It was tea-time at the Banzai Institute, which counted among the many traditions it accommodated the genteel habit of 'elevenses' that Buckaroo and Peggy had brought home from their Oxbridge educations. Of course, adapted to the conditions of life on a four hundred acre ranch and high tech think tank in northern New Jersey populated by scientists and musicians from five continents, elevenses took on a somewhat different aspect then they'd had in the Junior Common Rooms of Merton and Christ Church Colleges. And the loss of Peggy Simpson, the Institute's nonpareil dispenser of tea and sympathy, had given the morning break an air of elegy that newer arrivals at the Institute acquired without ever knowing its source.

"I wish you'd get this fixed." Perfect Tommy directed this remark to Rawhide, as a refrigerator squeaked open with an unpleasant E or F-sharp above C.

His interlocutor merely grunted and continued to pour a cup of coffee. Perfect Tommy watched with a pained expression. "That stuff is probably four hours old," he warned Rawhide. "You'll be lucky if it hasn't actually boiled."

Rawhide shrugged. "So?"

Perfect Tommy grimaced and turned away from the gruesome spectacle of a man about to voluntarily drink sludge.

The Institute's kitchens, under the general supervision of Rawhide and occasional interference of the more epicurean Perfect Tommy, produced three meals a day. Kitchen service was a rotating community chore, the same as fence riding, grounds work, and laundry, but the big kitchen was open at all times and anyone was free to come and cook. Or eat, since Institute leftovers were dated and stored in a big 'frig; anything not specifically labeled with someone's name was free for the taking.

At the moment, Perfect Tommy was rummaging through the shelves looking for something he considered fit to eat. The Hong Kong Cavaliers had convened at an early hour to discuss a new recording contract, a chore that all of them found intensely boring. Whatever Rawhide said would go, but the cowboy insisted on a democratic vote all the same.

It had taken Rawhide about forty-five minutes to lay out the terms of the contract, discuss the alternatives, and ask for a vote. Vastly to Perfect Tommy's irritation, Reno had actually asked a couple questions and New Jersey showed signs of taking the whole process seriously, but after they had been attended to, it took less than two seconds for Rawhide's recommendation to be adopted unanimously.

"I've earned a beer," Reno had said. A bottle of Tsing-Tao was well within the established boundaries of elevenses, and the meeting had immediately adjourned to the kitchen.

They found Penny Priddy and Zoo Story already in possession. Zoo Story, the Argentine, Mrs. Johnson, and Buckaroo Banzai had become Penny's principal teachers as she struggled to transform her life into something worth keeping.

"... echinodermata and coelenterata," Zoo Story was saying.

"And a partridge in a pear tree," said Penny Priddy. "Genus, uh, passerine."

Zoo Story laughed. "Okay, okay, school's out. I've got some microbes cooking that need to get checked at 11:27, anyhow. Tomorrow at ten?"

"Be there or be square," said Penny Priddy with mixed emotions as Zoo Story exited.

"How goes it, kid?" said Perfect Tommy, looking up from his perusal of the leftovers with amusement.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm starring in our own private production of Penny Goes to College, and I can't seem to learn my lines," sighed Penny Priddy. The face under the blonde curls was woebegone. "Botany, Renaissance literature, the economic history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the alphabets of kanji, katakana and hiragana, and that's just this morning...."

Her face puckered. "I'd do anything for Buckaroo, I'd die for him, but I'm afraid I can't... Everyone here is a genius but me."

Rawhide shifted in his chair. "That's not so."

"Look at me," said Reno, who was drinking from a Foster's tallboy. "I'm no genius--"

"--that's for sure," said Perfect Tommy across the room. Reno shot a look in his direction that caused the bassist to return to his scrutiny of the available food with heightened interest.

"--but I belong here," said Reno. "You do too, and that doesn't depend on whether you master the intricacies of Balkan politics or any other blessed thing."

"No," said Penny, even more miserably. "It depends on my face."

An uncomfortable silence filled the kitchen.

"My sister's face," Penny went on. A note of spite entered her voice. "My DEAD sister's face!"

Anger flashed into the expressions of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Rawhide stood up frighteningly fast, knocking over his chair; Tommy slammed the refrigerator door and Reno froze with the tautness of a snake about to strike.

