Orbit 2 - Anthology

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “Huh! You can’t beat the energy laws, Mr. Lankenau. The more people come in, the more closely they will apply. Kruger told me that himself, and I can see them taking hold already.”

  “The Herr Kruger has never worshipped the Second Law. Otherwise none of us would be here. And most of the people who come in will not remain persons, you know.”

  Von Lankenau turned a doubtful look on Garcia and continued, “That is another fascinating thing, to watch the personality elements filter back into external nature until the boundary between subject and object is almost lost. Think of what a power of mass suggestibility we will dispose of then! The very trees and rocks will be amenable to suggestion, each with its indwelling fragment of the human spirit! Oh, Kinross . . . your Second Law . . . your dry, word-smothered world . . . this will be a world of magic for long ages before it becomes a world of science.”

  Kinross frowned. “What right have we to disintegrate personalities in that way? Or to let it happen? Fay and Bo Bo—”

  “Those two are special cases, sacrificed to an emergency that will not occur again. As for the others, we will devise a set of ritual life patterns that will stabilize them at some lower limit. That is what I and the Herr Kruger talked longest about.”

  “Let me jump into this,” Garcia growled. “Do you birds think that’s going to happen to me? Suppose I won’t come apart for you, what then?”

  “You may not be able to help it, Mr. Garcia. And perhaps you will be much happier when you do . . . come apart.”

  “You sound like Kruger. Kinross, what does he mean?”

  “He means the emptiness of this world pulls you apart, like it or not. Like when you put a lump of salt in a cup of fresh water, it will dissolve a little at a time.”

  “Emptiness? Not in the old world?”

  “Only rarely, in places like the Antarctic, on a life raft at sea, empty places.”

  “I see. Like in most places the old world is already so salty it can’t take more?”

  “That’s the idea. The lumps of salt gain instead of losing.”

  “Hmmm. Like we talked this morning. We used to push our devils off on each other.”

  “Devils. That is the Herr Kruger’s analogy,” von Lankenau interrupted.

  “Funny how I know just what he meant by it, without being able to say it any different,” Garcia said.

  “You have to lose a few devils before you know,” Kinross told him.

  “Well, I’ve lost some, okay. But I’m still Joe Garcia and my insides work.”

  “Name magic is one of the oldest and most powerful means of binding one’s devils into a unity, Mr. Garcia,” von Lankenau assured him. “We will stabilize the villagers well above the name level, I hope.”

  “Why do you and Kinross just take it for granted that you’re not in line for this . . . this devil losing?”

  “We are. We lose devils cheerfully, but it is a selective losing. I, and I suspect Mr. Kinross also, we hold ourselves together under a higher magic.”

  “It’s like this, Garcia,” Kinross said, “you can either just plain be all your devils, or you can be yourself and carry a spare load of devils around with you.”

  “Devils, Mr. Garcia,” von Lankenau said gravely, “are bits of experience, large or small, gay or mournful.”

  “The lived experiences, good or bad, we bind in to ourselves,” Kinross said. “The unlived experiences, the regrets, the might-have-beens, the just-escaped things, we carry around on our backs. But we know it.”

  “We’re really explaining to each other, aren’t we, Mr. Kinross?” said von Lankenau. “We lose the devils which ride us and we keep the ones which power us. The villagers must lose both kinds indiscriminately.”

  “I’m still with you,” Garcia said. “Keep talking.”

  “To draw on your earlier analogy, Mr. Kinross,” von Lankenau said, “might I say that devils exert an osmotic pressure? It is strongly outward on mountaintops and in such places I have shrugged off a thousand devils. But in Berlin or Paris . . . back they came in tens of thousands.”

  “That I savvy,” Garcia said. “It’s the difference between being on a long cruise and coming ashore for a month. I get a burn on me to ship out.”

  “I think you’re okay, Garcia,” Kinross said. “If you weren’t, you would’ve already drifted off like Kerbeck.”

  “Is not Kerbeck magnificent?” von Lankenau asked. “The end product of devil dispersion, an elemental force, with powers we hardly dare guess at. The Bo Bo thing, too, black and savage. Mr. Kinross, we pay a price for mind. But we must not let it happen to our villagers.”

  “No, I guess not,” Kinross agreed. “You spoke of rituals. . .”

  “Yes, a pattern of group rituals to take them through their days and nights, perhaps later through seasons. We will keep them in a mass, maintain a local concentration of devils by mutual reenforcement or successive recapture ... I don’t know quite how to phrase it.”

  “I see. The thought disturbs me, Mr. Lankenau.”

  “It need not. I find it exhilarating. I hope that you and Mr. Garcia will help.” Von Lankenau stood up and looked toward the hut-building activity.

  “We’ll think about it,” Kinross said, getting up himself.

  “I’ll do what I can,” the Mexican said. Lankenau excused himself and went over to the villagers.

  “Kinross, something tells me you’re still packing a devil as big as the Queen Mary, for all of your brains,” Garcia said.

