Damon Knight - Orbit 19

Cyrus felt faint. He used some precious levitational energy to get atop a theater marquee. Tufts of orange pollen were budding into ridges on his sleeve. He felt a very convincing diarrhetic twinge. He took one of the nutritional activators, and immediately felt the expanding stomach blastula. Swallowing was difficult for him; he cleared his throat and spat out mucus and tiny white crabs. Good Christ, he thought, what kind of a world is this? Panic welled up inside him, he hacked, and gagged, and spat again. He leaned against a rusted cable; it shredded in his hand, the parterre swayed and collapsed. He wrenched the levitator just in time to minimize the g forces, rising from the crumbled debris like a rocket lifting ponderously from its pad.

He felt sick, hunkered down in the center of a parking lot, and felt fluid seeping past his anal sphincter. I shit my pants, teacher, he thought, remembering one hawk-faced pedagogue who had refused to let him go to the third grade bathroom. He closed his eyes. They felt pasted shut. His ears began to itch, something was crawling up his back, and a small mutant lamprey had affixed its saxophone mouth to his mastoid surface. Cy rubbed his eyes clear of wax and tiny fibers. A fanlike crystal blipped into life, splitting his earlobe. “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” he said aloud, but he was lost. He lumbered out onto the street, looking for the force-field. Maybe I can make it back, he thought. A leather-winged pterodactyl dove at him and banked away, screeching. Cy veered heavily toward the curb, crashed through a soft wooden fence, toppled into a shallow grease pit. He moved as if in a dream, lifting to upright position like a crane hoisting a heavy weight. His body isomorph glistened with oily waste from the pit, and the surface was covered with strange spores, molds, buds, barnaclelike growths, the lamprey, and a large slug. He lifted a few feet off the ground, feeling the weakened levitational energy. Black fluids sluiced from his spleen and watery excrement dribbled from his rectum. He settled on a mound of soft earth, took a tentative step, and fell like a puppet with severed strings. A wolverinelike creature crept up from a hole in the mound, snarling. Cy flicked the fusion torch to sear and pulled the trigger. A cone of orange fire enveloped the creature, and it somersaulted wildly before dying in the flames. A wet, translucent tuber grew on Cy’s chest, his brows and lashes bloomed with crystal growths. He vomited and excreted in dual projectile gushes. I’m dying, goddammit, he thought, goddammit to hell, goddam all you solid-state, latency-spouting consolbots, holobots, provobots—all you fucking tin spheres and boxes and cylinders. You’re not human. There is nothing like a true human. Fine cartilages, bones like tree trunks, valves and kingposts and tubes and ducts. Marble skin, golden hair, agate eyes, and holy neurologic brain in its bony case. You’re nothing but a bunch of machines—circuit breakers, fuses, Hong Kong transistors. Cy salivated gelatin, trying to breathe past the thorns erupting in his nostrils. He rammed the levitator to full lock, and his body dug a shallow furrow down the rutted knoll, back to the Potomac Trench, a scant fifty yards away. The energy supply gave out as he moved very slowly out onto the spongy dark river bed. He saw the softly glimmering force-field veil in the distance—so near and yet so far away. Little things scuttled across his eyes, blurring the picture. With his last bit of strength, he rolled supine and spread-eagled, firing the torch at sear. He tried to aim it like a flare-pistol, but it fell flat on his stomach, cremating him from the waist down.

The torch burned for three days and nights before expending its cells. A trio of service bots sent to repair the force-field watched Cy try to make it back home. They even found themselves cheering him on.

Back at his billet, the consolbot clacked out the data cube:

“Cyrus Beta Livingston, assigned to my care these two years past, has died in an attempt to escape from the Washington DC continental quadrant. I had hoped sincerely that he would prove malleable and adaptive; however, he has consistently shown a willful strength, a resistance to programming, a stubborn endogenic egocentricity, as well as a certain subjective likeability. He seems to have been admired in the peer-group, but is formally classified as robopathic. The current population of the area is three hundred twenty-three. I am ready for reassignment.”

He was a good person, that cop. There weren’t any rotten people around there. (But have you looked under your eaves lately?)

And heal my heart and bless my bones

With nightly fall of pebble-stones.

Ellenbogen, Rainy Morning Rimes.

Bill Sorel stood at his nineteenth-floor window and shied pebbles and stones out over space to land in the sidewalk and street. It had rained the night before, and there were pebbles on that little ledge under his window after every rain. It’s always fun to throw stones, even small stones, in the morning and see what they will hit.

“Hey, that cop’s going to come up and get you again, Bill Sorel,” Etta Mae Southern called from her window next door. “Where were you last night? I called every guy I know for a date and couldn’t get anybody. You remember the other day the cop came all the way up to your place and told you the people in the street were getting crabby about getting hit on the head with pebbles.”

“I have been awarded the big red plum, Etta Mae,” Sorel boasted to the early morning air and his neighbor. “I’m not a professor; I’m not a doctor: I’m just a hardworking and dirty-scheming popularizer and feature writer. But I have wrested the big red plum from the big boys in the Q. and A. scientific field.”

“Well, don’t throw the plum-pit down on someone’s head when you’re finished,” Etta Mae said. “You told that cop, ‘They’re not very big pebbles,’ and he said, ‘No, I know they’re not.’ You told him, ‘People just like to complain about things,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I know they do. Now you just cut out hitting people on their heads with pebbles so they’ll have one less thing to complain about.’ You said, ‘How did you know it was me?’ and he said, ‘Who else in this building would be the mad pebble-thrower?’ He sure is a nice cop but I bet he won’t be so nice if he has to come all the way up here after you again.”

“I’ve been awarded the big red plum,” Sorel repeated, and he continued to pick the pebbles out of that little ledge below his window and throw them down over the street. “I have been selected to compile, edit, write or whatever The Child’s Big What and Why Book. This will pay me well. All I have to do is answer the scientific questions that children of all ages will ask, and do it in the style that the most doltish kid can understand and the smartest kid will not find patronizing. And really most of the work is already done before I start.”

“You hit a man with a pebble, Bill. He’s looking around to see where it came from. He’s on the edge of being real mad if he finds out someone hit him on purpose.”

“I didn’t,” Sorel said. “I discovered that I can’t hit any of them on purpose, so I concentrate on hitting them by accident. I just throw them and let them find their own targets. But it wasn’t a very big pebble and it didn’t hurt him much. Now all I have to do is find out half an answer to one question and a full answer to another, and I’ll be able to put the book together. Where do you think the pebbles come from, Etta Mae?”

“My idea is that the rain makes them. Pebbles are made out of silicon mostly. And silicon and nitrogen are almost exactly alike. I used to go with a smart fellow and he taught me things like that. When it lightens, the rain makes almost as much silicon water as nitrogen water, and it deposits it as pebbles. That’s one way. Hey, do you know that rotten people never have pebbles around their houses? The other way is that little pieces of sand come together and the lightning-impregnated water fuses them into pebbles. It has to be one of those ways or there wouldn’t always be pebbles after it rains. There’s a third way that pebbles could happen, but it’s a little bit doubty.”