Orbit 16 - [Anthology]
Page 19
* * * *
And at the back of the sanctuary, on the metal wall, was graven the inscription the robot had put there before it left the palace:
* * * *
I was a sun, and they made me their slave.
GOLEM
And time, and the wind, and the rain were very long in wearing it away.
—Translated from the French by Damon Knight
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* * * *
HEARTLAND
Gustav Hasford
There are few things in marriage that mutual toleration and good humor will not cure. One of them, however, is being a horse.
Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization, we will find the footprint of the horse beside it.
—John Trotwood Moore, in
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
Marshall Frankfort comes home from work and does not notice that for some unknown reason his wife has become a large grey horse.
In the living room, Cecilia relaxes on a fat pink sofa with a True Confessions magazine on her chest.
“Hello, dear.” Her voice is dry. She eats candy orange slices.
Marshall bombardiers his black leatherette briefcase into the formica German wasteland of his new dining table and opens his fat white Frigidaire. “Hello, dear.”
His wife asks: “Have a good day, dear?”
“And how was ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ today, dear?”
“That’s awful, dear. You really should tell them at the office that they’re working you too hard.”
Pouring Bavarian beer, Marshall pays scant attention to a thick grey horsehair frozen to the lip of the ceramic stein he has extracted from the freezer compartment of his Frigidaire. Boldly, his right forefinger flicks the ugly horsehair off the stein and it falls forever out of his life.
The sports page. Too portly to participate in athletic contests in person, Marshall secretly admires Joe Willie Namath and will create a baby son of such sturdy timber when Cecilia grows weary of the easy life and flushes her pills.
The late show.
* * * *
And Christmas.
“Marshall? Marshall! Do I look tired? Run down? Does my skin look crooked?”
Marshall (talking to Johnny Carson, exploring for Christmas presents in TV Guide): “You look real good, dear.” An aside: “Would I pull your leg?”
She touches her face. “Still . . .”
* * * *
“So for sure I couldn’t fix it myself, so . . .”
“—that damn Andrews kid, the little bum. Pirates my new accounts with my ink wet on the contracts. Why, I’ll bet—”
“—plumber took off that shiny thingy and promised it won’t cost more than—”
“—and the boss walks in, right? Just as I’m trying to—”
“—but sometimes I don’t feel well, Marshall. I get these pains . . .”
“—told him just what he could do with—”
“Marshall, I feel . . . heavy . . . I . . .”
“—but no—no way. Said there was just no way I was—”
“Marshall!”
“What? What did you say?”
“Marshall ...”
“What? What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m scared.”
Marshall walks into the living room, locks the door.
* * * *
Cecilia flumps around on all fours in ways much (lumpier than the casual lifestyle cultivated by her past.
Marshall notices subtle signals—sobs, complaints about sore legs, snorts, whinnies. Irrefutable evidence manifests itself: wet hoofprints all over the bathroom floor, breakfasts of dry oats and grass in a bowl with a heavy side order of horseradishes, and a damp and gooey emptiness in the “Souvenir of Grand Canyon” sugar bowl.
“We never fight,” says Cecilia as though she were a key witness at a trial.
* * * *
Breaking coffee at the office water cooler, Marshall (the archaeologist) excavates a stack of little emotional newspaper clippings about a Mexican standoff he had with Cecilia on their first date way back when. She wanted to see Don Rickles Bites a Cow in 3-D Technicolor, but Marshall had tickets to see Pat Boone’s white shoes in Bernadine. Marshall devised a compromise: they saw a double feature—Self Abuse and Oral Communications. Prehistoric dirty pictures were featured in a short cartoon, The Paintings of Reindeer and Bison on the Cave Walls in Southern France. Marshall was happy to sacrifice Pat Boone for the woman he loved. In those shiny days he’d let her live it up all the time. Now, picking the crunchy goodness of historical popcorn from his teeth, Marshall decides to remind Cecilia of the old days to cheer her up.
Home life gives birth to a silent event: Marshall finds Cecilia sitting alone in the kitchen in the dark. On a cracked saucer before her lies an incredibly old souvenir slice from their wedding cake—half eaten. In ten years of waiting, the cake—very much at home with the ice cubes in the freezer— has hardened into a yellowish sugar-coated fossil, as dead now as the curling full-color photographs of happy Cecilia and happy Marshall cutting the long-digested living pastry with a silver knife.
* * * *
Marshall remains humble about his ability to tolerate Cecilia’s crazy moods. The household disarmament treaty remains as solid as the Siegfried Line. No cruel tanks allowed in the living room, no hand grenades in the goldfish bowl, no Nambu machineguns or pastel-colored Fokker biplanes—and none of the thermonuclear devices which utilize the erotic potential of atomic fission.
