The Flavors of Other Worlds Read online

  By Saturday he needed another hit, and went looking for the pusher.

  The chipets that university professors used to distribute material to their students contained enormous quantities of information that were supposed to be doled out gradually, by experts and specialists, in measured doses of information, properly footnoted and annotated. Their contents were not intended even for experienced instructors to absorb all at once. There was real danger involved in doing so; the threat of overloading the cerebral cortex, of swamping the brain’s ability to process raw data.

  But because it shouldn’t be done, didn’t mean it couldn’t be.

  Soft-spoken and polite, well-educated, a reliable toiler in Menlo Park’s silicon alleys, Charlie Fellows was a knowledge addict. Ever since he had been exposed to the eSnood at a college party and the chipets it broadcast, the non-working portion of his adult life had been given over to learning, finding out, spending time in the acquisition of lore. When the ability to do so only slightly less than instantly, to suck up whole reams of learning overnight, had become scientifically possible if physically dangerous and culturally frowned upon, a small but thriving subculture had sprung up in its wake. Charlie had become an active member of that subculture very early on. It was an obsession he had in common with his closest friends, with Cheryl Chakula and Wayne Moorhead and C.K. Wang and Winona Gibson. Some of them he saw regularly at work, others he knew socially.

  Like all of them, he was a knowledge junkie.

  If the acquisition of erudition was your be all and end all, if it was your grail, your heart’s desire, then no faster way had ever been devised to achieve it than through the use of the eSnood and the chipets that fueled it. Like information acquired by reading or viewing, once stored in the mind, data derived via inducted chipets stayed put. Charlie’s brain was stuffed, swollen, crammed full of wondrous esoterica gleaned from night after night of reposing in his favorite chair while the eSnood pumped fact after fact through the neurons hiding under his hair. He knew more about salt water aquarium maintenance than any pet store manager. His ability to delineate the formulae for common sugars and proteins was the equal of innumerable highly-paid chemists on the payroll of Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines. He could recite quatrains whole and entire from medieval French poetry and discourse learnedly on the mechanics of moon rockets as well as bicycles. Only two dilemmas marred his artificially acquired scholarly bliss.

  It wasn’t enough. Ever.

  And when he wasn’t learning, his head began to hurt.

  It was not as if no warnings existed. Every chipet manufactured for industrial or university use carried imprinted upon it in microscopic font the standard caveat: “The Surgeon General has warned that the assimilation of too much knowledge too rapidly can be hazardous to your health.” At least once a week one of the major newscasts carried the story of some poor soul dead of an overdose on Proust or Hawking, African agricultural statistics or an attempt to digest the entire Mahabharata in one evening’s sitting. What was news to the uncurious was not news to Charlie. He knew the risks from personal experience.

  Just last year, his friend and company co-worker Dexter Ashburn had o.d’ed right on his florid and floral living room couch halfway through Manley’s Guide to the Echinoderms of the Western Pacific. Sheree LeMars was still in rehab, recovering from an ill-conceived attempt to mainline The Complete Fashions of the English Court: 1600-2000. And then there was the sad, bad case of little Chesley Waycross. He was still recovering from the beating he’d received from a disgruntled customer. Ches’ had tried to trade straight up for a copy of Barrington’s Ornithology of Brazil and Venezuela with an unperused bootleg of The Complete Literature of 16th century Tibet. Unfortunately, the chipet Chesley had offered in exchange had been bogus: there was no literature in 16th century Tibet. His enraged client had netted nothing but a standard pornset compilation; common, cheap, and useless. He’d taken out his anger and frustration on the unknowing Waycross.

  One had to tread carefully on the street of knowledge.

  Why not stop? he had once been challenged by an ex-girlfriend. Stop learning, he had replied? One might as well stop breathing. Hadn’t Erasmus (whose complete writings Charlie had inhaled one night on a beautiful day in May) said that “To stop learning is to start to die”? Sure it was so, she had agreed, but with the eSnood and a tsunami of chipets, wasn’t the reverse true?

