Orbit 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “I swear I couldn’t help it. It just hit me so suddenly. And—”

  “You lost your Place. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “If I have to start over now—I’ll be over seventy when I get to the Window!”

  “That’s not my lookout—”

  “ . . . but if you’ll just tell the Line Police what happened, explain about my special case—”

  “You’re crazy, I can’t do that!”

  “But you . . . I always thought you looked like a decent sort—”

  “You’d better go. Suppose someone sees me talking to you?”

  “I had to speak to you here, I don’t know your name, but after all we’ve been four Spaces apart in Line for nine years—”

  “Go away! Before I call a Line cop!”

  Hestler had a hard time getting comfortable again after Four Back left. There was a fly inside the queuebana. It was a hot night. The Line moved up again, and Hestler had to emerge and roll the queuebana forward. Two Spaces to go! The feeling of excitement was so intense that it made Hestler feel a little sick. Two more moves up, and he’d be at the Window. He’d open the lockbox, and present the Papers, taking his time, one at a time, getting it all correct, all in order. With a sudden pang of panic he wondered if anyone had goofed, anywhere back along the line, failed to sign anything, missed a Notary’s seal, or a witness’ signature. But they couldn’t have. Nothing as dumb as that. For that you could get bounced out of Line, lose your Place, have to go all the way back—

  Hestler shook off the morbid fancies. He was just nervous, that was all. Well, who wouldn’t be? After tonight, his whole life would be different; his days of standing in Line would be over. He’d have time—all the time in the world to do all the things he hadn’t been able to think about all these years . . .

  Someone shouted, near at hand. Hestler stumbled out of the queuebana to see Two Up—at the Head of the line now—raise his fist and shake it under the nose of the small, black-moustached face in the green eye-shade framed in the Window, bathed in harsh white light.

  “Idiot! Dumbbell! Jackass!” Two Up yelled. “What do you mean take it back home and have my wife spell out her middle name!”

  Two burly Line police appeared, shone lights in Two Up’s wild face, grabbed his arms, took him away. Hestler trembled as he pushed the queuebana forward a Space on its roller skate wheels. Only one man ahead of him now. He’d be next. But no reason to get all upset; the Line had been moving like greased lightning, but it would take a few hours to process the man ahead. He had time to relax, get his nerves soothed down, get ready to answer questions . . .

  “I don’t understand, sir,” the reedy voice of One Up was saying to the small black moustache behind the Window. “My Papers are all in order, I swear it—”

  “You said yourself your father is dead,” the small, dry voice of Black Moustache said. “That means you’ll have to reexecute Form 56839847565342-B in sextuplicate, with an endorsement from the medical doctor, the Residential Police, and waivers from Department A, B, C, and so on. You’ll find it all, right in the Regulations.”

  “But—but he only died two hours ago: I just received word—”

  “Two hours, two years; he’s just as dead.”

  “But—I’ll lose my Place! If I hadn’t mentioned it to you—”

  “Then I wouldn’t have known about it. But you did mention it, quite right, too.”

  “Couldn’t you just pretend I didn’t say anything? That the messenger never reached me?”

  “Are you suggesting I commit fraud?”

  “No . . . no . . . ” One Up turned and tottered away, his invalidated Papers clutched in his hand. Hestler swallowed hard.

  “Next,” Black Moustache said.

  It was almost dawn six hours later when the clerk stamped the last Paper, licked the last stamp, thrust the stack of processed documents into a slot and looked past Hestler at the next man in Line.

  Hestler hesitated, holding the empty lockbox in nerveless fingers. It felt abnormally light, like a cast husk.

  “That’s all,” the clerk said. “Next.”

  One Down jostled Hestler getting to the Window. He was a small, bandy-legged Standee with large, loose lips and long ears. Hestler had never really looked at him before. He felt an urge to tell him all about how it had been, give him a few friendly tips, as an old Window veteran to a newcomer. But the man didn’t give him a chance.

  Moving off, Hestler noticed the queuebana. It looked abandoned, functionless. He thought of all the hours, the days, the years he had spent in it, crouched in the sling . . .

  “You can have it,” he said on impulse to Two Down, who, he noted with surprise, was a woman, dumpy, slack-jowled. He gestured toward the queuebana. She made a snorting sound and ignored him. He wandered off down the Line, staring curiously at the people in it, at the varied faces and figures, tall, wide, narrow, old, young—not so many of those—dressed in used clothing, with hair combed or uncombed, some with facial hair, some with paint on their lips, all unattractive in their own individual ways.

  He encountered Galpert whizzing toward him on the power wheel. Galpert slowed, gaping, came to a halt. Hestler noticed that his cousin had thin, bony ankles in maroon socks, one of which suffered from perished elastic so that the sock drooped, exposing clay-white skin.

  “Farn—what . . . ?”

  “All done.” Hestler held up the empty lockbox.

  “All done . . . ?” Galpert looked across toward the distant Window in a bewildered way.

  “All done. Not much to it, really.”

  “Then . . . I . . . I guess I don’t need to . . . ” Galpert’s voice died away.

  “No, no need, never again, Galpert.”

