Orbit 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “No. No. But I know what they’re thinking now. They’re afraid of me, of people like me. You see, people who have high creativity don’t usually have the right sort of genes to take their RNA. A few, but not enough. It worries them.”

  “Who’ve you been talking to?”

  “Martie, you know where I’ve been spending my time.” She laughed. “It is nice to be home, isn’t it?” The fireplace half of the living room was cheerful and glowing, while shadows filled the rest of the long room. “Of course, when you consider that only about twenty-five percent of the people are getting the RNA it isn’t surprising that there aren’t many with creative abilities that have been developed to any extent. But, what is sad is that those few who were writers or painters, or whatever, don’t seem to continue their work once they know they are immortal. Will women want to continue bearing children if they know they’re immortal already?”

  “I don’t know. You think that the maternal instinct is just a drive to achieve immortality, although vicariously?”

  “Why not? Is a true instinct stilled with one or two satisfying meals, or sex acts, or whatever? Women seem to be satisfied as soon as they have a child or two.”

  “If that’s so, then, whatever happens, the race will be finished. If women don’t want children, don’t have to satisfy this drive, I should say, it’s a matter of time. We have the means to prevent pregnancy, why would they keep on getting knocked up?”

  “Because something else needs the children, the constantly shifting, renewing vision that is provided by children. Not us, not me. It. Something else. That thing that is behind us pushing, learning through us. You have the books. You’ve been reading everything you can find on psychology. The nearest we have been able to describe that something is by calling it the collective unconscious, I think.”

  “Jung’s collective unconscious,” Martie muttered. “You know, some scientists, philosophers, artists work right down the middle of a brightly illuminated strip, never go off it. Darwin, for instance. Skinner. Others work so close to the edge that half the time they are in the grey areas where the light doesn’t follow, where you never knew if madness guided the pen or genius. Jung spent most of his time on the border, sometimes in the light, sometimes in the shadows. His collective unconscious, the fantasy of a man who couldn’t stand mysteries not solved during his own lifetime.”

  Julia stood up and stretched. “God, I’m tired. Bath time.” Martie wouldn’t let her get into and out of the bathtub alone now. “Martie, if there is such a thing—and there is, there is—it’s been threatened. It has to have the constantly shifting viewpoint of mankind in order to learn the universe. A billion experiences, a trillion, who knows how many it will need before it is finished? It was born with mankind, it has grown with mankind, as it matures so does man, and if mankind dies now, so will it. We are its sensory receptors. And what Wymann and the others propose is death to it, death to them eventually. It feeds the unconscious, nourishes it, gives it its dreams and its flashes of genius. Without it, man is just another animal, clever with his hands perhaps, but without the dream to work toward. All our probes into space, into the oceans, so few inward. We are so niggardly in exploring the greatest mystery of all, potentially the most rewarding of all.”

  She had her bath, and he helped her from the tub and dried her back and smoothed lotion over it. He tucked her into bed, and she smiled at him. “Come to bed, Martie. Please.”

  “Soon, honey. I’m . . . restless right now.”

  A few minutes later when he looked in on her, she was sound asleep. He smoked and drank and paced, as he did night after night. Julia was like one possessed. He grimaced at the choice of words. She worked from dawn until night, when he forced her to stop. He made their meals, or she wouldn’t have eaten. He had to touch her before she knew he was there to collect her for a meal. He stood sometimes and watched her from the doorway, and he was frightened of her at those times. She was a stranger to him, her eyes almost closed, sometimes, he thought, and discarded the thought immediately, her eyes were all the way closed.

  Her hands held life of their own, strong, white knuckled, thin hands grasping mallet and chisel. She couldn’t wear gloves while she worked. She dressed in heavy wool pants, and a heavy sweater, covered by a tentlike poncho that she had made from an army blanket. She wore fleece-lined boots, but her hands had to be bare. He would touch her arm, shake her, and slowly recognition would return to her eyes, she would smile at him and put down her tools; without looking at the thing she was making, she would go with him. He would rub her freezing hands for her, help her out of the heavy garments that were much too warm for the house.

  Sometimes after she had gone to bed, usually by nine, he would turn on the barn lights and stand and stare at her work. He wanted, at those times, to pull it down and smash it to a million pieces. He hated it for possessing her when he would have her sit on a velvet cushion and spend her last months and weeks with . . .

  He threw his glass into the fireplace, then started to pick up the pieces and put them in an ashtray. Something wet sparkled on his hand, and he stared at it for a moment. Suddenly he put his head down on the floor and sobbed for her, for himself, for their child.

  “Sayre, why haven’t you brought her in for an examination?”

  Martie watched Wymann prowl the living room. Wymann looked haggard, he thought suddenly. He laughed. Everyone was looking haggard except Julia.

  Wymann turned toward him with a scowl. “I’m warning you, Sayre. If the child is orphaned at birth, the state won’t quibble a bit about our taking it. With you or without you ...”

