THE BARON SAYS THESE THINGS

William S.Burroughs

"No one owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death." So says William S. Burroughs, dangerous prophet of a dangerous age. The author of the banned-in-Boston and still harrowing tale of the heroin underworld, Naked Lunch, was this year elected to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters—a shock of official recognition for the man who has been cultural guru for several generations of the avant-garde. And this Hieronymus Bosch of contemporary letters is still going strong: recent activities include a stint with performing artist Laurie Anderson and an appearance on the TV show Saturday Night Live.

Pictured at right, the Baron and a "Greenie," two characters from Burroughs's new novelistic fantasia, a section of which appears on the following pages. In The Place of Dead Roads, out in February, Burroughs takes on the Wild West as it never was, in the person of Kim Carsons and his shoot-'emup adventures. We find our young hero in a pensive mood, writing a moral tale-

within-a-tale_He has an

active imagination, this boy....

Kim Carsons, age fifteen, occu pies himself with his sketches and maps, poems and stories. He'd written a story he wanted

to publish in Boys' Life. It was, he thought, very educational, entitled "The Baron Says These Things."

The Baron Says These Things

Wrapped in a living cloak of furbearing oysters, the Baron rides his swift Arn. The Arn is like a streamlined turtle with a shell of light flexible metal that serves as a means of locomotion and also as a weapon. Its claws are razor-sharp and can strike six feet with a bullet-shaped head to ram or slash. On this remote satellite of the Dog Star, Arn fighting is an esteemed art. The cloak lovingly outlines the Baron's lean form, the narrow waist, the flaring buttocks, the powerful thighs. The neck flares to a broad jaw. The Baron leans forward, knees bent, like a skier, his long sharp teeth glinting in icy starlight. His eyes are like black opals. He wears a wicker headdress from which the hood of a spitting cobra protrudes. He is scanning the path ahead with a blue laser beam from his third eye.

The long night is coming and he must find a pod for the Ordinate Sleep. He has picked up a pod but there is something wrong, some lurking danger. It is just off the path. He guides his Arn into a courtyard and a Greenie steps forward to bed down his Arn and put his cloak in a nutrient solution. He removes his headdress and hands it to the Greenie, petting the reptile, which emits a servile hiss, rubbing its green furred head against his hand. The Greenie leans forward to take the headdress, his breath heavy and rank as the exhalation from a greenhouse in the icy air.

"Be careful, sir."

As the Baron squeezes his naked body through a diaphragm in the side of the pod, the clinging mucilaginous passage rubs and excites his genitals. On the satellite Fenec, the penis is not confined to a sexual function but serves as a general means of social communication. To enter a public pod without an erection is an act of gross aggression, like coming in with a snarling dog.

As he pops through into the soft pink light of the pod his lightning reflexes are already activated before he hears the foreign voices scream out:

"What the fuck are you doing in front of decent people?'

He throws up a protective shield, deflecting projectiles from primitive exploding weapons as he cuts his assailants to steaming fragments with his laser eye. He looks down at the badges and weapons.. . B.B.s... Bible Belts. Barbarians from Planet Earth. The thought forms that had for a moment been solid are fading. The Baron throws himself petulantly on the padded floor of the pod.

"People of such great stupidity and such barbarous manners.... Intolerable!"

A total solution to the B.B. problem must be found. The war must be carried to Planet Earth. He knows that the B.B.s are a minority and he will find many potential allies. Allies must be contacted and organized. A plan is forming in his mind. In response to his peremptory erection the Greenie appears with a glass of Schmun.

"Sorry about that, sir. I'm not equipped for such encounters."

The Baron sips his Schmun, looking speculatively at the young Greenie. These creatures breathe in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen from the pores of their skin.

"I want to sleep with you."

The Greenie youth blushes bright green with pleasure.

"Oh, sir, of course."

During the three months of the long night they will curl in a tiny pod in dreamy symbiosis.

