Complete Stories (3 page)

“Actually, Helen, what you call ‘Venus’ is in one of those parallel universes Jack likes to talk about. In a way it’s in the same place where your Venus is, only ‘Venus’ is a different superspace location. We don’t call it ‘Venus’ though. We call it the Pure Land.”

“But how can the Pure Land be where Venus is without really being there?” Helen responded. Jack interrupted impatiently before I could answer.

“It has a different fourth-dimensional location is all, Helen. You can read about it in that
Geometry and Relativity
book I wrote.” We were all dressed and on our way out of the apartment. Jack turned to me. “What I want to hear is your answer to her other question, Simon. If you ‘Venusians’ are just here to make friends, then why do you sneak around so that only the nuts believe in you?”

I cleared my throat nervously. “We’re scared, Jack. Scared of small-minded xenophobic bigots. We’re really a very weak race. If we tried to land a ship openly, the pigs would blast us out of the sky. We want to come out in the open, but it’s not time yet. We need to know more about human psychology first, and we need time to spread the right kind of rumors about us.” I smiled self-deprecatingly.

But Jack seemed to be becoming more hostile. He was probably just jealous that I’d gotten more off Helen than him. “You say you’re weak, Simon, but didn’t you threaten to fry my brain just a little while ago?”

I generated a chuckle. “Oh that. Well, I
could
fry your brain…hard-boil it really…but only by converting my body into pure energy. That’s how we get back to the Pure Land. We call it chirping.” I explained the process to them, meanwhile trying to put my arm around Helen, but she shrugged it off.

Although it was supper time, the restaurant was almost empty. I’d never been there before, but Jack seemed to be a regular. He stopped to chat with the guy making pizzas in the front window.

I steered Helen to a table in the rear…I was hoping to lesnerize them after they’d had a good meal and a few beers. I was prepared to act forcibly if necessary…at the worst I’d lose a pseudopod. I smiled moistly at Helen. “Did you have a nice time in my room?”

“You know I did,” she said haltingly, “But I’m scared of what I could become if I keep seeing you. And I don’t know how I’ll be able to stay away.” She began crying, and reached out to touch my face. “One part of me already wants to do it again…especially with a man watching and thinking I’m the lowest kind of slut …” She hesitated, then resumed in a strained voice, “But if I kept doing that, what would happen to the rest of me…to
Helen
?” She covered her face with her hands.

Someone had turned the jukebox on, and over a background of moans and abrupt guitar chords a voice crooned, “Well it’s all right now, in fact it’s a gas …” Helen was slipping away from me…but where was Jack? Surely he would listen to reason. I skrenned him walking across the room. I started to turn, but then he was already upon me, and he sank an eight-inch knife into my neck.

That did it. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Jack Flash was going to get it. I relaxed my hold on the knotted spacetime which made up my body and put everything I had into my chirp…carefully beaming it at the spot behind me where he crouched.

But I should have looked first. The bastard had an aluminum pizza pan in front of his face…and I bounced off it and out through the ceiling.

It doesn’t take long to get to the Pure Land from Earth. You get a faster-than-light phase-shift going in your pulse, lock it real, tear loose, and jump spacetime sheets. Once you’re back in the home space, it’s just a matter of a little simple tube-surfing. The only hard thing about it is that the whole trip seems to happen at once…so you have to know just what you’re going to do before you start.

I didn’t get much of a welcome at home when they found out I’d screwed up another mission. They said I could either go back to Earth or spend fifteen years in the tissue fields. I was frantic to revenge myself on Jack, and even more frantic to get back between Helen’s legs, so I would have been perfectly willing to go back to Earth…except that the trip back takes so long.

You can’t chirp from the Pure Land to Earth, since there’s no one waiting on Earth to reconstitute you. You have to go the long way…around the Horn, as it were. That is, you have to take a spaceship out the collapsed star Gouda X-1, fly in, bounce off the ring singularity into a new universe, and fly back to Earth. It’s dangerous and the whole trip takes about ten years proper-time. So the tissue fields didn’t necessarily sound that bad.

I asked for a week to think it over. They gave me two days, and I went out into the plaza promising to be back.

