Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  He thought perhaps his head might be falling to the left, or the right, and he had used the wrong arm to try to grab it. One of his arms wasn’t extending, so he transferred his efforts to that. It grabbed what felt like Anubis’ tongue, a long, slimy organ. He felt along it and pulled his hand away. Either the dog’s tongue had grown or Anubis had turned into one giant tongue. He was immediately sorry that he had moved his hand. He seemed to be groping around in the dog’s guts. Something moved against the back of his hand, something that beat quickly and sent a throbbing through him. Anubis’ heart, he thought. He kept his hand against it and when it started to slide away he closed his fingers around it. It was the only identifiable object in this terrifying universe outside himself, an object which he had to cling to, to keep his sanity. It also kept him from feeling utterly alone, and it was the only thing which gave him any security at all. It alone was not changing shape.

  Or so he had thought at first. Within a few seconds, it had grown bigger and its throbbing became faster. He hoped that the dog wasn’t going to die of a heart attack.

  Suddenly, they were out among the stars. Simon almost screamed with joy. They had made it; they weren’t doomed to ride forever, like some Flying Dutchman, through the lightless, shapeless seas of the boojum.

  Then he hastily released his grasp. It wasn’t Anubis’ heart he’d been holding. It was his penis.

  Simon apologized to Anubis and then asked the computer to check out the stars in the area. It reported that the ship was in an uncharted area. Simon didn’t care. A man without a home can’t be lost, and one galaxy was as good as another for his purposes.

  Simon directed the computer to take the ship to the nearest galaxy and look for an inhabited planet. He went to the captain’s quarters and poured a big drink of rice wine to soothe his nerves. The trouble with Chinese liquor was that it didn’t satisfy. A few minutes after he’d had a shot, he felt as if he needed another. No wonder the ancient Chinese poets were always loaded out of their skulls.

  Shut up in the cabin, Simon was able to relax by playing his banjo. The ship was going at only 20X, so the sound from the engine rooms wasn’t loud enough to upset him. But he had to play behind closed doors because the banjo made Anubis howl and gave the owl dysentery. Their reaction hurt Simon’s feelings, but something good came out of it. By backward logic and analogy, he had figured out why his concerts always got such bad reviews. Since animals hated his playing, there must be something bestial in music critics.

  A week, ship’s time, passed. Simon studied philosophy and Chinese, cooked meals for himself and his companions, and cleaned up after the dog and the owl. And then, one day, in the middle of his breakfast, the alarm bell rang. Simon ran to the control room and looked at the control panel screen. Translated, the Chinese words said, “Solar system with inhabitable planet approaching.”

  Simon ordered the ship to go into orbit around the fourth planet. When the Hwang Ho was over it, Simon looked through a telescope which could pick out objects as small as a mouse on the surface. It looked like a nice planet, Earth-size, no smog, clean oceans, and plenty of forests and grassy plains. All this was easily accounted for. The sentients were in a primitive agricultural stage and probably numbered less than a hundred million people.

  What attracted his attention most was a gigantic tower on the edge of the smallest of the two continents. This tower was about a mile wide at its base and two miles high. It was shaped like a candy heart, its point stuck in the ground. A hard metal without a break made up its shell. In fact, it looked as if it had been made from a single casting. But the metal was striped with white, black, yellow, green, and blue. These were not painted on but seemed integral to the metal.

  The massive structure looked brand-new. However, it was leaning to one side as if the solid granite under it was giving way to the many billions of tons pressing on it. Eventually, maybe in a million or so years, it would fall. It had been there for about a billion years, long before the human population had evolved from apes or even from shrew-sized insect eaters. Perhaps it had even been erected before life had crawled out of the primeval seas, warm and nutritious as a diabetic’s urine.

  Simon knew something about towers like this one, which was why he was delighted to see it. Interstellar voyagers to distant galaxies had reported finding such towers on every inhabited planet of these systems. There were, however, none on the planets of Earth’s galaxy. Nobody knew why, though many resented this slight.

  Deciding to investigate the tower first, Simon directed the ship to land on it. The Hwang Ho settled down on a flat area between the two lobes, and Simon and his two pets strolled out. They didn’t stay long. The flat part was covered with thousands of noisy, squabbling, egg-laying, white-and-black-checkered birds and about ten feet of guano. Simon threaded his way through the hook-billed birds, dodging vicious pecks from the mothers when he came too close to the eggs. Simon inspected the lobes, which towered above him as if they were mountains. Their slopes held no windows or doors. They were as unbroken as the passage of time itself, as impenetrable as yesterday.

  Simon hadn’t expected to find any entrances. Of the six million towers so far reported by Earth tourists, all had been just like this one. The natives of various planets had tried everything from diamond-tipped drills to laser beams to hydrogen bombs without scratching the mysterious metal. The buildings were hollow. A hammer could make one ring like a gong. There was even one planet which had a symphony orchestra which played only one instrument, the tower. The musicians stood on scaffolds built at various levels along the tower and struck it with hammers, the size and layout of the rooms within determining the notes evoked. The conductor stood on a platform a mile high and half a mile away and used two flags to wigwag his directions.

