by Ian Wallace
There was Paige on the floor, catatonic in the fetal position. The bishop, awakened by the rape of his halo, knelt over Paige, concerned. O’Duffy had turned on the room light, and I could not tell whether his halo was back where it belonged.
Across the eyes and upper face of Paige, his flesh was seared black in a parallelogram like one face of a prism.
I entered the Paige-brain—and came out again as swiftly as I could. Instantly I terminated the hideous alternate track that my miscalculation had launched him on; and I cried out to Thoth: Take back their souls, comfort the bishop, and start therapy on Paige for the love of Heaven!
For his brain was shriveled, and his soul had crouched catatonic in the fetal position. And burned into his retinae and upon his optic cortex and optic thalamus, I had seen ‘quite clearly.
Not the notation. The referent.
Part Eight
Adult, Western
On the planet Prosit, in a raunchy frontier town on a newly opened cattle continent, an unimaginative but well-meaning bar-girl named Hertha became masochistically addicted to the experiences of her business, submitted to a particularly cruel and degrading assignation, and thereafter died partly because of physical trauma but mainly because she had lost will to live. The cringing soul that we have is the self-scarified soul of a good kid. This one, Pan, you will have to handle physically in part, for it is the only language she knew; but—see what else you can contribute toward self-redirection for Hertha.
8
The honkytonk was noisy, tin-music jangly, yellow-smoke murky. In my own body, I pushed through the swinging louvre-doors, advanced a few feet inside, and stood appraising the dive, getting my eyes used to tobacco-smoke smart and my ears used to violent assault. My hands rested easily on the grips of my big blasters that hung holstered low toward the front of my gun belt. I was dressed, like many of the other men though a trifle cleaner, in a loose open-collared brown shirt and tight-fitting brown pants and boots.
The environment was a saloon straight out of the adult westerns that had dominated Erth’s twentieth-century television: I had checked them out in Antan. However, this saloon was neither anachronistic nor otherwise phony but a logical contemporary development in the frontier life of a newly opened cattle continent on Sigma Persei IV, a planet that called itself Prosit. This social stage was indigenous, not imported: the people of Prosit had independently evolved to resemble Erth’s Homo sapiens in most features—a not-uncommon course in any galaxy.
Telling myself therefore to behave like a hero in an adult western, gradually but insistently I shoved in to the bar between two big cowhands and held up three fingers to the barkeep. Nodding, the heavy-mustached portly-greasy sleeve-gartered man poured something dark out of a bottle into a glass which he set before me, picked up my money, and turned his back. I slugged off half the drink, restrained tears, and turned to consider the people.
The barkeep had noticed me and served me: already an alternate track was in progress, although it was still tight on the original…
The scene was the usual: carding, dicing, dancing, wenching. The women were in character, all shapes and sizes, wearing wasp-waisted ornate dresses cut high enough to show knees and low enough to flaunt cleavages.
My eyes alit on a woman who sat alone, elbow on table, chin in palm, other hand toying with a half-full glass, staring moodily my way without seeing me or anybody. She was blonde and a bit haggard and inclined to be plump: the tops of her breasts bulged the merest trifle above her dress top. The medium-full lips of her small mouth were pursed into a cupid bow, and her pale-blue eyes were glazed a little. I reached out delicately to taste her soul: yes, she was my assignment.
(May I do better than I did with Lewis Paige!)
Picking up my half-full glass, I started toward her—and saw that I had been anticipated by a dirty black-whiskered giant who bent over her with a classic leer, one big boot on the chair adjacent. Looking up at the giant, she had gone a shade paler, and both her hands were gripping the table edge. I moved in.
“—had all the others,” the giant was saying in a hoarse voice that tried bullishly to be unctuous, “so you and I might as well have a go before I start the next round.”
She wet her lips and shook her head slightly.
Entirely enclosing her bare upper arm with a hairy hand, he pulled her erect, clasped her to him, buried his mouth in her neck.
