Orbit 12 - [Anthology] Read online

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  Orbit 12

  By Damon Knight

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Contents

  Edward Bryant

  SHARK

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  DIRECTION OF THE ROAD

  Michael Bishop

  THE WINDOWS IN DANTE’S HELL

  Brian W. Aldiss

  Four Stories

  SERPENT BURNING ON AN ALTAR

  WOMAN IN SUNLIGHT WITH MANDOLINE

  THE YOUNG SOLDIER’S HOROSCOPE

  CASTLE SCENE WITH PENITENTS

  Kate Wilhelm

  THE RED CANARY

  Mel Gilden

  WHATS THE MATTER WITH HERBIE?

  Edward Bryant

  PINUP

  Vonda N. McIntyre

  THE GENIUS FREAKS

  Steve Chapman

  BURGER CREATURE

  Doris Piserchia

  HALF THE KINGDOM

  Gene Wolfe

  CONTINUING WESTWARD

  Arcs & Secants

  * * * *

  Edward Bryant

  SHARK

  THE WAR came and left but returned for him eighteen years later.

  Folger should have known when the clouds of smaller fish disappeared. He should have guessed but he was preoccupied stabilizing the cage at ten meters, then sliding out the upper hatch. Floating free, he stared into the gray-green South Atlantic. Nothing. With his tongue he keyed the mike embedded in his mouthpiece. The sonex transmitter clipped to his tanks coded and beamed the message: “Query—Valerie—location.” He repeated it. Electronics crackled in his ear, but there was no response.

  Something moved to his right—something a darker gray, a darker green than the water. Then Folger saw the two dark eyes. Her body took form in the murk. A blunt torpedo shape gliding, she struck impossibly fast.

  It was Folgers mistake and nearly fatal. He had hoped she would circle first. The great white shark bore straight in, mouth grinning open. Folger saw the teeth, only the teeth, rows of ragged white. “Query—” he screamed into the sonex.

  Desperately he brought the shark billy in his right hand forward. The great white jaws opening and closing, triangular teeth knifing, whipped past soundlessly.

  Folger lifted the billy—tried to lift it—saw the blood and the white ends protruding below his elbow and realized he was seeing surgically sawed bone.

  The shock made everything deceptively easy. Folger reached behind him, felt the cage, and pulled himself up toward the hatch. The shark flowed into the distance.

  One-handed, it was difficult entering the cage. He was half through the hatch and had turned the flotation control all the way up when he blacked out.

  Her name, like that of half the other women in the village, was Maria. For more than a decade she had kept Folger’s house. She cleaned, after a fashion. She cooked his two meals a day, usually boiled potatoes or mutton stew. She loved him with a silent, bitter, unrequited passion. Over all the years, they had never talked of it. They were not lovers; each night after fixing supper, she returned to her clay-and-stone house in the village. Had Folger taken a woman from the village, Maria would have knifed both of them as they slept That problem had never arisen.

  “People for you,” said Maria.

  Folger looked up from his charts. “Who?”

  “No islanders.”

  Folger hadn’t had an off-island visitor since two years before, when a Brazilian journalist had come out on the semiannual supply boat.

  “You want them?” said Maria.

  “Can I avoid it?”

  Maria lowered her voice. “Government.”

  “Shit,” said Folger. “How many?”

  “Just two. You want the gun?” The sawed-off twelve-gauge, swathed in oilcloth, leaned in the kitchen closet

  “No.” Folger sighed. “Bring them in.”

  Maria muttered something as she turned back through the doorway.

  “What?”

  She shook her matted black hair. “One is a woman!” she spat

  Valerie came to his quarters later in the afternoon. The project manager had already spoken to Folger. Knowing what she would say, Folger had two uncharacteristically stiff drinks before she arrived.“You can’t be serious,” was the first thing he said.

  She grinned. “So they told you.”

  He said, “I can’t allow it.”

  The grin vanished. “Don’t talk as though you owned me.”

  “I’m not, I’m just—“ He floundered. “Damn it, it’s a shock.”

  She took his hand and drew him down beside her on the couch. “Would I deny your dreams?”

  His voice pleaded. “You’re my lover.”

  Valerie looked away. “It’s what I want.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You can be an oceanographer,” she said. “Why can’t I be a shark?”

  Maria ushered in the visitors with ill grace. “Get along,” she said out in the hallway. “Señor Folger is a busy man.”

  “We will not disturb him long,” said a woman’s voice.

