Muddle Earth

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

ANNOUNCING THE TOURIST EXPERIENCE THAT IS THE TALK OF THE GALAXY! MEET: The Cryogenic resurrectee Rinpoche Gibbs. He's not surprised to awaken in the twenty-fourth century, cured of cancer. He is, however, very surprised by everything else... The incredibly beautiful Nixy Anangaranga-Jones, who may or may not be haunted by ghosts, but to whom the unexpected always happens... The Yelignese Chief Bureaucrat - the Esteemed Thingitude in charge of restoring Earth who can't quite grasp what human history is all about... Spotch from the planet Trigon, whose trip to Earth really did cost an arm and a leg... The amazing Cardinal Numbernine and Her Wiliness Pope Joan II - religion may be gone, but the church will endure forever... The adolescent Sherlock Holmes and his Biker Street Irregulars...

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

AMONG THE SELLING POINTS THAT SECURED THE Earth contract for the Yelignese was their undertaking to revive the cryonuts* of California. By the time the fad for freezing petered out—partly because no one had yet been thawed without terminal damage, partly because most people who could still have afforded it had left for deep space and the chance to live two or three centuries anyway, and partly because the state was under several centimeters of snow—the tombs of the undead occupied ten percent of the land and the cost of liquid nitrogen had become the single largest item in the continental budget. As everyone agreed, this was ridiculous. In the upshot, therefore, generations passed without any attempt being made actually to pay for the stuff. It was taken for granted that some Californians manufactured it, others hauled sleds across the tundra to deliver it on site, others still poured it into the vaults, and then the same thing happened again the following week. Meantime each of the parties concerned handed credit vouchers to the others certifying the job had been done, and against these frayed, grimy scraps of paper they obtained food, drink, and lodging. There was no obvious reason why such a system should not continue indefinitely, except that (a) the vouchers were dissolving into shreds, (b) the sea was beginning to freeze, and (c) the whole setup had proved offensive to an influential group of mystical economists. These latter held that something had to be done to underpin a currency, and passing bits of paper from hand to hand didn’t count. The fact that the galactic economy had survived for aeons on nothing more substantial than an occasional exchange of nudged neutrettos signally failed to impress them.

Also there were grumbles among the hungry to the effect that an awful lot of protein was going to waste. Which was true enough, but raised the hackles of relatives and descendants of the frozen. Therefore the Yelignese offer was accepted, and their rivals—most of whom had proposed superior and in some cases cheaper schemes for the rehabilitation of the planet—retired to nurse their grudge among the stars.

Leaving the Yelignese to nurse theirs on Earth.

However, despite having declined from their glory days they were not a totally inefficient species. They automated cryonut recovery from the start, and the operation went smoothly enough for the climate of California to revert more or less to what it had been in the twentieth century, and to provide a sizable labor pool for the Los Angeles Reenactment Zone. Indeed, after initial problems due to excessive reliance on what proved to be fictional rather than historical data—thereby wasting rather a lot of time on projects designed to ensure that adequate supplies of fresh blood would be available for the resurrectees, tradition indicating this would be their sole sustenance—raising the dead became such a routine matter that when one of the inevitable glitches did occur it was sometimes overlooked for quite a while …

“The computers suggest that we do WHAT?”

“HOWEVER SYMPATHETIC I MAY OR MAY NOT BE,” SAID the Chief Bureaucrat, “toward your plan to reclaim the Earth from humans and allow the dinosaurs a second chance, my hands are tied.”

He displayed them. They were. In a granny knot, naturally, so they could easily be pulled apart again.

At that focus of the Ground of Being that is the consciousness engendered by a human brain:

A sparkle, brilliant as a diamond. A point of infinitesimal smallness became a nucleus, an expanding shell, a—

Well, no. Not a Big Bang. A bang as tiny as it is possible for any bang to be. Not even a tremor in the fabric of spacetime. A hint of a shiver of a flash.

To be succeeded by a gleam, reflective as anthracite is reflective when cleft correctly down the perfect plane.

Replaced in turn by a dull sheen like graphite, smeared as it were on the brown paper of a parcel intended for a different address.

