Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  Argaven looked at them, face after face, the bowed heads and the unbowed.

  “I am Argaven,” she said. “I was king. Who reigns now in Karhide?”

  “Emran,” one answered.

  “My child Emran?”

  “Yes, my liege,” old Bannith said; most of the faces were blank; but Ker said in her fierce shaking voice, “Argaven, Argaven reigns in Karhide! I have lived to see the bright days return. Long live the king!”

  One of the younger ones looked at the others, and said resolutely, “So be it. Long live the king!” And all the heads bowed low.

  Argaven took their homage unperturbed, but as soon as a moment came when she could address Horrsed the Plenipotentiary alone she demanded, “What is this? What has happened? Why was I misled? I was told I was to come here to assist you, as an aide, from the Ekumen— “

  “That was twenty-four years ago,” said the Ambassador, apologetically. “I’ve only lived here five years, my lord. Things are going very ill in Karhide. King Emran broke off relations with the Ekumen last year. I don’t really know what the Stabile’s purpose in sending you here was at the time he sent you; but at present, we’re losing Winter. So the Agents on Hain suggested to me that we might move out our king.”

  “But I am dead,” Argaven said wrathfully. “I have been dead for sixty years!”

  “The king is dead,” said Horrsed. “Long live the king.”

  As some of the Karhiders approached, Argaven turned from the Ambassador and went over to the rail. Grey water bubbled and slid by the ship’s side. The shore of the continent lay now to their left, grey patched with white. It was cold: a day of early winter in the Ice Age. The ship’s engine purred softly. Argaven had not heard that purr of an electric engine for a dozen years now, the only kind of engine Karhide’s slow and stable Age of Technology had chosen to employ. The sound of it was very pleasant to her.

  She spoke abruptly without turning, as one who has known since infancy that there is always someone there to answer: “Why are we going east?”

  “We’re making for Kerm Land.”

  “Why Kerm Land?”

  It was one of the younger ones who had come forward to answer. “Because that part of the country is in rebellion against the— against King Emran. I am a Kermlander: Perreth ner Sode.”

  “Is Emran in Erhenrang?”

  “Erhenrang was taken by Orgoreyn, six years ago. The king is in the new capital, east of the mountains—the Old Capital, actually, Rer.”

  “Emran lost the West Fall?” Argaven said, and then turning full on the stout young noble, “Lost the West Fall? Lost Erhenrang?”

  Perreth drew back a step, but answered promptly, “We’ve been in hiding behind the mountains for six years.”

  “The Orgota are in Erhenrang?”

  “King Emran signed a treaty with Orgoreyn five years ago, ceding them the Western Provinces.”

  “A shameful treaty, your majesty,” old Ker broke in, fiercer and shakier than ever. “A fool’s treaty! Emran dances to the drums of Orgoreyn. All of us here are rebels, exiles. The Ambassador there is an exile, in hiding!”

  “The West Fall,” Argaven said. “Argaven I took the West Fall for Karhide seven hundred years ago—” She looked round on the others again with her strange, keen, unheeding gaze. “Emran—” she began, but halted. “How strong are you in Kerm Land? Is the Coast with you?”

  “Most Hearths of the South and East are with us.” Argaven was silent a while. “Did Emran ever bear an heir?”

  “No heir of the flesh, my liege,” Bannith said. “She sired six.”

  “She has named Girvry Harge rem ir Orek as her heir,” said Perreth.

  “Girvry? What kind of name is that? The kings of Karhide are named Emran,” Argaven said, “and Argaven.”

  Now at last comes the dark picture, the snapshot taken by firelight —firelight, because the power plants of Rer are wrecked, the trunk lines cut, and half the city is on fire. Snow flurries heavily down above the flames and gleams red for a moment before it melts in mid air, hissing faintly.

  Snow and ice and guerrilla troops keep Orgoreyn at bay on the west side of the Kargav Mountains. No help came to the Old King, Emran, when her country rose against her. Her guards fled, her city burns, and now at the end she is face to face with the usurper. But she has, at the end, something of her family’s heedless pride. She pays no attention to the rebels. She stares at them and does not see them, lying in the dark hallway, lit only by mirrors that reflect distant fires, the gun with which she killed herself near her hand.

  Stooping over the body Argaven lifts up that cold hand, and starts to take from the age-knotted forefinger the massive, carved, gold ring. But she does not do it. “Keep it,” she whispers, “keep it.” For a moment she bends yet lower, as if she whispered in the dead ear, or laid her cheek against that cold and wrinkled face. Then she straightens up, and stands a while, and presently goes out through dark corridors, by windows bright with distant ruin, to set her house in order: Argaven, Winter’s king.

