Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  Simon asked her to explain this seemingly contradictory remark. She replied that an aborted baby didn’t have a soul. But a baby that made it to the open air was outfitted with a soul at the moment of birth. If it died even a few seconds later, it still went to heaven. Indeed, it was better that it did die, because then it would be spared the hardships and pains and griefs of life. Killing it was doing it a favor. However, to keep the population from decreasing, it was necessary to let one out of a hundred babies survive. The Shaltoonians didn’t like to have a fixed arrangement for this. They let Chance decide who lived and who didn’t. So every woman, when she got pregnant, went to the Temple of Shaltoon. There she picked a number at a roulette table, and if her ball fell into the lucky slot, she got to keep the baby. The Holy Croupiers gave her a card with the lucky number on it, which she wore around her neck until the baby was a year old.

  “The wheel’s fixed so the odds are a hundred to one,” she said. “The house usually wins. But when a woman wins, a holiday is declared, and she’s queen for a day. This is no big deal, since she spends most of her time reviewing the parade.”

  “Thanks for the information,” Simon said. “I’m going back to the ship. So long, Goobnatz.”

  “I’m not Goobnatz,” she said. “I’m Dunnernickel.”

  Simon was so shaken up that he didn’t ask her what she meant by that. He assumed that he had had a slip of memory. The next day, however, he apologized to her.

  “Wrong again,” she said. “My name is Pussyloo.”

  There was a tendency for all aliens of the same race to look alike to Earthmen. But he had been here long enough to distinguish indviduals easily.

  “Do you Shaltoonians have a different name for every day?”

  “No,” she said. “My name has always been Pussyloo. But it was Dunnernickel you were talking to yesterday and Goobnatz the day before. Tomorrow, it’ll be Quimquat.”

  This was the undefinable thing that had been making him uneasy. Simon asked her to explain, and they went into a nearby tavern. The drinks were on the house, since he was working here as a banjo-player. The Shaltoonians crowded in every night to hear his music, which they enjoyed even if it wasn’t at all like their native music. At least, they claimed they did. The leading music critic of the planet had written a series of articles about Simon’s genius, claiming that he evoked a profundity and a truth from his instrument which no Shaltoonian could equal. Simon didn’t understand any more than the Shaltoonians did what the critic was talking about, but he liked what he read. This was the first time he’d ever gotten a good review.

  They had ordered a couple of beers, and Pussyloo plunged into her explanation. She said she’d be glad to tell him all she could in half an hour, but shed have to talk a lot to get everything into that length of time. In thirty minutes it’d be quitting time. She liked Simon, but he wasn’t her type, and she had an assignation with a man shed met on her lunch hour. After Simon heard her explanation, he understood why she was in such a hurry.

  “Don’t you Earthmen have ancestor rotation?” she said.

  Simon was so startled that he upset his beer and had to order another. “What the hell’s that?” he said.

  “It’s a biological, not a supernatural, phenomenon,” she said. “I guess you poor deprived Terrestrials don’t have it. But the body of every Shaltoonian contains cells which carry the memories of a particular ancestor. The earliest ancestors are in the anal tissue. The latest are in the brain tissue.”

  “You mean a person carries around with him the memories of his foreparents?” Simon said.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “But it seems to me that in time a person wouldn’t have enough space in his body for all the ancestral cells,” Simon said. “When you think that your ancestors double every generation backward, you’d soon be out of room. You have two parents, and each of them had two parents, and each of them had two. And so on. You go back only five generations, and you have sixteen great-great-grandparents. And so on.”

  “And so on,” Pussyloo said. She looked at the tavern clock while her nipples swelled and the strong mating odor became even stronger. In fact, the whole tavern stank of it. Simon couldn’t even smell his own beer.

  “You have to remember that if you go back about thirty generations, everyone now living has many common ancestors. Otherwise, the planet at that time would’ve been jammed with people like flies on a pile of horse manure.

  “But there’s another factor that eliminates the number of ancestors. The ancestor cells with the strongest personalities release chemicals that dissolve the weaker ones.”

  “Are you telling me that, even on the cellular level, the survival of the fittest is the law?” Simon said. “That egotism is the ruling agent?”

  Pussyloo scratched the itch between her legs and said, “That’s the way it is. There would never have been any trouble about it if that’s all there was to it. But in the old days, about twenty thousand years ago, the ancestors started their battle for their civil rights. They said it wasn’t right that they should be shut up in their little cells with only their own memories. They had a right to get out of their cellular ghettoes, to enjoy the flesh they were contributing to but couldn’t participate in.

  “After a long fight, they got an equal-time arrangement. Here’s how it works. A person is born and allowed to control his own body until he reaches puberty. During this time, an ancestor speaks only when spoken to.”

  “How do you do that?” Simon said.

  “It’s a mental thing the details of which the scientists haven’t figured out yet,” she said. “Some claim we have a neural circuit we can switch on and off by thought. The trouble is, the ancestors can switch it on, too. They used to give the poor devils that carried them a hard time, but now they don’t open up any channels unless they’re requested to do so.

