Damon Knight - Orbit 19

His first word surprised me. I was at home alone, trying to deal with several Naperian logarithms, a simple manipulation. Unable to concentrate, I sat back and heard it, a sound like a sparrow’s peep. I looked around the room, thinking it originated externally. Again I heard it, a single sound, Me. I should have killed him then.

Madline, dressed in a low-cut, clinging garment—proud of her knobby frame—meets me at the door. Externally, we are a chronological mismatch. Father-daughter. Hers is in its twenties, mine in its sixties. I want to finish the navigator program before reembodiment.

She puts her long arms lightly on my shoulders, interlacing her fingers behind my neck. She smiles, satisfied she is still attractive to me, letting me see how attractive she is—this time, thin and bony— and kisses me.

Stop that.

It is something he dislikes. It makes him feel self conscious. I kiss Madline.

Stop it!

Mind your own business.

Madline leads me to the sofa, a contragravitational field she developed once (fifty? seventy-five years ago?), holding my hand. The sofa, its field decorated with a green pastel smoke, enfolds us.

“You look tired, Tomus.”

“I’ve been working hard. I want to finish the program before the next exchange.”

The comment reminds her of something. She goes to her desk, an ancient plastic rolltop she has kept through four embodiments. She holds up a letterdisk. I recognize the seal.

“Have you read this?”

“No.”

“They’ve found two more.”

“Where?”

“One in Peking. The other in Vermont. They’re the first two we’ve found on Earth this century.”

“It’s too stable here. Adversity breeds intelligence.” I indicate the viewer on the desk next to her. She drops in the disk and hands me the viewer. Two men, both well over the two hundred I.Q. threshold, both with substantial personal achievements, one a chemist, the other a poet. The poet interests me. I point at him.

Madline nods, understanding me. We have known each other too long for misunderstandings.

“We’ve never had one,” she says. “They’ve allowed him one probationary embodiment.” Part of Madline’s job is screening potential Longevitors. “He probably won’t last more than one exchange anyway. Poets burn out early.”

“And mathematicians?”

She smiles and returns to the sofa. “You’re approved. I saw the recommendation myself. There was no trouble.”

I had expected more resistance. My output, due primarily to him, has diminished. They might have interpreted it as a trend.

“We’ll always need mathematicians,” says Madline.

“They said that about engineers before Caster.”

Caster, the inventor of flexible computer engineering, permitting computer design of anything mathematically possible, had been too old to retrain. The device he thought would guarantee his reembodiment made it unnecessary. Society no longer needed engineers. When they cease needing mathematicians, will I be in a young phase, young enough to retrain? Intelligence always finds a place in society. Only when the skills trained into that intelligence become outmoded does it become expendable. If they are physically able, most men retrain, satisfy the Center of their usefulness. Intelligence does what it must to survive.

“Madline, have you ever thought about dying?”

“Once, the first time. Before I was chosen.”

“Lately?”

“No, why?”

“He brought it up. He realized today he’s going to die.”

Her expression takes on an air of disapproval. She frowns, grave and solemn. “Why did you let him live in the first place?”

“Is there a law against it?”

“No, but it’s cruel.”

“Everyone else dies. He has it better than most of them. He has no problems, no worries about making a living.”

“How old is he now, mentally?”

“Eleven or twelve. I’m surprised he’s developed that far.”

Madline shivers. “It’s so cruel. If you just overwhelm them, smother them as soon as you’re in control, it’s much more humane. Why did you let him live?”

I remember the embodiment, sixty years before. It is the best part of an exchange, the old carcass discarded, suddenly seeing through new eyes, feeling new muscles, weak but adequate, a feeling of vitality. I remember the laboratory table, the computer, flickering, dying, ending the program that transferred me. I looked at the overhead mirror. The transfer cap, its myriad wires blurred and out of focus, looked frothy on my new skull. I tried the arm. It jerked across the chest, unused to so strong a stimulus. I tried again, more gently. The arm moved and stopped. I sensed the presence. At that moment, when you gain control, you are supposed to kill. I hesitated. Why? I had done it before. Something, some latent ethic from my past, asserted itself. I let it live.

I look at Madline. “I don’t know.”

I’ve got it!

What?

The answer.

What answer?

To your equation.

I smile.

“What is it?” asks Madline.

“At dinner, I gave him a simple algebra problem. He thinks he has the answer.”

I do! I do have it!

“Does he?” She looks worried.

What is it?

True.

That’s all?

What else do you want?

A proof.

Oh. Just a minute.

“Does he?” repeats Madline.

“I framed it like a true-false question. He says the answer’s true.”

She relaxes, smiling. “Can he flip a coin?”

Tomus.

What?

Pay attention . He begins, haltingly, to give me a proof. The terminology is wrong. He recognizes only that A and B, X and F are symbols. He has observed roots and coefficients, watching me work. Still, I become interested in his explanation. It is good, simpleminded and unsophisticated, but good. It is also correct.

I nod. “He got it.”

An expression of utter horror comes over Madline’s face.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“We have been afraid something like this—” She shakes her head. “Tomus, please go home. I have to think. The Center will have to know.”

“That he can do algebra?”

“That he is twelve and without training and can do algebra.”

I see that she is right. I nod and prepare to leave. She stops me at the door, her long fingers light on my forearm.

“I’ll have to tell them.”

“I know.”

“They’ll reevaluate your application for exchange.”

I nod. “Probably.”

She frowns again, uncertain how to read my expression. “Does it worry you?”

“My energy goes into my work, not worrying.”

Momentarily her fingers tighten on my arm. “I hope—”

“You hope what?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. The decision isn’t ours.” She kisses me lightly. “Good night, Tomus.”

Outside, the sun has set. The sky, awash with stars: clear, crisp points of light, seemingly eternal. I look for the nova, a bright buckle on Orion’s belt. It became visible from Earth a decade ago. Even stars end, collapse and explode, their vitality reabsorbed by the whole. The stars change. Only the people remain the same.

A cold wind catches me off guard. I walk to the nearest gravity tunnel. I punch in the number of the stop nearest my apartment and take a capsule. It drops several stories, is routed, rerouted, starts upward and emerges at Newport Beach Station Three. The journey from Los Angeles has taken three minutes.

I walk toward my apartment building, remembering Madline’s face when she realized the implications of his algebra. For me it is only a fact. It has no emotional significance. Somehow I knew he would develop. His progress has been geometrical. He gibbered for decades, perpetually infantile, the child locked in the closet through middle age, never developing, without the normal means of asserting itself, bound and gagged in his closet, able only to think. He mumbled only a few years. He spoke, first one word, then several. I took an interest in him. I explained the world he saw through my eyes, the sounds he heard through my ears. Once the nucleus of a vocabulary developed, he learned quickly, putting two and two together. Now he puts F and X, A and B together.