Orbit 9 Read online

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  Orbit 9

  By Damon Knight

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Contents

  Josephine Saxton HEADS AFRICA TAILS AMERICA

  Leon E. Stover WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS TOO MUCH

  COMMUNICATION

  Kris Neville DOMINANT SPECIES

  Gene Wolfe THE TOY THEATER

  Robert Thurston STOP ME BEFORE I TELL MORE

  Joanna Russ GLEEPSITE

  James Sallis BINARIES

  Lee Hoffman and LOST IN THE MARIGOLDS

  Robert E. Toomey, Jr.

  Kit Reed ACROSS THE BAR

  Vernor Vinge THE SCIENCE FAIR

  W. Macfarlane THE LAST LEAF

  R. A. Lafferty WHEN ALL THE LANDS POUR OUT AGAIN

  James Sallis ONLY THE WORDS ARE DIFFERENT

  Kate Wilhelm THE INFINITY BOX

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  Josephine Saxton

  HEADS AFRICA

  TAILS AMERICA

  In Africa the clouds never cross the sun. Clouds countable changing, racing, dispersing and gathering fill the skies of Africa and yet they never veil the sun. That I read once and believe and the idea attracts me violently. Perpetual sun. Cosmic cosmetic glamorizing protective layer on my grayish hide, sunglasses and bright lipstick, beautiful at a glance. For what enhances the human frame more than color? Deeper than bronze I would bake, for even in England I have achieved miracles of transformation in two days on a withering lawn. And in seven days become bleached beneath the clouds that do most frequently obscure the sun. Yes.

  Now when I was in a bar in Greenwich Village, sitting shivering in the heat of a New York August, this because I was wet to the skin with the waters of Washington Square fountains, the temptation to douse myself publicly and thoroughly having proved too great and sudden an onslaught on my sexual mores (and what else would have prompted a woman to wet herself to the skin whilst several hundred hippies in various states of degradation watched and whilst her male companion watched unmoved except for a faint startlement appearing in his otherwise controlled pale eyes), shivering all the more violently because not only was the bar too efficiently air-conditioned so that even the sweat of normal people in the bar dried before it had properly beaded beneath the arm but the man I was listening to spoke of Africa. He did not tell me that the sun never hides behind clouds, he did not mention the weather much at all, but mostly the beautiful scenery in East Africa, most particularly Kenya. I manifested as one born under blazing sun. In any other climate such people shiver. Some poor wretches arrive in England with the sun in their blood and never feel warm again. Though I have not touched the tropics in my feeble wanderings I felt that I had the sun in my blood. I thought: how could my blood congeal with benison continuous?

  Outside my window now, in England, the skies are clear, the sun is yellow on the white garden rocks and birds and butterflies are active. Second flowerings occur. Almost November. Exquisite, excellent, and, in case the nights prove cool, the house is centrally heated. Yet my marrow is solid and my breath steams and icicles, crystallizes on the rim of a cup. I sweat rime, I do not bathe but crack open my shell and step out on the shattered fragments, clean, cold. I wept last night and Rhinestones woke me, embedded in my spine, my own tears taken shape, sharp. And my hair, oh that, it is like the winter lawn cutting—did you know that to cut the lawn with the hoar frost on it is good for the grass? Snap and tinkle goes my brush and little fragments that I must remember to look at under a microscope fall conspicuously onto my black-clad shoulders. And my teeth how they ache at contact with water, how the brush scratches and brazes down into the soft nerve with burning cold, how I could scream into the blue handbasin if only I did not fear I should strike the right note and crash it into splinters. And I am menstruating rubies and bloodstones and pink opals. At first I thought it was sacramental wine, it was so thin and clear and mean but it froze solid and lost its odor in the mineral world. So I have to take care of my fingernails and drum up a little warm breath now and again to soften them lest they break away. It is getting harder and harder to breathe warm, it is getting harder and harder to breathe at all.

