Orbit 15 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  She looked away momentarily. “I see Mother about once a month, Earthtime. There are times when I don’t want you, times when I do. My existence has to belong to me sometime, doesn’t it? Come and see my secret garden—if you’re well enough.”

  “I’m okay. I’m overwrought.”

  “How’s Gloria?” Rosey asked, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

  “Gloria? Oh, she’s fine . . .” He stood up. “I must find you a nicer place to live in. It’s terrible being a failure of a parent—one of the terrible things about it is that although you know you’re a failure, it seems impossible to change. Well, that’s what predestination’s all about.”

  “I don’t agree with that viewpoint, but let’s not argue. Come and see my secret garden. Motown, you stay here.”

  “Take care,” Motown said.

  She led him out of the apartment and along the passage, down to another passage where all the doors were shut up with metal sheeting and litter lay thick about their feet.

  “It’s all broken down.”

  “People have moved out of Trinket. I like it better without them. There used to be awful fights and I was scared. I’m not scared anymore.”

  Down more corridors where desolation and perspective reigned.

  At a corner suite, they came to a broken door.

  “You have to push it a bit,” she said, leading the way. They stood in a wrecked apartment. Some furniture was left, all ruined. Someone had had a fire in the room and one wall was burned.

  “I’ll find you a better place to live, Rosey, my darling. I know I’ve said it before, but this time I will. You can come and stay with us on Turpitude.”

  “I don’t want to leave Earth. I don’t want to leave Trinket. This is my place. Look what I’ve found!”

  She climbed over debris into a rear room. There was a shattered window frame through which she scrambled. Sighing, her father followed.

  The long-dead planners of Trinket Gardens had made an error in design, or so it appeared to Colding. A wedge of ground was left between sheer walls on three sides. Just a wedge of ground, not much wider at its widest point than a fair-sized room.

  “Real ground, Daddy, real soil!” She squatted in the grass. “And just look what I’ve got!”

  A green thing had seeded itself. Colding knew that it was a tree or a bush. Something moved under it and came towards them, so that for an instant he was alarmed. It waddled towards Rosey’s outstretched hand, making small soothing noises at her.

  “A chicken!” he said.

  She looked up, laughing, her face all alight and unfamiliar in the open air. “It’s a goose, Dad, a real live goose. I call her Jinny. Jinny, come and meet my pop.”

  The goose walked about them, craning her neck and opening and shutting her beak.

  “Isn’t it dangerous? Doesn’t it bite or peck or something?”

  “She’s hoping I might have brought her some food. I generally do.”

  He leaned against one of the walls, taking in the miserable wedge of derelict land, the bedraggled bird, the green growth, the sky overhead, fighting against another urge to weep.

  “Your old grandfather keeps dreaming about horses.”

  “Don’t you think I’m lucky to have this little garden all to myself, Dad? It’s mine alone, my secret. I found the goose. She wasn’t here. She was in a lorry that crashed a way from Trinket, and I rescued her, or else she would have died, and carried her here. The lorry driver was dead, so it wasn’t stealing or anything. I come to see her every day. Jinny’s safe here, aren’t you, Jinny?”

  The destimeter readout had even included the goose, terming it “a feathered animal”—at least an 87.5 percent success.

  “Look, Rosey, let’s get back, you can’t hang around this filthy scrap of ground—it’s unhealthy, and dangerous.” The readout had implied there was someone else here, doing something.

  “Nonsense, Dad, don’t say that! This is my own special desert island, I love it here.”

  He grasped her hand. “You can’t stay here with this chicken, girl, now don’t be so silly. Suppose someone discovers you? Aren’t there any parks left you can go to?”

  She stood up and looked sadly at him. “Daddy, this is my place, do you understand? Do you ever understand?”

  Colding moved his leg away from the bird and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I understand better than you. You’ll go crazy here. You’re still only a child. Now, please, let’s get back. I’ll take you to see your grandfather in hospital; you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  As they returned through the cavernous perspectives, she said, “I do get sad sometimes. Not so much that you’re away, just that you never understand. And I’m not a child anymore, either, so it’s no good your going on thinking so.”

  “Dear, dear Rosey, come and live with us and I will attempt to understand, or I’ll keep quiet when I don’t. I’m trying to work out my life, and I’m on the verge of a big breakthrough. I’m getting old ... I get confused. I don’t know, it’s such a petty world.”

  “No, that’s not true, either. To me it’s not petty, and it hurts me to hear you say it.”

  “Now you don’t understand.” He achieved a smile.

  Rosey stood right where she was, so that Colding was also forced to halt. He looked at her with love and impatience.

  “That makes me sad, Daddy . . . You see, I’ve now come to the end of my childhood. It’s going from me, I can feel it—slipping away. Everything’s changing, so I must cling to what I’ve got. . .”

