By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  “Why’d you hurt your hand?” the kid asked.

  McGinny checked an angry retort. This kid was just too dumb to know any better, he decided. “Ah, the karkin’ quadio blew a speaker,” he grumbled.

  “Looks okay from here,” the kid said.

  “Well, it doesn’t sound okay from here,” McGinny snapped. “Left front channel’s gone.”

  “I didn’t mean to rub it in, Mr. McGinny. I just thought you mighta thought…”

  “Well-I-didn’t-so-just-shut-up-about-it-all-right?” the prisoner said through grated teeth. Kark, this kid was dumb!

  “Sure. Hey listen, wow, I meant to ask you. You never told me about how come you let that fem talk you into taking the green.” The jailer tugged at his mustache and regarded McGinny expectantly.

  McGinny turned, took a few steps from the window. Then he frowned and turned back resignedly. “It’s like I told you: she was going to stick it to me.”

  “Yeah, but she couldn’t prove a thing. Or could she?”

  “She didn’t have to prove it. I told you I got a wife and kids, didn’t I? What do you think my wife’d do, I’m down in Paternity Court? What do you think my boss’d do? Bigshot Z.P.G. supporter, he’d toss me on the street in a minute. It ain’t like if I sold illegal dope or run over somebody stoned. You can’t get fired for criminal record anymore. But an unlicensed pregnancy? A third kid? Don’t make me laugh. She didn’t have to prove a thing to finish me off.”

  “Yeah, I guess I see…” said the kid. “But one thing I don’t understand…”

  “You don’t understand nothing. You never been married. I’d have done anything to keep Alice from leaving me. Anything.” His voice broke. “I…I loved her.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand,” the kids said eagerly. “I mean, if you loved her so much, how come you topped this other fem? I mean, sure, everybody likes variety once in a while, but you must have a House in your neighborhood, you must have had the money.”

  “Hey, listen, I never paid for it in my life,” McGinny said proudly. “I mean, half the thrill of love is in the conquest.” He had read that somewhere.

  “So, then, since your wife was already ‘conquered’ she didn’t turn you on?”

  “Of course she turned me on. I told you I loved her, didn’t I? But there was this fem I met at the Automat, worked in the same building, and she looked like she never had it, you know? So I called her up that night, invited her out for a drive.”

  “Top her that night?” the kid exclaimed.

  “Well, sure,” McGinny said modestly. “You know, I kind of always had good luck with virgins.”

  “Plural? You mean there were others?”

  “Not too karkin’ many others. I told you I loved my wife,” McGinny said suspiciously.

  “But you said…”

  “I know what I karkin’ said,” McGinny barked.

  “Okay, take it easy. I was just asking. ’Cause I thought you meant…”

  “Well, keep your thoughts to yourself. Jesus, you ask a lot of dopey questions. What’s the matter, you got nothing better…” His voice trailed off as he caught himself. “I mean, what makes you so taken curious?”

  “Oh, I just wonder a lot. You know, how come you’re in there and I’m out here and all—I’ve always been kind of philosophical, you know? Into people, like I said. I mean, we all start out the same, and some of us do things others don’t. I guess I’m just curious about what makes people tick. How come she got pregnant?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, don’t you use anything?”

  “Well, sure, but I mean, I didn’t know. Hell, first date and all, I…I just figured she’d be using something. Nice piece like that…”

  “But you said she looked like a virgin.”

  “Well, that’s it, see? How was I supposed to know she’d spread right off like that?”

  “But you just said you always had good luck with…”

  “Get of my case, will you? I’m telling you, this fem was a slot. She…she told me it was all right, see, because she wanted to get me by the pills, pump me for green, get it?”

  “Look, I don’t know, you were there and I wasn’t, but frankly that sounds like a load of used food to me,” the kid said evenly. “You told me all she asked for was support until she could work again, didn’t you? And just for that she was willing to take the rap and lose her own Welfare. Doesn’t sound like a slot to me.”

