The Insect Tapes
MICHAEL SCOTT ROHAN

A Fly, that up and down himself doth shove...
(Wordsworth)
BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ WONDER why he does! Here I am all alone in the Argosy, and who is me but a honey-bee? I do beg your pardon, but I’m the one with the Insect Tapes. The oxygen plants are being done the dirty by the Colorado beetle which has also buggered the potatoes, and a moth is fluttering around in my head; it blundered in through my ear, attracted by the light of my last, my very last bright idea. If only I’d had the flower tapes on the Argosy, if only someone else had had the stinking lousy Insect Tapes — 

But the thing I really dread
When I’ve just got out of bed

— Sing the entertainment tapes which are not at all like the Insect Tapes —

Is to find that there’s a Spider in the bath!

EEEEE! If only there was! I have a bath — though the Drosophila flies have clogged the showerhead, they shall not conquer — I have, as I said before the insects, a bath. Somewhere. Somewhere in the spiders, that is, among the spiders, also the death’s-head hawk moths, stick insects and dung-beetles that have made their home in the bathroom. It is blacker than black with them. I even blocked off the gravity and had them all over the ceiling, but some just scuttled down the walls and my bath would not remain in the bath. I had to keep getting up and putting it back and finally my jury-rigged cancelling switch went BLOOEY! And the insects and the bath — not the bath itself but its essential constituent, the water — fell on me oh they did oh boy didn’t they. Have you ever — no you have not. If you had six hundred-odd — very odd — spiders and sundry insects fall on ‘naked cringing you, ‘t’would be you telling me this tale. You would have been the one with the Insect Tapes.
Oh, we can’t do without them, can we — can they? Can all those canned Colonists frozen in the hold, can they do without their flutterbysies and buzzingly beesies and so forth? No. I’d like to wake them, wake them, let the ants crawl up their noses, let them bathe in beetles, let the termites gnaw those sterile suspension tanks they snore in. Read in the Library what the book-lice chew not. Read how back when there was all that life on Earth insects was a natural enemy and us all overrunning if it were not for the nice sweet lovely SINGING birds. I do not have the bird tapes. The Odysseus, Joey on the Odysseus, he has them. Birds sing at least, even if they foul up the statues and say ‘Pieces of Eight!’ in your ear all the time like in the old movie the termites ate. Insects do not sing.

— from the store there shrills
the cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever 

