Orbit 16 - [Anthology]

by Ed By Damon Knight

  “How’s that?” I should have kept my mouth shut. They both glared at me, then bent back over the table.

  “There used to be an operation in early Fortran called a do loop. The idea was that a subroutine could be set up to repeat until some limit or result was reached. Like testing an equation by substituting all the numbers between one and one hundred for constants. You didn’t have to write one hundred instructions. Just use a do loop with one hundred as the upper limit. The equation would be solved and one hundred solutions printed out. Nobody uses that anymore, but if we could slip one in after the instruction regarding intent, maybe we could give the idea many times the weight it would normally have. That might be enough to swing it.”

  The other nodded. “Why not? There’s nothing else going for us.”

  * * * *

  Back in the courtlab, we all rose, and we all sat; then the prosecutor got up for his summary. Most of it was about programs, routines, and weighted averages. He did a good job. Minus the buzz words though, one thing came through very clear: I was guilty as hell. Then my team got the green light, and it was more of the same. I think I saw him enter the do loop. There was one time when his hands were awfully busy, while he wasn’t saying much. The prosecutor was frowning about something.

  Finally it was all over. The last entry was in. The green lights were gone, and a big yellow one on the main panel came on. The tapes were all going at once, and the indicators were a blur. After about a minute, a printer clattered briefly and was silent. The tape decks all switched to fast rewind. Everyone sat quiet for a moment, then the clerk stood up and headed for the printer, where he tore off a strip of paper. He handed it to the judge without even a peek. I held my breath. My attorney drew more doodles. The judge took the slip, then, with his eyes fixed firmly on the statue of Justice, he announced the verdict.

  “The computed verdict finds the defendant innocent of all charges. The electron knows no favorites.”

  I let out my breath in a rush and jumped to my feet. The prosecutor was up too, shouting.

  “Your Honor, I appeal this verdict as provided for in the master file of court procedures.”

  The heavy hand was on my shoulder again, and a voice told me to sit down.

  The judge nodded. “Granted,” he said, and bang went the gavel. The clerk did something to his panel, and we had a yellow light again.

  “Now what?” I wanted to know.

  My attorney looked around. “ There has been an appeal. The appellate court will review your case.” I felt honored. He had actually spoken to me. Might as well keep him talking.

  “Where are they? Are they here too?”

  “No. They’re probably playing golf right about now.”

  “But ...” I nodded toward the yellow light.

  “Oh, that. Their Honors have all been on record since they were appointed to the bench. They just stop by in the morning for an emotional index reading, and the appellate computer takes it from there. We’re linking up with it right now.”

  As he spoke, one tape spun briskly, then stopped. Another wait. I munched a mangled thumbnail and watched the flashing lights. They stopped, and the printer clattered again. Once more the clerk tore off the paper and handed it to the bench. The judge looked, then nodded. This time, he looked straight at me.

  “Decision reversed, by a vote of six to one. Counsel for the defense is commended for a job well done.” My team nodded and smiled. “The prisoner will rise.” This time I was hauled to my feet.

  The judge began to punch some buttons on his own private console. Twice he shook his head and made some more entries. Finally he nodded.

  “Leonard Verst, in accordance with the laws, programs, and procedures of this state, you have been found guilty of the crime of alteration. You are accordingly sentenced to a term of thirty days, these days to be served consecutively as a member of the jury of this court.”

  As the gavel banged for the last time, a flicker of motion at the bench caught my eye. I glanced up at the jury. The left-hand face had been changed. I was staring into my own eyes, and I was not smiling.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE HOUSE BY THE SEA

  Eleanor Arnason

  She only wanted to be alone with her melancholy i here in the windswept house beside the sea with her troglodytes and her holovision, but alas, her sensitive nature could not ignore the burning need of Craig—and Ricardo, and Ming, and Harry: until, one storm-swept night . . .

  I was happy enough in the old house by the sea before Craig returned. Many people would have minded the almost continual mists and the sound of the sea below the house, the grating roar of pebbles which the waves sucked back and flung, at their return, up the high strand. Not to speak of the noises the troglodytes made at night in the basement. But I had lived in the house my whole life, as had my ancestors for half a millennium. I felt comfortable walking on the great stone terrace, wrapped in a warm cloak of grumbler fur, hearing the sea’s slow, tremulous cadence far below.

  Of course my heart had been broken that night, two years before, when Craig had stepped into the transmitter and disappeared, forever I had thought. There’d been a thunderstorm, and my troglodytes had been nervous, padding restlessly around the house, their silver-grey fur standing on end. I’d begged Craig not to go. The new settlers and the city dwellers don’t believe the troglodytes are psychic, but we who belong to the old families know they are.

  Craig had shaken his head, his dark face set and stern. He had decided to go to Newport that day, and go he would. He believed that a person should give in to circumstances as little as possible. Into the glassite box he stepped, and activated the machine. At that moment, lightning struck the house. The lights went out. I heard a great crack of thunder directly overhead. Then the auxiliary generator came on. The lights glowed, dimmed, brightened, and I saw that Craig was gone. Worried, I called the main transmission station in Newport. Craig had not arrived there.

