She came the remainder of the steps to the napeless wine-colored rug. She stood there and exhaled deeply, as though she had just put a satisfactory finis to an immense project.
“My name is—” I began, but she cut me off with a sharp snort and, “Name’s the same.” She giggled prettily.
“Names ring of little consequence, don’t you agree?” and there was such conviction in her voice, I could hardly disagree.
So I said, “I suppose that’s so.”
She snickered softly and patted her auburn hair, bed-disarrayed. “Indeed,” she said with finality, “that is so; very much so.”
This was most peculiar to me, for several reasons.
First, she was talking with a rather complicated incoherence that seemed perfectly rational at the time, and second, she was the first person I had spoken to since I had been admitted to the Place, two years and three months before.
I felt an affinity for this woman, and hastened to strengthen our flimsy tie.
“And yet,” I ventured, “one must have something by which to know another person.” I became most bold and went on, “Besides—” gulping, “if one likes someone.”
She considered this for a long second, one hand still on the wall, the other at her white throat. “If you insist,” she replied, after deliberation, and added, “you may call me Piretta.”
“Is that your name?” I asked.
“No,” she answered, so I knew we were to be friends.
“Then you can call me Sidney Carton,” I released a secret desire of long sublimation.
“That is a fine name, should any name be considered fine,” she admitted, and I nodded. Then, realizing she could not hear a nod, I added a monosyllable to indicate her pleasure was mine also.
“Would you care to see the gardens?” I asked chivalrously.
“That would be most kind of you,” she said, adding with a touch of irony, “as you see…I’m quite blind.”
Since it was a game we were playing I said, “Oh, truly? I really hadn’t noticed.”
Then she took my arm, and we went down the corridor toward the garden French doors. I heard someone coming down the staircase, and she stiffened on my arm. “Miss Hazelet,” she gasped. “Oh, please!”
I knew what she was trying to say. Her attendant. I knew then that she was not allowed downstairs, that she was now being sought by her nurse. But I could not allow her to be returned to her room, after I had just found her.
“Trust me,” I whispered, leading her into a side corridor.
I found the mop closet, and gently ushered her before me, into its cool, dark recess. I closed the door softly, and stood there, very close to her. I could hear her breathing, and it was shallow, quick. It made me remember those hours before dawn in Korea, even when we were full asleep; when we sensed what was coming, with fear and trepidation. She was frightened. I held her close, without meaning to do so, and her one arm went around my waist. We were very near, and for the first time in over two years I felt emotions stirring in me; how foolish of me to consider love. But I waited there with her, adrift in a sargasso of conflicting feelings, while her Miss Hazelet paced outside.
Finally, after what seemed a time too short, we heard those same precise steps mounting the stairs—annoyed, prissy, flustered.
“She’s gone. Now we can see the gardens,” I said, and wanted to bite my tongue. She could see nothing; but I did not rectify my error. Let her think I took her infirmity casually. It was far better that way.
I opened the door cautiously, and peered out. No one but old Bauer, shuffling along down the hall, his back to us. I led her out, and as though nothing had happened, she took my arm once more.
“How sweet of you,” she said, and squeezed my bicep.
We walked back to the French doors, and went outside.
The air was musky with the scent of fall, and the crackling of leaves underfoot was a constant thing. It was not too chilly, and yet she clung to me with a soft desperation more need than inclination. I didn’t think it was because of her blindness; I was certain she could walk through the garden without any help if she so desired.
We moved down the walk, winding out of sight of the Place in a few seconds, shielded and screened by the high, neatly prunted hedges. Oddly enough, for that time of day, no attendants were slithering through the chinaberry and hedges, no other “guests” were taking their blank-eyed pleasure on the turf or on the bypaths.
I glanced sidewise at her profile, and was pleased by her chiseled features. Her chin was a bit too sharp and thrust forward, but it was offset by high cheekbones and long eyelashes that gave her a rather Asiatic expression. Her lips were full, and her nose was a classic yet short sweep.
I had the strangest feeling I had seen her somewhere before, though that was patently impossible.
Yet the feeling persisted.
I remembered another girl…but that had been before Korea…before the sound of a metallic shriek down the night sky…and someone standing beside my bed at Walter Reed. That had been in another life, before I had died, and been sent to this Place.
“Is the sky dark?” she asked. I guided her to a bench, hidden within a box of hedges.
“Not very,” I replied. “There are a few clouds in the north, but they don’t look like rainclouds. I think it’ll be a nice day.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said resignedly. “The weather doesn’t really matter. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen sunlight through the trees?” Then she sighed, and laid her head back against the bench. “No. The weather doesn’t really matter. Not at this Time, anyhow.”
I don’t know what that meant, but I didn’t care, either.
There was a new life surging through me. I was surprised to hear it beating in my ears. I was surprised to find myself thinking minutes into the future. No one who has not experienced it can understand what it is to be dead, and not think of the future, then to have something worthwhile, and begin to live all over again. I don’t mean just hope, nothing that simple and uncomplicated. I mean to be dead, and then to be alive. It had come to be like that in just a few minutes since I had met Piretta. I had ignored the very next instant for the past two years and three months, and now suddenly, I was looking to the future. Not much at first, for it had become an atrophied talent in me, but I was expecting from minute to minute, caring, and I could feel my life ranging back to pick me up, to continue its journey.
