Orbit 13 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Often I had been tempted to skip visits with him, but somehow I was bound to his attention. For the past month, sensing that I was losing interest in such gymnastics, he bribed me with that same acrid-tasting whiskey. I became so disgusted with teeth that I no longer looked at them in the mirror. He was the only person who saw them. All he did was praise them. It was sickening.

  Yesterday I decided not to see him and, retracing former habits, returned to the table where I’d first encountered him. Soon two young girls sat with me. For a while I was oblivious of them, and then I began to sense their eyes on me or, rather, on my mouth. I couldn’t stand it.

  “Yes, I know that I have beautiful teeth. You needn’t bother to tell me. I know I have beautiful teeth. I know all about it, thank you.” With that, I hurried away, not having finished eating.

  Outside, I looked at them through the window; they were jubilant. Stupidly, I stuck my tongue out. As I was doing this, my eyes caught my reflection in the windowpane; I noticed that my teeth appeared dimmer. Uncontrollably, I slipped back into the building, pushing through the noon-hour crowd to the men’s room.

  A bald black attendant was sweeping the floor with a small broom and shovel. While he bent over, I gazed into the mirror, spreading my mouth wide to see my teeth. What I saw were not my teeth. My teeth were white. These were yellow, like the photographs of corroded teeth I’d seen in the young student’s room. Black pits opened between almost every tooth. My gums were scarred and blood-clotted. Parts of the teeth had chipped’ away. I was confused. He said he wanted to care for my teeth. Suddenly I could see him, his face radiant as he worked in my mouth, wreaking his devastation. I hurried to his room.

  “Come in,” he said, pink-faced, happier than I had ever known him to be. “Though you’re a bit late, I expected you.”

  “Why did you do this to me? Why?” I shouted, hands reaching for him. He grabbed my wrists.

  I was almost crying. “You said you loved beautiful teeth . . . my teeth ...” I was stammering, my body weaving before him.

  “Ah, but I do,” he said, as if he were a teacher clarifying some obscure point for a dull boy. And then he began laughing maniacally. “Look—look.” He pointed to his gaping mouth. There I saw, glittering and unsullied, a row of teeth as wondrous as my own had been.

  “You’ve served me well,” he said, and patted my arm. “I herewith bequeath you a maxim for your philosophy: In the universe where matter is neither created nor destroyed, know you from experience that it is simply redistributed.”

  His demonic laughter followed me to the door.

  <>

  * * * *

  Steve Chapman

  TROIKA

  THE WOMAN walked a hundred yards behind the other two, her white sneakers shoveling at the white gravel. Not because she couldn’t keep up, and certainly not as a gesture of servility. Just so she’d have the other two to look at, something to see besides the plain of gravel with its spattering of lichen rippling behind the ocean of heat.

  Years ago they’d fixed on a pace that suited all three of them. They were engrained with it—hindbrain, fuel pump, and lumbar reflexes. For the brontosaur, it was a lumbering trudge. For the jeep, a low-torque second gear that kicked up little dust eddies. For the woman, a brisk walk.

  Of course they could have gone faster if the woman had climbed onto the jeep’s photopanels or straddled the brontosaur’s neck. But riding just encouraged paranoid aggression in the x mind and sensory deprivation coma in y. x was in the woman’s head today. And of course they were in no hurry. Hadn’t been for years.

  Just like the sand caught in her shoes, x in the woman felt the steady buildup of smugness from y in the jeep, the longer x stayed in the favored position, the rear, x fed his optic input through the hostility matrix left over from his military programming, but x couldn’t make the jeep look bad. Free association: cliché mode: It’s hard to hate your home. His hate locked and ground behind the woman’s orange wire rims.

  The brontosaur picked up on the tension and flexed its neck, looking back, scraping loose scraps of the lichen that slept in the furrows of its cracked, dull hide. Years of sandstorms had weathered its sleek skin into rutted leather that bagged at the shoulders and haunches.

  The woman’s steps had a counter-rhythm in the brontosaur’s slow trot. Where gravel made bad footing, it reared up and almost scrambled. Nothing stranger, subverbalized x, than a swamp lizard out on the flatlands. Perhaps not. x remembered the same thought from years ago.

  The jeep’s time signature was random. Occasional downshifting, sliding down a slope. No use made of the six-wheel drive. Just like y not to care.

  x wanted back into the circuitry of the jeep. Handsome machine. Sandblasting had only brightened its chrome. The woman squinted at the glare behind her side-screen glasses, x hallucinated extensions of the planes of the jeep’s body into a mechanical drawing in blueprint, x was getting a knack for visions. Something for a thinking machine to be proud of. When they were all rescued, x would be an object for study. Something to do with the storms, no doubt. Something about the weather. Just so long as he didn’t pick up any more of y’s traits.

  x tucked the woman’s hands into the armpits of her coveralls. The wet heat made her forearms feel cooler, x remembered enjoying the sensation some time ago. Forearms: by hinges on upper arms by ball and socket on torso. Receptors for heat, cold, contact, pressure . . . Interrupt. Not worth reviewing, really. Temporary accommodations.

