Orbit 2 - Anthology

by Edited by Damon Knight

  It, too, was green. He started up a concave slope which turned steeply convex so that he seemed to be defying gravity as he climbed it. Then the slope leveled off considerably and he was approaching a wall of dark forest beyond which a reddish-black rock pinnacle soared into the sky.

  He pushed into the forest, to find it only a half-mile belt of woods which gave way to a desert. This was a dull red, gently rising plain over which were scattered huge reddish boulders many times higher than his head. He picked his way between them over ground which seemed hot and vibrating until he came to the base of the rock pinnacle. As he neared it a pattern of intersecting curves on top indicated that it was cratered.

  It was a vertical climb, but Kinross made it with the same inexplicable ease as the earlier ones. He descended a little way into the crater and said, “Here I am, Kruger.”

  Kruger’s natural voice spoke out of the air from a point directly ahead. “Sit down, Kinross. Tell me what you think.”

  Kinross sat crosslegged on the rough rock surface. “I think you’re running this show, Kruger,” he said. “I think maybe you saved my life. Past that, I don’t know what to think.”

  “You’re curious about me, aren’t you? Well, so am I. Partly I make up the rules and partly I discover them. This is a very primitive world, Kinross.”

  “It’s prehuman,” Kinross said. “You took us deep.”

  “Had to, for people like us.”

  “You’re just a voice in the air to me,” Kinross said. “How do you experience yourself?”

  “I have a body, but I suppose it’s a private hallucination. I can’t animate my real body. It must be some result of my not having been in deep trance when we crossed over.”

  “Is that good or bad, for you?”

  “Depends. I have unique powers but also special responsibilities. For instance, I am forced to animate this world and my capacity is limited. That’s the reason for the taboo on looking closely or trying to use things.”

  “Oh. Silva then . . . can you restore his sight?”

  “Yes, his blindness is purely functional. But I won’t. He’d destroy us all. He’d look and look until our world fell apart. He gave me a bad time, Kinross.”

  “I was scared too. Tell me, what would have happened if—?”

  “Back in the boat, perhaps. Or some kind of limbo.”

  “Is your existence purely mental now, Kruger?” .

  “No. I told you, I have an hallucinated body which seems perfectly real to me. But it cannot use the substance of this world the way you and the others do. Kinross, I still have the same thirst I had when we came over. It is like—what you remember. I can’t quench it and I can’t endure it. This world is a kind of hell to me...”

  “Holy Moses, Kruger! That’s too bad. Can we do anything?”

  “I have one hope. It’s why I brought you here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I want to put you into still deeper hypnosis, deep as man can go. I want to set up such a deep rapport between us that I will share with you the animation of your body and you will share with me the animation of this world. Then I will be able to eat and drink.”

  “Granting it’s possible, how would that seem to me?”

  “You mean animating the world? I can’t describe it to you. A joy beyond words.”

  “No, I mean you in my body. How do you know I won’t have your thirst then? Which of us would be dominant?”

  “We could quench the thirst, that’s the point. I would grant you dominance in the body and retain my dominance in the world.”

  Kinross tugged at his shaggy brown hair. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “You scare me, Kruger. Why me?”

  “Because of your mind, Kinross. You’re an engineer. We must build natural law into this world if I am ever to have rest. I need intimate access to your world-picture so that it can inform this world.”

  “Why can’t I help you just as I am?”

  “You can, but not enough. I need to superimpose your world-picture on mine in complete interaction.”

  Decision welled up in Kinross. “No,” he said. “Take one of the others. Except for Garcia and maybe Silva they hardly seem to know they’re alive, but they eat and drink.”

  “I’ve taken a large part of them into the world already, and something of you and Garcia too. But I want you intact, as a unity.”

  “No.”

  “Think of the power and the joy. It is indescribable, Kinross.”

  “No.”

  “Think of what you can lose. I can blind you, paralyze you.”

  “I’ll grant that. But you won’t. In a way I can’t explain I know you need us, Kruger. You need our eyes and ears and our understanding minds in order to see and appreciate this world of yours. Your sight dimmed when you blinded Silva.”

  “That isn’t wholly true. I needed you absolutely in order to get across, in order to form this world, but not now.”

  “I’ll gamble you’re lying, Kruger. You don’t have a large enough population to afford playing tyrant.”

  “Don’t underestimate me, Kinross. You don’t know me and you never can. I have a fierce will in this matter that must not be denied. From childhood on I have worked toward this culmination with absolute ruthlessness. I deliberately did not send a distress message from the Ixionbecause I wanted the chance I got. Does that impress you?”

  “Not in your favor, Kruger. So little Ratface was right. . .”

  “I don’t want your favor or your pity, Kinross. I want your conviction that you cannot stand out against me. I’ll tell you more. I planted the bomb in the Ixion’s cargo hold. I dumped the food and water out of the launch. I ran down the battery and jammed the fuel pump. I timed the explosion so that you would be just coming off watch. That convinces you. Now you know that you cannot stand out against such a will as mine.”

