The Wanting Seed (6 page)

‘Yes. Have you been looking for me or something?’

‘That’s it, my dear. To tell you how terribly sorry I am. Poor, poor litde boy.’

The lift was filling fast. ‘Is this official commiseration? I always understood your department rejoiced over deaths.’ He frowned, puzzled.

‘This is me, your brother,’ said Derek. ‘
Not
an official of the M of I.’ He spoke rather stiffly. ‘I came to offer my –’ He nearly said ‘condolences’, but that, he realized in time, would have sounded cynical. ‘A fraternal visit,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen your
wife’
(the slight pause before the word, the unnatural stressing – these made it rather obscene) ‘and she told me you were still at work, so I – Anyhow, I’m terribly, terribly sorry. We must,’ he valedicted vaguely, ‘get together some evening. Dinner, or something. Now I must fly. An appointment with the Minister.’ And he was off, his bottom wagging. Tristram crushed himself into the lift, hard against Spragg and Miss Wallis, still frowning. What was going on? The door slid to, the lift began to rise. Miss Wallis, a pallid dumpling with a nose that shone as if wet, breathed on Tristram a ghost of reconstituted dehydrated potatoes. Why had Derek deigned to pay their flat a visit? They disliked each other, and not solely because the State had always, as an aspect of the policy of discrediting the whole notion of family, encouraged fraternal enmity. There had always been jealousy, resentment of the preferential cosseting given to Tristram, his father’s favourite – a warm place in his dad’s bed on holiday mornings; the top of his breakfast egg; the superior toys on New Year’s Day. The other brother and the sister
had shrugged good-humouredly at this, but not Derek. Derek had expressed his jealousy in sly kicks, lies, mud spattered on Tristram’s Sunday space-suit, acts of vandalism on his toys. And the final channel between them had been dug in adolescence–Derek’s sexual inversion and Tristram’s undisguised nausea at this. Moreover, despite inferior educational chances, Derek had got on far, far better than his brother – snarls of envy, thumbed noses of tdumph. So, what malevolent motive had brought him here today? Tristram instinctively associated the visit with the new regime, the opening of the Interphase. Perhaps there had been swift telephone messages to and from Joscelyne and the Ministry of Infertility (search his fiat for heterodox lecture-notes; question his wife about his views on Population Control). Tristram, in slight panic, leafed through memories of lessons he had given – that ironic laudation of the Mormons in Utah; that eloquent digression on
The Golden Bough
(forbidden reading); a possible sneer at the homo hierarchy after a particularly bad school luncheon. It was most unfortunate that he should have chosen to leave the school premises without permission, he thought yet again, on this day of all days. And then the brave spirit rose within his stomach as the lift stopped at the fortieth floor. The alc cried, ‘To hell with them!’

Tristram made for his flat. Outside the door he paused, wiping out the automatic expectation of a child’s cry of greeting. He went in. Beatrice-Joanna sat in her dressing-gown, doing nothing. She got up quickly, very surprised, on seeing her husband home so early. Tristram noticed, the bedroom door being open, a
crumpled bed, bed of a fever-patient.

‘Have you had a visitor?’ he asked.

‘A visitor? What visitor?’

‘I saw my dear brother down below. He said he’d been here, looking for me.’

‘Oh, him.’ She let out a good deal of breath. ‘I thought you meant, you know – a visitor.’

Tristram sniffed through the all-pervading scent of Anaphro, as if after something fishy. ‘What did he want?’

‘Why are you home so early?’ asked Beatrice-Joanna. ‘Didn’t you feel well or something?’

‘What I was told made me very unwell. I don’t get my promotion. My father’s philoprogenitiveness disqualifies me. And my own heterosexuality.’ He wandered, hands behind him, into the bedroom.

‘I didn’t have time to tidy up,’ she said, coming in to straighten the bedclothes. ‘I was at the hospital. I haven’t been back long.’

‘We seem to have had a disturbed night,’ he said. He left the bedroom. ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘The job’s going to some little homo squirt like Derek. I suppose I should have expected it.’

‘We’re going through a rotten period, aren’t we?’ she said. She stood limply an instant, forlorn-looking, holding the end of a rumpled sheet. ‘No luck at all.’

