A Bowl Bigger Than Earth, Page 2

  Yes, he was free to discuss any subject as long as it did not concern We-Know-Where. Talking of that place led to discussions of -- forgive the term -- one's former identity and prestige. Besides, controversial subjects migbt arise and so lead to antisocial behavior.

  Yes, this place was not constructed, physically, like We-Know-Where. The sun might be a small body; some eggheads had estimated it to be only a mile wide. The sun orbited around the strip, which was composed of the slides, two rivers and the city between the rivers, all of wbioh hung in space. There was some speculation that his place was in a pocket universe, the dimensions of wbioh were probably not more than fifty miles wide and twenty high. It was shaped like an intestine, closed at one end and open at the other to infinity -- maybe.

  At this point, the O.D. cautioned Morfilcs about the perils of intellectual speculation. "This cou1d be a misdemeanor or felony. In any event, eggheadedness was to be avoided. Pretending to be brainier than your neighbor, to question the unquestionable, was unegalitarian.

  "There's no worry about that," Morfiks said. "If there's anything hateful and despicable, it's eggheadedness."

  "Congratulations on skill in avoiding the personal," said the O.D. "We'll get along fine here."

  III

  They entered an immense building in which citizens were sitting on brass benches and eating off brass tables running the length of the bui1ding. The O.D. told Morfiks to sit down and eat. Afterwards, Morfiks could get to his new home, No. 12634, by asking directions. The O.D. left, and a citizen on K.P. served Morfiks soup in a big brass bowl, a small steak, bread and butter, salad with garLic dressing and a pitcher of water. The utensils and cup were of brass.

  He wondered where the food came from, but before he could ask, he was informed by a citizen on his right that he was not holding the spoon properly. After a few minutes of instruction and observation, Morfiks found himself able to master etiquette as practiced here.

  "Having the same table manners as everybody else makes a citizen a part of the group," said the instructor. "If a citizen eats differently, then a citizen is impolite. Impoliteness is antisocial. Get it?"

  "Got it," said Morfiks.

  After eating, he asked the citizen where he could locate No. 12634.

  "We'll show us," said the citizen. "We live near that number."

  Together, they walked out of the hall and down the street. The sun was near the horizon now. Time must go faster, be thought, for it did not seem to him that he had been here for more than a few hours. Maybe the Protectors sent the sun around faster so the days would be shorter.

  They came to No. 12634, and Morlik's guide preceded him through swinging batwing doors into a large room with luminescent walls. There was a wide couchbed of the violet rubbery substance, several chairs cut out of solid blocks of the same stuff and a brass table in the center of the room. In one corner was a cubicle with a door. He investigated and found it to be the toilet. Besides the usual sanitary arrangements, tho cubicle contained a shower, soap and four cups. There were no towels.

  "After a shower, step outside, dry off in the sun," the guide said.

  It looked at Morfiks for such a long time that Morfiks began to get nervous. Finally, :the guide said, "I'll take a chance you're a pretty good Joe. What was your name on Earth?"

  "John Smith," said Morfiks.

  "Play it cool, then," the guide said. "But you were a man? A male?"

  Morfiks nodded, and the guide said, "I was a girl. A woman, I mean. My name was Billie."

  "Why tell me this?" he demanded suspiciously.

  Billie came close to Morfiks and put her hands on his shoulders.

  "Listen, Johnny boy," she whispered. "Those bastards think they got us behind the eight ball by putting us into these neuter bodies. But don't you believe it. There's more than one way of skinning a cat, if you know what I mean."

  "I don't," Morfiks said.

  Billie came even closer; her nose almost touched his. A face in a mirror.

  "Inside, you're just the same," said Billie. "That's one thing They can't change without changing you so much you're no longer the same person. If They do that, They aren't punishing the same person, are They? So, you wouldn't exist any more, would you? And being here wouldn't be fair, would it?"

  "I don't get it," Morfiks said. He took a step backwards; Billie took a step forwards.

  "What I mean is, you and me, we're still male and female inside. When They, whoever They are, stripped off our old bodies, They had to leave us our brains and nervous systems, didn't They? Otherwise, we'd not be ourselves, right? They fitted our nervous systems into these bodies, made a few adjustments here and there, like shortening or increasing nerve paths to take care of a stature different than the one you had on Earth. Or pumping something inside our skulls to take care of brains being too small for the skulls They gave us."

  "Yeah, yeah," Morfiks said. He knew what Billie was going to propose, or he thought he did. He was breathing hard; a tingle was running over his skin; a warmth was spreading out from the pit of his stomach.

