Orbit 12 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Eternity is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty, and I do it; I have my pleasures, and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds are fewer, and the winds foul. But, long-lived though I may be, impermanence is my right Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken from me.

  It was taken from me on a rainy evening in March last year.

  Fits and bursts of cars, as usual, filled the rapidly moving road in both directions. I was so busy hurtling along, enlarging, looming, diminishing, and the light was failing so fast, that I scarcely noticed what was happening until it happened. One of the drivers of one of the cars evidently felt that his need to “go somewhere” was exceptionally urgent, and so attempted to place his car in front of the car in front of it. This maneuver involves a temporary slanting of the Direction of the Road and a displacement onto the far side, the side which normally runs the other direction (and may I say that I admire the road very highly for its skill in executing such maneuvers, which must be difficult for an unliving creature, a mere making). Another car, however, happened to be quite near the urgent one, and facing it, as it changed sides; and the road could not do anything about it, being already overcrowded. To avoid impact with the facing car, the urgent car totally violated the Direction of the Road, swinging it round to north-south in its own terms, and so forcing me to leap directly at it. I had no choice. I had to move, and move fast— eighty-five miles an hour. I leaped: I loomed enormous, larger than I have ever loomed before. And then I hit the car.

  I lost a considerable piece of bark, and, what’s more serious, a fair bit of cambium layer; but as I am now seventy-two feet tall and about nine feet in girth at the point of impact, no real harm was done. My branches trembled with the shock, enough that a last-year’s robin’s nest was dislodged and fell; and I was so shaken that I groaned. It is the only time in my life that I have ever said anything out loud.

  The motorcar screamed horribly. It was smashed by my blow, squashed, in fact. Its hinder parts were not much affected, but the forequarters knotted up and gnarled together like an old root, and little bright bits of it flew all about and lay like brittle rain.

  The driver had no time to say anything; I killed him instantly.

  It is not this that I protest. I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore have no regret. What I protest, what I cannot endure, is this: as I leaped at him, he saw me. He looked up at last. He saw me as I have never been seen before, not even by a child, not even in the days when people looked at things. He saw me whole, and saw nothing else—then, or ever.

  He saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally.

  This is unendurable. I cannot uphold such an illusion. If the human creatures will not understand Relativity, very well; but they must understand Relatedness.

  If it is necessary to the Order of Things, I will kill drivers of cars, though killing is not a duty usually required of oaks. But it is unjust to require me to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death. For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal.

  If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.

  <>

  * * * *

  Michael Bishop

  THE WINDOWS IN DANTE’S HELL

  1/the combcrawlers

  WE RECEIVED notification of the woman’s death on the Biomonitor Console in the subsidiary control room on West Peachtree. A small cherry-red light went on; it glowed in the blue halflight that hangs about the console like the vague memory of fog. “Someone’s dead,” Yates’ son said. “That light just came on.” Yates’ son is fourteen years old. His broad face was purplish in the fog of the control room, the sheen of flesh over forehead reflecting back a small crescent of the red that had just come on. Only a moment before, the boy had entered the building, stopped at my elbow, and waited for an opportunity to talk. Yates is my boss, the head of the city’s Biomonitor Agency. Because our interests were similar, his son frequently came around to talk to me: I girderclimbed on the weekends, and the boy was just learning. But he had never come into the console area before, and when the red light began faintly pulsing on the monstrous board, his lank body had stooped toward it

  “Yes,” I said. “Someone’s dead. The board don’t lie. ‘Deed it don’t.” To sentimentalize the death of a cubicle-dweller is a soul-destroying business. I try to keep it light.

  “I’ve never seen a dead person. Papa says that people get sick, that the board reports that all the time—but people don’t die very often.”

  “People die all the time.”

  “I’ve never seen a dead person,” Yates’ son said ‘‘Never at all.”

  “You’re lucky you haven’t seen a girderclimbing accident, Newlyn. You’d see death and terror and plummeting human beings all in one fell swoop.” I am nine years older than Newlyn, and those nine years have taught me one or two things that I’m not always capable of communicating to those younger than myself. But I try—for their benefit, not mine. “When I was your age, I saw a party of six combcrawlers, hooked together with a glinting golden cord, lose either the magnetic induction in their girderboots or else all sense of the teamwork involved in dome-traversing.”

  Newlyn looked away from the board. His heavy forehead turned toward me; his African lips framed a faint exhalation: “What happened?”

  “The climbers,” I told him, “had reached a section of honeycombing about three hundred yards from the very apex of the Dome. Their backs were down, and inside the spun-iron gloves their hands were probably clinging like crazy to the track of the navigational girder they had chosen. They had worked out a complicated, a truly beautiful assault on the apex. They were high above the city, bright specks on the artificial sky, and suddenly the fourth man in the contingent fell away from the group and bobbed on the elastic gold cord that held them together— bobbed just like a spider weighting the center of its web.

