Orbit 12 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  If she left this place she could walk downtown for perhaps half an hour in the warmed, well-lit night, before an agent saw her smoothing people and chased her out, or had her held and checked. That she could not afford. She stayed where she was. She pulled her coat over her knees and put her head down. Staying outside was her own choice. The dump nearby would give her one of the transients’ beds, but out here the cold numbed her, a free anesthetic that otherwise she might be driven to buy in more destructive form.

  A scuffing through slush on the flagstones roused her. Lais crawled stiffly from beneath the tree. Pain clamped on her spine before she could straighten. She leaned against the garden’s retaining wall, breathing the thin air in shallow cut-off gasps. The man was almost opposite her when she moved into the mall. “Hey, you got any spare change?”

  Startled, a little scared, he peered down at her through the rain. His face was smooth, without character, the set and seemingly plasticized face of a thousand betrayers, a face she would not live to share. He had nothing to be frightened of but mercifully rapid senility and a painless death that could be over a century away. His life-span would be ten times hers.

  “You’re dressed well to want money.”

  She moved closer to him, so close that she had to conceal her own uneasiness. She needed, if anything, more distance around her than other people, but she understood the need and controlled it. The man succumbed to it and moved away from her until gradually, as they talked, she backed him against the wall. He was odorless, a complete olfactory blank, firmly scrubbed and deodorized at mouth and armpits and feet and groin, as clean as his genes. Even his clothes had no smell. Lais hadn’t bathed in days, and her clothes were filthy; her damp coat smelled familiarly of wool, and she herself smelled like a warm wet female animal with fur. The remembered instincts of her short time as a carnivore built an image of herself preying on others. It amused her, because they had been preying on her all her life.

  “Some people are more generous,” she said, as if someone had given her the coat. Wisps of hair clung in damp streaks across her forehead and at her neck.

  “Why don’t you sign up for Aid?”

  She laughed once, sharply, and didn’t answer, turned her back on him and guessed two steps before he called her. It was one. “Do you need a place to sleep?”

  She made her expression one of disdain. “I don’t do that, man.”

  Cold rain beading on his face did not prevent his flush: embarrassment mixed with indignation. “Come now, I didn’t mean—”

  She knew he didn’t mean—

  “Look, if you don’t want to give me anything forget it” She stressed “give” just enough.

  He blew out his breath and dug in his pockets. He held out a crumpled bill that she looked at with contempt, but she took it first. “Gods, a whole guilder. Thanks a lot.” The insolence of her mock gratitude upset him more than derision. She walked away, thinking that she had the advantage, that she was leaving him speechless and confused

  “Do you like hurting people?”

  She faced him. He had no expression, only that smooth, unlived-in look. She watched his eyes for a moment. They, at least, were still alive.

  “How old are you?”

  He frowned abruptly. “Fifty.”

  “Then you can’t understand.”

  “And how old are you? Eighteen? It isn’t that much difference.”

  No, she thought, the difference is the hundred years that you’ve got left, and the self-righteous hate you’d give me if you knew what I was. She almost answered him honestly, but she couldn’t get the words out. “It is to me,” she said, with bitterness. Only fifty. He was the right age to have had his life disrupted by the revolt, and if he did not hate her land, he would still fear them. Deep feelings were no longer so easily erased by the passage of time.

  He seemed about to speak again, but he was too close; she had misjudged him and he had already stepped outside her estimation of him. Her mistakes disturbed her; there was no excuse for them, not this soon. She turned and fled, slipped to her hands and knees in the slush. She struggled to her feet and ran again.

  Around a corner she had to stop. Even a month earlier she would not have noticed minor exertion; now it exhausted her. The Institute could at least have chosen a clean way to murder its fellows. Except that clean deaths would be quick, and too frequently embarrassing.

  The wind at Lais’ back was rising. On a radial street leading toward the central landing pad, it seemed much colder. Sleet melted on her face and slid under her collar. Going to the terminal, she risked being recognized, but she didn’t think the Institute could have traced her here yet. At the terminal she would be able to smooth a few more people, and maybe they would give her enough for her to buy a ticket off this mountain and off this world. If she could hide herself well enough, take herself far enough, the Institute would never be sure she was dead.

  Halfway between the mall and the landing terminal, she had to stop and rest. The cafe she entered was physically warm but spiritually cold, utilitarian and mechanical. Its emotional sterility was familiar. Recently she had come to recognize it, but she saw no chance of replacing the void in herself with anything of greater meaning. She had changed a great deal during the last few months, but she had very little time left for changes.

  The faint scents of half a dozen lands of smoke lingered among the odors of automatic, packaged food. Lais slid into an empty booth. Across the room three people sat together, obviously taking pleasure in each other’s company. For a moment she considered going to their table and insinuating herself into the group, acting pleasant at first but then increasingly irrational.

