Mindswap (8 page)

With a long rolling stride and a creaking of leather boots, Marvin Flynn strode down the wooden sidewalk. Faintly there came to him the mingled odors of sagebrush and chaparral. On either side of him the adobe walls of the town glittered under the moon like dull Mexican silver. From a nearby saloon there came the strident tones of a banjo-

Frowning deeply, Marvin stopped in midstride. Sagebrush? Saloons? What was going on around here?

'Something wrong, stranger?' a harsh voice intoned.

Flynn whirled. A figure stepped out of the shadows near the General Store. It was a saddlebum, a snuffling, slump-shouldered loafer with a dusty black hat crushed comically on his begrimed forehead.

'Yes, something is very wrong,' Marvin said. 'Everything seems – strange.'

' 'Tain't nothing to be alarmed about,' the saddlebum reassured him. 'You have merely changed your system of metaphoric reference, and the Lord knows there's no crime in that. As a matter of fact, you should be happy to give up those dreary animal-insect comparisons.'

'There was nothing wrong with my comparisons,' Marvin said, 'After all, I am on Celsus V, and I
do
live in a burrow.'

'So what?' the saddlebum said. 'Haven't you any imagination?'

'I've got plenty of imagination!' Marvin said indignantly. 'But that's hardly the point. I simply mean that it is inconsistent to think like a cowboy on Earth when one is actually a sort of molelike creature on Celsus.'

'It can't be helped,' the saddlebum said. 'What's happened is, you've overloaded your analogizing faculty, thereby blowing a fuse. Accordingly, your perceptions have taken up the task of experimental normalization. This state is known as "metaphoric deformation".'

Now Marvin remembered the warning he had received from Mr Blanders concerning this phenomenon. Metaphoric deformation, that disease of the interstellar traveller, had struck him suddenly and without warning.

He knew that he should be alarmed, but instead felt only a mild surprise. His emotions were consistent with his perceptions, since a change unperceived is a change unfelt.

'When,' Marvin asked, 'will I start to see things as they really are?'

'That last is a question for a philosopher,' the saddlebum told him. 'But speaking in a limited fashion, this particular syndrome will pass if you ever get back to Earth. But if you continue travelling the process of perceptual analogizing will increase; though occasional short-lived remissions into your primary situation-perception context may be expected.'

Marvin found that interesting, but unalarming. He hitched up his jeans and said, 'Waal, reckon a man's gotta play out the hand that's dealt to him, and I ain't about to stand here all night jawing about it. Just who are you, stranger?'

'I,' said the saddlebum, with a certain smugness, 'am he without whom your dialogue would be impossible. I am Necessity personified; without me, you would have had to remember the Theory of Metaphoric Deformation all by yourself, and I doubt that you are capable of it. You may cross my palm with silver.'

'That's for gipsies,' Marvin said scornfully.

'Sorry,' the saddlebum said, without the least show of embarrassment. 'Got a tailor-made?'

'Got the makings,' Marvin said, flipping him a sack of Bull Durham. He contemplated his new companion for a moment, then said, 'Waal, yore a mangy-looking critter, and it seems to me yore half jackass and half prairie dog. But I reckon I'm stuck with you no matter who you are.'

'Bravo,' the saddlebum said gravely. 'You conquer change of context with that same sureness with which an ape conquers a banana.'

'Reckon that's a tech highfalutin',' Marvin said equably. 'What's the next move, perfesser?'

'We shall proceed,' the saddlebum said, 'to yonder saloon of evil repute.'

'Yippee,' Marvin said, and strode lean-hipped through the batwinged saloon doors.

Within the saloon, a female attached herself to Marvin's arm. She looked up at him with a smile of vermilion bas-relief. Her unfocused eyes were pencilled in imitation of gaiety; her flaccid face was painted with the lying hieroglyphics of animation.

'C'mon upstairs with me, kid,' the grisly beldame cried. 'Lotsa fun, lotsa laughs!'

'It is droll to realize,' the saddlebum said, 'that Custom has decreed this lady's mask, proclaiming that those who sell pleasure must portray enjoyment. It is a hard demand, my friends, and not imposed upon any other occupation. For note: the fishwife is allowed to hate herring, the vegetable man may be allergic to turnips, and even the newspaper boy is permitted his illiteracy. Not even the blessed saints are required to enjoy their holy martyrdoms. Only the humble sellers of pleasure are required, like Tantalus, to be forever expectant of an untouchable feast.'