  “Anyway, when a person reaches puberty, he must then give each ancestor a day for himself or herself. The ancestor comes into full possession of the carrier’s body and consciousness. The carrier himself still gets one day a week for himself. So he comes out ahead, though there’s still a lot of bitching about it. When the round is completed, it starts all over again.

  “Because of the number of ancestors, a Shaltoonian couldn’t live long enough for one cycle if it weren’t for the elixir. But this delays aging so that the average life span is about ten thousand years.”

  “Which is actually twenty thousand years, since a Shaltoon year is twice as long as ours,” Simon said.

  He was stunned. He didn’t even notice when Pussyloo squirmed out of the booth and, still squirming, walked out of the place.

  7

  QUEEN MARGARET

  The Space Wanderer had been thinking about moving on. There didn’t seem to be much here for him. The Shaltoonians did not even have a word for philosophy, let alone such as ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. Their interests were elsewhere. He could understand why they thought only of the narrow and the secular, or, to be exact, eating, drinking, and copulating. But understanding did not make him wish to participate. His main lust was for the big answers.

  When he found out about ancestor rotation, however, he decided to hang around a little longer. He was curious about the way in which this unique phenomenon shaped the strange and complex structure of Shaltoon society. Also, to be truthful, he had an egotistic reason for being a little reluctant to leave. He enjoyed being lionized, and the next planet might have critics not so admiring.

  On the other hand, his pets were unhappy. They would not leave the spaceship even though they were suffering from cabin fever. The odor from the Shaltoonians drove Anubis into a barking frenzy and Athena into semishock. When Simon had guests, the two retreated into the galley. After the party was over, Simon would try to play with them to cheer them up, but they would not respond. Their big dumb eyes begged him to take off, to leave forever this planet that smelled of cats. Simon told them to stick it out for another week. Seekers afte
r knowledge had to put up with certain inconveniences. They didn’t understand his words, of course, but they did understand his tone. They were stuck here until their master decided to unstick them. What they wanted to stick and where was something else. Maybe it was a good thing they couldn’t talk.

  The first thing Simon found out in his investigations was that ancestor rotation caused a great resistance to change. This was not only inevitable but necessary. The society had to function from day to day, crops be grown and harvested and transported, the governmental and business administration carried out, schools, hospitals, courts, etcetera run. To make this possible, a family stayed in the same line of work or profession. If your forefather a thousand generations removed was a ditch-digger, you were one, too. There was no confusion resulting from a blacksmith being replaced by a judge one day and a garbage hauler the next.

  The big problem in running this kind of society was the desire of each ancestor to live it up on his day of possession. Naturally, he/she didn’t want to waste his/her time working when he/she could be eating, drinking, and copulating. But everybody understood that if he/she indulged in his/her wishes, society would fall apart and the carriers would starve to death in a short time. So, grudgingly, everybody put in an eight-hour day and at quitting time plunged into an orgy. Almost everybody did. Somebody had to take care of the babies and children, and somebody had to work on the farms the rest of the day.

  The only way to handle this was to let slaves baby-sit and finish up the plowing and the chores on the farms. On Shaltoon, once a slave always a slave was the law. Yet, how do you get an ancestral slave to work all day on the only day in five hundred years that he’ll take over a carrier? For one thing, who’s going to oversee him? No freeman wanted to put in his precious time supervising the helots. And a slave that isn’t watched closely is going to goof off.

  How did you punish a slave if he neglected his work to enjoy himself? If you hung him, you killed off thousands of innocents. You also reduced the number of slaves, of which there weren’t enough to go around in the first place. If you whipped him, you were punishing the innocent. The day following the whipping, the guilty man/woman retreated into his/her cell, shut off from the pain. The poor devil that followed was the one that suffered. He resented being punished for something he hadn’t done, and his morale scraped bottom like a dog with piles.

  The authorities had recognized that this was a dangerous situation. If enough slaves got angry enough to revolt, they could take over easily while their masters were helplessly drunk in the midst of the late evening orgy. The only way to prevent this was to double the number of slaves. In this way, a slave could put in four hours on the second shift and then go off to enjoy himself while another slave finished up for him. This did have its drawbacks. The slave that took over the last four hours had been whooping it up on his free time and so he was in no shape to work efficiently; But this could not be helped.

  The additional slaves required had to be gotten from the freemen. So the authorities passed laws that a man could be enslaved if he spit on the sidewalk or overparked his horse and buggy. There were protests and riots against this legislation, of course. The government expected, in fact hoped for, these. They arrested the rebels and made them slaves. The sentence was retroactive; all their ancestors became slaves also.

  Simon talked to a number of the slaves and found out that what he had suspected was true. Almost all the newly created slaves had come from the poor classes. The few from the upper class had been liberals. Somehow or other, the cops never saw a banker, a judge, or a businessman spit on the sidewalk.

  Simon became apprehensive when he found out about this. There were so many laws that he didn’t know about. He could be enslaved if he forgot to go downwind before farting in the presence of a cop. He was assured, however, that he wasn’t subject to the laws.