  * * * *

  Krugertown, as they called it, was built in a day. Mary had a large hut of wattle and daub, near the stone-banked communal fire and a little apart from the village cluster, which lay nearer to the dark grove and the cave entrance. Kinross and Garcia built themselves a similar shelter a short way downstream from the fire. Von Lankenau lived in the village. Every morning Kinross and Garcia took a few bananas or a breadfruit to the cairn. Afterward Garcia often helped von Lankenau with the villagers, but Kinross walked apart with mixed feelings. He climbed about the hillsides, heedless of the growing number of black things and gray women that lurked there. Sometimes he saw Kerbeck, endlessly pursuing the dwarfs and the smoke women, and tried to talk to him. He tried to tell Kerbeck what Kruger had done to him in taking away his humanity. The impassive Swede buzzed and hummed and Kinross did not know how much he understood.

  Mary walked apart too, always in a flutter of birds. He saw dainty green and blue sun birds, green and white pittas, green and bronze drongos and the demure white nutmeg pigeons she loved most of all. When they met he tried to talk to her and found her aloof and remote.

  “This world is harmful to you, Mary,” he urged one day. “It disintegrates you, makes you lose part of yourself. Don’t you want to go back to Queensland while you still can? Before it’s too late?”

  “I send out my birds and I call them back,” she replied. “No harm here.”

  “That’s no answer, Mary,” he protested. He looked at her untroubled face with the red lips and the smooth brow and laid his arm across her shoulders. She slipped away from him.

  “Mary, I’m going to take you back to Queensland,” Kinross said sharply. “It’s my duty to you.”

  She hummed like Kerbeck and moved away. Kinross looked after her morosely. Shortly after, he saw her high on the hillside talking to Kerbeck. . . Or humming with him.

  * * * *

  New arrivals came in almost daily, by ones and twos, and melted at once into the village pattern. One day Kinross asked von Lankenau how long he thought it would go on.

  “The rate is dropping off,” von Lankenau said. “I expect it will decrease asymptotically and never quite stop. But the gate apparently sweeps a quite narrow path and has already caught up most of the susceptibles. And it may be that, as this world fills, its power of attraction lessens also.”

  “When will it be full?”

  “Never, I hope. We want thousands, a large gene pool, a larger world. I estimate our surface is only about five m
iles in diameter now, Mr. Kinross.”

  “Can’t Kruger make it larger if he likes?”

  “Only at the expense of internal definition. He is striking a workable balance. But it is boundless by re-entry, and is not that a most fascinating experience, Mr. Kinross?”

  “I found it disturbing and then frustrating,” Kinross said.

  “Ah! The limits, of course. But with more people we can extend our surface to more comfortable limits. In the end, I suppose, we shall make it spherical and remove the re-entry barrier to a higher dimension. But I shall be just a bit sorry when we do. Do you take my feeling, Mr. Kinross?”

  “Just who are ‘we’?” Kinross asked with a sudden edge in his voice. “You and Kruger?”

  “Oh no. All of us. The culture, the Herr Kruger . . . you will have a part.”

  “You are kind, Mr. Lankenau.”

  The tall man looked at him sharply. “Mr. Kinross,” he said solemnly, “any time that you wish to, you may take your rightful position in this world. I urge you to do so. I command by your default, and you know that very well.”

  “I’ll have no part of it,” Kinross said. “Damn Kruger and his world, snatching up a young woman like Mary Chadwick...”

  “The Herr Kruger loves you,’ Mr. Kinross. You and Mr. Garcia are his sensorium, due to the peculiar circumstances of your coming here. He can be aware of his world only indifferently through the rest of us and through the Kabeiroi on the hillside.”

  “Well, I don’t love the Herr Kruger. I hope he’s still mad with thirst.”

  Von Lankenau raised a cautionary hand. “He does still suffer from thirst,” he said in a low voice, “but your words are unworthy of you, Mr. Kinross. Hate me, if you must, but not the Herr Kruger.”

  “Why in hell do you have to shave every day?” Kinross asked angrily as he turned away.

  He looked back from a distance and tugged at his beard. Mary Chadwick was talking to von Lankenau, standing close, looking up at him. Kinross reflected with a twinge that she had never looked up at him in that way. Then he remembered that she was as tall as himself and could not. He walked away swallowing a curse.

  * * * *

  That night in their hut Kinross suggested to Garcia that next day they try to break the reentry barrier. The Mexican declined, saying that he and von Lankenau were working out a path-marking ritual with the villagers.

  “Well, I will,” Kinross said. “I’ll go up there and walk right through it by not believing it’s there, just like I should have done in the boat.”

  “Yes, and got your throat cut,” Garcia said. “But it’s there, all right. You’ll find out.”

  Kinross found out. He fought the barrier all day, knowing its impossibility, striving to locate the exact point of reversal in order to step boldly across it. He came near doing so. Again and again, with the tiny instant of vertigo almost upon him, he saw the leering Kabeiroi drift by him and birds fly over, but each time he was turned back, suddenly half a mile down the hill and headed the wrong way. He came home in the evening disgruntled and exhausted.

