Orbit 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Cities of the Plain. What does that have to do with it?”

  “It strikes me that this figure has only appeared—thus far—when you are doing Proust. You said he followed you home. Does he also follow you into the Language Research Complex here? Is he outside in my reception room now?”

  “No.” David shook his head. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but you’re right; he doesn’t come here. He rides half a block behind me when I’m coming in the morning, then I lose him in the corridors on my way here to L.R.C., and don’t see him again until I go to class.” Suddenly he understood what the other man was driving at. “You think it’s my imagination, don’t you?” It was shocking, humiliating. He felt the blood surge into his face and was afraid to allow himself to say anything more for fear that he would actually insult Saunders.

  Saunders looked distressed. “We live in an age of tension, Paramore. You know the slogan: ‘Only one out of every twelve will never suffer mental illness.’ A person like yourself, hardworking, conscientious, perhaps a little introverted, is almost certain to have a little trouble sooner or later. Why do you think we have machines in the coffee shop selling the psycho-specific drugs?”

  “But other people see him too. The students do, in class—they look toward him, they giggle.” It was preposterous, but it was that which made him feel so helpless; if Saunders could not see the absurdity of his accusation at first glance, how could he be made to see it?

  “But they don’t speak to him?”

  “I told you that. I don’t speak to him myself; I don’t want to give him an opening.”

  “Undergraduates are liable to let their eyes wander during class, and they laugh at almost anything.” Saunders’ tone was soothing. “Perhaps if there were nothing there they might look at a spot toward which you yourself seemed to be staring.”

  “I refuse to continue this.” He stood up.

  Saunders half rose himself, thrusting out a hand in a gesture of apology. “Listen now, about this black figure; will you do what I ask you to?”

  “You’re head of the department.”

  “Fine. I want you to take the rest of the day, and the next four days, off from teaching. I’ll have Henderson take your classes. And don’t forget what I said about the psycho-specifics. Here—” Digging into a pocket, Saunders produced an opened packet still containing two rather linty para-reserpine capsules. “These ought to hold you until you can get some of your own; I’ll buy some more when I go to lunch.”

  David wanted to object, but only managed to say, “It is real.”

  “If it’s real, fine. I hope it is. And if so it will come to the classroom just as you say it has for the past three days and Henderson will report it to me. But in any case you should have a rest, Dave; you look ready to drop.”

  He threw the para-reserpine into the first trash recepticle he passed in the corridor, but following Saunders’ instructions did not go to his classes that day, and when he pedaled home in the evening he was not followed. Presumably, he reflected, the student under the black cloth was following poor old Henderson. He wondered how Henderson liked it.

  That evening he talked to Ruth as little as he decently could, saying nothing about his interview with Saunders. Long after she had dropped off to sleep, still propped up by pillows in her big bed, he remained awake, thinking about the black shape and speculating on the exact nature of the plot in which it must be involved. It was nearly daylight when it occurred to him that he might be able to frustrate it and that it was indeed his duty to do so.

  After much searching in the attic he found an old robe which would serve his purpose, and, providentially in the same box, a square-topped hat that would lend the correct shape to his head. The next morning, after he had carried up Ruth’s breakfast, he put them into a large grocery sack and rode to the campus with it clamped under his arm. Once in the study cell assigned him, he stowed it in an empty file drawer. A few minutes before the beginning of the final lecture period he left unobtrusively with the bundle again under his arm.

  In a rest room he put on the hat and flung the cloak over his head, reminded of how as a child he had believed that if his own eyes were concealed he could walk unseen by others, like Gollum with the One Ring. The old robe smelled musty and the cuts he had made in it were difficult to keep aligned with his eyes, but the hooded student, whoever he might be, would surely take him for a second member of the conspiracy sent to help him. He stepped onto the belt, and a moment later he was opening the door of the classroom that was normally his own.

  The other had not come yet. Neither, it seemed, had Henderson. He took a seat in the back of the room, grateful that the students seemed disposed to ignore him.

  The lights dimmed, and in the split second before the projector switched itself on, the realization that he knew what was about to come came rushing down upon him like a wind from the mountains, shrieking in his face.

  In bright primary colors the screen showed the rumpled bedroom with its cork-lined walls and the bearded man in the bed. Involuntarily the words formed themselves in his mind: For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.”... Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. . . . When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly hosts. It was the beginning of Swann’s Way again.

  He knew what was happening now, and when Mme. Swann’s victoria swung through the Porte Dauphine he crept silently out of the room to watch, invisible, his own bent form arrive on the belt; then reentered to see himself start with fear.

  Without lapse of time he found himself on his bicycle again, pursuing his own back under the towering white shapes of the sycamores. He pulled the gown from his face, letting it hang properly, and straightened the mortarboard on his head. Soon—the red and yellow leaves were racing past his ears—he would be back. Soon—he seemed to fly. He looked at his hands, and they were liver-spotted still, but the spots were fading. He would not teach. He would tell Ruth as they sat together in the folding tin chairs and listened to the droning speakers. He would not teach. He would wake up.

