“That’s a damned lie,” someone up the front said.
Thrown out of orbit, the guide hesitated.
“What about K’ung-fu-tse?” the someone went on.
“What? I’m afraid I don’t—” The guide gave a meaningless smile. This wasn’t an interruption by a plantee, Stal concluded, and raised on tiptoe to see what was happening.
“Confucius! You’d say Confucius! At the University of Peking they’ve had a megabrain computer in operation since—”
“Shut his hole! Traitor! Dirty lying bleeder! Throw him over the side!”
The yells were instant, reflex, automatic. Zink pushed forward and shouted with the others. Stal’s eyes narrowed as he drew a pack of Bay Golds from his pocket and set one at the corner of his mouth. Only four left in the pack, spin them out with some of this Nytype dreck, this son-of-Manhattan-green which was what you could get on this coast. He bit down hard on the automatic aerating tip.
What was so important about what the Chinese did, unless the draft got your balls? Nothing to shout about, for def.
Corporation police dragged the little red brother out before anyone had a chance to do more than punch his head, and the guide, relieved, went back into his standard flight pattern.
“See where I’m focusing the light now? That’s the SCANALYZER input. We feed all the news from every major beam agency through that readin unit. Shalmaneser is the means whereby Engrelay Satelserv can tell us where we are in the happening world.”
“Yes, but surely you don’t operate Shalmaneser just for that,” another plantee said loudly, making Stal squirm in his shirjack.
“Of course not. Shalmaneser’s main task is to achieve the impossible again, a routine undertaking here at GT.” The guide paused for effect. “It has been shown theoretically that with a logical system as complex as Shalmaneser consciousness, self-awareness, will eventually be generated if enough information is fed it. And we can proudly claim that there have already been signs—”
Commotion. Several people pressed forward to get a sight of what was going on, including Zink. Stal stood his ground with a sigh. Another planted distraction was the likeliest. Whyinole should these blocks believe people couldn’t tell a fake event from the real?
But—
“Blasphemers! Devilspawn! Consciousness is the gift of God and you can’t build a soul into a machine!”
—a GT plantee wouldn’t be invited to scream that.
There was a block in his way: some elderly codder inches shorter and pounds lighter than Stal. He shoved him aside and put Zink between himself and recriminations while he leaned over the balcony’s rail. Clambering hand over hand down one of the twenty-foot pillars supporting the gallery was the shiggy in the shapeless brown outfit, jumping the last five feet now and rounding on the alarmed staff as they hurried to intercept her.
“It’s Teresa!” someone shouted, attempting wit, and was answered by a few half-hearted chuckles. But most of the people on the gallery were at once showing signs of fright. Nothing like this had ever happened during a visit by Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere. People who wanted a better view started shoving against people who wanted out, and almost immediately tempers began to rise and voices with them.
Interested, Stal considered and rejected possibilities. No Divine Daughter would carry anything that would work at a safe distance—no bolt-gun, no firearms, no grenades. So the blocks who were shrieking towards the exit or hurling themselves flat on the floor were wasting their energy. On the other hand, there was room in that sack affair slung from her shoulder to hold quite a—
A telescopic axe with a blade the full length of the folded handle. Hmmm!
Screaming: “Devil’s work! Smash it and repent before you’re damned to all eternity! Don’t presume to infringe God’s—”
She flung the bag in the face of the nearest machine-tender and charged at Shalmaneser. Some mind-present codder threw a heavy service manual at her and it struck her on the leg, making her stumble and almost fall. In that instant defenders grouped, arming themselves with handleless whips of multicore cable and shelf-struts awaiting installation which made six-foot bludgeons.
But, cowardly, they only circled and didn’t close in. Stal curled his lip in contempt.
“Go it shiggy!” whooped Zink, and Stal didn’t comment. He might have said the same but that it was unbefitting.
A clash of metal on metal resounded through the vault as the girl squared up to the boldest of her opponents, wielding one of the shelf-struts. He yelped and dropped it as if it had stung him and she followed through wildly with the axe.
