(1) ARGO PRODUCTIONS INC. Unregistered. Private subsidiary of Sagittarius Security Police.
Hunting and shooting. Your own war to order. Raiding parties, revolutions, religious crusades. In anything from a small commando squad to a 3,000–ship armada. ARGO provide publicity, mock War Crimes Tribunal, etc. Samples:
(a) Operation Torquemada .23–day expedition to Bellatrix IV .20 ship assault corps under Admiral Storm Wengen. Mission: liberation of (imaginary) Terran hostages. Cost: 300,000 credits.
(b) Operation Klingsor. 15–year crusade against Ursa Major. Combined task force of 2,500 ships. Mission: recovery of runic memory dials stolen from client’s shrine. Cost: 500 billion credits (ARGO will arrange lend–lease but this is dabbling in realpolitik).
(2) ARENA FEATURES INC. Unregistered. Organizers of the Pan–Galactic Tournament held trimillennially at the Sun Bowl 2–Heliop1is, NGC 3599.
Every conceivable game in the Cosmos is played at the tournament and so formidable is the opposition that a winning contestant can virtually choose his own apotheosis. The challenge round of the Solar Megathlon Group 3 (that is, for any being whose function can be described, however loosely, as living) involves Quantum Jumping, 7dimensional Maze Ball and Psychokinetic Bridge (pretty tricky against a telepathic Ketos D’Oma). The only Terran ever to win an event was the redoubtable Chippy Yerkes of Altair 5 The Clowns, who introduced the unplayable blank Round Dice. Being a spectator is as exhausting as being a contestant, and you’re well advised to substitute. Cost: 100,000 credits/day.
(3) AGENCE GENERALE DE TOURISME. Registered. Venus.
Concessionaires for the Colony Beatific on Lake Virgo, the Mandrake Casino Circuit and the Miramar–Trauma Senso–channels. Dream–baths, vu–dromes, endocrine–galas. Darleen Costello is the current Aphrodite and Laurence Mandell makes a versatile Lothario. Plug into these two from 30:30 V5T.Room and non–denominational bath at the Gomorrah–Plaza on Mount Venus comes to 1,000 credits a day, but remember to keep out of the Zone. It’s just too erotogenous for a Terran.
(4) TERMINAL TOURS LTD. Unregistered. Earth.
For those who want to get away from it all the Dream of Osiris, an astral–rigged, 1,000–foot leisure–liner is now fitting out for the Grand Tour. Round–cosmos cruise, visiting every known race and galaxy. Cost: Doubles at a flat billion, but it’s cheap when you realize that the cruise lasts for ever and you’ll never be back.
(5) SLEEP TRADERS. Unregistered.
A somewhat shadowy group who handle all dealings on the Blue Market, acting as a general clearing house and buying and selling dreams all through the Galaxy.
Sample: Like to try a really new sort of dream? The Set Corrani Priests of Theta Piscium will link you up with the sacred electronic thought–pools in the Desert of Kish. These mercury lakes are their ancestral memory banks. Surgery is necessary but be careful. Too much cortical damage and the archetypes may get restive. In return one of the Set Corrani (polysexual delta–humanoids about the size of a walking dragline) will take over your cerebral functions for a long weekend. All these transactions are done on an exchange basis and SLEEP TRADERS charge nothing for the service. But they obviously get a rake–off, and may pump advertising into the lower medullary centres. Whatever they’re selling I wouldn’t advise anybody to buy.
(6) THE AGENCY. Registered. M33 in Andromeda.
The executive authority of the consortium of banking trusts floating Schedule D, the fourth draw of the gigantic PK pyramid lottery sweeping all through the continuum from Sol III out to the island universes. Trancecells everywhere are now recruiting dream–readers and ESPerceptionists, and there’s still time to buy a ticket. There’s only one number on all the tickets – the winning one – but don’t think that means you’ll get away with the kitty. THE AGENCY has just launched UNILIV, the emergency relief fund for victims of Schedule C who lost their deposits and are now committed to paying off impossible debts, some monetary, some moral (if you’re unlucky in the draw you may find yourself landed with a guilt complex that would make even a Colonus Rex look sad). Cost: 1 credit – but with an evaluation in the billions if you have to forfeit.
(7) ARCTURIAN EXPRESS. Unregistered.
Controls all important track events. The racing calendar this year is a causal and not a temporal one and seems a little obscure, but most of the established classics are taking place.
(a) The Rhinosaur Derby. Held this year at Betelgeuse Springs under the rules of the Federation of Amorphs. First to the light horizon. There’s always quite a line–up for this one and any form of vehicle is allowed rockets, beams, racial migrations, ES thought patterns – but frankly it’s a waste of effort. It’s not just that by the time you’re out of your own sight you’re usually out of your mind as well, but the Nils of Rigel, who always enter a strong team, are capable of instantaneous transmission.
