RHYTHMIC FRICTION

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

rnby's the name.  I don't wear no cologne.  You wanna catch my left upside your noggin, call me a transcat's tail.  My last client‑-Murder One‑-turned out to be a transcategorical: her scalp was a part of the Horsehead Nebula, her feet were the square root of two, her cuticle was Supernova 1987A, her left breast was from April 17 to July 8 of the year 2297‑-and so forth.  The sockdolager?  I was her tail.  When she wagged, I wiggled.

I am not partial to this sort of action.  Nights, if the transcat I was part of happened to feel restless, I'd wave and shimmy between the sheets.  I could be cross‑examining some skank, left‑handed protein hustler from the asteroid belt, and I'd start to wag.  My clients dwindled.  I drank.  I squashed a few Vandals.

Then I took up causes.  Anything to forget.  Boycott clockwhammers.  Save the vorkils.  Earth for Earthlings.  You name it. When the Rev and his Kelloggites hit the inner planets with their gospel of sexual purity, I guess I was ripe for conversion.  Protect The Unconceived?  Every Spermatazoan Is A Potential Person?  I was the Rev's man, one hundred percent.

That's how I found myself in a half‑second slot at the Beulah County chrono‑clinker.  The John Laws had busted our picket at the Boy Scout Camp in the Sea of Tranquillity.  Those little boys have got an orgone box up there in which they do unspeakable things to themselves‑-in a circle.  I never thought the ultraviolets would have the cajones to buck a statute maven like yours truly, but here I was, squished to a timewall, eyeballing my own fanny.

Was I surprised when the Rev himself showed up to pay my bail?  I just managed to keep my Adam's apple inside my collar.  I knew it couldn't be my cologne.

He was a pale leptosome in the Kelloggite flat black slicker, just like the posters and vidoxes.  "Mr. Arnby?"

"Call me Chuck, Rev.  You gonna spring me from this joint?"

"Sure, Chuck.  I think you can help me in a special way."  The Rev jerked his head into the next minute and summoned the turnkey.  "You!  Here!  Now!"  We were out of there a couple of seconds before they'd locked me in.  The Rev's chauffeur let me into his cushy chrono‑coupe.  I hesitated just a second, trying to remember whether or not it was ca se fait to tip him.

No.

The Rev skipped us about three days in that chrome and platinum baby with the engine in the pluperfect ("where it should be") and we were reclining in adjoining deck chairs on a Kelloggite sloop in synchronous orbit over what used to be the Pacific.  Below, terpene and sulfur dioxide clouds, big nimbi, were swirling and massing like dirty bath water at the plug hole.

"Give me the lowdown, Rev," I said.  "You know I'm your man one hundred percent."

"Have you ever heard of SN 1987A?"

"No, I haven't, but if it's some kind of awful position those tropicals do, I'll be on the picket line tomorrow."

"It's a supernova, Arnby."

"I knew that."

"Yes.  Sanduleak.  Little star in the Magellanics.  It was a blue supergiant when it exploded a couple of hundred thousand years ago, Arnby‑-fifty or sixty thousand parsecs from here.  Light reached Earth in 1987.  Suck a vandal?"

"No thanks.  I'm giving them up."

"Good for you!"  He peeled both packs, warmed them up in his hands as he spoke, then squashed them all over his mouth, staining the deep cleft in his chin violet.  It set me craving, I can tell you, but I hung tight.  He lapped and sucked it all in.  Then he took a deep, happy breath and commenced to lean over me, snoot to snoot, tipping his chaise longue en point.  "What I'm about to tell you is highly sensitive, Arnby."

"I'm a highly sensitive guy."

"Right.  You're a highly dead guy if any of this leaks out.  And so am I."

"Trust me."

"Yes.  SN 1987A was not just an exploding star.  It was‑-is‑-a last ditch effort by the Guardians of our galactic group to save the Milky Way from moral annihilation."

Before I could fully drop my jaw, the Rev's chauffeur floored the accelerator, and we blurred over to a Stone Age cavern.  "We'll have more privacy here," said the Rev.

I shook my head to reconfigure the contents and looked around.  There were casks of Martian zoot‑rot arranged by century in a cabinet carved into the living rock.  On the wall above it was a mural of some beefy quadruped bristling with arrows; it was still wet.  The only light came from a row of torches dipped in meat drippings.  Homey.

We were sitting across from each other at a round, glass table supported by a pretty Venusian slave girl, squatting as if to pee.  She was naked as a full moon.  The table was decked with sweets and aromatics, somewhat occulting the view.  However, I was able to take advantage of our conversation to expressively tilt my head now and then; the resulting librations enabled me to see the Venusian's more fetching qualities refracted through the table top.

I finished dropping my jaw.  "Save the galactic group, huh?  You don't say!"

"My entire public life, Arnby, my ministry, this candidacy, the many campaigns‑-the Guardians have guided me in all of it."

I nodded.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  It didn't matter: suddenly we were over Callisto, the eighth moon of Jupiter, in a small, rotating space station the Rev used for whistle stops.  The walls were stuffed, upholstered naugahyde‑-banana yellow, my fave.  The Venusian girl was still with us; she was pouring me a tumbler of the zoot‑rot, a hella good year.

"Forgive the change of venue, counselor.  Secrecy is essential.  We mustn't be caught at this.  We mustn't be seen."

"Who by?"

"I'll get to that.  The main thing you have to know, Chuck, is that we are at a moment of crisis.  Hundreds of millennia of sacrifice and planning are about to spill into a hanky.  The Guardians arranged the Sanduleak explosion in anticipation of the current situation."

"Current situation?"

"Moral decay.  Depravity."  I had to squint.  Old Sol was just coming into view in the huge quartz window behind the Rev.  "People think what happens in the closet doesn't count, but it does, Chuck.  There are beings who feed off it, winking and licking their cosmic lips, gorging themselves on it, pulsing in rhythm . . . ""

"Start with a 'c'?" I guessed.  "The Cepheids?  Like the ones in the Small Magellanic Cloud?"

"Exactly."  He shot a glance at the Venusian girl, and she decanted a steam blast of zoot‑rot into my tumbler.  "The Magellanic Clouds!  A mass of malevolent stars anchoring our galaxy by the Magellanic Stream‑-a flow of non‑ionized hydrogen gas, a black tide across two hundred thousand light‑years!  When the Cephean puppet masters feel like jerking us around, that's the strings.  That's their path of influence.  They feed off our vital energy, Arnby!  And do you know what keeps them from flying off, dissipating into endless space, leaving us alone?"

"Gravity?"

"No, Chuck.  Think again.  I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with dark matter."

I made a loose fist, positioned it palm upward a hand's span below my navel, and I moved it rhythmically toward and away from my groin‑-the universal sign.

"Exactly."  The Rev looked around nervously.  The Venusian inclined her head forward to see if something new was being required of her, but that wasn't it.  "Let's get out of here.  The walls have psi."

We were huddled in a bathyscaph in shallow tropical waters, and I longed for a change of underwear.  Octopi, rainbow fish, and sluggish creatures in glittering spiral shells danced through sun‑dappled coral.  The chair I sat in, like a burnished throne, was the Venusian girl's buttocks.  The Rev was wearing a jock strap and a doo‑rag.  My drink was half‑empty.

"Good.  It's about eight hundred years ago.  They won't think to look here.  They peep everywhere, Chuck, and everywhen, but there are still some places . . .

"Look,"‑-waxing intimate, leaning in toward me at butt‑horn distance‑-"it is the specific vibration accompanying solitary rhythmic friction, either vulvar or penile, that keeps the Magellanic Cepheids choking us.  Their very existence, and that of the Magellanic Stream that binds our galaxy to theirs is sensitively dependent on IT.  The Big M sustains them."

Across his lean face passed a sneer of the sort that I would give half my frontal lobe to be able to pull off in the courtroom.  "It's them pumping in the rhythm for your friction, like oil to a refinery."

"Oh, yes.  By the way, this is the best zoot‑rot I've ever had.  Do you have a different chair, though?"  She kept shifting her balance under me, and I was afraid of embarrassing myself before the Rev.

"The Guardians were willing to sacrifice anything in order to save us, the Milky Way, you and me, Arnby.  They penetrated deep into the Magellanics to plant the Sanduleak supernova‑-you can't imagine the expense involved in stellarportation.  The idea was to interrupt the, er, frictional activities we have been discussing, but something stopped it."

"What something?"  Think about interstellar distances.

"Law, Chuck, intergalactic law."

"Well, that's it then.  We can't change that."  Never mind the dorsal friction‑-think numbers, lines, paragraphs, sections . . . "Believe you me, Rev, I've been around that block a few times.  So happens, I was the shark who represented the outer planets in the thermal inertia squabble of '047."

"You?"

"Well, a pal of mine.  Never a cleaner case of unjust market manipulation, and he couldn't get to base one."  I'm not here.  I'm somewhere else, somewhere boring and cold.

"Look, Chuck, I know you can do this!  The Cepheans over in the Magellanics have stacked the legislature since before nucleosynthesis.  Secret alliances, back room deals, you name it!  Chuck,"‑-his beefy hand on my shoulder increasing, through its pressure, the shared surface area of my gluteus maximus and that of my Venusian chaise, an unwelcome development‑-"we need you!  You are an Anti‑frictive and a damned good lawyer.  You could plead our case before the Ylemic Congress.  Am I wrong, Chuck?"

"You're right, Rev!"  She was inching down on knees and elbows, lowering me unsteadily backwards.

"The rest of the light from SN 1987A, and the neutrinos and other exploded material, have all been blocked by bogus legal maneuvers from reaching the Milky Way.  All that energy and matter carry codes designed to interdict the M‑impulse.  We've got to have it released.  We've got to have the absorbing media abolished."

"I'm your man, I think."

"Get off my slave girl, Arnby."

"Yes, sir."

 

he Rev let me off too early‑-chronoburetor problems, space‑time mixture a little lean‑-and I landed in the clinker again a couple hours before his arrival.  My cell mate was snoozing on his plank, rolled up in a ratty blanket in foetal position, facing the wall.  Who could blame him?  As Mofo Tutman sang, when he found himself in the lockup on that time draft up from 1938:

 

"Them chrono‑pokies am a loopy locus.

"Make you loco with they hokey‑pocus."

 

But when I looked a little closer, I noticed that the palpitations under his covers were not the beating of his heart.  Accelerando.  Crescendo.  Shifting and moaning.

"Cool down, Jack," I says, "you may not know it, but there is galactic business at stake here."  No response.  "Hey!  Cut it out."  Sighing and squeaking.  "Did you hear me?"

So I pull off the blanket, and there's the Venusian girl, covered with sweat and twisted like a braided egg loaf!  For the second time that day, my jaw drops‑-this time I get to complete the maneuver in the same locale.

"Galactic business, huh, white man?  You don't know the half of it."

The Venusian and I lock weepers.  That Louise Brooks hair gift wrapping her dimples!  The green eyeliner only slightly smeared!  The lips so full they seem to be pouting, even in repose!  The saucy jutting chin, the breasts like cumuli!  The groove of her belly, the tuck of her hips!  I distend.  I perspire.  I wear no cologne.

"You're the Rev's slave girl!  What are you doing here?"

"The Rev's 'Guardians' are Pop Twoers, Earth scum!"  She bellies to my belly and delivers a little I‑mean‑business shove to the chest area.  "So happens, Arnby, that the presence of life in the Milky Way Galaxy is a cause of concern to them.  It increases the psionic radiance acting on the Population Two stars, a noose of ancient stars tightening around our galaxy, and that, counselor, affects the preparation of certain traditional confections‑-certain treats enjoyed by the Pop Twoers during their pupal phase.

