“There’s a possibility that you can help me,” I said, “if you wouldn’t mind. I’m in need of a pound of flesh—not just any flesh, but a very particular kind of flesh...a kind of flesh that’s rather rare, even way down here at the bottom end of Winding Sheet Street. You have a fairly abundant supply, as it happens, and I’d like to cut it from your body, if you wouldn’t mind. I don’t think it’ll hurt you—either in the sense that the cutting will be painful, or in the sense that the wound will do you any harm. I can’t claim to be any kind of expert, but I think that if you were a Living person in a hospital the surgeons would make a similar incision in the hope of doing you some good. We both know that you’re not Alive, and that nothing I can do could possible do you any good, so I won’t try to pretend that there’s anything altruistic in what I want to do—but I honestly don’t think it can hurt you.
“I know that you probably can’t understand me, and may not even be able to hear me, but I need to explain what I’m doing, if only for my own benefit, so I hope you’ll bear with me for a few minutes more. You see, I have an embarrassing condition—a sort of disease, which probably isn’t as rare as I thought it was when I first contracted it, but one that skellies really don’t like to talk about—to the extent that the innocent among us can quite easily get by without even realizing that it exists. I’m growing flesh. That might not sound like a terrible thing to you, and probably wouldn’t to anyone except a skelly, but to us...well, let’s just say that it’s a uniquely horrible thought. I’ve seen some other people that have it, and they’ve tried all the things that immediately spring to mind: cutting it off; scrubbing it off; burning it off. They’ve tried acids and alkalis, alcohol and ammonia. All those treatments make inroads into the symptoms, but only temporarily. It keeps coming back.
“I thought of a different approach, but when I first mentioned it the idea was only half-baked, and it was dismissed out of hand. When I’d thought it through a little further, I figured I’d better try it out by myself rather than risk further humiliation. What I figure, you see, is that the best weapon with which to fight Life might be Life...I thought at first that we ought to consult a Living doctor, but then I realized I’d got it backwards. What I needed wasn’t a doctor—it was a disease. I needed something extremely inimical to flesh—something that wouldn’t only get rid of the unnatural growth temporarily, but might linger, lying dormant in the bone, and prevent it ever coming back. What skelly sufferers from this kind of plague need, you see is to become carriers of a jealous kind of life that can and will prevent anything more substantial ever getting a foothold on their substance. I’m no expert, as I said, but the word gangrene immediately sprang to mind. I’m not fussy—any kind of flesh-eating bacterium would probably do—but I figured that gangrene would be the easiest one to track down, with it being so notorious.
“I don’t suppose zombies are any more anxious to talk about their existential woes than skellies are, even to one another, but zombies don’t have the advantage of not needing to eat. The habits and weaknesses of your kind tend to be an object of urgent interest and concern to your potential victims, so they get a lot more publicity—publicity that even gets into skelly gossip. We know that zombie Death is a fleeting phenomenon—more fleeting even than Life—because zombie flesh tends to be even more prone to all the shocks that flesh is heir to than the original model. In brief, zombies suffer from the same diseases as the Living, only more so; they don’t die of them in quite the same way, because they’re already Dead, but the worst such afflictions literally rot the flesh on zombie bones, eventually reducing it to mere slime—and zombie bones, being incapable of simply getting up and walking away, eventually go the same way. There are all kinds of ways in which you folk can melt, I suppose, but I knew that gangrene is one of them, and I knew that if only I could find a zombie at exactly the right point in his—or her—career, I’d be able to reap an abundant harvest.
“I’ll try it on myself first, of course. If it works, I’ll give the rest to Dr. Setlow. The probability is that he can make a culture and grow it in a lab—but if not, the city has no shortage of zombies, has it? And the time comes when every one of them is so far dissolved that he—or she—can no longer feed. At which point...it’s not for me to say when the wielding a knife like mine is a kindness, but it’s certainly no injury. I didn’t tell the boys who told me where to find you what I was going to do, but that was more to spare their fugitive feelings than to get them back for tying me to a railway line. There’s really nothing malicious in what I intend to do. Do you think you could possibly blink your eyes to let me know that it’s okay?”
The gaze of the staring eyes had never left my face. They weren’t incapable of movement yet—but they didn't blink either. The likelihood was that she hadn't been able to understand a word I'd said. Her brain had probably turned to grey goo.
I thought about it for a minute, and realized that there was something else I could try—something else I ought to try, before getting on with the job. It was obvious, and I would certainly have thought of it earlier if my mind hadn’t shied away from the thought as if by reflex action.
I looked at the fingers of my left hand, where I’d first noticed the alien growth, and where it seemed to be thickest.
She had no nose but she still had lips, and a tongue. I eased my fingers into her mouth, and invited her to suck.
She didn’t respond immediately, but her mouth eventually got a grip, if only by virtue of reflex action.
