Monsters in Orbit

by Jack Vance

  Jean made no protest. There had been no further sign of the black-haired youth or of anyone she could identify as Cholwell’s niece.

  In the air-boat he pulled her to him and kissed her passionately. Jean resisted a moment, then relaxed. Why not? she thought. It was easier than fighting him off. Though in a way she hated contributing further to his self-esteem.

  VII

  Sunrise on Codiron was accompanied by a phenomenon unique in the entire universe: a curtain of blue-white light dropping down the western sky line like an eyelid. It was as if a plug under the horizon had been pulled to let the darkness gush swiftly away, leaving behind the ice-color of Codiron day. The effect was ascribed to a fluorescent component of the air which became activated by Mintaka Sub-30’s actinic light, and the sharp line of separation was explained by reference to the minute size of Mintaka Sub-30’s disk—nearly a point source of fight.

  Jean slipped quietly from her room in time to witness the occurrence. Main Street was long and empty, steeped in blue gloom. Wind swept up the street, cut into her face. She licked her lips hungrily, and wondered where breakfast could be found. At one time a slatternly coffee-house down Paradise Alley served late-hour drunks, gamblers and surfeited patrons of the town’s two brothels; perhaps the place was still in operation.

  Jean shivered in the wind sweeping down from Codiron’s desolate rocks, pulled the dark blue jacket close around her neck. Under her clothes she felt sticky, but so early there was not hot water for a bath—one of the petty economies by which the Soone House had achieved flashy trim for the street front. Superficial glitter, inner deficiency, like certain human beings, and the picture of Gem Morales came to her mind. Her mouth curled in a wintry smile. Arrogant opinionated creature. He had swaggered away from Soone House very satisfied with himself…She dismissed him from her mind. He was an atom in a vast universe; let him enjoy himself, so long as he forwarded her own goals.

  She shivered. It was really very cold and very early to be undertaking such a business. The attic would reek of damp tobacco smoke, beer and whiskey fumes. Accumulated dirt and dust would be clammy under her fingers, but she could not expect her quest to be a round of pleasure. And it would be less complex to sort out Joe Parlier’s old belongings before Gem Morales arrived on the scene.

  She made the familiar turn past the courthouse into Paradise Alley, and saw ahead the yellow glow of the New York Café. She slipped in, took a seat at the counter next to a wheezing farm laborer still stupid from his revelry of the previous night. Quietly she drank coffee and ate toast, watching herself in the mirror behind the counter—a very pretty girl with heavy black hair cut short, a skin like a pane of ivory with golden light behind, a wide pale-rose mouth in a delicate jaw structure, black eyes that might be wide with excitement or long and narrow and veiled with heavy lashes…Ill be pretty a long time, thought Jean, if I don’t let myself go stale. It’s the look of vitality—aliveness —that does so much for me. I hope it’s not just because I’m seventeen: adolescent, so to speak. It’s more than that.

  She finished her coffee, slipped back into Paradise Alley. Behind her, blue-white morning light shone down Main Street; comers and protuberances caught the glow and shone as with St. Elmo’s Fire.

  Ahead, dingy and dark, rose the front of Joe Parlier’s old Aztec Tavern, the earliest home of her memory.

  She slipped around to the back, entered by a well-remembered way. up to the roof of the little storage shed, where a yank at a panel of apparently solid louvers provided an opening. Then through, writhing and panting, to land breathless and scraped on a narrow stairs to the garret.

  She listened. No sound.

  Without hesitation she ran up the stairs, pulled open the dingy frame door.

  She paused in the doorway, and memories flooded up to choke her throat and fill her with pity for the dark-eyed little wretch that had once slept here.

  She blinked, and then set emotion to one side. She looked around the garret. Light seeped through the dirty window to show her a pile of dusty boxes, all that remained of leering Joe Parlier.

  As she had feared it was dusty, damp and clammy, and smelled of the bar below.

  In the first box she found bills, receipts, cancelled checks. The second held a photograph album, which she laid aside, and a number of sound tapes. The third box contained—she raised her head alertly. A stealthy creak in the floor. Jean, sighed, turned her head.

