* * * *
They came back to Leptophlebo Street, and a “Gala and Welcome” banner was stretched clear across the street. So it was quite impossible to decline any of the activities. And who would want to? The trumpet was blowing a great blast, and the other instruments were joining in.
* * * *
Canute was having his teeth cleaned, his head groomed, his appendix removed, his dreams analyzed, some other pleasant surgery done to him, and his clothes rewoven, all at one time. This was life at its most full, and the dazzle and confusion were to be expected.
“This is the first appendectomy since my father got his knife sharpened,” Pat Thingruel sang happily in Canute’s ear. “Oh, you are lucky! Listen now as I join the rowdy-dow band for you. I play eighth flute.”
“And this is the first free seven-minute surgery since my father got his knives sharpened,” another little boy was chirruping. “Listen when I join the band. I play fifth drum.” Canute couldn’t remember what the free seven-minute surgery was about, but it had to be good. He heard the eighth flute and the fifth drum join the band and it was rapturous music. His dreams were being analyzed, right on the glittering edge of his senses, and he could only guess what rich residuals they would leave. And a written note was placed shyly before his eyes.
“Listen now as I join the rang-dang band,” it read in the handwriting of the monkey Hoxie. “I play third bagpipe.” Canute passed the note to Effie Poorlode for processing and salvaging. Everything that was done on Leptophlebo Street contributed to the fortune of that famous place. With joy Canute heard the third bagpipe join the rang-dang band. He was in glowing confusion as he recovered from his surgeries (there had been several of them) and his cleanings and groomings and reweavings and other things. Oh, it all did make him feel light and lightheaded and slick-fit and trim-limbed and happy!
As Canute rose to his feet, with a little help, the band played on with flutes and drums and bagpipes and all the wonderful and skinny-sounding instruments. It was certainly fine just to be there between the two beautiful and meager Shortribs girls.
“I have swallowed the hook without noticing it,” Canute said, “and it didn’t hurt a bit. I wonder what distinguishing mark has been placed upon me? And my rewoven clothes fit me so trim! How is it possible that anything should be so trim?”
No man can have everything—but on Leptophlebo Street he sure can come close.
<
* * * *
A BRILLIANT CURIOSITY
Doris Piserchia
Plumbing the depths of the prejudice in my soul, I came upon an unpleasant piece of debris, like when I once stirred a cup of tea with my finger and picked up a stray leaf: I didn’t know why I hated Blacky or, indeed, if I hated her at all.
I decided to enumerate the reasons in my mind: number one, two, three, and so forth.
Looking at her was one thing, but thinking about her was another. I would rather have done the former, as the latter made for a tight belly.
Without skin, Blacky would have been attractive. Hmm. There was that slight protruding of her rear. Some of them had odd hip structure. Too leggy. Bosom too high. Head elongated. Why? Genes, naturally.
That last conclusion brought me no satisfaction, reminded me of pants, inside which all sorrow resided. People ought to have been more fastidious about where they dropped their jeans/ genes.
I think maybe I’ll die tomorrow.
Blacky’s grin? She had good teeth, but I didn’t care for pink-gray gums. The palms of her hands were all wrong. Off-shade. Another thing I never took to was the whites of her eyes, because they flashed red. You could spot colored right off that way, like for instance the famous movie star who said he was Mexican. His wicked eyes gave him away, with their streaks of red.
I didn’t feel right when I called Blacky a nigger. It embarrassed me. She didn’t deserve it. Nobody ever persecuted me for anything. I am—I was a Wasp: you know, one of those people who didn’t know what they were and were proud of it. (Relieved?) A chunk of potato in a stew; a little fish in a big pond.
As for us rednecks, we’re okay, we’re more American than any of you foreigners. My folks brought me up to be a good little girl and never even told me what a Jew was. I grew and went around with a frown because people were so concerned with names. “Levy? You say Levy?” Berg-stein-wald, hell, I learned, but I still had to be hit over the head with a name before I recognized it as anything but homo sap. My talent, you realize, lay in the two big dark balls above my nose. I couldn’t hear anything but homo sap, but I could spot an ape a mile away, whether he was peeling a banana or not.
I wish all those apes were around now. (Without an equal complement of rednecks? I don’t know.)
Blacky opens her mouth and you can hear the collard greens squeezing through her teeth. Where in the hell did that godawful accent originate?
Did you know their sex organs were blue? S’fact. Whence comes this sacrilege? We don’t need or want blue but in the sky. Human beings have this and that. Anything else is an added upon, and we question who did it.
I don’t believe in God. Never did. Well, when I was little. They said, “Don’t, give, sweat, give, suffer, give, cry, give, give, give.” I stopped listening when I realized they were a carbon copy of the government, or vice versa.
Blacky, you and I, we are both lost. Will you cry tomorrow when I get killed? No, I imagine you’ll do like the psychs used to say was normal and sensible and virtuous. You’ll cower in a corner and be glad because it isn’t you.
