Mindswap (2 page)

In New York, Marvin went directly to the body-brokerage house of Otis, Blanders and Klent. He was sent to the office of Mr Blanders, a tall, athletic man in the prime of life at sixty-three, and a full partner in the firm. He explained to this man his purpose in coming.

'Of course,' Mr Blanders said. 'You have reference to our advertisement of Friday last. The Martian gentleman's name is Ze Kraggash, and he is very highly recommended by the rectors of East Skern University.'

'What does he look like?' Marvin asked.

'See for yourself,' Blanders said. He showed Marvin a photograph of a being with a barrel chest, thin legs, slightly thicker arms, and a small head with an extremely long nose. The picture showed Kraggash standing knee-deep in mud, waving to someone. Printed on the bottom of the photograph were the words: 'Souvenir of Mud Heaven – Mars' Year – Round Vacationland, highest moisture content on the planet!'

'Nice-looking chap,' Mr Blanders commented. Marvin nodded, even though Kraggash looked just like any other Martian to him.

'His home,' Blanders continued, 'is in Wagomstamk, which is on the edge of the Disappearing Desert in New South Mars. It is an extremely popular tourist area, as you probably know. Like you, Mr Kraggash is desirous of travelling and wishes to find a suitable host body. He has left the selection entirely up to us, stipulating only mental and physical health.'

'Well,' Marvin said, 'I don't mean to boast, but I've always been considered healthy.'

'I can see that at a glance,' Mr Blanders said. 'It is only a feeling, of course, or perhaps an intuition, but I have come to trust my feelings in thirty years of dealing with the public. Purely on the basis of my feelings, I have rejected the last three applicants for this particular Swap.'

Mr Blanders seemed so proud of this that Marvin felt impelled to say, 'Have you really?'

'Most certainly. You can have no conception of how frequently I must detect and eliminate misfits in this line of work. Neurotics who seek ugly and illicit thrills; criminals who wish to escape the purview of local law; the mentally unstable, trying to escape their internal psychic pressures. And many more. I cull them all.'

'I hope that I don't fit any of those categories,' Marvin said, with an embarrassed little laugh.

'I can tell at once that you do not,' Mr Blanders said. 'I would judge you as an extremely normal young man, almost
excessively
normal, if that were possible. You have been bitten by the travel bug, which is very suitable for your time of life, and is a passion akin to failing in love, or fighting an idealistic war, or becoming disillusioned with the world, and other postures of the young. It is very fortunate that you had either the native wit or the good luck to come to us, the oldest and most reliable brokerage house in the Swap business, rather than to some of our less scrupulous competitors, or, worst of all, to the Open Market.'

Marvin knew very little about the Open Market; but he remained silent, not wishing to betray his ignorance by asking.

'Now then,' Mr Blanders said, 'we have certain formalities which we must go through before we can gratify your request.'

'Formalities?' Marvin asked.

'Most certainly. First, you must have a complete examination, which will produce an operational judgement of your physical, mental, and moral standing. This is quite necessary, since bodies are swapped on an equal basis. You would be quite unhappy if you found yourself stuck in the corpus of a Martian suffering from sandpest or tunnel syndrome. Just as he would be unhappy if he found that you had rickets or paranoia. By the term of our charter, we must attempt as complete a knowledge of the health and stability of the Swappers as possible, and apprise them of any discrepancies between real and advertised condition.'

'I see,' Marvin said. 'And what happens after that?'

'Next, you and the Martian Gentleman will both sign a Reciprocal Damage Clause. This states that any damage to your host body, whether by omission or commission, and including Acts of God, will, one, be recompensed at the rate established by interstellar convention, and, two, that such damage will be visited reciprocally upon your own body in accordance with the
lex talionis
.'

'Huh?' Marvin said.

'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,' Mr Blanders explained. 'It's really quite simple enough. Suppose you, in the Martian corpus, break a leg on the last day of Occupancy. You suffer the pain, to be sure, but not the subsequent inconvenience, which you avoid by returning to your own undamaged body. But this is not equitable. Why should you escape the consequences of your own accident? Why should someone else suffer those consequences for you? So, in the interests of justice, interstellar law requires that, upon reoccupying your own body, your own leg be broken in as scientific and painless a manner as possible.'

'Even if the first broken leg was an accident?'

'
Especially
if it were an accident. We have found that the Reciprocal Damage Clause has cut down the number of such accidents quite considerably.'

'This begins to sound sorta dangerous,' Marvin said.

'Any course of action contains an element of danger,' Mr Blanders said. 'But the risks involved in Swapping are statistically unimportant, assuming that you stay out of the Twisted World.'

'I don't know very much about the Twisted World,' Marvin said.

'Nobody does,' Blanders said. 'That's why you're supposed to stay out of it. That's reasonable enough, isn't it?'

