Orbit 9 Read online

  “There are the beginnings of earthquakes,” another of the disciples said.

  “Then we will put an end to the earthquakes,” Koster rasped. “There will be earthquakes only when we command them. It is time that the earth learned that it has masters.”

  “The dogs have all gone wild and developed the running sickness,” a third of the disciples said. “The birds have all gathered in huge flocks and started to migrate, and not at all in their usual directions. Some of the fruit trees are blooming again and it isn’t the season for it. Some of them have begun to fruit a second time this year, and that isn’t the strangest part of it. I myself have seen, this very morning, walnuts growing on an apple tree, and there weren’t any signs of them there yesterday.”

  “Well, we will immediately put a stop to all that,” Trumait declared. “We have the powers, we are the powers, we have all the power of the red-devil earth and we will use that power. We aren’t given rule over the elementals for nothing.”

  “There are rumors of tidal waves,” said another disciple.

  “This we will not tolerate for a moment!” Cachiporro swore, “neither the waves nor the rumors. There is sky-business involved in this somewhere and we will not permit it. If the waves are running, let them stand still!”

  Would you believe it? The waves everywhere in the world stood still. They were taken by surprise, perhaps, but they had always obeyed the voice of Authority wherever given.

  “Let the rumors run no more,” Koster spoke like fire. “Let all such talk cease right now. Let the rumor-men’s minds be befuddled and their tongues be like rocks in their mouths.”

  It happened just like that. Rumor everywhere was frozen in midspeed, and the tongues of all the mongers were like rocks in their mouths. These things can be stopped.

  “The migrating birds will halt in midair!” Saul Trumait commanded. “Not one wing will beat till we say it may beat again.”

  And all the migrating birds were frozen motionless in midair.

  “Look, look!” one of the more excitable disciples cried out. “It’s like lava flow bursting up through the pavements outside, up through the sidewalks, up under this very floor, it seems like.”

  “Oh, that is us,” Saul Trumait said easily. “Where do you think we draw our power from? We also have our fathers.”

  “Let the people stop their wandering,” Cachiporro ordered. “Should there be a revolution that is not ours? Let all vehicles stand still at once. Let the wandering people not set another foot down.”

  And quite a few persons of the world were paralyzed with one foot in midstride. These three men were really very powerful.

  “Let the fires and bombings stop if they are not our own fires and bombings,” Koster commanded. And all except the privileged bombings and fires ceased.

  “Is there anything else of the divergent unlawful—that is not of the true unlawful going on?” Trumait asked, breathing a little heavily from the power that had been flowing through him. “What do our special monitors show? Is there anything going on that is not ours?”

  “There are still earthquakes; there are still people laughing; and there are other lava flows which do not seem to be yours,” said one of the disciples who was fiddling with the instruments.

  “Let the false lava stop!” Cachiporro commanded. “There must be no lava that does not come from our own fire fathers.”

  “Let the people’s laughter cease,” Koster roared. “Let it scorch their throats.”

  “May the quaking leave off right now,” Trumait ruled. “We are the only earth-movers.”

  “Stop, you fool things, stop!” Pedro Cachiporro ordered. “We are the only authority and we order you.”

  “Halt!” Koster barked. “We are the power.”

  “Let none of it move,” Trumait commanded.

  And it all stopped.

  The red lion and the red tiger and the red wolf looked at each other with thunderous triumph; and the disciples adored. The three men themselves were Revolution, they themselves were the Moving Powers of the world and nothing could move without their instigation.

  * * * *

  “Ah, something is beginning again,” said the disciple who was fiddling with the instruments. It had been a short but momentous pause. “It’s like a new kind of earthquake now, a new sort of lava flow, a different shape of world waves. Hear it? You don’t need instruments. Hear it?”

  It all broke loose. It broke wide open. What world-noise was that? Laughter, world-laughter. The three unpowered leaders diminished and their faces cracked like clay pots. It was the whole world laughing at them, in new mountains that had not been mountains a moment before, in craters that were fire-new craters, in pinnacles and persons that had just been renewed. The whole world was laughing at the three creatures that shrank and shattered and turned into unnameable minuscules.

  This was Revolution, and the revolutionaries had never stood tall enough to touch the least hairs on its toes.

  * * * *

  The continents began to detach each from each and to drift. Whether they would move much or little during the Jubilee depended on their own proclivities and states of mind, but they were free to move. And it was not a thing of a million years or a thousand. It was the thing of an hour.

  There were world disturbances, of course; there were three-mile-high waves here and there, and such; but there were no more disturbances than could be expected from such causes.

  * * * *

  “There is land below that isn’t charted,” said the navigator of the plane that was carrying the president and the congresses.

  “Chart it then if it will make you happy,” the pilot told him. “That is Hy-Brasil, an old land come back. I bet it felt that it had been submerged long enough.”

  “And you’re coming down too soon, coming down to no possible land,” the navigator said an hour later. “You’ll hit open ocean.”

  “Oh no. We’ll hit risen land,” the pilot insisted. “See it there now. Is it not fresh and shiny with the sea-water still rushing off its risen flanks and the spray of it rising a mile high?”

  The plane came down to Lyonesse which had been the mother of assemblies a long time ago, which had sunk into the ocean a long time ago. It was a good town and a good land, and it seemed glad to be back.

  Other planes and various craft were also arriving at Lyonesse. They were homing in on it from everywhere. The crafts carried the governing bodies of more than two hundred commonwealths, and all those parliamentary and official types were beaming and bright and happy. What town they would form there now would be a curious one, but there are advantages in having all governing bodies gathered together in one place where they will not bother the peoples of the world.

  * * * *

  And in another place there were three wise men walking in that first noontime of the Jubilee. Perhaps these three men had once had the names of Ruil and Amerce and Romer, but they did not have those names now.

  They were walking in a direction that had not yet been renamed. They would not sleep that night where they had slept the night before, nor would any other person in the world. They had sandals on their feet; they were wrapped in cloaks and euphoria; they had staffs in their hands; and they carried (from some old symbolism or from some new joy) lighted lanterns in the daytime. Three wise men.

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  * * * *

  James Sallis

  ONLY THE WORDS ARE DIFFERENT

  1.

  Pulse

  I just looked up and a man fell by my window with his arms waving. (Earlier, my thumb was engaged in moving across the paper like a chicken drumstick. Scratching, scratching.) He seems to have been in a great hurry, and possibly there was something he wanted to tell me. This may, I realise, have something to do with the scaffolding which grew outside my window during the night; it’s out there now, as I write a wood and steel doily of piping, ladders, planks and pantlegs;

  the sky shows through

  in squares
of blue.

  I go to the window and there is a crowd below me, a red truck with two white attendants. The man is lying strangely on the pavement; perhaps he is very tired. Pigeons tiptoe down his legs and arms. Snails would be better, but snails (les escargots) are not in season—only strawberries. His mouth is full of strawberries. The red juice dribbles out of his mouth and streams along the pavement.

  I wonder what it was that he wanted to tell me? Probably that he loved me.

  * * * *

  2.

  Schlupp-thunkk. Schlupp-thunkk. The wipers mimic a heart. Beating.

  Postmortems of parties dead and cold now, passing home in a bouncing car. You here beside me, warm with drinking, soft with sleep in your pumpkin dress that skis off one shoulder and slides along your leg. The child in your lap. Shapeless in her bundle of flannel.

  —like it’ll snow forever. And our Fiat crunches through the crust of that snow. The motor, in third, hums and whirrs. Thinking of our Ford gathering snow on the salvage yard. In the backseat now there are the remains of two pheasants and a bottle of brandy. The brandy rolls and clatters against the oven pan, rolls in its nest of birds’ bones and greasy dressing. Snow stipples the flat grey air, slurs the streets. I smoke the last cigarette and watch for ice. Guilt in small actions, always. The heater growls.

  Who was that girl?

  I pass the cigarette to you, you drag once and hand it back. The tip is wet now. Of course.

  The sexy one. You consider her, try to remember other qualities she may have had. Long hair, boots. The one who kept drinking the brandy.

  I shrug. Undergrad, I think. Light from an oncoming car catches in my eyes, trapped under the ridges, supraorbital—as you say, like pueblo cliffs, a moderately effete baboon. (And you . . . you have sat on those ledges and watched a world, the world in front, the world behind them . . . lived on the edge, looking.)

  Painter?

  That’s the guy she was with. Workshop, I think. Supposed to be very good. She has a novel coming out next year, from Harper.

  In your class?

  Too obvious, Jane. The brandy, or real annoyance? I shift into second to take a curve. The wipers are tossing away time. To buy our way home.

  No. Not many of the writers are interested in Pope, they mostly go for modern lit. I’ve told you all that before.

  The baby has crapped in its sleep and the smell fills the car. You reach for the cigarette, draw, encounter filter and throw it out, leaving the window a little open. You twist and rummage through your pockets; skirt, sweater, coat. I thought I had a pack of Salems somewhere...

  We smoked them.

  So: that sideways glance. A measured apprehension. A truck comes toward us, puffing chimney, cab outlined in small red lights. A huge interstate rig. We’re out of the city, coming onto open road. I shift to fourth and see your face in the truck’s lights. How many times, these five years, this same moment? The Fiat takes the curve and starts, up a hill, dropping speed. Touching the shift, I almost touch your knee but you pull away. The road drops steadily into the darkness, the vacuum, behind us. The lights spread out in front of us, a dull flash-lightning inside the fog, that goes on and on.

  Look! but we’ve passed it, whatever it was.

  What . . .

  A styrofoam snowman. Someone has a goddamn styrofoam snowman in their yard—

  O shit! A styrofoam snowman.

