Stand on Zanzibar (6 page)

Damned good-looking.

Thinking that any one of these crowding-near neighbours could be a mucker.

The New Poor of the happening world.

*   *   *

Stal Lucas didn’t like the way the guide looked over the party when he finally deigned to show. Someone looking over that many people wouldn’t notice Stal Lucas, individual: age twenty, height six, wearing SirFer S-Pad-Drills, Mogul slax and a freeflying Blood Onyx shirjack with real gold fastener tags.

He’d see, rather, a vaguely milling bunch of misfits, vagabonds and pseudos, out of which some subgroups could be separated. Like Stal and his sparewheels from California, in New York on a two-night-one-day Jettex Cursion for the lift and not getting any. The world shrunk so tight you couldn’t pull it on over your shoes and still this distancing effect between the coasts …

On the entire one hundred and nine, there were four shiggies to fine-focus: one orbiting, probably by now ignorant not only of what building she was in but of what astral plane she was inhabiting; two with codders they hung to the arms of undetachablike; one like she just blew in from RUNG with African hair and bilberry skin which it wouldn’t do for Stal to be seen counting down with.

The rest were so drecky it was hard to believe, going right down to one in a shapeless brown bag of a garment toting a big heavy sacking purse, hair cropped to a crewcut, nervous face shiny except where it was chapped or spotted—a Divine Daughter, probably. Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.

“Whereinole the shiggies?” Stal said half under his breath. In company jobs, of course. Of all the megalopoli New York ate most and paid best. Same problem Ellayway, though there the hirer was government, drecking the draftees to the Pacific Conflict Zone, but who’s richer than a government?

So kill time. So put up with this sheeting notion of being dragged around a cold vault. So wait until tomorrow anti-matter when the plane will take Stal and sparewheels back to love on her and oh Bay.

“Where they keep Teresa, say?” muttered Zink Hodes, sparewheel nearest to Stal. He alluded to Shalmaneser’s legendary girl-friend, source of endless dirty jokes. Stal didn’t deign to reply. Zink had gone storehopping last night and was wearing a Nytype outfit. Stal was unpleased.

A couple up ahead with not one or two but count ’em three prodgies trailing along: embarrassed at the attention they attracted from envious neighbours in the crowd, explaining in loud voices that the three weren’t all theirs but they were taking a cousin’s appleofmyeye out for the day as well as their own two, mollifying the people around them but not so readily that they weren’t the last to shush when the guide finally called the visitors towards him.

“Good afternoon and welcome to the General Technics tower. I don’t have to tell anyone about GT—”

“So why you don’t get the mouth sewn shut?” whispered Zink.

“—because it’s environment-forming for everyone in this hemisphere and even beyond, from Moonbase Zero to the Mid-Atlantic Mining Project on the deep ocean floor. But there’s one element of our manifold operations which always fascinates you, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, and that’s what you’re going to be shown.”

“He should fascinate good and tight, such as weld it,” Zink said.

Stal cracked fingers at the two other sparewheels a pace distant and gestured they should shut Zink in from both sides.

“Leave you behind,” Stal said. “Nylover. Or get on that plane we put you out at thirty thousand, no ass-padding for you land.”

“But I—”

“Fascinate,” Stal said, and Zink complied, eyes round with dismay.

“Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.”

A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing.

“Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!”

A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name.

“Why is it so sheeting cold in here?” yelled someone up the front near the guide.

“If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it,” the guide responded promptly.

Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do?

“But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.”

Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter what.

Stal remained in two minds. His eyes darted across the equipment laid out below. There was eighty or ninety feet of it, at least—cables, piping, keyboards, readins and readouts, state-of-action banks, shelving loaded with gleaming metal oddments.

“It’s pretty big even if it doesn’t use a whole skyscraper,” someone called. Another drecky plantee, doubtless. Stal refrained from objecting when Zink scuffed his feet noisily.

“Wrong,” the guide said, and swivelled a spotlight head-high beside him. The beam leapfrogged over machinery and people and came to rest on an unimpressive frustrum of dull white metal.

“That,” he said solemnly, “is Shalmaneser.”

“That thing?” the plantee exclaimed dutifully.

“That thing. Eighteen inches high, diameter at the base eleven inches, and it’s the world’s largest computer thanks to GT’s unique patented and registered system known as Micryogenics. In fact it’s the first computer estimated to fall in the megabrain range!”

“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.