By the street-signs he had reached the lower East Side, an area presently at the bottom of the cycle of death and renewal that sometimes made the city seem like an organism. At the end of last century there had been a brief moment of glory here; decade by decade the would-be connectors had followed the intellectuals and the pseudos eastwards from the Village into the ruined area close to the river, until by 1990 or so this had been a high-price zone. But the wheel turned further, and the bored and prosperous moved out. Now the grace of the elegant buildings was crumbling again under a bright masking of advertisements: flagging vigour calls for Potengel, MasQ-Lines take the world in their stride, ask the man who’s married to Mary Jane … Across the display slanted the unrelated diagonals of fire-escapes, spotted with piles of garbage like forest fungi.
Donald turned slowly around. There were fewer people on the streets here. The very air breathed a sense of decay. Only a few minutes’ walk away was the brilliance and activity he had left behind without noticing, so it was small wonder the residents preferred not to spend their time here. The stores were closed except for the few that could afford automated pay-out clerks, and those were almost vacant of customers. There was no silence—there was no silent place in the city—but every sound which came to his ears seemed to be distant: not in that building but the next, not on this street but a block away.
Facing him now was one of the luxuries the architects had included when they worked this district over twenty years ago—an adventure playground elaborated into the gap between two tall buildings, a monkey-puzzle in three dimensions calculated so that a careless child could fall no further than one short level. For a moment his mind refused to accept the connection between the lines and forms he saw, and anything with solidity. Then the perspective separating near from far enabled him to grasp the image and he realised he was looking at a sort of Riemann ladder of concrete and steel silhouetted from behind by the last of the unbroken lamps on the struts.
Something moved among the frightful artificial branches. Donald, uncertain whether it was human, eased his hand into his pocket and began to wriggle his Karatand over his fingers.
The monstrous creature loomed, incredibly flexible, down the lip of a miniaturised precipice, and took on reality—a shadow, cast by a child passing in front of the surviving lamp.
Donald let out a great gasp of relief. The idea occurred to him that he must have been slipped a psychedelic, and then, when he discounted actual ingestion, he found himself wondering if perhaps the air was charged with the fumes of some drug affecting his perceptions.
Mechanically tugging the Karatand towards his wrist, he beat a retreat towards his own manor.
Unexpectedly, because this was not a cab-hiring district, he spotted a cruising taxi within a hundred yards. He called to the driver, who acknowledged him with a wave shadowed on the windshield.
Purring, the vehicle drew level with him. He made to get in as the driver activated the hydraulic door-controls.
Not so fast.
The words were as clear in his mind as if someone had spoken them from inside the passenger compartment. He delayed removing his hand from the door-pillar and looked for anything which might have alarmed him.
Probably imagination. I’m jumpy enough—
But no. Affixed to the air-conditioning nozzles was a device that automatically sent a radio signal to police headquarters if the driver dozed a passenger. It had been tampered with; the plastic seal certifying its annual inspection had discoloured to a warning red. He’d hailed a pseudo, one of the cabs whose drivers dozed their victims illegally and took them to be robbed in a dark side-street.
The door slammed. But not all the way. Even with the force of the hydraulics behind it, it could not crush the impact-sensitive Karatand which Donald had left in its way. There was a clang of hammered metal and a jar that travelled clear to his elbow, but he retained enough presence of mind not to snatch back his hand.
By law, these cabs were designed so that they could not be driven away unless the doors were closed. But Donald’s strength was inadequate to force his way out.
Impasse.
Behind the armour-glass of his cabin, the driver hit the door-controls again and again. The door slammed back and forth, but the Karatand endured. Suddenly very calm, Donald stared at the driver, but the man was too wary to let his face be seen even in the rear-view mirror. It was twisted to the side so that it covered his licence photograph, and its function had been taken over by a miniature TV unit.
What am I going to do now?
“All right, Shalmaneser!”
The voice made him start as it boomed from the speaker set in the roof.
“I’ll open up, you hit the sidewalk and we’ll say no more about it, how’s that?”
“No,” Donald said, surprised at his own determination.
“You can’t get out unless I let you.”
“You can’t drive off unless I let you.”
“Hoping for a prowlie to come by, hm? Fuzzy-wuzzies don’t pass this way if they can help!”
“Somebody’s going to notice a cab with the hire sign lit sitting in the middle of the street and not moving.”
“Who said it was lit?”
“You can’t turn it off without you closing the door!”
“Think not? I cut out the police alarm, didn’t I?”
“And it shows—you turned the seal red.”
“You’re the first in two weeks noticed that. Last one I chopped the fingers off.”
Donald licked his lips and eyed the adjacent sidewalks. Although this district was comparatively empty, it was not wholly unpopulated. An old Afram woman was this very moment approaching. He leaned to the gap in the door and called out.
“Lady! Fetch the police! This cab’s a pseudo!”
The old woman stared at him, crossed herself, and hurried by.
The driver gave a sour laugh. “You don’t know what it’s like around here, do you, Shalmaneser? Got left out of your programming!”
Donald’s heart sank. He was on the point of admitting defeat and offering to hit the sidewalk, when a movement at the corner of the street attracted him.
