Damon Knight: Orbit 17

There came a low, ferric chuckle. “Did you not penetrate tonight?”

And Soribus, ever the puritan, blushed slightly, and laughed. “In the Abbey of Black St. Mark,” he said through a smile greater than ever he had worn, “I may be able to discern the answers to the problems that plague me. I am not one to act, not one to roam the spaceways seeking wealth, adventure, or experience. Such wisdom as I may need is, I think, somewhere within me. Perhaps among the Markists, free to question as I will, unbound by custom, superstition, or prejudice, perhaps there I will find it.”

When the robot turned his head to me, his cat’s head following, I, unable to speak of plans never made, of longings unborn, was still.

“Do you wish nothing,” Morundissimis asked, “but to be free to wish? Do you expect never to be at peace, at one with the Earth? Even such unprepossessing goals as that, I fear, may never be fulfilled.” He waited, but I remained silent.

“Very well, then,” he said, “it has come my turn to speak, by all that’s metallic, it has. I was built three hundred seventy-three years ago, bom fully grown, to assist an Oriental geologist with the exploration of Antarctic volcanoes. He was thin, I remember, and had a chipped front tooth. He worked alone, wearing a pressurized suit, and so having a psioid to assist him was a great help. We explored many fires together, and learned much. And then one day he fell to his death in a lava pool. His death was for me unbearably hard to adjust to; I was left alone, without purpose. Having nothing else to do, I came to Starport, and learned poker. I have seen a great deal—seen, but not felt—in the years since Himate died in the flames. I know all the great buildings of Starport, know every street, every shadow. And here I remain, winning money and art from drunken old men; communicating with boys, and with cats; talking to the women, who are my only friends, and eavesdropping on their business transactions; working an occasional swindle with other tramps. This and more. It is enough, though. The present, despite what we think, is always sufficient.

“I think, at times, that I would like to possess, or at least to understand, emotions. But I hope, at my age, I know better than to pursue the impossible. And sometimes I think that I should try to unite the tramps, to lead them on some enterprise worthy of them. But then—” Something inside him clicked. “I am acting, in my fashion, on my surroundings, and reacting to them. In the final analysis, all human endeavor amounts to no more than this. At least my motives are not frivolous.”

Jiggory was involved in a game with one of the cats. The Dane was in another room; his voice came to us under the music. And so I alone heard how sad the robot sounded, how defeated, how very alive.

We left him soon, and left Starport, as we wended our way back to the mune. Arcturus had settled low in the west; Vega and the Milky Way dominated the sky now, and Pisces and Pegasus were climbing in the east. One of us naked, one fully clothed, and one wearing only his trousers (the seat tom open), we walked home through the forest which, for all its shadows, was not as dark as certain places in the city.

One of us ran ahead, from time to time, to climb trees. One of us talked to himself in the night, in tones much more somber than any thirteen-year-old had a right to use. One of us, pensive, walked behind.

Ah, youth! Ah, lustl Ah, life! We had known women that night! Were we not men?

They are here, they are beautiful and cold, we look at them and don’t see them . . . and they wait, for what apocalypse?

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I noticed him. I suppose I had been subliminally aware of him for some time, though he was just standing there with the rest of the crowd. Anyway, I had other things on my mind: a Pinto and a Buick were wrapped around each other like lettuce leaves. The paramedics had two of them out, wrapped in plastic sheets waiting for the meat wagon, and were cutting out a third with a torch. He appeared to be in the Buick, but you couldn’t really tell.

My partner Camehan and I were holding back the crowd of gawkers. A couple of bike cops in their gestapo uniforms were keeping the traffic moving on Cahuenga, not letting any of them stop and get out. But there were still twenty or twenty-five of them standing there—eyes bright, noses crinkled, mouths disapproving.

All except him.

That’s one of the reasons I noticed him in particular. He wasn’t wearing that horrified, fascinated expression they all seem to have. He might have been watching anything—or nothing. His face was smooth and placid. I think that’s the first time I ever saw a face totally without expression. It wasn’t dull or blank or lifeless. No, there was vitality there. It just simply wasn’t doing anything at the moment.

And he was . . . Don’t get the wrong idea—my crotch doesn’t get tight at the sight of an attractive young man. But there’s only one word to describe him—beautiful!

I’ve seen my share of pretty boys—the ones that flutter and the ones that don’t. It seems the prettier they are, the more trouble they get into. But he wasn’t that kind of beautiful.

Even though the word is used these days to describe practically everything, it was the only one that fitted. I thought at first he was very young: nineteen, twenty, not more than twenty-one. But then I got the impression he was much older, though I don’t know why, because he still looked twenty. He was about five-ten, a hundred and sixty-seventy pounds—one of those bodies the hero of the book always has but that you never see in real life.

His hair was red, or it might have just been the light from the flashers. There were no peculiarities of feature; just a neutral perfection. I’ve heard it said that perfect beauty is dull, that it takes an imperfection to make a face interesting. Whoever said it had never seen this kid.

He was standing with his hands in his pockets, watching the guys with the torch, neither interested nor uninterested. I guess I was staring at him, because his head turned and he looked directly at me.

I could smell the rusty odor of the antifreeze dribbling from the busted radiators and the sharp ozone of the acetylene and the always remembered smell of blood. A coyote began yipping somewhere in the darkness.

Then a couple of kids got too close and I had to hustle them out of the way. When I looked back, he was no longer there.

They finally got the third one out of the Buick. When they pulled him out I could see the wet brown stain all over the seat of his pants where his bowels had relaxed in death. The ambulance picked up all three of them and the wrecker hauled off the two cars still merged as one. Part of the mess was dragging on the street and I could hear the scraping for a long time. The bike cops did a few flashy turns and roared away. The crowd started to wander off, and Camehan and I began sweeping the broken glass from the pavement.

But there was only one thing I could think of: I couldn’t remember the color of his eyes.

Nothing much happened the rest of the night. We cruised the Boulevard a few times, but there wasn’t anything going on. A few hustlers still lounged around the Gold Cup and the Egyptian, never giving up hope. There was no point in hassling them— they’d just say they were waiting for a bus, and we couldn’t prove they weren’t. It was a pretty scruffy-looking bunch this late in the morning. The presentable ones had scored a long time ago. You could probably get most of these with an offer of breakfast.

Camehan reached behind the seat and pulled an apple from the paper sack he always kept back there. He took a bite that sounded like a rifle shot and then offered me one. “No, thanks.”