On the Planet of Bottled Brains

by Harry Harrison

  "No, I don't," Bill said, desperation in his voice, a trapped feeling coursing through every fibre of his being.

  "I keep on forgetting you weren't born here," Illyria said. "An Usladish look is what we call a look that means, I know you're up to something sneaky and rotten but I'm not going to tell anybody about it yet because I'm sort of sneaky and rotten myself."

  "They don't have that feeling where I come from," Bill said.

  "No? How curious. Anyhow, I'm going to have to stay away for a while. But don't worry, I'm working on your case."

  "Hurry up, while I'm still inside this head," Bill said.

  Since then quite a few days and nights had gone by since he had seen her. Exactly how many he didn't know, because Tsuris seemed to have an odd fluttery sort of movement around its sun, resulting in days and nights of differing lengths. Some days were what the Tsurisians called Tiger Days, or was it Picket-Fence Days? The translation was a little difficult. Those days in which the sun rose and set every hour on the hour, striping the planet in yellow and black. He decided to make a mark on the wall to mark each period of light. He didn't know why he was doing this but it was what guys in cells were always doing in the stories he used to read back home in the hayrick behind the manure pile back on his parents' farm on Phigerinadon. He tried the mark system, but when he came to do his next mark, he found that he had put his mark close to a mark already on the wall which he hadn't noticed. Unless he had marked two light periods without remembering it. Or had marked one light period twice absentmindedly. The more he thought about it, the more he decided that mark-making in prison was the sort of thing you ought to study in school before trying it in field conditions. So mostly he sat. There were no books or newspapers available, and no television. Luckily there was a small switch on the side of his translator that let him switch it from "Translate" to "Converse". Bill felt a little silly doing it, but there didn't seem to be anyone else around to talk to.

  "Hello," he said.

  "'Alo," the translator said. "'Ow are you, heh?"

  "Why are you speaking with a stupid accent?" Bill asked.

  "Because I am a translator, that's why, Buster." The thing sounded very miffed. "It would falsify my position and my image if I didn't allow impurities inherited from the many languages I deal with to creep into my talk during my conversational phase."

  "That's a pretty dim reason," Bill said.

  "Well not to me, squishy repulsive non-machine creature!" the translator said heatedly.

  "There is no reason to get insulting," Bill muttered. A mechanical sniff of annoyance was his only answer. After this there was a long silence. Then Bill said, "Seen any good movies lately?"

  "What?" said the translator.

  "Movies," Bill said.

  "Are you crazy or something? I am a tiny transistorized gadget lodged under your right armpit. Or on your ear. I get about. How would I ever get to see a movie?"

  "I was just making a joke," Bill said.

  "They didn't tell us about jokes," the translator complained. "Is that enough?"

  "Enough what?"

  "Conversation."

  "No, of course not! I've just begun!"

  "But you see, I've almost used up the conversational capacity which was built into me. I will still carry on as your translator, of course, but I very much regret telling you that the conversational aspect of our relationship is at an end. Over and out."

  "Translator?" Bill said after a while.

  Silence from the translator.

  "Haven't you got any words left at all?" Bill asked.

  "Just this," the translator said. And that was the last word Bill was able to get out of him.

  It was soon after that that he heard the second voice.

  The second voice came to him that night, after his evening meal of a raspberry brain malted and a plate of what tasted like fried chicken livers but looked like orange gumdrops. He was reading his shirt labels under the light of a lamp called a Blind Philistine because it shines indifferently on whatever is put in front of it. He was just stretching for a yawn, when a voice from behind him said, "Listen."

  Bill gave a violent start and looked around in all directions. There was no one in the room with him.

  As if to confirm his observation, the voice said, "No, I'm not in the room."

  "Where are you, then?"

  "That's a little difficult to explain."

  "You can at least try."

  "No, not today."

  "Then what do you want?"

  "I want to help you, Bill."

  Bill had heard that before. Still, it was always good to hear. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub and looked around the room again. Nope, nobody there. "I could use some help," Bill said. "Can you get me out of here?"

