Orbit 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  Emma caught hold of the older girl’s hand and smiled, but she could not bring herself to echo her words. It was not that she would, exactly, have been lying: Charmian was indeed her best—and her only—friend, as Charmian knew quite well. It was just that, even liking someone so awfully, it is unpleasant to be at their mercy.

  Once you started burning their incense, they just didn’t let you stop.

  Noon, the First Friday of May. Along the High Street the shoppers offered to the vivid sun their English limbs, white for sacrifice. Like the very molecules of the air, flesh, warming, seemed to move at a quicker tempo. Mrs. Rosetti passed before the great moneyed pageant of shop-fronts with a mild intoxication, as of amphetamine, scudding, a cloud. Dawdling, Emma followed.

  The pavement divided right and left. Mrs. Rosetti would have preferred the mild self-surrender of the pedestrian belt that arced, at a temperate velocity of five mph, above and across the traffic stream, but Emma was able, with no stronger persuasion than a coaxing glance, to persuade her to take the left fork into the subway arcade. Fragments of advertising melodies lifted and sank into the ground bass of the ventilation, and at intervals the murmuring twilight opened into abrupt, bright recessions of holography. The hollies were crude things usually (for it had always been more dowdy, this side Thames)—book-vending machines, a shower of gold celebrating Ascot Day, odorless images of food that boded to be as flavorless in the eating, and everywhere dense crowds of mannikins in polly and paper dresses, and cheap copies of the new African masks. Often the shops proclaimed themselves with nothing more than a painted sign-

  Buy Your

  Wet Fish

  Here

  or, even more sparely—

  Stuffs

  —an austerity that had been smart a decade before but was now, once again, merely drab.

  There was, however, one shop in this arcade that could equal, in a small way, the brilliances of Oxford Street or Piccadilly, and it was this that had lured both mother and daughter down from the daylight world. The Bride Stripped Bare was admittedly only an affiliate—one of the smallest—of the great Frisco-based couturier, but here, in Southwark, it was something quite out of the way. Already, this early, a crowd was gathered before the two long windows, and Emma, who was small for her thirteen years, had difficulty worming her way to a vantage point.

  The model this week was a Madagascan, shorter even than Emma (a fashion house of any pretension had to employ mortals), with the piquant name of Baiba. The model’s close-cropped head seemed grotesquely large, though considered as a thing apart it would have been judged a very pretty head indeed, with a ravishing pug nose and, when she grinned, deltas of deep-grained wrinkles about her dark eyes. She could easily have been as old as Emma’s mother, though, of course, she carried the burden of her years with much more grace. Four attendants, two men and two women, dressed her and undressed her in Stripped Bare swimwear, Stripped Bare evening dresses, and Stripped Bare pollies and origami, but the last item—an elaborate ensemble of mourning clothes—Baiba put on without their assistance to a droll, rather honky-tonk version of Death Shall Have No Dominion.

  “Don’t they have lovely things there, Mother?” Emma asked, with what she thought a deceptive generality, as they continued down the arcade.

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Rosetti said, not taken in. “And very dear too.”

  “That little coral do-thingy was only twelve bob.”

  “That little coral doily would last about two days, if you were careful, and then it would be down the chute with it. Polly obsolesces fast enough.”

  “But I will need something, you know, for the party.” Walt would be sixty-seven on the twelfth of May, and Emma was determined to shine for him.

  Her mother was just as determined that she wouldn’t— not, at least, too brightly. “In any case, Emma, that dress is years too old for you.”

  “You say that about everything I like.”

  Mrs. Rosetti smiled vaguely. “Because everything you like is too old. Now don’t, my darling, bring me down.”

  Emma, who had learned to read the signs of her mother’s weathers, said no more, though she didn’t, for all that, give up hope. Friday, when Walt was at work and her mother shopped, was a bad time to dig for favors. The disparity between the real and the ideal, between what the money had to go for and what one would simply like, was then too starkly defined.

  They came out of the arcade in front of St. George the Martyr, another whited sepulcher of the C of E, which was nevertheless prettier, Emma had to admit, both inside and out, than St. George’s Cathedral, where she went. Was it only that the Cathedral was made of yellow brick and lacked a proper steeple up front? The same architect, Pugin, had designed the cathedral in Killarney, which was so magnificent, but it only seemed stranger, then, that his London cathedral should be so . . . lacking. Emma would have liked, when she grew up, to become an architect, but for mortals that was out of the question. Leonard Aneker was the living proof of that.

  “Come along then,” her mother said. “It’s only a church.”

  “Only!” she protested, but (Emma was in the state of grace) she obeyed. Almost at once the strength of this obedience was put to a second test. Passing Trinity Street, Emma wanted to turn off to look at the stalls of fresh flowers. Irises were selling at four and six the bunch, narcissi at three shillings. This time her mother would not be swerved.

  “We don’t have the time,” she said. “Or the money.”

  “Only to look,” Emma pleaded.

  The fact was that Mrs. Rosetti, perhaps as a result of years tending the shop, didn’t appreciate flowers. “Emma!”

  “Walt would like them. Walt loves flowers.”

  “Walt loves many things he can’t afford, including us.”

  Sometimes her mother could be terribly coarse. Emma obeyed, though with a sense of having somewhat blemished, nonetheless, the immaculate Presence in the sanctuary of her breast.

  At Maggy’s on the Borough Road they stopped for a snack. Emma had a sixpenny cake from the machine, while her mother went to the counter for jellied eel. Maggy’s was famous for its jellied eel. She ate them from the bag, four thick pale cylinders coated with quaking bits of gelatin. Now and again, chewing on one, she would wince, for her molars were getting worse.

  Emma made a funny face. “I think those things are disgusting.”

  “That,” her mother said, her mouth still full, “is half the pleasure of eating them. Would you like a taste?”

  “Never!”

  Her mother shrugged. “Never say never.”

  Which was, if you looked at it closely, a paradox.

  They crossed St. George’s Circus on the pedestrian belt. Emma’s mother cursed the crowds of idlers and sightseers who rode the belt with no other purpose than to view the Vacancy at the center of the Circus. The Vacancy was a monumental sculptured hole, and Mr. Harness said it was one of the masterpieces of twentieth century art, but Emma, though she had looked at it and looked at it, could see nothing but a big, bumpy, black hole. There simply wasn’t anything there, though now, because it was spring and people were flower-crazy, the lusterless plastic was strewn with flowers, irises and narcissi and even, here and there, the extravagance of a rose. The flowers were lovely, but the artist—Emma couldn’t remember her name—could hardly be given credit for that. While she watched, a bunch of daffs, at two and six a dozen, hurtled from the north-south belt into the sculpture’s maw, struck a ledge, and tumbled into the funereal heap in its farthest depth.

  The drugstore on Lambeth Road was their last stop. Emma, as her conscience dictated, waited outside, almost within the shadow of St. George’s Cathedral. From this simple, unkind juxtaposition, Emma had derived, some time before, her first conscious taste of irony. Her mother had not been to Mass for years. Just as everyone in Clonmel had foretold, Mrs. Rosetti had lost her faith. There was no use talking to her about it, you could only hope and pray.

  Her eyes, when she came out, s
eemed much darker, black rather than brown. Her lower lip had slackened, become kind. She seemed, though in a way that Emma did not like, in some new way, more beautiful.

  “Shall we go back now?” Emma asked, looking aside.

  “As always,” her mother said, with the barest hint, a wrinkle at the corner of her mouth, that this might be a joke. She leaned back against the garish mandala that was the trademark of the manufacturer of the shop’s chief commodity.

  “And did you go to Holy Communion today?” her mother asked.

  Emma blushed, though it was certainly nothing to be ashamed of. “Yes. It’s First Friday.”

  “Well, that’s good.” She closed her eyes.

  After a long silence, she said, “The sun is very warm today.”

  “Yes,” said a voice from behind Emma, “it will be summer before we know it.”

  Emma turned around. The speaker was an old woman in a dress of tattered black origami, an obvious piece of refuse. Sparse hair, dyed to a metallic silver, hung down over a face that was a witch’s mask of sharp bones and pouchy skin.

  She laid an arthritic hand on Emma’s head. “She’ll be a beautiful little lady, she will.”

  Mrs. Rosetti seemed to give this serious consideration before replying. “Probably. Probably she will.”

  The witch cackled. “You couldn’t spare half a crown for an old woman, could you?”

  “How old?”

  “Old enough to know better.” Another spasm of laughter, and the hand clenched, tangling itself in Emma’s hair.

  For no reason at all (since mortals no less decrepit than this woman were often to be seen in this part of the city) Emma felt terrified.

  Mrs. Rosetti took a coin from her pocket and gave it to the old woman. Without a word of thanks, she pushed past Emma to the entrance of the drugstore.

  Mrs. Rosetti put a hand on her shoulder. “How old?” she insisted.

  It was hard to tell if the woman meant her smile to be as nasty as it looked to Emma. “Fifty-four. And how old are you, my lovely?”

  Mrs. Rosetti closed her eyes tightly. Emma took her hand and tried to pull her away.

  The woman followed them along the pavement. “How old?” she shrilled. “How old?”

  “Thirty-seven,” Mrs. Rosetti said in a whisper.

  “It wasn’t you I meant!” The old woman lifted her head, triumphant in her malice, then returned and entered the shop.

  They walked back to Lant Street in silence, following a roundabout path along the least busy streets. Mrs. Rosetti did not notice her daughter’s tears.

  The bitterness that Emma felt was insupportable, and she could not, at last, stifle the cry of outrage: “How could you! How could you do it!”

