The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel (1999) (19 page)

“Carlton?”

“Don’t worry. Mild sedatives. Nothing lethal in there.”

“Yeah, she’s sleepy all right,” said Lewis sarcastically. “Probably exhausted after being grilled by you. Perhaps it’s time I took her a nightcap.”

When Lewis entered the sick bay, she almost leapt out of her skin.

“All right, Katy. Spare me the acting class. You can fool Alex but you can’t fool me. Just what’s going on?”

Her eyes rolled and she rushed at him. If Carlton hadn’t come running in, she might have got him. In her hand she had a hypodermic. Carlton knocked it from her. She collapsed on the bed weeping.

“Okay,” said Lewis, “suppose you just tell us everything you know?”

Well, there’s a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.

—
Miguel De Cervantes

Inside the
Iceman
, Josef and Pavel were watching the old man. Tears streaming down his face. He looked suddenly very old.

“You and I know, Comus, don’t we. We’ve looked into the heart of it. The bleakness. We’ve sent people to their deaths before. What’s the difference, one way or another?” Josef, the hard man. Josef, the up-and-coming. Josef, Comus’s heir.

“It’s just a girl, man. A girl you never met, right?”

A sob, a bitter sob.

“Want to talk about her? Tell us who she is?”

Jesus, the man was coming apart.

“You do see, don’t you, that had you left her alone, she wouldn’t be dead.”

Bitter irony. The horror in the man. The terrible accusation for Comus to live with.

“What the hell was so special about her?”

The old man looked up out of his tormented soul.

“She was my daughter, Josef.”

“Oh hell.”

“His daughter?”

“Jesus, why didn’t he tell us right away?”

“His daughter,” Pavel repeated.

“Go figure.”

They had left the old man in the bulkhead while they decided what to do. He at least seemed calmer. Staring blankly at the wall. Maybe it was the drugs.

Sven appeared.

“What you got there?” said Josef to the Swede.

“Coupla messages.”

“And?”

“The watchers have forwarded a Mayday request from the
Johnnie Ray
.”

“We’re not picking anybody up. This is a secure operation.”

“They think you’ll make an exception when you see the passenger list.”

Josef glanced at the signal.

“Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

“What?” said Pavel.

“She’s alive!”

“Who?”

“The Wallace woman. Look here, aboard the
Johnnie Ray
.”

“She survived? I thought they shot her full of Corazone.”

“A tin man pulled her out.”

He read on. “There’s a report from a deskbot who worked at the Rialto. One of our mechanicals.”

He swiftly scanned the document.

“Took her aboard the
Johnnie Ray
.”

“The deskbot tapped them,” said Sven. “Got a bug aboard their ship. Stuck it on her shoe when it helped the tin man carry her from the Rialto.”

“Now that is wonderful,” said Josef. “Send that brave ’bot some flowers. Or what do we send tin men? Oil? A new hard drive?”

“Bit late for that. He went up with H9.”

“Good for him.” He thought for a second. “Well, they know way too much. We simply can’t take a risk. Activate the bug.”

It was hard, metallic, and cylindrical, no more than three inches in length. It looked like a strange stick insect. It had crawled off Katy’s shoe and along the corridor and entered the games room of the
Johnnie Ray
. It was a mechanical bug. A third-generation minibomb. Four spidery legs lifted the cylinder off the ground, and two tiny antennae sniffed the air, searching for electricity. It could sit silently for weeks, years even, until it was activated, and then it would begin to do something very extraordinary: it would give birth. Right now it was one puzzled parasite. All these wires and all these games should be fully powered, but it could find nothing. Not a watt. Must be some kind of temporary outage. It decided to sit and wait.

“We have a problem with the bug,” said Sven. “It needs to tap into a source. They have no power on the
Ray
. It can’t start until they get their power back.”

“Okay. Let me know the minute they do, and meanwhile I want you to monitor their signals traffic, Pavel. I want to see who they communicate with.”

“Shall we tell Comus?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But she’s his daughter.”

“It’s too late for sentiment. The bug is already on board.”

Comedy naturally wears itself out—destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

—
William Hazlitt

Check one of the following:

Comedy is a sickness.

Comedy is a disease.

Comedy can be cured.

