Read First Person Peculiar Online
Authors: Mike Resnick
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Anthologies, #Science Fiction, #Short Stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories
First Person Peculiar (10 page)
So I got an assignment to write a story for Piers Anthony’s anthology about American Indians, and I was sure everyone would be using Sitting Bull and Geronimo … and then I remembered that charming scene in Cat Ballou where Cat’s father is convinced that Indians are one of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and suddenly I had a story to tell.
The Kemosabe
So me and the Masked Man, we decide to hook up and bring evildoers to justice, which is a pretty full-time occupation considering just how many of these
momzers
there are wandering the West. Of course, I don’t work on Saturdays, but this is never a problem, since he’s usually sleeping off Friday night’s binge and isn’t ready to get back in the saddle until about half past Monday.
We get along pretty well, though we don’t talk much to each other—my English is a little rusty, and his Yiddish is non-existent—but we share our food when times are tough, and we’re always saving each other’s life, just like it says in the dime novels.
Now, you’d think two guys who spend a whole year riding together wouldn’t have any secrets from each other, but actually that’s not the case. We respect each other’s privacy, and it is almost twelve months to the day after we form a team that we find ourselves answering a call of Nature at the very same time, and I look over at him, and I am so surprised I could just
plotz
, you know what I mean?
It’s then that I start calling him Kemosabe, and finally one day he asks me what it means, and I tell him that it means “uncircumcised goy,” and he kind of frowns and tells me that he doesn’t know what
either
word means, so I sit him down and explain that Indians are one of the lost Hebrew tribes, only we aren’t as lost as we’re supposed to be, because Custer and the rest of those
meshugginah
soldiers keep finding us and blowing us to smithereens. And the Kemosabe, he asks if Hebrew is a suburb of Hebron, and right away I see we’ve got an enormous cultural gap to overcome.
But what the hell, we’re pardners, and we’re doing a pretty fair job of ridding the West of horse thieves and stage robbers and other varmints, so I say, “Look, Kemosabe, you’re a
mensch
and I’m proud to ride with you, and if you wanna get drunk and
shtup
a bunch of
shiksas
whenever we go into town, that’s your business and who am I to tell you what to do? But Butch Cavendish and his gang are giving me enough
tsouris
this month, so if we stop off at any Indian villages, let’s let this be our little secret, okay?”
And the Kemosabe, who is frankly a lot quicker with his guns than his brain, just kind of frowns and looks hazy and finally nods his head, though I’m sure he doesn’t know what he’s nodding about.
Well, we ride on for another day or two, and finally reach his secret silver mine, and he melts some of it down and shoves it into his shells, and like always I ride off and hunt up Reb Running Bear and have him say Kaddish over the bullets, and when I hunt up the Masked Man again I find he has had the
chutzpah
to take on the whole Cavendish gang single-handed, and since they know he never shoots to kill and they ain’t got any such compunctions, they leave him lying there for dead with a couple of new
pupiks
in his belly.
So I make a sled and hook it to the back of his horse, which he calls Silver but which he really ought to call White, or at least White With The Ugly Brown Blotch On His Belly, and I hop up my pony, and pretty soon we’re in front of Reb Running Bear’s tent, and he comes out and looks at the Masked Man lying there with his ten-gallon Stetson for a long moment, and then he turns to me and says, “You know, that has got to be the ugliest
yarmulkah
I’ve ever seen.”
“This is my pardner,” I say. “Some goniffs drygulched him. You got to make him well.”
Reb Running Bear frowns. “He doesn’t look like one of the Chosen People to me. Where was he
bar mitzvahed
?”
“He wasn’t,” I say. “But he’s one of the Good Guys. He and I are cleaning up the West.”
“Six years in Hebrew school and you settle for being a janitor?” he says.
“Don’t give me a hard time,” I said. “We got bad guys to shoot and wrongs to right. Just save the Kemosabe’s life.”
“The Kemosabe?” he repeats. “Would I be very far off the track if I surmised that he doesn’t keep kosher?”
“Look,” I say, deciding that it’s time to play hardball, “I hadn’t wanted to bring this up, but I know what you and Mrs. Screaming Hawk were doing last time I visited this place.”
“Keep your voice down or that
yenta
I married will make my life hell!” he whispers, glancing back toward his teepee. Then he grimaces. “Mrs. Screaming Hawk. Serves me right for taking her to Echo Canyon.
Feh!”
I stare at him. “So
nu
?”
“All right, all right, Jehovah and I will nurse the Kemosabe back to health.”
“Good,” I say.
He glares at me. “But just this one time. Then I pass the word to all the other Rabbis: we don’t cure no more
goys
. What have they ever done for us?”
