The Lovers

by Филип Хосе Фармер

  He downed three tall glasses and then rose and lifted Jeannette in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. She was kissing the side of his neck, and it seemed to him that an electric charge was passing from her lips to his skin and on up to his brain and on down through his beating chest and warming stomach and swelling genital and on down through the soles of his feet, which, strangely, had become ice. Certainly, holding her did not make him want to withdraw as when he had carried out his duty toward Mary and the Sturch.

  Yet, even in his ecstasy of anticipation, there was a stronghold of retreat. It was small, but it was there, dark in the middle of the fire. He could not completely forget himself, and he doubted, wondering if he would fail as he had sometimes when he had crawled into bed in the dark and reached out for Mary.

  There was also a black seed of panic, dropped by the doubt. If he failed, he would kill himself. He would be done forever.

  Yet, he told himself, it could not possibly happen, must not. Not when he had his arms around her and her lips were on his.

  He put her on the bed and then turned off the ceiling light. But she turned on the lamp over the bed.

  'Why are you doing that?' he said, standing at the foot of the bed, feeling the rise of panic and the fall of his passion. At the same time he wondered how she could so swiftly, unseen by him, have unclothed herself.

  She smiled and said, 'Remember what you told me the other day? That beautiful passage: God said, Let there be light.'

  'We do not need it.'

  'I do. I must see you at every moment. The dark would take away half of the pleasure. I want to see you in love.'

  She reached upward to adjust the angle of the bedlamp, her breasts rising with the movement and sending an almost intolerable pang through him.

  'There. Now I can see your face. Especially, at the moment when I will know best that you love me.'

  She extended a foot and touched his knee with her toe. Skin upon skin... it drew him forward as if it were the finger of an angel gently directing him toward destiny. He knelt upon the bed, and she drew back her leg with her toe still placed upon his leg as if it had grown roots into his flesh and could not be dislodged.

  'Hal, Hal,' she murmured. 'What have they done to you? What have they done to all your men? I know from what you have told me that they are like you. What have they done? Made you hate instead of love, though they call hate love. Made you half-men so you will turn your drive into yourself and then outward against the enemy. So you will become fierce warriors because you are such timid lovers.'

  'That's not true,' he said. 'Not true.'

  'I can see you. It is true.'

  She removed her foot and placed it beside his knee and said, 'Come closer,' and when he had moved closer, still on his knees, she reached up and pulled him down against her breasts.

  'Place your mouth here. Become a baby again. And I will raise you so you forget your hate and know only love. And become a man.'

  'Jeannette, Jeannette,' he said hoarsely. He put out his hand to pull the cord of the bedlamp and said, 'Not the light.'

  But she put her hand on his and said, 'Yes, the light.'

  Then she took her hand away and said, 'All right, Hal. Turn it off. For a little while. If you must go back into the darkness, go far back. Far back. And then be reborn... for a little while. Then, the light.'

  'No! let it stay on!' he snarled. 'I am not in my mother's womb. I do not want to go back there; I do not need to. And I will take you as an army takes a city.'

  'Don't be a soldier, Hal. Be a lover. You must love me, not rape me. You can't take me, because I will surround you.'

  Her hand closed gently on him, and she arched her back slightly, and suddenly he was surrounded. A shock ran through him, comparable to that he had felt when she kissed his neck, but comparable only in kind and not in intensity.

  He started to bury his face against her shoulder, but she put both hands on his chest and with surprising strength, half-raised him.

  'No. I must see your face. Especially at the time I must, for I want to see you lose yourself in me.'

  And she kept her eyes wide open throughout as if she were trying to impress forever upon every cell of her body her lover's face.

  Hal was not disconcerted, for he would not have paid attention to the Archurielite himself knocking on the door. But he noticed, though he did not think of it, that the pupils of her eyes had contracted to a pencil point.

