SHELL GAME

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

he old nun strapped Karl into the hypodyne.  She touched his hand, then began the command sequence to scan him into the Collective Unconscious.

"Shouldn't we wait for Willard?"  His skin began to glow as if he were a swamp animal, moonlit and steaming.  "If I'm going to turn into stars and breezes for the Resistance, I want someone who knows this gizmo to run me."

"Can't wait," the old nun said, closing the switch that would make him stars and breezes.  "They're coming.  Wenty's Gang!"

Under the hypodyne Karl's body fizzed like a head of lager.  His liederhosen ballooned.  He became translucent, then transparent, as flesh sizzled into data, manipulable data.

He was gone.  The old nun prayed: "Sleep, Wenty!  Please don't see him.  Sleep!"

She massaged her temples, then raked her fingers through hair dry as windburn.  It was down to her shoulders now--still a strange feeling.  Eight years a shave pate at Butsu Shin Ji, she'd made herself a promise when Wenty burned all the monasteries to the ground:       "I'll let it grow till the world has its conscience back."

Outside her door, the ancient wooden stairs creaked.  The old nun stiffened.  Her blood bumped-bumped, core to skin.  She gripped the keyboard--now it meant weight, not wiring; she could smash a nose with it and run.  The door opened.

As she--but not her glands--had known, it was her tech man.  He skulked in, munching an apple.

"Close the door," she said.  "You're sure you weren't followed?"

"What do you take me for?"

She stood.  "You punch Karl in, Willard.  I just hypodyned him."

"No, you do it.  I want to finish the apple, okay?"

The old nun scowled.  She sat again.  She punched the keys that threw Karl into the Collective Unconscious.  She divided him in two, as they had planned; Karl was Karl and Dagmar now.  Then the old nun set to work on the old fairy tale.

 

issen@"  Toes sticking out the holes in their quilt, Gretel curled against Hansel.  Hansel pressed his ear to the well.

("Not a well, dammit, a wall!"  The old nun squinted at the monitor and retyped.)

On the other side of the wall, Karl, their papa, fastened down the sender, matte black and chrome, its perfect, tiny telegraph key surmounted by a wooden knob.  He uncoiled the wire from its spool and laid it out in a large figure eight, reaching up to fasten the end to a stone outcropping in a coroner of the ceiling.  The gaunt doctor tugged it into his surgical gown, then faded into the mortar as the old nun removed the extra 'o'.  ("Damn!")

Papa cradled the sender in his lip, then in his lap,  to insulate the sound of the key--Even with the mercury plunger, the hinge made a slight noise.  He began sending the encoded message, with the lag before the seventh, eleventh and nineteenth letters--the assurance to the old nun that everything was okay.

 

untington Wentworth, XIX grabbed pretty Cyd and kissed her all over her face and neck.  "The place is ours now, Baby, like everything else."  He kicked the table onto its side and laughed as the plates shattered and silverware avalanched to the floor, already littered with shards of fingerbowls exploded by his laughter.  "And it only took two nukes!"

Suddenly, he pulled his lip from her little teeth and pushed her away.  He stood very still, as if listening for a rat in the wall.  "Did you feel that?"  He fished the transmission monitor out of his cummerbund, punched in a short code, and watched . . .

"I knew it!"  He upended some more tables and kicked a small hole in a partition covered with antique French wallpaper.

"What is it, honey?"

"Guilt!"  He was livid.  "I felt this twinge of guilt.  I hope to God you never have to find out what that is, Baby.  It's liquid shit.  That nun bitch is screwing around in the CU.  Sure as death, she's trying to fool us, using old electromag stuff!"  He smacked the monitor with the back of his hand.

"What's death, sweetie?"  Cyd was wrinkling her powdered forehead, her shawl falling off her shoulders and slipping to the floor, her little red mouth catching flies.

Wenty charged into the Moon Bazaar office, slamming an ancient clerk between door and corner.  The former owner stopped cleaning out his desk and tried to make himself flush with the wall.  Wenty scooped up the telephone, slapped the tiny transmission monitor against the receiver and started up the phone tree.  "Two can play the low tech game!"

