Bill 4 - on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure (8 page)

As it happened, one day in the misty past in a low bar on Boozeworld, a Trooper R & R center, Bill was enthusiastically sitting, enjoying a couple dozen drinks and heading quickly for alcoholic extinction while ogling the multiple pink mammaries of the whorebots, the entertainment the planet provided, when a temperance-minded missionary, transported there by the authorities as some sort of sadistic joke, supremely disgusted by the activities of his fellow humans at the bar, brought up these very same arguments to Bill and asked him why, in light of all knowledge of the evils of drink, he was ruining himself with demon liquor.

Bill had remembered saying, with great drunken clarity and understanding, “Because I can feel it doing me harm.” Not satisfied, the missionary had pressed for a more intelligent explanation so that Bill, too drunk to expound at length, and physically incapable of shlurring more than the shimplest shentence, summed all up in a brilliant Cartesian sentence:

“I drink, therefore I am.”

He had then added a certain pungent punctuation to his remarks by flipping his cookies all over the missionary before mercifully passing out.

But the philosophy stuck, and so did the philosophical wax, so now as he surveyed this dipsomaniac Disneyland, spread out before him like a feast of unreason, he 'am'ed with every core of his being, much as Zoroastrian monks 'om'ed with theirs.

“Finally! Finally, I have reached my goal,” said Rick, the Supernal Hero, falling upon his knees with awe. “Throughout the universe I have searched for one particular beer! And here is the Holy Bar and Grill, which surely serves every potation concocted in the Universe! A bar of truly mythic proportions!” He struggled up to his feet, stumbled toward a clearing in the shiny waxed wood. “Arrrrrrr! C'mon, first mate. This one's on me!”

Bill, never one to refuse a free drink, followed his Captain. But at the same time he surveyed with growing gloom the crowds milling through the huge bar. How ever was he going to find Irma in this place?

“Bartender!” called out Rick. “Set up a round for me and my buddy.”

“What's your poison, fella?” said the bartender with asinine enthusiasm at the stupid line.

“Holy Grail Stout!” said Rick with a broad grin as he slapped his Gold Galactic cred voucher on the walnut surface of the bar.

All drinkers within earshot stopped talking, stopped drinking, seemed to even stop breathing. They turned and stared at the newcomer and the bartender.

“Sorry, stranger,” lisped the bartender in an unctuous androidal voice. “That's the one brew we don't have.”

Rick blinked. “Well, then, how about some Holy Grail ale?”

“Sorry. Don't have that either.”

“Uhmm. Well, then, what about Holy Grail lager.”

“Nope.”

“Holy Grail pilsner?”

“Uh uh.”

Rick, by this time, had turned quite white. “Arrrrrrr! But I've traveled parsecs upon parsecs to slake this special thirst. I was told that the Holy Bar and Grill served every drink known to mankind!”

“We do. Everything but the Holy Grail line. Nobody knows where that stuff is, though we've had plenty of Sir Galahads and Sir Reptitious like you traipsing through looking for it. How about a nice Aldebaran Moosetail bitter? I personally can vouch you'll not find a better brew south of the North Star!”

The crestfallen Rick muttered gloomily, “No way. I am going to need something a lot stronger than that to kill the growing state of depression that is about to overwhelm me. Two Dickhead whiskeys, bartender. That is two barrels. And you'd better serve them in pint mugs.”

That sounded good to Bill. Anything but rum. He accepted his Dickhead mug, needed both hands to lift it, and with uncharacteristic reserve, merely sipped it as he surveyed the room. That is, after he had half-drained it to see if it had gone off in the barrel. Still no sign of Irma. And thankfully, no sight either of gentlemen walking about carrying thunderbolts in their hands, as Zeus was reputed to do.

However, parts of the room were peripherally fading in and out. That damnable problem with his grip on reality again! Maybe this huge room held too much for his tiny brain to absorb, thought Bill. By the end of the Dickhead jug, however, and the beginning of the next, things were fading in and out even more, but by this time Bill really didn't care.

Finally, after the second barrel was well gotten into and he was feeling decidedly squiffed, the man parked at the bar beside them tapped him on the shoulder. “Oy, mate!” he said, staring at him through bottle-bottom glasses. “What's that 'anging 'round yer neck there?”

Bill had become so accustomed to his little item of deceased avian jewelry since the “loo stasis” had been sprayed on, stopping the stench, that he'd almost forgotten about it.

