Orbit 12 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.” That was easier than trying to explain why she was, but could not eat. He accepted it without question or surprise, and still seemed to wait for her orders. She realized that she could stay and he would never dare complain—perhaps not wish to—nor dare tell anyone she was here. If he had been one of the plastic people she might have used him, but he was not, and she could not: full circle.

  His hands moved in his lap, nervous.

  “What’s wrong?” Gently.

  As an apology, he said, “Miz, I have to work.”

  “You don’t need my permission,” trying to keep her tone from sounding like a reprimand.

  He got up, stood uncertainly in the center of his room, wanting to speak, not knowing the right words. “Maybe later you’ll be hungry.” He fled.

  She unwrapped herself from the blanket and massaged her knees. She wandered uneasily around the room, feeling trapped and alien.

  One station on the trid bounced down all news. She came on at the quarter hour. The hope that they had only traced her to this world evaporated as she listened to the bulletin: the broadcast was satellite-transmitted; unless they had known, they would not have said she was in Highport and risked missing her in another city. They kept saying she was crazy, in the politest possible terms. They could never say that the malignancy was not in her mind but in her body. No one got cancer anymore. People who related their birth dates to the skies of old Earth didn’t even call themselves Moon children if they were born under the Crab. All the normals had been clean-gened, to strip even the potential for cancer from their chromosomes. Only a few of them, and now Lais, knew that the potential had been put back into the Institute Fellows, as punishment and control.

  They used even this announcement to remind the people how important the Fellows were, how many advances they had made, how many benefits they had provided. Before, Lais had never known that that sort of constant persuasion was necessary. Perhaps, in fact, it wasn’t. Perhaps they only thought it was, so they continued it, afraid to stop the constant reinforcement, probing, breaking old scars.

  She turned off the trid. There was a small alcove of a bathroom off the old man’s quarters; there was no pool, only a shower. She stripped and took off the dark wig. If there had been a blower she would have washed her clothes, but there were only a couple of worn towels. She turned on the shower and slumped under it with water running through her bright, colorless, startling hair, over her shoulders and breasts and back. Her bones were etched out at ribs and hips, and her muscles made a clear chart of anatomy. Her knees were black and purple; she bruised very easily now.

  She left before the old man returned. Trying to thank him would embarrass him and force him to search for words he did not possess. If she waited she might lose her courage and stay; if she waited she might convince herself that she did not need to run again to defy the Institute. If she waited they might trace her to him. It would not matter to them or help their search if they questioned him, but it would confuse and hurt him. She felt strangely protective toward him, perhaps as he had felt toward her. As if people responded to helplessness in ways that had nothing to do with their capacity to think.

  Outside it was dark again—could be still dark, for all the sun Lais had seen. But the sleet had stopped and it was a midnight-blue morning, cold and clear, and even the city’s skyglow could not dim the stars. People strolled alone or in groups on the softly lit mall or sat on the bronze or stone flanks of prehistoric-beast sculptures. Lais stayed in shadows and at edges. No frozen-young faces blanched on seeing her; no one sidled toward the nearest communications booth to call the security agents. Many of the people, by their clothes and languages, were transients who had no reason to be interested in local news.

  The haranguers were back after the rain, preachers for bizarre religions, recruiters for little outwoods colonies, proponents of strange social ideals. Lais could ignore them all, except the ones who preached against her. She could feel the age about them: they remembered. Onlya few kept that much hate, enough to stand on walls and cry that the freaks were a danger and a curse. Lais crept by them on the opposite side of the path, as if they could know what she was just by looking. Their voices followed her.

  Drained, she stopped and entered one of the frequent CMU booths. The door closed over the sounds. She needed to rest. The money she had scrounged and smoothed could buy no ticket now past the watchers in the port, so she used it to open lines to the city’s computers, and they returned to her the power of machines. Their lure was too great, measured against the delay. She had been straining so long at the problem she was working on when she left the Institute that the programs needing to be run sprang out full-grown. She did a minute’s worth of exploration and put a block on the lines so she could not be cut off as soon as her money ran out. It should hold long enough. Into the wells she inserted the data cubes she had carried around for two months. Working submerged her; reality dissolved.

  Later, while waiting for more important output, Lais almost idly probed for vulnerability in the city programs, seeking to construct for herself a self-erasing escape route. The safeguards were intricate, but hidden flaws leaped out at Lais and the defenses fell, laying the manager programs open to her abilities. It was hardly more difficult than blocking the lines. At that moment she could have put glitches in the city’s services and untraceable bugs in its programs. She could see a thousand ways to disrupt things for mere annoyance, she could detour garbage service and destroy commercial records and mismatch mail codes and reroute the traffic, and there were a thousand times a thousand ways to disrupt things destructively, to turn a community of a million people into the ruined inhabitants of a chaotic war zone. Entropy was all on her side. Yet when the city was stretched out vulnerable before her, the momentary eagerness to destroy left her. The fact that she could have done it seemed to be enough. Taking vengeance on the plastic people would have been senseless and very much like experimenting with mice or rabbits or lower primates, small furry stupid beasts that accept the pain and degradation with frightened resignation in their wide deep eyes, not knowingwhy. The emotional isolation that might have allowed her to tamper with the city was shattered in her own experience and existence as a laboratory animal, knowing, but not really understanding why.

