A RAM IN THE THICKET

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

"Before Elvis there was nothing." -- John Lennon

 

t was getting dark outside.  Once more I looked at the vidprin of Abraham's latest victim and failed to experience empathy.  Call it galacto-centrism.  I'd seen enough of these post mortem shots to paper the crab nebula, and I'd gotten used to the human stiffs, but Xesan anatomy still made me cringe.  I couldn't tell which of those limp pseudopods held the sentient parts and which it took a dump through.  And Memphis was getting impatient.

With one graceful finger Reverend Memphis nudged his shakti's chin, and she lowered her head to his shoulder.  Nestled in his lap, the amorous creature -- an Earthling in her twenties -- had been arching toward his lips as he spoke and nipping at them like a goldfish.  Now she resumed foetal position, naked against his torso, her face hidden in the folds of his robe.

I was glad not to have to look at her eyes.  There was something disturbing about them -- an inaccuracy in the lobotomy, no doubt.

"Why don't you let me worry about Abraham?" I said.  "We're drawing a bead on him, padre.  Trust me."  I was tired.  I wanted my Martian cocoa and my percale sheets.

"No," the Reverend snarled. "I only trust The King."  Eyeing me through his wild brows, he leaned forward, a bull ready to lock horns, and I got a whiff of his Vitalis.  He hadn't gotten into the Blue Moon Boys, the Elvites' regional ruling body, by being sweet.  Under the waves of black fabric which comprised his vestments -- little more than a sack tied off at wrists, ankles and neck -- I detected a wiry frame of hard muscle and cruel, angular bone, like that jawbone of his, big as an ass's.  "Tell me your thoughts about Abraham, Inspector."

The boys called him Abraham because of the Old Testament story.  God tells Abraham to kill his son.  Only, in the story, he doesn't go through with it.  Our Abraham killed six times on Xesis and on Earth and twice in transit on intergalactic vessels.  No ram ever showed up -- the creature of the Bible; everyone our Abie courted died or disappeared.  His victims were always priests.

This is what Abraham shouted at his victims while their blood -- or ichor -- ebbed away:

"What is the meaning of life?"

Sometimes there was this preface: "My child, my child . . ." And sometimes, autopsies revealed, he continued beating them, even after they had expired.

"Well, I remember something like this nine or ten years ago," I said, "some crazy Earthman attacking people with a knife and asking questions.  But nobody ever got killed, did they?  Just shook up."

"No.  You're right.  That was just a nuisance.  This is quite serious.  It brings to mind the Old Enemy."

"Satan?" I said.

"No.  I am not referring to the Old or Middle Testaments, but to the New.  In the Book of Las Vegas, Chapter XII, Verse 3, we read: 'The stillborn twin of Elvis was spirited away from Tupelo by polka demons and raised to become The Enemy, a slayer of stars.  His name was called Manson . . .'"

"Right!  Of course!  Charles Manson!"  Even I knew that.

"The Old Enemy spilled the blood of the starlet Tate."

"Yes.  Fear was his sacrament," I remembered.  "He claimed that it opened people to the truth."

"Justifying even murder!  Tate's home was not far from The King's residence in the California State," the Reverend said.

"That's when Elvis started stockpiling guns."

"Yes, and that is why we priests, like the King of Western Bop Himself, train ourselves in weaponry.  You do know your scripture."

"I know it.  I don't like it."

"Ripe for conversion!"

"I mean no offense, Reverend," I said, "but it's possible our killer is one of your holy men."

"You are not a believer," Reverend Memphis sighed.

"I am a believer," I said.  "I just don't believe in any of your answers.  I believe in questions."

"Perhaps you are the murderer."

"Or you.  On the other hand, you might be his next victim, padre."

"Or you."

He wasn't thinking, of course -- I'm not Abraham's type, no robe, no shakti, no nostrums, no bullshit.  It was just a wild retort by the Rev.  But it gave me an idea.  I began to look him over very carefully: the shakti, the vestments, the shaved pate, the ramrod spine . . .

"Find him, Inspector.  No one dares wear the cloth any more."

. . . The sandals and jewelled rings, the cash, the smell . . .

"You dare," I said.

"Don't be disrespectful.  I am not speaking for myself alone or for the clergy alone.  I am speaking for religion, for Elvis.  Without Elvis no culture can endure."

 . . . As if he were followed everywhere by castrati waving sensors, but it was just his aftershave . . . Did he splash that on top of his head as well? . . .

