Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  “No,” Mary said. “I won’t have it so.”

  “We can’t really change the past, Mary, and you know it,” Chalmers said. “Both times you were out you trended to the left under a kind of tropism that brought you back in. The worst that can happen is that we will all have a shaking up and a bad dream. But how do we know that this island of ours will not move with us if we all go? We must use trial and error until we have enough data for an operational hypothesis.”

  “Muscle-thinking,” Svirsky said. “But let’s try it, Hank. We can pick up our word game afterward.”

  “I’m coming back,” Mary warned.

  Svirsky’s big hand encircled her left wrist.

  * * * *

  Water black as the night sky above swirled around Thomas Gard’s chest. His small son in the crook of his left arm whimpered into his ear. His wife was losing her footing, clinging to his right elbow, pulling him over.

  “Climb up on me, Mary,” he said, stooping a little. “Let me carry you both. We’ll be swept away else.”

  “You haven’t the strength, Tom. Let me go, save Edward.”

  “All of us or none of us, Mary. Only a hundred yards now.”

  “Too far. I know it. Edward, goodbye Edward, you be a brave, strong man now.”

  “Mary!”

  “Goodbye, Tom. I love you.”

  The current swept her into darkness. Thomas Gard shouted her name in anguish over the black, swirling water. The child cried in a greater fear.

  * * * *

  The four men stumbled into present awareness by the metal cage, still holding hands. Chalmers was trembling.

  “I grant you that death-urge now, Ed,” he gasped, “but don’t ask me—”

  “Never mind, Hank,” Gard said. “Let’s be convinced now that charging bullheaded into it isn’t going to change a thing. We have to think our minds free of this.”

  “God yes,” McPherson said. “I relived that fight I had with Vane when he tried to restrict me to the base the night before liftout. I felt murderous, I tell you. He kept getting up and I beat him almost to death. I thought I’d get a year in jail.”

  “He was trying to beat the jinx on Proteus,” Gard said. “That’s why he restricted you and also why he wouldn’t bring charges.”

  “The fight bothered me,” McPherson admitted. “I went on to the party, but I couldn’t get drunk. I didn’t have enough steam and ugliness left in me to carry through that near-rape I relived the first time out. Funny how things hang together.”

  “Isn’t it, though? I went through a crucial episode in my grandfather’s life, a flood. I was three people and this time I think I accepted death while willing life. But that’s not data, even for a word game.”

  “I’ll play now, Joe,” Chalmers said. “Start your word game.”

  “Let your muscles hear this part,” Svirsky said. “Sit down and relax.”

  They sprawled on the dull green grass.

  “We vertebrates define time, space and thingness first in our own bodies,” Svirsky began. “Then we generalize them to all sensory input to make a real world. It was an action-world for a billion years before it became a thought-world, and it is muscles which act. Our wiring diagram provides our muscles with two separate innervation circuits.

  “One circuit is for muscle tone and it never relaxes completely until death. It maintains posture, any unchanging position we hold through time. It does it by continuous motor discharge from and kinesthetic sensory feedback to the cerebellum. From the cerebellum association fibers go to the cerebral cortex and almost all of this innervation is on the same side of the body as the muscles concerned.

  “Suppose for the moment that tonus underlies our basic feeling of time as duration.

  “The phasic innervation provides for action, the causing of relative position changes among things. It starts from the motor area of the cortex and feeds back to an adjacent sensory area. Both areas on both hemispheres have the shapes of grotesque manikins. Discriminatory touch, pain and temperature also feed into the sensory areas. But the fibers nearly all cross over from muscles and skin on theopposite side of the body.

  “Suppose now that phasis underlies our root-feeling for space and change. Suppose further that its cortical projection areas are superimposed on the uncrossed sensory-tonic projection from the cerebellum. Suppose finally that combination of sameness-in-difference gives us the stubbornly felt apartness of time from space and, in the tension between them, thingness. Number, magnitude, causality, the world, can follow.

  “We know our language structures our thought and the world we experience. But the structure of our nervous system, our coding and uncoding equipment, provides language itself with an invariant pattern upon which linguistic relativity is only secondary elaboration.

  “All of this, my brothers, is to persuade your muscles not to listen to what I wish to say next.”

  Gard flexed his powerful left arm. “You just go along for the ride, now,” he addressed his biceps.

  “Almost you make me touch the how of how itself,” Chalmers mused. “Go on with the word game. My muscles are out of circuit.”

  Svirsky smiled. “The Protean vertebrate wiring diagram,” he said, “does not provide for tract crossings in the cord. The brain is imperfectly divided and has no bundled commissures. Like us, they code the world in volleys of neural impulse, but their decoding equipment is different.

