Orbit 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  I told him what was troubling me and he laughed. “I’m an old hand. Funny, but while you were worrying about me I was fretting about you and the boss and the rest of you; wondering if you’ll be all right when I leave.”

  “About us?” Frankly I was shocked.

  “Uh-huh.” He swung the snow jeep around a fallen tree. “I know there are a lot of these completely automated stations operating successfully, but I still worry.”

  Completely automated? I suppose in a sense Mark was right, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. I said as gently as I could, “We’re designed for it, Mark. This is our home out here. If anyone’s out of place it’s you, and I’m sure the station boss and all of us will feel a lot less concern when you go to one of the cities.”

  Mark didn’t say anything to that, but I could see he didn’t really agree. To change the subject I said, “The bears will be going into hibernation soon, I suppose. Then we won’t have to worry about them.”

  “Most of them are in already.” Mark sounded like a bear himself. “The one we had around camp was probably an old male; some of them don’t go until the last bit of food’s gone, and they’ll stick their heads out any time during the winter when there’s a little stretch of better than average weather.”

  I know all that, of course. I had asked the question to give him something to talk about that wouldn’t hurt his pride. It worked, too. Bears around camp are always a problem, and he told bear stories for the rest of that day as we picked our way north.

  The storm came on our fifth day out, but we were expecting it and had made ourselves as secure as possible, pitching our tent in a sheltered spot and weighing down the edges with rocks until it looked almost like a stone house. The storm kept us there for three days, but when it was over we could put the skis on the snow jeep and skim along where we had had to pick our way before. We looked in on the sea otter rookeries north of the abandoned city of Kivalina, then followed the coast north toward Point Hope. We were still about two days’ travel south of it when the second storm came.

  That one held us five days, and when it was over Mark decided we’d better cut our tour short and head back toward the station. We dug the snow jeep out of the drifts and got ready to leave, but when Mark engaged the transmission the engine died and would not restart.

  I know very little about turbines—I’ve only so much program capacity after all—but Mark seemed to be quite familiar with them, so while I built a snow wall to give him some shelter from the wind, he tore the engine down.

  A drive shaft bearing race had shattered. It was broken so badly it wouldn’t even keep the shaft in place, much less allow it to turn. It had jammed the turbine, and the overtorque breaker was what had actually shut down the engine; the trouble with the bearing had probably been due to cold-shortness, the weakness that will make an ax head fly into a thousand pieces sometimes when it’s been left outside all night in sub-zero cold and you slam it into a frozen knot. All our equipment is supposed to be tested against it, but apparently this slipped through, or more likely, as Mark says, some mechanic doing an overhaul made an unauthorized substitution.

  For as long as the battery lasted we tried to raise the station boss on the radio, but the cold reduced its efficiency so badly that we were forced to disconnect it from time to time so that we could carry it into the tent to warm up. For a while we considered tearing the entire radio out of the jeep so that we could take it inside, but we were afraid we’d damage something in the process (neither of us were too clear on how closely its wiring was integrated with the jeep’s), and by the time we had about made up our minds to do it, the battery failed completely.

  After that we had to reassess our position pretty thoroughly and we did, sitting by our little stove in the tent that night. Mark had food for at least ten days more, twenty with rationing, but it was too heavy to carry with us together with our other gear, and the loss of the snow jeep’s engine meant no more power-pack recharges for me. We decided the smart thing to do was to stay with the jeep and our equipment, making what we had last as long as possible. We could burn the jeep’s fuel in our stove, and if we kept the snow off it, just having it near us would make us a lot more visible to a search party than we would be otherwise. When we failed to return from our tour on schedule the station boss would send someone after us, and if we conserved what we had we thought he ought to find us in pretty good shape.

  At first everything went quite well. I cut my pack transformer ratio: first to .5, then as the days went by to .3 without seeming to lose too much. I wasn’t strong, of course, but as I told Mark it kept my monitor on, kept me going, and I didn’t feel too bad. If you’re not familiar with us, you who are hearing this tape, you may wonder why I didn’t simply turn myself off altogether and instruct Mark to reactivate me when rescue came. The reason is that my memory is dependent on subminiature semiconductor chips which make up bistable circuits. When there is no electromotive force on them, the semiconductors “forget” their position, and that would mean wiping out every memory I possess—the total erasure of my personality as well as the loss of all my training.

  Two days ago Mark built this hut of earth and snow for us with the tent as a liner, but I was too weak to help him much. The truth is that for the past week I have been simply lying here conserving as much energy as I can. Yesterday Mark went out and was able to shoot a seal on the beach, and when he dragged it inside I know he thought I was dead. He knelt beside me and passed his hand in front of my eyes, then slipped it inside my parka to feel the place in my chest above the heaters that prevent my hydraulic pump’s freezing. There was so little current that he felt nothing, and I could see him shake his head as he drew his hand out.