"Reverend, whether or not that's good, frankly, I can't say.  But I'll get him.  And soon."

"Crazy!" he said approvingly.  "My child," he added, stroking his shakti's long, yellow hair, "you are very direct.  You have intensity, curiosity . . . "

"Yeah," I said, "I have a classical education, and I used to be a studio man on synthhorn too."

He ignored my comment, though it was actually the truth.  "Be careful," he continued.  "These traits may also be detrimental to your spiritual practice.  We must be humble.  We are all hound dogs, you know."

"Thanks," I said.  "I'll bear that in mind."

 

his is the transcript of a portion of a tape made by a security audio scanning device aboard the interstellar slowship Mystery Train.  These are presumed to be some of the dying words of one of Abraham's victims.  The officer responsible for monitoring the device was drunk and asleep.  (He has since been cashiered.)

 

     I see something.  I don't know what it is.  I don't

want to see nothing.  I don't care.  Leave me alone.  I

don't care.  No, I haven't been thinking about nothing.

Leave me alone, I told you.  It's all over the place, up and

down and inside and outside.  It's too bright.  Leave

me alone.  I don't want none of this weird junk.  I want to

live, goddamnit.  I wanna be me!  That's all.  I just wanna

be me!

 

It sounded to me like he was lying.

 

esis can sneak up on you.

I am not partial to intergalactic travel.  I'm too old.  I didn't grow up with it the way some of these young turks have.  They step in the door on the Milky Way side and step out near one of the Cepheids.  I can't do that.  I have to temporize a little, take a few days, decompress.  It's like the ancient computers, when they had to make them lap-size to accommodate people's paws, even though the hardware could fit in a flea's butt.  I like to feel that I'm going somewhere before I actually arrive.

Besides, I'm afraid of bumping into stars or going blind.  This is my personal phobia.  There's no need to hide it from you.  Ever since I heard of Heinrich Olbers' Paradox, in High School Astrophysics, I've believed it to be true, and I have this fear.  Don't laugh.  This is how Olbers reasoned, a hundred years before Elvis:

     1. By our best-confirmed theories and most reliable data, the universe is isotropic: the distribution of matter, on the large scale, is uniform.

     2. Consider the observable universe as a series of concentric spheres.  Then each more distant sphere's skin contains proportionately more stars, for if not, the larger, outer layers would be thinner than the nearer, and the universe would not be isotropic.

     3. Therefore, our night sky is a plenum of starlight, as bright as the sun itself.  There is no darkness at all.

But, of course, we don't see it that way, do we?  Olbers suggested a cosmic "absorbing medium" to resolve the conundrum.  Others say the light is red-shifted, that the universe is expanding away from us, that the hydrogen available for star fuel is limited, and so on.  I don't buy it.  I never did.  I always believed: there's something wrong with the way we see, not with the way we think.  I try not to dwell on it.  I take the slowship.

Still, Xesis can sneak up on you, even on a slowship like The Sneer.  I was sitting at the bar sipping a marginally passable Grenadine Bomber with a faint methane smell to it -- Venusian bootleg, no doubt -- when that now-familiar outline hit the vidscreen: bluish, oblate, peppered by twenty craggy moons.  The bar chamber was empty, the way I like it, except for me, my conk, and the bartender, a Weenie, who was dangling from the ceiling cabinet, polishing glasses with his tongue.

"There she is, Father," my conk told me.  My concubine for the trip was a Sneer issue; I didn't have time to hunt up a free lance, and I thought I'd have an easier time with the slowshippers.  Besides, Memphis had recommended her.  Sahar was a native of Xesis.  She managed to look more humanoid than most, thank God.  As it was, we didn't copulate, but just capered with a semblance of affection to make the passage easy.  I wouldn't have procured a conk at all -- they never interested me much -- but that would have been less credible for a man of the cloth.

Yes, I was the bait.  Goodbye, hair!  Hello, robes!

"Isn't it beautiful, Father Isaac?" my conk sighed through an unseen orifice.  (By the momentary swell of her gown, it was somewhere behind, in the thoracic region.)  "My own Xesis!  Actually, my family is from one of the moons, but I've been living on the planet itself since I was post-larval."

Post-larval!  I shiverred to think what might be slithering, cinched, under the darts and gathers of her dress.

The bar chamber became transparent as we arrived at maneuvering distance of the planet.  I hate that.  You feel like there's nothing holding you up, the walls, floor, ceiling full of stars.  Sahar oohed and encircled my waist with a couple of tendrils which, in their latex sheaths, seemed a bit like arms.

