Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  18

  LIGHT IN THE TAVERN

  “Where is the center of the universe?” Simon asked Elder Sister Plum.

  “Wherever one happens to be,” the computer said.

  “I don’t mean in a personal sense,” Simon said. “I mean, taking the volume of the universe as a whole, considering it as a sphere, where is its center?”

  “Wherever one happens to be,” Elder Sister Plum said. “The universe is a constantly expanding closed infinity. Its center can only be hypothetical, and so the observer, hypothetical or not, is its center. All things radiate equally, in mass or space-time from him, her, or it, as the case may be. Why do you want to know?”

  “Everywhere I have been, except in my own galaxy, I’ve found the towers of the Clerun-Gowph,” Simon said. “Apparently their builders were on the planets before there was any other life there. I don’t know why my galaxy doesn’t have any. But I suspect that the Clerun-Gowph decided they had gone far enough before they got to my galaxy. So they went back to wherever they had originated, to their home planet.

  “It seems to me that this most ancient of peoples came from a planet which is in the center of the universe. So, if I could find the center, I’d find them. And they, the first race in the world, will know the answer.”

  “Good thinking, but not good enough,” the computer said. “They could just as well have originated on the edge of the world. If there were any edge, that is. But there isn’t.”

  It was shortly after this dialog that Simon saw the first big blue bubble. It was hurtling toward him at a speed far exceeding that of the ship’s. And it covered almost all of the universe ahead. As it passed through the stars and the galaxies, it blotted them out.

  Simon jumped up, calling for Chworktap. She came running to his side. Simon pointed with a trembling finger. She said, “Oh, that!”

  Just then the bubble burst. Patches of shimmering blue, larger than a thousand galaxies jammed together, rocketed off in all directions, fragmented, became smaller patches, and then winked out. Some of them shot by the ship; one went through the ship, or vice versa, but Simon could see no sign of it in the rearview screen.

  “Those come by quite regularly in my galaxy,” Chworktap said. “They always have. But you have to be in a 69X ship to see them. Don’t ask me what they are. Nobody knows. Apparently, the little bubbles, the broken-up pieces, keep going through the rest of the universe. Your Earth gets the little bubbles.”

  Simon had one more question to add to the list.

  A few days later, the Hwang Ho landed on the planet Goolgeas. Its people looked much like Earth’s except for their funnel-shaped ears, complete hairlessness except for bushy eyebrows, a reddish ring around their navels, and penile bones.

  The Goolgeases had a world government and a technology like early 20th-century Earth’s. This should have been rapidly advancing, since many people from more scientifically progressive planets had visited there. One of the reasons they were so retarded was their religion. This claimed that if you drank enough alcohol or took enough drugs, you could see God face to face. Other reasons were their high crime rate and the measures taken to reduce them.

  Simon didn’t know this at first. Due to the quarantine, he had to spend his first few months in the little town built by the spaceport. His favorite hangout was a tavern where people from all over space mingled with townspeople, preachers, government officials, bums, reporters, whores, and scientists. Simon liked to stand all day and half the night at the bar and talk to everybody who came in. None of them had the answer to his primal question, but they were interesting, especially after he was deep in his cups. And his banjo-playing was so well received that he was hired by the owner. From dinner hour until ten, Simon sang and played Earth songs and others he’d picked up during his wanderings. The crowd especially liked Bruga’s lyrics, which wasn’t surprising. Bruga had been an alcoholic, and so his poems appealed to the Goolgeases’ religious sensitivities.

  Chworktap stayed sober. The two animals, however, didn’t. The customers kept plying them with free drinks as well as their master. Their eyes were always bloodshot, and on awakening in the morning they had to have some of the hair of the dog that had bitten them. Chworktap objected to this. Simon said that, even though they were beasts, they had free will. Nobody was forcing the stuff down their throats. Besides, the Goolgeas religion claimed that animals had souls, too. If they took in enough booze to dissolve the fleshy barriers, they could also see their Creator. Why deny them the numinous experience?

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got religion?”

