Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains (3 page)

“Who gives a bowb?” Bill muttered, trying to get the last drops of metabolic poison from the bottle.

“An interesting problem in linguistic analysis,” the translator said. “In the former dialect it means, 'Please don't throw the eggshells on the grass.'”

“And in the other one?” Bill asked, feigning interest.

“In the other it translates to, 'Tickle knees on the Steppes.'”

“Sounds a lot of bowb either way.”

“A cogent observation that is entirely possible,” the translator agreed.

Well, he could figure out what they were saying later. For now, he was entranced by the sights below him. Looking through the transparent hull of his drone ship, he could see bright flowers of enormous size blossoming from the surface of Tsuris.

“Pretty nice shtuff,” he said, wishing he had another drink.

“Aren't you going to take evasive action?” the translator asked him.

“Why bother? Ish nice to look at the flowers down there.”

“Flowers my silicon ass!” the translator said with great agitation. “Those red things are high explosives. They're shooting torpedoes at us!”

That's all it took to bring Bill out of his stupor, cold sober and in a cold sweat. Shooting at him? Suddenly he remembered the mission. Then his little drone ship bucked violently.

“Mayday. Mayday!” screamed the translator. The ship started to plunge and careen and cartwheel and spin and tumble, all the things that spaceships do when they're hit. Bill grabbed for a stanchion and missed, he still wasn't that sober, and hit his head. The darkness of unconsciousness instantly descended. Which was not such a bad thing, considering what happened next.

Bill's ship disintegrated under the impact of atomic torpedoes.

“A gravchute,” he muttered when he stumbled back to consciousness. “That's nice.”

As he dropped gently through the clinging mists, which of course were the clouds that forever veil Tsuris, especially if you're trying to take pictures of the planet, he looked down and saw that the ground seemed to be coming up very fast. Was the gravchute working properly? Weren't there supposed to be controls on it somewhere?

He fumbled and cursed but before he could find them the ground came up and struck him and merciful unconsciousness drew its cloak about him yet one more time.

Bill returned reluctantly to consciousness. He discovered that he was floating in a lukewarm nutrient bath. Its specific gravity was such that his head just bobbled above the surface without his having to make any positive effort to keep himself afloat. It felt very nice. He blinked up at the multicolored lights overhead. Watching them glitter and shine reminded Bill of the happy Fundamentalist Zoroastrian Winter Solstice Defloration Festival, that the nonbelievers called Christmas, back home. A tear formed in either eye, dribbled down his nose and dropped into the nutrient solution.

Immediately an alarm went off. Or something that might be an alarm; a raucous electronic flatus. A person hurried grotesquely into the room. At least Bill supposed it was a person. It might have been a robot, or anything between a person and a robot. Or a thing. It was mainly composed of a large sphere about three feet in diameter. From its underside there depended four skinny black legs. On top of the sphere was another sphere, smaller, and a still smaller one above that. What were these spheres made of? Bill hiccupped lightly and realized that he didn't really care. It was nice and comfy here in the warm bath. A tickle of worry tickled him. Maybe he should care, trapped in a bubble bath on this alien planet. He looked again. The spheres seemed to be a combination of metal and pink-colored flesh. There was a smiley face painted on the uppermost sphere where a face would be if this was anything human.

The creature ground some internal gears and said, “Please don't do that.”

“Do what?”

“Cry into the nutrient solution. You're changing the acid levels. It isn't good for your skin.”

“What's wrong with my skin?” Bill asks. “Am I burned?”

“Not at all, bless you. We just want to make it nice and soft, your skin.”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“We'll talk about it later,” the Tsurisian said. “By the way, should you wish to know, and I'm sure that you do, I am Illyria, your nurse.”

They kept Bill in the nutrient bath for several more hours. When he got out, his skin was nice and pink and rosy. They gave him back his trooper uniform, which had been brushed and dry cleaned by some alien but effective process. He was allowed to walk up and down in the corridor, for that's what it seemed to be. His weapons were gone and he didn't see anything that looked like it would be useful. Not that he had any idea what he would do even if he got a weapon against an entire planetful of enemies.

