Amen, brothers and sisters! Amen!
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
tracking with closeups (6)
WHICH SIDE AM I ON?
In New York Elihu Masters preferred not to stay at a hotel, nor even at the home of one of his many friends, though he knew some of them were hurt by his repeated refusals. Instead he took a room at the United Nations Hostel, and if—as on this visit—the premises were so crowded that all they could find for him was a poky overgrown closet where the bed folded back to the wall so the occupant could get at the bathtub underneath, that was cool.
He was afraid of falling in love with his own country as his old friend Zadkiel Obomi had done, to the point where his precariously fostered, deliberately chosen commitment to the species man would cave in under pressure from the plight of his fellow Americans. Today he had come perilously close to doing exactly that. The spectacle of that youthful VP at General Technics had made him so indescribably sad …
He had not yet brought into the open the reason for his approach to General Technics, but he didn’t doubt that they would have submitted the facts to Shalmaneser and received an assessment that was very close to the truth. Too much of his life was a matter of public record: his personal request for transfer to Beninia, for example, when in the normal course of events he should have been the next ambassador to Delhi and afterwards reaped one of the real plum jobs—Paris, perhaps, or even Moscow. There had been such a clamour about his going to Beninia, especially from the Children of X …
He sat in the room’s only chair, facing but not seeing a wall-flat TV screen on which the marvel of holographic signal transmission presented images that seemed solid and changed their appearance and perspective if one moved from side to side of the picture. The set had recently shown him a SCANALYZER programme, and the details of Pacific fighting and vandalism, of anti-Right Catholic riots and muckers at large, had depressed him into a near-stupor.
Lax in one hand he held a book recommended to him by a friend, one which had appeared a few months after his departure for Beninia. He’d heard the author’s name before, naturally; he was rated by those who should know as among the handful of truly great sociological vulgarisateurs in the tradition of Packard and Riesman.
But he’d announced this book as his swan-song, and true to his promise—according to the friend who’d loaned it to him—since its publication he had vanished. Rumour said he was dead by his own hand. Indeed, the despair that breathed through his mocking definitions reminded Elihu of nothing so much as Wells’s Mind at the End of its Tether, that grim epitaph for human aspiration, and suggested that the rumour might be right.
He stirred now and looked at it afresh. The cover showed a barrel of gunpowder with a train fizzing across the floor. Doubtless that design had been chosen by the publisher, not by Chad Mulligan himself—he was aware of the twenty-first century and would never have permitted anything so archaic if he’d been informed in time.
In fact, Mulligan …
Elihu gave a slow nod. He had to concede that he was impressed, as one might be by a doctor who declined to mislead his patients with false reassurances. Mulligan might have understood the motives which could take the bright star of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps to the shabby, run-down slums of Port Mey instead of the clean modernity of Moscow. He might even, though himself a Caucasian, have comprehended the choice such a man felt was facing him: either to give himself up to the crying needs of his own people, who in this brave new century were still the trapped ones, spawning the majority of the muckers (though the newscasts by policy never mentioned their colour), the majority of the dicties (though most of them couldn’t afford Skulbustium or Triptine and poisoned themselves on kitchen-brewed Yaginol or scraped poppy-juice from the slit pods with the backs of dirty knives), the ones who said, “I don’t have to ghetto where I’m going because I was born here!”—or else determinedly to give love only to friends, and loyalty only to the entire human race.
Black or not black, this man Elihu Masters could not identify any better with the greedy bosses in Bamako and Accra, alternating between wheedling overtures to Beninia and shrieks of rage at each other designed to distract their own people from inter-tribal squabbling, than he could with the board of General Technics. Let the Dahomalians and the RUNGs fight their shadow-wars, utter their rival boasts about which country was the more industrialised, the more powerful, the more ready to spring to the defence of its national integrity; for him, the fact that Zadkiel Obomi could juggle four language-groups—two of which were intruders anyhow, descendants of refugees from twentieth-century tribal massacres in adjacent territories—and keep them singing under circumstances which might have been expected to lead to civil war, was the grand achievement of all Africa.
And perhaps … of the whole world.
He could hear that singing in memory now, over the thump-thump beat of pestles in mealie mortars because there were no surplus hides for luxuries like drumheads. To that insistent rhythm he found himself speaking aloud.
“It’s not that it’s good to live in squalor!” he exclaimed, and slapped the book on his palm for emphasis. “It’s that they haven’t been taught the ways we more sophisticated folk know to hate each other!”
He knew that was nonsense the moment he had said it. Human beings were deluding themselves when they claimed that hatred was something they had to be taught. Hatred of rivals, of intruders on private property, of the more powerful male or the more fertile female, was implicit in the psychological structure of mankind. And yet the fact remained: he had sensed in Beninia a sort of happiness in face of poverty he had never detected anywhere else.
Possibly it’s due to Zad himself? No, that’s equally nonsensical. Not even Jesus, not even Mohammed, not even the Buddha, could have made such a claim. Yet I’m sure it’s an objective phenomenon! Maybe, when GT moves in, they’ll put the facts to Shalmaneser and come up with the explanation.
But that was more ridiculous than ever, a pure piece of self-excusatory rationalising. The only facts available to be fed into a computer were public knowledge: Beninia was a small country, assailed by famine, run by its president and a handful of talented subordinates long past the point where its larger neighbours had given up and federated into colonial-language groups. In the background loomed certain curious historical problems, such as the reason why the Arab slave-traders ignored Shinkas when assembling parties for sale to European purchasers, why despite an unwarlike tradition that tribe had never been subjugated by its neighbours, why under the British colonial government there had never once been a revolutionary party set up, why …
“What the hell is the good of worrying about it?” Elihu said, once more addressing the walls of the room. “I love the place, and when they get love down to a bunch of factors you can analyse with a computer there’ll be nothing left of whatever makes it worth being human!”
context (7)
BULL FIGHT
Scene: a cathedral during morning service.
Cast: Bishop and congregation.
Detaiclass="underline" a smear along the front rim of the pulpit. It was applied with a paintbrush and consists of a vesicant (formula related to mustard gas but a sight more efficient) and a hallucinogen (GT’s catalogue reference AKZ-21205 converted by boiling with dilute sulphuric acid into the product nicknamed “Truth or Consequences”).