William S. Burroughs (6 page)

Now the beautiful
lady appears wrapped in an orange cloak that glows with cold fire.

"The Lords have
lived here since time began. To go on living one must do things
that you Earth people call 'evil.' It is the price of immortality."

They walk on and
come to a vast ruined amphitheater. John hears a sound like bees. The
guide whips out a wand.

"Stay close to
me. I cannot save your companions."

John can see in the
air transparent creatures with humanoid heads and black insect eyes.
A long pink proboscis protrudes from each mouth. They hover on
vibrating rainbow wings, jabbing their proboscises into his
three companions, who swat and scream and run.

"I am sorry,"
she says. "But they are already dead...Worse than dead. They are
already eaten."

"Eaten?"

"Eaten. Body
and soul. The same would have happened to you had I not been here."

At the center of the
amphitheater is a huge golden Moloch that seems to stir with slow
metal peristalsis. His three companions rush toward the idol in
a shambling run, grunting like animals. They clamber up the idol
and dissolve into gobs of liquid gold.

John somehow gets
back to present time. "It is better so," she tells him
gravely. But in the end he plans to return: "No danger to body
or soul can keep me from
her."

(Kim will change her
sex of course.)

Kim was walking
along the edge of a cliff with a drop of three thousand feet to the
valley below. Looking down through the clear still air he could see
the glint of water, cities of red brick, trees and moving figures,
but no sound reached him. On the other side away from the cliff,
he saw woods and glades and rolling hills. His step was very sure and
light and he moved in slow effortless strides, taking ten feet
at a step. The path was strewn with wild flowers and flowering
shrubs, and vines grew along its edges overhanging the cliff. The air
was heavy with perfumes that swirled about him as he moved.

He catches the sound
of distant flutes and horns growing steadily louder. Kim stops on the
edge of a glade, the sky a deeper blue than the sky of earth, with a
suggestion of perilous depths. He is trembling with anticipation. On
the other side of the clearing he sees a smear of red as a creature
breaks from cover.

It is a giant spider
covered with fine red hairs like copper wire growing on its shiny
body. The creature has the torso and head of a man. The arms end in
insect pincers. The spider man pauses, looking around desperately
with his faceted eyes, grinding his mandibles and salivating
with fear. A horrible odor drifts across the clearing. Kim doubles
over retching and when he looks up the creature is gone. The sound of
horns and flutes is closer and now a procession of hunters moves into
view led by tall thin figures in red robes, floating just off the
ground as if riding on invisible skateboards. Bounding around them,
leaping ten feet into the air, naked boys with heavily developed
thighs and buttocks are playing flutes. Other boys are riding huge
crabs and playing horns. They wear headdresses of shell through which
the music vibrates. The boys are inside the crab creatures up to
their waists. The huntsmen stop, the flute players poised and silent.
The shell boys freeze and Kim can see that they have something like a
tuning fork jetting from their foreheads and translucent pink disks
for eyes. They converge, pointing with the tuning forks like dogs, to
a cluster of bushes and vines that projects over the void. Kim
can see now that the spider man is clinging to the underside of the
ledge, hidden by the bushes. One of the red-robed figures glides
forward with an ivory wand. He leans down and with a touch of the
wand loosens the spider man's hold and sends him plummeting into the
void screaming and trailing a wake of red excrement.

The Lord turns now
and looks where Kim is standing, not looking at Kim but letting Kim
see him. The eyes are like shafts of dead water leading down into
black depths, devoid of feeling or even of thought. The nose is
pocked with tiny holes. There is no mouth. The hands are smooth and
yellow, semitransparent with red insect claws at the fingertips. Kim
notices youths in the procession with wings flaring from the ankles
and the sides of the head, casques of bright red curls growing from
pink marbly flesh.

The procession is
moving back through the clearing, the flutes and horns trilling out a
song of victory so vile that Kim retches again. One of the winged
youths stops and looks at Kim. The eyes are green, completely
immobile, with slitted pupils and bright red lashes. The boy touches
Kim's arms and a shock of alien recognition burns through his body.
The boy is naked, his body smooth as marble. Over his genitals is a
cupped red seashell translucent and pulsing. Kim realizes that he is
also naked, his phallus erect and pulsing. He runs his hands down the
boy's stomach, which is like flexible marble, and touches the
covering shell which glows and dissolves in light. The boy's phallus
stands out smooth as polished coral.

His eyes shift from
green to deep blue with a purple pupil that glows like an amethyst
crystal. He leads Kim toward the edge of the cliff. They stand poised
on a jutting ledge. His wings quiver and he follows his closed fist
in a half-turn, so that his back is to Kim, and bends over.

Kim feels himself
pulled forward by the boy's long sinuous arms hooked behind his
buttocks and he slides into the smooth pink opening, a soft mollusk.
The boy's wings vibrate, pulling him forward and over the edge. They
move down in a slow dream slant. A rush of wind carries them up into
the sky. Kim is
„
steering the youth
through the wind, his head back, teeth bare, the wings whistling
against his ears...

Portland
Place
...
empty houses
...
yards
overgrown with weeds
...
out through the west
gate
...
Joe Garavelli's
...
roast-beef
sandwiches and spaghetti
...
Skinker
Boulevard
...
a pond
...
the
farm at Saint Albans
...
Tom leafing through
Field
&
Stream
and
Boy's Life
...

