Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  And what about the sphinx’s sex life? She hung around on the road to Thebes, Greece, which was a long way from Thebes, Egypt, and from the male sphinxes. Had she been like the female black widow spider and made love to men before she devoured them?

  Simon wasn’t particularly randy, but like everybody else he thought a lot about sex.

  The Egyptian sphinx had massiveness and a vast antiquity. The Greek sphinx had class. The Egyptian was ponderosity and masculinity. The Greek was beauty and femaleness. Leave it to the Greeks to make something philosophical out of the merely physical of the Egyptians. The Greeks had made their sphinx a woman because she knew The Secret.

  But she had found somebody who could answer her questions.

  After which she killed herself.

  Simon wasn’t in much danger of having to commit suicide.

  Nobody ever answered his questions.

  The guidebook in his hand said that the sphinx’s face was supposed to have Pharaoh Chephren’s features. The guidebook in his back pocket said that the face was that of the god Harmachis.

  It did not matter which had been right. The reconstituted sphinx now bore the features of a famous movie star.

  The guidebook in his hand also said that the sphinx was 189 feet long and 72 feet high. The one in his pocket said the sphinx was 172 feet long and 66 feet high. Had one of the measuring teams been drunk? Or had the editor been drunk? Or had the typesetter had financial and marital problems? Or had someone maliciously inserted the wrong information just to screw people up?

  Ramona said, “You’re not listening!”

  “Sorry,” Simon said. And he was. This was one of those rare moments when Ramona suddenly became aware that she was talking to herself. She was scared. People who talk to themselves are either insane, deep thinkers, lonely, or all three. She knew she wasn’t crazy or a deep thinker, so she must be lonely. And she feared loneliness worse than drowning, which was her pet horror.

  Simon was lonely, too, but chiefly because he felt that the universe was being unfair in not giving answers to his questions. But now was not the time to think of himself; Ramona needed comforting.

  “Listen, Ramona, here’s a love song for you.”

  It was titled The Anathematic Mathematics of Love. This was one of the poems of “Count” Hippolyt Bruga, né Julius Ganz, an early 20th-century expressionist. Ben Hecht had once written a biography of him, but the only surviving copy was in the Vatican archives. Though critics considered Bruga only a minor poet, Simon loved him best of all and had composed music for many of his works.

  First, though, Simon thought he should explain the references and the situation since she didn’t read anything but True Confessions and best sellers.

  “Robert Browning was a great Victorian poet who married the minor poet Elizabeth Barrett,” he said.

  “I know that,” Ramona said. “I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I saw The Barretts of Wimpole Street on TV last year. With Peck Burton and Marilyn Mamri. It was so sad; her father was a real bastard. He killed her pet dog just because Elizabeth ran off with Browning. Old Barrett had eyes for his own daughter, would you believe it? Well, she didn’t actually run off. She was paralyzed from the waist down, and Peck, I mean Browning, had to push her wheelchair through the streets of London while her father tried to run them down with a horse and buggy. It was the most exciting chase scene I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’ll bet,” Simon said. “So you know about them. Anyway, Elizabeth wrote a series of love poems to Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese. He called her his Portuguese because she was so dark.”

  “How sweet!”

  “Yes. Anyway, the most famous sonnet is the one in which she enumerates the varieties of love she has for him. This inspired Bruga’s poem, though he didn’t set it in sonnet form.”

  Simon sang:

  “How do I love thee? Let me figure

  The ways,” said Liz. But mental additions

  Subtracted from Bob Browning’s emissions,

  Dividing the needed vigor to frig her.

  Here’s what he said to the Portuguese

  In order to part her deadened knees

  “Accounting’s not the thing that counts.

  A plus, a minus, you can shove!

  Oh woman below and man above!

  It’s this inspires the mounts and founts!

  “To hell with Euclid’s beauty bare!

  Liz, get your ass out of that chair!”

  “Those were Bruga’s last words,” Simon said. “He was beaten to death a minute later by an enraged wino.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Ramona murmured.

