Orbit 18

by Damon Knight

  Evolution. Statistics. He can drive off the road now, or not drive off, and either way help fill the statistics. He feels he is falling again; weightless, orbiting; falling forever through the void.

  He looks at the speedometer and sees with shock the needle at 110. He slows, the Thruway slows beneath him, and he drives calmly all the rest of the way back to Jersey.

  o

  That week his inquiry and samples are returned with a polite letter; his name at least has brought him the courtesy of a prompt personal response. The editor explains how interesting the poetry looks, how intrigued he is by the prospects, but why he must reluctantly refuse. The house has been losing money consistently on poetry, and they now have a blanket policy about first poetry books. You must be published before you can publish. This circular logic annoys Edwards: he remembers his father saying long ago you can’t go in the water till you can swim, John boy, and you can’t swim till you get in the water.

  The letter goes on to state that a dramatized account of his voyage might be of interest, but he is no longer assured of selling even that on the strength of his name. Sic transit gloria mundi, he thinks, and drops letter, precis, and samples into the trash.

  The next day he gets his renewal notice from the Air Force. He thinks of his $2,500 a month, he thinks of Kevin’s college, he thinks of his $10,000 in the bank. He has two days to decide. He thinks of four years ahead of him, of retirement and pension at forty-four.

  The letter joins his poems.

  o

  For some reason he goes to the typewriter. He sits at it for a long time, silent. Minutes pass, and then with great definiteness, he types his name, slowly and precisely. J. O. H. N. C. H. R. I. I. I. Why. Why the Moon is void to him. Needed something to put his mark on. Nothing on the Moon: Bags, machinery, plaques: had anything to do with him. Me. I. John Chri. S. T. I. E. E. D. W. And the fear of God that came on him in the capsule. A. R. D. S. The single key strokes echoed through the house. J.

  The universe is round. Life is round. The Moon goes from full to new to full, he himself has gone from understanding to not understanding and so on. What was the point in that? Perhaps it was that you understood a little more each time, and the place you returned to was different for having been left. It was not like in the books, though: no triangles or pyramids, no ends or beginnings. He should have been able to write a book like that, a book that was round, incidents orbiting around the center, himself. But he could not do it well enough to get it published. And if he learned to write well enough to get published, by then he would be proficient and facile and would see things differently: books like monuments, not circles.

  They were not circles, even: they were helixes. You came to the same point again, like the Earth moving through space, but it was not the same point because time had moved the circle’s center. The form of life then was the helix: that same corkscrew molecule that carried in your cells messages of growth and regeneration.

  Why should he try to put life in a book, anyway? What had books to do with life?

  o

  It is quite possible that until the Apollo photos no one really believed the Earth was round. It took the photographic image of the blue Earth, streaked with ochres and swirls of white, hanging visibly alone in the void, to make man speak of a spaceship Earth. We disregard thoughts, ideas, concepts, until they are interfaced with us through our technology. The best seat in the stadium belongs to the camera. News comes to us only on a screen. Four centuries of foreknowledge could not prepare us for the impact of that single photo, its horrible truth.

  Watching the preparations for the last Apollo on his screen, Edwards remembers the rocket’s thrust, remembers solid ground falling from him and slowly drawing in on itself until a circle formed and shrank so he could cover it with his thumbnail.

  Kevin and he watch the last Apollo unwind. Mission Control counts down in a cold clear passionless voice. Smoke, cables move, but the rocket is still, even past zero. In the cabin it feels like liftoff starts ten seconds early; from the ground it appears ten seconds late.

  The rocket moves. The Saturn V thrusters have generated sufficient force, and it rises slowly, disencumbered of gravity.

  What sexual energy a rocket had. Despite the sterile veneer NASA threw up around the program, its final inevitable symbol was phallic. In the slow steady rise of energies was the primeval pulse of the animal, man’s ends and beginning tied together in his artifacts. Charlotte had attended the lunar liftoff and she said later it was so sensual, so compelling, that warm sympathetic pulsings had started within her. When it was over, she said, people hurried away, awed and embarrassed by that immense potency.

