Damon Knight - Orbit 17

Light. Who opened the door? She squints. —Is it you, she mumbles. All she can see are those bloodshot lenses, eyebrows like white spiders, a closeup of gums gnashing in her face. —Ha, ha, I can’t hear your blathering, she giggles, ever since you’ve jammed those corks in my ears. But the next second she’s groveling at his shoes. —Don’t beat me, don’t beat me again ... I can’t talk if I wanted to... my tongue has shriveled to a raisin... don’t, please don’t use the acid, oh god no! not that, not the mouthstretcher . . .

The door opens again. She pretends to be unconscious. He drags her out by her hair, across the cold laboratory floor. She thought it was just the closet that felt like a refrigerator, another punishment, but the entire lab is freezing. He’s wearing a parka fringed in wolfs fur. —Wake up, you crazy old bitch, I want you to see how it ends! She can see his breath as he talks, gesticulating wildly, explaining how he’s set the computer the task of destructing the maze, an atomic chain reaction, blasting it out of the entire country, the entire hemisphere, perhaps the entire planet, like a tapeworm. He’s laughing as the clock counts down: 30, 29, 28 ... turns to see her staggering to her feet and moves to knock her down, still laughing. She smashes her foot down on his toes, the foot with the Spanish Boot. While he’s hopping and yelping she tries to finish him off with a cast-iron kick to the groin, but can’t swing her leg high enough. It cracks into his kneecap, carrying her off balance, and they both go down. He drags himself toward her across the floor. She tries to crawl away. He rips her rags off. Breathing hard, eyes magnified behind fps lenses, an expression she’s never seen before. He drops his trousers and rolls on top of her, grunting and biting, prying her legs apart, licking in her ear, “So ugly, so ugly,” he’s almost cooing, their faces staring into each other, straining only inches apart, then suddenly his jaw unhinging in a scream. She sees his eyes roll up into his head as he’s lifted off her, Theo pumping into him from behind like a piston and him screaming again and again with each thrust. She can hear Theo’s antennae sending her thought waves as he drives it in over and over: Mother, Mother, are you all right? The computer, she thinks, the computer, and Theo has already dumped him and is lunging for the control panel.

She watches as he rolls over, trousers still around his ankles, a stream of blood running down his legs, then realizes his arms are outstretched and shaking because of the weight of the Luger he’s holding with both hands, taking careful aim at Theo’s back, and before she can scream the golden tails lash around his wrists, cinch mercilessly around his throat.

She watches the golden mutants file into the maze. A long line, she had no idea there were so many, smiles pouting their lips, their exotic flashing eyes. The last two enter, the ones who saved Theo, one of them obviously pregnant. —My mate, he says, as they disappear into the maze. —Theo, we can escape now . . . through the east wing . . . bring your wife . . . your children will be able to walk the earth free, to know the fields, flowers . . . sun . . . stars. He’s smiling. The words sound all wrong to her. He steps into the entrance and extends his hand. She looks at the laboratory, the scattered files, the shattered beakers, buzzing video screen, snow drifting in, blowing through the cracks in the walls, coating everything like dust, his body on the floor, already a little mound of snow, and out the window the icicles like bars across a landscaped white, duned like a desert. She steps in and he slams the door. It fuses behind them. —The last instructions I gave the computer, he says. The corridors are warm, silver tinged with a faint infrared glow. The tunnels so streamlined she seems to glide by their volition, clanking softly with her Spanish Boot. They come to the first intersection. —Turn left, he says.

"I think, at times, that I would like to possess, or at least to understand, emotions.”

Quite late one spring night, the three of us, Jiggory, Soribus and I, intoxicated quite with our success in the tech school and free, for once, of Melcanno (having painted his eyes with a dark, thick paint), sallied into the great city of Starport, in whose shadow we had lived all our lives, to prove that we were men. There were, you see, certain places where we knew certain women could be found, and it was to these dark regions, lustfully monied, perversely innocent, corrupt to the very toes with the vague knowledge of what we must do, it was to these nether realms that we headed. We drained all the cunning of our thirty-nine years to become one—or three—with the shadows, to skulk our way ominously through this the night’s first adventure, to initiate ourselves into the moods of vice that we might fully enjoy the night’s spoils when they came.

We talked.

“Suppose they kidnap us and sell us into slavery?”

“In the cinny they always have bad teeth. I hope mine has nice teeth.”

“It’s not her teeth you’re supposed to worry about, Jiggory.” “I can’t help it. Rotten teeth are so . . .”

“I wonder if they’ll understand what we want. I mean, to have to tell them everything that . . . I’m not sure I could.”

Soribus was a thinker, almost to the exclusion of all else. It was for him to probe, to question, and he saw no reason why being thirteen, alive and quick-limbed, possessed of blood and semen, bound by obligations and imaginings—he saw no reason why these things should interrupt, for even a moment, the function of his questing young mind. And everywhere that Soribus traveled, he was accompanied by the sound of his own voice, hiding at the lowest levels of his breath, giving vent to the thousand problems that worried his overworked mind. “Melcanno is not one of the psioids—how does he know what I am thinking? How do I, for that matter?” “Why is the water always colder in the bathroom?” “Is living in a mune really the best way? Then why didn’t all the philosophers [for he knew of philosophers, and many other dark things] live in them?” It was a fine, mellow thing, this voice of his, and we’d grown nearly as fond of it as we had of him; we felt lost when we could not hear it (for the three of us, of all the people in the mune, were truly inseparable). Like the whistle of a teakettle, his voice assured us that there was important matter brewing within. It made the streets of Starport that much less ominous, stark and cold. Our nickname for Soribus, for reasons of which we were never quite certain, was the Dane.

If Soribus was Intellect (or such intellect as can be housed in a brain a mere thirteen springs old), then Jiggory was Energy, mad and inchoate, seeking vent without sense. There was not a tree in miles had not known the indignity of his boots and fingers; not a cat but had been stalked by him, and stoned. Jiggory said little, and when he spoke, no one listened very hard. For it was with his body, not merely his vocal cords, that he expressed himself. Wherever we went, he removed his clothing and became one with the landscape: swimming, so lithe as to shame the eels; running, swift as birds, through the wheat and the elders, so that even Melcanno was hard put to capture him; masturbating in the forest, to my amazement and the Dane’s embarrassment and irritation; jumping from, crawling through, dancing with, laughing like . . .

These two, then, were my brothers, friends and accomplices as I stole through the city’s umbra. Allegro and Penseroso, art and philosophy, transport and melancholy, Jiggory and Soribus.