Damon Knight - Orbit 15

At three in the morning I woke up in my one-room home. Dry-eyed, I didn’t fight the chunk of my brain that had developed during the past weeks. Some gift. It was a chunk of a man named Lydon. Consider him. Monster. Nothing but a beef pumper, same as everybody. Rather do that than . . . what?

What if Lydon had no mind? Say he was just a man with no will, and he was with me alone somewhere, and I could do anything to him that I wanted? Consider it. Lydon, you were so sweet. What would I do to you? You wear too many clothes. How can I see you that way? You’re skin all over, and I want to look at all of it. I take off your shirt. Just as I thought; you give me a bellyache. Common, ordinary back and chest. Let me put my lips between your shoulderblades. They aren’t common if they make me want to do that. Now, Lydon, puppet man, take off your pants. Not too fast, as I’m getting ill. Wait a minute, let me kiss your mouth, because I may never get around to it later. There he is, Lydon is naked as a jaybird, and since I read all that porno I know all about men.

I have made a mistake. All I intended to do was look at him.

It was four in the morning, and I came stumbling from one of my stalls. I didn’t remember getting out of bed and going there, didn’t remember walking through the rain. But I knew what I had done inside the stall. The first time, and now I was really sick. It had taken about fifty seconds to do the job, and I hated it. I was a monster like everyone else.

Someone came out of a stall across the street. It was Lydon. He saw me and ran away. I sat down on the curb and cried. The past came back to me, haunted me. Now I remembered what they had done to me in the Conditioning Center.

“When you hear the sound of the bell, your physical desire will be focused. You will step inside a stall and bring yourself to orgasm. You are promised a rich, full sexual life. No urge must be ignored. Sexual activity in private quarters is evil. Desire is unfocused. Sexual activity between two people is evil. Desire is unfocused. The masturbation stalls are public facilities built for your use. You have nothing to hide. Your neighbors can see that you have nothing to hide. Sex and the stalls are united in your mind. There cannot be the first without the second. First comes desire. Without the sound of the bell, desire remains unfocused. You will not be deprived of pleasure, as the sound of the bell can be heard when you pass the stalls. First comes desire. Remember that it is unfocused without the sound of the bell. Remember that the sound comes from the stalls. You must go to the stalls. When you hear the sound of the bell . . . desire is focused . . . evil is sex with another ... no such thing as private love or sex, as you can’t be trusted to obey if you are hidden away from the eyes of the world . . . someone might be with you and you might be tempted . . . rich, full life . . . many orgasms mean lack of tension and happiness . . . sex like stepping into public toilet . . . so sorry, but you’ve such a ravenous appetite . . . you won’t be able to talk about it because your head will hurt . . . sound of bell in your head . . . not real . . . your id clamoring . . . oh, how I need a good one, or, it’s a nice day and I feel energetic and mellow, oops, there goes the bell, better hop inside and enjoy my rich, full . . . that man I saw, he makes my id clamor, oops, where’s the bell, where’s the bell, where’s the ... he does me like no other, and all my life there will be men who send me speeding to the stalls, why don’t they just cut out our eyes . . . one day I saw a human being who had the average complement of qualities, except that God meant for him to be meaningful to me, and my hands and my mind reached out for him and when I grasped him because I had to I found not him but a bell and it rang not in my hands but in my head and I wanted to scream because . . .”

It was true that the bell sounded only in my head, because never in my life did I ever hear it ring.

Sunup and I came out of a stall, and there was Permilia walking toward me. She had an axe in her hand. She went inside a stall. I heard a strange sound, and she walked outside and let the blood from the stump of her wrist leak into the gutter. Across the street, Lydon stood on the curb, crying.

“I love you, Vega,” he said and went into a stall.

“I love you, Lydon,” I said and went into a stall.

IF EVE HAD FAILED TO CONCEIVE　

•

The End

—Edward Wellen

WHY BOOTH DIDN’T KILL LINCOLN

•

The End

—Edward Wellen

Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches

pour out thine heart like water before the

face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for

the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger

in the top of every street.

What David always hated most about the Sumner family dinners was the way everyone talked about him as if he were not there.

“Has he been eating enough meat lately? He looks peaked.”

“You spoil him, Carrie. If he won’t eat his dinner, don’t let him go out and play. You were like that, you know.”

“When I was his age, I was husky enough to cut down a tree with a hatchet. He couldn’t cut his way out of a fog.”

David would imagine himself invisible, floating unseen over their heads as they discussed him. Someone would ask if he had a girl friend yet, and they would tsk-tsk whether the answer was yes or no. From his vantage point he would aim a ray gun at Uncle Clarence, whom he especially disliked because he was fat, bald, and very rich. Uncle Clarence dipped his biscuits in his gravy, or in syrup, or more often in a mixture of sorghum and butter that he stirred together on his plate until it looked like baby shit.

“Is he still planning to be a biologist? He should go to med school and join Walt in his practice.”

He would point his ray gun at Uncle Clarence and cut a neat plug out of his stomach and carefully ease it out, and Uncle Clarence would ooze from the opening and flow all over them.

“David.” He started with alarm, then relaxed again. “David, why don’t you go out and see what the other kids are up to?” His father’s quiet voice, saying actually, that’s enough of that. And they would turn their collective mind to one of the other offspring.

As David grew older, he learned the complex relationships that he had merely accepted as a child. Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, third cousins. The honorary members: brothers and sisters and parents of those who had married into the family. There were the Sumners and Wistons and O’Gradys and Heinemans and the Meyers and Capeks and Rizzos, all part of the same river that flowed through the fertile Virginia valley.

He remembered the holidays especially. The old Sumner house was rambling, with many bedrooms upstairs and an attic that was wall-to-wall mattresses, pallets for the children, with an enormous fan in the west window. Someone was forever checking to make certain that they hadn’t all suffocated in the attic. The older children were supposed to keep an eye on the younger ones, but what they did in fact was to frighten them night after night with ghost stories and inhuman sighs and groans. Eventually the noise level would rise until adult intervention was demanded. Uncle Ron would clump up the stairs heavily and there would be a scurrying, with suppressed giggles and muffled screams, until everyone found a bed again, so that by the time he turned on the hall light that illuminated the attic dimly, all the children seemed to be sleeping. He would pause briefly in the doorway, then close the door, turn off the light, and tramp back down the stairs, apparently deaf to the renewed merriment behind him.