The Best of Margaret St. Clair

by Margaret St. Clair

  He jetted backward exuberantly once more.

  How much of his new sensations was hallucinatory and how much was a genuine empathy cannot be decided. The action of dentautasen is very obscure. Wilmer, at any rate, was happy. He had never felt this good before.

  He hung over the tank lovingly. Though he felt that he was the squid, some physical limitations remained. He could feel identified with it only when he could see it. He knew intuitively that he would feel depersonalized again when he was no longer near his “self.”

  The keeper fed him around four. The food was delicious; he was angry at the keeper, though, because he was so stingy with it.

  The aquarium closed at five-thirty. Wilmer left reluctantly, with many a backward glance. On the way home he realized that somebody, probably a sort of Wilmer, was hungry. He stopped at a hash house on the corner and had two bowls of clam chowder. As he spooned it up, he wondered whether enough fresh water was coming into his tank.

  When he got back to his apartment, he stood for a long time in the middle of the living room, thinking. Of water, of the taste of salt, of sun. At last he roused himself to undress. In the bathroom he took his usual assortment of psychiatric drugs. And the syrup of senta beans.

  He woke about two in the morning, feeling utterly miserable. His head hurt, his throat ached, the air in the room was hot and dry. Worst of all was his longing for his absent person. He knew now who he was—Wilmer Bellows, who was a squid in a tank at the municipal aquarium. He wanted to get back to himself.

  He started to dress. Then he checked himself. He couldn’t possibly get into the aquarium building at this hour. If he tried, he’d only set off a burglar alarm. But he wouldn’t go through another night like this one. Tomorrow he’d hide in the aquarium when it came closing time.

  He sluiced his face and neck with water, and lay down on the chesterfield in the living room. He turned and twitched until daybreak. Then he took a long cold shower. For breakfast, he unzipped a plastic package of sardines.

  Once he was back in the aquarium, his malaise disappeared. He seemed in fine shape, with his tank properly aerated and plenty of clean salt water bubbling in. Glub-glub. Life was good.

  As the day progressed, Wilmer began to fear that he had attracted the attention of the guard. He’d tried to stay away from his tank, but it hadn’t been easy, when he was so deeply attracted to himself. All the same, he managed to hide at closing time, dodging adroitly from the visiphone booth to the men’s room and back to another visi booth, and when the building was quiet, he came tiptoeing out again.

  He shone his flashlight on himself. Yes, he was fine. Well, now. They might have a little snack.

  He would have liked to feed him some fish meal, but he was afraid that if he went into the pas sages behind the tanks he’d get caught. He had to settle for some seaweed crackers and a thermos of clam broth. He didn’t know when he’d enjoyed a feed so much.

  The night wore on. Wilmer grew sleepy. He leaned up against the glass of his tank in drowsy contentment, dreaming softly of rock pools and gentle tides. When the nightwatchman made his third round, at one-fifteen, Wilmer was asleep on his feet.

  The watchman saw him, of course. He hesitated. He was a big man, and Wilmer was slight; he could probably have overpowered him easily. On the other hand, an aquarium is a poor place for a scuffle. And something in the pose of the man by the squid tank alarmed the watchman. It didn’t seem natural.

  The watchman went to his office and vizzed the cops. He added that he thought it would be a good idea if they brought a doctor along.

  Wilmer awoke from his dreams of pelagic bliss to find himself impaled on the beams of three flashlights. Before he had time to get alarmed and jet backward, the fourth man stepped forward and spoke.

  “My name is Dr. Roebuck,” he said in a deep, therapeutic voice. “I assume that you have some good reason for being where you are now. Perhaps you would like to share that reason with me.”

  Wilmer’s hesitation was brief. Years of psycho-therapy had accustomed him to unburdening himself to the medical profession. “Come over by the sea horses,” he said. “I don’t want the others to hear.”

  Briefly—since his throat was sore—he explained the situation to Dr. Roebuck. “So now I’m a squid,” he ended.