  “I was converted the other night,” he said with dignity. “This preacher, Rangadang, you’ve met him, a hell of a nice guy, showed me the light last night.”

  “Some light,” Chworktap said. “But then, alcohol does burn, doesn’t it?”

  “You look devastatingly beautiful tonight,” Simon said.

  And so she did. Her long wavy Titian hair, the harmoniously featured face with its high forehead, thick chestnut eyebrows, large dark gray-blue eyes, slender straight nose, full red lips, and full-breasted, narrow-waisted, long-legged body, with a skin that seemed to shine with health, made every man ache to have her.

  “Let’s go back to the ship and go to bed,” Simon said.

  He was now drunk enough that he did not mind that thousands of ancestors would be looking over his shoulder. Unfortunately, when he attained this state, he also became impotent. Chworktap reminded him of this.

  “You can’t beat City Hall. Or the balance of Nature,” Simon said. “Let’s go anyway. At least, we can hold each other in our arms. And I haven’t lost my digital capabilities.”

  Simon said this because he had been studying computer circuits.

  “All right,” she said. “Lean on me. Otherwise, you’ll never make it to the ship.”

  They left the tavern. Anubis staggered along behind them, his head dragging, now and then tripping on his tongue. Athena rode on top of the dog, her head beneath her wing, snoring. Halfway across the field, she fell off when Anubis tripped, but nobody noticed it.

  “Listen, Simon,” Chworktap said. “You’re not fooling me. All this talk about getting drunk so you can see God and also so you can lose your inhibitions is a cover-up. The truth is that you’re getting tired of your quest. You’re also afraid of what you might find if you should get the answer to your primal question. You might not be able to face the truth? Right?”

  “Wrong!” Simon said. “Well, maybe. Yes, you’re right. In a way. But I’m not scared to hear the answer. Mainly because I don’t believe there is an answer. I’ve lost faith, Chworktap. So, when you lose faith in one religion, you adopt another.”

  “Listen, Simon,” she said. “When we get on the ship, I’ll tell Plum to take us off. Now! Let’s get away from here so you can sober up, so you can forget this nonsense about bottled religion. Resume your quest. Become a man again, not a shambling soft-brained pathetic disgusting wreck.”

  “But you’ve always said that my quest was ridiculous,” Simon mumbled. “Now you want me to take it up again. Is there no pleasing you?”

  “I don’t want you to be doing something so it’ll please me,” she said. “Anyway, I was happier when you had a goal, a worthwhile goal, I mean. I didn’t think, and still don’t, that you’ll ever get there. But you were happy trying to get there. And so I was happy because you were happy. Or as happy as anyone can expect to be in this world. Anyway, I like to travel, and I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Simon said, and he burst into tears. After wiping his eye and blowing his nose, he said, “O.K. I’ll do it. And I’ll quit drinking forever.”

  “Make that vow when you’re sober,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get off this swinery.”

  19

  THE PRISON PLANET

  At that moment, they were surrounded by a dozen men. These wore tight-fitting manure-colored uniforms and had matching faces. Their eyes looked as if they were covered with a semi
opaque horn. This was because the eyes had seen too much and had grown a protective shield. Or so it seemed to Simon in his intoxication. Sometimes a drunk does have flashes of perception, even if he usually doesn’t remember them.

  “What’s the trouble, officers?” Simon said.

  “You two are under arrest,” their chief said.

  “On what charge?” Chworktap said in a ringing voice. She didn’t look at them. She was estimating the distance to the ship. But Simon and his pets were in no shape to run. Anyway, the dog and the owl were already in custody; some men were putting them in a wheeled cage. Simon would never desert them.

  “The man is charged with cruelty to animals,” the chief said. “You’re charged with illegal flight from your master on Zelpst and theft of a spaceship.”

  Chworktap exploded into attack. Later, she told Simon that she meant to get to the spaceship herself and then use it to chase the policemen away while Simon got his pets aboard. At the moment, she had no time for explanations. A chop of the edge of a palm against a neck, a kick in the crotch, stiff fingers in a soft liquor-and-food-sodden belly, a kick against a knee, and an elbow in a throat later, Chworktap was off and running. The chief, however, was a veteran who seldom lost his calm. He had stepped out of the area of furious activity, and as Chworktap sped away, far too fast to be caught, he pulled out his revolver. Chworktap fell a moment later with a bullet in her leg.

