Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“I wonder when there will be another lustrum year?” Aloysius Shiplap asked, somewhat worried.

“Not right away, I don’t believe,” Director Gregory Smirnov assured them all. “None of the signs of it are present. And the people, while very good in these last few decades, are not quite good enough that it spills over, not so overpoweringly good as to require being counteracted by a toy evil in another time and place.

“Aw, feather dusters!” Gregory swore suddenly. “I’m getting mighty tired of eating flaming duck. And it doesn’t help as much as it did to call it quail or swan.”

“We must all be careful not to be too good, lest we precipitate the thing,” Valery warned. “If only we could have salt with the damned duck! But the doctors all say that we should forego salt in favor of sulfur. Here, Greg, I’ll make you a good hard-times sandwich, break-bone bread, holy cow, flamed—ah—grackle, blood pudding, offal—no, really, they say it’s good for you— yellow sulfur, and that good new Moloch mustard. Here, eat it hot, Greg, eat it hot.”

“Oh, all right,” Director Gregory Smirnov said glumly.

The stranded riverboat was hooting mournfully over on Fourteenth Street. It would have to wait many hours yet before being able to float on the morning dew. And the dew was never near as drenching as it should have been. In one week, the steamboat had been able to move only two and one-half blocks on the morning dews: no more than eighty yards a day.

There were many people dancing the chorea in the streets. One of them was dressed as St. Vitus, and several of them were holy. And always there was the towering noise behind it all, a noise that had once been music.

There were a few discouraged-looking holy cows, inquiring of people (somehow or other) the way to the Cow Palace. There was a person who said that he was the son of the Pied Piper. He was piping the children into following him, and they were being drowned in the reservoir.

There was a newly appeared, sad-looking person in motley or clown suit. He had mean-looking mustaches; he had a little spike beard; he had red-rimmed eyes. He was unkempt. He looked like the Devil.

The children of the large birthing of the week before (they who had walked and talked on the day of their birth) had now taken over most of the city offices. And there was one of them in particular—ah, well, never mind, there is one like that in every large birthing.

There had been further huge, bloody globs falling from the low sky. It was believed, however, that they were the last remnants of some old giant, that they were not from the new giant who had not indeed arrived yet.

“Scrat!” cried Valery as she played the Strange Lover card.

And still there were the flaming ducks, all of them capons, stenchy and outrageous, thudding, thudding, thudding to earth day and night. One does get tired of burnt duck.

Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far,

Before you agonize them in farewell?

2021, and what had we to show for it? Overpopulation, for one thing. What did people see in each other? I read pornography by the pile, thinking I might find the answer there, but I didn’t. It cost me a great deal, that erotica, because it was forbidden. The only way to get it was from pushers who charged according to how expensively a buyer was dressed. I always wore my oldest dress whenever I went on the hunt for porno.

Everyone spent their first six years of life in the Conditioning Center in Illinois. I didn’t remember what I learned there, and no matter how much I questioned my friends, they told me nothing about their memories or their personal lives. It made me feel ignorant.

I cleaned masturbation stalls for a living. There must have been millions of them. One side of Fifth Avenue was my territory, the other side belonged to Lydon. I didn’t know his last name. He came after Pisby died. Pisby was a dirty old man who spent too much time in the stalls. With that bad heart of his, he shouldn’t have pumped his beef so much.

My best friend was Permilia. She worked in a jewelry store on the corner of Fifth, and she always used one of my stalls whenever she got the urge to do it. The thing that fascinated me about Permilia was her hands. I mean, why make a fetish of hands? I thought about it and finally decided she removed all her rings and bracelets before getting down to business. Crude way of putting it? No cruder than saying people used to bang their heads off until they got the world so crowded it was like a can of beans. Banging. Why did they call it that? Why did some people always smear mud on the beautiful things? Wasn’t it beautiful to make love? But how did they determine if they were in love or merely in a state of randiness?

Oh, well, it didn’t affect me personally. I wasn’t interested in sex, and as for masturbation, the stalls were just places I cleaned. Once a week I painted the walls. Every day I scoured them with ammonia, dragged the stools out onto the sidewalk and hosed them down. That was my life.

I had a one-room pad just off Fifth, a comfortable place I called home. Stall maids earned fairly good pay, so I had some modern conveniences, though not as many as Permilia. Jewelry was a very popular commodity.

Poor Pisby. He had something wrong in his head. That was where his trouble lay. His body was a pawn of his mind, and he couldn’t control that, so he died. Maybe he was sick both in body and mind. Why didn’t he simply quit doing it, or why didn’t he find a girl? It made no sense. After all, he was nearly fifty, and nobody that age had an intense sexual urge. Had they? I couldn’t say, being young and inexperienced and dead as a doornail in the beef department.

Fifth Avenue wasn’t exactly crawling with queers, but now and then one ambled by. They were particularly vulnerable to the stalls, so they ought to have stayed on the few streets where there were none. For instance, a queer walks by, takes a gander at a stall and breaks his neck getting inside. According to the erotica I read, such people used to frequent park toilets, which may have been a good deal like the stalls in appearance. Anyway, I sympathized with the queers, as they were made randy as hell by their botched hormones.

Lydon. What did I think of him? He took over for Pisby, showed up one rainy day when the stink of the stalls was ruining the air. I described him to Permilia, and she laughed and said he was a virgin, like me. How could she tell? Because he didn’t make a fetish of his hands. Later I recalled how she frowned and stiffened after she said that, exactly as if she had suddenly experienced a sharp pain. I asked her what she meant by the hand-fetish business, but she didn’t answer, broke her neck getting away from me, and it was a week before I saw her again.

No one could live together; no roommates; no girls together, no men together, and, of course, a male and female were not permitted to share a pad. The population had to be kept down.

Permilia said Lydon must be dead in the beef department because males almost always took to the stalls in their early teens. Their bodies were too exposed to stimulation, and this made them vulnerable. Women were a step behind them. Permilia laughed as she added, “But it’s a short step.”

Lydon. The first time I laid eyes on him, I thought, “What a grubby little thing; but interesting.”

He had a red face, and it wasn’t until I got close to him that I realized the redness was acne. It wasn’t bad, except at his jawline. It was unfortunate, because his face was sweetly formed. He had dark eyes and a small nose and mouth. His body was square, but too small. Well, not too small, at that. Looked at as a package of man, he wasn’t unattractive.