Venus on the Half-Shell (11 page)

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.

7

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.