Damon Knight - Orbit 14

“In addition to being a charlatan,” says the young foreigner, rather shrilly, “you are also a fool.”

My cousin retreats, shocked, behind his handkerchief.

“Black! Black! Black!” cries the foreigner. “What for?”

My cousin says nothing. To let the night hear such questions! It’s necessary for a clairvoyant to be unseen, to become part of the dark itself, but it’s very dangerous. And who talks about it?

“This place is underdeveloped,” says the young man, “as to the matter of density of population. What do you people think land is for?” He squints ahead into the dark. He says, heartfelt, something I don’t understand; he says, “Oh, damn!”

Outside the inn courtyard things are indeed the same, which is a great pleasure to my cousin and me; there are no grassy lawns, no scrubby second growth, none of the waste places that are the worst form of Mutability or Uncertainty, only the old solid dark and the smell of pine needles. The old trees cut out the light of the stars. Now (this is a long time later) the forest thins and melts away silently; slowly fading into one another the somber huge trees become dwarf trees and the dwarf trees the last trees of all; this is the way it has always been, which is very reassuring; they are now riding along between sand dunes with grass running like a coarse fringe over the ridges. It’s the foreigner’s trip; they are going five hundred miles north to find his machinery, so you’d think he’d be awake, but he’s been dozing as if it were all my cousin’s job to make the journey; now he wakes up and bobs on his horse, confused. Far away the horizon has begun to turn grey.

“What,” he says.

“We have to go round,” says my cousin uncertainly.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Neither do I.” My cousin throws back his head and rides off the path, which has appeared from nowhere: ten feet one way, ten feet the other.

“What the devil are you doing?” says the foreigner. He is a spoiled young man.

“Looking.”

“Find anything?” (sarcastically)

“You should know,” says my cousin, astonished.

“Well now, how should I know?” the foreigner asks nobody in particular. He repeats this peevishly to himself, “How should I know?” as if he wanted to change guides, though that’s impossible now, as if he were angry, and for no reason at all. It’s an awful place. The light is lingering between false dawn and dawn with a sickening, faint smell, as if the morning had been embalmed or frozen to death. My cousin stops again, with that agony you get.

“What now?” says the foreigner, apparently controlling himself. My cousin—ill—says nothing.

“I remarked,” says the foreigner, with rising sarcasm, “what now? And—”

“It stinks,” says my cousin mildly. The other man should know how hard it is to talk. Is this man a better seer than my cousin, to bear it all so easily? Why is he so confident? He shakes his head.

“A swamp,” he says and takes the lead. “Nothing but a swamp.”

As they ride on, the light increases and the pools of ice along the path turn the color of lead. My cousin fixes his eyes unhappily on the horizon, he massages one side of his face, unhappily he shifts in the saddle. Again he knows he must stop. The foreign man, jolted out of sleep, looks along my cousin’s outstretched arm. “What?” he says thickly. He’s a big man, never still, always moving uncomfortably in the saddle. My cousin points toward the east where something rises like the skeleton of a beached whale; from the foreigner I learn that this is an unfinished building for people to be in, that it is two hundred “stories” high, that it is made of “steel.” They have, like poor damned fools, come to one of the Changing Places, the Unsafe Places, they’ve blundered on it through some awful mistake, maybe the foreigner’s insistence, which now looks either stupid or horribly vicious, and once you’ve done that, the only thing to do is get away as fast as you can. My cousin speaks urgently to his horse; they swing round.

“Where are you going?” says the young foreigner, and then “Oh, I see,” as he makes out the ten-foot-thick walls and the “emplacements” that will hold the “big guns.” I don’t know what these are. That insane man is proud of himself. Perhaps he is not a true person but a piece of a Mutable Place that’s attempting to fool us by taking on the shape of a man—though how he could come into a human habitation is a mystery to me. And Places can’t think, anyway; they’re just rotten bits in the world where anything can come in. Only a saint can live through a Changing Place. So who is this madman after all? No saint, to be sure, for the next crazy thing he says is:

“I’m going to sleep there.” (I can feel my cousin’s horror.) “No more words.”

“But—”

“Never you mind. You mind your own business.”

“But I—”

“Shut up!”

They stare at each other and I think both are surprised at their own anger. The foreigner spurs his horse away down the path that leads—happy and smooth, smooth, smooth!—toward the Big Thing; now he’s a toy, a dot, a speck, at the base of that monolith; now he’s a pinprick on the lowest of those two hundred horizontal streaks of steel that seem to hang by themselves against the livid light. My cousin turns to go, but a cry arrests him. Against the dictates of reason he runs forward—you can’t ask an animal to go into one of those places—and floundering in the sand, falling on one arm and getting up again, stumbling, cursing himself, he reaches the Thing and pitches onto his knees. The Place has drawn him right up against its wall. There is a something-nothing there, a solid, transparent thing that holds his face. It lets you see inside the belly of the Thing and there—not three inches away—is the face of the young foreigner, lying on its side, white, with its mouth open in a piteous O and its round eyes staring into my cousin’s. Something has changed, changed mightily under him or around him or in him.

The poor young man is dead.

With a gasp my cousin vaults to his feet, presses his hand against his side, wrings his hands. He ought to run away now. On his left a swell of sand shivers and slides. My cousin throws out both hands blindly and stares agonized at the sunrise as if even now he feels the pains of death take hold of him. It’s the worst time, neither night nor day. Don’t think clairvoyants are afraid of bodily death; we know what waits for the mind in those pits of Mutability. I send him my thoughts. We both pray.

And then, with a yellowing of sand and a glinting of steel, the sun rises. With a noiseless flicker, with a simplicity that makes it even more real than the disappearing of smoke, the Big Thing vanishes. A reprieve. The desert changeless again. Safe.

My cousin weeps. He mounts his horse, sets spurs, and throws back his cloak in a passion of haste. Blood rushes to his face. For hours he does nothing but ride, think of riding, go, think of going. Then, once in the salt flats, his face takes on a dreaming, abstracted sweetness. He’s very sorry for the young man. He’s thinking. Can there be Uncertain Places out there between the suns, bogs, pits of waste and change in the sky? And did that poor fool come from one of them? Did he even speak our language or was it just that my cousin is such a gifted man? Would a worse seer have been able to understand the foreigner at all? My cousin thinks: We must be charitable. We must help one another. The suns are too hot to change and the world itself too massive, but on the surface of the world anything can happen. Anything at all: chaos, agony, beauty. My cousin stretches in the saddle. He appreciates the fact that horses stay horses when people ride them. He enjoys the air that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s a good world, better than the temperate cities, where there are so many persons and so many used things that one might almost forget what Change is like, or that Change exists, one might get careless and arrogant there. Like that poor young man. My cousin looks about the salt flats and says to me, who am a thousand miles away in the sleeping jungle, where the Uncertain Places are as green as nightmares, where plants become animals and animals plants, where rocks grow wings and fly away: