Venus on the Half-Shell

6 SHALTOON, THE EQUAL-TIME PLANET

Simon ordered the computer to set the ship down on a big field near the largest building of a city. Since this city had the largest population of any on the planet, it should be the capital of the most important nation. The building itself was six stories high and made of some white stone with purple and red veins. From the air it looked like a three-leaf clover with a long stem. Its windows were delta-shaped, and its doors were oval. The roofs were breadloaf-shaped, and the whole building was surrounded by roofless porches on the outer edges of two rows of pillars. The ones on the edge of the porch were upside-down V’s. The others were behind the deltoids and projected from the floor of the porch at a forty-five-degree angle so that their ends stuck through the deltoids. The leaning shafts were cylindrical except for the ends which pierced the deltoids. These terminated in round balls from which a milky water jetted. At their base were two nut-shaped stones, the surfaces of which bore a crisscross of incisions.

The people that poured out of the building were human-looking except for pointed ears, yellow eyes which had pupils like a cat’s, and sharp pointed teeth. Simon wasn’t startled by this. All the humanoid races so far encountered had either been descended from simians, felines, canines, ursines, or rodents. On Earth the apes had won out in the evolutionary race toward intelligence. On other planets, the ancestors of cats, dogs, bears, beavers, or rabbits had developed fingers instead of paws and come out ahead of the apes. On some planets, both the apes and some other creature had evolved into sapients and shared their world. Or else one had exterminated the other. On this planet, the felines seemed to have gotten the upper hand early. If there were any simian humans, they were hiding deep in the forests.

Simon watched them through his viewscreens. When the soldiers had gathered around the ship, all pointing their spears and bows and arrows at the Hwang Ho, he came out. He held his hands up in the air to show he was peaceful. He didn’t smile because on some planets baring one’s teeth was a hostile sign.

“I’m Simon Wagstaff, the man without a planet,” he said.

After a couple of weeks, Simon had learned the language well enough to get along. Some of the suspicions of the people of Shaltoon had worn away. They were wary of him, it seemed, because he wasn’t the first Earthman to land there. Some two hundred years ago a fast-talking jovial man by the name of P.T. Taub had visited them. Before the Shaltoonians knew what was happening, he’d bamboozled them out of the crown jewels, taking not only these but a princess who’d just won the Miss Shaltoon Beauty Contest.

Simon had a hard time convincing them that he wasn’t there to con them. He did want something from them, he told them over and over, but it wasn’t anything material. First, did they know anything about the builders of the leaning heartshaped tower?

The people assigned to escort Simon told him that all they knew was that the builders were called the Clerun-Gowph in this galaxy. Nobody knew why, but somebody somewhere sometime must have met them. Otherwise, why did they have a common name? As for the tower, it had been here, unoccupied and slowly tilting, since the Shaltoonians had had a language. Undoubtedly, it had been here a long time before that.

The Shaltoonians had a legend that, when the tower fell, the end of the world would come.

Simon was adaptable and gregarious. He loved people, and he knew how to get along with them. Whether he was with just one person or at a party, he enjoyed himself, and he was generally liked. But he was uneasy with the Shaltoonians. There was something wrong with them, something he couldn’t describe. At first he thought that it might be because they were descended from felines. After all, though humanoid, they were fundamentally cats, just as Earthmen were basically apes. Yet, he’d met a number of extraterrestrial visitors on Earth who were felines, and he’d always gotten along with them. Actually, he preferred cats to dogs. It was only because circumstances had been beyond his control that he’d taken along a dog when he left Earth.

Maybe, he thought, it was the strong musky odor that hung over the city, overriding that of manure from the city. This emanated from every adult Shaltoonian he met and smelled exactly like a cat in heat. After a while, he understood why. They were all in the mating season, which lasted the year around. Their main subject of conversation was sex, but even with this subject they couldn’t sustain much talk. After a half-hour or so, they’d get fidgety and then excuse themselves. If he followed them, he’d find him or her going into a house where he or she would be greeted by one of the opposite sex. The door would be closed, and within a few minutes the damnedest noises would come from the house.

This resulted in his not being able to talk long to the escorts who were supposed to keep an eye on him. They’d disappear, and someone else would take their place.

Moreover, when the escorts showed up again the next day, they acted strangely. They didn’t seem to remember what they’d asked or told him the day before. At first, he put this down to a short-term memory. Maybe it was this which had kept the Shaltoonians from progressing beyond a simple agricultural society.