“Maybe nobody’s thought of this up at the quarantine unit,” I said. “If they have, they’ve probably kept quiet about it. If you think about it, though, zombies and my kind of skelly are kind of made for one another. It would never work as a meaningful relationship, though—not on any kind of routine basis. All I want from you is a means of stopping the growth and curing the disease, but your fresher friends wouldn’t see it that way, would they? They wouldn’t want to stop it—they’d want to promote it. They’d want it to keep on growing, the thicker and quicker the better. I wouldn’t want to be some zombie family’s private meat factory, and nor would any other skelly—even one who couldn’t bear to be seen by others of their own kind. This is a one-off trade. You take my unwanted flesh; I take yours. You don’t tell anyone; I only tell people who’ll be extremely anxious to keep the secret. No one will ever know who doesn’t need to know. It’s all a bit primitive—maybe a bit fourteenth-century—but if so, that gives us cause to hope that the fix might work for a little longer than a lifetime, even in a world where there’s too much reckless use of antibiotics.”
I looked around then, suddenly anxious that I’d been utterly stupid, and that I’d find the younger of the two zombie brothers standing exultantly in the doorway, having just possessed himself of knowledge that would make him a hero to his folk—but he wasn’t there. Even if he’d worked out that there was something deeply fishy about the question I’d put to him, he hadn’t been able to come down to the address he’d given me in order to discover the reason why. He was afraid of catching something.
The stricken zombie woman licked my fingers clean.
Then she blinked. It might have been a reflex action, signifying nothing—or it might not.
Either way, I took my pound of gangrenous flesh, and only spilled a few sluggish drops of foul black blood. Then I left, and didn’t look back.
If the plan hadn’t worked, there’s no way in the world that I’d ever have told anyone this story, so you can be certain that it worked magnificently.
I was back at the Palais de Danse Macabre the Saturday after next, as bright as a brand new button, just as I’d promised Melissa that I would.
We danced all night, and it was fabulous.
Melissa and I have a meaningful relationship now, and the inside of my skull feels ten times better than anything anyone with a brain could possibly imagine.
To cap it all, the next time I get grabbed by a gang of zombie thugs who want to tie me to the railway line,
they’d better watch out for themselves. These days, I’m dangerous—to anyone, Living or Dead, who has a heart, or half a brain, or any other kind of loving-tackle.
I’m Peterkin the piano-player, and I’m carrying.
Don’t mess with me, if you’re any kind of fleshy folk, and don’t want to find out the hard way exactly what a scythe might symbolize.
MURPHY’S GRAIL
We get all sorts in here. That pit out there is the busiest wormhole in this sector of the galaxy, and it isn’t just the soldiers who need a little rest and recreation before they dive in and after they haul themselves back out again. That sign saying that we have the finest liquor this side of Antares isn’t just hype. The cellar’s full of bootlegged biotechnics hijacked during one of the Seventh Empire’s most successful extermination campaigns—long before my time, I hasten to add. The girls in our sister establishment are nice and clean, and they come in all shapes, styles and sizes, so we can get very busy during peak traffic flow, although you wouldn’t know it to look at the place right now.
One thing you have to remember is that we’re not just here to serve the drinks. We’re here to help the people wind down, and that means smiling a lot, and saying sir a lot. Most of all, it means being prepared to listen.
You’ll hear a lot of stories, and you’ll meet a lot of heroes. The Ninetieth Hussars and the Thirty-ninth Cavaliers will be in and out while the State of Emergency lasts, and they won’t spare us the least blood-stained detail of the mopping-up they’ll have to do when bug-ear discipline finally falls apart. I know at least five men who saved their fortress on Rynn’s World virtually single-handed when the Furballs launched that sneak attack last year. I’ve been told half a dozen sure-fire ways to ice a Hypnoprodigius, which I hope I’ll never have the chance to try out. I’ve also heard horror stories about nebular numbatodes and neutronium clappertrappers that would make your pubic hairs curl, but every one of them had a happy ending, at least for the guy who told it to me.
Do I believe them?
Certainly I believe them—every last one. We just serve the drinks around here; it isn’t for the likes of us to start calling a hero a liar. How do you think I got to be this old?
Well, sure, some of the stories are more interesting than others. Bound to be, aren’t they? Personally, I get bored with big guys who keep their brains in their pricks, always yammering about heavy lasers and splattered voidsharks. If I’m going to enjoy a story it has to have a little human interest, and something I can think about—and something that makes me feel, yeah, ain’t it a great big mind-boggling, heart-wrenching, piss-’em-all-off universe after all.
For that sort of story, you have to listen to the traders.
I’ll even give a trader a drink on the house, once in a while.
There’s no such animal as a typical trader. In fact that’s why they become traders—because they aren’t typical, and wouldn’t know how to become typical. They don’t fit, and it’s one of the greater glories of this fabulous galactic civilization of ours that we have somewhere to put the guys who just don’t fit—a job for them to do, for the greater good of humankind. They do their bit, just like the ultrageeks and the genejumpers, just like the whores and the dickheads with the big guns. Yeah, just like the bartenders too—but don’t start getting any stupid ideas about how important you are in the great scheme of things.
Well okay, as it’s so quiet—must be a fierce bit of warbiz going on at the far end of the tube, I suppose—I’ll give you a for-instance.
I’ll tell you one of Murphy’s stories. I don’t know that it’s the best story I ever heard, or even the best that Murphy’s told me, but it isn’t the longest, and that’s something to recommend it. We might not have all night...after all, battles don’t last forever and there could be a hundred hungry hussars hustling through those doors any minute, queuing up to explain how they would all be covered in medals if their commanding officers had only let them do their stuff.
* * * * * * *
First of all, if you’re going to understand the story, you have to understand Murphy.
Murphy’s basically a loner. Nobody’s really a loner, of course, because starships need crews and even traders need to ship a little bit of cannon-fodder, to take the heat and keep the locals in line, but what I mean is that Murphy isn’t the sociable type. He’s introspective, moody...you could even say morose.
Murphy often says that he’s an unlucky man. He claims that one of his ancestors had a law named after him, which said, if I remember rightly, that no matter how clever you think you are, fate will always find a way to poke you in the eye with a sharp stick.
Murphy takes his unluckiness very seriously; all of his stories are bad luck stories. But they also have a sort of wicked irony in them that I rather like. And no matter how unlucky Murphy is, he always survives; he always lives to tell the tale.
Apart from bad luck, the other thing that Murphy has in abundance—according to his own account—is the wanderlust. He isn’t a trader for the profit or the glory—it’s because he’s pathologically restless, always wanting to be somewhere else. He says it sometimes feels as though he’s under a curse that makes him keep searching for something, without ever letting him know what it is that he needs. Another of his ancestors, he says, spent his entire life hunting for something called a Holy Grail—a magic cup full of some marvelous potion, which was supposed to give whoever drank from it long life, good health and the very best of luck. Murphy thinks that he might be looking for something of the kind, and most of his stories are about times he nearly got his mitts around it, but couldn’t quite bring it off.
This particular one’s like that, though you couldn’t say it was typical.
It all happened on a world called Daydrum. You’ve never heard of it; it’s not famous for anything. It’s in Other Side Space, under the theoretical jurisdiction of the Engelian Hegemony. It has a duly-appointed governor, but the way Murphy tells it, the governor is an unlucky man himself, who was sent way out into the sticks because he’d annoyed somebody high up in the Nomenklatura. According to Murphy, this governor lives in a little gal-tech enclave and never goes out—at any rate, he certainly doesn’t take much interest in what goes on in the wilder regions of his despised dirtball. The culture of Daydrum’s native pseudohumans is so low-tech it’s barbaric, and its depleted ecosphere only has a few life-forms peculiar enough to be reckoned interesting, none of which are monstrously nasty enough to be really interesting.
What brought Murphy to Daydrum was a rumor that there was a miniature d-gate somewhere on the surface of the planet. Where he picked the rumor up I don’t know—it was probably just trader gossip. The governor had put on a show of sending out search-parties now and again, but they’d found nothing. How hard they’d tried, Murphy wasn’t sure—most likely they’d just waved their instruments around for an hour or two, then put their feet up until they were bored enough to go home. The governor had been quite content to come to the conclusion that there was nothing there—he didn’t want to fail in his duty to Allpeoplekind, of course, but he really didn’t want a delegation from the Great Komintern eating him out of house and home while they tried to figure out which of the ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dimensions the d-gate opened up into and whether it might be worth establishing a regiment on the Blood Red Army to defend against possible emanations therefrom.
When Murphy said that he wanted to take a look for himself, the governor’s response was not far short of ungracious, but the long and the short of it is that in the end he told Murphy to go ahead, but to call in immediately if he found anything.
Murphy’s theory was that the rumor must ultimately be based in stories told by the natives—stories that passed for legends among the folk who remembered them, but which actually had a grain of truth in them. The trouble was, Murphy explained, that every cultural group of every pseudohuman species in the known universe tells stories about miraculous doorways between the worlds and pe
ople who go through them, and the tribes of Daydrum were no exception. This made it difficult to decide whether there was any truth in any of them—and, if so, which. Murphy’s method was to go native, as far as he was able, and try to figure out from the inside, as it were, which tales were the real McCoy, and where exactly those tales had originated.
Following this plan, Murphy got himself a somatic makeover and went traveling in the remoter regions of Daydrum, without even a squad of gunmen for protection. After a few months on any world he could usually pass for a native—he was a real chameleon, behavior-wise as well as biocosmetically. Although he was mostly moving among lunkheads who thought that anyone from the other side of the nearest hill was a filthy foreigner, he soon got close enough to the various sets of locals to hear the real grass-roots kind of gossip. By sifting through the kind of stories the wild men told one another he was able to pick up clues as to where the d-gate might be.
The kind of barbarians who live on worlds like Daydrum have no idea what a d-gate is, of course, but because ninety-nine pseudohuman tribes out of a hundred don’t have writing they can sometimes hand down tales from father to son over hundreds of generations and thousands of years. The ones that interested Murphy were tales of magical disappearances and miraculous visitors.
The tales weren’t too clear about such things as location—which wasn’t surprising, given that most of the morons telling them thought that the edge of the world was only ten days’ walk away—but by tracing the references step by step Murphy was able to get gradually closer to the neighborhood where whatever had happened, if anything actually had happened, had taken place.
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Page 16