"How many times have you done this?" I said.

"Oh, never!" she said.  "This is my first reentry!"

"Your first trip off-planet?  Your first concubinage?"

"Yes.  Don't you like me?"

"Sure.  I just assumed you'd been living aboard the Sneer, like the others, going back and forth without disembarking . . ."

"No.  I just left Xesis a few days ago, and now I'm coming back.  Isn't it glorious?  Look!  That was my moon."

"Wait a minute," I said.  The bartender was beginning to show some interest.  He lowered himself from the ceiling cabinet by a rectal thread and sat beside my tankard like a hairy tar ball, waiting for a break in the conversation.  "I thought they weren't letting anyone off the planet except by government pass."

"Yeah," she said, "because of the Abraham thing.  But that doesn't affect me."

"Why the hell not?"

"I'm a Xesan."

"Elvis!  They're letting off Xesans?  But maybe Abraham is masquerading as a Xesan!"

"Don't be silly," she said, nibbling my ear.  Actually, gumming it.

The barkeep took the opportunity to deliver the ancient greeting of his trade:  "Everything OK?"

"Everything's perfect," I said, " . . . son."

"Anyway, he's not Abraham," Sahar whispered into my ear through lips I knew would flop out like Elvis's belly if the cosmetic stitchery ever came loose.

"No," I said, "but you might be."

"Or you," she said.  I'd heard that before.

The barkeep had begun, despite my discouraging stare -- a grimace which had once stopped the greatest solo tenor on Earth in the middle of his cadenza from the twenty-fifth row back -- to stru m his rectal string.  It was an ancient melody, with religious overtones that I found soporific: "Don't Be Cruel (To A Heart That's True)."

"Or maybe it's Elvis," I said.

She pulled away from me.  "You're bad," she said.

"It comes with the cloth."

The bar started filling up as we went into a holding orbit around Xesis.  They were mostly Earthlings and human colonists from other planets, with some Xesans made up, out of colonial sycophancy, to look human, more or less.  They were all government, of course, maintenance of one sort or another: agricultural consultants and interplan officials, quark fusion engineers and bio-transport people.  Since Abraham, every individual entering Xesis had to be government.  Well, there were also a couple of Andromedan Elvite monks, of whom I steered clear.

If Sahar was right about the laxity of the Xesan quarantine, any one of these drinkers, the humans anyway, could be Abraham.

A very tall, fat Xesan, dressed, like Sahar, as a human, deposited himself beside me, invading our table -- an execrable custom of space travel -- when all the others had filled up.  There was a faint odor of formaldehyde about him, and he was dressed in a voluminous bubble suit, all the rage inside the asteroid belt.  Sahar seemed uncomfortable at his arrival.  She squirmed into my lap and twined round me; from this safe vantage she gave him the fisheye.

The 'man's' whiskers, a sunburst of greasy corkscrews, dusted my forehead as he turned to address me:  "We who are about to die salute you," he said.  Then he laughed.

I spoke next:  "Hunh?"

"It's what the gladiators said to the Romans."

"Is that a joke?"

"Time will tell.  Abraham's still down there, isn't he?"

"Yeah," I growled, "unless he's up here, . . . son."

The Weenie bartender, who had been whizzing about like a tether ball, taking orders, took the big 'man's': "Aqua pura, if you please."  Exotic.

"What's your business on Xesis, Reverend?" he asked me.  Reverend.  That word.  I had to stop myself from looking around to see who he was talking to.

"I've been assigned to the colonial mission, my child, serving the spiritual needs of the embassy staff."

He laughed.  The Weenie yoyoed down to 'hand' him his water, and the 'man' guffawed so, he splashed us with it.  "Sorry," he said.  "It's just so funny!  I can't help myself."

"What's so funny?"

"You're no padre," he said, "any more than she's an Earth girl."

Once more, I summoned all my mental resources for the mot juste: "Hunh?"

He glanced under the table in a way that made me look as well.  He was holding something in his lap; at first I thought it was a Laser Point, small and lethal, but it was a much older tool -- a gimlet with an ornate wooden handle.  He pushed it forward into my lap and looped some of my threads on the gimlet's point.  In the most charming manner imaginable, he inclined his head to the side -- like a dog before a lava lamp -- and said sweetly:  "Won't you come into my parlor, Reverend?"

"He's not a human," Sahar said.  She had not seen the little drama under the table.  "Don't go."