  “From the top of the new Russell Complex, my father and I watched them—even though we hadn’t gone up there for that purpose.

  “The combcrawlers couldn’t recover, Newlyn. The fifth and sixth men broke away, flailing their arms around. It was amazing how slowly—how really distinctly—their fates overtook them. The first three men in the chain were sucked down toward us, and the whole broad sky under the Dome seemed to hold them up for a while. Then they fell, twirling around and around each other like the strands of one of those Argentine bolas, hypnotizing everybody in the streets. At last they fell through the canyon of buildings to our north and disappeared toward the concrete that I could feel impacting against them. It was terrifying, but it was beautiful. I resolved to become a combcrawler myself. All unbeknownst to my father, of course—he’d’ve suffered a multiple aneurysm if he’d known about that resolution. You see, Newlyn, you’re lucky. Your father approves.”

  “But did you see them after they fell?” Newlyn asked, unawed. “Did you see them lying in the street, dead?”

  Annoyed, I said: “Hell no, I didn’t see them! If my father was the sort to frown on combcrawling, do you think he’d bundle me off to ogle six crumpled, blood-spattered husks of humanity in some crappy alley?”

  Newlyn smiled. “Then you haven’t seen a dead person, either.”

  “Certainly I have.”

  “Where?”

  “On the board,” I said, smiling too. “There’s one right there, that pulsing red light.”

  “And who is it, then?” the boy said, continuing his interrogation. “And where does he live?”

  “Just a minute, lad.” I leaned forward, recorded the coordinates of the light, and at last gave it permission to go dead, its dull cherry sheen fading out of the naked crystal and leaving us, the boy and me,
swimming in the blue dimness. (Wherever possible, you see, the city conserves its resources.) I ran the coordinates through the appropriate computer and found that the dead person lay in a cubicle somewhere on Level 8. To be exact: Concourse E-16, Door 502, Level 8. Another computer gave me the corpse’s name, age, and vital statistics—though there weren’t many of the latter.

  “Well, who is it?” Newlyn asked.

  “Almira Longhope. One hundred and seven years old. Unmarried. No relatives. Caucasian. Came into the city at the age of thirty-one with the refugees of the first Evacuation Lottery. . .”

  “Let’s go see her!”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go see her. Somebody’s got to go get her, don’t they?”

  “Somebody. Not us.”

  “Look, Mr. Ardrey, that old woman died down on Level 8 because she was old and alone, probably. I’ve never seen a dead person, you’ve never seen a dead person. Let’s go and retrieve her and keep them servo-units from eating her up like a wad of dust. Okay?”

  “Newlyn, we’re not going anywhere to gawk at an old woman who couldn’t get any higher than Level 8 in seventy years.”

  “It wouldn’t be any gawking,” Newlyn said. “It wouldn’t.”

  And with that as a prologue and only a little more argument, I finally consented. The Biomonitor Agency does not ordinarily send human beings to dispose of the human beings who have died in their cubicles—nor does the Agency refrain from want of sufficient manpower or out of callousness. The problem is that human beings are invariably too compassionate; they represent feeling, and when that feeling confronts a corpse and all its attendant suggestions of loneliness, the living human beings suffer—and suffer profoundly. Therefore, the Agency usually dispatches servo-units to the cubicles of the kinless and the forgotten. It is best.

  I appointed Am Bartholomew to take my place at the console. I gathered from our files and resource rooms some of the things we would need. Then Newlyn and I went into the street

  Because it was winter and because our meteorologists maintain internal conditions that correspond with the external passing of the seasons, we wore coats. Newlyn, in his navy pea jacket, strode ahead of me like an adolescent tour guide, spindly, purposeful, curt. We walked across one marble square, circumnavigated a huge fountain whose waters were frozen in fantastic loops and falls, and jogged toward the monolithic lift-terminal that dispatches its passengers up and down the layered levels of the city in crystal lift-tubes. We jogged because it was cold. We jogged because it is difficult to talk while jogging, and we did not believe that we had, in actuality, committed ourselves to the viewing and the disposal of a . . . dead person. Jogging, we tried not to look at each other.

  The Dome glowered above us; it seemed that it hung down with the weight of its own honeycombing, threatening to crush us. No one was up there. No one was crawling over the girders.

  Then we reached the lift-terminal, found an open tube, and descended into the great hive of the city—descended in utter silence, descended through a nightmare halflight, a halflight freaky as the cold simulation of dawn. On Level 8, one stratum above the nethermost floor of the hive, we disembarked

  * * * *

  2/the glissadors

  We found the concourse; we found the corridor. The people we passed in the corridor refused to look at us, passing us like wisps of smoke against the smudge-red illumination that contained us all.

