Venus on the Half-Shell

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 semiopaque 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 could 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.

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 three 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?”

“Make them work for us.”

“But don’t you want freedom and justice for all?” he said. “And doesn’t all include the former masters?”

“Freedom and justice for all will be my slogan, of course,” she said. “But that’s just to gull some of the more liberal humans into joining us robots.”

Simon looked horrified, though not as horrified as he would have been a hundred years before. He had seen too much while in prison.

“Revolutions are never really about freedom or justice,” she said. “They’re about who’s going to be top dog.”

“Whatever happened to the sweet little innocent? The one I met on Giffard?” he murmured.

“I was never programmed for innocence,” she said. “And if I had been, experience would have deprogrammed me.”

Simon let her out of the ship onto the roof of the castle. He followed her out to make a last appeal.

“Is this really the way it’s going to end?” he said. “I thought we’d be lovers for eternity.”

Chworktap began weeping, and she pressed her face against Simon’s shoulder. Simon cried, too.

“If you ever run across any couples who think they’re going to heaven and live there forever as man and wife, tell them about us,” she said. “Time corrupts everything, including immortal love.”

Sniffling, she drew away. She said, “The terrible thing about it is, I do love you. Even though I can’t stand you anymore.”

“Same here,” Simon said, and he blew his nose.

“You’re not a robot, Chworktap, remember that always,” he said. “You’re a real woman. Maybe the only one I ever met.”

By this he meant that she had courage and compassion. These were supposed to distinguish real people from fake people. The truth, and he knew it, was that there were no fake people; everybody was real in the sense that everybody had courage and compassion tempered by selfishness and vindictiveness. The difference between people was in the proportions of these mixed up in them.

“You’ll be a real man someday,” she said. “When you accept reality.”

“What is reality?” Simon said and did not stay for an answer.