Venus on the Half-Shell (25 page)

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.”

18

“Where is the center of the universe?” Simon asked Elder Sister Plum.

“Wherever one happens to be,” the computer said.

“I don’t mean in a personal sense,” Simon said. “I mean, taking the volume of the universe as a whole, considering it as a sphere, where is its center?”

“Wherever one happens to be,” Elder Sister Plum said. “The universe is a constantly expanding closed infinity. Its center can only be hypothetical, and so the observer, hypothetical or not, is its center. All things radiate equally, in mass or space-time from him, her, or it, as the case may be. Why do you want to know?”

“Everywhere I have been, except in my own galaxy, I’ve found the towers of the Clerun-Gowph,” Simon said. “Apparently their builders were on the planets before there was any other life there. I don’t know why my galaxy doesn’t have any. But I suspect that the Clerun-Gowph decided they had gone far enough before they got to my galaxy. So they went back to wherever they had originated, to their home planet.

“It seems to me that this most ancient of peoples came from a planet which is in the center of the universe. So, if I could find the center, I’d find them. And they, the first race in the world, will know the answer.”

“Good thinking, but not good enough,” the computer said. “They could just as well have originated on the edge of the world. If there were any edge, that is. But there isn’t.”

It was shortly after this dialog that Simon saw the first big blue bubble. It was hurtling toward him at a speed far exceeding that of the ship’s. And it covered almost all of the universe ahead. As it passed through the stars and the galaxies, it blotted them out.

Simon jumped up, calling for Chworktap. She came running to his side. Simon pointed with a trembling finger. She said, “Oh, that!”

Just then the bubble burst. Patches of shimmering blue, larger than a thousand galaxies jammed together, rocketed off in all directions, fragmented, became smaller patches, and then winked out. Some of them shot by the ship; one went through the ship, or vice versa, but Simon could see no sign of it in the rearview screen.

“Those come by quite regularly in my galaxy,” Chworktap said. “They always have. But you have to be in a 69X ship to see them. Don’t ask me what they are. Nobody knows. Apparently, the little bubbles, the broken-up pieces, keep going through the rest of the universe. Your Earth gets the little bubbles.”

Simon had one more question to add to the list.

A few days later, the
Hwang Ho
landed on the planet Goolgeas. Its people looked much like Earth’s except for their funnel-shaped ears, complete hairlessness except for bushy eyebrows, a reddish ring around their navels, and penile bones.

The Goolgeases had a world government and a technology like early 20th-century Earth’s. This should have been rapidly advancing, since many people from more scientifically progressive planets had visited there. One of the reasons they were so retarded was their religion. This claimed that if you drank enough alcohol or took enough drugs, you could see God face to face. Other reasons were their high crime rate and the measures taken to reduce them.

Simon didn’t know this at first. Due to the quarantine, he had to spend his first few months in the little town built by the spaceport. His favorite hangout was a tavern where people from all over space mingled with townspeople, preachers, government officials, bums, reporters, whores, and scientists. Simon liked to stand all day and half the night at the bar and talk to everybody who came in. None of them had the answer to his primal question, but they were interesting, especially after he was deep in his cups. And his banjo-playing was so well received that he was hired by the owner. From dinner hour until ten, Simon sang and played Earth songs and others he’d picked up during his wanderings. The crowd especially liked Bruga’s lyrics, which wasn’t surprising. Bruga had been an alcoholic, and so his poems appealed to the Goolgeases’ religious sensitivities.

Chworktap stayed sober. The two animals, however, didn’t. The customers kept plying them with free drinks as well as their master. Their eyes were always bloodshot, and on awakening in the morning they had to have some of the hair of the dog that had bitten them. Chworktap objected to this. Simon said that, even though they were beasts, they had free will. Nobody was forcing the stuff down their throats. Besides, the Goolgeas religion claimed that animals had souls, too. If they took in enough booze to dissolve the fleshy barriers, they could also see their Creator. Why deny them the numinous experience?

“Don’t tell me you’ve got religion?”

“I was converted the other night,” he said with dignity. “This preacher, Rangadang, you’ve met him, a hell of a nice guy, showed me the light last night.”

“Some light,” Chworktap said. “But then, alcohol does burn, doesn’t it?”

“You look devastatingly beautiful tonight,” Simon said.

And so she did. Her long wavy Titian hair, the harmoniously featured face with its high forehead, thick chestnut eyebrows, large dark gray-blue eyes, slender straight nose, full red lips, and full-breasted, narrow-waisted, long-legged body, with a skin that seemed to shine with health, made every man ache to have her.

“Let’s go back to the ship and go to bed,” Simon said.

He was now drunk enough that he did not mind that thousands of ancestors would be looking over his shoulder. Unfortunately, when he attained this state, he also became impotent. Chworktap reminded him of this.

“You can’t beat City Hall. Or the balance of Nature,” Simon said. “Let’s go anyway. At least, we can hold each other in our arms. And I haven’t lost my digital capabilities.”

Simon said this because he had been studying computer circuits.

“All right,” she said. “Lean on me. Otherwise, you’ll never make it to the ship.”

They left the tavern. Anubis staggered along behind them, his head dragging, now and then tripping on his tongue. Athena rode on top of the dog, her head beneath her wing, snoring. Halfway across the field, she fell off when Anubis tripped, but nobody noticed it.

“Listen, Simon,” Chworktap said. “You’re not fooling me. All this talk about getting drunk so you can see God and also so you can lose your inhibitions is a cover-up. The truth is that you’re getting tired of your quest. You’re also afraid of what you might find if you should get the answer to your primal question. You might not be able to face the truth? Right?”

“Wrong!” Simon said. “Well, maybe. Yes, you’re right. In a way. But I’m not scared to hear the answer. Mainly because I don’t believe there is an answer. I’ve lost faith, Chworktap. So, when you lose faith in one religion, you adopt another.”

“Listen, Simon,” she said. “When we get on the ship, I’ll tell Plum to take us off. Now! Let’s get away from here so you can sober up, so you can forget this nonsense about bottled religion. Resume your quest. Become a man again, not a shambling soft-brained pathetic disgusting wreck.”

“But you’ve always said that my quest was ridiculous,” Simon mumbled. “Now you want me to take it up again. Is there no pleasing you?”

“I don’t want you to be doing something so it’ll please me,” she said. “Anyway, I was happier when you had a goal, a worthwhile goal, I mean. I didn’t think, and still don’t, that you’ll ever get there. But you were happy trying to get there. And so I was happy because you were happy. Or as happy as anyone can expect to be in this world. Anyway, I like to travel, and I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Simon said, and he burst into tears. After wiping his eye and blowing his nose, he said, “O.K. I’ll do it. And I’ll quit drinking forever.”

“Make that vow when you’re sober,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get off this swinery.”

19

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.