The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (25 page)

The convolutions leading to the steaming, meat-laden pouch closed and the foldings of flesh rearranged themselves. Eddie was suddenly hosed with warm water from what he called the
“sanitation” stomach. The iris closed. He was put down. The scalpel was put back in the bag.

For a long time Mother seemed to be shaken by the thought of what she might have done to Eddie. She did not trust herself to transmit until her nerves were settled. When they were, she did not
refer to his narrow escape. Nor did he.

He was happy. He felt as if a spring, tight-coiled against his bowels since he and his wife had parted, was now, for some reason, released. The dull vague pain of loss and discontent, the slight
fever and cramp in his entrails, and the apathy that sometimes afflicted him, were gone. He felt fine.

Meanwhile, something akin to deep affection had been lighted, like a tiny candle under the drafty and overtowering roof of a cathedral. Mother’s shell housed more than Eddie; it now curved
over an emotion new to her kind. This was evident by the next event that filled him with terror.

For the wounds in the spot healed and the swelling increased into a large bag. Then the bag burst and ten mouse-sized Sluggos struck the floor. The impact had the same effect as a doctor
spanking a newborn baby’s bottom; they drew in their first breath with shock and pain; their uncontrolled and feeble pulses filled the ether with shapeless SOSs.

When Eddie was not talking with Polyphema or listening in or drinking or sleeping or eating or bathing or running off the tape, he played with the Sluggos. He was, in a sense, their father.
Indeed, as they grew to hog-size, it was hard for their female parent to distinguish him from her young. As he seldom walked any more, and was often to be found on hands and knees in their midst,
she could not scan him too well. Moreover, something in the heavywet air or in the diet had caused every hair on his body to drop off. He grew very fat. Generally speaking, he was one with the
pale, soft, round, and bald offspring. A family likeness.

There was one difference. When the time came for the virgins to be expelled, Eddie crept to one end, whimpering, and stayed there until he was sure Mother was not going to thrust him out into
the cold, dark, and hungry world.

The final crisis over, he came back to the center of the floor. The panic in his breast had died out, but his nerves were still quivering. He filled his Thermos and then listened for a while to
his own tenor singing the “Sea Things” aria from his favorite opera, Gianelli’s
Ancient Mariner
. Suddenly, he burst out and accompanied himself, finding himself thrilled as
never before by the concluding words.

Afterward, voice silent but heart singing, he switched off the wire and cut in on Polyphema’s broadcast.

Mother was having trouble. She could not precisely describe to the continent-wide hookup this new and almost inexpressible emotion she felt about the mobile. It was a concept her language was
not prepared for. Nor was she helped any by the gallons of Old Red Star in her bloodstream.

Eddie sucked at the plastic nipple and nodded sympathetically and drowsily at her search for words. Presently, the Thermos rolled out of his hand.

He slept on his side, curled in a ball, knees on his chest and arms crossed, neck bent forward. Like the pilot room chronometer whose hands reversed after the crash, the clock of his body was
ticking backward, ticking backward . . .

In the darkness, in the moistness, safe and warm, well fed, much loved.

James Morrow (1947– ) is one of the leading literary satirists today, who chooses to work in the science fiction and fantasy mode. He is particularly
notable for his willingness to take on large intellectual and metaphysical challenges, and for his accomplished prose style. He has often, and with some justice, been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
He is a moralist and an allegorist. He has never been comfortable with the conventions and literary habits of the SF field, and occasionally breaks them, sometimes to good effect.
The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
says Morrow “has great difficulty giving credence to the artifices of fiction. This may be the price paid for passion and clarity of mind; and it may be a
price worth paying.” His major novels include
Only Begotten Daughter
(1990), in which God’s daughter is born in New Jersey in the closing years of this century.
Towing
Jehovah
(1994), in which God is dead and his corpse, about the size of a small city, is found floating in the Atlantic Ocean and must be towed to the Antarctic to be preserved; and its sequel,
Blameless in Abaddon
(1996), in which the corpse is sold.

“Veritas” is a satirical utopia. kathryn Cramer, in “Sincerity and Doom,” her long essay on Morrow and science fiction, says, “Beyond defrocking
utopia, the story hits you in the face with the uncomfortable relationship between Art (particularly fiction) and the Lie.” She also suggests that this story may be in opposition to Orson
Scott Card’s popular Ender series of SF novels, which aspire to a utopia in which everyone tells the truth. Morrow addresses the question: Will the truth set you free?

Pigs have wings . . .

Rats chase cats . . .

Snow is hot . . .

Even now the old lies ring through the charred interior of my skull. I cannot speak them. I shall never be able to speak them – not without being dropped from here to hell in a bucket of
pain. But they still inhabit me, just as they did on that momentous day when the city began to fall.

Grass is purple . . .

Two and two make five . . .

I awoke aggressively that morning, tearing the blankets away as if they were all that stood between myself and total alertness. Yawning vigorously, I charged into the shower, where warm water
poured forth the instant the sensors detected me. I’d been with Overt Intelligence for over five years, and this was the first time I’d drawn an assignment that might be termed a plum.
Spread your nostrils, Orville. Sniff her out. Sherry Urquist: some name! It sounded more like a mixed drink than like what she allegedly was, a purveyor of falsehoods, an enemy of the city, a
member of the Dissemblage. The day could not begin soon enough.

The Dissemblage was like a deity. Not much tangible evidence, but people still had faith in it. Veritas, they reasoned, must harbor its normal share of those who believe the status quo is ipso
facto wrong. Paradise will have its dissidents. The real question was not, Do subversives live in our city? The real question was, How do they tell lies without going mad?

My in-shower cablevision receiver winked on. Grimacing under the studio lights, our Assistant Secretary of Imperialism discussed Veritas’s growing involvement in the Lethean civil war.
“So far, over four thousand of our soldiers have died,” the interviewer noted. “A senseless loss,” the secretary conceded. “Our policy is impossible to justify on
logical grounds, which is why we’ve started invoking national security and other shibboleths.”

Have no illusions. The Sherry Urquist assignment did not fall into my lap because somebody at Overt Intelligence liked me. It was simply this: I am a roue. If any agent had a prayer of planting
this particular Dissembler, that agent was me. It’s the eyebrows that do it, great bushy extrusions suggesting a predatory mammal of unusual prowess, though I must admit they draw copious
support from my straight nose and full, pillowlike lips. Am I handsome as a god? Metaphorically speaking, yes.

The picture tube had fogged over, so I activated the wiper. On the screen, a seedy-looking terrier scratched its fleas. “We seriously hope you’ll consider Byproduct Brand Dog
Food,” said the voice-over. “Yes, we do tie up an enormous amount of protein that might conceivably be used in relieving worldwide starvation. However, if you’ll consider the
supposed benefits of dogs, we believe you may wish to patronize us.”

On the surface, Ms. Urquist looked innocent enough. The dossier pegged her a writer, a former newspaper reporter with several popular self-help books under her belt. She had some other
commodities under her belt, too, mainly fat, unless the accompanying OIA photos exaggerated. The case against her consisted primarily of rumor. Last week a neighbor, or possibly a sanitation
engineer – the dossier contradicted itself on this point – had gone through her garbage. The yield was largely what you’d expect from someone in Ms. Urquist’s profession:
vodka bottles, outdated caffeine tablets, computer disk boxes, an early draft of her last bestseller,
How to Find a Certain Amount of Inner Peace Some of the Time If You Are Lucky
. Then came
the kicker. The figurative smoking gun. The nonliteral forbidden fruit. At the bottom of the heap, the report asserted, lay “a torn and crumpled page” from what was “almost
certainly a work of fiction.”

Two hundred and thirty-nine words of it, to be precise. A story, a yarn, a legend. Something made up.

ART IS A LIE, the electric posters in Washington Park reminded us. Truth was beauty, but it simply didn’t work the other way around.

I left the shower, which instantly shut itself down, and padded naked into my bedroom. Clothes per se were deceitful, of course, but this was the middle of winter, so I threw on some underwear
and a gray suit with the lapels cut off – no integrity in freezing to death. My apartment was peeled to a core of rectitude. Most of my friends had curtains, wall hangings, and rugs, but not
I. Why take chances with one’s own sanity?

The odor of stale urine hit me as I rushed down the hall toward the lobby. How unfortunate that some people translated the ban on sexually segregated restrooms – PRIVACY IS A LIE, the
posters reminded us – into a general fear of toilets. Hadn’t they heard of public health? Public health was guileless.

Wrapped in dew, my Plymouth Adequate glistened on the far side of Probity Street. In the old days, I’d heard, you never knew for sure that your car would be unmolested, or even there, when
you left it overnight. Twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, yet the thing started smoothly. I took off, zooming past the wonderfully functional cinderblocks that constituted city hall and heading
toward the shopping district. My interview with Sherry Urquist was scheduled for ten, so I still had time to buy a gift for my nephew’s brainburn party, which would happen around two-thirty
that afternoon, right after he recovered. “Yes, I did take quite a few bribes during the Wheatstone Tariff affair,” a thin-voiced senatorial candidate squeaked from out of my radio,
“but you have to understand . . .” His voice faded, pushed aside by the pressure of my thoughts. Today my nephew would learn to hate a lie. Today we would rescue him from deceit’s
boundless sea, tossing out our lifelines and hauling him aboard the ark called Veritas. So to speak.

Money grows on trees . . .

Horses have six legs . . .

And suddenly you’re a citizen.

What could life have been like before the cure? How did the mind tolerate a world where politicians misled, advertisers overstated, women wore makeup, and people professed love for each other at
the nonliteral drop of a hat? I shivered. Did the Dissemblers know what they were playing with? How I relished the thought of advancing their doom, how badly I wanted Sherry Urquist’s bulky
ass hanging figuratively over the mantel of my fireplace.

I was armed for the fight. Two days earlier, the clever doctors down at the agency’s Medical Division had done a bit of minor surgery, and now one of my seminal vesicles contained not only
its usual cargo but also a microscopic radio transmitter. My imagination showed it to me, poised in the duct like the Greek infantry waiting for the wooden horse to arrive inside Troy.

What will they think of next?

The problem was the itch. Not a literal itch – the transmitter was one thousandth the size of a pinhead. My discomfort was philosophical. Did the beeper lie or didn’t it? That was
the question. It purported to be only itself, a thing, a microtransmitter, and yet some variation of duplicity seemed afoot here.

I didn’t like it.

MOLLY’S RATHER EXPENSIVE TOY STORE, the sign said. Expensive: that was okay. Christmas came every year, but a kid got cured only once.

“My, aren’t
you
a pretty fellow?” a female citizen sang out as I strode through the door. Marionettes dangled from the ceiling like victims of a mass lynching. Stuffed
animals stampeded gently toward me from all directions.

“Your body is desirable enough,” I said, casting a candid eye up and down the sales clerk. A tattered wool sweater molded itself around her emphatic breasts. Grimy white slacks
encased her tight thighs. “But that nose,” I added forlornly. A demanding business, citizenship.

“What brings you here?” She had one of those rare brands in which every digit is the same. 9999W, her forehead said. “You playboys are never responsible enough for
parenthood.”

“A fair assessment. You have kids?”

“I’m not married.”

“It figures. My nephew’s getting burned today.”

“And you’re waiting till the last minute to buy him a gift?”

“Right.”

“Electric trains are popular. We sold eleven sets last week. Two were returned as defective.”

She led me to a raised platform overrun by a kind of Veritas in miniature and kicked up the juice on the power-pack. A streamlined locomotive whisked a string of gleaming coaches past a factory
belching an impressive facsimile of smoke.

“I wonder – is this thing a lie?” I opened the throttle, and the locomotive nearly jumped the track.

“What do you mean?”

“It claims to be a train. But it’s not.”

“It claims to be a
model
of a train, which it is.”

I eased the locomotive into the station. “Is your price as good as anybody else’s?”

“You can get the same thing for six dollars less at Marquand’s.”