  “You’ve got so little—I’ve given you so little.”

  “No, I’ve got—most things. Only . . . my dear secret garden isn’t quite such a secret anymore. Look, you’d better know, but I’ve got a boy friend. I’m grown up now. He comes here. He loves the garden, and Jinny, and . . .” She read his face, put a hand up to her mouth, inclined her head, and started to weep.

  “Oh, my darling . . .” He put his arm about her shoulder. An awful black thing rose inside him, choking him. He seized her hand, staring at the lines there, to see if what she said was true.

  From a great distance, he heard himself say, “It’s time to go to the hospital. Let’s go together.”

  ~ * ~

  Two days later, Colding caught a shuttle belonging to the Chinese line which had virtual monopoly of the Earth-Turpitude route. His father had not died, he had found no alternative to Trinket for his daughter, he had managed to make himself see that the green suit assault had simply been a Lyra-2 paranoia onslaught; he contained his despairs and behaved like an average man, ergatoid among his fellow passengers.

  Sitting in the soft-class lounge, he watched Turpitude float closer in the big screen. It was shaped like a rose petal which, falling, turns towards the sun that has been both its reason and its downfall. Colding was moved by the sight. The planetoid had been designed and built by a Japanese-Brazilian consortium; they had wrought well. He jotted down a note on his pad to call Kai Tak at Gondwana and discuss the design of the production model of the destimeter. There were, after all, little important things to be done; one could hide from oneself.

  And was predestination—”the exact science of the future”— really being built there, on the energy-loaded surface of that petal, to spread outwards and transform the minds and habits of men? Was there really something new under the sun? How would Rosey’s generation accept it?

  The petal was changing contour and shape now, as the Verbena Star swung in towards its homing boom. It was becoming a confusion of sine curves, growing like a three-dimensional drawing in a computer, just as its precise ergonomic shape had once been conceived in a computer.

  For a moment, Colding felt himself to be in the computer, knew he functioned only as a statistic, knew predestination was truth: all of science, and in consequence all of religion, all of thought. He might suffer, and feel himself alive through that suffering; but the biochemistries of his system secreted a specific, predetermined, and consequen
tly computable meed of suffering. Of happiness, too. The ration was not random. Every emotion that ever moved mysteriously through whatever life now could be charted with as much rigour as a comet, visiting and fleeing from the sun on tight celestial schedule.

  Something of that moment of perception lingered with him as he stepped out into the transportation station and caught a tube home, whistling through the plastic core of Turpitude towards Urbstak East.

  He bought a pill on the train, warding off tachycardia and other maladies which afflicted him after space flight, and in consequence was feeling no more than slightly sick as he stepped off at Equinoctial E and grafted home.

  Part of his ill-ease was the final wording of his destimeter readout: Unfaith causes Resignation. At Gondwana, they’d have to sort out the way the destimeter’s language grew vaguer as its event horizon grew more distant and probability levels sank.

  Unfaith causes resignation? His lack of faith in himself? Gloria’s unfaithfulness to him? His betrayal of everyone close to him? Or did “unfaith” simply imply doubt? And what sort of resignation? Was he going to resign from Gondwana, or Gloria from their compatibility contract? Or did it mean a sort of philosophical acceptance?

  ~ * ~

  There was that clear face of hers, the features so beautifully formed. She stood and smiled at him. All innocence.

  Colding always had to remember, as he took her into his arms, how small she was, how tall he was. Physically, they were not well matched.

  She kissed him on the lips. He knew by her breathing and the moisture index of her mouth that she was in a special mood. Holding her, he placed his left palm across the cervical plexus at the back of her neck, so that the resonances in his palmar arch told him that her central nervous system was on the high.

  He smelled and listened, catching vibes from under her parietal bones.

  “Lovely to have you back,” she said quickly. “I’ll put on some musuc and make a fuss of you. How was Rosey—and your father?” Her movements over to the veeps system were too fast. “Is he getting better?”

  “Who was here just now?” he asked. “He’s still dying.”

  He was aware of the buzz of the fluorescents and conditioning before she said, “Someone from Gondwana—your boss, actually.”

  “Tab Polymer? What did he want?”

  “Nothing. Just a social call. Don’t be so uneasy!”

  “You’ve promiscued again, you rotten bitch! It’s what the destimeter predicted.”

  “You’d believe its word rather than mine, wouldn’t you? You get more like a machine every day, Colding, you know that?”

  “I am a machine. So are you. We just happen to be human machines, treading a computed path. That’s how the destimeter can predict events. That’s how I know you’ve betrayed me again.”

  Gloria started the musuc automatically. It was a modal hushkit vibration, and instantly the chamber seemed to fill with cloud that saturated all but objects under direct gaze. She had always enjoyed the tunnel-vision effect better than he.

