Waiting for the Galactic Bus Read online

  Waiting for

  the Galactic Bus

  Parke Godwin

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 0-385-24635-8

  LCCN: 87-33069

  Copyright © 1988 by Parke Godwin

  All rights reserved

  These ePub, Mobi and LIT editions v1.0 by Dead^Man November 2011

  dmebooks at live dot ca

  Jacket illustration © 1988 Chris Hopkins

  Jacket design by Jamie S. Warren

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  To Marvin Kaye,

  for more Incredible Umbrellas

  Charity, by way of prologue

  I – Sort of Genesis

  1 – This was a real nice clam bake...

  2 – Killing time: genius ad lib

  3 – The serpent’s gift

  4 – Topside/Below Stairs

  5 – Management problems among the mad

  6 – Slouching toward Plattsville

  7 – A conspiracy of princes

  8 – The hero is the one who just wants to finish his drink and go home

  9 – H hour minus one

  10 – The woman taken in adultery, and other set pieces

  II – The Eduction of Charity Mae Stovall

  11 – One man’s media...

  12 – Prometheus in Dolby

  13 – Yonder lies the castle of my father

  14 – Enter Nemesis, pursuing

  15 – Aryans in the fast lane

  16 – Problems of the whore/madonna syndrome (Aryans at the half-mast)

  17 – Faith, hope and Charity Stovall

  18 – This can’t be hell, the plumbing works

  19 – Money can’t buy happiness, but why not be miserable in comfort?

  20 – The late, late show

  21 – Doing the Reichstag rag

  22 – The rewards of faith and their avoidance

  23 – The clear vistas of paranoia

  24 – Romanticism as theology: Is there hope for the spiritual drunk?

  25 – Meanwhile, back at reality...

  26 – A rescue! A rescue!

  III – Banalities

  27 – Judas with strings

  28 – Everyone comes to the Banal

  29 – The treadmills of your mind

  30 – Barion explains; it doesn’t help

  31 – Roy Stride and the First Amendment

  32 – Blossoms and thorns of the media culture

  33 – All this significance – what does it mean?

  34 – The catsup factor

  35 – The higher education of Roy Stride

  36 – Perks for the upwardly mobile

  37 – Doom at the top

  38 – The new, the terrible and the maybes

  39 – Back to the drawing board...

  About the Author

  Charity, by way of prologue

  Charity Mae Stovall spent her childhood in a county orphanage. Yearning for a mother or any kind of palpable parent, she sublimated in adolescence to a rigid Christianity. Charity was — and still is — a highly intelligent young woman, although for her first twenty years she never thought herself acute in this regard, nor was the quality noted by the school system that passed her through its portals and curricula without a second glance. Since she didn’t read much and no one ever required her to think, Charity’s potential remained a string unsounded in the decaying factory town of Plattsville.

  She was very active in the house of her chosen faith, the Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior, where she accompanied congregational hymns on the hammer-worn piano, was wooed by an aggressive young man named Roy Stride and, to a more retiring extent, by Roy’s self-effacing friend, Woody Barnes. Woody furnished trumpet obbligato for these musical effusions. He played well, Charity with more precision than talent. She was a Fundamentalist and earnest about it, distributing leaflets for the removal from libraries of harmful books like The Wizard of Oz and The Diary of Anne Frank. On a personal basis, Oz didn’t do much for Charity one way or the other, though she did wonder why the Tabernacle was against Anne Frank. Outside of her being a Jew, the day-to-day life and thoughts of Anne were pretty much like her own at thirteen. Nevertheless, Reverend Simco thundered against it as an alien blot on a Christian land already imperiled. Dutifully, Charity demonstrated against an abortion clinic, opposed the teaching of evolution as a dastardly onslaught of secular intellect upon defenseless children and believed herself a direct descendant of Adam.

  Not entirely without justification.

  Barion found her earliest direct ancestor by a Pliocene water hole, a creature with no likeness to Adam other than health, appetite and uncertainty. Unlike Adam, the ape was quite savage. Anything outside its immediate family group was a dangerous enemy. The crucial difference in this primate, for Barion’s purposes, was a brain verging on but not quite ready to be called a mind. In this regard, the creature had much in common with its descendant, Charity Mae Stovall.

  I

  SORT OF GENESIS

  1

  This was a real nice

  clambake...

  Without question the grandest party of a brilliant season. Racketing across the universe through the myriad clusters of stars, across the dark void between galaxies, like a gleaming silver tear glistening on black velvet, the end-of-term celebration became an unbridled riot of the senses for the self-conscious students. On young worlds they bathed in the scarlet splendor of volcanoes, rhymed solemnly to each other and made love in the cold light of moons drawn close to dying mother worlds, dove headlong through the chromospheres of small suns to prolong their high on rarefied gases. They basked and swam in plasma-soupy primordial seas gravid with life to come; roared drunk in a perverse course counter to a slow-wheeling galaxy to reach the outer whorl simply because it was there and looked lovely; came to rest finally on a green savanna in an atmosphere so oxygen-rich that it shot their high even higher and they changed form again to complement it. No one expected a school’s-out party to make much sense, not in this generation at least.

