Complete Stories (4 page)

I was so anxious about missing Earth that I woke up a few months early. Those were peaceful months, hurtling towards the Sun with a speed that I steadily diminished. There was plenty of time to think about what I would do on Earth.

I began to wonder about the wisdom of reproducing by lesnerization. The whole idea of reproducing ourselves on Earth by planting the buds inside people’s skulls went back to Brow, the first “Venusian” who ever survived the ring singularity bounce-trip to any of the inhabited versions of Earth. Disguised as a Dutch mathematician, Brow had advanced the destructive mathematical philosophy called intuitionism, and he had lesnerized dozens, perhaps hundreds of people before chirping back to the Pure Land. Many of the “Venusians” now on Earth are Brow’s descendants, although every year a few new colonizers, such as myself, make the ring singularity bounce-trip to one of the Earths.

But what had made Brow feel that the only safe place to grow a bud was inside a human skull? At home we grow buds in nautons, in geezel plants…sometimes even in the ground. What gave Brow, and the rest of us, our conviction that on Earth we should only reproduce by the murder of innocent human beings?

The power of suggestion, that’s what. A solitary “Venusian” on an alien Earth behaves as humans consciously or subconsciously expect a blob from outer space to behave. As I explain in my article on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, blobs from outer space symbolize the unchecked id. With their natural fear that their lower, more bestial desires will take over their minds, what could be more natural than for people to expect the “Venusians” to reproduce by lesnerization. Nobody had told Jack what lesnerization was…in his guts he
knew
I wanted to eat his brain…so he’d come after me with the knife.

Why couldn’t I break this cycle? Why couldn’t humans and “Venusians”
really
be trans-universal allies? But a less idealistic part of me was still wondering how to safely reproduce myself on Earth if not by lesnerizing. Would not the humans hunt out and destroy a bud which was hidden anywhere other than inside a human skull? And if I failed to achieve trans-universal consciousness this time I could never return to the Pure Land.

The topography of the Earth below me looked familiar, so I knew I’d bounced into a universe pretty much like the one where Jack had knifed me. I splashed down in one of the Finger Lakes, formed Si Bork’s body again, and swam ashore. I didn’t feel any special need to rush or to stall. If I was going to show up at the right time, I would.

It was around dusk when I reached the highway and stuck out my thumb. I’d grown my own clothes this time, and I looked like any other hitchhiker. After awhile a pickup truck stopped. The driver was an old farmer, bound for Livingston, my destination.

I told him I was an English prof at the college there, and we talked a little about monster movies. He had a strange way of putting his fingers under his nose and sniffing them when he talked about creatures from outer space. Was he trying to tell me something? When I looked closely, I seemed to see bumps under his faded cotton shirt …

“Are you ‘Venusian?’” I asked him, and then added something that a human would have taken for a cough, but which was really a Pure Land proverb meaning something like, “Once you’re born, the worst has already happened.”

Without answering he pulled the pickup off the road and turned to look directly at me. His features were flowing with joy and we embraced.

We sat there maybe a half hour, pulsing each other’s like stories back and forth. His name was Roon, and he’d come from a bud some “Venusian” had lesnerized into the body of the farmer Roon still impersonated. The farmer and his wife had been UFO enthusiasts willing to go along with anything an alien suggested, and Roon’s sib-bud had agreed that lesnerizing was wrong, and the sib-bud had gone down to the Pentagon, trying to tell them the truth. Roon had never heard from his sib-bud again, and figured he’d either chirped out or joined the CIA.

Roon raised pigs now, and when I asked him why we couldn’t just grow our buds in his pigs’ bodies, he was shocked. “Pigs are lower forms of life, Sibork!”

“So are humans,” I responded. “And for that matter, so are we.” I told him my theory about why Brow had acted as he did. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” I concluded. “If we stop murdering people, we’ll be able to come out in the open and really befriend them. I’ve found it’s almost impossible to lie to a human.” Which reminded me…if I was going to stop Jack from knifing me, I’d better get a move on.

Roon dropped me off near the pizza-parlor, and we agreed to meet again. Now to explain what happened next, I’m going to have to introduce a little notation. Roon dropped me off near the pizza-parlor, right? Now if I had walked down, looked in the window, and seen a “Venusian” talking with Helen at the rear table…who would that be? Me. But to keep things from getting too confusing, let’s call that “Venusian” me*, reserving the word
me
for the “Venusian” looking in the window.

It was just about night now, maybe seven o’clock, and I walked down the street towards the pizza-parlor. Everything was clicking. I knew that Jack was going to be standing in that window.

And he was. He’d just turned the jukebox on, and was picking up a pizza pan and an eight-inch knife from the counter. At the back of the room I could see my* back and Helen, her face in her hands.

I opened the door and walked in. Jack had paused to exchange a few last words with the counterman and he didn’t see me. I walked over to the jukebox and kicked it so hard that the needle slid across the record and the machine turned itself off. He whirled around, knife at the ready.

“Hi, Jack.”

I was ready for him, and there was no way in the world he could get that knife into me. I could see that realization sink into him, and he mumbled something about getting the knife to cut up the pizza. He hadn’t noticed yet that I* was still sitting at the table.

“Jack,” I began, “I’ve been through a lot of changes since the last time I saw you …”

He laughed nervously, “It’s been all of two minutes, Simon. What kind of …” and then he broke off. I* was walking across the room towards him.

I* was glad to see that I had made it in time…but I* had always known that I would. I wondered how I* had known that, since I didn’t recall having expected anyone to come save me the last time around. I* pointed out that that had been a different universe…and I realized that since things were happening differently here from the last time, it must be that I really had bounced out of Gouda X-1 into a universe just a shade different from the one where I had gotten knifed.

While Jack was staring at me*, I deftly took the knife away from him. I* thought that was nicely done, and we exchanged a smile.

“We’ve got double consciousness,” I and I* said to Jack happily. He looked confused.

“Where did
you
come from?” he said to me, “Are you Si’s twin brother, or what?”

“Actually I’m the same person as Sibork*,” I answered, “Only I come from a different universe.” And then I began laughing, “I’ve finally got it.”

“Got what?” Jack said, expressionlessly looking from me to me*.

“Trans-universal consciousness,” I* answered, and then , “So I* don’t need to lesnerize anyone anymore. You were right to be scared of it, and I’m* sorry for wanting to do it to you.” Finally Jack broke into a smile.

“Tell me more,” he said. So I* did.

Meanwhile I walked over to Helen. She had stopped crying and was sitting there watching the conversation in amazement. “Helen,” I said, “I love you, I can make you happy. Just because you love a ‘Venusian,’ doesn’t make you bad. You have broader horizons than other people is all.”

She smiled up at me, “And now there’s two of you?”

I smiled back. The Pure Land could wait.

============

Written in Spring, 1976.

The 57th Franz Kafka
, Ace Books, 1983.

This apprentice exercise touches upon some of my favorite SF themes: time-travel, UFO aliens, brain-eating, and sex. It also marks the start of my “transreal” practice of modeling some of my characters on myself, my friends and my long-suffering family. Loosely speaking, I’m Jack Flash and Si Bork was my Geneseo English professor friend Lee Poague. Lee also appears in
White Light
, and his younger brother Dennis became the Stahn “Sta-Hi” Mooney character of my
Ware
series of novels. Not that my family, friends or I are really very much like my fiction characters. The distinction is comparable to that between an actor’s real life and the life of the characters whom he or she plays.

The word “geezel” is an homage to the master Robert Sheckley, who once used it to stand for a kind of alien food; and “lesnerize” is from a Golden Age story that used it to mean “sneeze.”

His boots looked so perfect. Two dark parabolas in a field of yellow; slight three-dimensional interest provided by the scurf strewn about. Time to act. Bodine took a newspaper the size of a bubblegum wrapper from the stack at the android’s elbow.

“Three dollars.”

Handing over the money, he again forgot where he was. Or entered another spacetime. “The cave and the marketplace” is what he called it. Buying the newspaper was marketplace, and grooving on his boots was cave. This was an old Zen distinction comparable to the One/Many distinction of the Greeks. Bodine tried to live at the interface of complementary world-views; but more often than not he was just really out of it.

