Damon Knight - Orbit 16

The sun, still high over Pharès, gave the building a little of its old splendor. That splendor of the great ones, built on the oppression of peoples.

The metal creature turned its head when it heard the crunching sound.

Out of the shadow of a collapsed building a man was coming toward him. Wearing a long blue coat. Sandals. And on his right cheek the mark of the Diatshins. His eyes put out. To sing better. As the barbarians did long ago to birds, to make them warble.

The man went toward the metal creature with slow and tired steps. Then he stopped in front of it and put out his hand to touch the metal breast.

“You are Emidhin the Robot,” he said. “You have journeyed very far and very long. You have traveled in other universes and you were once a sun.”

“Can you tell me how you know that?”

“If you like, I can. I haven’t much longer to live, but you will lend me your eyes and I will teach you marvelous songs.”

The metal creature entered the palace and followed the long corridors. The ancient seat of the Princes of Pharès. Cracks along the walls. Rotted tapestries. Decayed paneling. Then a bare corridor. A half-open door. A little room. Walls that had once been painted green. On the floor, tiles that had once been white. At the back, metal. A spiderweb in a corner of the ceiling. A little camera. A tired voice that came from the little loud speaker.

“Here you are at last.”

(Face to face with myself.)

“Here I am.”

(You are me and you are different. I could not follow you out of this universe and I gave you your freedom. And since then you are no longer entirely myself.)

“You have found it.”

(I had no one but this spider for company after all the others died. Then it died too. Then there was no one left.)

“I found it.”

(I’m going back to my planets. There will be much heat to give.)

(Much love.)

(Yes. Much love.)

The robot went up to the metal wall and pressed down a steel lever. Then another. Then a third.

“There. I’m setting you free.”

(I press this now and you’ll go back to your body of light.)

(Wait.)

“Are you coming back with me?”

(You will not come back.)

“No. Farewell, sun.” The Enashin pressed down the fourth metal lever.

On a frozen planet. Two corpses at the foot of a dune. Dead without having seen the ocean.

Emidhin the Robot left the palace and rejoined the blind man who was waiting in the square.

The man stood up and the two of them went together under the summer sun, making their way through the ruins of Pharès, the blind man’s hand on the shoulder of the android.

And at the back of the sanctuary, on the metal wall, was graven the inscription the robot had put there before it left the palace:

I was a sun, and they made me their slave.

GOLEM

And time, and the wind, and the rain were very long in wearing it away.

—Translated from the French by Damon Knight

There are few things in marriage that mutual toleration and good humor will not cure. One of them, however, is being a horse.

Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization, we will find the footprint of the horse beside it.

—John Trotwood Moore, in

The Encyclopaedia Britannica

Marshall Frankfort comes home from work and does not notice that for some unknown reason his wife has become a large grey horse.

In the living room, Cecilia relaxes on a fat pink sofa with a True Confessions magazine on her chest.

“Hello, dear.” Her voice is dry. She eats candy orange slices.

Marshall bombardiers his black leatherette briefcase into the formica German wasteland of his new dining table and opens his fat white Frigidaire. “Hello, dear.”

His wife asks: “Have a good day, dear?”

“And how was ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ today, dear?”

“That’s awful, dear. You really should tell them at the office that they’re working you too hard.”

Pouring Bavarian beer, Marshall pays scant attention to a thick grey horsehair frozen to the lip of the ceramic stein he has extracted from the freezer compartment of his Frigidaire. Boldly, his right forefinger flicks the ugly horsehair off the stein and it falls forever out of his life.

The sports page. Too portly to participate in athletic contests in person, Marshall secretly admires Joe Willie Namath and will create a baby son of such sturdy timber when Cecilia grows weary of the easy life and flushes her pills.

The late show.

And Christmas.

“Marshall? Marshall! Do I look tired? Run down? Does my skin look crooked?”

Marshall (talking to Johnny Carson, exploring for Christmas presents in TV Guide): “You look real good, dear.” An aside: “Would I pull your leg?”

She touches her face. “Still . . .”

“So for sure I couldn’t fix it myself, so . . .”

“—that damn Andrews kid, the little bum. Pirates my new accounts with my ink wet on the contracts. Why, I’ll bet—”

“—plumber took off that shiny thingy and promised it won’t cost more than—”

“—and the boss walks in, right? Just as I’m trying to—”

“—but sometimes I don’t feel well, Marshall. I get these pains . . .”

“—told him just what he could do with—”

“Marshall, I feel . . . heavy . . . I . . .”

“—but no—no way. Said there was just no way I was—”

“Marshall!”

“What? What did you say?”

“Marshall ...”

“What? What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m scared.”

Marshall walks into the living room, locks the door.

Cecilia flumps around on all fours in ways much (lumpier than the casual lifestyle cultivated by her past.

Marshall notices subtle signals—sobs, complaints about sore legs, snorts, whinnies. Irrefutable evidence manifests itself: wet hoofprints all over the bathroom floor, breakfasts of dry oats and grass in a bowl with a heavy side order of horseradishes, and a damp and gooey emptiness in the “Souvenir of Grand Canyon” sugar bowl.

“We never fight,” says Cecilia as though she were a key witness at a trial.

Breaking coffee at the office water cooler, Marshall (the archaeologist) excavates a stack of little emotional newspaper clippings about a Mexican standoff he had with Cecilia on their first date way back when. She wanted to see Don Rickles Bites a Cow in 3-D Technicolor, but Marshall had tickets to see Pat Boone’s white shoes in Bernadine. Marshall devised a compromise: they saw a double feature— Self Abuse and Oral Communications. Prehistoric dirty pictures were featured in a short cartoon, The Paintings of Reindeer and Bison on the Cave Walls in Southern France. Marshall was happy to sacrifice Pat Boone for the woman he loved. In those shiny days he’d let her live it up all the time. Now, picking the crunchy goodness of historical popcorn from his teeth, Marshall decides to remind Cecilia of the old days to cheer her up.

Home life gives birth to a silent event: Marshall finds Cecilia sitting alone in the kitchen in the dark. On a cracked saucer before her lies an incredibly old souvenir slice from their wedding cake—half eaten. In ten years of waiting, the cake—very much at home with the ice cubes in the freezer— has hardened into a yellowish sugar-coated fossil, as dead now as the curling full-color photographs of happy Cecilia and happy Marshall cutting the long-digested living pastry with a silver knife.