  A magnificent time — yet Sorlij was bored.

  They were the purest and most sublime of sentient life forms: energy to matter to energy at will. Where their kind passed, less advanced creatures called them gods. This generated wise laws among the mature and in jokes among snotty adolescents like Barion and Coyul.

  They were neither gods nor the only advanced mutable form, as the recent war had proven. Certain developments might have been predicted by far less advanced cultures, particularly the war’s effect on the young. After the inconclusive hostilities, the anthropoid form became a dissident movement among students. Thinking themselves the first to be disillusioned and sold down the cosmos by craven elders, they brazenly adopted any lifestyle and form disapproved by the retiring generation. They transported blithely in their glittering, half-ethereal ships to any planet that pleased them and cavorted on two legs or three as the fancy took them.

  Why not? Bodies were fun. They opened a whole new spectrum of sensory highs. Sexual possibilities were narrow and local but with interesting side effects. They found it a real kick to chew certain green leaves with actual teeth and feel the profound effect on a finite being, and if you overdosed, you could always dissolve to energy state to detoxify. Some substances were very dangerous; you had to identify the onset of physical death before coma set in. You could actually die, and some loved to see how close they could come before winking safely back to energy. Fun, danger, uncertainty, courage. Works of art perpetrated in this perilous state were considered ultim
ate truth. A few extremists formed death pacts, left bad verse in farewell and went all the way.

  Older academics considered the anthropoid form an unprofitable dead end for study. The new generation loved being decadent and lost, reveled in irony and romantic self-pity, created sad or savage music like that of Coyul, Barion’s bratty little brother. In the bizarre four-limbed form they leaned together, murmured solemn verities, felt doomed and dramatic or glittered defiantly in radical chic.

  Though all this could pale. Sorlij, the class leader, was terribly bored. The party was coming down from its high, scattered about the moist grass, too exhausted now even for the queer, comic form of lovemaking peculiar to the bipedal body. They should start home. A long way, Sorlij remembered fuzzily, five galaxies away... or was it six?

  “Which way did we come?” he asked about. No one remembered.

  Meanwhile the party languished. Sorlij’s pet hates, Barion and Coyul, were not fun drunks. The brothers were not even of the graduating class, sophomores in every sense of the word, but well connected and precocious. A few of the seniors had thrilled for a moment to Barion’s poetry —

  “It sings! It soars!”

  — and someone else twittered over Coyul’s music and flip cynicism. The brothers were invited along over Sorlij’s objections. He could always pass on Barion’s poetry and interests which centered unhealthily on the possibilities of the anthropoid form. The main thrust of all their studies was life-seeding on new worlds, but Barion seemed obsessed with the one creature far beyond the limits of fashion or fad. Anyone else would be laughed at or disciplined. Barion, the spoiled darling of prominent family, would probably win the coveted first prize in genetic science that should go to Sorlij for his work in marine life forms. To most observers, Barion’s faults were drowned in his alleged charm, and Sorlij politely detested him.

  As for Coyul, Sorlij considered him a mere added irritant. His ennui and affected decadence could wear on you, especially if those poses had only recently been renounced in one’s self. Nothing galled so much as yesterday’s follies worn today by someone else.

  “The green shoot plays the autumn leaf,” Sorlij quipped, not above an epigram himself.

  He gazed about at his friends lounging about the grassy slope and found his favorite, Maj, whose radical concepts in the anthropoid form had prompted her to assume something dramatic for the occasion: a scarlet mer-seductress with a broad tail that changed colors with Maj’s every whim.

  “Stroke my fin?” she invited Sorlij.

  “Maj, I think it’s time to go home.”

  “Oh, not yet. The party’s a huge success.”

  “Before it becomes tedious.”

  Maj covered a delicate yawn with cerise fingers. “There’s that, yes. Time to go, everyone. Don’t have to be sober, just mobile.” Her mer-tail flirted suggestively at Sorlij and became a remarkable pair of female legs. “Shall we?”

  One by one the party let go of physical shape and became daubs of silver light against the green and amber of late afternoon, flowing toward their ship. All but Barion and Coyul, prostrate on the grass. Sorlij lingered in substance to prod them with a custodial toe.

  “Up, you two. We’re going home.”

  Coyul hiccupped, rumbled somewhere in an unaccustomed digestive tract and passed out again.

  “Barion! Gather up your unspeakable brother and bring him to the ship. Time to leave.”

  The young man turned over, labored up on one elbow. “Leave?” he said thickly. “Ridiculous.”

  Sorlij booted him again. “Party’s over. Come on.”

  Barion pronounced with drunken care, “It has just begun.” He gouged double handfuls of grass from the moist earth and flung them high. “Rich with promise and oxygen, new-made creatures pattering, thundering toward destiny. Primates... what’s the literal meaning of ‘primate’ in our tongue? ‘Those who look up.’ Utter par-hic-adise.”

  Sorlij hauled him to his feet, on which Barion swayed like a tree about to fall. His chosen physical form was advanced primate. Millions of years later on this same world the image would be described as Byronic.