"Don't embarrass him, dear," I said.  "Why don't you amuse yourself here while I talk to the gentleman?  Is that all right with you?" I asked him.

"I prefer it," he said.

I had to pull her off me like chokeweed from a tree.  I don't know what they see in shaktis.  I ordered her "anything but the Grenadine" and got up to accompany my 'man' to his room.  He immediately slapped his 'arm' around me to lead me out.  I could feel his 'fingernails' in my shoulder.

The floor was still transparent.  It was like walking on stars, and I do not find that pleasant.  We could locate ourselves by the outlines of things, as if moving through a pencil sketch.  When we crossed the hallway and entered his chamber, however, the walls were opaque, and I was very grateful.

The door winked shut behind us, and he pinned me against it with one brute 'hand,' while, with the other, he rubbed something against my lip, bruising it.  I felt a vague numbness, harmless but irresistible, creep through my body.  The look on his face, inches from mine, was almost apologetic.

"You don't like the see-through, do you?" he said.  "I've been watching you.  There are a lot of things you don't like."

"You wanna tell me what this is about?" I asked the Xesan.

"I was about to ask you the same thing.  Why are you pretending to be a priest?"

"Aren't you pretending to be a human?"

"No," he said.  "I'm not."

He shimmied and shoved his way out of the amorphous bubble suit.  I could have run then or turned the tables somehow while he was shaking off the last of his bubble suit, but somehow I just didn't feel like it.  My mind was racing, but I just ran my tongue over the bruised lip; it tasted like fennel, and I couldn't help licking and licking it like a fool.

He was a Xesan underneath.  I nearly gagged at the sight of him naked, a scabrous hulk of ooze and blubber.  But then, he wasn't naked.  Suddenly, out of what could have been an anus or a vagina -- or a mouth for that matter -- a human hand emerged.  The arm followed, then a long, bald head, the torso and the rest of him, sweaty and completely human.

A double disguise!

He stood before me, smiling.  Now he was naked except for a scanty loincloth.  He was thin but moved with power and intelligence even in the small gestures -- rubbing a wisp of fake protoplasm from between two fingers, or pursing and relaxing his lips over and over as he cased me.

"Abraham?" I said.

"Yes, Lord?" he joked.  He was not smiling.

"But I'm no priest.  You know that.  What do you want with me?"

"You disgust me," he said, "with your petty likes and dislikes.  Your transparent ruses!  Your little life!  Memphis was wrong."

"Memphis?!"

"He sent you to me.  He is one of my people.  I have many Memphis's feeding me.  They want to know the truth too."

"The truth?"

Abraham lifted his arms straight up over his head, paused as some sort of frenzy came over him, and then brought them down on my shoulders, pressing me to my knees.  "Memphis said you had the question.  He said that in your heart you screamed it."

"Screamed what?"

"Was he wrong?"  Abraham struck me across the face with the back of his hand.  I fell onto my side.  He kneeled over me.  He pressed the gimlet to my throat.  "We were wrong about all the priests.  The vestments fooled us.  We thought the truth was buried in them.  We thought if we took away all their excuses, in extremis, it would be revealed."

"What would be revealed?  What are you talking about?"

"Questions are like gimlets, aren't they?" he whispered.  I could feel blood trickling down my neck onto my collar bone.  "You drill in.  You bore till you feel it prick something solid.  That's where I come in, Earthman.  I pry it out, see what's there.  But have you been drilling?"

"No!" I shouted.  "No, I don't give a damn!  I never gave a damn!"

"My child, my child . . . "

I closed my eyes.

" . . . I believe you."  He threw the gimlet aside.  I opened my eyes.  He towered over me.  He loathed me.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted to kill him.  I wanted to shout something in my defense.  But I did nothing.  Inert, I watched him climb back into his Xesan hide and then into the human disguise.  It took a long time.  When he was done, he said, "You've been a waste of time.  I'll send in your conk, Inspector."  He retrieved his weapon from the floor where it lay, and he left me there.

The Slowship Sneer had landed on Xesis, and most of the passengers had already disembarked.  Sahar curled beside me in Abraham's room.  We lay on the floor like nested bowls just where Abraham had left me.  I had never before made love to a conk.  If not for the warmth of her body against my back and the calming rhythm of her breath, I would have let go the thread of sanity and fallen into hell.

I still couldn't speak to her, except to repeat, as I stared at the opaque ceiling, "What is the meaning of life?"

