Ibn Qirtaiba rises again after its longest hiatus yet! I do apologise to those of IQ's readers who have been checking back from time to time only be disappointed by the lack of new material. From the days when Ibn Qirtaiba launched on-line in 1995 as one of the Web's first zines, we have endeavoured to produce a new issue every month. However with its editor now working 100 hours per week to manage his businesses, this is obviously no longer possible.
So the call goes out to our loyal readers to consider stepping forward to edit Ibn Qirtaiba and return it to its glory days. Our two would-be assistant editors, mentioned in last issue's editorial, have not been able to commit themselves to the magazine, so expressions of interest from others are welcome. If IQ is to retain its affiliation with Mensa its editor would have to be a member, but do not hesitate to apply if you are not. I will continue to host the Web site and provide technical and editorial assistance to the new editor, as well as developing some new features at this domain.
This issue has only had room for three of the backlog of submissions that are awaiting publication (a backlog which I hope to resume clearing more frequently than twice per year, with or without the help of a new editor!). We begin with a review of a feminist SF classic, Native Tongue by Suzette Elgin, then the conclusion of last month's incredible two-part serial Coinkydink by Chris Kassel, concluding with a submission from Tony Chandler who turns his hand to poetry with the gods of chaos. This issue is again very capably illustrated by Alain Valet.
If Ibn Qirtaiba's irregularity has you hankering for a more reliable SF fix, there are a number of resources out there which you might find useful: E-Genre Weekly is one useful pointer to genre fiction on-line, and SFF Net's E-Stand is another regularly-updated resource of recently-published fiction. But for now, I'm glad to confirm that Ibn Qirtaiba is back, and I hope that you will be glad with this issue too.
Review: Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin
Native
Tongue by Susanne Haden Elgin is a book by a female linguist, about female
linguists; but it is also science fiction, and the combination is a strange and
interesting one. As a radical feminist, Elgin presents in her novel an
exaggerated story of masculine domination of a future world. This is a world in
which female suffrage is repealed in the United States in the year 1991 (seven
years after the book's publication). By the year 2179, the human society is not
only segregated by the sexes, but also into linguists and non-linguists;
linguistics being the field of study that now holds the key to commerce and
diplomacy with scores of alien races.
Jones appreciated it greatly when the Lingoe putting him down was a male, at least... when it was one of the bitches, he got physically sick. Oh, they observed all the forms, those women; they said all the right words. But they had a way of somehow leading the conversation around so that words came out of your mouth that you'd never heard yourself say before and would have taken an oath that you couldn't be made to say... He knew all about linguists. You couldn't win, not face to face with one, and he knew better than to try.
The novel tells the stories of Michaela, a women trained to be a perfect partner who exhibits the ultimate in battered wife syndrome, and of Nazereth, wife of a high-ranking linguist who joins an underground movement to create a secret and special womens' language. The government also has a secret project of its own; to discover how to "interface" a human baby with a non-humanoid lifeform, and thus to overtake the linguists at their own game. They succeed only in visiting shocking atrocities upon the infant subjects of their experiments.
We know what you men go through here, and we honor you for it. But it's something that's got to be done, for the sake of preserving civilization on this planet. I mean that, gentlemen! Literally for the sake of preventing the end of humankind on this green and golden Earth of ours - the permanent end, I might add. I'm not talking a few decades in the colonies while things cool off and then we can move back planetside. I'm talking the end. Period. Final. Total.
The reader, of either gender, quickly becomes bound up in the daring conspiracy planned by the women, and soon comes to believe the novel's strange thesis (less strange, perhaps, to linguists) that the mere creation of a new language can of itself shape and effect a fundamental change in the nature of social reality. In a sense the novel is more social-science fiction than simple science fiction - although devotees of hard SF will find the governmental experiments as intellectually intriguing as they are morally shocking. The novel ends at a turning-point in the narrative - which continues in its sequels, The Judas Rose (1987) and Earthsong (1994).
