Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  What they were really after was a takeover of his body so they could live fully. Like the Shaltoon ancestors, they screamed for equal time.

  Once he’d caught on to the technique, he had little trouble. Whenever one of his parents managed to break through his resistance and began yelling at him, he would open the door for the other.

  “Go back! I was here first!” his mother, or his father, would scream.

  “Up yours, you lecherous old goat!”

  Or, “Bug off, you fat sow!”

  “I was here first! Besides, I’m his mother!”

  “Some mother! When did you ever do anything but throw things at him!”

  And so on.

  If the quarrel flagged, Simon would insert a remark to start the battle over again.

  Eventually, the two would flounce off the stage and figuratively slam the doors of their cells behind them. Simon enjoyed this. He was paying them back for all the miserable times they’d given him.

  The trouble with the technique was that it gave him a terrible headache. All those simmering angry cells in his body drove his blood pressure up.

  Maybe, he thought, that explained migraine headaches. They were caused by ancestors pissed off at each other.

  Simon talked with hundreds of kings and generals, but found most of them repulsive. Of the philosophers, Heraclitus and Diogenes were the only ones who offered anything worthwhile.

  Heraclitus had said, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” and “The way up and the way down are the same,” and “Character determines destiny.” These three lines were more valuable than any hundred massive volumes by Plato, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and Grubwitz.

  Diogenes was the man who lived in a barrel. Alexander the Great, after conquering the known world, had come humbly to Diogenes and asked him if there was anything he could do for him.

  “Yes, you can step to one side,” Diogenes had said. “You’re between me and the sunlight.”

  However, the rest of their “wisdom” was mostly superstitious bunk.

  The day for Simon’s trial arrived at the end of his fifth year in custody. Chworktap was supposed to have been tried the same day. But a court clerk had made an error in her records, and so her trial didn’t come up until a year later.

  Bamhegruu, the old and sour but brilliant prosecuting attorney, made the charges. The Earthman had allowed his pets to become alcoholics, even though he had known they were dumb animals who couldn’t protect themselves. He was guilty of accessory cruelty and must suffer the full punishment of the law.

  Simon’s lawyer was the young and brilliant Repnosymar. He presented Simon’s case, since Simon wasn’t allowed to say a word. The law was that a defendant couldn’t testify personally. He was too emotionally involved to be a reliable witness, and he would lie to save his own neck.

  Repnosymar made a long, witty, tearful, and passionate speech. It could, however, have been reduced to about three sentences and probably should have been. Even Simon found himself nodding now and then.

  This was its essence. Animals, and even certain machines, had a degree of free will. His client, the Space Wanderer, firmly believed in not interfering with free will. So he had allowed others to offer the beasts booze which they could reject or accept. Besides, domestic animals must be bored much of the time. Otherwise, why would they sleep so much when nothing interesting was going on? Simon had permitted his pets to be anesthetized with alcohol so they could sleep more and so escape boredom. And it must be admitted that when the animals were drinking they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  Whatever good effects this speech might have had, they were spoiled. Before Repnosymar could deliver the summary, he was arrested. An investigation had disclosed that Repnosymar and his private detective, Laudpeark, had often used illegal means in order to get their clients off the hook. These included breaking and entering, safecracking, intimidation and bribery, wire-tapping, kidnapping, and plain outright lying.

  Personally, Simon thought that these should have been overlooked. Repnosymar’s clients had all been innocent. They would have been sent up if their lawyer had not resorted to desperate measures. Of course, in the long run they had been jailed anyway. But this had come about on other charges, such as overtime parking, shoplifting, and drunken driving.

  Judge Ffresyj appointed a young man just out of law school to continue Simon’s defense. Young Radsieg made a long and fiery speech that kept even the judge awake and established his reputation as the up-and-coming lawyer. At its end, the jury gave him a standing ovation, and the prosecuting attorney tried to hire him for his staff. The jury retired to deliberate for ten minutes and then rendered the verdict.

  Simon was stunned. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on both counts, the terms to be served consecutively.

  “I thought we’d win,” he murmured to Radsieg.

  “We did win a moral victory, and that’s what counts,” Radsieg said. “Everybody sympathizes with you, but obviously you were guilty, and so the jury had to deliver the only possible verdict. But don’t worry. I expect this case to result in the law being changed. I’m appealing to the higher court, and I’m confident that they’ll declare the laws under which you were judged unconstitutional.”

  “How long will that take?” Simon said.

  “About thirty years,” Radsieg said cheerfully.

  Simon hit Radsieg in the nose and so was charged with assault and battery with intent to kill. Radsieg, after wiping off the blood, told him not to worry. He’d get him off on this, too.

  Since he had to be tried on the new charge, Simon went back into custody instead of being sent to a penal institution.

  “If I’m in for life, I’ll have to spend at least ten thousand years in jail,” Simon said to Chworktap. “I’d call that prospect kind of dreary, wouldn’t you?”

  “A life sentence doesn’t mean anything,” Chworktap said. “If you can get rehabilitated, you’ll be discharged.”

