Bill 3 - on the Planet of Bottled Brains (7 page)

“Never!” he groaned aloud, then started coughing and sneezing. “Give in to a crappy machine! Not me, not macho Bill! I have survived, ha-ha, far worse. I'm a real winner, I am. No surrender! Onward!”

Cheered on by this masculine bullshit he forced himself to his feet and staggered on, no surrender! Even though his lungs were puffing like a bellows gone berserk, even though the mountains ahead of him presented themselves, on closer inspection, as steep ice pinnacles with screaming winds howling among them, and him without a crampon. Good guys win! The phallus forever!

Despite all this it was no go. Exhausted he slumped back, tired, finished. Without crampons he could not go on, despite the best will in the world...

But then he remembered his clawed foot! Yes, of course, his lovely alligator's claws! A natural crampon, born from a lab-mutated foot bud! He wasn't licked yet!

Bill tore off the clumsy wrappings that kept his foot from the metaphoric cold, the coldest kind of cold there is. One foot wrapped, the other unwrapped, he stood for a moment, then, throwing caution to the winds, and commending his soul to the great Tribunal in the sky where troopers collect their final medals and ultimate demerits, he tore off the coverings from the other foot, too. Although it was a normal foot, it had been so long since Bill had cut his toenails that he found now that even with that foot he could get good purchase on the icy metaphor. He scrambled up, panting, grinning, his taloned claw striking deeply into the adamantine ice, while the other foot scrambled for a foothold in the slightly softer sub-adamantine ice. His hands clawed at the sheer face, finding here and there little wiry vines that had withstood the cold and were deeply rooted enough to give him additional leverage. He pulled himself up the cliffside, onward, onward, while insane lights exploded in the sky and he could hear an orchestra in his head playing the 1812 Overture. And then, suddenly, he was on the crest of the summit. He took one more step. He was over the top. He looked eagerly down the downslope of the icy summit, and beheld a sight he had not anticipated even in his wildest imaginings.

There, sitting in a little natural hollow in the slope, was Brownnose. In front of him there was a fire, and Brownnose was feeding small phosphorus logs into it. These, mounting high in the air, and giving off phosphorescent sparks and also emitting a violet glow, were the source of the light Bill had seen in the sky.

“Brownnose! What are you doing here?” Bill asked.

“Bill! Gosh, how great to see you!” Brownnose looked much the same as at their last meeting. Perhaps his freckles were more pronounced due to the cold; possibly his hair, sticking out from under a fur-lined parka hood, was a little less orange than formerly. It was not impossible that there was another line or two in his face. But despite these changes wrought by time, the evil cosmetician, it was the same old Brownnose, Bill's former friend, a man desperately eager to prove himself and win back the love and respect of his friends, the other troopers, for some idiotic reason known only to himself, or, failing that, at least to have them stop laughing at him.

Bill squatted down by the fire. The phosphorus sparked and flashed, but Bill was too numb to even feel the pain when the occasional spark landed on his skin. This was the first time he'd been warm and dry (because Brownnose had providentially erected a small two-person tent just before Bill's arrival and even had a small pot of stew brewing on the edge of it). Bill had a lot of questions to ask, and the stew was one of them. As he understood it, nothing real could exist here in this place. Even Bill was not real. His body, the really real part of him, was off slumbering in what Bill hoped was a safe place. The computer was the master of reality. It dictated not only what food Bill ate, but what that food would look like, taste like, and so the computer controlled how Bill would react to his food since the computer could shape it to get any response he wanted. If this were true, and there seemed no reason to doubt it, since Bill had seen his own body stacked on a cot in the waiting room while he hovered about in uncertainty for a moment, until the computer sucked him up and took him in. So in that case, how had Brownnose gotten here, and how come he was able to produce his own metaphor for food?

“Brownnose,” Bill said to his stupidly grinning friend, “it's not really you, is it?”

“Of course it's me,” Brownnose said, his grin turning just a shade anxious.

“No, it can't be,” Bill said. “You must be one of the hallucinations or constructs that the computer produces. You couldn't be making this food, either, without the knowledge of the computer. So you're just another fake production of the computer, sent here to make me have false hope again so it can dash it.” Bill snuffled with self-pity and wiped a pendant drop from his nose with the back of his hand.

