Sidney's Comet

by Brian Herbert

  “What the Hooverville?” Sidney said.

  “You WERE chosen, fool,” the second, deeper voice said, “but not to save anyone. We selected you because you’re such a magnificent sap! It increases our fun, don’t you see?” The voices laughed uproariously. Sidney heard more laughter in the background—unmistakable party sounds.

  “A sap? That’s what you think I am? Someone to laugh at?”

  “Yes! And you’re doing marvelously!”

  “I HAVE found God!” Sidney yelled. He waved his healed arm and hand in the air. “This didn’t heal through luck!”

  “Your mind made the flesh sick,” the first said. “Then your mind healed it. . . . Flesh is like that, you know.”

  Sidney shook his head in disbelief. “Oh come now—”

  “It’s quite simple, fleshcarrier. Really, it is.”

  “Who are you?” Sidney demanded. “God? The Devil? And what do you mean by a garbage comet?”

  The voices laughed in disturbing unison. Then the first said, in a tenor, lilting tone: “As we told you, we occupy the Realm of Magic, and are unburdened with smelly, bulky bodies . . . with all their chronic pains, quirks, inefficiencies and frailties.”

  “You are more advanced than we?” Sidney asked.

  “Fleshcarriers are next to lowest in the Great Order,” the deeper voice replied. “Magicians are second highest.”

  “Only the Realm of the Unknown is higher,” the other said.

  “What are you, then?” Sidney asked, staring at a pebble on the motopath. “Concentrated energy?”

  The voices laughed again. “It is nearly impossible to explain in your terms, fleshcarrier,” the deeper voice said. “Energy is part of it, to be certain. But there is more, much more. Our existence is . . . essential . . . primordial, yet exalted. Words are inadequate.”

  “But you are not God?”

  “No,” the tenor voice said. “Like you, we have no proof of God’s existence.”

  “Or non-existence,” said the other.

  “We are what we are not,” the tenor voice said.

  “That is a good way to put it,” the other agreed. “We are what we are not. But come now—we can dispense with such serious talk. We’re having a party!” A wave of raucous laughter bounced around the inside of Sidney’s skull.

  Sidney stared at the pebble, wondering where it stood in the Great Order. ‘This is all very confusing,” he said.

  “Don’t look for profundities,” the deeper voice said. “Philosophy is no fun . . . philosophy is no fun . . . philosophy is no fun. . . . ”

  Other voices picked up the chant: “Philosophy is no fun . . . philosophy is no fun . . . philosophy is no fun. . . . ”

  “Shuttup, for Christ’s sake!” Sidney screeched. “Shuttup!” He cupped his hands over his ears, felt a migraine headache at each side of his temple. The smoke over Elba House was white and wispy now. Sidney saw helipumpers hovering over the smoldering structure, searching for flare-ups.

  “Listen to me!” Sidney yelled. “Listen to me!”

  “Yes, fleshcarrier?” a sophisticated voice unfamiliar to Sidney said. Then others piped in with irritating whines: “Yes, fleshcarrier? What do you want?”

  “I asked about the garbage comet. You didn’t answer.”

  “You fleshcarriers didn’t want all that garbage around,” the sophisticated voice said. “So you catapulted it . . . along with decaying, stinking bodies . . . all of it in flimsy, leaking containers. Well we’re sending this muck back to you now in a massive garbage ball!”

  “My God!”

  “It will hit Earth Friday!”

  “My Rosenbloom! That’s only three days away! No! It can’t be!”

  “We couldn’t send back the garbage without telling a few fleshcarriers what was going on! That would take all the fun out of it, don’t you see?”

  “What’ll I do, what’ll I do, what’ll I do?” Sidney lamented. “Carla will be killed, and these monsters are enjoying it!”

  The tenor voice returned: “We always have fun! The most complicated minds have the greatest need for play”

  “And you tried to spoil our fun, don’t you see?” the deep voice said, “by hurling all that nasty, smelly crud at us.”

  “What a rotten, terrible thing to do!” exclaimed the other.

  They cackled uproariously, then faded off into a cavern of Sidney’s skull.