  If another truck, even a car came by, I might see you crying. But nothing else passes, we’re alone on the road. I can only hear the sound of your breath in the dark. Finally you lean forward and shut off the heater.

  How much further?

  A few miles.

  0.

  * * * *

  3.

  Have you ever noticed how books accumulate around you? Like clouds. You don’t remember putting them there, or buying them (and if you had bought them, you’d have put them on the coffee table, or a shelf, or perhaps beside the bed). And they couldn’t have come through the mail slot; it’s too small. The post office doesn’t deliver. You never enter it: the Draft Board is just upstairs. But they go on accumulating, even now that you know, like clouds.

  Then one day there appears on your desk—a surprise beside your morning coffee—this memo advocating the extinction of poems (though a few would be maintained in cages, well-fed and cared for, by way of Justice, for the children to see; to which they might toss an occasional leftover letter, partly eaten, or melted to a shapeless mess in their warm hands; perhaps an occasional colon or dash; an adjective, apostrophe). You quickly add your name —recalling it, letter by letter, as you write—to the already formidable list. This, it occurs to you now, is a petition. You pick it up and the first page comes apart in your hands like a newspaper. It begins to unfold, a very long list indeed. You follow the names through the study, library, den, kitchen, living room, dining room, up three flights of stairs to the bedroom. You jump out the window and run, as though you are (in October) flying a kite, and still the petition comes open, unfolds, like panels of toilet paper folded front to back, back to front, front to back. Each is stamped in blue Property of the British Government and you realise now that this was stolen from the Tate, more precisely from one of the toilet booths on the bottom floor by the cafeteria, behind the Trova and the would-be Michelangelo virgin.

  You run, you run, you’re out of breath. Finally, in New Jersey, you reach the end of the list. It began with the names of several well-known artists (painters, sculptors, ceramists, filmmakers, mixed mediasts) and ends with the signature of the local cub reporter. The only names missing are those of the poets themselves—though a few of them, too, have signed. Under pressure, one presumes. Of their wives, publishers, bankers, typewriters, cigarettes, “humor.” All the way back across mitred New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, you search for your name but are unable to find it, even in Philadelphia. But you have considered removing it and this, like the poetry itself, is a noble gesture; you are sure of that, at least. . .

  Over dinner I explain all this to you, my wife, and your new friend Harrison. It apparently means little to you, but Harrison feigns interest quite well. And I like him. I feel myself attracted to this strange, quiet man. But let me warn you, darling: his name was not on that list!

  * * * *

  4.

  Story

  They are in love. They go to the beach at Brighton and she is disappointed, there are only rocks, where is the sand. The Camden Town Zoo. Shopping together at Heal’s. The East and West for curry. Westbourne Grove (Notting Hill). Baby elephant. Theatre closed—seats outside for sale, want them, can’t find anyone to ask. They return to Portobello Road and, stomachs rumbling from the Madras (this, like the sound of wind in the pastiche-Corbusier elephant house), make love. She wants “your child.” Sadly watching him roll the rubber down over his penis, thinks of discarded peacock feathers lying on ground at zoo; they climax (him 3, her 2). Nothing is ever said. He returns with her to America (on the boat, his birthday, she has him lean his arms against the upper bunk and masturbates him, slowly). They take a flat just outside New York. Strain of isolation, his disorientation, intimations of an affair apart from her. Their love, always silent, is now proclaimed in words. The words distort, fictionalise, lead them each into “false” emotions; they are farther apart with each day, each word (she still wants his child). He finally leaves in the middle of the night, after a (rationalised) argument—the words—over sex. Three days later she receives a small package. No name, no return address, postmark Grand Central Station. She opens the package, which is beautifully gift-wrapped, and takes out what is inside. Holds it up to the light of the kitchen window: precise visual description. A rubber, the nipple filled with semen, a knot tied just above it. Title: Love Letter.

  * * * *

  5.

  Molly keeps a cockroach. It lives in a cage made of Japanese matchsticks, the size of a child’s shoebox, floor covered with a jiggerful of sawdust. It lives on charcoal which it extracts fr
om cigarette filters dropped into its cage by Molly and her lovers, rolling the residue of paper into tiny neat balls to store in one corner of the cage. When Molly mates, it climbs up the side, crawls upsidedown halfway out across the top, then drops down into the litter and starts up the side again—faster and faster, again and again. Finally it drops down onto its back and lies there in the sawdust, exhausted, moving its legs slowly, like eyelashes.

  Afterward Molly stands there by the cage telling us, The roach is a dead end, it hasn’t changed in a handful of thousands of years.

  Later the roach will ascend to the light fixture and cry there for the crumbling dry bodies of flies. When Molly climbs on a chair to bring it down, it will stare at her with its one cold black eye, it will wave one leg frantically in her face. J’accuse, J’accuse.