  “Bruga only did his best work when he was paid on the spot for his instant poetry,” Simon said. “But in this case he was improvising free. He’d invited this penniless bum up to his Greenwich Village apartment to have a few gallons of muscatel with him and his mistress. And see the thanks he got.”

  “Everybody’s a critic,” Ramona said.

  Simon winced. She said, “What’s the matter?”

  He plucked the banjo as if it were a chicken and sang:

  “Why does critic give me a pain?

  Father’s name was Killer Kane.”

  Feathers of sadness fluttered about them. Ramona cackled as if she had just laid an egg. It was, however, nervousness, not joy, that she proclaimed. She always got edgy when he slid into a melancholy mood.

  “It’s such a glorious day,” she said. “How can you be sad when the sun is shining? You’re spoiling the picnic.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “My sun is black. But you’re right. We’re lovers, and lovers should make each other happy. Here’s an old Arabian love song:

  “Love is heavy. My soul is sighing...

  What wing brushes both of us, dearest,

  In the sick and soundless air?”

  It was then that Ramona became aware that his mood came more from the outside than the inside. The breeze had died, and silence as thick and as heavy as the nativity of a mushroom in a diamond mine, or as gas passed during a prayer meeting, had fallen everywhere. The sky was clotted with clouds as black as rotten spots on a banana. Yet, only a minute before, the horizon had been as unbroken as a fake genealogy.

  Simon got to his feet and put his banjo in its case. Ramona busied herself with putting plates and cups in the basket. “You can’t depend on anything,” she said, close to tears. “It never, just never, rains here in the dry season.”

  “How’d those clouds get here without a wind?” Simon said.

  As usual, his question was not answered.

  Ramona had just folded up the blanket when the first raindrops fell. The two started across the top of the sphinx’s head toward the steps but never got to them. The drops became a solid body of water, as if the whole sky were a big decanter that some giant drunk had accidentally tipped over. They were knocked down, and the basket was torn from Ramona’s hands and sent floating over the side of the head. Ramona almost went, too, but Simon grabbed her hand and they crawled to the guard fence at the rim of the head and gripped an upright bar.

  Later, Simon could recall almost nothing vividly. It was one long blur of numbed horror, of brutal heaviness of the rain, cold, teeth chattering, hands aching from squeezing the iron bar, increasing darkness, a sudden influx of people who’d fled the ground below, a vague wondering why they’d crowded onto the top of the sphinx’s head, a terrifying realization of why when a sea rolled over him, his panicked rearing upward to keep from drowning, his loosing of the bar because the water had risen to his nose, a single muffled cry from Ramona, somewhere in the smash and flurry, and then he was swimming with nowhere to go.

  The case with the banjo in it floated before him. He grabbed it. It provided some buoyancy, and after he’d shucked all his clothing, he could stay afloat by hanging onto it and treading water. Once, a camel swam by him with five men battling to get onto its back. Then it went under, and the last he saw of it was one rolling eye.

 
; Sometime later, he drifted by the tip of the Great Pyramid. Clinging to it was a woman who screamed until the rising water filled her mouth. Simon floated on by, vainly trying to comprehend that somehow so much rain had fallen that the arid land of Egypt was now over 472 feet beneath him.

  And then there came the time in the darkness of night and the still almost-solid rain when he prepared to give up his waterlogged ghost and let himself sink. He was too exhausted to fight anymore, it was all over, down the drain for him.

  Simon was an atheist, but he prayed to Jahweh, his father’s god, Mary, his grandmother’s favorite deity, and Gitche Manitou, his mother’s god. It couldn’t hurt.

  Before he was done, he bumped into something solid. Something that was also hollow, since it boomed like a drum beneath the blows of the rain.

  A few seconds afterward, the booming stopped. He was so numb that it was some time before he understood that this was because the rain had also stopped.

  He groped around the object. It was coffin-shaped but far too large to be a coffin unless a dead elephant was in it. Its top was slick, and about eight inches above water. He lifted the banjo case and shoved it inward. The object dipped a little under his weight, but by placing the flats of his palms on it, he got enough friction to pull himself slowly onto the flat surface and then onto its center.