  She was disgusted by her fantasies. Briefly, she thought she might be able to believe she was insane. Even the possibility would be comforting. If she could believe what she had been taught, that Institute geniuses were prone to instability, she could believe all the other lies. If she could believe the lies, the Institute could remain a philanthropic organization. If she could believe in the Institute, if she was mad, then she was not dying.

  She wondered what they would do if she walked over and told them who and what she was. Lais had had no experience with normal humans her own age. They might not even care, they might grin and say “So what?” and move over to make room for her. They might pull back, very subtly, of course, and turn her away, if their people had taught them that the freaks might revolt again. That was the usual reaction. Worse, they might stare at her for a moment, look at each other, and decide silently among themselves to forgive her and tolerate her. She had seen that reaction among the normals who worked at the Institute, those who needed any shaky superiority they could grasp, who made themselves the judges of deeds punished half a century before.

  A lighted menu on the wall offered substantial meals, but despite her hunger she was nauseated by the mixed smells of meat and sweet syrup. The menu changed a guilder and offered up utensils and a covered bowl of soup. She resented the necessity of spending even this little, because she had almost enough to go one more hard-to-trace world-step away. The sum she had and the sum she needed: they were such pitiful amounts, pocket money of other days.

  For a moment she wished she were back at the Institute with the rest of the freaks, being catered to by pleasant human beings. Only for a moment. She would not be at the Institute but hidden in their isolated hospital; those pleasant human beings would be pretending to cure her while sucking up the last fruits of her mind and all the information her body could give them. All they would really care about would be what error in procedure had allowed such a mistake to be brought to term in their well-monitored artificial wombs. Fellows were not supposed to begin to die until they were thirty, though that would be denied. Nothing had warned the Institute that Lais would die fifteen years too early; nothing but the explanation, and perhaps not even that, could tell them if any of her colleagues would die fifteen or fifty years too late, given time by a faulty biologic clock to develop into som
ething the Institute could no longer control, let alone understand. Their days would be terror and their sleep nightmare over that possibility.

  And her people, the other Fellows, would hardly notice she was gone: that brought a pang of guilt. People she had known had left abruptly, and she had become so used to the excuses that she had ceased to ask about them. Had she ever asked? There were so many worlds, such great distances, so many possibilities: mobility seemed limitless. Lais had never spent as much as a year in a single outpost and seldom saw acquaintances after transient project collaborations or casual sexual encounters. She had no emotional ties, no one to go to for help and trust, no one who knew her well enough to judge her sane against contrary evidence. Fellows were solitary specialists in fields too esoteric to discuss without the inducement of certain intellectual interaction. The lack of communication had never bothered Lais then, but now it seemed barbarous, almost inconceivable.

  Clear soup took the chill away and let minor discomforts intrude. The thick coat was too warm, but she wore it like a shield. Her hair and clothes were damp, and the heavy material of her pants began to itch as it grew warmer. Her face felt oily.

  Trivialities disappeared. She had continued the research she had started before she was forced to run. She was crippled and slowed by having to do the scut-work in her mind. She needed a computer, but she couldn’t afford to loan one. It was frustrating, of course, exhausting, certainly, but necessary. It was what Lais did.

  A hesitant touch on her shoulder awakened her. She didn’t remember falling asleep—perhaps she had not slept: the data she had been considering lay organized in her mind, a new synthesis —but she was lying on her side on the padded bench with her head pillowed on her arms.

  “I’m really sorry. Mr. Kiviat says you have to leave.”

  “Tell him to tell me himself,” she said.

  “Please, miz.”

  She opened her eyes. She had never seen an old person before; she could not help but stare, could not speak for a moment. His face was deeply lined and what little hair he had was stringy, yellow-white, shading at his cheeks into two days’ growth of grey stubble. He was terrified, put in the middle with no directions, afraid to try anything he might think of by himself. His pale, sunken eyes shifted back and forth, seeking guidance. On the thin chain around his throat was a child’s identity tag. Pity touched her and she smiled, without humor but with understanding. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s all right I’ll go.” His relief was a physical thing.

  Groggy with sleep she stood up and started out. She stumbled, and the malignant pain crawled up her spine where eroded edges of bone ground together. She froze, knowing that was useless. The black windows and the shiny beads of icy snow turned scarlet. She heard herself fall, but she did not feel the impact

  She was unconscious for perhaps a second; she came to calmly recording that this was the first time the pain had actually made her faint.

  “You okay, miz?”

  The old man knelt at her side, hands half extended as if to help her, but trembling, afraid. Two months ago Lais would not have been able to imagine what it would be like to exist in perpetual fear.

  “I just—” Even speaking hurt, and her voice shocked her with its weakness. She finished in a whisper, “—have to rest for a little while.” She felt stupid lying on the floor, observed by the machines, but the humiliation was less than that of the few endless days at the hospital being poked and biopsied and sampled like an experiment in the culture of a recalcitrant tissue. By then she had known that the treatments were a charade, that only the tests were important. She pushed herself up on her elbows, and the old man helped her sit.

