Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Baw? Baw?”

  “Him’s a sweet boy.” When he smiled like that he looked just like Margie or Little Artie. She swept him to her bosom. “Him can be my baby boy.”

  “Ba-by?”

  She had an apple pie cooking; she would give the whole thing to him. “Baby, poor baby.” She smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “All dat finking wadn’t dood for him.”

  <>

  * * * *

  The History Makers

  by James Sallis

  In the morning (he wasn’t sure which morning) he began the letter . . .

  * * * *

  Dear Jim,

  The last time I saw you, you advised against my coming here. You were quite insistent, and I don’t believe the perfectly awful 3-2 beer we were drinking was wholly responsible for said adamance. You virtually begged me not to come. And I suppose you must have felt somewhat duty-bound to sway me away. That since it was yourself who introduced me to the Ephemera, you’d incurred some sort of liability for my Fate. That you would be accountable.

  I remember you said a man couldn’t keep his sanity here; that his mind would be whirled in a hundred directions at once, and he would ravel to loose ends—that he would crimp and crumble, swell and burst, along with this world. And you held that there was nothing of value here. But the government and I, for our separate reasons, disagreed.

  And can I refute you now by saying that I’ve found peace, or purpose, or insight? No, of course not, not in or with this letter. For all my whilom grandiloquence, and accustomed to it as you are, such an effort would be fatuous and absurd. What I can do: I can show you this world in what is possibly the only way we can ever know it, I can show you where it brims over to touch my own edges. I can let you look out my window.

  The Blue Twin. That was...three years ago? Close to that. (“Time is merely a device to keep everything from happening at once.” Isn’t that wonderful? I found it in one of the magazines I brought Out with me, in a review of some artist’s work about which I remember only the name of one painting: A Romantic Longing To Be Scientific.) Three years ... I miss Earth, dark Earth. I miss Vega.

  (I remember that you were shortly to be reassigned to Ginh, and wonder if this letter will find you there among the towers.)

  The Blue Twin, which we always insisted was the best bar in the Combine at least, probably the Union (and did I ever tell you that bars are the emblem of our civilization? A place to lean back in, to put your feet up, a place of silences and lurching conversations: still center, hub for a whirling universe. And pardon my euphuism, please).

  And the two of us sitting there, talking of careers and things. Quietly, with the color-clustered walls of sky-bright Vega around us and the massive turning shut out. You dissuading. And bits of my land slaking into the sea. Talking, taking time to talk.

  My work had soured, yours burgeoned, I envied you (though we always pretended it was the other way around). All my faces had run together like cheap water-color. My classes had come to be for me nothing but abstract patterns, forming, breaking, reforming—while the faces around you were becoming distinct, defining themselves, giving you ways to go.

  I envied you. So I took this sabbatical: “to do a book.” And the sabbatical became an extended leave of absence, and that became a dismissal. And no book.

  Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...Talking about dissent and revolution, the ways of change, things falling by the way and no Samaritan—and you mentioning something you’d seen in one of the Courier bulletins that crossed your desk: which was my introduction to it all, to Ephemera. (Ephemera. It was one of those pale poetic jokes, the sort that gave us Byzantium and Eldorado and Limbo and all the others, names for out-Union planets, for distant places. You wonder what kind of man is responsible.)

  How many weeks then of reading, of requesting information, of clotted first drafts? How long before the night I collapsed into my bed and sat up again with the line “Hold hard these ancient minutes in a cuckoo’s month” on my lips—days, weeks? It seemed years. Time, for me, had broken down. And I came to Ephemera . . .

  The Ephemera. My window looks out now on one of their major cities, towered and splendid, the one I’ve come to call Siva. It is middle season, which means they are expanding: yesterday the city was miles away, a dark line on the horizon; tomorrow it will draw even closer and I’ll have to move my squatter’s hut back out of the way. The next day it will swell toward me again, then in the afternoon retreat—and the collapse will have begun. By the next morning I’ll be able to see nothing of Siva, and the hut will have to be relocated, shuttled back in for the final moments.

