Venus on the Half-Shell Part 10

He sighed and said, "O.K. I consent to the oper-ation provided you'll amputate the tail before I leave. I must talk to Mofeislop."

"Oh, you'll love your tail!" Shunta said. "And you'll see how foolish your talk of amputation is. Your att.i.tude is like that of a two-dimensional being who fears the third."

Simon came out of the anesthesia the evening of the next day. He had to stay face down for several days but on the third was allowed to totter around. On the sixth, the bandages were removed. He stood naked before a mirror while nurses, doctors, and govern-ment officials oohed and ahed around him. The tail was long and splendid, rising from a ma.s.sive group of muscles which had also been implanted at the base of his spine. He could only flick it a little, but he was as-sured that inside a week he'd be able to handle it as well as any native, short of hanging from a branch by it. Only children and trained athletes could do that.

They were right. Simon was soon delighted to find that he could wield a spoon or a fork and feed himself with it. He had to send Anubis to another room, how-ever, because the dog got upset. And Anubis several times could not resist the temptation to grab the tail in his teeth. Simon had to learn to keep it extended straight up whenever the dog was around.

Dokal life was arranged to accommodate the tail, of course. Chairs had to have a s.p.a.ce between the seat and the upper part of the back so the tails could go between. The backs of auto seats were split for the tails to slide through. A secretary not only typed but swept the floor at the same time. And long brushes were not needed to scrub one's back. Masons could handle five bricks to every three an Earthman could. A Dokalian soldier was a terrible fighting man, swing-ing a sword or an axe at the end of his tail. Simon, watching some in mock combat, was glad that a tailed species had not existed on Earth alongside his own. If it had, it would have exterminated h.o.m.o sap long be-fore the dawn of history. Not that that would have made any difference in the long run, he thought. For all practical purposes, h.o.m.o sap was extinct anyway.

A week later, Simon found out another use for his tail, though it did not surprise him. He was invited to a feast given by the ruler of the nation in which he had landed. He was seated at the huge table at the right hand of the ruler, The Great Tail Himself. As a sign of the esteem Simon was now held in, he was fed with a spoon wielded by the tail of The Great Tail Himself. On Simon's right side the daughter of the ruler, a lovely juvenile named Tune, acted as his goblet-filler. After numerous toasts, Simon wondered if he was losing control over his tail. He felt a hairy tuft sliding up and down his thigh and then, when he made no move, he felt the hairs tickle his crotch. He felt around behind him with a hand that seemed to have gone numb, grabbed the root of the tail, and slid his hand along it. It was sticking straight out behind him.

Tunc smiled at him, and it penetrated his wine-fro-zen brain that she was playing tailsey with him. He had a fleeting thought that he would be false to Chworktap if he responded to Tunc. Still, it wasn't his fault that she had practically kicked him out of the Hw.a.n.g Ho and had refused to join him later.

With some difficulty, he guided his tail under the table and moved it up Tune's thigh. At least, he thought it was hers. The woman sitting next to Tunc, The Great Tail Himself's mother, gasped and sat up. But then she smiled at him.

Probably, she'd had a gas pain.

He had not been in bed in his luxurious apartment in the palace more than ten minutes when his door was opened. Tunc entered, shed her robe and skirt, and crawled into bed with him. Simon had by that time reconsidered the ethics of the situation. Chwork-tap was being true to him, even if she had temporarily exiled him. So could he, in conscience, be untrue to her?

On the other hand, did Chworktap give a d.a.m.n?

And, back to the first hand, he disliked hurting Tune's feelings.

She snuggled up against him, kissed him, and the end of her tail caressed his throat, his chest, his stom-ach, the insides of his thighs, and tickled his genitals.

From dislike, he went to hate, hate of hurting her feelings.

Simon rolled her over and got on top and he found that the tail had indeed added another dimension. How had he ever been so content without it? Wait un-til he told Chworktap about this; no, he'd better not do that.

Tunc's tail came up from between her legs and its end slid into the nearest orifice. This was a new, though pleasant, in fact, ecstatic, experience for him.

He used his tail to reciprocate.

Tunc moaned and gasped, did all the things that lovers do over and over without the novelty seeming to wear off. Simon did likewise, though he tried to avoid her tail when she stuck it in his mouth. o.r.g.a.s.m, however, could care less about fastidiousness, and so he overcame his momentary repulsion.

When Tunc staggered out through the door, he watched her go, glad to see her go.

One more demand, and the honor of Earth would have been blackened. Tarnished, anyway.