  The visitors, as they entered, had to duck to clear the doorframe. The woman was nearly two meters in height; the man half a head taller. Identically clad in gray jump-suits, they wore identical smiles. They were—Folger searched for the right word—extreme. Their hair was too soft and silkily pale; their eyes too obviously blue, teeth too white and savage.

  The pair looked down at Folger. “I am Inga Lindfors,” said the woman. “My brother, Per.” The man nodded slightly.

  “Apparently you know who I am,” said Folger.

  “You are Marcus Antonius Folger,” Inga Lindfors said.

  “It was supposed to be Marcus Aurelius,” Folger said irrelevantly. “My father never paid close attention to the classics.”

  “The fortune of confusion,” said Inga. “I find Mark Antony the more fascinating. He was a man of decisive action.”

  Bewildered, Maria stared from face to face.

  “You were a component of the Marine Institute on East Falkland,” said Per.

  “I was. It was a long time ago.”

  “We wish to speak with you,” said Inga, “as representatives of the Protectorate of Old America.”

  “So? Talk “

  “We speak officially.”

  “Oh.” Folger smiled at Maria. “I must be alone with these people.”

  The island woman looked dubiously at the Lindfors. “I will be in the kitchen,” she said.

  “It is a formidable journey to Tres Rocas,” said Per. “Our air-boat left Cape Pembroke ten hours ago. Unfavorable winds.”

  Folger scratched himself and said nothing.

  Inga laughed, a young girl’s laugh in keeping with her age. “Marcus Antonius Folger, you’ve been too long away from American civilization.”

  “I doubt it,” said Folger. “You’ve obviously gone to a lot of trouble to find me. Why?”

  Why?

  She always asked him questions when they climbed the rocks above the headland. Valerie asked and Folger answered and usually they both learned. Why the Falklands’ seasonal temperature range was only ten degrees; what were quasars; how did third-generation computers differ from second; how dangerous were manta rays; when would the universe die. Today she asked a new question:

  “What about the war?”

  He paused, leaning into a natural chimney. “What do you mean?” The cold passed into his cheeky numbed his jaw, made the words stiff.

  Valerie said, “I don’t understand the war.”

  “Then you know what I know.” Folger stared down past the rocks to the sea. How do you explain masses of people killing other people? He could go t
hrough the glossary—romary, secondary, tertiary targets; population priorities; death-yields—but so what? It didn’t give credence or impact to the killing taking place on the land, in space, and below the seas.

  “I don’t know anything” said Valerie somberly. “Only what they tell us.”

  “Don’t question them,” said Folger. “They’re a little touchy.”

  “But why?”

  “The Protectorate remembers its friends,” said Per.

  Folger began to laugh. “Don’t try to snow me. At the peak of my loyalty to the Protectorate—or what the Protectorate was then—I was apolitical.”

  “Twenty years ago, that would have been treason.”

  “But not now,” said Inga quickly. “Libertarianism has made a great resurgence.”

  “So I hear. The boat brings magazines once in a while.”

  “The years of reconstruction have been difficult. We could have used your expertise on the continent.”

  “I was used here. Occasionally I find ways to help the islanders.”

  “As an oceanographer?”

  Folger gestured toward the window. “The sea makes up most of their environment. I’m useful.”

  “With your talent,” said Per, “it’s such a waste here.”

  “Then too,” Folger continued, “I help with the relics.”

  “Relics?” said Inga uncertainly.

  “War surplus. Leftovers. Look.” Folger picked up a dried, leathery rectangle from the table and tossed it to Per. He looked at the object, turning it over and over.

  “Came from a killer whale. Got him last winter with a harpoon and shaped charge. Damn thing had stove in three boats, killed two men. Now read the other side.”

  Per examined the piece of skin closely. Letters and numerals had been deeply branded. “USMF-343.”

  “See?” said Folger. “Weapons are still out there. He was part of the lot the year before I joined the Institute. Not especially sophisticated, but he had longevity.”

  “Do you encounter many?” said Inga.

  Folger shook his head. “Not too many of the originals.”

  The ketch had been found adrift with no one aboard. It had put out early that morning for Dos, one of the two small and uninhabited companions of Tres Rocas. The three men aboard had been expecting to hunt seal. The fishermen who discovered the derelict also found a bloody ax and severed sections of tentacle as thick as a man’s forearm.

  So Folger trolled along the route of the unlucky boat in his motorized skiff for three days. He searched a vast area of choppy, gray water, an explosive harpoon never far from his hand. Early on the fourth afternoon a half dozen dark-green tentacles poked from the sea on the port side of the boat. Folger reached with his left hand for the harpoon. He didn’t see the tentacle from starboard that whipped and tightened around his chest and jerked him over the side.