  “Oh, no!” I cried, and fell to the floor in a faint.

  When I awoke, a man was bending over me: tall and slender and silver-haired, though his face was unlined. His eyes were an extraordinary bright blue.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said, and he helped me to my feet.

  In that manner I met Ricardo. Ah, that summer! He was a troubleshooter for the transit service, and he kept coming back to check my transmitter. First he took it apart, hoping to find Craig in the storage matrix. Then he checked the transmitting mast from top to bottom. Then he checked the house’s electrical system. Everything was in order, he said. Craig had apparently transmitted just as the lightning struck and the power went off. Either the lightning had garbled the transmitter signal, or there hadn’t been enough power to transmit the signal to its destination. Craig was gone forever.

  By midsummer Ricardo and I were in love. Poor Craig, I thought, wandering hand in hand with Ricardo along the stony shore. But least said, soonest mended. Ricardo and I embraced in the mist at the sea’s edge, our ears full of the waves’ melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

  Early in the fall Ricardo was transferred to another district on the other side of the planet, and I met Ming at a party in Newport. Half Chinese, he was stocky and broad-shouldered, brown-eyed and brown-haired. He was a collateral descendant of Mao Tse-tung and the present head of the family, paid by the state to return to Earth every several years and perform certain necessary rites of ancestor worship. He and I stayed together all winter, spending our days on one or another of the Pearl Islands, which were halfway around the planet from my house. We swam in the warm water and basked in the sun on shimmering, pearl-grey beaches. In the jungle behind us, birds darted from branch to branch of the flowering bloodroot trees. Out in the lagoon, broad-backed grumblers sometimes surfaced and made loud grunting and mumbling noises. Our nights were spent at my house, while the wind moaned around the old stone walls and snow whirled down onto the terrace. My faithful trogl
odytes brought us baked apples and hot wine. A fire burned in the fireplace. Warmed by it, we embraced, and my troglodyte musicians played water drums and chimes.

  After Ming came Harry, a red-headed oceanologist. With him I spent the spring and summer, commuting daily between my house and his submersible laboratory. What nights we spent in the ocean’s depths! Beyond the laboratory’s portholes, deep-sea fishes glowed. I brought him brightly colored mosses and lichens from my rock garden and shells from the shore below my house. He gave me hard, delicate pieces of sea lace which his nets had dragged off the ocean floor.

  We kissed and parted in the fall, and I was alone for a while, except for my faithful troglodytes. I stayed home a lot that winter, troubled by melancholy and the sense that life was passing me by. Those were dark months. Even the merry antics of my troglodyte tumblers couldn’t cheer me. The house seemed cold and drafty, though it had excellent central heating. I took up embroidery to help pass the time, took holovision courses in Amerindian cooking and flower arranging, and tried to get the family library in order. Nothing helped. I remained as melancholy as ever.

  With spring came hope, however. My spirits lifted, and I set to work in my rock garden. One by one, my plants revived. The scarlet parasols opened their round red leaves and tilted them toward the sun, and the silverspears thrust their white, slender stalks up through the sandy soil. My troglodytes cavorted on the terrace on nights when the mist cleared and the moons were visible: three tiny yellow disks lighting the dark sea.

  Early in the summer Craig returned, my stern, bold, starfaring lover, back from the dead.

  The night before he came back, my troglodytes were nervous and wandered through the house, mewing. They clutched at my hands with their small, soft, furry hands and stared up at me with huge dark eyes. What could it mean? I wondered. Restless myself, I walked on the terrace. The sea was calm that night. The tide was full, and the three moons shone. North and south of me, I saw the cliffs that stood, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

  I went to bed finally, but couldn’t sleep, got up and walked again on the terrace. At dawn I went to sleep.

  I woke late in the morning, when someone shook my shoulder. Opening my eyes, I saw Craig. I gasped and passed out. I woke again when he slapped my face. I said something silly, such as “You’re dead.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “No, no, my love.”

  I sat up and looked at him. His face was unchanged, but his body was entirely different. Or had I forgotten him so completely? It wasn’t possible. The Craig I remembered was tall and thin and muscular, a keen-looking sword blade of a man. This fellow was squatty and apelike, with too-long arms and too-short legs. He grinned again. “It took two years of surgery to get this result, my love. You should’ve seen me before.”

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “All I know is I came out in Landingtown instead of Newport. Half crazy, with half my memory gone, and my body looking like—” He shrugged again. “Something went wrong with the transmission, obviously. Well, that’s done and I’m back.” He bent and kissed me lightly on the lips. I drew back.

  “Oh, no,” he said, and grasped my shoulders. I saw his hands as they came toward me. They had no little fingers. Craig pulled me toward him and kissed me again, this time ruthlessly.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were still alive?” I asked after he let me go.