  16

  The Alcoholics in the Haijac Union were sent to H. Therefore, no psychological or narcotic therapies had been worked out for addicts. Hal, frustrated by this fact in his desire to wipe out Jeannette's weakness, went for medicine to the very people who had given her the disease. But he pretended that the cure was for himself.

  Fobo said, 'There is widespread drinking on Ozagen, but it is light. Our few alcoholics are empathized into normality with the help of medicine, of course. Why don't you let me empathize you?'

  'Sorry. My government forbids that.'

  He had given Fobo the same excuse for not inviting the wog into his apartment.

  'You have the most forbidding government,' said Fobo and went into one of his long, howling laughs.

  When he recovered, he said, 'You're forbidden to touch liquor, too, but that doesn't hold you back. Well, there's no accounting for inconsistency. Seriously, though, I have just the thing for you. It's called Easyglow. We put it into the daily ration of liquor, slowly increasing the Easyglow and diminishing the alcohol. In two or three weeks, the patient is drinking from a fluid ninety-six percent Easyglow. The taste is much the same; the drinker seldom suspects. Continued treatment eases the patient from his dependence on the alcohol. There is only one drawback.'

  He paused and said, 'The drinker is now addicted to Easyglow!'

  He whooped and slapped his thigh and shook his head until his long cartilaginous nose vibrated, and laughed until the tears came.

  When he managed to quit laughing and had dried his tears with a starfish-shaped handkerchief, he said, 'Really, the perculiar effect of Easyglow is that it opens the patient for discharge of the strains that have driven him to drink. He may then be empathized and at the same time weaned from the stimulant. Since I have no opportunity to slip the stuff to you secretly, I'm taking the chance that you are seriously interested in curing yourself. When you're ready for therapy, tell me.'

  Hal took the bottle to his apartment. Every day, its contents went quietly and carefully into the beetlejuice he got for Jeannette. He hoped that he was psychologist enough to cure her once the Easyglow took effect.

  Although he didn't know it, he was himself being 'cured' by Fobo. His almost daily talks with the empathist instilled doubts about the religion and science of the Haijacs. Fobo read the biographies of Isaac Sigmen and the Worfo: the Pre-Torah, The Western Talmud, the Revised Scriptures, the Foundations of Serialism, Time and Theology, The Self and the World Line. Calmly sitting at his table with a glass of juice in his hand, the wog challenged the mathematics of the dunnologists. Hal proved; Fobo disproved. He pointed out that the mathematics was based mainly on false-to-fact assumptions; that Dunne's and Sigmen's reasoning was buttressed by too many false analogies, metaphors, and strained interpretations. Remove the buttresses, and the structure fell.

  'Moreover and to continue,' Fobo said, 'allow and permit me to point out one more in a score of contradictions embodied in your theology. You Sigmenites believe that every person is responsible for any event happening to him, that no one else but the self may be blamed. If you, Hal Yarrow, stumbled on a toy left by some careless child – happy, happy infant with no responsibilities! – and skinned your elbow, you did so because you really wanted to hurt yourself. If you are seriously hurt in an 'accident,' it was no accident; it was you agreeing to actualize a potentiality. Contrarily, you could have agreed with your self not to be involved, and so actualized a different future.

  'If you commit a crime, you wish to do so. If you get caught, it is not
because you were stupid in the commission of the crime or because the Uzzites were more clever or because circumstances worked out to make you fall into the hands of – what is your vernacular for them, the uzz? No, it was because you wished to be caught; you, somehow, controlled the circumstances.

  'If you die, it is because you wanted to die, not because someone pointed a gun at you and pulled the trigger. You died because you willed to intercept the bullet; you agreed with the killer that you could be killed.

  'Of course, this philosophy, this belief, is very shib for the Sturch, for it relieves them of any blame if they have to chastise or execute or unjustly tax you or in any way take uncivil liberties with you. Obviously, if you did not wish to be chastised or executed or taxed or dealt with in an unfair way, you would not permit it.

  'Of course, if you do disagree with the Sturch or try to defy it, you do so because you are trying to realize a pseudofuture, one condemned by the Sturch. You, the individual, can't win.