Her response was oddly ambivalent. Her head was turned away from him, her mouth working, her eyes desperate; but her body was not resisting, and her small hands were massaging his big shoulders.
I saw how it was with her, and I comprehended my first move but nothing thereafter. Coming up behind the giant, I poked his shoulder with a hard forefinger and demanded sharply: “May I cut?”
He froze, clutching the woman—who couldn’t see me behind his broad shoulders. Then he dropped the woman and whirled with an angry roar. Stepping back a pace to avoid a killing bear hug, I stood with my hands in the classic quick-draw hang.
The situation was precarious, more so than the others in the suddenly quiet saloon realized. By my rules I could not kill or even wound—but my body could be wounded; and if I should be in the body at the time, I could suffer as horribly and long as the next man.
The woman cringed back against the table, half sitting on it, back-gripping it.
The giant said slowly: “Ain’t shot anybody all day. You any good, Pardner?”
“Pretty good, Pardner,” I told him, “and I’ve never had a bigger target.”
“My size ain’t got in my way so far. You could stand over there by the bar, and I’ll back up a little.” He glanced at the woman: “This won’t take long, Honey.” Her eyes were wide, she said nothing.
“How do you want it?” I asked, backing slowly. “Sting, stun, or kill?”
For answer, he drew blasters, showed me the setting permanently locked on kill, and holstered them.
“Then,” I said, “I suggest we drop gun belts and rassle.”
He didn’t grin. He inquired: “Chicken?”
“Let’s test it,” I responded. Languidly drawing my left blaster, I held it at arm’s length. “See if you can shoot that out of my hand before I shoot yours out of your hand. If you can, we’ll blast; if you can’t, we’ll rassle.”
The giant wiped his mouth with a hand-back. “No good. One of us can cheat. Come on, Pardner—draw or go away.”
I sighed and dropped my belt to the floor.
Shrugging, the giant turned back to the cowering woman.
Low comedy, then: I booted the mighty derriere. He whirled with another bellow and gathered me into his lethal embrace just as my fist sank deep into his solar plexus. Grunting, he jackknifed.
I seized the woman’s hand and started for the stairway, scooping up my gun belt en route. She followed willingly as I drew her up the rickety stairs, hurried down a corridor, ducked into a vacant room, swung her onto the bed, bolted the door, and turned to consider her.
She was in disarray, breathing swiftly through her mouth, one breast almost out of her dress. She sat taut on the bed edge, clutching the bed, looking up at me.
I laid my gun belt on a seedy dresser, then leaned back against it with folded arms, examining her thoughtfully. She wasn’t any of the sorts of women who readily arouse me, but neither was she repulsive; and her clearly evident masochistic nymphomania wasn’t uninteresting to my normally channeled aggressions, especially since in this situation there was virtue in dealing with her in the long-range best way (whatever that might be), letting any hedonistic by-product fall where it might. But then I remembered a colleague in a garden, a colleague named Vogeler, and I comprehended that this was the counterproductive attitude for going into it. Pondering, I continued to regard her. Althea had suggested that with this woman, the obvious thing to do might prove instrumentally the most productive if it should be accomplished with love for a change; but I wasn’t quite ready to settle for this…
She said
: “He’ll be up here. He’ll break down the door.” Her low voice was liquor-damaged.
“Let’s gamble,” I advised, “that he’ll be diverted by another woman. Listen.”
Noises floated up from below: giant profanity, a heavy foot on the stairs, a woman’s low persuasive talking, a colossal sigh—and a general sound-relapse into happy crowd-babel.
I said: “Jackpot. Well, now: are you glad or sorry I did that?”
“He’s too big. He’s mean and dirty. But—”
“You aren’t in this game just for money.”
She kept looking at me, and a small tongue tip licked her small lips. “Not just for money—but you better be sure to pay me.
“You have to have men. But you don’t want to have to have men. So you don’t compete very well, down there, because you’re ashamed of going after what you have to have. That’s why you were alone.”
