“Spending your vacations on me? What’s going on? A guy did something to my mind . . .”
“Shaman.”
“Yes! Then you fixed me somehow. That’s all I know.”
“How can you drink that stuff so easy? You look like you like it! You know, you can tell a lot about various civilizations by the kind of coffee they put up with; that’s what I find. . . . Listen to me. Shaman is trying to set you up to be his pabulum, Mel boy.”
“He wants to eat me?”
“Yes, Mel, he wants to eat you, farm you and eat you. He’s tired of hunting and gathering, let’s say. He’s been living catch-as-catch-can for five, six thousand years, and now he wants to cultivate, raise a family, like. Between you and me, he doesn’t know what he’s in for in that department, but try to get Shaman to listen to my say-so.
“Now, I’m just a little guy, see, but we can play the star guys off against him, because they want you back on Sanduleak.”
“Ah.”
“Listen. Shaman’s gotta start fertilizing now to plant seeds next year and harvest the year after that, when his larder gets echoey. This is why I have committed two vacations, though God knows there are things I’d rather be doing, named Fay in East Tonawanda. You kapeesh, Old Lower Forty?”
“Why do I believe you’re not crazy?”
“It is written.”
7. Shaman’s Farm
Many things were written of which I was unaware then, but where I now live, folks know everything. Time flows differently two hundred thousand light-years from my old galaxy. I look up at the sky from Sanduleak, rotating five times a second, and I see there the histories of all the worlds, compiled by epochй. . . .
Shaman chose the womb of a twentieth century North American woman to be born from. Egyptians, he had found, were too hard to proselytize, Indians too easy, Japanese too slavish, Australians too anarchic, but the American bourgeoissie?perfect. He magnetized their children, told them tales of Pharaohs and extraterrestrials, himself always in the middle, Tuthmosis, seed of Chephren, son of the Great Sphinx. Compare Chephren’s statue and the Sphinx: were not their faces the same? Anciently, as Tuthmosis, he had excavated and restored the man-lion from the stars.
To prove it, he brought down lightning, made stars dance, grew younger instead of older, humped or killed, without compunction, everyone, high and low, male or female, drawing his strength, he declared, from the Father of Terror, Abu al-Hawl, the Great Sphinx. He visited the Father of Terror yearly, in El Giza. Travel was difficult, but he had an easier way in mind, more present and more permanent. That is why he gathered his Space People. That is why he drilled a hole in my mind. Many holes he drilled, to no effect, in many souls: the Space People. But at the bottom of the hole in my mind he glimpsed Abu.
8. Oil of Cloves
“What do I do? What am I supposed to do? You haven’t told me anything!”
They were pulling away, about to leave me at the rest stop. Sarvaduhka’s squareback screeched to a stop, sending a cloud of dust back into my face. I ran to Izzy’s window. Sarvaduhka was gritting his teeth and peevishly chanting, “Female action, female action, Izzy. This is what you promised me. This is what my vacation is about. Female action, female action, female action.”
“Never mind Sergeant Ducky,” Izzy told me through the window. “Jeez! We’ll see you next year. You’ll live till then, don’t worry. I plugged you; that’s all I do this time. Just remember, that thing is a temporary. If you start to feel pressure . . . what can I say? Oil of cloves? The Lord’s Prayer? My hands are tied, kid. I gotta be back at the plant in a few days or they’ll fire my ass, and kimosabe here still has to get his damned female action, and guess what: I just got this. The North Vietnamese just overran the South. A rout. It’s all over. Keep this in mind, Mel. It’s a good bench mark. Next year we’ll plow you up and sow salt, don’t worry. Nobody’s gonna farm you.”