"Do you suck Vandals, Arnby?"

"I'm trying to qu . . . Wait a minute!  Are you saying that the Guardians, the Rev's sponsors, want to end life in our galaxy, so they can suck their Vandals?"

"That's about the size of it, Arnby.  And suck on this: you're being used.  The Rev's crowd wanted you in with them because of your transcat connection, not just your Bulova goddam legal mind."

 

(Obiter dicta.  "Transcat connection," huh?  So she knew about my lifer client, the transcategorical who was up the river for Murder One.  Did the Venusian know that I was the transcat's tail?  What kind of connection did the Venusian know about, her and her titular boss, the Rev?  And did they realize what I was thinking inside this parenthesis?)

 

I'd been about to give her one of my business cards.  I shoved it back into my wallet.  Instead, I gave her one of my primo barrister scowls, designed to shake the truth out of a giant redwood.  (Those babies cover acreage these days.)  She didn't shake.  She just stood there in her funky, post‑orgasmic cool, inclining her cranium toward the wispy time currents sizzling off the grate of our chrono‑cell.  They stank of inmates, both future and past, including Mofo Tutman, who used to sing:

 

"Dames lie."

 

"I'm a Cephean, Arnby, a Magellanic.  I'm the girl your Rev warned you about.  But we're trying to save your galacto‑centric little asses.  For the time being, we've managed to counter the Sanduleak blast.  If not for us pumping you up (and you pumping what you pump back) that blast would interdict your rhythmic friction, disconnecting you from the Magellanic Clouds and exposing the Milky Way to the bald power of the Pop Twoers, who would snuff you out for their frigging Vandals.

"You, Arnby, are part of the transcat of which Sanduleak is also a part.  We know that.  They know that.  Do I have to draw you a picture?"

"They want to bypass your blockade of the 'Protection Blast' through . . . me!"

"Give the man a pipe of Venusian fecals!" she laughed.

For the first time, as she raised her arms in mock triumph, her armpits were visible, hairless and slick as a canopied evening in Tuscany‑-and without offensive odor.  The tendons defining them tugged up her perfect, small breasts, so that the nipples stared straight at me.  And part of me, willy nilly, was staring straight back.

 

DREAM SEQUENCE

 

ind you, this is all circumstantial.  I did not, in pointo factorum, slide back in time to chrono‑snoop on the Rev's activities.  However, knowing what I now know, ex post facto, I can surmise that at the moment of this diminutive intercourse betwixt me and the Cephean Party of the Second Part, the bum was luxuriating on one of his personal asteroids, chitchatting with a chauffeur.

(Excuse me while I download my creative writing faculty‑-Cerebral Data Insert #2333‑CW‑-into active recall . . . There.)

"Beauregard," says the Rev, half through those black hole nostrils caked with Xesan snuff, "Beauregard, my good man, tighten up that withe round my thigh a notch, would you?  Hie up those leathers, and another go‑round of the truncheon, ey, love?  Delicious!  Delicious!  By the by, where's that Venusian whore I bought from the Proximans last month? . . . Oh, never mind!  Just cap me before I blow.  I don't want to feed vibes to the Magellanics.  Pity!"

"Sire, Lord, Your Majesty, Most Awful Candidate Magnifipotens, and Minister Non‑Plus‑Ultra Of The Anti‑Sexualites, not to mention Loyal Spy Plenipotentiary and Secret Ambassador sans Portfolio to the Too‑Terrible‑To‑Be‑Even-Alluded‑To‑Or‑Begun‑To‑Be‑Thought‑Of Master Beings Of The Globular Clusteroids of Population Two . . . "

"Yeah?"

" . . . Isn't it so that only those vibrations produced by solitary vice will help the Magellanics‑-vile Cephean bumlickers‑-and prevent our masters' ungluing the Milky Way?"

"Yes, dodo, only solitary.  Conjunctions of any sort mutually damp.  In the words of Saint Kellogg:

 

'Only lonely self‑abuse

'Will produce

'The hateful juice.'

 

"That is, the hateful wave length, of course.  However, I am taking no chances, since you, Beauregard, dodo, my lowly ancillary, are so close to being non‑existent, after all.  There, that's it!  Cap it now.  Ah!  Ah!"

"Yes, Your Grace."

I imagine the Rev as being very hairy.  Bristly, in fact.  Forested.  Beauregard degreases him, and they slide into one of his fleet of late‑model hurries‑-four‑door: two present, one a bit future, one well into the past‑-for a pilgrimage down the time shaft to one of his favorite religious events.  At Havrod College Observatory in a year variously described as 1908, 1912, or 1914, Harriet Fneeple, let's say, to protect the innocent, is squinting through her bottle‑bottom cheaters and a tube full of concaves and convexes at a number of yellow giants and supergiants blinking in and out of sight.  Every one of these pinpricks is as bright as ten thousand suns, give or take, but someone is fingering their dimmer switch; they glow and fade, glow and fade.

"This is it," whispers the Rev.  Beauregard shifts the hurry into transparent hover and idles just behind Harriet's swivel chair.  "The naming of the Beast!"

Harriet sucks the stem of her spectacles, and she glances back and forth between the telescope's eyepiece and the charts, graphs, and dog‑eared sheets full of calculations scattered across a nearby table.  "The longer the cycle, the brighter the star," she mumbles.  ("The angle of the dangle, the heat of the meat . . . "  Under his breath, Beauregard, amazed, rehearses the ancient, forbidden trope.)  Her stars pulse, collapse, and push out again.  It is one of those Aha! experiences‑-Harriet grasps the principle of the Cepheid stars!

