Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  Simon wasn’t too jarred by the rudeness. Very few of the natives were in a good mood when sober. This was because the carrier’s body was continually abused by the rotating ancestors. Each had to get all the debauchery he could cram into his allotted time between the quitting whistle and the curfew bell. As a result, the first thing the ancestor felt when he took his turn was a terrible hangover. This lasted through the day, making him tired and irritable until he had had a chance to kill the pain with liquor.

  Every once in a while, the body would collapse and be carried off to a hospital by drunken ambulance attendants and turned over to drunken nurses and doctors. The poor devil who had possession that day was too sick to do anything but lie in bed, groaning and cursing. The thought that he was wasting his precious and rare day in convalescence from somebody else’s fun made him even sicker.

  So the Space Wanderer didn’t wonder at the grumpiness of the citizen. He walked on and presently found a heavily bandaged but untypically amiable woman.

  “Everybody, if you go back a few thousand years, has the same ancestors,” she said. “So, every thousand years or so, a day occurs when one particular ancestor happens to come into possession of many carriers. This usually happens to only a few, and we can cope with most of these coincidences. But about five thousand years ago, Shag, a very powerful personality born in the Old Stone Age, took over more than half of the population on a certain day. Since he was an extremely authoritarian and violent man who hated himself, the first Shag Day ended with a quarter of the world’s people killing each other.”

  “And what about yesterday’s Shag Day?” Simon said.

  “That’s the third. It’s a record breaker, too. Almost half of the population were casualties.”

  “From the long-range view, it has its bright side,” Simon said. “You can allow more babies to stay alive now so you can bring the population back to normal.”

  “The sweetest catnip grows behind the latrine,” she said. This was the equivalent of the Terrestrial “Every cloud has its silver lining,” or “An ill wind blows somebody good.”

  Simon decided to cut his trip short. He would leave the next day. But that evening, while reading the Shaltoon Times, he found out that in four days the wisest person who had ever lived would take over the queen’s body. He became excited. If anyone would have the truth, it would be this woman. She’d had more turns at rotation than anyone and combined the greatest intelligence with the longest experience.

  The reason that everybody knew that Queen Margaret was due to take over was the rotation chart. This had been worked out for each person. Generally, it was hung on the bathroom wall so it could be studied when there was nothing else to occupy one’s mind.

  Simon sent in a petition for an audience. Under normal circumstances, he would have had to wait six months for an answer. Since he was the only alien on the planet, and famous for his banjo-playing, he got a reply the same day. The queen would be pleased to dine with him. Formal attire was mandatory.

  Resplendent in the dress uniform of the captain of the Hwang Ho, a navy blue outfit adorned with huge epaulettes, gold braid, big brass buttons, and twenty Good Conduct medals, Simon appeared at the main door of the palace. He was ushered by a lord of the royal pantry and six guards through magnificent marble corridors loaded down with objets d’art. At another time, Simon would have liked to examine these. Most of them consisted of phallic imagery.

  He was led through the door flanked by two guards who blew through long silver trumpets as he passed them. Simon appreciated the honor, even if it left him deaf for a minute. He was still dizzy when he was halted in a small but ornate room before a big table of polished dark wood. This was set with two plates and two goblets full of wine and a crowd of steaming dishes. Behind it sat a woman whose beauty started his adrenalin flowing, even if she wasn’t strictly human. To tell the truth, Simon had gotten so accustomed to pointed ears, slit pupils, and sharp teeth that his own face startled him when he shaved.

  Simon didn’t hear the introduction because his hearing hadn’t come back yet. He bowed to the queen after the official’s lips had quit moving, and at a sign he sat down across the table from her. The dinner passed pleasantly enough. They talked about the weather, a subject that Simon would find was an icebreaker on every planet. Then they discussed the horrors of Shag Day. Simon became progressively drunker as the dinner proceeded. It was protocol to down a glass of wine every time the queen did, and she seemed to be very thirsty. He didn’t blame her. It had been three hundred years since she had had a drink.

