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Or, as the star-dwelling Merskeenians themselves might have put it:
“Know this important wisdom, O sharer of heavy atoms from the very same supernova that that we ourselves derived from in far-ancient times: Every entity or entities wants or want something desperately, even if he or she or it or they doesn’t or don’t even know it. And if you, our cosmic cousin, are able to convince him or her or it or them that you can provide that thing or feeling or wish, fulfill that gaping need, then you will most surely have him or her or it or them by the short hairs and/or tendrils.”
And looking over the scrubbed little faces of all the little boys and girls who had each paid one thousand dollars to attend his powerful one-day workshop, Malcolm thought that that was what he most surely had them all by.
One particular girl had hair the color of the hair of the woman of Malcolm’s dreams. True, it was fashionably short and had been assaulted by a hairdresser rather than hanging softly, wonderfully to her shoulders. True, this girl was tall — taller than Malcolm — rather than short, and only pretty rather than exotically beautiful, and her skin was creamy, her cheeks rosy, rather than blessed with the olive tones of the skin of Malcolm’s dusky dream woman. The latter, presumably, derived from the mystic and erotic East, whereas the young woman seated in the front row at his seminar no doubt traced her roots to somewhere much closer to Scandinavia. But life, Malcolm reminded himself, is a series of compromises.
In her favor, this real female had the dewy lips and unlined face that bespeak the tight skin and high body fluid levels of youth, and her shining eyes followed him in adoration as he stalked about the front of the room spewing gibberish.
When, in his pre-Business Secrets days, had a woman looked at him adoringly? Pondering the question, Malcolm was forced to admit that the answer was “Never.”
Wisely, he began to direct his extempore silliness more and more at the young woman and to color it more and more with whatever double entendres he could devise.
He noticed, though, as the day wore on, that she seemed to be distressed about something. A hint of a frown began to disfigure her pretty brow. It grew, changing from a hint to a chasm. She raised her hand, waving it to catch Malcolm’s attention.
Malcolm pointed at her. “I’m sorry. Your name... ?”
“Tracy Smith.”
Oh, my God, Malcolm thought. His dream girl wouldn’t be named “Tracy” or any other two-syllable American female name ending with a long “e” sound. Compromises, he reminded himself. “Yes, Tracy, what is it?”
“I don’t understand something.”
Tracy’s voice was low in pitch and a bit husky. Rather pleasant, Malcolm decided.
“All the names you’ve mentioned,” Tracy continued, “I mean, like, the executives and all, and the heroes of the wars against the Marlingas — they’re all men. Didn’t these Merskeenians have equal employment opportunity and stuff, since they were so enlightened?”
Malcolm cursed himself. How could he have forgotten to pay lip service to that particular current business cliché? He had thought he’d covered them all.
Inspiration struck. Malcolm was not a hack writer for nothing.
Remembering Larry Lefkowitz, Malcolm tilted his head back so that he was looking down his nose at Tracy. Fortunately, he had trimmed the hair in his nostrils that very morning.
“Have I said that the Merskeenian heroes were all men, my dear young lady?” My dear, delectable young lady.
“Well, gee, no,” Tracy stammered, “but, but, you know, you went ‘Lukas’ and ‘Paulus’ and ‘Henricus’ and all like that, so it’s pretty clear, isn’t it?” She had started defensively, but she ended on the offense.
Malcolm turned to the rest of the class. The women, he noted, were waiting with interest for his answer. The men were staring into space and waiting it out. “Here you see the unfortunate result of an ethnocentric upbringing,” he said. “You know, now that it’s so vital for us to compete with the Japanese and the Koreans and the Taiwanese and... and whoever, it’s particularly essential that we not fall into the trap of thinking that other cultures must mirror our own. What is a man’s name here may be a woman’s name somewhere else. That’s especially true of the Merskeenians, who were so equal, so dedicated to equal employment opportunities and non-discriminatory hiring practices and equal pay for equal work, that they even,” he paused, his face red, glaring about the room as if challenging anyone to dispute with him, “subscribed to equal naming conventions for their children!”
Tracy looked properly ashamed. Malcolm felt that it was necessary to drive the point home still further, though. “Why, I well remember Lukas saying to me, ‘Suppose, O fellow product of the Big Bang, that you were called upon to do business in the far land of South Korea. Think what a dreadful and costly error you would commit were you to assume that, just because Kim is a girl’s name in the land of your nativity, it must needs be the same in the land in which you are doing business! Should you address the President of that wondrous land of almond-eyed, black-haired women as “Honey,” what further prospects would you have of racking up significant sales?’ How right Lukas was! President Kim, Prime Minister Kim, Speaker of the House Kim, Waiter and Waitress Kim — Christ, they’re all named Kim! Get the point, Tracy?”
Tracy nodded, abashed.
However, at the back of the room was a student with almond eyes and black hair and olive skin and of the wrong sex. He was hesitantly raising his hand, wearing an expression which said clearly that he hated to contradict an authority figure but felt he had no choice when faced with so egregious an error.
What now? Malcolm wondered. Oh, shit. Kim’s a surname, not a first name. “Well,” Malcolm said loudly, “let’s move along. Time’s awastin’. Tracy, stay behind after the session’s over, if you can. You at the back. Get your hand down.”
At the end of the day, as the starry-eyed kids filed out, a few stayed behind.
Some were enthusiastic young men and women with a sharp glint in their eyes that belied their apparent naiveté and revealed that their sights were set on vice-presidencies of the supernumerary corporations that already paid them more than any honest assembly-line worker earned. These, Malcolm was able to take care of quickly with appropriate manufactured Merskeenianisms.
“Send not to ask upon whose face you must tread, because the great wheel turns and treads equally upon all, from the lowest to the highest, and so you might as well get yours while you can.” Or, “It is written that the lowest shall be highest and the highest, lowest, so just make sure you end up on the right side of the equation.” Or his favorite, “Always sit with your back to the wall.” Wild Bill Hickock, one of Malcolm’s boyhood heroes, ignored that advice, and just consider, O Big Bang Buddy, what happened to him.
Two stayers-behind were different. One was the unfortunately male Oriental troublemaker, and the other was Tracy.
With exaggerated facial gestures, Malcolm tried to say wordlessly to Tracy, “Wait a minute, interesting sweetie, while I deal with this jerk.” She seemed to understand. He turned to the man and said, “Mr. Kim, I presume?”
The Oriental man seemed confused. “No, Otsinuga. You have been to Korea, sir?”
Only in my wet dreams. “No. But if you’re about to tell me that ‘Kim’ is a surname, rather than a first name, I already know that. It was just an illustration.”
Otsinuga nodded. “Ah. I understand. I lived in Korea as a child, but because of what you said, I was afraid I had become confused about Korean names.” He nodded happily, all confusion fled, and left.
Malcolm stared after him, mouth agape. What was this fatal power he now possessed, this aura of interstellar omniscience? Were so many people so hungry for illumination, guidance, and certainty that they would accept virtually any silliness if some charlatan in a business suit asserted it, even if it contradicted their own direct experience? More important, was there any limit to the number of dollars Ma
lcolm Erskine could extract from them by seeming to be able to answer their needs?
“Oh, Mr. Erskine,” Tracy breathed in hormonally heated admiration. “It must be so wonderful to have a brilliant alien being enter you at night!”
Malcolm turned from contemplating Mr. Otsinuga’s back, looked up at her, and grinned from ear to ear.
* * * * *
Two days later, looking forward to another night of being entangled in Tracy’s long arms and legs and nearly suffocated by her large mouth and long tongue, Malcolm received from her instead the following note:
My new job came through! Thanks to you! Like Lukas says, I made my own reality and went for it and visualized success, and now a man named Mr. Nostra has hired me to be Director of Marketing at his headquarters office in Sicily.
I’ll be back on business about once a month, so maybe we can get together then and have some good times again. Etc., etc., etc.
Have a good one.
Tracy
Malcolm sighed heavily at the loss and consoled himself with the knowledge that there were others. Many others, in fact. Lining up after every Business Secrets from the Stars seminar, in fact. Every one of them young and gorgeous, in fact.
So what if they lacked brains? What need had he, confidant of star-dwelling Merskeenians, of women with brains?
* * * * *
CHAPTER NINE
Spawn of my spawn, beware the terrible currents flowing beneath the placid surface of your world. Deep inside the Earth, all is fluid, changing, plastic. Great rivers of molten rock, vast convection currents, rise and fall, bearing upon them the continents that seem to you so solid. This fearsome magma shapes your world and your lives. Who can say what effects it has upon each of you, upon your nature and your life? Who knows what vapors it secretly releases into your atmosphere? Placate this terrible power, for it may burst forth without warning and destroy everything.
— Lukas of Aldebaran, explaining matters he wasn’t entirely sure Malcolm Erskine could handle.
When Malcolm was an iddle widdle boy, he read a nauseating children’s story about an iddle widdle boy whose doting grandfather lived with the family and was the iddle widdle boy’s bestest friend ever. So Malcolm decided that his Grandpa Tibbs would become his own bestest friend. He was sure that his Grampie — the boy in the story had called his grandfather Grampie — would be happy to take on the role.
At that time, Malcolm’s paternal grandfather, Tibbs Erskine, had not yet been transported kicking and screaming in a straitjacket to a very special kind of nursing home. He was still living upstairs in the attic, which had been converted to a suite of rooms that would have been quite pleasant if not for the rats, barn owls, and poisonous spiders. All of those steered clear of Tibbs, though, so he found the attic satisfactory.
He had shown no interest at all in his grandson, just as he had never shown any interest in his own son beyond demanding that the poor man provide him with shelter and food. After a long and satisfying life spent making a large number of relatives, business associates, and strangers miserable, Tibbs wanted to spend his twilight years in peace in his attic, sitting at the huge metal desk he had somehow stolen from his last employer, writing page after page of a mysterious manuscript no one was ever allowed to look at, and drinking large quantities of vodka, to which he had become addicted while stationed at the American embassy in Moscow before World War II.
He certainly had no interest in his pestiferous little grandson.
Malcolm was too young to understand the complicated ways of adults. Indeed, that was something he was to have trouble with throughout his life. So, convinced that life must imitate the saccharine book he had just finished reading, he climbed the almost endless flights of creaking wooden stairs toward the attic.
Golly, it sure was a long way up to where Grandpa Tibbs lived! Why, he must be practically in Heaven! Long and difficult though the climb was for Malcolm’s short, chubby, unexercised little legs, it seemed more worthwhile the more he thought about his grandpapa’s probable semi-divinity. Not only would Malcolm be gaining a new bestest friend, he’d be practically acquiring a guardian angel!
Life was pretty goddamned fucking amazing, little Malcolm thought, using a coupling of adjectives he didn’t understand but had heard his father use when referring to Grandpa Tibbs, so he knew they must be good ones.
Once he finally reached the tippety top of the flight of stairs, Malcolm stopped to catch his breath. He leaned against the banister and breathed and breathed and breathed for the longest time, for he was a very lazy child who never did anything physically that he didn’t absolutely have to, and so he was close to passing out from lack of breath and the immense altitude.
Finally, when his heart had stopped hammering away and returned to its normal soft, squishy regularity, he opened the attic door without knocking and stepped inside.
The attic stank.
It made Malcolm sad to think that his grandpappy had to live in a place that stank.
There was Grandpa Tibbs, leaning over his big gray metal desk, writing away steadily with his right hand, his pen making a scratching sound, and holding a large glass of water in his left hand. From time to time, he took a sip from the glass. He was tall and slender, with thinning gray hair that had not been washed in ever, ever, ever so long, a brown, seamed face, a long white beard with odd stains on it, and bony, strong-looking hands with long, yellow nails. His eyes were brilliant blue, and so were the pajamas, slippers, and robe he wore.
This was just as Malcolm had overheard his father describing the scene to his mother, and that gave Malcolm a warm, secure feeling, even though he hadn’t understood everything else his father had said and he wasn’t sure all of it was nice.
But how nice Grandpa Tibbs looked!
Or so Malcolm was able to convince himself.
Malcolm walked forward until he was standing right next to his grandpapa’s leg. He stared up the old man for a while in fascination, intrigued by his concentration. Writing must sure be fun and interesting!
“Hi, Grandpa Tibbs,” Malcolm shrieked.
Tibbs leaped to his feet and skittered away. Papers flew every which way. “Jesus fucking Christ!” His voice was hoarse and rough. When he spoke, it sounded like stones rubbing against each other. “Who the shit are you?”
“I’m Malcolm. You’re my grandpapa.”
Tibbs relaxed and gathered up his papers, shuffling them carefully into order and putting them back atop the large pile on his desk. He sat down again. “Oh, right. Go away. Close the door behind you. Little fucker.”
“Watcha doin’?”
“Writing. Get lost.”
“Watcha writin’?”
“My memoirs. Piss off.”
“Watsa mem... ?” Malcolm trailed off without trying to finish the word.
“Holy shit,” Grandpa Tibbs said. He put down his pen and glass with a sigh of resignation and twisted in his chair until he was facing his grandson.
This Tibbs looming over him suddenly didn’t look so sweet and lovable. Malcolm backed up a step.
“You’re as annoying as your goddamned father was at your age. At any age. He still is. Look a bit like him. Your older brother and sister were like that, too. Kept bothering me. Brats.”
Malcolm frowned in puzzlement. “I don’t gots no older brother ‘n’ sister.”
“You gots your father’s mastery of grammar, though,” Tibbs said, mimicking Malcolm’s childish voice. Then his tone changed to a snarl. “Never could pound any of it into his thick head. Anyway, you used to have an older brother and sister.”
“Where’d they go?”
Tibbs leaned forward. His lips drew back in what might have been a grin, but it revealed his long, yellowish gray teeth, all of them pointed as though they had been filed. “I ate them.”
For a fraction of a second, Malcolm held his ground.
Then he turned and fled, all the way down, down, down the immensely long flight of stairs, crying and yell
ing the whole way, falling and banging himself, getting up again, running down the stairs again on his weak, plump little legs, tears running down his face, blood leaking from his nose from one of the falls on the way, terror filling his heart.
Behind him, Gramps laughed and slammed the door shut.
Malcolm’s parents met him at the bottom of the stairs and hurried him away to another part of the house, where they comforted him and petted him and bullied him until he finally managed to calm down.
He described what had happened to him in tedious detail, but they assured him he had imagined it all. Why, Grandpa Tibbs wasn’t even in the house right now. And of course Malcolm had never had an older brother and sister whom his grandfather had eaten. What a silly idea! Here, have some ice cream.
After a great deal of petting and bullying and ice cream, which he suddenly decided he hated, Malcolm was able to convince himself that he had indeed imagined the whole thing.
As the years passed, and Grandpa Tibbs kept to his attic retreat, presumably adding to the pile of pages that constituted his memoirs and downing a steady stream of vodka, and as Malcolm entered and endured a painful adolescence and horrific high-school experience, the incident began to seem like a dream.
It took on realistic contours only on the rare occasions when Tibbs left his attic for one reason or another and encountered Malcolm, at which time Gramps would grin ferociously at his grandson and snap his fearsome teeth together and tell Malcolm that he was worthless and would never amount to anything, just like his father. Once or twice he varied things by muttering in that hoarse voice that cleanliness was next to godliness. Tibbs was always accompanied by a ghastly stench that Malcolm finally realized came from him, not from the attic.
Business Secrets from the Stars Page 17