Universe 2 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

“One giant pizza, three seventy-five,” he said. Rumborough got out his wallet. As he counted out the money, he noticed that he could see the city very clearly today, only about two miles away, he thought, and wondered why it looked like pine trees so often. Rumborough heard sounds behind him, turned, and saw Oscar moving toward the door. Rumborough backed away. “It’s just Oscar,” he said to the boy. “Never mind him, he’s just trying out his new apparatus.” The boy stood there, staring at the creature, and then began to move away. He dropped the pizza and started out the door. Oscar aimed his device. There was no sound, no light or flash, but where the boy had stood, a pile of excrement was standing.

  “Great!” Oscar yelled, moving out the door, over the pile of feces, down the hill. “I’ve done it!”

  * * * *

  Rumborough sat by the living room window, next to the picturephone. He peered outside and saw four-eyed turtles of various sizes moving around on his lawn, and hoped that they would not trample the rose bushes. He could not see the city now and wondered if he would see it if he had a belt of Johnny Walker.

  Everything smelled of fertilizer. Rumborough got up and went to the kitchen for some ice and a bottle. As he walked toward the kitchen, the floor under his feet seemed soft. He went in and opened the refrigerator. He saw brown lumps of matter resting on the shelves.

  “What a smell,” Rumborough muttered. He opened the freezer and then remembered that he had not filled the ice trays in a while. He wondered if he should try to call Edie. He closed the freezer door, looked at the refrigerator shelves again. He saw pickles and bottles of Michelob, lettuce and jars of gefilte fish. He grabbed one of the bottles of beer and closed the refrigerator door.

  Rumborough squished back into the living room over his brown floor and sat down again. He opened his beer. He looked out the window again. Lines of turtles were moving toward the city. Rumborough looked at the turd he held in his hand, put it down, and picked up the picturephone, while adjusting the small screen. He dialed the operator, but got no sound.

  “Operator,” he said into the dead phone, “I’ve got to get through to Edie Kudatsky, I want to . . .” Rumborough stopped, and grinned to himself.

  “Kudatsky, that’s it,” he said softly. “She lived in Queens.” The phone felt soft and he dropped it, and picked up his bottle of beer. He got up from the soft brown chair, walked across the red carpet, thought he saw turds on the floor. He went into the hallway, opened the front door, and watched the creatures crawling over the landscape. He took a swig from his beer bottle, then spit the beer out violently.

  “Christ, this beer tastes terrible,” he said softly. He walked back to the living room and looked at the brown rug and walls. As he looked, the house seemed to flow, feeling like toothpaste. He squished toward the window and saw a flat brown plain; it was bubbling in some places. There seemed to be thousands of the turtles around. Rumborough climbed out the window and fell on his stomach. He watched his house sink quickly, turning brown.

  “What do you know,” Rumborough said. When the house was gone, he lay spreadeagled on the soft muddy stuff. Then he tried to crawl, and started to sink. His feet went first, then he grasped at the air with his hands, but there was nothing to grab. A large turtle was coming closer, and he could see his eyestalks looking at him curiously, but there was no time.

  At last he screamed, and went under. His mind, still conscious, fought the sensations, the mass of stuff around him felt thicker, then thinner. Rumborough moved his arms as if swimming—

  —and struggled onto the brown surface. He crawled a few inches forward on his four feet, shaking his body slightly in order to remove some debris from his shell. He looked around with his four eyestalks, noticed a girl with large breasts, flat on her back, sinking into the brown stuff. He looked at her curiously. “Help,” called the girl. Rumborough drew his feet into his shell and relaxed, admiring the, brown landscape. He felt fine.

  Oscar, Rumborough thought, while luxuriating in the muck, you sure knew what you were doing.

  All over the earth’s brown surface, the hard-shelled quadrupeds moved slowly.