He heaved himself out of bed to wash his teeth. Halfway across the immense room, he heard a knock. He stopped and said, "No more, Tunc!" But the door, opening, revealed Agnavi, Tune's grandmother.

Simon groaned and said, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, Your Majesty. But I can't even stiffen my tail."

Agnavi was disappointed, but she smiled when Si-mon said he could schedule a command performance for tomorrow. Meantime, sweet dreams. She was a pleasant woman who had the patience of middle age.

Simon did not, however, sleep well. He had another of the recurring nightmares in which thousands of people seemed to be speaking to him all at once. And the faces of his father and mother were getting closer.

CHAPTER 14.

Off to See the Wizard.

The queen and her granddaughter were fluent and charming talkers. Simon spent many an hour, lying side by side with them-though not at the same time-his tail entwined with theirs. But neither of them had the answer to his primal question.

Nor did anybody else he met in the capital city. Fi-nally, he asked to have a chance to meet the great sage Mofeislop. Shintsloop, The Great Tail Himself, said he had no objections. He was so cooperative that Simon wondered if he was glad to get rid of him. Maybe he suspected something, though if he did he showed no resentment. Simon had not yet learned that a Dokalian could control his facial muscles but could not keep his tail from expressing his true feelings. If he had, he might have noticed that Shintsloop's tail was held straight out behind him but twitched madly at it's end.

Simon sent another messenger to the ship to ask Chworktap if she wanted to go on the trip with him. The messenger returned with a piece of paper.

/ can't come with you. I think Tzu Li does have self-consciousness but she's afraid to reveal it. Either she's shy or she mistrusts humans. I've told her I'm a ma-chine, too, but she probably thinks it's a trick. Have a good time. Don't do anything I wouldn't do. Love and Kisses Simon smiled. She got very upset when she thought that he might regard her as a machine. But if it would gain her something to admit that she might be, she would not hesitate. This was so human that it certified her as human.

The trip on the railroad took four days. At the end of the line was a wall of yellow bricks two hundred feet high, stretching as far as Simon could see.

Actu-ally, it surrounded the Free Land and was a work equivalent to the Great Wall of China. It wasn't as long but it was much higher and thicker. It had no gates, but it did have brick staircases on the outer side every mile or so.

These were for the guards, who manned the stations on top of the wall.

"How many men would it take to guard the prisons if the criminals were put into them instead of being sent into the Free Land?" Simon said.

His escort, Colonel Booflum, said, "Oh, about forty thousand, I suppose. The Free Land is a great saving for the tax-payer. We don't have to feed and house the prisoners or pay guards or build new prisons."

"How many soldiers are used to guard these walls?" Simon said.

"About three hundred thousand," the colonel said.

Simon didn't say anything.

He climbed to the top of the wall with Anubis be-hind him and Athena on his shoulder. Three miles away was the inevitable tower of the Clerun-Gowph. Beyond it for many miles was the top of Mishodei Mountain, his goal. Between him and it lay dozens of smaller mountains and an unbroken forest.

Simon and his pets got into a big wickerwork bas-ket and were lowered by a steam winch. When he climbed out of the basket, he waved goodbye to the colonel and set out. He carried a pack full of food and blankets, a knife, a bow and arrow, and his banjo. Anubis also carried a pack on his back, though he didn't like it.

"A lot of people have left here intent on seeing the wise man," the colonel had said. "n.o.body has ever come back, that I know of."

"Maybe Mofeislop showed them the folly of return-ing to civilization?"

"Maybe," the colonel had said. "As for me, I can't get back to the fleshpots soon enough."

"That reminds me, give my regards to the queen dowager and the princess," Simon had said.

Now he entered the Yetgul Forest, a region of giant trees, pale and stunted underbrush, swamps, poisonous snakes, huge cat-like, bear-like, and wolf-like beasts, hairy elephant-like pachyderms, and men without law and order. Anubis, whimpering, stuck so close that Simon fell over him a dozen times before he had gotten a mile. Simon didn't have the heart to kick him; he was scared, too.

When he got to the foothills of the vast Mishodei Mountain six weeks later, he was still scared. But he was much more fond of his pets than when he had started. Both had been invaluable in warning him of the presence of dangerous beasts and men. Anubis had sense enough not to bark when he smelled them; he growled softly and so alerted Simon. The owl quite often flew ahead and hunted for rodents and small birds. But when it spotted something sinister, it flew back and landed on his shoulder, hooting agitatedly.

Actually, the big beasts were only dangerous if they came upon a human suddenly.

Given warning, they would either take off or else stand their ground and voice threats. Simon would then go around them. The only animals that were a genuine peril, because they did not have much sense, were the poisonous snakes.

