Damon Knight - Orbit 16

Abruptly her mind went deeper into his. Revelation and irrelevance together assailed the hermit’s overloaded senses. He was torn between his drive to comprehend a little, and the need to survive whole. But his desire far outpaced his ability, and he buckled under the pressure of insistent unwanted visions. Jake’s eyes watered and he gasped for breath. His hands appeared in the sand before him, his throat caught, and he began to vomit.

Together the desert man and the mutant felt the sun, in days and days gone by, moving across the floor of Phoenix House with slow warming strokes. Ta Chaunce probed. She put the shack and the hermit through time past. There were nights of the shack groaning and ticking as the cold swept down from the mountains and the day’s heat rushed out to the open desert sky with nothing to retain it. The void above filled and refilled with stars, year after year.

Jake felt his brain slip the way a pail full of water sometimes slipped a foot or two in the well. He shook and wept while his head pulsed with the imagery of the mutant. Jake went down on his side, curling into the fetal position.

In the shack, Ta Chaunce felt the hermit fall, but she was not disturbed. Human emotion was not hers; compassion was a thing alien to her. She was equipped marvelously to explore and wander in a broken world. Now she was tuning in on an anonymous voice from some time far away. As she focused on that distant calling, her hooded eyes opened fully and the shack blazed as though it were filled with flares. Outside, Jake groaned and writhed; he squeezed his eyes shut.

The voice Ta Chaunce had picked up was located before even the arrival of the hermit. The speaker had been staring at the starry sky of the desert and had said, full of awe: “The more you look, the more you see . . .” It was this man who had painted the sign “Phoenix House.”

The mutant focused on an empty bean can on the table. Together she and the hermit saw rust working as a retarded fire, the shack holding the flaking, reddening can on the altar of the table, fresh, good-smelling wood going dryer than paper. The hermit became aware of his bones.

There were shelves falling and shades slowly tearing, time passing rhythmically, until the day Jake himself slowly walked in from the outer desert with a pack on his back.

“Time,” the mutant whirred and clicked. She walked out of the shack, her closed lids diffusing the solar luster of her eyes to a cold blue glow.

Jake didn’t have to look to know she was coming out. He felt her desire to leave a marker, something time could not affect. It came to him that she was about to burn the shack.

A small tongue of flame appeared, dancing and pale in the cloudy gray light. Then there were others, and Jake could feel the mutant carefully watching.

Filled with sudden rage, the hermit lowered his head and ran at the mutant. He caught her around the waist, knocked her back through the open doorway so that she tripped and stumbled backward over the step just as the little house erupted, belching dry crackling heat.

Ta Chaunce lay on her back a moment. She pulled herself up to a sitting position, slowly, as if stunned.

There was a vacuous sensation, and Jake knew she was bottling her rage, preparing to release it in one terrible bolt. He started to run, but stopped, feeling suddenly free. There was no sense of danger, no feeling of impending disaster.

He turned cautiously. The shack was filled with fire. Cinders and thick crumbly ashes were dancing in the shimmering air above the inferno. At the center of the fire Jake could see the dark silhouette of the mutant. She was standing erect now, trapped in the center of the blaze. Jake approached as close as he dared. He saw the mutant turning toward him. He saw, or sensed, her eyelids opening, and suddenly it was as though he had entered the fire. The heat was so intense it was like the burn of liquid gas. It seared his skin and he knew he was blistering. His face seemed to be hardening, and when he tried to touch it, his arms were stiff and his skin cracked, dry and crisping.

Then it was over. Jake was standing alone again in relative coolness, watching a fellow creature burn. He recalled the girl who had died in his arms, and he knew what he had to do. He turned, ran to the well, began to pull up the bucket.

Jake’s notebooks had been lost in the fire. He had started a new one, but between repairing the house and nursing the badly burned mutant, he had had very little time to make entries in it. The mutant seemed to be gaining strength, but she was dehydrated. Jake spent hours dabbing a wet cloth to her lips.

He knew she was improving because she lay very still. Through her closed eyes there was a tiny glimmer of light, and that light grew stronger day by day.

He had a large supply of white gas for his Coleman lantern. When he poured a few gallons into the jeep, to his delight it started. The trek to Easterly had taken him more than a day on foot. In the mutant’s jeep, it took less than an hour. He had never wanted a vehicle before, but now, with two people to care for, he needed it to haul extra supplies.

In the remains of Phoenix House, Ta Chaunce was coming out of hibernation. Her breathing remained shallow, her features changed not at all, yet she was fully recovered. She perceived the hermit, away in Easterly, and saw that he was open and defenseless. She saw him on the road, felt his presence nearing, and she strode out into the yard.

Jake hopped from the jeep and walked quickly to her side. Ta Chaunce was facing the mountains. When she felt him beside her, she turned to confront him.

Jake recoiled. Her eyes were not eyes, but bright points of shining energy. She was in his brain again, marveling at his constant amazement. He wondered briefly how they could stay together if he could never look her in the face.

Immediately there was a picture in his mind of the two of them, together at night, and the light radiating from her eyes was strong and bright enough to read by. Jake shook his head to clear it, but the image lingered, and Ta Chaunce turned away from him again, looking out at the horizon.

She seemed to be telling him he would just have to get used to it.

“I can’t see your eyes,” Jake sputtered.

The mutant was aware that Jake didn’t understand. But she was also aware that he had made a beginning. How to tell him she had no sight? How to tell him the power of speech was not hers?

She knew there was plenty of time. Life was suddenly full of promise. When the hermit became adjusted, there were many things she could teach him, and she would learn compassion, and for the children . . . nesting.

What would the reciprocal of this story be like— that is, what if the author had put in what he left out, and vice versa?

The room was all Jack knew. He had been other places but he could no longer remember them. He stood still, concentrating on his peripheral vision. To his left the room seemed to have blurred, then faded. He turned quickly. For a split second the other side of the room was not there. Then it reappeared, mud-colored and barren.

Betty was long in coming this time.

He paced the mud-colored floor. Floorboards sank beneath his feet like the springs of a hard, lumpy mattress. He sat on the mud-colored divan.

Whatever Betty did when she was away, this time she was a long time doing it.

He played breathing games. Long inhale, long exhale. Short inhale, short exhale. Long inhale, short exhale. Short inhale, long exhale. Rhythmic breathing where the breaths imitate the drum accompaniment to a song played by full orchestra in the mind. He concentrated on the orchestra itself, placing the bass fiddle section right by his left ear. Second bass fiddle was an orange-haired girl with a freckled face. She leaned over the instrument as if she were having an argument with it.