Orbit 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  She was in black from head to foot.

  I thought black, but black was not the word; the word was blackness, dark beyond dark, dark that drained the eyesight, something I could never have imagined even in my dreams, a black in which there was no detail, no sight, no nothing, only an awful desperate dizziness, for her body - the thing was skintight, like a diver’s costume or an acrobat’s - had actually disappeared, completely blotted out except for its outline. Her head and bare hands floated in the air. She said, ‘Pretty, yes?’ Then she sat crosslegged on our radio. She said, ‘Please pull the curtains,’ and I did, going from one to the other and drawing them shut, circling my frozen parents and then stopping short in the middle of the quaking floor. I said, ‘I’m going to faint.’ She was off the radio and into my mother’s coat in an instant; holding me by the arm, she got me on to the living room couch and put her arm around me, massaging my back. She said, ‘Your parents are asleep.’ Then she said, ‘You have known some of this. You are a wonderful little pickup but you get mixed up, yes? All about the Morlocks? The Trans-Temporal Military Authority?’

  I began to say ‘Oh oh oh oh —’ and she massaged my back again.

  ‘Nothing will hurt you,’ she said. ‘Nothing will hurt your parents. Think how exciting it is! Think! The rebel Morlocks, the revolution in the Trans-Temporal Military Authority.’

  ‘But I - I —’ I said.

  ‘We are friends,’ she continued gravely, taking my hands. ‘We are real friends. You helped me. We will not forget that,’ and slinging my mother’s coat off on to the couch, she went and stood in front of the archway. She put her hands on her hips, then began rubbing the back of her neck nervously and clearing her throat. She turned around to give me one last look.

  ‘Are you calm?’ she said. I nodded. She smiled at me. ‘Be calm,’ she said softly. ‘Sois tranquille. We’re friends,’ and then she put herself to watching the archway. She said once, almost sadly, ‘Friends,’ and then stepped back and smiled again at me.

  The archway was turning into a mirror. It got misty, then bright, like a cloud of bright dust, then almost like a curtain; and then it was a mirror, although all I could see in it was our visitor and myself, not my parents, not the furniture, not the living room.

  Then the first Morlock stepped through.

  And the second.

  And the third.

  And the others.

  Oh, the living room was filled with giants! They were like her, like her in the face, like her in the bodies of the very tall, like her in the black uniforms, men and women of all the races of the earth, everything mixed and huge as my mother’s hybrid flowers but a foot taller than our visitor, a flock of black ravens, black bats, black wolves, the professionals of the future world, perched on our furniture, on the Philco radio, some on the very walls and drapes of the windows as if they could fly, hovering in the air as if they were out in space where the Morlocks meet, half a thousand in a bubble between the stars.

  Who rule the worlds.

  Two came through the mirror who crawled on the rug, both in diving suits and goldfish-bowl helmets, a man and a woman, fat and shaped like seals. They lay on the rug breathing water (for I saw the specks flowing in it, in and out of strange frills around their necks, the way dust moves in air) and looking up at the rest with tallowy faces. Their suits bulged. One of the Morlocks said something to one of the seals and one of the seals answered, fingering a thing attached to the barrels on its back, gurgling.

  Then they all began to talk.

  Even if I’d known what language it was, I think it would have been too fast for me; it was very fast, very hard-sounding, very urgent, like the numbers pilots call into the ground or something like that, like a code that everybody knows, to get things done as fast as you can. Only the seal-people talked slowly, and they gurgled and stank like a dirty beach. They did not even move their faces except to make little round mouths, like fish. I think I was put to sleep for a while (or maybe I just fell asleep) and then it was something about the seal-people, with the Morlock who was seated on the radio joining in - and then general enough - and then something going round the whole room - and then that fast, hard urgent talk between one of the Morlocks and my friend. It was still business, but they looked at me; it was awful to be looked at and yet I felt numb; I wished I were asleep; I wanted to cry because I could not understand a word they were saying. Then my friend suddenly shouted; she stepped back and threw both arms out, hands extended and fingers spread, shaking violently. She was shouting instead of talking, shouting desperately about something, pounding one fist into her palm, her face contorted, just as if it was not business. The other Morlock was breathing quickly and had gone pale with rage. He whispered something, something very venomous. He took from his black uniform, which could have hidden anything, a silver dime, and holding it up between thumb and forefinger, he said in perfectly clear English, while looking at me:

  ‘In the name of the war against the Trans-Tempor —’

  She had jumped him in an instant. I scrambled up; I saw her close his fist about the dime with her own; then it was all a blur on the floor until the two of them stood up again, as far as they could get from each other, because it was perfectly clear that they hated each other. She said very distinctly, ‘I do insist.’ He shrugged. He said something short and sharp. She took out of her own darkness a knife - only a knife - and looked slowly about the room at each person in it. Nobody moved. She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Tchal grozny?’

  The seal-woman hissed on the floor, like steam coming out of a leaky radiator. She did not get up but lay on her back, eyes blinking, a woman encased in fat.

  ‘You?’ said my friend insultingly. ‘You will stain the carpet.’

  The seal-woman hissed again. Slowly my friend walked towards her, the others watching. She did not bend down, as I had expected, but dived down abruptly with a kind of sidewise roll, driving herself into the seal-woman’s side. She had planted one heel on the stomach of the woman’s diving suit; she seemed to be trying to tear it. The seal-woman caught my friend’s knife-hand with one glove and was trying to turn it on my friend while she wrapped the other gloved arm around my friend’s neck. She was trying to strangle her. My friend’s free arm was extended on the rug; it seemed to me that she was either leaning on the floor or trying to pull herself free. Then again everything went into a sudden blur. There was a gasp, a loud mechanical click; my friend vaulted up and backward, dropping her knife and clapping one hand to her left eye. The seal-woman was turning from side to side on the floor, a kind of shudder running from her feet to her head, an expressionless flexing of her body and face. Bubbles were forming in the goldfish-bowl helmet. The other seal-person did not move. As I watched, the water began falling in the seal-woman’s helmet and then it was all air. I supposed she was dead. My friend, our visitor, was standing in the middle of the room, blood welling from under her hand; she was bent over with pain and her face was horribly distorted but not one person in that room moved to touch her.

  ‘Life —’ she gasped, ‘for life. Yours,’ and then she crashed to the rug. The seal-woman had slashed open her eye. Two of the Morlocks rushed to her then and picked up her and her knife; they were dragging her towards the mirror in the archway when she began muttering something.

  ‘Damn your sketches!’ shouted the Morlock she had fought with, completely losing control of himself. ‘We are at war; Trans-Temp is at our heels; do you think we have time for dilettantism? You presume on being that woman’s granddaughter! We are fighting for the freedom of fifty billions of people, not for your scribbles!’ and motioning to the others, who immediately dragged the body of the seal-woman through the mirror and began to follow it themselves, he turned to me.

  ‘You!’ he snapped. ‘You will speak to nobody of this. Nobody!’

  I put my arms around myself.

  ‘Do not try to impress anyone with stories,’ he added contemptuously. ‘You are lucky to live,’ and
without another look he followed the last of the Morlocks through the mirror, which promptly disappeared. There was blood on the rug, a few inches from my feet. I bent down and put my fingertips in it, and then with no clear reason, I put my fingers to my face.

  ‘—come back,’ said my mother. I turned to face them, the wax manikins who had seen nothing.

  ‘Who the devil drew the curtains!’ shouted my father. I’ve told you’ (to me) ‘that I don’t like tricks, young lady, and if it weren’t for your mother’s —’

  ‘Oh, Ben, Ben! She’s had a nosebleed!’ cried my mother.

  They told me later that I fainted.

  * * * *

  I was in bed a few days, because of the nosebleed, but then they let me up. My parents said I probably had had anaemia. They also said they had seen our visitor off at the railroad station that morning, and that she had boarded the train as they watched her; tall, frizzy-haired, freakish, dressed in black down to between the knees and ankles, legged like a stork and carrying all her belongings in a small valise. ‘Gone to the circus,’ said my mother. There was nothing in the room that had been hers, nothing in the attic, no reflection in the window at which she had stood, brilliantly lit against the black night, nothing in the kitchen and nothing at the Country Club but tennis courts overgrown with weeds. Joe never came back to our house. The week before school I looked through all my books, starting with The Time Machine and ending with The Green Hat; then I went downstairs and looked through every book in the house. There was nothing. I was invited to a party; my mother would not let me go. Cornflowers grew around the house. Betty came over once and was bored. One afternoon at the end of summer, with the wind blowing through the empty house from top to bottom and everybody away, nobody next door, my parents in the back yard, the people on the other side of us gone swimming, everybody silent or sleeping or off somewhere - except for someone down the block whom I could hear mowing the lawn - I decided to sort and try on all my shoes. I did this in front of a full-length mirror fastened to the inside of my closet door. I had been taking off and putting on various of my winter dresses, too, and I was putting one particular one away in a box on the floor of the closet when I chanced to look up at the inside of the closet door.

  She was standing in the mirror. It was all black behind her, like velvet. She was wearing something black and silver, half-draped, half-nude, and there were lines on her face that made it look sectioned off, or like a cobweb; she had one eye. The dead eye radiated spinning white light, like a Catherine wheel. She said:

  ‘Did you ever think to go back and take care of yourself when you are little? Give yourself advice?’

  I couldn’t say anything.

  ‘I am not you,’ she said, ‘but I have had the same thought and now I have come back four hundred and fifty years. Only there is nothing to say. There is never anything to say. It is a pity, but natural, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ I whispered. ‘Stay!’ She put one foot up on the edge of the mirror as if it were the threshold of a door. The silver sandal she had worn at the Country Club dance almost came into my bedroom: thick-heeled, squat, flaking, as ugly as sin; new lines formed on her face and all over her bare skin, ornamenting her all over. Then she stepped back; she shook her head, amused; the dead eye waned, filled again, exploded in sparks and went out, showing the naked socket, ugly, shocking, and horrible.

  ‘Tcha!’ she said, ‘my grandma thought she would bring something hard to a world that was soft and silly but nice, and now it’s silly and not so nice and the hard has got too hard and the soft too soft and my great-grandma - it is she who founded the order - is dead. Not that it matters. Nothing ends, you see. Just keeps going on and on.’

  ‘But you can’t see!’ I managed. She poked herself in the temple and the eye went on again.

  ‘Bizarre,’ she said. ‘Interesting. Attractive. Stone blind is twice as good. I’ll tell you my sketches.’

  ‘But you don’t - you can’t —’ I said.

  ‘The first,’ she said, lines crawling all over her, ‘is an Eloi having the Go-Jollies, and that is a bald, fat man in a toga, a frilled bib, a sunbonnet and shoes you would not believe, who has a crystal ball in his lap and from it wires plugged into his eyes and his nose and his ears and his tongue and his head, just like your lamps. That is an Eloi having the Go-Jollies.’

  I began to cry.

  ‘The second,’ she went on, ‘is a Morlock working; and that is myself holding a skull, like Hamlet, only if you look closely at the skull you will see it is the world, with funny things sticking out of the seas and the polar ice caps, and that it is full of people. Much too full. There are too many of the worlds, too.’

  ‘If you’ll stop —’ I cried.

  ‘They are all pushing each other off,’ she continued, ‘and some are falling into the sea, which is a pity, no doubt, but quite natural, and if you will look closely at all these Eloi you will see that each one is holding his crystal ball, or running after an animated machine which runs faster than he, or watching another Eloi on a screen who is cleverer and looks fascinating, and you will see that under the fat the man or woman is screaming, screaming and dying.

  ‘And my third sketch,’ she said, ‘which is a very little one, shows a goldfish-bowl full of people in black. Behind that is a smaller goldfish-bowl full of people in black, which is going after the first goldfish-bowl, and behind the second is a third, which is going after the second, and so on, or perhaps they alternate; that would be more economical. Or perhaps I am only bitter because I lost my eye. It’s a personal problem.’

  I got to my feet. I was so close I could have touched her. She crossed her arms across her breast and looked down at me; she then said softly, ‘My dear, I wished to take you with me, but that’s impossible. I’m very sorry,’ and looking for the first time both serious and tender, she disappeared behind a swarm of sparks.

  I was looking at myself. I had recently made, passionately and in secret, the uniform of the Trans-Temporal Military Authority as I thought it ought to look: a black tunic over black sleeves and black tights. The tights were from a high school play I had been in the year before and the rest was cut out of the lining of an old winter coat. That was what I was wearing that afternoon. I had also fastened a silver curling-iron to my waist with a piece of cord. I put one foot up in the air, as if on the threshold of the mirror, and a girl in ragged black stared back at me. She turned and frantically searched the entire room, looking for sketches, for notes, for specks of silver paint, for anything at all. Then she sat down on my bed. She did not cry. She said to me, ‘You look idiotic’ Someone was still mowing the lawn outside, probably my father. My mother would be clipping, patching, rooting up weeds; she never stopped. Some day I would join a circus, travel to the moon, write a book; after all, I had helped kill a man. I had been somebody. It was all nonsense. I took off the curling-iron and laid it on the bed. Then I undressed and got into my middy-blouse and skirt and I put the costume on the bed in a heap. As I walked towards the door of the room, I turned to take one last look at myself in the mirror and at my strange collection of old clothes. For a moment something else moved in the mirror, or I thought it did, something behind me or to one side, something menacing, something half-blind, something heaving slowly like a shadow, leaving perhaps behind it faint silver flakes like the shadow of a shadow or some carelessly dropped coins, something glittering, something somebody had left on the edge of vision, dropped by accident in the dust and cobwebs of an attic. I wished for it violently; I stood and clenched my fists; I almost cried, I wanted something to come out of the mirror and strike me dead. If I could not have a protector, I wanted a monster, a mutation, a horror, a murderous disease, anything! anything at all to accompany me downstairs so that I would not have to go down alone.

  Nothing came. Nothing good, nothing bad. I heard the lawnmower going on. I would have to face by myself my father’s red face, his heart disease, his temper, his nasty insistencies. I would have to face my
mother’s sick smile, looking up from the flowerbed she was weeding, always on her knees somehow, saying before she was ever asked, ‘Oh the poor woman. Oh the poor woman.’

  And quite alone.

  No more stories.

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  * * * *

  Remembrance to Come

  by Gene Wolfe

  Leaves in his face.

  He had chosen, in order to prepare himself, to go surface and walk in the sycamore-shaded park where he and Ruth had once received their diplomas. Surface the air had been cool and fragrant with autumn and rain just past; but once underground and on the belt again there was only the never-changing odorlessness, and the eighty-three-degree warmth, set to make coeds in body paint comfortable.