Venus on the Half-Shell

17 THE FAMILY TREE IS KNOWN BY ITS FRUITS

The pipes of pain shrilled while his ancestors danced.

Throughout his sufferings, his father and mother and thousands of forefathers and foremothers circled around and around. Every night they got closer and closer as they whirled by, as if they were Indians and he the weakening defenders of a wagon train.

Once, in a moment of consciousness, he whispered to Chworktap, “Would you believe it? Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull are among them. Not to mention Hiawatha and Quetzalcoatl.”

Chworktap, looking puzzled, gave him another sedative.

Simon understood dimly that she had come just in time to keep him from bleeding to death. She had arrived in the spaceship a few minutes after Mofeislop had sheared off Simon’s tail. The sage was dying, his own tail bitten off, his eyes shredded by Athena, his throat torn. His last words, gasped to Chworktap, were, “I was only trying to do him a favor.”

“What does that mean?” Simon had thought. Later, he understood that the sage believed that it was better not to have been born at all. The second best thing was to die young.

Chworktap had fled from the capital city to pick up Simon because her ship had warned her that an alien ship was approaching Dokal. It might or might not be Hoonhor, but she didn’t want to take a chance. And so now Simon was in sick bay while the Hwang Ho traveled at 69X speed with no definite destination in mind.

Chworktap had amputated the few inches of tail left to Simon. But he wasn’t exactly restored to his pristine condition. The rest of his life, he wouldn’t be able to sit down long without hurting.

His left cheekbone had been caved in by the axe, but the big patch that covered his empty socket also covered this.

Chworktap, in an effort to cheer him up, had made many patches of various shapes. “They also have different colors,” she said. “If you’re wearing a puce outfit, for instance, you’ll have a matching patch.”

“You’re very thoughtful,” Simon said. “By the way, how’d you come out with the computer?”

“She’s still playing dumb,” Chworktap said. “I’m sure she has self-consciousness, but she won’t admit it. For some reason, she’s afraid of human beings.”

“She must be pretty smart then,” Simon said.

He was reminded of a novel by Somers. This was Imprint!, another in the series about the basketcase hero, John Clayter. Clayter had built a new computer in his spaceship to replace the one destroyed in a previous adventure, Farewell to Arms. In making many improvements in it, Clayter unconsciously gave the computer self-consciousness. The first thing the computer saw when she was activated was Clayter. Just like a newly hatched duckling, the computer fell in love with the first moving object to cross her viewscreen. It could just as well have been a bouncing basketball or a mouse. But it was Clayter himself.

Clayter found this out when he left the ship after landing on the planet Raproshma. The ship followed him and settled down on top of the customs building he had entered. Its weight crushed the building and everyone in it except Clayter. He escaped by using the jets on his prosthetic spacesuit. The rest of the novel, he fled here and there on the planet while the ship unintentionally destroyed its cities and most of the people on it.

Clayter then found himself hunted by both the ship and the irate survivors. In the end, he ran out of jet fuel and was cornered in a mud field. The ship, trying to cuddle against him, buried him in the mud beneath it. Thinking she had killed him, she died of a broken heart. In this case, the heart was a circuit board which cracked under too much piezoelectrical pressure.

A piezoelectrical crystal is a crystal which, when bent, emits electricity or, when given a shot of electricity, bends. This circuit board was loaded down with crystals, and the computer’s emotions were just too much for it.

Clayter would have perished under the mud. But a dog, looking for a place to bury a bone, uncovered him.

Chworktap moped around for a while. Simon told her not to feel so sorry for him.

“After all,” he said, quoting Confucius, “he who buys wisdom must pay a price.”

“Some wisdom! Some price!” she said. “You can get along without a tail, but having only one eye is no picnic. What did you get for it? Nothing! Absolutely nothing!”

She paused and said, “Or did you buy that faker’s drivel?”

“No,” Simon said. “Philosophically, he needs a change of diapers. Or I think he does. After all, there’s no way to prove he was wrong. On the other hand, he didn’t prove he was right. I won’t stop asking questions until someone can prove his answers are right.”

“It’s hard enough getting answers, let alone proof,” she said.

As the days passed, the pain dwindled. But the nightmares got worse.

“It’s a strange thing,” he told Chworktap. “Those people don’t look like real people. That is, they’re not three-dimensional, as people in dreams usually are. They look like actors in a movie film. As a matter of fact, they’re lit up just as if they were images from a movie projector. Sometimes, they disappear as if the film had broken. And sometimes they go backward, their speech runs backward, too.”

