Orbit 14

by Damon Knight

  The presence of dawn took him by surprise, as a hand brushed his shoulder.

  “Sojer, ’tis you?”

  Soldier looked up fiercely into a gray-bristled face.

  “Y’all right? What’ree doin’ down here at dawn, lad?”

  He recognized old Makerrah the fisherman, finally. Lately it amused the old man to call him “lad.”

  “Nothin’ . . . nothin’.” He pulled away from the brine-warped rail. The sun was rising beyond the mountains, the edge of fog caught the colors of fire and was burned away. It would be a hot day. “G’bye, ol’ man.” He began to walk.

  “Y’sure y’re all right?”

  Alone again he sat with one foot hanging, feeling the suck and swell of water far below the pier. All right . . .? When had he ever been all right? And tried to remember into the time before he had known her, and could find no answer.

  There had never been an answer for him on his own world, on Glatte; never even a place for him. Glatte, with a four-point-five technology, and a neo-feudal society, where the competition for that technology was a cultural rationale for war. All his life he had seen his people butchered and butchering, blindly, trapped by senseless superstition. And hated it, but could not escape the bitter ties that led him to his destruction. Fragments of that former life were all that remained now, after two centuries, still clinging to the fact of his alienness. He remembered the taste of fresh-fallen snow … remembered the taste of blood. And the memory filled him of how it felt to be nineteen, and hating war, and blown to pieces … to find yourself suddenly half-prosthetic, with the pieces that were gone still hurting in your mind; and your stepfather’s voice, with something that was not pride, saying you were finally a real man. . . . Soldier held his breath unaware. His name was Maris, consecrated to war; and when at last he understood why, he left Glatte forever.

  He paid all he had to the notorious spacer women; was carried in stasis between the stars, like so much baggage. He wakened to Oro, tech one-point-five, no wars and almost no people. And found out that now to the rest of humanity he was no longer quite human. But he had stayed on Oro for ninety-six years, aging only five, alone. Ninety-six years: a jumble of whiteness climbing a hill, constant New Piraeus; a jumble of faces in dim-blue lantern light, patterning a new life. A pattern endlessly repeated, his smile welcoming, welcoming with the patience of the damned, all the old-new faces that needed him but never wanted him, while he wanted and needed them all. And then she had come to Oro, and after ninety-six years the pattern was broken. Damned Tin Soldier fell in love, after too many years of knowing better, with a ballerina who danced between the stars.

  He pressed his face abruptly against the rail, pain flickered. God, still real; thought it all turned to plastic, damn, damn . . . And shut out three times twenty-five more years of pattern, of everyone else’s nights and cold, solitary mornings trying to find her face. Ninety-one hundred days to carry the ache of returned life, until she would come again, and—

  “See? That’s our ship. The third one in line.”

  Soldier listened, unwillingly. A spacer in lavender stood with her Tail where the dock angled to the right, pointing out across the bay.

  “Can’t we go see it?” Blue glass glittered in mesh across the boy’s back as he draped himself over the rail.

  “Certainly not. Men aren’t allowed on ships; it’s against regulations. And anyway—I’d rather stay here.” She drew him into the corner; amethyst and opal wrapped her neck in light. They began to kiss, hands wandering.

  Soldier got up slowly and left them, still entwined, to privacy. The sun was climbing toward noon; above him as he walked, the skyline of New Piraeus wavered in the hazed and heated air. His eyes moved up and back toward the forty-story skeleton of the Universal Bank under construction, dropped to the warehouses, the docks, his atrophying ancient lower city. Insistent through the cry of sea birds he could hear the hungry whining of heavy machinery, the belly of a changing world. And still I triumph over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time—

  “But I can’t stand it.” His hands tightened on wood. “I stood it for ninety-six years; on the shelf.” Dolefully the sea birds mocked him, creaking in the gray-green twilight, now, now— Wind probed the openings of his shirt like the cold fingers of sorrow. Was dead, for ninety-six years before she came.

  For hours along the rail he had watched the ships in the bay; while he watched, a new ship had come slipping down, like the sun’s tear. Now they grew bright as the day ended, setting a bracelet on the black water; stiffness made him lurch as he turned away, to artificial stars clustered on the wall of night.

