Damon Knight - Orbit 16

“What are you planning?” I asked.

Craig stopped, turned and stared at me. I was sure that his eyes had been dark brown before. Now they were light brown, almost yellow. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment. He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me toward him, murmuring, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another.” He kissed me. For a moment I remembered I had loved him once and returned the kiss. When he let me go, he laughed. “That’s better.”

We walked farther down the beach. Craig kept hold of my hand. At last we turned back. What I needed, I thought, was a weapon. There was my grandfather’s collection of death rays and shock whips, which covered the wall above the big fireplace, but it had been a century since they had been recharged. Why hadn’t I taken karate or kung fu? Then I remembered that Craig was a black belt in everything. I sighed.

We went back into the house, and I fixed an Aztec luncheon while Craig wandered around. My troglodytes were still upset and pattered around the kitchen, mewing sadly while they helped me. Was there worse to come?

“The flower arrangements are new,” he said when he came back. “And all that sea lace. Are you starting a collection?”

“No,” I said, and set food on the table.

After lunch we made love, if love is the right word, in the red bedroom. It had always been Craig’s favorite room. When we were done, he went to sleep. I got up and took a shower. I considered getting a knife out of the kitchen and stabbing him while he slept. But I’ve always been squeamish. I put on a houserobe with a band of embroidery around the bottom that I’d done myself and went back to look at Craig. He was still asleep. One arm was outside the covers. I looked at the abnormally long forearm and the four-fingered hand. I sighed and went down to the kitchen. There were several troglodytes there, cleaning up. They came over and touched my hands gently and looked up at me. “It’s all right,” I said, though it wasn’t, and the troglodytes, being psychic, knew it. I got myself a snifter of brandy and took it to the sunroom. How long would it be before someone tried to reach me and couldn’t? How long before a repair crew was sent out? What would Craig do then? The sunroom ceiling glowed, giving the plants the sunlight they needed. I sat down in the shade of a potted palm.

He would have to go back to the hospital, of course. The doctors had done a terrible job of putting him back together. Could he sue them? I wondered. I was certain that I could sue them, and I intended to. He should not have been let out in his condition. That was negligence, if I ever saw it. My troglodytes brought me more brandy and made soft growling sounds which were intended to reassure and comfort me. I smiled at them, patted them and said it was all right. After they left, I looked out the windows. It was raining. Drops of water ran down the panes. The mist was so thick that I couldn’t see the parapet on the other side of the terrace. Craig ought to be able to sue the transit service, I thought. Or was the lightning an act of God? In any case, that wasn’t my problem. I drank the brandy.

Shortly thereafter, Craig came looking for me. He stopped when he saw me and grinned. “I thought you might’ve run away.”

Now why hadn’t I thought of that? It would not be easy, of course. There were barren mountains on three sides of the house, and no other habitations for a hundred kilometers. On the fourth side was the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea. Would it be possible to escape Craig in the mountains and stay alive there till help came? I wasn’t sure.

Craig went and got some brandy, coming back to sit beside me.

“How long are you planning to stay?” I asked.

He shrugged and cupped his hands around the snifter, warming the brandy. “Are you so eager to get rid of me, Lucia?”

I looked at his worn, weary-looking face. Poor fellow, I thought.

There’s no more dangerous emotion than pity, except guilt, of course. Both make you put up with intolerable situations. “No. I’m not,” I said softly and took hold of his hand. He smiled and set down the brandy snifter. We kissed.

That afternoon we walked on the beach again. At night, we slept in the crystal bedroom, which was my favorite room. The ceiling shone and shifted like a kaleidoscope. Multicolored gleams of light slid over the glassite furniture. The floor was silver. My troglodytes, calm at last, brought us glasses of cold wine and clusters of crystallized grapes. When I woke in the morning I heard Craig singing in the shower. That at least was unchanged. He couldn’t carry a tune any more now than he could before.

I spent the morning working in my rock garden and the afternoon making an Aztec dinner. In the evening my troglodytes entertained us with music and tumbling. When they were done, Craig put a music cube into the player. I turned off the ceiling. We danced in the firelight, one of the old, slow dances that were coming back again, after I forget how many centuries. When we started to get tired, we went up to the red bedroom.

Early the next morning the repair crew came in a fanwing that landed on the beach below the house. Neither of us woke till they rang my doorbell. That woke me. I rose and put my robe on. Craig groaned, rolled over and sat up. I kissed him good morning, then went down to let the repair crew in. They asked me what had happened to my transmitter. I told them, and they called the law service. A few minutes later the cops arrived. They found Craig in the silver bathroom, shaving in front of the mirror wall, and they arrested him and took him away.

Which is more important: the truth, or an error that holds the whole world together?

The elevator was passing the tenth floor when Dr. Donald Lucus started from his reverie into the panic of embarrassment he always felt when he had passed his floor unknowingly. His mind shifted with reluctance from one program to another as it was drawn to the demand for a decision by the illusion of a sudden decrease in gravity that indicated the elevator would stop on the eleventh floor. He would have approximately ten seconds to decide. He could stay on this elevator, possibly all the way to the twenty-fifth floor, and get off at six on the way down, wasting a large but certain amount of his time, resulting in only a brief moment of embarrassment before unknown engineers on the top floor, who would realize his foolish mistake when he remained in the elevator, who would smile and wonder why this absentminded old fellow hadn’t been retired by the Institute yet. Or he could get off now, at eleven, and wait for the next down elevator to take him to his own floor. Again, it would be apparent to the secretary at Genetics that he had gone by his floor, and he would be aware of her, sitting behind him at her desk, thinking he had been a section head much too long and ought to be replaced. As an alternative, he could resort to subterfuge and walk down the hall to knock on the door of an empty office, pretending that he had legitimate business there.

But he had neither the will nor the energy to act out such a pantomime, when his mind needed urgently to be occupied with another problem, which it had been drawn away from by this trivial face-saving decisionmaking. In the end, he decided that getting off at eleven would waste less time than any other course of action, and that was, after all, the most important consideration.

As it was, he made this decision too late to avoid another embarrassment, that of being hammered on both sides by the elevator doors as he stepped out, while the secretary of Genetics looked up and smiled. An automatic mumbled “Pardon me” crossed his lips as he pulled free of the gentle vise-grip and turned self-consciously to push the down button.