  He lay there panting, face down, too cold and miserable to sleep. Despite which, he went to sleep, though his dreams were not pleasant. But then they seldom were.

  When he awoke, he looked at his watch. It was 07:08. He had slept at least twelve hours, though it hadn’t been refreshing. Then, feeling warm on one side, he turned over slowly. A dog was snuggled up against him. After a while, the dog opened one eye. Simon patted it and lay back face down, his arm around it. He was hungry, which made him wonder if he wouldn’t end up having to eat the dog. Or vice versa. It was a mongrel weighing about sixty pounds to his one hundred and forty. It was probably stronger than he, and bound to be very hungry. Dogs were always hungry.

  He fell asleep again and when he awoke it was night again. The dog was up, a dim yellow-brown, long-muzzled shape walking stiffly around as if it had arthritis. Simon called it to him because he didn’t want it upsetting the delicate balance. It came to him and licked his face, though whether from a need for affection or a desire to find out how he tasted, Simon did not know. Eventually, he fell asleep, waking as stiff as a piece of driftwood (or a bone long buried by a dog). But he was warm. The clouds were gone, the sun was up, and the water on the surface of the object had dried off.

  For the first time, he could see it, though he still did not know what it was. It was about ten feet long and seven wide and had a transparent plastic cover.

  He looked straight down into the face of a dead man.

  3

  THE HWANG HO

  Simon knew now that he was on top of one of the plastic showcases in which mummies of ancient Pharaohs were displayed in a Cairo museum. Airtight, it had floated up out of the building.

  Simon pushed the protesting dog back into the sea and then lowered himself over the edge alongside the animal. He had a hard time raising the lid and sliding it into the water, but he finally succeeded. Then he crawled back over the edge and let himself, and some water, into the case. Standing on the edge of the open coffin on the case’s floor, he hauled the dog in. The dog sniffed at the mummy and began howling.

  After many thousands of years of neglect, the mummy had a mourner.

  Simon got down onto the floor and stared at the falcon face of an ex-ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt. The skin was as tight as a senator from Kentucky and as dry as a government report. Time had sucked out, along with the vital juices, the flesh beneath the skin. But the bones had kept their arrogance.

  Simon looked around the case and found a placard screwed into the side. He couldn’t read it because it was facing outward. On the other side of the coffin, on the floor, he found a screwdriver, a dried-up condom, a pair of panties, and a cheese-and-salami sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. Evidently, some museum worker had had an assignation behind the coffin. Or perhaps the night watchman had brought in a woman to while away the lonely hours. In either case, someone had disturbed them, and they had taken off, leaving behind them the clues he had put together à la Sherlock Holmes.

  Simon blessed them and opened the wrapper. The bread, cheese, and salami were cardboard-hard, but they were edible. He broke the sandwich in half, gave one piece to the dog and gnawed away gratefully at his. The dog, after gulping down his half, looked at Simon’s sandwich and growled. Simon thought he was going to have trouble with him until he understood that it was the dog’s belly, not his throat, which was growling.

  He patted him and said, “You like old bones? You can eat away. But not now.”

  Using the screwdriver, he removed the placard. It bore this legend:

  MERNEPTAH

  Pharaoh from 1236 B.C. to 1223 B.C.

  Thirteenth son of Rameses II.

  He gave Moses a hard time.

  Moses and history had, in turn, given Merneptah a hard time. Everybody considered him to be a villain. When they read in the Bible that he’d been drowned in the Red Sea while chasing the refugee Hebrews, they thought, “Drowning was too good for him.” But this story was a myth. Merneptah, at age sixty-two, had died miserably of arthritis, plugged arteries, and bad teeth. As if this and an evil reputation hadn’t done enough to him, the undertakers had removed his testicles and tomb robbers had hacked his body, incidentally removing the right arm.

  “You’re still useful, old man,” Simon said. He tore off the wrappings and then the penis and threw it to the dog. The dog caught it before it hit the floor and swallowed it. So much for the mighty phallus that had impregnated hundreds of women, Simon thought. Just so the resin-soaked flesh doesn’t give the dog a stomachache.

