Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (17 page)
In any case, the thing he knew most about was the genetic selection and manipulation of strains of marijuana; it was his most salable skill. And Hitrip of California could easily slap a ten-year injunction on him under the Industrial Secrets Act to prevent him working for anyone else in a competing line of business.
Trapped.
The elevator door slid open, and he led Penlope, protesting as always, along the corridor towards the block school. He quelled his compunction about leaving her to the tender mercies of her peers with the usual glib reflection that she had to learn to sink or swim, and marched off towards the rapitrans terminal.
At least the four yonderboys who’d been haunting him recently hadn’t put in an appearance yesterday or the day before. Perhaps they’d grown bored; perhaps it hadn’t been him personally they’d been interested in.
He had his ticket checked by the auto gate-control and passed on to the platform to await the humming monorail car.
And there they were, all four of them, lounging against a pillar.
This morning the platform was even more jampacked with people than usual. That meant the trains weren’t keeping their schedule—probably there had been sabotage on the track again. The rapitrans system was a prime target for pro-Peking “partisans”; no amount of patrolling was proof against such tactics as dropping a bottle that appeared to contain an innocent soft drink but actually had been spiked with a colony of tailored bacteria capable of reducing steel or concrete to a fragile sponge. Normally this would have made Eric furious, like everyone else, but today the throng of impatient passengers held out the hope of evading the yonderboys’ notice.
He moved, sidling, towards the rear of the platform, keeping as many bodies as possible between himself and the four gaudily dressed youths. He thought at first he had made it. Then, as the car finally rolled in, he sensed a shoving behind him and glanced back to discover that they had worked their way over to where he stood and now flanked him in pairs.
With an insincere grin the leader motioned him to enter first, and he did so, quaking.
The car was crowded, of course. It was necessary to stand. Only those lucky people who got on at the first station were able to enjoy a seat for their journey. But the noise made it possible to talk privately if one spoke very close to the listener’s ear, and that the yonderboys proceeded to do.
“You’re Eric Ellerman,” one of them said, and a tiny spray of spittle landed on his cheek with the words.
“You work at Hitrip.”
“You live at Apartment 2704 in that block there.”
“You’re married to a woman called Ariadne.”
“And you have too damned many prodgies, right?”
Prodgies?
Eric’s terror-bemused mind wrestled with the term, and finally sorted it out. From “progeny”. Means “children”.
“I’m Stal Lucas.”
“A lot of people can tell you about Stal. People who’ve learned to do as he asks, and been—
safe
.”
“And that’s my sparewheel Zink. He’s a mean codder. He’s evil.”
“So listen carefully, Eric darling. You’re going to get us something.”
“If you don’t, we’ll make sure that everyone knows the facts about you.”
“Such as that you have other cubs back where you came from in Pacific Palisades, by another shiggy.”
“And what you’re up to now is not three, but five—or six.”
“They’ll love you for that, darling. Just love you!”
“And they’ll be pleased to hear you go to Right Catholic services in secret, won’t they?”
“And you have a special dispensation from Pope Eglantine in Madrid to buy the Populimit Bulletin—”
“And anyway you don’t have a clean genotype like you say but an undercover Right Catholic in the Eugenics office was bribed to alter your charts—”
“And when they grow up your cubs will almost certainly be schizophrenic—”
“Or
their
cubs will be—”
“What do you want?” Eric forced out. “Leave me alone, leave me alone!”
“Sure, sure,” Stal said soothingly. “You follow our programme and we’ll leave you alone, promise promise. But—ah—you work at Hitrip, and Hitrip’s got something we want.”
“It’s got Too Much,” Zink said from the other side.
“One little pack of seeds,” Stal said. “Like a dime bag. That’s all.”
“But—but that’s ridiculous!”
“Oh, it can’t be
ridiculous
.”
“But it doesn’t grow direct from seed! And it needs special chemicals all the time, and—and you can’t plant it in a window-box, for God’s sake!”