While he waited for the first connection, Wenty smiled.  He threw a wad of money on the floor to lure the startled lackey close enough to kick his head.

"Can I pop him later?"  Cyd nibbled Wenty's ear as the little man wormed nearer.

"Yeah, sure,"--eyes on the monitor--"if it don't bore you by now."

"You're so swell, Wenty!  Things bore you that would give anybody else a heart attack!"

 

ortense Meander Smythe-Hampton rubbed her temple against the cellular as she listened to Snarls's baritone rasp.   In her mind, she ran over the locations of all her accounts and deposit boxes.  Plutonium was a sensitive market.  A little shift of balance in the CU, the slightest twinge of self-recollection, social conscience, or remorse, and her whole empire might come tumbling down.

The phone set cradled on his shoulder, Snarls "The Butcher" Jessup was polishing off some baby ribs from one of the villages he'd lately slaughtered.  "(Urp!)  They got into the CU through one of the old fairy tales.  Their old nun is changing round the plot, like she tried to do with Eden before Wenty fixed it."

"Eden?"

"Remember where Adam is naked in the Garden, and God tells him (Urp!) what a beautiful hunk he is . . . ?"

"'And God saw that he was good'?"

" . . . That's it.  (Urp!)  Well, before Wenty fixed it--Not everybody knows this--when the pinkos still had their gums in it, it used to be that Adam was ashamed, and he hid himself.  Don't you think (Urp!) the pinkos loved that, the stinking, people-hating, pamphleteering little . . . "

"Adam was what?"

"Ashamed!"

Hortense had to think hard to remember the meaning of that word; when it started to come back to her, she didn't like it--"I don't think I want to continue this conversation"--and she hung up.

Ashamed!  A shiver went up her spine.  She did what she was supposed to do, however, what Snarls called her for, what Wenty called the guy who called the guy who called Snarls for.  She removed the steel casing of her household service connector and entered Wenty's code.  Her house lights dimmed; Wenty's brightened.

Then she dropped her tunic, unpinned her hair, and marched right out onto the street for some sex.

 

enty watched the numbers flash by on his tiny portable.

Cyd leaned over his shoulder, counting along.  "Jeez, Wenty, that's a lot of ergs!  What are you gonna do with all that?"

"Watch my smoke, baby.  We got them outgunned a hundred to one.  Let's have a little fun.  What's your favorite thing to eat?"

"I like caviar on melba toast with champagne, kind of.  Okay?"

 

hildren, we are going for a walk in the woods," Mama shrilled with jackboot diction.  Papa swung wide the larder door.  "As you see, the larder is empty.  We shall have to do without breakfast."

Hansel and Gretel were just running in from the well, where they had gone to wash.  "But Plapa!  Malma!"  Hansel's face was dripping wet.  He smelled of wine.  Gretel giggled and clapped her hands.  She skipped unsteadily behind him, clinging to his nitshirt.  "Our troubles are over!  Look outside."

Next to the woodpile were two great mounds that had not been there the day before.  Each was nearly the size of the cottage itself.  One mound consisted of slices of melba toast in individual cellophane wrappers, and in the other were innumerable wooden crates with Cyrillic lettering on the sides.  Each crate, Hansel had discovered, contained twenty jars of imported caviar.

Mama ushered the children inside and pulled the drawer shut on their behinds.

("Dammit, the door, not the drawer!  Shut the door on their behinds!  Willard, can't you do this?  Aren't you done with that apple?")

"Yes, Papa, Mama!" Gretel sang.  "We shall surely live happily ever after!"

"You children had better go to your room and lie down for a minute.  You are so hungry, you are seeing things."  Papa nudged them toward their rheum and shat the door.  A vile odor spread through the hut as the door sagged and dripped.

"Bourgeois pigs!  Wenty's boys have found us, Dagmar."  Papa felt the old disappointment, like scum settling in a fishbowl.  "Now what--happily ever after?  There'll be no stopping them.  They'll gobble the world, quash every scruple, every restraint!"

"Karl, Karl,"--taking his hand in hers--"please try to stay calm.  Caviar, toast--it's a joke!  They could have made us rich and lazy and the children stupid and happy.  We can out-think them, if we just stay calm."

