Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  by Avram Davidson

  The rumor that the already controversial new double-speed thruway would be closed to motorcycles was just that: a rumor: and it had already been officially denied —twice. Craig Burns thought now that perhaps it had been a mistake to deny it at all. Gave the rumor dignity ... his mind absently sought a better word as he slipped through the milling crowd (crowd? almost a mob) on the steps and in the corridors of the new State Capital Building. Currency! That was the word.

  . . . gave the rumor currency . . .

  Because, besides the usual knots of little old ladies with their Trees, Yes! Thruway, No! buttons, besides the inevitable delegations of hayseeds from Nowhere Flats who were either complaining that the thruway was scheduled to go too near their town or complaining that it wasn’t scheduled to go near enough, besides the representatives of the rival guild—the urban planners—with their other ideas and their briefcases and their indoor-pale skins (so different from the ruddy glow or tan of a real out-in-all-weather man; besides all these (and including as always some Hire More Minority protesters), today it seemed as though all the motorcycle freaks in the state were on hand. On hand, and out for blood. Well, well, what the hell. It added a little color to the scene. And wouldn’t make any difference at all, in the end: Gypsy Jokers with long hair, Hell’s Angels who were merely shaggy, Brave Bulls in their Viking-horned crash helmets, and the Gentlemen of the Road, so super-groomed and—

  With the blank face and absent-minded slouch he had learned to be the best thing for slipping through angry crowds, Craig managed to get almost to the door of the Committee Room without being recognized. And even then, with a pleasant smile, he succeeded in getting inside before the reporters and cameramen got to him. With an apologetic gesture. No point in antagonizing Media, generally so helpful in picking out and publicizing the more outstanding of the anti-highways people and thus showing them up for the nuts and oddballs that they really were. But it made little sense to stop in the middle of them just to grant an on-the-spot interview.

  In fact, Burns thought, taking one last look, head half-turned, it made no sense at all.

  Horns on their crash helmets, for God’s sake!

  * * * *

  Just as some composers never tire of playing their own music, so Craig Burns never tired of driving over the beautiful highways he...well ... he and his Department...had created. It had been a labor of love building them, seeing each one through from the preliminary survey through actual construction to the time he liked best of all. When the roads were ready to go but not yet open to the public. When he could drive along and drive alone for miles...and miles...sometimes for hundreds of miles. Just Highway Chief Craig Burns and his car and his beautiful roads, with their lovely and intricate bypasses and cloverleafs and underpasses, slow and steady when he felt like it, revving it up and gauging the niceties of the straight stretches or the delightfully calculated curves when he felt like it. Over and under and around and across and back and under and— —nobody on the whole highway but him. It was better than a woman. It was better even than the power of office. It was just about the best thing there was.

  Sometimes, smiling to himself, he wondered if he really didn’t sometimes push through new road plans just for the sheer pleasure of this, even if the new roads weren’t really needed. But the smile was for the joke, the secret, private little joke, for there was really no such thing as a new road which wasn’t needed. And as for the things which weren’t so nice ... the stupid, stupid, jackass things which people did with the beautiful roads...crowding and packing and jamming them with their cars and trucks and motorcycles and station wagons...stupid people, stupid jerks, jackasses!—so that all kinds of things had to be done, afterwards, to the sweet and clean and lovely new roads—

  As for that, Craig didn’t care to think about that, much. It made him get that hot feeling in the skin of his face, that surging, raging feeling around his heart. That sort of thing, he left mostly to the others in the Department. And everybody else in the Department was the others. He’d created. Let them mar it, since it had to be marred. Changing routes, adding, subtracting, closing down, chopping and changing—let them do it. It wasn’t his fault.

