Eric Brown - Pithecanthropus Blues

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Pithecanthropus Blues

a short story by Eric Brown

Foreword

"Pithecanthropus Blues" was one of those all too rare events in a writer's

life - the story that arrives out of the blue almost fully formed. In my

experience, most stories start as a small idea, and slowly grow over the

weeks and months. Then they reach critical mass and must be written down.

"Blues..." wasn't like that at all. It came to me in March 1988, and I

wrote it in two days, left it a week and went through it to tidy up any

lose ends. I've often wondered why its birth was so painless. Perhaps

because it's a light, and light-hearted, tale, with no involved character

studies, or because it's set in an already existing background (that of

the nada-continuum locale of a few of my other tales), or... but if I

could work it out scientifically, I'd have all my stories come out that

way...

It sold to Maureen Porter's short-lived magazine, The Gate, the following

year, but never appeared there. I had included it in the ms of my first

collection, The Time-Lapsed Man and other stories, and my editor at Pan

wanted "Pithecanthropus Blues" as an original in the collection, and I had

to withdraw it from the magazine. Fortunately, Maureen understood the

situation. The story finally appeared in the collection in 1990, and now,

ten years later, makes only its second appearance.

Pithecanthropus Blues

24th May, 2060.

Proxmire Industrial Solar Satellite.

It began as a tickle in the backbrain, just like the first time. The

cerebellum is a difficult place to scratch, and I was reduced to holding

my head in my hands and yelling at the top of my voice. The neighbours on

all five sides began complaining and I had to quit the cubby. I took the

radial slide out to the arcing crystal membrane of the dome, darkened now

in night-phase. I stepped onto the perimeter causeway and began walking.

The tickle was a constant chatter now - no longer just tactile but

audible. It was as if the two hemispheres of my head were conversing in

tongues, or rather in grunts. Then I became aware of a very real presence

in my head, of an identity taking over my brain. This was how it had

happened before. Soon, I knew, I'd find myself elsewhere...

I passed the hatch of a slouch bar in the deck, raised like the conning

tower of a submarine. Strobing lights and music throbbed out, along with

the sound of voices and laughter. I wanted to climb down there and talk to

people, to establish the reality of my identity through social contact.

But I knew that would be a mistake. The last time this had happened, two

nights ago, I had returned to my senses to find myself naked and chin deep

in an H20 effluent conduit on the flipside of this solar spinning top. The

last thing I wanted was to go under drunk.

I blacked out.

As before, I had the sensation of swimming in some neutral medium. I was

in darkness and thrashing around and shouting for help. Gradually, with a

sense of relief I suspected was ill-founded, I returned to consciousness.

I felt the reassuring physical form of a human body assume substance

around my shattered psyche. I almost whooped for joy - surely anything was

better than the sensory deprivation I had just undergone. Then some vague

recollection of my last experience made itself known to me. I opened my

eyes, and I was no longer aboard the Sol orbital satellite.

Anyone born on Earth might have called this paradise. To me, conceived on

Venus and a Spacer ever since, it was purgatory. The clear blue sky went

on for ever without the reassuring confines of a dome, and on all sides

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the land stretched away with nothing more substantial than scrub and

sun-parched trees between me and the distant horizon. To someone

accustomed to overcrowded orbital agglomerations, the sudden sense of

infinity was overwhelming. My head spun with agoraphobia.

More disconcerting than the geographical dislocation, however, was the

fact that I was no longer in my own body. Ridiculous as it may seem, the

lean, hairless body of my former self was no more. In its place was the

squat, hirsute frame of a being one step above the ape. My arms hung down

to my bowed knees in a manner both negligent and thuggish. I was naked. I

tried to protest, but all that came out was a plaintive scale of grunts.

I had been this way before. Now I recognised the body by the parallel claw

marks on its belly and the missing left big toe. That first... seizure...

had lasted mere seconds before I was returned to my own body. I had

retained but a hazy recollection of the interlude, the alien landscape and

the even more alien body. I had managed to convince myself that the

experience was the flashback effect of certain pharmaceutical substances

partaken of during my time as an Engineman for the Canterbury Line. Which

still might be the case... But I doubted it. There was something very real

about the way I inhabited this proto-human form beneath the open, searing

sun...

