Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

“The combcrawlers couldn’t recover, Newlyn. The fifth and sixth men broke away, flailing their arms around. It was amazing how slowly—how really distinctly—their fates overtook them. The first three men in the chain were sucked down toward us, and the whole broad sky under the Dome seemed to hold them up for a while. Then they fell, twirling around and around each other like the strands of one of those Argentine bolas , hypnotizing everybody in the streets. At last they fell through the canyon of buildings to our north and disappeared toward the concrete that I could feel impacting against them. It was terrifying, but it was beautiful. I resolved to become a combcrawler myself. All unbeknownst to my father, of course—he’d’ve suffered a multiple aneurysm if he’d known about that resolution. You see, Newlyn, you’re lucky. Your father approves.”

“But did you see them after they fell?” Newlyn asked, unawed. “Did you see them lying in the street, dead?”

Annoyed, I said: “Hell no, I didn’t see them! If my father was the sort to frown on combcrawling, do you think he’d bundle me off to ogle six crumpled, blood-spattered husks of humanity in some crappy alley?”

Newlyn smiled. “Then you haven’t seen a dead person, either.”

“Certainly I have.”

“Where?”

“On the board,” I said, smiling too. “There’s one right there, that pulsing red light.”

“And who is it, then?” the boy said, continuing his interrogation. “And where does he live?”

“Just a minute, lad.” I leaned forward, recorded the coordinates of the light, and at last gave it permission to go dead, its dull cherry sheen fading out of the naked crystal and leaving us, the boy and me, swimming in the blue dimness. (Wherever possible, you see, the city conserves its resources.) I ran the coordinates through the appropriate computer and found that the dead person lay in a cubicle somewhere on Level 8. To be exact: Concourse E-16, Door 502, Level 8. Another computer gave me the corpse’s name, age, and vital statistics—though there weren’t many of the latter.

“Well, who is it?” Newlyn asked.

“Almira Longhope. One hundred and seven years old. Unmarried. No relatives. Caucasian. Came into the city at the age of thirty-one with the refugees of the first Evacuation Lottery. . .”

“Let’s go see her!”

“What?”

“Let’s go see her. Somebody’s got to go get her, don’t they?”

“Somebody. Not us.”

“Look, Mr. Ardrey, that old woman died down on Level 8 because she was old and alone, probably. I’ve never seen a dead person, you’ve never seen a dead person. Let’s go and retrieve her and keep them servo-units from eating her up like a wad of dust. Okay?”

“Newlyn, we’re not going anywhere to gawk at an old woman who couldn’t get any higher than Level 8 in seventy years.”

“It wouldn’t be any gawking,” Newlyn said. “It wouldn’t.”

And with that as a prologue and only a little more argument, I finally consented. The Biomonitor Agency does not ordinarily send human beings to dispose of the human beings who have died in their cubicles—nor does the Agency refrain from want of sufficient manpower or out of callousness. The problem is that human beings are invariably too compassionate; they represent feeling, and when that feeling confronts a corpse and all its attendant suggestions of loneliness, the living human beings suffer—and suffer profoundly. Therefore, the Agency usually dispatches servo-units to the cubicles of the kinless and the forgotten. It is best.

I appointed Am Bartholomew to take my place at the console. I gathered from our files and resource rooms some of the things we would need. Then Newlyn and I went into the street

Because it was winter and because our meteorologists maintain internal conditions that correspond with the external passing of the seasons, we wore coats. Newlyn, in his navy pea jacket, strode ahead of me like an adolescent tour guide, spindly, purposeful, curt. We walked across one marble square, circumnavigated a huge fountain whose waters were frozen in fantastic loops and falls, and jogged toward the monolithic lift-terminal that dispatches its passengers up and down the layered levels of the city in crystal lift-tubes. We jogged because it was cold. We jogged because it is difficult to talk while jogging, and we did not believe that we had, in actuality, committed ourselves to the viewing and the disposal of a . . . dead person . Jogging, we tried not to look at each other.

The Dome glowered above us; it seemed that it hung down with the weight of its own honeycombing, threatening to crush us. No one was up there. No one was crawling over the girders.

Then we reached the lift-terminal, found an open tube, and descended into the great hive of the city—descended in utter silence, descended through a nightmare halflight, a halflight freaky as the cold simulation of dawn. On Level 8, one stratum above the nethermost floor of the hive, we disembarked

We found the concourse; we found the corridor. The people we passed in the corridor refused to look at us, passing us like wisps of smoke against the smudge-red illumination that contained us all.

Many of those who passed us were ghostly glissadors, hive inhabitants who spend so much of their time going up and down and about and through the various hallways that they have donned nearly soundless skates to conserve their energy and speed their labors. The skates are pieces of simulated cordovan footwear with a multitude of miniature ball bearings mounted in the soles. The city issues these glierboots to its sublevel employees. And Newlyn and I watched the graceful glissadors sweep past us through the gloom, their heads down.

Each time that one went past, Newlyn turned in a slow circle to watch. He said, “That looks like fun.”

“It gets to be work,” I said. “Everything gets to be work.”

Still, I caught the next effortlessly volplaning figure by the elbow and spun him about before he could disappear into the dim distance. A small sound of protest escaped his lips, but he controlled his turn and wheeled about like a mute ballet performer. He was tall. Like Newlyn, he was the intense color of ripe wet grapes.

“Almira Longhope,” I said. “Do you know her cubicle?”

The glissador stared at me: “What’s her number, surfacesider?”

I told him.

“Then you keep following these here doors till you reach it.” He threw up his arm and spun away. He looked at us briefly. Turning with sinuous skill, he strode out forcefully and skated off, off forth on swing.

“Why’d you stop him?” Newlyn asked. “We knew where we were.”

I said nothing for a moment, trying to pick out the departing glissador’s figure in the crimson light

Newlyn said: “Well? Why’d you do that?”

“I wanted one of them to ... to acknowledge us. I wanted to watch how one of them resumed his skating. Maybe it is fun,” I said. And stopped. Newlyn was watching me. “Never mind. Let’s follow the goddamn doors.”

We did. We walked. Our feet tap-tap-tapped on the tiles, mundanely coming down one foot after another. In this fashion we eventually reached Door 502, a door which looked uncannily like the two doors on either side.

I extracted from my pocket the obscenely rubberoid sheath upon which were embossed the whorls of Miss Almira Longhopes right thumbprint, and slipped this sheath over my forefinger so as not to distort the print with my own outsized thumb. Then I held my forefinger to the electric eye for scanning, and the panel slid back, admitting us to the cubicle in which the dead woman must necessarily lie: unwept, unhonored, very nearly unborn. Newlyn preceded me into the odd closet just inside the cubicle’s door.