Call me Ishmael. You might as well, since I'm a plagiarist. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner, but my real name is Bond, James Bond, and that's not true either. This is not going to be easy to set down.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied and there I go again, caught myself this time but I don't always, what gave it away was that "nineteenth" when I meant to say twentieth.
Try again.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now, except maybe the sound the Nansi flagship made when it leveled Petropavlovsk, although I wasn't there and this is only a guess. The current scream springs from myself, as I have just this moment realized I've read the beginnings to many more stories than I've read endings and I may never get this thing rolling. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these towels must show. You'll have to forgive me; I have an alien artifact lodged in my hippocampus.
Again.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and put more things in each than were dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy. Then one day about six months ago, some of those things, undreamt of by Horatio but not undreamt of by others, dropped down from the heavens and put a hammerlock on earthly commerce. That, at least, begins to sound like my own voice.
More or less.
The Kanamit, the Kzinti, the Tralfamadorians, the Groaci—cacogens all, their name was legion, they called themselves Skreejon, but everyone knew them as Nansi—deterred armed resistance by incising holes in the earth where defense plants had been. Military bases became skating rinks, their smooth glassy surfaces—without a hint of radiation, despite what lay buried beneath—proving suitable for nothing else. The Nansi conquered the earth in less time than it had taken Wells's Martians, and, going the Martians one better, had done it outside a fictional context.
The Nansi announced, drawing an analogy between themselves and nineteenth-century European visitors to Baden-Baden, that they had come to take the waters. They also left behind a book entitled To Serve Man after two of their dignitaries—unless it was one of their dignitaries, sporting two heads—visited the General Assembly, although Dr. Huer tells me that that book was found in The Twilight Zone and not the United Nations. My vivid memories of one of their egg-shaped ships hovering for days over the UN building she ascribes to the paramnesia induced by my hippocampal lodger, coupled with the voluminous reading I did as a child. (She, April Huer, my doctor, my darling, has promised to remove the lodger when conditions permit. She has acquired a scalpel to this end but quells my eagerness by reminding me that she is as much a prisoner here as I am. The Nansi may be gone, but their mechanical guards remain, patrolling the halls with measured tread, their humanlike appearance sheathing death-dealing steel.)
They took the waters. Or at least tried to. Four days after the Nansi vanguard arrived, something enormous appeared in geosynchronous orbit, extruded a pipeline two kilometers in diameter down to the planet's surface, extruded a shaft of equal mass out into space, and began draining the seas. The New York Times correspondent filed from Taprobane, the headline announced INVADERS SUCK, and the Times building was slick and skateable before a second edition could hit the streets…
-30-
(Suction, of course, had nothing to do with it, despite the pipeline's resemblance to a gigantic drinking straw. The water was being lifted via a series of acceleration rings, a method of transport unsuspected by earth-side scientists and unexpected by the first scuba diver to swim accidentally into earth orbit. Said diver went into the water off the coast of Sri Lanka in a search for coral and resurfaced in the belly of the satellite, 22,000 miles up. He opened the door when the first expedition from earth arrived in its shuttle, after the Nansi had made their hasty retreat, and he endeared himself to his rescuers by forbidding their entry until they had wiped their feet. He was diagnosed as having a monumental case of the bends, aggravated by an unvarying diet of fish, and helped not a jot by the superstitious dread his surroundings had induced. Sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, he took his rescuers on a tour of the satellite and unsettled them greatly by genuflecting at all the corridor intersections.)
The invaders were not the victims of drought. Early apologists assumed this, and argued persuasively that the earth could do without the Sea of Japan and Lake Huron, if they were expended to save a dying race. The Nansi, however, were not dying; were not interested in anything less than the sum total of the earth's waters; and would have had all of it within the space of two years at the rate their soda straw was slurping, had they not run afoul of me. Catastrophic climatic changes would have killed all life on earth long before the two years had elapsed, so it was just as well they found the Yoyodyne canister when they did.
Their own world, the third planet of Canopus, was a lush garden spot dripping with rain-forest. At the time of their visit to earth, they were merely touring the Local Group, collecting oceans, the way a lepidopterist might tour a meadow, collecting butterflies.
