Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

The suns shone orange as ever. The wind hissed no louder than ever. All three felt the daily storm close in.

standard program exceeds octane 18 only when lub—my brain is a leathery starfish that scratches and scrapes in my skull—save me let me never come back into any of us—just like the cunt-brain—time and time and then time—I weep I tear my hair I beat my breasts—you’ll run out of tears you’ll run out of hair your breasts are sagging—we all have time and time enough—I rip my clothes I bleed I eat my insides—you don’t have the guts—time for a dolphin for a lizard for a cancer for xyo— help me save me no not you or you no help—we lizard metal breast wheel lip leather who

xyo the letters once whatever now each other torn loose in a direction inconceivable as out to a fish in water, sideways for a jeep, death to a woman.

and all fall clutching without arms, or wheels no jaws into . . .

Wait.

o in brontosaur for the fourth time in a row.

x revs his engine.

y she trembles and gasps. Tears sit quietly on the jeep’s hood in the dusk.

The brontosaur touches the crusty bottom of his chin to the sandy coveralls on the woman’s narrow back. “Peace,” o murmured. And o meant, “After so long, it should make no difference. Are you sure that x is right? Do you really think he remembers where we started, which bodies we started with? I’ll tell you a story. I remember that this lizard is a reconstruction from extinction. A man-made beast of burden, cultivated in a vat of nutrient broth. One of a crop of neuter plough animals. This I remember with my hindbrain. My forebrain, I remember, was a transplant from a dolphin. I remember an ocean. Starfish stirring up the sand, turning out their insides. Fields of brown kelp, swaying, rubbery like lichen. A herd of others like me, close to me but never merging like xyo. Touch and love, but never complete. Here with time for completion, we hate. And stay apart. And remember an ocean. Rocks that touched without knowing. Kelp that slept without knowing. Starfish that loved without knowing. An ocean. Have you enjoyed my story? I cannot say I have not imagined it all. You are such a little thing. You should not fret.”

The orange sand sucked up her tears as she ran away from them. One of the suns set.

Headlights glaring, the jeep dug in and patched out and rammed through three gears to run her down, hacking a laugh-rattle at top volume. His fenders shoved into lizard flesh, x could never understand the old giant’s speed.

“Cancerous bag. Let’s see you stick your tail up your bitch.”

The woman held to the brontosaur, kneeling against it, fingers buried in its bark. She pushed her hand into the rough, orange sand and rubbed it across her cheek. She bled very little and didn’t scratch her glasses. The dinosaur worked up a bolus of food from its second stomach. The woman chewed it slowly, pushing her hair out of her face, and rested against the beast’s neck. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “Parade anyone?”

o smiled weakly, thinking that the extinct face he wore was ill equipped for smiling. But then, o had picked up many strange habits on the trip. At times, like the solar-powered jeep, he was afraid of the dark.

“Yes a parade!” x bellowed with decibels that shook his speaker grill. “And a speech!” While they marched in the ritual figure eight, x orated. “Yes and yes and yes we represent here we are a symbol of course for a good reason, explicable, immense, enormous, the ever onward troika of progress surely man machine and nature bound into eternity until death us do in! I thank you.”

No, thought o, we are not important. We are only stranded. It is a strange situation but not unusual. No one ever admits to being one leg of a starfish. As we used to say in school.

She wrapped her arms and legs around o’s foreleg, and o whispered to her another lesson in the Buddhist religion, the way of acceptance, o’s way back to the lizard from the storm, the lessons which o’s keepers taught to the lizards of o’s crop to accommodate them to slavery, because the karma of the keepers was the wheel of greed, o told y she was part of everything. y arranged ruffles of lichen on the sand and said she didn’t want to be. She said she was a Presbyterian, and she was sure that God would forgive her for missing so many services. They made love in their own way. The lizard did what it could for her.

“Don’t dream,” she said and managed a small laugh, y meant: “Remember when I told you that if you ever had one of my bad dreams, you’d roll over and crush me?” She tried to think why it was funny,

o was sleeping,

x never slept.

“And remember how when I carry you on your back when you’re in me because I said you said and I knew you meant . . . you know ... we must be rescued. Or find an oasis. Of some kind. What if they find your tumorous carcass and me smashed and smashed again by six wheels and far away the jeep broke down where my hands weren’t there to fix it? They wouldn’t even know how far we’ve come. They’d never know how we came to this! How long! What if we forget how we came to this?”

It was hard for them, and it took a long time.

I LIVE on a hill. Tonight the dark came too soon. I was down cutting the grass for the landlady and I came up for a drink of cold water about seven o’clock. The wind started blowing over from the east side of town then. I had to stop by the back door. All of a sudden my face and neck were cool. The wind was from the cemetery. I closed my eyes. It smelled sweet and damp and full of roses.

Inside the house was filing up with blue shadows. Shyla never liked that time of day.

The living room.

Sitting in the rattan rocking chair.

How to tell you? Begin anywhere:

“I think I’ll kill myself tonight,” she sighs. “There’s nothing else to do.”

I stop long enough to manage a wan smile. “There’s always Scrabble. But in a little while. I almost have Series II licked.”

“What do they want to know now?”

“ ‘State the nature of your belief,’“ I read from the 150 Form, “ ‘. . . and state whether or not your belief involves duties which are to you superior to those arising from any human relation.’ “

“Nosy.”

“ ‘Explain how, when and from whom or from what source you received the training and acquired the belief . . .’ “

“I wonder,” asks Shyla, “why they don’t just ask you to define the universe and give two examples? In twenty-five words or less.”

“Don’t exaggerate. They give me two whole blank lines here.”

I watch her as she shifts her hip and lays her long legs up on the madras coverlet. She has to be moving every other second now; it is the macrobiotics, part of the natural high.

“That’s Section III, I believe,” I tell her, cracking my cramped knuckles. “You’ve been through this yourself, haven’t you. Don’t lie.” I lift the typewriter off my knees and stretch my back. “Jeezus. This is worse than that last term paper.”

I look over at her. The round rice-paper lantern moving slowly behind her head. She is absorbed. She is filing her nails with a long emery board very carefully, as if playing a rare violin.

“You do remember that weekend,” I remind her.

“How could I forget? You, your typewriter, the kitchen table. Thank God you’ve learned how to type since then. I had to sleep in a chair, at your beck and call.”

The bamboo wind chimes are tinkling outside the window.

I pluck off my glasses, rub my eyes and make a truce with myself again for a time.

Trying to get a fix on her through the blur.