Orbit 5 - [Anthology] Read online

  Only then am I able to catch a few winks.

  The month goes by. When I begin to think I’ll never remember, how to use a fork, the loudspeaker is turned on and I hear this very smooth, modulated voice, the tranquillized tones of a psychiatrist sucking glycerine, telling us it’s just about over, and we should expect a slight jolt upon landing.

  That slight jolt starts my life going by so fast I’m missing all the good parts. But finally the ship is still and all you can hear are the wheezes and sighs of the engines - the sounds remind me of Sadie when she’s winding down from a good argument. I look around. Everybody is very white. Sadie’s five fingers are around my upper arm like a tourniquet.

  ‘We’re here,’ I tell her. ‘Do I get a hacksaw or can you manage it yourself?’

  ‘Oh, my goodness.’ She loosens her grip. She really looks a mess - completely pale, not blinking, not even nagging.

  I take her by the arm and steer her into customs. All the time I feel that she’s a big piece of unwilling luggage I’m smuggling in. There’s no cooperation at all in her feet and her eyes are going every which way.

  ‘Sadie, shape up!’

  ‘If you had a little more curiosity about the world you’d be a better person,’ she says tolerantly.

  While we’re waiting to be processed by a creature in a suit like ours who surprises me by talking English, I sneak a quick look around.

  It’s funny. If I didn’t know where we are I’d think we’re in the back yard. The ground stretches out pure green, and it’s only from the leaflet they give you in the ship to keep your mind off the panic that I know it’s 100 per cent Acrispan we’re looking at, not grass. The air we’re getting smells good, too, like fresh-cut flowers, but not too sweet.

  By the time I’ve had a good look and a breathe, what’s-its-name is handing us back our passports with a button that says to keep Mars beautiful don’t litter.

  * * * *

  I won’t tell you about the troubles we had getting to the house, or the misunderstanding about the tip, because to be honest I wasn’t paying attention. But we do manage to make it to the right door, and considering that the visit was a surprise, I didn’t really expect they would meet us at the airport. My daughter must have been peeking, though, because she’s in front of us even before we have a chance to knock.

  ‘Mother!’ she says, looking very round in the stomach. She hugs and kisses Sadie, who starts bawling. Five minutes later, when they’re out of the clinch, Lorinda turns to me, a little nervous.

  You can say a lot of things about me, but basically I’m a warm person, and we’re about to be guests in this house, even if she is a stranger to me. I shake her hand.

  ‘Is he home, or is he out in the back yard, growing new leaves?’

  Her face (or what I can see of it through the climate adapter) crumbles a little at the chin line, but she straightens it out and puts her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Mor had to go out, Daddy - something important came up - but he should be back in an hour or so. Come on, let’s go inside.’

  * * * *

  Actually there’s nothing too crazy about the house, or even interesting. It has walls, a floor and a roof, I’m glad to see, even a few relaxer chairs, and after the trip we just had, I sit down and relax. I notice my daughter is having a little trouble looking me straight in the face, which is only as it should be, and it isn’t long before she and Sadie are discussing pregnancy, gravitational exercise, labour, hospitals, formulas and sleep-taught toilet training. When I’m starting to feel that I’m getting over-educated, I decide to go into the kitchen and make myself a bite to eat. I could have asked them for a little something but I don’t want to interfere with their first conversation. Sadie has all engines going and is interrupting four times a sentence, which is exactly the kind of game they always had back home - my daughter’s goal is to say one complete thought out loud. If Sadie doesn’t spring back with a non sequitur, Lorinda wins that round. A full-fledged knockout with Sadie still champion is when my daughter can’t get a sentence in for a week. Sometimes I can understand why she went to Mars.

  Anyway, while they’re at the height of their simultaneous monologues, I go quietly off to the kitchen to see what I can dig up. (Ripe parts of Mor, wrapped in plastic? Does he really regenerate, I wonder? Does Lorinda fully understand how he works or one day will she make an asparagus omelet out of one of his appendages, only to learn that’s the part that doesn’t grow back? ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’)

  The refrigerator, though obsolete on Earth, is well stocked - fruits of a sort, steaks, it seems, small chicken-type things that might be stunted pigeons. There’s a bowl of a brownish, creamy mess - I can’t even bring myself to smell it. Who’s hungry, anyway, I think. The rumbling in my stomach is the symptom of a father’s love turning sour.

  I wander into the bedroom. There’s a large portrait of Mor hanging on the wall - or maybe his ancestor. Is it true that instead of hearts, Martians have a large avocado pip? There’s a rumour on Earth that when Martians get old they start to turn brown at the edges, like lettuce.

  There’s an object on the floor and I bend down and pick it up. A piece of material - at home I would have thought it was a man’s handkerchief. Maybe it is a handkerchief. Maybe they have colds like us. They catch a germ, the sap rises to combat the infection, and they have to blow their stamens. I open up a drawer to put the piece of material in (I like to be neat), but when I close it, something gets stuck. Another thing I can’t recognize. It’s small, round and either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it. It’s made of something black and shiny. A cloth bowl? What would a vegetable be doing with a cloth bowl? Some questions are too deep for me, but what I don’t know I eventually find out - and not by asking, either.

