Mindswap

by Robert Sheckley

  Marvin knew very little about the Open Market; but he remained silent, not wishing to betray his ignorance by asking.

  'Now then,' Mr Blanders said, 'we have certain formalities which we must go through before we can gratify your request.'

  'Formalities?' Marvin asked.

  'Most certainly. First, you must have a complete examination, which will produce an operational judgement of your physical, mental, and moral standing. This is quite necessary, since bodies are swapped on an equal basis. You would be quite unhappy if you found yourself stuck in the corpus of a Martian suffering from sandpest or tunnel syndrome. Just as he would be unhappy if he found that you had rickets or paranoia. By the term of our charter, we must attempt as complete a knowledge of the health and stability of the Swappers as possible, and apprise them of any discrepancies between real and advertised condition.'

  'I see,' Marvin said. 'And what happens after that?'

  'Next, you and the Martian Gentleman will both sign a Reciprocal Damage Clause. This states that any damage to your host body, whether by omission or commission, and including Acts of God, will, one, be recompensed at the rate established by interstellar convention, and, two, that such damage will be visited reciprocally upon your own body in accordance with the lex talionis.'

  'Huh?' Marvin said.

  'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,' Mr Blanders explained. 'It's really quite simple enough. Suppose you, in the Martian corpus, break a leg on the last day of Occupancy. You suffer the pain, to be sure, but not the subsequent inconvenience, which you avoid by returning to your own undamaged body. But this is not equitable. Why should you escape the consequences of your own accident? Why should someone else suffer those consequences for you? So, in the interests of justice, interstellar law requires that, upon reoccupying your own body, your own leg be broken in as scientific and painless a manner as possible.'

  'Even if the first broken leg was an accident?'

  'Especially if it were an accident. We have found that the Reciprocal Damage Clause has cut down the number of such accidents quite considerably.'

  'This begins to sound sorta dangerous,' Marvin said.

  'Any course of action contains an element of danger,' Mr Blanders said. 'But the risks involved in Swapping are statistically unimportant, assuming that you stay out of the Twisted World.'

  'I don't know very much about the Twisted World,' Marvin said.

  'Nobody does,' Blanders said. 'That's why you're supposed to stay out of it. That's reasonable enough, isn't it?'

  'I suppose so.' Marvin said. 'What else is there?'

  'Nothing to speak of. Just paperwork, waivers of special rights and immunities, that sort of thing. And, of course, I must give you the standard warning about metaphoric deformation.'

  'All right,' Marvin said. 'I'd like to hear it.'

  'I just gave it,' Blanders said. 'But I'll give it again. Watch out for metaphoric deformation.'

  'I'd be glad to,' Marvin said, 'but I don't know what it is.'

  'It's really quite simple,' Blanders said. 'You might consider it a form of situational insanity. You see, our ability to assimiliate the unusual is limited, and these limits are quickly reached and surpassed when we travel to alien planets. We experience too much novelty; it becomes unbearable, and the mind seeks relief through the buffering process of analogizing.

  'Analogy assures us that this is like that; it forms a bridge between the accepted known and the unacceptable unknown. It attaches the one to the other, imbuing the intolerable unknown with a desirable familiarity.

  'However, under the continued and unremitting impact of the unknown, even the analogizing faculty can become distorted. Unable to handle the flood of data by the normal process of conceptual analogizing, the subject becomes victim to perceptual analogizing. This state is what we call "metaphoric deformation". The process is also known as "Panzaism". Does that make it clear?'

  'No,' Marvin said. 'Why is it called "Panzaism"?'

  'The concept is self-explanatory,' Blanders said. 'Don Quijote thinks the windmill is a giant, whereas Panza thinks the giant is a windmill. Quijotism may be defined as the perception of everyday things as rare entities. The reverse of that is Panzaism, which is the perception of rare entities as everyday things.'

  'Do you mean,' Marvin asked, 'that I might think I was looking at a cow, when actually it was an Altairian?'

  'Precisely,' Blanders said. 'It's simple enough, once you apply yourself. Just sign here and here and we will get on with the examinations.'

