The Snake Oil Wars

by Parke Godwin

  “Just putting it in. Difficult to fit.”

  “Shouldn’t wander, it’s his. This is hers.”

  “Thanks. I can’t find her appendix anywhere.”

  “Check for a scar, Maybe she had it out.”

  “So she did. You are a treasure, darling.”

  Even with the essentials restored, Lance didn’t look right to Coyul. He squished and rattled with every movement. Ego had dictated the lapse into Eastwood. Now pure burgeoning libido seized his loins. Never hugely endowed and still in shock, Lance awarded himself a penis out of legend.

  “Now, now. Eyes bigger than our stomachs.”

  “I like it,” Lance rasped. “How’m I doing?”

  “Epic, my boy, but in view of human limitations, shouldn’t we downscale a bit?”

  On second thought, Lance modified the impractical organ to something fine but realistic.

  “Feeling our old self?” Coyul inquired.

  “Reborn,” Lance managed hollowly. “Through suffering.”

  Letti’s assault had not diminished his inexhaustible flair for self-dramatization. The erstwhile hero rose on one elbow like a child’s toy incorrectly assembled, blinking at Coyul. Whether the difference in him resulted from maladjustment or trauma, Lance’s mien was definitely changed. “That... damn, I can’t even talk.”

  “Thought so. Open up. Say ah.”

  “Ug...”

  “Yes, I certainly did,” Coyul clucked over him. “Purji, we have the teeth mixed up.”

  She brightened, a problem solved. “That’s why she looks so paleolithic. Need your teeth back, angel. Sorry about that.”

  There was another glitch, a small damp object that should go somewhere in Scheherazade but Purji hadn’t a clue. “What is this? Never saw one before.”

  Coyul squinted at the unlovely bit of viscera. “Oh, it’s her gall bladder. Throw it away; she’ll never miss it.”

  “That’s not tidy.”

  “So be a purist. Put it in.”

  Scheherazade floated upward to total awareness, gratefully sensing a whole body again where anything below the neck had been conspicuous by absence. As with Lance, ego and libido cut a disruptive swath through Purji’s efforts to help. Her breasts blossomed to pure Monroe beneath a rugged but incongruous resemblance to Rock Hudson. Beyond her fog, the sexiest voice in creation was encouraging gently. Her own nature responded with radically altered signals.

  “Try for consistency, child.”

  That was the problem of a mercurial lifetime. Changes were coming. Scheherazade had felt their onset for days. Her eyes, puttering open, were rewarded with sight of the most ravishing creature fate would ever set within human reach. Like Lance, she was reborn, but with an arresting difference. She felt healthy, aggressive and horny. Gazing up at that peach-and-honey vision, Ms. Ginsberg salivated.

  “Sherry...?”

  Somewhere close by she heard the voice calling, but destiny pulsed in Scheherazade like fevered blood in her ears, drowning out all but that ineffable siren-voice and that smiling, luscious mouth she longed to kiss.

  “You are the most.” She stroked Purji’s flawless cheek. “I would love to lunch on your boobs.”

  Purji had a moment of uncertainty. “Did I get everything in the right place?”

  “Perfecto, baby.”

  “I didn’t forget something?”

  Wolf Girl whispered huskily, “Let’s go somewhere and check it out.”

  18

  The treacherous Wycherley

  LETTI LOPS LANCE AND LADY

  CANDOR AND OTHER WOMAN RECUPERATING

  CANDOR TRIAL SUMS TODAY

  No court, no solid appurtenance of the law, no spectators. Only the starscattered dark Void and eleven human figures shadowed or sun-silvered as they drifted two thousand miles above Earth. The group kept their approximate court positions, six jurors in one group, Coyul and Speed to one side, Helm to the other, all facing Aurelius and the clerk.

  To Speed, the jury looked uncomfortable. Few were equal to the loneliness and isolation that bore down on humans in space. The first to be truly fit for it were being bred in this century, and who could say how their descendants would imagine infinity when light-distant wonders became common?