Simon was a good talker, but he was a good listener, too. Once he’d learned the language well, he caught on to a discrepancy of intonation among his escorts. It varied not only among individual speakers, which was to be expected, but in the same individual from day to day. Simon finally decided that he wasn’t uneasy because the Shaltoonians were, from his viewpoint, oversexed. He had no moral repugnance to this. After all, you couldn’t expect aliens to be just like Earthmen. As a matter of fact, his attitude, if anything, was envy. Evolution had cheated Terrestrials. Why couldn’t Homo sapiens have kept the horniness of the baboon? Why had he allowed society to shape itself so that it suppressed the sex drive? Was it because evolution had dictated that mankind was to progress technologically? And, to bring this about, had evolution shunted much of man’s sex drive to the brain, where he used the energy to make tools and new religions, and ways of making more money and attaining a higher status?

Earthmen were dedicated to getting to the top of the heap, whereas the Shaltoonians devoted themselves to getting on top of each other.

This seemed a fine arrangement to Simon—at first. One of the bad things about human society was that few people ever really had intimate contact. A people who spent a lot of time in bed, however, should be full of love. But things didn’t work out that way on this planet. There wasn’t even a word for love in the language. They did have many terms for various sexual positions, but these were all highly technical. There was no generic term equivalent to the Earthman’s “love”.

Not that this made much difference generally between Earth and Shaltoon behavior. The latter seemed to have just as many divorces, disagreements, fights, and murders as the former. On the other hand, the Shaltoonians didn’t have many suicides. Instead of getting depressed, they went out and got laid.

Simon thought about this aspect. He decided that perhaps Shaltoon society was, after all, better arranged than Terrestrial society. Not that this was due to any superior intelligence of the Shaltoonians. It was a matter of hormone surplus. Mother Nature, not brains, deserved the credit. This thought depressed him, but he didn’t seek out a female to work off the mood. He retired to his cabin and played his banjo until he felt better. Then he got to thinking about the meaning of this and became depressed again. Hadn’t he channeled his sex drive where it shouldn’t be? Hadn’t he made love to himself, via his banjo, instead of to another being? Were the notes spurting from the strings a perverted form of jism? Was his supreme pleasure derived from plucking, not fucking?

Simon put away the banjo, which was looking more like a detachable phallus every minute. He sallied forth determined to use his nondetachable instrument. Ten minutes later, he was back in the ship. The only relief he felt was in getting away from the Shaltoonians. He’d passed by a rain barrel and happened to look down in it. There, at the bottom, was a newly born baby. He had looked around for a policeman to notify him but had been unable to find one. It struck him then he had never seen a policeman on Shaltoon. He stopped a passer-by and started to ask him where the local precinct had its headquarters. Unable to do so because he didn’t know the word for “police”, he took the passer-by to the barrel and showed him what was in it. The citizen had merely shrugged and walked away. Simon had walked around until he saw one of his escorts. The woman was startled to see him without a companion and asked why he had left the ship without notifying the authorities. Simon said that that wasn’t important. What was important was the case of infanticide he’d stumbled across.

She didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about. She followed him and gazed down into the barrel. Then she looked up with a strange expression. Simon, knowing something was wrong, looked again. The corpse was gone.

“But I swear it was here only five minutes ago!” he said.

“Of course,” she said coolly. “But the barrel men have removed it.”

It took some time for Simon to get it through his head that he had seen nothing unusual. In fact, the barrels he had observed on every corner and under every rain spout were seldom used to collect drinking water. Their main purpose was for the drowning of infants.

“Don’t you have the same custom on Earth?” the woman said.

“It’s against the law there to murder babies.”

“How in the world do you keep your population from getting too large?” she said.

“We don’t,” Simon said.

“How barbaric!”

Simon got over some of his indignation when the woman explained that the average life span of a Shaltoonian was ten thousand years. This was due to an elixir invented some two hundred thousand years before. The Shaltoonians weren’t much for mechanics or engineering or physics, but they were great botanists. The elixir had been made from juices of several different plants. A by-product of this elixir was that a Shaltoonian seldom got sick.

“So you see that we have to have some means of keeping the population down,” she said. “Otherwise, we’d all be standing on top of each other’s heads in a thousand years or less.”

“What about contraceptives?”

“Those’re against our custom,” she said. “They interfere with the pleasure of sex. Besides, everyone ought to have a chance to be born.”

Simon asked her to explain this seemingly contradictory remark. She replied that an aborted baby didn’t have a soul. But a baby that made it to the open air was outfitted with a soul at the moment of birth. If it died even a few seconds later, it still went to heaven. Indeed, it was better that it did die, because then it would be spared the hardships and pains and griefs of life. Killing it was doing it a favor. However, to keep the population from decreasing, it was necessary to let one out of a hundred babies survive. The Shaltoonians didn’t like to have a fixed arrangement for this. They let Chance decide who lived and who didn’t. So every woman, when she got pregnant, went to the Temple of Shaltoon. There she picked a number at a roulette table, and if her ball fell into the lucky slot, she got to keep the baby. The Holy Croupiers gave her a card with the lucky number on it, which she wore around her neck until the baby was a year old.