  They live in a separate time-plane from ours—is that too abrupt? I don’t know another way to say it, or how I should prepare for saying it. Or even if it makes sense. They are but vaguely aware of my presence, and I can study them only with the extensive aid of machines, some I brought with me, a few I was able to requisition later (the government always hopes, always holds onto a chance for new resources). And all I’ve learned comes down to that one strange phrase. A separate time-plane.

  When I first came here, I was constantly blundering into the edges of their city, or being blundered into by them; I was constantly making hasty retreats back into what I started calling the Deadlands. It took my first year just to plot the course of the cities. I’ve gotten little further.

  It’s a simple thing, once you have the key: the cities develop in dependence to the seasons. The problem comes with Ephemera’s orbit, which is wildly eccentric (I’m tempted to say erratic), and with her queer climate. Seasons flash by, repeat themselves with subtle differences, linger and rush—all in apparent confusion. It takes a while to sort it all out in your mind, to resolve a year into particulars.

  And now I’ve watched this city with its thousand names surge and subside a thousand times. I’ve watched its cycles repeat my charts, and I’ve thrown away the charts and been satisfied to call it Siva. All my social theories, my notes, my scribble-occluded papers, I’ve had to put away; I became a scientist, then simply an observer. Watching Siva.

  It’s always striking and beautiful. A few huts appear and before you can breathe a village is standing there. The huts sprawl out across the landscape and the whole thing begins to ripple with the changes that are going on, something as though the city were boiling. This visual undulation continues; the edges of the village move out away from it, catch the rippling, extend further: a continuous process. The further from center, the faster it moves. There’s a time you recognize it as a town, a time when the undulation slows and almost stops—then, minutes later, endogeny begins again and its growth accelerates fantastically. It sprawls, it rises, it solidifies.

  (A few days ago while I was watching, I got up to put some music—it was Bach—on the recorder. Then I came back and sat down. I must have become absorbed in the music, because later when the tape cut off, I looked up and the city was almost upon me. I keep thinking that someday I won’t move back, that I’ll be taken into the city, it will sprout and explode around me.)

  Siva builds and swells, explodes upward, outward, blankets the landscape. Then, toward the end of the cycle, a strange peace inhabits it: a pause, a silence. Like Joshua’s stopping the sun.

  And then: what? I can’t know what goes on in the city at these times. From photographs (rather incredible photographs ) and inspection of the “ruins,” I’ve gathered that something like this must occur: some psychic shakedown hits the people in full stride; most of them go catto, fold themselves into insensible knots—while the rest turn against the city and destroy it. Each time, it happens. Each time, I’m unable to discover the respective groups or even the overall reason. And each time, destruction is absolute. The momentary stasis breaks, and the city falls away. No wall or relic is left standing; even the rubble is somehow consumed. It happens so quickly, the cameras can’t follow it; and I walk about for hours afterward, trying to read something in the scarred ground....“All
Pergamum is covered with thorn bushes; even its ruins have perished.”

  Three years. Amusing and frightening to think of all I’ve seen in that time, more than any other man. And what have I learned? One thing perhaps, one clear thing, and this by accident, poking about the “ruins.” I found one of their devices for measuring time, which had inexplicably survived the relapse, a sort of recomplicated sundial—and 1 guessed from it that this race reckons time from conclusions rather than beginnings. (I leave it to you to decide whether this is a philosophical or psychological insight.) That is, their day—or year, or century, or whatever they might have termed it—seems to have been delimited by the sun’s declension rather than its rise; and I assume this scheme, this perspective, would have become generalized (or itself simply expressed an already prevailing attitude). There’s a part of the mechanism—a curious device, either rectifier or drive control, possibly both—that seems to work by the flux of the wind, I suppose bringing some sort of complex precision into their measurements: a kind of Aeolian clock.

  And since that last sentence there’s been a long pause as I sat here and tried to think: what can I say now...Hours ago, when I began this letter, I had some vague, instinctive notion of things I wanted to tell you. Now it’s all fallen back out of reach again, and all I have for you and for myself are these pages of phatic gesturing: Look. See. That, and the first piece of an epiphany, an old song from the early years of Darkearth: “Time, time is winding up again.”

