Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  Got drunk saft. Downtown. Dangerous. Not fair to Siss. Liable get et up by dogs while stinko. Bad show.

  Can’t bring bottle home, tho. Too great a temptation to get sozzled daily and twice on Sunday.

  Why is Sunday worse than other days? I tried to rename it but Siss insisted we keep it. She also demanded it come every seven days, just like in good old days. Had to give in. So much for calendar reform.

  * * * *

  He sought other ways of escaping. He hiked and climbed and explored.

  Once he found a spot on the brow of a hill from which one (that is, he) could see for miles but from which no work of man was visible except the top of a silo at the top of a similar hill across a wide valley.

  Having found the spot, he cleared wild strawberry plants from beneath a young maple tree, leaving the ferns and the cushiony moss, and lay down to rest. It had been a strenuous climb, and hot, and now the insects were upon him. But though the flies buzzed they did not often land and the mosquitoes were torpid and easily slapped. After a while—it was almost noon (as if the hour mattered)—he had a couple of swallows from the flask he carried in his rucksack and ate some cheese. He thought of the flask as his iron rations.

  As he rummaged in the rucksack he found a roll of plastic tape he’d brought along to help him blaze a trail. He hadn’t needed it; instead he’d marked his way by cutting branches with a long-handled pruning tool.

  But as he lay in the solitude he had sought out and found (how odd to seek solitude in an empty world!), under one of a myriad of trees, where the only sounds were of buzzing insects, chirping birds, the soughing of trees in a soft wind—he knew what to do with the plastic tape. He printed something on a little square of paper, small but legible, and, with the tape, attached it to the lowest bough of his young maple. Now he lay under it, savoring what he had done.

  The little sign said: this tree reserved.

  * * * *

  One June night it rained in great, warm, wind-driven sheets. He had not experienced such a storm since a visit a decade earlier to the tropics.

  The pleasure he took in the soaking, bath-temperature rain was enhanced by the danger from the lightning. It stabbed down from the sky as if seeking him out, destroying and burning only yards away, as if it would be a great cosmic joke to strike that one spot on the surface of the Earth and kill the last man.

  He defied it, prancing wildly, then halting deliberately as if transfixed when it flashed, posing with outthrust or upthrust arms, yelling, defying the thing or Being that had sent the storm, loosing his pent-up frustrations, his disappointments and hates in the elemental power of the storm.

  * * * *

  He had trapped the beast in a pit, unfairly. It had nearly exhausted itself in attempts to leap the sheer walls. At least he hadn’t lined the bottom with spikes.

  Rolfe could have killed it from above, poisoned it, let it starve. Instead he jumped into the pit, armed with two knives, to risk mauling and death.

  He realized his folly instantly. The creature was far from helpless. Its claws were sharp, though its movements were clumsy in the cramped pit-bottom, and its fetid breath was as much a weapon as its fangs.

  Only by the sheerest of luck, he felt, did he avoid the claws and fangs long enough to plunge first one knife then the other into the beast’s heart.

  As its death struggles subsided he lay there, his face buried in the back of its neck, hugging the thing he’d killed, a sadness coming over him as he felt the fading heartbeat.

  Later he skinned the beast. He and Siss ate the meat and slept under the pelt. But first he had buried the head, in tribute to a worthy antagonist, a kind of salute to another male.

  * * * *

  And unto them was born a son.

  Siss seemed to know just what to do, by instinct. Clumsily he helped. He cut the umbilical with a boiled pair of scissors. Made a knot. Washed the red little thing.

  Eventually Siss lay quiet, dry, serene, holding her swaddled child. He sat on the floor next to the bed and looked and looked at the mother and child. A holy picture, he thought. He sat for hours, staring, wondering. She looked back at him, silent, wondering.

  The new human being slept, serene.

  It could not have been more perfect.

  His son. His boy. His and hers but, he felt it fair enough to say, mostly his.

  His son Adam. What else had there been to name him? Adam. Trite but noble. He had considered calling him Ralph, but only briefly. It would be too comical to have his mother go around introducing him to their near circle of friends—relatives all, come to think of it—as Ralph Ralph.

  There’d be no need for introductions for many years, of course, in a closed society such as theirs. The years did pass.

  There was his son, tall for his age, straight, brown, good with his hands ...

  But bright? Intelligent? How was a father to know? A prejudiced parent sees only the good, ignores what he doesn’t want to accept, can be oblivious to faults obvious to anyone else.

  He talked to him and got gratifying responses. But wouldn’t almost any response be gratifying to a parent? Parents are easily satisfied. Especially fathers of sons.

  Had he conditioned himself to the point where he would be satisfied if his son showed more than animal intelligence? The conditioning encompassed an agony of watching as his son grew—watching for signs of mental retardation, of idiocy, of dullness, or bigheadedness, of torpor.