"If we can't change the stories, Dagmar, and if Wenty finds the old nun, it's all over.  Conscience is dead."

"They've slowed us down a bit, that's all.  Don't worry, Karl!"

"I can't help it.  I sloughed off everything--my name, my body--I let it all be translated into this cybernetic buzz.  For what?  The old nun said we could beat them.  The old nun said we could change back the heart of the world, Dagmar."

Dagmar laid her other hand on Karl's shoulder and shook him gently.  "We're in the CU, Karl, and Wenty's not.  We've got that advantage, and we've got the old nun for air cover, fixing the words before they're out of their throats.  The old nun won't let them win."

Suddenly the walls glistened and throbbed.  The room collapsed in on them like a punctured balloon.  The floor was a dark red, viscous fluid sucking at their feet.  From all around them, a sustained, hysterical whinny.  They were inside the flesh of a small horse.  Then, just as suddenly--BACKSPACE, DELETE--the old nun spied her error, and it was a small house again.

"She can't even keep the spelling straight."  Karl leaned, exhausted, against a windrow, which cracked slightly under his weight when the "r" was removed.  "Back in Moses, when the water covered us and we needed a Reed Sea to breathe through, she typed in 'Red,' and look what happened."

"She fixed it.  She got us out okay."

"Yeah.  With a miracle.  How many of those can you pull before Wenty's boys are all over you?"

"Shush!"  She tightened her arms to her sides--a military stance.  "They're peeking."  The door had become a wooden structure again--SHIFT REPLACE--but retained the shape it had settled into as excrement, covering only half the doorway.

"Look," Mama whispered.  "We've got to try it anyway, Karl.  Never mind the non sequitur."

"Right.  Into the woods!"

 

 like to eat the core too," said Willard, "and the seeds--everything but the stem actually.  Did they kill the tots yet?"

The old nun hazarded a desperate look away from the monitor at Willard.  "No!"  As she stared at the screen again, days passed in the CU.  Wenty sneaked the children back from the woods, keystroke by keystroke--"I was too slow, Willard!"--with moonlit stones.  The old nun had Dagmar latch the hut to keep Hansel from gathering more stones, and they tried the woods again next morning.  How Wenty's lot got the bread crumbs into Hansel's pocket, she had no idea.

"Did you try birds?"

Well, yes, the old nun managed to supply a few hungry birds to get rid of them, but it was close.  At first they were a company of Hassidic elders in long black coats, stooping and dragging their whiskers through the bracken to nibble up the trail of crumbs; finally, the old nun caught her error and changed the rabbins to robins.  The candy house was next . . .

"Hang on, Boss.  Lemme just finish my seeds here."

. . . Dagmar, now a gobbling witch, had nearly finished the children off, when the Gang finessed them--Dagmar was in the oven instead.  Karl moaned beside her:  "We'd better pack up shop and go back while we can.  Face it, Dagmar--it's their story.  We're beaten."  In the dark oven, Karl and Dagmar, invulnerable as a string of zeds and ones, sizzled on hot coals.

"No, Karl!  We can still stop the Gang."  The old nun was trying, but she could follow them only dimly now.  She tried giving them various tools: a crow bra, a harmer, an actylene rotch to force their way out.  They can put a Bazaar on the Moon, but they can't make a machine that reads my intention!

Dagmar examined the rotch, a strange, useless thing, before tossing it into the coals.  "We'll change the shell by ourselves.  We can shift out of here before they catch on."

"The old nun won't know where we are.  It will be just us against the whole Gang."

"We've got no choice, Karl."

She was right, and he knew it.  "Close your eyes, then."  She did so.  "Now close the rest of your senses."  And she did.  They crossed hands, his right in her right, his left in her left, and they squeezed till a drop of blood trickled down where her nails pierced him.

 

've lost him . . . Where can I toss this stem?"  Willard said it without emotion.  He didn't blame himself.  There was no blame.  Watching over his shoulder, the old nun noted that absence of affect as more important than the techy's words themselves.

