Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  However, he had a personality as pleasing as a blind date’s.

  He smiled and said “Welcome!” and he radiated good will and jolly fellowship.

  “Doctor Mofeislop, I presume?” Simon said.

  “Bless your little heart, no,” the man said. “I am the good doctor’s secretary and house servant. My name is Odiomzwak.”

  His parents must really have hated him, Simon thought, and he warmed toward him. Simon knew what it was to have a father and a mother who couldn’t stand their child.

  “Come in, come in!” Odiomzwak said. “All three of you.”

  He reached out to pat Anubis, who lolled his tongue and shut his eyes as if very pleased to be petted. Simon decided that his apprehensions had been wrong. Dogs were known to be reliable readers of character.

  Odiomzwak took a flaming torch from its stand by the door and led them down a narrow and long hall. They came out into a giant room with black granite walls and a tile mosaic floor. At its end was the great fireplace Simon had imagined. The roasting pig wasn’t there, but the kettle of steaming soup was. Near it stood a tall thin man, all forehead and nose, warming his hands and tail. He was dressed in furry slippers, bearskin trousers, and a long flowing robe printed with calipers, compasses, telescopes, microscopes, surgeon’s knives, test tubes, and question marks. The marks were not the same as those used on Earth, of course. The Dokalian mark was a symbol representing an arrow about to be launched from a bow.

  “Welcome, welcome indeed!” the tall man said, hastening to Simon with his hand out, fingers spread. “You are as welcome as food to a hungry man!”

  “Speaking of which, I am famished,” Simon said.

  “Of course you are,” Mofeislop said. “I’ve been watching your rather slow progress up the mountain through my telescope. There were times when I thought you weren’t going to make it.”

  Then why in hell didn’t you send out a rescue party? Simon thought. He did not say anything, however. Philosophers couldn’t be expected to behave like ordinary people.

  Simon sat down at a long narrow pine table on a pine bench. Odiomzwak bustled around setting the table and two bowls on the floor for the pets. The food was simple, consisting of loaves of freshly baked bread, a strong goaty-smelling cheese, and the soup. This had some herbs, beans, and thick pieces of meat floating in it. The meat tasted somewhat like pork with an underlying flavor of tobacco.

  Simon ate until his belly creaked. Odiomzwak brought in a bottle of onion vodka, a drink for which Simon did not care much. He tasted it to be polite and then, at the request of the curious sage, played a few songs on his banjo. Anubis and Athena retired to the end of the room, but Mofeislop and Odiomzwak seemed to enjoy his music very much.

  “I particularly liked that last one,” Mofeislop said. “But I’m curious about the lyric itself. Could you translate it for me?”

  “I was planning to do so,” Simon said. “It’s by an ancient named Bruga, my favorite poet. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, you Dokalians don’t have TV, so I’ll have to explain what TV and talk shows and commercials are. Also, the identity of the three guests on the show and their backgrounds.

  “This Swiss noble, Baron Victor Frankenstein, made a man out of parts he dug up from the cemetery,” he said. “Nobody knows just how he vitalized the patchwork monster, though the movie showed him doing it with a lightning bolt. The monster went ape and killed a bunch of people. The baron tried to track him down, and at one time he was chasing the monster across the arctic ice, though they didn’t have the dog-and-sled sequence in the movie version either.

  “Lazarus was a young man who died in ancient times in a country then called Palestine. He was resurrected by a man called Jesus Christ. Later, Jesus was killed, too, and he resurrected himself. Before he was killed, however, his judge, Pontius Pilate, asked him, ‘What is Truth?’ Jesus didn’t reply, either because he didn’t know the answer or because Pilate didn’t hang around to hear it. Jesus was deified after this and one of Earth’s important religions was named after him. He was supposed to know if man was immortal or not. At least, in Bruga’s poem, it is presumed that he does know.”

  Revelation on the Johnny Cavear Show

  The make-up’s on, the trumpets sound.

