Voices On …
“GOOD MORNING! GOOD MORNING! Good morning! This is Phantomas your famulus waking you to another wonderful morning with a selection of your favorite music, news, gossip, information, and appointments for your day from your personal diary program! And the weather this morning is: much the same as ever, I’m afraid; changeable, maximum temperature a steamy twenty-four, probability of rain before noon ninety-four percent, winds, strong, variable with gusts of up to fifty-five kilometers per hour; yes, just another monsoon day out there in the Big City …”
SAATCHI & AUGUSTINO: CUSTOM LIFESTYLE CONSULTANTS. YOUR DAYS THE WAY YOU WANT THEM. INDIVIDUALLY TAILORED ROMPAKS FOR YOUR FAMULUS/LARES-PENATES SYSTEM. MINIPAIN APPROVED, ABSOLUTE CONFIDENTIALITY ASSURED. CUSTOM-CLIENT PSYCHOFILING ASSURES MINIMUM 90% COMPATIBILITY. ITS YOUR LIFE, YOU LIVE IT, WITH SAATCHI & AUGUSTINO!
Dear sir,
the Bureau of Happiness regrets to inform you that your application for Aptitudinal and Vocational Training as a toymaker Class 16/B has not been successful.
Whilst your Manual Dexterity, Spatial Orientation, and Creative Interpretation factors were all well within the required parameters, Motivational Analysis, Social and Structural Apperception, and Vocational-Altruistic Cross-Correlations indicate that this career would not afford you the maximum of personal happiness and satisfaction which we, as organs of the Compassionate Society, are obliged to provide for you. Therefore, the Bureau has forwarded your application and psychofile results to Career Training and Orientation in Nonfunctional Natural-Wood Furniture Construction. Should you have any queries or questions, please do not hesitate to contact me, Hester Birkenshaw, at the following tellix code …
Hello? Hello? Pantycar Twenty-seven? Report from Data Retrieval: a disturbance in Simbimatu Covered Market: Privacy infringement. PainCrime probability currently sixteen percent—no immediate increase forecast. Suggest you investigate intervention level three. And bring me back a bag of guavas, will you? Damn famulus’s on the fritz again, didn’t get me up in time for breakfast and I’m ravenous.
Mulu the Rainforest:
Pray for us.
Mudmother, Soulsister:
Pray for us.
Green One, Patroness of Planted Things:
Preserve us.
From the sweeping monsoon rains, from the terror of environmental collapse, from radiation, from the stalking horror of mutated disease, from cat, rat, and raccoon:
Preserve us. Hear our prayer.
Hear the prayer of this thy humble servant, laborer in the fields beneath the earth, harvester of the crops of thy bounty:
Hear our prayer.
“So I said, like, whazz new, I mean, like new new, not old new, yuh know, like last-week new, so she said, this yulp in the shop, ‘This is new,’ like, she said, ‘Cheez, like everyone, but everyone’s going to be wearing one this week,’ like, whazz a yulp know ’bout fashion? anyway, I thought, I thought, well, maybeez sheez right, so, I got one, so I did, like, whadjou think? Isn’t it wheeeee! like. Isn’t it the most? Meanasay, you not got fashion, you not got nothing!”
Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid, Captain Elvis in neon skin-hugger and power-wheels, rides the high wires in the wee wee dawn hours when the cablecars sleep in their barns, when four A.M. TAOS gurls call the Scorpios from the high and the low places; silver-maned, forgotten samurai in a world with honor without swords; out on blue six through the vastnesses of Great Yu.
See! Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid run the wires! Power-wheels squeal-shreel on steel ten, twenty, fifty, hundred stories above flat-life ground-zero. See! the speed’o’light flickers of information zigzagging along the circuit webbing of Chiga-Chiga’s chromium ’hugger; pray pray pray to San BuriSan Celestial of silicon and fiberoptics and bioprocessors and young turks up on the wires that the cizzen on the gyro-stabilizer production line wasn’t Monday-or-Fridaying when they built Captain Elvis’s set of power-wheels. Danger on the cables of Yu: if the Love Police ever catch Chiga-Chiga, he will be seeing the remainder of his yearlong walkabout from the inside of a Social Responsibility Counseling Center learning that words like “danger” and “thrill” cannot be allowed to have any meaning in the age of the Compassionate Society. But Chiga-Chiga Sputnik-kid is too fast, too young, too shiny for that, isn’t he?
Citizen Tambuco? Citizen Tambuco? Selma Whiteside here, Ministry of Pain, Childwatch Department.
Yes, I know you have a constitutional right to children, that is not the issue here. The issue here is April’s constitutional rights. Can you hear me, Citizen? Mizz Tambuco? She has as much right to a happy, fulfilled life as you do, Mizz Tambuco; how would you like it if you were taken out of your caste and forced into one quite wrong for you? Of course you wouldn’t be happy.
Citizen Tambuco, the tests are infallible. Can you not accept that your April is just not suited psychologically, emotionally, physically, to be an athleto?
No, I don’t have to explain the Department’s decisions to you, Mizz Tambuco.
It has to do with sexually dimorphic structures in the brain. In April’s brain. Mizz Tambuco, please stop crying, please try to listen. April will be much happier as a george, the trans-sexing process is safe, painless, and utterly reliable.
Mizz Tambuco, the Compassionate Society does not use words like “perversion” anymore. It is as normal for her to be a george as it is for you to be an athleto. The Ministry of Pain does not judge, who are you to say what is normal and what is not? To some other castes, you might not appear to be normal, Mizz Tambuco. Mizz Tambuco, the Ministry of Pain has the constitutionally enshrined duty to provide each citizen with the greatest possible personal happiness. Can you deny your daughter the only happiness she may ever know?
Her fosterers are good and loving people. Yes, of course they will look after April. Yes, they will love her. I’m sorry, but no, you will not be allowed to visit. Or even call on the public dataweb. I know it sounds hard, Mizz Tambuco, but it is in April’s best interests. At this early and vital developmental stage we cannot allow April to be in any way confused as to her social identity. Now, are you going to send April out to me? Please …
Mizz Tambuco, I’m waiting. Mizz Tambuco, please open the door. Citizen Tambuco, think. Not only are you obstructing a representative of the Ministry of Pain in their appointed duty, but by denying April her right to personal happiness, you are committing a PainCrime. …