Flesh

by Philip José Farmer

  The starship rose shortly after dawn from the little valley in which it had been hiding. It sped at a height of thirty meters above ground, heading due east. When it reached the Housatonic River, Churchill turned it back to the west. He calculated that Stagg could not have reached the river yet and so must be somewhere in the wasteland.

  Returning, they were delayed a dozen times, because they saw people in the woods and descended to investigate. Once a man and a woman disappeared into a cave and the starmen went after them to interrogate them. They had trouble getting them out of the winding tunnels of what turned out to be an abandoned mine. By the time they had questioned them, and found out the two knew nothing of Stagg’s location, they had lost several hours.

  Reaching the Hudson again, the starship went due north a few miles and then began her eastward hunting.

  “If Stagg sees the Terra, he’ll come out of hiding,” Calthorp said.

  “We’ll go up a few more meters and turn on the full power of the magnifier,” Churchill said. “We have to find him!”

  They were above five kilometers from the Housatonic River when they saw a number of deer riders racing pell-mell down a trail. They dropped down but, seeing a lone figure on foot leading a deer about a kilometer behind the others, they decided to interrogate the straggler.

  She was Virginia, the ex-chief maiden-priestess of Washington. Heavy with child, unable to endure the hard riding any longer, she had gotten off her mount. She tried to escape into the woods, but the ship sent a cloud of gas around her, and she crumpled. Revived a short time later by an injection of antidote, she proved willing enough to talk.

  “Yes, I know where the so-called Sunhero is,” she said viciously. “He is lying on the path about two and a half kilometers from here. But you need be in no hurry. He’ll wait for you. He is dead.”

  “Dead!” Churchill gasped. He thought, So close to success. Half an hour sooner, and we could have saved him!

  “Yes, dead!” Virginia spat. “I killed him. I cut off his remaining antler, and he bled to death. And I am glad! He was not a true Sunhero. He was a traitor and a blasphemer, and he killed Alba.”

  She looked pleadingly at Churchill and said, “Give me a knife so I can kill myself. I was proud once, because I was to bear the child of the Horned King. But I want no brat of a false god! And I do not want the shame of bearing it.”

  “You mean that if we let you go, you’ll kill yourself and the unborn child?”

  “I swear by the sacred name of Columbia that I will!”

  Churchill nodded to Calthorp, who pressed the syringe against her arm and pushed in on the button which sent a blast of anesthetic into her flesh. She slumped, and the two men carried her to the deep-freeze tank.

  “We certainly can’t allow her to kill Stagg’s child,” Calthorp said. “If he is dead, his son will live.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about his not having descendants, if I were you,” Churchill said. He did not elaborate on the statement, but he thought of Robin, frozen in the tank. In about fifty years, she would give birth to Stagg’s boy.

  Oh well, there was nothing he could do to change the situation, so he quit thinking about it. The immediate concern was Stagg.

  He raised the ship and shot it straight east. Below, the trail was a thin brown curving line bordered by green. It went around a small mountain, a hill and then another hill; and there was the scene of the battle.

  Bodies of dogs and deer and pigs. And a few human forms. Where were the many reported killed?

  The ship touched ground, settling on the path and crushing many trees on either side. The men, armed with rifles, stepped out of the main port and surveyed the scene. Steinborg stayed behind in the pilot’s seat.

  “I think,” Churchill said, “that the dead Caseys have been taken off the trail into the woods. They’re probably being buried. You’ll notice that all the corpses here wear Deecee clothes.”

  “Maybe they’re burying Stagg,” Calthorp said.

  “I hope not,” Churchill replied. He was sad because his captain, who had led him successfully through so many dangers, was gone. Yet he knew that there was a reason why he could not find it in him to mourn very much. If Stagg were alive, what complications would exist once they arrived on Vega? Stagg would not be able to help taking more than a mild interest in Robin’s child. Every time Churchill loved or punished the boy, Stagg would be wanting to interfere. And he, Churchill, would be wondering if Robin still regarded Stagg as more than human.