"It's all right, baby," she said.

I could not bear for her to see my eyes.

 

hat was ten years ago.  I let the slowship take me home.  Sahar took care of me, never leaving Abraham's room until we were on Earth again.  It wasn't the drug that disabled me; it was the question.  I let all the vidaxes from home office go unanswered and sneaked off the ship wedged between two big Jovians, my face hidden in my lapels.

I heard that the priest killings stopped.  Only Elvis and I knew why -- and Memphis's ilk, I supposed.  So I had been Abraham's last victim, for I was certainly dead!

For ten years I've been hiding out in cold water flats and flophouses, gigging in cheap bars on my synthhorn, even doing an Elvite Rock from time to time, always splitting as soon as I got paid.  Ten years at the end of Lonely Street.  Ten years avoiding humans and interrogating the peeling paper on a tenement wall while the stars wheeled round without me.  What is the meaning of life?

Then, eight days ago, Memphis found me.  I never bothered to lock my place.  I think, in my heart, I was hoping to be robbed and killed.

"I didn't know places like this existed any more," he said, sweeping away cobwebs as he invaded my flat with his Vitalis and his shakti.  She was a new one, in pink plastic knee boots and hair layered high in the pious Elvite fashion.  She clung to his side like a Siamese twin.  Memphis himself had increased in importance; he was now wearing the bejewelled white jumpsuit with gold brocade and the flowing cape reserved for Intergalactic Archrockerdaddies.  "And I certainly didn't imagine that you, with your precious preferences, would choose to live in one."

"I don't live," I said.  "I exist.  Isn't that what you think of me anyway?"

"What are you talking about?" he asked me.  He dusted my folding chair with his cuff and settled into it.  The shakti relaxed into his lap and slung her arms around his neck.

"Don't be cruel," I said.  "Don't pretend Abraham didn't tell you about me."

"What?  The killer?  What would he tell me?  How would he talk to me?"

"Relax, Reverend.  Abraham told me everything."

"What exactly is 'everything'?"

"How you fingered me for him.  How you thought I  . . . "  I was trembling, out of control.  I didn't feel like I was crying;  I felt like someone was using me to cry with, shaking the tears out of me, sobbing with my guts.

Memphis persisted: "What?  How I thought you what?"

"You thought I had been questioning.  You thought I was ripe, damn you.  You sent me to him to be killed, to have the answer pulled out of me.  But you were wrong.  I haven't got it.  It's not in me, padre.  I never gave a damn."

"The answer to what?"

"Please don't make me say it."  But I wanted to.  I had to.  I had been thinking and saying nothing else for the past ten years.

"Say what?  Make you say what?"

"What is the meaning of life?"

"That's it?"

"Yes."

"That's all of it?"

"Yes, of course it is."

"You fool!  You've been on the run for ten years because of that line?  You thought I was in cahoots with Abraham?  Me?  You believed him?  So that's what happened on the Sneer!"  The shakti cautiously removed herself from the Reverend's lap.  Obviously, she had not seen him reach this emotional pitch before, outside copulation.  She turned away from us, with the excuse of a lipstick and a compact.

It had become pitch dark outside, and my one window, turned mirror-like beside Memphis, showed me the other side of his face, crueller than the one he gave me, less ironic and more violent.  We were making a row.  The disheveled Moon Man from down the hall peeked in as he passed by on his way to the communal john.  (I've never figured out what they do in there.)  His snake was with him, and a little boy who stopped by from time to time to scar them with lunar caustic.  They leaned in through the casing as if on civil alert.  A few seconds later a workman joined them, a plumber who had been scavenging copper from decayed portions of the building.

"Shove off," the Reverend barked at them.

"It's all right," I managed to say.  "Everything's all right."  Memphis's shakti, responding to his nudge, sashayed to the door, closed it in my neighbors' faces and didn't let go the knob until the tumbler clicked.  Memphis looked at her again, and she contemplated the lock.  It was a door of ancient design, preserved in the dark, low places of Earth where losers like me, gravel and bilge water, settled.  She mastered it and locked us in, then stayed there, leaning against the jamb and gazing into her tiny mirror.

"Listen to me, Inspector," the Reverend continued, taking my jaw in his hand to make me look.  "You are the only person we've ever found who has survived an attack by this maniac -- if you can call this survival.  Nobody else even knows what he looks like.  You've got to help.  He is killing our people again."

I stared at him.

"You don't believe me, do you?  You still think I'm what that murderer told you."

