Damon Knight - Orbit 19

The Takser home dissolves into a picture of the street. Therapy is over for the day, but I’m still shaking. I always shake after empathy treatment: that’s why they do it to me. But at least I don’t go into bleak despair, as I do when I’m reminded of the pleasures from which my crime has cut me off. The freedom scenes, with their blue skies and wide worlds waiting for me, are plenty bad, as the ones featuring my buddies in the neighborhood bar. When the shrinks make cuddly little children smile at me, it’s like they’re tearing my heart out. And when they put me in bed with a woman who loves me, I cry for days.

A wobbly figure is stumbling from shadow to light to shadow. With the infrareds and the parabolic, I recognize her. She’s a divorced junior executive who lives across the street. I could pick her up for a D & D, but that’s only two points, and besides, she’s not making a nuisance of herself. I think I’ll wait. She’s going to enter that lobby. The guy who’s lurking there will take her purse, and then waltz out onto the street.

But he won’t get past me. Uh-uh. He’s at least fifteen points, twenty if he’s got a gun.

And I only need five thousand two hundred eleven points before they’ll give me back my body.

If the past does not exist, is it necessary to invent it?

“Do you ever wonder,” I said to Aurelian after we finished the Great Sow, “what the point of all this is?”

Aurelian, who exactly fitted his golden name—his hair was pale yellow and his eyes were a shade of brown so light it seemed almost yellow—shook his head.

“I envy you your certitude or stupidity or whatever it is,” I said.

We were standing high on Peak 32, looking across the valley at Peak 33, where the Sow was, a pictograph cut with lasers in the rock of a mountainside we’d scraped clean and sheared flat. There was a wind blowing, cold and wet, and grey clouds were moving quickly across the sky. The enormous sow lay on her side, her gross bulk covering an entire mountainside, while her piglets sucked on her rows of tits.

“Skipped your pill, didn’t you?” Aurelian said.

I nodded and pulled up the collar of my jacket. It was cold up there above the treeline, with nothing around to break the wind. I’d known for several days I was going into a depression, but I couldn’t make myself take one of the little blue pills out of their bottle and pop it into my mouth. The doctors told me it was all chemical, my ups and downs, a cyclical imbalance of something or other in my brain. All I had to do was take the blue pills when I was down and the orange pills when I was up, and I’d be as sane and happy as the next person, who was probably popping pills too.

“What’s so difficult about taking a pill?” Aurelian asked me. “You must be crazy or something to make a problem out of that.”

That remark, of course, was to reassure me: there was nothing really wrong with being crazy, nothing we couldn’t joke about. I said, “Uh-huh. Come on, let’s go somewhere warm.”

We went back to the helicopter and Aurelian flew us out of there, over the grey mountains and down over the green plain. The sky had cleared in the west, so we could see the sun setting. Its color at sunset was darker than Sol’s, an almost purple red; its red light glinted on the rivers and rice paddies below us. I lit a cigar. Aurelian said, “Do you have to?”

“Okay,” I said, and put the cigar out. In a normal state, I’d have been angry with him, but I have only one emotion when I’m going down, a kind of numb despair. Ahead of us was the first thing we had done on this planet, the Ring of Heaven. We had cut a circle in the plain and run the Maison River into it, bringing the river in and out through long tunnels so that all you could see from above was the ring of water, encircling a smooth, green lawn with a huge standing-stone at its center. I could remember how excited I had been the first time I saw it after it was done. Aurelian and I had gone up in a helicopter with a couple of bottles of rice wine and someone to fly the chopper while we got drunk: a Meshniri, since they got sick not drunk on our booze and we knew he/she wouldn’t drink even if we got drunk enough to try passing the bottle. Now the Ring bored me. A cheap trick, I thought as we passed over it.

Ville-Maison was a little way beyond it, spread out on both sides of the Maison River, a few of its lights already on. The city was two grids at a thirty-degree angle to each other. The great bow curve of the river separated them, and they were joined by the five bridges. The sun had set and the city’s colors had all turned to grey, but I could imagine them: the dark reddish-brown of the river, the pale grey of the streets and buildings and the bright summer green of the trees and the lawns. Not bad, not bad, I thought, and it had been done more or less by accident, the basic plan laid out by a couple of engineers in the settlement days and modified by almost everyone since then. I looked at Aurelian, who was busy talking to the control tower. An engineer, a stupid engineer. I got the ideas and he figured out how to make them work. If I were not around, he would probably do as good a job as the guys who had laid out Ville-Maison. So what was the point of having me around?

The runway lights were on, and we dropped slowly into the center of a circle of white light. When he had landed, Aurelian said, “Look, you go home and take a pill.”

“Maybe.” I retrieved the cigar from the ashtray, figuring I would light it as soon as I got out of the helicopter.

Aurelian turned to look at me. “If you were diabetic, you’d take insulin, wouldn’t you?”

“In my present mood, maybe not.”

“Listen, every time we do a job, you get more and more manic, till finally you’re kiting so high you’re barely in sight. Then, as soon as we’re done, you come crashing down. And you’re not easy to get along with either up or down, so I wish you’d take the pills.”

“Okay,” I said, and climbed out of the helicopter. It was pretty cold even on the plain, but that was normal. They had had to develop a new kind of rice to grow here, because the regular kinds couldn’t take the cold. I walked across the wet grass into the terminal and out again, just in time to catch the bus downtown. I still had the cigar, unlit because they won’t let you smoke cigars on any kind of public transport. We ought to organize, I thought, looking out at the wet streets, the dark trees moving in the wind, the houses set back behind little gardens, light shining out their windows. Cigar smokers, arise.

I went to the office instead of home. There was nothing at home except the pills. I lived alone in a one-room apartment, its windows looking out at the windows of another house. All I had there was a bed and bookcases full of books, and more books that I had to stack on the floor or put in the kitchen cabinets, because there was no more room in the bookcases. I didn’t do much there except sleep. Even my reading I did elsewhere, usually at one of the cafes you found on every other sidewalk like cafes in Paris; but here they were glassed in for protection against the cold and wet, and the windows were opened only on bright days in summer. I liked them best in winter. I’d sit by a window and drink hot tea, looking out through the rain-streaked glass at people with umbrellas hurrying down the street. If the spectacle of other people getting wet began to bore me, I could read or order something to eat. I always ate out. I didn’t even own any kitchenware.

Our office had two rooms, one for me and one for Aurelian, and the windows opened out on a canal lined with trees. It was dark enough out there so that I could see the pale, glimmering lights that were ghost moths flying among the trees. I opened the window in my office and smelled the weedy canal smell, then sat in the dark to watch the ghost moths and smoke my cigar. When I had finished the cigar, I turned on the lights and looked around. I had three big blowups that covered most of three walls: aerial photos of Stonehenge and a five-or six-level interchange somewhere in North America and bomb craters in Vietnam, almost a century old and still visible. They didn’t know, the guys who dropped the bombs, that they were creating an enduring work of art. Under the grass or whatever was growing there, you could still see the faint lines that had been the boundaries of rice paddies. Scattered across the uneven grid the paddies made were deep pocks left by the bombs. It’s all art, if you get high enough. Remember that Italian pilot—you won’t unless you’ve read a lot of history books—who dropped bombs on the Ethiopians and saw the explosions as red roses blooming below him? But that, as they say, was long ago and in another country and all those people are dead.