They land by a stone
road worn smooth from centuries of passage.

Kim considers these
imaginary space trips to other worlds as practice for the real thing,
like target shooting. As a prisoner serving a life sentence can think
only of escape, so Kim takes for granted that the only purpose of his
life is space travel. He knows that this will involve not just a
change of locale, but basic
biologic
alterations, like the
switch from water to land. There has to be the air-breathing
potential
first.
And what is the medium corresponding to air
that we must learn to breathe in? The answer came to Kim in a
silver flash...
Silence.

Kim knew he was in a
state of Arrested Evolution: A.E. He was no more destined to stagnate
in this three-dimensional animal form than a tadpole is designed
to remain a tadpole. Newts and salamanders have gills in their early
life. At some point they shed the gills and come out onto the land,
or most of them do. But this one salamander, the Axolotl, which lives
in sluggish streams in Mexico, never sheds its gills. Why not? a
researcher asked himself, and he gave an Axolotl an injection of
hormones, whereupon Axolotl shed his old gills and crawled up onto
the promised land...Perhaps this would be as simple, Kim mused...just
put it in the Coca-Cola and the reservoirs and we all mutate one
way or another...

If the mortality
rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher.
There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.

Kim knows that the
first step toward space exploration is to examine the human artifact
with
biologic
alterations in mind that will render our H.A.
more suitable for space conditions and space travel...We are like
water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we
can survive in that alien medium. The water we live in is Time.
That alien medium we glimpse beyond time is Space. And that is where
we are going. Kim reads all the science fiction he can find, and he
is stunned to discover in all these writings the underlying
assumption that there will be no basic changes involved in space
travel.

My God, here they
are light-years from the Earth, watching cricket and baseball on
Vision Screens (can you imagine taking their stupid pastimes
light-years into space?). Yes sir, the fish said, I'm just going to
shove a little aquarium up onto the land there, got everything I need
in it.

You need entirely
too much. To begin with there is the question of weight. A raw H.A.
weighs around
170
pounds. This breathing,
eating, excreting, sleeping, dreaming H.A. must have an entire
environment essential to accommodate its awkward life processes
encapsulated and transported with it.

"One
wonders
..."
Kim goes into his academic
act, letting bifocals slip down onto his nose as he launches a
well-worn joke..."One wonders, gentlemen, if this H.A. doesn't
have perhaps a pet elephant essential to its welfare."

The concept of space
travel finds people rushing around to build rocket ships.

Kim raises an
admonitory finger.

"Think, my
little Earth slobs, about
what
you propose to transport. I
have brought up the question of weight. We have at hand the model of
a much lighter body, in fact a body that is virtually weightless. I
refer to the astral or dream body. This model gives us an indication
of the changes we must undergo. I am speaking here not of moral but
biologic imperatives and the dream gives us insight into space
conditions. Recent research has established that dreaming is a
biologic necessity. If dream sleep, REM sleep, is cut off, the
subject shows all the symptoms of sleeplessness no matter how much
dreamless sleep he is allowed: irritability, restlessness,
hallucinations, eventually coma and death."

Kim sees dreams as a
vital link to our biologic and spiritual destiny in space. Deprived
of this air line we die. The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut
off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians:
killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.

Kim has never
doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of
gods. In fact he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to
immortality, to invent his way, to write his way. He has a number of
patents: the Carsons spring knife, an extension of the spring
blackjack principle; a cartridge in which the case becomes the
projectile; an air gun in which air is compressed by a small powder
charge; a magnetic gun in which propulsion is effected by
compressing a reversed magnetic field. "Whenever you use this
bow I will be there," the Zen archery master tells his students.
And he means
there
quite literally. He lives in his students
and thus achieves a measure of immortality. And the immortality of a
writer is to be taken literally. Whenever anyone reads his words the
writer is there. He lives in his readers. So every time someone
neatly guts his opponent with my spring knife or slices off two heads
with one swipe of my spring sword I am there to drink the blood and
smell the fresh entrails as they slop out with a divine squishy
sound. I am there when the case bullet thuds home
—
right
in the stomach
...
what a lovely grunt! And
my saga will shine in the eyes of adolescents squinting through
gunsmoke.

Kapow! Kapow!
Kapow!

Kim considers that
immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that
it isn't something you just automatically get for believing some
nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something
you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this
life or another.

The most arbitrary,
precarious, and bureaucratic immortality blueprint was drafted by the
ancient Egyptians. First you had to get yourself mummified, and that
was very expensive, making immortality a monopoly of the truly rich.
Then your continued immortality in the Western Lands was entirely
dependent on the continued existence of your mummy. That is why they
had their mummies guarded by demons and hid good.

Here is plain G.I.
Horus...He's got enough
baraka
to survive his first physical
death. He won't get far. He's got no mummy, he's got no names, he's
got nothing. What happens to a bum like that, a nameless, mummyless
asshole? Why, demons will swarm all over him at the first checkpoint.
He will be dismembered and thrown into a flaming pit, where his
soul will be utterly consumed and destroyed forever. While others,
with sound mummies and the right names to drop in the right places,
sail through to the Western Lands.