Not even while Cecilia screams “Look at me! Look at me!” does Marshall break his cool. Rather, his response is calculated to suggest a more agreeable topic: “And so Jeannie turned Major Healy into a big chicken. What happened then, dear?”
* * * *
Cecilia gallops into the living room, makes noise, mumbles clumsily, “I’m a horse, Marshall. I’m a horse. I’m a real horse. Really. I can see myself in the bathroom mirror.”
“Oh, stop horsing around,” says Marshall, chuckling behind his Sports Illustrated. “Use your horse sense, dear.”
“I’m a horse, Marshall.”
“Then you must eat a big bowl of fresh grass, dear. A person needs horse food to get enough horse vitamins, right? And frankly, dear, you haven’t looked well lately.”
“Marshall?”
“Yes?”
“I hurt. When I try to walk it feels like my guts are floating around inside my body. Sometimes I can’t breathe.”
“Horsefeathers. You’ll be fine. Probably just a bug of some kind—the flu.” He laughs. “Why, there’s still a lot of horsepower left in you!”
* * * *
In a drugstore, Marshall skims through a paperback copy of Handy Horse Lore. He learns that a horse will not step on a man. He reads that if a horse stays off its feet for a few hours, it dies. He finds these facts interesting. He decides to tell Cecilia that she’d better keep moving.
* * * *
Roller Derby.
Cecilia does not produce TV dinners. Hours pass. Marshall waits patiently for the two small aluminum trays of cryogenically petrified food to be brought back to life with heat.
He makes a joke about putting Cecilia out to pasture for this, but he is alone and does not laugh.
The bedroom smells sick and hot with horsehairs and defecation, and Marshall’s queen-size bed is sprinkled with decaying hay. A real elderly workhorse, sway-backed, shedding, bone-angled and dead, crumples in all kinds of directions, crushes fat pink pillows—half a ton of gristle and cold meat and big piano-key teeth and worn steel horseshoes staring out obsidian-hard over the hand-sewn watercolors of a butterfly quilt.
Calmly, Marshall calculates the extent of Cecilia’s horseplay. This, he quips, is the last straw. It is bad enough that Cecilia refuses to talk to him. It’s bad enough that she trots all over the house drowning in maudlin squalor, and won’t cook. His heart is big for her. But this? This sloppy housekeeping?
“I can take a joke,” Marshall announces in a loud voice, “but I’ll be god damned if I’m going to sleep with a dead horse!”
Period.
Dirty sheets.
Marshall goes to see if maybe Cecilia is hiding somewhere in the living room.
On TV, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby sit in a big cooking pot and talk about love. They are surrounded by cannibals of the wildest design.
Marshall thinks: Have I seen this?
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* * * *
A Little Lexicon for Time-Travelers
afterhead got pfirstic vanrangement
Ante Toasties heanow postposterous venial sex
arewolf Hucome Gernsforth Pushman car usouthodox
birth wish isherwoman rearquish Wasaac Asimov
come-come girl Katabaptist retrophylactic Waswas
carlyx Math E’Nar unisin Zweifront
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* * * *
SANDIAL
Moshe Feder
Ach! Those German philosophers, how literally they take everything.
Examine sand. It’s not really white, but a halftone blend of many shades. Some grains are white or beige, some clear quartz crystal, and there are small black ones like the specks of bean in vanilla ice cream. The sand at the beach is a loose conglomerate of trillions of such particles. There they are piled in drifts and dunes shaped by the imprint of seagull feet and other natural forces.
Sand is the primary ingredient of glass. In that capacity it has some symbolic meaning, no doubt. Glass is a transparent noncrystalline amorphous supercooled liquid. It’s not a true solid at all. Does that suggest anything? It was just such speculation that led Frierhoff to his theory of the universal metaphor. Ach! Those German philosophers, how literally they take everything.
Sand has other interesting properties. When mixed with a suitable amount of water it is the perfect medium for ephemeral sculpture. Sand castles are the most commonly seen examples. I wonder if Frierhoff ever built a sand castle? It might have done him good.
* * * *
The day was ending with a warm red sunset. Henderson opened his eyes and saw that the beach was empty. Noting the imminence of evening, he rose from his place in the shadow of a dune. The fabric of his shirt and the shape of his back had left a concave imprint. He walked to just short of the line of tangled seaweed and shell fragments. Staring up the beach in each direction he saw that it was indeed empty. But there was a mound that stood out from the smoothness at the water’s edge. He transferred the pair of shoes he was carrying from his right hand to his left and walked over to look at the mound. It was a sand castle.