His hand—Stal saw it clearly in mid-flight—looped free in the air like a shuttlecock and there was blood on the axe’s blade.
“Hey-hey,” he said under his breath, and leaned another two inches over the balcony rail.
From behind her someone else lashed out with a length of cable, leaving a red brand across her cheek and neck. She flinched but disregarded the pain and slammed the axe down on one of the readin tables. It shattered into fragments of plastic and bright little electronic parts.
“Hey-hey,” Stal repeated with a little more enthusiasm. “Who next?”
“Let’s us all go out this evening and raise a little whaledreck,” Zink proposed excitedly. “I didn’t see a shiggy with this much offyourass in years!”
The girl dodged another onslaught and seized something from a trolley with her left hand. She hurled it in the direction of Shalmaneser and a flurry of sparks marked the impact.
Stal considered Zink’s proposal thoughtfully, inclined to agree. The blood from the axe had spattered the girl’s brown clothing and the injured man was lying howling on the floor.
He sucked at the tip of his Bay Gold, feeling decision gather as the smoke automatically diluted with four parts of air swirled into his lungs. But he was still holding it there—he could hold it for ninety seconds without trouble—when the sceneshifter moved in.
context (3)
YOU HAVE TO PUSH HIM OVER
“It’s no coincidence”
(COINCIDENCE You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
“that we have muckers. Background: ‘mucker’ is an Anglicisation of ‘amok’. Don’t believe anyone who says it’s a shifted pronunication of ‘mugger’. You can survive a mugger, but if you want to survive a mucker the best way is not to be there when it happens.
“Prior to the twentieth century the densest concentration of human beings was almost certainly found in Asian cities. (Except Rome and I’m coming to Rome later.) When too many people got in your way you armed yourself with a panga or a kris and went out to cut some throats. It didn’t matter if you were educated in their use or not—the people you came up against were in their normal frame of reference and died. You were in the berserk frame of reference. Background: the berserkers developed from communities who for a large part of the year sat on their asses in Norwegian fjordal valleys with an unclimbable mountain range on each side, a lid of horrible grey cloud on top, and you couldn’t get away by sea either because of the winter storms.
“There’s a saying among the Nguni of South Africa that you didn’t only have to kill a Zulu warrior—you had to push him over to make him lie down. Background: Chaka Zulu made it a policy to take his assegai-fodder from their parents in early childhood and raise them in barrack-like conditions owning no possessions bar a spear, a shield and a sheath to hide the penis, with absolutely no privacy. He made independently the same discovery the Spartans made.
“Also it was when Rome had already become the world’s first million-city that the Eastern mystery religions with their concomitant self-privation and self-mutilation took hold. You fell in behind the procession honouring Cybele, you seized a knife from one of the priests, you cut your balls off and ran through the streets waving them till you came to a house with the door open when you threw them over the threshold. They gave you a
n outfit of women’s clothing and you joined the priesthood. Reflect on the pressure that drove you to think that that was the easy way out!”
—You’re an Ignorant Idiot by Chad C. Mulligan
continuity (2)
THE DEAD HAND OF THE PAST
Norman strode out of the elevator door prepared to let go one of his rare, always calculated blasts of temper, under which any of his subordinates would cringe into guilt. He had hardly seen the interior of Shalmaneser’s vault when his toe struck something on the floor.
He glanced at it.
It was a human hand severed at the wrist.
* * *
“Now my grandfather on my mother’s side,” Ewald House said, “was a one-arm man.”
Age six, Norman looked up at his great-grandfather with circular eyes, not understanding everything that the old man told him, but aware that this was important in the same way as not wetting his bed or not getting too friendly with Curtis Smith’s boy of his own age but white.
