“I don’t know what to do with that.”
“Shove it in your glass eye.”
“I don’t have a glass eye.”
“Well, find somewhere else.”
Betty tried to strike an adamant pose, but she could not make her arms work right. Extra flesh slapped against extra flesh. She had trouble fitting her left hand into her right armpit. Only the fingertips of her right hand touched the flabby muscle of her left arm.
“I think we should split,” she said.
“Gladly.”
“Agreed then?”
“A-greed.”
Each sat motionless, waiting for the other lo move.
“Well?” Betty said.
“Well what?”
“In every separation somebody has to go. You!”
“Go? Where’ll I go?”
“Out there.” She waved a hand at the mud-colored door.
“Now wait a minute. One thing I do not do is go out there.”
“Coward!”
“Intimidator!”
“Well, I’m not going. It’s not the girl’s plat e to challenge the unknown.”
Jack stood up, began to pace.
“At your age afraid of dragons!” Betty said sardonically. “Remember when we looked out the door and saw only a hallway with dark at the end? Quite conventional-looking if you ask me, just a quaint drab corridor, nothing to be terrified of. You just walk on down it, all you’ll probably encounter is a minotaur or two.”
“I won’t go. I can’t.”
“Bloodless. Spineless. Shrinking violet. Drooping lily. Chicken. Faint of heart, cold of feet.”
Betty spoke tonelessly, leaving a precise two-second pause after each insult.
“Poltroon. Dastard. Jelly-testicled. Churning-stomached. Trembling-lipped. Scaredy-cat. Shadow-terrified. Pusillanimous. Sissy. Effeminate. Milksop. Lacker of the essential juices. Slacker. Dodger. Abdicator of responsibility. Limp-wristed. Eye-flincher. Pigeon-hearted. Spermless.”
“Are you going to keep this up?”
“Impotent. Weak-kneed. Worry-wart.”
“Stop it, please.”
“Terror-struck. Blench-faced. Bulgy-eyed. Panic-stricken.”
“Okay. Second chance. We’ll try harder.”
“Number two. Cold running blood. Goosefleshed. Tremoring cowerer.”
“Betty!”
“Cold-sweated. Ball-less. Yellow-streaked a mile wide. Duty-shrinker. Quisling. Benedict—”
“All right, I’ll go.”
He opened the door a little way, slipped through the narrow space. The door clicked shut hollowly. She listened to his steps going down the hallway. Tentatively. He seemed to pause near the end. Betty grunted, she expected now to hear him return. When the sound of steps resumed, the footfalls came quickly, resolutely. Their sound diminished gradually until Betty realized that she had imagined the sound of the last few steps. The faint scream seemed to come also from her imagination.
Although she had been alone in the room before, this time she felt stimulated about it. There was that chance that he would not come back. She listened for his footsteps.
He won’t get far. He’ll be like the first one to test the water on the first good swimming day. He’ll test the surface with his toes, let the good chill run up his legs, venture out to knee level maybe, then race back to the beach, heedlessly splashing water behind him. Unless he’s dead or something. Eaten up by the minotaur, bad-breathed by the dragon. Strongest odds are that there’s nothing out there but more of this. He’s probably lost in a maze of hallways. Or maybe he’s outside the cave, foraging for food. He’ll come back a naked ape. A welcome change.
She stretched out on the divan and tried to go to sleep. At first she was disturbed by worries. Maybe something had happened to Jack. What about the scream? If that’s what it was. Too far away to be sure. He probably just saw his own shadow or something.
Gradually she dozed off.
She could not keep track of the number of times she awoke groggily. At these moments she would not allow herself to come to full consciousness, at least not to a consciousness where she might have to reflect upon anything serious. Enough to notice a change of dress and return to sleep. On some awakenings she would look around the room to see if Jack had returned. When she did not see him, she shrugged and resumed the napping position.
Abruptly she was aware of herself lying awake, staring at the faded-lace ceiling. Her body felt stiff. Gripping the back of the divan with both hands, she pulled herself up, muscles straining at the effort. Sharp pains ran between her elbow and wrist.
Reluctantly, she examined herself. She looked like a mountain. Breasts like elongated watermelons, resting on the ample field of her stomach. Thighs like overfilled sacks, so thick she could not make her knees touch. Below them, parts of her body she might never see again. She wore an old lady’s dress, basic brown with miles of grainy lace, fading.
Jack had not returned. Or else he’d come back while she slept, seen her grown fat and lumpy, and had left again.
She let her fingers journey over her face. Trenches and pits, loose coarse skin, eyelids like thin lampshade paper.
