Orbit 13 - [Anthology] Read online

  “No, no, no, we are men,” Jorge Segundo cried out, very much as the brindled ape Joe Sunrise had cried out the same words. “We are the lords of creation. Ours is the world civilization. We are the First Age of Mankind.”

  “You were the Second Age of Apedom,” the man said, “and an abridged and defective age it has been. I intuit that there have been other such unsatisfactory half-ages or no-ages. Ah, and I am responsible for getting rid of the clutter you have left.”

  The magic had suddenly gone out of the seven persons or erstwhile persons. Pieces of it that had fallen off them seemed to shine like jellyfish on the ground.

  “We have fission, we have space travel,” Hatari Nahub protested. “We have great cities and structures of every sort.”

  “I intuit all this,” the man said. “You are a hiving species, but your hives and structures do not have the style of those of the bower-birds or the honeybees or the African termites. I have wondered a little though, how you build up these ferroconcrete hives that you call cities. Do you accrete them by deposits of you regurgitations or your excrement after you have eaten limestone and iron ore? It’s a grotesque way, but the blind and instinctive actions of such hive creatures as yourselves always seem grotesque to thinking creatures such as myself. Such mindlessness, such waste in all that you do! The ferroconcrete and wood and stone and chrome hive-colonies that you construct for the billions of inmates, they are more strange, more mindless, of less use than would be so many great anthills. Go now, you mindless hiving folk. You tire me.”

  “But we have civilization; we have the electromagnetic complex and the nuclear complex,” Charley Mikakeh challenged.

  “And the firefly has a light in his tail,” the man said. “Go. Your short day is done.”

  “But we have all the arts,” Toy Tonk claimed, and she was very near the art of tears.

  “Can you sing like the mockingbird or posture like the peacock?” the man asked. “What arts do you have? Go now.”

  (This was not really a long argument. The crows, had argued much longer, and just for the jabbering fun of it. Besides, this was happening at the same time that all the other decisions were being given.)

  “We will not go. You have not named us yet,” Helen Rubric spoke.

  “It will be better if I do not speak your name,” the man said. “You will shrivel enough without. Go back to your hive cities and decay in their decay. Your speech now becomes gibberish and you begin your swift decline.”

  “Why, I know who you are now,” Lisa Baron exclaimed. “You are the Genesis Myth. In fact you are the Par the no-Genesis Myth. Is it not strange that no language has a masculine form of ‘parthen,’ and yet it appears to be the oldest. Now I know why the myth is in pain. From your side, will it be? I am a doctor, among other things. May I assist?”

  “No,” the man said. “You may not. And know you something else, female of the unnamed species: every myth comes true when enough time has run. There was a great myth about the earthworm once. There was even a sort of myth about yourselves. And you, creature, have a little more than the rest of your kindred. It seems a shame that you have already come and gone before the scene itself begins.”

  “We have not gone, we will not go,” Antole Keshish insisted. “Everyone is of some use. What can we offer?” Then his tongue lost its cunning forever.

  “You can offer only your submission and retrogression,” the man said.

  “Ah, but tell us finally, what is our real name?” Hatari Nahub asked. Those were the last true words he ever spoke.

  “Your name is ape,” the man said. “Really your name is ‘secondary ape.’“

  There were fair and dark visages, and blue and gray and brown eyes shining with tears. The seven followed the other seven away, speechless forever, shedding their robes and wrappings, knowing that the blight was already upon their already obsolete world-hives, knowing that their minds and talents were dimmed, and then not really knowing anything, ever again.

  <>

  * * * *

  Edward Bryant

  GOING WEST

  HIS NAME was Lindsey.

  They (mother, stepbrother, older sister) reared him on a farm in upstate New York. Raised from the potent germ plasm of a father lately dead in Cambodia, Lindsey endured a generally happy childhood. The stepbrother, product of an earlier marriage, served as a surrogate father until he was killed pulling a service-station holdup in Rochester. Eleven at the time, Lindsey cried in his mother’s arms, then returned to the woods behind the house to play with his soldiers.

