Damon Knight - Orbit 18

Peter Renoir was an alien and didn’t know any better. He came here for a good education. A good sex education. He was an alien and didn’t know any better. He turned to television for advice, for the facts, for the inside info. He found what he sought. He never had a minute of regret.

“It could have happened to anyone,” he said. And indeed he might just have been right. He was an alien and he came here from another galaxy, came here with a problem of sorts. It was the kind of thing that can happen to anybody. The people on Peter Renoir’s planet, they had this culture, see, really a ball-breaker, see, with everything wired for sound, juiced right up to the limits. See, they had perfected perfection. They had it made, only they were so busy being perfect, they forgot how to do it.

“What do you mean, do it?”

“I mean do it, do it,” said Peter Renoir. “It’s a natural.”

Semina scratched inelegantly. “It’ll never sell product,” she said.

“Oh, man!” shouts Peter Renoir. “You cannot see the frigging unbelievable scope of this thing! I mean, see, he comes eight million miles or whatever in this big frigging flying space something or other! See what I’m getting at?”

“Jesus!” said Semina. “That’s a hell of a long drive for just one person. Don’t he let somebody else take a turn driving?”

“That’s what I’m getting at!” shouts Peter Renoir. “See him and his girl, course she looks just like a real girl like on TV or something. You know, what was the name of that broad with the gaps in her teeth, you know the one on the acne commercial, the before one?”

“Norma Jean, you mean,” said Semina, finally catching some of his enthusiasm.

“See, they got the hots, they got ’em so bad and they don’t know which end is which.”

“Right!” screams Semina. “And that’s where we hit them with the commercial, our plug for toilet paper!”

“Aw, shit,” said Peter Renoir, “you should of let me say it first! You’re always taking all the fun out of it! ”

I know he’s out there. I know he’s reading my story, wondering about the size of my breasts, missing every single word of what I had to say. How many times have I told him. Explore other people’s metaphors. It isn’t only a metaphor. It’s an angle of vision.

I’ve based my life on the theory of the persistence of vision. You can’t throw up 3,000 years of art in three minutes and not see something.

Joanna Russ

“Jesus!” said Peter Renoir. “That name, Joanna Russ. Sounds very Hollywood. I think we can go with it. I really think this one is our baby. How does she look in a bikini?”

I am an alchemist, the father of science, the death of us all. I am the real root of science. I am an erotic science. I am deeply involved with buried aspects of reality, from novel to film and back again.

Rain is copulation. The sexual activity of man is an energy-to-matter conversion. Mineral formations are sexual crystal trysts. The creation of the world was a sexual activity. I am an alchemist. I can remember love affairs of chemicals and stars, romances of stones, fertility in fire. I am an alchemist.

On the other hand, maybe I am only showing you the soft underbelly of a stealing tide of nostalgia. Maybe I need a new analogy.

I am a science-fiction writer, the mother impregnator of dreams. I reflect culture. Culture reflects me. Why are both these statements true?

“Joanna Russ, and we throw in some other kind of broad, I don’t know who just yet, but we tear her clothes halfway off and so she’s got to look like she’s asking for it, but what I mean we can maybe do,” said Peter Renoir, “is have these two broads, see, and this alien menace from somewhere, how the hell I know, one of the damn planets or something. Are you with me on this?”

“Gotcha,” said Semina, licking the end of her pencil and scribbling it down on her napkin.

“Well see, my idea for the series is first these two aliens come down and these two broads have one hell of a time trying to escape from them. In the last ten minutes of the show, we burn this Russ’s clothes off, see, get some good leg shots going for us and maybe a couple good back shots, then the alien catches her and rapes the hell out of her. We make that nine minutes and then cut away for the commercial. We cut back for the final minute, in which it is revealed that the alien is really working for the government. So the show ends on an upbeat note and we sell one hell of a lot of product.”

“But won’t it get stale? Don’t you have to have a sad show once in a while, you know a downbeat one for a change of pace?” asked Semina.

“You mean like could we add something like a pet goat or something that gets killed off or a baby dog or something?” asked Peter Renoir, mulling it over in his head.

His face lit up. “Oh, man! It just hit me! It’s a frigging natural! We come back next week and throw in this time machine device, see, and she and this other broad gets thrown back into the past. Back to fifteen hundred and forty-eight or whenever the hell the Civil War was. Do you see it! See, we have the whole Confederate Army and the Union Army and Russ and this other broad lands in a Union town. We kill off the other broad when the Rebels overrun the town. Then, see, we got the audience’s sympathy. We got their attention and then the Confederate Army catches Joanna Russ and rapes the hell out of her. We do it in three versions, soft focus for television with lots of shots of horses taken extra so we can cut them in, crotch closeups for the drive-in and for the big downtown theater market, we got to shoot something symbolic or something. I don’t know what, maybe a picture of Orson Welles in the buff.”

“It’s going to be beautiful,” said Semina.

“Then see, the way we end it is, the Union Army comes in and saves her.”

“Then what happens?” said Semina.

“Then the Union Army rapes the hell out of her and the picture ends and we are left with a sense of loss.”

“You’re a frigging genius!” said Semina. “You really are, Peter.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” said Peter Renoir. “But it damn well will sell.”

NOTE TO THE READER: I’LL BET THE EDITOR THINKS I DON’T CARE TOO MUCH FOR YOU. HE’S WRONG, PLEASE REMEMBER THE EDITOR BEHIND HIS SMILE IS MY PIMP. I DO LOVE YOU VERY DEARLY AT EXACTLY FIVE CENTS A WORD. AND BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I*M GOING TO CLARIFY THINGS FOR YOU. I WANT EVERYTHING IN THIS STORY TO BE RIGHT BETWEEN US.

ON PLOTTING THE STORY:

The plot is simply about an alien who has come into your bedroom, your life, your church. He has come seeking knowledge, information. He is looking to the reader for that information. He is an alien and doesn’t care how he gets it. He wants information about doing it. Yes, he does. He is an alien and he learned about your planet from watching television and going to the drive-in movies on Saturday and Sunday nights. While the alien is very much in sympathy with the reader, while the alien is very much on the reader’s side, the alien cannot deny his personal feelings and values as an alien, which is why his meaning may not be too clear. This is the story of his struggle in your world to figure out how to do it.

In 1934 Clark Gable took off his shirt and underneath he wasn’t wearing an undershirt. The undershirt industry fell off that year by 50 percent.

“Christ!” said Peter Renoir. “When is this damn story going to finish up? I say we cut the hell out of the son of a bitching thing. I say we muzzle the son of a bitch and get it over with. He isn’t Screen Guild anyway. Just because he wrote some stuff under the name of Rudyard Kipling do I have to listen to the whole thing? I got things to do.”

“But how the hell we going to do it up without you got the whole picture?”