  “Here no plebes will disrupt consideration,” Aurelius began. “No cameras will translate clean thought to false image. Here in this silence, a thought is heard like a plucked note in a still room. The court has considered how often human truth is drowned in human need or fear. Let us then give as much consideration to that purity as to music. Counsels and jury present, we may proceed with summation. Mr. Speed?”

  As that awkward scarecrow floated out to face the jury, Coyul found it amazing that none of the Americans on that panel had yet recognized him, but why should they? They were used to the statues and his sonorous words dulled to platitude in the mouths of gaseous politicians. The original voice was unimpressive, the man himself a disappointment to myth-seekers. Only the eyes held to the legend, the look of a man grown up facing west to endless forest when the heart alone put limits to freedom. He first saw men in chains in New Orleans and carried the scar of that sight for a lifetime along with a definition of liberty as deeply etched.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Speed addressed the jury. “This has been a civil trial for damages based on the Defendant’s assumption that my client’s identity was other than as testified. Coyul is not the Devil but what he represents, an alien charged with developing our potential to its fullest. You’ve heard his testimony and Purji’s in corroboration of his origins. You’ve heard Yeshua of Narareth, and finally the Defendant himself in what we must assume is an accurate representation of the beliefs of his church. I need hardly remark that the issues at stake overshadow both Plaintiff and Defendant in their magnitude. Let me then deal with those issues.

  “My colleague speaks for one side of that question which has confronted men for thousands of years: the need for absolutes in a world that keeps changing. He offers as a solution to contradictory mandates a rigid totality of belief. Expedients, like healing drugs, must be administered with care. The moment you resort to morphine against great pain, you begin a chain of dependency that grows and strengthens with each repeated dose. Mr. Helm will tell you that the end justifies the means. Absolute power as a means to a benevolent end. No. As with the pain killer, we cannot come unaddicted from the abuse. We can say as much for history. We cannot escape or ignore it.

  “Two sides of an irreducible argument are put before you. Can Man live by rationale alone? Not without hungering for an Infinite, a God he can conceive but not encompass. What men can imagine, they will carve. Can he live by faith alone? Not without throwing blinders over his common sense and leading it like a frightened horse through the fire of reality, a threat in every ray of light that pierces the cover.

  “We are left with a disparity, the price Man pays for his humanity, that he can look up at the stars around us and feel small in one breath and in the next wonder what is beyond them. The ideal versus the actual. The political realities of a free people in a working but flawed democracy, versus the absolute of God’s law. That which must change versus that which is immutable. We must live with this enduring disparity. To deny one side for the other is to deny half of our nature. To destroy either for the sake of the other is spiritual suicide for both, the free faith and the free mind.

  “This is the kernel, the core of what you have heard and must weigh. If my colleague is right, then every secular doubt or objection that enters your mind is a deviation from and a danger to the stasis of God’s law, punishable by the secular arm. If he’s right, then there are nothing but absolutes, and we who wonder, question or deny are alien. Our very powers of reason become at worst evil and at best insanity, an imbalance that threatens perfection.

  “If you find for the Plaintiff, you live and believe as you will – imperfect, incomplete, untidy, inconsistent and illogical as that life and faith may be. If you find for the Defenda
nt, tomorrow someone like my learned colleague will be telling you what to believe or risk trial yourself.

  “Well – it’s been said, perhaps in the course of this trial, certainly in America within the last few years, that ‘democracy is the great love of the cowards and failures in life.’ I don’t know how that goes down with you, but it sticks in my craw. When the fat’s boiled down to soap, I’m giving you a choice. Mr. Helm is telling you to buy him or else.”

  I suppose Barion and I didn’t do too badly at all, Coyul thought as Speed relinquished the jury to Peter Helm. Trouble is, like pure radium in pitch blend, for every Josh Speed, you get thousands of Helms and billions of Candors.

  He took his lawyer’s hand, very much wanting to hail him by his rightful name. “Josh, if I were a constitutional monarch instead of an appointee, I’d make you a knight. But you’d probably argue with that, too.”

