Damon Knight - Orbit 16

Marshall remains humble about his ability to tolerate Cecilia’s crazy moods. The household disarmament treaty remains as solid as the Siegfried Line. No cruel tanks allowed in the living room, no hand grenades in the goldfish bowl, no Nambu machineguns or pastel-colored Fokker biplanes—and none of the thermonuclear devices which utilize the erotic potential of atomic fission.

Not even while Cecilia screams “ Look at me! Look at me!” does Marshall break his cool. Rather, his response is calculated to suggest a more agreeable topic: “And so Jeannie turned Major Healy into a big chicken. What happened then, dear?”

Cecilia gallops into the living room, makes noise, mumbles clumsily, “I’m a horse, Marshall. I’m a horse. I’m a real horse. Really. I can see myself in the bathroom mirror.”

“Oh, stop horsing around,” says Marshall, chuckling behind his Sports Illustrated . “Use your horse sense, dear.”

“I’m a horse, Marshall.”

“Then you must eat a big bowl of fresh grass, dear. A person needs horse food to get enough horse vitamins, right? And frankly, dear, you haven’t looked well lately.”

“Marshall?”

“Yes?”

“I hurt. When I try to walk it feels like my guts are floating around inside my body. Sometimes I can’t breathe.”

“Horsefeathers. You’ll be fine. Probably just a bug of some kind—the flu.” He laughs. “Why, there’s still a lot of horsepower left in you!”

In a drugstore, Marshall skims through a paperback copy of Handy Horse Lore. He learns that a horse will not step on a man. He reads that if a horse stays off its feet for a few hours, it dies. He finds these facts interesting. He decides to tell Cecilia that she’d better keep moving.

Roller Derby.

Cecilia does not produce TV dinners. Hours pass. Marshall waits patiently for the two small aluminum trays of cryogenically petrified food to be brought back to life with heat.

He makes a joke about putting Cecilia out to pasture for this, but he is alone and does not laugh.

The bedroom smells sick and hot with horsehairs and defecation, and Marshall’s queen-size bed is sprinkled with decaying hay. A real elderly workhorse, sway-backed, shedding, bone-angled and dead, crumples in all kinds of directions, crushes fat pink pillows—half a ton of gristle and cold meat and big piano-key teeth and worn steel horseshoes staring out obsidian-hard over the hand-sewn watercolors of a butterfly quilt.

Calmly, Marshall calculates the extent of Cecilia’s horseplay. This, he quips, is the last straw. It is bad enough that Cecilia refuses to talk to him. It’s bad enough that she trots all over the house drowning in maudlin squalor, and won’t cook. His heart is big for her. But this? This sloppy housekeeping?

“I can take a joke,” Marshall announces in a loud voice, “but I’ll be god damned if I’m going to sleep with a dead horse!”

Period.

Dirty sheets.

Marshall goes to see if maybe Cecilia is hiding somewhere in the living room.

On TV, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby sit in a big cooking pot and talk about love. They are surrounded by cannibals of the wildest design.

Marshall thinks: Have I seen this?

afterhead got pfirstic vanrangement

Ante Toasties heanow postposterous venial sex

arewolf Hucome Gernsforth Pushman car usouthodox

birth wish isherwoman rearquish Wasaac Asimov

come-come girl Katabaptist retrophylactic Waswas

carlyx Math E’Nar unisin Zweifront

Ach! Those German philosophers, how literally they take everything.

Examine sand. It’s not really white, but a halftone blend of many shades. Some grains are white or beige, some clear quartz crystal, and there are small black ones like the specks of bean in vanilla ice cream. The sand at the beach is a loose conglomerate of trillions of such particles. There they are piled in drifts and dunes shaped by the imprint of seagull feet and other natural forces.

Sand is the primary ingredient of glass. In that capacity it has some symbolic meaning, no doubt. Glass is a transparent noncrystalline amorphous supercooled liquid. It’s not a true solid at all. Does that suggest anything? It was just such speculation that led Frierhoff to his theory of the universal metaphor. Ach! Those German philosophers, how literally they take everything.

Sand has other interesting properties. When mixed with a suitable amount of water it is the perfect medium for ephemeral sculpture. Sand castles are the most commonly seen examples. I wonder if Frierhoff ever built a sand castle? It might have done him good.

The day was ending with a warm red sunset. Henderson opened his eyes and saw that the beach was empty. Noting the imminence of evening, he rose from his place in the shadow of a dune. The fabric of his shirt and the shape of his back had left a concave imprint. He walked to just short of the line of tangled seaweed and shell fragments. Staring up the beach in each direction he saw that it was indeed empty. But there was a mound that stood out from the smoothness at the water’s edge. He transferred the pair of shoes he was carrying from his right hand to his left and walked over to look at the mound. It was a sand castle.

The sand castle was guarded by a steep-sided moat that was a foot deep and was filled with water from a channel that ran to the tideline. Inside the moat there was a flat unblemished area three feet wide. The wall around the castle was as smooth and featureless as that surrounding plain; there was no gate, barbican, portcullis, or drawbridge. The wall was a foot high, square with rounded corners, had a flat top, sloped inward, and was about five inches thick at the bottom. The area enclosed by the wall was six feet long and five feet wide. This, the courtyard, was cross-hatched with lines that simulated flagstone pavement. The keep with its attendant fortifications was square—four feet on each side. It was built in no easily identifiable style, but its massive solidity suggested Romanesque. The castle appeared to have three main stories and it was topped by a watchtower that reached a height of over four feet. The edges of the roof and the top of the watchtower were perfectly crenelated. The few windows were little more than narrow slits. On the ground level the outlines of doors were traced on the two sides that faced the larger sections of the courtyard. One was slightly ajar, and a hollowness could be seen inside it.

Stepping closer, Henderson put his naked foot in the area between the moat and the walls, violating its perfect smoothness. He carefully lifted his other foot and brought it down in the courtyard, erasing some of the delicate tracery on its floor. He bent down to examine the keep more closely, and grunted when he heard faint music within.

Henderson thrust his hand through the roof of the castle and rooted around for the radio he knew he would find inside. His fingers felt nothing but damp coolness. Curious and annoyed, he pounded the roof in, and in its collapse it took part of the supporting walls with it.

The sun was already behind the dunes, and the beach was grey, unlit by the yet unrisen moon. It was too dark to search any longer in the wet sand, and Henderson gave up. Stepping over the wall and the moat, he walked away. Discrete grains of sand detached themselves and fell away from the keep’s perfect crenelations. The crumbling ruin dissolved in the moonlight.

Do you see what I mean about sand? This Henderson had obviously never read any metaphysics. Sand is certainly an interesting substance. Of course there are others: fire, air, water. But they are amorphous, they lack granularity. Not like sand. Only to Henderson are they the same.