  Simon told her his life story at her request. She was horrified but at the same time complacent.

  “Our religion maintains that the stars, planets, and moons are living beings,” she said. “These are the only forms of life big enough and complex enough to interest the Creatrix. Biological life is an accidental by-product. You might say that it’s a disease infecting the planets. Vegetable and animal life are bearable forms of the disease, like acne or athlete’s foot.

  “But when sentient life, beings with self-consciousness, evolve, they become a sort of deadly microbe. We Shaltoonians, however, are wise enough to know that. So, instead of being parasites, we become symbiotes. We live off the earth, but we take care that we don’t ruin it. That’s why we’ve stuck to an agricultural society. We grow crops, but we replenish the soil with manure. And every tree we cut down, we replace.

  “Earthlings, now, they seem to have been parasites who made their planet sick. Much as I regret to say it, it was a good thing that the Hoonhors cleaned Earth up. They only have to take one look at Shaltoon, however, to see that we’ve kept our world in tiptop shape. We’re safe from them.”

  Simon did not think that Shaltoon society was above criticism, but he thought it diplomatic to keep silent.

  “You say, Space Wanderer, that you mean to roam everywhere until you have found answers to your questions. I suppose by that that you want to know the meaning of life?”

  She leaned forward, her eyes a hot green with vertical black slits showing in the candlelight. Her gown fell open, and Simon saw the smooth creamy mounds and their tips, huge and red as cherries.

  “Well, you might say that,” he said.

  She rose suddenly, knocking her chair onto the floor, and clapped her hands. The butlers and the officials left at once and closed the doors behind them. Simon began sweating. The room had become very warm, and the thick ropy odor of cat-heat was so heavy it was almost visible.

  Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon let her gown fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing underneath. Her high, firm, uncowled bosom was proud and rosy. Her hips and thighs were like an inviting lyre of pure alabaster. They shone so whitely that they might have had a light inside.

  “Your travels are over, Space Wanderer,” she whispered, her voice husky with lust. “Seek no more, for you have found. The answer is in my arms.”

  He did not reply. She strode around the table to him instead of ordering him, as was her queenly right, to come to her.

  “It’s a glorious answer, Queen Margaret, God knows,” he replied. His palms were perspiring profusely. “I am going to accept it gratefully. But I have to tell you, if I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, that I will have to be on my way again tomorrow.”

  “But you have found your answer, you have found your answer!” she cried, and she forced his head between her fragrant young breasts.

  He said something. She thrust him out at arm’s length. “What was that you said?”

  “I said, Queen Margaret, that what you offer is an awfully good answer. It just doesn’t happen to be the one I’m primarily looking for.”

  Dawn broke like a window hit by a gold brick. Simon entered the spaceship. A human doughnut dunked in weariness, satiety, and cat-in-mating-season pungency, he slopped in. Anubis sniffed and growled. Simon put out a shaking hand drained of hormones to pet him.

  Anubis bit it.

  8

  THE NO S
MOKING PLANET

  During the banquet with Queen Margaret, Simon had drunk a goblet of the Shaltoon immortality elixir. And just before he left, he was given two vials of elixir for his animals. Simon hesitated for a long time about offering Anubis and Athena the green sweet-and-sour liquid. Was it fair to inflict long life on them? Would he have swallowed the stuff if he had not been drunk with alcohol and the queen’s musky odor?

  “It may take several lifetimes, or more, for you to find a place where the answer to your primal question is known,” the queen had said. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if you died of old age while on your way to a planet where the answer you seek was known?”

  Simon had said, “You’re very wise, Queen Margaret,” and he emptied the cup. The expected thunder and lightning of imminences of immortality for which he braced himself had not come. Instead, he had belched.

  Now he looked at the dog, hiding behind a chair with shame because he had bitten Simon, and at the owl, sitting on top of the chair, her favorite perch, spotted with white.