— Crickets do not sing, they creak like the door mechanisms full of squashed bug. I would like to take the guy that said crickets sing to Il Trovatore in a version for crickets. I have an aversion for crickets. You will find them on number 5 deck, where my gymnasium is. I try to pretend it’s just my muscles creaking but it’s no good. I did a backward roll and gooshed two hundred of them. Somebody — anybody? — want to buy the Insect Tapes? Buyer collects, from the tarantula house that used to be Main Growth Control. You turn left at the cockroaches — Filipino roaches six inches long — knock three times and ask for archy. Step on the weevils in the carpet in passing, dodge the clouds of sandflies in the elevator and there you are and more fool you.
More fool me, to have bolted just because tarantulas kept popping out at me. Have you ever seen a tarantula pop? It freezes the soul, does a popping tarantula. Wouldn’t you have bolted if you’d expected pretty little ladybirds and got poisonous perambulating pin-cushions? While somewhere in there the Growth Elements are still hiccupping away to themselves churning out seventy of everything in two sexes, no waiting, come and get ‘em while they’re hot! Some disaffected bookworms have chomped half the circuitry out of the controls, which are now as dead as the bookworms, and the Tapes totter blindly about, occasionally stopping to churn out another insect assortment. When they randomly light on track 84400(b) I will have fleas ... Still, perhaps they will like the Witchiti grubs better than myself. They cannot like the Witchiti grubs less than myself. The Library, in between stinkbugs and fireflies, informs me that the Australian aborigines considered Witchiti a delicacy. I’m convinced this was a bad joke played on explorers — The Abos’ Revenge! My God, Holmes, how diabolically clever! They’re like sausages with a viable metabolism. I was a vegetarian, you see, my Growth Elements set to turn out fruit trees and pretty flowers, miles and miles of edible and aesthetic vegetation of all kinds. But now the Control is out of, the flies feast on my sugar beets and all’s hell. The controls I thought I could fix, taking the tarantulas in my stride — squidge! heeheehee — but now my right hand will be swollen for a week, from them and the Kongo ants in the emergency rations. They are INCHES long. Now the Growth won’t stop, the Insect Tapes have the Hellstrom Hiccups and repeat for ever and ever, bugs without end, amen.
The mosquitoes and sandflies drain me of blood, the tsetse will no doubt put me to sleep before the sexton beetles come for me, however. How can one drive a stake through all the little bastards’ hearts? Each night they rise from their weeny coffins, wrap their Insect Capes about their shoulders and rush forth to suck the blood of innocent maidens and failing that they find me. I wish they’d club together and get some innocent maidens — I could use them too. I might even stake them to it — but isn’t that my problem?
Yes, Sir, it all started with insects. The right kind — you can hardly see them. They call them the San Jose Scale — sounds like something you weigh your peyote in. Actually — says the library — they are Diaspididae, Aspidiotus perniciosus. Very perniciosus they are, too. They made my lovely grove of fruit trees on number 2 deck look as if it had dandruff. You can hardly see them as individuals, but en masse they coat your trees like ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the whisky don’t get you the Diaspididae must. So I ask the Library, the then gleaming, quiet, bugless Library what to do.
‘Ah,’ it says in wise paternal tones. ‘No doubt some plant on your Tapes had some Scale eggs on it and they got scanned with it. When you reproduced the plant the eggs came too. Hunc illae lacrimae.’
‘So what do I do, my mentor?’ say I.
‘Fight fire with fire. Ref. 331117(a). The Ladybird, or Ladybug (vein), natural predator of diverse species of insects such as greenfly, San Jose Scale, etc. Comes in pleasing range of colours, especially shades of red, and various intriguing polkadot patterns. Unleash the Ladybird,’ intones the Library from deep in its files, ‘and your problems are over.’ Indeed, I got ladybirds eventually, and they managed to eat most of the Scale before the locusts ate all the fruit trees. This leaves me with a food problem. From somewhere I remember reading some line in a poem about —

—  Locust flesh steeped in a pitcher — 

My brain, my then still sane un-mothulated non-hymenopteral brain, set to work. An old poem, egad. What was a pitcher? A fragment of my now, alas!, extinct thesaurus referred me to ‘— phora; bottle; jug—’ and there the termites had truncated it about the same time they clogged the Library. Aha! says I — ‘pitcher’ is liquid, else things could not be steeped in it. The references bear me out — bear me out gently, ye burying beetles, when I am fly-blown and maggot-bait! Locust-flesh steeped in pitcher, eh? So I drowned a couple of them in synthoskotch. The result was hallucinogenic, I thought my guts were leaving me and going home to Momma, leaving me here tangled up in the endless, ceaseless, peaceless repeating of the damnable Insect Tapes!

Dune-bug, moon-bug, was that a June-bug?
Beating on my temples,
Trying to get in,
Will it wake the neighbours with all this din?

