Orbit 2 - Anthology

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “We live from day to day,” she said. “But you don’t know the worst.”

  “My radio,” I said in a spasm of fear. “They took away my radio.”

  “There is a reason,” she said. “They call it therapy.”

  I was mumbling in my throat, in a minute I would scream.

  “Wah.” With ceremony, she pushed aside a picture and touched a tiny switch and then, like sweet balm for my panic, Tommy’s voice flowed into the room.

  When I was quiet she said, “You only hear him once a day.”

  “No.”

  “But you can hear him any time you want to. You hear him when you need him most.”

  But we were missing the first few bars and so we shut up and listened, and after “When a Widow” was over we sat quietly for a moment, her resigned, me weeping, and then Ramona threw another switch and the Sound filtered into the room, and it was almost like being plugged in.

  “Try not to think about it.”

  “I’ll die.”

  “If you think about it you will die. You have to learn to use it instead. In a minute they will, come with lunch,” Ramona said and as The Screamers sang sweet background, she went on in a monotone: “A chop. One lousy chop with a piece of lettuce and maybe some gluten bread. I pretend it’s a leg of lamb, that works if you eat very, very slowly and think about Tommy the whole time; then if you look at your picture of Tommy you can turn the lettuce into anything you want, Caesar salad or a whole smorgasbord, and if you say his name over and over you can pretend a whole bombe or torte if you want to and. . .”

  “I’m going to pretend a ham and kidney pie and a watermelon filled with chopped fruits and Tommy and I are in the Rainbow Room and we’re going to finish up with Fudge Royale ...” I almost drowned in my own saliva; in the background I could almost hear Tommy and I could hear Ramona saying, “Capon, Tommy would like capon, canard a. I’orange, Napoleons, tomorrow we will save Tommy for lunch and listen while we eat . . .” and I thought about that, I thought about listening and imagining whole cream pies and I went on, “. . . lemon pie, rice pudding, a whole Edam cheese. . . I think I’m going to live.”

  The matron came in the next morning at breakfast, and stood as she would every day, tapping red fingernails on one svelte hip, looking on in revulsion as we fell on the glass of orange juice and the hard-boiled egg. I was too weak to control myself; I heard a shrill sniveling sound and realized only from her expression that it was my own voice: “Please, just some bread, a stick of butter, anything, I could lick the dishes if you’d let me, only please don’t leave me like this, please. . .” I can still see her sneer as she turned her back.

  I felt Ramona’s loyal hand on my shoulder. “There’s always toothpaste but don’t use too much at once or they’ll come and take it away from you.”

  I was too weak to rise and so she brought it and we shared the tube and talked about all the banquets we had ever known, and when we got tired of that we talked about Tommy, and when that failed, Ramona went to the switch and we heard “When a Widow,” and that helped for a while, and then we decided that tomorrow we would put off “When a Widow” until bedtime because then we would have something to look forward to all day. Then lunch came and we both wept.

  It was not just hunger: after a while the stomach begins to devour itself and the few grams you toss it at mealtimes assuage it so that in time the appetite itself begins to fail. After hunger comes depression. I lay there, still too weak to get about, and in my misery I realized that they could bring me roast pork and watermelon and Boston cream pie without ceasing; they could gratify all my dreams and I would only weep helplessly, because I no longer had the strength to eat. Even then, when I thought I had reached rock bottom, I had not comprehended the worst. I noticed it first in Ramona. Watching her at the mirror, I said, in fear: “You’re thinner.”

  She turned with tears in her eyes. “Nelly, I’m not the only one.”

  I looked around at my own arms and saw that she was right: there was one less fold of flesh above the elbow; there was one less wrinkle at the wrist. I turned my face to the wall and all Ramona’s talk of food and Tommy did not comfort me. In desperation she turned on Tommy’s voice, but as he sang I lay back and contemplated the melting of my own flesh.

  “If we stole a radio we could hear him again,” Ramona said, trying to soothe me. “We could hear him when he sings tonight.”

  Tommy came to Faircrest on a visit two days later, for reasons that I could not then understand. All the other girls lumbered into the assembly hall to see him, thousands of pounds of agitated flesh. It was that morning that I discovered I could walk again, and I was on my feet, struggling into the pink tent in a fury to get to Tommy, when the matron intercepted me.

  “Not you, Nelly.”

  “I have to get to Tommy. I have to hear him sing.”

  “Next time, maybe.” With a look of naked cruelty she added, “You’re a disgrace. You’re still too gross.”

  I lunged, but it was too late; she had already shot the bolt. And so I sat in the midst of my diminishing body, suffering while every other girl in the place listened to him sing. I knew then that I had to act; I would regain myself somehow, I would find food and regain my flesh and then I would go to Tommy. I would use force if I had to, but I would hear him sing. I raged through the room all that morning, hearing the shrieks of five hundred girls, the thunder of their feet, but even when I pressed myself against the wall I could not hear Tommy’s voice.