Well, I am all prepared to argue the point, because I’m a pretty open-minded kind of guy, but just then the Kemosabe starts moaning and I realize that if I argue for more than a couple of minutes we could all be sitting
shivah
for him before dinnertime, so I wander off and pay a visit to Mrs. Rutting Elk to console her on the sudden passing of her husband and see if there is anything I can do to cheer her up, and Reb Running Bear gets to work, and lo and behold, in less than a week the Masked Man is up and around and getting impatient to go out after desperados, so we thank Reb Running Bear for his services, and he loads my pardner down with a few canteens of chicken soup, and we say a fond
shalom
to the village.
I am hoping we have a few weeks for the Kemosabe to regain his strength, of which I think he is still missing an awful lot, but as Fate would have it, we are riding for less than two hours when we come across the Cavendish gang’s trail.
“Aha!” he says, studying the hoofprints. “All thirty of them! This is our chance for revenge!”
My first thought is to say something like, “What do you mean
we
, mackerel eater?”—but then I remember that Good Guys never back down from a challenge, so I simply say “Ugh!”, which is my opinion of taking on thirty guys at once, but which he insists on interpreting as an affirmative.
We follow the trail all day, and when it’s too dark to follow it any longer, we make camp on a small hill.
“We should catch up with them just after sunrise,” says the Masked Man, and I can see that his trigger finger is getting itchy.
“Ugh,” I say.
“We’ll meet them on the open plain, where nobody can hide.”
“Double ugh with cherries on it,” I say.
“You look very grim, old friend,” he says.
“Funny you should mention it,” I say, but before I can suggest that we just forget the whole thing, he speaks again.
“You can have the other twenty-nine, but Cavendish is mine.”
“You’re all heart, Kemosabe,” I say.
He stands up, stretches, and walks over to his bedroll. “Well, we’ve got a hard day’s bloodletting ahead of us. We’d best get some sleep.”
He lays down, and ten seconds later he’s snoring like all get-out, and I sit there staring at him, and I just know he’s not gonna come through this unscathed, and I remember Reb Running Bear’s promise that no medicine man would ever again treat a goy.
And the more I think about it, the more I think that it’s up to me, the loyal sidekick, to do something about it. And finally it occurs to me just what I have to do, because if I can’t save him from the Cavendish gang, the least I can do is save him from himself.
So I go over to my bedroll, and pull out a bottle of Mogen David, and pour a little on my hunting knife, and try to remember the exact words the medicine man recites during the
bris
, and I know that someday, when he calms down, he’ll thank me for this.
In the meantime, I’m gonna have to find a new nickname for my pardner.
***
One day we’re driving along, and Carol is humming the first couple of lines of an old nursery rhyme repeatedly, and finally I ask her to hum something else. She asks what, and since nursery rhymes seem to be the order of the day I suggest the only other one I can think of, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”—and the second I say it, I start thinking about what kind of farm Old MacDonald will have in a century or two, which resulted in this Hugo nominee.
Old MacDonald Had a Farm
I came to praise Caesar, not to bury him.
Hell, we all did.
The farm spread out before us, green and rolling, dotted with paddocks and water troughs. It looked like the kind of place you wish your parents had taken you when you were a kid and the world was still full of wonders.
Well, the world may not have been full of wonders any longer, but the farm was. Problem was, they weren’t exactly the kind you used to dream of—unless you were coming down from a
really
bad acid trip.
The farm was the brainchild of Caesar Claudius MacDonald. He’d finally knuckled under to public pressure and agreed to show the place off to the press. That’s where I came in.
My name’s McNair. I used to have a first name, but I dumped it when I decided a one-word byline was more memorable. I work for the
SunTrib
, the biggest newstape in the Chicago area. I’d just broken the story that put Billy Cheever away after the cops had been after him for years. What I wanted for my efforts was my own syndicated column; what I got was a trip to the farm.
For a guy no one knew much about, one who almost never appeared in public, MacDonald had managed to make his name a household word in something less than two years. Even though one of his corporations owned our publishing company, we didn’t have much on him in our files, just what all the other news bureaus had: he’d earned a couple of Ph.D.s, he was a widower who by all accounts had been faithful to his wife, he’d inherited a bundle and then made a lot more on his own.
MacDonald was a Colorado native who emigrated to New Zealand’s South Island, bought a 40,000-hectare farm, and hired a lot of technicians over the years. If anyone wondered why a huge South Island farm didn’t have any sheep, they probably just figured he had worked out some kind of tax dodge.
Hell, that’s what I thought too. I mean, why else would someone with his money bury himself on the underside of the globe for half a lifetime?
Then, a week after his 66th birthday, MacDonald made The Announcement. That’s the year they had food riots in Calcutta and Rio and Manila, when the world was finding out that it was easier to produce eleven billion living human beings than to feed them.