  Choking on the past, he climbed the worn streets, where the old patterns of a new night reached him only vaguely, and his eyes found nothing that he remembered anymore. Until he reached the time-eaten door, the thick, peeling mudbrick wall beneath the neon sign. His hand fondled the slippery lock, as it had for two hundred years, TIN SOLDIER . . . loved a ballerina. His hand slammed against the lock. No—this bar is closed tonight.

  The door slid open at his touch; Soldier entered his quiet house. And stopped, hearing the hollow mutter of the empty night, and found himself alone for the rest of his life.

  He moved through the rooms by starlight, touching nothing, until he came to the bedroom door. Opened it, the cold latch burning his hand. And saw her there, lying asleep under the silver robe of the Pleiades. Slowly he closed the door, waited, opened it once more and filled the room with light.

  She sat up, blinking, a fist against her eyes and hair falling ash-golden to her waist. She wore a long soft dress of muted flowers, blue and green and earth tones. “Maris? I didn’t hear you, I guess I went to sleep.”

  He crossed the room, fell onto the bed beside her, caressing her, covering her face with kisses. “They said you were dead … all day I thought—”

  “I am.” Her voice was dull, her eyes dark-ringed with fatigue.

  “No.”

  “I am. To them I am. I’m not a spacer anymore; space is closed to me forever. That’s what it means to be ‘dead.’ To lose your life . . . Mactav—went crazy. I never thought we’d even get to port. I was hurt badly, in the accident.” Fingers twined loops in her hair, pulled—

  “But you’re all right.”

  She shook her head. “No.” She held out her hand, upturned; he took it, curled its fingers into his own, flesh over flesh, warm and supple. “It’s plastic, Maris.”

  He turned the hand over, stroked it, folded the long limber fingers. “It can’t be—”

  “It’s numb. I barely feel you at all. They tell me I may live for hundreds of years.” Her hand tightened into a fist. “And I am a whole woman, but they forbid me to go into space again! I can’t be crew, I can’t be a Mactav, I can only be baggage. And—I can’t even say it’s unfair. . . .” Hot tears burned her face. “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know— If I should come. If you’d want a . . . ballerina who’d been in fire.”

  “You even wondered?” He held her close again, rested her head on his shoulder, to hide his own face grown wet.

  A noise of pain twisted in her throat, her arms tightened. “Oh, Maris. Help me . . . please, help me, help me. . . .”

  He rocked her silently, gently, until her sobbing eased, as he had rocked a homesick teenager a hundred years before.

  “How will I live … on one world for centuries, always remembering. How do you bear it?”

  “By learning what really matters. . . . Worlds are not so small. We’ll go to other worlds if you want—we could see Home. You’d be surprised how much credit you build up over two hundred years.” He kissed her swollen eyes, her reddened cheeks, her lips. “And maybe in time the rules will change.”

  She shook her head, bruised with loss. “Oh, my Maris, my wise love—love me, tie me to the earth.”

  He took her prosthetic hand, kissed the soft palm and fingers. And make it well . .. And knowing that it would never be easy, reached to dim the lights.


  REASONABLE PEOPLE

  In which we learn there is more than one way to skin an alien invader.

  Joanna Russ

  The foreigner appeared in our skies at an acceleration of 15.3 feet per second per second, his automatic warning system—whether bemused or fascinated or perhaps frightened by the new place— having stopped dead, but I do not think he thought in those terms. I think he prided himself on his realistic attitude. He caused himself to be ejected automatically from the ship, and the last we saw of it, it was plunging toward the Pole as if infatuated beyond the dictates of reason. But he didn’t think in those terms, either. He merely lingered in the stratosphere for a few minutes, hanging (so it would seem to anyone else) between heaven and earth. Five miles down and the sky grew light, ten miles and it was blue; stupendous mountains rose on his right, dark forests sucked up sunlight on his left, and on the horizon flickered and died the green auroral glow of the Pole. His parachute opened with a jerk and blossomed above him in a brilliant, sun-shot print of white. Still he fell. I believe, from what my cousin overheard, that at this point he frowned and said to himself, quite audibly, “I don’t like things that aren’t reliable