  What if she wanted to keep her religion alive?

  The men separated, looking for the burial party. Presently, a whistle sounded. It could not be heard by the Caseys, because it was pitched too high. The starmen wore in one ear a device which lowered the frequency to an audible noise, yet did not block normal sound.

  They came swiftly, stealthily, and assembled behind Al-Masyuni, who had blown the whistle. There, inside a ring of trees, they saw the worst: a girl and four men, smoothing out the mound of what was obviously a common grave.

  Churchill stepped out from the trees and said, “Do not be alarmed. We are friends of Stagg.”

  The Caseys were startled, but, hearing Churchill repeat his assurance, they relaxed somewhat. However, they did keep their hands upon their weapons.

  Churchill advanced a few steps, stopped and explained who he was and why he had come here.

  The girl’s eyes were red-rimmed and her face tear-streaked. Upon hearing Churchill ask about Stagg, she burst into weeping again.

  “He is dead!” she sobbed. “If only you had come sooner!”

  “How long has he been dead?”

  One of the Caseys eyed the sun. “About half an hour. He bled much for a long time and did not give up without a fight.”

  “Okay, Steinborg,” Churchill said into his walkie-talkie. “Bring the ship up and send out a couple of walking shovels. We have to dig Stagg out of this ground fast. Calthorp, do you think there’s a chance?”

  “That we can resurrect him? A good chance. That he’ll escape brain damage? No chance at all. But we can build up the damaged tissue and then see what happens.”

  They did not tell the Caseys their real reason for wanting to exhume Stagg. By now they knew a little of Mary’s love for him, and they did not want to rouse false hopes. They told her they wished to take the captain back to the stars, where he would have wished to be buried.

  The other corpses were left in the grave; they were badly mangled and had been dead too long.

  Inside the ship, Calthorp, directing the delicate robo-surgeon, cut the bony base of the antlers out of Stagg’s skull and removed the top of his skull.

  His chest was laid open, electrodes implanted in the heart and the brain. A blood pump was attached to his circulatory system. Then the body was lifted by the machine and placed in a lazarus tank.

  The tank was filled with biogel, a thin fluid which nourished the cells swarming in it. There were two kinds of cells. One would eat away the damaged or decomposed cells of the corpse. The other was a multitude descended from cells from Stagg’s own body. These would seek out and attach themselves to the mother organs and replace those which had been scourged from his body.

  Stagg’s heart began pumping under the electrical stimulus. His body temperature began to rise. Gradually, the grayish color of skin was replaced by a healthy pink.

  Five hours passed, while the biogel did its work. Calthorp studied for the hundredth time the indications on the meters and the waves on the oscilloscopes.

  Finally he said, “No use keeping him in there any more.”

  He twisted a dial on the instrument panel of the robo-surgeon, and Stagg was slowly lifted from the tank.

  He was deposited on a table, where he was washed off, the needles withdrawn from heart and brain, his chest sewed up, a metal skull cap fitted on, the scalp rolled back over the cap and the skin sewn up.

  From there the men took over. They carried Stagg to a bed and put him in it. He slept like a n
ew-born baby.

  Churchill went outside, where the Caseys waited. They had refused to enter the ship, because they were too filled with superstitious fear and awe.

  The men were talking in low tones. Mary Casey sat slumped against a tree trunk, her face a Greek mask of tragedy.

  Hearing Churchill approach, she raised her head and said, emotionlessly, “May we go now? Id like to be with my people.”

  “Mary,” Churchill said, “you may go wherever you wish. But first I must tell you why I asked you to wait all these hours.”

  Mary listened to his plans for going to Mars, picking up or making fuel there and then going on to Vega II to settle. She lost some of her grief-stricken look at first, but after a while she seemed to fall back into her apathy.

  “I am glad for you that you have something to look forward to,” she said. “Although, somehow it sounds blasphemous. However, it does not really concern me. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Mary, when we left Earth in 2050 A.D., it was common practice to bring men back from the dead. It was not black magic or witchcraft, but application of knowledge that did it...”

