Orbit 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “This is rhapsody, this is panorama, this is Africa,” said Luna Boyle.

  And they were all totally in the middle of Africa, on a slippery bole of a broken tree that teetered over a green swamp. And the animals were around them in the rain forests and the savannas, on the shore, and in the green swamp. And a man black as midnight was there, his face broken with emotion.

  Justina Shackleton screamed horribly as the crocodile sliced her in two. She still screamed from inside the gulping beast as one might scream underwater.

  The ecumene, the world island, has the shape of an egg 110° from East to West and 45° from North to South. It is scored into three parts, Europa, Asia, and Libya. It is scored by the incursing sea, Europa from Asia by the Pontus and the Hyrcanum Seas, Asia from Libya by the Persian Sea, and Libya from Europa by the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas (the Mediterranean Complex). The most westerly place in the world is Coruna in Iberia or Spain, the most northerly is Kharkovsk in Scythia or Russia, the most easterly is Sining in Han or China, and the most southerly is the Cinnamon Coast of Libya.

  The first chart of the world, that of Eratosthenes, was thus, and it was perfect. Whether he had it from primitive revelation or from early exploration, it was correct except in minor detail. Though Britain seems to have been charted as an island rather than a peninsula, this may be the error of an early copyist. A Britain unjoined to the Main would shrivel, as a branch hewed from a tree will shrivel and die. There are no viable islands.

  All islands fade and drift and disappear. Sometimes they reappear briefly, but there is no life in them. The juice of life flows through the continent only. It is the ONE LAND, THE LIVING AND HOLY LAND, THE ENTIRE AND PERFECT JEWEL.

  Thus, Ireland is seen sometimes, or Hy-Brasil, or the American rock-lands; but they are not always seen in the same places, and they do not always have the same appearances. They have not life nor reality.

  The secret geographies and histories of the American Society and the Atlantis Society and such are esoteric lodge-group things, symbolic and murky, forms for the initiated; they contain analogs, and not realities.

  The ecumene must grow, of course, but it grows inwardly in intensity and meaning; its form cannot change. The form is determined from the beginning, just as the form of a man is determined before he is born. A man does not grow by adding more limbs or heads. That the ecumene should grow appendages would be as grotesque as a man growing a tail.

  —Diogenes Pontifex, World as Perfection

  August Shackleton guffawed nervously when his wife was sliced in two, and the half of her swallowed by the crocodile; and his hand that held the Roman Bomb trembled. Indeed, there was something unnerving about the whole thing. That cut-off screaming of Justina Shackleton had something shocking and unpleasant about it.

  Justina had once gone hysterical at a séance when the ghosts and appearances had been more or less conventional, but August was never sure just how sincere her hysteria was. Another time she had disappeared for several days after a séance, from a locked room, and had come back with a roguish story about being in spiritland. She was a high-strung clown with a sense of the outrageous, and this present business of being chomped in two was typical of her creations.

  And suddenly they were all explosively creative, each one’s subjective patterns intermingling with those of the others to produce howling chaos. What had been the ship the True Believer, what had been the slippery overhanging bole, had now come dangerously down into the swamp. They all wanted a closer look.

  There was screaming and trumpeting, there was color and surge and threshing mass. The crocodile bellowed as a bull might, not at all as Shackleton believed that a croc should sound. But someone there had the idea that a crocodile should bellow like that, and that someone had imposed his ideate on the others. Unhorselike creatures whinnied, and vivid animals sobbed and gurgled.

  “Go back up, go back up!” the black man was bleating. “You will all be killed here.” His face was a true Mummers Night black-man mask; one of the party was imagining strongly in that stereotyped form. But the incongruous thing about the black man was that he was gibbering at them in French, in bad French as though it were his weak second language. Which one of them was linguist enough to invent such a black French on the edge of the moment? Luna Boyle, of course, but why had she put grotesque French into the mouth of a black man in contingent Africa?

  “Go back up, go back up,” the black man cried. He had an old rifle from the last century and he was shooting the crocodile with it.

  “Hey, he’s shooting Justina too,” Mintgreen giggled too gaily. “Half of her is in the dragon thing. Oh, she will have some stories about this! She has the best imagination of all of us.”

  “Let’s get her out and together again,” Linter suggested. They were all shouting too loudly and too nervously. “She’s missing the best part of it.”

  “Here, here, black man,” Shackleton called. “Can you get the half of my wife out of that thing and put her together again!”

  “Oh, white people, white people, this is real and this is death,” the black man moaned in agony. “This is a closed wild area. You should not be here at all. However you have come here, whatever is the real form of that balk or tree on which you stand so dangerously, be gone from here if you can do it. You do not know how to live in this. White people, be gone! It is your lives!”

  “One can command a fantasy,” said August Shackleton. “Black man fantasy, I command you to get the half of my wife out of that dying creature and put her together again.”

  “Oh, white people on dope, I cannot do this,” the black man moaned. “She is dead, and you joke and drink Green Bird and Bomb and hoot like demented children in a dream.”