  “I would take this birthing world into my hands” — Barion tried to focus on them — “and through my fingers run the saltwaters of oceans, the grains of earth, a cosmos of thought...”

  “Meanwhile, let’s go home.”

  “... teach my creations to see the atom and through it to the larger worlds, galaxies within: one vast, concerted, soaring purpose...” Barion trailed off, wilting down onto the grass like a garment fallen from a hanger. “Soon’s I get a nap.”

  “Serve you both right to be left here,” Sorlij muttered. He nudged Coyul again. One bleary eye opened and found him. “We’re going. Come on. You’ll have to carry Barion to the ship.”

  “Abs’lutely. Common sense to the rescue.” Coyul rolled over beside his unmoving brother, studied him and then Sorlij. “The lovely thing about being drunk: I don’t have t’listen to him or look at you. My dear brother,” Coyul mumbled on the verge of maudlin tears. “He believes all that cosmic-poetical nonsense, y’know.”

  Coyul squinted up at Sorlij with drunken malice and apparently came to a decision. Lurching erect somehow, he balled the novelty of his right hand into a clumsy fist. “I know you don’t like him, but he’s never been hurt. Which, as of this moment, is more than I can say for you.”

  Coyul launched a roundhouse right at Sorlij. Unused to real muscles, he aimed the blow where Sorlij’s mouth was supposed to be. His target merely dissolved. Coyul passed through thin air, went down on his face and stayed there.

  “All right,” Sorlij huffed, a little shaken by the sudden violence that recalled too sharply everything he disliked about the irresponsible siblings. “So be it. For once you two can get your precious selves out of trouble. Just stay here a while and cool off. I’m sick of you both.”

  “Where are the boys?” he was asked at the ship.

  “They don’t feel like coming.” Sorlij bit off the words. “Frankly, I don’t care. I don’t want to be bothered with them now.”

  Maj tittered at the prospect. “That’s amusing. Imagine them waking up with nothing to do until we come for them.”

  The notion caught on immediately. “Doomed!”

  “Alone.”

  “No one to impress but monkeys.”

  The whole thing was a lark. After all, someone would return sooner or later. They were all still too partied out to care. Anyway, what harm could come to the brothers on a world where the highest form of life was an undersized primate? Crossing the orbit of the system’s frozen outermost planet, more immediate problems beset them.

  “I’ve been in some unfashionable neighborhoods,” their navigator observed, “but this is really obscure, not even on our charts. Anyone remember where we came out of jump?”

  No one did. They hadn’t cared much about directions coming out, though in a curved, finite universe, they couldn’t stay lost forever. On the other hand, the volunteer navigator was less than expert.

  They landed many times on the way home, mostly for a change of scene, knowing certain systems to be in varying stages of civilization. After some bad experiences, they became discreet about asking directions. On worlds where they were not understood, the higher life forms proclaimed them deities, wrote sacred works, promulgated dogma on what they were supposed to have said, and flattered them with the sacrifice of surplus population. Where they were understood, the natives tried to sell them trinkets, real estate and surplus daughters.

  “Thank you, no,” they declined, “we’re just passing through...”

  “Unless perhaps you have a son with four arms,” suggested Maj, who was quite jaded.

  As their near-immortal kind went, they were not appreciably older when they found a familiar sun for reference, but the universe was. By then, no one even faintly remembered or cared much where they’d left Barion and Coyul.

  Shortly after their return, a conservative administration c
ame to power. Trends altered, youth no longer flamed. The few post-adolescent gatherings in the now unfashionable human form looked merely anachronistic. Primate studies languished. The family and friends of Barion and Coyul found themselves less well connected than before, though it was understood that Sorlij would have to return for the boys since he knew the way. More or less. Sooner or later.

  Meanwhile Sorlij’s discipline became high-priority for a newly discovered batch of sea worlds, his academic star in the ascent.

  “Of course you’ll go back for them one of these days, no question. But now, dear boy — how do you like advanced studies?”

  2

  Killing time: genius ad lib

  Barion stood on the brow of a low hill, seven feet tall, idealized in every fine-chiseled feature, a time bomb of idealism. Eons later in the Age of Romance, this likeness would inspire a plethora of sonnets by repressed ladies who played the spinet and reproduced parthenogenically by thinking of England. A little later, Whitman would write much the way Barion presently conceived existence. By then Barion would be more restrained in taste and method, but the errors of early enthusiasm would be irreversible.

  He felt buoyant this primal morning, breathing deeply of the oxygen-rich air and the heady impurities exhaled by this fecund planet. On the flatland below, a mild breeze stirred the tall savanna grass — no, not breeze but movement. A small group of the fascinating primates noted yesterday: two males, three females, shambling through the high grass in search of food, physical differences barely discernible under the silky black hair that covered most of their body.

  Their stereoscopic vision and acute color perception would register Barion as alien. Yes; they saw him and halted. Barion faded to energy phase, moving closer. With nothing to see or smell, the primates went on foraging. Barion concentrated on one of the males turning over a stone in search of grubs. It had no forehead at all, merely a thick supraorbital ridge of bone. The brain was almost entirely instinct.