our children are going to be handicapped!”
our children are going to be handicapped!”
“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up
“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up
“What good are all our gadgets going to be when we’re up
against people who can think better than us?”
against people who can think better than us?”
against people who can think better than us?”
“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t
“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t
“You know what you can do with the Eugenics Board, don’t
you? You can—”
you? You can—”
you? You can—”
“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being
“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being
“It’s going to reduce us, relatively speaking, to being
morons and cripples.”
morons and cripples.”
morons and cripples.”
“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an
“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an
“Did you see that Engrelay Satelserv decided to send an
expert in genetics to Yatakang?”
expert in genetics to Yatakang?”
expert in genetics to Yatakang?”
“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously
“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously
“Well, if a company like that is taking it so seriously
there must be something in it.”
there must be something in it.”
there must be something in it.”
“But the government seems to be trying to convince people
“But the government seems to be trying to convince people
“But the government seems to be trying to convince people
it’s a lie.”
it’s a lie.”
it’s a lie.”
“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to
“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to
“What that means is that they haven’t got the skill to
do the same for us.”
do the same for us!”
DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
“DO THE SAME FOR US!”
(UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage. See also DISHONESTY, SNEAKY, UNDERHAND and JUST LUCKY I GUESS.
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
continuity (27)
MANSCAPE
Near the road, high grass flushed green with summer wet, set with low bushes, punctuated with trees. Tethered on expensive chains because they could gnaw through rope or leather, goats strained to crop the tree-bark and kill the trees though there was plenty of grazing closer to the pegs they circled. Chains apart, the road seemed like the only human intrusion into a beast-plant universe, and not the road as such because wild nature was reclaiming it, pitting its surface with holes that held bowlfuls of mud, but its idea of straightness.
Yet the manufactures of man came into view and went again. Every mile or two there were plots of ground trenched for vegetables surrounding a hamlet built in traditional Beninian style of timber and thatch. Some of the wealthier families’ homes were turtle-plated in a riot of colours, the owners having taken old cans, oil-drums, even sheets of metal from abandoned cars, and after flattening them with mallets lapped them together as carefully as medieval armour to protect the wood against wet, rot and termites.
Maps of the district had been kept up to date by a makeshift system involving as much gossip and rumour as actual surveying, but even if they had been revised last week by a team of UN geographers Norman would still have found it hard to relate that out there with this flapping on his knee. He had to say painfully to himself, “Those two hills must correspond to these markings, so this is where they would mine river-clay and bake it into porous filters for the plastics plant at—where?—Bephloti…”
The insect humming of the engine beneath their vehicle’s floor droned down to a grumble. Steering, Gideon Horsfall said, “Sheeting hole, I hoped we’d make it clear to Lalendi before I had to swap cylinders. I’ll pull down off the road when we get around the bend.”
Around the bend there was another of the interchangeable hamlets, except that this was one of the fourteen per cent of the country’s villages which possessed a school and a clinic. It was the wrong day for the clinic, a plain white concrete hut with large-lettered signs in English and Shinka, but the school was busy. As yet, in this region, the summer rains were only intermittent; the full drenching flow would follow in three weeks. Accordingly the teacher—a fat young man with a fan and spectacles of an old-fashioned pattern—was conducting his class under a grove of low trees. They were boys and girls from about six to twelve, clutching UN-issued plastic primers and trying not to let themselves be distracted by the appearance of the car.
It wasn’t yet raining, but it was horribly humid. Norman, clammy from head to toe, thought about the energy required to get out and stand up. He asked Gideon whether he needed help in swapping cylinders. Twisting around to take a pair of fresh ones—one hydrogen, one oxygen—from a crate on the back seat, Gideon declined the offer.
But Norman got out anyway, and found he was looking at the verandah-like frontage of a house on which a small group of women were assembled, and one man, middle-aged, very thin, who lay among them on a low trestle-table. They were wringing cloths in buckets of water and wiping his skin, and he seemed to be making no effort to co-operate.
A little puzzled, he asked Gideon, “What’s the matter over there? Is the man ill?”
Gideon didn’t look at once. He dropped the cylinder-tray at the back of the car, unclipped and reconnected the gas-hoses, and gathered up the empties for return to store before following Norman’s gesture.
“Ill? No, dead,” he said absently, and went to put the cylinders inside the car.
One of the older pupils of the school, squatting cross-legged at the back of the class, raised his hand and asked something of the teacher.
“Is something wrong?” Gideon demanded, realising that Norman had made no move to get back in the car.
“Not really,” Norman said after a pause. “It’s just that I … Well, you see, I’ve never seen a corpse before.”
