Perhaps Norman’s bedroom was a more honest reflection of him? Donald concluded that was unlikely. His own was not, because in theory at least, if not at present in practice, it was shared by a visiting shiggy. Additionally each of them had another small room for total privacy. Donald had never set foot over the threshold of Norman’s, though he had glimpsed it through the open door. He had seen too little to judge if that was genuinely personalised. His own—probably not. It was more of a library than anything else, and half the books had been chosen on orders from his employers, not to suit his own tastes.
If the consequences of having to share an apartment were as negative as this, he thought, how would he justify his and Norman’s preference for it and the widespread incidence of the habit, to a foreigner from a less healthy—hence less crowded—country, or to an old man who remembered when the first aspiration of a successful bachelor was a place entirely of his own?
Well … there was one obvious advantage, plus a number of minor additional ones. The easiest to see was that sharing enabled both of them to enjoy a standard of accommodation which for spaciousness and comfort exceeded what either could have afforded alone. Even on his GT salary Norman would have been hard put to it to live this well otherwise, what with the way prices had rocketed since the Fuller Dome was erected.
Some of the additional inducements were almost equally plain, like the shiggy-trading which was taken as a matter of course. Others were subtler, like the convenience of being able to let strangers assume that they were not just living together but living together. It grew so tiresome to be asked over and over again, “But if you’re allowed to be a father, why aren’t you?”
* * *
There was nothing in his own mail to attract his interest; Donald dumped the whole lot into the disposall. Sipping his drink, he grew aware that Norman had glanced at him, and he forced a smile.
“Where’s Victoria?” he inquired, for lack of any other subject.
“Showering down. She smells, and I told her so.” Norman’s tone was absent, but behind the words Donald could detect all the inverted snobbery of the modern Afram.
You dirty black bastard …
Since Norman was apparently disinclined to prolong the exchange, he let his attention wander back to the Wholographik picture on the floor. He remembered the latest come-on he’d seen, one which Norman had left lying around in this room; it had claimed accurate genetic analysis given nothing more than one nail-paring from each of the subject’s parents. That was such a flagrant lie he’d considered reporting it to the Better Business Bureau. Even in this year of grace you had only a sixty-forty chance of proving who your father was on such slender evidence, let alone of tracking back into the Caucasian side of what was predominantly an Afram heredity.
But he had changed his mind about making the complaint, for fear of infringing his cover.
God, if I’d known it was going to be such a lonely life I think I’d have …
“Hi, Donald,” Victoria said, emerging from Norman’s bathroom in a veil of steam and Arpège Twenty-first Scentury. She walked past him and threw one leg challengingly across Norman’s lap. “Smell me now! Okay?”
“Okay,” Norman said, not raising his head. “Go put some clothes on, then.”
“You’re a bleeder. Wish I didn’t like you.”
But she complied.
On the sound of the bedroom door shutting, Norman cleared his throat. “By the way, Donald, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you going to do something about—?”
“When I find someone suitable,” Donald muttered.
“You’ve been saying that for weeks, damn it.” Norman hesitated. “Frankly, I’ve been thinking I might be better off if I took in Horace in your place—I know he’s looking for a spare tatami.”
Suddenly alarmed, but concealing his reaction, Donald gazed directly at his roomie. Overlaid on his image he saw, as brilliantly as if she had still been in the room, Victoria: a high-Scandahoovian natural blonde, the only type Norman had ever brought into the apartment.
Does he mean it?
His own last steady, Gennice, had been his favourite: not one of the shiggies working the executive circuit like most of the ones they’d had in, but a woman with a strongly independent personality, almost forty and born in Trinidad. The reason he hadn’t replaced her was partly lack of inclination, partly the impression that he wouldn’t find her equal in a hurry.
He felt bewildered all over again, almost nauseatingly confused—the last thing he would have expected in his own home. He had imagined that he had made an accurate assessment of Norman, identified and typed him as the sort of self-conscious Afram who was uneasily balanced between insistence on having a white roomie and ill-concealed annoyance at that roomie’s preference for Afram girls. But Horace, to whom he’d referred a moment previously, was shades darker than Norman himself.
He was relieved when the phone went. Answering the call, reporting over his shoulder to Norman that it was Guinevere Steel inviting them to a forfeits party, he was able to complete in his mind, privately, the conclusion he had come to. Norman must have undergone a traumatic experience today.
If he’d come right out and said so, though, he’d have risked Norman putting his threat into effect; the Afram hated anyone to see beneath the calm mask he usually maintained.
And I don’t think I could face adjusting all over again to a stranger the way I’ve adjusted to Norman. Even if I can’t claim that we’re friends.
* * *
“What’s the theme of this forfeits party, by the way?”
“Hm?” Pouring himself another slug of whisky, Donald turned his head. “Oh—twentieth century.”
“Talk and behave in period, is that the idea?” On Donald’s nod: “Sort of stupid thing you’d expect from her, isn’t it?”