The pets detected most of these in time, except when Simon awoke late one morning to find a cobra-like snake by his side. Simon froze, but the owl flew at it, hit it, knocked it over, and Simon rolled away to safety. The cobra decided that it was in a bad place and slithered off. Two days later, the owl killed a small coral snake which had crawled by the sleeping Anubis and was on its way to Simon.

The most dangerous animal was man, and though Simon saw parties of them ten times, he always man-aged to hide until they had pa.s.sed by. The males were scruffy-looking, dressed in skins, hairy, bearded, gap- toothed, and haggard-looking, and the children were usually snot-nosed and rheumy-eyed.

"Excellent examples of the genuine n.o.ble Savage," the colonel had said on the trip down. "Actually, most of the Free Landers are not criminals we've sent in but their descendants. The majority of criminals we do drop into the Land are killed by the tribes that roam the woods."

"Then why don't you let the descendants come into your society?" Simon said.

"They're not guilty. Surely you don't believe that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children?"

"That's a nice phrase," the colonel said. He took out his notebook and wrote in it. Then he said, "There's been some talk in parliament of rescuing the poor devils. For one thing, they'd be a source of cheap labor. But then they'd bring in all sorts of dis-eases, and they would be difficult to control and ex-pensive to educate.

"Besides, they are the descendants of criminals and have inherited the rebellious tendencies of their fore-fathers. We don't want those spreading through the population again. After all, we've spent a thousand years extracting the rebels from the race."

"How many rebels, or criminals, are now present in the population compared to the number a thousand years ago?" Simon said. "On a per capita basis?"

"The same," the colonel said.

"And how do you explain that after all the selective straining out?"

"Humans beings are contrary creatures. But give us another thousand years, and we'll have a criminal-free society."

Simon said nothing more about this. He did ask why the Dokalian society was so advanced technologi-cally in many respects yet still used bows and arrows. Why hadn't gunpowder been invented?

"Oh, guns were invented five hundred years ago," the colonel said. "But we're a very conservative peo-ple, as you may have noticed. It was thought that guns would introduce all sorts of disturbing innovations in society. Besides, they'd be too dangerous in the hands of the rabble. It doesn't take much training to use a gun. But skill with the sword and bow takes many years of training. So guns were outlawed, and only the elite and the most stable of the lower cla.s.ses are edu-cated in the use of swords and bows."

Despite this resistance to innovations, the steam en-gine had been accepted.

This had resulted in a general disuse of the horse. Horseflies and the diseases they carried had almost been eliminated, and the streets were no longer full of horses.h.i.t. But the invention of the internal combustion engine had been suppressed, and there was no gas and noise pollution from auto-mobiles and trucks.

On the other hand, the drop in casualties from horsefly-borne sicknesses was more than made up by traffic accidents.

Simon pointed this out.

"Progress, like religion, must have its martyrs," the colonel had said.

"One could say the same about regress," Simon said. "What do you do with your traffic criminals? I'd think that you'd send so many of them here that there wouldn't be room, even in that vast forest."

"Oh, those responsible for traffic casualties aren't felons," the colonel had said. "They're fined, and some are jailed, if they don't happen to be rich."

"Well," Simon said. "Couldn't you greatly reduce the murders and the maimings on the highway if you inst.i.tuted a rigorous examination, physical and psy-chological, of drivers?"

"Are you kidding?" the colonel said. "No, you aren't. Less than one-tenth of the people would be permitted to drive. Good G.o.d, man, the whole economy would crumble if we did that. How did your politicians ever get your people to agree to such dras-tic measures?"

Simon had to admit that they hadn't pa.s.sed any such laws until after cars were no longer much used.

"And by then, n.o.body cared, right?" the colonel said.

"Right," Simon had said, and he had wished that the colonel would quit laughing.

It was with such thoughts, humiliating though they were, that Simon kept up his courage. The Yetgul Forest was getting thicker and gloomier with every mile, and the path was so narrow that bushes and branches tore at his clothes with every step. Even the birds seemed to have found this area undesirable. Whereas before he had been cheered by many dozens of differing calls, whistles, cheeps, and songs, continu-ing through the day and half the night, he was now surrounded by a silence. Only occasionally was this broken, and when it was, the cry of a bird startled him. There seemed to be only one type, a sudden screech that sounded to him like a death cry. Once, he glimpsed the bird that was responsible, a large dusty black bird that looked like a raven with a rooster's comb.

What especially depressed him were the bones. From the beginning he had seen scattered skeletons and skulls of men and women. Sometimes, they were spread out on the trail; sometimes, their gray or white bones peeped out from under bushes or leaves. Simon had counted a thousand skeletons, and there must be three times as many whose bones were hidden in the brush off the trail.

Simon tried to cheer himself with the thought that anybody who could inspire so many to defy death just to talk to him must be worth talking to.

But why would the sage have isolated himself so thoroughly?

That wasn't difficult to figure out. A sage needs much more time in which to meditate and contem-plate. If he or she has visitors beating at the door, clamoring day and night, the sage has no time to think. So Mofeislop had built his house in the most difficult-to-reach place on the planet. This a.s.sured him solitude. It also a.s.sured that whoever did get to him would not be bringing trivial questions.

At the end of the third week, Simon came out of the dark woods. Before and above him were steep and warty slopes with patches of gra.s.s and clumps of pines here and there. Above these circled hawks and vultures. Simon hoped these were not hanging around because the pickings were so easy.

The third peak beyond, by far the tallest and the most jagged, was the end of his journey. Simon, thinking of all the climbing he had to do, felt discour-aged. Then out of the clouds, which had been thick, dark gray, and as joyless as an eviction notice, the sun emerged. Simon felt better. Something on the tip of the third peak had batted the sun's rays in a line drive straight into his eyes. This, he was sure, was a window in the house of Mofeislop. It was as if the sage him-self was heliographing him to come on ahead.

A week later, Simon and Anubis crawled up the fi-nal slope. Lack of food and oxygen was making his heart thump like a belt buckle in an automatic drier, and he was breathing like an old man with a teenager bride. Athena, too tired to fly, was riding on his back, her talons dug in with a grip as painful and unrelenting as a loan shark's. He could not spare the energy to drive her off him. Besides, the talons had a value. They were reminding him that he was still alive, and that he would feel so good when the pain was gone.

Above him, occupying half of the two-acre plateau on top of the peak, was the house of the sage. Three stories high, thirteen-sided, many-balconied, many-cupolaed, it was built of black granite. The only win-dows were on the top floor, but there were many of these, small, large, square, octagonal, or round.

From the center of the flat roof a tall thick black chimney rose, black smoke pouring from it. Simon envisioned a big fireplace at its base with a pig turning slowly on a spit and a kettle boiling with a thick savory soup. By it the sage waited, to feed him food first and then the answers to his questions.

To tell the truth, Simon at that moment did not give a d.a.m.n about the answers.

He felt that if he could fill his belly, he would be content throughout all eternity. The rest of his life, anyway.

Simon pulled himself over onto the lip of the plateau, crawled to the huge door, oak and crossed with thick ironwork, heaved himself up slowly-the owl fell off him-and pulled the bell cord. Somewhere inside a cavernous room, a big bell tolled.

"I hope he's not gone," Simon said to himself, and he giggled. Starvation and the thin air were making him silly. Just where did he think the sage would be?

Stepped out to pick up cigarettes at the corner drug-store? Gone to the movies?

Attending the local Rotary Club luncheon?

His long wait at the door did give him time to won-der how the sage had managed to get this house built. Who had hauled the heavy stones up the mountain? Where did Mofeislop get his food?

Simon pulled the cord again, and the bell boomed again. After a few minutes, a key turned in the mon-strously large and rusty lock, and a giant bar thudded.

The door swung out slowly, creaking as if Dracula's butler was on the other side. Simon felt apprehensive, then rea.s.sured himself that he had been conditioned by watching too many old horror movies. The heavy door b.u.mped against the stone wall, and a man sham-bled out. He did not look at all like the Count's ser-vant, but it was no relief to see him. He resembled Doctor Frankenstein's a.s.sistant or perhaps Lon Chaney Senior in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His spine curved like a freeway on-ramp; he was bent over as if he had just been kicked in the stomach; his hair foamed like a gla.s.s of beer; his forehead slanted back like the Tower of Pisa; his supraorbital ridges bulged as if they were full of gas; one eye was lower than the other and milky with a cataract; his nose was red and crumpled, like a dead rose; his lips were as thin as a dog's; his teeth were those of a moose that has chewed tobacco all his life; his chin had decided in the womb to give up the ghost. And he wheezed like an emphysematic at a political convention.

However, he had a personality as pleasing as a blind date's.

He smiled and said "Welcome!" and he radiated good will and jolly fellowship.

"Doctor Mofeislop, I presume?" Simon said. "Bless your little heart, no," the man said. "I am the good doctor's secretary and house servant. My name is Odiomzwak."

His parents must really have hated him, Simon thought, and he warmed toward him.

Simon knew what it was to have a father and a mother who couldn't stand their child.