...imagine a person standing on a block of ice, planning and planning and planning. Planning ways to get about on the ice, ways to decorate it, ways to divide it up, ways to copy with all the possible knowns and givens of a block of ice. That would be a busy person, privident and industrious and independent and admirable, isn't that so? Except that when the ice melts, none of that is any use at all.
The allegorical intent of this novel does not overshadow its engaging storyline. At worst, the book descends to caricaturing the protagonists along gendered lines, which makes it even more difficult for the reader to suspend disbelief at the strange social order portrayed. Nonetheless, there is much of interest for the casual reader, and much inspiration for feminist SF fans. Native Tongue has been republished in 2000 by Spinifex Press, and comes recommended as a unique, disturbing and confrontative read.
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Mission accomplished, Big Mike felt somewhat relieved. Not as much as he'd
expected, but a little better. He made a quick, illegal turn to avoid the Hummer
limo, thoroughly enraging the chauffeur (who, fortified by his vehicle, screamed
at him, "I'm gonna slaughter your family, you fuckin' lice cocksucker..."
), which reminded him to make a courtesy call to Dana, his wife, in order to
listen to her whining in quasi-British intonations.. she complained a lot, but
she was tall and strikingly beautiful; good, blueblood Gold Coast
stock...actually, he always sort of wished he'd married somebody petite and
stupid who dressed in souped-up motorcycle leathers... he made some business
hook-ups, trying to organize his day and get out from under the oppression of
fidgets that Abu ben Bullshit had left in his wake... and he'd done a
respectable job of it, having steered the Lincoln back onto the expressway
before he realized that after all that, the oddball doctor had forgotten his
ridiculous math journal. It was wedged between the seat and the map pocket,
poking out ominously from the tufted leather, like a dorsal fin. 
Big Mike
sniffed and chewed his inner cheek, and acutally passed four exits before the
need to peek inside it grew fiercer than he could bear. He pulled off the
highway, onto an unsavory-appearing downtown side street, among menacing hulks
of decaying concrete, ramparts mutilated with gangsta graffitti, pausing before
a cadre of flat-fix businesses.
Power-locking himself in, he flipped open the booklet and ressurected the pages on which Dr. ben Berber had been scribbling. Despite his nerves, Big Mike guffawed. Pretty childish crap, he decided, for a doctored consultant on integrable field theory, plasma physics, and nonlinear dynamics, which (according to his business card) he was; it looked the doodles of an pre-adolescent schoolgirl. A four-stroke face, that dorky Have A Nice Day icon from the brainlessly optomistic Seventies, was repeated dozens and dozens of times across the figures, although it made a sudden, infernal morph on the last page, forming ben Berber's final image, the image which he'd been hiding from Mike, prodding him to identify, daring him to guess at... a miniature, poorly drawn, but unmistakeable L'il Devil, identical to Macon Bacon's tit tattoo. Of course, that coincidence was perfectly explicable; a bit improbable at worst, but it was hardly impossible to believe that the foul-breathed toga-tented third-world poindexter had noticed the same juxtapositions on the spackling truck, on the road dyke's sweaty t-shirt... however.... as the brassy growl of Latino jazz leaked from behind a pulldown shade, upon on which was written in magic marker, Lupita, you're late, as usual; Rango... Big Mike continued to stare downward... he gave a little snort of distress... the dastardly incubus decorated a sheet Logarithmic Functions, starting with the values for sines... a series of math figures followed, beginning with 6.46373, which also happened to be the first six digits of his personal, unlisted telephone number. This was followed by tangent values, and six more numbers, which happened to be the last digit of that phone number followed by the first five digits to his office phone number... and so, he checked the cotangents, and damn it all if the cotangents weren't the remainder of that number, followed by the cosines, which were his dorm extension in college, and then the secants, which incorporated the phone number to the house he'd lived in before he went to college, and slowly the bradycardia returned, his throat began to feel like he was being spoon-fed kitty litter and his head began to feel like an airbag was detonating behind his occipital lobe.
