Orbit 12 - [Anthology] Read online

  “That’s not what I hear.” Nert was nearly hysterical from the mittlebran, and his olfactory nerves felt as if they were burning. It helped to know the symptoms would pass when he got out of the room, but it seemed he’d been with Dr. Billingsley for hours. “You can have the film. For one thousand credits, even.”

  “I see.” Dr. Billingsley walked casually around the desk to the examination table behind it “A little blackmail, eh? But then, I suppose, it’s only fair after what I did to you.” He rested his hands on the edge of the table and suddenly was holding a blip-gun.

  “Now,” he said, “put that camera on the desk and get out of here.”

  Nert screamed and stamped on the floor three more times.

  Dr. Billingsley’s face contorted as if it were a carved apple drying in the sun, and he groaned and dropped the gun. “Now,” shouted Nert, “the thousand credits!”

  The doctor crawled across the floor to the desk where he opened the bottom drawer and thumbed open a metal box. He counted out a thousand credits and struggled to his knees to put it on the desk top.

  Nert took the film magazine out of the camera and exchanged it for the money. Bright points of light sparkled on everything in the room. It was the first sign of mittlebran shock. If he began to hear bells he would need a doctor and he wouldn’t be able to leave the planet for many days.

  He said, “Thank you,” and ran out of the room.

  With the quick three-legged lope the Droshi use when in a hurry he ran across the waiting room, threw the empty camera to the Fomalhautian, opened the door and ran down the rusting stairway.

  The Fomalhautian bounded after him, shouting, “Wait. What am I supposed to do with this?” It yelped in surprise as Dr. Billingsley suddenly grabbed it from behind and pulled it into the waiting room.

  Nert went to the hole in the old wooden door and said, “Come on! It’ll only take him a few seconds to find out that the Fomalhautian isn’t me.” He went to the passageway and climbed the stone steps two at a time. Herbie rolled past him like a soft living wheel and beat him to the top.

  “Which way?” Nert said.

  “There.” They ran across the street and hid in the shadows of the grotesque sculpture of an old portico, while Dr. Billingsley ran toward the city chased by the Fomalhautian, still waving the camera and shouting wildly about tests.

  When they were gone, Nert and Herbie walked out of the shadows and looked down the empty street. Herbie said, “Being taken by a new Blue probably hurts him more than losing the thousand credits.” He looked at Nert. “By the way, youdid get the money, didn’t you?”

  “Sure did.” He flipped through the sheaf of bills.

  “In an hour or so every shady character on Spangle will be looking for us. If we’re going to make that ship, we’d better hurry.”

  They walked and undulated toward the nearest slideway. The stink of the mittlebran was almost gone and Nert felt better with every step. He said, “Herbie?”

  “Um?”

  “You don’t ever have to retire to a gerbis farm or any other place, do you?”

  After a while, Herbie said, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you can just keep turning into your own children forever. Isn’t that right?”

  There were streetlights around them now and the buildings did not look so forbidding. “Almost forever, yes,” Herbie said.

  “Then why did you buy a gerbis farm with me for your old age if you never will get old?”

  “Oh, I’ll get bored with being a spaceman after a while, and I’ll want to do something else. I might as well do it with a friend”

  They were silent as they walked among the gathering crowds near the slideway. Nert finally said, “If we’re friends, next time you’re going to do something like becoming your own child, please don’t try to surprise me.”

  Herbie laughed and said, “If you think I’m unusual, you should see how the Terrans produce offspring.”

  “How’s that?”

  Herbie told him.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Nert.

  “Frooth’s truth,” said Herbie.

  They thought of Dr. Billingsley doing that and laughed about it all the way to the spaceport.

  <>

  * * * *

  Edward Bryant

  PINUP

  IT STARTS, I think, with Lucia and her Lucite block full of the exploded watch. If I could lie at peace and sleep I’m sure I would dream of cogs and springs and escapements and crystals wheeling about me in eccentric orbits.

  But I can’t. I cannot sleep. I hang suspended, manacles chafing the skin of my wrists, chains angling up to darkness, body pulled uncomfortably downward by the weight of plaster at my loins. It could be a scenario for Torquemada, or a Gahan Wilson cartoon.

  Eyes of Bogart, Jagger, Fonda (Peter), Morrison, Nimoy, Dylan stare at me passionlessly. The lights are primary colors and they flash randomly, only occasionally assuming patterns during my hallucinations. Most of the pain stopped some time ago. There’s still a dull pressure that throbs almost subliminally.

  I suspect the odor of incense is vervain, but my olfactory nerve synesthizes to leaf of oregano and I want to throw up.

  Love, vain love. When I was eighteen and a virgin, I went off to college both timidly expectant and fearful that I somehow could never partake of the fantasies I had seen in the X-rated films. Four years later I was jaded. Only a few years more in the matter-of-fact environment of communicative arts, and I was bored. All the one-night understandings, all the meaningful ententes were misunderstood and meaningless. Then dear Lucia love flew in from Rochester and reflinted my Ronson.

  I had recalled Lucia from a book about holiday customs around the world. I’d read it, I think, in the third grade. Each year in the spring Saint Lucia would appear in alpine villages and meadow huts. The eldest girl-child of each family, she would dress in a white robe and crown of lighted candles. Tall and golden-haired and quite Nordic, she would haunt the early-morning hours of Saint Lucia’s Day, putting out strudel and cheese and making coffee for her parents. The real Saint Lucia had undoubtedly been martyred centuries before in some messy fashion by the Magyars or Slovaks or whomever. But the book didn’t cover that ground. Rereading the story usually made me hungry, and at recess I would pull the orange or apple from my lunch pail and covertly devour it behind the swings.

  My Lucia was tall and blond and her eyes had the requisite hue of unsmogged sky. She ran up behind me that particular day in Chicago as I was walking along North Michigan Avenue on my lunch break.

  “Jim! Mr. James W—. I love you. Stop.”

  Sophisticated as I was (I am employed as an assistant editor for a flourishing and well-paying men’s magazine) I stopped and turned. Coolly I appraised my accoster.

  “I’m Lucia,” she said, eyes level with mine. “James W—, I adore you.”

  “Quite right,” I said, my wit somewhat dulled by my late lunch of a reuben sandwich at Renaldos. The sauerkraut had been undistinguished.

  “May I?”

  “Uh,” I said.

  She flung her arms around me and kissed my lips passionately. Something angular in her left hand painfully dug into the base of my neck. The paisley overnight case in her right hand caught me in the small of the back. The girl was stunning.

  She stepped back, smile broad, and said, “You will come with me. For a drink.”

  “I’m due at the office at two,” I said.

  “Come,” she repeated.

  * * * *

  It continues, I believe, at Lucia’s apartment. Just as I’m quite unsure about the precise location of this darkened room in which I hang, swaying slightly in a draft of unknown origin, so I am similarly disoriented about my eventual destination that day on North Michigan. I vaguely remember three bus transfers and many flights of stairs. Then my memory blurs completely.

  At last, music. The boredom of watching those lights is unbelievable. And giant photo-posters remain mute, even u
nder the most urgent pleas for conversation. But now the music starts, chords swelling in gentle progression from a hidden speaker. It is jazz, quite progressive. I don’t recognize the group, though I’m sure I should. I have listened to nearly all the candidates in our recent jazz poll. The guitar is superb, the guitarist a master. And the piano! I’m certain the fingers belong to Hundley.

  My lucid recollections placed me across a gray formica-surfaced kitchen table from Lucia. Each of us held a tall glass, dark-amber liquid inside, dappled condensation outside. Between us wasa four-inch cube of clear Lucite. Inside, the disassembled movement floated in a litter about the handless face.

  “It’s the only way I like to see clocks,” she said.

  I made a non sequitur remark about Dali.

  “I’m in love with entropy,” said Lucia.

  I didn’t understand and didn’t want to display my ignorance; she didn’t offer to explain.

  “Utter stasis . . .” she mused. “Now there’s a goal.”

  I nodded and took another sip from my glass. The liquor was unfamiliar; the taste reminded me of cinnamon and licorice.

  “Well, come on,” she said, draining her glass.

  And led me to her bedroom.

  Somewhere I missed a transition. I was lying there on her bed, naked, waiting for some rush of hedonistic experience. The quilt was cold against my buttocks. I must have been somewhat drunk; I could hear my watch where it lay on the dresser and its beat was irregular.

  Lucia knelt beside the bed and began to massage me. “Nice,” I said. “I’m sure I love you.”

  “Of course,” she said. Lucia set a silver bucket on the bed by my hip. She dipped into it with her hand and began to pack something white and gooey around my— “Hey!” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Lucia, packing. “It’s only plaster.”

  Something didn’t seem logical. “Oh,” I said.

  “Plaster of Paris. I’m taking a cast.”

  “Um,” I said. “I, uh, I thought you people only did that with rock stars.”

  “Oh, I did. I got all the big ones. Hendrix and Morrison and all the rest. I’m extending my collection.”

  At the time it seemed plausible.

  * * * *

  And continues. I occasionally wonder whether my prolonged absence has been noted or remarked upon by the guys at the office. Probably not. Tenure at the magazine is tenuous even at the top. And probably the theory has been offered that the upstairs killer got me at lunch on that particular day.

  I’ve discovered that I can alleviate the numbness by twisting my body slightly. The muscles in my sides can do it. The slight torque flexes new muscles in turn. But the pain is so intense that I seldom bother to alleviate the numbness.

  Instead I dip into my cornucopian past:

  I recall awakening and half-opening my eyes and feeling the déjà vu of that Easter demonstration when I first saw the Washington Monument in the dawn. Then my perspectives rushed inward and I knew I was not looking at the Washington Monument.