  Gem Morales stood looking through the door. He was half-smiling, lips drawn back over his teeth—a thoroughly unpleasant expression.

  “Thought I’d find you here,” he said softly.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” said Jean.

  He took a step into the room. “You thieving little—”

  Jean saw that his expression was passing through the sequence of the night before. She tensed herself. In another minute , . .

  She said, “Gem.”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you afraid to die?”

  He made no answer, but stood watching like a cat. She said, “If you’re not very careful—you’re going to die.”

  He stepped forward easily. “Don’t come any closer.”

  His body loomed above her; he bent slightly, reaching forward.

  “Two more steps, Gem…”

  She showed him what she held in her hand, a little metal box no larger than a match-case. From a tiny hole in its side a sliver of a dart would plunge six inches into a human body, and the little thread of mitrox would explode.

  Gem stopped short. “You wouldn’t dare. You wouldn’t dare to kill me I” His mental powers were insufficient to envision a universe without Gem Morales. With a supple motion of his shoulders he lunged forward.

  The dart whispered across the air, ruffled his shirt front. She heard the internal thump saw the outward heave of his chest, felt the quiver in the floor when his body struck.

  She grimaced, slowly tucked the dart-box back in her sleeve. She turned back to the boxes. Perhaps she should not have led Gem on with the tale of hidden wealth; it wasn’t really fair to dangle temptation before one so vain and so weak.

  She sighed, opened the third box. It contained calendars, as did the fourth. Joe Parlier had saved calendars, marking off day after day with red crayon and each year laying the record of used-up time to rest. Jean had seen him scribble in the spaces; possibly it had been memoranda. At the time she had been unable to read.

  She leafed back seventeen years, searched along the chain of days. January, February, March—a scribble in faded black ink caught her eye: “Tell Mollie, for the last time, to call for her damned brat.”

  Mollie.

  Mollie was her mother’s name. And who was Mollie? Joe’s mistress? Was it possible that Joe himself had been her father?

  She considered, decided in the negative. Too many times Joe had vilified the fate that made him her keeper. And she remembered when Joe had the horrors after a terrible bellowing drunk. She had dropped a pan to the floor; the clang had jangled the discordant skein of his nerves.

  Joe had cried out in a voice like a comet; he cursed her presence, her eyes, her teeth, the very air she breathed. He told her in a reckless wild voice that he’d as soon kill her as look at her, that he only kept her until she grew old enough to sell. It settled the question. If she had been a part of him, he would have coddled her, given her his best; she would have been a vicarious new start in life for him.

  Joe was not her father.

  But who was Mollie?

  She picked up the photograph album—froze to silence. Footsteps in the street outside. They stopped. She heard the outside door rattle, a voice call out something she could not understand. There was a rattle, then footsteps dying away. Then there was silence.

  Jean seated herself on a box and opened the album.

  VIII

  The first pictures dated from Joe Parlier’s childhood. There were a dozen shots of a stilt-house on Venus, evidently along the Brandy Coast. A sallow little
boy in tattered pink shorts that she recognized as Joe stood beside a buxom hard-faced woman. A few pages later Joe had become a young man, posing beside an old Duraflite air-wagon. Behind were sagging brown and white tassel-trees; the locale was still Venus. On the next page was a single picture, a pretty girl with rather an empty expression. Scrawled in green ink were the words, “Too bad, Joe.”

  The scene changed to Earth: there were pictures of a bar, a restaurant, a large tableau with Joe placid and pompous among a dozen men and women, apparently his employees.

  There were only a few more pictures in the album; evidently Joe’s enthusiasm for pictures declined with his fortunes. Of these two were professional photographs of a brass-blond woman, apparently an entertainer, smiling hugely. The inscription read, “To a Good Guy, Wirlie.”

  There was one more photograph. It showed the Aztec Tavern of twenty years before, so Jean judged by Joe’s appearance. He stood in the doorway flanked on one side by two bartenders in short sleeves, a porter, a man Jean recognized as a gambler; on the other side by four bold-looking women in provocative poses. The legend read: “Joe and the Gang.” Under each figure was a name: “Wirlie, May, Tata, Mollie, Joe, Steve, Butch, Carl, Hopham.”