"I don't know what to believe."

He let me go.  "I'll make you a deal," he said, "Come with me.  Leave this place.  Help me find Abraham, and I'll tell you the answer to your stupid question."

The shakti laughed.  Reverend Memphis smiled.  "Oh, shush," he told her.  Then to me:  "You know it's true.  You know I have the answer, don't you?  You know I can tell you the truth."

There were no more tears in me.  I felt the wind go in and out of my chest, but there was nothing there.  He and the girl were still smiling, though he seemed to be trying not to.  I said what I had to say, what I believed, though it made me hate myself and him: "Yes.  I know."

He immediately stood.  The shakti rushed to his side.  "Come on," he told me, "we're going to Xesis."

He unlocked and opened the door, and the little boy fell in, the Moon Man and the plumber on top of him, with the snake hissing between them.  The shakti kicked at them in disgust, and they scattered.

I left everything I had there -- which was nothing -- and went with Memphis.

 

     And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold,

behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns; and

Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt

offering in the stead of his son . . . And the Angel of the

Lord [said]: . . . I will multiply thy seed as the stars of

heaven.

                                   -- Genesis XXII, 13-17

 

ife is funny that way.  I am walking on stars.

I've got to get this straight.  It's all so new, and I want you to understand.  I don't want you to have to go through the hell I've seen, and I don't want you to be meat for some Abraham.

Reverend Memphis took me in tow, booked passage on a slowship to Xesis -- Abraham's venue of choice -- and kept me in his rooms for the flight.  I heard their lovemaking day and night, Memphis and the shakti, like fat men nibbling junk food.  I hated the sound.  The softness of my bed was like that too, and the delicate meals he ordered for us -- armadillo from the preserves at Graceland, pates of lunar mushroom -- the wines, the exotic incense, the first generation recordings of Elvis 45's.  Every sensum lashed and humiliated me.

What is the meaning of life?

Occasionally, I was capable of conversation.  "Why is he killing priests again?" I asked Memphis.

"Why did he ever stop?" Memphis said.  I had no desire to tell him.  "The authorities have never caught a rabbit -- that much is certain.  They are completely in the dark.  Why the lapse of ten years?  I don't know.  Do you?"  He peered at me strangely, half smiling, as if with some hidden joke.

"How can you know the most important thing and not know a little thing like that?" I said.

"Do you doubt me?" he asked.

I had to say, "No."

"You'll go out soon," he told me.  "Make yourself available to Abraham.  He may well be aboard this ship.  We are going back and forth along this circuit, my child, until we find him or he finds us."

"Then what?" I said.

"First this."  He handed me a small capsule, a suppository, and motioned me to the bathroom to put it in.  I had never seen a transmitter like that one, but then, I'd been out of the picture for a decade.

"And then this," he added.  As I took the capsule from him, he slipped his hand into the ample fold of his left sleeve and gripped something inside.  A point of steel gleamed through the net of threads.

This pleased the Shakti.  She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him on the mouth.  I did my business with the capsule and left them wrestling and laughing there.  But before I went out into the passageway, I said, "And then you'll tell me?"

"What?"

"Then you'll tell me."

"Yes.  Of course, Inspector.  Then I'll tell you."

They were laughing into each other's mouth again.  I left.

I remember shading my eyes to the harsh light of the passageway.  It seems like darkness to me now.  Every concentric onionskin of space is filled with stars, the farther the vaster and thicker with stars.  The night sky is a plenum of white light; only, you cannot yet see it.

I remember how Sahar first seemed to me in her native form, unabashed, pooling her gelatinous members into the recess outside the barroom portal, with no attempt to seem human.  In the course of ten years she had pleased people that well that they learned to enjoy Xesan anatomy.  She was beautiful.  I could see it now, squinting through cataracts of memory.  She was beautiful as a moth is or a slug, sunlit, gleaming on a garden rock.

"Father Isaac!" she called out.  I saw the small cilia ringing her midriff shudder.  Her color darkened with affection.

I ducked into a doorway, but she followed.  I found myself in a closet filled with cleaning implements, autovacs and small, dirty robots hanging, humming, on wall hooks or scattered underfoot along with rags, buckets and open jugs emitting sharp, eye-watering fumes.

A tendril snaked through the doorway.  Its tip, undulating, climbed head-high and said: "Isaac, you naughty teddy bear!"  The rest of her seethed in.  "Why are you hiding from moi?"  After her fashion, she kissed me, and I remembered everything: her smell, the taste of her on Abraham's floor, the revulsion at first, and then the pleasure, the warmth of every caring nook and tuck of her, washing away my dread . . . for a moment.

