Orbit 15 - [Anthology]
Page 11
Without opening his eyes, David asked, “Did I do much damage?”
“Very little,” W-1 said.
Two days later David was asked to attend a meeting in the cafeteria. His head was still bandaged, but with little more than a strip of adhesive now. His shoulder ached. He went to the cafeteria slowly, with two of the clones as escorts.
Most of them were in the cafeteria. D-1 stood up and offered David a chair at the front of the room. David accepted it silently and sat down to wait. D-l remained standing.
“Do you remember our class discussions about instinct, David?” D-1 asked. “We ended up agreeing that probably there are no instincts, only conditioned responses to certain stimuli. We have changed our minds about that. We agree now that there is still the instinct to preserve one’s species. Preservation of the species is a very strong instinct, a drive, if you will.” He looked at David and asked, “What are we to do with you?”
“Don’t be an ass,” David said sharply. “You are not a separate species.”
D-1 didn’t reply. None of them moved. They were watching him quietly, intelligently, dispassionately. David stood up and pushed his chair back. “Then let me work. I’ll give you my word of honor that I won’t try to disrupt anything again.”
D-1 shook his head. “We discussed that. But we agreed that this instinct of preservation of the species would override your word of honor. As it would our own.”
David felt his hands clench, and he straightened his fingers, forced them to relax. “Then you have to kill me.”
“We talked about that, too,” D-1 said gravely. “We don’t want to do it. We owe you too much. In time we will erect statues to you, Walt, Harry. We have very carefully recorded all of your efforts in our behalf. Our gratitude and affection for you won’t permit us to kill you.”
David looked about the room again, picking out familiar faces. Dorothy. Walt. Vernon. Margaret. Herbie. Celia. They all met his gaze without flinching. Here and there one of them smiled at him faintly.
“You tell me, then,” he said finally.
“You have to go away,” D-1 said. “You will be escorted for three days, downriver. There is a cart loaded with food, seeds, a few tools. The valley is fertile, the seeds will do well. It is a good time of year for starting a garden.”
W-2 was one of the three who accompanied him for the first three days. They didn’t speak. The boys took turns pulling the cart of supplies. David didn’t offer to pull it. At the end of the third day, on the other side of the river from the Sumner farm, they left him. W-2 lingered a moment and said, “They wanted me to tell you, David. One of the girls you call Celia has conceived. One of the boys you call David impregnated her. They wanted you to know.” Then he turned and joined the others. They vanished among the trees very quickly.
David slept where they had left him, and in the morning he continued south, leaving the cart behind, taking only enough food for the next few days. He stopped once to look at a maple seedling sheltered among the pines. He touched the soft green leaves very gently. On the sixth day he reached the Wiston farm; alive in his memory was the day he had waited there for Celia. The white oak tree that was his friend was the same, perhaps larger, he couldn’t tell. He could not see the sky through its branches covered with new, vivid green leaves. He made a leanto and slept under the tree that night, and the next morning he told it good-bye solemnly and began to climb the slopes overlooking the farm. The house was still there, but the barn was gone, and the other outbuildings. Swept away by the flood they had made so long ago.
He reached the antique forest late in the afternoon. He watched a flying insect beat its wings almost lazily and remembered his grandfather telling him that even the insects here were primitive—slower than their more advanced cousins, less adaptable to hot weather, dry spells.
It was misty and very cool under the trees. The insect had settled on a leaf spread out horizontally to catch what sun it could. In the golden sunlight the insect was also golden. For a brief moment David thought he heard a bird’s trill—a thrush. It was gone too fast to be certain, and he shook his head. Wishful thinking, no more than wishful thinking.
In the antique forest, a cove forest, the trees waited, keeping their genes intact, ready to move down the slopes when the conditions were right for them again. David stretched out on the ground under the great trees and slept, and in the cool, misty milieu of his dream saurians walked and a bird sang.
<
~ * ~
MELTING
Gene Wolfe
“It is the use of temporal arresters—such is my
own opinion—which have rendered delectable
these celebrations.”
~ * ~
I am the sound a balloon makes falling into the sky;
the sweat of a lump of ice in a summer river.
It was the best cocktail party in the world. It took place in someone’s (never mind whose) penthouse apartment; and it spilled over into the garden outside, among the fountains and marble ruins, and into the belly of the airship moored to the building, and the ship spilled over into the city, taking off from time to time to cruise the canyons of clotheslines and neon signs, or rise to the limbus of the moon. Many were drinking, and certain of the fountains ran with wine; many were smoking hashish—its sweet fumes swirled into men’s pockets and up women’s skirts until everyone was a trifle dazed with them and a little careless. A few were smoking opium.
