Mindswap

by Robert Sheckley

  The heart of the system, of course, was the Insectarium. This particular one was an Ingenuator, the Super-Max model, with both automatic and manual selection and mixture controls, regulated feed and disposal, and various maximizing and minimizing features.

  Marvin selected a grasshopper gavotte (Korestal, 431B) and listened to the thrilling tracheal obbligato and the subtle bass accompaniment of the paired Malphigian tubules. Although Marvin's appreciation was casual, he was well aware of the virtuoso ability of this particular performer: a Blue-Striped Grasshopper, his second thoracic segment pulsating slightly, visible in his own compartment of the Insectarium.

  Leaning down, Marvin nodded in appreciation. The Blue-Stripped Grasshopper clicked mandibles, then turned back to his music. (He had been bred especially for treble and brilliance, a flashy performer, more showy than sound. But Marvin did not know this.)

  Marvin turned off the selection, flipped the status switch from Active to Dormant mode; the grasshopper went back to sleep. The Insectarium was well stocked, especially with Mayfly symphonies and the strange new cutworm songs, but Marvin had too much to explore to bother with music just now.

  In the living-room, Marvin lowered himself into a stately old clay bank (a genuine Wormstetter), rested his head against the well-worn granite headrest, and tried to relax. But the ring in his snout ticked away, a continual intrusion to his sense of well-being. He reached down and picked at random a quick-stick from a pile on a low table. He ran his antennae over the grooves, but it was no use. He couldn't concentrate on light fiction. Impatiently he threw the quick-stick aside and tried to make some plans.

  But he was in the grip of an implacable dynamism. He had to assume that the moments of his life were severely limited, and those moments were passing away. He wanted to do something to commemorate his final hours. But what was there he could do?

  He slid out of the Wormstetter and paced the main gallery, his claws clicking irritably. Then, coming to an abrupt decision, he went to the wardrobe room. Here he selected a new casing of gold-bronze chitin, and arranged it carefully over his shoulders. He plastered his facial bristles with perfumed glue, and arranged them en brosse over his cheeks. He applied a mild stiffener to his antennae, pointed them at a jaunty sixty degrees, and allowed them to droop in their attractive natural curve. Lastly, he dusted his midsection with Lavender Sand, and outlined his shoulder joints with lamp-black.

  Surveying himself in the mirror, he decided that the effect was not unpleasing. He was well dressed, but not dandified. Judging as objectively as he could, he decided that he was a presentable, rather scholarly-looking young fellow. Not a Squig Star by any means, but definitely not a drunfiler.

  He left his burrow by the main entrance, and replaced the entrance plug.

  It was dusk. Stars glittered overhead; they seemed no more numerous than the myriad lights in the entrances of the countless burrows, both commercial and private, which made up the pulsating heart of the city. The sight thrilled Marvin. Surely, surely, somewhere in the endless intertwining corridors of the great city, there would be that for him which would bring pleasure. Or, at least, a soft and forgetful surcease.

  Thus, Marvin walked dolorously, yet with a tremulous hopefulness, towards the hectic and beckoning Main Groove of the city, there to find what chance held out for him or fate decreed.

  Chapter 16

  With a long rolling stride and a creaking of leather boots, Marvin Flynn strode down the wooden sidewalk. Faintly there came to him the mingled odors of sagebrush and chaparral. On either side of him the adobe walls of the town glittered under the moon like dull Mexican silver. From a nearby saloon there came the strident tones of a banjo-

  Frowning deeply, Marvin stopped in midstride. Sagebrush? Saloons? What was going on around here?

  'Something wrong, stranger?' a harsh voice intoned.

  Flynn whirled. A figure stepped out of the shadows near the General Store. It was a saddlebum, a snuffling, slump-shouldered loafer with a dusty black hat crushed comically on his begrimed forehead.

  'Yes, something is very wrong,' Marvin said. 'Everything seems – strange.'

  ' 'Tain't nothing to be alarmed about,' the saddlebum reassured him. 'You have merely changed your system of metaphoric reference, and the Lord knows there's no crime in that. As a matter of fact, you should be happy to give up those dreary animal-insect comparisons.'

  'There was nothing wrong with my comparisons,' Marvin said, 'After all, I am on Celsus V, and I do live in a burrow.'

