The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Anne said, “That joke poses the finest distillation of the problem of ontology ever invented. If you ponder it long enough—”

  “Hell,” he said angrily, “it’s five pounds of cat; it’s nonsense—there’s no steak if the scale shows five pounds.”

  “Remember the wine and the wafer,” Anne said quietly.

  He stared at her. The idea, for a moment, seemed to come through.

  “Yes,” she said. “The cat was not the steak. But the cat might be a manifestation which the steak was taking at that moment. The key word happens to be is. Don’t tell us, Barney, that whatever entered Palmer Eldritch is God, because you don’t know that much about Him; no one can. But that living entity from intersystem space may, like us, be shaped in His image. A way He selected of showing Himself to us. If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter. So don’t talk ontology, Barney; don’t say is.” She smiled at him hopefully, to see if he understood.

  “Someday,” Barney said, “we may worship at that monument.” Not the deed by Leo Bulero, he thought; as admirable as it was—will be, more accurately—that won’t be our object. No, we’ll all of us, as a culture, do as I already am tending toward: we’ll invest it wanly, pitifully, with our conception of infinite powers. And we’ll be right in a sense because those powers are there. But as Anne says, as to its acutal nature—

  “I can see you want to be alone with your garden,” Anne said. “I think I’ll start back to my hovel. Good luck. And, Barney—” She reached out, took him by the hand, and held onto him earnestly. “Never grovel. God, or whatever superior being it is we’ve encountered—it wouldn’t want that and even if it did you shouldn’t do it.” She leaned forward, kissed him, and then started off.

  “You think I’m right?” Barney called after her. “Is there any point in trying to start a garden here?” Or will we go the familiar way, too…

  “Don’t ask me. I’m no authority.”

  “You just care about your spiritual salvation,” he said savagely.

  “I don’t even care about that any more,” Anne said. “I’m terribly, terribly confused and everything upsets me, here. Listen.” She walked back to him, her eyes dark and shaded, without light. “When you grabbed me, to take that bindle of Chew-Z; you know what I saw? I mean actually saw, not just believed.”

  “An artificial hand. And a distortion of my jaw. And my eyes—”

  “Yes,” she said tightly. “The mechanical, slitted eyes. What did it mean?”

  Barney said, “It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called—stigmata.

  For an interval she regarded him. “That’s the way you really are?” she said, then, and drew away from him, with aversion manifest on her face. “Why aren’t you what you seem? You’re not like that now. I don’t understand.” She added, tremulously, “I wish I hadn’t told that cat joke.”

  He said, “I saw the same thing in you, dear. At that instant. You fought me off with fingers decidedly not those you were born with.” And it could so easily slip into place again. The Presence abides with us, potentially if not actually.

  “Is it a curse?” Anne asked. “I mean, we have the account of an original curse of God; is it like that all over again?”

  “You ought to be the one who knows; you remember what you saw. All three stigmata—the dead, artificial hand, the Jensen eyes, and the radically deranged jaw.” Symbols of its inhabitation, he thought. In our midst. But not asked for. Not intentionally summoned. And—we have no mediating sacraments through which to protect ourselves; we can’t compel it, by our careful, time-honored, clever, painstaking rituals, to confine itself to specific elements such as bread and water or bread and wine. It is out in the open, ranging in every direction. It looks into our eyes; and it looks out of our eyes.

  “It’s a price,” Anne decided. “That we must pay. For our desire to undergo that drug experience with that Chew-Z. Like the apple originally.” Her tone was shockingly bitter.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “but I think I already paid it.” Or came within a hair of paying it, he decided. That thing, which we know only in its Terran body, wanted to substitute me at the instant of its destruction; instead of God dying for man, as we once had, we faced—for a moment—a superior—the superior power asking us to perish for it.

  Does that make it evil? he wondered. Do I believe the argument I gave Norm Schein? Well, it certainly makes it inferior to what came two thousand years before. It seems to be nothing more or less than the desire of, as Anne puts it, an out-of-dust created organism to perpetuate itself; we all have it, we all would like to see a goat or a lamb cut to pieces and incinerated instead of ourselves. Oblations have to be made. And we don’t care to be them. In fact our entire lives are dedicated to that one principle. And so is its.

