Venus on the Half-Shell

7 QUEEN MARGARET

The Space Wanderer had been thinking about moving on. There didn’t seem to be much here for him. The Shaltoonians did not even have a word for philosophy, let alone such as ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. Their interests were elsewhere. He could understand why they thought only of the narrow and the secular, or, to be exact, eating, drinking, and copulating. But understanding did not make him wish to participate. His main lust was for the big answers.

When he found out about ancestor rotation, however, he decided to hang around a little longer. He was curious about the way in which this unique phenomenon shaped the strange and complex structure of Shaltoon society. Also, to be truthful, he had an egotistic reason for being a little reluctant to leave. He enjoyed being lionized, and the next planet might have critics not so admiring.

On the other hand, his pets were unhappy. They would not leave the spaceship even though they were suffering from cabin fever. The odor from the Shaltoonians drove Anubis into a barking frenzy and Athena into semishock. When Simon had guests, the two retreated into the galley. After the party was over, Simon would try to play with them to cheer them up, but they would not respond. Their big dumb eyes begged him to take off, to leave forever this planet that smelled of cats. Simon told them to stick it out for another week. Seekers after knowledge had to put up with certain inconveniences. They didn’t understand his words, of course, but they did understand his tone. They were stuck here until their master decided to unstick them. What they wanted to stick and where was something else. Maybe it was a good thing they couldn’t talk.

The first thing Simon found out in his investigations was that ancestor rotation caused a great resistance to change. This was not only inevitable but necessary. The society had to function from day to day, crops be grown and harvested and transported, the governmental and business administration carried out, schools, hospitals, courts, etcetera run. To make this possible, a family stayed in the same line of work or profession. If your forefather a thousand generations removed was a ditch-digger, you were one, too. There was no confusion resulting from a blacksmith being replaced by a judge one day and a garbage hauler the next.

The big problem in running this kind of society was the desire of each ancestor to live it up on his day of possession. Naturally, he/she didn’t want to waste his/her time working when he/she could be eating, drinking, and copulating. But everybody understood that if he/she indulged in his/her wishes, society would fall apart and the carriers would starve to death in a short time. So, grudgingly, everybody put in an eight-hour day and at quitting time plunged into an orgy. Almost everybody did. Somebody had to take care of the babies and children, and somebody had to work on the farms the rest of the day.

The only way to handle this was to let slaves baby-sit and finish up the plowing and the chores on the farms. On Shaltoon, once a slave always a slave was the law. Yet, how do you get an ancestral slave to work all day on the only day in five hundred years that he’ll take over a carrier? For one thing, who’s going to oversee him? No freeman wanted to put in his precious time supervising the helots. And a slave that isn’t watched closely is going to goof off.

How did you punish a slave if he neglected his work to enjoy himself? If you hung him, you killed off thousands of innocents. You also reduced the number of slaves, of which there weren’t enough to go around in the first place. If you whipped him, you were punishing the innocent. The day following the whipping, the guilty man/woman retreated into his/her cell, shut off from the pain. The poor devil that followed was the one that suffered. He resented being punished for something he hadn’t done, and his morale scraped bottom like a dog with piles.

The authorities had recognized that this was a dangerous situation. If enough slaves got angry enough to revolt, they could take over easily while their masters were helplessly drunk in the midst of the late evening orgy. The only way to prevent this was to double the number of slaves. In this way, a slave could put in four hours on the second shift and then go off to enjoy himself while another slave finished up for him. This did have its drawbacks. The slave that took over the last four hours had been whooping it up on his free time and so he was in no shape to work efficiently; But this could not be helped.

The additional slaves required had to be gotten from the freemen. So the authorities passed laws that a man could be enslaved if he spit on the sidewalk or overparked his horse and buggy. There were protests and riots against this legislation, of course. The government expected, in fact hoped for, these. They arrested the rebels and made them slaves. The sentence was retroactive; all their ancestors became slaves also.

