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 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.