  'So what?' the saddlebum said. 'Haven't you any imagination?'

  'I've got plenty of imagination!' Marvin said indignantly. 'But that's hardly the point. I simply mean that it is inconsistent to think like a cowboy on Earth when one is actually a sort of molelike creature on Celsus.'

  'It can't be helped,' the saddlebum said. 'What's happened is, you've overloaded your analogizing faculty, thereby blowing a fuse. Accordingly, your perceptions have taken up the task of experimental normalization. This state is known as "metaphoric deformation".'

  Now Marvin remembered the warning he had received from Mr Blanders concerning this phenomenon. Metaphoric deformation, that disease of the interstellar traveller, had struck him suddenly and without warning.

  He knew that he should be alarmed, but instead felt only a mild surprise. His emotions were consistent with his perceptions, since a change unperceived is a change unfelt.

  'When,' Marvin asked, 'will I start to see things as they really are?'

  'That last is a question for a philosopher,' the saddlebum told him. 'But speaking in a limited fashion, this particular syndrome will pass if you ever get back to Earth. But if you continue travelling the process of perceptual analogizing will increase; though occasional short-lived remissions into your primary situation-perception context may be expected.'

  Marvin found that interesting, but unalarming. He hitched up his jeans and said, 'Waal, reckon a man's gotta play out the hand that's dealt to him, and I ain't about to stand here all night jawing about it. Just who are you, stranger?'

  'I,' said the saddlebum, with a certain smugness, 'am he without whom your dialogue would be impossible. I am Necessity personified; without me, you would have had to remember the Theory of Metaphoric Deformation all by yourself, and I doubt that you are capable of it. You may cross my palm with silver.'

  'That's for gipsies,' Marvin said scornfully.

  'Sorry,' the saddlebum said, without the least show of embarrassment. 'Got a tailor-made?'

  'Got the makings,' Marvin said, flipping him a sack of Bull Durham. He contemplated his new companion for a moment, then said, 'Waal, yore a mangy-looking critter, and it seems to me yore half jackass and half prairie dog. But I reckon I'm stuck with you no matter who you are.'

  'Bravo,' the saddlebum said gravely. 'You conquer change of context with that same sureness with which an ape conquers a banana.'

  'Reckon that's a tech highfalutin',' Marvin said equably. 'What's the next move, perfesser?'

  'We shall proceed,' the saddlebum said, 'to yonder saloon of evil repute.'

  'Yippee,' Marvin said, and strode lean-hipped through the batwinged saloon doors.

  Within the saloon, a female attached herself to Marvin's arm. She looked up at him with a smile of vermilion bas-relief. Her unfocused eyes were pencilled in imitation of gaiety; her flaccid face was painted with the lying hieroglyphics of animation.

  'C'mon upstairs with me, kid,' the grisly beldame cried. 'Lotsa fun, lotsa laughs!'

  'It is droll to realize,' the saddlebum said, 'that Custom has decreed this lady's mask, proclaiming that those who sell pleasure must portray enjoyment. It is a hard demand, my friends, and not imposed upon any other occupation. For note: the fishwife is allowed to hate herring, the vegetable man may be allergic to turnips, and even the newspaper boy is permitted his illiteracy. Not even the blessed saints are required to enjoy their holy martyrdoms. Only the humble sellers of pleasure are required, like Tantalus, to be
forever expectant of an untouchable feast.'

  'Yer friend's a great little kidder, ain't he?' the termagant said. 'But I like you best, baby, 'cause you make me go all mush inside.'

  From the virago's neck there hung a pendant upon which was strung in miniature a skull, a piano, an arrow, a baby's shoe, and a yellowed tooth.

  'What are those?' Marvin asked.

  'Symbols,' she said.

  'Of what?'

  'Come on upstairs, and I'll show you, sweety-ass.'

  'And thus,' the saddlebum intoned, 'we perceive the true unmediated confrontation of the aroused feminine nature, 'gainst which our masculine fancies seem mere baby's toys.'

