarked on something that apparently struck you as irrelevant—the fact that you don’t hear people calling each other ‘bastard’ so much any more. It’s important. To be born out of wedlock doesn’t signify, any more than it did in slavery days when our forefathers and mothers didn’t marry—they simply bred. What you do hear used as an insult is a word that probably means ‘haemophiliac’. It matches the preoccupations of our society; it’s become detestable, anti-social, to have children if you’re carrying a harmful gene like that one. Are you on my orbit now?”
“Things change,” Norman said.
“Exactly. You aren’t six years old any longer. A boss can’t do to his subordinates what a long-ago white man did to your three times great-grandfather. But is the world a paradise because of those truisms?”
“Paradise?”
“Of course not. Aren’t there enough problems to handle in present time, that you should brood over ancient ones?”
“Yes, but—” Norman made a helpless gesture. “You don’t know what sort of a dead end I’ve been lured down! I’ve been working on the current version of myself for years, for decades! What am I to do?”
“That’s for you to work out.”
“It’s easy enough to say ‘work out’ the answer! You’ve been away from this country for years at a time, you said so yourself. You don’t know what The Man is like, even nowadays—you don’t know how he leans on you all the time, needles you, goads you. You just haven’t experienced my life.”
“I guess that’s a fair comment.”
“For example…” Norman gazed without seeing at the wall behind Elihu’s head. “Heard of a woman called Guinevere Steel?”
“I gather she’s responsible for the mechanical styles women are affecting here at the moment, as though they were built in a factory and not born of a mother.”
“Right. She’s planning to hold a party. It’ll be a microcosm of what I mean, all there in the one apartment and dripping slime. I should drag you along with me, and then perhaps you’d—”
He stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly appalled at what he was saying and who he was saying it to.
“Mr. Masters, I’m dreadfully sorry! I have no business to talk to you this way!” Rising to his feet, covered in embarrassment. “I ought to be thanking you very sincerely for your tolerance, and here I am insulting you and…”
“Sit down,” Elihu said.
“What?”
“I said sit down. I haven’t finished, even if you have. Do you feel you owe me anything?”
“Of course. If I hadn’t been able to talk to somebody tonight, I think I’d have gone insane.”
“How well you express my feelings,” Elihu said with po
nderous irony. “May I take it that right now you aren’t excessively concerned with GT’s company secrets remaining inviolate?”
“I know too damned well that they aren’t.”
“I’m sorry?” Elihu blinked.
“A private problem … Oh, why try and hide it? The shiggy I’ve been keeping around lately turned out this evening to be an industrial spy; my roomie discovered an eavesdropping gadget hidden in a polyorgan she brought with her.” Norman gave a harsh laugh. “Anything you want to know, just ask—I can always claim she was the one who got away with the secret.”
“I’d rather you told me openly if you tell me at all.”
“Yes, I shouldn’t have said that. Go ahead.”
“What do GT’s people think is my purpose in approaching them?”
“I don’t know. No one has told me.”
“Have you figured it out for yourself?”
“Not exactly. I was talking about it with my roomie earlier this evening. But we didn’t reach any definite conclusion.”
“Well, suppose I were to say my intention is to sell my dearest friend into slavery to The Man, and that I believe it’s for his own good—what then?”
Norman’s mouth rounded slowly into an O. He snapped his fingers. “President Obomi?” he said.
“You’re a very intelligent man, Mr. House. Well—your verdict?”
“But what have they got that GT might want?”
“It isn’t GT as such. It’s State.”
“Not willing to risk another Isola-type crisis?”
“You’re beginning to amaze me, and I’m not joking.”
Norman looked uncomfortable. “To be frank, it was one of the ideas my roomie and I were tossing around. If I hadn’t heard it from yourself, though, I’d never have credited it.”
“Why not? GT’s annual profit is almost fifty times the gross national product of Beninia; they could buy and sell many of the underdeveloped countries.”
“Yes, but even granting their ability to do it, which I can’t contest, the question remains: what is there in Beninia that GT might want?”
“A twenty-year rehabilitation project that will create an advanced industrial bridgehead in West Africa, serviced by the best port on the Bight of Benin, able to compete on their own terms and on their own ground with the Dahomalians and the RUNGs. State has a computer analysis which suggests that the intervention of a third force is the only factor likely to prevent a war over Beninia when my good friend Zad dies—and that day can’t be as far off as I’d like it to be. He’s working himself into his grave.”
“And this will belong to GT?”
“It’ll be—mortgaged to GT, let me put it that way.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“But if the alternative is war—?”
“From the inside, from the status of a junior VP in the corporation, I say that war itself isn’t as foul as what GT can do to a man’s self-respect. Listen!” Norman leaned forward earnestly. “Do you know what they’ve duped me into doing? I subscribe to these Genealogical Research outfits, these near-crank businesses which claim to trace your descent on the basis of your genotype. And do you know I haven’t commissioned one to track my Afram heritage? I don’t know where my black ancestors came from to within two thousand miles!”
“And supposing it’s a cousin of yours—and mine—who gives the order and the armies march into Beninia! What’s going to be left of the country? The loser is going to scorch the earth behind him when he retreats, and there will be nothing left except rubble and corpses!”
