by Brian Aldiss
Seems Kellylarge had undergone a pretty trying day on the game preserve. The zambuck, or whatever those deer are with curly horns, had been stampeding, and three of them went over a precipice. That’s a mark against anyone’s Proficiency C, as you can imagine. Costs about forty mahounits a day to maintain, does one zambuck – you don’t want to lose any.
So Kellylarge was not too agreeable that evening when he got into the marrena. His proxi sensed this and said she would take him for a spin. They’d just had new batteries and A-G plates installed, and the bug went like a boom.
Kellylarge’s proxi was a pleasant-looking blonde girl called Ida Cassilis. She had, besides the usual female curves, the usual female range of moods. An exciting girl, generous, and full of life – far too good for Kellylarge. This evening she was reckless, driving like jazz through the city. Why? Well, she had a new green wisp of scarf on, and probably she wanted to see it flutter in the wind. You know women, stranger; in a word, unpredictable.
Yes, as you say, that’s what marrenas are for – to see how well a man responds to such womanliness.
Anyhow, Ida gears in on a levelway, U-turns, and is A-Ging up a flyup in the city centre before you can say ‘World President.’ She bats out on to a level above the rooftops without signalling, and they run slap into an oncoming biwheel, pflatt!
Of course Kellylarge and Ida were strapped; they weren’t hurt, although the bug was a write-off. Since its A-Gs were still functioning, it hung there in the air, slightly lop-sided and six feet off the level. He jumped down. He called to Ida to jump down into his arms. She couldn’t; she was scared. He persisted. She got hysterical. He couldn’t get up to her again. Big scene.
The biwheel, being roboted, had staggered on after dropping an audibuoy to mark the spot of the accident. A passing tellicopter picked up the audibuoy signal before the militia did, homing in on it in time to catch the big scene. I saw it myself. I was passing through McKenna Concourse when it came up on the public globe and stopped to watch.
Certainly it looked funny to an onlooker, with him down there shouting and her up there shouting back – was his neck red! Anyhow Kellylarge didn’t find it amusing. Ida looked nice even in that absurd position.
When the militia had rescued her, they caught the pneumat back to his flat, where a good old row started. Kellylarge said he had wanted to go out for a quiet ride, Ida said of course he had: his flat was small enough to give anyone claustrophobia.
That really hurt Kellylarge, slap in his pride. I don’t know if you understand the social stratifications here in the United African Republics, stranger, but the situation is roughly like this. Now that the last slice of the Amazon Basin has gone under the plough, these big wildlife reserves we run here – particularly the Kasai Park, which is the most highly organised – are the last stretches of undeveloped land in the world. In consequence, they’re worth a mint of money. Countries like Common Europe and the United States of Both Americas, that are almost entirely covered by urbanism, send their executives here to untense among the animals, and pay through the nails for the privilege. Kellylarge was sent here on leave in this way, and at the same time he was carrying on his marriage trials here in Manono.
His social ratings stood at about 30 : 60 : 75 : 80. Low on Ability even then you see.
In a small town like this – we only cover an area of twenty-five square miles, but we’re growing – accommodation is short all round. Same thing all over UAfR, but particularly bad here. So we allow floor space in ratio to social ratings. A real crack 95 : 95 : 95 : 95 man would be allowed maybe as much as fifty square feet to live in, and so down on a sliding scale. Poor old Kellylarge only rated twenty-six square feet.
You know what that means – shared amenity rooms. Being an insecure sort of individual, Kellylarge took this personally. No social sense! Funny how often Common Europe breeds that type nowadays.
Don’t shuffle like that, chum. The queue’s beginning to move, and I’ll get on with the tale.
‘You damned hutch-dweller!’ Ida called him. Not that I don’t think twenty-six square is enough for any man – particularly a punk like Kellylarge – but you know how these proxi queens live! They’re privileged, rightly so, to my mind, considering the ardours of their jobs.
‘Call me that again if you dare,’ Kellylarge said, moving towards her.