  'Yet, hear and listen to this: You also believe that you yourself have perfect free will to determine the future. But the future has been determined because Sigmen had gone ahead in time and arranged it. Sigmen's brother, Jude Changer, may temporarily disarrange the future and the past, but Sigmen will eventually restore the desired equilibrium.

  'Let me ask and question you, how can you yourself determine the future when the future has been determined and forecast by Sigmen? One state or the other may be correct, but not both.'

  'Well,' Hal said, his face hot, his chest feeling as if a heavy weight were on it, his hands shaking, 'I have thought of that very question.'

  'Did you ask anyone?'

  'No,' Hal said, feeling trapped. 'We were allowed to ask questions, of course, of our teachers. But that question was not on the list.'

  'You mean to tell me that your questions were written out for you and you were confined to those?'

  'Well, why not?' Hal said angrily. 'Those questions were for our benefit. The Sturch knew from long experience what questions students ask, so it listed them for the less bright.'

  'Less bright is right,' said Fobo. 'And I suppose that any questions not on the list were considered too dangerous, too conducive to unrealistic thinking?'

  Hal nodded miserably.

  Fobo went on in his relentless dissection. Worse, far worse than anything he had said were his next words, for they were a personal attack on the sacrosanct self of Sigmen himself.

  He said that the Forerunner's biographies and theological writings revealed him to an objective reader as a sexually frigid and woman-hating man with a Messiah complex and paranoid and schizophrenic tendencies which burst through his icy shell from time to time in religious-scientific frenzies and fantasies.

  'Other men,' Fobo said, 'must have stamped their personalities and ideas upon their times. But Sigmen had and advantage over those great leaders who came before him. Because of Earth's rejuvenation serums, he lived long enough, not only to set up his kind of society, but also to consolidate it and weed out its weaknesses. He didn't die until the cement of his social form had hardened.'

  'But the Forerunner didn't die,' Yarrow protested. 'He left in time. He is still with us, traveling down the fields of presentation, skipping here and there, now to the past, now to the future. Always, whereever he is needed to turn pseudotime into real time, he is there.'

  'Ah, yes,' Fobo smiled. 'That was the reason you went to the ruins, was it not? To check up on a mural which hinted that the Ozagen humans had once been visited by a man from another star? You thought it might have been the Forerunner, didn't you?'

  'I still think so,' said Hal. 'But my report showed that though the man resembled Sigmen somewhat, the evidence was too inconclusive. The Forerunner may or may not have visited this planet a thousand years ago.'

  'Be that as it may, I maintain your theses are meaningless. You claim that his prophecies came true. I say, first, that they were ambiguously stated. Second, if they have been realized it is because your powerful state-church – which you economically term the Sturch – has made strenuous efforts to fulfill them.

  'Furthermore, this pyramidal society of yours – this guardian-angel administration – where every twenty-five families have a gapt to supervise their most intimate and minute details, and every twenty-five family-gapts have a block-gapt at their head, and every fifty block-gapts are directed by a supervisor-gapt, and so on – this society is based on fear and ignorance and suppression.'

  Hal, shaken, angered, shocked, would get up to leave. Fobo would call him back and ask him to disprove what he'd said. Hal would let loose a flood of wrath. Sometimes, when he had finished, he would be asked to sit down and continue the discussion. Sometimes, Fobo would lose his temper; they would shout and scream insults. Twice, they fought with fists; Hal got a bloody nose, and Fobo a black eye. Then the wog, weeping, would embrace Hal and ask for his forgiveness, and they would sit down and drink some more until their nerves were calmed.

  Hal knew that he should not listen to Fobo, should not allow himself to be in a situation where he could hear such unrealism. But he could not stay away. And, though he hated Fobo for what he said, he derived a strange satisfaction and fascination from the relationship. He could not cut himself off from this being whose tongue cut and flayed him far more painfully than Pornsen's whip ever had.