Simon talked to a number of the slaves and found out that what he had suspected was true. Almost all the newly created slaves had come from the poor classes. The few from the upper class had been liberals. Somehow or other, the cops never saw a banker, a judge, or a businessman spit on the sidewalk.

Simon became apprehensive when he found out about this. There were so many laws that he didn’t know about. He could be enslaved if he forgot to go downwind before farting in the presence of a cop. He was assured, however, that he wasn’t subject to the laws.

“Not as long as you leave within two weeks,” his informant said. “We wouldn’t want you as a slave. You have too many strange ideas. If you stayed here long, you might spread these, infect too many people.”

Simon didn’t comment. The analogy of new ideas to deadly diseases was not new to him.

One of Simon’s favorite writers, a science-fiction author by the name of Jonathan Swift Somers III, had once written a story about this parallel between diseases and ideas. In his story, Quarantine!, an Earthman had landed on an uncharted planet. He was eager to study the aliens, but they wouldn’t let him out of the spaceship until he had been given a medical checkup. At first, he thought they suspected him of bringing in germs they weren’t equipped to handle. After he’d learned their language, he was told that this wasn’t so. The aliens had long ago perfected a panacea against illnesses of the flesh. They were worried about his disrupting their society, perhaps destroying it, with deadly thoughts.

The port officials, wearing lead mind-shields, questioned the Earthman closely for two weeks. He sweated while he talked because the aliens’ method of disease-prevention, which was one hundred percent effective, was to kill the sick person. His body was then burned and his ashes were buried at midnight in an unmarked grave.

After two weeks of grilling, the head official said, smiling, “You can go out among our people now.”

“You mean I have a clean bill of health?” the Earthman said.

“Nothing to worry about,” the official said. “We’ve heard every idea you have. There isn’t a single one we didn’t think of ten thousand years ago. You must come from a very primitive world.”

Jonathan Swift Somers III, like most great American writers, had been born in the Midwest. His father had been an aspiring poet whose unfinished epic had not been printed until long after his death. Simon had once made a pilgrimage to Petersburg, Illinois, where the great man was buried. The monument was a granite wheelchair with wings. Below was the epitaph:

Somers had been paralyzed from the waist down since he was ten years old. In those days, they didn’t have a vaccine against polio. Somers never left the wheelchair or his native town, but his mind voyaged out into the universe. He wrote forty novels and two hundred short stories, mostly about adventure in space. When he started writing, he described exploits on the Moon and Mars. When landings were made on these, he shifted the locale to Jupiter. After the Jovian Expedition, he wrote about astronauts who traveled to the extreme edge of the cosmos. He figured that in his lifetime men would never get beyond the solar system, and he was right. Actually, it made no difference whether or not astronauts got to the places he described. His books about the Moon and Mars were still read long after voyages there had become humdrum. It didn’t matter that Somers had been one hundred percent wrong about those places. His books were poetic and dramatic, and the people he depicted going there seemed more real than the people who actually went there. At least, they were more interesting.

Somers belonged to the same school of writing as the great French novelist Balzac. Balzac claimed he could write better about a place if he knew nothing of it. Invariably, when he did go to a city he had described in a book, he was disappointed.

Near Somers’ grave was his father’s.

However, the book reviewers had given the son a hard time most of his life. It wasn’t until he was an old man that Somers was recognized as a great artist. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he remarked, “This heals no wounds.” He knew that critics never admit they’re wrong. They’d still give him a hard time.

Simon was worried that he, too, might upset the Shaltoonians. It was true that he never proposed any new ideas to them. All he did was ask questions. But often these can be more dangerous than propaganda. They lead to novel thoughts.

It seemed, however, that he wasn’t going to spark off any novelty in the Shaltoonians’ minds. The adults were, in effect, never around for more than a day. The young were too busy playing and getting educated for the time when they’d have to give up possession of their bodies.