“Friend of yours, isn’t he—God? You keep Him supplied with new recruits to the heavenly choir. You breed like He wanted us to, Right—Catholic?”
“Fasten it, Zink. What do you grow it from, then—cuttings?”
“Y-yes.”
“Cuttings will do. Too Much is too much at three bucks fifty a pack of ten reefers. But it’s good pot, I’ll grant that. So that’s the programme, darling: a dime bag of good fertile cuttings—and you’d better let us have a table of the kind of treatment it needs to grow up. And we’ll be generous and keep your secret for you, about those cubs in Pacific Palisades.”
The monorail car was slowing for its next station. Eric said frantically, “But it’s impossible! The security—the guards they have on it!”
“If they don’t let the geneticists who evolved it get a close squinch, who gets one?” Stal said, and the four yonderboys moved towards the door, the other passengers, nervously eying their identifying clothes, making way for them.
“Wait! I can’t possibly—!”
But the doors were open and they were gone on the crowded platform.
“At bottom the human species finds idealism an uncomfortable posture. Prime evidence of this can be found in the way neither of the two groups locked in irresoluble conflict around the Pacific has been able to achieve its stated goal—even though, given the lucid, simple, obviously attractive statement of either of their ideals, an impartial observer might wonder why commitment had not ensued like sunrise after night.
“‘Give the wealth back to the people who created it!’ Here’s an ideal capable of generating crusades among people who interpret it as expropriating greedy landlords, sharing out land so that every family may enjoy reasonable nutrition and repudiating debts to moneylenders at usurious rates of interest. Having hit on this, the Chinese charged ahead—until they overreached themselves. They became unable to distinguish between the evils they were preaching against and those traditional influences which literally constituted the way of life of people they hoped to recruit to their cause. In short order they fell into the same pit as their rivals, who had for decades ignored the plain and simple fact that to a starving man ‘freedom’ implies a full rice-bowl—or, if he has an exceptional imagination, a healthy ox to pull his plough. It has
nothing
to do with voting for a political delegate.
“Analogously with the way the Tsarist army deserted
en masse
during the First World War, not because of Bolshevik impact on the soldiers but because they were sick of fighting and wanted to go tend their farms, the eager early recruits to the red flag discovered that while they were dying abroad the things they wanted to guard were being undermined at home. So they quit. China, like Russia before her, found she was surrounded by a gaggle of heirs to the mantle of the late Marshal Tito, not a few of whom were themselves within China’s boundary.
“However, by that time, thanks to ineptitude, racial prejudice against them, fighting the right wars with the wrong weapons, and general mismanagement of their affairs, the opposition (or if you prefer, which I don’t because I’d rather not identify with such a bunch of incompetents, ‘our side’) was so far in arrears that the greatest single territorial gain to date in a contest which bids fair to outdo the Hundred Years’ War both for duration and for inconclusiveness only restored a rough balance and didn’t tip the scales the other way.
“We can’t even claim in honesty that it was the result of foresight and planning—only that when the grabbing was good, we grabbed. Don’t believe anyone who tries to claim that the existence of Isola is proof of the superiority of the Western system. The Chinese couldn’t have taken over. There was no form of discontent they could have exploited. How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people concerned is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?
“Life in the Philippines had become intolerable well before the civil war of the 1980s. The state of things obtaining (which some accounts misname anarchy, but which any decent dictionary will tell you was nothing of the sort, but free-enterprise capitalism gone out of its skull) was on the verge of ruining the country permanently. The annual average of unsolved murders was running around 30,000 in a population of under fifty million. In the eyes of the inhabitants of the Sulu Archipelago, where most of them were committed, the offence for which they revolted against and ultimately assassinated President Sayha was that he interfered in their traditional right to slaughter and steal. This was unforgivable.
“Oh, doubtless there were some among the people who gave that celebrated majority of eighty-eight per cent in the plebiscite on secession who hoped that being policed and governed by Big Brother in Washington would ensure them a quieter life, free them from the need to fit bullet-proof shutters and plant man-traps in their gardens. Far more, however, seem to have hoped that the bait on the hook (full States’ rights and a billion dollars of aid) would offer another and fatter cake of which they could snatch their slice.