  “Get out of here, you fuzz-faced stuffer! Who the hell asked for your opinion, anyway? Go on, get taken before I…”

  “Before you what, bro?” the kid asked softly. “You can’t get out of there, can you? You can’t even snuff yourself to embarrass me. I’m not a captive audience, but you’re sure a captive performer. I don’t understand what you did, and you’re going to explain it to me. Sooner or later.”

  “I’ll see you in hell first,” McGinny shouted, almost gibbering.

  “Sooner or later,” he repeated, tugging at his mustache.

  McGinny’s eyes widened, and he placed a hand on either side of the window. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? You little hark, you’re really enjoying this!”

  “Does that matter?” the kid asked softly. “Does it really make any difference whether I enjoy it or not? All I’m doing is asking you questions. The answers you already know yourself, right? Or you couldn’t answer the questions. I’m not putting any words in your mouth—just asking questions so I can understand why you did what you did. All I want,” he said simply, “is the truth.”

  “You want it, you clinical little bastard, but maybe I don’t,” McGinny snarled.

  “Oh, well…” said the kid, shrugging. “There I can’t help you, Mr. McGinny. I mean, even if I don’t ask you another thing, you’ve got ten years to go, and there’s no place to hide in there. How long you think you can duck the truth?”

  “Forever, you lousy bastard,” McGinny roared. “Get out of my life, go on, get the hell out of here.” He turned away in dismissal, began pacing the room angrily. I don’t have to take this kind of sewage! I’ll write to the Warden, to my Congressman, to…he stopped suddenly, struck the obvious. Prisoners lost all their civil rights—including access to the postal computer network. His voicewriter lacked the familiar “Transmit” key. There was no way for him to get a letter to anyone, unless the kid agreed to take it down for him and deliver it.

  Somebody else has got to come by, sooner or later, he thought frantically. A maintenance man, somebody!

  No one had so far.

  He was trapped, pure and simple, trapped with this shaggy punk kid with his words that twisted the truth into lies and made you feel like you’d done something wrong, like you deserved all this instead of merely being caught up in a web of circumstances that could have happened to anybody. The little stuffer’ll be back, to pick at me and twist everything all up. Enjoys it, like he was pulling the wings off flies, like…

  He spun around angrily, and the kid was still there, his face framed in the window over the skull-like time-lock.

  “Spying on me, you…” McGinny groped for words.

  “No,” the kid murmured. “Just…just observing you.”

  McGinny howled.

  The drug which Solomon Orechal’s age knew as Truth Dope had been known to man for hundreds of years before a single word was ever written about it. Known, that is, to some men.

  The first words written about Truth Dope appeared in the middle Twentieth Century. Author William Burroughs passed on a legend of unknown origin concerning a forgotten tribe in the trackless wilds of South America who used a drug he called “yage,” which induced temporary mental telepathy between its users. The brief mention was too preposterous to be taken very seriously, of course, but there were many in those times who took preposterous things seriously. Rumors traveled the junkie grapevine, apocrypha rode the dealers’ trail, and the A-heads spoke in whispers of yage.

  In vain. Yage existed, and its ridiculous Los
t Tribe as well. But they were not exactly lost.

  They were hidden.

  For the telepathy that its users experienced under the influence of yage was more than the ability to send and receive messages without material aid. It was rather a total dissolution of all the walls surrounding human consciousness, a complete opening of minds one to the other, providing the first and only escape from the solitary confinement of the human skull. It was a melding of personalities, a stripping away of all cover.

  Two people who took yage simply had no secrets from one another. At all.

  Secret thoughts, inner motivations, hopes, shames, dreams, pretenses, likes and dislikes and the true inner feelings of that part of the heart whose name is unpronounceable, all were laid bare to a partner in the yage experience.

  That the drug should have remained so perfect a secret for so many hundreds of years was not in the least surprising. Realizing what they possessed, and its potential for good and evil, its discoverers—the Kundalu—adopted a policy of isolationism utterly simple in execution: anyone they did not recognize was apprehended, and yage stuffed down his throat.