There’s a wasps’ nest on the main control board and it’s bollixed the settings. There’s caddis-fly in the water supply. Cocoons hang from the astrocompass, blowflies and wasps drown the clear buzzing of the engines. Touch-sensitive controls — the merest brush of a dragonfly’s wings would set them off. It does. I always rush and switch the lifesystems back on but the wasps defeat me. The motors have been slowed to a crawl, we progress as fast as a fly flies. I tell the cantha rides to get out and push, but they ignore me.
Beep! What insect makes that sound? The fleas have at last sprung forth from the Tapes and are even now biting my eardrums. Beep! They’re doing it again — have not the mosquitoes declared my blood supply a closed shop? Beep! The shipcom it is, but it will not be me they are calling, it must be the insects they want.
‘It’s for you!’ I shout, but they are lazy buzzers and will not answer it. I have to do everything here, so I goosh a horsefly and press the control, ending the sorrows of a silverfish. A minute’s fuzz, during which interval I do a dance with an inquisitive scorpion, then more fuzz appears on the screen. It is the hair of my friend Joey, face agleam.
‘Odysseus callin’, hiya, hi-de-ho! Caught you up, has I, you leaf-eatin’ bastard? Why you slow down? How’s tricks?’
My story spills forth like maggots from my last peach. He listens — and laughs! Laughs at my sorrows! Where is the brotherhood of spacemen, I wail.
‘Listen, my little honky pal,’ he says when he stops giggling, ‘what you need is some birds!’
‘Yes yes pretty birds you’ve got the Bird Tapes — can you duplicate me a set over the shipcom pretty please?’ He frowns.
‘Not at this range, whitey. Love to play a set on you, but the signal wouldn’t be that precise. Pick up interference, distortion, you get blur, you get blurred birds and man could that be heavy shit! No way.’ My wails and gibberings start the very ichneumons from within their caterpillars.
‘But you doan’ need Bird Tapes!’ he bawls. All is suddenly very quiet.
‘Man,’ I say at last, ‘you come over here and say that...’ He shakes his head furiously.
‘No, spook, I mean you got ‘em already. In the Insect Tapes. No, doan’ scream. Didn’ that last RNA shot take, man? Insects can’t exist in isolation — could anythin’? You shoulda seen that, dope — you got spiders first and they’re not insects — they’re predators on insects. Neither is half the stuff I see crawling over the wall behind you insects. What you got in these Tapes is a complete miniature temporary-type ecology to keep the insect stock goin’ on the colony world until the proper ecology gets set up. Same with my birds—I got bugs and all kinda things on the tapes.’
‘Then why don’t I get any birds?’
‘Could be your Growth Control — it was set for plants and mebbe ladybugs, right? Now they’re small and simple — minimum settin’. Seedlin’s and itsy bugs, man, that’s nuthin’! But a bird now — big and complicated. On minimum settin’ you get maybe an egg, but what use is that? All you gotta do is adjust the settin’, no matter if you turn it off — and you can dodge the spiders long enough to turn one control! Run off, little pal, for I am now overtakin’ you and movin’ out of range — run off— ‘the picture fades’, — and get lotsa birds, goin’ CHEEP!’ Fuzz fades into fuzz; he is gone, his hair melting into the static it resembles. I am gone also so fast I leave the sound of my own gibbering behind.
The Taped insects are like piped music, they get in your ears and up your nose. But I am as one possessed and win through to the Control, where I tap-dance with tarantulas.

Tip-toe
Through-the-tulips, On-the-spiders — 

A second to adjust the control and out pops a hummingbird which the tarantulas fall on with cries of joy, as on all the other sixty-nine. At least this gets them off me but I object to providing the bastards with haute cuisine. Still I persevere, and birds are upon me, around me, above me, below me, they would be beside me as well only I am beside myself with glee for the Argosy’s an aviary and the Ouroboros Tapes have bitten their own tails. In a spacecraft there is no chance of achieving a balanced ecology. The bugs are doomed.
You would never believe what birds are necessary to an insect-oriented ecology. I could list ‘em all, but I won’t. I am now the best shot in the spacefleet and none of your goddam clay pigeons neither. There is something with a moustache that is apparently a night-jar and swallows and swifts that whizz dementedly about. Also there are other birds that eat my new fruit trees nearly as well as the Scale and the locusts, even if they do it more politely. Still, I am saner now and birds are easier to wipe out. What remains untermited of my plant tapes supplies me well enough, and I supplement that with the six thousand eggs I have deep- frozen. If I get desperate enough to eat meat there’s everything from pheasant to coq au yin, since some dumb cluck raided my wine cellar and drank himself to death. No, it could be — it has been ! — worse. I think I am free of all the bugs and all the birds at last.
Or am I? A swish of flight in long-deserted corridors; a far-distant cry, bleak and eerie, echoes across the chill stillness of the suspension tanks in which the colonists lie, the icy waste of frozen bodies. A glimmer of white wings in the cool depths of the engine room. I think I have identified it now, this big ghostly white bird. How it could be part of an insect ecology I cannot imagine. I must get rid of it. I am out of ammunition, but have cobbled together a crude steel-spring crossbow which should cope with any albatross. This could be a hell of a voyage.