Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“Real ground, Daddy, real soil!” She squatted in the grass. “And just look what I’ve got!”

A green thing had seeded itself. Colding knew that it was a tree or a bush. Something moved under it and came towards them, so that for an instant he was alarmed. It waddled towards Rosey’s outstretched hand, making small soothing noises at her.

“A chicken!” he said.

She looked up, laughing, her face all alight and unfamiliar in the open air. “It’s a goose, Dad, a real live goose. I call her Jinny. Jinny, come and meet my pop.”

The goose walked about them, craning her neck and opening and shutting her beak.

“Isn’t it dangerous? Doesn’t it bite or peck or something?”

“She’s hoping I might have brought her some food. I generally do.”

He leaned against one of the walls, taking in the miserable wedge of derelict land, the bedraggled bird, the green growth, the sky overhead, fighting against another urge to weep.

“Your old grandfather keeps dreaming about horses.”

“Don’t you think I’m lucky to have this little garden all to myself, Dad? It’s mine alone, my secret. I found the goose. She wasn’t here. She was in a lorry that crashed a way from Trinket, and I rescued her, or else she would have died, and carried her here. The lorry driver was dead, so it wasn’t stealing or anything. I come to see her every day. Jinny’s safe here, aren’t you, Jinny?”

The destimeter readout had even included the goose, terming it “a feathered animal”—at least an 87.5 percent success.

“Look, Rosey, let’s get back, you can’t hang around this filthy scrap of ground—it’s unhealthy, and dangerous.” The readout had implied there was someone else here, doing something.

“Nonsense, Dad, don’t say that! This is my own special desert island, I love it here.”

He grasped her hand. “You can’t stay here with this chicken, girl, now don’t be so silly. Suppose someone discovers you? Aren’t there any parks left you can go to?”

She stood up and looked sadly at him. “Daddy, this is my place, do you understand? Do you ever understand?”

Colding moved his leg away from the bird and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I understand better than you. You’ll go crazy here. You’re still only a child. Now, please, let’s get back. I’ll take you to see your grandfather in hospital; you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

As they returned through the cavernous perspectives, she said, “I do get sad sometimes. Not so much that you’re away, just that you never understand. And I’m not a child anymore, either, so it’s no good your going on thinking so.”

“Dear, dear Rosey, come and live with us and I will attempt to understand, or I’ll keep quiet when I don’t. I’m trying to work out my life, and I’m on the verge of a big breakthrough. I’m getting old ... I get confused. I don’t know, it’s such a petty world.”

“No, that’s not true, either. To me it’s not petty, and it hurts me to hear you say it.”

“Now you don’t understand.” He achieved a smile.

Rosey stood right where she was, so that Colding was also forced to halt. He looked at her with love and impatience.

“That makes me sad, Daddy . . . You see, I’ve now come to the end of my childhood. It’s going from me, I can feel it—slipping away. Everything’s changing, so I must cling to what I’ve got. . .”

“You’ve got so little—I’ve given you so little.”

“No, I’ve got—most things. Only . . . my dear secret garden isn’t quite such a secret anymore. Look, you’d better know, but I’ve got a boy friend. I’m grown up now. He comes here. He loves the garden, and Jinny, and . . .” She read his face, put a hand up to her mouth, inclined her head, and started to weep.

“Oh, my darling . . .” He put his arm about her shoulder. An awful black thing rose inside him, choking him. He seized her hand, staring at the lines there, to see if what she said was true.

From a great distance, he heard himself say, “It’s time to go to the hospital. Let’s go together.”

Two days later, Colding caught a shuttle belonging to the Chinese line which had virtual monopoly of the Earth-Turpitude route. His father had not died, he had found no alternative to Trinket for his daughter, he had managed to make himself see that the green suit assault had simply been a Lyra-2 paranoia onslaught; he contained his despairs and behaved like an average man, ergatoid among his fellow passengers.

Sitting in the soft-class lounge, he watched Turpitude float closer in the big screen. It was shaped like a rose petal which, falling, turns towards the sun that has been both its reason and its downfall. Colding was moved by the sight. The planetoid had been designed and built by a Japanese-Brazilian consortium; they had wrought well. He jotted down a note on his pad to call Kai Tak at Gondwana and discuss the design of the production model of the destimeter. There were, after all, little important things to be done; one could hide from oneself.

And was predestination—”the exact science of the future”— really being built there, on the energy-loaded surface of that petal, to spread outwards and transform the minds and habits of men? Was there really something new under the sun? How would Rosey’s generation accept it?

The petal was changing contour and shape now, as the Verbena Star swung in towards its homing boom. It was becoming a confusion of sine curves, growing like a three-dimensional drawing in a computer, just as its precise ergonomic shape had once been conceived in a computer.

For a moment, Colding felt himself to be in the computer, knew he functioned only as a statistic, knew predestination was truth: all of science, and in consequence all of religion, all of thought. He might suffer, and feel himself alive through that suffering; but the biochemistries of his system secreted a specific, predetermined, and consequently computable meed of suffering. Of happiness, too. The ration was not random. Every emotion that ever moved mysteriously through whatever life now could be charted with as much rigour as a comet, visiting and fleeing from the sun on tight celestial schedule.

Something of that moment of perception lingered with him as he stepped out into the transportation station and caught a tube home, whistling through the plastic core of Turpitude towards Urbstak East.

He bought a pill on the train, warding off tachycardia and other maladies which afflicted him after space flight, and in consequence was feeling no more than slightly sick as he stepped off at Equinoctial E and grafted home.

Part of his ill-ease was the final wording of his destimeter readout: Unfaith causes Resignation. At Gondwana, they’d have to sort out the way the destimeter’s language grew vaguer as its event horizon grew more distant and probability levels sank.

Unfaith causes resignation? His lack of faith in himself? Gloria’s unfaithfulness to him? His betrayal of everyone close to him? Or did “unfaith” simply imply doubt? And what sort of resignation? Was he going to resign from Gondwana, or Gloria from their compatibility contract? Or did it mean a sort of philosophical acceptance?

There was that clear face of hers, the features so beautifully formed. She stood and smiled at him. All innocence.

Colding always had to remember, as he took her into his arms, how small she was, how tall he was. Physically, they were not well matched.

She kissed him on the lips. He knew by her breathing and the moisture index of her mouth that she was in a special mood. Holding her, he placed his left palm across the cervical plexus at the back of her neck, so that the resonances in his palmar arch told him that her central nervous system was on the high.