And ultimately by another concept also fundamentally carbonaceous, though a lot less organized than even the lead of a pencil. Figuratively speaking, that’s to say. There was nothing strictly physical, though an awful lot of energy, corresponding to the concept that galvanised/infused/ pervaded the minuscule, pointlike, neutrinoesque location of what would in a little while again start to think of itself as Rinpoche Gibbs: not because it wanted to, but because it couldn’t be helped, and never mind how unwelcome the fact might be. Said high-in-but-not-exclusively-composed-of-carbon concept ran:

Oh, shit.

And was followed a moment later by the qualification:

Still, at least I’m not bathed in smoky red light, so it can’t be the Bardo Thödol shtick. I couldn’t have put up with that.

On the other hand, what was happening instead was far from pleasant. Once his lungs had begun to fill and empty, his legs started jerking back and forth, first left, then right; moments later his arms did the same, fingers curling and uncurling. A tube was forced between his teeth and, bypassing his attempts to swallow, discharged warm thick liquid into his stomach. Almost at once there ensued a resounding fit of borborygmus. He tried to protest at such cavalier treatment, but the resuscitation process had not yet extended to his vocal cords.

Then he felt his eyes open, though for the first few seconds he could not focus properly. He felt his ears pop. He felt saliva ooze into his mouth, which had been as dry as the cardboard tube inside a toilet roll. He felt an electric tingling pass clear through his body from scalp to soles. After that he saw, but did not clearly understand, what was reviving him: a many-faceted machine glowing with ice-blue radiance, floating ten centimeters above the floor and currently retracting numerous and illogical appendages within its carapace. As it vanished, the last of them shed a drop of bright red blood—but only one drop, promptly wiped away.

Meantime a confusing medley of emotions flashed through his brain: delight, despair, surprise, alarm, excitement, switched on and off with such compartmentalized neatness that even in his befuddled state he realized they must be artificially induced. Not until anger put in its appearance did he feel that any of these emotions reflected his real state of mind. Even then the anger was muted, more like a mild and diffuse annoyance than the screaming fury he really wanted to give vent to. No doubt he was being chemically soothed. Why should that be a matter of routine? Granted, some people might resent being revived, especially if they hadn’t wanted to be frozen …

Hang on a moment. That’s me!

But there was no time to pursue the matter. The machine spoke.

“Can you hear me?”

Muscles that had not been used in—how long? Centuries?—moved with surprisingly little stiffness. Rinpoche heard what emerged from his mouth as a croak, but it was indisputably a word.

“Yes.”

“Can you see me?”

“Yes.”

All of a sudden his eyes were focusing perfectly. He was able to see that on the front of the machine there hung a label. It read:

THEODORSurgeon

“Can you stand up?”

He realized he was lying on a kind of padded table rather below waist height. With barely a trace of giddiness he lowered his legs to the floor, noting from the lower edge of his vision that his unclad body appeared neither older nor younger than he remembered it, and eased himself into an upright posture. He was startled by how clearly he could see the floor; he had been used to wearing glasses before—

But why in the name of all the countless Tibetan hells had he been frozen in the first place? (The second place, this one, was amazingly uninteresting, considering that it was offering his introductory glimpse of the future: a long, vague room containing rows of anonymous cabinets with numbered tags hanging from their door handles. In the middle distance he discerned another identical machine, doubtless awaiting orders for its next resurrection.)

He tried as hard as he could to summon the full force of honest rage, but it was no use.

“Can you walk?”

Rinpoche essayed a few steps with tolerable success.

“Can you dress yourself?”

He blinked. For an instant he was poised to counter, “What in?” Then he realized that a package wrapped in clear plastic was being extruded from the side of the machine. Taking it, he saw that it held underwear, socks, slippers, slacks, a sweatshirt, and a pair of dark glasses. If this were truly a time long after his own—as he was bound to assume because he felt none of the lassitude that had accompanied his decline into leukemia, implying that he had in fact been cured—why were these garments so familiar in cut, in color, even texture?

Oh, maybe the people here were trying to make him feel at home!

He donned the clothes. They fitted fine. The machine waited until the shoes were on. Then it said, “You have been cured of all infirmities. Do you regard yourself as enjoying normal functionality?”

“Uh … I guess so. Not that I’ve had much chance to find out as yet.”

“That concurs with my readings. You are now required by law to confirm that you have been well and truly restored to the status of a cognizant human being responsible for all debts public and private. Details of relevant costs including supervision, maintenance, and the supply of liquid nitrogen are herewith furnished to you. Sign, please. Any recognized terrestrial script will do.”

