Orbit 12 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Newlyn reacted noisily: “What kind of place does this old woman live in, Mr. Ardrey? What’s it supposed to be?” As in the hallway, his body revolved out of the impulse of sheer wonder. “What the heck is all this stuff for?”

  “I don’t think it’s exactlyfor anything.”

  “Everything’s for something, Mr. Ardrey. What’s this stuff supposed to be? What’s it do?”

  I tried to make sense of my suspicions. We had stumbled into what was evidently an elaborate mockup, and the octagonal room could have been a wide variety of things: the hall of planets in a second-rate surfaceside museum, some sort of wildly improbable computer chamber, or—

  “—The command pit of a spaceship,” I said. “It’s supposed to be the command pit of—”

  Newlyn cut me off with a cry that might have come out of the mouth of someone a great deal younger: “Look, there she is!” He pointed down into the pit which I had been trying to identify; he pointed at the back of the huge swivel chair that dominated this intriguing area. Visible above the back of this chair, the back of a woman’s head, matted over with frowzy iron-grey pleats, caught my eye and sent a cold wrinkle unwinding up my spine. Newlyn jumped from the dais, jumped into the command pit before I could say anything. As I had spun the glissador about in the hallway, he spun the arm of the chair and turned the ruined face of Almira Longhope, glassy eyes open, lower lip twisted, toward me—toward me!

  I stared at the dead woman, feeling her accusation.

  “She’s really dead,” Newlyn told me excitedly, running a finger over the silver lamé sleeve of her gown. “She’s really dead.”

  “I know. I can see that.”

  Newlyn turned impulsively around, forgetting the old woman. He did not spin the chair in the direction of his turn. Instead, he simply walked around the chair and paused momentarily at the semicircular panel of “instruments” over which the dead woman had been gazing before he had disturbed her. He looked toward the four viewing screens. Dome, Moon, planet, stars. The last three could have meant almost nothing to Newlyn, even though he had undoubtedly seen the night sky in visicom presentations and read about the “promise of space” in pre-Evacuation literature. Besides, the four windows had no reality. The stars on the far right were sharp and cold, yes, but they existed only as glossy points on a piece of lusterless mounted silk. Each window, in fact, was just such a piece of lusterless mounted silk. Despite this, Newlyn stared at the viewing screen on the far right for a long while. “Look at that,” he said before turning away. “Look at all that distance, all that space.” At last he did turn away. He brought his attention back to the semicircular console in front of the old woman’s command chair.

  Reaching over it, he pushed buttons. One or two of them seemed to operate lights in the walls. He fiddled with levers. One of the levers controlled two mobiles that hung from the ceiling, seemingly as navigational devices, since each one represented a miniature spaceship moving gyroscopically inside a glass sphere divided into sections by thin blue lines. “Look at all this stuff,” Newlyn said over and over again. He made low whistling noises, articulations of pleased astonishment.

  Meanwhile, the corpse of Almira Longhope continued to stare at me. I was certain now that the bitch’s stare was singlemindedly accusatory, even though her sunken features contained less malice than disappointment.

  But for Newlyn’s oblivious duckings, the room was deathly still. And cold. The orange and red lights on the phony computers made no noise; none of the instruments on the semicircular panel hummed, or clicked, or whirred. I grew uneasy.

  “Newlyn!”

  He did not even look up. “What?”

  “Get away from there. We’ve got things to do.”

  “Just a second, Mr. Ardrey. This thing’s got a purpose, I can tell.” He was manipulating a dial on the command console. Soundlessly the scenes depicted in the four windows opposite us slipped into another continuum; to take their places there came the images of (1) an alien planetscape, (2) the craggy moon of a world not belonging to Sol, (3) an eerie double binary, and (4) a minute spiral galaxy as seen from the loneliness of open space. How far outward the old woman had permitted herself to venture! These new images—or perhaps simply the changes he had worked—exhilarated Newlyn. “Climbersguts!” he said; a bit of irritating slang.

  “God damn it, Newlyn, will you get away from there!”

  He looked up hurriedly and faced me, his chin tilted a little. I had never spoken to him like that before. His eyes betrayed his hurt and bewilderment.

  “You were the one,” I reminded him, “who said we weren’t going to come down here to gawk. Do you remember that? You were the one who wanted to make sure the servo-units didn’t vacuum her up like a piece of dirt.”

  The boy dropped his head, chastened.

  I was still angry. My fists were clenching and unclenching of their own accord. It was difficult not to look into the corpses vein-woven eyes, lose all resolution, and return surfaceside to the control room on West Peachtree. Especially since we had stumbled on the mausoleum of an aged lunatic with an adolescent pituitary where her brains should have been. No wonder that Almira Longhope, at the age of one hundred and seven, still resided in a three-room cubicle on Level 8: she had exhausted her monetary and spiritual resources constructing a tomb with faster-than-light-speed capabilities, patching together an epitaph out of old screenplays and pulp magazine stories, paying homage to the very worst of the products of the pre-Evacuation mass media. No wonder that she stared at me with accusation and disappointment; the dream, too, had finally died, and we had walked in on its naked remains.