  Kinross stood up and squinted his brown eyes into the emptiness before him. “I’m convinced that you made your own world but now you can’t get all the way into it. I’m convinced that you should not. Kruger, to hell with you.”

  “It is my world and I’ll come all the way into it in spite of you,” Kruger said. “Look at me!” On the command the voice rang out strong and silvery, a great singing.

  “You’re not there,” Kinross said, standing up.

  “Yes I am here. Look at me.”

  The air before Kinross became half visible, a ghostly streaming upward.

  “Look at me!” the chiming, silvery voice repeated.

  There came a sound like tearing silk. The hair stood up on Kinross’ neck and a coldness raced over his skin. The streaming air thickened and eddied, became a surface whorled and contoured in a third dimension, became vibrantly alive, became the shape of a great face.

  “Kinross, look at me!” the Face commanded in a voice like great bells.

  Kinross took a deep breath. “I learn my lessons well, Kruger,” he said in a trembling voice. “You’re not there. I don’t see you.”

  He walked directly into the Face and through it, feeling an electric thrill in his cringing flesh as he did so. Then he was clambering down the sheer face of the pinnacle.

  As Kinross crossed the high plain on his way back, rain began to fall from the overcast. Gusts of wind buffeted him. There was no surface runoff of the rain and no clear effect of the wind in the indefinite trees and shrubbery. “Kruger’s learning,” Kinross said to himself. Then darkness came suddenly and he lay down and slept. When he awoke he was back beside the little stream and Garcia told him he had been gone four days.

  * * * *

  “Four days?” Kinross asked in surprise. “Doesn’t everything still happen yesterday?”

  “Not anymore,” the Mexican said. “Where in hell have you been?”

  “Outside somehow, arguing with Kruger,” Kinross said, looking around. “Damn it, this place feels different. And where’s Kruger’s body and the others?”

  “It is different,” Garcia said. “I’ll tell you.
First, Fay found a cave. . .”

  The cave was the source of the stream, which now ran out of it, Garcia explained. Fay and Bo Bo had carried Kruger’s body into it and now spent most of their time in there. Fay claimed that Kruger awoke at intervals to eat and drink and that he had made Fay his spokesman. Fay and Bo Bo had piled up a cairn of rocks before the cave mouth and had commanded Kerbeck and Garcia to bring fruit and place it there every morning. Silva now sat beside the cairn, rocking and wailing as before.

  “I couldn’t make Kerbeck understand,” Garcia added. “He roams the hillsides now like a wild man. So I’ve been supplying them by myself.”

  “The place is bigger,” Kinross commented. The valley floor extended now for several hundred yards on either side of the little stream and the walls rose hundreds of feet. The oppressive regularity of outline was relieved by a hint of weather sculpturing and meaningful groupings of plant life.

  “Space is nailed down better too,” Garcia said. “There are all kinds of trees now that stay put and can be looked at.” He slapped at a fly buzzing around his head.

  “Hello!” Kinross exclaimed. “Insects!”

  “Yes,” Garcia agreed sourly. “Little animals in the brush, too. Rats and lizards, I think. And I got rained on once. It ain’t all good, Kinross.”

  “Let’s go see that cave,” Kinross proposed. “I’ll tell you what happened to me on the way.”

  They walked half a mile upstream. The valley narrowed and its walls became more vertical. A tangled growth of dark timber trees filled it. The diffuse light from the permanently overcast sky scarcely penetrated its gloom. Then they came into a clearing perhaps a hundred yards across and Kinross could see the darkly wooded slopes rising steeply on three sides. Directly ahead was the cave.

  Two relatively narrow basaltic dikes slanted up the slope for more than a hundred feet, coming together at the top to form an inverted V. The stream ran out of the cavernous darkness at its base, bisected the clearing and lost itself in the dark wood. Near where the stream emerged, Kinross could see the cairn like a low stone platform about ten feet across and he could see and hear Silva, who sat wailing beside it.

  “I can’t talk to Silva no more than Kerbeck,” Garcia said. “Silva thinks I’m a devil.”

  They walked across the clearing. The giant Bo Bo came out of the cave to meet them.

  “You have not brought fruit,” he said, in words that Kinross knew were never his own. “Go away and return with fruit.”

  “Okay, Kruger,” Kinross said. “That much I’ll do for you.”

  * * * *

  Days passed. To Kinross they seemed interminable, yet curiously void of remembered activity. He and Garcia tried marking off time with stones from the creek, but overnight the stones disappeared. So did banana peels and papaya rinds. The land would not hold a mark. The two men wrangled over what had happened in the preceding days and at last Kinross said, “It’s just like before, only now everything happened last week.”

  “Then my beard grew an inch last week,” said Garcia, stroking its blue-blackness. Kinross’ beard was crinkled and reddish and more than an inch long.

  “What’s the end of this?” the Mexican asked once. “Do we just go on in this two-mile-across world forever?”

