Venus on the Half-Shell (14 page)

Simon didn’t want to get involved in the domestic affairs of these creatures. But he had to show a certain amount of interest and sympathy if he was to get information. So he whistled a question at the female whom he’d named Anastasia.

“Yes, that’s right,” Anastasia said. “We do all the work and those useless sons of bitches do nothing but play around all day.”

Anastasia didn’t actually say “sons of bitches” but Simon translated it as such. What she said was something like “farts in a windstorm.”

“We females talk a lot among ourselves during the day,” she said. “But we’d like to talk with our mates, too. After all, they’ve been up in the wild blue yonder, having a great time, seeing all sorts of interesting things. But do you think for one moment that they’ll let us in on what’s going on outside these meadows? No, all they want to do is to be fed and have a quickie and be off to dreamland. When we complain, they tell us that we wouldn’t understand it if they did tell us what they saw and did. So here we are, ground-bound and shut up in these little meadows, working all day, taking care of the children, while they’re roaming around, zooming up and down, having a good old time. It isn’t fair!”

Simon whistled some more sympathy and then went down to the beach to watch the males.

He had found out that the stomachs of the fliers also generated hydrogen. It was this gas which enabled them to float in the air. They carried water as ballast, which they drew up from the ocean through their hollow tentacles. When they wanted altitude quickly, they released the water, and up they went. They were always holding races or gamboling about, playing all sorts of games, tag-the-leader, loop-the-loop, doing Immelmann turns, follow-the-leader, or catch-the-bird. This latter game consisted of chasing a bird until they caught it by sucking it into their jet-holes or forcing it to the ground.

They also liked to scare the herds of animals on the ground by zooming down on them and stampeding them. The male whose herd raised the biggest cloud of dust won this game.

The males had another form of communication than whistling, too. They could emit short or long trails of smoke corresponding to the whistled dots and dashes. With these they could talk to each other at long distances or call in their buddies if they saw something interesting. They never used this skywriting, however, in sight of the females. They took great delight in having a secret of their own. The females knew about this, of course, since the males sometimes boasted about it. This made the females even more discontented.

Simon would not have stayed long on this planet, which he named Giffard after the Frenchman who first successfully controlled a lighter-than-air craft. Simon did not believe that the simple natives had any answers to his questions. But then he talked to Graf, his name for the big male that dominated the herd. Graf said that the males didn’t spend all their time just playing. They often had philosophical discussions, usually in the afternoon when they were resting. They’d float around on the ocean or a lake and discuss the big issues of the universe. Simon, hearing this, decided he’d wait until he knew the language well enough to talk philosophy with the males. A few months after he’d landed, he asked Graf if he would take him to the lake where the males had their bull sessions. Graf said he’d be glad to.

The next day, Graf wrapped a tentacle around Simon and lifted him up. Simon was thrilled but he was also a little scared. He wished that he had flown to the lake in the lifeboat. But he was eager for new experiences, and this was one he wasn’t likely to find on any other world.

Shortly before they got to the lake, Simon took a cigar out of his pocket and lit up. It was a good cigar, made of Outer Mongolian tobacco. Simon was puffing happily some hundreds of feet above a thick yellow forest, the wind moving softly over his face and a big black bird with a red crest flapping along a few feet away from him. All was blue and quiet and content; this was one of the rare moments when God did indeed seem in His heaven and all was well with the world.

As usual, the rare moment did not last long. Graf suddenly started bobbing up and down so violently that Simon began to get airsick. Then he whistled screamingly, and the tentacle around Simon’s waist straightened out. Simon grabbed at it and hung on, shouting wildly at Graf. When he got over his first panic, he whistled at Graf after removing the cigar.

“What’s the matter?”

“What are you doing?” Graf whistled like a steam kettle back at him. “You’re on fire!”

“What?” Simon whistled.

“Let go! Let go! I’ll go up in flames!”

“I’ll fall, you damned fool!”

“Let go!”

Simon looked down. They were now over the lake but about a hundred feet up. Below, the cigar-shaped males were floating in the water. Or they had been, a second before. Suddenly, they rose upward in a body, their ballast squirting out through the hollow tentacles, and then they scattered.

A few seconds later, Simon realized what was going on. He opened his hand, letting the cigar drop. Graf immediately quit his violent oscillations, and a moment later he deposited Simon on the shore of the lake. But his skin was darker than its usual purple, and he stuttered his dots and dashes.

“F-f-f-fire’s th-th-the w-w-w-worst th-th-thing there is! It’s the only th-th-thing we f-f-fear! It w-w-was invented b-b-by th-th-the d-d-devil!”

The Giffardians, it seemed, had religion. Their devil, however, dwelt in the sky, and he propelled himself with a jet of flaming hydrogen. When it came time for the bad Giffardians to be taken off to the hell above the sky, he zoomed in and burned them up with flame from his tail.

The good Giffardians were taken by a zeppelin-shaped angel whose farts were sweet-smelling down into a land below the earth. Their planet was hollow, they claimed, and heaven was inside the hollow.

They had a lot of strange ideas about religion. This didn’t faze Simon, who had heard stranger on Earth.

Simon apologized. He then explained what the thing on fire in his mouth had been.