'I suppose so.' Marvin said. 'What else is there?'

'Nothing to speak of. Just paperwork, waivers of special rights and immunities, that sort of thing. And, of course, I must give you the standard warning about metaphoric deformation.'

'All right,' Marvin said. 'I'd like to hear it.'

'I just gave it,' Blanders said. 'But I'll give it again. Watch out for metaphoric deformation.'

'I'd be glad to,' Marvin said, 'but I don't know what it is.'

'It's really quite simple,' Blanders said. 'You might consider it a form of situational insanity. You see, our ability to assimiliate the unusual is limited, and these limits are quickly reached and surpassed when we travel to alien planets. We experience too much novelty; it becomes unbearable, and the mind seeks relief through the buffering process of analogizing.

'Analogy assures us that
this
is like
that
; it forms a bridge between the accepted known and the unacceptable unknown. It attaches the one to the other, imbuing the intolerable unknown with a desirable familiarity.

'However, under the continued and unremitting impact of the unknown, even the analogizing faculty can become distorted. Unable to handle the flood of data by the normal process of conceptual analogizing, the subject becomes victim to
perceptual
analogizing. This state is what we call "metaphoric deformation". The process is also known as "Panzaism". Does that make it clear?'

'No,' Marvin said. 'Why is it called "Panzaism"?'

'The concept is self-explanatory,' Blanders said. 'Don Quijote thinks the windmill is a giant, whereas Panza thinks the giant is a windmill. Quijotism may be defined as the perception of everyday things as rare entities. The reverse of that is Panzaism, which is the perception of rare entities as everyday things.'

'Do you mean,' Marvin asked, 'that I might think I was looking at a cow, when actually it was an Altairian?'

'Precisely,' Blanders said. 'It's simple enough, once you apply yourself. Just sign here and here and we will get on with the examinations.'

There were many tests, and endless questions. Flynn was poked and probed, lights were flashed in his face, sudden noises were broadcast at him, and strange smells assailed his nostrils.

He passed everything with flying colours. Some hours later he was taken to the Transfer Room, and was seated in a chair that looked alarmingly like an old electric chair. The technicians made obligatory jokes: 'When you wake up, you'll feel like a new man.' Lights flashed at him, he was getting sleepy, sleepier, sleepiest.

He was thrilled by the imminence of travel, but appalled by his ignorance of the world beyond Stanhope. What was the Open Market, anyhow? Where was the Twisted World located, and why was he supposed to avoid it? And finally, how dangerous was metaphoric deformation, how often did it occur, and what was the recovery rate?

Soon he would find the answers to these questions, as well as the answers to many others that he hadn't asked. The lights were hurting his eyes, and he closed them for a moment. When he opened them again, everything had changed.

Despite a bipedal frame, the Martian is one of the strangest creatures in the galaxy. Indeed, from a sensory viewpoint, the Kvees of Aldeberan, despite their double brains and special-function limbs, are closer to us. Accordingly, it is a disturbing thing to Swap directly and without initiation into the corpus of a Martian. And yet, no amelioration is possible.

Marvin Flynn found himself in a pleasantly furnished room. There was a single window; through it, he gazed with Martian eyes upon a Martian landscape.

He closed his eyes, since he could register nothing except a dismaying confusion. Despite innoculations, he was beset by the nausea-producing waves of culture-shock, and he had to stand very still until it subsided. Then, cautiously, he opened his eyes and looked again.

He perceived low, flat sand dunes, which were made up of a hundred or more distinct hues of grey. A silvery-blue wind was running across the horizon, and an ochre counter-wind seemed to be attacking it. The sky was red, and many indescribable hues were visible in the infra-red scale. In everything, Flynn saw spidery spectrum lines. Earth and sky presented him with a dozen separate palettes, some complementary, more of them clashing. There was no harmony in nature's colours on Mars; these were the colours of chaos.

Marvin found a pair of glasses in his hand, and slipped them on. Immediately, the roar and clash of colours was reduced to manageable proportions. The numbness of shock receded, and he began to perceive other things.

First, a heavy booming in his ear, and a quick rattle beneath it, like the tattoo of a snare drum. He looked around for the source of this noise, and saw nothing except earth and sky. He listened more carefully, and found that the sounds were coming from his own chest. They were his lungs and heart, sounds that all Martians lived with.

Now Marvin was able to take stock of himself. He looked at his legs, which were long and spindly. There was no knee joint; instead, the leg was pivoted at the ankle, shin, midthigh, and upper thigh. He walked, and admired the fluid motion of his movements. His arms were slightly thicker than his legs, and his double-jointed hands had three fingers and two opposable thumbs. He could bend and twist these in a surprising number of ways.

