Stand on Zanzibar

  She said, “I hope you’re not finding life as difficult as I am.”

  Pierre shrugged. “We get along, Rosalie and I.”

  “There must be more to be had than simply ‘getting along’,” Jeannine said with a kind of obstinacy.

  “You’ve had a quarrel with Raoul,” Pierre said, naming the latest of his sister’s many lovers.

  “Quarrel? Hardly. One doesn’t quarrel any longer. One lacks the energy. But—it’s not going to last, Pierre. I can feel the disillusionment gathering.”

  Pierre leaned back on his couch. He preferred couches to the big armchairs, though the latter were better scaled to his length of leg. He said, “I can almost measure the progress of your affaires du coeur by the number of times you come to call on us.”

  “You think I treat you as a wailing wall?” Jeannine gave a bitter little chuckle. “Perhaps so—but can I help it if you are the only person I can talk to openly? There’s something between us which outsiders can never enter. It’s a precious thing; I’m sparing with it.”

  She hesitated. “Rosalie senses it,” she added finally. “You can see the effect on her when I arrive. That’s another reason why I come only when I need to very much.”

  “Do you mean she makes you feel unwelcome?”

  “That? No! She’s the soul of courtesy. It’s only that she like the rest of the world cannot understand what she has never experienced.” Jeannine straightened, stabbing her kief cigarette through the air as though it were a teacher’s pointer indicating words on a blackboard. “Consider, chéri, that we are not unique, being expatriates! Since they cut down the barriers between the countries of this tired old continent there must be fifty nationalities in Paris alone, and not a few of them—such as the Greeks—are better off than they would have been at home. As we are.”

  “At home?” Pierre echoed. “Our home is nowhere. It never existed except in father’s and mother’s minds.”

  Jeannine shook her head. “I don’t believe they could have been discontented in a fine city like Paris unless they had been truly happy in a real country.”

  “But they grew more and more to talk only of good things. They forgot about the bad. The Algeria they imagined has gone forever under a wave of disorder, assassinations and civil war.”

  “Yet it made them happy. You can’t deny that.”

  Pierre gave a sigh and a shrug.

  “In short, we’re not expatriates, you and I. We’re extemporates, exiled from a country that vanished even before we were born, of which our parents made us citizens without intending to.” She paused, searching her brother’s face with sharp dark eyes. “I see you understand. I never knew you not to understand.”

  She reached over and gave his hand a squeeze.

  “You’re not discussing Algeria again, are you?” Rosalie said, entering with the handsome coffee-jug that matched the tray of cups on permanent display. She sounded as though she was trying to make a joke of the question. “I keep telling Pierre, Jeannine—it may have been fine to live there in the old days, but I wouldn’t care to live there now.”

  “Of course not,” Jeannine said with a forced smile. “Life in Paris is bad enough—why should anyone wish to go and live under the even grosser mismanagement of a native government?”

  “Is life in Paris so bad, these days?”

  “Perhaps you’re lucky and don’t notice it so much as I do, having this fine quiet home and nothing to do except look after it while Pierre reaps his fat salary from the bank! But I work, and in fashion advertising life isn’t so secure as in banking. There are more salauds to the square metre and they wield far more power!”

  Pierre gave his sister a look of alarm. When she was in a particular mood kief sometimes loosened her tongue more than politeness would permit, and more than once—not with Rosalie but with his first wife—he had to smooth over serious rows based on something she let slip while she was high.

  “But even salauds have their uses,” she continued. “That was what I came to tell you, Pierre. You’re aware that Raoul works for the Common Europe prediction department?”

  Pierre nodded. The prediction department was a building at Fontainebleau that had once housed a NATO detachment; now it was filled with computers to which intelligence reports, commercial as well as military, were daily fed for trend analysis.

  “Something rather interesting…” Jeannine went on. “You know, too, that the prediction department processes not only European material but also what our former colonies send, giving a discount rate for old times’ sake? And you’ve heard of the underwater mining project sponsored by the American corporation General Technics?”

  “Naturally.”

  “The Americans have been sending agents to price the cost of transporting bulk raw materials from Port Mey, in Beninia. Also the same company is conducting inquiries among former colonial administrators in London. Raoul tells me that the computers foresee a great new company being launched in Port Mey to handle all these minerals.”

  There was a pause. Handing coffee to Jeannine, Rosalie looked in bewilderment from her to her husband and back, wondering at the look of wistful speculation that had appeared on both their faces.