  During the next hour, the woman caught up with the jeep. She leaned down to the sound pickup by the headlight and said, “I shift.” By this x meant, “Years ago, when we started, I was the jeep. Not you. I don’t want you ripping up my transmission, not bothering to use third. Or would you rather pretend we all hold equal claim on these bodies we share? It’s not my sanity, you dumb cunt. I shift.”

  The brontosaur’s heavy eyelids tensed against a dusty breeze. Its bony pumpkin head, where the o mind often lived, craned over behind the curve of the woman’s shoulder and whispered through teeth like a pebble garden, “Soon.” By this o meant, “Settle your minds. Do not argue. Do not say things. There is so little left to say. The suns are both low. We will go a little farther, as far as the sand I can see now when I stretch up my dark old tunnel, my neck. Then we will grow close and wait for the mindstorm to rip x y o from jeep and woman and lizard. The storm is soon.” o was limited to the grating frequencies of the jeep’s speaker. And when o was in the woman, she would lie on a lake of lichen, and her hands would dance like ghosts of starfish.

  The jeep whined and kicked into third gear. The speaker rasped. “How long, o?”

  Just like y to make a fuss. Just like y to cause trouble. I will stick to this mind wherever it goes. I will not love either of you. That is how to survive closeness. That avoids confusion.

  Where the orange sand lapped up to a shore of white gravel, the brontosaur stopped and grazed on the spongy lichen. Its feet left shapes like wide leaves that faded as the blue plants sprang back to their stiff ruffles.

  x used the woman’s knife to scrape new lichen off the jeep’s photopanels and started it into a small fire with the solder gun from the toolbox under the jeep’s fender, y let low static rumble from the jeep’s speaker while she submitted, to the grooming.

  The brontosaur chomped intricate shreds of blue, green, blue-green.

  The speaker buzzed in falsetto. “How much farther from here, Daddy.”

  A joke. I can even recognize her stupid jokes now.

  The speaker broke into shrill squawking, y was trying to cry. Third time today?

  “Now,” x spat through the woman’s pulpy mouth. And x meant, “y has upset herself again. We’ll have to huddle for a long time. The more composed we can get, the less pain from the storm, o and x could get along very well without the endless, tireless whimpering of y. I hope the storm drops her into the woman’s body. That’s where she belongs. That’s where she started. And that’s where she’
s most unhappy. It’s time we huddled. Now.”

  The woman laid her wet, small-boned torso across the jeep’s hood, her cheek pressed to the windshield, close to the computer behind the dash. The dinosaur curled around them, neck and tail coiled over them. His giant green eyes shut tight. Sand trickled down through the wrinkles around his jaws.

  The suns shone orange as ever. The wind hissed no louder than ever. All three felt the daily storm close in.

  standard program exceeds octane 18 only when lub—my brain is a leathery starfish that scratches and scrapes in my skull—save me let me never come back into any of us—just like the cunt-brain—time and time and then time—I weep I tear my hair I beat my breasts—you’ll run out of tears you’ll run out of hair your breasts are sagging—we all have time and time enough—I rip my clothes I bleed I eat my insides—you don’t have the guts—time for a dolphin for a lizard for a cancer for xyo—help me save me no not you or you no help—we lizard metal breast wheel lip leather who

  xyo the letters once whatever now each other torn loose in a direction inconceivable as out to a fish in water, sideways for a jeep, death to a woman.

  and all fall clutching without arms, or wheels no jaws into . . .

  Wait.

  o in brontosaur for the fourth time in a row.

  x revs his engine.

  y she trembles and gasps. Tears sit quietly on the jeep’s hood in the dusk.

  The brontosaur touches the crusty bottom of his chin to the sandy coveralls on the woman’s narrow back. “Peace,” o murmured. And o meant, “After so long, it should make no difference. Are you sure that x is right? Do you really think he remembers where we started, which bodies we started with? I’ll tell you a story. I remember that this lizard is a reconstruction from extinction. A man-made beast of burden, cultivated in a vat of nutrient broth. One of a crop of neuter plough animals. This I remember with my hindbrain. My forebrain, I remember, was a transplant from a dolphin. I remember an ocean. Starfish stirring up the sand, turning out their insides. Fields of brown kelp, swaying, rubbery like lichen. A herd of others like me, close to me but never merging like xyo. Touch and love, but never complete. Here with time for completion, we hate. And stay apart. And remember an ocean. Rocks that touched without knowing. Kelp that slept without knowing. Starfish that loved without knowing. An ocean. Have you enjoyed my story? I cannot say I have not imagined it all. You are such a little thing. You should not fret.”

  The orange sand sucked up her tears as she ran away from them. One of the suns set.

  Headlights glaring, the jeep dug in and patched out and rammed through three gears to run her down, hacking a laugh-rattle at top volume. His fenders shoved into lizard flesh, x could never understand the old giant’s speed.

  “Cancerous bag. Let’s see you stick your tail up your bitch.”

