Free The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess Page B

The parents of one of my pupils were carted off by the Population Police – do you realize that? It happened only last night. And, as far as I can gather, they hadn’t even had the baby yet. She just happened to be pregnant, as far as I can gather. Good Dog, woman, it won’t be long before they’ll be coming round with mice in a cage, testing urine for pregnancy.’
    ‘How do they do that?’ she asked, interested.
    ‘You’re incorrigible, that’s what you are.’ He got up again. Beatrice-Joanna let his chair whine back to the wall, giving him room topace. ‘Thanks. Now, look,’ he said, ‘just think of our position. If anybody found out we’d been careless, even without the results of the carelessness going any further, if anybody found out that –’
    ‘How could anybody find out that?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. Somebody might hear you, in the morning, when you get up, that is,’ he said delicately. ‘There’s Mrs Pettitt next door. There are spies around, you know. Where you have police you always have spies. Narks, they call them. Or you might say something to somebody – accidentally, I mean. I might as well tell you that I don’t like the way things are going at the school. That little swine Wiltshire keeps plugging in on my lessons. Look,’ he said, ‘I’m going out now. I’m going to the chemist’s. I’m going to get you some quinine tablets. And some castor oil.’
    ‘I don’t like them. I hate the taste of both of them. Give it a bit longer, will you? Just give it a bit longer. Everything may be all right.’
    ‘There you go again. Let me try and get it into your thick skull,’ said Tristram, ‘that we’re living in dangerous times. The Population Police have a lot of power. They can be very very nasty.’
    ‘I don’t think they’d ever do me any harm,’ she said complacently.
    ‘Why not? Why wouldn’t they?’
    ‘I’ve just got a feeling, that’s all.’ Careful, careful. ‘I just have a sort of intuition about it, that’s all.’ Then, ‘Oh,’ she cried powerfully, ‘I’m sick to death of the whole business. If God made us what we are, why should we have to worry about what the State tells us to do? God’s stronger and wiser than the State, isn’t He?’
    ‘There is no God.’ Tristram looked at her curiously. ‘Where have you been getting these ideas from? Who’s been talking to you?’
    ‘Nobody’s been talking to me. I see nobody, except when I go out to buy rations. When I talk, I ta1k tomyself. Or to the sea. Sometimes I talk to the sea.’
    ‘What is all this? What exactly is going on? Do you feel all right?’
    ‘Except for being hungry all the time,’ said Beatrice-Joanna, ‘I feel very well. Very well indeed.’
    Tristram went to the window and gazed up at the patch of sky visible between topless towers. ‘I wonder sometimes,’ he said, ‘if perhaps there is a God after all. Somebody up there,’ he mumbled, musing, ‘controlling everything. I wonder sometimes. But,’ he said, turning in a small show of sudden panic, ‘don’t tell anybody I said that. I didn’t say there was a God. I just said I wondered sometimes, that’s all.’
    ‘You don’t trust me very much, do you?’
    ‘I don’t trust anyone. Forgive me, but I might as well be honest with you. I just daren’t trust anybody at alL I don’t seem able even to trust myself, do I?’ Then he went out into the pearly morning to buy quinine in one State Druggist’s, castor oil in another. In the first shop he talked loudly about malaria, even mentioning an educational trip he had once taken down the Amazon; in the second he simulated a convincing costive look.

Five
    I F no God, there must be at least a pattern-making demiurge. So Tristram was later to think, when he had leisure and inclination for thinking. The next day (though only the calendar really accepted such a term,the shift-system cutting across natural time like a global air-journey) the next day Tristram knew he was