Continuum 1, page 3
part #1 of Continuum Series
“Inspired? That sounds like a blow job,” Tincrowdor said. “No, I apologize for that remark. When among the aborigines, respect their religion. However, I will point out that if Jesus was the result of parthenogenesis, he should have been a woman. All parthenogenetically stimulated offspring are females, females only carry the X chromosome, you know. Or do you? It’s the male’s Y chromosome that determines that the baby be a male.”
“But God is, by the definition of God, all-powerful,” Glenda said. “So why couldn’t He have, uh, inserted a sort of spiritual Y chromosome?”
Tincrowdor laughed and said, “Very good, Glenda. You’d make an excellent science-fiction author, God help you.
“Anyway, every culture has its deviates, and this lesbian society was no exception. So a few perverts were not repulsed by the spaceman. Instead, he was to them a most desirable sex object.”
“How could a woman who wanted a man instead of a woman be a deviate?” Paul said.
“Deviation is determined by what the culture considers normal. When we were kids, going down was considered by almost everybody to be a perversion, and you could get put in jail for twenty years or more if caught doing it. But in our lifetime, we’ve seen this attitude change. By 2010, anything between consenting adults will be acceptable. But there are still millions in this country who think the only God-favored way is for the woman to lie on her back with the man on top. And would you believe it, there are millions who won’t undress in front of each other or keep a light on during intercourse. The sexual dinosaurs, for that’s what they are, will be extinct in another fifty years. Could I have another drink?”
Paul Eyre glared at his wife. She must have been confiding in Morna. Tincrowdor had made it obvious that he was talking about the Eyres. Was nothing sacred anymore?
Nor did he like this kind of talk before Glenda.
He said, “Roger, will you get him another whiskey?”
Roger left reluctantly. Mavice said, “So what happened to the spaceman?”
“He was a homosexual and wanted nothing to do with the woman who let him out of his cage. Scorned, she turned him in to the priestess, and they sacrificed him. However, he was stuffed and put in a museum alongside a gorilla-type ape. Due to complaints from the Decency League, he was eventually fitted with a skirt to hide his nauseating genitals.”
“What does the title mean?” Mavice said.
“That’s from Oscar Wilde, who said that women were sphinxes without secrets.”
“I like that!” Mavice said.
“Oscar Wilde was a queer,” Morna said. “What would he know about women?”
“Being half-female, he knew more about them than most men,” Tincrowdor said.
Paul wanted to get away from that subject. He leaned over and took the other book from Glenda. “Osiris On Crutches. What does that mean? Or maybe I’m better off if I don’t ask.”
“Osiris was an ancient Egyptian god. His evil brother, Set, tore him apart and scattered the pieces all over earth. But Osiris’ wife, Isis, and his son, Horus, collected the pieces and put them back together again and revivified him. My book tells the story in detail. For a long time, Osiris was missing a leg, so he hopped around earth on crutches looking for it. That wasn’t the only thing he was missing. His nose couldn’t be found, either, so Isis stuck his penis over the nasal cavity. This explains why Osiris is sometimes depicted as being ibis-headed. The ibis was a bird with a long beak. An early Pharaoh thought this was obscene and so ordered all artists to change the penis into a beak.
“Anyway, after many adventures, Osiris found his leg but wished he hadn’t. He got a lot more sympathy as a cripple. He found his nose, too, but the tribe that had it refused to give it up. Since it was a piece of a divine being, they’d made a god of it. It was giving them good crops, both of wheat and babies, and it was dispensing excellent, if somewhat nasal, oracles.
“Osiris blasted them with floods and lightning bolts, and so scared them into returning his nose. But he would have been better off if he hadn’t interfered with their religious customs. His nose elongated and swelled when he was sexually excited, which was most of the time, since he was a god. And he breathed through his penis.”
“For heaven’s sake!” Paul said. “That’s pornography! No wonder Potts won’t review your books!”
“They said the same thing about Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Joyce,” Tincrowdor said.
