Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

Outside, I looked at them through the window; they were jubilant. Stupidly, I stuck my tongue out. As I was doing this, my eyes caught my reflection in the windowpane; I noticed that my teeth appeared dimmer. Uncontrollably, I slipped back into the building, pushing through the noon-hour crowd to the men’s room.

A bald black attendant was sweeping the floor with a small broom and shovel. While he bent over, I gazed into the mirror, spreading my mouth wide to see my teeth. What I saw were not my teeth. My teeth were white. These were yellow, like the photographs of corroded teeth I’d seen in the young student’s room. Black pits opened between almost every tooth. My gums were scarred and blood-clotted. Parts of the teeth had chipped’ away. I was confused. He said he wanted to care for my teeth. Suddenly I could see him, his face radiant as he worked in my mouth, wreaking his devastation. I hurried to his room.

“Come in,” he said, pink-faced, happier than I had ever known him to be. “Though you’re a bit late, I expected you.”

“Why did you do this to me? Why?” I shouted, hands reaching for him. He grabbed my wrists.

I was almost crying. “You said you loved beautiful teeth . . . my teeth ...” I was stammering, my body weaving before him.

“Ah, but I do,” he said, as if he were a teacher clarifying some obscure point for a dull boy. And then he began laughing maniacally. “Look—look.” He pointed to his gaping mouth. There I saw, glittering and unsullied, a row of teeth as wondrous as my own had been.

“You’ve served me well,” he said, and patted my arm. “I herewith bequeath you a maxim for your philosophy: In the universe where matter is neither created nor destroyed, know you from experience that it is simply redistributed.”

His demonic laughter followed me to the door.

THE WOMAN walked a hundred yards behind the other two, her white sneakers shoveling at the white gravel. Not because she couldn’t keep up, and certainly not as a gesture of servility. Just so she’d have the other two to look at, something to see besides the plain of gravel with its spattering of lichen rippling behind the ocean of heat.

Years ago they’d fixed on a pace that suited all three of them. They were engrained with it—hindbrain, fuel pump, and lumbar reflexes. For the brontosaur, it was a lumbering trudge. For the jeep, a low-torque second gear that kicked up little dust eddies. For the woman, a brisk walk.

Of course they could have gone faster if the woman had climbed onto the jeep’s photopanels or straddled the brontosaur’s neck. But riding just encouraged paranoid aggression in the x mind and sensory deprivation coma in y. x was in the woman’s head today. And of course they were in no hurry. Hadn’t been for years.

Just like the sand caught in her shoes, x in the woman felt the steady buildup of smugness from y in the jeep, the longer x stayed in the favored position, the rear, x fed his optic input through the hostility matrix left over from his military programming, but x couldn’t make the jeep look bad. Free association: cliché mode: It’s hard to hate your home. His hate locked and ground behind the woman’s orange wire rims.

The brontosaur picked up on the tension and flexed its neck, looking back, scraping loose scraps of the lichen that slept in the furrows of its cracked, dull hide. Years of sandstorms had weathered its sleek skin into rutted leather that bagged at the shoulders and haunches.

The woman’s steps had a counter-rhythm in the brontosaur’s slow trot. Where gravel made bad footing, it reared up and almost scrambled. Nothing stranger , subverbalized x, than a swamp lizard out on the flatlands. Perhaps not. x remembered the same thought from years ago.

The jeep’s time signature was random. Occasional downshifting, sliding down a slope. No use made of the six-wheel drive. Just like y not to care.

x wanted back into the circuitry of the jeep. Handsome machine. Sandblasting had only brightened its chrome. The woman squinted at the glare behind her side-screen glasses, x hallucinated extensions of the planes of the jeep’s body into a mechanical drawing in blueprint, x was getting a knack for visions. Something for a thinking machine to be proud of. When they were all rescued, x would be an object for study. Something to do with the storms, no doubt. Something about the weather. Just so long as he didn’t pick up any more of y’s traits.

x tucked the woman’s hands into the armpits of her coveralls. The wet heat made her forearms feel cooler, x remembered enjoying the sensation some time ago. Forearms: by hinges on upper arms by ball and socket on torso. Receptors for heat, cold, contact, pressure . . . Interrupt. Not worth reviewing, really. Temporary accommodations.

During the next hour, the woman caught up with the jeep. She leaned down to the sound pickup by the headlight and said, “I shift.” By this x meant, “Years ago, when we started, I was the jeep. Not you. I don’t want you ripping up my transmission, not bothering to use third. Or would you rather pretend we all hold equal claim on these bodies we share? It’s not my sanity, you dumb cunt. I shift.”

The brontosaur’s heavy eyelids tensed against a dusty breeze. Its bony pumpkin head, where the o mind often lived, craned over behind the curve of the woman’s shoulder and whispered through teeth like a pebble garden, “Soon.” By this o meant, “Settle your minds. Do not argue. Do not say things. There is so little left to say. The suns are both low. We will go a little farther, as far as the sand I can see now when I stretch up my dark old tunnel, my neck. Then we will grow close and wait for the mindstorm to rip x y o from jeep and woman and lizard. The storm is soon.” o was limited to the grating frequencies of the jeep’s speaker. And when o was in the woman, she would lie on a lake of lichen, and her hands would dance like ghosts of starfish.

The jeep whined and kicked into third gear. The speaker rasped. “How long, o?”

Just like y to make a fuss. Just like y to cause trouble. I will stick to this mind wherever it goes. I will not love either of you. That is how to survive closeness. That avoids confusion.

Where the orange sand lapped up to a shore of white gravel, the brontosaur stopped and grazed on the spongy lichen. Its feet left shapes like wide leaves that faded as the blue plants sprang back to their stiff ruffles.

x used the woman’s knife to scrape new lichen off the jeep’s photopanels and started it into a small fire with the solder gun from the toolbox under the jeep’s fender, y let low static rumble from the jeep’s speaker while she submitted, to the grooming.

The brontosaur chomped intricate shreds of blue, green, blue-green.

The speaker buzzed in falsetto. “How much farther from here, Daddy.”

A joke. I can even recognize her stupid jokes now.

The speaker broke into shrill squawking, y was trying to cry. Third time today?

“Now,” x spat through the woman’s pulpy mouth. And x meant, “y has upset herself again. We’ll have to huddle for a long time. The more composed we can get, the less pain from the storm, o and x could get along very well without the endless, tireless whimpering of y. I hope the storm drops her into the woman’s body. That’s where she belongs. That’s where she started. And that’s where she’s most unhappy. It’s time we huddled. Now.”

The woman laid her wet, small-boned torso across the jeep’s hood, her cheek pressed to the windshield, close to the computer behind the dash. The dinosaur curled around them, neck and tail coiled over them. His giant green eyes shut tight. Sand trickled down through the wrinkles around his jaws.