  Africa, you would thaw me out I know. And yet I fear to live in you, your men are far too tempting and I canalways resist temptation nowadays, I have learned strength and the consistency of moral fiber and the value of faithfulness, but not without enormous pain. I am a great one for suffering. People have been known to despise me for it, and also, but less often, love me because of that capacity.

  It was nice to hear David talk of East Africa.

  “Farms of white set in trees, each more perfect than the one before, it was too much for me.”

  “Was it David?” I said. And I further enquired how it could be that he lived in squalid New York when the best places in the world were obtainable to him. He had hitchhiked around the entire world, why not go again?

  OH HE HAD TO LIVE IN NEW YORK TO KEEP HIS HEAD STRAIGHT

  “I see.” And thought that Africa would straighten my head, that it would, and true. Not having at that moment thought about the frustration of seeing a thousand ideal lovers every time one went out to buy a bit of cheese. It would be too much, one’s head would not only grow askew, it would burst, ripe with substances more proper to other body-parts. Thoughts of Africa and of a rather dull party I attended in New York, perhaps the only dull hours I spent there. I am reminded of an African ballet we all went to see many years ago in the North of England. The dancers had blue-painted nipples and excited my senses more than anything had for months. Afterwards in the pub I fell to dreaming of fancy-dress parties in my studio, everyone wearing raffia and blue poster-paint, dancing wildly until Sunday dawn. Aloud I said:

  “We’ll definitely have to have an African party.” The place was silenced until they comprehended.

  “I thought you said ‘a fuckin’ party’ for a moment.” Perhaps I did, are not such floating fragments on the sea of the unconscious called Freudian ships?

  “Oh David, tell me about it,” I said, shuddering so hard I could not hold my glass. “Did you go to the Mountains of the Moon?”

  “Yes I did, of course I did, and the Great Rift Valley.” And he told me of the high craters set about with giant weeds and sitting numerous on the ground dappled panthers naked and slithery in the moonlight; plateaux unexplored and the metallic light that would not keep the head straight.

  Oh Jesus Christ I could have wept into my beer.

  “You are shivering,” said Tom who is an observant fellow, he being a professional writer.

  “Yes, I was watching my limbs shaking, it is interesting, I cannot think why I shake quite so much, I am perfectly relaxed.”

  He left the bar to go and purchase a secondhand chair which later proved too large to go into his apartment without removing the door which might in turn ruin the doorbell connection. I thought of him lonely and unvisited, sitting in his apartment in the chair, wondering if the chair had been a jinx on all his friendships. The fact of him having a telephone spoiled that joke, oh surely, they would call him on the phone? But if all one’s means of communication fail, do people come and tell you about it?

  It is nice to arrive at a destination and discover that it is the one place on the planet that will KEEP THE HEAD STRAIGHT. I found that New York was that very destination to me once I had taken a few deep breaths and looked around. I loved it, and strangely, it loved me back. I felt blessed walking the streets, I felt warm and alive and I could find my tongue, it was like being reborn, I had an answer for everyone and I also had things to say from myself. Whoever that was.

  There was a hippopotamus in a pond on a cold day, and we approached it eagerly and stood amazed as it explained to us about itself. Our childre
n were entranced that a hippo could talk. Its voice was very deep and very slow and it opened its mouth with apparent difficulty, slowly and muddily enunciating its likes and dislikes, the name of its natural habitat (Africa) and a warning about its powerful jaws which were capable of breaking a man into two pieces, although it seldom did so. Oh, hippo from Africa, are you not cold to the bone in that English slime? Where is your mate? When do you mate? How often? Do you wallow in your cool distress and groan and grunt for a suitable mate, do you sublimate your sexual energies by eating salted peanuts thrown by the crowd, producing instead of orgasms enormous stinking farts? Do you long for the sun to bake a crust of mud onto you, do you wish you could jump into the fountains of Washington Square on a hot summer afternoon and get wet through whilst the Americans watched? A hippopotamus in the fountains, what a gas, natural gas, it smells suspiciously like sublimation, exhibitionism. No, no, it is just the hot weather, anyone with the sense would do it, I am now so cool in the breeze it is a delight to be alive. To add to our comforts, let’s have a beer in a bar.

