Damon Knight - Orbit 16

Without skin, Blacky would have been attractive. Hmm. There was that slight protruding of her rear. Some of them had odd hip structure. Too leggy. Bosom too high. Head elongated. Why? Genes, naturally.

That last conclusion brought me no satisfaction, reminded me of pants, inside which all sorrow resided. People ought to have been more fastidious about where they dropped their jeans/ genes.

I think maybe I’ll die tomorrow.

Blacky’s grin? She had good teeth, but I didn’t care for pink-gray gums. The palms of her hands were all wrong. Off-shade. Another thing I never took to was the whites of her eyes, because they flashed red. You could spot colored right off that way, like for instance the famous movie star who said he was Mexican. His wicked eyes gave him away, with their streaks of red.

I didn’t feel right when I called Blacky a nigger. It embarrassed me. She didn’t deserve it. Nobody ever persecuted me for anything. I am—I was a Wasp: you know, one of those people who didn’t know what they were and were proud of it. (Relieved?) A chunk of potato in a stew; a little fish in a big pond.

As for us rednecks, we’re okay, we’re more American than any of you foreigners. My folks brought me up to be a good little girl and never even told me what a Jew was. I grew and went around with a frown because people were so concerned with names. “Levy? You say Levy?” Berg-stein-wald, hell, I learned, but I still had to be hit over the head with a name before I recognized it as anything but homo sap. My talent, you realize, lay in the two big dark balls above my nose. I couldn’t hear anything but homo sap, but I could spot an ape a mile away, whether he was peeling a banana or not.

I wish all those apes were around now. (Without an equal complement of rednecks? I don’t know.)

Blacky opens her mouth and you can hear the collard greens squeezing through her teeth. Where in the hell did that godawful accent originate?

Did you know their sex organs were blue? S’fact. Whence comes this sacrilege? We don’t need or want blue but in the sky. Human beings have this and that. Anything else is an added upon, and we question who did it.

I don’t believe in God. Never did. Well, when I was little. They said, “Don’t, give, sweat, give, suffer, give, cry, give, give, give.” I stopped listening when I realized they were a carbon copy of the government, or vice versa.

Blacky, you and I, we are both lost. Will you cry tomorrow when I get killed? No, I imagine you’ll do like the psychs used to say was normal and sensible and virtuous. You’ll cower in a corner and be glad because it isn’t you.

I ask you to analyze that bit of indecency: “Better her than me.” Never mind God, or what price valor, or what does it profit a man if he . . .

At the time I thought all those things, I was curled around Blacky’s back, keeping it warm, while she kept my front warm. It was chilly spring outside.

It isn’t true that they stink. Blacky shivered and moved closer. My back was plastered against a wall colder than a witch’s ninny. (I don’t like vulgarity, but sometimes use it without thinking, as I’m a ridge runner who never ran fast enough to get away from it one hundred percent.)

Nigger, nigger on the wall, who’s the fairest of the two of us? Which one of us represents humanity? Poor little lambs, we are victims of our archetypes. How deep does the blood have to run before the subconscious lets go of that old survival rope? A foot deep in low gutters? Don’t ask me. I have a strong stomach. Ask the nigger in my arms. Sometimes I think she is almost all ape. Cry? As she laughs. All the time. How high is her IQ? Statistically speaking, that is, in comparison with mine, well, neither of us had the brains to find our way out of the maze, not for weeks. (You should be alive to try this dilly. Einstein would give up after a year.) My roomie and I took a stab at it every morning before breakfast. And who ever said “Straw for the ox and wheat for the man”? I ate straw, or anything else that didn’t break my teeth. But every morning, Blacky and I were forced to run and climb and crawl, and we had lots of energy because we dined so well.

I got out of Blacky’s clutches, climbed from the bed and practiced walking on my hands. It wouldn’t do me any good, though, because I’d made up my mind that today I was going to get through the maze with no assistance and that it was going to be the last day I acted like a clown.

Maze: Like a honeycomb, glittering white and yellow, glistening as a sticky surface will, a little like frozen crystals on ice cream. The floor didn’t feel sticky to my touch. My hands sank into it a fraction and I experienced a sickening sensation. I didn’t lose my balance, but then I never did.

There were thousands of holes in the walls, each large enough to accommodate a body, and each having no end, or so it seemed, besides which, a person inside one of those holes could end up getting eaten.

The single door in our wooden shack led into the maze, and we couldn’t dig our way out of the shack, having nothing but our teeth and fingernails. Woman is a piece of meat. Note I didn’t say man. We, the nigger and I, may be the only women left, and what would all you studs who are inseminating flowers have to say to that? You let us down. You got yourselves slaughtered and who have we to depend on now? As you depended upon bigger men and men in positions of power, even so we women depended on you. Everyone did it, it was no crime, for this was a symbiotic universe and not even light traveled on its own ticket. We are, were, together. You lost. I cry to think how you tried. You don’t know about Blacky and me. What would you do if you knew? I mean, illogic, if drawn to infinite length, can make a mind go bananas. That’s it. What’s the point of two girls surviving?

Don’t interrupt, mind, I’m looking at that maze.

I tried crawling into a hole, any hole, got ten yards and the thing reached out little yellow suckers and started tasting me. I scrambled backward and got out of that hole and tried another. How would you like getting tasted every day of your life, a dozen times a day?

Every morning Blacky and I woke up to the noise of the maze, and talk about a thing getting ready for a meal, even the floor became active. Blacky and I hopped, were experts by then, and we continued to hop until we finally saw the one inactive hole in the entire joint, and in we dived, fighting to get there first, and we crawled like hell to the end of the hole, and we dropped out and there we were, on stage in the Council Chamber, and right away we began our acrobatic act, and that was why we didn’t die. Because we had good balance.

So I was just spouting when I swore I’d get through the thing with no help and I was braying when I said I wouldn’t be a clown anymore. I’d do anything to keep from getting killed.

What would you do if razors suddenly started raining from heaven one day? Likely you would get sliced up. Not just likely —you did get sliced up. I didn’t. Talk about a mob, there must have been three hundred people on the block, gawking at the sky. When that many bodies began to fall apart, there wasn’t much space left that could be described as unlittered.

I was in the middle of my act when it happened. Soap-box stuff. Fifth Avenue, standing on my hands on the sidewalk. More natural to me than being on my feet. Everybody started dying in a hurry. I froze solid, I did. My hands grew red to my wrists. I examined my environment with my crazy eyes while my body remained stationary.

They had good eyesight, spied me standing the wrong way, down on the ground, otherwise they would have showered me with spears, along with the others.

The red was nearly halfway to my elbows. Something closed around my ankle and I was hauled into the sky. I had me a slow, slow jaunt through the countryside of NYC. Above me hovered a white bug the size of a truck. Shiny streamers hung from it like Christmas ornaments, and one of these held me suspended.