William S. Burroughs (5 page)

Kim occupies himself
with his sketches and maps, poems and stories. He'd written a story
he wanted to publish in
Boy's Life.
It was, he thought, very
educational, entitled "The Baron Says These Things."

THE
BARON SAYS THESE THINGS

Wrapped in a living
cloak of fur-bearing oysters, the Baron rides his swift Arn. The Arn
is like a streamlined turtle with a shell of light flexible
metal that serves as a means of locomotion and also as a weapon.
Their claws are razor-sharp and they can strike six feet with a
bullet-shaped head to ram or slash. On this remote satellite of the
Dog Star, Arn fighting is an esteemed art. The cloak lovingly
outlines the Baron's lean form, the narrow waist, the flaring
buttocks, the powerful thighs. The neck supports a broad jaw. The
Baron leans forward, knees bent like a skier, his long sharp teeth
glinting in icy starlight. His eyes are like black opals. He wears a
wicker headdress from which the hood of a spitting cobra protrudes.
He is scanning the path ahead with a blue laser beam from his third
eye.

The long night is
coming and he must find a pod for the Ordinate Sleep. He has picked
up a pod but there is something wrong, some lurking danger. It is
just off the path. He guides his Arn into a courtyard and a Greenie
steps forward to bed down his Arn and put his cloak in a nutrient
solution. He removes his headdress and hands it to the Greenie,
petting the reptile, which emits a servile hiss, rubbing its
green furred head against his hand. The Greenie leans forward to
take the headdress, his breath heavy and rank as the exhalation from
a greenhouse in the icy air. "Be careful, sir."

As the Baron
squeezes his naked body through a diaphragm in the side of the pod,
the clinging mucilaginous passage rubs and excites his genitals.
On the satellite Fenec, the penis is not confined to a sexual
function but serves as a general means of social communication.
To enter a public pod without an erection is an act of gross
aggression, like coming in with a snarling dog.

As he pops through
into the soft pink light of the pod his lightning reflexes are
already activated before he hears the foreign voices scream out:

"What the
fuck are you doing in front of decent people?"

He throws up a
protective shield, deflecting projectiles from primitive
exploding weapons as he cuts his assailants to steaming fragments
with his laser eye. He looks down at the badges and
weapons
...
B.B.s
...
Bible
Belts. Barbarians from Planet Earth. The thought forms that had for a
moment been solid are fading. The Baron throws himself petulantly on
the padded floor of the pod.

"People of such
great stupidity and such barbarous manners...Intolerable!"

A total solution to
the B.B. problem must be found. The war must be carried to Planet
Earth. He knows that the B.B.s are a minority and he will find many
potential allies. Allies must be contacted and organized. A plan
is forming in his mind. In response to his peremptory erection the
Greenie appears with a glass of Schmun.

"Sorry about
that, sir. I'm not equipped for such encounters."

The Baron sips his
Schmun, looking speculatively at the young Greenie. These
creatures breathe in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen from the
pores of their skin.

"I want to
sleep with you."

The Greenie youth
blushes bright green with pleasure.

"Oh sir, of
course."

During the three
months of the long night they will curl in the tiny pod in dreamy
symbiosis.

The Baron stretches,
takes a deep breath of the warm dank compost-heap smell, and squeezes
out of the pod. It is now spring. Time to continue his journey to
Summer City. The Greenie hastens to prepare him a meal of fuel eggs.
The eggs are laid by radioactive reptiles that inhabit the
coldest regions of the planet in an area of total darkness. The eggs
glow with a soft blue fire as the Baron savors the sweet nutty eggy
metallic taste. After a go with his Greenie he straps on his
summer Arns and puts on his cobra headdress. The reptile is tumescent
with venom. The Baron will not need his cloak for this is the season
of nakedness.

The fuel egg is
working and he straps on a penis shield connected to a jet over the
anus. The first coughing spurts soon settle into a steady blue flame
carrying him along at a thirty-mile speed. Suddenly he finds himself
surrounded by a crowd of frenzied B.B.s, some carrying ropes and many
with the primitive projectile guns. Scorning to use his laser
eye he engages them in a classic Am fight, jetting around in circles,
kicking sideways with his Arn as the heads lash like loaded whips and
his cobra sprays venom in all directions. A drop the size of a
pinprick on the skin will cause death in a few seconds. The posse of
B.B.s is a mass of steaming entrails, blood, brains, and shattered
bone already fading into nothingness.

He comes to Summer
Lake and now the Arns spread their retractable wings as he turns the
jet up full blast and skims over the water like a hovercraft. His ass
is sputtering out the last of the fuel as he glides to the pier.

Summer City slopes
down to the lake and spills into the water in a maze of piers and
catwalks and disk-shaped houseboats. The Baron checks his jet strap
and releases his Arns to disport themselves in the water. The long
sleep and the fuel eggs have made him hot. He can taste sweet metal
in his mouth and his ass burns with soft fire. At the foot of the
pier he encounters a group of Sloane porters with red skin and bright
blue eyes. They flex their huge muscles and bare their teeth in
greeting and invitation...

"HI HI HI HI HI
HI HI HI"

The Baron is tempted
but he knows that the cadets have arrived from Planet Earth and
he must see to their training without delay.

On the waterfront he
runs into two boys who must be from the Planet Earth. They are
strolling along in white naval uniforms. One is red-haired, the other
has kinky hair and yellow-brown skin.