The Baron stretches, takes a deep breath of the warm dank compostheap smell, and squeezes out of the pod. It is now spring. Time to continue his journey to Summer City. The Greenie hastens to prepare him a meal of fuel eggs. The eggs are laid by radioactive reptiles that inhabit the coldest regions of the planet in an area of total darkness. The eggs glow with a soft blue fire as the Baron savors the sweet nutty eggy metallic taste. After a go with his Greenie he straps on his summer Arns and puts on his cobra headdress. The reptile is tumescent with venom. The Baron will not need his cloak, for this is the season of nakedness.

The fuel egg is working and he straps on a penis shield connected to a jet over the anus. The first coughing spurts soon settle into a steady blue flame carrying him along at a thirty-mile speed. Suddenly he finds himself surrounded by a crowd of frenzied B.B.s, some carrying ropes and many with the primitive projectile guns. Scorning to use his laser eye he engages them in a classic Arn fight, jetting around in circles, kicking sideways with his Arn as the heads lash like loaded whips and his cobra sprays venom in all directions. A drop the size of a pinprick on the skin will cause death in a few seconds. The posse of B.B.s is a mass of steaming entrails, blood, brains, and shattered bone already fading into nothingness.

He comes to Summer Lake and now the Arns spread their retractable wings as he turns the jet up full blast and skims over the water like a Hovercraft. His ass is sputtering out the last of the fuel as he glides to the pier.

Summer City slopes down to the lake and spills into the water in a maze of piers and catwalks and diskshaped houseboats. The Baron checks his jet strap and releases his Arns to disport themselves in the water. The long sleep and the fuel eggs have made him hot. He can taste sweet metal in his mouth and his ass burns with soft fire. At the foot of the pier he encounters a group of Sloane porters with red skin and bright blue eyes. They flex their huge muscles and bare their teeth in greeting and invitation....

"HI HI HI HI HI HI HI HI"

The Baron is tempted but he knows that the cadets have arrived from Planet Earth and he must see to their training without delay.

On the waterfront he runs into two boys who must be from Planet Earth. They are strolling along in white naval uniforms. One is redhaired, the other has kinky hair and yellow-brown skin.

"You are the cadets from Planet Earth?"

"Yeah. Nice place you got here, but where are the women?"

"Women? What is that?"

"You know. WOMEN." The boy makes a gesture in the air.

The Baron gets the picture and turns into a naked woman with long red hair, skin like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights.

"WOW!"

He leads the boys into a sex pod and satisfies them both three times. In the course of this encounter he learns a great deal about conditions on Planet Earth. The B.B.s are completely possessed by a Venusian virus. The whole Christian religion, Catholic and Protestant, is a Venusian ploy.

Later he addresses the fifteen cadets. To put them at ease he takes the form of Old Sarge:

"All right, you jokers, you're here to learn and learn fast. Your planet is riddled by the walking dead taken over by a Venusian virus. I will show you how to recognize these viruscontrolled bodies. Many of them are Christians. In fact Christianity is the most virulent spiritual poison ever administered to a disaster-prone planet."

"You mean, Sarge, that most of the trouble on Earth is caused by Venusians in human bodies?"

"Now you're getting smart."

"Wouldn't it be a good idea to kill these mothers?"

"Now you're getting smarter. You are here to learn the theory and practice of Shiticide. Boys will be organized into Shit Slaughter troops...the S.S., with two phosphorescent spitting cobras at their lapels....

' 'Slaughter the shits of the world. They poison the air you breathe. "

"But, sir, aren't the B.B.s and their equivalents in other countries, the bigoted ignorant basically frightened middle class, just dupes and lackeys of the very rich and the politicians, exploited for votes and labor and the consumption of consumer goods while they also serve as convenient guard dogs to protect the status that benefits the very rich?"

"Yes, but they are still vectors, carriers of the virus. How do you control yellow fever? You kill the mosquitoes first, right? Now some

THE BARON

vectors are more potent than others. Look at Jesus Christ, for christsakes. As an integral part of the Shiticide Program master vectors will be pinpointed and assassinated... .You gentlemen and the trainees who follow you are chosen to be the elite, the masterminds of the glorious S.S."

And Kim composed a marching song for the Johnsons:

Wenn Scheissenblut von Messer spritz

Denn geht schon alles gut...

(When shit blood spurts from the knife

Then everything is good...)