  And then they had a daughter.

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  My son. Brown as a penny. Naked as a jaybird. Slender, muscled, handsome, active, good with his hands.

  Bright? Seems so. Obviously too soon to really tell.

  Five years old and just made his first kill. Wild dog, attacking our goat. Got him in the right eye with a .30-30 at ________ yards (measure and fill in).

  Strong and brave and skilled and good looking.

  Let’s hope intelligent, too.

  Please, God.

  * * * *

  My daughter. My precious, my beauty. What a delight you are, with your serene smile and your loving way of wrapping your arms around my leg and looking up at Old Daddy. You’re your mother’s child, aren’t you? So good, so quiet. But you’re quick on your feet and your reflexes (I’ve tested them) are sound. I think we’re all right.

  * * * *

  The Diary of Siss

  (Siss was not very faithful about her diary. The printed word was not her medium. Although her intentions were obviously good, there are fewer than a dozen entries in all, and they are reproduced below. She did not date them. The handwriting in the last entry is slightly better than that of the first, but maybe only because she was using a sharper pencil. A more revealing diary probably would be found in her heart, if that could be read, or in her children.)

  Mr. Ralph told me write things down when they big & inportant I will start now. Today Mr. Ralph married me.

  Very happy today. Learning to please my husband.

  * * * *

  Very very happy. Today moved to our country house I like it better than the big city.

  * * * *

  Today I had a baby, a boy.

  * * * *

  My word for today is contentment. I have to spell it and tell what it means. Mr. Ralph says I need an eddukaton, he will eddukate me.

  * * * *

  My word for today is education. Mr. Ralph seen what I wrote in my dairy yestdy.

  * * * *

  I have 2 words for today diary & yesterday. Also saw not seen.

  * * * *

  Today I had a baby, a girl. Ralph said now everything is going to be alright.

  * * * *

  And presumably it was. Having doubled the population, the human race seemed to be on a firm footing. There was love in the world; a growing, proud family, and a new self-assurance in Siss—note that he was Ralph now, not Mr. Ralph. We may be sure, though,
that the strict if loving father gave her two words for tomorrow: all right. A father, a mother, a son, a daughter. A little learning, a lot of love.

  * * * *

  In the summer of his eighth year Adam and his father were in the woods back of the pasture, in the little clearing at the side of the stream that ran pure and sparkling before it broadened into the shallow muddy pond the livestock used. Martin and the boy were eating lunch after a morning of woodcutting and conversation.

  Adam, naked like his father, had asked: “Am I going to grow some more hair, like you?”

  And Martin said: “Sure, when you get bigger. When you begin to be a man.”

  And Adam had compared his smooth skin with his father’s hard, muscled, hairy body and said: “Mom’s got hair in that place, too, but she’s different.”

  So Martin explained, sweating even though he was sitting still now, and his son took it all in, nodding, just as if it were no more important than knowing why the cow had her calf. It was obvious that until now Adam had not connected the function of the bull with the dropping of the calf. Martin explained, in human terms.

  “That’s pretty neat,” Adam said. “When do I get to do it?”

  Martin tried to keep his voice matter-of-fact. How do you instruct your son in incest?

  The explanation was completed, finally, and it was Martin’s turn to ask a question. “Think carefully about this, son. If you could save the life of one person—your mother or me but not the other—which would you save?”

  Adam answered without hesitation. “I’d save Mother, of course.”

  Martin looked hard at his strong, handsome son and asked the second part of the question. “Why?”

  Adam said: “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Dad. I’d save both of you if I could—”

  “I know you would. You’ve been a crack shot since you were five. But there might be only one chance. Your answer is the only possible one, but I have to know why you gave it.”

  The boy frowned as he struggled to reason out the reply he had made instinctively. “Because—if necessary —she and I could—” Then it came out in a rush: “Because she could be the mother to the world and I could be the father.”

  Martin shuddered as if a long chill had just passed. It was all right. He embraced his fine, strong,intelligent son and wept.

  After a little while Siss appeared, walking the path beside the stream, naked as the two of them but different, as Adam had said, and riding the naked baby on her hip.

  “Thought we’d join the menfolks for lunch,” she said. “I picked some berries for dessert.” She carried the blackberries in a mesh bag and some had been bruised, staining the tanned skin a delicate blue just below her slim waist.

  Martin said: “You sure make a good-looking picture, you two. Come here and give me a kiss.”

  The baby kissed him first, then toddled off to smooch up for Adam, who gave her a dutiful peck.

  Their father held open his arms and Siss sat beside him, putting the berries aside. She rested her head on his shoulder, serene. Martin folded her to him and kissed her eyes and cheeks and hair and neck and finally her lips, there in the sunshine, by the side of the pure stream, in the presence of all the world.