"Let's get out of here."  The Rev urgently nudges Beauregard.

"Why, sir, if I may ask?  Why don't we ever stay beyond this point?"

"I should thrash you for the impertinence of asking a question.  However, I'll explain," says the Rev as Beauregard noses the hurry back up the shaft toward Time Present.  "Another minute and we might see her sink to a squat, supported on her crucials by one heel, causing her to oscillate, Cepheid‑like, producing the hateful wave length in irresistible sympathy with the Beast she has just named.  The ancient Cepheids above, the masturbaters below, primed and pumped, all resonating to the same infernal rhythm!  I prefer to leave on an up note.

"Now, Beauregard, while we're in the twentieth century, let's scan the aboriginals to see what progress we're making."

"We want to get them to stop soloöscillating, right, Your Eminence," I'll have Beauregard say here, "so our Pop Two paymasters can jimmy the stars and dust of the Milky Way, button from hole, nicht vahr?"

"That's the idea, dodo.  Set the hurry for time lapse, so we can check their progress.  But first bend over, so I can kick you for asking."

As Beau rubs his buns, he and the Rev shiver through a series of timewalls to make comparative observations.  There is some progress to report in Africa.  The Ashanti have been warning their small boys not to.  The Lepchi (Himalyans) abstain.  For the Siriono, a nono: the men may tug and tap, but it never leads to the undesirable wave length.

"Not enough!" the Rev fulminates, or so I surmise.  "Angle the afferent toward the Pop Two stars, Beauregard, and flick her into Receive & Accumulate mode."

"We are aligned with the Clusteroids, Oh Captain, My Captain.  The ammo banks are flooding full."

"Now blast those aboriginals."

In the time windows, a net of dark reflections like the compound eyes of a gigantic gnat, one simultaneous flash.  The Trukese, sizzled, tumble out of their trees.  The Chuckchee are abashed.  In New Hebrides, the Seniangs take sudden notice of the whereabouts of their children's fingers.

"Delicious!  Delicious!" sings the Rev.

"Boss man Nonpareil, those African men beating up the women, are they not Azande?"  Beauregard queries cautiously.

"Yes.  They caught the wenches at play with wooden roots interiorly."

"And the Apinaye, how fiercely they thrash their children!"

"If not, the Clusteroid purpose were dulled."

"Look, in New Guinea, two minutes from now and upstage center, the women are hitting the boys' crucials with sticks."

"And with nettles!  The brutes distended.  Now here's progress!  Look how shame can do what sticks will not.  Look where our blast shattered the Manus, the Americans, the Dahomeans . . . "

"They scatter.  They hide.  They censor.  They abjure.  They writhe in self‑loathing, fearing blindness, insanity, damnation, death, pimples!"

"Not bad!  Bend down again, Beauregard."  As the Rev, crucials distantly responding, thwacks him, Beauregard maneuvers the hurry as best he can, to Time Present and the stately pleasure domes of the Rev's personal asteroid.

That's when I figure the Pop Two bosses themselves put the tug on his threads.  In the tank of heavy water that occupies most of the subterranean area of the asteroid, a rod slightly distends with the passage of a gravitational wave‑-a prearranged signal from the Rev's lords, prearranged, that is, by twenty billion years, in a compromise act of the Ylemic Congress, one half‑second Post Bang.

The Rev cross‑checks the strength of the incoming vibrations against local planetary transmissions of known amplitudes, moving back and forth between bands‑-a technique used by radio‑astronomers for centuries and still known as the Dicke Switch.  "It's them, all right."

"What are you doing down there, Earth jissom?  Why is there still a Milky Way Galaxy?  Did we not give you specific orders to advance its annihilation?"

The Rev delivers a vicious slap to Beauregard's a posteriori and intones into the transceiver: "Yes, but . . . "

"Why are some of the beings down there still feeding the Cepheid pigs of the Magellanics, horrid scrofules, by bumping and grinding between their lonely bed sheets?"

"It'll soon stop, my lords.  We've got a good plan this time.  We're giving it an altruistic twist.  It's to save the lives of the spermatozoa, see . . . ?"

"They'll never buy it."

"It worked with pre‑human foetuses.  We've got kinaesthetio's and everything.  It's a movement."

"Well, they're still doing it."

"It's not my fault.  Whenever you ask anybody, they deny it.  You can't find anybody in civilized places who is actually doing it."

"Well, somebody's doing it.  We look up at our sky, and we see you all still there, and we are greatly displeased, Earth jissom."

"I'm sorry."

The asteroid trembles.  Volatile liquids spontaneously combust, blowing the lids off cans and bottles.  Pleasure domes dip and shimmy like bobbers on a rip tide.  The Rev is just maintaining bowel control.  A seal unzips from the skylight, sucking artificial air into the thirsty asteroidal void.  The blasts create an eerie high‑pitched screaming noise, like that of a woman terrified.

I wish I could have been there to see it, providing it went that way.

"You're sorry!"  The walls say it.  The floor says it.  The chauffeur says it with every orifice but his mouth, which, like the skylight, is screaming.  "You and your Kelloggites!  I'll cut off your Vandals, you syphilitic blow hole!  First the Cepheans obstruct our counterblast: Sanduleak and all its planets and peoples destroyed for naught!  Then they set the Earthlings to self‑stroking‑-rhythmic friction‑-a planetary amplifier for their insidious galactic shield.  Then, when we ask you to stop it, surely a simple matter for a local with our full backing, you defer."

"I am your servant!"  The Rev is trembling so hard the teeth shoot out of his gums like skyrockets.  His skin curdles and shakes off his bones in hunks the shape of pork rinds.  This is so tasty I will not even trouble my imagination about what gut buggy Beauregard is filling.

"You may yet redeem your ignoble self."

"How?  How?  Just tell me how!"

