Bill 4 - on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure (7 page)

"Namely, who came first, flying saucers or Raymond Palmer? Or, its logical corollary, did Raymond Palmer come from a Flying Saucer?

"Two, which came first, the chicken or the Western Omelette with home fries on the side?

"Three, if a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there to hear it, does it fall upwards or downwards? And its corollary, if a deaf man falls in the wood, does he make a sound?

"Four, does God exist, and if he (or she) does why does drinking too much eventually kill you, why does sex produce disease and finally why can I never get good tickets for the Galactic World Series?

“And finally, Bill, the real stumper, what is the meaning of life, why is a man born, why does he live, and why does he die — and where the hell can I get a good bottle of Pepto Abysmal for Archimedes. I'm getting sick of the smell of parrot bowb all over the place.”

Bill's head reeled at the depth of these philosophical questions. Incredible! Profound! It was all too much for him, so he asked for another soy milk and pyech to obfuscate the implications aborning in his head.

To relax him further, Captain Rick told him his story.

CAPTAIN RICK'S TALE

or

“Stars in My Handkerchief Like Clumps of Green Gunk”

to unwind the digital alarm clock.

So ginsberged out for the universe to give him a moniker.

The sub-voice answered with an eructation.

Belched forth the answer: Kid, you sniveling cyberrunt bratshit, what the bowb do I care? Captain Kid, Captain Rick, career astronauts and beats with bongos pound and sound forth the international anthems, and sheesh! the price of bananas in Nicaragua has skyrocketed, and elevator operators grease their asses with their thumbs, and Walden's and Dalton's are really down on Pynchon-hitters lately, so what why should I give a good Gesundheit? Anyway, I got this mouthful of cold espresso in my mouth, and hell if I know why? Jesus! Ptoui! Tastes dreadful!

Another minute Kid squatted on the Johnny-on-the-Spot, clutching his New York Review of Books and Little Magazine toilet paper, listening to his heaving breath and kerouac inner-music.

Beyond leafy trees, moonlight painted, wallpapered and interior decorated strips of fashionable West Village light in the forest.

He rubbed poetry across his bum. Somewhere in Soho (or maybe Tribeca) an art gallery opens a William Burroughs shotgun art show. The whole city has turned into skyscraper after skyscraper of art galleries in this fiction-turned-semirealscape of stranger-than-real gangs wandering inanely about with holograms for switchblades.

The leaves leered and winked.

The woman wearing a sweatshirt of shadows and a Jimi Hendrix hairdo rose up from the dark culture of Sixties and smell of hashish. A pill of light lay upon her nose.

Captain Kid and the woman had sex, and then tried to figure out what would happen in the eight hundred and seventy-seven page anticlimax.

For what is “Myth” but the neo-deconstructionist prose of a missing literary critic who lisps?

“Huh?” said Bill, quite baffled.

“Oh, sorry, that's the highbrow version for my intellectual friends at cocktail parties,” said Captain Rick. “I dare say you want something more soothing. Arrrrrrr. Yes, I have just the thing.”

Rick rolled out his thousand watt amplifier as big as a space tug, his Stratosphere-blaster electro-drone guitar. He laid down a few tasteful deady-metal fret licks (deady-metal being the au courant fashionable version of rock-and-roll, where computer-operated corpses of electrocuted murderers fronted your standard lead guitar, kitchen synth, drum and bass ensemble) and began to sing.

Archimedes squawked and, in a hail of feathers and a critical splatter of fresh doo-doo, fled the room.

CAPTAIN RICK'S STORY

TAKE TWO

“Ballad of the Supernal Hero”

They call me the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I see lots of things and go lots of places.

I'm a mythic hero, I like to ramble.

But my hero's not Joseph but John W. Campbell.

Ye see, sometimes I'm a pirate, sometimes a saint,

But first a homo sapiens; coward I ain't.

Mankind was meant to rule all these stars

Build malls and condos, and taverns and bars.

As I child I was a wimp, I found nothing arousing.

Till I read John on Dean Drive and Dowsing.

Now I travel from planet to planet, circum-celestial

Killing things smart and extraterrestrial.

“Terra Uber-alles” I sing with a belch and a shout

And my surging male humanity I like to flout.

And when things get grim, and bare goes the cupboard

I just pull out DIANETICS by good old Ron Hubbard.