I was looking ahead, and wasn’t that the first step to regaining my lost life?
“Why are you here?” she inquired, placing a cool, slim-fingered hand on my bare arm.
I placed my hand over it, and she started, so I withdrew it self-consciously. Then she searched about, found it, and put it over hers again.
“I was in Korea,” I explained. “There was a mortar and I was hit, and they sent me here. I—I didn’t want to—maybe I wasn’t able to—I don’t know—I didn’t want to talk to anyone for a long time.
“But I’m all right now,” I finished, at peace with myself abruptly.
“Yes,” she said, as though that decided it.
Then she went on speaking, in the strangest tone of voice: “Do you sense the Time of the Eye, too, or are you one of them?” She asked it with ruthlessness in her voice. I didn’t know what to answer.
“Who do you mean by them?”
She let her full upper lip snarl, and said, “Those women who bedpan me. Those foul, crepuscular antiseptics!”
“If you mean the nurses and attendants,” I caught her line of thought, “no, I’m not one of them. I’m as annoyed by them as you seem to be. Didn’t I hide you?”
“Would you find me a stick?” she asked.
I looked around, and seeing none, broke a branch from the box hedge. “This?”
I handed it to her.
“Thank you,” she said.
She began stripping it, plucking the leaves and twigs from it. I watched her dextrous hands flitting, and thought How terri
ble for such a lovely and clever girl to be thrown in here with these sick people, these madmen.
“You probably wonder what I’m doing here, don’t you?” she asked, peeling the thin, green bark from the stick. I didn’t answer her, because I didn’t want to know; I had found something, someone, and my life had begun again. There was no reason to kill it all at once.
“No, I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Well, I’m here because they know I’m aware of them.”
It struck a note of familiarity. There had been a man named Herbman, who had lived on the first floor during my second year at the Place. He had always talked about the great clique of men who were secretly trying to kill him, and how they would go to any extreme to get him, to silence him before he could reveal their dire machinations.
I hoped the same thing had not befallen her. She was so lovely.
“They?”
“Yes, of course. You said you weren’t one of them. Are you lying to me? Are you making fun of me, trying to confuse me” Her hand slipped out from under mine.
I hastened to regain ground. “No, no, of course not; but don’t you see, I don’t understand? I just don’t know. I—I’ve been here so long.” I tried not to sound pathetic.
Somehow, this seemed to strike her logically. “You must forgive me. I sometimes forget everyone is not aware of the Time of the Eye as am I.”
She was pulling at the end of the stick, drawing off the bark, making a sharp little point there. “The Time of the Eye?” I asked.
She had said it several times. “I don’t understand.”
Piretta turned to me, her dead blue eyes seeing directly over my right shoulder, and she put her legs close together. The stick was laid carelessly by her side, as though a toy it had been, but now the time for toys was gone. “I’ll tell you,” she said.
She sat very still for an instant, and I waited. Then:
“Have you ever seen a woman with vermillion hair?”
I was startled. I had expected a story from her, some deep insight into her past that would enable me to love her the more…and in its place she asked a nonsense question.
“Why…no…I can’t say that I…”
“Think!” she commanded me.
So I thought, and oddly enough, a woman with vermillion hair did come to mind. Several years before I had been drafted, the rage in all the women’s fashion magazines had been a woman named—my God! Was it? Why, yes, now that I looked closely and my memory prodded, it was—Piretta. A fashion model of exquisite features, lustrous blue eyes, and an affected vermillion-tint hairdo. She had been so famous her glamour had lapped over from the fashion magazines, had become one of those household names everyone bandies about.
“I remember you,” I said, startled beyond words of more meaning.
“No!” she snapped. “No. You don’t remember me. You remember a woman named Piretta. A beautiful woman who cupped her life in her hands and drank deeply of it. That was someone else. I’m a poor blind thing. You don’t know me, do you?”
“No,” I agreed, “I don’t. I’m sorry. For a moment—”
She went on, as though I had never spoken.
“The woman named Piretta was known to everyone. No fashionable salon gathering was fashionable without her; no cocktail party was meaningful with her absence. But she was not a shrinking violet type of woman. She loved experience; she was a nihilist, and more. She would do anything. She climbed K.99 with the Pestroff group, she sailed with two men around the Cape of Good Hope in an outrigger, she taught herself the rudiments of drumming and recorded with Good man.
“That kind of life can jade a person. She grew bored with it. With the charities, with the modeling, with the brief fling at pictures, and with the men. The wealthy men, the talented men, the pretty men who were attracted to her, and who were at the same time held at bay by her beauty. She sought new experience…and eventually found it.”
I wondered why she was telling me this. I had decided by now that the life I was anxious to have return was here, in her. I was living again and it had come so quickly, so stealthily, that it could only be a result of her presence.
