Damon Knight - Orbit 19

On my drawing board was a sketch of the next project: the Serpent. It was going to be a mound like the ones built by the North American Indians: a wide, low, grass-covered ridge that began with a series of hummocks—the rattle—and went spiraling out till finally it straightened and ran due north for two or three hundred meters, and ended in a diamond-shaped hill that was the snake’s head. I didn’t like the way the sketch was coming along, so I fiddled with it for a while, wrecked it and tore it up. Forget that, I thought, and turned off the lights. It must have been raining, though the only sign of it I could see was a mistiness around the street light across the canal. The ghost moths were gone, all except one that gleamed, then vanished, then gleamed again in the dark beneath a tree.

We had been brought out here, Aurelian and I, because they had found out—years ago when we first began to settle other planets—that people were so used to living surrounded by their own artifacts, living on top of the debris of millennia, that a bare planet made them uneasy. They felt exposed and vulnerable, somehow, without mounds, dolmens, Roman roads, arrowheads in the earth that turned up when they plowed. So we came and made a past for them. Your friendly neighborhood history-makers. Give us a month and we’ll make you a century. They could have got the result they wanted by dropping bombs all over a new planet. The craters would have marked the land sufficiently, said “This is ours” to all comers.

There was a Meshniri bar down the street, and I needed a drink. I closed up the office and went downstairs. As I had suspected, it was raining, a light drizzle that was barely more than a mist. Somebody had their windows open and a recording on: a Chinese opera. Almost all the planet’s settlers were East Asians, Chinese mostly. The climate was too cold for the Indochinese, the Thais, or the Indonesians. I walked to the corner where the bar was, orange light shining out its tiny windows, orange being the color of Meshnir’s sun. Their sun was visible from this planet, a dim star in the Dragon constellation. People told me it had a definite orange tinge. But I’ve never been able to see the colors of stars; they all look white to me.

Inside, the air was hot and full of the sweet smell of Meshniri bodies. The jukebox was playing old-time Meshniri music, which used a lot of percussion instruments made out of wood. This particular piece had a lot of rattling and clicking in it, along with the clear sound of a wooden drum. The jukebox screen was blank, since the Meshniri didn’t combine pictures with their music. But the screen had not been disconnected. A grey-white flickering light filled it. It was bright enough to be irritating, and I didn’t know how the Meshniri could stand it. The Meshniri looked at me, not really wanting me there, but too polite to tell me to get out. I went to the bar and asked the bartender for ansit. He/she poured me a glass. For some reason we can drink Meshniri booze, though they can’t drink our stuff. I sipped a little. At first you taste the sweetness. It’s as sweet as a liqueur. Then it starts burning. You feel as if you’ve just stuffed your mouth full of hot peppers. You choke and gasp and drink the water chaser and then try another sip. The Chinese from Szechwan, where they cook with hot pepper, love the stuff. It was a Szechwanese who first got me drinking ansit and going to Meshniri bars, getting used to the Meshniri watching me—wishing I would go and leave them in peace.

I sat down at a table. The jukebox was playing a modern piece, an electric flute from Earth replacing a Meshniri wooden flute. If I hadn’t been there, they would probably have danced, all of them in a row, their long, thin arms and legs moving slowly and stiffly. I sipped more ansit, listening to the sound of the wooden pipe-gongs. They loved wood and trees, the Meshniri. They sculpted trees the way the Japanese did, but the trees they bent and pruned were enormous. They had whole gardens full of sculptured trees, all centuries old. The sculptors must have been very patient and very determined; I envied them those qualities. I didn’t have the discipline to bend a branch and wait for the tree to learn to grow that way. If I were working with trees, I would probably have Aurelian bulldoze them all down and put in plastic substitutes whose branches went the way I wanted.

I drank slowly, which is the only way to drink ansit, and went through four or five glasses of water. I felt myself sliding deeper into depression, sitting in the dim room, surrounded by the black-brown shiny bodies of the Meshniri, their sweet smell so thick I thought I could taste it. Soon, I knew, the floor beneath me would collapse, and I’d be falling through black space for hours or days. I had to get out before that happened, get back to my place and take a pill. I left my drink unfinished, got up and walked out, looking straight ahead so I couldn’t see the Meshniri watching me. Their eyes were large and so pale they seemed colorless.

Outside it was still raining, a fine, misty rain. Burrowing beetles were everywhere, driven out of their burrows by the water. They scurried across the sidewalk, their black, scaly bodies glittering in the light from the street lights. I had to watch my feet to avoid stepping on one. They crunched underfoot the way really big roaches did. Sometimes when I went down, something funny happened to my vision: things seemed to recede and get very distinct, both at the same time. Those beetles on the sidewalk were a long, long way below me, but I saw them so clearly I could almost count the scales on their backs.

I hurried, thinking my apartment was only four or five blocks away; I’d be there in a few minutes; all I had to do was take a pill and hold on an hour or so till it took effect.

The rain started coming down hard. The beetles scurried for shelter, and I ran the rest of the way home, up the front steps and in the front door. Ms. Li opened her apartment door and looked out when I came slamming in. I could hear her 3D: the evening news giving the body count for a border skirmish somewhere light-years away.

“Oh. It’s you,” she said.

Right, I thought, going up the stairs. It was me. The mad genius was home. But where were the flowers, the red carpet, the band? The hall upstairs was bare except for a piece of silk embroidered with flowers and birds, framed and glassed, hung by Ms. Li. It had come with her all the way from China, and it was hideous. I could smell marijuana smoke coming from the room across from mine, where a girl lived who, Ms. Li had told me, worked as a systems analyst for the Statistical Center. I would come up the stairs sometimes and hear her hurrying to get inside before I appeared; or open my door and see her door open then shut again, when she realized I was coming out. As careful as she had been, I had seen her a couple of times. She was a perfectly ordinary-looking girl, from North China probably, since she was tall and very fair-skinned.

My phone was going meep-meep-meep. I unlocked my door, got inside, turned on the phone and said, “History Unlimited. If you don’t like your old past, let us build you a new one.”

“Just checking,” Aurelian said. “You weren’t home earlier.”

“I was out drinking. I’m going to take my medicine, so you can stop worrying.”

“Why don’t you take it right now and come back and tell me you’ve done it?”

“Okay.” I went and took a pill. When I got back to the phone, I said, “Your good deed is now done. The ghosts of dead Boy Scouts can rest easy.”

“I’ll see you at the office. Okay?”

“Uh-huh,” I said and turned the phone off. I got out my last bottle of rice wine and took a big swallow to get the metallic taste of the pill out of my mouth. I had only one picture in my apartment: a blown-up aerial photo of Manhattan, the spiky towers thrusting up like trees in a forest, blurred by the thick pollution haze. What an amazing artifact, I thought, looking at it. The photo had been taken from so high up, all you could see was the towers. The people who scurried like beetles between them were invisible. I opened a window and sat on the ledge, wine bottle in my hand. The rain had become a downpour. I swallowed more wine, watching the rain come down, shining like silver where the street lights lit it, filling the gutters, swirling down the drains. All I had to do was wait an hour till the pill went to work, and then I’d be fine.