  And so I sit here and look out my window, watching this city build and fall. I stare at their clock, which no longer functions, and have no use for my own. I am backed to the sea, and tomorrow Siva will spread and extend out onto these waters. I’m left with the decision, the ancient decision: shall I move?

  I put on my music—my Bach, my Mozart, my Telemann—and I beat out its rhythms on chrome tiles. For a while I lose myself in it, for a while I break out of the gather and issue of time . . .

  And outside now, the sky fills with color like a bowl of strung ribbons, the ribbons fall, night billows about me. Twelve times I’ve begun this letter over a space of months, and each time faltered. Now at last, like the day, I’ve run through to a stammering end. I’ve filled hours and pages. Yet all I have to offer you is this: this record of my disability. Which I send with enduring love.

  Your brother,

  John

  * * * *

  In the evening he finished the letter and set it aside and felt the drag of the sea against his chest.

  He sat at the empty table he used for a desk, looking up at the opposite wall. On it, two reproductions and a mirror, forming a caret: mirror at the angle, below and left The Persistence of Memory, one of Monet’s Notre Dame paintings across from that. Glass bolted in place, stiff paper tacked up—time arrested, time suspended, time recorded in passing. And about them depended the banks of shelves and instrumentation which covered the hut’s walls like lines and symbols ranked on a page.

  He rose, making a portrait of the mirror, seeing: this moment. Behind that, three years. Behind that, a lifetime. And behind that, nothing.

  (Take for heraldry this image: the palimpsest, imperfectly erased.)

  He ambled about his room, staring at the strange, three-dimensional objects which surrounded him, not understanding. He picked up the Ephemera chronometer, turned it over in his hands, put it back. Then (four steps) he stood by the tape deck. Making sound, shaping sound.

  (All of this, all so...vivid, so clearly defined. Clear and sharp like an abstraction of plane intersecting plane, angle and obtrusion...hard, sharp on a flat ground.)

  Bach churned out of the speakers, rose in volume as he spun controls, rose again till bass boomed and the walls rattled.

  And then he was walking on the bare gray ground outside his hut. . .

  (Feet killing quiet. No: because the silence hums like a live wire, sings like a thrown knife. Rather, my feet tick on the sands. Passing now a flat rock stood on its feet, leaning against the sky. A poem remembered...Time passes, you say. No. We go; time stays...And on Rhea there are a thousand vast molelike creatures burrowing away forever in heart-darkness, consuming a world.)

  He stopped and stood on the beach in the baritone darkness, with the pale red sea ahead and the timed floodlights burning behind him. Three yards off, a fish broke water and sank back into a target of ripples.

  Looked up. Four stars ticked in the sky, an orange moon shuttled up among them.

  Looked down. The city, Siva, swept toward him.

  (A simple truth. What denies time, dies. And that which accepts it, which places itself in time, lives again. Emblem of palimpsests. Vision of this palimpsest city.)

  The Bach came to his ears then, urgent, exultant. The night was basso profundo, the moon boxed in stars. He sat watching a beetle scuttle across the sand, pushing a pebble before it, deep red on gray.

  Later he looked up and the music was over. He turned and saw Siva at his penumbra’s edge, turned back to still waters.

  Turned back to silence . . .

  Then the lights went off behind him and he was left alone with the fall and the surge of the sea.

  <>

  * * * *

  The Big Flash

  by Norman Spinrad

  T minus 200 days . . . and counting . . .

  They came on freaky for my taste—but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in LA, competing with a network-owned joint like The American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.

  I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.

  First the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke— blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokely Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, bass, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore Early Hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.

  “Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”

  “We ain’t, baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian. We just started putting our thing together.”

  One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.

  “Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One A.M. to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”

  “Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.

  “What?”

  “Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hu
ndred sounds like pretty light bread.”

  “We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.

  “The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”

  I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But on the other hand $400 was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.

  “Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”

  “Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.

  That’s this business—the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.

  * * * *

  T minus 199 days . . . and counting ...

  Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are defined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the con­ceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advanta­geous application of the means at its command.