But now the long-time calm of Beninia seemed likely to be shattered for good. If a succession dispute followed Obomi’s retirement, the jealous neighbours would certainly pounce. The intervention of GT might prevent the war. Shalmaneser had reviewed the various hypothetical outcomes and given his quasi-divine opinion.
Yet Norman kept being nagged by doubt. After all, Shalmaneser could only judge on the basis of the data he was fed; suppose Elihu had allowed his love for Beninia to colour his views with optimism, and this had affected the computer’s calculations?
It seemed absurdly sanguine to suggest turning a poverty-stricken, famine- and sickness-ridden ex-colony into a bridgehead of prosperity within twenty years. Why, there wasn’t even a university, not even a major technical school—nothing better than a privately financed business school in Port Mey from which the government already skimmed the cream of the graduates.
Of course, they did claim that all the country’s male children acquired a minimum of literacy and numeracy, and a grounding in English as well as one other of their country’s tongues. And there was no disrespect for education in Beninia—they were even shorter of truants than of teachers. Eagerness to learn might make up for a good few deficiencies in other areas.
Might …
Sighing, Norman gave up worrying. The exclamation-mark shape of Beninia might twist on the map into an imagined question-posing curl, but that was in his mind. The facts were in the real world, and he was acutely aware how he had systematically isolated himself from reality.
* * *
He said as much to Chad Mulligan, on one of the increasingly rare occasions when he was at home long enough to spend a few minutes in talking. The sociologist’s heart had not proved to be in his intention to debauch himself to his grave; habit unweakened by three years in the gutter had dragged him back into familiar patterns of study and argument.
His response to Norman’s remark began with a grimace of disgust. “What you’re up against, codder, is the intractability of the outside world! Okay, I sympathise—I have the same trouble. I can’t keep enough liquor in my guts to rot them the way I planned. Before I pass out, I throw up! So what’s making you so angry with Beninia, hm?”
“Not the country itself,” Norman sighed. “The fact that nobody seems to have noticed this weird anomaly of a whole nation sitting on the edge of a political volcano and hardly getting singed.”
“With a volcanic eruption in progress, whoinole is going to take time out and wonder about folk who are getting on with their ordinary business?” Chad grunted. “Why don’t you save the guesswork until you’ve been there and seen for yourself? When are they sending you over, by the way?”
“Directly the project is finalised,” Norman said. “Elihu and I are going to present it to President Obomi together. Another three or four days, I guess.” He hesitated. “You know something?” he continued. “I’m scared of what I’m going to find when I actually get there.”
“Why?”
“Because…” Norman tugged at his beard with awkward fingers. “Because of Donald.”
“Whatinole does he have to do with it? He’s off the other side of the world.”
“Because I shared this apt with him for years, and always thought of him as a neutral kind of guy, leading a rather dull easy-going life. Not the sort of person you’d form strong opinions about. And then all of a sudden he told me he’d been responsible for the riot I found myself caught up in—down the lower East Side. I told you about that, didn’t I?”
“You talked about it at Guinevere’s party. So did a lot of other people.” Chad shrugged. “Of course, to claim responsibility for starting a riot is arrogant, but I see what you’re setting course for. You mean you’re wondering whether the Beninians are set up the same way he was, capable of starting something disastrous when they blunder out into the big scene.”
“No,” said Norman. “I’m wondering whether I’m the one who’s ignorant and apt to trigger a disaster.”
context (17)
FEELING THE OVERDRAFT
“Yes, my name’s Chad Mulligan. I’m not dead, if that was going to be the subject of your next silly question. And I don’t give a pint of whaledreck about what you called up to say to me, even if you are from SCANALYZER. If you want me to talk I’ll talk about what I want to, not what you want me to. If that’s acceptable plug in your recorders. Otherwise I’m cutting the circuit.
“All right. I’m going to tell you about the poor. You know where to look for a poor man? Don’t go out on the street like a sheeting fool and pick on a street-sleeper in filthy clothes. Up to a few days ago the man you picked on might have been me, and I’m worth a few million bucks.
“And you don’t have to go to India or Bolivia or Beninia to find a poor man, either. You have to go exactly as far as the nearest mirror.
“At this point you’ll probably decide to switch off in disgust—I don’t mean you, codder, taking this down off the phone, I mean whoever gets to hear it if you have the guts to replay it over SCANALYZER. You out there! You’re on the verge of going bankrupt and you aren’t paying attention. I don’t suppose that telling you will convince you, but I’m offering the evidence, in hopes.
“A codder who lives the way I’ve been living for the past three years, without a home or even a suitcase, isn’t necessarily poor, like I said. But free of the things which get in the way of noticing the truth, he has a chance to look the situation over and appraise it. One of the things he can see is what’s changed and what hasn’t in this brave new century of ours.
“What do you give a panhandler? Nothing, maybe—but if you do cave in, you make it at least a fin. After all, his monthly licence costs him double that. So he’s not really poor. Costs have gone up approximately sixfold in the past fifty years, but fifty years ago you were liable to give a panhandler a quarter or a half. Relatively, panhandlers have moved up on the income ladder.
