Venus on the Half-Shell (26 page)

“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.