  “Um.” Dr. Roebuck rubbed his nose. He had had some psychiatric training, and Wilmer did not seem particularly crazy to him. Besides, he was aware that a patient who is aggressive, anxious, and disoriented may actually be in better psychological shape than a person who is quiet and cooperative. Wilmer wasn’t anxious or aggressive, but he was certainly disoriented.

  “When’s your doctor coming back?” he asked.

  “Week from next Friday.”

  “Well, we might wait until then. You can’t stay here, though. Could you afford a few days in a nursing home?”

  Wilmer made a sort of gobbling noise.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Roebuck.

  “Don’t know. Air’s dry. Throat hurts.”

  “Let me look at it.”

  With one of the cops’ flashlights, Roebuck examined Wilmer’s throat. “Good lord,“he said after a moment. “Good lord.”

  “Matter?”

  “Why, you’ve got—” it had been a long time since Roebuck had taken his course in comparative anatomy. Still, there was no mistaking it. “Why, man, you’ve got gills.!”

  “Have?” Wilmer asked uncertainly.

  “Yes. Well, I don’t suppose that makes much difference. Can you afford a nursing home?”

  “Got ‘nu ff money. Can’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Live here. In tank.”

  “Nonsense,” answered Roebuck, who could be stern on occasion. “You can’t stay here.”

  “…not?”

  “Because it would annoy the other fish.”

  Against the cogency of this argument, Wilmer was helpless. He submitted to being led out to the police ‘copter and flown to the Restwell Nursing Home. Roebuck saw him into a bathtub of salty water, and promised to come back next day.

  Wilmer was still in the bath next morning.

  “Where am I?” he asked as Roebuck came in.

  “Why in the Restwell Nursing Home.” Roebuck sat down on the corner of the tub.

  “No, no. Where am I?”

  “Oh. Still in a tank at the Municipal Aquarium, I suppose.”

  “I want back.”

  “Impossible.”

  Wilmer began to weep. As he wept, he kept ducking his neck under the water to hydrate his gills.

  “Let me look at those gills,” said Roebuck, after the third duck. “Hum. They’re more prominent than they were.”

  “…I WANT MY SQUID.”

  “You can’t have it. I’m sorry. You’ll just have to put up with this until Dr. Adams gets back.”

  “So long to wait,” said Wilmer wistfully. “Want squid.”

  He continued to ask for his squid on Roebuck’s next two visits, but on the fourth day the doctor found him sitting up in a chair, wearing a faded pink bathrobe.

  “Out of the water, I see,” said Roebuck. “How are you feeling today?”

  “O.K.,” Wilmer answered in a high-pitched, listless voice. “Joints hurt, though.” There was the hint of a lisp in his speech.

  “Joints? Could be caused by staying in the water so long.

  “Move over by the light… You know, this is most unusual. Your gills seem to be going a way.” Roebuck frowned.

  “Gillth?” Wilmer giggled. “What are you talking about, you funny man? Jointh hurt. And boneth. Fix it, Mither Man.”

  Roebuck frowned a little longer. Then, on a hunch, he ordered a series of skeletal x-rays. They showed an unusually large amount of cartilage for an adult skeleton, and a pelvis that was definitely gynecoid.

  Roebuck was astonished. He knew how powerful psychosomatic effects can be; he would not have found it inconceivable that Wilmer’s libidinal identification with the squid
would finally have resulted in Wilmer’s becoming completely aquaticized. But now the man’s gills were atrophying, and his skeleton was becoming that of an immature female! It wasn’t reason able. Some remarkable psychic changes must be taking place.

  What was happening, of course was that Wilmer’s libido, balked by its primary object, the squid, was ranging back over the other objects he had almost identified with, trying to find a stable one. It was an unconscious process, and Wilmer couldn’t have told Roebuck about it even if the doctor had asked him. Roebuck didn’t ask him.

  On Roebuck’s next visit, Wilmer wasn’t talking at all. His skin had become a flat, lusterless tan, and he crunkled when he moved. That phase lasted for two days, and then Wilmer took to standing on one leg and barking. The barking phase was succeeded by…

  The trouble with these surrogate libidinal identifications, as Wilmer realized on a sub-sub-unconscious plane, was that each of the objects had existed in relation to somebody else. The little girl had had her mama and her pink parasol. The furry dog had had its owner and the lamp post. Even the brown paper parcel had been carried by the old lady. But the manure bun—Only the manure bun had been orbed, isolated, alone, splendidly itself.