All the males shuddered and bobbed up and down and one was so terror-stricken that he shot away, unable to control his ejaculations of gas.

“It might be better if you left,” Graf said. “Right now.”

“Oh, I won’t smoke except in the ship from now on,” Simon said. “I promise.”

This quieted the males down somewhat. But they did not really breathe easy until he also said he would put up some
NO SMOKING
signs.

“That way, if other Earthmen should land here,” Simon said, “they’ll not light up.”

He didn’t tell them that it was doubtful that any people from his native planet would ever come here. Nor did he tell them that there were billions of planets whose people couldn’t read English.

It wasn’t fire that made Simon so dangerous. It was the ideas he innocently dropped while talking to the females. Once, when Anastasia complained about being kept on the ground, Simon said that she ought to take a ride. He realized at once that he shouldn’t have ventured this opinion. But Anastasia wouldn’t let him drop the subject. The next day, she tried to talk her mate, Graf, into taking her up. He refused, but she was so upset that the gruel she fed him became sour. After several days of stomach upset, he gave in.

With Anastasia hanging on to him through the lock in their apex-organs, he lifted. The others stood or floated around and watched this epoch-making flight. Graf carried her up to about two thousand feet, beyond which he was unable to levitate. However, her weight dragged his nose down so that his tail was far higher than his fore part. He was unable to navigate in this fashion and had a hard time getting her back to the meadow. Moreover, his skin had broken out in huge drops of yellowish sweat.

Anastasia, however, was enraptured. The other females insisted that their mates take them for rides. These did so reluctantly and had the same trouble navigating as Graf. The males were too exhausted that night to have sexual intercourse.

There is no telling what might have happened in the next few days. But, the day after, the females started to give birth. Perhaps it was the excitement of their first aerial voyages that made them deliver before the end of their term. In any event, Simon strolled out onto the meadow that morning to find a number of tiny zeppelins and mooring masts nursing.

The baby males floated up as high as the nose-apex locks and took their gruel there. The baby females cropped the grass alongside their mothers.

“You see, even at birth, we females are discriminated against,” Anastasia said. “We have to stick to the ground and take food that isn’t nearly as easy to digest as the stuff the males get from the apex-organs. The males have the best of it, as usual.”

“Function follows form,” Simon said.

“What?” Anastasia whistled.

Simon strolled off, wishing that he could keep his mouth shut. He walked along the seashore and thought about leaving that very day. He had been able to have one philosophical discussion with the males, but it turned out to be on the level of what he’d heard in the locker room in high school. He didn’t expect to find much deeper stuff. He had, however, promised Anastasia that he’d be the godfather of her daughter. He supposed he should wait until the ceremony, which would take place in three days. One of Simon’s weaknesses was that he couldn’t bear to hurt anyone’s feelings.

He walked around the curve of the beach, and he saw a beautiful woman just rising from the foam of a wave.

9

Simon couldn’t have been more shocked than if he had been Crusoe when he saw Friday’s footprint. It was, in fact, Friday on the Earth calendar in the spaceship, another coincidence found only in bad novels. What was even more unforgivable—in a novel, not in Nature, who could care less about coincidences— was that the scene looked almost like Botticelli’s famous painting
Birth of Venus.
She wasn’t standing on a giant clamshell and there wasn’t any maiden ready to throw a blanket over her. Nor was there any spirit of wind carrying a woman. But the shoreline and the trees and the flowers floating in the air behind her did resemble those in the painting.

The woman herself, as she waded out of the sea to stand nude before him, also had hair the same length and color as Botticelli’s Venus. She was, however, much better looking and had a better body—from Simon’s viewpoint, anyway. She did not have one hand covering her breast and the ends of her hair hiding her pubes. Her hands were over her mouth.

Simon approached her slowly, smiling, and her hands came down. They didn’t understand each other’s language, of course, but she pointed inland and then led him into the woods. Here, under the branches of some big trees, was a small spaceship. They went into its open port where she sat Simon down in a small cabin and gave him a drink, alcohol mixed with some alien fruit juice. When she returned from the next room, she was dressed. She had on a long, low-cut gown covered with silver sequins. It looked like the dresses hostesses wear in honky-tonks.

It took several weeks before she was able to converse semifluently in English. In the meantime, Simon had taken her to his ship. Anubis and Athena seemed to like her, but the owl made her nervous. Simon found out why later.

Chworktap was not only beautiful, she was fun to be with. She talked very amusingly. In fact, Simon had never met anyone who had so many stories, all howlingly funny, to tell. What’s more, she never repeated herself. What’s also more, she seemed to sense when Simon did not want to talk. This was a big improvement over Ramona. And she liked his banjo-playing.

One day, Simon, coming back from a walk, heard his banjo. Whoever was playing it was playing it well since it was in his exact style. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it a recording. He hurried in and found Chworktap strumming away as if to the banjo born.

“Do you have banjos on Zelpst?” he said.

“No.”

“Then how did you learn to play it?”

“I watched you play it.”

“And I spent twenty years learning what you’ve learned in a few hours,” he said. He wasn’t bitter, just amazed.

“Naturally.”

“Why naturally?”