A strip of paper like the lolling tongue of a terminally anemic dog spewed out of a frontal orifice. A pen thrust itself into Rinpoche’s temporarily nerveless hand. He scrawled his name as instructed because arguing felt like too much trouble. He was briefly tempted to use Tibetan writing but settled peaceably for the Roman alphabet.

The machine’s appendages folded the paper, tucked it neatly into an envelope, and handed it over. “Please,” it said, “present this to the emissions officer, who may be located by following the signs.”

Thereupon it retreated to the wall and became motionless.

Docilely, Rinpoche looked for the promised signs. They proved to be a series of green arrows that led him along a windowless corridor—featureless, too, but for the many closed doors on either side. Eventually it debouched into a wide, low-ceilinged hall with glass doors at the far end. Through them he glimpsed grass, trees, flower beds, a skyful of scudding clouds … Perhaps being brought back to life wouldn’t be so bad after all, no matter that he had really deserved at least a thousand years of nonexistence after the ordeal he had undergone in his latest incarnation.

And then his attention fell on a personage who sat at a horseshoe desk in the middle of the hall, halfway between where he stood and the threshold of the outer world. The said individual was clad in a green surgical gown and calf-high white rubber boots. Above plump apple-red cheeks twinkled bright blue eyes. A shock of white hair surmounted his freckled forehead. For a long moment he seemed unaware of Rinpoche’s approach; then teeth even whiter than his hair were exposed as he parted his lips in a broad smile of welcome.

Along the front edge of his desktop—which was bare apart from a jar of pink capsules—a luminous sign identified:

WRONG GHOULARTEmissions

“Congratulations on your successful resuscitation!” this personage exclaimed. “Welcome to your new lease of life!”

“Uh—thank you,” Rinpoche muttered, unable to rid himself of the suspicion that the other had been in some way activated when he crossed some invisible line, or electronic beam, or whatever.

“It is my invariable custom to minimize the shock of awakening by telling a few traditional jokes. Have you heard the one about the isolated head?” He broke into two distinct voices. “‘Were you a head of state?’ ‘No, head of traffic control.’ ‘Ah, a sleeping policeman!’ ‘Yes, the jams were awful.’ ‘Really? What fruit were they made of?’ Good, that’s out of the way. May I have your documentation, please? Thank you.”

He took and ripped open the envelope. Glancing rapidly down the paper within, he said, “That appears to be in order, Mr. Verdi. Now all you have to do is—Just a second!”

Rinpoche blinked at him.

“Mr. Verdi, why have you signed this document with the name of Rinpoche Gibbs?”

“Because that’s who I am,” was the bewildered answer.

“And by what right do you claim not to be who you actually are?” The blue eyes were no longer twinkling, but flashing ire. Rinpoche hoped for a pang of genuine alarm, a sign perhaps that the dullness of his reactions might be wearing off, but all he managed to feel was a hint of mild anxiety.

“Do you deny that this account is made out to Guido Sansepolcro Verdi?”

“Is it? I can’t say I’d noticed.”

“Then notice now!” Ghoulart invited sarcastically, practically spiking the paper on the end of Rinpoche’s nose. But the name at the top wasn’t what seized his attention. That was usurped by the bottom line.

Three hundred and sixty-five BILLION crunits?

Whatever a crunit might be, it wasn’t likely to be Monopoly money—not in any society that really could revive the dead! And he’d signed the account, if not in the correct name … but with so large a sum at stake surely they would find a way around that minor obstacle!

Casting about desperately for a way of escape (I never asked to be frozen in the first place, it was done completely against my will, can’t you send me back to sleep until humanity evolves far enough to manage without money?), Rinpoche suddenly saw the paper snatched by a thin pale hand on a thin pale wrist sticking out of a black sleeve. A voice said, “Don’t worry, nonno! I’ve taken care of this!”

“The hell you say! He’s mine!” boomed a resonant bass.

“Too late to argue! I just transferred enough credit to—”

“But I paid in advance!”

Professionally urbane once more, Ghoulart donned a tolerant smile. “That is correct,” he said. “But it is a matter of the greatest possible indifference who pays Mr. Verdi’s fees, or—come to that—how many times. My compliments, Mr. Verdi. You are free of all debt. And that, for someone who has spent so long in freeze, is quite remarkable.”

But I’m not called Verdi … Rinpoche bit back the words. It did indeed seem like rather a good idea not to be in debt to the tune of several billion crunits. But who were these—these Good Samaritans, who weren’t looking the least bit pleased about their charitable deed?

