Damon Knight: Orbit 14

He pressed his face abruptly against the rail, pain flickered. God, still real; thought it all turned to plastic, damn, damn . . . And shut out three times twenty-five more years of pattern, of everyone else’s nights and cold, solitary mornings trying to find her face. Ninety-one hundred days to carry the ache of returned life, until she would come again, and—

“See? That’s our ship. The third one in line.”

Soldier listened, unwillingly. A spacer in lavender stood with her Tail where the dock angled to the right, pointing out across the bay.

“Can’t we go see it?” Blue glass glittered in mesh across the boy’s back as he draped himself over the rail.

“Certainly not. Men aren’t allowed on ships; it’s against regulations. And anyway—I’d rather stay here.” She drew him into the corner; amethyst and opal wrapped her neck in light. They began to kiss, hands wandering.

Soldier got up slowly and left them, still entwined, to privacy. The sun was climbing toward noon; above him as he walked, the skyline of New Piraeus wavered in the hazed and heated air. His eyes moved up and back toward the forty-story skeleton of the Universal Bank under construction, dropped to the warehouses, the docks, his atrophying ancient lower city. Insistent through the cry of sea birds he could hear the hungry whining of heavy machinery, the belly of a changing world. And still I triumph over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time—

“But I can’t stand it.” His hands tightened on wood. “I stood it for ninety-six years; on the shelf.” Dolefully the sea birds mocked him, creaking in the gray-green twilight, now, now— Wind probed the openings of his shirt like the cold fingers of sorrow. Was dead, for ninety-six years before she came.

For hours along the rail he had watched the ships in the bay; while he watched, a new ship had come slipping down, like the sun’s tear. Now they grew bright as the day ended, setting a bracelet on the black water; stiffness made him lurch as he turned away, to artificial stars clustered on the wall of night.

Choking on the past, he climbed the worn streets, where the old patterns of a new night reached him only vaguely, and his eyes found nothing that he remembered anymore. Until he reached the time-eaten door, the thick, peeling mudbrick wall beneath the neon sign. His hand fondled the slippery lock, as it had for two hundred years, tin soldier . . . loved a ballerina. His hand slammed against the lock. No—this bar is closed tonight.

The door slid open at his touch; Soldier entered his quiet house. And stopped, hearing the hollow mutter of the empty night, and found himself alone for the rest of his life.

He moved through the rooms by starlight, touching nothing, until he came to the bedroom door. Opened it, the cold latch burning his hand. And saw her there, lying asleep under the silver robe of the Pleiades. Slowly he closed the door, waited, opened it once more and filled the room with light.

She sat up, blinking, a fist against her eyes and hair falling ash-golden to her waist. She wore a long soft dress of muted flowers, blue and green and earth tones. “Maris? I didn’t hear you, I guess I went to sleep.”

He crossed the room, fell onto the bed beside her, caressing her, covering her face with kisses. “They said you were dead ... all day I thought—”

“I am.” Her voice was dull, her eyes dark-ringed with fatigue. “No.”

“I am. To them I am. I’m not a spacer anymore; space is closed to me forever. That’s what it means to be ‘dead.’ To lose your life . . . Mactav—went crazy. I never thought we’d even get to port. I was hurt badly, in the accident.” Fingers twined loops in her hair, pulled—

“But you’re all right.”

She shook her head. “No.” She held out her hand, upturned; he took it, curled its fingers into his own, flesh over flesh, warm and supple. “It’s plastic, Maris.”

He turned the hand over, stroked it, folded the long limber fingers. “It can’t be—”

“It’s numb. I barely feel you at all. They tell me I may live for hundreds of years.” Her hand tightened into a fist. “And I am a whole woman, but they forbid me to go into space again! I can’t be crew, I can’t be a Mactav, I can only be baggage. And—I can’t even say it’s unfair. . . .” Hot tears burned her face. “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know— If I should come. If you’d want a . . . ballerina who’d been in fire.”

“You even wondered?” He held her close again, rested her head on his shoulder, to hide his own face grown wet.

A noise of pain twisted in her throat, her arms tightened. “Oh, Maris. Help me . . . please, help me, help me. . . .”

He rocked her silently, gently, until her sobbing eased, as he had rocked a homesick teenager a hundred years before.

“How will I live ... on one world for centuries, always remembering. How do you bear it?”

“By learning what really matters. . . . Worlds are not so small. We’ll go to other worlds if you want—we could see Home. You’d be surprised how much credit you build up over two hundred years.” He kissed her swollen eyes, her reddened cheeks, her lips. “And maybe in time the rules will change.”

She shook her head, bruised with loss. “Oh, my Maris, my wise love—love me, tie me to the earth.”

He took her prosthetic hand, kissed the soft palm and fingers. And make it well . . . And knowing that it would never be easy, reached to dim the lights.

In which we learn there is more than one way to skin an alien invader.

The foreigner appeared in our skies at an acceleration of 15.3 feet per second per second, his automatic warning system—whether bemused or fascinated or perhaps frightened by the new place— having stopped dead, but I do not think he thought in those terms. I think he prided himself on his realistic attitude. He caused himself to be ejected automatically from the ship, and the last we saw of it, it was plunging toward the Pole as if infatuated beyond the dictates of reason. But he didn’t think in those terms, either. He merely lingered in the stratosphere for a few minutes, hanging (so it would seem to anyone else) between heaven and earth. Five miles down and the sky grew light, ten miles and it was blue; stupendous mountains rose on his right, dark forests sucked up sunlight on his left, and on the horizon flickered and died the green auroral glow of the Pole. His parachute opened with a jerk and blossomed above him in a brilliant, sun-shot print of white. Still he fell. I believe, from what my cousin overheard, that at this point he frowned and said to himself, quite audibly, “I don’t like things that aren’t reliable.”

Now he has been sitting all evening in a tavern, arguing price with my cousin, who is the clairvoyant and local guide of the neighborhood; the young foreigner does not believe that my cousin is a trained or gifted person, and this I find incredible; our foreigner must be from the cities of the temperate zone where there are so many people that Uncertainty has almost disappeared. My cousin has had to put an irritable finger to his irritable nose, refuse a lower price, shake his head vehemently, and then make as if to stand up and go away. That does it. So they rise in mutual detestation, the foreigner smiling round, I think to declare his good humor and reasonableness, and my cousin retiring sourly into his cloak. The young man has to bend under the lintel of the door but my cousin makes himself into a ramrod; the foreigner runs hands pleasantly through his curly hair and my cousin—who is of course all in black —touches with two fingers his tongue, his forehead, his heart, and his sex. We always halt on the way out of buildings; human habitations stay the same, and so do the clothes that people wear and the land they cultivate and the tools they use, at least unless you direct very strong thoughts at them. And the bodies of sane people never change. But outside it’s a different matter—we must brace ourselves for the possible strangeness: beauty, agony, chaos. So the two men hesitate before they go out, my cousin feeling unhappily and very carefully what’s going on in the night air this night.