‘I called you a damned little hutch-dweller,’ Ida said. ‘You come home stinking of animals, and then you expect me to stay cooped up in here with –’
He jumped her. He had his hands round her throat and was choking the life out of her before they could get to him. Boy, I’m anti-social, I know, or I wouldn’t be in this queue, but why don’t they show that sort of stuff on the tellyglobes? Wishywashy, that’s what the world’s become. With fifty thousand million people around, naturally they’re scared of violence.
Anyhow, the flat door burst open, and in rushed the marrijudicator, a man called Ben Manjaro, his continuity girl, and a couple of the marriage ministry boys.
They pulled Kellylarge off Ida and clapped a stun on him.
‘You’re a murderer, Kellylarge!’ Ben Manjaro said, mopping his brow.
‘You didn’t give me time,’ Kellylarge said.
‘You know the law, Kellylarge – only the intent to murder has to be proved. Prevention is better than the crime. That’s twenty points off your Ability A, and you know it.’
‘Please not that, sir. I can’t face the disgrace. Why, if I drop twenty I shall lose my job with Eldorado Els. You know this was just a test – I’d never treat my real wife like that!’
‘No? Well, with your new rating you’ll never get the chance. With a 10 : 60 : 75 : 80, you don’t think they’ll let you marry your intended, do you? You’re all washed up, Kellylarge.’
Kellylarge staggered back, white as a shirt, robbed of the power of speech. And at that point, Ida got up and made her speech!
Eh? No, thanks, chum, I’d never dare to smoke here, and I’d advise you not to either. You must come from Common Europe – cigarettes may be lit on the streets there, but you’re in a smokeless zone here, which includes reefers and cigarettes.
As I was saying, Ida Cassilis started letting fly at the marrijudicator then.
Manjaro let her have her say. Any lesser breed would have been knocked right down the rating hierarchy on the spot. Still, you know what proxies are. Since they stopped marriage being a lottery and took to testing men for matrimonial suitability the proxi girls have become more glamorous than drama stars; so the marrijudicator stood with his mouth open, letting Ida have her say.
That’s what comes of paying people on a scale outside the ratings. They get too much those girls, and for what? For just acting a part, that’s all. Does that make them better than us? Does that qualify them for dual consumption quotas? Okay, buster you’re right – it does. But it shouldn’t.
I’m all mixed up. I admire the proxies really, but look at it historically. (You can see I’m an educated man, even if I do stand here flattening my feet with you abil-nils.) Once you start getting whole regions of the world covered with two- or three-level cities, you get population troubles, even with planktrition to ease feeding, right? You have to breed inhibitions, right? To keep Billy Blank from elbowing his neighbour or stepping into someone else’s centimetre of space, right? That was how we progressed from world peace to the concept of Personal Peace.
To have that, you want nice quiet docile kids growing up everywhere like those flowers they used to have that you see in the period globies. Okay, then that means systematised mating – husband and wife well adjusted, no trouble, no friction, all nice and quiet and docile. Heck, it’s not as difficult as it sounds. They don’t have to be happy, just so long as they don’t quarrel.
It took some organising at first. Not that there were protests, I don’t mean; we’ve been lucky the way we’ve been able to trim calorie intake so that those old civic liberties so-called – all that medieval ritual of voting and stuff – b
ecame a nuisance and were abolished. But the trouble was to pass the right legislation.
Probably you remember how World President Soepoena took a hand in polishing some of the final clauses himself. What it boiled down to in the end is two main laws: that it is criminal to bear children out of wedlock – since the Church flung in its hand with the State, that went through easily enough – and that marriage can only be permitted where the couples have undergone tests to prove they aren’t suffering from violent tendencies or any other retrogressive emotions.
Under the newly established Ministry of Marriage, the marrenas were set up, with proxies and all, to carry out these tests, and of course Kellylarge had to go through the hoop like anyone else. His intended was some girl who worked on the Zuyderzee collective as a gametophyticists’ assistant, a nice quiet little creature who had already passed her tests. She’d never have been capable of jumping off on the slanging spree that Ida did.