  “You’ve met Hélène, who used to work in Mali?” Pierre said at length, ignoring his wife.

  “Yes. And you’ve met Henri, from Upper Volta?”

  “Yes.”

  “You seem to understand as much as the computers.”

  “It follows very logically.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rosalie said.

  Pierre glanced at her with a sort of pity. “Why should a big American corporation be sounding out former colonial officials in London unless they were well aware of the ignorance Americans display regarding the African mentality?”

  Before Rosalie could admit that the question had done nothing to enlighten her, Jeannine said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Americans are a little better than barbarians, one must concede.”

  “But a country on the Bight of Benin, which has not benefited from French culture—”

  “Part of it was settled by Berbers, and they for all their faults are cousins to the people of Algeria and Morocco.”

  Rosalie said with sudden uncharacteristic mistress-in-her-own-house determination, “Will you two tell me what you are talking about?”

  Brother and sister exchanged glances. One of Jeannine’s eyebrows rose, as though to say, “With a wife like her what do you expect?” Rosalie detected the action and flushed, hoping Pierre would disregard it for loyalty’s sake.

  Instead, he copied it.

  “I’m talking about going back to Africa,” Jeannine said. “Why not? I’m sick of France and the French who aren’t French any longer, but some sort of horrible averaged-out Common European mongrels.”

  “What makes you so sure you’ll get the chance to go?” Pierre countered.

  “Raoul says they’re intending to recruit advisors with African experience. There can’t be so many people to suit their requirements. After all, chéri, neither you nor I is a chick fresh from the shell!”

  “I don’t want to go to Africa,” Rosalie said, and set her chin mutinously. “Jeannine, drink your coffee—it’ll be cold.”

  She leaned forward to push the copper cup closer to her sister-in-law. Over her bowed back the eyes of brother and sister met, and each recognised in the other the matching half of a dream, that had been broken a long time ago like a coin divided between sweethearts faced with years of separation.

  context (16)

  MR. & MRS. EVERYWHERE: CALYPSO

  “Like the good Lord God in the Valley of Bones

  Engrelay Satelserv made some people called Jones.

  They were not alive and they were not dead—

  They were ee-magi-nary but always ahead.

  What was remarkably and uniquely new—

  A gadget on the set made them look like you!

  “Watching their sets in a kind of a trance

  We
re people in Mexico, people in France.

  They don’t chase Jones but the dreams are the same—

  Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that’s the right name!

  Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,

  A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

  “You can’t see all the places of interest,

  Go to the Moon and climb Mount Everest,

  So you stay at home in a comfortable chair

  And rely on Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere!

  Doing all the various things you would like to do,

  A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

  “Wearing parkas and boots made by Gondola

  You see them on an expedition polar.

  They’re sunning on the beach at Martinique

  Using lotion from Guinevere Steel’s Beautique.

  Whether you’re red, white, black or blue

  A gadget on the set makes them look like you!

  “When the Everywhere couple crack a joke

  It’s laughed at by all right-thinking folk.

  When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose

  It’s the with-it view as everyone knows.

  It may be a rumour or it may be true

  But a gadget on the set has it said by you!

  “English Language Relay Satellite Service

  Didn’t do this without any purpose.

  They know very well what they would like—

  A thousand million people all thinking alike.

  When someone says something you don’t ask who—

  A gadget on the set has it said by you!

  “‘What do you think about Yatakang?’

  ‘I think the same as the Everywhere gang.’

  ‘What do you think of Beninia then?’

  ‘The Everywheres will tell me but I don’t know when.’

  Whatever my country and whatever my name

  A gadget on the set makes me think the same.”

  continuity (17)

  TIMESCALES

  “Which is the real time—his or ours?”

  Norman had not intended the question to emerge in audible form. It was sparked by the sight of the enormous pile of printouts from Shalmaneser that had been delivered overnight to his office, and by recollection of the way they would have been produced. No conceivable printing device—not even the light-writers which had no moving parts except the fine beam from a miniature laser that inscribed words on photo-sensitive paper—could keep up with Shalmaneser’s nanosecond mental processes; the entire problem posed to him would have been solved, or at any rate evaluated, then shunted to a temporary storage bank while he got on with the next task his masters imposed, and the conversion of it into comprehensible language would have taken fifty or a hundred times as long.

  Elihu glanced at him. His eyes were a little red from lack of sleep, as were Norman’s; one could not afford to sleep if one wanted to keep up with modern information-handling techniques. He said, “Whose?”