  Then they either killed him or married him.

  This delightfully uncomplicated system lasted until 1984. Inevitably, the Kundalu were discovered, by a real estate developer looking for a place to put 2,650 condominiums. Over twelve hundred years of self-knowledge on a level unknown to mankind at large had made the Kundalu wise and canny indeed—175 of the condominiums had been built and fifty-three sold before the clearing crews stumbled across the Kundalu village.

  The strange and humble Indians would not leave the land where holy yage grew, nor permit its razing.

  They resisted the developer’s half-hearted attempt to learn their vestigial spoken language, lest the secret of its growth be somehow wrested from them. He, in turn, was impatient—and out there in the bush, no sanctions could be applied to him—he was, after all, building dwelling units. He slaughtered the simple Kundalu to the last man.

  It chanced that four of the crew assigned to demolish the primitively beautiful village of the Kundalu were welfare clients—counterculture types who recognized the ceremonial bowls of dried leaves they found for what they were: a communal drug. The foreman found them inside a structure like a decapitated dome, open to the skies but closed to the gaze of passersby, and he understood enough of the joyous babbling he overheard to shoot all four of them dead.

  In six months he and the developer had a small but established corporate identity in the underworld of big-time drug traffic. In a year, the developer had him killed. Within four years, the developer was outselling the quasilegal giant, Speed Inc., and was giving even the mammoth completely legal International Marijuana Harvesters a pain in the balance sheet, despite the fact that Truth (as yage was brand-named) was still on the Illegal List.

  The usual controversy flared in the news media, freighted with a larger than usual bulk of ignorance, for very little indeed was known about Truth Dope. In time the substance might completely overturn many time-honored concepts of personal privacy, many institutions of law and justice, many truisms of human psychology—but at present absolutely all that was known about it was that it was curiously resistant to chemical analysis, and that no more than three people could safely share the drug. The stress of mingling identities with a larger number was severely unhinging; the ego tended to get lost, and the secret of finding it again had died with the Kundalu. Before that had been proven to the counterculture’s cynical satisfaction, many communes ended in gibbering insanity.

  Nor did many triads flourish. By its nature truth became a couples’ drug. Thus:

  Solomon and Barbara sat naked in the rear of the Mome, facing each other in lotus. The windows were opaqued, the roof transparent; the mobile home was open to the skies but closed to the gaze of passersby.

  “Should we smoke?”

  Sol considered this at length, shrugged. “I don’t see why not. The parts to be opened go deeper than pot can reach. Maybe it’ll relax us. This is going to be a little scary.”

  Barbara caught his nervousness, mulled it over carefully. “Sol…you’re really jumpy about this, aren’t you?” A flash of insight: “You’ve done Truth before, haven’t you?”

  “Why ask? You’ll know for yourself in a little while.”

  “Sol…Sol, maybe you’re right. We don’t have to rush into this. I don’t…”

  “You don’t want to know?” Sol burst out. “After all the pleading and convincing you’re scared of the Truth? Oh, no! Have a few tokes and then we’ll get to it. I’m not going to call this off now, and then wait to see how long it is before you want to know again, before you start hinting and then urging and then demanding. No way, mama. We’re doing Truth today.”

  Barbara lowered her eyes, and busied herself searching for the Grassmasters. She found a crumpled pack on the right-hand service shelf over the bed and passed them to him. Current social etiquette required the woman to wave the joint alight, but Solomon had chosen to smoke GMs specifically because they did not have ignotips, and had to be lit by hand. He enjoyed the archaic ritual of striking fire with his hands and placing it where it was needed, and spent a not insignificant portion of his income on the hard-to-find matches. Now more than ever, she sensed, he would want that feeling of control.

  He accepted the marijuana impassively, producing a box of wooden matches from the pocket of the tunic which lay beside him on the bed. By his other side lay the ancient, handmade Gibson J-45 which was his comfort and sometimes his voice, and Solomon struck a match along the silk-and-steel A string with a quick snap of his wrist. Echoes of whispering giants overflowed the sounding-box, and Solomon sucked flame through the filtertip joint with a sharp urgency.