  “Yes, but what . . . ?” Galpert looked at Hestler, looked at the Line, back at Hestler. “You coming, Farn?”

  “I . . . I think I’ll just take a walk for a while. Savor it, you know.”

  “Well,” Galpert said. He started up the wheel and rode slowly off across the ramp.

  Suddenly, Hestler was thinking about time—all that time stretching ahead, like an abyss. What would he do with it . . . ? He almost called after Galpert, but instead turned and continued his walk along the Line. Faces stared past him, over him, through him.

  Noon came and went. Hestler obtained a dry hot dog and a paper cup of warm milk from a vendor on a three-wheeler with a big umbrella and a pet chicken perched on the back. He walked on, searching the faces. They were all so ugly. He pitied them, so far from the Window. He looked back; it was barely visible, a tiny dark point toward which the Line dwindled. What did they think about, standing in Line? How they must envy him!

  But no one seemed to notice him. Toward sunset he began to feel lonely. He wanted to talk to someone; but none of the faces he passed seemed sympathetic.

  It was almost dark when he reached the End of the Line. Beyond, the empty plain stretched toward the dark horizon. It looked cold out there, lonely.

  “It looks cold out there,” he heard himself say to the oatmeal-faced lad who huddled at the tail of the Line, hands in pockets. “And lonely.”

  “You in Line, or what?” the boy asked.

  Hestler looked again at the bleak horizon. He came over and stood behind the youth.

  “Certainly,” he said.

  <>

  * * * *

  The Living End

  by Sonya Dorman

  It wasn’t easy to get up the long, shallow flight of steps to the big hospital complex, with my belly so big and heavy, but I made it by going very slowly. Went through the mesh helix of the entrance, down a broad corridor to the rear, and entered the Department of Checks and Balances.

  I spent several minutes hunting for the Admitting Office, and then was waved to a chair by the lady at the desk. So I sat, waiting; the daily hospital activities went on around me as if I weren’t there. They brought in a leg. A yellow ticket was attached with the donor’s name and a code number on it. A
s if in response, the baby gave me a kick, and my knees jerked sympathetically.

  A half hour had gone by, and I was bored, in spite of the exhibits. The main one, of course, was the heart in its wired box; pump-pump, fluids ran through from walltubes. A printed card explained that it was the only heart ever rejected by thirty-seven recipients in a row. In the center of the dark, pulsing mass, Mother was tattooed in a semicircle.

  “Miss?” I said to the lady at the desk, but she shook her head brusquely at me. I had to wait some more, which didn’t seem right. Not even the holographs could attract my attention anymore. I’d already looked round and round the room staring at the sequence: the Marrow Fungus spores taking hold, little roots probing into the porous bone, extending, being nourished, the pale shelf extruding from a tibia.

  The final holograph in the series showed the man, alive and well, with various bulges at brow, elbow, and knee, all of him well-kept with daily injections.

  After the leg’s number was filed by the lady behind the desk, who had continued to ignore me in spite of the fact that she knew I was in labor, an attendant came and removed the leg with speed and delicacy.

  They brought in a pair of crossed fingers, ticketed. Entered, filed, catalogued, and removed.

  “Be with you in a moment,” the lady said, flicking me a glance. Her contacts must be old ones, for her lids were pink and her eyes bloodshot. Wouldn’t you think she’d take better care of herself? With such excellent care available.

  “Name? Address?” she asked me, running a new card into the machine which put it on a spindle and creased the pattern in. We went on through my references and code number. Tick tick, the machine made its record. The baby gave a final heave before another contraction squeezed it into temporary submission. A moment later I spread my knees a little and the child gave its unborn cry.

  “Oh, shut him up,” the lady said, pulling levers and punching buttons. “How can I be expected to work in such a racket? I don’t know what they want; they could at least give me an office aide.”

  While she was carrying on like this, and I increasingly dilated, and the baby continuing to squall and gulp, unceremoniously helping himself to oxygen, two men came in carrying a head. It had no ticket, but the donor’s name had been stamped in government purple across the forehead. The lids were shut, but the lips fluttered, and now and then it sounded as if a croak came out of them. At the first of these, the lady glanced suspiciously at me.

  I said, “I never did that.”

  The head was catalogued, and removed.

  “Listen,” I said to the lady. “I really think I’m going to have the baby almost immediately, right here.”

  “Well of course you are, why else would you have come?” she replied crossly, triple-indexing my code number, not to mention my blood count, though they hadn’t taken a blood sample.

  “Doesn’t it happen in another room?” I asked. I was finally getting nervous about it. It was my first baby, and after all the tales I’d heard, I didn’t know for sure what to expect. They’d only warned me to look out for interns.

  She rose from her chair, went to the blank-faced box on the wall directly in front of where I sat. She pressed its button, and the front lit up with a moving picture. A table. A huge central light like a sun. Around the table, an assortment of figures, male and female, dressed in pale green, and well masked. I lay on the table with my legs upheld.

  “There you are,” the lady said, and added ungraciously, “Now that we’ve got that settled, would you like a cup of tea?”

  Although my mouth felt dry, I didn’t think I could swallow a thing, so I replied, “No, thank you very much, though.”