‘You still haven’t told me what Derek was after.’

‘It wasn’t at all clear. He was looking for you.’ A close squeak, she was thinking; a very narrow shave. ‘It was a bit of a surprise, seeing him,’ she improvised.

‘The liar,’ he said. ‘I thought it wouldn’t be just to commiserate with us. How would he know about Roger,
anyway? How would he have found out? I bet he only knew because you told him.’

‘He knew,’ she invented. ‘He’d seen it at the Ministry. The daily death figures, or something. Will you eat now? I’m not a bit hungry.’ She left the bed, came into the living-room, and made the tiny refrigerator, like some Polar god, descend from the ceiling.

‘He’s after something,’ said Tristram. ‘That’s certain. I’ll have to watch my step:And then, the alc helping, ‘Why the hell should I? Blast the lot of them. People like Derek running the country.’ He summoned a chair from the wall. Beatrice-Joanna capped this by making a table rise from the floor. ‘I feel anti-social,’ said Tristram, ‘de iriously anti-social. Who are they to tell us how to run ourlives? And, oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t like what’s happening at all. There are a lot of police about. Armed.’ He neglected to tell her what had happened to the unfrocked priest in the bar. She didn’t approve of his drinking.

Beatrice-Joanna served him with a cutlet of reconstituted vegetable dehydrate, cold. He ate with fair appetite. Then she gave him a slice of synthelac pudding. ‘Have a nut?’ she offered, when he’d finished. A nut was a nutrition-unit, creation of the Ministry of Synthetic Food. She leaned over him, reaching for these from a wall-cupboard, and he caught a glimpse of her rich nakedness under the dressing-gown. ‘God damn and blast them all,’ he said, ‘and it’s God I mean.’ He got up and tried to take her in his arms.

‘No, please, don’t,’ she begged. It was no good; she couldn’t bear his touch. She struggled. ‘I’m not feeling at all well,’ she said. ‘I’m upset.’ She began to snivel. He desisted.

‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Oh, very well.’ He bit at his left little finger-nail. with his plastic teeth, standing by the window, awkward. ‘I’m sorry I did that. I just didn’t think.’ She gathered the paper plates from the table and shot them into the firehole in the wall. ‘Ah, hell,’ he said with sudden violence. ‘They’ve turned normal decent sex into a crime. And you don’t want it any more. Just as well, I suppose,’ He sighed. ‘I can see that I’ll have to join the volunteer geldings if I even want to keep my job.’

At that moment Beatrice-Joanna had a sharp revisitation of a sensation that, just for a blinding second, had buffeted her cortex when lying under Derek on that crumpled fever-bed. A sort of eucharistic moment of high-pitched trumpets and a crack of light like that (so it is said) seen at the instant of severing the optic nerve. And a tiny voice, peculiarly penetrating, squealing, ‘Yes yes yes.’ If everybody was talking about being careful, perhaps she’d better be careful, too. Not all that careful, of course. Only careful enough for Tristram not to know. Contraceptive devices had been known to fail. She said: ‘I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t mean that.’ She put her arms round his neck. ‘Now, if you like.’ If only it could be done under an anaesthetic. Still, it wouldn’t last long.

Tristram kissed her hungrily. ‘
I’ll
take the tablets,’ he said, ‘not you.’ Ever since the birth of Roger – on the admittedly and blessedly few occasions of his seeking his conjugal rights – he had always insisted on taking the precautions himself. For he had not really wanted Roger. ‘I’ll take three,’ he said. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’ The tiny voice within had a miniature chuckle at that.