Big Mike realized that the crazy trig tables contained, in precise sequence, the number to each and every phone he'd ever had, even those phone numbers he had to see again to remember, down to the one that animated the bell on the avocado-colored Princess which sat in an alcove on Ashland Avenue. As fate would have it, his mobile phone... whose number was listed neatly under Log cosec zero degrees dash thirty... trilled that instant.... a call from his boss, which he blew off with uncustomary brusqueness. How the hell should he know if Dr. ben Berber's plane had taken off yet? He'd performed the butt-boy airport shuttle gig as far as the departure gate, that's all he'd been required to do. Not tactically advisable to hang up on a division head, perhaps, but... screw him, the overpaid lugnut. He tore the phone's umbilical extension cord from the power point and tossed it behind him. Screw the division, while he was at it. Who needed their micro-centric crap? Larger patterns were clearly at work this morning. The time for sensible career moves had waned. He waited until his innards settled... wishing he had nothing more in life to do but sit around listening to salsa tapes, waiting for a piece of ass named Lupita... then pulled away. As long as he was already downtown, two blocks the public library, he figured he'd better do some immediate reconnaissance research and try to get a grip on whatever it was, exactly, that was coming down.
On the steps of the venerable library building, a prognathic street-cretin
was selling plastic dinosaurs from a Union Baptist comforter. There was
something dishearteningly familiar about his face, and Big Mike avoided
eye-contact as he passed by, entering the massive, Italian Renaissance-styled
portals. In fact, it turned out that downtown-branch library demographics on a
Monday at 9:30 AM were mostly homeless and cretin. They were everywhere, braced
against the green granite walls, squatting on the marble floors, leaning against
display cases, sucking hootch and snoozing underneath world-famous murals. The
only whitebread, non-cretin in evidence was a staggeringly voluptuous,
rosy-cheeked woman sitting at a bank of public computers along the library's
west wing, which is precisely where Big Mike was headed. Twelve of the fifteen
computers were out of service, so he had to sit directly next to her. She must
have been smoking something sweet, because as soon as he sat down, she turned
and said in an exaggerated stage whisper, "Did you know that Kevin Bacon
has a rock band? A real one?" Immediately, he recognized her. 
Rather
consider the odds that any stripper would be in any library ever, much less
Macon Bacon, here and now, he ignored her innane nonsequitar and went to work.
Sensing wariness, Macon continued in a desperate little squeal, "No, I know
I must sound kinda dingy, but I swear, Kevin Bacon is like my third cousin on my
dad's side. Never met him or nothing, but I've been feeling really spaced-out
since yesterday, I keep seein' the same shit over and over again and I think all
that coke finally got my heart messed up for good, and for some reason I kinda
needed to find out what Kev's been doing lately, since his movie career
tanked..." Normally, nervous chatter from a 44 double-D bimbette would not
have gone down altogether unpleasantly. This morning, however, Big Mike
pointedly ignored it.
He logged on to an Internet search engine and looked up 'coincidence', eliciting more than two million hits, which he rapidly narrowed down to four hundred twenty-three scholarly papers on the subject published over the past two years... four hundred eight of which had been written by Abu ben Berber, PhD. He immersed himself, to the best of his moderate cranial capacity, in highbrow mathematical terminology spewed from such obtuse physics journals as Hyperfine Interaction Bulletin and Forum of Recoil Atom Spectoscopy and Progress in Dynamical Circular Dichroisms and Few-Body Quasi-Optic Continuum Systems Quarterly, gradually becoming somewhat familiar with current, off-the-wall theoretics, most of which bore ben Berber's tagline. In a nutshell, as far as Big Mike could determine, the African whizbang was suggesting that a sudden, inexplicable increase of natural synchronicity in certain areas of the universe could be a precursor to a series of cosmic events that might quickly gain momentum, like tossing a ping pong ball in a roomful of mousetraps.
Why? How? Well, since ben Berber was evidentally dealing with hypothetical reactive implications on the subatomic level, where physics was dominated by the wacky laws of quantum mechanics, and utilizing relativistic phase shift analysis techniques built in part on some statistical calculations based around the number of people related to...nothing surprised him at this point... Kevin Bacon... Big Mike didn't have a clue. But his questions were suddenly huge and vital and terrifying; suddenly, he had an inexplicable longing for the type of lifestyle where he could drink Sterno out of cheesecloth and make a living hawking second-hand triceratopses.... for, in the conclusion of a paper published in Eschatology Today, ben Berber hypothesized: "If there is an innate tendency in any complex system to form stable collective properties, and if, as previously posed, mathematics is viewed as a shadow of parallel dimensions, then one might construct the following experiment: Say one discovers that a random, familiar figure, such as one's birth-date or telephone number, appears sequentially within, for example, a series of non-random figures, such as the ratios used in solving triangles (i.e., the logarhythms of trigonometric functions), such an event could, in conjecture, trigger a chain reaction of coincidences leading to the spontaneous fusion of energy and matter into a single, coherent system, resulting inevitably in eschatological collapse. Specific, testable predictions are proposed by calculating the time ratio spanning that coincidental occurrence and the subsequent, coincidental reading of these words on this page..."
Fourteen seconds after looking up 'eschatological collapse' in Webster's Unabridiged, he bid the busty Baconette good luck and bee-lined back toward the relative safety of the LS8, pausing only momentarily, as he realized that the passively-rotting dinosaur salesman out front was Bunk Doornbos, his schitzophrenic third cousin on his father's side; he bought a toy from him, unloading everything disposable he had in his wallet: ninety-two dollars, a transit token, and a freebie pass to a suburban multiplex. He sped back toward the airport, having no doubt whatsoever that the imploding infrastructure of reality might occasionally work to his advantage as well.
Sure enough, having negotiated the short-tempered crowd at the drop-off zone, a loopy woman at the airline desk replied, "Yes, sir; as a matter of fact, today's your lucky day! The flight out of that gate was held up. It's still here, waiting for clearance on stand Kilo 12. Well, let me check that name for you... Yes, there's a Dr. Abu ben Berber on board... No, I'm not able to deliver any messages, but... a seat? For you? Now? Normally, I wouldn't... couldn't... But, today... What the hell! Hmmm...we've apparently had a no-show... passenger named Murphy Nguyen... Wow, lookee there...hah! His seat was directly behind your Dr. Abu... that's a coinkydink...!"
"You don't say," said Big Mike weakly, handing over his Gold Card.
He was hustled onto an airline golf cart and deposited at the aft cargo door of behemoth 747. A vibration of urgent energy hung over everything; the various crews were making quick maneuvers, whisking him aboard; a harried-looking flight attendant received him in the rear of the economy section, shaking her head, confiding that the airline had been cutting corners, breaking such procedural norms all morning. Her voice trembled on the edge of hysteria, she had bags under her eyes as big as shopping carts, she was pawing her chest like something inside wasn't keeping time to the music. "As a matter of fact," she groused, "I was supposed to have a lay-over here; I'm exhausted; I've been on three days straight... but frankly, something funky's going on around here, and I don't trust half these people to do their jobs anymore..."
For emphasis, she indicated the cabin's galley section, where, behind the scarcely drawn curtains, a stewardess and a passenger appeared to be engaged in full-blown sexual activity. Just then, the big plane began to taxi and quickly, the flight attendant wedged Big Mike into his seat, buckling him down... he thanked her, glancing at her nametag; Lupita... he said, "By the way, hon, better call Rango, he's worried..." simultaeneously noting the white turban jutting above the headrest in the seat in front of him... no time for comment before the big Pratt & Whitney mills revved up to power and the jumbo jet lumbered aloft... he clutched his carry-on luggage, the eerie notebook and a plastic Uintatherium... it wasn't until the jet had climbed to flight level that he sprang forward, around the seat, and realized that he'd made a major, major mistake.
There, a meticulously-manicured gentleman in a twill center-vent suit sat napping... the turban was actually a courtesy pillow... but Big Mike's intrusive lunge woke him up. "Golly, I'm... sorry, buddy..." stammered Mike, "... I thought you were... Dr. ben Berber..."
