William S. Burroughs (39 page)

"You better get
back to the tourist place where you belong...
"

Another glimpse: The
tourist area shades away into the underworld. Kim sees passages
and arcades leading down into lightless depths.

"And what do
you think of my people?"

It is a Venusian
lady of the highest caste. Kim has seen her before someplace.

"Speaking from
an Intourist point of view, you mean? I don't want to get anyone else
into trouble...
"

Kim steps forward
gingerly to get a better look
...
worn stone
steps, narrow passageways between clay walls slanting steeply
down...shops like Gibraltar, Tangier, Panama, selling those ivory
balls one inside the other, hideous tapestries, carvings in jade
and soapstone
...
shoddy merchandise going
down into darkness...Kim has heard that the houses down there are put
together using human excrement as mortar. He smells no reason to
doubt it
...
darkness fills the lower levels
like water with the smell of countless years of encrusted shit and
sweat and unwashed bodies crowded into tiny cubicles...

"Yes,"
says an old resident. "It's bad here in the summer...gets up to
140
then you lose count. It's torture to move and in the
winter when it gets down below zero you will need summer shit to
chink the cracks."

"Down
there"
—
she gestures to the
lightless depths
—
"are blind
humanoid centipedes and scorpions...
"

"Ah yes,"
Kim says, anxious to impress the grande dame with his
erudition
...
"Like the Egyptian Watch
Goddess, who is a beautiful and irresistible woman...When man wakes
up him find she has the head of a scorpion, pincers in his face and
dead greedy insect eyes...
"

"I see you have
been well instructed," she says dryly.

Kim decides to say
nothing.

The tourist area
ends here in an area of vacant lots. In this no-man's-land the
underworld of Venus ply their incredibly precarious trades, for
punishments are severe...

"It's all so
unpleasant." In a sad little square lit by Primus gas lanterns
that flicker and spurt, the poor have gathered for a handout...This
consists of some metallic matter that is cut with a lead knife and
shows a bright silver sheen when freshly cut, like sodium...Little
slivers of this metal paste^ are handed out to the needy, who have
all brought their own bowls, from which they gobble greedily, the
metal flashing in the light
...
as if they
are signaling in phosphorus flashes...Kim drifts on.

A man has bared his
arm and he is about to slash it with a razor for his
"ninos"
(for some reason he seems to be speaking in Spanish
...)
and he did cut himself and the blood ran down
"para sus
ninos, madre de Cristo."
Was it ever distasteful...Kim wrote
in his guidebook that on the planet Venus entertainment reaches
an all-time low...One can, with a special pass, witness the "evening
meal
...
in which food is ritually handed out
to the poor. It will save both the tourists and the Venusian
authorities embarrassment if tourists will just understand we have
rules and they are intended to be obeyed. Certain areas are off
limits to tourists. Unscrupulous guides or drivers may direct you to
such a place. If this happens it is your duty as a tourist to report
the incident without delay...
"

The Shmunn is a
predator with the powerful hindquarters of a hyena and the
hyena's bonebreaking jaws. There the resemblance ends and indeed this
foul beast beggers description. Blind, entirely silent and devoid of
vocal cords, they are guided by scent perceptors that cover the
entire body, which is pale pink, pitted and porous like pumice stone.
It's a terrible sight to see a Shmunn smelling its way in, its whole
body writhing in peristalsis, steaming caustic saliva dripping from
its fangs. The Shmunn is devoid of an anus, voiding waste products
through the skin, which gives off such a foul odor as to repel the
hardiest predator. And the body temperature of the Shmunn is
212
°
,
the boiling point of water. The creature has such a rapid metabolism
that it literally burns for food. At the smell of food it quivers
with excitement as the boiling frenzied digestive juices flare
through its flesh like a furnace. It has to eat every twenty-four
hours to stay alive. It will eat anything alive or dead. A pack of
these creatures, owing to their high body temperature, steam off such
a pestilent cloud of noxious vapors that in many cases the prey is
already incapacitated before the serrated shark teeth and the tongue
sharp and hard as a rasp go to work.

The Shmunn is also
armed with an interlocking network of razor-sharp incurving claws on
its four feet. It can throw itself on one side and kick upward with
its hind claws to disembowel an opponent. And any wound inflicted by
a Shmunn will cause death by infection within twenty-four hours. The
virulence of such infections in this steaming inferno of explosive
growth must be seen to be believed. A man who cut himself while
shaving died of tetanus before lunch.

As for the miniature
vultures, I have so far seen none of them but today I heard a strange
rumor in the marketplace. [Kim was learning Venusian and he
frequently circulated in public gathering places disguising
himself as a beggar or an itinerant entertainer. Kim could do magic
tricks and juggling.]

So I start to tell
Tom about this rumor I picked up today, disguised as a diseased
beggar in the marketplace, about "Soul Suckers" and
without even waiting for me to go on Tom says he doesn't believe in
souls anyhoo, he knows I hate to hear anyone say anyhoo so I shoot
back,

"You should
keep an open mind
and stuff.
"

And he grins at
me...He can be so irritating at times, like the putdown nagging wife
they dragged out of the archetype closet and one time I did a little
skit:

Hubby comes in all
full of enthusiasm and mixes a drink. Wifey watches his hand and
catches him trying to add another dollop...

"I've just been
looking over the new place, darling, and it looks
great...
"

"That sounds
tacky."

Hubby finishes his
drink.

"Oh, you'll
like it when you see it, darling."