  <>

  * * * *

  * * * *

  I wrote in UNIVERSE 1 about the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshop and the new writers it’s produced. Since then science fiction writing courses have multiplied both on the campuses and sometimes in private classes; Avram Davidson taught one such course in the San Francisco area last year, and the story and author below developed there. It’s the first published story for Grania Davis, but her ability to bring places and people vividly to life will surely put her byline on more stories in the future.

  Asked about the background of the story, Mrs. Davis replied that it “is indeed based on a genuine, Garden-of-Edenish spot (and thus a spot which is impossible for a 20th Century American to enjoy for any length of time without becoming bored to tears). The protagonists and ‘natives’ and myths are also genuine, as is Brother Jo—who sadly is suffering from the final and unbeatable obstacle which the shaman or witch doctor must face; in Castanada’s DON JUAN, these are fear, power and old age. All his stories and magic will die with him, since the people there have discovered land rovers and transistor radios and regard him as a quaint relic. Sigh.”

  MY HEAD’S IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, NOW

  by Grania Davis

  Living on welfare is one of the biggest bummers in the whole world. To apply, you stand for hours in some huge, long line, your kid in your arms, all fussy and wet. When you finally get seen, some bitchy clerk tells you that you filled out line 67 in the forms wrong, and you have to redo the whole thing and go back to the end of the line.

  If you’re sick, you crawl on the bus to this clinic, and hope there’ll be a seat left for you in the hot airless waiting room, cause you know it’ll be maybe three, four hours. They tell everyone to get there at eight, and send you home if you’re late, but the doctors don’t show up till maybe 9:30, and by the time it’s your turn it’s maybe eleven or (twelve is lunch for the doctors) one o’clock . . . and your lad is in your lap, screaming and drooling. (No bread for baby-sitters, man.)

  And if you’re too sick to make it to the bus, but not sick enough for an ambulance, like maybe you sprained your ankle and can’t walk to the bus stop, well then, tuff titty, sister, you don’t see any doctor at all, and you end up with a bum ankle for the rest of your life.

  And you can’t get into a decent apartment, cause even if you could afford the rent, they won’t rent to welfare-freaks, so you end up in some raunchy flop-house, overlooking an airshaft, where the roaches are running across your kid’s face at night and eating holes in your dirty clothes to get out the little bits of food.

  The fascist papers make it sound like welfare’s some kind of groovy trip and like everyone is lying and cheating to rip-off the taxpayers’ bread . . . but, like, what the hell would you do if you had this two-year-old kid, and the day-care centers had a waiting list two miles long . . . and if you had no high-school diploma or job-training of any kind? You can get a job sometimes scrubbing floors, but nothing that’d support both you and your lad, and a full-time baby-sitter.

  I was kinda thinking to put my kid in Head-Start when she’s a little older . . . and maybe take a class in something so I could get a part-time job . . . somewhere ... if I could find one. ...

  My old man’s on welfare, too. He keeps psyching out. He’s into a big intellectual and revolutionary bag, an anarchist, but figures he might as well make use of the government until it can be destroyed. He’s a Leo, with Taurus rising.

  People are always saying to him, “Wow, the freedom part sounds really fine, but wouldn’t people get on a heavy violence trip and start runnin’ around, doing each other in?”

  His eyes get all big, and his red-bearded face starts to twitch with excitement as he explains, “People are already running around, doin’ each other in. Haven’t you heard of ‘crime in the streets’? And the government, with all its wars, has done in m
ore people than 10,000 Jack-the-Rippers ever could. The government doesn’t give a damn about protecting you and me, it only protects the rich and the powerful, because that’s all it cares about, power, power over us with the pigs, power over other governments with missiles and bombs . . . power for the rich to get richer, power for the oil companies to pollute our water, power for the automakers to make uselessly huge, fast cars that run around, doin’ people in. But if people had a sense of individual freedom and dignity, and could do their own thing, then a lot of hate and anger would disappear.”

  It’s a heavy trip, being an anarchist, and every now and then it just gets too heavy for him and he, like, just . . . freaks out . . . and has to take a little trip to the loony bin. They dope him up, and calm him down, and then he’s all right, for a while.