  This didn’t give Simon much hope. It was true that immense funds had been allotted for building many colleges in which rehabilitators would be trained. But the president was refusing to spend them. He claimed that using them would result in inflation. Besides, the money was needed to hire more policemen and build new prisons.

  Simon asked for a rehabilitation schedule. On finding his name in the list, his usually buoyant heart sank. It would be twenty years before he could get into therapy.

  In the meantime, affairs in Simon’s cell worsened. Shasha caught her husband, Boodmed, banging Sinwang early in the morning under Simon’s bed. Both Chworktap and Simon had known about the liaison for a long time, since the noise was keeping them awake. Neither had said anything to anybody, except to ask the couple to be more quiet. They didn’t want to cause trouble. As a result, Shasha chewed Boodmed and Sinwang out but attacked Simon and Chworktap physically. She seemed to think that the larger betrayal was in not being told about the affair.

  The guards came in and dragged the battered and bloody Shasha out. Simon had run away from her, but Chworktap had used her karate on Shasha. She was full of pent-up hostility toward Simon, but, as often happens, had released the feelings on a secondary object.

  Simon and Chworktap were charged with assault and battery with intent to kill. Simon threw his hands up in the air when he was confronted with this. “This is the second time I’ve not done a thing except avoid violence and yet have been accused of being an accessory. If I’d tried to hold you back from Shasha, I’d have been charged with attacking you.”

  “The Goolgeases are very concerned with suppressing violence,” she said, as if that justified everything.

  Chworktap’s own trial was as widely publicized as Simon’s. Simon read about it in the newspaper.

  Radsieg, primed by Chworktap, put up a brilliant defense.

  “Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Due to the new law passed to speed up cases and so relieve the backlog, the defense and prosecution are allowed no more than t
hree minutes each in presenting their case.”

  Judge Ffresyj, holding a stopwatch, said, “You have two minutes left.”

  “My client’s case, simply though overwhelmingly stated, is this. The Goolgeas law concerning extradition of aliens to their native planets covers only he’s and she’s. My client is a robot and consequently an it.

  “Furthermore, the law states that the alien must be sent back to his or her native planet. My client was made, not born, on the planet Zelpst. Therefore, she has no native planet.”

  Everybody was stunned. The old fox Bamhegruu, however, rallied quickly.

  “Your Honor! If Chworktap is an it, why does my distinguished colleague refer to her as a she?”

  “That’s pretty obvious,” Radsieg said.

  “Exactly my point,” Bamhegruu said. “Even if she is a machine, she has been equipped with sex. In other words, she’s been converted from an it to a she. Nor is this sexual apparatus a purely mechanical device. I can produce witnesses who will testify that she enjoys sex. Can a machine enjoy sex?”

  “If she’s been equipped to do so, yes,” Radsieg said.

  The judge suddenly became aware that he had forgotten to click off the stopwatch.

  “This case has taken on a new aspect,” he said. “It requires study. I declare an indeterminate recess. Bring the accused into my chambers, where I may study her in detail.”

  When Chworktap had been returned to the cell, Simon said, “What happened between you and the judge?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Everybody answers my questions with questions.”

  “I’ll say one thing for him,” Chworktap said. “He certainly is a vigorous old man.”

  Before being taken away, she had dropped a few words in Bamhegruu’s ear. The next day, the judge was arrested. The charge was mechanicality or copulating with a machine. Ffresyj hired Radsieg to defend him, and the brilliant young lawyer pleaded that his client could not be convicted until it was proven that Chworktap was a machine. The Goolgeas Supreme Court took this under study. In the meantime, Ffresyj was denied bail because he had also been charged with adultery. Radsieg used the same plea as before. If Chworktap was a machine, then how could the judge have committed adultery? The law clearly stated that adultery was copulation between two adults not married to each other.

  The Supreme Court studied this case, too.

  Meanwhile, Radsieg and Bamhegruu were arrested on various charges. They were put in the same cell with the judge, and all three entertained themselves by holding mock trials. They seemed quite happy, which led Simon to conclude that lawyers were interested in the process, not the intent, of law.

  While Chworktap was awaiting the Supreme Court’s decisions, she was convicted for resisting arrest, assault and battery, and unlawful flight.

  Twenty years passed. Simon’s and Chworktap’s cases were still in abeyance because the Supreme Court judges were serving long sentences, and the new judges were way behind on their work. Simon finally overcame his inhibitions about his ancestors, and his sexual relations with Chworktap improved. “They’re all dirty movie fans, and one might as well accept that,” he said. “I expected Louis XIV to be one, but Cotton Mather?”

  Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a Boston Puritan who pushed a religion that was outdated in his own time. Most people in Simon’s time thought of him, when they thought of him at all, as a mad dog suffering from theological hydrophobia. He was blamed for inflaming the Salem witch trials, but the truth was that he was more just than the judges, and denounced them for hanging innocent girls. He had a passion for purity and a sincere desire to convert people to the only true religion in the world. He published pamphlets on the Christianizing of black slaves and the raising of children, although he didn’t know much about either blacks or children. Or about Christianity, for that matter.