My own entry into the affair began some two weeks after their pipeline pierced the Indian Ocean.
It was on a bitterly cold and frosty morning during the winter of '97 that I was wakened by a tugging at my shoulder. It was Holmes. The candle in his hand shone upon his eager, stooping face, and told me at a glance that something was amiss. Mainly, that I had jumped the tracks again, that I had ripped the threads off my screw, that I was regurgitating false memories again when I thought I had the damned thing under control.
(April rushes in and consoles me here, massaging my neck as my fingers do spastic things on the processor's keyboard. The odds are too great; I can't get this done; there isn't even any tractor-feed paper for the printer, I've had to use a roll of paper-towels. I must concentrate.)
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
Steady.
As a young man I had resolved to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. To this end I became a certified public accountant, favoring firms that habitually kept two sets of books. I was, by coincidence, the last person to leave the offices of Yoyodyne, a division of General Technics, before those offices and their surrounding factory were reduced to a gaping pit by a salvo from a Nansi cruiser. Yoyodyne, in addition to making a best-selling oven cleaner, was at the time also under GSA contract to supply the armed forces with jellied petroleum. (Jellied petroleum, usually called napalm, inflicts burns; petroleum jelly, usually called Vaseline, heals them. Take care when stocking your medicine cabinet.) Despite their belligerency-scanners having shown the building in bright vermillion, the Nansi soon had cause to regret their abrupt annihilation of the place.
The Nansi scientists took a sample of the ocean they were collecting. It was contaminated to an alarming extent. Whatever we know of the Nansi, we can take it on faith that their home world is not polluted, since their immediate response was to go looking for a saboteur. An empty Yoyodyne canister, which might at one time have contained anything from pesticide to battleship paint, was found floating near the spot where the sample was drawn. The Nansi let their mandibles do the walking, found the number, phoned Yoyodyne, got no response, sent an emissary. The emissary sent back word that 2485 Summit Street was a hole in the ground.
So it was not Holmes who woke me on that bitterly cold morning in the winter of'97 but Egtverchi, an assistant cartographer in the Nansi Bureau of Neural Mapping. I was informed that my own particular pattern of misfiring synapses—a sad, unNansi-like product of alcohol-deadened dendrites—had been recorded as present in the Yoyodyne complex several hours prior to the strike, and that I happened to be the only one of the two verified survivors the Bureau of Neural Mapping had been able to trace. As such, I was being taken in for questioning.
As one who has never been able to believe more than five impossible things before breakfast, I put up a fight, but I was quickly subdued. I awoke an indeterminate time later in this place, which April calls the old Greenwood Sanitarium, but which, under the Nansi, is a place as congenial as Balfour VI, the prison planet where Captain Skyhammer and his men were trapped and cruelly tortured throughout one episode of The E = Mc Squad. (Give me credit for citing a source.)
Their interrogation of me was intense.
Believing an accountant might be carrying information in his head which he was unaware he possessed (or, more likely, which he was aware of but did not know how to assess), Egtverchi and his superiors questioned me relentlessly about Yoyodyne's finances: what was on the books and what was off, what they were buying and who they were firing, who they made contracts with and who walked through the room while I was doing the books, and particularly, did I know the identity of a Yoyodyne employee whose neural pattern had a bronze flare in the center with cilia gules dexter chief on an argent field? On none of which could I provide information which they found satisfactory, especially regarding the last, although as an undergraduate I had cheated on a metaphysics exam by looking into the soul of the boy sitting next to me, only that's a Woody Allen joke and I must stop this! Woody Allen's humor is full of angst; mine is full of Pabst, and I wish I had a bottle right now.
As more and more reports of soiled ocean came in from their scientists, my interrogators became more and more desperate, and at last decided that the information they needed might be buried in my mind at a subconscious level. An attempt would have to be made to extract it using the same mechanical means they had used to learn the location of the rest rooms in NGC4151, a Seyfert galaxy where the locals were understandably jumpy and consequently tight-lipped. (How much of this is misremembered? Some, but the gist is correct. It may not have been rest rooms, it may have been Eldorado, or the Seven Cities of Cibola, or the Paradise World, but accept it, for the moment, as written.) I was trepanned, and a tiny silver sphere was inserted in my brain. I was then resealed and questioned again.