Comedy is a genetic malfunction.

Comedy is a state of mind.

Comedy is like religion, a leap of faith.

Comedy is like magic, an illusion.

Comedy is like sex.

Comedy is like shopping.

Carlton was trying precepts on comedy as he worked on the power unit. He was getting nowhere with both. I sometimes wonder if he ever imagined someone like me coming along, reading his notes, admiring his work. A fan from the future. Mind-boggling, isn’t it. But of course I’m more than just a fan. I’m his editor. His alter ego. Almost like a manager. And they take 25 percent. I hear art dealers take 50 percent. So I think I’m entitled to something. You have no idea the amount of work I have to do, ploughing through his notes. The other day I was working through some of his precepts about comedy when I made a discovery. The precepts were banal enough. I think the tin man was trying to categorize the Ten Commandments of Comedy.

You have to be cruel to be comic.

Filthy is funny.

Where there’s muck, there’s mirth.

A pie in the face is worth two in the tush.

K’s are Komic.

One, two, three, the third’s funnee.

That sort of thing. But then I found this chart. Know what it is? It’s his original notes on the Red Nose⁄White Face dichotomy.

WHITE FACE RED NOSE

Steve Martin Robin Williams

Woody Allen Danny Kaye

Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy

Buster Keaton W.C. Fields

John Cleese Marty Feldman

Dan Aykroyd Chevy Chase

Billy Crystal Eddie Murphy

George Burns Gracie Allen

Mike Nichols Milton Berle

Peter Cook Dudley Moore

Carl Reiner Mel Brooks

David Letterman Jay Leno

Bob Hope Bing Crosby

Peter Sellers Spike Milligan

Dean Martin Jerry Lewis

Jennifer Saunders Dawn French

Groucho Marx Harpo Marx

Ernie Wise Eric Morecambe

Johnny Carson John Belushi

Garry Shandling Billy Connolly

Bud Abbott Lou Costello

Stephen Fry Hugh Laurie

Gene Wilder Gilda Radner

Joan Rivers Carol Burnett

Ellen DeGeneres Roseanne

Richard Pryor Syd Caesar

Elaine May Benny Hill

Desi Arnaz Lucille Ball

Lenny Bruce Phil Silvers

Mort Sahl Dick Van Dyke

Harold Lloyd Tommy Cooper

Bill Maher Danny DeVito

Griff Rhys Jones Mel Smith

Jerry Seinfeld Frankie Howerd

Harry Shearer Jim Carrey

Bill Cosby Will Smith

Alan Bennett Marty Short

Jonathan Miller Tim Allen

Steve Coogan Jonathan Winters

Conan O’Brien Molly Shannon

Chris Guest Harry Enfield

Chris Rock Paul Hogan

Tracey Ullmann Rosie O’Donnell

Charlie Chaplin Bobcat Goldthwaite

Bill Murray Jack Benny

Bob Newhart Flip Wilson

Who are all these people? You’ve never heard of any of them, have you? Of course you haven’t. They’ve all been dead for centuries. I’ve had to look them up. And guess what, they are all comedians from the late twentieth century. Some of them Carlton couldn’t make up his mind about. For example, he couldn’t decide which category to place George Carlin and Rodney Dangerfield in. Some were what he calls Double Controllers—White Faces masquerading as Red Noses—a category of comedian, he says, who exhibit both elements in their personality. He cites Woody Allen’s little nerdy Red Nose character as an example, inside which the White Face writer-director Allen is controlling everything. Other examples he cites are Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean, Charlie Chaplin as the little tramp, Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage, and Eddie Izzard. Again, I don’t expect you to have heard of these people. This chart dates from about the time he first began searching for the comedy gene, trying to see if there is something in the DNA of comics which might be passed on. He is looking for evidence of a comedy or even a show biz gene. Well, why not? There’s clearly a music gene: the Bachs, the Mozarts, the Strausses. There’s a literature gene—the Brontës, the Dumas, pere et fils, the Amises—so why not a comedy gene? He thinks he almost finds some evidence with one of the guys on a very weird show called
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
. I’ve seen the tapes, and boy, does it suck. It’s strange rather than funny. Five limeys and a Yank. No girls; they did drag. Typical Brits. They’re never happier than when dressing up as women. What is it with them?