  Additional charges were issued. Resisting arrest and injuring officers was a serious crime. Simon, though he had not moved during the carnage or flight, was charged with being an accessory before, during, and after the fact. That he had not the slightest idea that Chworktap was going to attack and that he had not tried to help her did not matter. Not assisting the officers was the same as aiding and abetting Chworktap.

  After Chworktap’s wound was tended to, the two aliens, with their animals, were carried off to a night court, stood before a judge for four minutes, and then were taken for a long ride. At the end, they got out of the paddy wagon before an immense building. This was of stone and cement, ten stories high, and a mile square. It was used mainly to hold people waiting to be tried. They were marched in, Chworktap hobbling, fingerprinted, photographed, made to strip and shower, and taken into a room where they were given medical examinations. A doctor also probed their anuses and Chworktap’s vagina for concealed weapons and drugs. Then they were taken up an elevator to the top story, and all four were put into a cell. This was a room ten feet wide, twenty feet long, and eight feet high. It had a big comfortable bed, several over-stuffed chairs, a table with a vase of fresh flowers, a refrigerator holding cold meats, bread, butter, and beer, a washbasin and toilet, a rack of magazines and paperback books, a record player and records, a radio, and a telephone.

  “Not bad,” thought Simon as the iron door was locked behind him.

  The bed was full of fleas, the chairs concealed several families of mice, the flowers, food, and beer were plastic, the washbasin faucets gave only cold water, the toilet tended to back up, the magazines and books had only blank pages, the record player and radio were empty cases, and the telephone was to be used in emergency cases only.

  “How come?” Simon asked a guard.

  “The state can’t afford the real thing,” the guard said. “The fake things are to give a similitude of comfort and home; they’re provided to buck up your morale.”

  The local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had accused Simon of making his pets alcoholics. Chworktap’s master on Zelpst was trying to get her extradited.

  “I can beat the rap,” Simon said. “I never gave the animals a single drink. It was those barflies, the bums.”

  “I can beat my case in the courts in a few minutes,” Chworktap said. She looked smug.

  There wasn’t any chance of being declared innocent on the resistance and flight charges. But Chworktap was sure that she could plead extenuating circumstances and get off with a light or suspended sentence.

  “If justice is as slow here as on Earth,” Simon said, “we’ll have to put up with this dump for at least a month. Maybe two.”

  Actually, it was ten years.

  It would have been twenty if Simon and Chworktap had not been special cases.

  The backlog constipating the courts was basically due to one thing. This was a law requiring every prisoner to be completely rehabilitated before being released. A secondary reason, almost as important as the primary, was the strict enforcement of the laws. On Earth, the police had let a lot of things go by because they didn’t consider them important enough. To arrest everybody who spat on the sidewalks or broke traffic laws or committed adultery would mean arresting the entire population. There weren’t enough policemen for this, and even if there had been they wouldn’t have done so. They would have been tied up with an incredible amount of paperwork.

  The Goolgeases, however, thought differently. What use having laws if they weren’t enforced? And what use the enforcement if the offender got off lightly? Moreover, to protect the accused from himself, no one was allowed to plead guilty. This meant that even parking violations had to be tried in court.

  When Simon entered jail, one-eighth of the population was behind bars and another eighth was composed of prison guards and administration. The police made up another eighth. The taxes to support the justice department and penal institutions were enormous. To make it worse, a person could go to jail if he couldn’t pay his taxes, and many couldn’t. The more who were jailed for failing to pay taxes, the greater the burden on those outside.

  “There’s something to be said for indifference to justice after all,” Simon said.

  The economic system was bent when Simon went into custody. By the time his trial came up, it was broken. This was because the giant corporations had shifted their industries to the prisons, where they could get cheap employees. The prison industries had financed the campaigns of both candidates for the presidency and the senate to ensure that the system would remain in force. This fact was eventually exposed, and the presidentelect, the incumbent, and many corporation heads went to jail. But the new president was taking payoffs, too. At least, everybody thought so.