  It’s kinda hard, never being sure if his head’s gonna be together from one day to the next, but we really have a lot of telepathy, both in and out of bed . . . and he hasn’t been bugging out, too much . . . lately. . . .

  The only thing that made welfare at all groovy was our social worker, Phil, a truly righteous dude . . . truly. Not only did he turn us on whenever we came in for an interview (he always kept a few joints stashed around in his office), and lay extra bus tickets and food stamps on us, but it was him that passed on the word about the new ruling saying that if the social worker was willing to do the paper work, you could leave the city, or even the country, and still get your check.

  Good news, man. First we thought of going on up to Oregon, and starting a little farm in the woods. But then we decided that this whole country is so uptight and fascist, with only plastic, expensive shit in the stores, and the air and water slowly poisoning us to death . . . and eventually Moonbeam (that’s my daughter, a Gemini and a truly tender little joy-freak) would be forced into one of their concentration camp schools, where they’d fuck her head, just like they did ours.

  So we finally decided to split, entirely, and go off to Mexico to groove with the cheap prices and the warm sun and the Indians, who are a bunch of truly righteous heads, all the time bombed out on peyote and grass and magic mushrooms, and everyone’s relaxed and smiling and like, together.

  But we’d also been reading in theTribe how some of the Mexican police have been really hassling hairs, and then, neither one of us spoke Spanish, let alone Aztec, or whatever the Indians speak . . . but if karma is building you up for something, it’s gonna come. So one night this dude, a Maoist, who my old man used to know, showed up looking for a place to crash, and he tells us about how a friend of his has just come back from a tropical island, a paradise, man, right off the coast of Central America, but English speaking, cause it was once owned by England, who sent runaway slaves there as a punishment.

  But these slaves really got it together and mixed with the Indians, and started little farms and built little villages, and fished and hunted and sang and danced, and shared everything they owned with anyone who needed it. And you can go down there and just sit on the beach, and get stoned, man, and pick coconuts off the trees, and everyone’s friendly and free, no bad vibes. You can rent a little hut for practically nothing, no plastic, tourist shit, and everything is really organic and together with the earth.

  Wow! We got high just hearing about it . . . and the I Ching said “It furthers one to cross the great water.” So, like what further proof did we need that we had truly found the place?

  * * * *

  The trip down was beautiful. We hitched along the coast, past the huge cliffs covered with Redwoods and Monterey cypress. Wow, the yellow sage smelled so sweet, and the water swirling around the rocks below was all mescaline colored .. . blue, green, red.. ..

  Brothers and Sisters in vans and campers gave us rides, fed us, turned us on . . . past the curving beige hills . . . through the L.A. and San Diego tracts (“Acne on an adolescent landscape,” said my old man) . . . surfing bums, beach houses. . . . Then things starting to look a little seamy and Mexican as we neared the border.

  Fortunately, no hassle with the border guards, who weren’t expecting us to smuggle grass into Mexico! Tijuana ... a million places advertisingMarriage/Divorce. “Shit,” says my old man, “if we believed in legal bondage, we could get married and divorced in one day . . . or vice versa.” Nightclubs, cheap Mexican schlock at high gringo prices, but you could smell the tortillas and the piss, so youknew you were in Mexico.

  We went to the Three Stars bus station and waited around for a second class bus to Mexico City. When it arrived we grabbed the roomy back seat, where Moonbeam could move around a little, and turning on, we settled back to groove with the desert, and the peddlers selling hot potato tacos for 3¢ each, and the buzzards . . . and people getting on and off, little old ladies in shawls with huge bundles . . . and the bus broke down, lots, and all the men would pile out and look at the engine and jabber excitedly in Spanish, then they’d make everyone (including the old ladies) get out and help push. But we dug it; we aren’t on a heavy time trip like most gringoes.

