Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“What are you trying to do to me?” Sara screamed from the rim of a dark ug]y crater bottomless hole being nothingness spume of evil festering lizardman scrawling unspeakable terminal fear-images on the shithouse walls of her mind.

“I’m trying to buy you, Miss Westerfeld,” he said softly. “And believe me, you’ll be selling. No one says no to Benedict Howards. Because I pay good coin; I buy you totally, but I pay totally too. I buy with what everyone wants.”

“You’re insane!” Sara said. “I don’t want any part of you at any price for any reason at any time.”

“Think what it’s like to be dead,” Benedict Howards almost cooed hypnotically. “Dead… nothing but a pile of worm-eaten flesh rotting underground. That’s the end of you, Sara, the end of all your goddamned principles, the end of everything you ever were or wanted to be. You don’t beat death, Miss Westerfeld; everything else you ever do or don’t do adds up to nothing but a pile of garbage sooner or later. And it’s always sooner.”

“Why… why…” Sara mumbled. No one talks about things like that, she thought. You live with it by ignoring it, whiting it out, or they peel you screaming off walls. Why don’t you scream when you hear yourself, Benedict Howards?

“I’m telling you about death so you’ll value your life,” Howards continued, “your immortal life. Because you don’t have to die, Miss Westerfeld, not permanently, not ever. A place in a Freezer, secure, yours when you die—but you’ll never really die. You’ll just go to sleep old one day and wake up young the next. Doesn’t that beat being dead, Miss Westerfeld?”

“A place in the Freezer—in return for what? I don’t have that kind of money. Besides, it’s not fair—a few people who have something you want going on and on, and everyone else dying and gone forever. That’s what’s so horrid about you and your Foundation—people dying by the thousands and a couple million rich bastards like you living forever! A Public Freezer Program would—”

“Now who’s a goddamned philosopher?” sneered Benedict Howards. “Sure, no one should die. But since I can’t Freeze everyone, I Freeze those who have something to offer in return. I’m a monster because I can’t do favors for everyone? Public Freezer horseshit! I’ve got the only viable Freezer system that exists or ever’ll be; you do business with me, or you’re eaten by the worms. You’ll feel goddamned virtuous when you die, but it won’t make you any less dead. What do you say, you can get up and leave and never hear from me again?”

Aware only of her flesh, lips, blood-filled tongue, as she shaped the words, saliva-taste, tooth-feel of mortality, Sara said, “All right, so I’m still sitting here. Sure, I don’t want to die, but you don’t have me yet. There are still a few things I’d never do, not even to live forever.”

She flashed horror-images of fates worse than death on the screen of her mind: Mutilating Jack’s crotch with her teeth devouring living puppy whole rotting in ordure for a thousand years murdering her mother fucking Howards… Hungry hoping search for prices too high to pay to smug, ferret-eyed, all-knowing, A-head satan, she felt powerless in cutting-edge monster reality, knowing truth unbearable—death is the end, what crime too terrible to make her embrace it? Please, she prayed to her mind, let it be something too terrible to stomach!

“Relax,” said Benedict Howards. “I don’t want you to murder anyone, and I’m not hot for your body. You want to live forever you gotta do just one little thing. You gotta go get your ass in the sack with Jack Barron.”

It hit her where she wasn’t through no defenses at all to the soft womanflesh of her mind. No unspeakable blood-crime, just Jack’s mouth on mine again body hard angles filling me tearing me apart with sweetness laughing tongues together in our secret places mingling of juices—Jack! Jack!

But she saw the cold measuring eyes of Benedict Howards and it all made hard-edged power-sense. How much does this slimy thing know? she thought and knew that Howards must know everything, everything that factored into his pattern of power. Jack’s an important power-creature now, measurable quantity of A-head reality-power, measured by Howards, wanted by Howards, maybe feared by Howards too, and I’m just the price Jack sets on delivery: Sara Westerfeld, back in bed, in love like Berkeley days, but on now-Jack cop-out terms. Go back to Jack, and then live forever with lying ghost of years-dead Jack sunk so low he sends lizardman Howards to pimp for him…

“So Jack’s sunk this low?” she asked cynically. “And what’s he supposed to do for you when you deliver my body?”

Benedict Howards laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong. Barron knows nothing at all about this, and he never will. Not from me… and not from you either, eh? I’m not selling you to Barron. You’re going to get Barron to sell something to me. I want Jack Barron to sign a Freeze Contract just like the one I’m offering you. And that’s the deal. The day you get Barron to sign a Freeze Contract with the Foundation, I sign yours. And that’s all you’ll ever have to do with me, after that you and me are even. You can leave Barron or stay with him or even tell him the whole truth, it’s no skin off my teeth then. What do you say, isn’t it the bargain of a lifetime? A long, long lifetime…?”

“But I don’t love Jack,” she insisted. “I despise him almost as much as I despise you.”

“Your love life doesn’t concern me,” Howards said, “even though I’m reasonably sure you’re lying. Let’s not kid around, you’re not Little Mary Sunshine. You’re humping everything in creation. Tell me you’re in love with all of them. So make it with one more man who means… nothing to you for a couple of weeks, long enough to get him to sign that contract, and you’ve got immortality, and that’s more than you get for screwing half the Village. And we both know you can get him to sign, we both know he still loves you, eh? And who knows, you may find yourself liking it, we both know that too, don’t we, Miss Westerfeld?”

“You’re a foul, slimy man,” Sara whined. “I hate you! I hate you!” Turn your back on it, she told herself. Walk away walk away from forever forever walk away from horrid power-reality walk away from Jack from Howards let two lizard-men tear each other to pieces, they deserve each other.

But Jack… Jack’s in danger; sleepwalking through a forest of hard steel knives poor blind Jack surrounded by— blind… Yes! Yes! Blind! Oh, you fool, Benedict Howards, you horrid blind fool! And it spread itself out before her like a kinesthop gestalt vision in her mind: Jack, poor blind, cop-out Jack, sleepwalking dream of plastic success, faceless death-god Howards’ spiderweb trap spun from bone-white lair around him. Me, last thread in web of evil; love, my love, Jack’s love, used like spiderspit cable in pattern of power.

Could it really be Benedict Howards is such a foool? Fool, yes! Blind to love, tuned out from love’s power—the fatal flaw in the bone-white lizard-plan. Because turned-on Jack, angry Jack, love-filled Berkeley Jack-and-Sara Jack would become apocalyptic angel to destroy Howards destroy Foundation lovers strong against the night against which no faceless lizardman death-god could stand, against the old Jack Barron that was meant to awaken…

I’ll give you Jack Barron! she thought, but I’ll give you my Jack Barron. Be brave. Yes, yes, take the deal, go to Jack, love him, get him to sign the contract…

“Those contracts,” she said, tightly-contained, shrewd, “they’ll be the usual contracts, public irreversible? We both get to keep the legal copies?”