Shareholder 954327186 was suspended from his job pending a full inquiry by an Industrial Tribunal. He bowed to the summonings officer, respectful, not in the least bitter or resentful, justice being justice, and went home to his buff-coloured front door to find a half a dozen demonstrators marching around in a circle outside.
“Reinstate Rael Mandella!” they chanted. “Reinstate reinstate reinstate!”
“What are you doing outside my house?” demanded Rael Mandella Jr.
“Protesting against your unjust suspension,” said a zealous-looking young man carrying a placard reading “Buff is boring, green is glorious.”
“We’re the voice of those that have no voice,” added a pinched woman.
“Excuse me, but I don’t want your protests, thank you. I’ve never even seen any of you before, please go away.”
“Oh, no,” said the zealous young man. “You’re a symbol, you see, a symbol of liberty to the oppressed slaves of the Company. You are the spirit of freedom crushed beneath the booted heel of corporate industry.”
“All I did was paint my door green. I’m no symbol of anything. Now, go away before you get into trouble with company security.”
They paraded around outside his house until night fell. Rael Mandella Jr. turned his radio up very loud and closed his blinds.
The industrial tribunal found him guilty of antisocial behavior and assault on the person of a Company executive in the execution of his duties. The chairman, in his short summing-up, used the phrase “industrial feudalism” thirty-nine times and concluded that even though junior Labour Relations Liaison Manager E. P. Veerasawmy was a fearful little shit whose punch in the gob was richly deserved and long overdue, Shareholder 954327186 was not the one to execute such judgment and was therefore fined two months wages spread over the next twelve months and barred from promotion in his section for the next two years. His job as a crane driver was reinstated. Rael Mandella shrugged. He had heard of worse sentences.
The protestors were outside waiting for him, banners and slogans at the ready.
“Draconian oppression of Shareholders!” shouted the pinched woman.
“Stop the show trials!” shouted the zealous man.
“We have a right to green doors!” cried a third protestor.
“Rael Mandella is innocent!” a fourth bawled, and a fifth added, “Quash the sentence! Quash the sentence!”
“Actually, I thought I got off rather lightly,” said Rael Mandella Jr.
They followed him home. They marched around outside his house. They would have followed him into the social centre that evening had they not been involved in a boycott of Company recreational facilities, so they marched around outside waving their banners, chanting their slogans, and singing their protest songs. Agreeably mellow, Rael Mandella Jr. left by a back way so that the protestors would not follow him. He heard shouting and peeked around the side of the Company commissary to see if they had somehow learned of his evasion. What he saw sobered him instantly.
He saw armed and armoured security police bundling protestors, slogans, banners, placards and shouts into a black and gold armoured van of a kind he had never seen before. Two black and gold guards burst out of the social shaking their heads. They piled into the back of the van and it drove away. In the direction of Rael Mandella Jr.’s house.
He had sworn that he would never return to sleep under his parents’ roof while he still had a job and independence, but that night he revoked the vow, slipped under the wire, and slept in the Mandella household.
The six o’clock Company news bulletin next morning carried a sombre tale. The previous night a number of Shareholders had taken themselves on a drinking spree (’doing the ring’ in popular parlance) and, utterly inebriated, had wandered too close to the desert bluffs and had fallen to their deaths. The newsreader concluded her salutary tale with a warning about the evils of drinking and a reminder that the True Shareholder permitted nothing to impair his effectiveness for the Company. She did not read names or numbers. Rael Jr. did not need to hear them. He was remembering the spiritual malaise of his childhood days, and as he remembered it returned to him, summoned by his remembrance; a nausea, a need, a destiny, a mystery, and he knew, as Santa Ekatrina ladled out breakfast eggs and ricecakes, that he could no longer be silent, he had a destiny, he must speak, he must vindicate. Sitting in his mother’s kitchen, the clouds parted for him and he glimpsed a future for himself both awful and dreadful. And inescapable.
“So,” said breakfast-busy Santa Ekatrina. “What now?”
“I don’t know. I’m scared… I can’t go back, they’ll arrest me too.”
“I’m not interested in anything you have or haven’t done,” said Santa Ekatrina. “Just do what is right, that’s all. Follow the compass of your heart.”
Armed with a borrowed megaphone, Rael Mandella Jr. crossed a field of turnips, ducked down into a culvert only he and his brother knew about, and splashed through the floating faeces into the heart of Steeltown. When no one was looking, he stood up on a concrete flower tub in Industrial Feudalism Gardens and prepared to speak.
The words would not come.
He was no orator. He was a simple man; he did not have the power to make words soar like eagles or strike like swords. He was a simple man. A simple man, sick in the heart, and angry. Yes… the anger, the anger would speak for him. He took the anger from his heart and placed it on his lips.
And the mothers children old folk off-shift strollers stopped and listened to his stumbling, angry sentences. He spoke about green doors and buff doors. He spoke about people and soft, peopley things that did not appear on Company reports or Statements of Account; of trust, and choice, and selfexpression, and the things which everyone needed because they were not things, material, Company-provided things, without which the people withered and died. He spoke about being a simple man and not a thing. He spoke about the terrible thing the Company did to people who wanted to be people and not things, he spoke of the black and gold police and the van he had never seen before and people taken away in the middle of a Friday night and thrown off a cliff because they wanted more than the Company was prepared to give. He spoke of neighbours and workmates taken from their homes or workplaces on the whisper of Company informers, he spoke the inarticulate speech of the heart and opened great gaping wounds in his listeners’ souls.
“What do you suggest we do?” asked a tall thin man whose slight build marked him a man of Metropolis. The by-now sizeable crowd took up the cry.
“I… don’t… know,” said Rael Mandella Jr. The spirit fled. The people wavered, taken to the edge, then abandoned. “I don’t know.” The cries rang around him what do we do what do we do what do we do, and then it came to him. He knew what to do, it was as simple, uncomplicated and clear as a summer morning. He snatched up the fallen megaphone.
“Organize!” he cried."Organize! We are not property!”
47
It was a beautiful day for a march.
So said the steelworkers buttoned up in their best clothes, full to the gills with breakfast pineapple and fried egg, striding out into the crisp morning sunlight.
So said the railroad men, straightening their peaked caps and examining the burnish of their brass buttons before stepping out to join the growing throng.