“You haven’t.
“The things which have gone up the standard, average, six times include your typical income, the cost of food and clothing, the cost of the gewgaws without which you don’t feel you are anybody—a holographic TV, for instance—and rents and housing costs generally, like heating charges.
“The things which have come down a little include intraurban transportation—that’s to say, a New York token, which I cite because I’m a New Yorker by adoption now, costs only eighty cents instead of the dollar twenty or so it would cost if it had kept pace with everything else—and, to most people’s surprise, taxes, which finance things we’re not going to carp about such as medicare and education. These aren’t bad at present, by the way.
“But what’s gone up, way way up? Things like water. Did you know you’re paying eleven times as much for water as people did fifty years back, and you’re not managing to use any more than they did then because there isn’t any more?
“And recreation space! Did you know that having a decent-sized open space within easy walking distance adds thirty per cent to your assessment for urban taxes?
“And health itself! I’m not talking about hospital care—that’s okay these days. I’m talking about natural, normal, everyday health with its resistance to infection and abundant energy.
“You can probably recognise the New Poor, as the phrase calls them. You may not know how; you may indeed be puzzled about how you can tell when they’re wearing clean clothes and carrying all kinds of lovely doodads which may not be the year after next’s model but are serviceable and numerous. You can tell them, though—can’t you?
“Well, what you recognise them by is the fact that they don’t spend—they can’t spend—on the things you add to keep yourself going. They eat mass-produced force-grown meat. So do you, but you add protein capsules and B12. They drink pasteurised imperishable milk. So do you, but you take calciferol tablets. They eat battery eggs. So do you, but you take Vitamin A. And even with all this, you probably also take Wakup pills, energisers, tranks, niacin, riboflavin, as
corbic acid—I’ve been going through a friend’s medicine cabinet, and they’re all there.
“Even so, you’re losing out. You’re falling further and further behind.
“I used a fifty-year baseline a moment ago. Let’s use one again. What have you got that’s new, around the place? The fifty years from 1910 to 1960 saw the arrival in the average Western home, and a good few non-Western ones, of the telephone, the radio, the television, the car of unlamented memory, plastics, the washing-machine, the electric stove, iron, toaster and mixer, not to mention the freezer, the hi-fi set, and the tape-recorder.
“I’ve been around the place where I’m staying, which belongs to a highly paid executive with one of our biggest corporations. I cannot find one single object which is as revolutionary as the things I just listed. True, the TV is holographic—but the holographic principle was discovered in the 1930s, catch that? They were ready to apply it to TV by 1983 or 1984, but it didn’t come in for another decade after that. Why not?
“Because you couldn’t afford it.
“Same with the screen on your phone. They had videophone service operating in Russia in the 1960s. You couldn’t afford it until the eighties. And that’s supposed to be new, anyway—thirty years old already?
“Why do you think you get such a generous trade-in allowance when you switch from next year’s model of some gadget to the year after next’s? Because some of the parts are going to be put right back into the new sets, and what can’t be cannibalised will be sold as precious—I repeat, precious—scrap.
“The biggest single building project in this country right now is costing a hundred million buckadingdongs. What do you think it is? You’re wrong. It’s a jail.
“Friends, you don’t have to go to India or Africa to find people existing on the borderline of poverty. You are. Our resources are stretched to the point where reclaiming a gallon of water so someone can drink it a second time costs eleven times more than it did in 1960. TV you can live without, a phone you can live without, but water? Uh-huh! We don’t starve to death, but if you want a diet that’s fit to match your unprecedented tallness and muscularity you pay not six times as much as your grandfather did but more like nine to ten times, depending on how you take in your vitamins and other supplements.
“I’m just going to tell you about a few odds and ends you don’t have because you can’t afford them, and I’ll quit. You could have in your home a domesticated computer of approximately Rehoboam standard, that would give you access to as much knowledge as most provincial libraries as well as handling your budget problems, diagnosing and prescribing for illness and teaching you how to cook a cordon bleu meal. You could have real polyform furniture that changed not only its shape but its texture, like Karatands do, over a range from fur to stainless-steel slickness. You could have a garbage disposal system that paid for itself by reclaiming the constituent elements of everything fed into it and returning them as ingots of metal and barrels of crude organics. You could have individual power-units for every single powered device you own, which would save the purchase price within months and render you immune from overload blackouts in winter.
“Shut up just a moment—I’ve nearly finished.
“When I say you could have them, I don’t mean all of you. I mean that if you did, your next-door neighbour wouldn’t, or in the case of big things on an urban scale, that if your city did the next city along the line wouldn’t. Is that clear? The knowledge exists to make all these things possible, but because we are so damned nearly broke on a planet-wide basis your home contains virtually nothing that your grandfather wouldn’t immediately recognise and know how to use without being told, and what’s more he’d probably complain about the stink of uncleared garbage from the street and he might even complain about your stink because water was cheaper in his day and he could take as many showers and even tub-baths as he felt like.