  In his infancy: Lindsey’s mother read some arcane predecessor of Dr. Spock and decided not to make the same mistake she had perpetuated through her first two children; she made a point of never holding Lindsey more than a minute, and then never rocking him. When it was too late, she read in the medical section of Time that physical contact is essential for the development of a child’s motor skills. She wondered, then shrugged off the knowledge. Lindsey grew older in a frangible world, wondering why he alone stumbled over obstacles others easily avoided.

  In his childhood: Naturally shy, Lindsey found himself increasingly alone and lonely when he started town school. His stepbrother neglected to teach him how to play baseball or fight. His sister never taught him to dance. Lindsey inhabited the periphery of his peers’ world, and he felt the pain.

  Every recess Lindsey went to the school bus parking lot. He played alone among the buses, their high, yellow flanks reminding him of animals. He gradually discovered the buses’ names and personalities.

  Crosstown busing for integration came to Lindsey’s city. One night someone dynamited one of the buses at his school. When he saw the burned-out wreckage in the morning, Lindsey collapsed. The school nurse took him home and he spent the next week in bed with a high fever. The doctor diagnosed the cause as a virus.

  When Lindsey returned to school, the bus parking lot was surrounded by a chain-link fence twice as high as he. All recess he looked through the mesh; the school buses returned his gaze from forlorn headlights.

  In his youth: Lindsey won a Regent’s scholarship and went off to college to become a certified public accountant. It was actually his mother’s idea. Lindsey lived with three roommates in a sterile new apartment building across the street from campus. He bought a tenspeed Sohwinn and kept it chained to the outside stairs. After a month, Lindsey realized that someone was spitting on the seat of his bicycle.

  His roommates suggested he was paranoid.

  Lindsey grew to dread returning from class to discover the iridescent spittle on his bicycle. He carried a handkerchief used only to wipe off the seat. Lindsey stayed home from classes one entire morning, hoping to catch the phantom expectorator. Nothing happened until noon, when Lindsey left the window and went into the bathroom to relieve a painful bladder. When he returned, he checked the bike. Someone had spat on the seat.

  A month later someone cut the locking chain with boltcutters and stole the bicycle.

  “You see,” said Lindsey to his roommates. “You see!”

  * * * *

  Stripes; they zip-zipped past the left side of his car, disappearing somewhere close under the front fender, then reappearing in the rear-view mirror, to recede into a vanishing perspective. Lindsey counted endlessly in his mind, all the way across Nebraska, about five hundred miles. Six feet of white stripe, six of black asphalt, six of white again, past Omaha and Lincoln, Grand Island and Hershey, North Platte. One day earlier it had been Newark and Allentown, McKeesport and Columbus. Stripes and stripes, cut along a hypnotic dotted line from coast to coast.

  Out of habit, Lindsey turned on the radio. Interference from the power towers beside the highway dismembered the music, saw blade biting obliquely into wet wood.

  It was early morning and enough sun up behind him so he could turn off the headlights. Lindsey inventoried stripes, but over ten the numbers became meaningless. “Zip, zippety zip,” he mumbled, counting the stripes individually as they
slipped under and into the rear-view mirror. The great attraction of the stripes was their utter lack of variation. Thousands upon thousands during the night, and only a dozen seemed to have been deformed. He wasn’t sure he had been fully awake all the time.

  Signs swept past, but Lindsey couldn’t integrate letters with meanings until he was jarred into alertness by a day-glo cowboy. HOWDY, PODNUH, read the sign. FOOD SIX MILES. Lindsey looked at the fuel gauge.

  “Hay and water,” said Lindsey. “Curry him down, isn’t that right?”

  “What?” said the filling station boy. “Fill her up?”

