Tomorrow's Alternatives

by Roger Elwood

  Oh Lucinda, Lucinda, it was never to be but I will say it and be damned, say it and know the vengeance of Huber through a thousand centuries of afterlife, say it and then end: we should have been monogamous and I should have should have should have had you alone, but I know —I see that you've received your penis.

  —Yes, I got it just today, isn’t it beautiful? And it’s guaranteed to work without fail ninety-nine times out of a hundred or they’ll fix it for free. Forever.

  —Oh, I’m so pleased for you! Are you complete now?

  —Except for a few last touch-ups and details. They’re going to put feeling in next Thursday.

  The Answer

  TERRY CARR

  What was it like, being a man?” the alien asked Stan Nelsen.

  It took a second or two for the words to penetrate Stan’s mood. He had been sitting motionless in the Presidential Suite of the Statler Hilton for hours, staring at the floor while the sad, disconnected thoughts that he had become accustomed to lately traced their way through his mind.

  He looked up at the light blue being from the stars who stood before him. The alien had dry, wrinkled skin with a fine down on all the portions not covered by his toga-like clothing. He stood nearly seven feet tall and had two large, multifaceted eyes, which rested patiently on Stan now, waiting for him to reply.

  “I’m sorry,” Stan said. “What did you ask me?”

  “What was it like, being a man?” the alien asked again.

  Stan frowned, somewhat annoyed at having his thoughts disturbed for idle questions. The aliens had been perfectly thoughtful, even solicitous, ever since they had found him amid the ruins of New York. After their initial questions they had left him alone when he wanted to be alone—which was just about always.

  “I wasn’t a man,” Stan told the alien shortly. “I was still a boy, just fifteen years old.”

  The alien made a sound like a chuckle. “Then what was it like, being a boy just fifteen years old? I really want to know, Stan Nelsen. I’ve seen what’s happened to the planet outside those windows—I want to know how that happened.”

  “I told you, all of you,” Stan muttered. “There was a war, with bombs and nerve gases and then later the fallout. It was all over before we ever heard your signals from space; there were only a couple dozen people still alive in New York then. And they all died before you got there. All but me.”

  The alien nodded, and the somewhat longer hairs on the top of his head rippled in a gesture Stan didn’t understand. “You did tell us all that, but you didn’t make us understand why. Obviously, the reason was in what men were, so I want to know what it was like to be one of them.”

  “I don’t know,” Stan said. “I never thought about it like that.”

  “Then please think about it now,” the alien said. He moved over to one of the windows and stood looking out; beyond him Stan could see the jagged silhouettes of tom and broken buildings rising against a gray sky. Out there, he knew, were the crumbling remains of what had been the greatest city on Earth—dead and empty now.

  He shook his head. How could he explain why men had started a war they had known would kill the entire race? He didn’t know why himself.

  “What was it like, Stan Nelsen?” the alien asked once more, turning from the window.

  Stan stood up. “Come out into the city with me,” he said, “and I’ll try to tell you a little about it.”

  They walked through what had been the heart of Manhattan—going slowly, pausing beside the remains of a department store, a movie theater, an art museum. They went through the seared grounds of Central Park, and Stan showed the alien where he had played baseball, on a field which was now only scorched earth; where he had rowed on a lake which had been turned to steam by the heat from the bomb over New Jersey, so that now there was only a dry depression in the ground, baked hard and cracked like an arid desert; where he had fed peanuts to squirrels and where he had seen bears and tigers in cages and where a bird had once turned a curious eye on him from a tree.

  Then he told the alien what squirrels and bears and tigers and birds were, because there were no more of them left, just as there were no humans except for Stan.

  When he had finished all this, the alien asked, “Was it all good, like the things you’ve told me about?”

  Stan thought back, and shook his head slowly. “No,” he said, and took the alien to a street corner where an old man had died in a soiled vest and with a bottle of wine in one hand; to another place where there had been a knife fight which Stan had watched with frightened fascination; to the building where a club Stan had belonged to had voted that they’d take Chinese kids as members, but not Negroes. Then he told the alien what different races were, and why some people thought they were important. He had trouble with the last part.

  When they came back to the hotel, the alien said, “I think you’ve done your best to explain it all to me, Stan Nelsen. But there are too many contradictions. Good and evil side by side, sometimes in the same people; beauty and ugliness, lies and truth, strength and weakness, all mixed up together. This doesn’t seem logical.”

  “I’d never thought much about it,” Stan said slowly.

  “But it’s a funny thing—telling you about it, trying to help you understand, made me see it all for myself. All of a sudden, while we were walking around, I began to realize that what I was saying didn’t make sense.” He frowned. “But it was the truth, and I never saw it until today . . . until I saw it all through your eyes.”

  The alien looked at him for several seconds, his multifaceted eyes shining in the evening sun. “No,” he said. “You didn’t see these things through my eyes. You saw them yourself, but you never thought about them. That was a mistake.”

  Stan nodded, looking around at fallen stones and girders, cracked and tom sidewalk, fire-blackened doorways. A vagrant breeze blew past, carrying with it the smell of decay and death which hung over the city now. It was an awfully big city to be so empty, he thought—and that was another contradiction for the alien.