  She slammed at the terminal to close down the holes she had made in the city’s defenses and touched it more gently to complete her work. She used an hour of computer time in less than an hour of real time.

  The results came chuckling out: first one, then a second world ecosystem map in fluorescent colors, shading through the spectrum from violet for concrete through blue and green and yellow for high to low certainty to orange and red for theoretical projections. The control map was mostly blue, very little red: it looked good. Its data had been nothing but a sample of ordinary dirt, analyzed down to its isotopes, from the grounds of the outpost where Lais had been working when she got sick. The map showed the smooth flow of natural evolution, spotted here and there with the quick jumps and twists and bare spots and rootless branches of alien human occupation. Its accuracy was extraordinary. Lais had not thought herself still capable of elation, but she was smiling involuntarily, and for a few moments she forgot about pain and exhaustion.

  The second map had less blue and more red, but it seemed unified and logical. Its data had been a bit of a drone sample from an unexplored world, and it showed that the programs were very likely doing what they were supposed to do: deduce the structure and relationships of a world’s living things.

  Lais’ past research had produced results that could hardly be understood, much less used, by normals. It would be extended and built on by her own kind, eventually, not in her lifetime, or perhaps not even in the lifetime that should have belonged to her. This time she had set out to discover the limits of theory applied to minimal data, and the applications were not only obvious but of great potential benefit. When the hounds tracked her, they would find
her last programs, and they would be used. Lais shrugged. If she had wanted to be vindictive, she would have tried not to finish, but her mind and her curiosity and her need for knowledge were not things she could flick on and off at will, to produce results like handfuls of cookies.

  The screen blinked. Her time had run out long since, and the computer was beginning to cut out the obstructions she had put in its billing mechanism. But they held for the moment, and the computer began obediently to print out the data blocks after the map and the programs. She reached to turn it off, then drew her hand back.

  Among crystal structures and mass spectrum plots a DNA sequence zipped by, almost unnoticed, almost unnoticeable, but it caught her attention. She thought it was from the drone sample. She brought it back and put it on the screen. The city computers had all the wrong library programs, and who bothered to translate DNA anymore anyway? She picked a place that looked right and did it by memory; for Lais it was like typing. AUG, adenine, uracil, guanine. Start: methionine. Life is the same all over. The computer built a chain of amino acids like a string of pop-beads. 2D valiantly masqueraded as 3D. Lais threw in entropy and let the chain fold up. When it was done she doubled and redoubled it and added a copy of its DNA. The screen flickered again; the openings she had made in the computers safeguards were beginning to close, and alarms would be sounding.

  The pieces on the screen began the process of self-aggregation, and when they were done she had a luminous green reproduction, a couple of million times real size, of something that existed on the borders of life. It was a virus, that was obvious. She couldn’t stay and translate the whole genome and look for equivalents for the enzymes it would need. She didn’t really have to. It felt, to all her experience, and memory, and intuition, like a tumor virus. She glanced at the printout again and realized with slow shock, free-fall sensation, that this was from the control data.

  There were any number of explanations. Someone could have been using the virus as a carrier in genetic surgery, replacing its dangerous parts with genes that it could insert into a chromosome. They didn’t grow freaks at that outpost, but they might have made the virus stocks that the freaks were infected with when they were no more than one-cell zygotes. Someone could have been careless with their sterile technique, especially if they had not been told what the virus was used for and how dangerous it was.

  The looming green virus particle, as absurd and obscene that size as the magnified head of a fly, dimmed. The computer was almost through the block. Lais had been in the company of machines so long that they seemed to have as much personality as people; this one muttered and grumbled at her for stealing its time. It lumbered to stop her, a hippopotamus playing crocodile.

  Lais had dug the virus up outside in the dirt, free, by chance, and there was a lot of it. If it were infectious—and it seemed complete—it could be infecting people at and around the outpost, not very many, but some, integrating itself into their chromosomes, eradicating the effects of clean-gening. It might wait ten or fifteen or fifty years, or forever, but when injury or radiation or carcinogen induced it out, it would begin to kill. It would be too late to cure people of it then, just as it was for Lais; the old, crippling methods—surgery, radiation—might work for a few, but if the disease were similar to hers, fast-growing, metastasizing, nothing would be much use.

  The light on the screen began to go out. She moved quickly and stored the map programs, the maps, the drone data.

  She hesitated. In a moment it would be too late. She felt the vengeful animals of memories trying to hold her back. She jabbed with anger at the keyboard and sent the control data into storage with the rest as the last bright lines faded from the screen.

