Orbit 15 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Random accommodation Tension. Encounter with Death. Previous encounter trigger Fresh onslaught Paranoia Type Lyra 2. Green suit assault. Palms a blank. Superior position. Trinket deserted . . .

  So it went, growing ever more threatening and less comprehensible. His thinking brain was coolly deciding that the delphic clement in these predictions would have to be eradicated before the model went commercial, while another and more basic part of his metabolism was whipped into terror by the menacing phraseology. Before he could read to the end of the recital, he sensed Gloria looking at him intently (it was Gloria?); he was unaware of what she was saying until she repeated it.

  “Will you look up Anna Kavan?” The very question seemed to echo implications in his readout.

  He swung round. “Damn it, Anna’s dead. You know she died in the Alaska Trophy. Must you keep resurrecting her?”

  She took in his anxiety, came nearer, and said gently, “Bad prognosis, I take it?”

  He screwed up the readout, would not speak. Pain, Weeping, Regret, Encounter with Death . . . Yet he was destined to go to Earth; otherwise the readout would have been blank. She read his expression.

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Why can’t things seem to hold together? Why can’t you ever grasp anything? Why does it all slide away? What have you got to go through while you’re Earthside? Tell me, at least let me smell your palm.”

  Colding pulled his hand away from her and stroked her cheek with it. “It can’t happen as the machine says. It’s not always right. I told you the other day it was playing up . . . I’ll just see Father and Rosey, then I’ll be back. I’ll go straight to the hospital. Nothing will happen.”

  “What won’t happen?”

  “Nothing,” he said. What the hell good was communication, anyway?

  ~ * ~

  As it happened, Colding saw his father first from the other end of the hospital corridor. The old man was walking slowly, but with a stiff upright carriage Colding remembered; people walked like that only on Earth. Colding himself proceeded slowly, uncomfortably aware of the thickness of the great natural globe revolving beneath his feet. He hoped he would never reach his father. Yet with every step the old man became clearer, with every step some piece of the past, long rejected, returned. An intricate relationship formed in the mild autumn air between them. The old man wore old clothes now. There had been a time when he had been younger, had driven planes and ridden horses, and had swum in the ocean off Santos, where they were both born.

  Colding remembered Santos, where the lorry drivers slept under their vehicles in string hammocks to escape the Brazilian sun. He remembered the failing coffee plantation, the farm where he helped raise Zebu-type cattle. The seasons of love. Lights and singing among the trees, the well-maintained church. Cars smashing off the autopista. A dead snake. His wife, the arrival of his children, the ranch hands gripped by macumba, floating little lights out across the flood of the placid river, chanting as they did so. Days in Santos.

  This sick old man with the goat’s face brought it all back, a whole lifetime and more, structures of hope and failure, and love read in a snake’s entrails.

  “Hello, Father. I didn’t expect to find you walking about.”

  “If you’re coming to see Phyllis, my boy, I must warn you that she’s really upset about you. She will wear black. I told her the other day, I said, ‘It’s not becoming. Only old ladies and horses wear black.’ “ He laughed. There was a stale smell about him, Colding found, as he took his father’s arm.

  “Phyllis and I were divorced five years ago, Father. I came back to Earth to see you. Is this your room in here?”

  “Well, it’s nice to see you again. You aren’t wearing black, are you? You’re certainly looking older. You look more like your grandfather every time I see you. There must be something in predestination…According to the palm of my hand, I shan’t die till next year. How long’s that? What month is this?”

  “We have a different dating system on the Zeepees.”

  “It seems all wrong to me . . . Doesn’t make sense. I said to Phyllis the other day, ‘To think that a son of ours should be forced to live on a manmade chunk of plastic out there in space . . .’ “

  “Father, Phyllis is my ex-wife, not my damned mother.” Senile incest obsession. One hundred percent—God, the machine was good!

  “Yes, yes, of course, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean Phyllis, I meant Pauline. No, let’s see, Pauline’s dead too, isn’t she? It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of who’s alive and who’s dead . . . People keep coming and going . . . Anyhow, this is my room. Come in, son.”

  They went into it, father and son, linked by more than arms. A wide white room with eight sides, auburn light filtering through a large falsie. A bed, tables, lamps, a cabinet, the big mediscanner, various old-fashioned books and static pictures littering tables and walls. Colding received a distinct glimpse of someone weeping in a black-and-gold boudoir, weeping because she was haunted by other rooms. Then the vision was gone, forgotten, irrecoverable. One more damned unwanted image. Beyond every room lay others, onwards and onwards, like some complex and old-fashioned astronomic clock representing an unworkable theory of the universe. He went and sat down in a white voluptuous chair, sickened.

  “This is home, son. We live in petty times. As Krohshaw says, we’re all inmates of the same astro-organic house. The world’s grown too small . . . All this predestination. A petty time to die in.” He stood alone in the middle of his room, looking at the palm of his right hand, leaning slightly on his stick, nodding his sick old goat head at the incoherent thoughts that filled it.