"I've had a
terrible headache all day...
"

"Oh uh I'm
sorry to hear that, can I get you an aspirin
.

"Certainly
not." She glares at him indignantly.

Hubby sidles
unobtrusively into the kitchen
...
thinking
someone should invent a silent drink mixer.

"Are you
mixing another drink?"

I showed this to Tom
and told him he acted that way sometimes and he didn't think it was
funny
at all.

So I took a big dose
of majoun, which is why the whole possum scene took place and stuff.
And I keep getting off the subject of the rumor I picked up today
from a traveling merchant into smuggling mostly
...
Red Devil and Dream Dust
...
force
knives
...
the usual line...Well he told me
over a glass of khat that in the areas south of here occupied by a
number of ancient decaying city states well there are these creatures
with human heads about the size of a fist
...
and
shimmering insect wings and they stick out from their mouths this
long proboscis
...
which penetrates right to
these special places in the nervous system and sucks all the soul and
spirit right out of the target while he squirms and shrieks in the
deadly pleasures of the proboscis. These creatures are transparent
like a heat wave, just the outline and the colors that flush through
them and you can hear the whir of wings hovering over you. Once
that proboscis gets into you it's curtains. A young soldier who was
rescued in time said it was like all the best comes he ever had all
rolled into sweet liquid gold in his nuts. "She was killing
me and I knew it and I loved it...
"

The Colonel
shuddered and put the area off limits to all personnel. We call
the critter Andy since it can assume the form of either sex. The
chemistry dept is trying to come up with a viable repellent. Since
the proboscis is composed of some substance much more rarefied than
ordinary organic or inorganic substance, no suit or space suit could
provide protection against penetration on a molecular level...

My informant also
told me that the "honey" so collected was stored in the
body of Andy and was used to feed scorpion larvae of a particular
breed of scorpion incomparably venomous, one hundredth of a drop
causes death by internal combustion. These scorpions are prized by
the nobles as bodyguards, a certain whistle conveying the attack
order.

The Colonel
shuddered some more
...
he gestured to
the south. "All those stinking little kingdoms down there, God
knows what goes on...I say we should knock them off one after the
other before they find some devilish way to get rid of us...
"

I want to visit this
southern area. It sounds like my sort of thing.

Kim is in a station
wagon driving east. Guy Graywood is at the wheel. No words are
spoken. To the south a low dark sky...Much lower than earth. Wind
behind us, clouds scudding east...a long skinny shape races across
the sky faintly illuminated from behind by a green purple light all
rather like the high-school play
...
music
from
The Isle of the Dead.
They pass a house of red brick
smooth as if the bricks have fused together under great pressure. The
house has a passageway through the middle and you can see it is only
six feet from front to back. No sign of anyone in or around the
house, which sits there in a block of palpable darkness, a dark black
red like rotten blood. On the right side of the road are some
buildings. We stop and get out. We have business here. A call to
make. A door opens on a narrow corridor with another door at the end.
Kim observes that the doors and walls are compacted layers like
plywood and that they have a malevolent life of their own, snapping
open and shut, you can get lost in a maze of doors and corridors,
steps going up to nowhere, steps going down to a dead end as a
heavy door slams shut behind you. Have to stick to your objectives. A
door at the end of the corridor opens.

Kim is standing in
the doorway of a room about eighteen feet long by twelve feet wide.
There are sand troughs in the floor and paths around the troughs at
the sides and one path down the middle. At the end of the room is
another door. The room is full of light from windows in the far wall.
In the sand troughs are naked men with bald heads, dead gray skin, a
soft boneless look. They are all small, dwarfs actually. Their gray,
faceted eyes keep darting about in agitation. They wallow in the sand
with galvanic sloughing movements, their bulbous gray foreheads like
egg sacs, from time to time a black claw moves inside. Other gray
dwarfs wearing tunics, who seem to be the overseers, move about on
the walkways, pass in and out of the door at the back...

Kim remembers a reek
of evil. In the middle of a red-carpeted room a plot of ground
about six feet square where hideous bulbous plants are growing.
Centipedes are crawling about and from beneath a rock protrudes the
head of a huge centipede. Kim arms himself with a cutlass. Graywood
stands by with a crowbar. Kim kicks the rocks over and the centipede
digs deeper, he can see that it is at least three feet long and
that the plant roots stir like centipede legs, part plant and part
insect...He wakes up shivering with horror because he knows these
hideous insect plants and giant centipedes were once (an evil
old-woman voice tinkles in his brain)

"silly little
boys like you."

He walks back along
the corridor through several doors and up some narrow stairs and
comes out onto an open hillside. Two hundred yards away across a
limestone court he can see a waterfront promenade. Someone from
inside the building says,

"He won't leave
without his friend." And Guy comes out in green slacks and a
gray shirt. I point to the promenade, the trees and the sea beyond.

"Run!"

Relief to be out of
that place like a breath of air in suffocation. A hieroglyphic
inscription lights up in his brain. They fell down on their faces in
land their own.

He flashes back to
the trough building. He goes down to the trough room. One of the
overseers comes at him, hands and fingers outstretched. Kim puts
up his hands palm out and arrests the dwarf. Leaves him frozen there,
hands stretched out. He walks back to the door that leads to the exit
where he encounters a giant twelve feet tall, rather thin with a
triangular face and peaked cap. The giant is wearing a brocade coat
and pants of black satin with white and yellow brocade. He seems
friendly. Another dwarf pops out through a door. Kim engages. The
dwarf snaps back through the door, leaving a stink of insect evil...