  "Well," said Billie, "I always heard that it was all in your head. And that's true. Of course, there's only so much you can do, and maybe it isn't as good as it was on You-Know-Where. But it's better than nothing. Besides, like they say, none of it's bad. It's all good, some is just better than others."

  "You mean?"

  "Just close your eyes," Billie crooned, "and imagine I'm a woman. I'll tell you how I looked, how I was stacked. And you think about it. Then you tell me how you looked; don't hold anything back, no need to be bashful here, describe everything down to the last detail. And I'll imagine how you were."

  "Think it'll work?" Morfiks said.

  Billie, her eyes closed, softly sang, "I know it will, baby. I've been around some since I came here."

  "Yeah, but what about the punishment?"

  Billie half-opened her eyes and said, scornfully, "Don't believe all that jazz, Johnny boy. Besides, even if They do catch you, it's worth it. Believe me, it's worth it."

  "If only I thought I could put one over on Them," Morfiks said. "It'd be worth taking any risk."

  Billie's answer was to kiss him. Morfiks, though he had to repress revulsion, responded. After all, it was only the bald head that made Billie look like a half-man.

  They struggled fiercely and desperately; their kisses were as deep as possible.

  Suddenly Morfiks pushed Billie away from him.

  "It's worse than nothing," he panted. "I think something's going to happen, but it never quite does. It's no use. Now I feel awful."

  Billie came towards hlm again, saying "Don't give up so easy, honey. Rome wasn't erected in a day. Believe me, you can do it. But you got to have faith."

  "No, I'm licked," Morfiks said. "Maybe if you did look like a woman, instead of just a carbon copy of me. Then . . . no, that wouldn't be any good. I'm just not designed for the job; neither are you. They got us where it hurts."

  Billie lost her half-smile; her face twisted.

  "Where it hurts!" she shrilled. "Let me tell you, Buster, if you can't get your kicks being a man here, you can by hurting somebody! That's about all that's left!"

  "What do you mean?" Morfiks said.

  Billie laughed loudly and long. When she mastered herself, she said,

  "I'll tell you one good thing about looking like everybody else. Nobody knows what you really are inside. Or what you were on Earth. Well, I'll tell you about myself.

  "I was a man!"

  Morfiks sputtered. His fists clenched. He walked towards Billy.

  But he did not strike her . . . him . . . it.

  Instead, he smiled, and he said, "Well, let me tell you something. My real name was Juanita."

  Billy became pale, then red.

  "You . . . you!"

  The next few days, Morfiks spent four hours each morning on the building of new houses. It was easy work. The walls and sections of the roof were brought in on wagons of brass pulled by citizens.
Supervised by foremen, the laborers raised the walls, secured the bottoms to the brass foundation of the city with a quick-drying glue and then fastened the walls together by gluing down strips of the violet stuff at the corners of the walls.

  Morfiks took his turn being a foreman for one day after he had gotten enough experience. He asked a citizen where the material for the houses and the rubber and the glue came from.

  "And where's the food grown?"

  The citizen looked around to make sure no one could hear them.

  "The original brass sheets and rubber are supposed to have originated from the blind end of this universe," he said. "It's spontaneously created, flows like lava from a volcano."

  "How can that be?" Morfiks said.

  The citizen shrugged. "How should I know? But if you remember one of the theories of creation back on You-Know-Where, matter was supposed to be continuously created out of nothing. So if hydrogen atoms can be formed from nothing, why not brass and rubber lava?"

  "But brass and rubber are organized configurations of elements and compounds!"

  "So what? The structure of this universe orders it."

  "And the food?"

  "It's brought up on dumbwaiters through shafts which lead down to the underside. The peasants live there, citizen, and grow food and raise some kind of cattle and poultry."

  "Gee, I'd like that," Morfiks said. "Couldn't I get a transfer down there? I'd like to work with the soil. It'd be much more interesting than this."

  "If you were supposed to be a peasant, you'd have been transformed down there to begin with," the citizen said. "No, you're a city-dweller, brother, and you'll stay one. You predetermined that, you know, in You-Know-Where."

  "I had obligations," Morfiks said. What'd you expect me to do, shirk them?"

  "I don't expect nothing except get out of here some day."

  "You mean we can get out? How? How?"

  "Not so loud with that you," the citizen growled. "Yeah, or so we heard, anyway. We never saw a corpse but we heard about some of us dying. It isn't easy, though."

  "Tell me how I can do it," Morfiks said. He grabbed the citizen's arm but the citizen tore himself loose and walked away swiftly.

