The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

by Brian Stableford

  The further away Murphy got from the civilized enclave where the governor lived the more he had to rely on his own resources. He had ways of calling for help, but whether help could have got to him in time was a very open question. Murphy didn’t mind that. In some ways, he says, he gets on better with ferals than with his own kind. I think he has a genuine respect for the way primitives live their stupid lives, knowing nothing at all about the Nine Imperia, the Engelian Hegemony, the Nebular Sargassoes, the Wormhole Webs or anything else. He certainly has a thing about pseudohuman women, and he’s more than once caused offence among the girls here by telling them that all their training and augmentation is a poor substitute for authentic primitive enthusiasm.

  Anyhow, one way or another Murphy made his way into the dark heart of Daydrum’s tropic regions, which are just as hot and sticky and as full of biting insects as tropic regions everywhere.

  On the way he got into the usual scrapes—encounters with man-eating plants, hand-to-hand fights with local champions to ingratiate himself with two bit warlords, having to scare the hell out of a few cannibal hordes—but there was nothing an average sort of guy couldn’t have handled with one hand tied behind his back. He said that he hadn’t had to drill more than a couple of dozen giants with his needle-gun, but that may have been calculated understatement.

  * * * * * * *

  In the end, Murphy’s assiduous clue-following brought him to a dense rain-forest, whose only pseudohuman inhabitants had reverted all the way back to stone-age culture, and not a great deal of that. Most of their tools weren’t even stone—they were made from a hard black resinous substance produced by a certain species of tree. They didn’t bother with agriculture, but lived mostly on insect-grubs, root vegetables and nuts, which they foraged from the wild.

  Progress-wise, these tribesmen were the absolute pits, but they had a rich folklore describing a very remarkable pantheon of gods and some tales of people who had disappeared for many years and come back long after they should have died, still apparently young. This was the kind of tale which Murphy had learned to filter out from all the usual mythical noise, and it was doubly interesting to him because it suggested not only that a d-gate might exist, but that it might lead to somewhere fairly interesting—which most, of course, don’t.

  You have to remember that Murphy has always considered himself an unlucky man. Nothing would have suited the pattern of his life better than to spend a year and a half tracking down a d-gate that turned out to be a doorway into hard vacuum, and he was very grateful for every suggestion that this time it might be different.

  Naturally, the primitives couldn’t simply lead him to the d-gate and say: “Here you are, strange foreign person, go to it.” They had only the fuzziest notion of exactly where one might look for the fabulous doorway to elsewhere, and their folklore suggested strongly that it wasn’t always discoverable.

  Murphy wasn’t too worried by all this—many planetary d-gates are disguised in some strange fashion, and the tales that concealed references to this one suggested that it was one of those which became accessible only at rare intervals. He didn’t believe that he would have to wait for its next spontaneous appearance, though—he knew that such gates could usually be forced to reveal themselves only in response to a variety of signals, either psychic or machine-produced. Murphy had a real wowser of a magic-machine with him—he called a feelie-machine for want of a better name—which could send out billions of different messages, transmitting them one after another as fast as it was possible to go. He had been assured by some ultrageek of his acquaintance that although it looked like a lunchbox it was a very powerful glamour-debugger, and that although it might take a few days to turn the trick, it would eventually compel an invisible d-gate to appear.

  When Murphy thought he was somewhere near the right spot he built himself a base as comfortable as he could contrive, and began scouting around for any sign of ancient buildings. He took the precaution of becoming friendly with the local witch-doctor, winning his confidence by teaching him a few new tricks of the trade. He didn’t do it because the witch-doctor was a talent—he was a charlatan through and through, although he believed in his own patter—but because he was what passed in those regions for well-informed and well-connected. He was also the best conversationalist for many a mile.

  The witch-doctor was a creep, but he wasn’t a fool, and he soon figured out that Murphy was looking for the magic doorway which figured so prominently in the folklore of his people. He wasn’t annoyed by this, but he was amused—because, in his way of thinking, men who tampered with the sacred and the peculiar were reckoned the silliest kind of fool.

  “Men should not become searchers,” he told Murphy, “because a searcher who finds what he is searching for has cheated himself out of his search, and a searcher who does not find it can never be at peace with himself. Wherever your doorway into elsewhere leads it cannot help but make you other than what you are, and whatever you become, you will regret what you have lost.”

  This was not a particularly profound piece of advice, but it tickled Murphy’s fancy a little, and he even paused to wonder whether he and this petty philosopher might somehow have ancestors in common, way back in the shrouded mists of galactic prehistory, before the First Seeding.

  “You only think that,” Murphy said to the witch-doctor, “because you live in such a narrow world, blind to the vastness of the universe. Your tribe, though you imagine it to be the one and only authentic human race, is but one among Daydrum’s thousands, and Daydrum itself is but one world in the million that constitute galactic civilization, and even galactic civilization is just a hole-in-the-corner affair in universal terms. Where I come from, we’re well used to becoming something else, with a little help from our friendly neighborhood gene-tweakers, and we’re proud of our ability to change. With us, discovery is a way of life, and it’s the nature of all true humans to be searchers.”