I ask you to analyze that bit of indecency: “Better her than me.” Never mind God, or what price valor, or what does it profit a man if he . . .
At the time I thought all those things, I was curled around Blacky’s back, keeping it warm, while she kept my front warm. It was chilly spring outside.
It isn’t true that they stink. Blacky shivered and moved closer. My back was plastered against a wall colder than a witch’s ninny. (I don’t like vulgarity, but sometimes use it without thinking, as I’m a ridge runner who never ran fast enough to get away from it one hundred percent.)
Nigger, nigger on the wall, who’s the fairest of the two of us? Which one of us represents humanity? Poor little lambs, we are victims of our archetypes. How deep does the blood have to run before the subconscious lets go of that old survival rope? A foot deep in low gutters? Don’t ask me. I have a strong stomach. Ask the nigger in my arms. Sometimes I think she is almost all ape. Cry? As she laughs. All the time. How high is her IQ? Statistically speaking, that is, in comparison with mine, well, neither of us had the brains to find our way out of the maze, not for weeks. (You should be alive to try this dilly. Einstein would give up after a year.) My roomie and I took a stab at it every morning before breakfast. And who ever said “Straw for the ox and wheat for the man”? I ate straw, or anything else that didn’t break my teeth. But every morning, Blacky and I were forced to run and climb and crawl, and we had lots of energy because we dined so well.
I got out of Blacky’s clutches, climbed from the bed and practiced walking on my hands. It wouldn’t do me any good, though, because I’d made up my mind that today I was going to get through the maze with no assistance and that it was going to be the last day I acted like a clown.
Maze: Like a honeycomb, glittering white and yellow, glistening as a sticky surface will, a little like frozen crystals on ice cream. The floor didn’t feel sticky to my touch. My hands sank into it a fraction and I experienced a sickening sensation. I didn’t lose my balance, but then I never did.
There were thousands of holes in the walls, each large enough to accommodate a body, and each having no end, or so it seemed, besides which, a person inside one of those holes could end up getting eaten.
The single door in our wooden shack led into the maze, and we couldn’t dig our way out of the shack, having nothing but our teeth and fingernails. Woman is a piece of meat. Note I didn’t say man. We, the nigger and I, may be the only women left, and
what would all you studs who are inseminating flowers have to say to that? You let us down. You got yourselves slaughtered and who have we to depend on now? As you depended upon bigger men and men in positions of power, even so we women depended on you. Everyone did it, it was no crime, for this was a symbiotic universe and not even light traveled on its own ticket. We are, were, together. You lost. I cry to think how you tried. You don’t know about Blacky and me. What would you do if you knew? I mean, illogic, if drawn to infinite length, can make a mind go bananas. That’s it. What’s the point of two girls surviving?
Don’t interrupt, mind, I’m looking at that maze.
I tried crawling into a hole, any hole, got ten yards and the thing reached out little yellow suckers and started tasting me. I scrambled backward and got out of that hole and tried another. How would you like getting tasted every day of your life, a dozen times a day?
Every morning Blacky and I woke up to the noise of the maze, and talk about a thing getting ready for a meal, even the floor became active. Blacky and I hopped, were experts by then, and we continued to hop until we finally saw the one inactive hole in the entire joint, and in we dived, fighting to get there first, and we crawled like hell to the end of the hole, and we dropped out and there we were, on stage in the Council Chamber, and right away we began our acrobatic act, and that was why we didn’t die. Because we had good balance.
So I was just spouting when I swore I’d get through the thing with no help and I was braying when I said I wouldn’t be a clown anymore. I’d do anything to keep from getting killed.
What would you do if razors suddenly started raining from heaven one day? Likely you would get sliced up. Not just likely —you did get sliced up. I didn’t. Talk about a mob, there must have been three hundred people on the block, gawking at the sky. When that many bodies began to fall apart, there wasn’t much space left that could be described as unlittered.
I was in the middle of my act when it happened. Soap-box stuff. Fifth Avenue, standing on my hands on the sidewalk. More natural to me than being on my feet. Everybody started dying in a hurry. I froze solid, I did. My hands grew red to my wrists. I examined my environment with my crazy eyes while my body remained stationary.
They had good eyesight, spied me standing the wrong way, down on the ground, otherwise they would have showered me with spears, along with the others.
The red was nearly halfway to my elbows. Something closed around my ankle and I was hauled into the sky. I had me a slow, slow jaunt through the countryside of NYC. Above me hovered a white bug the size of a truck. Shiny streamers hung from it like Christmas ornaments, and one of these held me suspended.
Occasionally I raised my head to look at the sky. Over the Empire State Building a huge white bug drifted, and from its tubular rear poured a stream of eggs. They bounced when they hit the streets. They were white as they dropped but red when they bounced. The bug covered ten blocks with eggs, and after they stopped bouncing they lay and soaked in the inert nourishment. Over New York I flew, and witnessed my species being cut to ribbons for fodder.
