First Person Peculiar Read online

  Of course, it wasn’t just the blacks and Jews and Hispanics who were emigrating, and it wasn’t just America and Africa that were getting emptier. The Chinese left the next year, followed by the Turks, the Bulgarians, the Indians, the Australians, and the French Polynesians. It didn’t even make headlines when the Cook County Democratic Machine went off to Daleyworld, which figured to be the only planet that was ever turned into a smoke-filled back room.

  “Great!” proclaimed Burt. “We finally got room to breathe and stretch our legs.”

  Things kind of settled down for a couple of years then, and life got pretty easy, and we hardly noticed that the Brits, the Germans, the Russians, the Albanians, the Sunis and the Shiites had all gone.

  “Wonderful!” said Burt on the day the Greeks and the Pakistanis left. “So maybe we still wear gas masks because of the pollution, and the water still ain’t safe to drink, and we ain’t quite gotten over our little problem with Eight Mile Island”—that was the problem that turned it into thirty-two Quarter Mile Islands—“but, by God, what’s a little inconvenience compared to a world run by and for 100% pure Amurricans?”

  I suppose we should have seen the handwriting on the wall when the NFL moved the Alaska Timberwolves and the Louisiana Gamblers, the last two franchises still on Earth, to the Quinellus Cluster. There were other little hints, too, like using downtown Boston to test out the new J-Bomb, or the day the Great Lakes finally turned solid with sludge.

  That was when the real emigration started, right in our back yard, so to speak. Nevada, Michigan, and Florida were the first to go; then New Hampshire and Delaware, then Texas, and then it was Katie-bar-the-door. For the longest time I really thought California would stick around, but they finally located a world with a 9,000-mile beach and a native populace that specialized in making sandals and cheap gold jewelry, and suddenly the United States of America began at St. Louis and ended about 60 miles west of Council Bluffs.

  “Let ‘em go,” counseled Burt. “We never needed ‘em anyway. And there’s just that much more for the rest of us, right?”

  Except that things kept happening. The ice cap slipped south all the way to Minneapolis, Mount Kilimanjaro started pouring lava down onto the Serengeti Plains, the Mediterranean boiled away, the National Hockey League went bankrupt, and people kept leaving.

  That was almost ten years ago.

  There are only eight of us left now. Burt was pressed into duty as World President this week, because Arnie Jenkins hurt his wrist and can’t sign any documents, and Sybil Miller, who was supposed to succeed Arnie, has her period and says she doesn’t feel like it.

  We haven’t gotten any mail or supplies in close to a year now. They say that Earth is too polluted and dangerous to land on any more, so Burt figured it was his Presidential duty to take one of our two remaining ships to Mars Base and pick up the mail, and bring Arnie back his yearly supply of cigarettes.

  I stopped by his office this morning to return a socket wrench I had borrowed, and I saw a letter addressed to me sitting on his desk, so I opened it and read it.

  I been mulling it over, and I decided that I was all wrong about this after all. I mean, being World President is all well and good, but not when your only duties are taking out the garbage and picking up the mail. A World President needs a army and navy to keep the peace, and lots of people paying taxes, and stuff like that. I hate to leave now that we’re finally down to nothing but 100% pure and loyal Americans, but the fact of the matter is that there ain’t no point to being President every eighth week without no perks and no fringes, so I’m off to the big wide galaxy to see if anyone out there wants a guy with Presidential experience. I’ll be happy to take over the reins of any government what wants me, so long as it’s white and Christian and mostly American and has a football team. In fact, I don’t even have to be President; I got no serious objections to hiring on as King

  Do me a favor and post this one last official message for me.

  And there was a printed sign saying, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE THE PLANET PLEASE SHUT OFF THE SUN?

  I can’t tell you how relieved the rest of us are. Burt was okay for a Baptist, but you know what they say about Baptists.

  Now if we can just find a way to get rid of Myrtle Bremmer and that Presbyterian claptrap she’s always spouting, we’ll finally have an America that I’m proud to be a part of.