“Of course it’s stupid,” Donald agreed, only half his mind on what he was saying. “She lives so obsessively in the here-and-now she probably thinks the twentieth century was a solid arbitrary chunk of thought and behaviour. I doubt if she remembers she was in it herself a decade ago. So we’ll have people going around saying ‘twenty-three skiddoo!’ and ‘give me some skin daddy-o!’ and wearing niltops with New Look skirts all in one hopeless, helpless bungle.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” Norman said. “You make it sound even worse than I imagined.”
“What were you thinking of?” Donald said. Half-sensed at the back of his mind there was a need to talk—it didn’t have to be about the shock he’d experienced earlier. Any kind of talk would do provided he could open out and feel he wasn’t being secretive. The strain of never really communicating with anyone was getting on his nerves.
The corners of Norman’s mouth turned down to hint at bitterness. “Why, I’ll wager I’m the first Afram on her guest-list, and since I’ve accepted I’ll remain the only one, and someone’s going to be programmed to make like—let’s say—Bull Clark. And she’ll get a bunch of her entourage to gang together and claim a forfeit off me for not Uncle-Tomming.”
“You really think so? Whyinole did you accept, then?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Norman said with a trace of grim satisfaction. “A lot of other things happened last century besides what Guinevere likes to remember, and I shall take pleasure in stuffing them up her aristocratic nose.”
There was a silence. Both of them felt it as intolerably long. Norman had smoked barely half his Bay Gold, not enough to elasticate time for him, but because he had trespassed to the edge of the subject above all others where people like himself preferred not to be too open, he could not continue, a fact of which Donald was well aware. For him, though, the grouped references to the twentieth century had started his mind working on a train of association which forked and forked until he could no longer tell which point was relevant to what had been said at the beginning and which was not.
* * *
Perhaps I shouldn’t have made that remark about putti
ng Donald out and taking in Horace. One thing about keeping company with a WASP, especially a worrisome intellectual type like Donald: our private problems are far enough apart not to reinforce and multiply each other.
* * *
Wonder what did happen to Norman today? Something’s shaken him, no doubt of it. What does it feel like to be inside his skull? The Children of X can’t approve of codders like him, and his obsession with blue-eyed blondes. The company probably laps it up, of course; that big turnover in the eighties and nineties still casts its shadow. “The ideal company wife nowadays is an extremely ugly member of another racial group with no known father and two Ph.D.’s!”
But a company is no substitute for kinship.
Like to ask why he dislikes Guinevere so much. I can take her or leave her and she always has useful people to her parties, so I don’t give a pint of whaledreck. Footnote: I must try to discover when that phrase leaked into common parlance; it was the sludge left when you’d rendered blubber down for oil, if I remember right. Maybe it was public guilt when they found it was too late to save the whales. The last one was seen—when? ’Eighty-nine, I think.
* * *
I envy Donald the element of detachment in his makeup. I’d never dare tell him, though. Could be it’s only what mine is: a mask. But Guinevere is such a … and he hardly notices. What annoys him about her proposed party is like he said, the anachronism of treating the twentieth century as a lump. And it wasn’t. Who should know better than one of us?
I’m behind the times. Prophet’s beard, I’m practically obsolete. So I’m a VP for the world’s richest corporation—have I succeeded in terms personal to myself? I’ve just chopped my way through the soft rotten feelings of ancestral guilt these WASPs suffer from till I’ve reached my nice cosy comfortable den. And here I am.
How long till sunset prayer this evening, by the way?
* * *
But the Guineveres of our world are no more than the spray on the top of the wave. It forms spectacular transitory patterns, but the ground-swell is what alters the coastlines. I can feel currents of it from where I’m sitting.
Imagine a VP of a big corporation sharing an apartment, forty years ago, with an alleged independently wealthy dilettante. They’d never have promoted him to the job in the first place. They’d have looked around for some type with a presentable wife, wouldn’t have cared that the couple ate each other’s hearts out in private and shipped their kids off to boarding-school and summer camp and any other place they could to get them out of the way. Nowadays they wouldn’t give a pint of whaledreck even if we were sleeping together. It doesn’t breed, and that’s good. Everybody boasting about their children, complaining about not being allowed children—but they couldn’t have pushed the eugenics laws through if people hadn’t secretly felt relieved. We’re at the precipice where even our own children add intolerably to the task of coping with our fellow human beings. We feel much more guilty these days about resenting other people’s children than we do about the existence of people whose impulses don’t involve propagating the species.
Come to think of it, there’s a psychological as well as a physical sense in which we reproduce our kind. And we’ve tended to push the physical one further and further back in our lives. A lot of us have given it up altogether. We owe our intelligence—what there is of it—to having stretched the cub-period, the dominance of the Lustprinzip, beyond all reasonable bounds. Wonder if this is another way of stretching it still further. That would account for the development of the shiggy circuit, the fact that the world’s big cities are alive with women who’ve never had a permanent home, but live out of a bag and sleep a night, a week, half a year wherever there’s a man with an apartment to share. I must see if Mergendahler has published anything about this—it sounds like his field. I wish to God Mulligan hadn’t quit; we need him to tell us where we are, we need his insight like we need food!
