Universe 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  Universe 10

  Edited By Terry Carr

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

  * * * *

  CONTENTS

  Saving Face

  michael bishop

  A Source of Innocent Merriment

  james tiptee, jr.

  And All the Skies Are Full of Fish

  r. a. lafferty

  Bête et Noir

  lee killough

  The Ugly Chickens

  howard waldrop

  Special Non-Fact Articles Section:

  SUPERL

  charles e. elliott

  Report of the Special Committee on the Quality of Life

  eric g. iverson

  The Confession of Hamo

  mary c. pangborn

  The Johann Sebastian Bach Memorial Barbecue and Nervous Breakdown

  carter scholz

  First Person Plural

  f. m. busby

  * * * *

  As the world’s media become ever more widespread and pervasive, questions about the rights of public figures become more difficult. What constitutes invasion of privacy in a world full of cameras and microphones? If a politician is satirized, where’s the line between fair comment and libel? And if it’s legal now for a performer to have his features surgically altered to look like those of Elvis Presley, would that be true with a living actor?

  Michael Bishop considers the latter question in the following novelette. His answers may surprise you.

  Bishop’s most recent book is Catacomb Years, an interrelated series of stories including “Old Folks at Home” from Universe 8.

  * * * *

  SAVING FACE

  Michael Bishop

  “Get back,” Rakestraw told his children, who were eyeing him curiously as he tried to chop the thick pruned branches of a holly tree into pieces small enough for the fireplace. “I don’t want you to get hit”

  He waited until the five-year-old girl and her slightly smaller twin brother backed hand in hand toward the mulch pile and the edge of the winter garden. Then, to demonstrate his strength to them, he swung the ax in a high arc and brought the blade down viciously on the propped-up holly branch. One half of it flew upward like a knotted boomerang, its gray-white bark coruscating silver in the December sunlight. After windmilling a good distance through the air, the severed piece landed with a thud at Gayle and Gabe’s feet

  “Damn it!” Rakestraw bellowed, dropping the ax. “I told you to get back! Your mother’d kill me if I killed you!”

  The boy retreated into the muddy turnip bed, but Gayle picked up the holly log and carried it to her father. Rakestraw knelt to accept it, and she reached toward his face with her small, damnably knowing fingers.

  “You diddn shave,” Gayle told him.

  He started to catch her hand in order to rub his coarse chin in its palm, but the holly log impeded him and Gabe was running forward from the garden.

  “Look, Daddy!” the boy cried. “Looka the truck!”

  Rakestraw stood up and saw, not a truck, but some sort of fancily decorated imported van coming cautiously along the gravel road from town. He tossed the log among several others he had cut that morning and pulled his children to him. “Wait a minute,” he said as they squirmed under his hands; “you don’t know who that is. Hold still.” He didn’t recognize the vehicle as belonging to anyone in the county, and since the road it was traveling dead-ended only a stone’s throw away, Rakestraw was as curious as the twins.

  The van halted abreast of them, and a man wearing a neck scarf as big, red, and silky as a champion American Beauty rose stuck his head out the window and squinted at them. He had on a pair of sunglasses, but the lenses were nestled in his hair.

  “Tom Rakestraw?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” Rakestraw responded.

  The man in the American Beauty cravat stuck his head back in the window, flipped his glasses down, and maneuvered the rear end of his van into the yard, running over several of the uncut holly branches Rakestraw had earlier dragged to the woodpile. He made a parking space between the garden and the house, where there’d never been a parking space. Another man sat in the front seat beside him, but the driver’s clumsy backing maneuver delayed recognition until the van stopped and Sheriff Harrison had opened his door and climbed out

  Benny Harrison, wearing a khaki shirt with his badge half-hidden in one of its greasy folds, was a head shorter than the newcomer and a good deal less at ease. Even though he kept his thumbs in his belt, at unexpected moments his elbows flapped like poorly hung storm shutters. He introduced the man who had backed into the yard as Edgar Macmillan, an attorney from California.

  Rakestraw said, “Gayle, Gabe, go play with Nickie.” Nickie was the dog, a lethargic brown mongrel visible now as a furry lump in the grass below the kitchen window. The twins went reluctantly off in the dog’s direction, and Rakestraw looked at Macmillan.

  “I represent Craig Tiernan, Mr. Rakestraw.”

  “Who?”

  “Craig Tiernan. Surely you’ve heard the name.” Macmillan had his hands deep in the pockets of his blazer. The lenses of his sunglasses glinted like miniature hub caps. “Craig Tiernan.”

  “An actor,” Benny Harrison put in. “A movie actor.”

  “He’s placed first among male performers in three consecutive box-office polls, Mr. Rakestraw, and this year he’s nominated for an Academy Award.”

  “We don’t go to the movies.”

  “You read, don’t you? You watch television?”

  “We don’t watch much television. But I read now and again.”

  ‘Then you’ve seen his name in the newspaper. In the amusement section, where the movie ads are. In ‘people’ news, in feature stories.”