Quite stirring, he thought....

And the "Song of the Vagabonds" could be adapted.

Sons of toil and danger will you serve a stranger?

Sons of shame and sorrow will you cheer tomorrow?

Kim stands resplendent in his Shit Slaughter uniform with a cobra S.S. on each lapel, they glow in the dark. Johnsons to the sky, all in S.S. uniform. They roar out the Johnson marching song.

Kim raises his hand and silence falls like a thunderclap:

"We're not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like Mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale. The Johnsons are taking over the Western Lands. We built it with our brains and our hands. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It's ours and we're going to take it.

"And we are not applying in triplicate to the Immortality Control Board. Anybody gets in our way we will get our communal back against a rock or a tree and fight the way a raccoon will fight a fucking dog."

Kim sees himself as the legendary raccoon who killed a whole pack of dogs before he succumbed to his wounds. .. .The raw red reek of deadly combat...his eyes light up inside with green fire, the hairs on his back stand up and crackle.. .his claws lash out with the speed of a striking snake to rip out an eye, tear off a screaming muzzle....A dog sinks its teeth into his flank. He rolls on his back, whimpering piteously....Two inexperienced young dogs rush forward sincerely. You know the type... volunteers... the old coon tears their steaming guts out with his hind claws and makes a break for the river. Here he takes out three more dogs, sitting on their backs and clawing their eyes out. He takes time to eat one eye with his dainty paw as the drowning dog sinks out from under him. He is losing blood. He swims for shore and confronts the last dog on a sandbar, a huge brute composite of mastiff and Irish wolfhound. As the dog's teeth close on his throat the coon's deadly claws go to work. He leaves the dog spinning in circles and snapping at intestines as they spill out. The old coon walks fifty feet and drops dead bleeding from twenty-three wounds... .That coon weighed fifty pounds.

And Kim was trying to re-create a story he had read somewhere years ago.. .he couldn't remember where or when, title or writer, just a flash of pulp paper and lurid illustrations. The hero, John, was on a mining expedition somewhere in Central or South America. They cross a frontier. . .a twang like an invisible bow that vibrated through him with exquisite pain....

He and his companions find themselves in a beautiful lush landscape, flowering shrubs, vines, and trees, rivers and meadows, but there is something overripe, a whiff of rottenness and corruption, a dark undercurrent of menace and evil. His companions, it seems, are utter dolts, crude grasping creatures rooting about for gold and gems. He hears strange wild music. And now a creature bursts into view with a horrible unknown stench. It is a man from the waist up and below that a giant spider covered with red hairs. The creature looks about, grinding its mandibles in panic. Now the Hunters appear, led by the Lords in red satin robes with gold threads. They float just above the ground. The spider man is hiding behind some bushes on the edge of a great cliff. One of the Lords takes an ivory wand from his belt. The wand twitches like a dowser stick pointing to where the spider man is hiding. The Lord glides forward and touches the spider man with his wand, dislodging the creature's hold, and the spider man plummets into the abyss with a despairing scream that raises the hair on our hero's head. Then the Lord turns and looks at him. The face is smooth and yellow like amber, encrusted with layers of cruelty and corruption and a cold dead evil that freezes the blood.

Now the beautiful lady appears wrapped in an orange cloak that glows with cold fire.

"The Lords have lived here since time began. To go on living one must do things that you Earth people call 'evil.' It is the price of immortality.''

They walk on and come to a vast ruined amphitheater. John hears a sound like bees. The guide whips out a wand.

"Stay close to me. I cannot save your companions."

John can see in the air transparent creatures with humanoid heads and black insect eyes. A long pink proboscis protrudes from their mouths. They hover on vibrating rainbow wings, jabbing their proboscises into his three companions, who swat and scream and run.

"I am sorry," she says. "But they are already dead.... Worse than dead. They are already eaten."

"Eaten?"

"Eaten. Body and soul. The same would have happened to you had I not been here."

At the center of the amphitheater is a huge golden Moloch that seems to stir with slow metal peristalsis. His three companions rush towards the idol in a shambling run, grunting like animals. They clamber up the idol and dissolve into gobs of liquid gold.

John somehow gets back to present time.