* * *
No, it’s not Donald I should show the door to. It’s Victoria. He’s told me a score of times about my preoccupation with paleass shiggies, and I never listened, but he’s right. Prophet’s beard, all this talk about emancipation! Just one of the shiggies who’ve been in and out of this apartment like doses of aperient was stunningly beautiful and solid-ground sensible and marvellous in bed and a whole, rounded, balanced sort of person. And that was Gennice, that Donald brought home, not me, and I was unappreciative because she was a brown-nose. I must be off my gyros. I must be busted clear out of my nappy old plantation-bred skull!
Emancipated! Allah be just to me, I’m a worse prisoner of historical circumstance than the oldest Red Guard in Peking!
* * *
I wonder if we’ve been around each other long enough for him to think of me as Donald-a-person instead of Donald-a-WASP. I wonder if his impression of me is accurate. For the sake of absolute security I guess I should take him up on the threat he made, and move away. Being exposed for such a long time so intimately to one person is what the Colonel would call erosive. Funny how that one word he used has stuck in my mind so long … Still, no doubt they keep their eyes on me. They’ll tell me if they think I’m endangering my cover.
If I were to come straight out and tell Norman: “I’m not a lazy slob parasitising off inherited wealth and making like a poor man’s cousin to a synthesist because I haven’t any creative talent—I’m a spy…!”
I’d be stupid.
Wonder if I’m going to get nightmares again, like in the a plane tomorrow to God knows where. Oh, surely they’re early days, dreaming of a call in the middle of the night and not likely to pull me out of cold storage now? It’s been ten years, and I’m adapted, and even if I sometimes get depressed I like things as they are. I’d prefer not to have to adjust to someone else as I’ve done to Norman. I used to imagine I could manage without friends so intimate it would be cruel to keep up the lie where they were concerned. I don’t think I can. But at least in Norman’s case I can excuse not telling him the truth on the grounds that it’s too late; we’ve shared too much already. If I had to get this close to someone else I don’t think I could maintain my pretence.
Lord, I hope the forecast of their needs was wrong when they sent Jean Foden and enlisted me!
It’s all breaking loose at once. Someone’s stirred my mind with a stick. Anybody would think I’d been ingesting Skulbustium instead of just my regular brand of pot. I have to hitch on to something fast, or I’ll break to bits.
I’ve never really talked, like you’d say talked, to that codder in the other chair. I wonder if I can. Because if I can, that’ll mean something did happen to me today, it wasn’t just a momentary shock.
But I can’t approach it cold. Work up to it by a roundabout route.
* * *
The quickest way to find out what he thinks about me, of course, might perhaps be to ask him…?
* * *
“Donald—”
“Norman—”
They both laughed a trifle uneasily.
“What were you going to say?”
“No, no—you go ahead.”
“All right, I will. Donald, what can you tell me to refresh my memory about Beninia??”
context (5)
THE GRAND MANOR
“Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy. (I say ‘we,’ but if you’re a bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm’s length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.)
“We still haven’t digested the truth that evolution applies to mental functions, too—that because a dog is a dog, a dolphin a dolphin, it has an awareness and sense of personal identity distinct from ours but not necessarily inferior. Is an apple inferior to an orange?
“But I’m trying to tell you what??
?s happening to you, not what’s happening to Crêpe Suzette your neurotic poodle. A good veterinary psychologist can probably be located by calling Information. You wouldn’t believe him if he started telling you how much you have in common with that pet of yours, and likely you won’t believe me. But if I annoy you sufficiently you may at least try to think up arguments to demonstrate how wrong I am.
“Basically, then: you have two things in common. You’re a pack-animal; so is a dog. You’re a territorial animal; so is a dog. (The fact that we mark our manors with walls instead of urine is irrelevant.)
“The depiction of Man the Noble Savage standing off the wolves at the cave entrance, all by himself with a club, while his mate and their young cower in the background, is so much whaledreck. When we were at the stage of taking refuge in caves our habit was almost certainly to congregate in troupes the way baboons still do, and when the dog-baboons move in everyone else—note that everyone!—moves out. I mean like lions will shift the scene, and a lion is not what you’d call a defenceless creature.
“Lions are rather solitary, tending to work by couples over a manor which affords them adequate game for subsistence. Or not, depending on outside pressure from other members of the species. (Try owning a whole tomcat and you’ll see the process in miniature.) Pack-animals have the evolutionary edge—in combination they’re deadly. Lions learn this as cubs and then ignore the practice, which is why baboons can cave them in.
“NB: I said ‘everyone’, not ‘everything’. You wouldn’t recognise your ancestors as people, but they were, and you still are. Those ancestors were arrogant bastards—how else did they become boss species on our ball of mud? You’ve inherited from them just about everything that makes you human, apart from a few late glosses such as language. You got territoriality along with the rest. If somebody trespasses on it you’re liable to turn killer—although if you don’t like the idea you can kill yourself, which is among our few claims to uniqueness.