“I'm nothing of the kind!” Brownnose said, wringing his hands with worry. “I'm your good friend, Bill, your old buddy, you know that. Say you know that!”

“Of course I know that, moron!” Bill growled. “But if you were the computer trying to fool me that's what you'd say, isn't it?”

“How do I know what I'd say if I was the computer,” Brownnose cried aloud, out of his meager intellectual depths with all this cerebration. All he really wanted was to be liked. Which was why everybody hated him. “I'm not something out of a computer like you said. I'm me. I think.”

“If you're you,” Bill said, “then tell me something the computer couldn't know.”

“How could I know what that'd be!” Brownnose cried. “I don't know what the computer knows!”

“No, but the fact that you're here at all means that the computer knows what you know.”

“That's not my fault,” Brownnose said.

“I know that. But do you realize what it means? It means that, since the computer knows everything you know, it is you.”

Brownnose thought about this furiously and still couldn't understand it. “Say, Bill, why don't you try some of this here real nice stew.”

“Shut up you fake computer projection.”

“No, I'm not. Bill, believe me, I'm me.”

“Oh all right,” Bill said. “If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. How are you, Brownnose?”

“Pretty well, Bill,” Brownnose smarmed happily. “I really had a tough time convincing the military to let me try to rescue you.”

“How did you manage that?” Bill asked suspiciously.

“They couldn't just leave you missing on patrol, could they? Not after I started making a fuss.”

“That was good of you, Brownnose. And they let you volunteer?”

“I think they just wanted to get rid of me. But they did let me go, and I came here and after a lot of difficulties, I found you.”

“You wouldn't like to tell me just how in hell you managed that?”

“What does it matter?” Brownnose shuffled his toe in the ice and looked uncomfortable. “The important thing now is to get you out of here.”

Bill stared with some bitterness at the being who either was his old friend Brownnose or a computer simulation. It was really important to figure out which he was, because the real Brownnose would help him whereas Brownnose the computer simulation had to be up to some sort of crappy playing around. Basically the entire thing did not bear looking at. Bill sighed heavily.

“I really think we should get moving,” Brownnose said.

“First tell me how you got here.”

Brownnose opened his mouth. Just then there was a crackling sound behind Bill. It was a startling noise, and unexpected, and he whirled, reaching for a weapon he no longer had and wondering just how in hell he was going to fight when he didn't even have a body.

What hideous sight bruised Bill's eyes when he turned around? What soul-shaking horror awaited him? He gurgled unphonetically when he realized that he was looking at a reindeer. A plain, old-fashioned, medium-sized reindeer with fairly young-looking horns. It was picking its way delicately along a ledge that ran just a few yards below the summit. When the reindeer saw them it shivered violently, but could not break into a run because of the narrowness of the ledge upon which it was walking. It picked its way delicately along, keeping its big brown eyes on them, its sharp little hooves making crackling sounds on the snow. At last it reached a place where the path broadened. With a flick of its tail it bounded off. In a few moments it was out of sight.

“Out of sight!” Brownnose said. “They like the high cold elevations, you know.”

“Who does?”

“Reindeer, Bill.”

“How,” Bill asked with ferocious impatience, “could a moth-eaten bowby reindeer get inside this computer?”

Brownnose thought about it. “Maybe the same way we did.”

Bill made hideous grating sounds and clenched his fists. “And would you like to tell me exactly how we did get here?”

“They didn't explain to me all the details.”

“Just tell me in broad outlines.”

“Bill, you're acting downright crazy. Do you want to get out of here or don't you?”

“All right,” Bill said gloomily, instantly descending from the craggy heights of anger to the dismal depths of despair. “Though I got a terrible crappy feeling that I'm going to regret this.”

He followed Brownnose down the slope. It was tough going for a while, though not nearly so tough as it had been for Bill to get up the other side. He struggled along in hip-deep snow, and envied the way Brownnose seemed to glide through the snow. But it bothered him, watching Brownnose move, because there was something graceful and inhuman about the way Brownnose slithered along. Bill asked himself, when is a klutz not a klutz? When he's controlled by a computer, he answered himself.