* * * *
Into the Council Chamber we two crawled every day, and the bugs loved us. Blacky said once in a while that they only loved our sweat, otherwise why did they carefully lick us clean after we tired ourselves out? It made me mad when she said that.
“You stupid nigger.”
“That wasn’t necessary.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Up yours.”
“The same to you and more of it.”
I wished it was anyone but me getting licked. The queen was beautiful and big, and there is no need to mention that she was also terrifying. The tip of her tongue, just the tip, was longer than I am. I never knew when she would tire of tasting me and swallow me. But maybe they didn’t eat meat, once they hatched.
The tongue slid down my back, making me shiver; it ran into my hair to play, fondly nuzzled my silky armpits, bored into my navel. I stayed balanced on my hands and tried to stop shivering; the tongue sucked my leg too hard and some hair went. I think she liked me. Not my taste. My soul. The thing God goofed while making.
“Blacky.”
“Shut up. They can hear. And don’t call me that.”
“They can’t hear,” I said. “And they’re stupid.”
“Oh, yeah? Then why are we getting licked like a pair of lollipops? If they’re dumb, why are they the bosses?”
“I don’t think I can stand this much longer. There’s such a thing as private—”
“Shut up and stand still.”
Being a nigger, she was one up on me in obedience. Her black body shone like grease, unnaturally so, as if something was coming off the queen’s tongue and sticking to her. Jesus, maybe we were being coated with a layer of egg seeds, and maybe the seeds were sinking into our pores.
“Blacky.”
“Don’t be a jerk. She eats vegetables and that shine is oil. She already laid her eggs. She brought them with her.”
“From where?”
“God knows.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Well, we know. They came out of the ground.”
* * * *
In our wooden shack, I grabbed Blacky around the belly and tried to steal her warmth. It didn’t matter if she froze, as long as I didn’t.
Where did everybody go? What happened, for instance, to the horses that lived here ten thousand years ago? What became of those other species that should have thrived but instead went away in a hurry to oblivion?
Down under the ground lie the eggs of Valene. So flexible are they that it takes a special kind of force to perforate them. They can’t be opened by, say, a section of earth shifting against them. Valene’s eggs flatten out and slide like fluid until they are free. The very pressure assists them in their flight toward open space. A rock falling on one of these eggs does no damage unless it stabs with a sharp edge, and this rapidly, before the shell begins its automatic cringing and sliding activity.
Say you dropped an egg in a field ten thousand years ago. A caveman who had survived the period of your reign came upon the egg and tried to destroy it. He was too demoralized to succeed and so he finally went away and left the egg in the field. Eventually the thing became buried. Ten millennia went by, while the egg lay like a lump of clay, moving not at all, except away from pressure. But one day the egg behaves differently. It swells a bit before a needle-sharp antenna penetrates it from the inside. A child of Valene emerges and begins a patient journey to the earth’s surface. It can bore through almost anything, though it prefers the easy way, and so it will detour around solid rock rather than go through it. Water presents no obstacle to Valene’s child. In fact, the innumerable underground wells and lakes are the reason so many of the monarch’s offspring arrive topside so quickly.
A starving Valenian will leap upon the first moving thing it sees. Animal or vegetable, it matters not, provided the youngster is able to penetrate the organism with its teeth and thereafter swallow pieces of it. A meal is a meal, and a Valenian is omnivorous, and practically anything will make it smack its lips in satisfaction. Of course, if you happen to be either of a pair of little gals named Blacky and Whitey, the Valenian won’t have a craving for your body except in an indirect sort of way.
Was that last part obscure? Well, the eyes of Valene’s child are drawn like magnets to beauty, after which it experiences a visceral blast.
Still obscure? Hmm. Consider a creature that digs pleasure, trips the light fantastic as a way of life, sucks without reservation when it is rewarding, and defines “reward” as anything that feels good. Know anybody like that? Of course you do. We. Us. Valenians are like people—hedonists at heart.
Valene was a big bug-mammal whose fur was whiter than snow. She had the wings of a bird, tail of a bunny, belly of a porcupine, ears like a hound and head like a grasshopper. So short were her legs that she might as well not have had any. The reason why I called her a bug was because her body was in th
ree segments and she also had six legs and four wings.
Long ago, Valene courted a partly mammalian creature, a maguma, who went by the name of Mattu. This was before there were any people on earth. Mattu was scared of his children because they hatched from eggs and were bigger than he. He tried to kill them and Valene. The babies killed him instead, and Valene gathered all magumas into an open pen and slaughtered them, except for the handsomest male. She kept him as a lover. His name was also Mattu. He had a furry white coat, long tail, padded feet, short legs, long snout and ears. A healthy stud, he was easily domesticated and all went well until dying time for the Valenians approached. Because Valene loved Mattu, and for a few other reasons, she commanded that he be treated with chemicals so that he would never die. As for herself, she would go the way of all flesh. Though she winced at the thought of another Valene having her lover, she needed to answer the call of her kind and go down into the grave with her comrades.
Orbit 16 - [Anthology] Page 12