  In the normal course of subjective time, they would both be dead in a few years. The future might show that they would have been far better off dead. On the other hand—Simon was hopelessly ambidextrous—they might be missing a vast and enduring joy if he denied them the elixir. Who knew? They might even find a planet where the natives had a science advanced enough to raise his pets’ intelligence to a human level. Then he could communicate with them, enjoy their companionship to the fullest potentiality.

  On the other hand, they might then become very unhappy.

  Simon solved his dilemma by pouring out the elixir into two bowls. If the two cared to drink the stuff, they could do so. The decision was up to their limited powers of free will. After all, animals knew what was good for them, and if immortality smelled bad to them, they wouldn’t touch it.

  Anubis rose from behind the chair and slinked across the floor to the bowl. He sniffed at the green liquid and then lapped it up. Simon looked at Athena and said, “Well?” The owl said, “Who?” After a while she flew down to her bowl and drank from it.

  Simon began worrying that he had done the wrong thing. Dogs will eat poison if it’s wrapped up in a steak. Perhaps the elixir’s perfume overrode the odor of dangerous elements.

  A minute later, he had forgotten his concern. The viewscreen flashed the information that the ship was approaching a star with a planetary system. The Hwang Ho dropped down into sublight speed, and two days later they were entering an orbit around the sixth planet of the giant red star. This was Earth-size, and its air breathable, though its oxygen content was greater than Earth’s.

  The only artificial object on the planet was the gigantic candy-heart-shaped tower of the Clerun-Gowph. Simon flew the ship around it a few times, but, on finding that it was as invulnerable as the other, he left it. This planet showed no sign of intelligent life, of beings who used tools, grew crops, and constructed buildings. It did have some curious animal life, though, and he decided to get a close look at it. He gave the landing order, and a few minutes later stepped out onto the edge of a meadow near the shore of an amber sea.

  The grass was about two feet high, violet-colored and topped with yellow flowers with five petals. Moving through and above these were about forty creatures which were pyramidshaped and about thirty feet high. Their skins or shells—he wasn’t sure which they were—were pink. They moved on hundreds of very short legs ending in broad round feet. Halfway up their bodies were eyes, two on each side, eight in all. These were huge and round and a light blue, and the lids had long curling eyelashes. At the top of each pyramid-shaped body was a pink ball with a large opening on two opposing sides.

  It was evident that their mouths were on their bottoms, since they left a trail of cropped grass behind them. He could hear the munching of the grass and rumblings of their stomachs.

  Simon had put the ship into a deep ravine beyond a thick wood so he could sneak up on the creatures. But purple things in the sky were moving out to sea and turning in a sweeping curve so they could come in downwind toward him. These were even stranger than the creatures browsing on the flowers. They looked from a distance like zeppelins, but they had two big eyes near the underside of their noses and tentacles coiled up along their undersides about twenty feet back of the eyes. Simon wondered how they ate. Perhaps the curious organs at the tips of their noses were some kind of mouth. These were bulbous and had a small opening.

  Just above the small bulb was a hole. This did not seem to be a mouth, however, since it was rigid. There was another hole at the rear, and a number of much smaller ones spaced along the underside.

  Their tail assemblies were just like zeppelins’. They had huge vertical rudders and horizontal elevators, but these sprouted yellow and green feathers on the edges.

  Simon figured out they must use some sort of jet propulsion. They took in air through the front hole, which was rigid, and squeezed it out of the rear hole, which was contracting and dilating.

  The huge creatures dropped lower as they neared the meadow, and the first one, emitting short sharp whistles, came in about thirty feet above the ground. It passed between a line of the pyramid-things, and then it eased its bulbous nose into an opening in the ball on top of one. This closed around the bulb and held the zeppelin-thing.

  The pyramid-thing was a living mooring mast.

