Stand on Zanzibar

  “And these things have just about counteracted the advances in medical science which have eliminated the traditional causes of spasticism. You decide to have that kid, you’re still bucking an eight per cent risk that if he reaches puberty he’ll suffer from a congenital disorder.

  “Mark you, some of them are pretty minor. For instance, pollen-allergy is hereditary, not congenital even, but modern antidotes make it possible for a child with pollen-asthma to lead a fairly normal life. Sounds like nothing, doesn’t it—these days?

  “Except that before he dies that child will likely have spent seventy-five thousand bucks on antidotes!

  “Now if you’ve been turned down by the Eugenic Processing Board, what’s happened is that they’ve assessed the risk of you having a handicapped child not at eight but at eighty per cent. You may disagree with them on the definition of a handicap—this recent row over dichromatism, for example. They have solid achievements to their credit, though. Fifty years ago Pauling said it would take twenty generations for all the recessives due to radioactive fallout to appear; now, they have tabs on enough of them to say they’ll be eliminated in fewer than twelve. That ought to cheer up your ten-times-great-grandchildren, if any!

  “But I tell you this, having looked at you for a good many years with the maximum cynicism I could contrive. There’s nothing so good about you that it deserves to be physically perpetuated in the body of your own born child. You’re hiding behind that Eugenics Board decision to conceal the fact that you’re really evading the responsibility of looking after a person who’s eventually got to go and face the world alone. You don’t want to risk him coming back and saying it was your fault he didn’t emerge a winner in the game of life. I know some people, even, who are lying about their clean genotype, pretending to a hereditary handicap to excuse their childless state.

  “Why can’t they be honest about it? I’m in favour of people who don’t breed, mostly. But not because I prefer dogmatic homosexuals, or because I favour religious fanatics like the Divine Daughters, who put on celibacy to mask their borderline hysteria. No! Only because a person who doesn’t insist on the expensive luxury of being a parent frees himself, or herself, to become a parent for one of the underprivileged children we already have.

  “If you’ve been forbidden to start a prodgy, you know there are potential adoptees around who are superior to anything you could breed. Wouldn’t you like to raise a child to be brighter than you are, more successful, handsomer, sexier, healthier?

  “No, you sheeting well wouldn’t. You’d prefer it to stay in a public orphanage where substandard nutrition will reduce its intelligence and lack of maternal affection will turn it into an unsuccessful neurotic.

  “When a species becomes terrified of its own young, it appears to be scheduled for the grand disposall down which went the dinosaurs. Some of us, as I’ve just demonstrated, are afraid in case their prodgies will prove inferior to themselves, which is halfway rational, but some are afraid they’ll be the opposite, and that’s insane. Now you’re erecting an Asiatic scientist you’d never heard of before a couple of weeks back into a Messiah-figure. All right, suppose Sugaiguntung can do as they maintain and tailor a baby to specification? What are you going to ask for?

  “Cleverer than you? But you don’t want to spend your old age feeling you’re a drag on your prodgies.

  “Stupider than you? But you don’t want to waste the rest of your life looking after a fool.

  “What you want is one which is guaranteed to behave itself until it’s old enough to run away from home, so that forever after you can complain about the ingratitude it displayed. But I doubt whether even Sugaiguntung can build that into an ovum with warranty of success.”

  —From an article which an over-eager journal commissioned Chad Mulligan to write when they realised he wasn’t after all dead

  tracking with closeups (21)

  THE DRY CHILD

  Linguistic evaluation suggests the earliest form of the name “Begi” is transliterable rather as “Mpengi” and in consequence it is generally rendered “winter-born”. The more close rendering would be “child of dry season”. December and January in northern Beninia (where he was supposedly born) are both least humid months of every year.

  It has been suggested the name was originally “Kpegi” (i.e. “foreigner”) but this would not give rise to the “Mpengi” form mentioned above. In any case Shinka superstition has it that a child conceived at the breaking of the maximum summer rains (hence born in midwinter) is likely to be livelier than average. Attempts to show that Begi was in fact a solar myth originating in latitudes where seasons are marked enough to foster concepts of death and rebirth of the sun are tantalising, but fruitless in the absence of any other than oral evidence, though it is highly possible that prehistoric cross-cultural interaction provided some elements of the Begi myth which has descended to us. On the other hand …1

  BEGI AND HIS GREEDY SISTER

  One day Begi was lying on the floor near a basket of fried chicken his mother had made for a festival. His sister thought Begi was asleep and took the largest chicken-leg and hid it under the roof.

  When the family gathered to eat Begi refused what he was offered from the basket. He said, “There is a bigger bird roosting under the roof.”

  “You’re silly,” said his mother, but his sister knew what he meant.

  He climbed up and got the chicken-leg and ate it.

  “You stole it and put it there,” his sister accused. “You wanted to have the biggest piece.”

  “No,” Begi said. “I dreamed that wanting to have the biggest piece was the best way to get the smallest.”