“Not sort of neat and tidy like you see nowadays,” said Ewald House. “Not an ampytee. Not done surgical in a hospital. He was born a slave, see, and …
“He was a lef’-handed man, see. What he did, he—he raised the fist of wrath against his bawss. Hit him ears over ankles inter the crick. So the bawss called up five-six fieldhan’s chain him to a stump they had in the forty-acre field and just natcherly took a saw and …
“And sawed it. ’Bout here.” He touched his own scrawny pipe-stem of an arm three inches below the elbow.
“Nothing he coulda done about it. He was born a slave.”
* * *
This time, very still, very calm, Norman looked at the interior of the vault. He saw the hand’s owner writhing and moaning on the floor, clutching his wrist and trying to find pressure points on the leaking bloodvessels through a fog of intolerable agony. He saw the smashed readin table whose fragments were crunching under the feet of the panicky, mind-absent staff. He saw the light in the eyes of the pallid white girl, breathing orgasmically deep, who was standing off her attackers with her bloody blade.
Also he saw, up there on the balcony, more than a hundred idiots.
He disregarded what was happening in the middle of the floor and walked over to a panel set into the wall of the vault. Two quick twists of the fastenings and it fell away, revealing a network of heavy insulated pipes as tangled as the tails of a king rat.
He hauled on a quadrant valve; struck a union a sharp blow with the side of his hand, too quick for the chill of it to penetrate his skin; and put one of the hoses under his arm so he could lean on it and drag it after him. There would be enough free length for his purposes.
He stared at the girl as he approached her.
Divine Daughter. Probably called Dorcas or Tabitha or Martha. Thinking of killing. Thinking of smashing. A typical Christian reaction.
You murdered your Prophet. Ours died old and full of honour. You would kill yours again, and cheerfully. If ours came back I could speak to him like a friend.
Six feet from her, the pipe scritching across the floor like the scales of a monstrous snake, he stopped. Uncertain about this man with the dark skin and the cold, dead stare, she hesitated, poising the axe to chop at him, then having second thoughts and thinking: this must be a distraction, a trap.
She glanced wildly about her, expecting to find someone preparing to take her from the rear. But the staff had recognised what Norman had brought with him, and were sidling away.
* * *
“Nothing he coulda done about it…”
* * *
Convulsively he opened the valve on the end of the pipe and held it to a count of three.
There was a hiss, and snow fell, and something laid white ice on the axe, and the hand holding it, and the arm above the hand. There was an endless instant of nothing happening.
And then the weight of the axe broke the girl’s hand off her arm.
“Liquid helium,” Norman said briefly for the benefit of the watchers, and let the pipe fall clang to the floor. “Dip your finger in it, it snaps off like a dry stick. Don’t try it is my advice. And don’t believe what you hear about Teresa, either.”
He didn’t look at the girl, who had keeled over—fainting or possibly dead from the shock—but only at the frosted form of the hand still gripping the axe’s haft. There should have been some sort of response, if no more than pride in his own quick thinking. There was nothing. His mind, his heart, seemed as frozen as that meaningless object on the floor.
He turned on his heel towards the elevator again, aware of a terrible disappointment.
* * *
Zink moved closer to Stal.
“Hey-hey!” he said. “Made it worth coming, huh? Let’s go raise a bushel of whaledreck tonight, clear from the floor of the ocean. That put me square on the proper orbit!”
“No,” Stal said, eyes fixed on the door through which the brown-nose had disappeared. “Not in this town. I don’t like the kind of enforcement they keep here.”
the happening world (2)
THE SOFT CELL
“It has been more than a decade since the contents of the New York Public Library were actually in New York. Their exact location is now classified, but this has not reduced—rather, it has enhanced—user-access.”
The most versatile copying system ever developed is Eastman Kodak’s Wholographik. Turn the print over, cut along the lines with ordinary scissors, distribute the pieces—and each of up to 24 sections will return up to 98% of the base information!
Donald Hogan sat among 1235 other people any or all of whom might be consulting the same book or magazine as he was at any given instant.