And it all came spilling out.
And hasn't stopped.
In inserting their lodger into my memory complex they apparently short-circuited some of those misfiring synapses which they had so disdained, and rendered it impossible for me to distinguish between fantasy and reality, between what had happened to me, and what had happened to the characters in books and plays and movies I had encountered over the course of a long life of eclectic reading, theater-going, and television-watching. A polygraph would never have said I was lying. Their sophisticated monitoring equipment was baffled as well.
I told them about polywater. I told them that in addition to manufacturing Imipolex G, which was their world-renowned oven-cleaner, and synthesizing Flubber, which was their answer to Neoprene, Yoyodyne was also engaged in a clandestine defense project with the code-name Ice-9, the purpose of which was to create polywater. I told them that polywater, seeded into the world's oceans in even an infinitesimal amount, would expand geometrically, converting ocean water to polywater, and soon engulf the globe with radically altered water molecules. I told them that this altered water would be inimical to life; that it was being developed as the ultimate Doomsday Device by Yoyodyne's Strangelove Division; and that the probable identity of the survivor they had been unable to find, with the bronze flare in his neural pattern, was Doc Savage, a research chemist who had been assigned to the polywater project and whose well-known "Live Free or Die" attitude had manifested itself in the slogan on his car's license plate and was no doubt behind his decision to seed the Atlantic with a canister purloined from the Ice-9 project.
Upon the conclusion of my recitation there was such a clamor among my captors, such a scrambling over subordinate's carapaces in a mad dash for the door, that I could not help but be convinced I had been believed. It was reasonable, since I was unaware I had lied.
The Nansi shut down their ocean-draining machinery, packed up their invasion force, and departed. Behind them they left innumerable skating rinks, an abandoned satellite, and the Greenwood Sanitarium, the latter staffed with androids of such cunning design that the world outside has yet to suspect that a vestige of the Nansi regime remains, mindlessly maintaining a prison for the world's true liberator.
He will get his account finished, however.
He will weed out the involuntary plagiarisms.
He will get it past the guards; he will make sure the right people read it.
He will deliver himself as easily as he has delivered his planet.
* * * * *
"The idea of aliens who are unfamiliar with the concept of fiction is nothing new," says April, my wad of towels in her hand. The towels are designer towels, with a pattern—kitchen condiments—and since the printer is a dot-matrix model, using a typeface designed by the artist Seurat, it has at times been difficult for April to distinguish between my words and the grains of pepper shown falling from the bases of the pepper mills. For this reason, her attempts at critical assessment are suspect.
"We've established that as a child, you watched The Twilight Zone," she says. "I, too, watched it, as did most everybody growing up back then, and I seem to recall an episode featuring Andy Devine—you ever watch Andy's Gang?"
"Never."
"—an episode with Andy Devine, where he's captured by creatures in a flying saucer, and he tells them such tall tales about his abilities as a marksman and a mountain-mover that the aliens high-tail it away, they're so scared. They had never encountered fiction before. Remember it?"
"Not at all."
"And I suppose," she says, pausing dramatically, apparently having spent the morning working this out, "you'll say you've never seen this before!" She whips a magazine out of the folds of her robe and slaps it on the table, a gesture more appropriate to Perry Mason than to Rod Serling. She looks at me for reaction, gets none. The magazine is twelve years old, dated 1984, with a cover illustration as surreal as the moment.
"This," she says, dulling her scalpel by jamming its point into the tabletop, "is a magazine we've had here in the reading room for as long as you've been here. It contains a story entitled Déjà Lu, which you have plagiarized not just in part but in toto, claiming all of its hero's improbable accomplishments for your own."
"I've never seen that magazine before in my life."
"You had to have; the story isn't good enough to have been anthologized. I think it's about time we got that silver ball out of your skull."
April has the crudest mouth.
MNQ/2009.12.20
2,705 Words