  “Don’t polish your dubbing sword,” Speed cautioned, eyeing Helm. “We ain’t out of the woods yet. How’d the jury feel to you?”

  “Master Wycherley seemed pensive, but he’s read that way all along. The stockbroker is bored, more curious about the Dow Jones closing index than your arguments. The Lutheran suspects Helm, both women hate your guts, but at least the Catholic stayed awake.”

  True, they were still deep in the wildwood.

  “This is indeed a civil trial,” Helm began before the jury. “Had it been criminal, my client might have been able to put before you a clearer picture of his motives. As it is, the Devil as Plaintiff chose a case which allowed him to cloud the contention with irrelevant testimony. Such as his alleged alien identity, corroborated by whom? Another alleged alien. To which he added testimony by someone who alleged himself as Christ. The meat of this testimony alone would constitute a separate trial for evaluation and strain the wisdom of theologians, let alone the six honest lay persons of a civil jury. In this ploy, one perceives more tactic than truth.

  “My client did not perjure himself on the stand. I need not hammer on this point. You were witness. He defined his beliefs in direct examination and reaffirmed them in cross, beliefs which some of you and a majority of the court spectators continue to hold sacred. He declined to answer only in regard to an essentially irrelevant issue, his mistress. We can conclude nothing about Mr. Candor from this – or the unruly interruption of the woman in question – but that he committed a sin of the flesh, regrettable but not central to this case. We can conclude a great deal more about the moral timbre of my colleague in raising the issue to confuse your judgment.

  “As Mr. Speed chose to do, let me address the deeper ramifications of this trial. If you arc honest with yourself, you cannot choose between convenient parts of two opposed philosophies and call them the considered product of your conscience. There is no melding point between fallible human authority and the clear mandate of God. Then ask: how much of human error has stemmed from attempts at such an adulteration and palpable compromise? Set the immutable law of God as laid down in Scripture against human precepts bent and twisted every day to suit secular purposes. You cannot shop for moral right as between competitive goods in a common market.

  “I have wondered in the course of this trial on the question of right and challenged even my own conclusions. Question the inerrancy of God’s law in Scripture and it fails of reason. What is conclusive in that? Deny the founding logic of any assumption and it falls. These are intellectual games and evasions invented by the fallible mind of Man, a creature in whose inherent nobility Mr. Speed misplaces so much faith.

  “Question the law of God – and find that through all the translations, that word remains constant. Question the law of God, divide between Caesar’s due and that of God, and find that one makes the other impossible. Question the will of God and you find that nothing can exist outside that will, not even evil can exert one finger without that will. Question as you will and find that your life and actions have been based either on a mountain of vague questions or one clear answer.

  “If you are all, as you profess, faithful Christians, quite obviously this Topside is not the end, not Heaven but a limbo known even to the pagans. A way station on our journey to judgment, neither good nor bad, neither edged with suffering nor gilt with reward. Does that prove that these ultimates do not exist? Grant a doubt there, then in what condition will you arrive at that final disposition of your own case?

  “Find for the Plaintiff, by whatever name he calls himself, and you must conclude that what you have believed all your life and even now is only a relative truth. A shifting, temporary expedient as so much else of human belief. Find for him and you choose the vague question in which the very lack of clarity affords a cowardly comfort and evasion.

  “Find for the Defendant and you reaffirm that belief in the eternal which has sustained you. That witness who called himself Jesus said himself on the stand: not the fact of his identity but the faith in it that shaped our beliefs and our survival as a people.

  “Whatever his failings as a man, Lance Candor acted from that faith. How stands your own, and what will you do for it?” Helm floated away from the jury to resume his place.

  “I commend both counsels for clear presentation of their arguments,” Aurelius said, “and for refraining from those earlier tactics which necessitated this change of venue.”

  He gave final instructions to the jury regarding their latitude of verdict. They might find for either side or in any degree between Plaintiff and Defendant or rest evenly divided, needing only a majority to one side or the other. Aurelius directed them to deliberate at some distance from the court. None of them could return Topside for any reason until a verdict had been reached. The jury trailed oft after Wycherley until they were small in the distance.