Near the end of his visit, on a fine sunny morning, Simon left the spaceship to visit the Temple of Shaltoon. He intended to spend the day studying the rites being performed there. Shaltoon was the chief deity of the planet, a goddess whose closest Earthly equivalent was Venus or Aphrodite. He walked through the streets, which he found strangely empty. He was wondering what was going on when he was startled by a savage scream. He ran to the house from which it came and opened the door. A man and a woman were fighting to the death in the front room. Simon had a rule that he would never interfere in a quarrel between man and wife. It was a good rule but one which no humanitarian could keep. In another minute, one or both of the bleeding and bruised couple would be dead. He jumped in between them and then jumped out again and ran for his life. Both had turned against him, which was only to be expected.

Since he was followed out on the street, he kept on running. As he sped down the street, he heard cries and shrieks from the houses he passed. Turning a corner, he collided with a swirling shouting mob, everyone of which seemed intent on killing anybody within range of their fists, knives, spears, swords, and axes. Simon fought his way out and staggered back to the ship. When the port was closed behind him, he crawled to the sick bay—Anubis pacing him with whimpers and tongue-licking— where he bandaged his numerous cuts and gashes.

The next day he cautiously ventured out. The city was a mess. Corpses and wounded were everywhere in the streets, and firemen were still putting out the blazes that had been started the day before. However, no one seemed belligerent, so he stopped a citizen and asked him about yesterday’s debacle.

“It was Shag Day, dummy,” the citizen said and moved on.

Simon wasn’t too jarred by the rudeness. Very few of the natives were in a good mood when sober. This was because the carrier’s body was continually abused by the rotating ancestors. Each had to get all the debauchery he could cram into his allotted time between the quitting whistle and the curfew bell. As a result, the first thing the ancestor felt when he took his turn was a terrible hangover. This lasted through the day, making him tired and irritable until he had had a chance to kill the pain with liquor.

Every once in a while, the body would collapse and be carried off to a hospital by drunken ambulance attendants and turned over to drunken nurses and doctors. The poor devil who had possession that day was too sick to do anything but lie in bed, groaning and cursing. The thought that he was wasting his precious and rare day in convalescence from somebody else’s fun made him even sicker.

So the Space Wanderer didn’t wonder at the grumpiness of the citizen. He walked on and presently found a heavily bandaged but untypically amiable woman.

“Everybody, if you go back a few thousand years, has the same ancestors,” she said. “So, every thousand years or so, a day occurs when one particular ancestor happens to come into possession of many carriers. This usually happens to only a few, and we can cope with most of these coincidences. But about five thousand years ago, Shag, a very powerful personality born in the Old Stone Age, took over more than half of the population on a certain day. Since he was an extremely authoritarian and violent man who hated himself, the first Shag Day ended with a quarter of the world’s people killing each other.”

“And what about yesterday’s Shag Day?” Simon said.

“That’s the third. It’s a record breaker, too. Almost half of the population were casualties.”

“From the long-range view, it has its bright side,” Simon said. “You can allow more babies to stay alive now so you can bring the population back to normal.”

“The sweetest catnip grows behind the latrine,” she said. This was the equivalent of the Terrestrial “Every cloud has its silver lining,” or “An ill wind blows somebody good.”

Simon decided to cut his trip short. He would leave the next day. But that evening, while reading the Shaltoon Times, he found out that in four days the wisest person who had ever lived would take over the queen’s body. He became excited. If anyone would have the truth, it would be this woman. She’d had more turns at rotation than anyone and combined the greatest intelligence with the longest experience.

The reason that everybody knew that Queen Margaret was due to take over was the rotation chart. This had been worked out for each person. Generally, it was hung on the bathroom wall so it could be studied when there was nothing else to occupy one’s mind.

Simon sent in a petition for an audience. Under normal circumstances, he would have had to wait six months for an answer. Since he was the only alien on the planet, and famous for his banjo-playing, he got a reply the same day. The queen would be pleased to dine with him. Formal attire was mandatory.

Resplendent in the dress uniform of the captain of the Hwang Ho, a navy blue outfit adorned with huge epaulettes, gold braid, big brass buttons, and twenty Good Conduct medals, Simon appeared at the main door of the palace. He was ushered by a lord of the royal pantry and six guards through magnificent marble corridors loaded down with objets d’art. At another time, Simon would have liked to examine these. Most of them consisted of phallic imagery.