“All right, codder, I know perfectly well you’ve been trying to interrupt me and say you can’t possibly use all that on SCANALYZER. But how about showing Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sleeping on the street in Calcutta some time?”
continuity (20)
THE SHADOW OF GRANDFATHER LOA
The tight adjustable harness passengers were not supposed to unfasten throughout the flight, because at this height emergencies arose so quickly, constricted Donald and made him think of straitjackets and padded cells. The whole passenger compartment could become exactly that—a padded cell—in the event of accident. An express had once collided with the tumbling third stage of a satellite launcher, its orbit decaying back to atmosphere, but all the sixty-seven occupants had lived.
That’s right. That’s wise. We need padded-cell protection from our own mad cleverness.
Also, of course, it was a womb, carrying its litter to a destination they could not see. For all the passengers knew, they might be borne to Accra instead of Gongilung, emerge blinking among tall black strangers instead of short yellow ones.
Donald rather hoped for that.
But when the can was cracked—for his exclusive benefit—he was spilled on to the Gongilung expressport just as promised. Mechanically, watched by the curious eyes of his companions, he made his way to the exit and stepped on to the travolator that would deliver him package-fashion into the arrivals hall. Glancing sidelong through its windows, he realised with jarring astonishment that he was looking at two things he had never seen before in his life.
Only fifty yards away, a Chinese express nursed at the refuelling bay, its long sides marked with the symbol of the red star and white sun. And beyond, veiled but not screened by a drizzle of light rain, was the first active volcano he had ever set eyes on.
Why—that must be Grandfather Loa!
What he had previously seen on maps acquired actuality. Nine thousand feet high, the mountain brooded over the Shongao Strait, smoking ruminatively, sometimes stirring like a drowsy old man dreaming of his youth and shaking a few rocks down the far side of the cone. There had been a strait on that side too, until 1941, but now there was a narrow land bridge made of lava and ash. Grandfather Loa had taken about two thousand lives on that occasion, mostly fishermen killed by the tsunami. He was not in the monster class with Krakatoa, boasting thirty-six thousand victims, but he was a powerful and dangerous neighbour.
On this side, then, the long narrow island of Shongao, bearing Gongilung the capital city and several others of considerable importance. Beyond the volcano, the smaller and rounder island of Angilam. To the left, or east as he was standing, the long catena of the archipelago swung in an arc that if extended would encounter Isola; to the right, the islands diffused more and were scattered into a rough hexagon. It was a popular image among Yatakangi writers to compare their country to a scimitar, the westernmost islands forming the pommel. And here, at the hilt, was the centre of control.
He was staring with such fascination that he stumbled off the end of the travolator when the moving belt brought him to the fixed floor of the arrivals hall. Confused, struggling to retain his balance, he almost bumped into a girl in the traditional costume of shareng and slippers who was regarding him with an expression of cool contempt.
He had chiefly written and read, not spoken, Yatakangi since completing his original high-pressure course in the subject; his grip on the subtle Asiatic sounds had lessened. Attempting to undo the bad impression he had just created, he essayed a formal Yatakangi apology anyway, but she ignored it so completely he wondered if he had garbled it.
Consulting a radiofaxed copy of the express’s passenger manifest, she said, almost without the trace of an accent, “You will be Donald Hogan, is that correct?”
He nodded.
“Go to Post Five. Your baggage will be delivered.”
At his muttered thanks she at least inclined her head, but that was all the attention he received before she moved on to greet passengers descending from an adjacent travolator. His face hot with embarrassment, Donald walked across the hall towards a row of long c
ounters such as one might see at any expressport, divided into posts each manned by an immigration officer and a customs man, uniformed in off-white with black skullcaps.
He was very conscious of being stared at. He was the only Caucasian in sight. Almost everyone else was of Asian extraction: local-born, or Chinese, or Burmese. There were some Sikhs at Post One, and scattered about there were a few Arabs and a solitary African negro. But no concessions were made to non-Asians; the only signs he could see were in Yatakangi, Chinese Cyrillic and Indonesian.
Reaching the line before Post Five, he fell in behind a family of prosperous expatriate Chinese—expatriate, clearly, because Yatakangi was the language they discussed him in. Their small daughter, aged about eight, marvelled loudly at how pale and ugly he was.
Wondering whether to embarrass them in revenge for his own discomfiture a moment earlier, by letting them know he understood what they were saying, he tried to distract himself by enumerating the ways in which this place differed from an expressport hall at home. The list was shorter than he had expected. The décor, of fierce greens and reds, matched the wet tropical climate of sea-level Shongao—up in the hills that spined the island, it was a trifle cooler but not much drier. There were about as many advertising displays as at home, though fewer of the items were commercial because more public services were under state control. Among them, too, were several political ones, including a couple that praised Marshal Solukarta for his promise to optimise the population. Many airlines had big displays on the walls: Chinese, Russian, Arab, Japanese, even Afghan and Greek. There were the inevitable cases showing local curios and souvenirs, and visible—though not audible—there was a thirty-three-inch holographic TV playing to people in the departures lounge separated from this hall by a pane of tinted glass.