  He told Jeannette of these incidents. She encouraged him to tell them over and over again until he had talked away the stress and strain of grief and hate and doubt. Afterward, there was always love such as he had never thought possible. For the first time, he knew that man and woman could become one flesh. His wife and he had remained outside the circle of each other, but Jeannette knew the geometry that would take him in and the chemistry that would mix his substance with hers.

  Always, too, there was the light and the drink. But they did not bother him. Unknown to her, she was now drinking a liquor almost entirely Easyglow. And he had gotten used to the light above their bed. It was one of her quirks. Fear of the dark wasn't behind it, because it was only while making love that she required that the lamp be left on. He didn't understand it. Perhaps she wanted to impress his image on her memory, always to have it if she ever lost him. If so, let her keep the light.

  By its glow he explored her body with an interest that was part sexual and part anthropological. He was delighted and astonished at the many small differences between her and Terran women. There was a small appendage of skin on the roof of her mouth that might have been the rudiment of some organ whose function had been long ago cast aside by evolution. She had twenty-eight teeth; the wisdom teeth were missing. That might or might not have been a characteristic of her mother's people.

  He suspected that she had either an extra set of pectoral muscles or else an extraordinarily well developed normal set. Her large and cone-shaped breasts did not sag. They were high and firm and pointed slightly upward: the ideal of feminine beauty so often portrayed through the ages by male sculptors and painters and so seldom existing in nature.

  She was not only a pleasure to look at; she was pleasing to be with. At least once a week she would greet him with a new garment. She loved to sew; out of the materials he gave her she fashioned blouses, skirts, and even gowns. Along with the change in dress went new hairdos. She was ever new and ever beautiful, and she made him realize for the first time that a woman could be beautiful. Or perhaps she made him realize that a human being could be beautiful. And a thing of beauty was a joy, if not forever, then for a long time.

  His enjoyment of her, and hers of him, was hastened and strengthened by her linguistic fluency. She seemed to have switched from her French to American almost overnight. Within a week she was speaking, within her limited but quickly increasing vocabulary, faster and more expressively than he.

  However, his delight in her company made him neglect his duties. His progress in learning to read Siddo slowed down.

  One day, Fobo asked him how he was doing with the books he'd loane
d him. Hal confessed that they were too difficult for him – so far. Fobo then gave him a book on evolution which was used in the wog elementary schools.

  'Try these. They're two volumes, but they're rather slim in text. The many pictures will enable you to grasp the text more quickly. It's an abridgement for the youngsters by a famous educator, We'enai.'

  Jeannette had much more time to study than Hal, since she had little to do in the apartment while he was gone during the day. She tackled the new boob, and so Hal fell into the lazy habit of allowing her to translate for him. She would first read the Siddo aloud and then translate into American. Or, if her vocabulary failed her, into French.

  One evening, she started out energetically enough. But she was sipping beetlejuice between paragraphs, and after a while she began to lose interest in the translating.

  She went through the first chapter, which described the formation of the planet and the beginnings of life. In the second chapter, she yawned quite openly and looked at Hal, but he closed his eyes and pretended not to notice. So she read of the rise of the wogs from a prearthropod that had changed its mind and decided to become a chordate. We'enai made some heavy jests about the contrariness of the wogglebugs since that fateful day, and then took up, in the third chapter, the story of mammalian evolution on the other large continent of Ozagen which climaxed in man.

  She quoted,' "But man, like us, had its mimical parasites. One was a different species of the so-called tavern beetle. It, instead of resembling a wog, looked like a man. Like its counterpart, it could fool no intelligent person, but its gift of alcohol made it very acceptable to man. It, too, accompanied its host from primitive times, became an integral part of his civilization, and, finally, according to one theory, a large cause of man's downfall.

  ' "Humanity's disappearance from the face of Ozagen is due not only to the tavern beetle, if it was at all. That creature can be controlled. Like most things, it can be abused or its purpose distorted so that it becomes a menace.