This story, which appeared in the December 1973 Galaxy, deals with two spacefarers, crashed on a lonely, inhospitable planet, facing certain death from starvation when their meager supplies run out. We begin before they land on the planet, but just after their mothership has been destroyed. The two men don't even get along--the younger man, crumbling under the stress right from the beginning, asks "why did they put me with an old man...? You should've been retired 10 years ago." Planetside, as they are coping with the emotional and physical problems of survival, two strange fish hominids emerge from the ocean and the younger man (naturally) kills one immediately. The other flees. The protagonist, in the meantime, is considering his medical belt, termed the Physician. The belt is a machine that labors to keep its human alive at all costs. On this spar of rock in a vast ocean millions of miles away from Earth, how can the belt do this? By changing his body into one of the fishlike hominids. He has no choice but to accept the change. He discovers the body of the younger man, who has committed suicide rather than be transformed.
This was a very lonely story. The protagonist is cut off quickly from everything--Earth, the mothership, human companionship, food, shelter...within the space of a few days. The only succor he has comes from a mindless tool, who, like HAL, fulfills its strongest command in a way its designers never dreamed of. It is the "Unbiased God" of the title. The one less-dark part is the suggestion that at least the ex-human can now join the other fishmen in the world ocean.
I wonder if Piserchia wrote this as "therapy writing" during a bad patch in her home life. I know that she had 5 kids and her husband was really sick at the time she wrote some of the stories for Galaxy. Writing about loneliness and despair can help get one through misery.
--Joanna Pataki
At a remote government weather station, someone has to do the boring task of punching the same five buttons four times a day, so the Feds have the bright idea of hiring the mentally disabled--three sisters with 75 IQ points between them--then linking their minds and raising their intelligences with an electronic device called the Cycler. Individually, the members of Idio (as the collective entity is called) are slovenly, physically repulsive, and not that smart even with the brain-boost, so with typical bureaucratic redundancy, two men are assigned to keep tabs on them. Things go smoothly until the sisters get a look at the magazines the guys are perusing and ask the station's computer about sex...
"Idio," first published in 1974, foreshadows Piserchia's novel I, Zombie (written under the name Curt Selby) in its droll descriptions of a nightmare work environment in the not-too-distant future. In the Selby book it's revived corpses who push the buttons, but both stories walk us through the daily routines of folks who are inescapably the opposite of dashing "captains of industry": wretched service workers hidden away like Morlocks from public view (most of whom are female, though the point isn't belabored). These minions are the lowest of the low but they do have inner lives, desires, and humorous takes on their own plights; Piserchia allows us to savor their occasional triumphs without suggesting their circumstances are anything less than hopeless. (In "Idio" the struggles are sexual as well as political, but to say more would spoil a great plot.)
The "Cycler" brings to mind Theodore Sturgeon's recurring fantasy of the telepathically linked group mind, but while Sturgeon treats this phenomenon as an evolutionary leap forward, for Piserchia, it's just another American labor-saving device, and not a very efficient one: whenever one of the sisters goes to sleep, they all conk out wherever they happen to be sitting or standing.* Sturgeon is a master, but he has a tendency to get all sappy in his narratives of collective humankind, like a sloshed bar patron who finishes his yarns by repeatedly telling everyone in the house how much he loves them. Piserchia, by contrast, could be the sardonic teetotaler who listens to a few such tales and says, "Oh yeah? Well let me tell you the one about the three idiots..."
*The "telepathic trio" motif also pops up in The Fluger. In that book, the consciousness of alien assassin Kam Shar cycles between three bodies, but only one is "awake" at any given time.
--Tom Moody
Years ago, when I first read this story, I had trouble imagining a machine so inefficient and so lousily designed that it needed human pressing of a few dumb buttons. I thought the "useless" job should have been guarding a remote patch of ground for reasons everyone has forgotten (as I believe they do somewhere in England. A soldier is stationed at a particular spot, all day, just like at Buckingham Palace, for no good reason).
However, after working for the state educational system for a few years, I have gained perspective. There is so much duplication of work and so many workhours wasted on trivial, outdated, inefficient things (and this is just in my department!), that now the five-button machine makes lovely sense. Also, the way jobs are handed out and to whom...whooee! I understand the ex-military Green and Brown a little better. Idio wasn't the only societal misfit in the wilderness. Some ex-military shuffle between homelessness and a government job. There seems to be no place for them.
There's another author who must have read both "Idio" and The Fluger--I can't recall his name or the title of the book right now, but his protagonist helps explore a planet which gives Terrans new bodies upon entry. A large brain is pulled along on a sled by half-a-dozen little creatures, all sharing the consciousness of the brain. If Piserchia had any literary descendants, it would be that author.
As with many other Piserchia protagonists, Idio (or at least Risa the narrator) is aware of being a misfit, but finds its own way of dealing with the pain. Risa even weeps when she learns about sex, another human activity that Idio is denied because they are monsters. Yet Idio does not succumb to wallowing in self-pity or fear of what Green and Brown can do to them. Idio might claim they were too dumb to be afraid or withdrawn, but they are emotionally healthy and strong. Even Idio gets bored with pushing those little buttons, which argues for intelligence...the warped result of the fatal boredom lies in Brown and Green and their joys of porn and bullying.
--J. P.