  She leaped to her feet and seized his hands.

  “Do you mean that you have brought Peter back to life?”

  “Yes,” he said. “He is sleeping now. Only...”

  “Only what?”

  “When a man has been dead as long as he was, he suffers a certain inevitable amount of brain damage. Usually this can be repaired. But sometimes the man is an idiot.”

  She lost her smile. “Then we won’t know until morning. Why didn’t you wait until then to tell me?”

  “Because you would have gone on home unless I told you this. There’s something else. Every man aboard the Terra knew what might happen if he died and was resurrected. All of us, except Sarvant, agreed that if he came out of the lazarus tank an idiot, he was to be killed again. No man wants to live without his mind.”

  “To kill him would be a terrible sin!” she said. “It would be murder!”

  “I will not waste time arguing with you,” he said. “I just want you to know what might happen. However, if it’s any help to you, I can tell you that when we were on the planet Vixa, Al-Masyuni was killed. A poisonous plant which shot little darts by means of air pressure got him twice. He died at once, and then the plant opened up and about twenty centipede-like insects raced out. They were enormous for insects, two feet long and armed with great pincers. They apparently intended to drag Al-Masyuni’s body into the plant, where everybody—including the plant—would share in the feast.

  “We stayed out of range of the darts and blasted the insects with rifle fire and the plant with grenades. Then we took Al-Masyuni’s body to the ship and resurrected him, after we’d gotten rid of the alkaloid in his system. He suffered no physical or mental effects from his death at all. But Stagg’s case is somewhat different.”

  “May I see him in the morning?” she said.

  “For better or for worse.”

  The night went slowly. Neither the starmen nor Mary slept, though the Caseys sprawled in the woods and snored lustily. Some of the crew asked Churchill why they did not proceed with their plans while waiting for Stagg to waken. They could gas a village or two, put more babies and women in deep-freeze, and be on their way to Mars.

  “Because of that girl,” Churchill said. “Stagg might want to take her with us.”

  “Why don’t we just put her in the tank, too,” Yastzhembski said. “After all, it’s rather delicate hairsplitting, isn’t it? Being sensitive about her feelings and yet kidnaping dozens of babies and women?”

  “We don’t know them. And we’re doing the babies, and the Pants-Elf women a favor by getting them out of this savage world. But we do know her, and we know that she and Stagg were going to get married. We’ll wait and see what Stagg has to say about it.”

  Morning came at last. The men ate breakfast and did various chores until Calthorp summoned them.

  “Time,” he said. He filled a hypodermic syringe, plunged it into Stagg’s huge biceps, swabbed the invisible break, and then stood back.

  Churchill had gone to Mary Casey and told her that Stagg would awaken very soon. It was a measure of her love for Stagg that she had the courage to enter the ship. She did not look around her as she was led through the corridors filled with what to her must have been weird and evil-looking devices. She looked straight ahead, at Churchill’s broad back.

  Then she was at Stagg’s side, weeping.

  Stagg mumbled something. His eyelids fluttered, became still again.

  His deep breathing resumed.

  Calthorp said loudly, “Wake up, Pete!”

  He lightly slapped his captain’s cheek.

  Stagg’s eyes opened. He looked around at them, at Calthorp, Churchill, Steinborg, Al-Masyuni, Lin, Yastzhembski, Chandra, and looked puzzled. When he saw Mary Casey, he was startled.

  “What the hell happened?” he said, trying to roar but succeeding only in croaking. “Did I black out? Are we on Earth? We must be! Otherwise, that woman wouldn’t be on board. Unless you Don Juans had her stowed away all this time.”

  It was Churchill who first grasped what had happened to

  Stagg.

  “Captain,” he said, “what’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Remember? Why, you know what I ordered just before I blacked out! Land on Earth, of course!”

  Mary Casey became hysterical. Churchill and Calthorp took her out of the room and Calthorp gave her a sedative. She fell asleep in two minutes. Then Calthorp and the first mate went into the control room.