‘You’re just a log of cog!’ Ida told Manjaro. ‘Why didn’t you stay outside and let Randy murder me? Maybe we’d both have been happier! I’m sick and tired of this job. Look at all I had to put the poor boy through today – faking that stupid bug accident on the upper levels, needling him about his floor quota, and all that! Do you wonder he got angry at me? Who can blame him?!’
‘The question is not one of blame but of classification,’ snapped the marrijudicator. Manjaro was a big man, swelling now like bagpipes, the likeness increased by a tartan flush on his face caused by an amalgam there of blue vein and red flush. ‘Kellylarge has proved himself unfit for modern marriage, and it’s no further concern of yours.’
‘So much the worse for modern marriage!’
‘You mustn’t say that,’ Kellylarge interrupted. ‘I just forgot myself, Ida, and I’m sorry, but don’t get yourself into trouble for my sake.’
‘You stay out of this, Randy, you darned fool. You’ve put your foot in it far enough as it is.’
‘What do you mean, put my foot in it? I’m trying to apologise, aren’t I? Is this Christmas or isn’t it, when people of goodwill are nice to each other?’
‘What’s Christmas to do with it? Don’t be old-fashioned! No wonder you only qualify for enough floor-space for a chipmunk.’
‘Why. you cow, I wish I had really got you down there and got my hands round that damned white delicate delicious neck –’
‘Just because you’ve been fraternising with animals you think –’
Ben Manjaro seized her by one white delicate delicious wrist and swung her away from Kellylarge.
‘Now see here, Miss Cassilis,’ he said sternly, ‘just you cool down, you’ve been through these tests with a thousand men before. Many of them muffed their tests, and you never gave a chirp. Why all the excitement this time over a lousy 30 : 60 : 75 : 80?’
She stamped with anger, swished her arm free, swirled her hair. It must have been a marvellous sight.
‘Because he’s not just a 30 : 60 : 75 : 80. He’s not just a cog like all the rest of them. He’s Randy Kellylarge, and he’s the first man ever to offer me violence.’
‘Ida, I said I’m sorry –’
‘You keep out of this!!’
‘Okay, Miss Cassilis, he offered you violence. Is that any reason why you should offer violence back?’
‘Yes it is. I love him!’
‘But Ida –’
‘Don’t keep interrupting, you lovely crazy hunk of maladjusted manhood, you!’ she cried, and flung herself upon him with an orgy of kisses.
You know the old saying about the course of true love never running counter to one’s rating. It didn’t hold true in this case. There was a real dust-up, I tell you, the reverberations of which were heard in the highest quarters, and it wasn’t long before things started moving – talking of which, I detect a sluggish shuffle at the head of this dead-and-alive queue. We’re on our way, feller!
This row, you’ll recall, took place on Christmas Day. By the middle of Boxing Day, both Ida Cassilis and Randy Kellylarge were in trouble – and both were giving trouble back. Let’s take this girl Ida first, because she is definitely the more interesting of the two.
Manjaro stood just so much maladjustment from her, and then he hit back.
‘Miss Cassilis, carrying on like this in front of witnesses will do you no good,’ he warned her.
The gesture she made at the marriage ministry boys showed exactly what she thought of them. Indicating Kellylarge, she said, ‘Can’t you see why I’m upset? For heaven’s sake, what’s going to happen to this poor boy? One man in a thousand with spirit, and you inflict this brutal punishment on him.’
Manjaro sighed heavily.
‘Brutal nothing. The law’s the law, whether you kid yourself you’re in love or whether you don’t. Calm down before I get irritable, Miss Cassilis, and stop trying to buck against the status quo.’
‘To hell with the status quo, Mr Manjaro! I’m fed up with it. It stinks! Oh, for a man with spirit, with fire, with daring!’
Manjaro went tartan-faced again.
‘You’ve gone just too far, you trumped-up little proxi. As of now, you’re fired from the marriage ministry. Now get out of here, the lot of you!’
Well, Ida wasn’t the girl to sit down under that; she organised all the other proxies to go on strike on her behalf.
