The Western Lands Read online

  "Why not slip Einstein's brain into the body of a young biker whose brain has been destroyed in a collision?"

  Many recoil in horror from such a concept. Why, it could lead to immortality! Just shift the old brain from one body to another. And sooner or later they won't be waiting for accident victims.

  "Paging Doc Sibley . . ."—best scrambled egg man in the industry. He can switch brains in an alley.

  This is of no interest to Joe. Clearly possible, but why do it? Interspecies transplants offer more enticing perspectives. Say, the brain of a chimp in a man's body. Unhampered by the crippling emotional blocks so carefully installed in humans by interested parties, the chimp might prove to be a super-genius; that is to say, he might realize a relatively larger segment of the human potential.

  Why stop there? Why stop anywhere?

  Joe can't stop. He has no place to stop in. He can't love a human being, because he has no human place to love from. But he can love certain animals, because he has animal places.

  Grief is very painful for Joe—"iron tears down Pluto's cheek." He feels it in the plates in his skull, in his artificial arms, in his artificial eye, in every wire and circuit of the tiny computer chips, down into his atoms and photons.

  In setting up his project to research transplant rejection and immune response in animal subjects, instead of assembling a battery of immunologists and surgeons, Joe picked personnel without surgical training or specialized research experience. By the time a student gets through medical school his brain is so crammed with undigested, often misleading, data that there is no room left to think in. In addition to misinformation, the student has also absorbed a battery of crippling prejudices.

  As a renowned transplant surgeon with an impressive array of degrees and titles, he has no difficulty in obtaining funds for his project. He has only to point out the financial advantages: the personnel he has selected will work for one-fourth the usual fees. So why bribe some prima donna immunologist away from some other project? Most competent surgeons would not be interested at any price:

  "We are not veterinarians!"

  In fact, any surgeon who would agree to work in the Zoo, as it was called, is probably incompetent or worse. Doctor Benway is the only MD on the program, and his license has been called into question.

  Joe stresses mechanical aptitude, with particular emphasis on electrical and electronic expertise. Boys who from an early age took things apart and put them back together (more or less). Surgeons are nothing more than mechanics in any case, and many of them are piss-poor mechanics.

  Here are some of the persons Joe recruited:

  1. Electrician, inventor

  2. Computer programmer, hobby is to tie his own trout flies

  3. Mathematician, organic chemistry

  4. Wood and ivory carver

  5. Gunsmith, watch repairs

  6. Veterinarian, lost his license for treating pet skunks

  7. Gunsmith, inventor

  8. Stage magician, hypnotist

  9. Draftsman, makes model boats in bottles

  "Scrambles!"

  The Zoo Team plunges into an orgy of outlandish operations on the animal subjects . . . hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers, appendixes are exchanged in the operating room where often six operations are underway, the surgeons passing organs and instruments back and forth, slipping on the bloody floor. Brains are slopped from one pan to another like scrambled eggs.

  "Move over! I got a pregnant wart hog here."

  Each day, stretchers loaded with patched-together animal cadavers are carted off for autopsy, and some to Recovery. It is surprising that the animal subjects were able to exhibit any behavior for study after such surgery, but some of them were able to walk, bark, howl and snarl.

  There were no meows, since Joe would have no cats in the Zoo, nor any raccoons, skunks, minks, foxes, lemurs or any creature with a high cuteness rating. He did not want even to contemplate or describe dubious surgery on these creatures, mute evidence that at one time a Creator with skilled, delicate and loving fingers drew breath on planet Earth, before the bad animal, Man, put an end to creation and so brought the evolutionary process to a halt.

  For Man is indeed the final product. Not because homo sap is the apogee of perfection, before which God himself gasps in awe—"I can do nothing more!"—but because Man is an unsuccessful experiment, caught in a biologic dead end and inexorably headed for extinction.

  "All right, boys, let's cut our way to freedom."

  The hybrid concept underlies all relations between man and other animals, since only a being partaking of both man and animal can mediate between two species. These are blueprint hybrids, potentials rather than actual separate beings, capable of reproduction.

  It is the task of the Guardian to nurture these half-formed creatures and to realize their potential. Some beings are bought with terrible suffering; others fail completely. All previous instructions, all guidelines, all past experience, count for nothing here. . . .

  He holds the animal spirit gently to his chest, palms crossed. The first of its kind, the only one of its kind, turns to Him with total trust. There is no one else. And he must accept total responsibility. No one else is there. What does the creature need? He must find out and provide it, at any cost. The apprentice Guardian, apprenticed no longer.

  Once you are in the field you are absolutely on your own. It is up to you to invoke the aid you need, by the intensity of your need. There has been much talk of love on this planet, and after all is said and done—and more is said than is done—few realize that there is a love more intense than any love of man for woman, or man for man, a love that is neither sexual nor religious. The love for a creature that you have created from your whole being transcends any other love.

