There was a pause. Handing coffee to Jeannine, Rosalie looked in bewilderment from her to her husband and back, wondering at the look of wistful speculation that had appeared on both their faces.
“You’ve met Hélène, who used to work in Mali?” Pierre said at length, ignoring his wife.
“Yes. And you’ve met Henri, from Upper Volta?”
“Yes.”
“You seem to understand as much as the computers.”
“It follows very logically.”
“I don’t understand,” Rosalie said.
Pierre glanced at her with a sort of pity. “Why should a big American corporation be sounding out former colonial officials in London unless they were well aware of the ignorance Americans display regarding the African mentality?”
Before Rosalie could admit that the question had done nothing to enlighten her, Jeannine said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Americans are a little better than barbarians, one must concede.”
“But a country on the Bight of Benin, which has not benefited from French culture—”
“Part of it was settled by Berbers, and they for all their faults are cousins to the people of Algeria and Morocco.”
Rosalie said with sudden uncharacteristic mistress-in-her-own-house determination, “Will you two tell me what you are talking about?”
Brother and sister exchanged glances. One of Jeannine’s eyebrows rose, as though to say, “With a wife like her what do you expect?” Rosalie detected the action and flushed, hoping Pierre would disregard it for loyalty’s sake.
Instead, he copied it.
“I’m talking about going back to Africa,” Jeannine said. “Why not? I’m sick of France and the French who aren’t French any longer, but some sort of horrible averaged-out Common European mongrels.”
“What makes you so sure you’ll get the chance to go?” Pierre countered.
“Raoul says they’re intending to recruit advisors with African experience. There can’t be so many people to suit their requirements. After all, chéri, neither you nor I is a chick fresh from the shell!”
“I don’t want to go to Africa,” Rosalie said, and set her chin mutinously. “Jeannine, drink your coffee—it’ll be cold.”
She leaned forward to push the copper cup closer to her sister-in-law. Over her bowed back the eyes of brother and sister met, and each recognised in the other the matching half of a dream, that had been broken a long time ago like a coin divided between sweethearts faced with years of separation.
context (16)
MR. & MRS. EVERYWHERE: CALYPSO
“Like the good Lord God in the Valley of Bones
Engrelay Satelserv made some people called Jones.
They were not alive and they were not dead—
They were ee-magi-nary but always ahead.
What was remarkably and uniquely new—
A gadget on the set made them look like you!
“Watching their sets in a kind of a trance
Were people in Mexico, people in France.
They don’t chase Jones but the dreams are the same—
Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that’s the right name!
Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,
A gadget on the set makes them look like you.
“You can’t see all the places of interest,
Go to the Moon and climb Mount Everest,
So you stay at home in a comfortable chair
And rely on Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere!
Doing all the various things you would like to do,
A gadget on the set makes them look like you.
“Wearing parkas and boots made by Gondola
You see them on an expedition polar.
They’re sunning on the beach at Martinique
Using lotion from Guinevere Steel’s Beautique.
Whether you’re red, white, black or blue
A gadget on the set makes them look like you!
“When the Everywhere couple crack a joke
It’s laughed at by all right-thinking folk.
When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose
It’s the with-it view as everyone knows.
It may be a rumour or it may be true
But a gadget on the set has it said by you!
“English Language Relay Satellite Service
Didn’t do this without any purpose.
They know very well what they would like—
A thousand million people all thinking alike.
When someone says something you don’t ask who—
A gadget on the set has it said by you!
“‘What do you think about Yatakang?’
‘I think the same as the Everywhere gang.’
‘What do you think of Beninia then?’
‘The Everywheres will tell me but I don’t know when.’
Whatever my country and whatever my name
A gadget on the set makes me think the same.”
continuity (17)
TIMESCALES
“Which is the real time—his or ours?”
Norman had not intended the question to emerge in audible form. It was sparked by the sight of the enormous pile of printouts from Shalmaneser that had been delivered overnight to his office, and by recollection of the way they would have been produced. No conceivable printing device—not even the light-writers which had no moving parts except the fine beam from a miniature laser that inscribed words on photo-sensitive paper—could keep up with Shalmaneser’s nanosecond mental processes; the entire problem posed to him would have been solved, or at any rate evaluated, then shunted to a temporary storage bank while he got on with the next task his masters imposed, and the conversion of it into comprehensible language would have taken fifty or a hundred times as long.
Elihu glanced at him. His eyes were a little red from lack of sleep, as were Norman’s; one could not afford to sleep if one wanted to keep up with modern information-handling techniques. He said, “Whose?”
Norman gave a sour laugh, ushering the older man past him and closing the office door. “Sorry. I’m thinking of Shalmaneser as a ‘he’ again.”
Elihu nodded. “Like Chad said, he’s becoming one of the GT family … How is Chad, by the way? I expected him to take more of an interest in this project—after all, when I first met him at Miss Steel’s, he spent practically the entire evening interrogating me about Beninia.”
“I’ve hardly seen anything of him,” Norman said, moving around his electronic desk and shoving at the swivel chair with his knee to turn it so he could sit down. “He’s been using Don’s room, I know that, and I think much of the time he’s been going through Don’s books—he has about three thousand of them. But apart from a hello, we haven’t talked much.”
“I see what you mean about the real time,” Elihu said.
Norman blinked at him, puzzled.
“This!” Elihu amplified, tapping one of the three foot-deep stacks of printouts awaiting their attention. “Both you and I want to talk about the Beninian project. But we can’t. Anything we say without reference to computers is already out of date before it’s uttered, isn’t it? The information to correct and shape our opinions exists, and we know it exists, so we decline to communicate until we’ve briefed ourselves, and because Shalmaneser works thousands of times faster than we do, we can never catch up so we never genuinely manage to communicate.”
Norman hesitated. After the pause, he said, “Speaking of information to shape and change our opinions…”
“Yes?”
“Could you get me some data from State, do you think?”
“It depends.” Elihu settled into a chair facing him. “I can get anything that touches directly on my own interests, but even ambassadorial rank, these days, doesn’t carry infinite cachet.”
“It’s about Don,” Norman said. His mouth twisted into a wry grin. “What you said about failing to communicate made me think of it. I lived with that codder for years, you know, and I never really got to be close friends with him. And now he’s not around my place any longer, I miss him. I feel sort of guilty. I’d like to know if it’s possible for me to keep in touch.”