I’ve always argued that these proxies get far too many privileges, and nothing will ever make me change my mind. Yet you can see that they hold a unique position of power in our well-organised society. I mean, through their pretty hands go all the men who ever aspire to marriage, so that they are for ever indulged, for ever having men trying to court them nicely. Then again, they have to play up and be more cantankerous than a normal woman, just to make the tests rigorous enough, and you can’t tell me this does not make them something of a race apart.
So the proxies staged a strike. They refused to test any more men till Ida was reinstated. As a result – pouff! – no more marriages! World President Soepoena sent them an address all about working for the greatest integration of the greatest number. Made no difference. The girls stuck to their guns.
As for Kellylarge, he went back to the Kasai Park preserve like a beaten dog. Knowledge of his derating had preceded him, but the authorities there left him alone. They knew that as soon as his company got the news it would jerk him back to Europe. He had just a few hours left before his leave was cancelled.
What did he do? He headed into the bush, where he had struck up a relationship with some sort of gazelle – a gerenuk, I believe it was. During his range work, he had found this animal with its foot wedged between two boulders. Kellylarge rescued it, and they’d been close ever since; the way I heard it, Kellylarge saw Boxing Day in with his gerenuk.
Came morning and he had to face up to reality. As he reported back to the lodge, the beam came through from his company, and there was Kellylarge’s boss glaring at him from a private globe.
‘Kellylarge, your leave’s cancelled,’ that individual said. ‘Your marrena report’s just in. As a result, you’re reclassified. From date you’re working as assistant artificer with our subsidiary firm in the Lofoten Islands. Report there by midnight tonight, General European Time.’
Huh! Kellylarge was a lunk, a clot, a real abil-nil, I grant you, but he had his feelings the same as the rest of us, and you can imagine how his feelings were. For one thing, he’d never see his intended again; with his new rating, they could not even meet, let alone marry.
Don’t get restless, stranger, we’re nearly at the top of the queue. And then, zippo, the old free trip to Callisto! Yes, I’ve heard all those rumours about it being just a penal colony. Don’t believe a word of it; it’s this intense secrecy about deportees Earthside that gives rise to the ugly talk. We’re being shipped out there as misfits, right? Right, then on a frontier world we’ll have a chance to fit. Anyhow, back to Kellylarge.
No sooner had he had this kick in the teeth from his company, than Ida came through o
n the beam to him. Most of what I’m telling you is more or less common knowledge, but some of it I heard from a friend at Beam Central. Unfortunately, Ida came through on scramble, so we don’t know what was said – but we can guess.
For sure she told Kellylarge that the strike had now succeeded. The proxies had won their point, Ida was reinstated, mainly through the intercession of one of the other girls, who had tested World President Soepoena’s brother before his marriage; she got the President personally interested in Ida’s case. He brought pressure to bear on the marriage ministry, so that Ida was reinstated.
And no doubt when Kellylarge heard that, he saw a way to save himself from the Lofoten Islands. Probably he was in love with Ida I don’t know, but who wouldn’t be with an item like her? So he proposed marriage then and there, and she turned him down flat. A proxi marry a 10 : 60 : 75 : 80? Not likely?
So he broke loose in despair. Beat it into the bush, back to this gerenuk. Poor lunk! You know how close a man and a critter can be, now this law is passed and we don’t have to hunt ’em. Kellylarge hid out on the ranges among the acacias for two working weeks before they caught him. Only last week that was; they say he had grown very thin.
Still, who cares what happened to Kellylarge? He was just a small cog in a big big machine. What happened to Ida Cassilis was much more interesting. World President Soepoena unfortunately had his interest in her aroused by the strike. He sent for her secretly, and, well, they knew each other for rebels, and they fell in love with each other.
That was awkward, I tell you, with the World President forced to be celibate by church-state law. They married, anonymously and secretly, in Chile, in a little chapel five thousand metres above sea level. My God, there was a fool for you! It lasted only twenty-four hours before some dirty spy found out – and, well, the law is the law.
But Kellylarge: small time! A failure. He’s probably standing in some wretched deportee queue now, just as we are! What’s that, stranger?
I said I’m Randy Kellylarge, butch. How I’ve stood here listening to you spiel for so long I’ll never know.