Damon Knight - Orbit 21

Father stared at me carefully, suspicious of such a sentiment, as well he might be—for as I understood much later, my reluctance to go to Terra stemmed mainly from the fact that Hjalmar Nederland had said in his autobiography that he didn’t like it.

“You’ve never been there,” he said, “else you might not say that. And it’s something you should see, take my word for it! The chance doesn’t come that often.”

“I know, Dad. But the chance has come for you, not me—”

“There’s room for you.”

“But only if you make it. Look, you’ll be back out here sailing in a couple years—and I’ll get down there some day. Meanwhile I want to stay here. I got a job and friends.”

“Okay,” he said, and looked away. “You’re your own man, you do what you want.” I felt bad then, but not nearly so much as I did later, when I remembered the scene and understood what I had done. Father was tired, he was going through a hard time, he needed his friends. He was about seventy then, he had nothing to show for his efforts, and he was tired. In the old days he’d have been near the end, and I suppose he felt that way—he hadn’t yet gotten that second wind that comes when you realize that, far from being over, the story has just begun. But that second wind didn’t come from me, or with my help. And yet that, it seems to me, are what sons are for. . . .

So he left for Terra, and I was on my own. About two years later I got a letter from him. He was in Micronesia, on an island in the Pacific Ocean somewhere . . . he’d met some Marquesan sailors. There were fleets of the old Polynesian sailing ships, called wa’a kaulua , crisscrossing the Pacific, carrying passengers and even freight. Father had decided to apprentice himself to one of the navigators from the Carolines—one of those who navigate as they did in the ancient times, without radio or sextant, or compass, or even maps.

And that’s what he’s been doing, from that day to this: thirty-five years. Thirty-five years of learning to gauge how fast the ship is moving by eye; memorizing the distances between islands; reading the stars and the weather; lying at the bottom of the ship, on the keel, during cloudy nights, and feeling the pattern of the swells to determine the ship’s direction. ... I think back to the hand-to-mouth times of our brief partnership, and I see that he has, perhaps, found what he wants to do. Occasionally I get a note from Fiji, Samoa, Oahu. Once I got one from Easter Island, with a picture of one of the statues included. The note said, “And this one’s not a fake!”

That’s the only clue I’ve gotten that he knows what I’m doing.

And so Icehenge, and Nederland’s theory, the romantic story of the Vasyutin Expedition, remained part of my life—one of the myths that I believed in and lived by—as I grew up alone, moving from satellite to satellite, and then out to Saturn and the colonies surrounding it. I believed it until I was nearly thirty years old. Though it is a coincidence that may seem too appropriate to be true, coincidences are like that; the turning point in my history, the end of my innocence, came on New Year’s Eve, 2599.

I was on Titan, working for the Titan Weather Company. Early in the evening I was on the job, helping to create a lightning storm that crackled and boomed above raucous Ed’s Town. Just after the big blast at midnight (two huge balls of St. Elmo’s fire colliding just above the dome), we were let off, and we hit town ready for a good time. The whole crew—sixteen of us, good friends all—went to Jacque’s. Jacque was dressed up as the Old Year, and his pet chimpanzee was in diapers and ribbons, representing the New. I drank a lot of alcoholic drinks and once again observed how quickly one became incapable of tasting. Every New Year’s Eve I drank alcohol, and every New Year’s Day I wondered how humanity had managed to get by for so long with such an awful drug.

We soon got very drunk. My boss, Mark Starr, was rolling on the floor, wrestling the chimp. It looked like he was losing. An impromptu chorus was bellowing an old standard, “I Met Her in a Phobos Restaurant,” and, inspired by mention of my native satellite, I started singing a complicated harmony part. Apparently I was the only one who perceived its beauties; there were shouts of protest, and the woman seated beside me objected by pushing me off the bench. She stood up and I retaliated by shoving her into the table behind us. People there were upset and began pounding on her. Feeling magnanimous, I grabbed her arm and pulled her away. The moment she was clear of them she punched me hard in the shoulder and began swinging with serious anger. I saw that I was outmatched and slipped through the throng at the bar, out the door and onto the narrow street.

I sat down at the curb and relaxed. I felt good. There were lots of people on the street, many of them quite drunk. One of them failed to notice me, and tripped over my legs. He looked around, taking stock of his situation, and slid himself over so that he was lying comfortably in the gutter, out of people’s way.

He was a long-haired man. His torso was broad and round, but his limbs were thin, and under the tangle of hair his head seemed unnaturally small. After a moment he raised his head, opened a vial in his hand, and with awkward care waved the vial under his nose.

“You shouldn’t use that stuff,” I advised him.

“And why not?” His voice was scratchy.

“It’ll give you high blood-pressure.”

He looked up at me. “High blood-pressure’s better than no blood-pressure at all.”

“There is that.”

With a series of slow movements he levered himself into a seated position on the curb next to me. Sitting, he looked like a spider. “You got to have blood pressure, that’s my motto,” he said.

“I see.”

He looked around. “Man, on New Year’s Eve everybody just goes crazy. “

“And all because Terra returned to its magic zero-point.”

“Yeah. Just wait till Saturn’s New Year comes around.” Saturn’s year was reckoned to have started when the first colony was established, and its eighth New Year was coming soon.

“Yeah, but tonight every town in the system will be like this. It’s New Year’s Eve everywhere. On Saturn’s New Year nobody will be celebrating but us locals.”

“Yeah, but it’ll be crazy.”

Then Mark and Ivinny and a few more weather people crashed out of Jacque’s. “Come on, Ed, the chimp has got a fire extinguisher.”

I stood up, much too quickly, and motioned to my companion. He got up and we trailed the group, talking continuously. We had the opportunity to join several fights, for Ed’s Town was filled with Caroline Holmes’s shipworkers, and it was nearing dawn, but we only got caught in one, and it was an amiable free-for-all in a wide street. I got hit on the side of the head by an elbow and thought, “This goes too far.” My new friend helped me away, we saw Mark and Ivinny down a side street, and were off again in pursuit. In this manner we passed a couple of hours.

At dawn we were on the east edge of town, sitting on the wide concrete strip just inside the dome. There were seven or eight of the weather crew left. My new friend arranged pieces of gravel in patterns on the concrete. On the horizon a white point appeared, and lengthened into a knife-edge line dividing the night: the rings. Saturn would soon be rising.

My companion had grown a little melancholy. “Sports,” he scoffed in reply to a comment of mine. “Sports, it’s always the same story. The wise old man or men against the young turk or turks, and the young turk, if he’s worth his salt—which he is by definition—always seems to win it, every time. Even in chess. You heard of that guy Goodman. Guy studies chess religiously for a mere twenty-five years, comes out at age thirty-five and wins three hundred and sixty tournament games in a row, trounces five-hundred-and-fifteen-year-old Gunnar Knorrson twelve-four-two—Knorrson, who held the system championship for a hundred and sixty-some years! It’s depressing.”