“This,” he said, watching as a fly was zapped in the static electronic field, “...this is a dead dove. Quiet, though, pal. Don't call attention. Everybody will want one too.”

The interruption, however, had succeeded in knocking Bill out of his alcoholic reverie and slightly back on course. He remembered the main reason he was here at the Holy Bar and Grill.

“Irma!” he cried aloud, turning and frantically shaking his companion's arm. “Captain Rick, do you zhee Irma anywhere hereaboutsabouts?”

Captain Rick, dejected and depressed, was just working his way towards the bottom of the whiskey barrel, mumbling to himself about searching for Holy Grail beer until the day he died. “Irma?” he said, eyelids at half-mast, trying to get Bill in focus. “Just find Zeus, man. When you find Zeus, you'll find Irma.”

“Zeus? But how the bowb am I going to find Zeus?” Bill said. “There must be hundreds of thousands of people in this place.”

“Who's looking for people?” Rick cackled incontinently. “You're looking for a god.”

“Zeus?” said the neighbor. “You looking for the Great God Zeus? Why didn't you say so, mate? I just passed the bugger coming back from a celestial slash down in the Netherzone Quadrant. He's got 'imself a private party going down there.”

“Netherzone Quadrant?” said Bill, his excitement at the thought of finding Irma sobering him slightly. “Where's that?”

“Like I said, it's down by the WCs! The Bogs, Jakes — or whatever you call them in your dialect.” The mustachioed gentleman pointed over to the side of the hall, where four signs were posted. No writing on them, just Intergalactic symbols. One sign depicted a man, another what was probably a woman. Bill blinked at them rapidly until he could make them out. Men's and ladies' room he guessed. The adjoining sign depicted a six-limbed chitinous creature. Alien's room. The last was the largest, and it showed a huge halo parked by a toilet.

Gods' room.

“Rick, I'm going down to find Irma,” said Bill.

“Go 'head. Arm. I'm not going anywhere.” And, in the endless quest for alcoholic companionship, misery and drunkenness love sympathy, he bought the neighbor a drink, and together they toasted the dead and much-missed Archimedes the parrot.

Bill, who missed the feathery farter not at all, indeed had his own dead bird to consider, did not join in. He headed for the toilet signs, and there took a pneumatic tube to the Netherzone Quadrant. After visiting the men's room successfully, he emerged back into the long corridor. He only had to walk a very short distance to hear the thunder and booming of Zeus' party.

Roaring big band music filled the air as he opened the door and was confronted by the vast and twisted alien Escher print panorama of the Netherzone Room. Apparently, Zeus had twisted gravitational effects in such pretzel forms that in one part of the huge room, people were standing on the ceiling, and in four others, people were standing on the walls. As for the big band — well, that multitudinous ensemble hung swaying in a crescent moon suspended in the very middle of the room. They were doing a heated version of an ear-destroying number that had the walls throbbing in and out. Suddenly, as Bill walked into the wash of music and art-wrecko atmosphere, his mood foot started twitching and spasming, moving about in time to the beat.

The hairy-hoofed thing was trying to dance!

“That's 'Satin Doll' they're playing, idiot! Not Satyr's Doll!”

However, the foot ignored him, and he had to prance about a little as he moved about the roomscape, searching for Zeus and his lost true love, the incredibly luscious and lost Irma!

It did not take long to find Zeus. The God was on the ceiling, sitting at a long table crowded with a cornucopia of contraband.

MIND-MASTERS OF THE OVER-GLAND

In a thoroughly foul mood, more sexually frustrated than he'd ever felt in his entire life, Bill opened gummy lids and reached up to scratch the top of his head. He felt the fumbling resistance of wires. He heard a popping, a squealing — machine sounds rumbled all around him like amplified soap bubbles. Squeaks and blips and hollow “pings” echoed metallically and plastically.

“He's waking up again! Is that wise, Doctor?” said a familiar voice.

“Yes. His unconsciousness has fueled the Matrix sufficiently,” said another familiar voice.

Bill groaned. He lifted his head, looking around him. Again the resistance of the wires. He could feel cold metal now, adhering to the skin on his forehead. He could feel tiny subcutaneous implants in his scalp. He could feel the needle of a drug-drip, intravenously feeding him the contents of an upended bottle labeled with a skull and crossbones. He felt like a sliced-open body that had been poorly stitched together. He felt for the very first time in his life like a beetle pinned down by a long pin through his thorax. Felt this way even though he knew that he didn't have a thorax. The room swam before him, a thing that rooms usually find it very hard to do. Vaguely he could see a form in front of him. The figure wore a white lab coat, glasses and a stethoscope. Bill suddenly smelled the familiar scent of antiseptics.

