Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (20 page)

“How do you feel, Vassar?” asked Alan. “I—I don’t suppose you’ll love me now?”

“I’ll still run with you, big guy. I’ve got no problem with queers. But—”

“You’ll find the right man, Alan,” said Susan. “Vassar isn’t the right man for anyone. He’s a stopgap measure. Even for me.” Still naked, she cocked a roguish eye at her husband. “And now that I can teep his complete record of mortal and venial sins—”

“I like seeing your brain’s insides, too,” interrupted Vassar. “It’s like I’ve made it into my teenage girlfriend’s lacy bedroom with the picture of a horse on the wall. We’ll get all snuggly and lovey-dovey, what do you say? A new leaf.”

“I can be cozy if you can treat me right,” said Susan. “I’ve always gotten a thrill from you, Vassar. You know that.” She turned to Ned, who was rubbing against her leg. “Back off, cad. I don’t even know you.”

“My dear wife,” said Vassar. He yawned and sagged. “Curl up with me, Susan, and we’ll zonk some Zs. I feel like I just had brain surgery. Or something.”

“I’m
perky
,” said Susan. “
Jazzed
.”

“Oh, I’m for a snooze, too,” said Ned. “Let’s merge in a mound. This’ll be good for you, Vassar and Susan. Alan can pass you a wetware upgrade to take off the rough edges.”

Alan hung back, feeling himself on the outside once again. He feared that none of these three people would ever want to make love to him in a human way.

“Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself and merge with us, Alan,” exclaimed Ned, sensing his friend’s thoughts. “This won’t be mere sex,” Ned added for Vassar’s sake. “It’ll be skugger conjugation. Very intense, very good for you. Alan is improving his metabolism all the time, and he’ll share what he’s got. The man’s a genius, a mad scientist, the bullgoose wetware programmer in chief.”

So, urged on by Ned and by Alan, the four of them piled up. Guided by Alan’s teep, their tissues began to melt and flow, with tendrils from each body digging into the flesh of the skuggy flesh of the others. Alan was thinking of a topological paradox in which four endlessly ramifying solids share a single border.

But quickly the merge switched from the theoretical to the experiential. In some ways it was like sex, without being focused on the genitalia. They seeped, they shared, they shuddered, they slept as one. But Alan and Ned held back on the Los Alamos plan.

They woke in the early afternoon. Vassar gave Alan his extra shirt and pants. Led by Susan, they went upstairs into the on-rolling daily party in the Chateau La Pompe bar and grill. Zachary was improvising bebop bleats on his sax, with his jam-partners Nebuchadnezzar playing a lustrous wooden bass, and Long John on a red set of drums.

“Still no beer for you others?” Vassar asked as they paused by the bar. A golden-skinned woman named Bea was in charge.

“No need,” said Alan. “You haven’t half unpacked all the new wetware I’ve given you. Poke around in your
mitochondria
.”

“So, aha, I see that I can get myself high,” said Vassar, staring off into space. “Makes life easier. You tweedle the bonk of the wiggle-doo.”

“Putting it quite non-technically,” said Alan.

“But we still need food,” said Ned. “What kind of eats they got?”

“Crawfish?” said Vassar, leaning across the bar towards Bea, smiling and nodding. “You got? A giant pan of them, dear hostess. Enough for all of us. And I’ll have a Regal Lager anyway.”

“Feed our ears, Susan,” called Zachary. “Jack us to the next level.” While Long John played a stuttering tattoo, Nebuchadnezzar plucked suspenseful chords in a rising sequence that hinted at some dramatic conclusion.

“I’ll be right back,” said Susan. “I’ll run and get my tapes and the machine from the car. Can you bring us a big pan of candied yams, too, Bea? Remember those, Vassar?”

Susan returned and gotten one of her tapes going—a giggly mix called
Orgasm Anyway
. And then Bea appeared with a rectangular pan of golden yam halves broiled with brown sugar, and a great round platter bearing a mound of boiled crawfish, dark dusky red, most of them about three inches long. Vassar showed Alan and Ned how to eat the tails of the crawfish.