  The chill of the water stunned him. Folger had a quick, surrealistic glimpse of intricately weaving tentacles. Two eyes, each as large as his fist, stared without malice. The tentacle drew him toward the beak.

  Then a gray shadow angled below Folger. Razor teeth scythed through flesh. The tentacle was cut; Folger drifted.

  The great white shark was at least ten meters long. Its belly was uncharacteristically dappled. The squid wrapped eager arms around the thrashing shark. The two sank into the darker water below Folger.

  Lungs aching, he broke the surface less than a meter from the skiff. He always trailed a ladder from the boat It made thing’s easier for a one-armed man.

  “Would you show us the village?” said Inga.

  “Not much to see.”

  “We would be pleased by a tour anyway. Have you time?”

  Folger reached for his coat Inga moved to help him put it on. “I can get it,” said Folger.

  “There are fine experts in prosthesis on the continent,” said Per.

  “No thanks,” said Folger.

  “Have you thought about a replacement?”

  “Thought about it. But the longer I thought, the better I got without one. I had a few years to practice.”

  “It was in the war, then?” asked Inga.

  “Of course it was in the war.”

  On their way out, they passed the kitchen. Maria looked up sullenly over the scraps of bloody mutton on the cutting board. Her eyes fixed on Inga until the blonde moved out of sight along the hall.

  A light, cold rain was falling as they walked down the trail to the village. “Rain is the only thing I could do without here,” said Folger. “I was raised in California.”

  “We will see California after we finish here,” said Inga. “Per and I have a leave. We will get our anti-rad injections and ski the Sierras. At night we will watch the Los Angeles glow.”

  “Is it beautiful?”

  “The glow is like seeing the aurora borealis every night,” said Per.

  Folger chuckled. “I always suspected L.A.’s future would be something like that”

  “The half-life will see to the city’s immortality,” said Inga.

  Per smiled. “We were there last year. The glow appears cold. It is supremely erotic.”

  In the night, in a bed, he asked her, “Why do you want to be a shark?”

  She ran her nails delicately along the cords of his neck. “I want to kill people, eat them.“

  “Any people?”

  “Just men.”

  “Would you like me to play analyst?” said Folger. She bit his shoulder hard. “Goddammit!” He flopped over. “Is there any blood?” he demanded.

  Valerie brushed the skin with her hand. “You’re such a coward.”

  “My threshold of pain’s low,” said Folger. “Sweetie.”

  “Don’t call me Sweetie,” she said. “Call me Shark.”

  “Shark.”

  They made love in a desperate hurry.

  The descent steepened, the rain increased, and they hurried. They passed through a copse of stunted trees and reached the ruts of a primitive road.

  “We have flash-frozen beefsteaks aboard the airboat,” said Inga.

  “That’s another thing I’ve missed,” Folger said.

  Then you must join us for supper.”

  “As a guest of the Protectorate?”

  “An honored guest.”

  “Make mine rare,” said Folger. “Very rare.”

  The road abruptly descended between two bluffs and overlooked the village. It was called simply the village because there were no other settlements on Tres Rocas and so no cause to distinguish. Several hundred inhabitants lived along the curve of the bay in small, one-story houses, built largely of stone.

  “It’s so bleak,” said Inga. “What do people do?”

  “Not much,” said Folger. “Raise sheep, hunt seals, fish. When there were still whales, they used to whale. For recreation, the natives go out and dig peat for fuel.”

  “It’s quite a simple existence,” said Per.

  “Uncomplicated,” Folger said.

  “If you could be anything in the sea,” said Valerie, “what would it be?”

  Folger was always discomfited by these games. He usually felt he chose wrong answers. He thought carefully for a minute or so. “A dolphin, I suppose.“

  In the darkness, her voice dissolved in laughter. “You loser.”

  He felt irritation. “What’s the matter now?”

  “Dolphins hunt in packs she said. “They gang up to kill sharks. They’re cowards.”

  “They’re not. Dolphins are highly intelligent. They band together for cooperative protection.”

  Still between crests of laughter: “Cowards!”

  On the outskirts of the village they encountered a dozen small, dirty children playing a game. The children had dug a shallow pit about a meter in diameter. It was excavated close enough to the beach so that it quickly filled with a mixture of ground seepage and rainwater.

  “Stop,” said Per. “I wish to see this.”

  The children stirred th
e muddy water with sticks. Tiny, thumb-sized fishes lunged and snapped at one another, burying miniature teeth in the others’ flesh. The children stared up incuriously at the adults, then returned their attention to the pool.