Damon Knight - Orbit 16

“Don’t kid me. You couldn’t care less what I did to Blacky.”

“Well, at least remotely. Immortality begs for diversion and you provide me with such.”

“Do you love me, Mattu?”

“Do you care one way or the other?”

“Hell, no!”

“You are going to be a Valenian with a difference,” he said.

“Same as you?”

“Opposite of me.”

I said, “Devil’s Adversary, meet the genuine, already crowned Devil’s Advocate. From now on, I will be the Valenians’ lawyer, and I intend to see that they survive.”

“You have been chosen by the Council?”

“Signed, sealed and practically delivered.”

“Before you go to the nest, approach me for a last farewell. Look me in the eye and see a brilliant curiosity.”

He tilted his head toward me, and the outer portion of his eye nearest me acted as a mirror and revealed the Chamber and its contents. Before I turned away from him, I caught a glimpse of the last human being I would see for a long time. It was a tiny nigger gal with blue-black body and crazy eyes. A brilliant curiosity.

The nest is the laboratory. It preps oddities, like, say, Valenians who are unusually large, or the Devil’s Adversary, or the Devil’s Advocate, or anybody different for whom the Valenians form an affection. To them, life forms are all the same. They don’t care at all.

The nest sucks. Not out, but in. Into me went the chemicals necessary for my preservation. I felt bloated and well sucked by the time the nest finished with me.

A bit shrunken in size, but not much because I was small to start with, I was lifted by Dalia and kissed good-bye.

“We had a good time,” I said. “Love you.”

“I’ll see you after a short sleep.”

“It won’t be you. You’re going to die and I’ll be playing with another Dalia when the nest life span comes.”

“What’s the difference?” she said, and of course she was right.

The egg sac was warm and cozy. The tube was stiff when Dalia placed it in my throat. Immediately reality became fuzzy.

“Mattu, do you think the nest can give me a nice fur coat, next life span?” I said.

“It is a very capable organism. If you desire to grow fur—”

“Will it be shiny white like yours?”

Oh, how the gleam in his eyes pierced me. “Little girl, didn’t anyone ever warn you about wishing for the moon?”

I settled back, disgruntled, but not too much. “Mattu, you’re my friendly enemy and I’ll get you next time around.” It was the last thing I said.

I was aware of the sac’s contents pressing at me from all sides. My knees touched my chest, my chin touched my knees, my arms hugged my legs, I felt more comfortable than I had in my mother’s womb. If she were alive, she would understand. She gave me life, which, as I said before, was a mound of crap. Anyone would do the same as I was doing.

I heard Dalia close the sac. I sucked on the tube. It softened in my mouth. Sweet nectar slid and dropped and beckoned sleep. I was still aware as Dalia flew me to my resting place, scarcely felt it when I hit the ocean and sank.

In a minute I’ll take the deep nap. In the meantime, I think of the future. I am happy. Come the resurrection, I’ll live again. I am the Devil’s Advocate. As for you who are going to be around when I wake up, you mothers had better watch it. Blacky, my better half, my conscience, is dead. I killed her. Now there is only myself, and it is a thing you created. Here’s to an everlasting vacation in Hades.

It came across the desert, in a jeep nobody was driving, and its message was Hate.

Easterly, Nevada, 2016. In all the world, one of the few things remaining unchanged was the wind. It never ceased whistling sand in from the desert, where there was no one to be stung. The sand hissed against the porcelain flanks of the ghost town’s Carvel. It duned and piled in strange, eddy-chosen places.

Across the earth, over broken porches, banging shutters, howling unimpeded, whistled the wind. Through rusted streets, against crumbling buildings, currents of air flowed like water.

In New York, the Verrazano Bridge began its sweep whole from the Staten Island side, ending in the middle of nowhere. Halfway out over the Narrows, cables blew dangling like the ragged hem of a woman’s skirt.

Perhaps a hundred survivors led nomadic lives, scattered throughout the world. A few had settled, briefly, and children had come again to the earth. That was better; the children remembered nothing but their own lives. The remnants of men wandered, after fourteen years they wandered yet, as if in a dream.

Jake had been by himself for so long he had forgotten what it was like to be anyplace other than the desert. He was a hermit; he had learned desert ways, and he acted so wise and steady, there was a sort of crust about him.

It was not that he deliberately shunned contact with people, or that he hated civilization. What he remembered of humanity was heaven, and he wrote almost every day in his notebooks about the people he recalled.

“The blowup,” he printed neatly, “was an act of nature.” He looked up, out through the open door to the mountains, always on the horizon. Laying his palm against his forehead, he returned to the diary. “Our technology proved itself lo be no more than dust. Our planet was simply too crowded. There wasn’t enough of anything to go around.

“Now, in her wisdom, Nature has the few humans left struggling with the mutants. We are natural enemies.” Jake put down his pen, thinking for a moment about the little graveyard behind the shack. “May the best man win,” he added finally, slapping the thick diary closed.

The mutants had shown no more evidence of trying to stick together than the humans. They too led a solitary and nomadic life, scattered about the world. The mutants displayed a ferocious curiosity, and they examined whatever interested them in a way that could only be described as brutal. To be trapped by a curious mutant, young and eager to learn, often meant mutilation, sometimes death.

At Jake’s desert outpost there was an occasional human visitor. He called these migrants “pilgrims” in his notes. They all had stories which varied only in degree of horror.

There was a sweet well in the hermit’s yard. All who came through stopped for at least a day, and tales were exchanged into the starriest parts of the night. Jake was happy then: he felt important and vital.

Many pilgrims came to the shack injured, and a few died there. There had been a girl, a few months ago. Jake recalled her now as he drew water from the well. She was covered with burns, and she walked stiffly. She saw Jake and did not see him.

The desert man interposed himself in her path, and she collapsed in his arms. Jake dragged her to a cool place and went to the well. When he returned, cradled her head and dabbed her lips with water, she opened her eyes, and they were lackluster.

Jake buried her with the others, but he remained haunted. He felt, more and more each season, that time was passing him, and he told himself as he filled his books that he was essential to the continuance of the human race.

“There will be others,” he wrote.

On one of his two-day treks to Easterly, he had found a tin placard, hot with the sun. It was yellow, and in blue letters it bore the legend “Yoo Hoo, America’s Favorite Chocolate Drink.” Smiling ruefully, Jake had stooped and turned the sign over. The blank side was covered with white, and in sun-faded red paint there were two words: “Phoenix House.” He nailed the sign to the side of his shack, and it looked just right.

In his notes, he wrote more and more about the methods of nature, and he began to think of himself as wiser than he really was. After his evening meal he stood out in the yard and watched the sun go down behind the shack, tinting the big metal mountains pink.