'Yer friend's a great little kidder, ain't he?' the termagant said. 'But I like you best, baby, 'cause you make me go all mush inside.'

From the virago's neck there hung a pendant upon which was strung in miniature a skull, a piano, an arrow, a baby's shoe, and a yellowed tooth.

'What are those?' Marvin asked.

'Symbols,' she said.

'Of what?'

'Come on upstairs, and I'll show you, sweety-ass.'

'And thus,' the saddlebum intoned, 'we perceive the true unmediated confrontation of the aroused feminine nature, 'gainst which our masculine fancies seem mere baby's toys.'

'C'mon!' the harpy cried, wriggling her gross body in a counterfeit of passion all the more frightening because it was real. 'Upstairs to bed!' she shouted, pressing against Marvin with a breast the size and consistency of an empty Mongolian saddlebag. 'I'll really show ya somepin!' she cried, entwining his thews with a heavy white leg, somewhat grimy and heavily varicosed. 'When ya git loved by
me
,' she howled, 'you'll damned well know you been loved!' And she ground lasciviously against him with her pudenda, which was as heavily armoured as the forehead of a Tyrannosaurus.

'Well, er, thank you so terribly much anyhow,' Marvin said, 'but I don't think just at the moment I-'

'You don't want no
lovin'
?' the woman asked incredulously.

'Well, actually, I can't really say that I do.'

The woman planted knobkerry fists on tom-tom hips and said, 'That I should live to see this day!' But then she softened, and said, 'Turn not away from Venus' sweet-perfumed home of pleasure! Thou must strive, sir, to overcome this most unseemly gesture of unmanliness. Come, my lord! The bugle sounds; it awaits thee now to mount and fiercely press thy charge!'

'Oh, I rather think not,' Marvin said, laughing hollowly.

She seized him by the throat with a hand the size and shape of a Chilean poncho. 'You'll do it
now
, you lousy cowardly inward-directed goddamn narcissist bastard, and you'll do it good and proper, or by Ares I'll snap your scrawny windpipe like a Michaelmas chicken!'

A tragedy seemed in the making, for the woman's passion rendered her incapable of a judicious modification of her demands, while Marvin's reputed great vaulting lance had shrunken to the size of a pea. (Thus blind nature, by defending him from one assault, tendered provocation for another.)

Lucidly the saddlebum, following the dictates of his wit if not his predilection, snatched a fan out of his gun belt, leaned forward simpering, and tapped the enraged woman on her rhinocerine upper arm.

'Don't you dare hurt him!' the saddlebum said, his voice a squeaky contralto.

Marvin, quick if not apt, rejoindered, 'Yes, tell her to stop
pawing
me! I mean to say it is simply too much, one cannot even stroll out of one's house in the evening without encountering some
disgraceful
incident-'

'Don't cry, for God's sake, don't cry!' the saddlebum said. 'You know I can't stand it when you cry!'

'I am
not
crying!' Marvin said, snuffling. 'It is just that she has ruined this shirt. Your present!'

'I'll get you another!' the saddlebum said. 'But I cannot abide another scene!'

The woman was staring at them slack-jawed, and Marvin was able to utilize her moment of inattention by taking a pry bar out of his tool kit, setting it under her swollen red fingers, and prying himself free of her grip. Seizing the dwindling moment of opportunity, Marvin and the saddlebum sprinted out the door, leaped around the comer, broadjumped across the street, and polevaulted to freedom.

Once clear of the immediate danger, Marvin came abruptly to his senses. The scales of metaphoric deformation fell away for the moment, and he experienced a perceptual experiential remission. It was all too painfully apparent now, that the 'saddlebum' was actually a large parasite beetle of the species
S Cthulu
. There could be no mistake about this, since the Cthulu beetle is characterized by a secondary salivary duct located just below and slightly to the left of the suboesophegal ganglion.

These beetles feed upon borrowed emotions, their own having long ago atrophied. Typically, they lurk in dark and shadowy places, waiting for a careless Celsian to pass within range of their segmented maxilla. That is what happened to Marvin.