  “Lankenau called it a world of magic,” he reflected. “Well, magic, then. Birds fly through the barrier. I’m doing this for Mary. If she would only help me—”

  He decided to try again during the next thunderstorm, when he hoped Kruger would be too busy with his storm devils to guard the barrier. One morning several days later the sky darkened and the queer light lay along the ground and he knew a storm was making. The black things from the hillside invaded the valley in gusts of damp wind, sidling and eddying through the shrubbery just out of eye reach. Poised on rocks, treetops and all pointed things, the gray women strained upward in a tension of half-visible air. With the first drops of rain Kinross set off up the hillside.

  As he neared the barrier zone, the storm grew more violent. Thunder boomed and roared at him, rain slashed at him in sheets, jagged lightning flashes gave him glimpses of the storm devils. The Kabeiroi scurried around him with obscene menaces; over his head the gray women streamed by on the gusty wind. Once he saw Kerbeck, head thrown back, great chest bared to the wind.

  All day he fought the barrier, spitting curses into the storm, and all day the storm spat and thundered back at him. He fell and rolled and rose again, over and over, straining up the hill with aching chest. Wind-driven twigs and branches lashed his face and body. Smothering rain drilled at him; wind snatched his breath away. At last his pounding heart and trembling knees convinced him that he was beaten. He turned back down the hillside.

  “Well, Kruger, I gave you a fight,” he gasped aloud. The storm abated as he limped down the slope and he saw downed trees and scattered branches and raw-earth gullies swirling with runoff. The thought came to him that he had at least forced Kruger to wreck von Lankenau’s precious village. Then he was on the valley floor and the storm cleared entirely. Half a mile away he could see the village and its trees seemingly intact.

  As he neared his hut, Mary came from behind a screen of shrubbery. White nutmeg pigeons perched on her head and shoulders. She smiled at him oddly.

  “Regular cockeye bob up there, wasn’t it, Allan?”

  He looked at her stupidly. “Didn’t it rain down here?” he asked.

  “Only a sprinkle,” she said, smiling. “Go in by the fire and dry your things. You look tired.”

  He walked on, soaked, mud-stained, limping on a wrenched ankle. “She smiled and called me Allan,” he thought. “No storm here. Called me Allan. Oh, hell...”

  * * * *

  One morning, remote from the village, Kinross heard a pounding noise. In a clearing he found Peter White and two others beating mulberry bark with rounded paddles. The bearded Rhodesian looked tanned and fit and merry-eyed. The three men avoided looking at Kinross, as all the villagers tended to do, but they were aware of him and the rhythm of their pounding faltered.

  On impulse Kinross called out, “White! Come over here!”

  White paid no attention. Kinross spoke more sharply. White, without looking around, mumbled something about the Herr Kruger.

  “I command you by the power of Kruger!” Kinross shouted in sudden anger. “Come over here!”

  Reluctantly the man came to the clearing’s edge. He looked down, but did not seem afraid. The Bantu and the Kanaka continued pounding.

  “White, you were a man once,” Kinross said. “How would you like to be a man again?”

  “I am a man, Mr. Kinross,” White said soberly.

  “A man needs a wife. Do you have a wife, White?”

  “Soon the Herr Kruger will give me one.”

  “I mean back home. Do you have a wife there?”

  “There is no woman in my hut, but soon the Herr Kruger—”

  “Damn your hut. I mean where you came from, in Rhodesia.”

  “I have always been here.”

  “No, you have not. You came from another world and if you try you can remember it. Can’t you, now?”

  The man looked up. “Yes, but I was a lot of different me’s then. It was not a good world.”

  “Remember it. I command you to remember it by the power of Kruger. Remember your wife and your children.”

  The man twisted his body and his face darkened. “There were many wives and children. It was an underground world. Everyone lived in tunnels that ran in straight lines. They were tumbled together like straws and sometimes they crossed, but none ran side by side. One of my tunnels came through into Krugerworld. I crawled up out of the ground and here I am. That is all I can remember.”

  “Okay, go back to your work,” Kinross said.

  White did not move. “First you must lift the name of the Herr Kruger from me,” he said.

  “All right, I remove the name,” Kinross said.

  “Once more. Twice you placed it on me.”

  “Okay, once more I remove it,” Kinross snapped. “Go on, now.”

  He walked away. Behind him a third club took up the pounding and the rhythm steadied.

  *
* * *

  Alone in his hut he raged instead of sleeping. A magic world . . . what magic, then? Kruger’s teachings . . . before the word, before the thought . . . what act would serve him now? What blind, wordless, unthinking act?

  He decided he would refuse to place his usual token of fruit on the cairn in the morning and suddenly he could sleep.

  * * * *

  Kinross rose early and walked through the various fruit groves, eating as he walked, until his hunger was stayed. His aimless walking had led him to the edge of the dark timber grove screening the cave mouth. On impulse he walked through the grove into the clearing and on the way discovered with surprise that he had a small guava in his pocket. He threw it away. Two villagers, a man and a woman, were placing fruit on the cairn. Kinross wondered whether they were mated.