  Facing him, she said, through the long white perspective, “All right, all right. You want a computer that will do all your living for you. You’d like a machine for a wife. You want predestination because it gives you all sorts of excuses. I did go with Tab, I admit it. Your damned oracle is right. I want to be human, I want to feel— this vision of myself weeping in a black-and-gold room, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand to be shut out. I love you, Coldy, but I want to be human ...”

  He went to her. He stooped. “We’ll work it out, Gloria. I’ll try to understand. You must have your secret garden. I don’t forget that you’re a Sensitive of the Unrealised Multi-Schizophrenic Type B. It’s terrible being a failure of a husband—one of the terrible things about it is that you know you’re a failure—”

  “Don’t tell me that again! I know what you’re going to say.” She turned away from him. “Don’t you ever understand?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Maybe I understand better than you do. You say you want to be human. What you have to do is revise your understanding of what a human being is…”

  “Don’t give me that sort of argument—comfort me! You just stand there talking and talking! Comfort me!”

  Making a great effort, he moved forward through the solid sound, stretching out his hands to her. Like all the others for whom he felt pity and responsibility, she was being left in an obsolescing version of the present, unable to face the future.

  “I love you, Gloria,” he said. Even if it was not as much as 86 percent true, he thought hopefully, it just might provide her with some sort of workable hypothesis for existence.

  He kissed her, letting his hand stray down her body, sensing the tautness of her muscles, searching for warmth in her and in himself.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  ACE 167

  Eleanor Arnason

  What we sometimes forget about the future is that

  it may break the hearts of ordinary people.

  ~ * ~

  It was after I lost my job as the manager of a traveling troupe of precision unicyclists that I met Ace 167. I was down and out in a bar in Venusport, my last credit gone to buy cheap Venusian wine. The jukebox was playing an old, tinny-sounding Beatles tape and on the jukebox screen tiny grey figures cavorted: the Beatles in their prime, back in the magic sixties. Gone, all gone, I thought. The moving finger writes and having writ moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it. I drank the last of my wine, set down the glass and turned around, just in time to see Ace come in. His clothes were ragged and his feet were bare. He had long red hair, pulled back into a ponytail. His mustache was red too, a big, bristly handlebar. “167” was tattooed on his forehead: three big numbers, as bright blue as his eyes.

  “Out,” the bartender said.

  Ace stopped and scratched his nose. “Don’t be primitive, mister.”

  “Out.”

  Ace shrugged, turned and went outside. His shirt was torn across the back, so I could see a couple of the gill lines, slanting down on either side of his spine. When they’re shut, gills don’t bother me. But I’ve seen gillies underwater with their red gill slits open. My ancestors were vikings, and one of the nastier things they did was to make blood eagles. To make a blood eagle, you take a man and cut into his back on both sides of his spine, going right through his ribs. Then you pull his lungs out through the cuts and spread them across his back. That’s a blood eagle. You do this while the man is alive, and it makes the Allfather Odin happy. Whenever I saw open gills, I thought of the blood eagle and got a sick feeling in my gut. But, as I said, the gills didn’t bother me when they were shut.

  “ ‘Nother?” the bartender asked me.

  I shook my head, slid down off the bar stool, and followed Ace out. It was foggy. The streetlights were dim white areas of luminescence floating in darkness. There were docks across the street. I could hear ropes creaking and water slapping against the sides of the boats.

  “You got any money, lady?”

  I jerked away from the sound. The guy behind me laughed. “I’m begging, not robbing.”

  I turned around. It was Ace, of course. I said, “I’m broke.”

  “My luck. The rest of them in there look like they wouldn’t give their grandma burying money.”

  I nodded and started back toward my hotel. I figured I had two or three more days before they asked me for money. A foghorn was honking somewhere out in the harbor. Ace stayed beside me.

  “Isn’t there any work here?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Underwater. You want to know something funny? I don’t like it down there. It’s too cold, too dark and too full of things I don’t want to meet. Ain’t that a laugh?”

  I stopped. We were under a streetlight, so I could see him. “I thought it was supposed to be wonderful down there.”

  Ace shook his head. “It’s a job, lady. Only you got f
ish nibbling on your toes while you work. Tasting you out, sort of.”

  “You can’t get work up here?”

  “You crazy? Take a job away from a regular person and give it to a gillie?”

  We started walking again. The air was cold and wet. I put my hands in my jacket pockets, then looked over at Ace. He had his arms folded and his shoulders hunched against the cold. “Look,” I said. “I don’t have any money. I lost my job. But I have an extra jacket. Why don’t you take this one?”

  After a moment, Ace said, “Okay. I will. Thanks.”

  I took the jacket off and gave it to him. He put it on, then laughed. “You know what I’m going to do with it, lady?”