It was highly improbable, though, that anyone else would consult two consecutive items the same as his choice. His search pattern had been scrambled by Shalmaneser, and as an added precaution the transcript of it he carried with him had been copied out in Yatakangi—a difficult and unpopular language resembling Japanese in that it combined a welter of Chinese ideograms with two complete syllabaries, not, however, home-grown like the Japanese katakana but a bastard offshoot of Arabic script imported to the islands of South-East Asia in the late middle ages by Muslim proselytisers.
SUMMARY The authors describe a number of cases of debatable genealogy encountered by the New Jersey State Eugenic Processing Board. A successful method of detecting the genes responsible for recessive dichromatism is
CELL STRUCTURE ABSTRACTS
REVIEW OF BIOCHEMICAL ABSTRACT JOURNALS
PROCEEDINGS OF THE INSTITUTE FOR CEREBROCHEMICAL STUDIES
If you’re looking for a tailored bacterium capable of turning those low-grade slurries into a profitable source of sulphur, ask Minnesota Mining for a sample of their strain UQ-141. Your first million organisms: $1000 postage paid.
SUMMARY Computer testing of a tentative formula for the egg of Nannus troglodytes. The evaluation indicates
The most useful one-volume reference work available to the contemporary student of addiction is Friberg and Mahler’s DEFORMATION OF SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTS. It covers: opium and derivatives; coca and derivatives; peyote and derivatives; cannabis and derivatives; pituri, caapi, etc.; synthetics from lysergic acid to Yaginol® and Skulbustium®. Includes a specially written appendix on Triptine®. One spool micro: $75 to the medical profession only.
SOMATIC ECOLOGY JOURNAL
SPORTS AND MUTATION REPORT
REPTILIAN HEREDITY REVIEW
SUMMARY A case is presented for the interpretation of cross-economic relationships in a Bolivian mountain village as a manifestation of Mergendahler’s Syndrome with the energising factors deweighted by religious, nutritional and
Isolated genetic material is now available from GT for Rana palustris as well as Rattus norvegicus albus. Cross-sexual contamination g’teed held to less than 0.01%.
SUMMARY Occasionally when orbiting Bennie Noakes punches an encyclopedia connection on his phone and marvels at what it tells him, saying, “C
hrist what an imagination
COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS
TECTOGENETICS DIGEST
ABSTRACTS OF SUMMARIES OF BIOCHEMICAL PAPERS
SUMMARY Susceptibility to the carcinogenic effect of commercial-grade carbon tetrachloride is shown to be correlable with the known sex-linked heritable ability to detect by taste, in solutions of less than 1 ppm, the presence of
Nothing is more frustrating in the modern world than to be entitled to bear children and yet lack the capacity. We specialise in the reimplantation of externally fertilised ova.
BULLETIN OF THE SOCIETY FOR ABSOLUTE ORGASM
GRAUNCH::PROSOVERSEPIX
ANT, BEE AND TERMITE SOCIOLOGY JOURNAL
SUMMARY When ugly, frustrated dropout HANK OGMAN raped his mother and made her pregnant with what was almost certain to be a phocomelic foetus owing to her Yaginol addiction, things looked pretty black for responsible blockfather WALT ADLESHINE. However, thanks to nick-of-time intervention by gorgeous passion-panted surgeon IDA CAPELMONT, the tragedy was averted. “How can I ever repay you?” Walt demanded, and she named a price that
Donald Hogan, yawning, vacated his chair. It never took him more than three hours to get through the day’s assigned schedule. He pocketed the notebook in which he kept the search pattern and wandered towards the elevators.
context (4)
THE SUBJECT MATTER
(HUMAN BEING You’re one. At least, if you aren’t, you know you’re a Martian or a trained dolphin or Shalmaneser.
If you want me to tell you more than that, you’re out of luck. There’s nothing more anybody can tell you.
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
tracking with closeups (3)
NO YOU DON’T!
“So what do we do?” Sheena Potter demanded for the umpty-fourth time. “And don’t take another trank—it’s all I can do to get through to you as it is!”