"You are the
cadets from Planet Earth?"

"Yeah. Nice
place you got here but where are the women?"

"Women? What is
that?"

"You know.
WOMEN." The boy makes a gesture in the air.

The Baron gets the
picture and turns into a naked woman with long red hair, skin
like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights.

"WOW!"

He leads the boys
into a sex pod and satisfies them both three times. In the course of
this encounter he learns a great deal about conditions on Planet
Earth. The B.B.s are completely possessed by a Venusian virus. The
whole Christian religion, Catholic and Protestant, is a Venusian
ploy.

Later he addresses
the fifteen cadets. To put them at ease he takes the form of Old
Sarge:

"All right, you
jokers, you're here to learn and learn fast. Your planet is riddled
by the walking dead taken over by a Venusian virus. I will show you
how to recognize these virus-controlled bodies. Many of them are
Christians. In fact Christianity is the most virulent spiritual
poison ever administered to a disaster-prone planet."

"You mean,
Sarge, that most of the trouble on Earth is caused by Venusians in
human bodies?"

"Now you're
getting smart."

"Wouldn't it be
a good idea to kill these mothers?"

"Now you're
getting smarter. You are here to learn the theory and practice of
Shiticide. Boys will be organized into Shit Slaughter troops
...
the
S.S., with two phosphorescent spitting cobras at their lapels...

"Slaughter
the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe.
"

"But sir,
aren't the B.B.s and their equivalents in other countries, the
bigoted ignorant basically frightened middle class, just dupes
and lackeys of the very rich and the politicians, exploited for votes
and labor and the consumption of consumer goods while they also serve
as convenient guard dogs to protect the status that benefits the
very rich?"

"Yes, but they
are still vectors, carriers of the virus. How do you control
yellow fever? You kill the mosquitoes first, right? Now some vectors
are more potent than others. Look at Jesus Christ for chris-sakes. As
an integral part of the Shiticide Program master vectors will be
pinpointed and assassinated...You gentlemen and the trainees who
follow you are chosen to be the elite, the masterminds of the
glorious S.S."

And Kim composed a
marching song for the Johnsons:

Wenn
scheissen Blut von Messer spritz

Denn
geht schon alles gut

(When
shit blood spurts from the knife

Then
everything is good)

Quite stirring, he
thought...

And the Song of the
Vagabonds could be adapted.

Sons
of toil and danger

will
serve you a stranger?

Sons
of shame and sorrow

will
you cheer tomorrow?

Kim stands
resplendent in his Shit Slaughter uniform with a cobra S.S. on each
lapel, they glow in the dark. Johnsons to the sky, all in S.S.
uniform. They roar out the Johnson marching song.

Kim raises his hand
and silence falls like a thunderclap:

"We're not
fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings
hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The
Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our
brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives.
It's ours and we're going to take it.

"And we are not
applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets
in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a
tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog."

Kim sees himself as
the legendary raccoon who killed a whole pack of dogs before he
succumbed to his wounds...The raw red reek of deadly combat
...
his
eyes light up inside with green fire, the hairs on his back stand up
and crackle
...
his claws lash out with the
speed of a striking snake to rip out an eye, tear off a screaming
muzzle...A dog sinks its teeth into his flank. He rolls on his back,
whimpering piteously...Two inexperienced young dogs rush forward
sincerely. You know the type
...
volunteers
...
the
old coon tears their steaming guts out with his hind claws and makes
a break for the river. Here he takes out three more dogs, sitting on
their backs and clawing their eyes out. He takes time to eat one eye
with his dainty paw as the drowning dog sinks out from under him. He
is losing blood. He swims for shore and confronts the last dog on a
sandbar, a huge brute composite of mastiff and Irish wolfhound. As
the dog's teeth close on his throat the coon's deadly claws go to
work. He leaves the dog spinning in circles and snapping at
intestines as they spill out. The old coon walks fifty feet and drops
dead bleeding from twenty-three wounds
...
That
coon weighed fifty pounds.

And Kim was trying
to re-create a story he had read somewhere years ago
...
he
couldn't remember where or when, title or writer, just a flash
of pulp paper and lurid illustrations. The hero, John, was on a
mining expedition somewhere in Central or South America. They cross a
frontier
...
a twang like an invisible
bow that vibrated through him with exquisite pain...

He and his
companions find themselves in a beautiful lush landscape, flowering
shrubs, vines, and trees, rivers and meadows, but there is
something overripe, a whiff of rottenness and corruption, a dark
undercurrent of menace and evil. His companions, it seems, are
utter dolts, crude grasping creatures rooting about for gold and
gems. He hears strange wild music. And now a creature bursts into
view with a horrible unknown stench. It is a man from the waist up
and below that a giant spider covered with red hairs. The
creature looks about, grinding its mandibles in panic. Now the
Hunters appear, led by the Lords in red satin robes with gold
threads. They float just above the ground. The spider man is hiding
behind some bushes on the edge of a great cliff. One of the Lords
takes an ivory wand from his belt. The wand twitches like a dowser
stick pointing to where the spider man is hiding. The Lord
glides forward and touches the spider man with his wand,
dislodging the creature's hold, and the spider man plummets into the
abyss with a despairing scream that raises the hair on our hero's
head. Then the Lord turns and looks at him. The face is smooth and
yellow like amber, encrusted with layers of cruelty and
corruption and a cold dead evil that freezes the blood.