  “Not as long as you leave within two weeks,” his informant said. “We wouldn’t want you as a slave. You have too many strange ideas. If you stayed here long, you might spread these, infect too many people.”

  Simon didn’t comment. The analogy of new ideas to deadly diseases was not new to him.

  One of Simon’s favorite writers, a science-fiction author by the name of Jonathan Swift Somers III, had once written a story about this parallel between diseases and ideas. In his story, Quarantine!, an Earthman had landed on an uncharted planet. He was eager to study the aliens, but they wouldn’t let him out of the spaceship until he had been given a medical checkup. At first, he thought they suspected him of bringing in germs they weren’t equipped to handle. After he’d learned their language, he was told that this wasn’t so. The aliens had long ago perfected a panacea against illnesses of the flesh. They were worried about his disrupting their society, perhaps destroying it, with deadly thoughts.

  The port officials, wearing lead mind-shields, questioned the Earthman closely for two weeks. He sweated while he talked because the aliens’ method of disease-prevention, which was one hundred percent effective, was to kill the sick person. His body was then burned and his ashes were buried at midnight in an unmarked grave.

  After two weeks of grilling, the head official said, smiling, “You can go out among our people now.”

  “You mean I have a clean bill of health?” the Earthman said.

  “Nothing to worry about,” the official said. “We’ve heard every idea you have. There isn’t a single one we didn’t think of ten thousand years ago. You must come from a very primitive world.”

  Jonathan Swift Somers III, like most great American writers, had been born in the Midwest. His father had been an aspiring poet whose unfinished epic had not been printed until long after his death. Simon had once made a pilgrimage to Petersburg, Illinois, where the great man was buried. The monument was a granite wheelchair with wings. Below was the epitaph:

  JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS III

  1910-1982

  He Didn’t Need Legs

  Somers had been paralyzed from the waist down since he was ten years old. In those days, they didn’t have a vaccine against polio. Somers never left the wheelchair or his native town, but his mind voyaged out into the universe. He wrote forty novels and two hundred short stories, mostly about adventure in space. When he started writing, he described exploits on the Moon and Mars. When landings were made on these, he shifted the locale to Jupiter. After the Jovian Expedition, he wrote about astronauts who traveled to the extreme edge of the cosmos. He figured that in his lifetime men would never get beyond the solar system, and he was right. Actually, it made no difference whether or not astronauts got to the places he described. His books about the Moon and Mars were still read long after voyages there had become humdrum. It didn’t matter that Somers had been one hundred percent wrong about those places. His books were poetic and dramatic, and the people he depicted going there seemed more real than the people who actually went there. At least, they were more interesting.

  Somers belonged to the same school of writing as the great French novelist Balzac. Balzac claimed he could write better about a place if he knew nothing of it. Invariably, when he did go to a city he had described in a book, he was disappointed.

  Near Somers’ grave was his father’s.

  JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS II

  1877-1912

  I tried to fly on verse’s wings.

  Rejection slips all called it corn.

  How Nature balances joys and stings!

  I never suffered a critic’s scorn.

  However, the book reviewers had given the son a hard time most of his life. It wasn’t until he was an old man that Somers was recognized as a great artist. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he remarked, “This heals no wounds.” He knew that critics never admit they’re wrong. They’d still give him a hard time.

  Simon was worried that he, too, might upset the Shaltoonians. It was true that he never proposed any new ideas to them. All he did was ask questions. But often these can be more dangerous than propaganda
. They lead to novel thoughts.

  It seemed, however, that he wasn’t going to spark off any novelty in the Shaltoonians’ minds. The adults were, in effect, never around for more than a day. The young were too busy playing and getting educated for the time when they’d have to give up possession of their bodies.

  Near the end of his visit, on a fine sunny morning, Simon left the spaceship to visit the Temple of Shaltoon. He intended to spend the day studying the rites being performed there. Shaltoon was the chief deity of the planet, a goddess whose closest Earthly equivalent was Venus or Aphrodite. He walked through the streets, which he found strangely empty. He was wondering what was going on when he was startled by a savage scream. He ran to the house from which it came and opened the door. A man and a woman were fighting to the death in the front room. Simon had a rule that he would never interfere in a quarrel between man and wife. It was a good rule but one which no humanitarian could keep. In another minute, one or both of the bleeding and bruised couple would be dead. He jumped in between them and then jumped out again and ran for his life. Both had turned against him, which was only to be expected.

  Since he was followed out on the street, he kept on running. As he sped down the street, he heard cries and shrieks from the houses he passed. Turning a corner, he collided with a swirling shouting mob, everyone of which seemed intent on killing anybody within range of their fists, knives, spears, swords, and axes. Simon fought his way out and staggered back to the ship. When the port was closed behind him, he crawled to the sick bay—Anubis pacing him with whimpers and tongue-licking— where he bandaged his numerous cuts and gashes.

  The next day he cautiously ventured out. The city was a mess. Corpses and wounded were everywhere in the streets, and firemen were still putting out the blazes that had been started the day before. However, no one seemed belligerent, so he stopped a citizen and asked him about yesterday’s debacle.

  “It was Shag Day, dummy,” the citizen said and moved on.