Eddie, roused out of a doze, horrified, paralyzed, saw her toss her lab kit at him and heard an inarticulate cry from her. And saw her plunged, headforemost, into the stomach-iris.
Polyphema had taken the one sure way of burying the evidence.
Eddie lay face down, nose mashed against the warm and faintly throbbing flesh of the floor. Now and then his hands clutched spasmodically as if he were reaching for something that someone kept putting just within his reach and then moving away.
How long he was there he didn’t know, for he never again looked at the clock.
Finally, in the darkness, he sat up and giggled inanely, “Mother always did make good stew.”
That set him off. He leaned back on his hands and threw his head back and howled like a wolf under a full moon.
Polyphema, of course, was dead-deaf, but she could radar his posture, and her keen nostrils deduced from his body-scent that he was in terrible fear and anguish.
A tentacle glided out and gently enfolded him.
“What is the matter?” zzted the panrad.
He stuck his finger in the keyhole.
“I have lost my mother!”
“?”.
“She’s gone away, and she’ll never come back.”
“I don’t understand. Here I am.”
Eddie quit weeping and cocked his head as if he were listening to some inner voice. He snuffled a few times and wiped away the tears, slowly disengaged the tentacle, patted it, walked over to his pack in a corner, and took out the bottle of Old Red Star capsules. One he popped into the Thermos; the other he gave to her with the request she duplicate it, if possible. Then he stretched out on his side, propped on one elbow like a Roman in his sensualities, sucked the rye through the nipple, and listened to a medley of Beethoven, Mussorgsky, Verdi, Strauss, Porter, Feinstein, and Waxworth.
So the time – if there were such a thing there – flowed around Eddie. When he was tired of music or plays or books, he listened in on the area hookup. Hungry, he rose and walked – or often just crawled – to the stew-iris. Cans of rations lay in his pack; he had planned to eat those until he was sure that – what was it he was forbidden to eat? Poison? Something had been devoured by Polyphema and the Sluggos. But sometime during the music-rye orgy, he had forgotten. He now ate quite hungrily and with thought for nothing but the satisfaction of his wants.
Sometimes the door-iris opened, and Billy Greengrocer hopped in. Billy looked like a cross between a cricket and a kangaroo. He was the size of a collie, and he bore in a marsupialian pouch vegetables and fruit and nuts. These he extracted with shiny green, chitinous claws and gave to Mother in return for meals of stew. Happy symbiote, he chirruped merrily while his many-faceted eyes, revolving independently of each other, looked one at the Sluggos and the other at Eddie.
Eddie, on impulse, abandoned the 1000 kc band and roved the frequencies until he found that both Polyphema and Billy were emitting a 108 wave. That, apparently, was their natural signal. When Billy had his groceries to deliver, he broadcast. Polyphema, in turn, when she needed them, sent back to him. There was nothing intelligent on Billy’s part; it was just his instinct to transmit. And the Mother was, aside from the “semantic” frequency, limited to that one band. But it worked out fine.
VIII
Everything was fine. What more could a man want? Free food, unlimited liquor, soft bed, air-conditioning, shower-baths, music, intellectual works (on the tape), interesting conversation (much of it was about him), privacy, and security.
If he had not already named her, he would have called her Mother Gratis.
Nor were creature comforts all. She had given him the answers to all his questions, all . . .
Except one.
That was never expressed vocally by him. Indeed, he would have been incapable of doing so. He was probably unaware that he had such a question.
But Polyphema voiced it one day when she asked him to do her a favor.
Eddie reacted as if outraged.
“One does not – ! One does not – !”
He choked, and then he thought, How ridiculous! She is not – and looked puzzled, and said, “But she is.”
He rose and opened the lab kit. While he was looking for a scalpel, he came across the carcinogens. He threw them through the half-opened labia far out and down the hillside.
Then he turned and, scalpel in hand, leaped at the light gray swelling on the wall. And stopped, staring at it, while the instrument fell from his hand. And picked it up and stabbed feebly and did not even scratch the skin. And again let it drop.