(b) The Paraplegic Handicap. Recently instituted by the Protists of Lambda Scorpio. The course measures only 0.00015 mm, but that’s a long way to urge an Aldebaran Torpid. They are giant viruses embedded in bauxite mountains, and by varying their pressure differentials it’s sometimes possible to tickle them into a little life. K 2 on Regulus IX is holding the big bets, but even so the race is estimated to take about 50,000 years to run.
(8) NEW FUTURES INC. Unregistered.
Tired of the same dull round? NEW FUTURES will take you right out of this world. In the island universes the continuum is extra–dimensional, and the time channels are controlled by rival cartels. The element of chance apparently plays the time role, and it’s all even more confused by the fact that you may be moving around in someone else’s extrapolation. In the tourist translation manual 185 basic tenses are given, and of these 125 are future conditional. No verb conjugates in the present tense, and you can invent and copyright your own irregulars. This may explain why I got the impression at the bureau that they were only half there. Cost: simultaneously 3,270 and 2,000,000 credits. They refuse to quibble.
(9) SEVEN SIRENS. Registered. Venus.
A subsidiary of the fashion trust controlling senso–channel Astral Eve. Ladies, like to win your own beauty contest? Twenty–five of the most beautiful creatures in the Galaxy are waiting to pit their charms against yours, but however divine they may be – and two or three of them, such as the Flamen Zilla Quel–Queen (75–9–25) and the Orthodox Virgin of Altair (76–953–?) certainly will be – they’ll stand no chance against you. Your specifications will be defined as the ideal ones.
(10) GENERAL ENTERPRISES. Registered.
Specialists in culture cycles, world struggles, ethnic trends. Organize vacations as a sideline. A vast undertaking for whom ultimately we all work. Their next venture, epoch–making by all accounts, is starting now, and everybody will be coming along. I was politely but firmly informed that it was no use worrying about the cost.
(From J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story “Passport to Eternity”)
“The first thing the baby did wrong” by Donald Barthelme
The first thing the baby did wrong was to tear pages out of her books. So we made a rule that each time she tore a page out of a book she had to stay alone in her room for four hours, behind the closed door. She was tearing out about a page a day, in the beginning, and the rule worked fairly well, although the crying and screaming from behind the closed door were unnerving. We reasoned that that was the price you had to pay, or part of the price you had to pay. But then as her grip improved she got to tearing out two pages at a time, which meant eight hours alone in her room, behind the closed door, which just doubled the annoyance for everybody. But she wouldn’t quit doing it. And then as time went on we began getting days when she tore out three or four pages, which put her alone in her room for as much as sixteen hours at a stretch, interfering with normal feeding and worrying my wife. But I felt that if you made a rule you had to stick to it, had to be consistent, otherwise they get the wrong idea. She was about fourteen months old or fifteen months old at that point. Often, of course, she’d go to sleep, after an hour or so of yelling, that was a mercy. Her room was very nice, with a nice wooden rocking horse and practically a hundred dolls and stuffed animals. Lots of things to do in that room if you used your time wisely, puzzles and things. Unfortunately sometimes when we opened the door we’d find that she’d torn more pages out of more books while she was inside, and these pages had to be added to the total, in fairness.
The baby’s name was Born Dancin’. We gave the baby some of our wine, red, whites and blue, and spoke seriously to her. But it didn’t do any good.
I must say she got real clever. You’d come up to her where she was playing on the floor, in those rare times when she was out of her room, and there’d be a book there, open beside her, and you’d inspect it and it would look perfectly all right. And then you’d look closely and you’d find a page that had one little corner torn, could easily pass for ordinary wear-and-tear but I knew what she’d done, she’d torn off this little corner and swallowed it. So that had to count and it did. They will go to any lengths to thwart you. My wife said that maybe we were being too rigid and that the baby was losing weight. But I pointed out to her that the baby had a long life to live and had to live in a world with others, had to live in a world where there were many, many rules, and if you couldn’t learn to play by the rules you were going to be left out in the cold with no character, shunned and ostracized by everyone. The longest we ever kept her in her room consecutive was eighty-eight hours, and that ended when my wife took the door off its hinges with a crowbar even though the baby still owed us twelve hours because she was working off twenty five pages. I put the door back on its hinges and added a big lock, one that opened only if you put a magnetic card in a slot, and I kept the card.
But things didn’t improve. The baby would come out of her room like a bat out of hell and rush to the nearest book, Goodnight Moon or whatever, and begin tearing pages out of it hand over fist. I mean there’d be thirty-four pages of Goodnight Moon on the floor in ten seconds. Plus the covers. I began to get a little worried. When I added up her indebtedness, in terms of hours, I could see that she wasn’t going to get out of her room until 1992, if then. Also, she was looking pretty wan. She hadn’t been to the park in weeks. We had more or less of an ethical crisis on our hands.
I solved it by declaring that it was all right to tear pages out of books, and moreover, that it was all right to have torn pages out of books in the past. That is one of the satisfying things about being a parent-you’ve got a lot of moves, each one good as gold. The baby and I sit happily on the floor, side by side, tearing pages out of books, and sometimes, just for fun, we go out on the street and smash a windshield together.
Biblioklept 