There was a pause. Eventually Elihu dropped his hands to his lap. “Well, I’ve answered your question, and by your silence you haven’t had much benefit from it. Now answer one of mine. What happened to you when you were called down to the disturbance in Shalmaneser’s vault?”
Norman swallowed gigantically, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Nothing of much importance,” he muttered.
“I don’t believe you. When you came back you were on your automatic pilot; there wasn’t a spark of genuine personality in anything you did or said throughout the meal, just a set of conditioned reflexes operating well enough to fool anyone except maybe a psychologist—or a diplomat. I’ve learned to tell the difference, just by walking into a room, between an honest negotiator and a delegate instructed merely to parrot his government’s official standpoint. You may be able to lie to the WASPs you work for, but I’ve grown old in the study of human deceit, and I know.”
He leaned forward and took Norman’s left hand in his. He probed between the tendons with the tips of his fingers. For a moment Norman was too astonished to react; then he snatched himself loose as though he had been stung.
“How did you guess?” he said.
“I didn’t. An old man—I suppose you’d call him a witchdoctor—taught me muscle-reading in the back streets of Port-au-Prince while I was ambassador to Haiti. I thought for a moment you must have suffered some sort of major injury to that hand, but I can’t feel the effects of one. Whose hand was it, then?”
“My three times great-grandfather.”
“Back in slavery days?”
“Yes.”
“Cut off?”
“Sawn off. Because he hit his boss and knocked him into a creek.”
Elihu nodded. “You must have been very young when you heard about it,” he suggested.
“Six, I think.”
“A bad thing to tell a child that age.”
“How can you say that? It was the kind of important thing kids my age needed to be told! Six wasn’t too young for me to have learned that the kid I liked most on our block, the one I thought of as my best friend, was ready at a minute’s notice to join with other kids I didn’t like and call me a dirty nigger bastard.”
“Have you noticed you don’t hear that used so much any longer—that particular insult? Probably you wouldn’t have. I notice the shifts in usage because I spend years at a time out of the country, and the process has gone quite a long way whenever I return. Nowadays where you used to say ‘bastard’ you tend to say ‘bleeder’ instead—to mean ‘haemophiliac’, I assume.”
“What?” Confused, Norman shook his head.
“If the point isn’t clear, I’ll deal with it in a moment. How did this story about your ancestor affect you?”
“I used to get pains in this arm.” Norman held it out. “They called it rheumatism. It wasn’t. It was psychosomatic. I used to dream of being held down and having it sawn through. I’d wake up screaming and mother would yell at me from the next room to shut up and let her get her sleep.”
“Didn’t you tell her you were having nightmares?”
Norman looked at the floor between his feet. He shook his head. “I guess I was afraid she might scold my great-grandfather and forbid him to talk to me about it.”
“Why did you want him to? Never mind—you don’t have to spell it out. What happened today that connected with this traumatic at age six?”
“A Divine Daughter tried to wreck Shalmaneser with an axe. Chopped the hand off one of our technicians.”
“I see. Can they put it back?”
“Oh yes. But the surgeons said he might lose some of the motor functions.”
“And you walked in on this, from cold?”
“Prophet’s beard—cold! I didn’t know it was more than one of their sheeting demonstrations, slogan-shouting and waving banners around!”
“Why hadn’t your company police taken care of it before you arrived?”
“Worse than useless. Said they didn’t dare fire from the gallery for fear of hitting Shalmaneser, and by the time they made it to floor level I’d fixed her.”
“So you did fix her. How?”
Norman closed his eyes and palmed them. His voice barely audible between his hands, he said, “I saw a liquid helium leak once, from a pressurised hose. That gave me the idea. I got one of the pipes and—and I sprayed her arm. Froze it solid. Crystallised it. The weight of her axe snapped it off.”
“They can’t put her hand back then, presumably.”
“Prophet’s beard, no. It must have spoiled instantly—like a frosted apple!”
“Are you facing serious consequences from this? Are you going to be arraigned for maiming her, for example?”
“Of course not.” The words were half-contemptuous. “GT looks after its own, and in view of what she was trying to do to Shalmaneser … We’ve always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that.”
“Well, if it’s not the consequences it must be the act itself. How has it made you feel about yourself?”
Norman let his hands fall. He said bitterly, “You missed your vocation, didn’t you? You should have been a shrinker.”
“My neuroses aren’t the kind you can project on to other neurotics. I asked you something, and unless I’m much mistaken it’s what you came here to talk about, so why not get it over with?”
The forgotten reefer went waveringly to Norman’s lips. He got it lit, drew in and held the first puff. After half a minute, he said, “How I feel about myself? I feel I’ve been conned. I feel ashamed. I finally evened the score. I got a trophy—I got a paleass’s hand. And how did I get where I could take that off? By following the rules for living that The Man laid down. And they’re no good! Because what use is that hand to my long-ago ancestor? He’s dead!”
He drew on the reefer again and this time held the smoke for a full minute.
“Yes, I think he probably is,” Elihu agreed after a few moments’ reflection. “As of today. Think he needs to be mourned?”
Norman gave a quick headshake.
“Right.” Elihu resumed his original position, elbows on chair-arms, fingertips together. “A short while ago I remarked on something that apparently struck you as irrelevant—the fact that you don’t hear people calling each other ‘bastard’ so much any more. It’s important. To be born out of wedlock doesn’t signify, any more than it did in slavery days when our forefathers and mothers didn’t marry—they simply bred. What you do hear used as an insult is a word that probably means ‘haemophiliac’. It matches the preoccupations of our society; it’s become detestable, anti-social, to have children if you’re carrying a harmful gene like that one. Are you on my orbit now?”
“Things change,” Norman said.
“Exactly. You aren’t six years old any longer. A boss can’t do to his subordinates what a long-ago white man did to your three times great-grandfather. But is the world a paradise because of those truisms?”
“Paradise?”
“Of course not. Aren’t there enough problems to handle in present time, that you should brood over ancient ones?”
“Yes, but—” Norman made a helpless gesture. “You don’t know what sort of a dead end I’ve been lured down! I’ve been working on the current version of myself for years, for decades! What am I to do?”
“That’s for you to work out.”
“It’s easy enough to say ‘work out’ the answer! You’ve been away from this country for years at a time, you said so yourself. You don’t know what The Man is like, even nowadays—you don’t know how he leans on you all the time, needles you, goads you. You just haven’t experienced my life.”
“I guess that’s a fair comment.”
“For example…” Norman gazed without seeing at the wall behind Elihu’s head. “Heard of a woman called Guinevere Steel?”