Fearfully, Penny watched the storm of reaction sweep the room and leave. It was over in less than ten seconds. Rawhide walked out of the kitchen, and Reno, unclenching his fists, spoke with a strange gentleness.

"We're so sure she's alive, you see." His smile was almost apologetic. "And you're our best evidence yet."

Shocked out of her self-pity, Penny bent her head with embarrassment. "You all love her so much." She looked up, her expression wistful. "What can there be for me?"

"Respect." It was Rawhide, leaning on the doorjamb and lighting a cigarette. He inhaled and shook the match out. "Friendship. Whatever you make for yourself." He left again.

Tommy had reopened the 'frig and settled on leftover lasagna, using chopsticks to eat it directly from a plastic container. He picked up Rawhide's chair and settled into it backwards, facing Penny. He spoke seriously.

"Not everyone here is a genius, though some of us are." He gave Reno a sunny smile, then turned back to Penny. "Everyone here does work to the limit of his gifts."

"Or her," Reno introjected.

Perfect Tommy nodded. "Of course," he said. "And no one here lies to himself -- or herself -- about what he can or can't do."

"I don't know what I can do," Penny admitted.

Perfect Tommy's face clouded. "Find out," he said briefly. "And don't whine while you're doing it." He stood up, dropped the Tupperware and his chopsticks in the sink, and took off.

Penny exhaled. "Just when I thought he was being nice...."

Reno smiled at her. "He was. It's good advice. That doesn't mean you shouldn't admit difficulties -- just be honest with yourself about the difference between can't and won't."

Penny shook her head. "Never in my whole life."

Reno patted the blonde curls. "Penny, what Buckaroo taught us all is that human beings are made, not born. And for each of us, there is only one forge and only one smith. You must make yourself truly in that fire, or you make yourself something that will crack in the testing. Start now. There's no time like the present."

"There's no time but the present." The voice came from behind them.

Buckaroo Banzai walked in. "Come with me, Penny."

Penny followed her mentor, hero, brother-in-law and possible lover up the stairs toward the bunkhouse in silence.

It was next to impossible for Buckaroo Banzai to be objective about Penny Priddy, but then he was a man accustomed to doing the impossible on a daily basis. She was not Peggy....she was. There were moments when she looked at him exactly as Peggy had done, with the same bewildering and fetching blend of bril-liance and love that Peggy had beamed on him every day of their eight years together.

It had been like living without sunshine to lose her.

But now Buckaroo Banzai was beginning to wonder if it might actually be worse to have this excruciatingly close approximation of her back. Occasionally Penny herself would enlarge the distance between them, reluctant to be swallowed by a memory, desperate to become the individual she glimpsed within herself some of the time.

Hardest for both of them were the inexplicable moments when Penny knew something that only Peggy could know: the moment when she said "diamonds are a girl's best friend" about Peggy's laser project -- no one but Buckaroo had heard that joke when the idea of using artificial diamonds as refractors had first struck Peggy. Or the moment when she reached out to run one finger down the back of his hand, a gesture of Peggy's that dated from their earliest courtship.

Buckaroo Banzai and Penny Priddy had instantly been close, and almost as instantly had become wary of their feelings for each other. Since her return from Wyoming, and her first look at what should have been her roots, Penny, greedy as she was to be loved, had been notably brave in her desire for only genuine coin: "I never know for sure whose feelings I'm having," she said. "And I don't want to ever have to wonder who you're in love with."

