How long till sunset prayer this evening, by the way?
* * *
But the Guineveres of our world are no more than the spray on the top of the wave. It forms spectacular transitory patterns, but the ground-swell is what alters the coastlines. I can feel currents of it from where I’m sitting.
Imagine a VP of a big corporation sharing an apartment, forty years ago, with an alleged independently wealthy dilettante. They’d never have promoted him to the job in the first place. They’d have looked around for some type with a presentable wife, wouldn’t have cared that the couple ate each other’s hearts out in private and shipped their kids off to boarding-school and summer camp and any other place they could to get them out of the way. Nowadays they wouldn’t give a pint of whaledreck even if we were sleeping together. It doesn’t breed, and that’s good. Everybody boasting about their children, complaining about not being allowed children—but they couldn’t have pushed the eugenics laws through if people hadn’t secretly felt relieved. We’re at the precipice where even our own children add intolerably to the task of coping with our fellow human beings. We feel much more guilty these days about resenting other people’s children than we do about the existence of people whose impulses don’t involve propagating the species.
Come to think of it, there’s a psychological as well as a physical sense in which we reproduce our kind. And we’ve tended to push the physical one further and further back in our lives. A lot of us have given it up altogether. We owe our intelligence—what there is of it—to having stretched the cub-period, the dominance of the Lustprinzip, beyond all reasonable bounds. Wonder if this is another way of stretching it still further. That would account for the development of the shiggy circuit, the fact that the world’s big cities are alive with women who’ve never had a permanent home, but live out of a bag and sleep a night, a week, half a year wherever there’s a man with an apartment to share. I must see if Mergendahler has published anything about this—it sounds like his field. I wish to God Mulligan hadn’t quit; we need him to tell us where we are, we need his insight like we need food!
* * *
No, it’s not Donald I should show the door to. It’s Victoria. He’s told me a score of times about my preoccupation with paleass shiggies, and I never listened, but he’s right. Prophet’s beard, all this talk about emancipation! Just one of the shiggies who’ve been in and out of this apartment like doses of aperient was stunningly beautiful and solid-ground sensible and marvellous in bed and a whole, rounded, balanced sort of person. And that was Gennice, that Donald brought home, not me, and I was unappreciative because she was a brown-nose. I must be off my gyros. I must be busted clear out of my nappy old plantation-bred skull!
Emancipated! Allah be just to me, I’m a worse prisoner of historical circumstance than the oldest Red Guard in Peking!
* * *
I wonder if we’ve been around each other long enough for him to think of me as Donald-a-person instead of Donald-a-WASP. I wonder if his impression of me is accurate. For the sake of absolute security I guess I should take him up on the threat he made, and move away. Being exposed for such a long time so intimately to one person is what the Colonel would call erosive. Funny how that one word he used has stuck in my mind so long … Still, no doubt they keep their eyes on me. They’ll tell me if they think I’m endangering my cover.
If I were to come straight out and tell Norman: “I’m not a lazy slob parasitising off inherited wealth and making like a poor man’s cousin to a synthesist because I haven’t any creative talent—I’m a spy…!”
I’d be stupid.
Wonder if I’m going to get nightmares again, like in the a plane tomorrow to God knows where. Oh, surely they’re early days, dreaming of a call in the middle of the night and not likely to pull me out of cold storage now? It’s been ten years, and I’m adapted, and even if I sometimes get depressed I like things as they are. I’d prefer not to have to adjust to someone else as I’ve done to Norman. I used to imagine I could manage without friends so intimate it would be cruel to keep up the lie where they were concerned. I don’t think I can. But at least in Norman’s case I can excuse not telling him the truth on the grounds that it’s too late; we’ve shared too much already. If I had to get this close to someone else I don’t think I could maintain my pretence.
Lord, I hope the forecast of their needs was wrong when they sent Jean Foden and enlisted me!
It’s all breaking loose at once. Someone’s stirred my mind with a stick. Anybody would think I’d been ingesting Skulbustium instead of just my regular brand of pot. I have to hitch on to something fast, or I’ll break to bits.
I’ve never really talked, like you’d say talked, to that codder in the other chair. I wonder if I can. Because if I can, that’ll mean something did happen to me today, it wasn’t just a momentary shock.
But I can’t approach it cold. Work up to it by a roundabout route.
* * *
The quickest way to find out what he thinks about me, of course, might perhaps be to ask him…?
* * *
“Donald—”
“Norman—”
They both laughed a trifle uneasily.
“What were you going to say?”
“No, no—you go ahead.”
“All right, I will. Donald, what can you tell me to refresh my memory about Beninia??”
context (5)
THE GRAND MANOR
“Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy. (I say ‘we,’ but if you’re a bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm’s length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.)
“We still haven’t digested the truth that evolution applies to mental functions, too—that because a dog is a dog, a dolphin a dolphin, it has an awareness and sense of personal identity distinct from ours but not necessarily inferior. Is an apple inferior to an orange?
“But I’m trying to tell you what’s happening to you, not what’s happening to Crêpe Suzette your neurotic poodle. A good veterinary psychologist can probably be located by calling Information. You wouldn’t believe him if he started telling you how much you have in common with that pet of yours, and likely you won’t believe me. But if I annoy you sufficiently you may at least try to think up arguments to demonstrate how wrong I am.
“Basically, then: you have two things in common. You’re a pack-animal; so is a dog. You’re a territorial animal; so is a dog. (The fact that we mark our manors with walls instead of urine is irrelevant.)
“The depiction of Man the Noble Savage standing off the wolves at the cave entrance, all by himself with a club, while his mate and their young cower in the background, is so much whaledreck. When we were at the stage of taking refuge in caves our habit was almost certainly to congregate in troupes the way baboons still do, and when the dog-baboons move in everyone else—note that everyone!—moves out. I mean like lions will shift the scene, and a lion is not what you’d call a defenceless creature.
“Lions are rather solitary, tending to work by couples over a manor which affords them adequate game for subsistence. Or not, depending on outside pressure from other members of the species. (Try owning a whole tomcat and you’ll see the process in miniature.) Pack-animals have the evolutionary edge—in combination they’re deadly. Lions learn this as cubs and then ignore the practice, which is why baboons can cave them in.