Soft wrinkles formed around a frown of concentration; the gentleman replied in an echoey whisper, "I am Dr. ben Berber."
Electro-babble was spewing from an overhead speaker: "...get up and move about the cabin. Until that time, please remain comfortably seated, with your seat belts securely fastened. We also suggest for your safety that seatbelts be fastened even after the sign has..."
"No, I mean Abu ben Berber," sighed Mike. "Some dingledork African doctor... a consultant in physics or something... My mistake..."
"No, young man, no mistake; that would be me; I perform such a service... I possess a doctorate in analytical quantum chemistry from King Khalid College in Khartoum..." The man spoke gently, stroking a neatly trimmed black beard latticed with grey. An intoxicating waft of eau de cologne rose from his pores. His smile was kind, incandescent and genuine, except briefly, when his chest seemed to seize up and he winced in pain. "How can I help you, my friend?"
"Look, doc.... I don't wanna be an a-hole, particularly; but I just jacked in my job and climbed on board this airline looking for a specific guy, a greasy little dude about about yay-tall, dressed up like Lawrence of Arabia on goofballs. I dropped him off at the airport a couple hours ago; he was supposed to be on this plane, on his way back to Africa..."
"Oh," replied the elegant gentleman, blanching slightly. "Oh, my goodness. This plane? Africa? Dear, dear. I believe that you have... I believe that the Africa flight was routed to a different gate before taking off... us... well, this plane, we were just a re-fuel stop, waiting for clearance..."
On went the overhead spiel: "...listing of our complimentary beverages, they may be found on page five of our Hot Times magazine... for now we just ask that you sit back and relax and enjoy your flight to Macon, Georgia..."
"I don't friggin' believe it," groaned Big Mike, sinking back into his seat. He clutched the plastic gewgaw to his body like a teddy bear. "Couldn't have seen that one coming, huh? Two Abu ben Berbers...?"
"Oh, it isn't the uncanny, numerically inexplicable coincidence you might imagine," said the doctor, leaning over the seat. "Ben Berber is among the most common surnames in Northern Africa!"
A pop-eyed fellow in the seat opposite Mike glanced up from his magazine and added brightly, "...like in Vietnam, where everybody's last name is Nguyen...?"
"Precisely," said Dr. ben Berber, "...not only that, but fully half of the Islamic world goes by Abu, or some variation thereof... Abba, Apu, Abdullah... I've met literally hundreds of Abu ben Berbers throughout my academic career, many of whom still wear the outlandish traditional apparel you describe..."
Big Mike formed a sullen little lump in his seat and glanced around for Lupita and the liquor cart. Suddenly, though, he had a flash of insight: "Say, doc..." he said, tapping the headrest, leaning forward, "...speaking of coincidences... I don't suppose you know anything about..." He tried to resurrect some of the scientific jargon he'd been reading. "Theoretical ramifications of.... ...of.... lots of 'em happening in a row, do you?"
"Funny you should ask. Actually, I recently completed an interdisciplinary dissertation entitled Phase Transition Dynamics in Peridoically Amplified Linkage Systems as Exemplifed by the Movie Trivia Game 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'."
Big Mike flinched. "Man, what's the story with that pug-nosed little prick, anyway? Kevin Bacon? Haven't heard about him in years, and suddenly, he's all anybody seems to talk about..."
"Ain't it the truth," chirped in the passenger with the protruding eyes. He held up a series of in-flight magazines, GQ, Time, What Ever Happened To Digest, even Popular Mechanics.... all of them featuring Kevin Bacon cover stories.
"Ah! Indeed! I thought that's where you might be going with all
this," said Dr. ben Berber with a wink. His gaze became fixed, almost
hypnotic. "You've been noticing a sudden increase in coincidences, haven't
you? Repetitious images in advertisements? Numerical synchronicities? Kevin
Bacon references? Minor heart attacks? Would you be interested in hearing an
explanation as to why...?"