He was able to form some idea of his surroundings when Illyria came to take care of him. He questioned her adroitly; that is he asked questions and she answered them, and quickly learned that she was a typical female Tsurisian, twenty years old, quite sophisticated for a girl who had lived and worked on her parents' farm until just last year, when her high grades in high school had won her this position in the alien lifeforms hospital in Graypnutz, the capital city of Tsuris.

Every day several Tsurisian males came by to see how Bill was doing. They were considerably older than Illyria, as he could tell by the grayish stubble on their intermediate spheres, which, Bill learned, served as holders for the batteries that helped keep the Tsurisians going.

Bill quickly discovered that the Tsurisians saw nothing cruel or unnatural about what they were proposing to do to him. “We Tsurisians always have to be reborn in the body of someone else,” Bill's doctor pointed out. “Otherwise we don't get born at all.”

“That's really great for you — but what about me?” Bill whimpered desperately. “Where do I go?”

“Out like a burnt-out bulb,” the alien grimaced, though this was hard to tell since his painted-on expression really did not change very much. “Anyway, haven't you an iota of the spiritual in you? Don't you crave, in some part of your tiny soul, to serve all sentient beings?”

“No, I don't think so,” Bill said.

“Pity,” the doctor said. “You would have been a lot better off if you had learned to think properly about things.”

“Listen, buddy,” Bill said, “a mind transplant means I'm not here any more and that means I'm dead. How am I supposed to feel good about that?”

“Consider it an opportunity,” the doctor said.

“What are you talking about?” Bill screamed.

“Whatever happens is an opportunity,” the doctor said.

“Is that a fact? Then let this guy take over your mind instead of mine. You can have the opportunity.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, “it didn't knock for me.”

Even Illyria stopped visiting so often. “I think they suspect me of something,” she told him when she did come by for a brief visit. “They're giving me the Usladish look; you know what I mean?”

“No, I don't,” Bill said, desperation in his voice, a trapped feeling coursing through every fibre of his being.

“I keep on forgetting you weren't born here,” Illyria said. “An Usladish look is what we call a look that means, I know you're up to something sneaky and rotten but I'm not going to tell anybody about it yet because I'm sort of sneaky and rotten myself.”

“They don't have that feeling where I come from,” Bill said.

“No? How curious. Anyhow, I'm going to have to stay away for a while. But don't worry, I'm working on your case.”

“Hurry up, while I'm still inside this head,” Bill said.

Since then quite a few days and nights had gone by since he had seen her. Exactly how many he didn't know, because Tsuris seemed to have an odd fluttery sort of movement around its sun, resulting in days and nights of differing lengths. Some days were what the Tsurisians called Tiger Days, or was it Picket-Fence Days? The translation was a little difficult. Those days in which the sun rose and set every hour on the hour, striping the planet in yellow and black. He decided to make a mark on the wall to mark each period of light. He didn't know why he was doing this but it was what guys in cells were always doing in the stories he used to read back home in the hayrick behind the manure pile back on his parents' farm on Phigerinadon. He tried the mark system, but when he came to do his next mark, he found that he had put his mark close to a mark already on the wall which he hadn't noticed. Unless he had marked two light periods without remembering it. Or had marked one light period twice absentmindedly. The more he thought about it, the more he decided that mark-making in prison was the sort of thing you ought to study in school before trying it in field conditions. So mostly he sat. There were no books or newspapers available, and no television. Luckily there was a small switch on the side of his translator that let him switch it from “Translate” to “Converse”. Bill felt a little silly doing it, but there didn't seem to be anyone else around to talk to.

“Hello,” he said.

“'Alo,” the translator said. “'Ow are you, heh?”

“Why are you speaking with a stupid accent?” Bill asked.

“Because I am a translator, that's why, Buster.” The thing sounded very miffed. “It would falsify my position and my image if I didn't allow impurities inherited from the many languages I deal with to creep into my talk during my conversational phase.”