  ***

  So I got an assignment to write a story for Piers Anthony’s anthology about American Indians, and I was sure everyone would be using Sitting Bull and Geronimo … and then I remembered that charming scene in Cat Ballou where Cat’s father is convinced that Indians are one of the twelve lost tribes of Israel, and suddenly I had a story to tell.

  The Kemosabe

  So me and the Masked Man, we decide to hook up and bring evildoers to justice, which is a pretty full-time occupation considering just how many of these momzers there are wandering the West. Of course, I don’t work on Saturdays, but this is never a problem, since he’s usually sleeping off Friday night’s binge and isn’t ready to get back in the saddle until about half past Monday.

  We get along pretty well, though we don’t talk much to each other—my English is a little rusty, and his Yiddish is non-existent—but we share our food when times are tough, and we’re always saving each other’s life, just like it says in the dime novels.

  Now, you’d think two guys who spend a whole year riding together wouldn’t have any secrets from each other, but actually that’s not the case. We respect each other’s privacy, and it is almost twelve months to the day after we form a team that we find ourselves answering a call of Nature at the very same time, and I look over at him, and I am so surprised I could just plotz, you know what I mean?

  It’s then that I start calling him Kemosabe, and finally one day he asks me what it means, and I tell him that it means “uncircumcised goy,” and he kind of frowns and tells me that he doesn’t know what either word means, so I sit him down and explain that Indians are one of the lost Hebrew tribes, only we aren’t as lost as we’re supposed to be, because Custer and the rest of those meshugginah soldiers keep finding us and blowing us to smithereens. And the Kemosabe, he asks if Hebrew is a suburb of Hebron, and right away I see we’ve got an enormous cultural gap to overcome.

  But what the hell, we’re pardners, and we’re doing a pretty fair job of ridding the West of horse thieves and stage robbers and other varmints, so I say, “Look, Kemosabe, you’re a mensch and I’m proud to ride with you, and if you wanna get drunk and shtup a bunch of shiksas whenever we go into town, that’s your business and who am I to tell you what to do? But Butch Cavendish and his gang are giving me enough tsouris this month, so if we stop off at any Indian villages, let’s let this be our little secret, okay?”

  And the Kemosabe, who is frankly a lot quicker with his guns than his brain, just kind of frowns and looks hazy and finally nods his head, though I’m sure he doesn’t know what he’s nodding about.

  Well, we ride on for another day or two, and finally reach his secret silver mine, and he melts some of it down and shoves it into his shells, and like always I ride off and hunt up Reb Running Bear and have him say Kaddish over the bullets, and when I hunt up the Masked Man again I find he has had the chutzpah to take on the whole Cavendish gang single-handed, and since they know he never shoots to kill and they ain’t got any such compunctions, they leave him lying there for dead with a couple of new pupiks in his belly.

  So I make a sled and hook it to the back of his horse, which he calls Silver but which he really ought to call White, or at least White With The Ugly Brown Blotch On His Belly, and I hop up my pony, and pretty soon we’re in front of Reb Running Bear’s tent, and he comes out and looks at the Masked Man lying there with his ten-gallon Stetson for a long moment, and then he turns to me and says, “You know, that has got to be the ugliest yarmulkah I’ve ever seen.”

  “This is my pardner,” I say. “Some goniffs drygulched him. You got to m
ake him well.”

  Reb Running Bear frowns. “He doesn’t look like one of the Chosen People to me. Where was he bar mitzvahed?”

  “He wasn’t,” I say. “But he’s one of the Good Guys. He and I are cleaning up the West.”

  “Six years in Hebrew school and you settle for being a janitor?” he says.

  “Don’t give me a hard time,” I said. “We got bad guys to shoot and wrongs to right. Just save the Kemosabe’s life.”

  “The Kemosabe?” he repeats. “Would I be very far off the track if I surmised that he doesn’t keep kosher?”

  “Look,” I say, deciding that it’s time to play hardball, “I hadn’t wanted to bring this up, but I know what you and Mrs. Screaming Hawk were doing last time I visited this place.”

