Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (13 page)

“The role suits me well enough,” said Alan. “I’m a psychic morphodite—as you might put it. Although ideally I’d prefer man-on-man sex.”

“They had some of that action on the sub,” said Ned carelessly. “Part of the reason I deserted when we came up for air near Gibraltar. Slipped out at night and swam ashore. That prick of a chief was calling me a sissy. One guy dropped his soap in the shower and this other guy took him up on it. My supposed crime was to be standing near them, washing my hair, not giving a damn about what they did. Fact is, the chief wanted to bust me because I’d beat him at poker. Everyone gets testy in a gmetal coffin that’s a hundred fathoms down. With a nuclear reactor for the engine.” Ned wriggled his fingers, miming radiation.

“The sub’s called the
Nautilus
?” said Alan, accessing his borrowed Ned Strunk memories. “It’s not officially launched yet, is it?”

“This was the super-secret first cruise,” said Ned. “Don’t want reporters in case your tin scow goes off like A-bomb when the captain presses
start
.”

With a clatter the waitress brought their food. “Is that everything you need?” she asked.

“I—I wonder if there’s a clothing shop in this district?” Alan asked. “My usual things got ruined in the storm, which is why I’m wearing
these
sad rags.” He fluttered his fingers at the lapels of his coat. He figured that, when pretending to be a woman, he could hardly go too far.

“Sure, hon,” said the waitress, warming a bit. “Just down the block. But it won’t open till afternoon, what with it being Sunday.”

“We’re frikkin’ masters of disguise,” gloated Ned as they dug into their ham and eggs. “The waitress is buying our routine. Like in a spy movie.”

“How were you planning to get back to the States from Europe after you deserted?” inquired Alan. “Sailors aren’t issued passports, are they?”

“I was gonna bum around the Old World like the rich college boy I never got to be. I’ve got the inside track on how that
Nautilus
reactor works. Figured I could turn traitor, sell info, and buy a passport. F-T-N. Fuck the Navy.”

“I’m rather soured on the government myself,” said Alan. “What with them attempting to
assassinate
me. The bright side is that my escape strategy led me to invent the skug.”

“A partner organism, huh?” said Ned. “A symbiote.”

“Exactly. You help your skug, and it helps you. I’m still working on perfecting the balance.”

“Balance? I was like a goddamn zombie after I got skugged in Gibraltar. In the dark. You saw how I was on the ship. With the voice in my head saying I should merge with Alan to get my, uh,
wetware upgrade
.”

“Wetware upgrade?” echoed Alan, savoring the phrase. “You coined that expression?”

“You know how it is,” said Ned modestly. “The skug gooses up your mind.” Ned paused. “And now I want a new face. When you copied that Belgian girl from the ship—how’d you imitate her so well?”

“I ate a fleck of skin from her napkin,” said Alan. “A skug knows how to assimilate a tissue’s genetic code. Lacking that, you can fake a look from memory. Like making a face in the mirror and wearing that to dinner. You managed quite a robust emulation of Vassar this morning.”

“I wasn’t all that close. You just saw what you wanted, old horn dog. It was a stretch for me to keep it up as long as I did. ”

“You’ll find it dead easy once you sample your target’s
genes
. Your system settles down like a stone rolling into a valley. Look into yourself. You’ll find you the gene codes for Pratt, me, and an Arab boy named Driss. And, come to think of it, now that we’ve conjugated, you’ll have the codes for William Burroughs, Katje Pelikaan and, for that matter, Vassar Lafia. I’ve sampled Vassar’s
effluvia
rather—”

“Hey! Spare me the slop. No offense, but I don’t wanna copy any of you.” Ned looked around the busy diner. “I want something fresh. Check that guy cleaning the table over there. I’ll go Black! No way Uncle Sam will find me then.”

Ned rose to his feet and headed towards the rest-room, brushing past the busboy. He feigned a stumble and ran his hand across the young man’s hair. Sensing something amiss, the youth stepped back and frowned. Ned made an apologetic gesture and walked on.

On his return to the table, Ned displayed a commandeered fleck of dandruff—and proceeded to morph into the busboy’s shape. Over coffee he tweaked his features a bit, peering at his reflection in the back of a spoon.

When the waitress brought their check, she noticed the mocha color of Ned’s skin.

“Now look at you two,” she said, cocking her head and laughing. “I’m serving a night fighter and a fairy lady. Where’s my brain at? Let’s cash you out before the manager starts in on us.”

“You’ve been most kind,” said Alan. He paid the check and led Ned outside.

Some of the passers-by were frowning at them, and a man in a car yelled something crude.

“That’s the race thing,” said Ned. “Florida’s got rednecks out the wazoo. Make your skin color match mine. So we’re not, uh, miscegenating and all.”

“I suppose I could do,” said Alan. He felt down into himself and found the channel for communicating with the melanin-producing organelles of his skin. A minute later he was browner than Ned.

“We won’t be able to go into this clothes store here,” said Ned. “We’ll have to find the Black part of town. Shouldn’t be far.” He gestured at the mansions facing the sea. “All these rich people have Black servants. The deep South.”

A police car came tearing down the beachfront avenue and made a squealing turn into the side street that Ned and Alan had come down. Peering after the car, they saw it pulling up before the Burroughs family home. Alan and Ned regarded each other uneasily.

“I wonder if that Mrs. Burroughs lodged a complaint on us,” said Ned.

“Or it could have someone else,” said Alan. “I’ve been having this occasional sensation of being watched.”

“What happens if the police nab us?” worried Ned. “I don’t have any papers at all.”

“We’ll get new ones,” said Alan. “I’ll be discarding my Burroughs passport myself. Good show that we’re disguised.”

“But even so the police might somehow know that we’re not, not—”

“Normal?” said Alan lightly. “Here’s a secret. If we’re cornered, we can always convert our captors on the spot.”

“Break off a piece of me and let it crawl onto them?” said Ned. “Yeah. When that hand jumped me in Gibraltar, I went skugger right away. Not that I grasped that.”

“I feel I’ve improved our skug processes to the point where the transition can be very nearly seamless,” said Alan. “I’ve upped the virulence so that it requires no more than a pin-prick to your candidate’s body—assuming the touch is empowered by your volition. Now that you’ve merged with me, Ned, you’re in possession of my latest upgrades. We’ll have no problem in skugging any particularly importunate pests.”

“Okay, fine,” said Ned. “But let’s not go on any big rampage just yet.”

The upgraded Ned was a good mixer. And his Kentucky accent went over better than Alan’s Oxonian blither. Frequently asking directions, Ned led them to West Palm Beach, which was separated from Palm Beach proper by a narrow bay. Soon they were in the heart of the local Black community.

The first thing Ned and Alan did there was to buy clothes. Alan selected a maroon wool skirt and jacket with a cream-colored blouse. Ned bought tight slacks, a yellow shirt, and a poisonous-green sweater. The salesman was friendly, although he wondered at Alan’s accent and odd garb.

“She’s from Jamaica,” Ned told the man. “My island girl.”

Back outside, they sat on a park bench for awhile. Alan slowly tore his Burroughs passport into bits—shedding an identity yet again. The strolling Black couples and families smiled upon them. The park had a peaceful Sunday feel, with spots of light filtering through the palms.

Sitting so close together, Alan and Ned were able to synch their thoughts, although Alan wasn’t yet sharing the full plan that he and his skug had formulated. It involved heading West—perhaps they should steal a car? Now that they were skuggers, society’s rules meant less than ever before.

“But have I told you I’m meeting Vassar tomorrow?” Alan asked Ned, speaking aloud. “I don’t want to depart before then.”

“I’ve picked up some inklings of that,” said Ned. “You call it teep? I wonder—am I supposed to be jealous?”

“How so?” said Alan.

“You’re a woman, more or less. Vassar and I have both fucked you—more or less.” Ned burst out laughing. “I can’t believe this crazy trip.” A little boy ran past carrying a ball.

