The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Mute Fly jerked from her grasp, leaving his empty glove in her hand, and dived in the nearest tank. He instantly began hissing, bubbling, and floundering. Some thing in the wax of the water made a strange growl-like snort and heaved and turned. The sides were sloped so exit from the tank was almost impossible without aid.

  Kumo leaned over the tank to help, and froze—staring at an ominous filmy residue that was unraveling from Mute Fly. She was reluctant to touch the fluid, but started to reach in anyway.

  “Don’t!” The swastika-mask Pinkie knocked her to the floor. He kicked her hard in the ribs with his big boot and she spit up blood. “Leave him alone. Leave him to die there, you stupid animal. We don’t want him out”—he nodded his head to the dissolving tissue—“like that.”

  Kumo heard and comprehended. No, they wouldn’t.

  A faint drumming echoed down the corridors. The zombies pounding. The Pinkie cursed and ran off. Kumo picked up Mute Fly’s bloody, fingerless glove she’d dropped. She stuck the little piece of dried tongue in it and then tossed them both in the vat. “RIP then, Fly.”

  Kumo turned to follow the swastika and get out of the steelworks. She hurried down the corridor but stopped suddenly when she saw that two tall, mirasmic zombies stood in the way. They had absurdly long, sharp-tined forks in their skinny hands.

  For all the food they mashed, they certainly looked thin. Kumo thought maybe human flesh wasn’t nutritious. Or maybe it was the drip-dry drug, that BopZ—benzyloxypromezap—modified pesticide, they all took.

  She’d never been this close to a zombie before. They had day-of-the-dead bones painted on the grub-colored thermal underpieces they wore. Their faces were waxy white, with greenish circles around their eyes. In short, like slightly decomposed corpses. Inside the dark circles of their eyes, small needle-points glowed red. Kumo had a sudden urge to pounce on the neck of one and shake it like a rat. The rotting-flesh smell that clung to them made her lip curl back. She hugged the wall even closer than she normally did, a lower profile for someone creeping up behind her. The zombies took two steps forward while Kumo pondered her next move. She wasn’t about to go back down the corridor toward the room writhing with butchered Pinkies. The zombies advanced.

  Kumo tried to hold her breath to keep from gagging on the foul stench emanating from them. The Vigowear outfits were covered with rusty spots of grime.

  Termites, Kumo said to herself, shifting back and forth on her boots, she couldn’t think of them as human.

  Jeezus, they’re so emaciated. She thought she could just take them apart with her bare hands. Their slight forms gave her confidence. Kumo lunged forward and bowled into their skinny knees.

  They all came down in a tumble and a strange wet whoosh that made Kumo wince. What the hell was that? flashed in her mind as the zombies grabbed her arms and ankles with their long bony hands. They gripped tight and stabbed at her with the sharp fork tines.

  One of them bit into her suit with its artificial shovel-like teeth. Kumo gave a quick jerk and the teeth shattered at the roots, letting blood and enamel fly everywhere. The zombie clapped its hands over its mouth and its partner took the moment to strike down at her with a fork. Kumo grabbed an arm on its downward swing and, scrambling up, busted it hard across her own thigh. It broke easily, like a dry stick.

  The zombie went, “Ungh, ungh, ungh.”

  Kumo grabbed its wrist and wrenched it hard, marveling at the tight “crack” it made as the thing screeched. The fork dropped on the cement. Kumo snatched it up and jabbed it deep into the lungs of the first zombie. She lunged forward as she struck with the fork and knocked the zombie on its back. The fork went in deep and in a second the zombie was vomiting forth suds of orange, frothy blood.

  Uuuucck. Kumo planted her boot heel into the thing’s ruined nose. She hissed as she felt it smoosh into a skull like a rotted pumpkin.

  “Shhiiiitt.” Kumo gagged. These things ain’t even real.

  With both boots she jumped on the thigh bone of the broken-armed voodoo doll and urbled a hysterical laugh when she saw the bones poke through the rotten Vigowear. Fucking-a. She grabbed its ankle and jerked, positive she could pull the thin tendons apart with the strength of her arms.