“I’m just as glad that the paper won’t review his books,” Morna said. “It would be so embarrassing. I’m on good terms with our neighbors, but if they found out what he wrote, we’d be ostracized. Fortunately, they don’t read science-fiction.”
Leo was silent for a moment, and then he looked at Paul’s bandaged hand. “Morna said your dog bit you today. You had to shoot him.”
He made it sound like an accusation.
“It was terrible,” Mavice said. “Roger cried.”
“Tears over a dog from a man who’s booby-trapped cans of food to blow up infants?” Tincrowdor said.
Roger handed him his drink and said, “Those same little kids were the ones tossing grenades in our trucks!”
“Yeah, I know,” Tincrowdor said. “Don’t criticize a man unless you’ve walked a mile in his G.I. boots. I shot some twelve-year-old kids in World War II. But they were shooting at me. I suppose the principle’s the same. It’s the practice I don’t like. Did you ever see your victims, Roger? After the explosions, I mean.”
“No, I’m not morbid,” Roger said.
“I saw mine. I’ll never forget them.”
“You better lay off the booze,” Morna said. “You’ve been insulting and now you’re going to get sloppy sentimental.”
“Advice from the world’s champion insulter,” Tincrowdor said. “She calls it being frank. Does it hurt, Paul? The bite, I mean.”
“You’re the first person who’s asked me that,” Paul said. “My family’s more concerned about the dog than me.”
“That’s not true!” Mavice said. “I’m terribly worried about rabies!”
“If he starts foaming at the mouth, shoot him,” Tincrowdor said.
“That’s not funny!” Morna said. “I saw a kid that’d been bit by a dog when I was working in the hospital. He didn’t get rabies, but the vaccination made him suffer terribly. Don’t you worry, Paul. There’s not much chance Riley had hydrophobia. He hadn’t had any contact with other animals. Maybe the postmortem will show he had a tumor on his brain. Or something.”
“Maybe he just didn’t like Paul,” Tincrowdor said.
Paul understood that Tincrowdor was speaking not only for the dog but for himself.
“I once wrote a short story called The Vaccinators from Vega. The Vegans appeared one day in a great fleet with weapons against which Earth was powerless. The Vegans were bipedal but hairy and had bad breaths because they ate only meat. They were, in fact, descended from dogs, not apes. They had big black eyes soft with love, and they were delighted because we had so many telephone poles. And they had come to save the universe, not to conquer our planet. They said a terrible disease would soon spread throughout the galaxy, but they would be able to immunize everybody. The Earthlings objected against forcible vaccination, but the Vegans pointed out that the Earthlings themselves had provided the precedent.
“After they had given everybody a shot, they departed, taking with them some of the terrestrial artifacts they thought valuable. These weren’t our great works or art or sports cars or atom bombs. They took fire hydrants and flea powder. Ten weeks later all members of homo sapiens dropped dead. The Vegans hadn’t told us that we were the dreaded disease. Mankind was too close to interstellar travel.”
“Don’t you ever write anything good about people?” Paul said.
“The people get the kind of science-fiction writer they deserve.”
At least, that’s what Paul thought he said. Tincrowdor was getting more unintelligible with every sip.
“Sure, I’ve written a number of stories about good people. They always get killed. Look at what happened to Jesus. Anyway, one of my stories is a glorification of mankind. It’s entitled The Hole in the Coolth. God is walking around in the Garden in the coolth of the evening. He’s just driven Adam and Eve out of Eden, and He’s wondering if He shouldn’t have killed them instead. You see, there are no animals in the world outside. They’re all in the Garden, very contented. The Garden is a small place, but there’s no worry about the beasts getting too numerous. God’s ecosystem is perfect; the births just balance the deaths.
“But now there’s nothing except accident, disease, and murder to check the growth of human population. No saber-tooth cats or poisonous snakes. No sheep, pigs, or cattle, either. That means that mankind will be vegetarians, and if they want protein they’ll have to eat nuts. In a short time they’ll have spread out over the earth, and since they won’t discover agriculture for another two thousand years, they’ll eat all the nuts. Then they’ll look over the fence around the Garden and see all those four-footed edibles there. There goes the neighborhood. The Garden will be ruined; the flowers all tromped flat; the animals exterminated in an orgy of carnivorousness. Maybe He should change His mind and burn them with a couple of lightning strokes. He needs the practice anyway.