  Meanwhile he wished that he had something more to eat. His belly was growling like a truck going up a steep grade. If he couldn’t somehow catch some fish, he was going to starve. And then the dog would be eating him.

  Since he had nothing else to do, he decided to think about giving the dog a name. After rejecting Spot, Fido, and Rover, he chose Anubis. Anubis was the jackal-headed Egyptian god who conducted the souls of the dead into the afterworld. A jackal was a sort of dog. And this dog, if not a conductor, was certainly a fellow passenger in this queer boat that was taking them to an unknown but inevitable death.

  Whatever the dog’s old name, he responded to the new one. He licked Simon’s hand and looked up with eyes as big, brown, and soft as Ramona’s. Simon patted his head. It was nice to have someone who liked him and would keep him from feeling utterly alone. Of course, this, like everything, had its disadvantageous side. He was expected to provide for Anubis.

  Simon got up and ripped off the Pharaoh’s right leg. For a moment, he was tempted to chew on it himself, but he didn’t have the teeth or the stomach for it. He threw it to Anubis, who retreated to a corner and began gnawing on it voraciously. A few hours later he had a violent attack of diarrhea which stank, among other things, of resin. Simon got up on the coffin and leaned out over the edge of the case to get fresh air. At the same time, he saw the owl.

  Simon yelped with joy. Since owls lived in trees, and trees grew only on land, land couldn’t be far away. He watched the big bird turn and fly northward until it had disappeared. That way was salvation. But how to get there?

  When dusk came, with no land in sight, he prepared despondently for bed. He heaved Merneptah out into the several inches of water on the floor and stretched out on the coffin. When he awoke with the sun in his eyes, he was even weaker and hungrier. He wasn’t thirsty, since the sea water was diluted enough with rain to be potable. But water has no calories.

  He looked over the side of the coffin. The Pharaoh was a mess. Anubis had chewed him up, leathery skin, bone, and all. But the Pharaoh, that inveterate traveler, had made another passage. Anubis lay in the corner, sopping wet and sick. Simon
felt sorry for him but could do nothing for him. As it was, he had to stick his head over the edge of the case to keep from dying of the stench before he died of starvation.

  A few hours later, while he was thinking of voluntarily dying by drowning, he saw something to the northwest. As the day passed, this slowly became larger. Just as the sun slid into the waters, he saw that it was not, as he had hoped, land. It was a submarine or something that looked like a submarine. But it was too far away for him to hope to swim to it.

  Dawn found him awake, looking northwest, hoping that the sub had not gone away during the night. No. It had drifted on the same collision course during the night. And it was close enough so he could see that it was a spaceship, not a submarine. On its side were two big Chinese ideograms and underneath them, in Roman letters: Hwang Ho. Since it wasn’t proceeding under power, it must be crewless. It had been sitting on some spaceport field somewhere, and when the rains came, its crew hadn’t been able to take refuge in it. They had probably drowned while roistering in the tavern or in bed with a friend or friends.

  Its ports were closed, but it was no problem to open one. There’d be a plate by the port which only had to be depressed to make the port open.

  More hours passed. By then Simon saw that the case was not going to bump into the ship. He shoved the heavy wooden coffin to the wall of the case, causing it to tilt and to ship water. Simon’s weight made it lean even more, and Simon went into the sea. Anubis didn’t want to leave the case, but he had no choice. Simon swam to the nearest port and pushed in on the plate. The port sank back and then swung aside. He put the banjo case inside, reached up, grabbed the threshold, and pulled himself in. After hoisting Anubis inside, he stood up shakily and watched the swirl which marked the sinking of the case until the surface was smooth again.

  “Just think,” Simon said to Anubis. “If old Merneptah had really been drowned in the Red Sea, and his body had been lost, there would have been no case for him in the museum, and you and I would have drowned several days ago. Kind of makes you wonder if it was destined or we’re just lucky, doesn’t it?”