  “We are in a dream, and you are of the dream,” Shackleton said easily. “And we may experiment with our dream creatures. That is our purpose here. Here, catch a bottle of Roman Bomb!” and he threw it to the black man who caught it. “Drink it. I am interested in seeing whether a dream figure can make incursion on physical substance.”

  “Oh, white people on dope,” the black man moaned. “The watering place is no place for you to be. You excite the animals and then they kill. When they are excited it is danger to me also who usually moves among them easily. I have had to kill the crocodile who is my friend. I do not want to kill others. I do not want more of you to be killed.”

  The black man was booted and jacketed quite in the manner of a hunting store outfitting, this possibly by the careful imagining of Boyle who loved hunting rig. The black Mummers Night mask was contorted in agony and apprehension, but the black man did drink the Roman Bomb nervously the while he begged them to be gone from that place.

  “You will notice that the skull form is quite human and the bearing completely erect,” Linter said. “You will notice also that he is less hairy than we are and is thick of lip, while the great ape to the left is more hairy and thin of lip. I had imagined them to be the same creature differently interpreted.”

  “No, you imagine them to be as they appear,” Shackleton said. “It is your imagining of these two creatures that we are all watching.”

  “But notice the configuration of the tempora and the mandible,” Linter protested. “Not what I expected.”

  “You are the only one of us who knows about tempora and mandible shape,” said Shackleton. “I tell you that it is your own imagery. He is structured by you, given the conventional Mummers Night black mask by all of us, clothed by Boyle, and speeched by Luna Boyle. His production is our joint effort. Watch it, everyone! It becomes dangerous now, even explosive! Man, I’m getting as hysterical as my wife! The dream is so vivid that it has its hooks in me. Ah, it’s a great investigative experience, but I doubt if I’ll want to return to this particular experience again. Green perdition! But it does become dangerous! Watch out, everyone!”

  Ah, it had become wild: a hooting and screaming and bawling wild Africa bedlam, a green and tawny dazzle of fast-moving color, pungent animal ste
nch of fear and murder, acrid smell of human fear.

  A lion defiled the watering place, striking down a horned buck in the muddy shallows and going muzzle-deep into the hot-colored gore. A hippo erupted out of the water, a behemoth from the depths. Giraffes erected like crazily articulated derricks and galloped ungainly through the boscage.

  “Enough of this!” Mintgreen Linter, frightened, took the lead out of it, incanting: “That the noon-time nightmare pass! The crocodile-dragon and the behemoth.”

  “We abjure them, we abjure them,” they all chanted in various voices.

  “That the black man and the black ape pass, and all black things of the black-green land.”

  “We abjure them, we abjure them,” they chanted. But the black man was already down under the feet and horns of a buffalo creature, dead, and his last rifle shot still echoing; he had tried to prevent the buffalo from upsetting the teetering bole and dumping all the white people into the murder swamp. The great ape was also gone, terrified, back to his high-grass savanna. Many of the other creatures had disappeared or become faint, and there was again the tang of salt water and of distant hot-sand beaches in the air.

  “That the lion be gone who roars by day,” Luna Boyle took up the incantation, “and the leopard who is Panther, the all-animal of grisly mythology. That the crushing snakes be gone, and the giant ostrich, and the horse in the clown suit.”

  “We abjure them all, we abjure them all,” everyone chanted.

  “That the True Believer form again beneath our feet in the structure we can see and know,” August Shackleton incanted.

  “We conjure it up, we conjure it up,” they chanted, and the True Believer rose again barely above the threshold of the senses.

  “That the illicit continents fade, and all the baleful islands of our writhing under-minds!” Boyle blurted in some trepidation.

  “We abjure them, we abjure them,” they all chanted contritely. And the illicit Africa had now become quite fragile, while the Cinnamon Coast of South Libya began to form as behind green glass.

  “Let us finish it! It lingers unhealthily!” Shackleton spoke loudly with resolve. “Let us drop our reservations! That we dabble no more in this particular illicitness! That we go no more hungering after strange geographies that are not of proper world! That we seal off the unsettling things inside us!”

  “We seal them off, we seal them off,” they chanted.

  And it was finished.

  They were on the True Believer sailing in an easterly direction off the Cinnamon Coast of Libya. To the north was that lovely coast with its wonderful beaches and remarkable hotels; to the south and east and west were the white-topped waves that went on forever and ever.

  It was over with, but the incantation had shaken them all with the sheer psychic power of it.

  “Justina isn’t with us,” Luna Boyle said nervously. “She isn’t on the True Believer anywhere. Do you think something has happened to her? Will she come back?”

  “Of course she’ll come back,” August Shackleton purred. “She was truant from a séance for two days once. Oh, she’ll have some good ones when she does come back, and I’ll rather enjoy the vacation from her. I love her, but a man married to an outré wife needs a rest from it sometimes.”

  “But look, look!” Luna Boyle cried. “Oh, she’s impossible! She always did carry an antic too far. That’s in bad taste.”