It felt good to be flowing across the intricately grooved stones again with the swarm. We aren’t very big on individual personalities, and before long I’d almost forgotten I’d ever left. A warm hydro-carbon rain drizzled down, and I circled around the plaza in the figures of the swarm’s never-ending dance.

The pimpled hides of my fellow “Venusians” felt familiar and comforting…but still I couldn’t put the feel of Helen’s breasts and thighs out of my mind…she was so smooth…so slippery.

I realized I was horny, and found a willing fellow-citizen…whom you might as well think of as a girl. We flowed away from the plaza together, and our individual consciousness returned. She told me her name was Pasmit.

As we passed through a grove of geezel fungi I paused to pry loose one of the immature spores. I threw it to Pasmit, she digested a little of it and threw it back to me.

We went on for several versts this way, finally stopping when the singing in our tissues could no longer be ignored. We pressed our vents together, guided by the sensitive bristles surrounding them; and then we let our bodymasses mingle for a timeless interval. The hydro-carbon drizzle increased, and the geezel spore rolled stealthily back towards its mother fungus. Finally we stopped pulsing and slid apart. The gamma-radiation is much stronger out in the country, and everything was suffused with a kindly glow.

I must have been mad to want to go back to Earth, I thought. Pasmit and I could build a burrow near the tissue fields. I’d get strong and green working in the fields, and every night we’d go dance with the swarm. It had been good enough for my ancestors; why shouldn’t it be good enough for me? There was just one thing …

“Pasmit,” I vibrated, “Could you do something for me…something special?”

She snuggled closer to me. “What is it, Sibork?”

“Could you form your bodymass like this, and this, and this …” I gestured rapidly, “And then could you rub on me? I’ll show you how I mean.”

She burbled, and started to do it. I sighed and went limp, images of Helen filling my mind. Pasmit leaned over me and began to knead my bodymass with her hands. Quaveringly I pulsed my next request, and extruded the appropriate protuberances. She started to do it …

But abruptly she stopped, and her pulsations became harsh. “But this is
human
shape! You want me to be like a
human
, Sibork!” She recoiled and rapidly re-assumed “Venusian” shape. “You’re a filthy H-sexual!” she shrilled, “Don’t come
near
me!”

Pasmit delivered her parting shot as she began flowing back towards the swarm. “You’re not fit to live in the Pure Land anymore, Sibork. You’re tainted. You’ll have to go back to Earth tomorrow.”

I knew she was right. I couldn’t even blame her for feeling the way she did…I used to feel the same way about H-sexuals.

I spent an uneasy night sleeping under a rock, and the next morning I shipped out for Earth again. Despite what I’d told Jack, we “Venusians” are virtually indestructible. So our spaceships do not need any very complex life-support systems.

My ship consisted, basically, of one hundred kilos of geezel and the shell of a nauton, a sort of gigantic fungus-snail common in the Pure Land. I packed the geezel into the front of the cone-shaped spiral shell, crawled in after, and sealed the back off with a specially thickened section of my hide.

During the trip I would feed off the geezel, and propel the ship by converting some of the food energy into a stream of ions, to be blown out of an aperture in my hide door. In effect, I fart myself through space. Given the steady force and the small mass of my ship, I can reach relativistic velocities rather easily…and once one travels close enough to the speed of light, time dilation sets in. As far as my body’s aging processes are concerned, the one hundred light-year trip to Gouda X-1 takes only five years.

Even five years might seem like a long time to be wadded up inside a nauton shell, but I have the ability to let my individual consciousness go totally dormant…turning the control of my body over to what we call “Big Mind” in the Pure Land.

I spent five years in a trance, pooting along towards Gouda X-1. When I was not too far from it, the intense gravitational radiation jolted me back into existence.

For a few moments I was totally disoriented. I had no idea where I was…for a second I didn’t even know if I was “Venusian” or human. Ahead of me I skrenned a hot bluish star with a huge tufty horn of flame growing out of it. The name Beetroot 322 popped into my mind. The horn fed an immense spiral of brightly glowing gas which was twisted around a region of what seemed to be absolute blackness.

I was falling…at almost the speed of light…down towards the collapsed star which nestled in the center of the spiral of gas it had pulled out of its companion star. The collapsed star was Gouda X-1, and at its very center was the gate which led out of the Pure Land universe.