  “You are shivering,” said Tom who is observant.

  “Y-y-yes,” I said and made no further rejoinder although I am observant too, I have swiveling eyes that stand up above the water. David was cold also, he had followed me into the fountains, but either he had not got so extremely soaking wet as I or Africa still warmed his blood. Both. Both.

  The sun has gone, great banks of late October cloud obscure him, a wind whips up the rose petals and lawn trimmings, if I go outside I will get motes of dust in my eyes and that will spoil the shine of the ice. Refrigerated amber beads with dust on them, could anything be more sad?

  Had I whole strings of such beads I would wear them around my neck and go and live in a corner of Washington Square, and watch the hippos splash. Or I would trade them with the tribes of East Africa, tell them of the magic properties of frozen human eyes, make with the eyes at the lovely inhabitants of my mind and bare my sparse bosom to the burning sun.

  As winter approaches I think more and more of hibernation. I store salt peanuts under the rather hard mattress and I have cunningly replaced the stuffing of one of my pillows with little cubes of nourishing vitaminized fudge more normally used to take away the appetites of fat people. I stay in bed later every morning and go to bed earlier every night. I am Ursa the female bear, and I am not pregnant with cub either, I shall not have to wake in January to give birth or anything sordid like that. It is very pleasant to curl the paws around the ears and draw up the haunches, hear the prairie winds like a mistral fade into the distance with its popping of corks and murmur of friendly waiters and flap of white linen and oh such lively talk. Big Bear pulls on cowboy boots and crunches over New York snows, twenty below and a girl in every taxi. He never went to Africa, he went to Paris and caught dysentery, came to England huge and shivering and used our bathroom facilities about thirty-nine times although I was not counting, just marveling that anyone could be so brought down and yet have such verbal energy, and worrying also in case we should run out of toilet tissue before he departed depleted. Oh Ursus but I could have comforted you by snuggling into your massive back just where it aches and taking over the task of stroking your mustaches for a while, so that you could sweat in peace in that brightly colored nursery room where we put you to sleep, and put out the light in your eyes and I would have shared my store of peanuts with you, we could have stayed there all winter and slept all through our dormant sexuality, snuffling our way to the bathroom at increasingly infrequent intervals and I could have offered you a square of the vitamin fudge, growling:

  THIS REMOVES THE APPETITE AND KEEPS THE HEAD STRAIGHT

  Snuffle snuffle growl pad.

  “Mummy there’s a bear in my bed.”

  “Good heavens, dear, are you sure. Come with mummy and we shall frighten him away.”

  Great Ursus, named Marc, left us a bottle of pink champagne. We had meant to drink it all together but what with the dysentery and his desire for icewater and what with Colin’s ulcer trouble I wasn’t going to drink it all myself was I? It lay in the fridge until Saturday when we opened it and gave some to the children who sneezed and giggled and went straight off into strange dreams and Colin swore it didn’t affect him at all and I felt instantly drunk.

  MY HEAD WAS FAR FROM STRAIGHT

  I wept into the bubbles and said some horrible things and went to bed by myself and curled up, first checking on the winter food supplies and that was when my temperature started to drop even lower. Hence the sharp pangs of Rhinestones and the banging about in the night when Colin came to bed.

  “Someone’s been eating peanuts in bed.”

  “Don’t be silly, I never touch them, you know nuts give me the wind.”

  Well maybe we are going to go and live in Africa. Yes, we’ll definitely have to have an African safari.

  “Bearer, have you got my portable bath, my portable handbasin and my portable toilet?”

  “Yassuh mam.”