  Mollie! With a dry mouth Jean scrutinized the face. Her mother? A big beefy woman with a truculent look. Her features were small, kneaded, doughy: a face like a jar full of pig’s-feet.

  Mollie. Mollie what? If her profession were what it seemed, the chance that she still lived in the neighborhood was small.

  .Jean petulantly went back to the calendar, turned back the months…Two years before the date of her birth she found a notation, “Collect bail refund on Mollie and May.”

  There was nothing more. Jean sat a moment pondering. If this revolting Mollie were her mother, who might her father be? Jean sniffed. It was doubtful if Mollie herself knew.

  With a conscious effort Jean returned to the lard-colored face, the little pig eyes. It hurt. So this is Mother. Her eyes suddenly flooded with tears, her mouth twitched. She went on looking, as if it were some land of penance. What in her arrogance had she expected? A Pontemma baronet and his lady, living in a white marble castle?…“I wish I hadn’t been so nosy,” said Jean mournfully. She sighed. “Maybe I have a distinguished father.”

  The idea amused her. “He must have been very, very drunk.”

  She detached the photograph, tucked it in her pocket, rose uncertainly to her feet. Time to go.

  She repacked the boxes, stood looking indecisively at Gem’s body. It wasn’t nice leaving him here in the garret…Nothing about Gem was very nice. He might lay here weeks, months. She felt a small queasiness in her stomach which she repressed angrily. “Be sensible, you fool.”

  Better wipe up fingerprints…There was a rattle, a pounding at the front door, a hoarse voice called, “Gem I…Gem!”

  Jean ran to the door. Time to go. Someone must have seen Gem enter.

  She slipped down the stairs, wiggled out the louver opening to the shed roof, carefully pushed the louvers home. She slid to the ground, ducked over a sagging fence into Aloha Place.

  Ten minutes later she was back in her room at the Soone House, throwing off her clothes for a shower.

  The sleek and lazy clerk m the courthouse grumbled when Jean modestly approached him with her request.

  “Oh, please,” said Jean, smiling half-sidelong, an old ruse.

  It invested her with wistful appeal, magic daring, an unthinkable unimaginable proffer.

  The clerk licked his wine-colored old lips. “Oh…Very well. Little girl like you should be home with your mother. Well?” he asked sharply. “What are you laughing at?”

  Jean did not think it wise to mention that her mother was the topic of her inquiry.

  Together they pored over the records, sliding tape after tape through the screen.

  “That year we was busy as bees,” grumbled the clerk. “But we ought to find that name if—well, now, here’s a Mollie. Mollie Salomon. That the one? Arrested for vagrancy and narcotic addiction on January 12, remanded to the Rehabilitation Home February 1. Bail posted by Joe Parlier, man used to run the saloon down Paradise Alley.”

  “That’s her,” said Jean excitedly. “When was she discharged?”

  The clerk shook his head. “We wouldn’t have no record of that. Must have been when her addiction was cleared up, a year or two.”

  Jean calculated, chewing her lip with little sharp teeth, frowning. That would put Mollie back in circulation something before the date of her own birthday.

  The clerk watched like an old gray cat, but made no comment.

  Jean asked hesitantly, “I don’t suppose this—Mollie Salomon lives around here now?”

  The clerk showed signs of uneasiness, twitching a decorative tassel on his lapel. “Well, young lady, it’s hardly the kind of place you’d be apt to care about.…”

  “What’s the address?”

  The clerk raised his head, met her glance. Quietly he said, “It’s out on Meridian Road, past El Panatela. The Ten-mile House.”

  Meridian Road led into the uplands, winding around the three volcanic necks which ruled the Angel City skyline, dipping like a humming-bird into each of the old mines, fining out into Plaghank Valley. Ten miles along the road was six miles by air, and in minutes after rising from Soone House, the cab set Jean down by a ramshackle old building.