I can’t stay in this room anymore. I should never have let him go. Retribution like that takes the juice out of victory. Well, who the hell likes victory juice anyway? I’ll go out there. Anything’ll be better. I’ll step tippy-toe into the mouth of the nearest dragon.
She stood up. Unbearable pain rode up from her calves and thighs. She sat down again. Eyes shut, concentrating, she tried to separate herself from the fat, as if the fat were pasted to her thin body and could be ripped off at any time. She felt it as discrete and alien matter. She inhaled and it rose, pushed up by her breathing. She shifted position on the divan and it moved with her. Silly to get hysterical about it. I should relax. Contemplate my navel. If it is physiologically possible to locate my navel.
Hours later she heard a shuffling sound, somebody walking in the hall. The echo of the steps seemed awesome, threatening. She pictured, in a quick series of flash-card images, hundreds of monsters in a variety running from reconstituted human creatures to the ugliest possible sentient collages. The steps stopped in front of the door. Betty wished she could disappear at will. The doorknob began turning.
“Who is it?” she shouted.
The doorknob’s movement stopped.
“Is it you, Jack? Is that you?”
An answering mumble. He slowly opened the door, slid in sideways, a little of him at a time. A withered old hand, sharp-pointed and lace-colored. Glimpses of an emaciated arm beneath a tattered shirtsleeve. Half of a dirty shirt and trousers, half of a wrinkled bearded face. The entire head came into full view: skin yellowed and spotted, completely bald, lines running into lines, sparse and speckled whiskers. The creature seemed to be Jack. It must be. But Jack as if his face had been made of candlewax which was now half melted. He stood before her, tottering on trembling legs. Shakily his hand rose in a hello salute. It was almost the wave of a returning hero.
Struggling to control her nervousness, Betty spoke in a guarded and toneless voice. “Where’ve you been?”
He shrugged a long, quaking shrug. “I have some memories, but dim and growing dimmer as I think of them. Broken sidewalks, thick forests, a strange city that left me messages, rocks falling from the sky. There was a dragon, I think. But I can’t concentrate, synthesize.”
He could hardly see her. His vision was impaired by glaze and other matter. She looked big now. She looked very big.
She beckoned to him and patted a cushion beside her. Without speaking, she kept patting it. His feet sliding along the floor, he walked toward her. It seemed a long way. She extended her hand, took his, and guided him onto the divan. Her hand remained in his. The skin of their hands had the texture of wood, of old boards; if one altered the grip, the other would get splinters.
“How do you feel?” Betty asked. “You feel okay?”
“No, don’t feel so go
od. Don’t feel okay.”
He looked at her with eyes so dark they reminded her of tarnished coins. She touched his grizzled beard, with the tips of her fingers wiped away some wetness by his mouth.
“You know,” she said, “I have this funny feeling that any minute now somebody is going to scream ‘Cut it and print it,’ and the walls are going to be struck, and the makeup men are going to stride in and tear off the plastic that’s our makeup and rip out the pillows from inside my costume and compliment us for a good job well done and escort us to our limousines, and you can say to me, ‘Nice working with you,’ and I can say to you, ‘Nice working with you,’ and we can bid farewell against a setting sun and drive off in highly polished Cord automobiles. Something like that could happen, couldn’t it?”
“Not bloody likely.”
She rested her head on his shoulder, felt herself drifting off to another nap. “My legs hurt like hell,” she muttered.
<
* * * *
PRISON OF CLAY, PRISON OF STEEL
Henry-Luc Planchat
The tale of a little man who threw himself over a cliff; a dynasty of sick princes; and a captive sun . . .
I was a sun, and they made me their slave.
And I am here, alone, a prisoner in this body of steel, between these cold walls.
In this block of clay that imprisons my soul.
* * * *
GOLEM
Made of sun and clay
Powerless, with this punched card
That holds me like a chain
Son of Heaven and the Machine
GOLEM
I was a sun, and they made me their slave.
They drew my soul into this block of clay and shut me up in this prison of steel, of integrated circuits, and they locked away my freedom with this punched card. They, the merchants, they bought my life and the lives of those I created.
He threw himself down from the top of the cliff, the one who sold me, but that did not set me free. And they, the merchants, they keep me here, in this machine, to watch over their city.
Watchman at their gates.
GOLEM
But I must love or die.
And they have taken away my love and condemned me to life.
They have mastered me—me, a sun. And they say:
“Here are the data, Golem!”
And I record them.
And they say: “Destroy our enemies!”
And I, who was drunk with love, must kill. And I cannot rebel against these bonds which hold me, from beyond space and time, in this block of clay. Then I wait (and time is no more than a hope) for them to need me again.
While the beings that I created are dying, far from me, in the glacial cold of space that overcomes them little by little, and while my body of energy and light, their only protection, so far away, is going out.
