Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“Phyllis and I were divorced five years ago, Father. I came back to Earth to see you. Is this your room in here?”

“Well, it’s nice to see you again. You aren’t wearing black, are you? You’re certainly looking older. You look more like your grandfather every time I see you. There must be something in predestination…According to the palm of my hand, I shan’t die till next year. How long’s that? What month is this?”

“We have a different dating system on the Zeepees.”

“It seems all wrong to me . . . Doesn’t make sense. I said to Phyllis the other day, ‘To think that a son of ours should be forced to live on a manmade chunk of plastic out there in space . . .’ “

“Father, Phyllis is my ex-wife, not my damned mother.” Senile incest obsession. One hundred percent—God, the machine was good!

“Yes, yes, of course, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean Phyllis, I meant Pauline. No, let’s see, Pauline’s dead too, isn’t she? It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of who’s alive and who’s dead . . . People keep coming and going . . . Anyhow, this is my room. Come in, son.”

They went into it, father and son, linked by more than arms. A wide white room with eight sides, auburn light filtering through a large falsie. A bed, tables, lamps, a cabinet, the big mediscanner, various old-fashioned books and static pictures littering tables and walls. Colding received a distinct glimpse of someone weeping in a black-and-gold boudoir, weeping because she was haunted by other rooms. Then the vision was gone, forgotten, irrecoverable. One more damned unwanted image. Beyond every room lay others, onwards and onwards, like some complex and old-fashioned astronomic clock representing an unworkable theory of the universe. He went and sat down in a white voluptuous chair, sickened.

“This is home, son. We live in petty times. As Krohshaw says, we’re all inmates of the same astro-organic house. The world’s grown too small . . . All this predestination. A petty time to die in.” He stood alone in the middle of his room, looking at the palm of his right hand, leaning slightly on his stick, nodding his sick old goat head at the incoherent thoughts that filled it.

“Predestination’s been round a long time. I must go and see Rosey while I’m here.”

“Of course. Your daughter’s more important ... I suppose you’re still living on What’s-It with that woman Gloria.”

“Turpitude. We live on Turpitude. One of the outer and cheaper Zeepees.”

“That’s where predestination came from. Pernicious theory...” The old man sat on the side of the bed and looked across at Colding. “All those little ticky-tacky planetoids or whatever you call ‘em—they’re all limited environments. Of course they limit thinking. You need a big world to grow up in, to live in, to think big. Turpitude . . . Predestination is a typical product of the Zodiacal Planets. A tiny thing. Now you’ve exported it back to Earth, the way we used to buy U.S. instant coffee in Santos made from beans grown in our own good alluvial soil. Why, that soil was so rich . . . Before you were born . . .”

Colding stirred impatiently. There was a whispering in the room.

“Predestination is a science now, Father,” he said. “An exact science. The most complex science ever devised, and still evolving. When it is fully developed, it will embrace all knowledge. It represents the marriage of the human metabolism back into its local and cosmic environment.”

“Marriage? I don’t understand you.” The sick man went and sat down, saying resignedly, “You never worked out your life, did you? How old are you now? Rosey understands more than you do—or me, come to that. Why don’t you marry Rosey?”

“You’re senile, Dad! Rosey’s my daughter, you keep forgetting.”

“Oh, yes, I keep forgetting. She’s a good girl, though, is Rosey. Time means nothing to me now. What about that artist woman you used to knock about with? Anna?”

“Anna Kavan? She died on the Skidmore Glacier in a car race, if you remember.”

The remark appeared to focus the old man’s attention. For the first time he lifted his head to look straight at Colding.

“I’ll tell you something, Colding. I know you were making love to her during your first marriage, when we were all living in Alaska. Well, I made love to her once, when the two of us were alone in the house. I must have been sixty then.”

“You’re lying, Father. You told me that before. You’re lying.”

His father’s voice took on a womanish note. “You’ve experienced it all before—you’ve had it explained to you. You’re a Sensitive of the Unrealised Multi-Schizo Type C. It’s nothing to worry about. I’m not a child anymore.”

“You have it all memorised, I know. You keep repeating yourself.”

“Why not? It’s a petty world . . .”

Colding, in a fit of energy, shook the newsfax lying on the arm of his chair and took it across to the old man. “Petty? Look at this. Read the headlines. Ingratitude is at war with Ecstasy and Knowledge ii. The Third Philosophical Lever has been found at last. The abeings of Saturn are reproducing in the Moscow Exohouse. The shapes of five thousand notable smells have been identified; scentologists are now investigating the shapes of consciousness. It has just been proved on a statistical basis that rigorous application of the three laws of immobility can overcome malnutrition. Holman Hunt’s ‘The Awakening Conscience’ has been animated. Antarctic icebergs five miles long and more are being sold to United Mars and shipped entire to the Red Planet. Spontaneous generation is now known to be as much a reality as the luminiferous ether. Isn’t all that important?”

“Petty,” the old man said, turning his head away in disgust. “Petty. People don’t have command of their lives anymore. That’s a fact. Petty . . .”

As Colding went towards the door, he said, “I shall look in again tomorrow, Father.”

“I dreamed about a horse last night,” his father said. “Or I think it was last night. Is that good or bad, do you believe?”

Not without misgiving, Colding decided that he would visit his daughter Rosey on the following day. He became lost when he left the hospital, failing to recognise a single item in the immense urban landscape which stretched across a continent; in their profusion, their determination to reach their target, the covered ways had obliterated any true destination. Life here was a temporary shift between mobility and mobility. A trajaxi carried him to a five-star Belvedere Hotel, where he hired an interior room, ate a modest meal, and settled on the bed to sleep.

The doorbell rang.

He went to answer it, and stood there blinking.

The woman was small and dark and something less than pretty. She wore some sort of a green suit and smiled at him with a nervous familiarity. What was that hateful phrase in the readout? Green suit assault . . .?

“I saw you come in. I just happened to be stopping by the hotel to bring a picture to a client. Colding, my pet, how are you?”

He backed away. “Hello, Anna,” he said. She had been dead five years. He could hear the traffic outside and wondered where everyone was endlessly going. The readout from his own machine had specified that Anna would reappear—his own machine, yet he had refused to believe. And the destimeter could not distinguish between objective and subjective experience . . .

She came towards him. “It was always you, Colding. I know I made things difficult for you. But you were the one man with meaning for me. I’ve had time to think it over. I want to come back to you.”

But he had seen her on the slab after the car crash. She had been dead five years—or had the crash been a paranoid hallucination? He stood against a wall. Always he lived totally enclosed. No wonder people chose to die in space these days.