Most of the time, Buckaroo thought, she did well in her effort to become an individual. But every now and then a streak of self-indulgence surfaced in Penny Priddy that could never have appeared in her sister. If she was going to stay on at the Banzai Institute, it had to go. Buckaroo Banzai knew a cure.

~~~

"Quiz time," said Buckaroo sharply, when they reached the bunkhouse Common Room. Billy Travers took one look at his boss's face and vacated the room.

"Kings of England, in order." Penny's eyes widened, but she started obediently. He cut her off at Ethelred the Unready.

"Periodic Table." "Hydrogen, helium, lithium...." Buckaroo let her get all the way to lawrencium.

"Function of a catalytic converter.... Process of sister chromatid exchange in toxin-induced mutagenesis.... How do you trim a wolf tooth in a horse that bites?"

"I don't know." This inquisition had lasted for nine and a half hours. She asked for a bathroom break and Buckaroo said "endure;" she made a funny joking answer, like the one that Zoo Story had accepted as a signal to quit, and got only a stony silence and a repetition of his latest demand. The light of day had died away from the windows; she was hungry, thirsty, tired...

"Please, Buckaroo..."

Buckaroo Banzai held out a gun, showing her that it had a round chambered. "Disable this weapon."

"I can't, I can't--" tears formed in her eyes.

Now, at last, he was giving her a break. Buckaroo reached out and took the gun back from her. His face showed no expression. He moved too fast for her to see: there was a click--

"This is called the one-eyed stare," he said. His voice was as devoid of emotion as his face. She could see the rifling inside the barrel, inches from her eyes. Penny believed -- no, knew -- she was close to death -- closer even than when she'd held a tiny derringer to her own head.

"Buckaroo."

"Buckaroo?"

"Buckaroo!" As hard as she could.

He must hear her, yet he didn't. She moved, and the gun -- the stare -- followed. Dead, alive: how could she have ever thought they were the same? She felt cold sweat break out all over her body, felt nauseated, feverish -- and flashingly, wildly, lustful. She wanted to--

"Now, what can you and can't you do?" Infinitely quiet, dry voice. The voice of Fate.

A door opened in Penny's mind. Dead, alive:alive, dead. She went through the door.

Penny Priddy laughed.

"Fire when ready," she said.

~~~

Penny Priddy laughed. Buckaroo had fired the gun, the bullet perceived only as a tiny breeze through her blonde hair and then the terrible noise of the explosion. Seconds later, Rawhide and several residents had spilled into the room, armed, ready for a firefight, and taking her, for a few confused moments, to be the enemy at hand.

She hadn't flinched at all, had felt like a spectator, or, more, like someone invulnerable. Buckaroo had been wiping at the powder stain on his hand, barely deigning to acknowledge the sudden deployment of a strike force in the Common Room.

In the middle of the chaos, Penny Priddy had reached over and tilted Buckaroo's face up to meet her gaze. She observed him through narrowed eyes. "Say, pardner, what's the average annual rainfall in the Amazon basin?"

Buckaroo had smiled at her with a sweetness and purity that took her breath away. "Exactly," he said. "Now you're like the porcupine. You know one big thing."

"The one big thing?" She murmured this question in absolute seriousness. Around them, the defensive force was melting away.

"Penny, there is only one thing." He seemed almost troubled. "There are many ways of knowing -- including not knowing, attaining the no-mind -- but only one known. You won't find it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica."

He smiled again, his eyes focusing on a memory. "At least, not under K. The Paladin of the Red Hand and his men trapped me in a library once, and I read that entire volume while I waited for a chance to get away."

~~~

.... entrusted to the defenses of the Thousand-Petal Tong, said to have derived its moniker from its commanding warlord's ruling passion, an obsession with breeding that perennial will o' the wisp of flower fanciers, a blue rose.

The battle to gain entry to the dread cave was brief and exceedingly nasty. The concentrated methane in the atmosphere meant, of course, that no firearm could be drawn, nor any metal blade clashed against another. Yet powered as we were by our own much more substantial will o' the wisp -- our collective memory of a living, breathing, cherished comrade -- we fought like berserking banshees and slew our enemy without let or mercy. In seventeen sanguinary minutes, we gutted and garotted and simply crushed our way toward the chill mouth of that cave that no sane man would ever elect to enter. No man, that is, but B. Banzai, for that cave was the door of the hell to which he must travel to reclaim his martyred bride.

It was Rawhide, a man not given to unnecessary verbiage, who set our final blessing upon B. Banzai's brow as he girded himself to pass through the looming hellsgate on his Orphic quest. Perhaps the ancient, beautiful myth, with its tragic outcome, was also plucking at Rawhide's mind at that moment, for it was Peggy's own frequent benediction that our quiet gunsmith pronounced: "Just keep singing, son, it'll get you there." Begrimed, bloodstreaked, exhausted, and terrified though we were, no one found the invocation of Peggy Banzai's cheerful speech incongruous. B. Banzai exchanged brief grips with each of us, and then our chief was gone, obscured in the malodorous mists of the place.

But indeed we heard him singing as he passed beyond the threshold of our comprehension. For what came next, we have only B. Banzai's report. His voice abruptly . . .

excerpt from Buckaroo Banzai Beyond the Deathless Void, Reno Nevada Granite Press (1985)

reprinted by permission

~ 30 ~