“The wheel’s fixed so the odds are a hundred to one,” she said. “The house usually wins. But when a woman wins, a holiday is declared, and she’s queen for a day. This is no big deal, since she spends most of her time reviewing the parade.”

“Thanks for the information,” Simon said. “I’m going back to the ship. So long, Goobnatz.”

“I’m not Goobnatz,” she said. “I’m Dunnernickel.”

Simon was so shaken up that he didn’t ask her what she meant by that. He assumed that he had had a slip of memory. The next day, however, he apologized to her.

“Wrong again,” she said. “My name is Pussyloo.”

There was a tendency for all aliens of the same race to look alike to Earthmen. But he had been here long enough to distinguish indviduals easily.

“Do you Shaltoonians have a different name for every day?”

“No,” she said. “My name has always been Pussyloo. But it was Dunnernickel you were talking to yesterday and Goobnatz the day before. Tomorrow, it’ll be Quimquat.”

This was the undefinable thing that had been making him uneasy. Simon asked her to explain, and they went into a nearby tavern. The drinks were on the house, since he was working here as a banjo-player. The Shaltoonians crowded in every night to hear his music, which they enjoyed even if it wasn’t at all like their native music. At least, they claimed they did. The leading music critic of the planet had written a series of articles about Simon’s genius, claiming that he evoked a profundity and a truth from his instrument which no Shaltoonian could equal. Simon didn’t understand any more than the Shaltoonians did what the critic was talking about, but he liked what he read. This was the first time he’d ever gotten a good review.

They had ordered a couple of beers, and Pussyloo plunged into her explanation. She said she’d be glad to tell him all she could in half an hour, but shed have to talk a lot to get everything into that length of time. In thirty minutes it’d be quitting time. She liked Simon, but he wasn’t her type, and she had an assignation with a man shed met on her lunch hour. After Simon heard her explanation, he understood why she was in such a hurry.

“Don’t you Earthmen have ancestor rotation?” she said.

Simon was so startled that he upset his beer and had to order another. “What the hell’s that?” he said.

“It’s a biological, not a supernatural, phenomenon,” she said. “I guess you poor deprived Terrestrials don’t have it. But the body of every Shaltoonian contains cells which carry the memories of a particular ancestor. The earliest ancestors are in the anal tissue. The latest are in the brain tissue.”

“You mean a person carries around with him the memories of his foreparents?” Simon said.

“That’s what I said.”

“But it seems to me that in time a person wouldn’t have enough space in his body for all the ancestral cells,” Simon said. “When you think that your ancestors double every generation backward, you’d soon be out of room. You have two parents, and each of them had two parents, and each of them had two. And so on. You go back only five generations, and you have sixteen great-great-grandparents. And so on.”

“And so on,” Pussyloo said. She looked at the tavern clock while her nipples swelled and the strong mating odor became even stronger. In fact, the whole tavern stank of it. Simon couldn’t even smell his own beer.

“You have to remember that if you go back about thirty generations, everyone now living has many common ancestors. Otherwise, the planet at that time would’ve been jammed with people like flies on a pile of horse manure.

“But there’s another factor that eliminates the number of ancestors. The ancestor cells with the strongest personalities release chemicals that dissolve the weaker ones.”

“Are you telling me that, even on the cellular level, the survival of the fittest is the law?” Simon said. “That egotism is the ruling agent?”

Pussyloo scratched the itch between her legs and said, “That’s the way it is. There would never have been any trouble about it if that’s all there was to it. But in the old days, about twenty thousand years ago, the ancestors started their battle for their civil rights. They said it wasn’t right that they should be shut up in their little cells with only their own memories. They had a right to get out of their cellular ghettoes, to enjoy the flesh they were contributing to but couldn’t participate in.

“After a long fight, they got an equal-time arrangement. Here’s how it works. A person is born and allowed to control his own body until he reaches puberty. During this time, an ancestor speaks only when spoken to.”

“How do you do that?” Simon said.

“It’s a mental thing the details of which the scientists haven’t figured out yet,” she said. “Some claim we have a neural circuit we can switch on and off by thought. The trouble is, the ancestors can switch it on, too. They used to give the poor devils that carried them a hard time, but now they don’t open up any channels unless they’re requested to do so.

“Anyway, when a person reaches puberty, he must then give each ancestor a day for himself or herself. The ancestor comes into full possession of the carrier’s body and consciousness. The carrier himself still gets one day a week for himself. So he comes out ahead, though there’s still a lot of bitching about it. When the round is completed, it starts all over again.

“Because of the number of ancestors, a Shaltoonian couldn’t live long enough for one cycle if it weren’t for the elixir. But this delays aging so that the average life span is about ten thousand years.”

“Which is actually twenty thousand years, since a Shaltoon year is twice as long as ours,” Simon said.

He was stunned. He didn’t even notice when Pussyloo squirmed out of the booth and, still squirming, walked out of the place.