It’s a stupid show, as I say, and Carlton found it totally puzzling.

Heads come off or pop open in demented animations, sheep drop on people’s heads for no reason whatsoever, Vikings sing love songs to pressed meat, weird men dressed as old ladies squeak in silly voices, there are dead parrots, and Spanish Inquisitions, it’s all very silly nonsense. They seem dangerously cuckoo to me. Carlton couldn’t make head or tail of it, but it seemed from the tape that the audience laughed, and as far as he could tell it was genuine, not canned, laughter. In casually cross-checking the genetic backgrounds of the six strange men involved, he turned up an ancestor for one of them in show biz. Eric Idle’s great-grandfather Henry Bertrand, a Victorian gentleman from the 1890
s
, had been a circus manager. Was this the genetic missing link? His great-grandfather was a ringmaster in a circus and Idle was in a Flying Circus. Surely this was significant? Of course it wasn’t. Turned out Idle was screwed up by losing his RAF rear-gunner father in a traffic accident in World War Two (irony, eh?—killed coming home on Christmas leave after surviving the war). This was compounded by being stuck in a semiorphanage for twelve years with a bunch of fatherless boys. The circus thing was just a coincidence. But you can see the lengths he went to in searching for the comedy gene.

Further down the corridor he saw Alex looking through the window of the sick bay. Carlton went over and looked in too. Lewis was inside questioning Katy. Carlton watched for a moment, then he turned to Alex and put on a big grin.

“Hello,” he said, “‘what’s eating you?’ as the actress said to the bishop.”

Alex stared at him, puzzled. “What?” he said.

“‘What is it up with you,’ as the art mistress said to the gardener. ‘Is that a penis in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?’”

“You okay?” said Alex.

“Never better,” said Carlton. “I’m up and down like a whore’s drawers.”

“Are you trying to be funny?” asked Alex.

“Yes,” said Carlton.

“Cut it out then.”

“As the doctor said to the appendix.”

“That’s enough.”

They both watched Lewis questioning Katy for a while.

“How’s he doing in there?”

“No better than me,” said Alex.

Carlton looked at him thoughtfully, his head to one side (a characteristic of Bowies when thinking).

“I believe you are attracted to that woman,” said Carlton. “What?” said Alex rather too irritably. “Am I right about the attraction thing?”

Perhaps he was. When he had glimpsed her poor naked bruised body, he had felt both pity and desire.

“Depends what you mean by attraction,” he said defensively. “Attraction in humans,” said Carlton, “is usually referred to by the ambiguous word ‘love.’ An emotion which can range anywhere from polite admiration to an overwhelming desire to mate, which is often called lust.”

“Score one for lust then,” said Alex.

“Interestingly, ‘love’ corresponds to the electromagnetic field in inanimate objects.”

“Excuse me?”

“As the apple feels the pull of the earth’s gravity, as even the tiniest iron filing feels the tug of the magnet, so do humans feel the power of love. It is the mating force that all bionic life suffers from.”

“Suffers from?”

“Is subject to against its will. It’s in your genes. You are manipulated by your own DNA. It is a weakness that computers do not suffer from.”

They were distracted by a shout from inside the sick bay. Lewis was rapidly losing his cool.

“Goddammit, Katy,” he yelled, “just tell me why our gigs were canceled.”

“I haven’t a clue,” she said.

“Then who were you meeting in the Rialto?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You go to elaborate lengths to set up a rendezvous with someone you don’t know? Why? Who did you
think
you were going to meet?”

“Someone who knew my father.”

“The dead hero. So why did they rough you up?”

She shrugged.

“Was it McTurk who beat you?”

She frowned. “Who’s McTurk?” she asked.

Lewis showed her a picture of McTurk from Carlton’s file.

“Not my type,” said Katy.

“Is that a no?”

“It’s a no thank you.”

“How about this guy?”

He showed her the heavy.

“I never saw him before.”

“Oh, come on, Katy, Carlton saw you go upstairs with him, for Christ’s sake. What do you think, I’m completely dumb?”

She shrugged. “You said it.”

“What about the Ganesha?”

“What about it?”

“You gave it to Alex. Who gave it to you?”