"Let me see that," she said.  Willard yielded her the swivel chair and earphones.  The old nun had not noticed before what a linear creature he was, broken lines head to toe, no curve, no softness anywhere.  She took his place at the screen and watched the characters fill the dark rectangle and start to scroll, glowing emerald snow, flashing now and then:

 

" . . .. . . a puff of blue smoke . . .

rubbed their eyes to see the cottage and

everything in it gone . . . skin like sand and

limbs like cracked taffy where the pit yawned . . . "

 

Then numerals, ampersands, paragraph and pound signs, asterisks and noise . . .

"They've changed the shell," the old nun said.  "Can you find them?"

"I don't know if I feel like it," he said.

She felt her stomach muscles tighten.  "Tell me what you recall of the Hansel and Gretel story, and don't waste any time."

"Me?  What I recall?"

"Yes, from your childhood, or wherever you seem to remember it from.  Tell me the story."

She listened with increasing horror to the tale of the two sweet children and their happy parents, who gave them a surprise party one day in the woods, and how they all lived happily after.  She realized that she now remembered it the same way.  All the darkness was gone, and with it, caution.

The old nun rose and backed away slowly as Willard played with a pair of large channel locks, tossing them from hand to hand and eyeing her coldly.

 

arl plunged into prehistory.  Dizzying--he felt carobs and cypresses from inside, as if they were prickles of hair.  He trembled, and dunes shifted.  He sighed: a cyclone gathered.  The oceans were his lymph and blood.  He was Jehovah!

Far below, he saw Cain.  Eyes downcast, Cain brooded over his slain brother.  Now to mark him!  Now to shame him and all the House of Cain--a prophylactic twinge in the Wenties' unconscious!

"Am I my brother's keeper?"

Jehovah poised to answer when suddenly, from another quarter, a deep voice thundered, rending the sky and shaking the mountain side.  "Well spoken, Son of Adam!  Well spoken and well done!  I was but testing thee when I favored thy brother.  Now thou hast shown thyself his better!  To thy seed, conquerers and kings, shall belong all peoples and things of the earth."

Dumbstruck, Jehovah surveyed the landscape, translating, in his mind, all its features back into the mother code, the patterning force of the CU.  He spotted them behind a nimbus, laughing.  They had found him.  Wenty's boys were there, laughing at him.

Jehovah shrouded himself in a pillar of smoke and fled.  Another shell! 

 

enty and Cyd repaired to the budoir of convenience adjoining the Bazaar office.  Things were well in hand.  Why be a dull boy?

"What's the guy doing now, the CU crook?"  Cyd slid her finger down Wenty's cheek and rested it on his lips.

He kissed her hard into the pillow.  Then he laughed and held the portable up for her to see.

"He's trumped.  He's fleeced.  He thought he was God.  What a burner on him, huh?  Him and the nun!  Ain't I the smartest, baby?  Ain't I the best?"

"Oh Wenty, I love you so much, you make me wanna kill somebody with my teeth."

"Later.  Look at this.  The pinko is trying to pull something down there.  See those numbers?  He's getting cute, but he can't go nowhere I can't follow."  Wenty pushed a tiny button and laid the portable down on the night table.  He beat his fist against the wall, and they heard the old Bazaar boss groan in his shackles.  Cyd giggled.

Then they made the percale flutter.

 

ry different shells, other layers of the CU.  They are all coextensive, interpenetrating.  Changing one changes all, according to the causal structures of the mother code, of which all shells are dressing, personae, aspects of a gem, dewdrops on a sky-wide web, each reflecting all the others, a myriad languages for one intent.

The old nun sat at the computer, monitoring the wild flow of data.  Willard's inert form slumped in the doorway, the channel locks where she had left them--in his teeth.

Her operative in the CU had struck out on his own, God help him!  Only occasionally she saw a fleeting sign of his activity--a ghostly alphanumeric flashing in one of the familiar configurations--but there was too much flux to focus in.  There even seemed to be some interference from a weather satellite.

Wait a minute . . . !  Stars and breezes . . . !

 

our type always has a headache!" the fellow said.  "You're a tease, that's what you are."

"Please don't take it personally," Hortense gathered her scattered underwear from the lawn.  "I thought I could do it.  I can't, that's all.  Look at the sky, will you?  When is the sun going to show?"

