Venus on the Half-Shell Part 4

"What about contraceptives?"

"Those're against our custom," she said, "They in-terfere with the pleasure of s.e.x. Besides, everyone ought to have a chance to be born."

Simon asked her to explain this seemingly contradictory remark. She replied that an aborted baby didn't have a soul. But a baby that made it to the open air was outfitted with a soul at the moment of birth. If it died even a few seconds later, it still went to heaven. Indeed, it was better that it did die, because then it would be spared the hards.h.i.+ps and pains and griefs of life. Killing it was doing it a favor. However, to keep the population from decreasing, it was necessary to let one out of a hundred babies survive. The Shaltoonians didn't like to have a fixed arrangement for this. They let Chance decide who lived and who didn't. So every woman, when she got pregnant, went to the Temple of Shaltoon. There she picked a number at a roulette table, and if her ball fell into the lucky slot, she got to keep the baby. The Holy Croupiers gave her a card with the lucky number on it, which she wore around her neck until the baby was a year old.

"The wheel's fixed so the odds are a hundred to one," she said. "The house usually wins. But when a woman wins, a holiday is declared, and she's queen for a day. This is no big deal, since she spends most of her time reviewing the parade."

"Thanks for the information," Simon said. "I'm going back to the s.h.i.+p. So long, Goobnatz."

"I'm not Goobnatz," she said. "I'm Dunnernickel."

Simon was so shaken up that he didn't ask her what she meant by that. He a.s.sumed that he had had a slip of memory. The next day, however, he apologized to her.

"Wrong again," she said. "My name is p.u.s.s.yloo."

There was a tendency for all aliens of the same race to look alike to Earthmen.

But he had been here long enough to distinguish individuals easily.

"Do you Shaltoonians have a different name for ev-ery day?"

"No," she said. "My name has always been p.u.s.s.yloo. But it was Dunnernickel you were talking to yesterday and Goobnatz the day before. Tomorrow it'll be Quimquat."

This was the undefinable thing that had been mak-ing him uneasy. Simon asked her to explain, and they went into a nearby tavern. The drinks were on the house, since he was working here as a banjo-player. The Shaltoonians crowded in every night to hear his music, which they enjoyed even if it wasn't at all like their native music. At least, they claimed they did. The leading music critic of the planet had written a series of articles about Simon's genius, claiming that he evoked a profundity and a truth from his instru-ment which no Shaltoonian could equal. Simon didn't understand any more than the Shaltoonians did what the critic was talking about, but he liked what he read. This was the first time he'd ever gotten a good review.

They had ordered a couple of beers, and p.u.s.s.yloo plunged into her explanation.

She said she'd be glad to tell him all she could in half an hour, but she'd have to talk a lot to get everything into that length of time. In thirty minutes it'd be quitting time. She liked Si-mon, but he wasn't her type, and she had an a.s.signa-tion with a man she'd met on her lunch hour. After Simon heard her explanation, he understood why she was in such a hurry.

"Don't you Earthmen have ancestor rotation?" she said.

Simon was so startled that he upset his beer and had to order another. "What the h.e.l.l's that?" he said.

"It's a biological, not a supernatural, phenomenon," she said. "I guess you poor deprived Terrestrials don't have it. But the body of every Shaltoonian contains cells which carry the memories of a particular ances-tor. The earliest ancestors are in the a.n.a.l tissue. The latest are in the brain tissue."

"You mean a person carries around with him the memories of his foreparents?"

Simon said.

"That's what I said."

"But it seems to me that in time a person wouldn't have enough s.p.a.ce in his body for all the ancestral cells," Simon said. "When you think that your ancestors double every generation backward, you'd soon be out of room. You have two parents, and each of them had two parents, and each of them had two. And so on.

You go back only five generations, and you have sixteen great-great-grandparents. And so on."

"And so on," p.u.s.s.yloo said. She looked at the tav-ern clock while her nipples swelled and the strong mat-ing odor became even stronger. In fact, the whole tavern stank of it. Simon couldn't even smell his own beer.

