Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  “You’ve turned into a sly man, Rousse,” Miller said. “What’s taken hold of you suddenly? What is it that you’re not saying?”

  “What I am saying, Miller, is that we will use it tomorrow. When the dream has reached its crest and just before it breaks up, we’ll cut in a second-stage booster. I’ve done it before with lesser dreams. We are going to see this thing to the end tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  * * * *

  “It will take some special rigging,” Rousse told himself when Miller was gone. “And I’ll have to gather a fair amount of information and shape it up. But it will be worth it. I am thinking of the second stage shot in an­other sense, and I might just be able to pull it off. This isn’t the quest-in-itself at all. I’ve seen plenty of them. I’ve seen the false a thousand times. Let me not now fumble the real! This is the Ultimate Arrival Nexus that takes a man clean out of himself. It is the Compensation. If it were not achieved in one life in a million, then none of the other lives would have been worthwhile. Somebody has to win to keep the gamble going. There has to be a grand prize behind it all. I’ve seen the shape of it in that sec­ond sky. I’m the one to win it.”

  Then Rousse busied himself against the following day. He managed some special rigging. He gathered a mass of information and shaped it up. He incorporated these things into the shadow booth. He canceled a number of appointments. He was arranging that he could take some time off, a day, a month, a year, a lifetime if necessary.

  * * * *

  The tomorrow session began very much the same, except for some doubts on the part of the patient Miller. “I said it yesterday, and I say it again,” Miller grumbled. “You’ve turned sly on me, man. What is it?” “All ana­lysts are sly, Miller, it’s the name of our trade. Get with it now. I promise that we will get you past the verge today. We are going to see this dream through to its end.”

  There was the Earth Basic again. There was the Mountain booming full of water, the groaning of the rocks, and the constant adjusting and readjusting of the world on its uneasy foundation. There was the salt spray, the salt of the Earth that leavens the lump. There were the crabs hanging onto the wet edge of the world.

  Then the Basic muted itself, and the precursor dream slid in, the ritual fish.

  It was a rendezvous of ships and boats in an immensity of green islands scattered in a purple-blue sea. It was a staging area for both ships and is­lands; thence they would travel in convoys to their proper positions, but here they were all in a jumble. There were LST’s and Jay Boats, cargo ships and little packets. There were old sailing clippers with topgallants and moonscrapers full of wind, though they were at anchor. There was much moving around, and it was easy to step from the ships to the little green islands (if they were islands, some of them were no more than rugs of floating moss, but they did not sink) and back again onto the ships. There were sailors and seamen and pirates shooting craps together on the little islands. Bluejackets and bandits would keep jumping from the ships down to join the games, and then others would leave them and hop to other islands.

  Piles of money of rainbow colors and of all sizes were everywhere. There were pesos and pesetas and pesarones. There were crowns and coronets and rix-dollars. There were gold certificates that read “Redeemable only at Joe’s Marine Bar Panama City.” There were guilders with the Queen’s picture on them, and half-guilders with the Jack’s pic­ture on them. There were round coins with square holes in them, and square coins with round holes. There was stage money and invasion money, and comic money from the Empires of Texas and Louisiana. And there were bales of real frogskins, green and sticky, which were also cur­rent.

  “Commodore,” one of the pirates said, “get that boat out of the way or I’ll ram it down your throat” “I don’t have any boat,” said the dreamer. “I’m not a commodore; I’m an army sergeant; I’m supposed to guard this box for the lieutenant.” Oh hell, he didn’t even have a box. What had happened to the box? “Commodore,” said the pirate, “get that boat out of the way or I’ll cut off your feet.”

  He did cut off his feet. And this worried the boy, the dreamer, since he did not know whether it was in the line of duty or if he would be paid for his feet. “I don’t know which boat you mean,” he told the pirate. “Tell me which boat you mean and I’ll try to move it. “Commodore,” the pi­rate said, “move this boat or I’ll cut your hands off.” He did cut his hands off. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” the dreamer said, “tell me which boat you want moved.” “If you don’t know your own boat by now, I ought to slit your gullet,” the pirate said. He did slit his gullet. It was harder to breathe after that, and the boy worried more. “Sir, you’re not even a pi­rate in my own outfit. You ought to get one of the sailors to move the boat for you. I’m an army sergeant and I don’t even know how to move a boat.”

  The pirate pushed him down in a grave on one of the green islands and covered him up. He was dead now and it scared him. This was not at all like he thought it would be. But the green dirt was transparent and he could still see the salty dogs playing cards and shooting craps all around him. “If that boat isn’t moved,” the pirate said, “you’re going to be in real trouble.” “Oh, let him alone,” one of the dice players said. So he let him alone.

  * * * *

  “It’s ritual sacrifice he offers,” Rousse said. “He brings the finest gift he can make every time. I will have to select a top one from the files for my own Precursor.”