  Or say, rather, force: for NASA had stripped rockets of their potency. They had taken the V-2 and removed the warhead, removed in fact the point of it since rockets had been originally designed as missiles, engines of destruction. They flew, fell, exploded. Their trajectories were dramatic curves. But at nasa’s tampering, science’s imperative, they flew straight up, out, fell apart in sections to hurl a payload of weak men at a weightless point in the sky. There was no meaning to that, no climax. Man had not yet grown enough out of his urge for destruction to appreciate this new application, the straightening of the trajectory. There was no drama in it; and Edwards sees now that drama and sex are inextricably linked, that the rise and curve of one is the same as the other. Anything without a climax is ultimately disappointing, and in that is the key to the end of the program.

  The ships orbit. The screen is dark with static and crackling voices. They are positioning a camera to follow the docking. Watch now: the Earth rolls slowly beneath, Apollo roams the skies. Over the far curving horizon is a dot, a hint of movement. Soyuz approaches, gaining dimension. It elongates. There is an excited interchange, static garbling Russian and English equally to nonsense.

  “Can you understand it, Dad?”

  “Shh.”

  The Russians’ manned program is scheduled to continue, he understands from what faint rumors escape that tantalizing curtain of silence. So, imagining himself in space, he feels vaguely threatened by the sight of Soyuz. Perhaps he projects his own tension into the voice of the American pilot, but he seems to Edwards as jauntily nervous as a virgin on his first date, strange to the mysteries of women. Edwards has that virgin’s nervousness of Russians himself.

  Whispers of space move in the room. He gets a whiff of the void, a brief flicker of weightlessness, a vertigo. The far craft gestures in its approach, makes a single elegant inclination as it nears. Radio signals control the camera; it shifts slowly to take in Apollo. The two ships whisper through vast sweeping statics, they make minor adjustments as the trajectories close. The radio energy is dense as they make ready to touch. Electrons move, pattern, shift. Computers click. Data flickers in great networks around the world.

  Kevin is leaning forward, his breath coming quick and shallow. In the moment before contact he hunches, feeling the shadows of all contacts to come in this one. In the screen’s light Edwards sees everything in perspective: blue flickers on the wet brown beer bottle he has not touched, Kevin’s rapt face washed pale, his own reclining tense posture, fat on the once-solid frame . . .

  The ships link. Apollo mates with Soyuz. The gates are open, static floods between them, the astronauts and cosmonauts can move between vessels. The mission is consummated, the program over. The camera drifts and Earth swims slowly under it. Browns, blues, whites, haloed in static. The Moon forgotten.

  Something recedes in Edwards.

  It is his fortieth birthday.

  o

  In the yard he studies the moon, and the empty black between it and earth where two vessels reel and clasp each other. They will shuttle between crafts for a bit, trade dull laborious jokes and dry paste meals, then disengage and return to Earth, nothing reached, nothing resolved, America behind while Russia pushes outward. The first time they pulled back from a frontier. He sees what Byrne meant. What will it mean to lose this initiative? Do
es it matter? Russia, America, what difference? The race goes on. It is the nature of things to continue. Only man, who is born and must die and has enough of a brain to possess a sense of self, thinks in terms of birth and death, starts and stops. Only man needs drama to make his short, tragic, linear life bearable.

  When he goes in, Kevin is gone. He turns off the television. On impulse he goes to the attic to get the heavy binoculars he bought in Okinawa. There is the smell of time behind the attic door, a musty wasting smell that makes him feel heartsick and lost. The attic is neat and orderly, but he cannot find the binoculars. Finally he steps back out, shuts the door.

  He stands in the hall, feeling the house’s emptiness. He listens to its hums and murmurs. Downstairs in the dark the refrigerator turns on. He is numb. He stands in a paralyzed panic at the top of the long dim stairway, unmoving for several minutes.

  There is a ringing in his ears now and his hands are cold. He drifts down the hall into Kevin’s room. It is dark, with only a pale illumination flooding sharply in one window. The Moon is gibbous again, waning back through all its phases. It is very late, after midnight; a new day has started.

  Kevin lies angled back on the bed as if in a bathtub, binoculars propped in thin white arms bent double against his chest. Edwards enters but does not sit on the bed for fear of breaking the view. Nor does he speak. A minute drags by. Edwards is trembling. He says, “What do you see?”