Her breathing was slower but deeper. She was deliberately and hungrily looking me over.
I added: “You didn’t want the big guy, but you did want him, but you hated wanting him. You were hideously afraid of him, but you loved the fear and hated loving the fear. And it’s more or less like that for you with most men. With me, for instance.”
“It’s a living—”
“He hasn’t come up yet, you notice. Let’s assume he won’t.”
Her eyes closed, her head went down. “He won’t come now. I was just the last one for luck, before the next round of good ones.”
I nodded slowly, my eyes on hers.
Her breath was quickening. “Are you gonna just stand there?”
“If you like, I’ll go away.”
“He got me all steamed up! You can’t go away!” Seizing the top of her fancy-girl gown, she jerked it down, baring her breasts—plump, firm, but showing marks of abuse. Leaning toward me, she tongue-touched her lips and husked: “I don’t want you to pay me anything. Just this once, I want to give somebody something.”
Sitting beside her, I hand-cupped the bareness of her near shoulder. “Considering your hunger, would it be entirely giving?”
After a moment she pressed her face against my chest, groaning: “But there’s no end to it! It’s like a thirst that is all the worse when your belly is bulging with water—no, it’s like a liquor yen that is still gnawing at you when you’re so loaded you’re passing out, and you wake up hungover stinking sick but wanting it all the worse…No, that isn’t that either, it’s not like that or anything else in the world, it’s just—what it is, you can’t compare it to anything—”
She threw herself back on the bed, staring up at me. “If you ain’t gonna act, for God’s sakes talk! Why is it like that? Why is it so endless, even for ordinary people who aren’t hung on it like me? Why do these guys come in here and risk getting clap and fight each other for it? What is so goddamned wonderful about it?”
So now I knew my way. It would be physical up to a point, but not in terms of the physical point that she was used to. Regretfully I commanded stiffening inclination to decline, and I turned my attention to this particular sort of physical approach that would end by leaping off into supraphysical psyche…
Mind-reaching into the deep pyriform cortex of her brain, I found myself dizzying in the maelstrom of the expected reverberating circuit. As an emergency measure, I introduced a local potential that channeled off the current in a wider circuit which wound around and came back in on the center of the trouble, creating a mild inhibitor where no inhibitor had functioned for a long time. It was purely first aid and would not last, but the temporary effect was benign: I had not unsexed her but only down-sexed her into low key, so that she now responded to me psychically but not erotically as woman to man.
Retreating from her brain, I checked the visible results. It had calmed her, so that her face sagged a little: she looked older but less disturbed. She blinked up at me, confused, feeling that I must have done something but uncertain what question to ask about it.
Bunching up pillows against the iron bed head, I sat back with her, my arm around her shoulders. She reclined, staring, torpidly appreciating my warm hand on her bare arm, my comforting nearness. Presently she glanced down at her breasts, then looked up at me, puzzled. “Either way,” I told her. She looked away again, not bothering to cover herself.
I waited.
She inquired: “You some kind of freak?”
“Depends on how you look at it. Not sexually, if that’s what you mean.”
“Okay, so you just don’t want me. So why am I here?”
“Doyou want me?”
“I always—” She paused, studied herself inwardly, turned up to me again that baffled look. “No, damn it, I did but all of a sudden I don’t! Why don’t I?”
“Do you positively not want me?”
She shook her head in a slow negative, eyes on my face, mouth open a little. “If you screwed me, I guess I’d like it—but for once I ain’t dying. What’s with me, Mister? You did something to me. What did you do?”
“What’s your name?”
“Hertha. What’s yours?”
“Pan.”
“I like that name. It sounds kinda wild.”
“I like Hertha. It’s a pretty name. Strong, too.”
“Hertha? Strong? Me?”
“Strong, Hertha. Do you like the way you feel now?”
“It’s restful, I’ll say that. It’s kinda nice. Professionally, though, I dunno. Will it last?”