  <>

  * * * *

  How the Whip Came Back

  by Gene Wolfe

  Pretty Miss Bushnan’s suite was all red acrylic and green-dyed leather. Real leather, very modern—red acrylic and green, real leather were the modern things this year. But it made her Louis XIV secretary, Sal, look terribly out of place.

  Miss Bushnan had disliked the suite from the day she moved in—though she could hardly complain, when there was a chance that the entire city of Geneva and the sovereign Swiss nation might be offended. This evening she did her best to like red and green, and in the meantime turned her eyes from them to the cool relief of the fountain. It was a copy of a Cellini salt dish and lovely, no matter how silly a fountain indoors on the hundred and twenty-fifth floor might be. In a characteristic reversal of feeling she found herself wondering what sort of place she might have gotten if she had had to find one for herself, without reservations, at the height of the tourist season. Three flights up in some dingy suburbanpension, no doubt.

  So bless the generosity of the sovereign Swiss Republic. Bless the openhanded city of Geneva. Bless the hotel. And bless the United Nations Conference on Human Value, which brought glory to the Swiss Republic et cetera and inspired the free mountaineers to grant free hotel suites in the height of the season even to non-voting Conference observers such as she. Sal had brought her in a gibson a few minutes ago, and she picked it up from the edge of the fountain to sip, a little surprised to see that it was already three-quarters gone; red and green.

  A brawny, naked triton half-reclined, water streaming from his hair and beard, dripping from his mouth, dribbling
from his ears. His eyes, expressionless and smooth as eggs, wept for her. Balancing her empty glass carefully on the rim again, she leaned forward and stroked his smooth, wet stone flesh. Smiling she told him—mentally—how handsome he was, and he blushed pink lemonade at the compliment. She thought of herself taking off her clothes and climbing in with him, the cool water soothing her face which now felt hot and flushed. Not, she told herself suddenly, that she would feel any real desire for the triton in the unlikely event of his being metamorphosed to flesh. If she wanted men in her bed she could find ten any evening, and afterward edit the whole adventure from Sal’s memory bank. She wanted a man, but she wanted only one, she wanted Brad (whose real name, as the terrible, bitter woman who lived in the back of her skull, the woman the gibson had not quite drowned, reminded her, had proved at his trial to be Aaron). The triton vanished and Brad was there instead, laughing and dripping Atlantic water on the sand as he threw up his arms to catch the towel she flung him. Brad running through the surf . . .

  Sal interrupted her revery, rolling in on silent casters. “A gentleman to see you, Miss Bushnan.” Sal had real metal drawer-pulls on her false drawers, and they jingled softly when she stopped to deliver her message, like costume jewelry.

  “Who?” Miss Bushnan straightened up, pushing a stray wisp of brown hair away from her face.

  Sal said blankly, “I don’t know.” The gibson had made Miss Bushnan feel pleasantly muzzy, but even so the blankness came through as slightly suspicious.

  “He didn’t give you his name or a card?”

  “He did, Miss Bushnan, but I can’t read it. Even though, as I’m sure you’re already aware, Miss Bushnan, there’s an Italian language software package for me for only two hundred dollars. It includes reading, writing, speaking, and an elementary knowledge of great Italian art.”

  “The advertising package,” Miss Bushnan said with wasted sarcasm, “is free. And compulsory with your lease.”

  “Yes,” Sal said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Miss Bushnan swung around in the green leather chair from which she had been watching the fountain. “He did give you a card. I see it in one of your pigeonholes. Take it out and look at it.”

  As if the Louis XIV secretary had concealed a silver snake, one of Sal’s arms emerged. With steel fingers like nails it took the card and held it in front of a swirl of ornament hiding a scanner.

  “Now,” Miss Bushnan said patiently, “pretend that what you’re reading isn’t Italian. Let’s say instead that it’s English that’s been garbled by a translator post-processor error. What’s your best guess at the original meaning?”

  “ ‘His Holiness Pope Honorius V.’ “

  “Ah.” Miss Bushnan sat up in her chair. “Please show the gentleman in.”

  With a faint hum of servomotors Sal rolled away. There was just time for a last fragment of daydream. Brad with quiet eyes alone with her on the beach at Cape Cod. Talking about the past, talking about the divorce, Brad really, really sorry . . .

  The Pope wore a plain dark suit and a white satin tie embroidered in gold with the triple crown. He was an elderly man, never tall and now stooped. Miss Bushnan rose. She sat beside him every day at the council sessions, and had occasionally exchanged a few words with him during the refreshment breaks (he had a glass of red wine usually, she good English tea or the horrible Swiss coffee laced with brandy), but it had never so much as occurred to her that he might ever have anything to discuss with her in private.