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  * * * *

  The Time Machine

  by Langdon Jones

  The cell is not large. There is just room for a small bunk along one wall, and a small table on the other side, a stool in front of it. The table and the stool have once been painted a glossy red, but their finish has long been spoiled by time, and now light wood shows through the streaks of paint. The floor is flagged, and the walls are made of large blocks of stone. The stone has streaks of dampness across its surface, and in the air is a sweet smell of decay. There is a window high in the far wall, set with bars of rusted iron, and through it can be seen a patch of blue sky, and a wisp of yellow cloud. Sometimes, not very often, a bird flashes across the space like a brief hallucination. In the opposite wall there is a large metal door, with a grille set into its surface. Behind the grille is a shutter, so that those outside may, when they wish, observe the prisoner from a safe distance.

  The bunk is made of metal, and is fixed permanently to one wall. It is painted green, and this color is interrupted only where the rusty nuts and bolts extrude. On one side the bunk is bolted to the wall, and on the other it is supported by two metal legs, which have worn little depressions in the stone floor. Above the bunk, crudely scratched into the wall, are various drawings and messages. There are initials, dates, obscenities and phallic drawings. Set a little apart from the others is the only one which does not make immediate sense. It is engraved deeply into the wall, and consists of two words, set one above the other. The engraving obviously took a great deal of time to complete. The upper of these words is “time,” the lower, “solid.”

  The bunk is covered by rumpled grey blankets, which smell of the sweat of generations of prisoners. Sitting at the foot of the bunk is the prisoner. He is leaning over, his elbows on his knees, his back hunched, looking at a photograph in his hands.

  The photograph is of a girl. It is just a little larger than two inches square, and is in black and white. It is a close-up, and the lower part of her arms, and her body below the waist are not revealed. Her head is not directly facing the camera, and she appears to be looking at something to one side, revealing a three-quarter view of her face. Behind her is a brick wall—a decorative wall in Holland Park on that day after the hotel and after the morning in the coffee shop; soon they were to part again at the railway station.

  Her dark hair was drawn back, and she had a calm but emotional expression on her face. Her face was fairly round, but her high cheekbones caused a slight concavity of her cheeks, giving her always a slightly drawn look which he had always found immensely attractive, ever since he had first known her. Her features were somewhat negroid—”a touch of the tar brush, as my mother used to put it,” she had said in one of her letters—large dark eyes, and large lips which, when she smiled, gave her a look of ironic sadness. Occasionally she also had the practical look of a Northern housewife, and her energy was expressed in her face and her b
ody. Her body was very slim, and her flesh felt like the flesh of no other woman on earth. When he had first seen her she had been wearing a black dress at a party, a dress which did nothing to conceal the smallness of her breasts, and which proudly proclaimed her slightness. This had captivated him immediately. It was something which accented her femininity, although doubtless she had not considered it in this way, and he saw her that first time as the most beautiful thing on earth.

  He would meet her in Leicester. He would set off early on Sunday and take a train to Victoria, and walk among the few people about at this time on a Sunday morning to the coach station. He could never understand why it was— as he sat in the cafeteria with a cup of coffee—that the people all about appeared so ugly. The only people that morning who were at all pleasing to the eye were a family of Indians who had sat near him—the women in saris, and the men bewhiskered and proud in turbans. Perhaps it was all subjective, and everyone appeared ugly because he knew that this morning, in little more than three hours, he would be meeting her again. The weather was not impossibly cold—they wanted to make love, and many things were against it that week. At nine-fifteen he would walk over, past the coaches for Lympne airport and France, to the far corner of the yard, where the Leicester coach would be waiting.

  He got in the coach. There were never more than eight or nine people who wanted to go to Leicester early on a Sunday morning, and he would walk down to the back of the coach and sit on the left-hand side. Why always the left, he didn’t know. At nine thirty-five the vehicle would set off, pouring out clouds of diesel smoke, emerging from its home like a mechanical dragon. As they passed Marble Arch, Swiss Cottage, and headed for the M1, he was conscious of a mounting tension. Partly sexual— partly the knowledge that soon he would see her again, and partly because he knew that he knew. What was going to happen this time? He could visualize that one morning she wouldn’t come, but he would, and instead of loving there would be hatred and fighting. She had told him during the week, and he had been very upset. But he wanted her to continue, for he knew what it would do to her to have to stop now. What had been set into action was a series of circumstances that had to run a certain course until it was possible to break it. And the breaking would be hard—was hard.

  The sun was shining, and the fields that they passed became transformed, as they always did, by her proximity in time. Everything around him was beautiful. It was as if he could see the scene through the coach window with an intensity that would not be possible normally. It was as if together they were one being, and that apart from her he was less than half a person. But there were four other people who depended on her as well. Two little boys, one little girl and one adult man. A family is a complete entity as well. Later he would go to her home in West Cutford, and see her with her children, and feel himself to be a malevolent force, a wildly destructive element; that didn’t belong here, and yet, seeing at the same time an image of what might have been; how close was this reality to the one he wanted.