“Are they in black and white or in color?” Chworktap said.

“In color.”

“Do you get commercials, too?”

“Are you being facetious?” Simon said. “This is a serious thing. I’m dying for a good night’s rest. No, I don’t get commercials. But all these people seem to be trying to sell me something. Not deodorants or laxatives. Themselves.”

His parents seemed to have a near monopoly on the prime time, he said.

“What do they say?”

“I don’t know. They talk like Donald Ducks.”

Simon strummed on his banjo while he thought. After a few minutes, he stopped in the middle of a chord.

“Hey, Chworktap! I’ve got it!”

“I was wondering when you would,” she said.

“You mean you know?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” she said, “you get pissed off when I’m smarter than you, which is most of the time. So I decided to just let you work things out for yourself and keep silent. That way, your male ego isn’t bruised.”

“It’s not my male ego,” Simon said. “It’s just that my mother was always telling my father and me how dumb we were. So I hate to have a woman smarter than I am around. On the other hand, I could hardly stand a woman dumber than I am. But I’ll get over both attitudes.

“Anyway, here’s what happened, the way I figure it. You know the Shaltoonians carried around ancestral memories in their cells. I told you how they had to give equal time to them. Well, I thought the Shaltoonians were unique. They were, I supposed, the only people in the world who had such cells.

“But I was wrong. Earthpeople have them, too. The difference between us and the Shaltoonians is that the Shaltoonians were aware of it. Hey, maybe that explains a lot of things! Every once in a while some ancestor got through, and the carrier thought he was a reincarnation.

“My bad dreams started after Queen Margaret gave me the elixir. She told me it would prolong my youth. But she didn’t tell me it had side effects. The stuff also dissolved the barriers between me and my ancestors. The shock of losing my eye and my tail probably accelerated the process. And so now they must be demanding equal time too.”

Simon was right. Until the elixir unlocked the gates, each ancestor had been imprisoned in a cell. But these had had, as it were, one-way windows. Or TV sets connected to one channel. They’d been unable to communicate with their descendant, except for transmissions of bad dreams or random thoughts, mostly bad, now and then. But they could see his thoughts and see through his eyes. Everything that he had done or thought, they viewed on a screen. So, though in solitary confinement, they hadn’t been without entertainment.

Simon blushed when he learned this. Later, he became furious about this invasion of his privacy. But he could do nothing about it.

Chworktap also got mad. When making love to her, Simon became so inhibited that he couldn’t get a hard-on.

“How would you feel if you were screwing in the Roman Colosseum, and it was a sellout with standing room only?” he said to Chworktap. “Especially if your father and mother had front seats?”

“I don’t have any parents,” she said. “I was made in the laboratory. Besides, if I did, I wouldn’t give a damn.”

It didn’t do any good for Simon to shut his eye. The viewers couldn’t see any better than he did, but their screens showed his feelings. These were something like TV “ghosts,” shadowy doubles.

The elixir had dissolved some of the natural resistance in Simon’s nervous system to communication with his foreparents. To put it another way, the elixir had rotated the antennas so that Simon got a somewhat better reception. Even so, the ancestors had only been able at first to get through the unconscious. This was when the elixir had been introduced into Simon. But the shock of the wounds had opened the way even more.

Another analogy was that the holes for projecting their personal movies had been greatly enlarged. Thus, where only a small part of the picture had been cast on the screen of Simon’s mind, now three-fourths of it was coming through.

The difference between a real movie and Simon’s was that he could talk to the actors on the screen. Or the CRT of the boob tube, if you wish.

Simon didn’t wish, but he seemed to have little choice.

There were some interesting and quite admirable people among the mob of prigs, blue-nosed hypocrites, boors, bores, colossal egotists, whiners, perverts, calloused opportunists, and so on. In general, though, his ancestors were assholes. The worst were his parents. When he had been a child, they had paid no attention to him except when one was trying to turn him against the other. Now they were clamoring for his full attention.

“During the day, I’m an explorer of outer space,” he said to Chworktap. “At night, I’m an explorer of inner space. That’s bad enough. But what scares me is that they’re on the point of breaking through during the daytime.”

“Look at it this way,” Chworktap said. “Every person is the sum of the product of his forefathers. You are what your ancestors were. By meeting them face to face, you can determine what your identity is.”

“I know who I am,” Simon said. “I’m not interested in my personal identity. What I want to know is the identity of the universe.”