On his left were three persons dressed identically in black hats, jackets, trousers, shirts, socks, and shoes, the whole ensemble highlighted solely by white neckties. At first he assumed they were all men; a second glance revealed that one who hung back a trifle was in fact a woman.

Confronting them was a tall, bulky, white male human wearing an iridescent kilt and matching ankle boots, a costume scanty enough to reveal that he boasted wobbly pads of fat wherever there ought to have been muscles. But it was not this person on whom Rinpoche’s eyes dwelt in horrified fascination. It was his companion.

Who had an awful lot of blue tentacles—eighteen or nineteen, at a guess—and an awful lot of mouth, fuller of teeth than any mouth had a right to be, plus an awful lot of what might possibly be a tongue but put Rinpoche more in mind of a lamprey, being tubular, with rasps.

Yes, this is the future, he concluded. He wished he could summon up at least a shiver of awe.

The black-garbed trio stepped back, reaching in unison inside their jackets, presumably for concealed weapons.

The fat man snatched from his right boot something that gleamed and sizzled as he used it to carve a luminous arc in the air. To Rinpoche it resembled nothing so much as a battery-powered butcher’s knife. Meantime, his—his … the thing that had come with him, anyway, did nothing except look even more repulsive, if that were possible.

“Gentlebeings!” Ghoulart exclaimed, rising to his feet with both hands on the desk and a shocked expression on his face. “Such behavior is unseemly!”

“You stay out of this!” barked the leader of the three in black. “This is human business!”

“But if it weren’t for us,” Ghoulart countered, “there wouldn’t be any wrecks for you to argue over!”

Us? Wrecks? Rinpoche blinked at the man in green and realized that he was in fact looking at a projection of a man, that up to this point had been tolerably convincing but now had started to waver. Disguised by it was—was …

Well, it wasn’t quite as disturbing as the creature in plain sight, but it was well along the way. Rinpoche was glad when the visual camouflage restored itself.

“So let’s discuss this like rational beings,” Ghoulart went on in a soothing tone, “bearing in mind that chattel slavery is illegal on this planet except in certain yet-to-be-approved re-enactment zones. May that be stipulated?”

There were reluctant nods from all save the alien, who merely waved an impatient tentacle.

“Very well. Don Marco”—to the leader of those in black. “You assert a claim on the person of this resurrectee”—oh, of course!—“based not merely on having paid his debts in full but on a blood relationship: that’s to say, you addressed him as nonno, which in Italian means male progenitor of one’s own male or female progenitor. I hope that’s right; as you know, we have no counterpart of sex.”

Rinpoche struggled to digest the implications of those words, with minimal success.

“Oh, he is not merely our grandfather, but our four-times-great-grandfather!” cried the black-garbed girl.

“Yes!” affirmed Don Marco. “And don’t worry, nonno! Even if we have to shoot our way out, we’ll convey you to a place of safety!”

“And there,” said the third of them, who had sleepy low-lidded eyes and a mustache not much thicker than a pencil line, “we shall find out what became of the mazuma from the Continental Scam. We know it’s not on Earth because at eight percent per annum compound it would have become the biggest fortune in the world by now, and it hasn’t. So it must be in space. Where in space? Do you feel like telling us at once, or do you prefer the slow and painful way?”

“Consigliere!” said the girl, shocked. “Is it polite to talk so to our great-great-great-great-grandfather? Especially when he’s only just woken up.”

Meantime the thing with teeth had been whispering, or rather hissing softly, to the fat man. Who unexpectedly burst out laughing.

“Ah! I see! You think he’s the notorious Guido Sansepolcro Verdi, don’t you?”

The trio in black were visibly at a loss. Uncertainly Don Marco said, “Of course he is. That’s why we paid his revival costs—”

“So how come you don’t know Guido faked his death? His henchmen put in his vault someone else who had really died on the same day!”

The girl plucked at Don Marco’s coat sleeve. “He doesn’t look much like those old home movies, does he?” she muttered. “What do you think, consigliere?”

“Ah …” With much rubbing of his chin. “Well … Well, what I want to know”—a sudden flare of spirit—“is how come you two claim to be so well informed about this matter! Why should you be interested in the fate of an obscure mafioso and petty racketeer who died long ago and—well, not very far away, but at any rate in Nevada?”