  * * * *

  Probably the hearing had taken more out of him than he’d realized. And so damned unnecessary. Legislative hearings! After all, what did the legislature have to do with it? The very state constitution granted the Highways Department all the authority it needed. It could condemn property and pay what it knew to be right and reasonable. It could say where the roads would go and where they wouldn’t go. What shape they’d take. How to design and how to build. The roads, the roads were engineered beautifully. It was the stupid bastard people who were engineered wrong. Tiring him out and confusing him with their hearings and demonstrations. No wonder he’d missed the Hadley turnoff. That is, well, yeah, sure, he must have missed it. This cloverleaf was after the Hadley turnoff. Well, nothing to do but turn around and go back. The afternoon had yeah, you bet, upset him. But what in hell did the rest of the people have to be upset about? All that crap about highways dehumanizing, for Christ’s sake. —Take this next turn.

  No!

  Well, had no choice, stupid jerk back there zooming along and forcing him— All that crap about highways exhausting, hypnotizing, confusing ... All that crap. Look at this lovely cloverleaf. And this neat tunnel, here. No, but it wasn’t the highway, for God’s sake, it was just that stupid—

  Okay, then, he just couldn’t remember this tunnel. So what? All the highways in the state— Okay, that was that, out of the tunnel! Nothing hard about that! And back on the cloverleaf again.

  Cloverleaf? There wasn’t supposed to be— And hadn’t he had a clear glimpse, in the shadows and the blinking lights (make mental note: report defective lights) of another tunnel branching off back— Hadley turnoff. Great. Just tired out after that damned hearing, crowd, mob, reporters, motorcycle gangs, what the hell. What the hell! Cloverleaf! Tunnel! Tunnel branching off, no he didn’t want it, well for God’s sake! Here he was. Lights bad, lights very bad, lights worse. No lights. No traffic, either, for that matter. Must be, yes, certainly: was: a discontinued branch tunnel. Vague recollection. Bad drainage. Turned out not to fit in with new, unforeseen traffic pattern subsequently developed. Bad air. Bad smell. Car gone dead! Flip on the radio, signal for the Department’s very own high-speed tow-car and ever-ready private Departmental emergency limousine. Radio dead. Of course. Tunnel. Okay. Okay. Okay. Get out, walk.

  Seemed, it seemed to Craig that it was, must, had to be shorter going ahead than going back. A car. Stopped. He waited for the head to be stuck out of the window, the smashed and dusty window. Motorcycle on its side. Station wagon almost a third of the way up the ramp. What crazy— Of course. Word had gotten around, sure. And those in the know had taken their old hulks and abandoned them here. Oh boy. Thought they’d save money, avoid tickets, ah. Another think coming. Look at them all! And what a stink, what—

  Definitely, someone, something, was moving up ahead there. Half in the shadows cast by strange, dim light. A man, sure enough. Black leather jacket, filthy jeans, obscene feet, and—

  Craig Burns turned and fled, his screams echoing, echoing.

  Behind him, unhurried, assured, horns jutting from the helmet on his head, the newest minotaur followed upon his newest victim.

  <>

  * * * *

  Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles

  by Carol Carr

  To tell you the truth, in the old days we would have sat shivah for the whole week. My so-called daughter gets married, my own flesh and blood, and not only he doesn’t look Jewish, he’s not even human.

  ‘Papa,’ she says to me, two seconds after I refuse to speak to her again in my entire life, ‘if you know him you’ll love him, I promise.’ So what can I answer - the truth, like I always tell her: ‘If I know him I’ll vomit, that’s how he affects me. I can help it? He makes me want to throw up
on him.’

  With silk gloves you have to handle the girl, just like her mother. I tell her what I feel, from the heart, and right away her face collapses into a hundred cracks and water from the Atlantic Ocean makes a soggy mess out of her paper sheath. And that’s how I remember her after six months - standing in front of me, sopping wet from the tears and making me feel like a monster - me - when all the time it’s her you-should-excuse-the-expression husband who’s the monster.