  Morfiks started to follow him, then could not identify him because he had mingled with a dozen others.

  In the afternoons, Morfiks spent his time playing shuffleboard, badminton, swimming, or sometimes playing bridge. The brass plastic cards consisted of two thicknesses glued together. The backs were blank, and the fronts were punched with codes indicating the suits and values. Then, after the evening meals in the communal halls, there were always neighborhood committee meetings. These were to settle any disputes among the local citizens. Morfiks could see no sense in them other than devices to keep the attendants busy and tire them out so that they would be ready to go to bed. After hours of wrangling and speech-making, the disputants were always told that the fault lay equally on both sides. They were to forgive each other, shake hands and make up. Nothing was really settled, and Morfiks was sure that the disputants still burned with resentments despite their protestations that all was now well with them.

  What Morfiks found particularly interesting was the public prayer -- if it could be called that -- said by the an O.D. before each meeting. It contained hints about the origins and reasons for this place and this life, but was not specific enough to satisfy his curiosity.

  "Glory be to the Protectors, who give us this life. Blessed be liberty, equality and fraternity. Praise be to security, conformity and certainty. None of these did we have on We-Know-Where, O Protectors, though we desired them mightily and strove always without success to attain them. Now we have them because we strove; inevitably we came here, glory be! For this cosmos was prepared for us and when we left that vale of sippery, slidery chaos, we squeezed through the walls and were formed in the template of passage, given these bodies, sexless, sinless, suitable. O Mighty Protectors, invisible but everywhere, we know that We-Know-Where is the pristine cosmos, the basic world, dirty, many-aspected, chaos under the form of seeming order, evil but necessary. The egg of creation, rotten but generative. Now, O Protectors, we are shaped forever in that which we cried for on that other unhappy universe . . ."

  There was more, but most of it was a repetition in different words. Morfiks, sitting in the brass pews, his head bowed, looked up at the smooth hemisphere of the ceiling and walls and the platform on which the O.D. stood. If he understood the O.D., he was bound here forever, immortal, each day like the next, each month an almost unvarying image of the preceding, year after year, century after century, millenia after millenia.

  "Stability, Unseen but Everfelt Protectors. Stability! A place for everyone and everyone in a place!"

  The O.D. was saying that there were such things as souls, a configuration of energy which exactly duplicated the body of the person when he had existed on We-Know-Where. It was indetectible by instruments there and so had been denied by many. But when one died there, the configuration was released from the attraction of the body, was somehow pushed from one universe into the next.

  There were billions of these, all existing within the same space as the original universe but polarized and at angles to it. A "soul" went to that universe for which it had the most attraction.

  Indeed, the universe to which it traveled had actually been created by men and women. The total cumulative effect of desire for just such a place had generated this place.

  If Morfiks interpreted the vague statements of the O.D. correctly, the structure of this universe was such that when a "soul" or cohesive energy configuration came through the "walls," it naturally took the shape in which all citizens found themselves. It was like hot plastic being poured into a mold.

  Morfiks dared question a citizen who claimed to have been here for a hundred years. "The O.D. said all questions have been settled, everything is explained. What's explained? I don't understand any more about the origins or reasons for things here than I did on We-Know-Where."

  "So what's new?" the citizen said. "How can you understand the ununderstandable? The main difference here is that you don't ask questions. There are many answers, all true, to one question, and this place is one answer. So quit bugging me. You trying to get me -- uh, us -- into trouble? Hey, O.D.!"

  Morfiks hurried off and lost himself in a crowd before he could be identified. He burned with resentment at the implications of this world. Why should he be here? Sure, on We-Know-Where he had stayed with one company for 20 years, he had been a good family man, a pal to his kids, a faithful husband, a pillar of the best church in the neighborhood, had paid off his mortgages, joined the Lions, Elk, and Moose and the Masonic Lodge, the PTA, the Kiwanis, the Junior Chamber of Commerce and been a hard worker for the Democrats. His father before him had been a Democrat, and though he had had many misgivings about some of the policies, he had always followed the party line. Anyway, he was a right-wing Democrat, which made him practically the same thing as a left-wing Republican. He read the Reader's Digest, Look, Life, Time, Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, and had always tried to keep up with the bestsellers as recommended by the local newspaper reviewer. All this, not because he really wanted it but because he felt he owed it to his wife and kids and for the good of society. He had hoped that when he went "over yonder" he would be rewarded with a life with more freedom, with a number of unlimited avenues for the things he really wanted to do.