  The zombie cried, “Hunh, hunh.”

  Kumo let go and walked around to its head. She stepped on that too, just like she had the other zombie, who was now only moving convulsively and not consciously. A coil of green snot came out of its nose, and some long writhing worms. Kumo laughed aloud. It was a nightmare she had found here. Not a real thing. It wasn’t human—it was a-a-meat puppet. Kumo threw herself down on her knees on the chest of the broken zombie and heard a satisfying crunch. In a way, she wondered if the parasites had given the zombies the illusion of being alive. Just the movement of the worms through the putrefying flesh animated them.

  What was the point of being so skinny? she wondered. Her muscular weight alone could smear them like a frog on a highway. Kumo shook her head again, sicked up a bit, and then pissed on the zombies. She couldn’t treat them like beings—they were just these cancerous, leprous…

  Kumo kept her brow furrowed as she ran. She could still hear the snap of the limbs breaking across her knees and wanted to go back, to do it again, just to see if it really happened. If she had taken the thin bones and broken them like toothpicks. Hadn’t she? It was so confusing. The soft lungs, the softened skulls. Like pickled eggs in the shell. Eggshells. The zombies ate the gangs, but who preyed on the zombies? Gangleshanks?

  Dung beetles? Kumo thought of their icy, greasy faces and shook her head rapidly. How did those things kill the gangs? How could shit and maggots and those white termites kill gangs? Gangs could pop them like lice between their fingernails.

  Or was it that there were so many? Were gangs buried alive in their soft bodies, with matchstick legs and sharpened tines? Toxiphobia. Telling themselves, Don’t panic, don’t panic, it’s just, just…The gouging, the ear ripping, tongues lapping and teeth shoveling in the young gang flesh.

  Kumo giggled nervously. Weird world. She went back to Tommy’s briefly, to get her jacket, and some loose credits. He was nowhere to be seen, so she headed out again, to burrow down to Dogton. She found the place she was looking for, prayed, and jerked the handle. Miracle number two, it opened. The hatch dropped straight into the Dogton tunnels. She dived in, slamming the hatch behind her.

  She untangled herself and fingered a goose egg on her head, and then ran underground into the heated tunnels. She kept running all the way to Ded Tek, where she surfaced near market and then lit off to her own boxcar. She vomited over and over again, until dry heaves held her in the throes of exhaustion.

  She trembled and sweated and cried long and savagely, like a wounded big cat. It echoed like a looped tape, over and over out into the yards. Some artists on the tracks looked at each other through smoky, spooked eyes, but nobody went to see. Nobody dared.

  Revenge wasn’t sweet, only its own demon, demanding more hate and blood than any human had to give. In her fingers Kumo could feel the thin cold bones snapping, snapping.

  The Brains of Rats

  MICHAEL BLUMLEIN

  Michael Blumlein (1948– ) is a US science-fiction writer who works full-time as a medical doctor at the University of California, San Francisco. His novels include The Movement of Mountains (1987), X, Y (1993), and The Healer (2005). Despite a small output—he has only published six books—Blumlein has had considerable impact on the field, beginning with his first published story, “Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report” for Interzone (1984). This tale remains one of the most astonishingly savage political assaults ever published. The target is Ronald Reagan, whose living body is eviscerated without anesthetic by a team of doctors, partly to punish him for the evils he has allowed to flourish in the world and partly to make amends for those evils through the biologically engineered growth and transformation of the ablated tissues into foodstuffs and other goods ultimately derived from th
e flesh, which are then sent to the impoverished of the Earth. The story recalls the “condensed novels” of J. G. Ballard and would not have been out of place in a New Wave–era volume of New Worlds magazine.

  “Tissue Ablation” and other remarkable tales, including the striking exploration of gender couched in the language of medicine reprinted in this anthology, “The Brains of Rats” (originally published in Interzone, 1986), were assembled as The Brains of Rats (1989), which also included original stories such as “The Wet Suit.” Blumlein’s later stories, assembled in What the Doctor Ordered (2014)—which includes a novella, “The Roberts” (2010)—continue in the same externally cool, internally incandescent manner. At his best, Blumlein writes tales in which, with an air of remote sangfroid, he makes unrelenting assaults on public issues (and figures).