  The data was there, for them to notice and fear, or ignore and pay the price. She would give them that much warning. The normals might find a way to clean-gene people after they were grown; they might even set Fellows to work on the problem and let them share the benefits. Lais wondered at her own naïveté, that after everything a small part of her still hoped her people might finally be forgiven.

  She left it all behind, even the data cubes, and went back out onto the mall.

  * * * *

  A hovercar whirred a few streets back; sharp beams from its searchlights touched the edges and corners of buildings. She walked faster, then ran painfully, past firmly-shut doors to a piece of sculpture that doubled as a sitting park. She crawled into the deepest and most enclosed alcove she could reach. Outside she could hear the security car intruding on the pedestrian mall. The sucks passed without suspecting her presence, not recognizing the sculpture as a children’s toy, a place to hide and climb and play, a place for transients to sleep in good weather, a place that, tonight, was Lais’ alone.

  There was a tiny window by her shoulder that cut through a meter of stone to the outside. Moonlight polished a square of the wall that narrowed, crept upward, and vanished as the moon set.

  Lais put her head on her knees and focused all her attention on herself, tracing lines of fatigue through her muscles to extrapolate her reserves of stamina, probing at the wells of pain in her body and in her bones. She had become almost accustomed to betrayal by the physical part of herself; but she was still used to relying on her mind. The slight tilt from a fine edge of alertness was too recent for her to accept. Now, forcing herself to be aware of everything she was, she was frightened by the changes to the edge of panic. She closed her eyes and fought it down, wrestling with a feeling like a great grey slug in her stomach and a small brown millipede in her throat. Both of them retreated, temporarily. Tears tickled her cheeks, touched her lips with salt; she scrubbed them away on her rough sleeve.

  She felt marginally better. It had occurred to her that she felt light-headed and removed and hallucinatory because of hunger, not because of advancing pathological changes in her brain; that helped. It was another matter of relying on feedback from a faulty instrument. The thought of food was still nauseating. It would be harder to eat the longer she put it off, but, then, perhaps it was too late to matter anymore.

  The sitting park restored her, as it was meant to; for her it was the silence and isolation, the slight respite from cold and the clean twisting lines of it, whatever reasons others had for responding. She would have liked to stay.

  She walked a long way toward the edge of the bazaar. Her knees still hurt—it took her a few minutes to remember when she had fallen, and why; it seemed a very long time before—and her legs began to ache. Resting again, she sat on a wall at the edge of the bazaar, at the edge of the mountaintop, looking down over acity of pinpoint lights (holes in the ground to hell? but the lights were gold and silver, not crimson). The lights led in lines down the flanks of the mountain, dendrites from the cell of the city and its nucleus of landing field. She knew she could get out of Highport. She believed she could run so far that they would not catch her until too late; she hoped they would never find her, and she hoped her body would fail her before her mind did, or that she would have courage and presence enough to kill herself if it did not or if the pain grew great enough to break her. All she really had to do was get to the bottom of the mountain, and past the foothills, until she reached lush jungle and great heat and a climate like an incubator, where life processes are faster and scavengers prowl, and the destruction of decomposition is rapid and complete. The jungle would conspire with her to deny the Institute what she considered most precious, knowledge. She slipped off the wall and started down the hill. Before her the sky was changing from midnight blue to grey and scarlet with the dawn.

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  * * * *

  Steve Chapman

  BURGER CREATURE

  FIRST I should tell you about our manager. He weighed about 300, composed of equal parts of grease and fat, like our burgers, except that our burgers weigh nothing. I would say that his most annoying habit (aside from chain smoking and making us counter girls pick up his butts, so he could look up our uniforms, or down them, or through them) was to put a
n inch of orange drink in a cardboard cup every morning, fill it up with vodka, and call it a screwdriver. “Screwdriver,’’ he would say, wiping his greasy chin. After two of these, he was ready to face the day, lying on his back in the storeroom. “Never skip breakfast,” he’d say, popping a french fry into his greasy mouth.

  One day he delayed his breakfast to introduce me to a new girl. The last one had quit because of heat exhaustion aggravated by a growing fear of food. It had been pitiful to watch her. When fishburgers were introduced, she’d been robbed of the last form of protein she could still stomach. She’d show up for work with her eyeliner smeared across her bloodshot lids. She’d unwrap patties in her little hands and sweep a limp strand of blond hair out of her face, biting at her lip frost to get the smell out of her mouth. Some of us got it, and she got it bad. Finally, one noon rush, she threw her cage of fries down into the boiling grease and staggered out the service door, muttering, “The pickles are dyed green. The Coke is dyed brown. My hair is dyed blond. I’m turning into a cheeseburger.” She never even picked up her last paycheck. We didsmell like cheeseburgers. Our uniformsare the same white as the paper bags. I don’t want to think about it.