  “Right, podnuh,” said Lindsey, walking off toward the sign FOOD. He leaned against the steel jamb of the door for a moment and took a deep breath. The clean prairie air scored his mind with a terrible clarity; Lindsey reeled. A Minnesota tourist couple seated at a table by the window thought he was drunk and ignored him.

  Lindsey grinned and assumed a sober posture. The Minnesotans studied their plates of steaming buffalo sausage. The chill rigidity of the jamb passed into Lindsey’s fingers and down his backbone; he entered the restaurant.

  The skeg: I’m Lindsey, he thought, looking around the dining room for an empty booth. Not Lindsay or Lindsy. Certainly not Veach. Veach was a fag who entered the office mornings with a flourish of violet—scent and shirts. Veach’s face, framed in the doorway of Lindsey’s office, said, “Hey Lindy, come home with me tonight and meet the wife?” Ritual, almost daily joke for two years. Lindsey said automatically into his ledger, “No thanks, not tonight. Mona’s having friends over.” For the first months Veach had frightened him. Veach took note and was amused.

  Not Lindsay or Lindsay, old or young. The older Lindsay had founded the firm just after one of the Great Wars. There was never a question to whom he was referring—Lindsay or Lindsey. A Harvard man, unselfconscious aristocrat, his pronunciation always came down hard on the a. He tolerated Veach out of a perverse democratic fascination, and he thought Lindsey was a good solid worker.

  The son Lindsay had attended the University of Southern California. He slurred his words, and his meanings all came from contextual clues. He would rather have been someone other than a CPA.

  Lindsay, Lindsay, Linsey, and Veach. A firm firm, thought Lindsey, which is losing its grip. Veach always knew the difference between the Lindsays and the Lindsey; but Veach was—

  “Guhmorninmistuhwhatcherwant?” like a garbled readout from the office terminal.

  “Mona,” Veach learned to say. “Who the hell’s Mona?”

  Persistent, the waitress hovered impatiently at Lindsey’s elbow. “Black coffee,” he said.

  “Nothin’ else?”

  It’s too quiet in this apartment. The stereo is up and the street buffets the windows, but it’s too silent. All sound sinks into the green-flowered wallpaper.

  If there were movement, if there were warmth...

  If she were in the kitchen, fixing breakfast.

  If . . .

  There is movement and there is warmth.

  She is in the kitchen fixing breakfast.

  Sure you don’t mind?

  Of course not. I love making your breakfast.

  Never mind; come here. I don’t want breakfast. Only you.

  “You all right?” The waitress looked at him suspiciously.

  “Just coffee,” said Lindsey. “Leave the pot.” The waitress left.

  The coffee was hot and caustic. Lindsey patiently cooled it with his spoon, a steel hull constantly filling and sinking and carrying him to cooler depths. The two men in the next booth were talking, and Lindsey listened.

  “Look at the headlines,” one declared, crackling the newspaper. “New York Man Sought in Nebraska.” He traversed the page with his finger. “Supposed Psychopath Sighted Near Omaha.”

  They both studied the photograph.

  Lindsey slouched low in his seat.

  “What did he do?” said the nearer man in the next booth.

  “Assault,” said the man with the paper. “Beat up a doctor.”

  Lindsey surfaced from dreams raggedly, limbs jerking in small spasms. He awoke and Mona would be close, very warm and reassuring. Her stroking fingers calmed him. Her voice soothed, cradled him until he could sleep peacefully. No dreams then, not until morning when he awoke to dirty sunlight in the city.

  The waitress slapped down the lime-green check. Lindsey reached for his wallet. “Pay the cashier.”

  On his way out of the restaurant, Lindsey slipped a quarter into a vending machine and took out a copy of the newspaper. One headline read, NEW YORK AIR ALERT IN EIGHTH DAY. The other read, NO AGREEMENT IN YUCATAN. The front page photo was of the president of Mexico. Lindsey dropped the paper in the KEEP AMERICA CLEANER receptacle.