  “Your Holiness,” she said as smoothly as the gibson would let her manage the unfamiliar words, “this is an unexpected pleasure.”

  Sal chimed in with, “May we offer you something?” and looking sidelong Miss Bushnan saw that she had put Scotch, a bottle of club soda, and two glasses of ice on her fold-out writing shelf.

  The Pope waved her away, and when he had settled in his chair said pointedly, “I deeply appreciate your hospitality, but I wonder if it would be possible to speak with you privately.”

  Miss Bushnan said, “Of course,” and waited until Sal had coasted off in the direction of the kitchen. “My secretary bothers you, Your Holiness?”

  Taking a cigar from the recesses of his coat, the Pope nodded. “I’m afraid she does. I have never had much sympathy with furniture that talks—you don’t mind if I smoke?” He had only the barest trace of Italian accent.

  “If it makes you more comfortable I should prefer it.”

  He smiled in appreciation of the little speech, and struck an old-fashioned kitchen match on the imitation marble of the fountain. It left no mark, and when he tossed in the matchstick a moment later, it bobbed only twice in the crystal water before being whisked away. “I suppose I’m out of date,” the Pope continued. “But back in my youth when people speculated about the possibility of those things we always thought of them as being shaped more or less like us. Something like a suit of armor.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Miss Bushnan said. “You might as well shape a radio like a human mouth—or a TV screen like a keyhole.”

  The Pope chuckled. “I didn’t say I was going to defend the idea. I only remarked that that was what we expected.”

  “I’m sure they must have considered it, but—”

  “But too much extra work would have had to go into just making it look human,” the Pope continued for her, “and besides, a furniture cabinet is much cheaper than articulated metal and doesn’t make the robot look dead when it’s turned off.”

  She must have looked flustered because he continued, smiling, “You Americans are not the only manufacturers, you see. It happens that a friend of mine is president of Olivetti. A skeptic like all of them today, but...”

  The sentence trailed away in a shrug and a puff of smoke from the black cigar. Miss Bushnan recalled the time she had asked the French delegate about him. The French delegate was handsome in that very clean and spare fashion some Frenchmen have, and she liked him better than the paunchy businessman who represented her own country.

  “You do not know who the man who sits by you is, mademoiselle?” he asked quizzically. “But that is most interesting. You see, I know who he is, but I do not know who you are. Except that I see you each day and you are much more pretty than the lady from Russia or the lady from Nigeria, and perhaps in your way as chic as that bad girl who reports on us for Le Figaro— but I hope not quite so full of tricks. Now I will trade you information.”

  So she had had to tell him, feeling more like a fool each second as the milling crush of secretaries of delegates, and secretaries of secretaries, and unidentifiable people from the Swiss embassies of all the participating nations, swirled around them. When she had finished he said, “Ah, it is kind of you to work for charity, and especially for one that does not pay you, but is it necessary? This is no longer the twentieth century after all, and the governments take care of most of us quite well.”

  “That’s what most people think; I suppose that’s why so few give much any more. But we try to bring a little human warmth to the people we help, and I find I meet the class of people I want to meet in connection with it. I mean my co-workers, of course. It’s really rather exclusive.”

  He said, “How very great-hearted you are,” with a little twist to the corner of his mouth that made her feel like a child talking to a grown-up. “But you asked the identity of the old gentleman. He is Pope.”

  “Who?” Then she had realized what the word meant and added, “I thought there weren’t any more.”

  “Oh no.” The French delegate winked. “It is still there. Much, much smaller, but still there . . . But we are so crowded here, and I think you are tired of standing. Let me buy you a liqueur and I will tell you all about it.”

  He had taken her to a place at the top of some building overlooking the lake, and it had been very pleasant listening to the waiters pointing him out in whispers to the tourists, even though the tourists were mostly Germans and no one anyone knew. They were given a table next to the window of c
ourse, and while they sipped and smoked and looked at the lake he told her, with many digressions, about a great-aunt who had been what he called “a believer” and two ex-wives who had not. (History at Radcliffe had somehow left her with the impression that the whole thing had stopped with John XXIII, just as the Holy Roman Empire had managed to vanish out of sheer good manners when it was no longer wanted. On the teaching machines you filled in a table of Holy Roman Emperors and Popes and Sultans and such things by touching multiple-choice buttons. Then when you had it all done the screen glowed with rosy light for a minute— which was called reinforcement—and told you your grade. After which, unless you were lucky, there was another table to be filled—but Popes had disappeared and you put the Kings of Sweden in that column instead.)

  She remembered having asked the French delegate, “There are only a hundred thousand left? In the whole world?”

  “That is my guess, of real believers. Of course many more who continue to use the name and perhaps have their children wetted if they think of it. It may be that that is too low—say a quarter million. But it has been growing less for a long time. Eventually—who knows? It may turn about and grow more. It would not be the first time that happened.”