For the first time I became aware that I was not alone. A hundred metres

ahead of me was a small band of short, trotting creatures; it was some

minutes before I realised that I - or rather the body that I inhabited -

was one of their number. There was something about their diminutive

stature, their hairiness and the way they almost skulked across the plain,

that leant them the aspect of animals. One of their number turned, grunted

and gestured at me to hurry; and there was something at once reassuring in

the familiarity of the human gesture, and frightening in the fact that

this identified me unmistakably as one of them...

Warily, I began shambling in pursuit. The absence of the big toe gave me a

wild, swaying gait. I approached the band but kept my distance. They

jogged across the plain with the stealth of the hunters I assumed they

were. They carried rocks and lengths of wood in such a fashion as to

suggest they had discovered their application as weapons. I alone was

unarmed.

After what I judged to be about ten minutes we came to a gorge or rift in

the land. Here the flat, scorched plain came to an abrupt end, and fell

away in a deep, steep-sided valley. A river bisected the valley bottom,

and the land on either side was lush and green.

The creatures - I could not bring myself to call them men, though the

evidence was mounting that they were indeed just that - crouched on the

lip of the escarpment in attitudes of wariness. They took cover behind

sparse trees and infrequent boulders, peered into the valley and from time

to time pointed.

As I scanned the valley bottom I made out the subject of their interest.

Beside the river, in a green meadow of knee-high grass, a group of figures

- as humanlike as my compatriots - lay about or sat watching the water.

They too were naked, small and hairy. I tried, and failed, to find in them

some difference, some evidence that they were somehow less human than my

band, to excuse what I sensed was about to happen.

At a gesture from our leader - a tall creature with a monstrous, flattened

face - the band charged en masse down the steep incline, yelling and

waving their clubs.

And I lost consciousness.

I experienced the familiar sensation of being afloat in darkness, of

struggling towards some unseen point of safety. One by one I felt my

senses return - and last of all my sight. I was in my own body again, but

naked, and wading waist-deep in the freezing waters of an effluent

conduit. Par for the course, this; last time, I had managed to creep back

to my cubby without being seen, and I endeavoured to do so again. I waded

from the wide steel trough and ran naked through the darkened industrial

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sector of Sol City, fear and dread pounding in my head like migraine.

26th May, 2060.

Proxmire Industrial Solar Satellite.

The day following the 'seizure' I skipped work - I just couldn't bring

myself to leave the cubby. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, six

inches above my nose. Eventually I could stand no more - there was

something about just lying and waiting for the first hint of backbrain

tickle that was more horrific than the actual experience. The following

shift I went to work. I thought that the familiar routine of the job might

take my mind off what had happened to me. But I thought wrong.

I worked as a coffin-engineer for Sol Funeral Services Inc - and while I'd

rather have worked on bigships or shuttles, coffins were easy and the

money was good. I did a six hour shift each 'day'. The first three hours I

spent in the control room, a cosy bleb that adhered to the turning collar

of the station and provided a constant view of Sol burning outside. From

here I loaded coffins into the breach by remote control and, with the

service over and the mourners gathered by the viewscreen, I pressed the

button that sent the jet-powered coffins on graceful trajectories towards

the big fire. Once out of sight, the coffin ejected its passenger into the

sun and turned for home. The second half of my shift I spent repairing and

servicing the coffins I'd sent out earlier, tuning the jets, spraying the

casks with new coats of silver paint burned off on each run, and in

general readying the coffins for their next trip.

That 'morning' I sent three casks on their way, and in the 'afternoon' I

tinkered around with them in the service bay. I usually took pride in my

work, enjoyed the manual labour of replacing faulty jets and test firing

the coffins on a quick orbit of the satellite - but today my heart wasn't

in the job. Visions of my time among the proto-humans returned to me, and

I could concentrate on nothing for fear of that first, insidious tickle

that would prefigure another seizure.

I was considering whether to check off sick when Anton, my boss, gave me

the excuse to leave. His thin, high voice summoned me to the Chapel of

Rest. "Hey Chester, boy. Get yourself down here and take a look at

this..." Now Anton is sick - it's a combination, I suppose, of being

reared in the subterranean hives of Ganymede and spending half a lifetime

in the business of death. From time to time he'd summon me to the nether

regions of the complex to show me what he considered a particularly

interesting corpse.