  Now he has been sitting all evening in a tavern, arguing price with my cousin, who is the clairvoyant and local guide of the neighborhood; the young foreigner does not believe that my cousin is a trained or gifted person, and this I find incredible; our foreigner must be from the cities of the temperate zone where there are so many people that Uncertainty has almost disappeared. My cousin has had to put an irritable finger to his irritable nose, refuse a lower price, shake his head vehemently, and then make as if to stand up and go away. That does it. So they rise in mutual detestation, the foreigner smiling round, I think to declare his good humor and reasonableness, and my cousin retiring sourly into his cloak. The young man has to bend under the lintel of the door but my cousin makes himself into a ramrod; the foreigner runs hands pleasantly through his curly hair and my cousin—who is of course all in black —touches with two fingers his tongue, his forehead, his heart, and his sex. We always halt on the way out of buildings; human habitations stay the same, and so do the clothes that people wear and the land they cultivate and the tools they use, at least unless you direct very strong thoughts at them. And the bodies of sane people never change. But outside it’s a different matter—we must brace ourselves for the possible strangeness: beauty, agony, chaos. So the two men hesitate before they go out, my cousin feeling unhappily and very carefully what’s going on in the night air this night.

  “In addition to being a charlatan,” says the young foreigner, rather shrilly, “you are also a fool.”

  My cousin retreats, shocked, behind his handkerchief.

  “Black! Black! Black!” cries the foreigner. “What for?”

  My cousin says nothing. To let the night hear such questions! It’s necessary for a clairvoyant to be unseen, to become part of the dark itself, but it’s very dangerous. And who talks about it?

  “This place is underdeveloped,” says the young man, “as to the matter of density of population. What do you people think land is for?” He squints ahead into the dark. He says, heartfelt, something I don’t understand; he says, “Oh, damn!”

  Outside the inn courtyard things are indeed the same, which is a great pleasure to my cousin and me; there are no grassy lawns, no scrubby second growth, none of the waste places that are the worst form of Mutability or Uncertainty, only the old solid dark and the smell of pine needles. The old trees cut out the light of the stars. Now (this is a long time later) the forest thins and melts away silently; slowly fading into one another the somber huge trees become dwarf trees and the dwarf trees the last trees of all; this is the way it has always been, which is very reassuring; they are now riding along between sand dunes with grass running like a coarse fringe over the ridges. It’s the foreigner’s trip; they are going five hundred miles north to find his machinery, so you’d think he’d be awake, but he’s been dozing as if it were all my cousin’s job to make the journey; now he wakes up and bobs on his horse, confused. Far away the horizon has begun to turn grey.

  “What,” he says.

  “We have to go round,” says my cousin uncertainly.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Neither do I.” My cousin throws back his head and rides off the path, which has appeared from nowhere: ten feet one way, ten feet the other.

  “What the devil are you doing?” says the foreigner. He is a spoiled young man.

  “Looking.”

  “Find anything?” (sarcastically)

  “You should know,” says my cousin, astonished.

  “Well now, how should I know?” the foreigner asks nobody in particular. He repeats this peevishly to himself, “How should I know?” as if he wanted to change guides, though that’s impossible now, as if he were angry, and for no reason at all. It’s an awful place. The light is lingering between false dawn and dawn with a sickening, faint smell, as if the morning had been embalmed or frozen to death. My cousin stops again, with that agony you get.

  “What now?” says the foreigner, apparently controlling himself.

  My cousin—ill—says nothing.

  “I remarked,” says the foreigner, with rising sarcasm, “what now? And—”

  “It stinks,” says my cousin mildly. The other man should know how hard it is to talk. Is this man a better seer than my cousin, to bear it all so easily? Why is he so confident? He shakes his head.

  “A swamp,” he says and takes the lead. “Nothing but a swamp.”