Thirteen

B
EATRICE
-J
OANNA
and Tristram, preoccupied in their several ways, did not see and hear the Prime Minister’s announcement on television. But in millions of other homes – generally on the bedroom ceiling, there being insufficient space elsewhere – the stereoscopic image of the pouched, bulbous, classical scholar’s face of the Right Hon. Robert Starling glowed and scolded like a fretful lamp. It spoke of the desperate dangers that England, that the English-Speaking Union, that the great globe itself would soon be running into unless certain strong repressive measures were, albeit regretfully, taken. This was war. War against irresponsibility, against those elements that were sabotaging – and such sabotage was clearly intolerable – the engines of state, against the wholesale flouting of reasonable and liberal laws, especially that law which, for the community’s good, sought to limit the growth of population. All over the planet, said the luminous face with gravity, the leaders of state would be speaking–tonight or tomorrow – in similar urgent terms to their various peoples; the whole world was declaring war on itself. The severest punishments for continued irresponsibility (hurting the punishers more than the punished, it was implied); planetary survival dependent on the balance of population and a scientifically calculated minimal food supply; tighten belts; win through; evil things they would be fighting; pull together; long live the King.

Beatrice-Joanna and Tristram also missed some exciting
stereoscopic film-shots of the summary settling of the strike at the National Synthelac Works
– the police, nicknamed greyboys, using truncheons and carbines, laughing the while; a splash of chromatic brains on the camera lens.

They also missed a later announcement about the formation of a corps called the Population Police, its proposed Metropolitan Commissioner well-known to them both – brother, betrayer, lover.

Part Two

One

A
N
eight-hour shift system operated in all the State Utilities. But the schools and colleges split the day (every day, vacations being staggered) into four shifts of six hours each. Nearly two months after the opening of the Interphase, Tristram Foxe sat at midnight breakfast (shift starting at one) with a full summer moon slanting in. He was trying to eat a sort of paper cereal moistened with synthelac, and – though hungry at all hours these days, the rations having been cut considerably – he found it very difficult to spoon down the wet fibrous horror: it was somehow like having to eat one’s words. As he munched an endless mouthful, the synthetic voice of the
Daily Newsdisc
(23.00 edition) squealed like a cartoon mouse, what time the organ itself wheeled slow and shiny black on the wall-spindle. ‘. . . Unprecedently low herring catches, explicable only in terms of inexplicable failure to breed, Ministry of Pisciculture reports –’ Tristram reached out his left hand and switched off. Birth control among fish, eh? Tristram reeled an instant in a sudden race-memory – a sort of round fiat fish overlapping the plate, crisp brown with a sharpish sauce. But all fish caught these days were crunched up by machines, converted into manure or mashed into the all-purpose nutrition-block (to be served as soup, cutlets,
bread or pudding) which the Ministry of Natural Food issued as the main part of the weekly ration.

The living-room now being emptied of the manic voice and its ghastly journalese, Tristram could hear more clearly his wife being sick in the bathroom. Poor girl, she was regularly sick on rising these days. Perhaps it was the food. Enough to make anyone sick. He got up from the table and looked in on her. She was pale and tired-looking, limp as though the vomiting had wrung her out. ‘I should go to the hospital if I were you,’ he said kindly. ‘See what’s the matter.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You don’t seem all right to me.’ He turned over his wrist microradio; the watch-face on the back said past twelve-thirty. ‘I must fly.’ He kissed her damp forehead. ‘Look after yourself, dear. Do go and see somebody at the hospital.’

‘It’s nothing. Just a tummy upset.’ And indeed she began, as if for his benefit, to look much better.

Tristram left (just a tummy upset) and joined the group waiting at the lift. Old Mr Earthrowl, Phipps, Arthur Spragg, Miss Runting – race-blocks like nutrition-blocks: Europe, Africa, Asia mashed together, salted by Polynesia – off to their jobs in the ministries and the national factories; Allsopp and the bearded Abazoff, Darking and Hamidun, Mrs Gow whose husband had been taken off three weeks before – ready for the shift that would end two hours later than Tristram’s own. Mr Earthrowl was saying, in a wavering ancient voice, ‘It’s not right at all, the way I see it, having these coppers watching you all the time. Wasn’t like that in my young days. If you wanted a smoke in the lavatory
you went for a smoke, and no questions asked. But not now, oh, no. Breathing down your neck, these coppers are, all the time. Not right, way I look at it.’ He continued his grumbling, the bearded Abazoff nodding the while, as they got into the lift – an old man, harmless and not very bright, driver of a large screw into the back of the television cabinet that, in endless multiplication, crawled towards and past him on a conveyor-belt. In the lift, Tristram said quietly to Mrs Gow: