by Jeffrey Ford
Then they descended, iridescent in the dim light of the street-lamps, circling in like a flock of Earth geese landing on a pond. The Beetles were always hot for action and they had a directive that allowed them to kill first and ask questions later. The Aphid they just kicked the crap out of until it looked like a yellow pancake with green syrup, but Gable was another story. Because he was human, they shot him once with a stinger gun, and when the needle pierced his exo-flesh, the real him blew out the hole with an indelicate frrrappp and turned to juice on the street. The dung balls were retrieved, Gable’s outer skin was swiped, the bluebottles swooped in for a feeding, and twenty minutes later there was nothing left but half a mustache and a crystal coin good for three tokes at Spid’s. I crossed the street, picked up the crystal and went back into my home away from home away from home.
This is Exo-Skeleton Town, the dung-rolling capital of the universe, where the sun never shines and bug folk barter their excremental wealth for Earth movies almost two centuries old. There’s a slogan in Exo-town concerning its commerce—“Sell it or smell it,” the locals say. The air pressure is intense, and everything moves in slow motion.
When the first earthlings landed here two decades earlier, they wore big, bulky exo-suits to withstand the force. It was a revelation when they met the bugs and by using the universal translator discovered that these well-dressed insects had smarts. I call them Beetles and Aphids, etc., but they aren’t really. These terms are just to give you an idea of what they look like. They come in a span of sizes, some of them much larger than men. They’re kind of a crude, no-frills race, but they know what they want, and what they want is more and more movies from Earth’s twentieth century.
In trying to teach them about our culture, one of the members of the original Earth crew, who was an ancient movie buff, showed them Casablanca. What appealed to bugs about that pointless tale of piano playing, fez wearing, woman crying, I can’t begin to tell you. But the minute the flick was over and the lights went on the mayor of Exo-Skeleton Town, a big crippled flealike specimen who goes by the name of Stootladdle, offered to trade something of immeasurable worth for it and the machine it played on.
Trying to work détente, the crew’s captain readily agreed. Stootladdle called to his underlings to bring the freasence and they did. It came in a beeswax box. The mayor then whipped the lid off the box with three of his four hands and revealed five sweating bug turds the size of healthy meatballs. The captain had to adjust the helmet of his exo-suit to get a closer look, not believing at first what he was seeing. “Sure,” he said in the name of diplomacy, and he forced his navigator, the film buff, to hand over the Casablanca cartridge and viewer. The navigator, wanting to do the right thing, also gave the mayor copies of Ben Hur and Citizen Kane. When the captain asked Stootladdle, through the translator, why he liked the movie, the big flea mentioned Peter Lorre’s eyes. The earthlings laughed but the mayor remained silent. When the captain inquired as to what they were supposed to do with the freasence, the answer came in a clipped buzz, “Eat it.” And so began one of the first inter-galactic trading partnerships.
I know it sounds like we humans got the messy end of the stick on this deal, but when the ship returned to Earth and scientists tested the freasence, it proved to be an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac. A couple of grains of one of those spherical loads in a glass of wine and the recipient would be hot to go and totally devoted for half a day. The first test subjects reported incredible abilities in the love act. Those original five globes disappeared faster than cream puffs from a glutton’s pantry, and none of it even made it out of the laboratory. So another spaceship was sent, carrying Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Double Indemnity, and Gone with the Wind. Ten balls of dung came back at warp speed, and the screwing started in earnest.
Two decades of this trade went on, and by then we had bartered copies of every movie we could find. Private corporations started making black and white, vintage original films by digitally resurrecting the characters of the old films, feeding them into a quantum computer, and putting them in new situations. The bugs got suspicious with the first couple of batches of these, especially one entitled We Dream with Bogart, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Carmen Miranda and Veronica Lake. It was about a love pentagon during the Nazi occupation of Brooklyn. In the end Welles explodes, Trevor Howard poisons Bogart and then is shot by Carmen Miranda, who runs off with Veronica Lake. The problem with the film was that it was too damn good. It didn’t have what the ancients called that “B” quality.
To offset this problem the specialists came up with a batch of real stinkers, starring the likes of Mickey Rooney, Broderick Crawford, and Jane Withers. One in particular, Lick the Devil, was credited with having saved the precious dung trade. I’ve seen it and it’s terrible. Crawford plays an Irish Catholic priest, Withers is the ghost of the Virgin Mary, and Rooney plays a slapstick Chinese waiter in the racist fashion of the old days with a rubber band around his eyes. I’ve always said I’d like to shake the hand of the insidious mother who made that one.
Anyway, as the ships kept coming, trading their bogus movies, technical advances were made on Earth in the exo-gear that humans would have to wear on the bug planet. The geniuses at the Quigley Corporation came up with a two-molecule-thick suit that hugged the body like a second skin. Everything that one needed was shrunk down to nano-size and made part of the suit. It breathed for you, saw for you, heard with a built-in translator for you, ate for you. The only task that was necessary was emptying the exhaust twice a day through a three-inch-long circular spigot in the crotch area. The device you emptied the spigot into was a vacuum, so that when the pipe opened for its instant, the crushing weight of the atmosphere couldn’t splat you. This new alloy the designers used was so flexible and strong it easily withstood the pressure.
The first of these exo-skins, as they were called, gave Earth traders back their human form, so that they now had false faces and eyes and smiles and skin color and hair. The exo-skins were made to resemble the people that they encased like so much sausage. Then some ad exec got the idea that they should make these suits in the guise of the actors of the old movies. Bogart was the prototype of these new star skins. When he showed up on the bug planet, they rolled out the brown carpet. Stootladdle was beside himself, calling for a holiday. The dung rollers came in from the luminous veldt that surrounds the town and there was a three-day party.
As time went on, the exo-skins improved, more authentic with greater detail. They made a Rita Hayworth that was so fine, I’d have humped it if Stootladdle was wearing it. Entrepreneurs started investing capital in an exo-skin and a ticket to the bug planet. They’d bring a couple of movies with them, score a few turds and head back home to cut the crap up into a fortune. At first, one trip was enough to set up an enterprising businessperson for the rest of his life. Back on Earth, the freasence was so sought after that you could only buy it with bars of gold bullion. For the wealthy it was the death of romantic love, but the poor still had to score with good looks and outlandish promises.
The bugs rationed how much freasence could be sold in a year, and on Earth the World Corporation did the same, because the rich didn’t want the poor screwing out of their class. In Exo-Skeleton Town, if you were caught trafficking without a license, like poor Gable, you were disposed of with little ceremony by the Beetle Squad. Anyone could come to the bug world and try to get a license, but they had to go through Stootladdle and he operated solely out of whim. If you had an exo-skin resembling a star he admired, you had a good chance, but sometimes even that didn’t guarantee anything.
So a lot of people made the space flight, which took a year each way even at three times the speed of light, and got stranded on the bug world with no way to raise the money to finance the return trip. If you brought a hot movie, something the bugs were into, you could make enough money to survive by showing it to individual bugs at a time for a few bug bucks, which were actually mayflies that when dried and folded resembled old Earth
dollars. Twenty mayflies could be exchanged for a crystal chip.
Some unlucky bastards brought movies they were positive would get them some action on the freasence market. I can see them on their trip here as the stars stretched out like strands of spaghetti during the warp drive, thinking, “Oh, baby, I’ve got a Paul Muni here that’s gonna make those cold-blooded vermin do a jig, or Myrna Loy has got to be worth at least a turd and a half.” But when they got here, they found the fickle tastes of the population had changed and that of all people, it was Basil Rathbone and Joan Blondell who were making the antennae twitch that year. So they were stranded with an old movie not even a mosquito would watch and no means of support. The bugs didn’t care if these interlopers starved to death. I remember seeing Buster Keaton sitting in a dark corner at Spid’s for a week and half. Finally, one day a Mantis figured out the silent comic had died and took him away for his private collection.
I got into it probably at the worst time, but I was young and so determined to get rich quick, I didn’t heed any of the warnings. I didn’t have a lot to spend on my skin, so instead of trying to get a top-shelf actor suit, I figured it would be wise to go for someone who was only on the verge of super stardom but who showed up in a lot of the old movies. The company I bought from showed me a nice Keenan Wynn, but after becoming a student of the old films in preparation for my journey, I knew Wynn was strictly television movies and light heavies in the full-fledged flicks he had done. Then they showed me a Don Knotts, and I told them to go fuck themselves. I was about to leave when they brought out a beauty of a Joseph Cotten. I knew better than the people who made the suit how cool Cotten was. Shadow of a Doubt, Citizen Kane, The Third Man. I plunked down my money and before I knew it, I was walking home with a bag full of suave and vulnerable everyman.
I would have rather sat on the bowl backwards for a year than take that space flight. It seemed endless, but I spent my time reading books about ancient movies and dreaming what I would do with all my gold after I scored my load. My ace in the hole was that I had a great movie to trade. This was a real one too. It had been handed down over generations on my father’s side. To tell the truth, I stole it from him the day I left for the spaceport. It was a little low budget job called Night of the Living Dead. My old man would dust it off for holidays and we’d watch it. Who knew what the hell was going on in the film? It was in black and white, but supposedly, from what I had read, it was a cult classic in its time. I remember once, as a kid of about ten, my old man leaned over to me where I lay on the floor one Christmas watching it with the rest of the relatives. He said to me, “You know what the deeper implications are here?” pointing to the monitor. I shook my head. “The director is trying to say that the dead will eat you.” My old man was as profound as a stone. All I saw was a bunch of stiffs marching around. For years I thought it was a parade. If I were to see that movie today, it would probably still get me in the holiday spirit. Anyway, it wasn’t as early as I would have liked, but I thought the whole anti-Hollywood, independent movie scene, a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, might be ready to explode on the bug planet.
I still remember the day when we landed at the little spaceport next to Exo-Skeleton Town, and I looked out the window at a village of one-story concrete bunkers in the dark lit by streetlights. It was like a nightmare. Putting on the Cotten was the only thing that saved me from crying. Climbing into those skins is a painful experience at first. There’s a moment when you have to die and then be revived by the suit’s biosystem. The one thing nobody told me about was how it itches when you first get in. I thought it would drive me wild. Then another guy who had been to the bug planet before stepped into a smart little Nick Adams getup and warned me, “Whatever you do, don’t think about the itching. It can seriously drive you insane.” I was in agony when I stepped through the airlock and into the slow, heavy world of insects.
It cost me a fortune but I managed to arrange a meeting with Stootladdle only a few days after my arrival. He was a sight to behold. Hairy, too many arms. His eyes were round as saucers and a thousand mirrors each. I became momentarily dizzy trying to watch each and every me he was seeing all at once. The voice that came through the translator was high and thin and full of annoyance.
“Joseph Cotten,” he said. “I’ve seen you in a few things.”
“Shadow of a Doubt?” I asked.
“Never heard of it,” said the flea.
Now, as I gaze through the pale orange haze into the mirror behind Spid’s smoke bar, I realize all that was a long time ago. Five, ten years may have passed since I came to the bug planet. The smoke has a way of paralyzing time, blotting out its illusion of progress, so that yesterday might as well be today and vice versa. Whatever this stuff is that Spid burns to make the smoke, it looks like big handfuls of antennae. The mind spins with a logic as sure as a spider web. Real memories intrude now and then as do self-admonitions for a wasted life, but the smoke’s other feature is that it lets you not give a shit about anything but taking in more smoke.
The smoke has turned my brain to cotton, so that now I am cotton(en) inside and out. Yes, the Cotten went rotten a long time ago. So now I give old Spid, that affable arachnid, the crystal chip Gable dropped, and he says, “The usual, Joe?” I nod and bare my exhaust pipe. He fits the tube to my opening and I set the vacuum on intake by touching my left pinky finger to my right earlobe. The nano-machinery does its thing and sucks a bolus toke of the orange mist. With the smoke, you never exhale.
It wasn’t long after I arrived that I got hooked on the smoke and ended up selling my movie for a ridiculously low price in order to get high one night. An elegantly thin cricket gave me ten crystal chips for it, and I spent the next three days dozing and smoking at Spid’s. When my credit ran out, and a few hours passed, I came to and began to panic. That was how I became Stootladdle’s flunky.
“How do you feel about living?” he asked me when the Beetle Squad brought me to his office. I had been caught on the street trying to score a turd without the proper papers. Even in my orange haze, I was surprised they hadn’t plugged me.
“Tomorrow is another day,” I said to him.
“I’m going to slap you around and you’re going to like it,” he said. Then he did, all those arms working me over at once. The blows were like a stinging swarm of locust and the nano-technology, true to its guarantee, registered every one. When I was thoroughly dazed, he gave a little jump in the air and kicked me right in the nuts, or where they would have been if the suit makers had bothered to render them. I fell forward and he caught me with his mandibles by the neck.
“I’ve got a spot for you in my private collection right between Omar Sharif and Annette Funicello,” he said.
I promised I’d do anything he wanted if he let me live. He loosened his grip and I stood, rubbing my throat. He laughed loud and long, the sound of teeth scraping concrete, and he put two of his arms around me.
“Now, Joseph,” he said, “I have a little job for you to do.”
“Anything,” I said.
Stootladdle waved away the Beetle Squad, and I was left alone with him in his office. He sat down at his desk and triple motioned for me to take the chair across from him.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
I looked into his eyes and saw myself nodding ad infinitum.
“Yes,” he said. “Very well. Have you ever heard of a film called The Rain Does Things Like That?”
“Will it go badly for me if I haven’t?” I asked.
He laughed. “It will go badly for you no matter what,” he said.
“No,” I admitted.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I saw this movie once, years and years ago, very early on in our trade relationship with your planet.”
“How is it?” I asked.
“It’s the butterfly’s dust,” he said.
“If it’s that good, how come I never heard of it?” I asked.
“The actors were unknown, but I tell you there
is a young woman in it named Gloriette Moss, who is nothing less than startling. It’s a love story. Poignant,” said Stootladdle, scratching his hairy stomach.
“I’ll have to catch it some time,” I said.
“No, Joseph,” he said, “you’re going to catch it now. The only copy of the film on the planet resides out in the luminous veldt with the widow of Ambassador Lancaster. His widow, who still lives out there on the estate, is none other than Gloriette Moss. I’ve tried to buy the movie from her for my collection, but she refuses to sell. It was her husband’s favorite film because she starred in it. Sentimental value, as you earthlings say. I want that movie.”
“Why don’t you just send out the Beetle Squad and take it?” I asked.
“Too delicate a situation,” he said. “She has ties to Earth’s military. How would it look if we started roughing up an ex-ambassador’s wife? It could interrupt our thriving trade.”
“If you send me back to Earth, I’ll tell them to make her give you the film,” I said.
“Ready for another beating, I see,” he said. “No, I want you to go out there and get it for me. I don’t care how you get it short of stealing it, but I want it. You can not harm her. She must willingly give it to you and then you will give it to me and I will let you live.”
“How am I going to do that?” I asked.
“Your charm, Joseph. Remember how you were in The Third Man, bumbling yet sincere, but altogether charming?” he said.
I nodded.
“Succeed or suffer a slow, painful death.”
“I think I hear zither music,” I said.
Stootladdle put his slackey (like an ancient rickshaw conveyance) and driver, an ill-tempered termite, at my disposal for the trip out of town. Once beyond the dim glow of the streetlights of Exo-town, things got really dark. Our only guide was the ragged moon all jumbled and bashed. The driver kept complaining about the pests, miniscule mammals with gossamer wings, bats the size of Earth mosquitos, that traveled in clouds and stung viciously. He at least had a few extra appendages at his disposal with which to keep them away. I was frightened of him, frightened of the dark and my grim future, but the thing that scared me more than anything was the thought of going without the smoke for more than a day. The mayor had assured me that Gloriette Moss was a smoke fiend herself and had her own setup, keeping a huge supply on hand of whatever that stuff is that one burns to make it. I prayed he wasn’t playing with me on this score. He said that the reason she never went back to Earth was because she was hooked.