  Applaud our Johnny, host renowned!

  He introduces the guests around

  And after all the jesting’s crowned

  With a station break, our Johnny craves

  To hear what happened in the graves.

  But Frankenstein’s monster—“Call me Fred”—

  Won’t talk of life among the dead,

  Remembers only that the sled

  Was slow; his dogs, his heart had bled.

  “Behind me vowing vengeance came Victor.

  His dying bride had sworn I’d dicked her.’”

  Lazarus says he found no riddling

  In the tomb, no questions fiddling

  For replies, just Death’s cold diddling,

  Which, not feeling, he thought piddling.

  The host declares, “It’s dangerous to vex

  The sponsors with allusions to sex.”

  There yet remains a guest unheard.

  “Tell us, Jesus, what’s the Word?”

  He rises. “Here’s the Truth unblurred.”

  All goggle. Man: A soul? A turd?

  Then Time and Tide impose their pressage.

  “And now for an important message.”

  “You were trying to tell me something when you sang that,” the sage said. “You were hoping that my message to you would not be disturbed or marked by commercialism or trivialities, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’ve come to the right place, the right man. I alone in all Dokal, perhaps all the universe, know the Truth. After you have learned it, your quest will be over.”

  Simon put his banjo down and said, “I’m all ears.”

  “You’re more than that,” the sage said. He and Odiomzwak looked at each other and burst out laughing. Simon reddened but said nothing. Sages were famous for laughing at things other people were too imperceptive to see.

  “Not tonight, though,” Mofeislop said. “You are too tired and thin to take the Truth. You need to be strong and rested, to put some meat on your bones, before you can hear what I have to say. Be my guest for a few days, restrain your impatience, and I will answer the question which you say this Jesus could not answer.”

  “Very well,” Simon said, and he went to bed. But it was not well. Though exhausted, he could not get to sleep for a long time. The sage had intimated that he would have to be strong to take the Truth, which apparently would be strong stuff. This made him apprehensive. Whatever the Truth, it would not be comforting.

  At last, telling himself that he had asked for it, no matter what it was, he drifted off. But the rest of the night seemed nightmare-shot. And once again the images of his father and mother slid closer to him while behind them crowded thousands of people, imploring, threatening, weeping, laughing, snarling, smiling.

  His last dream was that the old Roman, Pilate himself, approached him.

  “Listen, kid,” Pilate said. “It’s dangerous to ask that question. Remember what happened to the last man who asked it. Me, that is. I fell into disgrace.”

  “I’ve always been disappointed because it wasn’t a rhetorical question,” Simon said. “Why didn’t he answer it?”

  “Because he didn’t know the answer, that’s why,” Pilate said. “He was a fool to say he was a god. Up to that moment, I was going to tell the Jews to go screw themselves and let him go. But when he told me that, I believed that the most dangerous man in the Roman Empire was in my power. So I let him be crucified. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about the situation, and I realize now I made a bad mistake. The surest way to spread a faith is to make martyrs. People began thinking that if a man is willing to die for his belief, then he must have something worth dying for. They want to get in on it, too. Besides, martyrdom
is the surest way to get your name in the history books.”

  “You’re very cynical,” Simon said.

  “I was a politician,” Pilate said. “Any ward heeler knows more about people than any psychologist with a dozen Ph.D.’s and unlimited funds for research.”

  And he faded away, though his grin hung in the air for a minute, like the Cheshire Cat’s.

  15

  WHO PULLS THE STRINGS?

  Simon rested and ate the first three days. Mofeislop insisted that Simon get on the scales every morning.

  “When you’ve gained enough weight, then you will gain the Truth,” he said.

  “Are you telling me there’s a correlation, a connection, between mass and knowledge?” Simon said.