  "I can," the voice said, "if you do exactly what I tell you."

  "And what are you going to tell me to do?"

  "Something that may seem crazy to you. But it is of the utmost urgency that you do it with conviction and precision."

  "Just what is it you want me to do?"

  "You're not going to like it."

  "Tell me or shut up!" Bill screeched. "This is doing my nerves no good. I don't care if I like it or not, if it'll help me get out of here I'll do it. Now — tell me!"

  "Bill, can you pat your head with one hand and rub your belly with the other simultaneously?"

  "I don't think so," Bill said. He tried and failed. "See? I was right."

  "But you can learn how, can't you?"

  "Why should I?"

  "Because there is a chance you can get out of your predicament. Your continuing existence as a being with a mind of his own depends on you doing exactly what I tell you when I tell you."

  "I see," Bill said, not seeing at all but going along with all this stupidity since he had very little choice. "Would you mind telling me who you are?"

  "Not now," the voice said.

  "I see," Bill said. "There are reasons, I suppose?"

  "Yes, but I can't tell them to you. Will you do as I say, Bill? Now practice. I'll be back."

  And then the voice was gone.

  A delegation of Tsurisian doctors came to Bill's cell the next morning. Two of them were of the familiar spherical shape. Another was controlling what appeared to be the body of a large collie. With lots of fleas for he kept scratching with one hind leg. The final two may have been Chingers at some other time in their existence because they were shiny green and quite lizardy.

  "Time for the good old protoplasm vat," Dr Vesker said in a cheerful voice. That was his name. "I am Dr Vesker," he said so Bill would know too. Bill could not have cared less.

  These Tsurisian males were doctors, as could be told by the long, loose-fitting white coats they wore, and the stethoscopes sticking rakishly from their pockets. All of them spoke Standard, Classical, or Tsurisian, so Bill's translator, which was still implanted under his armpit, was able to handle the language without difficulty. One of the first questions Bill asked was, "Doc, how am I?"

  "You're doing fine, just fine," the doctor said.

  "Well, if I'm all right, how about letting me out of here?"

  "Oh, there's no rush for that, I'm sure," the doctor said, and left with a little chuckle.

  "What did he mean by that little chuckle?" Bill asked Illyria after the doctors had left.

  "You know how doctors are," Illyria said. "They find anything funny."

  "What's supposed to happen to me when I'm released from here?"

  "Must we talk about that?" Illyria said. "It's been such a nice day, why spoil it?"

  Illyria got transferred to nights. She and Bill would talk about many things. Bill learned that the Tsurisians had been living on this planet of Tsuris for much longer than anyone could remember. There was a theory that, when Tsuris was born out of the fiery explosions of Eeyore, its yellowish-red sun, all of the intelligences which now lived on the planet as Tsurisians were born with it. Bill didn't understand what she meant. Illyria had t
o explain that there were no real births or deaths on Tsuris. All of the intelligences who had ever lived here were still around, existing unconsciously in a psychovivant solution of natural electrolytes.

  "All of them?" Bill asked. "How many are there?"

  "Exactly one billion," Illyria told him. "No more and no less. And they — we — have all been here since the beginning. Some day I must show you where those without bodies are waiting. Or resting as we call it. They are in bottles —"

  "A billion brains in bottles! That's an awful lot of bottles."

  "Indeed it is and we had to scour the galaxy for them. We have wine bottles, beer bottles, soft drink bottles — just about every kind of bottle that you can name."

  "Whee," Bill oozed, depressed again. "And why should there be exactly one billion?"

  "The ways of the Deity are strange," Illyria said. She was a religious woman — a practicing member of the Church of Very Little Charities. Despite that she was a pleasant companion, and more broad-minded than most Tsurisian females. Or so she told Bill.

  Bill wondered, naturally enough, what was to become of him. Illyria didn't seem to want to talk about it. She would grow somber, or indicate whatever passed for somber whenever Bill raised the topic. Her bluish-yellow eyes would cloud over. Her voice would grow husky.

