Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (7 page)

Billy

Chapter 4: Aboard the Phos

Alan left Burroughs’s apartment with empty hands and a happy head. He patted his face, savoring its firm, healthy contours. The cure had worked. And it was still Christmas Day—although you’d never know it from these evening-shadowed Moslem streets.

He’d been so anxious about allowing the skug onto his body this morning that he’d taken a shot of Eukodal first. So his memories of the transformations had a hallucinated, fun-house quality. The skug had infected first Alan and then, at Alan’s urging, Burroughs—with no harm done.

Alan chuckled to himself in the street, recalling Burroughs’s whinnying scream when he’d dropped onto him from the ceiling. What a lark. And then he and Bill had melted together—intricate, esoteric, electric. They’d stumbled outside, divided in two, and regained human form, more or less their same selves, but both of them looking like Bill.

It was a surprise that Driss and Kiki were already skuggers as well. Evidently the preliminary tweaks that Alan had done on the Pratt zombie had brought the thing’s biocomputations into a reversible mode—and thus the new converts hadn’t had their personalities erased. But certainly the boys’ affect had improved once they’d merged with Alan this afternoon. Alan’s intricate feedback techniques had evolved his skugly processes to a high degree of elegance. And there was more to be done, much more. Alan’s body was his laboratory now.

As he strode smiling down the street towards the port, he wondered how it would feel to break into run. But he didn’t want to risk extra attention.

He now forgave Driss’s drive to amass money by any means. But even though Driss was a skugger, it was still conceivable that he might shop Alan to the British agents. All the more reason to leave Tangier right away. This routine was done.

Alan would miss Burroughs, but he was keen indeed to exit this pest hole before some new leering jack-in-the-box popped up. He still had most of the money he’d gotten from Pratt, plus Burroughs’s passport, not to mention a letter of introduction to Burroughs’s father. Perhaps he’d be safe from the Queen’s government in America.

Alan fully realized that both he and Burroughs were something slightly other than human now. The symbiotic skugs had altered them for good. Nearly all of the time he felt preternaturally alert.

Driss and Kiki said there were dozens or even hundreds more skuggers in the Casbah now—radiating out from Pratt. The Pratt skugger had been the only mindless one, and the boys had incinerated him as a matter of good public relations. In any case, Driss had said the local police were impounding whatever skuggers they could capture. Driss and Kiki were being very careful. Everything was in a state of change.

“Far out,” said Alan to himself, drawing on Burroughs’s subcultural vocabulary, and even managing to produce something like the man’s dry Missouri accent. “Wild kicks.”

Some of Burroughs’s memories seemed to have migrated into Alan’s retrofitted frame, perhaps at the cellular level. Sloping through the bustling last few streets by the pier, he even found himself wondering whether he ought to bring along some Eukodal for the trip. But no, no, this was an alien, Burroughsian thought procedure. Terminate it.

Alan took the short ferry ride across the strait that divided North Africa from Spain. As he debarked, he had a bad moment—he thought he saw a severed human hand scurrying down the ferry’s gangplank behind him. It was up on its fingers. Alan looked away, looked back, and the apparition had either vanished or had lost itself in the clamorous crowd.

From the ferry port, Alan rode a smelly omnibus to Gibraltar, tormented by fantasies of something creeping under his seat to grab his ankles. He arrived in the colonial port town after midnight in a state of extreme nervousness and exhaustion. He got the night clerk’s permission to sleep on a bench in the bus station, grateful to have his feet off the floor. Before closing his eyes he privily grew a pouch in his belly, tucked in his cash and papers, then sealed the pouch shut.

All night he dreamed of tunnels—and when he woke it occurred to him that these branching, narrowing passages had been his veins, arteries and capillaries. The skug’s rudimentary mind was familiarizing itself with his flesh. It was as if Alan now had two souls.

Alan worried that he might have lost his shape overnight—that is, he might be looking more like Alan Turing than like William Burroughs. Still lying on the bench, he focused inwards upon his musculature, locking himself into the proper form. It was amazing to have such control over one’s body.