“The hell he did! If he’s dead at all, which he very well may not be since he got away with such a planetoid of loot, he was laid to rest far out in space.” The bulky man stumped toward the three in black, leering. “I told you: he faked his death and cryostasis! That’s how my friend and I got involved.”

He gave a mocking bow, as best he could for the size of his belly. “Permit me to present ourselves: I am Horace Saketori-Shang, the greatest gourmet of the planet Dahlia and arguably of our entire species, and my friend is Leuyunk-Lun, of equal distinction among his own race. Together we have quested across the light-years for the rarest, most remarkable, most memorable foods. We form a perfect team, for our metabolisms are incompatible, yet we can mind-bind flawlessly. The upshot is that each of us can taste with amazing fidelity dishes that, were we to physically ingest them, would upset or even kill us.

“There is, however, one compliment Leuyunk-Lun paid me, years ago, which I have not so far managed to return. He enabled me to learn how the flesh of his own species tastes. To him the sacrifice of a limb is no great matter, for it will quickly regenerate. My attempts to enlighten him as to the flavor of humans, however, have met with failure. No matter how my robochef prepares tissue cultivated from my cells, there always seems to be something lacking. I have been driven to the conclusion that only a complete body, with all its interacting organs, can display that subtle, that unique, that addictive flavor of which the quality is attested in the memoirs of countless South Sea explorers, and indeed in the folklore of the people that they went among.

“But how to obtain a complete human being for gustatory evaluation? Where goes without saying; the supreme, the unmatchable flavor can a priori be found only on the birth world of our species. Why, here are millions of them, totally unspoiled by the freezing process, as is proved by the fact that they can be reanimated. So we instituted a search for a body wrongly labeled, or misfiled, or for some other reason of no value to itself or anyone.

“In due course, we established that the vault said to contain Guido Sansepolcro Verdi could not possibly do so, for we found proof he had survived his alleged demise. Pooling our resources, we transferred to Earth sufficient credit to have the impostor thawed, and it was only by ill luck that we arrived here fractionally too late to lay claim to him before his resurrection.” With a scowl at Ghoulart: “But we think it was disgraceful of you to accept a double payment from these—these interlopers!”

“And I have been looking forward to my taste of human for so long!” buzzed Leuyunk-Lun. The voice was nearly, if not quite, the worst part of him. Or possibly it. However, much though Rinpoche wanted to shudder, he failed. How long was this emotional numbness going to last?

“Never mind that,” snapped the consigliere. “As far as I can make out, you, Ghoulart, permitted my clients to make a nonreturnable payment in respect of the debts incurred by Mr. Verdi despite their already having been paid by another party!”

The sign on the front of Ghoulart’s desk had altered. Now it read:

COUNT YOUR CHANGE—NO REFUNDS

“But the debts weren’t incurred by nonno Guido!” interrupted the woman. “It wasn’t him in the vault after all! Now what’s happened to your brilliant idea about gaining control of all those quadrillions? What you’ve done is squander our entire savings—and your own!—on reviving someone who can’t possibly tell us anything about the Continental Scam!”

“What’s more, a person rights to whom had already been purchased by us!” bellowed Horace Saketori-Shang.

“Now look here!”

“No, you listen to me!”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Shut up yourself!”

“I’ll sue you for every crunit you’ve got!”

“You should live so long! My seconds will wait on you tomorrow!”

“Gentlebeings, please, please!”

No one seemed to be paying much attention to Rinpoche at the moment, not even Ghoulart. Concluding that it made sense to sneak away before someone decided he did owe billions of crunits after all, he sidled across the resilient floor of the hall toward the nearest exit door. Obligingly, it slid open at his approach. He took to his heels.

“The computers suggest that we do WHAT?”

“DAMIA I GOSPODA, I HAVE SOME GOOD NEWS AND some bad news. The good news is that the Yelignese have finally agreed to include Moscow among the cities to be reconstructed as they used to be, along with New York, Paris, London, and the rest, so as to attract tourism.”

After the cheering subsided, from the far end of the council table a voice called, “So what’s the bad news?”

“The Moscow that they’ve chosen is in Idaho.”

So unpleasant had Rinpoche found the prospect of being eaten, it had evoked a semblance of fear in him. Accordingly he kept on running until he was nearly out of sight of his point of departure, or, putting it another way, arrival. When he glanced back, he could no longer discern the doors throug. . .