Some people say he created a new life form. Some say he produced a hybrid (though not a single geneticist agrees with that.) Some—I used to snicker at them—say that he had delved into mysteries that Man Was Not Meant To Know.
According to the glowing little computer cube they handed out, MacDonald and his crew spent close to three decades manipulating DNA molecules in ways no one had ever thought of before. He did a lot of trial and error work with embryos, until he finally came up with the prototype he sought. Then he spent a few more years making certain that it would breed true. And finally he announced his triumph to the world.
Caesar MacDonald’s masterpiece was the Butterball, a meat animal that matured at six months of age and could reproduce at eight months, with a four-week gestation period. It weighed 400 pounds at maturity, and every portion of its body could be consumed by Earth’s starving masses, even the bones.
That in itself was a work of scientific brilliance—but to me the true stroke of genius was the astonishing efficiency of the Butterballs’ digestive systems. An elephant, back when elephants still existed, would eat about 600 pounds of vegetation per day, but could only use about forty percent of it, and passed the rest as dung. Cattle and pigs, the most common meat animals prior to the Butterballs, were somewhat more efficient, but they, too, wasted a lot of expensive feed.
The Butterballs, on the other hand, utilized one hundred percent of what they were fed. Every pellet of food they ingested went right into building meat that was meticulously bio-engineered to please almost every palate. Anyway, that’s what the endless series of P.R. releases said.
MacDonald had finally consented to allow a handful of pool reporters to come see for themselves.
We were hoping for a look at MacDonald too, maybe even an interview with the Great Man. But when we got there, we learned that he had been in seclusion for months. Turned out he was suffering from depression, which I would have thought would be the last thing to affect humanity’s latest savior, but who knows what depresses a genius? Maybe, like Alexander, he wanted more worlds to conquer, or maybe he was sorry that Butterballs didn’t weigh 800 pounds. Hell, maybe he had just worked too hard for too long, or maybe he realized that he was a lot closer to the end of life than the beginning and didn’t like it much. Most likely, he just didn’t consider us important enough to bother with.
Whatever the reason, we were greeted not by MacDonald himself, but by a flack named Judson Cotter. I figured he had to work in P.R.; his hair was a little too perfect, his suit too up-to-the-minute, his hands too soft for him to have been anything else but a pitchman.
After he apologized for MacDonald’s absence, he launched into a worshipful biography of his boss, not deviating one iota from the holobio they’d shown us on the plane trip.
“But I suspect you’re here to see the farm,” he concluded after paraphrasing the bio for five minutes.
“No,” muttered Julie Balch from
NyVid
, “we came all this way to stand in this cold wet breeze and admire your clothes.”
A few of us laughed, and Cotter looked just a bit annoyed. I made a mental note to buy her a drink when the tour was done.
“Now let me see a show of hands,” said Cotter. “Has anyone here ever seen a live Butterball?”
Where did they find you?
I thought.
If we’d seen one, do
you really think we’d have flown all the way to hell and gone just
to see another?
I looked around. No one had raised a hand. Which figured. To the best of my knowledge, nobody who didn’t work for MacDonald had ever seen a Butterball in the flesh, and only a handful of photos and holos had made it out to the general public. There was even a rumor that all of MacDonald’s employees had to sign a secrecy oath.
“There’s a reason, of course,” continued Cotter smoothly. “Until the international courts verified Mr. MacDonald’s patent, there was always a chance that some unscrupulous individual or even a rogue nation would try to duplicate the Butterball. For that reason, while we have shipped and sold its meat all over the world, always with the inspection and approval of the local food and health authorities, we have not allowed anyone to see or examine the animals themselves. But now that the courts have ruled in our favor, we have opened our doors to the press.”
Screaming
bloody murder every step of the way,
I thought.
“You represent the first group of journalists to tour the farm, but there will be many more, and we will even allow Sir Richard Perigrine to make one of his holographic documentaries here at the farm.” He paused. “We plan to open it to public tours in the next two or three years.”
Suddenly a bunch of bullshit alarms began going off inside my head.
“Why not sooner, now that you’ve won your case?” asked Julie, who looked like she was hearing the same alarms.
“We’d rather that
you
bring the initial stories and holos of the Butterballs to the public,” answered Cotter.
“That’s very generous of you,” she persisted. “But you still haven’t told us why.”
“We have our reasons,” he said. “They will be made apparent to you before the tour is over.”
My old friend Jake Monfried of the
SeattleDisk
sidled over to me. “I hope I can stay awake that long,” he said sardonically. “It’s all rubbish anyway.”
“I know,” I said. “Their rivals don’t even need the damned holos. Any high school kid could take a hunk of Butterball steak and come up with a clone.”
“So why haven’t they?” asked Julie.
“Because MacDonald’s got fifty lawyers on his payroll for every scientist,” answered Jake. He paused, his expression troubled. “Still, this guy’s lying to us—and it’s a stupid lie, and he doesn’t look
that
stupid. I wonder what the hell he’s hiding?”