As I drew closer I could see the ring singularity that lay at the heart of this whirlpool of space and time. If a star such as Gouda X-1 is rotating fast enough when it collapses to form a black hole, then the singularity at its center takes the shape of a ring. Space is infinitely curved at each point of this ring, and to venture too close to it is to be torn apart atom from atom. But if you manage to go
through
the ring, something quite different happens.

Think of the many parallel universes as being a stack of so many pieces of cloth. Now imagine punching a circular hole through this stack of fabrics, and then sewing all of these spacetime sheets together along the edges of the circles you punched out. That’s what a ring singularity is like…almost.

But I left out what’s
inside
the ring. Well, when you go through the ring you enter an antimatter, anti-gravity anti-universe…which repels you, spits you back like a squeezed watermelon seed.

When you come back through the ring, you go onto one of those many sheets of spacetime which are sewed together along the ring singularity…and if you’re lucky you come out where and when you wanted to.

Actually it’s not really luck that determines in which universe and at what time in that universe you come out. It’s more like you come out where you
expect
to come out.

Causality takes a beating when minds and singularities interact. But Big Mind doesn’t need causality anyway…every instant of every universe springs into existence together, and synchronicity is the natural order of things.

Anyway, there I was in a flexible nauton shell being sucked down into the heart of Gouda X-1 at something like the speed of light. And Jack Flash thought
he’d
been far out. I had to laugh thinking of that jerk sneaking up behind me like that with his knife and pizza pan. When I got to Earth this time things were going to be different. Because I was planning to get back there before I’d left.

The singularity was dead ahead now, a bright ring a few kilometers in diameter. Bright isn’t the word for it, really. You know how a mirror looks when it bounces sun into your eyes?

All of Gouda X-1’s mass had gone into that circle of light and, friend, it was a
perfect
circle. It was like looking at the ultimate platonic circle in Big Mind, the circle from which all other circles derive their feeble and reflected reality.

As you can imagine, the gravitational force coming off that ring was incredible. I was thin as a needle and I whisked through without even slowing down. But as soon as I’d gone through I was in an anti-universe, and every particle of that universe wanted me out of there. This was the most dangerous part of the trip. If some piece of antimatter happened by and brushed into me I’d be annihilated. If I didn’t steer just right the anti-universe would throw me against the ring and I’d be annihilated. If I panicked and chirped, my energy pulse would be trapped in an endless pendulum orbit around the ring and, for all practical purposes, I’d be annihilated.

There was also the matter of bouncing out into the right space and time. I could already see myself looking in through the pizza-parlor window at Jack Flash getting a knife and pan from his friend behind the counter. Jack looked scared and I felt a little sorry for him. Maybe I shouldn’t suck his brain out after all…but how else could I establish a trans-universal consciousness?

My attention snapped back to the situation at hand. The repulsive force from the anti-universe counterpart of Gouda X-1’s mate, Beetroot 322, had decelerated me from the speed of light to rest, and had already started forcing me back towards the ring singularity. This was the roughest part of the ride. One second you’re going 99.999 percent the speed of light one way, and the next instant you’re going 99.999 percent the speed of light the other way. There weren’t many “Venusians” who could handle the ring singularity bounce-trip. I’d been trained for it from budhood, and even so it must have taken five years off my life every time I did it.

As I zoomed back through the ring, I struggled to keep from blacking out, and I kept my mind fixed on frightened Jack Flash in the pizza-parlor window…and on Helen, across the table from me with her face in her hands…I’m sorry Jack…I love you Helen …

I burst out of the ergosphere of Gouda X-1 traveling so fast that it would have taken a photon a year to gain five meters on me. I had some slowing down to do before I got to Earth…if there was an Earth in this space.

The ship was traveling rear-end first now, and I began absorbing geezel and shooting out the ion-steam again. Five years of this and I would have decelerated back to rest. I had started out with revenge and lust in my mind, but for some reason I was now suffused with thoughts of peace and love. Good old Jack. Dear sweet Helen. Even my department chairman seemed almost “Venusian.” I drifted into a trance and let Big Mind take over.