  After she’s gone to live with him (new Horizon Village, Crag City, Mars), I try to tell myself it’s not me who has to - how can I put it? - deal with him intimately; if she can stand it, why should I complain? It’s not like I need somebody to carry on the business; my business is to enjoy myself in my retirement. But who can enjoy? Sadie doesn’t leave me alone for a minute. She calls me a criminal, a worthless no-good with gallstones for a heart.

  ‘Hector, where’s your brains?’ she says, having finally given up on my emotions. I can’t answer her. I just lost my daughter, I should worry about my brains, too? I’m silent as the grave. I can’t eat a thing. I’m empty - drained. It’s as though I’m waiting for something to happen, but I don’t know what. I sit in a chair that folds me up like a bee in a flower and rocks me to sleep with electronic rhythms when I feel like sleeping, but who can sleep? I look at my wife and I see Lady Macbeth. Once I caught her whistling as she pushed the button for her bath. I fixed her with a look like an icicle tipped with arsenic.

  ‘What are you so happy about? Thinking of your grandchildren with the twelve toes?’

  She doesn’t flinch. An iron woman.

  When I close my eyes, which is rarely, I see our daughter when she was fourteen years old, with skin just beginning to go pimply and no expression yet on her face. I see her walking up to Sadie and asking her what she should do with her life now she’s filling out, and my darling Sadie, my life’s mate, telling her why not marry a freak; you got to be a beauty to find a man here, but on Mars you shouldn’t know from so many fish. ‘I knew I could count on you, Mama,’ she says, and goes ahead and marries a plant with legs.

  Things go on like this - impossible - for months. I lose twenty pounds, my nerves, three teeth and I’m on the verge of losing Sadie, when one day the mailchute goes ding-dong and it’s a letter from my late daughter. I take it by the tips of two fingers and bring it into where my wife is punching ingredients for the gravy I won’t eat tonight.

  ‘It’s a communication from one of your relatives.’

  ‘Oh-oh-oh.’ My wife makes a grab for it, meanwhile punching CREAM-TOMATO-SAUCE-BEEF DRIPPINGS. No wonder I have no appetite.

  ‘I’ll give it to you on one condition only,’ I tell her, holding it out of her trembling reach. ‘Take it into the bedroom and read it to yourself. Don’t even move your lips for once; I don’t want to know. If she’s God forbid dead, I’ll send him a sympathy card.’

  Sadie has a variety of expressions but the one thing they have in common is they all wish me misfortune in my present and future life.

  While she’s reading the letter I find suddenly I have nothing to do. The magazines I read already. Breakfast I ate (like a bird). I’m all dressed to go out if I felt like, but there’s nothing outside I don’t have inside. Frankly, I don’t feel like myself - I’m nervous. I say a lot of things I don’t really intend and now maybe this letter comes to tell me I’ve got to pay for my meanness. Maybe she got sick up there; God knows what they eat, the kind of water they drink, the creatures they run around with. Not wanting to think about it too much, I go over to my chair and turn it on to brisk massage. It doesn’t take long till I’m dreaming (fitfully).

  I’m someplace surrounded by sand, sitting in a baby’s crib and bouncing a diapered kangaroo on my knee. It gurgles up at me and calls me grandpa and I don’t know what I should do. I don’t want to hurt its feelings, but if I’m a grandpa to a kangaroo, I want no part of it; I only want it should go away. I pull out a dime from my pocket and put it into its pouch. The pouch is full of tiny insects which bite my fingers. I wake up in a sweat.

  ‘Sadie! Are you reading, or rearranging the sentences? Bring it in here and I’ll see what she wants. If it’s a divorce, I know a lawyer.’

  Sadie comes into the room with her I-told-you-so waddle and gives me a small wet kiss on the cheek - a gold star for acting like a mensch. So I start to read it, in a loud monotone so she shouldn’t get the impression I give a damn:

  ‘Dear Daddy, I’m sorry for not writing sooner. I suppose I wanted to give you a chance to simmer down first.’

  (Ingrate! Does the sun simmer down?)