  “Goodbye,” Anne said. “I’ll leave you alone; you can sit in the cab of that dredge and dig away to your heart’s content. Maybe when I next see you, there’ll be a completed watersystem installed here.” She smiled once more at him, briefly, and then hiked off in the direction of her own hovel.

  After a time he climbed the steps to the cab of the dredge which he had been using and started the creaky, sand-impregnated mechanism. It howled mournfully in protest. Happier, he decided, to remain asleep; this, for the machine, was the ear-splitting summons of the last trumpet, and the dredge was not yet ready.

  He had scooped perhaps a half mile of irregular ditch, as yet void of water, when he discovered that an indigenous life form, a Martian something, was stalking him. At once he halted the dredge and peered into the glare of the cold Martian sun to make it out.

  It looked a little like a lean, famished old grandmother on all fours and he realized that this was probably the jackal-creature which he had been warned repeatedly about. In any case, whatever it was, it obviously hadn’t fed in days; it eyed him ravenously, while keeping its distance—and then, projected telepathically, its thoughts reached him. So he was right. This was it.

  “May I eat you?” it asked. And panted, avidly slack-jawed.

  “Christ no,” Barney said. He fumbled about in the cab of the dredge for something to use as a weapon; his hands closed over a heavy wrench and he displayed it to the Martian predator, letting it speak for him; there lay a great message in the wrench and the way he gripped it.

  “Get down off that contraption,” the Martian predator thought, in a mixture of hope and need. “I can’t reach you up there.” The last was intended, certainly, to be a private thought, retained in camera, but somehow it had gotten projected, too. The creature had no finesse. “I’ll wait,” it decided. “He has to get down eventually.”

  Barney swung the dredge around and started it back in the direction of Chicken Pox Prospects. Groaning, it clanked at a maddeningly slow rate; it appeared to be failing with each yard. He had the intuition that it was not going to make it. Maybe the creature’s right, he said to himself; it is possible I’ll have to step down and face it.

  Spared, he thought bitterly, by the enormously higher life form that entered Palmer Eldritch that showed up in our system from out there—and then eaten by this stunted beast. The termination of a long flight, he thought. A final arrival that even five minutes ago, despite my precog talent, I didn’t anticipate. Maybe I didn’t want to…as Dr. Smile, if he were here, would triumphantly bleat.

  The dredge wheezed, bucked violently, and then, painfully contracting itself, curled up; its life flickered a moment and then it died to a stop.

  For a time Barney sat in silence. Placed directly ahead of him the old-grandmother jackal Martian flesh-eater watched, never taking its eyes from him.

  “All right,” Barney said. “Here I come.” He hopped from the cab of the dredge, flailing with the wrench.

  The creature dashed at him.

  Almost to him, five feet away, it suddenly squealed, veered, and ran past, not touching him. He spun, and watched it go. “U
nclean,” it thought to itself; it halted at a safe distance and fearfully regarded him, tongue lolling. “You’re an unclean thing,” it informed him dismally.

  Unclean, Barney thought. How? Why?

  “You just are,” the predator answered. “Look at yourself. I can’t eat you; I’d be sick.” It remained where it was, drooping with disappointment and—aversion. He had horrified it.

  “Maybe we’re all unclean to you,” he said. “All of us from Earth, alien to this world. Unfamiliar.”

  “Just you,” it told him flatly. “Look at—ugh!—your right arm, your hand. There’s something intolerably wrong with you. How can you live with yourself? Can’t you cleanse yourself some way?”

  He did not bother to look at his arm and hand; it was unnecessary.

  Calmly, with all the dignity that he could manage, he walked on, over the loosely packed sand, toward his hovel.

  That night, as he prepared to go to bed in the cramped bunk provided by his compartment at Chicken Pox Prospects, someone rapped on his closed door. “Hey, Mayerson. Open up.”