  “Keep your voice down or that yenta I married will make my life hell!” he whispers, glancing back toward his teepee. Then he grimaces. “Mrs. Screaming Hawk. Serves me right for taking her to Echo Canyon. Feh!”

  I stare at him. “So nu?”

  “All right, all right, Jehovah and I will nurse the Kemosabe back to health.”

  “Good,” I say.

  He glares at me. “But just this one time. Then I pass the word to all the other Rabbis: we don’t cure no more goys. What have they ever done for us?”

  Well, I am all prepared to argue the point, because I’m a pretty open-minded kind of guy, but just then the Kemosabe starts moaning and I realize that if I argue for more than a couple of minutes we could all be sitting shivah for him before dinnertime, so I wander off and pay a visit to Mrs. Rutting Elk to console her on the sudden passing of her husband and see if there is anything I can do to cheer her up, and Reb Running Bear gets to work, and lo and behold, in less than a week the Masked Man is up and around and getting impatient to go out after desperados, so we thank Reb Running Bear for his services, and he loads my pardner down with a few canteens of chicken soup, and we say a fond shalom to the village.

  I am hoping we have a few weeks for the Kemosabe to regain his strength, of which I think he is still missing an awful lot, but as Fate would have it, we are riding for less than two hours when we come across the Cavendish gang’s trail.

  “Aha!” he says, studying the hoofprints. “All thirty of them! This is our chance for revenge!”

  My first thought is to say something like, “What do you mean we, mackerel eater?”—but then I remember that Good Guys never back down from a challenge, so I simply say “Ugh!”, which is my opinion of taking on thirty guys at once, but which he insists on interpreting as an affirmative.

  We follow the trail all day, and when it’s too dark to follow it any longer, we make camp on a small hill.

  “We should catch up with them just after sunrise,” says the Masked Man, and I can see that his trigger finger is getting itchy.

  “Ugh,” I say.

  “We’ll meet them on the open plain, where nobody can hide.”

  “Double ugh with cherries on it,” I say.

  “You look very grim, old friend,” he says.

  “Funny you should mention it,” I say, but before I can suggest that we just forget the whole thing, he speaks again.

  “You can have the other twenty-nine, but Cavendish is mine.”

  “You’re all heart, Kemosabe,” I say.

  He stands up, stretches, and walks over to his bedroll. “Well, we’ve got a hard day’s bloodletting ahead of us. We’d best get some sleep.”

  He lays down, and ten seconds later he’s snoring like all get-out, and I sit there staring at him, and I just know he’s not gonna come through this unscathed, and I remember Reb Running Bear’s promise that no medicine man would ever again treat a goy.

  And the more I think about it, the more I think that it’s up to me, the loyal sidekick, to do something about it. And finally it occurs to me just what I have to do, because if I can’t save him from the Cavendish gang, the least I can do is save him from himself.

  So I go over to my bedroll, and pull out a bottle of Mogen David, and pour a little on my hunting knife, and try to remember the exact words the medicine man recites during the bris, and I know that someday, when he calms down, he’ll thank me for this.

  In the meantime, I’m gonna have to find a new nickname for my pardner.

  ***

  One day we’re driving along, and Carol is humming the first couple of lines of an old nursery rhyme repeatedly, and finally I ask her to hum something else. She asks what, and since nursery rhymes seem to be the order of the day I suggest the only other one I can think of, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”—and the second I say it, I start thinking about what kind of farm Old MacDonald will have in a century or two, which resulted in this Hugo nominee.

  Old MacDonald Had a Farm

  I came to praise Caesar, not to bury him.

  Hell, we all did.

  The farm spread out before us, green and rolling, dotted with paddocks and water troughs. It looked like the kind of place you wish your parents had taken you when you were a kid and the world was still full of wonders.

  Well, the world may not have been full of wonders any longer, but the farm was. Problem was, they weren’t exactly the kind you used to dream of—unless you were coming down from a really bad acid trip.