  Then it was toward the North Shore again as the Precursor Dream faded.

  It was with a big motor launch now, as big as a yacht, half as big as a ship. The craft was very fast when called on to be. It would have to be, for it was going through passes that weren’t there all the time. Here was a seacliff, solid and without a break. But to one who knows the secret there is a way through. Taken at morning half-light and from a certain angle there was a passage through. The launch made it, but barely. It was a very close thing, and the cliffs ground together again behind it. And there be­hind was the other face of the seacliff, solid and sheer. But the ocean ahead was different, for they had broken with the map and with convention in finding a passage where there was none. There were now great group­ings of islands and almost-islands. But some of them were merely sargasso-type weed islands, floating clumps; and some of then were only floating heaps of pumice and ash from a volcano that was now erupting.

  How to tell the true land from the false? The dreamer threw rocks at all the islands. If the islands were of weed or pumice or ash they would give but a dull sound. But if they were real land they would give a solid ringing sound to the thrown rock. Most of them were false islands, but now one rang like iron.

  “It is a true island,” said the dreamer, “it is named Pulo Bakal.” And after the launch had gone a great way through the conglomerate, one of the islands rang like solid wood to the thrown rock. “It is a true island,” said the dreamer, “it is named Pulo Kaparangan.”

  And finally there was a land that rang like gold, or almost like it (like cracked gold really) to the thrown rock. “It is true land, I think it is,” said the dreamer. “It is named Pulo Ginto, I think it is. It should be the land itself, and its North Shore should be the Shore Itself. But it is spoiled this day. The sound was cracked. I don’t want it as much as I thought I did. It’s been tampered with.”

  “This is it,” Rousse urged the dreamer. “Quickly now, right around the point and you are there. We can make it this time.”

  “No, there’s something wrong with it. I don’t want it the way it is. I’ll just wake up and try it some other time.”

  “Second stage called for,” Rousse cried. He did certain things with electrodes and with a needle into Miller’s left rump, and sent him reeling back into the dream. “We’ll make it,” Rousse encouraged. “We’re there. It’s everything you’ve sought.”

  “No, no, the light’s all wrong. The sound was cracked. What we are coming to—oh no no, it’s ruined, it’s ruine
d forever. You robbed me of it.”

  What they came to was that little canal off the River and into the Sixth Street Slip to the little wharf where barges used to tie up by the Consoli­dated Warehouse. And it was there that Miller stormed angrily onto the rotten wooden wharf, past the old warehouse, up the bill three blocks and past his own apartment house, to the left three blocks and up and into the analyst’s office, and there the dream and the reality came together.

  “You’ve robbed me, you filthy fool,” Miller sputtered, waking up in blithering anger. “You’ve spoiled it forever. I’ll not go back to it. It isn’t there anymore. What a crass thing to do.”

  “Easy, easy, Miller. You’re cured now, you know. You can enter onto your own full life again. Have you never heard the most beautiful para­ble ever, about the boy who went around the world in search of the strangest thing of all, and came to his own home at the end, and it so trans­figured that he hardly knew it?”

  “It’s a lie, is what it is. Oh, you’ve cured me, and you get your fee. And slyness is the name of your game. May somebody someday rob you of the ultimate thing!”

  “I hope not, Miller.”

  * * * *

  Rousse had been making his preparations for a full twenty-four hours. He had canceled appointments and phased out and transferred patients. He would not be available to anyone for some time, he did not know for how long a time.

  He had his hideout, an isolated point on a wind-ruffled lake. He needed no instrumentation. He believed he knew the direct way into it.

  “It’s the real thing,” he told himself. “I’ve seen the shape of it, accidentally in the dream sky that hung over it. Billions of people have been on the earth, and not a dozen have been to it; and not one would bother to put it into words. ‘I have seen such things—’ said Aquinas. ‘I have seen such things—’ said John of the Cross. ‘I have seen such things—’ said Plato. And they all lived out the rest of their lives in a glorious daze.

  “It is too good for a peasant like Miller. I’ll grab it myself.”

  * * * *

  It came easy. An old leather couch is as good a craft as any to go there. First the Earth Basic and the Permeating Ocean, that came natural on the wind-ruffled point of the lake. Then the ritual offering, the Precursor Dream. Rousse had thrown a number of things into this: a tonal piece by Gideon Styles, an old seascape by Grobin that had a comic and dream­like quality, Lyall’s curious sculpture “Moon Crabs,” a funny sea tale by McVey and a poignant one by Gironella. It was pretty good. Rousse un­derstood this dream business.

  Then the Precursor Dream was allowed to fade back. And it was off toward the North Shore by a man in the finest craft ever dreamed up, by a man who knew just what he wanted, “The Thing Itself,” by a man who would give all the days of his life to arrive at it.

  Rousse understood the approaches and the shoals now; he had stud­ied them thoroughly. He knew that, however different they had seemed each time in the dreams of Miller, they were always essentially the same. He took the land right at the first rounding of the point, leaping clear and letting his launch smash on the rocks.

  “There will be no going back now,” he said, “it was the going back that always worried Miller, that caused him to fail.” The cliffs here appeared forbidding, but Rousse had seen again and again the little notch in the high purple of them, the path over. He followed the path with high ex­citement and cleared the crest.

  “Here Basho walked, here Aquin, here John de Yepes,” he proclaimed, and he came down toward the North Shore itself, with the fog over it beginning to lift.

  “You be false captain with a stolen launch,” said a small leviathan off shore.

  “No, no, I dreamed the launch myself,” Rousse maintained. “I’ll not be stopped.”

  “I will not stop you,” said the small leviathan. “The launch is smashed, and none but I know that you are false captain.”

  Why, it was clearing now! The land began to leap out in its richness, and somewhere ahead was a glorious throng. In the throat of a pass was a monokeros, sleek and brindled.

  “None passes here and lives,” said the monokeros.

  “I pass,” said Rousse.

  He passed through, and there was a small moan behind him.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “You died,” said the monokeros.

  “Oh, so I’m dead on my couch, am I? It won’t matter. I hadn’t wanted to go back.”

  He went forward over the ensorceled and pinnacled land, hearing the rakish and happy throng somewhere ahead.

  “I must not lose my way now,” said Rousse. And there was a stele, standing up and telling him the way with happy carved words.

  Rousse read it, and he entered the shore itself.

  And all may read and enter.

  * * * *

  The stele, the final marker, was headed:

  Which None May Read and Return

  And the words on it—

  And the words—

  And the words—

  * * * *

  Let go! You’re holding on! You’re afraid! Read it and take it. It is not blank!

  It’s carved clear and bright.

  Read it and enter.

  * * * *

  You’re afraid.

  <>

  * * * *

  Paul’s Treehouse

  by Gene Wolfe

  It was the day after the governor called out the National Guard, but Morris did not think of it that way; it was the morning after the second night Paul had spent in the tree, and Morris brushed his teeth with Scotch after he looked into Paul’s bedroom and saw the unrumpled bed. And it was hot; though not in the house, which was air-conditioned.

  Sheila was still asleep, lying straight out like a man on the single bed across from his own. He left her undisturbed, filling his glass with Scotch again and carrying it out to the patio at the side of the house. The sun was barely up, yet the metal furniture there was already slightly warm. It would be a hot day, a scorcher. He heard the snip-snack of Russell’s shears on the other side of the hedge and braced himself for the inevitable remark.

  “It’s going to be a hot one, isn’t it?” Sticking his head over the top of the hedge. Morris nodded, hoping that if he did not speak Russell would stay where he was. The hope was fruitless. He could hear Russell unlatching the gate, although he purposely did not look.

  “Hotter than the hinges of hell,” Russell said, sitting down. “Do the gardening early, that’s what I told myself, do it early while it’s cool, and look at me. I’m sweating already. Did you hear what they did last night? Beat a cop to death with golf clubs and polo mallets out of a store window.”

  Morris said nothing, looking up at Paul’s treehouse. It was on the other side of the yard, but so high up it could be seen above the roofline of the house.

  “Beat him to death right out on the street.”

  “I suppose some of them deserve it,” Morris said moodily.

  “Sure they do, but it’s them doing it. That’s what gets to me … Drinking pretty early, aren’t you?” Russell was tall and gangling, with a long neck and a prominent Adam’s apple; Morris, short and fat-bellied, envied him his straight lines.

  “I guess I am,” he said. “Like one?”

  “Since it’s Saturday …”

  It was cool in the house, much cooler than the patio, but the air was stale. He splashed the cheaper “guest” whisky into a glass and added a squirt of charged water.

  “Is that your boy Paul’s?” When he came out again, Russell was staring up at the treehouse just as he himself had been doing a moment before. Morris nodded.

  “He built it on his own, didn’t he? I remember watching him climb up there with boards or something, with his little radio playing to keep him company.” He took the drink. “You don’t mind if I walk around and have a look at it, do you?”

  Reluctantly Morris followed him, stepping over the beds of flame-toned, scentless florabundas Sheila l
oved.

  The tree at the other side of the house gave too much shade for roses. There was nothing under it except a little sparse grass and a few stones Paul had dropped.

  Russell whistled. “That’s way up there, isn’t it? Fifty feet if it’s an inch. Why’d you let him build it so high?”

  “Sheila doesn’t believe in thwarting the boy’s natural inclinations.” It sounded silly when Morris said it, and he covered by taking another sip of the whisky.