Damon Knight: Orbit 18

On the day of the misunderstanding, Silvester Sureman had phoned the Morning Enterprise to tell them to begin delivering the paper at his new house. “These changes take a little time,” the man at the Enterprise said. “It may be the day after tomorrow morning before you receive the paper at your new place.”

“I am sure that it can be done by tomorrow morning,” Sureman said. “With effort and understanding all things can be done quickly.”

Then it was the next morning and Sureman went out from his new house early in the morning to get his paper. Yes, it was there. Or was it his? The paper was exactly midway between his house and the house next door. Did the people next door take the morning paper? The light was on there, so Sureman went and knocked on the door. A huge man with oversized eyes and lather on his face came and opened. (Those oversized eyes—the man either had a thyroid condition or he was a Groll’s Troll.)

“Do you take the Morning Endeavor newspaper?” Silvester Sureman asked brightly.

“That is no possible business of yours,” the man said. “No, I do not take such a thing. What this neighborhood does not need is one more nut. Don’t be one.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Sureman said. “I am just trying to prevent misunderstandings before they start.” He patted the man on the shoulder and the man winced. How awkward of Sureman! Possibly the fellow was a Groll’s Troll, and they hate to be touched.

Sureman picked up the paper and sat at the little sidewalk bench in front of his house to read it. And after a while the huge, shaven man came out of the house next door. He seemed to be looking for something. Then he came over to Silvester Sureman and punched him in the nose and took the paper.

“I told you not to be a nut in this neighborhood,” the man said. “Stealing my morning paper is in the order of being a nut.”

“But you said that you didn’t take the Morning Endeavor, ” Sureman said reasonably out of his bloody face.

“I don’t,” the huge man said. “This is the Morning Enterprise. There isn’t any such paper as the Morning Endeavor. ”

The man started back into his house with the paper. Sureman had gotten his tongue twisted on the name, that was all. Oh-oh, that big man was coming back again!

That huge man came up to Silvester Sureman again and punched him in the nose so hard that he broke it.

“It’s one thing to be a nut,” the huge man said. “It’s something else to be a nut with a worm in it. That last punch was because you have a worm in you.”

And Silvester Sureman did have a worm in him. It rotted him and it ate him up from the inside, and it brought him down and still further down. Silvester lost his business, of course. He lost everything. He was prone to total misunderstandings and he could do nothing right. He went down and down till he had become one of the vile untouchables.

Conchita Montez had once been legendized as a stunningly beautiful woman of the Latin persuasion. It had been believed that she had great charm and elegance and intelligence and presence. Her way with the English language had seemed enchanting, with all those delightful slurrings and mispronunciations. Her eyes and her wit twinkled, and she was one of the persons who brightened her era. That was the legend. But beautiful legends are not always self-sustaining; there is a fragility about even the best of them. And those were the times of fragile personalities.

It isn’t known quite where Conchita went wrong. She had given so much enjoyment to everyone! But it was said that she was very particular about whom she gave more special enjoyment to. She apparently didn’t know who was running the world in those years. Her rejection of some of the high lords was resented.

“The old way would be to throw acid in your face and so wreck your beauty,” one of those lords told her. “We are more subtle and more thorough now. We throw the acid behind your face and it wrecks your whole person. Then your face will crumble of itself.”

So those Person-Projectors did a job on Conchita and she became repulsive at once. Became repulsive? She had always been repulsive, of course. Hers was a repulsive nature.

What did we ever see in her? Old posters of her had shown her as absolutely beautiful. That was when those old posters were new. Well, why didn’t those same posters still show her as beautiful? Because she was repulsive and had always been. And now they showed her as repulsive.

But no poster could show her as repulsive as she really was. A poster could not show the mush-mouthed offensiveness of her speech or the screaming tediousness of her person.

So she became a hooded and swathed untouchable, ringing her cracked bell when she had to be out of doors, avoiding and avoided by all decent people.

My wife is a doll with a crooked back

And a voice like a broken fiddle.

I love her like a potato sack

With a rope around her middle.

—Rotten People’s Rollicks

Crispin and Sharon Babcock went that evening into what was probably the most beautiful sly hall in the world. If it had not been so before, their entering almost guaranteed that it would be so now. The sly halls were the last refuge where obnoxious people could gather to enjoy (it was as if the word “en-joy” had been minted fresh just for the sly halls) the rousing old pleasures and beauties. The enjoyments and the beauties were very subjective and selective, and they were awfully tenuous. But they were the only enjoyments and beauties that these people could bring about. These places might be kept enjoyable as long as their people held together on their clear course.

“The thing will work as long as we are all faithful to each other,” Crispin Babcock said. “Oh, Lord of the Sick Scorpions, please don’t say that again, and again, and again!” Sharon Babcock moaned to herself. (Crispin’s statement was one that he made a thousand times a day.)

All the members of the sly halls were outcasts. They ate and drank in the sly halls. They played music and chukki there. They had shows, they had arts, they had books and all graphics. There were body sports and mind sports. There was song and dance, conversation and cookery and casuistry.

In every sly hall were the one- and two-room mansions for the couples and for the families (though there were few children; most of the children of the outcasts had been destroyed). There were the single rooms for the singles. There were the blessed rituals that are at the heart of every sly hall; and there was the intense civilization that is the seal of all the sly people.

Some of the folks in the halls were neither masked nor veiled. Some did not even wear the great cloak, the wrongly called “invisibility cloak.” They were guised of themselves, they said; they had no need to be disguised. But that was only fancy talk. Most of them were as masked and swathed as it was possible to be.

“Wintergreen was knocked off today,” Judge Roger Baluster said. “That’s nine of the sly halls knocked off in four days and nights. Somehow the companies are shattered and the people flee out of the halls. They haven’t anywhere to go then, after they abandon their last refuges which are the halls. So they are arrested for being persistently in public places, and some of them are executed for it. They can’t live anywhere except in the halls. Who would rent or sell rooms or houses to the outcasts? But the people get more fun out of the outcasts when they are driven into the open. There were complaints before that they hardly got to enjoy those of us who made such shelters for ourselves. Some new technique is being used to break up the companies and make the outcast people flee the halls.”