Damon Knight - Orbit 16

In that manner I met Ricardo. Ah, that summer! He was a troubleshooter for the transit service, and he kept coming back to check my transmitter. First he took it apart, hoping to find Craig in the storage matrix. Then he checked the transmitting mast from top to bottom. Then he checked the house’s electrical system. Everything was in order, he said. Craig had apparently transmitted just as the lightning struck and the power went off. Either the lightning had garbled the transmitter signal, or there hadn’t been enough power to transmit the signal to its destination. Craig was gone forever.

By midsummer Ricardo and I were in love. Poor Craig, I thought, wandering hand in hand with Ricardo along the stony shore. But least said, soonest mended. Ricardo and I embraced in the mist at the sea’s edge, our ears full of the waves’ melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

Early in the fall Ricardo was transferred to another district on the other side of the planet, and I met Ming at a party in Newport. Half Chinese, he was stocky and broad-shouldered, brown-eyed and brown-haired. He was a collateral descendant of Mao Tse-tung and the present head of the family, paid by the state to return to Earth every several years and perform certain necessary rites of ancestor worship. He and I stayed together all winter, spending our days on one or another of the Pearl Islands, which were halfway around the planet from my house. We swam in the warm water and basked in the sun on shimmering, pearl-grey beaches. In the jungle behind us, birds darted from branch to branch of the flowering bloodroot trees. Out in the lagoon, broad-backed grumblers sometimes surfaced and made loud grunting and mumbling noises. Our nights were spent at my house, while the wind moaned around the old stone walls and snow whirled down onto the terrace. My faithful troglodytes brought us baked apples and hot wine. A fire burned in the fireplace. Warmed by it, we embraced, and my troglodyte musicians played water drums and chimes.

After Ming came Harry, a red-headed oceanologist. With him I spent the spring and summer, commuting daily between my house and his submersible laboratory. What nights we spent in the ocean’s depths! Beyond the laboratory’s portholes, deep-sea fishes glowed. I brought him brightly colored mosses and lichens from my rock garden and shells from the shore below my house. He gave me hard, delicate pieces of sea lace which his nets had dragged off the ocean floor.

We kissed and parted in the fall, and I was alone for a while, except for my faithful troglodytes. I stayed home a lot that winter, troubled by melancholy and the sense that life was passing me by. Those were dark months. Even the merry antics of my troglodyte tumblers couldn’t cheer me. The house seemed cold and drafty, though it had excellent central heating. I took up embroidery to help pass the time, took holovision courses in Amerindian cooking and flower arranging, and tried to get the family library in order. Nothing helped. I remained as melancholy as ever.

With spring came hope, however. My spirits lifted, and I set to work in my rock garden. One by one, my plants revived. The scarlet parasols opened their round red leaves and tilted them toward the sun, and the silverspears thrust their white, slender stalks up through the sandy soil. My troglodytes cavorted on the terrace on nights when the mist cleared and the moons were visible: three tiny yellow disks lighting the dark sea.

Early in the summer Craig returned, my stern, bold, starfaring lover, back from the dead.

The night before he came back, my troglodytes were nervous and wandered through the house, mewing. They clutched at my hands with their small, soft, furry hands and stared up at me with huge dark eyes. What could it mean? I wondered. Restless myself, I walked on the terrace. The sea was calm that night. The tide was full, and the three moons shone. North and south of me, I saw the cliffs that stood, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

I went to bed finally, but couldn’t sleep, got up and walked again on the terrace. At dawn I went to sleep.

I woke late in the morning, when someone shook my shoulder. Opening my eyes, I saw Craig. I gasped and passed out. I woke again when he slapped my face. I said something silly, such as “You’re dead.”

He grinned and shook his head. “No, no, my love.”

I sat up and looked at him. His face was unchanged, but his body was entirely different. Or had I forgotten him so completely? It wasn’t possible. The Craig I remembered was tall and thin and muscular, a keen-looking sword blade of a man. This fellow was squatty and apelike, with too-long arms and too-short legs. He grinned again. “It took two years of surgery to get this result, my love. You should’ve seen me before.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “All I know is I came out in Landingtown instead of Newport. Half crazy, with half my memory gone, and my body looking like—” He shrugged again. “Something went wrong with the transmission, obviously. Well, that’s done and I’m back.” He bent and kissed me lightly on the lips. I drew back.

“Oh, no,” he said, and grasped my shoulders. I saw his hands as they came toward me. They had no little fingers. Craig pulled me toward him and kissed me again, this time ruthlessly.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me you were still alive?” I asked after he let me go.

“I asked them not to. I didn’t want to see you. I remembered enough to know I hadn’t looked that way before.”

I realized with sudden outrage that Ricardo must have known what had happened to Craig. He had told me he was looking for Craig in my transmitter’s storage matrix, when he had known perfectly well that Craig was in the hospital in Landingtown. What perfidy! I thought.

I got up and we had breakfast in the sunroom, my troglodytes serving us, their grey fur all abristle. There was no sunlight that morning. A grey mist swirled outside the glassite windows, and the clear panes were beaded with water. The sea was quiet. I could hear the fountain at the other end of the room gurgling softly, surrounded by pots of azalias. When we were done eating, Craig leaned back in his chair and sipped at a final cup of coffee. “I got invalided out of the space service. After they finished putting my mind back together, I couldn’t pass the psych tests. So here I am.”

“Why?” I asked, sipping at my own cafe au lait.

He grinned. He hadn’t smiled that way before, I thought. This smile was twisted and wry. There were lines around his eyes now, and his face was a little thinner, so there were hollows below his high cheekbones. “What else do I have?”

I set down my cup. “I don’t want you to stay, Craig.”

“I have to. The transmitter’s no longer working.”

“What! Why?”

“When I arrived, you were asleep and your troglodytes were all in the basement. I shorted the transmitter refrigeration unit. By this time, the transmitter brain ought to be too hot to function.”

“I’d better call a repairperson,” I said, and stood up.

“The radiophone isn’t working either.”

I looked across the table at Craig, who was still sipping at his coffee, and I thought about asking my troglodytes to take care of him. But troglodytes are a peaceful folk, which is why they have disappeared from most parts of the planet. They survive only where there are old houses, and members of the old families able to protect them.

What could I do? I sat down and asked my troglodytes to bring me more cafe au lait. Craig grinned. “One of the things I’ve always liked about you, Lucia, is your calmness.”

After breakfast Craig said he wanted to walk on the beach. I got my grumbler-fur cloak and a brooch an ancestor of mine had found three hundred years before, lying on a beach on a distant planet. There had been no other signs of intelligent life anywhere on the planet. The brooch was a gold disk, engraved with strange characters. I used it to fasten the cloak and we went outside. The mist had lifted a little, and I could see smooth, dark-grey billows coming slowly in to break against the grey gravel beach. I was, of course, afraid. What was this strange, new Craig planning? Was he dangerous?