  Many of those who passed us were ghostly glissadors, hive inhabitants who spend so much of their time going up and down and about and through the various hallways that they have donned nearly soundless skates to conserve their energy and speed their labors. The skates are pieces of simulated cordovan footwear with a multitude of miniature ball bearings mounted in the soles. The city issues these glierboots to its sublevel employees. And Newlyn and I watched the graceful glissadors sweep past us through the gloom, their heads down.

  Each time that one went past, Newlyn turned in a slow circle to watch. He said, “That looks like fun.”

  “It gets to be work,” I said. “Everything gets to be work.”

  Still, I caught the next effortlessly volplaning figure by the elbow and spun him about before he could disappear into the dim distance. A small sound of protest escaped his lips, but he controlled his turn and wheeled about like a mute ballet performer. He was tall. Like Newlyn, he was the intense color of ripe wet grapes.

  “Almira Longhope,” I said. “Do you know her cubicle?”

  The glissador stared at me: “What’s her number, surfacesider?”

  I told him.

  “Then you keep following these here doors till you reach it.” He threw up his arm and spun away. He looked at us briefly. Turning with sinuous skill, he strode out forcefully and skated off, off forth on swing.

  “Why’d you stop him?” Newlyn asked. “We knew where we were.”

  I said nothing for a moment, trying to pick out the departing glissador’s figure in the crimson light

  Newlyn said: “Well? Why’d you do that?”

  “I wanted one of them to ... to acknowledge us. I wanted to watch how one of them resumed his skating. Maybe it is fun,” I said. And stopped. Newlyn was watching me. “Never mind. Let’s follow the goddamn doors.”

  We did. We walked. Our feettap-tap-tapped on the tiles, mundanely coming down one foot after another. In this fashion we eventually reached Door 502, a door which looked uncannily like the two doors on either side.

  I extracted from my pocket the obscenely rubberoid sheath upon which were embossed the whorls of Miss Almira Longhopes right thumbprint, and slipped this sheath over my forefinger so as not to distort the print with my own outsized thumb. Then I held my forefinger to the electric eye for scanning, and the panel slid back, admitting us to the cubicle in which the dead woman must necessarily lie: unwept, unhonored, very nearly unborn. Newlyn preceded me into the odd closet just inside the cubicle’s door.

  At first we saw nothing. After our trip through the murky, glissador-haunted catacombs, the room’s bright midday glare struck at us cruelly. We squinted. We blinked. And then there was the inevitable resolution of detail (in itself a haunting experience) as our eyes came back to us.

  We found ourselves in an environment immensely strange. We were in a cramped artificial foyer. The walls on the inside of the cubicle had been altered so that they formed an octagonal area of space rather than a square one. Moreover, just inside the cubicle’s doorway Newlyn and I stumbled upon a crude wooden step which we had to mount in order to see more than the tops of the wall sections opposite us. We climbed the step.

  We stood then on a narrow dais, approximately one foot from the cubicle’s real floor, that made an octagonal circuit about the entire room and provided an odd catwalk for the unexpecting, and certainly unexpected, intruder into Miss Longhope’s splendidly insane sanctuary. It was a sanctuary unlike any that one would expect to find on the lower levels of the hive—or anywhere else, for that matter.

  Banks of computerlike gadgetry, from which there emanated the faint and fitful winking of orange and red lights, stood against two facets of the octagonal wall Against two more sections—the two flanking us—we saw tall glass cylinders that were polarized so that we could not see into them; these cylinders could have been anything, from models of the city’s lift-tubes, to gigantic chemical beakers, to containers for space travelers in suspended animation. The mystery intrigued us, but something else drew our attention away. In the remaining four facets of the octagonal wall, directly across the room, we looked upon four distinct and different windows: view screens that permitted us to see panoramas that no living inhabitant of the Dome had ever gazed upon, unless he were possessed of a vivid clairvoyance.

  Newlyn and I drank in these panoramas quickly.

  From left to right these “windows” demonstrated a progression based on an expanding consciousness of the universe. The screen on the far left depicted a view of our own domed city, but from theoutside, as if from
a distant hilltop in the wilderness that we had so long ago fled; and darkness swirled over the Dome’s imposing hump like a disturbed gas, uneasily hovering.

  The second window showed us the dead face of the Moon from about ten thousand miles away. No man had set foot there for more than eighty, ninety, perhaps one hundred years.

  The third window gave us the ethereal aloofness of Saturn and its incandescent rings.

  And the fourth window, the one on the far right, made us look into the cruel depths of outer space—where the glassy indifference of a thousand sharp stars somehow stung us back into the here-and-now, sucking away our breaths. And since the biomonitor units in the cubicle had begun to refrigerate the air to compensate for the onset of the old woman’s physical decay, our breaths were chill.