  “It’s too early to tell for certain,” Calthorp said, “but I don’t think he’s suffered any loss of I.Q. He’s no idiot; but that part of his brain which contained the memory of the last five and a half months was destroyed. It’s been repaired, so it’s as good as ever, but the memory content is gone. To him, we’ve just returned from Vixa, and we’re preparing to descend to Earth.”

  “I thought so,” Churchill said. “Now, what are we going to do with Mary Casey?”

  “Tell her the situation and allow her to decide for herself. She may want to try to make him fall in love with her.”

  “We’ll have to tell her about Virginia. And Robin. She may not like the idea.”

  “No time like the present,” Calthorp said. “I’ll have to give her a shot to bring her out of her sleep. Then I’ll tell her. She can make up her mind now. We’ve no time to dillydally.”

  He left.

  Churchill sat thinking in the pilot’s seat. He wondered what the future held. Certainly events wouldn’t be boring. He would have troubles enough of his own, but he would not be in Stagg’s shoes for anything. To have fathered hundreds of children in the wildest and most extended orgy a man could dream of, yet be innocent of any knowledge of it! To go to Vega II and there be presented with two babies by different women, and perhaps a third if Mary Casey came along. To be told what had happened—and yet be absolutely unable to visualize it, perhaps not to believe it even when a dozen witnesses swore it was true! To have incidents of which he had no remembrance at all hurled at him during the inevitable marital quarrels.

  No, thought Churchill, he would not care to be Stagg. He was content to be Churchill, though that was going to be bad enough when Robin awakened.

  He looked up. Calthorp had returned.

  “What’s the verdict?” Churchill said.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Calthorp said. “Mary is coming with us.”

  POSTLUDE

  Thunder, lightning, and rain.

  A small tavern in a neutral area on the border of Deecee and Caseyland. Three women sitting at a table in a private room in the rear of the tavern. Their heavy hooded robes hanging from pegs on the walls. All three wearing tall black conical hats.

  One, Virginia, the younger sister of the woman on the Terra. Now, like her older sister when Stagg came to Washington, maiden priestess of the holy city. Tall,
beautiful, hair like honey, eyes so deep blue, nose curved like a delicate hawk’s, lips like a wound, exposed breasts full and upthrusting.

  One, the abbess of a great sisterhood of Caseyland. Thirty-five years old, graying hair, heavy-breasted, protruding stomach, and, under the robe, broken veins on the legs, tokens of childbirth, though she is sworn to chastity. In public, she prays to Columbus the Father, and the Son, and the Mother. In private, she prays to Columbia, the Goddess, the Great White Mother.

  One, Alba, white-haired, toothless, withered hag, successor to the Alba slain by Stagg.

  They drink from tall glasses filled with red wine. Or is it wine?

  Virginia, the maiden, asks if they have lost. The starmen have escaped them and taken with them the Sunhero and her dear sister, heavy with his child.

  The gray-haired matron replies that they never lose. Did she think that her sister would allow the thought of the Goddess to die in her child’s mind? Never!

  But Stagg, the maiden protests, has also taken with him a devout maiden of Caseyland, a worshiper of the Father.

  Alba, the old hag, cackles and says, Even if he takes the religion of the Caseys as his, young and beautiful but ignorant girl, do you not know that the Goddess has already won in Caseyland? The people pay thin-blooded homage to the Father and the Son on their Sabbath, but it is to the Mother they pray most fervently. It is Her statues that fill the land, She who fills their thoughts. What does it matter whether the Goddess is called Columbia or some other name? If She cannot enter the front door, She enters the back.

  But Stagg has escaped us, the maiden protests.

  No, the matron replies, he did not escape us or the Great Route. He was born in the south and went north, and he met Alba and was killed. It does not matter that he slew a human being called Alba, since Alba lives today in this old flesh that sits with us. And he was killed, and buried, and he rose again, as it was told. And he is like a new-born baby, for I have heard that he has no memory of the life he spent on the Great Route.