“Another thing that bothers God is that He can’t stop thinking about Eve. God receives the emotions of all his creatures, as if he’s a sort of spiritual radio set. When an elephant is constipated, He feels its agony. When a baboon has been rejected by its pack, He feels its loneliness and sadness. When a wolf kills a fawn, he feels the horror of the little deer and the gladness of the wolf. He also tastes the deliciousness of the meat as it goes down the wolf’s mouth. And he appreciates the animals’ feelings for sex.
“But human beings have a higher form of sex. It involves psychology, too, and this is so much better. On the other hand, due to psychology, it’s often much inferior. But Adam and Eve haven’t existed long enough to get their psyches too messed up. So God, as a sort of mental peeping tom, enjoys Adam’s and Eve’s coupling. Qualitatively, Adam and Eve are so far ahead of the other creations, there’s no comparison.
“When Adam takes Eve in his arms, God does too. But in this eternal triangle, no cuckolding is involved. Besides, God had made Eve first.
“But when Adam and Eve were run out of Eden, God decided to dampen the power of His reception from them. He’ll stay tuned in, but He’ll be getting only faint signals. That means He won’t be getting full ecstasy of their mating. On the other hand, He won’t be suffering so much because of their grief and loneliness. The two are deep in Africa and heading south, and the signals are getting weaker. About the only thing He can pick up is a feeling of sadness. Still, He sees Eve in His mind’s eye, and He knows He’s missing a lot. But He refuses to apply more of the divine juice. Better He should forget them for a while.
“He’s walking along the fence, thinking these thoughts, when He feels a draft. The cold air of the world outside is blowing into the pleasant warm air of the Garden. This should not be, so God investigates. And he finds a hole dug under the golden, jewel-studded fence that rings Eden. He’s astounded, because the hole has been dug from the Garden side. Somebody has gotten out of the Garden, and He doesn’t understand this at all. He’d understand if somebody tried to get in. But out!
“A few minutes later, or maybe it was a thousand years later, since God, when deep in thought, isn’t aware of the passage of time, he receives a change of feeling from Adam and Eve. They’re joyous, and the grief at being kicked out of Eden is definitely less.
“God walks out of Eden and down into Africa to find out what’s made the change. He could be there in a nanosecond, but He prefers to walk. He finds Adam and Eve in a cave and two dogs and their pups standing guard at the entrance. The dogs snarl and bark at Him before they recognize Him. God pets them, looks inside the cave, and sees Adam and Eve with their children, Cain, Abel, and a couple of baby girls. It was their sisters who would become Cain and Abel’s wives, you know. But that’s another story.
“God was touched. If human beings could gain the affections of dogs so much that they would leave the delights of Eden, literally dig their way out just to be with humans, then humans must have something worthwhile. So He returned to the Garden and told the angel with the flaming sword to drive the other animals out.
“‘It’ll be a mess,’ the angel said.
“‘Yes, I know,’ God said. ‘But if there aren’t other animals around, those poor dogs will starve to death. They’ve got nothing but nuts to eat.’”
Paul and Mavice were shocked by such blasphemy. Roger and Glenda laughed. There was a tinge of embarrassment in their laughter, but it was caused by their parents’ reaction.
Morna had laughed, but she said, “That’s the man I have to live with! And when he’s telling you about Osiris and God, he’s telling you about himself!”
There was silence for a moment. Paul decided that now was his chance. “Listen, Leo, I had a dream this afternoon. It may be a great idea for you.”
“O.K.,” Tincrowdor said. He looked weary.
“You didn’t sleep this afternoon,” Mavice said. “You weren’t in bed for more than a few minutes.”