"You have to remember that if you go back about thirty generations, everyone now living has many common ancestors. Otherwise, the planet at that time would've been jammed with people like flies on a pile of horse manure.

"But there's another factor that eliminates the num-ber of ancestors. The ancestor cells with the strongest personalities release chemicals that dissolve the weaker ones." - "Are you telling me that, even on the cellular level, the survival of the fittest is the law?" Simon said, "That egotism is the ruling agent?"

p.u.s.s.yloo scratched the itch between her legs and said, "That's the way it is.

There would never have been any trouble about it if that's all there was to it.

But in the old days, about twenty thousand years ago, the ancestors started their battle for their civil rights. They said it wasn't right that they should be shut up in their little cells with only their own memories. They had a right to get out of their cellular ghettoes, to enjoy the flesh they were contributing to but couldn't partic.i.p.ate in.

"After a long fight, they got an equal-time arrange-ment. Here's how it works. A person is born and al-lowed to control his own body until he reaches p.u.b.erty.

During this time, an ancestor speaks only when spoken to."

"How do you do that?" Simon said.

"It's a mental thing the details of which the scientists haven't figured out yet," she said. "Some claim we have a neural circuit we can switch on and off by thought. The trouble is, the ancestors can switch it on, too. They used to give the poor devils that carried them a hard time, but now they don't open up any channels unless they're requested to do so.

"Anyway, when a person reaches p.u.b.erty, he must then give each ancestor a day for himself or herself. The ancestor comes into full possession of the car-rier's body and consciousness. The carrier himself still gets one day a week for himself. So he comes out ahead, though there's still a lot of b.i.t.c.hing about it. When the round is completed, it starts all over again.

"Because of the number of ancestors, a Shaltoonian couldn't live long enough for one cycle if it weren't for the elixir. But this delays aging so that the average life span is about ten thousand years."

"Which is actually twenty thousand years, since a Shaltoon year is twice as long as ours," Simon said.

He was stunned. He didn't even notice when p.u.s.s.yloo squirmed out of the booth and, still squirming, walked out of the place.

CHAPTER 7.

Queen Margaret.

The s.p.a.ce Wanderer had been thinking about moving on. There didn't seem to be much here for him. The Shaltoonians did not even have a word for philoso-phy, let alone such as ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. Their interests were elsewhere. He could understand why they thought only of the narrow and the secular, or, to be exact, eating, drinking, and cop-ulating. But understanding did not make him wish to partic.i.p.ate. His main l.u.s.t was for the big answers.

When he found out about ancestor rotation, how-ever, he decided to hang around a little longer. He was curious about the way in which this unique phenomenon shaped the strange and complex struc-ture of Shaltoon society. Also, to be truthful, he had an egotistic reason for being a little reluctant to leave. He enjoyed being lionized, and the next planet might have critics not so admiring.

On the other hand, his pets were unhappy. They would not leave the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p even though they were suffering from cabin fever. The odor from the Shal-toonians drove Anubis into a barking frenzy and Athena into semishock. When Simon had guests, the two retreated into the galley. After the party was over, Simon would try to play with them to cheer them up, but they would not respond.

Their big dumb eyes begged him to take off, to leave forever this planet that smelled of cats. Simon told them to stick it out for another week. Seekers after knowledge had to put up with certain inconveniences. They didn't understand his words, of course, but they did understand his tone. They were stuck here until their master de-cided to unstick them. What they wanted to stick and where was something else. Maybe it was a good thing they couldn't talk.

The first thing Simon found out in his investiga-tions was that ancestor rotation caused a great resis-tance to change. This was not only inevitable but necessary. The society had to function from day to day, crops be grown and harvested and transported, the governmental and business administration carried out, schools, hospitals, courts, etcetera run. To make this possible, a family stayed in the same line of work or profession. If your forefather a thousand gener-ations removed was a ditch-digger, you were one, too. There was no confusion resulting from a blacksmith being replaced by a judge one day and a garbage hauler the next.

The big problem in running this kind of society was the desire of each ancestor to live it up on his day of possession. Naturally, he/she didn't want to waste his/her time working when he/she could be eating, drinking, and copulating. But everybody understood that if he/she indulged in his/her wishes, society would fall apart and the carriers would starve to death in a short time. So, grudgingly, everybody put in an eight-hour day and at quitting time plunged into an orgy. Almost everybody did. Somebody had to take care of the babies and children, and somebody had to work on the farms the rest of the day.

The only way to handle this was to let slaves baby-sit and finish up the plowing and the ch.o.r.es on the farms. On Shaltoon, once a slave always a slave was the law. Yet, how do you get an ancestral slave to work all day on the only day in five hundred years that he'll take over a carrier? For one thing, who's going to oversee him? No freeman wanted to put in his precious time supervising the helots. And a slave that isn't watched closely is going to goof off.

How did you punish a slave if he neglected his work to enjoy himself? If you hung him, you killed off thousands of innocents. You also reduced the number of slaves, of which there weren't enough to go around in the first place. If you whipped him, you were pun-is.h.i.+ng the innocent. The day following the whipping, the guilty man/woman retreated into his/her cell, shut off from the pain. The poor devil that followed was the one that suffered. He resented being punished for something he hadn't done, and his morale sc.r.a.ped bottom like a dog with piles.

The authorities had recognized that this was a dan-gerous situation. If enough slaves got angry enough to revolt, they could take over easily while their masters were helplessly drunk in the midst of the late evening orgy. The only way to prevent this was to double the number of slaves. In this way, a slave could put in four hours on the second s.h.i.+ft and then go off to en-joy himself while another slave finished up for him. This did have its drawbacks. The slave that took over the last four hours had been whooping it up on his free time and so he was in no shape to work effi-ciently. But this could not be helped.

The additional slaves required had to be gotten from the freemen. So the authorities pa.s.sed laws that a man could be enslaved if he spit on the sidewalk or overparked his horse and buggy. There were protests and riots against this legislation, of course. The gov-ernment expected, in fact hoped for, these. They ar-rested the rebels and made them slaves. The sentence was retroactive; all their ancestors became slaves also.

Simon talked to a number of the slaves and found out that what he had suspected was true. Almost all the newly created slaves had come from the poor cla.s.ses.

The few from the upper cla.s.s had been liberals. Somehow or other, the cops never saw a banker, a judge, or a businessman spit on the sidewalk.

Simon became apprehensive when he found out about this. There were so many laws that he didn't know about. He could be enslaved if he forgot to go downwind before farting in the presence of a cop. He was a.s.sured, however, that he wasn't subject to the laws.

"Not as long as you leave within two weeks," his informant said. "We wouldn't want you as a slave. You have too many strange ideas. If you stayed here long, you might spread these, infect too many people."

Simon didn't comment. The a.n.a.logy of new ideas to deadly diseases was not new to him.

One of Simon's favorite writers, a science-fiction author by the name of Jonathan Swift Somers III, had once written a story about this parallel between dis-eases and ideas. In his story, Quarantine!, an Earth-man had landed on an uncharted planet. He was eager to study the aliens, but they wouldn't let him out of the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p until he had been given a medical checkup. At first, he thought they suspected him of bringing in germs they weren't equipped to handle.

After he'd learned their language, he was told that this wasn't so. The aliens had long ago perfected a panacea against illnesses of the flesh. They were worried about his disrupting their society, perhaps de-stroying it, with deadly thoughts.

The port officials, wearing lead mind-s.h.i.+elds, ques-tioned the Earthman closely for two weeks. He sweated while he talked because the aliens' method of disease-prevention, which was one hundred percent effective, was to kill the sick person. His body was then burned and his ashes were buried at midnight in an unmarked grave.

After two weeks of grilling, the head official said, smiling, "You can go out among our people now."

"You mean I have a clean bill of health?" the Earthman said.

"Nothing to worry about," the official said. "We've heard every idea you have.

There isn't a single one we didn't think of ten thousand years ago. You must come from a very primitive world."

