Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

The boy dropped his head, chastened.

I was still angry. My fists were clenching and unclenching of their own accord. It was difficult not to look into the corpses vein-woven eyes, lose all resolution, and return surfaceside to the control room on West Peachtree. Especially since we had stumbled on the mausoleum of an aged lunatic with an adolescent pituitary where her brains should have been. No wonder that Almira Longhope, at the age of one hundred and seven, still resided in a three-room cubicle on Level 8: she had exhausted her monetary and spiritual resources constructing a tomb with faster-than-light-speed capabilities, patching together an epitaph out of old screenplays and pulp magazine stories, paying homage to the very worst of the products of the pre-Evacuation mass media. No wonder that she stared at me with accusation and disappointment; the dream, too, had finally died, and we had walked in on its naked remains.

Still chastened, Newlyn said: “All right, Mr. Ardrey, what do we have to do now?” Finally he looked up. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I—”

This time I cut him off. “Don’t be sorry. It was a natural response, Newlyn, a very natural response.” Then I told him that the first thing I wanted him to do was face the old woman toward her windows once again, and he did this for me. “The computer said that she had no relatives,” I went on, “so we don’t have to try to contact anyone. All we have to do is go through her belongings and determine if she’s left a will or any papers. Then we must see that her body goes into the waste converter on Level 9 and file a report so that her cubicle can be sprayed. All this junk will have to be destroyed.”

“It doesn’t look like junk, Mr. Ardrey.”

“It’s junk. ”

He didn’t protest a second time, but his eyes, though superficially still penitent, cut away from me at an angle of vague reprimand. I ignored this silent cavil. He was young.

It took us a little while to find the entrance into her sleeping quarters because the artificial hull of her “spaceship” had been erected in front of the cubicle’s internal doorways. (The entrance from the outer corridor, through which Newlyn and I had originally come, was disguised as the facing of an airlock, for the artifices of Miss Longhope were nothing if not thoroughgoing.) We walked around the catwalk that circled the vessel’s command pit. We tested the firmness of the walls with our hands and knees. We scrutinized the phony computer banks and puzzled over the two tall glass cylinders. And, at last, we did find the doorway to the old woman’s bedchamber.

Newlyn made the discovery. Running his hands over the surface of one of the cylinders, he was surprised to find a vertical seam. He pressed this seam, and the cylinder split apart and opened out. “Mr. Ardrey!” he called. I went to him. Together we found that the other half of the cylinder also opened out, but in the direction of the concealed sleeping chamber.

We went through this unorthodox portal, down a single step, and into the old woman’s private alcove. Newlyn dialed up the lights.

The alcove contained a low bed, a study area, and the standard visicom console on which one can display reading material or run his choice of entertainment visuals. However, the visicom’s screen was silver-grey. And dead. The fanaticism manifested so tangibly in the main living area did not appear so virulent here. I looked at Newlyn. The disappointment on his face mirrored the look on the old woman’s corpse. In truth, however, he had nothing to be disappointed about Almira Longhope’s ruling passion had merely secreted itself away into drawers, boxes, diaries, packets of photographs, and a heavy blue ledger. One or two testimonies of this passion remained shamelessly in the open, although Newlyn had not noticed them.

“Cheer up,” I said. “Look there.”

Beside the old woman’s bed, resting on her night table, there was a spherical lamp mounted on a tripod base. The lamp had hundreds of tiny holes in its surface, for in reality it was not a lamp at all but a simple version of the star-projectors that one of the old networks had marketed in such profiteering quantities before the Last Days of our great-grandfathers. Newlyn asked what the thing was: I told him. Then he wanted to see how the thing worked. Therefore, after he had dimmed the lights, I turned the projector on. At once stars appeared on the walls and ceiling —the constellations all misshapen and askew, however, because Miss Longhope had apparently not been able to devise a curved surface on which to project them. To Yates’ son, the resulting distortion made no difference. Even after I had made him dial the lights up again, he stood over the star-projector with all the solicitude of a nursing mother for her newborn whelps. His face was silly with concern.

“How did she think up all these things?” he asked.

“She didn’t. She just copied them.”

“From what?”

“From a style of entertainment that existed before the Domes went up—similar to our visual entertainment tapes. Most of this stuff has its origin in one of their shows . . . back when they believed in interstellar travel and galactic civilizations. Or at least when some of them did. She’s just copied everything from that one particular series of tapes—and from magazines and movies.”

“When was it? When was all this stuff thought up?”

“Eighty years ago. Ninety years ago. I don’t know, Newlyn.” He stared at the star-projector. He looked back toward the half-open cylinder beyond which lay the spaceship’s command pit. His lips scarcely moved. “It’s neat,” he said pontifically. “It’s some of the neatest stuff I’ve ever seen.”

“That old woman wasted her life,” I said. “She wasted it”

Turning my back on Yates’ son, I sat down at the study center and began pulling drawers open. What I found confirmed my judgment. Newlyn, sullen and belligerent now, looked over my shoulder as I arranged the contents of the drawers and of several crumpled manila envelopes on the surface of the desk. The stench of another time flew out of these envelopes like the moths that still flutter from the surfaceside grasses in April. I coughed. Like moths, the photographs and slips of precious paper seemed to beat about my head with their dusty hard-edged wings. In Miss Longhope’s blue ledger I flipped randomly to one of the pages of broad childish handwriting.

I read one of the paragraphs on the page.

Log entry: Tonight I saw the episode entitled “Between the Star Mirrors” for the third time. Is there an alternate Almira somewhere in the universe? I wish that I could break through for a moment and visit my other self. The Rigelian first officer is an honorable man in both universes. What would I be? Sometimes I am afraid that I am empty of stars in both places, but this is not true. Even my other self, just as I do here, would have all her alternate universe to reach into and to wonder at But she would probably need to have help to reach out—just as I do. I hate the image that the mirror I hold up to the world returns to me. The image in the mirror clouds over every day, like the dirty sky and people’s ugly wrinkled unhappy faces.

I read this passage aloud to Newlyn. “Neat, huh?”

He said nothing. He picked up one of the laminated photographs, bent and yellowed in spite of the lamination, and ran his finger over the heavy intense face of one of the actors who had been in the series. In the photograph, the actor had a smooth triple-lobed cranium and no discernible eyebrows; he had signed his name across the bottom of the picture. Newlyn touched the signature, too—or tried to touch it; the dull plastic prevented him. Stymied, he studied the face.