Norman’s intensity faded. He shrugged and nodded. “I guess you’re right. We’re all human beings, after all.”
“Let me tell you the scheme. GT will float a loan to finance the operation, and State will buy a fifty-one percent interest through front agents—mainly African banks. GT will guarantee five per cent per annum for the twenty-year period of the project, and publish estimates of a yield in excess of eight per cent. That’s solidly based, by the way, on State’s computations; when they give the data to Shalmaneser they expect it to be confirmed. Then they’ll recruit the teaching staff, mainly among people who were colonial administrators and so on in the old days, people who are used to West African conditions. The first three years will go on diet, sanitation and building. The next decade will go on training—a literacy drive first, then a technical education programme designed to make eighty per cent of the population of Beninia into skilled workers. I see you’re looking incredulous, but I say I believe this will work. There’s no other country in the world where you could bring it off, but in Beninia you can. And the last seven years will go to build the factories, install the machine-tools, string the powerlines, level the roads—everything else, in short, to leave Beninia as the most advanced country on the continent, South Africa not excepted.”
“Allah be merciful,” Norman said softly. “But where do you get the power to feed into the lines?”
“It’s going to be tidal, solar, and deep-sea thermal. Mainly the latter. The temperature gradient between the surface and the sea-bed at those latitudes could apparently run a whole country much larger than Beninia.”
Norman hesitated. “In that case,” he ventured at length, “the raw materials will presumably be coming from MAMP?”
A new cordiality entered Elihu’s manner. “As I said before, Mr. House, you suddenly astonish me. When we met earlier today your—ah—superficial image was so flawless as to conceal from me this sort of perceptivity. Yes, that’s going to be the carrot with which we coax the GT donkey into agreement: the promise of a built-in market that will enable them to put the MAMP mineral deposits to work.”
“On the basis of what you’ve told me,” Norman said, “I presume they jumped at the idea.”
“You’re the first person at GT to hear the full details.”
“The—? But why?” Norman’s question was almost a cry.
“I don’t know.” Elihu seemed suddenly weary. “I guess because I’d kept it to myself too long, and you were here when it broke loose. Shall I call Miss Buckfast and tell her I want you sent to Port Mey to conduct the initial negotiations?”
“I—wait a moment! What makes you so sure she’ll consent when you haven’t even explained the project to her?”
“I’ve met her,” Elihu said. “And I only need to meet someone once to know if this is the sort of person who’d like to own nine hundred thousand slaves.”
the happening world (5)
CITIZEN BACILLUS
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice
Take stock, citizen bacillus,
Now that there are so many billions of you,
Bleeding through your opened veins
Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific,
Of that by which they may remember you.
Gravestones, citizen bacillus?
“Here lies in God the beloved husband
Of Mary, father of Jim and Jane”?
But they closed the cemetery at Fifth and Oak
And put up an apartment block on it.
Ideas, citizen bacillus?
They raised you literate and educated,
Equipped to exercise initiative.
But now our technological society
Insists you behave as a statistic.
Products, citizen bacillus?
It’s not by any means improbable
You possess advanced crafts and skills.
But there’s a tape in the chemical milling machine
Accurate to one molecular diameter.
A son, citizen bacillus?
Apply to the Eugenic Processing Board,
Give them a sample of your genotype.
But be prepared to hear it’s disallowed
And don’t complain in hearing of your neighbours.
No, no, citizen bacillus!
Here is your monument and it stands high!
The cars which you wore out, the clothes you tore,
The ca
ns you emptied, furniture you broke,
And all the shit with which you clogged the drains.
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice …
tracking with closeups (7)
THE TOO MUCH STRAIN
Until very recently Eric Ellerman had thought that this was the worst time of the day, the interval between waking and arriving at his job, spent steeling himself afresh each morning for the ordeal of facing his colleagues. But there seemed to be no “worst time” any longer.
It was purely and simply hell to be alive.
From the breakfast alcove where he was gulping his second cup of synthetic coffee—the three-child tax had taken away his chance of buying the real thing—he could see the morning sun glinting on miles of green-houses, rising from the far side of the valley, climbing up over the hill and vanishing into the next dip. Above them loomed a gigantic orange sign: FOR ME IT’S HITRIP OF CALIFORNIA EVERY TIME, SAYS “THE MAN WHO’S MARRIED TO MARY JANE”!
But how much longer can I live in sight of my work?
Through the flimsy wall separating him from the children’s room came the fractious squalling of the twins, neglected while Ariadne dressed Penelope ready for school. She was crying again too. How much longer before the hammering from the next apartment started? He cast a nervous glance at his watch and discovered that he had time to finish his drink.
“Arry! Can’t you quiet them?” he called.
“I’m doing my best!” came the fierce reply. “If you’d give me a hand with Penny that’d help!”
And, as though the words had been a signal, the banging from next door began.
Ariadne appeared, hair tousled, negligee hanging open to show the way her belly was sagging, shoving Penelope in front of her because the child was rubbing both tear-swollen eyes and refusing to look where she was going.
“All yours,” Ariadne snapped. “And I wish you joy of her!”