  And you do die of it, to lose the only thing your whole life means, every breath, every gesture, all the weariness and pain for this one act—such grief can kill. He begins to understand why people will do anything to avoid it. But he cannot avoid it. He has assumed the role of Guardian.

  Outside a Palm Beach bungalow waiting for a taxi to the airport. My mother's kind, unhappy face, last time I ever saw her. Really a blessing. She had been ill for a long time. My father's dead face in the crematorium.

  "Too late. Over from Cobblestone Gardens."

  3

  Neferti is eating breakfast at a long, wooden table with five members of an expedition: English, French, Russian, Austrian, Swedish. They are housed in a large utility shed, with filing cabinets, cots, footlockers, tool shelves and gun racks.

  The Englishman addresses Neferti: "Look at you, a burnt-out astronaut. You are supposed to bring drastic change . . . to exhort!"

  "It is difficult when my exhortations are shot down by enemy critics backed by computerized thought control."

  "Critics? Stand up! Exhort!"

  Neferti experiences a sudden surge of energy. He soars to the ceiling. The others continue eating. The Russian is studying graphs on the table between mouthfuls. Up through the ceiling. He encounters a blanket of compacted snow. He breaks through the snow into a crystalline cobalt sky over the ruins of Samarkand.

  Below him he sees a Turkish shed on a rise above a deep blue lake. He alights and walks across an arm of the lake on pilings that protrude a few feet above the surface, to reach a spiral stairway with wide steps of tile in patterns of blue and red. He is willing to remain in this context and to accept whatever new dangers he may encounter. Anything is better than stasis. He is ready to leave his old body as he bounds up the steps, which curve toward a landing about twenty feet above the lake.

  At the top he comes to a door of burnished silvery metal in which he can now see his face and garb. He is dressed in Tartar clothes . . . gold braid, red and blue silk threads with stiff shoulder pads and felt boots. There is a curved sword at his belt. His face is much younger, as is the lean, hard body. The teeth are yellow and hard as old ivory, his mouth set in a desperate grin. Clearly there is immediate danger and the n
eed for drastic action.

  The door has a protruding, circular lock. He twists the lock and the door opens. A small gray dog advances. He knows the dog and tells it to shut up. There are two more door dogs behind it, one black and one brown. He tries to lock the door behind him, but is not quite sure how the mechanism works.

  He is in a small room with low divans around the walls, and pegs for clothes. There is another room of the same size, alongside the entrance hall, separated by a partition with an opening at the far end. In the second room are two men, one an elderly man in a gray djellaba, who presents Neferti to a fat middle-aged eunuch in a brown robe, with a toothless mouth and an unmistakable air of authority and silken cunning. The old eunuch is Master of the Door Dogs.

  Neferti bows and says, "It is my honor."

  The eunuch bows in return. Obviously they have serious and urgent business.

  A servant brings mint tea and glasses. The three men confer. The door dogs sit immobile, looking from one face to the other.

  The old eunuch takes from a leather bag a worn copy of Officers and Gentlemen. A gray dog sniffs and his lips curl back with a flash of yellow fangs.

  Now he brings out a fork with the dry yellow skein of distant eggs. The brown dog sniffs and his eyes light up.

  He brings forth a page of newsprint, a sweatshirt with the number 23, a knife with a hollow handle. The black dog sniffs . . . a panel slides open. The door dogs file out.

  When Neferti told the door dog to shut up, it was a joke, because door dogs never make a sound. Silent and purposeful, they stray a few inches behind the heels of the target. No matter how quickly he turns, the door dog is always behind him. They are small creatures, not more than twenty pounds, with a long, pointed muzzle, something like a Schipperke. Door dogs are not guarders, but crossers of the threshold. They bring Death with them.

  For a literary precedent, we turn to The Unbearable Bassington, by Saki (H. H. Munro):

  Comus Bassington, having fumbled his prospect of marrying a fortune by asking the heiress for a loan of five pounds—nothing is better calculated to antagonize the wealthy than to ask for a small loan—must now accept a job in West Africa.

  The farewell dinner is loaded with portents of doom:

  "I did not know you kept a dog," said Lady Veula.

  "We don't," said Comus. "There isn't one in the house."

  "I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall this evening."

  "A small black dog, something like a Schipperke?" asked Comus in a low voice.

  "Yes, that was it."

  "I saw it myself tonight. It ran from behind my chair just as I was sitting down."

  "Have you ever seen it before?" Lady Veula asked quickly.

  "Once when I was six years old. It followed my father downstairs."

  Lady Veula said nothing. She knew that Comus had lost his father at the age of six.

  Note that the little black dog followed Comus into the dining room. Here the door dog seems more a harbinger than a bearer of death. Who would put a door dog on Comus? He is already doomed as an embodiment of flawed, unbearable boyishness.