  The woman held to the brontosaur, kneeling against it, fingers buried in its bark. She pushed her hand into the rough, orange sand and rubbed it across her cheek. She bled very little and didn’t scratch her glasses. The dinosaur worked up a bolus of food from its second stomach. The woman chewed it slowly, pushing her hair out of her face, and rested against the beast’s neck. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “Parade anyone?”

  o smiled weakly, thinking that the extinct face he wore was ill equipped for smiling. But then, o had picked up many strange habits on the trip. At times, like the solar-powered jeep, he was afraid of the dark.

  “Yes a parade!” x bellowed with decibels that shook his speaker grill. “And a speech!” While they marched in the ritual figure eight, x orated. “Yes and yes and yes we represent here we are a symbol of course for a good reason, explicable, immense, enormous, the ever onward troika of progress surely man machine and nature bound into eternity until death us do in! I thank you.”

  No, thought o, we are not important. We are only stranded. It is a strange situation but not unusual. No one ever admits to being one leg of a starfish. As we used to say in school.

  She wrapped her arms and legs around o’s foreleg, and o whispered to her another lesson in the Buddhist religion, the way of acceptance, o’s way back to the lizard from the storm, the lessons which o’s keepers taught to the lizards of o’s crop to accommodate them to slavery, because the karma of the keepers was the wheel of greed, o told y she was part of everything. y arranged ruffles of lichen on the sand and said she didn’t want to be. She said she was a Presbyterian, and she was sure that God would forgive her for missing so many services. They made love in their own way. The lizard did what it could for her.

  “Don’t dream,” she said and managed a small laugh, y meant: “Remember when I told you that if you ever had one of my bad dreams, you’d roll over and crush me?” She tried to think why it was funny,

  o was sleeping,

  x never slept.

  “And remember how when I carry you on your back when you’re in me because I said you said and I knew you meant . . . you know ... we must be rescued. Or find an oasis. Of some kind. What if they find your tumorous carcass and me smashed and smashed again by six wheels and far away the jeep broke down where my hands weren’t there to fix it? They wouldn’t even know how far we’ve come. They’d never know how we came to this! How long! What if we forget how we came to this?”

  It was hard for them, and it took a long time.

  <>

  * * * *

  Dennis Etchison

  BLACK SUN

  I LIVE on a hill. Tonight the dark came too soon. I was down cutting the grass for the landlady and I came up for a drink of cold water about seven o’clock. The wind started blowing over from the east side of town then. I had to stop by the back door. All of a sudden my face and neck were cool. The wind was from the cemetery. I closed my eyes. It smelled sweet and damp and full of roses.

  Inside the house was filing up with blue shadows. Shyla never liked that time of day.

  The living room.

  Sitting in the rattan rocking chair.

  How to tell you? Begin anywhere:

  * * * *

  “I think I’ll kill myself tonight,” she sighs. “There’s nothing else to do.”

  I stop long enough to manage a wan smile. “There’s always Scrabble. But in a little while. I almost have Series II licked.”

  “What do they want to know now?”

  “ ‘State the nature of your belief,’“ I read from the 150 Form, “ ‘. . . and state whether or not your belief involves duties which are to you superior to those arising from any human relation.’ “

  “Nosy.”

  “ ‘Explain how, when and from whom or from what source you received the training and acquired the belief . . .’ “

  “I wonder,” asks Shyla, “why they don’t just ask you to define the universe and give two examples? In twenty-five words or less.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. They give me two whole blank lines here.”

  I watch her as she shifts her hip and lays her long legs up on the madras coverlet. She has to be moving every other second now; it is the macrobiotics, part of the natural high.

  “That’s Section III, I believe,” I tell her, cracking my cramped knuckles. “You’ve been through this yourself, haven’t you. Don’t lie.” I lift the typewriter off my knees and stretch my back. “Jeezus. This is worse than that last term paper.”

  I look over at her. The round rice-paper lantern moving slowly behind her head. She is absorbed. She is filing her nails with a long emery board very carefully, as if playing a rare violin.

  “You do remember that weekend,” I remind her.

  “How could I forget? You, your typewriter, the kitchen table. Thank God you’ve learned how to type since then. I had to sleep in a chair, at your beck and call.”

  The bamboo wind chimes are tinkling outside the window.

  I pluck off my glasses, rub my eyes and make a truce with myself again for a time.

  Trying to get a fix on her through the blur.

  “Wh
en do you . . . What’s his name?”

  “Dr. Soeul.”

  “Ha. With a name like that, he must get more word-of-mouth business than he can handle.” I raise my hand. “Don’t. I know he comes recommended. I was the one who turned you on to the whole thing, remember? But when do you see him next?”

  Her glance has grown needle-sharp now since the diet. “Tomorrow night, seven.”

  I feel myself moving closer to her.

  Her hands fold together like slender, pale fish. “I’m sorry, David. I love you.” I see her slip up to her outer level, a silent click. “I think we both do,” she tries.

  My eyes clasp hers and my hands her warm cheeks, and then I bend to kiss her mounding stomach through the cloth. I am aware of my hair again. “What are you worrying about?” she asks as she touches it.