  Wherever men worked and produced and made money in hard and hostile back-country, Ten-Mile Houses appeared. When towns were built, when civilization brought comfort and moderation, the Ten-Mile Houses became quiet backwaters, drowsing through the years in a mellow amber gloom. The rooms became dusty and footfalls sounded loud where once only silence would have been noticed.

  When Jean marched briskly up the stone-foam steps the downstairs saloon was empty. The bar extended along the back wall with the mirror behind overhung with a hundred souvenirs of the old days: choice sound-light crystals, fossils of Trotters and other extinct Codiron life-forms, drills, a tableau of six miner’s hats, each painted with a name.

  A voice rasped suspiciously, “What you want, girl?”

  She turned, saw a hawk-nosed old man sitting in a corner. His eyes were blue and sharp; with his ruff of white hair he reminded her of an old white parakeet disturbed from its sleep.

  “I’m looking for Mollie,” said Jean. “Mollie Salomon.”

  “Nobody here by that name; what do you want her for?”

  “I want to talk.”

  The old man’s jaws moved up and down as if he were chewing something very hot. “What about?”

  “If she wants you to know—shell tell you herself.”

  The old man’s chin wrinkled. “Pretty pert, ain’t you?”

  Soft footsteps sounded behind Jean; a woman in a drab evening gown entered the room, stood looking at Jean with an obvious expression of hunger and envy.

  The old man barked, “Where’s Mollie?*

  The woman pointed at Jean. “Is she coming to work? Because I won’t put up with it. Ill make trouble; the minute a young tart like that sets her—”

  “I just want to talk to Mollie.”

  “She’s upstairs…Cleaning the carpet.” She turned to the old man. “Paisley did it again. If you’d keep that old drunk outa here, I’d thank you kindly for it”

  “Money is money.”

  IX

  Gingerly Jean started to climb the stairs, but a large female figure blocked the passage.

  She was carrying a bucket and a brush. As she came into the light, Jean recognized the woman in Joe Parlier’s photograph, modified by twenty years of ill health, bad temper, a hundred pounds of sour flesh.

  “Mollie?” ventured Jean. “Are you Mollie Salomon?”

  “That’s me. What about it?”

  “I’d like to talk to you. In private.”

  Mollie looked her over briefly, darted a bitter glance into the saloon where the old man and the woman sat listening with undisguised interest. “All rig
ht, come on out here.”

  She pushed open a rickety door, waddled out on a side porch overlooking a sad little garden of rattle-bush, pilgrim vine, rusty fungus. She sank into a wicker chair that squeaked under her weight.

  “What’s the story?”

  Jean’s imaginings had never quite envisioned a meeting like this. What was there to say? Looking into the pudgy white face, conscious of her sour woman-reek, the words came haltingly to her mouth…Sudden anger flared inside Jean.

  “Seventeen years ago you left a baby with Joe Parlier in Angel City. I want to know who the father was.”

  Mollie Salomon’s face changed by not a twitch. After a moment she said in a low harsh voice, “I’ve often wondered how that baby turned out…”

  Jean asked in sudden hope, “It wasn’t your own baby?”

  Mollie laughed bitterly. “Don’t run away with yourself. It was my brat, no doubt of that, no doubt at all…How did you find out?”

  “Joe left a kind of diary…Who was the father? Was it Joe?”

  The woman drew herself up into a ludicrous exposition of dignity. “Joe Parlier? Humph, I should say not.”

  “Who then?”

  Mollie inspected Jean through crafty eyes. “You look like you’re doing well in the world.”

  Jean nodded. “I knew it would come to this. How much?”

  Mollie’s price was surprisingly modest—perhaps the gauge of importance she put on the matter. “On ten, twenty dollars, just to pay for my time.”

  Jean would have given her a hundred, a thousand. “Here.”

  “Thank you,” said Mollie Salomon with prim gentility. “Now I’ll tell you what I know of the affair, which to my way of thinking is one of the queerest things I’ve ever heard of.”

  Jean said impatiently, “Never mind that, who is my father?”

  Mollie said, “Nobody.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody.”

  Jean was silent a moment. Then: “There must have been someone.”

  Mollie said with dignity. “There’s no one that should know better than me, and I’ll tell you that for sure.”