Damon Knight: Orbit 18

“As long as we have each other, it will not matter what the rest of the world does or thinks,” Sharon said once.

“If we are faithful to ourselves and to each other, then we can survive even the ruination of the world,” Crispin had said. And both of them, for a while at least, had believed these things.

There had been a time when Crispin and Sharon had appeared to be successful in their lives. They had satisfaction and station and money and children and a happy home and fine friends. Or so they thought. They even had the illusion of a cup running over with sheer delight. Self-deception must have been rampant in them. And when they finally had to face up to reality there was never a couple who opposed that facing-up so stubbornly or so unreasonably.

Both of them had refused to have personality-correction-projection. They just didn’t want it, they said. They didn’t believe they needed it, and they preferred things the way they were. Refusals like theirs would tear the very fabric of the new society.

On the matter of giving up their children, they had even defied the law. And they had refused for a long time to admit that their children were ugly and malodorous and moronic and repulsive.

“They are beautiful children, they are pleasant children, they are intelligent children, and they are good children,” Sharon had insisted to an official, in defiance of all reason. “We love them and they love us. Let us alone! We will maintain our own ways. We will walk in beauty and happiness as we have walked. You have no right to interfere!”

But the officials had the “right of reality” to interfere. So the children were projected as officially deficient. And this projection, by definition, was the reality of the case. And Crispin and Sharon became more and more suspect after the termination of their children. Their attitude just wasn’t good.

They retained, however, a sense of humor. But unsanctioned humor in bestial persons can be made to project itself badly. Their magic together had been very much weakened when it became the case that they couldn’t stand to be too close to each other.

We are the sick, ungallant band

Whose once bright step must lag.

We are the people who live in the land Where even the buzzards gag.

—Rotten People's Rollicks

Judge Roger Baluster had once been a magistrate, and later he had been a manufacturer and businessman. Still later he had been a tycoon. And that was where he broke it. Tycoons are so easy to type and tear.

And really had he ever had the nobility of character that a magistrate and a businessman and a tycoon should have? What he did have was a long history of noncooperation with the person-projector firms.

As a young man Roger had been a crusading judge. He had crusaded against a complex of disintegrating things when they had been new and unestablished. And now when they were set and established they crusaded against Baluster to his ruination. But through the years he had become a man of much hidden wealth. He was a full-feathered bird and his plucking would take a long time.

In the beginning of it, he had refused to pay to a firm that was in the person-projection business the simple monthly fee for “Personality Updating and Maintenance.” This was petty of him, for he was a rich man.

Roger had had the look of an eagle. He had had pride and judgment and compassion. And humor. He had been (this is hard to believe in the light of his real character as it was later revealed) admired and liked and respected by almost everyone.

But he had refused to pay a simple fee. Well then, he would have to pay a complex fee of a much steeper sort. He was handed upward. A bigger and more comprehensive firm in the personprojection business decided to take the enhancing of Baluster’s personality in hand. And, unaccountably, he refused this offer also. He was placing himself above the law and above the community.

“Well, then, Baluster, we will degrade your personality till you are held in universal contempt,” the men of the first-class personprojector firm told him. “We will reveal a totally shabby person who is the valid ‘you.’ Of the false image which you built for yourself nothing will remain. That is the way things are, and there is only one side to things.”

“Aw, I think there is another side to this,” Roger Baluster said resolutely. “And I believe that something of what I built will remain. The ‘Inner Me’ will remain.”

“So, then, it will remain,” said those huckstering men of that firm. “But it will remain as it really is and not as you imagine it. We will give you a certain transparency now. There is nothing like letting the honest light of day into a dark man like yourself.

This transparency will be subliminal, of course, but it will be near universal. Everybody will be able to see into you in those faster-than-a-blink moments. And nobody’s ‘Inner Person’ is attractive. People will see you, in those multitudinous intervals that are too short to be recorded, with complete revulsion. They will see you as a dirty complex of entrails and uncased organs. Yours will be the sharp and foul smell of blood and viscera and illegally opened persons. Other aspects of you will become other vile things, but the ‘Inner You’ will have become a charnal house in its offensiveness.”

“There will be another sort of ‘Inner Me,’ ” Baluster insisted, “and you will not be able to touch that.”

“Whatever there is of you, we can touch it and bend it and twist it,” they said.

Well, they did touch and bend and twist every discoverable aspect of Judge Roger Baluster. They rotted every element of him, and they set his reputation into reeking corruption.

Once there had been the time when Roger Baluster had had the look of an eagle. Now he had the look of a buzzard or vulture. His pride and judgment had been destroyed utterly. His compassion and his humor had been horribly twisted. His appearance, whenever a glimpse could be got of it, was completely repulsive. As were so many now, Roger was cloaked and masked and swathed most of the time. But a really foul appearance can come through every swathing and speak to every sense.

They had disrupted Baluster’s household also. They had taken his wife away, and he couldn’t find out what they had done with her. They had destroyed two of his children, and they had turned the other two against him.

But he still had money, very much money, cannily hidden. That was what kept him alive. Money can buy a grudging sort of acknowledgment as long as there is any of it left.

Silvester Sureman had gotten crossways with the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. Before that, things had gone well with him. He had, on the day of the misunderstanding, moved into a new suburban home, a sign of affluence. Silvester himself had a misunderstanding-removing business which he called “Roadsmoothers, Inc.” He was a good relations man. He talked now to the men of the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. “There is no need for misunderstanding here,” he said. “I beg of you to take no action on this now. I beg you to take no action till tomorrow morning. Misunderstandings often disappear overnight.” Silvester thought that he had them convinced, but something must have gone wrong. That firm did take action against Silvester that night while he slept. A nightshift man at the firm found a note on Silvester that had been written by a day-man. The day-man had forgotten to put a hold on that note. So the night-shift man routinely had Silvester destroyed in the area of his strength: his sureness in things, and his ability to remove misunderstandings. A split-second echo had gone and come from the world mind that this was a man who was Mr. Quagmire himself, the man who would always be bogged down in indecision and misunderstanding.