Damon Knight - Orbit 20

She shook her head hard. “I don’t know."

Farley made her face the valley again. “Look at it, Victoria. Look! You’re hiding among the boulders on that ridge over there. You know they might see you. You keep in the shadows, hiding. Don’t move! Don’t make a sound! What do you smell? What do you hear?”

She moaned and he said, more insistently, “You smell something. What is it, Victoria? You know what it is, tell me!”

“Water!” she cried. “Water, a river, a forest!”

“You’re running,” Farley said, holding her hard. “You’re on the hill and you’re running. Your eyes are open. What do you see?”

She tried to push him away. “Nothing! I can’t remember that part. Nothing!”

“Look at the ridge. Look at it! You couldn’t run up there! There’s no place to run!”

“It’s not the same place! I told you, I was on a hill, there was grass. I ran until that man, Reuben, stopped me.”

“You’re terrified they might hear you. You smell the river and forest. You hear the rushing water. You run. Where are you running to? Why?”

“The trees,” she gasped. “Bushes under the trees. I’ll hide in the bushes, in the mist.” She pulled harder, her voice rising in hysteria. “There isn’t any forest or river! Let me gol Let me go!” She began to sag. “I can’t breathe!”

Farley and Sam half-carried, half-led her back to the campfire, which had burned to a bed of glowing ashes. Sam built up the fire and Farley held a drink to Victoria’s lips, keeping one arm around her shoulders. She sipped the bourbon, then took the cup and drank it down.

“Better?” Farley asked. She nodded. “Sit down. I’ll get a blanket to put around you.” Wordlessly she sat down by the fire. Sam was making coffee.

No one spoke until they all had coffee. Then Farley took Victoria’s hand. “We have to finish it,” he said.

She nodded without looking at him. “I’m crazy,” she said. “I would have killed myself that night if that cowboy hadn’t been there to save my life.”

“You saved yourself,” Farley said. “You panicked and you ran. You knew there was no forest, no river, no mist, but they were there. You invented Reuben, you projected him, because you couldn’t resist the evidence of your senses. You had to have help and no one was there to help you, so you helped yourself, through Reuben.”

“I’m going to bed,” Victoria said dully. She made no motion to get up.

Farley was not certain if she could accept anything he was saying. He could not tell if she heard him. “You acted out of self-preservation,” he said.

“It was all just a dream or a series of hallucinations,” Sam said. His voice was hard, grating. His angular face looked aged; his full beard made him look Biblical, like an old bitter prophet.

“You can’t regard it all as one thing,” Farley said. “That’s the mistake you made before, the same mistake the psychiatrist made, that if part of it was false, it all was. Obviously the cowboy figure is right out of romantic fiction, but that doesn’t make the rest of it false. I wondered if Victoria rejected the truth because she was convinced the truth was impossible, and accepted instead the illusions that could have been possible.” He paused, then added, “Both in what she saw in the valley, and again in the cowboy.”

Victoria stirred and shook her head. “I don’t understand anything,” she said, but with more animation now, as if she were awakening.

“I don’t either,” Farley said. “But you did see something, and you smelled and heard Ghost River. I bet not more than a dozen people today know it was ever called that, but you renamed it. That’s what I keep coming back to.”

“That’s crap!” Sam shouted. “She saw something and ran. Probably she stumbled and knocked herself out. You know you can’t run over that country, not even in daylight. She dreamed the rest of it.” He had risen to stand over Victoria. “The only important thing is what did you see in the valley?”

“Not what you want me to say!” Victoria cried. “It wasn’t a god figure. Not a burning bush or a pillar of flame. Not good or evil. Nothing we can know.”

Farley reached out to touch her and she jerked away. “You said we have to finish it. We do! I do! Sam, you wanted to know my nightmare. Let me tell you. I’m wearing tights, covered with sequins, circus makeup, my hair in a long glittering braid. Spotlights are on me. I’m climbing the ladder to the tightrope and there’s a drum roll, the whole thing. I know I can do this, the way you know you can ride a bike, or swim, or just walk. I smile at the crowd and start out on the rope and suddenly there is absolute silence. I look down and realize the crowd is all on one side of the rope, to my left: no one is on the right side. The audience is waiting for me to fall. Nothing else. They know I’ll fall and they are waiting. They aren’t impatient, or eager, they have no feelings at all. They don’t care. That’s when I panic, when I realize they don’t care. And I know I must not fall on their side. I try to scream for someone to open the safety net, for someone to take my hand, for anything. Then I am falling and I don’t know which side I’m on. I won’t know until I hit. That is what terrifies me, that I don’t know which side I’ll die on.” Her voice had become almost a monotone as she told the dream. Abruptly she rose to her feet. “I’d like some more bourbon, please.”

Farley poured it and she sat down once more and drank before she spoke again.

“I came back here to see which side of the rope I’ll land on. The next time I’ll finish the dream and find out.”

Sam reached for the bottle and poured bourbon into his cup. “A lousy dream,” he muttered.

“Indifference, that’s what made it a nightmare. Their indifference,” Victoria said quietly. She sipped at her drink and went on. “It’s the same way we might break up an anthill and watch the ants scurry. Or how we tear a spiderweb and maybe see the spider dart away, or not. We don’t care. We watch or not, it doesn’t matter. Like the bank camera that photographs me when I go to the window. Me, a bank robber, someone asking for information, it doesn’t matter, the camera clicks its picture.” She was starting to slur her words slightly. Her voice was low, almost inaudible part of the time. “It . . . they watched me like that. They didn’t care if I went over the cliff or not.”

Farley felt the hair rise on the back of his neck and wondered if she realized what she was saying. She wasn’t talking about the dream any longer.

“They didn’t care if I went over the cliff. They didn’t care if I stopped, or ran, what I did.” She drained her cup, then set it down on the ground with elaborate care. “That’s inhuman,” she said. “Not like a god, the opposite of what it would be like for a god. Beyond all idea of good and evil. No awareness of good and evil.”

Sam sighed and said, “She’s drunk. She never could drink.”

Victoria pushed herself up from the ground. She nodded. “I am,” she said carefully. “I’ll go to bed now.” Both men rose. She looked at Farley. “I know why I’m here. I have to see where I land. And I know why Sam’s here. He’s looking for God. Why are you here? What is your noble cause?” She was taking care to pronounce each word, as if speaking a foreign language.

“You’re too stinko to talk any more tonight.”

“I can’t talk, but my ears are not drunk. My ears are not blurring anything.”

“Will you remember?”

She nodded an exaggerated yes.

“It’s my land. Over the years twenty-five or thirty head of cattle have gone over that cliff. Two people have vanished in that area. My land. I have to know what’s there. I put it off and pretended it was just a superstition, wiped it from my mind, but I can’t do that now. You won’t let me do it ever again.” He paused, examining her face. “Do you understand that?”