  There is no clear line between harbinger and carrier, but rather one shades into the other.

  A medieval chronicler called Günther of Brandenburg wrote: "Never yet has the plague come but one has first seen a ragged stinking boy who drank like a dog from the village well and then passed on." The plague referred to is the Black Death.

  And a harbinger can readily be converted into a bearer. The door dog is loaded with doom and misfortune, as a snake in spring is loaded with venom. The door dog is directed toward a specific target. It has been said that man makes dogs in his own worst image. Certainly your door dog is reciprocally fashioned as a vehicle for the worst image of the target. The door dog fits a target as a key fits a lock.

  Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective. If someone has reason to expect a psychic attack, an excellent move is to make oneself as visible as possible to the person or persons from whom the attack is anticipated, since conscious attacks on a target that engages one's attention are rarely effective and frequently backfire.

  This strategy is especially indicated for critics. Leave your name in the phone book, attack writers on radio shows, anything to keep your image clearly in the foreground of enemy attention. Best of all, engage the writer in public refutation by outrageous misrepresentation and falsifications. For example, here is a critic on a writer who has spent six years on a book: "This slovenly potpourri, obviously thrown together in a few weeks."

  A rule that is almost always valid: never refute or answer a critic, no matter how preposterous the criticism may be. Do not let the critic teach you the cloth, as they say in bullfighting circles. Never charge the cloth, even if the critic resorts to actual misquotation.

  Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating, disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

  This procedure is based on scientific evidence: Poetzel's Law states that dream imagery excludes conscious perception in favor of preconscious perceptions. And Freud's hypothesis that the neutral character of preconscious perception permits it to serve as a cover for material that would not otherwise escape the dream censor, so that unpleasant affect is attracted to preconscious perception. There is, in fact, a fifty-seven percent correlation between preconscious recall and peak unpleasantness. Charles Fischer says that dreams have a tendency to take up the unimportant details of waking life.

  There are other tricks: the use of generalities like "the man in the street" and the editorial "we" to establish a rapport of disapproval with the reader and at the same time to create a mental lacuna under cover of an insubstantial and unspecified "we." And the technique of the misunderstood word: pack a review with obscure words that send the reader to the dictionary. Soon the reader will feel a vague, slightly queasy revulsion for whatever is under discussion.

  Julian Chandler, book reviewer for a prestigious New York daily, knows all the tricks. He has chosen for his professional rancor the so-called Beat Movement, and perfected the art of antiwriting. Writers use words to evoke images. He uses words to obscure and destroy images.

  This afternoon he has delivered his latest review to the office and made an appointment with the editor for three o'clock. Reading over a copy of the review, he feels a comfortable, cool-blue glow. A perfect job of demolition, and he knows it. And the editor will know it too. Two columns and not one visual image . . . word, pure word. The effect is depressing and disquieting, gathering to itself a muttering chorus of negation and antagonism.

  "One starts on a mesa, a jump ahead of the posse, and soon finds oneself in the highlands of Yemen a hundred years later in quest of the Yacks, mysterious monkeys who have sex by rubbing larynxes, and this gives rise to a terrible (ho hum) plague. When the plague dies down one is back in the Old West, having lost track of time in a labyrinth of irrelevant incidents . . . like Theseus leaving a thread lest he be bored to death by the terrible Minotaur, and so finds his way back to the feeble and pointless ending . . . The sky darkened and went out.' Not nearly soon enough, was the feeling of this reviewer. Occasionally one glimpses flashes from the man who long ago wrote Naked Lunch, to show that he is not totally dead but simply sleeping, and putting his readers to sleep."

  A sudden silence that can happen in big cities . . . traffic sounds cut off, a pause, a hiatus, and at the same moment the feeling that someone is at the door. This should not happen unannounced—that is what he is paying $3,500 a month for.

  He steps to the peephole. The hall is empty down to the elevator. He slides the deadbolt and opens the door. A small black dog slithers in without a sound, its brush against his leg light as wind. He snatches a heavy cane he ke
eps by the door.

  "Get out of here!"

  But the dog is nowhere to be seen.

  "It's gotten under something," he decides. But moving furniture and checking with a flashlight brings no dog to light.

  "Well, it slipped out."

  The following morning he complains to the doorman.

  "A dog, sir?"

  Clearly the Irish doorman resents the implication that he would allow an unauthorized dog to slink into the building. After all, he is the doorman.

  "Yes, a small, black dog."

  "A small, black dog, sir?" (Just a slight emphasis on small and black.)

  Julian Chandler was short and slender. His family came from Trinidad, and he was inclined to boast of his black blood. This is outrageous insolence, but the doorman's face is impeccably bland, as he turns to smile at another tenant.

  "Ah, good evening, Doctor Greenfield."

  "Good evening, Grady."

  Doctor Greenfield is an elderly WASP, trim despite his sixty years, with a pink complexion and a white mustache.