  Martie nodded. “I’ve considered that.” He rubbed his hand over his face. A four- or five-day beard was heavy on his cheeks and chin. His hand was unsteady. “I’ve thought of everything,” he said deliberately. “All of it. I lose if I take you up, lose if I don’t.”

  “You won’t lose with us. One woman. There are other women. If she died in childbirth, in an accident, you’d be married again in less than five years. ...”

  Martie nodded. “I’ve been through all that, too. No such thing as the perfect love, lasting love. Why’d you come out here, Wymann? I thought you were too busy for just one patient to monopolize your time. Farthest damn housecall I’ve ever heard of. And not even called.” He laughed again. “You’re scared. What’s going wrong?”

  “Where’s Julia?”

  “Working. Out in the barn.”

  “Are you both insane? Working now? She’s due in two weeks at the most!”

  “She seems to think this is important. Something she has to finish before she becomes a mother and stops for a year or two.”

  Wymann looked at him sharply. “Is she taking that attitude?”

  “You first. Why are you out here? What’s wrong with the master plan for the emerging superman?”

  “He’s here because people aren’t dying any more. Are they, Dr. Wymann?”

  Julia stood in the doorway in her stocking feet, stripping off the poncho. “You have to do things now, don’t you, Doctor? Really do things, not just sit back and watch.”

  “There is some sort of underground then, isn’t there? That’s why you two made the grand tour, organizing an underground.”

  Julia laughed and pulled off her sweater. “I’ll make us all some coffee.”

  Martie watched her. “A final solution, Doctor. You have to come up with a new final solution, don’t you? And you find it difficult.”

  “Difficult, yes. But not impossible.”

  Martie laughed. “Excuse me while I shave. Make yourself comfortable. Won’t take five minutes.”

  He went through the kitchen and caught Julia from behind, holding her hard. “They’ll have to change everything if that’s true. They won’t all go along with murder, wholesale murder. This will bring it out into the open where we can decide. ...”

  Julia pulled away and turned to look at him squarely. “This isn�
�t the end. Not yet. There’s something else to come. . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that this isn’t the end, not yet. Not like this. Martie, have you decided? It’s killing you. You have to decide.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it will be decided for me. I’m going up to shave now.”

  She shook her head. “You’ll have to make the decision. Within a week, I think.”

  “Dr. Wymann, why is it that proportionately more doctors than laymen are suicides?” Julia poured coffee and passed the sugar as she spoke. “And why are there more alcoholics and drug-users among the medical profession?”

  Wymann shrugged. “I give up, why?”

  “Oh, because doctors as a group are so much more afraid of death than anyone else. Don’t you think?”

  “Rather simplistic, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Often the most unrelenting drives are very simplistic.”

  “Julia, you have to come in to be examined. You know that. There could be unsuspected complications that might endanger the baby.”

  “I’ll come in, as soon as I finish what I’m doing. A few more days. I’ll check in then if you like. But first I have to finish. It’s Martie’s Christmas present.”

  Martie stared at her. Christmas. He’d forgotten.

  She smiled. “It’s all right. The baby is my present. The sculpture is yours.”

  “What are you doing? Can I see?” Wymann asked. “Although, remember, I like understandable things. Nothing esoteric or ambiguous.”

  “This one is as simple ... as a sunset. I’ll go get my boots.”

  As soon as she had left them, Wymann stood up and paced back and forth in quick nervous strides. “I bet it reeks of death. They’re all doing it. A worldwide cultural explosion, that’s what the Sunday Times called it. All reeking of death.”

  “Ready? You’ll need warm clothes, Doctor.”

  Muffled in warm garments, they walked together to the barn. The work was ten feet high in places. The quartzite was gone, out of sight. Martie didn’t know what she had done with it. What remained was rough sandstone, dull red, with yellow streaks. It looked very soft. She had chiseled and cut into it what looked like random lines. At first glance it seemed to be a medieval city, with steeples, flattened places, roofs. The illusion of a city faded, and it became a rough mountainous landscape, with stiletto-like peaks, unknowable chasms. Underwater mountains, maybe. Martie walked around it. He didn’t know what it was supposed to be. He couldn’t stop looking, and, strangely, there was a yearning deep within him. Dr. Wymann stood still, staring at it with a puzzled expression. He seemed to be asking silently, “This is it? Why bother?”

  “Martie, hold my hand. Let me explain. ...” Her hand was cold and rough in his. She led him around it and stopped at the side that the west light hit. “It has to be displayed outside. It should rest on a smooth black basalt base, gently curved, not polished, but naturally smooth. I know that they can be found like that, but I haven’t been able to yet. And it should weather slowly. Rain, snow, sun, wind. It shouldn’t be protected from anything. If people want to, they should be able to touch it. Sculpture should be touched, you know. It’s a tactile art. Here, feel . . .” Martie put his hand where she directed and ran his fingers up one of the sharply rising peaks. “Close your eyes a minute,” she said. “Just feel it.” She reached out for Wymann’s hand. He was standing a foot or slightly more to her left. He resisted momentarily, but she smiled and guided his hand to the work.