  “Like us, they exist in the continuum as world-lines. They have wound around our own thin sheaf of world-lines a massive coil of their world-lines. It makes a time cage that coerces our world-lines in a way our muscles cannot grasp.”

  “You mean they outvoted us muscleheads?” McPherson asked.

  “They have more of their kind of muscle, Ike,” Chalmers agreed. “But Joe, do you mean we have to grasp their reality?”

  “We must stop trying to grasp it. I said our vertebrate wiring diagram may dictate our primal symbol of reality. But some few of the fibers in each case I cited do not follow the structural rule. And we have also, below consciousness, a phylogenetically older diagram. These are ghosts within us, my brothers, not bound to the primal symbol. Let us wake them now.

  “Let go of lever and pushrod causality for the notion of statistical covariance. Let go of that for the still more primitive notion of ‘organism’ and ‘sympathy of the whole’ out of which both arise. Remember that fairly late in the pre-space era our own ancestors used to bewitch each other and one potent how was to run nine times widdershins around the victim. Think of that timeless, spaceless, pre-vertebral ‘sympathy of the whole’ as the substrate from which parapsychological phenomena still arise to bedevil science centuries after Rhine.”

  “You mean we’re bewitched, then?” Chalmers asked.

  “That’s the simplest how that we can dredge out of our symbol system,” Svirsky agreed. “We are under a spell so powerful that our massed rationality cannot prevail against it at any cost. So we must erect your operational hypothesis on an irrational base.

  “Here is one. We are caged by a field effect. When we cut across it consciousness drops almost to a cellular level and the coordinating ‘I’ flees screaming. But fields have structure. We must find a geodesic and it may lead us out.”

  “We can only grasp fields instrumentally,” Chalmers objected. “But of course, we can be the instruments. To hell with observer detachment.”

  “Exactly,” Svirsky smiled. “Each time Ed trended to the left out there, I think the pre-vertebral ghost in him was seeking the geodesic.”

  “I’ll be the instrument,” Gard said. “How do you calibrate me?”

  “You’re already calibrated, in degrees of rationality on scales of perception and speech,” Svirsky said. “Get me two of those sticks you meant to use in playing Kohler to the Proteans.”

  He took out his shoelaces and tied an eight-foot stick to each of Gard’s upper arms.

  “So I steer you, Ed, when the pointer swings off optimum,” he said. “
See, we play Kohler to ourselves now.”

  Gard slanted leftward into the critical area. “The musclehead leading the muscleheads,” he laughed. “Here we go, people.”

  He described what he saw and Svirsky held him to coherence with tugs and nudges. Very shortly Gard learned to correct for himself. He followed an erratic, looping, doubling course that still trended leftward. After the first lap around the cage Chalmers remarked that it was a spiral of opposite hand to the Protean mass-spiral.

  “That’s our statistical trend,” Svirsky chuckled, “but who will write the equation for the path we actually follow?”

  “We really must work up the statistical dynamics of witchcraft someday,” Chalmers laughed back. “Teach every sophomore how to unrun a spell.”

  The fifth lap missed the ship’s ramp by twenty feet. McPherson was dismayed, but Chalmers laughed again.

  “I always knew Finagle was a Protean,” he said. “We forgot to add his constant to the right hand vector:”

  “We’ll add it now,” Svirsky said. “Ed, untie the sticks. Now imagine yourself running to the top of that ramp. Flex your muscles for each step. Experience yourself at the top looking down. Then pull the trigger and make it so. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” Gard said.

  He looked up and down the ramp, pranced a little, then dashed to the top through a blur of motion. He turned, only to be knocked flat by three hurtling bodies.

  “Take it easy,” Gard said, getting up. “It’s good to be home, but not that good, people.”

  “We stood down there at least five minutes deciding why you were frozen like a statue up here,” Chalmers said. “Then Ike came up and froze, then Joe, and finally I came. We all got here at the exact, same instant.”

  “I see. We snapped back into our own time. But Joe, how could you know we’d be out of the field up here? Is it a ship effect?”

  “Another hunch, Ed. I suspected the Proteans might only project space in two directions so that the field might attenuate rapidly on the vertical.”

  “Well what d’ye know!” McPherson said disgustedly.

  “We could just as well have walked out on stilts. So damned simple! How stupid can you get?”

  “Science can’t answer that question,” Chalmers said.

  “Stations,” Gard said. “Let’s lift out, Ike.”

  In subspace, on automatics, the four of them relaxed with coffee.

  “Our report,” Gard said. “I propose we rig it and conclude that Proteus is not only unsuitable for settlement but of no interest to commerce, science or even art.”

  “Right,” Chalmers agreed. “How could we ever tell them otherwise?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” McPherson said. “Use Joe’s line about fields. People savvy fields, all right.”

  “Yes,” Chalmers said. “Fences around them. Flowers and grass. When a man’s in a field he’s got both feet on the ground.”