  I go back to the living room.

  ‘Did you find anything to eat?’ Lorinda asks. ‘Or would you like me to fix - ‘

  ‘Don’t even get up,’ Sadie says quickly. ‘I can find my way around any kitchen, I don’t care whose.’

  ‘I’m not hungry. It was a terrible trip. I thought I’d never wake up from it in one piece. By the way, I heard a good riddle on the ship. What’s round and black, either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it, and made out of a shiny material?’

  Lorinda blushed. ‘A skullcap? But that’s not funny.’

  ‘So who needs funny? Riddles have to be a laugh a minute all of a sudden? You think Oedipus giggled all the way home from seeing the Sphinx?’

  ‘Look, Daddy, I think there’s something I should tell you.’

  ‘I think there are all sorts of things you should tell me.’

  ‘No, I mean about Mor.’

  ‘Who do you think I mean, the grocery boy? You elope with a cucumber from outer space and you want I should be satisfied because he’s human in all the important ways? What’s important - that he sneezes and hiccups? If you tell me he snores, I should be ecstatic? Maybe he sneezes when he’s happy and hiccups when he’s making love and snores because it helps him think better. Does that make him human?’

  ‘Daddy, please.’’

  ‘Okay, not another word.’ Actually I’m starting to feel quite guilty. What if she has a miscarriage right on the spot? A man like me doesn’t blithely torture a pregnant woman, even if she does happen to be his daughter. ‘What’s so important it can’t wait till later?’

  ‘Nothing, I guess. Would you like some chopped liver? I just made some fresh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chopped liver - you know, chopped liver.’

  Oh yes, the ugly mess in the refrigerator. ‘You made it, that stuff in the bowl?’

  ‘Sure. Daddy, there’s something I really have to tell you.’

  She never does get to tell me, though, because her husband walks in, bold as brass.

  I won’t even begin to tell you what he looks like. Let me just say he’s a good dream cooked up by Mary Shelley. I won’t go into it, but
if it gives you a small idea, I’ll say that his head is shaped like an acorn on top of a stalk of broccoli. Enormous blue eyes, green skin and no hair at all except for a small blue round area on top of his head. His ears are adorable. Remember Dumbo the Elephant? Only a little smaller - I never exaggerate, even for effect. And he looks boneless, like a fillet.

  My wife, God bless her, I don’t have to worry about; she’s a gem in a crisis. One look at her son-in-law and she faints dead away. If I didn’t know her better, if I wasn’t absolutely certain that her simple mind contained no guile, I would have sworn she did it on purpose, to give everybody something to fuss about. Before we know what’s happening, we’re all in a tight, frantic conversation about what’s the best way to bring her round. But while my daughter and her husband are in the bathroom looking for some deadly chemical, Sadie opens both eyes at once and stares up at me from the floor.

  ‘What did I miss?’

  ‘You didn’t miss anything - you were only unconscious for fifteen seconds. It was a cat nap, not a coma.’

  ‘Say hello, Hector. Say hello to him or so help me I’ll close my eyes for good.’

  ‘I’m very glad to meet you, Mr Trumbnick,’ he says. I’m grateful that he’s sparing me the humiliation of making the first gesture, but I pretend I don’t see the stalk he’s holding out.

  ‘Smutual,’ I say.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Smutual. How are you? You look better than your pictures.’ He does, too. Even though his skin is green, it looks like the real thing up close. But his top lip sort of vibrates when he talks, and I can hardly bear to look at him except sideways.

  ‘I hear you had some business this afternoon. My daughter never did tell me what your line is, uh, Morton.’

  ‘Daddy, his name is Mor. Why don’t you call him Mor?’

  ‘Because I prefer Morton. When we know each other better I’ll call him something less formal. Don’t rush me, Lorinda; I’m still getting adjusted to the chopped liver.’

  My son-in-law chuckles and his top lip really goes crazy. ‘Oh, were you surprised? Imported meats aren’t a rarity here, you know. Just the other day one of my clients was telling me about an all-Earth meal he had at home.’

  ‘Your client?’ Sadie asks. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be a lawyer?’ (My wife amazes me with her instant familiarity. She could live with a tyrannosaurus in perfect harmony. First she faints, and while she’s out cold everything in her head that was strange becomes ordinary and she wakes up a new woman.)

  ‘No, Mrs Trumbnick. I’m a - ‘

  ‘ - rabbi, of course,’ she finishes. ‘I knew it. The minute Hector found that skullcap I knew it. Him and his riddles. A skullcap is a skullcap and nobody not Jewish would dare wear one - not even a Martian.’ She bites her lip but recovers like a pro. ‘I’ll bet you were out on a Bar Mitzvah - right?’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact - ‘

  ‘ - a Bris. I knew it.’

  She’s rubbing her hands together and beaming at him. ‘A Bris, how nice. But why didn’t you tell us, Lorinda? Why would you keep such a thing a secret?’

  Lorinda comes over to me and kisses me on the cheek, and I wish she wouldn’t because I’m feeling myself go soft and I don’t want to show it.