"Get us a lawyer‑-a transcategorical.  When we exploded Sanduleak, we noticed it was the cuticle of a space‑and‑time‑disjunct being one of whose other members was a certain small‑time Earthside ambulance chaser who passed his bar via Cerebral Data Inserts and chutzpah.  We subsequently received his promotional flyer in a bulk mailing.  Looks good.  Get him.  Get us Arnby.  Over and out."

Below, the circles in the heavy water wink out.  The rod falls into repose.  The Rev's complexion regains its youthful luster and the volatiles return to their cans.  Everything is okay.  Everything is fine.  Get Arnby.

"Bend over, Beauregard, you are a very bad boy."

 

he guard saw us, but she couldn't do anything, because she happened to be a couple minutes ahead of us at the time, so she could only gnash her teeth and remember what we were up to.  Tasty, yes?

"Come with me, Arnby."  It was a difficult offer to refuse.  She pulled on her grey Beulah County issue, a hooded one‑piece.  With her left hand she formed the ancient rune: thumb and forefinger touched, making a little circle, and the other digits extended like the whiskers of a tropical fish‑-'OK.'  "Jump through."

"Jump through what, sweetheart?"

The guard was accelerating backtime towards our when.  She was sure to be displeased with our little intercourse.  Also, the Rev would be arriving in fifteen seconds, as I recalled.  How was I going to explain Venus?

She pushed her rune in my face again: 'OK.'

I shrugged.  I scowled.  I rolled my eyes.  Life is not logical.  I jumped.  Naturally, this world being the ridiculous fruitcake it is, I made it, all six foot one of me, through this inch and a half hole.  Venus jumped in after me, like Ouro‑Bulova‑goddam‑bouros swallowing its tail.

At this time, the only part of me I could locate was my business cards.  I wish I could say I was not used to this.  I jumped through Venus's 'OK' with one paw shielding my crucials, and the other around my business cards; when the ride got rough, I let the crucials go.  Everything was dark and tingly.  In this place‑-I use the term loosely‑-it was impossible to tell, Your Honor, which tingles were me and which were not‑me.  This, here, might have been thinking, for example, but then again, it might have been a cloudburst of pigeon shit.  I don't wear no cologne.

"You ought to,"‑-a voice from nowhere.

"Is that me talking?"

"No, it's me."

"Very illuminating.  Venus?"

"Yes.  My name is Kaybuffer, Arnby."

"Call me Chuck."  A reflex.

"Chuck, do you believe what I told you?  We're on the same side, Chuck."

"Where the hell are we?"

"Safe.  In a chrono‑bubble."

"Very illuminating.  A what?"

"Forget it.  We're safe.  Are you with me or not?"

"Listen, Buff girl, I don't want to be unpleasant, but I don't happen to like what I saw you doing under that blanket.  It disinclines me to form an alliance, if you catch my drift."

"I was helping hold the galaxy together, Chuck.  Don't you . . . ?"

"Certainly not.  I don't believe in it.  And it would be murder, Kaybuffer.  All those little whiptails carrying my DNA."

"That's Pop Two propaganda."

"Well, I don't."

"The tenth one lies."

"What?"

"The tenth one lies.  It's an old saying.  'Nine out of ten boys do it, and the tenth one lies.'"

"Well, I'm the eleventh."

I could feel her sidling up to me, but you have to subtract both sides of the sidle; still, empty as it was, fore and aft my sensorium, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, I felt our intimacy waxing in that tingling, absolute, non‑clocked night‑hole.  I just loved the tickle of her voice, I gotta say, when Kaybuffer said, "As soon as we take care of the Rev, I'll FTL you to the Magellanics."

"What am I, a flower arrangement?"

"FTL, Arnby, not FTD‑-Faster Than Light!"

"I knew that."

"I've been hanging around the Rev for two years in both directions, waiting to euchre him like this," said Kaybuffer.

"Look," I said, "they've got it all wrong.  I'm no use to the Pop Twoers.  Can you wiggle your ears?  I can't.  I can't wiggle my ears, and I can't do anything with SN‑Bulova‑goddam‑1987A, whether it's connected to me or not."

"Well, Chuck, the Rev's boys could mangle you pretty good trying to teach you.  They wouldn't even have to touch your proper body, would they?  If those Globular Clusteroids got hold of that transcat client of yours up the river, they could wag you like a tail, couldn't they?"

A tough customer.  "Why should I believe you?  The Rev is crusading against solitary vice.  He poured me the best zoot‑rot I ever had in my life."

"‑-I did that‑-"

"Plus he's gonna throw a lot of fat‑cat clients in my direction.  What can you do?"

"Save the galaxy.  Just play along for a while, Chuck.  You make up your own mind.  You don't have to do anything special . . . yet.  I'll show you that I'm telling you the truth‑-with your own experience."

Maybe if I could have seen her just then or smelled her or been able to put my finger on the place where she stopped and I began, I wouldn't have liked her so Bulova goddam much.  Human affection is a pain in the butt.  And as Mofo Tutman observed, "Dames lie."

I felt myself hypostatizing out of the chrono‑bubble and back into my cell at the Beulah County clinker.  It was like the blood rushing back into your arm after it's fallen asleep, but this was my whole body and mind blinking back into one of the normal worlds.

I looked around.  Kaybuffer wasn't there.  My business cards were in one hand, and in the other, my crucials.  I tucked them both out of sight.  The Rev was just arriving.

"Mr. Arnby?"

"Call me Chuck, Rev.  You gonna spring me from this joint?"

"Sure, Chuck.  I think you can help me in a special way."  Those vermicelli lips were doing the hokey pokey, and I could see from the wrinkling and unwrinkling around his eyes that he was quashing a grin.  I am a jury watcher of some experience.