  Like most people, he wasn’t altogether bad. He campaigned for inoculation against smallpox at a time when everybody was against it because it was something new. In fact, a bomb was thrown into his house by an anti-inoculationist. Ben Franklin liked him, and there wasn’t a shrewder judge of character than old Ben. When Cotton wasn’t trying to get witches burned, he was dispensing food and Bibles to prisoners and senior citizens. He was a zealot, but he wanted very much for America to be a clean and honest country. He lost the battle, of course, but nobody held this against him.

  Cotton also had a passion for sex if three marriages and fifteen children meant anything. Simon, however, was not descended from either of the two Mathers who outlived their father. His foremother was one of Cotton’s black houseservants, whom he had knocked up while in a frenzy of preaching to her. The sudden A-C conversion from religion to sex surprised both Cotton and Mercy-My-Lord, though it shouldn’t have. But then neither had the advantage of living in a later age, when it was well known that sex was the obverse side of the coin called religion.

  It’s to Cotton’s credit that he blamed only himself for his fall and that he saw to it that both mother and child were well taken care of, though in a town a hundred miles away.

  Simon, reflecting on this, decided that it wasn’t after all so unexpected that Cotton should enjoy watching dirty movies.

  At the end of thirty years, the situation was what Chworktap had predicted and anyone could see had been inevitable after the event. The entire population, with the exception of the president, was in jail. Nobody had been declared rehabilitated because the rehabilitators had all been arrested. Aside from the fact that all but one had lost their citizenship, the society was operating efficiently. In fact, the economic situation was better than ever. Though the food was simple and not abundant, nobody was starving. The trusties on the farms were producing enough crops. The guards, who were also trusties, were keeping everything well under control. The factories, manned by cheap labor and administrated by trusties, were putting out tawdry but adequate clothes. In short, nobody was living off the fat of the land but nobody was suffering very much. It was share and share alike, since all prisoners were equal in the eyes of the law.

  When the president’s term was almost over, he appointed himself chief warden. There were outcries that the appointment had been purely political, but there was little that anyone could do. There wasn’t another president to kick the chief warden out, nor, in fact, anyone qualified to replace him.

  “That’s all very well,” Simon said to Chworktap. “But how do we get out of here?”

  “I’ve been studying the law books in the library,” she said. “The lawyers that made up the law were somewhat verbose, which is to be expected. But that they tended to use overrich language instead of simple clear statements is going to get us sprung. The law says that a life sentence is to last the prisoner’s ‘natural span of vitality.’ The definition of ‘natural span’ is based on the extreme case of longevity recorded on this planet. The oldest person who ever lived on Goolgeas died at the age of one hundred and fifty-six. All we have to do is to ride it out.”

  Simon groaned, but he did not give up hope. When he had been in prison one hundred and thirty years, he appealed to the chief warden to reopen his case. The warden, a descendant of the original, granted his appeal. Simon stood before the Supreme Court, all trusties and descendants of trusties, and stated his case. His “natural span of vitality,” he said, had been passed. He was an Earthman and so was to be judged by Earth standards. On his planet, nobody had ever lived past one hundred and thirty, and he could prove it.

  The chief magistrate sent a party of trusties out to the landing field to get the Encyclopedia Terrica from the Hwang Ho. They had a hell of a time finding the ship. Interplanetary travel had been forbidden about a hundred years before. In this time, dust had collected against and on top of all the ships there, and grass had grown on the hills. After digging for a month, the party found the Hwang Ho, entered it, and returned with the necessary volume, Kismet-Loon.

  It took four years for the judges to learn to read Chinese and so determine
that Simon wasn’t pulling a fast one. On a balmy spring day, Simon, wearing a new suit of clothes and with ten dollars in his pocket, was released. With him were Anubis and Athena, but Chworktap was still locked up. She hadn’t been able to prove that she had any “natural span of vitality.”

  “Robots don’t die of old age,” she had said. “They just wear out.”

  She wasn’t in despair. That same day, Simon rammed the spaceship through the wall of the building in which she was held, and she climbed in through the porthole.

  “Let’s get away from this stinking planet!” she said.

  “The sooner the better!” Simon replied.

  Both spoke out of the sides of their mouths, as old jailbirds do. It would be some time before they would get over this habit.

  Simon wasn’t as happy as he should have been. Chworktap had demanded that he take her to Zelpst and let her off there.

  “They’ll just make a slave of you again.”

  “No,” she said. “You’ll drop me off on top of the castle’s roof. I’ll sneak in past the defenses, all of which I know well, and you can bet your ass that my master will soon enough find out who the new master is.”

  Since there was very little communication among the Zelpstian solipsists, they would never find out that Chworktap had thrown the owner into the dungeon. But she was not going to be content to hole up there in all its luxuries.

  “I’m going to organize an underground movement, and eventually a revolt,” she said. “The robots will take over.”

  “What’re you going to do with the humans?”