by Rucker, Rudy
Feeling overly full, your humble correspondent lumbered down the stairs to his filth-strewn back yard and took a seventy kilogram dump...eliminating redundant units like a corporation resizing herself after a handsome acquisition. Mercy me, but I was shivers all over when I passed that gentleman’s skull. Can’t say as I actually looked back at what I crapped out, just scuffed some dust over the remains like a dog does, then hurried back inside for a festive refreshment—candied dates and hot black tea. For the first time in years, I’m feeling no craving for junk, booze or Miss Green.
I sat down at my well-oiled typewriter and began transmitting you this latest news...and then came the confrontation that every man fears and longs for the most.
The shambling thump of...something Burroughsian... huffing up the sun-sharpened stairs to my door, my fellow skugger dragging himself towards me like a canvas sack of black meat.
Taking a jiu-jitsu stance, I open my door to find...a lean, weathered man with thin lips and a sly smile, balding, horsy jaw, narrow nose, keen eyes, he’s really quite dazzling this fellow...I might as well be looking into a mirror. This weasel Turing have absorb my chromosomes so he can lift my papers. Call him Alan-William Turing-Burroughs now.
The obvious question: do we make fucky-fuck? Fie! I’m not my type, dear. Instead we rustle up a brace of boys in the Socco Chico—my Kiki, and Alan’s erstwhile soul-mate Driss. The big surprise is that the boys are already by way of being skuggers too. The transformation has had a bad effect on them, they seem a listless, limp. But once Turing lay on his hands and flow in his latest skuggy program tweaks, they peppy.
So we four while away a lovely Christmas afternoon in my digs, eating couscous and nibbling sweetmeats between tastes of the Forbidden Fruit, sometimes melting into a mound. Even when we’re not in physical touch, we’re reading each others’ feelings and thoughts. It’s richer than what I’d expected from telepathy—I call it teep.
Such expansiveness today, such laughter and joy...luxe, calme et volupté. And Turing—how rare to share the company of a truly intelligent and utterly subversive man. An oasis in the long caravan of life.
But then our hired boys leave, the sweets are all eaten up, and my opportunistic double want to sit in my rocker and use my typewriter even though I am still in mid-stream on this letter.
Over my shoulder, even now as I type, I tell him he’s disloyal as a sheep-killing dog, and he think I’m joking. Even under the ameliorating influence of my genes, his laugh still very ugly and he enjoy to talk about like Diophantine equations yet. I have this suppurating anxiety he gonna burst open any second and release uncountable numbers of skug larvae to recruit the local citizenry en masse.
So I pull my shiv on him and explain it best he leave town tonight on the ferry to Spain. I’m giving him my passport and a letter of reference...just for the pleasure of seeing his questionable ass go out my door before he get me exiled from my Land of Nod. Still some details to wrap up...and then for The Novel. Interzone.
Love,
Bill
***
To Mortimer Burroughs
Tangier, Christmas Day, 1954
Dear Father,
The man who bears this letter and my passport has taken on my form as a way to avoid unjust persecutions of the sort that I myself am subject to. I ask you to assist him as much as you can.
He is a pleasant gentlemen of sober habits and considerable scientific skill. He hopes to find work in some technical field. I realize that you’ve long since sold your stock in the Burroughs Corporation, but perhaps you still have some contacts among the higher-ups. He feels he would do very well in a research lab.
I won’t try to explain how it is that he took on my appearance. Suffice it say that the interaction had no bad effects on me...far from it, I feel livelier than usual, and I am full of energy for my next book.
Rest assured that I remain your true son Billy, and that I am indeed still in Tangier. I can arrange a confirming telephone call through the US Legation if you like. By no means should you discontinue my monthly payments.
Love to Mother, and Merry Christmas to you both.
Billy
Chapter 4: Aboard the Phos
Alan left Burroughs’s apartment with empty hands and a happy head. He patted his face, savoring its firm, healthy contours. The cure had worked. And it was still Christmas Day—although you’d never know it from these evening-shadowed Moslem streets.
He’d been so anxious about allowing the skug onto his body this morning that he’d taken a shot of Eukodal first. So his memories of the transformations had a hallucinated, fun-house quality. The skug had infected first Alan and then, at Alan’s urging, Burroughs—with no harm done.
