The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson Page A

unsettle Dinah. She shrugged herself free of his inattentive hands, slid off the side of the chair and loped over to her toy-store. Knowing her as well as he did Morris could see that this was only one of her typically devious feints. She had decided that Anne was not a hungry predator and was therefore worth investigating, stealthily, from the flank.
    “Is that Bruce’s line too?”
    “Bruce?”
    “Your Sultan. I always call my blokes Bruce. It keeps them in their place. In fact I know an Anatolian village where they now think Bruce is the English for ‘darling’.”
    “Oh . . . er . . . I didn’t know.”
    “Why should you?”
    “Um. Well, if you ask him he just takes the line that he has an hereditary obligation, and that’s that. He takes it seriously, anyway. I mean, there’s much more comfortable places he could live, but he stays here ten months of the year.”
    “I know. The women spend most of their time grumbling and discussing what they’re going to buy next time they go to Paris. How rich is he?”
    “I don’t know. Enormously, but I don’t know how enormously. He told me he couldn’t afford to buy a Concorde. It wasn’t the capital expenditure, it was the upkeep. But that’s his sort of joke.”
    “Did you see the emerald he gave Simoko when she left?”
    “Simoko?”
    “That’s a funny thing about this place. It’s just one building, but there’s such a lot going on in it that people only a few rooms away haven’t any idea about the dramas happening in your bit. Simoko was one of the air hostesses—the plain one, too sweet—and she and Bruce had a passionate five days; they kept at it just as if the world was ending, and when the plane came to fly the Japs out he gave her an emerald as big as my thumbnail. You could have bought a Phantom with it. It was rather funny—the other women weren’t at all jealous, even the real wives. In fact they loved it—something to gossip about. But if Bruce can afford that sort of thing, why doesn’t he do something for the marshmen? I bet there isn’t a school or a clinic anywhere. What about his hereditary obligation?”
    Out of the corner of his eye Morris could see Dinah beginning her flank attack, pushing a couple of building-bricks with deceptive aimlessness across the floor. He kept his gaze on Anne so as not to spoil the fun, and saw that her indignation was again simmering up to a full revolutionary boil-over.
    “There are clinics and schools for the Arabs,” he said quickly. “There’s a young Parsee doctor who goes round the tents in a very up-to-date mobile unit, and the Sultan flies in teachers during the winter, when there’s steady grazing up in the hills which means that the kids stay all in one place for a bit. But he won’t let anyone touch the marshmen—I don’t think he’d be very pleased if he knew how far I’d got with the language.”
    “It seems bloody selfish to me.”
    “Ung. Well, I expect you realise that most of his money comes from the oil company. Apparently their geologists decided that the richest fields were probably under the marshes, but he wouldn’t let them drill there. He still won’t.”
    Dinah had left her bricks and was creeping in behind Anne’s left shoulder.
    “The Sultan’s manner is very deceptive,” said Morris. “He really is very superficially Westernised. His Oxford accent and his slang and the gadgets in the palace are all a sort of parody of our civilisation—at least half-deliberate—a way of having what he wants of us and rejecting our values at the same time. Anyway, I’m not sure he isn’t right about the marshmen. We’re all rushing along, faster and faster, like water in a river before a cataract, dragging the developing nations along with us. It might be important that there are a few totally undeveloped peoples, so undeveloped that they don’t get involved when we go over the edge. It really isn’t an untenable attitude, but if you adopt it you’ve got to go