My greatest adventure. Hmm, well, let me see.

There was the time in a cantina that I had to wee

Alas, I'd left my blaster in my digital locker

There in the stall was Lay-ya and Luke Starfokker.

Now Lay-ya I'd divorced 'couple years before

Sex with a princess was mostly a bore.

Luke I thought was raising sheep on Mount Shasta.

“Help!” Luke cried. “We need you and your blaster!”

"Lord Brain-Death is back, the Farce help us all.

We hear Heavy Breathing, and that is his Call.

He's back from the dead, practicing evil Craft

I am scared, I am crazy — I'm going half daft."

No sooner said, that, than Storm Troopers attacked.

Dodging deathrays, quickly, to the DESIRE we backed.

We zoomed through space, hid in nebulean bogs.

Trained hard for the battle, read old ANALOGS.

Good old John Campbell, his essays were profounding!

Hectoring lectures in the good old ASTOUNDING.

In those pre-Spielberg days you'll have to agree

John would have crunched the ALIEN, barfed on ET.

“Bowb the Force,” he'd have said, "Man the garrison!

Technology rules! Up Anderson! Up Harrison!

Alien invasion? Build a great gun!

Stay to the Right of Baen and Attila the Hun."

So we cobbled and soldered like technology's fools

A better death ray, using brains and slide rules!

John would've liked it, Doc Smith would turn green

Buddy, this beamer was big, huge, and obscene!

So we hurtled on out to meet the death fleet

A terrible sight — they were something to meet!

A thousand alien ships, designed by George Lucas

Wanted to turn us to slag and horrible mucus.

“Surrender to the Dark Side,” said Death, big surprise!

“Join the Empire! Make mythic movies! Merchandise!”

In answer we just aimed our out big beamer and happily shot 'em

No way was John's boys gonna kiss the Empire's bottom.

Now, for Brain Death technology was a given!

But his scientists hadn't read Tom Clancy, Pournelle and Niven

ASF's sons, all — so what if they couldn't write.

They knew their nuts from their bolts, and boy could they fight.

Our blaster, you see, wasn't loaded with energy rounds.

It was stocked with ultra and hyperfrequency sounds.

Homocentric readings from Asimov, deCamp and Clement.

Dickson and del Rey, thrilling as drying cement.

We blasted the coup de grace! Hyperboreals!

John W. Campbell's editorials!

Stunned, the Empire's death ships whimpered away.

Old Death hoisted surrender. Ours was the day!

They say good old John Campbell, he's somewhere up there.

Watching new writers with all their hot air.

Gulping aloud great celestial gulps.

“If this junk is SF — then bring back the pulps!”

The last chords of the song hung in the air between them like the final strains of Bill's favorite martial music by John Philip Soused. Big fat tears dripped down his cheeks. He sniffled and choked back his heart rising in his throat.

“Bowb! That ... that was the most beautiful song ... I ... I ever heard in my entire life.”

“Then you will be feeling better, First Mate Bill?”

“Yeah! Much better.”

“Arrrrrr! That's me hearty! You're a super trooper, Bill. Arrrrr! It's a pleasure having you aboard. Now we better get back to our hammocks and squeeze in the winks! Navigational computer says that the Holy Bar and Grill is just a matter of days away!”

Irma! He would be able to see Irma again. He sighed with passion like a leaking locomotive. Smiling happily at the thought of her bright innocent eyes, her shapely body, her gentle feminine sighs.

He fell asleep then, still smiling. Dreaming dreams of such erotic content that his body temperature rose five degrees and moisture condensed on the bulkhead above.

LAST CALL AT THE HOLY BAR AND GRILL

As it happened, it took somewhat more than a week to finally find their goal, and Rick the Supernal Hero had to resort to a variation of the Bloater Drive he'd bought in a used starship lot, called a Bilious Drive. Bill had always hated the Bloater Drive when Empire Trooper ships had used it to hop between star systems and if anything the Bilious Drive was exceedingly worse, since it involved pumping the entire space ship full of a singularly repulsive mixture of xenon and hydrogen and sulfurous gases which made everything — if the Bible is to be believed — literally stink like hell. When the right mixture of gases had been reached, their molecules were vibrated electronically until the gas, the ship and all of its contents were shaking like crazy and synchronized with the atomic pulse beat of their destination. The instant this occurred everything would be belched across the cosmic distances in a most uncomfortable and sickening manner. Bill even thought good things about the Bloater Drive when this happened.