  “Do you think—” she started to say, but Martin said “Hush, now. It’s all right. Everything’s all right, Siss darling.” She sighed and relaxed against him. He had never called her darling before. He kissed her again for a long time and she gradually lay back on the soft ground and raised one knee and bent the other to accommodate her husband.

  The baby lost interest and went to wade in the stream but Adam watched, his elbow on his knee, and once he said, “Don’t crush the blackberries,” and reached out to get them. He ate a handful, slowly.

  Then he heard his mother gasp, “Oh, praise God!” and after a moment both his parents became still. And after a little while longer he looked to see that the baby was okay and then went to the intertwined, gently-breathing bodies, which were more beautiful than anything he had ever seen.

  Adam knelt beside them and kissed his father’s neck and his mother’s lips. Siss opened her arms and enfolded her son, too.

  And Adam asked, with his face against his mother’s cheek, which was wet and warm, “Is this what love is?”

  And his mother answered, “Yes, honey,” and his father said, in a muffled kind of way, “It’s everything there is, son.”

  Adam reached out for the berries and put one in his mother’s mouth and one in his father’s and one in his. Then he got up to give one to the baby.

  <>

  * * * *

  In Orbit 1, it was “The Secret Place”; in Orbit 2, “Fiddler’s Green.” Now here is “Bramble Bush,” and it is the last. After this, there will be no more stories by Richard McKenna in Orbit.

  This remarkable story was written early in McKenna’s career: he brought it to the Milford Writers’ Conference in 1960 or thereabouts. I did not understand a word of it then, and concluded that it was a failure. After McKenna’s death in 1964, it turned up in a batch of manuscripts Eva McKenna sent me. Reading it again, with more care, I discovered that far from being muddled all the way through, it was a brilliant and perfectly lucid story, buried under a mass of trivial confusions inadvertently or deliberately introduced by the author. With Mrs. McKenna’s permission, therefore, I made a number of minor changes, mostly in the characters’ names. (In the original version, half a dozen of the characters had names that looked or sounded alike.) Except for these, the story remains as McKenna wrote it. It is that rare thing, a pure science fiction story. It deals with one of the most puzzling questions in relativity, one to which Einstein never gave an unequivocal answer: If all four spacetime dimensions are equivalent, how is it that we perceive one so differently from the rest?

  Only a writer with McKenna’s peculiar talents and training could have given this solution, which involves the anatomy of the nervous system, symbology, anthropology, the psychology of perception ... and magic.

  * * * *

  Bramble Bush

  by Richard McKenna

  Team Leader Ed Gard did not tell them until after Explorer Vessel M-24 rotated irreversibly into subspace.

  “We’ll not come out by kappa-12 Carinae,” he said then to the five men standing clumped in the control room. “We’re going to alpha-1 Centauri.”

  Fat Webb Onderdonck, the climatologist, exploded. “A field trip for kids! How come?”

  “Isn’t it already settled?” asked Minelli, the slender geologist.

  Shipman Isaac McPherson punched a reference combination and glanced at the lighted screen.

  “One Earth-type planet named Proteus,” he said, frowning. “Never been a landing. Now why didn’t I ever wonder about that before? My God, the nearest system to Earth—”

  “Only in the Riemannian sense,” Onderdonck broke in. “Means nothing relative to subspace.” McPherson’s craggy face cleared.

  “But we’ve taken them in order of Riemannian contiguity all along,” objected Chalmers, the biochemist. “This exception does seem unaccountable. There must be a reason.” His thin, sharp features were troubled.

  “Overlooked in the shuffle. Maybe a misfiled report. What’s one planet anyway, among a billion?” Webb Onderdonck scowled.

  “Not so, Webb,” Gard said, squaring massive shoulders. “In the past century the Corps projected several trips to Proteus. Each one aborted through a long series of personnel accidents and other delays. We are the first to get away.”

  “Why the secrecy? Who’s being fooled?”

  “Fate, maybe. A sop to superstition. Sit down, people, and I’ll explain.”

  Seated along the wall bench, all but the scowling fat man, they listened as their tall leader paced and talked. Proteus had been his personal mystery since he was ten years old, he said, and the mystery was that no one else was curious.

  “Everybody shushed my questions and got mad when I persisted,” he said. “Just one of
those things, they kept telling me, too many planets to worry about any single one. It came to me that the most insoluble mystery is one that no one will admit exists.”

  He aimed his education at the Explorer Corps, he went on, enlisted and in time qualified as team leader. When he tried to rouse official interest in a trip to Proteus he hit a stone wall of indifference grading into covert hostility. But finally he had infected Vane, the project coordinator at Denverport, with his own curiosity. Together they had planned this secret diversion of a routine Carina trip.