cone-shaped armor. Their little tootsies dangle from the cones like clappers from dinnerbells.
“But there comes a time for every barnacle, at childhood’s end, when the rim of its cone secretes a glue that will stick forever to whatever it happens to touch next. So it is no casual thing on Earth to say to a pubescent barnacle or to a homeless soul from Vicuna, ‘Sit thee doon, sit thee doon.’”
The judge from Vicuna in the story tells us that the way the people on his native planet said “hello” and “goodbye,” and “please” and “thank you,” too. It was this: “ting-a-ling.” He says that back on Vicuna the people could don and doff their bodies as easily as Earthlings could change their clothing. When they were outside their bodies, they were weightless, transparent, silent awarenesses and sensibilities. They had no musical instruments on Vicuna, he said, since the people themselves were music when they floated around without their bodies. Clarinets and harps and pianos and so on would have been redundant, would have been machinery for making clumsy counterfeits of airborne souls.
But they ran out of time on Vicuna, he says. The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere—toheat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make cloches out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.
“On Vicuna,” says the judge, “we lived as though there were no tomorrow.”
The patriotic bonfires of time were the worst, he says. When he was an infant, his parents held him up to coo and gurgle with delight as a million years of future were put to the torch in honor of the birthday of the queen. But by the time he was fifty, only a few weeks of future remained. Great rips in reality were appearing everywhere. People could walk through walls. His own speedboat became nothing more than a steering wheel. Holes appeared in vacant lots where children were playing, and the children fell in.
So all the Vicunians had to get out of their bodies and sail out into space without further ado. “Ting-a-ling,” they said to Vicuna.
“Chronological anomalies and gravitational thunderstorms and magnetic whirlpools tore the Vicunian families apart in space,” the story goes on, “scattered them far and wide.” The judge manages to stay with his formerly beautiful daughter for a while. She isn’t beautiful anymore, of course, because she no longer has a body. She finally loses heart, because every planet or moon they come to is so lifeless. Her father, having no way to restrain her, watches helplessly as she enters a crack in a rock and becomes itssoul. Ironically, she does this on the moon of Earth, with that most teeming of all planets only two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away!
Before he actually lands at the Air Force base, though, he falls in with a flock of turkey buzzards. He wheels and soars with them and almost enters the ear of one. For all he knows about the social situation on Earth, these carrion eaters may be members of the ruling class.
He decides that lives led at the center of the Air Force base are too busy, too unreflective for him, so he goes up in the air again and spots a much more quiet cluster of buildings, which he thinks may be a meditation center for philosophers. He has no way of recognizing the place as a minimum security prison for white-collar criminals, since there were no such institutions back on Vicuna.
Back on Vicuna, he says, convicted white-collar criminals, defilers of trustingness, had their ears plugged up, so their souls couldn’t get out. Then their bodies were put into artificial ponds filled with excrement—up to their necks. Then deputy sheriffs drove high-powered
“But there comes a time for every barnacle, at childhood’s end, when the rim of its cone secretes a glue that will stick forever to whatever it happens to touch next. So it is no casual thing on Earth to say to a pubescent barnacle or to a homeless soul from Vicuna, ‘Sit thee doon, sit thee doon.’”
The judge from Vicuna in the story tells us that the way the people on his native planet said “hello” and “goodbye,” and “please” and “thank you,” too. It was this: “ting-a-ling.” He says that back on Vicuna the people could don and doff their bodies as easily as Earthlings could change their clothing. When they were outside their bodies, they were weightless, transparent, silent awarenesses and sensibilities. They had no musical instruments on Vicuna, he said, since the people themselves were music when they floated around without their bodies. Clarinets and harps and pianos and so on would have been redundant, would have been machinery for making clumsy counterfeits of airborne souls.
But they ran out of time on Vicuna, he says. The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere—toheat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make cloches out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.
“On Vicuna,” says the judge, “we lived as though there were no tomorrow.”
The patriotic bonfires of time were the worst, he says. When he was an infant, his parents held him up to coo and gurgle with delight as a million years of future were put to the torch in honor of the birthday of the queen. But by the time he was fifty, only a few weeks of future remained. Great rips in reality were appearing everywhere. People could walk through walls. His own speedboat became nothing more than a steering wheel. Holes appeared in vacant lots where children were playing, and the children fell in.
So all the Vicunians had to get out of their bodies and sail out into space without further ado. “Ting-a-ling,” they said to Vicuna.
“Chronological anomalies and gravitational thunderstorms and magnetic whirlpools tore the Vicunian families apart in space,” the story goes on, “scattered them far and wide.” The judge manages to stay with his formerly beautiful daughter for a while. She isn’t beautiful anymore, of course, because she no longer has a body. She finally loses heart, because every planet or moon they come to is so lifeless. Her father, having no way to restrain her, watches helplessly as she enters a crack in a rock and becomes itssoul. Ironically, she does this on the moon of Earth, with that most teeming of all planets only two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away!
Before he actually lands at the Air Force base, though, he falls in with a flock of turkey buzzards. He wheels and soars with them and almost enters the ear of one. For all he knows about the social situation on Earth, these carrion eaters may be members of the ruling class.
He decides that lives led at the center of the Air Force base are too busy, too unreflective for him, so he goes up in the air again and spots a much more quiet cluster of buildings, which he thinks may be a meditation center for philosophers. He has no way of recognizing the place as a minimum security prison for white-collar criminals, since there were no such institutions back on Vicuna.
Back on Vicuna, he says, convicted white-collar criminals, defilers of trustingness, had their ears plugged up, so their souls couldn’t get out. Then their bodies were put into artificial ponds filled with excrement—up to their necks. Then deputy sheriffs drove high-powered
Similar Books