Jonathan Swift Somers III, like most great American writers, had been born in the Midwest. His father had been an aspiring poet whose unfinished epic had not been printed until long after his death. Simon had once made a pilgrimage to Petersburg, Illinois, where the great man was buried. The monument was a gran-ite wheelchair with wings. Below was the epitaph: JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS III.

1910-1982 He Didn't Need Legs Somers had been paralyzed from the waist down since he was ten years old. In those days, they didn't have a vaccine against polio. Somers never left the wheelchair or his native town, but his mind voyaged out into the universe. He wrote forty novels and two hundred short stories, mostly about adventure in s.p.a.ce. When he started writing, he described exploits on the Moon and Mars. When landings were made on these, he s.h.i.+fted the locale to Jupiter. After the Jovian Expedition, he wrote about astronauts who traveled to the extreme edge of the cosmos. He figured that in his lifetime men would never get beyond the solar sys-tem, and he was right. Actually, it made no difference whether or not astronauts got to the places he de-scribed. His books about the Moon and Mars were still read long after voyages there had become hum-drum. It didn't matter that Somers had been one hun-dred percent wrong about those places. His books were poetic and dramatic, and the people he depicted going there seemed more real than the people who actually went there. At least, they were more interesting.

Somers belonged to the same school of writing as the great French novelist Balzac. Balzac claimed he could write better about a place if he knew nothing of it. Invariably, when he did go to a city he had de-scribed in a book, he was disappointed.

Near Somers' grave was his father's.

JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS II 1877-1912.

I tried to fly on verse's wings.

Rejection slips all called it corn.

How Nature balances joys and stings!

I never suffered a critic's scorn.

However, the book reviewers had given the son a hard time most of his life. It wasn't until he was an old man that Somers was recognized as a great artist.

When he received the n.o.bel Prize for Literature, he remarked, "This heals no wounds." He knew that crit-ics never admit they're wrong. They'd still give him a hard time.

Simon was worried that he, too, might upset the Shaltoonians. It was true that he never proposed any new ideas to them. All he did was ask questions. But often these can be more dangerous than propaganda. They lead to novel thoughts.

It seemed, however, that he wasn't going to spark off any novelty in the Shaltoonians' minds. The adults were, in effect, never around for more than a day. The young were too busy playing and getting educated for the time when they'd have to give up possession of their bodies.

Near the end of his visit, on a fine sunny morning, Simon left the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p to visit the Temple of Shaltoon. He intended to spend the day studying the rites being performed there. Shaltoon was the chief deity of the planet, a G.o.ddess whose closest Earthly equiva-lent was Venus or Aphrodite. He walked through the streets, which he found strangely empty. He was won-dering what was going on when he was startled by a savage scream. He ran to the house from which it came and opened the door. A man and a woman were fighting to the death in the front room. Simon had a rule that he would never interfere in a quarrel be-tween man and wife. It was a good rule but one which no humanitarian could keep. In another minute, one or both of the bleeding and bruised couple would be dead. He jumped in between them and then jumped out again and ran for his life. Both had turned against him, which was only to be expected.

Since he was followed out on the street, he kept on running. As he sped down the street, he heard cries and shrieks from the houses he pa.s.sed. Turning a cor-ner, he collided with a swirling shouting mob, every-one of which seemed intent on killing anybody within range of their fists, knives, spears, swords, and axes.

Simon fought his way out and staggered back to the s.h.i.+p. When the port was closed behind him, he crawled to the sick bay-Anubis pacing him with whimpers and tongue-licking-where he bandaged his numerous cuts and gashes.

The next day he cautiously ventured out. The city was a mess. Corpses and wounded were everywhere in the streets, and firemen were still putting out the blazes that had been started the day before. However, no one seemed belligerent, so he stopped a citizen and asked him about yesterday's debacle.

"It was s.h.a.g Day, dummy," the citizen said and moved on.