  ‘I know it would have been inconvenient for you to come to the wedding, but Mor and I hoped you would maybe send us a letter just to let us know you’re okay and still love me, in spite of everything.’

  Right at this point I feel a hot sigh followed by a short but wrenching moan.

  ‘Sadie, get away from my neck. I’m warning you ...’

  Her eyes are going flick-a-fleck over my shoulder, from the piece of paper I’m holding to my face, back to the page, flick-a-fleck, flick-a-fleck.

  ‘All right, already,’ she shoo-shoos me. ‘I read it, I know what’s in it. Now it’s your turn to see what kind of a lousy father you turned out to be.’ And she waddles back into the bedroom, shutting the door extra careful, like she’s handling a piece of snow-white velvet.

  When I’m certain she’s gone, I sit myself down on the slab of woven dental floss my wife calls a couch and press a button on the arm that reads SEMI-CL.: FELDMAN TO FRIML. The music starts to slither out from the speaker under my left armpit. The right speaker is dead and buried and the long narrow one at the base years ago got drowned from the dog, who to this day hasn’t learned to control himself when he hears ‘Desert Song.’

  This time I’m lucky; it’s a piece by Feldman that comes on. I continue to read, calmed by the music.

  ‘I might as well get to the point, Papa, because for all I know you’re so mad you tore up this letter without even reading it. The point is that Mor and I are going to have a baby. Please, please don’t throw this into the disintegrator. It’s due in July, which gives you over three months to plan the trip up here. We have a lovely house, with a guest room that you and Mama can stay in for as long as you want.’

  I have to stop here to interject a couple of questions, since my daughter never had a head for logic and it’s my strong point.

  First of all, if she were in front of me in person right now I would ask right off what means ‘Mor and I are going to have a baby.’ Which? Or both? The second thing is, when she refers to it as ‘if is she being literal or just uncertain? And just one more thing and then I’m through for good: Just how lovely can a guest room be that has all the air piped in and you can’t even see the sky or take a walk on the grass because there is no grass, only simulated this and substituted that?

  All the above notwithstanding, I continued to read:

  ‘By the way, Papa, there’s something I’m not sure you understand. Mor, you may or may not know, is as human as you and me, in all the important ways - and frankly a bit more intelligent.’

  I put down the letter for a minute just to give the goose-bumps a chance to fly out of my stomach ulcers before I go on with her love and best and kisses and hopes for seeing us soon, Lorinda.

  I don’t know how she manages it, but the second I’m finished, Sadie is out of the bedroom and breathing hard.

  ‘Well, do I start packing or do I start packing? And when I start packing, do I pack for us or do I pack for me?’

  ‘Never. I should die three thousand deaths, each one with a worse prognosis.’

  * * * *

  It’s a shame a company like Interplanetary Aviation can’t afford, with the fares they charge, to give you a comfortable seat. Don’t ask how I ever got there in the first place. Ask my wife - she’s the one with the mouth. First of all, they only allow you three pounds of luggage, which if you’re only bringing clothes is ple
nty, but we had a few gifts with us. We were only planning to stay a few days and to sublet the house was Sadie’s idea, not mine.

  The whole trip was supposed to take a month, each way. This is one reason Sadie thought it was impractical to stay for the weekend and then go home, which was the condition on which I’d agreed to go.

  But now that we’re on our way, I decide I might as well relax. I close my eyes and try to think of what the first meeting will be like.

  ‘How.’ I put up my right hand in a gesture of friendship and trust. I reach into my pocket and offer him beads.

  But even in my mind he looks at me blank, his naked pink antennas waving in the breeze like a worm’s underwear. Then I realize there isn’t any breeze where we’re going. So they stop waving and wilt.

  I look around in my mind. We’re alone, the two of us, in the middle of a vast plain, me in my business suit and him in his green skin. The scene looks familiar, like something I had experienced, or read about... ‘We’ll meet at Philippi,’ I think, and stab him with my sword.