“It’s all quite mad,” agreed Alan. “Really I should be working up a theory of
analog computation
. Putting my fortuitous advances onto firm scientific ground. But instead I’m playing the fugitive and nursing a schoolgirl crush.”

“Oh, calm down,” said Ned, leaning back so the sun hit him in the face. “Let’s stay here all afternoon.”

So that’s what they did, enjoying the passing scene, not talking much, each of them thinking their own thoughts. Alan got himself a pencil and a pad of paper from a newsstand, and jotted down some electromagnetic field equations and chemical reaction rules. Thanks to his skugs he could program organisms like computations. His mind felt keener than ever before.

Night fell early. With the personable Ned in the lead, they found their way to a Black supper club called the Sunset Lounge. Alan ate his fill of fried chicken—a dish he’d never had before, although Ned seemed intimately familiar with it. After a dessert of pecan pie, the lights dimmed and a jazz band began to play. Sheer enchantment.

Alan and Ned danced a bit, and Ned ordered a second round of desserts. The sweets struck the two skuggers with the force of intoxicants. Relaxing into joy, Alan gazed at the hot-lit bandstand and the lavender haze of smoke that curled and wreathed above it. Not for the first time, he got the sense that being a skugger allowed him to absorb the world’s information at a faster rate. As if his perceptual bandwidth had been upped by, say, fifty percent.

The Sunset Lounge felt immense. The bar, the polished glasses, the long mirror, the waitresses poised like blackbirds to fly to their customers, the tables, booths, dancers, musicians—everything was exactly where it belonged. The room was an inalterable pattern of spacetime, and this moment was eternal. As the band swung and bopped, Alan began hearing tiny musical details, miniature sounds—the trumpeter’s blue comments, the saxophone’s half-notes astride the main line, the whisking of the bassman’s fingers along his strings, the beats between the figures of the drum. The music was a shared sea in which they swam; a computation that chased its own tail.

Alan’s thoughts grew ever more abstract until, without meaning to, he drifted into a reprise of a vision he’d had this morning. About an invisible eye that was watching him. The eye was a cupped disk at the center of a daisy whose petals were human flesh. The eye was angry.

Alan twitched spasmodically and fell over backwards in his chair, making a great clatter. Fortunately his doughy form took the fall without harm. And now Ned was helping him to his feet. People were laughing, not unkindly. The music played on.

“Something is
spying
on us,” Alan told Ned, raising his voice to be heard. “A dreadful threat! Come away!”

“Who?” said Ned after Alan had dragged him outside. “What?”

“A type of eye,” said Alan. “Far away. Tracking us, I reckon. I saw it this morning, too.”

“How’s any eye gonna see us?” protested Ned. “It’s dark, man. You’re batshit. Let’s go back inside the club. I want a third piece of that pecan pie.”

“The eye is rather like a radio antenna dish,” said Alan, who could still sense the thing. “Open your mind, you besotted layabout. Snap to.”

Ned leaned against the club’s outer wall and gave the search a moment’s concentration. And then he saw the eye too.

“Damn, Abby. That thing’s made of skuggers all in a circle, with their heads wadded into a glob. Watching us for true. And now it knows about our new disguises.” Defiantly Ned shook his fist at the empty air.

“I’ll wager it’s in Tangier,” said Alan. “And that William Burroughs is involved. This morning the eye seemed disturbed—when Mrs. Burroughs dropped her bombshell about cutting off Bill’s
payments
.”

“Your pal William Burroughs is watching us?”

“My question is how the eye can work with such accuracy from Tangier,” said Alan. “We’re hidden by the curve of the globe. I need to understand the mechanism so as to—“

“I bet they’re using the fourth dimension!” volunteered Ned. “I read about it in
Astounding Science Fiction
. Ordinary matter poses no obstacle in the fourth dimension.”

“Utter bosh,” sniffed Alan. “It’s too absurd to have a rustic American preach crank science to me.”

“Snothead,” shot back Ned, undaunted. “The four-dimensional rays are carrying
telepathy
.”