  There were many tests, and endless questions. Flynn was poked and probed, lights were flashed in his face, sudden noises were broadcast at him, and strange smells assailed his nostrils.

  He passed everything with flying colours. Some hours later he was taken to the Transfer Room, and was seated in a chair that looked alarmingly like an old electric chair. The technicians made obligatory jokes: 'When you wake up, you'll feel like a new man.' Lights flashed at him, he was getting sleepy, sleepier, sleepiest.

  He was thrilled by the imminence of travel, but appalled by his ignorance of the world beyond Stanhope. What was the Open Market, anyhow? Where was the Twisted World located, and why was he supposed to avoid it? And finally, how dangerous was metaphoric deformation, how often did it occur, and what was the recovery rate?

  Soon he would find the answers to these questions, as well as the answers to many others that he hadn't asked. The lights were hurting his eyes, and he closed them for a moment. When he opened them again, everything had changed.

  Chapter 4

  Despite a bipedal frame, the Martian is one of the strangest creatures in the galaxy. Indeed, from a sensory viewpoint, the Kvees of Aldeberan, despite their double brains and special-function limbs, are closer to us. Accordingly, it is a disturbing thing to Swap directly and without initiation into the corpus of a Martian. And yet, no amelioration is possible.

  Marvin Flynn found himself in a pleasantly furnished room. There was a single window; through it, he gazed with Martian eyes upon a Martian landscape.

  He closed his eyes, since he could register nothing except a dismaying confusion. Despite innoculations, he was beset by the nausea-producing waves of culture-shock, and he had to stand very still until it subsided. Then, cautiously, he opened his eyes and looked again.

  He perceived low, flat sand dunes, which were made up of a hundred or more distinct hues of grey. A silvery-blue wind was running across the horizon, and an ochre counter-wind seemed to be attacking it. The sky was red, and many indescribable hues were visible in the infra-red scale. In everything, Flynn saw spidery spectrum lines. Earth and sky presented him with a dozen separate palettes, some complementary, more of them clashing. There was no harmony in nature's colours on Mars; these were the colours of chaos.

  Marvin found a pair of glasses in his hand, and slipped them on. Immediately, the roar and clash of colours was reduced to manageable proportions. The numbness of shock receded, and he began to perceive other things.

  First, a heavy booming in his ear, and a quick rattle beneath it, like the tattoo of a snare drum. He looked around for the source of this noise, and saw nothing except earth and sky. He listened more carefully, and found that the sounds were coming from his own chest. They were his lungs and heart, sounds that all Martians lived with.

  Now Marvin was able to take stock of himself. He looked at his legs, which were long and spindly. There was no knee joint; instead, the leg was pivoted at the ankle, shin, midthigh, and upper thigh. He walked, and admired the fluid motion of his movements. His arms were slightly thicker than his legs, and his double-jointed hands had three fingers and two opposable thumbs. He could bend and twist these in a surprising number of ways.

  He was dressed in black shorts and a white jumper. His chest-prop was folded neatly and covered with an embroidered leather case. He was amazed at how natural it all seemed.

  And yet, it was not surprising. The ability of intelligent creatures to accommodate to new environ
ments was what made Mindswap possible. And the Martian frame, despite certain striking morphological and sensory differences, was easy to get used to, unlike some of nature's more perverse creations.

  Flynn was musing on this when he heard a door open behind him. He turned and saw a Martian standing in front of him, dressed in a government uniform of green and grey stripes. The Martian had reversed his feet in greeting, and Marvin quickly responded in kind.

  (One of the glories of Mindswap is 'automatic education'. Or, in the amusing jargon of the trade: 'When you take over a house, you get the use of the furnishings.' The furnishings, of course, are the use of primary available knowledge in the host brain, knowledge such as language, customs, mores and morals, general information about the area in which one lives, and so forth. This is primary-environment information, general, impersonal, useful as a guide, but not necessarily reliable. Personal memories, likes, dislikes are, with certain exceptions, unavailable to the occupier, or available only at the cost of considerable mental effort. Again, in this area there is what appears to be a type of immunilogical reaction, which allows only a superficial degree of contact between disparate entities. 'General knowledge' is usually exempt; but 'personal knowledge', involving beliefs, prejudices, hopes and fears is sacrosanct.)