“You said prowlies don’t come this way,” he exclaimed.
“Right.”
“Then how about that one closing from behind?”
The driver stared at his TV unit, dismayed.
Does he think I’m bluffing? That’s no bluff—it’s a hundred per cent genuine prowl car!
Armoured, armed with gas and flame, the police car pussyfooted towards the stationary cab. The driver sounded his move-along siren.
“Take your hand off the pillar,” the hackie said. “I’ll balance the deal for you. What you want? I have contacts—Skulbustium, Yaginol, shiggies, name it and I’ll fix it.”
“No,” Donald said again, this time triumphantly.
He could see the silhouettes of the men in the prowlie now. Also, by this time, half a dozen people had gathered on the sidewalk. A couple of them were teenage Aframs, who shouted something indistinct at the police and doubled up in laughter.
The door of the prowlie opened, and Donald relaxed. A matter of seconds now—
Except that the moment the fuzzy-wuzzy stood up on the street, a hail of garbage pelted him from nowhere. He yelled a curse, hauled out his bolt-gun and sent a shot high into the darkness towards the adventure playground. Someone screamed. The standers-by dived for cover. The driver piled out of Donald’s cab and the policeman loosed another shot at him but missed. A whole can of garbage came slamming down from a higher level now, contents first, then can, squelch, then crash. Another policeman leaned out of the car and fired at the approximate source of the attack.
Belatedly aware that the door was no longer pressing on his hand, Donald scrambled out, shouting for the police to stop wasting their shots and go after the hackie. The man peering from the prowlie’s window saw him only as a human shape and fired at him. The hiss of the bolt searing past his ear made
him gulp and stumble for the sidewalk.
A hand reached up from the protection of a stoop and caught his ankle. The gesture might have been friendly but Donald could not tell. He tore his Jettigun from his pocket and fired it into the face of the man who had clutched at him.
A scream. A girl’s voice: “You do that to my brothah—!” Windows flinging open both sides of the street. Shouting kids, emerging from the senseless shadows of the adventure playground, delighted at the excitement and starting to hurl down whatever came handy—fragments of split concrete, cans and packages, plant-tubs. A dark, pretty face transformed by fury. The erratic brilliance of gun-bolts as the police fired wildly. Someone uttering a resonant Spanish curse: “May that lover of he-goats catch the clap and the pox!”
He struck out at the girl who was trying to claw his face, and remembered his Karatand too late. The metal-rigid glove slammed into her mouth and sent her moaning and bleeding into the middle of the street, into the fierce lights of the prowl car. The red trickling down her chin was brilliant as fire.
“Kill the bleeders!”
Where did they all come from?
Suddenly the street was alive, like an overturned ants’ nest, doors and passages vomiting people. Metal bars glinted, throats shrieked animal fury, windows shattered and glass rained slashingly on heads below. The prowlie’s siren added to the din and the two policemen who had ventured out climbed back in a second ahead of another salvo of garbage. Between the prowlie and the cab the injured girl rocked on her heels, moaned, dripped blood from her cut lip down her shimmering green dresslet. Donald shrank back into an embrasure decorating the wall of the nearest building, overlooked because the late arrivals had taken it for granted the police were responsible for the girl’s crying.
The prowlie tried to back up. Through its still-open window Donald heard its occupants shouting to headquarters for aid. A flame-gun belched at the base of a lamp-post and metal ran like lard in a pan. The post fell across the back of the prowlie and blocked its retreat. Yelling joyfully, scores of people ran to develop the improvised barricade into something more substantial. A can of oil was flung down and the flame-gun ignited it. Capering like dervishes, youths and girls taunted the police by its light. Someone scored a hit on the car’s left headlamp with a rock and it shattered. Too late the driver remembered to wind up the wire-mesh screens. Another scream of triumph and another rock, making the car’s roof boom like a steel drum. Paint chipped and fragments flew, one of them taking a stander-by in the eye so that he covered his face with both hands and shouted that he was blind.
That settled matters.
“Oh my God,” Donald said, and it was more of a prayer than he had uttered since he was a schoolchild. “It’s going to be a riot. It’s going—to be—a riot…!”
context (9)
GUNCRIT
“People who feel the need to foul up their perceptions with hop or Yaginol or Skulbustium simply aren’t turned on to the essential truth that the real world can always be identified by its unique characteristic: it, and it only, can take us completely by surprise.
“Take two lumps of greyish metal and bring them together. Result: one wrecked city.
“Could anyone have predicted or envisaged that until they knew enough about the real world to calculate the properties of a substance called Uranium-235?
“People are going around marvelling at the fact that there’s a solid scientific basis for palmistry. Anybody with a grain of intelligence could have said, directly the notion of the genetic code was formulated, that there was no a priori reason why the pattern of the folds in the palm should not be related to a person’s temperament by way of an association of genes sharing the same chromosome. Indeed, there were all kinds of reasons for assuming this actually was so, because we aren’t totally stupid—as I’ve pointed out before—and unless there was in palmistry some element of relevance to real experience we’d have given it up and gone chasing some other will-o’-the-wisp. There’s no shortage of them.