"You!  Here!  Now!"‑barking like a mad dog, then snarling at the cowed turnkey.  So that's the cash value of Kellogg's megillah!  The perfection of character, huh?  Here's this lepto, umpteen years a Kelloggite monk, now he wears the flat black and runs for office on their dough.  What's it got him?  A bad disposition.  Maybe Kellogg was just a front man for sadistic Pop Two Globular Clusteroids after all.  Maybe Kellogg was wrong:

 

"Keeping hands from center stage

"Builds patience and reduces rage."

 

We are on the sloop again, a few hundred kilometers above the Pacific remains‑-"Have you ever heard of SN 1987A?"‑-and then it was the cavern with zoot‑rot and bull totems.  Kaybuffer squatted to support the glass table, and this time I caught her wink.  This time I caught a lot of things.  I wasn't busy kissing the Rev's ass or trying to cop a look at the Buff.  I didn't like the pinch the Rev gave his chauffeur's Exhibit B, sub rosa, while he lubed me with zoot.

"Secrecy is of the essence . . . "  Instead of watching my tumbler fill with zoot‑rot from Kaybuffer's decanter, I eyeballed the Rev through my brows.  Now he was elbowing Mr. Steeringwheel, pointing at me and snickering.  When I lifted my chin, he put a lid on it, wrinkled his forehead, frowned.

Kaybuffer must have seen me wince.  She was standing discretely back apace, let the record show, and a look of motherly concern animated her sweet puss.  She liked me.  I liked her.  As of that glance, although the prosecution had not yet rested by a long shot, I switched my allegiance.

And Kaybuffer knew it.  She smiled, then blushed and looked away, sloshing zoot‑rot onto her lovely brown forearms . . . and we were huddled in the bathyscaph in shallow tropical waters, tailbone to tailbone.

" . . . A last ditch effort by the Guardians of our galactic group to save the Milky Way from moral annihilation . . . "

"Cut the crap, Rev.  I know this spiel."

He looked confused for a moment.  Then he smiled, that is, his lips smiled, but not the eyes.  "Ah!  I see.  A time‑crossing.  Deja‑do!  We've done this moment before, is that it?  Very good, Arnby!  Then you've already done your sleuthing for us, ey?  You've found a basis for legal action, a loophole . . . "  He was sashaying to a low metal cabinet, nonchalantly reaching into a drawer.

"Presque you, Rev.  Neg the heater while you're at it.  You blast me, and I jet straight to the Magellanics and cut your SN 1987A and your little Globular Clusteroid butt out of my galaxy forever."

"Why, Arnby,"‑-removing a pack of Vandals from the drawer, tearing off end, pulling string down‑-"you surprise me.  Suck a Vandal?"

"Forget it."  My chair was getting clammy.  Schools of fish crisscrossed behind the Rev.  A glove of sea weed held the bathy; its fingers were doing the hula hula.  I could see Beauregard outside in his wetsuit, sucking on a SCUBA and paddling flippers.  He chased the little fishies round, angling for lunch.

You could say I was a little disoriented.

"Suit yourself."  He squashed the stuff all over his lying mandibles and never stopped talking.  I watched his tongue stain violet and his breathing slow.  "Arnby‑-Chuck‑-I don't know who's poisoned you against us!  Sounds like some Magellanic has bumfuzzled you.  Can't you see that the truth is on our side?  And our side is your side, after all!"

"You Kelloggite codpiece, I'm wise to you!"  My chair was getting nervous.  "I know all about the Pop Twoers trying to stiff the Milky Way.  I know who the good guys are, you dumb wang tourniquet."

Beauregard was just irising in.  He flippered over to the Rev, dripping algae on Kaybuffer's calves.  He spat out his mouthpiece.  "Boss, you gotta believe me!  I've been tracking him every second, me and the Callisto boys, and they're good!  We didn't see any Magellanics approach him!  The Pop Twoers checked out the whole scenario!"

"Shut up!  Shut up!"‑-Vandal steam spidering from under the Rev's eyelids and from the creases on his forehead.  The Rev's knuckles replaced the SCUBA gear in Beauregard's mouth, and Beauregard keeled over to fully appreciate their flavor.

"Excuse my chauffeur."  Massaging the knucks.

"Think nothing of it," I said.

"He becomes overwrought, especially in these depths.  Obviously, Chuck, someone has been playing games with you.  Just what do you imagine our intentions are, hmm?"

"Your Pop Twoers  are trying to throttle us, that's all."

"Hmm!"  Nothing fazed this guy.  "Chuck, Chuck, Chuck!  I had no idea how far you would go to protect your precious little ritual."

"Huh?"

Now he made the universal sign, fist wagging between his legs in proxima genitalibus.

"C'mon, Rev, this has nothing to do with that."

"Doesn't it?  Isn't that what this is really about, Chuck?  You heard my speeches, and something touched you.  Something moved you.  You wanted to get right and to spread the news, to end the sin of autoeroticism.  I then revealed to you, Chuck, the deeper truth of the evil of these practices imposed on us by the Cepheans and all the Magellanic stars behind them.  You were with us, Chuck.  I know you were.  Your mind was clear.  Your hands were clean."

His paws were on my shoulders, his hobnails on Kaybuffer's wrists.  He was leaning over me.  His violet maw filled my courtroom.  "You are a backslider, Chuck Arnby."

"No!"

"All you want to do is stoke your own chimney."

"That's not true!"

"Somebody's bumfed you, Arnby.  Use your brains, for Kellogg's sake."

"Your chauffeur just spilled the beans, for Kellogg's sakes!  He as much as confessed your Clusteroid connection."

"Too much nitrogen in his blood.  He was delirious.  If I hadn't decked him, he might have gotten violent.  Come clean, Chuck.  I know you believe in us.  Maybe you've soiled yourself, my boy, but you can be rehabilitated.  You're important to us, Chuck.  You can help us save the galaxy.  Tell me who you've been talking to."