  'C'mon!' the harpy cried, wriggling her gross body in a counterfeit of passion all the more frightening because it was real. 'Upstairs to bed!' she shouted, pressing against Marvin with a breast the size and consistency of an empty Mongolian saddlebag. 'I'll really show ya somepin!' she cried, entwining his thews with a heavy white leg, somewhat grimy and heavily varicosed. 'When ya git loved by me,' she howled, 'you'll damned well know you been loved!' And she ground lasciviously against him with her pudenda, which was as heavily armoured as the forehead of a Tyrannosaurus.

  'Well, er, thank you so terribly much anyhow,' Marvin said, 'but I don't think just at the moment I-'

  'You don't want no lovin'?' the woman asked incredulously.

  'Well, actually, I can't really say that I do.'

  The woman planted knobkerry fists on tom-tom hips and said, 'That I should live to see this day!' But then she softened, and said, 'Turn not away from Venus' sweet-perfumed home of pleasure! Thou must strive, sir, to overcome this most unseemly gesture of unmanliness. Come, my lord! The bugle sounds; it awaits thee now to mount and fiercely press thy charge!'

  'Oh, I rather think not,' Marvin said, laughing hollowly.

  She seized him by the throat with a hand the size and shape of a Chilean poncho. 'You'll do it now, you lousy cowardly inward-directed goddamn narcissist bastard, and you'll do it good and proper, or by Ares I'll snap your scrawny windpipe like a Michaelmas chicken!'

  A tragedy seemed in the making, for the woman's passion rendered her incapable of a judicious modification of her demands, while Marvin's reputed great vaulting lance had shrunken to the size of a pea. (Thus blind nature, by defending him from one assault, tendered provocation for another.)

  Lucidly the saddlebum, following the dictates of his wit if not his predilection, snatched a fan out of his gun belt, leaned forward simpering, and tapped the enraged woman on her rhinocerine upper arm.

  'Don't you dare hurt him!' the saddlebum said, his voice a squeaky contralto.

  Marvin, quick if not apt, rejoindered, 'Yes, tell her to stop pawing me! I mean to say it is simply too much, one cannot even stroll out of one's house in the evening without encountering some disgraceful incident-'

  'Don't cry, for God's sake, don't cry!' the saddlebum said. 'You know I can't stand it when you cry!'

  'I am not crying!' Marvin said, snuffling. 'It is just that she has ruined this shirt. Your present!'

  'I'll get you another!' the saddlebum said. 'But I cannot abide another scene!'

  The woman was staring at them slack-jawed, and Marvin was able to utilize her moment of inattention by taking a pry bar out of his tool kit, setting it under her swollen red fingers, and prying himself free of her grip. Seizing the dwindling moment of opportunity, Marvin and the saddlebum sprinted out the door, leaped around the comer, broadjumped across the street, and polevaulted to freedom.

  Chapter 17

  Once clear of the immediate danger, Marvin came abruptly to his senses. The scales of metaphoric deformation fell away for the moment, and he experienced a perceptual experiential remission. It was all too painfully apparent now, that the 'saddlebum' was actually a large parasite beetle of the species S Cthulu. There could be no mistake about this, since the Cthulu beetle is characterized by a secondary salivary duct located just below and slightly to the left of the suboesophegal ganglion.

  These beetles feed upon borrowed emotions, their own having long ago atrophied. Typically, they lurk in dark and shadowy places, waiting for a careless Celsian to pass within range of their segmented maxilla. That is what happened to Marvin.

  Realizing this, Marvin directed at the beetle an emotion of anger so powerful that the Cthulu, victim of its own hyperacute emotional receptors, fell over unconscious in the road. That done, Marvin readjusted his gold-bronze casing, stiffened his antennae, and continued down the road.

  He came to a bridge that crossed a great flowing river of sand. Standing on the centre span, he gazed downwards into the black depths that rolled inexorably onwards to the mysterious sand sea. Half-hypnotized he gazed, the nose ring beating its quick tattoo of mortality three times faster than the beat of his hearts. And he thought:

  Bridges are receptacles of opposed ideas. Their horizontal distance speaks to us of our transcendence; their vertical declivity reminds us unalterably of the imminence of failure, the sureness of death. We push outwards across obstacles, but the primordial fall is forever beneath our feet. We build, construct, fabricate; but death is the supreme architect, who shapes heights only that there may be depths.