  Bill was having a good time, all things considered. The only work required of him, if you wanted to call it that, was a two-hour session in the nutrient bath. Never had his skin been so soft. His fingernails were getting soft, too. Even the claws on his alligator foot, which had grown to respectable size now, were starting to soften up. Once he asked Illyria why they were giving him so many baths, but she said she'd rather not talk about it.

  Illyria was fascinated by Bill's foot. At first it had frightened her, and she had insisted that he wear a velvet sock over it. But after a while she became used to the green alligator's foot, and would ask to see it, and pull his talons gently with her fingerlike appendages, the way mother vultures play with the talons of baby vultures.

  Once Illyria had asked him how he was in math. "Not very good," Bill said. "I needed two terms in special technical training school and that was no good. I had to get special math injection brain treatments before I could do simple addition on an electronic computer."

  "We don't allow any of those here," Illyria said. "Everybody does math in their heads."

  "So if everyone else does math, why should I have to?"

  Illyria sighed and did not reply. The doctors came in next morning. There were three of them. They wore shapes different from the other ones. Bill learned that this was common on Tsuris.

  "But how come you have so many different shapes?" Bill asked.

  "The one thing that has always been lacking on our planet," a doctor tells him, "is the normal function of birth and death. When our world came into existence, all of the intelligences were already here, in the form of water droplets inside large purplish clouds. It took a very long time before any physical forms came about here. Even then, they came from off planet. An expedition from some other world. We were able, with our superior intelligences, at least in regard to devices for taking things over, to incorporate them. Thus our life on Tsuris got a Physical basis. Unfortunately, none of us was able to have children, though I can assure you, the men tried every bit as hard as the women. The results? Zilch. Therefore we're always on the lookout for likely bits of protoplasm in which we can house unborn members of our race."

  "I hear what you're saying," Bill said, "and I don't think I like it."

  "There's nothing personal about it," the doctor said.

  "Nothing personal about what?" Bill asked, fearing the worst.

  "Nothing personal about our decision to make use of your body. Assuming you fail the intelligence test, that is."

  "You're going a little too fast for me," Bill said. "What intelligence test?"

  "Didn't Illyria mention it to you? We require of all visitors to our planet to take an intelligence test. Those who fail get reused."

  Bill saw that he had been correct to fear the worst. Even now, before he knew what the worst was, exactly, he could see that it was going to be a bad sort of worst.

  "What's the intelligence test?" he asked.

  "Just a few simple questions."

  The doctor then rattled off a sentence which Bill didn't understand even when it was translated into English for him by his translator. The sentence contained words like "cosine" and "square root of minus one" and "log log" and "sigma" and "rhomboid" and other words that Bill didn't even recognize as English. Temporizing, he asked if he could have the thing written out.

  The next question involved imaginary numbers, transfinite numbers, Kantor's number, and several other numbers, all applied to something called lobachevskian geometry. Bill failed this one too. He fared no better on any of the other questions.

  "Well, old chap," the doctor said, "no offense, but the results of our tests show that you have an intelligence so minuscule as to not even show on our charts."

  "It's just math," Bill said, "I was never able to do math. But you could quiz me on geography, for example, or history —"

  "Sorry," the doctor said, "the only test we use is the mathematical one. So much more precise, you know."

  "Yes, I know," Bill groaned. "No, wait a minute! I'm just as smart as anybody here! Maybe smarter — and I got medals to prove it. I'm a hero, a galactic hero awarded the highest awards awardable by the military. I just don't happen to be from a race that does math in its head. Most of us don't, that is."

  "I really am sorry," the doctor said. "And also, PS, we are not so keen on military awards. You are a fairly amiable, albeit stupid, sentient being, and so keen at times is the expression on your face that one could almost believe you understand what is being said to you. Too bad. It's the protoplasm vat for you, my lad."