“What is it? What is it?” crackled the panrad hanging from his wrist.
Suddenly, a heavy cloud of human odor – mansweat – was puffed in his face from a nearby vent.
“????”
And he stood, bent in a half-crouch, seemingly paralyzed. Until tentacles seized him in fury and dragged him toward the stomach-iris, yawning man-sized.
Eddie screamed and writhed and plunged his finger in the panrad and tapped, “All right! All right!”
And once back before the spot, he lunged with a sudden and wild joy; he slashed savagely; he yelled. “Take that! And that, P . . .” and the rest was lost in a mindless shout.
He did not stop cutting, and he might have gone on and on until he had quite excised the spot had not Polyphema interfered by dragging him toward her stomach-iris again. For ten seconds he hung there, helpless and sobbing with a mixture of fear and glory.
Polyphema’s reflexes had almost overcome her brain. Fortunately, a cold spark of reason lit up a corner of the vast, dark, and hot chapel of her frenzy.
The convolutions leading to the steaming, meat-laden pouch closed and the foldings of flesh rearranged themselves. Eddie was suddenly hosed with warm water from what he called the “sanitation” stomach. The iris closed. He was put down. The scalpel was put back in the bag.
For a long time Mother seemed to be shaken by the thought of what she might have done to Eddie. She did not trust herself to transmit until her nerves were settled. When they were, she did not refer to his narrow escape. Nor did he.
He was happy. He felt as if a spring, tight-coiled against his bowels since he and his wife had parted, was now, for some reason, released. The dull vague pain of loss and discontent, the slight fever and cramp in his entrails, and the apathy that sometimes afflicted him, were gone. He felt fine.
Meanwhile, something akin to deep affection had been lighted, like a tiny candle under the drafty and overtowering roof of a cathedral. Mother’s shell housed more than Eddie; it now curved over an emotion new to her kind. This was evident by the next event that filled him with terror.
For the wounds in the spot healed and the swelling increased into a large bag. Then the bag burst and ten mouse-sized Sluggos struck the floor. The impact had the same effect as a doctor spanking a newborn baby’s bottom; they drew in their first breath with shock and pain; their uncontrolled and feeble pulses filled the ether with shapeless SOSs.
When Eddie was not talking with Polyphema or listening in or drinking or sleeping or eating or bathing or running off the tape, he played with the Sluggos. He was, in a sense, their father. Indeed, as they grew to hog-size, it was hard for their female parent to distinguish him from her young. As he seldom walked any more, and was often to be found on hands and knees in their midst, she could not scan him too well. Moreover, something in the heavywet air or in the diet had caused every hair on his body to drop off. He grew very fat. Generally speaking, he was one with the pale, soft, round, and bald offspring. A family likeness.
There was one difference. When the time came for the virgins to be expelled, Eddie crept to one end, whimpering, and stayed there until he was sure Mother was not going to thrust him out into the cold, dark, and hungry world.
The final crisis over, he came back to the center of the floor. The panic in his breast had died out, but his nerves were still quivering. He filled his Thermos and then listened for a while to his own ten
or singing the “Sea Things” aria from his favorite opera, Gianelli’s Ancient Mariner. Suddenly, he burst out and accompanied himself, finding himself thrilled as never before by the concluding words.
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
Afterward, voice silent but heart singing, he switched off the wire and cut in on Polyphema’s broadcast.
Mother was having trouble. She could not precisely describe to the continent-wide hookup this new and almost inexpressible emotion she felt about the mobile. It was a concept her language was not prepared for. Nor was she helped any by the gallons of Old Red Star in her bloodstream.
Eddie sucked at the plastic nipple and nodded sympathetically and drowsily at her search for words. Presently, the Thermos rolled out of his hand.
He slept on his side, curled in a ball, knees on his chest and arms crossed, neck bent forward. Like the pilot room chronometer whose hands reversed after the crash, the clock of his body was ticking backward, ticking backward . . .
In the darkness, in the moistness, safe and warm, well fed, much loved.
Veritas
JAMES MORROW
James Morrow (1947– ) is one of the leading literary satirists today, who chooses to work in the science fiction and fantasy mode. He is particularly notable for his willingness to take on large intellectual and metaphysical challenges, and for his accomplished prose style. He has often, and with some justice, been compared to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He is a moralist and an allegorist. He has never been comfortable with the conventions and literary habits of the SF field, and occasionally breaks them, sometimes to good effect. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says Morrow “has great difficulty giving credence to the artifices of fiction. This may be the price paid for passion and clarity of mind; and it may be a price worth paying.” His major novels include Only Begotten Daughter (1990), in which God’s daughter is born in New Jersey in the closing years of this century. Towing Jehovah (1994), in which God is dead and his corpse, about the size of a small city, is found floating in the Atlantic Ocean and must be towed to the Antarctic to be preserved; and its sequel, Blameless in Abaddon (1996), in which the corpse is sold.
“Veritas” is a satirical utopia. kathryn Cramer, in “Sincerity and Doom,” her long essay on Morrow and science fiction, says, “Beyond defrocking utopia, the story hits you in the face with the uncomfortable relationship between Art (particularly fiction) and the Lie.” She also suggests that this story may be in opposition to Orson Scott Card’s popular Ender series of SF novels, which aspire to a utopia in which everyone tells the truth. Morrow addresses the question: Will the truth set you free?
———————————
Pigs have wings . . .
Rats chase cats . . .
Snow is hot . . .
Even now the old lies ring through the charred interior of my skull. I cannot speak them. I shall never be able to speak them – not without being dropped from here to hell in a bucket of pain. But they still inhabit me, just as they did on that momentous day when the city began to fall.
Grass is purple . . .
Two and two make five . . .
I awoke aggressively that morning, tearing the blankets away as if they were all that stood between myself and total alertness. Yawning vigorously, I charged into the shower, where warm water poured forth the instant the sensors detected me. I’d been with Overt Intelligence for over five years, and this was the first time I’d drawn an assignment that might be termed a plum. Spread your nostrils, Orville. Sniff her out. Sherry Urquist: some name! It sounded more like a mixed drink than like what she allegedly was, a purveyor of falsehoods, an enemy of the city, a member of the Dissemblage. The day could not begin soon enough.
The Dissemblage was like a deity. Not much tangible evidence, but people still had faith in it. Veritas, they reasoned, must harbor its normal share of those who believe the status quo is ipso facto wrong. Paradise will have its dissidents. The real question was not, Do subversives live in our city? The real question was, How do they tell lies without going mad?
My in-shower cablevision receiver winked on. Grimacing under the studio lights, our Assistant Secretary of Imperialism discussed Veritas’s growing involvement in the Lethean civil war. “So far, over four thousand of our soldiers have died,” the interviewer noted. “A senseless loss,” the secretary conceded. “Our policy is impossible to justify on logical grounds, which is why we’ve started invoking national security and other shibboleths.”
Have no illusions. The Sherry Urquist assignment did not fall into my lap because somebody at Overt Intelligence liked me. It was simply this: I am a roue. If any agent had a prayer of planting this particular Dissembler, that agent was me. It’s the eyebrows that do it, great bushy extrusions suggesting a predatory mammal of unusual prowess, though I must admit they draw copious support from my straight nose and full, pillowlike lips. Am I handsome as a god? Metaphorically speaking, yes.
The picture tube had fogged over, so I activated the wiper. On the screen, a seedy-looking terrier scratched its fleas. “We seriously hope you’ll consider Byproduct Brand Dog Food,” said the voice-over. “Yes, we do tie up an enormous amount of protein that might conceivably be used in relieving worldwide starvation. However, if you’ll consider the supposed benefits of dogs, we believe you may wish to patronize us.”
On the surface, Ms. Urquist looked innocent enough. The dossier pegged her a writer, a former newspaper reporter with several popular self-help books under her belt. She had some other commodities under her belt, too, mainly fat, unless the accompanying OIA photos exaggerated. The case against her consisted primarily of rumor. Last week a neighbor, or possibly a sanitation engineer – the dossier contradicted itself on this point – had gone through her garbage. The yield was largely what you’d expect from someone in Ms. Urquist’s profession: vodka bottles, outdated caffeine tablets, computer disk boxes, an early draft of her last bestseller, How to Find a Certain Amount of Inner Peace Some of the Time If You Are Lucky. Then came the kicker. The figurative smoking gun. The nonliteral forbidden fruit. At the bottom of the heap, the report asserted, lay “a torn and crumpled page” from what was “almost certainly a work of fiction.”
Two hundred and thirty-nine words of it, to be precise. A story, a yarn, a legend. Something made up.
ART IS A LIE, the electric posters in Washington Park reminded us. Truth was beauty, but it simply didn’t work the other way around.
I left the shower, which instantly shut itself down, and padded naked into my bedroom. Clothes per se were deceitful, of course, but this was the middle of winter, so I threw on some underwear and a gray suit with the lapels cut off – no integrity in freezing to death. My apartment was peeled to a core of rectitude. Most of my friends had curtains, wall hangings, and rugs, but not I. Why take chances with one’s own sanity?
The odor of stale urine hit me as I rushed down the hall toward the lobby. How unfortunate that some people translated the ban on sexually segregated restrooms – PRIVACY IS A LIE, the posters reminded us – into a general fear of toilets. Hadn’t they heard of public health? Public health was guileless.
Wrapped in dew, my Plymouth Adequate glistened on the far side of Probity Street. In the old days, I’d heard, you never knew for sure that your car would be unmolested, or even there, when you left it overnight. Twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, yet the thing started smoothly. I took off, zooming past the wonderfully functional cinderblocks that constituted city hall and heading toward the shopping district. My interview with Sherry Urquist was scheduled for ten, so I still had time to buy a gift for my nephew’s brainburn party, which would happen around two-thirty that afternoon, right after he recovered. “Yes, I did take quite a few bribes during the Wheatstone Tariff affair,” a thin-voiced senatorial candidate squeaked from out of my radio, “but you have to understand . . .” His voice faded, pushed aside by the pressure of my thoughts
. Today my nephew would learn to hate a lie. Today we would rescue him from deceit’s boundless sea, tossing out our lifelines and hauling him aboard the ark called Veritas. So to speak.
Money grows on trees . . .
Horses have six legs . . .
And suddenly you’re a citizen.
What could life have been like before the cure? How did the mind tolerate a world where politicians misled, advertisers overstated, women wore makeup, and people professed love for each other at the nonliteral drop of a hat? I shivered. Did the Dissemblers know what they were playing with? How I relished the thought of advancing their doom, how badly I wanted Sherry Urquist’s bulky ass hanging figuratively over the mantel of my fireplace.
I was armed for the fight. Two days earlier, the clever doctors down at the agency’s Medical Division had done a bit of minor surgery, and now one of my seminal vesicles contained not only its usual cargo but also a microscopic radio transmitter. My imagination showed it to me, poised in the duct like the Greek infantry waiting for the wooden horse to arrive inside Troy.
What will they think of next?
The problem was the itch. Not a literal itch – the transmitter was one thousandth the size of a pinhead. My discomfort was philosophical. Did the beeper lie or didn’t it? That was the question. It purported to be only itself, a thing, a microtransmitter, and yet some variation of duplicity seemed afoot here.
I didn’t like it.
MOLLY’S RATHER EXPENSIVE TOY STORE, the sign said. Expensive: that was okay. Christmas came every year, but a kid got cured only once.
“My, aren’t you a pretty fellow?” a female citizen sang out as I strode through the door. Marionettes dangled from the ceiling like victims of a mass lynching. Stuffed animals stampeded gently toward me from all directions.
“Your body is desirable enough,” I said, casting a candid eye up and down the sales clerk. A tattered wool sweater molded itself around her emphatic breasts. Grimy white slacks encased her tight thighs. “But that nose,” I added forlornly. A demanding business, citizenship.
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 19
