Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“My father is dying.”

“Fuck him, let him die! And I suppose you will see your ex-wife while you’re there?”

He laid his fingers across her left palm, measuring her psychogalvanic response. “I want you to miss me, but you aren’t going to miss me greatly—your whole body image says as much. Gloria, you always escape me; this whole big act we play out on Turpitude consists of your being elusive. Now I have to go and see my father, and elude you for a change. So you feel obliged to be angry.”

“All right.” She draped her arms loosely round his neck. “I elude you, Colding, and you regard that—if not as deliberate on my part—at least as a piece of my character composition. Suppose you are wrong? Have you ever in your life enjoyed a satisfactory relationship with anyone, man or woman, in which you weren’t feeling they eluded you?”

At considerable expense, Colding had had their egg-shaped eight-room transferred to a point high up the cliff of the outer urbstak of Turpitude 1, to a socket in the sunward face. His firm, Gondwana Inc., had financed the move, anxious to keep so talented a predestinographologist happy. Unable to bear Gloria’s probing—she was sweet as pie until threatened by any kind of parting, however temporary—Colding retreated to his rec room.

For a moment he stood looking out the noctures at the view, consoled by the immense concave chip of a world in which he made his way, and by the view of many other Zeepees, glinting out in space like malformed sequins, all basking in the giveaway energies of the sun. It was a fine sight, although Colding knew that less successful men, with apts embedded deep in the urbstak, had falsies which showed scenes even more striking than this, with whole mantillas of Zodiacals riding round Earth. Well, his view was real and theirs wasn’t, whichever looked better. As befitted the brains behind the new destimeter.

One of the prototypes of the Gondwana destimeter stood in a corner of the rec room. Colding went over to it, sat down, removed his socks, and placed his bare feet on the lower screens. His hands he placed, flat-palmed, on the middle screens, juxtaposing his face against the lines etched on the upper screen. A pressure with the right elbow, and the machine was working. His astrological and biophysical data were already recorded. Now the machine was merely updating dermatoglyphic, chirological, physiognomical, and secretional readings against previous data, and formulating them out against Colding’s projected Earth trip.

It had long been recognised that the hand—and the foot to a lesser degree—mirrored the internal condition, physical and mental, of its owner. The destimeter was a sophisticated way of tallying all information groups and producing an extrapolative graph. Eventually, Colding knew, later models of his machine would come to rule the everyday life of men and women; they should prove more trustworthy than oneself.

Gloria entered as he sat there. She was slightly in awe of the destimeter.

“Sorry I was bitchy, darling. I do realise that you must see your lather.”

“And that I shall go nowhere near my ex-wife?”

She hesitated. “You’ll go and see your daughter?”

“Of course I’ll flaming well go and see Rosey—what do you think I am? Don’t I neglect her enough as it is, poor kid? But that doesn’t mean to say I have to see her mother—Rosey lives alone, as well you know. Christ knows where Phyllis is.”

“I’m sorry. Relax!”

He couldn’t. The destimeter computer had switched to Readout, and was giving him the likely action (86-87.5 percent probability) on his Earth trip. He clutched at it, reading sickly. As usual these readouts, or PreDestinations as they were called by the media, seemed to be talking nonsense; and as usual their veiled terms produced queasiness in Colding.

Space-passage Discomfort-rating 3. No incidents. Blonde smiling No overtures intended. Item misplaced. Ramp stumble. Disorientation, First Aid station relief. Injection. Random images. Gravity Traffic High-rise increase.

Hospitalization surprise with parent vocal. Noncommunication. Days in Santos. Time confusion Senile incest obsession causes pain. Memory of other parent weeping in Santos boudoir Nausea of Regret. Argumentation Avoid. Promises Keep now later. Visionary horse.

Random accommodation Tension. Encounter with Death. Previous encounter trigger Fresh onslaught Paranoia Type Lyra 2. Green suit assault. Palms a blank. Superior position. Trinket deserted . . .

So it went, growing ever more threatening and less comprehensible. His thinking brain was coolly deciding that the delphic clement in these predictions would have to be eradicated before the model went commercial, while another and more basic part of his metabolism was whipped into terror by the menacing phraseology. Before he could read to the end of the recital, he sensed Gloria looking at him intently (it was Gloria?); he was unaware of what she was saying until she repeated it.

“Will you look up Anna Kavan?” The very question seemed to echo implications in his readout.

He swung round. “Damn it, Anna’s dead. You know she died in the Alaska Trophy. Must you keep resurrecting her?”

She took in his anxiety, came nearer, and said gently, “Bad prognosis, I take it?”

He screwed up the readout, would not speak. Pain, Weeping, Regret, Encounter with Death . . . Yet he was destined to go to Earth; otherwise the readout would have been blank. She read his expression.

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Why can’t things seem to hold together? Why can’t you ever grasp anything? Why does it all slide away? What have you got to go through while you’re Earthside? Tell me, at least let me smell your palm.”

Colding pulled his hand away from her and stroked her cheek with it. “It can’t happen as the machine says. It’s not always right. I told you the other day it was playing up . . . I’ll just see Father and Rosey, then I’ll be back. I’ll go straight to the hospital. Nothing will happen.”

“What won’t happen?”

“Nothing,” he said. What the hell good was communication, anyway?

As it happened, Colding saw his father first from the other end of the hospital corridor. The old man was walking slowly, but with a stiff upright carriage Colding remembered; people walked like that only on Earth. Colding himself proceeded slowly, uncomfortably aware of the thickness of the great natural globe revolving beneath his feet. He hoped he would never reach his father. Yet with every step the old man became clearer, with every step some piece of the past, long rejected, returned. An intricate relationship formed in the mild autumn air between them. The old man wore old clothes now. There had been a time when he had been younger, had driven planes and ridden horses, and had swum in the ocean off Santos, where they were both born.

Colding remembered Santos, where the lorry drivers slept under their vehicles in string hammocks to escape the Brazilian sun. He remembered the failing coffee plantation, the farm where he helped raise Zebu-type cattle. The seasons of love. Lights and singing among the trees, the well-maintained church. Cars smashing off the autopista. A dead snake. His wife, the arrival of his children, the ranch hands gripped by macumba, floating little lights out across the flood of the placid river, chanting as they did so. Days in Santos.

This sick old man with the goat’s face brought it all back, a whole lifetime and more, structures of hope and failure, and love read in a snake’s entrails.

“Hello, Father. I didn’t expect to find you walking about.”

“If you’re coming to see Phyllis, my boy, I must warn you that she’s really upset about you. She will wear black. I told her the other day, I said, ‘It’s not becoming. Only old ladies and horses wear black.’ “ He laughed. There was a stale smell about him, Colding found, as he took his father’s arm.