  As they ride on, the light increases and the pools of ice along the path turn the color of lead. My cousin fixes his eyes unhappily on the horizon, he massages one side of his face, unhappily he shifts in the saddle. Again he knows he must stop. The foreign man, jolted out of sleep, looks along my cousin’s outstretched arm. “What?” he says thickly. He’s a big man, never still, always moving uncomfortably in the saddle. My cousin points toward the east where something rises like the skeleton of a beached whale; from the foreigner I learn that this is an unfinished building for people to be in, that it is two hundred “stories” high, that it is made of “steel.” They have, like poor damned fools, come to one of the Changing Places, the Unsafe Places, they’ve blundered on it through some awful mistake, maybe the foreigner’s insistence, which now looks either stupid or horribly vicious, and once you’ve done that, the only thing to do is get away as fast as you can. My cousin speaks urgently to his horse; they swing round.

  “Where are you going?” says the young foreigner, and then “Oh, I see,” as he makes out the ten-foot-thick walls and the “emplacements” that will hold the “big guns.” I don’t know what these are. That insane man is proud of himself. Perhaps he is not a true person but a piece of a Mutable Place that’s attempting to fool us by taking on the shape of a man—though how he could come into a human habitation is a mystery to me. And Places can’t think, anyway; they’re just rotten bits in the world where anything can come in. Only a saint can live through a Changing Place. So who is this madman after all? No saint, to be sure, for the next crazy thing he says is:

  “I’m going to sleep there.” (I can feel my cousin’s horror.) “No more words.”

  “But—”

  “Never you mind. You mind your own business.”

  “But I—”

  “Shut up!”

  They stare at each other and I think both are surprised at their own anger. The foreigner spurs his horse away down the path that leads—happy and smooth, smooth, smooth!—toward the Big Thing; now he’s a toy, a dot, a speck, at the base of that monolith; now he’s a pinprick on the lowest of those two hundred horizontal streaks of steel that seem to hang by themselves against the livid light. My cousin turns to go, but a cry arrests him. Against the dictates of reason he runs forward—you can’t ask an animal to go into one of those places—and floundering in the sand, falling on one arm and getting up again, stumbling, cursing himself, he reaches
the Thing and pitches onto his knees. The Place has drawn him right up against its wall. There is a something-nothing there, a solid, transparent thing that holds his face. It lets you see inside the belly of the Thing and there—not three inches away—is the face of the young foreigner, lying on its side, white, with its mouth open in a piteous O and its round eyes staring into my cousin’s. Something has changed, changed mightily under him or around him or in him.

  The poor young man is dead.

  With a gasp my cousin vaults to his feet, presses his hand against his side, wrings his hands. He ought to run away now. On his left a swell of sand shivers and slides. My cousin throws out both hands blindly and stares agonized at the sunrise as if even now he feels the pains of death take hold of him. It’s the worst time, neither night nor day. Don’t think clairvoyants are afraid of bodily death; we know what waits for the mind in those pits of Mutability. I send him my thoughts. We both pray.

  And then, with a yellowing of sand and a glinting of steel, the sun rises. With a noiseless flicker, with a simplicity that makes it even more real than the disappearing of smoke, the Big Thing vanishes. A reprieve. The desert changeless again. Safe.

  My cousin weeps. He mounts his horse, sets spurs, and throws back his cloak in a passion of haste. Blood rushes to his face. For hours he does nothing but ride, think of riding, go, think of going. Then, once in the salt flats, his face takes on a dreaming, abstracted sweetness. He’s very sorry for the young man. He’s thinking. Can there be Uncertain Places out there between the suns, bogs, pits of waste and change in the sky? And did that poor fool come from one of them? Did he even speak our language or was it just that my cousin is such a gifted man? Would a worse seer have been able to understand the foreigner at all? My cousin thinks: We must be charitable. We must help one another. The suns are too hot to change and the world itself too massive, but on the surface of the world anything can happen. Anything at all: chaos, agony, beauty. My cousin stretches in the saddle. He appreciates the fact that horses stay horses when people ride them. He enjoys the air that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s a good world, better than the temperate cities, where there are so many persons and so many used things that one might almost forget what Change is like, or that Change exists, one might get careless and arrogant there. Like that poor young man. My cousin looks about the salt flats and says to me, who am a thousand miles away in the sleeping jungle, where the Uncertain Places are as green as nightmares, where plants become animals and animals plants, where rocks grow wings and fly away: