Damon Knight - Orbit 15

Here goes, I thought, and turned around to face all those gillies. “There’s a friend of mine in your hospital. They won’t tell me anything about him. Could one of you find out how he is?”

“What’s his name?” a black gillie woman asked.

“Ace One Sixty-seven.”

A gillie man, who was brown-skinned and black-haired and looked Mexican, said, “He’s alive. He was lucky. Taki died and Slim ain’t in good health. Nothing happened to Ace except he lost an arm.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” I started toward the door.

“Hey, lady,” the black woman said.

I stopped. “Yes?”

“How come you got gillie friends?”

“De gustibus non est disputandum, “ I answered. “Or do I mean honi soit qui mal y pense?” I got out of there.

The next day I asked Harry to switch me to the day shift. He grumbled a lot and said the daytime bartender wouldn’t like it. But I’d already talked to her, and she’d agreed to trade shifts till my friend was out of the hospital. So Harry had to give in. After work, I went down to the hospital. Ace was allowed no visitors, they said. I came back the next day and the day after. Finally, after four days, they let me see him. His face was white as a fish’s belly, and he had dark blue bags under his bright blue eyes. He’d been clean-shaven several days before, but now his beard was beginning a comeback. His red-gold hair was long again. Tubes went from bottles into him. His right arm was half as long as it used to be and all wrapped up in white bandages.

“Hey, lady,” he said.

“How’re you doing, Ace?”

“How does it look?”

“It looks like you’re sick. I’ll bring flowers the next time I come. I brought them a couple of times, but they died in the waiting room.” I sat down. “I’m sorry about the arm.”

“They’ll grow me another one. I can collect workers’ comp till it’s ready to graft, and I won’t have to work underwater.”

“An aspect I hadn’t considered,” I said.

“You don’t know what it’s like down there. If you did, you’d’ve considered. Those walls started buckling, and I thought, this is it. You know, there’s no big religion that’s figured out how to fit in gillies. Suppose we become angels. Where do they attach the wings? On top of our gills? If they do that, will we still be able to breathe underwater? Can gillies fly underwater in the afterlife?”

I laughed and the security guard came in to tell me time was up.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.

“Okay.” Ace shut his eyes. He really looked sick. I tried to imagine what it was like, working way down where the water was cold and dark, and the pressure could push a wall in on top of you. Thank God I’m not a gillie, I thought, and went home.

The next day at work, a guy came in who wanted me to help him organize a Venusian ethnic festival. The idea was to get together a bunch of the poor lunks, who’d hop around in their shell kilts and wave feather staffs and tell tourists they were propitiating some native sex god.

I pointed out that as far as I knew, the Venusians did not have any sex gods.

“They must have. This is Venus, the planet of sex.”

I’d read up on Venusian religion in National Geographic, and I could’ve told him that the Venusian gods, if gods was the right word, were not beings but levels of spiritual power. When the Venusians said a sorcerer had become such-and-such a god, they meant he’d reached the power level that had that god’s name on it. It wasn’t only sorcerers who gained power and became gods. Trees, rocks, flowers, fish, insects, and even Earth people could too. I didn’t think this guy would appreciate my lecture, so I told him I wasn’t interested in his ethnic festival. He left, and I went back to selling wine.

That evening I brought Ace a bunch of crimson trumpets, a bright-red lilylike flower native to Venus. They reminded me of Isis. They grew in the water gardens there, blossoming so profusely that the pools were red from side to side. Ace had gotten a shave and looked a little better than he had the day before. He watched while I stuck the flowers in a vase. “I like ‘em.”

“Good.” I fiddled with the flowers for a while, trying to make them look as if they’d been arranged, then gave up and sat down. We didn’t know each other very well, so we talked about current events. There’s no safer subject than a flood in China or the discovery of corruption in city government. Hardly anybody is in favor of floods or corruption. The security guard came around before we ran out of noncontroversial disasters, and I went home.

I went to the hospital every night till Ace was released. He told me about working underwater, and I told him about bartending and promoting. Then we talked about our childhoods—his in a Venus Company crèche in Ceylon, mine in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from the ruins of Detroit. Finally, we got onto the meaning of life. Neither of us knew what it was.

I have confused memories of that period of my life: the white hospital bed, the rows of fake bottles behind my bar, flowers, girders going up on an undersea building site, Ace’s face and half-gone arm, sea thorns and serpent fish, the mechanical pool table—its top green as water, moving up and down like waves.

Finally the hospital let Ace go. We exchanged com numbers and promised to call each other up. But we didn’t. I was pretty sure we wouldn’t. It was too hard for us to figure out how to get along outside the hospital. Our lives were too different. All we had going for us was an irrational affection.

So I went back to working nights at the bar. After a month or two or three, my friend the fish trainer showed up. She’d started feeling guilty working at the fish market. All those rows of dead fish had seemed to reproach and accuse. “There’s more to fish than edibility,” she said. “I’m going to prove it. I’m putting together another fish act.”

Somehow I ended up agreeing to manage the act. This time we went out of business in Inanna. We let the fish go in the sea. My friend borrowed some money and went back to Tanit Island. I got a job in a curio store, selling little animals made out of seashells and 3-D panoramas of the famous Inanna Heights where, legend said, the Venusians had sacrificed young maidens to the goddess of procreation—or was it chastity? Needless to say, the legend was not Venusian.

One day I looked up from a pink shell elephant and saw Ace out in the street, staring in the store window. For the first time since I’d met him, he was well dressed, his white shirt shimmering like a pearl, his dark green pants covered with embroidery. He had a new right arm and a Brigham Young beard. I got out into the street as quickly as I could. “Ace.”

“Hey, lady.” He grinned. “What you doing in that dump?”

“Working.”

“Yeah? So am I. On the mining complex they’re building out in the Narrows.”

“That isn’t like you.”

He shrugged. “The workers’ comp stopped when I got the arm. Listen, I got plenty of money, and there’s a restaurant down in the gillie district that’ll serve both of us, or else get broken up. I’ll buy you dinner.”

I said okay and went back to sell someone a set of monkey musicians made of pale blue shells. At six Ace came back and we went to Nathan’s, a gillie dive on the waterfront. The jukebox was full of tapes of gospel greats from the late twentieth century. Ace put in money and played “Take Me in the Lifeboat” by the Transcendent Nightingales. The jukebox screen lit up and showed three women in glittering green dresses, singing and dancing in front of a golden wall. We sat down at a window table. Outside were the dark waters of Inanna Inlet. On the other side the lights of North Inanna shone, and beyond them was the Heights. The weather engineers had been working for a quarter of a century and at long last the weather was changing: the ever present clouds were beginning to break apart. Once in a while we could see the sun or a couple of stars. Tonight, Earth was visible, a bright blue-white point of light blazing above the Heights. We ordered drinks and Ace said, “You staying here?”