Beauregard lifted his head, spat out a few teeth and moaned.  "Shut up!" said the Rev.  Then to me:  "It was a Cephean, wasn't it, Arnby?  She's using you, you and half a trillion like you, to enslave the entire galaxy."

"You're crazy.  It's not like that at all."

"Come back aboard with us, Chuck.  We'll set you up the way you deserve.  A guy like you, you should be pleading cases before the Ylemic Congress, not plea bargaining for Venusian grifters and transcat trash.  This Pop Two case is just the beginning."

"Her story seemed so convincing!  She came to me in the lockup."  I felt myself fade like the moon at dawn; the Rev was glowing and rising.  The sky was red.

"Of course it seemed convincing, Chuck.  That's her business.  Where did she tell you she was from‑-Neptune?"

"Venus."

"Venus!"  He threw his head back and laughed.  "Well, there you have it!  The Cephean witch says she's from Venus.  From Venus, Chuck!  And you swallowed it!"

"I feel pretty silly, Rev."

"We all have our little weak spots, Chuck . . . Beauregard, get Chuck some of that good zoot‑rot, why don't you, if you're feeling up to it?"

"Yes, Your Hiny."  Beauregard rubs his jaw, shakes his head, rises.

The Rev is feeling expansive.  "But really, Chuck!  Venusian!  Look there‑-the girl your sitting on, she's a Venusian.  Got her a few weeks ago from a Proximan trader.  Did the Cepheid bitch look the least little bit like her?"

I had to lock my legs around her to keep Kaybuffer from bucking.  "I've been a fool, Rev."

"We all have our little weak spots.  You're with us now.  That's all that counts.  Suck a Vandal?"

"No thanks, Rev.  Can you ever forgive me?"

"Of course!  Of course!"  He was tugging another pack open with his teeth.  Beauregard was pouring my zoot‑rot.  The Buff was bridling between my stirrups.

"Beauregard, let's went, boy!  This has been one tough afternoon, boy!"  The second Vandal was kicking in.  In a zootful, we were standing on carbonaceous chondrite on the Rev's personal asteroid‑-which I had figured for the next stop.

Kaybuffer looked more beautiful than ever in a Fratellini collar with velvet ruffles down to her sweetly dimpled knees.  She was coming from the Rev's pleasure dome with a tray of aromatics.  She smiled, then dropped the tray and drew a clockwhammer on the Rev.

"Don't scratch," she said, "or I'll blast you back to foetal."

Meanwhile, I was using more primitive means on the chauffeur‑-an arm lock followed by a jab to the carotid artery, a move popularized in ancient times by Killer Kawalski in his grudge match with Yukon Eric.  It was immediately effective, as the poor sap went down again.

"You are a fool, Arnby."  Clenching and unclenching his fists, the Rev spat out Vandal stems.  The ground was vibrating.

"No, you're a genius, Chuck!  I almost believed you myself!"  Kaybuffer smiled.  Case closed; judgment for the plaintiff.  "Now we've got the bum disarmed on his home turf.  I bet this place is the com center for the whole galactic operation.  And with your transcat link we can close down Sanduleak for good."

Below us, however, let the record show, a gigantic rod was microscopically distending as the Population Two overlords broadcast another cheery message to their man in the Milky Way.  The ground shook, lightning flashed, Kay girl looked up in alarm, and the Rev began to like the odds again.  The sky screamed: "Good!  Good!  You have obtained the transcat for us."

The Rev looked up and chuckled.  "He says he won't do it!"

I'd been laughed at before, but I'd never been laughed.  Now I know how a uvula feels.  Kaybuffer was in the same pickle.  We and the landscape were being shaken like dice in a cup.  The Rev didn't seem to mind.  Those Pop Twoers have quite a sense of humor.

But when the Pop Two bosses stopped laughing, I was still dancing!

"It's the transcat!"  Kaybuffer still managed to train the clockwhammer on the Rev's crucials, but an element of doubt had entered the picture.  "She's doing you, Chuck!  Oh, Chuck!"

The Rev regained his composure.  "Exactly!  Murder One!  We traced her from Sanduleak to the Beulah County Prison and upriver to the Total Security where they keep the lifers.  Your ex‑client is your mainframe, Arnby.  You're just a peripheral.  She's the brains and heart.  We've got her, so we've got you too, transcat butt."

"Tail," I said.  Call me pedantic.  My teeth were falling out.

"We have everything now!"‑-booming from the sun on one side and Jupiter on the other‑-"The lawyer's transcat connection to Sanduleak cinches it!  We can feel it!  We can feel the Milky Way ungluing!"

"Get away from here, Kay girl!" I stuttered.  "Get back to the Magellanics!  Forget about me!  I'm shaking to pieces!"

The Rev was radiant.  He slid open the decorative facing of a nearby rock.  He fiddled with a few dials and transformed half of the southern sky into a honeycomb of space‑time monitors, each one featuring a different species or human culture in the control epoch, twentieth century Earth, and its special solitary vice, or‑-as they hoped‑-the absence of same.

"Our own, our delight, our true child, who art called 'Rev,' thou hast done well to open these views before us, that we may delight in our triumph!"  This time, it was the clockwhammer singing the Pop Twoers' basso profundo, and Kaybuffer dropped the thing before she knew what was happening.

 

The Buffer and I have been reduced to rug rats in the teevee parlor.  Daddy adjusts his inner and outer garbs and gazes at his rock.  On Monitor Number One we see five or six Trobriand Islanders, each alone, seated on a broad beach front, men and women, rhythmically fricting.

 

"Ikivayna kwila!" the men laugh to themselves.

"Ibasi wila o yamala!"  The women ooh and ah.

 

"What are they saying?"  The Rev smiles stiffly, one palsied eye on the Globular Clusteroid empyrean.  His face barely moves when he speaks.