  “Have you got my portable electric typewriter, my portable vacuum cleaner and my portable dining-room table?”

  “Yassuh mam.”

  “Have you got my portable Washington Square fountains, my portable food-blender and my portable central-heating system?”

  “Yessuh mam.”

  “Have you got my portable television set, my portable lawnmower and my portable double bed?”

  “Yassuh mam.”

  “Jesus Christ, you must be so tired. Put down the bed and get into it alongside me.”

  “Mam, you know you got Rhinestones in your bed?”

  “Yes, I’m saving them for the winter.”

  “You should meet my cousin, he works down in Kimberley.”

  Goodness gracious me, how loudly these tribesmen snore!

  It will be cool this evening so I shall light a fire. But such a dangerous occupation for one so deeply frozen, what if part of me thaws, I shall drip onto the carpet and besides, I should not be so active with my low blood pressure, I might damage my brain cells and then:

  MY HEAD WILL NOT BE STRAIGHT

  At a party in New York there was a lady who had written a book on how to grow avocado pits. I have an avocado plant eight feet tall as it happens so I had no use for her book but I noticed how apt it was when some gallant commented on her appearance.

  “Like a young Karen Blixen.”

  “Oh she wrote so exquisitely about Africa,” said both David and Tom in the air-conditioned bar, and outside in the New York sun they spoke of her writings and I said I had admired her too but it had been many years before. I could visualize the coffee plantations in flower and knew that I wanted to travel to Africa and, God help me, write about it afterwards!

  Well, I got the fire lighted, the coals caught up and reflections of hot light glimmer in my brass and copper, could anything be more English? We had trouble with the fire the night Marc stayed, he was very interested in the small flame I managed to induce from the bucketful of nutty slack, damn the coalman for delaying delivery. Marc knelt down and peered into the tiny fire as if he might see his future there, I recalled an uncle on a hearthrug long ago growling for me to ride on the bear.

  “Again uncle bear, again, let’s do it again.”

  “Not just now dear, I seem to have caught the dysentery.”

  And like all well-trained good little girls I did not cry and howl selfishly, throw myself on the rug in a tantrum or bite his leg but went into the kitchen and chipped off some crystals of ice that had formed round my eyes, dropped them into a glass tumbler and decorated it with a slice of fresh lemon and returned with it to Marc who thought that he would never see a real glass of icewater in England. Oh but it is a country full of marvels that Americans would never expect.

  The conversation just then was about Tarzan and the myth of the free wildman and all that crap. I said to Colin:

  “Well why are you so damned keen on living in Africa and swinging in trees in municipal parks whenever you get the cha
nce if you aren’t still sold on Tarzan?” I was sorry I’d said it the moment I realized I had said it, I had hurt his dream of Africa. But not half so much as he will hurt mine.

  And my temperature is going down still, everything is getting slower and slightly distorted, time has less and less influence on me, only yesterday I had the dinner ready at four in the afternoon being under the misapprehension that it was well after six and time the children were fed.

  “But mummy we’ve only just had lunch.”

  “Have you dear, I didn’t notice, I was asleep in bed.”

  Marc is asleep in bed when Tom rings him in the middle of the night. By a certain tone of voice Marc can tell that he is in for a long conversation. I wonder what kind of a problem it is that could keep Tom talking for an hour or more in the middle of the night? If I lived in New York would he call me up with his problems? It does not seem too likely, all the signs indicate that Tom and I will never have a really intimate friendship, the passkey to that requires something more than mere admiration of his work and a personal attraction, and whatever it is, I do not think I have it. One thing I do have of Tom’s is an old cap. But maybe the things he discusses with Marc are not so much personal problems. Maybe he wants advice on how to get a secondhand double bed into his apartment, he has been obliged to sleep downstairs in the vestibule these last two nights, it won’t even go into the lift. If someone rings him in the middle of the night he cannot hear the phone.