Дэймон Найт: Orbit 12

I confess that sometimes, in the blessed nights of darkness with no moon to silver my crown and no stars occluding with my branches, when I could rest, I would think seriously of escaping my obligation to the general Order of Things: of failing to move. No, not seriously. Half seriously. It was mere weariness. If even a silly, three-year-old, female pussy willow at the foot of the hill accepted her responsibility, and jounced and rolled and accelerated and grew and shrank for each motorcar on the road, was I, an oak, to shirk? Noblesse oblige , and I trust I have never dropped an acorn that did not know its duty.

For fifty or sixty years, then, I have upheld the Order of Things, and have done my share in supporting the human creatures’ illusion that they are “going somewhere.” And I am not unwilling to do so. But a truly terrible thing has occurred, which I wish to protest.

I do not mind going two directions at once; I do not mind growing and shrinking simultaneously; I do not mind moving, even at the disagreeable rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour. I am ready to go on doing all these things until I am felled or bulldozed. They’re my job. But I do object, passionately, to being made eternal.

Eternity is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty, and I do it; I have my pleasures, and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds are fewer, and the winds foul. But, long-lived though I may be, impermanence is my right Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken from me.

It was taken from me on a rainy evening in March last year.

Fits and bursts of cars, as usual, filled the rapidly moving road in both directions. I was so busy hurtling along, enlarging, looming, diminishing, and the light was failing so fast, that I scarcely noticed what was happening until it happened. One of the drivers of one of the cars evidently felt that his need to “go somewhere” was exceptionally urgent, and so attempted to place his car in front of the car in front of it. This maneuver involves a temporary slanting of the Direction of the Road and a displacement onto the far side, the side which normally runs the other direction (and may I say that I admire the road very highly for its skill in executing such maneuvers, which must be difficult for an unliving creature, a mere making). Another car, however, happened to be quite near the urgent one, and facing it, as it changed sides; and the road could not do anything about it, being already overcrowded. To avoid impact with the facing car, the urgent car totally violated the Direction of the Road, swinging it round to north-south in its own terms, and so forcing me to leap directly at it. I had no choice. I had to move, and move fast— eighty-five miles an hour. I leaped: I loomed enormous, larger than I have ever loomed before. And then I hit the car.

I lost a considerable piece of bark, and, what’s more serious, a fair bit of cambium layer; but as I am now seventy-two feet tall and about nine feet in girth at the point of impact, no real harm was done. My branches trembled with the shock, enough that a last-year’s robin’s nest was dislodged and fell; and I was so shaken that I groaned. It is the only time in my life that I have ever said anything out loud.

The motorcar screamed horribly. It was smashed by my blow, squashed, in fact. Its hinder parts were not much affected, but the forequarters knotted up and gnarled together like an old root, and little bright bits of it flew all about and lay like brittle rain.

The driver had no time to say anything; I killed him instantly.

It is not this that I protest. I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore have no regret. What I protest, what I cannot endure, is this: as I leaped at him, he saw me. He looked up at last. He saw me as I have never been seen before, not even by a child, not even in the days when people looked at things. He saw me whole, and saw nothing else—then, or ever.

He saw me under the aspect of eternity. He confused me with eternity. And because he died in that moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally.

This is unendurable. I cannot uphold such an illusion. If the human creatures will not understand Relativity, very well; but they must understand Relatedness.

If it is necessary to the Order of Things, I will kill drivers of cars, though killing is not a duty usually required of oaks. But it is unjust to require me to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death. For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal.

If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one another’s eyes and see it there.

WE RECEIVED notification of the woman’s death on the Biomonitor Console in the subsidiary control room on West Peachtree. A small cherry-red light went on; it glowed in the blue halflight that hangs about the console like the vague memory of fog. “Someone’s dead,” Yates’ son said. “That light just came on.” Yates’ son is fourteen years old. His broad face was purplish in the fog of the control room, the sheen of flesh over forehead reflecting back a small crescent of the red that had just come on. Only a moment before, the boy had entered the building, stopped at my elbow, and waited for an opportunity to talk. Yates is my boss, the head of the city’s Biomonitor Agency. Because our interests were similar, his son frequently came around to talk to me: I girderclimbed on the weekends, and the boy was just learning. But he had never come into the console area before, and when the red light began faintly pulsing on the monstrous board, his lank body had stooped toward it

“Yes,” I said. “Someone’s dead. The board don’t lie. ‘Deed it don’t.” To sentimentalize the death of a cubicle-dweller is a soul-destroying business. I try to keep it light.

“I’ve never seen a dead person. Papa says that people get sick, that the board reports that all the time—but people don’t die very often.”

“People die all the time.”

“I’ve never seen a dead person,” Yates’ son said “Never at all.”

“You’re lucky you haven’t seen a girderclimbing accident, Newlyn. You’d see death and terror and plummeting human beings all in one fell swoop.” I am nine years older than Newlyn, and those nine years have taught me one or two things that I’m not always capable of communicating to those younger than myself. But I try—for their benefit, not mine. “When I was your age, I saw a party of six combcrawlers, hooked together with a glinting golden cord, lose either the magnetic induction in their girderboots or else all sense of the teamwork involved in dome-traversing.”

Newlyn looked away from the board. His heavy forehead turned toward me; his African lips framed a faint exhalation: “What happened?”

“The climbers,” I told him, “had reached a section of honeycombing about three hundred yards from the very apex of the Dome. Their backs were down, and inside the spun-iron gloves their hands were probably clinging like crazy to the track of the navigational girder they had chosen. They had worked out a complicated, a truly beautiful assault on the apex. They were high above the city, bright specks on the artificial sky, and suddenly the fourth man in the contingent fell away from the group and bobbed on the elastic gold cord that held them together— bobbed just like a spider weighting the center of its web.

“From the top of the new Russell Complex, my father and I watched them—even though we hadn’t gone up there for that purpose.