  On the day of Roebuck’s final visit, the day before Adams was due back, Wilmer did not bark or crunkle or lisp. He merely sat in the armchair, spread-out, shiny and corpulent, exhaling a faintly ammoniacal smell that Roebuck, who had had a city boyhood, could not identify.

  Early next morning Roebuck got Adams on the visiphone. They had a long conversation about Wilmer. Both of them were a little on the defensive about the way the case had turned out. Adams called at the Restwell Home, but he couldn’t get Wilmer to speak to him. The psycho-therapist was just as much baffled by the symptomatology as Roebuck was.

  Wilmer stayed on at the nursing home for a few days, both doctors watching him. There were no more changes. He had reached his nadir, his point of no return. There is nothing ahead for a man who has made a libidinal identification with a manure bun.

  When it became plain that nothing more was going to happen, he was removed to a state institution. He is still there. He still just sits, spread-out, shiny and corpulent.

  Whether he is happy or not is a question for philosophers. On the one hand, he has invested his libido in a thoroughly unworthy object. On the other hand, he has unquestionably invested it in something.

  After Wilmer’s commitment, his apartment was cleaned out and redecorated. The building superintendent was a frugal-minded woman who disliked wasting things. She latched on to the bottle of syrup of Senta Beans.

  She took the syrup for a couple of nights and then, since she couldn’t see it had any effect, threw the bottle into the garbage reducer. She does not connect the “grand old Martian remedy” with the disembodied voices she has begun to hear.

  1958. Satellite Science Fiction

  THE NUSE MAN

  I don’t know why; really, the nuse man comes to call on me. He must realize by now I’ll never order a nuse installation or an ipsissifex from him; I consider them as dangerous as anything our own lethal age has produced. Nuse, which is a power source that the nuse man describes as originating on the far side of 3000 A.D., IS THE WORSE OF THE TWO, BUT THE IPSISSIFEX, A MATTER DUPLICATOR, IS BAD ENOUGH. AND THOUGH I LISTEN TO THE NUSE MAN’S STORIES, I CAN HARDLY BE CONSIDERED A SYMPATHETIC AUDIENCE. I SUPPOSE HE DROPS IN BECAUSE I CAN ALWAYS BE DEPENDED ON FOR A CUP OF TEA AND SOME TOAST AND MARMALADE.

  “Hello,” he said as I answered the bell. “You’ve aged in the last six months.”

  Before I could wrap my tongue around the obvious ettu (he was looking terrible—his clothes looked as if they had been slept in by machinery, and there were bruises and cuts and lumps all over his face)—he had pushed past me into the living room and was sitting down in my husband’s easy chair. The dachshunds, who have never liked the nuse man, were growling at him earnestly. He put his feet up on the fireplace and lay back in the chair on his spine.

  “Ahhhhhh!” he sighed, and then, to me, “Put more butter on the toast than you did last time.”

  When I came back with the tea, he was standing by one of the bookcases looking at Woolley’s little book, Ur: The First Phases.

  “Silly book,” he grumbled. “That stuff about the plano-convex bricks is all wrong.”

  “What do you know about it?” I asked him.

  “I sold a nuse installation to King Nebu-kalam-dug of Ur of the Chaldees on this last trip.”

  “Oh, yes? Well, the home office ought to be pleased with you. Perhaps they’ll give you a vacation back in your own time.”

  The nuse man made no direct answer, but his battered, lumpy face grew dark. He bit into a slice of toast so savagely that I feared for his iridium alloy teeth.

  “Don’t tell me that something went wrong with the nuse again!” I cried.

  This time he couldn’t have answered if he had wanted to. He had choked over some toast crumbs, and I had to beat him on the back and pour tea down him before he could speak.