  Again the stripes zip-zipped past, all the way across arid Wyoming. Lindsey surrendered to their peaceful procession. A hum rose loud and louder in his ears until it drowned the motor and road noise. The road ahead constricted to a view seen through a tunnel. Lindsey took another of the red pills his doctor had prescribed for appetite-suppression during college. It stuck in his throat and he had to swallow repeatedly.

  Across the Utah border there were white airplane silhouettes painted on the pavement. With his limited knowledge of the Mormon culture, Lindsey assumed they were stylized seagulls. A public service billboard informed him that the road was under radar surveillance from aircraft. Lindsey reduced the ancient Camaro’s speed to five miles above the speed limit.

  Just before sunset on the salt flats, Lindsey invented a new game. He focused his left eye on the line of stripes coming toward him from the west. He focused his right eye on the rear-view mirror where the stripes receded into the distance. A dozen times his peripheral vision barely saved him from death. Twelve angry drivers drove toward Salt Lake, shouting silent curses back across the desert.

  “You idiot, you wanna get killed?”

  There was a need for running. They were driving him crazy.

  Go west, young man. So he went west.

  In Wendover, on the Nevada state line, Lindsey discovered he had taken the wrong turn for Los Angeles.

  “You wanted Interstate Fifteen,” said the wrinkled man, handing Lindsey a Chevron roadmap. “You’re headed for San Francisco.”

  “So I’m lost,” Lindsey admitted. “Help me.”

  They spread the map on the service-station counter above the gum and candy. “Bear south on U.S. Alternate Fifty. ‘Bout a hundred miles it runs into U.S. Ninety-three. That puts you right into Vegas and then it’s freeway all the way to LA. All downhill.”

  “Thanks,” said Lindsey, folding the map along the wrong creases.

  “You better get some rest.”

  “I’m fine,” said Lindsey, “but I’m late.”

  The service-station man called across the tarmac, “You remind me of that white rabbit in that kids’ book—sayin’ ‘I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.’ You got something important?”

  “A very important date,” said Lindsey. He looked at his watch. It had stopped at three twenty; he had forgotten to wind it.

  “What?” said the service-station man.

  “I’m late,” said Lindsey, looking back at him blankly.

  Left turn, right turn, Lindsey stopped his car at the junction and slumped forward, resting his forehead on the wheel. Choices—San Francisco and Los Angeles both meant California. San Francisco . . . something about fog and damp. He was too tired to consider more than simplicities; there was something mythic about Los Angeles. Hating decisions, he surged blindly into the intersection.

  For the first time he drove along two-lane black-top. The constant white dashes were now supplemented on curves and hills by continuous yellow stripes. Lindsey marked the addition.

  He encountered little traffic on the Nevada highway, yet the road was strewn with dead animals: rabbits, porcupines, even an occasional badger. Once he had to swerve to avoid something so massive it could only have been a dead cow. He
opened his window to the cold night air and after many miles realized that the scent coming into the car was the odor of corruption.

  Seventy miles south of Wendover he pulled off the road. He urinated in the barrow pit beneath the cold sky and stars. The desert tried to retain him. Lindsey thought of the highway department crew finding his frozen body in the morning, standing spraddle-legged and stiff, jutting a yellow rainbow into the east. When he got back into the car it was like slamming a refrigerator door. Lindsey turned the heater controls all the way up and the car began to smell of dust.

  At a truckstop south of Ely, he stopped briefly for gasoline. As Lindsey pulled out of the service area, he passed a hitchhiker. The man waited on the shoulder of the highway beneath a mercury lamp and extended a tentative thumb. Lindsey’s foot hesitated on the accelerator. He looked through the window at the hitchhiker; the man looked back from shadowed, invisible eyes. The hitchhiker was tall and thin, with a dark tapered beard. He was wrapped in heavy, shabby clothing, and carried a canvas rucksack slung over one shoulder.