Orbit 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  My father said, “I don’t think you understand me. I don’t necessarily mean here physically, but here, socially and intellectually. I have traveled, and you may, but—”

  “But you end here,” Dr Marsch said.

  “We end at this level!” It was the only time, I think, that I ever saw my father excited. He was almost speechless as he waved at the notebooks and tapes that thronged the walls. “After how many generations? We do not achieve fame or the rule of even this miserable little colony planet. Something must be changed, but what?” He glared at Dr Marsch.

  “You are not unique,” Dr Marsch said, then smiled. “That sounds like a truism, doesn’t it? But I wasn’t referring to your duplicating yourself. I meant that since it became possible, back on Earth during the last quarter of the twentieth century, it has been done in such chains a number of times. We have borrowed a term from engineering to describe it, and call it the process of relaxation—a bad nomenclature, but the best we have. Do you know what relaxation in the engineering sense is?”

  “No.”

  “There are problems which are not directly soluble, but which can be solved by a succession of approximations. In heat transfer, for example, it may not be possible to calculate initially the temperature at every point on the surface of an unusually shaped body. But the engineer, or his computer, can assume reasonable temperatures, see how nearly stable the assumed values would be, then make new assumptions based on the result. As the levels of approximation progress, the successive sets become more and more similar until there is essentially no change. That is why I said the two of you are essentially one individual.”

  “What I want you to do,” my father said impatiently, “is to make Number Five understand that the experiments I have performed on him, particularly the narcotherapeutic examinations he resents so much, are necessary. That if we are to become more than we have been we must find out—” He had been almost shouting, and he stopped abruptly to bring his voice under control. “That is the reason he was produced, the reason for David too—I hoped to learn something from an outcrossing.”

  “Which was the rationale, no doubt,” Dr Marsch said, “for the existence of Dr Veil as well, in an earlier generation. But as far as your examinations of your younger self are concerned, it would be just as useful for him to examine you.”

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “You keep saying that he and I are identical. That’s incorrect. I can see that we’re similar in some respects, but I’m not really like my father.”

  “There are no differences that cannot be accounted for by age. You are what? Eighteen? And you,” he looked toward my father, “I should say are nearly fifty. There are only two forces, you see, which act to differentiate between human beings: they are heredity and environment, nature and nurture. And since the personality is largely formed during the first three years of life, it is the environment provided by the home which is decisive. Now every person is born into some home environment, though it may be such a harsh one that he dies of it; and no person, except in this situation we call anthropological relaxation, provides that environment himself- it is furnished for him by the preceding generation.”

  “Just because both of us grew up in this house—”

  “Which you built and furnished and filled with the people you chose. But wait a moment. Let’s talk about a man neither of you have ever seen, a man born in a place provided by parents quite different from himself: I mean the first of you . . .”

  I was no longer listening. I had come to kill my father, and it was necessary that Dr Marsch leave. I watched him as he leaned forward in his chair, his long, white hands making incisive little gestures, his cruel lips moving in a frame of black hair; I watched him and I heard nothing. It was as though I had gone deaf or as if he could communicate only by his thoughts, and I, knowing the thoughts were silly lies had shut them out. I said, “You are from Sainte Anne.”

  He looked at me in surprise, halting in the midst of a senseless sentence. “I have been there, yes. I spent several years on Sainte Anne before coming here.”

  “You were born there. You studied your anthropology there from books written on Earth twenty years ago. You are an abo, or at least half-abo; but we are men.”

  Marsch glanced at my father, then said: “The abos are gone. Scientific opinion on Sainte Anne holds that they have been extinct for almost a century.”

  “You didn’t believe that when you came to see my aunt.”

  “I’ve never accepted Veil’s Hypothesis. I called on everyone here who had published anything in my field. Really, I don’t have time to listen to this.”

  “You are an abo and not from Earth.”

  And in a short time my father and I were alone.

  •

  Most of my sentence I served in a labor camp in the Tattered Mountains. It was a small camp, housing usually only a hundred and fifty prisoners—sometimes less than eighty when the winter deaths had been bad. We cut wood and burned charcoal and made skis when we found good birch. Above the timberline we gathered a saline moss supposed to be medicinal and knotted long plans for rock slides that would crush the stalking machines that were our guards—though somehow the moment never came, the stones never slid. The work was hard, and these guards administered exactly the mixture of severity and fairness some prison board had decided upon when they were programmed and the problem of brutality and favoritism by hirelings was settled forever, so that only well-dressed men at meetings could be cruel or kind.

  Or so they thought. I sometimes talked to my guards for hours about Mr Million, and once I found a piece of meat, and once a cake of hard sugar, brown and gritty as sand, hidden in the corner where I slept.

  A criminal may not profit by his crime, but the court—so I was told much later—could find no proof that David was indeed my father’s son, and made my aunt his heir.