  Still chastened, Newlyn said: “All right, Mr. Ardrey, what do we have to do now?” Finally he looked up. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I—”

  This time I cut him off. “Don’t be sorry. It was a natural response, Newlyn, a very natural response.” Then I told him that the first thing I wanted him to do was face the old woman toward her windows once again, and he did this for me. “The computer said that she had no relatives,” I went on, “so we don’t have to try to contact anyone. All we have to do is go through her belongings and determine if she’s left a will or any papers. Then we must see that her body goes into the waste converter on Level 9 and file a report so that her cubicle can be sprayed. All this junk will have to be destroyed.”

  “It doesn’t look like junk, Mr. Ardrey.”

  “It’s junk.’’

  He didn’t protest a second time, but his eyes, though superficially still penitent, cut away from me at an angle of vague reprimand. I ignored this silent cavil. He was young.

  It took us a little while to find the entrance into her sleeping quarters because the artificial hull of her “spaceship” had been erected in front of the cubicle’s internal doorways. (The entrance from the outer corridor, through which Newlyn and I had originally come, was disguised as the facing of an airlock, for the artifices of Miss Longhope were nothing if not thoroughgoing.) We walked around the catwalk that circled the vessel’s command pit. We tested the firmness of the walls with our hands and knees. We scrutinized the phony computer banks and puzzled over the two tall glass cylinders. And, at last, we did find the doorway to the old woman’s bedchamber.

  Newlyn made the discovery. Running his hands over the surface of one of the cylinders, he was surprised to find a vertical seam. He pressed this seam, and the cylinder split apart and opened out. “Mr. Ardrey!” he called. I went to him. Together we found that the other half of the cylinder also opened out, but in the direction of the concealed sleeping chamber.

  We went through this unorthodox portal, down a single step, and into the old woman’s private alcove. Newlyn dialed up the lights.

  The alcove contained a low bed, a study area, and the standard visicom console on which one can display reading material or run his choice of entertainment visuals. However, the visicom’s screen was silver-grey. And dead. The fanaticism manifested so tangibly in the main living area did not appear so virul
ent here. I looked at Newlyn. The disappointment on his face mirrored the look on the old woman’s corpse. In truth, however, he had nothing to be disappointed about Almira Longhope’s ruling passion had merely secreted itself away into drawers, boxes, diaries, packets of photographs, and a heavy blue ledger. One or two testimonies of this passion remained shamelessly in the open, although Newlyn had not noticed them.

  “Cheer up,” I said. “Look there.”

  Beside the old woman’s bed, resting on her night table, there was a spherical lamp mounted on a tripod base. The lamp had hundreds of tiny holes in its surface, for in reality it was not a lamp at all but a simple version of the star-projectors that one of the old networks had marketed in such profiteering quantities before the Last Days of our great-grandfathers. Newlyn asked what the thing was: I told him. Then he wanted to see how the thing worked. Therefore, after he had dimmed the lights, I turned the projector on. At once stars appeared on the walls and ceiling —the constellations all misshapen and askew, however, because Miss Longhope had apparently not been able to devise a curved surface on which to project them. To Yates’ son, the resulting distortion made no difference. Even after I had made him dial the lights up again, he stood over the star-projector with all the solicitude of a nursing mother for her newborn whelps. His face was silly with concern.

  “How did she think up all these things?” he asked.

  “She didn’t. She just copied them.”

  “From what?”

  “From a style of entertainment that existed before the Domes went up—similar to our visual entertainment tapes. Most of this stuff has its origin in one of their shows . . . back when they believed in interstellar travel and galactic civilizations. Or at least when some of them did. She’s just copied everything from that one particular series of tapes—and from magazines and movies.”

  “When was it? When was all this stuff thought up?”

  “Eighty years ago. Ninety years ago. I don’t know, Newlyn.” He stared at the star-projector. He looked back toward the half-open cylinder beyond which lay the spaceship’s command pit. His lips scarcely moved. “It’s neat,” he said pontifically. “It’s some of the neatest stuff I’ve ever seen.”

  “That old woman wasted her life,” I said. “She wasted it”

  Turning my back on Yates’ son, I sat down at the study center and began pulling drawers open. What I found confirmed my judgment. Newlyn, sullen and belligerent now, looked over my shoulder as I arranged the contents of the drawers and of several crumpled manila envelopes on the surface of the desk. The stench of another time flew out of these envelopes like the moths that still flutter from the surfaceside grasses in April. I coughed. Like moths, the photographs and slips of precious paper seemed to beat about my head with their dusty hard-edged wings. In Miss Longhope’s blue ledger I flipped randomly to one of the pages of broad childish handwriting.

  I read one of the paragraphs on the page.

  Log entry: Tonight I saw the episode entitled “Between the Star Mirrors” for the third time. Is there an alternate Almira somewhere in the universe? I wish that I could break through for a moment and visit my other self. The Rigelian first officer is an honorable man in both universes. What would I be? Sometimes I am afraid that I am empty of stars in both places, but this is not true. Even my other self, just as I do here, would have all her alternate universe to reach into and to wonder at But she would probably need to have help to reach out—just as I do. I hate the image that the mirror I hold up to the world returns to me. The image in the mirror clouds over every day, like the dirty sky and people’s ugly wrinkled unhappy faces.