  “I have ... I mean...my room...I’m not supposed to . . .” His seamed face was scarlet. It showed emotion much more readily than the dead faces of sustained folk, perhaps because he aged and they did not, perhaps because they were no longer capable of deep feeling.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He had to support her. His room was in the same building, reached by a web of dirty corridors. The room was white plastic and scrupulously clean, almost bare. The bluish shimmering cube of a trid moved and muttered in the corner.

  The old man took her to a broken sandbed and stood uncertainly by her. “Is there anything ... do you need . . . ?” Rusty words learned by rote long before, never used. Lais shook her head. She took off her coat, and he hurried to help her. She lay down. The bed was hard: air was meant to flow through granules and give the illusion of floating, but the jets had stopped and the tiny beads were packed down at the bottom, mobile and slippery only beneath the cover. It was softer than the street. The light was bright, but not intolerable. She threw her arm across her eyes.

  * * * *

  Something awakened her: she lay taut, disoriented. The illumination was like late twilight. She heard her name again and turned. Over her shoulder she saw the old man crouched on a stool in front of the trid, peering into the bluish space of it, staring at a silent miniature of Lais. She didn’t have to listen to know what the voice was saying: they had traced her to Highport; they were telling the residents that she was here and that she was mad, a poor pitiful unstable genius, paranoid and frightened, needing compassion and aid. But not dangerous. Certainly not dangerous. Soothing words assured people that aggression had been eliminated from their chromosomes (that was a lie, and impossible, but as good as truth). The voice said that there were only a few Fellows, that they confined themselves to research. Lais stopped listening. She allowed early memories to seep out and affect her. The old man crouched before his trid and stared at the picture. She pushed the twisted blanket away. The old man did not move. At the foot of the bed, Lais reached out until her fingers almost brushed his collar. Beneath it lay the strong thin links of his identity necklace. She could reach out, twist it into his throat, and remove him as a threat. No one would notice he was gone. No one would care. A primitive anthropoid, poised between civilization and savagery, urged her on.

  When he recognized her, he would straighten. His throat would be exposed. Lais could feel tendons beneath her hands. She glanced down to those hands, outstretched like claws, taut, trembling, alien. She drew them back, still staring. She hesitated, then lay down on the bed again. Her hands lay passive, hers again, pale and blue-veined, with torn, dirty fingernails.

  The old man did not turn around.

  They showed pictures of how she might look if she were trying to disguise herself, in dark or medium skin tones, no hair, long hair, curly hair, hair with color. The brown almost had it: anonymous. And she had changed in ways more subtle than disguise. The arrogance was attenuated, and the invincible assurance gone; the self-confidence remained—it was all she had—but it was tempered, and more mature. She had learned to doubt, rather than simply to question.

  The estranged face in the trid, despite its arrogance, was not cruel but gentle, and that quality she had not been able to change.

  It had taken them two months to trace her. They could only have followed her credit number to the last time she had used it, before cancellation. They would have known only how far she could get before her cash ran out. She had gotten farther, of course, but they had probably expected that

  Since they knew where she was, now was almost identical to later, and now it was still light outside. As she allowed herself to sleep again, she tried to imagine not recognizing a picture of someone she had met. She failed.

  * * * *

  Lais woke up struggling from a nightmare in which the blue images of the trid attacked and overwhelmed her, and her computers would not come to her aid. The old man pulled his hands from her shoulders abruptly and guiltily when he realized she was awake. The room was overwarm, windowless and stuffy. Lais was damp all over with feverish sweat. Her head ached, and her knees were sore.

  “I’m sorry, miz, I was afraid you’d hurt yourself.” He must have been rebuffed and denigrated all his life, to be so afraid of touching another human being. “It’s all rig
ht,” she said. She seemed always to be saying that to him. Her mental clock buzzed and jumped to catch up with reality: twelve hours since the trid woke her up.

  The old man sat quietly, perhaps waiting for orders. He did not take his gaze from her, but his surveillance was of a strange and anxious childlike quality, without recognition. It seemed not to have occurred to him that his stray might be the Institute fugitive. He seemed to live in two spheres of reality. When she looked at his eyes, he put his head down and hunched his shoulders. His hands lay limp and half-curled in his lap. “I didn’t know what to do. They yell at me when I ask stupid questions.” No bitterness, just acceptance of the judgment that any question he could ask must be stupid.

  She forced back her own useless flare of anger. To awaken hate in him would be cruel. “You did the right thing,” she said. She would have said the same words if he had innocently betrayed her. Two other lines of possible reality converged in her mind: herself of two months or a year before, somehow unchanged by exile and disillusionment, and an old man who called Aid for the sick girl in his room. She would have told him exactly what she thought without regard for his feelings; she would have looked on him not with compassion but with the kind of impersonal pity that is almost disdain. But they would have been more similar in one quality: neither of them would have recognized the isolation of their lives.