  “You can see that there’s order,” she said, “even if you can’t quite grasp it. Order covering something else ...”

  Martie didn’t know when she stopped talking. He knew, his hand knew, what she meant. Order over something wild and unordered, ungraspable. Something unpredictable. Something that began to emerge, that overcame the order with disorder, distorting the lines. The feeling was not visual. His hand seemed to feel the subliminally skewed order. Rain. Snow. Wind. The imperfections became greater, a deliberate deterioration of order, exposing the inexplicable, almost fearful inside. A nightmare quality now, changing, always changing, faster now. Grosser changes. A peak too thin to support itself, falling sideways, striking another lesser peak, cracking off the needle end of it. Lying at the base, weathering into sand, running away in a stream of red-yellow water, leaving a clean basalt base. Deeper channels being cut into the thing, halving it, dividing it into smaller and smaller bits, each isolated from the rest, each yielding to the elements, faster, faster. A glimpse of something hard and smooth, a gleam of the same red and yellow, but firm, not giving, not yielding. A section exposed, the quartzite, polished and gleaming. Larger segments of it now, a corner, squared, perfect, sharp. Even more unknowable than the shifting sandstone, untouched by the erosion.

  But it would go, too. Eventually. Slowly, imperceptibly it would give. And ultimately there would be only the basalt, until in some distant future it would be gone too.

  Martie opened his eyes, feeling as if he had been standing there for a very long time. Julia was watching him serenely. He blinked at her. “It’s good,” he said. Not enough, but he couldn’t say anything more then.

  Wymann pulled his hand from the stone and thrust it deep inside his pocket. “Why build something that you know will erode away? Isn’t it like ice sculpture, only slower?”

  “Exactly like it. But we will have a chance to look at it before it is gone. And feel it.” She turned toward the door and waited for them to finish looking. “Next year, if you look at it, it will be different, and ten years from now, and twenty years from now. Each change means something, you know. Each change will tell you something about yourself, and your world, that you didn’t know before.” She laughed. “At least, I hope so.”

  They were silent as they returned to the house and the dancing fire. Martie made drinks for Wymann and himself, and Julia had a glass of milk. Wymann drank his Scotch quickly. He had opened his coat but hadn’t taken it off. “It reeks of death,” he said suddenly. “Death and decay and dissolution. All the things we are dedicated to eradicating.”

  “And mystery and wonder and awe,” Martie said. “If you also kill those things, what’s left? Will man be an animal again, clever with his hands and the tools he’s made, but an animal without a dream. Inward that’s what it means. Isn’t that right, Julia? Inward is the only direction that matters.”

  “It itself is what it means,” she said, helplessly almost. “I tried to explain what it means, but if I could say it, I wouldn’t have had to do it. Inward. Yes. A particular way of looking, of experiencing the world, my life in it. When it doesn’t apply any longer, it should be gone. Others will reinterpret the world, their lives. Always new interpretations, new ways of seeing. Letting new sensations pass into the unconscious, into the larger thing that uses these impressions and also learns.” She drained her glass. “I’ll see you in a week at the latest, Doctor. I promise. You personally will deliver my baby.”

  Why? Why? Why? Martie paced and watched the fire burn itself out and paced some more in the darkened, cooling room. Snow was falling softly, lazily, turning the back yard into an alien world. Why did she promise to go to them? Why to Wymann? What had he felt out there in the barn? Martie flung himself down in an easy chair, and eventually, toward dawn, fell asleep.

  The hospital. The same dream, over and over, the same dream. He tried to wake up from it, but while he was aware of himself dreaming, he couldn’t alter anything, could only wander through corridors, searching for her. Calling her. Endless corridors, strange rooms, an eternity of rooms to search . . .

  “Julia is in good condition. Dilating already. Three or four days probably, but she could go into labor any time. I recommend that she stay here, Sayre. She is leaving it up to you.”

  Martie nodded. “I want to see her before we decide.” He pulled a folded section of newspaper from his pocket and tossed it down on Wymann’s desk. “Now you tell me something. Why did Dr. Fischer jump out of his window?�
�

  “I don’t know. There wasn’t a note.”

  “Fischer was the doctor who, quote, examined me, unquote, wasn’t he? The one who added that charming little note to my personal data record, that I’m schizophrenic? A psychiatrist.”

  “Yes. You met him here.”

  “I remember, Wymann. And you can’t tell me why he jumped. Maybe I can tell you. He dried up, didn’t he? A psychiatrist without intuition, without dreams, without an unconscious working for and with him. When he reached in, he closed on emptiness, didn’t he? Don’t all of you!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Conant has scheduled you for testing starting tomorrow morning. If positive ...”

  “Go to hell, Wymann. You, Conant, the rest of you. Go to hell!”

  “All right. Maybe that’s rushing it. We’ll wait until Julia has delivered. You’ll want to be with your child. We’ll wait. Julia’s in room four-nineteen. You can go up whenever you want.”