  I should not have done it, but for some reason that made me angry, and I turned up the power to my speaker until I could make myself heard and said, “I’m alive, Mark. Don’t junk me yet.”

  He said, “I wouldn’t junk you, Eyebem.”

  Then it all burst out of me, all the horror and frustration of these past days. I shouldn’t have talked to Mark that way, he has never done me any harm and in fact has done whatever he could to help me, but I lost control of myself. Perhaps the long period at reduced voltage had something to do with it. Perhaps I am going mad, but I told him over and over how unjust it was: “We are the advance of the future, not you men. All your stupid human history has been just your own replacement by us, and there’s nothing, not one thing, that you can do that we can’t do better. Why don’t you help me?” I suppose I was raving.

  He only took my hand and said, “I’ll think of something, Eyebem; turn down your power before you exhaust yourself.”

  And now another storm has come up, which means that whoever has been sent out to look for me, if anyone has, is pinned down just as we are; sitting in his tent while my power drains ampere by ampere, electron by electron on the way to nothing while Mark lies across from me in the dark eating his filthy seal blubber. Has the half-hour loop completed its cycle yet? Have I already erased the last beginning I made? I have no way of knowing.

  I am lying, I say again, in the dark. . . .

  <>

  * * * *

  Continued on Next Rock

  by R. A. Lafferty

  Up in the Big Lime country there is an upthrust, a chimney rock that is half fallen against a newer hill. It is formed of what is sometimes called Dawson Sandstone and is interlaced with tough shell. It was formed during the glacial and recent ages in the bottomlands of Crow Creek and Green River when these streams (at least five times) were mighty rivers.

  The chimney rock is only a little older than mankind, only a little younger than grass. Its formation had been upthrust and then eroded away again, all but such harder parts as itself and other chimneys and blocks.

  A party of five persons came to this place where the chimney rock had fallen against a newer hill. The people of the party did not care about the deep limestone below: they were not geologists. They did care ab
out the newer hill (it was man-made) and they did care a little about the rock chimney; they were archaeologists.

  Here was time leaped up, bulging out in casing and accumulation, and not in line sequence. And here also was striated and banded time, grown tall, and then shattered and broken.

  The five party members came to the site early in the afternoon, bringing the working trailer down a dry creek bed. They unloaded many things, and made a camp there. It wasn’t really necessary to make a camp on the ground. There was a good motel two miles away on the highway; there was a road along the ridge above. They could have lived in comfort and made the trip to the site in five minutes every morning. Terrence Burdock, however, believed that one could not get the feel of a digging unless he lived on the ground with it day and night. .

  The five persons were Terrence Burdock, his wife Ethyl, Robert Derby, and Howard Steinleser: four beautiful and balanced people. And Magdalen Mobley who was neither beautiful nor balanced. But she was electric; she was special. They rouched around in the formations a little after they had made camp and while there was still light. All of them had seen the formations before and had guessed that there was promise in them.

  ‘That peculiar fluting in the broken chimney is almost like a core sample,’ Terrence said, ‘and it differs from the rest of it. It’s like a lightning bolt through the whole length. It’s already exposed for us. I believe we will remove the chimney entirely. It covers the perfect access for the slash in the mound, and it is the mound in which we are really interested. But we’ll study the chimney first. It is so available for study.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you everything that’s in the chimney,’ Magdalen said crossly. ‘I can tell you everything that’s in the mound too.’

  ‘I wonder why we take the trouble to dig if you already know what we will find,’ Ethyl sounded archly.

  ‘I wonder too,’ Magdalen grumbled. ‘But we will need the evidence and the artifacts to show. You can’t get appropriations without evidence and artifacts. Robert, go kill that deer in the brush about forty yards northeast of the chimney. We may as well have deer meat if we’re living primitive.’

  ‘This isn’t deer season,’ Robert Derby objected. ‘And there isn’t any deer there. Or, if there is, it’s down in the draw where you couldn’t see it. And if there’s one there, it’s probably a doe.’

  ‘No, Robert, it is a two-year-old buck and a very big one. Of course it’s in the draw where I can’t see it. Forty yards northeast of the chimney would have to be in the draw. If I could see it, the rest of you could see it too. Now go kill it! Are you a man or a mus microtus? Howard, cut poles and set up a tripod to string and dress the deer on.’

  ‘You had better try the thing, Robert,’ Ethyl Burdock said, ‘or we’ll have no peace this evening.’

  Robert Derby took a carbine and went northeastward of the chimney, descending into the draw at forty yards. There was the high ping of the carbine shot. And after some moments, Robert returned with a curious grin.

  ‘You didn’t miss him, Robert, you killed him,’ Magdalen called loudly. ‘You got him with a good shot through the throat and up into the brain when he tossed his head high like they do. Why didn’t you bring him? Go back and get him!’

  ‘Get him? I couldn’t even lift the thing. Terrence and Howard, come with me and we’ll lash it to a pole and get it here somehow.’