  I read this passage aloud to Newlyn. “Neat, huh?”

  He said nothing. He picked up one of the laminated photographs, bent and yellowed in spite of the lamination, and ran his finger over the heavy intense face of one of the actors who had been in the series. In the photograph, the actor had a smooth triple-lobed cranium and no discernible eyebrows; he had signed his name across the bottom of the picture. Newlyn touched the signature, too—or tried to touch it; the dull plastic prevented him. Stymied, he studied the face.

  “Look at this man’s head, Mr. Ardrey.” He had forgotten his resentment of my skeptical attitude toward Miss Longhope’s memorabilia. “Look at his head, Mr. Ardrey. Where did this man come from?”

  “A makeup room, Newlyn. It’s just an actor pretending to be a member of a humanoid species that never existed. A nonexistent friendly alien.”

  He continued to look at the actor’s picture. “Can I have this?”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t mine to give you. What do you want with it, anyway?” I took it out of his hands, gently.

  He shrugged and looked at the other items on the desk. He feigned an interest in the ledger containing the old woman’s “log entries,” but I could tell that the writing there bored him.

  I sorted the papers and photographs and put them back into the dingy manila envelopes. There was nothing in the old woman’s possessions of any conceivable value to the city. We had innumerable collections of such maudlin remnants of the pre-Evacuation days, should anyone actually wish to see such things. Museums. Chronos galleries. Pedestrian corridors lined with glass cases and curioboards. No one was denied information about the past. And if Almira Longhope had anything at all worth saving, I supposed it to be the blue ledger. However miserable and cramped, at least it was a document of human suffering and therefore of some small value to the urban archives.

  But as I had mentally predicted he would, Newlyn had grown weary of this document. He had left the sleeping cubicle and gone back to the command pit of the Sojourner II. I finished putting away the old woman’s possessions, the inconsequential leftovers of a lifetime misspent and horrifyingly sad.

  Everything but the ledger.

  That I carried with me, out to where Newlyn prowled among the winking lights and the ghostly crewmen who rode their drifting derelict through the ruinous voids of that lifetime.

  Newlyn said: “What do we have to do now?”

  “Find a telecom unit. The old bitch must have tried to make it an integral part of the equipment on this ‘vessel.’ Why don’t you see if you can find it?”

  This request pleased Yates’ son; it gave him an excuse to finger the dials and levers, to examine the intricacy of the total construct. Meanwhile, the old woman surveyed us regally from the command chair. I realized that she was attired after the fashion of some anonymous producer’s concept of a Rigelian priestess; a sort of scepter, or abbreviated staff, lay across her thin thighs. How magnificently, how pettily, she had met her death. In the cubicle’s cold air her face seemed to be carved of ice. I had just looked away from her twisted lower lip when Newlyn called, “Here it is, Mr. Ardrey. In this box over here. Where it says ‘Communications.’“

  “Where it says ‘Communications,’“ I echoed. “Very apt.”

  I mounted the catwalk, sat down, and made three brief calls. One to the main control room. One to the office of the administrative head of the glissadors on Level 8. One to the city agency of Flame-Decontamination and Refurbishing.

  Newlyn said: “You’re going to have them burn out the old woman’s cubicle? You’re going to let them set fire to all this stuff she’s made?”

  “She’s done with these things, Newlyn. Somebody else should have access to what she can’t use anymore. Even though this is Level 8, there are people waiting to live here. People from the level beneath us.”

  “Maybe they’d like it the way she has it now.”

  “Grow up,” I said.

  He wouldn’t talk to me through the waiting that followed. He wouldn’t talk to me when the glissadors came with their silent cart to carry Miss Almira Longhope’s corpse through the murky corridors to the pneumatic scaffolding that would drop her to the waste converters on Level 9. He remained silent through the waiting that followed the glissadors’ departure.

  And when the men from F-D&R came into the cubicle with their canist
ers of bactericidal combustgens, and their flame-suits, and their unbelieving goggled-over eyes, Newlyn cut his own eyes in reprimand and stalked out. He went into the corridor-went with blatant contempt for my colloquy with these men— and waited outside in the smoky halflight that drifted there. I explained the situation to the men from F-D&R. I gave directions. They nodded their insectlike heads. My explanation done, I went into the silent corridor and, with considerable difficulty, found Newlyn leaning in a crimson shadow against the opposite wall. I said something, but he wouldn’t talk to me.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m going up. You can do what you like.”

  The tap-tap-tap of my footfalls was overwhelmed, just then, by the carnivorous whooshing of the F-D&R handtorches. The corridor filled with this noise, and the tightly closed panel of cubicle 502 gave me the momentary illusion that the panel itself was glowing with unnatural heat, unnatural light. I hesitated briefly. Then I resumed walking. Seconds later, it became apparent that another series of footfalls was echoing my own, albeit in a reluctant and irregular way:taptap tap taptaptap.