  “Tom!” Sidney called out. “Where in the hell are you, Tom?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  Sidney looked up from his kneeling position, saw a white-uniformed little oriental woman staring down at him with her hands on her hips. She smiled softly, kept one eye closed against the sunlight on that side. “You were talking to yourself,” she said. “Who is Tom?”

  “Tom Javik. I’m supposed to operate a space cruiser with him. There’s a terrible emergency—”

  “I will help you.”

  “You will? How?”

  “Say,” she said, studying Sidney’s soft-featured face. “You look like a fellow I saw yesterday, except half his face was distorted, and one arm . . .”

  “I’ve experienced a rather miraculous recovery,” Sidney said. He heard oxygen pumps throb, noted the air around him no longer looked or smelted smoky. “Now how can you? . . .”

  “How nice! I sat across from you on . . .” She interrupted herself, laughing as she tossed a long ponytail of dark brown hair over one shoulder. “But then you wouldn’t remember!”

  “I believe I would,” Sidney said, rising to his feet. Although the woman did not look at all like Carla, something about her reminded him of Carla. He looked away, watched distant patching ships at work outside the habitat as they repaired holes made by the fire in the habitat’s glassplex skin.

  “I mean, you couldn’t possibly! You see, I’m a chameloperson, bred in the laboratories of Bu-Tech.”

  As Sidney was trying to comprehend that statement, he looked back at the little woman and saw her body become very large and masculine, clothed in a green client’s smock. Clear facial features disappeared, being replaced by puffy-ruddiness. The dark brown hair changed to a matted tuft. Dark wraparound sunglasses appeared over the eyes.

  “You’re . . .” Sidney said, pointing with a shaky forefinger, “ . . . You’re the blind man on the ship!”

  “Quite so,” a familiar masculine voice said. The chameloperson changed once more now, and presently it again was the oriental woman. “Very convenient for undercover work,” she said.

  “You must lead an extraordinarily interesting life,” Sidney observed.

  “Oh I do, I most certainly do! But now I’m concerned about you . . . out here on the motopath, talking to yourself.”

  “I must find Tom Javik,” Sidney said. He motioned toward Elba House. “So many things are happening to me.”

  “You escaped from the fire?”

  “Yes,” he said. Then, with sudden excitement: “I prayed just moments ago, and the fire went out!”

  Their work completed, some of the helipumpers began to leave, whirring high over Sidney’s head.

  “I see,” she said, shielding the reflected sun with one hand. Her light brown, almond-shaped eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  He looked at her with sudden hostility. “You don’t believe me?”

  “Sure. I believe you. But you may have received some assistance from the fire brigades.” The wind blew her hair forward. She pushed it back.

  “Didn’t you notice? The fire went out suddenly . . . as I knelt!”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t see that.”

  “Who are you anyway?” Sidney demanded, noting a Bu-Med G.W. 500 badge on her lapel. “A Procedures Checker?”

  “No,” she replied calmly, again tossing her ponytail over one shoulder. She noted Sidney’s black, scowling eyebrows and said, “I CAN help you, if you’ll just—”

  “How many forms will be required?”

  “Why, none. I’d like to—”

  �
��No forms?” Sidney gasped with mock incredulity. His voice whined sarcasm as he added, “But you can’t do anything without forms!”

  “Interesting, the way you put that,” she observed, studying him intently. “Were you ever in mental therapy?”

  “Why do you ask?” Sidney replied, glaring.

  “The anti-establishment diatribe. We hear a lot of it from . . .” She paused, looked away uneasily.

  “I see.” Sidney turned abruptly, intending to leave. Maybe I am going wacko, he thought.

  “Wait,” she urged, taking him gently by the arm. A hypodermic ring on one of her fingers injected Sidney’s arm with a concealed needle. He did not feel the pinprick. “I will take you to your friend.”

  “You know him?”

  “No, but I have powerful friends of my own.” Her voice was soothing.

  “It’s important, you know.” The drug had begun to take effect. Quickly, Sidney was losing the ability to doubt anything this woman said.

  “I understand,” she said.

  “A terrible comet . . .”

  “Try to relax. We can speak of this later. . . . ”

  “Yes, later. Of course.” It did not seem so urgent to Sidney now. His large round hazel eyes stared back as innocently as a sheep about to be butchered.

