“And there are more of them than ever before—and you’ve grown to expect privacy so that every now and then you can take the pressure off, but that privacy is becoming more and more expensive so that it’s considered normal for even well-paid businessmen to share their apartments in order to enjoy luxuries their own salaries won’t stretch to, such as rooms large enough to hold their private possessions as well as themselves—and you’re being commanded by today’s aggressive advertising to throw out those cherished belongings and get others which are strange to you—and you’re being told day and night from authoritative official sources that people you don’t know but who adhere to some mysterious quasi-religious precepts known as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist dogma and communicate in a language whose characters you can’t even recognise as real writing are trying to trespass on your national gang’s manor—and …
“In the last decade of the twentieth century sales of tranks soared a whopping thirteen hundred per cent. Unless you’ve been living in a country too poor to furnish the supplies, the odds are that two of every five of your acquaintances are dicties—perhaps on some socially acceptable drug like alcohol, but quite likely on a trank that by way of side-effect depresses orgasmic capacity and compels the user to resort to orgies in order to stimulate flagging potency, or on a product like Skulbustium which offers the tempting bait of a totally, untrespassably private experience and entrains senile dementia rather more certainly than tobacco entrains cancer of the lung.
“In short: your life from birth to death resembles the progress of a hopelessly drunk tightrope walker whose act has been so bad up till now that he’s being bombarded with rotten eggs and broken bottles.
“And if you fall off, what they will do is broadly this: they’ll take you out of the environment you’re used to—you don’t like it much, but at least it’s not totally strange—and put you somewhere else you’ve never been before. Your key deprivation is of territoriality; they will shove you in a cell which has nothing whatever about it to help identify you as an individual. Your secondary lacks are of abstracted territoriality-equivalents; they will take away the clothes you chose yourself and give you tattered second- or twentieth-hand garments, and you will have no privacy whatever because on the basis of a time-schedule deliberately randomised so that you can’t even brace yourself for the impact by the clock of hunger you carry in your stomach they will fling open the door and stare at you to see what you’re doing.
“You will wind up inventing a private language because there’s no other way of isolating yourself; you’ll scrawl on the walls with your excrement because nothing else in the place belongs to you except the products of your own body; and they will call you a hopeless case and intensify the ‘treatment’ you’re receiving.
“Don’t say that it won’t happen to you. The odds in favour have been going up daily for a hundred years. You know at least half a dozen people who have been in mental hospitals, and of that half-dozen at least one was related to you, even if no more closely than as a cousin. Again, if this is not the case, that’s because you’ve been living in a country too poor to afford enough mental hospitals for its population on the generally accepted scale.
“Thank heaven for such countries! You might do worse than emigrate to one if what I’ve been saying worries you.”
—You: Beast by Chad C. Mulligan
tracking with closeups (5)
SCENESHIFTER
A little shamefacedly, because of official hostility towards such superstitions, students on their way to the fine tall modern buildings of Dedication University were apt to dodge into a shrine gay with paper streamers and gold leaf, there to light a volcano-shaped cone of incense paste as a propitiation, and concentrate a trifle more fully on their studies as a result.
There had been many changes in Yatakang, but the man who had been personally responsible for most of those which counted shunned publicity. Moreover there was one highly significant factor which had not altered: in Yatakang perhaps more than anywhere else on the face of the globe men felt a sense of divine arbitrariness.
The richness of the country’s vaunted hundred islands was almost incredible. Alone of the nations of Asia it had an exportable surplus of food, mostly sugar and fishmeal. (The particular strain of Tilapia which provided the latter in thousand-ton batches had been modified by Professor Doctor Lyukakarta Moktilong Sugaiguntung.) Its mines made it self-sufficient in products like aluminium, bauxite and petroleum—for plastics, not for fuel. (A bacterium tailored by Sugaiguntung cracked the sticky aboriginal tars into pumpable light fractions all by itself and a mile below ground.) It was the largest country in the world without a single synthetic rubber factory. (Its plantations had been ruthlessly stripped of twentieth-century stocks and re-sown with a strain Sugaiguntung had developed to yield twice the quantity of latex every season.)
But all this, with hardly more warning than the tremor of a needle on a paper tape, might be shattered by the fury of Grandfather Loa, who slumbered beside the Shongao Strait. He had not lost his temper since 1941, but the market in incense volcanoes flourished nonetheless.
“Now what I want you to do,” Sugaiguntung said to the orang-outang, “is this: go to the room with the door painted blue—blue, yes?—and look through the drawers of the desk until you find the picture of yourself. Bring it to me. And be quick!”
The orang-outang scratched himself. He was not a very prepossessing specimen. An unlooked-for side-effect had afflicted him with alopecia, and his belly and half his back were bald. But, having thought over the instructions, he loped obediently towards the door.
The most important of Dr. Sugaiguntung’s four visitors, and the only one sitting down, was a heavy-set man in a plain off-white jacket and trousers, his close-cropped scalp lidded with the traditional black skull-cap. In the hope of an immediately favourable comment, Sugaiguntung addressed him.
“You’ll appreciate, I’m sure, that this demonstrates his ability to follow spoken commands, as well as to distinguish colours not normally perceived by his species, and moreover to identify his own image among a number of others—an achievement which in the time available and considering the complexity of the problem we…”
The visitor carried a short cane. When he wanted the subject changed he slapped the side of his boot with it. He did so now, with a noise like a cracking whip. Sugaiguntung fell silent with Pavlovian responsiveness.
The visitor rose and for the fifth or sixth time made a tour of the laboratory, his attention lingering on the two framed items decorating the wall. There had been a third, and a patch of unfaded paint still betrayed its former location, but it had been intimated that even a citation for the Nobel prize in chemistry was an unpatriotic thing to put on show. What remained were a map of the world and a portrait of Marshal Solukarta, Leader of the Guided Socialist Democracy of Yatakang.
The visitor said abruptly, “You’ve looked at this map lately?”
Sugaiguntung nodded.
The cane flicked up to become a pointer, rapping on the glass overlying the map.
“It remains like a sore on the body of Yatakang, this ulcer of American imperialism, this memorial to their barefaced rapacity! I see,” he added with marginally more approval, “that your map at least does not perpetuate the name of Isola.”
It was a pre-Isolan map, but Sugaiguntung did not feel he could claim credit for that. He remained silent.