"Sahar," I said, "don't take it personally.  I've been hiding from everyone."  I knocked over a can of dry lubricant at my elbow; Sahar blew the stuff back into its container and set it right.

"Why?"

"Don't you remember?"

She was all over me.  I could have swooned for pleasure and relief, but I pushed her away.  "You don't want me?" she said.

"It's not that."

When a Xesan cases you, it's like gooseflesh pointing at you from all over their body.  "What then?" she asked me.  "What have you been doing for ten years?"

I couldn't speak.

"Is it still the same thing?" she whispered.  It was dark in there.  It seemed to be getting darker.  She rubbed her gland, swathed in diaphanous silk, against my thigh, and I stiffened.

I said, "Yes."  I said, "I still have to find out.  It's killing me, Sahar.  It's killing me, but I can't spit it out."

The little sunflowers in her skin, the curious peaks that had leaned toward me, dissolved.  "I have to go," she said quite suddenly.  "I have to meet somebody."  Sliding away, she made a sound against the floor like a bath mat peeling off the tub, as she always did when she was hurried.

Numb, I had not even realized that it was the Slowship Sneer we were traveling on, until I ran into Sahar.  The bar looked different.  There was an altar to The King where some tables had been, and people had to sit in booths along the wall.  Each booth had a small antique jukebox connected to the Elvis simulacrum on the altar.  The Weenie bartender -- I don't know Weenies well enough to know if it was the same one -- was ejecting a drunken patron from one of the booths by pummelling him like a little wrecking ball.  It was crowded, and the Weenie had a hard time guiding the poor fool out of the room.

I went in and took the drunkard's place.  I was surrounded by nonhumans with greasy duck's ass hairdos that smelled like genuine antique pomade.  They were expensively dressed and made up to look like Earthling businessmen, in white tee shirts with folded-up short sleeves holding packs of Luckies, blue suede shoes form-fitted to their hopelessly odd feet.

All at once, I was in a nightmare.  They were all Abraham, doubly disguised.  They were pointing their gimlets at me under the table.

"My child, my child," they said . . .

"What's yours?" the Weenie asked me.

"Huh?  Oh," I said, "I don't care.  Just give me something."  He clucked at me and flew off.

"It's going to go up," the one on my right said.

"You mean down," said the one next to him.

"No," he said, "I said up and I mean up.  I like Xesan timber futures too."

Across the table they were chuckling under their breath and elbowing one another conspiratorially.  Finally, one of them said: "That whole market is for jackasses.  Go with deuterium products and you'll never have to fly slowship again."  Then they all laughed.

I am not holding them up for ridicule.  Such folk do what they must, like all of us.  If it had not been for them, I would never have seen Olbers' vision.  I didn't understand that at the time, of course; that's the point.  I couldn't hold myself in any longer.

"What does it mean?"  I said.

The conversation stopped.  It was like a chain reaction.  People at other booths stopped talking and leaned to listen.

"What does . . . what?" asked the man next to me, who was, of course, a Xesan inside.  (And inside that . . . ?)  He spoke for everyone.

"What is the meaning of life?" I said.

They all backed away.  Someone yelled, "Help me!"  The three on the other side of the table immediately got up and ran out of the bar screaming.  The two remaining on my side squeezed themselves against the wall, popping out of their human costumes and prostheses like pudding boiling out of a saucepan.

"It's him!  It's Abraham!"

My neighbors rushed under the table to make their escape along the other side of the booth.  Twenty humans -- or their like -- were crowding the door, pushing one another aside, funnelling through.  Two or three others were lying on the floor, moaning or still screaming as they groped toward the passageway.  The Weenie was leaping from head to head in a panic.  The simulacrum Elvis was grinding and spinning like a button on a string as he sang, "I want no other love!" to an empty room, or to me.  "Baby, it's just you I'm thinking of."

Then, for a brief moment, I was completely alone, without living beings and without Elvis.  I had the illusion that the entire ship was empty.  It was quite silent except for the ubiquitous humming of the atmosphere controls.

Sahar was at the door.  She pointed at me, and Abraham himself came in.  He was dressed as before, in a loin cloth, but he had a little paunch now; he was hairy and unkempt.  Nor was he as spry.  His posture a bit more concave, his face more turbid, the eyes were less clear and darker.  He held the gimlet in front of his nose, flexing his wrist to pulse it back and forth like a metronome.

