Damon Knight - Orbit 19

The rat was through the hole now, edging along the wall, while a second rat glared out with shining eyes.

“To the center of the room!” Kent urged.

But Gloucester cautioned: “No. Let us stay here, where we can guard one another’s backs, or put our own to the wall.”

The king’s voice had continued all the while, though neither had heard it. Now it said: “Some insinuate that I grow old. Do they think that I, who know so much, cannot renew myself? And do they not know that if I should die, the tower will fall upon them? The rats are at the foundation even now.”

The rat sprang for Kent’s throat. He hewed it with his sword, and plunged his dagger into its chest as it flew toward him; but as he struck, the septic fangs of the second rat opened his left leg from thigh to ankle. Grizzled Gloucester, awkward but bull-strong, clove its spine with a single stroke; still, it was too late.

“I will carry you wherever you wish to go,” he told Kent when a tourniquet had eased the bleeding. “Back to earth or to the moon. Wherever you think there may be help.”

The bison had fallen silent, but the claws of the dying rats still scrabbled on the floor. “I’ll carry you wherever you want to go,” Gloucester repeated, thinking Kent had not heard him.

But Kent only said: “Be quiet. Someone is coming.”

Gloucester thought him delirious. “I see no one.”

“That is because the sun is at his back,” Kent said. “You cannot see him against the glare.”

After a moment Gloucester muttered: “A boy. I see him now.”

The boy wore a crown. He was about thirteen, but his eyes were the cold, mad eyes of the king. Maidens followed him; these had no eyes at all—only little flames, like candles burning, in the empty sockets. “Who are you men?” the boy asked.

Gloucester bowed as well as he could, still holding Kent, and said: “We are your courtiers, sire. Kent and Gloucester.”

The boy king shook his head. “I do not remember those names.”

“In the beginning you called us Youth and Learning, sire; you promised us a great deal.”

“I don’t remember that either,” the boy king said. “But if you will behave yourselves and amuse me, I will give you whatever it was I promised you before.”

Gloucester asked, “Will you heal my friend?” but the king had already turned away.

Later Kent whispered, “Gloucester . . .”

“Are you in much pain?”

“Gloucester, I have been thinking.”

Gloucester said, “That is always painful, I know,” but the younger man did not smile.

“You said that if this tower reaches to the moon, it has no top. . . .”

“Yes.”

“But isn’t it equally valid to say both ends are the top? From the moon, the foundation on earth is the summit. Isn’t that correct?”

“If you say so. But perhaps you should try to rest now.” The wound in Kent’s leg was bleeding freely again; Gloucester thrust the fingers of one hand through the tourniquet and twisted the cloth to tighten it.

He was still fussing with it when Kent murmured: “Call back the king, Gloucester, and carry me to the window. With one single bound I will leap this tall building; and that is something a boy should see.”

Perhaps not all art corrupts; but

absolute art corrupts absolutely.

Sunlight reflected dully from the polarized cap of the Stockton Condo Dome that rose out of the winter-morning Tule fog. Inside, a young man peered through the gloom toward the central plaza. To him, the fog presented a paradox of arrested movement, an ethereal ocean that embraced the entire circumference of the complex. Dieter, nervously gripping his portfolio, thought how dark it was for mid-morning; it was not dark enough, however, to shroud Dwalae Workshop.

There it was, almost at the center of the low curved layerings of Condo units that radiated outward from the plaza all the way to the shimmering margin of the Dome field. It stood apart, different, tawny styroflo exterior a little more massive, sculptured just enough to set it off markedly from any other building within the Dome.

Dieter crossed the plaza, scuffing his feet cautiously on the terrazzo surface, as if the fog could somehow have made the tile slick. It wasn’t, and the sharp echoes across that empty space made him a little embarrassed, made him walk a little faster to the Dwalae’s front entrance. There he halted to stare at the stylized lettering on the door:

K. KINCHON’S DWALAE WORKSHOP

Fine Transfers

Galleries: Tahoe, Marin, Mendocino, Santa Cruz

DEALERS ONLY

Kinchon: Dieter read the name again. The man whose elegant scrawl had graced Dieter’s letter of acceptance was one of the best—no, the best—transferist in all of North America. From Canada to Mexico, Kinchon’s work was in demand; now he, J. Dieter, was going to work for him. “Join my little stable,” the fuzzy voice had told him over the phone. And he would. It was hard for him to push through the swinging panel without a complete surrender to panic. But he did it, and opened his eyes to the cool white of a waiting room.

Dieter stared. It seemed a joke, a mocking understatement. Certainly, it was not what he had expected: Ivory wool (yes, wool!) carpet, simple fluorescent panels spaced at odd intervals along the concave surface of the walls. Indeed, the only color in the whole space was the red of two painfully artificial poinsettias which stood on a rough wood dais not quite in the center of the room.

The effect was unsettling, and Dieter wandered around the pedestal attempting to locate a place to sit. Abruptly a young man leaned, penstyle in mouth, from a receptionist’s window.

“May I help you?”

“What? Oh.” Dieter glanced quickly at his portfolio. “Yes. I’m contracted to work here.”

The man stared.

“M. Kinchon requested that I see him first thing today.”

“Hm. Oh, yes. M. J. Dieter, is it not? This way, please.”

He opened a door for Dieter, then indicated another, stenciled with Kinchon’s familiar signature. Dieter hesitated.

“Go on in,” the man said. “K’s been waiting.”

Dieter opened the door to a room decorated in the same manner as the lounge, except that light was provided by a staggered array of skylight bubbles. In a far corner, he noticed two large viewing consoles; on either side of these stood easels and a worktable. Directly in front of Dieter was a large freemold desk where Kinchon sat gazing at some papers. For a moment, Dieter feared that he wouldn’t be noticed, but suddenly Kinchon stood up.

All the pictures Dieter had seen of the man did nothing to prepare him for his presence. He was shorter than Dieter had imagined, but powerful, with a bull’s chest deeply tanned where his open-fronted cream velcro jumpsuit revealed a thick mat of bleached golden hair. A platinum cross with a soldered Redeemer twisting across its face hung from a heavy chain around his neck. Kinchon smiled; it was a wide smile, hung between shiny protruding cheekbones and below a drooping dark-brown moustache.

“M. Dieter, welcomed he said, quickly glancing up the length of Dieter’s thin body.

“Thank you, M. Kinchon.” (Oh, the feel of that warm steel hand!) “I’m a little late, I’m afraid.”

“Nonsense, forget it. We’re not peasants, eh?” He gently placed his hand on the small of Dieter’s back, guided him to a silk brocade styrobag in front of the shining desk. “Sit down.” Kinchon returned to his own chair, then pointed to Dieter’s portfolio.

“May I see that, please?” Kinchon opened the portfolio and began leafing through the work. One by one, he glanced at the sketches and holo reproductions Dieter had selected as his best. Occasionally he grunted, and Dieter had to fight the temptation to lean closer. Finally Kinchon put the work down.