“Kiss me.”
She held up her mouth open a little. With my fingers, gently I half-closed her lips; I kissed her lips softly, then lifted her hand and laid my lips on her fingers. Afterward I watched her eyes.
She gazed at me. Taking my hand, she pressed its palm against a breast. “This ain’t for hot stuff unless you want it,” quickly she explained. “It just feels right, with you. This is me, and I want you to hold me. I ain’t falling in love, am I?” “Probably not. Did you ever?” Cherishing her breast, I touched my lips to her temple.
Her eyes closed. “Once.”
“What happened?”
Her hand clamped viciously on my hand on her breast. “He didn’t notice. He took me for just a B-girl and used me and went away.”
“Were you already a B-girl?”
“Yes—”
“But not long, yet.”
Her eyes closed tight. “He was my first one.”
There would have been timid-sacred virginity before, outraged by an economic-rational decision to join this coterie, sanctified by love for her first, blasted by the cheapening outcome, plus years, plus the way the brain has of twisting disappointments into reverberating circuits that swing around and around and out and out until they involve all the forebrain including the pyriform cortex.
As far as I was concerned, a conscientious harlot who took care of herself and liked her work was merely an unimaginative species of professional athlete; but a compulsive loser in any sport ought either to start winning or get out of it.
“What is so goddamned wonderful about it?” Back there before I had gentled her, Hertha had asked the most ultimate philosophical question that is ever asked about sex. Even Plato had tackled it, suggesting that man-woman was born bisexually twain only to be disastrously sundered, that each half had been seeking reunion with the other half ever since. For Hertha, repetitious sex trauma had driven the urge into compulsive desperation, but the extreme case only dramatized the general principle: compulsive sexuality with its genteel rules for control and aesthetized or sanctified indulgence had stylized the vertebrate life of every planet that boasted vertebrates. For the extreme Hertha-case, unless she felt sexual action as violation it was nothing, but when she did feel it as violation it had no explicable significance, and her confusion fired her passion—which is perhaps all right if you like it that way, but Hertha did and did not.
Way down deep, did not. Wanted it some other way…
Hertha too had meandered back to that thought, proving its significance.
I picked up the thread of her mumbling: “—maybe you’re right if you want to say that it’s because we came from monkeys, because they sure are…But wait: how come they’re like that? it only pushes my question back a few jumps.”
I rejected a temptation to tell her that all the monkeys she’d seen were in zoos, and zoos do for monkeys what this honkeytonk had done for her. Because even for normal jungle-type monkey morals, she was perfectly right: it only pushed it back a few jumps. For cultural sophistication, the B-girls of Prosit were considerably ahead of the ones on Erth’s frontier! And as for Plato…
But could he have been intuitively right—rather as Aristotle’s entelechies were intuitive anticipations of genetic programming?
Wait, now: the gambit was coming…
I shook my head slowly. “What I’m going to say goes back a lot farther than monkeys. Back a couple of billion years, in fact. Do you know how primitive one-celled animals reproduce?” “Natch. They just split in two, like our body cells.”
It raised my eyebrows a little: I would have to visit this Prosit again—what did big-city girls talk about? I pressed on: “But some of the one-celled animals do something else first.”
“Do what else first?”
“They conjugate.”
“Which is?”
“They pair; and the two members of the pair don’t just copulate—they fuse.”
“They—fuse?”
“They open up wide to each other and exchange all their body substance. And then they separate and begin to reproduce by cell fission—but as they begin to divide, they are identical to each other, they are two of the same because of their total interchange.”
She was frowning. “You’re saying something to me. What?”
“I think maybe, long ago, there was a one-celled ancestor of us primates that used to conjugate like that. And then, as evolution multiplied the cells that constitute a single animal, conjugation was no longer feasible, so the specialized fusion of reproductive gametes developed, involving the specialization of sexual body parts, the one to receive, the other to insert…Am I losing you, Hertha?”