I stood up.  "Kill me," I said.  "Do whatever you like.  I'm not afraid of you.  I have to know too."

Never blinking, Abraham inched toward me, stopping a few yards in front of me.  "You were right about him -- he's bursting with it," he said to Sahar, but he was looking at me.  "She's an ichneumonfly," he told me, "one of those wasps that push their eggs into hawktails and fly away.  The babies hatch and eat their way out.  We planted many such eggs, Sahar and I, twenty years ago, and a second crop ten years later when the first one came to naught, in priests at first, and then in others.  Now comes the second harvest.  So far, nothing!  But with you . . . who knows?"

"You lied about Memphis," I said.

"Certainly I did.  It was Sahar who chose you for me.  If I'd told you that, she would have been of no further use to me.  And, of course, it was helpful to keep you away from Memphis.  You wanted time to cook, my child."

"But Memphis knows."

"Don't be stupid."

"I'm not being stupid," I said.  "I can tell.  I've been gnawing this bone for ten years!  You and I are both fools, but he knows.  Only he'll never say it, not even if you impale him like the others.  He'd only laugh at you."

"Kill him," Sahar said to Abraham, "Please kill him.  Don't draw this out.  He wants it.  We all want it.  Don't be cruel, my love."

The haggard fellow in the loincloth took three more steps and bruised my mouth as before.  The taste of fennel!  He pressed the gimlet against my belly this time.  Again, I felt blood trickle.

Sahar screamed and slumped forward, dead.  My cheek lolling against Abraham's shoulder, I watched her tremble and tremble and stop trembling.  Abraham turned round, slicing me with the gimlet, then fell backward against me, and I smelled flesh burning as we fell together.

It was Memphis.  His Laser Point still surrounded by a haze of heat waves, he looked like a fairy tale merman caught in a tide pool.  The muck he was standing in had been Sahar.

I was looking up at Memphis from the floor.  Abraham's cadaver covered me like a clammy pelt.  Behind the Reverend -- or was it a dream? -- the King of Western Bop, in simulacrum, was climbing to the top of a laser-projected shower stall to escape a crowd of screaming bobbysoxers, ecstatic gopi girls with scarves and frills.  The Hillbilly Cat, radiating spines of pink light, was in tatters; like Bacchae, they had torn off his clothes and shoes and would have taken his skin as well, had not the Jacksonville Police cleared them out of his dressing room.  There they were, the cops, big as life, to save him.

Father Memphis leaned over me.  The shakti's ankles crossed at his belt line, her hands clasped at his sternum; she was riding on his back, peeking over his shoulder at me.

"Tell me," I said.

Now two security women grabbed the Reverend's elbows while a third, reaching round the shakti, pressed a baton across his throat.

"Get off me, you goons," Memphis demanded.  "That's Abraham!"  The three heavies looked down at Abraham and me.  They released Memphis.

"Tell me," I said.

He leaned close.  Embarrassed, the guards permitted him everything.  "Are you hurt?" he said.  "Are you dying?"

"You promised."

He must have seen my blood; his head jerked away.  Then he forced himself to look at me again.  "All right," he told me.

They were peeling Abraham off me.  Then someone was pouring cold liquid over my wound and bandaging me.  It was no use.

They were lifting me and carrying me.  Father Memphis's face floated above me like the moon, motionless in the Earth's old sky.  He was walking beside me, talking at me furiously, explaining something.  Sometimes he laughed.  The shakti's hair would whip across his face from time to time, eclipsing the crazy eyes.  I felt the Musical Gates of Graceland open.

Socrates saw it best on hemlock, dying, but hazily even then.   Anaximander before him was very close.  He said that the sky was an opaque dome and that the stars were pin pricks through which the ubiquitous, surrounding brilliance shone.  Later science, opening its grand doors from galaxy to galaxy or quark to quark, like a chicken, thought it a triumph to peck through a fence around which there was open passage.

Olbers was right to question but wrong to answer.  The only "absorbing medium" is ignorance.  There is no occlusion anywhere, and everybody knows it, but hides.  There's no need to listen to Memphis.  He's right, of course, blabbing away.  They're all right.  With my eyes closed, I see skies, mountains, flags.  When I open them, the earth steams and people run about.  The farther I look, the more light I see.  Please tell them.  Tell everyone.

There's no need to kill or to die.  A ram is in the thicket.