Still, he followed, because there wasn't anywhere else to go. Maybe if he made believe that the computer was Brownnose, he'd get a chance to escape. Or at least get the last laugh on the computer.

“It's right down here,” Brownnose said, directing them towards a clump of trees dark against the snowy landscape.

“What's right down here?” Bill asked.

“Help,” Brownnose said.

They went down through a snow-filled gulch, then scrambled up the icy rocks on the other side. Bill was so busy trying to get up the steep and slippery slope that he didn't look up until he had reached the next crest. He saw Brownnose, or the thing that was pretending to be Brownnose — there may not have been much difference between the two — but surely there was some difference — saw Brownnose motion, waving both arms in a curiously boneless gesture. A computer-animated Motion. Bill pretended not to notice, because he didn't want Brownnose to know that he'd caught on to him.

Looking up now, Bill could see, from the far ridge, four black dots moving across the snowy landscape. There was another, larger black dot behind them. “What's that?” Bill asked.

“Those are friends,” Brownnose said. “They are going to help us.”

“That's great,” Bill said. He looked around. There was nothing on either side but icy peaks and snowy fields and five black dots moving toward them and slowly growing in size. There wasn't much he could do at the moment. He wished there were a few more possibilities.

“Who are these guys?” Bill asked.

“Allow me to introduce you,” Brownnose said. “The large man with the wavy brown hair wearing the two-color, one-piece jumpsuit is Commander Dirk, Captain of the Starship Gumption.”

“I never heard of the Gumption,” Bill said. “Is that a new class?”

“Don't worry about it,” Brownnose reassured him. “Dirk and the Gumption are an independent command. Theirs is the most powerful ship in space. You'll love the ship, Bill.”

Bill didn't want to ask how Brownnose had gotten on board the Gumption. He figured Brownnose would have a logical answer, like simulations always do.

“Who's the guy with the pointy ears?” Bill asked.

“That's Splock, a Nocturnian from the planet Fortinbras II. They are aliens.”

“No kidding,” Bill said scathingly.

“But they are friendly aliens,” Brownnose hurriedly pointed out. “Splock is real friendly even though he may not act friendly. I wanted to warn you.”

“If he's friendly,” Bill said, “why doesn't he act friendly?”

“The Fortinbrasians,” Brownnose said, “are a race that worships lack of emotion. The less emotion you have, the better they like it.”

“That sounds really great,” Bill said. “What do they do for fun?”

“Calculations,” Brownnose said.

“Better them than me,” Bill sighed.

They had almost reached the group. Just before they got into earshot, Brownnose said, in an urgent aside, “By the way, Bill, I almost forgot to tell you. Whatever you do, don't make any jokes or wisecracks about pointy ears. And another thing, even more important —”

He stopped, because Commander Dirk, walking a few feet ahead of the others, had reached them and was holding out his hand. Bill shook it. Dirk had a warm hand and a friendly manner, although Bill didn't like his two-tone jumpsuit — puce and mauve weren't his favorite colors. But then, he'd never been much of a fashion plate. There hadn't been much fashion or stuff like that back on the farm.

“Glad to meet you, Bill,” Dirk said.

“And you, sir,” Bill said. “Good of you to come all this way to rescue me. I don't really understand how you did it, since to the best of my knowledge I am a disembodied intelligence inside a computer.”

“We didn't exactly come here to rescue you,” Dirk said. “We are here to find the secret of how the creatures on this planet manage to make spaceships disappear from one place and turn up in another place millions of miles, sometimes even light years away. Imagine how important it would be to our armed forces in space to have this power. As to how we got here, Splock is our science officer. Despite what you may think about his pointy ears, he has an intelligence many times more powerful than mine, and therefore almost infinitely more powerful than yours, as it is easy to tell.”

Bill let the insult ride; you got nowhere arguing with officers. “I didn't think anything wrong about his pointy ears! I think they look real nice. I bet the girls get kinky thrills from them. Like from my teeth.” He twanged a protruding tusk.

Splock came shuffling up to them now. The science officer from Fortinbras had a long thin face and eyebrows that were obviously alien since they turned up at both ends. When he spoke he had an uninflected buzzing voice like a badly adjusted voice simulator. “If you like ears like this it is highly probable that arrangements could be made to get a pair for you.”