  Mrs. Rosetti regarded Emma with puzzlement, almost with fear. “Do what, Emma?”

  “How could you give her that money? It was enough for a dozen daffs. And you just threw it away!”

  She slapped Emma’s face.

  “I hate you!” Emma shouted at her. “And Walt hates you too!”

  After the girl had run away, Mrs. Rosetti took another twenty grams. She sat down, not knowing where, not caring, and let the spring sun invade the vast vacancies of her flesh, a beauty that tumbled into her farthest depth.

  <>

  * * * *

  The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories

  by Gene Wolfe

  Winter comes to water as well as land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

  Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying your work.

  Home is the big house on Settlers Island, but Settlers Island, so called, is not really an island and for that reason is not named or accurately delineated on maps. Smash a barnacle with a stone and you will see inside the shape from which the beautiful barnacle goose takes its name. There is a thin and flaccid organ which is the goose’s neck and the mollusc’s siphon, and a shapeless body with tiny wings. Settlers Island is like that.

  The goose neck is a strip of land down which a country road runs. By whim, the mapmakers usually exaggerate the width of this and give no information to indicate that it is scarcely above the high tide. Thus Settlers Island appears to be a mere protuberance on the coast, not requiring a name - and since the village of eight or ten houses has none, nothing shows on the map but the spider line of road terminating at the sea.

  The village has no name, but home has two: a near and a far designation. On the island, and on the mainland nearby, it is called the Seaview place because in the earliest years of the century it was operated as a resort hotel. Mama calls it The House of 31 February; and that is on her stationery and is presumably used by her friends in New York and Philadelphia when they do not simply say, ‘Mrs. Babcock’s’. Home is four floors high in some places, less in others, and is completely surrounded by a veranda; it was once painted yellow, but the paint - outside - is mostly gone now and The House of 31 February is grey.

  Jason comes out of the front door with the little curly hairs on his chin trembling in the wind and his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his Levi’s. ‘Come on, you’re going into town with me. Your mother wants to rest.’

  ‘Hey tough!’ Into Jason’s Jaguar, feeling the leather upholstery soft and smelly; you fall asleep.

  Awake in town, bright lights flashing in the car windows. Jason is gone and the car is growing cold; you wait for what seems a long time, looking out at the shop windows, the big gun on the hip of the policeman who walks past, the lost dog who is afraid of everyone, even when you tap the glass and call to him.

  Then Jason is back with packages to put behind the seat. ‘Are we going home now?’

  He nods without looking at you, arranging his bundles so they won’t topple over, fastening his seatbelt.

  ‘I want to get out of the car.’

  He looks at you.

  ‘I want to go in a store. Come on, Jason.’

  Jason sighs. ‘All right, the drugstore over there, okay? Just for a minute.’

  The drugstore is as big as a supermarket, with long, bright aisles of glassware and notions and paper goods. Jason buys fluid for his lighter at the cigarette counter, and you bring him a book from a revolving wire rack. ‘Please, Jason?’

  He takes it from you and replaces it in the rack, then when you are in the car again takes it from under his jacket and gives it to you.

  It is a wonderful book, thick and heavy, with the edges of the pages tinted yellow. The covers are glossy stiff cardboard, and on the front is a picture of a man in rags fighting a thing partly like an ape and partly like a man, but much worse than either. The picture is in colour, and there is real blood on the ape-thing; the man is muscular and handsome, with tawny hair lighter than Jason’s and no beard.

  ‘You like that?’

  You are out of town already, and without the street lights it’s too dark in the car, almost, to see the picture. You nod.

  Jason laughs. ‘That’s camp. Did you know that?’

  You shrug, riffling the pages under your thumb, thinking of reading, alone, in your room tonight.

  ‘You going to tell your mom how nice I was to you?’

  ‘Uh-huh, sure. You want me to?’

  ‘Tomorrow, not tonight. I think she’ll be asleep when we get back. Don’t you wake her up.’ Jason’s voice says he will be angry if you do.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t come into her room.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The Jaguar says ‘Hutntntaaa ...’ down the road, and you can see the whitecaps in the moonlight now, and the driftwood pushed just off the asphalt.

 
‘You got a nice, soft mommy, you know that? When I climb on her it’s just like being on a big pillow.’

  You nod, remembering the times when, lonely and frightened by dreams, you have crawled into her bed and snuggled against her soft warmth - but at the same time angry, knowing Jason is somehow deriding you both.

  Home is silent and dark, and you leave Jason as soon as you can, bounding off down the hall and up the stairs ahead of him, up a second, narrow, twisted flight to your own room in the turret.

  ‘I had this story from a man who was breaking his word in telling it. How much it has suffered in his hands - I should say in his mouth, rather - I cannot say. In essentials it is true, and I give it to you as it was given to me. This is the story he told.