Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [32]
This American traitor bore a strong resemblance to a great American hero, Charles Augustus Lindbergh. He was tall and big-boned. He had Scandinavian blood. He was a farm boy. He was fairly fluent in a weepy sort of French from having listened to Edith Piaf for so long. He had actually been almost nowhere outside of prison but Ames, Iowa, and Osaka, Japan. He was so shy with women, he told me one time, that he was still a virgin when he reached Osaka. And then he fell crashingly in love with a female nightclub singer who passed herself off as Japanese and sang word-for-word imitations of Edith Piaf records. She was also a spy for North Korea.
“My dear friend, my dear Walter Starbuck,” he said, “and how has this day gone for you so far?”
So I told him about sitting on the cot and having the same song run through my head again and again, about Sally in the garden, sifting cinders.
He laughed. He has since put me and the incident into a science fiction story of his, which I am proud to say is appearing this very month in Playboy, a RAMJAC magazine. The author is ostensibly Frank X. Barlow. The story is about a former judge on the plane Vicuna, two and a half galaxies away from. Earth, who has had to leave his body behind and whose soul goes flying through space, looking for a habitable planet and a new body to occupy. He finds that the universe is virtually lifeless, but he comes at last to Earth and makes his first landing in the enlisted men’s parking lot of Finletter Air Force Base—thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia. He can enter any body he likes through its ear, and ride around inside. He wants a body so he can have some sort of social life. A soul without a body, according to the story, can’t have any social life—because nobody can see it, and it can’t touch anybody or make any noise.
The judge thinks he can leave a body again, any time he finds it or its destiny uncongenial. Little does he dream that the chemistries of Earthlings and Vicunians are such that, once he enters a body, he is going to be stuck inside forever. The story includes a little essay on glues previously known on Earth, and says that the strongest of these was the one that sticks mature barnacles to boulders or boats or pilings, or whatever.
“When they are very young,” Dr. Fender writes in the persona of Frank X. Barlow, “barnacles can drift or creep whence-so-ever they hanker, anywhere in the seven seas and the brackish estuaries thereof. Their upper bodies are encased in 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