Tales of Riverworld

by Philip José Farmer

  'Sonar' exemplifies one of my earliest beliefs and passions. That is, that you may find The Truth only in yourself, yet, paradoxically, you may also find it outside yourself. There are codes all around us and in us, codes which, if cracked, would Reveal all.

  It may take a cracked person to crack them. Which is only fair.

  t.v.o.t.s.i.m.v.a.

  * * *

  Whiteness blinked within Barnes. The whiteness was like a traffic signal light from which the red plastic lens had fallen.

  It was his resonance again. There was too much whiteness around him. The laboratory walls and ceiling were fishbelly white. The floor was penguin-breast pseudo-marble. The two doctors wore white.

  But Miss Mbama, the technician, though she, too, wore white, was black. This was why Barnes kept turning his revolvable chair to stay zeroed in on her. Then the bursts of whiteness in his brain were reduced in brightness and frequency.

  Miss Mbama (nee Kurtz) was a tall well-built young woman with a towering bush of au naturel hair and West African Bush Negro features modified by some alpine bush Bavarian ancestors. She was good-looking and should have been used to stares. But his embarrassed her. Her expression told that she was thinking of asking him why he rotated like a weathercock with her as the wind. But he had decided not to answer her. He was tired of explaining that he could not explain.

  Electrodes were taped to his scalp, over his heart, and over his appendix. (He wore only pyjama pants.) Wires ran from the electrodes to the instruments on the far side of the room. The cathode ray tubes flashed squiggles, dots, sine waves, square waves, and complex Lissajous figures.

  One instrument was emitting: ping! ping! Like the sounds the supersubmarine in the old Journey to the Bottom of the Sea TV show emitted as it cruised fifty miles under the surface in search of the giant sentient roaring radish.

  There was a submarine of sorts inside him – shades of Fantastic Voyage and the saving teardrop! – a tiny vessel which carried a sonar transceiver.

  From another instrument issued a woman's voice speaking a language which had baffled the greatest linguists of the world.

  Doctor Neinstein leaned over Barnes. His white jacket cut off Barnes' view of Mbama, and the whiteness resonated blindingly inside Barnes. Between flashes, he could, however, see quite clearly.

  'I hate to cut it out,' Doctor Neinstein said. 'I loathe the very idea. You can see how upset I am. I always am happiest when cutting. But we're losing a priceless opportunity, a unique chance, to study it. However, the welfare of the patient comes first, or so they taught us in medical school.'

  A reporter, also dressed in white (he wanted to be the twenty-first-century Mark Twain), stepped up to Barnes. He thrust a microphone between doctor and patient.

  'A few final comments, Mr Barnes. How's it feel to be the only man in the world to have an appendix and then lose it?'

  Barnes snarled, 'That isn't my only claim to fame, Scoop. Shove off.'

  'Thank you, Mr Barnes. For those who've just tuned in, this is Doctor Neinstein's laboratory in the John Hopkins Medico-psychic Annex, donated by the philanthropist recluse, Heward Howes, after Doctor Neinstein performed an operation on him. The nature of the operation is still unknown. But it is common knowledge that Heward Howes now eats only newspapers, that his bathroom is in a bank vault, and that the government is concerned about the flood of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills whose source is apparently Las Vegas. But enough of this idle chatter, folks.

  'Our subject today is Mr Barnes, the most famous patient of the twenty-first century – so far. For the benefit of those who, through some incredible bad luck, have missed the case of Mr Barnes, he is the only person in the world who still has genes responsible for growing an appendix. As you know, genetic control has eliminated the useless and often dangerously diseased appendix from the entire human population for fifty years. But due to a purely mechanical oversight...'

  '...and a drunken lab assistant,' Barnes said.

  '...he was born with the genes...'

  'Stand back, journalistic dog!' Doctor Neinstein snarled.

  'Quack! Butcher! You're interfering with the freedom of the press!'

  Doctor Neinstein nodded at his distinguished colleague, Doctor Grosstete, who pulled a lever projecting from the floor behind a dressing screen in the far corner. Scoop's yell rose from the trapdoor like the mercury in a thermometer in the mouth of a malarial patient.

  'Hmm. G in altissimo,' Doctor Grosstete said. 'Scoop was in the wrong profession, but then I guess he knows that now.'