  Putting on his robe he opened the door.

  “That trading ship is back,” Norm Schein, excited, grabbing him by the lapel of his robe, declared. “You know, from the Chew-Z people. You got any skins left? If so—”

  “If they want to see me,” Barney said, disengaging Norm Schein’s grip from his robe, “they’ll have to come down here. You tell them that.” He shut the door, then.

  Norm loudly departed.

  He seated himself at the table on which he ate his meals, got a pack—his last—of Terran cigarettes from the drawer, and lit up; he sat smoking and meditating, hearing above and around his compartment the scampering noises of his fellow hovelists. Large-scale mice, he thought. Who have scented the bait.

  The door to his compartment opened. He did not look up; he continued to stare down at the table surface, at the ashtray and matches and pack of Camels.

  “Mr. Mayerson.”

  Barney said, “I know what you’re going to say.”

  Entering the compartment, Palmer Eldritch shut the door, seated himself across from Barney, and said, “Correct, my friend. I let you go just before it happened, before Leo fired the second time. It was my carefully considered decision. And I’ve had a long time to dwell on the matter; a little over three centuries. I won’t tell you why.”

  “I don’t care why,” Barney said. He continued to stare down.

  “Can’t you look at me?” Palmer Eldritch said.

  “I’m unclean,” Barney informed him.

  “WHO TOLD YOU THAT?”

  “An animal out in the desert. And it had never seen me before; it knew it just by coming close to me.” While still five feet away, he thought to himself. Which is fairly far.

  “Hmm. Maybe its motive—”

  “It had no goddam motive. In fact just the opposite—it was half-dead from hunger and yearning to eat me. So it must be true.”

  “To the primitive mind,” Eldritch said, “the unclean and the holy are confused. Merged merely as taboo. The ritual for them, the—”

  “Aw hell,” he said bitterly. “It’s true and you know it. I’m alive, I won’t die on that ship, but I’m defiled.”

  “By me?”

  Barney said, “Make your own guess.”

  After a pause Eldritch shrugged and said, “All right. I was cast out from a star system—I won’t identify it because to you it wouldn’t matter—and I took up residence where that wild, get-rich-quick operator from your system encountered me. And some of that has been passed on to you. But not much. You’ll gradually, over the years, recover; it’ll diminish until it’s gone. Your fellow colonists won’t notice because it’s touched them, too; it began as soon as they participated in the chewing of what we sold them.”

  “I’d like to know,” Barney said, “what you were trying to do when you introduced Chew-Z to our people.”

  “Perpetuate myself,” the creature opposite him said quietly.

  He glanced up, then. “A form of reproduction?”

  “Yes, the only way I can.”

  With overwhelming aversion Barney said, “My God. We would all have become your children.”

  “Don’t fret about that now, Mr. Mayerson,” it said, and laughed in a humanlike, jovial way. “Just tend your little garden up top, get your water system going. Frankly I long for death; I’ll be glad when Leo Bulero does what he’s already contemplating…he’s begun to hatch it, now that you’ve refused to take the brain-metabolism toxin. Anyhow, I wish you luck here on Mars; I would have enjoyed it, myself, but things didn’t work out and that’s that.” Eldritch rose to his feet, then.

  “You could revert,” Barney said. “Resume the form you were in when Palmer encountered you. You don’t have to be there, inhabiting that body, when Leo opens fire on your ship.”

  “Could I?” Its tone was mocking. “Maybe something worse is waiting for me if I fail to show up there. But you wouldn’t know about that; you’re an entity whose lifespan is relatively short, and in a short span there’s a lot less—” It paused, thinking.

  “Don’t tell me,” Barney said. “I don’t want to know.”

  The next time he looked up, Palmer Eldritch was gone.

  He lit another cigarette. What a mess, he thought. This is how we act when finally we do contact at long last another sentient race within the galaxy. And how it behaves, badly as us and in some respects much worse. And there’s nothing to redeem the situation. Not now.

  And Leo thought that by going out to confront Eldritch with that tube of toxin we had a chance. Ironic.