"What are you talking about?"  Dames were all inscrutable and perverse.  He should have just walked on by when she peeked out to proposition him from the bushes.  Now he was late for the poppings.

"Doesn't it depress you?  How can anybody do it?  I can't remember what a good day feels like.  It isn't like this everywhere, is it?"

Suddenly, he thought it was.  He knew just what she meant.  Life was hardly worth living.  He didn't feel like making love either.  Not ever, not any more.  "You know, I can't help feeling like it's something we done, you know what I mean?"

"Yes, that's exactly how I feel."  So did a lot of people.

He didn't want to go to the poppings any more.  He didn't want to do anything.  He just wanted to sit down and think things over.  He wanted to be a better person.

Hortense did too, only the phone was ringing inside, and she'd have to answer it first.  "Hello?"

"Don't you hello me," Snarls barked.  "Why did you take so long to answer?  We're on alert."

"'La chair est triste, helas,'" she moaned, "'et j'ai lu tous les livres!'  That's Baudelaire."

"This has been the sunniest year anybody cares to remember, and as soon as this little cloud passes, it's looking to be sixty-eight degrees and sunny for the rest of the week."

"That's not true."

"It will be in a minute, goddamnit.  Wenty's fixing it in the CU."

"'One must change one's life,' Snarls.  Rainer Maria Rilke."

"'You're an asshole, Horty.'  Snarls Jessup.  Just keep it together till the climate stats change back, will you?  We need your energy credits."  He hung up.

 

enty found him.  He had traced Karl's, a.k.a. Jehovah's movement across the quivering, prismatic shell space, through numerical isomorphs, lattices of hex-dumped pinko footprints, to a shadowy corner of the CU.

The old nun's operative burrowed like a mite into the skin of the subconscious, working on emotional perceptions of wind, air, clouds, light . . . the component impressions of a "climate."  She helped him skew the figures to give the entire world the climacteric mentality--"No, not menopausal, for pity's sake!"--climatic mentality of twentieth century Finland.

Wenty undid it in a dozen key strokes.  Hortense scattered her undies again.

"Are you a genius, sweetums, strictly speaking?" Cyd asked him.

"Honey, they ain't come up with a name yet for what I am."  Trailing satiny bedsheets, Wenty strode back to the Bazaar office.  He threw the clerk another couple of hundred to continue bludgeoning the Moon Bazaar's old boss.  Wenty especially liked the squealing that accompanied strangulation after a good beating.

Later, he would let Cyd pop him.

 

ight had fallen.  Bleary-eyed and headachy, numbers spooling through her brain, the old nun had lost him again--"Jehovah!  Jehovah!  Where are you?"

She licked the knuckle she had bruised against her techy's jaw, then the old nun pounded the desk and stood up; the sudden straightening of her knees sent her chair flying backwards into the prostrate technician.  "Do bad and feel good--that's what you want.  Well, over my dead body!"  There were plenty of dead bodies in the Resistance.

She looked down at the screen again and suddenly cried out.  Jarred by her movement, something had changed, and there, mirabile dictu, in a dizzy swarm of pixels, was her man's electronic signature.

The old nun typed furiously, changing shells again.  The prone techy might have accomplished it more elegantly.  She threw her man stumbling on eight legs through Little Miss Muffet, and spinning, asterisked and italicized, through five monkish theologies.  Wenty was everywhere, as the old nun typed and retyped.  BACKSPACE!  DELETE!  "Got to get it right!"

The old nun swooped him down into biochemistry, down into the niches between quanta, under the dark crests of Compton waves,  where the CU tickles; there, her man Jehovah could fiddle with nucleic acids from inside.  He linked and unlinked carboxyls by jimmying the orbits of electrons below the limens of uncertainty.  Double helices regrouped.  Alter a genotype here and there, and you might effect a sympathetic change in the expression of emotions.  Could conscience be far behind?

--Another mistake!  Wenty, following, grinned and tweaked a few molecules.  Suddenly timber wolves stopped lowering their heads.  The old nun had led him to it!  Now, even as she typed, the old nun could hear the din from a nearby park.  Animals, unrestrained by instinctive deference, were tearing one another to pieces.