He was led through the door flanked by two guards who blew through long silver trumpets as he passed them. Simon appreciated the honor, even if it left him deaf for a minute. He was still dizzy when he was halted in a small but ornate room before a big table of polished dark wood. This was set with two plates and two goblets full of wine and a crowd of steaming dishes. Behind it sat a woman whose beauty started his adrenalin flowing, even if she wasn’t strictly human. To tell the truth, Simon had gotten so accustomed to pointed ears, slit pupils, and sharp teeth that his own face startled him when he shaved.

Simon didn’t hear the introduction because his hearing hadn’t come back yet. He bowed to the queen after the official’s lips had quit moving, and at a sign he sat down across the table from her. The dinner passed pleasantly enough. They talked about the weather, a subject that Simon would find was an icebreaker on every planet. Then they discussed the horrors of Shag Day. Simon became progressively drunker as the dinner proceeded. It was protocol to down a glass of wine every time the queen did, and she seemed to be very thirsty. He didn’t blame her. It had been three hundred years since she had had a drink.

Simon told her his life story at her request. She was horrified but at the same time complacent.

“Our religion maintains that the stars, planets, and moons are living beings,” she said. “These are the only forms of life big enough and complex enough to interest the Creatrix. Biological life is an accidental by-product. You might say that it’s a disease infecting the planets. Vegetable and animal life are bearable forms of the disease, like acne or athlete’s foot.

“But when sentient life, beings with self-consciousness, evolve, they become a sort of deadly microbe. We Shaltoonians, however, are wise enough to know that. So, instead of being parasites, we become symbiotes. We live off the earth, but we take care that we don’t ruin it. That’s why we’ve stuck to an agricultural society. We grow crops, but we replenish the soil with manure. And every tree we cut down, we replace.

“Earthlings, now, they seem to have been parasites who made their planet sick. Much as I regret to say it, it was a good thing that the Hoonhors cleaned Earth up. They only have to take one look at Shaltoon, however, to see that we’ve kept our world in tiptop shape. We’re safe from them.”

Simon did not think that Shaltoon society was above criticism, but he thought it diplomatic to keep silent.

“You say, Space Wanderer, that you mean to roam everywhere until you have found answers to your questions. I suppose by that that you want to know the meaning of life?”

She leaned forward, her eyes a hot green with vertical black slits showing in the candlelight. Her gown fell open, and Simon saw the smooth creamy mounds and their tips, huge and red as cherries.

“Well, you might say that,” he said.

She rose suddenly, knocking her chair onto the floor, and clapped her hands. The butlers and the officials left at once and closed the doors behind them. Simon began sweating. The room had become very warm, and the thick ropy odor of cat-heat was so heavy it was almost visible.

Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon let her gown fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing underneath. Her high, firm, uncowled bosom was proud and rosy. Her hips and thighs were like an inviting lyre of pure alabaster. They shone so whitely that they might have had a light inside.

“Your travels are over, Space Wanderer,” she whispered, her voice husky with lust. “Seek no more, for you have found. The answer is in my arms.”

He did not reply. She strode around the table to him instead of ordering him, as was her queenly right, to come to her.

“It’s a glorious answer, Queen Margaret, God knows,” he replied. His palms were perspiring profusely. “I am going to accept it gratefully. But I have to tell you, if I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, that I will have to be on my way again tomorrow.”

“But you have found your answer, you have found your answer!” she cried, and she forced his head between her fragrant young breasts.

He said something. She thrust him out at arm’s length. “What was that you said?”

“I said, Queen Margaret, that what you offer is an awfully good answer. It just doesn’t happen to be the one I’m primarily looking for.”

Dawn broke like a window hit by a gold brick. Simon entered the spaceship. A human doughnut dunked in weariness, satiety, and cat-in-mating-season pungency, he slopped in. Anubis sniffed and growled. Simon put out a shaking hand drained of hormones to pet him.

Anubis bit it.