Damon Knight - Orbit 15

He smelled and listened, catching vibes from under her parietal bones.

“Lovely to have you back,” she said quickly. “I’ll put on some musuc and make a fuss of you. How was Rosey—and your father?” Her movements over to the veeps system were too fast. “Is he getting better?”

“Who was here just now?” he asked. “He’s still dying.”

He was aware of the buzz of the fluorescents and conditioning before she said, “Someone from Gondwana—your boss, actually.”

“Tab Polymer? What did he want?”

“Nothing. Just a social call. Don’t be so uneasy!”

“You’ve promiscued again, you rotten bitch! It’s what the destimeter predicted.”

“You’d believe its word rather than mine, wouldn’t you? You get more like a machine every day, Colding, you know that?”

“I am a machine. So are you. We just happen to be human machines, treading a computed path. That’s how the destimeter can predict events. That’s how I know you’ve betrayed me again.”

Gloria started the musuc automatically. It was a modal hushkit vibration, and instantly the chamber seemed to fill with cloud that saturated all but objects under direct gaze. She had always enjoyed the tunnel-vision effect better than he.

Facing him, she said, through the long white perspective, “All right, all right. You want a computer that will do all your living for you. You’d like a machine for a wife. You want predestination because it gives you all sorts of excuses. I did go with Tab, I admit it. Your damned oracle is right. I want to be human, I want to feel — this vision of myself weeping in a black-and-gold room, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand to be shut out. I love you, Coldy, but I want to be human ...”

He went to her. He stooped. “We’ll work it out, Gloria. I’ll try to understand. You must have your secret garden. I don’t forget that you’re a Sensitive of the Unrealised Multi-Schizophrenic Type B. It’s terrible being a failure of a husband—one of the terrible things about it is that you know you’re a failure—”

“Don’t tell me that again! I know what you’re going to say.” She turned away from him. “Don’t you ever understand?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Maybe I understand better than you do. You say you want to be human. What you have to do is revise your understanding of what a human being is…”

“Don’t give me that sort of argument—comfort me! You just stand there talking and talking! Comfort me!”

Making a great effort, he moved forward through the solid sound, stretching out his hands to her. Like all the others for whom he felt pity and responsibility, she was being left in an obsolescing version of the present, unable to face the future.

“I love you, Gloria,” he said. Even if it was not as much as 86 percent true, he thought hopefully, it just might provide her with some sort of workable hypothesis for existence.

He kissed her, letting his hand stray down her body, sensing the tautness of her muscles, searching for warmth in her and in himself.

What we sometimes forget about the future is that

it may break the hearts of ordinary people.

It was after I lost my job as the manager of a traveling troupe of precision unicyclists that I met Ace 167. I was down and out in a bar in Venusport, my last credit gone to buy cheap Venusian wine. The jukebox was playing an old, tinny-sounding Beatles tape and on the jukebox screen tiny grey figures cavorted: the Beatles in their prime, back in the magic sixties. Gone, all gone, I thought. The moving finger writes and having writ moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it. I drank the last of my wine, set down the glass and turned around, just in time to see Ace come in. His clothes were ragged and his feet were bare. He had long red hair, pulled back into a ponytail. His mustache was red too, a big, bristly handlebar. “167” was tattooed on his forehead: three big numbers, as bright blue as his eyes.

“Out,” the bartender said.

Ace stopped and scratched his nose. “Don’t be primitive, mister.”

“Out.”

Ace shrugged, turned and went outside. His shirt was torn across the back, so I could see a couple of the gill lines, slanting down on either side of his spine. When they’re shut, gills don’t bother me. But I’ve seen gillies underwater with their red gill slits open. My ancestors were vikings, and one of the nastier things they did was to make blood eagles. To make a blood eagle, you take a man and cut into his back on both sides of his spine, going right through his ribs. Then you pull his lungs out through the cuts and spread them across his back. That’s a blood eagle. You do this while the man is alive, and it makes the Allfather Odin happy. Whenever I saw open gills, I thought of the blood eagle and got a sick feeling in my gut. But, as I said, the gills didn’t bother me when they were shut.

“ ‘Nother?” the bartender asked me.

I shook my head, slid down off the bar stool, and followed Ace out. It was foggy. The streetlights were dim white areas of luminescence floating in darkness. There were docks across the street. I could hear ropes creaking and water slapping against the sides of the boats.

“You got any money, lady?”

I jerked away from the sound. The guy behind me laughed. “I’m begging, not robbing.”

I turned around. It was Ace, of course. I said, “I’m broke.”

“My luck. The rest of them in there look like they wouldn’t give their grandma burying money.”

I nodded and started back toward my hotel. I figured I had two or three more days before they asked me for money. A foghorn was honking somewhere out in the harbor. Ace stayed beside me.

“Isn’t there any work here?” I asked.

“Yeah. Underwater. You want to know something funny? I don’t like it down there. It’s too cold, too dark and too full of things I don’t want to meet. Ain’t that a laugh?”

I stopped. We were under a streetlight, so I could see him. “I thought it was supposed to be wonderful down there.”

Ace shook his head. “It’s a job, lady. Only you got fish nibbling on your toes while you work. Tasting you out, sort of.”

“You can’t get work up here?”

“You crazy? Take a job away from a regular person and give it to a gillie?”

We started walking again. The air was cold and wet. I put my hands in my jacket pockets, then looked over at Ace. He had his arms folded and his shoulders hunched against the cold. “Look,” I said. “I don’t have any money. I lost my job. But I have an extra jacket. Why don’t you take this one?”

After a moment, Ace said, “Okay. I will. Thanks.”

I took the jacket off and gave it to him. He put it on, then laughed. “You know what I’m going to do with it, lady?”

“Pawn it.”

“Yeah. Thanks again.”

We parted then. I went back to my hotel and found a message from a friend on Tanit Island who was putting together a trained-fish act. She’d sent money, enough so I could pay my hotel bill and buy a hydroplane ticket. I left Venusport the next morning.

As was to be expected, the fish act was a disaster. We ended up selling it to a fish market in Ishtar. They put it in a tank in the front, so the customers would have something to watch while they waited for service. My friend got a job in the market working as a counterwoman. She said she’d gotten used to being around fish. Me, I found a hydroplane that needed a bartender and worked my way back to Venusport. That town was the same as ever, cold and wet and foggy, full of steep hills and rickety prefab buildings. I got another job as a bartender in a bar by the docks, where the dock workers and the artists came. After a while, I was managing a sculptor on the side, also a couple of dock workers who wanted to be singers. One night Ace 167 came into the bar. He stopped at the door, waiting to be told to get out. He was as ragged as before and still barefoot. His mustache had turned into a beard and his hair was short. He looked at me, grinned and came over.