  “Yes, it was a mistake,” he said. “But it was a mistake we all made, not seeing what was in front of us.”

  He paused, thinking. Then he added, “You asked me earlier what it was like to be a man. Well, I guess that’s your answer. We made mistakes. All of us. We made mistakes.”

  In Outraged Stone

  R. A. LAFFERTY

  1

  The look of indignation on the face of that artifact was only matched by the total outrage of her whole figure. Oh, she was a mad one! She was the comic masterpiece of the Oganta Collection. If stone could speak she would be shrilling. She was a newly catalogued item among that grotesque alien stonery called the Paravata Oneirougma.

  “You’d almost believe that she were alive!” was the laughing comment of many who watched her there in the display. “Oh, it’s that she was alive once, and now she is furious at finding herself frozen in stone.”

  But that was the whole missed point of her outrage: she wasn’t alive; and she never had been.

  It was the cultural discovery time of the Oganta of Paravata. The Oganta had become things both in and interesting. Earth people had taken a seasonable delight in their rough culture, in their hominess, in their froggishness. Many earth people from the scientific simmer were now visiting them and studying them. In particular were those of the psychologic phratry involved in this. A quick trip to Paravata would yield such theses as enhance reputations and make names. There the mysterious human undermind and underbody was atop and open to explore. There was no way that one could miss if he had the energy for the encounter.

  The energy for it, though: that was the thing that separated the bulls from the steers and the horned heifers from the freemartins.

  “Paravata has half again earth’s gravity, so it calls out our strength. It has an atmosphere that keeps one on an oxygen binge, so it gives that strength something to draw on,” so had Garamask, that most vigorous earth-man, said of the planet.
>
  Many earth people wilted on Paravata. They couldn’t stand the weight (there was something wrong about the weight) and the weirdness: they hadn’t the strength for it. But others (and not always the ones you would guess) found a new strength and excitement there. It was bigger than life and rougher. It was vulgar and misshapen. It was a grinning challenge and it would smash anyone who wasn’t up to it.

  But if you could make it there you could make it big. The loins bulged with new energy for these fortunates, and the adrenalin ran in rivers. It was a common and shouting and delirious world for those who could match it, and it was not only the body juices that were called into fresh spate. The mind juices sang their new tunes also, and the ideas came in tumbling torrents. They were pretty shaggy, some of those ideas, but there was nothing tired about them. Mind and body appetites grew steeply, almost exploded. There was an absolute horniness that came onto such visitors as had the capacity to take it. And a froggishness. What is the mystique about frogs?

  The homed frog of earth is a miserable sleepy little antediluvian and has nothing to do with these vigorous whorls. Let us take the name away from it and give it to another. Somewhere, on some world, there is a real horned frog, rampant with green comedy, outrageous in its assumptions, able to get away with worse than murder. The Oganta of Paravata were really such homed frogs, except that they hadn’t actual visible horns, except that they were frogs only in a manner of speaking.

  Five young earth psychologists (they all had the capacity and ruggedness for Paravata) were dining in one of those gape-walled inns on a ridge above the small town of Mountain Foot on one of the stunning Paravata plateaus. Dining wasn’t the proper word for it: they were gorging. They were gorging with Oganta friends (an Oganta had to be your friend or one of you would be dead quickly). And they didn’t sit at table for their stupendous eating. This would be unthinkable to the Oganta, and it was immediately unthinkable to the earth people. For such action, they stood, they strode, they rollicked; they tromped about on the big tables from giant bowl to giant bowl, and they grabbed and ate commonly from these common caldrons. They dipped and slurped, they toothed great joints of flesh-meat, they went muzzle-deep into musky mixtures. They were as mannerless as the Oganta themselves. They were already full of the coarse Oganta spirit and had even taken on something of the Oganta appearance.

  On Paravata, one never reclined when he could stand (the Oganta even took their carnal pleasure leaping and hopping); one never sauntered where he could stride, nor walked when he could run. Aimless it all might be, but there was a burning energy and action in the very aimlessness.

  They wrestled, they rolled, they walked upon one another and sat upon one another. “Och, I could hardly eat another bellyful,” Margaret Mondo groaned happily as she rolled on one of the big tables among the bowls. Then a huge male Oganta landed in the middle of her belly with both feet and bounced. Ah, he’d have gone three hundred pounds on earth, and things were half again as heavy on Paravata. “Och, now I can eat again. How I can eat!” Margaret chortled. We knew that Margaret, the earthiest of them all, wouldn’t really give out so quickly. The dining customs on Paravata are extreme. If you can’t take them, don’t go there.

  It was just at frost-bite and there was a light snow sifting. The five youngish earth-folk were dressed near as barely as the Oganta. It would be many degrees colder than this before the walls of this mountain inn would be raised. The open air is always to be praised. On Paravata there were no heating fires ever, except the internal ones: and these burned hot.