  “Joe,” Gard broke in, “I think you knew more all along than you let on. Why didn’t you come up with that explanation sooner? Of course nobody got hurt, but you did let us all bloody our noses on that barrier.”

  “Maybe I could have, Ed,” Svirsky admitted. “Maybe I even wanted to. But if I had, my brothers, it would have seemed to all of us too silly for words.”

  “Not to speak of action,” Chalmers said softly.

  <>

  * * * *

  If Joanna Russ had consulted me before beginning to write her Alyx stories (see “I Gave Her Sack and Sherry” and “The Adventuress,” in Orbit 2), I would have told her nobody could get away with a series of heroic fantasies of prehistory in which the central character, the barbaric adventurer, is a woman. I would have been wrong, just as I was when I told Rosel George Brown she couldn’t sell a novel about a female private eye. [See Sibyl Sue Blue, Doubleday, 1966; Berkley, 1967 (published as Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue).]

  It is a little idiotic, isn’t it, that women in adventure stories should have been restricted to the roles of simpering princesses and insatiable vampires? . . . and that even women writers, crushed by convention, should have been too timid to tell us what women are really like?

  The attractive thing about Alyx is that she is not a cardboard fantasy figure, but a real person. And incidentally, this is the overlooked clue to the age-old “mystery” about women: they are people.

  * * * *

  The Barbarian

  by Joanna Russ

  Alyx, the gray-eyed, the silent woman. Wit, arm, kill-quick for hire, she watched the strange man thread his way through the tables and the smoke toward her. This was in Ourdh, where all things are possible. He stopped at the table where she sat alone and with a certain indefinable gallantry, not pleasant but perhaps its exact opposite, he said:

  “A woman—here?”

  “You’re looking at one,” said Alyx dryly, for she did not like his tone. It occurred to her that she had seen him before—though he was not so fat then, no, not quite so fat—and then it occurred to her that the time of their last meeting had almost certainly been in the hills when she was four or five years old. That was thirty years ago. So she watched him very narrowly as he eased himself into the seat opposite, watched him as he drummed his fingers in a lively tune on the tabletop, and paid him close attention when he tapped one of the marine decorations that hung from the ceiling (a stuffed blowfish, all spikes and parchment, that moved lazily to and fro in a wandering current of air) and made it bob. He smiled, the flesh around his eyes straining into folds.

  “I know you,” he said. “A raw country girl fresh from the hills who betrayed an entire religious delegation to the police some ten years ago. You settled down as a picklock. You made a good thing of it. You expanded your profession to include a few more difficult items and you did a few things that turned heads hereabouts. You were not unknown, even then. Then you vanished for a season and reappeared as a fairly rich woman. But that didn’t last, unfortunately.”

  “Didn’t have to,” said Alyx.

  “Didn’t last,” repeated the fat man imperturbably, with a lazy shake of the head. “No, no, it didn’t last. And now,” (he pronounced the “now” with peculiar relish) “you are getting old.”

  “Old enough,” said Alyx, amused.

  “Old,” said he, “old. Still neat, still tough, still small. But old. You’re thinking of settling down.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Children?”

  She shrugged, retiring a little into the shadow. The fat man did not appear to notice.

  “It’s been done,” she said.

  “You may die in childbirth,” said he, “at your age.”

  “That, too, has been done.”

  She stirred a little, and in a moment a short-handled Southern dagger, the kind carried unobtrusively in sleeves or shoes, appeared with its point buried in the tabletop, vibrating ever so gently.

  “It is true,” said she, “that I am growing old. My hair is threaded with white. I am developing a chunky look around the waist that does not exactly please me, though I was never a ballet-girl.” She grinned at him in the semi-darkness. “Another thing,” she said softly, “that I develop with age is a certain lack of patience. If you do not stop making personal remarks and taking up my time— which is valuable—I shall throw you across the room.”

  “I would not, if I were you,” he said.

  “You could not.”

  The fat man began to heave with laughter. He heaved until he choked. Then he said, gasping, “I beg your pardon.” Tears ran down his face.

  “Go on,” said Alyx. He leaned across the table, smiling, his fingers mated tip to tip, his eyes little pits of shadow in his face.

  “I come to make you rich,” he said.

  “You can do more than that,” said she steadily. A quarrel broke out across the room between a soldier and a girl he had picked up for the night; the fat man talked through it, or rather under it, never taking his eyes off her face.

  “Ah!�
�� he said, “you remember when you saw me last and you assume that a man who can live thirty years without growing older must have more to give—if he wishes—than a handful of gold coins. You are right. I can make you live long. I can insure your happiness. I can determine the sex of your children. I can cure all diseases. I can even” (and here he lowered his voice) “turn this table, or this building, or this whole city to pure gold, if I wish it.”