  When the coach left the motorway, it was only half an hour before he would be in Leicester, and three quarters before they would be together, their proximity having an astronomical rightness, as implacably correct as the orbit of the earth. The watery January sun shone onto the brown brick buildings that told him that soon he would be at their meeting-place—the coach station in Southgate Street. This place had a special significance for him; it was like the scene of some great historical event. But most of the places were; not the hotel, where the coming and going of other people obscured the significance of their own, but their little shed at Groby Pond, their room at the top of a house in West London. All these places deserved some kind of immortality.

  Now the tension was very strong; his muscles were clenched all over his body and his hands were shaking. The coach approached some traffic lights, turned left, bumping over a rough road surface, and went down a grim street, full of half-demolished buildings. Further down were some other buildings composed of reddish-brown brick, except for a modern pub which was opposite a large flat area surrounded by metal railings. The coach turned into this concrete area, for this was Southgate Street. As the coach slowed up the few people inside began to rise, putting on overcoats and collecting their luggage. He looked intently through the windows to see if she had arrived. She wasn’t here yet. The coach was early; it was only quarter-past twelve. There was six and a half hours of the day left. This was always the most difficult part. Before he had felt that he was going toward her; that he could feel the distance between them lessening. But now all the movement was up to her and he could no longer be directly aware of it.

  He climbed down from the coach and went to the other side of the road, waiting for her car to arrive. Looking across at the coach station, he knew that he would remember this place for the rest of his life whatever happened. In one month, seventeen days and six hours they would say goodbye for the last time.

  Cars were passing in groups; there would be a time when nothing was on the road at all, then later twenty cars would come along together, and his eyes would move as he looked at first one, then the next. A cold wind was blowing, and he was shivering uncontrollably. A couple of girls walked past on the other side of the street, talking and laughing together. A car came along that looked like hers, but inside it was a large, white-haired man. This was impossible. He turned and walked round to the entrance of the pub. This was The Shakespeare, the same name as another pub that had featured in their lives; it was as if their whole existence was marked out by commonplace things that were all cryptograms, that all had hidden significance. Their love made everything more real, and at the same time turned the world into a devious collection of symbols.

  He pushed through the doors of the pub and went into the lounge bar. He ordered a drink, and then went to sit by one of the windows. If he stood up and looked through the net curtains he could just see part of the coach station. Parked outside was a car, but from here it did not look like hers. He sat down, and regarded the shiny surface of the table in front of him.

  Things were obviously bad for her at home. Her letters had told him what had been going on. She could not get away from this situation; she would part from him and then go back to a person who was being hurt, a person whose life was being threatened by their love—a love that seemed innocent and inevitable. That first night, when they suddenly found themselves in bed together, when a few hours before they had been little more than friendly strangers, it had all seemed so right. They both knew that life was now going to become difficult, but still wanted it to happen. He stood up, and peered through the window. The parked car was still there, and she was not in sight. He sat down again. But how much stress could one stand? How much could this man stand? He understood the situation, but how long would it be before his control broke down, and he came with nothing in his brain but an urge to destroy? How would he react to this? How could he possibly try to physically hurt a man he had hurt so much already? He stood up and looked through the window again. Suddenly finding it impossible to wait in the pub any longer, he abruptly walked toward the door and went outside in the cold again. The parked car was not hers. It was nearly half-past twelve. He crossed the road and went back inside the coach station. He sat down on a bench with his back to the road. In his bag was a book, and he took it out. It was very cold. He began to read.

  The sun has passed the point at which it shines directly into the cell. Now dark shadows are creeping across the floor, and it is becoming colder. The prisoner lifts his feet from the floor and lies back on his bunk, holding the photograph above him. At the time the photograph had been taken they had spent two days in a room in a hotel in London, doing little but making love, going out occasionally for food. It had been a fairly cheap hotel, and the room had looked, at first, rather bare. But in two hours it had become transformed into a jeweled palace. The red bed-cover had glowed with the mystical luminosity of a robe in a Flemish painting. When they had left the hotel, they had gone to Holland Park, ach
ing to make love again, full of an insatiable desire to repeat an experience so good it should have been unrepeatable. He felt vaguely surprised that the exposed flesh of her face and neck did not show any signs of his love. He felt that his hands and lips and tongue should have left visible tracks on her skin that would show that this woman was loved. Perhaps there was a gentleness in her eyes, a quirk of her lips; but perhaps he was imagining these signs.

  He held the photograph close to his eyes so that he could see the grain, and the slight fuzziness of her individual hairs. Now he was conscious of the photograph as a record only. A piece of paper that was not even there at the time. Recorded tracks of light that had reflected from her at that time into the lens of a camera. This contact with her was so nebulous, and yet the photograph somehow solidified the events, gave them a concrete reality, as if at some time or some place they were together in Holland Park, she in front of him, apologizing for her tiredness and the untidiness of her hair, saying “Just after making love is not the best time for taking a picture of me,” and then being quiet and looking to one side, and the shutter opening, slowly, slower, and then freezing, wide open, this “time” a tangible material like film going through a camera, that can be wound on, stopped and taken out.