Meanwhile the musicians played deedle-honk filigrees over the background of
Bulldozer at the Dump
. The tape contained sirens and the roaring of a lawn-mower.

“Highly agreeable,” said Alan, his mouth full. “But what’s wrong, Susan? I get a sense that—”

“I think some people have staked out our car. One of them tried to follow me. A thin redneck with a burr haircut. I cut through some alleys to shake him, which was a bitch, carrying my heavy tape machine.”

“If we see the guy again, we can skug him,” said Ned, his mouth full of orange yam. “And anyone else who’s on our case. We rule.”

“We’re making it new,” said Vassar. “You know how in all the SF movies, the fat cops and tight-ass scientists are working to control the giant ants or the twonky robots or the invisible aliens from space? We’re turning the story around. We’re the bizarre mutants, yeah—but we’re the
heroes
.”

“Should we feel sorry for the cops and scientists?” asked Susan.

“They get to be skuggers, too,” said Ned. “So I like our new story better. It’s time to break the system. The fat cats have been trampling the little guys for too long.”

“And we’re the rebel outsiders,” said Susan. “Physical mutants. I always liked
playing
that role, but—” Her chin quivered ever so slightly. She was scared.

“Revel in your enhanced powers,” said Alan, sympathetic to Susan’s mix of feelings. “We’ve whole new worlds to explore.”

“I hope we don’t have to feel sorry for these
crawfish
,” said Vassar, trying for a joke. “We’re converting them, too.”

“Converting the people and the crawfish and the yams,” said Susan, perhaps a little too brightly. “It’s all the same, huh? The flow of life.”

“I’ve eaten
sixty-seven
of them now,” said Alan, who’d been keeping track.

“He has a prime number in his stomach,” said Ned.

“And now I need more sweets,” said Vassar, finishing the last of the yams. “I’m realizing that from now on, sweets are what
really
get me high. Speaking as a shapeshifting mutant. Beer is piss.”

“The light dawns,” said Susan getting to her feet. She went to bop and dance beside Zachary and Nebuchadnezzar, and then she put on a new tape called
Granny Goose
. Bea returned with a half gallon of vanilla ice cream and a chocolate pie.

Perhaps everything was wonderful.

Chapter 11: On The Road

Right about then a skinny, weathered man came up the stairs.

“That’s him,” teeped Susan, shading her face with her hand. “The creep who followed me.”

Without directly looking at them, the man had a quick shot of whiskey, then disappeared back down the stairs.

“
Stoooolie
,” sang Zachary, the word long and low.

“I’ll handle this,” said Alan, feeling uncharacteristically tough. Bit by bit, being a skugger was changing him.

Making his feet soft and quiet, Alan hurried down the stairs like a nimble spider. He didn’t have far to go. The spy was in a phone booth by the bathroom, talking into the receiver. Without over-thinking it, Alan pushed open the door and poked his hand into the saggy folds of the man’s neck. He felt a slight tingle as a gout of skug tissue flowed into his enemy’s body. And then the conversion was done.

“Rupert’s the name,” the man told Alan, placing the quacking phone receiver back into its cradle. “Rupert Small.”

Alan’s teep fed the man layers of information, although he made sure to block the new convert’s access to the Los Alamos plans. The fellow was an informer for the FBI, a part-timer rather than a fully employed agent. He’d gotten word from his contacts to look for a two-tone Pontiac Catalina, with a fifty dollar reward if he could finger the passengers.

“You was a few seconds late in tagging me,” said Rupert aloud, baring his yellow teeth in a half-smile. “And now the heat’s comin’ down.” He touched his neck. “Is it bleeding?”

“It’s fine,” said Alan, his mind racing. “How soon till they get here?”

“Ten minutes. This voice in my head says I should give you my car. A dark gray 1949 Hudson. It runs, once it starts.”

“I’ll call my friends,” said Alan, sending them a teep signal.