  He passed the joint to Barbara, cupping it protectively in his hand. Reaching to take it, she was struck for the first time by how much in him was conservative, if not reactionary. His independent thinking had struck her until now only as an evidence of the creativity she admired and loved in him; all at once she realized how much of him yearned for an earlier age. He cupped the joint as if wary of detection—yet pot had been legalized long before his instincts were trained. He played an acoustic guitar in an electronic age—certainly it sounded mellower than contemporary instruments, but mostly it was older. In a dozen innocent mannerisms she detected for the first time an undercurrent of yearning for the uncomplicated past, when men still controlled their destiny. If I keep pulling insights like this, she thought, gulping smoke, I won’t need Truth.

  And it was true. Expecting imminent truth, her mind was revving up, extending the sensitivity threshold of its own built-in truth detectors, trying to approach both drug and experience as honestly and openly as possible.

  She passed the joint back to Solomon, who took it impassively, emptying his lungs for a second hit. He would not meet her eyes.

  She watched his bare chest fill as he drew on the smoldering cigarette, and became unaccountably aware of the weight of her own breasts. She looked down at them, and it was only when she observed that her nipples were swollen that she remembered that before the night was out, Solomon’s impotence should be over at last. In a vivid flash of memory she saw again the look of his eyes when orgasm took him, and she shivered.

  “Barb.”

  She looked up. He was holding out the joint, breath held tightly. Brushing hair from her eyes with a vague hand, she took the joint, which was burned down close to the filter.

  She inhaled sharply.

  Very suddenly, the air began to sparkle, and a gentle buzzing filled her head. “Whoops, I’m stoned,” she said and giggled, taking another puff.

  “Say, you must have been smoking some of that there merry-wanna,” Solomon said gravely.

  “Well, of course, ye damn fool,” she crowed, spraying smoke. “How else would I get stoned?” They roared with laughter.

  Sol retrieved the joint from her relaxing fingers and stubbed it out in an ashtray. Still giggling, he sl
id open a panel in the wall, removed an Oriental figurine: a carven dragon with sparkling eyes. He touched it under one wing, and its mouth opened wide. Prisoned in its lower fangs was a blue capsule.

  Solomon tilted the dragon. It spat the capsule onto his upturned palm.

  Barbara stopped giggling. “Oh,” she said. “Yes.”

  Solomon met her eyes. “Yes.”

  He made a long arm, pulled open the refrigerator, and removed a plastic flask, red with white logo. “Better take this with soda,” he said judiciously. “Taken stuff tastes worse’n peyote.”

  He could have read that in a magazine, she thought.

  He put the flask of coke on the bed between them, shifting his weight carefully to avoid spilling it. He dried his sweaty left hand on his thighs and broke the capsule open onto his palm. It made a powdery pile of gray veined with green, fine-grained and dry. He held out his hand.

  Barbara reached, gingerly bisected the pile with her thumbnail, sweeping the two portions far apart. Looking up at him one last time, she bent close, licked one of the two doses from his hand, and grabbed for the coke. She made a face. “Oooooh!”

  He nodded gently as she gulped coke, then took the flask from her. Eyes on the remaining powder, he licked and gulped coke in almost the same motion. When he had swallowed, he put down the flask, wiped his hands on the bedspread, and took her hands in his.

  “Okay, mama,” he said with great tenderness, suddenly vulnerable. “Here we go.”

  McGinny came howling out of sleep, flailing wildly with leaden arms.

  “Goddam skull-faced kid,” he shouted, and then fell back exhausted, drenched in sour sweat. Coherence came slowly to his thoughts, and he was torn by an unbearable craving for a cigarette. He tried to masturbate, and could not.

  He rolled finally from the bed, padded to the bookviewer, and selected a book at random, falling heavily into the chair. He stared at the displayed title page for a few moments, reached out to punch for the next page, and slapped the set off instead. He buried his face in his hands and wept.