  “Just come with me,” she said sweetly. “My name is Cherry Blossom.” Another doomie mental case, she thought. There is no doubt.

  Sidney looked into her eyes, saw deep compassion and thought of Carla again. Maybe it was the way the woman tossed her hair over one shoulder as Carla did when she wore falls. Or maybe it was the way she looked at him. Carla had cared, too.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  Beyond the rhododendron garden, a small one-story moon-brick building stood in the shade of two elm trees. Cherry Blossom led Sidney through a revolving door in the building to a small lobby containing striped yellow-and-green lounge chairs, some of which were covered by glassplex smoking bubbles. A bank of elevators dominated one wall beneath a picture of Uncle Rosy. They took an elevator to the sub-eighty-one level.

  “I noticed several missing floor numbers on the carscreen,” Sidney commented as they rolled off the elevator. “Seventy-one through eighty.”

  “Off-limits areas,” Cherry Blossom said matter-of-factly. “Management personnel reach those floors on private elevators,” she explained, leading Sidney along a wide yellow corridor which was painted with a broad green stripe along the bottom of each wall. The brightly lit hallway was crowded with orange-and-green-uniformed employees and yellow-smocked clients.

  “What is this place?” Sidney asked as they slowed to roll around a cluster of lethargically rolling people in orange smocks. “Something seems unusual here.” He noted a silver-and-black scroll sign on one wall which read, “JOBS ARE SACRED.”

  “Bu-Prog,” she replied flatly.

  “Bu-Prog? I’ve never heard of that bureau.”

  “I will explain it to you presently,” she said with a smile in his direction.

  A door to Sidney’s left was marked, “ARTHRITIS DIVISION—JOINT LUBRICATION BOOTHS.” Beyond that, a series of doors had signs describing services for the aged, including sight recovery and aging reversal.

  “Is this part of Bu-Med?” Sidney asked. Then he yelled, “Look out!” suddenly and pushed Cherry Blossom to one side. A blue-and-grey star-shaped creature hovered half a meter over her head. Perhaps the circumference of a human head, the creature had an eye at the tip of each scaly and pointed tentacle.

  To Sidney’s surprise, she looked up calmly and extended a hand to the creature. “Don’t worry,” she said, undulating her fingers in a graceful, welcoming gesture. “This is Henry, my Jupiter Airfish.” Cherry Blossom’s light brown eyes danced happily.

  “A pet?”

  She nodded. “He’s entirely harmless. Did you miss me, Henry?”

  The airfish lit on her hand, made a cooing sound as she petted its scaly back. “Found him dazed in Hub Warehouse Three one day,” she said. “He’d come in as a hitchhiker on a cargo ship.”

  Sidney breathed an audible sigh of relief. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

  She tossed the airfish into the air, resumed moto-shoeing.

  “We’re in the moonslag radiation shield now, aren’t we?” Sidney asked, glancing back to watch the Jupiter Airfish as it followed a few meters overhead. “I noticed that the elevator seemed to jump across a short gap. I assume that gap was the space between the habitat’s rotating outer rim and the stationary radiation shield.”

  “Very observant,” she said. But not observant enough, she thought. Only three more applicants and I win the trip to . . .

  Sidney interrupted her thoughts. ‘This looks like quite a large facility,” he said, glancing through an open double-doorway as he spoke. He saw endless rows of desk employees processing mounds of paperwork, heard the rhythmic tapping of rotatypers and the purr of Harmak.

  “Yes,” she replied, noting his interest in the room. “They are re-documenting identification papers for the cappies we process.”

  “This is part of Bu-Med then?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Bu-Prog is a full-fledged bureau in its own right, voting by proxy in all votes taken by the Council of Ten.” Cherry Blossom paused at a large imitation walnut door marked “ADMITTING” in bright gold letters. After touching a red wall button, she faced Sidney and folded open one of her lapels to reveal a green-and-yellow circular badge bearing the designation “G.W. 631.”

  Sidney furrowed his brow. “Bu-Prog?”