But when the starship named DESIRE finally drifted into the Ad Hoc System, he saw the gigantic neon signs flashing out the letters “Holy Bar and Grill,” “On the Sands Stage: Mr. Wayne Newton!” and “Nude Drinking” and “Topless-Bottomless Bar” which he hoped meant more nudity and not prefrontal lobotomy and gluteotomy. A tear in his eye, a frog in his throat — and incipient liver failure on the horizon — Bill knew that his heart had finally found a home.

The Holy Bar and Grill was actually a large complex of hover-buildings, squatting beatifically in a bank of chartreuse clouds on anti-grav plates, high above the giant methane world of Zeus.

“Old Zeus loves this huge planet mostly because it's named after him,” explained Rick as he swung the starship named DESIRE in to land it on a pillar of crimson flame.

“Yikes,” said Bill. “How come there's a pillar of crimson flame down there in the middle of that spaceport?”

“Complimentary ionized starship hull cleaning service!”

“We're going to cook!”

“Also kills any space bacteria hanging onto the fins. Asteroid barnacles and such. Don't worry, Bill. It's perfectly harmless.”

Later, after their burns were treated and the roasted Archimedes, who had fired his last guanic salvo, was served up in sandwiches as a thank you to the white-robed medics who had treated them, Rick allowed that he had forgotten you were supposed to turn up the air conditioning a tad when landing in the Holy Pillar of Starship Cleaning Flame. Bill took it all in stride. Cleaning up parrot bowb wasn't too bad, but Archimedes' constant stream of knock-knock jokes was beginning to set his teeth on edge. It was a pleasure to realize that he would never have to listen again to the like of “Knock-knock,” “Who's there?,” “Toby,” “Toby who?” “Toby or not Toby.”

And he was really looking forward to a nice cold beer!

The Holy Bar and Grill was the biggest drinking saloon Bill had ever seen. After they checked into their room at the overpriced and undercleaned Hiltom Hotel, they walked past banks upon banks upon banks of slot machines, blackjack tables and Galactic lottery booths. Bill was stunned. The bar in the main building stretched for over two miles and there were clouds obscuring the far end. It was lined with an army of cloned android bartenders, all of whom looked equally repulsive, with pig's heads — which had a tendency to drool down their tusks — and twelve-fingered hands which were great for carrying a lot of glasses at once.

The lines of taps served every beer in the known universe, from Old Peculier from a planet called England to Really Old and a Lot More Peculier from Ireland, along with Happy Barrel Dredgings from New South Whales. Lines of all manner of bottled spirits strung out like colorful baubles on a giant prostrate Christmas tree stretching for kilometers and kilometers. Bill was alternately assailed by whiff's and fumes of blissful brews, scintillating spirits. Oh, heady hops! Oh, mischievous malts, ah! the blissful joys of alcohol! He had the sudden thought that maybe in this place even the bar-rags probably tasted good, but resisted the sudden impulse to find out.

In mundane matters like women and the Troopers, Bill was simply a knee jerk, reflex kind of guy with any traces of conscience or original thought eroded away by years of military indoctrination. But in matters of drinking, he often waxed philosophical since this, and creative cursing, were the only areas of originality the Troopers had left open to him. Why, some pundit had asked recently, when there are numerous varieties of mood and mind-altering drugs available these days, naturally from exotic worlds, or synthetically from legal or illegal laboratories, why is the favored drug amongst the military, and perhaps even the human universe alcohol in all its insidious forms?

To this question, Bill had three relevant responses:

1. Alcohol gets you drunk.

2. Alcohol then gets you even drunker.

3. Alcohol then gets you unconscious, which is the only escape from the military a Lifer would ever get.

But, continued the pundit's challenge, why alcohol when there are so many other inebriating drugs that were less addictive, that did not cause eventual gross tissue damage in the internal organs, that did not have such a history, of human degradation, suffering and shame permanently affixed to all their various and sundry forms?

Bill might have pointed out that perhaps there was a natural need in a human being to get blotto from time to time; but he was only aware of this instinctually and could not articulate the thought or the urge. He might have sung the praises for the panorama of taste available in the wide range of alcoholic drinkables, but since most of his favorite drinks tasted awful and since by the third or fourth drink he didn't taste anything anyway, he didn't.