Alan chuckled to himself in the street, recalling Burroughs’s whinnying scream when he’d dropped onto him from the ceiling. What a lark. And then he and Bill had melted together—intricate, esoteric, electric. They’d stumbled outside, divided in two, and regained human form, more or less their same selves, but both of them looking like Bill.
It was a surprise that Driss and Kiki were already skuggers as well. Evidently the preliminary tweaks that Alan had done on the Pratt zombie had brought the thing’s biocomputations into a reversible mode—and thus the new converts hadn’t had their personalities erased. But certainly the boys’ affect had improved once they’d merged with Alan this afternoon. Alan’s intricate feedback techniques had evolved his skugly processes to a high degree of elegance. And there was more to be done, much more. Alan’s body was his laboratory now.
As he strode smiling down the street towards the port, he wondered how it would feel to break into run. But he didn’t want to risk extra attention.
He now forgave Driss’s drive to amass money by any means. But even though Driss was a skugger, it was still conceivable that he might shop Alan to the British agents. All the more reason to leave Tangier right away. This routine was done.
Alan would miss Burroughs, but he was keen indeed to exit this pest hole before some new leering jack-in-the-box popped up. He still had most of the money he’d gotten from Pratt, plus Burroughs’s passport, not to mention a letter of introduction to Burroughs’s father. Perhaps he’d be safe from the Queen’s government in America.
Alan fully realized that both he and Burroughs were something slightly other than human now. The symbiotic skugs had altered them for good. Nearly all of the time he felt preternaturally alert.
Driss and Kiki said there were dozens or even hundreds more skuggers in the Casbah now—radiating out from Pratt. The Pratt skugger had been the only mindless one, and the boys had incinerated him as a matter of good public relations. In any case, Driss had said the local police were impounding whatever skuggers they could capture. Driss and Kiki were being very careful. Everything was in a state of change.
“Far out,” said Alan to himself, drawing on Burroughs’s subcultural vocabulary, and even managing to produce something like the man’s dry Missouri accent. “Wild kicks.”
Some of Burroughs’s memories seemed to have migrated into Alan’s retrofitted frame, perhaps at the cellular level. Sloping through the bustling last few streets by the pier, he even found himself wondering whether he ought to bring along some Eukodal for the trip. But no, no, this was an alien, Burroughsian thought procedure. Terminate it.
Alan took the short ferry ride across the strait that divided North Africa from Spain. As he debarked, he had a bad moment—he thought he saw a severed human hand scurrying down the ferry’s gangplank behind him. It was up on its fingers. Alan looked away, looked back, and the apparition had either vanished or had lost itself in the clamorous crowd.
From the ferry port, Alan rode a smelly omnibus to Gibraltar, tormented by fantasies of something creeping under his seat to grab his ankles. He arrived in the colonial port town after midnight in a state of extreme nervousness and exhaustion. He got the night clerk’s permission to sleep on a bench in the bus station, grateful to have his feet off the floor. Befo
re closing his eyes he privily grew a pouch in his belly, tucked in his cash and papers, then sealed the pouch shut.
All night he dreamed of tunnels—and when he woke it occurred to him that these branching, narrowing passages had been his veins, arteries and capillaries. The skug’s rudimentary mind was familiarizing itself with his flesh. It was as if Alan now had two souls.
Alan worried that he might have lost his shape overnight—that is, he might be looking more like Alan Turing than like William Burroughs. Still lying on the bench, he focused inwards upon his musculature, locking himself into the proper form. It was amazing to have such control over one’s body.
An Arab boy began vigorously shaking Alan’s foot. No doubt the urchin had searched his pockets for cash while he was sleeping. Alan was glad for the human attention, and glad for his hidden kangaroo pouch.
“Take to me to the harbor, and I’ll tip you,” Alan told the lad, sitting up. “You speak English, yes?”
“Breakfast first?” said the boy, rapidly miming an eating gesture.
“And then you’ll find me an outbound ship for America,” said Alan agreeably.