He passed through the news-shop’s air-curtain and glanced up at the sky. A shareholder jostled him, then remarked, “They’re saying it’ll rain tonight, uh.”

“I don’t care what they’re saying. I make my own weather,” Bodine snapped.

The shareholder’s face froze behind his stunglasses and began to fade. Bodine elaborated, “If you let those glasses tell you what tomorrow’s weather is today, then you don’t have your tomorrow. You have their tomorrow. Lose the consensus, Jimmy. Wake up, uh.”

The shareholder gave him a cautious but superior smile. “You had your vaccination?” he asked with exaggerated clarity, and walked on.

Bodine fell into a dream looking at the gauzy white clouds against the light and bright November sky. Good day for something. He put some music in his workspace and started walking. The shareholder’s question surfaced in his mind.

Vaccination. Damn. Seemed like they’d just been through all that a few weeks ago. Bodine had nearly been swept that time. He’d caught the disease…“Dirtbug” they’d been calling it…he’d caught it and would have died if he hadn’t been able to score some anti-toxin. Had cost him ten grand, and he’d had to kill a man to get the money. This time he’d do it the easy way and let the state vaccinate him.

Bodine sat down on a bench and took the newspaper out of his packet. It was really a small white-light hologram. He held it up to his eye and looked through to see an old-fashioned newspaper spread out on a table. Social hygiene was page four.

… tragic death of three patients at Veterans’ hospital…ten soldiers at research center…new virus isolated…disease has been named “Enlightenment Rabies” …

Bodine laughed bitterly. There must be more people working the interface than he’d realized. The state invented the diseases and spread them, but it always named them after some perceived social ill. This time it was enlightenment, next time it might be underconsumption or dirty teeth. In any case, the point was that if you were too wasted or stubborn to go get the state-administered antidote you were going to get swept.

… cramps, buboes, and convulsions ending in death by suffocation…crash vaccination program…available November 17–20 at these local centers …

Bodine checked the date on the paper. Today was the 20th. Now where was the nearest center? After a few minutes he knew where to go. Off the interface, brought down in the marketplace, running scared like they wanted.

Halfway down the block Bodine bumped into his friend Ace High. Ace was standing on the sidewalk with his head thrown far back and his arms wrapped around his legs. The Metal Crane position.

Bodine stopped to look at Ace for a minute. Ace’s eyes were aimed at him, but there was nobody home. Bodine was clearly in the presence of an unvaccinated fellow-citizen.

“Hey Ace,” he said, trying to straighten up his friend’s bent body, “Come on, uh, it’s eigenstate time.”

Ace High was infinitely differentiable. He got the message and locked in on the signal. His face split like a melon when he smiled, as he did now, uncleaned teeth glistening in the sun. “Why…does the doctor…have no face?” he crooned, guessing Bodine’s meaning. “Lez go, boss.”

Bodine and Ace High started off for the vaccination center. It was easier to be going together. That way if you forgot where you were going, your friend might still know.

“Let’s get some stunglasses on,” Bodine suggested, feeling through his pockets. He still had his pair. Ace had lost his, so they decided to stop in at the next news-shop to get some.

Bodine was already feeling the effects of his stunglasses. His mind was filled with safety tips, news updates, and new product information. Purposefully he went into the news-shop and bought a pair of stunglasses for Ace High. It was an attractive little shop with a big multiplexed holographic display in the corner. If Bodine looked in just the right direction, the image his stunglasses produced fit right on top of the image displayed in the news-shop. An indescribably beautiful moiré interference pattern appeared, and he was gone again.

Fortunately Ace High had already put on his new stunglasses. As he watched, Bodine slowly assumed the Silent Planet posture, his face turned rapturously to the news-shop’s advertising display. Ace High looked at the floor, not wanting to disturb his friend. The stunglasses were projecting a three-dimensional holographic image in front of everything he looked at. The image was multiplexed, so he couldn’t actually say for sure what it was of. It was a lot things at once, and his brain knew how to sort out and store the information. His trusting brain was soaking it right up.