“But it took forty years for someone to conduct a properly rigorous study of the subject and demonstrate that the suspicion was well-founded. This I do find remarkable—or disheartening might be a better word.
“All right: what should you be surprised at, these days?
“The fact that, having learned so much about ourselves—the designs on our palms being just one example of the way we’ve analysed ourselves down to the constituent molecules, so that we can claim to be in sight of the day when we won’t merely be able to ensure the sex of our offspring (if we can afford the fee) but also to choose whether we’ll have a math genius in the family, or a musician, or a moron (some people might like to breed a moron for a pet, I guess…)—having got to this state, then, we know less about our reactions in the mass than we do about the behaviour of non-human things like a lump of U-235.
“Or maybe it’s not so amazing. Without being totally stupid, we do display a tremendous aptitude for it.”
—You: Beast by Chad C. Mulligan
(HISTORY Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can’t even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
tracking with closeups (9)
POPPYSEED
Was this really a drab corner of the world, or was it only apparently drab because she was back from orbit? To a place like this one had to come walking firm and heavy on one’s own two feet, just in case when they did the analyses they thought to check for what was usually there, but according to people who should know the end-products should be flushed out by a thirty-six hour abstinence, which was freefalling.
But it made one so easily bored.
Detail by detail: the plastic walls, of a faded yellow; the windows turned to part-opaque because the sun was shining on the far side of them; various posters displayed in frames, setting forth miscellaneous regulations you were supposed to comply with; benches apparently designed to make the users uncomfortable so that persons of no fixed abode would not care to keep returning on pointless visits for the sake of a seat and a little warmth; and everywhere the smell of staleness, of dust and ancient paper and old shoes.
The only touch in the place which suggested nature was in the floor, covered by tiles with a design of dead leaves embedded under a clear plastic surface. But even that was a failure, for when one looked directly down at the tiles one noticed the way the pattern repeated, and if one looked obliquely, the leaves disappeared behind a mist of scratches and scrapes, the legacy of uncountable feet that had crossed the room, and all one could see was a generally dung-brown expanse.
“Not much longer.”
“Better not be.”
The other people waiting glanced up, the fact of speech being a distraction and a stimulus. They were all women, from twenty to fifty, and all further advanced than Poppy, some with their bellies protruding far on to their laps, others as yet barely showing a roundness. These latter would presumably have come to hear the result of their karyotypings. Poppy shuddered at the idea of having fluid from her womb drawn off through a needle, and wondered how many of these women would have to be officially emptied of their offspring.
As though to enter the protective aura of her femininity, being the only man present, Roger crowded close and put his arm around her shoulders. She reached up to stroke his hand and smiled sidelong at him.
She was a strikingly lovely girl, even dressed as usual in three-quarter puffed slax that needed laundering and a shapeless bluzette meant to fit a much bigger woman. She had a fine-boned oval face highlighted with big dark eyes and framed with black braids, and just enough tawny admixture to her complexion to make her seem feral. And, as yet, her pregnancy had done nothing except improve the line of her bust.
She giggled at a private thought, and Roger squeezed her with his encircling arm.
“Miss Shelton,” said a disembodied v
oice. “And—ah—Mr. Gawen!”
“That’s us,” Roger said, and rose to his feet.
Through the door which opened for them on their approach they found a tired-faced man of early middle age seated at a table beneath a picture of the King and Queen and their two—count them, a responsible number, two—children. Ranked before him were piles of forms and a number of sterile-sealed containers with spaces on the lids for writing names and numbers.
“Sit down,” he said, hardly looking at them. “You’re Miss Poppy Shelton?”
Poppy nodded.
“And—ah—how long?”
“What?”
“How long since you became pregnant?”
“My doctor says about six weeks. I went to him when I missed my period and he told me to come along here as soon as I was sure it wasn’t irregularity.”
“I see.” The man behind the table wrote on a form. “And you’re the father, are you, Mr. Gawen?”
“If Poppy says so, yes, I am.”
The man gave Roger a sharp glare as though suspecting levity. “Hah! Well, it always helps to have the putative father turn up. These days one can’t rely on it, of course. And you want it to go to term, Miss Shelton?”
“What?”
“You actually want to bear the child?”
“Of course I do!”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. Most of the women who come in here arrive armed with everything they can think of in the hope of being granted an abortion—lists of diseases they caught as children, the story of how grandma became senile after her hundredth birthday, or some specious bit of string tied to a child on the next block who’s rumoured to have German measles. Are you getting married?”
“Is that required by law, too?” Poppy snapped.
“No, unfortunately. And I don’t like your tone, young woman. The things that are—as you put it—‘required by law’ are a simple matter of human ecology. With almost a hundred million people in this overcrowded island of ours, it would make very little sense to continue wasting our resources both material and human on such pointless undertakings as training phocomeli or cleaning up after morons. All the advanced countries of the world have come around to this point of view now, and if you want to evade the legal restrictions on child-bearing you’ll have to go to a country that can’t afford decent medical care for you anyway. Here at least you’re assured that your child will on the one hand have no hereditary disabilities and on the other enjoy adequate protection from pre- and post-natal risks. What you make of the child after it’s born is up to you.”