Oh, when will I rekindle the star-fire!
GOLEM
The city is called Pharès. For thousands of years it has been the greatest port of the Northern Ocean, and its ships go in search of precious cargoes even beyond the Mountains on the Rim of the Abyss. Its caravans cross the Great Plain to bring back goods found only in the most remote countries of the Old Continent. Pharès is famed for its great wealth, but famed also for being a city it is best not to attack, and all who have tried it have failed, for the City of Merchants is protected by Emidhin, the slave-sun, the chained god, the Golem.
* * * *
Hyersios, the Prince of Pharès, opened the sanctuary door by means of the retractable key embedded in his left forefinger.
Hyersios, the seventeenth of the Sick Princes, was dressed as usual in a wide toga of green silk which brushed the floor, and his face and arms were painted with the blue insignia of his rank.
Hyersios, the Jailer of God, had a somber visage, and the lines traced by illness on his forehead made his expression even darker.
Hyersios, the Master of the West Provinces, was soon to die.
And he knew it. He closed the door quietly behind him. Here he was in the presence of Emidhin.
* * * *
Or rather of Emidhin’s organs of communication, for the soul of the star was imprisoned in a block of clay behind twenty meters of metal. The sanctuary. A little room. Walls painted green. On the floor, white tiles. At the rear, metal. A few buttons and handles. A little loudspeaker, the voice of the sun. A little mobile camera, the eye of the sun.
* * * *
Cold.
Hold me tighter, child.
The wind. Cold.
Take my coat, child, I don’t need it.
The dark . . .
Don’t be afraid, child, I am here, close to you. Sleep now. Tomorrow it will be light and we will go to the dune.
* * * *
“Good morning, Emidhin,” said Hyersios, advancing toward the wall of metal.
“Greeting, Hyersios the Prince,” answered the prisoner.
Hyersios seated himself delicately on the only chair in the sanctuary. The pain in his back made him grimace slightly. The corner of his mouth rose a little, pressing his right cheek upward. The eye half-closed. A silent rictus. A contortion of pain and a resigned smile, mocking that illness that had fastened its claws in the dynasty of the Princes of Pharès. He leaned gently against the wooden back of the chair and for a moment had the illusion that it eased him. But the pain returned, stronger than before. He closed his eyes and slowly passed his hand over his forehead, rubbing the lines as if to make them disappear. The camera, motionless, gazed at him.
The Prince of Pharès opened his eyes again and breathed deeply. The green silk sleeve had slid back along his arm, revealing the blue marks that Freeyn had tattooed there when he had received his title, seven years before. The marks said things known to him alone, and sometimes he had an almost irresistible impulse to tell them to someone. To Emidhin, to a beggar in the North Quarter, to anyone. His hand fell slowly and rested on the punched cards which he held in the other hand, the left, the one that contained the key to the sanctuary. His fingers slid over the edges of the cards, then held them tightly. Hyersios leaned forward to place the little pile of cards on the cold tiles. The pain seized its opportunity. It gripped the right hand as it moved toward the floor, then climbed along the arm, turned around the shoulder and sprang onto his back, between the shoulder blades. Hyersios grimaced again, then straightened. He had thrown down the gauntlet to the illness that tormented him, and it had accepted the challenge. They understood each other very well. Each was lying in wait for the other. But the Prince of Pharès already knew the end of this silent duel. He straightened again and leaned against the back of the chair.
“I’m going to need you, Emidhin,” he said at last.
* * * *
The little man had said simply there it is, and had left the sanctuary. Prince Greter, President Tremis and the other high dignitaries of the city followed him for a moment with their eyes, then turned back to the wall of metal. The Prince activated the prisoner’s organs of communication. At once a murmur, almost a moan, was heard:
“Aaaaah! Aaaaah!”
Then they told him that he was their slave.
He replied that he was a sun.
They told him that he must obey them.
He asked them to set him free so that he might continue to protect his planets.
They repeated that he was their slave.
He told them that, without him, his planets would die.
They explained to him that if he did not obey them, they would kill him and that in this case his planets would be lost forever.
He began to howl, and they lowered the volume of the loudspeaker.
The next day, the body of the little man was found at the base of the cliff that overhangs the Northern Ocean.
* * * *
Is that better, child?
Yes.
Dawn has come, child. It is cold and the sun is very red, but we’ll be able to start moving.
T
he dune?
Yes, child, we must reach the dune.
* * * *
A man was working in his field when he saw them. They were moving along the road, a little farther away. He was a brave man, but he felt the sweat chill his back under the shirt. He wondered if it was their footsteps that reverberated or the earth that groaned at their passing.
Orbit 16 - [Anthology] Page 17
