Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“What’ll you have?” I asked.

He laid a one-credit piece on the bar. “What’ll that buy?”

“A glass of wine.”

“Okay.”

I got him his wine, then pushed the credit back toward him. “You’re not working yet.”

“I was. Salvage job out in the harbor. Then a guy I knew got stung by a spine worm. Ever seen one of them?”

I nodded. “In the aquarium. It was pretty, I thought.”

“Yeah. You know what the poison does? Paralyzes the respiratory system. So Mad Hat drowned before we could get him to the first-aid station. Me, I thought I’d sooner starve.” He sipped a little wine. “Seeing as how you’re buying the wine, would this credit buy a piece of pizza?”

I nodded and told the cook to heat up a cheese-and-tomato. “You work salvage. Does that mean you can handle a torch?”

“Uh-huh.” He finished his wine and I refilled the glass. “Thanks.”

“I know a sculptor who’s building something big. He might need help.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll give you his name.”

Ace nodded and the cook brought out the pizza. I went down the bar to draw beers for a couple of dock workers. Later on, I gave Ace the sculptor’s name and my name too. He said, “Thanks. How come you’re doing all this?”

I shrugged, which was a lie in gesture. I knew all right and Ace probably knew too. I did it for his bright blue eyes and his thick red hair that had gold highlights in it.

“Anyway, thanks.” He held out his hand and I shook it. “I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Ace.”

“Glad to meet you,” I said.

He left and I didn’t see him for a while. My singing dock workers got a recording contract right after that. I quit my job and told the sculptor I was going to be too busy to handle his business, and the three of us lit out for Isis, which was where the recording company was.

Now that was a city! There were almost as many canals as streets. Their still, green water reflected flowering trees and white, graceful bridges. At the city’s center were the water gardens and, all around them, skyscrapers made of blue glass. In the suburbs the many-domed houses of the rich shone like clusters of pearls. On an island in Isis Bay was the famous Night Market, where the nocturnal Venusians came to sell their wares: kilts made from strings of shells, baskets woven out of feathers, and other bits of useless esoterica. I went out there once. The Venusians came in after nightfall, their long canoes emerging from the darkness into the dim light of the torches along the shore. To the sound of flutes and drums, they brought the canoes in and beached them. Then they set out their kilts and baskets, their god-symbols made of flowers tied together, their tiny cages with brightly colored insects inside them. And then they waited, squatting in the midst of their goods, their huge eyes blinking rapidly, till the tourists moved in to buy. The whole spectacle made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t know why.

I was in Isis four months. My singing dock workers made several recordings, which nobody liked. Finally they decided to go back to the docks, and I decided to go back to Venusport. As soon as I got there, I got another job as a bartender. Then I looked up the sculptor I’d sent Ace to.

He worked and lived in a warehouse down by the docks. At the moment, the warehouse was full of “The Triumph of Steam,” an enormous construction consisting of a lot of steam engines all welded together. He’d had a hell of a time building it, since there weren’t any steam engines or steam-engine builders on the planet. He insisted that all the steam engines had to work.

When I got to his place he was drinking wine, sitting on his bed, which was in one corner of the warehouse, next to a bright yellow dresser with a blowtorch on top of it. “You back?”

“Uh-huh.” I waved at the construction. “Is it done?”

He nodded. “Now what do I do?”

“Sell it. What else? Where’s Ace 167?”

“The gillie? I fired him.”

“Why?” He handed me the wine. I drank some and handed the bottle back.

“He made me nervous. How could I work with him flapping his gills at me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They never open their gills above-water. I’m not sure they can.”

“He still made me nervous. I couldn’t stop thinking about those gills. Hey, I need someone to help me sell this.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Okay?” I left the sculptor and went back to my bar.

I couldn’t sell the construction, but I can’t say I tried too hard. I was getting interested in bartending. The place where I worked was quiet, with the same customers every night. They came in and watched the 3-D, played pool on the new table that changed its surface at thirty-second intervals, and drank. The best thing was, I didn’t have to push the product. People came in and bought it without a word of encouragement.

The next time I heard anything about Ace was on the evening news. There was an implosion in a sea lab they were building at the edge of the continental shelf. Three gillies were caught inside when the dome collapsed. One of them was Ace 167. I stopped whatever it was I was doing and looked up at the 3-D. Bodies on stretchers were being carried off a boat. I hadn’t been listening till I heard Ace’s name. Was he still alive?

“Harry,” I said to the boss, “I’m suddenly sick. See you tomorrow.”

Harry opened his mouth, but I was gone before he could say anything. I caught the monorail to Bayside, where the gillies lived. Down the hill the car slid, then swung out over the shoddily built apartment complexes of Bayside. It was crazy, I thought, looking through the window at the rows of identical buildings and the dimly lit streets. It cost a fortune to make a person into a gillie. The first modifications were genetic and took place before conception, when there wasn’t a person yet, only an egg and a sperm under some kind of amazing microscope. Later on, there usually had to be surgical corrections. The host-mother had to be paid, and there was all that special training, ten or fifteen years of it. Gillies were terribly expensive. So why were they housed in tenements? It was like having the Kohinoor diamond set in dung.

But what sane person can understand modern economics? The car came to a stop next to the white, bright gillie hospital, and I got off. What am I doing here, I wondered as I went down the stairs from the station and in through the hospital’s front entrance. The waiting room was empty. The lady at the information desk looked at me, saw my brow, which was as blank as hers, and looked surprised.

“Where do I find out about the gillies who were hurt in the sea-lab implosion?”

“Are you a reporter?”

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid that information is confidential.”

“Look, one of them is a friend of mine. I want to know if he’s still alive.”

She stared at me, frowning. I knew what she was thinking. Friends with a gillie? For shame. She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

Like hell you are, I thought. May your forehead sprout warts shaped like numbers, may gills open in your back, may you become what you most dislike.

“Thanks,” I said, and smiled and left. There was a bar down the street from the hospital, its sign flashing wine, Beer, wine, Beer. I walked toward it. The night was cold and misty. The wet air had a harbor stink. Foghorns were blaring and honking out in the bay. Into the bar I went, braving all the gillie stares, the black, white, brown faces all marked with blue numbers, all turned toward me.

I ordered a beer from the bartender, who was a regular human being. Gillies didn’t work air jobs, even in their own section of town.

The bartender shook his head. “Please leave, miz.”