An Arab boy began vigorously shaking Alan’s foot. No doubt the urchin had searched his pockets for cash while he was sleeping. Alan was glad for the human attention, and glad for his hidden kangaroo pouch.

“Take to me to the harbor, and I’ll tip you,” Alan told the lad, sitting up. “You speak English, yes?”

“Breakfast first?” said the boy, rapidly miming an eating gesture.

“And then you’ll find me an outbound ship for America,” said Alan agreeably.

Alan ordered some raisin buns and white coffee from the bus station canteen. A low-class Englishwoman was at the counter, a ruddy virago with a hoarse voice like a jeering crowd. She cocked her head to watch as Alan reached under his shirt for some money—he only hoped she couldn’t see his fingers sliding into his flesh. It was unsettling to be in an outpost of the Queen’s empire.

Outside, the sun shone, with people taking walks and visiting each other, many of them carrying gifts. It was the second day of Christmas, what the English call Boxing Day. The sphinx-like Gibraltar Rock rose over the town, and the wild local apes scrounged garbage in alleys, chattering and baring their teeth.

A man in a black suit had collapsed in one of these cul-de-sacs. A few locals were leaning over him. The man looked floppy, practically boneless. For whatever reason, the skug within Alan wanted him to stop and help the fellow. But he had no time. The young guide was running ahead, leading the way to the steamers’ docks.

In short order the boy had brought Alan to the gangplank of a Portuguese liner, claimed his tip and hurried on his way.

Alan studied his really rather slender sheaf of bills, totting up his holdings.

“Welcome aboard,” said a man loitering near the gangplank, a roughly dressed fellow with a blue chin. “You going where,
Senhor
? We have one free cabin. Very commodious. Top side.”

“I’m, ah, looking for passage to America,” said Alan.

“We gladly take you,” said the man, smoothly whirling his hand. “I am the ship’s purser. She is the
Santa Maria
, top luxury, with ten ports of call, including Canary Islands and Venezuela.”

“And how much to the United States?”

The man named a figure more than triple what Alan had on hand. Reading Alan’s expression, the purser gestured the more expansively. “You pay me now for reserve, we bill the balance. Is no problems. I welcome you aboard. We go fetch luggage, yes?”

“I—I’d prefer something simpler,” said Alan, uneasily glancing along the wharves that dwindled into the distance like an exercise in perspective. He wondered if this man really
was
the ship’s purser. “Is there a chance of finding a freighter?”

“You want to travel like a pig iron, like a bale of ox-hide, like a sack of cement?” said the blue-chinned man. “No eat lobster, no dance big band?” He shrugged and pointed to the farthest end of the wharves, towards some smudgy ships like grains of rice. “You go down there,
Senhor
. A Greek ship called
Phos
.”

“Thank you.”

The apron of the wharves was cobbled and sunny. Nobody seemed to be watching Alan, so he went ahead and ran a mile to the end, unlimbering his Burroughs-shaped limbs, shaking out the kinks, reinvigorating his lungs with the cool, salty air.

While he ran, he imagined that his inner skug was conversing with him, not so much in words, but rather with flashes of color in his eyes, hissing sounds in his ears, twinges in his stomach and a tingling on his skin. Was the parasite urging Alan to spread the contagion? Or were these thoughts Alan’s alone?

“We’ll work all this out once I’ve got my cabin,” said Alan, speaking aloud. “But don’t expect me to go
inoculating
strangers.” No answer. Perhaps he was going insane.

Looking at the less savory piers near the wharf’s end, Alan spotted a Greek-flagged freighter whose name was
ΦΩΣ
, which he knew from his classics studies to be pronounced
Phos
and to mean
light
. This was the freighter that the Portuguese man had recommended. She was a lean, narrow ship, built for speed.

Her deck bristled with cranes, all quite still. Alan sidled up the companionway and found a solitary, dissipated man sitting on a chair drinking coffee. His feet propped on the ship’s railing.