  'Soft wind,' the Martian said, in the classic old-Martian greeting form.

  'And cloudless sky,' Flynn replied. (To his annoyance, he found that his host body had a slight lisp.)

  'I am Meenglo Orichichich, of the Tourist Bureau. Welcome to Mars, Mr Flynn.'

  'Thanks,' Flynn said. 'Awfully good to be here. It's my first Swap, you know.'

  'Yes, I know.' Orichichich said. He spat on the floor – a sure sign of nervousness – and uncurled his thumbs. From the corridor there came a sound of heavy voices. Orichichich said, 'Now then, concerning your stay on Mars-'

  'I want to see the Burrow of the Sand King,' Flynn said. 'And, of course, the Talking Ocean.'

  'Both excellent choices,' the official said. 'But first there are one or two minor formalities.'

  'Formalities?'

  'Nothing too difficult,' Orichichich said, his nose twisting to the left in the Martian smile. 'Would you look over these papers and identify them, please?'

  Flynn took the proffered papers and scanned them. They were replicas of the forms he had signed on Earth. He read them through, and found that all the information had been sent correctly.

  'These are the papers I signed on Earth,' he said.

  The noise from the corridor grew louder. Marvin could make out words: 'Scalded egg-laying son of a frostbitten tree stump! Gravel-loving degenerate!'

  Those were very strong insults indeed.

  Marvin raised his nose quizzically. The official hastily said, 'A misunderstanding, a mix-up. One of those unfortunate occurrences which occur even to the best run of government tourist services. But I am quite sure that we can straighten it out in five gulps of a rapi, if not sooner. Permit me to ask you if-'

  There was the sound of a scuffle in the corridor. Then a Martian burst into the room, with a Martian sub-official clinging to his arm and trying to stop him.

  The Martian who had burst in was extremely old, as could be told by the faint phosphorescence of his skin. His arms quivered as he pointed both of them at Marvin Flynn.

  'There!' he shouted. 'There it is, and by tree-stumps I want it now!'

  Marvin said, 'Sir, I am not in the habit of being addressed as "it".'

  'I am not addressing you' the old Martian said. 'I do not know nor care who or what you are. I am addressing the body which you are occupying, and which is not yours.'

  'What are you talking about?' Flynn asked.

  'This gentleman,' the official said, 'claims that you are occupying a body which belongs to him.' He spat twice on the floor. 'It is a mix-up, of course, and we can straighten it out at once …'

  'Mix-up!' howled the old Martian. 'It's an out-and-out fraud!'

  'Sir,' Marvin said, with cold dignity, 'you are under a grave misapprehension; either that, or you are engaging in this slander for reasons I cannot hope to fathom. This body, sir, was legally and fairly rented by me.'

  'Scaly-skinned toad!' the old man shouted. 'Let me at him!' He struggled with circumspection against the restraining grip of the guard.

  Suddenly, an imposing figure dressed entirely in white appeared in the doorway. All within the room fell silent as their gaze fell upon the feared and respected representative of the South Martian Desert Police.

  'Gentlemen,' the policeman said, 'there is no need for recriminations. We shall proceed now to the police station, all of us. There, with the help of the Fulszime telepath, we shall penetrate to the truth, and to the motivation behind it.' The policeman paused impressively, stared full into each man's face, swallowed saliva to show supreme calm, and said: 'This, I promise you.'

  Without further ado the policeman, the official, the old man, and Marvin Flynn proceeded to the police station. They walked silently, and they shared a common mood of apprehension. It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin.

  Chapter 5

  At the police station, Marvin Flynn and the others were taken directly to the dim, moist chamber where the Fulszime telepath lived. This tripedal entity, like all of his fellows from the Fulszime Planet, possessed a telepathic sixth sense, perhaps in compensation for the dimness of his other five.

  'All right.' the Fulszime telepath said, when all were assembled before him. 'Step forward, fellow, and tell me your story.' He pointed a finger sternly at the policeman.