  The writer Michael McDowell notes in his astute introduction to The Brains of Rats, “The futured world of Blumlein’s occasional science-fiction stories is strange and unsettling. Fellini’s stylized and grotesque cinematic past is probably nearest to it, not because its details are correct but simply because history is shown to be alien and unrecognizable…aberrations sanctioned in fiction only by their reality [which] segue abruptly into the pathology of the civilized mind.”

  Blumlein’s almost scatological fearlessness—seemingly influenced by the Decadents and Symbolists as well as his medical background—demonstrates the very considerable thematic and stylistic range of late twentieth-century science fiction, and shows how very far from reassuring it could be. In some ways, the story and the writer’s career have been an unintended rebuke to the bourgeois middle-of-the-road quality of much 1980s and 1990s Humanist SF. Certainly, his fiction often reminds the reader more of attempts at a grittier realism in speculative fiction by writers like James Tiptree Jr. (linked in part by explorations of weird pathology).

  Even today, “The Brains of Rats” shocks and disturbs, with its far-from-likable narrator and the provocative ideas to which he gives voice.

  THE BRAINS OF RATS

  Michael Blumlein

  There is evidence that Joan of Arc was a man. Accounts of her trial state that she did not suffer the infirmity of women. When examined by the prelates prior to her incarceration it was found that she lacked the characteristic escutcheon of women. Her pubic area, in fact, was as smooth and hairless as a child’s.*1

  There is a condition of men, of males, called testicular feminization. The infants are born without a penis, and the testicles are hidden. The external genitalia are those of a female. Raised as women, these men at puberty develop breasts. Their voices do not deepen. They do not menstruate because they lack a uterus. They have no pubic hair.

  These people carry a normal complement of chromosomes. The twenty-third pair, the so-called sex chromosome pair, is unmistakably male. XY. Declared a witch in 1431 and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen, Joan of Arc was quite likely one of these.

  Herculine Barbin was born in 1838 in France; she was reared as a female. She spent her childhood in a convent and in boarding schools for girls and later became a schoolmistress. Despite her rearing, she had the sexual inclination of a male. She had already taken a female lover, when, on account of severe pain in her left groin, she sought the advice of a physician. Partly as a result of his examination her sex was redesignated, and in 1860 she was given the civil status of a male. The transformation brought shame and disgrace upon her. Her existence as a male was wretched, and in 1868 she took her own life.*2

  —

  I have a daughter. I am married to a blond-haired, muscular woman. We live in enlightened times. But daily I wonder who is who and what is what. I am baffled by our choices; my mind is unclear. Especially now that I have the means to ensure that every child born on this earth is male.

  —

  A patient once came to me, a man with a painful drip from the end of his penis. He had had it for several days; neither excessive bathing nor drugstore remedies had proven helpful. About a week and a half before, on a business trip, he had spent time with a prostitute. I asked if he had enjoyed himself. In a roundabout way he said it was natural for a man.

  Several days later, at home, his daughter tucked safely in bed, he had made love to his wife. He said that she got very excited. The way he said it made me think she was the only one in the room.

  The two of them are both rather young. While he was in the examining room, she sat quietly in the waiting room. She stared ahead, fatigue and ignorance making her face impassive. In her lap her daughter was curled asleep.

  In the room the man milked his penis, squeezing out a large amount of creamy material, which I smeared on a glass slide. In an hour the laboratory told me he had gonorrhea. When I conveyed the news to him, he was surprised and worried.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “An infection,” I said. “A venereal disease. It’s spread through sexual contact.”

  He nodded slowly. “My wife, she got too excited.”

  “Most likely you got it from the prostitute.”

  He looked at me blankly and said it again. “She got too excited.”

  I was fascinated that he could hold such a notion and calmly repeated what I had said. I recommended treatment for both him and his wife. How he would explain the situation to her was up to him. A man with his beliefs would probably not have too hard a time.