  “Why are you so prejudiced against nuse?” he demanded at last. “The nuse had nothing to do with it. It was the king and the priests that birded it up.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  * * *

  The nuse man’s face turned even redder. It was a shade or two darker than the lapels around the waist of his trousers. “I’ll tell you all about it!” he said passionately. “You be the judge!”

  “Oh, Lord.” There was no polite way of getting out of it. “All right,” I said.

  “Everything was going fine,” the nuse man began, “until the old king Nebu-kalam-dug, died. I’d sold him a nuse installation—”

  “General or special?”

  “Special, of course. Do I look like fool enough to put a general nuse installation into the hands of a lot of 3000 B.C. yaps? I sold him a special nuse installation in exchange for a stated number of Sumerian gold artifacts, so many on installation and so many each lunar month until the price was paid.”

  “What were the artifacts?”

  “Gold wreaths and necklaces and jewelry. Of course, gold’s nothing. Only good for lavatory daises. But the workmanship was interesting and valuable. I knew the home office would be pleased. Then the old yoop died.”

  “What killed him?”

  “His son, Nebu-al-karsig, poisoned him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Everybody in the court knew it, but of course nobody would talk about it. I was sorry the old king died, but I wasn’t worried, because I thought I could work out the same sort of deal with the new king. Even when I saw how scared the court ladies looked when they were getting ready for the funeral, I didn’t apperceive. And then the soldiers came and arrested me!”

  “What had you done?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing. They were short little tzintes with big muscles, and they wore sort of skirts out of sheepskin with the wool twisted into bunches to look elegant. They wouldn’t say a word while they were arresting me. Then I found out I was supposed to be strangled and put in the royal tomb with the dead king.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d been one of the old man’s special friends. At least, that was what young Nebu-al-karsig said. The prime minister and two or three of the councilors were being strangled along with me.”

  “Gosh.”

  “I argued and argued, and talked and talked. I told the young king we hadn’t been such good friends as all that. And finally he said, very well, I could go with the court ladies in the death pit.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Of course I was scared,” the nuse man said irritably. “I didn’t have my chronnox—they’d arrested me in too much of a hurry for that—so I couldn’t get into another time. And I had no way of getting in touch with the home office. Certainly I was scared. And then there was the indignity—somebody from when I come from to be killed by a lot of primitive button heads. It made me sore.”

  * * *


  He slurped at his tea. “When we got to the pit.” he continued, “they were just closing the old king’s tomb up. You understand the tomb was at the bottom of the pit, and there was a ramp leading down into it. They hung matting over the sides of the pit, to cover the earth, and then they backed old Nebu-kalam-dug’s war chariot down the ramp; he’d want his chariot in the next world. Then the rest of us went down the ramp into the pit.”

  “Who was ‘us’?” I asked curiously.

  “Oh, harpists and singers and court ladies and slaves and soldiers and attendants. If anybody didn’t want to go, the soldiers had spears they used for prodding. I counted, and there were fifty-eight of us.”

  “Pretty barbarous,” I said sympathetically.

  “Nobody from your period has any right to call anything barbarous,” the nuse man said severely. “I’ve seen some bad ages, but yours—! Anyway, there we were.

  “The funeral services began. The harpists twanged on their harps and the singers sang in high falsetto voices. It sounded awful. The priests chanted prayers from the edge of the pit above. The soldiers passed around an opiate in little bronze cups for us to drink. The priests prayed some more. It was beginning to get dark. Then they started shoveling earth in on us.”

  “Were you sorry for the others?” I asked.

  “I was more sorry for myself. It was their era, and if they wanted to die in it, that was their business. After all, they thought that when they woke up they’d go on serving old Nebu-kalam-dug in the next world. I didn’t—and even if I had, he was nobody I’d want to serve.”

  “How did you get out?” I asked quickly. I did not like the thought of the scene in the death pit, even if it had taken place so many thousands of years ago.

  “I got under the car of the chariot to shelter myself from being crushed. After a long while, the earth stopped coming in and I decided the mourners had gone away. I didn’t have my chronnox, and, as I told you, I couldn’t get in touch with the home office. But I was wearing an ipsissifex. I started materializing myself up through the earth of the pit.”