  “Bureau of Progress. We have our own rehabilitation facilities. Our rehabilitation is not like Bu-Med’s, however. Ours is very real, and includes relocation of the client in mainstream society.”

  “That sounds very nice.” Sidney thought for a moment as he looked at the lettering on the door. He heard the Jupiter Airfish coo. “You’re not planning to admit ME here, are you?”

  She smiled as the Admitting Room door slid open. Two stocky attendants in green-and-yellow smocks rolled to Sidney’s sides. “Hi, Cherry Blossom,” one said as they took Sidney by each arm.

  “Hey!” Sidney said, trying to pull away from their powerful grasps. “I can’t go in there! You said you’d help me!” He glared at Cherry Blossom, his eyes wild with rage.

  “This WILL help you,” she said, smiling sweetly. “We’ll cure your mental problems and then release you back to society. You’ll be a contributing consumer again.”

  “I don’t have time for that! A terrible comet—”

  “Of course,” Cherry Blossom said with a smile, “Bu-Med trackers may find you eventually. But we’ll probably rescue you from them again. . . . The cycle goes on and on!”

  The attendants dragged Sidney into the room. He pulled and kicked helplessly. “You lied to me!” Sidney yelled. “You lied!”

  “This one said he stopped a fire through prayer,” Cherry Blossom said as she followed them into the room. “And he keeps babbling about a comet.”

  “Another doomie!” one of the attendants exclaimed. “We get so many of them these days!”

  The Admitting Room was long and narrow, with glassplex application booths along each wall. Perhaps half the booths were occupied when Sidney was dragged into the room, and outside each booth sat a Bu-Prog employee monitoring a C.R.T. control panel.

  “Brain scanners will take your application automatically,” Cherry Blossom said, designating an application booth for Sidney. She lifted his right wrist as the attendants held him, read the plastic nametag. “After the app,” she said, “you’ll be issued a yellow smock and will receive a rehab itinerary.”

  Sidney was strapped to a white plastic chair in the booth. “Just sit there and relax,” Cherry Blossom said. “This won’t take long.”

  Sidney watched her mento-close the sliding door, made an unsuccessful attempt to calm himself as he felt his heart beating too rapidly. His skin was warm and clammy, making the Bu-Med smo
ck he still wore cling to his body. Closing his eyes to relax, Sidney leaned forward and touched his temple with the hand of one strapped arm, feeling beads of browsweat there with his fingertips.

  Cherry Blossom was at the control panel now, and as Sidney closed his eyes, he felt the vacuum surge of powerful electronic equipment probing his brain, attempting to tear away his thoughts, delving into private areas of consciousness and remembrance.

  “Don’t let them do it, fleshcarrier!” a voice said. It was the deeper of the two voices with whom he had grown familiar.

  “The machine is too powerful,” Sidney said. “I can’t stop it!” He felt something tugging and tearing at the membranes holding his brain intact, and he wanted to scream out but knew that would do no good.

  “Does it anger you?” the voice asked.

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “Then concentrate upon resisting it, fleshcarrier! Don’t let it rape your brain!”

  Sidney concentrated, then became cognizant of a growing internal strength . . . and somewhere, beyond that, a vast and all-consuming nothingness. Words came back, dancing as thoughts upon an elusive consciousness: We are what we are not. From somewhere far away, he heard the metallic voice of Cherry Blossom screeching, “You’re blocking, Malloy! You’re blocking! Try to relax, damn you!”

  Sidney felt his mind fighting, surging, dominating, pushing away the thought-probes of the brain scanner. A new serenity filled him. He saw his past and present self. All the motivations, hopes and desires of his lifetime were laid out in front of him. He was a child again, longing to join the Space Patrol, to explore uncharted and glamorous corners of the galaxy. Sidney felt pain returning as he re-experienced his first seizure at the age of nine. Years fled through his memory in seconds while Sidney relived the years of wishing as he worked in Central Forms . . . wasted time spent working and longing. Could it have been different? The fear of discovery returned. Again, Sidney kept his dreams alive in the pages of a scrapbook and in ego pleasure dreams.

  “I’ve never seen such determined resistance,” a man’s voice said through the speaker.

  “What does the manual prescribe, Dr. Arroyo?” Cherry Blossom asked.