  ‘Oh Robert, you’re out of your beautiful mind,’ Magdalen chided. ‘It only weighs a hundred and ninety pounds. Oh, I’ll get it.’

  Magdalen Mobley went and got the big buck. She brought it back, carrying it listlessly across her shoulders and getting herself bloodied, stopping sometimes to examine rocks and kick them with her foot, coming on easily with her load. It looked as if it might weigh two hundred and fifty pounds; but if Magdalen said it weighed a hundred and ninety, that is what it weighed.

  Howard Steinleser had cut poles and made a tripod. He knew better than not to. They strung the buck up, skinned it off, ripped up its belly, drew it, and worked it over in an almost professional manner.

  ‘Cook it, Ethyl,’ Magdalen said.

  * * * *

  Later, as they sat on the ground around the fire and it had turned dark, Ethyl brought the buck’s brains to Magdalen, messy and not half cooked, believing that she was playing an evil trick. And Magdalen ate them avidly. They were her due. She had discovered the buck.

  If you wonder how Magdalen knew what invisible things were where, so did the other members of the party always wonder.

  ‘It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology,’ Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. ‘The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and undersurface of the earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It has its upthrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.’

  ‘And it has its glaciations,’ Ethyl Burdock said, and perhaps she was looking at her husband in the dark.

  ‘The mind has its hard sandstone, sometimes transmuted to quartz, or half transmuted into flint, from the drifting and floating sand of daily events. It has its shale from the old mud of daily ineptitudes and inertias. It has limestone out of its more vivid experiences, for lime is the remnant of what was once animate: and this limestone may be true marble if it is the deposit of rich enough emotion, or even travertine if it has bubbled sufficiently through agonized and evocative rivers of the under-mind. The mind has its sulphur and its gem-stones—’ Terrence bubbled on sufficiently, and Magdalen cut him off.

  ‘Say simply that we have rocks in our heads,’ she said. ‘But they’re random rocks, I tell you, and the same ones keep coming back. It isn’t the same with us as it is with the earth. The world gets new rocks all the time. But it’s the same people who keep turning up, and the same minds. Damn, one of the samest of them just turned up again! I wish he’d leave me alone. The answer is still no.’

  Very often Magdalen said things that made no sense. Ethyl Burdock assured herself that neither her husband, nor Robert, nor Howard, had slipped over to Magdalen in the dark. Ethyl was jealous of the chunky and surly girl.

  ‘I am hoping that this will be as rich as Spiro Mound,’ Howard Steinleser hoped. ‘It could be, you know. I’m told that there was never a less prepossessing site than that, or a trickier one. I wish we had someone who had dug at Spiro.’

  ‘Oh, he dug at Spiro,’ Magdalen said with contempt.

  ‘He? Who?’ Terrence Burdock asked. ‘No one of us was at Spiro. Magdalen, you weren’t even born yet when that mound was opened. What could you know about it?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember him at Spiro,’ Magdalen said, ‘always turning up his own things and pointing them out.’

  ‘Were you at Spiro?’ Terrence suddenly asked a piece of the darkness. For some time, they had all been vaguely aware that there were six, and not five, persons around the fire.

  ‘Yeah, I was at Spiro,’ the man said. ‘I dig there. I dig at a lot of the digs. I dig real well, and I always know when we come to something that will be important. You give me a job.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Terrence asked him. The man was pretty visible now. The flame of the fire seemed to lean towards him as if he compelled it.

  ‘Oh, I’m just a rich old poor man who keeps following and hoping and asking. There is one who is worth it all forever, so I solicit that one forever. And sometimes I am other things. Two hours ago I was the deer in the draw. It is an odd thing to munch one’s own flesh.’ And the man was munching a joint of the deer, unasked.

  ‘Him and his damn cheap poetry!’ Magdalen cried angrily.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Terrence asked him.

  ‘Manypenny. Anteros Manypenny is my name forever.’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Oh, just Indian. Shawn
ee, Choc, Creek, Anadarko, Caddo and pre-Caddo. Lots of things.’

  ‘How could anyone be pre-Caddo?’

  ‘Like me. I am.’

  ‘Is Anteros a Creek name?’

  ‘No. Greek. Man, I am a going Jessie, I am one digging man! I show you tomorrow.’

  Man, he was one digging man! He showed them tomorrow. With a short-handled rose hoe he began the gash in the bottom of the mound, working too swiftly to be believed.

  ‘He will smash anything that is there. He will not know what he comes to,’ Ethyl Burdock complained.

  ‘Woman, I will not smash whatever is there,’ Anteros said. ‘You can hide a wren’s egg in one cubic metre of sand. I will move all the sand in one minute. I will uncover the egg wherever it is. And I will not crack the egg. I sense these things. I come now to a small pot of the proto-Plano period. It is broken, of course, but I do not break it. It is in six pieces and they will fit together perfectly. I tell you this beforehand. Now I reveal it.’