  “I asked them not to. I didn’t want to see you. I remembered enough to know I hadn’t looked that way before.”

  I realized with sudden outrage that Ricardo must have known what had happened to Craig. He had told me he was looking for Craig in my transmitter’s storage matrix, when he had known perfectly well that Craig was in the hospital in Landingtown. What perfidy! I thought.

  I got up and we had breakfast in the sunroom, my troglodytes serving us, their grey fur all abristle. There was no sunlight that morning. A grey mist swirled outside the glassite windows, and the clear panes were beaded with water. The sea was quiet. I could hear the fountain at the other end of the room gurgling softly, surrounded by pots of azalias. When we were done eating, Craig leaned back in his chair and sipped at a final cup of coffee. “I got invalided out of the space service. After they finished putting my mind back together, I couldn’t pass the psych tests. So here I am.”

  “Why?” I asked, sipping at my own cafe au lait.

  He grinned. He hadn’t smiled that way before, I thought. This smile was twisted and wry. There were lines around his eyes now, and his face was a little thinner, so there were hollows below his high cheekbones. “What else do I have?”

  I set down my cup. “I don’t want you to stay, Craig.”

  “I have to. The transmitter’s no longer working.”

  “What! Why?”

  “When I arrived, you were asleep and your troglodytes were all in the basement. I shorted the transmitter refrigeration unit. By this time, the transmitter brain ought to be too hot to function.”

  “I’d better call a repairperson,” I said, and stood up.

  “The radiophone isn’t working either.”

  I looked across the table at Craig, who was still sipping at his coffee, and I thought about asking my troglodytes to take care of him. But troglodytes are a peaceful folk, which is why they have disappeared from most parts of the planet. They survive only where there are old houses, and members of the old families able to protect them.

  What could I do? I sat down and asked my troglodytes to bring me more cafe au lait. Craig grinned. “One of the things I’ve always liked about you, Lucia, is your calmness.”

  After breakfast Craig said he wanted to walk on the beach. I got my grumbler-fur cloak and a brooch an ancestor of mine had found three hundred years before, lying on a beach on a distant planet. There had been no other signs of intelligent life anywhere on the planet. The brooch was a gold disk, engraved with strange characters. I used it to fasten the cloak and we went outside. The mist had lifted a little, and I could see smooth, dark-grey billows coming slowly in to break against the grey gravel beach. I was, of course, afraid. What was this strange, new Craig planning? Was he dangerous?

  “What are you planning?” I asked.

  Craig stopped, turned and stared at me. I was sure that his eyes had been dark brown before. Now they were light brown, almost yellow. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me toward him, murmuring, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.” He kissed me. For a moment I remembered I had loved him once and returned the kiss. When he let me go, he laughed. “That’s better.”

  We walked farther down the beach. Craig kept hold of my hand. At last we turned back. What I needed, I thought, was a weapon. There was my grandfather’s collection of death rays and shock whips, which covered the wall above the big fireplace, but it had been a century since they had been recharged. Why hadn’t I taken karate or kung fu? Then I remembered that Craig was a black belt in everything. I sighed.

  We went back into the house, and I fixed an Aztec luncheon while Craig wandered around. My troglodytes were still upset and pattered around the kitchen, mewing sadly while they helped me. Was there worse to come?

  “The flower arrangements are new,” he said when he came back. “And all that sea lace. Are you starting a collection?”

  “No,” I said, and set food on the table.

  After lunch we made love, if love is the right word, in the red bedroom. It had always been Craig’s favorite room. When we were done, he went to sleep. I got up and took a shower. I considered getting a knife out of the kitchen and stabbing him while he slept. But I’ve always been squeamish. I put on a houserobe with a band of embroidery around the bottom that I’d done myself and went back to look at Craig. He was still asleep. One arm was outside the covers. I looked at the abnormally long forearm and the four-fingered hand. I sighed and went down to ihe kitchen. There were several troglodytes there, cleaning up. They came over and touched my hands g
ently and looked up at me. “It’s all right,” I said, though it wasn’t, and the troglodytes, being psychic, knew it. I got myself a snifter of brandy and took it to the sunroom. How long would it be before someone tried to reach me and couldn’t? How long before a repair crew was sent out? What would Craig do then? The sunroom ceiling glowed, giving the plants the sunlight they needed. I sat down in the shade of a potted palm.

  He would have to go back to the hospital, of course. The doctors had done a terrible job of putting him back together. Could he sue them? I wondered. I was certain that I could sue them, and I intended to. He should not have been let out in his condition. That was negligence, if I ever saw it. My troglodytes brought me more brandy and made soft growling sounds which were intended to reassure and comfort me. I smiled at them, patted them and said it was all right. After they left, I looked out the windows. It was raining. Drops of water ran down the panes. The mist was so thick that I couldn’t see the parapet on the other side of the terrace. Craig ought to be able to sue the transit service, I thought. Or was the lightning an act of God? In any case, that wasn’t my problem. I drank the brandy.