Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“Jupiter’ll show you,” she said.

She would not have been trying to explain or even to state what she meant, perhaps would not have bothered to mean at all, had she not been made loquacious by scotch. To give himself apparent leisure for his real work, Kalkas had concluded negotiations for the europium oxide in four days, at a cost that would strip three rooms of the Retrospect Gallery and commit to Blushing half of Sulawesi’s coffee crop for the next five years. Then he concentrated upon his secret diplomacy. He was prepared to be egregious, if he must: break into the cubicle Cris shared, waylay her in a deserted corridor, the sort of antics in which the Garbage Authority occasionally indulged. But he preferred other tactics, so he happened to meet his daughter at breakfast or lunch or supper or odd moments, two or three times he visited the procomp section, and once the Head Beep Programmer had an impromptu yayho to which Cris came for a short time. Cris liked the crystal pendant, offhandedly given, casually accepted, and opened, in her fashion, to the interest in procomps that Kalkas painstakingly simulated.

Yet for all his efforts Kalkas had made little progress toward the isolated fifteen minutes or so that he needed, and was nearly settled upon a Garbage method, until the shalom party given him two nights before Vega was to blast. Before leaving his own cubicle Kalkas filled his little cryogenic flask with the last of his scotch. As he anticipated, both flask and scotch became talk things at the party. The flask, not inspected too closely, was admired as quirky craftsmanship, and the scotch, once sniffed, led to discussions of taste and chromosomes. Cris, sipping Greenwhistle, became interested when Kalkas, with a straight face, asserted that the Spaceborn were handicapped.

“We can all smoke or drift or dazzle,” he said, “but to drink, you —not I—must camouflage the alcohol with dextrose or sucrose or plastic flavors. Even then your tolerance is low.”

“What do we dump?” asked Cris.

From among his disreputable reading a quotation occurred to Kalkas. “ ‘The troubles of our proudly angry dust / Come from eternity and will not fail. / Bear them we can, and since we can, we must. / Shoulder the sky, my boy, and drink your ale.’“ He was glad he remembered it in English; in Persian, of course, it did not rhyme. Neither did it appear to say much to Cris, even after he explained “dust” and “ale” to her, and he abandoned the notion, never very promising, of getting her intoxicated. But when he poured a second forty millies for himself, she asked if she might have a taste. She sipped delicately, did not gasp or choke, and finished the few millies Kalkas had given her, and asked for more. Kalkas, his hopes rising, poured a long squirt.

Although she thus began her fall by attempting to show that Spaceborn could drink just as neatly as Earthborn, when she grew talkative her subject was the procomps. For her they were not the essence but perhaps the sine qua won—although she didn’t know the phrase— of the Spaceborn achievement; through them and by them and in them the Spaceborn not only knew the universe but spoke with it. She did not, however, mean “spoke,” so she had to try to explain the language: “It’s not like words, because the connections are inevitable. In any system you can use.” “See, we can assume reality, because it doesn’t count if it’s not real, and every quiddy is real as it is.” “If there’s a vector, it’s physically there” “You don’t memorize compsy, you see it. Like you see stars.” “Jupiter’ll show you.”

Standing again in the surface dome, Kalkas would have given his attention, as he had before, mostly to the auroras at the horizon, where the charged particles bound in Jupiter’s magnetosphere were turned away from the dwellings of men. But Cris wanted him to attend to Jupiter, fifty degrees up the curve of the sky, flaunting its racing bands, its sodium cyclones, its presence. She described, not very clearly, some findings of the quasi-phoenix studies.

“See,” she said, pointing to the gibbous disc but looking continually at her father and now touching his arm, “all meaning and beautiful.”

For many seconds Kalkas stared at the gas giant; he had been touched suddenly by sympathy for Cris in her frustration, as she tried to make a language she despised serve her. Speaking carefully he said, “Yes. The sight of Jupiter is powerfully emblematic to you because the planet is the reason you’re here, the focus of all your labors. Furthermore, it’s an enormous and complex thing, yet from here you see it singly and at once, so the perception is intense, extremely intense. Is this analogous to the functioning of the readout globe patterns for you?”

Cris had begun to look disappointed before he finished. In the space between them or between worlds, a link had been broken or had never been forged. After a few mute seconds, Cris looked away from Kalkas to Jupiter, then away from both. Tired, vexed, still wondering how he might complete his errand, the purposeful traveler began to follow his daughter down the circular stairs that led into the safety lock and so to the elevator. As she went, Cris lifted one shoulder in what seemed to be a kind of shrug.

“I random Earthborn never will reckon,” she said. “We’ll run without you.”

Hoping she’d break her neck, Kalkas pushed her, and she clanged down the spiral in a flurry of arms and legs.

The fall was not lethal, but it was stunning; Kalkas had the opportunity he wanted. In the dome’s tiny washroom he rinsed the flask of the remaining scotch. With his penknife he sliced several grams of skin from Cris’s left forearm. He scraped the wound roughly, as the edge of a step might have done, and sealed his prize in the flask; the suspensor fluid would have to be added when he returned to his cubicle. He had what he had come to get.

Many years later he would have to count what he had given for it.

EDGAR:

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,

His word was still,—Fie, foh, and fum,

I smell the blood of a British man.

“He’s senile,” Gloucester said.

Kent, who would die that day, shook his head and shrugged. He was standing at the room’s nearest window looking out, his broad shoulders wrapped in an old goatskin cloak.

“Senile,” Gloucester repeated. Hoping to lighten Kent’s mood he added, “I like to think that the first syllable derives from the Anglo-Saxon sendan , meaning ‘to transmit.’ The second from the Latin Nilus, the name of a mythical, northward-flowing river in Africa. This river was supposed to be lined with antique structures; so that transmission to the Nilotic region indicated that a thing was of ancient age.”

Kent said nothing.

“Can you see anything through that ivy? What are you looking at out there?”

“Fog,” Kent said.

Gloucester walked over to the window. The bronze tip of the scabbard hanging from his belt, weighted by the broad blade of the sword within, scraped the stone flags. He peered out. The window was no wider than the length of a man’s forearm, cut in a gray stone wall several times as thick. “Fog my bung, sir,” he said. “Those are clouds. But never mind, we’ll get down, clouds or no.”

“They might be clouds,” Kent answered mildly. “You never can tell.”

“They blasted well are clouds. Throw your dagger out of there, and it would spit an eagle before it struck the ground. There’s no telling how high up we are.”

“I prefer to believe that it is fog,” Kent said. He turned to face Gloucester and seated himself on the clammy windowsill. “I could leave this place at any time, simply by climbing out this window and jumping to the ground. Conversely, if I leave the window unguarded, it is possible that a bear or jaguar or other wild thing might enter.”