  There was a faint splash and then the bellowings of hungermad crocodiles.

  Doctor Grosstete shook his head. 'Opera's loss. But in the ecology of things...'

  'Nothing must interfere with the march of medical science,' Doctor Neinstein said. For once, the mournful lines of his face were winched up into a smile. But the strain was too great, and the fissures catenaried again. He bent over Barnes and applied a stethoscope to the bare skin of the right lower quadrant of the abdomen.

  'You must have a theory by now explaining why a woman's voice is coming from the sonar,' Barnes said.

  Neinstein jerked the thumb of his free hand at the screen which showed a sequence of what looked like hieroglyphs.

  'Observe the video representation of the voice. I'd say there is a very small ancient Egyptian female riding inside that device. Or on top of it. We'll not know until we cut it out. It refuses to obey our commands to return. Doubtless, some circuit has malfunctioned.'

  'It refuses?' Barnes said.

  'Forgive the pathetic fallacy.'

  Barnes' eyebrows rose. Here was a physician who read more than medical literature. Or was the phrase an echo of a humanities course which the good doctor had had to endure?

  'Of course, linguistics is not my profession. So you must not pay any attention to my theory.'

  Here was a medical doctor who admitted he was not omniscient.

  'What about the white flashes I get? Those are in your proper province. I'd say they reflect my idiosyncratic resonances, so to speak.'

  'Tut, tut, Mr Barnes. You're a layman. No theories, please.'

  'But all these phenomena are inside me! I'm originating them! Who is better qualified to theorise than I?'

  Neinstein hummed an unrecognisable and discordant tune, causing Grosstete, the opera buff, to shudder. He tapped his foot, did a little shuffle-off-to-Buffalo without releasing the stethoscope, looked at his wristwatch, and listened to the sounds coming up from the tiny prowling U-boat.

  Barnes said, 'You'll have to abandon your original theory that I was insane. You're all hearing the voice and seeing it on the CRT. Even if no one so far has seen the flashes in my head. Unless you think the voice is a mass illusion? Or is the correct term a hallucination?'

  Doctor Grosstete said, 'Listen! I could have sworn she was reciting from Aida! Never fading, endless love! But no! She's not speaking Italian. And I don't understand a single word.'

  Mbama went by on Barnes' left, and he followed her with his eyes as far as he could. The pulses of white faded reluctantly like the noise of popcorn in a cooling pan.

  'Miss Mbama does look remarkably like Queen Nefertiti, except for her skin colour, of course,' Barnes said.

  'Aida was Ethiopian, not Egyptian,' Doctor Grosstete said. 'Please remember that, if you don't want to be embarrassed in a musical group. Both Egyptians and Ethiopians are Caucasians, by the way. Or largely so.'

  'Get your program here,' Barnes said. 'You can't tell your race without a program.'

  'I was only trying to help,' Grosstete said. He walked away, looking like Doctor Cyclops with a bellyache.

  Two men entered the laboratory. Both wore white. One was red; one, yellow. Doctors Big Bear and Chew. The red linguist said, 'How!' He attached a tiny recorder to Barnes' abdomen. The yellow linguist asked Neinstein for a thousand pardons, but would he please stand out of the way?

  Big Bear's dark broad big-nosed face hung before Barnes. He sa
w him as an afterimage for several seconds. He was standing on the edge of a great plain with tall yellow-brown grass and half-naked men wearing feathers and riding painted ponies in the distance, and nearby was a herd of great dark-furred dark-eyed round-humped bison. The voice in his ears had become a man's, chanting in a language which was a mixture of fricatives and sadness.

  The scene vanished. The woman's voice returned.

  Big Bear had left to talk to Doctor Neinstein, who was looking very indignant. Chew stood before Barnes, who saw a landscape as if he were looking out of the window of a jet taking off. Pagodas, rice fields, kites flying over green hills, a drunken poet walking along the edge of a blue brook.

  Why was it he got pictures from red and yellow but not from black and white? Black was the absence of colour, and white was a mixture of all colours. This meant that, in reality, blacks were uncoloured people and whites (of the lighter variety) were the coloured folks. Except that whites were not white, they were pink or brown. Some were, anyway. And blacks were not black, they were brown.