  A moment later, the flying animal was released. It headed toward the bush behind which Simon was crouched. After it came the other fliers, all whistling. The pyramid-things crowded together and faced inward. Or were they facing outward, like a bunch of cows threatened by wolves? How could they face anything if they had eyes on all sides and no faces? In any event, they were forming a protective assembly.

  Simon stepped out from his cover with his hands held up. The foremost zeppelin-creature loomed above him, its huge eyes cautious. Its tentacles reached out but did not touch Simon. He was almost blown down as the thing eased forward toward him. The stench was terrible but not unfamiliar. He had batted .500 in his guess about its method of propulsion. Instead of taking in air, compressing it with some organ, and shooting it out, it drove itself with giant farts. Its big stomachs—like a cow it had more than one— generated gas for propulsion. Simon figured out that its stomachs must contain enzymes which made the gas. At this moment, it hung about ten feet above the surface, bobbing up and down as it expelled gas from the hole in front to counteract the wind.

  Simon stood there while the thing whistled at him. After a while he caught on to the fact that the whistles were a sort of Morse code.

  Simon imitated some of the dots and dashes just to let them know that he, too, was intelligent. Then he turned back and went to his ship. The zeppelins followed him above the trees and watched him go into the ship. Through the viewscreen he could see them hovering over the ship and feeling it with their tentacles. Maybe they thought it was a strange living creature, too.

  Simon went out the next day to the edge of the meadow. The living mooring masts got alarmed again, and once more the fliers came down. But after a few days they got used to him. Simon walked closer to them each day. By the end of the week, he was allowed to stroll around among the pyramids. A few days later, however, the pyramids were gone. He walked around until he found them in another meadow. Evidently, they had eaten up all the grass and flowers in the other place.

  Simon found it difficult to learn the language of the zeppelin-things. Most of them were too busy in the daytime to talk to him. When dark came, the fliers locked into the balls on the top of the pyramids and stayed there until dawn. When they did speak—or whistle—to him, the stench they expelled was almost unbearable. But then he found out that the pyramids could whistle, too. They did this, not through the mouths on their undersides but through one of the openings in the balls at the tops. These emitted a stench, too, but he could endure it if he stood upwind. And, being females, the pyramids were more loquacious and better suited to teach him zeppelinese.

  They
liked Simon because he gave them someone to talk to and about. The males, it seemed, spent most of their time playing and carousing in the air. They came down at noon for a meal but wouldn’t hang around to talk. When night fell, they landed, but this was for supper and a short session of sexual intercourse. After which, they usually dozed off.

  “We’re just objects to them,” said one female. “Nutrition and pleasure objects.”

  The ball on top of the females was a curious organ. One opening was a combination mooring lock, gruel nipple, and vagina. The females browsed on the meadow, digested the food, and fed it through a nipple inside the ball into the tips of the males’ noses. This opening also received the slender tongue-like sex organ of the male. The opening on the other side of the ball was the anus and the mouth. This could be tightened to emit the whistling speech.

  Simon didn’t want to get involved in the domestic affairs of these creatures. But he had to show a certain amount of interest and sympathy if he was to get information. So he whistled a question at the female whom he’d named Anastasia.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Anastasia said. “We do all the work and those useless sons of bitches do nothing but play around all day.”

  Anastasia didn’t actually say “sons of bitches” but Simon translated it as such. What she said was something like “farts in a windstorm.”

  “We females talk a lot among ourselves during the day,” she said. “But we’d like to talk with our mates, too. After all, they’ve been up in the wild blue yonder, having a great time, seeing all sorts of interesting things. But do you think for one moment that they’ll let us in on what’s going on outside these meadows? No, all they want to do is to be fed and have a quickie and be off to dreamland. When we complain, they tell us that we wouldn’t understand it if they did tell us what they saw and did. So here we are, ground-bound and shut up in these little meadows, working all day, taking care of the children, while they’re roaming around, zooming up and down, having a good old time. It isn’t fair!”