Damon Knight: Orbit 14

He joined her tracing opalescences. “It’s petrified wood—some kind of plant life that was preserved in stone, minerals replaced its structure. I found it in the desert.”

“Desert?”

“East of the mountains. I found a whole canyon full of them. It’s an incredible place, the desert.”

“I’ve never seen one. Only heard about them, barren and deadly; it frightened me.”

“While you cross the most terrible desert of them all?—between the stars.”

“But it’s not barren.”

“Neither is this one. It’s winter here now, I can take you to see the trees, if you’d like it.” He grinned. “If you dare.”

Her eyebrows rose. “I dare! We could go tomorrow, I’ll make us a lunch.”

“We’d have to leave early, though. If you were wanting to do the town again tonight . . .”

“Oh, that’s all right; I’ll take a pill.”

“Hey—”

She winced. “Oh, well ... I found a kind I could take. I used them all the time at the other ports, like the rest.”

“Then why—”

“Because I liked staying with you. I deceived you, now you know, true confessions. Are you mad?”

His face filled with astonished pleasure. “Hardly ... I have to .admit, I used to wonder what—”

“ Sol -dier!” He looked away, someone gestured at him across the room. “More wine, please!” He raised a hand.

“Brandy, come on, there’s a party—”

She waved. “Tomorrow morning, early?” Her eyes kept his face.

“Uh-huh. See you—”

“—later.” She slipped down and was gone.

The flyer rose silently, pointing into the early sun. Brandy sat beside him, squinting down and back through the glare as New Piraeus grew narrow beside the glass-green bay. “Look, how it falls behind the hills, until all you can see are the land and the sea, and no sign of change. It’s like that when the ship goes up, but it happens so fast you don’t have time to savor it.” She turned back to him, bright-eyed. “We go from world to world but we never see them; we’re always looking up. It’s good to look down, today.”

They drifted higher, rising with the climbing hills, until the rumpled olive-red suede of the seacoast grew jagged, blotched greenblack and gray and blinding white.

“Is that really snow?” She pulled at his arm, pointing.

He nodded. “We manage a little.”

“I’ve only seen snow once since I left Calicho, once it was winter on Treone. We wrapped up in furs and capes even though we didn’t have to, and threw snowballs with the Tails. . . . But it was cold most of the year on our island, on Calicho—we were pretty far north, we grew special kinds of crops . . . and us kids had hairy hornbeasts to plod around on. . . Lost in memories, she rested against his shoulder; while he tried to remember a freehold on Glatte, and snowy walls became jumbled whiteness climbing a hill by the sea.

They had crossed the divide; the protruding batholith of the peaks degenerated into parched, crumbling slopes of gigantic rubble. Ahead of them the scarred yellow desolation stretched away like an infinite canvas, into mauve haze. “How far does it go?”

“It goes on forever. . . . Maybe not this desert, but this merges into others that merge into others—the whole planet is a desert, hot or cold. It’s been desiccating for eons; the sun’s been rising off the main sequence. The sea by New Piraeus is the only large body of free water left now, and that’s dropped half an inch since I’ve been here. The coast is the only habitable area, and there aren’t many towns there even now.”

“Then Oro will never be able to change too much.”

“Only enough to hurt. See the dust? Open-pit mining, for seventy kilometers north. And that’s a little one.”

He took them south, sliding over the eroded face of the land to twist through canyons of folded stone, sediments contorted by the palsied hands of tectonic force; or flashing across pitted flatlands lipping on pocket seas of ridged and shadowed blow-sand.

They settled at last under a steep out-curving wall of frescoed rock layered in red and green. The wide, rough bed of the sandy wash was pale in the chill glare of noon, scrunching underfoot as they began to walk. Pulling on his leather jacket, Maris showed her the kaleidoscope of ages left tumbled in stones over the hills they climbed, shouting against the lusty wind of the ridges. She cupped them in marveling hands, hair streaming like silken banners past her face; obligingly he put her chosen few into his pockets. “Aren’t you cold?” He caught her hand.

“No, my suit takes care of me. How did you ever learn to know all these, Maris?”

Shaking his head, he began to lead her back down. “There’s more here than I’ll ever know. I just got a mining tape on geology at the library. But it made it mean more to come out here . . . where you can see eons of the planet laid open, one cycle settling on another. To know the time it took, the life history of an entire world: it helps my perspective, it makes me feel—young.”

“We think we know worlds, but we don’t, we only see people: change and pettiness. We forget the greater constancy, tied to the universe. It would humble our perspective, too-—” Pebbles boiled and clattered; her hand held his strongly as his foot slipped. He looked back, chagrined, and she laughed. “You don’t really have to lead me here, Maris. I was a mountain goat on Calicho, and I haven’t forgotten it all.”

Indignant, he dropped her hand. “You lead.”

Still laughing, she led him to the bottom of the hill.

And he took her to see the trees. Working their way over rocks up the windless branch wash, they rounded a bend and found them, tumbled in static glory. He heard her indrawn breath. “Oh, Maris—” Radiant with color and light she walked among them, while he wondered again at the passionless artistry of the earth. Amethyst and agate, crystal and mimicked wood-grain, hexagonal trunks split open to bare subtleties of mergence and secret nebulosities. She knelt among the broken bits of limb, choosing colors to hold up to the sun.

He sat on a trunk, picking agate pebbles. “They’re sort of special friends of mine; we go down in time together, in strangely familiar bodies. . . .” He studied them with fond pride. “But they go with more grace.”

She put her colored chunks on the ground. “No ... I don’t think so. They had no choice.”

He looked down, tossing pebbles.

“Let’s have our picnic here.”

They cleared a space and spread a blanket, and picnicked with the trees. The sun warmed them in the windless hollow, and he made a pillow of his jacket; satiated, they lay back head by head, watching the cloudless green-blue sky.

“You pack a good lunch.”

“Thank you. It was the least I could do”—her hand brushed his arm; quietly his fingers tightened on themselves—“to share your secrets; to learn that the desert isn’t barren, that it’s immense, timeless, full of—mysteries. But no life?”

“No—not anymore. There’s no water, nothing can live. The only things left are in or by the sea, or they’re things we’ve brought. Across our own lifeless desert-sea.”

“ ‘Though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither.’ ” Her hand stretched above him, to catch the sky.

“Wordsworth. That’s the only thing by him I ever liked much.”

They lay together in the warm silence. A piece of agate came loose, dropped to the ground with a clink; they started.

“Maris—”

"Hmm?”

“Do you realize we’ve known each other for three-quarters of a century?”

“Yes. . . .”

“I’ve almost caught up with you, I think. I’m twenty-seven. Soon I’m going to start passing you. But at least—now you’ll never have to see it show.” Her fingers touched the rusty curls of his hair.