  “Its much more earthy than Earth,” George Oneiron was saying, was almost shouting. “It’s everything, it’s all through everything. The butterflies here are absolutely rampant, they’re rutting, they’re ravening. We know that ‘psyche’ originally meant butterfly as well as soul. The psyche, the soul-mind-person, is our field of study, and here it is grossly material, fleshed and blooded. Even the Marsala Plasma of this place (there’s no counterpart to it on Earth, there couldn’t be), though it floats and drifts and jostles in the air, has a heaviness and materiality about it that startles one. Don’t turn your back on one of those floating blobs or it’ll crash down on you like nine tons of rock. We’ll solve the mystery of these plasma balls, or we will not solve any other mystery here.”

  The Oganta themselves had this sometimes weightlessness and this sometimes great weight. It was a part of the jokes they played. And the earth people discovered that now they had it too, sometimes, mostly when they were in contact with the oafish Oganta. You are light or heavy when you think light or heavy.

  The floating globs, the air balls, had more mysteries than their weight. There was their sound, the most raucous dissonance ever, when one caught it only out of the corner of the ear. But turn full ear on one, and it was all innocence and quiet. Incredible scenes flashed and lounged inside the balls when taken at a careless glance, but they murked over when looked at straight. The globs made lascivious gestures, but what was lascivious about them? They were only charged air drifting in uncharged air (if there was any uncharged air on Paravata). The lasciviousness must be in the eye of the beholder. But what were the globs anyhow? “Oh, they’re persons, some of our own persons, persons that we’re not using right now,” one of the Oganta tried to explain it.

  George Oneiron, still avid to solve the mystery, was trying to take one of these plasma balloons into his hands. It was a yellowish, greenish, translucent, transparent glob of crystal gas (crystal gas? yes, crystal gas) the size of his own head. It challenged him. It was as if it shook its horns at him. He had it, it escaped him, he had it again; he grunted and grappled with it, he seized it out of the shimmering air and he didn’t seize it easily.

  “It’ll go heavy on you,” one of the Oganta grinned. “It’ll cut you to shreds. Its weight is polaroid, just as ours is, just as yours begins to be. If it’s in alignment it hasn’t any weight; if it isn’t it’s crushing. You match it or it breaks you down. You shape with it or one of you breaks to pieces.”

  George Oneiron was quite strong; and the thing, after all, was only a floating glob of gas. “I have you now!” he cried when he had it. “Why do you follow and cling to the Oganta while you evade ourselves? I have you, and you’ll spill your secrets to me.”

  “Poor George is reduced to talking to globs of air,” Helen Damalis jibed, but Helen was no great one at understanding deep things.

  Actually, it was a giant wrestle, and it was close there for a moment. But it was the plasma ball, and not George, that broke to pieces. The Marsala Plasma shattered in George’s hands, broke jaggedly into a hundred edged pieces, and clattered and crashed heavily on the stoney ground. And George was cut badly on the hands and forearms and chest by the jagged slivers of it.

  George cursed, he howled with quick pain, he laughed at the crashing puzzle of it: the floating balloon that turned into jagged rock. And he laughed at the half dozen Oganta of both sexes who came with hasty bowls and cries of “Here, her£, to me, to mine.”

  George shook and dribbled his running blood into the Ogantas’ bowls. The big oafs loved the tang of blood, human blood or their own, in their strong stew. It was salt and condiment to them. And to George too. For he lept barefooted onto the shoulders of the chuckling Oganta girls and trod them. It was bloody revel.

  “Here, here, to me, to mine/’ the earth girls also cried, partly in comedy, partly in novel passion. George Oneiron dribbled his blood into the crocks of Helen Damalis and Margaret Mondo and Bonta Chrysalis, and lept onto their shoulders also. Then, borne there by Margaret, he poured his blood into the common caldrons on the largest table.

  George was bleeding a surprising quantity of blood from the cuts of the gas globule, that floating thing that had shattered so quickly into vitreous daggers that were heavier than stone or metal. The loss of blood made him light-headed and gave him the froggish passion. But he quickly received more blood. All the Oganta, then the other four of the earth people, slashed themselves with the dagger
-shards of the broken globule and gave him their blood to drink. Now they were of one blood forever.

  All five of the earth psychologists were quite young adults. This would give them closer and quicker understanding of the Oganta who were such vivid and outgoing oafs that even their dreams were on the outside. There was no denying that there was an abnormality about the Oganta, even beyond the differences of worlds and the differences of species.

  The Oganta were a neotenic species who had lost, or almost lost, their adult form. As well as it can be explained in earth context, they were teen-agers forever whatever their age: and they seemed to age not at all after they had attained their high oafishness. There is no thing to which they might be compared in this: but imagine, if you dare, teen-ager attitudes and activities continued by certain individuals to a far greater age, twenty-two years, twenty-three, twenty-four, even further. If such things happened on earth where would earth be? Imagine neotenics breeding, reproducing, and never attaining an adult form. That was the state on Paravata.

  The Oganta of Paravata were large. They looked like a cross between humans and frogs. They themselves said that they were analogous to the tadpoles who had been unable to make the frog leap. But to human earth eyes they looked like frogs and they leapt like frogs.