Orbit 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  Brandon bellowed his anger. “Dammit, Jilly! Put out that fire!”

  Slowly the smoke cleared.

  But the only vision it had concealed was that of Jilly’s broad face and pendulous udders. Her mouth opened to reveal the yellowed stubs of her teeth.

  “Can’t bake a snake without a fire.”

  Brandon tried to glare. “Move the fire, woman! Over to the cliffs edge!”

  “You want someone see? You want them come take me?”

  Brandon considered. It wasn’t as if a woman were always easy to find, and he would miss Jilly on cold nights. In the old days when the world was not-old, there had been more people than was good for Brandon’s ease of mind. He had been very strong in body, so strong that every male he had challenged had given up what he wanted, whether it was a woman, a haunch of deer or a bigger club. He had taken other men’s women, and their brains. Remembering, Brandon licked his lips. But as the years passed it had become harder to swing the club; the book was safer. He had retreated to this valley and raised his deadfalls.

  Jilly was insisting: “Brandon?”

  He straightened, his spine making a snapping sound. He tried to walk to the cave’s mouth as a young warrior walks. It was an absurdly short journey.

  The tree branch with its knobbed end was leaning against the cave wall at the entrance. He took it up, raised it and feinted at Jilly.

  “Move it far enough,” he said. “Far enough; not too far. You hear, woman? Must I bash dirt loose from your ears?”

  “N-no, Brandon. I move it.” She was not really frightened of him any longer. Brandon returned to the book.

  He had often thought, How to build a better deadfall? How to trap more game? And because he had brooded long over the open pages, answers had come to him. Sometimes they made little sense, those thoughts that tortured his slow mind. Why did it work for him? He did not know. He did not know.

  There had been a time:

  His young muscles straining against the boulder that had concealed the cave’s entrance. It moved, because everything moved to his shoulder, then. Inside was the book, with all its magic. It took him long to learn its use: concentrating, staring, watching the lines crawl and gradually, gradually become a thought for him. For him only.

  He wondered, sometimes, why he stared at the book for so many hours each day. Time not spent picking the fruits and berries that crowded each other in this valley; time not spent in spearing fish in the chuckling stream, or in setting animal traps, or in watching for strangers. It had first occurred to him while staring at the book that he might stay here and protect himself. A new thought: traps for defense. But why should he not eat of certain roots, and why should Jilly eat of them? Why should they make clay vessels to hold their food? Why should they plunge into the stream at least every moon to scrub the dirt from their sides, rubbing a rough, foaming root all over their bodies?

  It was unmanly, this slavery to the book. It had kept him from the fresh air, stooped his back, dimmed his eyesight. Because of the book, he had done things that would have provoked the young Brandon to howls of outrage. It had persuaded him to keep but one wife, to send away the children of his own seed and the women he could not protect—send them away from the valley rather than destroy them. Why save a woman for another man? Why raise young if not to satisfy his own appetites?

  That reminded him: Jilly had been acting strangely.

  “Jilly,” he said. “You carrying again?”

  She scowled at him. Her hand went to the bit of sharp flint in her hair. “You will not sacrifice it,” she said fiercely. “You will not kill this one on the Sun stone! You will not eat of its brain and make me eat!”

  “No,” Brandon said, frowning at the book. “No. It is written here, in gold.”

  “Written?” Her voice was suspicious. “What is ‘written’?”

  “These...marks” he told her. “They are written. Made. Someone put them here so they would mean something to someone else.” The thoughts and the phrasing of them threatened to split his brain. “They mean what I need them to mean.” He touched his chest “I read them. You can read too.”

  Shaking her head, she backed to the cave wall. Her hand rose again to the flint. “No!”

  Brandon shrugged. He could force her, of course, but there was no desire in him to make her behave as a man. A woman, after all, was just a woman. If she were to learn to read, let her next mate—

  Her next mate! With a growl, he seized his club. Blood pounded behind his eyes and in his wrists. Her eyes went wide, then narrow as she crouched. Her flint was out and ready, her teeth bared. She expected him to kill her, he saw. It would be no more than a natural act, for no man wishes to enter the shadow-world without at least one wife to accompany him and serve him there.

  He raised the club. His muscles quivered. He had to! It was the book’s fault!

  Jilly fell to her knees. “The new one!” she pleaded.

  He paused. Had she knowledge of his thought?

  “What new one?” he demanded.

  “Here,” she said in a small voice, touching her belly. “New one kick. Don’t hit me now. I learn if you want.”

  But he knew she would not, and he did not care. Nor did he want to kill her. But if she should live after him, for long....Brandon stopped. Hating her, hating himself, hating the book, he stopped. Hating the book most of all.

  He picked up her shard of flint and walked to the book. He raised a sharp edge above the pages. His hand trembled. Before his eyes the symbols seemed to twist and writhe, begging him:Do not strike me! Do not strike me! How could he destroy what had been so good to him?