“That's a pretty dim reason,” Bill said.

“Well not to me, squishy repulsive non-machine creature!” the translator said heatedly.

“There is no reason to get insulting,” Bill muttered. A mechanical sniff of annoyance was his only answer. After this there was a long silence. Then Bill said, “Seen any good movies lately?”

“What?” said the translator.

“Movies,” Bill said.

“Are you crazy or something? I am a tiny transistorized gadget lodged under your right armpit. Or on your ear. I get about. How would I ever get to see a movie?”

“I was just making a joke,” Bill said.

“They didn't tell us about jokes,” the translator complained. “Is that enough?”

“Enough what?”

“Conversation.”

“No, of course not! I've just begun!”

“But you see, I've almost used up the conversational capacity which was built into me. I will still carry on as your translator, of course, but I very much regret telling you that the conversational aspect of our relationship is at an end. Over and out.”

“Translator?” Bill said after a while.

Silence from the translator.

“Haven't you got any words left at all?” Bill asked.

“Just this,” the translator said. And that was the last word Bill was able to get out of him.

It was soon after that that he heard the second voice.

The second voice came to him that night, after his evening meal of a raspberry brain malted and a plate of what tasted like fried chicken livers but looked like orange gumdrops. He was reading his shirt labels under the light of a lamp called a Blind Philistine because it shines indifferently on whatever is put in front of it. He was just stretching for a yawn, when a voice from behind him said, “Listen.”

Bill gave a violent start and looked around in all directions. There was no one in the room with him.

As if to confirm his observation, the voice said, “No, I'm not in the room.”

“Where are you, then?”

“That's a little difficult to explain.”

“You can at least try.”

“No, not today.”

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to help you, Bill.”

Bill had heard that before. Still, it was always good to hear. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub and looked around the room again. Nope, nobody there. “I could use some help,” Bill said. “Can you get me out of here?”

“I can,” the voice said, “if you do exactly what I tell you.”

“And what are you going to tell me to do?”

“Something that may seem crazy to you. But it is of the utmost urgency that you do it with conviction and precision.”

“Just what is it you want me to do?”

“You're not going to like it.”

“Tell me or shut up!” Bill screeched. “This is doing my nerves no good. I don't care if I like it or not, if it'll help me get out of here I'll do it. Now — tell me!”

“Bill, can you pat your head with one hand and rub your belly with the other simultaneously?”

“I don't think so,” Bill said. He tried and failed. “See? I was right.”

“But you can learn how, can't you?”

“Why should I?”

“Because there is a chance you can get out of your predicament. Your continuing existence as a being with a mind of his own depends on you doing exactly what I tell you when I tell you.”

“I see,” Bill said, not seeing at all but going along with all this stupidity since he had very little choice. “Would you mind telling me who you are?”

“Not now,” the voice said.

“I see,” Bill said. “There are reasons, I suppose?”

“Yes, but I can't tell them to you. Will you do as I say, Bill? Now practice. I'll be back.”

And then the voice was gone.

A delegation of Tsurisian doctors came to Bill's cell the next morning. Two of them were of the familiar spherical shape. Another was controlling what appeared to be the body of a large collie. With lots of fleas for he kept scratching with one hind leg. The final two may have been Chingers at some other time in their existence because they were shiny green and quite lizardy.

“Time for the good old protoplasm vat,” Dr Vesker said in a cheerful voice. That was his name. “I am Dr Vesker,” he said so Bill would know too. Bill could not have cared less.

These Tsurisian males were doctors, as could be told by the long, loose-fitting white coats they wore, and the stethoscopes sticking rakishly from their pockets. All of them spoke Standard, Classical, or Tsurisian, so Bill's translator, which was still implanted under his armpit, was able to handle the language without difficulty. One of the first questions Bill asked was, “Doc, how am I?”

“You're doing fine, just fine,” the doctor said.

“Well, if I'm all right, how about letting me out of here?”

“Oh, there's no rush for that, I'm sure,” the doctor said, and left with a little chuckle.