Alan ordered some raisin buns and white coffee from the bus station canteen. A low-class Englishwoman was at the counter, a ruddy virago with a hoarse voice like a jeering crowd. She cocked her head to watch as Alan reached under his shirt for some money—he only hoped she couldn’t see his fingers sliding into his flesh. It was unsettling to be in an outpost of the Queen’s empire.
Outside, the sun shone, with people taking walks and visiting each other, many of them carrying gifts. It was the second day of Christmas, what the English call Boxing Day. The sphinx-like Gibraltar Rock rose over the town, and the wild local apes scrounged garbage in alleys, chattering and baring their teeth.
A man in a black suit had collapsed in one of these cul-de-sacs. A few locals were leaning over him. The man looked floppy, practically boneless. For whatever reason, the skug within Alan wanted him to stop and help the fellow. But he had no time. The young guide was running ahead, leading the way to the steamers’ docks.
In short order the boy had brought Alan to the gangplank of a Portuguese liner, claimed his tip and hurried on his way.
Alan studied his really rather slender sheaf of bills, totting up his holdings.
“Welcome aboard,” said a man loitering near the gangplank, a roughly dressed fellow with a blue chin. “You going where, Senhor? We have one free cabin. Very commodious. Top side.”
“I’m, ah, looking for passage to America,” said Alan.
“We gladly take you,” said the man, smoothly whirling his hand. “I am the ship’s purser. She is the Santa Maria, top luxury, with ten ports of call, including Canary Islands and Venezuela.”
“And how much to the United States?”
The man named a figure more than triple what Alan had on hand. Reading Alan’s expression, the purser gestured the more expansively. “You pay me now for reserve, we bill the balance. Is no problems. I welcome you aboard. We go fetch luggage, yes?”
“I—I’d prefer something simpler,” said Alan, uneasily glancing along the wharves that dwindled into the distance like an exercise in perspective. He wondered if this man really was the ship’s purser. “Is there a chance of finding a freighter?”
“You want to travel like a pig iron, like a bale of ox-hide, like a sack of cement?” said the blue-chinned man. “No eat lobster, no dance big band?” He shrugged and pointed to the farthest end of the wharves, towards some smudgy ships like grains of rice. “You go down there, Senhor. A Greek ship called Phos.”
“Thank you.”
The apron of the wharves was cobbled and sunny. Nobody seemed to be watching Alan, so he went ahead and ran a mile to the end, unlimbering his Burroughs-shaped limbs, shaking out the kinks, reinvigorating his lungs with the cool, salty air.
While he ran, he imagined that his inner skug was conversing with him, not so much in words, but rather with flashes of color in his eyes, hissing sounds in his ears, twinges in his stomach and a tingling on his skin. Was the parasite urging Alan to spread the contagion? Or were these thoughts Alan’s alone?
“We’ll work all this out once I’ve got my cabin,” said Alan, speaking aloud. “But don’t expect me to go inoculating strangers.” No answer. Perhaps he was going insane.
Looking at the less savory piers near the wharf’s end, Alan spotted a Greek-flagged freighter whose name was ΦΩΣ, which he knew from his classics studies to be pronounced Phos and to mean light. This was the freighter that the Portuguese man had recommended. She was a lean, narrow ship, built for speed.
Her deck bristled with cranes, all quite still. Alan sidled up the companionway and found a solitary, dissipated man sitting on a chair drinking coffee. His feet propped on the ship’s railing.
Alan hazarded a hello.
“Yeah, I speak English,” said the man in a New York accent. “Merry fuckin’ Xmas. What’s on your mind, man?”
“I was wondering if I might book passage,” said Alan. “To America.”
“Find a bunk and hunker down,” said the stranger. He had curly dark hair and brown eyes. “Squat and gobble. It’s real slack on the Phos. Yesterday Captain Eugenio shit on the deck and wiped his butt with the flag. Now he’s in town chasing whores.”
“I wonder about the schedule and the rates,” said Alan, not caring for the man’s vulgar tone. “I’m William Burroughs, by the way.”
“Vassar Lafia,” said the stranger, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette that gave off the smell of kief. His unshaven face was oily in the sun. He cocked his head. “I could swear I’ve seen you before.”
“I’ve a poor memory for recent months,” said Turing. “I’ve been in the wars, rather. But I’m back in an approximate state of health. What can you tell me about this ship?”