John Edward was drinking, but he was fairly certain he had been smoking hashish an hour before, and he might have been smoking opium, but it was the best cocktail party in the world, a party at which he knew everyone and no one.
The man on his left was British, and had a clipped mustache and the thin, muscled look John Edward associated with Bagnold and the Long Range Desert Group. The man across from him was Tibetan or perhaps Nepalese, and wore a scarlet robe. The girl beside him (who stood up often, sometimes bringing other people drinks, sometimes drinking herself, sometimes only to wave at the airship as it circled overhead while partygoers threw confetti from its balconies) was tall and auburn-haired, and wore a white gown slit at one side from hem to armpit. The girl to John Edward’s right was blond, and beautiful, and had a cage of singing birds, living but too small to be alive, in her hair.
“This is a good party,” John Edward said to the man on his left.
“Smashing. You know why, I take it?”
John Edward shook his head, but before the Englishman could tell him, a being from the Farther Stars who resembled not so much a man as a man’s statue—with some of the characteristics of a washing machine—interrupted them to ask for a light. The Tibetan leaned forward, kindling a blue flame in the palm of his hand; and the man from the Farther Stars walked away puffing gentle puffs, his cycle on Delicate Things.
The girl with the birdcage in her hair said: “Some of these people are from the past. Mankind’s mastery of the laws of Time makes it possible to ask the people of the past to parties. It makes for a good crowd.”
The auburn-haired girl, she of the slit dress, said: “Then that man at the piano who looks like Napoleon must be Napoleon.”
“No, that’s his brother Joseph; I don’t think Napoleon’s here right now.”
The Tibetan (leaning forward, so that his robe opened to show a hairless chest puckered with old scars) said: “It is the use of temporal arresters—such is my own opinion—which have rendered delectable these celebrations.” He was talking half to the auburn-haired girl, half to the birdcage girl, totally to John Edward. “So. One pays one’s fee. One receives a machine so subtle that it is in a card contained. One attends. When wishes, one absents. That, too, is good. One returns at the time of absenting.”
“Damned good,” the Englishman put in, “for sweating up conversational crushers. You’ve all the time in the world. If you’ve got the card.”
“I don’t,” John Edward said.
“Didn’t think you had, really.”
“Very much,” John Edward said. The auburn-haired girl stood up and waved her glass, shouting, “Everybody’s under temporal arrest!” No one paid any attention.
“High cost for cardholders,” the Tibetan continued. “Oh, high cost. Others selected for interesting people, as I. Or look nice.” He made a little bow toward the (ex)birdcage woman.
Who said to John Edward: “Would you in the dark?”
“Yes, but it’s better with a nightlight.”
“Or candle,” the Tibetan.
The auburn-haired girl: “Or with a bar sign outside. I was born under Aquarius, but conceived over the sign of the Pig and Whistle.”John Edward watched her hair to see if it had changed, but it had not.
“Under a blanket at noon,” the Englishman said. “Had a Belgian girl up to my room at Shepheard’s like that once. I was on Allenby’s staff then . . .”
“Many are tulpas,“ remarked the man from the Farther Stars, who was passing by once again, and seemed to remember with gratitude the light the Tibetan had given him. “At least ten percent.” (His voice was water dashing against stone.)
“But would you in the dark?” the braided-haired blond woman continued to John Edward. “If I asked you.”
He nodded.
“A Belgian girl,” the Englishman continued. “Refugee. Didn’t know if the Boche would ever be out of Belgium—none of us did then—and would do anything. The colonel one night and the sergeant the next. She’s saving you, m’boy. Going to save your bacon—save your sausage. Ha ha!” He hit John Edward on the shoulder.
“What’s a tulpa?” the auburn-haired girl asked the Tibetan.
“For a little while,” the blond woman said. Her hair was straight now, the style John Edward liked best, but it seemed a trifle too young for her. “Not anything that would disgust you, darling.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending.
“Ten years. Ten little years, darling. That’s nothing. With all they can do now—and I have money, darling—it’s less than nothing. In the dark, sweetheart, promise.”
The Englishman said: “He’s a tulpa, old girl. Why bother. A nice chap, but a tulpa. I knew at once. Look at those shoulders. See how regular his features are? Handsome devil, eh? Not greasy at least, like so many of them.”
“What’s a tulpa?” the auburn-haired girl asked John Edward.
“I don’t know.” John Edward turned to the Englishman. “What do you mean, when you say she’s saving me?”
“For her old age, you idiot. You flick off the lights and she flicks out for a quarter century or so. Then when no lover will have her, back she comes. One doesn’t know in the dark, eh? Not unless the gal’s been gone a devil of a long time.”