  The highest point of music in the history of this planet occurred when a conductor, Ruboklngshep, fell off the platform. The orchestra, in trying to follow the wildly waving flags during his descent, produced six bars of the most exquisite music ever to be created, though some critics have disparaged the final three notes. Art, like science, sometimes gets its best results by accident.

  Simon returned to the ship and found himself in an unforeseen situation. Since the flat area was tilted to one side, the ship had been put down at the lowest point, where the guano had built up to form a horizontal plane. Simon had made sure that the ship would not roll over. But he had forgotten about its enormous weight. It had sunk into the soft guano and so the ports on this side were about twenty feet under the surface and the ports on the other side were too high to reach. There was nothing to do but dig his way through with his bare hands. Anubis wouldn’t help, since he had not buried any bones there. Simon got down on his hands and knees and excavated away. Two hours later, dirty, sweaty, and disgruntled, he broke through and fell into the port. It took a half-hour to clear out the port entrance and another half-hour to clean up himself and the pets.

  His usual good spirits returned shortly afterward. He had told himself that he shouldn’t get angry at such a little thing. After all, a man should expect to get his hands dirty if he dug into fundamental issues.

  * * *

  1 The boojum of Trout has a remarkable resemblance to the “black hole” of space conjectured by contemporary astronomy. Trout intuitively anticipated this concept five years before it was first proposed in scientific journals. Editor.

  6

  SHALTOON, THE EQUAL-TIME PLANET

  Simon ordered the computer to set the ship down on a big field near the largest building of a city. Since this city had the largest population of any on the planet, it should be the capital of the most important nation. The building itself was six stories high and made of some white stone with purple and red veins. From the air it looked like a three-leaf clover with a long stem. Its windows were delta-shaped, and its doors were oval. The roofs were breadloaf-shaped, and the whole building was surrounded by roofless porches on the outer edges of two rows of pillars. The ones on the edge of the
porch were upside-down V’s. The others were behind the deltoids and projected from the floor of the porch at a forty-five-degree angle so that their ends stuck through the deltoids. The leaning shafts were cylindrical except for the ends which pierced the deltoids. These terminated in round balls from which a milky water jetted. At their base were two nut-shaped stones, the surfaces of which bore a crisscross of incisions.

  The people that poured out of the building were human-looking except for pointed ears, yellow eyes which had pupils like a cat’s, and sharp pointed teeth. Simon wasn’t startled by this. All the humanoid races so far encountered had either been descended from simians, felines, canines, ursines, or rodents. On Earth the apes had won out in the evolutionary race toward intelligence. On other planets, the ancestors of cats, dogs, bears, beavers, or rabbits had developed fingers instead of paws and come out ahead of the apes. On some planets, both the apes and some other creature had evolved into sapients and shared their world. Or else one had exterminated the other. On this planet, the felines seemed to have gotten the upper hand early. If there were any simian humans, they were hiding deep in the forests.

  Simon watched them through his viewscreens. When the soldiers had gathered around the ship, all pointing their spears and bows and arrows at the Hwang Ho, he came out. He held his hands up in the air to show he was peaceful. He didn’t smile because on some planets baring one’s teeth was a hostile sign.

  “I’m Simon Wagstaff, the man without a planet,” he said.

  After a couple of weeks, Simon had learned the language well enough to get along. Some of the suspicions of the people of Shaltoon had worn away. They were wary of him, it seemed, because he wasn’t the first Earthman to land there. Some two hundred years ago a fast-talking jovial man by the name of P.T. Taub had visited them. Before the Shaltoonians knew what was happening, he’d bamboozled them out of the crown jewels, taking not only these but a princess who’d just won the Miss Shaltoon Beauty Contest.

  Simon had a hard time convincing them that he wasn’t there to con them. He did want something from them, he told them over and over, but it wasn’t anything material. First, did they know anything about the builders of the leaning heartshaped tower?

  The people assigned to escort Simon told him that all they knew was that the builders were called the Clerun-Gowph in this galaxy. Nobody knew why, but somebody somewhere sometime must have met them. Otherwise, why did they have a common name? As for the tower, it had been here, unoccupied and slowly tilting, since the Shaltoonians had had a language. Undoubtedly, it had been here a long time before that.

  The Shaltoonians had a legend that, when the tower fell, the end of the world would come.

  Simon was adaptable and gregarious. He loved people, and he knew how to get along with them. Whether he was with just one person or at a party, he enjoyed himself, and he was generally liked. But he was uneasy with the Shaltoonians. There was something wrong with them, something he couldn’t describe. At first he thought that it might be because they were descended from felines. After all, though humanoid, they were fundamentally cats, just as Earthmen were basically apes. Yet, he’d met a number of extraterrestrial visitors on Earth who were felines, and he’d always gotten along with them. Actually, he preferred cats to dogs. It was only because circumstances had been beyond his control that he’d taken along a dog when he left Earth.