"'Manipulate the kwila!'" half‑translates the faithful chauffeur.  "'Pierce the wila with the hand!'"

Let's try the Alorese, the Rev suggests, the Copper Eskimos, the Cree, the Dusun, Easter Islanders, Flathead, Ganda, Hopi . . .!  Everywhere he looks, it's rhythmic friction: in the closet, in the bedroom, in the cave, in the hutch.  Maybe there is something wrong with the sets?  Jiggle the joystick!  Manipulate the dials!  There are the Ifugao, the Lesu, Marquesans, Ojibwa, Panapaeans, Pukapukans, Samoans, Tikopians, Tinguans, Trukese, Wogeo, Yapese . . . Rhythmic friction!  Over the Rev's shoulder‑-the restive heat lightning of Clusteroid watchers.

Try other species!  In the far eastern bank of screens, there is wild activity: female spider monkeys creating rhythmic friction with their long, prehensile tails; male apes lollypopping their own twangers; baboons and rhesus, mates despite, rhythmically fricting, rhythmically fricting.  Porcupines straddle a long stick, imbuing it with their own scent for circular excitement.  Male elephants become enamored of their trunks.  Dolphins fondle the engorged extremity in their water intake jets, rhythmically, rhythmically, and ho ho ho!

What's this?  Male stags rubbing antler tips against low‑hanging branches‑-rhythmically fricting and ho ho ho!‑-extrude from their sheathes and reach cadence after fifteen seconds, ho, ho, ho!  The grey‑cheeked mangabey rubs her swollen perineum against . . . whatever's handy.  Rhythmic friction!  Rhythmic friction!

Back to Homo sapiens, the Rev, horror-stricken, sees wifeys and hubbies, bookend‑like, one in the pantry, the other in the den, doing it, doing it.  Others join the dance: businessfolks phoning their brokers; old men lolling in geriatric homes; young girls, breathlessly, for the very first time, eyes squeezed tight, brows ascending like embers from bonfires; young boys, amazed; people reading Playboy, reading Shakespeare, reading Von Krafft Ebbing, reading Teen Romance; the President of the United States of America, in his oval office, between briefings, with the shades drawn; the Pope, when the Cardinals are sleeping; and the Cardinals, in their sleep.

Saving the galaxy, that's why, boys and girls, fricting in the rhythm of the universal beat!

The Rev slips toward panic like a dragged pizzle toward orgasm.  "What about Truk?"  He finds their window, a minute ago, down two and left.  Several Trukese men, unknown to one another, are hiding in branches as a woman bathes in a brook shaded by a thick grove of trees.  The boughs vibrate rhythmically.  Exhalations flutter the fragrant leaves.

Moi, je wear no cologne.  (CDI #4932‑FL‑-Romantic Languages.)

"Perverts!"  The Rev's nostrils swell to apogee, and his lips contract to perigee, as he tries to coöpt his overlords' wrath.

In Siberia, the Chuckchee women are making strange, solitary use of the large calf muscle from a reindeer.  In Tikopia it's maniok roots and bananas.  Fingers among the Crow and the Aranda, in adjacent windows but opposite sides orbis terrae!  More heel squatting among New Ireland's Lesu!  The Hottentots are hot.  Pukapuka parents pooh‑pooh it.  In Seniang no one gives a hang . . .

"Impossible!" trumpet the moons of Jupiter.  "You jerk!  You punk!  You low‑count jissom!"  The Rev is quaking like jello on a jeep‑-make that Majello.  "How have you screwed up now?  We have him!  We have the transcat!  We have the tail!  We have Sanduleak!  We have everything!  Why are your beings down there still doing it?  We have disarmed the Magellanic Cepheids!  Who is priming the pump?"

 

uddenly I stopped shaking.  A vapor puffed out of my flesh, like gaseous sweat.  I have never been partial to gaseous sweat.  It was reddish‑brown, like iodine vapor, and there were little Paisleys floating around in it.  "What the Bulova goddam hell is going on here?"

Then Kaybuffer started laughing.

"What are you laughing about?" the Rev said, terrified, just before a screaming, blue lightning bolt streaked down from what was left of the sky and parboiled him instanter.

"Let's get out of here, Chuck."  Kaybuffer flashed me the old rune again.

Beauregard had fallen through a sinkhole and was dog paddling in a tank of heavy water.  I jumped through Kaybuffer's 'OK' without any cross or redirect, because the whole Bulova goddam asteroid was about to come!

And there we were again.  Nowhere.  I was kissing her, though.  I knew that I was kissing her, even without the lips, without the tongue, without the je ne sais quois.  "Kaybuffer, we've nailed them, haven't we?  The Rev is fricasseed, and even the tenth one has quit lying."

"What about that eleventh, Arnby?"

My Kaybuffer was curling all around me, in and out of her body, as only Cepheans can do.  "Wait a minute," I said, "before we get carried away here.  Why were you laughing back there?  And while we're at it, what was priming the pump, if the Pop Twoers had all the cards?  If the Cepheids were blocked, who was pumping out the rhythm for all that rhythmic friction, huh?"

"You were, Chuck.  That's why I was laughing."

"Wanna read me back that testimony?"

"The vapor‑-it wasn't sweat, Chuck."

"Wait a minute, Buffo.  Are you telling me that that was a transcategorical orgasm?"  She didn't say a word.  "Then I'm not the tail after all, am I?  I'm . . . "

"Shut up and kiss me, transcat."

I paused.  I cased.  I kissed.  But as I distended, Kaybuffer slid away.

"Galactic business, Arnby!  You have to do the rest alone . . . "

In the words of Mofo Tutman:

 

"Mofo know what his mojo fo'.

"Love that mofo mojo so!

"Yaas, Mofo love it so!"

 

I don't wear no cologne.  In the solitude of the Buff's 'OK' I did my galactic duty.