  His arm still quivered. He tried. Slowly he brought the flint down until it touched the page. Averting his face, he gripped the flint strongly and pushed it down. The sharp edge gouged, twisted—and slipped from his fingers.

  He lifted his hand to stare. Blood. It was his blood, not the book’s. The page remained unmarked. Even his blood ran off without leaving a trace. And Brandon knew fear.

  He told himself that he would wait until after the child was born, after Jilly had known the happiness of it. He pictured her on the rock ledge outside, singing and crooning to the new one, her breasts big and her belly flat and wrinkled again. He would have to destroy it then, before it demanded the little new one.

  But now Jilly was sobbing and moaning, and the book lay before him. He would close it, and he would not look at it again. If he did not read, perhaps he would not be compelled to do the things it made him want to do. The senseless, foolish things so much worse than bathing in the stream or sending away the wives and children.

  Yes, that was it. He would close the book.

  His hand was slick with blood and sweat as he attempted to grasp the book’s edge. No sign of wear marred the covers; none ever would. He was certain of that, if of nothing else.

  But what, he wondered, lay beyond? What came next?

  Again Brandon wrestled with curiosity, and once again curiosity won. Brandon turned the page.

  Jilly changed gradually. Since giving birth to Little New One she had behaved as Brandon had expected. Every day she nursed the infant beneath the living sun, waiting for Brandon to perform the Great Father role. He went daily into the rich valley, returning with her wants. One day it was fish. Another blueberries. Today crayfish, which was indeed strange, because never, never even during pregnancy, had she cared to eat the hard-shelled creatures with their outsize pincers and alarming eyes. He had pursued them all morning amid the stones, and now he returned, laden with them. He peered inside. Jilly! With the infant on her back, fingers twined fast in her stringy hair, Jilly was leaning over the book!

  Brandon’s mouth worked, but he found no words. He had told her, he remembered, to learn to read. What an idiotic thing to say! A woman had no business with magic, other than the art of birth. What had he been thinking of? Was it only to make her defy him that he had suggested she read?

  Or...had the book? Was the book suggesti
ng that he was to admit strangers to his valley, and die, without even Jilly to comfort him? Or perhaps it had been the book that had persuaded him to tell Jilly to read...where did the book’s power leave off and his own thoughts begin? When had the two become indistinguishable?

  “You are angry,” she said. She was trembling.

  “Read!” he commanded angrily, and he stamped out. He had more important matters, though he was uncertain what they were.

  In the valley, surrounded again by greenery, and the blues and scarlets of the berries, the flickering black and gold and brown of birds, surrounded by the strident hum of insects and the muted roar of the brook, Brandon vented his new frustration. He ripped up bushes and hurled them from him with ridiculous force. He discovered a harmless yellowish snake and jumped up and down upon it, breaking and tearing its twisting body until it was a red jelly upon the grass. He pounded his fists on the boles of trees until his hands bled. He jerked his limbs in an arthritic travesty of a hate dance. He brought down oaths of fire and thunder and hailstone and flood upon oblivious nature. Blowing like a winded animal, foaming in his beard, he snarled down at the darting fish in the little stream.

  Then he grunted.

  The new thing began with a very small pain somewhere in his chest, like the first ray of the morning sun. And like the sun, it rose and grew and widened until he saw the landscape dim and swirl and he fought his breathlessness with sobs. He fell.

  He was dying.

  Dying! Dying, after having given his days and his eyesight to an illusion, and it hurt him, more than the dying, to know that what he had given had not been given but spent, spent in the way that his seed had sometimes been spent as he slept.

  “Brandon?” The softer voice was not Jilly’s.

  “Brandon?” Not Jilly’s, but a voice he recognized: Jalene’s. She had been his wife once and he had let her leave him rather than kill her. He twisted, strove desperately to look up at her.

  They swam in the mist. There were two of them: Jalene and a strange man with a strong, cruel face.

  He tried to think. His mind wanted rest, but it came, filtering, creeping: she had returned, disobedient woman, and she had brought with her a stranger. An enemy, and a man should challenge his enemies. But there was so little time—and no strength.

  “You are dying, old man,” the stranger said. His voice held malicious joy. “Soon you will lie breathless and stiff. I will take your wives and your valley, and when you’re eaten, I will make a medicine of your bones. Does that anger you, old man?” He was grinning.

  Brandon flickered his eyelids, an effort. The light did not seem right, but it was there, it and the sun and the faces above him. The face of the stranger—big, corded neck with some whiskers and some patches of skin discolored and scarred from having been scraped with flint; bristly cheek, flattened nose, smallish eyes set deep in his powerful skull. A brute. A brute such as Brandon had been. The thought filled him with horror and longing; the book had changed him so much!

  “You want something, old man? Cold water? Shade? Roots? Medicine? You want me to break your head?”

  The club did not waver. He watched it descend slowly, felt it touch his skull, watched it ascend. The man made a show of bunching his muscles, settling his feet, tightening his hands on his log of a weapon. He was taking his time, delighting in the torment. As Brandon had.