  Not that that had anything to do with his getting pulses of white from his resonance, his inner tuning fork, unexplainedly aberrating now. He also, now he thought about it, must get pulses of black in between the white when he looked at Miss Mbama. But he did not see these. Black was a signal, but just not there, just as, in an electronic circuit, a pulse could mean yes or 1, and a nonpulse could mean no or zero. Or vice versa, depending on the code you used.

  Barnes told Chew what he had been thinking. Chew told Barnes to pick up his feet and hang on to the chair. He whirled Barnes around many times in the revolving chair while the wires wrapped themselves around Barnes and the chair. Then Chew rotated him swiftly to his original position with the wires hanging loose. The pulses of different colours and flashes of landscapes scared Barnes. He seemed to have flown from the laboratory into an alien kaleidoscopic world.

  The voice was a high-pitched gabble until the chair stopped whirling.

  He described everything to Chew.

  'Perhaps there is something to your theory of resonances,' Chew said. 'It's quasimystical, but that doesn't mean it can't describe certain phenomena, or be used to describe them, anyway. If a man had a way to determine what truly sets him to vibrating, what wave lengths he is tuned to, down under all the inhibitions and wounds, then he would have no trouble being happy.

  'But you did not have this superresonance until you got sick. So what good is it to you or to anybody?'

  'I'm like a TV antenna. Turn me in a particular direction, and I get a particular frequency. But I may only pick up a fuzzy image and audio, or a ghost. Turn me another direction, and I receive a strong frequency. Strong to me; weak to you.'

  Barnes swivelled on the chair to point directly at Mbama.

  'How about a date tonight, Mbama?' he said. Her name was a murmur of immemorial elms, of drowsy bees, or something from Tennyson. At the same time, the woman's voice from the sonar became even drippier with honey and with the suggestion of silk sliding over silk. And the hieroglyphs on the cathode ray tubes bent and shot little arrows at each other.

  'Thanks for the invitation,' she said. 'You're a nice guy, but my boyfriend wouldn't like it. Besides, you aren't going anyplace for a week or more, remember? You'll be in bed.'

  'If you and your friend should ever split...'

  'I don't believe in mixed dating.'

  'Pull your feet up again,' Doctor Neinstein said. 'Close your eyes. If some linguist can whirl you around, I certainly can. But I'll take the experiment further than he did.'

  Barnes drew his legs up and closed his eyes. He opened them a minute later because he felt the chair turning. But no one was standing close enough to have turned the chair.

  Mbama was obeying Neinstein's signals. She was walking only a few feet from him in a circle around him. And he and the chair were rotating to track her.

  Neinstein made a strangling sound.

  'Telekinesis,' Chew said.

  'Walk back this way,' Barnes said to Mbama. He closed his eyes again. The chair turned.

  'I don't even have to see her,' Barnes said, opening his eyes. Mbama stopped walking. The chair overtracked, then returned so that Barnes' nose pointed along a line that bisected her.

  'I have to go to lunch,' Mbama said. She walked through the door. Barnes rose, stripped off the electrodes, and followed her, picking up his pyjama top as he went out.

  Neinstein shouted, 'Where do you think you're going? You're scheduled for surgery shortly after lunch. Our lunch, not yours. Don't you dare eat anything. Do you want another enema, maybe an upper colonic? Your appendix may burst at any moment. Just because you don't feel any pain, don't think...! Where are you going?'

  Barnes did not answer. The pinging and the voice of the woman were coming, not from the machines, which had been disconnected, but from inside him. They contended in his ears. But the white pulses were gone.

  An hour later, Miss Mbama returned. She looked frightened. Barnes staggered in after her and collapsed into the chair. Doctor Neinstein ordered him to go to the emergency room immediately.

  'No, just give me first aid here,' Barnes said. 'I hurt a lot of places, but the worst is in my appendix. And he didn't even touch me there.'

  'Who's he?' Neinstein said, applying alcohol to the cut on Barnes' temple.

  'Miss Mbama's boyfriend, who's no boy but a man and a big one. Ouch! It didn't do any good to try to explain that I couldn't help following her. That I was, literally, swept off my feet. That I'm a human radar sending out pulses and getting back strange images. And when I started to talk about psychophysical resonances, he hit me in the mouth. I think I got some loose teeth.'

