The Best of Science Fiction 12

"Just a statue," I said.

"I'd swear it was alive."

"Don't stand too close."

"Why not?"

"She might bite you."

He had the grace to blush; I never thought I'd ever see a surgeon blush. He wanted to touch Luana, but I led him into the patio, rubbing mushroom off my hands. I even had her in my hair. I stopped wiping her off; somehow it seemed a sacrilege. Her flesh was only slightly moist, pleasantly taut, excellent for subtlety with the knife. Dr. Mannfried picked a piece from my hair and stupidly said, " ... it's springy."

"Yes," I said. "isn't it."

"What is it?"

"What's what?"

"What material are you using?"

"A new plastic"

"Oh."

But I could see he didn't believe me. And then I made the mistake of saying:

"I'd prefer you didn't tell anyone about this."

He smiled that rapacious smile; he had something on his mind. I knew I shouldn't have trusted the big bastard.

"You can trust me," said Dr. Mannfried.

He came every day to see Luana. And oddly enough, to my knowledge, he did keep his word — no one mentioned Luana or asked what I was doing on holiday.

When there was no breeze I would turn on the fans, two oscillating twelve inchers I had bought for the purpose, placing one on each side of her. I would play 'Sweet Leilani' on the hi-fi, 'Bali H'ai', and watch her move to the music — a lovely nymph from some lost planet, perhaps now gone from the universe, a billion years ago, for spore is immortal. Almost. Raise the temperature of earth but a few degrees and she would take over the world. My beautiful dancing mushroom, Luana.

I kept her shored with cupcakes in case she wanted to eat; it was impossible to know at what moment she might die. I thought of covering her with moist cloth, but she seemed moist enough and I didn't want to run the risk of fungi forming, fungi on fungi, it would only seem humourous to someone who had never seen Luana. And yet something was missing and I knew what it was. Being shy, I just couldn't do it. But Dr. Mannfried could. Earthy bastard.

"She hasn't got that thing," said Dr. Mannfried. He'd been observing her closely for some minutes. He moved one of the fans and changed the record. We were both sharing her now, there was no way to shut him out, persistent swine.

"No, my friend," said Dr. Mannfried, "you are a great sculptor, but she hasn't got that thing."

I still hadn't allowed him to touch her.

"That's my department," said Dr. Mannfried.

Remembering Picasso and the goat, I felt an inadequacy that goes beyond belief. That full-blooded Spaniard could do it but not me. I had even considered draping her with a pareu, a little one, about the hips. Dr. Mannfried was right. I had to let him have his way.

"I've taken a lot of them out," he said, "but this is the first time I've ever put one in," and he was sweating, even with the fans on, his eyes beady.

"Now?" I asked.

"Now," he said.

"Can ... I watch?"

"No, it'll be better if you wait outside."

"You'll be careful ... "

"Please, I know my business."

"How long will it be, Doctor?"

"I'll let you know when it's over. There's nothing to worry about." And taking my smallest, sharpest knife, he started for Luana. His eyes never left her and his hand was snaking.

I must have walked the floor for 10 — 15 minutes, smoking cigarette after cigarette, which isn't like me — up and down outside that door — letting Dr. Mannfried do what I should have done. It was his sudden scream that sent me hurtling into the room of my beloved. Dr. Mannfried was hanging on her, torn by ecstasy, his teeth buried deep in her neck.

I'll never know how I got through the next few hours. I tried patching her throat with brown bread, but it wasn't the same. I didn't turn on the fans or play the music that night.

It was sometime after midnight when I received the call from my colleague Dr. Shih. He told me to come over to Dr. Mannfried's house at once, that this was an emergency. Oddly, I still believe in Hippocrates, and so I went, to be met at the door by a wide-eyed Dr. Shih with the contents of a stomach in his hands.

"Raymond, Raymond," he said, "Mannfried is dying ... "

"Is that so," I said.

A ripping yell filled the house, as if all the voices of the damned were being forced through the throat of one man. I ran to the bedroom — what had been Dr. Mannfried lay stretched on the mattress. One look at his face and I knew what was wrong. I had seen that look on the faces of a family of seven who had died in the 15th century — mummified in the catacombs of France — the look of unendurable pain persisting through the centuries. Only one thing could put that look on a man's face — a look he would carry to his grave under his cosmetics — poisoning by the Amanita.

Luana was a toadstool.

I was afraid of that.

Getting back from media (like phlogiston, ether, spirit messages, poetry , oil paints, or mushrooms) to The Media —

Would you believe that Gilbert Thomas was the highest-rated TV newscaster in all the Hawaiian Islands in 1959? True. Altogether he has had more than a quarter-century in The Media: newscasting, commentating, producing, packaging, directing and writing for radio and TV, from Buffalo to Saigon. He now sandwiches articles on the Far East (for Asia, Saturday Review, etc.) and occasional short stories in between script-writing jobs.

Of course the medium is not the message: I mean, obviously, the message is not the medium. Q. E. D.

There was some basis for my wariness about the Pop Prof: between the beginning of his cult in 1951 and hitting the Big Time in 1964, he acquired one besetting, and audience-besotting, sin. Whether through carelessness or (miscalculation, it adds up to the too frequent subordination of his message by his own medium, words: the sacrifice of clarity to the hypnotic cadence of pop-talk, pun-fun, and the catch-phrase. For example: 1) He describes the 'participation involvement' of TV-viewing as 'cool' — the 'fragmented' detachment of the reader as 'hot'. (The reason: a course in Contemp. Eng. from uncool Jack Paar, who got told by a put-on kid that 'cool' means 'hot' nowadays.) 2) From 'The Medium is the Message', the most-quoted chapter of the most-quoted Book of McLuhan, Understanding Media:

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.

For 'artist', read 'craftsman' or 'technician': the pastry chef, cobbler, engineer, or copywriter has, of necessity, the same 'expert awareness' of the effects of his own medium on sense perception as the painter, oboist, or poet. Now replace that adventurous 'encounter' with pedantic old 'relate to': the awareness can be applied not only as consumer, but as creator.

3) Maybe: 'Any medium is also a message' ?

Put them all together, they don't swing the same way, but they spell out an important message: that the serious artist, too, can do as for instance, the Adman must do — design the message going into the medium to include and take advantage of the message of (in this case) The Media.

W-A-V-E-R, non-controversial radio