  The witch-doctor replied to this with an aphorism which—so Murphy assured me—does not translate well into our more civilized tongue but which might be rendered, very approximately, as: That’s the sort of thing all fools say, when they manage to convince themselves they aren’t such fools after all.

  Which, as Murphy pointed out to me, only goes to show how fond barbarians are of circular arguments.

  Anyhow, Murphy wandered around for a while, playing with his feelie-machine until it started responding to something unusual. The machine led him to a peculiar hill, where the trees grew very strangely—more like big bushes, all ricked and racked about, with multi-colored flowers as big as a man’s head, no two of them identical. The place was always humming with huge insects and tiny birds, just as peculiar in their own way as the plants that fed them. Murphy was as sure as sure could be that this was where the d-gate must be, if only he could persuade it to appear. So he moved his base, and set the feelie-machine to run through its repertoire of Open Sesames with all the perverse determination for which your average ultrageek’s cleverest gizmos are justly famous.

  While the machine hummed and gurgled away, Murphy kept mostly to his tent, dodging the nastier members of the local insect-population. Three or four of them had tried to suck his blood but every one of them keeled over and died as a result and it didn’t seem fair to let the silly creatures go on trying. What made it doubly unfair was that although he was poisonous to them, it didn’t work the other way around; his friend the witch-doctor had already taught him that there was a kind of giant pink larva that was absolutely delicious, fried or roasted.

  Of course, being so rich in juicy insects the hill also tended to attract predators—mostly big black things that swung through the jungle like scaly gibbons and had faces like cunning crocodiles. While he waited for his machine to hit the jackpot Murphy amused himself by shooting a few of them and throwing the carcasses to the local vermin—which were probably very grateful for the opportunity to get a little of their own back on the toothy terrors. All in all, though, it was no
t a fun place to hang about. It was far too hot for Murphy’s liking, and very boring when it rained, which it did twice a day for five or six hours a time. For this reason he was profoundly glad when the feelie-machine got its wizardry in gear at last, and the d-gate finally appeared.

  * * * * * * *

  Murphy had only ever seen one planetary d-gate before, although he’d gone through several bigger ones in his spaceship. Even so, he knew pretty much what to expect. Most of the d-gates in that part of the galaxy are oval in shape, with frames made of some ultra-hard stuff that standard-issue drills are impotent to chip or dent. They aren’t usually very ornate, but sometimes have hieroglyphics inscribed—nobody knows how—on the lintel. The space within the frame is always grey, like a wall of super-concentrated mist.

  Being a scrupulous sort of person, in his own eccentric fashion, Murphy made a careful note of the numbers that his feelie-machine was registering, so that the glamour-debuggery could be worked again if and when it became necessary. He dusted off his pocket communicator and sent off a signal to the governor’s mansion, offering up a little prayer to the effect that it might arrive in a reasonably ungarbled fashion and would not be received by some crack-brained minion too stupid to do anything but ignore it.

  Then, without further ado, he picked up the feelie-machine and stepped boldly through the grey curtain, which was—he hoped—the interface between two worlds.

  Theoretically, it was a foolhardy thing to do—but Murphy trusted the legends that said that some of the locals had not only gone through the gate, but had also come back again. Wherever it went to, he figured, it couldn’t be an ordinary run-of-the-mill deathtrap.

  He was right, of course. How else could he have got back to tell me the story?

  Murphy found himself on a golden beach—a narrow strip of lustrous sand. On one side of him there was a placid ocean, very blue beneath a cloudless sky; on the other side there was a region of grass-topped dunes, beyond which he could see the crowns of tall trees with big palmate leaves. The sun was standing almost vertically overhead, and was a nice shade of lemon-yellow. The air seemed to be rich in oxygen, and was also full of pleasant scents.

  Murphy felt mildly intoxicated, but couldn’t decide for the moment whether there were psychotropics about or whether it was just the extra oxygen.

  When he began to walk up the dunes he was caught by a breeze, which flung rosy flower-petals at him, and made his head reel with the narcotic odors that it carried from the trees.

  Beneath the trees there were rounded houses made of grass, with tall conical roofs. There were people of a sort too, but they weren’t ordinary pseudohumans, or even standard subhums. In fact, they weren’t like any people-type race that Murphy had ever seen or heard of. They had silvery skins, which they showed off by going naked, and faces that had a vaguely Tsathokkuan cast to them—but they weren’t nearly as froglike as authentic Tsathokkuans.

  Being a solid citizen of the Seventh Empire, Murphy promptly got out his needle-gun and got ready to start blasting, but he put it away again when they came to meet him with open arms, obviously having none but friendly intentions. The largest ones—the adults, that is—were about a head shorter than he was, but at least half of those who came to meet him were children. Even in those first few minutes, he noticed that there were three different morphic types, and wondered whether he was the first man in the known universe to discover a three-sexed humanoid species.

  They seemed curious about him—especially the children—but not particularly surprised that he had appeared out of thin air. He figured that even if they had never seen a human before they must have folklore relating to human visitors, just as the witch-doctor’s tribe did. They had nice liquid voices, and though he couldn’t understand a word they said he thought that they sounded warm and welcoming.

  They brought him into their village, and spread colored mats around the sandy space in its centre. Then they brought out fruit and other food, and beckoned him to join them in their feast. They also offered him jugs of sweet-tasting liquid that turned out to pack a very powerful punch.

  In fact, within minutes of being invited to tuck in, Murphy was stoned completely out of his head, riding the highest high he had ever had, and wondering (but not too anxiously) what kind of a hangover he was going to have if and when he came down.

  * * * * * * *

  As things turned out, Murphy didn’t come down at all. He stayed high.

  He stayed high while the sun set and rose again, and set and rose again a thousand more times. He stayed high while the blossom grew on the trees and was shed on to the playful wind, and grew again, all the while sending out its magical scents. He stayed high while the fruit ripened and fell, and was eaten as it was or fermented for its miraculous liquor, and was meanwhile replaced upon the branch by a prodigiously provident nature.

  While he walked on the ground he thought that he was floating and when he swam in the sea it was incredibly easy to pretend that he was some wandering voidswimmer, with all the universe of stars his infinite playground. When the lemon-yellow sun soared in the electric blue sky his spirits soared with it, and the whole world was abuzz with the sheer thrill of breathing, and the blood seemed to sing in his veins. When the twin moons and the clustered stars that blazed at night cast their multicolored shadows on the sand he danced until he could dance no more, and there was never the least clumsiness in his capering.

  It hardly seemed that he slept at all, except for the rare days on which cloud filled he sky—but even the rain, when it fell, was gentle and fresh and as full of fizz and sparkle as the boisterous sea.

  He went fishing with the silver-skinned folk, and helped them gather wood to build fires and grass to make huts. He played their games and ate their food and listened to their musical voices—and never once tried to teach them any tricks of his own. He threw his needle-gun into the sea and put away his feelie-machine, and folded up his clothes forever.

  He told me that he made a lot of love, too, but he wouldn’t say exactly what kind of love he made, or which of the silverskins’ three sexes he most liked to make it with.

  Each of the natives’ three types was a hermaphrodite of sorts, except that each had male-type organs compatible with one of the other kind and female-type organs compatible with the other, so that each male/female coupling might be AB, BC or CA. Each child produced by a mating was the kind that neither of its parents were, so that all Cs had As for fathers and Bs for mothers, while all As had Bs for fathers and Cs for mothers, and all Bs had As for mothers and Cs for fathers. Murphy said that he came to believe eventually that it was the most natural system imaginable, and that all the two-sexed species in the universe were obviously just mistakes made by a Nature that hadn’t yet got its act together—and silly mistakes at that.

  He never learned a word of the language, although the people talked at him all the time. He said that the natives themselves never seemed to have the same name two days running, and never called anything else by the same name more than once, so far as he could tell. He could never figure out how they managed to understand one another, and was never entirely sure that they actually did understand one another. Sometimes he thought that the whole of their language and all of their talk must be nothing more than one amazingly complicated joke whose humor they were trying to teach him to see.

  He would have been much more curious, of course, if he hadn’t been high all the time, but, while he was constantly up on cloud nine, mere matters of fact and detail didn’t seem to matter very much by comparison with the joys of breathing and moving and seeing and feeling. Thinking of any kind was very difficult, and thinking about the past or the future most difficult of all. Mostly, he was more than content just to be. He said that later he wished he’d made more effort, but at the time it just didn’t seem important enough.

  Murphy took great pains to tell me that it wasn’t actually paradise, or that if it was, it really didn’t seem that way. When joy becomes a permanent cond
ition, he said, it doesn’t make any sense any more to ask whether you’re happy, or whether there’s anything you need, or whether there’s anything you want. Everything else was virtually blotted out of him, relegated to some vague grey background where he could be aware of it, but couldn’t really care about it.

  It wasn’t paradise at all, he said, but just a state of being: only a state of being, like any other. He sounded to me like a guy who had been trying to convince himself of that for quite some time, and hadn’t yet succeeded.

  He didn’t count the days while he was there, but he was morally certain that thousands must have come and gone; maybe hundreds of thousands. He didn’t know how long each day might have lasted, either, in terms of heartbeats or any other measure—but he thought that they were much longer than ours. Of course, he might have been mistaken. He admitted that. He conceded, very fairly, that the whole damn thing might have been a dream that took place within a few seconds of authentic time. Indeed, he went further than that and said that it was possible that he’d never been anywhere at all, and that what he had found wasn’t a d-gate at all, but something much more peculiar.

  Everything a man is, he pointed out, must logically be contained within the state of his mind at any single instant in time. Everything has to be there at once: all identity, all memories of the past, all hopes and fears for the future. If there were a machine—some kind of ultra-sophisticated feelie-machine, if you care to think of it that way—which could simply zap your mind into some particular state, it could change you, in your own estimation, into any damn thing at all. It could give you an instantaneous personal history a billion years long, with every memory crystal clear. Maybe, Murphy agreed, that was what happened to him when he thought he crossed the bridge between the worlds. Maybe all he got was a magic zap that put all of it into him instantaneously, and he never went anywhere at all.