Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (7 page)
“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 an 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
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.”
“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, “Christ 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.
(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)
“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!”
“You’re trying to give me ulcers,” said her husband Frank.
“You sheeting liar.”
“Then you’re doing it inadvertently, and that means you’re not fit to be allowed loose on the street, let alone breed your species.” Frank spoke from the elevated, almost Olympian level of dispassion due to the five tranks he’d taken already this anti-matter.
“You think I want to breed? That’s a different song you’re singing from the usual, isn’t it? Let’s have you carry the little bastard—they can do that now, pump you full of female hormones and implant in the visceral cavity.”
“You’ve been watching
Viewers’ Digest.
No, that’s wrong. You must have taken it off SCANALYZER. That’s even more sensational.”
“Dreck! It was Felicia who told me when I was last down at the night-school—”
“Lot of good your classes are doing you! You’re still as stiff as Teresa! When do they progress you to elementary Kama Sutra?”
“If you were more than half a man you’d have taught me yourself—”
“The lack of response is in the patient not the agent, which is why I—”
“Now you’re quoting ad copy, not even a news programme but a plug put out by some dribbling—”
“I should have had more sense than to marry a block who’d only had a few clumsy highschool—”
“I should have had more sense than to marry a man with colourblindness in the family—”