  "What happens there?" Bill moaned.

  "We have a special process that dedifferentiates your special-purpose cells, thus rendering you fit for rebirth by one of the Tsurisians. The nutrient baths were to soften up your skin for the protoplasm vat in case the intelligence test turned out the way it did. A simple precaution that is now paying off."

  Bill swore and cursed and prayed, and fought and kicked and foamed at the mouth. But it was no good. The doctors were adamant. And a hell of a lot stronger en masse. They seized him, struggling and screaming, rushed him out of his room and down the corridor into a room where a special holding tank bubbled and frothed. Bill bubbled and frothed as well but resistance was useless. They splashed him into the tank.

  "This will soften you up even further, and you will enjoy it," the doctor said with obvious insincerity.

  The next day they strapped him to a wheelchair and wheeled him down the hall. Past a room with its door open. Inside was a huge vat of protoplasm, colored a sort of undigested greenish brown. It was rather repellent and looked more than a little bit like an octopus that had lost its stiffening. The protoplasm bubbled and gurgled, throwing up turgid waves now and then — on the end of which were large, bulging eyes. The eyes stared wildly for a moment before the wave collapsed into the rest of the liquid.

  They put Bill into a special cell where he was fed nutritious food preparatory to reusing his body. When he ate it he cheered up. As soon as he was finished however he became instantly depressed because every ounce of muscle, every inch of fat around his waistline brought him that much closer to the conversion vat. And, if that wasn't enough, one other thing bothered him. "When I am all dissolved away, what happens to my brain?"

  "We use that too," the guard on his ward told him.

  "Then what happens to me?" Bill asked tremulously, wanting to know. And really not wanting to know.

  "That is an interesting question," the guard mused. "You will be present physically, of course. But as for the person inside you who says, I am I, well, that part will be, I am forced to say, to put it as nicely as I can, gone."

  Bill moaned. "Where will it
go to?"

  "Difficult to say," the guard told him. "Anyhow, you won't even be around to ask the question and frankly I don't give a damn."

  They fed Bill on yard-wide slices of liver, he shuddered at the thought of what sort of animal it had come from, and cubical fish eggs, and forced him to drink twenty-one milkshakes every day made mostly of homogenized brains. Even with strawberry flavoring it was not a good drink. He was getting more than a little depressed about all this. It was no consolation for him at all to know that his body and brain would be used to house one of Tsuris's most eminent statesmen, old Veritain Redrabble, one of the greatest statesmen of all the previous years. This didn't comfort Bill in the slightest. In fact it depressed him even more. That his priceless body gunk should be recycled as a politician was too awful to contemplate.

  Since he did not want to blame himself for his inborn bucolic stupidity he tried to blame his translator instead.

  "Why didn't you help me out with the math quiz?"

  "Hell," the translator said, "I can't do that stuff either."

  "If only we could get word to the military," Bill moaned. "If they sent a math whizz the situation could still be saved."

  "For the math whizz maybe, but not for you," the translator intoned with electronic sadism. "And anyway they don't send math whizzes to explore alien planets," the translator pointed out.

  "I know," Bill gritted through clenched teeth, "but I can dream, can't I? You wouldn't take even a man's dreams away from him?"

  "I am totally indifferent to the matter," the translator said, then turned itself off.

  After Bill had been in his special cell with the padded walls for two days, Illyria came to visit him. She sat in his cell for hours, encouraging him to talk about his childhood, his military service, his adventures on strange planets. Bill found he was getting very fond of Illyria. Although she looked to him like all the other Tsurisians, her manner was different. She was sympathetic, feminine. Her voice was low and pleasing. Sometimes, in the darkness of the cell, Bill thought he could see the suggestion of breasts on the gleaming metal of her midpoint sphere. He was even starting to think that her skinny black legs were pretty cute, although, of course, there were too many of them. But deep down he knew that these images were brought on by desperation. He could never really love a woman composed of three spheres. Two spheres maybe, that was kind of a familiar image. But not three.