He was dressed in black shorts and a white jumper. His chest-prop was folded neatly and covered with an embroidered leather case. He was amazed at how natural it all seemed.

And yet, it was not surprising. The ability of intelligent creatures to accommodate to new environments was what made Mindswap possible. And the Martian frame, despite certain striking morphological and sensory differences, was easy to get used to, unlike some of nature's more perverse creations.

Flynn was musing on this when he heard a door open behind him. He turned and saw a Martian standing in front of him, dressed in a government uniform of green and grey stripes. The Martian had reversed his feet in greeting, and Marvin quickly responded in kind.

(One of the glories of Mindswap is 'automatic education'. Or, in the amusing jargon of the trade: 'When you take over a house, you get the use of the furnishings.' The furnishings, of course, are the use of primary available knowledge in the host brain, knowledge such as language, customs, mores and morals, general information about the area in which one lives, and so forth. This is primary-environment information, general, impersonal, useful as a guide, but not necessarily reliable. Personal memories, likes, dislikes are, with certain exceptions, unavailable to the occupier, or available only at the cost of considerable mental effort. Again, in this area there is what appears to be a type of immunilogical reaction, which allows only a superficial degree of contact between disparate entities. 'General knowledge' is usually exempt; but 'personal knowledge', involving beliefs, prejudices, hopes and fears is sacrosanct.)

'Soft wind,' the Martian said, in the classic old-Martian greeting form.

'And cloudless sky,' Flynn replied. (To his annoyance, he found that his host body had a slight lisp.)

'I am Meenglo Orichichich, of the Tourist Bureau. Welcome to Mars, Mr Flynn.'

'Thanks,' Flynn said. 'Awfully good to be here. It's my first Swap, you know.'

'Yes, I know.' Orichichich said. He spat on the floor – a sure sign of nervousness – and uncurled his thumbs. From the corridor there came a sound of heavy voices. Orichichich said, 'Now then, concerning your stay on Mars-'

'I want to see the Burrow of the Sand King,' Flynn said. 'And, of course, the Talking Ocean.'

'Both excellent choices,' the official said. 'But first there are one or two minor formalities.'

'Formalities?'

'Nothing too difficult,' Orichichich said, his nose twisting to the left in the Martian smile. 'Would you look over these papers and identify them, please?'

Flynn took the proffered papers and scanned them. They were replicas of the forms he had signed on Earth. He read them through, and found that all the information had been sent correctly.

'These are the papers I signed on Earth,' he said.

The noise from the corridor grew louder. Marvin could make out words: 'Scalded egg-laying son of a frostbitten tree stump! Gravel-loving degenerate!'

Those were very strong insults indeed.

Marvin raised his nose quizzically. The official hastily said, 'A misunderstanding, a mix-up. One of those unfortunate occurrences which occur even to the best run of government tourist services. But I am quite sure that we can straighten it out in five gulps of a rapi, if not sooner. Permit me to ask you if-'

There was the sound of a scuffle in the corridor. Then a Martian burst into the room, with a Martian sub-official clinging to his arm and trying to stop him.

The Martian who had burst in was extremely old, as could be told by the faint phosphorescence of his skin. His arms quivered as he pointed both of them at Marvin Flynn.

'There!' he shouted. 'There it is, and by tree-stumps I want it now!'

Marvin said, 'Sir, I am not in the habit of being addressed as "it".'

'I am not addressing you' the old Martian said. 'I do not know nor care who or what you are. I am addressing the body which you are occupying, and which is not yours.'

'What are you talking about?' Flynn asked.

'This gentleman,' the official said, 'claims that you are occupying a body which belongs to him.' He spat twice on the floor. 'It is a mix-up, of course, and we can straighten it out at once …'

'Mix-up!' howled the old Martian. 'It's an out-and-out fraud!'

'Sir,' Marvin said, with cold dignity, 'you are under a grave misapprehension; either that, or you are engaging in this slander for reasons I cannot hope to fathom. This body, sir, was legally and fairly rented by me.'

'Scaly-skinned toad!' the old man shouted. 'Let me at him!' He struggled with circumspection against the restraining grip of the guard.

Suddenly, an imposing figure dressed entirely in white appeared in the doorway. All within the room fell silent as their gaze fell upon the feared and respected representative of the South Martian Desert Police.

'Gentlemen,' the policeman said, 'there is no need for recriminations. We shall proceed now to the police station, all of us. There, with the help of the Fulszime telepath, we shall penetrate to the truth, and to the motivation behind it.' The policeman paused impressively, stared full into each man's face, swallowed saliva to show supreme calm, and said: 'This, I promise you.'

Without further ado the policeman, the official, the old man, and Marvin Flynn proceeded to the police station. They walked silently, and they shared a common mood of apprehension. It is a truism throughout the civilized galaxy that when you go to the police, your troubles really begin.