  The farm was the brainchild of Caesar Claudius MacDonald. He’d finally knuckled under to public pressure and agreed to show the place off to the press. That’s where I came in.

  My name’s McNair. I used to have a first name, but I dumped it when I decided a one-word byline was more memorable. I work for the SunTrib, the biggest newstape in the Chicago area. I’d just broken the story that put Billy Cheever away after the cops had been after him for years. What I wanted for my efforts was my own syndicated column; what I got was a trip to the farm.

  For a guy no one knew much about, one who almost never appeared in public, MacDonald had managed to make his name a household word in something less than two years. Even though one of his corporations owned our publishing company, we didn’t have much on him in our files, just what all the other news bureaus had: he’d earned a couple of Ph.D.s, he was a widower who by all accounts had been faithful to his wife, he’d inherited a bundle and then made a lot more on his own.

  MacDonald was a Colorado native who emigrated to New Zealand’s South Island, bought a 40,000-hectare farm, and hired a lot of technicians over the years. If anyone wondered why a huge South Island farm didn’t have any sheep, they probably just figured he had worked out some kind of tax dodge.

  Hell, that’s what I thought too. I mean, why else would someone with his money bury himself on the underside of the globe for half a lifetime?

  Then, a week after his 66th birthday, MacDonald made The Announcement. That’s the year they had food riots in Calcutta and Rio and Manila, when the world was finding out that it was easier to produce eleven billion living human beings than to feed them.

  Some people say he created a new life form. Some say he produced a hybrid (though not a single geneticist agrees with that.) Some—I used to snicker at them—say that he had delved into mysteries that Man Was Not Meant To Know.

  According to the glowing little computer cube they handed out, MacDonald and his crew spent close to three decades manipulating DNA molecules in ways no one had ever thought of before. He did a lot of trial and error work with embryos, until he finally came up with the prototype he sought. Then he spent a few more years making certain that it would breed true. And finally he announced his triumph to the world.

  Caesar MacDonald’s masterpiece was the Butterball, a meat animal that matured at six months of age and could reproduce at eight months, with a four-week gestation period. It weighed 400 pounds at maturity, and every portion of its body could be consumed by Earth’s starving masses, even the bones.

  That in itself was a work of scientific brilliance—but to me the true stroke of genius was the astonishing efficiency of the Butterballs’ digestive systems. An elephant, back when elephants still existed,
would eat about 600 pounds of vegetation per day, but could only use about forty percent of it, and passed the rest as dung. Cattle and pigs, the most common meat animals prior to the Butterballs, were somewhat more efficient, but they, too, wasted a lot of expensive feed.

  The Butterballs, on the other hand, utilized one hundred percent of what they were fed. Every pellet of food they ingested went right into building meat that was meticulously bio-engineered to please almost every palate. Anyway, that’s what the endless series of P.R. releases said.

  MacDonald had finally consented to allow a handful of pool reporters to come see for themselves.

  We were hoping for a look at MacDonald too, maybe even an interview with the Great Man. But when we got there, we learned that he had been in seclusion for months. Turned out he was suffering from depression, which I would have thought would be the last thing to affect humanity’s latest savior, but who knows what depresses a genius? Maybe, like Alexander, he wanted more worlds to conquer, or maybe he was sorry that Butterballs didn’t weigh 800 pounds. Hell, maybe he had just worked too hard for too long, or maybe he realized that he was a lot closer to the end of life than the beginning and didn’t like it much. Most likely, he just didn’t consider us important enough to bother with.

  Whatever the reason, we were greeted not by MacDonald himself, but by a flack named Judson Cotter. I figured he had to work in P.R.; his hair was a little too perfect, his suit too up-to-the-minute, his hands too soft for him to have been anything else but a pitchman.

  After he apologized for MacDonald’s absence, he launched into a worshipful biography of his boss, not deviating one iota from the holobio they’d shown us on the plane trip.

  “But I suspect you’re here to see the farm,” he concluded after paraphrasing the bio for five minutes.