Damon Knight: Orbit 14

“Make it two.”

“Anybody want a pitcher?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Come sit with us in a while, Soldier. Have we got things to tell you!”

He jammed the clumsy pitcher under the spigot and pulled down as they drifted away, watching the amber splatter up its frosty sides.

“Alta, hi! Good timing! How are things on the Extra Sexy Old-115?”

“Oh, good enough; how’s Chrysalis—has it changed much?”

The froth spilled out over his hand; he let the lever jerk up, licked his fingers and wiped them on his apron.

“It’s gone wild this time, you should see what they’re wearing for clothes. My God, you would not believe—”

He hoisted the slimy pitcher onto the bar and set octagonal mugs on a tray.

“Aralea, did you hear what happened to the—”

He lifted the pitcher again, up to the tray’s edge.

»—Who Got Her-709?”

The pitcher teetered.

“Their Mactav had a nervous breakdown on landing at Sanalareta. Branduin died, the poet, the one who wrote—”

Splinters and froth exploded on the agate bar and slobbered over the edge, tinkle, crash.

Stunned blank faces turned to see Soldier, hands moving ineffectually in a puddle of red-flecked foam. He began to brush it off onto the floor, looking like a stricken adolescent. “Sorry . . . sorry about that.”

“Ach, Soldier, you really blew it!”

“Got a mop? Here, we’ll help you clean it up . . . hey, you’re bleeding—?” Brigit and Ling-shan were piling chunks of pitcher onto the bar.

Soldier shook his head, fumbling a towel around the one wrist that bled. “No . . . no, thanks, leave it, huh? I’ll get you another pitcher ... it doesn’t matter. Go on!” They looked at him. “I’ll send you a pitcher; thanks.” He smiled.

They left, the smile stopped. Fill the pitcher. He filled a pitcher, his hand smarting. Clean up, damn it. He cleaned up, wiping off disaster while the floor absorbed and fangs of glass disappeared under the bar. As the agate bar-top dried he saw the white-edged shatter flower, tendrils of hairline crack shooting out a hand’s-breadth on every side. He began to trace them with a rigid finger, counting softly . . . She loved me, she loved me not, she loved me—

“Two cepheids and a wine, Soldier!”

“Soldier, come hear what we saw on Chrysalis if you’re through!” He nodded and poured, blinking hard. God damn sweetsmoke in here . . . God damn everything! Elsah was going out the door with a boy in tight green pants and a star-map-tattooed body. He stared them into fluorescent blur. And remembered Brandy going out the door too many times . . .

“Hey, Sol -dier, what are you doing?”

He blinked himself back.

“Come sit with us?”

He crossed the room to the nearest bulky table and the remaining crew of the Dirty Old Man-428.

“How’s your hand?” Vlasa soothed it with a dark, ringed finger.

“It only hurts when I laugh.”

“Fou really are screwed up!” Ling-shan’s smile wrinkled. “Oh, Soldier, why look so glum?”

“I chipped my bar.”

“Ohhh . . . nothing but bad news tonight. Make him laugh, somebody, we can’t go on like this!”

“Tell him the joke you heard on Chrysalis—”

“—from the boy with a cat’s-eye in his navel? Oh. Well, it seems there was . . .”

His fingers moved reluctantly up the laces of his patchwork shirt and began to untangle the thumb-sized star trapped near his throat. He set it free; his hand tightened across the stubby spines, feeling only dull pressure. Pain registered from somewhere else.

“—‘Oh, they fired the pickle slicer too!’ ”

He looked up into laughter.

“It’s a tech-one joke, Soldier,” Ling-Shan said helpfully.

“Oh ... I see.” He laughed, blindly.

“Soldier, we took pictures of our black hole!” Vlasa pulled at his arm. “From a respectable distance, but it was bizarre—”

“Holograms—” somebody interrupted.

“And you should see the effects!” Brigit said. “When you look into them you feel like your eyes are being—”

“Soldier, another round, please?”

“Excuse me.” He pushed back his chair. “Later?” Thinking, God won’t this night ever end?

His hand closed the lock on the pitted tavern door at last; his woven sandal skidded as he stepped into the street. Two slim figures, one all in sea-blue, passed him and red hair flamed; he recognized Marena, intent and content arm in arm with a gaudy, laughing Tail. Their hands were in each other’s back pockets. They were going uphill; he turned down, treading carefully on the time- and fog-slicked cobbles. He limped slightly. Moist wraiths of sea fog twined the curving streets, turning the street lights into dark angels under fluorescing haloes. Bright droplets formed in his hair as he walked. His footsteps scratched to dim echoes; the laughter faded, leaving him alone with memory.

The presence of dawn took him by surprise, as a hand brushed his shoulder.

“Sojer, ’tis you?”

Soldier looked up fiercely into a gray-bristled face.

“Y’all right? What’ree doin’ down here at dawn, lad?”

He recognized old Makerrah the fisherman, finally. Lately it amused the old man to call him “lad.”

“Nothin’ . . . nothin’.” He pulled away from the brine-warped rail. The sun was rising beyond the mountains, the edge of fog caught the colors of fire and was burned away. It would be a hot day. “G’bye, ol’ man.” He began to walk.

“Y’sure y’re all right?”

Alone again he sat with one foot hanging, feeling the suck and swell of water far below the pier. All right . . . ? When had he ever been all right? And tried to remember into the time before he had known her, and could find no answer.

There had never been an answer for him on his own world, on Glatte; never even a place for him. Glatte, with a four-point-five technology, and a neo-feudal society, where the competition for that technology was a cultural rationale for war. All his life he had seen his people butchered and butchering, blindly, trapped by senseless superstition. And hated it, but could not escape the bitter ties that led him to his destruction. Fragments of that former life were all that remained now, after two centuries, still clinging to the fact of his alienness. He remembered the taste of fresh-fallen snow ... remembered the taste of blood. And the memory filled him of how it felt to be nineteen, and hating war, and blown to pieces ... to find yourself suddenly half-prosthetic, with the pieces that were gone still hurting in your mind; and your stepfather’s voice, with something that was not pride, saying you were finally a real man. . . . Soldier held his breath unaware. His name was Maris, consecrated to war; and when at last he understood why, he left Glatte forever.

He paid all he had to the notorious spacer women; was carried in stasis between the stars, like so much baggage. He wakened to Oro, tech one-point-five, no wars and almost no people. And found out that now to the rest of humanity he was no longer quite human. But he had stayed on Oro for ninety-six years, aging only five, alone. Ninety-six years: a jumble of whiteness climbing a hill, constant New Piraeus; a jumble of faces in dim-blue lantern light, patterning a new life. A pattern endlessly repeated, his smile welcoming, welcoming with the patience of the damned, all the old/new faces that needed him but never wanted him, while he wanted and needed them all. And then she had come to Oro, and after ninety-six years the pattern was broken. Damned Tin Soldier fell in love, after too many years of knowing better, with a ballerina who danced between the stars.