“I feel like I’m shit crazy,” said Rupert, stepping from the phone booth. An anxious frown shadowed his narrow face. “I don’t like no voices in my head. That’s what put my wife in the state hospital. The feds told me you was a cop-killer gang. But you more like Satanists, ain’t you?” Rupert looked down at his arms which, in his nervousness, he’d begun twining around each other like vines. Jerkily, he straightened them out. “This thing that’s possessed me—it’s called a skug? I’m scared, Mister.”

“You’ll grow accustomed to it, Rupert. And the devil’s not involved. Here come my mates. Let’s go out the back door.”

Ned, Vassar and Susan clattered down the stairs, Susan with her tape machine, and Vassar carrying the pile of tapes.

“It seems they extracted the information about our car from Landers,” said Alan. “And Rupert here has phoned the FBI. We’d best roll on quite smartly.”

“Who
is
this Landers, anyway?” asked Vassar petulantly. “I don’t get what happened to him.”

“He was a skugger and they captured him and they’re torturing him to make him help,” said Ned. “He’s a skugsniffer. But he’s not here in New Orleans yet. It’ll be easy enough to skeeve away from the local clowns.” He flashed a hard grin. “Dopes who’d hire someone like Rupert here.”

“I was already sayin’ your gang can take my car,” put in Rupert, sounding aggrieved. “Although I will need a replacement. If your skug monsters can help with that.”

“But our Pontiac was
beautiful
,” wailed Susan. “Cream and maroon. And everything I own is in the trunk.”

“We’ll redeem your treasures, lady fair,” said Ned softly. Alan could readily teep that, young and innocent as Ned was, he’d fallen in love with Susan as soon as he’d had sex with her. “And we’ll make a clean sweep of the additional lowlifes staking out our car,” continued Ned. “How many on your team, Rupert?”

“Three more,” said Rupert, with a hillbilly cackle. “I’d relish to play a trick on those boys. They’s a regular crew of crotch lice, horning in on my gig. We was playing poker when I got the call, you see, and they rode along in my car. It’s parked right near yours.”

The five of them exited the alley behind the hotel. It was three in the afternoon, a cool day, cloudy and bright.

“Look what somebody wrote on that pedestal, Susan,” said Vassar, as they hurried past a statue of a saint. “
I am the light.
I’m gonna start saying that. Yeah, baby. I am the light.”

“Illuminating every scene you’re into,” said Susan, enjoying her husband more than before. “My rebel seraphim.”

“What we gonna do is slip through this little boneyard here,” Rupert told Alan. “We’ll motorvate over the back wall and skug them three boys in my car afore they know what’s hit em. Make ‘em slaves of Satan too.”

“No black magic is involved,” insisted Alan. “Skugs are
science
. A contagious and opportunistic biocomputational upgrade.”

The vest-pocket cemetery was weedy and crumbling, with trash on the ground. As was the custom, the bodies were in crypts sitting atop the wet ground. A pale, fey woman in a ragged black dress slunk out from one of the tombs as if she’d taken shelter there.

“I’m Veronica Vale. You pilgrims lookin for a tour?”

“Sure,” said Vassar, giving the woman the eye.

“We headin’ straight through to the back is all,” put in Rupert, who seemed to know the waif. “Go back in your hidey-hole, you.”

“Your friends want me, Rupert,” said Veronica, striking a pose. “
Noblesse oblige
. I’ll show them my highlights. Hold your tips till the end.” Very light on her feet, the spritely woman clambered atop the crypts, hopping from one to the next, staying abreast of the five skuggers, intoning a series of spontaneous effusions.

“Here lies Mamselle Bumpo de la France. Her poodle ate her frowny face. Over there is Doctor Patrice Congo. He invented the inside-out trombone. Whoops-a-daisy, here’s Marie Atomiste.”

“You’re great!” called Susan. She had her tape machine running, and she was pacing beside Veronica with her mike outstretched.

Veronica Vale hopped to the muddy ground, and skirted an overgrown structure. “Everything’s glowing, you understand. With V-rays, eh? I see the future and the past.”

“Where does it end?” asked Susan.

“New life for old meat,” said the fey woman as they reached the cement wall at the back of the graveyard. “In Mexico City.”