  Benny Harrison flapped his elbows. “Tom gets the Dachies County Journal,” he told Macmillan by way of defending his friend. “And you’ve got a little library of history and farming books, don’t you? And Nora’s magazines. Nora subscribes to magazines.”

  “Tiernan’s always in the women’s magazines,” Macmillan said almost accusingly. “He’s always being featured. Sometimes he gets a cover.”

  “I don’t read those,” Rakestraw confessed. “Nora gets them for recipes and pictures of furniture. She shows me the pictures sometimes.”

  “Has she ever told you you look like Craig Tiernan?”

  Rakestraw shook his head.

  “That’s why I’ve come out here,” Macmillan said. ‘That’s why I stopped at Caracal’s sheriff’s office and asked Sheriff Harrison to ride out here with me.” He took a piece of paper from an inside blazer pocket, unfolded it, and shook it out so that Rakestraw could see the matter printed on it

  Rakestraw recognized it as the poster he had sat for when Harrison and two or three other people on the Caracal city council persuaded him to run for mayor against the sharp-spoken, doddering incumbent. He had lost by only ten or twelve votes, primarily because he had been unable to convince the ladies of the local women’s club that he wasn’t too young and inexperienced for the job, which in reality was little more than a sinecure. Mayor Birkett was pushing seventy, and Rakestraw had just turned thirty-two.

  “Is this you?” Macmillan wanted to know. He paced toward the woodpile, then waved off his own question. “Of course it is. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.” He turned around. “Somebody in Caracal sent this to the studio. The studio forwarded it to Tiernan, and Tiernan sent it to me, along with instructions and air fare to your state capital. A friend of mine up there loaned me this van, and here I am.” A sudden gust of wind rattled the pecan tree towering over the woodpile, and the smoothed-out election poster in Macmillan’s hand fluttered distractingly.r />
  “Why?” Rakestraw asked.

  “To take care of the matter.”

  “What matter, Mr. Macmillan?” Rakestraw heard the twins shouting and laughing in another part of the yard. He also heard the bewilderment and impatience in his own voice.

  “Your trespass on Tiernan’s physiognomic rights, which he now has on file in Washington, D.C. Your state legislature approved local compliance with the Physiognomic Protection Act last May, Mr. Rakestraw, and that makes you subject to every statute of the otherwise provisional federal act.”

  “Benny,” Rakestraw asked, “what the hell does that mean?”

  “It means your face don’t belong to you anymore,” said Benny Harrison, flapping his elbows. “Sounds crazy, don’t it?”

  Rakestraw let his gaze drift from the perturbed, disheveled sheriff to the attorney with the crimson scarf at his throat, who was standing among the holly logs Rakestraw had already cut

  “Let me finish these,” Rakestraw said. “I’m almost finished.” He retrieved his ax and began hacking at a smooth, gray-white holly limb only a small distance from Macmillan’s foot. The attorney backed up to his borrowed van and watched the other man chopping wood as if witness to a performance as rare and exotic as ember-walking or lion-taming.

  * * * *

  “Craig Tiernan?” Nora said. “Tom doesn’t look like Craig Tiernan.” She dug an old magazine out of the wall rack in the den and flipped it open to a double-page color layout.

  “He does to me,” Macmillan countered. “I’ve seen Tiernan up close, oh, a thousand times, and your husband looks like him. An amazing likeness, really amazing.” He stubbed his cigarette out on the canning lid Nora had given him for an ashtray. “At least you know who Tiernan is, though. That’s more than I can say for your husband. I wouldn’t’ve believed anybody that uninformed or isolated, Mrs. Rakestraw. I mean, the boondocks just aren’t the boondocks anymore—the media’s everywhere. Everybody touches everybody else. That’s why it’s necessary to have a law like the Physiognomic Protection Act.”

  “Tom isn’t interested in movies.” Nora examined the photograph in the magazine. “And I don’t think he looks like Craig Tiernan, either. I don’t see what you see.”

  “That’s why I’m going to drive him to the capital—so we can do a point-by-point match-up of features. This procedure isn’t hit-or-miss, Mrs. Rakestraw—it’s very scientific.” Macmillan shook out another cigarette. “Okay. So he isn’t interested in movies. But how can he be unaware? That’s what I don’t understand, how he can be so unaware.”

  “Do you know who the head of the government of Kenya is, Mr. Macmillan?” Nora asked the attorney.

  “Hell, Mrs. Rakestraw, I don’t even know who the President of Canada is.”

  “Prime Minister.”

  “Okay, Prime Minister. But the Prime Ministers of Canada and Kenya don’t happen to be up for Academy Awards this year, either.”

  “Maybe they should be,” Benny Harrison said. “The President, too.” He stood by the double windows fronting the road to Caracal and, when a noise overhead reminded them all of Tom’s activity upstairs, lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

  “How long are you going to keep him?” Nora asked.