  Maybe, he thought, it was the strong musky odor that hung over the city, overriding that of manure from the city. This emanated from every adult Shaltoonian he met and smelled exactly like a cat in heat. After a while, he understood why. They were all in the mating season, which lasted the year around. Their main subject of conversation was sex, but even with this subject they couldn’t sustain much talk. After a half-hour or so, they’d get fidgety and then excuse themselves. If he followed them, he’d find him or her going into a house where he or she would be greeted by one of the opposite sex. The door would be closed, and within a few minutes the damnedest noises would come from the house.

  This resulted in his not being able to talk long to the escorts who were supposed to keep an eye on him. They’d disappear, and someone else would take their place.

  Moreover, when the escorts showed up again the next day, they acted strangely. They didn’t seem to remember what they’d asked or told him the day before. At first, he put this down to a short-term memory. Maybe it was this which had kept the Shaltoonians from progressing beyond a simple agricultural society.

  Simon was a good talker, but he was a good listener, too. Once he’d learned the language well, he caught on to a discrepancy of intonation among his escorts. It varied not only among individual speakers, which was to be expected, but in the same individual from day to day. Simon finally decided that he wasn’t uneasy because the Shaltoonians were, from his viewpoint, oversexed. He had no moral repugnance to this. After all, you couldn’t expect aliens to be just like Earthmen. As a matter of fact, his attitude, if anything, was envy. Evolution had cheated Terrestrials. Why couldn’t Homo sapiens have kept the horniness of the baboon? Why had he allowed society to shape itself so that it suppressed the sex drive? Was it because evolution had dictated that mankind was to progress technologically? And, to bring this about, had evolution shunted much of man’s sex drive to the brain, where he used the energy to make tools and new religions, and ways of making more money and attaining a higher status?

  Earthmen were dedicated to getting to the top of the heap, whereas the Shaltoonians devoted themselves to getting on top of each other.

  This seemed a fine arrangement to Simon—at first. One of the bad things about human society was that few people ever really had intimate contact. A people who spent a lot of time in bed, however, should be full of love. But things didn’t work out that way on this planet. There wasn’t even a word for love in the language. They did have many terms for various sexual positions, but these were all highly technical. There was no generic term equivalent to the Earthman’s “love”.

  Not that this made much difference generally between Earth and Shaltoon behavior. The latter seemed to have just as many divorces, disagreements, fights, and murders as the former. On the other hand, the Shaltoonians didn’t have many suicides. Instead of getting depressed, they went out and got laid.

  Simon thought about this aspect. He decided that perhaps Shaltoon society was, after all, better arranged than Terrestrial society. Not that this was due to any superior intelligence of the Shaltoonians. It was a matter of hormone surplus. Mother Nature, not brains, deserved the credit. This thought depressed him, but he didn’t seek out a female to work off the mood. He retired to his cabin and played his banjo until he felt better. Then he got to thinking about the meaning of this and became depressed again. Hadn’t he channeled his sex drive where it shouldn’t be? Hadn’t he made love to himself, via his banjo, instead of to another being? Were the notes spurting from the strings a perverted form of jism? Was his supreme pleasure derived from plucking, not fucking?

  Simon put away the banjo, which was looking more like a detachable phallus every minute. He sallied forth determined to use his nondetachable instrument. Ten minutes later, he was back in the ship. The only relief he felt was in getting away from the Shaltoonians. He’d passed by a rain barrel and happened to look down in it. There, at the bottom, was a newly born baby. He had looked around for a policeman to notify him but had been unable to find one. It struck him then he had never seen a policeman on Shaltoon. He stopped a passer-by and started to ask him where the local precinct had its headquarters. Unable to do so because he didn’t know the word for “police”, he took the passer-by to the barrel and showed him what was in it. The citizen had merely shrugged and walked away. Simon had walked around until he saw one of his escorts. The woman was startled to see him without a companion and asked why he had left the ship without notifying the authorities. Simon said that that wasn’t important. What was important was the case of infanticide he’d stumbled across.

  She didn’
t seem to understand what he was talking about. She followed him and gazed down into the barrel. Then she looked up with a strange expression. Simon, knowing something was wrong, looked again. The corpse was gone.

  “But I swear it was here only five minutes ago!” he said.

  “Of course,” she said coolly. “But the barrel men have removed it.”

  It took some time for Simon to get it through his head that he had seen nothing unusual. In fact, the barrels he had observed on every corner and under every rain spout were seldom used to collect drinking water. Their main purpose was for the drowning of infants.

  “Don’t you have the same custom on Earth?” the woman said.

  “It’s against the law there to murder babies.”

  “How in the world do you keep your population from getting too large?” she said.

  “We don’t,” Simon said.

  “How barbaric!”

  Simon got over some of his indignation when the woman explained that the average life span of a Shaltoonian was ten thousand years. This was due to an elixir invented some two hundred thousand years before. The Shaltoonians weren’t much for mechanics or engineering or physics, but they were great botanists. The elixir had been made from juices of several different plants. A by-product of this elixir was that a Shaltoonian seldom got sick.

  “So you see that we have to have some means of keeping the population down,” she said. “Otherwise, we’d all be standing on top of each other’s heads in a thousand years or less.”

  “What about contraceptives?”

  “Those’re against our custom,” she said. “They interfere with the pleasure of sex. Besides, everyone ought to have a chance to be born.”