Damon Knight - Orbit 16

They answered.

He pointed above their heads. “And what the goddamned hell are you going to see with all that smog?”

“I have my coin,” a woman shouted back.

“And I,” the perhaps plastics president yelled. And they all yelled, and Donovan knew they were his.

“Well, tell me this,” the old man said, the contempt running thick as his blood, “how the hell are you going to get back down?”

A shower this time: glass, twisted metal, shoes, boots, unnameable debris scooped from the street. The man screamed and was gone again. Donovan waited, panting. The crowd waited.

Not breathing.

There was nothing, and they started moving again, forward, wearily.

“In the beginning—” Donovan shouted.

The crowd stiffened.

“In the beginning—” Donovan shouted.

The crowd screamed wildly.

Damn, Donovan thought, but it’s great to be alive.

Death, the great obscenity—how odd that we spell it with five letters!

The anti-technologists are taken far too lightly. They want only to clean up the smog, the sewage, you say? Think again. These politicians, “intellectuals,” all the sundry voices, who, like asthma, choke the lines of discourse, reason, and progress—these are our real enemies! A return to natural beauty , they cry, a return to wildness, irrationality, savagery! The basic inhumanity of their goals is so obscene that any doubt about their moral character is in itself an obscenity.

—Ona Ransome, The Doctrine

of Dionysus , a polemic

She had turned her apartment into a greenhouse, just as the world itself was turning into a greenhouse, lush and tropical, environmental affectation justified by ecological necessity. African violets, miniature cacti, Aloe Vera and hindu ropes. Rugged plants. Delicate plants. The withered dendriform phantoms of bonsai. You breathed out, and they breathed back. At least that’s what she read often enough—usually twice, first in the morning faxsheet, and later at dinner, when the sans-serif pronouncements were shredded into elaborate salads. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who shredded the equally edible but noncommittal advertisements, she believed in Involvement. Nutrition of the mind as well as the body.

So. The icecaps were going. Santa Claus would have to learn to swim, and her cacti and rubbery fronds would give way to seaweed. One couldn’t stop progress.

Cynic, she chided herself. She would make up for it that night, with a more relevant salad than usual, cancer cure hopeful, with Roquefort dressing.

Her name was Gudrun Maxa. Maxa: the name suggested an abundance, the upper limits of a scale, the tops. She had a wide, inviting mouth, brown liquid eyes. The large frame that had embarrassed her as a child had melted into a woman’s generous sensuality. Gudrun Maxa.

As usual, it was raining; black sooty water streaked her apartment windows. She paid attention to the elements, as a rule; this was only natural, since she worked as a weathermaid on a local television station. The job had built up a certain resiliency in her character, a toughness if you will, but a toughness tempered by a pervading optimism. Her twice-daily spot, “Weather Break” (the subtle psychological suggestion!), was a testament to these qualities; no matter how caustic or deadly the atmosphere might become, no matter how many fatalities there might be (which weren’t broadcast anyway, but Gudrun got the figures), Gudrun Maxa had a sunny smile for everybody. And if after watching her program, people came away feeling, why, yes, the weather has lifted a bit, then wasn’t it all worthwhile?

“The persistence and ubiquity of denial! Its survival value has been long overlooked . . . consider yourself an angel of mercy in a world starved for miracles.”

That was the way Andrew had explained it to her—Andrew, the program director, when she had been picked for the job. Hand-picked, as it turned out—although now she and Andrew hadn’t slept together in months.

She wasn’t quite sure what had happened. There were no hostilities, just no sex. They still had lunch together, smiles, studio gossip . . . but something else had fizzled out. Andrew didn’t talk about it, and Gudrun didn’t think about it. It was easier that way.

She wasn’t thinking about it that day as she stood before the bright-blue matte screen, modeling a photosynthetic shift for the cameras. Her natural complexion was pale, but not so pale as the while-white makeup she wore, enabling the technicians to tan her an unhealthy but attractive Scandinavian bronze (her contract, like most nowadays, had a cancer clause).

She often wondered what backdrop was being electronically keyed in, what canned three-dimensional footage of open, windswept fields. A spring thaw, perhaps...clumps of straw-colored grass like the bowed heads of flaxen-haired women...virginal...fresh . . .

Without warning, someone started coughing—violently. Gudrun felt herself blush. The cameramen cursed.

“Get her the hell out of here!” It was Andrew, but Gudrun couldn’t discern who had caused the disturbance. The technicians muttered angrily to themselves, they had already run overtime. Gudrun stepped out from under the hot holographic illumination, which had already begun turning her costume to hot spinach, and saw Andrew collaring one of the office girls.

“Who do you think you are, bringing your filth in here, costing us time and money? Answer me, you bitch!”

The girl trembled in his grasp. She had high, sallow cheekbones, and the little makeup she wore was inexpertly applied. “I’m sorry, sir—they asked me to deliver these papers—they said it was important—” Although she could have been no more than twenty, from a distance she appeared much older; she had the crabbed aspect of one of Gudrun’s bonsai trees, an unhealthy, foreign complexion. She skittered around the floor like a crustacean in her worker’s smock, picking up lost scraps of paper, handing them up to Andrew, an offering.

Andrew looked at the papers, then burst into laughter. “Do you know what these are?” He addressed the room. “Plumbers’ invoices! For fixing the toilets! Crap!” He shoved the papers under the girl’s nose. “Somebody in my department gave you these? Yes? And can you think of any earthly reason why a man in my position would want or need the deeds to a shitcan?”

Tears welled up in the girl’s red eyes. She started to answer, but was suddenly seized by a coughing fit, worse than the last— obscene ripping sounds, a cord being pulled through a bellows. Was she spitting up blood? Gudrun couldn’t tell.

The men gathered around her, taking up a low chant, almost inaudible: Scum, scum, filthy scum . . . Gudrun had a mental image of a ritual exorcism. The girl’s mouth was pressed against the floor, her eyes glued shut with pain. Scum! Scum!

“Andrew—”

“Don’t look!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Andrew, I’m not a child.” But she was blushing all the same. Did it show, even through her thick layer of paint?

Andrew ignored her. The girl was being hauled out. “I just don’t get it,” he muttered. “You see stuff like that all the time now.”

Gudrun tried to be helpful. “But don’t they have . . . places?” Tubercular, cancerous ghettos.

“ ‘Equal opportunity employment,’ they call it . . . Christ, they’re nothing but animals.”

Gudrun couldn’t help feeling some measure of pity for the girl; she had obviously been set up by those goons in Andrew’s department. The malicious pigs had been on the girl’s back from the moment she started on the job. Gudrun had seen it all. But still—