  —

  I admit that I have conflicting thoughts. I am intrigued by hypnotism and relations of power. For years I have wanted to be a woman, with small, firm breasts held even firmer by a brassiere. My hair would be shoulder-length and soft. It would pick up highlights and sweep down over one ear. The other side of my head would be bare, save for some wisps of hair at the nape and around my ear. I would have a smooth cheek.

  I used to brush it this way, posing before my closet mirror in dark tights and high-heeled boots. The velveteen dress I wore was designed for a small person, and I split the seams the first time I pulled it over my head. My arms and shoulders are large; they were choked by the narrow sleeves. I could barely move, the dress was so tight. But I was pretty. A very pretty thing.

  I never dream of having men. I dream of women. I am a woman and I want women. I think of being simultaneously on the top and on the bottom. I want the power and I want it taken from me.

  —

  I should mention that I also have the means to make every conceptus a female. The thought is as disturbing as making them all male. But I think it shall have to be one or the other.

  —

  The genes that determine sex lie on the twenty-third pair of chromosomes. They are composed of a finite and relatively short sequence of nucleic acids on the X chromosome and one on the Y. For the most part these sequences have been mapped. Comparisons have been made between species. The sex-determining gene is remarkably similar in animals as diverse as the wasp, the turtle, and the cow. Recently it has been found that the male banded krait, a poisonous snake of India separated evolutionarily from man by many millions of years, has a genetic sequence nearly identical to that of the human male.

  The Y gene turns on other genes. A molecule is produced, a complex protein, which is present on the surface of virtually all cells in the male. It is absent in the female. Its presence makes cells and environments of cells develop in particular ways. These ways have not changed much in millions of years.

  Certain regions of the brain in rats show marked sexual specificity. Cell density, dendritic formation, synaptic configuration of the male are different from the female. When presented with two solutions of water, one pure, the other heavily sweetened with saccharin, the female rat consistently chooses the latter. The male does just the opposite. Female chimpanzee infants exposed to high levels of male hormones in utero exhibit patterns of play different from their sisters. They initiate more, are rougher and more threatening. They tend to snarl a lot.

  Sexual differences of the human brain exist, but they have been obscured by the profound evolution o
f this organ in the past half-million years. We have speech and foresight, consciousness and self-consciousness. We have art, physics, and religion. In a language whose meaning men and women seem to share, we say we are different, but equal.

  The struggles between the sexes, the battles for power, are a reflection of the schism between thought and function, between the power of our minds and powerlessness in the face of our design. Sexual equality, an idea present for hundreds of years, is subverted by instincts present for millions. The genes determining mental capacity have evolved rapidly; those determining sex have been stable for eons. Humankind suffers the consequences of this disparity, the ambiguities of identity, the violence between the sexes. This can be changed. It can be ended. I have the means to do it.

  —

  All my life I have watched men fight with women. Women with men. Women come to the clinic with bruised and swollen cheeks, where they have been slapped and beaten by their lovers. Not long ago an attractive middle-aged lady came in with a bloody nose, bruises on her arms, and a cut beneath her eye, where the cheekbone rises up in a ridge. She was shaking uncontrollably, sobbing in spasms so that it was impossible to understand what she was saying. Her sister had to speak for her.

  Her boss had beat her up. He had thrown her against the filing cabinets and kicked her on the floor. She had cried for him to stop, but he had kept on kicking. She had worked for him for ten years. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  Another time a young man came in. He wore a tank top and had big muscles in his shoulders and arms. On one biceps was a tattoo of the upper torso and head of a woman, her huge breasts bursting out of a ragged garment. On his forearm beneath this picture were three long and deep tracks in the skin, oozing blood. I imagined the swipe of a large cat, a lynx or a mountain lion. He told me he had hurt himself working on his car.

  I cleaned the scratches, cut off the dead pieces of skin bunched up at the end of the tracks. I asked again how this had happened. It was his girlfriend, he said, smiling a little now, gazing proudly at the marks on his arm. They had had a fight, she had scratched him with her nails. He looked at me, turning more serious, trying to act like a man but sounding like a boy, and asked, “You think I should have a shot for rabies?”