Philip Farmer: Venus on the Half-Shell

This is the story of his quest and why he is no longer seen in the known cosmos.

Oh, yes, he also suffers from an old wound in his posterior and thus can’t sit down long. Once, he was asked how it felt to be ageless.

He replied, “Immortality is a pain in the ass.”

Making love on a picnic is nothing new. But this was on top of the head of the Sphinx of Giza.

Simon Wagstaff was not enjoying it one hundred percent. Ants, always present at any outdoor picnic anywhere, were climbing up his legs and buttocks. One had even gotten caught where nobody but Simon had any business being. It must have thought it had fallen down between the piston and cylinder of an old-fashioned automobile motor.

Simon was persevering, however. After a while, he and his fiancée rolled over and lay panting and staring up at the Egyptian sky.

“That was good, wasn’t it?” Ramona Uhuru said.

“It certainly wasn’t run of the mill,” Simon said. “Come on. We’d better get our clothes on before some tourists come up here.”

Simon stood up and put on his black Levis, baggy gray sweatshirt, and imitation camel-leather sandals. Ramona slid into her scarlet caftan and opened the picnic basket. This was full of goodies, including a bottle of Ethiopian wine: Carbonated Lion of Judah.

Simon thought about telling her about the ant. But if it was still running—or limping—around, she’d be the first to know it.

Simon was a short stocky man of thirty. He had thick curly chestnut hair, pointed ears, thick brown eyebrows, a long straight thin nose, and big brown eyes that looked ready to leak tears. He had thin lips and thick teeth which somehow became a beautiful combination when he smiled.

Ramona was also short and stocky. But she had big black sheep-dog eyes and a voice as soft as a puppy’s tail. Like the tail, it seldom quit wagging. This was all right with Simon. If she was a compulsive talker, she made up for it by not being a compulsive listener. Simon was a compulsive questioner but he didn’t ask Ramona for answers because he knew she didn’t have them. Ramona couldn’t be blamed for this. Nobody else could answer them either.

Ramona, talking about something or other, smoothed out the Navajo blanket made in Japan. Ramona had been made in Memphis (Egypt, not Tennessee), though her parents were Balinese and Kenyan.

Simon had been made during his parents’ honeymoon in Madagascar. His father was part-Greek, part-Irish Jew, a musical critic who wrote under the name of K. Kane. Everybody thought, with good reason, that the K. stood for Killer. He had married a beautiful Ojibway Indian mezzo-soprano who sang under the name of Minnehaha Langtry. The air-conditioning had broken down on their wedding night, and they attributed Simon’s shortcomings to the inclement conditions in which he had been conceived. Simon attributed them to his eight months in a plastic womb. His mother had not wanted to spoil her figure, so he had been removed from her womb and put in a cylinder connected to a machine. Simon had understood why his mother had done this. But he could not forgive her for later going on an eating jag and gaining sixty pounds. If she was going to become obese anyway, why hadn’t she kept him where he belonged?

It was, however, no day for brooding on childhood hurts. The sky was as blue as a baby’s veins, and the breeze was air-conditioning the outdoors. To the north, the reconstituted pyramids of Cheops and Chephren testified that the ancient Egyptians had really known how to put it all together. East, across the Nile, the white towers of Cairo with their TV antennas said upyours to the heavens. But they’d pay that day for their arrogance.

Below him, tourists and visitors from distant planets wandered round among the hot dog, beer, and curio stands. Among them were the giant tripods of Arcturus, sneering at the things that Terrestrials called ancient. Their oldest buildings were one hundred thousand years old, built over ruins twice that age. The Earthmen didn’t mind this because Arcturans looked so laughable when they sneered, twirling their long genitals as if they were key-chains. It was when an Arcturan praised that Earthmen became offended. The Arcturan would lift one of his tripods and spray the praisee with a liquid that smelled like rotten onions. A lot of Terrestrials had had to smile and take this, especially ministers of state. But these got what was referred to as a P.O. bonus.

Everything usually evens out.

Or so Simon Wagstaff thought on that fine day.

He picked up the guidebook and read it while drinking the wine. The guidebook said that the sphinx originated with the Egyptians. They thought of it as a creature that had a man’s face and a lion’s body. On the other hand, the Greeks, once they found out about the sphinx, made it into a creature with a woman’s head and lioness’ body. She even had women’s breasts, lovely white pink-tipped cones that must have distracted men when they should have been thinking about the answer to her question. Oedipus had ignored those obstacles to thought, which maybe didn’t say much for Oedipus. He was a little strange, married his mother, killed his father. He had answered the sphinx’s question correctly, but that hadn’t kept him out of trouble later.

And what about the sphinx’s sex life? She hung around on the road to Thebes, Greece, which was a long way from Thebes, Egypt, and from the male sphinxes. Had she been like the female black widow spider and made love to men before she devoured them?

Simon wasn’t particularly randy, but like everybody else he thought a lot about sex.

The Egyptian sphinx had massiveness and a vast antiquity. The Greek sphinx had class. The Egyptian was ponderosity and masculinity. The Greek was beauty and femaleness. Leave it to the Greeks to make something philosophical out of the merely physical of the Egyptians. The Greeks had made their sphinx a woman because she knew The Secret.

But she had found somebody who could answer her questions.

After which she killed herself.

Simon wasn’t in much danger of having to commit suicide.

Nobody ever answered his questions.

The guidebook in his hand said that the sphinx’s face was supposed to have Pharaoh Chephren’s features. The guidebook in his back pocket said that the face was that of the god Harmachis.

It did not matter which had been right. The reconstituted sphinx now bore the features of a famous movie star.

The guidebook in his hand also said that the sphinx was 189 feet long and 72 feet high. The one in his pocket said the sphinx was 172 feet long and 66 feet high. Had one of the measuring teams been drunk? Or had the editor been drunk? Or had the typesetter had financial and marital problems? Or had someone maliciously inserted the wrong information just to screw people up?

Ramona said, “You’re not listening!”

“Sorry,” Simon said. And he was. This was one of those rare moments when Ramona suddenly became aware that she was talking to herself. She was scared. People who talk to themselves are either insane, deep thinkers, lonely, or all three. She knew she wasn’t crazy or a deep thinker, so she must be lonely. And she feared loneliness worse than drowning, which was her pet horror.

Simon was lonely, too, but chiefly because he felt that the universe was being unfair in not giving answers to his questions. But now was not the time to think of himself; Ramona needed comforting.

“Listen, Ramona, here’s a love song for you.”

It was titled The Anathematic Mathematics of Love. This was one of the poems of “Count” Hippolyt Bruga, né Julius Ganz, an early 20th-century expressionist. Ben Hecht had once written a biography of him, but the only surviving copy was in the Vatican archives. Though critics considered Bruga only a minor poet, Simon loved him best of all and had composed music for many of his works.