We were going to have to wait to find out, because Cotter began leading us across a rolling green plain toward a barn. We circled a couple of ponds, where a few dozen birds were wading and drinking. The whole setting looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell or a Grandma Moses painting, it was so wholesome and innocent—and yet every instinct I had screamed at me that something was wrong here, that nothing could be as peaceful and tranquil as it appeared.
“To appreciate what Mr. MacDonald has done here,” said Cotter as we walked toward a large barn on a hillside, “you have to understand the challenge he faced. More than five billion men, women and children have serious protein deficiencies. Three billion of them are quite literally starving to death. And of course the price of meat—
any
meat—had skyrocketed to the point where only the very wealthy can afford it. So what he had to do was not only create an animal as totally, completely nutritious as the Butterball, he had to also create one that could mature and breed fast enough to meet mankind’s needs now and in the future.”
He stopped until a couple of laggards caught up with the group. “His initial work took the form of computer simulations. Then he hired a bevy of scientists and technicians who, guided by his genius, actually manipulated DNA to the point where the Butterballs existed not just on the screen and in Mr. MacDonald’s mind, but in the flesh.
“It took a few generations for them to breed true, but fortunately a Butterball generation is considerably less than a year. Mr. MacDonald then had his staff spend some years mass-producing Butterballs. They were designed to have multiple births, not single offspring, and average ten to twelve per litter—and all of our specimens were bred and bred again so that when we finally introduced the Butterball to the world two years ago, we felt confident that we could keep up with the demand without running out of Butterballs.”
“How many Butterballs have you got here?” asked the guy from
Eurocom International
, looking out across the rolling pastures and empty fields.
“We have more than two million at this facility,” came the answer. “Mr. MacDonald owns some twenty-seven farms here and in Australia, each as large or larger than this one, and each devoted to the breeding of Butterballs. Every farm has its own processing plant. We’re proud to note that while we have supplied food for billions, we’ve also created jobs for more than 80,000 men and women.” He paused to make sure we had recorded that number or were jotting it down.
“That many?” mused Julie.
“I know it seems like we sneaked up on the world,” said Cotter with a smile. “But for legal reasons we were compelled to keep the very existence of the Butterballs secret until we were ready to market them—and once we
did
go public, we were processing, shipping and selling hundreds of tons from each farm every month right from the start. We had to have all our people in place to do that.”
“If they give him the Nobel, he can afford to turn the money down,” Jake said wryly.
“I believe Mr. MacDonald is prepared to donate the money to charity should that happy event come to pass,” responded Cotter. He turned and began walking toward the barn, then stopped about eighty feet from of it.
“I must prepare you for what you’re going to—”
“We’ve already seen the holos,” interrupted the French reporter.
Cotter stared at him for a moment, then began again. “As I was saying, I must prepare you for what you’re going to
hear
.”
“Hear?” I repeated, puzzled.
“It was a fluke,” he explained, trying to look unconcerned and not quite pulling it off. “An accident. An anomaly. But the fact of the matter is that the Butterballs can articulate a few words, just as a parrot can. We could have eliminated that ability, of course, but that would have taken more experimentation and more time, and the world’s hungry masses couldn’t wait.”
“So what do they say?” asked Julie.
Cotter smiled what I’m sure he thought was a comforting smile. “They simply repeat what they hear. There’s no intelligence behind it. None of them has a vocabulary of more than a dozen words. Mostly they articulate their most basic needs.”
He turned to the barn and nodded to a man who stood by the door. The man pushed a button, and the door slid back.
The first big surprise was the total silence that greeted us from within the barn. Then, as they heard us approaching—we weren’t speaking, but coins jingle and feet scuff the ground—a voice, then a hundred, then a thousand, began calling out:
“Feed me!”
It was a cacophony of sound, not quite human, the words repeated again and again and again:
“Feed me!”
We entered the barn, and finally got our first glimpse of the Butterballs. Just as in their holos, they were huge and roly-poly, almost laughably cute, looking more like oversized bright pink balloons than anything else. They had four tiny feet, good for balance but barely capable of locomotion. There were no necks to speak of, just a small pink balloon that swiveled atop the larger one. They had large round eyes with wide pupils, ears the size of small coins, two slits for nostrils, and generous mouths without any visible teeth.
“The eyes are the only part of the Butterball that aren’t marketable,” said Cotter, “and that is really for esthetic reasons. I’m told they are quite edible.”
The nearest one walked to the edge of its stall.
“Pet me!”
it squeaked.
Cotter reached in and rubbed its forehead, and it squealed in delight.
“I’ll give you a few minutes to wander around the barn, and then I’ll meet you outside, where I’ll answer your questions.”