  Neinstein touched Barnes' abdomen, and Barnes winced.

  'Oh, by the way, I got plenty of referents for you linguists,' he said. 'I'm seeing what the voice is talking about, if it is a voice. Miss Mbama's boyfriend jarred something besides my teeth loose. I got a neural connection I didn't have before.'

  'Sometimes kicking a malfunctioning TV set helps,' Grosstete said.

  Chew and Big Bear stuck electrodes on Barnes' body and adjusted the dials of several instruments. Peaks, valleys, ditches, arrows, skyrockets shot across the faces of the tubes and then rearranged themselves into the outlines of Egyptian-type hieroglyphs.

  Barnes described the words that coincided with the images.

  'It's like an archaeologist with scuba gear swimming through the halls of a palace, or, perhaps, a tomb in sunken Atlantis. The beam of light he's shining on the murals picks out the hieroglyphs one by one. They swim out of darkness and then back into it. They're figures, abstract or stylised birds and bees and animal-men, and there are strange figures which seem to be purely alphabetical mingled with these.'

  Big Bear and Chew agreed that the so-called voice was actually a series of highly modulated sonar signals. They were registering the differing depths and ridges on the wall of his vermiform appendix as the tiny bloodmarine cruised up and down.

  Hours went by. The linguists sweated over sound and visual referent. Everybody had coffee and sandwiches, except Barnes, who had nothing, and Doctor Grosstete, who drank grain alcohol. Neinstein talked on the phone three times, twice to postpone the operation and once to tell an angry editor he did not know where his reporter was.

  Suddenly, Big Bear shouted, 'Eureka!'

  Then, 'Champollion!'

  Then, 'Ventris!'

  He held up a long piece of paper covered with phonetic symbols, codes for the hieroglyphs, and some exclamation marks.

  'There's the hieroglyphs for this and for a copula, and there's one for the definite article and that one, that means secret, every time so far. Let's see. THIS IS THE SECRET OF THE... UNIVERSE? COSMOS? THE GREAT BEGETTER? THIS IS THE WORD THAT EXPLAINS ALL. READ, O READER, LITTLE MAN, THIS IS THE WORD...'

  'Don't be afraid, man! Say the word!' Chew said.

  'That's all there is!' Barnes said, and he groaned. 'There's only a gap, a crack...
a corruption. The word is gone. The infection has eaten it up!'

  He bent over, clutching at his abdomen.

  'We must operate!' Neinstein said.

  'McBurney's incision or the right rectus?' Doctor Grosstete said.

  'Both! This the The Last Appendectomy! We'll make it a double show! Are all the guests in the amphitheatre? Are the TV crews ready? Let us cut, Doctor Grosstete!'

  Two hours later, Barnes awoke. He was in a bed in the laboratory. Mbama and two nurses were standing by.

  The voice and the pingings were gone. The pulses and the visions were fled. Mbama walked by, and she was only, a good-looking black girl.

  Neinstein straightened up from the microscope. 'The sonar is only a machine. There is no Egyptian queen riding in it. Or on it.'

  Grosstete said, 'The tissue slides reveal many microscopic indentations and alto reliefs on the inner walls of the appendix. But nothing that looks like hieroglyphs. Of course, decay has set in so deeply...'

  Barnes groaned and mumbled, 'I've been carrying the secret of the universe. The key to it, anyway. All knowledge was inside me all my life. If we'd been one day sooner, we would know All.'

  'We shouldn't have eliminated the appendix from man!' Doctor Grosstete shouted. 'God was trying to tell us something!'

  'Tut, tut, Doctor! You're getting emotional!' Doctor Neinstein said, and he drank a glass of urine from the specimens on Miss Mbama's table. 'Bah! Too much sugar in that coffee, Mbama! Yes, Doctor, no medical man should get upset over anything connected with his ancient and honourable profession – with the possible exception of unpaid bills. Let us use Occam's razor.'

  Grosstete felt his cheek. 'What?'

  'It was coincidence that the irregularities on Barnes' appendix reflected the sonar pulses in such a manner that the hieroglyphs and a woman's voice seemed to be reproduced. A highly improbable – but not absolutely impossible – coincidence.'