8
No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with powers and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.
Jan Rodricks, though he seldom appreciated his luck, would have been even more discontented in an earlier age. A century before, his colour would have been a tremendous, perhaps an overwhelming, handicap. Today, it meant nothing. The inevitable reaction that had given early twenty-first-century negroes a slight sense of superiority had already passed away.
The convenient word “nigger” was no longer tabu in polite society, but was used without embarrassment by everyone. It had no more emotional content than such labels as republican or methodist, conservative or liberal.
Jan’s father had been a charming but somewhat feckless Scot who had made a considerable name for himself as a professional magician. His death at the early age of forty-five had been aggravated by the excessive consumption of his country’s most famous product. Though Jan had never seen his father drunk, he was not sure that he had ever seen him sober.
Mrs. Rodricks, still very much alive, lectured in advanced probability theory at Edinburgh University. It was typical of the extreme mobility of twenty-first-century Man that Mrs. Rodricks, who was coal black, had been born in Scotland, whereas her expatriate and blond husband had spent almost all his life in Haiti. Maia and Jan had never had a single home, but had oscillated between their parents’ families like two small shuttlecocks. The treatment had been good fun, but had not helped to correct the instability they had both inherited from their father.
At twenty-seven, Jan still had several years of college life ahead of him before he needed to think seriously about his career. He had taken his bachelors’ degrees without any difficulty, following a syllabus that would have seemed very strange a century before. His main subjects had been mathematics and physics, but as subsidiaries he had taken philosophy and musical appreciation. Even by the high standards of the time he was a first-rate amateur pianist.
In three years he would take his doctorate in engineering physics, with astronomy as a second subject. This would involve fairly hard work, but Jan rather welcomed that. He was studying at what was perhaps the most beautifully situated place of higher education in the world — the University of Cape Town, nestling at the foot of Table Mountain.
He had no material worries, yet he was discontented and saw no cure for his condition. To make matters worse, Maia’s own happiness — though he did not grudge it in the least — had underlined the chief cause of his own trouble. For Jan was still suffering from the romantic illusion — the cause of so much misery and so much poetry — that every man has only one real love in his life. At an unusually late age, be had lost his heart for the first time, to a lady more renowned for beauty than constancy. Rosita Tsien claimed, with perfect truth, to have the blood of Manchu emperors flowing in her veins. She still possessed many subjects, including most of the Faculty of Science at Cape. Jan had been taken prisoner by her delicate, flower-like beauty, and the affair had proceeded far enough to make its termination all the more galling. He could not imagine what had gone wrong….
He would get over it, of course. Other men had survived similar catastrophes without irreparable damage, had even reached the stage when they could say,