Slowly, intently, Big Mike nodded. So did the googly-eyed magazine man across the aisle. So did an anorexically winsome passenger with a scraggly cascade of mouse-brown hair in the seat next to him. And a body-pierced weeniebopper beside ben Berber. Big Mike felt a sudden, profound wave of kinship with these haggard, jaundiced, haunted-looking souls.
Dr. ben Berber cleared his throat, threw back his head and closed his eyes; the rest of the on-lookers assumed he'd nodded off. Big Mike knew better. The doctor's sonorous voice began a moment later:
"Ever since I can remember, I've been facinated with the mathematic principal behind a bit of social-science folklore known as Six Degrees of Separation, which suggests that any pair of humans on earth can be conntected by a chain of no more than six acquaintances. This evolved into a trivia game, whose premise is that any actor, living or dead, can be linked to Kevin Bacon by a network of no more than six movies. You're familiar with it? You've played it, even? Coincidentally, I heard about this odd phenomenon during my analysis of gene sequences in human DNA, during which I discovered that any pair of humans on earth... including Kevin Bacon... can be connected genetically by a chain of no more than six relatives! Later, in attempting to duplicate my experiments, a young research director at the El Abbasiya Physical Analysis Institute in Spez, a man with similar interests as I...another Abu ben Berber, you'll be amused to note... using identical data, determined that the chain of genetic connection was not six, but five degrees. Each presuming the other's horrific computational errors, we recalculated the whole experiment using IBM's I'm Curious Yellow supercomputer, which can analyze two hundred billion bits of information per second, and concluded that the chain of intermediaries was 4.28655 relatives and shrinking exponentially...! Six months ago, I re-figured again, and it was less than three, and by last week, it was down to two... which means that each of us here today must know somebody who's related to Kevin Bacon...
"My sister's brother-in-law's lawyer is married to his niece," said the perforated punk in a subdued, awestruck growl.
"I had sex with his brother once at the grand opening of the MammoMart in Pasadena..." said the skinny broad, eyes flinching, chest heaving.
"My wife's agency represents his rock band," said the exophthalmic magazine guy. "Boy, do they suck..."
Dr. ben Berber nodded, laying a hand softly on his breast. "And me... even me... my family owns the Red Devil Spackling Company, which employs one of Kevin's uncles..."
"Get out... I thought Red Devil was owned by 'Big Mike Murphy'," grunted Big Mike. He was unwilling to mention his encounter with Macon Bacon, and it was the only comment he could think to come up with. It sounded ludicrous, of course, given the circumstances.
"Yeah, well, he changed it for the radio ads..." said the doctor, a little sharply. "...we though ben Berber was a bit too... Jewish sounding." The doctor turned to considered a rapt group, which now included virtually the entire coach section of the airliner who were craning their necks to hear the lecture, massaging peculiar spasms in their own chests. "You see, folks, it's not Mr. Bacon that's an issue... it's us... all of us... each and every one of us are separated by merely two degrees of seperation, and soon, when that number dwindles to one, we'll all be related to one another...amid the torrent of quanta... as it was in the beginning..."
"Why's my chest feel so... tight, doc..." said the thin girl, biting her lip. "I feel like I'm dying..."
"You are. You see, my dear, our internal chemistries, our core intuitions, everything evolved with reliance upon what's genuinely and inescapably unpredictable. Our very heartbeats are made up of random contractions of muscle fibers... Unpredictability is innate in nature. But there's a continual struggle between cosmic quantum indeterminacy and determinate patterns... large, coherent substructures that appear spontaneously from computer-generated chaos... read Abu ben Berber on the subject, if there's time... It would appear that such a chain reaction will lead to universal fusion of all matter and energy. Of course, long before that happens, there will be a collapse of our individual chaotic internal dynamics, our hearts will begin to beat in such perfect synchonicity that our brains can't possibly keep up with them..."
"And then?" A perspiration-drenched young man had emerged from the rear of the plane, and now stood in front of Big Mike's seat. He shirt was sloppy and untucked; he was wearing sunglasses despite the cabin's poor lighting and a dribble of damp hair hung across his face.