I know if I slept or if I didn’t. The dream must’ve been caused by what happened this morning. But it’s wild. I dreamt I was hunting quail, just like I did this morning. I was on the same field, and Riley had just taken a point, like he did this morning. But from then on…”
Leo said nothing until Paul was finished. He asked Roger to fill his glass again. For a moment he twiddled his thumbs, and then he said, “The most amazing thing about your dream is that you dreamed it. It is too rich in imaginative details for you.”
Paul opened his mouth to protest, but Tincrowdor held up his hand for silence.
“Morna has related to me dreams which you told Mavice about. You don’t have many — rather, you don’t remember many, and those few you do seem to you remarkable. But they’re not. They’re very poor stuff. You see, the more creative and imaginative a person, the richer and more original his dreams. Yes, I know that you do have a flair for engineering creativity. You’re always tinkering around on gadgets you’ve invented. In fact, you could have become fairly wealthy from some of them. But you either delayed too long applying for a patent, and so someone else beat you to it, or you never got around to building a model of your gadget or never finished it. Someone always got there ahead of you. Which is significant. You should look into why you dillydally and so fail. But then you don’t believe in psychoanalysis, do you?”
“What’s that got to do with this dream?” Paul said.
“Everything is connected, way down under, where the roots grope and the worms blind about and the gnomes tunnel through crap for gold. Even the silly chatter of Mavice and Morna about dress sizes and recipes and gossip about their friends is meaningful. You listen to them a while, if you can stand it, and you’ll see they’re not talking about what they seem to be talking about. Behind the mundane messages is a secret message, in a code which can be broken down if you work hard at it, and have the talent to understand it. Mostly they’re S.O.S.’s, cryptic maydays.”
“I like that!” Mavice said.
“Up your cryptic!” Morna said.
“What about the dream?” Paul said.
“As a lay analyst, I’m more of a layer — of eggs, unfortunately — than an analyzer. I don’t know what your dream means. You’d have to go to a psychoanalyst for that, and of course you’d never do that because, one, it costs a lot of money, and, two, you’d think people would think you were crazy.
“Well, you are, though suffering from that kind of insanity which is called normalcy. What I am interested in are the elements of your dream. The flying saucer, the gaseous golden blood from its wound, the sphinx, and the glittering green city.”
“The sphinx?” Paul asked. “You mean the big statue by the pyramids? The lion with a woman’s head?”
“Now, that’s the Egyptian sphinx, and it’s a he, not a she, by the way. I’m talking of the ancient Greek sphinx with a lion’s body and lovely woman’s breasts and face. Though the one you described seemed more like a leocentaur. It had a woman’s trunk which joined the lion’s body, lioness’, to be exact, where the animal’s neck should be.”
“I didn’t see anything like that!”
“You didn’t see the entirety. But it’s obvious that she was a leocentaur. Nor did you give her a chance to ask you the question. What is it that in the morning goes on four legs, in the afternoon on two, and in the evening on three? Oedipus answered the question and then killed her. You wanted to shoot her before she could open her mouth.”
“What was the answer?” Mavice said.
“Man,” Glenda said. “Typically anthropocentric and male chauvinistic.”
“But these are not ancient times, and I’m sure she had a question relevant to this contemporary age. But you must have read about her sometime, maybe in school. Otherwise, why the image? And about the green city? Have you ever read the Oz books?”
“No, but I had to take Glenda and Roger to see the movie when they were young. Mavice was sick.”
“He wouldn’t let me see it on TV last month,” Glenda said. “He said Judy Garland was an animal.”
“She used drugs!” Paul said. “Besides, that picture is a lot of nonsense!”
“How like you to equate that poor suffering soul with vermin,” Tincrowdor said. “And I suppose your favourite TV series, Bonanza, isn’t fantasy? Or The Music Man, which you love so much? Or most of the stuff you read as the gospel truth in our right-wing rag, the Busiris Journal-Star?”
“You’re not so smart,” Paul said. “You haven’t got the slightest idea what my dream means!”
“You’re stung,” Tincrowdor said. “No, if I was so smart, I’d be charging you twenty-five dollars an hour. However, I wonder if that was a dream. You didn’t actually see all this out in that field? By the way, just where is it? I’d like to go out and investigate.”