  “Certainly,” the sage replied. “Everything’s connected in a subtle manner which only the wise may see. A star exploding may start a new religion, or affect stock market prices, on a planet removed by ten thousand years in time and millions of miles in space. The particular strength of gravity of a planet affects the moral principles of its inhabitants.”

  Emotional states were part of the overall field configuration. Just as Earth’s gravity, no matter how feeble far out in space, affected everybody, so anger, fear, love, hate, joy, and sadness radiated outward to the ends of the universe.

  Bruga had once written a blank-verse epic, Oedipus 1-Sphinx 0. It had two lines which summed up the whole situation of subtle and complex casuality.

  Must idols crack, the walls of Ilium crumble,

  When Hercules’ onions make his bowels rumble?

  These two lines said more than all of Plato’s or Grubwitz’ books. Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn’t compete successfully with poets.

  Jonathan Swift Somers III had written a novel which developed this idea, though he’d taken it much further than Mofeislop and Bruga had. This was Don’t Know Up from Down, starring Somers’ famous basketcase hero, John Clayter. All Somers’ heroes, except for Ralph von Wau Wau, were handicapped one way or another. This was because Somers had lost the use of his own legs.

  Clayter lived in a spacesuit with all sorts of prosthetic devices he controlled with his tongue. When he had to use his tongue to talk but wanted to act at the same time, he used a second control. This was located in the lower part of the suit and responded to pressure from Clayter’s penis. It had to be erect at this time to push on the walls of the flexible cylinder in which it fitted. It also had to wax and wane. This was because Clayter couldn’t move his body to move the penis. The degrees of swelling or deflation were converted by a digital computer which operated the spacesuit at this time. To bring his penis up or down, Clayter moved his head against a control which caused varying amounts of aphrodisiacal hormones to be shot into his bloodstream.

  It never occurred to Clayter that he could have bypassed the hormones and used the head-control directly. If that idea had sprung into his subconscious, it was sternly suppressed by his conscious mind. Or maybe it was the other way around. In any event, Clayter’s chief pleasure was operating the control with his penis, and he wasn’t about to give that up.

  Clayter was always landing on some planet and solving its problems. In Don’t Know Up from Down, Clayter visits Shagrinn, a world which has a problem unknown elsewhere. Every once in a while Shagrinn’s sun flares up. During this solar storm, Shagrinn’s electromagnetic fields go wild. This causes some peculiar hormone reactions in the planet’s people. The women become very horny. The men, however, can’t get a hard-on.

  Though this condition causes great distress, it is temporary. Solar flares have never lasted more than a month or two. And its overall result is beneficial. The population has been kept down, which means that Shagrinn isn’t polluted.

  But when Clayter lands, the flare has lasted for five months and shows no sign of subsiding. Nor can Clayter maintain his usual objectivity in solving the mess. He himself is trapped, and unless he figures a way out of his personal situation, he’s going to be stranded until he dies. The tongue-control is malfunctioning, which is why Clayter landed on the nearest planet. He wants the Shagrinnians to repair the unit.

  They can’t do it because their technology is at the level of 15th-century Europe. In fact, they can’t even get him out of his suit. Fortunately, his helmet visor is open enough for him to be fed. But this leads to another problem.

  An astute Shagrinnian has noticed that, whenever the bottom rear of Clyter’s suit opens, the suit spins furiously for about ten minutes. He doesn’t know why, but the reason is that another malfunction in the control apparatus has developed. The suit’s rear opens whenever the excrement tank inside is full, and the refuse is dumped out. Its control wires have gotten crossed with those controlling the little jets that keep the suit stabilized. When the dump section opens, a jet is activated for a little while. Clayter spins around and around helplessly, only kept from falling over by the suit’s gyroscope.

  The Shagrinnian owns a grain mill nearby which uses four oxen to turn the huge millstone. He sells the oxen for a profit and connects the suit to a rope connected to a big flywheel. The spinning of the suit turns the flywheel, which stores up energy to run the millstone. But the suit doesn’t spin enough to keep the mill working twenty-four hours a day. The owner force-feeds Clayter, which makes the rear section open more often, which makes the suit spin, which runs the millstone steadily.

