Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

“A bigshot fire man. A burnheaded topsider.”

He spoke with such incredible malice, enunciating each consonant and each vowel as if they would carve flaming signs in the air, that I could say nothing. My thumb was on the panel; the door remained open. At last, gathering a little strength against my embarrassment, I said: “You knew what we had to do. And what we found in Almira Longhope’s cubicle didn’t make any difference. In fact, it deserved the combustgens and the spray even more than the ordinary furnishings of one of these places. What a waste, Newlyn! That sort of thing, that sort of crap, has to be burned out, cut away, buried. Everyone goes through that, Newlyn.”

Yates’ son sprang toward me and knocked my hand away from the control panel. The glass door slid into place. I dropped the old woman’s blue ledger.

Then a number of things happened simultaneously.

A huge shadow leaped at us from the corridor and affixed itself to the surface of the lift-tube. Another shadow, less quick, fell away behind the first and disappeared as the lift-tube began, seemingly of its own accord, to ascend. An hysterical, mocking scream pierced the thin wall of glass that contained the boy and me.

And then (beneath the terrifying scream) another sound: Newlyn was trying to quench the sobs that rose in his throat Unsuccessfully.

“It doesn’t have to be—” he said. “It doesn’t have to be . . . to be . . . unless you make it—”

I’m afraid that I pushed him. He was leaning into my chest, and all my attention had shifted from him to the droop-lipped, acromegalic hoisterjack who clung to our lift-tube, leering, insupportably leering.

I shoved Newlyn aside and began pounding on the glass between me and the hoisterjack’s hooded face. I wanted him to lose his grip. I wanted him to fall down the terminal shaft to the concrete of Level 9, there to split and pulp open like an overripe radish. I wanted to murder his iconoclasm and turn his impudence to bile.

Then I felt a fist against the side of my head and heard Newlyn shouting and sobbing at once: “Leave him alone, you bastard! Leave him alone!”

We grappled. The boy struck me again. I pushed him down. He came back and pummeled my chest Now I realized exactly what I was doing, and the pain that it gave me could not have been more real, more cruel, more excruciating. I knew that we would not go combcrawling with each other this weekend, nor any weekend to come. I struck Newlyn solidly under the chin, and it was like striking myself.

He crumpled and sat on the crystalline floor, making low noises.

The lift-tube continued to ascend. I picked up Almira Longhopes ledger. I raised my eyes. The hoisterjack clinging to our little prison was grinning at me, grinning at me in cryptic triumph.

THE CRANES flying south at window level were a splendid omen for the getting and giving of amatory gifts. Accordingly, after the morning’s rehearsal, my friend Lambant decided he would order a nuptial present for his sister, whose marriage date had been announced. This chanced to be on the first day of the autumn fair or mop.

Lambant and I visited a glass-engraver’s studio to order some glass goblets as a gift befitting the great family occasion. The studio stood beyond the city wall. The paint on its orange door flaked and fell like frost-nicked leaves as we heaved it open. The entrance was narrow and the stairs as crooked as any in Malaria, leading to Master Giovanni Bledlore’s studio.

He came out on the landing to us, an ague-ridden old figure, closing his creaking workshop door behind him.

“You young fellows are a nuisance to an honest craftsman,” he said. “You disturb the dust, and dust will spoil my colours. What do you want of me? I shall have to go back and sit still for a quarter hour before the dust settles and I can open my palettes again!”

“Then you should keep cleaner premises, Master Bledlore,” I said. “Open up the windows—even your bluebottles are crying for escape.”

“I need you to make me a dozen goblets with local scenes on them, such as you designed for Thiepol of Tera a twelve-month ago,” Lambant told him.

The old man threw up his hands and wagged his beard in our faces. “Spare me your needs! Every one of those designs aged me by a lifetime. Nor has Thiepol paid me yet. My eyesight’s too bad for any more of that sort of order. My hand shakes too much. Besides, my wife is ill and I must care for her. My foreman has deserted me and gone over to that rogue Dapertuto...No, no, I could not possibly attempt . . . Besides, when would you require them?”

He took much persuading. Before we had signed our bond on the deal and paid him a token in advance, the old craftsman had shown us the treasures of his workshop, and the beautiful miniatures on which he had worked with so much pain and skill, their tiny figures incised on glass and glowing with colour.

“Ah, what accomplishment!— It’s nothing short of alchemy,” Lambant said, as we passed through the narrow doorway and strolled, hands on each other’s shoulders, across the green to where the pedlars were putting up the frail stalls of their autumn fair. “You saw his azure vase with its vignette? You saw those two children sporting by the whale’s skeleton, with the hurdy-gurdy man playing in the background? What could be more beautiful in such small compass?”

“Indeed, it was beautiful. And isn’t perfection greater for being so small? He confirms what I have heard rumoured, that he studies everything from life. The broomstick is copied from one in his niece’s yard, the hurdy-gurdy belongs to an old man living over by the flea market, and no doubt the two urchins are running ragged-assed about the gates even now!”

“What a decadent age we live in! Giovanni Bledlore is the last of the grand masters, and he scarcely recognised except by a few cognoscenti!”

“Such as ourselves, Lambant!”

“Such as ourselves, Prian! People are so blind in these last years of the century—the lees of time!—that they only appreciate merit on a grand pretentious scale. Write a history of the universe and it will be applauded, however lousy and steeped in errors factual and grammatical; yet paint a tiny perfect landscape on your thumb and nobody will cheer.”

A pleasant warbling filled the air. A flute seller was moving toward us, bearing his tray full of flutes and playing one as he came. As we circled him, I snatched a flute and played a quick echo to his own charming tune, “When the Still Air Hath Waked.”

“Flutes would be no better if they could be heard half a dozen valleys off—you’re not suggesting that Bledlore should take to monstrous frescos in his old age, to make his name?”

“I’m condemning the general taste, not Bledlore’s. He has found perfection because he has first found his correct scale. I’m regretting that he does not receive the just acclamation due to him. Thirty kopits per glass!—He should demand and get ten times that!”

We had stopped by the marionette stall, to watch both puppets and their childish audience. “I feel as you do on that score. Better paid, he could fight his dust obsession with a vacuum cleaner. But in that we are perhaps merely children of our admittedly decadent age. Should not the real reward of a true artist be his ability, and not the applause it merits him?”

“Real. . . True . . . Your adjectives baffle me, Prian! Who was it said that Reality and Truth are weapons in the dialectical armoury of all schools of thought?”

The school of thought whose activities we were now negligently observing was a primitive one, designed to elicit immediate and uproarious pleasure from its unreflecting spectators. Robber Man came on with red-masked eyes and tried to break into Banker Man’s big safe. Banker Man, fat and hairy and crafty, appeared and caught him at it. Robber Man socked him with his sack, to the plaudits of the children. Banker Man pretended genial, asked to see how much money Robber Man could get into sack. Robber Man, despite warning cries of children in front, climbs obligingly into safe. Banker Man slams safe shut, laughs, goes for Police Man. Meets Allosaur Man instead. Children roar with merriment, open and honest, as Allosaur Man gets multitudinous teeth round Banker Man’s nose. Space Man descends, traps Allosaur Man in helmet. During fracas, Banker’s Lady, togged to nines, enters to take some cash from safe. Releases and is walloped by Robber Man. And so on. Continuous entertainment