Shuteye for the Timebroker (42 page)

Wilberine idled over to the bar, and the stranger smiled and offered some sincere compliments on the music. After several stiff drinks— double Rosie O’Daniels—Wilberine found herself back in her Somerville apartment with the woman, whose name, it turned out, was Calyx DeSoyle.

In bed, Wilberine was astonished to find that Calyx’s essential secretions tasted exactly like hard cider. As Calyx’s thighs clamped Wilberine’s head and hands, the musician found herself becoming somewhat woozy from ingestion of the unnatural secretions. Her vision began to grow hazy. Suddenly she felt pinpricks from Calyx’s legs, which were crossed atop Wilberine’s back. It was as if hundreds of questing rootlets were delving into Wilberine’s flesh.

Struggling to free herself, Wilberine scratched frantically at Calyx’s inner thigh. A flesh-colored patch of plastic like a large Band-Aid peeled away. Even with her fading vision, Wilberine could make out the tattoo the patch had concealed.

The Monsanto logo had never looked so frightening.

28.

THE EVOLUTION OF SUPERSTITION

It is a little-known fact that Atlantis was populated by intelligent dinosaurs. The last refuge of a flourishing yet numerically sparse race millions of years old, the island nation was remarkable not only for the level of its scientific achievements but for the fact that its citizens had no conception of religion, magic, or superstition. Utterly rational, the saurians of Atlantis were simply incapable of conceiving of extra-physical deities, forces, or customs.

One day the protective force field that enclosed the entire island of Atlantis and shielded it from intrusion failed for approximately twenty-four minutes. Just long enough for the waves to wash ashore the sole survivor of a Phoenician shipwreck.

Yam Mot, priest of Baal, dragged himself a bit farther up the sands of Atlantis, then fell unconscious.

Yam Mot awoke in a huge, luxurious bed. At the first signs of his awakening, an enormous lizard snout heaved into Yam Mot’s field of vision.

Convinced he had passed into the afterlife, Yam Mot began to recite the appropriate prayers and invocations to whatever god might be ready to judge him.

Much to the priest’s surprise, the lizard head addressed him in perfectly good Phoenician, asking if Yam Mot would care for something to eat. Later, the lizard informed Yam Mot that the Atlanteans could not, of course, let him leave, to spread news of their secret haven. But otherwise, they gave him complete freedom within their nation.

It took a few days to convince Yam Mot that he had not actually died. But when he finally understood his true situation, he found cause to rejoice.

Here was a whole race of unbelievers to convert. Open-minded to a fault, the dinosaurs would intellectually digest the sacred lore they could not derive on their own, and thus perhaps reach the divine.

Within six months, half of Atlantis was pitted against the other half, arguing over the superiority of Astarte versus Baal.

Within a year, open warfare had broken out, a thing unprecedented in over one hundred million years of saurian history.

Eighteen months after the arrival of Yam Mot, the Astarte camp unleashed their tectonic disrupters, while the Baal sect sank dozens of destructive magma taps.

As Yam Mot clung to the few dry cubits of the highest tower in Atlantis, now sinking rapidly beneath the waves, he uttered a final prayer of thanks to all the gods of his people. His bold words soared above the harsh bellows of the drowning dinosaurs.

The precious souls of yet another race had been saved!

29.

AN ALIEN IN THE LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE

George Goodspeed was the first man to circumnavigate the universe.

As twenty-first-century scientists had theorized, the topology of the cosmos was such that it had no edges. To travel in any direction in a straight line for a sufficient distance meant that one would inevitably arrive at ones starting point again. But traveling the distances necessary to prove this theory—on the order of billions of light-years—was an insurmountable obstacle.

Until the invention of the Goodspeed Drive.

The Goodspeed Drive achieved a velocity approaching one million light-years per hour. Even so, circumnavigating the plenum would require nearly two years of constant flight.

Goodspeed was up to the task. A dauntless explorer as well as a laboratory genius—he had been the first human to set foot on Ragovoy IV, where the living continents reacted with ire to any foreign tread—Goodspeed equipped his one-person ship, the
Eternal Recurrence
, with two years’ worth of food, entertainment discs, and objects of intellectual curiosity, then set off, basking in the acclaim of the entire human race.

The voyage passed reasonably quickly. Cybernetic overseers kept the ship functioning and on course, leaving Goodspeed free to pass the time in idleness, sleep, amusement, and lofty thinking. By the end of the first year, he had disproven Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and invented a self-flattening toothpaste tube which insured that not a squidge of paste was wasted.

A remarkable feature of the Goodspeed Drive was that it went from zero to a million lights in no time flat, as soon as it was activated. Likewise, any vessel so equipped would come to a complete stop once the drive was shut off.

Goodspeed halted at intervals during his trip, photographing strange galaxies that he used as landmarks in his progress and as proof of his journey.

At the final moment dictated by his calculations, Goodspeed flicked the drive off for the last time.

He was closer to Earth than the Moon itself. The instant he made radio contact with the home planet, the whole world erupted with joy.

Goodspeed landed under conventional power, was whisked away and soon found himself the subject of a ticker-tape parade in Paris, the capital of the world community.

After two years of hermitlike existence, Goodspeed discovered that it was somewhat hard to be instantly sociable. So at first he chalked up the curiously off-kilter conversations he was experiencing to his atrophied social skills. But as his car floated down the Champ de Mars, Goodspeed saw a sight that instantly confirmed his suspicions that all was not right with the Earth he had returned to.

In place of the Eiffel Tower stood a hundred-foot-tall statue of a one-eyed demon of ferocious mien.