Alan hazarded a hello.

“Yeah, I speak English,” said the man in a New York accent. “Merry fuckin’ Xmas. What’s on your mind, man?”

“I was wondering if I might book passage,” said Alan. “To America.”

“Find a bunk and hunker down,” said the stranger. He had curly dark hair and brown eyes. “Squat and gobble. It’s real slack on the
Phos
. Yesterday Captain Eugenio shit on the deck and wiped his butt with the flag. Now he’s in town chasing whores.”

“I wonder about the schedule and the rates,” said Alan, not caring for the man’s vulgar tone. “I’m William Burroughs, by the way.”

“Vassar Lafia,” said the stranger, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette that gave off the smell of kief. His unshaven face was oily in the sun. He cocked his head. “I could swear I’ve seen you before.”

“I’ve a poor memory for recent months,” said Turing. “I’ve been in the wars, rather. But I’m back in an approximate state of health. What can you tell me about this ship?”

“She’s a tramp freighter,” said Lafia. “A free agent with no timetable. She snags her cargoes as she goes along. Last I heard, the captain is planning to pick up wine in Madeira, steam flat-out for Miami, then swing down to Havana for some cigars. We’re loaded with olive oil and the man says feta cheese.” He winked at Turing. “I’ve got a tramp cargo of my own. Socko from Morocco in the heels of my shoes. And don’t look inside my toothpaste tube.” Lafia paused, studying Alan again. “I’ve got it. You were in the Café Central. You weren’t talking like a limey then. About four months ago?”

“I’ve been lodging in Tangier, yes,” said Alan, not wavering from his usual accent. “So it’s possible our paths crossed. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not delve into my private affairs.”

“Visions of the past,” said Lafia, his lips spreading in a grin. “Through the gem-encrusted glass. This August? You said we were dump dogs on a magic carpet—you wave it, Bill? Oh, never mind. I won’t pry. We’ll light off new bombs. And, hey, here comes Captain Eugenios after all. He’ll book you onboard. Lunch is at one o’clock, most days, if the cook’s in shape. Wiggy to have you here, man!”

The black-bearded captain was a hearty fellow with a short attention span. He offered Alan a price of a passage to Miami that was more than reasonable, leaving Alan with forty-odd pounds to spare. And then the captain disappeared for a nap. Alan retired to his own private cabin as well, number 17, a windowless steel cell below decks. The room had a sink and a mirror, a door that Alan could lock. A shared toilet and shower lay further down the passageway.

Alan lay on his bunk for awhile, sorting out his memories of Christmas Day. The skug had crawled onto him and melted into his flesh. It had been Alan’s own idea to convert Burroughs. It wasn’t yet clear to Alan if the skug had a true mind of its own. Perhaps he had been reading too much into the twitches and cilia of his tissue culture. He felt he was still his own man.

But, yes, his conjugation with the skug had changed him. His body was more responsive, more fluid than ever before. Perhaps this was how it felt to be a mollusk. Remembering a bit more from yesterday’s hallucinatory segues, Alan stared at his hand and willed it to change shape.

With a slight sinking of his stomach, he saw his fingers warp and sag like melting wax. Focusing his full attention into his hand, Alan formed it into—oh, why not a duck’s head, a shape fit for casting candle-shadows on the wall.

The hand drooped, the fingers fused, and—the tip became a shiny yellow beak.

“Quack,” murmured Alan, opening and closing the beak. “Quack, quack, quack. Now resume being my hand.”

His fingers returned to normal, leaving a tingling sensation in the muscles and the skin. He recalled what his Mum used to say when she’d find him making grimaces into the looking-glass.
What if you stayed that way?

Alan went back on deck. There was no sign of a lunch, not that he was sure where to look for it. Everyone seemed to be napping or in town. And so he roamed the ship alone over the next hour or two—studying the intricacies of the cargo hoists, the radio antennas, and the smokestacks. He had the run of the
Phos
. He even made his way below decks and examined the engines.