  And here I am, without having even consummated the miserable act for the courts’ benefit, physically, basically, unclean.

  Maybe Anne can do something for me, he thought suddenly. Maybe there are methods to restore one to the original condition—dimly remembered, such as it was—before the late and more acute contamination set in. He tried to remember but he knew so little about Neo-Christianity. Anyhow it was worth a try; it suggested there might be hope, and he was going to need that in the years ahead.

  After all, the creature residing in deep space which had taken the form of Palmer Eldritch bore some relationship to God; if it was not God, as he himself had decided, then at least it was a portion of God’s Creation. So some of the responsibility lay on Him. And, it seemed to Barney, He was probably mature enough to recognize this.

  Getting Him to admit it, though. That might be something else again.

  However, it was still worth talking to Anne Hawthorne; she might know of techniques for accomplishing even that.

  But he somehow doubted it. Because he held a terrifying insight, simple, easy to think and utter, which perhaps applied to himself and those around him, to this situation.

  There was such a thing as salvation. But—

  Not for everyone.

  On the trip back to Terra from their unsuccessful mission to Mars, Leo Bulero endlessly nitpicked and conferred with his colleague, Felix Blau. It was now obvious to both of them what they would have to do.

  “He’s all the time traveling between a master-satellite around Venus and the other planets, plus his demesne on Luna,” Felix pointed out in summation. “And we all recognize how vulnerable a ship in space is; even a small puncture can—” He gestured graphically.

  “We’d need the UN’s cooperation,” Leo said gloomily. Because all he and his organization were allowed to possess were side arms. Nothing that could be used by one ship against another.

  “I’ve got what may be some interesting data on that,” Felix said, rummaging in his briefcase. “Our people in the UN reach into Hepburn-Gilbert’s office, as you may or may not know. We can’t compel him to do anything, but we can at least discuss it.” He produced a document. “Our Secretary-General is worried about the consistent appearance of Palmer Eldritch in every one of the so-called ‘reincarnations’ that users of Chew-Z experience. He’s smart enough to correctly interpret what tha
t implies. So if it keeps happening undoubtedly we can get more cooperation from him, at least on a sub rosa basis; for instance—”

  Leo broke in, “Felix, let me ask you something. How long have you had an artificial arm?”

  Glancing down, Felix grunted in surprise. And then, staring at Leo Bulero, he said, “So do you, too. And there’s something the matter with your teeth; open your mouth and let’s see.”

  Without answering, Leo got to his feet and went into the men’s room of the ship to survey himself in the floor-length mirror.

  There was no doubt of it. Even the eyes, too. Resignedly he returned to his seat beside Felix Blau. Neither of them said anything for a while; Felix rattled his documents mechanically—oh God, Leo thought; literally mechanically!—and Leo alternated between watching him and dully staring out the window at the blackness and stars of interplan space.

  Finally Felix said, “Sort of throws you at first, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Leo agreed hoarsely. “I mean, hey Felix—what do we do?”

  “We accept it,” Felix said. He was gazing with fixed intensity down the aisle at the people in the other seats. Leo looked and saw, too. The same deformity of the jaw. The same brilliant, unfleshly right hand, one holding a homeopape, another a book, a third its fingers restlessly tapping. On and on and on until the termination of the aisle and the beginning of the pilot’s cabin. In there, too, he realized. It’s all of us.

  “But I just don’t quite get what it means,” Leo complained helplessly. “Are we in—you know. Translated by that foul drug and this is—” He gestured. “We’re both out of our minds, is that it?”

  Felix Blau said, “Have you taken Chew-Z?”

  “No. Not since that one intravenous injection on Luna.”

  “Neither have I,” Felix said. “Ever. So it’s spread. Without the use of the drug. He’s everywhere, or rather it’s everywhere. But this is good; this’ll decidedly cause Hepburn-Gilbert to reconsider the UN’s stand. He’ll have to face exactly what this thing amounts to. I think Palmer Eldritch made a mistake; he went too far.”