"Then... satori, my friend..." said ben Berber. "Then phhht... it will transcend physics; it becomes the domain of the Buddhists. The notion of the singular self is... a morass of illusions anyway. That's that."
"Glad I was makin' a little bacon, in that case; tucking in some last-minute poontang," crowed the stranger, polishing his sunglasses, rubbing his vaguely oriental eyes, and Big Mike recognized him as the passenger who had been dorking the stewardess in the plane's kitchenette.
"By the way," said the stranger to Mike. "You're in my seat. Sorry 'bout that, I was too busy gettin' busy to check in..."
On better days, Mike would have argued it out, threatened violence. Today, he shrugged and offered his hand in friendship. "Murphy Nguyen, I presume? I'm Mike Doornbos. Hey, since we're all doomed anyhow, and probably related to each other to boot, why not just have a seat right here on my lap?"
"Why not?" said the stranger brightly, perching on Big Mike's knee like a ventriloquist's dummy. "Hey! Cool dinosaur!"
A minute later, the stranger snapped his fingers. "Did you say Mike Doornbos? Of course! You're Little Mike, aren't you?!" He began to rummage through his wallet. "I still have the article my mother gave me..." The stranger withdrew a yellowed, laminated slice of newsprint. It was Murphy Doornbos' thirty-year-old obituary; 'Little Mike' Doornbos was listed as a surviving nephew.
"What in the world are you doing with that?" said Mike.
"Murphy Doornbos was my father," said the stranger solemnly. "I was named after him. He knew my mom in Plieku for a little bit. 'Course, me and mom, we didn't have any real contact with him... we didn't come out to the States until after he died. I ended up growing up in L.A."
"Goddamn. That means we're... cousins! Small world, isn't it?"
"You have no idea," said Dr. ben Berber, listening in.
"Anyway, 'cuz'," said Murphy Nguyen, oozing familiarity, "how ya doin'? Me, I'm doing real fine, too bad it's the end of the world and all that. My radio show just went into national syndication... The Uncle Murphy Hour... the name's a little joke... it's what my girlfriends' kids call me..." "Yeah... I was listening to you this morning," said Big Mike. "Hey! How'd you make it out here so fast?"
"Show's pre-recorded.".
Obviously. Big Mike Doornbos shook his head, and settled back into his seat. Everything was obvious, suddenly. Growing obviouser. His lifelong sense of separation and isolation had faded. He felt as though he was floating within a non-automotive... state of grace.
He swallowed hard. The big muscle inside his chest flip-flopped like a rodent on a cattle prod. He clapped Cousin Murphy on the back in a gesture of solidarity. "Whoa, this is some kinda weird day, huh?"
"Boy oh boy. No shit, buddy. Hubba hubba. Gimme a witness! No shit..."
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Islands of tiny lights
Sparkle in faintest yellows and whites.
Myriad stretch their electric webs
In a sea of darkness pure and black.
Home to the gods of chaos...
Thalidomide and CFCs,
Chernobyl and Nagasaki.
The Raven cries, "Unsinkable."
And we buy our tickets so eagerly.
Stir the genes of fish and sew inside the tomato.
What will the gods reap? What do we eat?
What will tomorrow?
Genetically enhanced, we begin the dance.
Listen! Mary Shelly whispers on the wind,
The monsters of Moreau will live again.
Read true Chromosome 22,
Even as Caesar asked his friend, "Et tu?"
Extinction is known by another word;
"In the twinkling of an eye, the fiery sword."
Life. Ah, life. Can the gods control
what they do not know?
Clone a sheep, Clone a man, Clone God above...
Once the gods have mapped
the human genome, who we really are...
Will they sell it for our very souls?
For a fantastic show?
To strike a mortal blow?
Calculated risks. Certain Probabilities.
Nightmare possibilities. A Plague upon ourselves.
But will it make money?
Laugh at Armageddon...
Look in the mirror when you do.
Straight into your very eyes.
Time is fast slipping away...
and even now we have passed GO!
Perhaps "Nothing" will save us from ourselves.