“Which of these parties saw its dream fulfilled? Dear reader, you must be joking. That vaunted billion-dollar aid budget went nowhere near the natives’ pockets. It was spent on roads, airfields, port facilities and fortifications. And, while it’s true that the smugglers and black-marketeers who had hitherto rampaged unchecked had their hinder ends smartly kicked, to get rid of them the new owners imposed martial law and it hasn’t been lifted since 1991!
“Dubbed ‘Isola’ on the grounds that Montana was a mountainous territory and the new acquisition was an island territory, the Junior State went from the frying-pan into the fire. However, the Americans had been desperately in need of bases closer to the Asian mainland than what they currently had, and they were reasonably well satisfied.
“The Chinese, on the other hand, when they tried a counterstroke by wooing Yatakang, were disappointed. The Yatakangi are descendants of the former dominant people in South-East Asia and firm believers in the traditional military dictum that the first thing you do after contracting an alliance is prepare plans for the day when your ally welshes on you. Just because they’re Asiatics it doesn’t follow that they’re going to invite their yellow fellows into their beds. Nor, because they haven’t performed the Peking kotow, should it be assumed (as some blockbottoms I know in Washington have assumed) that they are all set to become the second Isola. Why should they? Things are peachy down in Yatakang; it’s among the world’s great nations, by Asian standards it’s fabulously wealthy, and it can enjoy the game of playing off Washington against Peking until doomsday, on present evidence.
“Until doomsday? Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration. There’s one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture known as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between ‘ideals’, and with luck they won’t have left their genes behind because they’ll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they’re too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. And after that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.”
—
Better ? than ?
by Chad C. Mulligan
Donald felt pitted and pendulumed in the vacant apt. Almost, he could have welcomed the return of Victoria and the need to act as though nothing had happened until Norman programmed the law to pick her up.
He dialled for a meal from the block kitchens, but between ordering it and its arrival his appetite seemed to be eroded by apathy. He put on a recent record he had bought and sat down to watch the play of colour on the screen which matched the music; it had hardly begun before he was on his feet again and tramping restlessly about. None of the TV channels which he checked offered a programme to interest him. A day or two before someone had persuaded him to get a polyforming kit. He opened its box and considered starting a copy of Rodin’s
Kiss
, but halted his hand in mid-movement and let the lid fall shut again.
Furious with himself, he stared out the window. The Manhattan-pattern was at its most brilliant at this time of the evening—an Aladdin’s Cave of multicoloured lights, gorgeous as the stars at the centre of the galaxy.
Out there: all those millions of people … Like looking up at the sky and wondering which of those suns shine on beings like ourselves. Christ: when did I last look up at the night sky?
He was suddenly appalled. These days, a great many people never left their homes at night except for some specific purpose, when they could call a cab to the door and expose themselves for no longer than it took to cross a sidewalk. It wasn’t inevitably dangerous to wander the night streets of the city—the hundreds of thousands who did still do so were proof enough of that. In a country of four hundred millions there were two or three muckers per day, yet some people acted as though they couldn’t get past the next corner without being attacked. There were rollings, robberies and rumbles; there were even riots.
But there must still be room, surely, for an ordinary person to go about ordinary business?
The habit had settled on Donald’s mind unnoticed, like gradually thickening fog. He had stopped going out after six or seven in the evening for the mere sake of not being at home. Most weekends there was a party; between times, friends of Norman’s called or they were invited to join someone for dinner, or a concert, or a freevent. And the cab that came to fetch them was driven by a man or a woman secure behind armoured glass, its doors could only be opened from the dashboard, and affixed to the neat little nozzle of the air-conditioning system was a certificate stating that the sleepy-gas cylinders had been approved by the City Licensing Authority. For all its smoothness and fuel-cell silence, it was like a tank, and encouraged the feeling that one was venturing on to a battlefield.