An updating, however modest, of the signs of the zodiac seems long overdue. The houses of our psychological sky are no longer tenanted by rams, goats and crabs but by helicopters, cruise missiles and intra-uterine coils, and by all the spectres of the psychiatric ward. A few correspondences are obvious — the clones and the hypodermic syringe conveniently take the place of the twins and the archer. But there remains the problem of all those farmyard animals so important to the Chaldeans. Perhaps our true counterparts of these workaday creatures are the machines which guard and shape our lives in so many ways — above all, the taurean computer, seeding its limitless possibilities. As for the ram, that tireless guardian of the domestic flock, his counterpart in our own homes seems to be the Polaroid camera, shepherding our smallest memories and emotions, our most tender sexual acts. Here, anyway, is an s-f zodiac, which I assume the next real one will be…
The skies were sliding. Already the first of the television crews had arrived in the hospital’s car park and were scanning the upper floors of the psychiatric wing through their binoculars. He lowered the plastic blind, exhausted by all this attention, the sense of a world both narrowing and expanding around him. He waited as Dr Vanessa adjusted the lens of the cine-camera. Her untidy hair, still uncombed since she first collected him from the patients’ refectory, fell across the view-finder. Was she placing the filter of her own tissues between herself and whatever threatening message the film might reveal? Since Professor Rotblat’s arrival in the Home Office limousine she had done nothing but photograph him obsessively during a range of meaningless activities — studying the tedious Rorschach images, riding the bicycle in the physiology laboratory, squatting across the bidet in her apartment. Why had they suddenly picked him out, an unknown long-term patient whom everyone had ignored since his admission ten years earlier? Throughout his adolescence he had often stood on the roof of the dormitory block and taken the sky into himself, but not even Dr Vanessa had noticed. Pushing back her blonde hair, she looked at him with unexpected concern. ‘One last reel, and then you must pack — the helicopter’s coming for us.’ All night she had sat with him on her bed, projecting the films on to the wall of the apartment.
He sat at the metal desk beside the podium, staring at the hushed faces of the delegates as Professor Rotbiat gestured with the print-outs. ‘A routine cytoplasmic scan was performed six months ago on the patients of this obscure mental institution, as part of the clinical trials of a new antenatal tranquillizer. Thanks to Dr Vanessa Carrington, the extraordinary and wholly anomalous cell chemistry of the subject was brought to my attention, above all the laevo-rotatory spiral of the DNA helix. The most exhaustive analyses conducted by MIT’s ULTRAC 666, the world’s most powerful computer, confirm that this unknown young man, an orphan of untraceable parentage, seems to have been born from a mirror universe, propelled into our own world by cosmic forces of unlimited power. They also indicate that in opting for its original right-hand bias our biological kingdom made the weaker of two choices. All the ULTRAC predictions suggest that the combinative possibilities of laevo-rotatory DNA exceed those of our own cell chemistry by a factor of 1027. I may add that the ULTRAC programmers have constructed a total information model of this alternative universe, with implications that are both exalting and terrifying for us all..
