The Simulacra Read Online Free Page A

himself, could get me a jalopy wholesale.
    On the TV screen, Nicole was saying, “And really, it is a world of much enchantment, with luminous entities far surpassing in variety and in sheer delightful wonder anything found on other planets. Scientists compute that there are more forms of life in the ocean—”
    Her face faded, and a sequence showing unnatural, grotesque fish took its place. This is part of the deliberate propaganda line, Duncan realized. An effort to take our minds off Mars and the idea of getting away from the Party—and from her. On the screen a bulbous-eyed fish gaped at him, and his attention, despite himself, was captured. Jeez, he thought, it is a weird world down there. Nicole, he thought, you’ve got me trapped. If only Al and I had succeeded; we might be performing right now for you, and we’d be happy. While you interviewed world-famous oceanographers Al and I would be discreetly playing in the background, perhaps one of the Bach “Two Part Inventions.”
    Going to the closet of his apartment, Ian Duncan bent down and carefully lifted a cloth-wrapped object into the light. We had so much youthful faith in this, he recalled. Tenderly, he unwrapped the jug; then, taking a deep breath, he blew a couple of hollow notes on it. Duncan & Miller and Their Two-man Jug Band, he and Al Miller had been, playing their own arrangement for two jugs of Bach and Mozart and Stravinsky. But the White House talent scout—the skunk. He had never even given them a fair audition. It had been done, he told them. Jesse Pigg, the fabulous jug-artist from Alabama, had gotten to the White House first, entertaining and delighting the dozen and one members of the Thibodeaux family gathered there with his versions of “Derby Ram” and “John Henry” and the like.
    “But,” Ian Duncan had protested, “this is
classical
jug. We play late Beethoven sonatas.”
    “We’ll call you,” the talent scout had said briskly. “If Nicky shows an interest at any time in the future.”
    Nicky! He had blanched. Imagine being that intimate to the First Family. He and Al, mumbling pointlessly, had retired from the stage with their jugs, making way for the next act, a group of dogs dressed up in Elizabethan costumes portraying characters from
Hamlet.
The dogs had not made it, either, but that was little consolation.
    “I am told,” Nicole was saying, “that there is so little light in the ocean depths that, well, observe this strange fellow.” A fish, sporting a glowing lantern before him, swam across the TV screen.
    Startling him, there came a knock on the apartment door.
    With caution, Ian Duncan answered it. He found his neighbor Mr. Stone standing there, looking nervous.
    “You weren’t at All Souls?” Edgar Stone said. “Won’t they check and find out?” He held in his hands Ian Duncan’s corrected test.
    Duncan said, “Tell me how I did.” He prepared himself.
    Entering the apartment, Stone shut the door after him. He glanced at the TV set, saw Nicole seated with the oceanographers, listened for a moment to her, then abruptly said in a hoarse voice, “You did fine.” He held out the test.
    “I
passed?
” Duncan could not believe it. He accepted the papers, examining them with incredulity. And then he understood what had happened.
    Stone had conspired to see that he passed. He had falsified the score, probably out of humanitarian motives. Duncan raised his head and they looked at each other, neither speaking. This is terrible, Duncan thought. What’ll I do now? His reaction amazed him, but there it was.
    I wanted to fail,
he realized. Why? So I can get out of here, so I would have an excuse to give up all this, my apartment and my job, say fork it and go. Emigrate with nothing more than the shirt on my back, in a jalopy that falls to pieces the moment it comes to rest in the Martian wilderness.
    “Thanks,” he said glumly.
    In a rapid voice, Stone said, “Y-you can do the same for me, sometime.”
    “Oh