Stand on Zanzibar

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 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

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)

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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.

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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.