  “I don’t know,” Macmillan replied, exhaling smoke. “He might get back tomorrow. It might be three or four days. Or a week. Depends on what the examiners report after the match-up of features.”

  “Well, what happens if—if they match up?”

  “There are options, Mrs. Rakestraw. Nobody gets thrown in jail or caught out for damages for looking like somebody else. —Listen, if the test’s positive, you’ll be able to talk to him by telephone at our expense. It’s nothing to worry about. You may even make some money.”

  “I don’t care about that. However much it is, it won’t be worth going through all this. I don’t even see why he has to go. It’s ridiculous.” There was more noise from upstairs. “Listen to that. He’s upset with me for not helping him pack”

  “Nora,” Benny Harrison said, turning around, “Mr. Macmillan’s got a legal summons for this test. That’s why Tom’s going.”

  “What am I supposed to tell Gayle and Gabe? This is working out just as if Tom’s done something wrong. And he hasn’t—not a thing.”

  Neither the attorney nor the sheriff answered her. Sunlight fell across the hardwood floor through the double windows, and Nora tilted her head to catch the subtly frantic inflection of Nickie’s barking.

  After a time, Tom came into the room with his overnight case and asked if there was an extra tube of toothpaste anywhere. As a concession to the legality, if not the reasonableness, of Macmillan’s visit, Nora went looking for one. The men straggled out to the van while she looked, and when she found the extra tube of toothpaste, she carried it outside and handed it to her husband with a sense of vague disappointment Nevertheless, she kissed him and touched him affectionately on the nose.

  “Take care,” Rakestraw said. “I’ll call you.”

  Back inside the house, Nora found a check for a thousand dollars on the kitchen table. Macmillan’s lazy signature was at the bottom, twisted like a section of line in Tom’s tackle box. Nora wanted to tear the check up and scatter the pieces across the floor, instead, she left it lying on the table and returned thoughtfully to the den.

  * * * *

  The drive from Caracal to the state capital took four hours. Rakestraw asked Macmillan no questions, and Macmillan volunteered nothing beyond ecstatic but obtuse comments about the scenery.

  “Look at those blackbirds,” he exclaimed as they sped by a harvested cornfield in which a host of grackles was strutting. “There must be a thousand of ‘em!” He drummed his fingers on the dashboard in time to the disco music on the radio. He filled the van’s ashtray with cigarette butts.

  But he was subdued and solicitous checking Rakestraw into the private sanitarium where the testing was to be performed. He kept his voice down in the gloomy but spacious lobby where potted plants were reflected doubtfully in the streaked marble flooring, and he gave the black teenager who insisted on carrying Rakestraw’s bag to his first-floor room a generous but far from flashy tip. Then he left and let Rakestraw get a nap.

  Surprisingly, the testing itself began that same evening. A young man named Hurd and a young woman named Arberry—dressed, but for their name tags, as if for the street—came into Rakestraw’s room with photographic equipment, a scale on removable coasters, a notebook of laminated superimpositions of Craig Tiernan’s features, and various kinds of stainless-steel calibrating instruments, most of which looked sophisticated enough to induce envy in a physical anthropologist Rakestraw reflected that these two young people were physical anthropologists of a kind—they wanted to determine, scientifically, whether or not he looked like Craig Tiernan.

  “Do I look like Craig Tiernan?” Rakestraw asked Arberry as, after weighing him and noting down his height in centimeters, she posed him for a series of photographs.

  ‘There’s a real resemblance,” Arberry said genially. She smiled at him and made him point his chin for a portrait of his left profile. “Don’t people you’ve never met before do double takes when they first see you?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “Her next question,” Hurd put in, fiddling with a calibrating tool, “is whether you’re married or not.”

  “Married,” Rakestraw managed between his teeth.

  “Don’t move,” Arberry cautioned him mildly. In the same low-key tone she added, “Shut up, Hurd, and get your own act together.”

  There was a surprisingly silent flash from her camera, and then Arberry was posing him face on. Like a tailor, Hurd was using a tape measure across his shoulders. Rakestraw found their finicky probing more interesting now than annoying, and he cooperated with his examiners as he was always urging Gabe and Gayle to cooperate with Dr. Meade when he took them for checkups back in Caracal. Chin up, face on, no bickering; child or adult, that was how you were s
upposed to do things. . . .

  Arberry and Hurd were in the room with him for most of the evening, but they did give him a few odd minutes to himself as they conferred over the notebook of plastic superimpositions, flipping pages and matching features.

  Rakestraw began to feel like a pretender to the name, title, and person of the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Those fervid women had tried to prove their claims by a variety of methods, including the assertion that their ears had twelve or thirteen or fourteen positive points of identity-out of a possible seventeen—with the ears of the infant Anastasia, as revealed by photographs. The difference, of course, was that he didn’t wish to establish himself as Craig Tiernan; he certainly didn’t want his examiners to find enough points of similarity to make his resemblance to the actor a trespass against the Physiognomic Protection Act. Where had such legislation come from, anyway?