  'Sir!' the policeman said, straightening with embarrassment,'I happen to be the policeman.'

  'That is interesting,' the telepath said. 'But I fail to see what it has to do with the question of your innocence or guilt.,

  'But I am not even accused of a crime,' the policeman said.

  The telepath mused for a moment, then said, 'I think I understand … It is these two who are accused. Is that it?'

  'It is,' the policeman said.

  'My apologies. Your aura of guilt led me to an over-hasty identification.'

  'Guilt?' the policeman said. 'Me?' He spoke calmly, but his skin was showing the typical orange striations of anxiety.

  'Yes, you,' the telepath said. 'You need not be surprised; grand larceny is the sort of thing about which most intelligent creatures feel guilty.'

  'Now just a minute!' the policeman shouted. 'I haven't committed any grand larceny!'

  The telepath closed his eyes and introspected. At last he said, 'That is correct. I meant to say that you will perform grand larceny.'

  'Clairvoyance is not admissable as evidence in a court of law,' the policeman stated. 'And furthermore, readings of the future are a direct violation of the law of free will.'

  'This is true,' the telepath said. 'My apologies.'

  'It's quite all right,' the policeman said. 'When will I perform this alleged grand larceny?'

  'About six months hence,' the telepath said.

  'And will I be arrested?'

  'No. You will flee the planet, going to a place where there is no extradition law.'

  'Hmm, interesting,' the policeman said. 'Could you tell me if … But we can discuss this later. Now, you must hear the stories of these men, and judge their innocence or guilt.'

  The telepath looked at Marvin, shook a flipper at him, and said, 'You may proceed.' Marvin told his story, beginning with his first reading of the advertisement and leaving out nothing.

  'Thank you,' the telepath said, when he was through. 'And now, sir, your story.' He turned to the old Martian, who cleared his throat, scratched his thorax, spat once or twice, and then proceeded.

  Aigeler Thrus' story

  I don't even know where to begin this thing, so I guess I'd better start with my name, which is Aigeler Thrus, and my race, which is Nemucthian Adventist, and my occupation, which is that I own and operate a clothing store on the planet Ach
elses V. Well, it's a small business and not a very good business and my store is located in Lambersa on the South Polar Cap, and I sell clothing all day to immigrant Venusian labourers, who are big, green, hairy fellows, very ignorant and very excitable and apt to fight, though I have no prejudices against them.

  You get to be philosophical in my business, and maybe I'm not rich, but at least I got my health (thank God), and my wife Allura is healthy too, except for a mild case of tentacular fibrosis. And I got two grown sons, one of whom is a doctor in Sidneport, and the other is a trainer of Klannts. And I also got one daughter, who is married, so of course that means I got a son-in-law.

  This son-in-law of mine I have always distrusted, since he is a fancy dresser and owns twenty pairs of chest-props, although his wife my daughter hasn't even got a matched set of scratchers. But it can't be helped, she dug her burrow, now she has to crawl in it. But still, when a man is so interested in clothes and fancy-smelling joint lubricants and similar luxuries on the salary of a moisture salesman (he calls himself a 'hydrosensory engineer') it mikes you wonder a little.

  And he's always trying to scratch up extra income on the side with various foolish ventures, which I have to equip him for out of my hard-earned savings, which I get by selling to these big green fellows. Like last year he got hold of this novelty item, a backyard cloudmaker, and I told him, who would want it? But my wife insisted that I help him out, and sure enough he went broke. And then this year, he had another scheme, and this time it was iridescent synthetic wool seconds from Vega II, a consignment of which he somehow found in Heligoport and which he wanted me to buy.

  I said to him, 'Look, what do my customers these Venusian loudmouths know about fancy dressing? They're lucky if they can afford a pair of twill shorts and maybe a robe for holidays.' But my son-in-law has got an answer for everything and he says to me, 'Look, Papa, have I or have I not made a study of Venusian folkways and mores? The way I look at it, here are these people straight out of the backwoods, and they've got this love of ritual and dance and bright colours. So it's a natural, true or not?'