  The son shrugs. “Craters.”

  He looks and sees the blurred patches of gray against white. Copernicus, Ptolemy, Clavius, Tranquility . . . the dead. Flags in the void. He felt remote and cold and untouchable. Kevin looked at him.

  “Dad? Are we ever going back there?”

  He sighed, tired, or on the edge of sorrow, though sorrow was a pointless thing. Waves receded from him. Each word broke a vast illimitable silence. “I don’t know, son. I don’t know.”

  Arcs & Secants

  Two novels by KATE WILHELM (“Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis”) were published early in 1976. One, from Harper 8c Row, is called Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang; part of it appeared in Orbit 15 under the same title. The other, from Farrar, Straus 8c Giroux, is called The Clewiston Test.

  DAVE SKAL wrote a long time ago, concerning a change we had proposed in his story “When We Were Good” (Orbit 17):

  “Page 6: ‘Dante’s ears have been pointed, either through accident or design.’ The old rice-picking machine again? Seriously, I think we ought to say 'through genetic accident or design’ to avoid the improbability of a child falling down on the sidewalk and pointening his ears.”

  In March ’75 R. A. LAFFERTY (“The Hand with One Hundred Fingers”) wrote the following poem about Ms. Wilhelm:

  Oh Kate has gone to writing pomes I Hi hoi

  She writes them bright without the bromes,

  She piles them up as tall as tomest Hi, hoi The Collie Woll

  She routs the temper of the times, Hi hoi

  She cuts the strings that worked the mimes,

  It doesn’t matter if they rimes.

  Hi, hoi The Gollie Woll

  This was a contribution to a round-robin letter circulated among a few Orbit writers: Mr. Lafferty later withdrew from it, alleging unparliamentary remarks and stuffiness, but at least we got this piece of free verse out of him.

  In February we wrote to a young writer, “After reading the sex scene, I venture the guess that you have never been kneed in the stones.”

  GEORGE R. R. Martin (“Meathouse Man”) writes science fiction on weekends and makes his living by managing chess tournaments, an occupation now in decline “in the wake of the Bobby Boom.”

  “Actually, what you probably should run in Arcs Secants is a want ad for me. With the chess business dying on the vine, I’m currently sending out resumes all over the place, hoping to find a position teaching sf and or creative writing at the college level…. If any of your readers are college presidents, they should flip through the book and read “Meathouse Man” and hire me. . . .”

  Michael Helsem of Dallas sent us a short story written by a Burroughs 5700 computer. “This example originated in a 20’80 mix of punctuation and words expanded about fifteen times for a total of 1,500 units. The input can be literally anything, from a carefully selected vocabulary to pages out of a book. For instance War and Peace can be condensed to a few paragraphs for quick scanning; or ‘The Game of Rat and Dragon’ can be turned into a full-length novel.”

  GARY COHN (“Rules of Moopsball”) is a motorcycle freak and a maker of scene phone calls. (“I know you’re watching me through the window…. You want to see me naked,” etc.) Cohn sometimes pretends not to be serious about Moopsball, but he really is, and we think he is just crazy enough to be right.

  In “The Memory Machine” in Orbit 17 we quoted two sentences from an article by Frederik Pohl in Galaxy, November 1974: “There’s a handsome mountain called Avala near Belgrade; people go there on one-day excursions. … It also has a small plague to the memory of Soviet Marshal Zhokov, who died there a few years ago when his plane crashed into the mountain.” Somewhere between the cup and the lip, “plague” got changed back to “plaque.” If you were confused, now you know why.

  A trend we deplore is the substitution of lay for lie as an intransitive verb, now well on the way to becoming standard. Lay, being defective, produces monstrosities like had lay (as in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren). The past tense of may (might) is now known to few, and is probably beyond rescue. English has been shedding its inflections for centuries, and no doubt could get along without any. In that event we would have to retranslate the Twenty-third Psalm for modern readers: “The Lord be my shepherd; I not want. He make me lay down in green pasture,” etc.