  My movements were very slow, but I crept my hands like spiders up across my flanks and wonderingly touched the hard plaster. I touched. I tapped. I grasped. I wrenched. And stopped, pained. The plaster had a myriad firm anchors.

  “I regret the inconvenience,” said a voice behind me. “I forgot to apply the Vaseline first. Terribly stupid of me.”

  I tried to turn my head to look at Lucia, but the exertion was too much. She moved into the line of my vision. She had an ice pick in her hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you. This is for obvious sanitary reasons.” She leaned over the apex of the monument and began to chip a hole.

  I fainted.

  There is a distorted montage of wakenings. Once my eyes opened and I saw Lucia kneeling at my waist, her lips in a horizontal plane with the peak of the plaster. She was blowing gently across the opening and I could hear the deep bird-whistle of a cockatoo.

  * * * *

  It will end, I suspect, soon. Here. The feedings of water and drugs and cookies have been more infrequent of late. I hear the invisible tone arm scrutch across the jazz album and there is transitory silence. Something new begins; an acid raga. I would like to dance and my feet make a few sympathetic twitches.

  Ah love, there were so many fruitless dialogues:

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Why am I here.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What are you going to do.”

  “Are you a kidnapper for ransom? A twisto? A radical? In league with a Conspiracy? From women’s lib?”

  “Who are you.”

  The music is louder and faster.

  Eyes of Gable, Garbo, Fonda (Jane), Hopper, some Kennedys, Baez stare at me passionlessly. The patterns of light are extinguished and a door opens in the poster wall. My eyes sting with the brightness and I must squint to see.

  I am looking through a bomb-bay door at the mountain lake below. The dark island in the center is surrounded by scaled ripples. Perspectives slide back to the apartment in Chicago.

  Staring in at me through the diminished doorway is one blue eye.

  <>

  * * * *

  Vonda N. McIntyre

  THE GENIUS FREAKS

  DARTING into a lighted spot in a dim pool—

  Being born—well, Lais remembered it, a gentle transition from warm liquid to warm air, an abrupt rise in the pitch of sounds, the careful touch of hands, shock of the first breath. She had never told anyone that her easy passage had lacked some quality, perhaps a rite that would have made her truly human. Somewhere was a woman who had been spared the pain of Lais’ birth, everywhere were people who had caused pain, and, causing, experienced it, paying a debt that Lais did not owe. Sleeping curled in fetal position in the dark gave her no comfort: the womb she was formed in had seemed a prison from the time she was aware of it. Yet the Institute refused to grow its fetuses in the light. The Institute administrators were normal and had been born normally. If they had ever been prenatally aware, the memory had been obliterated or forgotten. They could not understand the frustration of the Institute Fellows, or perhaps the thought of fishlike little creatures peering out, watching, learning, was too much even for them to bear.

  Lais’ quiet impatience with an increasingly cramped world was only relieved by her birth, and by light, which freed a sense she had felt was missing but could not quite imagine. Having reasoned that something like birth must occur, she was much calmer under restraint than she had been only a little earlier. When she first realized she was trapped, when she first grew large enough to touch both horizons of her sphere, she had been a wild and intelligent carnivore, suspicious and easily angered. She had thrashed, seeking escape; nothing noticed her brief frenzy. The walls were spongy-surfaced, hard beneath; they yielded slightly, yet held her. They implied something beyond the darkness, and allowed her to imagine it. All her senses were inside the prison, so she imagined being turned inside out to be freed from her tether. She expected pain.

  As she waited, she sometimes wished she were still a lower primate, small and stupid enough to accept the warm salty liquid as the universe. Even then, as she kicked and paddled with clumsy hands and feet, missing the strong propulsion of her diminishing tail, she was changing. That was when she first thought that the spectrum of her senses might lack a vital part. Her environment was more alien now than it had been when she was a lithe amphibian, barely conscious, long-tailed and free in an immense world. Earlier than that, her memories were kinetic impressions, of gills pumping, heart fluttering, the low, periodic vibration that never changed

  * * * *

  —the silver-speckled black fish settled in a shadow at Lais’ feet, motionless but seeming to ripple beneath the mist and the disturbed surface of the water. Lais hunched down in her thick coat. The layered branches of a gnarled tree protected her from the sleet, but not
from the wind. She shivered. Overhead, the vapor rising from the pool condensed in huge drops on the undersides of dark-green needles, and fell again. The tree smelled cool and tart. Beyond her shelter, the shapes of sculpture and small gardens rose and flowed between low buildings and sleet-cratered puddles that reflected intermittent lights. Except for Lais and the fishes, the flagstone mall was deserted. People had left their marks, bits of paper not yet picked up, sodden; placards and posters the haranguers had abandoned in the rain, leaning against each other like dead trees. Lais let her gaze pass quickly over them, trying not to see the words; in the dim light, she could almost pretend she couldn’t read them.