  To hasten matters, the owner also crams laxatives down the spaceman’s throat.

  Clayter has to solve his problems fast. Even with his diarrhoea he’s gaining weight. Within a month, he’ll be squeezed to death inside the suit. Meanwhile, he’s so dizzy he can’t think straight.

  His only hope is to learn the language swiftly and talk the maidservant who’s feeding him into helping him. Between mouthfuls and whirling, he masters enough of the language to plead for her help. He also learns about the plight of the Shagrinnians from her.

  He instructs her to let a wire down inside the front of his suit and into the secondary control cylinder. She does so and tries to get the end of the wire, which is looped, into the cylinder. Clayter hopes she’ll be able to pull his organ out and then use the wire to exert pressure inside the tube. If she can apply just the proper pressure, he’ll fly back up to his ship, which is stationed just outside the atmosphere. Of course, he’ll have to hold his breath for a few minutes during the transit from air to space to the ship. It’s a desperate gamble.

  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, considering the odds if she succeeds, she fails. The wire hurts Clayter so much that he has to tell her to stop.

  The next morning, while he’s still sleeping, he gets an erection from an excess of urine. Technically, this is called a piss hard-on. It is the only kind a human male can get on Shagrinn during the solar flare. But his jubilation is short-lived. The uncontrolled expansion inside the tube activates the suit’s jets. He takes off at a slant and lands on top of his head in a barnyard twenty miles away. The flywheel he’s trailed behind him misses him by an inch. The head of the suit is buried in the muck just enough to keep him from toppling over. Clayter now has a new problem. If he can’t get upright, the increased blood pressure in his head will kill him.

  However, the faulty connection between the dump section and the stabilizing jet has been broken. He no longer spins around. And the force of the impact has sprung open the suit’s lower front section, which in his position is now the upper front. And it has jarred him loose from the control cylinder.

  He sees a nursing calf eye him, and he thinks, “Oh, no!”

  A few minutes later, the farmer’s daughter chases the calf away. As randy and desperate as the other women on this planet, she takes advantage of the gift from the heavens. She does, however, turn him upright afterward with the aid of a block and tackle and two mules. Clayter tries to instruct her in how to use the lower control. She can use her finger to set it so that his
suit will return to the ship, orbiting above the atmosphere. Once in it, he can tell the ship’s computer to take him to a system where such peculiar solar flares don’t exist.

  The farmer’s daughter ignores his instructions. Each morning, just before dawn, she sneaks out of the house and waits for all the beers she’s been feeding him to work on him. One morning, the farmer’s wife happens to wake up early and catches her daughter. Now, the daughter has to alternate morning shifts with her mother.

  Early one day, the farmer wakes up and sees his wife with Clayter. Enraged, he begins beating on the helmet with a club. Clayter’s head is ringing, and he knows that the farmer will soon start thrusting a pitchfork into the helmet or, worse, into the opened lower section. Desperately, though knowing it’s useless, he rams his tongue against the upper control. To his surprise, and the farmer’s, the suit takes off.

  Clayter figures out that the impact of the fall, or perhaps the farmer’s club, had jarred the circuits back into working order. He talks a smith into welding the lower section shut and flies back to the ship. A few months later, he finds a planet where his suit can be fixed. He is so sore about his adventures on Shagrinn that he has almost decided to leave its people in their mess. But he does have a big heart, and besides, he wants to shame them for their scurvy treatment of him.

  He returns to Shagrinn and calls its leaders in for a conference. “Here’s the way it is,” he says. “The whole trouble is caused by the wrong attitude of mind.”

  “What do you mean?” they say.

  “I’ve studied your history, and I find that the founder of your religion made a prediction two thousand years ago. He said that the day would come when you would have to pay for your wicked ways, right?”