  “Now we wait,” said Speed. “The machine is in motion and can’t be stopped. I wouldn’t have it any other way. He would.” Meaning Helm, alone and apart from the court, turned outward to the Void, his whole stance one of defiance. “He hates it out here,” Coyul remarked, “but he won’t give in. As much of a gadfly to his time as you were to yours.”

  “You know him then?”

  “I know him. Finally.”

  “Who?” Speed asked eagerly, “I’d like to know myself.”

  “He has his reasons for being Helm as you have for being Josh Speed, I must respect them. But he’s found you out.”

  “And informed my wife,” Speed nodded gloomily. “Wonder he didn’t make it public.”

  That would have been bad trial strategy, Coyul explained. People saw surfaces and labels. To name Speed would have been to run him up on a flagpole, unmistakable as the stars and stripes. Helm would have divided or lost entirely the American sympathy he strove for. By the same token, his own foreign origins would win no support from American Christians notable for chauvinism.

  “So he restricted blackmail to your wife,” Coyul concluded. “She’s on her way Topside. Will you want to see her?”

  Speed considered at length before replying. “No, not yet. Sometime perhaps.”

  The jury, though distant, was animated by disagreement, gesticulating at each other in eloquent pantomime. “Good sign,” Speed diagnosed. “Too quick would be bad news for us.”

  Coyul didn’t quite agree. Out of a job meant out of an impossible dilemma. He and Purji could go where they liked. Nothing grandiose, not even gods but ordinary beings in a quiet place where at last he could begin his cycle of symphonies. Given her leaning toward compassionate deity, Purji might work part-time as a forest sprite, say, prayed to by woodcutters and lost children. Not too shabby as futures went...

  He came out of his reverie at Speed’s light touch on his shoulder. “They’re coming back.”

  “That was quick.”

  “Quick enough,” Speed worried. “And here comes Helm. I hope he doesn’t gloat as well as he argues.”

  Peter Helm braked his momentum a short way from Coyul and Speed. Noting the return of the jury, Aurelius drew in closer from his private meditatio
n.

  “Members of the jury, can you return a true verdict?”

  Matthew Wycherley detached himself from the others and took a position midway between them and Marcus Aurelius, “My lord, we have a verdict. How true and satisfactory, we leave to the court.”

  “Verdict is your office, Master Wycherley. Please elucidate.”

  “We are divided and must render division as a verdict. Jury finds in part for the Defendant. No damages to the Plaintiff. We find in part for the Plaintiff, in that the question of his identity and purposes, despite testimony and argument on either side, is insufficiently proven.”

  “Insuff —” Helm leaped in, “I move for mistrial!”

  “This is, I admit, an ambiguous verdict,” said Aurelius. “Foreman will enlarge on these findings before the court entertains the motion for mistrial.”

  Matthew Wycherley glanced back at his co-jurors, a look that incorporated their disagreement and mutual frustration throughout the trial. “The verdict did stand three to two for the Defendant. I myself cast the vote of balance. Save for myself, this jury is American and of this time. Yet they cannot deny they bring to judgment their forebearers’ several beliefs.”

  Coyul could discern a mixed attitude toward Wycherley in the jurors’ demeanor alone. Only the stockbroker and the Italian stonemason seemed content; the rest were plainly unhappy.

  “Thus did I bring my own belief and custom of law insofar as this court allows. In the north of England and in Scotland, a verdict of insufficient proof was valid to conclude and dismiss a case. According to my conscience, I could not weigh with the majority. No damages to Plaintiff, no measure against Defendant.”

  “This is a mockery of justice,” Helm interjected sharply.

  “More a quandary,” Aurelius vouchsafed. “Master Wycherley, an evenly divided verdict can be final in a civil case. Such a verdict in a case like this – I may now speak of it – where the Plaintiffs authority is at stake, throws open the door to challenge and further trial of the religious issues. A motion has been made for retrial. Have you anything to add before I rule on that motion?”