Goodspeed whirled on his host, the mayor of Paris, and said, “My God, what is that monstrosity?”

The mayor performed an arcane mudra, then said, “Monsieur Goodspeed, your historic accomplishments do not entitle you to blaspheme the figure of Collembola the Orgulous!”

Quickly Goodspeed performed certain mental calculations in light of this new knowledge, and realized what had happened.

The universe was spatially contiguous but temporally discontinuous. At some point, Goodspeed’s ship had jumped across an entire Big Bang/Big Crunch cycle and ended up in a new, partially convergent era, billions of years in the future. He was forever exiled from the familiar, comforting Earth he knew.

Goodspeed shrugged. What could he do? It was just as Mark Twain had said in his classic novel,
Tom Trickster of the Cree Confederacy
: “You can’t go home again.”

30.

THE DAWN OF MIRACLES

Hurting, despairing, Mica Moondragon had been trapped in the cavern for thirty-six hours now, and was starting to go a little insane.

An amateur spelunker, Mica took every precaution in his underground forays. But even the best equipment and most cautious approaches could not contend with a sharp stalagmite, a severed rope, and the subsequent fall of some forty feet down a tall chimney that had resulted in two broken legs.

Mica, a loner without many friends or any family, had told no one of his weekend expedition. His only hope was that when Monday came, his unexplained absence from work would result in a call to his home and a subsequent all points bulletin.

But probably not. Everyone might surmise he had just flitted off irresponsibly. And even if anyone did decide to track him, what traces had he left to point to his current location? Very, very few.

No, things did not look promising for Micas rescue.

Mica had gone through his entire rations—two breakfast bars—in the first twenty-four hours. His liquid sustenance had come from a nearby drip that tasted like the bottom of a zinc pot. To conserve the batteries of his miraculously unshattered lamp, Mica had taken to lighting it only at two-hour intervals.

Lying in the darkest darkness imaginable, Mica found his vision playing tricks on him. Phantom images, faces, and scenes from his past would arise and dissipate. After a while, he ignored them.

But the latest apparition bore no relationship to his personal history. Which was why Mica knew he was cracking up.

A luminescent nude goddess seemed to hover in the chilly air of the cavern. Radiantly blue, the ethereal female possessed an attenuated form, almost serpentine in the proportions of her limbs and torso. She seemed to writhe in midair.

Helplessly hoping, berating himself for a desperate fool even as he did so, Mica extended his hand upward to the floating deity.

He could see his hand dimly in the light cast by the goddess! Could she be real—-?

Mica’s fingers touched those of the chthonic woman. There came a blinding flash of light. When Mica’s vision returned, he found himself outdoors, under the homely, gorgeous light of the sun!

Flicking his forked tongue joyously to taste the thickly scented open air, Mica slithered happily away through the wet grass.

31.

CHARMING HAECKEL’S SERPENT

India called.

Ever since he could remember, Homer Haeckel had felt an uncanny kinship with a land and culture as far removed from his birthplace—Muncie, Indiana—as could be. From the very first time he had seen pictures of that exotic nation, Homer had sensed a deep connection between his soul and that of the Asian Subcontinent. When the concept of reincarnation was introduced to his young brain, Homer had an explanation at last for his affinity with all things Hindu.

He had spent one or more previous lifetimes in India. Of this he was increasingly certain, as the years passed and every encounter with the clothing, cuisine, and customs of India brought a jab of recognition way down low in his gut. The trappings of his American life began to chafe him.

Finally, when he attained the age of eighteen, Homer Haeckel achieved the practical means and freedom to voyage to the land of his dreams.

Bidding what he expected was a permanent good-bye to his tearful parents, Homer boarded his flight to the realm in which he would finally feel at home.

Walking the streets of Calcutta, Homer moved in a daze of glory. Every rancid smell, every discordant sound, every glimpse of beggarly flesh or Brahmin robes convinced him that he was among his own kind.

After some time, Homer encountered a sidewalk snake-charmer. The elderly, turbaned, bearded fellow sat cross-legged, a dhoti his only clothing, piping to a basket of serpents.

Astonishingly, Homer began to feel an erection blooming. How could this be? There was nothing conventionally erotic about this situation. But it was as if his penis was responding directly to the swami’s music.

The swami seemed to take notice of Homer’s embarrassing tent pole and, after finishing his act and accepting a few coins from onlookers, he beckoned Homer over. Homer approached the man and dropped down to the dirty mat where the swami sat. The swami whispered in accented but perfectly intelligible English, “I see your
lingham
has returned home at last.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Your male organ. It is Hindu in origin. That is what has drawn you here.”

“But, but—what about the rest of me? My soul—”

The swami chuckled. “You are in the grip of an intellectual fallacy, young man. None of us has a unified soul. Instead, we are just a collection of disparate allegiances, each tethered to one particular organ or another. Every individual is a patchwork, reshuffled from a welter of ethnic parts at birth. You, I can see, for instance, possess a liver from Greece, a heart from Sweden, and a left foot from Ireland. But your lingham is definitely Hindu, of that I am certain.”

Stunned, Homer rose and stumbled off.

The forty-five-year-old Homer Haeckel is quite happy in his job as a janitor at the United Nations.

It’s the only place every single part of him feels at home.

32.

INTO THE VALLEY OF FINKS AND WEIRDOS

I stepped off the flying eyeball that I had ridden over from my workshop and pulled up a seat in front of the bandstand. Paul Revere and the Raiders were playing “Kicks,” and the teenyboppers were frugging and swimming like there was no tomorrow.

And of course, there wasn’t.

Since the Global Groove Bomb had exploded in 1967, we all lived in a perpetual moment of changeless change.