  “Predestination’s been round a long time. I must go and see Rosey while I’m here.”

  “Of course. Your daughter’s more important ... I suppose you’re still living on What’s-It with that woman Gloria.”

  “Turpitude. We live on Turpitude. One of the outer and cheaper Zeepees.”

  “That’s where predestination came from. Pernicious theory...” The old man sat on the side of the bed and looked across at Colding. “All those little ticky-tacky planetoids or whatever you call ‘em—they’re all limited environments. Of course they limit thinking. You need a big world to grow up in, to live in, to think big. Turpitude . . . Predestination is a typical product of the Zodiacal Planets. A tiny thing. Now you’ve exported it back to Earth, the way we used to buy U.S. instant coffee in Santos made from beans grown in our own good alluvial soil. Why, that soil was so rich . . . Before you were born . . .”

  Colding stirred impatiently. There was a whispering in the room.

  “Predestination is a science now, Father,” he said. “An exact science. The most complex science ever devised, and still evolving. When it is fully developed, it will embrace all knowledge. It represents the marriage of the human metabolism back into its local and cosmic environment.”

  “Marriage? I don’t understand you.” The sick man went and sat down, saying resignedly, “You never worked out your life, did you? How old are you now? Rosey understands more than you do—or me, come to that. Why don’t you marry Rosey?”

  “You’re senile, Dad! Rosey’s my daughter, you keep forgetting.”

  “Oh, yes, I keep forgetting. She’s a good girl, though, is Rosey. Time means nothing to me now. What about that artist woman you used to knock about with? Anna?”

  “Anna Kavan? She died on the Skidmore Glacier in a car race, if you remember.”

  The remark appeared to focus the old man’s attention. For the first time he lifted his head to look straight at Colding.

  “I’ll tell you something, Colding. I know you were making love to her during your first marriage, when we were all living in Alaska. Well, I made love to her once, when the two of us were alone in the house. I must have been sixty then.”

  “You’re lying, Father. You told me that before. You’re lying.”

  His father’s voice took on a womanish note. “You’ve experienced it all before—you�
�ve had it explained to you. You’re a Sensitive of the Unrealised Multi-Schizo Type C. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m not a child anymore.”

  “You have it all memorised, I know. You keep repeating yourself.”

  “Why not? It’s a petty world . . .”

  Colding, in a fit of energy, shook the newsfax lying on the arm of his chair and took it across to the old man. “Petty? Look at this. Read the headlines. Ingratitude is at war with Ecstasy and Knowledge ii. The Third Philosophical Lever has been found at last. The abeings of Saturn are reproducing in the Moscow Exohouse. The shapes of five thousand notable smells have been identified; scentologists are now investigating the shapes of consciousness. It has just been proved on a statistical basis that rigorous application of the three laws of immobility can overcome malnutrition. Holman Hunt’s ‘The Awakening Conscience’ has been animated. Antarctic icebergs five miles long and more are being sold to United Mars and shipped entire to the Red Planet. Spontaneous generation is now known to be as much a reality as the luminiferous ether. Isn’t all that important?”

  “Petty,” the old man said, turning his head away in disgust. “Petty. People don’t have command of their lives anymore. That’s a fact. Petty . . .”

  As Colding went towards the door, he said, “I shall look in again tomorrow, Father.”

  “I dreamed about a horse last night,” his father said. “Or I think it was last night. Is that good or bad, do you believe?”

  ~ * ~

  Not without misgiving, Colding decided that he would visit his daughter Rosey on the following day. He became lost when he left the hospital, failing to recognise a single item in the immense urban landscape which stretched across a continent; in their profusion, their determination to reach their target, the covered ways had obliterated any true destination. Life here was a temporary shift between mobility and mobility. A trajaxi carried him to a five-star Belvedere Hotel, where he hired an interior room, ate a modest meal, and settled on the bed to sleep.

  The doorbell rang.

  He went to answer it, and stood there blinking.

  The woman was small and dark and something less than pretty. She wore some sort of a green suit and smiled at him with a nervous familiarity. What was that hateful phrase in the readout? Green suit assault . . .?

  “I saw you come in. I just happened to be stopping by the hotel to bring a picture to a client. Colding, my pet, how are you?”

  He backed away. “Hello, Anna,” he said. She had been dead five years. He could hear the traffic outside and wondered where everyone was endlessly going. The readout from his own machine had specified that Anna would reappear—his own machine, yet he had refused to believe. And the destimeter could not distinguish between objective and subjective experience . . .

  She came towards him. “It was always you, Colding. I know I made things difficult for you. But you were the one man with meaning for me. I’ve had time to think it over. I want to come back to you.”

  But he had seen her on the slab after the car crash. She had been dead five years—or had the crash been a paranoid hallucination? He stood against a wall. Always he lived totally enclosed. No wonder people chose to die in space these days.

  “I’ve got a wife, Anna. And an ex-wife. And a mistress. My life —the surface of it has closed over. There isn’t any room in it for you.” He could hardly speak for trembling.