The air itself seemed to be separating into warring gases.  The old nun's skin felt as if it were leaping off her bones.  Her world winked out for a moment.  All she could see were her own hypnagogic images, the firefly streaks inside her eyelids.

When the light came back, Jehovah was there--not the God but the field operative, bowed and naked.  "What am I doing back here?"

"Hell!  I must have mistyped.  I brought up the wrong shell."

"Yeah, this one--everyday life."  He was panting.  His skin was a patchwork of scabs, filth and grue.  His nose was smashed and bloody.  His left wrist bent at an impossible angle.  Patches of hair were missing.

"Everyday life!  Is that a shell?"

The walls rumbled.  Jehovah went to the window and peered out.  "They're coming.  No more finesse.  No more filigree.  They're just going to come and beat the shit out of us and then kill us like the others."

"Is everyday life a shell?"  She couldn't stop saying it.  She looked at the trail of characters she had typed into the console, the error that had brought her operative back into the everyday world.  It had never been done this way before.  The configuration was the same as that for calling up a shell in the Collective Unconscious.

"Well, what are we going to do?"  Jehovah watched Wenty's convoy crash down a dirt road toward the decayed warehouse, their HQ in exile.  "This is it, isn't it?  The Gang is right.  Why not?  Conscience is a dinosaur.  Nothing means anything."

"Don't say that!"

Thundering up the staircase, two uniformed thugs, heavily armed, shouldered the door down and tramped in.  In the hallway, a high-pitched voice: "Remember, Wenty.  Don't let them hurt anybody.  No killing.  No shooting."

"Right, baby.  Sure, Baby.  You get to pop 'em,"--a deeper voice.

They walked in.  Like a child in a candy store, Wenty's girl hugged his arm, her eyes big with delight.  Wenty laughed at the old nun: "That's one for me, kid.  You let me trace you--very careless.  But I would have got you anyways."

"Everyday life is a shell!"  The old nun's left hand rested on the space bar--click, click, click, click . . .

"Sure it is,"--laughing--"We knew that.  That's why anything goes, babe.  That's why we can do whatever the hell we wanna.  It's just a shell, you poor moralistic sap.  It don't matter a damn if I kiss your feet or pop you."

"Wenty," the girl said, "you promised me I get to do that."

The thugs handcuffed Jehovah and next turned to the old nun.  She leaned into the console and started typing furiously.  Suddenly, they stopped.

"What the hell is going on?" Wenty barked.  "Get her!"

The old nun just fixed her eyes on the screen and typed.

"Wait," said Wenty.  "You're right.  Live her alone.  What the hell am I saying?  Wenty's Glang is finished.  We can't can't fight tha truth eny longer.  Wait a damn minute!"

"Wenty," his girl said, "I've been dying to heark you say those words.  I feeel so bad.  I don't like whok I've become."

"I now what you mean," one of the soldiers said, his eyes filling with tearks.

The other soldier uncuffed Jehovah and then embraced him.  "Forgrive me, brother!"

"Let me use your phone," Wenty said.  "I have to start thisk moving ub the tree."

The old nun was too busy typing to respond.  Jehovah laid a hand on Wenty's back and directed him to the telephone.  "Here it is, Huntington," he said.  Jehovah moved to the old nun's side, leaned over and whispered, "You didn't just type me over here, did you?"

"No," she said, "that was your own move."  She was still typing.

"What happens when you croak at the keyboard?"

"While they're busy sending the Good News up and down Wenty's Gang, we'll change the controlling stories underneath this.  Then I can take a breather.  Are you ready to get back into Hansel and Gretel and the rest?"

"Whatever you say."

"Whatever I say.  Frightening, isn't it?  I have to stop talking.  One typo and you might have a nose on your belly."

Jehovah looked at Wenty's girl.  She was chewing her lip and sobbing.  "Take it easy," he told her.  "Everybody makes mistakes.  You're a good person.  I can tell."

"Forglive me," the old nun typed.

"Forglive me," the girl said.

 

n up the phone tree, Snarls was saying, "A convent, Horty?  It sounds just the thing."  He threw down his giblets in disgust.  "One must change one's lrfe."