Simon wasn't too jarred by the rudeness. Very few of the natives were in a good mood when sober. This was because the carrier's body was continually abused by the rotating ancestors. Each had to get all the de-bauchery he could cram into his allotted time between the quitting whistle and the curfew bell. As a result, the first thing the ancestor felt when he took his turn was a terrible hangover.

This lasted through the day, making him tired and irritable until he had had a chance to kill the pain with liquor.

Every once in a while, the body would collapse and be carried off to a hospital by drunken ambulance at-tendants and turned over to drunken nurses and doctors.

The poor devil who had possession that day was too sick to do anything but lie in bed, groaning and cursing. The thought that he was wasting his precious and rare day in convalescence from somebody else's fun made him even sicker.

So the s.p.a.ce Wanderer didn't wonder at the grumpiness of the citizen. He walked on and presently found a heavily bandaged but untypically amiable woman.

"Everybody, if you go back a few thousand years, has the same ancestors," she said. "So, every thousand years or so, a day occurs when one particular ancestor happens to come into possession of many carriers. This usually happens to only a few, and we can cope with most of these coincidences. But about five thou-sand years ago, s.h.a.g, a very powerful personality born in the Old Stone Age, took over more than half of the population on a certain day. Since he was an extremely authoritarian and violent man who hated himself, the first s.h.a.g Day ended with a quarter of the world's people killing each other."

"And what about yesterday's s.h.a.g Day?" Simon said.

"That's the third. It's a record breaker, too. Almost half of the population were casualties."

"From the long-range view, it has its bright side," Simon said. "You can allow more babies to stay alive now so you can bring the population back to normal."

"The sweetest catnip grows behind the latrine," she said. This was the equivalent of the Terrestrial "Ev-ery cloud has its silver lining," or "An ill wind blows somebody good."

Simon decided to cut his trip short. He would leave the next day. But that evening, while reading the Shaltoon Times, he found out that in four days the wisest person who had ever lived would take over the queen's body. He became excited. If anyone would have the truth, it would be this woman. She'd had more turns at rotation than anyone and combined the greatest intelligence with the longest experience.

The reason that everybody knew that Queen Mar-garet was due to take over was the rotation chart. This had been worked out for each person. Generally, it was hung on the bathroom wall so it could be studied when there was nothing else to occupy one's mind.

Simon sent in a pet.i.tion for an audience. Under normal circ.u.mstances, he would have had to wait six months for an answer. Since he was the only alien on the planet, and famous for his banjo-playing, he got a reply the same day. The queen would be pleased to dine with him. Formal attire was mandatory.

Resplendent in the dress uniform of the captain of the Hw.a.n.g Ho, a navy blue outfit adorned with huge epaulettes, gold braid, big bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, and twenty Good Conduct medals, Simon appeared at the main door of the palace. He was ushered by a lord of the royal pantry and six guards through magnificent mar-ble corridors loaded down with objets d'art. At an-other time, Simon would have liked to examine these. Most of them consisted of phallic imagery.

He was led through the door flanked by two guards who blew through long silver trumpets as he pa.s.sed them. Simon appreciated the honor, even if it left him deaf for a minute. He was still dizzy when he was halted in a small but ornate room before a big table of polished dark wood. This was set with two plates and two goblets full of wine and a crowd of steaming dishes. Behind it sat a woman whose beauty started his adrenalin flowing, even if she wasn't strictly hu-man.

To tell the truth, Simon had gotten so accus-tomed to pointed ears, slit pupils, and sharp teeth that his own face startled him when he shaved.

Simon didn't hear the introduction because his hearing hadn't come back yet. He bowed to the queen after the official's lips had quit moving, and at a sign he sat down across the table from her. The dinner pa.s.sed pleasantly enough. They talked about the weather, a subject that Simon would find was an ice- breaker on every planet. Then they discussed the hor-rors of s.h.a.g Day. Simon became progressively drunker as the dinner proceeded. It was protocol to down a gla.s.s of wine every time the queen did, and she seemed to be very thirsty. He didn't blame her. It had been three hundred years since she had had a drink.

Simon told her his life story at her request. She was horrified but at the same time complacent.