  The severed lower half of Justina Shackleton floated in the clear blue water beside the True Believer. It was bloodied and gruesome and was being attacked by slashing fishes.

  “Oh, stop it, Justina!” August Shackleton called angrily. “What a woman! Ah, I see it now! We turn to land.”

  It was the opening to the Yacht Basin, the channel through the beach shallows to the fine harbor behind. They tacked, they turned, they nosed in toward the Cinnamon Coast of Libya.

  The world was intact again, one whole and perfect jewel, lying wonderful to the north of them. And south was only great ocean and great equator and empty places of the under-mind. The True Believer came to port passage with the perfect bright noon-time on all things.

  <>

  * * * *

  Sunburst

  by Roderick Thorp

  She prodded him awake violently. Still heavy with sleep, he rolled onto his back and blinked her into focus. “What is it, Cyn? What’s the matter?”

  “Something terrible’s happening. Get up.” She had his robe over her arm. “I don’t know what it is, Johnny. Come on, please.” She gave him the robe. “I turned on the kitchen radio when I got up—there’s nothing but news. The same on television. The kids wanted to watch their cartoon shows, but there aren’t any—”

  “News? News? Make sense, Cyn.” Johnny Loughlin stepped into his slippers. “What news are you talking about? Has the war started?”

  “No, thank God. It’s all kind of news—no; all the news is bad, but it’s coming from all over. All bad things—”

  Johnny Loughlin felt the energy sag out of him. For her sake, he did not flop down on the bed. It was Saturday, and while she could go back to bed after the kids got off to school, he had only the weekends—rare ones—to catch up on his health. He lit a cigarette. For some reason his hand was shaking. “Cyn, give me an example of this bad news.”

  “Senator Clinton was beaten up, Johnny. He was in California last night to give a speech. They have films of him being punched and kicked.”

  “For God’s sake.” He nodded. “All right.”

  She led the way out of the room. They knew Senator Clinton. They had campaigned for him and he had been a guest—once—in this house. “You’d think the cameramen would have stopped it,” Cynthia said, speaking her husband’s thoughts. “But what happened to him is only part of it, I swear. There’s a demonstration down at Grand Central Station, people lying on the tracks and nobody with the courage to move them.”

  “What are they demonstrating for?”

  “Not integration. It’s a labor dispute. Grand Central is filled with people waiting to take excursion trains, too.”

  Downstairs, the living room was still dark. The two children, dressed in play clothes, were sitting in front of the television set, which was showing newsreels of a fire. “What is that?” Johnny Loughlin asked.

  “A tenement fire in Chicago,” Cynthia answered. “It started after midnight and it’s still going. Fifty people are dead and the radio had that two boys set it for a joke. Oh, there’s more, Johnny, I promise you.”

  “Good morning, Daddy,” Jodi said. Now Johnny, Jr., realized that he was there.

  “Good morning, kids. I’m sorry that your programs aren’t on.”

  They said something, he didn’t hear it. “I’ll get you a cup of coffee,” Cynthia said.

  The television screen flashed to the news announcer. He seemed to be caught by surprise. Quickly he tried to find something on his desk to read. But slowly his image began to fade, and before he blanked out completely he could be seen looking beyond the camera to a man in the studio. “What the hell do you call that. You told me you were cutting right to the damned commercial!”

  “Which of the five leading pain remedies—”

  Cynthia reentered the room. “I heard that. They couldn’t seem to get straightened out at the radio station, either.” As she came closer with the coffee, Johnny Loughlin looked carefully into her eyes.

  “Did you take your pill this morning?”

  “No. I ran out.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Don’t yell at me, Johnny. It just happened.”

  “I didn’t yell. Call the drugstore and give them the prescription number.”

  “In a minute. The bottle is upstairs.” She sat down on the sofa beside Jodi.

  He would probably have to run the errand himself. It was unimportant. She could go for days without taking the pills. The television went to a station break and a local commercial. Johnny Loughlin wanted to show his wife that he wasn’t angry abou
t the pills. In the past when she had forgotten to take them his own emotional behavior had done her more damage than the lack of medication. When he had realized that, he had been able to change his attitude. “What else has happened, Cyn?”

  “There’s been trouble in China. What kind, nobody knows. Thousands of people have been trying to get into Hong Kong all night—all day, over there. The story is confused because they’re out of control even when they get into Hong Kong. The refugees, I mean. There was one of those telephone hookups and the reporter said that the Hong Kong police have had those water cannon trucks out for hours. Apparently the Communists have had to call out their army. The refugees have told of riots and massacres—”

  The television station switched to the news announcer while he was in midsentence. “. . . Negroes have seized a radio station in Johannesburg. ‘Help us. Help us, free people of the world,’ in the manner of the Hungarian freedom fighters of nineteen fifty-six. No other details are available at the moment. To repeat, monitoring receivers throughout the world have picked up broadcasts from Johannesburg, South Africa. Unsubstantiated reports say that the natives have begun a large-scale, though uncoordinated, revolt. As soon as further bulletins come in, we’ll pass them on to you.”