Whatever indefinable quality she had possessed as a world-renowned mannequin, she still retained, even as a slightly haggard, still lovely, blind-eyed woman of indeterminate age. In her white hospital gown she was shapeless, but the magnetic wonder of her was there, and I was alive.
I was in love.
She was still speaking. “After her experiences with the urban folk singers and the artist’s colony on Mohawk Island, she returned to the city, and sought more and different experience.
“Eventually she came upon them. The Men of the Eye. They were a religious sect, unto themselves. They worshiped sight and experience. This was what she had been born for. She fell into their ways at once. Worshiping in the dawn hours at their many-eyed idol and living life to its hilt.
“Their ways were dark ways, and the things they did were not always clean things. Yet she persisted with them.
“Then, one night, during what they called the Time of the Eye, they demanded a sacrifice, and she was the one so chosen.
“They took her eyes.”
I sat very still. I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard what I’d heard. A weird religious sect, almost devil worship of a sort, there in the heart of New York City; and they had cut out the eyes of the most famous fashion model of all time, in a ceremony? It was too fantastic for belief. Surprising myself, I found old emotions flooding back into me. I could feel disbelief, horror, astonishment. This girl who called herself Piretta, and was that Piretta, had brought me to life again, only to fill me with a story so ludicruous I could do nothing but pass it on as dream fantasy and the results of a persecution complex.
After all, didn’t she have those shallow blue eyes?
They were unseeing, but they were there. How could they have been stolen? I was confused and dismayed.
I turned to her suddenly, and my arms went about her. I don’t know what it was that possessed me, for I had always been shy when women were involved, even before Korea, but now my heart leaped into my throat, and I kissed her full on the mouth.
Her lips opened like two petals before me, and there was ardour returned. My hand found her breast.
We sat that way in passion for several minutes, and finally, when we were satisfied that the moment had lived its existence fully, we separated, and I began to prattle about getting well, and marrying, and moving to the country, where I could care for her.
Then I ran my hands across her face; feeling the beauty of her, letting my fingertips soak up the wonder of her. My smallest finger’s tip happened to encounter her eye.
It was not moist.
I paused, and a gleam of a smile broke at the edge of her wondrous mouth. “True,” she said, and popped her eyes into the palm of her hand.
My fist went to my mouth, and the sound of a small animal being crushed underfoot came from me.
Then I noticed she had the sharpened stick in her hand, point upward, as though it were a driving spike. “What is that?” I asked, suddenly chilled for no reason.
“You didn’t ask if Piretta accepted the religion,” she answered softly, as though I was a child who did not understand.
“What do you mean?” I stammered.
“This is the Time of the Eye, don’t you know?”
And she came at me with the stick. I fell back, but she wound herself around me, and we fell to the ground together, and her blindness did not matter at all.
“But don’t!” I shrieked, as the stick came up. “I love you. I want to make you mine, to marry you!”
“How foolish,” she chided me gently, “I can’t marry you: you’re sick in the mind.”
Then there was the stick, and for so long now, the Time of the Eye has been blindly with me.
Private joke time, friends. “God bless you, little Life Hutch!” said Robert Silverberg, hauling Randall Garrett into a closet and locking the door
. “Put the robot in the wall!” screamed Garrett, and Ellison heard, turning to John Campbell who said, “You can’t lecture people, Harlan. Now here’s why you can’t lecture people…” and began a seven-hour lecture. Private joke time is over, patient reader. Now read
Life Hutch
TERRENCE SLID his right hand, the one out of sight of the robot, up his side. The razoring pain of the three broken ribs caused his eyes to widen momentarily in pain.
If the eyeballs click, I’m dead, thought Terrence.
The intricate murmurings of the life hutch around him brought back the immediacy of his situation. His eyes again fastened on the medicine cabinet clamped to the wall next to the robot’s duty-niche.
Cliche. So near yet so far. It could be all the way back on Antares-Base for all the good it’s doing me, he thought, and a crazy laugh trembled on his lips. He caught himself just in time. Easy! Three days is a nightmare, but cracking up will only make it end sooner.
He flexed the fingers of his right hand. It was all he could move. Silently he damned the technicain who had passed the robot through. Or the politician who had let inferior robots get placed in the life hutches so he could get a rake-off from the government contract. Or the repairman who hadn’t bothered checking closely his last time around. All of them; he damned them all.
They deserved it.
He was dying.
He let his eyes close completely, let the sounds of the life hutch fade from around him. Slowly the sound of the coolants hush-hushing through the wall-pipes, the relay machines feeding without pause their messages from all over the Galaxy, the whirr of the antenna’s standard turning in its socket atop the bubble, slowly they melted into silence. He had resorted to blocking himself off from reality many times during the past three days. It was either that or existing with the robot watching, and eventually he would have had to move. To move was to die. It was that simple.
He closed his ears to the whisperings of the life hutch; he listened to the whisperings within himself.
To his mind came the sounds of war, across the gulf of space. It was all imagination, yet he could clearly detect the hiss of his scout’s blaster as it poured beam after beam into the lead ship of the Kyben fleet.
From the Land of Fear Page 5