Realizing this, Marvin directed at the beetle an emotion of anger so powerful that the Cthulu, victim of its own hyperacute emotional receptors, fell over unconscious in the road. That done, Marvin readjusted his gold-bronze casing, stiffened his antennae, and continued down the road.

He came to a bridge that crossed a great flowing river of sand. Standing on the centre span, he gazed downwards into the black depths that rolled inexorably onwards to the mysterious sand sea. Half-hypnotized he gazed, the nose ring beating its quick tattoo of mortality three times faster than the beat of his hearts. And he thought:

Bridges are receptacles of opposed ideas. Their horizontal distance speaks to us of our transcendence; their vertical declivity reminds us unalterably of the imminence of failure, the sureness of death. We push outwards across obstacles, but the primordial fall is forever beneath our feet. We build, construct, fabricate; but death is the supreme architect, who shapes heights only that there may be depths.

O Celsians, throw your well-wrought bridges across a thousand rivers, and tie together the disparate contours of the planet; your mastery is for naught, for the land is still beneath you, still waiting, still patient. Celsians, you have a road to follow, but it leads assuredly to death. Celsians, despite your cunning, you have one lesson still to learn: the heart is fashioned to receive the spear, and all other effects are extraneous.

These were Marvin's thoughts as he stood on the bridge. And a great longing overcame him, a desire to be finished with desire, to forgo pleasure and pain, to quit the petty modes of achievement and failure, to have done with distractions, and get on with the business of life, which was death.

Slowly he climbed to the rail, and there stood poised over the twisting currents of sand. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow detach itself from a pillar, move tentatively to the rail, stand erect, poise itself over the abyss and lean precariously outwards-

'Stop! Wait!' Marvin cried. His own desire for destruction had been abruptly terminated. He saw only a fellow creature in peril.

The shadowy figure gasped, and abruptly lunged towards the yawning river below. Marvin moved simultaneously and managed to catch an ankle.

The ensuing wrench almost pulled him over the rail. But recovering quickly, Marvin attached suckers to the porous stone sidewalk, spread his lower limbs for maximum purchase, wrapped two upper limbs around a light pole, and maintained a tenacious grip with his remaining two arms.

There was a moment of charged equilibrium; then Marvin's strength prevailed over the weight of the would-be suicide. Slowly, carefully, Marvin pulled, shifting his grip from tarsus to tibia, hauling without respite until he had brought that person to a point of safety on the roadbed of the bridge.

All recollection of his own self-destructive desires had left him. He strode forward and grasped the suicider by the shoulders, shaking fiercely.

'You damned fool!' Marvin shouted. 'What kind of a coward are you? Only an idiot or a madman takes an out like that. Haven't you any guts at all, you darnned-'

He stopped in mid-expletive. The would-be suicide was facing him, trembling, eyes averted. And now Marvin perceived, for the first time, that he had rescued a woman.

Later, in a private booth in a bridgeside restaurant, Marvin apologized for his harsh words, which had been torn from him by shock rather than conviction. But the woman, gracefully clicking her claw, refused to accept his apology.

'Because you are right,' she said. 'My attempt was the act of an idiot or a madwoman, or both. Your analysis was correct, I fear. You should have let me jump.'

Marvin perceived how fair she was. A small woman, coming barely to his upper thorax, she was exquisitely made. Her midbody had the true sweet cylinder curves, and her proud head sat slightly forward of her body at a heartwrenching five degrees from the vertical. Her features were perfection, from the nicely bulged forehead to the angular sweep of jaw. Her twin ovipositors were modestly hidden behind a white satin sash, cut in princess style and revealing just a tantalizing suggestion of the shining green flesh beneath them. Her legs, all of them, were clad in orange windings, draped to reveal the lissome segmentation of the joints.

A would-be suicide she may have been; but she was also the most stunning beauty that Marvin had seen on Celsus. His throat went dry at the sight of her, and his pulse began to race. He found that he was staring at the white satin that concealed and revealed her high-tilted ovipositors. He turned away, and found that he was looking at the sensual marvel of a long, segmented limb. Blushing furiously, he forced himself to look at the puckered beauty scar on her forehead.

She seemed unconscious of his fervent attention. Unselfconsciously she said, 'Perhaps we should introduce ourselves – under the circumstances!'

They both laughed immoderately at her witticism. 'My name is Marvin Flynn,' Marvin said.