  Mexico City smelled like exhaust fumes and wood smoke. Big old churches sinking and tilting in the soft sand, Indian ladies with black-haired babies squatting nearby, selling squash seeds in neat little piles. Traffic. Noise. All day and night, lots of strong vibes, but not much hate. Big glasses of fresh, natural orange juice for 8¢. We’ve all got the shits now, but figure we’ll build up an immunity to it like the Indians. I tell my old man I’m all out of diapers. He says, “Oh, just let her crap in the street, what’s more organic than shit?” His head is in a really wise place when he isn’t freaking out.

  Another bus down to Yucatan, out of the desert-mountain country, into the jungle ... a total gas . . . all the greens, I’ve always dug green. Tangled green vines, sluggish green rivers, and birds. Big white ones with long necks. “Egrets,” says my old man.

  People are living in round thatched huts and old boxcars all decorated with birdcages and flowers. Naked babies and pigs are rooting around. Peddlers are selling us pineapples, and we’re sweating and shitting, man, shitting and sweating. . . .

  We expected Merida to be some primitive jungle town, so our minds were slightly blown by the big fancy buildings, the tile and stained glass, and the marble love seats in the plaza, over which huge flocks of crows flew at sunset. “Right on the nineteenth century trade routes,” explained my old man. “Bourgeois capitalist pigs.”

  But despite the European look, there were crowds of May ah Indians in far-out, embroidered shifts, and you could take a bus to visit ruined pyramids, all jungly and overgrown like out of a cheapy adventure flick . . . and my old man got on this trip like we were in all kinds of camp movies and books that had been laid in his brain when he was in college and still into that kind of artificial head shit. He starts rapping like what if Tarzan came swinging on that big vine, or maybe we’ll find Mighty Joe Young behind that tree, peacefully chewing on a banana. .. .

  We farted around in Yucatan until it was time for our weekly “coastal-and-inter-island ferry” to leave. “Pure Joseph Conrad,” sighed my old man. “The wine dark sea . . .” Mostly a cargo boat, with benches for the passengers to sit on and a canvas awning to protect you from the sun and rain. Indians . . . blacks ... a few Chinese and Eurasian businessmen ... a couple of Australians going around the world in shorts . . . and some beautiful people that were a mixture of everything. Babies . . . lunches in earthen pots . . . animals with their legs tied together . . . bales, crates, bundles.

  We lucked out with a psychedelic red and purple sunset . . . shared some of our grass . . . shared their rotgut aguardiente and thick tortillas with black beans and chilis. Then we hit a rain squall, wind. The canvas was about as useful as a torn rubber, but we didn’t let it bring us down, just grooved with it, while Moonbeam curled up on a blanket, asleep with a bunch of other kids like puppies. Stopped all through the night at little ports . . . the boat rocked and swayed, but no sweat, cause everyone knows that grass is good for seasickness. Around noon the next
day we finally got to where we were going . . . the paradise, man, Jobo’s Caye.

  The water was too shallow for the boat to sail in, so dugouts sail out to load and unload cargo and passengers. We climbed down the ladder with an old black woman and several chickens, and urged Moonbeam to jump into our arms.

  The black boatman gave us a big smile and started rowing to the shore where we could see little white-washed wooden houses, on stilts with tin roofs glinting, and lots of palm trees. A few people in thin, nondescript clothes, the men carrying machetes, were meeting the boats and singing a little chanting song. A real upper, and we offer the boatman some grass. His smile gets even bigger.

  Man, like this is really it! “Hey,” says my old man, “we’re Bob Hope and Bing Crosby starring in The Road To Jobo’s Caye. We’re making slightly dirty remarks (but only slightly) about all the sexy women and pretty soon Dorothy Lamour is going to show up with a sarong and adventures!”

  The capital, Bender Creek Town, was a backwater little place. Houses and shacks, puddles in the main street, in which ducks were swimming. Public water faucets and outhouses every few blocks. A few Chinese-owned stores, a few Land-Rovers . . . old black women selling fruit, parrots and fried conch in the market ... a government building on a small square ... a fly-filled, shuttered room in a rickety hotel. The vibes were good, but it was hot, crowded and polluted.