The sand castle was guarded by a steep-sided moat that was a foot deep and was filled with water from a channel that ran to the tideline. Inside the moat there was a flat unblemished area three feet wide. The wall around the castle was as smooth and featureless as that surrounding plain; there was no gate, barbican, portcullis, or drawbridge. The wall was a foot high, square with rounded corners, had a flat top, sloped inward, and was about five inches thick at the bottom. The area enclosed by the wall was six feet long and five feet wide. This, the courtyard, was cross-hatched with lines that simulated flagstone pavement. The keep with its attendant fortifications was square—four feet on each side. It was built in no easily identifiable style, but its massive solidity suggested Romanesque. The castle appeared to have three main stories and it was topped by a watchtower that reached a height of over four feet. The edges of the roof and the top of the watchtower were perfectly crenelated. The few windows were little more than narrow slits. On the ground level the outlines of doors were traced on the two sides that faced the larger sections of the courtyard. One was slightly ajar, and a hollowness could be seen inside it.
Stepping closer, Henderson put his naked foot in the area between the moat and the walls, violating its perfect smoothness. He carefully lifted his other foot and brought it down in the courtyard, erasing some of the delicate tracery on its floor. He bent down to examine the keep more closely, and grunted when he heard faint music within.
Henderson thrust his hand through the roof of the castle and rooted around for the radio he knew he would find inside. His fingers felt nothing but damp coolness. Curious and annoyed, he pounded the roof in, and in its collapse it took part of the supporting walls with it.
The sun was already behind the dunes, and the beach was grey, unlit by the yet unrisen moon. It was too dark to search any longer in the wet sand, and Henderson gave up. Stepping over the wall and the moat, he walked away. Discrete grains of sand detached themselves and fell away from the keep’s perfect crenelations. The crumbling ruin dissolved in the moonlight.
* * * *
Do you see what I mean about sand? This Henderson had obviously never read any metaphysics. Sand is certainly an interesting substance. Of course there are others: fire, air, water. But they are amorphous, they lack granularity. Not like sand. Only to Henderson are they the same.
* * * *
Counting each step, Henderson proceeded along the beach. To his right, the barren ocean; to his left, just as barren desert. He walked rhythmically, deliberately.
He stayed on the beach as much as possible. The surf imparted a relative firmness to the sand that made walking easier. But periodically the splashing metronome would become too much to bear. His body’s natural beat would lock into that of the sea. His heart, his breath, his blinking, his steps, resonated with the waves. Then he would forsake the beach for the desert and walk among the dunes.
Only in the darkness could he travel any distance; in the searing daylight he slept. He was not yet weak and could still appreciate the chill night winds as refreshing. But he was fasting, and so he allowed himself regular rest stops. 9,994; 9,995; 9,996; 9,997; 9,998; 9,999; 10,000. Ten thousand steps since his start that evening from the sand castle. He stopped whenever he was precisely ten thousand steps away from his last stop. This way, at the rate of ninety thousand steps a night, he hoped to walk to civilization, whatever low form that might take on this thin margin between sea and desert.
He dropped his shoes and opened his volume of Frierhoff to page 335. “Kapitel IX—Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen. “ It was too bad his college German was so poor. Although he understood some chapter headings and many individual words, he was rarely able to make sense of a complete sentence. But reading did serve as a convenient timer. He would rest for as long as it took him to subvocalize his way through five pages, then he would get up and go on. So he opened his book and read by the lunar light. Fortunately the night skies were always clear, and the sandy white environment provided a uniform ambient illumination. His readings in Die allumfassend Metapher also served as a diary of his trek, an odometer that clicked over five pages for every ten thousand steps, before having to start again from page one.
On reaching page 340 Henderson snapped the book shut, got up, and started to walk. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . .
* * * *
Sand. A geologist defines it as particles of rock between .05 and 2 millimeters in diameter. The shape of sand grains, transported by water and wind, is a clue to their history. When sand is used in an hourglass, to measure time, it sifts through cycles of movement as top becomes bottom and bottom top. All the sand grains in the universe go through great Hindu cycles, eons long, keeping always the karma of previous ages, holding it in their shape. An angular grain of sand is young, the ancient ones are smooth and polished. All are graded by the rivers and the breezes, separated into uniformity. If you could count all the grains you could count the years of the cosmos, the days of creation.
Henderson thought of all his previous days of walking. He would long ago have lost track of them if it had not been for his book. But knowing that he walked ninety thousand steps each night, he was always able to calculate how many days he had been walking. He did not have to depend on his memory. Someday Die allumfassend Metapher would sit in an honored
place on the walnut shelves of his library.
He jarred to a stop, realizing he’d lost track of his counting. His thoughts had been wandering. He’d lost count. Grunting with annoyance, he stood for a moment tapping his fool in a deliberate rhythm. Then, sighing, he sat down and turned to page 340 of Friedriche Frierhoff’s masterwork of philosophy.