  Another problem with English is that it has no neuter singular noun for human beings (except person, as in chairperson, washerperson, etc.). To remedy this, we propose to substitute Sap (from Homo sapiens) for the collective noun Man in all its uses—Sapkind, Stone Age Sap, etc. This word now has an unfortunate connotation, but that will wear off with use, and even if a trace of it should remain, it will be no more than we deserve.

  In response to our request for biographical information, CRAIG STRETE (“Who Was the First Oscar to Win a Negro?”) wrote as follows: “Nosluke showt. Novak nussmam shinlusk. Hawotoi shispi chowt. Zuma nahsoc nah tia. Haliwa gloosklap 1954,” and so on for quite a while, ending, “Orbit niga kaw sit Kaw Oscar scu-la. Jope-le-wa. Bak-kar kantie-no-nah oddin Kigir aroflimah Kigi. Wichi wah-nunc. I would also like to add, that in my opinion, Custer got off much too lightly.”

  A correspondent asked us, “Why don’t you right more of your own stories?” We do, but they keep turning turtle again.

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, who prefers to be called Stan, is a graduate student in English. “In Pierson’s Orchestra” was his submission story for the Clarion Workshop in 1974. He did not attend that year, because his acceptance letter arrived too late, but we saw the manuscript there and bought it. (He did make the Workshop in 1975.) “In Pierson’s Orchestra” and “Coming Back to Dixieland” are his first two published stories.

  In June WILLIAM F. Orr (“Euclid Alone,” Orbit 17) wrote on the back of an envelope addressed to us:

  If all people of the world learned ESPERANTO

  They could communicate with Harry Harrison.

  HOWARD WALDROP (“Mary Margaret Road-Grader”) was born in Houston, Mississippi, now lives in Texas. Since 1970, his stories have appeared in Galaxy, Analog, Vertex, etc., and in many hardcover anthologies. His novel The Texas-Israeli War, 1999, written in collaboration with Jake Saunders, was published by Ballantine in 1974.

  We told all we know about FELIX C. Gotschalk (“The Family Winter of 1986”) at the time of his last appearance here, except that he is one of the most interesting and fastest-rising of the new science fiction writers, and that his spelling is untrustworthy.

  KATHLEEN M. Sidney (“The Teacher”) writes movingly about the teaching professi
on, of which she is a member, but she is not herself a dedicated teacher: she is a frustrated film director. This is her second story for Orbit.

  RAYLYN MOORE (“A Modular Story”) lives in “an elderly white frame cottage attached to a garden full of roses (which for some inexplicable reason seem to bloom all year) and nasturtiums, almost within throwing distance of the Pacific Grove [California] beach.”

  JOHN VARLEY (“The M&M, Seen As a Low-Yield Thermonuclear Device”) is a young writer who lives in Eugene, Oregon, the very place where we intend to settle when we leave Florida. We have not yet had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Varley, but by the time you read these lines we may have done so: both the I Ching and the Tarot say we will sell our house and move to Oregon in December or January. (Stop Press: They were right.)

  GENE WOLFE, a frequent contributor, reports that at a session of the Windy City Writers’ Conference early in 1975, he was severely criticized for having introduced into a far-future story a family coat of arms including a spaceship volant. “Now as you may have noticed earlier, Damon, I am a villager. I live in the Village of Barrington [Illinois]; and Barrington may be small, but it’s classy—it even has a coat of arms, and it makes me go down to the village hall every year and shell out ten dollars for the privilege of putting its tax stamp on each car. So there, waiting for me on my own windshield, was the quartered escutcheon of Barrington: dexter chief point, a sheaf of grain; sinister chief point, an open book; sinister base point, a tree in leaf; and dexter base point, a test tube and retort.”

  The day after we got this letter, we read a newspaper article about a firm that will design a coat of arms and put on it any damn thing you want—if you’re a hog merchant, for instance, a hog. Hurrah for the spaceship volant!

  CARTER SCHOLZ (“The Eve of the Last Apollo”) dropped out of school in 1974 because it was taking too much of his time. He has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, composer, radio announcer, etc. At present he is living with the talented print-maker Lisa Houck in Providence, Rhode Island. This is his first published story.