“It doesn’t look any different from a living person,” Gideon said. “Except it doesn’t move, and it doesn’t suffer. The hole, I was afraid of that. Do you mind being a visual aid to the schoolmaster for five minutes?”
The women had finished their task of washing the corpse; they poured out the dirty water on the ground and a piglet came over to lap at a puddle it formed. From the long poles supporting the thatch over the verandah, a few chickens solemnly looked down. One of the women fetched a galvanised tub full of something sticky and white and began to daub the corpse’s face, using a bundle of hen’s feathers tied on a twig.
“What’s that for?” Norman asked Gideon.
“What? Oh, the white paint? Relic of early missionary interference, I gather. All the pictures of saints and angels they saw when they were being converted to Christianity had white skins, so they decided to give their dead a better chance of admission to heaven.”
The entire class of children rose to their feet and waited for the teacher to walk past, take station at their head, and lead them over towards the car.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the fat young man said affably. “My class has requested permission to put a few questions to you. Since they have little chance
to travel about themselves, perhaps you’d indulge them.”
“Certainly,” Gideon said with only the trace of a sigh.
“Thanks awfully. First, may we know where you come from?” The teacher turned and held out his hand expectantly to one of the older pupils, who gave him a rolled map in bright colours and simplified outlines. Those children who were not too much attracted by the car or the preparation of the corpse craned to see whereabouts in the world Gideon would point to.
When his finger stabbed down in the area of New York, there was a concerted sigh.
“Ah, you’re American!” the teacher said. “Sarah, we learned about America, didn’t we? What do you know of that great country so far away?”
A serious-mannered girl of thirteen or so, one of the oldest pupils, said, “America has over four hundred million people. Some of them are brown like us but most of them are Cock…”
She hesitated.
“Cauc…” corrected the teacher.
“Caucasian,” Sarah managed. “The capital is Washing-ham—”
“Washing—?”
“Washington. There are fifty-two states. At first there were thirteen but now there are four times that number. America is very rich and powerful and it sends us good seed for planting, new kinds of chickens and cows which are better than the ones we used to have, and lots of medicines and disinfectants to keep us healthy.”
She suddenly smiled and gave a little skip of pleasure at her own success in the brief recitation.
“Very good,” Gideon approved.
A boy next to Sarah, about her own age, raised his hand. “I should like to ask you, sir—”
Norman felt inclined to let his mind wander. No doubt this was one of the regular public-relations jobs Gideon had to cope with when he went about the country in this incredibly informal manner—which struck Norman as absurd: the First Secretary of the U. S. Embassy stopping off at random in an isolated village and chatting with children! But he had his mind too full trying to organise his perceptions.
He had discovered why organising them was so difficult a few seconds ago. The sight of a corpse being made ready for burial, matter-of-factly in the view of everyone, was a shock to him. In sterile modern America one was intellectually aware that death could be a public event, from heart-failure or more messily through the intervention of a mucker, but hardly anyone had actually seen a mucker on the rampage, and emotionally and for all daily purposes one assumed it was something that took place tidily in a hospital out of sight of everyone except experts trained to handle human meat.
But people do die.
In the same way, Beninia was a continuing shock. Taken in by eye and ear, the canned information supplied by Shalmaneser and the GT library was manipulable, digestible, of a familiar sort. Confronted with language, smell, local diet, the sticky hot early-summer air, the clutch of mud around his shoes, he was in the same plight as a Bushman trying to make sense of a photograph, exhausted by the effort to bridge the gap between pre-known symbol and present actuality.
Yet it had to be done. Isolated in the air-conditioned GT tower, one might juggle for a thousand years with data from computers and pattern them into a million beautiful logical arrays. But you had to get out on the ground and see if the data were accurate before you could put over the programming switches on Shalmaneser from “hypothetical” to “real”.
His attention shot back to here and now as though a similar switch had been pulled in his own mind. He had heard, in memory, the rest of the boy’s question.
“—how the Chinese can do so much damage in California!”
Gideon was looking baffled. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you,” he said after a moment.
“You must forgive the child, sir,” the teacher said, plainly embarrassed. “It’s not the most tactful subject—”
“I’ll answer any question, tactless or not,” Gideon said. “I didn’t quite follow, that’s all.”
“Well, sir,” the boy said, “we have a television set here, and teacher makes us older ones watch the news programme after school before we walk home, so we see a lot about America. And there’s often a piece about damage done by Chinese infiltrators in California. But if Americans are either like you, or like English people, and the Chinese are like what we see on television, with their funny eyes and different skins, why can’t you recognise and catch them?”
“I get the point,” Norman said gruffly. “Like me to handle that, Gideon?” He pushed himself away from the roof of the car where he had been leaning and approached the group of children, his eyes on the questioner. Not more than thirteen at the oldest, yet he had phrased his inquiry in first-class English with a slight British inflection. Learned off one of the Common Europe news-commentators, probably. Still, it was an achievement at his age.
“What’s your name, prodgy?”
“Simon, sir. Simon Bethakazi.”
“Well, Simon, you’re probably old enough by now to know how it feels when you do something silly you wouldn’t like other people to find out about. Not because you’d be punished, but because people would laugh at you—or because they thought of you as one of the cleverest boys in the school and a clever boy oughtn’t to have done such a stupid thing. Catch?”
Simon nodded, face very intent.
“Only sometimes things happen which are too big to hide. Suppose you—hmmm! Suppose you knocked over a jug of milk and that was all the milk in the house? And it was your fault but you’d been doing something silly to make it happen, like seeing if you could hang by your feet from the rafters.”
Simon looked blank for a second and the teacher, smiling, said something in Shinka. His face cleared and he had to repress a grin.
“Well—you might try and put the blame on someone else … No, you wouldn’t do that, I’m sure; you’re a good boy. You might try and blame it on a pig that tripped you up, or a chicken that startled you and made you fall over.
“The Chinese would have to be very clever indeed to do all the damage they’re supposed to. But because America is a big and rich and proud country we don’t like admitting that there are some people who aren’t happy—who are so unhappy, in fact, they want to change the way things are run. But there are only a few of them, not enough to make the changes happen. So they lose their tempers and they break things, same as people do anywhere.
“And there are some other people who would also like to change things, but who haven’t got around to using bombs yet, or setting houses on fire. If they thought there were many more like themselves, they might decide to start too. So we like to let it be thought that it’s really someone else’s fault. Do you understand?”
“It may be a trifle sophisticated for him,” the teacher said aside to Norman.
“No, I understand.” Simon was emphatic. “I’ve seen somebody lose his temper. It was when I went to stay with my cousin in the north last year. I saw an Inoko lady and gentleman having a quarrel.”
Incredulous words rose to Norman’s lips. Before he could utter them, however, Gideon had coughed politely.
“If you’ll excuse us, we have to get on our way,” he said.
“Of course,” the teacher beamed. “Many thanks for your kindness. Class, three cheers for our visitors! Hip hip—”
* * *
Back on the road, Norman said, “And what would State think of that—uh—presentation?”
“It was honest,” Gideon said with a shrug. “It’s hardly what they’ll hear over the TV, but it’s honest.”
Norman hesitated. “There was something I wanted to ask, but it seems foolish … The hole! Why was young Simon so eager to stress that he’d seen someone lose his temper?”
“That’s a very bright kid. And sophisticated.”
“Anyone could see he’s no simpleton! But I asked—”
“He could say that in English. He couldn’t have said it in Shinka, which is his native language, and that’s good for a boy barely into his teens, isn’t it?”
Norman shook his head in bewilderment.
“Ask this linguist—what’s his name? The one you brought with you.”
“Derek Quimby.”
“Ah-hah. Ask him if you can express the idea of losing your temper in Shinka. You can’t. You can only use the word which means ‘insane’.”
“But—”
“I’m telling you.” Gideon guided the car around a wide curve, seeking a route between potholes. “I don’t speak the language well myself, but I can get along. Facts are: you can say ‘annoyed’ or even ‘exasperated’, but both those words came originally from roots meaning ‘creditor’. Someone you get angry with owes you an apology in the same way you’re owed money or a cow. You can say ‘crazy’ and put one of two modifiers on the front of it—either the root for ‘amusing’ or the root for ‘tears’. In the latter case, you’re talking about someone who’s hopelessly out of his mind, sick, to be tended and cleaned up after. In the former, you’re inviting people to laugh at someone who’s lost his temper, but will return to normal sooner or later.”
“They regard anger as being literal insanity?”
“They don’t regard it as being important enough to have a separate word to label it, that’s all I can say.”
“But people must lose their tempers occasionally!”
“Of course they do. I’ve even seen Zad lose his temper. But that wasn’t at anybody—it was the day his doctors told him he must retire or die. Did him a power of good, too, like any catharsis. What they don’t do is go crazy-mad and smash things that they’ll regret later. I’ve been here more than two years and I haven’t seen a parent hit a child. I haven’t seen a child hit another child. Trip him over, yes, or jump out at him from around a corner and pretend to be a leopard. You know what the Mandingo used to say about the Shinka in the old days?”
Norman gave a slow nod. “They were magicians who could steal the heart out of a warrior.”
“Right. And the way they do it is by dodging passion. I don’t know how they manage it, but there’s the record. A thousand or more years in the same spot, not bothering anyone, and like I said the day you arrived they swallowed up the Holaini and the Inoko and Kpala immigrants … Shall I tell you something you really won’t believe?”