I took the down-chute to the Chapel of Rest and found him in the

preparations room. Sickly organ music played. Anton stood beside an open

cask, garbed in the black cloak and top hat of the Morticians' Guild.

He looked up when I entered. He frowned. "You look ill, Chester. Is

something bothering you?" He gave me the swift appraisal usually reserved

for sizing up a new corpse.

"I'm fine," I lied. "What is it, Anton?"

He gestured towards the cask. "Not a pretty sight, Chester."

Anton had an aptitude for the understatement. The body, that of a man in

his fifties, had met a violent end. I clutched the edge of the cask for

support.

"What... what happened to him?"

"In my opinion," Anton said, "he was eaten alive." He pointed to the thigh

bone. "Observe the teeth marks. Much of his entrails are missing - ditto a

large proportion of his brain..."

I managed a feeble chuckle. "Eaten? On Sol station?"

Anton looked at me. "And why not? For the past week the bigship Hanumati

has been docked here, refuelling before its run to the Out-there. Haven't

you noticed all the boosted-animals in the bars and night clubs? Obviously

one of these, a boosted leopard or tiger, suffered a computer malfunction

and reverted to type. I always said that augmentation was unnatural. And

now look..." He gestured again at the body.

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I refrained from doing so. "I don't feel so well," I said, and slipped to

the floor in a cold faint.

When I came to my senses, Anton was slapping my face back and forth with a

clammy hand. "I thought you looked rather pale, Chester. Take the day off.

And a word of advice - see a medic."

I took my leave of the funeral parlour and wandered home in a daze. Sight

of the corpse had served to focus my mind on the fact of my own mortality

- and on my singular predicament. In the cubby, I lay tossing and turning

in a torment of indecision. If I did take Anton's advice and consulted a

medic, then my worst fears might be confirmed. On the other hand, there

was always the chance that my 'seizures' had a perfectly innocent

psychological explanation. A trip to the medic might put my mind at

ease...

I decided to make an appointment first thing in the morning.

27th May, 2060.

Proxmire Industrial Solar Satellite.

The clinic was the tallest building on the satellite. It stood at the

exact centre of the residential hemisphere like a giant spindle. Dr

Lassiter's penthouse consulting surgery was a great glass bauble that hung

metres below the apex of the dome and commanded a three-hundred-and-sixty

degree view of the surrounding city.

Lassiter himself was a tall, dignified man in his late nineties. He sat

between the wings of a large v-desk and joined his fingertips before his

long nose. He turned from the screen on his desk and regarded me.

Already I had been thoroughly examined and questioned by a Robodoc, and I

had expected to be diagnosed by the same. The fact that the Robo' had seen

fit to refer me to a human medic - and a top specialist at that -

suggested that something was very wrong indeed.

I quaked.

"I see that you have been suffering seizures as you call them, Mr

Carnegie," Lassiter said softly. The man had a honeyed larynx. "Perhaps

you would care to explain the nature of these seizures...?"

I did my best to describe the physical symptoms of my displacement, the

terrible sense of disorientation I experienced as a result.

"And you've suffered these on two previous occasions now?"

I nodded.

"Tell me, for how long did the first attack last?"

I shrugged." A matter of seconds."

"And the following attack?"

"About one hour."

Dr Lassiter nodded. "I see." He murmured into a microphone and regarded

the ceiling.

"Can you recall if, preceding these attacks, you heard noises in your

head?"

"Yes - a tickle at first, and then... grunts. Then I black out and come

round again... elsewhere, in a different body."

Dr Lassiter nodded sympathetically.

He glanced at the screen on his desk. "I see that you worked as an

Engineman. How long were you in this employment, Mr Carnegie, and when did

you leave?"

"Ten years," I answered promptly. "And I left six months ago. I was made

redundant when the all the Lines decided it was more profitable to employ

boosted-animals instead of Enginemen." I shrugged. "Does it matter?"

The Doctor chose to ignore me and murmured again into the microphone.

I waited until he finished, then cleared my throat. "Do you know what's

wrong with me, Dr Lassiter? Am I imagining all this, or-"

"I'm afraid that your imagination has nothing to do with this, Mr

Carnegie. And yes, I do know what is wrong with you..."

I waited.

"You are suffering from the rare and particularly unpleasant syndrome of

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