  Yet Ramona, when she came back to the room, said the most interesting thing. It was some time before she could speak at all, but in her generosity she played “When a Widow” while she regained herself, and then she spoke:

  “He came for something, Nelly. He came for something he didn’t find.”

  “Tell about what he was wearing. Tell what his throat did when he sang.”

  “He looked at all the before pictures, Nelly. The matron was trying to make him look at the afters but he kept looking at the befores and shaking his head and then he found one and put it in his pocket and if he hadn’t found it, he wasn’t going to sing.”

  I could feel my spine stiffen. “Ramona, you’ve got to help me. I must go to him.”

  That night we staged a daring break. We clubbed the attendant when he brought dinner, and once we had him under the bed we ate all the chops and gluten bread on his cart and then we went down the corridor, lifting bolts, and when we were a hundred strong we locked the matron in her office and raided the dining hall, howling and eating everything we could find. I ate that night, how I ate, but even as I ate I was aware of a fatal lightness in my bones, a failure in capacity, and so they found me in the frozen food locker, weeping over a chain of link sausage, inconsolable because I understood that they had spoiled it for me, they with their chops and their gluten bread; I could never eat as I once had, I would never be myself again.

  In my fury I went after the matron with a ham hock, and when I had them all at bay I took a loin of pork for sustenance and I broke out of that place. I had to get to Tommy before I got any thinner; I had to try. Outside the gate I stopped a car and hit the driver with the loin of pork and then I drove to the Hotel Riverside, where Tommy always stayed. I made my way up the fire stairs on little cat feet and when the valet went to his suite with one of his velveteen suits I followed, quick as a tigress, and the next moment I was inside. When all was quiet I tiptoed to his door and stepped inside.

  He was magnificent. He stood at the window, gaunt and beautiful; bis blond hair fell to his waist and his shoulders shriveled under a heartbreaking double-breasted pea-green velvet suit. He did not see me at first; I drank in his image and then, delicately, cleared my throat. In the second that he turned and saw me, everything seemed possible.

  “It’s you.” His voice throbbed.

  “I had to come.”

  Our eyes fused and in that moment I believed that we two could meet, burning as a single, lambent flame, but in the next second his fac
e had crumpled in disappointment; he brought a picture from his pocket, a fingered, cracked photograph, and he looked from it to me and back at the photograph, saying, “My darling, you’ve fallen off.”

  ”Maybe it’s not too late,” I cried, but we both knew I would fail.

  And fail I did, even though I ate for days, for five desperate, heroic weeks; I threw pies into the breach, fresh hams and whole sides of beef, but those sad days at the food farm, the starvation and the drugs have so upset my chemistry that it cannot be restored; no matter what I eat I fall off and I continue to fall off; my body is a halfway house for foods I can no longer assimilate. Tommy watches, and because he knows he almost had me, huge and round and beautiful, Tommy mourns. He eats less and less now. He eats like a bird and lately he has refused to sing; strangely, his records have begun to disappear.

  And so a whole nation waits.

  “I almost had her,” he says, when they beg him to resume his midnight shows; he will not sing, he won’t talk, but his hands describe the mountain of woman he has longed for all his life.

  And so I have lost Tommy, and he has lost me, but I am doing my best to make it up to him. I own Faircrest now, and in the place where Ramona and I once suffered I use my skills on the girls Tommy wants me to cultivate. I can put twenty pounds on a girl in a couple of weeks and I don’t mean bloat, I mean solid fat. Ramona and I feed them up and once a week we weigh and I poke the upper arm with a special stick and I will not be satisfied until the stick goes in and does not rebound because all resiliency is gone. Each week I bring out my best and Tommy shakes his head in misery because the best is not yet good enough, none of them are what I once was. But one day the time and the girl will be right—would that it were me—the time and the girl will be right and Tommy will sing again. In the meantime, the whole world waits; in the meantime, in a private wing well away from the others, I keep my special cases; the matron, who grows fatter as I watch her. And Mom. And Dad.

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  * * * *

  Brian Aldiss, who came to America in 1966 to receive a Nebula Award, turned out to be a living rebuttal to the myth of British reserve. If Aldiss can be taken as typical, Englishmen do not talk or behave like David Niven; they are irreverent, earthy, exuberant and outspoken.

  None of this, however, goes into Aldiss’ fiction, which is classical in tone, spitefully pessimistic, brilliantly polished and ingeniously horrid. Aldiss is one of the half-dozen writers I most wanted to bring you in Orbit. Here he is, with a disturbing and plausible glimpse into the remote future of Earth.

  * * * *

  FULL SUN

  By Brian W. Aldiss

  The shadows of the endless trees lengthened toward evening and then disappeared, as the sun was consumed by a great pile of cloud on the horizon. Balank was ill at ease, taking his laser rifle from the trundler and tucking it under his arm, although it meant more weight to carry uphill and he was tiring.