  I watched the screen, sliding down a bit more comfortably in the chair where I sat, my knees spread awkwardly apart. The baby gave a rip-snorting screech, the figures on the screen reached down between my legs and lifted up a dripping baby boy.

  I said, “Ooof,” and pressed my hands against my belly. I took several deep breaths, still watching the screen where a female figure tied off the cord, cleaned the boy, and wrapped it in a cocoon of nylon.

  The lady was back at her machine, one eye on the moving picture, her lips moving. I could hear her whisper, “One boy, normal, delivered in eight minutes,” as the machine tick-ticked the information into creased cards on the spindle.

  Slowly, I began to draw myself up in the chair until I was sitting up straight. I felt breathless, but relieved, after carrying that burden all week. After a moment, I asked the lady, “Is that all now?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Except for our usual advice: don’t return before the end of next month. You must not use up all your privileges at once, no matter how many maternity pills you’re tempted to gobble. After all, you’ve got five years of childbearing ahead of you. If that’s what you want,” she added the last with a certain sneer which I knew had been practiced on many others.

  She got up from her chair to file the cards. I got up, pressing my skirt down over my flat stomach. “Look,” I said, angered by her attitude, “as far as the law goes, I could come in here and have a baby every single week for a year. So don’t threaten me.”

  She disdained to answer. I was on my way to the door when another woman came in, rushing, and plunged past me to the lady’s desk. She said, “I’m in labor!”

  “Do sit down, you’ll have to wait until they clear the spools,” the lady said.

  I looked back as the woman sat down, balancing her belly in her lap, and she caught my eye. “Did you have one yet?” she asked.

  “Yes, a lovely boy. Good luck with yours.”

  She said, “Thanks, I’ll need it. I’m having twins again.”

  “Greedy, greedy,” said the lady disapprovingly to her, as I went out.

  <>

  * * * *

  A Dream at Noonday

  by Gardner R. Dozois

  I remember the sky, and the sun burning in the sky like a golden penny flicked into a deep blue pool, and the scuttling white clouds that changed into magic ships and whales and turreted castles as they drifted up across that bottomless ocean and swam the equally bottomless sea of my mind’s eye. I remember the winds that skimmed the clouds, smoothing and rippling them into serene grandeur or boiling them into froth. I remember the same wind dipping low to caress the grass, making it sway and tremble, or whipping through the branches of the trees and making them sing with a wild, keening organ note. I remember the silence that was like a bronzen shout echoing among the hills.

  —It is raining. The sky is slate-gray and grittily churning. It looks like a soggy dishrag being squeezed dry, and the moisture is dirty rain that falls in pounding sheets, pressing down the tall grass. The rain pocks the ground, and the loosely packed soil is slowly turning into mud and the rain spatters the mud, making it shimmer—

  And I remember the trains. I remember lying in bed as a child, swathed in warm blankets, sniffing suspiciously and eagerly at the embryonic darkness of my room, and listening to the big trains wail and murmur in the freight yard beyond. I remember lying awake night after night, frightened and darkly fascinated, keeping very still so that the darkness wouldn’t see me, and listening to the hollow booms and metallic moans as the trains coupled and linked below my window. I remember that I thought the trains were alive, big dark beasts who came to dance and to hunt each other through the dappled moonlight of the world outside my room, and when I would listen to the whispering clatter of their passing and feel the room quiver ever so slightly in shy response, I would get a crawly feeling in my chest and a prickling along the back of my neck, and I would wish that I could watch them dance, although I knew that I never would. And I remember that it was different when I watched the trains during the daytime, for then even though I clung tight to my mother’s hand and stared wide-eyed at their steam-belching and spark-spitting they were just big iron beasts putting on a show for me; they weren’t magic then, they were hiding the magic inside them and pretending to be iron beasts a
nd waiting for the darkness. I remember that I knew even then that trains are only magic in the night and only dance when no one can see them. And I remember that I couldn’t go to sleep at night until I was soothed by the muttering lullaby of steel and the soft, rhythmical hiss-clatter of a train booming over a switch. And I remember that some nights the bellowing of a fast freight or the cruel, whistling shriek of a train’s whistle would make me tremble and feel cold suddenly, even under my safe blanket-mountain, and I would find myself thinking about rain-soaked ground and blood and black cloth and half-understood references to my grandfather going away, and the darkness would suddenly seem to curl in upon itself and become diamond-hard and press down upon my straining eyes, and I would whimper and the fading whistle would snatch the sound from my mouth and trail it away into the night. And I remember that at times like that I would pretend that I had tiptoed to the window to watch the trains dance, which I never really dared to do because I knew I would die if I did, and then I would close my eyes and pretend that I was a train, and in my mind’s eye I would be hanging disembodied in the darkness a few inches above the shining tracks, and then the track would begin to slip along under me, slowly at first then fast and smooth like flowing syrup, and then the darkness would be flashing by and then I would be moving out and away, surrounded by the wailing roar and evil steel chuckling of a fast freight slashing through the night, hearing my whistle scream with the majestic cruelty of a stooping eagle and feeling the switches boom and clatter hollowly under me, and I would fall asleep still moving out and away, away and out.