  Meantime, Simon and Chworktap weren’t getting along together at all. Except for an hour of exercise out in the yard, they never got to talk to anybody else. Being alone together on a honeymoon is all right for a couple. But if this condition is extended for over a week, the couple gets on each other’s nerves. Moreover, Simon had to console himself with his banjo, and this caused Anubis to howl and the owl to have diarrhoea. Chworktap complained bitterly about the mess.

  After three years, another couple was moved in with them. This was not because the prison officials felt sorry for them and wanted them to have more companionship. The prisons were getting crowded. The first week, Simon and Chworktap were delighted. They had somebody else to talk to, and this helped their own relationship. Then the couple, who quarreled between themselves a lot, got on their nerves. Besides, Sinwang and Chooprut could talk only about sports, hunting, fishing, and the new styles. And Sinwang could stand the close proximity of a dog as little as Chworktap could stand a bird’s.

  At the end of five years, another family was moved in with them. This relieved the tension for a while even if it did make conditions more crowded. The newcomers were a man, his wife, and three children, eight, five, and one. Boodmed and Shasha were college professors and so should have been interesting to talk to. But Boodmed was an instructor in electronics and interested in nothing but engineering and sex. Shasha was a medical doctor. Like her husband, she was interested only in her profession and sex and read nothing but medical journals and the Goolgeas equivalent of Reader’s Digest. Their children were almost completely undisciplined, which meant they irritated everybody. Also, the lack of privacy interfered with everybody’s sexual lives.

  It was a mess.

  Simon was the most fortunate prisoner. He had found that what had been a liability was now an asset. He c
ould retreat within himself and talk to his ancestors. His favorites were Ooloogoo, a subhuman who lived circa 2,000,000 B.C; Christopher Smart, the mad 18th-century poet; Li Po, the 8th-century Chinese poet; Heraclitus and Diogenes, ancient Greek philosophers; Nell Gwyn, Charles II’s mistress; Pierre l’Ivrogne, a 16th-century French barber who had an inexhaustible store of dirty jokes; Botticelli, the 14th-15th-century Italian painter; and Apelles, the 4th-century B.C. Greek painter.

  Botticelli was delighted when he saw, through Simon’s eyes, Chworktap. “She looks exactly like the woman who posed for my Birth of Venus,” he said. “What was her name? Well, anyway, she was a good model and an excellent piece of tail. But this Chworktap is her twin, except she’s taller, prettier, and has a better build.”

  Apelles was the greatest painter of antiquity. He was also the man who’d painted Aphrodite Anadyomene, the goddess of love rising from the waves. This had been lost in early times, but Botticelli based his painting on Apelles’ from a description of it.

  Simon introduced the two, and they got along well at first, even if Apelles looked down somewhat on Botticelli. Apelles was convinced that no barbaric Italian could ever equal a Greek in the arts. Then, one day, Simon projected a mental picture of Botticelli’s painting inside his head so Apelles could see it. Apelles went into a rage and shouted that Botticelli’s painting wasn’t at all like his, the original. The barbarian had parodied his masterpiece and had not even done a good parody. The conception was atrocious, the design was all wrong, the colors were botched, and so on.

  Both painters retired to their cells to sulk.

  Simon felt bad about the quarrel, but he did learn one thing from it. If he wished to get rid of any ancestors for a while, he needed only to incite an argument. This was especially easy to do with his parents.

  When he’d been a child, his father and mother had had little to do with him. He was raised by a succession of governesses, most of whom hadn’t lasted long because his mother suspected his father of seducing all of them. She was one hundred percent correct. As a result, Simon had no permanent mother-father figures. He was an orphan with parents. And when he’d grown up and made a name for himself as a musician, he was even more rejected by them. They thought a banjo-player was the lowest form of life on the planet. Now, however, they were angered when he talked to the other ancestors instead of to them. And one was angry whenever the other got some of his attention.