A doctor? Antiseptics? Was he back in the hospital then? Fragments of memory swam about him like chunks of detritus from an explosion, floating in free fall. Vague images of Bruce the satyr ... the Fields of Elysium ... delicious wine ... the droppings of Archimedes the parrot....

Irma's smiling face.

“Irma!” he cried again, struggling in his containment.

“Whoa there, Trooper. Settle down, big fellow,” said the unctuously theoretically comforting voice of the doctor, leaning over him. Bill looked up and the vague form resolved into recognizable features. The nasty, pointy nose, the gruesome chin, the furtive look in those bulging eyes....

“Where am I?”

“You're in a secret compound, deep below the reefs of the ocean on Colostomy IV, Bill. You're here on the most important and monumentous mission of your career as a human being.”

Bill looked harder. That voice, that face!

“Dr. Delazny!”

“That's right, Bill. Now calm down. No one's going to hurt you!”

“Secret compound? Whose secret compound?”

“Gee, Bill!” a little voice piped up. He was aware of the scampering of tiny reptilian feet up the metal gurney top. A heavy weight suddenly landed on his chest. He craned his neck and was suddenly eyeballs to eyeballs with a seven-inch tall lizard with four arms. “Don't you know? Haven't you figured it out yet, buddy?”

A Chinger!

More than that, he recognized the high-pitched, adenoidal voice he had come to detest more than the ghost of Sergeant Deathwish Drang, who from time to time haunted his drugged dreams.

It was Eager Beager!

“Eager Beager!” said Bill. “I thought you were dead.”

“The rumors of my death were pure hyperbole, Bill! You like that word Bill? 'Hyperbole!' Yeah. But Eager Beager no longer. He was just a humanoid robot that I operated from a control where his brain would be if he had a brain. My name is Bgr the Chinger, as you should remember but you have forgot with all the brain-stirring. I am the Chinger specialist in alien life forms — and gee, humans are as alien as they come, let me tell you! — I've been doing a little study into human semiotics, human literary terms, and of course, in-depth human psychology. Gee — I got lots of new terms for you. Can you say 'phenomenological psycho-meta-scape?' Gee — I didn't think so.”

Mostly, Bill was just laboring to breathe. Being from a ten-G (hence perhaps his preoccupations with the expression “gee”) world, although they were small, the Chingers were also very dense and very, very heavy. “Could — you — get — off, Eager?”

“Gee — oh yeah. Sure, Bill. We got a lot to talk about.” The Chinger hopped down to the gurney again, capered over to sit beside Bill's face, its little tail wiggling with reptilian happiness. “Yeah. Like, soldiers, how's the subversion of the Empire going? The dissemination of truth, peace and righteousness?”

“Death to all Chingers!” growled Bill.

“Hmm. I thought so. A backslider. I thought we had a deal, Bill. Or maybe your training was just too much. Gee — too bad!”

Bill turned to Dr. Latex Delazny. Slowly, the truth began to filter through his thick head. “I'm being held captive in a Chinger compound. Which means —” He snarled at the Doctor, bearing his fangs. “You're a Chinger spy, Doctor. You're a traitor!”

The thin man stood erect to his full height, puffing out his chest with hurt pride. “I am nothing of the sort! I am a humanitarian! I work for the best interests of the human race. I work for armistice in the Empire-Chinger War. I work for peace, goodness, happiness! I work to cure the aberrations of the human subconscious!”

“Traitor scum! And I trusted you with my foot? Where have you taken me? What's going on?”

“Gee — and it is a nice foot, isn't it Bill?” said Bgr, scampering down to admire the cloven hoof.

Bill remembered. “Yeah! A 'mood foot' the Doctor calls it. And it's your fault, Bgr!”

“Knock it off, Bill. Shut up and listen. The Doctor has a lecture for you. We're going to need you for the next phase of the operation. Gee — and this is going to be fun, too!”

“Not really a lecture — rather an attempt to impart information, always a difficult task. Particularly with you. Try to understand that your subconscious must share the group subconscious which is a hell of a lot smarter than your conscious mind. Which is not saying very much in any case. What you experienced truly happened, though perhaps not quite in the same dimensional-experiential plane we are accustomed to.”