  She died, and a letter from an attorney informed me that by her favor I had inherited “a large house in the city of Port-Mimizon, together with the furniture and chattels appertaining thereto’. And that this house, ‘located at 666 Saltimbanque, is presently under the care of a robot servitor’. Since the robot servitors under whose direction I found myself did not allow me writing materials, I could not reply.

  Time passed on the wings of birds. I found dead larks at the feet of north-facing cliffs in autumn, at the feet of south-facing cliffs in spring.

  I received a letter from Mr Million. Most of my father’s girls had left during the investigation of his death; the remainder he had been obliged to send away when my aunt died, finding that as a machine he could not enforce the necessary obedience. David had gone to the capital. Phaedria had married well. Marydol had been sold by her parents. The date on his letter was three years later than the date of my trial, but how long the letter had been in reaching me I could not tell. The envelope had been opened and resealed many times and was soiled and torn.

  A seabird, I believe a gannet, came fluttering down into our camp after a storm, too exhausted to fly. We killed and ate it.

  One of our guards went berserk, burned fifteen prisoners to death, and fought the other guards all night with swords of white and blue fire. He was not replaced.

  I was transferred with some others to a camp farther north where I looked down chasms of red stone so deep that if I kicked a pebble in, I could hear the rattle of its descent grow to a roar of slipping rock—and hear that, in half a minute, fade with distance to silence, yet never strike the bottom lost somewhere in darkness.

  I pretended the people I had known were with me. When I sat shielding my basin of soup from the wind, Phaedria sat upon a bench nearby and smiled and talked about her friends. David played squash for hours on the dusty ground of our compound, slept against the wall near my own corner. Marydol put her hand in mine while I carried my saw into the mountains.

  In time they all grew dim, but even in the last year I never slept without telling myself, just before sleep, that Mr Million would take us to
the city library in the morning; never woke without fearing that my father’s valet had come for me.

  •

  Then I was told that I was to go, with three others, to another camp. We carried our food, and nearly died of hunger and exposure on the way. From there we were marched to a third camp where we were questioned by men who were not prisoners like ourselves but free men in uniforms who made notes of our answers and at last ordered that we bathe, and burned our old clothing, and gave us a thick stew of meat and barley.

  I remember very well that it was then that I allowed myself to realize, at last, what these things meant. I dipped my bread into my bowl and pulled it out soaked with the fragrant stock, with bits of meat and grains of barley clinging to it; and I thought then of the fried bread and coffee at the slave market not as something of the past but as something in the future, and my hands shook until I could no longer hold my bowl and I wanted to rush shouting at the fences.

  In two more days we, six of us now, were put into a mule cart that drove on winding roads always downhill until the winter that had been dying behind us was gone, and the birches and firs were gone, and the tall chestnuts and oaks beside the road had spring flowers under their branches.

  The streets of Port-Mimizon swarmed with people. I would have been lost in a moment if Mr Million had not hired a chair for me, but I made the bearers stop, and bought (with money he gave me) a newspaper from a vendor so that I could know the date with certainty at last.

  My sentence had been the usual one of two to fifty years, and though I had known the month and year of the beginning of my imprisonment, it had been impossible to know, in the camps, the number of the current year which everyone counted and no one knew. A man took fever and in ten days, when he was well enough again to work, said that two years had passed or had never been. Then you yourself took fever. I do not recall any headline, any article from the paper I bought. I read only the date at the top, all the way home.

  It had been nine years.

  I had been eighteen when I had killed my father. I was now twenty-seven. I had thought I might be forty.

  •

  The flaking gray walls of our house were the same. The iron dog with his three wolf-heads still stood in the front garden, but the fountain was silent, and the beds of fern and moss were full of weeds. Mr Million paid my chairmen and unlocked with a key the door that was always guard-chained but unbolted in my father’s day—but as he did so, an immensely tall and lanky woman who had been hawking pralines in the street came running toward us. It was Nerissa, and I now had a servant and might have had a bedfellow if I wished, though I could pay her nothing.

  •

  And now I must, I suppose, explain why I have been writing this account, which has already been the labor of days; and I must even explain why I explain. Very well then. I have written to disclose myself to myself, and I am writing now because I will, I know, sometimes read what I am now writing and wonder.

  Perhaps by the time I do, I will have solved the mystery of myself; or perhaps I will no longer care to know the solution.

  It has been three years since my release. This house, when Nerissa and I re-entered it, was in a very confused state, my aunt having spent her last days, so Mr Million told me, in a search for my father’s supposed hoard. She did not find it, and I do not think it is to be found; knowing his character better than she, I believe he spent most of what his girls brought him on his experiments and apparatus. I needed money badly myself at first, but the reputation of the house brought women seeking buyers and men seeking to buy. It is hardly necessary, as I told myself when we began, to do more than introduce them, and I have a good staff now. Phaedria lives with us and works too; the brilliant marriage was a failure after all. Last night while I was working in my surgery I heard her at the library door. I opened it and she had the child with her. Someday they’ll want us.

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  * * * *

  Edward Bryant

  JODY AFTER THE WAR

  LIGHT LAY bloody on the mountainside. From our promontory jutting above the scrub pine, we looked out over the city. Denver spread from horizon to horizon. The tower of the U.S. Capitol Building caught the sun blindingly. We watched the contrail of a Concorde II jetliner making its subsonic approach into McNicholls Field, banking in a sweeping curve over the pine-lined foothills. Directly below us, a road coiled among rocks and trees. A campfire fed smoke into the November air. The wind nudged the smoke trail our way and I smelled the acrid tang of wood smoke. We watched the kaleidoscope of cloud shadows crosshatch the city.

  Jody and I sat close, my arm around her shoulders. No words, no facial expressions as afternoon faded out to dusk. My feet gradually went to sleep.

  “Hey.”

  “Mmh?” she said, startled.

  “You look pensive.”

  Her face stayed blank.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not. I’m just feeling.” She turned back to the city. “What are you thinking?”

  “Uh, not much,” I said. Lie; I’d been thinking about survivors. “Well, thinking how beautiful you are.” Banal, but only half an evasion. I mean she was beautiful. Jody was imprinted in my mind the first time I saw her, when I peered up out of the anesthetic fog and managed to focus on her standing beside my hospital bed: the half-Indian face with the high cheekbones. Her eyes the color of dark smoke. I couldn’t remember what she’d worn then. To­day she wore faded blue jeans and a blue chambray work shirt, several sizes too large. No shoes. Typically, she had climbed the mountain barefoot.

  Without looking back at me, she said, “You were thinking more than that.”

  I hesitated. I flashed a sudden mental image of Jody’s face the way she had described it in her nightmares: pocked with red and black spots that oozed blood and pus, open sores that gaped where her hair had grown, her skin. . .

  Jody squeezed my hand. It was as if she were thinking, that’s all right, Paul, if you don’t want to talk to me now, that’s fine.

  I never was any good with evasions, except perhaps with my­self. Survivors. Back after the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese had called themhibakusha - which translates roughly as “sufferers.” Here in America we just called them survivors, after the Chinese suicided their psychotic society in the seventies, and destroyed most of urban America in the process. I guess I was lucky; I was just a kid in the middle of Ne­vada when the missiles hit.I’d hardly known what happened east of the Mississippi and west of the Sierras. But Jody had been with her parents somewhere close to Pittsburgh. So she became a sur­vivor; one of millions. Most of them weren’t even hurt in the bomb­ings. Not physically.

  Jody was a survivor. And I was lonely. I had thought we could give each other something that would help. But I wasn’t sure any­more. I wondered if I had a choice after all. And I was scared.

  Jody leaned against me and shared the warmth of my heavy windbreaker. The wind across the heaped boulders of the moun­tainside was chill, with the sun barely down. Jody pressed her head under my chin. I felt the crisp hair against my jaw. She rested quietly for a minute, then turned her face up toward mine.

  “Remember the first time?”

  “Here?”

  She nodded. “A Sunday like this, only not so cold. I’d just got­ten in from that Hayes Theatre assignment in Seattle when you phoned. I hadn’t even unpacked. Then you called and got me up here for a picnic.” She smiled. In the new shadows her teeth were very white. “What a god-awful time.”

  That picnic. A summer and about fourteen hundred miles had separated us while she set up PR holograms ofHamlet and I haunted Denver phone booths.

  Then here on the mountainside we’d fought bitterly. We had hurt each other with words and Jody had begun to cry and I’d held her. We kissed and the barbed words stopped. Through her tears, Jody whispered that she loved me and I told her how much I loved her. That was the last time either of us said those words. Funny how you use a word so gl
ibly when you don’t really understand it; then switch to euphemisms when you do.

  “You’re very far away.”

  “It’s nothing.” I fished for easy words. “The usual,” I said. “My future with Ma Bell, going back to school, moving to Seattle to try writing for the network.” Everything but—Liar! sneered some­thing inside. Why didn’t you include damaged chromosomes in the list, and leukemia, and paranoia, and frigidity, and . . . ? Shut up!

  “Poor Paul,” Jody said. “Hemmed in. Doesn’t know which way to turn. For Christmas I think I’ll get you a lifesize ‘gram from Hamlet. I know a guy at the Hayes who can get me one.”

  “Hamlet, right. That’s me.” I lightly kissed her forehead. “There, I feel better. You ought to be a therapist.”

  Jody looked at me strangely and there was a quick silence I couldn’t fill.

  She smiled then and said, “All right, I’m a therapist. Be a good patient and eat. The thermos won’t keep the coffee hot all night.”