  Charlie didn’t care. He only knew that from the time he had been old enough to read, the pursuit of knowledge had been the principal driving force in his life. If only we lived for thousand years or so there might be no need to try and cram so much information into so little time, he knew. But humans did not live for a thousand years. If you wanted to learn a little bit, a minimally respectable amount, really learn, then direct induction was the only way.

  Ignorance could not be borne. It was unthinkable. Like his friends and fellow addicts, it wasn’t simply that Charlie wanted to know. He had to know. Needed to know. Needed knowledge as urgently as he needed food, or water, or air. Otherwise, what was the meaning of life? Gobbling hamburgers and watching football? Mindless reproduction and the acquisition of false wealth? Far better to grasp the intricacies of diatom skeletons, the taxonomy of Southeast Asian flowers, the workings of the Aurora or the mysteries of zydeco music. So what if it killed you, eventually, by overloading your cranial capacity?

  At least you would die knowing something.

  They caught up with him eventually. If he’d moved away, he very likely would have escaped arrest, trial, incarceration, and imprisonment. But he loved where he lived, he liked his job, and besides, the best stuff was always to be found in the vicinity of major universities. Stanford was no exception. Given the scope of his personal chipet inventory and the extent of his addiction, the judge threw the book at him. This was not necessary, since he had long since inducted the complete civil code of the State of California. It did not help his defense, however.

  He was sent to the Northern California Center for the Treatment of the Data Addicted, in Monterey. There, when he wasn’t in lockdown and forced to watch endless hours of mind-purifying daytime television, he wandered the halls in the company of fellow compulsives: lapsed physicists from the heavily addicted part of Pasadena that bordered Cal-Tech, dour-faced recreational users caught hiding out with volumes of Balzac and African healer texts up in Humboldt County, softly mumbling immigrant programmers from Uttar Pradesh and Canton and Singapore. Shared verbalized snatches of Rabelais and Einstein and Cosell filled the hallways, repeated by the desperate inmates as self-sustaining mantras, but it wasn’t enough, not near enough, to satisfy the information-starved like himself.

  It was almost as tough as being forced to go cold turkey. In addition to television, the presence of daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and internet access provided the merest dribble of data, the feeblest kind of mental methadone. To someone used to ingesting the complete works of Shakespeare or Mammals of Eastern Russia or Statistical Digest of Nebraska in a few hours, it was the cerebral equivalent of providing nothing to drink for months on end but distilled water to a community comprised of seventy-year old Scotsmen.

  Charlie pleaded. He wept, he raged, he implored. It was no use. Newspapers, magazines, tv, internet was all that was supplied. Information presented in the traditional manner: to the brain via the eyes, slowly, oh so slowly.

  He got better. Withdrawal was painful, but he got better. Gradually he re-learned how to read a magazine: how to skip the advertisements, block out the irrelevant, and concentrate on the articles only. How to handle a newspaper again without avidly devouring the obituaries or the columns of sports statistics or the innumerable but still educational want ads. How to watch and enjoy television without—well, without doing much of anything. Slowly, he could feel his brain softening to something like tapioca pudding normal. The process of rehabilitation was made easier because during it all he retained everything he had absorbed through the use of his now confiscated eSnood
and precious, priceless, irreplaceable chipets. He did not lose information already acquired; at least, no more than was typical. In data rehab, some leakage was inevitable.

  When they felt he was sufficiently cured, they returned him to society. He was welcomed back at his job, for despite his boss’s occasional outbursts, Charlie was regarded as a fine, competent worker who excelled at his craft and would willingly work long hours. Besides, by now everyone knew that he had been sick. He went about his daily activities with a new serenity, the result of the best treatment the State could provide. He went about them for weeks, and then for months, without a relapse. Went about them until he was sure he was no longer being monitored by the local police data division of Narcotics.

  Only then did he once more begin to venture out to his old, familiar haunts in response to the lure of pure, undiluted, concentrated knowledge. His first buy since getting out of rehab was a wondrous compilation of the lives of the Mughals, translated from the original Sanskrit. Nestling back in his chair, the newly purchased, battered, but still serviceable second-hand eSnood resting awkwardly but satisfactorily on his head, he let himself lapse all over again into the sumptuous, sensuous sensation of effortlessly absorbing erudition. Of learning far faster than he ever could by the ancient eyescan method called reading. Of becoming more knowing. It might kill him, but he didn’t care. We all die eventually anyway. Only, some of us die knowing more than others.

  In a way, he felt badly for the authorities. All the courses of treatment they had devised, all the expensive programs and curriculum that had been developed with an eye toward curing the afflicted, couldn’t really treat the root causes of the problem. Once one has become truly, madly, deeply addicted to the acquisition of knowledge, nothing else really satisfies. It was like any true craving: the more you have, the more you want. For the first time, where knowledge was concerned, the eSnood made it possible to completely indulge that compulsion.

  It was mid-morning when old Aurangzeb, the last of the Mughals, finally passed into history and into the repository of Charlie Fellows’ memory. With a languid sigh of complete satisfaction that bordered on the prurient, Charlie blinked and tenderly removed the plasticized network of induction contacts from his head. A glance at the clock showed that he had missed another day of work. He didn’t care. He now knew all about Akbar and Shah Jahan and their most interesting ilk, and felt much the better for it. The more knowledgeable. The pounding at the back of his head was no worse than tolerable. He felt fine. Infused. Educated. There was only one problem. As always. As there ever would be.

  He was still thirsty.

  3

  Perception

  You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait.…” So sang the Supremes.

  As humans we have been able to quantify a good many things. Love is not one of them. It remains as mysterious and fascinating as it ever was, likely since before the dawn of civilization.

  Unfailingly, we all remember our first love. The tingle of attraction, the overwhelming desire to join with another, the temptations inherent in giving oneself wholly to another person. We also equally remember the first time we were in love and were rejected. The hurt, the pain, the feelings of worthlessness.

  But in the latter instance, what does the rejector feel? Regret? Apology? Sympathy? Anything at all? In the coldness of adolescence, often nothing.

  It is left to the rejected to feel.

  (Note: “Perception” appears here in its original form for the first time.)

  * * *

  Stefan didn’t want the assignment to Irelis. He didn’t want to work at the Outpost. He’d seen pictures of Irelis, and the Outpost, and the natives, and found all of them unpleasant in equal measure. But advancing up the company ladder meant climbing the rungs in order. Maybe skipping one now and then, if you were fortunate. For a young apprentice such as himself, Irelis was a rung that couldn’t be skipped.

  So it was that he found himself installed at the Outpost, a self-contained subdivision of the larger Irelis station set in the middle of a swamp. It could as easily have been anywhere on Irelis except at the poles. Swamp or savanna, take your choice: they were what covered nearly all of Irelis except for the murky, algae-coated oceans. Of the two, the savannas offered the more pleasant prospect, with drier, cooler, weather. Unfortunately, humans weren’t the only ones who preferred the plains to the swamps. So did the several dozen species of ferocious biting arthropods that sucked body fluids without discriminating between planets of origin.

  The Allawout got around the swamps on primitive flat rafts fashioned from fiberthrush and covango saplings fastened together with strong, red looporio vine. Ages ago, some Allawout Einstein had figured out that if you built the rafts with points at both ends, not only would they go faster through the tepid, turgid water, but you wouldn’t have to turn them around to reverse direction. That discovery represented the height of Allawout nautical technology. The idea of a sail was beyond them. Ignoring directives that forbade supplying indigenous aliens with advanced knowledge, visiting humans who observed the locals struggling with poles and paddles had taken pity on them and introduced the concept of the rudder, an innovation that the natives readily adopted and for which they were inordinately grateful.

  To the Outpost they brought the pleasures and treasures of the Irelis hinterlands; unique organic gem material, seeds from which exotic spices were extracted, sustainable animal products, barks and resins and flowers from which were derived uniquely unsynthesizable pharmaceuticals, and their own fashionable primitive handicrafts. Widely scattered and hard to find, located in disagreeable, dangerous country, these diverse products of Irelis found their way into the insatiable current of interstellar trade through the good offices of the dirt (literally) poor natives. Everyone benefited, and the government was happy.

  Stefan was not happy. He did not quite hate Irelis, but he disliked the place intensely. For someone his age, there was nothing in the way of entertainment. Worst of all was having to work with the locals. None of the Allawout stood taller than a meter in height—if you could call it standing. In the absence of anything resembling legs or feet, it was hard to tell. They sort of slimed their way along, their listless pace in perfect harmony with their sluggish metabolisms. A quartet of narrow but strong tentacles protruded from their cephalopodian upper bodies. These were covered in a fine, hairless, slick skin not unlike that of a frog or salamander. From the center of the upper bulge that was not quite a proper head, two large round eyes marked by crescent-shaped pupils took in the swamp that was their whole wide world. They had no external ears, no fur or horns, and wore no clothing. Not that there was much to cover. When they burbled at one another in their crude, vowel-rich language, bubbles frothed at the corners of their lipless mouths. They had no proper teeth and subsisted on a wide variety of soft plant life, supplementing this with the occasional fresh-water mollusk that did not require overmuch chewing. Soon after arriving, Stefan had the opportunity to observe them eating. It was not a pretty sight.

  It did not take him long to learn from his three co-workers that the Allawout were as oblivious to human sarcasm as they were too much of the world around them. Making fun of the slow-moving, slow-thinking natives was one of the few spontaneous diversions available to the Outpost’s inhabitants. Except when a supervisor came visiting, it was a sport they indulged in shamelessly, taking care to do so only out of range of the station’s largely humorless scientific compliment. By the time Stefan’s tour of duty was half over, his own personal file of Allawout jokes had grown as fat as one of the natives.

  Not that they were inherently unlikable, he mused as he lazed his way through his daily turn at the trading counter. On his right was a projector that could, magically as far as the Allawout were concerned, generate a three-dimensional, rotatable image of anything in the Outpost’s warehouse. Those visiting natives who made endless demands of the device simply for its entertainment value soon found themselves cut out of the trade loop
. Once word spread among the local clans, this abuse stopped. The Outpost, they learned, was a place in which to conduct serious trade.

  The tripartite clan that was now leaving carried between them several parcels sealed in the ubiquitous, biodegradable plastic wrap that was used to package all trade goods. As he watched them depart, Stefan directed the room’s air purifier to grade up a notch. Allawout body odor was no more pleasing than their appearance. In a few minutes the atmospheric scrubber would have removed the last lingering odiferous traces of the clan’s visit.

  Pervasatha waited for the cheerful, noisily bubbling family to exit before coming in. Despite his special cooling gear, he was sweating profusely. A number of visiting supervisors and scientists felt that would have been a better name for the planet: Sweating Profusely. It was certainly more descriptive than Irelis IV.

  “Got something for you, Stef.” Perv, as his friends and co-workers called him, leaned one elbow down on the counter. The corners of his mouth twitched. He seemed to be striving hard to repress a grin.

  “Not another carved Ohrus tooth.” Stefan eyed the other young man warily. “They’re pretty, but we’ve already got a boxful.”

  “Nope. Better than that.” The grin escaped its bounds. Perv pointed to the door. “Enter! Come inside.”

  A native slid slowly inward on the familiar, disgusting trail of lubricating gunk. Behind it, the floor did its best to clean up after the visitor. Unfeeling mechanical though it was, Stefan still felt sorry for the autocleaner. Unlike the rest of them, it could never look forward to a day off. Not on Irelis.

  Perv’s grin was wider than ever. “You remember that directive? Not last week’s—the one before. Page twelve. ‘All company Outposts must strive where possible to encourage local life forms to participate in the ongoing activities of a given station, with regard to maintaining and enhancing benign relations between the human and native populations.’”