Damon Knight - Orbit 21

His gaze dropped from hers. “Come on,” he said, taking her arm. “Come inside. You’re upset.”

In his office he handed her a cup of nucoff and put a blanket about her shoulders.

“I need to go home, Manny.”

He sat down carefully. “Only two of those shuttles will be hooking up for home. The flagship is headed to another defensive quadrant where we’ll get a few weeks’ rest before being reassigned. I’ve been promoted, Chrystan! I was right about their nesting grounds. Now we have a clue to their swarming patterns.” Manny’s face lit up with happiness.

The coff burned her lips but she gulped it down. She tried the phrasing out internally first before she said, “Manny, we agreed that you were retiring. That we were going home. That I could have children.”

“That would be difficult to plan now, wouldn’t it? Or do you want to become like the Bharan female soldiers—producing mindless litters of babies for troop consumption? With your role as a shield, you wouldn’t even know who the father was!” His lips whitened.

“We agreed—”

“What we agreed when we married was to avoid the mistake of my first marriage and remember that my career comes first! You’re just a volunteer, but the years I’ve put in are important to me, and if you think I’m going to give it up just when my potential is being realized—” He stopped suddenly and took a breath.

In fear, Chrystan put out her hand to bridge the distance between them. Manny did not take it.

She pulled her hand back, saying, “As a woman of childbearing years, I have the right to request home passage anytime after two years’ service. That’s my potential, Manny. You used to say that my being with you was what made this hell livable. Well, it’s not livable for me. I’m tired of death. I want to go home because I’m pregnant, and I won’t lose this one too by being on the wrong world while it tries to grow!”

He tried to look at her, but found his desk top easier to deal with. “What will you do?”

“What will I do?” she repeated. “I have my therapy work, back pay, my painting and the baby.” She stood up, dropping the blanket from her shoulders, and left her husband sitting there.

Chrystan hunched her shoulders against the bitter and barren cold as she made her way to the shuttles. She lay down in a berth, pressing her hands to her stomach for a moment. She felt the coursing of a tiny spark along wire-thin nerves to a mind still forming. Then she reached up to attach monitor strips and begin the coldsleep setting. She thumbed in Manny’s transceiver on her com lines.

“Good-bye,” she said. There was no answer.

Chrystan lay back and closed her eyes. The abduction was over.

An aeroplane flew along the Strand at a height of one thousand feet. When it reached Trafalgar Square people began jumping from it. Bystanders found it difficult, later, to describe the sound they made as they fell, but many found great significance in the fact that some had actually bounced on hitting the ground. This detail was repeated many times, with relish or revulsion or awe, to friends, police, mediamen.

To Frank, however, sitting on a damp bench in the Square, hands thrust deep in pockets, lazily pondering spectacular methods of exterminating the grimy pigeons dipping and bowing at his feet, the most significant point concerning this unexpected event was that it had no style. Something like fifty bodies lay about the Square, smashed and broken, crumpled and bloody. Some had hit buildings on the way down and rags of flesh were daubed along parapets and balconies; some, amazingly, were not dead, and were now moaning and crying. It was . . . messy. Personally, Frank would have tried for something memorable, like impaling himself on the upraised arm of Nelson, atop his column; but then, of course, he would never have involved himself in such a vulgar mass stunt, in which there could be no individual recognition.

He heard the sound of the aeroplane again and looked up. It had turned sharply, somewhere above Knightsbridge, and was now heading back for the Square. More people jumped, and the scene was repeated. No point, muttered Frank; once achieves the effect. He looked hopefully up at Nelson’s arm. Nothing.

The aeroplane made two more passes, on the last of which the falling bodies were joined by a snowstorm of white leaflets. Frank picked one up.

It was headed, church of universal despair.

Brothers and Sisters! Look around you! Do you like what you see? No? Then why do you put up with it? What do you think God feels when he sees you wallowing like pigs in the mess you have made for yourselves? Isn’t it obvious? He thinks, How can they Love Me when they have turned the world I made into a pigsty and wallow in it like pigs? How can they turn their eyes up to Me when they are so busy rooting in the slime they have created? And God is right, Brothers and Sisters, you know He is! You must prove to God that you Love Him, you must show Him that you have nothing but contempt for the world you have created. And how is that done? Brothers and Sisters! It is done by rejecting the pigsty you have made, by treating it with the utter contempt which is all it deserves! You know, Brothers and Sisters, in your heart of hearts, that the only sane response to the pigsty we have made for ourselves, is to leave it! To give ourselves to God in pure faith, to prove to Him by our rejection—

Frank crumpled the leaflet and threw it to the ground. It made him sick when people joined themselves together like this, so that they were indistinguishable, one from the other. What was the point of them all killing themselves together like that, for some stupid cause? They might as well have thrown a couple of hundredweight of guts from an abattoir out of that aeroplane.

Police sirens were approaching from all directions, and the Square was rapidly filling up with people, running from one smashed body to another. Some were collecting souvenir smears of blood on handkerchiefs, some were rapidly clicking cameras, some stood frozen in some powerful emotion, staring at the scene. The pigeons were hovering in a great cloud, but some were landing now, pecking daintily at the pools of blood.

Frank found the scene pathetic. The way people were able to be so completely, so shamelessly . . . themselves . . . the way they were able to ignore what others might think of them and just behave exactly as they felt—fighting and shoving to catch a glimpse, stupid wet mouths open, hands anxiously clutching and pushing. After all, the scene was no more bloody than the gang fight in Hyde Park last month between the Punks and the Lords —when the cleavers and hatchets had stopped swinging, the Park had looked like a butcher’s shop. And of course, when the Mob had an outing, the city streets were piled high with torn corpses. And yet they behaved like this just for some pointless religious stunt.

Thinking of the Mob, he realised that there was every chance a nucleus would form here shortly—people were already coalescing into groups and several fights had started—and he had no desire to be locked in when the riot barriers slid into place. He walked quickly away towards Lower Regent Street, as the Square began to fill up with police lorries and resound to the rise and fall of sirens and loudspeaker announcements.

These public scenes were something he tried to remain aloof from, and he had seen plenty of them in the four days he had been wandering backwards and forwards across the city. People would be moving along quite normally and quietly, then something would happen, and it would be as if, suddenly, strange animals with flashing eyes and teeth jumped out of their bodies and turned their faces into savage masks. Not that Frank minded the savagery—it was usually so real that it could only be honest —no, it was the inconsistency that upset him, the way people could change completely from one second to the next and not even be ashamed or embarrassed that the flimsy cardboard of their facades had been torn away for everyone to see inside. He liked people to be one thing or the other, but he could not bear it when they were both. He, personally, never let his mask slip. He was always himself.