  “You are not afraid? You not want say love words to wives? Maybe see something in cave?” The brute face smiled: immense white teeth.

  Brandon struggled to lift his head. His jaw muscles worked, seeming somehow detached from him. It was a strange thing he said, even to his own ears. He fought to phrase it:

  “I must ask you not—”

  “Not!” The giant’s nostrils flared. Brandon knew how he himself would have reacted.

  “You must not take other wife. You must kill her, Jilly, and Little New One. Bring them here. Their spirits must accompany me.”

  The brute smiled. “Your wives all be mine, old man. All are mine. Baby will live, too. You will not want to be bothered with baby, old man; you have no milk.” He chuckled. So, obediently, did Jalene. “What else you want?”

  Brandon had set the pattern. What he said he wanted would be doubled back on itself. What he asked would be denied. He would have what he wished because he would ask the opposite.

  “I want—you must not look at book in cave. My book, not yours. Never go and look at it. It—tears things in you. Makes you too wise. Makes you change, like me. Never look at it!”

  The strong man hesitated, frowning, but only for a moment. He smiled confidently.

  “I will look. Every day. I am strong. I can bear to look at it!” His muscles bunched. He glanced at the woman to be certain she had heard his boast and would remember.

  “Wait!” Brandon croaked. “One thing more. One thing you must not do—this above all else. You must not—”

  “Tell me, old man. I have no fear of your shadow-spirit. Tell me what I must not do.” Grinning, white teeth flashing, knuckles whitening about the club.

  As from a great distance Brandon forced out the words that expressed the strangest wish. The most important wish of all.

  “You must not eat of my brain.”

  <>

  * * * *

  CAROL CARR

  INSIDE

  The house was a jigsaw puzzle of many dreams. It could not exist in reality and, dimly, the girl knew this. But she wandered its changing halls and corridors each day with a mild, floating interest. In the six months she had lived here the house had grown rapidly, spinning out attics, basements, and strangely geometric alcoves with translucent white curtains that never moved. Since she believed she had been reborn in this house, she never questioned her presence in it.

  Her bedroom came first. When she woke to find herself in it she was not frightened, and she was only vaguely apprehensive when she discovered that the door opened to blackness. She was not curious and she was not hungry. She spent most of the first day in her four-poster bed looking at the heavy, flowered material that framed the bay window. Outside the window was a yellow-gray mist. She was not disturbed; the mist was a comfort. Although she experienced no joy, she knew that she loved this room and the small bathroom that was an extension of it.

  On the second day she opened the carved doors of the mahogany wardrobe and removed a quilted dressing gown. It was a little large and the sleeves partially covered her hands. Her fingers, long and pale, reached out uncertainly from the edge of the material. She didn’t want to open the bedroom door again but felt that she should; if there were something outside to discover, it too would belong to her.

  She turned the doorknob and stepped out into a narrow hall paneled, like the wardrobe in her room, in carved mahogany. There were no pictures and no carpet. The polished wood of the floor felt cool against her bare feet. When she had walked the full distance to the end and touched a wall, she turned and walked to the other end. The hall was very long and there were no new rooms leading from it.

  When she got back to her bedroom she noticed a large desk in the corner near the window. She didn’t remember a desk but she accepted it as she accepted the rest. She looked out and saw that the mist was still there. She felt protected.

  Later that afternoon she began to be hungry. She opened various drawers of the desk and found them empty except for a dusty tin of chocolates. She ate slowly and filled a glass with water from the bathroom sink and drank it all at once. Her mouth tasted bad; she wished she had a toothbrush.

  On the second day she had wandered as far as the house allowed her to. Then she slept, woke in a drowsy, numb state, and slept again.

  On the third day she found stairs, three flights. They led her down to a kitchen, breakfast area and pantry. Unlike her room, the kitchen was tiled and modern. She ate a Swiss cheese sandwich and drank a glass of milk. The trip back to her room tired her and she fell asleep at once.

  The house continued to grow. Bedrooms ap
peared, some like her own, some modern, some a confusion of periods and styles. A toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste appeared in her medicine cabinet. In each of the bedrooms she found new clothes and wore them in the order of their discovery.

  She began to awaken in the morning with a feeling of anticipation. Would she find a chandeliered dining room or perhaps an enclosed porch whose windows looked out on the mist?

  At the end of a month the house contained eighteen bedrooms, three parlors, a library, dining room, ballroom, music room, sewing room, a basement and two attics.

  Then the people came. One night she awoke to their laughter somewhere beyond her window. She was furious at the invasion but comforted herself with the thought that they were outside. She would bolt the downstairs door, and even if the mist disappeared she would not look. But she couldn’t help hearing them talk and laugh. She strained to catch the words and hated herself for trying. This was her house. She stuffed cotton into her ears and felt shut out rather than shut in, which angered her even more.