'Mine is Phthistia Held,' the young woman said.

'I'll call you Cathy, if you don't mind,' Marvin said.

They both laughed again. Then Cathy grew serious. Taking note of the too-quick passage of time, she said, 'I must thank you again. And now I must leave.'

'Of course,' Marvin said, rising. 'When may I see you again?'

'Never,' she said in a low voice.

'But I must!' Marvin said. 'I mean to say, now that I've found you I can never let you go.'

She shook her head sadly. 'Once in a while,' she murmured, 'will you give one little thought to me?'

'We must not say goodbye!' Marvin said.

'Oh, you'll get by,' she replied, not cruelly.

'I'll never smile again,' Marvin told her.

'Somebody else will be taking my place,' she predicted.

'You are temptation!' he shouted in a fury.

'We are like two ships that pass in the night,' she corrected.

'Will we never meet again?' Marvin queried.

'Time alone can tell.'

'My prayer is to be there with you,' Marvin said hopefully.

'East of the Sun and West of the Moon,' she intoned.

'You're mean to me,' Marvin pouted.

'I didn't know what time it was,' she said. 'But I know what time it is now!' And so saying, she whirled and darted out the door.

Marvin watched her leave, then sat down at the bar. 'One for my baby, and one for the road' he told the bartender.

'A woman's a two-face,' the bartender commented sympathetically, pouring a drink.

'I got the mad-about-her-sad-without-her blues,' Marvin replied.

'A fellow needs a girl,' the bartender told him.

Marvin finished his drink and held out his glass. 'A pink cocktail for a blue lady,' he ordered.

'She may be weary,' the bartender suggested.

'I don't know why I love her like I do,' Marvin stated. 'But at least I do know why there's no sun up in the sky. In my solitude she haunts me like a tinkling piano in the next apartment. But I'll be around no matter how she treats me now. Maybe it was just one of those things; yet I'll remember April and her, and the evening breeze caressed the trees but not for me, and-'

There is no telling how long Marvin might have continued his lament had not a voice at the level of his ribs and two feet to his left whispered, 'Hey, meester.'

Marvin turned and saw a small, plump, raggedly dressed Celsian sitting on the next bar stool.

'What is it?' Marvin asked brusquely.

'You maybe want see thees muchacha so beautiful other time?'

'Yes, I do. But what can you-'

'I am private investigator tracer of lost persons satisfaction guaranteed or not one cent in tribute.'

'What kind of an accent have you got?' Marvin asked.

'Lambrobian,' the investigator said. 'My name is Juan Valdez and I come from the fiesta lands below the border to make my fortune here in big city of the Norte.'

'Sandback,' the bartender snarled.

'What thees theeng you call me?' the little Lombrobian said, with suspicious mildness.

'I called you a sandback, you lousy little sandback,' the bartender snarled.

'That ees what I thought,' said Valdez. He reached into his cummerbund, took out a long, double-edged knife, and drove it into the bartender's heart, killing him instantly.

'I am a mild man, senor,' he said to Marvin. 'I am not a man quickly to take offence. Indeed, in my home village of Montana Verde de los Tres Picos, I am considered a harmless man. I ask nothing more than to be allowed to cultivate my peyote buds in the high mountains of Lombrobia under the shade of that tree which we call "the sun hat", for these are the bes' peyote buds in all the world.'

'I can understand that,' Marvin said.

'Yet still,' Valdez said, more sternly, 'when an exploitator del norte insults me, and by implication, defames those who gave me birth and nurtured me – why then, senor, a blinding red mist descends over my field of vision and my knife springs to my hand unaided, and proceeds from there non-stop to the heart of the betrayer of the children of the poor.'

'It could happen to anyone,' Marvin said.

'And yet,' Valdez said, 'despite my keen sense of honour, I am essentially childlike, intuitive, and easygoing.'

'I had noticed that, as a matter of fact,' Marvin said.

'But yet. Enough of that. Now, you wish hire me investigation find girl? But of course. El buen pano en el arca se vende, verdad?'

'Si, hombre,' Marvin replied, laughing. 'Y el deseo vence al miedo!'

'Pues, adelante!' And arm in arm the two comrades marched out into the night of a thousand brilliant stars like the lance points of a mighty host.