  ‘Mor isn’t just a rabbi, Daddy. He converted because of me and then found there was a demand among the colonists. But he’s never given up his own beliefs, and part of his job is to minister to the Kopchopees who camp outside the village. That’s where he was earlier, conducting a Kopchopee menopausal rite.’

  ‘A what!’

  ‘Look, to each his own,’ says my wife with the open mind. But me, I want facts, and this is getting more bizarre by the minute.

  ‘Kopchopee. He’s a Kopchopee priest to his own race and a rabbi to ours, and that’s how he makes his living. You don’t feel there’s a contradiction between the two, do you, Morton?’

  ‘That’s right. They both pray to a strong silent god, in different ways of course. The way my race worships, for instance-’

  ‘Listen, it takes all kinds,’ says Sadie.

  ‘And the baby, whatever it turns out to be - will it be a Choptapi or a Jew?’

  ‘Jew, shmoo,’ Sadie says with a wave of dismissal. ‘All of a sudden it’s Hector the Pious - such a megilla out of a molehill.’ She turns away from me and addresses herself to the others, like I’ve just become invisible. ‘He hasn’t seen the inside of a synagogue since we got married - what a rain that night - and now he can’t take his shoes off in a house until he knows its race, colour and creed.’ With a face full of fury, she brings me back into her sight. ‘Nudnick, what’s got into you?’

  I stand up straight to preserve my dignity. ‘If you’ll excuse me, my things are getting wrinkled in the suitcase.’

  Sitting on my bed (with my shoes on), I must admit I’m feeling a little different. Not that Sadie made me change my mind. Far from it; for many years now her voice is the white sound that lets me think my own thoughts. But what I’m realizing more and more is that in a situation like this a girl needs a father, and what kind of a man is it who can’t sacrifice his personal feelings for his only daughter? When she was going out with Herbie the Haemophiliac and came home crying it had to end because she was afraid to touch him, he might bleed, didn’t I say pack your things, we’re going to Grossingers Venus for three weeks? When my twin brother Max went into kitchen sinks, who was it that helped him out at only four per cent? Always, I stood ready to help my family. And if Lorinda ever needed me, it’s now when she’s pregnant by some religious maniac. Okay - he makes me retch, so I’ll talk to him, with a tissue over my mouth. After all, in a world that’s getting smaller all the time, it’s people like me who have to be bigger to make up for it, no?

  I go back to the living room and extend my hand to my son-in-law the cauliflower. (Feh.)

  <>

  * * * *

  Winter’s King

  by Ursula K. LeGuin

  When whirlpools appear in the onward run of time and history seems to swirl around a snag, as in the curious matter of the Succession of Karhide, then pictures come in handy: snapshots, which may be taken up and matched to compare the parent to the child, the young king to the old, and which may also be rearranged and shuffled till the years run straight. For despite the tricks played by instantaneous interstellar communication and just-sub-lightspeed interstellar travel, time (as the Plenipotentiary Axt remarked) does not reverse itself; nor is death mocked.

  Thus, although the best-known picture is that dark image of a young king standing above an old king who lies dead in a corridor lit only by mirror-reflections of a burning city, set it aside a while. Look first at the young king, a nation’s pride, as bright and fortunate a soul as ever lived to the age of twenty-two; but when this picture was taken the young king had her back against a wall. She was filthy, she was trembling, and her face was blank and mad, for she had lost that minimal confidence in the world which is called sanity. Inside her head she repeated, as she had been repeating for hours or years, over and over, “I will abdicate. I will abdicate. I will abdicate.” Inside her eyes she saw the red-walled rooms of the Palace, the towers and streets of Erhenrang in falling snow, the lovely plains of the West Fall, the white summits of the Kargav, and she renounced them all, her kingdom. “I will abdicate,” she said not aloud and then, aloud, screamed as once again the person dressed in red and white approached her saying, “Majesty! A plot against your life has been discovered in the Artisan School,” and the humming noise began, softly. She hid her head in her arms and whispered, “Stop it, please stop it,” but the humming whine grew higher and louder and nearer, relentless, until it was so high and loud that it entered her flesh, tore the nerves from their channels and made her bones dance and jangle, hopping to its tune. She hopped and twitched, bare bones strung on thin white threads, and wept dry tears, and shouted, “Have them— Have them— They must— Executed— Stopped— Stop!”

  I
t stopped.

  She fell in a clattering, chattering heap to the floor. What floor? Not red tiles, not parquetry, not urine-stained cement, but the wood floor of the room in the tower, the little tower bedroom where she was safe, safe from her ogre parent, the cold, mad, uncaring king, safe to play cat’s cradle with Piry and to sit by the fireside on Borhub’s warm lap, as warm and deep as sleep. But there was no hiding, no safety, no sleep. The person dressed in black had come even here and had hold of her head, lifted it up, lifted on thin white strings the eyelids she tried to close.

  “Who am I?”

  The blank, black mask stared down. The young king struggled, sobbing, because now the suffocation would begin: she would not be able to breathe until she said the name, the right name— “Gerer!”—She could breathe. She was allowed to breathe. She had recognized the black one in time.