  She smiled. The teeth were loose. “Always your excuses, Colding. And mine of course . . . But I’ve come to the end of mine. We can pick up where we left off—”

  “You mean, at the bottom of an abyss on the Skidmore Freeway? That’s where we left off, lady. Come on, get—”

  “Don’t live in the past! Touch me, feel me, put your hands on my breasts—I won’t mind anymore. What are you doing here, anyway? You’re staring at me as if I was a ghost. Do you like my wig? Are you sick?”

  “Look, I’m—yes, I’m sick. Anna—you’re . . . you aren’t here, or I’m not—”

  “I’m off drugs, I swear, right off them. Mix me a drink. This swine Currey, I want to escape him, he has a power over me. He won’t let me alone. You know how doctors are. I’m prepared to leave everything with him and start again, take up where we left off. Currey is a hateful man, we’ll have to hide, leave Earth—” She had touched him, put her delicate hands on his chest. He recognised her pressure, could feel her, smell her perfume. Green suit assault. He was in terror. He ran, jumped over the bed, said, “Anna, go away, I want no part of it—”

  “You know Currey, don’t you? He’s the secretary of Wombud —you must know him. Why be silly? Are you drunk?”

  He knew Wombud, the new sect believing that life after death was available to all, because real life took place in the nine months from conception to birth; expulsion from the womb was death, into a less real world, into a disembodied world after an intense tactual-sensual one. Human beings were living an afterlife, according to Wombud. And Anna . . .

  “You swallow that Wombud nonsense, Anna? Currey’s a madman, a menace just as great as the leader, Mister Queen Elizabeth—”

  “So you do know him! First you say you don’t, then you do! You’re not in league with him, are you? I’m going to get all the things from you that you refused me before, Colding . . .”

  She was coming round the bed.

  “I refused you nothing. You sucked from me all I had, over and over again, and you kept coming back for more. No more, Anna, no more—you’re dead, shit you, you’re bastarding dead!”

  “We’re all dead, darling—”

  He was screaming as he flung the bedding, mattress and all, at her, over her, and threw himself on top of it. They went down with noise and hell and hatred and confusion. Under him, under the muddled pile, she struggled, goading him to shout more.

  Then he rolled off onto the carpeting, burying his face, saying over and over, “The bloody wreckage of my life, the bloody wreckage of my life ...”

  “Life, life, you‘re always mouthing that stupid word ...” Who had said that to him recently?

  Pulling himself onto his knees, he wiped his sodden hair from his eyes and looked at the muddle of sheets. One of Anna’s hands lay exposed, its fingers half curled, the nails carmine with her old paint. The palm was innocent of all lines. No readout.

  “Oh, Anna, darling, you’d understand. I kill everyone I meet . . .”

  That damned night, he slept on top of her, leaving the body where it lay under the sheets.

  ~ * ~

  There were a few late flies in the room next morning. Earth’s last wildlife.

  The cleaning robots were purging the apartment commentlessly as he grabbed up his suitcase and left.

  With misgivings, he decided he would go and visit his daughter Rosey after seeing his father again. He was lost again when he left the hospital, failing to recognise one single item in the immense urban landscape which stretched across the whole continent. The covered ways, in their riotous proliferation, their madness to reach target, had obliterated any real destination. Life—life—had to fit where it could between interstices of mobility and mobility. Maybe Wombud had something.

  A trajaxi fled miles with him, depositing him in Trinket Gardens.

  Trinket Gardens was a gigantic pyramid, windowless on the outside. Vegetation perched here and there on ledges and levels. Trinket Gardens had been left in a parched desert of urbanisation, a Yucatan Peninsula of modernity. The gate that slid open for him had lost its glass. Ninety thousand people had lived here once, packed in their octagonal boxes. Before he was on the first climbing walk, he knew that little was left but boxes.

  At 15492, his daughter opened the door to him and smiled.

  She took him in and put her arms around him, whereupon he began to weep. The same old robot, Motown, was there, but Rosey pushed it aside and mixed him a strange drink that he took down in gulps.

  “Oh, Rosey, my little pet, it’s good to see you. I’m sick, sick or something.”

  “Dadd
y, you always live in the past. Come on, it’s not so bad. You’re upset. What are you doing here anyway? You’re staring at me as if I was a ghost.”

  He shook his head. “Your granddad’s dying. I had to come back to see him. It’s like getting stuck in the past. And I think I’m undergoing a Lyra 2-type paranoia onslaught, but I’ll be okay again in a minute.”

  As he went on talking to her, gradually getting his feelings in order, he tried to absorb her through his gaze. She was a big girl for twelve, well built, self-possessed, with a fine neat crop of mousy-yellow hair cut short about her ears and long at the back. She stood before him, smiling with a gentle friendliness. It occurred to Colding that she probably looked a lot like him.

  “I’m sorry I had to leave you here, Rosey. You should have stayed with your mother. Are you making out okay, with just Motown to look after you?”