  And he gave her the gnawed bone.2

  BEGI AND THE FOREIGN MERCHANT

  Once Begi went to the big market in Lalendi. There he saw a merchant from another tribe. The man was selling pots he claimed were made of gold, but Begi went behind him and took a knife and tried to cut the metal. It would not cut like soft gold although it was shiny and yellow.

  So Begi picked up the biggest pot and pissed on the ground underneath and put it back.

  Then he went around to the front and there were many people wanting to buy those gold pots which Begi knew were only made of brass.

  Begi said, “That is a fine big pot there. I need a pot like that to piss in at night.”

  And everybody laughed, thinking he was a fool to put that liquid in a pot fit to hold the chief’s finest palm-wine.

  “Piss in it and show me if it leaks,” Begi said. The merchant laughed with everyone else and did so, saying what a shame it was to defile such a valuable pot with urine.

  Begi lifted it up when the merchant had finished and the ground underneath was wet with piss. He said, “I will not buy a pot no matter how fine it looks if it leaks when you piss in it.”

  So all the people beat the merchant and made him give their money back.3

  BEGI AND THE SEA-MONSTER

  After he had left the house of the fat old woman, Begi walked along the trail through the forest whistling the tune he had learned from her and plucking the five wooden tongues of the kethalazi—what the British nicknamed the “pocket piano” when they came much later to Begi’s part of the world.

  A little bird heard him and fluttered down to the side of the trail, eager to listen to this fine new tune but a little afraid because Begi was a man.

  Seeing how timid the bird was, Begi stopped on the path and sat down. He said, “Do not be afraid, little cousin. Do you want to learn my song? I will teach it to you if you will teach me one of yours.”

  “That’s a good bargain,” said the bird. “But I can’t help being afraid of you. You’re as much bigger than I am as the monster from the sea is bigger than man-people.”

  “Certainly you’re smaller than I am,” Begi said. “But your voice is far sweeter than mine. I have heard you make the whole forest echo with your melody. By the bye, though,” he added, “what is this monster you just mentioned?”
br />   The bird told him that at a village near the sea, a day’s walk distant, a huge monster had come out of the water and caught two children and eaten them, and everyone had run away to hide in the bush.

  “I am bigger than you are,” Begi said. “But I can’t sing better than you. Perhaps the monster is bigger than I am. It remains to be seen if he can think better than I do. I shall go there and find out.”

  The bird said, “If you are not afraid of the monster I will try not to be afraid of you.” He perched on Begi’s head and dug his toes into the woolly hair there.

  So Begi walked all day carrying the bird and teaching him to sing the old woman’s song. After many hours’ journey he came to the village where everyone had run away from the monster.

  “Little cousin!” he said. “What is that I see on the horizon, where the dark blue water meets the light blue sky?”

  The bird flew out over the sea to find out. When he came back, he said, “There is a storm coming. There are clouds and lightning.”

  “Very good,” said Begi, and went to look for the monster.

  There he was lying in the market square, as much bigger than Begi as Begi was bigger than the little bird, and the bird had all he could do not to fly off in terror. But he clung to Begi’s hair with all his might.

  The monster roared at Begi, “Hey there, weakling! You come at the right time! I have finished digesting the children I had for breakfast and I’ll have you for my supper!”

  “I’m hungry too,” said Begi. “I haven’t eaten today.”

  “There’s something to eat sitting on your head,” the monster exclaimed. “You’d better make the most of it before I gobble you up!”

  Privately to the bird, Begi whispered, “There’s no need to be afraid. I would rather hear you sing than make a meal of you. But I don’t believe this monster cares about music.”

  Addressing the monster more loudly, he went on, “No! I’m saving this bird for the time when I’m so weak I cannot go and hunt for food.”

  The monster laughed. “If I eat you, when will the day come which finds you so hungry you must eat your pet?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Begi. “Any more than you know when the day will come when the giant whose back you ride on will need to eat you.”

  “I don’t ride on anybody’s back,” declared the monster.

  “In that case,” said Begi, “whose are the jaws I see closing on you? Whose is the voice I hear making the welkin ring?” He raised his blunt spear and pointed.

  The monster looked out to sea and saw the black clouds looming down on the village and the waves rippling like the tongue of a hungry beast licking its chops and heard the sound of thunder like the grumbling of hunger.

  “There is the giant whose back you have been riding on,” said Begi. “It’s called the sea. We men are like fleas compared to it, so we are usually safe—we would not even make a mouthful for such a colossus. Even so, sometimes it hurts us when we annoy it and it scratches. But you are as much bigger than I am as I am bigger than this bird on my head. And by the sound of it the sea is very hungry.”

  The monster saw the flash of lightning like the gleam of white fangs in the mouth of the ocean, and he jumped up howling and ran away. He was never heard of again.

  When the people came back to the village from where they had been hiding in the bush, they asked Begi, “Are you not a mighty warrior, to have driven away that horrible monster?”

  So Begi showed them his blunt spear and the shield with a hole in it which he always carried, and they said, “What does this mean?”

  “It means,” he explained, “that you cannot use a spear to kill a flea which is biting you, and a shield is no use against a monster that could gobble you up shield and all. There is only one way to win against both a flea and a monster: you must think better than either of them.”4

  BEGI AND THE GHOST

  Once the people were much troubled by a tlele-ki (ancestral spirit) which terrified the women going to fetch water and made the children have bad dreams.

  Begi’s father the chief called together the kotlanga (council of adults), and Ethlezi (lit. “sorcerer, medicine-man”) told him, “It is the spirit of your father, Begi’s grandfather.”

  The chief was very upset. He asked Begi, “What can grandfather want with us?”

  Begi said, “There is only one way to find out what a ghost wants. We will go and ask him. Or if you won’t, I will by myself.”

  So he learned from Ethlezi the right way to speak politely to a ghost and went out at night to the dark lonely place where it had been seen. He said, “Grandfather, I have brought you palm-wine and goat’s blood. Eat if you will but talk to me.”

  The ghost came and drank the wine and took the blood to make itself strong. It said, “Begi, here I am.”

  “What do you want with us?” Begi asked.

  “I keep watch on the village. I see that everything is going badly. The law-suits are not judged as I would have judged them. Young people are disrespectful to their elders. The girls go with boys they do not intend to marry. There is too much food so that people grow fat and lazy and there is so much palm-wine that they get drunk and sleep when they should be hunting.”

  “My father the new chief judges law-suits differently because he is dealing with different people,” Begi said. “The young people learned how to talk to their elders from their parents, who were taught by you. The girls choose their own husbands now and when they marry they are happier than their mothers. As for being lazy and sleeping, why not, when we know that spirits like you keep watch over the village?”

  The ghost had no answer to that and it went away.5

  BEGI AND THE WICKED SORCERER

  Begi came to a village where everybody was afraid of a sorcerer called Tgu. He could make cows and women miscarry, he could set huts on fire without going near, he could make witch-dolls and if he stabbed with his special knife the footprint someone left in a muddy path the person would fall sick or die.

  Begi said to Tgu, “I want you to help me kill a man whose name I cannot tell you.”

  The sorcerer said, “Pay me. But you must bring something of his—a hair or a scrap of nail or some of the clothes he has worn.”

  “I will bring you something of his,” said Begi. He went away and came back with some excrement. Also he gave the sorcerer a mirror and some valuable herbs he had gathered.

  The sorcerer made a witch-doll and roasted it at the fire singing powerful magical chants. When it was dawn the people of the village came to see because they were afraid to come at night, the magic was so strong.

  “The man will die,” said the sorcerer.

  “Now I can tell you his name,” said Begi. “It is Tgu.”

  The sorcerer fell on the ground in a fit, shrieking that he had been tricked. He said he was sure to die at once.

  Begi took the chief of the village apart and said, “Wait one more hour. Then you can tell him the excrement belonged to a friend of mine called Tgu in another village. I am going away to laugh with my friend at the foolishness of the sorcerer.”6

  BEGI AND THE STEAMSHIP

  (Author’s note: this must be a very late accretal to the mythos.)

  Begi went to the seaside and there he saw a big ship with smoke coming out. A white man from the ship met him on the shore and talked with him.

  Begi said, “Welcome. Be my guest while you are here.”

  The white man said, “That is a foolish offer. I am coming to live here.”

  Begi said, “Then I will help you build your hut.”

  The white man said, “I will not live in a hut. I will live in a house of iron with smoke coming out of the top and be very rich.”

  Begi said, “Why do you wish to come here?”

  The white man said, “I am going to rule over you.”

  Begi said, “Is it better living here than where you come from?”

  The white man said, “It is too hot, it rains, it is muddy, I do not l
ike the food and there are none of my own women.”

  Begi said, “But if you want to come and live here it must be better in some respect. If you don’t like the weather, the food or the women, then you must think it is better governed than your own country, and my father the chief rules us.”

  The white man said, “I am going to rule you.”

  Begi said, “If you have left your own home you must have been sent away. How can a man who has been sent from home into exile rule better than my father the chief?”

  The white man said, “I have a big steamship with many strong guns.”

  Begi said, “Let me see you make another.”

  The white man said, “I cannot.”

  Begi said, “I see the way of it. You are good at using what other people have made and nothing else.” (Author’s note: it is an insult in Shinka to say that a man cannot make anything, as a self-respecting adult is expected to build his own house and carve his own furniture.)

  But the white man was too stupid to see Begi’s point and he came and lived here anyway.

  However, after a hundred years he learned better and went home.7

  continuity (29)

  I BEG TO REPORT

  The doctor in charge of Donald wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight. It took him an hour’s arguing and the threat of reporting to his agency that he had been incarcerated before they reluctantly sent him back to his hotel in an official car, with escort. By now, scores of reports based on rumour must have been circulated telling how Sugaiguntung had been rescued from the mucker; Engrelay Satelserv might well have had the story from Deirdre Kwa-Loop. He didn’t care. On the first day of his mission he had succeeded more completely than those who sent him—let alone he himself—could ever have dreamed. What counted was not getting the story on the beam, but his discovery that the man on whom the whole Yatakangi optimisation programme pivoted was afraid as much of its possible success as of its probable failure.