  Norman gave a sour laugh, ushering the older man past him and closing the office door. “Sorry. I’m thinking of Shalmaneser as a ‘he’ again.”

  Elihu nodded. “Like Chad said, he’s becoming one of the GT family … How is Chad, by the way? I expected him to take more of an interest in this project—after all, when I first met him at Miss Steel’s, he spent practically the entire evening interrogating me about Beninia.”

  “I’ve hardly seen anything of him,” Norman said, moving around his electronic desk and shoving at the swivel chair with his knee to turn it so he could sit down. “He’s been using Don’s room, I know that, and I think much of the time he’s been going through Don’s books—he has about three thousand of them. But apart from a hello, we haven’t talked much.”

  “I see what you mean about the real time,” Elihu said.

  Norman blinked at him, puzzled.

  “This!” Elihu amplified, tapping one of the three foot-deep stacks of printouts awaiting their attention. “Both you and I want to talk about the Beninian project. But we can’t. Anything we say without reference to computers is already out of date before it’s uttered, isn’t it? The information to correct and shape our opinions exists, and we know it exists, so we decline to communicate until we’ve briefed ourselves, and because Shalmaneser works thousands of times faster than we do, we can never catch up so we never genuinely manage to communicate.”

  Norman hesitated. After the pause, he said, “Speaking of information to shape and change our opinions…”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you get me some data from State, do you think?”

  “It depends.” Elihu settled into a chair facing him. “I can get anything that touches directly on my own interests, but even ambassadorial rank, these days, doesn’t carry infinite cachet.”

  “It’s about Don,” Norman said. His mouth twisted into a wry grin. “What you said about failing to communicate made me think of it. I lived with that codder for years, you know, and I never really got to be close friends with him. And now he’s not around my place any longer, I miss him. I feel sort of guilty. I’d like to know if it’s possible for me to keep in touch.”

  “I can inquire, I guess,” Elihu agreed. “What happened to him, by the way?”

  “I thought you knew. Oh! If you don’t, maybe I shouldn’t … The hole with that, though. If a U.S. ambassador can’t be trusted, who can?”

  “They don’t trust anybody, literally,” Elihu shrugged. “Except computers.”

  “I do,” Norman said. He glanced down at his hands and wrung them together absently. “As of a few days ago, and on principle. Don’s gone to Yatakang on State business.”

  Elihu mulled that over for a while. He said, “That places him for me. I’d wondered where to pigeon-hole him. You mean he’s one of these standby operatives State keeps on tap as insurance against the eventuation of low-probability trends.”

  “I believe that’s correct, yes.”

  “And the only thing that’s happened in Yatakang lately is this fantastic genetic programme they’re boosting. Is that connected with his visit?”

  “I assume it must be. At any rate, Don took his degree in biology, and his doctorate thesis was on the survival of archetypal genes in living fossils like coelacanths and king crabs and ginkgos.”

  “State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s a bit difficult to explain … Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?”

  “Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.”

  “So have I, but—well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room.

  “Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?”

  “The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.”

  “So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?”

  “Yes, of course—these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.”

  “Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?”

  “Lord, no! It costs—what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?”

  “About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brown-nose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And—to be absolutely frank—a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie. There’s something absolutely unique and indesc
ribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.”

  “I can well understand that,” Elihu nodded. “And of course I’ve seen this on other people’s sets too. Also I agree entirely about what we regard as real. But I thought we were talking about the Yatakangi claim?”

  “I still am,” Norman said. “Do you have a homimage attachment on your set? No, obviously not. I do. This does the same thing except with your environment; when they—let’s see … Ah yes! When they put up something like the splitscreen cuts they use to introduce SCANALYZER, one of the cuts is always what they call the ‘digging’ cut, and shows Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sitting in your home wearing your faces watching the same programme you’re about to watch. You know this one?”

  “I don’t think they have this service in Africa yet,” Elihu said. “I know the bit you mean, but it always shows a sort of idealised dream-home full of luxy gadgetry.”

  “That used to be what they did here,” Norman said. “Only nowadays practically every American home is full of luxy gadgetry. You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?”

  Elihu chuckled, then grew grave. “That’s too nearly literal to be funny,” he said.

  “Prophet’s beard, it certainly is! I found time to look over some of Chad’s books after Guinevere’s party, and … Well, having met him I was inclined to think he was a conceited blowhard, but now I think he’s entitled to every scrap of vanity he likes to put on.”

  “I thought of asking State to invite him to come in on this project as a special advisor, but when I broached the matter to Raphael Corning I was told State doesn’t approve of him.”