  “I expect we’ll get old and die,” Kinross said.

  “I ain’t so sure even of that,” Garcia said. “I feel like I’m getting younger. I want a steak and a bottle of beer and a woman.”

  “So do I,” Kinross agreed, “but this is still better than the boat.”

  “Yes,” Garcia said feelingly. “Give Kruger that much, even if he did set the whole thing up.”

  “I think Kruger is a lot less happy than we are,” Kinross said.

  “Nobody’s happy but Kerbeck,” Garcia growled.

  They saw Kerbeck often as they gathered fruit or tramped the confines of the little valley seeking relief of boredom. The giant Swede ranged through the land like an elemental spirit. He wore the remnants of his khaki trousers and singlet and his yellow hair and red beard were long and tangled. He seemed to recognize Garcia and Kinross, but made only humming noises in response to their words.

  * * * *

  Kinross often felt that it was the unrelieved blackness of the nights which oppressed him most. He wanted stars and a moon. One night he awoke feeling uneasy and saw a scattering of stars in the sky, strangely constellated. He moved to wake Garcia but sleep overcame him again and he dreamed for the first time he could remember in that world. He was back on the rock pinnacle in the desert talking to Kruger. Kruger was wearing Fay’s body and he was worried.

  “Something’s happened, Kinross,” he said. “There are stars and I didn’t shape them; I couldn’t. This world has suddenly received a great increase in animation and not all of it is under my control.”

  “What can I do about it? Or care?”

  “You care, all right. We’re in this world together, like in a lifeboat, Kinross. And I’m scared now. There’s an alien presence, perhaps a number of them, seeking our world. They may be hostile.”

  “I doubt it, if they bring stars,’’ Kinross said. “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know. Wandering outside of our space here, looking for us, I suppose. I want you and Garcia to go and find them.”

  “Why can’t you do that?”

  “Your guess was partly right, Kinross. I have my limits and my need for men like you and Garcia. I’m asking, not commanding. We’re still in the same boat, remember.”

  “Yes. Okay, I’ll go. But how. . .”

  “Just start walking. I’ll let you through the re-entry barrier again.”

  Kinross awoke with a start. The stars were still in the sky and a crescent moon hung above the horizon across the little stream. Garcia snored nearby.

  “Wake up!” Kinross said, shaking him. The Mexican snorted and sat up.

  “Madre de Dios!” he gasped. “Stars and a moon! Kinross, are we back. . . ?”

  “No,” Kinross said. “Let’s go hunting. I’ve just been talking to Kruger.”

  “Hunting? At night? Hunting what?”

  “Maybe what made the stars. How do I know? Come on, Garcia, my feet are burning.”

  Kinross strode off, leaping the creek and heading directly toward the crescent moon. The Mexican stumbled after him muttering in Spanish.

  * * * *

  Once more Kinross reached the height of land, and the moon, fuller now, hung above the horizon on the right, in the same direction he had gone before. He walked briskly, the Mexican following in silence. Once Garcia exclaimed and pointed down to the right. Kinross looked and saw the cave mouth far below, the dwarfed clearing and the mighty slope curving convexly up from it to his present level. The moonlight touched the dark treetops with silver.

  As they walked Kinross told Garcia about his dream. The Mexican did not doubt that it was genuine. Kinross warned him about the peculiar timelessness of experience outside the re-entry barrier. “It’s like everything happened two minutes ago,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Garcia. “Look at that moon now, three-quarters full. Maybe we’ve been walking for a month.”

  “Or a minute,” Kinross said.

  It was not to be the same trip as before. Once on the high, gently curving plain he remembered, he found they were bearing sharply to the right, going up a gentle rise. Then the land pitched the other way and they began crossing shallow ravines with running water in their bottoms. The land grew rougher and the ravines deeper until, crossing one of them, Kinross saw that it bore directly for the moon. He continued down the stream bed in ankle-deep water instead of climbing out.

  The banks were of wet, dark stone and became steeper and higher as they went. The stream narrowed and became knee-deep and the current tugged fiercely at them, forcing them to cling to the stones to maintain their footing. The sharp V of the ravine ahead almost cradled the full moon and Kinross could hear a distant roar of falling water.

  “Looks ro
ugh up ahead, Garcia,” he called to the Mexican ten feet behind him. “Watch it.”

  He moved ahead another hundred yards toward the increasing noise and edged around a rock shoulder against which the water swirled angrily. The force of the current quickened suddenly, almost snatching his legs from under him, so that he flattened himself against the rock and called a warning back to Garcia.

  Over the glassily smooth, veined lip of the waterfall twenty feet in front of him, Kinross looked into a vast pit, steeply conical and many miles across. It was beaded around the rim and threaded down the sides with falling water that whispered enormously across the distance. The full moon riding directly above washed the whole with silver. At the bottom of the pit was another moon which, Kinross thought fleetingly, must be a reflecting pond or lake.