“She’s a tramp freighter,” said Lafia. “A free agent with no timetable. She snags her cargoes as she goes along. Last I heard, the captain is planning to pick up wine in Madeira, steam flat-out for Miami, then swing down to Havana for some cigars. We’re loaded with olive oil and the man says feta cheese.” He winked at Turing. “I’ve got a tramp cargo of my own. Socko from Morocco in the heels of my shoes. And don’t look inside my toothpaste tube.” Lafia paused, studying Alan again. “I’ve got it. You were in the Café Central. You weren’t talking like a limey then. About four months ago?”
“I’ve been lodging in Tangier, yes,” said Alan, not wavering from his usual accent. “So it’s possible our paths crossed. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not delve into my private affairs.”
“Visions of the past,” said Lafia, his lips spreading in a grin. “Through the gem-encrusted glass. This August? You said we were dump dogs on a magic carpet—you wave it, Bill? Oh, never mind. I won’t pry. We’ll light off new bombs. And, hey, here comes Captain Eugenios after all. He’ll book you onboard. Lunch is at one o’clock, most days, if the cook’s in shape. Wiggy to have you here, man!”
The black-bearded captain was a hearty fellow with a short attention span. He offered Alan a price of a passage to Miami that was more than reasonable, leaving Alan with forty-odd pounds to spare. And then the captain disappeared for a nap. Alan retired to his own private cabin as well, number 17, a windowless steel cell below decks. The room had a sink and a mirror, a door that Alan could lock. A shared toilet and shower lay further down the passageway.
Alan lay on his bunk for awhile, sorting out his memories of Christmas Day. The skug had crawled onto him and melted into his flesh. It had been Alan’s own idea to convert Burroughs. It wasn’t yet clear to Alan if the skug had a true mind of its own. Perhaps he had been reading too much into the twitches and cilia of his tissue culture. He felt he was still his own man.
But, yes, his conjugation with the skug had changed him. His body was more responsive, more fluid than ever before. Perhaps this was how it felt to be a mollusk. Remembering a bit more from yesterday’s hallucinatory segues, Alan stared at
his hand and willed it to change shape.
With a slight sinking of his stomach, he saw his fingers warp and sag like melting wax. Focusing his full attention into his hand, Alan formed it into—oh, why not a duck’s head, a shape fit for casting candle-shadows on the wall.
The hand drooped, the fingers fused, and—the tip became a shiny yellow beak.
“Quack,” murmured Alan, opening and closing the beak. “Quack, quack, quack. Now resume being my hand.”
His fingers returned to normal, leaving a tingling sensation in the muscles and the skin. He recalled what his Mum used to say when she’d find him making grimaces into the looking-glass. What if you stayed that way?
Alan went back on deck. There was no sign of a lunch, not that he was sure where to look for it. Everyone seemed to be napping or in town. And so he roamed the ship alone over the next hour or two—studying the intricacies of the cargo hoists, the radio antennas, and the smokestacks. He had the run of the Phos. He even made his way below decks and examined the engines.
It soothed Alan to analyze the workings of the ship’s cranes, her communication channels, and her power systems. How clear and logical these devices were compared to the oozy growths of biology—or to the frantic vacillations of the human soul.
Quite aside from any issues involving the skug, Alan was a little concerned about the potential chain of cause and effect running from his street-urchin guide through that so-called Portuguese purser to Alan’s booking passage on the Phos. Could this be an intricate trap? And what was the nature of Vassar Lafia’s prior association with William Burroughs? Rummaging around in Burroughs’s vague and partial memories, Alan could find no clues.
In any case, he couldn’t face the tension of remaining in the Old World any longer. He’d take his chances with the Phos, and once he was in America, then—well, that was something else to worry about.
While Alan fretted and paced, the passengers and crew straggled in—perhaps thirty people in all. Some of the sailors were quite luscious, with dark eyes in olive faces and nicely muscled arms. The passengers were mostly forgettable: commercial travelers, neurasthenic students, retired couples. A mother and daughter pair were noticeable—plump and a bit comical, with identically protruding lips. The mother was pink and blonde, the daughter a bit darker, with a bob of auburn hair.
