I, the Unspeakable E-Book

Walt Sheldon

• Herausgeber: Jovian Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 58

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

What's in a name? might be very dangerous to ask in certain societies, in which sticks and stones are also a big problem! A stunningly awesome science fiction tale, brought to you by one of the best minds in sci- fi wizardry, Walt Sheldon!

Leseprobe

I, THE UNSPEAKABLE

..................

Walt Sheldon

JOVIAN PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Walt Sheldon

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

I

..................

I FOUGHT TO BE AWAKE. I was dreaming, but I think I must have blushed. I must have blushed in my sleep.

“Do it!“ she said. “Please do it! For me!“

It was the voice that always came, low, intense, seductive, the sound of your hand on silk ... and to a citizen of Northem, a conformist, it was shocking. I was a conformist then; I was still one that morning.

I awoke. The glowlight was on, slowly increasing. I was in my living machine in Center Four, where I belonged, and all the familiar things were about me, reality was back, but I was breathing very hard.

I lay on the pneumo a while before getting up. I looked at the chroner: 0703 hours, Day 17, Month IX, New Century Three. My morning nuro-tablets had already popped from the tube, and the timer had begun to boil an egg. The egg was there because the realfood allotment had been increased last month. The balance of trade with Southem had just swung a decimal or two our way.

I rose finally, stepped to the mirror, switched it to positive and looked at myself. New wrinkles—or maybe just a deepening of the old ones. It was beginning to show; the past two years were leaving traces.

I hadn’t worried about my appearance when I’d been with the Office of Weapons. There, I’d been able to keep pretty much to myself, doing research on magnetic mechanics as applied to space drive. But other jobs, where you had to be among people, might be different. I needed every possible thing in my favor.

Yes, I still hoped for a job, even after two years. I still meant to keep on plugging, making the rounds.

I’d go out again today.

The timer clicked and my egg was ready. I swallowed the tablets and then took the egg to the table to savor it and make it last.

As I leaned forward to sit, the metal tag dangled from my neck, catching the glowlight. My identity tag.

Everything came back in a rush—

My name. The dream and her voice. And her suggestion.

Would I dare? Would I start out this very morning and take the risk, the terrible risk?

You remember renumbering. Two years ago. You remember how it was then; how everybody looked forward to his new designation, and how everybody made jokes about the way the letters came out, and how all the records were for a while fouled up beyond recognition.

The telecomics kidded renumbering. One went a little too far and they psycho-scanned him and then sent him to Marscol as a dangerous nonconform.

If you were disappointed with your new designation, you didn’t complain. You didn’t want a sudden visit from the Deacons during the night.

There had to be renumbering. We all understood that. With the population of Northem already past two billion, the old designations were too clumsy. Renumbering was efficient. It contributed to the good of Northem. It helped advance the warless struggle with Southem.

The equator is the boundary. I understand that once there was a political difference and that the two superstates sprawled longitudinally, not latitudinally, over the globe. Now they are pretty much the same. There is the truce, and they are both geared for war. They are both efficient states, as tightly controlled as an experiment with enzymes, as microsurgery, as the temper of a diplomat.

We were renumbered, then, in Northem. You know the system: everybody now has six digits and an additional prefix or suffix of four letters. Stateleader, for instance, has the designation AAAA-111/111. Now, to address somebody by calling off four letters is a little clumsy. We try to pronounce them when they are pronounceable. That is, no one says to Stateleader, “Good morning, A-A-A-A.” They say, “Good morning, Aaaa.”

Reading the last quote, I notice a curious effect. It says what I feel. Of course I didn’t feel that way on that particular morning. I was still conformal; the last thing in my mind was that I would infract and be psycho-scanned.

Four letters then, and in many cases a pronounceable four letter word.

A four letter word.

Yes, you suspect already. You know what a four letter word can be.

Mine was.

It was unspeakable.

The slight weight on my forehead reminded me that I still wore my sleep-learner. I’d been studying administrative cybernetics, hoping to qualify in that field, although it was a poor substitute for a space drive expert. I removed the band and stepped across the room and turned off the oscillator. I went back to my egg and my bitter memories.

I will never forget the first day I received my new four letter combination and reported it to my chief, as required. I was unthinkably embarrassed. He didn’t say anything. He just swallowed and choked and became crimson when he saw it. He didn’t dare pass it to his secretarial engineer; he went to the administrative circuits and registered it himself.

I can’t blame him for easing me out. He was trying to run an efficient organization, after all, and no doubt I upset its efficiency. My work was important—magnetic mechanics was the only way to handle quanta reaction, or the so-called non-energy drive, and was therefore the answer to feasible space travel beyond our present limit of Mars—and there were frequent inspection tours by Big Wheels and Very Important Persons.

Whenever anyone, especially a woman, asked my name, the embarrassment would become a crackling electric field all about us. The best tactic was just not to answer.

The chief called me in one day. He looked haggard.

“Er—old man,” he said, not quite able to bring himself to utter my name, “I’m going to have to switch you to another department. How would you like to work on nutrition kits? Very interesting work.”

“Nutrition kits? Me? On nutrition kits?”

“Well, I—er—know it sounds unusual, but it justifies. I just had the cybs work it over in the light of present regulations, and it justifies.”

Everything had to justify, of course. Every act in the monthly report had to be covered by regulations and cross-regulations. Of course there were so many regulations that if you just took the time to work it out, you could justify damn near anything. I knew what the chief was up to. Just to remove me from my post would have taken a year of applications and hearings and innumerable visits to the capital in Center One. But if I should infract—deliberately infract—it would enable the chief to let me go. The equivalent of resigning.