“Please,” the blond woman said to the Englishman. “You didn’t have to.”
“The chap’s a tulpa, I tell you. If that’s what you want, you can get an adept to stir one up for you anytime.”
“But don’t you understand? I knew him when I was young.”
“Certain lamas,” the Tibetan was telling the auburn-haired girl, “learn siddhis to flesh images from mind-stuff. Much same as ghosts, but never lived. Has been stolen and perverted in West, as all things.”
“Can’t understand how the blasted Chinese could conquer your country if you could do that,” the Englishman said. “Inexhaustible armies.”
The man from the Farther Stars, who was leaning over the auburn-haired girl’s shoulder now (and peeking down her dress, John Edward thought), moved his head rhythmically from side to side. “Sunspots,” he said. “Sunspots destroy tulpas.”
John Edward said, “But between—”
The man from the Farther Stars continued to shake his head. “Always sunspots on the sun, sun-where.”
The auburn-haired girl stood up, ducking from under his white marble chin. “I’m going to be sick,” she said. “Take me to a lavatory.”
She was looking at John Edward, and he stood too, and took her hand, saying, “This way.” He had not the least idea where he was, and discovered that the end table beyond the sofa was a rosebush. They were in the garden. Sober up, he thought, trying to give himself orders. Sober up, sober up, straighten out. Find a restroom.
The auburn-haired girl said, “At least we’re away from those terrible people.”
“Aren’t you really sick?”
“Oh, yes I’m sick. Oh, Lord, am I.” She was clinging to his arm. “And drunk. Am I drunk. Are they staring at me? I can’t even tell.”
The ramp of the airship was in front of them. There would be bathrooms on that; there would have to be.
“The last time my hair went in the toilet. Will you hold it up for me? You can lie down with me afterwards. I want to lie down afterwards; I want to go to bed.”
Somewhere a cock crowed.
It could not be heard, of course. It was a hundred miles away, out in the country. But it crowed, and the sun came up, and people went out like candles in the wind.
From the top of the ramp he looked back and saw them go, their glasses crashing to the flagstoned paths and brick-paved patios, their cigarettes dropping like poisoned fireflies.
“I loved you,” the girl said. “Or at least I liked you. You’ll be gone in a moment and I can’t even ask you to kiss me, because I’m going to be sick.”
“We’re still here,” John Edward told her, “both of us.” And she was gone.
He walked down the ramp and into his apartment, stamping out every cigarette he saw. Sunshine was making hard shadows on the walls, and the airship vanished like mist. “Mr. Richbastard,” he said to himself. “I wonder how much all those tulpas cost me.”
The garden vanished, and the walls of the apartment rushed in, growing dirty as they came. He sat up. His head was splitting, and he thought that he was going to be sick to his stomach. The book was still propped open on his dresser where he had left it. His eyes were too gummy to read the print, but he remembered it: “Repeat, ‘I am the sound of an owl’s wings, the heartbeat of a banyan tree.’ “ He closed the book, and noticed that the hair on the back of his hand was gray; tried to remember how old he really was, then made himself stop.
In the next apartment the washing machine said: “Sun-where, sun-where, sun-where,” then “sunspots destroy tulpas, “as it switched to Rinse.
“By the Lord Harry,” John Edward said, “in a day or so—when I’m feeling better—I’m going to do that again.” Then he vanished. I was tired of him, anyhow. (I’m getting tired of all of you.)
<
~ * ~
IN THE LILLIPUTIAN ASYLUM
A Story in Eight Poems & an Interrogation
Michael Bishop
. . . But his Imperial Majesty fully determined
against capital punishment, was graciously pleased
to say, that since the Council thought the Loss
of your Eyes too easy a Censure, some other
may be inflicted hereafter.
~ * ~
i Prelude: A Semi-political Reminiscence
The Mildendo Madhouse is stone.
I am blood and bone.
When the Man-Mountain left,
He cut us adrift
Like unstrung puppets,
Persnickety habits
Not worth commiseration.
We aren’t a nation
To take that lightly:
We shook our fists and cursed the sea.
Man-Mountain, Mountain-Man,
Slogging out of our ken.
The Mildendo Madhouse is bleak.
I am earnestness. I ache.
His outraged Reverence,
The Prince,
“Whoever thinks himself sane
Will—let me be blunt—
Forget the Giant,
Extirpate the Huge,
And take refuge
From the Dissident!”
Every patriot, of course, assented.
The Mildendo Madhouse is voices.
I am silent. I am choruses.
Man-Mountain, Mountain-Man,
Slogging off from land
With one stray boat in tow,
Because I acknowledged you (and still do),
They plopped me in a cell.
People poke fun. The guards belittle