Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“Dorothy? What are you doing here?” He couldn’t get off the bed. On the other side of the room a door opened and Walt came in, also very young, unlined, with his nice brown hair ruffled.

David’s head began to hurt, and he reached up to find bandages that came down almost to his eyes. Slowly memory came back and he closed his eyes, willing the memory to fade away again, to let them be Dorothy and Walt.

“How do you feel?” W-1 asked. David felt the cool fingers on his wrist. “You’ll be all right. A slight concussion, badly bruised, I’m afraid. You’re going to be pretty sore for a while.”

Without opening his eyes, David asked, “Did I do much damage?”

“Very little,” W-1 said.

Two days later David was asked to attend a meeting in the cafeteria. His head was still bandaged, but with little more than a strip of adhesive now. His shoulder ached. He went to the cafeteria slowly, with two of the clones as escorts.

Most of them were in the cafeteria. D-1 stood up and offered David a chair at the front of the room. David accepted it silently and sat down to wait. D-l remained standing.

“Do you remember our class discussions about instinct, David?” D-1 asked. “We ended up agreeing that probably there are no instincts, only conditioned responses to certain stimuli. We have changed our minds about that. We agree now that there is still the instinct to preserve one’s species. Preservation of the species is a very strong instinct, a drive, if you will.” He looked at David and asked, “What are we to do with you?”

“Don’t be an ass,” David said sharply. “You are not a separate species.”

D-1 didn’t reply. None of them moved. They were watching him quietly, intelligently, dispassionately. David stood up and pushed his chair back. “Then let me work. I’ll give you my word of honor that I won’t try to disrupt anything again.”

D-1 shook his head. “We discussed that. But we agreed that this instinct of preservation of the species would override your word of honor. As it would our own.”

David felt his hands clench, and he straightened his fingers, forced them to relax. “Then you have to kill me.”

“We talked about that, too,” D-1 said gravely. “We don’t want to do it. We owe you too much. In time we will erect statues to you, Walt, Harry. We have very carefully recorded all of your efforts in our behalf. Our gratitude and affection for you won’t permit us to kill you.”

David looked about the room again, picking out familiar faces. Dorothy. Walt. Vernon. Margaret. Herbie. Celia. They all met his gaze without flinching. Here and there one of them smiled at him faintly.

“You tell me, then,” he said finally.

“You have to go away,” D-1 said. “You will be escorted for three days, downriver. There is a cart loaded with food, seeds, a few tools. The valley is fertile, the seeds will do well. It is a good time of year for starting a garden.”

W-2 was one of the three who accompanied him for the first three days. They didn’t speak. The boys took turns pulling the cart of supplies. David didn’t offer to pull it. At the end of the third day, on the other side of the river from the Sumner farm, they left him. W-2 lingered a moment and said, “They wanted me to tell you, David. One of the girls you call Celia has conceived. One of the boys you call David impregnated her. They wanted you to know.” Then he turned and joined the others. They vanished among the trees very quickly.

David slept where they had left him, and in the morning he continued south, leaving the cart behind, taking only enough food for the next few days. He stopped once to look at a maple seedling sheltered among the pines. He touched the soft green leaves very gently. On the sixth day he reached the Wiston farm; alive in his memory was the day he had waited there for Celia. The white oak tree that was his friend was the same, perhaps larger, he couldn’t tell. He could not see the sky through its branches covered with new, vivid green leaves. He made a leanto and slept under the tree that night, and the next morning he told it good-bye solemnly and began to climb the slopes overlooking the farm. The house was still there, but the barn was gone, and the other outbuildings. Swept away by the flood they had made so long ago.

He reached the antique forest late in the afternoon. He watched a flying insect beat its wings almost lazily and remembered his grandfather telling him that even the insects here were primitive—slower than their more advanced cousins, less adaptable to hot weather, dry spells.

It was misty and very cool under the trees. The insect had settled on a leaf spread out horizontally to catch what sun it could. In the golden sunlight the insect was also golden. For a brief moment David thought he heard a bird’s trill—a thrush. It was gone too fast to be certain, and he shook his head. Wishful thinking, no more than wishful thinking.

In the antique forest, a cove forest, the trees waited, keeping their genes intact, ready to move down the slopes when the conditions were right for them again. David stretched out on the ground under the great trees and slept, and in the cool, misty milieu of his dream saurians walked and a bird sang.

“It is the use of temporal arresters—such is my

own opinion—which have rendered delectable

these celebrations.”

I am the sound a balloon makes falling into the sky;

the sweat of a lump of ice in a summer river.

It was the best cocktail party in the world. It took place in someone’s (never mind whose) penthouse apartment; and it spilled over into the garden outside, among the fountains and marble ruins, and into the belly of the airship moored to the building, and the ship spilled over into the city, taking off from time to time to cruise the canyons of clotheslines and neon signs, or rise to the limbus of the moon. Many were drinking, and certain of the fountains ran with wine; many were smoking hashish—its sweet fumes swirled into men’s pockets and up women’s skirts until everyone was a trifle dazed with them and a little careless. A few were smoking opium.

John Edward was drinking, but he was fairly certain he had been smoking hashish an hour before, and he might have been smoking opium, but it was the best cocktail party in the world, a party at which he knew everyone and no one.

The man on his left was British, and had a clipped mustache and the thin, muscled look John Edward associated with Bagnold and the Long Range Desert Group. The man across from him was Tibetan or perhaps Nepalese, and wore a scarlet robe. The girl beside him (who stood up often, sometimes bringing other people drinks, sometimes drinking herself, sometimes only to wave at the airship as it circled overhead while partygoers threw confetti from its balconies) was tall and auburn-haired, and wore a white gown slit at one side from hem to armpit. The girl to John Edward’s right was blond, and beautiful, and had a cage of singing birds, living but too small to be alive, in her hair.

“This is a good party,” John Edward said to the man on his left.

“Smashing. You know why, I take it?”

John Edward shook his head, but before the Englishman could tell him, a being from the Farther Stars who resembled not so much a man as a man’s statue—with some of the characteristics of a washing machine—interrupted them to ask for a light. The Tibetan leaned forward, kindling a blue flame in the palm of his hand; and the man from the Farther Stars walked away puffing gentle puffs, his cycle on Delicate Things.

The girl with the birdcage in her hair said: “Some of these people are from the past. Mankind’s mastery of the laws of Time makes it possible to ask the people of the past to parties. It makes for a good crowd.”