"It is better so," she tells him gravely.

But in the end he plans to return: "No danger to body or soul can keep me from her."

(Kim will change her sex of course.)

Kim was walking along the edge of a cliff with a drop of three thousand feet to the valley below. Looking down through the clear still air he could see the glint of water, cities of red brick, trees and moving figures, but no sound reached him. On the other side away from the cliff, he saw woods and glades and rolling hills. His step was very sure and light and he moved in slow effortless strides, taking ten feet at a step. The path was strewn with wild flowers, and flowering shrubs and vines grew along its edges overhanging the cliff. The air was heavy with perfumes that swirled about him as he moved.

He catches the sound of distant flutes and horns getting steadily louder. Kim stops on the edge of a glade, the sky a deeper blue than the sky of Earth, with a suggestion of perilous depths. He is trembling with anticipation. On the other side of the clearing he sees a smear of red as a creature breaks from cover.

It is a giant spider covered with fine red hairs like copper wire growing on its shiny body. The creature has the torso and head of a man. The arms end in insect claws. The spider man pauses, looking around desperately with his faceted eyes, grinding its mandibles and salivating with fear. A horrible odor drifts across the clearing. Kim doubles over retching and when he looks up the creature is gone. The sound of horns and flutes is closer and now a procession of hunters moves into view led by tall thin figures in red robes floating just off the ground as if riding on invisible skateboards. Bounding around them, leaping ten feet into the air, naked boys with heavily developed thighs and buttocks are playing flutes. Other boys are riding huge crabs and playing horns. They wear headdresses of shell through which the music vibrates. The boys are inside the crab creatures up to their waist. The huntsmen stop, the flute players poised and silent. The shell boys freeze and Kim can see that they have something like a tuning fork jetting from their foreheads and translucent pink disks for eyes. They converge, pointing with the tuning forks like dogs, to a cluster of bushes and vines that projects over the void. Kim can see now that the spider man is clinging to the underside of the ledge, hidden by the bushes. One of the red-robed figures glides forward with an ivory wand. He leans down and with a touch of the wand loosens the spider man's hold and sends him plummeting into the void screaming and trailing a wake of red excrement.

The Lord turns now and looks where Kim is standing, not looking at Kim but letting Kim see him. The eyes are like shafts of dead water leading down into black depths, devoid of feeling or even of thought. The nose is pocked with tiny holes. There is no mouth. The hands are smooth and yellow, semitransparent with red insect claws at the fingertips. Kim notices youths in the procession with wings flaring from the ankles and the sides of the head, casques of bright red curls growing from pink marbly flesh.

The procession is moving back through the clearing, the flutes and horns trilling out a song of victory so vile that Kim retches again. One of the winged youths stops and looks at Kim. The eyes are green, completely immobile, with slitted pupils and bright red lashes. The boy touches Kim's arms and a shock of alien recognition burns through his body. The boy is naked, his body smooth as marble. Over his genitals is a cupped red seashell translucent and pulsing. Kim realizes that he is also naked, his phallus erect and pulsing. He runs his hands down the boy's stomach, which is like flexible marble, and touches the covering shell, which glows and dissolves in light. The boy's phallus stands out smooth as polished coral.

His eyes shift from green to deep blue with a purple pupil that glows like an amethyst crystal. He leads Kim towards the edge of the cliff. They stand poised on a jutting ledge. His wings quiver and he follows his closed fist in a half turn, so that his back is to Kim, and bends over.

Kim feels himself pulled forward by the boy's long sinuous arms hooked behind his buttocks and he slides into the smooth pink opening, a soft seashell. The boy's wings vibrate, pulling him forward and over the edge. They move down in a slow dream slant. A rush of wind carries them up into the sky. Kim is steering the youth through the wind, his head back, teeth bare, the wings whistling against his ears....

Portland Place...empty houses ...yards overgrown with weeds .. .out through the west gate.. .Joe Garavelli's... roast beef sandwiches and spaghetti...Skinker Boulevard ...a pond...the farm at Saint Albans. . .Tom leafing through Field & Stream and Boys' Life. ..

They land by a stone road worn smooth from centuries of passage.