  The trundler never tired. They had been climbing these hills most of the day, as Balank’s thigh muscles informed him, and he had been bent almost double under the oak trees, with the machine always matching his pace beside him, keeping up the hunt.

  During much of the wearying day, their instruments told them that the werewolf was fairly close. Balank remained alert, suspicious of every tree. In the last half hour, though, the scent had faded. When they reached the top of this hill, they would rest-—or the man would. The clearing at the top was near now. Under Balank’s boots, the layer of dead leaves was thinning.

  He had spent too long with his head bent toward the brown-gold carpet; even his retinas were tired. Now he stopped, breathing the sharp air deeply, and stared about. The view behind them, across tumbled and almost uninhabited country, was magnificent, but Balank gave it scarcely a glance. The infrared warning on the trundler sounded, and the machine pointed a slender rod at a man-sized heat source ahead of them. Balank saw the man almost at the same moment as the machine.

  The stranger was standing half-concealed behind the trunk of a tree, gazing uncertainly at the trundler and Balank. When Balank raised a hand in tentative greeting, the stranger responded hesitantly. When Balank called out his identification number, the man came cautiously into the open, replying with his own number. The trundler searched in its files, issued an okay, and they moved forward.

  As they got level with the man, they saw he had a small mobile hut pitched behind him. He shook hands with Balank, exchanging personal signals, and gave his name as Cyfal.

  Balank was a tall slender man, almost hairless, with the closed expression on his face that might be regarded as characteristic of his epoch. Cyfal, on the other hand, was as slender but much shorter, so that he appeared stockier; his thatch of hair covered all his skull and obtruded slightly onto his face. Something in his manner, or perhaps the expression around his eyes, spoke of the rare type of man whose existence was chiefly spent outside the city.

  “I am the timber officer for this region,” he said, and indicated his wristcaster as he added, “I was notified you might be in this area, Balank.”

  “Then you’ll know I’m after the werewolf.”

  “The werewolf? There are plenty of them moving through this region, now that the human population is concentrated almost entirely in the cities.”

  Something in the tone of the remark sounded like social criticism to Balank; he glanced at the trundler without replying.

  “Anyhow, you’ve got a good night to go hunting him,” Cyfal said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Full moon.”

  Balank gave no answer. He knew better than Cyfal, he thought, that when the moon was at full, the werewolves reached their time of greatest power.

  The trundler was ranging about nearby, an antenna slowly spinning. It made Balank uneasy. He followed it. Man and machine stood together on the edge of a little cliff behind the mobile hut. The cliff was like the curl of foam on the peak of a giant Pacific comber, for here the great wave of earth that was this hill reached its highest point. Beyond, in broken magnificence, it fell down into fresh valleys. The way down was clothed in beeches, just as the way up had been in oaks.

  “That’s the valley of the Pracha. You can’t see the river from here.” Cyfal had come up behind them.

  “Have you seen anyone who might have been the werewolf? His real name is Gondalug, identity number YB-5921 stroke AS25061, City Zagrad.”

  Cyfal said, “I saw someone this way this morning. There was more than one of them, I believe.” Something in his manner made Balank look at him closely. “I didn’t speak to any of them, nor them to me.”

  “You know them?”

  “I’ve spoken to many men out here in the silent forests, and found out later they were werewolves. They never harmed me.”

  Balank said, “But you’re afraid of them?”

  The half-question broke down Cyfal’s reserve. “Of course I’m afraid of them. They’re not human—not real men. They’re enemies of men. They are, aren’t they? They have powers greater than ours.”

  “They can be killed. They haven’t machines, as we have. They’re not a serious menace.”

  “You talk like a city man! How long have you been hunting after this one?”

  “Eight days. I had a shot at him once with the laser, but he was gone. He’s a gray man, very hairy, sharp features.”

  “You’ll stay and have supper with me? Please. I need someone to talk to.”

  For supper, Cyfal ate part of a dead wild animal he had cooked. Privately revolted, Balank ate his own rations out of the trundler. In this and other ways, Cyfal was an anachronism. Hardly any timber was needed nowadays in the cities, or had been for millions of years. There remained some marginal uses for wood, necessitating a handful of timber officers, whose main job was to fix signals on old trees that had fallen dangerously, so that machines could fly over later and extract them like rotten teeth from the jaws of the forest. The post of timber officer was being filled more and
more by machines, as fewer men were to be found each generation who would take on such a dangerous and lonely job far from the cities.

  Over the eons of recorded history, mankind had raised machines that made his cities places of delight. Machines had replaced man’s early inefficient machines; machines had replanned forms of transport; machines had come to replan man’s life for him. The old stone jungles of man’s brief adolescence were buried as deep in memory as the coal jungles of the Carboniferous.