  O Celsians, throw your well-wrought bridges across a thousand rivers, and tie together the disparate contours of the planet; your mastery is for naught, for the land is still beneath you, still waiting, still patient. Celsians, you have a road to follow, but it leads assuredly to death. Celsians, despite your cunning, you have one lesson still to learn: the heart is fashioned to receive the spear, and all other effects are extraneous.

  These were Marvin's thoughts as he stood on the bridge. And a great longing overcame him, a desire to be finished with desire, to forgo pleasure and pain, to quit the petty modes of achievement and failure, to have done with distractions, and get on with the business of life, which was death.

  Slowly he climbed to the rail, and there stood poised over the twisting currents of sand. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow detach itself from a pillar, move tentatively to the rail, stand erect, poise itself over the abyss and lean precariously outwards-

  'Stop! Wait!' Marvin cried. His own desire for destruction had been abruptly terminated. He saw only a fellow creature in peril.

  The shadowy figure gasped, and abruptly lunged towards the yawning river below. Marvin moved simultaneously and managed to catch an ankle.

  The ensuing wrench almost pulled him over the rail. But recovering quickly, Marvin attached suckers to the porous stone sidewalk, spread his lower limbs for maximum purchase, wrapped two upper limbs around a light pole, and maintained a tenacious grip with his remaining two arms.

  There was a moment of charged equilibrium; then Marvin's strength prevailed over the weight of the would-be suicide. Slowly, carefully, Marvin pulled, shifting his grip from tarsus to tibia, hauling without respite until he had brought that person to a point of safety on the roadbed of the bridge.

  All recollection of his own self-destructive desires had left him. He strode forward and grasped the suicider by the shoulders, shaking fiercely.

  'You damned fool!' Marvin shouted. 'What kind of a coward are you? Only an idiot or a madman takes an out like that. Haven't you any guts at all, you darnned-'

  He stopped in mid-expletive. The would-be suicide was facing him, trembling, eyes averted. And now Marvin perceived, for the first time, that he had rescued a woman.

  Chapter 18

  Later, in a private booth in a bridgeside restaurant, Marvin apologized for his harsh words, which had been torn from him by shock rather than conviction. But the woman, gracefully clicking her claw, refused to accept his apology.

  'Because you are right,' she said. 'My attempt was the act of an idiot or a madwoman, or both. Your analysis was correct, I fear. You should have let me jump.'

  Marvin perceived how fair she was. A small woman, coming barely to his upper thorax, she was exquisitely made. Her midbody had the t
rue sweet cylinder curves, and her proud head sat slightly forward of her body at a heartwrenching five degrees from the vertical. Her features were perfection, from the nicely bulged forehead to the angular sweep of jaw. Her twin ovipositors were modestly hidden behind a white satin sash, cut in princess style and revealing just a tantalizing suggestion of the shining green flesh beneath them. Her legs, all of them, were clad in orange windings, draped to reveal the lissome segmentation of the joints.

  A would-be suicide she may have been; but she was also the most stunning beauty that Marvin had seen on Celsus. His throat went dry at the sight of her, and his pulse began to race. He found that he was staring at the white satin that concealed and revealed her high-tilted ovipositors. He turned away, and found that he was looking at the sensual marvel of a long, segmented limb. Blushing furiously, he forced himself to look at the puckered beauty scar on her forehead.

  She seemed unconscious of his fervent attention. Unselfconsciously she said, 'Perhaps we should introduce ourselves – under the circumstances!'

  They both laughed immoderately at her witticism. 'My name is Marvin Flynn,' Marvin said.

  'Mine is Phthistia Held,' the young woman said.

  'I'll call you Cathy, if you don't mind,' Marvin said.

  They both laughed again. Then Cathy grew serious. Taking note of the too-quick passage of time, she said, 'I must thank you again. And now I must leave.'

  'Of course,' Marvin said, rising. 'When may I see you again?'

  'Never,' she said in a low voice.

  'But I must!' Marvin said. 'I mean to say, now that I've found you I can never let you go.'

  She shook her head sadly. 'Once in a while,' she murmured, 'will you give one little thought to me?'

  'We must not say goodbye!' Marvin said.

  'Oh, you'll get by,' she replied, not cruelly.